Actions

Work Header

Names

Summary:

Sirius’s throat gains second life and the most pathetic noise comes out of it and by mercy Remus doesn’t hold it against him. A sobering thought creeps up his spine as he wonders why he'd ever think otherwise; if there was one person who would wholly understand that words can fall short, it'd be Remus.

-

companion to Blends.

Chapter 1: 1.

Notes:

psa: i… don’t want to have to say this and didn’t think i’d run into too much concerning it, but this work is a companion to blends (in my profile if you haven’t heard of it), and because of that, those who haven’t read the first instalment will be exceptionally confused with this work unless they start there; if you’ve indeed read blends, welcome back! we’re about to be in the thick of it with a batch of characters that have already been thoroughly explored in the first instalment of this series, so if we’re suddenly confused about any one character’s motivations, it may be an idea to have a reread of blends and reintroduce yourself to the characters we’re going to be exploring even more from here.

incidentally, because this work is a companion piece to an already established story, we’re indeed moving forward with the characters that were introduced and thoroughly explored in blends; we’re gonna be seeing them in new and exciting situations, we’re gonna be exploring new terrain with an established relationship rather than a pair of characters pining after each other in their perceived lonesome, we’re gonna be delving deeper into their personalities and the nitty-gritty thereof, and we’re gonna have some fun along the way, but seeing as the story does take place a few months down the line from when we last saw these characters, there will inevitably be questions as to what’s happened in the meantime and there will be new endeavours in their lives that you may not have every single detail for immediately, but that is alright because the answers will come.

every writer has a different style, some prefer to deliver information through five paragraphs of exposition, some prefer to deliver information via the characters themselves, and my style has always been and is still very much the latter (and if you’ve been here since blends then deep down you already know i don’t rush to give a reader everything all at once), so if you want a tale penned by someone that hands you information right up front then i’d pick something other than the blendsverse to invest your time into as i don’t see yourself getting that here, but if you’re on board and excited to learn about what the boys have been up to and what they’ll be getting up to as the story unfolds, then sit back, relax, and let the characters you met and got to know in blends bring you along with them

Chapter Text

Over the course of his twenty-three years, Remus had slowly come to the realization that bad news had a tendency to be delivered on good days. As it were on this particular day, he had been having a morning that fell on the certifiably splendid side of things, and for that, it seemed the universe simply had decided some evening out was in order. It was a fair play in a sense, but not an entirely welcomed one.

His morning began early as per his agreeing to trade shifts with Bridget and work her opening shift, and despite the variance to his sleep schedule as of late he surprisingly didn’t find himself scorned by the sound of his alarm going off at the wee hour of five am, if anything it felt as if he had been in a deep sleep one moment and wide awake the next.

He rolled over to swipe his phone screen to turn his alarm off, made sense of the dark room around him, and got himself out of bed without calling on too much effort to pull it off. He left his room and crossed over to the kitchen, bringing out the kettle to start himself a cup. He filled it at the sink, moved on to weighing his options for breakfast as he waited for the kettle to heat, and after a short debate it became quite obvious to him that practicality ought to be his main goal and decided on cereal. He poured himself a bowl and went for the fridge, but paused with his hand on the handle as he zoned in on the message scrawled on the whiteboard in far too visually appealing handwriting.

the five times I left you the last of the milk, and the one time I didn't.

Remus reworked his mouth around a smile, not able to find it in himself to feel scorned when his amusement outweighed any sense of betrayal he might have felt on a different morning. He uncapped the marker clipped onto the board under the note intended for him and scrawled a quick note of dismissal under it before he resolved to tip his dry cereal back into the box for a later, more milk-filled time.

He answered the whistle of the kettle before he gathered the fixings for a tea, thinking he’d be pushing the leisure time he had if he tried to finish a full pot and opting for his single-serve one. He sat down at the island and got himself set up, holding his tea below his mouth and blowing on it while he fired up his laptop.

He pulled up his online banking to ensure his paycheck had come in overnight and reeled a bit at his balance for a moment; having worked his first solid pay period on a full-time schedule he found he had quite a bit more to work with than he was accustomed to during the school year, and he took a quick moment to relish in the atypical feeling before he got down to business.

He opened a separate tab and checked the going rates for a pair of train tickets on a return trip. He lined up the dates he had been given the go-ahead for, checked for embarking times available, and after a few more clicks he brought up a total. The absence of a sharp bang of loss as he clicked to confirm the purchase and parted with a small chunk of his pay was, in truth, even better than the feeling he’d gotten just from staring at his paystub.

Remus made a hefty dent in his tea while he waited for the confirmation email to come in and as soon as it turned up in his inbox he got the same feeling he thought he might if he had the tips of his toes hanging off of a cliff.

He quickly forced that down staggering feeling down and readjusted his feet on the footrest of his stool, giving himself the feeling that he was, in fact, quite balanced. He finished off his tea as he checked whether his last grade had come in since the last time he’d gone in to look, but the answer was a frank no on that front. He washed his teapot and mug before leaving them in the drying rack to put away later on, made a stop off at the bathroom, and headed back into his room to find something to wear to work.

He managed fairly well in the dark, even with the light shimmy he had to take to in order to get his trousers on and not make a ton of noise in the process. Once he was dressed he had a look at the time displayed on the clock on his bedside table and there was something to be said about living a short walk from his workplace; pleased he had some time to spare before he would have to head out, he went back to bed to spend that time comfortably.

One of the things Remus quite liked about Sirius was that he tended not to be all that put off about being roused from sleep — if, that is, he had ample time to doze thereafter, which he would today. Waking at the crack of dawn because he had no other choice in the matter was a different story entirely and Remus knew in his bones he would have a lot of explaining to do once Sirius found out the time Remus set their travels for, but that was a problem for future Remus to deal with. Today Remus didn’t have any qualms about burrowing up on Sirius’ left and spurring him awake in the process.

As he'd had been absolutely hoping for, Sirius gave a great yawn, reached his left arm around Remus, and cosied up close. In the sleepy quiet of the room, Remus found he could feel his heart beating a lot more than he could outside it, and with his head still reeling from the whirlwind of the past few days, he found himself feeling both emboldened and content in the same beat.

“Tickets are bought,” he said, hoping it wasn’t too early for speech or the weight of the words to sink in.

Sirius rolled toward him at once, tangling his legs with Remus’s and promptly taking his entire head captive in his arms. He pressed four kisses to the top of Remus’s head in the span of a few quick seconds and Remus shut his eyes, basking.

“How long have you got?” Sirius checked, his voice the sort of deliciously hoarse that left Remus a little weak on a typical morning, let alone today.

“About twenty now,” he supplied.

Sirius shifted his arms down from around Remus’s head. “Should call out,” he suggested, leaving a trail of kisses along the curve of Remus’s jaw. “Stay here and celebrate some more.”

“I can’t do that,” he said, though now that he was this warm it was a bit more difficult to remain decent.

“Nheh, it was worth a shot,” Sirius said, pausing his kissing for a beat. “Twenty whole minutes, did you say?”

The right corner of Remus’ mouth curled up. “If you’re quick about it.”

He waited all of three seconds before he got wrangled, flattened, and covered by Sirius. He huffed a laugh and kneaded Sirius’ shoulders as he shifted down the bed, dragging kisses over his midriff on his way.

Sirius made well on his word and went for Remus’ trousers without too much sightseeing along the way. “This is very counterproductive, I only just got them on,” Remus said all while lifting his hips to help Sirius out a little.

Sirius worked them past his knees, pausing for a moment to pat Remus’s left one briskly. “When I’m done I’ll even put them back on you,” he offered before going right back in.

Remus had a reply ready but he didn’t bother with it for the first slide of Sirius’ mouth took it right out of his head. He gave up on coherent words altogether once Sirius took to tracing rather intricate shapes against the crown of Remus’ cock at each drawback, clearly taking their time constraint to heart, but Remus could hardly say he minded when it was over before he knew it if it meant he could use the rest of the time to return the favour.

Minutes later saw them flipped, Sirius gripping tight at the back of Remus’s head and his knees curled up on either side of Remus's body as he rode through his release. Remus waited until Sirius’s hips stilled completely before he pulled his mouth off of him, laying his head down on Sirius’s navel with a smile that just wouldn't quit for long and feeling rather accomplished in a myriad of ways just then.

He felt a tap on his head and pushed himself onto his knees, smiling down at Sirius, who lifted off of the bed to meet him in the middle. He whisked his right hand over Remus’s cheek and under his jaw before he pulled Remus’ lips against his own and, all things considered, there were far, far worse ways to start a day.

Dressed and walking on tingling legs, Remus made a quick stop out onto his perch to gauge the temperature and decided a light layer overtop of his shirt would probably suffice for a crisp, mid-May day. He quietly let himself back into his room to grab a cardigan to pull on, but Sirius was already out like a light. Remus smirked and left the room again, put some food in the cat’s bowl, and strolled back to the island where Mesophales must've perched directly on his laptop in his brief absence, running his hand overtop Mestophales’s head.

Remus gave her a pointed look but didn’t move her, forgoing that battle in favour of footing his shoes on. The walk to work was pleasant if a bit chilly, but Remus hoped it would warm up once the day got underway. His shift was busier than he was used to having mostly worked evenings and brought an entirely different crowd of would-be regulars if the mornings were indeed his repertoire, but the bustle led to the morning passing quickly.

Working an open also came with the opportunity to work with Emmeline, who worked a strict three mornings a week during school and therefore rarely did their schedules line up. He didn’t know too many or get to spend much time with people who self-identified as a morning person such as he, and as such, Remus found her energy infectious to work alongside, spurring his already cheerful mood to even higher percentiles.

He finished at two and made a stop at Boots along the way home to pick up milk, and then while he was at the shop he thought he ought to grab a few more items he’d been meaning to get but hadn’t found the time to spare. He carried his shopping bags the short walk back to his flat and found it quite Sirius-less, though the lad certainly left a signal that his prior presence hadn't been a mirage; an overflowing food bowl. To combat the huff rising up in him for the early dinner this exceptionally lucky cat was due to get whenever she decided it time to pick at the ample portion given away to her, Remus traded it for a smirk instead, grateful for a partner that clearly likes his cat more than most humans he came across.

Remus went to stick his shopping bags on the island, thinking he ought to put the milk away before anything else. He plucked the two bottles out of the bag and held one in hand and the other against his side as he opened his fridge only to find another four bottles of milk lined up in a row. Remus took a moment to laugh, giving up a quick, easy burst of a note before resigning himself to a bit of an intense game of Tetris in order to fit all six bottles inside the fridge comfortably along with everything else in it.

He weighed his options as he put away the rest of his shopping, thinking there was really only one thing he could do, and that was to dig up a few recipes that called for gallons of milk but he would need his mum’s wisdom on that front.

He checked the time displayed on the stove, thought it a bit too early to ring her just yet, and found himself tempted by the chance of a bit of rest. He didn’t have to head out again for some time, at least not until Dorcas rang, so he set himself an alarm as a precaution, giving himself just short of an hour to avoid coming out the other end feeling sluggish. He supposed he could've gone and stretched out on his bed, but the couch was a fine option and a comfy one, at that. He stretched out over the length of it, pulling his quilt off of the back of it, and shifted the throw pillow to better suit his head. Not allowing his indulgence to run too long, Remus woke to the sound of his alarm feeling rested and justified in his decision.

He gave a stretch, came out from under his quilt, and started himself a full pot while he decided on what to do for a late lunch. He decided to have the bowl of cereal he intended to have that morning and took his bowl and tea back to the island where he looked up his grades again, and this time his efforts proved fruitful. He perked when he saw the alert, brought up the page, and stared at a harsh 'B' on screen.

He didn’t even really have it in him to go in and find out just what caused the drop, instead he took to stewing while he ate, finding the 'B' stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the rest of his grades and trying his best to replace his frustration with something more like gratitude; the rest of his marks were top-notch, it was just one, little 'B,' trailing along after his other grades, and he was having too good a day to start nitpicking now.

Tomorrow, maybe. Not today.

He finished eating, shut his laptop with one last reminder that he’d done quite well with his term overall, and went to the sink to wash out his bowl. He picked up both his mug and teapot and relocated to the couch, deciding that given the circumstances and without assigned readings or a paper to outline, it was more than fair to get a little reading for pleasure while he had the chance. He went to the bookshelf on the other side of the living room and picked out the novel he’d set aside at the start of term and flipped to the dog-eared page he’d last left off as he returned to the couch, wrapping himself up in his quilt and settling in the left corner with his feet propped up on the coffee table.

At the start of the new year, Remus made a pact with himself that in the event that any contented silences came his way, he ought to not only try to notice it but spend a few moments truly immersed in it. He thought it might help him feel more appreciative of them, certainly, but a little above that, he hoped it would remind him that he could have contented silences, and then more so than that even, sincerely hoped the exercise might allow for him to look back on moments a lot like this one when things weren’t so calm, help him to remember that, at one point, he was there and the odds were that he'd be there again eventually.

Remus chose this silence, thinking he liked the image of it and wouldn’t mind looking back on this one on some dreary day in the future and remembering that he was here once; settled, accomplished, with a couple of free hours to simply be inside of before he would be expected anywhere and the extra time to spare toward simply enjoy it.

He wasn’t too sure how long he’d been reading for when he was spurred out of his reading by Mestophales batting at a bird on the other side of the window, but when he checked the time he was momentarily shocked to read it was past five. He flipped down the top corner of the page he was on and shut his book, patting around for his mobile until he found it squeezed between his left leg and the couch cushion. He thumbed through to his mum’s mobile, giving it a shot considering the time, and stuck his mobile against his ear as the dial tone sang back at him.

“Hallo,” she greeted, though there was a fair bit of bustle in the background.

“Where are you?” Remus asked, his curiosity quite piqued.

“I thought I’d stop in at the grocery just off work, but it’s very clear I’m not the only one who had that idea,” his mum said. “It’s a madhouse in here.”

“Well, I’ll be here a little longer if you’d rather talk when you’ve finished there,” Remus offered.

“Where are you heading?” his mum asked, not really taking his offer, not really declining it either.

“Dorcas is due back later today and we’ve dinner plans eventually,” Remus offered.

His mum gave a small trill. “Oh, that’ll be nice.”

Remus nodded, quite looking forward to it himself. “Her plane touched down late last night, but we figured we’d let her settle in and get some unpacking done before anything else, so I’ll be here for a little while yet if you’d rather shop first.”

“How about I shop and talk to you,” his mum raised. “I’m currently comparing two nearly identical slabs of beef to see which one has more to offer, so there’s nothing stimulating happening over here, I'm afraid.”

Remus breathed out a laugh, sticking his chin in his hand. “OK, I've two quick things for you in case you’re seized by conversation again,” he prefaced. “My last grade came in—“

“Mm! And?” his mum probed. “Are you happy with it?”

“So happy with it,” Remus said, sticking his mouth behind his hand.

He blinked when his mum let out an appraised sound. “Oh, I’ll just— turn down here,” she said quickly, then dropped to a whisper. “I frightened a gent.”

Remus dropped his hand from his mouth, smirking. “Can’t imagine how.”

“Oh, honey, that’s wonderful,” she instilled, either not hearing his quip or moving right on past it; both were equally likely. “I ought to get you something while I’m here, do you need anything?”

Remus snorted. “Sure, surprise me,” he said, playing along. “Oh — no milk, I beg of you.”

“Have you given it up?” his mum asked.

Remus gave a laugh. “Not at all, only I was foolish enough not to remember that when Sirius finishes off something of yours he typically repays you in bounds,” he said. “And I mean, bounds.”

“Oh dear,” his mum said weightily. “How much milk do you now have?”

“Six bottles,” Remus chimed.

His mum let out a snort. “I can’t even say I’m surprised.”

“I shouldn’t be, and yet,” Remus returned airily. “If you’ve got any recipes that call for a gallon of milk, I’ll take just about anything right about now.”

“Let me have a look around and I’ll send you what I come up with, how’s that?” his mum returned.

“Incredible, thank you,” Remus passed her. He crossed his toes in his socks and took a quick, deep breath away from the receiver for a moment before he brought it back to his mouth. “OK, second thing; the tickets are booked, so I can forward the itinerary to you so you have the dates and times on hand, if you’d like?”

His mum braces with quite the intake of breath. “That was quick,” she observed. “You got the approval already?”

“Oh, I know, I expected to have to wait until Lily was back to get a confirmation,” Remus said candidly. “I even made her swear to keep away from her mobile while they’re gone, but she absolutely didn’t do that and responded to my request straight away — I mean, she can’t do anything official from all the way over there, but she said it was as good as approved so I’d better book them now, and then I did do that.”

His mum let out a little laugh. “Thank you for that last bit, I really feel as if I was there to see it.”

“Anytime,” Remus said easily. “It’s not going to be until July, mind, but I wanted to have a bit more saved for the trip and then there’s the fall to consider of course, but I got the tickets early so those would be taken care of and get out of the way.”

His mum gave an agreeing hum. “Good thinking,” she said. “What did they add up to in the end?”

“Oh, no no,” Remus denied. “Nice try, but no.”

“Remus,” she said lightly.

“Hope,” he returned. “We had a deal.”

“Well, we could call it a birthday gift?” his mum offered.

“I’m wrapped in yours,” Remus said of the astonishingly brightly-coloured quilt wrapped around him.

“Oh, that was just a little something,” his mum insisted.

“Really, mum,” Remus instilled, “I’m on full-time, I’ll make it back in a day or two of working, it's OK; I don’t even need you to cover his ticket, but I know a dead horse when I see one.”

His mum let out a light sigh. Too light. “Alright, then, tell him you'll be showing him the Welsh countryside from way up close,” she maintained. “Make sure to pack a tent, it’ll get chilly if you don’t have a place to squat at for the nights.”

Remus frowned. “You’re far too good at this.”

“Send me the receipt, please,” his mum finished, putting a dead horse right between them.

Remus sighed, dragging his free hand over his face once. “OK, fine, but that is it,” he conditioned. “You’re to take care of nothing else while we’re there and I want that in writing.”

His mum laughed a lot, which didn’t bode well at all, and then she cut off quickly which was a bit funny, all in all. “One second,” she bid of him.

Remus half-listened to the words exchanged between his mum and another dinnertime shopper, but he couldn’t really hear much aside from his mum’s responses and leaned forward to pour himself a little more tea in her absence.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, her voice much clearer now. “It’s a church function without the steeple in here.”

Remus stuck the teapot back down on the coffee table and settled in again. “That’s alright,” he excused.

“So, is anyone else coming along?” his mum asked.

Remus hummed a no, his right knee jiggling. “Just us two for this one; Lily and James won’t get any more time off for the next while yet and, as far as I’m aware, it’s not the best time for Pete, either,” he relayed, his knee going like a sewing machine in the background.

“No one else?” his mum checked.

Remus looked left then right. “No?”

“There’s plenty of room here,” his mum said. “Be a shame not to bring her with.”

“If you're talking about Dorcas, then she’s got to work through the summer,” Remus passed along, feeling as if he’d been picked up and flung backwards to the tender, grisly age of seventeen.

“OK, well, I thought I’d offer,” his mum said. “Oh — just a second, sorry.”

Remus was rather grateful for his mum getting pounced on again for it gave him time for himself; he dropped the receiver away from his mouth in order to take in a full breath and let it out before she dragged herself away from whoever had spotted her.

“You’ll never guess who that was,” his mum said.

Remus hummed, though it was a little blank even for him. “Who?”

“Your teacher for, oh, level nine? No, Ten,” she said, and Remus was certain his entire stomach took to a roll and left his body behind. “Really kind, I know it starts with an S; I didn’t want him to know I couldn’t remember so I avoided having to say it, but I knew the face.”

Remus’s stomach went and did an impressive flip; a solid nine out of ten at least. “I’ve got the other line going, mum,” he said, pushing to sound a bit torn between two choices.

“Oh,” his mum said quickly. “OK, sorry hon; go, have fun.”

“I will, thanks,” Remus nodded.

“Send me that itinerary.”

“I will.”

“Talk to you soon.”

“'Course, yeah.”

Remus pulled his mobile away from his ear as he pressed to end the call, sitting in the silence of his flat for a few moments and ultimately deciding the whole room looked different than it did before. He looked to his mobile again for the time, wasn’t sure he would get Sirius at a good time when he was already well into his shift, but Remus went into his recent calls and hovered his thumb over Sirius’s name anyway, pressing it after a quick moment’s hesitation.

Two rings and a bark of a laugh came through on the other end, garnering Remus to drop his mobile away from his mouth one more time and simply bask in feeling grateful that he’d even given in to his impulse if it meant that was the first sound that came of it.

“There’s a girl in the dumpster,” Sirius delivered, sounding rather charmed by the fact.

Remus blinked, his lips quirking. “Oh?”

"I tossed two bags in and got a yelp in return,” Sirius added. “And when I say tossed, I mean I really wound up before I shot them in there.”

Remus’s shoulders shook as he attempted to hold his laughter in, but eventually a snort escaped and gave him away. “How certain are you of whether she was in there out of necessity or choice?” he asked. “It’ll help me decide which layer of hell I’m slated for.”

“Not as if I stopped to ask, but I’ll play,” Sirius said. “If it’d been necessity, then my best guess is you’re in for the fourth or fifth one, but you could absolutely argue when you're brought in front of the council that it’s likely she’s had a few bombs dropped on her in her day already.”

“Now I have a defence for trial,” Remus said. “Thank you.”

“But only the first layer if it had been by choice,” Sirius tacked on. “If that’s the case, I really should have thrown them harder.”

“You’ll be on trial with me, I see; glad to hear it,” Remus traded, hiding his twisted smile underneath the edge of his quilt, but he heard the sound of the back door shutting and wondered if he’d called at an inopportune time. “Are you able to take a few or were you just popping out for that?”

“I sure can, I’m just purelling before I go back out,” Sirius replied, rather airily at that.

Remus clicked his tongue into the receiver so that Sirius would really hear it. “It’s as if you want the lecture at this point.”

“Seems that way, doesn’t it,” Sirius said mildly.

Remus spared him the one Sirius well knew by heart, went for another sip of tea, and heard the back door shut again, which was caused to assume Sirius made it out back again. “Careful,” he cautioned. “Your friend could still be out there.”

“She can’t say for certain it was me,” Sirius returned, mid-stretch, and Remus had the image of him reclined and leaning against the building.

“Pretty sure what with the apron she’ll just assume it was you, but I digress,” Remus said, feeling himself settling into the couch more just hearing Sirius relaxing. “Good shift so far?”

He heard the flick of a lighter before an easy, affirming hum. “How was yours?”

“Good,” Remus replied. “Bit busier than I’m used to, but that made it pass quicker. Over in my personal life, however, my fridge is starting to bear an uncanny resemblance to one of the ones at work.”

“I’m sure you’ll go through those bottles before they pass,” Sirius said, unfazed.

“I picked up two on my way home,” Remus tacked on.

Sirius let out a quick bork. “We might have to get creative, then.”

“I’ve already begun gathering recipes,” Remus assured.

“Great minds,” Sirius said before a pause, drawing in a haul. “You and Dorcas still on for tonight?”

Remus hummed a yes. “I don’t know when yet, I told her to take the day to unwind and she could ring me whenever—“ he said, trailing off when he heard a second voice added to the mix.

He kept quiet for a few beats, pinning the voice as Mary’s. “That’s the most ominous thing you’ve ever said to me and I’ve no choice but to take it as a threat,” Sirius declared, his voice a little farther away from the receiver.

Remus looked up and around as he kept an ear out for some context clues he was greatly lacking from his end of the phone. Mary carried on too quickly to get much more than continued phonetics, so Remus leaned forward to reach for his mug, had a bit more of his tea even though it was quite a bit cooler now, and a minute or so later he heard the sound of the back door shutting again.

“Mary says you look good today,” Sirius relayed.

Remus swallowed a gulp of tea. “That’s very kind, but how could she know that?”

“I don't have to see you to know it either, why should she?” Sirius raised.

Remus stuck his mug back on the coffee table, feeling warm all over. “I'd return the gesture, but I hear she threatened you.”

“She certainly did,” Sirius echoed. “Came out here telling me how much I’m really going to like one of the newbies, which I have no choice but to assume means I’m definitely not going to like the newbie.”

Remus smirked a laugh. “No other conclusion to make, clearly,” he said. “Have any of them started yet?”

Sirius gave a non-committal hum around a haul. “I don’t know when the other one's starting, but the one she’s talking about starts next week,” he provided amidst holding in his haul, then let it out in one-go two beats later. “A transfer case and a piece of work, says her; she covered a shift at his old store a while back and he had her sitting face-down on the table in the back at the worst of it.”

Remus frowned, moving his left hand to scratch at the same hip and giving a mild hum. “Let’s hope that was just a bad first impression.”

Sirius replied with a sceptical hum. “Mary can get along with just about anyone, so this doesn’t bode particularly well, but I bet we'll see.”

Remus tilted his head evenly for that, but remained on point. “I still say you should give it a fair chance,” he said.

Sirius let out a light noise of offence. “What sort of person do you think I am?”

Remus made a thoughtful hum. “The sort that’ll go into this readily prepared for it to fail off the bat?” he raised.

Sirius let out a scoff. “She ought to get some of the blame when she’s the one who lay the foundation,” he defended.

“I’ll sprinkle some in her direction, then,” Remus allowed.

“Thanks for that, and besides, we’re getting one more newbie along with him and odds are if he’s as bad as she claims he is, then the other one can’t be nearly as,” Sirius decided, and then paused for a haul, and Remus marvelled at Sirius’s rather shiny outlook on probability. “Did you ring to distract me from my incredible work ethic?”

It was more like a distraction for himself, but yes, technically Remus had done that. “That depends if it's working or not,” he said.

Sirius paused, the sound of him exhaling a quick haul filtering through the phone. “Like a charm,” he returned at the end of it.

“You don’t need to head back in soon?” he checked.

“'Need' is a strong word,” Sirius deemed it. “I could just, accidentally spark this other one I happened to bring out with me and then I’d have to finish it so not to be wasteful, and I know you don’t much like that sort of thing.”

Remus stuck his mouth under his quilt again, smiling. “You’re right, I don’t,” he maintained. “I won’t keep you long after that, I just needed to hear your voice for a bit.”

“You good?” Sirius asked after a beat.

Remus breathed in quietly, catching the scent of his quilt’s edge that was sitting just over his nose. “Yeah, I think I’m just a schmooze today,” he said. “I must still be on a high from the weekend; I blame the cobblestones and all that wine we were fed, got me feeling sentimental.”

“Not that I don’t like it when you’re a schmooze, but you said 'needed,' and I don’t know you to be particularly hyperbolic with your phrasing,” Sirius kept on with it. “That’s more my thing.”

Remus ran his right pinky finger up and back down the side of his phone. “I picked the wrong word.”

“Mm, doubt you did.”

“I’ll just bring the entire mood down.”

“You won’t; what’s going on?”

Sensing no end in sight, Remus pulled the entire quilt tighter around him, wishing Sirius were in the room so he would be able to see him. He reached his left hand up and dragged it down his face, changing his tune completely when it reached his neck. “I don’t know what I’m even saying—”

“Yes, you do,” Sirius replied. “Take a minute, sort it out, start again.”

Remus pulled his feet off the coffee table and brought his legs in, curling them at the knee, definitely wishing he had anything to do with his hands now. “I rang my mum to tell her the trip’s on and don’t know why I let myself think that this would go over smoothly,” he started, rubbing his free hand at the back of his neck, “and now, when we go it’ll be less about me sharing you with them and more about me having this whole other area of my life that they didn’t know about; I completely screwed this up for us long before I knew there’d even be an us to screw up—”

“Oi,” Sirius returned the next beat. “Quit ragging on my man right now, you hear me?”

Remus was grateful for the first time since starting the call that Sirius wasn’t in the room so he couldn’t see the verklempt pout he gave into. “I did, Sirius,” he sighed. “To the point where my mum thinks I’m seeing Dorcas; that’s how badly I managed to screw this up.”

There was a bit of a pause before Sirius’s voice came through rather pointedly. “How could you possibly know that?”

“She asked if anyone else was coming with—”

“Great. Scot,” Sirius sent out. “Fuck it, then; the whole plan’s ruined.”

“Would you shush?” Remus implored. He got a breathy laugh for it, but it came with silence and that would have to do. “She thinks this is just a couple of blokes going on a trip.”

Sirius chose to speak there. “Right, and she would, seeing as it was pitched as a couple of blokes going on a trip,” he put in.

Remus huffed, dragging his free hand over his face. “Right, I’m making a big deal out of nothing,” he said flatly. "Thank you for such hands-on support."

“I didn't say that,” Sirius maintained. “I’m sorry, go.”

Remus breathed in once, out once. “I thought she’d been asking if I were bringing James and everyone else along with us too, but she wasn’t,” he said. “She meant Dorcas and then singled her out specifically, so—”

“Right, but does that really mean—”

“It was the way she said it, Sirius,” Remus instilled. “I know seems harmless to you but it was the tone she used, and if you knew her like I do, then there’d be no other way to spin it.”

“OK, but you still haven’t even gotten to what she actually said, which is sort of important here,” Sirius pointed out.

Remus sighed through his nose. “She said we've a lot of room to spare and it'd be a shame not to take her with,” he said. “As if I was leaving my girlfriend behind while I go on some buddy-buddy trip with you.”

Sirius hummed, but it was neither positive nor negative as far as Remus could hear; a ponderous note and a bit of a prompt in one. “I don’t know why she thinks it,” Remus tacked on, just in case it had been negative. “She used to do this kind of thing and I used to go along with it, but this time around, I really don’t get it; it’s not as if I talk about her any more than anyone else.”

Sirius smacked his lips there. “Well, only single girl you talk about,” he raised.

“Oh, so we skyped a lot while she was away so that must mean we’ve exchanged rings, obviously,” Remus returned, souring at the image of his mum miles away grinning like a fool any time he’d even said Dorcas’s name in passing in the past five months and getting more and more excited about it. “I hate the idea of you feeling like you’re playing second fiddle to—”

Sirius laughed, for some reason. “I don’t,” he said. “Believe me, I’m taking it as a supreme compliment you got caught up in the glitz and glamour of the entire idea not to stop to think about all the ways it could possibly go wrong until today; I’ll be strutting about for days, you’ll see.”

Remus fought a reluctant smile from forming. “I should have just told them years ago and then we wouldn’t even have this problem,” he said. “I should have corrected her years ago—"

Sirius clicked his tongue on the other end of the line. “You couldn't tell them then and beating yourself up about it now won’t help anything when you’re literally planning to do something about it as we speak,” he gave plainly.

“How are you being so good about this?” Remus asked. “You should be upset that I didn’t set this up properly.”

“I’m not going to shit on all the reasons you never felt free enough to say the words to them,” Sirius returned. “You had a constant devil on your shoulder telling you that it had to be kept secret and if you were calling to get a quick and easy reprimand for not getting this over with sooner, you’re not going to get it from me and you know better than that.”

Remus pulled his quilt right up over his head and wormed his way onto his right side, curling up in the corner of the couch. “Could you go a little easier on me?” he implored. “I’m not doing so hot right now.”

“I really think I was going easy on you, personally,” Sirius offered frankly, “and I’m working on it; what about your dad, then? Is he holding onto the same theory that she's got?”

Remus gave a flat noise. “Last we even discussed my love life he made sure to suggest I couldn’t get a date, but that’s just my dad for you.”

Sirius gave out a profound pfft. “If he knew how many people I have to beat off of you with a stick he’d change his tune right quick.”

“Alright; he was kidding around and I would've thought you’d catch on to that since you’re rather familiar with exaggerating for comedic effect, case in point.”

“I’m not even exaggerating,” Sirius returned. “That’s the funny part.”

Remus gave a sigh. “The point is, he mostly just reamed me on it and we went onto something else,” he maintained. “That’s fairly regular for us.”

“Were pronouns ever mentioned?” Sirius asked.

Remus shook his head. “Not a one.”

“Then maybe it all lies with him,” Sirius offered. “Did I tell you I ascended to the heavens the moment he reamed me? I was honoured, truly.”

Remus felt the corners of his lips lift. “You took it so well,” he gave him. “It takes a few good ones for people to realize he’s just being a shit, but you caught on straight away.”

“Takes a shit to recognize another,” Sirius said easily. “Far as I’m concerned I’ve already got his approval in a sense, I just need to seal the deal.”

Remus gave a considered nod. “You’ll at least stay in his good books if you keep bringing up 'Live Aid,'” he said, smiling.

“What, as if I could ever forget?” Sirius returned. “I plan on asking him plenty more questions so he best be ready for it.”

Remus’s small smile formed a grin before he rubbed at his eyes in turn with his free hand. “I don’t know, Sirius; if my mum’s convinced then he may hop on board too,” he said, dread bubbling back up in him. “It could go either way.”

“Ah, but she already loves me, she just doesn’t know how much yet but she’ll see,” Sirius said. “In the end, not much has really changed, has it?”

Remus gave a frown. No, it really hadn’t and not all of it in a good sense, but he stopped himself short of saying it when he couldn’t keep on lodging complaints, not with Sirius.

“Still with me?” Sirius asked, pulling Remus back in.

“I’m here.”

“It’s not as if we weren’t expecting an adjustment period, and at worst, I think that’s all we’re in for,” Sirius pressed on. “Not much we can do until we’re there, but I say our plan is in full motion.”

“Mm?”

“Forget what coming out stories you’ve seen, heard,” Sirius asserted, "forget whether they’ve ended terribly or hit out of the park; we don’t need them because we’re making our own, yes?”

“Yes."

“That’s right, we say, ‘fuck those stories, they’re old news,’” Sirius championed. “We just have to do what we do best, let them see how great we work together; we frame it around us as planned, we tell it like it is, and they’ll see that it makes all the sense in the world when you look at it properly—”

Sirius cut off quickly, speaking away from the receiver. “What?” he asked someone else, Mary likely. “Now?”

Remus barely registered anything past the exclamation, taking the moment Sirius seemed distracted and using it for himself. He dropped his phone away from his mouth for a shaky breath, shutting his eyes as they continued welling up.

“Rosmerta’s here,” Sirius clambers in, offering both words in a split second.

A few tears got away from Remus when he opened his eyes, and he’d never been more grateful for their district manager’s sense of timing. He swallowed hard and brought the phone back up by his mouth, pushing to sound steady until Sirius went on his way. “Best look alive.”

“She never drops in this late — I haven’t been living my life like she’d be coming in today,” Sirius insisted, and for a moment Remus got an image of a somewhat less than picturesque café. “This may be the last we speak, and if so, it’s been an honour servicing you.”

“Well, with a mouth like that I’m sure you’ll charm her in no time,” Remus sent him.

“I’ll bring out the big guns, but only because you said I could,” Sirius vowed, the sound of the back door shutting in the background of the call before his voice dropped to a fast-paced whisper. “Come over when you’re done there?”

Remus nodded. “Yeah,” he confirmed.

“Love you,” Sirius added right before the line went dead and Remus dropped his phone altogether.

A week’s worth of running on high caught up to him in one blow, knocking Remus from every angle, and he couldn’t do much more than shift down onto his side and simply let it happen.

If it could sink in soon he’d love it to get a move on, but some of it just wouldn’t line up no matter how much he wished he could flip a switch and make it happen. For Sirius to be so willing to go along with the hassle he came with, to be so steadfast, or to want to be a part of this section of his life even at all, or and or, on and on until Remus was back where he started once again. He didn’t know the steps backwards or forwards in that moment, or how he tripped into something so much bigger than him, or how he managed to trick Sirius into falling into it with him; or and or, on and on.

The flattened feeling never did catch him at a good time, but he was grateful he’d been able to hold out until Sirius was off the phone. He’d take being curled up and shaking under a chaotically colourful quilt while alone in his flat if it meant he wouldn't have someone staring at him as if he’d never catch up, and maybe he never fucking would. He hated this part more than any of it, but these moments never came with pride, so why, he wondered, did he expect to feel any different this time around? One heady week couldn't change months and months couldn’t change years, and if he was going to feel it he needed to without the pitying look that came along with him welling up at every bit of the newness of it all.

The couch dipped behind him, a weight settled against his lower back, and a sequence of purring told him plainly that he wasn’t alone, not quite. Remus breathed out, pulled the quilt down off his head, and made the effort to shift onto his back, then to his left side. He slung his right arm over the cat’s body, and she must have sensed that he needed this a bit if she allowed him to remain draped over her.

Minutes later he clued into her tail intermittently whipping against his stomach and wiped his eyes one by one with his left hand, feeling a bit silly on the other end of it. He lay still for a little while longer, running his right hand over the cat’s fur and actively trying to remember the important theme threading through his entire week; Sirius wanted this, too. He's wanted it for a while yet, but he waited, he waited for him to be ready. It should give him heart palpitations in some hokey way, have him reciting haikus about springtime and new beginnings just as he’d done that morning, not render him useless and holding onto his cat for support. Sirius was up for taking this step with him, he was going to come with just to see it through, and in that moment, Remus told himself what he had to do if he had any hope of getting off his couch; told himself that just because he wasn’t ahead of the game in a lot of areas, it didn't have to mean he was that far behind either.

He let out a long sigh, pushed himself up, and leaned his weight on his left elbow, glancing over the surface of the coffee table for his tin. When he didn't see he pulled himself off the couch and went into his room, finding it lying on his bedside table, and snatched it up. He went back to the couch and picked the opposite corner so he was closer to the window, slid it open fully, and packed himself a bowl. He lay stretched his legs out across the couch and was mid-way through his haul when his mobile rang again.

He let out a stream in one long sigh, hoping it was someone bringing him something he could handle. He leaned forward to squint at his phone on the other end of the couch and read Dorcas lit up on his screen.

He cleared his throat a few times, swiped the screen, and said hello, prompting Dorcas’s distinctly animated voice. “Well, this is a real disappointment; I was hoping you’d come back with a Parisian accent that I could then completely make fun of you for.”

Remus smirked, feeling a bit better already. “After just three days there?” he raised.

“Only takes one for some,” Dorcas returned.

“Then I could really say the same for you since you had four months on me to develop one of your own,” Remus said.

“We really have to work on being more pretentious,” Dorcas said.

“I’ll put one on the next time I come back, how’s that?” Remus offered.

“That’s more like it,” Dorcas said. “Only, you’ll have to start turning your nose up at every cheese platter you come across and insisting that you can’t even look at our sad excuse for cheese when you had the real stuff.”

“First of all, I love that that gives the impression I come across a lot of cheese platters in my day to day,” Remus maintained, “and second, I did try some of the cheese and they’re not making it up — it is better there; if you get a free day in the fall, come visit me, I’ll take you exactly where we went, and you’ll see what I mean.”

“Deal,” Dorcas returned. “My only amendment is that we have to go to one of those fancy wine tastings so I can put my pinky up and chortle the whole time.”

“What, like you don’t do that already?” Remus said.

“Can’t have them sniff me out as a tourist, can I?” she offered. “I’ll just have to hope they don’t ask me to sniff and name whatever wine it is.”

“Right, that’s when they’ll know you’re not one of them,” Remus said evenly.

Dorcas snorted. “Alright, I'm home, I'm settled enough, and I want dinner,” she declared.

“Where do you want to do this?” Remus asked.

“Raining out there, isn’t it?” she observed.

Remus leaned his head back to have an upside-down look at the window and saw that a drizzle had indeed started at some point over the course of the afternoon, which was fitting to say the least. “Right, I’ll come to you, then?”

Dorcas spoke through what sounded like a mild stretch. “Great idea.”

Remus smiled, thinking the fresh air might do him some good even with the drizzle involved. “Give me a bit to get myself sorted and I’ll head over."

Remus finished off his bowl before much else, then thought it might be on to roll a pinner to bring along in case Dorcas wanted to partake later on, and set about doing that. He stuffed the joint away in his tin and stuck that in his pocket, heading into his room to swap his cardigan out for something to better cover him from the rain and ended up picking one of Sirius’s on account that it smelled like him and had a proper hood.

He stopped at the entryway to foot his shoes on, then remembered his earbuds were plugged into his laptop on the island and went to grab them. He detangled them on the way through the stairwell and thumbed through to find a tune he even felt like hearing at the moment and ultimately hit shuffle and stuffed his mobile into the pocket of Sirius’ hoodie before stepping out of the lobby door.

His shuffle picked The Revivalists Wish I Knew You and after a pointed frown at that particular pick, Remus resolved to leave it, deciding he wasn’t interested in assigning that particular choice with any deeper meaning and called on a bit of Sirius's level of flipping a scene to better suit himself; his mobile simply knew he could use a jaunty bassline to accompany him on his travels, that's all that happened. He continued talking himself up as he rode the tube and by the time he made it to Dorcas’ block he’d managed to put some of the spring back in his step, thinking the rest would fall together once he got upstairs.

He wasn’t wrong about that for the moment Dorcas opened the door to let him inside Remus instantly felt better. “I may have ordered food but in my defence, I really didn’t feel like standing over the stove,” she said, stepping back to let Remus in.

“That’s fine with me,” Remus said, slipping inside and moving to foot his shoes off on the matt.

The two of them ended up eating on the couch, wherein Dorcas took the reigns of the conversation, which Remus hardly minded when they had a lot of catching up to do. He got a rundown of Dorcas’s last week in Milan, the tale of her mad dash to fit as many visits with mates as she could squeeze in, and he got a few of the finer details about her final day which he learned mainly consisted of a bed and the bloke she’d taken up with while there and not all that much else. From there, he got quite another, rather detailed tale of her flight, complete with some pleasant highlights and a lot more gruelling anecdotes. Having never done it himself, flying had always been a bit of a blind spot where Remus was concerned and thus usually found himself quite curious for anecdotes from those quite familiar with the process, but he found himself rather amused hearing from someone who so evidently hated the finer details of flying as much as Dorcas clearly seemed to.

By the time the two of them were mostly finished their plates Dorcas had made it to the actual flying part of the tale, which included being seated next to a woman who proceeded to show her many pictures of her rock collection.

“Was it impressive, at least?” Remus asked, feeling the need to interject right about there.

“One was a shocking, shimmery blue, but that didn’t mean I need to see it or the thousand others she had,” Dorcas returned. “It’s my face, I swear; it’s too polite, it screams, ‘tell me all about your rock collection' to people, and I don’t know how to train it to stop.”

“Apparently mine’s the same way and especially at work,” Remus passed her. “Sirius claims it’s the baby deer eyes that give customers the impression I’m absolutely there to hear about who got what in the divorce.”

Dorcas gestured at him with her free hand. “See? We’re doomed; we can’t change our faces,” she maintained, garnering Remus to attempt a gruff expression that really only got her snickering behind her glass. “Needs work.”

Remus snorted and traded the face for a smile, feeling warm and fed and contented. Before he could truly snapshot the moment to save for later a door opened down the hall and a bit of whistling floated back their way. Remus didn’t really think much of it past the sudden understanding that Dorcas’s roommate had to b home, but Dorcas’s bland expression as his footsteps approached was a bit difficult to miss. Her roommate came into view as he passed by the open doorway to the living room, tossing a vacant nod to Remus before he was out of view again and heading into the kitchen. Remus trained his gaze on Dorcas just as she raised her hands to her temples as her roommate continued his jaunty tune while he dug out whatever he was getting out of the fridge. She shut her eyes after about fifteen seconds in, where she began to look a little of what Remus had a hunch he had to look like when he was trying to ward off a particularly punchy migraine.

Remus lasted about all of a minute through the rather tense atmosphere before he reached into his right pocket for his tin, plucked out the pinner he’d rolled ahead of time, and poked her on the arm with the point of it.

Dorcas opened her eyes and dropped both her hands from the sides of her head. “You’re a good man,” she forwarded, pushing off of the couch.

Remus stifled a laugh and followed her out onto her balcony which was a surprisingly spacious area where two people didn’t have to squeeze to fit on it, but Remus wasn’t envious about that at all. Dorcas went ahead and took the deck chair on the left while Remus shut the sliding glass door behind him and sat down in the other chair, sticking his mobile on the small plasticine table between the two of them.

“I’m going to fucking sock him one day,” Dorcas said.

Remus fished out his lighter and handed both it and the pinner off for Dorcas to start. “What did I miss?” he asked.

Dorcas reached over and took both off of him. “I always kept to my area when he'd have his mates over, but when I clearly have company, he decides it’s completely on to just waltz on out of his area and kill the vibe with his fucking whistling,” she returned, sticking the end of the joint in her mouth, speaking while she flicked the lighter. “He knows I hate it too, which is the worst part about it.”

Remus bit the side of his lower lip out of mirth as he reached to cup his hands around the end of the joint so it’d have a chance to light, but seconds after Dorcas pulled a haul off of it she promptly erupted into a coughing fit that Remus tried vigorously not to snicker at.

“Strong shit,” she said hoarsely, thumping her fist against her chest a few times.

Remus rearranged his expression. “Yeah, I probably should have warned you; Sirius’s stuff is no joke,” he passed her.

“I’m learning,” Dorcas returned before taking a resounding breath and immediately lifting the lighter to try again.

Remus fully gave into his amusement there, not feeling all that bad about it when Dorcas successfully exhaled without another eruption a few moments later. She handed it off to him and gestured toward him with a hand. “What about you?” she asked. “What’s been going on here?”

Remus let his haul out in a quick stream. “I booked another trip this morning.”

Dorcas’ eyes lit up. “You’re going back already?” she asked. “The French must have really impressed you.”

Remus smirked and shook his head, shifting his gaze onto the marquis above the theatre across the street from Dorcas’s balcony. “No, just heading home; it’s going on two years since I moved away so I thought I’d make the trip now that I can wrangle the time and money to do it,” he supplied, hovering just at the cusp of the rest of it for a couple beats before making the plunge, “and I thought it was high time my mum and dad got to know Sirius properly.”

Remus made the effort to look at her then, but he got maybe a split-second's warning before she reached across the table and socked him right in the arm. “Why am I only hearing this now?” she demanded.

Remus reached up to ward off another go at him. “I wanted to hear about you,” he defended, pulling another haul off of the joint.

Dorcas shook her head. “But this is huge,” she instilled, gesturing her hand at him in prompt, and it helped then, just to hear it being called what Remus certainly felt it was.

Remus pushes his exhale out quicker than his last. “It’s all very soppy stuff,” he warned her. “You really ought to know that ahead of time.”

“Even better,” Dorcas said, draping herself back in her seat. “Lay it on me.”

Remus’s lips quirked as he handed the joint back to her. “There are two major points where I realized I really fucking owed it to him,” he prefaced, “one was when he helped me make the payment and helped me get accepted — after I'd forced myself to get past the fact that I had to let him do that in order to even try to get accepted, that is; let’s be clear on that before anything else.”

Dorcas paused her haul and let out a very small cloud. “Crystal.”

Remus tipped his head toward her for it. “And the other was him taking me there just to have a look,” he passed her, huffing out a laugh from there. “He was such a sneak about it too; just told me to pack for two nights but he wouldn’t tell me a thing of where we were going or what we'd be doing until we were already on our way there and I caught onto his plan, but why would he tell me, right?”

Dorcas burst out a quick laugh, tapping the joint to ash it. “No reason to.”

“Just useless information,” Remus said, passing the joint along.

“Bet the face you made was worth it,” Dorcas stuck in.

“Allegedly,” Remus said, but smirked all the same. “First day, he took me to as many sights as we could squeeze in, all the spots you’re supposed to. Never got into the Louvre because the queue was unbelievable, but I did stand at the top of the tower with him, so it’s all fair, really.”

“Can’t have it all,” Dorcas echoed, reaching to pluck the joint out from between his two fingers.

“But the second day, he brought me to all sorts of hidden spots that he knew about,” Remus said while she took a haul. “All these backroad shops and little hole-in-the-wall pubs he insisted that people miss while they're caught up in the typical touristy attractions because he wanted me to know all these little secrets of the city so I’d know where they were beforehand, and he was just glowing that day, so happy to show me all these gems, and that was it, that was the moment I knew I really needed to start thinking doing it finally.”

He stopped, registering Dorcas’s lower lip held in paired with her openly turmoiled expression, and she let go of her lip when his smile faded. “I’m trying to let you finish before I scream,” she offered in a quick burst, waving her hands erratically.

“He’s so happy that I got in, just ecstatic about it,” Remus said.

Dorcas handed the joint over for Remus to take, smiling at that. “He looked it when we were on skype,” she tacked on.

“Yes, but that — that didn't happen to me,” Remus insisted, pointing at her with the joint before taking a haul and adding to it once he exhaled. “It was never been about what good opportunities I’d managed to get, it was always who or wat I was leaving behind if I were to take any of those opportunities, except for this time. He wants me to go, for me, and that’s — it's...”

He meant for the words to sound as important as they were, but he wasn’t sure he really worded any of it properly. He saw Dorcas’s smile drop off a bit before she gave a small nod, and he knew that she knew what he was saying.

Remus breathed out his nose and worked to explain it. “At first, I really wasn’t sure why he kept pressing me to try for it so much, but he listens—” he paused there, tilting his head evenly, “—not all the time, but one thing I can say is that this was one of our problems from before we even started, but I can also say with confidence now that if Sirius knows he's mucked up, he works twice as hard not to do it again and I think that’s what he was doing here, and I don’t know — seeing all of the encouragement he'd given me for such a pipe dream of mine, getting to be there and walk the streets with him now that it's nothing like a pipe dream anymore, and seeing him so consistently happy at the thought of me going; I wanted my parents to know what he actually is to me and what he does for me.”

It felt right to say, in the same way it felt right that his brain replayed proposing the initial idea to Sirius, and then all the details he’d focused on since they've been home come back to him in a whirl; how Sirius sat eagerly, cross-legged in front of him on the hotel room bed, how bright his eyes went, how hard he kissed him afterwards, and that helped solidify it all. He thought it best not to relive any memories of the lively sex that ensued rather soon after, not a scene he thought he should replay snapshots of just then.

He shifted forward in his seat, crosses his legs, and stuck his chin in his hand, working to meet Dorcas’s eyes with levity in order to hopefully come off rather wholesome instead, but Dorcas hardly noticed his inner battle for she simply followed up his altogether grandiose solilquey with a deep groan and a clutch at her chest.

“Bury me at sea,” she requested. Remus eyed her amusedly and Dorcas reached out and drummed on the table between them. “Deets, deets! When are you off?”

“It’s not until July,” Remus provided from behind his hand.

Dorcas snorted, taking a pull off the joint. “Always have to plan ahead, don’t you."

Remus gave a conceding head tilt and moved his hand aside, resting his chin in his hand. “I’d have liked it to have been sooner, but — money.”

Dorcas clicked her tongue. "Hate that stuff,” she said. “Are you nervous?”

“No, never me,” Remus returned airily.

Dorcas breathed a laugh through her nose. “I wouldn’t be if I were you,” she said, offering the joint back to him. “He’s a good boy; If I brought that one home mine would begin the wedding preparations that very same day.”

Yes, he thought around a haul, but that would be very different. It came to him so quickly, but he kicked himself a beat later. It might have been a picturesque image compared to his own, and an idealistic outcome to expect, but he knew she was only trying to ease his nerves. He stared out at passersby on the street below them, thinking he should leave it alone. Some didn’t have parents around to presume things about them. Some didn’t have secrets collecting years worth of dust that put them in positions where assumptions can be made about them. Some didn’t hide, some were brave, some had it worse, some had it so much worse than him.

And yet he heard himself speak anyway. “Do your parents ever utter a phrase or even just use a tone that just sends you right back to being seventeen?”

Dorcas gave a loaded laugh that brought Remus’s startled gaze back on her. “Take your pick,” she returned. “You couldn't pay me enough to be seventeen again, but I take that trip for free every other time I ring home.”

“Hm?” Remus prompted, not wanting to lose the opportunity.

Dorcas gave an amused breath through her nose, nodding. “I just about blew my dad’s head apart when I picked my major, and two years on from there, he’s still getting his shots in whenever he can,” she detailed. “He just can’t help himself.”

Remus made a bit of a face at that. “Your program sounds incredible.”

Dorcas leaned in, putting her chin in her hand as she reached to pluck the joint out of Remus’ hand and gestured to him with it. “And it is, but I had the grades for Sciences, took a gap year to feel things out a little, and finally chose film,” she said, punctuating it with a quick toke. “He’ll never let me live it down; he’s asked ‘how’s the hobby?’ more times than I can count, as if it’s clever at all this far in.”

Remus thought that was a frankly dismal overview of a degree in film. “I’m sorry, did you not just finish up a term in Milan?” he raised.

Dorcas gave a loaded laugh. “Frivolous degrees are frivolous degrees whether I got to spend a term on Italian soil or not,” she maintained.

Remus blinked a few times, looked around the room, and with his own parents throwing near parties when it came to his schooling he drummed his hands on the table twice. “Right, well, that’s so disheartening, and my entire point just crashed and burned so I’ll take that as my cue and bow out,” he said frankly.

Dorcas burst out a laugh. “No no, now I’ve got to know what yours was,” she said, holding the joint outstretched.

Remus took a quick haul and held it in, thinking of how to articulate it without specific details, and decided that perhaps he could cover a fair amount of ground but refrain from giving the entire picture. “This morning, I finished arranging a trip solely based on bringing my boyfriend home to my parents, only to find out twelve hours later that my mum thinks I’m dating a lass,” he relayed, popping an enthusiastic smile on the end of it.

He watched as Dorca’s face went through an impressive series of emotions before finally landing on a heavy frown, and though he felt strange under her sympathetic gaze, it was difficult not to need it. Here, he had a friend. Here, he could process it aloud, without stomping all over Sirius’s spirit while doing so.

“I’d been on such a high for days and hearing that just took the wind right out of my sail,” Remus described, shaking his head and handing what was left of the joint back to her.

“Yeah, ‘course it did,” Dorcas extended, reaching to take hold of it.

“It was the exact same tone she’d use back in secondary,” he said. “She would put it on when she wanted me to know that she’d sussed out I was seeing somebody, but she always thought I'd been avoiding bringing the girl home to meet them because I didn’t want a giant production or the embarrassment, which — is more real than she even knows, but that’s not really the point; I know she means well and I know I can’t blame her, I never did anything about it then, I never said a word, I didn't think it wise to correct her, but the second I heard it again, I felt so young and in the worst way.”

Remus bit the inside of his lip, staring out at the face of the theatre across the street from them. “It’s not as if my reasons for doing this aren’t reason enough to go through with it; they are and it’s rich of me to expect things to be different now that I want them to be,” he said.

Dorcas turned her head to shoot a quick stream of smoke out of her mouth and turned it back before holding the joint out to him in offering. “What do you mean by that?” she asked.

Remus took a haul, sorting the words out before trying again. “Once Sirius and I actually started getting along, I’d catch myself telling them so many stories with him in them, mostly because I had so many of them, I saw him three nights a week just at work and then outside work once there wasn't a work building in common for us to see each other, and when I realized I was doing it a lot, saying his name so much, I started sticking in stories about the rest of you to balance it out and I kept doing it all through literally today,” he instilled. “Back in the early days, it was self-preservation, I know it was; I never saw him and me happening, so the last thing I’d have wanted was for either of them to pick me out over some unrequited love situation, that’d have just been awful.”

Dorcas let out a small, reluctant laugh at the face he pulled. “But now, since you and he did end up together, maybe a little part of you hoped she already sort of knew?” she raised.

Remus froze for a moment, feeling sussed out. “It doesn’t even make sense,” he insisted, lifting his free hand. “Truly it doesn’t; if she’d said, ‘great, what time are you and your boyfriend getting in’ my stomach would have dropped out of my body — and why would she have done it? I backed Tom up as just a mate for eons, I backed Sirius up as a mate of mine this whole time, and now I want her to catch on? It’s ridiculous, I’m ridiculous.”

Dorcas gave him a plain look. “Right, but none of this is simple, so why should your reaction be?” Remus sat blinking at her for a few beats and Dorcas breathed out a weak laugh through her nose. “I’m saying, you get to be annoyed here,” she reiterated. “Take the rest of it away; you were still gearing up to the impending reveal, so maybe you tested the waters a bit and then got your foot snapped at, and if you want to talk about disheartening, it’s what I’d call that.”

Remus felt a wave of appreciation for her just letting him pull apart bits of worries and thoughts that would otherwise go nowhere but in. “So fucking disheartening,” he echoed. “And, not three minutes later, she runs into the rather male professor I had the biggest thing for in year nine and tells me it chipper as all hell as if the piece of the puzzle isn’t right there.”

He let out a tired laugh, frowning at Dorcas’s own frown. His opportunity for absolution didn’t last long, it never really did, and in the next moment his stomach churned and he felt certain he should cut his mum some slack. “There’s really not much that can be done about it now,” he said, straightening up in his chair and handing the joint off to Dorcas to finish off. “Sirius isn’t deterred at all, if that’s even a surprise, and it does help that they’re quite fond of him already. It's better I turn up with the bloke who was very generous with them as opposed to one who’s got, I don’t know, a head tattoo or something.”

Dorcas let out a long snort at that, setting her head down on her raised knee for a moment as she got a hold of herself. “Helps that he's a babe, too,” she said, lifting her head to relight the joint.

"I’m not sure they’re going to think that?” Remus returned, but a small smile broke through anyway.

“Well, alright, maybe not, but he’s got such a good presence about him,” Dorcas said after an exhale. “No tense or awkward silences to be had if you’ve landed someone who simply doesn’t let them happen.”

Remus blinked. “That’s — that’s fair,” he said candidly, feeling one less thorn poking at his side from the sentiment alone. "He really doesn't."

“Are you telling them straight away?” Dorcas asked, reaching to stub the joint out.

That Remus smiled fully at. “Imagine we waited until the last moment?”

Dorcas bit her lip out of sudden mirth before reciting, “'Mother, father, I am dating a man,' and then you dive onto the train before it leaves the station.”

“Quick, easy, strong exit,” Remus observed.

“Call it from the window as the train pulls out,” Dorcas offered.

Remus narrowed his eyes in feigned thought. “Seems too personal, somehow?”

Dorcas gave a heavy nod. “Right, right, right,” she said. “So what you do is, ring them five minutes after you leave and go, ‘shit, I forgot some potentially life-altering news I need to tell you both, put me on speaker?’”

“That’s it, new plan,” Remus said.

“So, you’ll tell them early on?” Dorcas presumed.

“First night,” Remus confirmed.

“Atta boy,” Dorcas said. “Good thing you’re doing this before term starts and you head off to Frenchlandia too, otherwise you’d be waiting a full year and that’d be some real news, mm.”

Remus nodded for it, but falterd; if he thought projecting the two of them being five months into this was difficult to wrap his head around, projecting them a full year in felt like he’d jumped right off the cliff he was inching on. “Do you know the worst part about the fall?” he said, steering them away from that.

“No, but tell me,” Dorcas prompted.

“I have to start looking for a sublet,” Remus delivered, pairing it with a flat frown.

Possibly because she’d gone through a similar process the fall past, Dorcas didn’t seem all that phased. “Some of it’s a hassle, yeah, but you’ve time to find a good one.”

Remus hummed. “In theory, but rest assured I’ve come up with potential horror stories already,” he said.

Dorcas smirked. “Oh, please, I need to know,” she said.

Remus let out a puff of breath. “I get a response from someone who’s interested; they’re moving out of student housing, sick of getting gouged, and think I like the sound of that," he said evenly, "but they show up to see the place and they’ve got the shifty-eyes.”

“Oh no,” Dorcas tossed out, just barely humouring him, “not those.”

Remus ducked his head, breaking into a laugh. “And then, they’re touching all of my things and I hate that idea more than the shifty eyes,” he tacked on. “Or, here’s another good one — a variation of the same scenario wherein I turn up back at my flat in December only to find the place has been emptied.”

He huffed a laugh as Dorcas dissolved into her own fit. “That would happen to you,” she sent him.

Remus burst out a laugh of his own, lifting a hand in agreement. “I’m already exhausted by the process and I haven’t even begun it.”

Dorcas straightened up quite suddenly in her seat and levelled him with a sly look. “Listen, I’m right sick of this place,” she slid him.

Remus succumbed to a fit of his own. “You just got back,” he returned.

“Yeah, but these last few months have been full of the best sleeps I’ve had since moving out here and that's because I didn't have him whistling around everywhere,” she maintained. “And I don’t mean whistling while you work, I mean he strolls about at two in the morning whistling like a miner and I don’t want this for myself, Remus; I deserve better than this.”

And that had Remus shaking. “James and Sirius just got a new neighbour who practices the bagpipes deep into the night, for some reason, so whistling sounds good right about now.”

“OK, first, that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard, and second, he’s also a fucking dick,” Dorcas went on, holding onto her stomach. “I should have just taken the time to find a new place.”

“Alright, but you have so much space here,” Remus insisted before gesturing around them. “A dick’s a dick, but you have the space to be nowhere near him.”

“Space, sure, but you talked about being gouged before and that hit home,” she said. “Plus, I like yours; all quaint and cosy, that little kitchen alcove, and it can’t be more than what I’m paying here.”

Remus stared at her, feeling one of the many knots in his stomach asking for expressed permission to loosen. “Honestly, that would be such a relief,” he said. “Are you on a lease?”

“It’s month to month, thank God,” Dorcas said. “And, I’ll get to look after your cat.”

Remus sucked in a quick breath through his teeth. “No cat, I’m afraid,” he offered, but then Dorcas let out a loud gasp and he quickly backtracked. “No no, there’s still a cat, don’t worry, but Sirius laid claim on her already.”

"Beat me to the punch,” she said, pitching herself back in her chair disappointedly.

“He all but insisted,” Remus said, giving into a grin. “It really is out of my hands.”

“I suppose he’s got the right,” Dorcas put out, though she heaved a sigh on the end of it for good measure. Remus’s mobile chimed not a moment later from where it lay halfway across the table from him. “Speaking of. You can look, you know.”

Remus gave a quick, sheepish smile, and shook his head. It was nearing the time Sirius would have gotten off shift as is, so either he was checking to see if they were still on for later or he sneezed and got the sense he was being discussed and wanted to investigate, but either way it fell, Remus didn’t really want to be glued to his mobile.

“You’ll hate the washer and dryer situation in the building,” he brought up. “Sirius calls it highway robbery, but there’s a laundromat a few blocks away, and it works. Just, as a facility, it certainly washes and dries your clothing.”

Dorcas heaved out a tight laugh. “You’re really selling this,” she underlined. “If this teaching thing doesn't work out, I think you've a shot in real estate.”

Remus was still laughing when he answered his mobile on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Are you with him?”

Remus blinked, caught off guard by the speed at which James’s voice came through. “No, he was working tonight,” he gave him. “Is everything ok?”

“Have you heard from him today?”

“Earlier,” Remus said before a pause, apprehensive now. “What’s happened?”

“Walburga’s in the obit,” James provided, and it was as if Remus’ stomach returned to his body solely to leave it once again. “There isn’t a chance in hell he'd have gotten a word about it personally, but there are a lot of papers scattered about there and I don't want him without one of us if he decided to take a gander at the paper while tidying up. Can you get to him?”

Remus nodded before remembering vocal chords were an important part of a strictly verbal conversation. “Of course,” he said, and quickly done to make up for the lag.

"It’s shit fucking timing, otherwise I’d be there in a second,” James insisted.

“I know,” Remus instilled, the image of James stuck all the way out in the outskirts of London flooding his brain instantly. "I've got it, OK?"

“What’s happened?” Dorcas asked the moment Remus ended the call and pressed to call Sirius.

Remus put his phone to his ear. “Sirius’s mother passed.”

Dorcas’s expression dropped to one of full of dismay. “Tell him I’m sorry.”

Remus nodded, giving a tight sort of smile as the second ring came through for the would-be kind sentiment. He pulled the phone down for a quick second to catch a glimpse of the time and found out he’d undershot the time; Sirius should have left work at least half an hour ago. He ran his right thumbnail over his index finger through to the third ring, taking up an intense staring contest with the surface of the table between the two of them down as voicemail picked up, and Sirius’s voice rang through the line, bright and him and clashing terribly with the situation.

He told himself he’d just try again and he’d get him, but then it dawned on him in the span of a beat. Sirius rode Priscilla to Remus’s place the night before, if he'd decided just to snag some clothes out of Remus’s drawer and head to work straight from his flat then he’d have to drive the bike back to his own, and if he didn't drive all that carefully on a good day—

“Sirius, please call me back,” he said as soon as the tone chimed.

He set his mobile back down on the table and tried to shake his head clear, realizing then he’d answered James’s favour so quickly that he now had a mate he would have to bail on.

He looked to her apologetically. “Dorcas—”

“Go on,” Docas said, nodding once in the vicinity of the door.

Remus sighed gratefully. “Thank you,” he said, moving to stand.

She nodded, followed in behind him, and remained in the balcony doorway while he went for their plates. “Nevermind those,” she said. "Go."

Remus paused mid-reach for their plates and gave her another appreciative look before he made his way down the hall. “Next week?” he called as he footed his shoes on.

“Yeah, ‘course,” Dorcas said from the other room.

Remus infused a little more life into his voice. “Great, good, I’ll call you.”

He pulled out his phone the moment he shut the door behind him and opened his messages as he made for the stairwell. It couldn’t hurt to cover all corners; if Sirius missed his and James’s calls then perhaps he left his mobile on the other end of the Flat and didn’t hear the rings. Sirius left that thing everywhere, it could be sitting in the backroom at work for all he knew, but he had to keep trying.

He opened up their message thread and blinked down the complete lyrics of Sex on Fire copied, pasted, and sent along to Remus the evening prior. He did everything in his power not to succumb to the typical wave of amusement he felt whenever Sirius decided that was the best way of communicating his particular mood for it seemed quite inappropriate for the morbidity of the situation. He shot him a quick text with the same request his voicemail contained, took the stairs, and pushed through the lobby door out onto the sidewalk.

He debated the choice between a taxi or the bus and wound up cursing himself, wishing he’d sprang for a cheap car once settling in London and that he wasn't too much of a nervous ninny to drive in the city for he’d be at Sirius’s in no time at all if he’d sucked it up and tried giving city driving it a shot. He decided a taxi would get him there quicker when the chances of a bus coming along right as he got to the stop were far smaller than he needed them to be.

His ride showed up within mere minutes, something that he hoped for but certainly didn't bank on, and Remus thanked his lucky stars for it. The ride felt longer than it needed to when Dorcas lived much closer to Sirius’s than he did but he waited until the halfway mark to try again, and that truly was the most difficult thing he’d done all day. He got Sirius’s voicemail once again but didn’t bother leaving another message, partly because of the driver up front and partly because he would have rathered Sirius simply call him back when he noticed the missed calls without even bothering to check his voicemail.

He set his mobile in his lap and breathed. It could mean anything. Sirius could be out, could have missed any papers of the day completely, or flipped straight to the crossword and hadn’t even given the obituary a second glance, but even as he told himself this, the image of Sirius lying in a heap at the foot of his bed flooded in, the red on his hand, the red on him, and Remus tried to keep from pulling off his thumbnail altogether for his brain took him to far more unsettling places from there.

To put his active mind to use, he picked up his mobile and looked the obituary up, satisfying a morbid curiosity that really didn't help in the least, not when one particular family member’s name didn't appear alongside the list of surviving family members, all of them distant and not as deserving a mention over the only of her sons still out here surviving, and a horribly familiar feeling welled up in him.

Miraculously, the next time he looked up from his mobile the cabbie was turning down Sirius’s street. Remus shifted and pulled his bank card out a block from the flat, forced himself to be polite as he waited for the driver to boot up the interac machine and not be too irritated that it wasn't already raring to go. He tossed a thank you over his shoulder and climbed out of the backseat, took the stairs briskly, and didn’t bother with the spare key hidden under a frog statue by the front door as James and Sirius rarely bothered to lock it anyway.

Remus opened the door and nearly tripped over Sirius’s docs lying scattered in the entrance, but didn't curse their existence this time around for it meant Sirius had to be in there somewhere. He toed his own shoes off even though the owners of the Flat couldn’t care less if he did or didn’t; it was habitual at this point and he still couldn’t shake it. He checked Sirius’s room first to no avail, headed down the front hall, on through the empty living room, and straight on into the kitchen to find Sirius in his usual spot by the window, stone-faced and holding a cigarette in his right hand, and Remus knew Sirius already knew.

Sirius looked up by the time Remus cleared the room, looking right startled. “I summoned you.”

Remus knelt down, taking a glance over Sirius for marks or signs, anything, but his t-shirt showed his hands and arms bare, and that should have quelled him more than it did. He looked up at Sirius, his whole expression completely flipped, but he couldn’t take that at face value.

Remus shook his head clear and lifted his right hand to the side of Sirius's neck. “Wait, what did you say?”

“I pictured you and you appeared in my kitchen that same moment,” Sirius detailed, pressing his hands down Remus's sides as though he were trying to prove he was truly in front of him, and that worried him even more.

“Are you OK?” Remus said as Sirius’s hands roamed. “I’ve been trying to call you— James, too; we’ve both been trying.”

Sirius blinked at that, shifting in his seat to pull his phone out of his back pocket and Remus's head almost imploded on the spot; Sirius looked up from what no doubt had to be a collection of missed calls and spared him a rather tight smile. “I left on silent."

Remus breathed out then in, grateful that Sirius’s silence hadn’t meant anything terrible, but he had no control over the irritation burrowing in his gut. “Why’s it on silent?”

“Have you met Rosmerta?” Sirius returned.

Remus bit back a retort, breathing out, then in. “How long have you known?” he asked, thinking he might have deserved a gold statue for how well he managed to sound calm.

Sirius glanced past Remus toward the clock on the stove. “Hour, little more maybe,” he offered, and nevermind that; Sirius stole that statue right out of Remus's hands by sounding much more at ease than him, but his casual tone and simple shrug weren't well-received when Remus spent the last half hour in a state.

“And you didn't call either of us?” he asked.

Sirius squinted. “I thought of the both of you plenty of times since I got off, on opposite ends of the city and with other people,” he said with a bit of a bite to it, “so you’ll excuse me if I left you both to it.”

Remus’s breath hitched, his face reddening. “You didn't have to do that,” he insisted. “I'd have come — I did, I came right away; James would have flapped his arms until he figured out how to fly here if he could have—”

Sirius spoke on, pitching his voice louder to get the words out over Remus's. “And I appreciate that, but contrary to what they like to think the world doesn’t stop spinning because another Black family member got picked off and yours shouldn’t either,” he maintained, as if it were washed and done.

Remus dropped his head in an instant, set his forehead against Sirius’s collar, and closed his eyes for a few, long moments, forcing white-hot rage down and replacing it a few longer moments later with something else. “Have you eaten?” he asked. He felt Sirius shake his head and he was glad for it if only for the chance to put his hands to good use. “I’ll make you something, then, OK?”

Sirius gave a nod and Remus straightened up and moved to stand, instinctively pressing a kiss to Sirius’s forehead along the way, and before he got to his feet, Sirius leaned in to press one of his own to Remus’s neck and the small gesture was enough to send Remus’ stomach into a tizzy even now.

Chapter 2: 2.

Notes:

thank you for so much love and sweet words.

Chapter Text

Remus forced himself to turn away from Sirius and set to task, rinsing his hands off at the sink while on a mental hunt for something that would be a good idea to make for him. He wished he knew how to make a casserole or soufflé just on principle, but that was too far out of his repertoire or time frame to even consider; one day perhaps, but not today when the goal really is just to fill Sirius’s stomach.

He decided on a sandwich for simplicity’s sake and gathered the fixings together, bringing them to the counter to the left of the stove. He pulled a plate down from the cupboard and set two slices of bread on it before he realized he hadn’t told James he was there. He stopped to pull his mobile out of his back right pocket and typed a quick text.

He’s OK, with him now.

He sent it off, set his mobile down on the counter, and resumed where he’d left off, picking up the butter knife beside the plate and spreading some dressing on the slices of bread. He heard the flick of a lighter from behind him where Sirius remained seated, but Remus was quite sure he’d seen a lit cigarette when he came in. He glanced over his right shoulder, finding Sirius indeed with the lasts of a cigarette in one hand and a lighter in the other, lighting and relighting on loop.

Remus made it look like he’d simply been itching his chin on his shoulder while his hands were full and turned back to the task at hand. The sound of the lighter flicking away got drowned out by three distinct chimes from Remus’s mobile on the counter, one after the other echoing loudly in the room.

“Someone’s popular,” Sirius piped up.

“I’d say that’s you,” Remus said, pushing to sound mild as he broke off a piece of lettuce to fit onto one of the slices. “James is a little out of the loop over there.”

Another flick echoed from behind him. “Do pass along that I’m not curled up in the corner.”

Remus only managed to nod, not trusting himself to speak just then, and focused on finishing up. He picked up the plate once he was done and turned from the counter, walking it over to place it by Sirius, who reached for the sandwich and saluted him with it in thanks. Remus gave a tight smile before he went back to the counter to clean up, bringing the butterknife over to the sink across the room to give it a wash and setting it in the drying rack for the time being. He went to stick the sandwich fixings back into the fridge and once he shut the door to it, he wrung his hands out behind Sirius, unsure of what to do with himself now that the lingering bit of worry under his skin suddenly had everything and nothing to latch onto.

He had maybe three seconds worth of time before Sirius’s head started to turn his head to get a look at him, and then he stuck his arms at his sides and put on as easy a walk as he could manage, heading over to take the chair across the table from Sirius. He glanced up at him simply chowing down, looking a lot more at ease than Remus felt considering there was some rather striking news that might need further addressing, but then, Sirius did have a sandwich; sometimes it was the small things with him, too.

Remus watched him a bit, looked out the window between their spots at the table for a little, moved his gaze down to the nails on his right hand, then back up at Sirius, who went for another bite, caught Remus’s eye on that one, and pulled the sandwich from his mouth altogether.

“I don’t want to talk about her, Remus.”

Remus tried not to visibly wilt in his chair over how imposed Sirius sounded. “We don’t have to,” he said, though he really wished Sirius would give him something.

Sirius kept hold of the sandwich but didn’t take another bite. “I’ve nothing to say.”

Remus’s stomach took to somersault. Of course Sirius didn’t; Remus didn’t even know what to say and it wasn’t his mother in the obit, why would Sirius have anything prepared? “That’s OK,” he said.

“There’s nothing to say.”

“That’s OK, too.”

“Good fucking riddance.”

And that, Remus didn’t speak to. Couldn’t really, not when he was much closer to that opinion than he’d imagined himself being even a year ago. He watched Sirius watch him in the silence that followed, hoping it was simply to do with his mind on overdrive warning him that his silence would say something he certainly wasn’t thinking, but the reset of Sirius’s jaw was enough for him to realize his well had run dry on that front.

“Hm?” Sirius prompted.

Sirius’s gaze was so striking that Remus couldn’t keep looking at it when he’d truly managed to forget how otherworldly Sirius managed to look so close to an eruption. Remus turned his hands in his lap, hating where they were headed even with how hard he was trying not to have them end up there. He thought of James’s earlier grievance and how right he’d been about it; the timing was utter shit. Sirius hadn’t looked at him this way in months, not for months.

“I don’t know what to say, Sirius,” he said, wishing he’d prepared better on his way over, that he simply was better.

“Oh, no?” Sirius checked plainly. “You’re not thinking, ‘How could someone say something so heartless?’”

Remus felt a sharp pang of hurt this time, that Sirius had said it, that he even thought he could. He only had a few sordid memories of Walburga and the one that played on loop in his head more often than he liked to admit only showcased the force she wracked up to lay a hand on Sirius, but even if he’d only seen it the once, he certainly never saw him as the heartless one in the equation.

“You know I’m not thinking that,” Remus said. “Why would I ever think that?”

“Then what are you thinking?” Sirius probed.

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” he raised, splaying his hands openly on the table.

“You don’t think it matters?” Sirius barked. Remus kept his eyes trained downward while his shoulders went up, but he could see in his peripheral that Sirius was waving the blasted sandwich about the air as he spoke and that might’ve been a funny sight if his voice weren’t coming out so tightly caught between a laugh and a shout. “How have I not made it clear to you that it always matters what you think? Just say what it is so I don’t have to keep guessing whether you think I’m—”

Remus spoke louder to compensate. “I’m not going to tell you how to feel about this, Sirius,” he returned. “Believe me, I learned my lesson last time.”

Another silence hung between them and after a count of three Remus chanced a glance up, but Sirius wasn’t looking at him anymore. He wasn’t holding his jaw so tightly either, but he looked so miserable as he stared down at the tabletop that Remus had to fight the urge to go to him. He wasn’t sure his legs would get him there for one and, if he were honest with himself, a part of him didn’t want to find out if Sirius would turn him away if he tried it.

“It’s up to you,” Remus kept on, trying with words instead. “If you want to talk about this, then of course I’ll listen to you, if you just want to talk about footy, then I’ll listen to that, too.”

Sirius lifted his gaze to Remus and simply stared at him for a long moment. “When have we ever talked about footy?” he asked finally, tilting his head just a smidge to the right, but it was just enough.

Remus’s shoulders deflated the moment it happened and he ran a hand over his face, viscerally grateful for the familiarity of Sirius’s playful deadpan. “It might’ve been a bad example, but there was a sentiment in there somewhere,” he said of it, his own lips quirking at the sides as he fiddled with the left sleeve of Sirius’s hoodie.

“I mean, I haven’t been keeping up,” Sirius said, wearing mock concern.

“I’d let you make it up as you went along,” Remus mentioned, letting himself smile.

Sirius lifted his coffee mug to cheers him before taking a swig and Remus gave a half-sigh, half-laugh at how simple it felt suddenly, just to want to be close to Sirius in any way he could be. “I just want to be with you, Sirius,” he reiterated, feeling for the first time since he made it into the kitchen that he had this.

Sirius set his mug down on the table with a solid clunk that hung between them much louder than ever their tense silences seemed to and then, Remus watched with his heart beating at double-time as Sirius lifted out of his chair, rounded the table, and tugged Remus out of his seat and into a hug that Remus was so desperate to both give and get that he tripped on his way up to meet it properly.

“I was so worried about you,” Remus blurted, clinging right to him now that he’d been given the chance to.

It helped that Sirius was close, held him close, spoke so close. “I know you were.”

It was said so minutely that Remus probably should have left it, but words wouldn’t stop pouring out of him. “I just kept seeing you laying there looking so small on your bed last time, seeing your hand, and I couldn’t stop thinking that if I didn’t make it in time—”

Sirius pulled back to see Remus better, moving his hands up to hold Remus at his shoulders. “I’m fine, see?” he raised. “Completely fine.”

Remus shook his head, looking everywhere but at Sirius. “Don’t ever scare me like that again,” he implored.

Sirius brought his hands up to the sides of his face so Remus would hold his gaze. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry, Remus.”

And that, quite simply, felt like the two of them in a nutshell. Remus had slowly come to appreciate the taste of coffee over the past several months, but never more than he when he could taste it on Sirius, and he drank him in as if he’d never get enough of him. Sirius’s hands went everywhere and yet, nowhere for very long; in his hair, on his neck, pressing over his waist to pull him closer, he had the zipper of his stolen hoodie down before Remus really had a handle on the buttons of Sirius’s work shirt, so he gave up on those for a moment, letting the hoodie get pushed off of his shoulders.

He pulled his arms out of it and went right back to wrestling with the tiny buttons on Sirius’s shirt. “Hate these,” Remus mentioned.

Sirius gave his crooked little grin as he reached up to help him out a little and the rather lived-in knowledge that sex wasn’t the first step to smoothing over a tenuous situation wasn’t one Remus cared for at that moment; if anything, he found it quite easy to ignore the strict voice in his head advising him against it as Sirius began working his mouth against his neck, yet again when Sirius pulled Remus flush against him and backed up as he tugged on him so that Remus would eventually put together that he was now expected to help get Sirius to the floor without a scuffle on the way down.

Again and again, he pretended he couldn’t hear it; when Sirius’s hands moved whip-fast between them undoing Remus’s fly and shoving his trousers down past his hips, doubly so when Sirius’s own trousers were off and flung somewhere out of Remus’s field of vision, and he certainly didn’t need that voice pestering him when he was dragging his mouth down Sirius’s body and his navel fluttered underneath his tongue, thank you very much. He could practically taste the sounds he was pulling out of Sirius, he wasn’t about to stop now, and certainly not when Sirius went and made it quite explicit what he was gunning for specifically; Sirius tugged on his right arm until Remus let him have it, pulled Remus’s middle and forefinger into his mouth, and soon guided it down between his legs, and Remus pitched that nuisance of a voice so far out of his brain that he could barely hear it. He stayed right where he was, planting open-mouthed kisses everywhere he could reach from here as he held Sirius’s hips still with his left arm, and worked on him with his right hand, adamant that the two of them enjoy a bit of the scenery along the way.

Minutes later saw Sirius tapping his head erratically and Remus stilled both his mouth and hand in favour of pushing himself up to hover over Sirius, moving to his knees as he prepared himself for the mad dash he was in for, but then Sirius went ahead and hitched his legs up and around Remus’s hips and suddenly, this was all a bit too ambitious for him.

“Two minutes, not even,” Remus breathed, reaching behind his back to unhook Sirius’s ankles from each other.

“I’m good,” Sirius gave him, quite set on where his ankles were at the moment.

Remus eyed him pointedly before he managed to wrangle Sirius’s ankles apart. “Not even two minutes,” he reiterated, pushing his hips back so he could unwind from Sirius’s legs.

He was up and off of the floor before Sirius got his scoff out, which Remus thought was a little much considering he was only going to the bathroom and back; he sent him a mock scoff of his own over his shoulder and padded down the hall, heading into the bathroom to reach past the shower curtain to catch hold of the bottle of lube they’d left in there for convenience's sake, and booked it back to the kitchen. Coming back into a room that had a supremely naked Sirius solely biding his time for Remus to get back to him perhaps should have brought him right back into it quite obligingly, but it sort of forced him to stop and look at the bigger picture for a moment.

Remus tossed his free thumb over his shoulder. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather move anywhere with some cushioning?”

Sirius shook his head. “I would not,” he returned, some amusement showing through now. “Get down here and rail me.”

Remus dropped down to his knees over him. “I don’t know where your manners have gone to,” he mentioned, popping the cap of the lube for a dot of punctuation, and Sirius simply laughed beneath him, bright and alert and bare.

Remus gave himself a little more to time work with than entirely necessary, but in his defence, watching Sirius squirm underneath him was a little difficult to push past. Eventually, when he could hardly hold out himself, he put Sirius’s legs back around him as he certainly liked where they’d been before and reached down between the two of them to guide himself in, at the prime vantage point to both see and feel Sirius take in a full breath as much as he heard it.

He felt Sirius’s hands on his arms, his nails dig in, and Remus moved his hips slowly to let him adjust to the stretch. “I assume you're now glad I didn't just go right on in?” he put out there.

Sirius gave a tight laugh. “Oh, fuck off,” he returned, leaning up to catch Remus by the lips.

The cautionary voice petered the farthest away yet and Remus didn't reach to pull it back in the slightest, not when Sirius felt this good, not when Sirius took to responding to him so openly, not when Sirius was dragging his nails over every inch of Remus’s back that he could reach, and certainly not when all of the tension and worry and irritation of the past hour were quickly becoming equally fleeting thoughts at the back of his mind.

Remus read the signs Sirius was giving him, braced the floor with both his hands on either side of Sirius’s body as picked up his pace, and Sirius gave enough urgings in response that it only made Remus move faster still. Sirius let out a curse because of the pace switch, then repeated it tightly again and again as Remus angled his hips and aimed each one with purpose just to get him to repeat it. Sirius’s left hand grappled at Remus’s right shoulder first, his arm second, and then shot out shakily, gripping at the nearby table leg for purchase as Remus kept it up; the surface of the table knocked against the wall a few good, hard times because of it and Sirius’s laptop went from sitting on the far edge of the table and straight to the ground with a thud.

Remus looked up, alarmed by it, and though it may not have been the first casualty to their name, it was the first that cost many, many pounds total to obtain, but the laptop might well have been a throwaway dish for all Sirius seemed to care and that suspicion got confirmed seconds later when the plate on the table followed suit, shattered into pieces, and Sirius only grabbed at Remus’s arse and urged him right on as if that hadn’t happened either.

Remus, on the other hand, shot his hands up to shield Sirius’s face from any wayward shards. “It’s all the way over there,” Sirius put up, huffing it from beneath Remus's hands.

Remus clicked his tongue, slowed his hips down, and reached to grab a good hold of Sirius’s own hips in order to drag him further from ground zero and any more potential injury, but the sound of Sirius’s back sliding across the floor set off an alarm inside his head.

He stalled his hips completely, curled over Sirius, and looked him over carefully while Sirius only blinked up at him, his hands splayed at the pause. “I’m not going to break, Remus,” he implored.

“As if I don't know that,” Remus returned. "You’re still going on top and you’re going to be a lot more careful than this, yes?”

Sirius wiped his imposed expression clean off and took his lower lip into his mouth as he nodded emphatically. He stayed quite still while Remus pulled out and backed off of him, but he barely had a chance to situate himself against the cupboards to the left of the stove before Sirius sprang on him, straddling his lap and reaching behind his own back to guide Remus's cock back in.

Remus had a knob sticking right into the left side of his lower back and he’d have said as much if Sirius hadn’t reached up and braced the edge of the counter above their heads for leverage, rocking back on Remus’s cock in hard snaps and taking most of the air Remus had left to work with. Instead, he tipped his head forward into the crook of Sirius’s neck, gasping with what little air he had left and breathing it against Sirius's skin as he reached up shakily to get a hold of his wilding hips, and that got him feeling a bit wild himself, driving Sirius's down against him as he hitched his own into it, aiming to keep up with Sirius’s extreme pace.

He got his wits about him much, much closer to finishing than he would have liked to admit, but he reached his right hand in between them to pump Sirius in time with their thrusts just in the knick of time, and through the haze of his release, Sirius somehow managed to call on the presence of mind necessary to have budged his head out of the crook of his neck to watch Remus follow him over the edge personally.

Sirius went in for a kiss right at the last moment and Remus held his hips that much tighter as he shook through release, rolling his own through the lasts of it and letting out a weak breath against Sirius’s lips. Sirius let go of the counter in favour of grabbing onto him instead, sagging down into Remus’s lap and kissing him full, and Remus tried to enjoy being blanketed by him, tried to enjoy the kiss; truly he gave an honest go of both, but he couldn’t keep himself from vocalizing that damned voice’s opinion on the matter when it veritably slammed into him.

He broke the kiss. “That shouldn’t have been the first thing we did,” he blurted.

Sirius blinked before giving out a loud and lengthy pfft and dropping his head against Remus’s collar. “I'd say you worry too much but that's a little on the nose.”

Remus frowned and flicked Sirius’s arse for that one. “It’s not exactly healthy, is it.”

“I can think of at least ten health benefits to what we just did — more if you give me a minute,” Sirius said, puffs of his breath tickling Remus’s neck. “I think it makes perfect sense; a brush with mortality followed by a desperate shag on the kitchen floor, we’re a regular cliché.”

Remus couldn’t fight the small laugh that he muffled in Sirius’s hair. “The list of clichés we fall under is getting a bit ridiculous.”

“Not from where I'm sitting,” Sirius chimed, in Remus’s lap and quite settled there if the nestling of his head said anything about it, and after so much time logged away with him, Remus still found himself perplexed at how tender Sirius managed to be even after the plowing of a century.

The cupboards felt chilly against Remus’s back, not to mention there was still a knob sticking into it, and it didn’t take very long for Remus to start wondering about the state of Sirius’s own back after driving him into the floor and then dragging him all over it. He flushed at his behaviour and pressed his hands over Sirius’s back gingerly. “How is it?” he asked, straining his neck to try to get a peek at it from over Sirius’s curved shoulder line.

“It’s on fire,” Sirius provided, and quite jovially, at that. Remus inspected Sirius further with a frown etched on, trailing his hands lower down, and Sirius jolted the moment Remus reached his arse, lifting his head and leaning his hips up and to the left. “Oi, would you like a closer look?”

“I'm only checking,” Remus defended, giving him a pointed frown. “You have a lot of explaining to do, so I’m not sure why you’re so relaxed.”

Sirius blinked. “Really," he said dryly, "you’ve no idea how I could be so relaxed right now?”

Remus gave him another pointed look. “Since when do we spit and go?” he raised, and he didn’t much appreciate it when Sirius let go of him in favour of giving out a vague 'ehnnh' paired with an even gesture with his hands even though it was a bit cute. A bit. “No, that’s not the answer, and to that, no scenario should be so urgent that we can't pause for five seconds so I don't impale you—”

“Now, see, that was the goal,” Sirius cut in. “Just so we’re on the same page here; I wanted you to fuck my brains out.”

“If the roles were reversed, you wouldn't have agreed to that even if I’d begged for it,” Remus returned, then spoke right over Sirius’s objection. “You’d have put your trousers right back on and had me wait there, quaking in my boots, while you went ‘round to the shop if we hadn’t had any left, thank you very much, and it’s more than fair if I ask that it go both ways.”

“Fine, it won’t happen again,” Sirius heaved out, and Remus gave him a kiss on the forehead for his waving the white flag earlier than anticipated. “How’s your back?”

“There’s a knob pressing into it,” Remus replied.

“You could have said as much,” Sirius returned, inching his hips up enough to scurry off of his lap.

“Pretty sure I could hardly choke words out back there,” Remus mentioned.

“Well,” Sirius began, seemingly coming up with his responses on the spot, “you’re welcome for that.”

Remus huffed a reluctantly amused breath for all that Sirius’s counterpoint amounted to and made to push himself along the floor, but his body protested the movement and he simply lay down flat on his back, not far from the cupboards at all. Sirius snorted from where he knelt, shifted toward him, and slid in beside him on the floor before turning in more toward him than the cupboards, leaving his right leg stretched out the length of Remus's body and curling his left leg loosely over Remus’s thighs.

“Better?” Sirius asked.

“Not by much,” Remus said. “Floor’s cold.”

Sirius gave out a half-hearted hum. “Always something, hm.”

Remus ignored that bit, more preoccupied with watching Sirius behave as if he’d won a race, and though he couldn’t say that he was necessarily surprised by it, he found it lost its charm in record time; Sirius was notorious for working to look and sound cheerful even if he wasn’t and that fact alone put those tense first few minutes together back into perspective. As if in response, Sirius yawned, gave in to a long stretch of his arms, and shifted his head to send a beam up at him, and Remus made himself return a similar smile even while his head remained elsewhere.

He felt for Sirius, for the situation he was in itself, the unruffled mask he felt he had to put on where his family was concerned, and despised the fact that his own blood ran quicker when Sirius took it off for all of a few seconds with him. He didn't know where Sirius’s head was now, but Remus thought of quite a few places he could imagine it being just then and one in particular stood out above the rest; if Sirius wasn’t certain that had the room to say the words outright, then perhaps Remus would have to be the one to bite the bullet and let him off the hook.

“Sirius,” he started, “if you can’t come along with me, I’d understand.”

Sirius’s curious expression dropped off before he pushed himself up to lean against his right elbow. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Remus stared up at him a moment and for that same moment he didn’t really want to have to say it, but if Sirius was putting on an act then he saw no other way around it. “It could be hell on earth for you to have to sit around watching my parents and I star in some after-school special with all of this going on,” he said, lifting his shoulders listlessly. “We’re nauseating.”

Sirius sighed long, lifting his left hand to drag it over his face, and Remus’s right thumbnail found his index finger. “You’ve got to know by now that I'm fucking with you when I say that,” he said, from under his hand. “I don’t hate happy families on sight, especially not yours.”

Remus hated that he could always feel so viscerally when he was beginning to get on someone’s nerves and yet, he still couldn’t seem to avoid it. “I’m concerned that it’ll be too much and if you don’t want to say it in case I’ll take it badly, I really won’t—”

He trailed off as Sirius shifted off of him to lay flat on his back; Remus couldn’t see his face so well anymore and he wondered if that was the whole point of it. “We’re all set,” Sirius said.

“I know,” Remus gave him, “but things come up, and I’d be a jerk if I didn't give you an out if you needed one.”

Sirius’s shoulders did a substantial lift before a fall. “We’re just going to uproot the whole plan?”

“I’m still going to tell them,” Remus assured. “I know I had a low point earlier, but I've been dragging my feet too long—”

“You said you wanted me there for it,” Sirius tacked on.

Remus’s heart sank. “I do,” he insisted, reaching to brush Sirius’s hair out of his face.

“Doesn't look like you do from how quick you were to write me out of it,” Sirius sent back.

Remus froze just before his hand got to Sirius’s head. “Or, it’s that I’m so selfish it took everything I had to tell you that you didn't have to come,” he returned.

Be selfish for once, ‘cause this is a fuck of a lot worse than that would have been,” Sirius tossed at him.

Remus held his tongue on just how easier that was said than done, breathed in and out, and forced himself to do damage control. Taking a leaf out of Sirius’s own book, he shifted onto his side, moved down the floor so that their heads were level, and pushed Sirius’s legs apart, nestling himself in between them and being the blanket this time around.

Sirius set him with a wide-eyed, rather humbled expression that Remus hadn’t seen in months and that tripped him up, seeing it now. It was as if he was taken right back to Sirius’s bedroom, could practically feel Sirius dragging his forefinger over his lifeline repeatedly as if he were doing it right then, could see that quiet version of the two of them so clearly that he was certain he could feel some of his past self’s stomach flutters right then and there; Remus couldn’t kiss Sirius then, but he certainly could now and he leaned down, kissed him full, and when he felt the shiver that ran through Sirius he was glad he read the moment properly, found himself hoping that Sirius might have been seeing that same scene, too.

Sirius’s right hand came up to cup his jaw while their lips moved languidly together, as though the two boys having a rough shag not ten minutes ago hadn’t been them at all but two other boys, far away from them, and Remus didn't know if he’d ever get used to how the two of them kept shifting shape.

Remus paused the kiss and took Sirius’s flustered silence as his golden opportunity. “I want you there more than anything, I just don’t want you feeling as though it’s being rubbed in your face the whole time,” he maintained. “This has to be difficult—”

“No, Remus, do you know what’s the most difficult part about this?” Sirius said, his fully dilated pupils making him look five times more striking than he regularly did. “Having it assumed that I can't put my shit on the back burner for you; I’ve done it before and I can do it again.”

Remus bit his lower lip and moved his right hand to place it on Sirius’s chest, right about where he could almost feel that heart beating as quickly as his own was. “You don't have to,” he instilled. “I don't want you to feel obligated to come just because you already said you would; you can say no, you should be able to say no.”

“I don't want to say no,” Sirius returned. “Remus, I’m fine. I can admit it — rough end to a day and we both know that she got right in my head back there, but I’d rather think of the cosmic shift that’s just occurred if you’ll join me; the spite that one woman harboured in her has been completely snuffed from the earth — that’s a gift to the masses. We’ll have to pick up champagne because I think a toast is in order.”

Remus swallowed and spoke past the doubt that remained in his gut so no more stretches of silence could muck things up for him again. “We can do whatever you want,” he said, waving the white flag, “but if it somehow isn’t fine anymore, that would be OK and I'd still be here; I’m always here.”

Sirius reached to swipe his thumb over Remus’s cheek. “I’m not going to let her fuck around with you and me, and I suggest you don’t start letting her either,” he maintained. “Are you going to let me come with?”

Remus nodded after a moment, breathing the same air between them. “If you feel that it’s too much, at any point, please know that it’s OK to take a break from them,” he said. “And from me.”

Sirius searched him, his mouth open slightly. “That’s not going to happen,” he said, sounding so assured that Remus didn’t know how to keep pressing it.

Instead, he tried for levity, something he thought Sirius might appreciate now more than ever. “And really, look at you,” Remus offered, reaching to circle his right hand around Sirius’s visage, “with a face like this smiling back at them, you’re easily the best weapon I’ve got; I fucking need you there, Sirius.”

You’re an actual cherub,” Sirius countered, reaching up to fluff out Remus’s fringe. “That alone is one thing, but a tag team like us’ll be double the effect so you’re right; it’s unavoidable, I have to come.”

Remus ducked his head, pressing his smile against Sirius’s chest, and breathed out. He slowly became aware over the course of the next minute or so of his trousers hanging loosely around his knees and the kitchen they were lying in. “We ought to get dressed," he brought up. "Clean up a little, hm?”

“You and clothes,” Sirius said lazily. “I happen to know you don’t even bother with them at all some days, and yet here you are, forcing me to assimilate.”

Remus shifted onto his knees, pulled his trousers over his hips and redid the button for now, but Sirius simply kept on basking. “Come on,” Remus prompted, leaning over to grab both Sirius’s pants and trousers that somehow ended up in a heap near the stove, “you’re like a five-year-old I have to bribe to get a move on.”

“And what do you plan to offer me?” Sirius asked, sticking his hands back behind his head.

Remus pointedly placed both articles on Sirius’s chest. “I just fed you twice.”

It took another thirty seconds at least for Sirius to finally sit up properly, but to his credit, he had been shaking with mirth and Remus had just taken him to town. Remus went off to fetch the broom and a roll of paper towels, brought both back to the kitchen, and dropped the roll on the ground by Sirius, keeping the broom and the task of sweeping up for himself. He moved the chairs along with the table as a whole back from the wall while Sirius cleaned the mess on the floor and wandered off down the hall from there.

Remus paused in the middle of moving the table to watch him go, but the shower started up a few seconds later and answered his question as to where Sirius went off to quite plainly. He pulled the table back some more, stooped to pick up Sirius’s laptop, and spared a small prayer for it, breathing out a sigh of relief when it turned on a few seconds later. He stuck it on the windowsill for now, moved on to sweeping up the glass and last bites of the sandwich from there, and Sirius strolled back into the room by the time he was finished sweeping in nothing but his briefs.

Remus would have said a heartened thank you to him for parading around like that if he hadn’t felt the need to let Sirius know that his laptop was still alive and kicking. Sirius hummed pleasantly in response, came up behind Remus as he was dumping the accumulated glass and sandwich bits into the bin, and reached his arms around him, crossing his right hand in a T-formation over the bin as if blessing the broken dish for its sacrifice, and Remus couldn’t help huffing a laugh, bowing his head to it in turn.

Once the kitchen was back to its lived-in order, Sirius picked up his pack and started a cigarette for himself while Remus stole a quick haul before going for his own rinse. He aimed to keep it short, feeling that now that he had Sirius in his peripheral, he didn't want him out of it for very long. He towelled himself off, tied the towel around his waist before heading out into the hall, and found Sirius draped along the length of the couch, Gilmore Girls open on the telly and presumably paused from where they last left off with it. Remus couldn’t have agreed more with that decision, grateful for something much more lighthearted to sink his brain into, and he could only imagine Sirius’s own need for that sort of thing.

He went on through the flat to Sirius’s room for something comfortable to lounge in, tugged on a pair of Sirius’s joggers and picked the first t-shirt he saw in the second drawer, and made his way back to the living room while pulling the shirt on over his head. Sirius pushed himself up onto his left elbow and patted the couch, and Remus went in between it and the coffee table to take the spot where Sirius’s head had just been laying. Sirius shifted down the couch a bit, stuck his head down on Remus’s lap, and reached out to unpause the show with the remote sitting on the table while Remus teased Sirius’s hair instinctively, marvelling at how eased he felt by the rote memory that came with the motion, and it felt a little like their entire day hadn't taken place, that they were simply living a lot like they were two days into the past.

Sirius traded quips with him for another while but by the start of the following episode, Remus noted that he was fast asleep. More content than he had been in hours, Remus kept on teasing the hair above Sirius’s right ear while he continued watching for this must have been Sirius’s fifth run-through of the entire series while he was still only on his first viewing.

Just as the next episode was starting up, Remus heard his mobile chime from the kitchen and fought not to scramble, remembering quite suddenly that he basically left James on read and shifting slowly out from under Sirius's sleeping head so as not to stir him too much. He booked it down the hall, hitting all the quiet spots on the floor to avoid unnecessary creaking, and snatched his mobile off the counter by the stove, pressing to call James and waiting through the one ring it took before he picked up.

“Fuck me, I am so sorry,” he said off the bat, holding the elbow of his phone arm with his free hand and curling in on himself. “He’s OK, he's just sleeping, and I didn't know if I should wake him. Do you want me to? Of course you do, I'll get him, just a minute—”

“Remus, woah,” James returned, sounding thrown off. “He’s good?”

“Sorry, yeah, he’s—” Remus started before breathing in, sorting it out. “As good as he could be? It was touch and go for a bit, but once things settled he put Gilmore Girls on, so.”

“Just what the doctor prescribes,” James finished for him. "I know I'll sleep easier knowing you're there with him — and honestly so will he; let's be real.”

Remus shut his eyes in relief over his unprovoked tone. “I didn't want to keep pressing him about it,” he said. “Should I have?”

“Remus, no; you’re good,” James insisted. “This is where he needs to be reminded how much better off he is now, and with you there, he's already a step ahead; you’ve done all you can.”

Remus leaned back against the counter, feeling an insurmountable amount of appreciation for James and holding himself a little less tightly. “Thank you,” he said earnestly. “How’s it over there?”

James let out a groan that lasted a good ten seconds at least and Remus bit back a laugh. “You've been there four days, James.”

“And tell me, why did I agree to a fortnight here again?” James raised.

“Because you love their daughter and it's gorgeous there from what I've heard,” Remus offered.

“Valid points,” James gave back. “Lily’s parents are fine really, but Petunia? I’ll never know how she and Lily are related. And Vernon is just an absolute clod; I think he’s actually under the impression he’s living an envied life, but if I have to hear him talk up the finer details of drill manufacturing one more time, I think I'll just buy one of his just to use it to off him.”

Remus stifled his laugh so it wouldn’t carry down the hall. “They won't be there the whole time, will they?”

“They say they’re only stopping in for the weekend, but I wouldn't put it past them to stay longer just to fuck with me specifically,” James maintained.

"For your sake, I hope it’s the first one,” Remus said, then tilted his head evenly. “And I’m sure you’ll be able to hold out if it is the second.”

“Your confidence in me is staggering,” James said of it, and Remus smiled to himself for he could have said the same for him. “Theoretically speaking, if I were to make a break for it on foot, how long do you think it would take for me to get back there?”

“It would depend on how fast you’re going.”

“I could do a bunch of barrel rolls on the way, save time.”

“I mean, you always do, only now it’ll finally mean something.”

“You’ll be around when we’re due back?”

“I’d think so.”

“Good,” James said. “I should head in, or else Lily might think I did run off on her.”

“She very well might,” Remus conceded. “Get back in there and say hello for me.”

“Fine, I will,” James said. “Take care of our boy, and do tell him he’s to call me tomorrow.”

“I will,” Remus assured him. "Thanks, James."

He pressed to end the call and set a somewhat arbitrary alarm for the morning as he went back down the hall. He reached to stick his mobile on the coffee table, glanced down at Sirius and ultimately deem him too picturesque to consider ushering him to his room, and decided that getting in behind him was the easier option what with Sirius taking up most of the couch in his absence.

Remus gave him a gentle shake and Sirius started awake, locking his lidded gaze on him. “Wassat?”

“Scoot,” Remus said, gesturing with his hands.

Sirius gave him a sleepy smile and did indeed scoot over, but then he almost went off the side of the couch. Remus reached down to keep him on it, only just settled down on his side between Sirius and the back of the couch before Sirius wormed up against him, sticking his head under Remus's chin and his right leg back between his, warm, right, and fitting to him like a glove.

Remus held onto Sirius as he nodded off again, bringing his arms in to hold him even just a little bit tighter.

-

Remus blinked his eyes open to the light of a new day, made sense of the near-silent living room save for the tick of the clock on the far wall and the lulled breathing ahead of him, and lifted his head to peer over Sirius’s body. He blinked at the telly, finding that the streaming service they'd chosen had paused the program sometime during the night, and while that was thoughtful, it was ultimately a problem for Remus had no real sense of how much of it he slept through before that feature kicked in, but he slotted that predicament under the category of Future Remus Problems.

With that observation out of the way, Remus looked down and clued into exactly how close Sirius was coming to a sprawl on the floor. He kept his touch light as he reached to steer Sirius back from the edge a little bit, and after a few moments of that, Sirius rolled toward him, giving out a string of French mutterings that were a little too muttered to catch the specifics on but was by no means less cute. Remus smiled and gave a bit of a stretch, feeling quite bleary-eyed. He lay still for a time, letting his sleep brain catch up to his fully awake body, but a few more ticks of the clock passed before the loo called his name rather insistently.

He glanced right and looked over Sirius’s frame for the best escape route, but he wasn’t sure how he was going to get out from between Sirius and the couch without causing a stir. He debated leaving it for a time, but that didn’t work for very long. He inched himself up, set his left palm down on the cushion under him, and lifted himself, swinging his right leg over Sirius’s body and miraculously landing it on the floor beside the couch without brushing him in the process. He wasn’t so lucky with the other leg, however, as he clipped Sirius’s thigh with his left foot as he tried to get it to join his right one and froze altogether, blinking down at Sirius to find his eyes open and his pupils set on him.

“Hello sailor,” Sirius greeted, giving a little stretch underneath him.

Remus smiled, reached down to swipe his hand under a lock of hair that hung over Sirius’s right cheek, and leaned down to place a quick kiss where the lock had been. “Sorry,” he whispered. “Sleep more.”

“Not sure I can with a wake up like that,” Sirius mentioned, though his eyes were certainly closed again.

“Would you like some coffee in case that's true?” Remus offered, pushing himself to his feet.

He caught the right corner of Sirius’s mouth twitching up into a small, sleepy smile before he gave a hum in affirmation. Remus headed down the hall, making a stop at the bathroom before anything else. Once in the kitchen, he worked on Sirius’s morning cup first, scooping out a few spoonfuls of grinds for the French press before moving on to picking out a flavour of tea for himself, then dug out the kettle and went to fill it at the sink. He took up Sirius’s typical spot at the table while he waited for the kettle to boil, picked up a book sitting on the windowsill, and leafed through it, trying to decide on whether it belonged to Sirius, James, or was more a communal novel that wound up there for any and all flatguests to pick up for light entertainment.

A little more flipping had Remus settling on option three before he flipped back to the first page and started from the top, making it to page three before the kettle chimed. He took the book with him to the counter, paused reading in favour of pouring the water into each of their cups, and went back to the book while he let both steep, leaning his elbows on the counter as he read a little more, and once the timing seemed right, Remus reached to push down on the French press, watching dark swirls blend in with light, murky water.

He decided that leaving it black was likely in Sirius’s best interests after being rudely awakened by a foot just a few minutes ago, so he left the cup as is and did similarly with his own for convenience sake. He walked the book back to the windowsill for another time, went back to pluck both mugs off of the counter, and set off out of the kitchen. At the top of the hall, he glanced up and saw that Sirius had managed to get himself half-reclined against the arm of the couch in his absence, his legs extended out the length of the couch while he held mobile held just in front of his face. Remus walked down the rest of the hall, came up behind him, and extended Sirius's mug out, hovering it just to the right of his mobile screen.

Sirius gave an appreciative noise the moment he spotted it and pressed a quick peck to Remus’s forearm, settling his mobile down on his midriff in favour of grabbing onto the mug. He pulled his legs in and bent them at the knee, allowing room for Remus, who smiled behind his own mug as he blew on his tea and moved between the couch and the coffee table to get to the other end of it.

Sirius placed his feet squarely in his lap the moment Remus settled in. “Piping hot tea,” he warned him, half a warning, half a tune.

“Don’t burn me, then,” Sirius singsonged right on back, his attention back on his mobile as he held his mug underneath his chin for easy-access sippage.

Remus huffed and lifted his mug a little higher, blowing on his tea some more as he held onto it with both of his hands. He dragged his socked right foot back and forth over the floorboards, quietly observing Sirius to gauge his overall mood. He appeared quite at ease if a bit blurry-eyed, the lower half of his face hidden by his mug as he took a mighty first sip of coffee, but the longer Remus looked at him, the more he felt like he were in a catch twenty-two; if he asked how he was doing, he’d probably earn himself another wave-off, but if he didn’t ask, he risked Sirius thinking he didn’t care to.

He paused blowing on his tea to take a trial sip, swallowed that, and decided his self-preservation wasn’t worth it. “Did you sleep OK?” he asked.

"Like a log,” Sirius said, sticking his mobile back down again. He gave a bit of a hum there, leaned his head back against the arm of the couch, and gave a stretch of his neck as he gave in to a substantial yawn, speaking all the while, “although, ten thousand years can give you such a crick in the neck.”

Remus snorted through another mouthful of tea. “I take it I should have moved you at some point,” he said, when he could.

Sirius waved that off, straightening up some more. “I wasn’t going anywhere once I’d passed out,” he said of it, going for another hefty gulp of coffee.

Remus gave a considered head tilt for that; in some ways, Sirius wasn’t all that difficult to work with and in others, it took Remus two or three tries just to guess right. “How’re you feeling?” he asked. “Aside from the crick in the neck, that is.”

“Sore,” Sirius supplied, cliking his tongue at the pointed frown that immediately made it onto Remus’s face. “Would you take that off? It’s the good kind of sore, means we worked hard for it.”

Remus moved past that with an unimpressed blink. “I meant you, Sirius,” he said minutely.

Sirius went for another gulp and at this rate, he was going to be finished his cup before Remus even got halfway through his. “How’s this,” he said, lowering his mug, “if I’m not OK, I’ll let you know.”

Remus forced himself to keep eye contact with him, though his body told him not to. “Would you, though?” he asked. “You didn’t even tell me when you found out."

Sirius gave him a plain look. “I feel like we went through this already.”

Remus dropped his gaze there and picked at the goose imprint on his mug with his right thumbnail, getting the sense he understood what someone holding a tray of fine china and teetering all the while might feel. “I want us to be equal,” he said. “And I don’t want this to be so full of me that there isn’t any room for you.”

Sirius stared openly at him from across the couch. “There’s plenty of room for me."

Remus shook his head, holding onto his mug tightly. “Not if I’m ringing you at work in the middle of a breakdown, meanwhile you—”

“What, like that happens every day?” Sirius countered.

"You know what I’m saying, Sirius,” Remus said.

“I have plans, Remus,” Sirius said decidedly. “Good things coming my way and none of them having anything to do with her, and I’m not just talking about the trip.”

“I know that,” Remus maintained. “I was there when you made most of these plans.”

“Then actually listen to me right now, because I’m about to schmooze you right into the floor,” Sirius instilled. “These past few months have been the best of my life and it has a lot more to do with you than you’ll ever take full credit for, but I want spring to lead into summer and that won’t go so well if I’m weeping into my porridge over a woman who doesn’t deserve a single tear or thought. So, if you want to help so you can at least feel like you’re helping, I’ve a fine idea of how you can do just that.”

Remus let go of his lower lip caught between his teeth and nodded quickly. “I do,” he said. “I just want to help.”

“Perfect,” Sirius said of it. “You can start by telling me what’s off about this place.”

Sirius paired his request with a sweeping gesture with his free hand toward the room they were sitting in and Remus looked left, right, and back at Sirius in a quick second. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“There’s something off about it, don’t you think?” Sirius reiterated.

Remus had a look around, his eyes falling first on the ghastly puce flower pot on the coffee table that James totted back to the flat, calling it Ugly Pot and sporting the biggest grin Remus had seen on him to date, next over to the translucent, green, and rather inflatable armchair to the left of Sirius and the overall couch, and finally settling it upon Ludwig, the life-sized drawing mannequin Sirius ‘found' somewhere and brought back to the place, which was currently sporting a bowler hat and Sirius's leather jacket until the weather calls its use once again.

Remus gave out a puff of breath, looking back at Sirius with a small head tilt. “I don’t really know where to begin.”

Sirius snorted into his mug. “I meant this place is missing something.”

Remus mulled the question over for all of two beats before his eyes widened. “What else do you plan on putting in here?”

“Plan?” Sirius said sweetly. “Why, I don’t know the word.”

Remus shot his right hand out, pointing directly across the room toward Ludwig. “That thing scared the living shit out of me,” he implored.

“He can hear you?” Sirius put in. “And, ask me in December and that'll still be the funniest thing I’d seen all year.”

Remus, who’d gone and mistaken the looming figure standing right between James's door and the nook in the living room for an intruder the first five seconds he’d seen it, didn’t agree so much with that read of it nor had he appreciated Sirius dropping to the floor out of mirth over the sound he let out after spotting it. “I am not telling you what to do with your flat, but I reserve the right to know what I’m walking into,” he asserted.

Sirius’s rolling laugh took a few moments to peter off, along with the roundabout questioning apparently. “This place needs a dog,” he offered candidly. “That’s all I’m getting at here.”

Remus gave a heavy sigh. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sirius,” he implored, running his free hand over his face, “couldn’t you have just led with that?”

“So, you agree,” Sirius chimed, aiming him a smile.

Remus gave him a plain one in return. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see this coming at some point.”

“Oh, was that right about when you broke our hearts?” Sirius returned.

Remus gave a long sigh for that. Weeks back, James spotted a dust mop of a dog scurrying along the outskirts of the village square nearby the Flat and jovially brought her back to it, insistent on housing her for the night. Sirius had all but combusted at the sight of her, agreeing to the plan without anything else, and Remus did have to admit he took a lot of amusement just out of seeing the two of them setting up the living room as if they were throwing a slumber party with their blankets and pillows piled onto the couch just so she’d have company overnight. Unfortunately, as Remus had been a tad nervous about, one night blended into two which turned into three before he resigned himself to being the villain of the tale, snapping a quick photo of her to put up on posts in and around the surrounding area of the town square, and Sasha the Yorkie was picked up by her owner the following evening.

“Somebody had to do it,” Remus defended.

Sirius breezed right on past the truth. “I’m right, though; that’s exactly what this place is missing,” he maintained, pulling his knees in to better pat at the couch cushion between them. “Just take a quick second and picture this exact scene: you, me, the morning cups, only there’s a dog curled up right here.”

Remus altogether was rather taken by the image, but he kept his smile small while Sirius’s eyes shone from across the couch as he spoke. “And, it would teach me a thing or two about responsibility, and I know how hot that gets you,” he added on.

Remus left that last tidbit alone. “Just,” he started, “one quick thing?”

Sirius nodded. “I figured there’d be at least one.”

Remus let that slide, too. “Only, I imagine you’re much more keen on getting a bigger one?” he checked.

“Hi, this is me,” Sirius replied. “A giant woofer that lives life as if it’s a lapdog is the only kind for me.”

“Right, and I agree,” Remus allowed, trying to remain somewhat authoritative, “but it’s still important to remember—“

“I’m going to walk the fucking dog, Remus,” Sirius sent him through a laugh.

“I wasn’t going to say that; what's size got to do with it?” Remus raised. “Only, with a big one, sometimes they don’t always know their own strength and given how worked up you get over them, that could only excite the dog even more and then it could cause damage without meaning to — specifically to the region of your face. Which I quite like.”

Sirius exhaled through his nose, a resigned smile making it onto his face. “I’m not going to get my face chomped on,” he said. “You’ve seen my reflexes.”

Remus clicked his tongue. “I’ve also seen you put your face in countless dogs' faces too, so you really can’t say that and have this just be solved already,” he said of it.

“Haven’t been chomped on yet, have I?” Sirius raised.

“That’s the defence you’re going with?” Remus raised, lifting his free hand. “I’ve never walked out into oncoming traffic, but that doesn’t mean I might not be paying attention one day and do just that.”

Sirius's face contorted at once. “That’s a horrible analogy.”

“Not my best or brightest,” Remus let him have, “but there’s still a point in there somewhere.”

“Why would you ever put that image into my head?” Sirius asked, squinting at him from the other side of the couch.

Remus hesitated for a moment. “My point is, I’m not planning to do that,” he said carefully, “just as you’re not planning on getting snapped at, but it could happen if neither of us is careful.”

“If I’m to deny myself one of life’s simple pleasures, then what’s the point?” Sirius gave out, waving his arms dramatically, and good; they’d made it to the interpretive dance part of the morning.

“All I’m asking is that you indulge at a meter’s distance,” Remus reiterated, amused despite himself. “It’s like it is with Mestophales; she has her signals and if you don’t pay attention to them, then you’re in for a swat.”

Sirius snorted. “You, maybe,” he said, going for another sip of coffee.

“You won’t know the dog’s signals off the bat, so I'd better not catch you dropping to his level until you know him better,” Remus kept to it. “That’s it, that’s my only concern with this, and I think that’s pretty good as far as restrictions are concerned.”

Sirius lifted his mobile again, thumbing through it idly. “I’ll hold off on any face-smushing early on,” he granted.

“No, see, that’s not—”

Sirius had his mobile turned toward Remus in a snap. “What do you think of him?” he asked.

Remus gave him a Look for the interruption but refocused his eyes to take in the canine on Sirius’s screen. “Nope,” he said plainly.

“No?” Sirius repeated, his smile dropping off. “Look at him again.”

Remus shook his head. “You can’t get a borzoi.”

Sirius waggled his mobile at him. “His name is Tango,” he informed him longingly.

Remus huffed a laugh despite himself. “You’re a mystical being all your own," he addressed. "Put you beside one of those and you will be unstoppable, and I can’t allow that; it's hard enough for the rest of us as is, you know.”

Sirius finished off his coffee with a swig and shimmied his shoulders. “I’m going to be one of those people who walks their dog off-lead and only has to whistle to get him to follow along,” he raised, reaching to stick his empty mug on the coffee table.

Remus shook his head more vigorously than before, his eyes widening. “You can’t do that either,” he returned. “No one will be able to watch the road with a scene like that going on beside them; you’ll cause traffic accidents everywhere you go.”

Sirius’s shoulders shook as he gave in to one of his silent fits. “I’m going to get this guy,” he kept on, when he could manage air intake, that is, “and when I do, I’m going to have you snap a photo of me cradling him, I’ll make it black and white with a cursive ‘blessed’ at the bottom center, and it will be breathtaking.”

Remus broke there, fizzling into less of a human and more of a blob that had the power to laugh. “There’s no stopping this, is there?”

“Not a chance,” Sirius chimed, picking up his mobile and typing away on it.

“I don’t really understand how he’s even up for grabs,” Remus offered candidly.

“Their kid’s allergic,” Sirius responded after a beat.

“That’s a shame,” Remus said, going for another sip of tea.

“Isn’t it just,” Sirius said vaguely, his thumbs moving a mile a minute.

Remus tried to swallow around a snort and ended up coughing because of it. “Don’t gloat, now."

Sirius smirked, looking up at him with brighter than bright eyes. “It’s done,” he declared, setting his mobile back down on his midriff with an air of finality.

Remus blinked. “That’s it?” he asked.

Sirius tilted his head evenly. “Well, I told him to name a price, so."

Remus tapped his fingers against his mug. “One might’ve thought a bit more about it before dropping a hunk of money on this venture,” he said mildly.

"I’ve thought of it for weeks, and true love has no price, Remus,” Sirius served him, extending his right leg out the full length of the couch to prod Remus’s right knee with his big toe. “How was the rest of yesterday?”

Remus blinked at the sudden left turn. “It was fine,” he said, letting the prior conversation fizzle out.

“Nah, I’m interviewing you now,” Sirius informed him, lifting off of the arm of the couch. He crossed the length couch quicker than Remus could process that he was coming and settled in the crevice between Remus’s left side and the back of the couch, garnering Remus to hold his tea out over the side of the couch for Sirius’s sake. “Hit a bit of a snag there in the middle, but apart from that, did you get to see Dorcas for a bit at least?”

Remus shifted a touch to give Sirius a little more room, not that he’d use it. “I did, yeah,” he offered, smiling a bit. “She says hello.”

“Hi,” Sirius echoed.

Remus had a bolt of remembrance strike him and he couldn’t help himself from poking Sirius’s left shoulder many times. “She’s going to stay at my flat while I’m gone,” he told him, grinning.

Sirius blinked rapidly, at the sudden movement or perhaps the speed of the prodding, but he settled down after the words appeared to digest. “Hey, that’s an idea,” he returned, taking a pause. “What’s she doing with hers?”

Remus gave a loaded laugh. “She wants out of there, badly,” he insisted. “She’s only been back a full day and already she and her roommate are at odds, so this way saves us both a hassle.”

“Now,” Sirius put in circumstantially, “if you still come home to an empty flat, it ws definitely me punking you — know that now.”

Remus snorted. “Don’t you fucking dare,” he returned. “Not even for a funny.”

Sirius let out a groan that dripped with longing. “But the face you’d make,” he mused, shifting more onto his side to stretch his left leg out and drape it over the both of Remus’s.

Remus gave a half-grunt around his last sip of tea and swallowed. “You can imagine it all you like, but that’s all it’s going to ever be,” he served him, reaching his right arm out to deposit his newly empty mug on the coffee table.

Sirius gave a put-upon sigh and shifted to settle further over Remus’s frame, tossing a glance over Remus toward the telly. “How far did you get?”

“I can’t say for sure,” Remus replied. “Last I saw, Lorelai took Rory to visit Harvard, but who knows when it paused—”

Sirius gave out a sputter. “And you didn’t wake me?” he heaved. “I love that one.”

“How could I have known that?” Remus returned through a laugh, but Sirius only sent a grumble back to him. “I’m not opposed to rewatching it, either.”

Sirius seemed appeased by that addition, sticking his chin down on the side of Remus’s chest as he stared up at him with a smirk on. “I live for that B&B subplot,” he mentioned. “The fucking lady at the front desk — 'LaDawn,' that’s it.”

Remus snorted. “That whole section was a lot.”

“A good a lot,” Sirius built from there. “Fun fact: I’ve written 'Sat and forever am at work here' in so many guestbooks over the years, I’ve lost count.”

Remus heard that and it was as if a lock clicked cleanly in his head. “Is that why you insist on signing them?” he raised, giving a laugh at some newfound clarity. “I always assumed it was lewd comments that I really didn’t want to look at to confirm either way.”

Sirius smiled brightly. “No no, nothing lewd, just a reference to a bit part in a television show that’ll go right over people's heads until the right sort of person comes along and gets a kick out of it,” he said. “A secret gift, really.”

“I suppose you could call it that, yeah,” Remus allowed.

Sirius itched his chin on the fabric of the sleep shirt Remus borrowed. “I’m not even going to pretend that I’m not hoping your town is that quirky,” he said frankly. “I’ve been picturing a fantasy land full of quirk all week, so you best tell me right now if I’m to be disappointed.”

Remus gave a thoughtful hum. “It's got its own brand of quirk, I’d think.”

“Yes, good,” Sirius echoed, asking for more with just his tone alone.

A smile budded at the corners of Remus’s lips. “We haven’t got a town troubadour, unfortunately, but we do have this fellow who enjoys riding about the town on rollerblades while strumming on his guitar, so that has to count as a close second.”

His smile widened as Sirius’s entire face lit up with wonder. “What?” he said, nearly breathless.

Remus breathed a laugh through his nose, nodding. “Sort of a staple, once the weather gets a little warmer,” he provided. “You’ll just be strolling about your day and he’ll ride by on the main, tipping his head to street folk and playing away while he goes.”

Sirius flailed wildly. “Can we just go now?” he implored.

“Soon, soon,” Remus sing-songed, his stomach bubbling at the thought.

In some ways July felt forever away, but putting himself through higher education gave him a quick yet extensive lesson in how a few weeks could pass in the blink of an eye, and then they’d be there, at the cusp of something that made his insides twirl about. Sirius gave out a little appraised sigh, one that Remus felt rather encompassed how he was feeling right about then, and gave in to a long stretch, his left hip bone poking out from underneath the waistband of his briefs and making it a little difficult for Remus to keep his brain off of another activity they could've been doing.

Remus shook his head clear. “I’ve e-tickets, by the way,” he relayed, prodding Sirius once on the cheek with his right forefinger. “Did you want me to send you a copy or would you like me to just show them once we’re there?”

Sirius dropped his arms on the other end of his stretch and settled in again. “You hold onto them,” he decided. “How much did they come to?”

Remus brought his mug to his mouth. “Not telling,” he said before a quick sip.

Sirius blinked once. “You want to play this game?” he asked. “I’ll play.”

Remus sighed while he swallowed. “There is no game, it’s just taken care of.”

Sirius narrowed his eyes to a squint. “Is this you or her?” he checked.

“Bit of both, if I’m honest,” Remus delivered, “but she did very much insist.”

“I’m going to have a few words with her, trust,” Sirius said of it.

“The only words you’re going to even think of having with her will be ‘thank you,’ and those are it,” Remus asserted. “You did this to yourself months ago, so just think about it like that if you have to.”

Sirius stomped his right leg at the other end of the couch. “Let me cover your ticket, then," he bid of him.

“It’s already paid for,” Remus returned him. “The repayment period from me to you begins now, so you are just going to have to let this happen.”

Sirius shut his eyes and appeared to call on Earth and all her trimmings to restore calm. “We're going in July, then?” he asked finally, reopening his eyes.

“We leave on the tenth,” Remus supplied.

Sirius reached down to scratch at his left hip idly. “I think I’ll put in my two weeks just before then,” he raised. “Bleed them dry while I can.”

Remus chose to strive for a more pleasant perk about that plan. “By the time we’re back, opening day will be coming up quick,” he trades him. "There wouldn’t be much sense in keeping both going."

Sirius gave an agreeing noise to that. “Yeah, no thanks,” he echoed.

“The end of an era, though,” Remus mentioned, running his forefinger down the bridge of Sirius’s nose.

“It went on long enough,” Sirius said of it, his bland choice of tone contrasting with his gentle kneading of Remus’s finger. His left arm came to curl around Remus’s waist as he kept his chin resting on his chest, and Remus still couldn’t figure out how such a sculpted one didn’t result in discomfort when placed squarely on any part of Remus’s body. “Are you going to introduce me to your squad when we’re there?”

Remus blinked, realizing they’d gone back a step or two, and moved on from thoughts of Sirius’s sculpted visage for the time being. “I told you, I didn’t have one,” he raised, linking his right leg in between Sirius’s. “You had one.”

“Didn’t,” Sirius returned.

Remus nodded evenly. “Yes, you’re right,” he said. “'Troupe' is a much better word for it.”

Sirius snorted at that. “Not even,” he maintained. “The three of us flitted in and out of everyone else’s squads without committing full-time to a single one. Better that way, more variety.”

“Yes, well, that’s all well and good, but that wasn’t what I did,” Remus said of it. “It was mostly one on ones, a couple of little groups, and I really haven’t kept up with many of them.”

"Right, like we did?” Sirius countered.

“I can count at least,” Remus paused, puffing out a breath, “seven friends you’ve still got around from school; I’ve one I still talk to semi-regularly, so you can meet Angela if you’d like, she's great.”

“That's the workmate, right?” Sirius checked.

Remus gave an even nod. “Well, we had some classes together, too, but yeah, work was where we first hit it off,” he supplied, trailing off when his mobile rang from where he left it on the coffee table.

Sirius heaved himself up onto his elbows to take a gander at it before reaching to snatch it. “Ta maman,” he relayed, handing it over.

Remus felt his chest sink as held took hold of it. He wasn’t exactly interested in any kind of resurgence just then, once in twenty-four hours had been quite enough, and he was just starting to feel as lighthearted and weightless as he'd been all week; why did he have to lose that feeling now? Moreover, did he really have to answer it only to pretend he was in any way feeling up to pretending? He breathed in halfway, settled in his choice by the second ring, but then he caught the time in the top right corner of his screen and the oddity of it tossed out any of Remus’s reservations; she’d be well into her workday by now, it hardly made sense to call now, and by the time Remus coordinated his hand to be of any use, he’d conjured up a horrid image and categorized the call as an omen he couldn’t ignore no matter his pride.

“Mum?” he asked in place of hello.

“Hi, honey,” she said tentatively, and Remus’s stomach went for a pitfall.

“What’s happened?” he asked, and Sirius shifted onto his elbows delicately, hovering there as if ready for anything.

“Oh — no,” she said, sounding quite pained now. “He’s fine, don’t worry.”

Without the weight of an anvil on his chest, Remus took a moment or two for himself, breathing in and out once. He looked to Sirius's stare with a quick shake of his head before he slowly settled back down onto Remus, tucking himself back against the shape of his body, and if Remus were honest, that was right where he wanted Sirius to be just then. "The time had me worried,” he offered for a pardon, but the tone of her greeting still sounded off-kilter when he replayed it in his head. “Is everything OK with you?”

“Oh, now I just feel terrible,” his mum mused.

“Mum, it’s fine; I’m here,” he said. “What is it?”

“You’re busy — I wanted to catch you before work, but it’s nothing that can’t wait a little longer,” she insisted.

Remus deflated a little. “Mum, you’re not bothering me; did something happen at work?” He got little more than a delicate sigh from the other end of the line. “Was it the close-talker?” he probed. “Am I going to have to come up there myself?”

It sounded as though his mum’s tiny laugh caught her off guard as much as the question seemed to. “No, nothing to do with him, fortunately,” she offered.

Remus let out a low hum at that. “Well, you know who to call if he gets any ideas.”

“You or HR?” his mum checked, sounding a bit brighter than before.

"Both,” Remus said. “What’s going on?”

“Well, Joy announced her retirement to the team this morning,” his mum began.

“Mm, good for her,” Remus extended.

“Mhm, lovely,” his mum echoed. “That — that’s not the surprise, really, she’s been talking about it all spring; this was just her official announcement.”

“I mean, this is nice to know, but I’m sort of waiting on the punchline,” Remus mentioned.

“Well, hold on a minute, would you?” his mum returned, and Remus smirked a laugh. “Next thing I know I’m being called into Don’s office and I’m thinking, ‘oh, what have I done,’ and after a pause — too long of a pause, frankly — he up and offered her position to me, no warning at all—”

“Mum,” Remus gave out, garnering Sirius to lift his head, startled. “Why did you make it sound like you were walking the fucking plank? This is a good thing.”

“I didn’t mean for it to sound that way,” she defended, all while Sirius shifted up Remus’s body a little, leaning his head in to get his right ear closer to the receiver, and Remus brought the volume up to the max. “I was trying to find a quiet spot to call you, but Joy and Carol were guffawing in the stairwell so I couldn’t stay there — and I was hardly prepared for the offer, Remus; some credit, please?”

“Please tell me you didn’t decline, Mum,” Remus said.

His mum didn’t respond straight away, but a gentle sigh came through a few moments later. “No, but I didn’t jump to take it either, and I’ve got to tell you, something’s very fishy about this.”

Remus blinked, sharing a quick smirk with Sirius. “Is there, though?”

“Why would he offer it to me?” she raised.

"Why wouldn’t he?” he returned.

His mum let out a loaded laugh as if Remus were about to get plenty of reasons for it and yet only gave him one. “All the time I’ve had to take off,” she put up.

Remus gave a flat expression and looked to Sirius, who took one look at him and set his face down on Remus’s chest, muffling his snickers in his shirt. “And that’s a reason not to offer you a position when one opens up?”

“I’ve taken years off cumulatively, Remus,” his mum returned. “That doesn’t say much for reliability, does it?”

“OK, you’re exaggerating that by a long shot, and you put in double the time elsewhere to make up for it,” he reminded her. “This one’s a wash, I’m afraid.”

Sirius shifted a little so that his smile was visible and Remus whisked his free hand through his hair idly. “It still doesn’t add up, Remus,” his mum instilled.

“Maybe the reason he offered it to you is that you’ve been around there for eons and already do a bit of just about everything as is,” he raised, tousling the fine hairs over the shell of Sirius’s left ear.

His mum clicked her tongue. “Now who’s exaggerating.”

“You know all the secrets around there,” Remus kept on. “Too many of them, I’d wager; could be that it’s in their best interests to keep you close by.”

His mum didn’t accept that angle either. “It’s much more likely that they would rather hire from inside than out,” she maintained.

“You’re right, it could be that,” Remus echoed. “Could be they love you, too.”

His mum gave him a sardonic laugh for that. “I don’t think that’s it somehow.”

"Why not, everybody else does,” Remus said, returning Sirius’s bright grin with a wry one of his own.

His mum gave a weak sort of sound. “I wasn’t expecting this either.”

Remus gave a light hum. “I think you might have been looking for a little of this, just a bit, and the secret’s safe with me,” he offered, then glanced at Sirius, who smirked against him and lifted his hands above his head for a moment to signal he wouldn’t spill it either.

“It’s not as if I was going anywhere if they didn’t offer me it,” she protested. “I like where I am; I like my department, I like my team, I know the work like the back of my hand, and maybe I ought to stick to what I’m good at.”

Remus exhaled through his nose quietly. “Mum, you can stay exactly where you are if you’re not interested,” he put down. “Only, six months ago I was in a bit of a situation like this and do you remember what you said to me?”

“Remus,” she sent him, dripping with a warning.

“I remember you saying that either way, I had a good thing,” Remus kept on. “And it was true and I knew it because either way, I had something stable no matter which shop I ended up picking. You were very practical about it with me, so let’s try some of that here; you could stay where you’re comfortable and that’d be fine, but you might be just as good at this and you won’t know it unless you take it — which, if I haven’t made the least bit clear yet, I think you should. For all the reasons I just gave you.”

His mum gave a conceding hum for that, but Remus knew he didn’t quite have her yet. “What did Dad say?” he asked.

His mum gave a laugh. “I’d be lucky if he could hear his mobile going at this hour.”

Remus gave a considered head tilt. “OK, well, I think it’d be safe if I spoke for him just for now,” he maintained, and he did think it safe to, “and he’d want you to take it, Mum.”

“I know he would,” she echoed. “Immediately, without question, which is why you were my first stop.”

Remus gave a circumstantial hum. “It must be just awful that I’m telling you the same thing he would, then.”

“A bit,” she admitted outright, sounding so much more like herself than Remus thought he could reel her back to.

“Were you given time to think on it?” he asked.

“I was,” she provided. “I’ve until the end of the day.”

“Well, alright,” Remus said brightly. “I’d say take the day, ring Dad for a chat with him over lunch, and then, you go in there and say you’ll take it.”

“Just like that, hm.”

“Just like that.”

Remus’s mobile took to a buzz in the background of the call and he pulled it away from his ear to check it, finding his first alarm displayed on his screen. “Mum, I do have to get ready for work,” he mentioned.

“That’s alright, my time’s almost up anyway,” she excused. “Thank you for letting me harp at you.”

“There was none of that,” Remus said. “Do you need any else?”

“No, you’ve done quite enough,” she maintained. “I’ll do as you said.”

“All of it?” Remus checked.

“We’ll see,” she said, more pointedly.

“Right, well, let me know how the acceptance went,” Remus said cheerfully.

“Now where’d you learn that trick?”

“Couldn’t say,” Remus offered, lifting his shoulders airily.

Remus pressed to end the call after her farewell and as soon as he did it, Sirius let out a sigh so large that it was as if he were given permission to breathe again. “I know,” he echoed, working his mouth around a pointed smile, reaching to set his mobile on the coffee table again before settling in again. “We’re a lot.”

“A good a lot,” Sirius amended. “It’s sweet. Kind of like —” he looked up to the ceiling in thought, “—what I’d imagine it’d be like to have had a mum who values your opinion.”

Remus got enough of a hold on his expression to make it a mere half-frown, but his stomach did a pitfall. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” Sirius said of it.

Remus searched him for a few seconds but that yielded nothing still; nonchalance emanated straight out of Sirius’s pores and Remus so wanted even just some of it, have it tamp down on the doubt that continued to well up in him. “Hey,” Sirius said, leaning his head a smidge closer, “it looks as though you’re letting my mother’s inability to emote get to you, and you can’t be doing that sort of thing when it only gives her useless husk strength.”

Remus didn’t know what expression he should have on, but Sirius spoke before he had to settle on one. “It wasn’t a dig; it’s good you two have that,” he said, reaching to push the corners of Remus’s mouth up to form a makeshift smile. “Do you think she’ll take it?”

The corners of Remus’s lips tug up in a more genuine smile. “I do think she will,” he admitted. “The position is a step higher than the one she’s at right now, so she’ll start thinking about longevity in a little while and that’ll take over from where the nerves left off.”

“Good, she deserves it,” Sirius extended. He shifted out of the crevice he was in and set himself fully on top of Remus, crossing his arms over Remus’s chest and hooking his chin over them. “If I hadn’t already thought you were the sweetest, all that just now would have made it sink in.”

Remus searched him before Sirius’s shoulders rose and fell quite easily. “You could have just let it ring,” he tacked on.

Remus let out a weighted sigh. “No, I couldn’t have.”

“No, I know,” Sirius said commonly, “but there was a second there where I wasn’t even that sure you would, but you picked up anyway.”

Remus gave a plain look in regards to himself. “I know it’s been far too long to justify where my head went, but she doesn’t usually call midday—”

“Who says?” Sirius cut in, his right eyebrow higher on his forehead than his left.

Remus reworked his mouth around a circumstantial frown. “You did, sort of,” he said. “Six months was the cut-off and we’re way past that point.”

Sirius gave a tiny huff. “I only threw that time frame out so you’d stop reaming yourself on Christmas Eve of all days, thank you, and I only went with it because you were the one who threw out that arbitrary timeframe in the first place, weeks beforehand,” he reminded him. “How’s this, ten years on? Might be time to call it quits in this particular issue, but there’ll be something else by then and guess what, you will still be allowed to worry about him.”

Remus let out a loaded sigh. “If my heart’s still stopping over a strange time to call in ten years, I’ll turn myself in,” he said.

Sirius slipped his right arm out from underneath him and reached to flick Remus’s forehead. “Stop it,” he implored. “I was giving you a compliment before you took us on this detour—” he trailed off as he watched Remus’s expression go from softened to downturned in mere moments, “—why? Why is it that you’ll only take a compliment when you’re starkers, hm?”

Remus snapped out of it long enough to tilt his head pointedly. “That’s how kinks work, Sirius,” he gave him through gritted teeth, “how the hell should I know?”

Sirius looked as though he were trying immensely to hold a laugh in. “My point is, she called you, not her husband, while she was having this little moment of doubt and you stepped right up,” he reiterated. “Once you got over that initial fright, you could have rushed her off of the line and left her to sort it out herself, but you slogged your own stuff aside in order to talk her through it and I’m still living off the scraps that Good Boy Remus littered at my feet, so you’re just going to have to let me appreciate it.”

Remus chewed on the side of his lower lip, working to simply let Sirius have his request without the white noise going on in the pit of his stomach. Sirius inched forward, placing a kiss right on Remus’s twisted mouth. “I get that you have this give-and-take thing with them, but you can’t really talk about what’s been eating at you these past twenty-four hours with her, can you?” he raised. “No matter, that’s why I’m here.”

“You don’t have to do this, Sirius,” Remus said, curling his arms around Sirius’s waist haltingly. “I’m OK, really.”

Sirius shushed him once. “I did some thinking while my shift dragged on and on — and on, and I think this little moment I just got to see confirms what I already came to, but it’s that I really don’t think what we’re planning is all for naught,” he maintained, and Remus swallowed around the lump in his throat and nodded so Sirius would keep going, but thankfully Sirius had woken up in a talkative mood for went right on with it. “Right, so she went and did some assuming with you, but you and I did some of that to each other, didn’t we? I know I did; I flip-flopped daily about you, I thought you were straight as a board one day, gayer than a picnic basket the next, which is ridiculous of me when I know it’s not that clear cut, but did I think about that then?”

Sirius shook his head once for emphasis. “That’s me assuming right there, and judging by the way your jaw hit the floor when you first found out about me, I suspect you were doing a bit of flip-flopping on your end — which, is a bit strange, when, hello,” he dragged out, giving out a rather powerful cabaret note for so soon after waking up and garnering Remus to press his mouth together in a firm line to keep his amusement under control.

“Don’t know how you missed it, but that’s neither here nor there,” Sirius said of it. “I know hearing the same assumptions from her again had to have hurt, and I know you’re getting knocked twice because you fall somewhere in the middle and that’s not been given or might not even get a moment’s consideration, but if I made a similar mistake with you and you’re still looking at me like that—” he paused to nod toward Remus’s admittedly watery-eyed expression, “then I think it’s safe if we cut her just a little bit of slack here; your opinion matters the most to her, that part’s awfully clear to me now, so I doubt she’s going to risk stomping all over what you have going for each other, even if she gets a little whiplash from the news.”

Remus breathed out, taking a moment to enjoy the rolling of his stomach for it was the good kind this time; the kind that came around whenever he gave Sirius a portion only to have him turn around and make a meal with it. There marked the nth time since Christmas Eve that Remus felt he’d tripped and knocked over a pot of gold and the nth time he got a visceral feeling that the leap of faith he’d taken the very next day might have been one of the best choices he’d made for himself to date.

He crushed his body’s impulse to flee and called on a bit of gratitude instead, shut his eyes and put the scene to memory for a time he might need it more than now even, and pushed up to brace himself against the arm of the couch. He reached for Sirius’s chin, gave it a small tug, and breathed out with relief as Sirius took the gesture for what it was and crawled up the last few inches between them to meet him.

“I love you,” Remus said, just after the first catch of their lips.

Remus felt a thread pull tight in his chest at the small sound he both heard and felt at the back of Sirius’s throat, another pull at Sirius’s quick and avid response, and a third, very real pull when Remus was slid right off of the arm of the couch and onto his back before Sirius hovered over him in a snap, putting their mouths back on lock. “You taste,” he said between kisses, “so good.”

Remus breathed heavily, pausing for a quick moment. “It’s mandarin spice,” he offered, giving Sirius another quick taste. “Would you like a cup?”

Sirius shook his head. “Better like this,” he breathed, moving in to kiss him harder.

Remus smiled against him, pushing incessant thought out and letting feeling in. He ran his hands over Sirius’s sides, pressed his right hand in between the two of them, and splayed his fingers out over Sirius’s navel, feeling it twitch over his touch. Sirius moved his hands down to pry Remus’s legs more apart, nestling his hips in where he made room for them, and Remus responded to that choice in kind, reaching his hands around the back of Sirius, dipping them under the waistband of Sirius's briefs to get himself a full feel and pull him in that much closer. His breathing hitched as Sirius held the arm of the couch over Remus’s head, rolling his hips against his at downright blinding staccato, and right as they were meeting each other at just the right pace, Remus’s second alarm rang out, warning him that if he hadn't started getting ready yet, he really should.

The two of them let out similar groans, but it was Remus who gave a relenting breath into their kiss for his second alarm was mainly for instances just like this one. Remus reached out blindly, hitting the button on the side of his mobile to cut the noise off, but Sirius went and grabbed for Remus’s free hand, guided it lower, and left it squarely underneath his crotch, rolling his hips up against it.

Since his hand was there already, Remus took a few seconds to feel him from base to tip over Sirius’s briefs, hoping that might help win himself a compromise. “I have to shower,” he raised, pulling back enough to breathe between their lips. “Come with?”

Sirius gave a hum of protest. “We should reap the benefits of this empty flat while we still can.”

“How would we not be doing that one room over?” Remus raised, letting go of Sirius’s cock to reach around and tap him twice on the arse. “Come on; time efficiency gets me hot, too.”

Sirius huffed a laugh but cut it off as Remus sat up, sliding his right foot down to the floor by the couch. Sirius went ahead and straddled him, bearing down on him to keep Remus in place, and Remus decided there was not much else for it; if they were resorting to tricks, then they’d be resorting to tricks.

Sirius being directly in his lap really only helped Remus out for he stuck his hands underneath Sirius’s hips, lifted him off of his lap, and managed to get both his left foot down on the ground and himself stood to his full height with Sirius hanging off of him like a sloth. Sirius didn’t make another peep about it, rather a light dusting of pink notable over his cheeks as he let himself be carried down the hall, although Remus had a hunch it wasn’t all that self-sacrificial for Sirius anymore.

There was a short fumble wherein Remus had to brace Sirius against the wall in the hallway in order to kick the bathroom door open wider, but Remus managed to pull it off and Sirius certainly didn’t seem to mind what he was being pressed against. Remus moved into the bathroom once he could and deposited Sirius onto the counter near the sink, keen on running the taps and keeping to the timeframe he still did have to work with, but Sirius didn’t let him get very far at all, clamping his legs around Remus’s hips in a vice grip and hoisting Remus right back against him.

Remus thought about putting up a bit more of a fight, but Sirius stuck his right hand down the front of the joggers Remus stole from his room and won himself a full feel of him, and then, Remus decided that while a valiant effort had been made, it looked as if they would not be making it to the shower.

Remus hooked his forefingers over the waistband of Sirius’s briefs, looking to even things out a little more while Sirius ran his hand over him with an expert twist of his wrist. He hitched Sirius’s briefs down past his hips, and in turn, Sirius set him free from the confines of his legs so Remus could more easily get those briefs the rest of the way off of him. Remus tossed them behind him, grabbed hold of Sirius’s hips, and tugged him to the very edge of the countertop, and Sirius’s hands moved wildly between them, pawing at the front of his own joggers to get them down around Remus’s hips and hoisting himself off of the counter to press them flush together, his legs hanging off of the back of him as Remus took his cue and drove his hips up against Sirius's.

Remus had really been hoping the two of them were on the same page about how quick this one would need to be and the faster Sirius met his hips, the quicker that hope became more of an irrefutable fact, but then, Remus went and looked down at Sirius’s forearms straining as he rocked himself up to meet him and he knew there was nothing for it; this would be over in no time at all.

Not really wanting to blow before Sirius did, Remus shoved his hand in between them and palmed the both of them as he spurred his hips on, dipping his head forward to nip at Sirius’s right shoulder; Sirius stiffened, nodded fast, and a whimper followed suit — the desired effect, really, but when Remus bit down a little harder, Sirius let go of the counter and clung fully to him instead.

Remus pushed him forward, knocked the hairdryer out from underneath Sirius, and leaned him back onto the counter to make up for his momentary fumble. He focused solely on getting Sirius there before him, stroking him fiercely between their bodies as he curled over him to keep his teeth bared down on his skin; Sirius’s left hand clutched at the back of his head, his fingers caught tightly in Remus’s curls as he writhed under him, and his voice grew taut, taking up every bit of unused space around them as he hit his peak with French phrases on his lips and Remus’s name sprinkled in between them.

Remus unhinged his jaw from Sirius’s skin and pressed his lips to the spot he’d anchored to, and Sirius tugged on a bit of hair at the back of Remus’s head, pulling his face to meet his lips as he reached to curl his fingers around Remus’s cock, and while Remus relished in getting Sirius to come before him, this was going to be a close race; he thrust madly against Sirius’s hand around him with abandon, gasping as he felt the onset; it was going to take a few more trysts to feel free enough to take full advantage of the seldomly empty flat at their exposure, but Remus made the effort not to bite back the sounds at the back of his own throat as his orgasm peaked and subsided, and Sirius sure seemed to like that.

At first, Remus sort of slumped down against Sirius for a short time, simply catching his breath and regaining his tenacity for critical thinking. He lifted his head and glanced over the two of them, feeling rather guilty about the tangled position Sirius was stuck in, but the longer he looked at him, the more the guilt slowly dissipated for Sirius looked as though he couldn’t care less about how much of a pretzel he was currently resembling, simply laying spent and breathing heavily under him.

Remus quite suddenly remembered why they were in the loo at all and reached back to nudge at Sirius’s ankles. Sirius obliged him after a few more deep breaths, unhooking the legs hanging loosely around his hips and letting them slide off of him in one drop. Remus took a step back in the space newly afforded to him and gave a sweeping glance over Sirius, the mess over his stomach, and down the bit of that mess that certainly hadn’t missed Remus's own midriff.

“If you’d waited just a few more seconds, we’d already be halfway clean by now,” Remus mentioned, backing away toward the shower.

Sirius stretched his legs down to the floor and tested out his footing. “You’re actively ignoring the fine compromise we just made and that’s to your detriment, not mine,” he returned, pushing off the counter to give a go at standing.

“An incredible one, fine,” Remus allowed, pushing past the shower curtain to run the taps, “but not a single snog will be had once we’re in there; I’m cutting it close.”

“Sure, sure,” Sirius returned, padding up behind him. “You only start a two; relax a bit and let me take you in.”

“I’ve got to go by mine first,” Remus maintained, tugging his joggers off of his feet in turn.

“How does that bit change my offer?” Sirius raised, hoping right into the shower given that he was quite nude already.

Remus followed him in, pressing a quick kiss to Sirius’s forehead in thanks, and their bodies were at least clean before any snogging did occur, and to Sirius’s credit, that was all Remus’s fault; midway through rubbing shampoo into Sirius’s hair, he found himself caught up with Sirius’s smile and those eyes of his shut like a contented canine, and a small smile made its way onto Remus’s own lips before he leaned in to lock his in with Sirius’s. The resulting, deeper kiss wasn’t harried by any means and in fact, the quiet slide of their lips helped give the illusion that neither of them were in any sort of rush, but Remus did have to put his foot down eventually to get himself back on track.

He finished up Sirius’s hair with much more attention to detail than he gave his own, but he had a lot less hair to work with than Sirius did and his wasn't anything like Sirius's locks, come to that. Once the suds were washed out of the tub, he deemed the shower finished and turned to switch off the taps, pushing the curtain aside and reaching for a towel for Sirius before he grabbed one for himself.

Once his body was dry, he took it to his hair and towelled it off as he made his way back to Sirius’s room. He put the towel in Sirius’s hamper, fished through the top and second drawers for clothes he could wear to work, and had his briefs on before Sirius padded into the room wearing all of nothing and moving up beside Remus to fish through the top drawer.

Remus pulled his shirt on over his head, but it was Sirius’s reappearance that got him realizing that while he may well have had a shift to get going to, Sirius did not. “Do you have plans for the rest of the day?” he raised, reaching for the trousers he’d picked out.

“Marlene’s taking me to a thing later on,” Sirius announced, his voice muffled as he pulled a shirt on over his head.

Remus perked, happy that Sirius wouldn’t be wandering about the flat looking for things to occupy himself, but Sirius pointed firmly at him the moment he looked over and caught his smile. “No no, take that off,” he instructed, circling his hand around the look on Remus’s visage. “I finally let her talk me into going to an art installation with her so while you're out there in the real world, think of my struggle, would you?”

“Don’t say that,” Remus chided, moving to sit on the edge of the bed to pull on his trousers. “It could be fun.”

Sirius let out a sigh, brushing a few lingering strands of damp hair away from his face. “Is the world really as happy-go-lucky as you make it out to be, or is it all in your head?”

“Said the pot to the kettle,” Remus returned, standing to fasten his fly.

Sirius gave him a pointed look. “I blame you for this,” he informed him, and Remus blinked at him expectantly. “Your grandiose gesture followed by a week of dazed frolicking; it had my defences down and I couldn’t have said no to a thing when she asked me to go with.”

“Well, I really am sorry that I romanticized you right into an art installation, but have you seen this place?” Remus countered. “Maybe you’ll find a friend for Ludwig, but you will warn me if you do, you understand?”

Sirius let out a scoff of a laugh. “If I were walking into something like that it’d be fine, but this is going to be too much, I can already tell,” he maintained. “I have a twinge; call it intuition.”

“That might be from the bathroom acrobatics,” Remus put in.

Sirius missed his first trouser leg because of the snort he let out. “I don't think that's the twinge I’m talking about,” he traded him, getting his foot inside the leg this time around. “How about this… you call out, come with us, and we can play another round of Avoid Remus’s Eye.”

Remus put on a rueful sigh as he went for the entryway. “If only you'd said something earlier,” he called back, stooping to pick up his shoes.

“As fucking if,” Sirius sent him.

Remus’s mobile rang out as he reached to grab his shoes and Remus went back to the living room to retrieve it, thinking it was a good thing when he was that close to leaving it behind, but he paused when he saw James’s name lit up on display. “Sirius,” he called out, “take your mobile off silent.”

Sirius’s voice came from the entryway, at the very least. “Oi, I was a little busy,” he defended.

Remus walked his mobile down the hall and held it out to him. “James.”

Sirius paused with his right shoe on, left shoe off. “Tell him I’ll ring after take you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Remus excused. Not wanting James to think he’d been too caught up to remember his duty yet again, he swiped his thumb over the screen and put it to his ear. “He was just about to call you.”

"Uh-huh," James offered, but thankfully without much of a tone. “Sorry to pry you two off each other for even a second, but I've an appointment.”

Remus sniffed. “We weren’t on each other and he'll call you back on his,” he returned, keeping some form of dignity even if it was a bit of a lie.

“In forty-five-ish,” Sirius put up, loud enough that James would hear him on the other end of the line.

Remus dropped the reciever from his mouth. “I can still make it there if I catch the bus on time, it’s fine."

“I said I'd take you,” Sirius insisted.

Remus shook his head. “I have to leave right now and I’m going to need this,” he said of his mobile.

“Who's gonna cave first?” James put in. “Council’s split right down the middle, and I hear James can’t even pick a winner.”

Remus ended the call and the debate altogether. “Call him back on yours,” he instructed, slipping his mobile into his back pocket.

Sirius huffed. “Why can’t you just let me do nice things?” he raised, but Remus went on past him, nudging him out of the way of the door.

“Go talk to James,” he reiterated, leaning in to give him a quick peck, but the leaning only made it easier for Sirius to stuff a note in Remus’s front pocket. “Why?”

“So you could cab it,” Sirius said easily.

“We have a deal,” Remus returned, pulling the note back out of his pocket and flapping it Sirius’s way.

“What, that starts now?” Sirius raised, feigning confusion with his hands curled behind his back.

Remus huffed, stuck the note Sirius refused to take into one of his Docs, and wrenched the door open. “I have to go, but I’ll type up a clause if I have to, you just wait,” he manifested, shaking his mobile toward Sirius from the doorway.

Sirius, looking quite like Remus’s huffy state was the destination all along, came right for him, pulling him in for frankly too long a farewell kiss and simultaneously too good a kiss for Remus to call on the diligence to cut it short. “Come back here after you’re done?” he bid him, and Remus’s breathed in and out slowly, nodding foggily as he forced himself out of the flat.

-

Remus came through the same door a good eight hours later, kicked his shoes off, and stooped to stick them together on the mat. Every light in sight was on, as per custom, and the only sign that he should bypass Sirius’s room altogether and head straight for the living room was a call from that direction.

“How were the gulags?” Remus let a weary sigh in reply, heading down the hall and into the living room to find Sirius sitting on the middle cushion of the couch with his feet propped up on the coffee table and a takeout container in his lap, spoon in one hand, and his mobile in the other. “That good, mm?”

Remus ran a hand up through his hair as he made his way toward the couch, bent in to drop a kiss to the top of Sirius’s head, and settled down the cushion on his right, squinting to think of the best way to put it. “Long and strange,” he settled on, crossing his arms languidly over himself.

Sirius stuck his mobile down on the cushion to left of him. “Mm, well,” he hummed, setting his newly free hand down on Remus’s left knee to give it a pat, “plenty here to make yourself a stiff drink if that’s what you’re after.”

“Haven’t ruled that out,” Remus said of it, leaning his head back against the couch. “How was your art date?”

Sirius blew out a puff of breath, glancing at the ceiling for a moment. “Long and strange,” he offered.

“All around, then; good,” Remus echoed, but very soon, he found himself quite engrossed with figuring out exactly what was in Sirius’s take-out container.

Sirius took a spoonful of the substance. “It was mixed media.”

“Oh, that'd be a treat,” Remus offered distractedly; whatever it was, it had to be spooned out, that much he had so far.

“In theory perhaps," Sirius gave him, "but in practice, I have to say it was a lot of hullabaloo—”

“I’m sorry, but what are you eating?” Remus cut in, unable to help himself.

Sirius stuck the takeout container under Remus’s chin. “Ice cream,” he extended, as if Remus should have guessed that's what would go in there.

“And you decided to forgo a bowl?” Remus raised, absolutely certain he hadn’t seen a full sink that morning.

“This way, I won’t have to wash it when I'm done,” Sirius maintained, tapping his right temple.

Remus squinted at him. “Right, but you had to wash that out in order to use it, no?”

Sirius made a series of nonsensical noises before pressing on. “I was in the middle of the best story of your life, if you remember.”

Remus let this one go. “Sorry, mixed media,” he prompted.

“Mm, a joy,” Sirius nodded, grabbing a quick spoonful before continuing. “It was in this complex, there were about a thousand singular rooms in it, and each one had a… I want to say theme, but I still haven't worked out how the rooms had been divvied out.”

“I don’t understand how you wouldn’t have absolutely thrived in that setting,” Remus put out there.

“Well, hold the fuck on,” Sirius returned, pointing at him with his spoon. “You think I’m extra, just wait and see.”

“Sorry, go,” Remus prompted him.

“We were moving from room to room, had to go down a floor so we hit a stairwell, and there was a woman, squatting in the middle of the stairs, in a white hazmat suit—”

“Oh,” Remus put out, blinking. “That took a turn.”

“Do you remember in United States of Tara; 'Gimme?'” Sirius raised. “The impish alter?”

The clarification wasn't all that necessary as it wasn’t wholly difficult for Remus to think back to their screening in February. “Yeah?” he offered hesitantly, his eyes widening.

“She's just there, Gimme-ing on the stairs,” Sirius repurposed it. “Stairs, I'll add, that we had to go down in order to even keep going through this maze.”

“No,” Remus said outright. “No, no, no; no, thank you.”

Sirius reached his free hand over and slapped Remus's knee in apparent, but vivid agreement. “And, by the time I even digest that this was indeed what I was looking at, Marlene's already gone right on down the stairs, and I realize it, that was the whole point; you were meant to go past her and all I'm thinking is, ‘Remus would hate this, Remus would hate this,’” he detailed, ending it off with a sigh-song.

Remus nodded vigorously to the validity of that. “Thank you for just knowing that.”

Sirius forwards him a chime of a note, keeping right on. “The whole time I'm walking down, I'm expecting her to include me in this piece," he attested. "Shout at me, jump out and latch onto me, anything, and I know I’m going to kick her the moment she does, but I get past her and nothing’s happened; she’s just frozen in her pose, and I just — was that the point of it, do you think?”

“Do I think?” Remus repeated.

Sirius waved the spoon around idly. “Do you think, she was trying to suggest that, we, as a collective society, are too quick to jump to the worst-case scenario?” he theorized loftily.

Remus made a face at that. “Bit much.”

A long, rolling laugh burst out of Sirius. “And there’s Remus’s review,” he concluded.

Remus bit his lower lip out of amusement. “I just think there’d be other, less horrific ways to get that point across if you’re going to be making it,” he reserved.

Sirius smacks his lips once, letting that be his stamp of agreement. “Meanwhile, Marlene over there is simply going with the motions, barely batting an eye at that or any of it,” Sirius tacked on.

Remus blinked, considered it through a hum. “Her world, I suppose,” he offered, giving an even head tilt. “Probably felt right at home.”

“Like she was back in with her flock,” Sirius built on it, scooping a spoonful of ice cream from the container. “And I tried, Remus, I did; she was so chuffed I finally agreed to go to one with her, I knew I’d have to reign it in and play nice, but then, we hit a room with this film projecting on the wall of a man just chucking potatoes at a gong, and I was in hell, Remus. I’ve been to hell.”

Remus, who'd just leaned in to accept an outstretched spoonful, went and proceeded to choke on it, though he sure was laughing as he worked to swallow it down. “Well, that one I like,” he maintained. “What’s your theory there?”

“There was certainly a more direct conclusion built to that one, and strap in, ‘cause it's a doozy,” Sirius prefaced, and Remus made a show of settling in more. “He's pitching these gigantic taters over at it, sometimes they hit, other times they don’t get anywhere near the gong, and at this point, I’m sure I’ve entered another realm; I start looking ‘round at everyone else because there is just no way I could possibly be the only one who finds this ridiculous, but no one, not a single one of them seemed even slightly phased by all of that.”

Remus had already biting back a laugh at the sheer idea of projecting himself into that room, but he let it go there. “Oh, I don't believe that."

Sirius pointed at him with his spoon again. “I'm not shitting you, no one was even holding a smirk in; maybe it was a blessing that you couldn't have made it because I know I’d have looked at you for help and immediately lost it, and then the bark would have sounded out in the room and I bet that would've phased 'em; I'd have frightened the lot of them with the power of it,” he detailed, and Remus stuck his grin against Sirius’s right shoulder as his own shoulders shook. “So, as it turns out, the answer to the puzzle had been in the same room all along, sitting on a little, round table in the corner and lit up on display, where the — artiste, we’ll call him for now, had commissioned a bottle of vodka to made from the potatoes that hit the gong.”

Remus lifted his head quickly, reeling. “I—” he started, then ultimately shook his head clear. “What did he do with the ones that missed?”

“Never said,” Sirius chimed.

“That’s suspicious,” Remus called it.

“He had a second piece, that one,” Sirius tacked on.

“Oh, good; sounds like he really needs an outlet,” Remus returned.

Sirius pointed at him brazenly with a bright smile. “That’s more real than you even know,” he maintained, then set the same hand over the length of the two of them as if setting a scene. “It was another projection, only this time, it was the shadow of a lone man standing at the top of a pier, facing out at the water, just shouting nonsense sounds into a megaphone.”

Remus burst out a laugh. “Well, that’d be right up your alley.”

Sirius laughed, muffled around his spoon, and pulled the utensil out of his mouth with a pop. “It was probably the one I identified with the most out of any of them, I'll give you that.”

Remus sighed as if he’d just run a mile and brought his hands up to rub at his eyes. “Is there more?” he asked hopefully.

“I’ve so much more,” Sirius assured him.

Remus dropped his hands to his lap. “Good, save some,” he bid, and to Sirius’s quizzical look, he added, “one day, I'm going to need a pick-me-up and one of those tales is bound to do the trick."

Sirius’s eyes positively shone. “I won't even tell you when one's coming,” he said. “I’ll just drop it on you without any notice and you'll have to process it wherever we are.”

“Even better,” Remus said of it. Sirius scooped up another spoonful and held it out for Remus, who accepted it in kind and spoke when he could, nodding to him. “Well, you win. My day was not that strange.”

“Tell,” Sirius prompted.

Remus gave up a hum, trying to find the best way to explain it past the main descriptors. “It was like I kept missing normal human communication by a hair,” he offered after a moment or two. Sirius, mid-chew, lifted his right eyebrow only. “That, or everyone else was on the fritz today.”

“I’m going with column B,” Sirius informed him. “You’ve been hitting it out of the park ever since we got back; all smiles and bubbles, you.”

“Well, not today, apparently,” Remus said of it. “It was a bit of column A and B, I think; this bloke came up with a bottled drink and the bag of popcorn for the promo, and he said, ‘I get one of these if I buy this, right?’ and I meant to say ‘Sure thing,’ but I just said ‘Sure.’”

Sirius coughed out a laugh, lifting his shoulders easily. “Take whatever you like, what do I care.”

Remus nodded through a weak laugh, rubbing his reddened face. “Take the whole cash drawer while you’re at it; fuck it,” he tacked on, and Sirius leaned his head down on Remus’s left shoulder, succumbing to a silent fit. “And then, there was just a number of different people periodically ordering odd things, which is the name of the game, I know that, but this one woman was just adamant that I make her a tall latte with room.”

Sirius lifted his head, swiping a lock of hair that had fallen over his eyes and showcasing quite the squint. “What?” he said flatly.

“Mm, yeah,” Remus nodded, feeling frustration bubbling up in him again despite the situation happening hours earlier. “I thought she just meant she wanted it in a grande cup, but she insisted no, tall latte, no room, as she asked. So, I made it for her as she asked and she was back five minutes later saying it was too strong — 'well, yeah, it is, that would be because I had to put less milk in there to get that room you so badly wanted; what do you want me to do here, ma’am?'”

Sirius snorted. “Tell me you said that.”

“With much, much less ‘tude and no 'ma'am,'” Remus offered.

Sirius huffed. “That's the only power you’ve got around there," he returned. "Use it well, Remus.”

“Well, I managed to reign it in,” Remus put it, winning himself a lengthy booing for it, and moved right on past that. “Oh, and then, I’m working on this man’s soy latte and he gets right, right up there by the bar to watch me make it so I should have seen this coming, but then, he sticks his hand over the counter, points at me like this—" Remus shoved his right forefinger right up against the take-out container in Sirius’s lap which resulted in a near growl from him; unsurprising when Remus had certainly seen Sirius nearly bite off a hand or two for that particular transgression in his time, “—and insists I just used the wrong spoon for it.”

Sirius let out a quick bark. “Yeah OK, you,” he returned.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Remus put up, gesturing toward Sirius with his left hand. “If it had been you, I might have had to question it.”

Sirius knocked his right leg against Remus’s left knee. “Cheeky bugger,” he traded him, wearing a smile all the same.

“There was no way I'd done it, but it's not as if he was going to believe me,” Remus kept on, “so I had to remake it and dump a perfectly good drink because, of course, the next three people I tried offereing the drink to didn't take.”

“Well, could have drank it yourself,” Sirius put out there.

Remus made a face. “Soy milk tastes like chalk.”

“Oh?” Sirius quipped. “Had few pieces in your day to know that, did you?”

“Chalky substances,” Remus amended.

“Oh, chalky substances,” Sirius nodded, his crooked grin on.

“Listen, I had to take Milk of Magnesia for my ulcer and that stuff was horrid,” Remus served him. “White, chalk-paste hybrid that somewhoe managed to have the consistency of goo and should never have had medicinal properties.”

“I love it when you're like this,” Sirius offered, his eyes wide.

“Well, it was,” Remus maintained, not as amused as Sirius evidently was. “I had to take it three times a day to even hope it’d do anything, and I used to weigh out the options; the churning pain versus a spoonful of that horrid stuff and unfortunately, the pain won out more often than not but only just.”

Sirius took the last spoonful of ice cream before he leaned forward to set the container on the coffee table. “What’s an ulcer feel like?” he raised, propping his feet up on the table.

Remus thought back to how he’d described it to his doctor at age sixteen and thought it would likely still do the trick. “Like someone's giving a friction burn to your stomach.”

Sirius winced. “You really had to debate that over a spoonful of goo?”

“What part of gooey substances excites you?” Remus asked.

“Depends on the kind,” Sirius said easily.

“Happy sixth birthday, Sirius,” Remus sent him brightly.

Sirius gave in to a smile before dropping his head on Remus’s shoulder and snuggling in. It went on like that for some time, the both of them trading stories of the trade before Remus felt a twinge of remembrance and tried to locate it fully. Once he had, he hesitated, not sure he wanted to put himself through the mental Olympics it would take to rehash all of it, but as with his mum, Sirius rather knew he'd been waiting on one, last grade and would eventually ask if Remus avoided it for too long.

“My grade came in."

Sirius pulled his feet off the table and plunked them on the floor. “Oi, what?” he put up, straightening up and looking to him. “When?”

“Yesterday,” Remus said. “It was a 'B.'”

Silence hung between them for a few beats before Sirius nodded toward the front hall. “Allons-y?”

Remus turned his head that way before he looked back, finding Sirius had brandished a fist in that time. “Non, c’est correct,” he waved him off, smiling for the offer. “If I’m being honest, I had it coming.”

“Excuse I?” Sirius returned. “I read that paper.”

Remus smirked. “You did not.”

Sirius gave him a plain look. “You told me enough about it for me to know it was going to be an 'A' paper,” he reiterated.

Remus tilted his head to try and allow that, but kept in with the nag at his gut. “There's a difference between being able to articulate the vision you want versus actually getting it down on paper and then getting it across.”

“In what world would you not have done both?” Sirius raised.

Remus lifted his right hand. “Would you rather me mope around about it?” he asked. “I'm not going to kick a door in over this.”

“That's not what I'm saying,” Sirius maintained. “I'm saying your professor’s an idiot.”

“They can’t all be idiots simply because they throw me an 'A' when I don't deserve one,” Remus pointed out, and Sirius gave a click of his tongue for it. “It's fine, the odds weren't in my favour anyway.”

Sirius gave him a frank look of bemusement then wiped his face clean and lifted his feet off the floor, tucking them under him and turning to Remus, his right knee slotting easily up against the left side of Remus’s waist. “OK, get me on your level,” he prompted with a wave of both his hands toward himself. "How were they not in your favour?"

Remus tried to appreciate the effort to remain patient even if it was evidently costing Sirius a whole lot. “It wasn’t your typical class structure,” he explained. “Classes were essentially over a week into the term and the paper itself counted toward almost the entire grade, so realistically, I'd have to write a perfect paper to get top marks and I simply didn’t put the work or the time in for it.”

“Yes, you did,” Sirius countered, his brow furrowing. “I saw you putting both in.”

Remus lifted his hand for that. “Well, yeah, I didn't leave it until the last minute, but my practicum took more of my time and a lot more of my focus; I pushed that paper aside for other papers, classes, things, people,” he listed, and though he hadn't meant to call Sirius out specifically, he certainly lifted his hands as if he were being blamed outright. “I’m not saying it’s on you, I didn’t have to take as many study breaks as I did; this is just as much my fault. More so, even — those breaks weren’t all your idea, were they?”

Sirius slowly let his hands drop and Remus didn’t know what to do with him chewing his lip like he was, feeling a bit like he was dealing with a clone of Sirius that hadn't been programmed just right. “This is where you say, ‘it’s fine, Remus, a grade doesn’t determine your worth,’” he offered, nodding his head to Sirius for the repetition of that he'd like to hear.

Sirius broke into an incredulous scoff. “I know that,” he said. “I wrote the book on that.”

Remus gave him a look. “You just got fired up over it, so.”

Sirius made a vague noise of disagreement. “I wouldn't call it fired up.”

Remus made the same noise. “What would you call it?” he raised, and he'd never know why it was perfectly fine for Sirius to do the mocking but when it was Remus doing it, Sirius went right into a frenzy.

If I had been fired up, I'm sure it would have something to do with the fact that my protective streak begins and ends with you,” he returned haughtily. “Obviously, I'd rather you landed here than have you banging your head against the wall over it, but I saw how much you busted your arse this term and the last, and I think that ought to be rewarded, sue me.”

Remus’s stomach twisted along with his mouth, torn between finding the show Sirius was putting on off-putting or entertaining. “I appreciate it, Sirius, but it’s alright,” he insisted, sticking his hand on Sirius’s thigh. "I had a look at the spots where I lost points, and I didn't lose any that weren't deserved.”

Sirius blinked at that and shook his head. “I don't know who you are or what's gotten into you,” he maintained, but there was a fond note to his tone that certainly got Remus flushing in record time.

He ducked his head away sheepishly. “Well, I opened the paper up on my break, had a look through the feedback he gave and the rubric he marked off of, so I had the rest of the long and strange shift to talk myself up to this point,” he confessed. “It took a lot of work to get me here, believe me.”

Sirius blinked. “You found out yesterday?” Remus blinked too, nodding. “And you only opened the thing up today?”

“Yesterday was,” Remus said slowly, carefully picking his words, “quite a day.”

Sirius waved that effort off. “You had plenty of time to look at it,” he maintained, taking his feet off of the coffee table and pulling them in to drape them over Remus’s knees instead. “Come to my level for a second; you waited a full day before you checked all the places where you might’ve mucked up, and you were just going to gloss over that? No, sir, I think Party Punch is in order.”

Remus gave another sheepish smile around the twist his stomach took to; he didn’t feel as if he’d done anything substantial nor did he feel like he’d many any strides further, he’d ranted to himself for a while and pretended he was all well and good about it with another. “I did what I’ve always done,” he put up. “I just traded one fret out for another and in this case, I pretended I liked getting 'B's for a while and picked up a book.”

“What, you fretted about the characters in your book instead?” Sirius raised, flashing a bemused smile.

Remus sighed, looking at him imploringly. “Why are you taking everything I say so literally, now of all times?" he asked. “I avoided the grade hanging over my head for a while by completely ignoring it and then I rang my mum and that whole thing took over, and then I went to Dorcas's, and your thing took over; it was just one thing after another.”

Sirius took his lower lip into his mouth and nodded, then let out a small sigh. “Remus, you saw the grade, said ‘fuck this noise,’ and proceeded to pull out a book and move on with it,” he emphasized. Remus let out a small breath, giving a shake of his head, and Sirius shifted closer to him, and if he got any closer so he’d be right in Remus’s lap. “Remember our laundromat date?”

Remus found it quite easy to match his smirk. “Was that a date?” he checked, tilting his head at him.

“It was for me,” Sirius said of it, cocking a brow. “A successful evening even if it didn't end without pants, but if you want to make right on that later, I won't complain any—" Remus huffed a laugh, ducking his head to lean it against Sirius’s right shoulder since it was so close, “—but my point is, you did the exact thing I do, and the same thing you said you wished you could do that same night, so, how do you feel about it?”

Remus blinked against the fabric of Sirius’s t-shirt and lifted his head, considering him and his point for a few moments. “I didn't even think of it that way,” he gave him.

“Mm, good thing I'm here,” Sirius said. “Try it now.”

Remus did try, tried to let it sink in and give it a positive spin, but it didn't work for long; something felt too much like a thorn to let the whole of it sit still. “I’m not really any better than I was,” he maintained.

Sirius let out a sigh. “Remus,” he implored. “There’s no getting better when there’s nothing wrong with you; there’s just shifting the perspective around a bit so that, hopefully, you don't wind up with another ulcer one day from constantly kicking yourself when you’re already down.”

Remus deflated, leaning in and sticking his face back against Sirius's right shoulder. “It still hung over me throughout the day, though,” he clarified. “I told my mum I was so happy with it even though I wasn’t at all yet and now I wish I'd actually looked through it when I got it so maybe I'd have made it to a place where I was actually OK with it before I just said that to her.”

Sirius’s eyebrows knitted together as he stared him down, and Remus couldn't say he was a fan of them just then. “Why'd you tell her that?”

Remus’s own brow furrowed. “What?” he checked.

“Tell her you were happy with it when you weren’t,” Sirius tacked on.

"I don't know," Remus said, lifting a shoulder. "She knew I was waiting on that final grade so she was going to ask after it eventually, and I didn’t want her to be disappointed so I said it was fine."

“When has she ever been disappointed?” Sirius put out.

“She’s been,” Remus said uncomfortably. “I want to avoid that here.”

Sirius sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “She wouldn't have given you shit over a fucking 'B,' Remus,” he put up.

“Not aloud, no,” Remus returned, and at the widening of Sirius’s eyes, he jumped to explain himself. “I don’t want her to think I'm just coasting by out here.”

“Coasting?” Sirius repeated, his voice too tight for the situation in Remus's opinion. “What part of what you're doing here is coasting? You go to school, you work while you’re there, you have human interaction outside of both when you can squeeze it in; this is Hope we’re talking about here, she’s not going to smite you for having a life outside of school.”

Remus only just fought the urge to pull out of reach, unsure of how he was going to explain to Sirius something he’d set as a hard rule for himself so long ago. “The last thing I want is either of them thinking I'm out here struggling," he instilled, pushing patience into his voice and not doing it all that well, "and if she thinks that’s what's happening, then my dad will think it, too, so it's just easier for all of us if they don't hear about it when I am.”

Sirius sat poised to speak for a few moments and his breath hitched tightly in his throat before he managed it. "Party Punch, then?” he offered.

Remus leaned forward to leave a kiss relieved on Sirius’s lips, feeling the goosebumps that sprouted up all over his body beginning to smooth over. “We finished off the juice last time,” he reminded him. “Malibu’s low, too.”

“A quest first, then Party Punch," Sirius amended, uncurling his legs from under himself to get off of the couch.

Chapter 3: 3.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Remus heard the foot patters coming, the creak of the door opening and shutting, and lay in the five-second lapse that occurred before he was treated to an earthquake better known as Sirius burrowing up beside him on the bed. And yet, despite all that warning and ample time to sort it out, Remus still wished he’d used any of it to prepare himself better. He breathed out slowly, made a bleary noise, and the bed shifted along with the comforter he wound himself up in, and a moment later, Sirius was inside Remus’s cocoon with him, worming up close and draping his left arm over Remus’s right hip.

Remus reached his arms up between the two of them, readjusting the comforter around his shoulders. “Time?”

“About five,” Sirius supplied, nosing at Remus’s neck. “James got in a little while ago, says he’s going to make pancakes in a bit. What do you think, do you want to get out of the room for a while?”

“Does he know?” Remus asked.

“In general?” Sirius checked, getting an affirming mumble out of Remus. “Yeah, he’s been brought up to speed.”

“Does he also know I’m really sorry about Ugly Pot?”

“It took him a whole four seconds to get over it,” Sirius relayed, but Remus gave another muttered noise, not all that satisfied by the fact that those four seconds of disappointment were still directly caused by him. “Remus, it was the ugliest pot known to man, hence the name.”

“You saw his face when he brought it in,” Remus countered. “He was so chuffed.”

“And he’ll make that face again,” Sirius assured. “Soon even, if you choose to make a reappearance.”

Between staying cocooned and leaving the bed, Remus didn't have to weigh the options too hard. “I don’t think I'm up for it,” he said.

“Do you have any idea of how hard it’s been, keeping him out of here?” Sirius raised.

“I’m not fit to see anybody right now,” Remus insisted.

Sirius gave a measured exhale through his nose. “Sit up for me at least?” he requested. “I’ve got to bring you up to speed, too, but I’d rather see you while I’m doing that.”

Remus gave a bleak noise and nodded, working to untangle himself from both Sirius and the comforter, and Sirius went ahead and broke free of the cocoon before flapping the entire comforter out over the bed. “It could have been a less ceremonious exit,” Remus mentioned, crawling out from underneath the now vast expanse of the comforter.

“When have I ever?” Sirius asked, shifting around on the bed. “Lamp’s going on, OK?”

Remus nodded, heard the yank of the lamp’s chain and saw the rim of light visible around the edges of his sleep mask before he pulled it down from over his eyes, blinking to adjust to the dimly lit room. He startled at Sirius’s right hand turned up right by his face but settled down once he ran his thumb over Remus’s left eyebrow gingerly, reminded starkly of the mark going straight through it.

“How’s it look?” he asked, looking up automatically in the direction even though it’d be impossible for him to see it.

“Better,” Sirius provided, taking his hand back. “Wouldn’t hurt to change the stitches over, mind.”

Remus nodded before Sirius slid off the left side of the bed and headed right on out of the room, leaving the door open a crack. Remus hadn't exactly expected it to happen right then and there, but Sirius was already gone now so he pushed himself backwards on the bed to prop himself up against the headboard, crossed his legs underneath him, and reached up to rub his eyes with the edges of his palms, losing himself in the bleary sensation for a good half-minute or so. He pulled his hands away from his eyes once the feeling got too intense to keep up, blinked a fair number of times to rid his vision of spots, and heard Sirius whisper ‘go get him’ heartily from out in the hall; the door was pushed opened again before Tango trotted into the room, and Remus had to admit that even though he was in the midst of his own pity party, he had a harder time keeping to the itinerary with Tango ambling up onto the bed and hogging out beside him.

Remus smirked down at him and reached to give Tango’s snout a pat as Sirius wandered back into the room. Remus looked up, took in his armful of items, and watched Sirius kick back with his left foot to shut the door behind him, feeling satisfied with that choice. He carried the pile over to the bed, stepped up onto it, and walked a few steps further before landing himself slightly diagonal from Remus’s legs, crossing his own under him.

Sirius let the pile go just to the left of himself. “Scoot up a bit for me?” he requested.

Remus shifted himself off of the headboard and scooted closer to him. “I can’t wait until I can cover this thing up properly,” he said.

“Soon, soon,” Sirius gave, beginning to sort the items out into a neat line beside them.

“Not soon enough,” Remus said of it. “Yesterday's shift, I noticed no less than seven people staring at it as if I were some kind of street-fighter posing as their barista, and those were just the ones I caught doing it.”

Sirius looked up at him with a quirk of his lips. “Well, it was a fresh scar at that point; some of them might've been into the street-fighter look,” he offered. Remus gave him a plain look that really only amounted to him getting an uppity one in return. “What? You don’t know.”

Remus gave him a bland noise to go with the face while Sirius reached his right hand up to his left brow. He ran a finger over the first butterfly stitch and gave it a slight tug from the left, but clicked his tongue as the stitch held onto Remus’s gash. “Thought they might be stubborn,” Sirius offered, reaching back to pick up a facecloth he’d brought in with him. “Sorry if this hurts a bit.”

Remus aimed to shake his head best he could given his position, then decided waving it off would suffice better than moving his head at all. Sirius ran the damp cloth over his left brow and Remus left him to it, though if he were honest, there was always something hypnotizing about the way Sirius's eyes looked in the midst of a task that made Remus not want to interrupt the process. Sirius stuck the cloth down over his left thigh, held Remus’s head with his free hand, and gave another pull on the problem stitch with his right hand; this time, it pulled free without too much of a hitch, and Sirius let out a noise of celebration as he deposited the old stitch on a piece of tissue laying in the queue of fixings beside him.

Sirius retrained his gaze on Remus’s brow and worked on peeling off the second stitch. “So, it’s been a Day,” he said.

Remus blinked out of this chapter of vague hypnosis and breathed out as the words registered. “Mm?”

“Mm,” Sirius affirmed, his eyes fixed on the task at hand. “Some good news, some medium, and some bad.”

Remus inhaled through his nose. “The bad first,” he said.

“I had a feeling, but I might veto for the medium news first if you don't mind,” Sirius maintained, tugging the second stitch free from Remus's scar and sticking it down on the tissue with the other one, but didn’t resume his task right away. “I know that whatever I say is observational at this point, but I’ve done a lot of thinking and a lot more reading than thinking even, and I think we might’ve jumped the gun a bit, assuming that light is what brought it on both times.”

“Do you?” Remus prompted.

“Well, unless you stared directly at an incandescent bulb at some point last night, and I doubt you did?” Sirius raised, pausing for a moment’s confirmation before Remus nodded it along to him. “Not really a pastime of yours, but I grilled Peter for a play-by-play in case I might’ve missed anything big while I wasn't here, and none of what you two got up to lines up with Monday’s fiasco, unless you count the brewskies.”

Remus blinked, though it was lagged. “I only had three pints over the course of, what, three hours?” he raised. "You really think those did it?"

“I think they’re at least a contender,” Sirius put it, reaching for the packet of stitches that lay by them. Remus’s brow furrowed as he mulled that over, momentarily forgetting that Sirius was trying to line the first butterfly stitch up with his scar. “OK, I love your thinking face, but could you tone it down just a bit?”

He flickered kind eyes up to meet his for a moment and Remus did his best to relax his face. “It doesn’t add up,” Remus said of it.

“You don’t think so?” Sirius put up, pressing the stitch to Remus’s skin. “Our gin and juice on Monday, last night's pints; I see a pattern there.”

“Right, but I’ve had a few drinks over the course of my life and they didn’t all end with a cluster,” Remus put it.

Sirius flicked his gaze up to him while he ran a thumb over the stitch to smooth it down. “How astute.”

Remus gave him a plain look. “Wouldn’t I have run into this problem before now?” he reiterated.

Sirius reached to peel off a second stitch from the packet of new ones. “Well, now we’re getting into a chicken or the egg thing, aren’t we?” he raised, setting the packet aside.

“How?” Remus asked.

Sirius reached up to line the second stitch up with Remus’s gash. “You came before the clusters, not the other way around,” he reiterated, reaching up to lay the second stitch below the first one.

“Well, if we’re talking astute, then you just one-upped me,” Remus returned him.

Sirius paused his work, flickering his gaze back to meet Remus’s. “There’s a woman out there somewhere that I read about, gets a cluster like clockwork the instant she has a bite of strong cheese, to the point where she knows she has to avoid it completely if she wants to avoid a cluster,” he offered, his hands remaining frozen in place as he spoke. “Now, I don’t know her obviously, but I somehow doubt that from the moment she stepped out of the womb, she was never able to even look at a block of Montgomery Cheddar without the aura coming on; what say you?”

Remus sighed, not really sure how he hadn’t expected Sirius to have brought receipts along with him. “Well, when you put it like that,” he offered.

“Think of it like that,” Sirius encouraged, resuming his task and smoothing the second stitch down. “What does anyone really know about these things? All I’m seeing is that triggers can develop over time, so for me, it’s not all that far-fetched to think that in your case, it could be the same sort of thing only alcohol might be your Montgomery Cheddar, so to speak.”

Remus breathed in once. “I felt my left eye sting on Monday,” he instilled. “Maybe the sun didn’t cause last night’s, but I definitely felt my retina sear the second we went out into the sunlight on Monday, and it’s not as if I can pretend I didn’t feel that.”

Sirius leaned back, had a look over his work, and breathed out a breath of finality that suggested he deemed it a job well done before training his eyes on Remus full-time. “I’m not saying Monday’s cluster couldn't have been related to light,” he said candidly. “I’m saying, we don’t know where last night’s came from or why yet so I think we ought to tread lightly here; let’s not be daft about where and when you take your shades off in case anything like Monday was to happen again, but we may as well stare the bull in the face rather than turn away from it and in this case, booze might just be the bull.”

Remus sat with that for a few moments, and it was as if the room had changed its hue to match the new theory Sirius presented. He nodded to show he understood but he didn’t speak yet, still attempting to thicken the thread between Monday’s attack and the one that slapped him upside the head the evening prior.

“I know it’s a downer, but I don’t know what the alternative should be,” Sirius offered, speaking through Remus’s chosen silence. “I’m not into the idea of feeding you shots to test it and see whether one comes shooting along after them; it’d be a lot easier and a lot more humane to just keep away from it altogether, and there’s always weed if you feel the itch.”

“I’m fine with that,” Remus insisted, his vocal cords betraying him by showcasing the note of panic in his voice. “I’m not touching another drop if it means I won’t go barreling straight into another one.”

Sirius nodded, taking his lower lip into his mouth this time and reaching to curl his hands around Remus’s left ankle. “That's sort of where the bad news comes in,” he relented, keeping Remus’s gaze as he tosses him a frown.

Remus swallowed, nodding once. “OK.”

Sirius gave a quick glance to the ceiling, keeping his gaze there as he poised himself to speak. “It’s not that it won’t matter at all what we do, so I’m not going to say that,” he prefaced, and it truly was a sight to be had, watching Sirius picking out his words carefully, “but if you’re in a cycle, which it’s starting to look like you may be—”

“We don’t know that I am,” Remus interjected.

Sirius's careful expression petered off to more of a plain one as he lowered his gaze again. “Sure, we don’t know it like we know that winter comes after fall, but you don’t have to worry about them coming every hour on the hour so you don’t fall under the category of 'chronic,' and Monday’s cluster still happened and yesterday's clearly wasn’t a fluke either,” he offered, displaying his hands open on his lap. “I know you’ve forgotten your sunnies before and not ended up with a knockout hitting you, but you’ve had two attacks in under a week, so—” He paused to weigh his hands, “—we might as well treat it as if you’re a cycle at this point and if you are, from what I’ve been reading, the clusters are going to come round either way; the booze, the sunlight, or both, they’ll just trigger them to come quicker.”

Remus breathed out, the weight on his lungs helping him feel cornered in, as if he’d been stuffed into a straight jacket and forced to try to wiggle free. “Alright,” he put up, giving in to a tight grin. “Good. It doesn’t matter what I do to prevent them, I’m a time bomb waiting to go off.”

“Don’t say that,” Sirius said, not curt or unkindly, but Remus gave into a full-bodied shrug no matter the gentle cadence of his tone.

“Why not, I am,” Remus insisted. “Peter’s never going to look at me the same way after what I put him through, James probably won’t either once he's heard more about it, and they’ve both got the right to if I could blow at any moment—”

Sirius tightened his hands around Remus’s left ankle as if to anchor him down. “Peter is not a name I want to hear right now, James already knows a lot about it and he isn’t afraid of much, and I didn’t say we’re shit out of luck,” he maintained, striking down all three of Remus’s points in one go. “I’ve good news, too; don’t forget that.”

Remus gave out a tight laugh. “Well, it’s going to have to be fucking splendid, isn’t it?” he raised, lifting his left hand down over his forehead jaggedly. Sirius caught his wrist and guided it away from Remus’s head, and it took Remus a beat or two to realize he’d pressed his hand all over Sirius’s recently finished handiwork. “Sorry.”

Sirius shook his head, giving Remus’s apology little more than that. “It’s really good news,” he echoed, scooting forward a smidge so his and Remus’s knees touched. “I did a shitload of research last night, so much so that I think Professor Lupin should really be wondrously proud, and messaged this bloke—”

“Off to a fantastic start,” Remus put in.

“If you think that’s good, you just wait,” Sirius maintained, reaching to walk two fingers on his right hand up Remus’s arm. “I looked through a ton of threads before I came across a post of his, and what flagged me down about it was that he mentioned the NHS, so he was right where we needed him to be.”

Remus nodded, holding his breath; if Sirius managed to get a name, a number, even just a push in the right direction, it could make all the difference. He flapped his hands back toward himself to get Sirius to keep talking and Sirius eyed him once with a smile before he thankfully got on with it. “He had a bit of a life story going in the post so I skimmed a little of that, I’m not going to lie, but I caught the important stuff; he’s had them for years, minimal to no success on the treatment front until he finally wrangled himself a doctor who hasn’t got her head up her arse, she set him up for oxygen therapy, and now, he couldn’t be happier,” he detailed. “He practically sang her praises on that post, so I sent him a few questions and after going back and forth a bit, he gave me the number for her office, without me having to butter him up all that much to get it even, and I got you in to see her.”

If Remus hadn’t been sitting down he’d have surely tripped. “What?”

Sirius wasn’t at all deterred by the speed at which the word came out of him. “It’s happening,” he instilled, giving a grin before he searched Remus and the grin petered off of his lips. “I know I went ahead and did that without checking with you first, but you were in here, conked right out, and I needed to do something; it just made sense to get on it.”

Remus shook his head quickly. “No, it’s OK,” he said minutely. “I just can’t believe you got me in so fast.”

“Mind, her actually being legitimate means she’s booked up pretty tightly,” Sirius mentioned, tilting his head back and forth. “The earliest I could get you slotted in was, of course, right smack in the middle of when we’d be away, so the next best I could do was the week after we’re back.”

Remus reached his right hand out to him, trying to halt him. “Sirius,” he put out, feeling overwhelmed by every bomb dropped. “How did you even get me in?”

Sirius lifted his left hand and squeezed the fingers of Remus’s outstretched hand. “Well,” he started mystically, “I used this device called a telephone.”

Remus gave him a look. “Sirius.”

Sirius gave him a wry smile. “Pretended I was you,” he levelled with him, lifting a shoulder easily.

Remus gave him more of a pointed look, but his smile betrayed him anyway. “You little shit.”

“I do a pretty good Remus,” Sirius maintained, tossing his head to the side and putting on a huff. “Sirius. See?”

“That was very good,” Remus allowed. Sirius gave him a proud little smile, looking quite pleased with himself as he pulled a cigarette out of the pack lying between them, but Sirius also tended to look pretty pleased with himself whenever he successfully pulled off a prank, so Remus thought his suspicions were warranted. “Please tell me you avoided taking any creative liberties this time around.”

Sirius smirked around his first haul, letting it out in an easy stream as he reached for the ashtray on the nightstand. “I managed to restrain myself if you must know,” he returned, setting the tray beside him on the bed.

“Oh, mhm,” Remus echoed, reaching to steal the cigarette off of him.

“I did, I was the height of professional,” Sirius maintained, leaning back on his hands while Remus took a pull off of it. “Had to be a little careful with my R’s, mind, but I think I sold it well.”

Remus exhaled through his nose, his mouth twisting up into what might've been a smile if he didn't feel so sure it'd crack at any moment. “What day is the appointment on?” he asked, reaching up to swipe his right thumb over Sirius's left cheek.

Sirius turned his head and pressed a peck to Remus’s wrist. “Two-thirty on the thirty-first, and I already put it on the calendar,” he supplied. “So, I know it’s easy for me to sit here and ask this of you, but do what you can to forget the bad news for now.”

Remus gave a flat laugh there, reopening his eyes and pulling back from Sirius. “Who, me?”

Sirius gave him a flat smile. “All I’m asking is that you try,” he instilled, snagging his cigarette back. “Now that the appointment’s booked, my next plan is to get a list going of things we can try out ourselves, at least until we get you in that room; if these things could be coming along whether we perfect the art of prevention or not, then the least we can do for that is try not to trigger any more than we have to while also shifting some of our focus so that we’re figuring out how to abort the attacks when they do come on.”

Remus nodded again, swallowing around the lump in his throat and watching the cherry of the cigarette cast new shadows over Sirius’s face before they were gone again in a blink. For someone who maintained that he did not make many plans, Sirius had already checked off step one, had his sights set on step two, and step three was likely to be right around the corner.

Sirius watched him for a few moments, speaking through Remus's chosen silence. “It seems daunting now, I know,” he tacked on, “but we’re going to get you the best care we can and then, I’m thinking I like the idea of having a bag of dog shit delivered straight to your hack of a doctor’s doorstep—” Remus shook his head curtly at what step three was looking like it was going to be, “—ohh, yes, I am.”

“Sirius,” Remus implored.

“No, after all the reading I did, we were so not the only ones who've been let down along the way,” Sirius returned, consequently not leaving it. “The bloke I talked to? He got sceptical hums given back to him, same as us, right up until he got so desperate that he did the work for himself and found out about oxygen tanks through word of mouth, and even still, when he simply asked if he could get his hands on a tank, the doctor he had at the time told him to 'relax,' and your piece of shit doctor would have done the same to us, I know it like I know anything; with her, he’s far better off than he was, and so will we."

Remus didn’t have a ton of fond memories of his former doctor either, but he thought schoolyard antics would hardly get them anywhere at this point. “It’s finished, Sirius,” he said. “It has been for months now.”

Sirius sighed. “Could we not be noble for three whole seconds?” he raised.

“Or we could try it for three?” Remus suggested.

“That man stared into this face,” Sirius raises, circling a hand around Remus’s visage, “asking him for help, and all he did was up the dosage on the pills we both told him weren’t doing anything for you — a bag of dog shit is tame compared to what I ought to send him.”

“We don’t ever have to look his way again,” Remus offered. “There’s the silver lining if you need one.”

“No, there isn’t a silver lining to this when I knew something was off about him from the get,” Sirius said of it, shaking his head. “I should have pushed you harder to find a different one last year, and I definitely should have pulled you out of that room the second I didn’t see him blink at the word ‘cluster' — you, you were always going to see it differently, and you’re never going to question a doctor’s medical opinion no matter how basic it starts to look; you don’t know how to do that.”

Remus lifted a hand, his brow furrowing. “What do you mean, I don’t know how?” he pressed.

“After what you’ve been through?” Sirius raised, gesturing with his cigarette as he spoke. “You’re going to look at doctors as if they’re Gods, but the way I see it, wrong calls are made all the time; case in point, how many times did your dad see the inside of an O.R. before his doctor finally made the right call?”

Remus swallowed there. “Too many, but I’ll remind you what a difficult case his was,” he forwarded.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Sirius maintained. “How many close calls did it take to make the right one?”

Remus nodded pointedly. “Well, his doctor saved his life, Sirius.”

Sirius tilted his head and let an implored sigh out through his nose, managing to resemble a dragon with impeccable hair and making it difficult for Remus to hold so tightly onto the irritation that sparked in his gut. “You know what I’m saying,” he implored. “Who was it that suggested the right call in the end? Your dad did his job for him because patients aren’t as clueless as doctors like that make them out to be; your dad wasn’t, and we certainly weren’t either.”

Unfortunate as ever, Remus could see both sides of the coin shining brightly as ever. “OK, but what doctor opts for amputation right off the bat?” he raised him. “My dad would have told him to get the fuck out of the room if he suggested that in the early days — any of the early years, for that matter.”

“I didn’t say it had to be day one,” Sirius returned, pointing at Remus with his cigarette. “But say, going into the third operation with no end in sight? Might have been the time to rethink the strategy, and all of his other hospital stints could have been avoided if his doc hadn’t waited for a last-ditch effort to make the call, but instead, he went and tried a million other things as if your dad had all the time in the world to wait around for the right trick to work.”

“None of us knew what the next step was going to be,” Remus insisted, his head feeling even more weighted by the memory. “Each time he came out of the O.R., we thought it was going to work that time.”

“Well, of course you did,” Sirius delivered. “You trusted his doctor, and as far as I’m aware, you and your parents don’t have medical degrees, but someone else in that office sure did.”

“Sirius,” Remus chided.

Sirius blocked that with a hand. “We’re going off the rails again.”

“You took us off them,” Remus rebutted. “I asked for migraine relief when I had my first-ever visit with my doctor after I'd moved and that's what we kept with from there on; I didn’t ask him for help with clusters, so why would he have made that jump himself?”

“Well, you wouldn’t have asked him for help with the clusters back then when it took you how long to admit that you weren’t even sure what was happening to you anymore?” Sirius countered, holding up a mirror that Remus didn’t want to look into.

Remus breathed out his nose, calling on a thread of patience to tug on. “As much as we might want it to be the case, no GP’s first assumption is going to be clusters when a bloke walks into the room complaining about migraines," he puts it. "They'd prescribe him migraine medication, as expected.”

Sirius took in a measured breath this time around. “The point is, he didn't blink at the word, and it wouldn’t have even occurred to you to question whether he was the right sort for this situation, and that’s it, I’m done watching that go on,” he maintained, leaning over to stub his cigarette out in the ashtray. “I am done dicking around with GPs who get smarmy the moment clusters are even mentioned, acting as if a group of people with nothing better to do got together and made these things up for the fuck of it.”

“Well, then, I don’t see where petty revenge is going to get us if the important thing here is that we now have more options than we once did,” Remus reserved, somewhere in the realm of measured.

“Just let me hate the guy,” Sirius sent out, holding his hands open over his lap. “I hate my doctor, too; it poses no threat to you whatsoever.”

“I’m not sure I can stop you anymore,” Remus said of it.

“You can’t,” Sirius echoed plainly. “If yours listened to us when first we went to him, if mine had listened to me while I was begging him for help over the phone, then I might not have had to drag you into the E.R. on Monday, so you’ll just have to let me be bitter about this until I stop seeing it all so clearly in my head.”

Remus let his head fall forward, his gut twisting up. Stepping out of his own experience, he could understand the gravity of the situation; why all of the voices around him reached as high a pitch as they did, why he was held down so roughly to keep him from hurting others and making the situation any worse, why Sirius’s eyes looked the way they did when he perched himself on the end of Remus’s cot once it was all over and he was finally permitted back in the room.

He could see all of that objectively, but the moment he put himself back into the hysteria that he’d felt in himself at the time, the more he could feel it now, the more he could remember viscerally wanting to hit his head as hard as he could on something, anything, and doing just that, the more he could remember Sirius's voice hollering in the background of the briefest moments of peace that came in between the string of constant, white-hot spikes drilling over the left side of his face. That brief pause, that sliver of peace in the middle of all of the action, it had been breathtaking; short-lived certainly, but it came with the same feeling he equated to the first breath of clean air after catching water down the wrong tube, and nothing like Remus would have expected slamming his head against the window of a taxi would have felt like. It was breathtaking, cutting the pain off, but hearing the pitch of Sirius's panic had been breathtaking, too, just in a different way entirely.

Remus’s scrunched his eyes up tightly, fighting the sting behind them. “I’m sorry this is happening,” he said thickly.

“I didn’t ask you to be,” Sirius returned. “I asked you to let me be salty, which I deserve to be right about now.”

Remus wiped at his eyes, smearing tears across his eyelids and transferring most of it onto the right cuff of his sleep shirt. He sniffed and dropped his hand altogether when Sirius reached to block it from brushing and wetting Remus’s new stitches in the process. “I’m just sorry," he said again, and he knew the word had little weight to it coming out of his mouth anymore, but he was. "I don’t want this; I don’t want it for me, I don’t want it for you, I don’t want it at all, but especially not now; why now? Why’d I go three months without more than a tension headache just to get pummeled now?”

Sirius took to wiping Remus’s eyes for him with the pads of his thumbs. “I saw plenty of remission talk during my research, and some of them seem to go longer than others,” he offered. “It’s looking like it’s just the luck of the draw; you had a few really good months there, that's good.”

“No, I know that; one girl I read about, last year, she has a remission period of three weeks and the rest of the year it’s just Cluster City,” Remus raised. “That felt like a horror show to read about and part of why I was sure wasn’t getting them myself; I didn't and still don't get them like that, but I can know something is worse out there in the world and still think it's bullshit that I’m getting worse.”

“It is; it’s complete bullshit,” Sirius echoed, tipping Remus’s heavy head up by the chin. “I’m not going to deny you on that, but the good thing is, we now have a doctor who’s got a track record for getting right in the trenches with her patients and providing them the good shit, straight from the get.”

Remus ran his teeth over his lower lip before he spoke, reaching to fiddle with the dampened cuff on his sleep shirt. “I appreciate you getting me in her sights, but I can’t get too ahead of myself with this.”

Sirius’s eyes narrowed to the point where they appeared as near-slits. “What would you rather we do, pray about it?” he raised, following it up with a rather fluent yet blasé Hail Mary.

“Yes, I was just about to head to mass,” Remus returned.

A quick realignment twisted Sirius’s mouth into a smile, though it looked as if he really didn’t want to give in to it. “Why are you backtracking all of a sudden?” he asked, searching him.

Remus worked to keep his shoulders from deflating too noticeably. “It’s not all of a sudden,” he maintained.

“You were elated sbout this, just a few minutes ago,” Sirius pointed out, reaching up to wind his right forefinger into one of Remus’s curls on his fringe. “Where did that Remus go? I’ve such a soft spot for him.”

“I haven’t been in here sleeping all day," Remus attested. "I’ve scoured threads just like you until I couldn’t physically look at them anymore; I saw several accounts, both for and against oxygen therapy, and no treatment seems to work straight across the board, so I need to be very careful about how many eggs I put into one basket.”

“It’s our best option,” Sirius said of it, letting Remus’s curl go free.

“It’s an option,” Remus said carefully, “and I can’t jump in that easily when there’s plenty of room for it not to work for me.”

Sirius blinked once. “There’s just as much room for it to work, if that’s how you want to look at it,” he countered.

“Come to my level, please,” Remus implored. “Say that bloke was right and she’s incredible, gets me a prescription for the tanks, and it still doesn’t work; what then? Not only that, some people say their clusters disappear while the oxygen mask is on and come back twice as harsh the instant they take it off; if either one happens to me, I’m back at square one again after putting so much pressure on this one treatment to work for me.”

Sirius wet his lower lip before speaking again. “OK, I’m on your level, but why does it have to be just those two scenarios and no others?” he asked. “Why couldn’t the tanks work?”

“Why would they work?” Remus raised, holding his hands open.

“Why wouldn’t they?” Sirius countered, speaking on from where Remus dropped his head in his hands. “It’s not as if I’m waving a banner for oxygen therapy without reason, it’s raved about; what you’re doing is paying far more attention to all the counterarguments against it instead of taking all of the positive—”

“Of course I am,” Remus said, lifting his head again. “I’ve got one shot for it to work, that’s it.”

Sirius wet his lips, letting that sit for all of a second or two. “There are always going to be naysayers riding on into people’s celebration posts to announce that the tanks didn’t work for them, but why does that have to change anything about whether they’ll work for you?” he posed. “You’re not them; what do they have to do with you?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe they don’t want other people getting too caught up thinking it’ll be the magical cure for them?” Remus countered.

Sirius doubled down hard on his read of it. “Or, the post wasn’t for them in the first place,” he suggested. “It’s too good of an option not to walk into the room ready to ask for it.”

Remus blinked wildly, surprised that they were evening having this conversation when Sirius knew far too well how that tactic could backfire on them. “If I go in there making demands, it’s going to turn her right off,” he said of it. “It’ll go the same way it went last time, and I need her on my side for this or there’s no point in even setting foot in her office.”

Sirius’ breath hitched before he spoke again. “OK, forgive me for bringing him into this again, but it’s the perfect example,” he insisted, clasping his right hand over Remus’s left knee. “Look how well your dad’s doing now because he cut out all of the bullshit. He took his situation into his own hands, took names while he did it, and that’s all we’d be doing here; we don’t need to hear spiels about nasal sprays and shots and whatever other treatments you read about today, not when we could bypass all of those and go with something that’s more likely to work.”

Remus shook his head. “The oxygen tanks aren’t any more likely to work than the sprays or shots—”

Sirius kept on brazenly, lifting his right hand to count on his fingers and apparently, he considered himself two points down already. “The tanks aren’t expensive,” he offered, putting another finger down, “the whole arrangement is convenient—”

“By whose standards are they not expensive, first off, and convenient how?” Remus cut in.

“They’re affordable and they can be delivered right to your door,” Sirius answered.

“I’m not going to even be here come September, so how's that going to work out for me?” Remus raised.

“You’re doing a four-month stint in Paris, not picking up and moving there for good,” Sirius rebutted. “You’ll still be covered.”

Remus lifted his hands in frustration, dragging them up through his hair. “This is all so idealistic,” he snapped. “Not everything's going to work out for the best just because you say it will.”

Sirius drew back, his eyes flashing for a quick moment before a hard reset of his jaw, and Remus could have sworn he saw a wall being built between them with his very own eyes. A heavy silence came with the new architecture, lingering in the air around them for long enough that Remus was certain that he was finished speaking with him altogether; he would be booted out, told to fend for himself if he didn’t like the way Sirius was doing things any moment now, and suddenly, Remus saw how ungrateful he was being and viscerally knew he was walking on thin ice being the way he inherently was.

“That was so mean,” Remus said weakly, reaching to keep Sirius close in case he was about to lose him. “I know you’ve done everything you can to help and I still keep throwing it back at you like it’s not good enough; I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Sirius moved suddenly, picking every item in between them up just to stuff them aside and reaching to hoist Remus closer with one stark pull, and the wall was gone. “Nothing’s wrong with you,” he said, the words muffled what with his mouth pressed against the left side of Remus’s head. “You’re allowed to be a grump right now.”

Remus hid his face in the crook of Sirius’s neck, exhausted, put-off, and embarrassed all in one, festering breath. Sirius waited a few beats before he leaned his head down to press a 'grumble, grumble, grumble' over the shell of Remus’s left ear, giving out a smirk of a laugh as Remus hid his face further, a pithy, pathetic little noise escaping him with it. “We’re not going to convince each other of anything tonight, I don't think,” Sirius put it, keeping Remus close. “I say we put this aside for right now and start with getting you out of this room; nothing’s going to look promising from in here, promise you that.”

Remus shut his eyes against the fabric of Sirius’s shirt, hating the moments when Sirius was right about something that took a ton of sacrifice for him to rise to. He didn't move for a moment, couldn't even budge, loathing the idea of leaving Sirius’s bedroom more than he loathed the idea that Sirius hit the problem right on the nail. He didn’t know a lot just then; how Sirius managed to be so weightless and full of hope, why it was so difficult for Remus to call on some or even a smidge of that for himself, why Sirius even kept on with someone who’d only drag him down and snuff out every bit of the light in him over time, why Sirius hadn’t managed to see that yet and take off running in the opposite direction.

Sirius budged Remus’s head up with his shoulder. “Monsieur?” he raised, switching to holding his hands at the sides of Remus’s neck, his thumbs pressing the tops of his jawline to hold him steady. “There are pancakes coming with your name on them and I don't think that's a bad trade for coming out of the tunnels.”

“I’m not hungry, Sirius,” Remus implored.

“I need you to get something in your stomach,” Sirius kept to it. “For me, OK? Just a little, that’s all I’m asking.”

Remus frowned, training his gaze over Sirius’s left shoulder and toward the opposite wall. “One pancake, and I’m filling up on liquids,” he conditioned.

“One pancake, liquids, and you can’t come and burrow in here once you’ve had them,” Sirius amended, and Remus gave in to a deeper frown. “I didn’t know how to cancel on Dora again so she’s still coming in a little while.”

It took Remus a moment or two to remember Monday’s guitar lesson got an impromptu derailment. “That’s OK,” he pardoned, feeling further guilt well up in him on that front. “It’s your flat, you could have a thousand people over and I wouldn’t be able to say much of it.”

“Well, good thing it’s only two people,” Sirius offered. “Andromeda’s coming along so we can talk shop once the lesson’s over.”

Remus nodded. “OK,” he said, going for mildly while he’d just had a rather hands-on lesson in the fact that the world kept spinning no matter what happened to him in it. “I'll head out before they get here.”

Sirius shook his head. “No, I don’t want you going home just to burrow there," he refused.

“I stayed the night and a lot longer today than I’d planned to,” Remus explained. “Mestophales is going to need a refill for sure.”

“I already stopped in,” Sirius instilled. “That’s taken care of, all you have to do is leave this room."

Remus deflated in one swoop. “Sirius, I’m no good to anyone right now."

“I - want - you - here,” Sirius sent him, slowly, like each word were a sentence in itself. "Besides, what’s Andromeda going to think when she finds out you snuck out of here before she got a chance to see you, hm?”

Remus gave Sirius a heavy look, positively certain that he’d never been more unlikable than he was behaving today. “I’m more irritable than I’ve probably ever been in my life and I look like a fucking mess,” he maintained.

“You look a bit like you traded your hair in for a feather duster, but I’ll be the first to admit it looks incroyable,” Sirius returned, giving him an 'OK' symbol on both hands.

“Then I’m not going out there looking like a feather duster sprouted legs,” Remus coopted it.

“Well, give me a second, then; I've got this,” Sirius returned, pushing his hands up through Remus’s locks to contain the wild, wild mess.

When he was done, Sirius let out a similar breath to the one he’d given when Remus’s stitches had been changed over properly and pushed himself from the bed. Remus shifted himself to the edge of the bed but remained seated there, feeling like a wet noodle while he watched Sirius stroll about the room depositing the items he’d brought into the room in various spots; the tissue with Remus’s older stitches in it was balled up before it was shot into the bin by the bed, the pack of new stitches went into the drawer near it, the face cloth got dunked into the hamper near the closet in the corner of the room, and Sirius’s pack got slipped into his back left trouser pocket, each movement purposeful and easy in the same breath.

Once his hands were free, Sirius stopped and stood by the side of the bed, simply eyeing Remus sitting there picking at his fingernails; Remus splayed his hands out flat in response, tacking on a shrug when he didn’t know how to start looking as carefree as he did or how to even start articulating that. Sirius studied him for a long moment, moved to crouch in front of him, and crossed his arms over Remus’s thighs, leaning up to press their foreheads together, and Remus shut his eyes for the gesture first and the closeness second, fighting the sting behind them.

Sirius hummed a tune a few beats later, a few moments of silence hummed a tune that took a few moments to pin down with Remus’s heavy head in the mix. He opened his eyes once he had placed it and breathed out through his nose, knowing full well that he was getting treated to one of the sneakiest tactics that Sirius had at his disposal, and knowing just as well that the tactic would work on him.

He switched out of his quiet humming mid-line. “…every little thing is gonna be alright,” he sing-songed quietly.

Remus lifted his arms and gave Sirius the best squeeze he had in him, lifting his head enough to press his lips against his forehead. Sirius stayed still long enough for the gesture to land, but he wiggled free a few seconds after that, and though Remus expected to see a smile of the smug kind aimed at him, Sirius's expression twisted into a humbled one that Remus only got to see on occasion.

“Come on, nearly there now,” Sirius prompted, pushing himself to his feet and turning for the dresser.

He watched Sirius fish around in the top drawer until he lobbed a t-shirt toward him and though his reflexes were a little sluggish, Remus managed to catch the shirt before it could land on his head. Remus unfolded the shirt over his lap, the corners of his mouth lifting as he took in the Def Leppard logo on it. “Why’s it always this one?”

“How’s it my fault you wear it like it was made for you specifically?” Sirius sent him, digging around in the second drawer for bottoms for Remus to put on.

Remus switched out of his sleep shirt, replaced it with the frayed tee, and pushed himself to make the effort to leave the bed if Sirius was doing so much of the work for him already; the least he could do was stand up and put some clothes on. He wandered over to Sirius, accepting a new set of briefs before chucking his old ones in the hamper. He hoisted the new ones up his legs and over his hips, automatically reaching to grab the trousers that were being held out to him, but Sirius held onto them, his eyes trained directly at Remus’s left hip.

Remus quickly looked down, turning his hip inward to inspect the area, and found a monumental bruise must have blossomed over the side of it overnight, spider-webbing out toward the back of his thigh. He reached down to inspect it further, assuming that he had to have hit the floor hard enough to have created one so vibrantly purple, but he found it strange that he’d spent upwards of fourteen hours lying on that same side without even a twinge to suggest it was there, and even now, when he poked it, he could hardly say he felt much of anything.

“It looks worse than it is,” Remus assured, taking the trousers off of Sirius’s hands.

“Like fuck it does, Remus,” Sirius returned.

“I didn’t even know it was there,” Remus insisted, wrangling his legs into the leg holes. “I lay on that side for ages there, and I just pressed it a bunch and nothing; I don't feel it at all.”

“I don’t care if you do or don't," Sirius said of it. "He fucking maimed you."

Remus gave an imploring sigh, tugging his trousers up over his hips. “Please don’t make this a thing, Sirius."

“I’m not the one who made it one,” Sirius defended.

Remus zipped up and moved past him for the hall, wanting nothing to do with that facet of the prior evening's events. Pure, unadulterated avoidance got Remus through the first leg of the flat, but got cold feet about halfway through the living room as he heard clinks and clanks from the kitchen. He got himself around behind Sirius, pushing his hands against his back to illustrate that he be the first to head them down the back hall and step into that kitchen, and Sirius didn’t call him out for being a wuss as he took the lead for the final leg, but he certainly kept a hand on Remus’s wrist so he wouldn't and couldn’t run back to the safety of his room.

He led Remus into the kitchen and there, he did have to admit walking into any room to find James wielding a spatula at the stove with his Christmas apron on and Tango perched right beside him for any chance at scraps of food was a sweet enough sight to raise his spirits at least a little bit.

“There he is,” James hooted, waving the spatula around in the air a little in celebration.

Remus kept himself a little more behind Sirius than beside him, feeling a touch placated. “You are making pancakes,” he offered evenly enough, he thought.

“Seemed fitting for a fam-jam,” James said of it, evidently pushing for levity as he turned back to the stove to scoop some more batter out of a large pink bowl into the frying pan.

Remus followed Sirius to the sink and rinsed his own hands off once he was finished with the faucet. Sirius went and used his jeans for a hand towel and headed for his spot at the table, slipping his cigarette pack out of his back pocket and pulling his legs up to sit cross-legged in the chair. Remus dried his own hands off on the tea towel hanging by the sink and moved to take the spot diagonal from Sirius, facing the same windowsill that Sirius so liked to perch just beside.

He took a glance over the table that was already set, studying the mismatched plates and forks, the syrup holder shaped like a serpent, the pitcher of juice nearby it — even placemats had been set, and that never happened 'round here; Remus reworked his mouth around a smile, finding all of the effort put into a makeshift sit-down meal pulling on a string in his chest.

He wormed around in his seat until his left hip touched the back of his chair, reaching over the top of it to poke James in the back. “Thanks, Dad,” he offered.

James turned from the stovetop and gave Remus’s hair one hell of a ruffle with his free hand before he took his hand back right quick, his gaze on the gash over Remus’s left brow. “That’s fucking gnarly,” he attests. “I’m not crossing you in the streets, I'll tell you that.”

Sirius snorted as he lit up. “That's what I’ve been saying,” he echoed, pausing to shoot a stream of smoke out in the vague direction of the open window. "He thinks it makes him look like a street rat that'll cut you if you look at him wrong, but is that such a bad thing?"

“Yeah, yeah,” Remus returned, waving the both of them off. He waited a beat after James turned back to face the stove again. “I’m really sorry about Ugly Pot.”

“You’ve made me a whopping eight pounds poorer, you Goddamn hoodlum,” he said of it, tossing it over his shoulder.

Despite James’s vivacious version of a pardon, Remus still felt he owed him something. “I’m going to find you something to replace it,” he insisted. “The most hideous thing I can find.”

“I anxiously await whatever you bring through that door,” James returned, giving the pancake on the pan a flip.

The front door of James and Sirius’s flat had a reputation for a) being made of a thick, ancient hunk of wood, and b) loudly announcing whenever someone’s just come through it, and it sure did do the latter just then, sending an echo out through the flat and into the kitchen, where Sirius perked up and leaned around James's frame to get a look at the time on the stove.

“They’re a bit early,” he raised, reaching to stub his cigarette out real quick.

“That’d be Pete,” James provided, transporting the pancake he was working on over to the stacker.

Remus curled his hands in his lap, looking from James to Sirius and back to James again; he knew he'd have to face Peter eventually, he just would have liked it to happen another day, another time.

“He's mad," Sirius said of it, keeping that cigarette lit now, that's for sure. "Truly, he's gone off the deep end if he thinks he can just waltz back in here like it's all good."

"Well, he would think he's allowed back here since I invited him for pancakes," James offered, tilting the mixer bowl to scoop the last of the batter into the pan.

Sirius reached for his lighter on the table and tossed it at James's back. "What part of ‘I don’t want him near anywhere near this place’ did you not hear?” he demanded.

James swivelled back to face them, pointing the spatula at Sirius. “The open-door policy was your idea, and he’s sorry, Sirius,” he hissed, evidently aiming to keep his voice low while oncoming footsteps echoed through the flat and looking away from him to focus on Remus. “He’s really sorry, mate. It was just instinct, you know?”

Sirius scoffed loudly, Remus managed a vigorous nod as the footsteps came as close as the bathroom, and James sent a pointed look Sirius’s way before swivelling back to the stove, spatula at the ready. Sirius reached to procure a spare lighter from off of the windowsill and re-lit his cigarette, taking a stark pull off of it that Remus hoped would lend a hand toward calming him, while Remus ended up losing the battle with his nerves when the size of Peter’s eyes as he set foot inside the tense room didn’t do much good for his already wilted stomach.

“Yeah, you can cut that out right now,” Sirius came in before anyone else managed to get something out. "You're the one who wouldn't let this settle."

“Hey, hey guys?” James put in, not turning around. “I’ve a boatload of pancakes for anyone who doesn’t use a tone from now on; how’s that sound?”

Sirius shot a flat look to James’s back and turned to flick his cigarette in the tray on the windowsill while Remus quickly faced his placemat, attempting to look even the least bit comfortable while Peter slipped tentatively up the empty seat to the right and diagonal from his. “Alright?” he asked, his wide, hesitant eyes on Remus now.

Remus worked on giving him a smile. “Alright,” he echoed.

“I’m sorry for—” Peter started, then gave up on words and decided that gesturing listlessly toward Remus said the rest for him. “I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”

Remus shook his head, but Sirius spoke before he could. “That’s odd?” he raised, sticking his chin in his free hand. “Something about walking into my living room to find you tackling him to the ground really had me thinking you had such a handle on the situation.”

“I’m sorry, OK,” Peter expelled, to the room at first, but he turned his massive eyes back on Remus so his apology would be repurposed toward him.

Remus shook his head, speaking before he could lose the opportunity. “It’s fine, I’m just as,” he offered. “More sorry, even.”

“We’re all sorry,” James chimed in. "Ain't life grand."

The room sat still with that for a few, lagged seconds and though there was still a great deal of discomfort about him, Peter appeared somewhat pardoned, at least until Sirius pointed across the table at him with the cherry of his cigarette. ”Don’t think that means you’re off the hook,” he asserted. “His first word was 'sorry,' it’s just real convenient for you this time.”

“What was I supposed to do, then?” Peter retorted. “Let him cave his head in?”

“I would really rather talk about anything else,” Remus stuck in, but Sirius had already shot forward in his seat.

“I’ll tell you what you’re supposed to do,” he barked at Peter. “You're to take whatever’s in his hands out of them, that’s it; you don’t knock him down and put him in a fucking police hold—”

Oi” James called out. “I made fucking pancakes—”

“I tried to get it out of his hands,” Peter attested, flying a hand Remus’s way. “He just kept going for it, and he is way stronger than he looks; I could barely hold him down—”

“Well, when you trap him in like that, of course he’s going to fight it,” Sirius snapped.

“Anything else,” Remus said, raising his voice to cut between the two of them.

James turned up at the corner of the table between Sirius and Remus, leaning over to plunk the plate of pancakes down in the center of it. “None of these are for you,” he hissed at Sirius.

“Oh, honestly,” Sirius dragged out.

“I warned you,” James maintained, pointing to the far side of the kitchen toward the armchair by the washer-drier hybrid in the left-hand corner of the room. “Go sit over there.”

Sirius gave a whopper of an eye roll as he plucked up the ashtray off of the windowsill, moving over to the exceptionally tall and vibrantly green armchair that had no business being in a kitchen and somehow all the business in the world in this particular kitchen at the same go. “When does my time out end?” he inquired, having a seat over the plush cushioning the chair certainly boasted and putting his head on a tilt.

“Quit mouthing off and we’ll see,” James returned, swiping Sirius’s window spot. “Have at it, boys.”

Peter quickly reached over and forked a pancake onto his plate, James went and helped himself to two off of the stack in turn, and Remus merely sat still save for curling his hands in his lap. He stole a sidelong glance over toward Sirius, and in the time between Remus's first look over there and this one, Sirius had managed to make himself appear quite royal over there; his head held high, his right leg crossed over the other, his right elbow propped up on the arm of the chair as he held onto his cigarette as if it were burning inside a bejewelled holder, and despite all of the grievances within Remus, he simply couldn’t help but feel a twinge of amusement over the way Sirius behaved after a banishment.

Sirius met Remus's lingering gaze, held it for a moment, and nodded toward the table, all but insisting. Remus faced his plate again, taking in the tall stacker at the centre of the table, and held back a frown, reaching to move a few pancakes around on the plate before forking one of the smaller ones available onto his own. He picked up his knife and fork, cutting it up into smaller pieces in hopes that would help make the process of getting it down easier, and felt a pair of eyes staring him down while he did it. He glanced down and to his left to where Tango had newly situated himself, got a snoot placed on his left thigh for having addressed the dog proper, it seemed, and now tat he had, he sort of had to admit that refraining from feeding him a piece would be a tough ask.

James looked to Remus and read his internal struggle quite easily, setting his fork down and lifting out of his seat to cross to the kitchen counter and open up the cupboard where the plates lived. “Might want to cut it up first,” Remus suggested, pouring a bit of syrup on the side of his own plate.

“Will do, but watching him devour one whole would've been a treat,” James commented, moving back to the table with a smaller plate in hand than the rest of them had. He divided a pancake into makeshift squares with his fork, shovelled them over onto the new plate, and gave a quick glance at the table. “Do we think he’s a fan of generic syrup or would he be more of a purist?”

“Couldn’t hurt to give him a dollop and find out,” Peter said.

“Hey, Pete,” Sirius piped up, “how’s your uncle?”

Peter dropped his fork to take bits of his hair into his hands. “For fuck’s sake, Sirius,” he sighed.

Remus looked around quickly; to Peter, looking as if the world caved in on him quite suddenly, to James, taking his lower lip into his mouth to stifle a wan laugh as he leaned over to stick the plate down on the floor, and finally over to Sirius in the corner, smiling both brightly and politely.

“His uncle’s absolutely shredded,” he offered for Remus’s quizzical nature.

“No, he isn’t,” Peter denied.

James chose to put out a flat cough right about there. “Yes,” he put in, straightening up in his seat. “Yes, he is, Pete.”

“Well, I don’t like any of this,” Remus said of it, pushing bits of pancake around on his plate.

“Thank you,” Peter said, flying a hand his way.

“Why haven’t I seen your fit uncle yet?” Remus asked, sticking his fork into a bit of pancake and tilting his head at him.

Peter dragged a hand over his face. “You’re getting me back, I get that, but this isn’t the way to do it,” he lodged.

Remus’s smile dropped off. “I’m not 'getting back at you,' Pete,” he said. “I’m just kidding.”

“Sky blue, sea green, Remus isn’t anywhere near as livid as he should be,” Sirius sent over sweetly. “It’s really not that difficult to figure out these sorts of constants, Peter; they’re just facts of life.”

“And your plan was to give me hell enough for the both of you, that it?” Peter snapped.

Remus averted his gaze back to his plate while James pushed himself out of his seat and reached across the table to take Peter’s. “What did I say?” he asked a sputtering Peter. “No — no, you can have it back when you’ve fixed that tone.”

“Tell him to fix his, then,” Peter sent him.

James pointed over to Sirius as he brought Peter’s plate to set it on the counter to the left of the stove. “You, too,” he tossed him. “As fit as his uncle is, you’ve earned yourself five more minutes over there.”

Sirius shrugged openly while he reached to stub out the end of his cigarette. “Can you pull up a photo?” he bid. “Remus deserves to see him after the week he's had.”

Well, hold on a mo', I think I know just the one,” James offered, stepping back from the counter as he fished his mobile out of his pocket.

Peter stuck his head down on the table where his plate used to be, meanwhile Remus, trying for a bite of pancake, fought to get the bite past the back of his throat as he regarded James wryly as he took back his seat at the table. “You snuck a photo of him, James?” he raised, or when he could, that is.

“Oh, relax; he came to graduation,” James returned, scrolling through his mobile. “Aha — here we are.”

Remus had a look at the man standing beside Peter and his mum in a row. “I’m sorry, Pete,” he passed him, biting the right side of his lip. “I’ve never seen somebody embody the term ‘beach hunk’ quite like this before.”

Sirius’s bark drowned out Peter’s groan. “Hasn’t aged a day either,” he tacked on.

“Good for him,” Remus said of it, trying for another bit of pancake.

“I regret coming here,” Peter put out there.

“Feel free to head out anytime you like,” Sirius offered.

Remus looked to James in a near panic, desperate to get the conversation away from snipe territories. “How was the rest of your trip?” he asked.

Thankfully, James appeared positively thrilled about that topic. “Good, in the sense that I did not become a murderer,” he offered commonly, “bad, in the sense that Petunia and Vernon stuck around there like a swarm of bees for the duration of it.”

“That neck vein of his still violently prominent?” Sirius checked.

James raised his glass to him. “As ever.”

“He turn purple at any point?” Peter raised.

“Only daily,” James echoed. “I’m willing to admit I egged it on a bit toward the end, but I just couldn’t help myself anymore.”

“You’re forgiven,” Remus excused, trying for another piece that would then make him three down, two to go.

“Watching Lily take him on was a treat,” James tacked on. “Nothing quite like seeing her rapid-fire cold, hard facts at a man who resembles a dying walrus he’s getting told off.”

Remus smirked around the sip of juice he’d gone for, quite endeared by the image passed on to him, and James lifted his glass toward him for a beat, but wound up plunking it right back down on the table in favour of trumpeting a celebratory noise through his closed fist. “Boys, I’ve news,” he declared.

Remus coughed out a laugh, setting his juice down before he could fumble with it and perhaps upend the whole thing in the process. “Well, it’d better be astounding after such a lovely tune,” he said.

Sirius’s rolling laugh sounded from the other side of the room. “Fuck off and listen?” James commanded. “I’m going to marry her.”

“Right,” Remus echoed, going for his fourth bite.

“We,” Peter started, “know.”

Sirius leaned forward in his chair and pounded his left fist into the small table in front of it. “Where’s the fucking news, boy?” he chanted.

“This is the news,” James sent him, turning halfway in his seat to see Sirius properly. “I’m doing it, I’m proposing.”

The three of them spoke at once. “OK, I got none of that,” James said, wearing a smirk.

There was a quick flash of movement before James was yanked up half out of his seat and straight into a headlock by the force of a rogue Sirius. “Oi—”

Sirius spoke straight over him, giving him a righteous noogie. “How long have you been holding onto that?”

“Would you settle down?” James heaved out amidst his manhandling. “The epiphany’s only a few days old.”

James flailed wildly in an attempt to escape his captivity, but both Peter and Remus reached over to add their own hands into the mix, giving his hair a good ruffle while James simply took to slumping in defeat as he kept on with it. “I was doing the dishes with her mum, kept hearing Lily over in the den zinging Vernon left and right, and I just knew it; I want that fire around me until my time here is up,” he detailed. “And then, I just told her mum that, I said ‘I want to marry your daughter,’ and yes, one could say that I blurted it out to her, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m glad to have done it because she’s it, boys; she’s the one.”

Remus beamed, taking his hand back from James's mop of hair, his mood shooting up to a hundred in a mere instant. Of course, that was just before Sirius let go of his captive's head in favour of punctuating the bearing of James's soul by blowing a loud fart noise into the palm of his right hand and then Remus's spirits went into unimaginable percentiles.

“Fuck off, all of you,” James ordered, over the three of them in stitches. “From these two, I’d expect this kind of tomfoolery, but you, Remus? You’re supposed to be the whimsical, sophisticated one of us; set an example.”

The grin dropped off Remus’s face and was replaced with an attempt at a placid expression. “It was well-timed,” he defended, calling for some understanding from the other man. “Beautiful words, mind; love your words, James, always have.”

“Never lets up about your words, in fact,” Sirius tacked on, perching his chin down over the top of James's head.

“Kindly stick your head in a ceiling fan,” James asked of him.

Remus tutted. “Not very whimsical, James," he said of it, lifting the last bite of pancake into his mouth and calling himself a victor.

“Her mum was beside herself with joy, of course,” James breezed on. “Loves me dearly, you know how it is, so all that was left was asking her dad—”

Sirius snorted as he moved right of James, giving in to a little curtsy. “Travelled back a century, did you?”

Remus smirked. “Hope you remembered to pack your petticoat."

“I’ll rue the day I ever supported this,” James lamented, pointing between the two of them. “I had reason to ask; he's a bit old-fashioned and if I’m made to stay in the guest room when I’m there, then I figured my best bet was a brandy and fire chat, and I’ll have you know, the gesture was appreciated and I’m back in his good books, thanks much.”

Remus frowned, going into a bit of a squint. “Were you out of his good books before this?” he raised.

James lifted both his hands evenly. “Yes, well," he started, pausing to clear his throat, "he may have overheard my version of 'the Christmas Song' while we were over at Christmas.”

Remus tried to keep his grimace light, though Peter did not. “Well, no wonder," he said for it, and for Remus, frankly. "That one’s a bit much even for your regular-fashioned."

“All water under the bridge now,” James deemed it, making a sweeping gesture with a hand.

Remus gave in to a grin. “Very good work, James,” he gave him. “When are you doing it?”

James straightened up in his seat, visibly appreciating the question. “I was going to wait until her birthday, but January’s forever away and I can’t wait that long with all of this fire burning up inside me, come now,” he gave with a small shake of his head. “October seems the right fit, though: three years strong, drop the ring on the table, blow her mind.”

“Better yet: Lily, go long,” Sirius attested, miming pitching the ring across the room, and James burst out a laugh.

“See, without him around you’d never know what not to do,” Remus raised him.

“I knew there was a reason I’ve kept him so near,” James said of it, going for a bite of pancake.

Behind him, Sirius gave a single, resounding clap that Remus should have honestly seen coming but still jolted over all the same. He moved behind Remus's chair and passed the table at large with a skip to his step, heading for the cupboards above the sink and flinging them open. “Remus,” he bid, standing on the very tips of his toes as he fished around in the left side of the cabinet. “An occasion of this magnitude calls for a drink and the good china, be a dear?”

Remus smirked and pushed to stand, turning for the cupboard above the stove. “Classiest thing you’ve got is a goblet with a gigantic tortoise on the front, but OK.”

“Ah, bring him down, my boy,” James bid, a lofty air about him. “It’s been too long.”

Remus did, along with two other mismatched glasses for the other three to have at it, and brought them over to the table. Sirius plunked both the Malibu and Schnapps bottles down on the table and went for the fridge, standing still ahead of it with the door open and having a scan around the shelves before pulling out the carton of the standard tropical fusion that went in a drink reserved for celebrations.

“Love — love is a many splendid thing,” he gave out, shutting the fridge door and draping himself back over the face of it, "'love lifts us up where we belong; all you need is love.”

“Please don’t start that again,” Peter put in.

All you need is love.

“A girl’s got to eat,” James put in.

All you need is love.”

“She’ll end up on the street,” Remus implored.

All you need is l-o-o-o-ove.”

“Love is just a game,” the room echoed.

Sirius shot back to the table with his energy on high, leading the troupe, and Remus’s mobile began to ring on the table right about the time things got loud, so it was honestly quite lucky he managed to hear the thing at all, but the moment he saw Lily’s name lit up on display, the act of seeming natural suddenly became the most important task in the world to accomplish.

Remus ditched out of the room. “Hallo,” he greeted, heading down the back hall. “Sorry, bit loud in there.”

“Are you having a screening?” Lily asked.

“Oh, this was all Sirius,” Remus provided, heading on through the living room toward the front hall.

“Ah, mhm,” Lily returned; mildly, idly, used to it.

“Did you have a good time?” Remus asked, sporting a very, very wide grin he was glad she couldn’t see just then.

“Yes, yes, great time,” she replied. “'Course, now, vacation mode has come to a grinding halt and I’m stuck with this list of a thousand and one things to do, but that’s what you get for taking time off, isn’t it?”

“I should hope not,” Remus said, pushing Sirius’s bedroom door open, “otherwise I’ve got a lot coming to me come August.”

Lily let out a quick laugh. “You’d have a list whether you took a vacation or not.”

“Alright, just call me out, then,” Remus returned, smirking as he took a seat on the end of Sirius’s bed. “Have you been into work today, or are you just getting a more general thousand and one things done?”

“Bit of column A, bit of B; I stopped in for a while and took care of a few things, but I’m in bright and early tomorrow so I’ll be dealing with the rest of that pile soon enough,” Lily offered him. “Which reminds me, your performance review is tomorrow, so I’m thinking somewhere near or around three, once we’ve got the floor coverage, I’ll nab you for a little while and we’ll get that taken care of.”

Remus blinked. “Can’t wait for that.”

“OK, but,” Lily returned, “there's nothing I can do; Rosmerta’s expecting it and I should have got it done before I left, but I was bad; I was very bad, and we need to just get it done so we can grumble about it afterwards.”

“It's fine, Lily,” Remus waved her off, waving his free hand way more than he needed to in a room with no one else in it.

“Did you hit the pipe right before you answered?" she checked, giving in to a bit of a snicker. "You sounded a little, err, hoarse, we'll call it.”

Remus dropped his gaze to the floorboards between his feet, knowing the state of his vocal cords had about zero to do with his pipe. “Do you have a few minutes?” he checked.

There was a beat of silence before Lily spoke. “‘Course,” she said. “Why, what's up?”

“They've started up again,” he said.

“Singing?” Lily asked. “Nothing new there, my friend.”

“No, the clusters have; that's my bad,” Remus clarified. “I’ve had two this week.”

Remus,’ Lily sent back. “Wh— you let me go on about performance reviews of all things? Are you OK?”

“I’m OK,” Remus insisted. “Only, you would have probably heard all about it since James and Peter have been brought up to speed and I didn’t want you to find out that way.”

“What happened?” Lily asked, sounding a lot closer to the phone now.

Remus hesitated, but settled for lying on his back for the retelling, moving his free hand up to the back of his neck and leaving it there. “We caught a film on Monday and the first cluster came on while we were heading back from it," he offered her, "and then I had another one last night so I don’t get to claim the first one was a fluke anymore.”

Lily gave a sigh through her nose. "I hate this for you," she said solemnly. "I don't know, maybe it wasn’t very clever of me but by April, it’d been long enough I really thought that might have been the end of it for you."

Remus gave a slow nod, relating all too well to that particular point. “Looks as if I might've been in a sort of remission period for that last while,” he offered, finding the cotton coating his head and the glaze over his eyes helped relay their findings in a more measured manner than how he felt about it personally. “There are lots of cases like that; periods where they’re scarce to fully gone and come back around again like the turn of a year, some periods are longer than others, some shorter — there’s a ton of factors that honestly just make my head want to explode trying to sort them all out, but it’s just guesswork at this point; we don't know what my patterns are for certain.”

“Have you been to see someone?” she raised, quieter now.

Remus let out a loaded sigh at the question. “Not yet,” he offered. “Not for lack of trying, but that part hasn't been easy either; these things aren’t commonplace, so a lot of the information out there is spread by word of mouth from people who’ve got them rather than professionals and oftentimes those people get ran around in circles before they get anywhere close to a diagnosis.”

“How is that even possible?” Lily tossed out.

She gave out a tight sigh to go on the end of it and Remus frowned, knowing that sound so well it was as if he'd made it. “Sirius got me in with a specialist, though,” he forwarded her, pushing for a bright spot. “It’s not for a while yet, but she’s worked with cases like mine before so I'm sure I’ll be on the mend soon enough.”

“Are you sure you’re up for tomorrow?" she asked. "We could postpone the review, and I could find someone to cover you.”

“No,” Remus said, shaking his head though she couldn't see him do it. “I'm fine for it.”

“Remus, I’m not boss-Lily right now,” she insisted. “She skipped town a while ago.”

Remus swallowed, not really seeing a notable difference where this was concerned. “We still have to think about it like you’re my boss, even if we might not want to,” he said of it.

“Just tell me if you need a day,” Lily kept at it. “I’ll pass it on to your boss and she can suck it up.”

Remus shook his head again. “I already had a day; I slept for most of it,” he insisted. Slept, worried, read; slept and worried and read.

“OK,” Lily conceded, speaking concisely from there, “but, if you change your mind...”

Remus shut his eyes, his eyebrows knitting together. “I’m going to come in,” he said. He breathed out his nose slowly, working to keep his voice light and perhaps even infuse a little bit of Sirius into the mix. “It’ll be OK; chin up, light at the end of the tunnel and such.”

He didn't hear anything for a moment or two. “You're right, yes,” Lily echoed, and then Remus heard another long sigh from her end of the line. “If you’re sure about coming in, would you come a bit earlier? I'd like to see you for a bit before you have to start.”

“Yeah, I could,” Remus nodded, already brightened by the prospect.

“Good. Give Sirius my love,” she forwarded. “And anyone else who’s there.”

“I will.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Have a good one.”

Remus ended the call, gave out a heavy breath, and dropped his mobile on the bed beside him, feeling as drained as he was torn. He wanted to rekindle the genuine happiness he’d felt in the kitchen, not the faux kind he’d held up for Lily’s benefit, could still hear boisterous voices from that end of the flat though the singing seemed to have concluded, and the longer he lay there listening, the more he got the sense that if he hung back too long, Sirius would come looking for him whether Remus had managed to call on the energy he needed to reenter the fray or not.

Remus took a deep breath in and out, lifted himself off of the mattress, and made his way out into the hall. He heard a slight commotion out in the lobby and paused outside Sirius’s bedroom doorway, hearing footsteps bound closer and closer to the front door. It was flung open not a beat later and Dora headed on in with her guitar case slung over her shoulders like a backpack, flanked by her mother who was holding onto a bottle of wine as she entered the flat.

Remus waved at her brightly as Dora barreled into him, her arms squeezing him around his middle while Andromeda hung back with a smile, shucking her shoes off on the doormat, and Remus blocked the neck of the guitar case just before it could connect with his chin, folding down to give Dora as much of a squeeze as his height would allow. “How’ve you been?” he asked.

Dora bounced on the balls of her feet. “Good,” she gave him, moving back to stare up at him.

“I hear school’s almost out,” he mentioned.

“Not soon enough,” Dora returned.

Andromeda cleared her throat pointedly at that and Remus smirked at her over the top of Dora’s guitar case, though his smile grew multitudes as Andromeda came in for a bear hug. “Where have you been?” she asked.

“Finals took me hostage and then Sirius took over from there,” Remus said of it.

“Not good enough, you’ve been out for how long?”

“And work’s taken me from there.”

“Still not good enough.”

A bark followed by the scamper of nails on some already creaky wood flooring sounded out, garnering both houseguests to look up and toward the living room, Remus reached over amidst his bear hug to nudge Dora’s left shoulder. “There’s a surprise coming."

Dora’s eyes widened before she took off down the hall, heading into the living room to meet the surprise halfway. “He didn’t,” Andromeda said against him.

“He did,” Remus affirmed.

Andromeda pulled back from the hug with an appraised sigh, but her expression rearranged drastically when she looked at him. “Shit,” she put out, reaching up to hover her right thumb over Remus’s left brow and taking a closer look at the stitches. “What happened here?”

Remus thought that given the choice between the real answer that would likely open up a thousand questions and a simple fib, the latter had the better outcome. “Turns out I can’t fit through all doorways,” he offered. “It looks worse than it is.”

“Jesus,” Andromeda said, blinking as she lowered her hand from it. “I get it, busy body to go with the busy mind, but no more of that; you’re to slow down once in a while.”

“I’ll do my best,” Remus echoed, tipping his head to her with a smile, but then Andromeda lifted the bottle in her free hand to waggle it with enticement and his smile went a little tight. “Not a good night for me to, but the others have a glass going already so don’t let me hold you back.”

“Alright, I won’t,” Andromeda said easily. “Stay here, let me grab a glass, and then you’re all mine.”

Remus smiled and gave a nod, turning to head back into Sirius’s room while Andromeda headed off down the front hall. He made for the loveseat over on the other side of the double-room situation Sirius won himself, breathed in and out quite a few times in the time he had to himself, and Andromeda was back a short time later with a glass of wine in her left hand, a glass of water in her right, and Tango at her heels.

“He bought a horse?” she near-shouted, claiming the spot beside him on the loveseat.

Remus huffed a laugh. “He’s still growing, too,” he offered. “He’s going to reach my waist eventually.”

Andromeda reeled a bit at that tidbit, holding onto the two glasses in either hand while she idly watched Tango scamper back and forth between the two of them in the search for head pats. “Your husband sent this along, but I’m afraid I’ll spill,” she relayed, tipping her head toward the water glass.

Remus took it off her hands and drank from it, his entire face flush. “How are you faring?” he asked, dancing right on from that. “Good job on nabbing that building, by the way.”

Andromeda swallowed her first sip of wine, nodding vigorously. “Did you go check it out?” she asked, reaching to give Tango the pats he was vying for.

“Sirius brought me by it a few days ago,” Remus offered. “Such a good spot for it, and great location.”

Andromeda beamed, lifting her legs to curl them more toward him and settling in comfortably. “‘Course, now comes the work that needs to get done inside the place,” she offered. “We’re lucky that a bulk of the interior’s going to work for us otherwise this could take so much longer, but neither of us sees much point in fixing what’s not broken; we really just have to get a few things ripped out and up to code."

"All fair points," Remus afforded her.

"Once you see inside, you’ll see what I mean," Andromeda maintained. "We’re not touching the ceiling and you’ll thank us for that, the bar’s pretty much ready to serve off of, and the stage just needs a little bit of work, but apart from that, it’s mostly getting the right sort of decor for the feeling that we’re going for.”

“So, the fun part,” Remus translated, going for another sip of water.

“I can’t wait,” Andromeda said, going for a sip of wine before perking up and reaching over to thwap Remus’s left knee with her free hand. “We’ve closed a deal with Soho Radio, did he tell you?”

Remus smiled. “He did, but tell me anyway,” he requested.

“I will; just when I thought it couldn’t get better, turns out, it sure can,” she underlined. “They want to rent out the venue for shows they're putting on down the line, so the deal is, we let them use our space and in turn, they sponsor the shows and get the word out about the place for us."

“Word of mouth and networking can do a lot, but this is even better," Remus echoed.

"If Ted hadn’t given us a good ref, we wouldn’t have had a shot at securing it, but hey, it’s on now," Andromeda celebrated, going for a sip off her wine with it. "I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and realize I’ve hallucinated this entire thing.”

“You didn’t, it’s happening,” Remus assured, smiling away.

Andromeda beamed for it, letting a sigh leave her. “Shit, it’s stressful, exciting, I haven’t had known sleep in over a month and I’m not about to get one for who knows how long,” she described. "I love it."

Remus gave a chime of a laugh in his throat. “And, you know, at the very least, you’ll be used to long nights by the time the place opens up,” he raised her.

“And with Sirius around, I might actually get a night off now and again,” she took it from there, reaching to knock on the wood beneath the arm of the loveseat.

Remus's smile got a bit schmoozy, he could just feel it though he couldn’t see himself doing it. “He’s so excited about it,” he extended.

“I have never had someone say yes to one of my ideas so quickly before,” Andromeda laughed. “It’s good, though, I really think it’ll work; this sort of thing is right up his alley, he's a natural.”

Remus found himself inclined to agree. “Your tip jar will be full if you’ve got him manning the bar, so you might think about doing that,” he suggested.

Andromeda snorted. “We can't keep the tips, but he’ll be right up front either way, I'll tell you that,” she insisted. “OK, enough about me — you, how was the trip? Did the Parisian landscape live up to expectations?”

“And then some,” Remus offered her. “We packed a hell of a lot into two days, I’ll say that, and my only regret is foolishly making the mistake of letting Sirius in on my stark appreciation for the French language because he ribbed me so hard for it while we were over there.”

Andromeda’s lips quirked. “By stark appreciation, you mean—”

Stark appreciation,” Remus insisted, pairing it with a blink. “I just can't help it; it's the hottest language out there to me and it was a rookie move, telling him about that, because every now and again, usually right when I was least expecting it, he’d turn to me after we’d spoken to some city folk and say ‘bonér?'”

Remus paused with a loaded grin on as Andromeda threw her head back in a laugh. “Sometimes he wouldn’t even let them out of earshot before asking,” he tacked onto it. “Imagine those poor, innocent folks going about their day and all of a sudden, a pair of rogue tourists come gallivanting over their cobblestones, causing mayhem wherever they go; they didn't ask for us.”

“OK, but you're not even close to the worst that city's seen, I’ll tell you that right now,” Andromeda returned. "This is also a prime example of why you two are my favourite.”

Remus smirked around a sip of water, working to get it down the right tube. “Frankly, I’m a little worried for you if that’s a reason for it,” he traded her.

'Dirty Paws' as performed by Dora ft. Sirius began plucking away over in the living room, the fluttery intro notes floating down the hall and bringing the two of them to a pause. Remus listened without comment for a little longer, but he lost his resolve a few lines into the verse. “I can’t believe how well she’s done,” he offered, then paused, tilting his head. “No, I can, she's determined, but after a few months at it? I wouldn’t be able to form a chord, and look at her go.”

Andromeda sent him an easy smile around another sip of wine. “She never stops practising,” she delivered him, taking to curling her right eyebrow more so than her left. “And I mean that; I had to talk her down from it because Ted caught her speeding through her homework just to get extra playing time in.”

Remus smirked a laugh. “It’s doing her some good, even if the focus is a bit unequal,” he passed her. “Sirius will have a bundle of songs ready earlier on in the week and he'll wait to assign some of them for later as he’s come to expect her to ring him up between lessons to get a couple more because she’s gone and destroyed the others.”

“He’s been so good about it, I'll give him that,” Andromeda said. “Good for her, too.”

“Proud uncle, that one,” Remus echoed. “I’m sure he wanted to teach her as is, but I have gotten the sense some of it was a ploy to get to have her over once a week.”

Andromeda smirked behind her wine glass. “You and me both,” she traded him.

Smiling, Remus zoned in on Sirius’s voice from the living room and got lost in the levity behind it for a few moments. Blinking back, he shifted to cross his right leg over his left, running a few words around in his head before he faced Andromeda head-on and gave the words a try. “Has he talked to you?” he raised. “About his mum, I mean. Or any of it.”

Andromeda swallowed the sip of wine she’d taken, giving something between a shrug and a shake of her head. “Not that that says much, mind,” she offered him next. “We've talked so much shit about the lot of them, it’s honestly a bit tired a topic nowadays."

“Mm?” Remus probed.

Andromeda gave a circumstantial nod. “After a while, you just get to thinking you’ve said all you had had to say and there isn’t much else to do but keep your sights ahead,” she spoke to it, using her free hand in a forward salute to pair with the sentiment.

Remus nodded, considering a slightly new take on a similar sentiment he’d heard from Sirius along the way, and perhaps that should have quelled him enough, but he still ran his right thumbnail over the ridge of his forefinger. “I see the merit in that," he raised carefully, "I just can’t decide if I’m doing him any good by keeping in with it."

The moment he’d gone and said it, he knew he shouldn’t have woven those words together like that and Andromeda’s open reel was enough to confirm it. “You?” she quoted.

Remus shook his head. “That didn’t come out well,” he maintained. “Only, I’m more than happy to be a soundboard for him and he knows it, I've made sure of that, but so far he hasn’t needed that from me and I don’t want to force him to get into all of it, but I also don’t want to pretend it never happened in case he does need me to be the one to start talking about it; what do you think, am I doing this the wrong way?”

Andromeda leaned her head on a tilt. “No,” she said, sounding as surprised by the question as she was about his initial observation. “I’ve no doubt he’ll talk to you if he needs to.”

Remus took his lower lip into his mouth, going for a tilt of his own head though his doesn't stay put on one side for long. “It’s been so busy for the both of us lately, I'm not sure if he’s even stopped to consider whether he needs to talk about it or not,” he offered. “And then, when we get time where it’s just us, there are other things, other people to consider, or something's happening with me so his stuff gets pushed aside, or it really is just the two of us, we end up all over each other, and we’re not talking about his mother then, are we? There’s a line.”

Andromeda snorted. “Sorry, I’m following, I’m just really glad you’re still at it like rabbits,” she put in.

Remus gave a weak laugh, trying to keep the thread of his point intact. “I’m half of the problem, easily,” he admitted outright. “I’ll want to check if he’s OK because I'm thinking about it so much of the time as is, but then it's as if I forget what I’m even doing, we end up fused together, and my rationale leaves, out the window, gone—” Remus fluttered his free hand out above their heads, then zoned in on the even dimmer light to the side of the room they were on, “—there’ve been a lot of casualties lately, too; we broke the lamp that went on that desk last week.”

Andromeda’s gaze followed Remus’s right forefinger toward the desk under the windowsill to the right and a little ways ahead of them on the loveseat, clicking her tongue in realization. “I knew something was off in here,” she maintained, blinking her head clear before looking back at him wryly. “What’d you do to it?”

“Well, we needed the desk so we shoved everything off of it and the lamp shattered in the process,” Remus supplied, passing a hand over his forehead to push his fringe back. He looked sidelong at her when he heard nothing else and found Andromeda staring over at him with a slightly agape smile. “See? That day, we had a really quiet morning, there were plenty of moments where I could have tried to facilitate some sort of conversation about it, but I didn’t; I just kept putting it off, wanting to have the morning for us, and the sex just happened, frankly, but that’s a problem, isn’t it? I’m not trying hard enough.”

Andromeda's eyes widened before she reached up to clutch at her chest with her free hand. “You’re right, all that quality fucking’s nothing but bad news,” she sent him gravely, reminding Remus so starkly of Sirius that it blew his mind there for a moment or two.

“I really think you know what I’m trying to say here,” Remus maintained, going out on a limb with that one.

“Have you stopped to consider the fact that maybe he’s just, really into you?” Andromeda countered.

Remus gave her a plain look. “I think there’s more to it than that."

“I think it’s got something to do with it,” Andromeda maintained. “And I’ve got to be honest, I’d certainly rather have a quiet morning with Ted and then fuck until one of our lamps broke than talk about my side of the family, so perhaps that’s another piece to the puzzle?”

Remus chewed on the inside of his lower lip, feeling a little daft about bringing that point up with a rebuttal so frank as hers, but it wasn’t really about the sex, not really; there was more to it than that, and he took a few to work up to wording things a little better. “It’s not as though it’s a sudden spike, I just — would you relax?” he implored after Andromeda broke into a round of seal clapping, wine glass and all. “It’s not that we can only fuck around and talking is off-limits, it’s that when we do talk it’s about everything and anything else; we’ve been having a lively debate over whether Rory should have taken her gap year or not, and that we’ve discussed extensively."

Andromeda didn't do so well at hiding her smile behind a sip of her wine. “Who won that one?” she bid.

“I didn’t say the debate was over,” Remus returned.

“Is a quality debate your version of foreplay or something?” Andromeda checked, narrowing her eyes a little to read him better.

Remus sniffed airily, as if he had the right to cling to a bit of dignity at that point. “I’m not answering that,” he said, going for the dregs of his water.

“Well, that’s an answer in itself,” Andromeda concluded. “That lamp didn’t stand a chance.”

“There’s enough fire behind the both of us that this one could go on for weeks," Remus maintained. "We’ve charts, diagrams, pages of structured bullet points — the works.”

“I’m elated about this,” Andromeda said outright.

“Me, not so much,” Remus said of it. “Typically speaking, I’ve been able to count on Sirius being Team Lorelai until the end of time, but he’s gone and pulled a fast one on me with this particular topic, leaving me firmly on Team Lorelai and I’m not about to relent any time soon.”

“I need to see all of this data, stat,” Andromeda instilled.

“Our data’s in a binder in the kitchen if you really want to reopen that box, but I’m warning you, the debate will pick up right where we left off,” Remus forewarned.

"Oh, I'm going to reopen it," she insisted.

Remus gave a relenting breath through his nose. “But see, this is where I get worried again,” he raised, running his right thumb around the rim of his empty glass. “He used to talk to me about this stuff and not just because I’d asked; sometimes, he would just go and open up to me and I'd feel so chosen by it, and I don’t know where that went.”

She rearranged her coy expression to one that was more thoughtful. “I’m not excusing the work he’s done to get himself here, OK, but let’s just be honest about what he’s got going for him at this point,” she traded him. "He's got you, he’s got good mates — and I mean, great fucking mates, he’s loaded, he’s got a new business venture on the rise and a new passion project to put some of that excess money toward; the kid’s got it good right now, and maybe that’s what he’d rather put his focus on.”

Remus stared at the bottom of his glass, his breath leaving through his nose in a silent gust. “I know he’s got all of that, but what about when he’s alone, you know?” he asked, chancing a look over at Andromeda and feeling a sense of relief in finding patience in the expression coming back his way. “I know I’ve a limited point of view on this because if I lost either of my parents, I’d be a fucking wreck; I know it’s completely different for him, but I don’t think he knows what he’s even supposed to be feeling in all of this and I want him to be able to figure that out with me, be himself with me.”

“He is being himself with you,” Andromeda said of it. She took a long breath in, let that out, and reached down with her free hand to pet Tango’s head absently. “OK, storytime, are you ready?"

"Ready," Remus granted openly.

"I got out of my house the instant I turned eighteen and I didn’t have Dora for another three years after that, so while that house was my own circle of hell, I beat it past the worst I'd have had coming to me and I didn’t deal with half of the shit he had to live with," she detailed. "Back when I was still living there, I'd see him at the dinners and functions now and again, but he was still a kid, you know? Still spunky as hell, but still a kid nonetheless, so once I was out of there I didn’t really keep up with him after that; I was out doing my own thing and I needed separation from that world badly, but there he went, ringing me out of the blue years on and asking to meet up, and when we did, it was an absolute trip, Remus.”

Remus kept still save for a nod, remaining silent as a mouse so not to miss out on any more details he could get his hands on. “He'd gone from this spunky kid to this whole self-assured, literal, actual adult — as self-assured and adult as you can be at eighteen, I mean, but it was still mind-blowing to see him like that,” she maintained, a twist of a smile showing through there. “And every time we met up after that, he was always ten inches taller than the last time I'd seen him: you could just see it from a mile away, nothing was holding him back anymore, not like those people did, and I saw how freedom looked on him like I’d seen it look on me — what Ted said he saw in me the more time passed; Sirius went out and made the family he didn’t get to have, same as I did, and this past Christmas, with everyone here, that was the tallest I’ve ever seen him, and I think that’s always going to be what he’d rather focus on and kudos to him, right? He deserves to.”

Remus couldn’t help the smile that tugged at his lips, thinking of Sirius prancing about the flat wearing his festive apron, his hair pulled into a French braid à la Dora, and the brightest smile Remus had seen on him yet; it wasn’t the first time he thought it and it wouldn’t be the last either, but Remus didn’t stand a chance against Sirius that night; there was just no way he could have held off.

Remus gave out a breath littered with hope. He wasn’t certain that he’d come up with good enough words to follow hers and after a moment or three more, he found he might not have needed to worry about that anyway. “You’ve a lot to do with it,” Andromeda said, breaking the silence.

Remus certainly felt lucky her gaze was set over on the open doorway in the far corner of the double room rather than on him for she didn’t have to see him nearly drop his water glass out of disarray. “I’ve never heard him talk about anyone like this,” she extended, pausing for a sip of wine and glancing sidelong at him while she did it. “He stopped talking about blokes with me a while before you showed up, mostly because I hated so many of them — there were some garbage men along the way, alright, I had my reasons—" she tacked on, pointing at Remus who lifted his free hand, forwarding a tight smile her way, “—but let me tell you, the minute he brings you up in conversation, it’s countdown to when he gets to bring you up again, and if I didn’t love you so much, I’d have told him to get a fucking grip by now.”

Remus felt torn between straightening his neck out in a bout of pride and shrinking it down out of sheepishness, but he ended up performing a short rendition of both before settling on a small smile. In the same way he felt about Sirius & Co, he wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint what he’d done right to gain Andromeda’s approval, but the humility that came with that was heavy enough to drown out some of the nerves that plagued him over the past few weeks.

“He'll talk to you if he needs to, but in the meantime, would you try to enjoy this?” she raised, reaching over to jostle Remus’s left knee. “And take it from one of the elderly, but you won’t always be raring to go at the snap of a finger, so you best take all of this free, regular sex with a smile and a thank you.”

Remus's shoulders shook as he broke into a quiet laugh at the mere idea of Andromeda classifying herself as an elderly woman at a fresh thirty-one, but raised his empty glass to her all the same. “I’ll do my best not to sneer at it,” he said.

“That’s the stuff,” Andromeda echoes, tapping the side of her wine glass with the nails on her right hand and pushing herself to her feet. “Tanks empty — there’s a little Lorelai reference for you.”

“I caught that one, thanks,” Remus traded her, lifting off of the loveseat in turn. “I’d keep any more of those to yourself, however, seeing as I wouldn’t put it past him to start polling the room."

Andromeda tossed him a bright hum as she headed for the door. “No, see, that’s what I want."

Remus looked down at Tango, patted his right hip, and headed out of Sirius’s room with the dog at his heels. He went down the hall toward the music, passing through the living room where Dora and Sirius sat on opposite ends of the couch playing out the last few lines of Tegan and Sara's 'Fix You Up.' Andromeda headed on down the back hall toward the kitchen without a hitch, but Remus only made it to the middle of the same hall by the time the song ended and glanced back to see Sirius stretching long over on his end of the couch, curling his shoulders back over the arm of it, and that was about where Remus couldn’t help doubling back a few steps. He moved up behind the arm of the couch, bent down enough to place a quick peck on his forehead as Sirius held his masterful stretch to its fullest, and meant to make a quick and easy retreat before Sirius’s left hand wrapped around his right wrist and kept him from making himself scarce too quickly.

Sirius leaned his head back over the arm of the couch, aimed a bright smile up at Remus, and gave his wrist a squeeze before he let him go, repositioning his right hand on the fretboard and leaving his left arm hanging easily over the body of the guitar. “This one was caught strumming with her wrist again,” Sirius enunciated, tossing a pointed nod across the couch.

Dora let out a long-suffering sigh. “It’s too heavy to strum with my whole arm,” she returned, looking up at Remus then. “Tell him it’s fine.”

Remus gave her a circumstantial smile. “Oh, I would, but he knows this stuff a lot better than I do."

Dora clicked her tongue. “He made you say that,” she maintained. “I’ve seen plenty of people playing with their wrists; it’s not a big deal.”

“And they’ll all wake up with carpal tunnel one day, trust that much,” Sirius countered. “Kick that habit now while you still can.”

Remus had to force himself to turn away twice as much, making it into the kitchen to find that Peter had snatched up his prior spot at the table while Andromeda appeared to have dragged the armchair from the corner far corner up to the table between him and James, where the three of them poured over the binder stuffed full of sheets dedicated Remus and Sirius's differing causes.

“You were not kidding,” Andromeda addressed, looking over at him. “This is fucking extensive.”

“How far did you get while we were gone?” James demanded.

“Just about to start the seventh series,” Remus forwarded, smirking at James's reel. “I got really invested and he fell right back in with me—” he gestured toward the binder with his free hand, “—needless to say, really.”

The other three observed some more of the case at hand for a good minute or so while Remus set about keeping to his earlier word, bringing his glass to the counter and pouring himself some more juice to fill up on. He set the pitcher back down on the counter, went for the empty spot across the table from James, and jolted when Andromeda busted out an incredibly frustrated noise. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” she declared. “I’ve been riding the fence on this since it first fucking aired and none of this is making it any easier to pick a side; there are so many cross points, I can’t handle this.”

Peter reached in to flick one of the binder’s many dividers. “These are a nice touch,” he offered, giving into a smirk as he flickered his gaze over to Remus. “You’re doing, I take it?”

James snorted into his newest glass of Party Punch. “Who else?”

“Somebody had to do it,” Remus defended. “At least now, every one of the subsets of the overall argument is organized by category and much easier to locate; it was complete madness at first.”

Dora popping up over the right arm of Andromeda's chair to have a look at the binder for herself clued Remus into the dual fact that breaktime had commenced and Sirius’s presence was an inevitability at this point, and as such, right as he turned his head to look toward the hall, Sirius was already slipping up behind his chair.

“I see you’ve found the important stuff,” he observed, leaning forward and resting his forearms over Remus’s shoulders. “If you flip to the last page, I’ve recently included a simple but powerful ditty on the topic and I think it’s a game-changer.”

Andromeda’s face lit up anew as she processed that information and quickly flipped to the last page, snorting when she got there. “'She Needed Time,” she recited. “With sheet music, even?”

“I came to win, honey,” Sirius served her.

“Can I learn this?” Dora asked, pointing at the sheet music; great, good, lovely.

“You sure can,” Sirius chimed, his crooked grin audible without Remus having to see it to know it was there.

Remus felt the need to interject right about then. “I’d really like to point out that in a fair and just world, ditties would not be counted into evidence,” he mentioned. “And since I’m clearly not living in one, I motion that ditties should be filed under ‘flair’ considering I haven’t a musical bone in my body in order to even possibly attempt to write an apt response to it.”

“Absolutely no one is stopping you from writing a devastating piece of slam poetry as a rebuttal,” Sirius sent him from above. “If anything, that’s a challenge I expect you to rise to, Professor Lupin.”

Remus bit back a laugh as James went ahead and took on the challenge, launching into a trial version of said piece, and it wasn’t very long before Andromeda and Pete began to interject where pacing and structure were concerned; Remus slowly shifted his head to the left and tilted it back a bit, just enough to share a wan smile with Sirius, but these were the sort of mates you just couldn’t find anywhere else.

Unfortunately, Remus caught the time on the clock on the far wall on the tail-end of that exchange and the clang of duty rang out inside of him, but he found himself fighting the call a lot harder than he anticipated. Much had shifted both inside and around him since he’d practically begged for Sirius to let him head home early, and looking around now at the warmth inside the kitchen had him wanting to hold onto it as long as he could feel it.

Remus reached up to clasp his hand to Sirius’s wrists for a quick tug, turning a little in his seat to see him better, and Sirius caught his gaze for what it was, shifting down on Remus’s left and moving to a knee so that their heads were more or less level. Remus dropped his voice a bit, hiding it behind the commotion of all the stanza-building going on across the table from the two of them. “How much food did you give her?” he asked.

“Literal tons,” Sirius replied, the right corner of his mouth quirking.

“Does that mean she’s good until tomorrow?” Remus reiterated.

“Oh, believe me,” Sirius echoed, resting his right arm on Remus’s left thigh, “I hung out with her for a good while there and didn’t know when you’d feel up to leaving here, so I free-poured and hoped for the best.”

Remus felt a tug at the corners of his own lips. “I have to go into work a little earlier than planned, but if I head by mine earlier in the morning then I could stay tonight,” he raised, curling his hands around Sirius’s right wrist.

“Stay and I’ll deliver you right to your doorstep,” Sirius offered, dipping his head down to press a peck to Remus’s knuckles. “How early is 'earlier' exactly?”

“Nothing outlandish,” Remus insisted. “I start at the regular time, but I wanted to see Lily for a bit before I have to be on the floor and it’ll be a busy one with the training — oh, and she’s got my review slotted for the afternoon, so it’s going to be hard to get any time in with her unless I stop in beforehand.”

“Alright," Sirius relented. "So long as I don’t have to be up before ten."

“I’ll let you sleep right up until then,” Remus assured, thinking he owed Sirius about a thousand more things than just that, but it'd do for now. “Lily sends her love along, by the way.”

“Oh, ho?” Sirius said airily, turning his head toward the table. “Hear that, James? The wedding’s off.”

James, still free-forming a slam piece, cut himself off mid-word and lobbed a fast one at Sirius: “Bite your tongue.”

“Lily sends her love to you, too, Pete,” Remus relayed.

Peter clasped a hand over his heart as he sipped at his Party Punch, but the wistful sigh that followed came from Sirius. “It’ll be a modern marriage, you see,” he offered. “One for the ages.”

Andromeda looked between the lot of them. “Honestly, you’re all so married that I don’t even know if you're kidding or not," she gave bluntly. The four men at the table gave similar expressions before she fixed her eyes on James, who in response, gave her all of one sly raise of his right brow before earning himself a series of punches to his right arm. “When is it? When?

“Alright, alright,” he tossed out, waving his glass in the air. “I’ve already been manhandled by the rest of these ruffians, thank you, and I can’t tell you when yet since I’m waiting until our anniversary to ask her.”

“So, somewhere between October and the year twenty-thirty is a safe bet,” Peter translated.

“Save the date,” James punctuated it.

“Can I come?” Dora piped up.

James whipped his head toward her, speaking right past Andromeda. “If you’re not there carrying flowers down that aisle, I’ll have a word or three with your mother.”

Andromeda beamed before she gave one last, good punch to James’s arm. “How is Lilybean?” she asked. “Gorgeous as ever, I bet.”

“She is, thank you,” James echoed, preening behind his glass.

Sirius pushed himself to stand, whisked his right hand through Remus’s hair easily, and pointed to Dora with his free hand. “Alright, you,” he said. “Break's over.”

“You wanted the break,” Dora returned, pushing off of the arm of the armchair.

Remus smirked once. “I had to weigh in, madame,” Sirius defended, shooing her toward the hall, though he did swivel back toward the rest of them at the start of the hall to point directly to Andromeda. “After?”

Andromeda pointed right back toward him in a showcase or fine agreement and Sirius disappeared out of view, his footsteps leading down the hall and back to the living room. Remus pushed himself to stand, moved around the table to cross over to the other side of the kitchen, and pulled out some blank sheets of paper from a pack sitting on the end table over there. He plucked a regular, standardized pen out of a jar full of wonky-shaped ones and headed back to his spot, uncapping the pen and scooting his chair forward toward the table.

“Hand that over,” he requested, reaching out for the caseload laying open in front of Andromeda. “I might as well jot down whatever it is you came up with if I’m to have any sort of chance at matching that ditty.”

“I can’t believe he’d do that, and yet, I can,” Peter said of it. “He’s just that petty.”

“I’m far more livid that it wound up sounding as good as it did,” Remus returned, “but don’t tell him I said it.”

“It’s going to the grave,” Peter affirmed.

“Good man,” Remus forwarded, uncapping his pen. “James, start me in.”

Notes:

i realize this chapter is polarizing, but trust me when i say that it's intended for what occurs in this chapter to Feel sudden and strange because this *is* a sudden and strange occurrence for the boys as well. given that I once wrote blends and this is the companion to it, it's no secret that long-form storytelling is my jam, so I ask you to trust me when I say that the answers to your burning questions are dispersed all throughout this chapter and in the following ones. i promise i didn't forget to give yall the info you need, it's just coming to you in a non-linear fashion bc i enjoy subverting expectations and exploring new ways to deliver a plot. so, hang in there and keep your eyes peeled because the answers are all there :)

consider this chapter and the next one a murder mystery, only the question isn't 'whodunnit' and more 'wtf happened to remus'

Chapter 4: 4.

Chapter Text

Later that night, when Ted came to pick up his girls, James and Peter said their farewells to the guests in the kitchen while Sirius and Remus walked the girls to the door to see them off.

Remus dolled out hugs to the both of them before he hung back a bit, giving Sirius the room to run at Dora and give her a tight enough hug that her feet hung a few inches off of the floor. With that importance out of the way, Andromeda sent Dora down the stairs ahead of her and paused before going through the door herself.

“Ring me once you're out and about,” she bid, left hand on the doorknob with her right one pointing at Sirius.

Sirius nodded, scratching a spot on his left ankle with his right foot. “Won't be before noon, mind,” he mentioned.

Andromeda snorted. “In what lifetime would it be before then?” she returned, pulling the door shut behind her.

In the new, relative quiet of the entryway, Remus tilted his head at Sirius with a smile on. “Big plans?” he asked.

Sirius gave a hum that neither confirmed nor denied the claim. “She wants to get a head start on decor, but it's mostly going to be window shopping,” he relayed.

“A solid afternoon,” Remus called it, reaching his right hand up and pushing it through his hair. By the time he had his hand down again, he decided that while Sirius had done his best to tame the mop on his head, it might've been time to sort that out properly. “I think I might get a rinse in.”

Sirius nodded again, though he gave a more pointed nod toward Remus's stitches. “Careful with those when you're in there,” he bid.

“I will be,” Remus echoed, turning to head down the hallway. He stopped at the archway over the living room and hung back for a moment, looking over his shoulder at Sirius. “'Course, if you wanted to be absolutely sure that I don't get them wet, I wouldn't object.”

A solid beat passed before Sirius crowded him through the living room and on down the far hall toward the bathroom, and Remus let out a half-smirk, half-laugh as he got ushered into the room, turning around to face Sirius as he pulled the door shut behind them. Sirius reached to tug up on Remus's shirt, garnering him to simply stand still with his arms up in the air as he pulled on it until the collar reached Remus's eyes, and there, Sirius slowed his movements down, lifting the collar over Remus's brow without catching it on either one of his stitches.

Remus sought to be of some help in the matter and reached for Sirius's shirt once he had his arms free to do so. He rid Sirius of it quicker than his own came off when he thankfully didn't have to worry so much about healing scars on Sirius's head, but the static going between them sent a few strands of Sirius's hair to stand upright and Remus held in a laugh as he tossed the shirt aside to smooth some of the wayward strands down.

Sirius flashed him a grin before he got to work ridding himself of his jeans, which did put the reason behind them being in the bathroom at all back into the forefront of Remus's brain. He ditched his own trousers while Sirius pushed the shower curtain aside and got in first, testing the water out via a free-flow out of the faucet while Remus got his briefs down off his legs and got in behind him from there. He wasn't inside the tub for long at all before he gave himself over to being ushered about, but Sirius was rather adamant about turning him toward the far wall, facing him away from the upcoming spray before he took his hands off of Remus's waist and turned back to mess with the taps a little more.

“I say we get hair out of the way first,” Sirius raised, garnering Remus to glance over his shoulder and find him taking the showerhead off of its stand.

With no immediate objections, he hummed his understanding and left Sirius to it, watching him sideling as he reached down to pull on the shower nozzle and spark the showerhead to life. Sirius lifted his free hand over his forehead like a canopy, wordlessly asking him to mimic the movement to block as much of the spray as his hands would allow, and Remus dutifully cupped them over his left eyebrow and waited the few beats it took before Sirius tilted his head back and ran his fingers over his hairline, starting from the delicate section first and working his way back.

When Remus's hair was sufficiently drenched, Sirius pointed the stream of the showerhead down at the floor of the tub and reached it around in front of Remus, humming for him to hold it, and Remus dropped his left hand from his brow to take hold of it, happy to assist where necessary to pull the whole manoeuvre off. Sirius's hands returned not long later and there began the slow process of lathering shampoo into his hair, a process that Remus hardly saw a point in rushing either; they had no real-time constraint given Sirius's superior hot water situation compared to what Remus's flat could boast, and James and Peter could entertain themselves like nobody's business so there was no need to give much more of a passing thought toward them just then.

Sirius reached around him to take hold of the showerhead back, freeing Remus's left hand to resume its post at helping block any splashback as Sirius rinsed his hair out. He stuck the showerhead back on its mount and moved onto Remus's body, and Remus's only gripe with that arrangement was that he wasn't in a prime position to see Sirius while he had a task at hand, but with nothing to stare at but the tiles on the wall, it made it easier for Remus to give himself over to feeling; the feeling of Sirius's wet body pressed up against his back, the feeling of Sirius trailing the loofah up, down, and over his body, the feeling of being turned this way and that way, slowly and steadily being rinsed off all while Sirius kept a watchful eye on Remus's stitches.

The feeling of being catered to.

Sirius turned him away from the stream again and stole kisses wherever he saw necessary, which was another thing Remus could hardly object over when he'd been rather banking on that happening quite a bit; over-the-shoulder kisses that took Remus's breath hostage and suggested Sirius was in no hurry to make this one go quickly either, small ones trailed over the back of his neck and the lines of his shoulders, careful ones pressed over the spidered bruise on Remus's left hip, every single one felt important and left trails of heat in their wake.

Considering that Sirius was already down there, Remus should have seen where he was heading eventually, but when Sirius went at him like he hadn't eaten in days, he surged forward to brace the wall in front of him to keep his knees from buckling underneath him. That said, the knee-buckling would have been easy to avoid with Sirius moving right along with him without a single hitch, but then, the fact that Remus's knees didn't take him right out of the game even then was all thanks to Sirius's getting right up behind him, so he was both the culprit and the saviour in that sense.

Sirius drew it out like the rest of his prior kisses, slipping his arms around the front of Remus, his left one holding him in place while he played his right hand up and down on Remus's cock, the same hand that Remus had watched expertly churn out note after note on the neck of that guitar, all while the mouth that gave out chorus after chorus during class worked like hell behind him, and Remus was left with the sole, debilitating task of keeping his voice down through all of this duality. He held his lower lip tight between his teeth as he grappled his hands along the wall in front of him, finding nothing concrete to grip on to the way he so needed to, and reached his right hand behind him when he couldn't hold out any longer; he went careful as he could be about tapping out, keeping his hand splayed wide to avoid catching any strands of Sirius's free-flowing locks, and felt for his left shoulder before he clapping at it erratically, shivering as Sirius let out a smirk of a laugh right against him and thankfully relented from there.

He worked on taking in full breaths as Sirius trailed more kisses on his way back up his body, but the moment his hips were close enough to grab, Remus yanked on them by the left one, pulling Sirius flush against him and making a mad grab with his right hand for the bottle of lube that was still sitting in the shower caddy while The Flat was still all theirs and would soon have to migrate back to Sirius's bedroom, just not quite yet. He held the bottle behind him and waited the half-beat it took for Sirius to grab it, biting down on his lower lip again as he heard the pop of the cap and bracing himself so that any one of Sirius's fingers wouldn't catch him by surprise.

To that end, bracing himself only did so much as a means of combat given the slow drag of the first two, and Remus knew in that moment how spoiled the both of them really had been not having literal and may-as-well-be roommates quite so nearby for a fortnight. That said, someone in the room didn't seem to give as much of a shit about keeping it down and that someone certainly wasn't him; Sirius hooked his chin over Remus's left shoulder and pressed his lips just underneath his ear, speaking French like an arsehole and pairing it with phrases so delicious that Remus couldn't do much more than writhe back on Sirius's hand and send a half-prayer to the universe that his tightly-pressed lips would hold out.

Remus had a few brief moments to use for a breathing break as Sirius reached to stick the lube bottle back in place and he took in as many breaths as he could, preparing himself for the gauntlet; the moment Sirius hitched Remus's hips lower for their few-inch difference in height to match up, Remus took in the heaviest breath yet, waiting as Sirius held his hips still with his left hand and lined them up with his right one. He had a handle on it right up until Sirius had him filled up, but the roll of his hips as he worked them back and forth, as they built momentum, as the slick drag of it all had him wanting it all the more, Remus reached down to pry each of the fingers on Sirius's left hand off of the skin at his hip in favour of pulling the hand up to cover his mouth.

Sirius slowed his hips to a complete pause a beat on from there, and Remus breathed in best he could against Sirius's palm. In totality, there were many reasons Remus knew he'd struck gold falling in with this particular boy, but the hesitation Sirius showed in cases like this one was higher up on the very personal list Remus had going and it was one that he'd likely never be skilled at articulating even in his best of moods. While there were plenty of notes to Remus's entire existence that Sirius showed some trouble making sense of, this simply wasn't one of them; in all their months together where sex was even on the table (so to speak), Sirius hadn't so much as shushed him for a thing, at least not in the proverbial bedroom, and that hard rule Remus never had to explicitly state went somewhere beyond simple gratitude for him, but at the same time, Remus didn't really see a way around it here either.

He reached behind them with his left hand and held onto Sirius's left hip to spur him on himself, but he gripped that hip with so much else to signal that he was fine with it in this shower, with him, in this case, and some of it was for himself, a celebration of landing someone who was the sort to even stop long enough to hesitate; simply put, the idea of not holding onto Sirius became the just about the hardest thing he could do just then.

Sirius lay feather-light kisses over the nape of Remus's neck and only then did his hips start up again, and Remus held tight to both Sirius's left wrist and hip, shutting his eyes tight as he rocked back to meet him while he breathed staggered breaths against his palm. Sirius tightened his hold around him and stroked him in time, driving Remus back on him with the same arm, snapping his hips into it with each fucking tug on him, and setting off a fireworks show behind Remus's eyelids; his breathing ratcheted up to a staggering speed, some whimpers sure left him as he felt the onset, and if Sirius planned to hold out for Remus to get there first, it didn't really work out that way for Sirius's hips lost their staccato along the way and simply rutted fast against him as his chest heaved hard against Remus's back, fucking himself up and over the peak all while he still held Remus so carefully up front.

Remus had only been a handful of seconds behind him, it couldn't have been more than that, but feeling Sirius come as much as he heard it happen around him had Remus letting go of Sirius's hip and slamming his left hand up against the wall, bucking back on him and forward into the grip around his cock all while Sirius somehow remained coherent and thoughtful enough to fuck him right on through it.

He dipped his own head forward to rest it against the wall, but Sirius dropped his hand from his mouth and used the both of his to shift Remus's head to the right, keeping his scar off of the tiles, and Remus would have kissed him for it if he'd had the energy to make that happen.

“OK?” Sirius asked, a few moments on from there, leaning over Remus's left shoulder to get a good peek at him.

Remus gave an affirming hum, deciding that he had just enough energy to turn and place a kiss against his lips. Sirius reached down to hold Remus's hips in place while he pulled out and guided him back toward the middle of the tub to start the rinsing process all over again. Remus stood still underneath the steam, giving Sirius a circumstantial smile for holding his hands above Remus's gash to protect it while Remus soaped himself up and rinsed himself down. “If I go lie down after this is done, I want it on record that it was you who sent me there,” he mentioned, passing the showerhead back to him.

Sirius smirked. “Noted,” he said, taking hold of it. “I mean, you can go on ahead; I'll be there in a few.”

Remus gave a small frown. “I'm OK, really,” he maintained. “I'm tuckered out, is all; you can stay up.”

Sirius gave him a plain look. “And what, go pretend to play nice?” he raised. “Hopefully by the time the wedding rolls around, I won't want to punch Peter's sad little face so hard but we'll have to see.”

Remus gave him a plain look for that one, but used the general topic as a way to hopefully shift the focus off of Peter. “What do you think?” he raised, rinsing the last of the suds off of himself. “James and Lily, I mean.”

“Good, isn't it?” Sirius traded him. “I will warn you, though; James is going to be a fucking tyrant about finding the perfect ring and we're all going to have to humour him through this laborious process.”

“I'll accept it,” Remus said, tipping his head with it.

“He's not going to trust his gut, is the thing,” Sirius put up, switching spots with Remus to start on his own body. “He should but he won't, so we'll have to keep agreeing with him until he finds the right one 'cause he'll know it when he sees it, and let's be honest; what kind of help would we be with that anyway?”

Remus snorted. “Not much."

“And, we'll get to watch him completely flub this,” Sirius raised, holding in a laugh of his own as he soaped up. “I'm nearly two hundred percent sure he hasn't got a chance in hell making it to October; I'm calling it right now.”

Remus gave a doubtful noise, backing away from any wayward splashes. “I don't know about that,” he retained. “He took her surprise party a little too seriously.”

“Or,” Sirius said, flicking a few suds over at Remus, “it was just seriously enough.”

Remus tilted his head pointedly at him. “Whatever you want to call it, he took code names and secrecy to a new level,” he maintained. “I think he'll rise to this challenge.”

Sirius considered him for a few beats as he ducked under the full force of the stream, then poked his head back out from under it. “Foot rub for the winner?” he raised.

Remus squinted. “You say that like I wouldn't just give you one if you asked nicely.”

“But I'll have won it, Remus,” Sirius maintained, reaching for his bottle of shampoo and squirting a large blob into his hand that would cover the length of his hair. “Where's your competitive side gone, hm?”

“I think it's been working overtime in Stars Hollow,” Remus returned.

“Mm, that reminds me,” Sirius said, lathering up his hair, “I really think we ought to revisit—”

“No no,” Remus denied. “Not tonight; I'm good, I'm centred, let's just—”

Sirius dropped his hands and mimicked the smoothing gesture Remus had just made with his hands. “Oh?” he checked. “Is this what centred looks like?”

“Fuck you,” Remus returned, pushing the shower curtain aside enough to reach for a towel.

“No no, I really want to know,” Sirius sent him, his crooked grin rather audible behind from Remus, “because I have never made it to that level of centred before, but was I supposed to do that the whole time?”

Remus flipped him off as he dried his legs off. “You're the worst,” he said, stepping out onto the bathmat, “bane of my existence.”

He dried his body off while Sirius hummed a jaunty tune as he finished up with his hair, finding it a nice bit of music to work along to even if it was twitterings from a tune called 'She Needed Time.' He tied the towel around his waist and went to pick up his shirt, sticking it on over his head for the walk back to Sirius's room, but he froze before his hand touched the knob and went back toward the shower real quick, sticking half of himself back in and holding his hand out. Sirius paused in the middle of washing conditioner out of his hair, did the math right quick, and reached for the bottle of lube to pass it over to him.

“Meet you back there,” Remus slipped him, moving back to the door and successfully leaving through it this time.

He went through it and made a quick left, set on making it to Sirius's room without being noticed, but he took one look at the couch where James and Peter had decided to relocate to at some point over the last while and quickly stuck the bottle of lube behind his back; it was mostly for naught judging by the resounding applause the two of them broke into, and Remus flipped the both of them off as he passed through the living room and on down to Sirius's room.

-

In the first few seconds of the next morning, Remus was quick about silencing his alarm so not to rouse Sirius too early, as promised. He set his mobile down beside him on the bed, peeked over at Sirius through lidded eyes to check if he'd indeed silenced it in time, and though he couldn't see Sirius's face too well what with him facing away toward the far side of the double-room, he still saw a very rhythmic pattern to his breathing that quelled that tiny worry for him.

From there, Remus didn't do much more than study Sirius's ability to make an act as simple as sleeping look divine and odd in the same beat; his right arm was curled under his pillow while his left was raised up past his head, his right leg laying pin-straight down the bed while his left was hitched up and bent at the knee, and looked out cold for certain but a bit like the model on a kitschy superhero costume at the Halloween store. Remus trailed his gaze lower and over toward the sheet that Sirius apparently stole for himself over the course of the night and now had wrapped around his lower half like a toga, but even with the evidence of thievery Remus couldn't find it in him to be all that put off about it when Sirius's superhero-in-flight pose was still too funny to bother holding a grudge.

Remus lifted his gaze to the expanse of Sirius's back, reached over to lightly trace his forefinger in the tiniest, makeshift star just underneath his left shoulder blade, then scooted over to leave a featherlight kiss where his fingerprint had been before setting to leaving the bed; Sirius had a little less than an hour to doze and Remus wanted to keep well on his word and let him do just that.

Remus kept his footsteps light as he went to the hooks on the back of Sirius's door and pulled his housecoat down from one of them. He pulled his arms through it and tied the belt around his waist before leaving the room and shutting the door behind him. He crept past Peter who was fast asleep on the couch with Tango curled up at his feet and tried to signal for the dog to stay put, but Tango ambled off of the left corner of the couch and trotted down the hall behind him all the same.

Remus went ahead and scooped a cup of kibble into Tango's bowl since he was so sure about getting up and refocused on what he was gunning for after such a wobbly day prior; a proper pot of tea. He dug around in the cupboard he last remembered his rotund, bright red pot being in, mostly for the fact that it made just enough for two large cups and he thought today was the right day to be a bit greedy about it. He found the teapot stashed behind the popcorn maker, for some reason and dug it right out, rising to his feet to set it on the counter by the stove and plugging the kettle in from there.

He picked out the variety he thought would give him the best jump-start to the day, stopped off at the bathroom while the kettle heated, and timed his return to the kitchen to be a few seconds before the whistle of the kettle could sound off, feeling pretty good about that. He let his tea steep while he considered the weather outside, finding it to be a pleasant enough morning to have his tea out on the terrace. He stuffed the book on the windowsill that he was still working his way through into his housecoat pocket, knicked Sirius's aviators off of the small table over by the washer-drier hybrid, and went out back to the counter.

He took the handle of his teapot in his right hand and hooked the handle of his mug around his left pinky finger so he'd have enough use of his fingers to undo the latch and push the screen door open, but on the way out he very nearly lost his footing and his entire pot of tea as he tripped over Sirius's Docs strewn nearby the doorway. Remus shut his eyes after he gathered his bearings, reminded himself that this wasn't his flat and therefore he wasn't in the position to lecture either of the owners on the merits of not leaving footwear lying around as traps.

Remus pushed Sirius's boots aside with a foot, walked over to the table out back, and set himself up at it, placing his pot down in front of the spot facing toward the mirrored flat across the terrace from this one. The open roof of the back terrace allowed for sunlight to stream in from above, but the table was placed at the perfect spot to shield most of the sun's rays so that Remus was warm enough with the minimal layers he had on but also so he wasn't sweltering underneath the heat. He looked up and across the terrace as he pulled his chair in, spotting Hank the Bagpiper sitting out on his deck chair one floor up from the boys. In any other case, he might've felt a bit embarrassed about sporting his flannel housecoat around for the neighbours to see, if, that is, one of the neighbours in question had any understanding of shame, but since it was clear Hank The Bagpiper had very little to speak of in his own right given the times in the wee hours of some unlucky mornings that he chose to get his practising in, Remus simply pulled his book out of the pocket of his housecoat and flipped to the page he'd stopped at.

He was two chapters and one cup of tea down before the screen door opened behind him. Remus shifted in his chair to glance over his shoulder, finding James standing in the doorway propping the door open with his shoulder line.

“How is it out?” he asked, nodding in Remus's general direction.

Remus considered it, glanced down to James's work slacks, and seeing as he was quite comfortable in little more than a housecoat and pyjama trousers, he settled for a medium hum. “I'm fine, so you'll be hot in those,” he offered.

James snapped and pointed his forefingers to him before popping back inside. Remus thought that was just about the end of it, turning back to resume reading where he left off, but he was just about halfway down the next page when James made a reappearance in a pair of dark shorts instead of the slacks, taking a seat in the chair at the head of the table and just diagonal from Remus's spot.

Remus looked to him, gave him a smile, and eyed him from behind the cover of Sirius's sunglasses, watching him pull his chair in a little more and settle in with an easy sigh before fixing him with a rather firm stare, and he held the edges of his book a little tighter, chewing the side of his lower lip as James clicked his tongue three times seemingly in thought.

“I called you that night,” he said finally, “not just because you're my best second, or because I knew you'd have gotten to him the quickest, or even because you're one of his most thorough brands of medicine out there; I did it because I've got you on the brain.”

Remus sat still under the frank note to James's tone, mostly because the lad chose to pause there, as if he were actively waiting for the words to sink in properly. “Lily, too; you're definitely on hers,” he tacked on. “And Pete's, and that's because you've been taken in by us whether you like it or not.”

“James,” Remus said, not to halt him, but also to halt him, if he were honest.

“I would have thought we'd have made it here by now, but that doesn't seem to be the case,” James went on, crisp as a summer breeze, “so, to recap; when shit goes south with Sirius, you're going to get a call, if something happens to Lily, you'll be getting a call, and if something happens to me or Pete, the same rule applies, but the same applies to you so what I can't figure out, is whether you've realized it yet that we want to know when shit goes south for you, too.”

Remus let out a quiet sigh, miffed at himself for not seeing where James was heading sooner. “I do know that, but it was difficult enough wrapping my head around them showing up again," he maintained. "And all I could see a heads-up from me about it even being was a damper on your time away—”

“Yeah, I know,” James came in, nodding once. “We'd still have wanted to know because as it turns out, drinking margaritas and getting some R&R in while your mate's off dealing with real shit can make someone feel like actual shit when it dawns on them that that's likely exactly what they were doing at the time.”

“I'm sorry, James,” Remus offered, and he was; he truly was sorry he never knew where to step, that he spent so much of the time tripping over 'damned if you do' as a sentiment, it would likely fit nicely on his tombstone, right under the superlative about how he kept managing to make Sirius laugh while he had liquids in his mouth, that is.

James nodded his head for that, too. “It's not just you getting reamed, so you know,” he mentioned. “Sirius got his, too; this was just your turn.”

Remus held back a grimace, not loving the idea of being a direct point of contention between the two of them. “He was keeping me afloat all week,” he offered. “It wasn't personal, at all.”

“I know it wasn't, but he was still getting a lecture either way,” James said of it, sitting back in his chair. “And on that note, is there anything we can do for you?”

Remus wet his lower lip. “Sirius said he brought you up to speed?” he checked.

“He did,” James replied. “I'm asking you, though.”

Remus sat with that for a long moment. “There isn't much,” he relayed, when he found his voice again. “The appointment's further down the line than we'd like it to be; it's on the tail end of July, and it's looking like there will be a lot of trial and error until I get in that room and hear what my options are. So, a lot of patience in the meantime is really all I can ask for.”

“Never been very good at that, but I'll give it one hell of a shot,” James traded him, aiming a smile at him that the sun caught at just the right angle to strengthen it.

“I don't want any of you tripping over yourselves because of this,” Remus instilled. “It's going to be a long couple of months, but it'll feel longer if you're all walking around on eggshells around me, so maybe a little ground control could go a long way? If you wouldn't mind spreading the word around a bit, with Peter especially.”

James thankfully gave a sagely nod for that. “I've got you.”

Remus nodded and forwarded James an uneasy smile. “Thanks,” he said. “I know you hate it when any of us are fighting, and I thought the appearance of Dora and all the wedding talk was helping to reign Sirius back in, but hopefully after a full night's sleep he won't be so fired up about it anymore.”

James gave a weighed sigh through his nose. “I get where they're both coming from,” he put up. “There was a lot of panic, I don't imagine Peter expected him to walk in right then and there, just like how I don't imagine Sirius expected to come home to all of that, and to that, I don't imagine I'd be much of a peach if it'd been Lily on the ground, but I'd like to think that I'd have drilled my point home and moved along, but that's just not Sirius.”

Remus gave a half-nod, lifting a hand to drag it over his face as he pictured what he remembered of the scene, and ended up making a pained noise behind his hand. “There was so much going on,” he mused. “So much noise, yelling — and I'm not sure anymore, how much of the yelling is me versus anyone else when I'm in the thick of it.”

“From what I hear, a lot of it's yours,” James served him, a bit too circumstantial for the situation, he felt, and Remus resolved to bite down on his irritation before it could fester into something bigger; he'd very well asked James to treat the whole thing as if it were customary. “It'll smooth over soon enough, Sirius is in guard-dog mode, but that's about as much as any of us should have expected; he'd have gone off if anyone had done that to you, it just happened to be Peter — but for the record, I'm glad he stopped you.”

Remus gave a tight nod for that and pitched his brain somewhere else, eager to move past what might have happened if Peter hadn't intervened in time. “How did you manage to read the obit in time?” he raised, and felt odd about the topic switch when James blinked a few times at him. “I can't figure out how you even knew to look.”

James gave out a puff of a breath, his eyes widening. “I didn't know to," he offered candidly. "I read every single thing I could get my hands on in that house, and I mean that; I found an old book of Sudoku and did every single puzzle in there, had an extensive look through a pile of National Geographics I found in the den, and Lily's mum's got about four-thousand issues of Cosmo so you better believe I read some of those; anything and everything, just to not have to talk to the Dursleys for as long as I could hold out.”

Remus's lips quirked. “Well, hope you got an education out of that last one, at least.”

“Oh, you've no idea,” James returned. “Aside from all that, her dad's still subscribed to the city paper out there and that was one of the first things I sunk myself into; read that thing cover to cover, and, well... there she was.”

Remus gave a nod, then shook his head, feeling that the whole thing landed on the spookier side of intuition. “Strange you picked it up that day precisely?” he raised.

“Yeah, a little,” James conceded, lifting his shoulders for it a second or two later. “Perhaps it's that the bond we've forged has a lot more to do with the metaphysical than we even knew.”

“I'm beginning to think so, yeah,” Remus gave him. “Did you two talk about it, then?”

James considered him for a moment or two. “About five percent was 'ding dong, the witch is dead,' and the other ninety-five pretty well everything else but that, which is very him,” he said incidentally. “Quite refreshing to hear, on my end of the line.”

Remus fiddled with the mug in his hand. “Were you worried he wouldn't be like that?”

“I don't really know what it was I was expecting,” James traded him. “The moment I read her name, I flashed right back to the funeral and the way he looked after it, but I don't know why I expected the same this time around? She's not Reg, so by that alone, I should have expected him to pick up and move along as he was, but I needed someone there with him in case he didn't do that.”

Remus ran his right thumb over the face of his mug before going for a substantial sip. “He said something to me that night that spooked me,” he offered. “He asked if I thought he was in the wrong for being glad she was gone — except ask isn't really the right word; he more told me that's what I was thinking.”

James sized Remus up for a moment. “He say that?”

“There was more colour to it,” Remus said carefully, “but yes, the sentiment was that I thought he was heartless for thinking 'good riddance.'”

A few beats passed between them where Remus simply waited for James to say something. “S'pose he thought that's what anyone would think,” he raised, then paused short, almost as if he were playing his own words back to himself. “You told him you weren't thinking that, right?”

“Of course I did,” Remus echoed. “I don't think that.”

“Then you did it, you're good,” James said of it, blinking over at him. “Obviously it's bullshit that he'd even let himself think something like that, but he was bound to, wasn't he? He's going to think he's expected to be completely distraught over this, but the people that would think something like that probably had mothers who'd move mountains for them, so our job here, being a pair of blokes who did have decent mum's puttering about the house being sweeties, is not to hold him accountable for drawing the short straw on that one.”

Remus trained his gaze toward the far side of the terrace, but he lost focus on it quickly. He knew there were stark differences between his and Sirius's upbringings, there was no way around it; Remus had never been afraid to come home, never had to dodge flying hands or boots launched across a room, and for that, he'd had it easy. He knew Sirius found the way he and his parents leaned on each other to be so foreign that it looked like a pleasant, Norman Rockwell-level image to him, but that image looked nothing like the one Remus had been inside of, where the line of responsibility blurred so thoroughly the three of them, they were one and the same at different points. He hadn't quite come across another family quite like his, not in all his years, and for that, he could understand how odd it looked from the outside, but was that something he could have helped?

He couldn't have helped that responsibility shifted between the three of them in cycles so it certainly looked evenly distributed, that some of the time he would have to pick up the pieces where the other two couldn't or didn't have the time to, that he took on that role more times than he'd want to count, that his own incapability of failing either of them had been thick as soup in the air, unspoken since before he could even walk or talk; nothing about his upbringing looked anything like a Norman Rockwell painting when he looked at it, and yet, that was likely all Sirius was going to see when he looked at them.

“I hate that he thought I would think it,” Remus said minutely. “I know I didn't see even the half of what it was like for him, but I was there, I saw some of it in that church, and I know I made a piss poor mistake with Reg, but I thought I'd done OK, made up for some of it at least—”

“I really think he was looking for validation there, Remus,” James came in, cutting him straight off, and Remus reluctantly blinked his eyes back into focus. “We're the ones he's actually going to care whether we think he's a heartless monster and if he let a thought like that in and I wasn't there to snuff it out, maybe he just really needed to hear it from you.”

Remus's eyes widened behind Sirius's sunglasses. “But I didn't do that part right; I told him he knew I didn't think it," he insisted. "I didn't like that he insinuated that, and it's no fucking wonder he won't talk to me about it; I went and threw that back at him for even suggesting it—”

“Remus, he thinks the sun shines out of your arse,” James very nearly snapped, and Remus froze over it. “He's been staring at you like you're the last glass of water on the planet for months now and I haven't seen a difference since I've been back, so whatever went on between you two, he's not holding onto it tightly, alright?”

Remus took his lower lip into his mouth and forced a nod, wishing he could see even half of what James and Andromeda seemed to be able to without an iota of doubt. “He looked so small at first,” he offered. “It got easier once he looked like himself again, but then he went and three-sixtied in the same night and it's been all go-go-go for him since, and I want him to enjoy what he has, of course I do, but I don't want him to hit a wall before he even sees it coming either.”

“I know,” James said of it, after a moment's pass, bringing his right hand up through his hair and making it stick out at odd ends more than it typically did. “I get it. And even after knowing him all this time, I still haven't been able to work out whether he does that more for everybody else's sake or his own, so I just — remove the blame whenever he starts taking it on and I keep him above water; that's my job here.”

James gave him a tight smile and Remus took a few seconds to ruminate over that, wondering if the answer might've been a morbid combination of the two, but that response seemed moot now; any response seemed moot just then, if he were honest, and Remus had never been more of a fan of Peter's notorious sense of timing than when he announced through the screen on the door that coffee's on for it certainly gave him a form of an exit.

“I ought to wake Sleeping Beauty,” he raised, pushing his seat back from the table and gathering up his things.

James leaned back in his seat, stretching his arms high above his head. “Time?” he asked, his voice tight from the stretch.

Remus paused his task to press the button on the side of his mobile. “About ten,” he relayed, sticking his mobile into the pocket of his housecoat along with his book. “When do you start?”

“Not 'til eleven,” James gave him, letting go of his stretch and reaching to pick up Remus's teapot and relieving him of the balancing act he was trying to perform. “Sirius is right; you really can't ask for help.”

Remus sent a bland noise over his shoulder and went on inside with James not far behind him. He gave a quick smile to Peter sitting at the table, poured himself the last of his tea when James relinquished hold of his teapot, and wandered out of the room and on through the flat with his mug in hand. He let himself back into Sirius's room, moved around to his side of the bed, and stared down at him dozing, and the places his brain went to, the roll that his stomach took to were harsh; he saw flying hands and boots taking that serene face below him and warping it, saw wallops to the back of the head, twisted wrists, moments he'd been made privy to in that church, all the years it'd have had to go on for Sirius to shout himself hoarse that horrid Friday in November.

He flinched, feeling the image of the only person he'd managed to hate on sight coming on, cycling through to the withering stare she sent Sirius's way from near the pulpit, onto the pride she managed to stand with even with the ferocity of the venom she spat at her only surviving son; all of it culminated into one, stark feeling that good riddance was right, indeed.

He shook his head clear, straightened out his neck, and refocused on Sirius, but watching him snoozing easily made it that much more difficult to interrupt. He took a sip of tea, weighed his options, and decided he didn't necessarily have to take a lift over to his flat; he could make it there by bus, feed the cat and doll out pats, and still make it to work in time to see Lily before his shift. Easy-peasy.

He went to hang his housecoat back on its hook, changed into something acceptable for work as quietly as he could, and went for the desk on the far side of the double room once he was dressed. He picked up a half-finished pad of sticky notes he'd brought over at some point over the term and penned a quick note explaining his disappearance. He crossed back over to the other side, gave a look over the area to find a spot to stick it on, and smirked as his gaze lingered on Sirius's right shoulder; he'd at least see it fairly soon after waking up that way.

He tried to be slick about it but that didn't work out for him at all; Sirius blinked his eyes open the moment he took his hand back and Remus clicked his tongue. “No,” he mused, forlorn. “Sleep.”

Sirius made some more sense of the situation, glanced around a bit, and zoned in on the hot pink note attached to his shoulder. He pulled it off, turned it around, and narrowed his eyes as he gave it a read. “Rude,” he said, tossing the note aside.

“Not rude,” Remus corrected. “You looked cute.”

Sirius gave a minute hum, stretched his arms out long, and made grabby hands toward him. Remus caught a budding smile between his teeth and stuck his tea on the bedside table before moving to kneel beside the bed. He crossed his arms on the edge of the mattress while Sirius wormed himself over toward him and eventually pressed his face up against Remus's right arm. “I said I'd take you in,” he put up.

“You don't have to,” Remus said, reaching to cover the back of Sirius's head with his left hand. “You missed out on a lot of sleep doing all of that research for me, which is good because it'll count towards your final grade, but right now, you could absolutely sleep in longer.”

Sirius huffed a laugh against Remus's arm but kept to it. “I'm taking you.”

Remus gave a relenting sigh and leaned in to press a kiss to the top of Sirius's head. “I'll start a coffee for you?” he offered.

Remus caught Sirius's bright hum and made to push himself off of the bed, but paused short when Sirius pressed sleepy kisses to every available spot on Remus's arm that he could reach in his flattened position; Remus gave out a quiet, grateful sigh through his nose, putting the image to memory for a harder time.

“Milk or no milk?” he asked, rising to his feet.

“Surprise me,” Sirius replied, stretching long on the bed.

No milk, then. Remus plucked his tea off of the side table and drank the rest of it as he headed back through the flat. He picked out the strongest roast Sirius had at his disposal, gauged that there was enough water left in the kettle for a cup, and flicked the switch to reheat it. He headed over to the sink to give his dishes a wash while James and Peter seemed to be giving Tango treats for just about anything.

Remus glanced over his shoulder after the fourth treat was administered. “We're working on 'shake' at the moment, so perhaps keep in with that?” he suggested, pitching it over the sound of the taps running.

James pointed to his ear bemusedly. “Sorry, can't hear you?”

“Oh sure,” Remus returned, facing forward again.

He was finished with his dishes and just pouring the water for Sirius's coffee when he heard Sirius's feet padding down the hallway. “Where'd I leave my Docs?”

Remus gave a thought to the question and quite soon remembered his near-fatal incident with one of them. “Out back,” he called back to him.

Sirius appeared in the doorway seconds later in nothing more than his flannel trousers, slipping up beside Remus at the counter and leaning in to place a peck on his cheek. “Merci bein,” he said.

Remus leaned into it as he pressed down on the French press, flashed him a smile, and brought a mug down from the cupboard while Sirius swivelled around and honed in on Peter specifically. “Why are you still here?”

“Oi,” James called out, waving his cereal spoon around in the air. “That's not cute anymore.”

“Good thing I'm not trying to be cute,” Sirius returned, trudging to the screen door and heading through it.

Peter shook his head. “Nothing for it, he's going to be mad at me for years to come,” he maintained, reaching for his mug.

Remus sent Peter a plain frown over his shoulder. “No, he won't, Pete,” he instilled, pushing down on the French press.

Peter turned in his seat to face Remus better. “No, you didn't see it,” he insisted. “He had the Angry Eyes on and he keeps shooting them at me whenever he remembers just how mad he is—"

“Pete, remember breathing?” James cut in. “We like breathing.”

Peter didn't seem to think much of the concept. “I didn't know what else to do, Remus.”

“I know you didn't,” Remus insisted, for what felt like the millionth time.

“It was like a mad-house in here,” Peter went on, flying his hands out in front of him.

Sirius came zooming back through the door and past Peter's chair, his Docs tucked between his left arm and his side. “Oh, that's it, keep digging the hole deeper—”

A thread in Remus's already tense stomach stretched thin and snapped over how quickly Peter recoiled into the table to appear smaller. “Sirius,” he said. “Room.”

He hadn't entirely meant for it to come out sounding so much like a command, but James's eyes took on a whole new shape and light before he trumpeted a resounding oooh toward Sirius, stopping him short with his hand frozen in mid-reach for his coffee, where the room held incredibly still save for his quick glance between Remus and the French press.

Remus clicked his tongue. “Take it with you, then,” he huffed, leaving the kitchen.

He waited for Sirius in his room, perched on the edge of the bureau with his right ankle crossed over his left one and his arms crossed over his chest. It wasn't very long before he heard the patter of Sirius's feet along the floorboards followed by a thwump that indicated the Docs had been dropped by the front door, and a few moments later, Sirius came through his open doorway, drinking from the mug in his hand.

He headed for his bed and took a seat on the foot of it, facing Remus with a rather sweet blink. “Going to teach me a lesson?” he asked.

Remus left his flat expression on. “How long are you going to keep this up?”

Sirius smirked around another gulp of coffee, lowering his mug to showcase an easy expression while he lifted his shoulders. “As long as I like.”

Remus gave out a tight sigh. “If your goal was to get me wound up, then congratulations and please stop.”

“That wasn't totally my goal, but if it ends up happening then it's more of a bonus,” Sirius said, lifting his mug again and gesturing toward him with it. “What's the saying? 'It's not the destination, but the huffing we did along the way?'”

Remus just barely held onto a huff. “What would you have done in his place?” he pressed.

Sirius lowered his mug while his eyebrows went the opposite direction, which meant Remus was now hurtling toward a disadvantage. “Pretty sure I have been in his place and still managed to refrain from throwing you around like a rag doll, so I don't think it's unfair that I expect the same from our friends,” he replied.

Remus had to push to speak past the effect those expertly plucked eyebrows had on him. “He didn't do that, Sirius.”

“Yes, he did,” Sirius returned within a beat. He shook his head and reached down to stick his mug on the floor, which usually meant he was going to need his hands free for demonstration. “He's not getting a high-five for this and if he ever refers to you like an inpatient again I'm really going to lose it on him, so for now, he can keep kissing the ground we walk on and I'll see how I feel in a few days.”

“Days? He shouldn't have to beg for your forgiveness; he didn't do anything to you, did he?” Remus raised. Sirius fixed him with a fierce stare that had Remus wilting in a way that took his whole body with it. “He was trying to stop me and I wasn't making it easy for him; he had the right to call it like it is when I do look a hell of a lot like an inpatient when I'm in the middle of one.”

Sirius scoffed. “Don't you go listening to him?”

“It's not only him,” Remus insisted. “I can hear when one's happening, Sirius; it wasn't just him, it was the people on the street, the cabbie, everyone in that waiting room, the security guards, the nurses, the whole of the staff thinking I was in the middle of some mental break, and who can blame them when that's exactly what it looked like?”

A tight laugh burst from Sirius. “I can,” he said, as if there was nothing else to it. “No one has the right to touch you like that, not rando bystanders, not those guards, nurses, Peter, anybody; if we were out walking and a rogue paint can fell from a twelve-story building and hit you in the head, that paint can would be the enemy.”

Remus frowned and took to worrying at his lower lip; he could hear echoes of Sirius's voice Monday night, all the supremely colourful ways he told well-meaning strangers to keep their hands off him as if the echoes were in the room with the two of them, and Remus moved from the edge of the bureau to the bed, avoiding accidentally kicking the coffee over and sinking down on Sirius's left.

“I'm sorry you had to sit there through all of that,” he gave him, curling his hands in his lap. “It can't be easy to watch it and not be able to stop it, but it can't be easy for strangers to contend with either; it's a flight or fight situation, they're either going to freeze up because they don't know how to help or they'll try to intervene because they don't know how else to help, and if I'm acting like a fucking madman while they're trying to keep me down, then I—”

He trailed off at Sirius's look of warning. “You're in unimaginable pain,” he dropped pointedly. “Anyone with a lick of sense would be able to tell the fucking difference.”

“Then maybe we have to start treating people like they haven't any sense at all and give them a bit of a break,” Remus posed. “The nurses were just doing their jobs, but if they didn't know quite what they were looking at, then how are we supposed to expect randos to?”

Sirius worked his jaw and ended up reaching down to pick up his mug and knock back some more coffee, which was as much a sign that Remus still had the floor as it would've been if Sirius had stated it. He swallowed around his dry throat, lifted his legs off of the floor to cross them under him, and turned to face Sirius sidelong. “Maybe there's an easier way to do this,” he said, reaching to poke Sirius's right knee. “At least for our friends; I don't see us making another ER trip if we can help it—” He paused as Sirius let out a loud pfft, shaking his head once to echo it, “—so guards, randos, we can worry less about, but for the sake of our friends, maybe it'll be easier on all of us if I just kept to mine for now.”

Sirius made a sound as if Remus's suggestion was ludicrous. “And what, never leave yours?” he raised. "That's not going to help at all."

“Obviously I'll have to leave it, but this isn't my space,” Remus maintained, pulling patience out of thin air. “I'm inserting myself into yours, and in turn, the rest of you have to make room for this, too, and that's not fair; I don't want to put anyone else through having to make a call like Peter had to, not again.”

Sirius reached down to stick his mug on the floor, moved to match Remus's stance, and shifted closer. “Peter just needs to learn he's not on 'WWE Smackdown,' but James and Lily are going to be fine about this,” he said of it, sounding assured as ever. “You don't have to go hiding away for their sake—”

“We don't know how they'll handle it,” Remus countered. “James is playing both sides right now, but who knows how he'll fare when one comes around, same with Lily. I shouldn't even be around any of you when it's happening, I could hurt one of you; Pete's lucky I didn't slug him because I really, really wanted to right about then.”

“You're not going to hurt any of us,” Sirius insisted, moving his hands over the top of Remus's and oh, they were so warm. He was always so warm. “Most you've done is try to wiggle out from underneath someone and you can hardly be blamed for that.”

Remus breathed a long sigh through his nose. “I just don't see another way around it,” he put it. “I don't want them seeing me like that; it's not my best look.”

Sirius smirked, just a bit. “Fuck 'em, then.”

Remus curled in and dropped his head down to press his forehead against the hands covering his own. “No, see, that wasn't my conclusion."

“Too bad, it's mine,” Sirius said, a smile audibly breaking through. “I'm not having you turning into some sort of hermit and disappearing on me; we've a momentous summer ahead of us and your role in that is irreplaceable, so the clusters can fuck themselves and our friends can, too; I'll kick everybody out if you don't want them here for it, say the word.”

“You can't kick James out of his own flat,” Remus implored, lifting his head and narrowly missing Sirius's chin in the process.

Sirius's lips quirked as Remus reached up to grab a gentle hold on his chin, seeking pardon for the bonk they just barely managed to avoid. “He can bloody well take a walk,” he maintained. “Or, he can go over to Lily's; practice for when they're an old, boring, married couple, mm? We're really just a pair of self-sacrificing blokes here.”

Remus felt the makings of a genuine smile forming, appreciating the small reminder that bright spots still shone through the clouds he felt hovering over him, and as if knowing that he'd flashed to the topic of bright spots for the moment, Sirius lifted a hand to Remus's cheek and reminded him of the vast light source sitting right in front of him.

Remus spoke when he was certain he could manage it without a waver in his voice. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too,” Sirius sent him, squinting a little.

“But,” Remus added.

“I assumed there was one,” Sirius tacked on.

“You've got to go easier on Pete,” Remus bid, and Sirius gave out an agonized groan. “He's sorry, Sirius.”

“Yeah, I heard him, and read the fucking fourteen texts he sent me about it,” Sirius heaved out. He scooted up the bed a little, stretched out long enough to reach for his pack of cigarettes on his bedside table, and moved back to reclaim his post in front of Remus, placing his ashtray between the two of them. “What I want to know,” he raised, pausing to light up, “is how he got you on the ground.”

“You saw how he got me there,” Remus said of it. “Plus, have you seen me?”

Remus displayed his hands along the length and width of his torso. “Yeah, you're a twig, fine,” Sirius allowed, letting his first haul out, “but he had a point; trying to move you around while you're in it is like trying to shift anti-matter around, and he managed to get you down and keep you there? Has he been lifting while we weren't looking?”

“Adrenaline can do some things,” Remus said for the case of Peter's fortitude. He knicked Sirius's cigarette to sneak himself a haul, but then he wound up smirking around it, letting his puff out and biting down at the right corner of his lower lip. “Come to think of it, you've held me up for an impressive amount of time off of adrenaline alone, so you ought to know what kind of power it can yield.”

Remus truly did love the moments when he could watch Sirius's pupils dilate up close. “If you want me to take you right now, Remus; just say the word,” he raised, walking two fingers from Remus's right knee up toward his thigh.

Remus set a halting hand on the one walking up his leg. “I need to get going soon,” he maintained.

“You took us here,” Sirius objected. “This was you.”

“I promised I'd meet her beforehand,” Remus insisted.

Sirius gave a bit of a sigh. “You should just stay here."

“I would if I could,” Remus gave him.

“No, I mean, come stay here while this is going on,” Sirius clarified. “You're here enough as is, what's a few more of your things in the grand scheme?”

Remus didn't know that his heart could swell and shrink in such a short variable of time, nor did he know his brain could feel as if it were expanding and compressing in one go. “Sorry?”

“Well, do you want to draft up a pro/con list?” Sirius raised, lifting his right hand for a count. “You're here half if not more of the time, your favourite teapot's in my kitchen and not going anywhere as far as I can tell, and if we're going to be dealing with more clusters then I can keep a much better eye on you here, you bring the cat right on over here, and you wouldn't have to pay a thing.”

Remus thought he'd been doing a fair job at keeping his expression even while his body whirred, but his face must have shown some aversion to the last point for Sirius gave him a plain look and nodded toward the hall. “Trust Fund Boy is hardly going to care whether you put up money for this and it's not as if I'm going to either,” he maintained. “I've a strong sense you'll insist on paying your fair share, but I'll remind you that we're getting the deal of a lifetime here and if we split it three ways it'd be still less than what you're paying now, and you love it here.”

Sirius could sell junk to just about anyone, but even knowing that all too well, Remus took an almost involuntary look around the room he'd come to consider his home away from home, inside of a flat that seemed to exist on a different plane than just about everything else.

“Of course I do,” Remus gave openly.

“I know, I've literally heard you breathe out in relief when you've walked in the door,” Sirius said of it, smiling all the way through and bringing Remus's eyes back onto him. “I love your little flat, I do, but it's pretty clear that you don't love it so much, and I don't want you to just tolerate where you live because it's what you can afford that's close to your faculty building, I want you to love where you live.”

Remus breathed in tightly, finding it much more difficult to remain steadfast when he felt as vulnerable as he did. “I can't up and leave mine,” he said.

Sirius gave out a ponderous hum. “Your lease is probably just about up,” he mentioned. “Seems to me you could.”

“It's still an expense I really shouldn't be putting money toward when I've already got enough to save for,” Remus raised.

“Good thing your boyf's got deep pockets, isn't it?” Sirius served him, waggling his eyebrows.

Remus gave him an imploring look. “I can't borrow any more from you,” he attested.

“Then we won't consider it borrowing,” Sirius said simply. “It's not like you have a furnished penthouse to move into here; it's not going to break the bank, I promise you, and imagine not talking shit about the place you live? Imagine living in a place where you can actually rely on for decent heat in the winter.”

“It's still my flat,” Remus said, feeling a note of protectiveness over the hole in the wall he'd found. He couldn't call it home when he was sitting in what felt like his, but that didn't stop his body from whirring any. “It works for right now; it's well-situated, close to work.”

“I mean, you travel to and from here quite a bit,” Sirius brought up. “And that isn't just because your thirst for me is so great that no mere bus ride can get in the way of it, it's got a lot to do with this flat as a whole.”

“Poetic, thank you,” Remus said of it.

Sirius lifted his hands with a light laugh. “The moral is, it's a bit of a trek but you do it regardless because the reward is incredible and well worth the ride over here,” he maintained. “And, hi there, you've got a built-in transportation device right here if you don't want to bother with the bus.”

“I'm not going to rely on you to drive me everywhere,” Remus put up, making a face at that.

Sirius flattened his palms out in a calming gesture. “Alright, I see you're handling the con section of the list, but I think what you're doing right now is just focusing on the funny angles of the puzzle pieces rather than the complete sense that the whole picture makes when the pieces are lined up properly.”

“I have to,” Remus instilled. “What about Dorcas? I can't switch the plan up on her; she's counting on me here.”

Sirius's eyes lidded at that before he brought his right hand up to rub his thumb and forefinger over them. “You're not going to be the villain if plans have to change,” he said carefully, lowering his hand. “I think we both know that she's rather skilled at adapting when it comes to you, so maybe we can give her a little more credit here?”

“That wasn't necessary,” Remus said plainly.

“Well, I'm not wrong either, am I?” Sirius said, just as plainly.

Remus shook his head. “This isn't a good idea, Sirius."

Sirius took his eyes off of him and set them on the ground, reaching down by the foot of the bed for his mug. He took the dregs of it in a quick swig and held the empty mug in his lap, his previous demeanour replaced with a blank canvas. “What's this?” Remus asked, eyeing the whole display.

Sirius lifted his shoulders stiffly. “I'm going to have a rebuttal for every excuse you're going to make against this, but there isn't much point in that, is there,” he raised. “You made up your mind somewhere around the first few seconds after the offer was even on the table, so you're not going to hear any of what I have to say.”

Remus stared openly at Sirius, right affronted. “It's too soon to be talking about any of this.”

Sirius's face lit up there, shining the only smile of his that Remus truly hated. “There it is,” he said, faux-fondly. “Took a while to make it there, but it's good we're there now.”

Remus tore his gaze away from Sirius's professional smile, knowing he had seconds to decide between accepting the offer to avoid a problem or removing himself from the situation altogether.

Remus chose the latter. “I really have to head out,” he said, and Sirius flung his left hand out, plainly illustrating where the door was.

Remus swallowed and moved off of the bed, keeping his eyes down as he let himself out of Sirius's room and talking himself up while he walked through the flat to say his goodbyes to the others. He moved into the kitchen as James was up out of his seat and giving a resounding stretch, though mid-way through it he glanced to the time on the stove and jolted before he booked it right past Remus, shouting his goodbyes to every occupant of the flat as a whole as he bounded toward the door.

Remus looked to the time, saw it was about ten minutes to eleven and James's starting time, and gave Peter a smile that didn't feel so forced after a performance like that one. “Are you hanging out here, then?” he asked, eyeing Peter flipping through Remus's book and trying so very hard to look fine with the fact that his prime method of distraction was currently in someone else's hands.

“I don't start until three,” Peter offered. “I might give him another try, what do you think; is it worth it?”

“Wait a little bit,” Remus suggested.

Peter nodded tightly. “I will lay low, then.”

Remus gave him one in return and forgoed taking the book back from him. “Just give him some time, OK?” he raised. "He's nearly there."

Peter gave him a minute nod for that and it didn't take Remus legs very long to get himself back to the other end of the flat, but passing Sirius's open door without a sound took more out of him than he'd have liked to admit. He kept it down as he slipped his shoes on, but once he let himself out of the front door, the most objectively pathetic noise escaped his throat. He stopped at the top of the stairs to rub at his eyes, wiped at his cheeks until they felt dry, and pushed down Sirius's aviators, capping them over his eyes. He went down through the lobby and pushed out of the door and on toward the bus stop, pulling his mobile out to gauge his time frame, and relaxed about that part at least; even with the bus ride he was now in for, he had plenty of time to stop by his flat and go see Lily.

Once the number '3' turned up, he took a seat closer to the back of the bus. Over the course of his trip, every now and again, the dull vibrations of the bus moving along the route faked him out a few times, letting him think that a text had come in only to wind up with his heart in his throat before it'd sink back down when he'd find nothing on his home screen.

He ended up turning his mobile off to avoid any more fake-outs along the way, which helped some, but only by a little. He'd never been essentially booted out of someone's flat before; that was new. He'd been essentially dumped at someone else's home before, but that he chose not to equate with today, mostly for the fact that he didn't even want to think about whether this was two for two and tugged the image of Sirius planting tiny, half-asleep kisses over his arm not all that long ago; even with his unceremonious exit, that image was something to hold tight to.

Instead of festering on that, Remus made plans for his day: what he'd like to cover over the course of his training shift, how he was going to behave during his performance review. The fact that it was Lily who would be facilitating it helped, but he wasn't sure how the two of them would tackle any negative feedback that might have to come his way, but in the end, he told himself to treat it a little like it was his interview for the job in the first place; be polite, receptive, pepper in a couple of jokes here or there to cut through any nerves and tension on his end and hopefully ease Lily on her own end— that plan had worked out well for him before.

He looked up from his book a stop before his own and tucked it away, pushing himself to stand and pulling the cord above his window to sound the alarm. He waited by the back door until the bus pulled to a stop and gave a thank-you to the driver before stepping down onto the sidewalk.

From there, it was all about checking the next item off his list; feed the cat and doll out pats. Next, it was about his legs getting him to work, which they did in not very much time given his flat's convenient distance from his workplace. He made it to the front terrace which a likely palpable sigh, passed various patrons on his way in through the shop door, and only just side-stepped a toddler running for the door with his mother following right behind him. He reached back and held the door open for the small parade that went through it and then made a beeline for the backroom, waving to Emmeline and Ian as he moved up behind the counter.

He smiled at the new face joining their team, headed down the hall for the backroom, and strolled in to find Lily at the chair by the computer in the back, speaking over the cordless phone. She glanced over her shoulder as he moved past her chair and held up her forefinger, and Remus waved her off with a quick smile, and took a seat at the round table nearby, picking the chair closest to Lily's set up as Lily winded the call down.

“How's she doing?” he asked once the call was over, nodding toward the front.

“Good, so far,” Lily offered, sticking the cordless down on the desk and swivelling around in her office chair. “I've got her on ten to four, so Ian has her covered for now, and I figure both you and Elise can tag-team her for the rest of it.”

“Sure thing,” Remus said, removing his sunglasses and sticking them on the table.

“How're you feeling?” Lily asked, reaching back for her coffee cup on the desk.

Remus nodded, aiming a smile at her while he tried to ignore her gaze lifting to his brow. “Slept well,” he said. “That always helps.”

Lily nodded, meeting Remus's eye then. “You look like you did,” she forwarded.

Remus tipped his head to her. “No bags, then; good.”

Lily smiled around a sip of whatever it was inside the white and green cup in her hand, tapped the side of it with her nails as she swallowed, and gave a bright smile on the other side of it. “You'll never guess who was up until three in the morning devouring everything and anything she could get her hands on about cluster headaches.”

The speed at which Remus's smile petered off was unparalleled. “Lily, no,” he chided.

“I know,” she said, tossing her free hand up in appeal. “I know you've already got a mum and you don't need another one, but it's in my bones, Remus, I can't help it; I worry about you and once I started, I couldn't stop.”

“Alright, thank you, but no more late-night scouring,” Remus conditioned. "It'll read a hundred times worse with night brain, trust me on that.”

Lily nodded and watched him for a few moments longer, her mouth pulled into such a deep frown that the words that followed were hardly what Remus thought was coming. “I'm so proud of you.”

“Oh, no no,” Remus declines, shaking his head once. “Don't be.”

Lily let out a small laugh that bordered on incredulous. “How can I not?” she raised. “I found this thread where everyone in it was sharing all about how they first came to terms with all of it for the sake of the person who'd made the post, who was feeling down about it all, and they were all so supportive of each other that it really was the sweetest thing to read; I saw a lot of people having difficulties with it and I got a little misty-eyed thinking of how good you were on the phone, you're handling it so well.”

Remus's stomach took a remarkably fast pitfall. Lily's sad smile dropped off right quick, so Remus was, in fact, not the only speedy person in the room, but the way she shrank back didn't help Remus's state whatsoever. He breathed a tight breath against the praise he didn't believe he deserved, not with the way he'd been acting, but it felt as if there wasn't enough air in the room anymore, as if it were getting smaller by the second. Remus looked around to be sure that it wasn't closing in on him and wrung his hands out in his lap before smoothing them over the tops of his thighs to remind himself he was solid, but pins and needles broke out all over them despite his efforts.

“I'm not handling this well at all,” Remus said. “I'm not doing any better than any of them; I could barely get out of bed yesterday.”

“You must have been exhausted,” Lily offered, but Remus refused to catch the ball she lobbed at him.

“Sirius had to lure me out of his room and if he hadn't done that, I wouldn't have left it, no way,” he instilled. “I stayed in there the entire night, all morning, all afternoon; while he was out busting his arse and doing a million things to help me, I couldn't get out of bed. A fucking coward's what I am.”

“You're not,” Lily replied, shaking her head once. “The fact that you made it out of that bed is proof enough.”

Remus heard the words, he did, but all he ended up doing was serving her more muddled ones of his own. “He did everything in his power and then some to get me results, even though it's fucking futile for him to even bother,” he attested. “I don't know how I thought I'd have the luxury to make all of these plans as if something wasn't going to come along and stick a wrench in it; there's no way I can follow through with any of them now.”

“Of course you can,” Lily returned, alarmed. “This doesn't mean you can't enjoy everything you've planned for.”

“I can't go, Lily,” Remus implored, wringing out his hands again. “I can't go even home anymore if these things are going to come with me, but I certainly can't leave the country.”

“Why can't you?” Lily countered. “What happened to all you said last night? You're going to get a system going for you until you get professional help and then it'll all feel much more manageable.”

“Oh, we'll try,” Remus nodded. “Only, I'm not so sure what a makeshift list of possible home remedies are going to do for us, and no amount of tea-tree oil or whatever the fuck they'll suggest I take are going to stop a knockout and I've had two of those in less than a week — I thought I knew what a fifteen felt like and I was fucking wrong, and if I'm in for knockouts every time one comes on then I am fucked; I don't speak when they're that bad, I just scream and pummel into things and convince everyone around me that I've gone 'round the twist. Peter's afraid of me, did you hear?”

“OK, pause,” Lily bid. “Somebody has to tell me what happened with Peter.”

“Well, I was trying to kill the pain with Ugly Pot — not because I have a vendetta against it, I'd actually quite warmed to it, but I can barely see out the good eye when I'm in one and it was the only thing close by that was hard, so I grabbed it and Peter had to do something to stop me 'cause I wasn't going to stop,” Remus spouted. “And I know I tried to use the floor instead because I was suddenly tackled onto it and that was there and hard and could do the job in a pinch, and when he held me down and stopped that from happening, I tried to use shards of the Ugly Pot because that thing didn't survive the fall it took at all, so what else was he going to do but keep stopping me and keep holding my arms behind my back? I can't believe I put him through that.”

Lily's hand made it splayed over her chest by the time it took Remus to finish spouting. “Mhm,” he affirmed, pointing to it. “I'll put you all through that, I'll put my mum and dad through it, and they can't handle something like this, not now; things are just starting to feel normal for them again.”

“Don't go thinking like that," Lily pressed. "There's plenty of time before July to get a better handle on this.”

“Well, I'll see them before the appointment so I don't know about that,” Remus returned. “Say you're right, say that works out, what about the fall? I've gotten spoiled having Sirius there when I'm having one — he was working for the recent one, but he came in at the best and worst time possible and never left my side for the rest of it, and the one on Monday? He was there right up until they wouldn't let him stay with me anymore, but he still waited for me; he wouldn't leave me there, but I'm not going to have him when I'm traipsing about the cobblestones, am I? The stress of it will be too much, I'll be in a new city where I know nobody all over again, trying to balance school, work, and now these, my grades are going to go right down the drain so goodbye to A's at this point, it was nice knowing them, and oh, oh, on top of that, I told Dorcas she could stay at mine over the term so I wouldn't have to sublet and she could ditch her whistling roommate, but fuck me, I'm going to have to tell her she has to start looking for something else because mine isn't an option anymore.”

The sound of Lily's office chair scooting along the floor startled Remus into looking up, finding her much closer to him and reaching out to give him some sort of hug, but Remus shook his head rapidly. “See? Don't, I'm not a martyr, I'm a sham,” he attested. “I'm faking all of this happy-go-lucky shit and I'm not even doing it well; I'm horrible at this.”

Lily's face went through a wide array of emotions before she pulled him in for a hug anyway, providing quiet shushes and smooth rubs at his back for a full minute or so, rendering Remus into feeling like he were an estranged six-year-old, but shit, if it didn't help for the moment.

“Sirius asked me to move in,” he said quietly, needing to say it out loud.

Lily went and snapped back from him, her eyes wide, mouth hanging open before she shut it and rearranged her face quickly. “Someone's had a hell of a week,” she observed, rubbing at Remus's left knee. "And it's Wednesday."

“Did you hear that last bit?” Remus asked.

“Oh, no, I did,” Lily assured, her lips forming a smile that appeared quite coy despite all the churning going on in Remus's stomach. “Tamed a wild horse, you did.”

Remus shook his head, frowning. “He's doing this because he wants to keep an eye on me so I don't do something stupid when he isn't looking," he insisted. "That's not a reason to ask someone to move in; I could do something stupid anywhere, it doesn't matter if it's my flat or his.”

Remus stuttered on a breath as Lily's expression turned down, her gaze going to the bit of floor between her shoes to match it. “Do you think I should have said yes?” he asked.

Lily's gaze shot back up to him before she reached over and patted Remus's left knee twice. “Sweetie, I love you,” she said, patting him again once, “but I'm staying so far out of this one.”

“Please don't,” Remus urged. “I'm asking you.”

Lily gave him a pained look. “Remus, if I tell you what I'm thinking and he finds out—”

“He won't find out,” Remus said. “I rejected him five times over; he's not talking to me right now.”

“He'll talk to you again, believe me,” Lily said of it.

Remus breathed in and out, looked left then right, deciding this didn't mean that he couldn't say his piece. “You don't have to say anything, I just need to say that I can't move in,” he maintained. “Where is he going to go when he needs a breather? Where am I going to go? When he realizes he offered this out of some horrible combination of pity and fear that I'm going to crack my head against a countertop, he'll either drive himself into misery because he won't want to kick me out even though I'm the hardest to live with or, twist-ending, he will kick me out because that's half his rightful flat and then what will I have? I'd have given up my flat, and that'd leave me a bag of clothes, a cat, and a teapot to my name, that's it.”

Lily gave out a loaded breath and pressed down harder on Remus's knee. “Sweetie, don't do it unless you want to,” she put out. “That's it; that's all I'm going to say about it and if I'm asked, I'm denying everything.”

She brought her free hand up, mimed turning an invisible key at her mouth, and tossed the thing away for further illustration. Remus couldn't help a smile coming on, but it must have looked pitiful for Lily frowned and scooted her chair that much closer. “Let's work backwards, OK, only we're going to avoid the thing that'll get me throttled if I interfere any more than I've already done,” she maintained. “If, by some chance, you cannot go this fall, it will hurt, but Dorcas would hardly hold it against you for it? She's quite possibly the coolest person I've met aside from you four gits and that's a feat; she'll be fine, she's resourceful, and that's for the worst-case scenario, OK? We're not there yet, nowhere near it.”

Remus nodded, but he hardly felt pardoned. “Finding a place to work and a decent spot to live was already going to be tough acts to pull off, but my schooling's going to suffer here, too,” he put up. “Someone else ought to have my spot if I'm just going to waste it and barely coast by.”

“You'd never waste it,” Lily attested, sounding so assured that it made Remus want to shut it and leave it alone, but he was too far in for his mouth to listen to his head.

“Where am I going to find an employer who's going to take a chance on me?” he asked her, the room, the Earth herself. “I have to state that I have these from the start, don't I?”

Lily lifted a shoulder. “Don't,” she said, lifting one, coy brow.

“Lily,” Remus chided.

“What?” she laughed. “Fine, then state it up front; that doesn't necessarily mean someone won't take a chance on you.”

“I don't know what kind of employer wouldn't just roll onto the next available resume when they hear about these, even the prim and proper version of what they are,” Remus denied.

“Well, I wouldn't have,” Lily raised, tilting her head pointedly at the insinuation.

“We're friends, Lily,” Remus said. “Out there, I'm a nobody; I'll get stuck begging for coin on the tube.”

“Listen to me, please,” Lily urged. “You'll find work for someone who'd jump at the chance to have you, you're going to find a reasonable place to live, you're going to balance school, work, and these, and it will all work out.”

Remus rested his left elbow on his thigh and his chin in his hand, frowning as he tried to make the words digest. “I'm sorry I unloaded on you,” he said.

“That's OK, I'm going to need the favour returned one day,” Lily smirked, matching his stance with her right arm instead. “From a lot of what I read, you're not alone in feeling this way: it can feel like your whole life's been taken over, but the best you can do for yourself is to try to not let them take over every other aspect of your life and it's good to remember that you still deserve to have everything you set out to do without letting these things dictate your every step, so let's focus on the good that's coming your way instead.”

Remus tried to nod, but it felt stiff. He didn't know how he now had two people who had been able to stare at his situation from the outside and come up with the same action plan, but it had him feeling exhausted, small, and angrier with himself than even he knew what to do with. “You sound just like Sirius,” he said.

“High praise?” Lily checked.

Remus wasn't really sure just then, but after a few more beats he felt like scum for questioning it. “I've been such a prick to him,” he said. “He shouldn't have to put up with any of this, and if the clusters don't ruin us then I'm going to do that all my own because he's going to run out of patience with me.”

“Oh, this wasn't where I was going with that,” Lily offered frankly.

“Did you read about how many relationships fail because of these?” Remus asked. “I saw a ton of that; sometimes you luck out and you get a good one, but there are times you have a good one and it's still all too much for them; they can't give the support that's needed so they end up feeling trapped and helpless, and this could all blow up in my face if I’m not careful.”

Lily let out a puff of breath. “If anyone can handle something like this, it's him,” she instilled.

“Except it wasn't that long ago that you thought he'd bow out at the tiniest noise,” Remus pointed out.

“Yes, I'm aware, and I eat dirt every week that you two keep adding onto your count,” Lily returned. “Happily so if it means he's taking the two of you seriously, and it sounds like he really has been.”

“Yeah, and he's fucking infallible as usual,” Remus maintained. “He gets set on one idea, decides that's what's happening, and there's no room for questioning it. He did it with these things way back in October; he was absolutely convinced I had clusters after, what, watching a migraine go off the wall and looking the term up once? And of course, he got to be right about it.”

Remus gave a gesture to suggest he was so very stoked about that part, which garnered quite the smirk out of Lily. “He could have been wrong, though, but it’s like he never thought about that,” he went on. “And now, he's so far into the new plan he's cooked up that if I say anything to the contrary, he gets put off and I end up being the fussy one all over again; he's just, plan-plan-plan and I don't want to get my hopes up, but he won't hear any of it.”

Lily sighed through her nose, nodding slowly. “Watching him try to find a solution to a problem is right up there on the list of strangest things I've seen,” she forwarded.

She smirked to herself after that and then put Remus's context-less self out of his misery. “In his first few months with the company, bar two was on the fritz constantly and whenever the maintenance bloke would come round to fix it, Sirius would chat him up, ask him about what he was doing with the machine, getting details, and no one really thought much about it because Sirius can make conversation with a wall if properly motivated, but most of us thought he was just into the guy frankly,” she put up, waving her hand plainly for that. “Turns out, no, what he was really doing was soaking up information, and so, bar one started acting up one day down the line, and Sirius just went ahead and took it apart himself—”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Remus cut in.

“—Mmhm,” Lily affirmed, reaching back for her coffee. “Had himself a look at the innards of the machine, decided he knew what he was doing, and the worst part about it was, whatever he did — and I can't tell you what that was because I was off trying to call a professional in for the repairs — but it worked and for a week straight, he strutted about the place refusing to answer to anything other than 'the Toolman.'”

Remus burst out a quick laugh, bringing his hands up to rub at his eyes. “'Tool' is about the right word for him,” he said of it, sniffing a bit.

He let his hands fall, finding a pointed smile on Lily's face. “I hated that about him; all throughout my secondary school career and then some, he just had this air about him that was so self-assured and yet, so off-putting to me and nobody else,” she admitted, but then Remus reached up, idly scratching at his unmarked eyebrow, and she must have caught that for what it was for she smirked into her coffee. “I thought he was so arrogant, way too quick to jump to the answer to something even if there was still a debate going on, and on that note, he and I were forces of nature going up against each other in Debate, let me tell you."

“I can imagine,” Remus came in, smiling a little for that image.

“He had this innate ability to walk on into a room with a problem in it and decide that he alone had the answer to it, and I thought it was so dismissive, never once did it occur to me that he was all of those things because he had to be," she said, giving Remus a sad sort of smile. "But, then I worked with him quite a bit, started dating his best friend, and the more I got to know him better, the more time I spent with him, and the more I learned about where he's come from, it suddenly clicked; no one at home would have listened to a word he had to say but at school, and then later at work, he was home-free and people listened to him when he got struck with an idea.”

Remus frowned, looking at Lily through heavy eyes and a heart to match. “I know how hard it is to work around when you're on the other end of it, but I have a guess he didn't mean to be dismissive of you,” she tacked on. “I'm sure in his mind, all he was doing was being Mr. Fix-It.”

Remus shook his head. “Why are you all so much better at him than I am?”

Lily let out a smirk of a laugh. “Practice,” she called it.

“You should date him,” Remus suggested dryly, crossing his arms over his chest and sitting back in his chair.

“Can't, we'd kill each other,” she returned, not missing a beat. “Practice really is the secret; I've known him since we were eleven and that only sank in maybe three years ago? And let's not pretend like I don't have to stop and remind myself of why he's like that to this day, so you're well within your rights to find his methods a bit much now and again.”

“That's a nice way to put it,” Remus said of it.

“Isn't it,” Lily echoed.

“He could have turned out to be the most jaded person and we'd just have to be OK with that, but he isn't," Remus put up, rubbing a hand over his face. "He just picks up and keeps on, and what am I doing? Not leaving his bed until he lassos me out of the room; he must be kicking himself for ending up with me.”

“Kicking his heels, maybe,” Lily said frankly, behind the cover of her coffee cup.

Remus gave her a plain look. “He meets me halfway constantly,” he put down. “More than I ever do for him, and he's going to start seeing that soon enough.”

“No, so do you,” Lily traded him. “I've seen it.”

“I could be doing a lot more,” Remus instilled, sticking to his guns. “He tracked down multiple people, set up the appointment for me without a second thought, and I just sat there picking out flaws in the plan when I should just be grateful that he even bothers bringing me the bright spots.”

Lily put on a smile that looked rather tense the longer Remus peered at it. “I don't know if there's ever a moment where you're not grateful,” she gave him hesitantly. “He knows you, and 'grateful' is sort of your default setting.”

Remus uncrossed his arms and reached up to rub his hands over his face, wondering how any of his mates put up with him. “I should still be better, more appreciative,” he underlined. “I need to stop bringing the negatives into the mix so much.”

Lily took another long look at him once he looked to her again. “If you want to work on that outlook for yourself, then hat's off to you,” she put down, “but if he wanted someone who didn't bring him back down to earth like you do, then he'd have kept looking elsewhere.”

“Lily,” Remus said weakly, covering his face with his hands again.

Lily gave a laugh that was not unkind, thankfully. “OK, why don't we tackle the short-term first?” she raised, and Remus let his hands drop to his lap again, thankful that she could understand that he'd effectively hit a wall. “We can start by sending out transfer requests if you'd like? I mean, I don't want to speak for you, maybe you're sick of pouring coffee and want to give something else a shot, but there are options if you want to stay with the company while you're there.”

“That would be,” Remus said, shaking his head, “beyond helpful.”

“Then let's do it,” Lily said, sitting up straighter in her chair.

“What, now?” Remus asked.

“Why not?” Lily raised. “You've some time before you're on the floor, might as well get you feeling like you're getting on top of things by actually getting on top of things? What do you think?”

Remus sniffed and gave her a nod, not trusting himself to speak just then in case more spouting came out. Lily stuck her left foot out ceremoniously and dragged both her and her chair back over toward the desk, swivelling around to face the computer monitor. “Alright, you give me shops near where your faculty building is going to be, and I'll find shops nearby and work my way out,” she said as Remus dragged his chair over to plunk it down beside her on her left. “Let's say, five to start.”

“Ten.”

“Eight.”

“Fine.”

Remus met Lily's side glance and her rather defunct attempt at not smiling, succumbed to a smile of his own, and gave her the street for his faculty building. Lily typed it into the search bar and brought them to a map, doing some vague humming while she clicked this and that, and Remus felt a little better for the antics alone. They acquired exactly six possible locations before Lily put her foot down and suggested that was fine for a first round, but Remus swallowed his reservations down and replaced them with gratitude.

Next up, Lily pulled up the messaging program that the company offered, selected the first option on their list, and brought up a blank email.

“This one's name is—” she started before squinting. “Beats me, how do you even say that?”

Remus leaned in and had a look for himself, reading Guillaume on screen. “Gii-yolm,” he extended.

Lily let out a low whistle. “Nope, wouldn't have gotten that.”

“It's the French William,” he relayed.

Lily began slowly typing into the text box, putting on a sultry voice. “Hello, French William,” she recited.

Remus bit down on his lower lip and reached his right hand up to point at the screen. “Whoospie,” he said, hovering his forefinger under the glaring typo that simply read Herllo, and Lily snorted loudly, hitting the backspace and deleting the entire phrase in a few quick seconds while Remus sing-songed under his breath. “Herllo, it's me...”

Lily gave up all attempts at typing to simply stick her head down flat on the desk, her shoulders shaking. Moments later she straightened up and looked to be back to business except for the fact that she remained with gaze on the screen and her fingers set to type, and that was about it.

“You good?” Remus asked, biting back a laugh himself.

Lily shook her head clear. “Very good, only I'm thinking if I stick the words into Google Translate, it'll come out a mess," she maintained, "but since we've got you here, an authentic French letter of intent can only help us in the long run, right?"

“Alright, I'm nowhere near authentic French, but you do have a point,” Remus let her have.

Lily smiled bright. “OK, I'll pose as you for now, write glowing words about you because I have a good feeling you won't do that yourself, then I'll hand it off to you and you'll pretend you're not uncomfortable with translating an entire paragraph about yourself, and we'll be all set,” she instructed, already typing away, then gave out a sudden noise of realization. “Let's get it finished, draft the message until your review is finished, then I can CC a copy of it with your resume and you'll look like a fucking star.”

“You're killing this already,” Remus said of her, reaching for his mobile to start the process of adding his present workplace to the top of his resume, but he'd forgotten that he'd turned his mobile off on the journey over there.

Lily began typing again so all Remus had to accompany him for the longest thirty seconds of his life waiting for his mobile to boot up was the click-click-clicking of the keyboard. Lily hit the space bar resoundingly at the end of a sentence, unknowingly timing it for the moment Remus saw the empty home screen he had waiting for him, and he had to force himself to move past the anvil in his gut to resume his task.

Chapter 5: 5.

Chapter Text

By the time Lily had a finished product for Remus to translate into French, he'd done his due diligence in gearing himself up for the act of translating a paragraph solely dedicated to talking him up to a handful of strangers who might've been looking for extra hands in the fall; there was an end goal there that was worth the bit of strife and funny faces Remus would likely make throughout.

Lily slid the keyboard over Remus' way when she was officially done, and Remus scooted his chair in closer to the desk to have at it, opening up a blank word document to work off of Lily's blurb. A compatible, relative silence fell about the backroom as the two of them worked on separate things, Lily sat beside him pouring over the hordes of mail that accumulated over her time off, while Remus got so focused on the process of swapping out sentence structures and fine-tuning phrases that when Lily spoke up closer to the end of the task, he missed her words completely.

Remus blinked and shook his head clear. "Quoi?"

"They sent us new tunes," she relayed again, fanning the thin, square envelope back and forth loftily. "Good thing too, I was getting sick of nothing but Motown."

Remus, on the other hand, had hardly minded a little Motown added to his shifts, and he might've said as much if Lily hadn't gone and used the side of the desk as a springboard to get herself standing on the seat of the office chair, settling for a minimal hum of warning and reaching over to hold the back of the chair so it wouldn't go out from under her.

"I get why they did it," Lily went on, tearing at the seam of the envelope and standing up by the inconveniently placed sound system, "spring was coming, the sun was starting to shine; what better pairing for that than a few musical sun rays, but every day as the default list? Too much Motown."

"Yeah, it was getting to Sirius, too," Remus said of it, typing one-handed while he held onto Lily's chair as she popped the new disc into the machine.

"I can only imagine," Lily returned. "Alright, we have—" she paused as she navigated the machine through the playlists offered to them, "much of the same, but there are a few new ones: The Cafe, Unforgettable, City Lights, Soul of the '60s, and Summer in the Sun, any takers?"

"'60s," Remus responded next beat, thinking a list that could have a few tunes that may well've played around his house could only help raise his spirits at this point.

"Done and done," Lily said, clicking back through the lists for that one. She climbed down from above and sat in her chair again, freeing up Remus's free hand to continue typing with both hands. "So, what do we think? Does it sound like you've got a very French boss?"

Remus took his eyes off his mostly finished product, giving her a mild shrug. "You likely sound like a medium French boss," he offered.

"Better than the truth," she said of it.

Remus gave her a half-nod for that, read through the passage from the top, and deemed this part of the task complete. "Well, I think we're good for now, at least until we get the review attached," he raised, but then he paused for a thought. "Did you just want to get that over with now? I'm sure I have time."

Lily gave a bland noise while reading through another piece of mail. "No, I'd like you to be getting paid for that time, thank you," she traded, looking up and over at him then. "Draft it for now and I promise you, we will get to your review and have all emails sent out before I leave for the day, sound good?"

Remus nodded, drafted the email, and gave out a puff of breath as he confirmed the time at the bottom right corner of the monitor. "Well, I've got twenty minutes to spare," he put up. "Can I do something small? I could count the safe, seeing as I'd be the one to do it in twenty anyway."

Lily looked up from the paper in her hands, tossing her right thumb over her shoulder. "You don't want to grab a tea or something?"

Remus let out another puff of breath, shaking his head. "I had a full pot this morning," he said.

Lily looked to go back and forth for a few seconds before she finally sighed. "Fine, start counting, but I'm only saying yes because I like you."

"Friends in high places, hm," Remus raised, standing up and moving his chair back to the round table nearby.

"Make sure you clock in on the dot, though," Lily sent him, moving on to another envelope.

Remus hummed an affirmation, crouched down at the safe in the corner of the room, and typed the code in, moving to sit crossed-legged while he waited for the safe to count down and let him in. He didn't love the ten-minute waiting period on a regular day but usually had other things to go and busy himself with before he'd have to be back to open the safe up; today, however, having very little to do while he waited left him playing with his right thumbnail. "If you were me, how long would you wait for him to cool off before reaching out?" he asked.

Lily lifted her head and put it on a tilt. "If I were you? Not very," she said of it. "Mostly because I'd suddenly have magic powers where he was concerned."

Remus gave a small sigh through his nose. "I think you're all a bit confused about the sort of power I wield," he registered.

"One of us is, maybe," Lily quipped, her head bowed again.

Remus gave her a plain look that she didn't see. "I don't want to pester him and make things worse, but say there's a really good dog out front," he gave for example. "Does he want the picture like I know he would normally or does he want me to leave him alone for a while? That's where I'm at."

"Oh, well, that one's easy," Lily maintained, sending it over her shoulder. "If you see a good dog, you take the picture for him."

"Right, and I would, if we hadn't ended on a very tense note," Remus expressed, "and if I do send him one, he could look at his screen, see that a text from me came in, and think, 'great, there's that shithead now,' before he even opens it, and I don't want that to be the first thing he thinks when he reads my name."

"I mean, I think his pulse goes a little wonky when he reads your name, but that's just me," Lily mentioned. "Take the picture of the hypothetical dog and send it along when you're feeling less like this."

Remus nodded, though it was quite unclear when that would be. "Do you think I shot myself in the foot, saying no?" He thought perhaps Lily swivelled around in her chair halfway so they could see each other better, but when he saw her pained expression he realized why she'd have wanted him to see her face so badly. "You're not going to get in trouble."

"We don't know that," Lily returned, and bit too cryptically for Remus's liking, but there was an uncomfortable truth to it.

He pressed his lips in a firm line, sighing through his nose. "It isn't fair that I'm not allowed to talk to my friend about something that's going on with me just because he has something to do with it," he put out there. "It just isn't, especially when I know he talks to James when he's frustrated with me."

Lily chewed her lip, but his words must have stuck for she eventually nodded. "I don't think you shot yourself anywhere," she offered. "I think he moved a little too quickly and you hit the breaks, which I'm not going to tell you isn't something you're allowed to do."

Remus sat with that, waiting for the other shoe to fall, but Lily didn't drop it. "That's," he started, shaking his head, "that's almost too kind a read of it."

"Remus, it was a snag," Lily put up. "You two have been — to quote dear James, nauseatingly sweet for a good long while now, but it was probably overdue; the honeymoon period can't last forever and, to be fair, you two had a long one."

Remus tried to sit with that, but then he wound up sitting with the woefully apparent fact that he only ever realized he'd been in the honeymoon period once it began to fade out; he'd done it with Tom whenever he'd turned back up again, walked around in a sunny daze feeling picked, chosen even, and the end of that sunny haze typically came like a brick to the face, but now, with Sirius, he was feeling like a thousand bricks fell on him.

"It's like we're right back in November where we couldn't organize ourselves to save our lives, and I don't want us to be there," he put up. "We've always been different, but it was like, I don't know, nuclear fission when we'd disagree then and I don't want to go back to that; I want to rewind to a month ago when we were literally finishing each other's thoughts or, even better, January, remember that? I loved that."

Lily's mouth twisted up into a smirk at that. "Personally, I think February deserves a mention," she put in, "seeing as that was my favourite to watch from my seat."

Remus found a smile budding on his own lips. "Mm, and I wonder why that is."

"Listen, you," Lily said, pointing at him. "You told him you loved him in a sleepy little whisper and I swear I watched his heart grow five sizes, OK? I thought I was wandering into the living room, but apparently, I was wandering into a scene right out of a rom-com and I was weak."

"I still think running from the room was a bit of an overreaction," Remus mentioned, though he didn't even bother hiding his smile anymore.

"I needed to collect myself," Lily maintained. "I'm sorry everything's piling up and not everything's going to get sorted today, but as far as today's hiccup with him, I do think he'll bounce back from it; he's come back holding trophies from worse concerning you and you're still smitten, clearly."

Remus chewed on his lower lip some before he let it go. "Except, me being wasted over him doesn't change the fact that I only had to walk too loudly on the wrong day for Tom to decide he was completely sick of me until he'd eventually decide that he wasn't anymore," he raised, putting his hands up listlessly. "And I know Sirius isn't him, I go over that point in my head more than I could even say, it's overwhelming how different they are and sometimes it hurts more than it even feels good because there's so much more on the line this time; the thought that I'm going to send Sirius packing next if I say one wrong thing or step too loudly is paralyzing, no matter how much I separate the two of them."

The safe chose to chime in there, beeping to announce Remus was free to go in, but the sounds hung in the air between his and Lily's downturned expressions. Remus looked away from her then, turned the latch to pull the safe door open, and tugged the clipboard out of there, pulling the cash drawer a little closer to him inside the safe.

He counted the bundles of coins first and moved on to the packet of bills from there, jotting down what each denomination offered and matching it to the morning count. He stuffed the clipboard back inside, shut the safe back up, and looked to Lily sitting over by the desk studying him, finding it going longer than he knew what to do with. In reality, he knew it couldn't have been more than a handful of seconds, but Remus always did have a penchant for feeling time stretch to a slow crawl whenever he thought he said too much or something he shouldn't have said.

"Have I made any sense at all?" he asked.

Lily nodded her head deftly. "No, I get you there," she offered, pausing there to clear her throat. "Three years in, I still stop and ask why it's so much easier with James than it was with anyone else, and then I'll get sad for my younger self because she didn't know any better."

Remus's chest constricted at that. "Yes, that's it," he echoed. "I was always so grateful whenever he'd come round again because that meant for right then, at least until he was over it again, he'd picked me — and I look back now and just want to wring my own neck for thinking that was as good as it was ever going to get for me."

Lily flung her hands out, splaying them toward him. "Yes," she returned. "It's not knowing your own worth."

Remus felt tingles spring out from his head down to his toes. "It'll slap me upside the head sometimes, what Sirius just, gets about me," he maintained. "He doesn't need me to tell him that my parents are at the top of my list, he just knows it — but Tom? He was there through some of the worst times; I mean, there when I wasn't sure my dad was even coming home again, there through some of the worst days, and he didn't get that I'd be glued to my mobile in case my mum had any updates for me, but Sirius has never given me flack for pausing with him to talk to either of them, in all these months — at least not out loud anyway — and it sounds so small, I know—"

Lily shook her head there. "Oh, no no, that's big," she came in, nodding once.

Remus's hands had a bit of a shake to them when he lifted them, but he used them all the same. "If it bothers him, he's kept that part to himself because Sirius will tell me when he thinks I'm being a dick to either one of them, but with the calls, he just waits; he waits until I'm finished with them and he's never held it against me afterwards."

Lily sucked a breath in through her teeth. "Oh, that got me in the gut," she mused, passing a hand over her stomach for a moment.

Remus knew the feeling when he'd taken a fair few sucker punches to his own chest just hearing Sirius string the right combination of words together, let alone the little acts he performed for him. "The little things get me more than I even know how to handle; he caught onto so many little details about me, even in the early days, and I bet you that to this day, Tom couldn't list on one hand the odd little quirks I have, but Sirius spotted so many of them and when we were barely even friends; that's three, maybe four weeks of him studying me versus Tom's six fucking years," he emphasized. "Sirius clocked exactly how long I like my tea to steep if it's in versus a pot by the end of September and I never told him that; he just used his third eye and picked up on it. And with the Beatles? I said something off-hand about them once, maybe twice when they were on and we were already on the subject, but after that, he would play full albums for me while on shift together, just because it made me a little happier — and Jesus, he'll ask me about my school work, even if he's not that interested in whatever I'm doing right, right then, but he still asks, and he does it because he insists that my eyes get as big as dinner plates when I get to talking about something I'm invested in and I didn't even know I did that until he told me I did; I've never had someone pay this keen an eye to me before, and—"

Remus stopped there, realizing he was sitting in the backroom at work of all places, having already talked Lily's ear off and brought the conversation up, down, and back around again as if she even had that much free time to listen to his ramblings, and as sudden as the snap of a finger, he instantly felt like a wart for it.

Remus shrunk back when Lily flapped her right hand insistently toward him. "And what? And what?" she goaded. "You can't stop there."

He relaxed his shoulders by a smidge, ruminating over the fact that his patterns didn't end with Sirius; they went out in a radius. When he spoke again, it was quieter, the way forlorn omissions tended to need to be. "I don't know how to hold onto this now that I know what it's like," he offered. "It's been question after question after question in the background of everything; at first it was, 'how are you allowed this?' and then it was 'how are you going to hold onto it?' and it's on to 'how do I stop the roof from caving in on us?' I'm always so sure the rug is going to go right out from under me and now, I don't want to give too much of me upfront and tempt this more than I already have just by making all these plans with him."

Lily sat forward in her chair, and Remus really only realized then that he really could have conducted this from anywhere but the floor by the safe. "Have you told him any of this?"

Remus swallowed. "Some," he said, only then, at the plain look Lily gave him for it, he added, "I've told him a lot, but I don't always want to be the bloke who's nine steps behind everybody else with this stuff; it's embarrassing, getting choked up over the littlest thing."

Lily raised her gaze to the ceiling and brought them back down to him again. "Except, you're dating someone who's also about nine steps behind everybody else with this stuff," she raised, displaying her hands rather royally to pair with a take like that one.

Remus deflated with that, found himself straightening back up when footsteps scuttled along the floor from up the hall, and seconds later Emmeline rounded the corner into the backroom. "We're working with about three stir sticks at this point," she announced.

Lily gave out a great sigh. "I swear to God, people see the container of them and think it's a free-for-all."

Emmeline smirked from the edge of the room. "Want me to call out for some extras?"

"No, let me," Lily said, swivelling her chair toward the desk to reach for the cordless. "I'll have to figure out what we can pawn off first."

"What should I do for now?" Emmeline asked.

"Put a handful of drinks stoppers in their place, they'll work for now," Lily directed, swivelling back with cordless in her hand.

Emmeline nodded, took off back to the front, and Lily spoke to Remus once they were officially alone again. "Take a few hours to breathe a little, let him simmer down a bit, and see what talking about what this is actually about will do for the two of you," she suggested, smiling before nodding once toward the front of the store, "but we are going to have to cut Ian loose before anything else."

Remus took the hint, pushed himself to his feet, and dusted off the back of his trousers before he crossed the room and stopped in front of Lily, bending to match her height. "Thank you," he said, holding her tightly for the moment. "If you catch me moping around here even once, you're to kick my arse."

He felt the laugh bubble up through her. "For you, anything," she returned, giving him a resounding pat on the back. "Send Agnes for her fifteen when you get up there, and she's been on till for quite some time now so help her along on bar when she gets back."

Remus nodded his diligence as he pulled back from her, moving toward his apron hanging from one of the nearby hooks. "Emme's on until six for pre-close, Elise gets on at three, so there's plenty of back-up today," Lily tacked on while Remus hung the loop of his apron over his head, "and everything's going smoothly, I'll aim to steal you around three, three fifteen-ish, and we'll get that review started."

"Sounds good," Remus said, heading down the hall as he tied his apron.

He stepped up front, finding it much the same as it looked when he'd walked in, with Ian and Agnes over by the coffee station while Emmeline was caught up in conversation with a customer at the hand-off station. She looked his way as he passed, smiled mid-sentence, and Remus gave her his best one in return; having her on past noon was a bit odd given the shifts she normally kept, but he found it felt similar to how atypical and exciting a power outage felt to him as a kid.

He rinsed his hands off at the sink not far from where Ian stood talking Agnes through a coffee switch-over and was engaged with almost immediately after Ian finished his spiel and spotted him there. "If I give you room for cream as asked, are you then going to turn right around and dump out another two inches into the bin?" he checked.

"No, no, I wouldn't," Remus gave him, tugging for a sheet of paper towel from the dispenser. "You're nearly free; do a lap of the floor and get out of here."

To that Ian raised his hands, turning for the cupboard under the counter that housed the sanitizer bucket and procuring a cloth in seconds. He set out to do a sweep of the cafe while Remus tossed his towel into the bin, stepped over to till one to clock in, and managed to make it in for '1:01.' Not on the dot as promised, but not bad for having just had something between a breakdown and breakthrough in the backroom.

Remus smoothed his hands over the front of his apron, looked round at Agnes simply staring at him for context clues, and gave her a smile. "Hi, I'm Remus," he offered. "Orders are for me to get you comfortable on bar for the next leg of your shift, so why don't you take a fifteen and we'll get you started on that once you're back on; how does that sound?"

He expected perhaps slightly more than a silent nod; a word or two would have been quite fine even, but he wondered then if first-day jitters were at play. On top of that, Ian did have the ability to make training a bit more fun, whereas when Remus replayed his opening line in his head, he could admit it came off a bit stiff compared to Ian's training style.

"Normally, we do a quick bus of the cafe before breaks to keep on it, but since he's already taking care of that, you're good to go," he tacked on.

"Right, OK," Agnes said for that, and then she was gone.

Remus looked to Emmeline, finding that she'd seen some if not all of that strange exchange from over by the bar. "She a bit shy or was that me being a lot first thing?" he asked.

Emmeline shook her head. "Quite chatty up until you got out here," she offered.

Remus rearranged his expression before his frown could deepen, nodding once. "I came on too strong," he understood. "I'll tone it down."

Emmeline sent him an airy hum. "The strong jaw she was just made to see is my best guess," she raised, her mouth twitching when Remus looked one way and then the other before he landed his gaze back on her again. "Just be nice to her, OK? The girl's beet red."

Remus looked away from Emmeline and scoured the till area for a free marker, but he felt her eyes on him the entire time he searched. "I'm going to be showing her bar once she's back if you don't mind trading up," he reiterated, gesturing toward her and the entire bar area with the first marker he could find.

"She's all yours," Emmeline offered, lifting her hands to surrender her post. Remus moved for it, but she reached out as they passed each other and blocked his jaw with her hands. "Careful with that; it could cut someone."

"Stop that now," Remus huffed, budging her hands away, but Emmeline bobbed her shoulders easily as she headed for the till.

As with most lulls, the one they seemed to be in was short-lived for the shop door opened and carried a group of six in with it, but Remus hardly minded that when it meant the topic had to be dropped. Ian popped back up behind the counter, stuck the cloth he was using back in its cupboard, and made himself scarce rather quickly from there, but Remus hadn't expected him to stick around long when he both looked and sounded quite done with his workday.

The first couple of few ordered were all milk-based and, in making them, the sound of the steam wand cut off quite a bit of the bustle near and around Remus for a time. He cut off the wand to pour the milk into the second one, thought he caught a note he recognized from the speaker nearby the bar, and seconds later, he was treated to the first brass notes of With a Little Help From My Friends. He'd been indeed hoping for a tune or two that might give him a taste of home, but he found himself addressing the universe directly about that particular pick in regards to himself just about then.

Remus handed the drink off, took a look at the next set of them, and saw he had two Americanos coming back to back. He looked to the state of the syrup bottles along the bar next, checked for one that might've been getting low enough to replace, and noted that the vanilla syrup was getting precariously so, giving him a small form of an exit. He picked up both Americano cups and filled them with hot water as per, setting them underneath the shot pourer so that both cups would catch the drip in one go and queueing up six shots to pour in his short absence.

He ducked into the hall, stopped in front of the wide array of unopened syrup bottles arranged on a shelf close to the door to the floor, and slipped his mobile out of his pocket while he reached for a new vanilla bottle. He held the bottle in hand and thumbed a quick, one-handed text to his mum, citing 'Joe Cocker's playing at work' and sending a second one along that amounted to five saxophone emojis to top it off. He slipped his mobile back into his apron pocket, ducked back out onto the floor, and celebrated as he made it back in time for the last of the shots to pour; later, perhaps once Sirius was interested in talking to him again, Remus thought he might tell him that his speed and candour had reached this particular milestone.

He placed the new vanilla bottle beside the going one for the time being, started a pitcher of milk for the latte that would soon follow, and fired up the steam wand to go while he topped the two Americanos off with water, feeling better than he'd felt in hours at least with the tune playing out over his head while he went through the motions of a quick rush.

Once that was over with, Remus went and dug out the laminated charts he'd quite liked having nearby as a cheat sheet on his first day and brought them back to stick near bar two; that way, he could teach her the basics on the lesser-used machine while bar one could be reserved for the flow of orders that would be inevitably heading their way, and then, once Agnes got the hang of it, he'd see about blurring the line between the two machines. When it came to training, he generally tried to take into account the concerns and reservations he'd come across having been there once himself and to branch out from there, always hopeful about a balance between too much information right off the bat to know what to do with and too little information to know much of what to do with either, and when Agnes came back up front after her break, Remus strove for that same compromise.

A little of the way into getting her comfortable with the common drinks, Remus overheard a bloke at the till order up an extra hot latte; a slightly jarring request just days before June, but on another note, it practically shoved them the opportunity to show Agnes the process of achieving that request, so he deemed it a small blessing in disguise and gave her a few pointers while she gave it a shot.

A little later on, two small lattes came their way and he remembered the trick Sirius showed to him back on day one of the job, but even more so he remembered the relief he'd felt knowing he could plan for two of the same small drinks by pretending it was just one large cup coming down the pipeline, thinking it a golden opportunity to pass the same tidbit along to her. He didn't know exactly why the universe seemed to be lobbing him easy pitches where work was concerned, but he appreciated it immensely; now, if it could do some of the same in some more personal areas of his life, he wouldn't mind that either, but he'd take the simple throws where he could get them.

His overall plan proved to run smoothly, as did the process of transitioning to cold bar whenever the need arose, and to that, getting Agnes comfortable with blended beverages would only help when they were indeed more and more of them being ordered as the weather improved. It certainly helped the whole thing along that Agnes seemed to have eased up some over her break for she was much more talkative throughout the process, making what had to be the first hour of his shift pass by with some ease on his own part, and the longer the time ticked on — and the less Agnes had questions or concerns — the less Remus felt inclined to stand over Agnes's shoulder, feeling that she had a handle on most of the common drinks coming their way.

Alas, so was the case until he looked up from their training bubble and found Stan the Man at the till, ordering what would inevitably be the whirlwind of a drink he was most infamous for. Emmeline marked his cup, walked it over to hand it to him with a single, prim raise of her eyebrows, and headed right back to her post with that.

Remus turned himself to the right and faced his back more toward the till than Agnes herself, keeping his voice in an undertone. "This one's a bit of a doozy."

Agnes turned back with the pitcher she'd been rinsing and stepped up close, matching his volume. "Is it?"

Remus nodded once, sending a firm blink to the floor between their feet as he nabbed the pitcher off her, and stuck Stan's cup on the tray of the espresso bar. "I'm not looking to scare you off on your first day, but this is one we'll have no choice but to remake if it's not done to the exact taste," he explained, bringing his voice down even lower as Stan meandered from the till over toward the hand-off station. "The rest of the drink, I'm sure you would be fine with, it's the act of achieving a one-hundred-ninety-degree latte that also calls for no foam that I'd rather shield you from."

"But—" Agnes got out while he reached for the milk, "—it'll only be foam at that point, no?"

Though Remus certainly felt validated by hearing a similar reservation to his about it from another, he strove to keep the mood light. "You've got that right, but it is possible to manage, it just takes practice," he maintained, beginning to pour the milk. "This part, you can treat it like your regular no-foam latte and since this is a small, we're still going pour for a venti like we would've done, but this time we're going to pour a little higher than that line even, just to make up for all that foam we're going to have to disappear."

He stopped his pour when he eyeballed it to where he normally did and showcased the inner workings of the pitcher to her before he lifted it toward the steam wand. "So, like any other extra-hot one, keep the aeration short, but I'm saying a second or two for this one otherwise we'll be spooning foam out of this for hours," he supplied, firing up the steam wand and giving it almost no time at all before he stuck the base of the pitcher as far up as the steam wand would allow for and spoke beneath the whirring of the wand. "Make sure the tip of the wand touches the base of the pitcher because that'll only help keep too much froth from happening, or as much as can be done really, and then you just keep your eye on the temperature, watch it crawl to near-fire, and pull it straight down when you hit it."

"How are you not howling in pain?" Agnes asked, and it took Remus a moment or two further to clue into the fact that he was indeed holding the increasingly heating pitcher from the bottom.

"Maybe don't do that part," Remus amended, shifting the pitcher so he was holding onto the handle in his right hand. He flexed the fingers of his left one out by his hip, waiting on a sting that never really amounted to anything, and blinked that far into a pocket of his mind for another time, pressing on with it. "Hold it by the handle; you do get used to handling hot, metal objects but don't be a hero off the bat."

Agnes smirked, nodding over toward the coffee station. "I knocked my arm into the water spigot earlier and cursed my entire life out," she shared.

Remus smirked, too, while he kept an eye on the temperature creeping up close to the boiling point. "That thing splashed back on me my first day, too, so maybe it's got something to do with an initiation process?" he raised, switching the steam wand off and pulling the pitcher down to the counter.

"Not sure I passed, then," Agnes said of it.

Remus queued up the shot to pour into Stan's cup while he rifled for a spoon out of the cupful of them nearby the bar. "Well, you're still here so I'd say you did," he offered her, waiting the short time it took for the shot to finish up. He pulled the cup down from the tray to set it on the counter, knocked the bottom of the milk pitcher against the counter a couple times to loosen things up a bit, and began to pour, speaking under his breath all the while. "Same as before, use the spoon to hold back any excess froth because there will always be some so don't fret about that, and from there, it's all down to skimming off of the top, and don't worry about this—" he used the tip of the spoon to point at the thin film of foam gathering at the top of the drink, "—it's just microfoam; I worried about it early on, too, but it's damn near impossible to get rid of all of it unless you want to be spooning for days, so I usually go with two whisps off the top and call it a day on that front."

Remus set the pitcher down and picked up the finished product. "Not bad when you break it down, but when it's coming down the queue and the cup's all marked up like that, it can be a bit daunting," he instilled, going around behind Agnes to get to the hand-off station and offering a smile along with the drink. "There you go, Stan."

"I sure am glad you took over," Stan gave, chuckling while he reached for a lid.

"Alright, you have a good one," Remus chimed, hoping that might get Stan heading on his way a bit quicker.

Remus glanced sidelong at Agnes while Stan ambled over toward the condiment bar, biting down on his lower lip at the mother of a face she now had on. "He said that so I'd hear it on my first shift, too," he relayed. "I doubt you'll believe me right now, but he is a sweetheart once it dawns on him that you know what you're doing."

"You're right, I don't believe you," Agnes put out.

Remus smirked there. "Well, believe me on this; he's in here multiple times a week so you will get your practice in," he maintained, "but if he comes in tomorrow or your next shift, if you're not sure you have it down yet, nobody here is going to hold it against you if you ask them to handle it, deal?"

"I'm going to make the best he's ever had just to spite him," Agnes returned. "How's that for a deal?"

"Even better," Remus said of it, turning to rinse the pitcher out.

He stuck it back with the rest of them and gave Stan a parting smile as he made for the door, but before he went through it, Elise stepped into the shop. She gave Stan a hi there, hello as she passed him by and strolled up and around the far side of the bar to come upon the two of them.

"Oh, you poor thing," she offered, pulling her sunglasses off. "Was he a bitch?"

"Bit of a bitch, yeah," Remus confirmed, after a quick glance around to check if the coast was clear, that is. He looked to Agnes there, who didn't appear to know Elise's face from any one of the others traipsing in and out of the shop for the better part of the afternoon if the series of blinks she tossed him were anything to go by. "She also works here."

Elise burst out a laugh. "Yeah, no, I'm not just walking around back here weirdly," she tacked on, moving for the door to the backroom. "He had me remake his drink three times once."

Agnes looked to Remus in a near-panic after Elise disappeared into the back. "Is she kidding?"

Remus shook his head. "I was not on shift then, otherwise I'd have stepped in around round two, I think," he offered, catching Emmeline's small wag of a cup over at the till and heading over her way. He had a gander over the cup, walked it back to Agnes, and turned it around for her to see it. "This one's much less extensive, and it'll give you more frap practice?"

"Gimme," she said, snatching the cup and heading for cold bar. Smirking, Remus went ahead and took the soy milk out of the fridge for her, waiting the few seconds it took before she seemed to realize she would indeed need that. "Sure, sure, laugh it up."

Remus placed it beside her little area, looked over his shoulder as he sensed a presence, and saw that Emmeline was in the middle of hoisting a vat of coffee toward the sink to pour it out and as such, didn't really have her hands free to take the order of a regular of theirs that popped up at the till. "If you need anything, just call me back over," he offered, stepping over to the till.

He reached for a grande cup as per Denise's usual and made quick small talk with her while plugging her order into the till. Emmeline popped up beside him as Remus prompted the machine, taking over the transaction from there, and he went and started on the drink at hand while Elise came up from the back with her apron on.

"Cutting it kind of close," Emmeline noted.

Elise gave a bland noise from the hand-wash sink. "Some jack thought it'd be a stellar idea to try to beat the bus through the intersection and that went about as well as it would," she traded her, reaching for a sheet of paper towel.

Remus looked round at her quickly as he steamed the milk for Denise's drink. "Oh my God, are you OK?" he asked, but Elise looked over at him while she binned the ball of paper towel in favour of displaying both her hands over herself, showcasing that she was indeed fine, and to that, Remus added, "you know what, I meant that figuratively and next time I won't even ask."

Elise patted Remus's cheek as she passed him on her way to the till. "Yes, you will," she said.

"Careful there, those cheekbones are sharp as knives," Emmeline put in, and Remus only just held off flipping her the bird for it.

"What?" Elise raised, looking to her as she used Emmeline's till to clock in.

Remus sighed and turned away from that to top the drink off with water, looking round as Agnes crossed over to the hand-out station to slide her newly-finished and supremely green frap toward the girl waiting for it, and, since she was already where he would've been heading, reached Denise's drink in closer to Agnes, who passed that one off for him, too.

A flash of red appeared on his right not a beat later and announced that Lily was now on the floor, a clipboard in her hands. "Alright, I'm stealing Remus for a bit," she relayed. "Elise, take over for him."

Elise nodded easily and with that Lily led the two of them out onto the sales floor, picking a two-seater in the far left corner of the shop. Remus took the spot across from her and gave a small smile, reminding himself that this was Lily and therefore, not the worst person to have a performance review conducted by.

"How's Agnes doing?" she asked, tossing a quick look behind Remus toward the bar.

"She's great," Remus said. "Really good on bar; I hardly have to help her along at this point."

"Good," Lily said candidly, sticking her clipboard down on the table in front of her. "You're looking a lot better."

"I'll feel a lot better when this is finished," Remus mentioned, eyeing the clipboard between them.

Lily waved that off. "Standard procedure," she said easily, and almost as if she hadn't avoided this very assessment until she virtually couldn't anymore. "First off, how would you rate your performance?"

Remus gave her a face. "Please don't make me do this."

"I have to," she insisted, then lowered her voice to an exaggerated whisper. "Say anything."

Remus tilted his head back and forth, dying inside a little. "I think I've a knack for training," he raised her, "which I would hope for, given that I'll hopefully be teaching a room full of students down the line."

"Well, would you look at that," Lily raised, nodding toward her clipboard. "I put that down for you, too."

Remus leaned forward a little in his seat. "What else have you got there?" he bid, trying to get a peek at the sheet from upside down.

"No peeking," Lily chided, and Remus sat back in his booth seat, biting back a smile. "For positives, I put down that you run a tight ship when you're shift lead—" Remus glanced up at the ceiling, thinking of the dishes in back he really should have gotten somebody started on by now, "—you're punctual—"

"A little too."

"—No such thing on this," Lily guaranteed, gesturing to the sheet in front of her before heading on. "You'e keen to switch a shift or two around to help out where need be which means I get to put you down as a team player, and your customer service has been consistent if not better the longer you've been with us."

Remus fought hard not to scrunch his nose up through her list, tipping his head to her. "Thank you," he said, giving a smile. "The antique mall got me prepared for some of it, but this is the first I've done something where you have to be speedy and talkative at once."

"Well, I've no negatives concerning that so as far as I'm concerned, you're balancing both just fine," Lily offered.

"But there are negatives," Remus raised, bracing himself for the other shoe to drop.

"There are, and honestly, this one is dire," she said, showcasing what was left of the welt on her right forearm that, by extension, had been caused by him.

Remus relaxed his shoulders a little. "Does it say anything on there about how sorry I was and still am about that?" he asked, nodding toward her clipboard.

"Oh, I heard you, but I'll ask that you keep your lyrical observations to yourself when I'm holding scalding tea," Lily reiterated, her pointed look losing force by the second.

Remus bit his lower lip amidst a budding smile. "I'll do my best."

Lily gave him a smile, but then that sort of petered off. "I have to level with you, there's an actual negative on here," she warned, lowering her voice. "I do have to put down something that we can call a goal, just something to work on that we then talk about at your next review, and you are getting a little too laxed with your breaks."

Having not seen this one coming, Remus tried not to visibly flinch. "Am I?"

"It's not only you," Lily mentioned. "You're all pretty well on it when it comes to clocking in and out for your shifts, but breaks are where the ball gets dropped, or you'll — the royal you, but also you — will remember to clock out but not back in or vice versa, and sometimes it's as if nobody clocks in or out at all and that causes a lot of problems up the ladder; I don't want Rosemerta coming down here and accusing me of running a slave labour trade again."

Remus gave Lily a feeble frown. "When did that happen?"

"Mm, right before I left on hols," Lily relayed, a tight smile on. "Things have gotten far too cozy around here and I'll admit it, I let you all get there, but no more of that; Rosmerta's a gem, but she's a fright when she wants to be, and oh, did she want to be that day."

Remus nodded, but as much as he would have liked to say something along the lines of 'I will absolutely work on that,' he did see that becoming a bit of a problem down the line. "I understand what you're saying, but sometimes, I just feel like a shit sitting there in the back running out the last three minutes of my break while there's a massive queue happening up front," he explained. "So, I'll be honest, in those cases, I'm still going to hop on the floor, but I will set an alarm at the start of my break so I don't miss any clock-ins or outs."

Lily looked as if she really did try to hold in a smirk, but she gave that up fairly quickly. "I like that you're straight up telling me that you'll be continuing to shirk your breaks, but you wouldn't be you if you didn't so I can't even be that mad about it," she forwarded. "And really, forgetting to clock in or out for breaks is nowhere near the worst thing I've had to put down on one of these before, so don't worry about it because this is not where the world ends."

Remus gave her another nod for that, hoping that the list of positives would outweigh the negative. "I really will work on it, and I'm sorry it led to Rosemerta coming down on you," he offered.

Lily shook her head. "It is what it is," she said of it, splaying her hands open on the table. "Now, with that out of the way, we've come to the exciting part; you have earned yourself a raise."

Remus perked up there, but Lily lifted a halting hand and spoke again, lowering her voice a bit. "It's chump change, but it's all they'll let me do at this point," she slipped him, giving a bit of a frown as she turned the clipboard around on the table and pushed it toward him, tapping her forefinger over his new wage, one that Remus went on to read would kick in by his next scheduled pay period.

He looked up at her again and offered a smile for the frown he was being sent. "I won't scoff," he said. "A raise is a raise."

Lily's face broke there and a smile bloomed where her frown just was. "That's that Good Boy Remus stuff Sirius always waxes poetic about," she said.

"Oh, stop," Remus returned, sitting back in his seat a little more.

Lily did not do that. "I'm going to send Hope and Lyall a fruit basket," she alleged, a wry smile on her face, "let them know what a good boy they raised."

"Are we finished here?" Remus checked, making as if he were about to leave the table.

"That about wraps it," Lily affirmed. "See? No harm done."

"Just a little to my pride, but that was mostly shot as is," Remus quipped.

Lily gave him a circumstantial frown for that and reached for the clipboard between them. "Well, why don't the two of us make a quick detour into the back to get this scanned and once the emails are sent off, I've a feeling your pride will be doing a little better," she raised.

"Here's hoping," Remus echoed. "Thank you again."

Lily waved him off with a tiny scoff. "It wasn't difficult coming up with the words to sell you," she maintained. "Though, now that I think about it, I'm glad you took over because my disjointed attempt at sounding French would probably have backfired and I could have accidentally sold you off permanently."

Remus tilted his head to the right. "To a native Parisian, no less," he observed. "I'd have to thank you twice."

Lily burst out a quick laugh. "Any questions, concerns?" she asked, pointing down at her clipboard.

"I'm sure I'll think of some, but none for right now," Remus said, shrugging his shoulders once to pair with it.

"And you know what you'll be doing when your half comes around later tonight, yes?" Lily checked.

Remus tipped his head to her. "Yes, ma'am."

"Oh, would you look at that; we already have a negative for your next review," Lily returned, pushing out of her seat.

Remus ducked his head through a laugh as slipped out of his own seat, following her around behind the counter and down the hall to the backroom, and looked to the pile of dishes by the sink that had accumulated there over the course of the afternoon. "I'm going to get to that," he mentioned, reaching out to splay his hand over the dasterdly display on their right.

"Honey, you've been training," Lily returned, bypassing by the situation without much of a hitch and heading for the safe to press the code into it. "You can get at those when Agnes has gone for the day; it's all good, really."

The two of them congregated in front of the monitor again, sent off all six emails with both his CV and performance review attached, and Lily had been right about one thing, his pride didn't feel quite so cut when he didn't really have it in him to funnel his worry into whether or not he'd get an answer from any of them; once it was over with, all he felt was an immense relief over having done something productive in the middle of it all and he wanted to enjoy that feeling for as long as he could have it.

He hadn't bothered with taking his apron off for his short absence from behind the counter, so he was pretty well all set to go when it was all said and done. Lily let herself into the safe and stuffed the deposit into her purse, picking up a paper bag sitting on the desk and making her way up the hall beside him. "I'm taking the deposit in, and I'll be back with stir sticks," she announced, tossing her key ring a few inches into the air and catching them in the same palm.

"What did the trade come to?" Remus raised, reaching over to try and win himself a peek into the paper bag she was carrying.

"What do we have a thousand of?" Lily returned, holding the bag open.

Cartons of soy milk was the answer to that one and Remus gave a knowing hum for that; after not being wholly prepared for the student rally that blew through the shop in the fall and threatened their supply, Lily had vowed to never let that happen again, and months on from there, she'd made well on her word on that front.

Lily went straight for cold bar the moment she got on the floor and stopped by Agnes, who was shaking up a tea-lemonade concoction. "I have to step out for a bit, but if I don't make it back in time for the end of your shift, you did great today," she passed her.

Agnes's shoulders went up as she gave in to a circumstantial smile. "Thank you," she said, shaking a bit slower now.

"Guys, stir sticks are coming back with me, keep faith," Lily told the rest, making a beeline for the door.

Agnes popped the lid off of the shaker, poured the contents into the cold cup in front of her, and looked over her shoulder toward the rest of them milling about. "Her hair," she dragged out.

"I can't handle it," Elise put in, from over by the coffee station. "I've paid a lot of money trying to get that colour and voom, and I got neither."

Remus smirked to that as he checked on the time, found it to be coming on three-thirty, and set about sending Emmeline on her break, heading for Agnes as Emmeline set off to do a quick lap of the cafe. "You've about a half-hour left, so what do you think?" he raised her. "Do you want to stay on bar until you're finished or would you like another shot at till?"

"I'm fine right here," Agnes answered, popping a lid onto the tea lemonade and moving to hand it off.

"I had a feeling, but I thought I'd ask," Remus tacked on.

He took to floating between Elise at till and Agnes at bar, starting orders for Elise in the event of a line, funnelling them Agnes's way, and switching over the coffee roasts when the need arose. He pulled another one of Sirius's signature moves every now and again, slowing down his initial communication with customers and taking a bit longer longer to write on and subsequently pass the cups over to Agnes for her very sake, but he was happy to note that prepping for drinks that were further ahead in the queue was something she was already beginning to get the hang of.

Remus felt his mobile buzz in his pocket mid-way through pouring water for a tea, passed it off to the gent waiting for it by the till, and made a quick disappearing act to back. He stopped just inside the hall to pulled his mobile out and it was a strange feeling, having his stomach drop at not seeing Sirius's name lit up on-screen and then quickly rise at seeing 'Mum' lit up on it instead; he'd forgotten he'd even sent her that text. He opened it up, found about double the amount of sax emojis with the added bonus of a few of the dancing ones tacked onto the end, and grinned as he slipped his mobile back into his apron pocket and went back up front.

He kept up his role as floater until Emmeline returned from her break, looking round at her as she passed him. "Remember to clock back in," he said.

Emmeline gave him a severe look. "Oh, I got the spiel when I got here," she maintained, pressing her code into the lesser-used till. "You're up for a fifteen, aren't you?"

That may very well have been the case, but Remus wasn't so interested in sitting in back and staring helplessly at his mobile screen. "I might take care of the dishes before I do that," he decided, gesturing toward the coffee station. "I switched the Pike over about ten minutes ago, there's about fifteen left on the dark roast before that needs a switch, and Agnes is just about finished so take over for her for now?"

"Gotcha," Emmeline said of it.

Remus looked to Agnes from there, offering a smile as he got to her. "I assume you heard that," he raised.

"That I did," Agnes affirmed, passing a cloth over the counter at bar, which Remus just really liked to see happening.

"Well, in that case, I'm sure doing a bus would be overkill at this point, but do a quick look around and you're all set," he directed. "Don't worry about the creamers this time; those ones have about an hour left in them."

Agnes nodded, taking the cloth she was using out to wipe down the tables around the shop. Remus slipped into the back from there, stopped in front of the sink, and started on rinsing off the pile from earlier on in the day. He lined up the first dishwasher tray with plates, in-house cups, and empty carafes before he put in the first load, letting that run while he started up a second tray for some of the stragglers that didn't fit on the first one as Agnes passed him on her way into the backroom.

She headed back up the hall a few moments later, sans apron, and with her bag slung over her right shoulder. "Thanks for all your help," she said, stopping by the sink.

"You hardly needed any," Remus returned. "When's your next shift?"

"Saturday," she offered. "I think it's noon to six?"

"Oh, getting you started on pre-close," Remus presumed. "Well, I close that night so I'll be around for about half of it."

"OK, see you then," she offered.

"Do you have a code yet?" Remus checked.

Agnes shook her head. "No, she told me to write my time down in the book back there."

"Perfect," Remus said of it; two of his questions answered in one. "See you Saturday."

The dishwasher slowed to a stop not long after Agnes headed off and Remus swapped that load out with the second one, then ended up pausing to stare at the time on his mobile once again. He was closing in on an entire afternoon without having heard a thing from Sirius, and that hadn't been a common occurrence since — Remus clocked it, December at least. At this point, he'd settle for anything; a joke, a random thought bubble, a blunt if a bit bitchy take on any one person or thing that might've got stuck in Sirius's crossfire, the complete lyrics of 'Sex on Fire' copied, pasted, and sent along to him, literally anything that would give him a smidge of normalcy.

He stuck his mobile away with a long intake of breath and reached to lift the tray of clean dishes to run it up front, but stopped short when Lily appeared at the top of the hall again. "OK, crisis averted, and I am officially done," she announced, stepping over to stand by him. "Do you need anything before I head out?"

"An anvil," Remus replied, perching the tray of dishes on top of the dishwasher.

"What?" Lily asked, blinking up at him.

Remus shook his head. "Nothing, I'm fine," he said.

Lily took in a slow, pondering breath through her nose. "Still nothing?" she raised.

"No, and I'm not supposed to be moping otherwise you'll have to kick my arse," Remus offered. "You could do it, too; you've years of Zumba behind you while I've got zero training to speak of."

"Well," Lily said, a coy smile on now, "our class did just wrangle ourselves a float at Pride and if you'd just come see how the class is, you could be up there with me getting some training in—"

"I'm going to stop you right there," Remus said. "No one wants to see that."

"I could poll a room and everyone in it would say they'd want to see that," Lily returned.

Remus picked up the tray of dishes and went around her, heading up front and away from her trilling behind him. "I'm not doing it," he called back. "I'll look like a tree blowing in the wind with these limbs flying about at all angles."

"Boo on you," Lily sent him, finger-prodding at his back.

She said her farewells to the girls and headed on her way, meanwhile Remus brought the tray over to cold bar, sticking cups and plates back into their respective cupboards behind the menu boards and looking over at Emmeline once he had an empty tray. "You're pre-close," he observed, sticking his hands in his apron pocket.

"That's me," Emmeline chimed. "Bit of a change of pace, but I'm liking it."

Remus nodded, held off for a moment of hesitation, and then bit the bullet. "Are you at all interested in splitting some of those chores up?" he raised. "I could take care of sanitizing, if you'd like."

Emmeline looked rather chuffed about the proposition whether or not she knew he was looking for a hands-on task to sink himself into. "Go for it," she returned. "I've got floors when you're done there."

Remus felt a wave of newfound appreciation for bright, bubbly Emmeline and her unrealized role in his distraction methods. He began with the syrup bottles, pulled each one out of the two plasticine staircases that sat between the espresso bars, and aligned them into two rows just ahead front of the lesser-used bar two so they would be out of the immediate way of bar one, but still close enough for Emmeline to reach when the need arose.

"I'll wipe them down since I'm here," she offered, pulling a new cloth out of the sanitizer bucket.

"Great, thanks," Remus traded her, picking up a syrup staircase in each hand.

As the two pieces were large enough to take up a single tray, Remus laid them down on their sides and played a short game of Tetris to fit them onto the empty tray, totting the three items into the back with him. He swapped that tray for the one filled with straggler dishes, pressed start on the machine to roar it to life, and brought the tray up front with him, emptying it off and filling it right up again with any and all portable containers in need of a good rinse cycle.

Though Remus had indeed been looking for a hands-on and somewhat time-consuming task to disappear into, he sort of knew this one would be a bit of a bust; while the act of running every piece of equipment at both hot and cold bar through the dishwasher had the potential to stretch to forty-five minutes if one were taking it slowly, Sirius had managed to get the task down to a crisp twenty and thus, Remus knew all about the tricks to trimming the task down to less than half the expected time, but he strove for a happy medium today, taking his time to arrange the items on the trays and generally taking the task a bit slower than he might've gone otherwise.

Once hot bar was back in order and looking shiny and new, he moved on to cold bar, lining up the newly emptied tray with metal syrup holders, the lid to one of the two blenders, three out of four shakers, and took the time to thoroughly wipe the area down before he totted that load into the back.

He felt his mobile go as he got to the sink and sat the tray down on top of the dishwasher to pull it out, checking the text that had come in. He let out a resounding huff at reading Lily's name instead of the one he wanted to, stuffed it away in his pocket again, and pulled down hard on the door to the dishwasher, feeling far too transparent about his behaviour. Really? He couldn't go one fucking afternoon without hearing from him? He needed a hobby, and badly at that because this was officially getting pathetic.

He lifted the clean tray out of the dishwasher and just as he did it, one of the shiny, renewed milk pitchers rolled over the right edge of the tray and went careening to the floor unnecessarily, and Remus let go of the tray roughly, slamming it down on top of the one already on top of the dishwasher and stooping to pick the pitcher up before he sent that flying into the sink.

Remus stopped there, achingly thankful that nobody had been in the immediate area to witness him throwing a tantrum over a milk pitcher hitting the floor of all things, and paused for a quick breather, taking the time to rewash the pitcher by hand. He placed it back into the tray with the rest of the clean dishes, balanced that tray on the edge of the sink next to the dishwasher as he swapped in the load he brought back with him, and shut the door much softer than he had before, pressing start with a resounding sigh.

He felt a pang of guilt over blatantly ignoring Lily's text, pulled his mobile back out of his apron pocket to give it the attention he should have shown it already, and opened it up to find a picture of an astoundingly fluffy chow-chow perfectly centred in the frame. Remus saved it to his own mobile and forwarded it off to Sirius before he even knew he was really doing it, but once he realized he'd done it, he lifted his free hand to press the heel of his palm into his forehead, feeling like the biggest dolt this side of the city.

Remus dropped the hand from his forehead as his mobile buzzed in his right one and took a moment before he pressed his thumb over Sirius's name, staring down at the brief but altogether perfect little response that was waiting there for him.

9000/10!!!!!!!!!

Remus read the reply four times over before deducing there was nothing left to deduce from it. He remained still as he pondered what his next move should be; where did one go next after sending a picture of an undeniably fluffy dog just hours after a fight? Remus didn't know, but in the end, he didn't really have to come up with something when another text came in and stopped his rapidly beating heart in its tracks.

when's your break?

Remus typed and sent Give me five over to him before stuffing his mobile away again and grabbing the tray to cart it up to the front. He placed it over at cold bar and rapidly placed everything on it back in their spots, looking to Emmeline standing there at hot bar watching him while he did it. "You good?" she checked.

"Oh, yep, great," he said. "Just — I might actually go for that fifteen once the last load is finished, if that's alright with you."

"Yes, it is alright with me if you take the fifteen you're scheduled for," Emmeline replied after a beat.

"Great, thank you," Remus said, taking the empty tray to the back He waited the thirty seconds more it took for the dishwasher to wind down and flung the door open, pulling the tray out and totting it back up front.

Next up was probably the fastest loop of the cafe Remus had done in ages, but the fact that he even bothered to when he figured a lot of other people wouldn't have in his shoes had him thinking another one of Lily's earlier sentiments rang true; he wouldn't be him if he didn't feel it necessary to do, but he wouldn't be him if he didn't feel the push and pull of obligation from all sides either. He brought the total of two in-house mugs he accumulated into the back and left them at the sink for now, hoping Lily would turn out to be right about a few more of her prior sentiments.

He went into the backroom, had Sirius on speed dial before he reached the desk, and by some wonderful pardon, he only had to wait one ring before the line picked up. "Hey, one sec," he heard, Sirius's voice coming through with a bit of commotion going in the background. Remus didn't say anything to that, mostly because he hadn't even thought to text him first, but the hoopla in the background died down before Sirius's voice rang out rather faux-sweetly. "Oh, no no, you're welcome, really; I'll be here all day."

Remus's eyebrows did a slow crawl up his forehead. "What was that?"

Sirius gave out a 'tch.' "I was trying to get out of there and got stuck holding the door open for a group of quacks strolling on in like I'm paid to do it."

Remus's mouth quirked as he took a seat at the desk. "Where are you?" he asked.

"Some furniture store Andromeda wanted me to see," Sirius relayed, which reminded him of the plans Sirius had for the day that he'd completely forgotten about until just right then.

"Found anything you like so far?" Remus raised.

There was a click of a lighter before Sirius hummed noncommittally and exhaled a few beats later. "This one's a bit frou-frou for me, but the last one we checked out was quite the treat."

"Yeah?" Remus prompted, running his pinky finger over the bottom corner edge of his mobile.

Sirius hummed the 'yes' around another haul. "Took a few snaps for you to have a look at in case I ever feel the need to go back there and pick up a thing or two," he passed him, and Remus's stomach took to a little twirl over that piece of information. "I know you don't want another Ludwig sitch."

Remus breathed out a laugh for an end cap like that one. "Certainly not."

"I mean, to be clear," Sirius added, "I wouldn't mind another Ludwig sitch, but you don't, so that's the standstill we're in."

Remus let his head fall back a bit. "Impressive analogy," he said.

"Only the best for the professor," Sirius offered, and then a few beats of nothing followed. "OK, Remus? I just want to say that whatever that was, I shouldn't have kicked you out for it; let's just get that out in the open now."

Remus fiddled with a hangnail on his left ring finger; despite having held a version of that same opinion for a bulk of the afternoon, hearing Sirius own up to it rather softened his read of it. "I sort of kicked myself out, if we're being honest," he offered.

"Yeah, but what was that hand thing I did, even?" Sirius put up. "I don't get to toss you out just because I don't like what you're saying; how was that going to help?"

"It's OK, Sirius," Remus said. "I didn't explain myself well back there at all."

"I don't want this morning to stick out like a sore thumb over everything else, OK?" Sirius raised. "We can forget I even asked."

Remus swallowed. "I don't want to pretend it never happened."

"Remus, I'd really rather you did," Sirius instilled. "I picked a shit time to drop that on you, and I get that; it's what I get."

"It's not 'what you get,'" Remus denied. "This just isn't the time or way I wanted this to happen."

"No, I heard that, and the sixteen other reasons, so—" There was a few seconds' pause where near-silence was all that filtered through the line. "Wait, you want it to happen?"

Remus huffed. "Ideally, yes," he supplied. "Why wouldn't I want to? I'm not saying no, I'm not saying I need space; I'm saying not yet—"

He trailed off a little toward the end of that when he heard footsteps up the hall, but with that, he lifted out of the chair and slipped out the back door, winning himself a bit more privacy. "It's going to sound cliché, but it's got nothing to do with you and everything to do with me," he kept on. "I don't have my shit together enough to make a step this big and the last thing I want to do is scare you off."

"On what planet would that ever happen?" Sirius returned.

"The same one we're on now, Sirius; that's my point," Remus insisted. "You can't know that I won't just because you say I won't, and I've scared people off for much less than moving in with them—"

"People, meaning him," Sirius translated.

"Yeah, him," Remus gave up. "And that's not me saying you're anything like him because we both know you're not, but you being so good at this even while it makes almost no sense to me how you can be isn't going to fix the fact that I'm terrified I'm going to send you out the door one way or another, but especially now."

"Why now?" Sirius countered. "Why would I jump ship now?"

"Why wouldn't you?" Remus returned. "You didn't ask for this; I've been a moody shit around you all week, and I don't know when that's going to let up because I'm fucking livid that this had to happen to me now of all times because this summer was supposed to be ours."

"You don't think I'm just as livid as you are?" Sirius raised. "I was ready to kick down every door in this city until somebody got us answers and we're all lucky it didn't come down to that; your snark hasn't got a chance against me, so jot that down."

Remus swallowed around the lump in his throat. "It's not just the clusters," he said. "I feel like I steamrolled us back into this place where we keep missing each other by a hair."

"Why would you have?" Sirius asked. "Why's it all on you, at that?"

"Our timing has been fucking terrible lately," Remus maintained, giving out a humourless laugh. "I mean, I bought the tickets for our trip the same fucking day you got word about your mother, and what kind of sick timing was that? It's like we're getting bulldozed for even trying to look forward."

Sirius didn't speak for long enough that Remus had to pull his mobile away from his ear to make sure their call was still going, and it was lucky that he put it back against his ear when he did or else he'd have missed the moment Sirius chose to weigh in. "I had a friend in grade school whose aunt, uncle, and grandfather all died within three months of each other," he raised, and Remus's eyes took on a whole new shape, "and I didn't really get it at the time, but when her grandfather went, too, I remember thinking, 'Jesus Christ, really? Now?'"

Remus didn't dare speak in the pause Sirius gave, but thankfully the pause wasn't long enough to warrant it. "I didn't like that she was crying all of the time and I sort of hated that I didn't really get it, but I didn't know that then, I was just a ball of anger that had nowhere to go, but when I've thought about it since, it's obvious to me that timing is just a fucking bitch sometimes," he put it plain. "And, yeah, I could tell you shit happens and you need to get over it, but I'm not going to; I don't think you and I are getting punished just for going and living our lives, but even if by some unfair, mystical chance we are getting beat by an invisible hand, we owe it to ourselves to just keep fucking going. We deserve it, even."

Remus shut his eyes and bit down on his lower lip, willing himself to keep it together when he still had half a work shift to complete. "Still with me?" Sirius asked.

"Of course, but you slugged me really hard with that one," Remus returned, rubbing at his nose with his free hand.

Sirius gave out a breath that might've been a laugh if the situation warranted one, and thankfully, it seemed he had the wits about him to know it didn't. "You don't have to move in with me," he said, "but I need you to start swapping 'I' out with 'we.'"

"What?" Remus asked, dropping his free hand from his nose.

"I've been saying nothing but 'we' since Monday, but you keep isolating yourself in this," Sirius maintained. "You keep saying 'I' like I'm not right there, and I'm in this, too; I know I don't feel it the way you do, but I still feel it."

Remus picked a spot on the ground between his feet to stare at, but he couldn't make out many of the divots in the asphalt with the film over his eyes. "I didn't realize I was doing that," he admitted.

"You don't have to let anyone else into this; I'm fine if it's just you and me," Sirius instilled, "but there is a 'me' and he's sort of a giant man-baby at times, so let's just jot that down, too, while we're at it."

Remus succumbed to a weak laugh there. “OK, you have to stop,” he maintained.

“And why should I?” Sirius returned.

“Because I'm welling up at work because of you,” Remus told him.

“Is this a half or a fifteen?” Sirius asked.

Remus frowned. “Fifteen."

“Who's on right now?” Sirius raised.

“Elise is closing with me,” Remus forwarded. “Emmeline's here 'til six, and the new girl's gone for the day.”

Sirius gave another, but slightly longer pfft. “As if either of the E's are going to give a flying fuck if you take a few minutes longer out there,” he maintained.

“I know, but apparently I've been too laxed about my breaks lately,” Remus admitted, scrunching his face up a little.

“I'm sorry, but wasn't Elise the one who drove a half-hour out of her way just to get fucking pho on one of her breaks?” Sirius raised. “You're allowed to take a phone call.”

Remus worked his mouth around a reluctant smile. “I should head back in soon, though,” he said.

“Fucking model shift lead over here,” Sirius returned. “How's the newbie, anyway? Did she end up firing off on you out in the back room yet?”

“No, but there's still time,” Remus sent him, a smile budding at his lips.

“Good, glad to hear it,” Sirius said breezily. “So, what do you think? Are you sensing there'll be months of sexual tension between the two of you until you burst and fireworks go off?”

Remus gave a wistful sigh. “Only on my end this time.”

“You shit,” Sirius sent him, the effect marred by the laugh that came with it. “I'll get you for that one.”

“Can't wait,” Remus said of it, working his mouth around a smile. “You're stalling and I do need to head back in.”

Sirius huffed. “Am I that obvious?”

“Just a bit.”

“Fine, go milk that conscience while you still have it,” Sirius said loftily. “We're going to be at this a little while longer from what I can tell, but I could have Andromeda drop me by there when we're done; just putting that out there.”

“Yeah?” Remus asked, his heart rate picking up.

“Yeah,” Sirius echoed, dropping the airy tone to where it felt lovely just to hear the affirmation for what it was. “Get back to work, slacker.”

Remus pressed a huff directly into the receiver and was still grinning when he ended the call, but the breath he took in before opening the back door felt like the first breath clean breath after swallowing water, and he spent a moment with it before he let himself back into the backroom.

Chapter 6: 6.

Chapter Text

The first thing Sirius does after getting one of Remus's best huffs to date is bask in the relief that washes over him and how easy it all of it still feels. The second thing he does is puff up a bit over not having lost his touch; managing to get Remus to tear up, laugh, and huff in the span of one phone call isn't half bad given where they last left off. The third thing he does, and this is more important than even the first two, is embark on the face journey that immediately comes after receiving three little red hearts to top off Remus's regular huff-and-hang-up routine.

He sends three back to him, takes a long look at the pixeled version of the two of them cozied up and smiling up at him from the background of his home screen, and lights up another one, giving himself until the cigarette runs out to come up with a plan B. Only this time around, the underlying theme he keeps to is that he's got to include Remus in all decision-making going forward, and this time, Sirius can't be dropping any more bombs on him without any lead-up.

Andromeda comes looking for him around the same time he crushes the end of his cigarette with his boot, which incidentally is right around the time Sirius has jotted down notes for two plans that coincide with each other rather swimmingly in his opinion, so it's no surprise he learns quite quickly that he doesn't just feel like a million pounds; he must look a lot like it, too.

“Can't have gone too badly if you're smiling like that,” she observes, shouldering her purse and stepping up beside him on the curb.

Sirius tips his head to her. “I feel much less like I went cliff-diving and didn't have a parachute for landing,” he raises, closing the note app on his mobile and tucking it away altogether, “and on that note, I wish I'd caved sooner and called him because he's fucking adorable and I'm a lost cause.”

“I wish you had, too,” Andromeda sends him, rolling back on the balls of her feet, “then maybe you wouldn't have moped around all afternoon.”

Sirius gives her a look. “Pretty sure I didn't do that," he maintains.

“Pretty sure you haven't told me the verdict yet,” Andromeda hints.

“He's definitely not moving in,” Sirius reports, putting his head on a tilt, “and I definitely did make the whole thing about me when it really wasn't.”

“Well, I could have told you that,” Andromeda chimed.

Sirius reels back. “Could have,” he repeats, looking around and including a random passerby on their street corner, “could have, she says.”

The man has nothing to say for or against the matter, though he does speed up to make it past the two of them quicker which only adds to Sirius's very recent upswing in mood. Andromeda waits the two-point-five seconds it takes for the man to get far enough away to keep on, biting her lip out of amusement. “All I said was that there had to be more to it than just you,” she trades him, lifting her hands evasively. “Remus will wax poetic about you to whoever will give him a second to.”

"Mm, you're a little naive," Sirius tells her.

Andromeda lifts her hands. "Just a second ago I was right and now I'm naive?" she observes. "I can't keep up."

“I hate that you were right, too, you know that?” Sirius lobs at her.

“Oh, I'm sure you do just on principle,” Andromeda returns.

“Not only that,” Sirius maintains. “If it actually was to do with me then maybe I'd be able to do something about it, but it's bigger than me; he's literally afraid to catch himself being happy and I'm going up against the ripple effects of the actions of a sociopath, so maybe you could go just a bit easier on me considering I've got my work cut out for me?”

Andromeda takes a long breath in and reaches over to pat Sirius soundly on the back. “M'kay, change of plans,” she declares. “We're going to put a pause on this errand for now since your head's clearly not in it, go get some pub food, and by the end of our pints, you'll have remembered why he's worth it.”

“Oi,” Sirius sends out, “when did I say he's not? I was just making a plan for this, thank you—”

Andromeda smiles tightly, tapping Sirius's right arm with the points of her nails. “D'you," she starts, "remember how the last plan worked out?”

“Plans that include his input, at every step,” Sirius clarifies. “I'm literally making room for his shit, right now, as we speak.”

Andromeda barely bats an eye at Sirius's hands flying about accompanying his point, instead she gives him a squeeze. “Good, then,” she forwards. "He's done the same for you."

"I'm aware, yes," Sirius returns.

Andromeda sticks her head down on his shoulder and turns it toward him. “Still want to get that bite?”

“Of course I do,” Sirius says plainly, and Andromeda smiles brightly in contrast. “Want to come break a certain Welsh bloke's legs with me when we're done there? Not Remus, the other guy.”

“Listen; yes, I do,” she puts plain herself, “only we can't open a venue from a jail cell, so let's stick to tearing him to pieces and hoping that karma does its thing.”

Sirius scoffs. “Karma's never quick enough,” he says of it.

“Oh, but she is sweet when she comes 'round,” Andromeda instils, linking her left arm in with Sirius's right. “Come on, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that you hate it in there.”

“Literally everything about it is giving me hives,” Sirius maintains, allowing himself to be led back in the direction of Andromeda's car.

“Listen, I knew this one was going to be a long shot,” Andromeda offers, “and I only brought you here because the owner's a peach and would've given us a wicked deal on a furnishing the entire place—”

Sirius flaps his free arm back in the direction of the store. “In what world does that place have anything to do with our theme?” he raises her. “There's no air in there, first off, and I took a seat on one of their chairs and I couldn't tell whether I was sitting on a chair or a park bench for another; that's just how stiff it is in there, and is that the atmosphere you want our valued patrons to be in?”

“I don't think you're thinking about the fact that we have to cater to everybody, including those with deep pockets,” Andromeda instils. “I know you've been out of that world for a while now, but I just want to remind you that hoity-toits don't typically like to sit on threadbare chairs with beer stains all over them, Sirius.”

Sirius knows that she has a point in there somewhere, but he comes up with one of his own quite quickly. “I don't want hoity-toits anywhere near the building, is the thing."

“You'll want them spending their wads at the bar, though,” Andromeda mentions, letting go of Sirius's arm as they make it to the car.

Sirius heads round to the passenger side, pointing to her over the roof of the car. “This was never going to be a simple cocktail bar, so I don't know where you're getting that image from,” he maintains, waiting with his hand on the door handle for her to unlock it.

Andromeda presses the button on her key ring and slips into the driver's seat as Sirius gets in on his side. “We might have to think about dividing this into sections,” she suggests, sliding into her seat. “For instance, you could take care of the bar on the venue side of things because I see what you're going for there and it works for that, but maybe I could handle the lounge and the bar on that side of the place, and the both of us could work together on the stage seating, bookings, correspondence, all of that stuff.”

Sirius looks to Andromeda, out the front window of the car, and then back at her in a quick second. “OK, I don't hate that,” he admits.

Andromeda reaches over to slap Sirius's right knee three times in quick succession and straightens herself out in her seat to buckle in. “That's a good sport," she affords him, sticking the key in the ignition.

They do go get a bite, where they weave in and out of shoptalk, general talk, and Remus talk over a basket of chips and a pint, except Andromeda's treat is a traditional oatmeal stout whereas Sirius's is a blended daiquiri with a tiny green umbrella sticking out of it for a sprinkle of fringe, but he's celebrating for two tonight. And not that he doesn't already know that all the stretching and bending this way and that way to make Remus comfortable hasn't been worth it, Andromeda wasn't wrong; he feels grade-A rejuvenated and brimming with purpose once he gets to the bottom of his glass, but that might have a little something to do with the double shot of rum making everything a bit fuzzy around the edges, too.

It's closing in on seven-thirty when Andromeda drops him off, and yes, the rum may have mostly worn off by now, but not so for Sirius's spirit; that, he's going to hold on to so long as he has the hands to make it happen.

Sirius unbuckles himself in a quick click. "Thanks," he half-chimes, half-sings, pushing the sash aside.

“Tell him I love him for me?” she bids.

Sirius smirks, tugging on the door handle and stepping out of the car. “Oh, I will just to get him flustered,” he assures, shutting the door behind him and turning back to lean his arms on the window ledge to peer across the front seats at her. “Monday, then?”

Andromeda tosses a glance up in thought. “Probably fine, but I'll get back to you on it,” she returns.

Sirius drums his right hand against the side of the car in allowance, straightens up, and heads up the path toward the door, giving a quick glance into the shop window and spotting Remus near-immediately behind the counter closing down one of the coffee blends for the night, and snorts over the fact that Remus's height makes it so that his curly head o' hair sticks out above just about everything behind the counter. His smile widens as he realizes Remus is bobbing to something playing inside, suddenly feeling that he has to know what exactly has him bobbing along, and heads in through the shop door, immediately feeling that much sunnier hearing 'Rescue Me' playing out over the speakers. He saunters his way up to the till, doing a bit of shoulder-swaying to match Remus's little dance of his own, and avidly watches Remus as he passes a cloth over the coffee station and shakes the cloth out over the bin with a flourish to pair with one of Fontella's high notes playing out, and Sirius is fucking weak.

Remus seems to realize he may just have a bit of an audience for he checks over his shoulder, freezes on the spot, and steps over to the till with a sheepish smile on, and if Sirius has a guess, Remus is now sandwiched tightly between a bit embarrassed and happy to see him. “By all means, don't stop on account of me,” he insists.

Remus gives him a more pointed smile there, straightens his neck out, and sticks the cloth aside, simply not obeying Sirius's wish. “I didn't know when you'd be coming, so I just sent Elise on her break,” he tells him. “I can take mine when she's back, though.”

Sirius shakes his head quickly. “I'm fine to wait,” he says of it. “I've got all night.”

Remus's shoulders ease about three inches lower, but any easing is worth it in Sirius's books. “Would you like your drink while you wait?” he asks, hovering his left hand over the venti cold cups.

“You know I would,” Sirius returns.

Remus plucks a cup off of the stack, eyes the bar once before looking back at him, and Sirius takes the hint, strolling over toward the hand-off station without another peep. He goes a little further than Remus likely meant, slipping up to the ledge overlooking the left-hand side of the bar and leaning his arms over it, but he must take in the show in front of him as Remus pumps the many different syrups it takes to whip up his concoction without having to look at what he's doing.

“How was the quest?” he asks.

Sirius readjusts his focus, nodding lightly. “It was good," he offers. "We didn't get very far today, I'll be honest, but we've come to a compromise on what our vision is and we're going to reconvene soon enough.”

“Give me the vision,” Remus bids, queuing the shots for his drink.

Sirius pulls his arms off of the ledge to better use his hands. “See, what I want, is an exact crossroads: Black Dog meets Barfly meets Madame Arthur,” he raises, pausing when Remus's face lights up.

“That's so many meetings,” he says of it, shaking his head. “And so you that it's kind of perfect.”

“Right?” Sirius gives out, pumped to have an ally in Remus. “It's not farfetched to think that I'm not the only person who'd thrive in that atmosphere, and I really don't think it's that niche.”

Remus gives him a bit of a frown there, pulling the fridge open to get the milk out. “She doesn't agree, then?” he raises, pouring the milk to the exact line Sirius likes it at.

“She does to a point,” Sirius mentions, “but she still thinks like a rich bitch, you know? That never really left.”

“Says the richest bitch I know,” Remus quips, bringing the cup over to the ice bucket and using half of the smallest scoop for the very little ice Sirius is quite partial to.

“Right, but,” Sirius counters, taking the hit like a champ, “she's under the impression no one with a ton of coin to spend will ever set foot in the place if we don't somewhat cater to them in various ways, but either way, we'll make it work; we're just going to assign ourselves our separate sections, furnish them as we see fit, and in the end, I think that could work in our favour, having different atmospheres throughout the space, you know? I've seen it work before; there's this three-level pub I've been to that's got your regular dive bar and seating deal on the main floor, the second level where the dance floor is, and there's this hallway in between the two that leads up to a fucking library — like, a room with wooden booths, built right into the shelves that you can pull books off of, right there while having your pint, and that place was popping that night and still going strong these days, and d'you know why? Because people want a little extra zhoosh to their night out.”

Remus reached for a lid and stuck it on top of the drink before walking it over to him. “That's a very good point,” he offers him, plunking the drink down on the ledge in front of Sirius. “But also, eat the rich.”

“Love that,” Sirius returns, plucking a straw out of the bin near them and popping the paper off of it.

The door to the shop opens up and brings in a bloke at a brisk pace, clearing the distance between the door and the till in just two to three steps and calling Remus back over that way. “Hi there,” he offers, his I'm-a-model-employee smile on as he's stepping up to till, “what can I get started for—”

“Triple Espresso,” the man cuts in.

Sirius watches Remus's eyes drop to the till screen before he speedily plugs the order in. “Alright, that'll be—”

“Cre-dit,” the man says, making it two, distinct syllables, and as far as Sirius is considered, that man is now the enemy.

Remus prompts the machine, gestures vaguely toward the pin pad, and brings the smallest-sized cup on the menu over toward the bar. He sticks it under the spout, flickers his gaze over toward the man in the midst of paying while he queues up the shots, and puts his gaze on Sirius for a moment, bringing his voice lower. “Well, I'll just go fuck myself, then,” he grins.

Sirius breaks there, setting his forehead down on the ledge in front of him and succumbing to a fit. He comes up for air right around the time the man wanders over to wait by the bar and can practically see Remus willing the espresso shots to pour quicker by the way he's staring at them, biting down hard on his lower lip to keep his own amusement in, no doubt.

When the remaining six seconds are up, Remus picks up the cup and brings it over to slide it over to the man, but it's snatched from his hand before he can place it on the counter.

“Yeah, or you could just wait next time,” Sirius serves up. Remus steps back and quickly busies himself with rinsing off the espresso tray in Sirius's peripheral while the man scoffs and heads for the door, leaving Sirius staring after him through narrow eyes. “Tell me you decafed him."

“I did not do that, no,” Remus returns.

Sirius huffs, looking to him. “You aren't doing anybody any favours letting what little powers you have back there go to waste.”

“Alright, keep your voice down,” Remus undertones him, glancing around the café for any eavesdroppers.

“Who's he, anyway?” Sirius puts up. “What, has he got a breathtaking novel to get to the printers at fucking eight on a Thursday night? Eat me.”

Remus sets sail on a wonderful face journey and turns away from him altogether as the door brings in yet another customer, calling Remus back to till to engage an entirely different man, but this exchange, from what Sirius can decipher at least, is closer to the pleasant side of things judging by Remus's body-language throughout their rather short conversation. He rings the man right up and brings a grande cup over to the bar, where Sirius is still very much lounging against the ledge and sipping intermittently on his drink while he watches him work.

Remus tops the man's cup off with water and leaves very little room at the top, bringing the drink over to the hand-out station with a controlled hand, and it's quite apparent that the man who'd ordered the Americano is watching that movement very carefully. “I don't know how you managed that,” he puts up. “Must take a steady grip.”

“And how,” Sirius pipes up.

Remus ducks down below the counter and acts as if he's rotating the milk around in the fridge, giving his most recent customer a quick send-off from there and only rising to his feet when he knows the coast is clear. “Would it really be too much to ask you not to act like you're ten?”

Sirius smiles brightly at Remus's pointed Look. "You know the answer to that," he sends him, going for another sip.

“Ruined a perfectly innocent moment, you did,” Remus mentions.

“I believe they're called opportunists in some circles,” Sirius sends him evasively.

“That's enough out of you,” Remus maintains, turning his attention back to the bar.

Sirius watches him as he undergoes the process of closing down bar two for the night and finds a smile tugging hard at his lips as Remus lines the grounds drawer with a few torn sheets of paper towel. Remus gives him a quick smile before dipping into the back, reappearing seconds later with a brand new and rather dry cloth that he then sets down flat from one end of the espresso tray to the other to effectively catch any wayward drops from here on out. Remus lets out a tiny breath of accomplishment when all is said and done, or shall Sirius say, one more box checked off of his to-do list, dusting his hands off and looking over to Sirius grinning at him. “Yes?”

He shakes his head easily. “I just like watching you work,” he slips him.

Remus shifts on his feet a little, on the speedway headed to Flustertown. “I would've thought you were gloating over my implementation of one of your many tricks,” he offers.

“Oh, it's a bit of both,” Sirius allows. “Won't lie about that.”

“Well, in that case, I'll have you know that I officially knocked sanitizing down to a half-hour—” Remus pauses to smile at Sirius's scandalized gasp, “—but that's as low as I'll probably ever get it to; not everyone can be you, unfortunately.”

“Well, your right about that one,” Sirius lets him have, “though my greatest apprentice to date deserves all the praise here, I think.”

“Mm, well, hold on,” Remus tells him, pointing toward him, “because I pulled another you a little earlier that I think you'd just love to know about.”

Sirius pauses the sip he went for. “Tell,” he prompts, already quite puffed out.

Remus turns more toward him, leaning his right hip up against the bar and ruining Sirius's entire life as he does it. “Well, I was coaching Agnes along on bar and Stan the Man walked in,” he frames, setting the scene.

“'Course he did,” Sirius puts in, his eyes fixed on Remus's cocked hip.

“My thoughts,” Remus echoes, gesturing a hand toward him with it. “And, rather than end up in a whirlwind of second or third tries to get the drink to his exact taste, I decided that it'd be easier for everyone involved if I slipped in there and made the drink for her.”

Sirius lifts his eyes in a snap, giving out an incredulous noise. “Oh-ho?”

Remus nods brightly. “So, what I did was,” he adds, walking his right middle and forefinger over the countertop beside him, “I walked her through the process so she could learn how to make it herself one day.”

Sirius half-gapes, half-grins, his entire body singing. “You shit,” he sends him, slapping his right hand on the surface of the ledge between them, “you absolute—”

“See, if you simply break the drink down into small, incremental steps as you go along, the entire process becomes far less overwhelming,” Remus roasts on, smiling away over there. “It's so important for a new hire to understand that they shouldn't be afraid of the drink or the man behind it.”

Remus had been right to suggest they live in an unjust world, but just then, Sirius's main reason for agreeing with the entire sentiment is the fact that he can't lean over the ledge and snog the living shit out of him while he's at work; absolutely terrible and unjust circumstances. “I'm going to get you for that one, too,” he supplies, tipping his drink and pointing the end of his straw toward Remus. “You just wait.”

Remus gives him the quickest once-over Sirius ever did see. “I'm counting on it,” he maintains, glancing over at the shop door as it opens yet again. He heads for the till to meet the newcomer, leaving Sirius wondering why nobody has figured out an easy button to press when the act of fast-forwarding time starts feeling like an absolute necessity.

Remus pours his newest customer her coffee from the vat, hands it over to her, and heads back to him with a different smile on. “So, earlier today,” he mentions, stepping right up by the ledge Sirius is still claiming as his home for now, "Lily was typing out what was intended to be a very professional email, but her finger must've slipped and made it so she started the whole message off with 'Herllo.'”

Sirius sends three quick gusts of a laugh out through his nose before he all but drapes himself over the ledge he's leaning on. “'Herrllo, can you hear me?'” he croons, sultry-smooth.

Remus catches the tip of his tongue between his teeth for a quick smile before he lifts his bright gaze to the ceiling thoughtfully. “'Herllo... is it me you’re looking for?'” he offers, at a quieter volume than Sirius would ever go, but that's A-OK with him.

Sirius eyes the ceiling for a moment or two for show, but he already knows what the next one's gotta be. “'You say goodbye, and I say herllo...'”

Impossibly so, Remus's eyes brighten even more. “'Herllo, herllo,'” he echoes back, pulling his mouth into a firm line as a gent seated somewhere behind Sirius sends a scoff over to them, apparently not appreciating the free entertainment going on near him.

Remus sends Sirius a quick smile and a nod toward the greater floor. “Go get us a seat before all the good ones are gone,” he bids him. “Elise should be back on soon enough.”

Sirius nods valiantly and takes his drink with him when he goes, scouting the place for the best spot at their disposal and immediately heading for the farthest corner booth, picking the side that'll give him ample view of the bar from across the room. Remus's guesstimate wasn't far off in that Sirius couldn't have been fucking around on his mobile for longer than ten minutes before Remus slipped in across the booth from him, totting a small tea in his right hand and his mobile in his left that he sticks down on the table between them.

Remus lifts his tea up near his chin and blows on it, nodding to him. “You somehow picked the same spot Lily chose for my review,” he passes him, smiling circumstantially before taking to jolting at the sound of remembrance that Sirius lets out.

“How'd it go?” he bids, sitting forward.

Remus eased back into his seat, giving his tea another quick gust. “Good for the most part,” he offers, going for a trial sip and seemingly deeming the tea a drinkable temperature. “She and I found a few shops that are nearer to my faculty building and sent a few messages out with my resume attached as well as the review, so keep your fingers crossed for me that I hear back from any one of them.”

Sirius blinks. “Bit early for that, isn't it?”

Remus shrugged a shoulder, setting his cup down on the table in favour of playing with his right thumbnail. “It can't hurt any, can it?” he raises. “If some of those managers have an idea of what the fall is going to look like for them and know they're going to need somebody, they'll already have someone who's looking for work in me and even if they don't know what things will look like just yet, it'll be good to get my name out there for when they do.”

Sirius splays his hands out on the table. “It's May, though,” he puts in. Redundant when Remus knows what month it is as well as he does, but as the boy so loves to say, there was a point in there somewhere. “There's so much time between now and when you actually have to start panicking about a job.”

“I know,” Remus insists. “There's plenty of time, but I really did panic about everything to do with the fall today and Lily thought I'd feel better about it once I did something productive, and she was right; I felt much better once we sent them out.”

There's a feeling not unlike heartburn burrowing at the bottom of Sirius's throat over which plans Remus could make from May onward and which ones he couldn't, but what stops it from setting fully ablaze is the appearance of the word 'productive,' and how closely that coincides with half of his new plan. He just has to get them there.

“You've only taken this company into account, too,” Sirius mentions, leaning further into the table and folding his arms over it. “You saw it for yourself; can't throw a stone over there without hitting a café so you're going to find something even if every single one of these fools decides to take a pass on you, and that's unlikely given that you're more than qualified.”

Remus lifts his tea, half-hiding his tiny smile behind it. “I suppose it'd be one thing if I didn't know the language or have any experience,” he allows. “No one's really taking a big risk by going with me, are they.”

“Exactly,” Sirius echoes. “And, keep in mind, Andromeda's got quite a network out there as well so either way, we'll make sure you get work, OK? Say the word, and the dream team is on it.”

Remus gives into a grin, his eyes brightening substantially. “Do you think she'd put the word out for me?” he raises.

Sirius tilts his head back and forth with a faux-thoughtful hum. “'Know' is probably the better word in this case,” he says for it. “She wanted me to tell you she loves you, by the way; said it right as she dropped me off.”

Remus's grin, as predicted, goes right on into sheepish territory in record time. “She's far too kind to me,” he maintains, the tops of his ears going a touch redder than they’d been a moment or two ago.

Sirius hums blandly. “No, I'd say it's the right amount,” he serves him, going for a good, long sip of his drink before trying his hand at laying out part one of his plan. “I have two things that I want to get your take on; how are we on time?”

Remus blinks, glances down at his mobile, and presses it on to have a look. “We've got a while,” he passes him, looking back up at him curiously.

“Perfect,” Sirius calls it. “So, while I was doing my collegiate level research—” he pauses, catching Remus hiding another smile behind his tea and pressing on with a renewed fire pulsing in his gut, “—I saw something that the more I think about, the more I think we ought to try; it's nothing funky or weird, and you really might get a lot out of it.”

“OK,” Remus prompts him, nodding.

“Some sufferers say that keeping a log of attacks is helpful for them,” Sirius presses on, taking Remus's dinner-plate eyes as a very good sign, all things considered, “time of day that one strikes, length of the attack, possible triggers, pain level, various abortive methods and attempts, loads of stuff; some things, we're going to learn to be better at and some things we just are destined to get better at understanding as we go along, so I think keeping a record could really help us out here.”

“No, I do, I like that,” Remus returns him.

“I'd hoped so,” Sirius trades him. “Wish I could say I came up with it all my own, but that's neither here nor there.”

“I'll forgive you for pilfering somebody else's idea,” Remus forwards him with a smile.

Sirius places a hand over his heart in response. “That's very reasonable of you.”

Remus knocks his left shoe against his right boot and Sirius moves quickly, linking his ankle in with Remus's and pulling it a little closer to him underneath the table before keeping on with it. “This way, when the appointment comes, we'll be able to open the book and literally point to what's been happening to you, but just in terms of you and your peace of mind, maybe you'll feel a bit better about things knowing that this is an exercise that's can only to help us out down the line,” he raises him, bringing them back around again. “And not only that, you might feel a little more productive in all of this because while it's true we can't do all that much to stop these things from coming, we'll still be able to implement some prevention tactics out of this and, at the very least, you might feel like you're doing what you can just by keeping a record going; like, taking the worry and putting it into something more actionable than just sitting with it.”

Remus sucked a breath in through his teeth. “That was a really good finish,” he offers him.

“Thought you might like that,” Sirius smiles.

Remus takes another sip of tea, his brow furrowing overhead. “Did you think I wouldn't want to try that out?” he raises.

Sirius shakes his head. “No, that wasn't it,” he maintains, “but I don't imagine it'll always be a happy-go-lucky task considering it means we'll have to relive and rehash the attack once it's over to get the information down, but to that, maybe we won't feel so bamboozled once we start having a better idea of what we're in for when one comes round; we can work together on it since I can't answer all the questions for you, same as you wouldn't be able to answer every one of them for yourself either.”

Remus shakes his head this time. “I'm never a good judge of time when I'm in one,” he trades him, frowning a bit. “It drags on and on, and then all of a sudden, I come out of it and the time's just jumped ahead.”

Sirius keeps his expression easy, though he hates that Remus has had enough of them to know that already. “Well, that'll be one of mine, then,” he reserves. “If you can't keep track of time, I've got that, but I can't really rate them for you, can I? There's a pain scale for these things out there that I saw a ton of people referring to online so I'm going to get us that to look off of and I'll observe how you're looking during any given one, but you'll have the final say on what the rating is; between the two of us, we can piece this puzzle together, I'm not worried about that.”

Remus gives a small breath, deflating in his seat. “Thank you so much for being up for this.”

“Don't thank me yet,” Sirius halts him. “You haven't heard part two.”

Remus smiles a little tightly. “What's part two?” he bids, bracing himself.

Sirius waves him off. “Relax, everything's good,” he instils. “Only, I hate that I wasn't there for most of your last one and I want to make right on that.”

Remus's brow furrows even more, which was decidedly not a part of the plan. “I can hardly fault you for working,” he puts it, and strike that; that's the perfect anecdote for Sirius's point.

“I know that, which is why I'm thinking about dropping down to part-time at the shop,” Sirius unveils. "Maybe less, we'll see what I can get away with."

“But,” Remus starts, biting at the left side of his lower lip, “what about Will?”

“Well, I wouldn't be leaving him completely in the lurch,” Sirius maintains. “He has plenty of workers who'd gladly take the a share of the twenty-some-odd hours I'd be giving up, and you know what, Will can eat me if he has a fit over it because you come first and if something happens, I can get to you much quicker if I'm not tied up at the shop five nights a week while trying to open a venue.”

Remus puts his mouth in a flat line before he speaks. “I don't know if I like you restructuring everything in your life because of me,” he says quietly.

Sirius shakes his head. “It's not everything, though,” he insists. “It's just a job, one that I've kept because it's convenient; cozy, familiar, I like mostly everybody there, and I was doing Will a favour staying on as the closer until I'd actually be going, but none of that holds a candle to you so it's the easiest decision to make.”

Remus sticks his elbows on top of the table, covering his mouth with two balled-up fists, and tossed a quick glance around them before he settled on training a heavy look at him. “Fuck you for saying that in here,” he mutters.

“Well, I wasn't planning on telling you this here, but you said the thing about productivity and it seemed like the right time,” Sirius offers him, looking around the place that's carrying on without looking at them and going lower on his register for Remus's sake. “Nobody's looking over here, OK? And I'm not bringing this up to start slinging mud again, but if you won’t come stay with me then I think this is the best alternative; I'm not asking you to sacrifice anything here, I know you have to keep working, but in this case, I have the privilege to not need to work and I want to use it right.”

Remus let out a breath like he'd gone and done a run around the block. “Sometimes I'm sure that I'm going to wake up one day and find out I've made you up completely,” he shares, shaking his head.

“You didn't,” Sirius assures him. “I did lie a bit, though; there's one thing I am going to ask of you.”

Remus breaks there, laughing weakly as he lifts a hand to signal Sirius has the floor. “I want you to let me know the second you feel that something's off,” he puts down. “I can't promise I'll be right there or a block away for every one of them, but I'll be there as soon as I can and I won't know you need help if you don't tell me that you need it; two-way street, yes?”

The smile Remus settles on is small, but fuck if it isn't radiant. “Yes,” he echoes, resting his chin in his right hand. “And not to bring this up again to start slinging mud again, but it means the world to me, knowing that you'd have been fine with having me stay with you.”

Sirius nods, his jaw feeling a touch heavier than normal. “In a heartbeat,” he underlines, going for a smile, “but this is the next best thing I can think of, so thank you for not doing a rain dance all over my efforts to assuage myself back into your good graces.”

Remus smirks, lifting his tea to hide his mouth. “Boy, you were never out of them,” he returns, and right then and there his alarm blares out.

“That thing's rigged,” Sirius decides, going for the dregs of his coffee.

“Unfortunately not,” Remus denies, reaching to silence it. “It's five minutes ahead for cases just like this one.”

“Clever bloke,” Sirius forwards.

Remus's mouth twists as he pockets his mobile. “I'm glad you came by,” he tells him.

Sirius sets his left elbow on the table and his chin in his hand. “You say that like I'm heading out?”

A genuine smile replaces the budding one on Remus's lips. “Well, I hoped you weren't, but I didn't want to assume any,” he offers.

“Mm, I'm thinking we ought to head to yours?” Sirius raises. “We've been at mine quite a bit lately; wouldn't be on to not go back to a perfectly nice flat if we have the option.”

“Can't argue a point as good as that one,” Remus trades him, slipping out of the booth. He stands to his full height, stops for a moment, and whisps his right hand over the corner of the table, looking down at Sirius curiously. “If you'd rather not hang around here, there's always the mat key?”

Sirius shakes his head, reaching to pull the pair of tangled earbuds out of the right pocket of his jeans that he smushed them into hours ago now. “I'm fine here,” he assures, lifting the tangled monstrosity. Remus eyes it with a smile and lifts his hands as if to say either option was fine with him, but before he gets any further from the table, Sirius swirls his empty cold up at him. “Be a dear and fetch me another?”

Remus eyes him plainly now. “You're coming up and getting it yourself,” he says of it.

“Can't, too weak,” Sirius insists.

“Then at the bar, it will sit,” Remus gives him nonchalantly, heading back to work.

Sirius does go get the refill and makes himself scarce from there when he's more than plenty aware that the last hour of a shift is, in layman's terms, crunch time. He starts up a program on his mobile, checks to be sure Remus isn't looking over his way, and sticks his feet up on the booth seat across from him, settling in comfortably before pressing play. The next time he looks up, it's mostly due to the fact that a looming figure passes by his field of vision, which is to say that he looks up just as Remus heads past his booth while sweeping the floor and stops by the table long enough to flick Sirius's right boot before keeping on by. Sirius takes his boots down from the cushion and plunks them on the floor below, garnering Remus to look back at him with a haughty little smile and making the whole charade worth it in the end.

Remus collects all of the dirt and grime into a pile before he sweeps all of it up, disappears into the back, and returns a few minutes later with a full mop bucket. Sirius pauses his program but leaves his earbuds in as he watches Remus takes on a dual task of moping and pausing by the stragglers left in the shop to let them be aware of the fact that closing time is but minutes away now. Sirius, on the other hand, has been known to dip into the back and stick 'Closing Time' on over the speakers to send the same message home to whoever's still slow-sipping their drinks minutes to close, but unsurprisingly, Remus doesn’t have that sort of thing in him.

Sirius has also been known to snap the lock on the door a few minutes early every now and again to thwart a last-minute straggler from wandering in, but Remus waits until the clock strikes nine on the dot before he goes to lock up, the absolute madman. He heads back over to the mop to finish up the last of the floors and then it's on to cashing the till out, wherein Sirius watches Remus bopping along to The Supremes playing overhead as he stands over the cash drawer counting up notes and while there is an inherent truth to the idea that love can't be hurried, Sirius thinks he could certainly get away with making it so that he could get a some of that little sooner than later.

Sirius slips out of his booth and heads right for Remus, leaning his forearms on the counter between the two of them and waiting there until the boy looks up at him. “Can I help you?” he asks.

“Sure can, but not here,” Sirius says of it, taking to a stark undertone. “I'm hurting over here, so you best be quick about this, tu compris?”

Remus gives a glance to the left to locate Elise, but she's nowhere to be found for the moment. “I could finish a lot quicker if your forearms weren't right there throwing me off count,” he returns him, gesturing to his half-counted drawer. "And don't you start with the French."

Sirius smirks, quite thankful he'd gone and picked a sleeveless top at random this morning. He pushes himself off of the counter and wanders over to the bar, humming and hawing as he goes just because, and stops altogether when Remus flips him the bird high, high above the till so he'll really see it. Sirius snorts, brightens as Elise carts a tray of dishes up from the back, and heads up behind the counter with an offer to help put some of the dishes away since he's here.

Remus does end up counting quicker without Sirius's forearms there to distract him and then it takes all of a few minutes further for the shop to get shut up for the night, thank God for that. Sirius takes to leaning against a lamp post out front and lighting up a cigarette while Remus locks up behind the three of them.

He turns away from the door, backs away in the direction of his flat, and offers a quick wave to Elise. “Have a good one,” he wishes her, and this is good, there will be no loitering outside the shop tonight and that, is a sentiment Sirius can completely get behind.

Elise has a look around the parking lot while digging for something in her satchel. “No Priscilla tonight?” she raises, looking to Sirius.

He pushes off of the lamp post and lets his first haul out, shaking his head with it. “Nah, not tonight.”

Elise pulls out a much less tangled pair of earbuds than Sirius had to work with. “Shame,” she offers him. “Well, always a pleasure.”

“Likewise,” Sirius sends her, inching away at the same pace Remus has taken to.

The two of them face the direction they're heading in and get a few good steps down the sidewalk out front of the shop before Remus looks sidelong at him. “You didn't want to stop for her on your way here?” he asks.

Sirius shakes his head again. “If I'd done that it'd have taken me until now to get here,” he maintains.

Remus sways a bit closer as he walks along. “Did I really get picked over the ol' girl?” he raises airily, bumping Sirius's left hip with his right one.

“Certainly did, and you'd best keep those hips to yourself if you want to make it there before you get jumped,” Sirius returns him.

Remus smirks and puts a whole four inches of space between the two of them as they round the bend. “Am I ever going to see those snaps you took for me, or have you changed your mind on giving me an early peek?" he raises him.

Sirius perks up, reaches for his mobile in his back right pocket, and thumbs through it, opening up his gallery and selecting the first snap he took so Remus can simply swipe through the lot of them. Remus's face journeys are, overall, some of the best entertainment Sirius has at his disposal and he does not disappoint while he swipes through the collection of various decor pieces, reeling now and again as he goes.

“Are these for your home or your soon-to-be establishment?” Remus checks, looking over at him.

“Little of column A, little of column B,” Sirius supplies, smirking around a haul.

“Then which one is this horrifying portrait intended for?” Remus further bids, turning the screen toward him and displaying the eighteenth-century portrait of a wee child with a neanderthal's skull dressed up in the frilliest getup known to mankind.

“Don't be silly, that one's for you,” Sirius sends him brightly. “I was thinking about hanging it right in your entryway so that everyone who enters your home will know exactly what they're getting into.”

“A horror house?” Remus expels.

“Not my place to say,” Sirius maintains, shrugging for show. “Fine art is in the eye of the beholder, after all.”

Remus huffs loudly. “I hate that there is a fifty-fifty chance you're even kidding about this,” he attests.

“Mm,” Sirius hums, lifting his hands as if weighing them, “hate, love; fine line.”

“The finest,” Remus clarifies. “I'm this close to going and getting this thing just so it won't be there anymore and you won't be able to follow through with this horrible plan.”

“Good luck getting the address out of me,” Sirius chimes, bobbing his shoulders as he goes along.

Remus heckles him for another five blocks or so, which really was the overarching goal of taking all those snaps in the first place and that coming true for him has Sirius feeling lighter than air as he puts a pause on their trek to dip into Boots and pick up a spiral-bound notebook for them to fill. By the time they're back out on the street, Remus has found another photo that he's utterly frustrated by on principle and that's another three blocks of free entertainment for Sirius to indulge in before they're heading up the path to his building.

Sirius takes the stairs two at a time with Remus is right there behind him, his hand on the small of Sirius's back as if propelling him up the stairs and through the hall that much quicker. Sirius steps back at Remus's door, giving the lad just enough space to get at the lock while working his mouth over his neck from behind him, and then Remus fumbles with the keyring and the whole thing goes careening to the floor by the door.

“Oh, nice one,” Sirius puts out. Remus shushes him once, drops down to pick the keys up, and rises once again to refocus on getting the right one in the lock and successfully turning it this time. “See, this is a prime example of why I leave my door unlocked.”

“You leave your door unlocked because there's something wrong with you,” Remus tosses over his shoulder.

“Oh yeah, that's it,” Sirius goads, placing it right by the shell of Remus's right ear, but amusement betrays the sultry tone he was certainly aiming for, “tell me I'm wrong again.”

A laugh rolls out of Remus as he gets the door open and Sirius crowds him inside only to get pressed against the door as a means of shutting it, his pulse tripling as he tosses the notebook aside, landing it somewhere by the collection of shoes nearby. The dim light carrying in from the streetlights outside distorts his view of Remus's front, the main windows in the home looming both above and behind him and casting quite the shadow over his face, but then again, Sirius doesn't really need to see it all that well when Remus's voice comes out bare enough that he can quite vividly place exactly which shape his eyes have taken on.

“I love you, and I love this,” he puts down, reaching up to tuck a lock of hair behind his right ear, and Sirius is nothing but glorified putty. “You know that, right?”

Sirius takes his lower lip between his teeth, nodding vigorously as he reaches up for Remus's wrist and swipes his thumb over the front of it. He does know it, but fuck if he doesn't need to hear it after going and letting himself forget for as many hours as he did.

“Even your questionable taste in home decor,” Remus tacks on, laughing against Sirius's lips. “I love every bit of you—”

Sirius swoops in for a taste of him, pulling a light, startled noise out of him. He reaches up and braces his hands on the sides of Remus's face to keep him right there and Remus follows his lead, thank God, matching the slow strokes of his tongue without much of a hitch until he's the one who takes the lead, and Sirius has absolutely no objections to that. Remus drops his head down to latch on at his pulse point and Sirius leans his head to the left and arches into it, loving that Remus switches between using his lips, tongue, and teeth so much he's tangling his hands up in Remus's hair to hold on tight and urge him to keep that brilliant decision of his up.

Remus palms his cock over his trousers and Sirius undoes them right quick, rucking them down for him because a little teamwork never hurt anybody. Remus lifts his head and leaves him with a mind-numbing kiss that Sirius gives his best college try at dragging out, but Remus has other plans in mind and that's made rather plain; Sirius braces his hands back on the door as Remus lowers to his knees, skirts his hands over the flat surface behind him as Remus continues right where he left off, and squirms against him as Remus places open-mouthed kisses to his navel all while holding his hips against the door. Little more of that stuff and he's setting in on Sirius's cock rather indulgently, garnering him to give up on the door as his main source of aid, trusting that Remus's hands have him pretty well covered there, and grabs for Remus's head instead, his left hand latching tight to his curls while his right one smoothes over the back of Remus's neck, his shoulders, dips below the collar of his shirt just to feel his skin as Remus pulls his lips back and forth over him and palms the skin underneath his hands, right where he's got Sirius's hips braced to the door.

Being thanked profusely for a series of good deeds via some good head is certainly a reward Sirius is more than happy to accept, the only unfortunate part about it is that Remus is effectively killing it in the reciprocation department and Sirius wants it for as long as he can have it. He holds Remus's head around the back of it and moves his lips back and forth for him, showcasing a slower speed that he wouldn't mind taking to so as not to completely bust before he has the chance to really enjoy it, and Remus certainly does relax his jaw and follow his lead, letting Sirius guide him there and back, and that is a fantastic compromise, it is, right up until the part where Remus starts swallowing around his cock every time it meets the back of his throat, and then that only spurs Sirius's hips on all the more, seeking to hold brief but consistent meetings with the back of Remus's throat just to feel that again sooner, but it's all backfiring on him now.

“Nope,” Sirius prattles, trying for conviction despite his voice coming out a notch or three higher than he planned for, “I'm not going to lose it.”

Remus's laugh comes out both muffled and welcome, certainly, but the vibrations around him send Sirius into a full-bodied shudder before he's absolutely done for and there's nothing left for him to do but hold on tight and ride the whole thing out, his toes curling in his boots as his hips lose what's left of the rhythm they had going for them. He slumps back against the door and looks down at Remus through lidded eyes as he gets used to that whole breathing thing again while Remus swallows around him more for necessity than for thrills, pulling off of him with a slow move that cleans Sirius up in one go and clearing his throat.

“You did your best,” he offers, tapping at the curve of Sirius's left hip once.

Sirius blinks down at him, deciding that's three digs in a single day and for that, Remus is going to get it tenfold. He sends him a languid smile, humming lazily. “Oh yeah, laugh it up,” he goads, playing the leisurely fool while he waits for the prime moment to strike.

Remus's breathy little laugh tickles his navel before he rests his forehead against it and breathes in contentedly, and there, Sirius moves in a flash, dropping down, shoving Remus back, and sliding him back on the floor in an incredibly swift motion, he'd like to report. He crawls over him in the blink of an eye to work at his fly, yanking Remus's slacks down in three hard tugs, and strokes him with his right hand, setting a slow, intentionally maddening pace off the bat. Remus puts up with that until he rocks his hips up as a signal, but Sirius simply shifts over to settle his full weight over the left side of Remus's body, pinning him to the floor and keeping in with the speed he began with.

He hovers his lips just out of Remus's reach, enjoying the visibility he now has with the new angle he's got on Remus, giving him ample view of every slight change to his expression as Sirius speeds his hand up, as he works him up, as Remus watches Sirius watch him; the low light pouring in from the other side of the room makes it so his pupils have gone the size of saucers their own right and completely spellbinding, hypnotizing him until Remus leans up to catch hold of his lips and Sirius snaps to it, inching back just out of his reach, quite content with waiting however long it takes. He's got all night.

Remus knows exactly what Sirius is doing, there isn't a chance he hasn't worked it out, and yet, the boy lifts half off the ground for a second try at Sirius's lips only to get pressed back against the floor while Sirius moves his hand relentlessly over his cock. Remus lets out a wanton noise as he twists on the floor, writhing his hips against the weight on him and thrusting hard into the grip of his hand, and there, Sirius does show him a little mercy in return for the candour he's been shown. He leans in and slots their lips together, keeping the motions of his lips and tongue rather languid compared to the rapid pace of his hand, and smiles into their kiss as Remus whimpers in thanks, bringing a shaky hand up and twisting it at the back of Sirius's shirt as if to hold him there in case he has any other ideas, and he's right, Sirius does have another one.

He waits for Remus's breathing to peak, waits for a moment or two past that to win himself another whine, and pulls off of Remus's mouth just as he comes, grinning as Remus's whole body arches into it and his voice covers over every inch of the entryway that the two of them weren't already taking up.

Remus reaches up with the hand not practically sewn in at the back of Sirius's shirt and passes it over his face as he comes down, his breathing all shaky. “That had no business being as hot as it was,” he says of it.

“I fundamentally disagree,” Sirius puts in, leaning in to leave him a quick nuzzle before moving on to licking off his coated fingers.

“Well, of course you do,” Remus returns, dropping his hand and spotting Sirius mid-way through it. “How do you manage to go from a tender nuzzle to licking cum off of your fingers without any pause?”

Sirius shrugs his shoulders breezily. “I hear you like that sort of thing, so a thank-you would have been fine,” he trades him.

Remus looks away from him loftily, but there's a smile budding at his lips all the same and Sirius gives into a wicked stretch, bumping Remus's right hip with his left one purposefully as he does it and grinning like he's won the gold. Once he's done with that, he lifts his legs to foot his boots off in turn, propelling one toward the floor successfully while the other one ends up bouncing off the door and hitting Remus in the left leg, causing Sirius to reach for him, caught tight between an apology and a laugh that probably shouldn't have been there.

Remus waves him off, his movements languid as he toes his own shoes off of his feet, and then he goes the extra mile and stretches his right leg out and up toward the door, snapping the lock with his socked foot. Sirius lay there for a few moments, rather impressed by Remus's ability to reach it from down here until he connects the dots and a bork leaves his chest, startling Remus beside him. “What was the use in locking it now?” he raises. “Who did you think is going to come waltzing in here, anyway?”

“Say the building were to catch fire,” Remus offers.

Another laugh bubbles right on out of Sirius. “Bit of a jump, no?”

“Work with me here,” Remus asks of him, lifting a hand to silence him, “say it did and we were just laying here, trousers down; I doubt either of us would want a fireman bursting in only to find us with our tadgers out in the wild.”

“OK well, one, speak for yourself,” Sirius returns, lifting his left hand to do some of his own silencing, “and two, if the building were to catch fire, we'd have a lot more to worry about than giving a fireman a free show.”

Remus smirks a laugh, sighing on the other end of it. “I can't say you're not good for a little perspective,” he trades him. He reaches down for the waist of his slacks and lifts his hips off of the floor in order to tug them on a bit easier, looking to Sirius with a contented smile. “Do you want to stay over?”

Sirius sends him a psh for that. “'Course I do,” he returns, just before Mestophales pops up directly over his head with the loudest call for affection he's heard in quite some time. He huffs a laugh, reaches to pull his jeans up over his hips, and leans his head back to blow smooches at the cat while he gets his button fastened. “Nice of her to let us finish first."

“Well, she didn't come say hi to me, so I doubt she's happy about what the wait was for,” Remus raises. Sirius allows Mestophales the chance to nuzzle his head to her heart's desire while Remus takes to playing with a curl in his fringe as he watches the two of them with a languid smile on, though his next words are rather pondering in nature so it seems he was doing two things at once just there. “Do you think the two of them will get along?”

“I really think they'll be fine,” Sirius sends him, underneath a faceful of cat. “I've seen videos of borzois with cats and they just chill out; Tango's going to flounce around her happily while she takes on the role of queen of The Flat, I'm calling it now.”

“As in many other cases, I do hope you're right about that,” Remus says for it.

Sirius pokes his head around Mestophales's rotund figure to have a glance over Remus's expression to gauge it better. “Tomorrow I've got work, but afterwards I could bring him by and we can see how the two of them fare?” he offers.

Remus appears to rather like that idea, that is until he thinks about the finer details of it. “How're you going to get him here?” he raises.

“I have a handy-dandy thing called James,” Sirius sends him.

Remus nods, clicking his tongue in realization. “Right, that thing,” he echoes, smiling over at him. "He'd gladly help transport a dog, and especially that one."

Sirius hums to agree wholeheartedly, lifts off of the floor, and scoots around Mestophales to get better access to that smile. “'Scuse me, sorry ma'am,” he offers loftily, bracing his palms on either side of Remus's body and leaning down to plant a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

”Ohh,” Remus says heavily, “are you trying to make her upset?”

Sirius smirks, leaves Remus with one more kiss for now, and sits back, putting the bulk of his weight on his knees and reaching his right hand out for the notebook that fell over near the shoe rack. “We should get on this while our memories are still fresh," he maintains, reaching down to run his left thumb over the sliver of Remus's right hip bone poking out from underneath his work blouse. "Would you like your sleepy-time tea while we're at it?"

Remus studies him for a beat or two, lifts off of the floor, and holds Sirius's chin in place as he kisses him full, and that's a resounding 'yes' in Sirius's books.

Chapter 7: 7.

Chapter Text

Sirius rids himself of his apron the moment he gets to the backroom, tossing it over the back chair at the desk and firing a text off to Remus from there. He sticks his mobile face-up on the desk, leans over the back of the chair to type his employee code into the computer, and waits with his right forefinger on the mouse, ready to clock out the moment Remus gives him the signal.

He presses to call him with his free hand and switches to hold his mobile to his ear with his more prominent arm as he slips out back. He figures he'll have enough time to shoulder it and pull a cigarette out before Remus will answer, but the boy must have his own mobile either in his hand or very close by for he picks up before the first ring even goes through.

"Tell me," he prompts, skipping right past hello.

Sirius snorts while he lights up, taking a second or two to puff on his cigarette, and takes his mobile back in his right hand again. "Someone's fired up."

"I've been waiting all afternoon with nothing but a 'we're aces' sent to me, which really doesn't say much, does it?" Remus disputes.

"Apart from 'we're aces,' which, of course, means good news," Sirius offers, pocketing his lighter.

"Details, Sirius," Remus presses.

Sirius takes a moment or two to slide down the wall and has himself a seat to the left of the door or better known to him as ‘The Spot.' He has himself another puff or two, leaving that arm curled over his bent knees, and does as bid. "I'm officially slated to be Friday/Saturday closing bitch starting next week and on until the end of my days here, but I haven’t known what a free weekend’s like in years as is so it’s all the same to me," he details. “I’m still going to have to come in tomorrow so Will doesn't have to scramble to cover it, but apart from that, I’m essentially home free.”

"You're having me on," Remus says outright.

"Seems that way, but I'm not," Sirius insists, smiling around his cigarette. "Promise I'm not."

"He let you go down to two days?” Remus stresses. “You're at least fibbing — did you have to trade in a limb to get him to agree to that?"

Sirius lets his haul out in an easy stream. "Not a one," he relays. “And I do love that medieval torture practice was where your head went to first."

"It was the first thing I thought of,” Remus defends. “And in an ideal world, I saw you having to finish out what was already posted and then maybe, he would look into switching things around for the next batch of schedules; I did not see this coming and so quickly, at that.”

Sirius tilts his head back and forth mildly. "Well, I won't say he was thrilled about the state of things considering I'm a world-class employee—" Remus cuts his bewilderment off to send a hearty pfft through the line and it almost puts a pause on Sirius’s soliloquy from mirth alone, but not quite, "—and his favourite around here, to boot, so it's only fair that he laments the lesser time I'll be spending here in the coming weeks, but he does understand that things come up; my man's in dire straits and that, really is that."

Remus makes a weak little noise on the other end of the line. “Sirius,” he gives minutely. “I don’t know what to say.”

“We’ve been over this,” Sirius hints.

“Fine,” Remus allows. “'You’re a righteous king, Sirius.'”

“Thank you,” Sirius sing-songs, settling down again. “It helped that I rounded up the coverage for the shifts I dropped; did a lot of the heavy lifting before I even broke the news to him.”

“Only you would be able to manage that,” Remus quips.

Sirius preens a bit, giving a little shoulder shimmy. “Phase one was to find Mary the moment I got in here and get her to agree to take a shift from me, which proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be,” he offers candidly, “but then, once she quit boohooing over my impending absence long enough to hear that she’d only be helping you out in the long run, she caved real quick.”

“D’aww," Remus says fondly. "Mary."

Sirius smirks around another haul. “That, and you know as well as I do she’s always passing off shifts and then turning around and begging for hours the next week, so she’s fine with taking my Thursdays,” he keeps on, pausing for a snort. “And, fucking Charlotte over here, practically jumped to nab the other two shifts because she's apparently just as hard up for hours as Mary, so between the four viable closers Will has at his disposal, the place will live on without my being here so often; it really couldn’t have been easier to work out.”

Remus lets out a breath riddled with relief. “I feel like I’m in a fever dream,” he insists. “It’ll sink in soon — at least I think it will.”

A string of remembrance is plucked somewhere in the back of Sirius’s brain, bringing a budding smile to his lips. "I know what’ll wake you right up,” he offers avidly. “Charlotte has demanded to see you in person."

"Hm?" Remus raises.

"Charlotte," he says. "New girl?"

"No, I know," Remus clarifies. "I don’t know why she would, though."

"I'm glad you asked," Sirius says brightly. "She, has a 'Drowners' patch sewn onto the satchel she brought with her today and there I was, thinking, 'just what are the odds?'"

"Oh, I don't like where this is going," Remus mentions.

Too late for that, the lid's already been loosened so the pickles have to come out of the jar. "So naturally I let her in on the fact that you're Hitt's veritable imprint on this here soil, which she didn't believe a word of until I pulled out my mobile and handed her the proof, and then the girl almost dropped it on the floor when she saw you, it was marvellous."

"Did you really have to dig out proof?" Remus raises.

"Certainly did," Sirius instils, lifting his cigarette to his mouth for a lofty pull off of it. "My very character was on the line."

"Was it, though?" Remus returns, his voice going a little higher from the scepticism lining it.

"I may be many things, but a liar is not one of them, Remus," Sirius maintains, tapping the ash off of the cherry of his cigarette with it.

"You have been known for resting heavily on hyperbole now and again," Remus offers. "Perhaps she clued into that quicker than the bulk of us did."

"Fact is, she essentially called me a liar and for that, she needed to eat her words," Sirius presses on breezily, pausing to take one last haul off of his cigarette before he flicks it out and sends it soaring away in a rather impeccable arch. "And now, she wants a selfie with you so she can feel like she's been within three feet of the real guy so when the time comes round, do be a sport about it."

"Oh, I don't know if I can," Remus raises thoughtfully, "I'm suddenly incredibly busy from now until the end of time."

Sirius snorts loudly. "Oh, and you should know that she's taken my side in the debate," he tells him, grinning big. "Says Rory had every right to leave."

Sirius's grin only widens when Remus sends an enormous huff through the line. "Really?" he says flatly. "You're polling strangers now?"

"Charlotte isn’t a stranger, she’s your second biggest fan,” Sirius totes. “And d'you know what? I think it’d be fair game if I did poll a stranger.”

"First of all," Remus prefaces, sending Sirius right on into drumming the soles of his boots on the pavement below him in anticipation, "second opinions are just that and will do nothing to help you win this, second of all, my argument has never and will never be centred around her right to leave, of course she has the right to make her own decisions, just as I have the right to detest that particular one, and third of all, I'm not about to head back to work with steam coming out of my ears so we are pausing this until I say otherwise, tu compris?"

Sirius curls in on himself, setting his forehead down on his knees as he gives in to the laugh he'd been certainly trying to hold in with all his might. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he insists, managing to speak around his convulsing lungs, “what would you rather talk about?”

Remus clicks his tongue ponderously. “Did James agree?”

Sirius sniffs anew, straightening up. “Yeah, he’s bringing him by when I’m done here,” he affirms.

“OK, good,” Remus replies, and though there’s an undeniable excitement about him, there’s just as much apprehension lining his voice. “I'll likely get in before you do so when you're coming up, just send me a warning so I can round her up and then please be careful when you're coming in with him."

"I promise I won't come charging in with him," Sirius translates.

"I'll thank you not to," Remus replies. "He's a big boy, I just don't want her spooked right out of the gate."

"I'll keep a firm hand on his lead," Sirius tacks on.

"And I was thinking," Remus puts up, the dam already well and truly opened, "if they don't end up getting on, then there's always Dorcas? When she thought Mestophales would've been part of the package deal of staying at mine, she was thrilled—"

Sirius gives out a frank noise of a buzzer. "I'm taking in that cat and that's all there is to it," he supplies.

Remus breathes a laugh despite himself. "I know you'd like to take her in, I'm just trying to come up with a plan B in case this doesn't go as well as we'd like it to," he clarifies.

"It'll go fine," Sirius says. "They'll be the best of friends, you'll see."

"You had better be right about this one," Remus returns.

Sirius halts and looks round as the back door shoots open and David, newfound bane of Sirius's existence, sticks his head out of the backroom purposefully, honing in on him on the ground and levelling him with an unimpressed squint. "Oop, hold on," Sirius offers, looking back up at David with the same unimpressed expression he's being levelled with. "What could it possibly be now?"

"How long have you worked here exactly?" David asks.

"Longer than you," Sirius provides.

"If it has been a while, then why am I having to come out here and remind you that unpaid breaks are thirty minutes, not thirty-whatever-you-feel-like?" David finishes.

Sirius blinks twice, knowing full well that Remus John Lupin's likely got a timer going on his end of the call right this very second and if he hasn't bum-rushed the both of them off the line yet, then they're all set here, thanks. "Good, then we're both confused as to why you're doing that," he trades him. "I'm still under the cut-off."

David lifts his left hand past the edge of the door and counts on his fingers. "You're five minutes from being expected back up front, you took your sweet time coming back from your fifteens which you're not even supposed to take consecutively, and at first, I really thought you were so new that you just didn't know any better but it's getting more and more clear that you do, so you'll understand why I might've sensed more of your bullshit coming my way."

Sirius grins big and bright, putting his head on a tilt. "Hey, next time? Take the company's balls out of your mouth if you want me to take you even at all seriously; I'm not here for this."

David reaches for the edge of the door and backs out of the doorway in under three seconds, already put right off and Sirius hasn't even started in on him yet. "Ohh, you're going to have to grow far, far thicker skin than that with me, princess," Sirius gets in, just before the door shuts him out. He fumes silently, pulls another cigarette out and gets that lit, and puts his mobile back against his ear. "Seriously, fuck that guy."

"What the hell was that?" Remus raises.

"Oh, you haven't heard?" Sirius trades. "The other new kid's a bust and a half."

Remus gives a noise of realization. "Shit, he started this week, didn't he?" he raises. "I'm sorry, I've been really out of it."

Sirius waves him off via a profound pfft. "Been a hell of a week, Remus," he pardons, though he's fuming again a few beats later. "Who does he think he is, hounding me like that, and while I'm on a call, no less."

"Bit rude, yes," Remus allows.

"‘Ooh, ooh; policy this, policy that,’" Sirius mimics. "I've one foot out the door already, I couldn’t give a single shit about policy at this point, and do we really just have five minutes left or was he bullshitting me on that part?"

Remus gives a minimal hum as he investigates the claim. "He jumped the gun, but we're closing in on it," he says after a beat.

Sirius scoffs at the unjust passage of time. "It's sort of funny and frankly a little sad when you think about it," he puts up. "If he'd been at all decent at any point throughout the day and not come out here with his fists up, I might've actually considered coming up front on time, but he has no idea how hard he just shot himself in the foot; I may take several strolls around the block just to dig this one in a little more."

"Don't do that, be the bigger person, you'll rarely see him once the shift's over," Remus lists off. "Etcetera, etcetera."

"Sorry, you're breaking up," Sirius returns, taking a lofty pull off of his cigarette, "can't hear a word you're saying."

"Can't blame me for trying," Remus puts in.

"That's sweet of you and all, but he has no idea the amount of spite that exists within my body and he may as well learn a thing or two about it," Sirius maintains.

Remus must sense a losing battle for he gives out a relenting breath on his end of the line. "Just don't let it get out of hand," he requests of him. "Please?"

"He's been on my arse all shift," Sirius insists, pointing his free arm back toward the shop as if Remus could see him do it. "It wasn't just me either, you can ask everybody who was on today; none of them can stand the guy."

"Well, sorry to everybody else, but it's you I care about most in this situation," Remus says plainly. "Mainly because I heard your fake grin from here, and that's never a good sign."

Sirius scoffs a bit at that. "If I'm going to last through the rest of the shift, then I deserve to have a little fun with it," he maintains. "All I'm going to do is make him rue the day he spoke to me that way, not going to fight him on the sales floor."

"I didn't say that," Remus says evasively. "The parking lot, maybe."

"Serve him right if I did," Sirius retorts, going for another pull off his cigarette. "I'd win too; he's all spindly, has a face that's just begging for a good smack, and I bet he just flaps his hands like a windmill when he tries to come at you."

Remus snorts despite himself. "OK, think of it this way, then," he prefaces. "I don't know the guy enough to say one way or the other, but if he's the type to hound you over breaks and store policy, then he could very well be the type to press charges against you only because he technically could.”

"Alright, there's jumping to conclusions and then there's clearing a football field," Sirius says of it, calling for a dash of realism here.

"You don't know him at all," Remus emphasizes. "Lay a punch on the wrong person and you could be up to your elbows in problems, and I would really like to bring you home to my mum and dad without there being an arrest warrant out for you, so if you have to tell yourself that you're refraining from clobbering him for me, then please do that?"

The cocoon that took vacancy in Sirius's stomach right around the time Remus lay his head down on him right here on a brisk afternoon in September wiggles about before it lets another few butterflies free to flutter about. "Only for you," he passes him, his mouth twitching upward.

"Even better," Remus offers quietly, but Sirius can hear his little half-smile from here. "My alarm's going so I'll let you go for now, but thank you again for sorting all of that out so quickly, I'm unbelievably relieved."

"Yeah," Sirius gives him, smiling the whole way through. "Yeah, my pleasure."

"See you soon."

"Not soon enough."

"It never is," Remus tacks on, and another butterfly wiggles free.

Sirius simply sits there after the call is over, enjoying the dual joy of finishing off his cigarette slowly and feeling warm from his head down to his toes. He tosses the butt when it's run down to the end, pushes himself to stand, and lets himself into the backroom, taking a moment to scroll on his mobile. Two to three minutes out from there, he clocks back in on the monitor in the back and goes for his apron, stretching the act of tying it around his waist to a full minute, tying it around his back before pretending that it's just too loose so he'll have to tug the knot free to start over from the top, and does that whole thing one more time just for the fuck of it.

He makes the walk up the hall stretch out by keeping an easy air about him as though there isn't a hurry at all, but when he makes it to the doorway that leads out to the floor even from the first glimpse, he can suss out that nothing major is going on. There are only, what, nine people sprinkled about the seating out on the floor and all of zero people waiting for orders to either be rung through or made up, but David's face the moment he spots Sirius stretching long and limber in the doorway certainly gives off a vibe that suggests he's just so overwhelmed.

"Keep making that face and it'll stick," Sirius warns him, his voice going tight through his stretch.

"Does Will have any idea how long you take?" David raises.

Sirius lets go of his stretch with a bright smirk. "You could tell him if you'd like," he offers, shrugging a shoulder. "Only, I will say that I've kept regulars coming for ages, can upsell like nobody else here can or bothers to, and won't even be here more than two days a week from here on out, but you go ahead and see where snitching gets you."

David whips around and yanks a cloth out from below the counter. "You're impossible," he spouts, heading out from behind the counter via the pastry case route rather than have to pass Sirius to get there.

"That's the nicest thing you've said to me all shift," Sirius tosses after him brightly, heading for the hand-washing sink.

He finishes up and dries his hands off while he inspects the area around him, in search of something he can shut down for the night to help him feel that much closer to relative freedom. He lands his gaze on the two vats sitting side-by-side at the coffee station and squints to give the timers a once-over; dark roast's got about ten minutes left in it, whereas the medium roast has another twenty on top of that and, given that they're closing in on the seven o'clock mark, he decides the dark roast will be the one getting cut.

Sirius bins the ball paper towel in his hands, heads over there, and hoists the vat over to the sink on the left side of the coffee station, flicking up the red handle over the spout and letting what's left of the dark roast free-pour into the sink. He hoists the vat back to its spot, digs out the sanitizing powder for it, and tears at the packet, pouring it in through the hole at the top of the vat. He presses start on the greater machine overhead, leaves the rest up to the slow pour of the waters of hellfire to mix and mingle with the powder, and gets rid of the dark roast label before anyone can wander in and mistakenly think it's still a viable option to order.

He turns away from the station with an idle dusting off his hands and blinks as David reappears directly beside him, cloth in hand. "What did you do?" he demands. "We're supposed to have both featured blends available to customers at all times."

Sirius lets out a short, quick chirp of a laugh. "Yeah, no," he declines. "We're done with the dark roast for the night; I'm not keeping two full pots going when we're not going to sell through even half of either of them before we have to switch them out again."

"What sort of shop is being run around here?" David puts out, looking as if he's seconds from pulling his hair out.

"One with two brain cells to rub together?" Sirius returns, loving everything about this. "Nobody walking in here after seven is going to care which drip coffee we've got going; they'll look, see what it is, and go with that, and even if someone did get uppity about it, there's always pour-overs or they can just get an Americano for the price of a plain ol' coffee; it's literally that easy."

"You can't just push a customer to get something else because you don't feel like grinding out a new batch," David retorts.

"I can, though; that's the thing," Sirius insists. "It works seventy percent of the time and for the other thirty, I just take the hit, make the damn pour-over, and move on with my life; try it sometime."

"What are we going to do when that one needs switching?" David raises, pointing to the only other coffee on at the moment. "You just closed the other one down, now we only have one coffee going and you'll still have to switch that one out eventually."

Sirius lifts both his hands in display. "They'll wait five minutes," he enunciates, beaming at the end of it. "Or they won't and we didn't need their spare change anyway."

David turns away from him with a fitful expression, opens the cupboard with the sanitizer bucket in it, and chucks the cloth back into it. "I'm taking my fifteen," he says exasperatedly.

"Take a nap while you're at it," Sirius suggests.

A small, surprise rush occurs not long at all after David goes and it's the form of a rush that brings one customer into the store just as another's taking their drink and leaving the premises, which is Sirius's altogether least favourite form of a rush, and yeah, sure, it could be karma coming to bite him in the arse, but Sirius isn't about to let her do that; no, thank you, ma'am, he's taken. Instead, he resolves to take each order as it comes and get to each newcomer when he gets to them, and funnily enough, the next person who orders a plain old drip coffee has no obvious qualms about the pike roast being the only blend on, imagine that.

He's out of the woods and just starting on closing down bar two when David reappears up front, twittering on about how he's exactly on time, and Sirius simply whistles a happy tune over his words as he takes the espresso tray to the sink to rinse it off. He heads back to bar, hooks the tray back into place on the espresso machine, and tugs the grounds drawer out to dump it in the bin, fully aware that every one of his movements is being scrutinized and not giving the perpetrator the satisfaction of even looking toward him.

"I don't even know where to start," David gives listlessly, switching off the taps at the sink.

"Then don't," Sirius chimes, bringing the grounds drawer past David's useless husk and giving it a quick rinse at the sink over at the coffee station.

David halts him on his way back. "I'd wondered who started everyone doing this very thing, and of course it was you," he offers, lifting his hands and gesturing them jaggedly to help illustrate his newest frustration. "You can't close down either bar until the shop's closed."

Sirius steps right around David's hands, uninterested in his near-meltdown. "That is just fucking ridiculous."

"Oh, it's ridiculous," David parrots, following him to bar two. "Back at mine, we didn't do any of what you're doing."

Sirius sets the grounds drawer on the counter by the bar and digs out the cleaning tablets for the espresso machine. "M'kay, well, we're not at yours, so take the sand out of your snatch, shut your mouth a little more often, and you might learn something," he instils, shaking two tablets out onto his right palm while immensely enjoying how fucked off the kid gets over that serve alone. "When have we used bar two since five? Name one, single time."

"That's not the point," David sputters.

Sirius reaches the tablets into the bulk of the machine and inserts them in at the back. "That literally is the point," he insists, stuffing the grounds drawer back into the espresso machine and pressing the button to spark the rinse cycle to life. "We can keep using bar one and we won't have to worry about closing the two of them down later on; a good plan overall, I'd say."

Sirius heads around David to get to bar one, pulling the grounds drawer out of that one and dumping it out in turn. "Alright, no, bar one stays," David insists.

"I'm not shutting her down," Sirius maintains, bringing the grounds drawer to the sink for a rinse. "She's just getting a bit of a makeover, but don't you worry about it; she wants one."

David stays put, watching hawkeyed as he lines the drawer with three torn sheets of paper towel before sticking it back into the espresso machine, looks even more bemused as Sirius fetches a new cloth from the back, and in the time it takes Sirius to rinse off the tray and set the new cloth down on it from end to end, David's come to look positively irate. "What is even the point of doing all that?" he spouts.

"It couldn't possibly be that I'm trying to make it so all we have to do at the end of the night is start a good rinse cycle or anything, but this cloth right here is meant to catch any dribbles that may come along in the meantime," Sirius supplies, crossing his arms and feeling quite good about the state of things. "I get that you've nowhere else to be but here, but I do need to leave when we're done so if I do something that's only going to make the close go quicker and easier, you can either shut up and take it or you can hope and pray you don't get paired with me again, but you should at least get used to seeing my tricks because they'll be everywhere you look whether I'm on shift or not."

A customer heads in through the door and David moves to meet her at the till. "We'll see about that," he sends him.

"Yeah, you will," Sirius echoes.

The beat goes on. David fights him on counting up the cash drawer early so they can keep tabs on what cash goes in and out of it and at the end of the night all Sirius will have to do is add the paper and plastic totals together et viola, the task is handled before the store is even locked, he fights him on sweeping and mopping at the turn of the final hour before closing rather than leave both tasks until the last minute and suffer for that choice, he fights him on running most of the excess dishes to the back and leaving one of every item available if needed so all they'll have is the final load of everything that didn't already get run through the dishwasher; the good thing about all of that is it not only reinforces Sirius's reasons for doing any one of these tricks of the trade, but gives him plenty of chances to locate a pattern that David seems to be keeping, which is that as much as he does fight Sirius on his every move, he eventually gets so frustrated and tuckered out the longer Sirius presses any one point that he eventually gives up, so it's a win/win for him in the end.

David waits until he's back behind the counter after booting the small number of stragglers out and locking the place up to scold him for having gone and done that. "They don't have to go home, but they can't stay here," Sirius gives him, and really, David's just lucky that he's been having such a gay ol' time with the solid gold that is the Soul of the '60s playlist that he didn't even bother climbing up to the sound system to actually put 'Closing Time' on.

Sirius shuts bar one down once and for all, setting it up to rinse while he closes down the till and leaving David to figure the rest of the dishes out; he already went and made the task that much easier for him so by and large, David should be able to handle putting away a tray of mismatched dishes given that he is such a prideful, hard-working employee, and yet, when Sirius gets back up front after shutting the cash drawers away in the safe, sans-apron and ready to fucking go already, the man is still wandering around putting things back in their spots at a leisurely pace while James is already idling out front, and Sirius would have to be a right berk not to suss out that he's being taught a lesson here.

There are about four-to-five seconds where Sirius is this close to elbowing David out of the way and finishing the rest off himself, but he quickly shoves that urge down once he identifies it; wouldn't be on-brand to lose it after maintaining a laissez-faire mystique all shift so rather than give in to that impulse, he perches on the counter by the till with his keys in his lap and bids bittersweet adieu to the idea getting out early for he's about 99.9% sure he's dealing with the sort of suck-up that'll stamp his feet and bitch about staying right up until the moment they're scheduled to clock out, taking to communicating with James through the front window of the shop via hand-motions alone.

The face David makes when he notices the game of charades they've got going is neither new to them nor does it stop either of them from continuing on without a hitch; he and James have always been and will likely always be a spectacle in and of itself, but whether or not David clues into the fact that he's been being dragged this entire time is up in the air.

As Sirius came to terms with, the two of them get out of there precisely on the dot, wherein James sticks his head out his open window and calls to him in his best Jeeves voice. "Your chauffeur awaits."

"Yes, quite," Sirius trills back, turning the lock on the door.

He gives David a firm salute, heads down the path toward the car idling sideways over two parking spots, and takes to rolling over the hood to get to the passenger side that much quicker, climbing into the passenger seat and shutting the door behind him with a pop. "Watch him try to ring and get us committed first thing tomorrow," James puts up.

Sirius looks around James's head and barks a laugh loud enough to shake the heavens at finding David simply standing there looking as if he's seen the ghost of an odd little child run by. "Drive before he talks to me again," he urges, snapping his right hand toward the steering wheel while trying to locate his seatbelt blindly with his left one.

James makes a quick u-ie, needing nothing more than that to comply, and makes a swift left onto the street, meanwhile Tango seems to take his finger snap as a call to him for he ambles up between the front seats and situates himself there quite comfortably, nosing the side of Sirius's head. "What a fucking scab," he attests, dolling out the necessary rubs to Tango's ruff. "Him, not you."

James gives a guttural grunt. "I had but one full hour with him yesterday and let me tell you, that was enough," he returns him. "Can you move the dog a bit? I can't see a thing coming up behind me."

Sirius stops trying to connect his belt with its buckle and focuses on stretching his right arm past Tango's body to snap his fingers toward the backseat, and then has to repeat that two more times before Tango complies. "We'll work on that," he informs him kindly.

He puts his full attention on rolling his window down all the way and perches his elbow left over the sill, settling into just another one of his homes away from home. "Well, you could end up seeing more of him than I will, so enjoy that," he offers sweetly, digging out his cigarette pack.

"What, why?" James returns, pulling to a stop at a red.

Sirius chooses to light up a cigarette first and foremost, pairing a tight smile with a bit of a squint as he holds his first haul in, and leans his head toward the window to shoot a stream of smoke out of it. "I've asked for my hours to be cut," he supplies, settling in with his left arm curled over the windowsill and keeping to the same sweet tone in hopes of lightening the load, but James sputters for the news all the same.

"No — no," he returns him. "You said you'd hold out until July; I heard you say that."

"That was before the clusters came back for round two," Sirius holds up. "I'm not ditching out completely, but I'm going down to a neat fourteen hours as of tomorrow's shift."

"That's it?" James puts out, missing the light change by an entire second before the pilot of the car behind them toots his horn and then James is leaning his head right back out of his window again, calling out a string of colourful obscenities before he pulls his head back into the car and presses on the gas.

"That's it?" he repeats, like the outburst never happened.

Sirius lifts his hands evenly while he snickers his haul back out. "I can't be opening a venue, teaching Dora guitar, fighting clusters by moonlight, and working here full time," he replies. "I can't be everywhere at once so something had to go."

"Well, fuck you for putting it like that," James sends him. "Now I feel like a brat."

"Like one," Sirius quips, getting the two-finger salute from James in reply.

"Excuse you," he returns him. "I'm allowed to express sadness for the boys and understand why you're doing this; I have the capacity for both."

Sirius grins brightly, reaching his right hand over to ruffle James's unruly hair just that much more. "Well, the boys will go on whenever we're both on together and apart from that, we'll just have to be the same boys somewhere else," he maintains, getting his hand swatted out of James's hair and tapping it twice against his chest. "Putting all that love right here."

"Do what you want with it," James returns him. "I still reserve the right to grumble until this sinks in properly."

"I don't remember grumbling when you took fewer hours," Sirius brings up, blinking at him sweetly. "Your lucky little ass gets to work from home and elect to cover whatever mid-shifts could help Will out any given week, so you don't get to complain just because I'm dropping down to the same hours you've kept there for months now."

James reels back, blinking like mad. "That sounded so much like Remus, I got whiplash," he returns.

Sirius aims a wry smile his way and taps his right temple. "He gets right in there," he maintains. "Besides, we were always going to have to say a fond farewell to working together, all I'm doing is kick-starting it a little bit."

James gives a hearty sigh and one last pout. "I'm getting over it by the second," he reiterates plainly.

Sirius snorts, flicking the butt of his cigarette out the window. "There's the guy I know," he puts out.

James sends him a side grin and reaches up with his left hand to move his glasses up and down suggestively. "You'd have never moved a thing around to help lighten the stress load of a dude even a year ago and look at you now, you little cheeseball," he teases.

Sirius preens a little there. "He's not just any dude," he retains, garnering a series of prolonged retching noises from the driver. "Fuck off, you; he isn't."

"I know he isn't," James instils, backing off him a bit, but Sirius isn't done.

"And you went on off on hols with Lily and came back with a proposal plan, so you're as gross as I am, if not more so," he maintains.

James takes the hit like a champ, preening quite a bit himself. "Who knew we'd end up being a pair of lovesick fools, hm?" he raises.

Sirius snorts. "You? Literally everyone you've ever met," he returns, tossing an easy look behind him toward Tango panting in the backseat. "Thanks for bringing the pooch for us."

James offers an easy hum. "Not at all," he says for it. "Not quite sure why the feline was any less portable than he is, but alas."

Sirius gives a minimal hum, staring easily out the front window. "Well, Remus was worried they wouldn't get along, so I figured I'd quell that worry sooner than later so he won't have that thought in the back of his mind all summer long," he relays.

"Commendable," James calls it. "Still don't quite see why she couldn't have come to ours when that's precisely where she'll be once fall rolls around."

Sirius sticks a pointed face on and turns it slowly toward him. "Alright, you want the truth?" he bids, garnering a light mmmhm returned to him. "He's blacklisted The Flat as of yesterday morning."

James clicks his tongue. "Remus Fucking Lupin," he sounds out. "You're just going to let him?"

"Oh, I tried," Sirius returns, splaying his hands out in front of him and showcasing his useless set of them. "He doesn't want anything like Tuesday happening again and to a different extent, neither do I, but rather than fight him on something he's very much made up his mind about and risk repeating myself over and over again that none of you are holding any of that disaster against him until I'm hoarse, I'm just going to go with it."

There's after a few bewildered beats where James simply drives on before he formulates a reply. "You've had better ideas," he puts it plain.

Sirius scoffs wildly. "There's nothing I can do," he gives him outright. "I tried to reign him in, even offered the let him stay with us and that went horribly; he gophered faster than I could catch him."

"Well, pull him out of the hole, Sirius," James tells him.

"No no, we're not doing that," Sirius declines. "He's made it very clear that it's too soon for that, he thinks I'm seconds from running for the door at this point; it isn't the time."

"Want me to talk to him?" James offers.

Sirius presses his hands together in the form of a prayer. "No," he says heavily. "We just put all of that to bed and we're lucky he's still letting me in at this point, so no; thank you, but we're not going to do that."

James sends a scoff to him now. "It's not going to be forever," Sirius tacks on. "It's just until he gets his head wrapped around this."

"Alright, well, I don't know what the fuck that means," James returns plainly.

"It means, he'll come round to ours again eventually, he just has to lift the ban on mates being present for the attacks and The Flat embargo will get lifted, too," Sirius maintains, inverting his hands so his palms are facing up. "That's not going to be tomorrow so until he's comfortable with that idea again, I'm not going to hound him over it any more than I've already done when that'll just make him feel even more guilty for feeling this way; I'm going to be around his place as often as he'll let me and I'm just going to go with his flow."

James waits a block or two before saying anything else. "We're not holding it against him, though," he tosses out. "Why would we?"

"I know that," Sirius says of it, catching his toss. "Deep down, I think he knows it, too, but that's not the point; this is Remus."

"And?" James probes.

Sirius gives him a pointed look. "He, has memorized every spot on our floors that doesn't creak so he can step on them in the mornings and not wake either of us, even though I have told him in a thousand different ways that we'll just roll the fuck over if one of us stirs," he holds up. "He hates being a bother even when he's not even being one and right now, that’s been turned up to a hundred and nine; all he can see when he closes his eyes is that he scared Pete half to death, and he doesn't want that for you, Lily, Pete again, or anybody else."

"Speaking of, have you talked to Pete without yelling yet?" James stops to check.

"One thing at a time," Sirius stresses, barely holding back from barking it. "You don't have to like that Remus is doing this, you just have to take it and deal with it."

"I don't like it," James puts out. "In fact, it's literally the exact opposite direction that Remus and I discussed just yesterday morning, so you better believe I don't."

Sirius blinks expectantly at him. "Well, go on, then," he prompts. "You brought it up."

"I told him I was less than thrilled about finding out about all of this secondhand," James returns him. "I went way easier on him than I did you, by the way, and he looked me square in the eyes and told me he understood I wanted better from him, and there I went, thinking this kind of thing wouldn't be happening again."

"Where?" Sirius asks tightly.

James makes another bewildered face. "What?"

"Where did you have that conversation I specifically told you not to get into with him?" Sirius reiterates.

"On the terrace, who cares where it was?" James raises.

"So, he'd have been wearing shades, then," Sirius presumes. "He probably looked you in the eye once, maybe twice before avoiding it the rest of the time so I assure you, he wasn't promising you anything."

"Cool, OK, then," James sends him, chipper as a sunny day. "So, as the resident Remus-whisperer here, when I asked him how we could be of help and he said to be patient, was he talking about the situation as a whole like I thought he was doing, or was he just asking me to be patient with him?"

Sirius sits fantastically still for someone whose hands have begun to shake in his lap, his blood set to boil. "We could have lost him that night so I wouldn't be coming for his integrity right now if I were you," he presses, and he likes that James's face contorts like it fucking should. "Keep any more of your armchair character analyses out of this, if you please."

Sirius sets his gaze firmly out the windshield and stews for a block and a half before James lets out a sigh of magnitudes. "I shouldn't have gone at him like that," he offers. “I'll admit it.”

"No, you shouldn't have," Sirius barks. "I get that you're feeling useless; join the fucking club and quit ragging on him."

"I'd love to join if he'd let me anywhere near the fucking club," James barks back. "And you don't get to act like you've been a fucking angel to Lily."

The irony that Sirius is the one who ends up stamping his feet tonight is not lost on him, but he beats the shit out of the floor beneath his shoes all the same. "That's irrelevant right now."

"You sure as hell wouldn't be acting any differently than I am if it was her in this mess," James keeps to it. "You'd be all over it with me, and you wouldn't give a single fuck about her self-preservation if it meant she was being taken care of."

"I am taking care of him," Sirius shoots back. "If you want to help so much, don't bother hounding him over this and finish transporting this fucking dog for us because the minute those two furballs meet and frolic together, Remus is going to be beaming, and we want him doing that because he's already down in it and needs all the uppers he can get at this point."

Sirius stews for a beat or two before he realizes he isn't quite finished yet. "And no, I haven't worked out what we're going to do if they don't get along yet, so do not ask," he tacks on resoundingly.

James managed a respectable, if lightly pointed, silence throughout Sirius's little monologue, but this is the precise moment where he breaks, dropping his head forward in the throes of a laugh and garnering Sirius to reach over and help steer the wheel for the few seconds it takes for James to come back up for air. "They'll be fine," he maintains, all while Sirius helps pull the car up beside the curb out front of Remus's building. "He's the sweetest soul ever; she'll show him who's boss and he'll just take it."

Sirius takes his hand back as James puts the car in park, crossing both arms over his chest and sniffing anew. "Thank you," he lets him have. "That's what I was thinking, but it's nice to get a second opinion; I just want him smiling and he will be if this goes well."

"He has got a great smile," James puts out there.

"An actual sunshine ray," Sirius raises it.

"I still don't like you taking this on all your own," James can't help but mention, surely, and Sirius lifts his shoulders and drops them again without a response; it is, literally, what it is. "What happens when you're at work and one hits?"

Sirius shakes his head once. "No," he denies. "We're not going there."

James sends a pointed frown his way. "We have to."

"No," Sirius digs in. "I've worked everything else out; I can drop and go to him if I have to, but this is the one and only roadblock, and I can't think about it or I won't sleep again."

"That's what I'm saying, Sirius," James stresses. "You need backup, so call me if one strikes and you're stuck at work; I'll go in and cover for you, and you know I'm not taking no for an answer so don't even bother trying."

Sirius deflates in his seat, so overwhelmed with love for the shithead beside him going and giving him the answer to just one of the many hypotheticals he's refusing to think about. "I wasn't actually going to fight you on that one," he mentions.

"Perfect," James says of it, leaning back exhaustively in his seat before he takes a look out his window toward the building they're idling in front of, reminding Sirius of the fact that they are, in fact, at his destination.

"Well," he says, undoing his belt buckle with a pop. "Thanks for the ride, fuck-o."

James either chokes on a laugh or his own saliva, difficult to say which. "Will I ever see you again?" he raises, after beating his chest once or twice, that is.

"You'll see me plenty," Sirius returns, letting himself out of the car.

Although Remus's street is desolate at first glance, Sirius heads round to the other side to let Tango out onto the sidewalk rather than the road. He aims to open the door just a wee bit to grab hold of the lead, but Tango merely hops down out of the car before he has a good grip on it and simply prances around in a circle, making Sirius a right-proud papa.

Sirius stops at James's window, leans his head down, and reaches his left hand into the open window, ruffling James's hair one last time. "Seriously, thanks," he passes him. "I did not want to walk him all the way over here."

James gives him a loud psh, batting at his hand again. "Should have made you do it."

Sirius breezes past that and straightens up tall, pulling his mobile out of his pocket and pulling up his and Remus's everlong message thread. "Are you heading to Lilith's from here?" he bids, garnering a happy hum from James in confirmation. "Give her my best."

"Gladly," James responds, chipper enough, but when Sirius feels a tug at his left arm, he looks up from the screen in his right hand and finds James's Dad-face on. "Seriously, though; Pete."

Sirius gives a grand, agonizing noise toward the sky. "Fine," he spouts, pressing the home button on his mobile and seeking out Peter's name from his recent messages. "Here we go—" he prefaces, typing as he recites, "—S-O-R-R-Y; sorry. Happy?"

Sirius sends it off and strikes a pose. "Quite," James replies, stretching in his seat.

"'Kay bye," Sirius drags out, leading Tango across the grass to get to Remus's stoop. He pulls their thread open again, but he chooses to simply press to ring him instead, waiting on the stoop for him to pick up two rings later. "Hi, I'm about to head up."

"OK, I just—" Remus pauses there, "...have to find her first."

Sirius smirks out a laugh. "How'd you manage to lose her in there?" he raises, letting himself into the lobby.

"I have not lost her," Remus maintains. "She's just nowhere to be seen from the kitchen."

"Under the bed's my best guess," Sirius forwards him, heading up the first flight of stairs with Tango at his heels.

Remus gives a pondering hum before he follows that up a few moments later with a half-hearted gasp. "Your best guess proved false."

"Then she must've skipped town," Sirius laments, taking the stairs up to the second floor.

Remus breathes a laugh as his search continues, then lets out a bright, inwardly directed laugh a few beats on from there. "She's in the fucking hamper."

"God, I love her," Sirius returns, heading down the hall toward Remus's door. "We're ready when you are."

"OK, I'm going to try to scoop her out without being swatted," Remus instils. “Wish me luck.”

"Luck," Sirius wishes, and the call drops right about there.

Sirius slips his mobile back into his pocket and smiles down at Tango staring up at him, waiting on a signal they didn't quite discuss. Nevertheless, about thirty seconds or so pass before Remus calls 'ready' from inside and Sirius loops the lead twice around his wrist so their whole plan won't go tumbling over sideways on account of him alone, letting himself in and finding Remus standing in the middle of the flat with Mestophales in his arms.

"Should I—" he starts, looking down at her and nodding anyway. "I'll bring her down but keep a hold on her in case he springs, yeah?"

Sirius nods eagerly, keeping Tango back by the entryway while Remus shrinks down to his knees and holds one arm around Mestophales's front and tucks the other underneath her back legs. "Her face," he wheezes, breaking into a laugh.

Remus looks down at her sitting in a resigned heap on his thighs with a fierce, watchful gaze on Tango and ends up biting his lower lip out of mirth. "OK, bring him in," he prompts. "I have no idea how she's staying so still, but I don't want to tempt it for much longer."

Sirius does as bid, stepping into the main room and stopping short as the cat's eyes get comically larger as Tango springs forward buoyantly. He rocks back on his feet, keeping Tango in place, and reverts to slow, easy steps before giving a tug back on the lead when Tango gets a few steps from the two of them. He reaches down and pats the lower end of Tango's back so he'll take the hint and have a sit, moves down to the floor to mirror Remus's stance, and kneels just behind the dog, letting him have a good sniff of the cat.

The two of them trade glances between each other and the pets, watching avidly as Tango settles down onto his front in between the three of them and sticks his head down on Remus's thigh, just below the cat herself, who slowly moves her back left paw down and sets it directly on his face, sending both Remus and Sirius right into stitches.

"Good enough," Remus calls it, aiming a sunshine ray at Sirius and lighting up the flat better than the lamp in the corner of the room could ever. "You can say you were right if you'd like, I'll allow it."

Sirius unravels the lead from his left wrist, scoots around Tango's bulk to get in a little closer to Remus, and wins himself another taste of sunshine. "No need, you said it just fine for me," he trades him, slipping back from Remus's newly pointed smile to detach Tango's lead from his collar.

Remus looks down at the cat, readjusts his hold on her, and reaches to set her down on the floor, keeping a close eye on her as she spends a little more time studying Tango from above him. Sirius spots the moment when Remus moves on from her, sets his gaze on Tango still laying his head on his left thigh and apparently quite comfortable where he is, and lets a smirk leave his nose. "I started the French press for you," he offers, looking up at Sirius and nodding back toward the kitchen. "I don't have the heart to move him yet."

Well, don't mind if he does. Sirius pushes off of the floor easily and heads for the entryway to untie his boots, though in doing so he sparks Tango's avid interest, bringing him to lift his head, and that takes care of Remus's current predicament for him; Remus uses Tango's momentary disinterest in his leg to his advantage and moves back on his knees, rising to his feet by the time Sirius has footed his boots off in turn.

Sirius moves for the kitchen while Remus watches the pets mingle, pulls open the cupboard that houses the mugs, and reverts to standing on the tips of his toes to reach even one of them. "Would it be such a travesty to put the mugs somewhere else?" he asks.

Remus turns around and passes the island to lean against the open doorway to the kitchen. "Where else would they go?" he raises.

"Oh, any of the other shelves?" Sirius counters, still straining to reach one.

"I like my mugs where they are," Remus says of it.

"I think you get something out of watching me struggle," Sirius sends him, a mere inch or two from getting the fingers of his right hand around the handle of the closest mug to him.

Remus moves into the kitchen and swipes a hand over the small of Sirius's back that's flying free thanks to the hem of his shirt riding up. "Watching something, maybe," he amends, reaching to pull the mug down for him with a little less of a reach than Sirius's and hold it out to him. "So, did you punch anyone tonight?"

Sirius openly reels at the question before context comes careening back to him. "You'll be happy to know I refrained," he returns, taking the mug by the handle and poking Remus in the chest once with the front of it. "Only just, mind; he's gunning for a good one and I'd be more than happy to administer — Remus, what the hell?"

It's Remus's turn to reel, only he takes it a step further, looking up and around before glancing down at himself and relaxing altogether as he spots the gnarly welt on his left wrist. "Yeah," he offers, passing his right thumb over it. "Had a run-in with the hot water spigot earlier."

"And left it against it for twenty years?" Sirius observes.

"Yes," Remus relents. "For twenty full years, my arm pressed against that spigot."

"Go put something on it," Sirius goads, shooing him in the direction of the bathroom.

"I haven't anything to put on it," Remus trades him, appearing to find Sirius's behaviour both dumbfounding and entertaining in one swoop, it sure looks. Sirius steps over to the fridge pointedly and writes 'get aloe' in big, loopy letters on the whiteboard before underlining it a bunch. "Should put one more line down."

This punk-ass, handsome little shit. "How about I put it on you, hm," Sirius raises, pointing the point of the marker toward him.

Remus swipes his tea off of the counter and retreats from the kitchen before Sirius can get the point of the marker close enough to mark him properly. "What’d he do, then?" he bids, having himself a seat over on the middle cushion of his couch. "Aside from accosting you out back over breaks, that is."

Sirius sticks the marker back on top of the whiteboard and crosses back over to the French press he bought specifically to keep at Remus's flat months back now. "He just has to have his fingers in everything," he starts up, pressing down on the press. "I swear, the moment we had even a second of downtime in the midday, there he'd be, ordering everybody around and dolling out tasks like he's relevant.”

"Was he shift lead?" Remus checks. "Sometimes that is what they do."

"I was lead," Sirius stresses.

"Well, then — yeah," Remus sends back his way. "Not sure why he'd have felt the need to take that on for you."

Since that allowance is about as close to 'you're so right here, Sirius' he's likely going to win himself, he accepts that for what it is and raises the stakes a little from there. "He's only been at ours for two shifts," he puts up, pouring coffee from the press into his mug. "He doesn't get to walk in and take over everything just because he feels he's more important than everybody else who's already there; he isn't, and I don't care if he's worked for the company for a day or a decade, he's at the bottom of the ladder at our shop and should behave that way until otherwise stated, that's just how it works."

Remus gives an even hum from the couch. "I don't think there's something necessarily wrong with him making a presence for himself there, but he could easily do that without stepping on your toes in the process," he offers.

Sirius gives himself three spoonfuls of sugar simply because he's in the mood. "He didn't just step on them, he river danced over them," he takes it from there.

Remus breathes a laugh. "Did he now?"

Sirius smirks amidst his first taste of the coffee, deems it A-OK by him, and carries it out of the kitchen, strolling past Tango hogging out in the middle of the floor by the island, but since Mestophales has taken up residence on the couch cushion on Remus's right, Sirius heads around the coffee table to get to the far side of the couch. "And I'm not talking the load of us standing around, twiddling our thumbs and chattering away while there's a queue to the door and the cafe’s a mess, let's just make that clear," he maintains, slipping into the corner on Remus's left and lifting his legs in prompt, garnering Remus to lift his own mug higher so that Sirius can successfully drape his legs overtop Remus's thighs. "I'm talking no queue, the café's subdued, nothing needing to be made or refilled; an actual, beautiful, deserved lull would be gifted to us and instead of cherishing it, he'd start right in on everybody like the twat he is."

Remus has a sip of his tea, his brow furrowing over the rim as he works to swallow that down. "Do you think the store he started out at didn't have much in the way of downtime?" he raises, half genuine curiosity in it, half a possible thought bubble that ended up with vocals attached to it, but Sirius watches him come right back from that read rather quickly just by the sceptical face he pulls from there. "That said, letting everybody breathe for a minute or two without pouncing on them isn't going to result in the whole place blowing up."

"Exactly, Remus," Sirius chimes. "I knew you were a few steps behind me."

Remus gives him a plain look. "I'm just trying to work out why he might be doing that," he supplies.

"There's no secret reason, he's just a brown noser," Sirius insists. He goes for another sip of coffee, uses his free hand to hold it out splayed, and turns it back on his face, using makeshift puppetry to execute his point further. "He just, turns his face into my face and gets on me, way more than everybody else combined, saying 'this isn't how it done at my store, wah-wah,' and I'm like, 'look around? Are we at your store? No, so take the sand out of your snatch and shut it a little more often.'"

Remus's mouth twitches over his mug. "You say that to him?" he checks.

"Yeah, pretty much," Sirius confirms, and Remus huffs for it, but his wry, I'm-not-supposed-to-be-amused-but-I-sure-am smile is on all the same. "See, you? You were different; you like things to be tidy and running smoothly while you're shift lead and boy, oh boy, do you like a task list, but you're not a twat for no good reason and you're not allergic to a little fun on the job, for fuck's sake."

Remus takes a mighty sip of his tea there, smacking his lips when he's finished with it. "I'd thank you for saying that, but you used to find me and my ways particularly twatish."

Sirius gives him a rather plain look. "Pretty sure I softened up on you within days," he points out.

"Well, all I'm saying is, this could have been another very poor first impression," Remus counters, the right corner of his lip curling up. "Maybe, he's actually so frustrated by how hot he finds you that he was always seconds from shagging you into tomorrow every time he went in on you? Never know."

Sirius makes a retching noise around another sip of coffee from the image alone. "You're not getting any for at least another hour for that."

"Doubt that," Remus returns, striking over to the right to avoid Sirius's finger-jabbing with such a wicked grin on that Sirius doesn't really bother trying to land his forefinger in his side for much longer, settling back against the arm of the couch.

Remus straightens up again the moment he seems to realize he's been pardoned, reaches over Sirius's knees to set his mug on the coffee table, and leans over onto his left side to place a kiss on Sirius's right cheek before snuggling up against him, and now, it's Sirius's turn to hold his mug out and away from Remus, but he doesn't mind that one bit. "Well, I'm sorry it looks like you won't be bosom buddies after all," he offers him. "Do you know whether he'll be on Friday/Saturday?"

Sirius shakes his head. "Will's sending out the new schedule Monday so it's still up in the air," he trades him. "I'd ask to not be scheduled with him, but I think as far as favours go I've hit the jackpot and should probably just take my wins and let the rest go, you know?"

Remus's eyebrows do a quick rise and fall over his forehead. "Look at you," he raises. "Being so thoughtful and the like."

"'Course, I might still make it my mission to run him out of the shop before I make my exit," Sirius ponders, tapping his fingertips against his mug. "Haven't decided yet."

Remus blinks and breathes in. "It was short-lived, but the moment was there," he returns.

Chapter 8: 8.

Chapter Text

Sirius finishes his coffee in two quick swigs, leans over to leave it on the table near Remus's mug, and shifts onto his right side to face Remus, whose gone and sandwiched himself between Sirius and the corner of the couch and doesn't look the least bit regretful of that choice even with the sparse space he has to work with.

Sirius leans the right side of his head on the arm of the couch, lifting his gaze to Remus's scar and lingering it on the fray to the top butterfly stitch. Remus's own gaze darts up and around as Sirius reaches up toward it, but he eases when Sirius mimes passing a thumb over it. "Might think about changing those," he hints.

"I’m all out of the strips I knicked from yours," Remus confesses.

"Remus, what do you have here?" Sirius bids.

"Milk," Remus replies. "And lots of it."

Sirius gives him a pointed smile, decides they may as well do something about Remus's thoroughly unstocked medicine cabinet, and if anything, it couldn't hurt to push tomorrow's plans forward a dozen hours or so, given the circumstances. He glances down the length of the couch over toward Tango, lying hogged out on the floor by the island, and with that, Sirius gives into a hearty stretch, calling on the will and drive he's going to need to leave the couch now that he's quite comfy there, and lets go of his stretch with a satisfied sigh.

"We could take him out and do a Boots run?" Sirius raises. "Make it a whole quest."

"For butterfly stitches," Remus finishes mystically.

"You watched me write aloe up there, did you not?" Sirius raises, tossing his left thumb back toward the fridge. "We were going to have to make a run there tomorrow anyway, might as well kill three birds with one stone and do it tonight."

Remus's brow turns in a bit. "We were?"

Sirius gives an even hum. "Well, with the appointment and my schedule conundrums out of the way, treatment is our next step," he puts up. "I don't know that I really believe in jinxing as a concept so I'm not terribly concerned about addressing it, but you're going on three days without so much as a tension headache and while that is a relief, it'll only do us good if we use whatever grace period this is while we have it."

For a brief moment, Sirius wonders if he has just veered left and taken the expressway into Oh-Shitsville even bringing up the proverbial clock ticking over their heads as if Remus wouldn't be supremely aware of it himself, but the frown that Remus gives him is more circumstantial than it is pointed and Sirius eases even further for the even tone he speaks with. "You're right, we should," he echoes. "Have you got a list with you?"

Sirius hums in affirmation, lifting his left hand to tap on his temple once. "It's all in here," he assures, pausing to let Remus get away with a muttered 'oh ho, 'scuse me,' for he did expect that or something like it to follow; Remus, an evermore fan of penning a traditional list, would never leave an errand up to memory alone. "It's not the longest list in the world and I am sorry about that, but since Big Pharma's not all that interested in you and I right about now, I can really only work with what's available in-store for now."

"That's OK," Remus trades him.

"I am working on getting you shrooms, so you know," Sirius tacks on. "Only, my guy has to talk to his guy about them so it'll be another day or two before I'll get my hands on anything, but we can still get you a few alternative methods to that alternative method in the meantime."

Remus nods once, takes the left side of his lower lip into his mouth, and then tries his hand at speech patterns. "I," he starts, elongating it, "can't say I expected we would actually be bothering with those?"

"You said you couldn't put all your eggs in one basket, yes?" Sirius raises, waiting a beat or two for confirmation which he presumes he gets simply for Remus's second lower lip bite in under a minute. "Then consider this me getting you a few more baskets to work with."

Remus embarks on a remarkably short face journey before he shifts even closer to Sirius on the couch and if he gets any closer Sirius will end up on the floor, but fuck it; what a way to go down. "I don’t quite know how to handle how sweet that was," he offers, going for a careful intake of breath. "I appreciate that you're so—"

He pauses, seemingly in search of the right word. "Forthcoming?" Sirius offers, faux-quizzically. "Fervent? Intense?"

"Sure," Remus sounds out. "All of those, but considering that the last time we even discussed this was ages ago, I'm going to come clean and admit that when I asked you if you had any connections, I was doing it mostly to smooth over a very uncomfortable moment between us and I really think we'd do well to think on this a little more first."

Sirius smirks, transported right back to that night in Remus's bedroom, and nods, willing to grant him that. "Here's where my head is," he prefaces, "we've two months to either sit around and wait for the appointment or we can try other options in the meantime, and I know which one I'd rather do."

"A strong point, I'm not denying you that," Remus returns him. "Only, you did actively stomp on all means of treatment that weren't oxygen related, so you can probably see why I might've thought us going this particular route wouldn't be on the horizon."

Sirius clicks his tongue three times thoughtfully. "Right, but I never did stomp on shrooms, let's make that clear," he rebuts. "And I didn't technically stomp on anything else either if we really want to be technical about it."

Remus hums a vague, sceptical tune. "You did."

Sirius sends a breath out through his nose. "I said that of the myriad of prescriptions she could very well sign for you when the day arrives, I considered the oxygen tanks to be your best bet, which I still do, but I'm also wickedly flexible as you well know, and to that, I'm completely willing to be wrong about this one if it means that the shrooms sneak in between now and the appointment and kill your clusters before we even get there."

Remus does a substantial reel there; somebody present has been taking classes at the Sirius Black School of Dramatic Arts, and it's not Sirius. "Sorry, say that one more time for me?"

Sirius gives out the sound of a buzzer, denying him that. "You heard me just fine, thank you," he maintains. "I don't want another Ugly Pot incident ever again and I know you don't either, but realistically, it will if we don't start thinking and acting smart."

Yes, sure, the mention of Ugly Pot and all that implies could be considered a low blow in the simplest of terms, but if it works, it works; Remus quits holding himself so carefully the moment Sirius is finished and sinks himself down a little more into the crevice between Sirius and the back of the couch, but he drapes his arm over Sirius's left side and gives him a firm squeeze, so Sirius knows that every second going between them is crucial to getting Remus on board.

"Using shrooms for prevention is null at this point, I think you can agree with that?" he presses on, waiting a beat or two at most before Remus gives him a nod frown for it. "That doesn't mean we're out of options, though, as a staggering amount of people have had luck breaking a cycle with a strict dosing schedule, which I think is your best bet given your actual schedule. You could pick one day a week to dose up, a day where you know you're going to be home, and it'll be a controlled amount that you take, nowhere near the amount people need to take to start seeing ships going down the street and shit, and with some luck, July could roll around and you might not even be in a cycle anymore; how fucking cool would that be?"

"With some luck," Remus quotes.

Sirius does a slow blink, nodding once. "Yes, but you're not ignoring the rest of what I said," he mentions. "One bloke I was reading about, he wrote that he dosed up once a week for a total of four, and after that, his clusters were never to be seen from again until his next cycle rolled around and he broke that one in two as well, and I'm sorry, but we'd be a couple of plonkers not to give them a shot if your cycle could go anything like his did."

"When did you even do this reading?" Remus raises.

"Days and days of it, Remus" Sirius offers him. "I read that bloke's account on my fifteens; part of why I was late coming back, so David can eat me twice."

Remus appears as though he really, really doesn't want to let a smirk go, but it's a no-go. "This could still go very wrong if we're not careful," he cautions, keeping to his point despite his begrudging smile.

Sirius gives him an exceedingly blank look. "Remus, it's me," he instils. "I'd literally never give you a bad batch ever in my life; I'm trying to keep you around, not get rid of you."

Remus sends him an imploring frown. "I didn't think you'd actively try to do me in here, but you can't control what's in it, can you?" he raises.

"I trust my guy more than I trust most people," Sirius offers candidly. "Been a stand-up chap since day one."

"Good for you, but do you trust his guy?" Remus raises.

Sirius gives him a light if perhaps tight smile and lifts his left hand to brush it up through Remus's fringe. "So, I don't know how to tell you this, but when my guy is out, he tends to get me stuff from his guy, so you've technically inhaled and benefited from his guy's stuff here and there before," he points out, and Remus huffs a big one for that. "Oh alright, let's just tone it down a little; this isn't peer pressure, it's me giving you another option, and moreover, if weed could even touch a cluster, how much of it would you have smoked Monday/Tuesday, hm?"

Remus gives him the exceedingly plain look this time around. "Those are two very different drugs, Sirius."

"Mm, are they, though?" Sirius puts up, but gets a light scoff for it. "OK, obviously there are differences, but I don't know that you'll find it all that different from a regular high once you're in it, especially considering how small the dosage would be."

"Well, I never did get a straight answer on dosage the one time I looked this up, so maybe you should tell me some more about that?" Remus bids.

Sirius gives out a deep, agonized groan for that, feeling as if war flashbacks were upon him. "The answers were buried in discourse, but I found them eventually," he offers labouriously. "I.5gs should do the trick and would still leave room to up the dosage, and no, neither amount will land you in a trip strong enough for you to start wiggling around starkers in the corner of the room, so you can ditch that worry now."

There's a beat or three of silence that lingers between them wherein Remus simply stares at him with one brow cocked and Sirius huffs a sigh. "You may experience a light visual hallucination or two, but they'll be minor, I'm sure of it," he offers evenly.

Remus breaks character long enough to click his tongue loudly. "Sirius," he huffs.

"Remus," Sirius mimics.

"Stop that," Remus instructs. "I've a right to know what I'll be getting into, thank you."

"I'm telling you what you'll be getting into," Sirius insists, a throaty laugh escaping him. "Colours may go a little wonky, things might get a bit silly, but believe me, that's about it; James and me, we've taken way more than 1.5gs and we didn't go running headlong off of a bridge."

"Mm, but what did you do?" Remus inquires, squinting there.

Sirius smirks a little. "Ended up in my room spewing a thousand words per minute between each other for five hours straight and at one point, there was a parrot not unlike the one from Aladdin perched just outside of my right peripheral the entire time we spoke," he offers him, lifting his right arm to show him a vague idea of where the parrot had been chilling. "Absolutely none of which is going to happen to you just from the small amount you'd be having, I assure you."

Remus looks up, down, all around before taking a breath in. "No, you have got to give me more about the parrot," he puts plain.

Sirius hums fondly, thinking back to that frankly blurry night. "I'm sorry to say this, but I have very little to share about it," he insists. "He was just there, in the room, listening to us babble back and forth; no judgement coming from him, not as far as I could tell, just another ear in the room, really."

Remus promptly ducks his head down to stuff it against Sirius's chest and writhes under the force of a bout of snickers. "Well, thank God there was no judgement," he attests, muffled against Sirius's work blouse.

A bright laugh bubbles in Sirius's throat before he leans down to press a kiss to the top of Remus's head. "The good thing is, I highly doubt you'll see a single bird in the room."

Remus shifts his head back enough to meet Sirius's eyes. "Are you going to be taking it with me?"

Sirius shakes his head slowly from side to side. "It's all yours," he maintains. "I'm the DD, so to speak; someone has to be."

Remus scoots himself back from Sirius's chest, lets a sigh leave his nose, and leaves Sirius with a narrow-eyed look. "Then you cannot take the piss out of me for anything ridiculous I may do or say during," he conditions.

If Sirius were anyone else he might've kept this part to himself but he isn't, so. "I'm not promising anything," he tells it straight, breaking into a rolling laugh as Remus presses a round of finger jabs to his stomach in retaliation. "You have made me cry from laughter while dead sober, boy; all bets are off when you're loopy."

"Unbelievable," Remus calls it.

"You're funny, deal with it," Sirius returns him. "I've ideas aside from the shrooms, Remus; this is just one we can have chipping away in the background while we try out other things, too."

Remus leans his head down on the arm of the couch alongside Sirius's, mirroring him. "What're the others, then?"

Sirius takes in a breath, thinking about how to put it exactly, and lets his breath out in a solid puff. "If a mega thread of suggestions on what to get next were an artists' discography, I simply combed through and came up with a greatest hits compilation," he provides.

Remus blinks twice. "I'm interested," he coaxes.

"I've abortive strategies and some tips and tricks for how to make attacks easier on you, it's a variety," Sirius offers him. "All purely anecdotal, but that's the name of the game for now and if you'd get ready to go, we can get right on that."

Sirius reaches to tap Remus's right side twice in prompt and Remus appears to seek out the same will to move that Sirius already managed to find, gives out a decided breath, and lifts out from between Sirius and the couch. Getting off of it is a bit trickier; Remus has to work to get himself over Sirius's frame in order to get a secure footing on the ground by the couch, and Sirius would be the first to admit that the manoeuvre is tough while he himself is making absolutely no real attempt to help, but it's always been fun to watch Remus try to pilot his tree branch limbs around and that doesn't seem likely to change any time soon.

"Give me a minute," Remus requests, plucking his tea off of the coffee table and taking it into his room with him.

Sirius indulges in another long stretch in his wake, glances over at Tango after he lets it go, and gives out a light 'psst' to get his attention, and a mere beat or two later, Tango is upon him, putting his front paws up on the couch while leaving his back legs on the floor.

He gives Tango's ruff a stellar rub and leans his head back as Remus's voice carries over from the other room. "What's it like out?"

Sirius hums thoughtfully; on his own terms, it's a cool, late spring night, but Remus is in a simple tee and won't love that. "You'll want long sleeves," he trades him.

Sirius is herding Tango toward the entryway right about the time Remus makes his reappearance, drinking the dregs of his tea and sporting a pull-over hoodie with the hood popped, even. Although the presence of said hoodie is laughable in its own right, Sirius can and does wholly appreciate its cameo appearance for a few reasons; the hoodie's Sirius's, Remus's fringe is floofing out fantastically from underneath the hood, and it's frankly doing wonders for his recently-acquired street urchin aesthetic.

Sirius bites down on a laugh, focusing on getting Tango strapped to the lead once again. Remus makes a stop-off at the kitchen to rinse out his mug and while he's doing that, Sirius clips the lead on Tango's collar, rises to his feet, and times a good old-fashioned once-over for the instant Remus makes it to the entryway.

"No one better cross you while we're out there or it's wa-pow for them, mm?" he raises.

"How about a wa-pow for you, mm?" Remus returns, miming a sock to Sirius's gut before slipping around behind him to get near the shoe rack. "We're precariously low on lube around here, so don't let me forget to grab some while we're there."

Sirius swivels around after sticking his feet into his docs in turn. "Wouldn't dream of it," he echoes, following Remus out the door.

Remus hangs back to lock up behind them while Sirius takes to an easy jog down the hall just to amp Tango up a little. Remus catches up to them in little time at all and from there, catches Sirius up on a little plan of his own: it'd only be in their best interests to teach Tango how to stop at each landing rather than let him tear down the stairs and, to quote one Remus Lupin directly, "'drag you into sure death.'"

Sirius offers a mild noise of offence. "Look at his face," he instils, gesturing his free hand toward the Tango even as he's quite admittedly leading the way down the stairs. "He doesn't have a concept of what or even where death is."

"He's going to get bigger," Remus maintains. "It'd be better to train him how to heel sooner than later or you're going to end up dragging behind him someday because he took off after a squirrel."

"He's not going to do that," Sirius says plainly.

"He's a hound, Sirius," Remus returns. "That's what they do."

Sirius debates between the second and first landing whether this is the precise hill he wants to die on, decides there are bigger, better battles to be won overall, and stops at the next landing, emphasizing the word 'heel' and waiting until Tango comes to a full stop before showering him with praise and emphasizing the word 'go' next. Sirius heads on down the stairs behind a scampering Tango with Remus following them down while looking quite pleased with the turn of events, and that's good enough for Sirius.

He takes the three of them on a slight detour, leading them up a few blocks in the opposite direction to their destination just to introduce Tango to the village square near Remus's building and letting him frolic about for a time before looping them back in the direction of Boots. When they come upon the storefront, he walks Tango to a nearby light post that's as close to the entry door as can be done, ties the lead in a tight knot mid-way down the base of it, and leaves a warm-hearted pat on the dog's head.

"If any strangers try to walk off with you, bite 'em," he instructs, booping Tango's nose for a dot of punctuation.

"Brave of you, leaving him out there," Remus mentions, following Sirius through the in-door.

"It's not as if I can bring him in with us, can I?" he sends over his shoulder.

"Well, not a chance," Remus offers behind him. "Only, you don't see many like him around, which has me thinking he's just the type to get snatched."

"You're right, that could happen," Sirius allows, lifting a shopping basket off of a stacker of them sitting in the foyer, "so, I could either panic that some fuck-o is going to come scuttling out of the shadows and make off with him every time I have to leave him out front of a shop for a few minutes, or I could simply not do that."

"Oh, well, who the hell knows why I didn't think of that one," Remus says plainly.

Sirius gives a light hum of a laugh, hangs the basket loosely at the bend of his right arm, and heads a few steps over from the entryway to get himself a good view of the aisle markers. "Aloe and stitches first up," he declares, glancing over his shoulder to find Remus a step or two behind him, pulling his hood down.

"I should think they'd be somewhat near each other," he gives, passing a hand up through his fringe to keep it at bay, but thankfully it's just no use.

Sirius turns his smile back toward the row of aisle markers ahead of him. "My thoughts," he echoes, scanning the boards for some clues.

He nudges Remus to follow him when he's found a lead, beckons him to follow him over to aisle three, and there he splits the duty in half, giving Remus the task of finding aloe while Sirius handles keeps an eye out for butterfly stitches. He finds those quicker than Remus finds the aloe and takes a short detour, dipping out of the aisle and heading down one running parallel to the others, having a look this way and that one for any and all dog-related items.

He goes down as far as aisle six before he spots a few bags of dog food available, and though none are the brand he'd prefer, it'll just have to do for now. He makes a choice given his limited options, picks a smaller size so they'll have room for everything else on the list, and stuffs the pack of butterfly stitches to the side of the basket to make room for the bag. He heads back the way he came, spots Remus down at the other end of aisle four and just about to head onto the next one, and lets out a bird whistle to have Remus rethink that plan.

A man standing halfway between the two of them looks up and around quickly for the source of the twittering, but Sirius is more preoccupied with Remus a few steps further down, swivelling around to face him and putting an immense effort to hide his smile so not to encourage him any surely, but when has that ever worked?

Sirius smiles brightly as Remus waits at the top of the aisle for him to get to him and holds his basket out in offering, garnering Remus to set a modest jug of aloe into it followed closely by a comically larger bottle of lube, and the contrast between the two promptly sends Sirius into a round of rushed, breathy laughs through his nose.

Remus comes at him with a hearty whisper. "Oh, stop," he huffs, tossing a wayward glance past Sirius, though that doesn't deter a cheeky smile from forming on his own lips either, "it's cheaper in the long run if we get the larger one."

"Mm," Sirius manages, nodding brightly, "mhm."

"Alright, focus, yes?" Remus prompts. "What's next?"

Sirius shakes himself out, straightening up and sniffing once. "Sleep mask," he provides.

Remus's brow furrows slightly to that. "I've got one."

"Which is at mine, so that's not going to help you now, is it?" Sirius raises him. "Besides, someone online suggested keeping one in the freezer for attacks, swears that the chill helps ease some of the pain and the lake of fire running under his skin, and I thought we could try that out since you do shoot up to about a thousand degrees when you're in one."

Remus lights up before giving out a resounding noise of appreciation. "That's the best idea you've stolen yet," he puts out, beckoning Sirius to follow him back the other way.

Sirius glows a little or a lot; difficult to say for certain, but he feels a lot warmer as he follows Remus over to aisle five. He’s led upon a wired basket about halfway down the aisle that's practically bursting over the brim with options for sleep masks spanning a wide variety of colours with various slogans printed on the front of them. Sirius clicks his tongue in thought as he rolls up the sleeves of his work blouse, giving out the impression that this is certainly a tough call, and Remus's muffled snickers make it worth it.

Sirius lifts two contenders out of the bunch, one a simple black, the other a vibrant shade of pink, and has a look over them. "I've got 'don't fuck with me,' or 'don't wake the bride,'" he raises loftily, looking to Remus and putting his head on a tilt. "Which one speaks to you more?'"

Remus presses his lips firmly together and shuts his eyes, not giving him an answer for it seems Sirius has put him out of commission for the moment. "Guess it's a tie," Sirius offers lightly, sticking the both of them into his basket. "Now you've got one for the freezer and one for your nightstand, and your other one can just stay at mine."

Remus's shoulders slow their shaking and he recovers with a stark intake of breath, nodding through a slow, slow exhale. "What's next, then?" he bids.

Sirius reaches forward with his free hand, wraps it around Remus's right wrist, and tugs him down and out of the aisle, weaving him over toward the RTD&E section, and stops in front of the entire wall of refrigerated shelves. He whistles a quizzical tune, on the hunt, and perks when he spots a frankly stunning array of energy drink options, tugging Remus over to them with renewed purpose.

He lets go of Remus's wrist when they step in front of them and displays both his hands royally underneath a few of the brands in front of them. "Et voila: as far as personal testimonies go, the tiers are as follows," he details, lifting his hands to illustrate said tiers by stacking his flattened palms, "oxygen and shrooms are battling it out for the title of best defence strategy, oxygen's ahead by a nose, but shrooms aren’t far behind, and following those two bad boys is easily Redbull; now, Monster does have its diehards and it would do the job just as well, but Redbull is the overwhelming winner as far as name-dropping goes and look, they’re two for five — how frugal."

Remus has himself a look over the shelf in front of them. "I saw a lot of that name-dropping, too, but it almost seems too easy to work," he puts up.

Sirius nods, willing to let him have that. "I won't fight you there.”

"Oh, no?" Remus raises, glancing at him sidelong.

Sirius shakes his head once. "On the one hand, there are so few options around for you to sink your teeth into, to a point where it can get disheartening, but on the other, these are considered must-haves in the community, can be found at any corner shop within a mile radius of you, and legend has it, they can smack a cluster down from a ten to a three and sometimes even snatch it away altogether; sounds fake, but that would be one fucking elaborate lie, don't you think?"

Remus's eyes widen a smidge. "Well, well you put it like that," he trades him.

Sirius tilts his head to the right with a bright smile. "Not that you'll fall over out of surprise or anything, but not much research has been devoted to why these work," he supplies. "However, word on the street says it's all got to do with the taurine in them, which you'll find listed under ingredients in most, if not all of these."

Remus picks a can of Redbull off of the shelf and has a look for himself, turning it around to look at the back of the label. "You really did your homework," he observes, and Sirius wiggles his toes in his boots, feeling quite pleased with himself while Remus glances up from the label to fix him with a curious gaze. "How am I to use it?"

"They say it works best if taken at the onset," Sirius offers, show-stoppingly grateful that Remus isn't actively poking holes into every spot he could possibly fit a needle through, "and if all goes as well as they say it will, it could cut one down or bulldoze right through one and cut it short."

"Again, too easy," Remus calls it.

Sirius holds in a huff. "Sounds it, but it might not be," he returns. "There are going to be a lot of maybes from here on out: as far as these go, some say the effect is near-instant, others say there's some lag time before it can take effect, but these things do check out just from the amount of praise they get alone, so I don't see any reason to ignore them just because it may seem too easy or too unconventional; the moment you're sure one's coming on, pound one of these back and we'll see what's what."

"I don't think I've pounded anything back in my life," Remus comments, sounding quite candid about it.

Not the direction Sirius saw him going in, but alright, he'll play. "Pretty sure I rescued you from a drunken excursion due to you pounding back a slew of pints, but whatever you say, hon," he offers primly, reaching up to pat Remus twice on the small of his back.

Remus looks to him pointedly. "Well, I didn't pound those back like a row of shots," he highlights. "I’ve never been a shots-shots-shots sort of bloke."

Sirius gives an evasive sweep of his hand. "Bit of a shame, that, but the thing is, when you're smack in the middle of an attack, I've a sneaky suspicion I could tell you that the only cure for these things would be shooting heroin into your eyeball and you'd jump face-first on the needle without asking for any clarity," he maintains, not seeing any reason to sugarcoat it. "I get that right now, you just want all the information you can get your hands on beforehand, which I'm fine with, but let's not split hairs here; you'd slam one of these down in no time if it meant you could stop an attack from getting off the ground and there's nothing wrong with that, it can just be true."

Remus gives him a bland frown, but Sirius considers it crucial to note that he doesn't deny either claim so much as he lets them exist unchallenged and moves forward on the particulars. "That's if I see one coming," he mentions. "My last two were on me before I ever caught sight of them."

"I know they were, but they won't always come on like that," Sirius insists.

Remus gives him a frank look. "We don't know that."

"We've a pretty solid guess, though, don't you think?" Sirius counters. "Your left eye would not stop watering the entire time we were stuck in that waiting room, Pete said that same eye wouldn't even open during Tuesday's attack, so that right there tells me if you notice anything funky going on, anywhere near here—" he reaches out and circles a hand around Remus's left eye, "—is a warning in itself, and then, once it actually hits, that's when they say you'll need to start chugging on of these."

Remus lets a puff of breath leave the right side of his mouth before he plucks one more off of the shelf and puts both cans in the basket on Sirius's arm, making the total two. "Pick a few more," Sirius coaxes. "There are a thousand options here and I'll get you a variety."

Remus pulls a few more options off of the shelf, tossing them in the basket in turn, totalling six different flavours, three from the two most praised brands. "Not sure when you decided you’d be getting all of this, but I'm paying for it, so we're clear," he tells him, which is laughable at best.

"Yeah, OK there," Sirius returns, hiking his basket up further on his arm to accommodate the increasing weight to it.

"The bill's mine, thank you," Remus doubles down.

"I've got it, Remus," Sirius sends him. "Some of this is mine anyway."

"One thing is yours, and we have a deal," Remus returns him. "You wouldn't take my tax return, so this is how it's going to have to be."

"Right, because me taking your tax return is absolutely something I'd do," Sirius nods.

"If you'd just done it, I wouldn't have to resort to paying you back for Paris in increments," Remus returns. "I'd have paid you back in one go and now, I have to slow-seep it to you in chunks instead of you just letting me pay you back in full."

"Or," Sirius puts out, "or, we could forgo the entire deal, you could remember that I've got actual 'fuck-you' money now, and take whatever you're planning on sending me and put it toward literally anything other than paying a bloke who doesn't want or need to be paid back."

"I well know you've got 'fuck-you' money, thank you," Remus retorts. "When has that ever been the point?"

Sirius lifts his hands evasively. "We'll see who gets their card out quicker at checkout, then."

Remus gives an equally unaffected gesture with his own hands. "There will still be a money transfer headed your way on payday as is, so you really can't stop me from adding on a little more to cover whatever this quest amounts to," he returns, turning away from the refrigerated shelves and the conversation topic as a whole in one swoop. "Six cans should be good for now, I'd think; where to next?"

Sirius lets this one fall by the wayside for he has a strong hankering that this specific battle will go on until one of them truly forfeits, and Sirius can absolutely pretend Remus has won for now; he could do this forever. "Pharmacy," he offers pleasantly.

Remus tosses his left thumb over his shoulder. "In back," he provides.

Sirius smirks, heading that way. "'Course you'd know."

"I wouldn't be me if I didn't know where the cough syrup is kept," Remus maintains, a step or two behind him.

"You know what, that's perfect," Sirius sends to him. "If I'm ever forced to pick between you and your evil clone in the event of a climactic battle, I'll know to demand where the cough syrup is kept in here; it's foolproof."

Remus catches up to Sirius in a few easy strides, heading up on Sirius's left possibly to avoid running into the basket on Sirius's right arm and giving out an even hum. "Only hitch to that plan is, just about anyone with a lick of common sense would know to say 'the pharmacy,' so don't fall for that if that's one of the answers," he puts in. "I'll be much more specific about it and that'll be your answer in and of itself."

"Love that," Sirius returns him.

"Whoops, this way," Remus bids, wrapping his right hand around Sirius's arm to change the direction he'd absolutely been blindly heading in.

He guides Sirius down a few aisles further before he leads them out to a separate section of shelves from the rest; further down the way Sirius spots the pharmacy window and a lone staff member twittering about behind it, but they need not go there when what they're here for can be found on the shelves, lucky them.

"Any idea where they keep the caffeine pills, El Phamaculo?" Sirius raises, just in case Remus's knowledge of the area extends past the cough syrup.

Remus gives Sirius a side-eye to end them all. "What, like you're not buzzing already?" he returns, and OK, fair enough; Sirius is practically vibrating out of his skin, but the pills aren't for him.

"Nice one, but they're all yours," Sirius returns.

"Oh?" Remus sends him vaguely. "What does legend say about them?"

"Legend says it’s another abortive tactic,” Sirius offers. “Allegedly high amounts of caffeine can bring a cluster down to a screeching halt, so it couldn’t hurt to take a whack at it.”

Remus aims a frank stare at him. "You can't be suggesting I take a caffeine pill alongside a Redbull," he deadpans.

"Oh, fuck no," Sirius sends back, Remus's shoulder line going much more lax with that. "It's one or the other so if you pick one, you're committing to it until the next cluster rolls around before you try testing out the other; all I'm doing is taking you down a list of suggestions one can find at their local Boots."

"Talk to me, then," Remus prompts. "Why would caffeine help?"

Sirius keeps an eye on the other side of the aisle, humming a little as he strolls along at a leisurely pace. "It's more anecdotal than anything else."

"That's my favourite phrase," Remus insists.

"Cool it, would you?" Sirius asks of him. "One person said he slams down an iced espresso with, like, nine shots in it when he knows an attack's coming and swears that kills a cluster before it even has a chance to get anywhere, and there were several others who'd replied to it absolutely agreeing to that, so while that's nowhere near Redbull levels of an agreement party, it's just another option something to consider; I figure the pills could work the same way and I wouldn't have to bother trying to convert you to espresso, which is a relief because I do know a losing battle when I see one."

"Well, apparently you don't, seeing as you're going to lose the Rory debate and you can't even see it coming," Remus comes back, and without missing a single fucking beat, the complete shit.

Sirius reels back from the shelf he's scanning, forcing himself to recover from that devastating blow for his own sake. "Listen, you, if you want to reopen that box right here, right now, that's up to you, but did you hear anything I said just there?" he bids. "Anything at all?"

Remus looks over at him, aiming a pointed smile in his direction. "I heard you," he affirms. "Only, if caffeine can abort one, couldn't I just knock back any of the myriads of strong teas I've got in my cupboards and hope for the best?"

Sirius squints over at him, humming a little. "I mean, technically I suppose you could, only I don't imagine you'll feel up to dragging yourself into the kitchen to brew a pot just in time for a cluster to hit, do you?" he raises. Remus accepts that with an even tilt of his head, but Sirius isn't the fussy one in the building; he'll take it. "I'm thinking if these end up helping, then they can be more of an emergency abortive that you can take with you while on the go and they'll be way more convenient to carry around with you than the Redbulls would."

"Alright, well — that is a very good point," Remus lets him have, and Sirius can't quite decide if it cost him anything to give him that or not. "I'll be honest, then; I haven't a clue where those are kept around here."

"We'll find them," Sirius says of it, scouting the shelves.

"Could ask her?" Remus suggests, tossing a thumb over his shoulder.

Sirius's gaze darts to the lady over behind the glass partition down at the end of the aisle and quite honestly, he can't think of something he'd less like to do. "Nah, I'll find them," he insists.

The next time he looks up, Remus is completely gone from where he last stood, and Sirius has a fast look around before he spots him down the way speaking with the pharmacy lady, and the treachery of it all is absolutely dumbfounding. Remus gives a pleasant nod to the lady and heads one aisle over from the one he left him in, and Sirius waits with his arms crossed and his right foot tapping away for Remus to return to him, and then the little shit comes back the other way, ruining the intended intensity of the visual altogether.

"I'd have gone over to that aisle eventually," Sirius puts out there, swivelling around to face him.

"I'm sure," Remus echoes. "There are a few options over there, so I'll need you for this part unless you want me to start picking at random."

Sirius gives a lofty sweep of his hand, gesturing for Remus to lead the way. When they're in front of said options, Sirius scours for the recommended dosage, picks a modest bottle to start with, and holds it up. "Now, you're not to be taking the bottle with you on the go," he raises, rattling the bottle for a bit of extra flair. "I'm not saying you'll go all Saved by the Bell on me, but I'm also not that into the idea of you downing the entire thing in a fit of desperation so it'll be one or two in a baggie that you bring along in your bookbag and I'm putting my foot down on that."

The corners of Remus's lips twitch before he seems to give up on hiding his smile. "I accept your terms," he replies, half-tipping his head to him. "Is there more that we need?"

"Melatonin's the last of it," Sirius offers, tossing the pills into the basket.

Remus looks altogether stumped for a moment or two before he hums endearingly and heads off up the aisle in search mode again. "Aren't you going to ask your friend?" Sirius calls after him.

Remus flips him the bird over his shoulder, takes a right, and strolls out of sight, and from there, he either does head off to have a confab with the pharmacy lady or simply conducts his own search, but Sirius can't see his head overtop of the shelves so it's really up in the air. He heads the opposite way and turns into the aisle right of him, figuring he might as well have a look around, but a minute or so later Remus announces he's won the scavenger hunt.

Sirius heads back the way he came, only this time he loops around the outside of the pharmacy section to cut some time and heads for Remus, stopping just in front of him. Remus turns the pill bottle in his hand so its face is looking at Sirius, giving the bottle a tilt back and forth in question. "This one, is a bit of a mystery even to me,” Sirius levels with him.

Remus blinks once. “Honestly, it’s refreshing to hear you say that out loud,” he gives him, fiddling with the lip on the bottle with his fingertips.

“Well, here’s why,” Sirius prefaces, keeping his tone as light as possible, "some say, if taken before you head to bed, these can help ward off nocturnal attacks, and some go as far to say that repeated use has helped ward off daylight ones for them as well."

"So if they do help, it’ll be more of another over-time scenario," Remus surmises.

"As far as I'm aware, yeah," Sirius allows. "I do doubt that popping one tonight will make you cluster-free tomorrow, but prolonged use has brought alleged benefits for some, and I know you're already sick of hearing 'he said, she said,' but I’ve read that a lot of people use it just to sleep a little better and that alone makes me feel like they’re worth a shot to counteract some of the restlessness I have seen you dealing with since the attacks have come back; I just don't see any reason not to work these into your nightly ritual and see what comes of it."

Remus reworks his mouth and shuffles a bit on his feet, and Sirius watches with renewed anticipation, and then, to top it all off, there must be exactly no one in their immediate vicinity for Remus steps impossibly close to Sirius for the middle of Boots, night or day, and sticks his forehead against Sirius's. "You put so much thought into this," he offers, his mouth twisting into a sheepish smile.

Sirius moves his forehead against Remus's; side to side, up and down. "You've no idea."

"I've an idea," Remus instils, his lips twitching at the sides. "I know it doesn't seem like it, but I appreciate what you've managed to pull together from so little."

Sirius snorts. "Bitch?"

Remus smirks out a weak, imploring laugh. "I didn't mean it like that."

Sirius lets his eyes fall shut for a moment for if there's anything he knows how to do, it's bask wholeheartedly. "I know you didn't."

"I really didn't."

"I know."

A scuffle of shoes tapping on the flooring sounds off behind Sirius, further down the way but headed straight for them, and Remus steps back from him sooner than Sirius would've liked, but then again, if Sirius hadn't opened his eyes when he did, he would’ve missed Remus aiming a gaze at him that only ever gives the sorts of things he finds supremely engaging and that would've been a tragedy. The source of the tapping goes to a woman who passes them by on her way up the aisle, who promptly coughs a tad too pointedly as she goes and rounds her head back toward them with a wicked stank eye the instant Sirius sends triple the number of coughs her way, and really, Sirius hasn't a clue what she'd been expecting; talk shit, get hit.

Remus promptly sticks the package in his hand in the basket on Sirius's arm and tosses a pointed gaze toward the front of the shop, signaling he's quite ready to leave, and it's not technically fair given that they were here shopping before Cunty McCunterson came along, but he digresses; they've rounded up the last of the list as is.

Sirius swings around and falls into step with Remus, watching with plain curiosity as Remus eyes the basket on his arm pointedly before his face breaks open and a sharp laugh leaves his throat in a flash. Sirius, happy to hear that sound on any old day, let alone this dumpster fire of a week, watches the show from the front row while he waits for any and all context clues to be given to him.

Remus hangs his head sheepishly as he spots Sirius's open expression. "Sorry, just—" he tries, biting back another laugh and gesturing at the basket. "Our cashier's going to think we're a couple of kooks trying to go out with one intense bang."

Sirius looks down in the blink of a second, taking in the frankly disastrous haul their shopping tryst has amounted to, and promptly loses every morsel of his shit, barking a laugh loud enough to raise the dead judging by the face Remus makes and that only sends Sirius into further mayhem.

"The rest of the stuff, jaw-dropping to say the least, but I think the dog food is the cherry on top," Remus tacks on, his tone a perfect marriage between flat and wistful, and it's no use, Sirius can't do much more than bend forward to brace his hands over his knees in order to have any chance at recovering properly.

With resounding effort and a few long gulps of air, Sirius lifts out of his curled position and rises to his regular height, thinking he's got to get it together before they make it to checkout or he'll be heading right back into Snickerville the moment he starts unloading the basket.

Remus gives him a bright once-over. "Are we good?" he checks, beginning a light stroll.

"As good as we'll ever be," Sirius admits, matching his pace.

They do fairly well getting from the back of the store up to the front of it, but the moment Remus takes a look at the lone open register and the cashier waiting at it, he right forfeits. "You know what, I think you've got this handled so why don't I go make sure you still have a dog," he offers.

"I still have a dog, Remus," Sirius returns.

"I'll just double-check, then," Remus insists, and before Sirius has a chance to catch his arm and tug him back, Remus makes a quick and easy break for the out-door with a call over his shoulder. "Get the receipt."

"Chicken shit," Sirius sends after him.

He looks over at the cashier now sending a series of bamboozled blinks in his direction and smiles lightly at her, heading over to the register with the sort of purpose he’s going to need to get through this part. He sticks each item in his basket onto the till counter one by one and once that’s done, he looks left of the till area while his cashier is scanning away and has himself a vague glance over the impulse buys sitting by the counter, and though he wasn't necessarily expecting a right epiphany to take place at checkout, one certainly overtakes him all the same for there's an entire display of five-hour energy boosts, just ready for the taking.

He plucks a pack of twelve off the display and sticks it on the counter in an amassed bunch, smiling pleasantly as the woman slowly moves her scanner over to ring those in on top of the rest. "That's everything, then?" she raises.

"Sure is," Sirius replies, sticking his basket in a stacker by the till and pulling his wallet out of his back left pocket.

He pays with a quick press of his card, declines his receipt, and puts his card back and his wallet away while his cashier divvies out his haul into two plastic bags. He says his thanks, lifts them off of the counter, and hangs both bags from his left wrist, fishing through one of the bags as he heads for the foyer. He gives up on the first bag when his search brings him nothing and sifts through the second one as he leaves through the out-door, coming out to a desolate storefront and finding Remus wandering Tango up the block a little ways away, and perks up right up, heading straight for them.

"Did you chase all the bad men away?" he coos down at the dog, who hasn't a single clue what he's saying but as it's being done in an exceptionally kind tone, it's understandable that Tango does a little jig for it. Sirius finally gets his hand around the box of boosts that, of course, sank straight to the bottom of the bag he's sifting through and lifts it out to show him. "Found some of these on the way out."

"Some," Remus raises, interest piqued despite his amusement, and takes hold of it to have a better look at it.

"I'm thinking they'll do what the Redbulls could, only they'll be also easier to keep with you and the drinks could stay at home, keeping cold in the fridge," Sirius offers, waggling the box. "These, you could definitely throw back while on the go without a wall of lukewarm carbonation fighting you along the way."

"That's some good thinking," Remus trades him, looking to Sirius's collection of bags. "Here, I'll take one."

Sirius holds his left arm out for Remus to separate the handles of the bags, pulling one free from his wrist and sliding it onto his left one while he keeps a firm hold on Tango's lead with his right hand. He turns and starts them in the direction of his flat and Sirius heads up on his left for Tango's already trotting along on Remus's right. "Did you get the receipt?"

"You know, I didn't," Sirius returns, stuffing the box of boots away in the bag he got to keep and slipping his pack out of his back right pocket.

Remus clicks his tongue. "How much did it come to?"

"Two entire pounds," Sirius reveals, tapping the bottom of his pack to loosen things up a bit.

"So, sixty, seventy?" Remus estimates, humming before he shakes his head altogether. "No, it'd be more than that."

Sirius sighs through his nose as he plucks a cigarette out from the bunch of them and teeters the rest of the lot back into the pack. "Remus, I'm going to level with you; I didn't even look at the total." Remus breathes out and mutters something a touch too low down on his register for Sirius to hear. "Sorry, didn't catch that?" he bids, putting his head on a tilt as he slips his pack away again.

"I'll round up," Remus says politely, which is not what he said, no way in hell, but Sirius doesn't get much of a chance to investigate any further for Remus is overcome with a frown before he gets another word in. "It'll be such a shame if we got a load of odds and ends for nothing."

"Hey, no," Sirius denies, pointing starkly at him with the end of his unlit cigarette. "If you have to tell yourself anything so you don't start festering, then have it be this: we covered a lot of ground tonight and the chances of absolutely nothing in these bags working for you are slim to none."

"I don't know about none," Remus mentions.

"Slim, then," Sirius dials it back. "Besides, you practically levitated off the ground when I told you about the mask trick, so that alone should be worth this entire pharmacy haul, don't you think?"

Remus gives a similar noise to the one he'd done in the middle of aisle three, lifting his hands to mime like he's dragging them over his face. "I can feel the chill of it now and it's already incredible."

"Perfect; just keep feeling that, then," Sirius cements, fishing his lighter out of the front right pocket of his trousers.

He's exactly halfway through lighting his cigarette when his mobile rings out, alerting them rather vividly to a text from James coming in and, even better, startling Remus out of his pants in the process. Sirius smirks his haul out of his nose in a couple easy gusts, pockets his lighter to free up his hand to fish out his mobile, and pulls up the text message awaiting him.

if you're not shagging right this very second, do call

Sirius turns his screen toward Remus so he can have a gander at it. "Good of him to have been willing to wait," he quips, wandering up the block toward a shrub that Tango is just gunning to get near.

"Isn't it just," Sirius echoes, pressing to call James as bid.

He sticks his mobile against his left ear and tries to sneak in another haul while he's waiting on the dial tone to cut off, only James goes and thwarts that by answering on the first ring. "Call me surprised," he observes.

Sirius lets his half-haul out easily. "You've five minutes before we're back at Remus's and all bets are off."

"All this talk and no action," Remus puts in, lingering by the shrub Tango has taken to running his body across like it's the most stellar feeling in the world.

"I'll show you action," Sirius sends after him, refocusing on James from there. "I feel like it's been all of an hour since we last spoke?"

James gives a wistful sigh. "Well, when you announce the death of the boys as we know them, things happen," he offers.

Sirius sends a plain look to the sky. "How did I get deemed the dramatic one of the pair of us when you're right there, putting on a whole production over this? Go to bed."

"I will not, and furthermore, I know how we can keep the boys alive and well," James continues, breezing right on past what Sirius believes is a fair question. "Lily helped with bringing the idea to fruition, mind, so do thank her for her efforts."

Remus slows to fall into step with him as Sirius catches up with both him and the dog, rounding the corner to head the fastest way back to his building from Boots. "Oh, well, in that case, no to whatever you're about to say," Sirius serves him, lifting his cigarette to his mouth for a try at an actual, full haul.

"You say that now," James returns, keeping it to a lighthearted chime, "but her class got a spot on the Pride parade circuit and I think I know a certain someone who'd be thrilled about dusting off the ol' dancing shoes to reclaim one-half of the title known as the Zumba Kings for such a worthy cause, but do correct me if I'm wrong; it is just a theory of mine."

Sirius cuts his haul rapidly short, but he doesn't mind one bit. "Yes, yes, and yes," he returns on a dime.

James lets out a celebratory whoop and drums a substantial roll into whichever surface he's on or nearest to, the rapid thuds echoing back through the line and ramping Sirius's energy up a good dozen notches. "I fucking knew you would, you giant ham," he returns affectionately.

"Hold on, wait," Sirius insists, tamping down on his own celebration to let his instincts take over from there. "Are we not too late to join up?"

James sends a powerful pfft back to him. "We've plenty of time to catch up," he says for it. "Lily's going to find out for sure Sunday, but she's more than happy to get us up to speed on the side, too — tell him."

A beat and a half later, Lily's voice chimes in from further away from the receiver. "It's true, I am."

"See? Easy peasy," James says of it, back on the line.

"Lovely lady," Sirius passes along.

"And fear not, if there's anything we are, it's fast learners, am I right?" James raises.

A laugh bubbles up through Sirius's throat for that is certainly a description of them. He looks left, spotting Remus's hopeful, but context-less smile, and the speed at which his stomach drops once his brain catches up to his vocal cords is blistering. Berk, berk, berk, he's the biggest berk on the entire planet.

He looks down at the ground between his moving feet, sucks in a short breath through his teeth, and resigns himself to pulling the plug before James can get too carried away with it. "James," he starts.

"No," James comes back at once.

Sirius winds the shopping bag on his wrist around to one side and lets it spin back again. "I just don't know that now's the best time with all that's come up."

"You already said yes," James returns. "Three times, to be exact."

"I know I did, but I didn't drop one commitment just to take on another," Sirius reiterates.

"How could this possibly equate to that?" James returns. "It's one class a week, a few practice sessions sprinkled in on the side, and Pride itself, that's all this is; it's not even close to the twenty hours you cut out of your work week."

"I'm still going to have to drop and go at a moment's notice," Sirius returns. "There isn't much point in rejoining if my presence for a full class isn't even a guarantee."

"OK, for one," James starts, "no one said you couldn't still drop and go if you needed to, and two, if you had to go, we'd catch you up another day, another time; there's literally no reason for you not to get on board so get on it."

Sirius just barely tamps down the urge to fire off a thing or two about James going and making this that much harder to stick to just by making it sound so easy. Right about there is where Remus moves on from the idea of simply walking beside him and waiting for context clues by prodding Sirius's left shoulder in a slow, repetitive motion, as if reminding Sirius that he's quite present and as if he could forget that.

"He wants me to rejoin Zumba and won't take no for an answer," he gives Remus, who ceases his prodding altogether as his expression colours over with the weight of the context cues now in place, and Sirius shakes his head firmly since it's not happening.

"I heard that, git," James sends him.

"Good, I meant you to," Sirius returns him. "I can't swing it right now."

"Hand me to Remus?" James requests, changing his tune right quick.

Sirius hums a bland note. "You know I'm not doing that."

"Hand me to Remus," James repeats, less polite now.

"You have been wilding all evening, and I'm not about to subject him to that," Sirius denies.

"Fine, I'll call him myself," James says of it.

"Here's an idea?" Sirius puts out jovially. "How about you not even think about doing that and instead, take all this misplaced energy you've got for this idea and put it into making it a you-and-Lily thing, hm? Nothing more romantic than a little Zumba, am I right?"

Sirius isn't sure how James manages a slow clap, but he has to assume he'd shouldered the phone to achieve it. "The rest of us down below you and your soapbox can only hope to be as considerate as you one day."

Sirius clicks his tongue hard, not liking the tone James is giving him one bit. "Alright, I'm out," he says of it, pulling his mobile away from his ear and dropping the call before James gets even half of another word in.

He stuffs his mobile in his shopping bag just to get rid of the thing and looks over to Remus, who's taken to adjusting the handles of his own shopping bag dangling off of his right wrist, shooting Sirius a deeply unsettled frown. "He'll get over it," Sirius instils. "Don't worry about it, we're OK."

The fast way back from Boots is a little over a five-minute walk without any detours in mind and Sirius does have to say that James mercilessly blowing up his phone with text after text doesn't have the desired effect for Shania's ground-breaking opening hook on 'Man! I Feel Like A Woman' is quite a punchy little tune to have as a near-constant sound along the way and Sirius doesn't mind that one bit.

Remus, on the other hand, lasts until they've made it into his entryway before he breaks. "Sirius, I'm going to need you to ring him back or put that thing on silent," he maintains, reaching to hang Tango's lead over one of the hooks overlooking the area.

Sirius hears the I'm-Not-Kidding-Around inflection rather clearly and reaches into his shopping bag to conduct a search for his mobile while knocking his docs off of his feet. Unfortunately, much like with the energy boosts he tried to get his hands on not ten minutes prior, his mobile has sunk to the very bottom of the bag and it takes another three of Shania's twaining before he can even get his fingers wrapped around the width of it.

"Sirius," Remus sounds out, walking his shopping bag to the island and hauling it up onto the counter.

"I'm trying," Sirius insists. "It's buried under a thousand things."

"Of all the places to stuff it, honestly," Remus sends over his shoulder.

"I've a great idea where you can stuff it next?" Sirius returns him, lifting his mobile out of the bag, and Remus says nothing to that comment which is probably better for both their temperaments just now. He heads on past Remus emptying his shopping bag one item at a time and moves around to the other side of the island to set his own bag down. He unlocks his screen, can't help a look at all that's waiting for him in his and James's years-long thread, and huffs loudly at it. "This bitch."

"What is it?" Remus raises, not looking up.

"It's nothing but Zumba videos," Sirius spouts, silencing his mobile at once. He dumps it onto the counter and focuses on getting the dog's food in order, though he'd have to be blind as a bat not to notice Remus working his mouth around a smile. "What?"

"That's the most James move I've ever heard of," Remus offers, giving a tilt of his head back and forth.

Sirius scoffs to that, lifting Tango's food out of the bag and bringing it to the kitchen counter with him. "On brand or not, why he's chosen this as his hill to die on, I'll never know."

Behind him, Remus gives out a vague hum. "Possibly because you two still speak fondly about the Zumba days even to this day?" he raises.

Sirius makes a face as he brings a bowl down from the cupboard. "We talk about it in the same way we talk fondly about starting food fights in early secondary, but you don't see us chucking our lunches around much these days, do you?" he counters, sticking the bowl to the left of him and pulling open the drawer that houses the scissors.

"Thankfully not, but I doubt he expected you to river dance all over his idea nonetheless," Remus puts it.

Sirius huffs as he lines the scissors up with the lip of the dog food bag, sliding the blade across the top to slice the bag open. "You didn't hear his side of the call," he points out. "He made it sound like the best idea on the planet and it was purposefully done that way, I'd wager, just to get my defences lowered."

Remus hums an unconvinced note and Sirius gears up to get clocked with the face of a moral compass. "Do we think this is about the Zumba itself or do we think there could be a little more to it than that?"

"Thank you, Dr. Lupin," Sirius sounds out, pouring a load of kibble into Tango's bowl.

"He hasn't been able to see much of you in over a fortnight now," Remus mentions. "Couldn't be helped while he was away, but we could probably forgive him for the tactic he used to create a situation where he might get to—"

Sirius swivels on his feet, bowl in hand, and gives Remus a plain, imploring look as he walks Tango's dinner over to the island and sets it on the ground beside it. "He's seen me," he instils, moving out of the way as Tango shoots over to it without any further prompt.

"He's been doing quite a bit of damage control in the time he's been back," Remus points out. "I doubt he counts that as the sort of quality time he's used to getting in with you."

Sirius returns to his own shopping bag, heaving his shoulders in a shrug. "Well, tough; we all want more hours in a day," he puts up. "He doesn't have to act like we're never, ever going to be the boys again just because I've switched a few things around in my schedule; he's the one getting hitched, am I stamping my feet and musing the inevitable loss of time together?"

"Perhaps this is his very James

Sirius drums the fingers of his right hand on the countertop temperamentally, knowing he's stuck when he can't allude to any specifics on why Remus of all people shouldn't feel obligated to stick up for James, tonight of all nights especially. "I just don't think that's what this is."

Remus looks down, resumes his task for long enough to pull the aloe bottle out of his bag, and once he places it on the counter he sets one hand over the other on the counter, looks back up at Sirius again. "For a minute there, how badly did you want to rejoin?" he poses him, and since he's got a working pair of eyes and ears, Sirius can't really turn around and pretend he hadn't soared back there at first and Remus points directly at his guilt-ridden expression with the air of someone who knows he's right. "It's OK with me if you want to join back up; you did just get me two bags full of things to try out in a pinch, you don't have to feel guilty about making plans in front of me, so call him back and tell him you're in."

Sirius answers Remus's implore with a curt shake of his head. "I spoke before I even thought about it, Remus," he says of it, calling on a little of that reason thing Remus likes to sprinkle around so much. "He caught me off guard with it, that's all."

Remus lets out a sigh to end all of them. "You said yes, looked at me like you'd just remembered you'd signed your life away, and changed your mind like that," he retains, snapping the fingers on his right hand.

Sirius openly reels. "That's certainly not what I did."

"Alright, well, we could argue semantics until we're old and grey, but I saw how chuffed you were so maybe we don't need to be doing that?" Remus returns him. "I'm telling you, you're in the clear; Zumba your heart out."

Sirius lifts his hands and ends up flapping them this way and that, trying to make any of this line up properly. "I get that I mucked up, and doing it in front of you was the rookiest move I could have done, but every single one of my flubs is getting far more attention than the work I'm putting in to be good to you and I don't think that's the least bit fair."

Remus raises his own hands in a call for calm, shaking his head quickly. "I'm not trying to take any of that from you," he instils, and Sirius puts his hands on his hips just to have something to do other than flail them around. "It's not that I don't know you're incredible, I spent the entire day buried underneath everything you've been doing to help, I just don't want you feeling obligated to say no to things because I'm right there."

"I can't off and leave you while you're holed up in here counting the seconds until your next attack; that's not fair at all," Sirius insists, and Remus's shoulders drop seconds before he aims a weak, imploring look at him, and Sirius can't for the life of him figure out why that look is even there at this point. "Why are you even surprised? I told you I'm in this, I said I'd be here whenever you need me, and you were so relieved I'd got my hours dropped without a fuss; I genuinely thought we were finally on the same page here."

"I thought we were, too," Remus says, and with that gut punch administered to him, Sirius hasn't got a single note in his throat to work with.

Remus studies him for all of three seconds before he drops his shoulders and shuffles around to Sirius's side of the island, coming up on him with a kiss placed to the right corner of Sirius's mouth and winding his hands around him. "What did you think I'd expect you to do while I'm at work? Sit here and stare at the wall until I get home?" he raises, pulling back enough to properly see Sirius, who finally, slowly, lets his hands lower from his hips. "That doesn't sound like me, does it?"

Sirius finds his voice again in the form of a dry retort. "You caught me, that was my entire plan."

Remus's lips purse for a few seconds before he digs his heels in harder. "I want you to feel free enough to see your mates, Sirius."

"My mates," Sirius parrots. "Mine, like you're just some mold that grew in the cupboards that we haven't gotten around to yet."

Remus's entire visage colours over with open alarm. "Do you mean to tell me that you would put off calling someone to come take care of mold growing in your flat?" he demands.

Sirius tilts his head, giving Remus a whopper of a stare. "I think you know what I'm saying here, actually."

"I think it was worth it to check, actually," Remus returns pointedly. "And I think you know what I'm saying here."

"You're not taking my life away from me, Remus — kill that thought altogether, please," Sirius instructs. "I'm still teaching Dora, I've still got the venue to tackle, I'm still working, and I'll squeeze in time with the others when I have it, but you're the priority right now; I don't need the Zumba on top of all that, I was an idiot to say yes in the first place, and I'm fine with the way things are set up."

"Who said anything about 'need?'" Remus raises, looking around for the culprit. "You want the Zumba, so let's try to work it out; how much of your time would it actually take up? Not much, I'd imagine, given that I've never thought to myself, 'I just never see Lily enough and it's all because of that damned Zumba.'"

Sirius gives him a slow blink, working with every morsel of resolve in his body not to show his amusement. "Class on Sundays and some side practices in between," he lets him have. "Obviously a few hours on the day of Pride as well."

Remus nods once, considering it. "Seems doable to me?" he offers, lifting his shoulders once.

"Sunday was going to be dosing day, Remus," Sirius puts out.

"We never did pick a specific day, did we?" Remus puts up, raising his brow at Sirius like he's effectively decimated the playing field.

"It's your only guaranteed day off, why wouldn't we use it?" Sirius returns plainly.

"Well, am I going to be out of commission all day?" Remus asks, flicking the small of Sirius's back with one of his fingers. "You conveniently left that out, if that's the case."

"It's not going to be an all-day thing," Sirius echoes, mostly just to squash that worry before it gets any bigger.

"Then I don't see why we couldn't tackle that once you've finished class," Remus maintains. "If that still proves a problem, I'm sure Lily would rework the schedule so I don't have to come in on whatever day we pick instead so that's that issue taken care of, you're going to be at Pride anyway so what's the difference if you're on a float for a few hours of it, and side practices can happen whenever you three want them to; it's all doable."

It becomes woefully apparent in that moment that this, precisely, must be close to the push and pull Remus feels between every choice he's got to make, big or small. Remus eyes him, breathes in and out of his nose, and lets him go in favour of reaching for Sirius's mobile on the counter. "Oi," Sirius puts out. "Little thief."

Remus unlocks it and quickly heads back around to his initial side of the island, putting the entire rectangular block in between the two of them. "Love you," he chimes, putting the mobile against his right ear, and Sirius only has enough time to utter a single note of affront before Remus lifts a hand to silence him. "He would love to join you two ... yes, he had a think on it and he's changed his mind ... I will, but I'll be changing the wording around a bit ... absolutely not."

Remus presses to end the call at once, sticks Sirius's mobile back down on the countertop, and calmly resumes his task by reaching into his shopping bag and pulling out the caffeine pills, and Sirius can't fend off a throaty, quizzical laugh from escaping him over that as well as just how flat Remus sounded at the end there. "He asked if I'd join up, too," Remus supplies, setting the pills down.

Sirius leans his head back a few notches so his throat will open enough to infuse the appropriate amount of gusto necessary for his response. "If fucking only," he croons.

Remus ducks his head in a laugh, shushing him once. "Can you imagine these wiry limbs flying around every which way?" he raises, gesturing wildly at himself.

"I mean, I've seen that enough times not to really have to imagine it, but alright," Sirius returns him.

Remus huffs, but there's a dusting of pink over his cheeks even while he tries to push past any innuendo; unless, of course, he's the one making innuendo, then that's a different story. "Nobody needs to see me trying and failing to follow along with the rest of you with my disastrous sense of rhythm," he keeps to it.

Sirius hums in frank disagreement. "Literally would never call your sense of rhythm anything other than inspiring, so you picked the wrong bloke to side with you on this one," he says plainly.

Remus gives him one, substantially pointed look. "Help me get all of this sorted and then you can get as laid as you clearly need to be," he asserts, gesturing toward the shopping bag Sirius has hardly touched.

Sirius nods with a pointed smile on, reaching into his own shopping bag and pulling out the butterfly stitches, and there, he thinks they might as well cross that bridge now since they're here. He lifts them to get Remus's attention once again, tilts the package back and forth in question, and Remus trades him an even nod of his own, moving to perch on the stool to the right of where he'd been standing. Sirius rounds the island and heads past Remus to fetch a face cloth from the bathroom before heading back up on Remus's left.

Remus shifts to face him better on his stool and Sirius situates himself between his bent knees, reaching for the pack of stitches on the counter and depositing them in Remus's lap for the time being. "Wouldn't mind if you put some aloe on that burn," he hints, touching the face cloth to Remus's left brow.

Remus huffs, pushes the right sleeve of Sirius's hoodie up, and plucks the aloe bottle off of the counter, twisting the top open in his hands. He finishes applying that before Sirius even has the first stitch free from his brow, sticks the aloe bottle back on the counter, and settles in again, letting his eyes fall shut as Sirius works on the problematic stitch. Sirius trades glances between Remus's brow and his general visage, repeating that upwards of four times before he can't keep quiet any longer.

"Sure you're OK with it?" he checks.

Remus hums blandly, his eyes remaining shut. "Would I have called James myself if I weren't?"

"I'm only checking," Sirius instils, inwardly celebrating the first stitch's surrender.

"I think it'll be good for you to have something to funnel even some of your energy into," Remus adds on. "I don't love who'll inevitably be teaching you the Zumba, but that's the name of the game for me, I'm afraid."

Sirius puts out a long and lengthy pfft for that, depositing the first stitch on the counter until he can get rid of it. "You'd have nothing to worry about there," he maintains, passing the damp cloth over Remus's second stitch.

Remus offers a similar pfft right back to him, though he sure opens his eyes now. "Pretty sure that phrase is near-meaningless to me," he says of it.

"Mmkay, but that doesn't make what I said any less true," Sirius rebuts, meeting Remus's gaze once before he puts his own back on the task at hand. "Why would I go down the block and dig through the dumpster for scraps when I've got a fine meal at home — OK, control that brow of yours at once."

"How am I supposed to control it when you say something like that?" Remus defends.

"Well, give it a go, would you?" Sirius requests, reaching up with his free hand to work at the second stitch with his thumbnail and — bless it — the slight fray to this one makes it that much easier to pull from his skin.

Remus breathes out and evens out his brow for him. "My point was, I haven't seen this one myself, but have seen two of your previous encounters so far and there's a running theme between them that I presume extends past those two," he tacks on.

"Mm, and what's that?" Sirius goads.

"While your taste is certainly eclectic, you don't date below a ten," Remus finishes.

Agape and ecstatic in one swoop, Sirius reels back like he's just been blasted there by the sheer force of Remus's words alone. "That's the nicest compliment you've ever given yourself," he spouts, plucking the pack of stitches out of Remus's lap.

"I wasn't talking about me, you shit," Remus shoots at him, going from down below to jab at Sirius's stomach with a rogue forefinger.

Sirius's own hands move in a flash, blocking Remus's finger-jabbing with the box. "Oi, delicate work happening here," he says, picking the packaging open. "And you should've been, seeing as that trend hasn't changed any with you."

Remus huffs louder than he's done all evening. "Sue me for using the word 'don't' instead of 'didn't,'" he returns him.

"Oh, I'm never letting you forget that mix-up," Sirius maintains, slipping a sheet of stitches out and stuffing the packaging on the counter. He glances down at the slip in his hand and pulls a new strip off of it, sticking the remaining stitches down in Remus's lap again. "I'll tell you a secret; I didn't once think about how he'd be at the helm this entire time, so that should tell you how far off on my radar he is."

Remus blinks once. "Was it a letdown when it finally happened?" he checks.

Sirius hums a vague, pondering note, giving it a thought as he leans up to blow a gust of breath over Remus's scar to make sure it's dry enough for the stitch to land properly but ultimately decides on a mild denial. "Nah, I'd had better, I'd had worse," he recalls, lining the stitch up with the first section of Remus's scar. "I think I wanted to see if I could get him and then when I did, there was another class due to start in the studio ten minutes from when we'd started going so in hindsight, us getting it done in there might've been what made it as thrilling as it was."

Remus puts out a puff of breath. "I can just imagine how much you would've liked that part."

"You might think about sending him a thank-you card, come to think of it," Sirius offers up. "He is the reason I figured out that I can bend the way I can, after all."

"Mm," Remus observes. "Well, as much as I am glad I've gotten to reap the benefits of it, I won't be doing that."

Chapter 9: 9.

Chapter Text

The next morning, Sirius rouses from sleep to a weight pressing across the face of his feet, blinks his eyes open and adjusts to Remus's room before he peers down the bed, and finds that his feet have been made a headrest for Tango's substantial snooter.

The very moment the pooch notices he's been even a little engaged with, his tail whomps like a metronome on the floor below the bed, a muttered whine leaving his throat. "Don't let him fool you," Remus puts in slyly, "he's been fed and walked already."

Sirius peers left and finds him fully dressed and seated up against the wall behind his bed with a book lying open in his lap, his legs stretched out the length of the bed and crossed comfortably at the ankles. Sirius hums a hello again and gives into a sleepy stretch, letting out a pleased noise through it. He lets go of it, scratches his bare midriff absently, and lifts his head off the pillow that may as well be his at this point, glancing past Remus toward the clock on his bedside table and finding it to be nearing eleven, and then Remus having already been out and about by now quickly lines up properly with common sense.

By all accounts, he could potentially get away with a little more snoozing, but then he gets a better look at Remus, his eyes travelling from his curly head down to his sock-covered toes, and suddenly, continued half-sleep isn't such a strong temptation anymore. Sirius slips his feet out from underneath the dog's chin and gives into another, wider stretch, cocking his left hip to the side and inching it over toward Remus until it presses against the side of his right leg.

While the overall goal is to get Remus's attention off of his book and promptly redirected onto Sirius, there is something to be said about the quiet, easy familiarity that comes with Remus automatically placing his right hand down in the spot between Sirius's wandering hip and the top of his left thigh while he keeps right on reading. Sirius lets go of his stretch and sticks his arms behind his head, eyeing the display beside him and giving himself a few moments to enjoy the weight of Remus's hand on him and the warmth he can feel through his briefs, but then it's time to give out a faux-weighted sigh.

"Oh, to be a half-finished book," Sirius laments.

Remus's gaze pops right over to him, drops to the book again, and lifts back up to Sirius, all in the span of a second or two before Remus's shoulders bob up and down as a few amused breaths leave his nose. "Did you want to trade places with it?" he raises, and faux-curiously, to boot.

Sirius smacks his lips once. "Astute as ever," he puts out.

And look, Sirius is sure the book is gripping and all, but the speed at which Remus tosses it aside suggests that he, too, finds Sirius's proposed idea a lot more provoking at the moment, and thank God for that.

Sirius rolls toward him as Remus scoots himself closer to him, the two of them meeting in the middle of the bed. Remus shifts down a bit on the wall to lay his upper back against the pillows, leaving a Sirius-sized space between his legs, and that is some warm hospitality if Sirius has ever seen it. He situates himself quite comfortably in between them, remaining on his knees as he works on Remus's fly, and once he's ridden Remus of his pesky trousers and those blue plaid socks, a thin layer of cloth is all that separates Sirius from the gold, and with nowhere pressing to be just yet, he gets caught up with the idea of slowing things down and taking his time unwrapping Remus when this is as much a treat for Sirius as it is for him.

He settles down on his front in between Remus's legs, plants his arms on either side of his hips, and bows his head, tracing those three freckles that form a neat little triangle with the tip of his tongue before trailing it lower down. He nips and teases at his cock overtop of his briefs until Remus is fully there and then Sirius can't really stave himself off, but can really he be blamed? That's doubtful. He hooks his thumbs underneath the waistband of Remus's briefs to fold them down, laves over the crown, and, just because he can, he keeps that up, happy as a clam just to taste him, watch him while he's at it, feel him twitch underneath the roll of his tongue for as long as Remus will allow it.

Twenty whole seconds is the answer, or at least that's how long it takes for Remus to reach down and tap on the side of Sirius's left cheek, which is about the closest he'll get to pushing Sirius's head down on him, but the sentiment is well-taken by him, smirking quite a bit as he pulls Remus's briefs down and out of the way before descending on his cock as bid.

Sirius focuses on Remus's breathing patterns, moves quicker as each of them ratchets tighter, and cycles through watching from both above and below him as Remus's eyes fall shut, his face falling open and bare. He pays quite a bit of attention to the dual mouth and hand combo he's administering while keeping an eye on Remus's movements throughout, but if there's anything Sirius is made for, it's multitasking; he catches Remus's left hand twisting up the sheet beneath them for purchase, looks for his other hand and finds it right where Remus left it, paused in action between the left side of Sirius's jaw and a veil of hair just before Remus takes it back quickly and grips at the mattress nearby, and Sirius pinpoints the source of the struggle rather quick.

Getting Remus to the point where he can accept physicality and not worry about getting immediately shamed afterward for taking it may be one of Sirius's proudest accomplishments to date. Remus laying, sitting, or standing there thirty seconds after an orgasm and not avidly picking at his fingernails because he actively enjoyed the session they've just finished with? An unparalleled sight to behold, beats a sunrise any day. Strides have been made in that department; big ones, small ones, some lines blurred and taken care of early on, some as recent as days ago which only makes it feel as though the newness Sirius felt all through January won't ever quite disappear. They're all important, these steps they make, but there's one, stark line in the sand that, just there, grows fainter for Sirius, and before he really thinks on it any further, he's reaching down to tug Remus's hand off the bed and winding it up in his locks.

The moment it seems to click for the both of them, the mutual silence that fills the room is louder than Remus during sex on a Great Day. Heat floods Sirius's cheeks the moment Remus opens his eyes and finds his gaze, and there's apprehension in them, sure, Sirius can see that for what it is, but they're Remus's eyes, that's Remus's hand underneath his, that's Remus's body laying beneath him, and Sirius doesn't see a point in stopping to justify it any further, not when he's got all eight inches of Remus in his mouth and certainly not when the past several months with him have felt the safest he's ever been.

He keeps his hand pressed over Remus's as he starts moving again, tracing his thumb back and forth over the skin beneath it. He keeps his gaze on Remus, his eyes going between his lower lip caught between his teeth and that trepid look in his eye slowly, slowly softening, and only lets go of his hand when he's got a sense Remus won't pull it back instinctively, but it says a lot about Remus, he feels, the way he doesn't take an allowance like that and run buck-wild with it; he takes it slow, cupping the back of his head carefully as Sirius moves it over him, and the very moment that Remus's hand loosens, relaxing enough to tease at his locks as he's going, Sirius swears his body lights right up.

Hearing his name on Remus's lips is not and will never be unsolicited, but hearing it there, in the middle of all else, it's like paradise; Sirius can feel tingles in his fingertips, his toes, his cock, all over the place. Somewhere close to paradise himself, Remus stills the very moment his hand tightens in Sirius's hair, flies it down to the mattress and plants it there, and bucks his hips up to meet Sirius at each interval, and the moan Sirius gives around his cock is as involuntary as it is necessary while Remus rides him home.

The very moment Sirius has his load down, Remus starts tapping at his arms insistently, wordlessly asking Sirius to get to him quickly, and he gives a solid, college try at that, but his knees are shaky and frankly, he's packing a pipe at this point so he needs to be very careful where he situates himself. Thankfully, the speed he's moving at isn't quite fast enough for Remus, so he doesn't have to move very far before the boy scoots down the bed and meets him halfway, and then Sirius isn't going anywhere with Remus's eyes being the size that they are.

"I'm fine," he insists. "You're fine, we're fine."

Remus nods, still catching his breath. "Yeah?" he checks, lifting his right hand up to sweep a fair chunk of Sirius's hair out of his face and get it behind his shoulders, and Sirius lets out a silent laugh at the question.

"I wouldn't have put it there if we weren't, so I think the rest can just be details," he raises, kneading Remus’s hand.

Remus gives out a breath that borders on incredulous. "Shouldn't we at least have a look at the details?" he raises.

Sirius gives a slow exhale out of his nose, lifts his right arm, and reaches it up to hover his hand over Remus's mouth for illustration, aiming to call back to their most recent shower tryst. "After you instigated that, did you feel much like dismantling the reason why it was a delicate move to have made once we were done?"

Remus gives him a pointed frown. "I didn’t really think I had to."

"Ding-ding," Sirius rings out, splaying his hands out for show and sitting back on his heels to give his knees a break. "Why would I have to, then?"

The frown Remus had going behind Sirius's hand grows comically more pointed by the second. "Sirius," he pushes out, managing to make it one syllable somehow. "I could have read that moment completely wrong."

"How; how could you have?" Sirius returns candidly, lifting his right hand to count on it. "To recap: I instigated it, you were careful, you treated me like royalty like you fucking always do, and no one went home crying."

Sirius displays his hands as a dot of punctuation, but then, for an added bonus, he offers a grandiose tune to cap it off. "That's fuckin' teamwork," he croons, watching with a bright smile on as he watches Remus go from a moment of monumental confusion, to promptly switching his facial expression as recognition kicks in, and right onto hiding the entirety of his face behind his hands as he succumbs to a muffled fit behind them.

"I mean, I can hear you back there," Sirius points out, smirking all the while, but all he gets for that is three quick shushes. Sirius wets his lower lip, watching Remus's shoulders shake for a few more seconds for his own entertainment, and shifts closer to Remus on the bed, reaching to take hold of his wrists and aiming to coax his hands down from his face.

Remus's expression is a tad sheepish once he relents, but there's a reluctant smile there that Sirius wants to try and bloom, and if it means talking, then fine, he'll talk. "You've been so good about not crossing that line with me, but I'll be honest, I'm running out of reasons to keep it drawn so thick," he maintains, swiping his right thumb over the side of Remus's wrist. "So long as you don't take this as permission to start going at it like you're pulling out weeds, which I really doubt you'll do—" Sirius cuts off at Remus's resounding head shake to leave a kiss to the tip of his nose before keeping right on, "—then I don't see a reason not to blur the line a little more; if the two things you take home from this trial run are that I felt safe enough with you to try that out and you don't have to panic whenever either one of your hands gets near my head while we're going to Poundtown, let's let those—"

Sirius did have more to say on the matter, but his last few words get drowned out by Remus's lips, and then, under a kiss warm enough to keep a fire going in the dead of winter, he thinks any more of them would just get in the way of it.

Remus can move at lightning speed when he feels called to, Sirius learned that wonderful tidbit quite personally one Christmas morning in his very own kitchen of all spots, so by all accounts, he isn't surprised at all that Remus manages to get him down and onto his back in seconds flat; if anything, Sirius works to rid himself of his briefs in a timely manner that'll match up with Remus's pacing rather fittingly. He does quite well on his own, he'd like to think, but he won't complain about Remus taking over once his briefs are down by his knees, hitching up Sirius's hips by one quick lift around the back of him and tilting his legs this way and that one to get his briefs down and out of the way so that Sirius really doesn't have to do much of anything other than whine for him, and even that, Remus leans down to swallow from his lips almost gratefully.

Sirius hitches his legs up on Remus's hips, arches his back to give Remus enough room to ride his right hand over his cock as freely as can be done, and if Sirius won a gold star for multitasking, Remus gets two, it's really only fair when he's managing to balance three separate paces at once; the swift flicks of his wrist as he wrings his right hand along Sirius's cock, the middling pace of his lips catching each and every one of Sirius's muttered cries, and the careful, so so careful tousling of his left hand up in Sirius's locks. He deserves more stars than that, even, when he breaks their kiss just at the right moment, leaning down in the crook of Sirius's neck to speak love just by his left ear as he works him off, and Sirius twists his hands up into the back of Remus's shirt as he comes hard enough to see dotted lights flicker and flash behind his eyelids.

Remus is right there with him for the comedown, propped up on his left elbow and leaning some of his weight off of Sirius and onto the mattress instead, but he certainly can't get very far with Sirius's legs still hanging loosely off of his hips and that's really for the best.

He searches Sirius's face quietly, lifts his right hand up to smooth a section of Sirius's hair past his ear, and holds him there. "OK?" he checks, a lot like he did one fine Christmas morning indeed, and back then, Sirius didn't know what to do with any of the sparks short-circuiting in his brain; speaking wasn't even an option, but now?

Now he nods, breathes in and out without much of a hitch, and unwinds all ten of his fingers from the back of Remus's shirt, stretching them out behind Remus's back. "OK," he gives him. "My fingers might be broken, but I didn't need them anyway."

Remus smirks a little, his head resting in his propped left hand as he reworks his mouth around a smile, and then he simply gives into a full one. "I'd miss them, if that's any consolation," he offers.

"Mm?" Sirius hums, putting his head and his own smile on a tilt.

"Mm," Remus returns quickly, leaving absolutely no room for debate. A small laugh sounds off in Sirius's chest before he reaches up and floofs out Remus's fringe just because it's there and he can, garnering Remus to lift his gaze amusedly before he puts it back on Sirius. "Looks like they're working fine."

The two of them let out too-similarly startled noises as Tango, who Sirius truly forgot was even in the room with them, decides enough is enough and plants his top half onto the edge of the bed, and now that Sirius is laying the wrong way along the bed all thanks to Remus's placement of him, he's that much closer to the dog, who puts his snooter right up close to their situation.

"Excuse you," he sends him.

Remus shifts in the rather tight space between Sirius's legs. "We might want to clean up before he starts nosing anywhere he really shouldn't."

Sirius lets out a relenting sigh at a fair truth spoken aloud, letting his legs fall off the back of Remus's hips and onto the mattress on either side of him with a decided plop, and then simply lays there as Remus shifts off of him, half-basking and hoping his legs won't cave underneath him if he tries walking on them, half-blocking Tango's snoot every time he attempts to nose at Sirius's face, which is upwards of four times before Remus questions him on it.

"Need any help?" he asks, propped up on all fours over him.

Sirius gives an undecided hum, having a look at his exit options before deciding that he'll exit the bed on the left as trying to leave by the edge of it would require a somersault and a 9.5 or higher landing to pull off. In seeing Sirius scoot himself over to the left, Remus heads to the right, leaving the bed by that side while Sirius swings his legs over the left side of the bed, plants his feet down on the floor and pushes off of the bed, and promptly wobbles for an entire millisecond before his noodle limbs otherwise known as legs go out from underneath him.

From his spot on the floor beside the bed, he can really only see the top half of Remus paused on the right side of the bed, his expression the exact meeting between horrified and elated before Sirius lets out a rolling laugh, laying in a useless heap on the floor and pawing at the side of the bed for aid.

He can hear Remus snickering as he rounds the bed but he must not be all that pressed about Sirius's predicament when he takes the time to stop by the edge of the bed and pull his pants on, the little shit. "Oh, I see, I see," Sirius sends him, draping himself on the floor. "Far be it for me to expect speedy service around here while your modesty is at stake, take your time."

"Fuck off," Remus sends him, snapping the waistband of his briefs for punctuation, and then he does come and get Sirius off of the floor, escorting him into the bathroom without another hiccup, so all's well that ends well.

Since his hair got its typical and — says Remus — lengthy treatment the night before, Sirius pulls it up into a bun to begin a careful operation of not getting it wet while rinsing off, but the whole op could go a lot easier if Remus's showerhead were detachable and he says as much to Remus who's only a step or three behind him in the tub passing a loofah over himself.

"Take that up with my landlord?" Remus offers, shrugging once.

"Don't joke or I might," Sirius sings back to him.

"Here," Remus offers, holding his loofah in his right hand while he coaxes Sirius back with his left, switching spots with him, "I'll go first and then my hands will be free to block out any wayward splashes when it's your turn, hm?"

A worthy compromise, Sirius deems it, grabbing the free loofah and working on soaping it up while Remus rinses off. "Careful there," Sirius warns him, eyeing Remus's stitches when Remus looks over his shoulder and smiling brightly as he leans his head back and away from the shower stream as bid.

Eventually the two of them switch spots again, Remus playing such a solid game of defence while Sirius washes the suds off of his body that Sirius gets lulled into such a sense of security that Remus's sharp noise of remembrance knocks him right out of it. Sirius looks over his shoulder, freezing with his hands up in the air in signalling that he wants to hear whatever brought that noise out of him.

"I can't believe I didn't think of this yet," Remus offers, shaking his head at himself. "I decafed a man yesterday."

Sirius hears the words and it's as if an alarm goes off in his head. "You did not," he returns, trying to turn his whole head around like he's an owl.

"It's true," Remus instils, his mouth quirking, "I did."

Sirius swivels around at once, only the manoeuvre might have worked out better if he weren't standing in a wet tub, but since he is, he has to grab onto Remus to avoid slipping.

"Careful," Remus tells him, steadying him.

"Wh—" Sirius starts. "Who? Was it Satan, did he pay you a visit?"

Remus tilts his head evenly at that. "It could have been him, but even if it wasn't, I think you'll agree the bloke had it coming," he maintains, and Sirius drops the loofah in his hands, uninterested in that thing anymore when he needs the both of his hands to flap them back at himself in order to fully signal just how badly he needs more information, and Remus bites his lower lip and eyes the display brightly before continuing, ridding Sirius's body of suds while he goes. "If he'd shown his cards sooner, I think Lily would have understood if I refused the sale, but he waited until I was already in the middle of his drink so I did exactly as you said; used about the only power I have behind that counter."

Sirius reaches his hands out and sets them on Remus's shoulders, tapping all of his fingers in anticipation. "What did he do?" he bids.

Remus gives him a bit of a face, making a bland hum, but Sirius only drums his fingers harder, and to that, Remus decides it'll be easier just to tell him now rather than go through hours and hours of subtle to not very subtle at all questioning until Sirius gets the answer out of him either way. "Elise had just rung him through and she was wearing a, mm, rather bright shade of rouge lipstick last night," he offers circumstantially, turning Sirius so his lathered front could get a chance at some rinsing, "and he decided to tell me that the shade would look even better around the base of his dick, you know, because I'm your regular man's man and all."

Sirius dips his head and barks out a laugh so strong that it echoes off of the walls of Remus's respectable but teeny-tiny bathroom. "Better he tell me than her, I suppose, but I still don't know what he wanted me to do with that," Remus tacks on, and Sirius can hear him working his mouth around a smile without having to see him. "Chortle, maybe? Didn't happen, though."

Sirius huffs loudly, working on getting himself some clean air as he turns his rinsed front away from the spray. "I wish I could have seen your face," he says longingly.

Remus smirks a bit, sniffing once. "I think it was — wait," he instils, relaxing his face before giving Sirius a placid expression save for his right eyebrow cocked and a slow blink, but the addition of Remus lifting his right hand to mime pressing decaf without a word just wraps the entire thing with a bow on top, and neverfuckingmind, Sirius just won't have air; who needs it?

It takes a few seconds longer than Sirius even figured it would just to settle down, but once he does, he lifts his hands and drags them over his visage, feeling lighter than air. "Why you're never this spiteful around me, I'll never know," he says of it, dropping his hands. "I'm incredibly attracted to your spiteful side and I'm not willing to lie about it."

"When have you been willing to lie about it?" Remus returns flatly.

"Never, Remus," Sirius returns plainly, "because your spiteful side comes around as often as Nessie does; that's what I'm getting at here."

"You know, if it was forever on display, I'd think it might get a bit old, whereas if it's once every half-century or so, then you and I both know it's a big deal," Remus offers for it, giving the sides of Sirius's hips a pat. "You're done."

"That's another one for the books, I think," Sirius decides, turning and lifting his right leg to pop the shower knob down with his foot before he can freely bend to switch the taps off without his hair becoming a casualty in the process. "It's at least in the top five of the list of 'Shit Your Barista Did Not Ask For.'"

"How long's the list at this point?" Remus raises, pulling the shower curtain aside to get at the towels hanging nearby.

"Four years strong, for me," Sirius trades him. "Has to be over a hundred by now."

"'Course, what goes under your list tends to be anything other than telling you how they plan on paying," Remus returns, handing over a towel to him, which Sirius accepts along with that take for Remus isn't very close to being wrong about that part, "but I'll agree this one should be right near the top."

Sirius dries off and gets to brushing quicker than Remus does, mostly due to the fact that Sirius suddenly remembers time as a general concept and thus realizes that it has to be at least noon, and furthermore, he's going to have to head out sooner than Remus will, which is a fact he's then quite evidently expected to pass along to Remus, who is openly eyeing Sirius's speediness.

"Have to stop by mine before work," he offers, mouth full of toothpaste.

Remus nods, turning his towel over to the dry side to tackle his hair. Sirius finishes the job, rinses out his mouth, and shuts the tap, looking over at Remus just as he pulls his towel down flat over his head so his face is visible, though the way the towel falls beside his head and down onto either of his shoulders has him resembling a decidedly male and quite thought provoked Virgin Mary. "Did you want to come back later?" he asks.

Sirius sticks his toothbrush back in the cup that houses the both of theirs and turns from the sink, going with coy. "Well, someone went and left their housecoat at my flat, so it would only be on to return it to its rightful owner, don't you think?" he offers airily.

Remus's eyes light right up. "Could you?" he bids, moving his towel back and forth over his head. "I've been missing it."

"I figured as much," Sirius echoes, giving him an easy smile. "Is there anything else there you want me to bring back?"

Remus breathes in as he gives a glance to the ceiling in thought, originally going with a minimal head shake only to cut that off with a bolt of remembrance. "Mm, I left one of my books there," he supplies him.

Sirius gives him an easy nod. "Where's it?" he bids.

"Last I saw, Pete was reading it in the kitchen so that'd be my best guess," Remus extends.

"Done," Sirius assures him, heading for Remus's room.

He dresses, gives Tango a load of pats to get him through the rest of the day without, and heads back out into the main room after a quick look over himself in the mirror above Remus's bureau. Remus finishes up in the bathroom as Sirius is getting his shoes on, but if Sirius were pressed, he might say he has a hunch that Remus did his own routine rather speedily so that he could meet him at the door for the timing is a little too convenient.

Sirius straightens up after his second shoe is on and smiles; Remus has his towel hung around his waist instead of over his head, but Sirius wouldn't have minded if Remus went about nude more often, truly — wouldn't bother him one bit. "Thanks for taking him out, hey?" he offers, nodding toward the bedroom where he left Tango.

"Yeah, 'course," Remus trades him, unruffled or at the very least not bothered by it. Sirius squints, half searching him, half pretending to be, and Remus huffs a laugh when he realizes it. "I don't mind at all; you picked a good one."

Sirius sways easily in one place, thinking even a sentiment like that feels bigger than it sounds, and then, he takes the one step that's left between them to close the gap, leaving him with a longer, deeper kiss than maybe seems necessary for a quick goodbye at the door, but if Remus doesn't argue it, neither will he.

If given the choice between riding the bus all the way down to his place and calling a lift to come and bring him directly to it, Sirius is going to pick the latter. He has a lift ordered before he's fully descended the stairwell and stands out on the curb for a quick puff during the two-minute wait he's got before the ride turns up. He zones into his mobile the whole ride back to his, noting along the way that he's overshot his timeframe and ultimately happy about that development when it means he won't have to rush to work to make it on time.

Out front of the flat, Sirius blows a kiss to Priscilla on his way past her and vows to come back for her in due time. On his way up through the stairwell, he's treated to a colourful batch of notes unmistakably coming from a set of bagpipes, soaring down from level three and drowning out any sounds of passing traffic wafting in from out on the street. Sirius lets out a long huff; if Remus were here, he would say something akin to 'at least it's not midnight,' but Remus is not here, so Sirius is free to bitch and moan about the earth-shattering sound as much as he damn well pleases, which roughly translates to him using his own pipes to yell obscenities all the way up to his door and into his flat for good measure.

Suddenly quite set on keeping this visit home as short as humanly possible, Sirius is quick about finding a duffel to stuff a few changes of clothes into, leaving it open on the foot of his bed to toss articles into from his dresser drawers. One thing he'll say, as far as wacky neighbours go, Remus struck gold with Minerva on one side of him and a gent on the other whose worst offence is smoking pot inside and thus making the hallway smell like a music festival from time to time, big deal.

He stops for Remus's housecoat hanging on the back of his bedroom door and stuffs that in the bag, then stops everything he's doing to head on through the flat and down to the kitchen to retrieve Remus's book. Once there, he stands in the middle of the room and takes a long look around, but five to ten seconds go by before Sirius pulls out his mobile and dials 1 on speed dial, waiting the two rings before Remus picks up.

"I don't want to call you a liar, but there's no book in this kitchen," Sirius offers by way of hello.

Beat. "There isn't?"

"Nothing but our Rory binder," Sirius relays, pulling said binder off of the kitchen table and stuffing it between his right arm and side to take back with him; that, they're gonna need nearby should any further developments arise on the topic.

"Pete had it in there the other day," Remus insists.

"Want me to call and interrogate him on where he left it?" Sirius offers.

"Certainly not," Remus says, semi-mildly. "Either the book sprouted legs and ran off or Pete knicked it so he could finish it, but it'll turn up eventually."

Sirius pushes a breath of air out the left side of his mouth; if Remus were a country, he'd be Switzerland. "Well, I did my best," he says of it, shrugging the both of his shoulders.

"Duly noted," Remus offers him.

"Want anything else while I'm here?" Sirius bids. "I'm thinking I'll leave your eye mask here, unless you really, really want it?"

"Mmm, no, three in one place is just excessive," Remus returns, and Sirius thinks he can hear him smiling away all the way over at his place, but the sound of the bagpipes wafting in through the kitchen window drowns it right out.

Sirius shoulders his mobile at once, leans his left palm on the kitchen table to pivot himself closer to the window, and slides it shut with a great thwomp. "Hank's at it the fuck again and I've half a mind to think he's walking around while he does it," he offers brightly, taking his phone back into his right hand. "And before you say a thing about how it's better than hearing it now as opposed to deep in the night, it's no consolation."

Another beat. "I really was going to say just that," Remus affirms, a dry laugh cutting in on the last word.

"Well, it wouldn't have worked on me anyway seeing as I'm about to head right on up there to break those pipes over his head," Sirius maintains.

Remus huffs a sigh. "I would just really like it if you made it to at least twenty-five without a felony charge, and you can't do that if you're going around breaking people's property over their heads, now can you?"

Sirius blows a long and lustrous raspberry directly into the receiver. "I could haggle it down to a misdemeanour easily."

"I don't think that should be your response to that," Remus returns primly.

"In any case, if this pattern of his continues, someone else in this building may very well beat me to the punch."

"And if that's the case, you can celebrate then," Remus allows. "Mestophales has not stopped talking since you left, you should know."

"Oh-ho?" Sirius prompts, heading out of the kitchen when his presence in it is more circumstantial at this point than necessary.

"Mhm," Remus chimes. "Just wandering around, talking away."

"Looking for me, I bet," Sirius wagers, scuddling up the back hall and hopping up to touch the beam going over the archway to the living room with his left hand to high-five something.

"And," Remus drags out, "now she's attacking the end of the broom."

Sirius snorts. "Good," he says of it, crossing through the living room. "Doing some — very, very late spring cleaning?"

"Tango sheds at a rate I can't comprehend," Remus returns.

"He's been there one night, Remus," Sirius returns, moving into his room.

"Exactly, one night and it's everywhere, and if I don't keep on it we're going to end up suffocated — enough, you, I'm trying to sweep," Remus instils, no longer talking to Sirius clearly, who lets out a couple of fast gusts of air out of amusement as he shouldering his mobile to free his hands enough to work the Rory binder into the bag along with the rest of his stuff. "Oh, now my mum's trying to call me on Facetime, too."

"It's all happening for you," Sirius observes.

"To me, I should say."

"Why Facetime specifically?" Sirius raises, zipping his bag up.

"She's finally got herself a mobile that can handle it," Remus supplies. "A smartphone and everything, fancy lady."

Sirius lifts his bag off of the bed and shoulders it with a snort, happily living with the brand-new image of Hope excitedly pouring over the multitudes of promises located inside her new smartphone. "Go on, then," he tells him, moving out into the hall and plucking his helmet off of the chair to the left of the front door. "I'm about to head out, and I can't talk and ride at the same time unfortunately."

"No, no — I mean, you do what you have to do," Remus tacks on, "but if Tango so much as borks in here, I'm going to have to explain whose dog he is and come up with a fast reason as to why he's here."

And wouldn't that be just tragic. "Say I'm out of town," Sirius says instead, stopping for Priscilla's keys laying in the otherwise empty dish near the door that hasn't got James's car keys sitting in it.

"Mm, no, that won't work either," Remus maintains. "I'd have to come up with a really fast excuse as to why I've been dodging so many of her calls all week."

"Have you been?" Sirius asks, paused with his hand on the doorknob.

"Well, I saw that she'd called during Tuesday's attack, which was freakish timing, to say the least," Remus gives him. "She tried again Wednesday, but that wasn't the best day of my life so I wasn't about to answer, and I still don't really know what to tell her now."

The thing about that Wednesday is that there just haven't been many days he'd seen him quite that low in the entire time he's known Remus, but Sirius has a harder time thinking about Thursday and how he went and made that day even harder for him. "Well, the appointment's been made," he raises, shutting his front door behind him and moving for the stairs. "I mean, I get it; I know you don't want to have to give her bad news, but the fact that we have something lined up is a good thing; could start there?"

"I'm not saying it doesn't have the potential to be a good thing," Remus starts, but he doesn't get very far.

"Remus," Sirius says.

"There's still two months to go before we even get in the door, and you haven't seen the sort of helicoptering she can do," Remus emphasizes. "She will call, every single day if she knows what I'm up against."

Sirius takes a long look at the ceiling as he heads down the first flight, tamping down on the sudden and powerful urge to suggest Remus should be so lucky. Once he swallows, and once he's calmed the turn of his stomach and made it out through the lobby door and away from the overwhelmingly unwelcome sound of a piper piping away, he tries to find a tone to speak with that won't sound so bloody accusing. "Could leave out a few of the grimy details?" he offers.

"She knows how to use a search engine, Sirius," Remus maintains.

Sirius doesn't see a white flag in Remus's future and lifts his own. "Fine, then at least text her so she knows you're not lying in a ditch somewhere," he tells him.

"I've texted her since Tuesday, Sirius," Remus insists. "She knows I'm alright."

"Good," Sirius says, backing off him. "It's not the holidays, but muggers are rampant all year round, I've heard."

Remus sounds almost grateful for the laugh that springs out of him, and really that only has Sirius feeling like a tire tread. His newest goal first and foremost is to keep Remus above water and stacking their losses to pinpoint who had it harder isn't going to help with it. "I have to get going," he adds, heading for Priscilla sitting perfectly haloed by a ray of sunlight, "but keep your sunnies nearby, yeah? It's a bright one out."

"I will," Remus assures. "You have a good one, OK?"

"You have an even better one," Sirius sends him, swinging his right leg over Priscilla's bulk and settling himself on her cosily.

He ends the call, sticks his mobile sideways in his back right pocket so it won't go anywhere else but there as he's driving, and rests his helmet in his lap while he pulls the elastic free from his hair, intent on leaving it down for the ride so his helmet won't sit wonky on his head the whole time. He snaps his helmet on, sticks the key in and gets her all revved up and ready to go, and waits for a break in traffic before he takes off into the street.

The ride to the shop is woefully short and when he comes up on the mall strip his shop is located in, he's briefly seduced by the idea of taking her for a few more spins around the block, but he did forgo the chance at a morning coffee in favour of getting laid so he is running on zero caffeine, and that is a problem; he'll have the whole way back to Remus's tonight to ride on.

He's pleased to see the parking lot blessedly devoid of parked cars at least out in front of the shop itself, so Sirius rides on up to the spot left of James's car to park. He stays seated as he takes his helmet off and leaves it over his lap as he reties his hair, checks the time from there, and with twenty to spare before one o'clock, he'll have time for a cup and a cigarette before he'll have to start; how 'bout that.

He swings himself down and onto the pavement, hikes the strap of his bag up further on his right shoulder, and heads across the parking lot with his helmet tucked underneath his left arm and passing two seemingly separate groups of patrons strewn about the terrace as he heads inside. His first impression of the café is nothing but a lulled, easy atmosphere, at least until James looks toward the door from the till and springs to life, draping himself over the otherwise unoccupied till counter to beckon him longingly, and Sirius just can't help but smile.

Sirius heads up behind the counter via the pastry case route, sends a smile to Charlotte over at the bar, and saunters over to James with a lofty expression on. "You've forgiven me, I take it?" he raises.

"Keep to your word and yeah, we'll move right past this," James offers cheerily.

"Remus's word," Sirius clarifies, pulling a large cold cup off of the stack near the till.

"He helped, no denying that, but I've a feeling the moment you hear the first Zumbatastic note bursting out of a speaker, there'll be a glint in your eye that's all your own," James wax-poetics, but Sirius has nothing to the contrary to say to that claim and, since he feels he's been given the room to actually be chuffed about this, he lets himself get a little giddy in his veins about the prospect.

The door to the shop opens and brings Miranda into the picture, calling James to begin plugging her order into the till and for Sirius to get going. He heads for the bar with a spring in his step, sticks his helmet down on the counter while he goes and grabs his Venti cup, and slips in on Charlotte's left to lean in to get at the syrup stackers. "She just gets your regular brew, yes?" Charlotte raises, eyeing Sirius with a note of subdued scepticism while pointing toward Miranda from below the counter.

"Mm, she'll want the soy as well, though," Sirius passes along, pressing for two pumps here, a pump and a smidge there; a right smorgasbord of them. "Leave it over there and she'll just pour it herself."

Charlotte pulls the soy out and goes behind Sirius to leave it on the counter for her, returning to her spot on bar one. "Quieter than I was expecting," Sirius observes, having a look out over the floor; there are speckles of people sprinkled about the seats, but certainly nothing major which is a nice way to start a shift.

"The freakishly good weather might be doing it; almost everything's been taken to-go," Charlotte relays. Sirius gives an easy nod, willing to put stock into that theory. "It's kind of a relief; Saturdays were always shit at my last job."

"Mm?" Sirius hums, ready for details.

"Complete free-for-all," she says of her rather short-lived stint at Sainsbury's. "One time, this bloke came in, completely unnoticed during a huge rush, and stuck an ice cream sandwich in one of the microwaves out on the floor and just left."

Sirius bends inward, balancing both collapsing himself on the counter and trying to keep his cup of syrup upright in the process while his laughter dies down. "Sorry," he attests, coming up for air. "I'm not laughing at you, but that's fucking hysterical."

Charlotte works her mouth around a smile. "I've had enough distance to appreciate it now, but I'll tell you it wasn't so funny finding melted ice cream seeping out the microwave once the queues died down."

And that certainly doesn't help Sirius's state whatsoever, but he does his best. "How long are you on for?" he bids, smirking his way over to bar two to set his cup on the espresso tray.

"Just until two," she provides, and Sirius frowns a little at that.

"How long are you here 'til?" he raises, aiming it past Charlotte toward James, who wandered over to them once he realized there's laughter to partake in, by Sirius's best guess.

"Seven," he offers. "David's on 'til six."

"Joy," Sirius puts out, queuing up six shots to pour.

James smiles real, real big and takes in a light breath just before David's voice sounds off from the door to the backroom. "You're all going to have to start queuing up if you want drinks," he puts out, and suddenly there he is, right up on Sirius's left.

For a brief series of beats, the only sounds present are the slow pouring of Sirius's shots, the churn of the espresso machine working to get them out, and the smooth jazz playing throughout the place. "Anyway," he says, keeping his gaze on the machine ahead of him, which is an ultimately great move to make for he takes a new look at the decaf button and promptly reaches to slap James on the arm. "Guess who fucking finally decafed someone?"

James, who had been right in the middle of whacking Sirius back for the manhandling, takes his arm back real quick and reels back with an expression of prime wonder. "He did not," he returns.

"Did," Sirius affirms, raising one brow proudly.

"Impossible," James spouts. "The same Remus who helped the crossing guard in his youth? Great Scot, we'll have to throw a party."

Charlotte lifts her hands to rub at her temples. "Oh, no, no, no," she says lowly. "He didn't really help the crossing guard, did he?"

Sirius smirks as he pulls the milk out of the fridge. "He really, really did," he affirms. "Purest soul around, that one."

James coughs loud, loud, loudly to lodge his opinion on that one, but David's voice sounds off yet again from the hand-washing sink. "You really shouldn't be discussing that on the floor."

"Discussing what?" Sirius sends him, looking over at him finally.

"Oh, I don't know, something as juvenile as decafing a customer?" David raises.

Better than what he'd thought, but not by that much. "Why'd he do it?" James presses on, flapping his arms back toward him with a presentation of spirit Sirius finds quite appropriate for the situation.

"I can't; I won't do it justice," he insists, capping the milk and sticking it away. "Ask him to tell you."

"Balderdash," James calls it.

"Share with the class," Charlotte echoes.

Sirius has to hum an airy no, walking his cup over to the ice bucket. "Maybe he'll stop by soon and tell you himself," he chimes. "You'll need it to be face to face so you get the full weight of it, in any case; it's a doozy and he has facial expressions to go with that are worth seeing in the flesh."

A commotion sounds off as a group of four enter the shop and head up to the till while laughing away, garnering David to turn toward the lot of them. "Is anyone actually on shift going to ring them in?"

James blinks once. "You've hands, no?"

"I'm the floater," David sounds out.

"Float on out of here, then," James returns, beckoning him off and away while he heads for the till.

Charlotte and Sirius exchange a quick expression of mirth before the latter of the two takes a long swig of his lid-less drink and swivels on his heel, heading down the hall to the backroom and spotting Will down at the other end of it facing the computer monitor.

"Is there any way you could not schedule me with that festering turd of a human?" he puts up, stepping into the room with a plonk of his shoes for additional punctuation.

Will looks around at him as he scratches at his beard. "You know I can't promise that."

"Could you try at least?" Sirius bids him, strewing his things on a chair at the table in the back and allowing himself a decent gulp of his coffee now that his drink isn't so close to the rim of his cup.

"I've already reworked the schedule up to weeks in advance and I'm not redoing it even for you," Will says adamantly.

Sirius hangs his head back with a pronounced huff before heading Will's way. "Let's see the damage, then," he raises, moving over to the computer desk.

Will pulls up a few spreadsheets on-screen and Sirius leans in to get a look at them while he cycles through the weeks ahead. "Fridays are with Mary, same as ever, but you're on with him Saturdays," he supplies, speaking louder over Sirius's scoff, "and there's nothing I can do about that."

"This punishment?" Sirius checks, eyeing Will sidelong.

Will shoots a puff of breath out the side of his mouth, flying a hand toward the screen. "You wanted Friday/Saturday," he maintains. "No one else is available Saturday night; someone's got to close with you."

"I'd close the place up myself over closing with him," Sirius says of it, standing up straight.

"Well, they won't let me do that, so it is what it is," Will returns, minimizing the whole tab with a click and resuming from where he last left off.

Sirius digs his pack out of his pocket and pulls out a cigarette, freshly stewed. "At least admit you know that transferring him here was a mistake," he insists, and then, to Will's plain expression, he adds, "blink once if yes, twice if no."

After a beat or three, Will blinks once and Sirius taps the tip of his nose in understanding, feeling a fair amount better about the situation even though Saturdays will be known as Doom Day for the next six weeks, and yes, Sirius is counting.

He takes a sip of his drink, sends Will a closed smile, and heads for the back door. "How's he doing?" Will asks, a beat or two later.

Sirius swallows his mouthful quickly. "He's alright," he offers, pausing in the doorway. "There hasn't been another since Tuesday, so we're just gearing up, getting ready for the next one."

"Right," Will returns, nodding. "Erm—"

Sirius reads his uneven expression and the flutter of Will's right to the best of his ability. "Godspeed?" he offers in aid, liking the sound of that a little better than good luck.

Will points his way. "Yes."

Sirius points right on back to him and pushes on through the door, sticking his cigarette in his mouth and pulling out his mobile. He knocks the door shut behind him with the heel of his right boot, settles down beside the door, and lights up, intent on leaning back and chilling right up until he's expected to be on the floor.

Their time with Charlotte for the day is woefully short and since Sirius didn't get that that good a look at the upcoming schedules while his brain was busy imploding at the mere thought of spending eight hours with David each and every Saturday, he laments to himself over the fact that it wasn't her he got paired with, and then laments over it to her as well for good measure, and that does two things: gets Charlotte shining brightly at the comment and commiserating his lesser hours come tonight at 9 p.m. exact, and gets a scoff out of David, so it's good he said it, really.

After Charlotte takes off, James is really the star shining above Sirius's shift, and his presence makes it all the more easy to block out all of the umm, actually's that come their way. This dynamic is topped only by Mary walking onto the floor at three to start her shift, making it three of the O.G. crowd around here versus one, snivelling transfer-in, and that's a difficult ratio to beat.

The only drag about it is that James is slated for pre-close, meaning he's popping on and off the floor, running garbage out, stacking dishes to run into the back, and taking care of the floors behind the counter, so he's constantly on the move and that does put a wrench into things, but there is one consolation and it's that James leaves the sanitizing for him to do, which is really more of a personal gift for Sirius and one that he both appreciates and plans on using a later on in the evening to break his shift up nicely.

Will heads off at four, perhaps sensing little need to stick around when there are four viable employees traipsing around the place, and from there, the time flies by quicker than Sirius really even realizes it because suddenly Mary's headed off on her first fifteen and David's popping onto the floor, sans apron, to clock out on the unoccupied till.

Sirius sticks a cake pop in a pastry bag for a kid who barely passes the till counter in height, leaning over the counter to reach it toward the tyke, and watches him scamper off to rejoin his dad over in the corner, beating back a bolt of envy with a stick over how chuffed the man looks to see him scuttling back to the table. Beside him, David turns his way, freshly clocked out and, for some reason, standing there looking at him, and that is somehow more irksome than anything he's said or done in the five hours Sirius has been made to spend any sort of time with him today.

He inches his head a little closer to David, blinking once. "Bye?" he says, dragging that 'Y' right out.

"I'm opening tomorrow, so if you two could try leaving the place decent when you go, it'd go a long way," David imparts.

Over at the coffee station, Sirius both sees and hears James set the vat of coffee he's carrying down on the counter with a loud thwack, looking 'round at the two of them with quite the slow turn. Sirius, on the other hand, instantly puts on a grin so bright it could guide lost travellers home safely at night. "Yeah, we'll do our best," he chimes, nodding sweetly.

Whether David realizes he'd just made a grand and glorious mistake and therefore makes a quick exit or simply found Sirius's grin off-putting and dipped off the sales floor as soon as he could make his legs work quick enough, doesn't much matter to Sirius; it got him out of his face either way.

In David's wake, Sirius reaches for the receipt printer and holds the button down with his right forefinger, printing out a veritable streamer of paper before tearing it free from the printer. He uncaps his marker, sticks the cap on the back of it, and leans forward onto the till counter, repeatedly writing the word 'cunt' in altogether beautiful penmanship, if he may be so bold to say, and spacing them out nice and neatly so they'll all tear well.

James steps up on his right, getting a peek at his mini-project, no doubt, but then, when Sirius flickers his gaze up to him, he finds him staring off ahead, blinking repeatedly out the window across the café from the tills.

"Having a stroke there?" Sirius checks in.

James shakes his head clear, dropping his gaze to Sirius still very much bent over the till counter, and takes in a quick breath. "I knew he reminded me of someone, but I couldn't put my finger on it."

"Lucifer's child?" Sirius offers.

"Close, but no," James provides. "He's Reg incarnate, full-stop."

The moment the words reach Sirius's ears, he drops the marker in his hand in favour of cradling his face in the both of his hands. "Oh, I wish you'd never said that," he shoots him.

"Well, am I wrong?" James poses.

Sirius drops his hands, pushing his frame up to rest on his elbows. "No, you're not," he huffs. "Of course you're fucking right; he's him."

"Right?" James sends him. "It's actually uncanny."

Sirius pushes himself off of the counter and stamps a foot. "He's literally everything wrong with the guy wrapped into one being, and now I have to fucking think about why the fuck I'm having such a grand ol' time goading him to shit," he scoffs. "Thank you for that, James."

"Do you really have to?" James raises, squinting at him. Sirius gives him a pointed look/head tilt combo that really needs no more than that for James to get the picture. "OK, you could totally do that, or instead, you could remember that I'm literally always on your side and maybe we don't need to pick all that apart; what do you think?"

Sirius shuts his eyes and aims a disgruntled noise James's way, clasping his right hand over his left wrist, but there's a similar noise parroted back to him that, for whatever reason, hits him directly in the funny bone. There's a quick pop of a cap that sounds out a mere beat or two later and when Sirius opens his eyes again, James has his forearms set on the till counter just beside Sirius's post and his marker at the ready while he observes his handiwork.

"You're an artiste," he marvels.

Sirius presses his lips into a firm line, holding back a laugh. "It felt necessary at the time."

"Still is," James says of it, putting the tip of his marker to till paper. He adds to the existing row of expletives going down the page until there's room for no more, takes to ripping each and every 'cunt' free from the next until there's a pile of them on the counter, and lifts one of them, clicking his tongue a few times in thought before hovering it just above the till screen and just below the top ledge of the monitor. "Hm?"

Sirius's snort could've likely been heard from space. "Give me the tape," he beckons.

James reaches between the tills with his free hand and passes the deck over to Sirius, who pulls a strip free, pastes it over the obscenity, and presses it neatly to the top centre of the monitor. "Parfait," he calls it, tapping the finished product for a flair of finality.

By the time Mary's back on the floor from her fifteen, James and Sirius have succeeded in finding an array of hiding spots for the rest of the pile ranging from out in the open to tucked away for a lovely little surprise come morning. James waves Sirius off to the back to get a headstart on sanitizing, but if he's is honest about it, Sirius could use a break from the floor as is.

Mary swaps posts with him, takes one look at the 'cunt' tapped to the screen of till one, and lifts her right hand, pointing at it in question. "It's for David," James provides brightly.

Mary's mouth reworks in the span of a beat. "Apt," she forwards, and, perhaps owing to the fact that she's been around a long time, goes on to ask, "How many more are there?"

"So many more," Sirius assures, moving for the bar to begin plucking syrup bottles free from their stackers.

-

One of the many benefits of a closing shift alongside Mary is that she, too, has a life outside of work and therefore little to no interest in staying past closing time. Because of this particular benefit, the two of them split the duties up incredibly well to suit their strengths, tackling their respective tasks in between volley-balling customers at each other as they trickle in. Sirius has the coffees downsized to one, bar two closed down and bar one all prepped, and the money in the drawer counted up so all he has to do is hit rinse on bar two, close down the last vat, and and enter the totals into the books once they lock up. Mary hacks away at the lingering dishes once she's finished with the floors and from there, closing up for the night feels precisely as it should when the time comes: short, sweet, and to the fucking point.

They do linger in the parking lot for a post-shift cigarette before parting ways, but that's about as inconsequential as it is essential for it truly is the warmest evening they've had in ages. The ride back to Remus's flat is glorious in and of itself, and Sirius would be a liar if he said he didn't find the supreme urge to remove his helmet and let the warm night air blow through his hair, but he holds off on that purely due to the fact that the moment the urge surfaces, Remus's loud aversion to carrying through with that impulse rattles around in his cranium.

By the looks of it, Remus beat him to his flat by literal seconds given that he is only taking his shoes off when Sirius gets in the door, and that is a little odd, considering he had a tad longer of trip to make than Remus did. "Did you get out late?" he raises, blocking Tango's intense hello which amounts to a lot of half-jumping in the tiny space Remus's entryway has to work with. "I'll take you soon, hold on a second."

Remus gives a hum of affirmation to Sirius's question, stooping to put his shoes on the rack, and while he's there, puts Sirius's on the rack beside his own. "We had a last-minute rush we weren't accounting for and that put us back a good ten minutes," he supplies, straightening up tall.

"Gross," Sirius calls it, reaching to hang his helmet from one of the hooks by the door. He flickers his gaze to Remus, looks up as he snaps the straps together, and looks back down almost immediately, sending Remus's pointed smile a rather suspicious look. "What's that for?"

Remus sways his shoulders easily on the spot. "I got you something," he reveals, pulling an exhilarated trill out of Sirius.

"What is it, what is it?" he chimes, bobbing in place.

Remus right beams at him, inching his bookbag closer to himself with his left leg before stooping to flip open the flap. "I had some time before work to dilly around a little bit, and lo and behold, I came across something that is so wildly appropriate for your current situation that I simply couldn't leave without it," he prefaces, pulling out a plastic shopping bag that is perfectly sealed around a record and that is — too much and just right all at once.

Sirius trills yet again, only now he seal-claps as Remus stands tall again and pulls the record out, loftily displaying the face of it toward him and showcasing the title: Bagpipe Blues by one Rufus Harley, whoever he is. Sirius slaps a gape/grin hybrid onto his face as bobs in place again, though much springier than even before laying his peepers on such a find, and reaches for it just to have something to fan himself with.

"I'm never listening to this," he informs him, in case that isn't clear.

"Didn't think you would," Remus supplies him, breaking into a laugh halfway through it.

"OK, OK, OK," Sirius puts out, looking to Tango profusely shoving his snooter against his right hip and holding the gift out to Remus. "You take this and bask in your genius, I'll take him down, deal?"

"Deal," Remus returns, taking hold of the record.

Sirius plucks the lead off of the hook to the right of the one his helmet's on, stoops to latch it to Tango's collar, and flicks one of the two plastic bags tied near the loop of the lead. "Did you do this?" he bids.

"I did, I thought it'd be good to get into the habit of replacing them whenever we get back in from one," Remus offers for it. "I don't want to get caught unprepared and that way, if we keep to it there will always be a couple spares hanging about."

Sirius gives a strong salute to that, pulls the door open, and lets Tango trot out into the hall first. He takes him for a loop around the square and gives him a chance to really stretch his legs, thinking it only fair given Tango's size compared to the size of the flat he's currently staying at. He takes him back a different way than they came just to spice it up a little and races him up through the stairwell unleashed, but that bit he won't share with Remus, he thinks.

He heads back in through the door, leans around the partition, and spots Remus sitting crossed-legged over on the right side of the couch with their stash, grinder, and from the looks of it, a pack of rolling papers all in his lap. "Yes," Sirius drags out, hanging Tango's lead back up on its hook, "I love your mind."

Remus snorts from where he's sitting while Sirius stops in at the bathroom to give his hands a wash. He heads out past Remus's side of the couch where he's tinkering with the grinder, passes around the outskirts of the coffee table, and plops himself down on the other end, stretching his legs out the length of it and tucking his socked feet in between Remus and the back of the couch.

"Oi," Remus alerts, shifting forward a little, "delicate work happening here."

Sirius stretches long before settling in comfortably. "You could do that with your eyes closed," he says, unbothered and unfussed.

"Maybe so, but not with some feet in my lap," Remus returns.

"They're behind you," Sirius whispers. Remus sends him a plain look, but there's a hint of a smile there, too, be it a little fatigued. "Tuckered out?"

Remus hums to agree, pausing his grinding to rub at his eyes with the side of his left arm since his hands are a little preoccupied. "I'm a little stuffy, too," he offers. "I hope this isn't where I find out I'm actually allergic to your dog."

Sirius gives up a wan noise. "Don't even," he returns.

Remus resumes where he left off, giving the grinder a few more turns as he looks Sirius's way again. "Did you have a good shift?"

"Mhm," Sirius chimes, giving his left wrist a light scratch.

"Who was on?" Remus bids, leaving the grinder set open on his right knee in exchange for free hands to pull a new sheet of rolling paper free from the pack.

"James, Charlotte, Shitdick, Mary," Sirius lists off. "Will was there, too, for a bit."

Remus's shoulders bob up and down as he aims to balance laughing and rolling at the same time. "Sorry, who was that sandwiched in the middle there?"

"David, of course," Sirius provides, grinning.

"Ah, mhm," Remus nods, "and I've just encouraged you tenfold; grand."

Sirius brings his right hand up to pull twice on his hair tie before it loosens enough to pull it free from his hair, leaving it hanging around his wrist as he brushes his fingers up through his locks. "Told James a little tale of yours, by the by," he mentions.

Remus pauses, looking straight up in thought, and a wan laugh escapes him a beat after that. "Mm?"

"Certainly did," Sirius affirms. "The one about you dabbling in petty retribution toward a customer; I left many of the specifics out so you can freely tell the tale yourself, but you should know that James is so pumped about it that he's talking about throwing a party in your honour."

"Good Lord," Remus puts out, smiling profusely. "You know what? I thought I'd feel a little guilty about it later on, but I really don't?"

"Good," Sirius puts out.

Remus tilts his head back and forth. "I do wish I'd done maybe a little more than just press the decaf button," he admits. "In hindsight, you know."

"Right, because it's up to you and only you to make that one bloke less of an incel," Sirius returns blandly, but Remus sniffs hard again and that is a bit much. "OK, do we actually have to get you in for an allergy test?"

"I don't know," Remus says candidly, pausing his rolling to rub the heel of his left palm over his eye again, and that calls Sirius up to inspect him more closely; the left eye's watering a lot, yes, but he can't see Remus's right one from this angle to know if it's happening to the both of them or not. "It's like when your throat's itchy but you can't reach in there and scratch it."

Sirius sits rod-still, his eyebrows all the way up by his hairline by the feel of it, and waits for Remus to look at him again, only the deflation he gives in to the moment he reads Sirius's expression is deeply, deeply saddening. "No," he says quietly, shaking his head softly. "I was so good today, really — I was so careful."

"OK, I believe you," Sirius says gently, scooting closer to him on the couch.

He quickly takes hold of all three items set carefully in Remus's lap and right hand and moves them to the table. "No, I don't—" Remus tries. "I don't know what I did."

"Well, we'll get there, OK?" Sirius raises, reaching to clasp Remus's left knee. "We'll go over the day when it's over with and figure out what happened, but for now, let's just focus, yeah? We knew more were coming, we're all set, and you got home in time; these are all good things."

Remus nods, his breath coming out faster than before, but whether that's a true symptom or a symptom of the scenario itself, Sirius can't say for sure, but he'll put it in his back pocket for now. "Do you want a say in which option we pick first or does that matter to you right now?" he raises, lifting off the couch in no time at all, but he does have to force his feet to work properly.

Remus gives out a noise that's halfway between a discontent breath and a ponder. "Boost?"

Now standing by the couch, Sirius leans down and in to kiss Remus's left temple. "Read my mind," he offers, booking it to the kitchen to pull one of the many options out of the cupboard they were put in, reads the time above the stovetop, and repeats it thrice in his head as he books it right back to the living room, handing the boost over to him, which, thankfully, Remus cracks open and knocks back faster than Sirius was even banking on.

"What if it doesn't work?" Remus asks, back in it with the breathing troubles.

"Then it doesn't and we'll try something else next time," Sirius maintains. "I know that's not enough right now, but I need you to try to remember it won't last forever and I'll be beside you the whole time, OK? Now, do you want to stay here or would you rather be in your room for it?"

Remus shrugs heavily, sniffing hard, and Sirius nods to that, thinking about where he would rather Remus be, and wraps his right hand around his wrist a beat later, giving Remus a tug to get him moving. "You go sit in there, middle of the bed, and I'll bring the rest to you, OK?"

Remus nods again as he stumbles up to his feet and Sirius pauses until he's steady on his feet before sending him off, waiting until Remus is en route to his room before he swings around and shakes his hands out erratically, willing the spooks to leave his body when they're not going to help at all. He heads for the fridge, pulls the freezer door open, and pulls out the hot pink, bridal-themed mask first, and that, just the thought of having a splash of colour in the middle of the rest, is enough for a smile.

He grabs their notebook off of the island, a pen from out of the cup of many on the counter, and heads around the side of it, but stops short when he looks up and finds Remus standing only a step or two into his room, wringing his hands in front of his waistline with his expression all torn up, and Sirius genuinely can't decide if it would've been better or worse if he'd been made to see that expression with the both of Remus's eyes open.

"The pick's starting," is all he says; clipped, quick, and the worst octave known to Sirius's ears. He logs that away and crosses the space between them in the span of a second, aiming to crowd Remus further into the room, but he stays put, blinking his one working eye shut and cutting off his rapid-fire breathing to take in a deep one, and Sirius has to wait ten awful seconds before his voice even comes through again. "You shouldn't be here for it."

Sirius lets out a breath that could've been a laugh if this were the least bit funny. "I'm not going anywhere," he says of it, shuffling his items into the crook of his arm so he can shut them into the room properly.

"I don't want to hurt you, ever," Remus returns, statement of fact, no room for arguing, except for the fact he chose to take up with a bloke who could argue for a living and make bank while doing it.

"Good thing you're not going to," Sirius returns, coaxing him down onto the bed.

"We don't know that," Remus puts out incredulously, thankfully moving with Sirius's urging hand though he's certainly not done making his point known, however bated his breathing patterns are while he does it. "I threw Peter off of me last time and nobody seems to want to even acknowledge that."

"That's because nobody fucking blames you; where have you been?" Sirius sends him, urging backwards on the mattress and kneeling on the end of it to make his point clear as glass.

"That's not a consolation actually," Remus snaps.

Sirius flings the items in his arms onto the side of the bed, lunges for Remus's right wrist, and tugs it up toward his hair, but the very moment Remus realizes that's where it's going, he wrenches it back so quickly Sirius almost can't grab hold of it again. "Why would I have ever done that if I was afraid of you?" he demands, tugging on Remus's wrist. "You know I'm not and you want me here, I know you do; you're just scared so I'm going to do everything I can not to take your attempt to banish me personally if you lay the fuck down and quit fighting me on this."

Remus pitches himself backwards fitfully, but at least he's down. "Nicely done," Sirius says of it, more for himself than him just then, and heads around to the right side of the bed.

He sets to tackling the sturdy fixtures close by the bed, leaning over Remus's nightstand to unplug the chords for both the lamp and clock, and drags the entire nightstand over toward the wall by the window. He eyes Remus as he moves back, taking in his breathing and twisting around on the bed as he rounds the outside of it to repeat the process on his side of the bed, and quickly unplugs everything he needs to in order to push his nightstand up against the closet door.

With those out of the way, he heads back to the bed, situates himself directly in the space between Remus's head and the wall, and gears himself up to play defense if it comes to it, reaching to pull the notebook a little closer to him on the bed. He flips through the records of the last two attacks, starts from the top of a blank page, and puts the starting time down before he'll have the chance to forget it.

Next, the icepick. 'Icepick drilling out the centre of left pupil,' he writes down. "Remus?" he puts up, quietly when Remus in cluster mode doesn't much like noise, though the chances of him answering in speech are slim to none. "Is the clamp happening, too?"

Remus quits rocking back and forth long enough to twist around so far the opposite way his body is supposed to lay that if Sirius weren't supremely prepped on what this can look like, he'd think he was present for an actual possession. "I just need a confirmation, answer any way you can."

Remus does a rapid-fire pounding of his right fist into the mattress a solid five times before Sirius can get a solid grip on it, holding it down until the urge to do that stops. That a yes? Difficult to say when it could have just been Remus's recent pattern of generating pain elsewhere when the pain in his head gets to be far too much, but Sirius switches hands, holding Remus's down with his left one while he scrawls with his right: 'clamp's probably closing around the left side of his skull, but we'll have to reconvene at a later time.'

Sirius chances letting go of Remus's hand after a bit, leaves it hovering over Remus's for a good twenty, maybe thirty seconds in case there's a spur of further punching yet to come, and lifts the same hand up to press it over Remus's forehead. A thermometer might've been a clever thing to grab while purchasing a third of Boots' inventory, but Sirius can't think of everything, can he? It'll be the next item to buy, but for now, he thinks 'temperature hotter than a thousand suns' will do the trick; point is, he's burning the fuck up, as per usual.

Sirius takes his hand away from Remus and reaches for the mask, puts a pause on his scrawling to manoeuvre the elastic over the back of Remus's head, and shifts over a bit so he can rest his in the crook of his crossed legs. He shifts the notebook closer to him, set on doing his note-taking at an angle, and gives Remus's left temple a fierce rub-down as this is just about the only way he feels of help; whether it even really does at this point, he hasn't got a clue, but fuck if it doesn't help him out a little. Whether the mask is truly helping, also difficult to pinpoint, but Remus sounded so pumped about the prospect, Sirius hopes it's doing some good for him now that it's on.

He puts pen to paper again, moving on from guessing games and focusing on what's happening presently that he can indeed say for certain.

- left eye shut tight, watering profusely
- right one shut as well, can't confirm whether pain is present there too yet
- breathing so fast one breath can't finish before the next one starts
- twisting, churning, cannot stay still for longer than five to ten seconds, give or take
- possibly generating pain away from ground ze

As if sensing the particular topic he's on, Remus surges his own right arm up quicker than Sirius can move a muscle, sandwiches his right wrist between his teeth to bite down on it sharply, and Sirius drops his pen, scoots his legs out from underneath Remus's head, and quits his temple-rubbing completely just to have the double-grip he needs to successfully pry Remus's unrelenting jaw open without breaking it in the process, and then he has to perform a maddeningly quick pull on Remus's wrist to get it out of the fray, and that dual manoeuvre isn't an easy feat with Remus fighting his hold the entire time, but he isn't about to budge until Remus lets up, however long that takes.

A long time is the answer. Perhaps it feels longer because of the nature of the situation, or it could have something to do with the divots on Remus's arm and the crimson beads trickling down his arm that Sirius can't even get to from this angle, but he's willing to call it a lot of both. Remus ends up kicking the living shit out of the end of the bedframe soon enough, thundering his heels into it, and by Sirius's guess, attempting to set off some more pain receptors elsewhere, but doing the math doesn't make the answer to the equation any easier to stomach and the longer it goes on, the more Sirius feels he owes Peter something shiny and expensive, but he'll have to think more on that when he doesn't have a 6'3 bloke writhing around underneath him.

Remus's breathing ratchets up until they're one humongous cry that peters off into hordes of shorter, sharper ones, and where he even has the time to breathe in between them, Sirius will never know. He does, however, know deep in his gut that this has to be another knockout and his frustrations lay deep in his inability to become pure elasticity, but since that's not in the cards for him, he can't really hold Remus's arms down and reach Remus's legs to stop their rapid kicking and find Remus something to bite down on that isn't his skin all at one go, so something has to wait for a few and Remus's legs are, unfortunately, the furthest from his position, so those are it.

Sirius sweeps his right arm out past Remus's frame and brings it down to press it across his front to keep his arms in place, brings his free arm to himself and stretches it up the bed to paw at the pillows; doesn't matter which, he'll take either one, and gets a solid grip on a corner before dragging it down from the head of the bed. He shifts onto his knees and sticks the pillow down on Remus's chest so he won't smother himself in the process, accidentally, purposefully, what have you; not part of Sirius's plan whatsoever. He lets Remus have a single corner of the pillow to bite down on and once his teeth are attached to it and his cries are muffled, Sirius settles himself beside Remus's left hip on the bed so he's within arm's reach from the pillow if he has to interfere and close enough to keep Remus's legs in place.

And that is the precise spot where Sirius lives for nearly two hours; he knows it because he checks the time right as Remus's breathing stops coming out so harried. Sirius jots the number down for reference, tosses the pen aside, shifts closer to Remus on his knees, hovering over him and his pillow chest piece, and reaches to peak underneath the mask with his left hand and presses the fingertips of his right hand through Remus's sweat-soaked fringe.

"Remus?"

A response might've been nice, but a few things can be said for certain; Remus has opened his good eye, his breathing has evened out, and an hour and forty-four minutes isn't great in the grand scheme of things, but it's yards better than what either of the last two came to, and Sirius lets out a quiet breath of relief, sinking himself down on Remus's left side and along the line of his body, unable to quite pin down which of those three points he's most grateful for.

Chapter Text

The next few minutes could easily be a firm lesson in not celebrating too soon. Remus laying beside him, pressing his mask down against his left eye with the both of his hands, breathing long before a hitch interrupts it and he has to start all over again from the top; there are enough details there for Sirius to pick out that he isn't out of the woods yet, but while the backdrop is certainly a little different, the details are strikingly familiar.

Sirius scoots a smidge closer than he already is, leaving maybe an inch of space between his chest and Remus's right shoulder. “Remus?” he tries.

“Pick, pick, pick,” Remus puts out tightly, and while it's not all that eloquent, no, Sirius doesn't mind that one bit when at least Remus is talking.

Despite feeling oddly comforted by finally seeing a side of this whole ordeal that matches up to the kind of attack he witnessed last year, Sirius does feel a tad purposeless as Remus shakes beside him or at least until Remus puts decidedly too much pressure down on his left eye for comfort, and at that point, Sirius can't not intervene here; he'd like it if Remus came out of this with his eyesight intact.

This time, when Sirius inserts himself into the mix by tugging down on Remus's wrists, he's much more malleable to his touch. He doesn't fight Sirius's grip on him, doesn't kick out from underneath them, and that makes it all the more easy for Sirius to shift the notebook onto Remus's chest and jot live notes down while rubbing the pad of his right thumb under the bit of mask covering Remus's left eye, moving it in a small, rotating circle.

Given the fact that he's in a prime position to feel Remus underneath him, he hones in on the exact moment his body goes lax, and after a minute and some change after that, Sirius is profoundly aware that Remus has conked out. He shifts off of him carefully, aiming not to rouse him as he reaches up the bed to grab his mobile to make note of the time, and scrawls that down beside what he first thought was the end time, circles the numbers four times over, and then once more each, just for the hell of it.

Sirius taps the end of his pen against the page as his mind goes a mile a minute. He knows what he saw with his own two eyes, feels quite justified in it now, but something in his bones has him feeling like Remus is going to want some receipts before he'll get on board with his theory, and that's going to take some time and research to back up.

What he really wants just now, if he's honest, is a well-earned cigarette, but he can't quite justify slipping out for one until he gets the house back in order. Remus is the first item on the docket, poor thing, and namely that right forearm of his, which has certainly seen a lot in the past few days.

With that in mind, Sirius ducks out of the room and into the bathroom to gather fixings. A washcloth is easy enough to find when there's usually one hanging on the ring by the sink, but after some digging around in the cupboard below the counter, Sirius can't help but think it a little rich that Remus knocks his first aid supply when Remus's own isn't anything to be impressed by. Sirius will be speaking to him about that in due time, but for now, he's going to have to make do with what he's got and that is a band-aid typically reserved for large gashes which will be a overkill, but it’ll do the job of covering all of the teeth marks on Remus's arm at least.

Sirius grabs the bottle of aloe and pack of stitches that had been shut away in the cupboard the evening prior, thinking he'll just tackle everything that needs tending to in one swoop, and rises to his feet to wet the cloth in the sink before carrying his bounty back to Remus, who, Sirius is glad to see, hasn't woken up and wandered off somewhere in his absence.

He moves onto the bed, shifts across it on his knees, and plants himself down beside Remus's head, tucking his legs underneath himself and situating himself cross-legged. He leaves the pile of fixings beside him on the bed, pulls on the pillow now lying forgotten on the other side of Remus, and lifts his head enough that he can slide the pillow in underneath it, thinking if the roles were reversed, Remus would undoubtedly think of Sirius’s comfort before anything else.

Next up, Sirius manoeuvres Remus's mask up and turns his head toward him so he can have better access to his left brow, taking the clean cloth to Remus's stitches and working them off of his skin. Once the two stitches have come free, Sirius presses two new ones down over Remus's gash in turn and finds the whole process goes a lot smoother without Remus's thinking face making the job more difficult, oddly enough.

With the stitches out of the way, Sirius slips Remus's mask back over his eyes and moves on to his right arm, coaxing it closer to him and laying it face up in his lap. He takes the cloth to it, cleaning off the divots in his skin first off and moving on to working out the red stains going down his arm. He has to get a little creative when it comes to placing the band-aid on Remus's arm; Sirius already considered Remus's jaw substantially powerful for other reasons, but tonight has given him a slight reverence for it and since Remus wasn't all that bothered with precision when taking a nice chomp out of his arm, Sirius has to place the band-aid in a quasi-diamond in order to cover all the divots properly, but in the end, once he's smoothed the edges of the band-aid down, he looks over his handiwork and considers it up to par.

Last up, Sirius squeezes a glob of aloe over his right middle and forefinger and applies it to the welt on Remus's forearm, sitting just a few inches down from the lowest edge of the band-aid he just put on him. He wipes his fingers off on the cloth, shuts one eye as he takes aim, and launches the cloth through the air, landing it in Remus's hamper on the other side of the room. He gathers up the band-aid wrapper along with Remus's old stitches to send them to the bin and begins the process of restoring Remus's bedroom to its prior, homey state.

He starts with Remus's side of the bed first, picking the nightstand off the floor and bringing it back to its spot by the bed rather than drag it there and risk waking Remus in the process. He goes back for Remus's lamp and the digital clock lying by it, plugs the both of them in, and flicks the switch on the lamp to get some lower light going in here, heading round to the other side of the bed to repeat the same process for his nightstand and stopping at the light switch to turn off the overhead fixture, leaving the room dimly lit by lamplight before carrying on. He rights everything on his side of the bed, leaning over the edge of the mattress to pluck the aloe and pack of stitches back up, and brings them back to the bathroom cupboard before deciding that, without anyone or thing needing his immediate attention, he's free to enjoy one hell of a cigarette before he'll need to hunker down for research mode.

After his little break, Sirius resets his focus on the task at hand for the night — or morning, since the clock struck midnight a good while back. He stops for Remus's laptop laying over on the island and brings it back to the room with him, situating himself at the top of the bed and diagonally from Remus's head and creating a makeshift workstation around him; laptop on his left, notebook on his right, Remus all but a reach away if Sirius is needed — a perfect little setup.

The next item on the docket is to find anyone, anywhere, who's had some luck bringing a whopper of a cluster down to a quasi-manageable one by using an energy boost. A positive about that is Sirius definitely remembers seeing quite a few posts discussing the merits of energy drinks on his last search, a negative is that those threads are all saved on his laptop, which is sitting back at his flat of no use to him at the moment so the only thing left to do is to start over again.

It takes a great deal of time and energy just weeding through the first wave of results drummed up; a lot of cycling through posts that have little or nothing to do with the topic he's after, which is unfortunate in general but also a rather familiar feeling from the last time he took to scouring websites for answers for a bundle of topics pertaining to clusters, but after a good while of searching he realizes he may have started off a tad too specific here, deciding to go back to the basics, make his searches a bit broader, and work his way back toward the specifics he needs.

He goes forward with the topic of energy drinks as an abortive method, opening up tab after tab, and stopping at as many as he can have open and still have Remus's laptop run, keeping his eyes peeled for mentions of energy boosts while he scrolls through a number of replies to the post on the first of the tabs and washing, rinsing, and repeating from there. He finds one, single person raising the topic of energy boosts on tab four — which, isn't bombastic by any means, but it's something and he is sitting on multiple different threads with plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that anything with a bit of taurine in it has a shot at bringing a cluster down or eliminating one altogether, some posts a bit more direct in that they’re short, sweet, to the point, others quite a bit more lengthy and go into far more detail, and if he keeps these pages open for Remus to have a look through once he's awake, Sirius thinks he'll have a good chance at getting Remus on board with his theory.

Reinvigorated, Sirius takes his resurgence of energy and puts it into gaining traction for said theory. Anecdotal evidence from strangers on the internet is one thing, but what's happened to Remus should be the focal point here. He pulls the notebook into his lap, picks up his pen again, and starts off by highlighting and penning down the stark differences between Remus's last two clusters versus the one tonight.

This time around, Remus's behaviour, for me, is the key difference. He didn't grab for any hard fixtures in an attempt to bludgeon himself and while I might've otherwise contributed to that to my removing of anything within reach and therefore making that much harder for him to pull off, the biggest point to take home is that Remus didn't seek anything like that out this time. Remus in-cluster, if pressed enough, will and has used just about anything near him when made unable to move, but tonight he didn't try to wiggle free from my grasp and find a window to hurdle his head into as he did during Monday's attack, nor did he try somersaulting onto his own head like he had during Tuesday's, and that has to be highlighted in bold.

If Remus wants to crack his skull open, I'm now unfortunately aware that in true moments of hysteria, he will simply keep trying to break free from someone's hold in order to get the job done, or, as he'd done Tuesday night with our dear friend Peter, drag somebody along with him while he searches for something to get the job done, but that did not happen tonight. He certainly tried to alleviate what was going on in his head by causing a great deal of pain in other areas which is arresting in and of itself, but that leads me to believe that this cluster couldn't have reached the severity of the last two and the only things done differently this time around were prepping ourselves in advance for the attack and feeding him a five-hour energy boost at the onset.

Whether the boost was so fast-acting that it squandered what could have been another knockout — a term Remus has come to affectionately call the horrific severity of his last two attacks — or whether getting the boost in him sooner than we did could have curbed better results, it's still too early to tell. We aren't going to have substantial proof until we try it again but despite some unanswered questions, the facts of the matter are: I saw Remus's cluster drop from up high to a much lower notch, so much so that his behaviour echoed the first attack I ever saw him struggle through going back to October last, and while that isn't perfect by any means, it won't do us any favours pretending some good didn't come from using the boost as an abortive method. If I'm to include the substantial drop-off in severity with the original time frame, or what I first thought was the cluster in full, then, all in all, Remus's cluster clocks in at two hours and seventeen minutes which, and I'm stressing this politely, is yards ahead of the time frame that either of Remus's last two lasted for

The bed dipping a bit further down takes Sirius right out of his note-taking and puts his attention back on Remus directly, who's gone and rolled onto his right side. Sirius blinks over at him a few times, figuring that may well be all his turning will amount to, but before he can get back into the flow of his notes, Remus lifts his hands and pulls his mask off, blinking in the room around him.

Sirius remains quite still, quietly celebrating Remus stirring awake so soon when he was well and truly prepared to wait well into the morning for him. Remus aims quiet, calculating stares around the room before he hones in on Sirius's presence, and for a moment, Sirius gets too caught up in how swollen his left eyelid looks from here that he forgets to aim even the slightest smile in his direction and that, he realizes, was a huge mistake for he must have looked petrified of Remus for a moment there, and that is the absolute last notion he wants Remus taking in.

Sirius tosses the pen in his hand aside and all but slides between the laptop and notebook to get to him, but it's worth doing; Remus reaches up for him with a hitch of a breath locked tight in his throat, stuffs his face against Sirius's chest the moment he's close enough for him to manage it, and Sirius knows he hasn't got the right to celebrate Remus reaching for him in plain distress, but he needed to see Remus wanting him here more than anything, selfish as it may be. He holds Remus to him by the small of his back with his right arm and clasps the back of his head with his left hand, curling in close and finding it the most natural position they've found to date.

'Course, Sirius went and thought that true seconds before the dam really opened up, and then the urge to stop Remus from weeping is suffocating once he really gets going. He holds him that much tighter for it, but for a few long and frankly embarrassing moments, Sirius isn't certain what sort of care he's supposed to be giving him here, whether he's meant to stop it or if he ought to just let him get it out of his system, but the moment he registers Remus apologizing, he can't keep silent anymore; his body simply won't let him.

“Don't,” Sirius denies, tipping Remus's head back to clear a pathway for his lips to take and pressing them over Remus's shut eyelids in turn. “Don't be sorry.”

A few beats later is right about when Sirius wonders if the eyelid kisses might've been too much for Remus and the state he's in for the speed of his convulsions rise to double-time, but then again, Remus's hands wind up so much tighter a the back of his shirt, he has to think the kisses might've been just the right sort of thing for the occasion.

Sirius gives him another two because he can, one for each eyelid. “You're my hero, know that?”

Remus's convulsing lets up enough for him to digest the words properly and send a long, very long, so so long pfft directly at Sirius in return, but oh, that's his man in a nutshell right there; Sirius can get him back, no sweat. “Stop it,” he implores, sounding perhaps the quietest he ever has before and that won't do.

“It's true,” Sirius doubles down, leaving another kiss on the tip of Remus's nose. “Toughest lad this side of London, you.”

Remus goes ahead and places a hand directly over Sirius's face to shush him, but all that does is get him snickering against Remus's palm. “I don't feel particularly tough right now,” he maintains, lifting his left hand to give his eyes a solid rub-down with his forefinger and thumb.

Sirius leaves a kiss on Remus's palm since it's right there, then reaches up and tugs down on Remus's wrist gently so he can speak. “Go easier on them, please,” he requests.

“'Time is it?” Remus bids, slowing down the pace of the hand over his eyes.

Sirius automatically looks toward the clock on Remus's nightstand and that's when he realizes he never reset the time on it, shifting a little and reaching up the bed for his mobile. “Umm,” he hums on key, lighting his screen up. “Almost four.”

P.M.?” Remus asks at once, dropping his left hand from his face altogether and looking wildly around the room before finally setting Sirius with a pointed look for the fit of snickers he fell into.

“You're fine,” Sirius insists, reigning it in. “Still the A.M.”

Remus eases enough to lay the side of his head back down on the pillow below it and, more importantly, quit giving Sirius such a look of plain affront. “How long was I out for?”

Sirius hums another note as he clocks it. “Four hours, about,” he offers. “You officially conked out a little past midnight.”

Remus blinks at him. “You've been sitting up this whole time?” he raises.

Sirius gives him a wild look, half-smiling at the audacity of the question. “Monsieur,” he addresses him, “I had work to do.”

“Did you?” Remus asks after a beat.

Sirius aims a coy, enticing smile at him, reaches for the notebook, and ceremoniously flutters it about as he sits up, holding the two-page log open in front of Remus so he can see it and watching his brows pop up his forehead a little. “You have been busy,” he echoes, having a long look over the page.

Sirius aims a quick smile at him for that, looks down at the pages below him to locate the right spot to tap on the first page, and guides Remus to it with his left forefinger. “Check that runtime,” he raises.

Remus refocuses his gaze to where he's meant to and Sirius gets to watch in real-time as he takes it in, feeling justified at feeling quite celebratory about the time frame they've just dealt with when he notes of the intensely round shape Remus's eyes take on. “That's got to mean something, hasn't it?” he raises, meeting Sirius's gaze.

Sirius nods brightly, loving the feeling of being even half of the reason for Remus's engaged stare to make a reappearance. “I say it does,” he puts up. “We did it, we aborted one.”

The wheels turning in Remus's head are nearly audible to Sirius's ears and the last thing either of them needs is for Remus to start backtracking in fear of jinxing everything, or for him to drive those fast-turning wheels straight off of the road and into the woods and maybe crash into the trunk of a tree all because Remus found one small hole in the argument.

“I also found you some receipts from eight different people who have had the same luck I think we had here and they're all waiting on your laptop for you to have a look at when you feel up to looking at a screen again, OK?” Sirius raises. “This isn't a fluke situation and yes, we could spend hours coming up with holes to poke through our argument, but I think instead of that, we should celebrate the fact that you're not the only one who's experienced this first-hand; I know that a run-time of a little under two hours is far from perfect, we obviously aren't done here, but I watched a significant drop in severity happen right before my very eyes before it left completely, and that is something to hold onto for now. I haven't lost focus, I'm still gunning for the shrooms to do their part, and I'll contact my guy first thing to find out where we stand on those, you have my word on that.”

“You can't do that,” Remus says blandly, and after hitting every mark he knew he ought to hit so that Remus wouldn't run off in a different direction, Sirius simply looks left, right, and back at Remus, out of gasoline and puttering there alone on the speedway until Remus seems to realize how badly he took that. “I'm kidding, Sirius; only, you can't just contact a dealer first thing in the morning, you mad lad.”

Sirius blinks off-beat at the sheepish smile tugging at Remus's lips before he tosses the notebook aside so he'll have both hands available to successfully jab the hell out of Remus's gut with both his forefingers. “I meant afternoon at the earliest, you absolute shoe,” he tosses out, jabbing at Remus wildly.

Remus comes alive to bat Sirius's hands away. “Shoe?” he echoes, fighting a wave of laughter along with Sirius's retaliation methods.

“Yes, shoe,” Sirius buckles down, popping Remus in the left side once more for good measure. “My point is, we're not changing course, but I do think we need to stop and enjoy the scenery a little at each rest stop, if you know what I mean.”

Remus nods once, reaches for Sirius's left wrist, and pulls it close to him to press his lips to the inside of it, and Sirius's chest tightens almost violently. “What should we do with the rest of the stuff we got?” he asks, entwining his fingers in with Sirius's and seemingly quite set on keeping hold of Sirius's hand, and Sirius is rather versed in obliging Remus on several other counts so he isn't about to deny him this either.

Sirius weighs their options internally before taking in a semi-careful breath. “I don't know,” he says candidly. “Part of me wants to suggest that us trying out Redbull next time wouldn't be all that different from using the boost so I'm willing to experiment with that much, but I'm not sure we should even bother with the caffeine pills.”

“No?” Remus raises.

Sirius shakes his head evenly after a beat. “I just know how much easier it was to get you through this one than the last two," he hands him, "and I don't know that I want to risk trying something that we don't know for sure will work versus what we've already had luck with—”

He peters off when Remus hones in on the band-aid on his arm, possibly because Remus's arm is folded in a way that might've made it harder to ignore, but in a way, Sirius can't help but think that's some choice timing for the point he's trying to make. Well, at least until Remus starts working one of the edges of the band-aid back, that is. “Can you,” Sirius starts, “maybe not pick at that?”

“Just,” Remus says, still picking, “having a look.”

“I really wish you wouldn't, though,” Sirius insists, and Remus ceremoniously drops his left hand to the bed, but if he were that fucked off about it, he wouldn't still be holding his hand, so Sirius doesn't take the 'tude particularly too hard just there. “Do you remember doing that?”

“Vividly,” Remus answers.

Sirius nods once. “How much do you remember the lead-up to Ugly Pot's demise?” he further asks, though he backs off a little as Remus sends him a whopper of a stare. “These are relevant questions, Remus; we're past the point of embarrassment, everything now is just symptomatic and needs to be looked at from a different lens.”

“I'm not embarrassed anymore,” Remus returns him, and Sirius really has to work so his scepticism doesn't read plainly on his face, “I just don't think I should have to remind you again that I'm not brain-dead when it's happening.”

“I don't think I said that?” Sirius points out. “I'm telling you, I saw a huge difference between the hysteria you were in during both Monday and Tuesday's attacks versus the kind you were in for tonight's, so I'm checking to see if you felt the difference, too, or if it was all just me, going absolutely mad.”

The funny thing about Remus's character as a whole, and by funny Sirius means not very at all, is that he will stand rooted to the ground if he feels ragging on himself is necessary, but the instant Sirius shows a single second of that same vulnerability in his own abilities, Remus will practically barrel-roll his way through it. “You weren't going mad,” he offers, sounding hurt by the suggestion being put out there at all, interestingly enough. “This one didn't feel the last two at all.”

Sirius nods again, swallows, and squeezes the hand still holding his left one captive. “Good, I'd hoped I hadn't gone round the twist with that one, but it's why I'm hesitant to mess around here," he maintains. "The caffeine pills could help, sure, but if they don't, or don't work nearly as quickly as the boost did, we'll just have to turn to a boost anyway and make up for the time we spent waiting to see if the pills would do the trick; do you see what I mean?”

“I do,” Remus allows, pausing for a breath, “only, we don't know that it'll always be under two hours every time, do we? This was just the once.”

“Well, no, we don't,” Sirius allows, “but you asked me why I'm not interested in trying the pills out and that's my answer.”

“We don't actually know if the boost actually kept this one down,” Remus puts up. “Maybe I was just in for a shorter one tonight and the boost had nothing to do with the length of it; we don't really know much more than we did six hours ago.”

“We know your last two clusters went through the roof and lasted between four and six hours each,” Sirius rebuts. “You're right that we're not going to see a pattern until we have more attacks to go off of, but the only thing we did differently this time around was funnel an energy boost into you and this cluster was strikingly different and lasted a little over two hours, so that's it, that's my point, and I'm voting for either Redbull or boost next time around so we can actually start tracking patterns.”

“A lot can happen in two hours,” Remus raises, which isn't what should have come next, not as far as Sirius is concerned, and he must wear the confusion he feels quite openly on his face for Remus reads it like a book. “I can do a lot of damage, so I don't know if celebrating is smart right now.”

Sirius feels heat riding up his spine at the mere reminder that they're bound to the unpredictable laws of time and that he himself is only human, not a miracle worker, and has to breathe deeply, quite similarly to Remus coming down off a cluster, so not to spit fire about the room.

“I know that,” he puts down, working to keep his voice even, “but if I start thinking about all that can happen to you in even a split second, I'm never going to sleep again so I would rather you have a cluster that's tame enough for me to actually get in there and stop you from hurting yourself quicker; I choose that over the state you were in for the last two cases where I could barely keep a hold on you—” Sirius doesn't do so well at swallowing the warble in his voice down and it takes him another few seconds to get some control on that back to close out his argument, “—so, there, you've now heard me make myself crystal clear on where I stand on this.”

Remus has his lower lip pulled into his mouth by the end of Sirius's spiel, but at least he let him finish this time. “Now, I know it's late, but we're at the point where I need your input,” Sirius tacks on. “Do you have the brainpower to talk rating this one or do you want to take me step-by-step through your day to figure out what could have brought this one on; pick one.”

After what looks like quite a bit of internal weighing, Remus lets go of his lower lip. “First one.”

“Perfect, I've some notes right here,” Sirius chimes, grabbing for the notebook again. He reaches for his mobile next, pulls up a screenshot he'd taken of the defacto scale that depicts the pain of clusters from one to ten, and flips back to the two most recently filled pages. “Now, I think we've established that last night's never made it to a ten, and if I'm honest, a nine also seems a bit too high just in terms of your behaviour, but again, I wasn't in your head so I will need you to let me know where you think it clocked in at, so jump in any time, OK?”

Sirius looks up there, waiting on a confirmation of words rather than just the nod Remus went with, and four and a half seconds pass by before Remus clues into the fact that he's waiting on him. “OK,” he echoes.

Sirius gives him a smile for the effort, looks down at the notebook in his lap, and thinks he might do well with throwing out some symptoms and letting Remus weigh in where he sees fit. “For this one, I've written down the ice pick, but I do have to assume the clamp also made a reappearance?” he raises, leaving the last word with a curious lilt and getting a hum of affirmation for it before he looks back up at Remus. “So that bout of bed punching was, in fact, you answering me, I take it?”

Remus looks down and back up at Sirius within a short beat. “Don't take offence, but your voice is really hard to hear when I'm in one,” he says carefully.

Sirius blinks once. “Depends if it's my voice or voices in general.”

“In general,” Remus gives him, not missing a beat.

“Well, then, no offence taken and I'll try to learn morse code in the future,” Sirius says of it.

Remus puts a breath of air out through his nose that could have been considered a smirk, but it's the quirk of his mouth that really cements it. “Why don't we, wait until I'm out of the woods before asking questions?” he suggests. "I'll tell you once I'm back whether I got visited by the pin or the clamp, hm?"

Sirius nods once, grateful for a little give and take. “Deal,” he forwards him, leaving Remus with a smile before he writes a note to confirm the clamp mystery and pouring back over his notes from there. “On top of that, I put down restlessness, no real forms of traditional speech, and I could add in 'a steadfast inability to stomach voices in the room,' if you think that's worth a mention?”

He looks up in time to catch Remus's amused nod and quickly jots that down verbatim before continuing. “Rapid breathing, pained noises, you definitely didn't love it when I started interfering with the connection between your teeth and forearm, but you didn't fight my hold so much as you tried to generate that pain elsewhere, although I imagine you were quite present for that decision?” he raises, looking up at Remus again and faltering as he slides his head off of his pillow so he can better use it as a face-cover. “Remus, it has to be put down—” he reaches over to tug at the pillow, “—you want to hear a good thing? You didn't treat your head like a crash-test dummy's noggin this time around, and I really like your head in one piece so you can just imagine how thankful I was for that, can't you?”

Remus sniffs as he comes out from hiding and, after a few beats, meets Sirius's warm gaze, and that's where Sirius thinks of another anecdote to share. “I do have to ask if you remember doing this one thing, because at one point you twisted your torso around so violently it looked like a wet shirt getting wrung out—”

“Alright, fuck you,” Remus sends him, rolling onto his back with a decided plomp. “See how pretty you look when there's an invisible clamp closing around your head.”

“You were very pretty, the whole time,” Sirius insists.

Remus trades him the two-finger salute and a supreme effort not to smile, but that's enough for Sirius to figure he isn't in shit for putting some levity into the situation. He finishes jotting down the last bit, picks up his mobile to pull up the Kip Scale, and scans his eyes over the various numbered descriptions on the pain scale, aiming to match one of them to the symptoms he put down in the book and ending up getting caught between the descriptions of numbers seven and eight.

“Help me out here,” Sirius bids him. “Eight is described as, 'time to scream, yell, curse, head bang, rock, whatever works,' but I definitely didn't see any headbanging happening, and seven is, 'wake up, sleep not an option, take the beast for a walk, and finally fall into bed exhausted' and while that is some, mm, choice imagery the man used, it still seems a bit tame for what I just watched you deal with, so I don't know; do you think we could get away with putting it at a seven and a half or will she laugh us out of the room because we wouldn't commit to a solid number?”

Remus drops his gaze from the ceiling, blinking over at him. “I don't know,” he says candidly.

Sirius clicks his tongue three times, not loving the lack of input coming from the hardest nut in the peanut gallery, but in all fairness, this has got to be one of the least fun parts of the whole process. “Well, aside from the headbanging part, the rest of eight's descriptions check out,” he offers up. "I'm just going to go ahead and call it that for the sake of argument, deal?”

Remus nods, his shoulders lifting and falling in a quick moment. “Seems fair to me.”

“At least for Act I,” Sirius mentions, penning down the number ‘8’ all the same. “Act II, though, was a lot more similar to the first one I was ever there for; you couldn't stop yourself from shaking some, but your restlessness let up quite a bit, your breathing slowed down by a ton even if you were still doing it through gritted teeth, and you were much less verbal this time than you were that time around which I didn't love, if I'm honest, because at least with that one you could direct me on what was happening and what to do, but you spoke a little bit, mentioned the pick was still around, so what I'm wondering now is, where did the clamp go and when did it lift?”

Remus blinks hard at Sirius. “How did you—” he starts. “How did you even figure out it was gone?”

Sirius lifts his eyebrows once as he taps the forefinger of his free hand against his temple. "Plain, ol' observation over here," he puts up, snorting at the plain face Remus pulls at him and goes to give him more. "For one, you talked, for another, you talked about the pick but not the clamp, and for a third, your body language changed completely for that last stretch; hard not to notice.”

Remus lifts his right hand and passes it up through his damp hair, leaving his fingers woven into the curls at his fringe. “I don't know when the clamp lifted," he offers him. "I wasn't counting down the minutes; it was more like, suddenly the pick was all I could feel, not necessarily the absence of the clamp.”

“Well, shit; alright,” Sirius replies, nodding as he looks down at his notes. “I mean, I don't want to celebrate the pick taking longer to fuck off than the clamp did, but one of them leaving you be is still something, isn't it?”

Sirius looks back up at Remus in time to catch him nodding. “The pressure on my eye helped,” he relays. “And the chill of the mask, so. Thank you for both.”

“Anytime,” Sirius gives him, nodding away. “You were going a little harder on your eye than I'd have liked; it felt like my turn to put the pressure down so you might still have an eye on the other end of it.”

Remus gives him the saddest little smile. “Thank you.”

And that is, frankly, too many thank-yous for something Sirius is going to take upon himself to do whether Remus thanks him for it or not. “All that said,” he raises, steering them back, “Act II could and should slot in nicely at—” he elongates the word as he scans the Kip Scale once again, spots the description, 'wake up, sleep not an option, take the beast for a walk and finally fall into bed exhausted' and calls the corresponding number out resoundingly, “—a seven.”

Sirius squints down at his screen as the number sort of lingers pathetically in the air in the room, moving his befuddled stare to the window on the far wall before dropping it to meet Remus's placid stare. “I'm not going to lie, I was expecting that to sound much more impressive than it did,” he slips him. “I felt so much relief seeing you at a place I knew I could help weather you through, but a seven? That just doesn't have the oomph I was going for.”

Remus keeps his gaze trained solely on Sirius as he shifts off his back and onto his right side to face him, bunching up the pillow underneath his head to prop it up better. “Don't you think it's a bit odd that it seems like everything else to do with these things is on a case-by-case basis, except for the pain?” he raises him.

Sirius blinks once. “I hadn't, no."

“Well, if everything else to do with clusters is so varied from person to person, then how did all of these people, from all corners of the globe, come together and decide that the pain of it all was the one universal experience in all of this?” Remus poses, putting his last question up again, just with a collection of different words.

Sirius studies him for a few moments, putting particular focus on Remus's eyes, and though they're puffy and red and his left one looks much more swollen than the other, they're both rightful saucers in shape at this point and by that alone, he has to assume the boy isn't high as a kite, and even if the size of his peepers weren't a dead giveaway to whether or not Remus has had a few tokes, Sirius would have noticed him up leaving the room to take a hit or two in the last while, so all of that points to Remus being entirely sober despite the armchair philosophy at play here.

“I don't know how they did it,” he answers, quite genuine in tone; he's but an onlooker than one of the chess pieces in this situation, and altogether quite new to the world of clusters and the people who've got them by extension even with all the information he's managed to accumulate with his research.

Remus goes and smirks there. “I mean, people can't agree on anything,” he puts up, smiling fully now, if a bit facetiously, “and yet, this group of strangers from all over the world seems to have agreed that this specific pain scale is the one true scale, and that isn't a bit weird to you?”

“Well, now I think it is,” Sirius returns heavily. “If you're trying to tell me that we're caught in a conspiracy, I'm going to need at least six hits off the pipe before I can address this.”

Remus snorts. “I don't think we're in a conspiracy, I just think Kipple was one bloke,” he puts up, "who sat down one day to pen a scale describing the different heights of pain he felt depending on the severity of an attack, and somehow, it got so much traction over time that enough people read it and went, 'yes, that's the ticket,' that now, it's hung up as a banner on any site related to clusters and has been made so much a part of the language used to describe them that you almost have to go by it in order to decipher or explain what you just went through even though pain isn't actually a collective experience; it's much more varied than that.”

“How high,” Sirius enunciates, “are you?”

Remus gives him a huff and a plain look, respectively. “Quite sober, thank you,” he returns. “I don't actually need to be off my rocker to think pain is a subjective experience; if two people bashed a shin against something at the same time, they'd both feel something, but would they feel it the same way exactly? Probably not.”

“What are they bashing their shins against, though?” Sirius raises, placating him a little.

“Anything,” Remus drags out huffily. “Leg of a desk, for the sake of argument. One of them would probably howl and curse on impact while the other might shrug it off and keep going; people feel pain differently, and Kipple was just one bloke out there in the world who had clusters and I don't necessarily feel like we should be referring to his scale as the Bible of cluster pain.”

“Creative analogy,” Sirius compliments, “but if I thought it was the Bible, then by that rule alone I'd have drawn six or seven dicks all over it by now.”

Remus really ought to be used to his hue of colourful additions, and yet, he seems to need a moment or two to digest the comment before he wipes his face clean and doubles down on his point. “I'm also a bloke out there in the world who’s got clusters, so by that standard alone, I could pen 'the Lup Scale' to describe how I feel when I'm in one and it could have just as much legitimacy as Kip's, but is there a Lup Scale out there that everyone agrees on? No, there isn’t.”

“OK — fucking stellar point, I will give you that,” Sirius allows, “but please, let's pen a Lup Scale just for the fuck of it.”

Remus reworks his mouth around a smirk. “It would be four points,” he says decidedly, lifting his left hand to count on it. “One, no pain, two, migraine, three, what I just came out of, and four, Ugly Pot. And that's just because we're in the early days, who knows what number I could come up with next; it's the worst game of Pop Goes the Weasel I've ever played.”

Sirius will never, ever get used to Remus's ability to effortlessly deliver the driest comedy and render him flat-lining in seconds; he sets the notebook and his mobile aside calmly enough as he writhes through a rolling laugh, curling in to touch his forehead to the left side of Remus's torso and drowning his hoots out against his shirt.

“That wasn't supposed to be funny, I'm making a case for myself here,” Remus instils, but that just gets Sirius's hoots coming in at double-time.

“Stop being you, then; Jesus,” he sends out, lifting his head to get a good gulp of air and realigning himself. “Well, look, I don't think I can get away with putting the Lup Scale down and also have your doctor take us as seriously as we need her to, but do you want me to find you another scale? I saw others, Kip's was just the one I saw everywhere.”

“Well, see, that's at least half my point right there, so thank you for saying that,” Remus trades him, pointing fiercely at Sirius before dropping his left hand to the bit of mattress between them. “It's not one pain scale I'm uncomfortable with, it's all pain scales, mine included — I thought I knew what a fifteen used to be to me in November and then Monday's attack happened, and then Ugly Pot followed that up, and now, I don't even know what to call anything anymore because I have peaked; every attack from this point on, I will automatically compare it to one of those two because those attacks are my ceiling.”

Sirius probably knows that he could have simply asked Remus to elaborate by using his vocal cords, but flapping his hands toward himself seems to do the trick just fine for Remus shifts even closer to him and keeps right on. “Once, when I was nineteen, a couple years before I even knew what clusters were and all I had were tension headaches at most, I was at work helping Angela move a chesterfield down from the second level, my wiry wrists gave out on me, no surprise there, and I ended up taking most of that chesterfield's weight to my left foot.”

“Christ,” Sirius spouts, wincing hard.

“My words — sort of,” Remus tacks on. “I said some things I don't think Angela or anyone at work expected to come flying out of my mouth, but in my defence, it fucking hurt and it was after operating hours so nobody customer-related heard my swears.”

Sirius can't help but grin at all that. “You're forgiven,” he teases. “Why's it always your left side, to boot?”

“If I only knew,” Remus trades him, lifting his hands toward him at that particular addition and then scooted his left foot over toward him on the bed. “I fractured it in three places, had to hobble around in one of those boots until it healed properly, and it still twinges if it gets humid out and that's a forever problem I'm used to now, but at that point in time, I'd only had my ulcer to go on when it came to where pain peaked for me; that was a prolonged, twisting sort of ache that had a shelf life of anywhere near two to six hours depending on about a thousand factors, but then the chesterfield landed on my foot and that sharp, sudden pain was debilitating in a way that my ulcer had just never gotten to and it took first place. Am I making sense so far?”

“Yeah?” Sirius says after a beat, but he's more confused why Remus was even asking when Sirius knows he's got to look like an eight-year-old on a camping trip and it's Remus's turn to tell a campfire story to end them all, but that's got him reaching over to prod him in the side with his right forefinger. “I am literally always going to be up for Remus's tales of yore, so you definitely don't have to question it here.”

It takes Remus a few lagged seconds to continue and why is Sirius surprised, he doesn't even know; from day one, Remus always considered monopolizing a conversation an unforgivable faux pas for him to commit. “Well, since then, no foot-related injuries have ever matched up,” he offers, and quickly done, too, like there's a teleprompter over behind Sirius telling him to make it short. “And barring something like getting my foot run clear over, I'm not sure much else would; I sprained the same ankle my first term out here and that was a walk in the park, comparatively.”

“You did?” Sirius asks, putting his head on a tilt.

“Yeah, but — I stepped off of the bus funny, it wasn't that bad, but I can tell you that might well've been the case because I'd taken a chesterfield to that foot already,” Remus says of it. “Yesterday, if I was to drop something on my foot, I'd have likely thought one of two things: 'at least it wasn't a chesterfield' or 'this is very familiar' but now, I know that I'd take thirteen chesterfields to the foot over a cluster, any day, any time.”

Sirius didn't come into this room thinking he was going to be dismantling pain as a concept at what's got to be closer to five in the morning at this point, but fuck if he isn't quite provoked by the topic now that they're this far in. “I broke a rib once," he offers. "After that, a wayward limb accidentally going into my gut just never quite measured up to it.”

Remus gives him a grimace paired with a guttural noise. "When?"

"I was eighteen, little younger than you were," Sirius relays, lifting a shoulder with it.

Remus gives him a frown for that. “How did you do it?” he asks.

Sirius saw the question coming a mile away: it's what would get asked if the story weren't so precarious, he knows he could easily give numerous excuses like he'd done for various people at the time, say a fall on ice, an unforeseen casualty in attempting and failing to hop a fence after a prank gone wrong, a completely foreseen casualty in a scuffle at school, but this is Remus and aside from a few white lies told in the early days, Sirius hasn't truly lied to him yet and there wouldn't be much point in starting now. “A swift kick can do the trick, but you should see the other guy,” he says of it.

Sirius watches Remus's frown deepen, but the squint of his eyes is what he's really enthralled by. “Give me a name,” he says, each word its own sentence, and alright, his Neeson impression needs a bit of work, but in all fairness, the man's had a rough night and the sentiment behind it does quite a bit for the butterflies living in Sirius's stomach thanks to this man's existence near him alone.

“You'd have to dig him out of the ground to fight for my honour, and I just don't have my shovel on me,” he offers commonly, pairing it with a shrug and a quiet smile. “It's appreciated, though; believe me.”

Despite vying for a sparkle of levity in a disconcerting situation, Remus chews his lip with the saddest little face on. “Reg did it?” he raises, barely above a whisper.

Sirius shakes his head once. “Please, he couldn't catch up to me by then if he tried,” he insists flatly. “Pops had the speed and the lead foot to go with, but, seeing as he's the one laying in a cold grave, I'd say I won that fight in the end.”

Sirius has never once wanted to be his father, let him make that crystal clear, but he definitely doesn't want to be him now, not with the way Remus is looking; if he's honest, seeing that gaze there puts him right back into his bedroom months back now, with Remus looking just like that while he spat bullets disguised as words about Sirius's mother dearest, but he didn't bring up the rib tale for that.

He lifts his right hand and pets the crease between Remus's brows with the point of his forefinger, looking to make it disappear. “Where the break came from wasn't really why I brought it up,” he mentions. “Only, I get what you mean by sharp, sudden pain taking the cake; I pretty well figured it out mid-way through your tale, but I like it when you talk so I wanted it to go on a little longer.”

“I want you to talk, too,” Remus says weakly.

“Ah-ah; my turn, then,” Sirius chimes. “That break knocked the wind right out of me and it was, by and large, the worst pain I'd felt at the time, and yes, because of the sudden impact, but also because it lingered around for weeks as it healed up; hurt to breathe, hurt to cough, hurt to laugh, which... was sort of an issue because, have you met James?”

"Oh," Remus breathes out, a reluctant smile budding at his lips. "Oh no."

"Oh yes," Sirius affirms, smiling for him. "That little shit kept trying to make me laugh on purpose because, in all fairness, I kind of needed the levity right around then, but I kept having to tell him to quit because my chest would about implode every time he succeeded which was quite a lot on this particular day, so I said to him 'I mean it, James,' and he mimed sewing his mouth shut and tried to act natural, I'm sure, but in doing that, he leaned one of his arms on this wall shelf he had in his room and ended up taking both it and everything on it off the wall—" Sirius cuts of with a grin as a full, rolling laugh tumbles out of Remus, "—the entire shelf, decimated, meanwhile I'm over on the bed, losing my fucking mind; I thought I was going to pass out, I really did."

Remus brushes his right hand over his face as he settles down. "Thank God for James," he insists.

"A mantra I can get behind," Sirius calls it.

Remus aims a sheepish smile over at him. "Sorry," he offers. "I should've known you would understand that."

Since he hasn't got long sleeves to play with, perhaps that's part of what calls Remus to return to fiddling with the edges of the band-aid on his arm, but even if that is the case, Sirius holds his left hand out all the same and offers it up for Remus to fiddle with instead. "If you want to forget about pain scales, I can get behind that," he instils. "I can just keep making notes while I'm keeping an eye on you and then you can tell me how it felt to you once you can, and that can be it; I don't think we can really avoid how widespread Kip's scale is and I'll probably still have to match what you've said to a number on it so we're still using a language that your doctor is going to be familiar with, but you don't have to touch that scale with a ten-foot pole with me if you don't want to. That work for you?"

Remus nods, his lower lip caught between his teeth again, and this time, he looks so grateful for the pardon Sirius thinks that perhaps they've done enough work for now. "We'll pick up again tomorrow, alright?" he offers, unhooking their hands and moving up the bed to set the notebook on what's become his nightstand. “I'll get the melatonin and some water for you, and then you'll be right as rain.”

He waits for a nod, blink, any form of acknowledgement, and the moment he gets Remus's hum of affirmation, he heads across to the kitchen to bring a glass down from the cupboard. He lets the water run for a good half-minute before deeming it clear enough to stick the glass underneath the stream and steals a sip off the top of the glass on the way back because he can and it's there. He takes a quick stop off at the island to grab the pack of melatonin and one last stop off at the entryway to fetch his duffel that's been sitting there since he got in, slinging it over the shoulder that hasn't got a full water glass attached to the end of the same arm and bringing the lot back toward the room with him.

“I've a feeling you'll dry swallow the pill like the seasoned champion you are, so the water's just a perk,” he mentions, nudging the door shut behind him with a foot.

Remus lifts off his back to reach for both items being held out to him, knocks the water down in seconds, and promptly does exactly as Sirius said he would, popping a pill free from the packet and knocking that back like it were nothing.

“OK, clearly I thought of just about everything but the water glass, but you could also have told me you were that thirsty and I'd have grabbed you one sooner,” Sirius maintains, standing at the edge of the bed with his hands set in a double point toward him. “You do know that, yeah?”

“I honestly didn't realize how thirsty I was until you brought it over,” Remus says of it, reaching to stick the glass on his nightstand.

With his hands newly free, Sirius unzips the duffel and fishes in it for Remus's housecoat, procuring it with a substantial fluff-out, and Remus's mouth works around a budding smile as he sits up to fiddle with the fastens of his slacks. "Thanks for remembering it," he offers, working his trousers down his legs.

"First thing I took care of," Sirius chimes, sticking the housecoat on the foot of the bed and moving for Remus's set of drawers to find him something to put on that hasn't been sweat through. "Think I might have to get myself one, too; that thing looks so comfortable it should be illegal."

"It is that comfortable," Remus echoes, head down as he manoeuvres the legs of his trousers over his ankles, and that's that; Sirius needs a kitschy, flannel housecoat, stat.

He fishes out a lightweight shirt and a set of briefs before hip-checking the last of the drawers shut and carrying them over to the bed while Remus lobs his clothes into the hamper. Sirius rounds to Remus's side of the bed, perches on it while he waits for Remus to get all that on, and once he's settled, Sirius reaches clicks off the lamp switch so that the only light in the room stews in from the streetlights out front.

He moves down, shifting closer to the middle of the bed to lie down, and Remus scoots back enough to even give Sirius a little room to share his pillow, which is a small detail, but so big at the very same time; Sirius'll let him have the pillow to himself in due time, but for now, he's happy to bask in the closeness as Remus gets comfy, lifting his arms up in between their bodies and tucking his hands up underneath his chin.

Sirius lifts his right hand to swipe his thumb over Remus's left cheek and though his vision is a little compromised, he can tell Remus's thoughts are going a mile a minute without him. “Talk to me?”

Remus's breathing is a little hitched as he grants Sirius that. "None of this was part of my ten-year plan," he says, his breathing doing it again. "I'm not having an easy time accepting that tonight is my best-case scenario, that this is my foreseeable future, and I'm really not chuffed about the fact that I learned where my pain tolerance splits in half at the age of twenty-three."

"Remus," Sirius says, sounding to his own ears about as miserable as Remus does.

"It's true, there's nowhere up from here," Remus says thickly. "Pain doesn't feel the way it used to or the way it should, these things have messed that all up for me; I barely felt this—" he budges his right arm up to showcase the bandage on it. "I didn't feel the burn the way I should have either; I didn't even know I had it pressed against the spigot until I saw Elise staring at me as if I'd grown a third head, and where does it end? Am I only going to know pain in comparison to the knockouts from now on? Is everything else going to get delayed, too? If I'm losing sense of what pain even is, then how long until anything good starts feeling lesser, too?"

Sirius doesn't actually know how to talk Remus down from discussing a pain he'll never have to sit through, and he doesn't even know how to sit with the fact Remus is already feeling desensitized to day-to-day pain for he's really going to have to keep an eye on that, but he does know a thing or two about his last worry.

"The good's going to stick out from the rest," he instils.

“How can you just, say things and have them be true?” Remus puts up.

“Because it is true,” Sirius insists. “Take this week: has it really been the worst series of events of your life, or were there a bunch of bright spots in between all that muck? Say, every twenty minutes or so, after we get to talking, and one of us makes the other laugh so hard he tears up? Those are some of my favourite moments, of any day, and I've a sneaky suspicion it's the same for you; for a few moments there, as long as the laughing lasts, you feel pretty weightless, don't you, or am I wildly off track?”

Remus nods. “You're not,” he grants him, and maybe he's choosing words to go with his actions because he hasn't got the advantage of light illuminating from above them, but Sirius will take any and all engagement at this point.

“Did tonight's cluster negate all that came before it?” Sirius raises, moving on to the now of it all. “This morning, perhaps? That still gives me tingles and not just the dirty kind even — the gooey kind, too.”

Remus breathes out a breath that could have been a laugh if Sirius's eyes hadn't adjusted enough to the low light in the room to notice the horrible look he gives him, and Sirius wonders if it would have been better if the look was born out of scepticism and not pure, unmistakable guilt. “This isn't Guilt-101, Remus, I'm just reminding you of my secret, and it's done me well for years now,” he insists. “Me? If I'm smart, I'll see light and I'll go toward it, but if I'm not, all I'll see are tunnels; after the funeral, I was catatonic, I'm sure you remember that part better than I do, but I remember my vision going black outside that cathedral so thank God I had you two to get me out of there because I still couldn't really see that well on our way back, it just kept going in and out, and it was still really foggy when we were back in my room, but I had you there, and you touched my hair, and I swear I could see again.”

Certainly not for the first time and assuredly not the last either, Sirius prides himself on being able to pick up on which parts of Remus's life bring him the most joy and engagement, prides himself on knowing he's one of them, even if Remus's vision is too cloudy to see it, and even if he lets himself forget it now and again, too. He can't really avoid it; the way Remus is looking at him now makes him feel bare and real and seen, all in one go, and right now, in this very moment, Sirius may well be the only thing in the room to him.

“After that, it was like I was seeing everything through infrared?” he describes, or tries to. “I've never actually said it out loud so I know that sounds bizarre as fuck, but it's the best way I can describe it; the whole backdrop to the room were dull greens and yellows except you, all lit up in red against everything else, being my lighthouse, and then you left the room, Lily switched spots with you, and you came back eventually, and I know Lily was talking to me and I love her, I do, but I heard none of what she said because you were standing behind her and I couldn't take my fucking eyes off you.”

Remus gives out a tight breath, like he's been socked straight in the gut. “I couldn't either,” he offers him, like he's had a well-kept secret that he's finally getting off his chest. “I could barely breathe looking at you there.”

Sirius can't help but breathe with a butterfly hatching and taking flight right then and there. “I did think that look we had going was particularly charged,” he mentions, putting on a posh accent. “I'm glad to hear I wasn't actually alone in that like I thought for, oh, weeks and weeks after that.”

“You weren't, you shit,” Remus huffs, already sounding better than he did mere minutes ago. “I didn't mean to take so long to fucking snog you into tomorrow, but I still don't think that's hindered us any.”

“I am going to bring that up whenever, wherever I can 'til you quit huffing back at me and not a day sooner,” Sirius maintains. “And you know how much I like your huffing, so get comfy and prepared for more of it until you get a handle on that.”

Remus sends a long breath out through his nose, a wry smile forming on his lips, and Sirius lifts his right hand and brushes it up through Remus's fringe, leaving it there so he can have something to hold onto while his heart sits so high in his throat. “I've the best sort of people around me but when things get cloudy, I don't always see that even when I've trained myself for so long to look to them and the light they bring me,” he says, his breath hitching like the breath taken before a plunge. “I still forget with you, even while you really haven't let me down yet, and I still somehow automatically assume I'm the darkest stain on your life, too much of a mess for you to actually want to stick around to see the better parts of me, and it isn't fair to you when I do that because I'm stomping all over the first man I've been with to ever see me properly.”

“Sirius,” Remus says haltingly, but he's not finished yet.

“No, just — let me say it,” Sirius bids. “No man I've tried would've ever braved a torrential downpour just to make things right with me in person, no one's done that: that's not real, it's rom-com levels of a gesture, you could have just rung me if you really wanted to talk to me, but no, you showed up and you didn't expect anything out of it; that's how good a man you are, you don't expect anything in return for a good deed, you just, know when you're needed above all else, you show up, and you deserve so much better than the shit I gave you last month, you really do—”

Remus pushes past Sirius's hand, scoots underneath his arm, and curls up close to him, and Sirius knows he's milliseconds from telling him he's forgiven, it wasn't his fault, it was the weight of the situation, it was his mother getting in his head, but Sirius doesn't want to hear it and sticks his right forefinger over his mouth right as Remus makes to speak. “It's my turn,” he insists. “I need to show up for you, so let me finish, please?”

All Sirius gets is the quick press of Remus's lips to the pad of his finger, but that's a free pass as any and Sirius isn't about to waste it. "When I take my head out of my arse for five seconds and remember who I've got in my corner, I'm light years ahead; it doesn’t take much, sometimes it’s literally just James bounding into the flat with a story he’s got for me, or driving around in Lily’s car and I love that she’s made a playlist for me just in case, or even something as small as waking up and finding out you've already walked and fed the dog is so much bigger than it sounds. You? You don't have to do much; you can just walk by and I'll just be glad you chose to go that way—” Remus gives a heavy pfft, reaching out to clasp his left hand over Sirius's mouth, but there's such levity in that movement and the way he lets it fall again that he knows Remus isn't actually in much disarray, “—I'm not kidding, those little things are all so much bigger than they sound and they keep me from feeling like I'm treading water; you all do, in your own ways."

"You're an anomaly," Remus says of it. "I don't know how you manage to pick up and keep going the way you do, but I'm not wired that way."

"Yes, you are," Sirius returns emphatically. "Who the hell are you even kidding, telling me that? I've been around, seen you do it; you've done it all week."

Remus doesn't argue that, but that may be because Sirius spoke with enough conviction that he might've felt there wasn't room to, and good, there isn't any here. "You're so much less of a pessimist than you think you are, and I'd be in no better spot than you are right now if I were you, so, cool; you need more light than any of us right now, then that's what I'm going to keep bringing you,” he keeps on. “I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing; you have a bad week, day, hour? Fine, but fuck that, I'm going to make sure you have better ones straight after that; we'll just turn the good up higher, get you really sunken in it, and I'll be your light whenever you need me to be because if what I've read is true, you're right on the time for feeling this muted and grey, and I know how rough this next bit is going to be for you, but these things can't beat the life out of you if we don't let them and we're not going to. Are we agreed?”

Remus nods his head up and down erratically as he leans in and fuses his face against Sirius's chest again, but this time Sirius snatches him up quicker than he did the last, and this time, he's just going to let Remus get it out, and tomorrow? Tomorrow, they'll start over again.

Chapter 11: 11.

Chapter Text

Sirius wakes on his side to a quiet room with a dozing Remus laying beside him and a light breeze coming in through the window, but that's about all he can decipher for the moment. After about thirty seconds of uninterrupted, bleary blinking, the amount of light in the room suggests it's late morning at the very least, which is rather unsurprising given how late the two of them finally turned in. He pats around for his mobile, finds it behind him, and drags it closer before bringing it around in front of him, having a look at the screen and, given that it's exactly three minutes until noon, that's another win for Sirius's body clock.

With that information logged away, and with a renewed purpose coursing through his veins along with his blood, Sirius glances sidelong at their notebook on his nightstand, simply can't ignore the fact that there's still one question that needs answering before they can retire this case, and taps the bottom corner edge of his mobile against his right collarbone rhythmically as he draws out a plan of action.

Interviewing Remus about his day could be one of two things: an enlightening experience or a bit of a chore depending on where Remus's head is at, but to help ensure that the task falls under the former category, Sirius has a feeling a bit of enticement is going to be needed to pull that off. He could simply bring Remus a cup of tea and trade it for information, but no, he thinks he has to go bigger than that, and whipping up a breakfast dish may just be the ticket. Who, Sirius asks, can realistically have a shit day when they're woken up with breakfast in bed? And really, bringing Remus said breakfast in bed could only help his chances of getting some valuable information out of the guy along with feeding the poor bloke; it's a win/win in its purest form.

That decided, Sirius gives Remus a quick, hearty squeeze around the middle before making a hushed exit, thinking he may as well let Remus catch as many Z's as he can while Sirius handles gathering a breakfast together. He slips out of the room, leaving the door open a crack, and crosses the main room of the flat to get to the kitchen, having himself a look in the fridge. After some inspecting, he finds there's exactly one egg left in the carton inside it and, worse than that even, exactly zero bacon at his disposal, and that just won't do. Sirius is pretty well convinced a trip to the shop is in order, but he has a quick gander at Remus's bread situation and finds there's a good half a loaf chilling in the bread box, so that's one item that he doesn't have to fetch.

Sirius heads back into Remus's room and changes quietly, picking out a pair of jeans and a plain tee from his duffel, and then knicks a pair of socks from Remus's top drawer because he can. He shuts the door as he leaves the room, herds Tango toward the door, and takes him down to the square for a frolic before eventually steering them back toward the corner shop near Remus's building.

Tango's frolic takes longer than the actual mini-shopping trip does and soon enough, Sirius and the pooch are back at Remus's flat, Sirius letting the dog free of his lead and stowing his shopping bag on the island for a few moments, intent on feeding the pets and getting their breakfast out of the way before anything else. Once that's done with, Sirius sets himself up in the kitchen for go-time. He gets the bacon strips cooking first so they'll do their thing while he gets the kettle filled to the brim, keen on both of them having ample amounts for their respective morning cups, and has himself a look over the various options for tea in the cupboard before he goes with Remus's favourite, thinking that starting his morning off with a cup of oolong would be starting his day off on just the right note.

He refocuses on the meal at hand, having a think on what egg-related dish is best for the occasion. Scrambled seems the easiest style to contend with for eating in bed and while the image of serving Remus sunny-side up and watching him try to eat them and not drip yoke everywhere is absolutely delightful, Sirius does manage to hold off on going with that just to see the image play out in real-time.

Scrambled it is, then. Sirius digs out another pan from the drawer underneath the stove and gets that simmering while he selects the lone egg from the former carton and picks out two more from the new one. He whisks the three up in a bowl and about halfway through his stirring, Sirius realizes he's got himself an audience of the furball kind. He keeps on stirring as he moves a step or two toward the archway to Remus's kitchen alcove, has a peek around the corner toward the two, very full bowls of kibble being supremely ignored for the dish being prepared in here, and resigns himself to having both the dog and cat sitting side-by-side underneath the archway above the alcove for the rest of the preparation; a small price, large reward.

Sirius steps back to the stove and upends the bowl of stirred yokes into the pan, leaving them on medium. Since he has a few minutes to spare while the eggs cook and a full kettle waiting to be used, Sirius pours Remus's tea first so it'll have time to steep to his liking, then whips himself up a cup o' black coffee, and soon enough Sirius has a cup of joe in one hand and a strip of bacon in the other while he waits for the right moment to start scrambling the hell out of these eggs, and all in all, this is Sirius's prime state.

Once the eggs are ready to go, Sirius has had himself three strips of bacon and is in a profoundly cheerful mood as he pulls a large plate down from the cupboard that houses them and piles the eggs onto it with a substantial pile of bacon to go with. In a perfect world, Remus would already have a tray to eat his breakfast in bed on, but it isn't one and Sirius is absolutely certain that Remus would consider it a fringe item to have in his modest kitchen, but Sirius would be a liar if he said he wasn't currently quite seduced by the idea of finding a tray for him so that breakfasts in bed can be a well-rounded, complete experience in the future.

Helping Remus out financially is, in the simplest terms, a fucking task, and it's one that Sirius often has to get a bit creative with. Just being permitted to spot him the amount needed to win himself a term abroad took days of outright refusals before days more of pussyfooting around the issue before Sirius finally brought a blank check over to Remus's and demanded he fill in the amount it would take to get his foot in the door. It was an assertion that sparked an intense negotiation process wherein Remus made sure to distinguish that the transaction was a loan and therefore would be paid back in installments and going forward from there, more and more negotiations were agreed upon to the tune of Sirius offering to tweak the rules a bit depending on what took more precedence on which given week, and suggesting here and there that nixing the entire repayment deal altogether and simply allowing Remus to save solely for the fall might be a smashing idea, but that offer hasn't worked out so well for Sirius, unfortunately.

He could easily acquaint agreeing to Remus's terms with selling his soul to the devil, only in this case the devil is a tall, fit boy who cannot take a favour lying down and will absolutely dig his heels in to avoid the act of taking it, and the terms are that Remus will continue to slow-seep the money back to Sirius's account in small bursts that won't cost him rent, food, or heating until the amount is paid back in full no matter how badly Sirius doesn't need it; no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

'Course, that's money, not gifts. Getting Remus those is a whole other ballpark and a task that Sirius finds much more fun than writing Remus a cheque; gift-giving requires him to think outside of the box a bit more. Par exemple, the curious case of the coffee table: initially, he found Remus's use of his travel trunk as a makeshift coffee table to be quite simplistic and so very Remus of him that he didn't mind it so much, but by mid-March he got so sick of seeing it and doubly sick of Remus insisting that his trunk did the job just fine, Sirius went out one fine day, found one just right for him, and had to enlist James's help in transporting it from the store and up to Remus's flat.

On the way there, the two of them hatched a story they could use: Sirius walked by a store, saw the table, and wanted to snatch it up before somebody else did, but since the coffee table at theirs is rightfully James's coffee table and remains in perfectly good condition, the new table would only end up in storage until it could be put to use, whereas Remus needs a coffee table, so why not house it at his until the day comes when James moves on from the flat and takes his coffee table with him when he goes? A perfect story.

Remus didn't buy it for a second, but he kindly let the two of them tell their tale spiritedly before moving back to let them into his flat with it, and — the most important detail to note — he still uses said coffee table to this day, as he does the new(er) kettle Sirius just so happened to put in Remus's kitchen, and the vivaciously orange, corduroy armchair Sirius brought over as recent as the first week of May so they'd have a spot to sit while out on Remus's perch, so, in the event that a, oh, perhaps a dark oak breakfast tray were to appear in Remus's cupboard one day soon, what, Sirius asks, is Remus going to do about that? Not put it to good use? Hardly.

With all that in mind, Sirius adds a dark oak breakfast tray to his burgeoning list of items to get and refocuses on the last and arguably most important part of the meal prep; the toast. He sticks two slices in Remus's toaster that looks straight out of a kitchen showroom circa 1942, pops the switch down, and while he waits for them to do their thing, he checks the time and finds it quickly inching on one o'clock, and seeing as he has now waited forty-five minutes past the stated time, Sirius has no qualms about firing a text off to Braun requesting an update on the shrooms situation.

He slips his phone back into his pocket once it's sent, waits another half-minute more before the toast pops, and butters the both of them before cutting them into triangles for he thinks that'll look better than simply slapping two full slices of bread on top of an otherwise quite presentable plate, and in the end, Sirius has to say he's made up an attractive wake-up call. Sirius attempts to take his coffee alongside Remus's own cup and plate, but two steps from the counter finds him revisiting that bright idea and ultimately sensing his coffee may be destined to slip out from between the crook of his left arm and side and wind up being a live glass bomb for the pets to have to dive away from as it hits the floor and scatters across it, so Sirius ends up leaving his coffee on the counter to come back for it in a few.

He crosses the flat with both pets circling his feet like a pair of furry sharks, stops at the door to nudge it open with a knee, and finds a still-sleeping Remus has rolled over onto his left side, facing the far wall. Sirius changes course right then, heads around to Remus’s side of the bed, and perches by Remus’s hips, leaning over to push his tea onto his nightstand for safekeeping before straightening up again to see about rousing him. Holding the plate by the bottom with his left hand, Sirius has such a vivid image of Remus shooting up in bed only to send the plate flying in the process that it may very well be a premonition of sorts for how clearly it plays in his mind's eye.

He decides to hold the plate higher and more to the left of Remus’s body to avoid that happening, reaches down with his right hand to budge Remus’s right shoulder, and has to do that twice more before Remus stirs, but thankfully he doesn’t shoot up in bed so much as he remains quite still as he blinks in the scene around room, but Sirius is relieved to note that he visibly eases the moment he registers him sitting there.

Remus smiles as he peers up at him through lidded eyes while Sirius scopes out his left one, relieved to find the swelling has gone down substantially over the past few hours and reaching to swipe his right thumb over the sweet spot between Remus's lower eyelid and the top of his cheek. “You’re looking better,” he offers, working his mouth around a budding smile as Remus simply kneads his hand sleepily, the plate Sirius is holding off and away from him going rather unnoticed.

“I made you a plate, but you might have to sit up to have it,” Sirius entices.

Remus blinks once, follows the extent of Sirius’s left arm, and gives out a bleary but excitable trill as he takes in the plate, but instead of sitting up as suggested, Remus curls into a quasi-fetal position to touch his beholden little face to Sirius’s left thigh, and Sirius smirks as he whisks his right hand through the hair at the back of Remus’s head. “There’s some oolong over there, too, but that, you’ll definitely have to sit up for.”

Remus trills once again, looks up and around for said tea, and shifts to push himself up the bed to get to said mug at a much quicker speed than he’d previously been going at, but that's the power of oolong over Remus’s mortal body for you. “You think of everything,” he offers, propping himself up against the wall behind the bed and reaching for his tea once he’s situated.

“I try,” Sirius echoes, a butterfly hatching and releasing in his stomach.

He scoots up the bed with the heaping plate still in his hands, waiting for Remus to finish his trial sip of tea before holding the dish out to him like he’s a waiter bringing a patron an expensive meal, and Remus lights right up, smiling as he puts his tea back on the nightstand and takes hold of takes hold of the plate, crossing his legs underneath himself and using his lap as a tray.

Sirius pushes off of the bed, heading around the end of the bed to get to the doorway, and garners a bemused noise from behind him. “Where are you going?” Remus bids.

“I need my coffee,” he sends over his shoulder, already passing the island en route to the kitchen where he left it behind. “I couldn’t take all three with me at once.”

“But I bet you tried,” Remus returns, a smile audible from all the way over there.

Sirius hums a tune that’ll neither confirm nor deny the claim, plucks his coffee off of the counter, and heads right back to the room, relieved to find Remus already working on a strip of bacon. He heads around the bed again, perching himself a little further up the bed since Remus has freed some space up by seating himself at the head of the bed, and smiles at Remus overtop of his mug before taking a good sip.

Remus eyes him curiously, swallowing his mouthful and passing his left wrist past his mouth. “Did you already have a plate?”

Sirius gestures toward Remus’s plate with his mug as he swallows. “I checked on the quality of the bacon,” he maintains. “Three times over, in fact.”

“So, three pieces of bacon versus my full plate,” Remus notes, holding his plate up and out to him.

There’s a bit of a standstill, no more than a few seconds overall, wherein the two of them simply stare at each other, the twitch at the right corner of Remus’s lips the only movement in the room before Sirius gives in, plucking a triangle of toast off of the side of his plate. “The rest is yours,” he asserts, pointing at Remus with one of the longer points of the piece.

Remus obliges him, using his fork to cut the mass of scrambled egg on his plate into smaller pieces. The method itself reminds Sirius quite plainly of Remus trying to get through even a single pancake Wednesday evening, and while seeing it happening again gives Sirius a twisted feeling in his gut, at least he's trying; he has to give Remus that.

Sirius waits until he’s finished his coffee and Remus is about a third of the way through his plate before he sticks his empty mug down by the side of the bed and promptly sprawls himself onto his back, reaching over while upside down to pull their notebook off the nightstand on his side of the bed and rolling back up to his prior position in a beat as if he hadn’t moved at all.

Remus eyes the charade openly, working on a mouthful as he does it, and speaks up when he’s got a free mouth to do it. “Is this a faint note of bribery I’m tasting?” he raises, pointing to his eggs with the prongs of his fork.

“That’ll be the pepper I added for zest, actually,” Sirius offers, tucking his left foot underneath the bend of his right knee and leaving his right leg hanging off of the bed. “Thank you for noticing.”

Remus gives him a plain look as Sirius sticks the notebook down in his lap and flips to their current case. “We’re just going to talk, alright?” Sirius raises, pushing for ease. "Nothing scary about a conversation, is there?"

“It’ll be more like an interview than a standard conversation, I’m thinking,” Remus says of it.

“You act like I can’t chat and take notes at the same time,” Sirius tuts, pulling the pen out from the spiral binding on the notebook. “Why don’t you start by telling me about your day? Skip the morning, I was quite present for it.”

Remus breathes out his nose, turning to pull his tea toward him. “I went by Reckless before work,” he supplies, going for a sip.

“Incredible idea on your part,” Sirius forwards him, jotting it down. “Sunglasses on while you went in there?”

“Yes,” Remus forwards, a little blandly. “I’m now one of those people who don't take them off while inside the shops.”

“Were they the mirrored ones?” Sirius raises, thinking of the chrome aviators, and Remus hums an affirmation around another sip of tea. “In that case, those take you from a ten to a twelve easily, so you’re really just doing anyone who sees you with them on a huge favour.”

Remus gives him a wan smile as he turns to put his tea back on the nightstand, and Sirius sends him an exaggerated smooch noise before jotting down the sunglasses detail. “Anything of note happen in there?” he raises, moving this wagon along.

“Nothing I haven’t already told you,” Remus offers candidly, shrugging his shoulders to match. “I just, moseyed around for a while filling time, found the Bagpipe Blues, and immediately prospered.”

“Would you be at all offended if I repurposed your gag gift by slipping it under Hank’s door?” Sirius checks, putting his head on a tilt.

“A little, yeah,” Remus answers, picking up another strip of bacon and bidding it up into smaller pieces. “Besides, he might take it as a hint that he needs more practice and you’d be in a worse situation than you are now.”

Sirius blinks once. “You’re really good with foresight.” Remus smiles around a piece of bacon, shrugging while his speech is a tad compromised. “Alright, what happened from there?”

Remus swallows, putting his gaze on the ceiling in thought. “I walked to work,” he offers, a tad more mystical of a tone than Sirius had been banking on, but listen, Remus’s cheekiness easily makes it in his top five of favourite things about him, so it’s really only welcome here.

“And I trust you didn’t stop in at the pub on the way and knock back a few before your shift?” Sirius raises, putting on an exaggeratedly curious lilt.

“I managed to hold off on that,” Remus trades, tipping his head to him.

“Glad to hear it,” Sirius forwards him, jotting that detail down and underlining it. “How was the shift?

Remus lifts a shoulder again. “It was a pretty regular,” he says of it, giving him a slight frown. “Not much stands out, really.”

“Well, talk me through what you remember,” Sirius coaxes. “If we find nothing of note, then we find nothing and we’ll have to assume the cluster was slated to come without anything actively triggering it, but we should at least comb through and see what we can find before we call it a day.”

Remus nods, turning to pick up his tea again. “It was a full house when I got on,” he starts, folding his hands over the front of his mug. “I was there for an hour before the morning crew went home, then Lily headed off an hour later, Elise was on pre-close and Agnes closed up with me; a good day on that front.”

Sirius nods for that. “How’s she faring?” he raises.

Remus's face brightens there. “She’s doing really good,” he trades. “Catches on really quickly, it’s quite refreshing.”

“Bless,” Sirius extends. “You two fire off at each other in the backroom yet?”

“Not yet,” Remus returns, a half-smile on and a rather rose tint making it to his cheeks, which really only fuels Sirius’s teasing more.

“Oh, alright,” Sirius says coyly, “but if 'Kiss Me' comes on overhead right as you two are just about to snog each other into tomorrow, I do hope I’ll be the first to know.”

“The very first,” Remus nods, biting the right side of his lower lip. “And really, if that happened to me twice, I’d need to tell you so I could get a second opinion on how wild that would be.”

“I'll agree to that,” Sirius gives him. “Smooth night, then? Apart from the snag at the end, ‘course.”

Remus grunts around a sip of tea, pulling a face that Sirius can’t help but rejoice over. “One or two runners at the last minute, I’m fine with,” he absolutely has to mention, “but an entire group waltzed in an actual minute to close and they all wanted fraps, every single one—” Remus pauses to smile at the noise Sirius puts out, “—and not only that, one lady was adamant she get something off the Secret Menu—”

“My fucking favourite,” Sirius puts out, taking on the air of a game show host.

Remus gives him a grin and a tip of the head for that addition. “And I did mention that we don’t actually have a Twix frappucino on the menu but if she got me the rundown of what goes in it, I could get that going for her but if not, we’d be there for hours while I tried to figure out what even goes in one of those,” he keeps on, taking on a punchy diction that really only comes around when he’s genuinely riled and always, always gets Sirius wiggling his toes in anticipation for Remus’s version of tearing a customer to shreds, “and I know she wasn’t impressed by the fact that I didn’t just, randomly have a drink order posted online somewhere memorized by heart because she went and found the recipe and stuffed her mobile in my face like—”

Remus reaches out in the space between the two of them, hovering his right palm in front of Sirius’s entire visage and garnering a rigorous scoff from him for it, “—that, and I've never had that happen to me before, I wasn’t really all that prepared for her mobile to fuse with my face? So I just, backed up quick and had to blink the spots out of my vision before I’d have a hope of reading whatever was on her screen, and can I just say, it was on the brightest setting I could’ve ever imagined; I don’t actually know how she could look at a screen so bright upwards of a hundred times a day without feeling woozy and for that, I have to assume that she wasn’t of this world and I actually just took the order of a representative of a far-off alien species.”

Now, that stellar rant Sirius had the privilege of hearing certainly went places he didn’t prep for, and he might’ve exploded into laughter over such a colourful take on the situation if he weren’t quite preoccupied with a particular detail. He stares pointedly at Remus, who merely takes a sip of tea, appearing quite finished with his rant for he looks off to the left and aims a smile at Tango perched near the bed for any scraps, no doubt, and since Remus seems to be lagging a few seconds behind him, Sirius twiddles the pen in his right hand, rapping it back and forth rapidly against the page beneath it in an attempt to bring Remus to his level, and soon enough, the boy looks to Sirius’s drumming, up at Sirius’s face with his right eyebrow cocked, and promptly drops the entire bemused face altogether, replacing it with an imploring expression.

“It couldn’t have been that,” he says, sure of it somehow. “It was three seconds, if that.”

“Mm,” Sirius hums. “On Monday, it took you stepping out into the sun without your sunnies on for you to get slapped with a knockout.”

Remus takes in a quick breath, shaking his head. “I thought we already decided it was too hard to pin down what did it," he counters.

"Well, yeah, Remus, but either way, it hit sheer moments after we got outside," Sirius underlines.

"Someone’s mobile flashing before my eyes for three seconds isn't the same thing as coming out of a darkened theatre into a debilitatingly bright day outside,” he returns. “We don’t even know if that’s what did it; I could have just been blinded for a few seconds, but the gin and juice was really behind it.”

Sirius nods distantly. “Right, but I remember saying it could have been either one, and working against both options was our best bet without having any concrete proof of which one actually triggered it,” he reminds him. “You can't deny there’s some overlap here: for booze, we had Monday’s gin and juice, and we had Tuesday’s brewskies with Pete, for light-related possibilities, we had Monday’s retina-searing power of the mid-afternoon sun and since I know you didn’t go on a bender yesterday, we can’t really put the blame on alcohol this time, but you staring into that twat’s piercing backlight and ending up with a cluster coming on a half-hour or so later is a little suspicious.”

“It could have easily been a fluke,” Remus insists.

Sirius puts his mouth in a line. “Alright, maybe you’re right and the screen incident had nothing to do with it, but I don’t think it would hurt to avoid situations like that happening again on the off chance that it did have something to do with it,” he says of it.

Remus stares openly at Sirius like he’s received the worst news on the planet. “So, what, I can’t look at a screen now?”

“Not one bright enough to make you feel ‘woozy,’ I’m thinking,” Sirius returns.

“How am I supposed to avoid that happening again?” Remus puts up, looking so out of sorts for something Sirius doesn't see as a huge thing to ask of him overall.

He goes back to squinting at Remus, smacking his lips after a few beats of pressurized silence. “Do you,” he starts, going with a bit of a melodic tone, “find that randos tend to stick their mobiles in your face very often?” Remus clicks his tongue at him or the airy tone used, Sirius can’t quite tell. “Well, you literally just said that’s never happened to you before; I doubt it’ll be a common occurrence for you going forward, but it’s still something to keep in mind and try to avoid.”

“I can’t be going around acting flighty and jumping back from people every time they try to show me something on their screens,” Remus insists, looking appalled by the mere idea of it.

Sirius takes a long breath in, puts it back out slowly, and reaches over to lay his left hand over Remus’s right knee. “I love you, but you’re backtracking a bit and I need you to quit,” he insists.

Remus’s eyes pop to two perfectly rounded spheres. “How am I doing that?”

Sirius smiles tightly, taking his hand back. “Well, just a few minutes ago, you weren’t calling what she did ‘an attempt to show you something on her screen,’ now were you?” he raises. “If my memory’s any good, the general sentiment was that she reached across the till counter and stuffed her mobile in your face, so backing off her now just to pretend she was actually some sweet lady who just really wanted her order put through isn’t going to help us any; what you’re actually doing is trying to change the narrative around so it sounds more like a fluke than it might’ve really been.”

Remus’s brows turn in on a snap before he promptly sticks a forkful of scrambled eggs into his mouth, chewing pointedly rather than answer that call-out with any kind of speech, but hey, at least Sirius survived that one. “It’s another maybe situation, Remus, that’s all,” he insists, trying to build his case while his window of opportunity is still open. “I know it's nothing concrete, but good news is, it's not going to be a situation you’ll be in very often—”

Remus swallows his mouthful right quick, slamming Sirius’s window shut. “How am I supposed to predict and plan around other people’s actions?” he raises. “I didn’t see that coming at all.”

Sirius halts the course he'd been on, taking a couple moments to find an answer Remus might actually receive. “OK, let’s take the possible trigger out of this for a few seconds and just think of it on a base level,” he puts up, waving his left hand for added visuals. “That was wildly out of pocket for her to do, yes?”

Sirius waits for a sign of agreement and presses on when he gets one in the form of a reluctant nod. “So, now that it's happened to you, I’m about ninety-eight percent sure that if you see even a single sign that someone is about to reach over the counter and make contact with your face in any way, your body is going to take over for you; you’ll just automatically step back,” he assures him. “Now, if we bring the possible trigger back into it, if someone ever tries that with you again, you have my expressed permission to shut it down, back the fuck up, and fuck it if the person thinks you’re overreacting; you’re allowed to avoid an attack, Remus.”

He watches Remus gnaw on the inside of his lower lip, waiting for him to respond with something; anything, really. “I don’t want to be afraid every second of the day, Sirius,” he offers finally, which shaves a good five inches off Sirius’s spine in the process.

“Then we won’t look at it like that, OK?” Sirius raises, reaching up to tap on Remus’s left knee with his forefinger. “I’m not asking you to walk around on eggshells or feel like every second of every day is crucial to you not ending up slapped with one later on, so let’s try to look at this experience as a learning curve and maybe even try to see this as a fair, attainable rule of thumb to live by in general: not letting people shove things in your face.”

Remus mulls over that through another sip of tea, flickering his gaze to the ceiling and back to Sirius as he swallows. “Can we still shove some things in each other’s faces, though?” he checks.

It takes a moment for the question to register and a beat or two past that for the levity behind it to land, but Remus’s budding smile cements it, bringing a bright one to Sirius's own visage. “We’re exempt from the rule,” he tells him. “Finish your food and maybe there’ll be more where that came from.”

Remus perks right the fuck up which is an entirely welcomed reaction, Sirius has to say, but then it seems the condition fully washes over him for he puts out a weighted breath as he has a look over his plate. “You gave me a lot to work with here,” he addresses.

“Well, now you have a reward waiting for you when you finish it,” Sirius chimes, putting pen to paper.

He leaves Remus to work on the rest of his plate while he jots the whole end-of-shift tale down in the book before putting an emphasis on linking it back to Monday’s fiasco, slapping the notebook shut with gusto once finished and looking up at Remus, who seems to be fighting to finish the last piece of toast on his plate.

“You do not have to finish that,” Sirius maintains, half-smiling for the effort being put in here.

Remus gives a noise of relief and reaches to hold the last bit of toast out to Sirius, who leans in to nab it with his mouth and works on making it disappear. Remus turns to grab his tea and finishes that off in one full swig, while Sirius extends himself along the bed in a diagonal sprawl to reach the notebook back onto his nightstand and simply stays on his back from there, sticking his hands underneath his head and aiming a contented smile over at Remus.

“Now, I suggest having a look through the later on and if you feel the call to add anything that comes later or tht I might’ve missed, then you have at it, but apart from that, I think we’ve done our best here,” he maintains. "And remember, I left quite a few cases similar to yours open on your laptop; they’re there for you whenever you feel up to looking at them, but I do think it could help you feel less like a complete loner in this whole thing.”

Remus smirks. “Lovely closing statement,” he offers him.

“I’m a wordsmith, after all,” Sirius says of it.

Remus sticks his empty plate on the nightstand, sets his equally empty mug on top of it, and uncurls his legs from underneath him, moving on the mattress to lay down beside Sirius, facing him. “Thank you for doing all this,” he offers, and at the very instant Sirius opens his mouth, Remus does a staggering impression of Sirius by pressing his left forefinger to his mouth to shush him. “You didn’t have to stick around after I tried booting you out, so I really appreciate you staying.”

Sirius shakes his head, swallowing. “I did have to,” he maintains, but he has an inkling Remus didn’t hear it.

“For a few seconds there, after I woke up," he keeps on, "I didn’t see you here and I really thought you’d gone—”

“Yeah, no,” Sirius maintains, much louder than his last phrase. “Never in a million years, Remus.”

Remus’s exhale hitches in the middle of it. “It’s baffling to me how good you’ve been about it,” he insists. “You didn’t sign up for this.”

Sirius looks left, right, and back at Remus with an idle blink. “I didn’t?” he asks airily, getting a pointed frown for it. “I knew you were having clusters day one, Remus.”

Remus clicks his tongue, prodding Sirius in the side. “You didn’t know.”

“I fell upon the Wiki page, saw the similarities, and my gut did the rest,” Sirius reminds him. “Not my fault it took you weeks to pull your head out of the sand and admit there was a chance it really could be those, but I knew from the get.”

“I’m trying to compliment your loyalty right now, thank you,” Remus returns him. “You say I can’t take a compliment to save my life, and what are you doing now, hm?”

Sirius puts immense effort into hiding his amusement over a fired-up Remus. “I knew you’d be dealing with these for a long time when I got into this,” he instils. “Didn’t expect them to take a few months off before hitting the ground running, I’ll give you that, but I still called it and I will go to the grave celebrating, thanks much.”

“Yes, alright; you were right,” Remus grants, like it’s the hardest thing on the planet to have let Sirius have, the dolt. “Still, you can think you have an idea of what’s coming down the line and find it overwhelming when it finally comes to a head; Monday's cluster hit hard, Tuesday's was even harder in some ways, and most people wouldn’t think twice about getting out of this as quickly as they could, but here you are, staying anyway.”

“I signed up for you,” Sirius puts up, listless now. “If I want you, the rest comes with, and staying with you through this has never been up for debate, not Monday, not Tuesday, not now; I’m not scared of you or this one bit.”

Remus gives him such a wounded expression that Sirius's spine goes cold and of the things he expects to come out of saying that, tears would have been the winner, but Remus taking hold of Sirius’s chin and pulling it in so he can plant one on him? Best possible option, now that Sirius has it.

He drops his hands to Remus’s hips and hoists them closer to him, seeking the feeling of his body from every point that can be done in their position and drink him right in, not minding the taste of tea so much at all when it’s on Remus’s lips. He has a few more tastes because he can, drops his head to trail a row of kisses over Remus’s neck, and pulls gorgeously tight breaths out of Remus that have him latching on tightly to his pulse point and working his mouth against it, and right, right when Sirius has found the exact rhythm that tends to drive Remus wild, the boy goes and pushes on Sirius’s upper chest haltingly.

“Wait,” he halts, breathless and tight, “hold on, I’m gross.”

Sirius snorts in the crook of Remus’s neck, working the skin beneath his lips harder, and Remus seems to settle in, his resolve wavering for a good thirty seconds before he starts wiggling around absolutely incessantly, pushing himself out from half-underneath Sirius and over toward the side of the bed. “Oh, come on,” Sirius sends him, sitting up to catch Remus’s left wrist. “I don’t give a shit, Remus.”

Remus shakes his head insistently, slipping out of Sirius’s reach and stepping onto shaky feet. “There’s a limit and it is here; I can’t let you reach it,” he instils, scampering off out of the room and taking a sharp right into the bathroom, calling over his shoulder. “You’ll thank me.”

Sirius gives out a huff loud enough for Remus to hear in the next room, but he didn’t time it all that well for the spark of the shower sort of drowns it out instead. Since it is a bit too late to submit any further grievances about waiting, he plants himself at the head of the bed and waits there, pulling his mobile out and using that to pass the time.

Despite knowing quite plainly that he hasn’t heard a text tone, Sirius can’t pretend he isn’t a little perturbed by finding absolute proof that zero replies have come in since he sent his request off. It isn’t entirely unheard of for him not to hear back right away, it takes time, now and again, for his guy to deliver on the goods, and Sirius has never been a two-request sort of bloke; he’s more of a ‘he’ll see it when he sees it’ type, typically speaking, but there’s nothing typical about this request.

He bats his options back and forth since he’s got nothing else to do, but in the end, he can’t bring himself to be a pest; if he pushes too much, he could easily wind up being placed in the category of Rather Fucking Annoying, and Sirius can’t, in good conscience, muck around when he needs his guy to come through.

That decided, Sirius cycles through a few apps to kill time and tosses his mobile aside the very second he hears the shower turn off. It takes a few minutes for Remus to round the corner into his room, towelling his hair off and just giving Sirius an entire free show from the neck down.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” Sirius offers airily. “Just over here, waiting.”

A loud pfft sounds from underneath the towel. “I went as fast as I could reasonably go,” Remus maintains, his voice muffled.

It's another thirty seconds or so before Remus pulls the towel down from his head and deems his hair dry enough to leave be, but all in all, it’s actually a blessing that he took the time to towel-dry it for his hair wouldn’t be one gigantic mushroom cloud of floof if he hadn’t done and that would have been a travesty. “No no,” Sirius denies, the moment Remus lifts his hands to pat it down, “I’m going to have to request you keep it as is.”

Remus huffs with a smile on. “I am going to have to get it cut soon," he mentions.

“Absolutely not,” Sirius returns. “I won’t allow it.”

Remus flies his left hand around the vicinity of his head. “Look how ridiculous it’s getting."

“I’ll sue you for damages,” Sirius takes it.

“You’re unbelievable,” Remus tells him, turning to hang his towel on the doorknob.

“If you lob a chunk off of yours, I’ll just have to lob twice as much off of mine,” Sirius decides, light as a feather.

Remus whirls back to him in a snap with a pair of wild eyes and a mighty frown. “You drive a hard bargain.”

“Why don’t you come here and find out.”

Despite the rather open invitation he just gave out, Remus gets across the room quicker than Sirius saw coming, but he should really always assume Remus is going to accelerate ten times his default setting if he's being goaded like that; spurred right back to life, Sirius finds himself inspired to wrestle Remus off balance and pin him to the bed, coming out on top as the winner of this round though he has a sneaky suspicion Remus didn’t fight him all that hard.

“You or me?” Sirius bids, casting a quick glance toward Remus’s drawer and back to him.

Remus smirks, looking quite comfortable where he is, and doesn’t so much as answer with words, letting the slow spread of his legs do the talking for him just fine, and Sirius snaps his right arm out and yanks on the drawer while Remus works at his fly.

Yesterday, he didn’t mind letting Remus decide on the volume of their morning tryst, but he doesn’t feel much like letting Remus do the decision-making this time. Nah, today he wants the whole gambit and to get that, he has to be a bit of a trickster, halting his hips the moment Remus tries to stifle himself, starting again when Remus gives up on that, kissing Remus as a reward for giving in, and pulling his mouth off the second he gets a sense that Remus is using it to drown himself out, and the longer that goes on, the more Sirius gets the feeling Remus is working twice as hard to keep quiet as a method of getting Sirius to keep trying to get him to make noise, and if he’s honest? Hottest game they could’ve come up with, bar none.

He keeps playing it until he hears his name on Remus’s lips, feeling him shift his right hand from the back of his neck up into his hair, and then there’s really nothing else for it, neither of them are holding back; Sirius grips Remus’s hips tighter as he rocks into him faster, covers Remus’s mouth with his own, and whines against his lips as Remus urges him on with his free hand pressed tight against his left hip while the hand in Sirius’s hair stays feather-light in comparison to how fast he’s urging Sirius on below, and it’s painful, almost, how close Sirius is to falling over the edge before he’s even brought Remus there, each thrust inching him that much closer to the cliff so he should really reign it in before he blows, but his hips move of their own accord, meeting Remus’s at each interval and spurring on faster still, and—

The vivacious opening lick of 'Man! I Feel Like a Woman' goes off loudly in the room over their combined voices and plays out again near-immediately, the resounding interruption jarring enough to take the both of them out of their rhythm while the tune itself is just funny enough to leave them in stitches.

Sirius breathes in long, resting his forehead against Remus’s as he regains his composure, and restarts his hips, only this time he reaches down between their bodies to wrap his right hand tightly around Remus’s cock, keen on making up for his very near whoopsie-daisy.

Remus takes in a hitched breath, tipping his head back against the pillow beneath it. “Oh, what, you’re not going to check it?” he raises, a cheeky grin on his lips all while he quite literally gives himself over to Sirius’s whims; incredible.

Sirius snorts, quickening the pace of his hand as an answer to that, and hitches Remus’s right leg over the bend in his left arm, using it for leverage while he fucks him with all he’s got, and Remus, seconds out from euphoria by the look of it, flattens his right hand out as he lets it drop from Sirius’s hair and reaches back behind him with the both of his hands, skidding his fingertips over the wall behind the bed in a bid for something to grasp for purchase as he shudders through his release, and there, only there, does Sirius let himself go, dropping his hands to dig his fingers against the arch of Remus’s lower back and driving him down on his thrusts as he topples over the ledge after him.

He ends up using Remus’s collar as a pillow, but judging by the subdued trace of Remus’s right hand at the back of his neck, it would appear Sirius landed right where he should have. He rests there for an undisclosed amount of time, getting used to breathing again, breathing Remus in, relishing being surrounded by him from all sides, and feeling that, for right now, everything outside of the room can just stay out there and leave the two of them well enough alone.

Sirius starts, feeling Remus tap him once with his left hand. “James,” he says, but a single word enough to trigger the memory in Sirius’s brain, pulling a bark out of him.

“I forgot,” he discloses.

“I did, too,” Remus admits, snickering beneath him.

Sirius puffs out a breath against Remus's neck, lifts his head after a few more beats, and reaches over with his left hand to drag his mobile back toward him on the bed. He flips it over and presses the passcode into it, getting it right on the third try and receiving a few more snickers out of Remus for his fumbling.

Sirius leans his head down on its side, using Remus’s right shoulder as his new pillow as he pulls open his and James’s message thread.

LILY SAYS ZUMBA IS A GOOOOOOOOOOO

Be at the flat by 3:30 sharp

Sirius sends out a long and lengthy pfft and brings the intensity of the backlight down to a much lower degree, turning it toward Remus and leaving it a fair distance away from his face as his eyes go back and forth over his screen, his smile widening with every second that passes between them. “He’s so excited,” he puts up, looking back up at Sirius with the brightest eyes.

Sirius gives him a reluctant smile, then puts it away for now. “I don’t have to go today,” he mentions, setting his mobile down. “I have to be around there tomorrow for Dora anyway, so I could stay here if—”

Remus does another uncanny impression of Sirius, only this time, it’s the pronounced noise of a buzzer indicating the wrong answer. “He’s so excited, Sirius,” he repeats. “And you are, too, so no to that.”

Sirius looks off to the left, then back at Remus. “You sure?” he checks.

Remus nods, another slightly different smile making its way across his lips. “I’ll be fine,” he insists. “I’m not going anywhere; I'm just going to take it easy today.”

“OK,” Sirius grants him, “but if you need anything or something happens, I’m literally a call away, yeah?”

Remus nods, scritching the hand still idling in Sirius’s hair against his scalp, and the deep breath he pulls in from there lifts Sirius’s chest right along with his own. “I love you,” he says, looking like it, too.

“You saying it the way you just did? Only made it that much harder to leave,” Sirius informs him. “So you're aware.”

Remus smirks a laugh. “I did see that you’re expected to be there by three-thirty sharp, so you'd best be getting a move on."

“It’s not even close to two yet,” Sirius returns.

Remus drops the hand from Sirius’s hair, bringing the both of them around to tap Sirius’s cheeks with two swift claps. “Come on," he coaxes. "I’m destined for another rinse and so are you."

That does help, Sirius won’t lie about it. It's a slower process, but the two of them detangle from each other and haul themselves to the bathroom soon enough, but once there, Sirius keeps good time, going a little speedier than Remus has reason to be right about now; the only exception is, he does devote extra time toward his hair, but he resolves that James can eat it if he winds up walking in a little late because of his mane.

Once out, Sirius towels off his body first and takes another one to his hair, deciding he’ll get most of the drips out of the way and leave the rest up to the air to dry; why the hell not? He leaves the bathroom before Remus is even out of the shower and heads back to the room, taking one look at the burgeoning hamper and walking straight back to the bathroom. “Want me to take a load with me while I’m going?” he checks.

Remus lets out a trill from the other side of the shower curtain and promptly sticks his head out of it. “Would you?” he raises, a little unnecessarily when Sirius already offered, but the cheer of it all makes Sirius a little weak in the knees so he doesn’t bother taking the mickey out of him for it.

He points at him assuredly as he heads back to the room, digging out his joggers from the duffel he brought along, and even though he’s got a few options as far as shirts go inside said duffel, he totally snags one of Remus’s tees just for the fuck of it. He digs Remus’s own duffel out of the closet, upends the hamper into it before zipping 'er on up, and hangs the sash over his right shoulder as he moves for the bed to pluck up his mobile, perking when he finds a new message waiting for him and perking even more so when it isn’t from any one of his mates.

He presses to open it, shifting the duffel on his shoulder as Remus walks into the room.

My contact fell through, don’t know yet.

Sirius squints at the screen and types out a reply one-handed. what’s that mean, then?

He slips his mobile into the right pocket of his joggers but ends up taking it right back out of there for his guy is suddenly very free to text back and forth, it seems: He quit selling them last month.

The urge to climb right through the screen and fight the man is as strong as it is impossible, but Sirius goes ahead and types out a fiery reply mostly to make himself feel better: well, are you going to figure it out, or???

He pauses just before hitting send, deleting that real one quick before stuffing his mobile into the pocket for good, but he must've been puffin' breaths like a fire-breathing dragon might do for Remus pipes up from over by the dresser.

“What is it?” he raises, paused with a shirt halfway on.

Sirius takes in a pair of rounded-off baby deer eyes, the boy they belong to, and he just can’t. “Will sent the schedules out; I’m on Saturdays with David,” he puts out, picking a former thought debatably on-par grievance to complain about.

Remus bares his teeth in a plain grimace. “No chance you can request for that not to happen?” he raises, the look on his face suggesting he already knows it's quite futile.

“I fucking wish, but I already tried and it’s not going to happen,” Sirius trades him, re-shouldering the sash of the duffel and moving away from the bed.

Remus offers him a tight smile before pulling the shirt on over his head and Sirius rounds the end of the bed, heads for him, and leans in for a quick, parting kiss. “I’ll see you later on,” he says, suddenly finding it absolutely necessary to get out of there and regroup.

“Have fun,” Remus bids, turning from the dresser with a pair of trousers in his hands and a wry smile on his face. “I do hope you show me what you learned.”

“I’ll do a full show for you,” Sirius returns, heading for the entryway.

“Has he been out yet?” Remus calls out.

Sirius stops with one shoe on, the other in his hands, and has to think about who ‘he’ is for a moment before it clicks. “You’re good,” he calls back, stuffing the other shoe on his foot. “I took him when I went to the shop.”

Remus pokes his head out of his room just as Sirius has the door open, calling him back. "Wait, hold on,” he requests, passing by the entryway right quick.

Sirius hangs back with his hand on the doorknob, his right leg jittering as he waits for him to make a reappearance, and pauses his right leg’s motion as Remus returns holding a twenty-pound note out to him. "For the shopping," he offers, huffing after all Sirius does is eye the note as if he doesn't know what this paper thing is. “Sirius."

“It wasn’t anywhere near twenty,” Sirius tells him, dropping the antics.

“Consider the rest a tip, then,” Remus maintains.

“Nope,” Sirius returns, slipping out the door sans note in hand and shutting it behind him.

It sounds quite like Remus thunked a few, pointed knocks into his door as Sirius heads down the hall, but he doesn’t come chasing after him with the note flying around in urgency so Sirius deems this battle won, at least for now.

One could say that the gas in Priscilla’s tank is the fuel that gets him from Remus’s place back to his own, but Sirius could make the case that the pure, unfiltered spite coursing through his veins as he drives that helps get him there, too. On a more positive note, not a single, fraught bagpipe note greets him upon stepping into his lobby, and good for Hank, really; this is not the time to act out near Sirius. He heads in through the door and thunks his shoes unevenly onto the mat, more preoccupied with the sound of the telly filtering down the hall from the living room.

He shifts the strap of Remus’s duffel on his shoulder and makes his way down the hall, fully expecting to find James extended across the couch, but Peter’s the one he finds there.

“Where's James?” he asks.

“Waiting for Lily at hers,” Peter offers.

Sirius nods. “He tell you Zumba’s on?” he raises, passing in front of the telly.

“Sure did,” Peter returns. “I wasn’t about to miss that kind of buffoonery.”

“Fair enough,” Sirius says for it, heading down the hall to the kitchen. He gets two steps past the bathroom before a thought strikes him and next moment, he's swivelling around on his heel. “One of Remus’s books seems to have sprouted legs and run off; know anything about that?”

Peter takes his gaze off the telly and puts it on Sirius with a sheepish frown. “I put it back where I found it,” he fesses. “I just wanted to finish it.”

“I bet Remus did, too,” Sirius echoes. “Where’s it?”

“Kitchen,” Peter directs, nodding past him.

Sirius swivels around again, making a mental note to grab it before he heads out later on, and gets as far as the kitchen Peter pipes up again. “Where’s Tango?”

“Remus’s,” Sirius sends over his shoulder.

A beat. “Why’s he over there?”

Sirius extends a plain look to the wall behind the stove, unable to comprehend why he keeps hearing that question. “My thinking was, Remus needs a mythical creature flouncing around him more than we do right now,” he offers, making it to the washer and popping the lid open.

He waits a beat or two, almost begging Peter to keep on about it, but a response doesn’t come, and now that he thinks about it, probably better that way. He shucks Remus’s duffel onto the shelf by the washer and unzips it, then upends the whole thing in three fast motions, and has to dig out a few socks before the duffel is officially empty. He plucks the detergent off of the shelf, pours it to the highest line on the cap, and drops it in an absent semi-circle before putting the jug back where it was and pressing start on the machine.

Sirius heads back the way he came, making his way down the hall to the living room, and since Peter already has the couch claimed and Sirius isn’t in the mood to fight for it, he simply plants himself on the floor to the right of the coffee table and pulls the pack sitting on it closer to him. He shimmies a cigarette out from the bunch, plucks just one of the lighters peppered about the flat off of the table, and lights up, taking the cigarette with him as he reclines until he's sprawled on the floor, fixing the ceiling with a blank stare.

The telly either gets put on pause or turned off altogether and when Sirius lulls his head to the side to investigate, he finds it’s the latter. “Why the face?” Peter raises, setting the remote back down on the coffee table.

Sirius rolls his head back to where it was, taking another pull off of his cigarette as he trains his gaze on the ceiling again. “I’m trying not to heed my overwhelming desire to fight Braun and subsequently destroy a respectful, decade-long transactional relationship,” he puts out.

There’s a light rustle of fabric and when Sirius looks over, Peter has sat up and moved over to the right corner of the couch, placing himself much closer to where Sirius sprawled out and looking quite piqued. “What happened there?” he bids.

Sirius puts out a breath and takes another haul, thinking of how to put it. “You're familiar with Remus?” he inquires, shooting a stream of smoke out the side of his mouth.

“Met him once or twice,” Peter replies.

Sirius sits up to ash his cigarette out in the ashtray on the table and ends up taking it down to the floor with him, setting it beside his right knee. “Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this yet, but turns out, Remus doesn’t enjoy having only one option available to him,” he relays, garnering a rather sly nod out of Peter, and one Sirius can appreciate in the fucked off mood he’s in. “And to that, he doesn’t necessarily see oxygen therapy as his golden ticket to freedom, so I’ve had to think outside the box a little, bring him a few more options to try out, and I would’ve had to do that anyway; I wasn’t about to wait until the appointment to do anything of value for the meantime so it’s fine that he needs a few more baskets to put his eggs in, I get it, and it’s good we did do something for the short term because we’ve had some luck with it.”

“Yeah?” Peter prompts, and he really couldn’t be seated any closer to the edge of the couch.

Sirius takes another haul, nodding through it. “You know those energy boosts that are available at the check-out counter in, oh, just about anywhere?” he raises, shifting to sit crossed-legged.

“Those five-hour ones?” Peter checks.

“Exactement,” Sirius forwards, pointing the cherry of his cigarette toward him. “That was one of the options, he had another attack last night where I fed him one of those, and it not only cut his cluster in half timewise, but he was acting nothing like he did on Tuesday; I swear, he was a completely different person.”

“That’s great then, no?” Peter asks.

“Well, I’m not done yet, am I?” Sirius raises. “That’s just one option and we’ve had some luck with it, yeah, but it’s not a perfect solution that we can pack up and go home about, and I don't want to stop there anyway. Shrooms have quite the rep for cutting through a cluster cycle and snuffing it out completely with scheduled use, so I’ve been trying to get some to try out since we have weeks to experiment and may as well tackle this from as many sides as possible; if there’s a chance shrooms can cut in and kill his clusters before we even make it to the appointment and have to try the oxygen tanks, I’ll take it, I’m not fussy about what does the trick, I just want the trick done.”

“Why shrooms, then?” Peter checks.

“Something about the psilocybin in them,” Sirius puts out, tapping the ash off the end of his cigarette. “I mean, technically acid would work, too, from what I read, but I figured shrooms would be a tad tamer of an introduction into psychedelics rather than trying to feed Remus some acid tablets; it was a task just convincing him that he wasn’t going to go sprinting off a bridge from a gram and a half of shrooms.”

“Or see a parrot in the room,” Peter highlights.

“I expressly told him there would be no birds in any form,” Sirius offers, smirking. “Point is, I think dropping acid might be off the table.”

“Baby steps,” Peter calls it.

“Sure,” Sirius accepts, cracking a smile for that one. “I looked up a thousand different threads on DIY treatments and every single one had somebody in there citing shrooms as their go-to, and in some, there'd be tons of people replying to agree that it's the golden goose: I saw one bloke say he took the same dose, once a week, for a total of four, and his clusters were never to be seen from until his next cycle got up and running, but he did the same thing again, got the same results, and that's that; we have to try them, I have to get them for Remus, I already told him I would get them for him, and I didn’t, I don’t have a fallback guy, and I can’t look into Remus’s perfect fucking face and tell him I fucked it, not when I just got him on board.”

“How did you fuck it?” Peter raises, openly suspicious of that read of it.

“Figure of speech, Pete,” Sirius sighs, taking a haul and cutting it off mid-way through. “I can’t bring him bad news right now; I just can’t.”

“OK,” Peter says quickly. “Braun couldn’t get you any?”

Sirius sends out a profound scoff, feeling heat rise up his spine all over again. “Braun is pussyfooting around over there and I don’t what’s got into him, I really don’t; he’s never had a problem getting them for me before,” he insists, pulling his mobile out of the pocket of his joggers and typing the passcode in one-handed. “I asked him Thursday, he said he’ll need a few days but he’d likely know by Sunday, and I was fine with that, but today came and I had to message him, which is just bad business, I’m just going to say it, and then, I get these cryptic fucking responses.”

Sirius holds their message thread out for Peter to read off of. “What am I supposed to do with that, hm?” he emphasizes. “What?”

Peter shakes his head after scanning Sirius’s screen. “I have no idea,” he trades him. “Those are some of the most unhelpful responses I’ve seen, I might even say.”

“Thank you, Peter,” Sirius rings out, crushing the end of his cigarette in the ashtray.

“Well, do you really need him to get them?” Peter raises. “Could grow your own, can’t you?”

Sirius sends out a loaded laugh, leaving his mobile in his lap. “Believe me, I’ve been tempted; takes eight to ten weeks to go from scratch and at that rate, we might as well wait for the appointment,” he puts up, and Peter puts a light grimace on his face, shaking his head to agree. “And I’m not about to go asking just anyone; I’m not giving Remus something I wouldn’t swallow myself, end of discussion.”

“No arguments there." Peter lifts his right hand and tugs absently at the centre of his lower lip, which typically gives away that he’s having a think. “OK,” he offers, after a few, long moments of Sirius simply waiting, “so maybe his supplier fell through, but it's possible he knows somebody else that might have them?”

“He’d have put that in the response, no?” Sirius raises, and Peter puts his mouth into an even frown. “If I keep negging him about it he’s just going to write me off, but fuck him for putting me in this position after years of loyalty and bringing him business — and he’s not cheap either, I could get a better deal somewhere else, but his stuff is always quality and he’s never let me down until now, and now is not the time to fuck around with me.”

“It really isn’t,” Peter says of it. “You're on the warpath.”

“Absolutely, I am,” Sirius sends him. “He doesn’t have to act all ‘too bad, so sad,’ about this; it’s not about getting fucking high, it’s about trying out alternative medicine, thank you very much.”

“Did you tell him that?” Peter bids, and Sirius pauses short, his eyes widening a tad, and pulls a breath into his cheeks. “Well, that’s your first mistake, Sirius.”

Sirius lets the air out of his cheeks in one go. “Thanks, Petey,” he sends him.

“I’m just saying, that might’ve been something to lead with?” Peter returns, lifting his hands. “He probably does think you're just looking to get high.”

“Fine, then,” Sirius drags out, waving his mobile at him, “I’ll just tell him now.”

Peter gives a faint hum of disagreement. “Might want to wait a bit,” he advises.

“Why?” Sirius raises, already typing.

“You’re in too fiery a mood to come off as anything other than fired up?” Peter says for it. “Maybe have a hit or two or even a bowl before you give it a shot.”

Sirius pauses his thumbs mid-sentence to reel back. “You think I can be faded and learn a load of Zumba routines at the same time?” he poses. “That’ll be fun for you and only you.”

Peter puts out a sigh, pushes himself off of the couch, and leans forward to pluck Sirius’s mobile out of his hands, retreating to the middle cushion on the couch, a fair distance from Sirius’s grabby hands. “You’re going to lose him if you try this now.”

“Newsflash, Pete,” Sirius sends out. “I’m going to be fired up about this until I get a yes out of him and—”

“Then you’re not getting your mobile back,” Peter returns, going and sitting on the thing for good measure. “I’m doing you and Remus a favour here.”

Sirius stews on the floor as Peter pulls his own mobile off of the coffee table and starts typing away on it. He wets his lower lip, tosses a blank look to the wall behind the couch, and waits there for upwards of a minute before he can’t take it anymore. “What are you doing there, Pete?” he asks sweetly.

“I’m going to send my dealer a shout and see what he says about it,” Peter returns, not looking up from his screen as he types. “And if he comes up short, then we’ll go back around to Braun, but I will be the one messaging him from your mobile.”

Sirius does make an effort to see past the proverbial timeout he’s been put under, reworking his jaw and stretching it out once he realizes how tight he’s been holding it, and pulls a measured breath in. After he lets it out, he rises off of the floor in a singular move, takes the three steps to make it to the couch, and settles down on the corner spot Peter vacated, huffing loudly when he flies to the opposite end of the couch and takes both mobiles with him.

“I wasn’t stealing it back, you shit,” Sirius sends him. Peter all but shrugs, resuming without another comment. “I do think I’ve the right to see what you’re sending him, mind.”

“In a minute.”

“It’s about my fucking boyfriend, Peter.”

“He was our mate before you made him your boyfriend, and I’ll tell you what I wrote when I’m finished crafting it.”

“Oh, crafting, ‘scuse me.”

Sirius sinks into the corner of the couch and waits upwards of a minute more before Peter dawns a curious look upon him. “How much would you need?”

“He’s answered already?” Sirius puts out, sitting half-upright in his seat.

“No, but I thought I could put it in the message,” Peter reiterates.

Sirius eases back a bit, pulling his knees in and crossing his arms over them, a little fucked off at himself for jumping to conclusions for one and letting someone else see him do it for another. “1.5gs is the standard per dose from what I read and ideally, he'd want to do that once a week,” he offers, setting his chin atop the cross-point of his arms on his knees. “And it’s sort of an ongoing thing from there; it’s either until it works or the appointment yields its own treatment and that works.”

Peter mulls over that for a beat or two. “Maybe we’ll leave that part out for now and if he’s got a lead, we'll come back to the amount,” he figures, and Sirius can’t really see a reason to argue it. Peter types a little more but ends up pausing again, looking over to Sirius again. “Are we calling it ‘shroom therapy’ or should we call it something else?”

Sirius lifts a shoulder. “I’d just say something like, you read that shrooms have had a lot of good press,” he raises.

“OK, well, I’m not going to say that verbatim, but I get your point,” Peter tells him.

“That’s fine, just don’t waste time giving him the opportunity to correct you on a colloquial term, is all I'm saying,” Sirius returns him. “I’ll put a twenty down right now and say he’ll do just that if you leave it open like that.”

“Good point,” Peter allows. “And you don’t need an extra twenty, do you.”

“Not me, no,” Sirius concedes.

Peter resumes his typing and in the meantime, Sirius sits tight, waiting for him to finish his crafting, which isn’t all that long in the grand scheme of things, but boy does Sirius feel the time crawl all the same.

“What’s it called?” Peter pipes up, pausing his typing. “Ps-psybin?”

Sirius holds in a snort, but just barely. “Psilocybin,” he provides, and Peter’s thumbs go nuts again.

“OK,” Peter says eventually, shifting in his corner spot to sit crossed-legged. “I put down that I’ve a friend who's battling cluster headaches and having a rough go of it, but I’ve read about the benefits of psilocybin in fighting them — had to Google that for spelling, but I think it makes me sound less like a knob asking about something I know nothing about—” Sirius snorts real loud for that one, biting down lightly on the tip of his tongue as he gives in to a grin, “—and asked if he could help me out with finding some shrooms, either personally or if he’s simply got a name of somebody who can help my boy out.”

“I like the boy line,” Sirius offers, flashing an 'OK' symbol with his right hand.

“Straight from the heart,” Peter says of it.

“That ‘battling clusters’ one is good, too,” Sirius tacks on. “Just the right amount of casual urgency.”

Peter tips his head humbly. “I tried,” he trades him. “Should I hit send?”

“Jesus, yes,” Sirius grants him, watching amusedly Peter puts on a bit of a show about it before he puts his mobile down on the cushion between them to symbolize a job well done, and if Sirius is honest, he needs that bout of theatrics right about now. “Seriously, thanks.”

Peter nods after a beat, lifting a shoulder now too. “Feels good to be able to help out finally,” he puts it.

It’s been a lot harder of a task to swallow properly as of late, but this time around really takes the cake. “You already did,” Sirius gives numbly. “I know it hasn’t seemed like it, but I know he wouldn’t be here right now if you hadn’t—”

Peter reaches to itch his left wrist with his right hand, speaking where Sirius trailed off. “Pummelled him,” he translated.

“Yeah,” Sirius puts up, sounding more like an output of breath than a singular word, but Peter seemed to take it for what it was. “Look, I’m sorry I gave you so much shit about it.”

Peter gives him a tight-lipped nod. “You said, yeah.”

Sirius tilts his head back and forth. “Mm, but you never did respond, so I wouldn’t know if you got it or not,” he hints.

“I saw it the next morning and honestly, I wasn’t all that sure I wasn't hallucinating,” Peter offers.

Sirius pulls his front teeth over his lower lip slowly as he nods. “Well, next time I do a weird thing like apologize for something, any response would be ideal,” he forwards, blinking once for a dot of punctuation. “Kind of a recent thing for me.”

Peter nods once, putting his mouth in a line before words seem to just topple out of him. “You did also type out ‘S-O-R-R-Y’ so it didn’t sound like you were all that sorry about it, from my end,” he mentions.

“Well, you know what? James can be thanked for that, the way he hounded me to do it,” Sirius returns, pausing for a breather. “Look, you're right, I didn’t really mean it then and I only did it so James would get off my dick about it, but I am actually sorry now because I could have lost him and you’re part of the reason I didn’t, so if you want something shiny and/or expensive, guess who’s willing to get you it?”

Peter shifts in his seat. “It’s fine, Sirius,” he says. “I don’t need anything.”

“Then I’ll just find something in Wales that screams ‘Peter,'” Sirius says of it. “How's that sound?”

“That sounds fine,” Peter accepts.

Sirius feels, for a moment or three, that he’s satisfied where this ended off, but it isn’t long at all before he pulls a hand through his hair, feeling he isn’t totally off the hook yet. “It was just too much like Monday night and I hated how they treated him at the ER," he puts out. "I know you had to act fast and that’s that, but it hadn’t even been a full day yet and I walked in on him getting knocked around again, and I just couldn’t fucking take it—”

“I know,” Peter cuts in. “It’s Remus; you’d throw down with all the Queen’s men if she ever tried to take him out.”

“And I wouldn’t think twice about it; sorry, Lizzie,” Sirius returns.

Peter breathes a laugh out through his nose. “I know I could’ve done it better,” he says of it, a little diplomatically, though his next words sort of lend a hand as to why that is, “but if I can just make a case for myself, I didn’t know what the hell was happening to him and I don’t think we’ve considered the fact that he’s like, ten feet tall and way stronger than he looks.”

“No, I know that last one well,” Sirius echoes. “Trying to move him when he’s in the middle of a bad one is like trying to shift antimatter; it’s all just dead weight.”

The other day, when he made the same comparison to Remus, he didn’t get much of a response given how blindingly truthful that take was, but the way Peter shoots forward in his seat and flies his hands around in supreme agreement does make Sirius feel a tad grateful that at least somebody appreciates the analogy. “That’s it, only it’s dead weight that’s moving around at warp speed,” he takes it.

“He’s a modern marvel,” Sirius echoes it.

“Has he been weightlifting while we're not looking or something?” Peter raises, shaking his head.

“I’ve been meaning to ask if you have,” Sirius returns him. “I know adrenaline does some powerful things, but I don’t understand how you got him down in one shot.”

“I mean, do try to remember that you only came in for the grand finale,” Peter puts it. “He dragged me around the room for a while there, and then right as I hunkered down and charged at him, a rogue Sirius appeared, Death Eyes boring into my soul.”

Sirius snorts powerfully enough that it sort of hurts. “It really was the worst fucking timing, I’ll give you that,” he lobs him, passing the back of his right hand over his mouth idly. “Those energy boosts, though? They made him so much more — err, malleable? Can I say that?”

Peter considers it for no less than a half-beat before allowing it. “Do they really?” he bids.

Sirius nods, then switches to an even head tilt. “I mean, he still moved around a ton, but he lay down the entire time and that just wasn’t possible Monday or Tuesday,” he says outright.

It’s vindicating, he has to say, seeing Peter look right dazzled by the news. “What’s it about them?”

“It’s the taurine in them,” Sirius forwards.

A beat. “English?” Peter asks.

“What, you think I know a better way to put it?” Sirius returns, smirking. “It’s the chemical in it that I kept seeing people cite online as the biggie that kills them quicker than going without, I just listened to the mob on that one.”

“Seems a good thing you did,” Peter says of it.

Sirius almost accepts that as is, but he can’t help giving an even head tilt back and forth. “Well, no, I saw a billion comments about Redbull and the taurine in that,” he tacks on, “but I figured the energy boosts have a similar make-up, same ingredient, would be way easier to carry around, and they don't taste like shit if they've been out of the fridge for long.”

“Right, who wants a lukewarm Redbull,” Peter poses.

“Not me,” Sirius echoes. “Remus, on the other hand, knocked back that boost without missing a beat, so I know for a fact he doesn’t give a single shit what’s going in his mouth when he’s about to have an attack, but oh, Lord, Lord, Lordy, was he making faces at Boots while we were getting a whole whack load of Redbulls.”

Peter pushes an amused breath out of his nose. “He would."

Sirius returns him a knowing hum. “Which, really just provides weight to my claim that he’d shoot heroin into his eyeball if someone told him it’d stop one, so I don’t think he’d have cared too much about chugging down a Redbull had we gone with one of those instead, but we’re going to test it out next time he has one and see if it does any better than the boost did,” he tacks on.

Peter nods, a tad absently. “Apart from making him lay down, what else did it do?”

Sirius squints at the wall behind Peter’s head, struggling to find a way to put it. “Mm, I guess I’m more of what made him lay down, the boost didn't necessarily do that part,” he amends. “It's more that I saw a difference in his pain level from my end of things and he’s since confirmed it from his side, so the attack just wasn’t quite as severe as the last two were and since we didn’t do all that much differently aside from give him the boost, we have to assume that’s what held it back from being another knockout, but we don't really know at this stage; maybe it just made the whole thing manageable enough that he didn’t get up and pace around, but it sure did seem like it pushed the pain down and the cluster inarguably went a lot quicker than the others did.”

“What was he doing the whole time?” Peter bids.

“Well, he didn’t fight my hold as much as you saw him doing and he wasn’t relentlessly searching for a bludgeon this time around, but he was trying to generate pain elsewhere,” Sirius gives him. “It’s why we can’t just phone it in here; he bit the living shit out of his arm and when I tried to get him to stop doing that, he just moved on to beating his heels into the footboard like—” he lifts his legs, miming Remus's substantial kicking over the middle cushion and garnering quite the look from Peter for it, “—so he still wanted to do damage, just in a different way, and that’s comforting only in the sense that the pain couldn’t have been so horrible that caving his head in felt like the only option to stop it, but that’s not nearly enough, is it.”

“Well, no,” Peter offers candidly. “If he gets one when he’s alone, then what? He can’t be beating himself up senselessly if no one’s around to stop him from doing it.”

Sirius puts his lips into a firm line, choosing to exhale through his nose and speaking only when he’s absolutely sure he's not going to explode. “I’ve set it up the best way I can,” he says of it, going for calm, measured, assured even. “I’ve dropped most of my hours at the shop, I've only got two shifts a week until I'm gone, James is going to cover me if one strikes while I’m there, Andromeda and Dora know that I could have to postpone a class if one strikes and I have to get up and go, I'm not tied down to the venue just yet, I’ve rejoined Zumba on the condition that I'm able to bounce the second I hear something's wrong; if I’m not with him, he just has to text me ‘911’ and I'll get there.”

“I can help, too,” Peter offers. “I’m prepared now, I know the rules: take whatever’s in his hand out of it, don’t necessarily take him down.”

Sirius shakes his head. “No, were you even listening?” he raises. “If he’s taken a boost, he doesn’t grab for things; he’s what needs watching.”

“OK, but,” Peter tries, “I could pull his arm out of his mouth pretty easily, I'd think.”

Sirius puts a quiet breath in, speaking only when he lets it out. “Pete, it's appreciated, and I know he appreciates it, too, but—”

“You don’t have to be afraid to bring him around,” Peter insists.

Sirius blinks openly. “I’m not.”

Peter looks at him plainly. “Where is he?” he raises, looking around the room for effect.

“At his?” Sirius answers.

“Why’s he there, though?” Peter bids.

“Why are you here?” Sirius raises, looking around. “Why are any of us, anywhere?”

“I’m not looking to philosophize,” Peter returns. “We’re all going to be assembling here in a bit and he’s just, at his? That’s not normal; did you even invite him along?”

Sirius pauses short. “He wouldn’t have come if I did,” he instils, knowing it like he knows anything.

“That's a load of crock,” Peter returns.

Sirius lifts his hands, blocking the blame. “This is his thing,” he maintains. “I didn't bother trying to drag him here when he has stated many times already that he considers himself a time bomb, but that makes it rather hard for him to risk coming over just because he might otherwise like to; he doesn’t want to scare any of you.”

“Did you tell him we’re not scared?” Peter raises.

Sirius eyes him like he’s sprouted a third arm. “No? You were scared,” he offers him pointedly. “I told him it was reactionary and you’d all learn how to act around him once the spooks wore off, but he wasn’t having it; I can’t kidnap him and make him come over, can I?”

Peter breathes out, looks down, and seems to regroup after a beat or five. “How can that be the final answer?” he puts up, looking around the room like there’s someone in it to back him up but there's nobody else here but them.

"There's nothing I can do about it right now," Sirius says of it. "I want him here as much as you do, but he's having a rough go and I can't fix it all overnight; something has to wait."

"Well, do better, then," Peter demands.

Sirius pitches forward in his seat. "What did you just say?"

Peter instinctively sits back in his seat. "You can't just say you can't do anything about it and have that be it," he defends.

“Why don't you try doing better?" Sirius snaps.

"I'm trying to help you both, am I not?" Peter returns.

"Yeah, now you are," Sirius rebuts. "You're the one who stared at him like he was a mental patient on Wednesday; what did you think he was going to do, keep coming 'round after that? He saw you doing it.”

Peter deflates in his seat. "I didn’t mean for him to take it like that,” he insists.

“Wrong answer, Pete,” Sirius sends out. “He’s got anxiety, not eighteen screws loose; you were tip-toeing around him like you were in a minefield and I know that because I fucking watched you doing it, too, so how about you don't give me 'I didn't mean for him to take it like that—'”

“Woah, woah, woah,” James calls out, quite suddenly standing under the archway to the living room. “What the fuck's happening?”

“Remus hates me,” Peter puts out woefully.

“That’s just ridiculous,” James says for it, blocking the assertion with a wave of his hand, but the same one drops to his side before he looks at Sirius deftly. “He doesn’t, does he?”

A flash of red, and Lily is also apparently in the room. “Good God, no,” she puts up, leaning her left shoulder against the side of the doorway since James seems quite set where he is in the middle of it. “He loves you, Pete.”

“Thank you, Lilith,” Sirius puts out, now quite grateful for her presence. “And I never said that; I said I'll work on him, but it’s not going to be today.”

“Why not?” Peter whinges.

Sirius lifts a hand to pinch at the bridge of his nose. “What is this circle I’m trapped in?”

Peter scrambles his hand over the cushion between the two of them. “I’m calling him.”

“Mm, don’t do that,” Sirius returns, but he hears the dial tone anyway and drops his hand immediately. “Hang up right now.”

Peter shakes his head with the mobile at his ear and climbs out of the corner of the couch and over the arm to get himself out of reach of Sirius. “I’ll just tell him my head’s back on straight and it’ll be—”

He cuts off mid-sentence and appears to blank completely now that the stage lights are on him. “Hi,” he puts out forcefully, and then promptly pauses for a good five or six seconds at least. “One sec.”

Sirius puts out a snort just envisioning what Remus’s face might look like from all the way over at his. “Eloquent,” he sends him, watching Peter rush around the outskirts of the coffee table rather than pass close by him and scamper down the hall toward the kitchen.

James quite speedily takes up Peter’s vacated spot while Lily hangs back by the doorway, her arms crossed over her middle while her right hand sits pressed over her smirk, and perhaps she, too, is picturing one Remus Lupin's easily brilliant face right about now. “Why can’t you two be alone for five minutes without you coming for his neck, huh?” James accuses, dad-mode activated.

Sirius lifts his hands. “He wanted to know why Remus isn’t here so badly.”

“And putting all the blame on him seemed a good idea in your head?” James raises.

“Don’t give me that,” Sirius returns. “All I did was I tell him gawking at Remus like he’s a zoo animal was a huge mistake, and was I wrong?”

“No, that definitely didn’t help any,” Lily speaks up, from behind her hand. "We all need to make a point to quit doing that."

Both James and Sirius look over at her, but Lily takes one look at Sirius’s pondering expression in particular and evidently has a whopper of a problem with it. “Oh, you are going to have to reign it in," she tacks on, dropping her hand from her mouth. "He needed a friend to talk to and I’m not going to apologize for being there for him.”

Sirius reels back right quick. “I was simply trying to work out why you said that with such knowledge behind it, but sure, Lily; I’ll go ahead and reign it in for you,” he returns sweetly.

“You have realized he hates it when you fight over him, yeah?” James puts in, looking between the two of them. “Have we come to that yet?”

Lily breezes right on past that, which was Sirius’s plan too, overall. “I said it like that because he came into work acting like everything was fine and then five minutes later, he was tail spinning," she relays. "An entire section of his monologue was dedicated to Peter thinking he’d gone mad after the Ugly Pot fiasco and how the rest of us were bound to react the same."

James tosses a tortured huff to the ceiling. “Would one of you explain to him that I couldn’t give two shits about an ugly flower pot?” he puts out.

Sirius clicks his tongue. “That was days ago.” He pauses, looking over at Lily in the horrible case that whatever instance she referred to was as recent as yesterday. "Yeah?”

“Thursday,” she offers, after a beat.

Sirius nods once. “Rough morning,” he says of it, feeling like a tire tread all over again. “Point is, he’s eased up quite a bit about Ugly Pot already, to the point where we can almost joke about it and it’s alright, so it’s bound to happen with this, too: at some point, he’s going to ease up on the No Flat rule, but he doesn't want one to strike while he's here, we're still figuring out what triggers him, and we have to give him the time to get there; he just needs a hot minute.”

James flops himself back into the corner of the couch huffily while Lily moves from the doorway and heads over to take a seat in the inflatable armchair to Sirius’s left. “I told you, I get it but I don’t have to like it,” he gives numbly, though he is staring at the ceiling begrudgingly.

Sirius does something next that he doesn’t do very often; looks listlessly to Lily for some help. “He knows we're here for him,” she instils, and a true beat after she meets his eye, at that. “There's a difference between being there for him and coddling him to the point where he gets overwhelmed, and I think we straddle that fine line whenever we put too many expectations on him during an already delicate time."

Alone, Sirius is fine with it, but he doesn't love that sentiment paired with his ever-rising suspicion over what else Lily might've heard about on that awful day; it makes him feel like the atoms that make up his body are pulling apart andthough James lets out an aggravated noise that almost stands in perfectly for how he's feeling right about now, it was more to do with a different section of Lily's phrasing. "How is wanting to be included in this horrible shit show considered coddling him?" he raises.

Lily presses on. “I’ll keep an eye on him at work, Sirius will keep an eye on him outside of it, I’m sure, and gradually, with the more comfortable he gets, the more likely he’ll widen his circle again,” she offers up.

James hears the sentiment more so meant for him to take home than anyone else here and huffs, which sort of ruins the quiet smile Sirius and Lily share. “I don’t know why I'm being lumped in with Gawker over there,” he puts up. “I made him pancakes for supper last I saw him and I wasn’t staring like he was about ready to blow either.”

Sirius gives him a plain look. “You gawked at his scar the second he came into the kitchen, you knob,” he sends him. “After I’d already spent a ton of time trying to lure him out of the dark, so newsflash, you didn’t help him feel any less like a zoo animal.”

James’s mouth forms a distinct 'O' shape before he drops the face and puts out an affronted scoff. “You called him a street fighter,” he points out. “Why are you off the hook?”

“First of all, are you me?” Sirius chimes, getting a face out of James for that, but it's still a point to be made. “Second, what else was I going to do after you went and pointed it out like the crass man you are? I really thought you’d know better than to mention anything about a massive scar that came from a massively heightened situation, but that was an oversight on my part clearly; someone had to play it off.”

James rearranges his expression into a solid pout. “Well, now I have to call Remus, too.”

Or,” Sirius puts in, “you could leave it alone seeing as he's already dealing with a flood of apologies from Peter.”

“Now, that’s an idea,” Lily puts in brightly. “I’m going to have to request we start practicing sooner than later; my energy is up, but it’s not going to be running on high forever.”

“Incredible point,” Sirius gives her, extending his right leg along the length of the couch to prod James’s left knee with his big toe. “Where did I leave my dancing shoes?”

A slow smile creeps across James's mouth before it replaces his pout altogether. “I’ve a guess you’ve been wearing them all along,” he returns him, reaching to flick the top of Sirius's foot.

“You could say that,” Sirius lets him have.

James looks over at Lily. “Are we telling him now, or?”

Sirius looks sideways at Lily as she puts an exhale out through her nose. “I don’t know if it’s appropriate now.”

“He’s going to find out," James puts up. "May as well know ahead of time."

“I agree,” Lily puts diplomatically, but the slight widening of her eyes is not missed by Sirius by any means, “only, now’s a little—”

“Should I leave the room while you two sort this out?” Sirius checks.

James looks over to him now. “Andrew lit right up when she proposed the idea of us rejoining,” he passes him, a coy smile making it on his face, “and while I do think I’m special enough to warrant starried eyes, I don’t think those were for me, somehow.”

Sirius blinks and promptly places the back of his right hand over his forehead rather royally. “Oh no," he expels, "how will I ever keep my pants on?”

“See?” James raises, looking at Lily again. “No harm, no foul.”

Sirius looks to Lily there, too, timing three bright blinks at her before she sighs out her mouth this time. “I didn’t think you were going to throw your pants off,” she returns, lifting a halting hand, “but it was quite the smile; he puffed right up and I'll be honest, it gave me an odd feeling.”

Sirius hums flatly, prodding James down the way with the same poker foot. “He’s just pumped to have his two best students back in class, mm?”

Didn't ask her, but Lily tilts her head back and forth idly in Sirius's peripheral. “Could be it, but I think you'd have had to see the look,” she maintains. “I don’t think it would hurt to nip that in the bud sooner than later.”

Sirius pauses his prodding, turning his head toward her directly. “Excuse you?”

James flicks his foot. “Simmer down,” he chides. “He may well think he’s going to get something out of it; he sure did last time.”

“I was a touch more single then, wasn't I,” Sirius raises, putting his head on a tilt.

Lily lifts her hands diligently. “That’s what we’re getting at,” she offers. “I don’t know what’s going on in his head, but if he’s got an inkling something’s going to come out of you joining back up, it'd be better if he knew the extra bit wasn't on the table this time.”

“OK, say he does want another go at this,” Sirius offers, displaying his hands on either side of his body, “why does letting him down easy fall to me, and if the look was so worrisome, why didn’t you just slip Remus in there since you’re so concerned about Andrew's feelings in all this?”

Lily looks around the room whip-fast. “How is that my responsibility?” she rebuts, quite red in the face now. "You've made it quite clear I've no business sniffing around where I shouldn't."

"And yet, here we are," Sirius puts out, looking to James for some help.

“Nope,” James says brightly, moving to lift out of his corner spot. "I regret my actions completely and I'll see myself out—"

“Sit the fuck down,” Sirius sends him.

“Reel it in, then,” James sends right back, planting himself back down. “She’s not coming for you, dickhead.”

“I’m really not,” Lily insists. “I just think it would do well to avoid a miscommunication; I like Andrew a lot, but I like Remus more.”

“How weird, so do I?” Sirius puts out, faux-incredulously.

Lily bites back what might’ve been a smile. “OK,” she forfeits, lifting her hands. “I’ll back off.”

“Thank you,” Sirius chimes.

Footsteps creak up the hall, making it rather clear Peter’s rejoined the mix. “What’d I miss?” he bids.

“Nada, Petey,” James sends him lightly. “What’s the word?”

Peter situates himself on the bit of free floor between Sirius on the couch and Lily in the chair, putting out a grand sigh as he settles in cross-legged. “He says he doesn’t hate me, but he’s still not coming over."

“I could have told you that,” Sirius mentions, tugging on his right ear lobe idly.

“Well, I needed to hear it myself, thanks,” Peter comes back, jolting as 'Kiss Me' rings out from his left trouser pocket.

Sirius smirks for the three retching noises James aims across the couch at him. “Give it here,” he requests, left hand outstretched as he uses his right one to push out of his corner spot.

Peter hands it over to him as Sirius reaches back to snag his pack on the table, pulling one out of there and letting the pack drop back onto the table. “Give me this much time," he bids to Lily, holding up his cigarette as the time limit, "and then it's Zumbatown up in here."

She waves him off as Sirius side-swipes Peter to get to the hall, pressing to answer the call. “Yes?” he chimes, heading past the bathroom.

“Could you, I don’t know," Remus begins, "try to avoid encouraging any of our friends to think I hate them? I don’t hate anyone.”

“Not even Hitler?” Sirius raises dubiously, turning into the kitchen.

A huff. “Sirius.”

“Alright, but I didn’t actually do that,” Sirius puts in, pushing through the screen door and out onto the terrace. “All I did was explain that Peter’s embarrassing behaviour on Wednesday didn’t exactly help you feel all that comfortable coming ‘round as much.”

Remus sighs from the other end of the line as Sirius sparks his lighter. “I still understand why he looked at me that way.”

“Mm, and I know that,” Sirius maintains, pausing to let his first haul out, "but he was acting like I’m keeping you away from them on purpose and he was being very rude about it, if my word counts for anything, that is.”

“It does,” Remus sighs. “Of course it does.”

“Good,” Sirius says of it. “I’m not about to get branded the bloke who shut his boyfriend away in a tower; that’s not me.”

“No, you’re right,” Remus allows. “That changes the tone of it a lot; I didn't know that.”

Sirius feels a bit lighter on his feet as he takes another haul. “And since I’m being so honest here, I thought it was rich that it didn’t even occur to him that acting like being around you was akin to walking in a minefield wouldn't be a reason why you're not over here when you could be, and that’s not OK to me.”

“Well, you must have really hammered that home because he was nearly inconsolable just there,” Remus highlights.

“Good, he should've been better about it and maybe now, he and everybody else will be,” Sirius says of it.

Remus sighs again, weightier this time. “It’s just too soon,” he offers quietly.

“I know it is,” Sirius instils. “They know it, too, now; I’ve briefed all three of them, believe me, but they've been lobbing questions at me left and right, I can't always be sweet about it.”

“Do the other two think I hate them, too?” Remus raises.

“Certainly not Lily,” Sirius offers him. “I hope you’re sitting down because she’s on your side always and forever; I know that’s some staggering information for you to hear.”

A few amused breaths come through the line. “It probably helps I see her quite a bit,” he says of it, a smile audible from all the way over here. "Hard to miss somebody you see most days."

“Mm, might be part of it,” Sirius affirms, lifting his cigarette to his mouth, but pausing there. “I won't lie to you, James is being a bit of a prat about it and you very nearly got a call from him, too, and all because I pointed out that he didn’t exactly have to point out your scar the second he saw it, but the sentiment is this: he is sorry, I talked him out of ringing you over it, and I think you’re safe for now.”

Remus snorts. “It seems you’re on an incredibly specific mission today.”

Sirius runs his right big toe over the floor of the terrace idly. “I just think a lot of the garbage parts of this week could have been avoided if we all just backed off of you a little, me included,” he puts it, swallowing around the lump in his throat. “I know it’s hard for you to wrap your head around, but it sort of is your fault; if you weren’t so lovable, we wouldn’t all be so aggressively affectionate toward you.”

A laugh sounds as if it catches Remus off-guard. “That’s—” he tries amidst it, “wildly appropriate wording, actually; thank you for that.”

“I can’t offer the Professor any less,” Sirius says of it, smiling at the ground between his feet. “We just really care about you and that's just not as strange a phenomenon as you so often think it is.”

Remus breathes in thickly. “I’m not keeping away out of spite.”

“I know that,” Sirius says, quietly this time. “They're catching up, too. I think we all just need to let the dust settle a bit; it’s only been a few days — can you believe that?

“It’s madness,” Remus concedes, sniffing a bit. “Feels like an age has passed and no time at all.“

“We’re going to get better at this, mm?” Sirius offers him.

“Mhm,” Remus hums, controlled.

“They’ll be right here when you’re ready,” Sirius tacks on, needing Remus to know that about as much as they need him to.

“OK, no — that’s too much,” Remus maintains, decidedly less controlled. "You don’t get to make me cry again, Sirius; I’ve run out.”

Sirius gets a strong sense that was more directed at himself than to him just then. “Alright,” he allows, “but I think you might like that I’m a lot, even if it’s too much sometimes.”

Remus sniffs hard again. “Caught me red-handed,” he admits. “Have you guys started up yet?”

“No, not even close,” Sirius says plainly.

“Oh — go, then; I’m sorry,” Remus returns.

“I’m not,” Sirius says of it, taking another haul. “I’ve a few more hauls left; might as well keep me company.”

“Well, in that case,” Remus allows, and Sirius smiles around the filter. “I know you’ve stayed over quite a bit this week, but if you wanted to come back tonight, I wouldn’t say no to that.”

Sirius’s right brow goes crawling up his forehead, but in the three beats it takes for that to happen, Remus already takes that as a bad sign. “Only, if you wanted to stay there since you’ll just have to be there again tomorrow, then that’s OK, too,” he adds quickly.

Sirius lets out an incredulous laugh, sending his haul out through his nose rapidly. “Remus,” he addresses, taking a quick breath in through his smile. “I see you haven’t exactly pieced the hints together yet, but I packed my duffel with multiple nights in mind and brought my pooch over there; I sort of planned on staying over for a while yet.”

There are a few beats of silence where Sirius vividly thinks he might have an idea of what Remus deals with on a regular basis. “I promise, I’m not working an angle here,” he tacks on. “I’m not trying to move in without telling you, I just know I’ll sleep better if I’m there right now and I think you would, too — so, yeah; I'm planning on coming back tonight.”

“I would,” Remus says there. “Sleep better, I mean.”

“Good,” Sirius deems it, taking a full breath in at the prospect of finally reading the fucking room properly. He heads for the ashtray on the table in the centre of the terrace and puts his cigarette out in it, not really feeling it anymore. “I’ll see you later, then?”

“Looks like it,” Remus offers. “Go make me proud.”

“Absolument,” Sirius returns, slipping his mobile down from his ear.

He heads back inside with a poignant spring to his step, stops off at the washer to transport Remus’s load into the dryer, and heads back to the living room from there, finding his spot on the couch was taken up by Peter in his absence, but he’s much more piqued by Lily standing at the record player and trying to hook her mobile up to it.

“Alright,” he goads, clapping once and bringing all three heads in the room to look his way, “I’m ready, who’s ready?”

Lily rearranges her mouth around a smile, plugging the aux cord into her headphone jack. “I’ve made up a plan that I think will be realistic for you two, given that you’re a little behind but you're also you two,” she offers.

“Tell me,” Sirius goads, ready to hear it.

“We’ve sixteen songs on the roster that will loop back around as the parade goes along,” she details, “so what I think we should do is focus on four routines a practice session, otherwise I feel we’ll just end up giving up halfway if we try to power through all sixteen in one go.”

“You know them well,” Peter puts in.

Lily taps the tip of her nose primly in response. “So, if you’re alright with putting the work in this week, then you two will be versed enough for next week’s class, and,” she tacks on, looking to Sirius specifically, “that’ll free your weekdays up, so really it'll just mean crunch time this week and you’d only have to put in one hour a Sunday from there on.”

“And, you’re free to run off at any point,” James tacks on, “as per my last email.”

Sirius snorts. “I accept your terms,” he offers, looking to the both of them in turn. “I’ll be back tomorrow for Dora's class, should we want to try the next four either before or after that?”

Lily thinks about it for a beat. “I’ll see how things are going around work tomorrow,” she trades him. “If it’s going swimmingly then I may be able to cut out a little early, but definitely after her class if I can’t make magic happen around there.”

“Deal,” Sirius says of it. “For the back eight, I just can’t do Friday or Saturday evening, but I can do anytime before my shifts, barring any emergencies.”

“We’ll squeeze them in somewhere,” Lily assures, waving that off easily. “Do you want to see the first routine to get an idea or do you want me to start right in with the lesson?”

“Show me the whole thing first,” Sirius bids her, stepping in between the coffee table and couch to take up residence in the middle spot.

One thing Sirius can say for certain, once they really get into the practice, is he did sort of miss Zumba, and by sort of, he means a lot. There’s something oddly non-threatening about the routines they're being taught that remind him of what he felt about them back in the day, and when he finally understood the reason Lily fell so hard for the class in the first place: they were just complicated enough that he didn't feel like he was learning ones dedicated to a middle-aged fitness group but just easy enough that he didn't feel like he'd joined up with the ballet after zero preparation, and he's feeling that all over again plus some extra change. And one thing he’ll say for Andrew, and it's something he's is glad to see hasn’t lessened with time, but that man can curate one fuck of a playlist.

After the second routine has been knocked off the list, James demands a beverage break, which neither Sirius nor Lily have any reason to argue with. Lily, however, is quite diligent about keeping their recess short and that, Sirius definitely can't argue with for his energy level is sitting proudly at 100%, and the longer the pause, the more chance it has to deplete.

Peter spends his time cycling between playing audience member and fucking around on his mobile, so Sirius has long since given up on the idea that Peter picking up his mobile is in any way a sign of bountiful luck in the form of a baggie of shrooms coming his way and it’s part of the reason why, in the middle of ironing out the kinks in the last scheduled routine of the session, it takes Peter waving him down for Sirius to clue into the fact that he’s being summoned.

Sirius breaks from the routine at once, falls out of line, and dashes for the record player, putting Carly Rae’s 'Cut to the Feeling' on immediate pause and causing James and Lily to freeze still as the music goes off. “What, what?” he bids.

Peter pulls himself off of the couch. “He says he’s got a batch growing now,” he reiterates.

Sirius moves his neck back and forth, stretching it out as he pushes down the urge to throttle him. “Well, did he just start the batch ‘cause if so, that’s not going to help me out and I’m not sure why you flagged me down like this?”

“Well, hold on, he’s still typing,” Peter insists.

“Who?” James bids.

“Remus,” Lily guesses.

“No, shh,” Sirius sends him, waving the peanut gallery off.

“Upwards of two weeks until he can start handing them out,” Peter paraphrases, eyes on his screen. The moment the words are out there, however, he grimaces, looking over at Sirius with resigned doom lining his features. “That’s not soon enough, is it?”

“Are you kidding me?” Sirius sends him. “It’s not like I’m getting any sooner than that.”

“OK,” Peter returns, looking down quickly and typing away. “I’ll just confirm and ask that he keep us very much in mind.”

“Pause,” Sirius requests, and Peter does as bid, looking to him again. “You sure he’s legit?”

Peter looks left then right. “I’ve been buying off him for years.”

“Shrooms, though?” Sirius raises.

“Oooh,” James trills. “Are we acquiring some?”

“No, they’re for Remus,” Sirius supplies at once.

“Oh, ho ho,” James returns, beaming. “That little devil.”

“They’re for his clusters, James; he’s not taking them for leisure,” Lily puts in, then double checks that with Sirius, who’s got his hands on his hips now, well and truly impressed, but it’s clear she doesn’t read his expression for what it is for she falters a little. “I assume that’s it?”

“Oh, absolutely, I’m just admiring your finesse,” Sirius forwards.

Lily’s lips quirk. “I’ve been researching clusters a ton,” she admits.

“Oh, you too?” Sirius raises airily, smiling for it.

“Alright, I’m going to need everyone in this room to start filling me in more often,” James bids, hands going to his own hips. “In a timely manner, if you please.”

“He’s legit, Sirius,” Peter presses on. “I’ll even eat a piece before Remus does so you can see for yourself.”

“Deal,” Sirius returns, loving the dedication he’s seeing. “And tell him I'll buy the lot.”

“Well, I’m probably not going to do that, seeing as he has other customers,” Peter offers measuredly, “but I’ll see what isn’t already spoken for?”

Sirius takes on the will and drive of a thousand suns into one, heated expression. “Tell him I’ll buy the lot,” he repeats.

Peter looks down real quick and types speedily on his phone. “Do not fight him if he says no,” he warns. “He’s got much better pricing than Braun, and he delivers to your door.”

“Well, if I’m honest, I might be looking for a new dealer so you tell him you’ve got him two new customers with a fat wallet for him and I’m sure he’ll be willing to cooperate,” Sirius tacks on. “It's time to take charge, Pete.”

Yeah,” James goads. “And then someone tell James why shrooms are gonna help Remus out.”

“It’s the psilocybin in them, don’t worry about it,” Peter says absently, already back to typing.

Sirius sends out a bark that’s much more involuntary than not, practically bursting with excitement, pride, joy, the works, while Peter gets his message crafted and receives the eventual response to it. “He says he’ll let me know when they’re ready,” he relays, slipping his mobile away and putting his hands on his own hips now, too.

Sirius can’t, in good conscience, be expected to keep his joy inside any longer, and yet, no one in the room seems to see his next move coming, least of all Peter; Sirius bounds toward him, plucking the five-foot-six man straight off of the ground with the veritable force of his hug and running him around in a circle just because.

He puts Peter back down after he’s squeezed him good and well, ruffles his hair for good measure, and looks to James and Lily over there in stitches. “Guys,” he starts, tossing a listless thumb toward the front hall. “He could really use a bit of good news right now.”

“Oh, just go,” Lily instructs, waving him off with a wry smile on. “I’m beat as is.”

Sirius puts his hands together. “Thank you,” he instils, heading for the hall, but before he exits the room, he swivels on his heel, pointing over to James as he backs down the hall toward the door. “I will be back here tomorrow ready to do Carly proud at one o’clock sharp, you hear me?”

“Loud and fucking clear,” James sends him.

Sirius blows him a kiss from the hall, heads to stick his feet in his shoes, and heads through door, taking the stairs down two at a time and feeling both lighter than air and fucking invincible. On the way back, he stops in at Boots, finds a thermometer, the most attractive and well-stocked first aid kit he can find there, and stops in the aisle to order Remus a dark oak breakfast tray to arrive at his own flat, where he will then transport it over to Remus’s and sneak it into his cupboard. Finally, he steps up to the till, sets his purchases down on the counter, and plucks what's left of the energy boosts sitting nearby. Not quite as head-spinning as his last Boots haul, but he still gets a bit of a look for it from his cashier, but fuck it; it’s all details, baby.

He leaves the shop with his bag in tow, swings back onto Priscilla’s bulk, and rides the supremely short distance back to Remus’s from there, taking the stairs as fast as he took his own and rounding the bend in the hall, heading in through Remus’s door without a hitch to his step.

Remus isn’t visible from the doorway, doesn't seem to be in the bathroom to the left of the entryway, or in his room next to it from what Sirius can see from here, prompting him to peer around the partition in the entryway to scope out the main room and finding him at the island with quite a few things fanned out around him; his laptop, their notebook, a cup of tea, and Mestophales curled up on the countertop like she owns it (and she does, really).

Remus sends him a smile over the top of his mug as he goes for a sip and Sirius pulls himself back behind the partition, kicking his shoes off on the mat and coming out from behind it again with a shake of the shopping bag. “I got you a thermometer so we can start taking actual reads of your temperature in an attack from now on, a first aid kit since your supply here is absolute garbage, sorry not sorry to tell you, a shitload of boosts so you now have a whack load of them, your book back from Pete who definitely did snag it from mine so he could finish it, shrooms coming in about two weeks and I know that’s not as soon as we'd like it to be but it was the very best I could do, and I'd have brought you the cat this time, too, but I see she's already made herself quite comfortable where she is.”

He takes a fast breath in as Remus sets his mug down and pushes his stool back, heading around the side of the island and crossing the space between them in a few quick strides, and Sirius's heart goes and beats at double time as Remus takes his face in his hands before giving him a solid snog.

Sirius simply breathes after it ends, rooted in spot while the corners of Remus's mouth twitch upward. "I didn't get to do that the last time you did this," he offers evenly.

Rather than dig at Remus about him absolutely being welcome to snog him back then, he takes the high road here and kisses him once more when there's nothing holding him back from doing it now either. "That's OK with you?" he checks. "The wait?"

Remus runs the pad of his right thumb along Sirius's left cheekbone. “That's fine," he assures. He takes a moment to eye Sirius's general vicinity, drops his hands to Sirius's shoulders, and peers around his frame and the partition to get a better look at the entryway. "Think there might be something missing, though?"

Sirius blinks once, looking down and back up in a moment before it clicks. "They, are in the dryer," he tells him matter-of-factly, and Remus sends him the loudest pfft there could be. "I'm going back there tomorrow so you'll have them by the evening and at the very least, they'll be incredibly dry—"

Remus kisses him again for good measure. "You're fine," he instils, smiling bright, and that, precisely, is what it's all for.

Chapter 12: 12.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Sirius lets his head fall forward onto Remus's left shoulder, the name of his goal here is to stretch their embrace out for however long he can make it last, and that sure does work for a good ten to fifteen seconds or so before he hears the shopping bag hanging otherwise motionless from his left wrist start to rustle, sussing out quickly that Remus is on a hunt for the receipt.

Sirius pulls back from him at once, eyeing his blatant snooping around in there. “I didn’t take it.”

“No, I see that now,” Remus returns him, ending his search with a pronounced blink aimed at Sirius. “Are you really going to make me round up again?”

“Are you really going to make a huge deal about a couple of boosts and a thermometer?” Sirius counters, lifting his brows.

Remus huffs through a breathy laugh. “A couple?” he repeats, and in all fairness, there is a load of them in there. “Just give me an estimate of what you paid.”

“I didn’t look at the total,” Sirius insists.

Remus rearranges his pleading expression to a hell of a more pointed one. “You really ought to start looking at your totals more often.”

Sirius clicks his tongue three times rhythmically, sidestepping Remus to head for the island. “I used my mad money card therefore, no, I don’t have to look at that one so much,” he maintains, hoisting the shopping bag onto the counter.

He hears a plain output of breath from behind him before footsteps approach, but Remus stops nearby and leans over the set-up on the island to reach for his tea while Sirius gives Mestophales a scritch around the ears as a fond hello.

“Have you been diligent about your studies?” he raises, nodding at Remus’s open laptop.

Remus nods around a sip. “You could say that, yeah,” he offers, moving for his stool. “I sort of branched out from the pages you left for me, and I’ve noticed something a bit odd.”

Sirius gives the cat’s head a final scritch and heads around to Remus’s side of the island to have a look for himself, bracing his left elbow over Remus’s right shoulder as he leans in from above, behind, and a little beside him in one go to look at the screen. “Is it the incredible number of tabs you managed to have open and still run this thing?” he raises, and Remus shakes his head as he pushes a small breath out his nose that may have been a laugh if he didn’t look a bit trapped in the confines of his own head at the moment, garnering Sirius to budge him with the arm braced over him. “Alright, what’d you find?”

Remus switches between a few of the tabs with the help of some speedy fingers and a touchpad. “Well, I've been seeing a lot of references to the rather seldom categories involving the frequency of clusters: we've got our chronic cases, we've got our episodic ones,” he reiterates, “and then, we have me.”

Sirius only has to blink sidelong at Remus to get him to keep going. “Chronic, the person affected gets the attacks multiple times a day, always at the same times; say, at one, three, and five o’clock, right on the money,” he frames it. “Episodic, they’ve got a specific number of weeks, months, or what have you, where they're in a cycle and all bets are off, really; they'll get them whenever they come within that stretch of time before a type of remission period occurs and the cycle comes back around again, bit like a season.”

“Right, I’ve seen those words brandished about quite a bit,” Sirius offers him, waiting on the other shoe to drop.

Remus nods once. “There’s no chance I’d fall under the category of chronic since I’m lucky enough not to have them every few hours, on the hour, daily," he maintains, "but I don’t think I can comfortably fit into the episodic category either because that's not quite what's been going on with me and I don't know what I'm to do with that.”

Sirius hums a faint note. “Why can’t you?” he bids, needing a bit more to go on before he can start pinpointing a direction to steer Remus away from.

“Because,” Remus offers, gesturing toward the screen, but all Sirius sees on it is a wall of text he does not have the energy to read at the moment, so thankfully Remus starts to put words to his convictions. “Those people still get them at night, in the morning, evening, any time; there's no schedule and they come on frequently, but me? I’ve had two back-to-back cases and one later in the week.”

“Right,” Sirius echoes, "and you’ve only had three since your resurgence, so it's a bit tough to say what your patterns will be from where we’re standing now.”

“Well, from what I'm reading, mine don’t manifest quite like everybody else's do,” he reiterates, gesturing toward their notebook. “My triggers point straight to migraines, my attacks don't seem to be on any sort of schedule, sure, but I can go days without one at all and then have one three days in the same week, and I just don’t know that it’s going to be as easy as we hope to get a proper diagnosis if mine keep coming on the way they’ve been.”

“Remus,” Sirius raises. “By the time we're in there, she’s going to take a single flip through that book and diagnose you there in the room; the evidence in here is staggering already.”

Now, Sirius thinks he made a fair case for himself, whereas Remus doesn’t seem to soak it up the way Sirius would like him to, shaking his head instead. “I don't know that we can it that," he instils. "And mine don’t manifest in the ways she’d be used to seeing them."

Sirius stares at Remus for a good few seconds. “Well, we don’t know what the book's going to look like in July, but for the sake of argument and you, I’ll play,” he grants him. “Say you’re right and your patterns end up looking a bit wacky in hindsight, we literally can’t know if she hasn’t seen a case like yours when there are sure a lot of people in this city and others near it, and even if she hasn’t before, so what?”

Sirius has to admit Remus’s voice comes out rather voluminous for someone deadpanning him. “So what?” he repeats. “If I can’t keep from noticing that mine are all over the place, how would she be able to ignore that, too?”

“Remus,” Sirius says again. “I found you a top-notch professional who deals with these things enough to know how varied they are from case to case; she’s going to know that not every single person falls into two categories.”

“There’s no consistency to mine,” Remus puts out.

“Not yet,” Sirius amends. “Little too soon to tell, Remus.”

Remus takes in a harried breath. “I know you think I’m panicking for nothing, but if I could just point to another person’s experience and say, ‘that’s it; that's what I’ve got,’ then I could let this go, but aside from the boost helping me along, I’ve been seeing nothing on here that reads like mine,” he insists, his voice entering listless territories.

Sirius allows that, for a second. “Well, as usual, you don’t fit into a box,” he offers, tapping once on Remus’s right cheek. “Not that strange a concept to me, let me tell you.”

You’re not the one I’m worried about convincing, oddly,” Remus returns. “Besides, I want a box in this case; I need a box.”

“Well, I can’t give you one,” Sirius trades him, lifting his shoulders circumstantially. “You wouldn’t fit, but I can give you a reasonable concept to cling to, how about that?”

Remus breathes in and out his nose once. “It’d better be phenomenal.”

“Good, because I think it’s a game changer,” Sirius returns, curling his left arm around Remus’s shoulders casually. “Now, here me out: if such a small percent of the population deals with these things, so much so that we’ve had to knock on door after door just to find a doctor who would even say the word ‘cluster’ and had to traipse around Boots gathering odds and ends to make things work on our own for now, then maybe, just maybe, not enough time, research, and money have been devoted to creating a new category all for you, a rando bloke in London.”

Remus sends a hard breath through his nose. “Sirius.”

“Sorry,” Sirius extends, lifting his free hand in appeal, “a breathtakingly beautiful, rando bloke in London.”

Remus huffs. “Yes, because that was the distinction I wanted made.”

Sirius presses right on with it, jostling Remus’s shoulders a bit. “'Sirius?'” he bids, going with the voice that a young and awestruck student might use, “'does that mean it’s alright if Remus doesn’t have the same, cookie-cutter experience as the next rando on that subreddit?' 'Why, yes, sonny, indeed it does'.”

Remus nudges Sirius off of him with a huff and promptly crosses his arms over his chest, but that’s all just a gift for Sirius to get to see. “Look, it’s very clear you’re feeling sceptical of doctors at this point and while I do love the scent of distrust wafting off of you, why don’t we try to use some of the disillusionment you may be feeling in your gut and put it to our advantage; let it fuel us,” he raises him, and while Remus doesn’t ease up on his prim position any, he doesn’t immediately make to speak so Sirius has to assume he’s been given the floor to do more of that himself. “You had your own experiences taken away from you by a doctor who wouldn't even hear the word 'cluster', I had my own crock of a doc hear my bid for help and smirk loud enough that I heard it over the phone, and all because you’ve got this little thing called a rare condition, so by all means, that must mean that you couldn’t have it; makes complete sense, doesn’t it? People don’t have rare conditions, not a single one.”

The corner of Remus’s mouth twitches, but it’s the right side so Sirius gets to see it in the light. “And instead of listening to any of that horseshit this time? You get to walk into this new doctor's office and demand better care,” he insists, lifting a finger to point at Remus’s erratic shake of his head. “No no, that, is your right, Remus Lupin, and you’re going to bask in that and use it wherever you can, yes?”

“Yes,” Remus gives him, after a pause.

“Yes,” Sirius echoes, slapping the screen of Remus’s laptop shut; this bout of research is officially over with, says he. “I'd like you to use some of those high-brow critical thinking skills you’ve acquired through your studies and try to remember them when you’re on that site again, OK?”

Remus looks over at him, blinking once. “You’re the one who said I’d find some comfort on there,” he mentions.

“And didn’t you?” Sirius counters. “Even for a little bit?”

Remus gives him an even head tilt back and forth. “The pages you saved for me, yeah,” he forwards. “Then I went in deeper; I saw a lot of people coming there to find out if they’re also experiencing them, but because they only have them now and again or maybe not so religiously, they’re told they can’t have clusters and to pick something else.”

Sirius’s right eye twitches. “Well, like anything else, there are always going to be gatekeepers on there who’d like to keep it a small club and if you don’t check off all the boxes, then you’re not in it,” he says plainly, lifting his hands easily. “I saw a ton of that on there, too, but I also know what I’ve seen with my own eyes so the last thing we need you doing, is listening to any of those people and wind up second-guessing what we both know you have; take what the naysayers say with a grain of salt, please?”

Remus hands his head to the left, but there’s a smirk somewhere in there, and that, Sirius focuses on. “Or perhaps, I could take on your 200% sodium levels and subtract by 150,” he raises.

“You already idle 150% lower than I rest at, so I think you could stand to subtract by just twenty-five,” Sirius raises it.

“Well, that, I can’t promise,” Remus says of it.

“Can you try?” Sirius poses. “You know what you’ve felt, you know these aren't your usual migraines, and I need you to trust yourself and me a little more here; we both know more than you let on sometimes.”

Remus gives him a deep frown. “I don’t mean to suggest you don’t—”

He cuts off as Sirius reaches up and pushes on the corners of his lips with his forefingers, making a makeshift smile for him. “I’m not giving you shit,” he says measuredly. "That’s enough ominous thinking for tonight; do you want to come have a puff with me?”

Remus perks. “I rolled one for us earlier,” he forwards him, reaching over behind his research cave to pluck up one honkin' joint from over by the cupholder. “Figured we could make up for last night’s sudden left turn away from recreational practices.”

Sirius snorts, reeling back. “Yes fucking please,” he sends him, heading straight for the perch.

He looks back from the open doorway, finding Remus making his way toward the destination at a slightly more leisurely clip than he went at, but at least he's on the way. The two of them settle in side-by-side on the corduroy upholstered armchair otherwise dubbed as the Smoking Chair, prompting Sirius to congratulate himself on such a stellar choice for exterior home decor; the vivid colour and honking shape of it is, admittedly, a little arresting at first glance and certainly too much for the area it's in, but the comfort and width of the chair won out over those factors, and now, they’ve a seat big enough to for them share comfortably and it fits far enough underneath the shelter of the perch above Remus's that it doesn’t get soaked during a downpour.

Remus hangs the joint in his mouth and raises his right hand to light it, while Sirius does little more than lean up against the curve of Remus’s left side and make himself well and truly comfortable, his legs stretched out in front of the chair and crossed at the ankles. Quite soon though, Sirius realizes Remus has got his left arm occupied and hung around Sirius’s shoulders, so lifts his hands to shelter the flame of the lighter from the light breeze passing them.

Remus hums in thanks as he takes the first pull off of it, snuggles in with Sirius a bit more as he leans his head back on the neck of the armchair, slowly putting his haul out above them, and Sirius would be a liar if he pretended like he didn’t watch the entire thing sidelong when he does look so very good doing that. Remus lowers his head once again and gives Sirius a bit of a face as he takes another quick pull off of the joint; a half-smile, half-question raised without the words, and Sirius smiles, shaking his head, thinking if he says what’s on his mind there's a good chance Remus will succumb to performance anxiety and that would be a sad, sad thing.

“How was the day?” he asks instead, timing it for when Remus finishes letting his next haul out.

Remus hums, tilting his head back and forth evenly. “Talked to my mum a bit,” he offers, holding the joint up for Sirius to take hold of.

Sirius perks as he takes it in between his right forefinger and thumb. “Did you?” he raises, waiting with the joint at his lips for Remus to fork over the lighter so he doesn’t have to fish in his pockets to locate his own. “What made you answer her, in the end?”

“Mm,” Remus hums, passing the little yellow lighter over to him. “I just couldn’t keep pretending I was still too busy to, but it’s good I didn't; turns out, she’s been trying to get a hold of me not just to have a regular chat, but because she had some rather provoking news to share.”

Sirius gives a small trill around a haul. “Ooh, tell,” he goads, his voice tight as he speaks around full lungs.

Remus gives him a moderate hum. “Well, they’ve been going back and forth on whether they were going to put some of their land up for sale,” he relays. "My dad's all for selling while my mum's been a bit more reluctant about it, they've been in a bit of a standstill since late winter with no real progress or action plan made, but she seems to have hopped over to his camp more recently.”

Sirius puts his haul out quite speedily alongside a trill. “That’ll be something, hm,” he trades him.

“I think so, yeah,” Remus allows. “We hardly needed that much space and it's a bitch to maintain what we did use; when I was around there, it was easier to split the work up between us, but it’s a little much now that it's just the two of them."

“Yeah, fair enough,” Sirius offers, holding the joint up for him to take and watching him take a rather absent haul off of it. "Why the standstill?"

Remus waits a few beats before he exhales. "It was a piece of her inheritance," he offers. "That's her for you; not one of us can play a single note on the piano, but seeing as my granny left hers to my mum, she wouldn't dare get rid of it.”

“Well, I’d like to have a go at that piano when we’re there, so I highly approve of her holding onto it,” Sirius puts in.

“I’m sure she’d love the voucher,” Remus says of it, handing the joint back to him. "She wanted it passed down to me, but I’ve been trying to tell her for a while now that I wouldn’t mind one bit if they sold some of it off; really, what am I going to do with two acres of land?”

“Good point,” Sirius offers. “How much are they putting up?”

"I know they’re keeping the field behind the house, plenty of the woods behind that, and the section of waterfront we’ve further got down that way," Remus passes him, tilting his head evenly, "but that's about it, so it'll be a hefty chunk that goes."

“Smart thinking, though,” Sirius maintains. “They could make a killing off of it.”

Remus nods emphatically around another haul. “Well, exactly,” he echoes, letting it out. “If it means they’ll be a lot more comfortable than they've been in years, more power to them; just knowing the house and the land they will be keeping is going to be left in my name is more than enough for me, but nevertheless, she seems to have managed to shake her reservations on it because the for-sale signs went up earlier this week and it’s officially official.”

“Well, look at that,” Sirius chimes, rather fond of this news.

Remus offers him a sheepish little smile to go along with the joint. “Sort of makes me feel even that much more guilty for dodging her calls all week,” he gives up rather blandly.

Sirius hesitates before taking the joint from him. “You tell her anything yet?” he bids, knowing the answer already.

The plain frown Remus gives him only confirms his suspicions and Sirius licks the pad of his right thumb, wetting the paper around the cherry of the joint to keep it running longer and keeping his eyes trained sidelong on him. “I just,” Remus starts, lifting his shoulders deftly with it, “really want to have a handle on it before I go giving her bad news like this and I don’t know when that’s going to be, but I figure once I've gone to the appointment, I'll have a more than just the bad news to give them; I'll have sought help and hopefully, even have some viable solutions to point to along with it.”

Sirius nods, waiting in case Remus isn’t quite finished yet, and it doesn’t look like it judging by the way his eyebrows are knitted together, suggesting more words are coming together in that big, complicated brain of his. “I know it seems like I’m lying to her,” he keeps on, his eyes trained out over the railing of the perch, his right hand in his lap, his left arm draped over the back of the chair so he can tease at Sirius’s hair with his fingers, “but I know exactly how she’ll react, I know how my dad will react to her reaction, and if I’m going to tell them, I’d rather have good news to balance it out; be it that the appointment goes well or the shrooms do their thing to help me out, then I’d at least have something good to soften the blow, and maybe that has to wait until this whole situation looks a lot more livable.”

The word choice in picking 'liveable' of all things tightens a string in Sirius’s chest even when he knows deep down what it means within the context; he still has to take one long, long, very long haul off of the joint to power through that awful feeling in his gut. “OK,” he says, when he can.

Remus’s gaze is back on Sirius’s in a quick beat. “With what you know about my mum and how she can be,” he starts, his left hand teasing at Sirius’s hair, “just imagine, for even a moment, her in the room with us last night and how badly that would’ve gone over.”

Now, that is some serious, vivid imagery. “It’d have been like a helicopter was in there with us,” Sirius surmises.

“Oh, there’s no doubt in my mind,” Remus says candidly. “And since I could barely talk, you’d have had to be the one repeatedly saying something like, 'there’s nothing else we can do until it’s over, Hope,’ and I think she’d actually just disappear through the floor in an instant, hearing that.”

“If she didn’t, I’d have to tell her that keeping you from ripping your skin apart is just one of the many colourful parts of the process,” Sirius tacks on, lifting the joint to him. “It’d be a fucking nightmare.”

“And that’s just if she was there for one,” Remus tacks on, taking it back from him for a new pull. “If I’m here and she’s over there knowing I have these things, she’ll chew every single fingernail down to the quick, ring every single night, and do nothing other than worry about me.”

Sirius turns his head and presses his lips to the side of Remus’s chest since it's closest. “Alright,” he gives him, straightening up in their shared seat and patting Remus’s left knee once. "Fair enough, boy."

“That doesn’t mean I’m not going to tell her,” Remus assures, tucking a lock behind Sirius’s left ear. “I just want to control the way she finds out to the best of my ability because that would affect how my dad finds out and I know how manipulative that sounds — I don’t need to hear it, I know it already, but she cannot handle this right now and frankly, neither can my dad, not when things have finally looking up for them and have actually stayed that way; I don't want to be the reason they fall back into overwhelming stress.”

Sirius puts out a tight laugh that sort of hurts coming out, and that laugh looks to send Remus right into a reel. “I wasn’t going to call it that,” he says thickly, lifting his shoulders. “I mean, yeah, it is a little manipulative, but I’ve been that, too; did it with you today, actually.”

Remus pauses mid-way through the haul he went for and blinks three times in succession before the space between his eyebrows creases. “My guy didn’t come through for me like I was sure he was going to," Sirius elaborates. "I found out right before I left, you saw me react, and I had every chance to just say that to you, but I didn’t."

Remus is certainly looking at him through some fiercely lidded eyes, but that could have something to do with the pot, in fairness. He slowly puts his haul out to the left of them, shooting it in a stream before the wind takes it away. “OK, I know you said a lot at once when you got in, but I'm certain you said the shrooms were coming,” he maintains, and never mind, the lidded eyes may have just as much to do with plain bewilderment. “I’m at least ninety-six percent sure I heard that.”

“No, you heard right,” Sirius affirms. “Peter got them for you, turns out; I mean, I helped in that I provided context, but I can admit it was half if not more his doing.”

Remus puts out a quick hybrid of a breath and a laugh, and then he’s really more of a human squint than he is a regular presenting human. “Wait, what?”

“Yeah, well, when my plan fell through, I stormed back to the flat and he was just there chilling on the couch, nothing new there, really, but we got to talking about the steam noticeably coming out my ears, as one does, then one thing led to another and he checked with his guy for some direction and got us results,” Sirius gives him.

Remus gives out another few, breathy gusts of laughter through his nose. “He didn’t mention that once while on the phone with me,” he mentions. “That little sneak.”

“Oh, no, he wouldn’t have,” Sirius says knowingly. “We were still waiting on confirmation right about then and I’d already stressed through the tales of my grievances that I wasn’t about to let you know about the bumps in the road, if you will, but, all’s well: shrooms are coming and I’ve a new dealer.”

Remus puts out an incredulous breath. “I wouldn’t have minded being in the loop on that one,” he mentions.

“In theory, sure, but not in practice, Remus,” Sirius puts it. “It would have hurt, having another door close on you so soon, so I said the schedule thing which was technically true; I am on with David every Saturday from here on out and I sure am livid about it, but that wasn’t it; I'd just gotten the rug pulled out from under me and couldn’t let it come out from under you yet.”

Remus looks at him with a half-frown. “Sirius,” he says, nice and quiet.

Sirius lifts his shoulders impishly. “I didn’t want you to know that the thing I promised to get you was falling through my fingers, and I didn’t even want to suggest the idea that I was even having trouble with it so I could come up with a backup plan first, so let's call it a—” he pauses, putting out a thoughtful breath, “—standard manipulation tactic, since you’re so familiar.”

"Oh, my God," Remus puts out, jabbing him for that one, though there isn’t much fervour in that or his tone.

“Well, Remus, I wanted to bring you light,” Sirius maintains, fluttering his lashes a bit. “No worse for wear, are you? Either way, shrooms are coming, I didn’t want to have to break the bad news to you, so I waited until I had good news to share; do you smell what I’m stepping in here?”

Remus puts his lips into a firm line, but a smile peeks through despite the effort taken not to let it. “Pungently,” he allows, tipping his head to the left, “only, I do think the news of shrooms maybe being a little tougher to round up than you initially thought is a tad different than, say, the news of life-altering headaches plaguing my parent's only kid.”

“Absolutely,” Sirius allows. “Quite a bit more severe than my debacle, so the point is, I can't lecture you about transparency here, can I?”

“Well, you could,” Remus offers plainly, passing the joint back to him. “It just might be bad form if you tried.”

“Can’t have that,” Sirius says of it, keeping the joint in his hand for now. “Remus, you’re the boss: you’ve been it from day one and it’s your call when you want to fill her in, yeah?”

Remus searches him a little before Sirius feels the hand in his hair gently nudge his head around to face his properly, and then, he's using his newly freed hand to hold Sirius’s chin in place as he kisses him softly, unhurriedly, like they’ve all the time in the world for Remus to thank him properly, and Lord, is he doing that exceptionally well.

So well even, that Sirius definitely chases after Remus’s lips as he pulls back. “Does it get hard?” he asks.

“Every day,” Sirius replies.

“Not your dick,” Remus denies, eyeing him pointedly. “I meant, being fucking perfect all the time.”

Sirius sends him a pfft that echoes off the building. “Well, that mix-up was all on you,” he returns. “And it comes with a lot of trial and error, actually.”

“You make it look easy,” Remus returns, and Sirius smiles to himself as pulls on the joint, thinking nobody, nobody, makes him feel quite this good without even trying.

Remus blinks down between them after Sirius’s mobile chimes in his left trouser pocket, and Sirius exhales a cloud as he reaches with his free hand to fish it out, blinking down at his screen as he pulls up the text waiting for him. “D’aww,” he puts out, smiling down at it. “Lily sent a link to the playlist.”

Remus perks. “Oh, I can't believe I—" he starts, cutting off with a gesture to his head which is likely quite hazy now. "How’d it go?”

“Just lovely,” Sirius forwards. “We only learned the three and a half routines out of the four we were going to do today: there’s sixteen in total, but we're breaking them into fours so we don't go insane; got those first few down pretty well, then I had to bolt before we finished out that last one so I’m going to head there a little earlier than planned tomorrow so James and I can iron the kinks out before we learn the next batch.”

Remus blinks intently. "What about the other eight?" he raises.

Sirius waves him off with an easy hum, taking another quick pull off the joint and letting it out before elaborating. "We're figuring that out, but we'll squeeze those in somewhere this week, I'm not worried," he maintains, eyes on his screen as he clicks to open up the list.

"Sacre bleu," Remus puts out, and Sirius aims a wan smile at him as he waits for the playlist to load.

Sirius keeps control of how much of the list he can see and scrolls to the fourth tune on the list, thinking he'd like to leave the rest of the picks as a surprise for each practice session. He lifts his gaze to Remus again, taking on a true beam. “Want to know what our opening number is?” he asks to entice.

“Absolutely,” Remus says at once.

Sirius presses his thumb over the first track, sparking 'Get Ready for This' to life, and smirks as Remus reels at the admittedly bracing opening drone that sounds out around them. “Wait for it; if you don’t immediately recognize it after it starts, I’ll take your Gay Card back.”

Remus has just enough time to snort at the claim before the initial hook to the infamous cheerleading anthem starts up and there, he puffs out a loud breath in reply, and good, he can keep his Gay Card, then. “This is going to be so much, isn’t it,” he puts up, cracking a grin now, too.

“Yes, yes it is,” Sirius slips him, shoulder shimmying lightly along with it while his grin remains unchanged.

Remus watches him amusedly for four or six beats longer before reaching up and plucking the mobile out of Sirius’s hands. He scrolls through the list, quite intrigued now, and Sirius knows for a fact that Remus must be certifiably blazed at this point if he hasn't even put the song on pause while he thumbs through it. "Just don't tell me what any of them are past song four," Sirius conditions. "I want to be happily surprised each time."

Remus nods to grant him that and Sirius takes another pull off the joint before reaching over and hovering it just in front of Remus, who leans in absently to pull off of it as studies the list. Sirius watches him put his haul out to the right of them as scrolls, sneaks another quick haul before he thinks he’s had enough for now, and holds up the roach. “Want the lasts?” he raises.

Remus flickers his gaze over at him for a moment. “No, save it,” he returns, waving him off.

Sirius does as bid, reaching up behind him to stick it in the ashtray on the window ledge, snags the half-filled pack of cigarettes to the left of it, and pulls it down to him, plucking one out to light. He settles in again once it’s lit, perching his left elbow on the arm of the chair and propping his head up against his hand, taking a drag off of it as he watches Remus smirk at his screen.

“Thoughts?” he checks. "Vague ones, of course."

"Did you help make this list?" Remus checks.

"I did not," Sirius serves him.

“Well, this might just be the gayest collection of tunes I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing.”

“It's the time of the season,” Sirius chimes, lifting a pair of easy hands.

“Still, kudos are in order,” Remus says of it. "This list had to have been made with you in mind."

Whether it’s that thing called a conscience or an after-effect of the fat blunt the two of them just shared, despite knowing that's a joke in the purest form, Sirius battles with himself for the next ten or twelve seconds, going back and forth on whether now is really the time, but he gets a strong sense that the longer he doesn’t address it, the more it could turn into a potential issue when Remus does hear about it, which he will, and furthermore, with Remus being as blitzed as he is, he has to wonder if this may actually be the perfect scenario to mention it.

Sirius smiles absently as Remus pauses the tune in its tracks and hands his mobile back to him, appearing to be finished with investigating the playlist and promptly separating Sirius from the cigarette in his right hand. “Thief,” he calls him, without any real amount of fervour.

Remus smiles around a haul, lifting his eyebrows as he lets it out, and that settles it; if a list were to be made of the best times to give potentially off-putting news, he’ll be in no better a mood than he is just now, apart from straight after sex, that is.

Sirius drops his left hand from the side of his head, uses it to hoist himself up a bit in the seat, and promptly turns his knees toward Remus so they're effectively attached to his left thigh now, garnering Remus to eye the position switch and holds the cigarette out to him in reply. “Oh, no,” Sirius halts him. “Well, yeah, actually—” he goes ahead and takes it, having himself a quick pull on it before continuing, “—so, I’ve been made rather aware of a possibly nefarious situation and I just want your take on it, if you’re up for that.”

Remus searches him, nodding once. “Work-related?” he guesses.

“No, nothing to do with it,” Sirius replies. “And I should mention here that I have no proof of this myself; it’s all hearsay at this point, so let’s try to remember that throughout.”

“OK,” Remus says slowly, looking quite piqued.

Sirius goes for another quick one while he's got the joint on hand. “So, earlier," he starts, pausing to let his haul go, "when Lily first pitched the idea of us rejoining to Zumba Boy, she said there was a particularly interesting expression that popped onto his face."

“As in, a bad one?” Remus checks.

Sirius hums to that. “No, not necessarily,” he amends. “Titillated, perhaps?”

Alright, choosing to do this now might actually be a fine idea if Remus’s smirk is anything to go by. “He looked titillated about it?” he repeats.

“Allegedly,” Sirius highlights. “And part of me is willing to believe Lily’s full of shit, but James is on her side for this one and seemed to think he wasn’t particularly titillated by the idea of him rejoining so much as he was about me coming back, but he also wasn’t there for this moment Lily shared with Andrew so he doesn’t have a leg to stand on, does he? Just her word for it.”

“I could believe it, though,” Remus offers, and Sirius wets his lower lip, thinking of what he could possibly say next, but the boy spares him the effort. “Have you seen yourself?”

Sirius huffs, though he can’t help the tug up on his mouth one bit. “Well, thank you,” he forwards him, “but I don’t even know if she did see it or not.”

Remus tips his head, considering it. “She is pretty good at that sort of thing,” he trades him.

“At what?” Sirius clarifies.

“Reading an expression and deeming it quite telling,” Remus offers, a smile tugging at his lips. “She’s done it with me; about you, actually.”

Sirius peers at him intensely. “Tell.”

Remus smirks, sighing once. “It was back on Halloween,” he prefaces, pausing as Sirius makes a charmed noise in his throat.

“Love it already,” he explains of himself.

Remus's eyebrows raise a smidge, a pointed smile etched on his lips and seemingly quite comfortable where it is. “I bumped into her on the way to yours, she invited me to get the samosas with her, and this bloke called while we were waiting for the order; Sirius, heard of him?”

“What kind of a name is that?” Sirius raises, pulling a chesty laugh out of Remus.

“He rings me up while we're waiting for the food and by then, I’d been harbouring something fierce for the lad for a few horny weeks there as is, so his name lighting up on my screen was such a promising little feeling for me already," Remus divulges. "I answer, he starts telling me that he found a wig that would go perfectly with my costume, nothing particularly — titillating, we’ll call it?”

“Listen, I only did that so I could find out when you’d be coming over,” Sirius puts up, finding the distinction necessary to make here. "I needed a good segue."

“Well, funnily enough, I was quite taken by the fact that you'd even asked when I’d be arriving; had the dopiest smile on this face, let me tell you that,” Remus maintains, pointing up at it, and Sirius takes in an easy breath, a man lost to this one's every whim. “Alas, I can never leave people waiting on me so I had to cut the call short, but Lily caught that smile I had on at the end there, thought I must've been speaking to someone I'd been seeing or about to start seeing at the very least with the way she shimmied her shoulders as she asked who I'd been talking to, and well, you know the rest.”

“Un-fucking-fortunately,” Sirius mentions, sighing real big. “I wanted to fuck you so hard that night.”

“Well, same here, Sirius, but that’s not really my point,” Remus reiterates. “Lily’s good at picking out a funny look, is all.”

“Grand,” Sirius calls it, beaming wide for effect.

“Did you really not see this coming?” Remus raises, shaking his head at him a bit. “It's not like you two end off horribly, at least from what I know.”

“No, it wasn’t even an issue,” Sirius relays. “I just wanted my Sundays back and the class took up part of my me-day; he understood that and then we just kind of, lost track after a while there.”

“Right, well, if it didn't end terribly, I'd wonder why he wouldn’t glow at the thought of you coming back," Remus presses on. "I know I would, and I’m not even him.”

“No, I know that,” Sirius says outright. "That’s sort of my point; no one else has been you.”

Remus takes his gaze off him and puts it out over the railing of the perch. “So, why tell me, then?” he raises, putting his gaze back on him again. “There’s nothing on your end if that dumpster comparison says anything about it and that certainly put things into perspective for me, so what's the issue? Are you worried he’ll try something?”

Sirius puts out a bland pfft, making a face. “No, I just figured he’d have fucked off with someone else by now, not get starry eyes at the mere mention of my return," he says of it.

Remus chews on his lower lip a bit. “What do you want to do, then?” he raises, a smirk coming out through his nose in three fast gusts. “Do you want to walk in there fist-first and tell him he’ll get none of that glorious arse again because you’re taken, or would you rather be yourself and play it by ear?”

Sirius can’t help finding Remus funny even now, but he’s a riot when he’s sober and a worse one when he’s put a blunt away; he simply can't fend off his effect. “I don’t want to even have to address it at all, but Lily thinks I need to walk in there and ‘nip it in the bud sooner than later, Sirius,’” he mimics, a pitch-perfect imitation of Lily’s typical, mothering cadence, and he knows it came out perfect because even Remus can’t pretend he didn’t find it funny; his face says it all. “James didn't say it quite like that, but he thinks I should, too, and you know what? I don’t appreciate that they're putting the responsibility all on me, and I really don’t appreciate them acting like I’ll let it go on just to enjoy the perks of a chase: I know what I was like, I do know that, but how hard do I have to work to cover up the holes I made along the way, hm? It isn’t fair that I just get to keep getting called a hoe in all these other ways because I passed it around along the way and liked the attention I got; I’m still a fucking person, I deserve respect.”

“Yeah,” Remus nods, speaking quietly. “Yeah, you do.”

Sirius looks at him sidelong, takes a long pull off his smoke, and squints at him as he exhales. “How badly are you itching to say you don’t believe they meant it like that?” he raises.

Remus lifts his shoulders evenly. “Well, I’m sure they didn’t, but you’re allowed to be annoyed by it,” he offers simply. Sirius takes another pull off his cigarette, training a blank look out over the street ahead of them. “Well, don’t look so surprised.”

Sirius smirks, putting his gaze back on Remus as he lets his haul out. “I just," he starts, lifting and dropping his shoulders in a quick beat, "usually expect to get something reasonable told to me, and then I walk away from it with the reluctant understanding that I’ve got to adjust my petty thinking.”

“Well, you know what, you’ve been incredible lately so you can just be as petty as you like about this for now,” Remus grants him. “I will probably steer this somewhere within reason eventually because that’s just how I am, but for right now, you’ve the floor to be petty, as far as I'm concerned.”

Sirius’s face feels hotter than it usually does. “It just feels like no matter how much time passes, how much I feel like I’ve grown, I’m never going to shake how they see me,” he puts it, his gaze on the filter of his cigarette. “Deep down, I know they just really, really, almost distressingly want nothing to wedge its way between us, but could I get a little more credit around here?”

Sirius huffs after spewing all that, automatically leans into the hand rubbing circles over his back, and sighs listlessly. “It just made me feel so fucking young,” he keeps on, quietly, looking up as he registers Remus’s hand has stopped and is just sitting still on Sirius’s back. “I know that sounds—”

“No,” Remus cuts in. “No, I get that completely.”

And there, he sees Remus’s eyes are damn near dinner plates even with all that haze behind them and Sirius doesn’t dare speak in case it’ll drive him off course. “I mean, not from the same situation obviously, but I’ve felt like that,” he offers him, and Sirius can feel him fiddling with a cuticle behind his back. “It’s almost like you and your sensibilities keep on growing, but can’t quite shake the image they had of you from a time you’d never go back to for a second if given the chance.”

Sirius pulls his gaze off Remus, puts it out ahead of them again, and sits with that until he feels a burn on his right forefinger and drops his cigarette altogether. He pushes his knees apart to reach for it, but the tiny, cylindrical stick has other plans and promptly rolls off of the perch and out of sight. “Well, bye, then,” Sirius says to it, looking sidelong as Remus breaks into a serious case of the giggles. “Shit, you really blew my mind there for a second.”

Remus sniffs anew, straightens up, and reaches to wipe at his eyes with his right forefinger. “Glad to see I’m still doing that this far in,” he maintains, taking his left arm back and sticking the both of his hands between his knees warmly.

“Oh, I don’t imagine that’s going anywhere anytime soon,” Sirius offers knowingly.

Remus breathes in, offers him a half-smile, and gives in to a little more lip-tugging before he speaks again. “Do you want some advice?” he raises, and Sirius nods emphatically. “I suggest you focus on why you’re there when you’re in class, have a good time, and forget about boys completely if you can.”

“It’s not even that hard to do, honestly,” Sirius returns. “I’ve got the music in me; dicks are the furthest thing from my mind.”

“Well, then keep doing what you’re doing,” Remus says of it. “And if something comes up that needs addressing, you can handle it.”

“Lily’s so worried about his feelings in all this, too,” Sirius puts out, pettily for certain.

“Well, I love her, but boo to that,” Remus returns. “There’s a fine line between you going in there and wiggling your arse in front of him to tease and you rejoining the fun little troupe you used to be a part of for recreational purposes that also just happens to include a lot of moving around in outfits you're bound to look fit as hell in; it’s not a crime if you just wanted to let it lay.”

Sirius breathes in full, stretching his neck out. “You’re being incredibly cool about this," he forwards him, knocking Remus's left shoulder with his right one.

Remus lifts his hands, giving an even gesture. “Again, I think if you truly wanted to run off with him for another go, you’d have compared the idea of it to something a bit more enticing than sifting through the dumpster down the street,” he trades him.

Sirius smirks, feeling a lick of pride up his spine at Remus sorting this out well. “I liked that one, too,” he slips him. “Felt just vivid enough for you to hear that I’ve been there, done that, not really looking to repeat it.”

Remus puts his hands back between his knees, and there, Sirius wonders if that isn’t a good sign, and then, Remus looks at him and it’s evident it isn’t. “We should probably talk about what the rules are if you did meet somebody.”

And the pride's gone. “I did,” Sirius responds after a blink. “I met someone.”

Remus breathes in through his nose, leaning his head to the side with an imploring look. “I mean someone else,” he says gently. “You’ve been rather blasé about most of your previous encounters which is refreshing, if a bit difficult to comprehend—”

“It shouldn't be that difficult,” Sirius puts in, and it isn’t; no one’s pulled him forward and upward at once the way Remus has. “They haven’t held a candle to you—”

“Please just let me finish?” Remus bids. “I can't think straight when you're throwing charming anecdotes about."

"I'm not even trying to be charming," Sirius insists.

"Then that's even worse," Remus says of it, breathing in, starting again. "Somewhere down the line, you might find yourself tempted by—”

“Remus,” Sirius says, lifting his hands, frustration lining his vocal cords, “where is even some of the credit you just heard me call for?”

“It’s not a reflection on you,” Remus insists. “We’re just people, aren’t we? We can’t control how we feel or when we're going to feel it, and I am leaving soon; wouldn’t it be better if we discussed it beforehand?”

“Well, first of all, we’ve an entire summer before we'd even need to be thinking about that,” Sirius returns. “And second, I’m not going to go fuck some twink the second your train pulls out of the station.”

Remus puts out a quiet sigh. “I didn’t say you would.”

“OK, but you meant a week later, right?” Sirius returns. “I waited how long for you, again? I could've found a lanky bloke with impeccable curls and buried it in him, but did I do that? No, because I knew in my bones he wouldn’t be you and that wouldn't have been enough.”

Remus lifts his hands and pulls them over his face slowly. “Sirius, this conversation isn’t easy for me either,” he instils. “I'd like to never have to have it, but you don’t know who you’re going to meet whether I’m there or here, and as someone who has found out about things like this after the fact, many times—”

“I’m not OK with you comparing me to him,” Sirius cuts in. "I’m just not."

Remus lifts his hands haltingly, not speaking a word more until Sirius breathes out. “I’m not trying to do that,” he insists. “There are a lot of differences between you two, but he's it, he's my only experience besides you, and we were never actually together even when I was certain we were, so I don’t get to call it cheating, an open relationship, anything; we were fuck buddies, that’s it, and it took me a long time to accept that that was all it was for him, and even while I know that now, I still remember how horrible it felt to find out afterward, over and over again, whether we had a label on us or not.”

Sirius hasn’t got anything ready to follow that, merely putting out a long breath through his nose. “I’m not saying that I think you’re more likely to,” Remus reiterates, using Sirius's chosen silence. “I'm not calling you a hoe, a tease, nothing: I’m saying that, someday, if you get the urge to break free, explore, act on an attraction you can’t help feeling, I want to know; I just want you to tell me if you think you’re starting to wander."

Sirius nods once. “OK,” he offers, watching Remus look left, right, and back to him before it sinks in that he's waiting on something more like a quote. “I’ll tell you.”

“Thank you,” Remus returns. "I don’t want to find out about it afterward.”

Sirius nods again, sturdy as he can make it. "Only, you gotta agree to that, too,” he raises. "Fair's fair."

Remus huffs, a smile peeking through. “I can’t see that happening.”

“Same here,” Sirius offers, smiling while he keeps his tone unrelenting, “but you had me agree to something I know I'm not going to do, so: pony up, bitch.”

Remus shakes his head, looking away from him with a reluctant smile on. “I’ll tell you if I ever start to wander.”

“Deal,” Sirius cements, budging Remus’s shoulder with his own.

 

Sirius wakes up suddenly one morning later that week — Saturday, he'll realize when he's finished with his bout of confusion, but in his defense, it's a confusing sight to wake to: a quiet room, light strewing in from the edges of Remus's blinds suggesting morning has come and made itself comfortable, and Remus, sitting up rod-still in bed.

Sirius's first assumption is as much a knee-jerk as it is vivid — there's a ghost in the room and Remus has spotted it. For a brief moment, Sirius wants to kick at Remus for giving away their vulnerable positions like this, but that urge peters off as quick as it came after it dawns on him that Remus has his mobile lit up in his lap, and suddenly the potential for a possibly vengeful ghost in the room with them vanishes.

Sirius does move his left leg under the sheet over them to nudge Remus. "Wassit?" he tries blearily, but Lord, does it feel early.

"Lily texted," he supplies, his own voice wrought with sleep. "Just says, 'RemusRemusRemus.'"

Sirius rubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms. "But do you think she knows your name?"

He hears Remus smirk before the mobile rings loudly, jerking the both of them. Sirius remains on his back as it sure isn't his mobile ringing away at arse-early in the morning, while Remus scoots sideways off of the bed quickly with it in hand and walks around the end of the bed, swiping his thumb over the screen as he makes for the doorway.

"Hi, one sec," he bids, booking it out of the room.

Sirius blinks after Remus, sending a bemused face to the back of his head and thinking it a bit moot to leave the room for the call when he's already quite awake, but Remus is going to do what Remus is going to do, and at the moment, that means he's going to pace back and forth in his kitchen alcove, but at least he left the bedroom door open so Sirius can watch the show from here.

He gives into a stretch, takes his eyes off Remus's pacing for a moment, and reaches to check his own mobile for a sense of the time, date, year that it is, blinking down at his screen with the distant but incredulous understanding that it's 9:18 in the fucking morning. He cannot, for the life of him, figure out what would possess Lily to ring at such an offensive time, but if he's to make a guess, the volume and vigour of Remus's boisterous 'what?' that echoes back from the kitchen suggests it's got to be something big.

"You're pulling my leg," Remus says decidedly, and alright, fuck this, Sirius needs some context.

He lifts off of his back to sit up, pulling his legs in to sit cross-legged under the covers, and waits with his eyes trained on Remus wandering back and forth in his kitchen. if he listens carefully, he can hear Lily trilling a mile a minute on the other end of the line, but that's not all too helpful and Remus must sense he's looking for he meets his eye, holds up his free forefinger in a gesture to sit tight, and Sirius doesn't even mind being told to kindly sit tight when the bright grin Remus sends with the request makes tugging on a bit of patience easy as pie.

"Of course," Remus offers, nodding intensely, which is just a treat to get to witness really. "Yeah, see you then — thank you so much, hey?"

Sirius only has to wait seconds more for Remus to officially end the call, wherein he deposits his mobile on the island on the way back to the room and takes to a sudden sprint from halfway there, launching himself onto the bed in front of Sirius in mere seconds. "French William wants me," he says, bouncing on his knees.

Sirius grabs out for him with his right hand, not intending to stop the bouncing when that's a fine sight indeed, but he's got a few questions that need answers. "Who the fuck," he starts, raising his right hand with it, "is French William and what does he want you for exactly?"

Remus shoots him a double-blink and pauses the bouncing unfortunately, but he does promptly double over from a powerful laugh and that's a fine direction to have gone in. "Nothing sexual," he maintains. "He's the manager of one of the shops we tracked down, he just got back to me — less than five minutes ago."

Sirius springs to life with newfound clarity, swivelling his legs around under the sheet to mirror Remus. "What'd he say, what'd he say?" he bids, bouncing on his own knees.

"He wrote that he has an opening for the fall — back to school and such, but he wants a phone interview," Remus attests. "With me."

Sirius tries with all his might not to laugh at the distinction put in there. "Look at you, hustling," he offers instead, popping Remus lightly in the gut.

Remus blocks it with his left hand and aims a sucker punch at Sirius's gut in retaliation, but his fist never makes it to Sirius's skin. "At least, that's what Lily read after she pasted it into Translate given that her French is a little rusty," he adds evenly.

Sirius snorts, pushing a fair chunk of hair out of his face. "Non-existent, you mean."

"Sure," Remus allows, waving it off.

"No, really; I think the only French that's sunk in for her is 'kiki, so-so, oui oui, non non,' he offers, and while Remus certainly shoulder bobs a bit along with it, he does not correct him on that one and that's just as important as the bobbing. "When's the interview?"

"He said to ring his store once I'm there," Remus offers. "She said he left the number in the reply so I'm going to go in a little earlier and get that taken care of before my shift starts."

"How cool is that?" Sirius raises, a crooked smile poking at his lips.

Remus shakes his head at him. "Can you believe it?"

"That he wants you?" Sirius clarifies. "Not difficult to imagine, personally."

"Well, it's just so much sooner than I thought I'd hear back," Remus presses.

Sirius breathes in as he considers it. "Been over a week since you sent the messages out, no?" he puts up. "That's plenty of time for him to have been dazzled by your resume."

Remus hums to deny. "My resume isn't that dazzling."

Sirius gives him a plain look. "Boy, you've more experience than I fucking do," he returns. "You've literally been working some form of retail for years, been with the company a summer short of a year; that's some razzle-dazzle right there."

Remus pushes a measured breath through his nose, giving in to an even nod. "Alright," he allows for. "Maybe that did help, but we're doing this so far in advance, aren't we?"

Sirius narrows his eyes a smidge, looks him over, and deduces pretty quickly that they must be cycling through every counterpoint Remus can come up with live and that maybe, just settling in for a game of tennis is the only action he can take that won't get him in trouble here. "Maybe you just have a real go-getter on your hands," he raises, racketing the ball over the net to him.

Remus nods to that. "I think I might if he's already thinking about the fall in June," he trades him.

"Well, that, I think you can identify with on a near-spiritual level," Sirius serves him.

Remus huffs, but it's good-natured. "Still," he says, playing with the cuticle on his left ring finger, "I thought that if I was going to hear back from one of them, it wouldn't be any time soon and I certainly wouldn't have pegged my first choice as the one to reply back."

Sirius tilts his head a little to the right. "Why was he your first?" he bids, quite piqued.

"It's the closest shop to my faculty building," Remus offers, his lips twitching a bit. "It wasn't that deep a reason."

"Practical lad, you," Sirius trades him.

Remus bobs his head back and forth, sitting with the compliment for slivers of a second before he can't any longer. "Well, it would only count as good planning if I wrangle a room somewhere nearby as well," he offers. "Otherwise, I'll really only have a workplace close to school and end up travelling a fair distance to get to and from both."

Sirius takes in a quiet breath. "M'kay, fair," he lets him have. "That would be shit, yeah; living halfway across the city from both work and school, not saying it wouldn't be, but does today have to be the day for this?"

Remus shrugs his shoulders once in reply, though his fiddling continues. "I'm going to have to start figuring out a place to stay."

"Mhm, and I want you to have a roof, too, believe me," Sirius tacks on. "I'm just asking; does today have to be the day for this?"

Remus fixes him with a plain enough stare that Sirius is pretty sure he's in some kind of trouble, but the breath Remus lets out from there is born out of a white flag. "No, it doesn't," he concedes. "First things first."

"Exactement," Sirius puts out, grinning big, but Remus is still fiddling with the same cuticle and that calls Sirius to reach up in between them, separating Remus's hands slowly. "We've all summer to find a room, and remember, even if we don't need Andromeda to help find you work and it's starting to look like we may not, she still knows a shitload of people over there and could easily put the word out for you, see if someone she knows or someone they know is looking to rent a room."

Remus's eyes light up over that, thankfully. "Oh, that was a good one."

Sirius's lips quirk, feeling warm in his belly. "First things first," he echoes, squeezing Remus's hands. "I want to see some of that excitement back."

"I can't get too excited yet," Remus replies, making a face.

"Why not?" Sirius asks, going for an exaggerated whisper.

It might not have been what Remus wanted to hear for he gets a rather pointed look for it. "I can't—"

Sirius shoots a sigh through his nose. "Remus, you literally sprinted in here and used the bed as your personal bouncy castle in celebration, so it's a little late to back out of that now," he says plainly. "I was there, saw the whole thing, and now, thanks to your oopsie, I'm going to have to tell the universe about this so it can act accordingly and smite you for getting excited about a job prospect."

Remus settles on a face that's entirely too sheepish for the occasion. "I'm fucking with you," Sirius sends him, shaking Remus's hands. "Have you met me? I'm kidding, bounce all you like."

"You're sort of right, though," Remus offers circumstantially. "I got ahead of myself, bouncing."

"That was the best thing I've seen all week," Sirius puts down. "And that includes James popping the package of vanilla bean powder and exploding it all over himself."

"Oh, well, now you're just a liar," Remus returns plainly, but there's that lopsided smile tugging at the right corner of his lips. "His glasses were covered in it."

"I know, I was there," Sirius echoes, having parroted the tale to Remus via text seconds after it happened. "Your bouncing still wins over that and it's not too early to celebrate; d'you know why?"

Remus sighs. "I really don't."

Sirius squeezes his hands again. "Because it'll be over the phone and that'll take some of the pressure off, I just know it," he maintains. "You're just going to go in there, make the call, sell yourself well, do the whole thing in French so he'll be incredibly impressed by your skills, and he might even be a bit charmed by your accent which can only help—"

Remus's expression goes plain. "What's wrong with my accent?" he goads, putting his head on quite the tilt.

"Nothing wrong with it, it's just adorably Anglo," Sirius describes. "Endearing, even, since you speak the language well but can't roll your R's to save your life, and the French do love it when they hear someone from the Isles even try their hand at a fully French conversation; gets them rock hard."

Remus reels a bit. "That went somewhere I didn't see coming."

"Point is, you've got this," Sirius reiterates, biting back a smile. "If nothing else, keep the French thing and go in there pretending it's a regular conversation: you've been through this before, he's not going to ask you how astrophysics works, he's going to ask a bit about you, your availabilities, maybe a bit about what you're studying since that's the whole reason you'll be in town; you could do this in your sleep—"

Sirius trails off as Remus pulls his face into a grimace. "He might be looking for someone who can take on more hours than I can," he raises. "He mentioned twenty-five or more in the reply."

"Alright, yeah," Sirius allows, nodding once. "He could pick someone else on that note and then it'll be nobody's fault and we'll keep looking, but I do think I put up some solid points just now that you're effectively tossing out the window to focus on the next one thing that could not work out in all of it."

Remus presses his mouth into a firm line, pushes a long breath out through his nose, and squeezes the hands still easily clasped around his own. "I did do that, I'm sorry."

Sirius shakes his head once. "I just want you to hear me, that's it," he instils. "And give yourself a little credit, too; you blew your interview with Lily out of the water and you didn't even know her then, did you? You're a very striking stranger."

Remus's right brow quirks higher than his left. "Says the bloke who barely looked up when he first met me."

"Well, I'm ridiculously self-absorbed," Sirius offers easily. "That's nothing on you."

Remus smirks a laugh, leaning in to leave a kiss on Sirius's forehead. "Let's hope I can be similarly striking over the phone, then."

"That, I can attest to," Sirius says outright, but that brings a bolt of thought on. "That's the ticket; pretend you're talking to me — only, October-last-year me, not me now."

Remus shakes his head right quick, a half grimace, half-grin coming on. "Yeah, no, there's too much innuendo traded between us now to try that; he'd hang right up on me."

"Precisely," Sirius returns.

Remus pushes a long breath out. "One more thing?" he bids him.

"One more," Sirius grants.

"Should I tell him about the clusters?" Remus asks.

Sirius remains quite still. "Not in the interview," he replies.

Remus gives a faint grimace. "Isn't that a little dishonest?"

Sirius puts out a scoff. "Not when you're hustling, Remus," he insists. "You've got to get your foot in the door first."

"OK, but if I do get my foot in the door, when would be the next appropriate time to mention them?" Remus raises.

"Umm, let's go with," Sirius offers slowly, thoughtfully, "September fourth."

Remus gives him a quick, bemused blink. "Why the fourth?"

"It's after you'll already be there and settling in comfortably?" Sirius raises, lifting his shoulders for a shrug.

"Sirius, that's not OK," Remus implores.

"Who says it's not OK?" Sirius counters. "First off, by then, we'll know so much more about them than we do now, and second, you're already having smaller ones that you can work through, yes?"

Remus swallows. "Well, we never do know if I'm in for a whopper or a small one, and if I'm at work—"

"You deal with that unpredictability now, though," Sirius comes in. "Besides, I've watched you power through a small one here with my own eyes; you'll never convince me that you can't handle one of those in some other location, and I know it's tricky trying to figure out what brings on the whoppers versus the smaller ones, but we're still only two weeks into this, yeah?"

"Yeah," Remus echoes, a little pointedly.

"So by then, we will be, what, twelve weeks into the process? We'll have something a lot more concrete to work around," Sirius underlines. "And sure, you could go in there today and tack on 'oh, by the way, I've got this rare condition called cluster headaches that leaves me incapacitated — not regular headaches, they're some other kind of demon version and sometimes I can power through the mild ones and sometimes I'll be irate and inconsolable, but I don't know the whole science behind it just yet, da-da-da-da'— are you seeing my point here?"

Remus flattens his mouth into a line. "I'll spook him even trying to talk about it," he replies.

"Ding-ding," Sirius echoes, fluttering his fingers around him like they're streamers falling from the ceiling. "Don't bother about it yet, just work on making yourself sound like the best candidate; I know you already are, but a little effort to show him that wouldn't go amiss."

Remus hangs his head, giving him a sheepish smile. "Alright," he allows. "I'll leave it out."

"That's a sport," Sirius returns. "Now, it's still ass-early and you don't have to be in there for another while yet so, let's try and use this time wisely, catch a few more Z's, hm?"

Sirius shifts off of his knees and goes ahead and eases back onto the bed with Remus's hands still linked with his, hoping he'll follow him down. "I don't know if I could now," Remus admits, though he does shift closer on his knees.

"Then don't, and just lay with me," Sirius bids, letting go of Remus's hand to tap beside him on the bed. "Do you want to be the little spoon or the big one?"

Remus takes in a breath, considering it. "Big," he replies, moving for Sirius's left side.

Sirius perks, not having seen that answer coming, but it's a lovely surprise. He flashes Remus a grin before rolling over onto his right side, facing the closet and flattening out his bunched-up pillow so he can have some of it, too. Remus scoots up behind him, slips his left arm around Sirius's middle, and hoists him back into him a little, and Sirius feels they both deserve a pat on the back; Remus for the hoist and himself for proposing such a fine idea.

He doesn't get a pat precisely, but a quiet kiss pressed to his left shoulder blade is actually far better than that. "Thank you," Remus slips him, leaving the lower half of his face braced against the back of Sirius's shoulder.

Sirius turns his head a little to catch a peek of him, but he can really only see Remus's eyes above the line of his shoulder and a mop of lopsided curls above those rounded peepers. "Mhm," he hums, reaching down to the hand resting casually over his navel and swiping his thumb over the back of it.

He sets his head down again and lets his eyes fall shut after the room fills with a shared silence, feeling easy, breezy, beautiful even, and right as he's at that sweet spot between the waking world and dreamland, he notes of a rather firm appendage pressing against his back.

"You could fuck me while you're back there," he offers.

Remus drowns out a round of cough-laughing into the back of Sirius's neck. "I can't help it, you," he returns. "This is a precarious position already, and you feel really good."

"It's like I said," Sirius says airily, smiling while his eyes remain shut. "Wouldn't mind one bit."

"No, can't imagine you would," Remus gets him, a grin on as they speak, Sirius can hear it. "And there I was, thinking about how wholesome you were being."

"Mm, I don't think that's what you were thinking about, but alright," Sirius gives him wryly. "Don't know how I'm expected to remain wholesome while there's a veritable tree branch back there saying good morning to me either."

Sirius feels a breathy laugh against the back of his neck before not much else and just as he's thinking something quite similar to 'wow, alright; guess not, then,' Remus goes ahead and latches onto him at the curve of his jaw, dragging suspiciously open-mouthed kisses from there down to the left side of his collarbone.

Sirius's eyes snap open as Remus makes it to his shoulder. "Wait — yeah?"

Remus pauses long enough to speak three words. "Thinking about it." He continues right where he left off, shifting down to lay more kisses in a line between his shoulder blades, and Sirius is just left thanking his sheer lack of interest in finding a sleep shirt to wear overnight. Remus takes his arm back from around Sirius's waist and pauses again, tracing the print of a finger in a circle at the small of his back, making Sirius's skin sing. "Might take my time getting there, mind, if that's alright with you."

Sirius notes the lack of a lilt to mark it a question, lifting his hands in allowance with a breathy pfft to simply go with it; Remus can take however long he likes if he keeps doing what he's doing, no skin off Sirius's back.

On the topic of his back, it's a little difficult not to notice Remus using it to budge him off of his side and Sirius simply goes with it, shifting onto his front as Remus moves over him to leave even more kisses in a trail down his spine, and while Remus is certainly taking care not to leave a spot along that ridged line unmarked, there's a destination materializing here, Sirius can feel it in every cell in his body, and the effort it takes for him to hold back from fist-pumping the air is insurmountable.

The wait for Remus to get down there only ramps Sirius up more, has him giddily obliging as Remus nudges his legs apart with a knee without pausing his mouth at the base of his spine for even a beat. He settles down in the space afforded to him before scooting further down the bed and even through his complete elation, Sirius can't help but picture the scene from a bird's eye view and envision Remus's legs dangling off the end of the bed. He sneaks a peek over his left shoulder, checking on the state of things in case he really ought to move up the bed a bit, but Remus's legs are bent at the knee with his ankles crossed in the air behind him, and now, Sirius doesn't really know what he expected to find; Remus is a resourceful lad, makes do with what he's got.

Sirius faces forward quickly again as Remus slips the waistband of his briefs down, biting down on his lower lip in anticipation while he helps him out a bit by lifting his legs in turn as Remus inches the material down his legs. He gets rid of them from there and Sirius thinks he hears the sound of them landing somewhere off to the right, but where or what they landed on is anyone's guess and he can't really be bothered to check when Remus hitches Sirius's hips back and up; he’s got bigger things coming to him.

Sirius has just enough time to brace himself on his forearms before Remus starts in on him and even while he fucking knew he was in for a treat, there's no stopping the elated breath that comes out of him as he arches back into it and he wouldn’t want to anyway; he's a breather, always has been, always will be. There's really no exception here, his breathing hitches and pauses and starts up again from the top all while Remus fools around back there before settling on a steady rhythm that Sirius just cannot argue with. He shifts his left arm closer to the side of the bed, gripping at the edge of it with his hand while his right dances across the sheet laying close to forgotten under him, curling and uncurling his fingers around a section of it that'll give to his grip.

It takes a little while longer for him to note a particularly stirring thought; that perhaps this gift he’s been rewarded with could well be just as much for Remus's sake as his own. There’s just something to the way he’s holding Sirius’s hips, the steady yet unhurried motions he’s landed on and kept with, the tranquil note to his own breathing, and once Sirius hones in on the idea of Remus finding quite a bit of contentment here, it's really all he can think about.

Heat floods Sirius’s cheeks in record time and he can't for the life of him quit rutting his hips back against the friction, back against him, and Remus lets him keep that up for a little longer, but soon he's hunkering down with his grip over Sirius's hips, holding them steady while the calm, unhurried pace of his mouth keeps on without a hitch, and a half-gape, half-grin makes it onto Sirius's face before he unhooks his left hand from over the edge of the bed. He reaches it behind him blindly, grabbing for Remus's head and clasping at the back of it gratefully once he locates it, halfway born out of an enormous need to touch him in some form, halfway bort out of a need to reassure that this is all fine by him, but Remus must take it as some sort of frank urging for he switches up the pace the moment Sirius's fingers splay out through his curls, working a mind-numbing combo of faster, deeper, more against him that has Sirius fucking lost to it.

He presses his face down against the pillow below it, breathing harshly, his hair fanned out around his vision and making him blind to everything but Remus's fucking mouth. He keens against the bed and twists his fingers even further into Remus's curls, aiming to tug a little, warn him that if Remus wants to go at him for longer then he cannot, by any means, keep doing it like this, but Remus moves his right hand from Sirius's hip and lets his left do the work in holding him down, reaching in between Sirius's legs to work his cock in tandem with the work he's doing behind him, and fuck it, Sirius isn't about to fight it any longer; Remus is making a fucking meal out of him and frankly, he deserves this.

He's having a rough time getting clean air face-down like he is and while this sure would be a fine way to go out, the idea of suffocating before they even get around to fucking is a horrible thought; no thank you. He flips his head up to get a breath of fresh air going, trilling words out at a mile a second, and it's not the easiest feat to decipher what exactly he's uttering, but considering Remus's reaction, it has to be all in French, no question; he keens against him, wringing Sirius's cock out while the vibrations of his voice practically echo up through Sirius, and, yes, the bed's moving because of his complete inability to keep his hips still, but that can easily be just as much credited to Remus back behind him rutting his own hips against the mattress and that's just too much, it's officially all too—

Sirius whinges hard enough that it clips his throat on the way out, reaching his right hand down underneath him to still Remus's busy hand at once and skirts his left one over Remus's head to tap the fuck out, but it's the fact that it takes Remus some real-time seconds to even register the tapping before he inches away from him that's nearly enough to make Sirius come right then and there.

He breathes in, holds it for five, lets it out for five more. “Oh, that was so close,” he pushes out, breathless and a little melodic with it.

Remus smirks behind him. “Sorry, it was the French.”

“Couldn’t tell,” Sirius returns, eyes shut as he works to hone the concept of control.

The bed shifts and dips, and after a few moments, it sure does feel like Remus planted himself down on the bed beside him. Sirius opens his eyes, looks to his right, and finds him on his back looking sidelong at him, his hands behind his head as he smiles in a rather smug way. “Do you need a minute?” he checks.

Sirius springs for him, finding the energy to do so in the afterboom known as a cocky Remus Lupin, and has no doubt in his mind that was Remus’s goal for he immediately makes room for him between his legs. Sirius rests on his knees, unable to miss the outline of the pipe he's packing and hovering himself ahead of it as he pries at the waistband of his flannels. “Why are these still on?” he raises, tugging them down past Remus’s thighs.

Remus lets out an incredulous laugh midway through working on getting his sleep shirt off, right beaming underneath it. “I think I was a little more focused on something else,” he offers, pulling the shirt off his head.

Sirius works the flannels off of Remus's ankles and chucks them out of sight, paying exactly zero attention to where he flung them, but then Remus sends his own shirt soaring a beat later with a similar amount of disinterest in where it landed so carelessness must really be in the air this morning. Sirius pitches himself toward the nightstand on Remus’s side of the bed, draping himself over Remus's left thigh as he braces his left hand on the bed for balance and reaches his right out to fumble around in the drawer, and Remus goes and makes matters even more difficult as he gives Sirius’s bare ass a rather opportunistic slap.

“Oh, I’m going to fuck you so hard for that,” Sirius shoots at him, not even looking at that little shit’s face as he coordinates his right hand to get it properly gripping their recently purchased and already dented-in lube stock.

“Oh,” Remus sends back gravely, “oh no.”

Sirius gets live confirmation of Remus’s cheeky fucking smile as he pitches himself back over him with his free hand, popping the cap with a pointed expression that doesn’t reach his lips when he can’t fight a smile from showing on them nor does he really put the effort in on that front. Remus lifts off of his back as Sirius takes to straddling him, pulling his legs in and bending them at the knee to leave Sirius a comfy spot on his lap to perch on, and holds his right palm up for a dollop. Sirius finishes squeezing out his own, rather liberal glob into his left palm, but when he plans on riding him like a fucking horse it’s really more necessary an amount than strictly over-indulgent, and divvies out another glob to Remus in turn, tossing the bottle aside and landing it on the bed somewhere, doesn’t matter much if the cap's closed.

Sirius drops his hands to coat Remus’s cock in it while he reaches behind Sirius to work on him, the two of them sharing a glance when they’re both ready to go. Sirius pushes forward in Remus’s lap and slides his feet in past his torso while Remus takes his fingers out of him and replaces them with the head of his cock, clutching at Sirius’s hips like they’ve life’s answers in them as he lowers him down on him, and that's the exact sort of urgency Sirius can identify all too well with just now.

He hooks his arms around the back of Remus’s shoulders and digs his fingers in there as he rocks back on him, elated to find Remus had a similar idea of the pacing for it is brutal from the get and Sirius is all about it. Once they really get going, it’s not all that easy to decipher whether he's controlling the pace so much as Remus's arms seem to be given how hard he’s pulling Sirius down onto his thrusts from below, but what a question to have to contend with; Sirius feels like the luckiest chap on the planet, not being able to tell who’s got the reigns here.

The faster they go, the harder Remus breathes by his right ear and the harder Sirius goes about holding back on his own just to get to hear Remus’s voice unfiltered, dragging his right hand down, up, and over Remus’s back and leaving his left one curled over the back of his right shoulder for balance while he fights to keep his mouth shut, fights to be able to hear him. The work brings rewards, as it often tends to, and in the best form possible; a smattering of urgencies given out by his right ear, his name filtering in as they meet each other faster still, and truly, his name never has sounded better than when it's been stolen straight from Remus’s lips.

Sirius keens against the friction of his cock caught tightly between their bodies, can’t decide if he’d rather rut forward and get some more of that or keep rocking back and seeing lights burst behind his eyelids, but Remus reads him like braille and lets him have both, pulling his right hand from Sirius’s left hip to reach it in between them, and Sirius abandons all other forms of touch as he clings to Remus's shoulders and gives himself over to the final inning, not caring which one holds out longer when either way, they’re both about to be winners here.

Various tuneage rings out from over in the main room — Remus’s mobile going, Sirius realizes, promptly letting his distaste known for it known vocally. “Ignore it,” Remus gives back, tightening his grip around Sirius’s cock as he pistons his hips with abandon, and Sirius does not have to be told twice.

Remus comes first, just to put that out there, but Sirius isn’t far behind him by any means; hearing his name called as Remus shudders through it is enough to yank Sirius there in a sudden second, leave him crying out and rocking up into the circle of Remus’s grip on him like that’s what's actually going to have life’s secrets waiting on the other side of it, and Christ, maybe it does, given how calm and contented he feels once he’s finished riding it out.

Remus goes ahead and pulls Sirius down with him as he seeks to make himself horizontal, and that’s — that’s exactly where Sirius was hoping they’d end up, all in all, so he hardly minds. His knees are crying out for relief, mind, and his thighs are burning and cursing him a bit for all that work he just put them through, so giving the lot of them a break seems the right move, slipping out of his pretzel shape and lay flat over Remus as a result.

It takes a while for the two of them to move even at all, and Sirius, being in a rather precarious position and all, has to get a little creative with getting out of bed without any leakage happening, crawling off of Remus and backing toward the edge of the bed with his arse tooched in the air, which really only sends Remus into a round of breathy, helpless stitches. Sirius flips him the bird with a grin as he climbs down off of the bed and takes off out of the room, making it to the bathroom before too much can drip down his thighs and settling in to simply chill there on the toilet for the rest to follow suit.

Remus strolls in rather easily a good minute into Sirius’s near-meditative state, smirks at him sitting there twiddling his thumbs with his stare on the ether, and strolls on past him to reach in behind the shower curtain and run the taps. Sirius ties his hair up into a high bun in the meantime and chills there until he’s pretty sure he can make it the four steps into the tub without an issue or a stumble, getting in behind Remus and insisting that his man stay right where he is in front of him so Sirius'll have a better shot at keeping his hair dry.

Owing to that, Remus has a bit more drying off to do than Sirius does after getting out and figures he can put his free hands to good use while Remus tackles the soaking mop at the top of his head. Sirius wraps his towel around his waist and steps in close, setting his left hand on Remus’s waist to let him know he’s there and lifting onto the tips of his toes to leave a quick kiss atop his towel-covered head.

“I’ll start a pot, yeah?” he raises.

“Careful,” Remus chides, his voice muffled. “I could’ve whacked you.”

“Well, that’s what the hand was for, dear,” Sirius mentions, heading for the door and swivelling halfway back toward him when he gets out into the hall. “That a yes or a no for tea?”

“Resounding yes,” Remus calls out, pulling the edge of his towel up so he can peek out from underneath it and aim him a smile with eye contact involved; a gem, he is.

Sirius heads back to the bedroom with that, a notable spring to his steps as he goes for his duffel to pull out a new pair of briefs. He leaves his towel in the hamper, shimmies the briefs on, and slides the top drawer shut to get into the second one, picking a shirt out of there and moving over to the bureau while pulling it on to snatch up his deodorant. “Is it an oolong day, d’you think?” he raises, reaching underneath his shirt to apply it.

Remus hums in question, then seems to register the question after a few beats. “I’m hoping it is,” he sends back.

“Then it is,” Sirius echoes, putting the stick back in place.

He leaves the room and crosses over to the kitchen, getting the kettle heating first off. He pulls the tin of tea down from the cupboard before squinting up at his own options, debating whether a dark roast or a medium one is more his style at the moment, and ends up going with the latter in the end; he’d like a good kick-start after wiping himself out.

Sirius gets Remus’s tea steeping so it’ll do its thing while Sirius works his own cup out. When his coffee is finished, he looks over toward the bathroom, finds Remus hanging his towel from his shoulders as he sizes up the state of his hair in the bathroom mirror, and brings both of their mugs to the island, taking a seat on the kitchen side of the island and pushing Remus’s mug toward the other side of it.

He settles in, hooks his feet around the bar going underneath his stool, and smiles to himself as he lifts his mug to his mouth, finding the sight of a supremely nude Remus standing at the mirror and working on taming a particularly uncooperative batch of curls at his fringe quite an endearing slice of entertainment to have while working on his morning cup. He nurses the first few sips with the best show in town, at least until Remus’s mobile rings out yet again, half-startling him into swallowing his newest mouthful of coffee earlier than planned.

“Popular bloke,” he says of it, reaching over to swivel Remus’s screen to face him and finds a Facetime call trying to get through. “Tu maman.”

Remus looks sidelong at him, his hands frozen at his fringe. “I’ll call her back?” he raises.

“Remus,” Sirius sends him, blinking at him from the island. “Answer for your mother.”

“I’m a bit compromised here,” Remus returns, looking down at himself.

“I’ll talk to her ‘til you’re clothed, then,” Sirius offers.

Remus looks back at the mirror with an even laugh, which really only has Sirius feeling as though he’s been challenged. He pulls the mobile closer to him, tips it to lay titled, and presses to take the call, a window popping up on Remus’s screen that showcases a sunny little side-view of Hope kneeling somewhere in the great outdoors and digging of all things, if Sirius’s observation skills are up to par, but he’s a bit distracted by the summery feel of her circular, Hepburn-esque black sunglasses paired with the hot pink sunhat perched on her head.

Hope startles when she looks up. “Ohh,” she offers, putting her smiling face on a tilt. “You’re not my son.”

“Not quite,” Sirius chimes, absolutely seeing Remus flail his arms around like a windmill in the background and choosing to focus on the screen instead. “Are you digging?”

“I am,” Hope returns. “Hoping to get a new flowerbed growing in here, add it to the overall garden.”

“Out back?” Sirius bids, lifting his mug to his mouth with his left hand.

Hope nods for it, lifting her free hand to brush a flyaway hair out of her face and in doing that, showcasing a lime green rubber glove that's covered in dirt from the start of the digits up to the fingertips, and it’s all just an amazing coordination of vibrant colours happening here; Sirius can’t get enough of it. “Love the look,” he says, circling his right hand around the vicinity of her within the screen.

Hope lets out a quick and rather summery laugh, to boot. “It's a hot one; the sun’ll move behind the trees eventually, but for now I’m a bit exposed back here,” she offers, putting her digging tool down. “Did you stay overnight?”

“I sure did,” Sirius chimes. “I haven’t broken in, either; Remus is just in the loo.”

“The loo or Louvre?” Hope checks.

“First one,” Sirius answers.

“Well, I just never know anymore, do I,” she puts up.

“No, fair enough,” Sirius gives her, beaming behind his mug.

Hope faces the screen, moving off of her knees to sit more comfortably. “Well, how are you, then?”

“I’m great,” he offers. “What’s going in the garden?”

Hope puts out a bright, closed-mouthed laugh. “Hydrangeas mostly, I’m a beginner yet,” she passes him, so very Remus-like that Sirius needs a second to appreciate it fully.

He does chance a flicker of a glance up at Remus, however, who’s on his way to his room and already giving Sirius a good-natured eye roll for that claim of hers. “Well, if this is anything like your knitting skills, I'll have to assume you’re keeping a green thumb from me,” Sirius figures, putting his gaze back on Hope.

“Have you seen my work?” she bids, playing along.

“I have,” Sirius echoes. “I've used your quilt as a blanket many a time, in fact; impressive work, I was sure he bought it somewhere and was hurt when I found out there was only one of its kind.”

Hope smiles while putting out an impeccable huff, but Sirius is the resident expert on good-natured huffs; that there's a charmed lady. ”Well, I’m glad if it’s being put to good use,” she says of it, waving him off.

“Use?” Sirius returns. “I want it for myself but I don’t think Remus would let me make off with it, the way he hordes that thing.”

“Always so chilly, that one,” she says of it.

“Even in the summer,” Sirius echoes. “Does he get that from you?”

“Oh, no no,” Hope maintains. “That’s from his granny; she couldn’t wear short sleeves in July.”

Remus makes a quick reappearance, clothed and all, to afford himself some dignity. “Alright, I’m not that bad off,” he manifests, crossing the flat.

“Yet,” Sirius says of it, under his breath.

Remus raises his left hand, stretches over the island, and places the bird directly in front of Sirius’s face on his way to pick up his tea with that same hand. “Hi, hon,” Hope chimes.

“Hi, Mum,” he echoes, pausing to take a quick sip of his tea before nodding his approval and rounding the island. “Was that you ringing before?”

Hope hums a decline. “No, not me,” she passes him.

Remus hums a pondered note, moves up on Sirius’s right, and slouches a bit squeezing himself into the frame, but the difference in their heights with Sirius sitting and Remus standing tall brings a snort out of Sirius. “Do you just want the stool?” he offers, moving halfway out of it.

Remus shakes his head around a mouthful of tea, quite fine where he is, says his hum, and Sirius remains frozen with it not quite computing for a couple of off-beats, but it clicks after he settles back down and looks at the screen again; if Remus’s forehead is out of the frame, so too is his scar.

Remus smirks at Hope as he swallows, lowering his mug. “That is quite the look you’ve got, Mum.”

“It’s hot out here,” Hope defends.

“I like it,” Sirius chimes in.

“He does; he’s not even kidding you,” Remus tacks on pragmatically. “He’s going to go out and buy a pink sun hat tomorrow, I imagine.”

“Today, even,” Sirius offers, folding his hands over his mug. “Haven’t decided yet; the world’s my oyster.”

Hope waves the both of them off with a great huff. “What have you got your mobile sat on?” Remus raises, eyeing the screen.

Hope brightens with the topic switch, Sirius has a feeling. “Oh, I bought a rock to go out here.”

“Did you?” Remus raises, smiling quite a bit.

“I did,” Hope affirms, picking up her mobile to showcase a modest boulder. “There’s also a little birdbath over there, see?”

Hope turns the screen to face a comparatively much bigger birdbath a little ways away. "Little,” Remus returns, quite the face on now.

“Well, you know what, honey?” Hope returns, turning the screen back on her. “That’s it, I don’t have an excuse; I just wanted a big bath for the birds.”

“That’s a fine excuse right there,” Sirius affords her.

Hope tips her head to him for the voucher, sitting her mobile back down on the rock. “How are you, hon?” she bids, sitting back on the heels of her gloved palms, and Sirius cannot get over how Remus’s mum is just, chilling in a garden while they do this.

Remus quickly swallows the sip he mistakenly went for. “I’m alright,” he nods, smiling big.

“Better than, I’d wager,” Sirius raises wryly. Remus’s left eye twitches as he side-eyes him, and clearly, somebody’s mind is in the gutter, but it’s not Sirius’s; he can say that much. “The interview, you dink.”

Remus lights up bright and looks at Hope head-on, but his whole stance becomes tentative along with his tone. “OK, there is some news, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself here so don’t get too excited for me either, alright?” he prefaces, and Hope crosses her right hand over her heart, her lips pressed together firmly. “I got a reply back about a potential job for while I’m away—”

Hope sends out a trill, making Sirius duck his head through a smirk while Remus cuts off pointedly. “Sorry, sorry,” she insists, shaking it off and resuming with a much more placid stare, but it does nothing to hide the genuine enthusiasm radiating off of her even as she picks a detached, conversational tone to switch to. “What’s the job, then?”

“Same company, so exactly the same kind of work I'm in now,” Remus provides. “The only issue is, he wrote in the reply that he’s looking for twenty-five hours or more per week.”

Hope blinks there. “I thought that was around what you work now?” she raises.

Remus tilts his head back and forth once, humming around another sip of tea. “Well, I could make twenty-five work if I had to, yes, but I couldn’t do more than that,” he maintains. “If he’s looking for a full-timer, then—”

“What did I say?” Sirius cuts in, popping Remus in the side.

Remus pushes a solid breath out his nose, looking at Sirius to quiet down. “I’m just saying, there’s a possibility he could pick someone else who can do more hours than I can,” he reiterates, looking back at Hope again. “I just want everyone to be prepared in case it doesn’t work out, but he does want an interview, which, I’ll say I’m a little surprised about.”

“I’m not too surprised myself,” Hope puts in. “And I may not prepare for that on my end, so you know.”

“Well, I can’t make you, can I?” Remus returns. “Only, don’t go so far in the other direction that I end up getting jinxed by proxy."

Hope gives out a gentle laugh. “Not too worried about that either,” she trades him, her eyes flickering over to Sirius with an amused expression on, and whether it's meant to be shared with him or it's more due to the fact that he happens to be there, Sirius doesn't much care about the distinction right about now.

Remus shifts his weight on his feet. "Well, thank you," he offers, bringing his mug up higher and holding it just in front of his mouth — protection, Sirius figures; it's a good thing he made him that tea.

"Where's this shop, then?" Hope bids.

"Not far from where my faculty building is," Remus relays, and he sure is choosing his words carefully; this little glimpse into what Remus speaks about with her and how he does it is more gripping to Sirius than a thriller. "Which is just another reason why I think it might be too convenient for it to just all work out perfectly."

"Now, honey, sometimes," Hope starts, "things turn out to be convenient."

"Mum," Remus pleads.

"She's got a point there, Remus," Sirius puts in, lifting his coffee to his mouth loftily.

"Yes, thank you," Hope extends.

"You guys," Remus implores, "I have to keep my hopes simmering at a notch below medium or the entire pot's going to boil over."

"I'm just saying, hon," Hope instils. "We just did this with me a few weeks ago, so could we try that again from this side of the line?"

"Mum, you were guaranteed that job," Remus returns. "It's different for me."

Hope lets out a weighty sigh. "There's a whole lot of me in him, you see," she offers to Sirius, adorned by it. "I'd hoped more of his dad's sensibilities would've carried over, but it is what it is."

Sirius nods mildly while Remus goes for a rather large gulp of tea in his peripheral. "He quite a balance between the two of you," he maintains. "From what I've noticed, at least."

Remus smacks his lips to echo it. "I've also yet to swindle myself a job without ever even sitting for an interview, so I don't know that Dad's sensibilities would've helped out here," he puts it. "And speaking of, can we hold off on telling him until I know more?"

"Oh, Remus, he'd be chuffed to hear it," Hope returns.

"I don't doubt," Remus allows. "He'll also be chuffed about checking in many times to see if I've heard anything or why I haven't heard anything as if I wouldn't already be worrying about it from all the way over here as is."

"Oh, alright," Hope relents, waving her hands. "You know he means well with it."

Remus hums around another chosen sip of tea and Sirius has a feeling he does know it, despite what it does to his already complicated brain. "How are you, then?" he raises, after a swallow. "Was there something specific?"

Hope piques. "Oh, um," she offers, looking between the two of them idly. "Well, I had an interesting call with Doreen, but it's nothing that can't wait."

"I mean," Sirius puts in, "I don't know her, so pretend I'm not here if it helps."

"Oh, I don't know that I want to—" Hope starts, cutting off there to find a word choice, it looks.

"Gossip," Remus offers for her, smiling behind his mug.

"Yes, that," she echoes, gesturing a hand toward him.

"Believe me, he's just fine with that stuff," Remus assures, tossing his left thumb toward Sirius.

"He's right, I'm all about it," he echoes freely.

Hope looks a bit caught with her hand in the cookie jar and a little rouge at the cheeks, too, which is just lovely to get to watch. "She and Phil are going through a bit of a rough patch, but it's OK, we'll just move on from that," she offers decidedly.

"Well, you can't stop with just that," Remus attests, to Sirius's great appreciation.

"No, no, no," Hope says decidedly. "We'll talk another time, OK?"

"Fine," Remus sounds out. "How's dad?"

"He's out by the shed, tinkering as we speak," Hope provides, looking quite happy to have already moved on.

Remus nods circumstantially. "What now?"

"The lawnmower," Hope replies.

Remus puts his head on a tilt. "What's happened to her?"

"'Her?'" Hope quotes, her mouth quirking. "Never thought I'd see the day, Remus."

"That's his doing," Remus insists. "He's referred to his motorcycle as a she ever since the beginning."

Sirius nods brightly. "She's a beaut."

Hope huffs a laugh. "Well, then, she has been giving him some trouble lately, but he won't think about replacing her until he's had a good thousand tries at fixing her himself," she supplies, and Remus nods rather easily for it, so Sirius has to assume that bit of elaboration was for his own clarity. "Apart from that, there's a wicked bug going around the shop that I'm a bit nervous he'll be the next to catch, but do you think he's listening to me and being more careful?"

Sirius can't say either way, so that must be for Remus. "Never in his life," he says, rudimentary. "What sort of bug?"

"Flu, sounds like," Hope relays. "It's a powerful one, though; Bubba's been out sick for a couple days now."

Remus sucks a breath in through gritted teeth, while Sirius inadvertently snorts, taking both Lupin's eyes and putting them on him. "Sorry," he says, smiling sheepishly. "It's just a great name."

"You're going to love him," Remus assures.

Sirius brightens up like a supernova. "I get to meet him?" he raises.

"Absolutely," Remus says. "You'll want the full tour, no?"

"The fullest," Sirius stresses.

"Mm, it isn't much," Hope puts in. "Just your regular garage, but Bubba is the main attraction."

"Sounds like it," Sirius returns.

"I'm sorry to hear he's out sick, though," Remus offers, bringing them back. "That can't be easy on him at all."

Hope shakes her head agreeably. "He's sixty-two," she extends, her gaze back on Sirius.

"Oh, yikes," Sirius returns, putting a grimace on.

"All of five-foot-two and strong as an ox, mind," Remus puts in.

"Last I heard, he's stuffed up but finally able to be up and about somewhat," Hope passes along. "I was thinking of bringing some soup over later, check up on him."

Remus gives a warning hum. "Careful when you're over there, mind."

"I'll be very," Hope assures.

"Mm, might want to take Neocitran along while you're at it," Remus puts up. "If he's still stuffed up, that is."

Hope gives a pondering hum. "I thought you deemed that useless?" she raises.

"Oh, for me it doesn't do a fucking thing," Remus affirms, and Sirius almost feels as if they ought to dive out of sight after that F-bomb, but Hope merely lets out a quick, easy laugh and that is, quite frankly, the furthest from what Sirius would've ever received uttering that in front of his mother. "I have it on record that it does work for some lucky people out there, mind."

Hope piques, giving a plain look of interest. "What are your sources?"

"Secondhand testimony," Remus calls it, tossing his thumb toward Sirius again. "I gave March's cold to this one and after he finished whinging about my transgression—"

Sirius cuts in there with a distinct cough. "Alright, listen, Hope," he addresses, leaning his head over to block her view of Remus's, "I never got sick; truly never until this swot came around."

Hope smirks, nodding knowingly. "That's his plight," she echoes. "Mind, you were due for a cold, strolling around in the December chill in nothing but a light jacket; not even a scarf, you made me feel cold just looking at you."

Remus laughs behind Sirius's head. "Get fucked," he slips him.

"Remus Jean Lupin," Sirius sounds out, sweeping a hand underneath Remus's screen. "Your mother is right there watching you use that filthy mouth."

"She's heard it before," Remus instils.

"Many a time," Hope puts in.

"I told him the same thing, by the way," Remus says airily, bringing them back around. "He went the entirety of fall and almost all of winter without so much as a sniffle and when he finally did catch cold, he had one single pouch of the stuff and bounced back by the next morning; Bubba has that same kind of luck, I'd wager, so bringing a couple of pouches over couldn't hurt."

Hope nods once, dutifully. "You've made your case," she says of it. "Any other suggestions while we're at it?"

"Keep a few pouches on hand for when Dad gets it," Remus offers plainly.

Hope lets out a bleak sort of laugh. "We are on borrowed time, aren't we?"

Remus's mobile begins ringing out a low-volume version of his standard ringtone, a blurb with 'Dorcas' popping up on-screen. "Oh, mum, can we pick up another time?" he raises.

Hope pulls her face into a frown. "So soon?"

Remus looks sheepish about the rock and hard place he's been squished between. "Dorcas is ringing and we just keep missing each other, so."

Hope brightens up like the actual supernova in the proverbial room, and Sirius puts on as routine a farewell smile as he can muster. "You tell her I know the feeling," she hints.

Remus gives her an imploring look. "I've been working like mad, Mum."

Hope lifts her hands easily. "I know, I'm just saying; you've got to make time for—"

"OK, I'll talk to you soon, say hi to Dad," Remus runs her off, picking the mobile straight up off the island.

"Have a good one," Sirius calls up, but he doesn't think it went through before Remus dropped the call.

He realizes he chose a certifiably bad time to drop his smile when he notes of the continued ringing happening in the room; he looks over at Remus, feeling rather on display being studied the way he is. "You're not going to get that?" he hints, gesturing to the mobile held tightly in Remus's free hand.

Remus shakes his head, his eyes the size of dinner plates. "No, I'll call her back," he says, his voice coming out much more quietly. "I'm really sorry — I shouldn't have said who it was; I don't know how I keep putting my foot in my mouth whenever we've got something good going—"

"Hey?" Sirius bids, putting his mug down on the island and tugging Remus closer to him by the belt loops of his jeans. "No, you shouldn't have to police everything you say; I don't want you doing that any more than you already do."

Remus slips his hips into the space between Sirius's knees, standing in front of him, and if his hands weren't a little full, Sirius has a feeling he'd be being touched by now so he takes both Remus's tea and mobile off his hands in case he's right about that one; as much as he wants to keep cool, he does need that sort of contact right about now.

He's not wrong about it, Sirius is happy to report, carefully moving Remus's mug around the back of him to better lean into the resulting embrace and shutting his eyes as Remus sets his chin down over the top of his head. "I know how awful this is going to sound, but I was sure you didn't believe me," he raises, and it sounds forlorn coming out so it's got to be twice forlorn rolling around in that noggin of his. "Still, that was not the way I wanted you to see what I was saying."

Sirius takes in a deep breath, speaking once he feels ready to take on optimism as a concept. "OK, so, maybe she did light up at the sound of her name," he allows, pulling back to look up at Remus. "So what? She really likes me, I can tell."

Remus lets out a long, puffed breath; the closest he's sounded to a horse. "Oh, she loves you," he maintains. "It's what makes this whole thing a little easier to swallow."

"Mm?" Sirius hums, wanting to hear a bit of optimism from Remus's mouth.

He nods, a quiet smile making it onto his lips as he lifts his right hand to swipe his thumb under Sirius's chin. "I've always hoped they'd like who I ended up with, and they really like you," he offers; simplistic in concept, simplistic in nature, him.

Sirius tips his head to give Remus's hand a quick peck. "And one thing I've had the pleasure of noting already, but especially over this conversation," he starts, tugging in on Remus's belt loops with his forefingers and winning himself another step toward him, "is that Hope does not want to come off rude in any sense of the word, so I think that's only going to help with the adjustment period, don't you?"

Remus lifts his shoulders, but his gaze is so uncompromisingly on Sirius that it doesn't look like a helpless shrug so much. "I hope so," he insists. "I don't want this to be a horrible experience for either of us."

Sirius blinks, uses Remus's belt loops as leverage to pull on, and stretches up to press a kiss to his lips. "That's the sweetest thing you could have said," he puts down first, "but literally any reaction would be yards better than the one mine had, and who knows, maybe your mum will go so far the other way that she starts hanging Pride flags from the porch for all neighbours to see what a supportive and sweet mum she is to that queer son of hers, hm; wouldn't that be something?"

Remus puts his lips into a line. "I'd run straight off a cliff."

"OK, well, let's just hide all the flags from her in that case," Sirius reiterates.

"Deal," Remus returns. "I don't want a fuss in either direction, I just want them to know you the way I do."

Sirius tugs the right side of his lower lip between his teeth. "Maybe not in all the ways you know me," he raises.

"No, that's good," Remus agrees, nodding firmly. "I'll settle for happy that I'm happy."

Sirius grins, taking back his own supernova status again. "Deal," he returns, reaching to slide Remus's mug onto the island beside his own and sticking the mobile a little further away from them. With his hands newly freed, Sirius pushes off of the stool underneath him, hooks his legs in around Remus's hip, and when he's sure he won't go flying to the floor out of lost balance, slips his arms over and around Remus's shoulders, hanging off of him like a sloth.

Remus drops his hands to hold them underneath Sirius's thighs, not looking the least bit bothered by being a human bean stock. "How long 'til you have to go in?" Sirius raises.

Remus turns the both of them on his heel, checking the time displayed on the stove. "Not for another hour and some," he relays.

"Mm," Sirius trills, loving that news. "We could watch a little something 'til we have to head out?"

"Are you leaving with me?" Remus asks, walking them out of the kitchen.

"Might as well, I'm going that way as is," Sirius returns.

Remus hums easily in reply, leaning in to leave a quick kiss on Sirius's lips. "I like it," he says of the plan. "What about that one?"

He tips his head down and to the left, where Sirius looks to find Tango standing there looking rather enthralled by the two of them and sends out a short but no less powerful pfft. "I'll take him down first, then," he decides.

Notes:

just because sirius wants to keep the rest of the zumba tunes a surprise doesn’t mean you have to ;)

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/28Co8b6KaRQk9GiVHQfpW1?si=VwlGww_RRq6VeqZe8wGUGw

Chapter 13: 13.

Chapter Text

Later, after the dog's been walked and some telly's been watched, Sirius and Remus find themselves out front of Remus's building bickering on the sidewalk over whether it's necessary for Remus to be driven a few blocks over. Sirius's main argument: he's going that way anyway. Remus's: it's just a few blocks, but in the end, Remus makes the ultimate sacrifice and gives in on letting Sirius drop him off at work.

Sirius: 1, Remus: zero.

He pulls right up by Remus's storefront, hanging back while Remus manoeuvres his legs around and off of Priscilla's bulk. "Thank you," he gives Sirius, half-begrudgingly no doubt.

Sirius smiles like a summer's day as Remus unhooks his helmet and pulls it off of his head. "Bon chance," he offers, and Remus tips his head to him, tucking his helmet between his right arm and side. "Let me know how it goes, yeah?"

"OK," Remus nods, pushing his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose a little more. "I'm not sure I'll have much to update you on, but I can always let you know I've nothing to report."

"I'll take it," Sirius returns easily, readying himself to kick off the sidewalk and making a show of looking behind him so Remus will see he's a responsible driver.

Remus gives a little wave before Sirius pulls out onto the road, en route to his own shop. Even with the ride there, he's going to be early for his shift, but one James Potter did selflessly offer up his Saturday afternoons on a more permanent basis, half to help Will out and half to keep Sirius's sanity locked in place, so him already being at the shop is a fine excuse for Sirius to head there a little early as is.

There's a bit of a rush going through the place when Sirius gets in, but overtop of the commotion he can decipher Ben and Charlotte's heads behind the counter and that James is nowhere to be seen on the floor, leading Sirius to assume he's on break. Ben's a little too taken up at till to even bother nodding hello to as Sirius goes around the outside of the crowd waiting at the hand-off station to get up behind the counter, but he flashes Charlotte a quick grin in greeting as he passes her on bar to make for the hall to the back room.

He heads down the hall at an easy clip, figuring he'll drop his helmet off in the back before bothering with trying to make a drink for himself, and hopefully by the time he makes it back up front, that crowd will have thinned out some. Sirius rounds the corner to find James sitting at the staff table with a croissant on a plate in front of him, his mobile in one hand, and a multicoloured frap in the other, the complete traitor.

"Disgusting," Sirius calls both him and the drink.

James pops his head up and lets out a whoop at Sirius's appearance. "Could it be, is it he?" he puts out gravely.

"It is me," Sirius echoes, playing along as he heads for the hooks to hang his helmet from a free one.

He certainly hopes as he snaps the straps around the hook he picked that that would be the last of their pretending like he's gone and skipped town, but James munches daintily on a bite of croissant and trills right on about it. "I didn't think you'd still look the same."

"Don't talk when you chew," Sirius returns, heading back up front.

He slips behind Charlotte to get over to the stacker of cups by the till, gives an easy hello to Ben over at the pastry case, and heads back to the bar with a large cold cup in hand, slipping in to push his wide array of various syrup pumps into his cup.

"And there I thought it might be a calm shift," he muses.

"I think you brought the crowd in with you," Charlotte mentions, underneath the whirring of the steam wand.

"Impossible, it was already a madhouse when I walked in," Sirius says of it.

"I'm just saying, it was quiet as a mouse five minutes before you strolled in here," Charlotte says of that.

"Of course it was," Sirius huffs, bending to open the fridge below the counter and pull out the pitcher of cold brew he made sure to brew the night before — for customers, sure, but more so he could have a cup for himself upon arrival.

He pours it to his liking, puts the pitcher back in the fridge, and crosses over to cold bar to slide open the icebox, scooping a light amount of ice atop it before reaching for a lid. He snags a straw on his way back toward the hall and heads into the back again, pulling up a chair across the table from James and tugging both his mobile and pack out of his back pockets in turn before sitting down. He leaves them on the table, pops his straw against the surface of it, and pulls the rest of the paper off, taking his drink with him as he leans back on the heels of his chair while James continues to munch daintily on his croissant; a surefire sign Sirius is in for it.

"So, quick question," he puts up. "Are you planning on ever coming home or have you conducted a midnight move without my knowing it?"

Sirius makes a face around his straw. "I haven't moved out," he says of it, going for a good, long sip.

"Sure seems like you have," James says of it. "You took even the dog away and I'm willing to say it, that's the biggest transgression of all."

"Oh, mhm?" Sirius returns politely.

"Yes, yes it is," James asserts. "You can't just show me what true joy looks like and whisk him away to Remus's tower before I even get the chance to enjoy said joy; you're a regular villain."

Sirius pulls his mouth off his straw. "If I let you take the dog for a night, will this stop?" he raises, circling his free hand between them and what's happening here.

"It'll be a start," James returns at once.

"Fine, come take him, then," Sirius offers. "How difficult was that?"

"'Course, wouldn't mind any if you also came along with him," James tacks on airily.

"You know what I find the most interesting part about this?" Sirius raises, just as airy. "If I were out and about, having nights on the town, coming back to ours every night, leaving Remus to deal with all this on his own, I know for a fact you'd have some real hot takes about that behaviour, but here you are, giving me constant shit over sticking by him; I cannot win with you."

"I've never once suggested to leave him to deal with it, but there should at least be a balance here, Sirius," James sends him, the game of cheery disposition over apparently.

"I've been balancing," Sirius sounds out. "I came to every practice this week, not my fault or his if I had to push the start time back so I could watch him, but I still made time for it and memorized every routine to an art, have I not?"

"That's not the point, Sirius," James returns. "I knew you were going to go so far in that we'd probably never see you, hence the Zumba idea in itself, and what are you doing now? You learned the routines so no need for the sessions, you'll practice at Remus's, and that's it, then; we'll see you in class once a week and that's if you can make it."

Sirius lets his head fall back listlessly. "What do you want from me?" he sounds out. "I'm still teaching Dora, I'm showing up to my shifts, I'm making it to every meeting with Andromeda, I'm coming to classes, and I'm keeping my word to Remus that I'll stick the fuck around through this; I'm doing literally everything I can to keep things as normal as can be and you could stand to show me even a morsel of pride in the fact that I'm actually—"

"No, see, this is the problem," James cuts in. "We haven't caught a glimpse of you since Sunday—"

"I need you to quit saying we when this is clearly all you," Sirius denies him. "Lily understands, Pete finally does, too; it's literally just you still lodging complaints."

"Fine, you want transparency?" James raises. "You're right, I haven't seen you in days, so vague little 'he's fine, we're fine, everything's fine' texts — few and far between, I might add — aren't nearly enough to sustain me and those don't actually count as keeping me in the loop; I'm the last to find out about anything to do with this, you know that, right?"

Sirius hums thinly. "I'd say you and Pete are about even," he delivers, sending James into a frenzy of frustrated arm-waving. "His attacks have literally doubled since last week, James; now's not the time to go bar-hopping with you."

"Right, because that's what I was suggesting," James retorts.

"Well, who the fuck knows with you," Sirius returns. "You've been acting a real prat for weeks; maybe there's more than one reason I'm not negging Remus to come 'round right now, you ever think about that?"

"Oh, so now you're shielding him from me?"

"Not at first, but if the prat suit fits."

"He doesn't need a fucking babysitter—"

"I'm not having you berate him with complaints that he can't fucking do anything about—"

"Lily told me he's having milder ones," James shoots at him. "Hell, she said he powered right through one while making drinks; how is that not progress? They're coming on more often, but if he's able to work through some of them then I don't see why you can't take a night off once in a while."

Sirius lets his chair fall forward, waving his arms around in the air like he's flagging down a rescue chopper. "Have - you - met - Remus?" he accentuates, clapping his hands with it. "At this point, it's up in the air whether he's going to get slapped with a mild one or a knockout and that inability to tell his fortune has thrown an already anxious bloke for a loop, believe it or not; he doesn't know what he's in for at the start of one, I can't be off mucking about with mates when he needs me now more than ever."

"I don't know if he does," James mentions.

Sirius blinks once, putting his head on a tilt. "Well, go on, then," he goads, eyes wild. "Say how you really feel."

Now, Sirius has brought whole persons to their knees with this same very Look, but not James; he doesn't bat an eye, only shrugs lightly. "He's the reason you even said yes to Zumba in the first place, and I'm having a difficult time imagining his reasons for doing it were only about not getting in the middle of us," he surmises. "I think he wants you to keep as busy as you can, but I think you like playing house more."

"Oh, astute as ever," Sirius sends him audaciously.

"I think I'm right," James chimes, sitting back in his chair with an air of finality.

"No, you don't get to drop that like a mic and act like you just decimated me, you just don't," Sirius insists. "I could have told you that myself; I love playing house with him."

"Well, I'm glad you're keeping up with the class, but I'm allowed to miss my best friend, Sirius," James snaps. "Me missing you doesn't immediately equal out to me not giving a shit about him, and I'm sick of you acting like it does; I want him back, too, but it's real fucking clear he's not interested, so, what, then? I just get neither of you?"

Sirius shoves his drink on the table to free up both his hands to properly drag them over his face, breathing in for five seconds, letting it out. "OK," he says. "Tomorrow, after class, we can drive by Remus's place, pick up Tango, and I will come back to ours for some quality boys' time, alright?"

"Hm?" James presses, like Sirius really needs to repeat it.

Sirius leans in and takes a good quarter out of his drink. "Yes," he says after it, let James have this if he so needs it. "I'm not staying overnight, though—" James cuts in with a grandiose scoff, but Sirius practically invented those, "—sorry, pal, you can't just ship the two of us as hard as you do then turn around and act surprised when you see I'm all in, so you can fuck right off with that."

James sends him a round of blaring retching noises while Sirius mimes a jerk-off motion with his right hand frankly. "And, if I get a single '911' text, I'm leaving the room to assess the situation and if I have to run, we can reschedule our boys' time," Sirius tacks on. "Those are my terms; take it or leave it."

"What happens if it's a mild one versus a rough one?" James raises.

"He writes '911' and then a number that correlates to the Lup Scale," Sirius details, pausing when James blinks a good three times in succession, "it's an inside joke, don't worry about it — the point is, I know how to decode that; if the number is lower than a five, I can ring him, talk to him, and chances are he can power through it and my assistance is less necessary, but if it's above then we're getting into rough waters and I've got to go."

Sirius won't pretend any that James being fully enraptured in the grave details isn't a welcome sign. "If it's a really bad one, then how is able to even type the numbers out?" he asks. "I'm talking Ugly Pot bad."

"We've been practising," Sirius says of it, flashing a smile. "He can do it with his eyes closed if it's under a five, but if it's up higher, he just has to text gibberish and I'll know he's in trouble."

James puffs out a breath. "You're really locked and loaded."

"Yeah, we have to be," Sirius echoes. "I have to be; he's a pretty big deal."

James flattens his face out. "Like you need to tell me that."

Sirius pulls his top teeth over his lower lip. "Sometimes I feel like I do," he says after it, and then he has to grapple with the morose face James adopts. "Look, it's fine, OK? For what it's worth, I've missed you, too."

James lifts his left hand and clasps it over where his heart apparently remains. "Was that so hard to say?"

Sirius fumes. "If that's all you wanted to hear, you should have just said it and not come for my list of priorities—" he stops short, breathes in deep, starts over. "Alright, do we have a deal?"

"For tomorrow?" James checks.

"That, yeah," Sirius echoes. "May as well take advantage now because once the shrooms are here, Remus's dose day is going to be Sundays, so let's use up a Sunday evening like the old days while we can, hm?"

James lifts his hands and shakes his fists in what looks to be complete cheer. "You have to convince him to come over for dose days," he instils.

Sirius puts out a flat laugh. "Not going to happen," he maintains. "He's already chided me ahead of time because he knows as well as I do that I'm going to be laughing the whole time, so I can guarantee that he's not going to want an even larger audience."

James puts out an imploring noise. "I love high Remus."

Sirius sits forward in his chair, leaning his elbows on the table and subtly tugging on his right earlobe. "Not that you deserve it after acting like such a fool lately," he prefaces, "but I'm willing to share with you my two-week plan going forward if you want to hear it and discover the relevancy of it to this very topic."

"Give it," James bids at once.

"Alright," Sirius says, dropping his right hand from his earlobe and clasping both his hands in front of him on the table diplomatically. "I have no doubt in my mind that Remus will come back to ours in time, but it's going to take baby steps to get him there. You can't just snap your fingers and expect him to sort everything out at once, I've tried and it doesn't work; it's a process, not a race — with me so far?"

"Well, when you're speaking so slowly I don't know how I wouldn't be," James replies on beat.

Sirius fights a smile from showing. "The first item on the docket is to get Remus out more often, not because he's gotta work but because it's a nice day out and he should enjoy it," he delivers. "Now, that's easier said than done when he's just a tad afraid of spooking people — strangers, coworkers, friends alike, so I need to start small, go with little outings first. In a week's time, we'll have shrooms upon us, we'll get him on a weekly dosing schedule, we'll be attacking these things from two sides, and we'll have a better understanding of his triggers by then, but since I'll have branched him outside of his flat's radius and will have assured him that we'll keep a care-package at ours in case he gets one there, I'm confident that he'll agree to start coming over again, in smaller increments, then longer stays, and then, maybe you can be present for a dose day down the line. How's that sound?"

Sirius didn't know seal-clapping would come at the end of his proposal, but he can say for certain once James starts up that it's precisely the sort of reaction he should have been vying for. "But it won't be tomorrow," he tacks on, tamping down on the urge to smile yet again.

James sends him another scoff, but it's smaller and that's certainly something. "That's your favourite fucking phrase right now," he observes.

"Well, get used to it," Sirius offers, unapologetic about it. "He's come around on the shrooms debacle, but it took a lot of convincing him he wouldn't end up in the gutter half-dead somewhere because of it; I've a feeling it's going to take a few good dose days for him to agree it's not much more than a weensy little trip, but I do think he'll ease up on the no-audience rule one he knows what to expect."

James lifts his hands quizzically. "What is this prudish energy I'm sensing from him?"

"Sensing?" Sirius returns plainly. "I just told you he was prudish about it at first; you're not an oracle."

James lifts a hand for silence. "I have watched that bloke take a toke so forceful, it would have had me flattened if I'd even attempted it, I have heard him recite a lengthy monologue on the topic of how difficult it is for him to take the order of a person whose head is much too big or small for their body, I have witnessed him spend thirty full minutes fashioning a crane to perfection out of a sheet of aluminium foil, he was just that dedicated to the cause, I have seen him struggle so hard to open the screen door that he gave up and pushed the screen halfway out just to press down on the handle from the outside—"

Sirius pushes forward and sets his forehead on the table, giving in to and writhing with the current of rolling laughter coming out of him. "I'm just saying, it's a bit late for him to start acting like a dignified bloke now," James ties it up. "I know what he's really like when he cuts loose."

"Well, same for me, but he's nervous about it," Sirius raises, lifting back up. "And I need you to realize now that it really isn't going to be some huge trip; it's a gram and a half so while one can absolutely expect him to start firing off hot takes on just about anything, he's not going to be battling screen doors or seeing birds in the room with him."

James sighs with amazing gusto. "Why can't he be?" he raises, to Sirius or the room they're in itself, hard to tell.

"Again, the goal? Isn't to get him blasted here," Sirius reminds him. "Maybe down the line, but for now, it's just another route in the Curbing Clusters saga."

"But maybe eventually?" James hones in, speaking quietly, like it's little more than delicate theorizing at this point.

"I wouldn't rule it out," Sirius offers him. "I don't imagine he's going to hate the high once he's been through it, so just wait this out and one day, we could all see some birds in the room with us."

"I mean, one was enough," James says of it, snickering wildly. "I don't know how I'm going to do if there are multitudes of them."

"Well, there's not going to be a whole fucking aviary unless you plan on devouring the whole bag yourself," Sirius returns through a laugh. "Let's tackle one thing at a time, mm? Is tomorrow a go?"

James sends him a plain look. "I'll move some stuff around," he says, giving Sirius a sense of ease with it. "That said, I do motion you to come look at rings with me."

"I figured that was coming down the line," Sirius replies. "Motion accepted."

James puts out an accomplished sigh as Sirius goes for a celebratory sip of his coffee. "Last thing," he puts in. "Mind passing it along to Remus that I might actually like a true answer back from him now and again?"

"Elaborate," Sirius requests around his straw.

James does as bid. "I've reached out to him a-plenty, asking him how he's doing and all I ever get are vague answers."

"James, he's a vague answer these days," Sirius implores. "Sometimes he's great, sometimes he's not; it depends on the day, sometimes even the hour."

"Well, I want to know that stuff, too," James gives deftly, picking up the croissant that's gone forgotten on his plate for a good while. "I don't like knowing I'm being waved off over text just for asking how he's doing."

"It's not personal; he probably just doesn't want to get into all of it," Sirius insists, looking round as footsteps sound in the hallway, but then it's David who's rounding the corner and Sirius simply turns back around, not much caring whether he overhears. "If we go by the hour, he's actually doing really well considering; he's on a phone interview this very second for work in the fall and I would call that tremendously brave given all he's got to deal with."

James perks around a bite of croissant. "Mm?" he hums.

Sirius nods brightly. "He and Lily rounded up a few shops in the area he'll be in for school, messaged the lot, and he's talking to his first choice right now, the stallion," he passes along; glowingly, he's sure. "So, think good vibes and send them along to him; he'll be wanting all the luck he can scrounge up right about now even if he doesn't need any outside help."

James waggles ten spirit fingers in his direction while he's got his mouth full. "Oh, and, get this," Sirius tacks on, "that manager's name is Will; how fucked is that?"

James swallows hard. "Come off it," he returns.

"It's the truth," Sirius assures. "French William, they call him."

James looks positively charmed by the news. "We'll have to ask our Will if he's got a French clone out there—"

"Are you just sitting back here?" David comes in.

"Looks that way, doesn't it," Sirius returns, not looking over his shoulder.

"There's a massive queue up there," David bats to him.

"I'm on break," James offers, waggling the last bit of croissant he has to work through. "He's not even on yet."

"He's on in three minutes," David retorts, typing loudly on the keyboard now, likely his employee code because of course he'd clock in early.

"Hey, thanks," Sirius puts up. "I didn't even realize the time had come."

"No, and you wouldn't," David returns. Sirius plucks his pack off of the table and shakes it, pulling one of the runners out and pushing out of his seat with it between his lips. Just as he's moving away from the table, however, 'Kiss Me' echoes out from his mobile sitting on the table's surface. "God, could you get any more gay?"

Sirius leans over to pull it off of the table. "Oh, it could get so much gayer around here," he says of it, heading for the back door and pressing to answer the call before the opening bars can end. "Hi, just a sec, 'kay?"

"Oi?" David calls out. "You're on right now."

Sirius stops halfway out the door, aiming a stare of genuine wonder over at David just looming in the doorway of the backroom. "You're not actually like this, right?" he raises, against his better judgement, surely.

"What does that even mean?" David returns on a deadpan.

"Like, the things you think and the things you say have to have at least some dissonance, yeah?" Sirius reiterates. "They can't match up completely, otherwise what the fuck else are you here for than to—"

"I literally have no idea what you're spouting about," David cuts in.

"Nothing," Sirius shouts, whipping the back door shut behind him and pressing his back against the door just in case, his reflexes kicking in. He breathes long, steadying his focus against the bleary film in front of his eyes, and realizes his error after a long five seconds, clearing his throat quickly. "Sorry, everything OK?"

"Sirius," Remus returns at once.

"It’s fine," Sirius insists.

There's too long of a pause before Remus starts again. "I know you wanted to keep these two shifts to help out and that's really sweet of you," he prefaces, "but I don't like the idea of you going in there and hating it for another month."

"I don't hate coming here," Sirius insists. "I just hate that guy."

"I'm just trying to say, if you didn't see this through to the end, I think Will would have to understand," Remus tries again, and good fuck, he's always fucking trying for him. "You could put the blame on me if you need to; I'll take the heat for it."

"Remus," Sirius says, shutting his eyes tight. "If you keep going, I'm literally going to cave and I just need you to tell me I can do it."

"You can absolutely fucking do it," Remus returns him.

"Thank you," Sirius nods.

"I just don't want you miserable there, that's all," Remus instils.

"I'm not, for the most part," Sirius offers. He opens his eyes and trains his gaze above him, willing himself to find it in him to speed this along even when he'd really rather not. "I am on borrowed time out here, though; are you OK?"

"Oh — no, I'm very good," Remus assures. "Sorry, I knew I was cutting it close but the call went on longer than I thought it would — but I got it."

"The job?" Sirius blurts.

"Yes, sorry; specifics are always good," Remus returns him.

"Stop saying sorry," Sirius implores, smiling wide. "How did you swindle that so quick, you little sneak?"

"I don't know," Remus whispers, like this is a secret between the two of them, but Sirius can keep a secret; that's cool with him. "I don't even remember the first half of the conversation, but he was fantastically Parisian; had such a bright, full laugh — it was like he laughed in French which I never knew was possible, but I must have really made him laugh in there because apparently, I have this much intel on his laugh, as you can see."

"I'm on the edge of my seat here," Sirius assures, his smile breaking into a full grin.

"I remember the last leg of it, though," Remus comes back. "He wants me to ring him again closer to the date I leave just to touch base, and — well, that's it, really; I have a job?"

"You have two jobs," Sirius raises it.

"Not just you anymore," Remus plays along.

"Just a pair of hustlers, us," Sirius calls them.

Remus sighs — happily, Sirius notes. "OK, well, I won't keep you," he insists, winding down. "I just wanted to tell you since you asked for an update, and you can absolutely say you were right, by the way; I'll let you have that."

"You just said it so well for me?" Sirius trades him.

Remus sends a short huff over the phone. "I'll see you later?"

"Sure," Sirius returns. "Want to take our breaks together?"

Remus gives a slight hum. "I still haven't rung Dorcas back," he offers, another whispered secret.

"Oh — then yeah, do that," Sirius instructs.

"OK," Remus replies. "Maybe on a fifteen, though?"

"We'll talk," Sirius extends, letting him off the hook for now.

"Good luck in there, hey?" Remus raises.

"I'll need it," Sirius returns, matter-of-factly.

"I love you," Remus puts in right before the call drops, and that, is really all Sirius needs to gather the drive to head back inside.

It's a good thing he came in then, too, for he would have otherwise missed the sight of James filling up a spray bottle over at the mop sink.

He pauses at the sound of the door shutting, glances over his shoulder at Sirius, and in comes the justification for his actions. "I've already told him to leave you the fuck alone," he maintains, "but if he doesn't, he's getting sprayed."

"James," Sirius returns, utterly charmed.

"Well, you didn't ask to get stuck working with Reg incarnate and I don't know what kind of sick joke this is either, but if this is the game we're in, I'll play," James attests, shutting the taps and twisting the cap of the spray bottle expertly. "Since he's just about as clever as Reg was, I'm assuming we'll need to use this in about five minutes or less, so once I leave this can be all yours, but I wouldn't mind at all if I could—"

"Enjoy," Sirius chimes, sweeping a gracious hand toward him before heading to the computer to clock in back here.

In totality, James has to use said spray bottle eleven wonderful times in retaliation to each lukewarm take from David's mouth before passing the bottle off to Sirius like the proverbial torch that it is and clocking out at the start of the evening. Sirius sticks the bottle in the pocket of his apron, keeping the nozzle visibly poking out from the top and at the ready in case he'll need it — and he will; they may land in some hot water come Monday morning what with Will's inevitable return to work from the weekend, but Sirius isn't going to be there that morning so it's not his problem, is it?

One thing James didn't account for was Reg's resourcefulness, but Sirius saw a lot more of that than he did; can't be helped. He's reminded of it after David seems to work out that if he spews shite at random, Sirius'll be spraying all night and not a single task will get done, instead choosing save up his various opinions about Sirius's work style, lifestyle, and all that's in between, and let them out at various points throughout the evening like tiny, sharp bombs, and those are the times Sirius walks all the way over to him and sprays him real good. He doesn't plan on voicing this, but it's — fun isn't the word. Entertaining? That's more it. It's entertaining in the way it used to be.

As entertaining as it is, he isn't about to complain when the clock strikes closing time, and by that point, David must be fairly tuckered out for Sirius hasn't had a stray bomb come his way for upwards of an hour at least. A surprise to him, David didn't even lodge a pointed hum in his direction the moment Sirius started counting the till early and that is a whole feat when that of all things, for some reason, grinds David's gears to no end. Instead, David goes around putting the remaining dishes away without a single comment, and Sirius, though well aware this strange form of a truce will only last for tonight, is willing to bask in the relative silence while he still has it.

He's given up on the dream of getting out early on Saturdays, it was a nice idea but it's never going to happen, and it really is just so much easier to head out for a post-work cigarette while riding out the last ten minutes while David putz about inside. He heads back inside thirty seconds out, heads up behind the counter while swinging his helmet around to hold at it his left hip, and presses his code into till one with his right forefinger before heading on to the alarm panel just off of the sales floor. He waits with his right hand up and ready to key in the code for David to hurry his arse up from the backroom, checking the text that comes in while he's waiting there.

911 - 4

Sirius swivels on his heel. "I'm out," he calls down the hall.

"What?" David sends back.

"I'm going," Sirius returns him. "Lock up yourself."

He doesn't stick around long enough to hear what David's response is, but he stops to lock the door behind him since he's not a complete villain, thanks much. He crosses the parking lot and hops onto Priscilla, turning his key in the ignition and roaring her to life. There's some solace knowing Remus is sitting at a four, but the distinction between four and five isn't much just then. There's just enough of a freakish twinge of fear at the back of Sirius's neck as he rides, but just enough calm coursing through him to get him to Remus's without driving too recklessly; Remus would have his head for that.

On the way, he ramps himself up, breathes nice and long, and reminds himself of his role here. He needs to be a quiet, but persistent presence while Remus waits it out; the last thing he needs to hear when he's in the middle of it is how much worse it could be and Sirius knows that after being sent from the room this past Tuesday morning for not thinking before speaking that exact phrase to an encumbered and very snarky Remus. It's all trial and error.

He parks by Remus's building and heads up the path, holding his helmet against his chest as he heads in through the lobby. He takes the stairs two at a time and pulls his mobile out, checking the time Remus's text came in, noting it for later, and clears the hall to Remus's door in an impressive amount of seconds. He stops there, puts his mobile away, and shakes himself out. He tries the door and finds himself relieved to be able to head right in, stepping inside the darkened flat at a quieter clip and leaving his helmet hanging from its hook by the door; it's rote memory at this point, he doesn't need much light to pull it off.

He moves out of the entryway, blinks in the relative darkness in the main room save for the glow of the streetlights, and thinks he sees a shadow draped along the length of the couch. He moves closer, realizes there's a big dog curled up over by Remus's feet, and pets Tango's head as he passes by, moving more into the space between the coffee table and the couch to assess the situation.

He scans from left to right, Remus with his hot pink mask on, a good sign, and an energy boost sitting on the table with the cap strewn aside, also good news. He picks the boost up to make sure it's been emptied, celebrates the light weight of the small bottle in his hand, and leaves it back on the table for now. He uses the frame of the couch for leverage as he gets himself over and behind Remus, slipping in between him and the back of the couch to nestle up close, and sneaks his right arm around Remus's middle, both to give him a light squeeze and to lock Remus in place and avoid him going right off the edge of the couch, tucking his feet alongside Remus's and underneath Tango, who simply lets him do that, the champ.

He shuts his eyes as Remus takes in a long, harried breath ahead of him, opens them once Remus holds it in for slightly too long, and takes a big chance in shaking him just a bit so he'll quit it.

"I just wanted one day," Remus puts out, his voice scratchy, bitter, listless.

Sirius knows that Remus knows he's had days without, but he can't quite argue with the sentiment though he might like to otherwise; it'd have been nice if he hadn't gotten one on a day that was truly one for the books, plain as. He breathes against the nape of Remus's neck, places a kiss to the skin in front of his lips, and hums his allowance.

"When's your next day off?" Sirius bids, a while later.

"Thursday," Remus answers monotonously, a few beats behind him.

Sirius presses his lips to the back of Remus's neck again, humming lightly in both reply and acceptance, making Plans already.

 

-

 

Thursday morning, after Sirius opens his eyes and greets the day ahead, commences the start of what he has coined their Great Gay Date Day, all rights reserved. First item on the docket: the wake, shake, and bake, but he'll need Remus to be awake before that can commence. Having had the day teased to him first thing Monday morning, Remus seems none too surprised about being tapped awake, but he wouldn't be when he’s been made well aware of the plans ahead throughout the week.

Remus has a sleepy but rather coy smile on as he rolls toward Sirius, settling on his right side and tucking his hands under the right of his head to prop it up more on the pillow. Sirius takes a moment to appreciate the face he managed to get lucky enough to wake up next to, reaches up to pass his right thumb over Remus’s left brow, and even with the slight, left-of-centre divot where his scar is, it doesn’t take away from that face nor any of the historical contentment Sirius feels doing such a familiar act.

“So, it’s up to you,” Sirius starts. “With the wake part being out of the way, you can choose the standard shake and bake, or we could opt for a little more variety and shuffle the order around; make it a bake, shake, and bake again? Your decision.”

Remus breathes in airily, giving a pondering look and then speaking rather decidedly. “Second option speaks to me the most.”

“Adventurous man,” Sirius offers him.

Remus lifts his shoulders easily. “I did warn you.”

“That, you did,” Sirius echoes.

“Pipe’s in the other room,” Remus offers, nodding once toward the open doorway.

“Back soon,” Sirius returns, sliding out from under their shared sheet and tapering off into the main room. “Where is it?”

“Table, last I saw,” Remus calls.

Sirius heads around the side of the couch and spots it right where it was suggested to be, reaching to pluck it off of the coffee table. Their supply sits not far from where the pipe lay and he snatches the baggy up, bringing both back to the room. An incalculable time later sees the both of them sweaty, sticky, and certifiably wiped out, Sirius lazing with his arms crossed over Remus’s chest, his chin resting over them, and still gaining the feeling back in his toes while Remus reaches for the pipe that had once been put on his bedside table for safe-keeping and lifts off his back a little in order to pull an astounding hit off of it.

Sirius simply watches him sigh the resulting cloud out of him as if the scene is gripping television or the like, but in his defense, Remus will always look real good doing that. He seems satisfied with that hit for he holds the lighter and the pipe down to him in offering, spurring Sirius to uncurl his arms from underneath his chin and reach over to take both, otherwise quite happy where he is for the moment what with Remus’s bent knees keeping his lower half rather casually in place between them.

Sirius props himself up on his elbows to pull off a decent haul, shooting a stream out to the right while Remus reaches over to push his clock over a little to better see the time from where he is. “Jesus, it’s one,” he puts out.

Sirius squints up at him, leaving the pipe sitting on Remus’s chest and the lighter just by it. “That a bad thing?” he asks, voice hoarse. “Stage a lay-in was always phase one of the plan, I remind you.”

“Not — well, no, I do remember that,” Remus concedes, rubbing a lethargic hand over his face and smirking a laugh, looking down at Sirius with a quirk of a smile. “I was going to make a John and Yoko reference, say if we were going to stage a lay-in we really should have penned a tune from this very bed, called in a camera crew, a few reporters, claim we’re doing this for peace in the world, but would that have been low hanging fruit?”

Sirius gives an amused noise, scoots up a bit, and reaches up to drum out the very simplistic beat to 'Give Peace a Chance' into the wall behind Remus’s pillow, a more direct answer of no, not at all, as far as Sirius is concerned.

Tango borks three times in quick succession out in the main room. “And yet, no matter how long Remus and Sirius remained in bed, peace would not be achieved,” Remus narrates sagely, meanwhile Tango’s nails click-clack along the floorboards.

“They made it look so fucking easy; who were we to know?” Sirius returns, turning his head halfway toward Tango to shush him over his shoulder. “Should probably start phase two, take him out soon; he’s a tad rambunctious.”

Remus looks off behind Sirius, widening his eyes a bit. “Don’t know what you mean,” he offers. “Seems lethargic at best.”

Sirius turns his head to where Remus’s gaze ends, finds Tango over by the island twirling around in a circle after his tail, and barks out a laugh automatically, which really just has Tango freezing on the spot and staring him down from where he stopped: Sirius freezes too, just there, the resulting standstill lasting about five seconds in total before he makes a sudden move and sends Tango into an absolute frenzy before he gallops toward them.

Sirius lets out a base-level reaction which is really just more a light shriek than anything else, turns back toward Remus in a flash, and wiggles out of the confines of his legs to climb up his body, taking their sheet with him and pulling it over them. Remus only just manages to get the pipe out from between the two of them before Tango hits the bed on all fours and takes off running on it, nosing at the left side of Sirius’s makeshift shield at various spots in search of a weak link.

Sirius doubles down on his hold on the sheet, grinning down at Remus in stitches underneath him, and waits a few seconds before poking at the side of the sheet, snorting loudly as a gigantic snout shoves underneath the sheet. He pokes at the snooter since it’s there and he might as well, but that only takes Tango’s already overwhelming energy well past a hundred and sends him scrambling up to lay his full weight down on them.

“OK, you win,” Sirius maintains, sandwiched between Remus and the dog.

Remus puts out a charmed little noise, apparently quite fine with being squashed under two spritely beings, but Sirius still budges his shoulders against the weight over them until Tango shifts off of him and anchors down, hogging straight out over his ankles, but Sirius supposes that's what he gets. He pushes himself up, plants his hands on either side of Remus’s head, and smiles down at him, a substantial layer of his hair falling forward and laying around their faces as if providing an extra barrier around the two of them than just the blanket, and Remus reaches up with his right hand to catch him at the jaw and pulls him down and in for a kiss Sirius had been quietly begging for.

He responds to it with purposeful leisure, meeting Remus’s lips at a supremely unhurried pace and not letting up on that until Remus quickens the pace, leaving Sirius breathless and working to catch up with him through the haze.

Sirius stills his lips entirely as a long, huffy sigh sounds from down near the foot of the bed. “Hard life, I know,” he gives the dog.

Remus gives in to a little stretch underneath him, smiles as he gives a noise of deep satisfaction, and settles back in, kiss-rouge lips looking inviting all over again, but if Sirius starts up another round, they really will be here for a lot longer.

Sirius compromises and ducks his head to leave an open-mouthed kiss on Remus’s lips. “Could keep this up in the shower if you’re up for it?” he raises, pressing another quick peck to the tip of Remus’s nose.

“Mm, mhm,” Remus replies, moving a lot quicker than recently advertised.

They do spend a lot of time snogging in the shower, and look, if Remus’s cock wants to say hello again, Sirius can’t just leave it on read; that would be deplorable behaviour. No, he has absolutely no qualms about pressing him up against the tiles and rutting up against him until he’s as hard as Remus is, and once that’s done, there’s really nothing else for it than to see this new round through. Remus splays one hand open in Sirius’s locks, curls his left one around him to splay it at the small of Sirius's back, and scoots down a little against the shower wall, setting their heights up with the exact right positioning for wet, hot friction to take them over and rocking his cock against the thrusts he's effectively pulling Sirius into; a man after exactly what he wants. Sirius leaves his left hand curled at the side of Remus’s right thigh, braces the shower wall behind them with his right one, and gives himself over to all the personal directing Remus is doing with his hips, searching half-blindly for Remus’s lips and whinging once he's caught them. His breathing ratchets up tighter and tighter with the friction to match until Sirius hits the peak just as Remus's breath and body tense, and the two of them ride it out together, clutching at each other for purchase until they’re left still and gasping against the shower wall.

He lifts his head only after Remus lifts his hand from his hair, blinking three or four times before his vision comes back into focus, and takes in Remus’s right palm, held just in between them; he sends out a sated smirk, unhooks the fingers of his right hand from around the back of Remus’s thigh, and reaches up to return his high-five with a quick swipe, taking the opportunity to simply lean against Remus until his legs stop tingling.

“That really is as good as they say it’s going to be,” Remus says, between hitches of breath.

“What is?” Sirius checks.

“The whole coming together thing,” Remus offers. “I get it, and I get it well.”

“Oh, same,” Sirius sighs, effectively glowing with pride. “Give me a minute and I’ll move.”

“No rush,” Remus says of it, tracing his fingertips in a circle where he’s holding Sirius to him in a casual illustration of just how invited he is to stay put.

Once clean, Sirius pushes the curtain aside and reaches for a towel, pausing still with his arm outstretched as it becomes very clear that one long and furry dog in their midst has decided there is, in fact, a rush; he puts out a charmed laugh as he can’t help but notice Tango sitting in the bathroom doorway, coos at him as he pulls the towel toward him, and passes it off to Remus like the charming houseguest he is.

“We’ll go soon,” he assures, reaching for a towel of his own.

“I don’t know that he believes you,” Remus mentions, his left leg hitched up on the side of the tub as he towels it off.

“I bet he doesn’t, but I’m telling the truth,” Sirius says, tackling his own damp body.

“A half-truth,” Remus calls it, moving on to his right leg. “It’s going to take forever just for me to coordinate some clothes onto myself and I think he knows it.”

Sirius ties his towel around his waist and reaches to pull another one toward him for his hair. “Well, give me a sec and I’ll lay something out for you; that'll take care of half that problem right there,” he returns, bending forward to scoop all of his hair up into the towel and straightening up with it perched atop his head in time to catch Remus making a bit of a face.

“Normally I’d fight you on that, but I’m beat,” he says for it.

“Oh, look at that; I got lucky twice,” Sirius chimes, stepping out of the tub onto the mat.

He isn’t moving fast by any means so he doesn’t get out of Remus’s radius before the boy whacks his ass with one of the ends of his towel, but Sirius isn’t all that broken up about that, simply scampers off to the bedroom and starts on picking an outfit he knows he’ll like on Remus. He lobs a pair of briefs onto the bed from the dresser, decides on Remus’s tan corduroys as they give him legs for days and do wonders for that perfect peach of a behind; more selfish reasoning, but Sirius won’t pretend he isn’t generally out for at least some of his own gain. He picks a black tee to go with, liking the simplicity along with the contrast of the two colours, et voila, c'est fini.

“Your articles await,” he calls out, heading to the dresser to pick out something for himself.

He assumes something lightweight would be ideal given that he’s planning on running Tango around the square until they can’t any longer, but the dog needs some exercise, and if he’s honest, so does Sirius. He stands at the dresser, picks out a pair of black joggers, a sleeveless tank to match since he’ll be hotter than hell out there, and pulls out a pair of socks from the top drawer. He knows he can’t have his hair falling all around him as he runs Tango around, so once he’s clothed he unravels it from the towel and works on brushing it out to make it easier to pull up into a bun and keep it out of his face.

Remus wanders into the room just as Sirius is finishing up with the right side of his head, eyeing him openly as he passes him at the mirror. “Like what you see?” Sirius raises, tooching his ass a bit.

“Yes, and furthermore, I don’t know how you managed to look like you jumped off a sportswear catalogue in the three minutes since I last saw you,” Remus returns, heading for the clothes laid out for him while Sirius beams brightly as he moves onto brushing out the left side of his head. “Sirius, I’m going to melt in these.”

Sirius looks in the mirror to find Remus’s reflection holding up his corduroys. “They look so good on you, though,” he insists.

“They're really more of a fall pair,” Remus insists.

“Cuff them and you’ll hardly notice,” Sirius returns.

He huffs long and hard for it, but Sirius catches the smile he undoubtedly thought would go unnoticed while he handles a process as delicate as brushing his locks out; even Remus forgets how good Sirius is at multitasking at times. He finishes up with the brush, sets it down on the bureau, and backs up a little to avoid the bureau’s edge when he bends to pull his hair up into a bun, and then he definitely backs up a little more just to budge Remus while he’s trying to shimmy into the corduroys.

“Sneak,” Remus sends him through a laugh, hopping out of reach as he pulls them up over his hips.

Sirius smirks and straightens up to finish out his bun, drops his hands to his sides, and has another look in the mirror before deeming himself ready. He leaves Remus to finish dressing, hyping up the dog by clapping the whole way to the kitchen to pull a bottle of water out of the fridge, Tango fast at his heels. He digs out a few treats and puts them in a baggy, heads to Remus’s teeny-tiny linen/various item closet between the front door and the bathroom, and pulls out a few reusable bags in preparation for phase three of the Great Gay Date Day.

Sirius tosses the water bottle and treats into one of them, stuffs the two other bags in there, and perks at a thought. “Want me to pack a book for you?”

“Mm, am I being let off of jogging duty?” Remus raises, sounding piqued.

“Can’t run in corduroys,” Sirius trades.

“Good point,” Remus returns. “The one on the island, please.”

Sirius heads there for it, grabs his pack and a spare lighter off of the island while he’s there, and drops the lot in the bag along with the rest. He has a quick look around, feeling a pair of eyes on him, and finds Mestophales staring him down where she’s sat perched on the back of the couch, a come hither look about her. He smiles bright as he heads for her, thinking she deserves a bit of love that’s all her own now that there are two furballs to think about, and scoops her up off of the back of the couch, cradling her like a little baby and bobbing her around a bit before the fantastically colourful quilt draped over the back of the couch catches his eye and brings on a new thought.

“Can we stop off at Boots on the way?” he requests.

“Sure,” Remus returns from the room. “What sparked that?”

“I’m thinking that bringing a blanket would be a good plan, but I don’t want to get leaves and grime all over your mum’s handiwork,” Sirius provides.

“Oh, no,” Remus placates. “We can’t have that.”

With that decided, Sirius has nothing left to do but wait for him, so he gives Mestophales another nuzzle before letting her get back to her throne, sticks his hands on his hips, and stares down at Tango standing in front of him, puffing a breath of air in and out of his cheeks quickly until Tango gets so riled up, he hops up and budges Sirius’s face with his snout.

“Oi,” he laughs, blocking his nose before the dog comes in for a second budge, “you need to chill.”

The dog doesn’t chill so much as he simply hops about the main room until Remus steps out of his room looking like a rightful twelve and then Tango really must agree for he goes frolicking toward Remus at the very sight of him and nearly knocks him off balance. He manages to stay afoot, petting Tango’s nose before moving past the two of them to grab his aviators off of the island.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Sirius chants in reply.

Remus sends him a huff and sticks them on. “I wish I didn’t have to wear them so much,” he lodges. “Outside is one thing, but inside is another.”

“You could tell anyone who asks that you just really identify with Bono,” Sirius suggests.

Remus makes a frank face. “I don’t want anyone thinking that,” he returns, garnering Sirius to choke on literal air. “Do we have everything?”

Sirius gets himself together, nodding lightly. “Think so,” he offers. “Water and treats for the pooch, the blanket we can get at Boots, and I do want a coffee, so I say we stop by your shop on the way.”

“Sounds good,” Remus allows. “Did you put sunscreen on?”

Sirius smacks his lips once. “I did not.”

“Sirius, it’s scorching out there,” Remus chides, budging past Sirius to get into the bathroom. “You’re going to burn right up.”

“I forgot,” Sirius sends him, moving to stand in the doorway. “You almost forgot, too.”

Remus does not reply as he’s digging out a bottle of sunscreen from underneath the sink, then moves to stand again and beckons Sirius closer with his left hand as he uncaps it with his right thumb. Sirius steps up in front of him, turning around to give Remus access to the back of his neck and his shoulders.

“Your inner dad is really popping off right now,” Sirius mentions, side-eyeing Remus in the mirror.

Remus smooths a cold smear of sunscreen over the back of his neck, causing a jolt to go up Sirius’s spine. “Think this is more of a mum thing,” he raises.

Sirius nods deftly. “Suppose I wouldn’t know.”

Remus meets his gaze in the mirror, panic mode activated. “I was just responding,” he says of it. “My mum was always way more intense about it than my dad was — and fair enough, look at me; I’m whiter than a golf course, I needed the sunscreen.”

Sirius puts out a laugh at the personality shining through the panic. “It’s fine, you’re not in trouble,” he instils, feeling like a rightful dolt for derailing their good morning.

Remus averts his gaze and moves onto Sirius’s shoulders, leaving the sunscreen on the counter to be able to use both of his hands to rub it in. When he’s done there, he reaches for the bottle and squeezes another glob into his right palm, and meets Sirius’s gaze in the mirror again, gesturing with his left forefinger for him to turn around.

He does as bid and Remus reaches up to smear two stark, white lines over Sirius’s cheeks, and it’s sort of fitting that it looks a bit like warpaint. Sirius swallows hard, reaches for the sunscreen bottle and squeezes a globe into his left hand, gets it all mixed up on his hands, and smears two lines at the top of Remus’s cheeks, thinking if he’s a soldier, then Remus these days is the general.

“I need to think before I talk,” Remus offers, looking sheepish as all hell as he rubs out the two lines to spread the sunscreen out further.

Sirius shakes his head. “Me more than you,” he returns, working the sunscreen into Remus's skin. “That one was on me.”

Remus leaves his hands held at the sides of Sirius's face, leaning in over Sirius’s hands to leave a kiss on his lips. “Arms,” he requests, and Sirius pauses his hands and leaves his forearms open for Remus to cover. “Have to protect one of your best assets.”

“You and forearms,” Sirius negs him, unable to help a grin from forming on his lips.

“You have the best set I’ve ever seen,” Remus returns matter-of-factly, using Sirius’s wrists as a spot to wipe any excess sunscreen from his hands. “And I’m an expert, so you know; my credentials are solid.”

“I know you are,” Sirius assures, plucking the sunscreen bottle off of the counter again. “Gimme those arms, speaking of.”

Remus smiles bright as he poses with them out in front of him and Sirius goes right to town on them, but thankfully his shoulders are covered by the sleeves of his tee so a quick rub of the film on Sirius's fingers over them should do the trick. “Alright, you’re good,” Sirius imparts, patting Remus’s upper arms with finality.

Remus smiles and nudges Sirius as he passes him to get through the doorway, moving for the shoe rack to pull out a pair of loafers. He drops them to the floor to stick his feet into them, hands Sirius his very recently acquired runners since he’s right by the rack, and takes care of snapping the lead on Tango’s collar, handing it over when Sirius has finished putting his shoes on.

“You don’t want him for a bit?” Sirius raises, straightening up.

“Oh, no, no, no,” Remus assures decidedly. “No, I am good; my newest fear is losing grip on that lead.”

Sirius waves him off, taking hold of it when Remus jostles it against his torso. “You wouldn’t do that.”

“No, you love that dog way too much for me to chance it,” Remus insists, shaking his head once and pulling the door open. “I’m too high for it.”

Sirius follows Remus out, backs right back into the flat, and grabs the bag he almost left behind, shutting the door behind him and locking up with the mat key without Remus even noticing his tiny flub, but to be fair, he’s a little busy studying a painting hung a little ways down the hall.

Sirius puts the mat key back in place, straightens back up, and wanders over to have a look for himself, but it’s really just a painting of a field with a tractor in it and a blue sky above them. “Riveting,” he puts out, rolling that R.

Remus ducks his head, succumbing to a tight laugh. “The clouds were moving a bit,” he says of it, walking off down the hall toward the stairwell and just leaving Sirius with that.

“What?” he sends after him, catching up to him with a few quick strides. “Are you sure you can go out right now?”

“We’ll find out, I suppose,” Remus trades him, practically gliding down the first set of stairs.

“Loving this 'come what may' attitude,” Sirius offers, clomping down the stairs behind him.

They head to Boots first, tie Tango up outside at his regular post, and head inside to conduct a search for the blankets. They find the aisle in question after some rigorous searching, scanning a modest selection of blankets at their disposal, but Sirius supposes expecting to find anything comparable to Hope’s work at a typical pharmacy is a long shot in and of itself.

He pushes out a puff of breath. “Cow print?” he raises, pointing to the only other option after that, “or zebra?”

Remus hums over on Sirius’s right. “Cow,” he picks.

“Done,” Sirius says of it, pulling it off of the shelf. “That was easy enough.”

“If you’re getting that, I’m getting the drinks,” Remus conditions, following Sirius back up the aisle toward the front of the store. “I think that’s a fair trade.”

“Fine,” Sirius singsongs, in too light a mood to bother debating it. They make a left toward the registers, where Sirius, a little too blitzed to pull off small talk right about then, spots an easy out and budges Remus’s right arm with his left one, whispering exaggeratedly. “Self-checkout, self-checkout.”

Remus sweeps a hand ahead of him for Sirius to lead the way, evidently in plain agreement with that. Sirius searches for altogether too long a time for the bar code on the blanket cover, finally spots the thing after Remus points right to it, and lifts it to the scanner, moving the blanket this way and that way before the beep finally sounds out and startles him.

“Oh, this is going to be a task,” Remus quips, smiling wide.

“Shh,” Sirius sends him, smiling wryly all the same. He presses the button to take them to the pay screen, but a window pops up asking how many bags he’d like and he lets out a noise of major grievance. “I don’t want any.”

“You have to press zero, then,” Remus offers, reaching to take care of that.

Sirius pays as quickly as the machine will let it happen, takes the receipt only because he’s so not interested in being followed out the door for proof of payment in his state, and carries the blanket underneath his left arm like it’s a football. “I’ll take the bag,” Remus bids, going right on ahead and tugging the strap of the bag on Sirius’s right shoulder down.

Sirius wiggles his arm out from the loop of the strap and follows Remus out of there, letting out a loud breath of relief and heading for the dog. He hands Remus the blanket while he handles getting Tango’s lead untied from the post, and on, they traverse toward Remus’s shop.

Remus reaches out and stops Sirius from walking about three doors down from the storefront. “I need to think about what I want before I get in there,” he insists, speaking like this is thee mission of his entire life.

“OK,” Sirius returns, gravely to match.

“Yours is easy enough, I’ll have that drink memorized when I'm eighty," Remus presses on. “I have to prepare mine now so I don't stand there staring at the menu boards and have my coworkers thinking I’ve gone 'round the twist.”

“Well, my guess is a tea,” Sirius offers sagely, “but I wouldn’t do a hot one out in this sun.”

“No, no, that would be too much,” Remus echoes, nodding.

Sirius breaks at his intense resolve. “You know what we offer," he raises, succumbing to a fit. "Just make a choice, you knob.”

“Choices,” Remus puts up, like it's a curse word in itself.

“Alright, you can stay outside with the dog and I can go in and get them,” Sirius offers, “but then you’ll have to hold his lead and you’d be at the mercy of whatever I decide to get you in the moment.”

“No, not happening,” Remus says decidedly, walking on ahead. “I’ll figure it out.”

Sirius strides along behind Remus until Tango grabs the attention of a few patrons out on the front terrace and there, Remus quickly slips past the commotion and inside the shop before Sirius even realizes he’s been ditched. The good news is, his dog is one of Sirius's favourite topics of conversation so even as blitzed as he is, he has no qualms about the gaggle of girls that've assembled around Tango, vying to pet him, and Tango certainly doesn’t seem to mind the attention either.

Remus reappears a little while later, going around the outside of the little semicircle of Tango’s admirers to hand Sirius his drink with a straw already in it, and holds onto what looks like their chain’s signature iced green tea.

“Ooh, went with green, did you?” Sirius raises.

“Somebody else ordered it ahead of me so I just went with it,” Remus offers under his breath, taking to aiming his work smile at the small crowd congregated around Tango.

“Alright, time to go, yeah?” Sirius says to the dog, and by extension, the crowd.

They head back the way they came, pushing on for the square with Tango trotting along on Sirius’s right and Remus walking along on his left sipping his tea. The square has more people sprinkled about in it than Sirius was banking on, but he supposes it’s a fine day out and with primary and secondary school out, too, it’s something he probably should have seen coming.

They pick a spot on the grass in a less crowded spot under the shade of a large tree, open up their new blanket, and Remus fluffs it out far and wide before laying it on the ground. He takes a seat right smack in the middle of it, pulling out his book from inside the bag with a smile up at Sirius and signalling he’s A-OK where he is, and with that, Sirius trades him a grin, leaves his coffee with him, and takes off with Tango to run some laps around the perimeter of the square. He keeps to a light jog, not looking to end up heaving through overexertion before they get much exercise in, and weaves Tango in and out of various spackles of people walking along the pathways.

He stops a few laps in, letting Tango have a drink from the water fountain, and ends up flying the bird at a man passing by when he lets Sirius know exactly what he thinks about that decision. Back at it again, Sirius gets another three laps in before he’s stopped by a group around their age entirely obsessed with Tango just from the sight of him, which is really fair enough, and with Sirius’s lungs yelling at him to take it easy, he doesn’t really mind a short break.

He gets stopped a few more times and decides that next time he takes Tango for a run, he’s going to have to pick an off-time to do it because a star like him cannot go unnoticed in a crowded park. The last time they're stopped — and that's mostly because Sirius is beat and can’t go for much longer — it’s by a pair of older gents who take a strong interest in Tango and are so overjoyed by his existence that Sirius can’t help but find it endearing despite trying very, very hard to keep his heavy breathing at bay.

One of the men crouches in front of Tango, giving his ruff a solid rub down, and Sirius watches with his eyebrows up high on his forehead the moment the man calls the other one 'Hubie.' He stands quite still, looking back and forth between the gents as a debate strikes up over whether they could properly care for a dog the size and stature of one of Tango’s size, and Sirius, absolutely convinced he’s watching a couple go back and forth over getting one of their own, feels he has to interject right about there.

“He’s not full-grown yet so he will get a little bigger, yes, but he’s gentle, very good with other pets, and just a dreamboat,” he says, splaying a hand toward Tango with it, “I mean, look at him.”

The man name-dropped as Hubie offers his agreement, if a bit on the reserved side of things. “His colouring is lovely,” he allows for, “but he’s still so much larger than—"

“Oh, honey, look,” the other man urges, and Sirius knows he's not 'honey,' but he goes ahead and looks, too, finding Tango has perched his paws on the man’s shoulders.

Unfortunately for Hubie, Sirius has a feeling that man is already sold on this breed, and judging by the wry smile on Hubie’s face, it looks as if he’s coming to terms with that, too. “We’ll talk about it,” he offers.

Sirius smiles bright, his work done here, and paves the way out of this conversation that’s more or less his fault, citing he’s got to get back to 'the mister' when that really is the truth; he’s already thrilled about getting to tell Remus all about this. He leads Tango back to where he left Remus, heading up on the grass and taking a backwards sprawl on the blanket to the right of Remus.

“Taking a break?” Remus raises, looking up from his book.

“I did ten laps,” Sirius supplies.

“Well, shit,” Remus offers, scratching idly at his left ankle just below the cuff of his trouser leg. “At a pack a day, no less.”

Sirius sends out a righteous pfft for that dig. “I’ve cut way down,” he defends.

Remus reaches over and swipes his right thumb over Sirius’s dampened forehead, so quickly that if you blinked, you’d miss it. “I’m teasing,” he instils. “You really have cut down.”

“Thank you,” Sirius chimes, holding his right palm up and out. “Now give me my pack.”

Remus huffs a laugh, digs in the bag for his pack, and hands it over to him. “Have you got a light?” he raises.

“There’s one in the bag,” Sirius relays, popping a cigarette in his mouth while he waits for Remus to find it.

Remus gives a championed breath, lifting the tiny red lighter out of it. “God, there,” he huffs, handing it over. “Couldn’t have picked a smaller one.”

Sirius smirks as he flicks the lighter, puffing on the filter and humming brightly as Remus holds the bottle of water out to him. “Mm, can you give him some?” he bids.

Remus pats his lap to get Tango’s attention, snaps his fingers to lure him around to the outskirts of the blanket, and Sirius lets go of the lead so Tango can move freely and not take his right arm off in the process.

“I was talking to these two older gents just there,” Sirius raises.

“Yes, I saw,” Remus echoes, pouring a little stream out of the bottle for Tango to lap at.

Sirius perks. “Did you?”

“Mhm, you’re nice to look at,” Remus serves him, capping the bottle and leaving it on the blanket for now. Sirius hums brightly around his cigarette, feeling warm from his head to the tip of his toes and that has nothing to do with the run he just finished. “I looked up in time to catch the altercation at the water fountain, too.”

“He was thirsty?” Sirius defends.

“I’m not going to bother explaining why people aren’t overjoyed at the sight of a dog drinking from a water fountain typically reserved for people since I think you know why that is already,” Remus returns him. “I’m just glad it didn’t end in fisticuffs.”

“That guy was all talk,” Sirius maintains, unfazed. “Anyway, those gents hadn’t seen one like him before.”

“He is a particular breed,” Remus offers mildly. “They seemed nice; in the five seconds I spent checking up on you, I mean.”

“They were, yeah,” Sirius accepts. “I’m about ninety-eight percent sure they were a couple.”

“Oh?” Remus asks, looking quite piqued. “How’d you figure that?”

“They just had an old married couple vibe coming off them,” Sirius forwards. “One called the other guy 'Hubie' before asking if they could get one for themselves and then later called him 'honey' — I mean, I’m no detective, but I connected the dots with the evidence I scrounged up.”

Remus tilts his head evenly for that, a quirk alive at his lips. “Think you might be onto something there."

Sirius smiles around a haul, waiting a few beats before letting it out. “Hubie was you in fifty years, I swear,” he insists, and even with his shades on, Remus’s face is openly bemused. “Practical, careful, all ‘do we really want one so big?’ but his fella wasn’t having it.”

“Alright, you know what,” Remus puts in, lifting a hand to rub it over Tango’s snooter, “it’s a fair question, and I do think I’ve come around since.”

“You have, I’ll give you that,” Sirius allows, smiling as he chooses to pause and bask in the sight of Remus having a tender moment with his pooch. “However, he had Remus energy and Hubie's fella was very much me; it was a bit like I was looking through a projection of us in, like, forty years.”

It's risky, saying something like that with all the weight that could be attributed to it, but Remus moves to lay beside Sirius with a hearty smirk, leaving enough room between them to rest his hands behind his head without knocking his left elbow against Sirius. “We would chide each other in the park in front of some kid,” he puts up, turning his head a little more toward Sirius, a lopsided smile on. “What do you think, then? They’ll get one of their own?”

Sirius gives a smile paired with a sagely nod. “Last thing I heard before I went on my way was a firm but kind ‘we’ll see,’ but between you and me, the other one was far too excited by the idea for them not to.”

Remus gives an easy exhale through his nose. “Good for them,” he cements, looking down and plucking up a long hair absolutely belonging to Tango off of his black tee. “I should’ve thought about bringing a roller along; this isn’t going to end well for me.”

“You’re very high,” Sirius offers. “Can’t think of everything.”

“That was kind of you, thank you,” Remus returns, stretching his arms out above his head before crossing them underneath it for a makeshift pillow.

Sirius takes another haul, looking up at the sky above the smattering of tree branches over their heads, and looks down at Remus again a minute or so later, quite provoked by a thought. “Where are your grandparents?”

Remus hangs his head to the left, looking more toward Sirius. “Physically?”

“Well, sure,” Sirius offers.

Remus puts out a thoughtful breath. “I’ve only got one left, actually,” he offers. “My dad’s mum, and she’s out in Belfast.”

“Right, right,” Sirius echoes, snapping his free hand toward him. “You’ve cousins there, too.”

Remus nods a beat or three later. “Yeah, my dad’s brother and his family are there, too,” he reiterates. “Why do you ask?”

Sirius shrugs easily. "I just spoke with a pair of elderly folk and wondered where yours were?” he puts up. “Wasn’t a very big leap for me.”

Remus gives a conceding nod. “Well, there you have it; one’s in Belfast and the other three are… wherever,” he offers, pulling his right arm from underneath his head and pairing that with a half-gesture, half-flutter of his hand above their heads, and after a few beats the action sinks in for Sirius and brings a light laugh from his throat. “Sorry, it’s worn off a bit, but clearly not much yet.”

Sirius flashes him a grin. “No no, you’re doing great,” he extends. “Gather around, children; Professor Lupin’s about to teach us about The Great Wherever.”

Remus smirks, sticking his arm back behind his head and humming a frank no. “No, he is not,” he drags out. He leans his head in the other direction and Tango moves to lie down on the spot and noses at his face immediately. “You are utterly shameless.”

“He doesn’t know the word,” Sirius passes along, taking the last haul off the end of his cigarette before crushing the cherry out in the dirt.

“He’s definitely your dog,” Remus says of it.

Sirius smiles as he lets the stream of smoke out. “Why’d they go to Belfast?”

“Hm?” Remus hums, turning his head back toward him.

“Of all the places to end up, I mean,” Sirius elaborates. “Just a strange pick to me.”

“Is it?” Remus raises.

“A little,” Sirius offers, shrugging with a smile on. “Do you have a touch o’ the Irish in you without my knowing it?”

Remus pushes out a breath born of renewed comprehension. “No, just one incredibly Welsh bloke over here,” he maintains, huffing a laugh. “My dad and his brother were just kids when they moved them there and my dad was the only one who made it back to Wales eventually.”

Sirius nods, spends some time connecting a few dots since he got it, and ends up coming to a fork in the road. “So, on Christmas, when we were whittling down where your parents could be aside from the hospital, I remember you said they wouldn’t have been out in Belfast for the holiday.”

Remus reels for a moment. “You have an unsettlingly good but choosie memory," he reports.

Sirius reaches over to press his left forefinger against the tip of Remus’s nose like a button. “Why wouldn’t they have been there?” he reiterates.

“Well, they didn’t have the means to just travel around, if you remember,” Remus passes along.

“Right, no,” Sirius allows, turning onto his right side to face him better and propping his head up on his right hand, “but no one offered to come down and see them?”

Remus gives an even head tilt. “I don’t know that it would’ve been warranted,” he offers. “My uncle had come down for my dad’s operation, so he’d already had a visit with them in the summer, and my dad’s mum is seventy-three so I don’t think we can hold it against her for not making the trip down for either one.”

“No, I s’pose we shouldn’t,” Sirius allows. He looks down at the blanket between the two of them, reaches for his pack, and lifts it up between them, shaking it in question. “Want to share one with me?”

“Sure,” Remus replies.

Sirius thumbs the pack open, shakes it a bit until a few options come loose, and leans in to pull the best one out from the pack with his teeth. He lights up, takes hold of it in his left hand, and hands it over to Remus, who pulls his right arm out from under his head and takes hold of it.

“Shame you missed that little reunion,” he offers, shooting the exhale out to the side. “When your uncle was down, I mean.”

Remus hums around his haul. “Wasn’t fun, no," he allows, letting it out. “I know this is going to sound a bit shit, but wait for the punchline, OK?”

Sirius lifts his free hand easily. “Waiting.”

Remus tips his head toward him while taking another haul, waiting until it’s out before continuing. “I was less concerned about the little reunion I was missing and more bothered by the fact that I couldn’t make it for the operation,” he puts up. “The visit from my uncle was nice to hear about since I couldn’t make it, but missing out on that wasn’t really the difficult part; I just really wanted to be there with my parents.”

“You fucking monster,” Sirius deadpans.

Remus huffs a laugh. “I spoke to him over the phone while he was there; had a nice chat and that was enough for me,” he extends him. “It was kind of fun, though; he’s very like my dad in some ways, but nothing like him in others.”

“Tell,” Sirius goads.

“He swears far less for one, though I don’t know if he just hadn’t let one out while I was talking to him,” Remus maintains, holding the cigarette out to Sirius. “He’s a Stones man, too.”

“Not worth it, then,” Sirius quips, smirking around a haul. “Had the family been down to visit before that?”

“A few times,” Remus extends him. “The whole family came once, when I was—” he pauses, giving a vague little tune in thought, “—nine? Yeah, that’s it, for an actual planned reunion, and my uncle’s been down over the years visiting my dad, usually when he’d go into the hospital, and my last year of school had the big scare for him so my grandmother did come down with my uncle for that since it was so precarious for a while there.”

Sirius offers a bit of a grimace around a haul. “Not an ideal scenario for that quasi-reunion,” he offers.

“No, not the best,” Remus echoes.

“Grandfather wasn’t there?” Sirius raises.

Remus shakes his head. “No, he’d passed a few years back by then,” he passes along. “It was just the two of them that came down, and I didn’t really see them much that time either.”

“No?” Sirius bids.

Remus shakes his head, taking in a haul. “Well, between school and work in the evenings, I’d mostly be getting updates over the phone,” he relays. “My dad wasn’t working at the time obviously, but my mum was down to part-time, so it just made sense to keep working and I'd got myself my very own flip phone that year to keep in the loop — and by that, I mean it was a brick.”

He lifts the hand he's holding the cigarette with and illustrates the width he’s talking about. “I had one of those, too,” Sirius offers, smiling. “It was pay-as-you-go, and I hid that thing so well my parents had no idea it was even there.”

“Surprised you could hide it if it was a brick,” Remus quips.

“I’m resourceful,” Sirius puts it.

“Well, that, I should know,” Remus returns, taking a quick pull off of the cigarette and holding it out to Sirius.

Sirius takes it, has a pull of his own off of it, and leaves the haul in his chest for a little longer before letting it out. “Bit of a pattern there,” he raises. “Them only turning up when the chips are down?”

Remus gives a circumstantial nod to that. “I hadn’t thought of it like that, but yeah, you’re right,” he gives him.

“I mean, you graduated that year,” Sirius puts up. “They didn’t come for that?”

Remus searches him. “Everything OK?” he checks.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Sirius insists. “I just find that—” he tries to find the right word for it, but nothing holds up after a few beats and honesty feels like the best policy here, “—I don’t have a word for it, but it twists my gut up, whatever it is.”

“Well, I think since they’d already been down that year, it didn’t make sense for them to come again,” Remus offers, reasonable as ever. “This is me talking about it now, 'course, but I really just wanted my dad to make it to my graduation so I don't think I thought once about inviting anyone else.”

Sirius feels a different sort of feeling in his gut. “Yeah, who needs the relatives when you’ve got Hope and Lyall coming to your grad, right?”

“Well, exactly,” Remus echoes, laughing a bit there. “My dad needed to walk with a cane at the time, and he hated all the waiting around through all the awards and the whole first leg of the alphabet you have to wait through to get to the L’s, even though that is what you sign up for when you go to a graduation ceremony, but at one point, I thought he was going to start wielding that thing like a weapon; he was so over it.”

Sirius sends out a long pfft.Lyall.

“Yeah, he’s a bit of legend,” Remus says of it, smiling.

Sirius hands the cigarette off to Remus, finding the twist in his gut hasn’t let up much. “I get you not expecting them to come down for it,” he offers first. “This is you, and them coming to see you walk across the stage would be a fuss in the simplest terms in a regular situation, let alone a graduation ceremony after a real shit year, but I also just find it shit they didn’t come anyway.”

“Honestly, it’s probably better his side of the family didn’t come,” Remus trades him. “My dad called them curmudgeons more than I could even count as a kid; my grandmother in particular would ring and you could just hear my dad off grumbling in the house somewhere; she might've cramped his style a bit if she came.”

Sirius visibly tries to bite back a smile. “I love him,” he says of it.

“I’ve gotten the sense that their parenting style must've been more overbearing than my dad would've welcomed with open arms,” Remus continues. “It'd make sense to me why he huffs and puffs at my mum and me for fussing about him beyond what he sees as reasonable, but I suppose he puts up with it more for us because—”

“It’s you two,” Sirius comes in, and Remus’s lips twitch as he lends him a nod, a small smile threatening to form. “I see why he’d make the exception, myself.”

“Mm, my dad will absolutely grumble at you if you start telling him what you think he should be doing about anything,” Remus extends, taking Sirius’s output of the truth as a request for inclusion, it seems. “He’s a wildcard, that one, so prepare yourself ahead of time.”

Sirius smirks around another haul, letting Remus have a smile for the effort made whether he realizes Sirius pinpointed it or not. “I can’t wait for him to grumble at me.”

“Don’t go riling him up on purpose, you,” Remus warns him, a smile starting up on his own lips.

Sirius grins big, shaking his head as he hands him the last of the cigarette, and watches him for a bit as Remus pulls off of it, holds it in, and lets a stream out above them. “What about your mum’s parents, then?” he raises.

Remus perks up, putting the cigarette out in the grass by him. “Well, I didn’t really get to meet my granny; I’ve heard nothing but good things about her from my mum, but my dad just loved her and his opinion is important in this case, as we’ve just highlighted,” he offers, smiling for it. “I’ve heard it elsewhere, too; if you grow up in a place that tight-knit, everyone over a certain age knows you by your parents or your grandparents and will tell you about them, in detail, all your life.”

Sirius lets out a laugh. “I have no idea what living there would be like."

“Well, that’s a little tease of it, and as a lifelong Londoner, I don’t imagine you would be able to picture it,” Remus offers, smiling wryly. "You’ll see what I mean, though; we'll get stopped a lot, I'm sure.”

Sirius smiles for that, in a way just happy for the reminder that he’ll be there in a few weeks' time, but there’s a morose feeling circulating through him that takes precedence. “You didn’t get to meet her?” he raises, cycling back to that particular detail.

Remus gives a considered head tilt. “Well, I did technically but she passed when I was two, so I’m not all that sure if what I remember of her are actual memories or if I've made the stories I heard into memories,” he amends. “Do you know what I mean?”

“I do, yes,” Sirius says, smiling a bit.

Remus smirks, his mouth poised to speak. “There’s a photo of her holding me when I was a baby, and she looks very kind in it; excited to be holding a baby that could still burp up dinner all over her at any point before or after the photo was taken,” he shares. “I still have the quilt she made for me when I was born; it’s back home and so tiny it would probably only cover my arms at this point, but it’s still kicking around somewhere.”

“Should bring it back with you,” Sirius suggests. “Your arms get cold.”

Remus's lips quirk. “They sure do,” he echoes. He flattens out beside him, leaning his head up toward the sky, and Sirius doesn’t know the why, the how, or the anything about it, he just knows he likes Remus so much more than he already did before this conversation started. “My mum’s told me she liked my eyes.”

Sirius grins immediately. “I’ll bet.”

“Allegedly,” Remus puts forth mildly, though he looks pleased with the snort he gets out of Sirius for it.

“Nah, I believe it,” Sirius maintains. “They’re right blinkers now, so they must have been high beams back then.”

“Too big for my face, from what I’ve seen in pictures,” Remus tacks on.

“Even better,” Sirius instils.

“She looked a lot like my mum,” Remus offers. “Or, my mum looks a lot like she did, I should say.”

“Quite the opposite with you,” Sirius puts in. “Well, no, you’ve got Hope's eyes and hair, but for the rest, you’re literally an exact replica of Lyall just aged down twenty-odd years.”

Remus smirks a laugh, reaching over to pat Sirius’s left arm with his right hand. “There’s this bitty little lady who owns a bakery in town; Magda," he offers him, smiling quite a bit. "The very sweetest, but she's mixed my dad and me up quite a bit; it started once I hit my growth spurt and by the last few years I was still living there, we would both just let her think she was talking to the right Lupin so we didn't rain on her parade because either way, she was excited to see whichever one of us she thought she was talking to.

Sirius feels winded just for that gem of an anecdote. “Oh, you have got to turn up there as you are now and give her a heart attack,” he insists.

“Well, she is eighty-four, so maybe I won’t do that,” Remus says of it.

Sirius snorts. “OK, don’t do it, then,” he relents. “Alright, your mum's dad: go.”

“He was the greatest,” Remus sends him, happy to be on that topic, it looks like. “He would have me over for lunch every Sunday when I was a kid.”

“D’aww,” Sirius sends him.

“He was retired by then, but he taught maths his whole career so he would help me along with it,” Remus keeps on. “I’m no mathematician, but he did his best with me, got me up to par.”

“And thus, Professor Lupin was created,” Sirius concludes.

“Hardly,” Remus denies, his mouth twisted up into a smile. “Took that kiddo years upon years to dawn onto the fact that teaching might’ve been the right road to go down for him, and it’ll never be maths; let’s cross that off right now.”

“But it’s the same in every language,” Sirius puts in daintily. Remus gives a wan laugh and Sirius shimmies his shoulders a bit for it. “Nevertheless, he’s the one who planted the seed initially, and for that, I’d love to be able to thank him myself.”

“I’m sure he’d love the sentiment,” Remus extends. “I hope he’d feel a little proud if he knew what I’d chosen to major in.”

Sirius smiles, both for the fact that it’s almost impossible to imagine the man wouldn’t be proud of that or Remus in general, but his smile falters when he remembers all over again that they’re speaking about someone who’s deceased. “When did he pass?” he asks, quietly hopeful for a better picture of a timeline.

Remus pauses, counting back in his head by the looks of it. “Not long after we moved into the house, so it would've been in ‘02 and I'd have been eight or so when he went,” he extends, sending a small shrug in reply to Sirius's forwarded frown. “He was pushing seventy, and my mum saw him showing signs of trouble to come beforehand.”

“What sort of signs?” Sirius bids, morbidly curious perhaps.

Remus puts out a thoughtful breath. “It was strange because his body was starting to fail him, but his mind was still clear as a whistle,” he says of it. “He'd had a few falls in the months before we moved in and the house is bigger than a seventy-year-old can really keep up with, but he wouldn’t stand for being put in a home: too stubborn for it, surprise, surprise—” he pauses to smile as Sirius puts out a wan laugh, “—and you’ll see when we get there, but there are three levels, the washer and dryer are in the basement, and there’s a landing on the stairs between the ground floor and the second floor; it was too much for someone prone to falls so it just made sense to move in and help out where we could.”

“Nice of her, thinking of that,” Sirius puts up.

“He didn’t love all that came with it, but I think he appreciated it deep down,” Remus maintains, aiming a quick smile at him. “My mum thought it would be best to put him up in the den as it would be a lot easier for him to get around on the main floor and he didn’t like that so much, getting told where to sleep in his own house and all that, but honestly, he really couldn’t make it up the stairs without wobbling half the time and they didn’t want him taking a fall in the middle of the night just trying to get to the loo.”

Sirius raises his eyebrows a smidge. “You remember all that?”

Remus shakes his head. “Some, not all. That, I’ve put together over the years, but I do remember the grumbling, I’ll tell you that,” he assures him, smiling for it. “The strongest memory I have of that time is that he liked it when I practiced my reading with him, so I’d climb up next to him on the hide-a-bed and read what I'd been assigned, sometimes he’d have me read him the paper and help me out with the longer words, and he was so nice about it; I didn’t know it at the time, but it was definitely closer to the end by then and he must have been so wiped out most of the time, but he never treated time with me like it was a chore, he made it fun.”

Sirius takes in the quietest breath he can, speaking as low and unimposing as he can make it. “Did they tell you what was going on?”

Remus shakes his head. “Not really, no; I suppose I can’t really blame them, what are you supposed to tell a little kid?” he raises. “They told me he wasn’t well before we moved in, but I didn’t grasp the scope of it at seven and then I didn’t see his passing coming at all; I didn’t really have a frame of reference for it when the most I’d heard about death was from books and media geared toward children, I knew my gran had passed years ago by then, but it was still such a far-off concept to me that I really hadn’t planned on having in my own life? I had books to finish, homework to work on, maths to slug through; death just wasn’t on my radar yet.”

“How did you feel about it?” Sirius asks, unable to hold off. “Once it happened, I mean.”

“Confused,” Remus answers soon enough, and then there’s another small pause to gather words together, but Sirius isn’t in any rush. “I didn’t understand how someone could be there one minute and gone the next; it just wouldn’t compute so I’d wake up some Sundays, come down to the kitchen, and expect him to already be shuffling about and he wouldn’t be, or something good would happen and him being gone would just go right out of my head.”

Sirius says nothing, does nothing, lives and breathes absolutely nothing in case any movement or sound might close this window shut. “When I was nine, I won this read-a-thon we had in class, and I got this little blue ribbon for it that I can tell you right now I was just glowing over,” Remus tacks on, smiling with his head tilted a little toward Sirius, but mostly upward so the sky must be all he’s seeing right about now. “My dad picked me up from school that day and I ran out to that truck, telling him how excited I was to get home and tell Grandad all about my ribbon because he’d have been so chuffed about it; in a way, he’d helped me get that ribbon, but my dad just sort of sat there in the driver’s seat, waiting for my brain to catch up with my words.”

Remus pauses again, and Sirius doesn’t want to never find out where this is going. “Keep going,” he bids, quiet, gentle.

Remus shakes his head clear. “No, I just — now, I know why he did it, I wouldn’t know how to shoot a kid down either, especially my own, right? But I did not like it at all. I was so angry, with him, with me, but it was about me more than anything else; I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten long enough to make it all the way to the truck, and all for a little ribbon,” he maintains, shaking his head again, but differently.

"You were a little kid, though," Sirius raises.

“I know," Remus offers, nodding. "Sometimes I wish I’d known him as I am now, and that maybe if I had, I might not have seen him through the childhood lens I saw him through back then and his passing wouldn’t have been so confusing because I’d have been better prepared to deal with it — but then, I think that, and I realize I wouldn’t be any more prepared now than I was then, just more used to it. Death wasn’t such a far-off concept to me throughout my teens with how bad-off my dad got and it still isn't now, really; I don’t know why I'm even really saying it, I just wish things had gone differently all around.”

Sirius sits with the weight of all that and somehow none of it at once for it’s not even close to something he’s felt before; it's the most peculiar, alienesque feeling, but it’s easier to sit with it and allow it to flow through him rather than try and fight it.

The longer he lays with it, however, the more Remus seems to think he fucked up somehow. “Sorry — that was not what you asked for,” he says heavily, and Sirius gives a quick shake of his head, too spooked to speak just yet, and Remus turns in to face him, reaching over to tap him. “Did I say something I shouldn’t have?"

“Not at all,” Sirius returns emphatically. “You’re so good a person that you just, are that way without even trying to be and it knocks me on my ass sometimes.”

“I try really hard,” Remus says, barely above a whisper.

“Nah,” Sirius returns, shaking his head once. “That stuff’s hardwired.”

“What about you?" Remus bids, pushing past that. "What were your grandparents like?”

Sirius gives a glance left, right, and back at Remus, lifting his shoulders once. “Racists,” he offers, and now Remus looks like he’d rather be in the ground. “I mean, they were. Aside from that, most of them held on well into their nineties, my great-grandmother on my father’s side hung on until one hundred and two, and my mother’s mother was a shrew who had this hairless cat that would hiss at you from the shadows like a goblin.”

Remus presses his mouth into a line, expressly aiming to not smile, but a few puffs of air leave his nose and give him away all the same. “Complete evildoer, that thing,” Sirius goes on, his voice wavering in amusement despite trying to sound very circumstantial about this. “I counted forty-nine rolls of skin. Forty-nine. How’s that for an anecdote?”

Remus leans in the space between them and presses his face against the side of Sirius’s chest, succumbing to a tiny fit, and Sirius smiles away while he waits for him to pull himself together and lift his head. “This really puts your love for Mestophales into perfect perspective,” he offers him.

“Listen, I saw a rotund, fluffy diva prowling toward me and fell madly in love; I won’t ever pretend that isn’t my second biggest weakness,” Sirius returns.

Remus hums. “What’s your first again?” he checks.

“I think you know who that is,” Sirius instils, squinting at him for effect.

He watches Remus breathe in slowly, love on his face, love in his eyes if Sirius could see them, and right about that moment is when a passing jogger takes a quick detour over to their little setup, garnering Remus to move back from Sirius like he’s been stung.

“Queertown’s that way,” the jogger advises flatly, running in place and tossing a nod east.

“Why, you know a place?” Sirius asks, and the bloke just short circuits and heads off on his way, by the look of it. Sirius puffs out a plain breath, looks to Remus, and gives him a bright look. “I think that’d have landed better if he weren’t wearing spandex while heckling; not the best execution, a three out of ten is the highest I’ll ever go.”

Remus has his lower lip caught in his mouth, too in his head to hear Sirius's funnies apparently, and Sirius sighs out big and long. “Sorry,” Remus says, coming back in and lifting a shoulder. “I’m just—”

“In your head,” Sirius finishes, nodding. “Getting in it over a comment from someone like that seems a real shame, though.”

Remus swallows. “You’re so much better at this than—”

“I'm not, but let's unpack this, see where we end up?” Sirius raises him. “That sad little man woke up this morning, went about his day, took some time out of it to have a nice jog through the square, and purposefully sought out two upstanding queers to make certain they'd feel just as dreadful as he does every day, and you haven’t got time for that; say it with me.”

Remus lets out a quiet sigh. “Sirius, I’m fine.”

“You’re clearly not, and that wasn’t it,” he maintains. “Try it again: what don’t you have time for?”

“That,” Remus echoes.

“I’ll allow it,” Sirius accepts. “Now, I’m willing to head right over to phase three; what do you think?”

Remus gives him the best smile he probably has in him, nods him off, and lifts off of the blanket to start packing things up, and Sirius vows to get this boy smiling for real again.

Chapter 14: 14.

Chapter Text

Sirius doesn’t love the way Remus gathers their stuff up into the recyclable bag, nor does he love that Remus starts trying to get their blanket sorted out with Sirius very clearly still sitting on it.

He reaches for Remus’s wrists, holding them still. “What’s the rush?”

Remus automatically brings his hands in toward himself. “You said you wanted to start phase three.”

“Yeah, I meant like, in the near future,” Sirius clarifies. “What are we rushing for?”

“What do you think I’m rushing away from?” Remus returns, putting his head on a tilt.

“Well, that’s not what we’re doing here,” Sirius denies. “The key move is to show these kinds of people that we don’t have to be run off out of sight and mind; this isn’t that man’s square, and I’m not leaving before he does.”

“Well, then we’ll be here a while because he’s just circling back this way,” Remus mentions, flying his hand over toward the path, where Sirius looks to find Remus isn’t all that wrong about the claim.

“Well, so what?” Sirius counters. “He’s not coming back over here, and if he somehow decides that’s a really good plan on his part you can watch me knock him out, how’s that?”

Remus puts out a stewing sigh through his nose. “Why would we even stick around to tempt that when we could just head out?”

“I haven’t finished my coffee yet,” Sirius raises, sweeping his hand toward his cup still sitting off to the side of the blanket. “You’re not even halfway through your tea, so when we’re both finished we can start heading out; that’s my final offer.”

Remus reaches for his tea and clears a good quarter more out of it by the simple nature of performance, but Sirius takes his drink and slow-sips it; he can do this all day. “I’ll ask you to quit holding yourself like you’re trying to make yourself as small as possible,” he tacks on.

“Well, this is just getting ridiculous,” Remus says of it, shaking his head and not making the effort to unfold his arms from his middle.

“I agree,” Sirius returns, eyeing Remus’s body language.

“It’s chillier in the shade than I thought it’d be,” Remus defends, bringing a snort out of Sirius. “The wind’s picked up.”

“Has it, though?” Sirius sends him, flattening his straw out with his teeth before rounding it off again.

“Well, you’re a furnace at all times so you really wouldn’t notice the difference, would you?” Remus returns, and Sirius simply watches him for a full thirty seconds or so, a fond little smile on his face. “Quit looking at me like that.”

Sirius smirks around his straw, taking Remus's reluctant smile as a win in his books. “I will point out that perhaps my choice in pantaloons might’ve worked out better for you in the long run than you made it seem before we left,” he points out, practically glowing.

“Yeah, well, my arms are cold,” Remus returns. “No surprise there, I’m sure.”

Sirius shakes his head no through an amused expression, but with that said, a breeze does pass through that, for Sirius, feels more like the face of a rotating fan passing by on the lowest setting, but for Remus, it’s got to feel more like twenty below. “Do you want to stop by yours on the way?” he offers.

“No, I’ll be fine,” Remus insists.

“The grocery isn’t going to close any time soon, so we really could spare a five-minute detour to go grab something to cover those arms,” Sirius raises.

“I’ll be OK,” Remus instils. Sirius settles in and takes to watching Remus shuffle about, pulling his legs in to cross them at first, then lifting his knees to form a makeshift barrier around his torso, and then sticking his arms in between them before he lets out a flat sigh. “I actually wouldn’t mind if we went back and got something.

“Yeah, I figured I’d just wait until you came to terms with it yourself,” Sirius nods, popping his brows high up on his forehead in plain amusement.

“Well, can we head out, please?” Remus raises, frowning over at him.

Sirius nods once, takes another long sip of his coffee, and lifts up off the blanket onto his knees before pushing onto his feet with his free hand, moving to stand off to the side of the blanket and indulging in a large stretch. Remus folds out of his pretzel position and rises to his knees to start folding the blanket into even squares before he rolls it up into a freakishly tiny, cow-printed cylinder.

“How do you do that?” Sirius asks candidly.

“I had to learn how to pack many things into a travel trunk,” Remus offers, sticking the blanket cylinder into their bag with an air of accomplishment. “I just roll everything up as small as it’ll go and it gives me a lot more room to work with.”

“I might try that for the trip,” Sirius says, piqued. “I always end up having to take everything out again halfway through and start back from scratch, but then that doesn’t work and I have to leave stuff behind because I couldn't fit them in.”

Remus reaches into the bag to pull out the blanket cylinder again. “If you line shirts up like this and stick them in upright rather than folding them into squares,” he offers, holding the cylinder up straight before placing it straight down on the ground once like it's an open suitcase, “you can fit twice as much in the confined space you’re dealing with.”

“Imma do it,” Sirius manifests, smiling down at his very own Professor.

Remus sticks the blanket back into the bag, lifts up from his crouched position, and plucks the remainder of his tea off of the ground as he moves to stand. “I’ll take the bag if you take him?” he haggles, nodding to Tango, who is simply standing by them.

“See how good he is?” Sirius offers. “I don’t even have to hold the lead and he’s sticking by my side.”

“Yeah, until he sees someone or something he’d like to bolt after and then does,” Remus returns, lifting the bag to hang it from his right shoulder.

“I don’t think you’re giving him enough credit,” Sirius mentions, bowing to pick Tango’s lead up for the show of it.

“I don’t think you’re truly aware that you’ve got a hound on your hands,” Remus returns on beat. “As striking an appearance as he’s got, people don’t love having a hound his size galloping toward them at horse speeds.”

Sirius merely mimics Remus’s tone with a bunch of gibberish, heading in between the trunks of the two trees that provided them shelter from the beating sun to get over to the path. The issue is, with all that jibber-jabber coming out of his mouth, Sirius doesn’t actually hear the jingling of collars heading their direction, but Tango certainly does, springing forward and yanking on the lead and therefore Sirius’s right arm, launching the both of them up the path toward two identical miniature collies being led their way by their owner.

Sirius skids to a stop a little before them, tugging back on Tango so he won’t barrel into the small pups. “Alright, we’re going,” he instils, but the dog only scuttles along the pavement at a marginally slower clip.

The dogs collide inevitably, but Sirius can’t not find the sight of Tango standing tall above the pups as they prance around each other in a whirlwind and smiles wide at the lady attached to the collies' leads, who looks just as amused by the sight as he does.

Remus saunters — and Sirius means saunters up on his left, a completely royal air about him as he stands with his hands in his trouser pockets and the ever-enviable stupor of having been right about something. “Alright,” Sirius sing-songs to Tango, not looking to get heckled in public, and with the face Remus has on, Sirius’s time is running out, fast, “time to go.”

Sirius leads him away from the two pups barking erratically as they go and turns with his neck held high and straight, readying himself for the heckling of the century, but Remus simply strolls along beside him with an airy smile on, which is somehow even worse than if he just put this to bed by vocalizing that he’d been very right about the Tango versus Any Living Creature debate.

“You know what?” Sirius starts, leaning in close to Remus pointedly, “I’m going to let this slide because at least you’re smiling again.”

“Oh, you selfless soul,” Remus returns, gliding along the path.

“It’s true, I am,” Sirius accepts, giving a celebratory bob of his shoulders. “I knew I’d get you back soon enough, and if the way it was done ended up being as chaotic as it was, well, that’s the nature of the game.”

“My life did get a lot more chaotic after you strutted into it,” Remus offers circumstantially.

“Funny way to say exciting,” Sirius raises it, heading for the post up by the end of the curb.

“I was getting to that,” Remus offers.

“Oh, mhm,” Sirius nods, hitting the button for the crosswalk light.

When they get back to Remus’s building, it makes sense to bring Tango upstairs with them, and once inside, Sirius thinks it makes even better sense to retire Tango for the day. “Oh shit,” he puts up, stopping Remus from leaving the entryway so he can fish in the bag on his right shoulder.

Remus wiggles back, bemusedly looking in the bag for context clues. “What are you—”

“I forgot about the treats,” Sirius explains, tugging the baggie out.

Remus settles in with the provided context. “Oh, well, give him two for his plight, then,” he directs, unloading the straps of the recyclable bag onto Sirius’s hands and slipping off to his room.

Sirius accepts the fact that he’s now the bag holder for the time being and sticks it between his left arm and side to free up his hands to fish a treat out of the baggie, making Tango sit and shake for it before he gives them to him.

“Did he shake?” Remus asks from the room.

“Both paws,” Sirius chimes, quite proud of his little man.

“Good boy,” Remus sends back for it.

Sirius bows forward to unclip Tango’s lead, rises to full height again to hang it from one of the hooks, and leans around the partition in the entryway to pitch the second treat into the living room area of the flat, watching the pooch bolt off for it.

Remus steps out of his room just as the bullet known as Tango has found the treat by the sounds of it, but Sirius is a bit distracted by the maroon and black houndstooth poncho Remus has donned and somehow taken his overall Look up five notches.

“I—” Sirius starts, bracing the wall behind him for support, “—I need a second.”

Remus crosses his arms underneath the poncho, his mouth twisting up into a smile as he shifts his weight on his feet. “You’re easily impressed.

“I’m really not,” Sirius replies. “When did you get that?”

“Couple weeks back,” Remus answers.

“No, but — where?” Sirius asserts. “Where do you find these treasures?”

“This was a yard sale find,” Remus offers, smiling down at it. “Six whole pounds, to boot.”

“A steal,” Sirius calls it. “I don’t want to say this just with the risk it’ll pose for you taking it off, but are you sure that it isn’t going to be a little hot in that?”

“It’s lightweight,” Remus says of it, pushing his hands underneath it to puff up the material. “Feel.”

Sirius does so out of a mixture of true curiosity and an excuse to get in close, taking the edge of it and having a feel. “I want it,” he says, petting it.

“It’s mine,” Remus returns, pulling his hands out from beneath the poncho to hold it to himself.

“Well, I want one like it?” Sirius amends.

“Well, that, we could probably figure out,” Remus concedes, leaning in to leave a kiss on Sirius's lips. “Allons-y?”

Sirius cannot argue with the sentiment, least of all the language, stepping back to pull the door open and giving a sweeping gesture with his free hand for Remus to go first. On the way, Remus requests they stop in at his shop for a refuel as they near it, an appeal Sirius wholly agrees with so long as he gets this one. Remus neither confirms nor denies him that on the block and a half they walk to get to the shop, but he sighs long once they get to the storefront and accepts Sirius’s card for the purchase if nothing other to avoid a public debate with the terrace right there.

“We should eat something,” he raises. “Should I get us a snack, too?”

Sirius puts out the haul he’s in the middle of. “Yes, yes, and yes,” he returns.

Remus smiles and heads in while Sirius hangs back and works on the cigarette he’s got going. He thinks about and later decides on heading in once his cigarette is finished, but as he’s weaving in between tables on the terrace to get to the door, Remus heads out through it, their respective drinks in his hands and what appears to be a protein box tucked between his left arm and side.

“What, you didn’t get enough of that earlier?” Sirius raises, taking his drink from Remus’s hands and nodding at the box with a sly smile on.

Remus, on the other hand, puts on an intense expression, lowering his voice. “We are in public,” he hisses.

“Literally no one is listening to us,” Sirius hisses back, turning on his heel to exit the terrace.

They make it four steps from the storefront before Sirius cannot help himself any longer, looking to Remus munching away on a slice of apple. “Can I get in on your box?”

Remus huffs for that, but he sure does chortle about it as he holds the box out to him. “Leave the bread for me, please,” he requests.

Sirius snags the stem of grapes from inside the plastic box and hovers it over his face to eat them off the branch like he’s a Greek God indulging in one of life’s simple pleasures. “That bread’s nasty so by all means, it’s yours,” he says of it.

Remus hums brightly. “I’ll save you a bit of cheese, though,” he maintains, pointing a corner of the apple slice in his hand toward the cubed blocks of marble cheddar in the box.

“A man after my own heart,” Sirius offers him, chuffed about getting some cheese out of this.

By the time they get to the grocery, Sirius is rather ecstatic to note that there’s much less weight to Remus’s steps, and while that may very well be because of the poncho and/or the protein box he got to snack on, Sirius has an inkling he’s had something to do with it, too.

Remus goes to put the remnants of their snackage in the bin just inside the automatic doors while Sirius makes a beeline for the carts, pulls it out from the row it’s in, and straps his coffee into the baby carriage for safe riding. He plants his right foot up on the beam going along the back of the cart and leaves his left on the ground, scootering the cart in through the second set of automatic doors. He checks over his shoulder to be sure Remus is following him in and he’s happy to note that he’s indeed a mere few steps behind him, eyeing his scootering with reluctant amusement.

“Whose mobile did we write the list on?” Sirius asks. “‘Cause I’ll level with you, I did not bring mine with me.”

Remus smirks, speeding up to walk alongside Sirius. “It was mine,” he tells him, pulling his mobile out of his back right pocket and bringing it around the front of his poncho to thumb through it. “Flour was the first item I put down, but we can get that when we’re more down that way.”

“Well, we’re in produce so might that be a good place to start?” Sirius raises.

Remus looks up like he’s just realized that fact. “Mm, fruit for the pie,” he relays, pointing at Sirius, “only issue is, we never actually decided on what that would be.”

Sirius sucks a thoughtful breath in through his teeth, looking sidelong at Remus. “What were our choices again?” he bids, pulling the cart to idle there.

“Cherry or apple,” Remus delivers, stopping to the right of the cart.

“Well, now I know why we got stuck there,” Sirius puts up, smirking lightly. “I’m just going to ask it; do we have to choose between joy and more joy?”

Remus lowers their list, looking over at Sirius. “I suppose we don’t have to do anything,” he answers for it. “The world’s our oyster.”

Sirius loves seeing that sentiment being quoted back to him and soon freezes as a jolt of thought takes him over. “OK, hear me out,” he prefaces, and Remus stops short, freezing with his hands up in front of him as if readying himself for the catch. “What if, we did a cherry pie and an apple crisp; that way, we get twice the joy and a little variety at the same time?”

Remus pulls his raised hands into two fists. “Yes,” he returns gravely. “Remind me to stop for brown sugar then; my mum’s got the best recipe out there for apple crisp, but it just won’t be the same with plain old white.”

Sirius pops Remus’s fists with his own since they're still up. “Deal.”

Remus sticks his tea in the baby carriage alongside Sirius’s, strapping them in together and leaving himself empty-handed for the time being. He and Sirius split off there, Remus heading over to gather up some apples while Sirius wanders off to the towering display of cherries. He picks the bag that looks the most pleasing to the eye, hawks it into the baby carriage in the cart, and looks up and around for any potential onlookers, but once he deems that the coast is clear, he slides the ziplock open on the bag and pulls a cherry out of the bag, popping it into his mouth.

Remus comes back his way with a bag of some of the roundest pommes Sirius ever did see, and he’d have told him that himself if his mouth wasn’t full. Remus sticks the bag in the cart, looks up at Sirius, and pauses to search him carefully, garnering him to smile bright around his mouthful.

“You’re supposed to wash the fruit before you sample it in the middle of the store, you know,” Remus mentions, shaking his head when Sirius all but shrugs it off. “Where are you going to put the pit?”

“Was thinking about spitting it at you, maybe,” Sirius answers mildly, his voice a little muffled around it.

“I’ll be in the next one over,” Remus replies at once, turning on his heel and heading off down the aisle.

Sirius takes the pit out of his mouth and flicks it in Remus’s wake, but he’s going at too quickly a clip for it to land somewhere on him. He sighs easily and leans his forearms on the cart, tying the stem of the cherry into a knot with his tongue while he waits for Remus to come back to him, but then the complete shitter heads up the aisle from the other direction and spooks Sirius as he slips a loaf of bread into the cart.

He budges Remus’s arm on his way by to get his attention and pulls the bowed stem of the cherry out of his mouth, holding it up like it’s a piece ready for the MOMA as Remus looks over midway through reaching a bag of bagels in the cart and drops the bag altogether. “How did you do that?” he asks, mind blown.

“Practice,” Sirius calls it, beaming bright.

Remus checks around him real quick, but there’s only one lady down the aisle really feeling out the oranges over there, so he must consider that as close to alone as they can get in here. “This,” he starts, circling a hand around the vicinity of Sirius’s mouth, “and all that comes with it, makes so much more sense now.”

Sirius shimmies his shoulders a little in celebration, allowing the compliment to wash over him as he flicks the stem away, thankful for its service. “You’re making a mess,” Remus mentions.

“The pit’s over there, too,” Sirius extends, pointing over near where he flicked it.

Remus gives a sigh. “Can’t take you anywhere,” he insists, shaking his head for effect before nodding it back the way he came. “There’s a sample table over there, by the by.”

Sirius perks and immediately pushes his arms off of the handle of the cart, dropping his hands to it and wheeling the cart around to face that direction, and then it’s full speed ahead. Remus catches up rather easily, apparently just as Ready for a sample as Sirius is. They head down to the end of the produce aisle, take a left since there isn’t much of an option to take a right, and the sample table comes into view as if it’s lit up by a spotlight.

Sirius pushes the cart off to the side and steps up to get in the queue behind a few other curious and indulgent patrons. “Did you see what they were?” he asks, shooting it in a whisper toward Remus on his right.

Remus shakes his head for it, but with him being the tallest person in the queue ahead of them, he really only has to look straight over the heads of the people in front of him to find out. “Taquitos,” he supplies proficiently, and Sirius hums lowly, quite enticed. “Chicken or beef.”

“How do you know that’s what the choices are?” Sirius bids.

“The sign says it,” Remus responds, lower down to match Sirius’s whispering.

Up until this very moment, Sirius felt like he’d come down quite a bit from their wake, shake, and bake, but apparently not so much. “Well, what are the rules, then?” he raises. “Is it one each and that’s it or can I try both?”

“Well, the sign doesn’t say anything about that either way,” Remus returns, stepping forward as the queue moves up.

“A loophole for sure,” Sirius deems it, stepping with him automatically.

“You could perhaps not be greedy and just pick one?” Remus puts out there, a pointed smile aimed sidelong at him, and Sirius simply puts out a weighted breath at the mere idea and only partitally in jest. “You made so much fun of me for getting up in arms about thirty to forty drink options that I’d have to choose from and here you are anyway, unable to make up your mind between two; interesting.”

“It’s a dilemma, OK?” Sirius shoots him, causing a snort from Remus for it. “You were always going to pick a tea so in reality it was more like ten to fifteen options for you, but this — this is the question of my lifetime.”

“Is it, though?” Remus sends him, trying to keep a laugh from bubbling out of his throat.

“Listen, the dunderheads in here could probably tell that sample bloke what they want out of the two options, but they don’t know what I know, haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”

“What,” Remus starts, voice suddenly much louder than the volume they’d been quipping at, but in fairness, he is doing it through a laugh, “have you seen?”

“Attack ships on separate coasts vying for victory,” Sirius offers, his chest heaving through it, “timbering ballasts careening down to the ship's floor, sending out shock waves of destruction to the rest of the soldiers on board, shrapnel flying left and right—”

Remus ducks his head through his mirth. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“And when you’ve seen it all,” Sirius breezes on, smiling away, “it becomes nearly impossible to—”

Remus lifts his head and immediately budges Sirius’s right arm with his left one, collecting himself at once with a quick sniff. Sirius looks ahead, realizes the queue had truly dissipated somewhere during his monologue, and, turns out, they've made a sole audience member out of the sample bloke.

“So, after all that,” the lad deadpans, “which one will it be?”

Sirius’s gaze darts to his name tag. “Haven’t decided yet, Frank,” he chimes. “Haven’t decided yet.”

“Chicken,” Remus says immediately after, making the decision for the both of them.

Frank hands two taquitos over to Remus on cupcake sheets slightly too small for the job, wherein he and Sirius depart for the cart, the former snickering the whole way over there. “Poor bloke was just trying to get through his shift and then we came along,” he raises, a little flushed as he hands over Sirius’s sample.

Sirius holds onto it, humming thoughtfully as the two of them head away from the sample table. “You know, when looking back on it, he may think well of that little moment we all shared,” he maintains, getting a disbelieving smile out of Remus as they head stand by the cart. “No, think about it: all day, he’s probably heard the same boring yeses and nos, a few questions about the calorie count, I’m sure, and all we did there was give him a little variety to his interactions.”

“A little variety,” Remus quotes.

“Yes, in the middle of a sea of wooden reactions, we alone broke the monotony,” Sirius caps it off, cheersing him with his taquito, only Remus clearly didn’t see that coming and, owing to that, ends up fumbling with his own taquito and only just managing to catch it before it could drop to the floor. “Ooh, watch out.”

“I can’t account for your impulsivity at any point,” Remus returns him, tucking into his sample at a much quicker pace, perhaps before he actually loses it to the floor.

Sirius lifts his fists in the air as he finishes his own in under ten seconds. “Good pick,” he offers him.

“I think so, too,” Remus echoes, reaching to hold his free palm out for the empty cupcake sheet Sirius very hasn’t figured out what to do with yet. “Here, I’ll brave going back over there.”

Remus skirts around the new queue formed at the sample table and tosses the sheets in the bin, making his way back to him at a rushed clip. “Oh, he was not happy to see me again, so let’s just—” he offers, trailing off to let his gesture suggest they get out of the vicinity of the sample table for him.

“Where to next, boss?” Sirius bids, taking up the post as pilot of the cart once more.

Remus pulls out his mobile again, humming a vague tune as he has a gander over it, and ends up smirking. “Take a wild guess,” he offers.

“Say no more,” Sirius returns, setting sail automatically for aisle four.

At least, it would have been smooth sailing if the aisle they’re in weren’t a free for all with people headed this way and that without a discernible pattern. Remus heads up ahead of the cart, creating a thin but noble path behind him for Sirius to push the cart through as he weaves them along the back aisle running adjacent to the numbered aisles, and that does work for a short time before a pack of four pass in-between the two of them to huddle around a display of picnic essentials at the end cap of aisle three and apparently just make themselves at home there.

“Remus, no,” Sirius calls to him, garnering him to turn around and lean around the group of four, openly taking enjoyment out of the put-upon look Sirius knows he’s wearing. Remus heads around the group, gesturing to head down aisle three instead, and the two of them head up that one to come back down aisle four the opposite way.

That plan sounds A-OK to Sirius right up until they come to the end of aisle three and get a glimpse of the circus that is the check-out lanes, and Remus lets out a low whistle for it. “I may have made a poor judgement call,” he says of it.

“I was right there with you,” Sirius lobs him, inching the cart around the corner as soon as there’s a break in traffic.

Remus follows close behind him, one of his hands pressed to the small of Sirius’s back to keep up with him, and Sirius knows it has to do with simple logistics so not to lose him in the crowd, but the rush he feels from the simplicity of the contact blooms beneath his skin all the same. He pushes for the last stretch with renewed vigour, taking a swift right and bringing them into a blessedly less hopping aisle save for one gent down at the other end of it.

Sirius puts out a championed hoot as he pushes the cart down to the midway point to get to the wall of tea and parks it a little out of the way. “I was genuinely seconds from ditching the cart and tugging you on out of here while we had the chance,” he tosses behind him.

“Well, I'll thank you for pressing on in the face of chaos,” Remus affords him, glancing up at the cornucopia of teas at his disposal.

Sirius hangs back by the cart, sipping on his coffee and dwindling it down to about a quarter left in his cup, half-noting Bleeding Love starting out over the speaker above their heads and then suddenly, it’s too difficult to ignore. “Why do they always pick the most sultry ballads for places like this?” he raises. “There you are trying to pick between tea options, indulging in the idea that you might spring for a new one when we both know you’ll end up going with one of your regulars, and how are you meant to think clearly while she’s up there crooning in your ear the whole time.”

Remus smirks, turning his head to glance back at him. “So, the first time I heard this,” he offers, pointing above them, “I was in a crowded café doing homework two tables away from a speaker; close enough to hear it well enough, too far away to hear it properly, and I was absolutely certain I’d heard her go 'you call me your banana,' and it really challenged me there for a few good seconds until I heard it again on the second verse, and then I had to look it up to be sure I hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing—”

Sirius reels back from the cart, flying his hands in the air for mercy. “No — no, no, no,” he sends him through sudden mirth. “Stop it, you did not.”

Turns out, though, Remus timed his tale rather well for it takes mere seconds for the crooning of ‘you cut me open and I,’ to rain down from above and Sirius can’t not hear what Remus of yore did and similarly, he cannot handle anything anymore, holding onto the handle of the cart for support. “It changes the whole thing,” he puts out weakly.

“For better or for worse, I don’t know,” Remus puts in, looking quite pleased by the reception of his little tale.

“Better, definitely better,” Sirius sighs, lifting his hands to wipe at his eyes.

“Did you want to pick out a coffee since we’re here?” Remus raises, nodding his head past him toward the wall of coffee.

Sirius breathes in as he drops his hands from the handle, semi-collected, and pushes out a few pondering puffs out of his cheeks as he wanders down the aisle a little ways to the left, scanning the options ahead of him. A fully lime green bag of beans catches his eye fairly quickly when it certainly stands out to him amongst all the black and brown packaging quite typical for coffee beans, but the overall design of the package catches his intrigue more so than the bright colour even for that's some pleasingly simplistic white font over the front that reads ‘ethical bean coffee’ all in lower case.

“Hey, Remus?” he puts out curiously, plucking the bag off the shelf and turning it to face him from up the aisle. “Would you like any of this ethical bean coffee I'm holding?”

Remus presses his mouth in a line, turning his face toward the shelves a mere beat after looking his way. “I think I’m alright,” he returns, though it seems like it took a lot of work to speak.

Sirius waggles the bag back and forth. “You sure?” he raises, blinking quizzically, which just never fails to get Remus fighting a laugh. “Remus, it says right here on the label that this batch of beans adheres to a strict moral code; just your sort of thing, no?”

Remus purposefully doesn’t look his way again and though Sirius can’t be fully certain what with his sunnies on, he’s quite of the belief that Remus has got his gaze on the ceiling to avoid any accidental glance in his direction or else that kid's going to explode. “Where was that bag when I was slugging through philosophy, then, hm?” he raises, a waiver to his voice.

Sirius gasps at once. “You’re right,” he returns. “What does it think it’s doing, showing up long after you could’ve used it the most? Laughing?”

“Is that what that sound is?” Remus plays along, though he certainly reels back from the shelf and looks back his way once Sirius makes the bag of beans connect with the floor.

Remus lifts a hand to his mouth, covering a reluctantly amused smile as he rushes up the aisle toward him. “You’re lucky that thing didn’t explode,” he sends him.

Sirius sends a non-committal hum back his way as he stoops to pick up the bag. “Now I kind of wish it had,” he raises, slapping it back onto the shelf.

Remus drops his hand and exhales carefully to not encourage Sirius’s antics, surely. “Amazing how it doesn’t matter what time of day we turn up here, you’re still going to act out either way.”

“Amazing how you’ll pretend like you aren’t completely charmed by my brand of acting out,” Sirius returns, though he drops his airy tone the moment he hones in on the man down at the end of the aisle staring daggers in his direction.

Remus turns his head from Sirius’s placid stare and quickly satisfies his curiosity by glancing in the direction Sirius is sending the gaze, immediately facing it toward the shelf again and pretending like he’s very interested in the label directly in front of his face. “Stop that,” he bids, under his breath.

“Not doing anything,” Sirius returns, unfussed.

“Yes, you are.”

“Just want to see how long it takes.”

“Well, this is what happens when you treat a bag of coffee like a ball in a public place.”

“Is it? Is this what happens?”

Sirius eases his stature the moment the man turns out of the aisle, sighing through his nose with satisfaction and putting his gaze back on Remus. “I won,” he says brightly.

Remus has a look for himself. “By the skin of your teeth,” he mentions, turning his head back to him. “And if a staff member comes stalking over to us in a few minutes, I will ditch you and the cart the second I see them coming.”

“I see how it is,” Sirius sends him, swivelling around in a whirl and going back to the coffee bags to actually pick one this time. “The disloyalty around here is enough to suffocate me.”

“How low am I on English Breakfast?” Remus bids him, plainly moving on from Sirius’s performance.

Sirius hums a pondering note, picturing the state of the tin while he was making their respective cups the morning prior. “You’re down to the last few,” he offers him, sidling up to the coffee bags with his hands in the pockets of his joggers, “and oolong's right down to the wire, too.”

“Great, thank you,” Remus gives him.

Sirius ends up picking one of his tried and true brands and wanders back over to the cart with an air of satisfaction as Remus puts two tins of tea into it. “Oh, here,” he offers, holding up his hand for the bag.

Sirius very nearly hands it over just from how casual Remus's tone was, but not quite. “Nice try?” he raises, genuinely impressed.

Remus drops his shoulders by an inch as Sirius tucks the bag in between his right arm and side, and more importantly, out of his reach. “Put it in the cart, please,” he bids.

“I’ve got it,” Sirius insists.

“Sirius,” Remus instils. “They’re my groceries so it does makes sense if I pay for them.”

“I’m going to be consuming half of this, easily,” Sirius raises, circling his free hand around the admittedly sparse cartload, but it won’t be that for long. “This is expensive coffee, Remus; it’s a vice, not your typical essential.”

Remus sighs through his nose and reaches to snatch the bag out from under his grasp, but Sirius pulls it right out from where it’s tucked before he can get a decent hold on it and lifts the bag high in the air to keep it out of reach of Remus’s grabby-hands. Problem is, Remus is — to quote one Peter Pettigrew's hyperbole — ten feet tall and has a good three inches on Sirius even with the added height boost he's got with these particular kicks on his feet, so it doesn’t take much for Remus to grab hold of it again.

Sirius clasps his fingers tight around it, his last-ditch effort to keep it in his grasp foiled when Remus jabs his left forefinger into Sirius’s right side. Sirius buckles at once at a pressure point being hit and bows sideways to get away from Remus’s forefinger, his right arm coming down as his reflexes go wonky and his elbow connecting with Remus’s head as a result.

Remus gives out a yelp and Sirius freezes short. “Ohhhh, no,” he breathes out, half in sudden remorse, half in reluctant amusement as he reaches to pull his favourite of Remus's body parts down and against his chest for a rub, but Remus acts swiftly, taking the nurturing as a fine decoy as he tugs on the bag of coffee and wiggles out of Sirius’s reach to dunk the bag into the cart.

Sirius huffs long and hard, putting his hands on his hips. “You’re a little faker.”

Remus shrugs with a winning smile on. “I cannot believe you’d have actually gotten in the queue behind me just to buy that one, single item yourself rather than put it in the fucking cart and agree to sort the bill out after we’re finished here,” he chides. “It is truly mind-boggling.”

Sirius stares him down, reluctantly impressed by that takeaway. “Fine,” he says at once, holding up a finger, “but I will be forwarding you exactly half of what this cart comes to and you will not argue with me about it.”

Remus puts a measured sigh out of his nose before nodding once. “Fine, but we’re actually going to need to put more food in it before we can have a bill to split,” he says of it, more of a hint to get back to it than a condition.

Sirius moves back to helm the cart, leaning his forearms on the handlebar. “Onward, captain,” he bids.

Remus pulls his mobile out to peruse their list as Sirius pushes the cart along the aisle, heading back toward the aisle that runs along the back of the store. “Soup’s next up,” he offers.

Sirius hums easily in return, steering the cart around the bend as they take a left at the end of the aisle, a fancifully cut and tagged display of chardonnay catching Sirius’s attention at the end cap. The varietal itself, not one he cares for much, but Sirius does find the advertisement in the blurb on the label rather eye-catching, if only for the fact that it insists in bold lettering that this particular brand of chardonnay is 'unwooded.'

Sirius snorts, reaching to pull the cart to a quick stop with his right hand, garnering Remus to look up from his list, and reaches to hover his left forefinger underneath the word. “Me.”

Remus puts out a profound pfft. “Since when?

“Been many moons since I’ve been spelunked,” Sirius offers, aloof in tone, aloof in his steps.

Remus tilts his head back and forth mildly. “Two days,” he corrects.

“Been two days since I’ve been spelunked,” Sirius amends, keeping the tone identical.

“Yeah, well, wait an hour,” Remus returns, so low down that Sirius stops still, unsure of whether he hallucinated it or not, but Remus’s face suggests otherwise. “Focus now, and maybe we’ll get out of here before the day’s over and see what we can do about your spelunking needs.”

Sirius pushes for aisle six, rejuvenated and taking a speedy left turn again, and brings them to the wall of soups. There, Remus lets out a cheerful noise, flicking a tag hanging from the shelf advertising a three-for-one sale. “My lucky day,” he calls it, looking up at the rows of soup ahead of them.

Sirius frankly cannot control his face when it comes to Remus’s hardwired love of a good sale. “What do you think,” he starts ponderously, “is it a butternut squash kind of day?”

“I want it to be that kind of day,” Remus returns, the left corner of his mouth twitching.

“Then it is,” Sirius chimes, scanning the shelves for the particular brand Remus knows and loves and reaching for the carton when he spots it.

“Pick another for me?” Remus bids, already sticking a carton of cream of mushroom into the cart.

Sirius has another searching glance, lifts cream of broccoli off of the shelf as a long-standing fan of it, and Remus nods his approval with a smile. Sirius dunks the two cartons into the cart, pulling a sound of horror out of Remus for it. “There’s bread in there,” he says weakly, reaching into the cart to shuffle some things around.

“Might I remind you that you chucked that coffee in there like a basketball,” Sirius mentions, “so I’m not sure why you’re fussed now.”

“A bag of grinds isn’t two cartons of soup, now is it?” Remus returns, moving the bag of cherries from the child compartment into the cart in favour of lifting both the bagels and the loaf of bread into it for safekeeping.

Sirius pushes a laugh down when Remus lets out a breath of accomplishment. “Good to go, then?”

“I think so,” Remus returns, already scanning the list again. “Now, I’m not sure I really want to say the word aloud, but we are low on milk and we’ll need it for the baking.”

Sirius puts out an exhaustive breath, right sick of pairing a glass with nearly every damn meal for weeks just to consume the load of it before it could spoil. “Can we do a smaller one, then?” he implores, putting a bit of effort into his frown to make it a tad more exaggerated and, therefore, more of a jest.

Remus smirks at him for it. “I’ll get one that’ll cover the baking and cereal, but that’ll be it.”

“That, I can get behind,” Sirius relents. “And on that note, we’re low on cereal.”

“Are we?” Remus raises.

“I snuck a bowl last night, what of it?” Sirius returns, smiling wryly.

Remus nods, checking his list again. “OK, why don’t we split this up a little, cover more ground,” he raises, his thumbs moving wildly on the keyboard on his mobile.

Sirius moves out of the way of a lady passing through the aisle and slips back to the cart once she’s passed, a bright ping sounding out from his mobile. “Did you send me a love letter?” he asks, reaching for it.

“More like half of the list, but you could read it between the lines if you squint,” Remus offers. “I added cereal to it, so you just handle that part, I’ll double-check with my mum what we’ll need for the crisp and get the rest of that handled, and we'll meet up again with our respective bounties.”

Sirius checks his list, seeing milk, eggs, and ice cream; bit of a pattern there. “Do you just not like the dairy section anymore?” he raises.

“It’s just made sense to group them together and not have us zigzagging all over the store,” Remus justifies. “Besides, that’ll be my plight; one of us should get the easier stuff.”

“Do you want me to pick up some butter since I’ll already be over there?” Sirius checks.

Remus sighs as he puts some thought into it. “Fine, get a small one just in case we need it, but I know we have some of it in the fridge so we don’t need to go ham on that.”

“Deal,” Sirius calls it, typing butter in at the bottom of his bit of the list. “You take the cart while I’m gone.”

He makes to head off but Remus halts him before that can happen. “You can pick the ice cream flavour,” he mentions, “only, please try to pick something I’ll actually want a spoonful of this time?”

Sirius huffs long and loud. “How can you not like Chunky Monkey?” he raises. “How?”

“It’s the banana in it,” Remus offers labouriously. “It’s like a pint of cold medicine with chocolate flakes dumped in it, and that just doesn’t sit well in my mouth.”

“You’re a mad lad and that’s all I have to say to you,” Sirius returns, turning from both Remus and the cart to stalk off.

“Oi,” Remus calls after him, and Sirius swivels around to face him again, “if you happen to find a box of those taquitos, I'd look the other way if it ended up in the cart.”

Sirius sees Remus’s wry smile and raises it a grin, blowing him a kiss and heading off for good. He figures he’ll do well to gather intel on where the taquitos are before having to fill his arms up with all the dairy products he’ll need to bring back with him and heads back to Frank, head held high.

He bypasses the queue to get a sneak peek at the brand on the table, gets spotted doing that by Frank with little to no surprise, and smiles in greeting. “Where can I find those?”

“Aisle ten,” Frank delivers.

Sirius flashes him an 'OK' symbol with his right hand and heads straight to it. He stuffs the box between his left arm and side and heads for the dairy aisle from there, gathering up the milk, butter, and eggs before stopping at the ice cream freezer and scanning over his choices.

Thirty seconds into his debate, he lands what he thinks is a stellar compromise just as the opening lick of 'Brass in Pocket' starts up overhead, and it’s as if the plucky opening itself is congratulating him on his decision. Sirius opens the freezer door, plucks the pint of Half Baked off of the shelf, and reworks his armful of items around to carry them all easier, strutting along in beat with the tune when he really can’t hold off on that.

He can’t reach his mobile given that his arms are quite full so he struts along to the far end of the aisle and starts going along the rows from there, looking down each one for a tall curly-Q, and singing along with the Pretenders accompanying him on his search. He spots Remus down in aisle three, chatting on his phone as he looks up at the shelf, but he turns when he hears Sirius coming more than he sees him, a lopsided grin on his face as he stands with his mobile at his right ear and a bag of oats in his left hand.

Sirius bobs his shoulders as he heads for the cart, noting Remus has gone and finished his tea in his absence, spurring Sirius to lean in and kill the rest of his own in one good swing. He moves around to the side of the cart, looking down at the haul Remus scrounged together in his absence, and trills on along with the tune playing as he works on fitting his own armful of items in and around the baking soda, baking powder, and a big bag of all-purpose flour already in there.

“Yes, someone sure is,” Remus quips, pulling a bag of oats off of the shelf. “Alright, I’m heading for the checkout, but thank you ... say hi to Dad... yep, I will; Sunday, most likely.”

Remus ends the call with dear Hope, pockets his mobile, and brings the bag of oats over to the cart. “Did she like my crooning?” Sirius asks, fluttering his lashes.

“She didn’t really work out that it was you per se, but she enjoyed it nonetheless,” Remus rewards him.

“She will learn to recognize my pipes in time,” Sirius says of it, taking care in setting the carton of eggs down in the cart. “I got Half Baked, good with that?”

Remus hums a vigorous agreement. “Very good.”

“Are we all set?” Sirius raises.

“Close,” Remus echoes. “I picked up a rolling pin and honestly, my mixer spoons leave something to be desired so I picked up a new pack of those, too, but those were on sale.”

“It really is your lucky day,” Sirius returns. “Do we have pie sheets?”

Remus reaches into the cart and shuffles some things around, lifting a pack to showcase that part has already been handled. “I got cinnamon too, so I just need the brown sugar and we’re free to go.”

Sirius blinks once before sending out a snort. “I’m really glad you remembered that ‘cause it went right out of my head.”

Remus taps his left temple in reply. “I’ll just go grab it, you watch the cart,” he directs, heading off the way Sirius came.

Sirius plucks the bag of oats out of the cart again, reading the back of it for no other reasons than that it sat the tallest amongst their bounty and it'll give something to do while he waits for him to return, but it seems he really only has to wait under a minute for Remus to make his reappearance, stuffing a bag of brown sugar in with their haul and taking back his post as the recent pilot of the cart.

“So you know,” Sirius starts, circling his right hand over the pile of groceries, “I was very frugal with my picks; so frugal even, you’d have gotten hot just standing nearby.”

“Unnecessary addition, but thank you for the effort,” Remus offers, wheeling the cart back toward the tills.

“The ice cream wasn’t on sale, though,” Sirius levels with him, strolling along beside him. “I’m sorry to say it.”

“It’s a vice I’ve made room for, but thank you for your candour,” Remus offers him.

Check-out appears no less harried than their last glimpse of the area and Sirius puts out a small sigh as Remus wheels the cart over to the line that’s got the least amount of people lined up for it, getting in behind a mother and child, and very quickly getting locked in line by a lady coming and standing behind them, chatting away on her mobile. Remus looks round at her voice and steps in a little more, apparently under the impression he’s in the way somehow. The conversation sort of stalls there given their line situation, but that makes it all the more easy to hear half of the lady’s conversation going on behind them.

“Exactly... yes,” she says heavily, “I mean, you’ve known her about six different ways...”

Sirius darts his gaze over to Remus — a foolish move in the simplest terms when he's a pointed smile painted on and then, he's got to breathe in long and try to snip Remus’s direct line to his funny bone, but he can see for himself that Remus’s smile means he isn’t out of the woods yet.

To make matters so much worse, he reaches his right hand up to jostle his sunglasses up and down suggestively. “Stop that now,” Sirius shoots him, knowing he’ll burst if he keeps that up.

“That’s just a lot of ways,” he offers, keeping it under his breath, and Sirius has to lift his gaze to the ceiling in near-prayer. “And yet, very specific; not five, not seven.”

Sirius’s snort is far louder than he anticipates it’ll be once he knows he can’t keep it in anymore, and apparently it’s louder than Remus even saw coming for he ducks his head down and conducts an intense staring contest with the floor, it seems.

Sirius collects his own self, shuffling forward in the queue as Remus jolts with the understanding that they’re expected to move now and rolls the cart forward a full wheel rotation before hunkering it down again until further notice. Sirius looks to his right before he swivels to the side, his back purposefully facing a few shelves of impulse buys when he does not need a candy bar at the moment and knows he will have to avoid looking at them to accomplish leaving the place without sticking a bar into the cart, and then, for some ghastly, unknown reason, Sirius gets his left foot used as a step-stool for the boy who used to be in front of them in the queue and now apparently really wants to get at the candy bars behind him.

Sirius steps aside, looking to Remus for help as the child boosts him aside another inch or three to get at the shelf. “Why is it always me?"

Remus bites down on the right side of his lower lip, shaking his head in a way that roughly translates to 'it’s anyone’s guess.' Sirius looks to the boy’s mother, busy unloading the cart in front of them, but she certainly looks round when the kid hoots and runs something over to the cart in front of them that has him vibrating with excitement, and there, Sirius will cop to it; it’s cute. Borderline irritating, but cute and that’s the most anyone’s going to get out of him about it.

The boy’s mum, however, isn’t such a fan of the candy bar that gets dropped into their cart. “No, not today,” she maintains, in a manner suggesting that is that on that, and for a moment there, Sirius feels for the little lad, catches the little kid’s gaze, and aims a smile down at him.

The kid pouts up a storm, but doesn’t do much more than that as he returns the bar to the shelf. “Been there,” Remus whispers, scrunching his nose up a bit as if hating the memory of it, and there, if Sirius splices Hope and a tiny Remus in there in front of them in line, he’s got little to no choice but to tamp down on thinking the lady’s a bit of a bag.

The lady steps up to the counter, unzips her wallet to pull out a card, and looks back and down at the boy, and Sirius thinks he sees a split-second’s worth of a guilt flash before she bends to pick him up, hoisting him up by the pay pad on the machine and letting him push the buttons on the machine, a task the boy seems unbelievably pumped to have allotted to him.

Kids, hm. Sirius swallows, looks out ahead in the queue, and aims for the wall above the bag boy’s head to stare at, but in doing so, finds out the bloke had already been looking at him, for some fucking reason, and it's not even a split-second, innocuous meeting of gazes, but Sirius tears his eyes away anyway, hating that he was observable to anyone just then.

Well, maybe not everyone.

He chances a look at Remus, who's not watching him and instead taking in the little show going down in front of them with a knowing expression that lives and breathes nostalgia, but he must sense Sirius studying him for his shoulders stiffen rather suddenly.

“My mum used to let me press the buttons at the ATM,” he raises, lifting his shoulders a little sheepishly, and — it’s shit, all around it’s shit that he can feel and see and read how reprehensible Remus feels about the silent but humongous elephant dancing in the room, spouting its trunk off about how Sirius won’t ever be able to pick a single moment that he would've felt like kid Remus or that tyke because he landed the mother he got, but he'd rather listen to the elephants heckling than to have to plainly see the guilt washed over Remus's face for having landed a mum like Hope in the draw.

Sirius feels as if he’s breathing through a straw as he moves in to start unloading their cart, but it’s all he can do when he can’t really do much to even out the differences between their upbringings; the action seems to wake Remus up, too, however, garnering him to start unloading from his end of it and soon enough, they've an empty cart to bring back to the front and that, Sirius can do. He wheels the cart toward the end of the till as Remus passes the recyclable bags over to the bag boy with a distracted smile, but the bloke continues to stare at Sirius even as he takes hold of them. It's not even in a way that might be kind of titillating if he were single and looking either; it’s much more of a spooked, have-I-met-you-before inspired gaze, giving Sirius an inexplicably strange vibe he’s not all that interested in.

Remus steps up to the counter to pay and Sirius goes ahead and wheels it back to the foyer, dumping the remnants of their drinks in the bin on the way back to their checkout lane by the time Remus is pocketing the receipt. Sirius moves up to stand by him and catches the eye of the bag boy again, who simply will not stop staring at him even while bagging their items and by the time the bloke is close to the end of their haul and giving a dual attempt at watching while putting the grain-based products at the top of the bags, Sirius has more than had it with him.

“Can I help you with something?” he puts out sweetly, blinking twice at him.

The bloke shakes his head clear. “No,” he says, right quick. “Sorry, you just look identical to someone and it’s thrown me; that’s my bad.”

Sirius nods, squinting a bit. “Regulus?” he guesses.

The bloke’s eyes flash at once. “How—” he puts out, like his head’s gone and imploded on himself, but a beat past the implosion, he just smiles. “You knew him?”

“Oh, yeah,” Sirius assures, and since the bloke is still blinking like he’s working with fifty percent fewer brain cells than even a moment ago, he figures he’ll just add the important piece to help with the puzzlement lining the bloke’s face. “Brothers; we got that all the time.”

A confounded expression shows through before the bloke shakes it off quickly. “I didn’t know he had one, but God, you could've been his twin,” he insists.

Sirius grins, letting a morbid laugh escape him, but Remus speaks before he can lay the fuck into this incredibly brave bloke. “OK,” he says, loudly, lifting the recyclable bag right off of the counter and plucking the bag of bagels out of the bloke’s hands, “thank you and bye.”

Remus quickly reaches for the second bag and shoulders that before getting his third, rather empty, and nearly forgotten recyclable bag quietly waved at him by Bag Boy, but shakes his head quickly. “Keep it,” he insists, tugging Sirius along.

Sirius’s entire face is equal to the sun’s total heat output as he leaves Remus to the task of getting him the fuck out of there, and boy does Remus work to rush them out the doors with their two bags of shopping on his shoulders. Sirius has a cigarette out the second he steps outside, lighting up as he moves away from the door and promptly speeds through the parking lot diagonally, pushing in the direction of Remus’s place.

He takes a mighty haul of his cigarette, turning his head as Remus moves up on his right. “Why do people think it’s just fine to talk to me?” he shoots out.

Remus purses his lips for a beat or two. “I don’t know, but sometimes I really wish they wouldn’t.”

Sirius takes another heated haul. “And another thing?” he raises, flying his cigarette hand up and out in front of him. “Who the fuck says ‘oh, I didn’t know he had a brother’ straight after someone tells you they’re the fucking brother, who?

“I don’t know,” Remus says again, sounding pained. “Him, apparently.”

“He’s a piece of shit, then,” Sirius tosses out.

“Yeah,” Remus nods, as if he’s tamping down extremely hard on the urge to inject reason and impartiality into it, and on that note, he’s doing everything right here as far as Sirius is considered; he doesn’t need to hear it. He shakes his head while he takes yet another haul, fuming as he makes for the curb. “Please stop.”

Sirius stops at the urgency in his tone, whirls around, and goes still as Remus breathes out with relief. “I didn’t want you hurdling into the road,” he instils, more of that relief lining his features.

“Why would I do that?” Sirius asks.

“You’re a step away from the road and you weren’t stopping?” Remus defends. “Let's just please take the quieter way back.”

Sirius sticks his cigarette in his mouth, holds his right arm out for one of the bags on Remus’s shoulders, and gets the right one-handed to him once Remus zones in on his offering. Sirius puts it on his right shoulder in turn, heads left instead of right, aiming for the boroughs instead of the boulevard they’re on while Remus heads up on his left, going in between him and the edge of the sidewalk. “Well, this is good,” he puts out cheerfully. “Now, whenever I feel a sharp pang of guilt over how I let things end with him, I’ll just remember to ask myself this: why put myself through that misery for a bloke who didn’t even tell people I existed?”

Remus breathes in long, speaking once he lets it out. “He might not have known him for long or very well; I didn’t hear about Reg for a little while there—” he falters the second Sirius even looks toward him, “—I’m just trying to help,” he tacks on quickly, shrinking back on the sidewalk so he’s a step or two behind Sirius, and then it’s Sirius’s turn to falter.

“I’m not going to lose my shit on you, Remus,” Sirius instils, his throat dry as he lifts his hands deftly for some of the fucking reason this man sprinkles around. “I’m upset, that’s it.”

Remus turns his head toward the road on his left rather than keep it trained on him. “I don’t think it's a reflection on you, Sirius," he gives him, clipped and careful. "I’m going to want to help you get through this sort of thing, but you have to let me do it."

Sirius breathes in and out, takes a quiet pull off his cigarette, and shakes his head. “It is a reflection on me,” he instils. “I treated him like shit, him not even mentioning my name isn’t anything I didn’t already know in my gut, it just hit me hard; it’s like, yeah, I was terrible to him, but he was the devil to me half the time and I’ve had to squint to remember the good in that kid for so long, this should make me feel vindicated but instead, knowing he probably had to squint to remember that I had anything good in me the whole time we weren’t speaking is—”

Sirius cuts off as his throat wavers, feeling a tight knot in his throat, and startles as Remus links his right arm in with his left, a couple of chaps out on a stroll. “If it’s any consolation,” he starts, speaking so evenly that Sirius feels just as if not more anchored to his voice than Remus himself just then. “I know I didn’t know him, so all of this is probably going to sound like a lot of hooey coming from me, but—”

“Shut up,” Sirius says exhaustively, lifting his right hand to rub at his nose, “it’s always a consolation from you and I know you fucking know that.”

Remus gives his arm a squeeze. “OK, then hear me out, please?” he prefaces. “I do know you and have seen you say a few very unkind things to your friends, who I know for a fact you love so deeply you see them like they’re as good as blood — better than, even, and I know they see you the exact same way; they love you more than they can stand, so as much as it might seem easier to think that you’re damaged beyond repair and no good for anyone, you have to take those feelings about yourself and you have to throw them out, you have to think about how your friends hunker around you, you have to think about how I still manage to see so much good in you every single day, and you have to block the rest of the noise out.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no,” Sirius puts out, not about to burst into tears on the side of the road, he won’t do it.

“Hey, was I not talking?” Remus checks. “I’ll ask you to back off my man’s quality of character right this second or I might have to make you do it myself.”

Sirius puts out a snort, smiling sadly. “Oh, yeah?” he raises, budging Remus’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” Remus assures, a smile tugging at his lips. “Even if things were far from perfect between you two, I still have no doubt in my mind that he would've had such a hard time not talking about you—”

“No,” Sirius cuts in, “it was probably the easiest decision he had to make.”

“Sirius,” Remus huffs out. “Whether that bloke back there was a classmate, friend, or his best mate in the world, even if Reg told himself he’d never mention your name and was so adamant about it that it worked, I don't care; it’d have still been a task for him to just up and make himself forget about a sunray like you, and I know that because I’ve had a hard time not talking about you many, many times since I've had the pleasure and I have been very angry with you before.”

Sirius stops them from walking, turns his head right quick, and stuffs his face up against Remus’s right shoulder, momentarily silenced and left without the brainpower to come up with a reply that could even follow that. Remus leans in to press a kiss to Sirius’s head, out in the open, under the beating sun, with the potential for onlookers to spot it, and it’s enough, all of it's enough to get Sirius lifting his head and trying again.

“God, who the fuck cares?” he raises, rubbing at his nose. “He was awful, I was awful; we were both our worst selves back then and there’s nothing I can do about it now.”

“No, nothing except dragging yourself over the coals, and between you and me, I hate that option for you,” Remus says to it.

“And really, who the fuck cares if Hickery-Doo over there doesn’t know of me,” Sirius tacks on. “Who’s he anyway? Nothing to me.”

Remus stutters out a laugh. “Just—” he tries. “I agree with you, but why ‘Hickery-Doo’ of all things?”

A snort comes out of Sirius so ferociously that it sort of hurts on the way out. “What, you think I know?” he raises. “I don’t police what comes into my head and right out my mouth at any given point, OK? I just let it flourish.”

“Well, thank God for that in this case,” Remus says heavily, grinning at him.

Sirius sneaks a kiss to Remus’s forehead while he’s still got the chance. “Sorry I had a meltdown,” he offers, frowning at him.

“You didn’t,” Remus pardons, leading Sirius to continue walking, but at a slower stroll.

“I kind of did,” Sirius says of it. “Call it a mini-meltdown, if you want.”

“You didn’t punch a stone wall, so I would have to say that was more of a bump in the road,” Remus extends, passing his left hand deftly over the left-hand side of his jaw with a wince.

“What’s up?” Sirius asks.

Remus shakes his head a bit. “Just sore, it's OK."

“You shouldn’t have gone at me so hard with that thing,” Sirius sighs.

“I didn’t hear you complaining at the time,” Remus puts in, “and it’s not got to do with that, it’s my tooth.”

“Well, you’re right, that I can’t take the blame for,” Sirius echoes. “Which one?”

“Lower molar,” Remus says, tapping the line of his jaw for added visuals, but that backfires on him evidently when he pulls a face, wincing again.

“Well, why’d you do that?” Sirius raises, snickering.

“I don’t know,” Remus puts up, throwing him a reluctant smile. “Is there Tylenol back at mine?”

“Asks the man who just left the grocery where stockpiles of it live,” Sirius narrates.

“I meant in the first aid kit you brought home with you,” Remus implores, budging Sirius’s hip.

Sirius brightens at the idea, sure, but mostly for Remus putting the word 'home' in a sentence with him in it and not immediately backtracking. “Could be,” he offers. “I didn’t go scouring the contents with a fine-toothed comb, but we can see.”

Remus nods, dropping his left hand to pull their receipt out of his left trouser pocket and lifting it to hold it up to Sirius. “Here, go nuts,” he offers.

Sirius hums a bright note, snatching it from Remus’s hand. “You’re really going to let me split it?” he raises, grinning ear to ear.

Remus huffs out a good-natured laugh. “Well, if it’ll keep you smiling like that, I suppose I can find a way to accept it,” he maintains, giving him a tiny smile in return.

Sirius has a look at the total, pulls his mobile out, and throws on just a little more than half just to make it a rounded-off number. “Do you want me to send you a little extra for a check-up?” he raises, eyeing Remus's problematic jaw. “I can just tack it on right now.”

Remus puts out an aggrieved noise. “Why do you have to ruin a good thing?” he sends him, completely tortured by the mere idea of borrowing some money for a damned dental appointment. “I’m fine, I’ve been working a ton; I’ve money to move around if I really need to—”

“Right, but I could just move some of mine into your account, and then you wouldn’t have to dip into your stockpile,” Sirius raises.

“We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here,” Remus maintains. “It’s a twinge, I don’t think I’ll end up needing a root canal done so fork over some of the grocery bill and let’s just leave it at that.”

Sirius puts a huff toward the sky, straightening his neck out and hitting send. “There, it’s on the way.”

“Perfect,” Remus offers, leading Sirius diagonally across the road while there aren’t any cars coming from either direction.

“Alright,” Sirius gives, sighing with an air of completion as he puts his mobile away. “Tell me about work, hm? We didn’t get to talking about it last night.”

“Right, well, it’s sort of hard to talk shop when you’re inside of me generally,” Remus returns.

Sirius huffs, half-smiling for it. “Well, I’m not inside you now, am I?” he raises. “What’s the hap, hm? What’s the tea?”

Remus smirks a laugh through his nose, leading them up toward his street. “I’m trying to think,” he offers, a thoughtful expression on before he appears to be struck with something of note. “I had an elderly gent slap my hand at the till early on in my shift.”

“What?” Sirius sends out, whipping his head toward Remus’s. “Excuse me? Who the fuck—”

“He’s a regular, but more of an early afternoon sort so I don’t think you’d have seen him around,” Remus offers, and that may well be true given that Sirius really only tends to pop in for a visit later on in the evenings. “And that’s part of what was so strange about it; he’s usually quite kind, always been pleasant, not a particularly handy bloke.”

Sirius isn’t so interested in a laundry list of reasonings. “Why’d he hit you?” he demands.

Remus takes a measured breath, lifting his free hand. “It was more of a rap over my hand to scold,” he clarifies, demonstrating it on the hand he’s got linked in with Sirius’s left arm. “He put a note down on the counter and started fishing out the coins for the rest, I reached to pick up the note and he did not like that, rapped on my knuckles and said ‘that’s not yours yet.’”

Sirius puts out a profound scoff. “It’s fucking paper,” he returns, making a face. “You probably reached to help gather it up; I highly doubt it came off as ‘gimme your money, ya old fucker,’ he needs to chill out.”

“Mm, I didn’t love the method he used either,” Remus puts in moderately, ”but I suppose it’s a tactic that’ll work given that I’m definitely going to be less inclined to gather up someone’s money before they’re finished counting it out.”

Sirius fumes, shaking his head. “What time does he usually come in?” he raises. “I might show up there and rap that cup out of his hand to scold, see how he likes it.”

“No, see, I’m not going to tell you that,” Remus returns.

“You have to start telling Lily about more of this shit,” Sirius instils. “I guarantee she’s not going to care more about that man’s daily three pounds over her employees getting their hands smacked at the till for trying to help gather the money up, I’m—”

“OK,” Remus comes in, reaching a hand up to quell Sirius’s fiery disposition, “she was in back when it happened and Elise told her all about it later, so she does know and already has it out for the man so if you come in there and join the cause, I don’t know that he's going to make it out alive.”

Sirius smirks out a laugh, a smile budding at his lips. “You know, once, back when Lily was still at mine,” he starts, reaching to prod Remus’s arm linked with his, “she has been newly promoted to acting manager so she evidently wanted to perform well but was having a bit of a time trying to balance what the company wanted from her versus what the rest of us wanted—”

“Which is to leave you guys alone to goof off and work simultaneously,” Remus comes in.

“Yes, true,” Sirius accepts, “and a big issue for Lily was trying to balance what she would be expected to do if a prime regular started acting out with some of her staff, and so, one day, this middle-aged man wearing a pair of those God awful bottle-thick spectacles told Mary that he liked that she’d dropped some weight and when Lily found out about that, she about hunted that man down.

Remus lights up brighter than a Lite Brite, taking in an audible breath of sheer wonder. “Did she really?”

Sirius nods knowingly. “Oh, our girl went right after him the next time he was in and I swear, she grew eighteen inches in height to puff out and look mean, put a finger in his face and said, ‘don’t you ever talk about one of my staff’s bodies again or I will throw you out of here myself’” he dictates, doing a stellar impression of dear Lilith on fire, if he does say so himself. “It was the best I’d seen out of her and I wish I could superimpose you into the scene so you could see it as it happened for yourself, but alas, you didn’t come along until a good month or two later.”

Remus sighs longingly. “I want to have been there,” he gives him, breaking into a laugh. “Did the man come back after that?”

“Never saw him again, oddly,” Sirius passes along.

“Good,” Remus says of it.

“She’s always been a spitfire, but that time she took on something fierce, and we were all bowing to her when it was over,” Sirius extends, an amused though undeniably fond smile on, “so, I’m just telling you now, it’s very good that she knows that happened to you ‘cause I swear, she’d have climbed you by now if she weren’t already happily taken—”

“Oh, I need you to quit it while you’re ahead,” Remus cuts in.

“What, you’re allowed to use Lily as an example but I’m not? I’m just telling the truth,” Sirius manifests, pulling his arm out of Remus’s grasp to have his hands free for a demonstration, “there’s zumba,” he says, flattening his right hand a little above his head, “James,” he adds, putting his left one underneath it, “you,” he tacks on, putting his right hand underneath his left and waggling it around a bunch, “And then me and Pete are like, all the way down here—” He sticks his left hand down by his hip, pulling a loud sputter of a laugh out of Remus for it. “That’s the extent of Lily’s love, right there.”

“The puppet show helped, I won’t deny that,” Remus gives him, reaching his right arm out to link in with Sirius’s again, and Sirius almost wishes they weren't just mere steps away from Remus’s building, “but you and Pete are up much higher than that.”

Sirius tilts his head back and forth evenly. “Point being, I’ll bet you the price of a root canal that this will likely work out in your favour because Lily loves you more than she can probably handle and that man may well get clapped with a ban sooner than you think.”

Remus puts out a huff for the fuss of it all, no doubt in Sirius’s mind, and waves him off with his free hand as he leads Sirius up the path to his lobby door. The two of them likely could've managed to get up the stairs while linked together but there isn’t much point in that, so he lets Remus go on up ahead of him on the stairs, too. Minerva is just locking up and, by the looks of it, heading out when they get up to Remus’s floor, and there starts a joyous little meeting in the hall wherein she makes it starkly clear that the two of them are expected to come over for tea soon, and a tentative appointment is proposed for late Sunday morning, ahead of Sirius’s Zumba class so they’ll both be able to attend.

They head in through Remus’s door when that’s settled and Sirius heads for the kitchen while Remus takes a quick left and heads into the bathroom, opening up the cupboards and having a bit of a search through them. “Do you think there’d be something in the first aid kit?” Remus asks, and when Sirius looks round to him from the island where he’s dumping his shopping bag, he sees that he doesn’t really need to answer the question when Remus shakes a travel pack of Tylenol and a rattle echoes out.

Remus pops it dry as per, flicks off the light in the bathroom, and carries his shopping bag over to join in on the unloading process at the island, pulling his poncho off and draping it over the stool nearest to him. “Pie?” Sirius raises, pumped up about it already.

Remus hums a faint note. “I mean, sure, but I remember you saying something about going—” he offers, putting a thoughtful face on before taking in a breath of remembrance, “spelunking, was it?”

Sirius fumbles and drops the brick of butter in his hands, pushing back from the counter easily. “By all means, the pie can wait,” he insists.

“We do have all evening,” Remus says for it. He takes in a measured breath, halting Sirius up for a moment. “Let’s just get the dairy products put away and then we can see where you’ll end up?”

Sirius grabs the butter, milk, and heads around to Remus's side of the island to budge in and sift through the other shopping bag to pull out the carton of eggs, heading back around the island to get to the fridge. “Wait, Half Baked,” Remus offers, reaching the pint across the island toward him.

Sirius shuts what’s in his hands away and heads for the pint, plucking it out of Remus’s hand and bringing it back to stick it in the freezer, shutting the door with gusto and turning back to him with an air of finality.

Remus nods for Sirius. “Come here.”

Sirius makes it around the island and up on him in a flash, fusing their lips together as he steers him back toward the room. Remus goes with it, but puts out a short hum of discomfort, reaching up to press his hands against Sirius’s chest. “Just, careful?” he bids, puffing out his left cheek. “Tooth.”

Sirius nods at once, leans in again, and resumes with a kiss he thinks must be the exact meeting between slow, steady, and expertly tender for Remus’s knees wobble immediately, and from there, Sirius has to grip him at his waist to keep Remus walking properly. He gives another flick of his tongue against Remus’s lips, requesting to be let in again, and Remus hums his affirmation before getting them turned about and pushing Sirius down onto the bed instead, but that's just fine with him. Sirius backs up to give the both of them some room to stretch out, an avid smirk taking him over as Remus moves in over him and settles down, his body warm against Sirius’s as they keep to a careful, languid snog.

For a good batch of beats, he lays underneath Remus in a tender stupor and while he doesn’t mind the idea of taking their time, he also wouldn’t mind some skin-on-skin right about now, taking to skirting his hands down Remus’s back until he gets to the hem of his shirt and pushing his fingers underneath it to graze them over the skin at the small of his back. He tugs up on the shirt, lifting it up over Remus’s midriff in a signal that the article better go soon, and Remus pulls off of his mouth to lift up and pull the whole shirt off for him, obliging lad he is, and chucks it on the bed haphazardly, taking to ridding of Sirius of his tank and tossing aside before lowering himself down on him again, and Sirius sure as hell thinks he’s about to get his face snogged off before Remus ducks down and seems to take on the righteous task of covering every inch of Sirius’s chest down to his navel with kisses, and in all honesty, Sirius can’t oppose that one bit.

Remus wraps his arms over and around the back of Sirius’s hips, pulling them up and in tight, and lets out a loud huff against Sirius’s skin. “Why do these look so good on you?” he puts out, tugging on the waistband at the back of Sirius’s joggers for punctuation, and Sirius can’t help it; he’s just a human flush at this point.

“On or off, on or off?” he chants.

“I’m thinking on, if I’m honest,” Remus returns.

“That, I can do,” Sirius assures, lifting his hands in surrender and dropping them again in a grapple for mercy, gripping the sheets on either side of him as Remus starts in on him again. He breathes harshly, his chest rising and falling, his next question coming out rather tight. “Shouldn’t I roll over?”

“In a minute,” Remus says, muffled against Sirius’s navel, and fuck it, you do you, Remus.

For a bloke who just told Sirius to remember to be gentle, it’s a rather interesting turn of events to have Remus giving him all he’s got down there. He thought it too soon, turns out, for Remus huffs and lifts his head, flying his left hand up at his jaw. “I’m trying, but it just hasn’t kicked in yet,” he instils, breathing fast. “It’s like it’s pulsating—”

“It’s fine,” Sirius assures, though it pains him to lose the sensual torture practice being used on him, “we can just say no kisses from here on out.”

Remus looks down at Sirius's crotchetal region and back up at his face in the span of a beat. “Then I do have to switch up,” he says of it.

As hot as it is to find Remus has to switch things up if he’s to be expected to not cover him in kisses, Sirius lifts a hand to point directly at him despite that. “I am still getting dicked down,” he asserts. “I deserve it.”

Remus huffs. “I agree with you, now turn over?” he directs.

Sirius drops his hands to push himself up and back as Remus moves up onto his knees, but then he just braces himself on the bed, eyes shut tight, head hanging, and Sirius goes still, waiting for something, anything, but it comes out rushed and loud enough to spook Sirius even while he’s waiting for it. “Get a boost.

Sirius flies himself over to his bedside table, knows he put one in there the same night he decidedly went about Remus’s flat and dropped little boost bottles in every spot that made any bit of sense to him, and twists the cap off for him, clearing the distance between them in as quick a move as he can and tapping Remus with his free hand to get his attention.

“Here, open up,” he coaxes.

Remus fights his eyes open and reaches for the boost, knocking some of it back before shouting a sputter in the next beat. “Jesus Fucking Cunt,” he puts out.

“You don’t say,” Sirius returns weakly, his heart beating so fast in his chest he thinks he can hear it.

Remus drops down on the bed and fucking belts out a cry against it, and Sirius reaches for his back, just wanting to remind him that he’s right here, but Remus shirks out of his reach and, worse than that, pitches forward so hard onto his own head that Sirius flies over him to cease that from happening again; he shoves Remus down flat on the bed and puts every pound of dead weight that he has to work with down on him, putting out sorry after sorry after sorry as Remus shouts and thrashes under him.

He hates this part. Remus can’t fucking stand contact when it’s this painful, can’t stand being smothered, and Sirius can’t stand it doing either to him, but it’s do or don’t; lose him or don’t.

Sirius’s mobile is out there on the island of no use to him just now so he checks the time on the digital clock on Remus’s nightstand, dials it back a minute or so for the grand opening, and settles in for a long two hours of this.

At least, he'd been aiming to settle in, but if Remus keeps knocking back on him like he is, Sirius is going to lose his dick and/or balls in the process and he’s rather attached to all three. He presses his left hand to the center of Remus’s back, holds him down as he shifts his hips up and swivels his legs around, thanking the reprise of Zumba in his life for it’s a tricky little manoeuvre getting himself seated on Remus’s back and he'd have definitely pulled something trying that even two weeks back. He crosses his legs over him, adjusts his package a little for his own comfort, and settles in for the long haul, reaching up and swatting Remus’s arms each time he tries to beat his head in, and that goes on for a few solid minutes at least, but when that just isn’t enough anymore, he shifts forward with his back arched up, plants his hands down on Remus’s wrists from behind, and puts his weight down on them, flattening Remus’s fists against the bed.

Remus kicks his feet in retaliation, but they can’t get Sirius from all the way down there while he’s all the way up here. Nice try, clusters, but Sirius isn’t playing. Fortunate for Remus’s feet in particular, they landed exceptionally well on the bed just a few minutes ago, so his legs can whip back and forth all they like, he can try to beat his feet into the bed frame all he wants, but his feet are going to dangle off the bed and miss every attempt at smacking the frame, and that's a win in the simplest terms, but the mattress keeps providing a cushiony bounce to every one of Remus's tries from there and that's a bit funny, all in all; this is all too rough and Sirius needs to get his funnies in some way or another.

Banging sounds off from the other side of the wall behind Remus's bed, and yeah, fair enough, Remus sounds like he’s being actively murdered in here, but Sirius doesn’t give a shit what the neighbour thinks; call the police, fuck it, Sirius isn’t getting up to answer it; they can bust the door in and see for themselves how incapacitated he is at the moment. He thinks about that for a few seconds longer, but the banging keeps going and — he doesn’t love admitting this either — he thinks it over again, deciding that getting 911 called on them right now would be disastrous; if they barge in and find Sirius literally sitting on a bloke having a fit, it's not going to look good one bit.

Sirius looks up the bed, deems either one of the pillows as too far to grab from where he is, chides himself for not grabbing one while he was at the top of the bed, and looks around him for other options. He takes a long look at his shirt laying a little ways away on the bed, grimaces over the idea of trying to shove that in Remus’s mouth when he gallivanted around the park and the grocery and undoubtedly sweat up a storm in it, and ultimately deems that an unacceptable course of action.

Remus, on the other hand, had a pretty chill day overall, movement-wise. Sirius glances right, catching sight of Remus’s tee, hanging off the side of the bed and in danger of falling right off of it if Remus’s thrashing keeps up, and it will, so Sirius puts out a long breath, takes in another in preparation, and lets go of Remus’s hands in one-go, pitching himself toward the shirt and nabbing it off of the side of the bed. Remus takes his momentary freedom and does well with it, crawling up the bed and heading straight for the wall behind it, and Sirius puts everything he has into tackling him before he can reach it.

He situates himself over Remus again and reaches with his left hand to shove both their pillows in between his head and the wall, refusing to lose him to a piece of plywood. Once that’s done, Sirius reaches Remus’s t-shirt down to get it underneath his face and uses his left hand to come at the manoeuvre from both sides, tapping the right corner of his mouth erratically until Remus gets so fed up with it that he shrieks in frustration, but that works, too; with his mouth open, Sirius can just shove the t-shirt in it and leave a single pat on the back of Remus’s head, urge him to scream all he wants, and scream, Remus sure does.

Sirius hunkers down with his hands pressed down on Remus’s wrists again, though now due to the trip Remus took a trip up the bed, his arms have to be spread out to the sides as opposed to out straight ahead of him, but that does make it easier for Sirius to sit on him and hold his arms down while also giving the muscles in his lower back a break, so there is that.

The one good thing about him being behind Remus for the next while is that he can cry about it without being seen. He hates that he’s even doing it; he’s not the one battling a ten right now, but the tears come all the same and Sirius can’t move his hands to wipe them away so they’re here to stay, and once they really start coming, Sirius picks a spot on the wall straight ahead of him to stare daggers at, but as much effort as he gives it, he really can’t see anything but red as the time slugs on.

Sirius feels, once he's all cried out and mostly just sniffling, that the universe should do well by him and throw him a fucking bone before he goes apeshit, and perhaps it’s the unfiltered rage he funnels into his request for an iota of mercy, but the universe, she listens, if only for the fact that Remus stills at an hour and thirty-two minutes from the get, and that, truly, is their best time yet. He counts to ten, does it once more just for the hell of it, and shifts himself off of Remus, dipping down to catch a glimpse of his face and feeling like a whole pile of shit for not getting his mask on him sooner with the way he still has his eyes screwed shut tight as he pushes tiny, harried breaths in and out.

Sirius pulls Remus’s drawer open, fishing in it for his basic black mask, and while not quite as eye-catching as his hot pink one, it'll do just fine. He adjusts the band, shirks it down around the back of Remus’s head, and stretches the front of the mask down over his eyes, leaning in to leave a kiss on Remus's left temple.

Given that Remus will be out like a light in minutes if not sooner, Sirius lifts off of the bed and sets to gathering up the right sort of aftercare that’ll help just being within reach of Remus. He fetches the quilt off of the couch, a glass of water, changes his mind on the mask situation when he stops by at the freezer and feels for Remus’s hot pink one, thinking the chill of it would be monumentally refreshing for Remus to feel after a knockout like that, and then, since he's already he’s up and about, he heads for the bathroom to dig the travel bottle of Tylenol out of the first aid kit. He shakes one out, then another, thinking Remus's muscles could use some relief and his own could use a bit of that, too. He twists the cap back on the bottle, sets the kit back where it belongs, and separates the two pills over his left palm, thinking about how Remus makes dry swallowing look like a cinch, and really, how hard can it be? He knocks one back, tries it out, and immediately coughs it back up which is some bullshit when he’s put quite a few larger things down his throat with much less forethought than he put toward this damned pill.

Sirius moves to stand, runs the tap to cup a bit of water into his right palm, and pops the pill again, successfully swallowing it down and thinking he’ll sacrifice his pride in favour of telling Remus the tale of this little oopsie; it’d be worth it just to hear him snicker.

He plucks the water glass and mask off the bathroom counter where he set them, brings them back to the room, and heads around to Remus's side of the bed, setting the water glass down on his nightstand first so as to not spill any, sets the Tylenol beside it, and digs in Remus’s drawer again to pull out the bottle of melatonin, rattling a pill free from it. Five come out, of course, but Sirius plucks one out of his palm and shirks the rest back into the bottle, shuts the bottle back in the drawer, and leaves the lone capsule on the nightstand beside the painkiller.

He hikes Remus’s quilt over his left shoulder for now and perches on the side of the bed by Remus’s middle, reaching to pull the black mask off with as non-threatening a movement as he can make happen, and quickly replaces it with the chilled one, smiling a little as Remus puts a distant hum out for it. He pushes to stand, pulls the quilt off of his shoulder, and flares it out in the air before bringing it down on Remus’s body and tucking it in around him, figuring he’ll want the cover of something but perhaps not the comforter just yet and wrestling a shirt onto him right now is just a bit unrealistic.

He remains bowed over Remus for a few seconds, tracing his left thumb back and forth over Remus’s right hand, and in under twenty seconds, Sirius feels a sting behind his eyes and cannot feasibly stay in this room another second longer. He moves quickly, heads from the room, and makes a beeline for his mobile on the island, heading for the perch with James on speed dial. He pulls the door open as the first ring starts, winces and curses the sun’s positioning over the building across the street, and heads back to the island to knick Remus’s sunnies if he's going to be out there, snagging the poncho off of the stool to pull on over his bare chest while he’s at it.

James picks up on the third ring, right as Sirius is flopping himself down onto the Smoking Chair with a cigarette ready to light. “Allo gov'nah!”

“Jesus Christ,” Sirius puts out, flicking the lighter.

“Not quite,” James sing-songs. “What’s happening right now?”

Sirius puts his first haul out slowly. “I rang you?”

“Right and that is a lovely turn of events, but I remember you harping on and on about the Great Gay Date Day and how none of us, under any circumstances, were to ring either of you during,” James maintains.

Sirius lifts to lay across the arms of the Smoking Chair, his legs hanging off the left one, his head cushioned on the right. “Yeah, well, the Gay Day took a big ol’ gay dive, what can I say.”

“Did it?” James asks, and Sirius can tell it was said through gritted teeth.

“Of course it did,” Sirius puts up. “I don’t know why you’re even surprised; it doesn’t matter what fun little activities I plan out, Remus is going to get sandbagged by a cluster if I plan for dates or don't.”

“Was it a bad one?” James checks. “I mean, I have a guess; if it'd been mild, I don’t think I’d have the pleasure of hearing your dulcet tones today.”

“It was bad,” Sirius assures. “Ugly Pot worthy, but I sat on him so he couldn’t repeat that part.”

“Good on you,” James offers him.

“Good on you for yanking me back into Zumba,” Sirius turns it around. “I’ve limbered right back up.”

“Glad to hear it,” James accepts. “Gonna tell me what happened or should I throw up some guesses?”

“Gimme a sec,” Sirius bids, taking the time for a good, long, preemptive haul and the chance to let it out unhurried. “So, the morning was fantastique — truly.”

“Oh, good,” James sends him.

Sirius sneaks another quick haul. “Mhm, and then we went for phase two: a visit to the square, I took the pooch for a run, Remus hung back and watched our things while catching up on a book, and we had a lay down on a cow print blanket on the lawn, it was lovely,” he details. “And then, we went onto phase three; the grocery shopping, which is always a great time, got stuff for baking and got all prepped for phase four; the bakeage, and we get back here and, well, there’s really no point in pretending any, we got a little distracted by the concept of fucking, you know.”

“Right,” James echoes, as if Sirius is speaking about a constant, like how Earth ever spins on an axis.

"And we’re going, going, going; shirts off, hot and heavy—”

“—Mmkay, you can totally skip this part, if you’d li—”

“—And then he stops, middle of a position switch, to tell me to get him a boost, and it comes on before he even gets the tiny bottle choked down fully,” Sirius keeps on. “It was like, bam, bam, bam, and here’s a cluster.”

“Out of nowhere?” James raises.

“No, not even close,” Sirius returns. “He complained about a toothache on the way back from the store, and I’m thinking that wasn’t a toothache.”

James hums sceptically. “Why wouldn’t it have been one?”

Sirius sighs greatly. “Oh, you sweet summer child.”

“What?” James returns, wounded.

“It’s never just an ache,” Sirius delivers plainly. “I should have picked it out straight away so I’m not even excluding me or Remus here; we’re a couple of dinguses, it’s a wonder we can even put our shoes on the right feet.”

“OK, but the thing is?” James puts in. “It literally could have just been a toothache, which stands to reason why neither of you immediately thought a cluster was headed your way, so seeing as I’m woefully new to the world of clusters because no one ever gives me any background information; why would a toothache even be a cluster in disguise? Explain like I’m five.”

Sirius sighs out his haul, rubbing his free hand over his nose. “I mean, Remus has his warning signs, right: his left eye waters and droops a little, he gets the sniffles on that same side, and lately, he’s been feeling a stiff neck right before one hits, too,” he explains. “When we were going at it, both of his eyes were their standard size if a little squintier than usual because we spent all afternoon at least some form of stoned so that wasn't ever going to be a tip-off today, but I don’t think he had a stiff neck because he’d have immediately gone into reaction mode if he'd had, and he wasn’t sniffling so much as he was — well, he was doing a lot of breathing heavily since we were on our way to Poundtown, but all he talked about ahead of the onset was a pulsing happening in his jaw, seconds before he went all still and it hit him like a freight train, and now that we're out of the woods, I don’t really find it that difficult to believe that a pulsing jaw could be any less a symptom and it was on his left side too, so that should've been my first inkling that something was off.”

“Right, but hindsight’s always real nice and convenient given that it comes around after the fact,” James maintains, lobbing a ball that Sirius doesn’t know if he’s even allowed to be catching just then.

“It’s not good enough, James,” Sirius says finally.

“Who says?” James raises. “Now you’ve got something to look out for; sure, it was a shit way to learn about a new warning sign, but if you’re right then you’re right and you’ll know to act the next time he gets a suspiciously throbby tooth.”

Sirius shuts his eyes for a moment, supremely aware of the fact that he sought out the one bloke who’d be his yes-man in all of this and equally aware of the fact that he needs this sort of medicine more than any other kind. “The second it happens,” he echoes.

“Then I think you’re off the hook here,” James offers. “Any ideas on what brought this one on?”

Sirius sends out a weighty sigh. “I’ve got three theories, each one shittier than the last.”

“I’m listening,” James probes.

Sirius takes the last haul off of his cigarette, reaching behind his head to drop it into the ashtray on the small deck table behind him. “First one, Remus sort of fucked around with his sunglasses for a bit of innuendo while still under the wicked fluorescents hovering over the checkout,” he raises. “Which, if that is what did the trick, means that a two, three-second slip-up, a simple jostle of his sunnies while being the funniest person I’ve ever met, is a luxury he can no longer afford without checking our surroundings first, and I do not want to have to tell him to police himself any more than he already is.”

James puts out a low, aggrieved sort of hum for that. “Yeah, no.”

“It’ll break his little heart and then mine, too,” Sirius returns, frowning.

“Well, what’s the second one?” James bids.

“The second, a little worse,” Sirius raises. “I brained him on the side of the skull while we were in the middle of the coffee/tea aisle while having a game of tug-of-war over a particularly frou-frou bag of coffee—”

James snorts out a laugh. “Always on brand, glad to hear it,” he offers, a grin on his face, no doubt.

“Yeah, well, you know what, pal?” Sirius returns, unable to fight off a small grin, though he’s happy James isn’t present to see it. “I bet it’s all funny ha-ha over there for you, but if my elbow bonking his head ended up bringing this one on, I will be cutting the whole arm off.”

“Don’t even,” James sends him. “I’m just going to put it out there, I don’t think your elbow was the culprit, but for the sake of argument, let's say it was; I highly doubt that you’ve taken up elbowing as a sport in the three days since I last saw you, so I don’t imagine this will be an instance that repeats itself, what say you?”

“Bitch, have you seen Remus and me?” Sirius raises.

“Once or twice,” James allows.

“Then you know as well as I do that I can’t promise we won’t get into another tug-of-war game again,” Sirius returns. “It’s our brand, remember?”

“God,” James drags out. “I meant the game was on-brand for you two, not your elbowing.”

“I budge him all the time,” Sirius insists, feeling a twist in his gut. “Not hard, but we fool around a lot and I love it.”

“Well, you don’t budge his skull much, do you?” James raises, the same damn point being made with an array of different words strung together.

“No,” Sirius sighs deftly. “His head’s very important to me.”

“Right, and that’s understandable,” James accepts. “Just as it’s understandable that it would've been an accident that Remus isn't going to turn around and blast you over.”

“I told him I’d keep him safe from them and I gave him one, James,” Sirius returns. “A ten, to boot; not even a mild one, so just imagine this were you and Lily.”

“OK, I know you’re feeling responsible which I can get in a sense, but not here, not now,” James says calmly. “You want me to hop on the blame train toward your body on the tracks and I’m not about that; you haven’t even told me what the third theory is yet.”

Sirius drags his top teeth over his lower lip once. “The third is the worst of all because it brings into account the ever-present question of whether we did anything wrong at all and he was simply slated to have one.”

“That can’t be the only other option,” James says, convinced it couldn't. “I know you’ve got a powerful brain in that skull of yours, so let’s use it, yeah?”

“I have used it,” Sirius snips, wanting to kick something but his legs are curled over the arm of the chair still and they won’t reach anything with the amount of oomph he wants to kick with. “We didn’t go on a bender so it wasn’t booze, I already covered a funny light situation, and I've proposed a new theory which is Remus getting brained forty to forty-five minutes before the cluster came round for a visit.”

“OK, but let’s think outside the box a little more?” James raises. “Did he eat something funny? Could he have spiked a drink without you knowing it? Nice one out today.”

“James,” Sirius returns, making a face. “He hasn’t touched a drop since the day I suggested he avoid alcohol altogether; he’s not spiking his teas or knocking back shots in the loo, alright?”

“I mean, I was kidding mostly,” James offers.

Sirius hums blandly. “You’ve been funnier before,” he mentions.

“Fine, I take it back,” James sends him. “Yeesh, where’d your funny bone go?”

Sirius huffs a sigh through his nose, bringing them back around again. “I wonder where the fuck it went?” he raises, putting an effort once that retort comes out to breathe and regain a sense of composure, even if it's just a little of it. “Point is, there was no booze consumed by him; we had quite a few bowls over the morning and into the early afternoon, but weed has never been a trigger for him and apart from that, he consumed nothing but jizz, tea, and snacks throughout the day—”

“I’m gonna go?” James slides in.

“OK, but that’s my point,” Sirius insists. “I highly doubt the protein box we shared earlier or the taquito samples we devoured at the store brought it on, and considering how often he has his fair share of jizz and tea on a given day, he’d be having clusters left and right if it was one of those two.”

"I also have a feeling he’d just make room for clusters if jizz was a trigger.”

“Come watch him power through a ten and you’ll regret saying that.”

“I’d love to, but I haven’t gotten an invite.”

“Are you seriously going to get pissy about this now?” Sirius attests. “We’re losing focus here, I’ve highlighted the only things I can pick out from the day and those are fluorescents bugging his eyes, my elbow smacking him in the noggin, or destined to have one, on our Date Day.

“Alright, the timing was shit, I’ll give you that,” James offers, “but then, you’ll understand I hope, if I ask what the fuck you’re even doing ringing me, on your Date Day?

Sirius pulls his mouth into a frown. “He’s sleeping it off, James,” he defends, losing steam.

“What, does he typically sleep for nine hours after a cluster?” James raises, scepticism lining his tone.

Sirius frowns even deeper. “A while,” he puts up, not liking this one bit. “You know, for someone who gave me so much shit for leaving you out of the situation, you’re acting real ungrateful for me including you in it.”

“Right, and that had nothing to do with you needing someone to lick your wounds a little,” James returns.

“What, you don’t want the job anymore?” Sirius raises, feeling prickly at the back of his neck.

“Sirius, that’ll be my job ‘til the end of time,” James offers plainly, "but you did pick an odd time to include me in this.”

“I actually wanted a distraction from all this, so you know,” Sirius returns him, “but then you went ahead and had to point out the elephant in the room, and you know what—”

“Sirius, it’s literally just past five,” James cuts in.

“OK?” Sirius offers. “I’ve had to keep track of the time, too, thank you.”

“Well, I’m not sure you’re doing it so well,” James puts in thoughtfully, and he’s likely stroking his damned chin for effect over there, too, “because if you were really aware of the time and weren’t too busy throwing a pity party for yourself, you’d have realized by now that your Date Day isn’t over yet.”

“Fuck,” Sirius returns him, frowning big. “And Remus says I drive a point home hard.”

“You had to learn it from somewhere.”

“That’s it, I’ll blame you from here on out.”

“Do what you need to do,” James trades him. “New plan: let Remus rest up, see how he’s feeling when he’s come to, and maybe, just maybe, he'll be absolutely chuffed to start back in with the Great Gay Bake-Off, but you’re not going to find out on the phone with me, are you?”

Sirius reels a bit, leaning his head back over the right arm of the chair. “You’ve resurrected me with your words, young man.”

“I was trying my best,” James tacks on.

Sirius breathes in long. “OK, I’ll go in soon,” he instils, “but I wouldn’t mind hearing about your day first?”

“I,” James drags out, “fucked up grand.”

“Oh no,” Sirius reacts, grinning. “What did you do, James?”

James takes in a big ol’ breath, getting Sirius’s toes wiggling in enticement. “I went perusing some more ring shops earlier as I had a free morning to do so and there it was, Sirius,” he details, “the perfect ring, lit up like a halo itself.”

“OK, go on?” Sirius probes, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Mhm, so I chat up the shopkeep, ask her all about that ring, and it’s in my price range—”

“What price range?” Sirius cuts in.

“Exactly,” James puts back plainly, “and everything is going smashingly — too much so, turns out, for I was just heading out the shop with the ring in a box when the shopkeep made sure to tack on a mention about how they offer a great deal on resizing and it struck me there; I truly haven’t a single clue what Lily’s ring size would be — none, zilch, nada.”

Sirius throws his head back over the arm of the chair, putting out a profound bark of a laugh. “You have to be fucking with me,” he throws out. “All the shops you took me to, all the rings I pointed at only to hear ‘no no, Sirius; I’ll know when I know,’ back at me, over and over again, and you didn’t once think about her ring size until today?”

“She doesn’t wear rings, Sirius,” James enunciates.

“Well, that might’ve been a key detail to note prior to this whole journey beginning,” Sirius sends back, waving his free arm around in the air incredulously.

“Keep your voice down? Remus is sleeping,” James interjects. “And frankly, I’m not above thinking Lily can hear you, too.”

“Oh, my— Sirius starts, pausing to cover his face with his free hand and peeking through his fingers in horror, “—you cannot be discussing this with Lily in the other room; there’s no way, you’re not that daft.”

“She’s out with Mary, it’s fine,” James insists, “but you’re being fucking loud over there and I’ve half a mind to think she’ll hear you spouting and come asking questions.”

“Oh, what, she’s got supersonic hearing now?” Sirius raises.

“Are you going to help me out or not?” James turns it around.

Sirius reels again. “I’m sorry, is that what I’m doing?”

“Well, what else can I do?”

“Postpone the wedding.”

“Stop, Sirius.”

“OK, here’s an idea,” Sirius offers, whispering for effect, “keep the allegedly perfect ring, give it to her on the date, and resize it after?”

“What kind of proposal is that?” James whips back with a hiss. “‘Lily-dear, love of my life, here’s a ring that will not fit; let’s get it hanging loosely around your finger for pictures and resize it later, don’t you just want to marry me tomorrow?’”

Sirius blows out a long raspberry in reply. “You’re the one who planned everything out before even giving a thought toward her ring size, so all you’d be doing there is drawing attention to your inability to plan ahead fully—”

“Well, thanks, Sirius," James sends him faux-sweetly, "love getting your hot takes."

“Well, I don’t know what you want me to do for you?” Sirius returns.

“Gather intel for me?” James puts out.

A laugh bubbles up in Sirius’s throat. “If I go over there and start asking her about her ring size, she’s gonna ask a) what the fuck I'm doing in her house, b) what the fuck I’m doing asking about her ring size, then she will go to you, tell you all about how fucking odd that Sirius is, and you are not going to be able to play it cool; you will cave,” he finishes.

“Mmkay, but I wasn’t actually suggesting you turn up at her house unannounced,” James puts in thinly. “I’m saying, go have a spa day together, have a nice chat over a glass or two or three of wine and squeeze the information out of her like the spy I know you can be; that, I’ve seen you excel at for stakes far lesser than this.”

Sirius snorts long; a spa day does sound brilliant, but this doesn’t bode well. “James, it’s not going to work,” he puts it, puffing out a sigh at James’s colourful cursing. “Listen, it doesn’t make sense for me to take her on a spa day; we aren’t that close.”

“You fucking could be, that’s the kicker,” James returns heavily. “You’re both so alike; it’s almost horrifying in a way, but also wonderful.”

“I know that, you went and landed the female version of me and it’s an honour to hear it confirmed like this, truly,” Sirius forwards him, “but either way you spin it, we’re not spa day material yet. Maybe one day, but not right now.”

“Well, don’t ask her at a spa, then,” James returns. “The kitchen would work, too.”

Sirius drags his free hand over his face. “No, see, now we’re back around to the question of why the fuck I’d even be asking what her ring size is—”

“What, I gotta do all the thinking here?” James cuts in. “Say you’re getting her one for her birthday or something, and then change your mind last minute, get her something else—”

“Furthermore?” Sirius puts in, not done yet. “She’s a bright lady, how soon do you think she’ll put two and two together if her man’s bestie starts asking weird questions about rings?”

James puts out a frumpled breath. “What should I do, then?”

“Ask her mum?” Sirius suggests.

“She doesn’t wear rings, Sirius,” James repeats, each word its own sentence. “How would her mum know her ring size?”

“What, does Lily have her dad’s hands?” Sirius returns him. “I’d imagine it’s something her mum could guesstimate pretty well.”

“I don’t want her mum, who thinks I’m a wonderful bloke, to know I haven’t worked this out yet, thanks,” James sends him.

Sirius puts a huff out through his nose. “Well, could always ask Pete to gather intel for you,” he offers, immediately falling into a bout of giggles that only garner James to hoot right along with him.

“Fuck, would that not work,” James says of it. “If you can’t ask without risking suspicion, Peter doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

Sirius sniffs, feeling so much better about his plight already. “I think we both know who we need for this.”

If Sirius were home to see it, he might’ve been able to catch a light bulb popping on over James’s head. “You’re a genius.”

“He’d be so good at it,” Sirius insists. “Earlier, right before our coffee bag scuffle, he reached for it and put out such a casual, ‘here, I’ll put that in the cart for you’ that I almost gave it up to him — course, now, I wish I had just handed it over so I could clear my elbow of any potential charges, but I say this because Remus is really quite prolific in the art of coercion.”

James puts out an energetic hum. “Plus, he’s with her a ton," he tacks on. "Plenty of time to slip in a potential conversation about rings with a few of the gals in general, loop back around to specifics, and have Lily just oh-so-happen to hear it and maybe give her best guess as to her size—” James takes in a quick breath through his teeth, “—it’s gold.”

“OK, you’re getting a tad ahead of yourself,” Sirius mentions, aiming to quell the fire before it burns too strongly. “I understand the excitement, of course; you want the results at your fingertips but this can only happen if Remus agrees to it, and — you know the rest, I’m sure.”

James puts out an easy pfft for that. “He’s too good a soul, too big a sport to decline,” he says, convinced. “He doesn’t even have to work hard at it—”

“I’m aware, yeah,” Sirius extends, letting his legs go sideways off of the arm of the chair and pushing to sit up. “So, let him come to, let us have our Bake-Off, and then tomorrow, ring him up, ask about him first, and then, you may ask him if he’s willing to do some espionage for you.”

“I like it,” James allows. “Only, he never tells me the truth when I ask how he’s doing—”

“It’s the polite thing to do, James,” Sirius cuts in. “You don’t ask someone for a favour after neglecting to even ask how they're doing, and on that note, you don’t get to pitch a fit at him if he says no.”

“Why would he say no?”

“I’m just saying, we took in and embraced a wonderful yet stubborn little guy.”

“Little.”

“Fine, gigantic; you’re the one who kept scoffing at a little innuendo—”

“I was talking about his height actually, but of course you went with the dick.”

“Well, that’s a given and you’d go with it too given the chance.”

“Bah,” James huffs out, but he doesn’t deny it and that brings a funny grin to Sirius’s lips. “Fine, you get him back, I’ll chill out, and we’ll reconvene tomorrow.”

“Deal,” Sirius forwards, pushing up out of the armchair to head in.

“Good luck in there,” James bids.

“I don’t need it,” Sirius returns, ending the call as he opens the perch door.

It’s eerily silent inside, not a detail Sirius is the biggest fan of at the moment, but blasting tunes without earbuds is just not appropriate without a pair of earbuds, and even with them in, he doesn’t want to risk missing a single noise while drowning the silence out. He heads to the island where their notebook tends to get put, takes a seat with his back facing the kitchen and his front toward Remus’s room, and if he scoots the stool over to the left just a little, which he does do, then he only has to glance up to check on Remus from over on the bed, still conked out.

He sets the notebook open in front of him, flips through their growing case log to a new page, and plucks a pen out of the cup of many, jotting down what he can without Remus’s input. He starts with the time frame, recording the start and end times that have been variably tattooed onto his brain, and circles it with a different coloured pen a few times, the importance of their record shortest cluster to date going very much highlighted.

He moves onto the rating, gives his own guess with a big, red '10' and leaves a little extra room underneath for Remus’s opinion on the matter to be courteous, but Sirius’s is gut is telling him Remus will agree to that rating after he comes to. He moves onto triggers from there, writes the keywords 'Sunglass wigglin’ underneath fluorescents,' and leaves a few lines open underneath to elaborate on once Remus wakes up, and repeats the same process with the keywords 'My left elbow' and 'The general unease of destiny'

He flips the page, creating a section for initial symptoms.

- Eyelid not a factor
- Sniffles weren’t particularly present
- Possible stiffness in neck, will have to wait for confirmation on that
- Pulsing ache in Remus’s jaw — NEW

And moves onto general symptoms noted throughout:

- Desperation
- Screaming, shouting
- The general want for something to bludgeon his skull with or into
- Tried somersaulting onto his own head; succeeded once with the second try thwarted
- Fist beating, also thwarted
- Thrashing, restlessness, irritability irate sobbing
- Discernible speech was possible initially, some choice swears [jesus fucking cunt, our new lord and saviour], before speech became impossible once cluster settled in
- Moved at horsepower when let go of for nanoseconds, attempt at using wall as bludgeon also thwarted
- Aftermath: it is possible one of two things could have occurred at 4:42 p.m.: the cluster’s intensity either dropped off completely or the cluster’s intensity dropped to a mild number, symptoms included harsh breathing, inability to open eyes, no attempts at speech, little to no movement — difficult to deduce from those symptoms which of the two it was, will need confirmation for either once Remus is up and at'em.

Sirius taps his pen back and forth, racking his brain for any other notes of importance, but in truth, he just wants Remus’s input from here. He sets the pen down, sets the notebook open but aside, and gets up off of his stool, figuring he’ll put the rest of the groceries away. He leaves the baking essentials out, shutting away anything unnecessary for the moment, and tucks Remus’ recyclable bags back into the closet by the entryway, breathing easier with a sense of accomplishment.

Once that’s over, he checks the time on the stove, finds it nearing half-six, and decides he’ll let Remus rest up a little more before checking on him, and sets about creating a prime baking setup in the meantime. He figures why not start with the crisp and, if Remus is up for it, they can decide on whether the pie is on the horizon once they make it to that point.

He pulls the cutting board out of one of the cupboards, grabs the peeler and a big ol’ chopper for them apples from the utensil drawer, and brings the lot to the island to set them down by the bag of apples he left there. He figures it’ll be fun if they could have sections ready to work with and starts on setting up a spot at the counter to the right of the stove for pounding and rolling out the dough. He goes scrounging for useful tools and sets the rolling pin, big ol’ mixer bowl, and Remus’s recently acquired set of mixing spoons nearby, but with Remus’s tiny kitchen and all, some of the tools have to be set up on the stovetop or else they risk half of them falling into the sink if he sets any more of them on the wee counter space at their disposal.

He turns round, en route to the island to fetch the package of aluminium pie sheets to round off the whole section, but he truly spooks right out of his skin when he suddenly finds Remus standing in his bedroom doorway with his quilt wrapped around his body for protection and the most heartbreaking expression on his face.

Sirius rounds the side of the counter, intent on clearing the distance between them in as few seconds as he can make happen. Remus starts for him the instant Sirius starts moving, walking on shaky feet and reaching out for Sirius as he meets up with him in the middle of the flat, a cuttingly disconcerted breath leaving him as he presses his hands all over Sirius with some hybrid between an erratic and careful touch.

“Did I hurt you?” he asks.

Sirius shakes his head at once, but it's a little difficult what with Remus’s hands fusing to the sides of his face. “No,” he insists, reaching up to catch him by the wrists and looking down at himself in demonstration. “I’m fine, see? No worse for wear.”

Remus screws his eyes shut; not the reaction Sirius was going for precisely. He pulls Sirius right in for what he thinks is a simple hug, but once they’re wrapped up together it’s a little to ignore that Remus might just need something sturdy to lean up against and fuck if that isn’t already in Sirius’s job description.

“I’m sorry,” Remus puts out, sniffling hard against Sirius’s right shoulder.

Sirius shifts the arms he’s got wrapped up around Remus’s back and presses both of his hands to the back of his head. “OK, but you can’t say sorry every single time one happens or else that’s going to get very old, very fast,” he instils, gently with his lips pressed to the top of Remus’s head. “We should come up with something new to—”

“You made so many plans,” Remus cuts in, nearly wailing now.

“Ohhhh—” Sirius puts out to soothe, his gaze set unmovingly on the ceiling to keep his own waterworks at bay, “—kay, I did, yeah, but hey? I think we had a lot of fun in between the shit parts, don’t you?”

Remus simply sobs a notch heavier than he already was, but Sirius thinks he’s trying to nod against him so that's something. “And, and, the day’s not over yet?” he tacks on. “I was going to wait until seven to wake you and see how you’d be feeling, but I think we’ve still got ample time left for baking, if you’re still up for it.”

Remus sniffs hard, lifting his head a bit, though his mouth remains pressed against the line of Sirius’s shoulder as he seems to glance over it. “Oh,” he whimpers heavily, lifting his head to fully peer at Sirius through a watery frown, “did you set everything up?”

“Well, don’t sound so surprised,” Sirius says of it, smiling for him. “I thought we could tackle the crisp first, see how we’re feeling from there, and if we want to start on the pie, we can revisit the issue later; what do you think?”

Remus nods earnestly, putting out a teeny-tiny whimper as he shuts his eyes again and new beads take form there that Sirius thinks he’ll get away with letting go of Remus in order to wipe them away. He takes his arms back from around him, lifts them in the very little space between them, and passes his thumbs under Remus’s eyelids to do the trick. “There,” he says, admiring his handiwork.

Remus reopens his eyes, sniffing hard. “Don’t we have to write in the book?”

“I've already started, but I left tons of room for your input,” Sirius assures. “And I figure, we can get into all that while we work, so for now, I’ll hang back and add your thought bubbles to it as we work them out, all you’ll be expected to do here is sit at that island and peel some apples; what do you think, can you handle being the peeler?”

Remus puts out a breath that might’ve been a laugh in any other scenario. “You’ve seen my peeling,” he raises. “What do you think?”

“I think you’ve got an attention to detail that is both masterful and enviable,” Sirius delivers.

And Remus, beautiful bloke, smiles for him.

Chapter 15: 15.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Remus sniffs a few times once they’ve stepped apart, visibly shakes himself off, and looks Sirius up and down before reaching between the two of them and tugging on his very own poncho displayed on Sirius’s body, a plain and observant look about him now.

“OK, listen?” Sirius prefaces, lifting his hands between the two of them in a call for some reason, “you took it off, I needed something to throw on, and rather than putz about the room and risk waking you up, I threw it on. It just made sense, and plus, it smells like you, so call me a schmooze if you want but—”

Remus cuts him off with a kiss pressed to the right corner of Sirius’s mouth, lifting his head to leave another kiss on the tip of Sirius’s nose. “Just don’t wear it for baking, deal?”

“Deal,” Sirius returns, going ahead and pulling the poncho off in one swoop.

He holds it up in the space between them and Remus takes it to his room with him at a slow, concentrated clip, and Sirius winds up following him until the doorway before lingering in it, feeling as though now that Remus is up and about, it’s more than a little difficult to let him out of his sights.

Remus leaves his quilt on the bed and moves for his dinky little closet, sliding the door open and fitting the poncho over a wire hanger before hanging it up. He slides the door shut and moves around the end of the bed to get to his dresser, undoing the fly of his corduroys on the way there.

For a brief moment, the urge to boo Remus for it is insurmountable. “Ohh, relax,” Remus replies to Sirius's wordless heckling, tugging the trousers off of his legs in turn.

Sirius crosses his left ankle over his right one, scratching at a patch of skin underneath the hem of his joggers as Remus tosses his corduroys into the hamper nearby and pulls the third drawer open, taking his blue and white flannel trousers out of it.

A slow clap seems apt and Remus turns half-toward Sirius with a pointed smile on as he pulls the trousers on. “Are you planning on putting a shirt on or am I going to get to watch you parade about like that?” he asks, an amused lilt to his voice as he eyes Sirius’s bare chest.

Sirius gives a thoughtful hum. “Column B sounds a little more to your taste just now.”

“Caught that, did you,” Remus returns mildly, sliding the third drawer shut to make way for the second one, and fishing around in there.

Sirius, a supreme fan of how low these ones hang on Remus’s hips for they're just a little too big for him and tend to ride down and give a rather scenic view of his happy trail. “You could always forgo a shirt and then we could match,” he raises diplomatically.

Remus looks up at him again and wordlessly lifts the billowiest jumper in his entire wardrobe, so billowy even, that the two of them could fit inside of it at once — a task they’ve tried and succeeded — and then, it’s fair that Remus didn’t bother speaking.

“Never mind, you’ve got great instincts,” Sirius passes along, lifting his hands in allowance.

Remus flashes him a smile before pulling it on over his head, walks toward him as he tugs it down, and lets it hang ridiculously far past his midriff, but he’s a perfect portrait of a lazeabout and it’s a mood Sirius can completely identify with.

Sirius swivels around on his heel in the doorway and Remus slides his hands around Sirius’s waist, pressing his chest up against Sirius’s back and shuffling close behind him as they head into the main room, and even though Sirius is supremely aware that the area they’re working with doesn’t give them much time to keep that up much longer, he’s going to take it while he can get it. He stops at the island, where Remus leaves a quick kiss at the nape of his neck and steps around him, heading to the kitchen sink to give his hands a good rinse. Sirius takes up a stool at the island, facing Remus and the kitchen while leaving the spot across from him already reserved for the task of peeling open for Remus to take up.

Remus dries his hands off on the tea towel hanging from the handle of the oven door while Sirius leans over the island counter to pull their notebook closer to him, turning it right side up on the counter and plucking his pen back up.

Remus takes a seat in front of the cutting board, pulls a large, rotund apple out of the batch of them, and Sirius waits until he’s peeling to start from the top. “So, first thing’s first,” he prefaces, tapping the end of his pen on the page below it decidedly, “I went ahead and gave this one a starter three and an eventual four on the Lup Scale which would correspond with an eight that rose to a ten on Kip's, but of course, if you feel differently, you just say so.”

Remus’s gaze flickers up from his peeling before he gives a shake of his head. “No, I'd agree on that one,” he says, peeling on.

Sirius nods once, leaving the original guesstimation uncorrected. “And then, I’ve jotted down a ton of deets in here that you can go in and a look at any time, but you were there too and I think you know as well as I do that I had a lot to write down, so for now, I say we not dwell too hard on every single detail just now,” he raises. “I’ve two points I want to highlight and then we can move on to the meatier stuff, deal?”

Remus nods, giving him a tight smile. “Deal,” he echoes.

“First off, you have one hell of a mouth on you when you’re dealing with a whopper,” Sirius puts up, amusement tugging at his lips. Remus gives a flat 'haha' and itches his nose against the upper right sleeve of his jumper while his hands are rather occupied. “No, no ‘haha,’ you literally shouted ‘Jesus Fucking Cunt’ at the sky so forcefully that you created a new deity.”

Remus lifts his head, giving a nod toward the notebook laying below Sirius. “Did you put that detail in there?” he asks.

“Not in so many words, but close enough,” Sirius says of it. “Now, for my second point, I have a guess that right about the time you let that out, the pin and/or the clamp made an appearance, but correct me if I’m wrong, mind.”

“Right again,” Remus grants, setting the first, newly peeled apple down and cutting it in half and then into quarters.

He sets the pieces aside and reaches to pull a new, rotund apple out of the bag while Sirius stares at him, waiting for further details that apparently aren’t gonna come on their own. “And/or?” Sirius checks.

“And,” Remus clarifies.

“Well, fuck 'em both, then,” Sirius says of it, holding off on jotting that anecdote down simply to get just a little more clarity out of Remus while he has him here. “So, I lied, there actually are three points I want to highlight.”

“Shoot,” Remus probes.

“I’m beginning to notice a pattern where the way you look when you're coming down from one looks strikingly similar to the way you look when you're going through a milder one,” he mentions, “but I’m not really well-positioned to choose which one is actually happening because unfortunately, I’m not in your head.”

“You don’t want to be,” Remus insists dryly, pulling an artisanally peeled layer of skin off of the second apple.

Sirius shuts his eyes for a moment, not loving how literal that had to be taken, and he reopens them once he’s had a quick breather. “Just for the sake of clarity,” he reiterates, pushing for patience, “at the end there, it was difficult for me to tell whether it dropped from a ten to nothing versus a ten to, say, a three because you were still breathing funny and you wouldn’t open your eyes, so then I went and got your mask out and a few other things, was only gone five minutes at the very most, and by the time I came back, you were out like a light; do you remember any of that?”

Remus nods morosely. “I’d call that last bit a four,” he clarifies, cutting the second apple into quarters. “The clamp lifted and the pin hung out with me until the true end, but I don’t remember it leaving per se; I just remember waking up and trying to find you.”

Sirius nods again, well and truly appreciative of being the first thought to come to Remus’s head after waking up even if he shouldn’t take pride in it in this particular case, and sniffs once, leaning his left elbow on the counter next to the notebook and coming from the right with the pen in hand, jotting the details down where applicable.

“OK, and with that, we can move on for now,” he grants, sensing Remus’s distaste for the topic. “So, I’ll admit it, I jumped the gun with this one.”

“How so?” Remus raises, his gaze flickering up momentarily to him as he fishes another apple out of the bag.

Sirius tilts his head back and forth idly. “Well, I got so pumped about you settling down at the hour and a half mark, thinking, ‘this could be the shortest one yet’ but clearly it hung on longer than I thought it did, so if I add the five minutes, give or take, that I was out of the room to the total, this one would've still managed to clock in at an hour and thirty-five minutes and I’d say we have something really fucking cool to celebrate—”

“What part of this is really fucking cool?’” Remus enunciates, blunt as a whip.

Sirius cannot, cannot cannot cannot, hold back on making a face, but it doesn’t really matter if he did or didn’t because Remus isn’t looking at him; he’s got his eyes fixed on the task at hand and that’s about it. “Umm, wow, I don’t know,” he puts out, faux-thoughtfully, “could be the fact that you didn’t even get all of the boost down before the cluster really started going, and by then you couldn’t be bothered to down the rest and you still somehow managed to have a shorter one?”

“Mm, really fucking cool,” Remus nods. “Fucking tubular, bro.”

Sirius drops the pen in his right hand in order to fully nail an incredulous gesture with the both of his hands. “OK, could you not?” he returns. “We’re working with a time frame of under two hours and you didn’t even get a full boost down; so sorry I used the wrong phrasing apparently, but this means that so long as you even get a little of a boost down, you won’t be in for a six-hour cluster—”

Remus gives a throaty scoff to that. “Well, I sure do love that this is cause for celebration—”

“Well, it really ought to be,” Sirius snaps. “Add that to the six other clusters we cut short via the boosts already and we literally have evidence to suggest these things are doing some good, and that’s just with the boosts; once we get the shrooms going, we’ll be coming at these things from two sides so fuck it if I can’t be grateful for a little good news in—”

OK,” Remus cuts in, louder than Sirius.

“No, not ‘OK,’” Sirius quotes, louder than him. “You’re being needlessly critical so I’m going to need you to get a grip on this and cooperate with me even a little.”

Remus finally chooses to look at Sirius over the apple and it is harrowing, the way they narrow. “I’m sorry?” he says, shaking his head. “Did you just come out of a ten?”

Sirius blinks at him sweetly. “I sure did,” he says.

“Mm,” Remus hums, a thin, steady note.

“Who held you down?” Sirius spits out. “If you want to start playing this—”

Remus’s face turns to stone. “I just saw hell, so maybe I don’t know where you get off thinking I’ve got to be some gracious little wallflower about the smallest fucking detail,” he claps back. “I’m getting hit left and right, I can’t get through a single good day without one fucking me sideways, my neck is killing me right now which means I must've really fucked it up if I can even feel it throbbing this hard, so maybe, just maybe, you could actually give me a fucking break for not having a sunny disposition right now; I’m fucking exhausted, but I'm still trying to make apple crisp with you so our evening isn't a total wash.”

Remus flies his arms around in demonstration to the peeling station he’s in front of and Sirius has to fight to not show amusement or he’s going to be in even deeper shit. “Did you have the Tylenol yet?” he checks.

Remus blinks, blatantly lost. “What?”

Sirius tosses his left thumb over his shoulder deftly, toward the room. “I left you one on your nightstand,” he tells him. “Beside the water glass.”

Remus’s eyes glaze over with something akin to wonder. “I didn’t see either of those,” he says; quiet, like a secret.

“Well, that’s why your neck kills, you dink,” Sirius sends him, hopping off his stool to go fetch both and calling over his shoulder as he goes. “You threw your whole weight onto that head; of course it’s going to fucking hurt if all ten feet of you went into it, we’re lucky you’re still walking, pal.”

Remus is quiet as Sirius scoops the tiny red pill off of the edge of the nightstand and plucks the water up, stays quiet as Sirius walks both out of the room and over to him, and he’s still quiet when he realizes he’ll have to quit playing with his hands to successfully accept both offerings from Sirius. He pops the pill dry as ever, takes a long drink from the glass, and leaves it beside the cutting board before he swivels to the side on his stool and yanks Sirius in close with one, stark pull.

He moves without question, biting his lower lip as Remus squeezes him around the middle. “I’m sorry I’m such a bitch,” he says, a deep frown etched on.

Sirius lifts his right hand and passes it through Remus’s hair. “I’m sorry I’m so royally sensitive,” he offers, curling his left arm around the back of him.

“You’re not.”

“I really am; you are too, though, so we make quite the pair.”

“Remember when we were a good blend? I liked that.”

“Oi, that little spat does nothing to erase our legendary free-range Arabica blend, you hear me?”

“Free-range is for chickens, not coffee beans.”

“Tomato, tomahto.”

“Well, now we’re just going all over the place.”

Sirius snorts, bowing his head to give Remus’s forehead a peck, and feels around at the back of Remus's neck, curiously checking out what they’re dealing with here. “Ohh,” he says deeply, “no wonder it smarts.”

Remus hums in question just before Sirius double-checks a precarious, rock-hard batch of knots to see how far it spreads, feeling from the back of Remus’s neck and over toward his left shoulder. “Yeah, you’ve got like, five knots clotted into one back here,” he forwards, kneading the pad of his right thumb down on a small section of it in demonstration.

The simple act is enough to send Remus right into a tizzy, garnering him to reach out and dig his fingers into Sirius’s hips and toss his head back with a holler, and Sirius knows his eyes have to be dinner plate status in their own right as he tries the move again, bit harder this time, and Remus fucking loses his mind all over again, curling his arms around the back of Sirius and holding on for dear life as Sirius lifts his left hand alongside his right one to tag-team the batch of knots, grinning wickedly and rotating his thumbs in tiny, hard circles as Remus grips him for purchase and writhes up against him, and what, is Sirius supposed to leave it at that? Psh, make him.

He digs in harder even at the tightest knot he can find on him, the ground zero of knots, one could say, and Remus drowns out yes after yes into Sirius’s chest, but unfortunately for Sirius, Remus stills quite suddenly and begins to wiggle out of Sirius’s grasp, aiming an incredulous look at him. “Really?” he raises, eyeing the full-blown erection making itself wildly known from inside Sirius’s joggers. “Now?”

Sirius sends him his trusty gape/grin hybrid. “What am I to do about it?” he returns. “It just happened.”

“Unbelievable,” Remus calls it, but that's a smile right there so he can’t pretend that pride isn’t welling up in him on some level.

“Here,” Sirius offers, guiding Remus’s shoulders toward the island in demonstration and getting in behind him as Remus faces the counter as bid. “You peel, I'll rub one out—”

“You’re five,” Remus cuts in.

“I had to,” Sirius defends. “You peel, I'll rub, and maybe we’ll actually just get through the rest of this heap before tomorrow; wouldn’t that be nice?”

Remus waves the white flag by picking up his peeler. “Go easier on me or I won’t be able to peel at all,” he conditions, pointing it over his left shoulder at him. He lifts the half-peeled apple he got sidetracked from and starts where he left off while Sirius works the pads of his thumbs in tiny, moyen-pressured circles, giving a thought as to whether they ought to just move on from today's cluster specifically and take a look at the bigger picture in general.

“OK,” Sirius starts, smoothing his hands in opposite directions over Remus’s shoulder line in a gesture of calm before resuming his massaging, “would you like semi-good news or semi-bad news first?”

Remus puts out a sigh through his nose, and Sirius can’t tell if it’s for the question or for the massage itself. “Good,” he chooses.

Sirius blinks. “Sorry, did I hear that right?”

“Hm?” Remus sends over his shoulder.

“It’s just not what your answer usually is,” Sirius offers.

“Well, I could use some good news right about now,” Remus sends over his shoulder.

Sirius pauses his massage to squeeze Remus’s shoulders. “Alright, but you have to let me finish stating it, deal?” he conditions. “It’s going to sound like bad news at first, but I swear there’s a silver lining and I don’t want you hurdling for the abyss before I even get to the climax.”

Remus snorts. “Sorry, the what?”

“You heard me,” Sirius returns, resuming his massage. “The toothache.”

Remus gives out a long sigh. “The toothache that wasn’t a toothache?”

“Oh, so you agree?” Sirius raises.

“Yeah, there’s no way,” Remus says, quietly decided about it. “I mean, I thought it was one; it seemed like a regular ache but down at the root of the tooth, but then it was the entire side of my jaw, then it was like it pulsed back outward toward my neck, and then—”

Sirius leans in an inch or two, on the tips of his toes in all ways except physical until he realizes Remus simply stopped. “And then?” he goads, flicking Remus’s left shoulder.

“Well, I’m trying to figure out how to explain it,” Remus defends, putting his peeler down to swivel around on his stool, halfway facing toward Sirius. “This pulsing, it wasn’t painful like the throb so much as it was distracting, but then it spread up and blossomed out, like this.”

Sirius follows his right hand with his eyes best he can as Remus lifts it to his face, tracing his right forefinger from the lower point of Sirius’s left jaw, up toward the top of his cheek, and on up to Sirius’s left eye before he fans out all five of his fingers and presses their tips down, covering Sirius’s eye, temple, and a good chunk of his skull.

Sirius meets Remus’s gaze at once, puffing out a big ole breath. “Then, I think we might be onto something here,” he trades him, and Remus nods, a circumstantial frown on. “It does seem to be a much larger window than we’ve been used to, mind, which was going to be my semi-good news.”

“Well, go ahead and frame it the way you’d like,” Remus offers, and what a guy.

“Well, you first said something about it on our way back,” Sirius revisits. “Had it been going for a while before you said anything because I’d believe it?”

Remus works his mouth around a plainly reluctant smile. “It started at checkout,” he offers, hands curled together between his knees. “Not a persistent pulse at that point, but the first pangs happened there.”

Sirius puts a breath out his nose, nodding as he counts back. “So, in that case, there was a window of about a half-hour, forty-five minutes if we’re being generous,” he puts up, settling in with that notion and giving Remus’ right knee a solid poke. “That’s a long time to prepare, so I know this is probably going to sound unappealing, but we might’ve just been given a blessing here.”

“We don’t really know until it’s a pattern, do we?” Remus raises.

“No, I suppose not,” Sirius allows. “Am I saying this is a new sign that’ll always show up right beforehand? I don’t know that, so far your eyes and nose is the only signs we can bank on, but you gave me all the information I needed to know that the ache was a clear warning sign and now, if you get another ache like that, we could have an entire thirty to forty-five minute grace period to work with; that gives us so much time to act.”

Remus gives his lower lip a solid chew, but he’s nodding, which is something at least. “‘Course, if we’re wrong about it and I happen to actually have a toothache come down the line, then we’re going to feel like a couple of kooks sitting there waiting for a cluster to come that never will,” he offers, pushing an amused breath out of his nose.

Sirius lets a smirk leave him in turn. “I’m OK with feeling like a kook with you there,” he returns. “Look, at worst, you get a toothache that’s an actual toothache, you act as though it’s a warning sign and you get home safe, text me, have a boost ready to go, and worst that can happen is I come over and hang out with you—” Sirius lifts his hands in a mighty shrug, “—I call that a good time no matter how you spin it.”

Remus gives him a prize-winning smile, breathes in while nodding heavily, and pushes himself back to face the island counter, picking up the peeler and the apple that lays halfway peeled on the cutting board. “What’s the bad news, then?” he raises.

Sirius steps up and comes at Remus from the left, moving in to resume his massaging. “Now, I combed through the day to pick out what might’ve gone wrong to bring that bad boy on and I’ve come up with three viable options; a light-related oopsie, an elbow bonk, and the general unease of destiny, if you will—”

“Wait, hold on,” Remus puts in, turning his head a little to the left. “What light oopsie?”

Sirius switches to a lighter pace with his thumbs in hopes of helping stave off the blow. “So, you dicked around with your sunnies while we were standing under a bunch of fluorescents,” he puts down. “Funny as fuck, don’t get me wrong; you’ve a direct line to my funny bone, but I saw your uncovered eyes two or three times as you did it so who knows, right? There are two other options, but I’m only saying that you might want to chill out a little with the innuendo-inspired sunglass jostling while inside a place with fluorescents hanging overhead, even though I will miss it terribly.”

“Wait, wait,” Remus bids, holding up a hand for silence. “My toothache that wasn’t a toothache started at checkout, so as much as the sunglass jostling is a nice theory and all, it really doesn’t track with the timeline.”

Sirius pauses his kneading, aiming a wide-eyed stare at the far wall between Remus’s bedroom and the bathroom. “It could have, though?” he raises.

“If we’re talking about a split-second mistake that immediately brought on the ache that wasn’t an ache; there’s convenient and then there’s this,” Remus delivers him. “And if I’m honest, I don’t think the elbow bonk could have done it either; that came and went within a millisecond, less than even.”

Sirius takes his gaze off of the wall and puts it on the side of Remus’s face, unable to not be amused here. “Less than a millisecond?” he puts out wondrously.

Remus sends a huff over his shoulder. “Could you just let me exaggerate a little since you’re the resident expert in the field?” he raises. “It wasn’t even that hard a bonk.”

“Boy, I fucking brained you,” Sirius returns. “My elbow still smarts; you’ve one hard noggin.”

“Well, what am I to do about this?” Remus sends him.

“Nothing for it, just the way your skull is.”

“That’s not what I—” Remus puts a stewed breath out through his nose before trying again. “Say the bonk did do it; how am I supposed to avoid flying elbows coming at me at a moment’s notice?”

Sirius pauses the massage. “What, are you out there getting into street brawls every other night?”

Remus knocks his left shoulder back in an attempt to budge Sirius’s stilled hands. “Stop doing that.”

“The massage?” Sirius raises.

“The street-fighter bit,” Remus clarifies. “It’s not funny anymore.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Sirius returns, resuming the gentle rotation of his thumbs. “I do know it’s going to be rough for you to take a sabbatical from your double life as a vigilante, but we’ve got to protect your head so there’s no other way; the street-fighting must go—”

Remus sits up straighter on the stool, profusely peeling the rest of the apple in his hands before unravelling the layer of peel from it. “You’re the worst,” he says, the back of his neck rouge as a ripe tomato, “bane of my existence.”

Sirius holds in a hybrid of a laugh and cough while he looks around the island counter. “Where did I leave my mobile?” he inquires. Remus looks up and reaches across the island to lift the front cover of their notebook, and voila, his mobile lays beneath it and there, Sirius pushes out a thankful breath. “Perfect, once this is done, I’ll have to inform the city’s criminals they'll no longer have to fear your fists.”

Remus huffs loud and oh so clear, waving his peeler around in the air. “I’ll peel you next,” he manifests, and Sirius can’t do much more than rest his face down and press a round of snickers into the line of Remus’s left shoulder. “You’ve made your fucking point, but if you’re right and all it took was one of these split-second accidents to bring a ten on, how horrible is that?”

Sirius quits laughing right quick, breathes out against Remus’s collar, and leaves a kiss on the side of his neck for using the word ‘accident’ without prompt or provocation. “I know, but they're really not going to be that hard to avoid,” he says assuredly. “We’ve already got a plan in case the fluorescents did it, we’ve discussed the no more street-fighting rule, and I don’t go around elbowing your head for sport, do I?”

Remus puts out a sigh as he pulls the last apple from the bag; three down, one to go. “I’m only saying, we can’t really afford to account for accidents,” he says measuredly.

“Well, no, you’re right; not as much as we might like,” Sirius allows, “but I do think I’m also a bit right in thinking you’ll be extra careful with your sunnies from here on out, you probably won’t get thumped on the head unless you start a habit of going into pubs and starting fights but that’s unlikely, and there’s still another side to the coin to look at, even if it’s a bit rusty.”

Remus hums blandly, peeling harder at a particularly rough patch of skin on his apple. “And what’s that?”

“Well, I think you know what it is, but I’ll play; if you do get bonked again, you’ll know to act quickly,” he offers him. “Get somewhere safe, text me, dig out a boost, the whole nine yards, and if I’m wrong, and I hope I am, then all you’d have done is be extra cautious and I know you love being that way, so now’s your chance to caution up; don’t let elbows come flying at your head even if they're mine, work on your blocking, and we'll have a system in place if you can’t control every situation and do end up getting whacked in the head.”

Remus huffs, but it’s not his signature one. “Give me your brain,” he requests, his voice lower down on his register.

“You don’t want it,” Sirius insists. “Point is, just like not letting some stranger stick their mobile in your face, you don’t have to let an elbow come at you; it’s just small adjustments and I’m going to have to work on it too, it’s not just you; I’ll have to think twice about lording something over your head from here on out.”

“Oh, now you’re just lying,” Remus returns, a smile audible from back here.

Sirius reworks his mouth around a smile of his own. “I’m not, I am going to have to be more careful with you and I know that now,” he says of it. “No more flipping you over on a moment’s whim and fucking you into the headboard either, or wall in your case—”

Remus pauses his peeling to point over his left shoulder with the peeler itself. “Oh, no, you listen here,” he says, determined. “We are not going to let this seep into our sex life, I simply won’t have it; I’m not an antique, I’m just another person, and you’ll do well to remember I can handle a good dicking, thank you very much.”

Sirius had to bite down on his lower lip to keep from interrupting and/or laughing during Remus’s bombastic tirade, but thankfully he did for it was worth the strife. “You love a good Dickens, I understand that,” he allows for, “but your head is an antique to me.”

“Then you can put a pillow between my head and the wall, but that is the only change I’m willing to make, deal?” Remus returns, turning back to the cutting board. “And you may flip me over whenever you damn well please, I’ll just say that.”

Sirius lets the smile budding at his lips fly free, even if Remus won’t see it. “Deal.”

Remus nods once, must have heard the smile as it were, and calmly resumes his peeling. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the Dickens you deserved,” he puts up.

Sirius puts out a lengthy pfft, dropping the neck massage altogether to squeeze the proverbial life out of the man wearing a too-big-for-him waffle weave jumper in front of him. “You know I don’t actually mind, yeah?” he raises, hooking his chin over Remus’s left shoulder. “We have all the time in the world for you to get me later.”

Remus pushes a sigh through his nose and turns his head enough to successfully plant a kiss against the side of Sirius’s head. “I’m zonked,” he says, frowning.

“I didn’t mean tonight,” Sirius assures. “It’s whenever you want.”

“Tomorrow,” Remus decides. “You’ll get dicked twice over, trust me.”

“And I do,” Sirius assures.

Impeccably so.

 

-

 

Remus, in the end, makes exceptionally well on his word. In fact, while Sirius gets his Dickens the following morning, he can’t quite form the speech patterns to effectively urge Remus on in the midst of it all, but in a sense, he wouldn’t have had to when Remus, kneeling behind him and giving it to him like a champ, appears quite down for the task without his urging necessary.

To that, Sirius chokes on a breath as Remus flattens a palm on the small of his back and snaps him back on his dick at a pace so delicious, suddenly speech isn’t a thought in Sirius’s head anymore. He seizes the arm of the couch for purchase, but his knees end up sliding down the couch before he ends up going face-forward onto the arm instead, and that certainly has him thankful for its plush material for that one could've been a doozy. On the one hand, it’s so good that Sirius would not mind it one bit if Remus simply kept on going even with his face down for the count, but on the other, he does not mind at all when Remus curls his chest over Sirius’s back and reaches underneath his shoulders, tugging him up out of his bent position and right back into his thrusts.

Sirius moves right with it and inches back with Remus’s continued guidance, just fine with whatever Remus comes up with here; more than fine, turns out, seeing as soon enough, he’s being held upright against Remus’s chest by a more-than-friendly neighbourhood reach around while he fucks him like a second spent outside of him would be too many.

He shuts his eyes against the relentless pace, seeing white lights burst from behind his eyelids, and though speech still isn’t a feat he can quite reach, Remus certainly gets him hollering gibberish as his eyes well up; he leans his head back against the line of Remus’s left shoulder, reaching down to urge the hand on his cock on, and ruts back hard on Remus’s, sparking a devastating case of sensory overload and coming so hard that if someone were out in the hall, they could probably hear exactly who is doing the fucking here given that calling out for Remus leaves very little mystery.

Remus’s thrusts spike to a mind-numbing pace as he holds Sirius close and milks every last inch of his own release back there, the fingers of his right hand on Sirius’s left hip leaving divots in their wake as his hips twitch against him.

They remain in place once stilled for a few long breaths before Remus even tries speaking. “Forward or back?” he raises.

“Forward,” Sirius answers.

Remus moves with it, lowering Sirius toward the cushions and off of his knees to better stretch him out along the length of the couch and overtop the towel they hastily put down prior to starting, and Sirius is happy to report that Remus lays right down on top of him and doesn’t make moves to pull out just yet; that, is precisely what good intuition is.

Sirius lifts his right hand behind the pair of them and pats Remus’s toush once with gusto. “What’s that for?” he raises, his forehead pressed against the right side of Sirius's shoulder line.

“I can’t high-five you from down here,” Sirius says of it.

Remus smirks against his back, squeezing him around the middle. “Did I make up for your loss?”

“I don’t think I could walk again, pal; what do you think?” Sirius returns, budging back on Remus’s dick since it’s there and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere just yet.

“Want me to move?” Remus raises, but Sirius hums a frank no, quite comfortable as is, and Remus mercifully lets that keep on for a few more minutes, but eventually, Sirius feels the vibrations of him humming delicately more than he hears him do it. “I’m going to be late if we lay around much longer, which means you will be very late.”

Sirius gives a loud pfft for their respective employment obligations. “We could both play a little hooky?” he offers up.

Remus hums distantly. “Not my favourite game.”

“Live a little,” Sirius sends him, but all he gets is a pfft pressed to his skin. “Fine, but I call the bathroom first.”

Remus huffs exaggeratedly, unwinds his arms from around Sirius, and lifts off of his back, setting his hands down on Sirius’s hips for the pull-out and patting them once with completion when it's done. “Et voila,” he chimes, settling down on his side between him and the back of the couch before sweeping his arm in a gesture for Sirius to go on ahead of him.

Sirius pushes up onto his elbows first, knees second, and pivots off of the couch with gusto, issuing a quick deal with his legs; if they get him to the toilet without crumbling underneath him, he will lather those babies up in body milk as soon as he gets back later tonight.

They must want to win for he makes it to the toilet without a hiccup and takes a seat, aiming a circumstantial smile at the doorframe as Remus steps into it, but the two of them startle at the sound of three raps on the front door.

Remus looks over his shoulder and back at Sirius in the span of a short second. “I’m not expecting anyone,” he whispers.

Sirius gives an airy glance to the ceiling and back down to Remus in a quick beat. “I mean, I did scream back there so that could very well be a rumpled neighbour coming to tell us to keep it down,” he raises.

Remus looks right mortified at the idea and moves into the entryway immediately, leaving Sirius calling after his bare arse. “What, you’re gonna answer like that?”

“Yeah, I planned on just that,” Remus sends back. “I’m just checking who—”

He appears in the bathroom doorway again, looking bemused while he tosses his left thumb over his shoulder. “Are you getting a lift to work?”

Sirius looks left, right, and back at Remus. “No?”

“Then why’s James here?” Remus tacks on.

Sirius sits in a beat of major confusion before the dots form a line, and he settles in again with a smirk. “I told him to ring you about something, not to just drop in, so you know,” he puts out there, reaching to roll out a strand of toilet paper.

Remus’s curiosity piques quick. “About what?”

“Oh, no no; it’s better if he says it,” Sirius assures, folding up the paper and pulling the wad in behind him. “Sit down when he tells you, OK? You’re going to want to be.”

Remus, wonderful lad, perks right up and bounds into his room for clothes, is Sirius’s guess, while three more raps sound on the door and pull a huff out of Sirius. “We’re coming, relax,” he calls out, pressing the flusher down and pushing to stand.

Remus is back in very little time with his housecoat on and waits in the doorway with Sirius’s own folded over his right arm while he finishes up at the sink. Sirius, always a ham, goes the extra mile and turns around when he’s in front of Remus, holding his arms out straight in opposite directions for Remus to simply slip it onto him, but he only offers a little huff before helping Sirius into it, dropping his hands to tie the sash around his waist from behind.

He pats Sirius’s hips once to suggest they’re good to go and with that, the two of them assemble side by side in the entryway as Remus opens the door, garnering James to blink rapidly in the doorway. “I forgot you'd got a matching set,” he raises, eyeing their attire, but Sirius simply crosses his arms, jutting his left hip out in pride over their classy flannel robes, and gets the very same hip rammed into by Tango as he shoots between him and Remus to get at James.

“Hi perfect, I missed you,” James coos.

“Hey, remember when I said to ring Remus, not drop in unannounced?” Sirius raises.

“Right, you did say that,” James allows, giving Tango’s ruff a solid rub-down, “but I really thought this was more of a face-to-face conversation, and I have so missed his face as is.”

“Remus is right here,” Remus offers, putting on a bright smile.

“Not a mirage, then; good,” James trades, giving Tango's head one last scritch. “You know, it’s always on to invite your guests in further than the stoop.”

Remus and Sirius look to each other once before stepping back together to let James in, wherein they all split off in separate directions: Remus going for the far side of the island, James moving to take the stool across the countertop from him, and Sirius moving to drape himself along the length of the couch facing their way, noting that Remus must have moved the towel from the couch for it’s nowhere to be seen now, that smart, fast-acting lad.

He lays out across the couch, facing the two of them with new ease. James rests both his arms on the counter at the island and tucks his feet over the rod going underneath his stool, making himself quite at home. “How are you, then?” he bids, reaching to play with Mestophales’s ears when she’s quite plainly made the island her throne.

“I’m fine,” Remus replies, simply waiting for the punchline to come along.

James clicks his tongue and rounds on Sirius at once. “You told him already, didn’t you?”

Sirius lifts his hands above his head in insistence. “I didn’t say a word.”

“It’s true, he only said you had something to ask me,” Remus extends.

“I did say it’d be funny because it is,” Sirius tacks on, sticking his hands behind his head easily.

James sends him a round of nonsensical noises before facing Remus specifically. “I’ve run straight into a pickle, Remus,” he says gravely.

“You’re supposed to eat them, James,” Remus forwards.

“Next time, I’ll do just that,” James allows, “but for now, the pickle remains in front of me and I need your help.”

“I see we’re framing a picture, but not actually doing any of the painting,” Remus mentions. “How bad is it, James?”

“Mortifying,” James insists.

“He doesn’t know Lily’s ring size,” Sirius says, moving this along when they really do have to get a move on.

Remus reels back on his stool seat and places a hand over his mouth, his eyes shooting to dinner plate status as his chest moves up and down rapidly underneath the lapel of his housecoat, meanwhile James picks up a pen from the cup of many and lobs it across the room at him, landing it flat on Sirius’s chest before it bounces onto the floor between the couch and coffee table. “What’d you go and do that for?”

“I have to shower and head to work, so,” Sirius hints, snapping his fingers twice in suggestion, “might want to hurry it up.”

“Well, by all means,” James insists, sweeping an allowing hand back toward the bathroom behind him. “It’d be easier to do without you here, I’m sensing.”

“Sorry, you waltzed up to the door minutes after we’d finished a shag so he has to rinse off, too,” Sirius mentions. “We’re all about water conservation in this house.”

James mimes for Sirius to zip it and throws the key into Nothingland before refocusing on Remus. “He’s right, I don’t know her size and that’s why I need you, Remus,” he instils, and Remus slowly lets his hand slip down from covering his mouth and drags five splayed fingers down the front of his neck as he nods lightly, waiting expectantly for James to continue. “And don’t suggest I postpone the wedding, or send Sirius to gather intel for me, or ask her mum; we’ve already discussed those options and more, but overwhelmingly you are our best one.”

Remus’s gaze flickers over to Sirius and for a moment, he really can’t tell whether he’ll be in some trouble for this; not when he can’t quite read Remus’s quiet expression. “What could I possibly offer you in this case?” he raises, genuinely concerned by the sound of it.

James scoots his stool in closer to the island. “I’m glad you asked,” he replies. “Now, the fact of the matter is, Lily thinks you’re a motherfucking saint, and because of that, she won’t see any attempts at espionage coming her way if it’s you I send to her, so all I’m saying is since you see so much of her, spark a minuscule conversation with her one day and see what you can get out of her.”

“A minuscule conversation about rings,” Remus pronounces.

James sends a flat smile to him at that. “I’ve heard you two discuss way less relevant things with decidedly too much passion,” he says of it.

“Just enough, really,” Sirius amends, often an avid fan of those discussions and a worthy contributor to many of them.

“Fine, I’ll allow that,” James appeals. “I just need you to get in there and see about a ring size; I don’t care how you do it so long as you don’t put one on her finger and marry her for me, I draw the line there.”

“Same,” Sirius puts in.

Remus gives out a heavy sigh, smiles between the both of them, and lifts his shoulders once. “Sure, I’ll try.”

James turns to Sirius’s bright grin/gape hybrid while he points his right forefinger starkly toward Remus. “You heard him say it, yeah?”

“I did,” Sirius echoes, shimmying his shoulders a bit.

“We all heard it,” James insists.

“Only if,” Remus attaches to it, lifting a finger to him before James makes a show of settling down and hearing him out, “I can do it on a semi-relaxed schedule.”

“That’s a fine term,” James returns, not all that ruffled by the condition.

“I just don’t quite know how I'm to pull a conversation about ring sizes out of the air and make it sound organic, so I’ll need time to think on the best way to do it,” Remus explains. “I can’t just hold her purse over the bin and go ‘tell me your ring size or I’ll drop it.’”

James sends out a mighty pfft while a rolling laugh comes straight out of Sirius’s throat. “Can I visit the timeline where you do that, though?” he bids.

“Same here, so long as we don’t let it be this one,” James instils, tapping a forefinger on the island counter. “How's this: I don’t need the size until October, but if you get it to me sooner than that, I’ll be able to resize it in time for the big night.”

“That’s a fine amendment,” Remus deems it. He takes his hands off of the counter and cracks his knuckles, looking between James and Sirius before pushing out a circumstantial breath and scooting his stool back from the island to lift off of it. “Well.”

James readjusts the placement of his gaze as Remus stands up straight and looms a bit over the island. “What are you doing?” he asks, blinking up at him.

Remus gives a wordless gesture to the bathroom. “We do have to get that shower going,” he offers, switching to gesturing down at his housecoat.

“Right,” James says, sweeping a hand in allowance. “Onward, soldier.”

Remus adopts a quizzical look, turning his right wrist in on himself and passing the fingertips of his left hand over it absently. “You’re going to hang around here while we do that?”

“Well, I thought I could,” James raises, lifting his shoulders. “There’s a pooch and a cat to keep my attention, and I could drop you off after if you want.”

Remus adopts a tiny ‘o’ for a mouth. “It’s just a five-minute walk, but it's nice of you to offer.”

“I mean, I’m going that way anyway,” James insists.

“I’ll take a lift, Jimmyboy,” Sirius comes in, putting on a bright grin.

“Are you Remus?” James checks, not looking at him.

“No, he isn’t, but Remus really doesn't need a lift a few blocks over,” Remus reiterates.

And there, Sirius watches with very little excitement as the telltale sign that James is peeved beyond belief sinks into the room which, funnily enough, comes in the form of a large, exaggerated grin. “Alright, this is good,” he raises. “I mean, I haven’t seen you in forever, and I’ve only been here less than five minutes and here you are, already shooing me out the door.”

“I’m not shooing you out,” Remus corrects, professorial in both speech and stature. “I just have to be at work in an hour.”

James gives him a smile that would be better described as a sneer. “Why do I get the sense you’d shoo me out even if you didn’t have work to run off to?”

“Hey, James?” Sirius puts in sweetly. “Hop off his dick for me?”

“You know what? I’m not doing that,” James refuses, just as sweetly, and now he's definitely looking at him.

Sirius shoots him a plain look from the couch. “You’re really gonna do this now?”

“'Now,'” James quotes.

“It’s getting fucking old, James,” Sirius returns.

“Well, leaving it to you has done fuck all, hasn’t it?” James raises.

Sirius pushes himself to sit up, feeling the need to not be lying down for this. “I told you the plan, in small words, so you’d be able to figure it out—”

“Why don’t we settle down a second,” Remus puts in, smiling tightly between the two of them.

James gives a sardonic laugh. “Yeah, no,” he denies. “We’re well past the point of reasons here, thanks, especially from you; I still catch glimpses of him, you all but disappeared.”

“Oh, talk to him like that again,” Sirius nods. “See where that gets you.”

“I think he can handle it,” James returns. “You can handle your own, can’t you, Remus?”

Sirius thinks he might’ve seen Remus’s eye twitch, but it's his right one so it’s nothing to do with a cluster and everything to do with being gravely unimpressed. “I’ve been laying low for three weeks, so maybe you ought to simmer down.”

Sirius quietly bobs his shoulders from the couch, his mouth twisted up in enticement. “Simmer down?” James repeats.

“How is this any different than the weeks before my finals?” Remus poses.

“How’s it different?” James echoes. “How’s it different, he says.”

“I rarely got to see you then and I didn’t get dropped in on unannounced,” Remus serves him.

James lets out a laugh that borders on disparaging. “If I didn’t drop in, how long would this silence from you have gone on?”

“Ideally, whenever these things are sorted out,” Remus retorts. “What the fuck did you think was going to happen?”

“Well, at least you’re being honest now,” James sends him, grinning ear to ear.

“Alright, you,” Sirius comes in, circling his hand toward James’s vicinity, “need to take it down a peg because you are not helping the situation at all.”

“Right, you’re handling this,” James returns, waving Sirius right off and focusing in on Remus again. “You know, Pete would love to know how you’re doing, too, but who cares about that, right? You can tell him you don’t hate him all you want, but he’s been ostracized and somehow I got lumped in there despite having nothing to do with—”

“No one is ostracized,” Remus stresses. “You’ve all been kept in the loop.”

James sends out a trumpeted pfft. “Bits and pieces from that guy aren’t the same thing as being kept in the loop,” he maintains, pointing his left thumb at Sirius. “Thank fucking God for Lily giving me some information or I’d have very little to go on here.”

“There’s literally nothing you can do right now,” Remus puts it tightly. “I asked you to be patient with this.”

"As did I," Sirius puts in.

James stamps his feet against the footrest on his stool. “And you both should have known I’d be absolute shit at that,” he sends out. “Me, patient? Twats, the both of you.”

Remus’s lips quirk before he looks to Sirius, who's already gone and put his mouth in a firm line to keep from laughing, and now the two of them have to avert their gazes to avoid certain guffawing. “I really haven’t been doing this maliciously,” he offers him.

James sends him a tch. “You wouldn’t know how to be malicious if you tried,” he returns him.

Remus crosses his arms over himself, shifting his weight on his feet. “I just never know when one’s going to come on and I don’t want any of you to—”

“You didn’t listen to a single thing I said to you,” James cuts in. “And what am I even doing, really, trying to get through to you now?”

“James,” Sirius puts up, lifting his hands in a near plea to just fucking leave it alone.

“Well, he didn’t,” James says point-blank, keeping his gaze on Remus. “And the really sad thing about it is, you actually think dropping out on us is somehow going to have protected us from you in the long run, but what you're really doing is flying the bird at good people who want to help you.”

Remus slowly uncurls his arms from around himself, lets them hang by his sides with his fists clenched, and this is it, Sirius is going to have to watch Remus knock James out; he finds himself caught somewhere between the urge to split them up before that has to happen and to simply let it happen given that Remus bearing his fists is a great deal hotter than he can even contend with right about now.

“OK, you’ve said your piece, made your point,” Remus says, controlled, measured, devastatingly hot, “and now, I’m going to get ready and when I get out of that bathroom, you had better not still be here, got it?”

Sirius gives out an overcome noise, pulling Remus’s quilt off of the back of the couch and throwing it over himself. “No need, I’m done here,” James says, curtly. “Nice seeing you; let’s make it an even ten minutes next time, hm?”

“Maybe don’t show up ready to pounce next time, cupcake,” Sirius sends him, underneath the quilt.

It isn’t long at all before two doors slam in quick succession, but Sirius waits a good five seconds before coming out from underneath his veil, looking around the main area and making direct eye contact with Mestophales over on the island countertop. He pushes out a quick breath of a laugh at her truly bored expression but immediately stops that as the shower roars to life, gets off of the couch, and heads to join him in the bathroom, promptly running into a door that is very locked.

“Oi?” he calls out, rapping on the door. “Why’ve I been locked out?”

Footsteps sound beyond the door before the knob turns and Remus is standing in the doorway looking woefully sheepish. “I’m sorry, it was automatic,” he instils, tugging Sirius into the bathroom with him, and truly, it’s already forgotten when Sirius will let Remus tug him along just about anywhere.

He knocks the door shut with his right foot, lets his housecoat fall to the floor, and follows a solemn Remus into the shower, letting out a low whistle. “That was one salty bitch,” he raises, flying an attempt at a post-tift takedown.

Remus turns away from the stream to look at him weakly and Sirius lifts his hands to halt that right quick. “No, see, it was a joke; you know, 'cause it came from me?” he bids, reaching up to swipe his right thumb across Remus’s left cheek. “Still, it is nice to be reminded that James throws some pretty wild tantrums now and again, too.”

Remus frowns deeply, inching back to get his hair underneath the stream. “Tantrum or not, he made some stark points.”

“And I’m going to sort him the fuck out, trust me,” Sirius insists. “He’s not allowed to storm your flat and pick fights with you; I’ve half a mind to ring his mum and tell her about his behaviour.”

“Oh, don’t get his mum involved,” Remus chides.

“I mean, I was kidding there, too,” Sirius submits, handing over Remus’s shampoo bottle since he’s closer to it.

“He’s right, you know,” Remus maintains, gaze flickering up to Sirius as he squeezes a glob of shampoo into his left palm. “I’m a shit mate, somebody had to say it.”

Sirius puts out a heavy sigh. “OK, no,” he denies, shaking his head once. “Let’s back the car up; he didn’t say that.”

“He did,” Remus instils, handing the shampoo bottle to Sirius to put back in its spot. “He read me like a book.”

“How so?” Sirius raises.

Remus lifts his already tense shoulders while rubbing suds into his hair. “I do that; I’ve done it for years,” he attests. “I’ll know I’ve overstepped my welcome and hate it so I'll pull away before someone can get too sick of me; who needs a therapist when you’ve got James around telling it like it is?”

Sirius puts a lot into the reel he’s subjected to. “OK, you want to do this?” he raises. “Yeah, you push people away; you do.”

“OK, thanks,” Remus sings, turning around and dunking his whole head under the stream.

Sirius bites back a smile, saunters up behind him, and sneaks his arms around Remus’s middle, waiting for him to step back from the stream before he walks him back some more. “I just mean,” he starts again; calm, collected, going into a bit of a sway, “you sat on my couch in December and full-on told me to pass on you, right after I delivered you a gorgeous monologue about how striking I found you—”

“You had my heart right in your hands and I was afraid you were going to crush it in a week when you got bored of me,” Remus sends him, tossing it over his shoulder. “Never mind that I thought it’d be too much for you to take on—”

“I know that,” Sirius puts down. “I was there; I saw fear in your eyes for yourself and me, but hello? The move-in fiasco; you shoved me back—”

Remus deflates right in Sirius’s arms. “OK, I don’t want to—”

Shh, I’m just saying,” Sirius keeps on, "you already had a tendency to assume you’re too big a task to contend with so you blocked out love; that’s just a fact, and now the clusters have taken that and ramped it up to the nth degree, but I literally can’t let you paint that broad stroke over it and not give yourself any credit.”

“I don’t have credit to give,” Remus returns him.

Sirius hooks his chin over Remus’s right shoulder. “The fact that you don’t even understand how fucking decent a man you are breaks my fucking heart,” he puts down, leaving a kiss on the nape of Remus’s neck. “Yes, you can slip up, go back to the old days and your old ways, but you're working at it, all the time; I’ve seen it.”

Remus gives out a miserable little noise, wrangling himself around in the confines of Sirius’s arms to face him, and simply dumps his face into the crook of his neck, but that's fine with him. “Clearly, what’s actually going on here is that we are two stellar blokes on our own, but put together? We’re a fucking force,” Sirius carries on. “We, are actually so unbearably cool that poor James is having a rough time having to be away from our combined fervour and charm for longer than a fortnight and can we blame him?”

Remus lifts his head, levelling Sirius with a woodenly skeptical gaze. “I don’t know if that’s it somehow.”

“Well, either way, he misses us; you can’t deny me that,” Sirius says of it, pointing at him with the tooch of his lips while his hands are full. “And I don’t think you can deny that he misses the fuck out of you so bask in that a little; you won that bloke over last year, pal, and let me tell you, he was not easily impressed by the sorts of men I brought around or talked about, OK? That is, genuinely, the highest of compliments.”

Remus pushes out a heavy breath. “I don’t know what I did,” he offers; quiet, another secret.

“I do,” Sirius insists. “Want to know what you did?”

Remus nods emphatically. “Of course.”

Sirius lifts his hands from around Remus’s waist and hovers them over his shoulders, walking his fingers up the lines of his collarbone. “I didn’t know about this until after you’d already shown up at mine mid-monsoon, so I didn’t know who the fuck was at my door when you knocked, straight up; had no clue it’d be you,” he details. “Next day, he was home, told me you’d gone to him specifically to ask how I was doing, and I don’t know what you said to him because he wouldn’t tell me, the fucker, but he did say you implicitly understood his role in my life and after that, he was rooting for us tenfold.”

Sirius watches entranced as Remus’s eyes cloud over and straight-up jolts at the breath he pulls in. “He stopped calling me ‘Lupey’ right around then,” he sends out, lifting his hands to his temples in sheer wonder. “I couldn’t place why he'd stopped.”

“Mhm, bet it was your little confab,” Sirius echoes. “Mind, he was already starting to take you in like the rest of us, and he thought you were a riot when you got a pint or two in you, but he really fucking liked you after that, Remus; even more so nowadays.”

Remus leans his head forward on the line of Sirius’s left shoulder, giving out a bleary noise against his damp skin. “I feel even worse for throwing him out,” he muses.

“OK, that’s not what I was aiming for actually?” Sirius serves him, budging Remus’s head up with all the gentleness he can manage. “Point is, you’re not going to get rid of James; he’ll cool off, you’ll cool off, and it’ll be fine, but we are going to have to make more time for him, and all of them. Not just me and Lily because we're right there.”

“One could spring on me like that,” Remus attests, snapping his right hand for effect.

“Right, but one could also not,” Sirius holds up. “And look, we've a care package here for you; why couldn’t we make a second, identical one to store at mine? That way, if one does come along while you’re visiting, we’ll have everything you need, ready to go.”

“That all sounds ideal, but it’s just that,” Remus says of it. “We’d be lucky if yesterday doesn’t repeat itself while I’m there.”

Sirius pulls his top teeth over his lower lip once, his gaze darting to the wall behind Remus’s head before he puts it back on him. “Remus, we’re all compromising here,” he says of it. “It’d go a long way if you did a little of it, too.”

Remus’s brow furrows before he puffs a breath into his cheeks and aims it out at Sirius lengthily, and oh, turns out Remus is part horse? Amazing that Sirius will never be fully prepared for all the new little colours and shapes that come with this guy, and thank Cunt for that.

“Is that a,” Sirius starts, “‘yes, Sirius, I’ll work on that?’”

“I want it to be, it’s just really hard to say it,” Remus defends, holding his head high.

Sirius smirks a laugh out of his nose, leaning in to leave a peck on Remus’s lips. “Next week,” he puts down. “That way, you’ll have the weekend to fully prepare yourself for the idea of rejoining the group, but I think next week is fair.”

Remus hangs his head for a moment, huffs, and shuffles on his feet. “Full care package,” he conditions.

“Absolutely.”

“Two masks.”

“Funky ones, please; they bring so much joy to a shit situation.”

“Fine. And about a thousand boosts.”

“Thousand and one.”

Remus nods once and leaves a kiss on the tip of Sirius’s nose, and that feels like it’s been cemented. “We’d better hurry up,” he bids, reaching for his loofah, and four to five seconds pass between them before Remus’s face scrunches up with quiet, wheezy mirth. “He doesn’t know her ring size?”

Sirius’s snort echoes off the shower wall.

 

--

 

Sunday marks a day of great importance as it is Shroom Day and quite frankly, Sirius cannot wait to get started on that venture. But first, he needs to bounce right on out of this here dance studio before anything else can ensue, and he can’t do that until Tina Turner’s effervescent classic 'The Best' finishes out, but he puts every bit of the current of excitement running through his body into finishing off the last routine of the class.

The moment it’s done, Sirius heads for the loo, and the moment that’s over makes a beeline for the door, waving a speedy farewell at James and Lily over in the corner, but the former calls right over to him. “You’re leaving already?”

Sirius lingers by the door with a pointed smile and blink combo aimed at James, unable to just call ‘it’s Shroom Day’ out in the middle of the studio so he just beckons them over. “It’s Shoom Day, pal,” he says of it, lifting his hands easily. “You understand.”

James gives out a stammer of want, of need even. “Is he still fucked off at me?” he raises. “I just really want to be in that room for this.”

“We’ve talked about this,” Sirius returns. “And you’re definitely not getting in that room for the first session; it’s just not happening.”

James sniffs once. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m more fucked off at you than he is,” Sirius maintains. “We discussed it, he’s coming by on Wednesday, and if you want to see him and apologize for reading him for filth under his own roof, you can be at the flat on Wednesday.”

“That sounds like a lovely idea,” Lily echoes, and rather pointedly so, Sirius is chuffed to see.

“Somebody had to say it,” James defends, lifting a hand toward Sirius. “One could say he’s coming over because I read him for filth; sometimes a little bit of tough love is necessary.”

“I don’t have time to go over everything I hated about that sentiment,” Sirius says of it. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m needed elsewhere.”

“Why so soon?” Lily raises.

Sirius veritably dances in the doorway so the both of them will plainly see how badly they’re holding him up. “I’m going to get them now, dear,” he highlights.

“He delivers, Sirius,” James reminds him.

“No no, I’m starting this off well,” Sirius details. “I’m going to him; that's just good business.”

“Well, you don’t have to scamper off immediately,” James instils. “I bet you a thousand right here and now that Remus has a tea and a book happening for him and is just fine with that.”

Sirius sighs. “Now I just want to see that; look what you’ve done,” he says of it. “If you’re around there tomorrow, I’ll obviously be there for Dora so you'll see me—” he glancing to Lily specifically, “—that goes for you, too.”

Lily brightens, giving a light shimmy of her shoulders as she comes in to leave a kiss on Sirius’s left cheek. “Take care of him,” she bids, stepping back.

“He’s been high before, you know,” Sirius puts up, but from in between James’s head and Lily’s mane of fire, he can both sense and see Andrew making his way over to them and quite frankly, he’s already halfway out the door so he’s got every right to get fully out of it. “Alright, I’m out.”

“Fine, but I will not say no to a video of high Remus,” James mentions. “Just putting that right out there in the open.”

Sirius looks left, right, and breathes in once. “If I can sneak one on the fly,” he conditions. “If not or he catches me at it, you could be out of luck.”

“Just be covert about it,” James insists.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Sirius says of it, waving before he dips out the door, mere seconds before Andrew makes it over to them.

The pickup goes swimmingly, Sirius is happy to report, and from there, it’s a twenty-minute ride back to Boots where he stops in for a quick grab, and before long, he’s heading up Remus’s stairwell and in through his front door at a quick clip. He knocks his runners off on the mat, peeks into Remus’s room, and then steps into the main area to find Remus seated at the island with a mug and a book open in front of him; just divine.

“Guess what I have?” Sirius sing-songs, coming for the island and pulling the baggie out from the front of his slacks.

Remus reels. “Why were they in your trousers?”

“I had nothing else to put them in,” Sirius insists, slugging his shopping bag onto the island and piquing Remus’s interest.

Remus has a look inside, pulling out a chocolate bar. “Just felt like one?” he raises.

“Well, I’ll probably snag a piece, but it’s more for you,” Sirius passes along, taking a seat across the island from Remus. “I know without a doubt you’re going to hate the way they taste, but you can take your dose with a piece of this and you won’t notice it so much; it’s why I got the dark one.”

“I like your thinking,” Remus offers him, setting the bar down between them on the island and picking up his mug instead.

“Sometimes people take it in tea, but I don’t want to ruin your favourite thing for you,” Sirius mentions.

“I appreciate the thought,” Remus trades him, going for a new sip.

“Did you eat?” Sirius checks.

Remus nods as he swallows. “I did, yes.”

“When did you?” Sirius further checks.

Remus blinks, glancing up for a moment. “Noonish?”

Sirius glances beyond Remus at the time displayed on the stove. “OK, then you should be good,” he nods.

“Good for?” Remus checks.

“Well, they could make you a tad queasy at first, just when it’s starting up, so it’s good not to have a full stomach on you and they'd take longer to take effect with food in your system as is, but I also brought gum to get you through the nausea if it comes anyway,” Sirius offers. “Just want to cover all of the bases.”

“Now, I don’t love that you just told me all that point-blank, but you have really taken this on and it’s impressive, the amount of thought you’ve put into this,” Remus lets him have.

“Thank you,” Sirius chimes, smiling brightly as he opens the baggie in his lap.

He eyeballs the amount Remus’ll need, hands that off to him by nodding at Remus and getting him to hold one of his palms out, and opens the chocolate bar to break off two pieces, one for Remus, one for him.

“Godspeed,” Sirius offers.

“Godspeed,” Remus echoes.

He makes a face through most of his chewing, but Sirius will insist, it’d have been so much worse without the chocolate. “How long ‘til it does something?” he raises, one eye shut as he shudders it off.

“Half-hour, forty-five,” Sirius offers, tilting his head back and forth. “Your stomach isn’t full so once it starts digesting you’ll feel a little somethin' within the hour.”

Remus nods, grimaces big, and goes for a large sip of tea to gargle, and Sirius can’t pretend not to find it all supremely entertaining. “How was class?” the boy bids, passing a hand over his mouth.

Sirius perks up. “Great; we’re officially going through the whole list without stopping, thank Jesus Cunt for that, and guess who has a spot right up front and near-center?” he poses.

Remus perks. “Is it you?” he bids, bobbing his shoulders a bit.

“It’s me,” Sirius chimes. “Similar to Baby and the corner, you don’t put Sirius in the back row.”

“No, no you don’t,” Remus concurs. He takes another sip of tea, sets his mug down again, and sticks his arms straight down, his hands between his knees by the looks of it while he smiles innocently. “How beat are you?”

“No sex,” Sirius denies. “Not when you just took somma that.”

Remus huffs a laugh. “I meant, are you sick of practicing or do you feel at all up to performing a few of your favourites?”

Well now, that, Sirius definitely feels up to. A relocation ensues wherein Remus drapes himself along the length of the couch to watch while Sirius stands in the middle of the living room section of the main room, performing songs one through sixteen on the playlist.

“Why are you so good at it?” Remus demands, his face alive with wonder as the last beats of 'The Best' play out and cap off the overall playlist.

“I sold my soul to a demon years ago for these hips,” Sirius offers, moving for the coffee table to pause the list before it can loop back around to the beginning; they're good on that, thank you.

Remus lifts his right hand and beckons him closer, garnering Sirius to stop curiously, heading around the side of the coffee table to get to him, wherein Remus sits up and scoots to the left side of the couch, reaching up as Sirius gets close.

Though the dopey grin Remus has had on for upwards of the last twenty minutes rather tipped him off to Remus’s status, upon getting a closer inspection, his pupils are right saucers all their own and act as full confirmation that he is officially good and blitzed.

Remus takes to rubbing his hands up and down the sides of Sirius's hips. “You good there, bud?” he asks, grinning with it.

“Mhm,” Remus hums, slipping off of the couch onto his knees on the floor and tugging down on the waistband of Sirius’s joggers.

“Ooo-kay, nope,” Sirius says, dropping both his hands to Remus’s head. “It's appreciated, believe me, but—”

“Oh, come on,” Remus sighs, frowning as Sirius reaches for his wrists and tugs him back up to his feet. “We do it when we’re high all the time.”

“Yes, and there’s a we when that happens,” Sirius hints. “You can come and get it once you’ve come down, but not a moment sooner.”

Remus puffs a breath out and up at Sirius, pitching himself back into the corner of the couch and smiling up at Sirius brightly, and that, precisely, is the quickest Remus has ever forgotten about being horny.

“You’re my favourite person,” Sirius insists, breaking into a grin.

“You too,” Remus says, laying easy in his spot.

At least, he was until Remus is so struck by a thought that he grabs up at Sirius with his left hand and beats his right one enthusiastically into the arm of the couch, and then Sirius is the one dropping to a kneel, enticed for whatever’s about to come out of his mouth. “I have so much gossip for you,” he insists.

Sirius truly gasps. “Where did you get it?”

“My dad, of all people,” Remus trades him.

“What?” Sirius sounds out, overcome.

“Well, I talked to him earlier,” Remus offers. “He didn’t sit down all excited about telling me gossip or anything, but I had some questions for him and one topic led to another, so.”

Remus tilts his head back and forth in insinuation, and Sirius practically vibrates out of his skin. “Can I smoke while you tell me?” he bids.

“Sure can,” Remus attests, and soon they’re traipsing out to the perch and seating side-by-side in the Smoking Chair with Tango curled up at their feet.

Sirius lights up, tosses the lighter on the table beside him, and pushes himself to face Remus, sitting cross-legged in the chair. “Well, you were right,” Remus instils, patting Sirius’s left knee.

Sirius sputters put his first haul. “Say that again, but slower.”

Remus gives him a pointed, but lopsided smile. “I should preface this with the fact that I’m not as thrilled about this as you are because I find it a real shame, but you were onto something at our little picnic,” he forwards. “Things weren’t good between him and his mum, and I honestly wouldn’t mind a sounding board to just toss things at, if you're OK with that.”

Sirius lets his newest haul out with the words attached. “I have literally all night,” he insists.

Remus snags Sirius’s cigarette from in between his fingers and takes a quick haul before returning it. “So, I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad and his parents since we talked about them; surprise, surprise,” he offers, tilting his head back and forth. “And I didn’t really know when I'd get a chance to talk to him about it nor was I even really sure how I would go about it if I did get the chance, but he’s been quite sick with that bug, trapped in the house since Friday, and so between you and me, he has definitely started with the cabin fever so when he called me, he was already being a spitfire and I took my chances it and got quite the earful.”

Sirius puts out a haul with a noise of gravitas. “I’m shaking.”

“I can feel it,” Remus puts in, and Sirius puts out a breath of a laugh. “So, there were two big things.”

“Mm! Two?” Sirius reacts.

“Yes,” Remus echoes. “One, his mum wasn’t a big supporter of his amputation back when it was on the table, which I’m going to be very biased about obviously—”

“Ummm, me too; what the fuck?” Sirius puts up. “It was his last resort.”

“Well, exactly,” Remus echoes. “It wasn’t a matter of taking a vein from here and putting it there anymore; something had to be done about it, he couldn’t go on like that anymore, and the thing that really bugs me about it, is that I talked to her over the phone while she was visiting for the operation and I didn’t get one lick of a sense that she didn’t approve of it, so this is of course from my dad’s perspective of it which should get a spotlight, I know, but it’s just a bit spooky, to think that all this contention went on in the background about it and I didn’t even know about; it's like they completely kept me out of it.”

Sirius gives out a pondering hum, reaching to flick the ash off his smoke away from the dog curled up below their chair. “Like when a kid doesn’t see their parents’ divorce coming because they were good at hiding it,” he raises, and Remus’s pupils somehow get even larger with that. “I mean, I shouldn’t say it like I’m an expert here; I’m not, obviously.”

“No no, I’m listening,” Remus insists. “Very listening.”

Sirius can’t manage to hold in a smirk just for the style of probing Remus chose to go with. “It’s just that, Marlene’s parents got divorced back in year ten?” he puts up, thinking for a moment before a nod. “Ten, yeah, and she did not see it coming one bit and that didn't mean she was terrible at reading subtlety or picking out a crisis before it became one, she was just busy and so were you, I'd imagine; I mean, you were in the middle of a new city, juggling summer courses and tutoring jobs, and if she didn’t pass her disapproval of it on to you, then it wasn't on you to have gone assuming anything of her — in fact, that’s not like you at all.”

Remus pushes a fast breath out of his nose and turns in, leaning in and placing a kiss right smack in the middle of Sirius’s forehead. “You won’t let me give myself even a morsel of shit,” he observes.

“No, not me,” Sirius echoes, talking a haul and pondering some while he blows it out. “And if anything, would she tell her grandkid that? Is she some kind of shit-disturber, ‘cause you conveniently left that out of that’s the case.”

Remus pulls the side of his lower lip into his mouth but can’t help smiling around it while he’s doing it. “I don’t think so, but I don't know that either,” he offers, his brow line somewhat quizzical before he passes a hand over his face and, apparently more importantly, his smile. “This probably isn’t the best time to get into it, I don't think; I feel like a goon.”

“Why not?” Sirius puts up, shrugging a shoulder. “If I laugh at any point, it’s because you’re funny and I like the way you phrase things, but I won’t be laughing at the topic itself; I’m not that big a bitch.”

“No, I know that,” Remus allows, nodding for it. “Alright, but if I’m smiling at any point, it’s because — well, you know.”

Remus flutters his right hand around his head a bit. “Oh, and I do,” Sirius replies at once.

Remus flashes him a little grin, but it still counts. “OK, well, for clarity, she thought there were other options they could look into so that my dad could keep the leg, but I don’t think it really sunk in for her that there weren’t any others,” he says of it. “So, what I don’t know, is exactly how much of this came from her mouth and how much was my dad’s understanding of it — and I’m not saying he isn’t valid in feeling like this was an issue for her, OK?”

Sirius looks left, right, and back at him. “No, I know,” he says. “Didn’t think you were.”

Remus nods quickly. “Only, I don’t know the full extent of the conversations they had about it, but he sort of started with her and then started dragging anyone who thought of him as a lazeabout for it, so it might've been more of a—” he cuts off quickly at Sirius’s open reeling, “—those aren’t my words, they’re his: he expressed a lot of distaste for how people acted around him after the amputation and it’s the little things that get to him, so if neighbours or friends in town seemed surprised he'd gone for that it or suprised he was bouncing back as well as he had in the initial aftermath, he'd take it like they didn't think he had it in him to keep going, but apparently his mum was at the forefront of that camp because initially she thought he’d be down for the count and unable to work at all, support his family, put me through higher education, that he was giving up, and that kind of talk leaves a poor taste in my mouth because I know he chose life through that operation and I don't know if she made better on that in recent years, but it doesn’t look like it with the way he was talking about it.”

“Right, and we’ve already established that he’s allowed to feel the way he does,” Sirius revisits, “so, let's stay where are you on it since I’m talking to you and you wanted a soundboard.”

Remus swallows, pushes up onto his arm of the chair, and mirrors Sirius’s stance; his legs are a little longer than Sirius’s so his knees are pressing right up against his as they do this face-to-face, but Sirius doesn’t mind that one bit. “I just don’t know how much of what he told me was a projection or if I just want it to have been,” he says, speaking so low it’s like he’s afraid Lyall will hear from all the way in the Rhondda valley. “He definitely feels they see him as an underachiever, which is really difficult for me to stomach because he works a trade, first of all, and second, I know how hard he worked that whole time, just this past year getting back to it, and finding a new normal, and thirdly, I remember how restless and awful he felt about not being able to work when he couldn’t manage it.”

“I love it when you number your reasonings,” Sirius puts in. “Let me just say that.”

“No, but then I’m realizing, did they even know that?” Remus raises, missing the compliment completely or he’s just too blitzed to realize it happened. “I don't think he leaned on them much at all, not if they could even think that of him.”

Sirius takes in a haul, nodding around it, and he can’t even pretend for a second that he isn’t grateful to the shrooms for giving him one chatty Remus for he heads right on, giving him that much more to chew on. “I mean, they didn’t see how disappointed he was when I came home with a job when I was thirteen either,” he maintains, raising his eyebrows and letting them fall in a quick beat.

Sirius pushes his haul out at once. “Disappointed?” he puts up, and Remus tilts his head back and forth, even as ever. “No no, don’t walk it back; elaborate.”

Remus quits his head tilting, giving him a pointed smile, and yikes, Sirius could literally get lost in those eyes. “He did not appreciate that I'd be working that while that young and in school, but especially because he couldn’t himself,” he offers, frowning for it. “And then, I made it worse by saying outright I was trying to help out.”

Sirius lifts his cigarette to his mouth. “You fucking monster,” he says gravely, taking a haul.

Remus ducks his head in a snort. “He’s a very stubborn man,” he instils. “I know he did appreciate it, but he sure didn’t start right away; nearly marched me in there to decline the offer, but I really liked the sound of that job and I put the big ol’ foot down, if you can believe it.”

“I really can,” Sirius says candidly.

Remus flashes him a smile. “The thing is, at certain points, he was back at work and feeling fine, so we had three people bringing in money which definitely helped for the next time my dad wasn't doing so well, but I know how difficult it was for him to even need the help," he puts up, taking in a calming breath, it seems, because for a second there he really was just spitting facts. "Part of me doesn’t want to hold her accountable for what she thought at the time because none of us were at our best; I certainly wasn't, my mum was trying to keep her head up for him, and I think the only one of us who managed to put on a true smile after the operation was my dad.”

“Mm?” Sirius probes, wanting a lot more of that anecdote, if he can wrangle it.

Remus smiles, passing his right hand up through his fringe. “Well, my mum and I were buzzing around him like mad, her for real and me from all the way over here, and he just kept telling us to quit tiptoeing around him, he’d be fine soon, and I let off him just a bit, but not so much my mum,” he offers, laughing for it. “He just had the best attitude about it; my mum sent a photo from the hospital after the surgery and he was just up on his bed, beaming. He wanted that fucking leg gone and badly, at that.”

“Fair enough,” Sirius trades him. “After all that strife, get it out of there.”

“Oh, he went into the hospital a tyrant that time and, turns out, it was his last visit — knock on wood,” Remus tacks on.

Sirius looks around and there’s not a single wooden piece near them. “I’d knock on your dick, but I’ve half a mind to think you’d take it further than that,” he says of it.

Remus squints at him. “Mm, I might’ve,” he allows.

“I knocked on it in my head, so you know,” Sirius mentions, taking another haul. “Go on.”

Remus nods once. “He was in there because of a clot, after years of botched operations, and I shit you not, he was so sick of getting operated on, recovering well, starting back at work again, getting his hopes up just to fall back into the same pain over and over again, that his doctor walked into the room and my dad went, ‘cut this fucking thing off!’”

Sirius leans back into the corner of the gargantuan chair in the wake of an absolutely perfect Lyall impression, wheeze-laughing and unable to control it any more than that. Eventually, twenty to thirty seconds later, he gains a semblance of control, sighing out a single, affectionate word. “Lyall.

“Mhm, he’s a character,” Remus echoes. “I think if he hadn’t made the choice for himself, it might’ve been different and probably harder to accept the idea, but then again, his doctor was literally coming by to tell him they had no other options but amputation, so I'm sure you can imagine how elated the man was to find out my dad was already on the same page.”

Sirius takes a choice haul off his cigarette instead of answering that, Lyall’s doctor can kiss his fucking ass for dicking the whole Lupin fam around for years, but Remus doesn’t need or want that anecdote, not when they’re getting along so well. “So, are we to assume she hasn’t been let in on the fact that he’s doing so well now?” he raises, moving them back.

“Not from what I could tell,” Remus allows. "Bit of a, 'if you can't handle me at my worst, you can't have me at my best' situation from what I'm getting, but I didn't really know how to pry further than that."

Sirius wishes, with all his might, that sometimes Remus would want to pry. “Well, her loss, really,” he deems it. “Look at him now; driving again, scooting under vehicles, fixin’ people's car troubles, and doing it all with style to boot; he’s back, babey, and if she can't handle the bad, she shouldn't get the good either.”

Remus’s face could light up a darkroom. “He is doing so well."

“Could run laps around her, too, I'll bet,” Sirius trades him, turning to butch his cigarette out in the ashtray on the deck table behind him.

“Well, she is in her seventies; wouldn’t take much,” Remus raises, but he trails off as he taps the end of his nose and gives Sirius a quick flash of a smile with it, and mmm boy, even a lightly vengeful Remus is a treat.

It takes two-point-five seconds for him to walk that sliver of vengeance back, in true Remus fashion. “It’s just such a shame,” he sighs. “She could’ve known him and us so much more if she’d just… literally done the bare minimum in the first place; maybe things would have been different down the line.”

Sirius levels Remus with a frank, curious stare. “Wait, are we onto the second one?” he raises, already elated.

Remus gives him a plainly grim nod. “She didn’t like my mum much, at first,” he passes him.

Sirius puts his hands up, splayed out in sheer dissonance, and screws his face up as he revisits that sentence. “How could any living soul not like Hope?” he raises. “She’s a literal ball of sunshine.”

“Well, we're agreed on that,” Remus echoes, clearly ruffled up. “And she was a superhero when it came to my dad, especially when he wasn’t doing well; I suppose that's irrelevant when we're talking about the early days, but there are some hard feelings to this day from the way my dad was talking.”

“Oh?” Sirius asks, right eyebrow arched.

Remus pauses, hands up as he thinks it through. “Mm,” he says, distantly. “My dad called it 'civil.'"

“Ooh, backhanded compliments, do you think?” Sirius raises, mulling it over. “‘Oh, I love the drapes you have in the den; how much did you get them on sale?’”

Remus puts out a laugh that sounds quite involuntary. “No, there wasn’t any of that.”

Sirius smiles tightly. “Well, and I mean this in the best way,” he raises, shooting a flattened palm over his head for effect.

Remus puts out a breath through his nose that gives Sirius more of an impression of a bull than a horse, but good Cunt, is Remus versatile. “I know I can be a bit naive at times, but I do know when someone’s calling us poor and I didn’t hear that sort of thing from her,” he maintains. “Granted, last time I was in town when she was, I was busy with school and work and had a dad at home recovering from his fifth surgery, so I could have missed some backhanders while I wasn’t there to hear them; you may have that much.”

Sirius, knowing he just spent time vying for a black-and-white answer, doesn’t know much of what to do with a grey one, but now that he has it, he’s not sure why he wanted it to be black or white; not much is. “OK,” he allows. “Hit me with it, then; what stemmed this distaste for Hope that I’m still very much reeling over, for the record.”

Remus takes in a breath through his nose, his eyes widening a bit. “Well, you’re going to love it because it goes back to the way my mum and dad got together,” he lets him have.

Sirius gives a noise of stark anticipation at the back of his throat. “Was it,” he whispers, batting his lashes, "dubious?"

Remus smirks, shaking his head. “No, I wouldn’t call it that,” he offers mildly. "I know much more about this because I already got the story after my last year at school; my dad drove me out to our favourite day-trip spot, sort of half a graduation celebration, half 'hey, I’m still kickin' around' celebration, so we were having a few at the pub down near the harbour and I don’t know what happened there, but I’m sure the pints had a hand in it because we talked about a ton of things, and strangely openly?”

Sirius repeats the same anticipated noise, only he adds a shoulder bob for effect. “Tell, tell, tell,” he chants.

“Well, I’m getting to some of what he talked about, just wait,” Remus bids, smirking up a storm, “but you'll also love this quick thing, too: that night, he just asked me point blank if I’d finally shagged somebody, partly for a razz and partly digging for information that I’m positively sure he brought on back to my mum, but I’d had a few drinks myself by then so I told him I'd had and all he did was go, ‘good on you’ and then later, ‘you using condoms?’ to which I said yes and purposefully steered the conversation onto him so I wouldn’t have to talk about genders, so that's the sort of open conversations we were having at the time and also how I was able to get the story out of him.”

Sirius breathes in long. “I want to beam myself there so badly.”

Remus smirks, ducks his head to the side to place a kiss on Sirius's right shoulder, and straightens up again. “I'd heard the age-appropriate story about how they met as a kid, but he gave me the secondary school graduate version of it that night," he supplies, working his mouth around a smirk that won't quit, "but today, I got much more than I did then so I think the Benadryl had to have really kicked in for him.”

“Oh, my Cunt,” Sirius attests, jiggling his right leg underneath him. “I need everything he told you; need it, Remus.”

Remus eyes Sirius's leg with a smile and makes a show of settling in. “Alright, so, he took a lot of sporadic trips when he was younger,” he begins. “Starting around fourteen to about eighteen, he would set off at the beginning of a summer and make his way back home eventually, but typically just before school was back in.”

Sirius breathes in once, starting to clap. “I — love — Lyall,” he puts out in three solid bursts.

Remus snorts. “Different times,” he tacks on. “Nevertheless, he was a bit of a wildcard back then, but by the time he’d made it to his late teens, early twenties he was taking all kinds of trips—"

“Metaphorical or literal?”

“Both.”

“Mhm, thought so.”

“And at the time, he was in this on-again, off-again situation with a woman named Connie.”

Sirius lets out such a loud and lengthy pfft that two passersby on the far side of Remus’s street look around and up for the source of the noise. “Who’s Connie?

Remus’s eyes light up brighter than they already are. “I have to state my bias here and say that while I’m sure this Connie lady was just lovely, she’s not my mum so I wasn’t rooting her in this story either, but shh,” he slips in, tacking a smile on at the end.

“Secret’s safe with me,” Sirius insists, matching his smile.

“During one of their off-again periods, my dad decided to embark on another trip on the grounds of some much-needed soul-searching; his words," Remus mentions, giving a pointed smile. "He did not see a need to plan an itinerary, just sort of floated around instead; visiting new places, ones he'd meant to but hadn't made it there yet, made a point to pop over to Wales to have a better, closer look at his homeland, and there, he passed through a valley—”

“Is it,” Sirius cuts in, “the valley?”

“The very one,” Remus assures, tipping his head to him. “Now, when I was a kid, he claimed he only meant to stop in for a quick night’s rest before setting off again the next day, which was a certain kind of truth; he was only meaning to pay a quick visit to the town and make his way out, but between you and me, let’s be honest here, feels like he might've been looking for something else that night.”

He makes a rather wry face with it, pulling a bark out of Sirius for it. “We’ve all been there.”

“Didn’t tell me that in so many words when I was a kid, but he did just so happen to magically wind up at the pub during his quick night's rest so I put the two and two together myself by the time I'd heard it the second time,” Remus tacks on. “And, funny thing, my mum was also there that night, and he loves this part, said it when I was ten, said it again when I was seventeen, and said the same of it today: he strolled into town, saw my mum laughing from across a crowded pub, and never left.”

Sirius makes a weak little noise. “I wasn’t ready for that,” he says, overcome. “My wee heart.”

Remus makes a flat noise. “We both know that thing is huge,” he says plainly, and Sirius wiggles his toes in his socks. “So, my dad struck up a conversation with a few blokes who were near-ish to her, caught bits and pieces of her conversation with her friends, and thought, ‘well, shit; she’s funny, too.

“What are you doing to me?” Sirius demands, falling back on the arm of the chair like he’s been shot.

“I’m giving you everything he told me, just like you asked,” Remus delivers, and good point, Remus. “She wasn’t there for much longer so he didn’t get to talk to her that night, but he booked a room for the night and looked for rooms to rent for longer stays, and lo and behold, he ended up renting the little flat above that very pub, and once he got that, he went back down there and talked himself into a bartending job; I am not fucking with you, it just all managed to fall together for him.”

Yes,” Sirius champions. “Get it done, Lyall.”

“He got the shit end of the deal, though,” Remus mentions. “Nine to three a.m., Sunday through Thursday, and he was not chuffed about that, but figured his chances of seeing my mum again were better there than anywhere else because he at least had a home base to go on.”

“Reasonable fellow," Sirius calls him. “I assume it worked?”

Remus tilts his head back and forth idly. “Well, she and her mates did come in now and again so he got a rapport going with her, but then a few weeks passed, he got to know them all a bit more, and ends up catching word that my mum was quite involved with a man named Robert—” Sirius lifts his hands toward his mouth and blows a fart noise into his palms, taking Remus down for the count for at least ten, fifteen seconds.

He breathes in long as he catches hold of himself, settling back in with an easy smile. “Same,” he offers idly, and now it’s Sirius’s turn to lose it, but thankfully Remus heads right on once Sirius has control over his lungs again. “My dad didn’t love that information either, but the thing I really like about this tale is that he didn’t pack up and leave all defeated; he liked living there, had a good circle of mates going for himself, liked his job even if he did have the slower nights, liked the little flat he had, and he really liked my mum, so he stayed where he was.”

“As if I couldn’t love that man more,” Sirius puts up.

Remus hums brightly for that. “And after that, one of his mates worked at the garage in town, so my dad started swinging by there, getting himself all sorts of interested in that,” he details. “He was a quick study, got himself a couple shifts a week there, and Bubba took him in almost as his own and carved the mechanic straight out of him, I swear; he loved my dad so much, then and now.”

“I love Bubba,” Sirius puts out at once.

“He’s going to love you just by how much you can spout about Priscilla,” Remus insists. “He’ll be so impressed.”

Sirius bobs his shoulders with a newfound zest brimming up in him, and truly, three weeks cannot pass quick enough. “When did he snag Hope?” he bids, shimmying his shoulders, waggling his eyebrows.

Remus breathes out a laugh. “Not anytime soon, unfortunately for him,” he extends. “She was with Robert for another while yet so it was a, how do you say, slow burn?

Sirius blinks. “I’m not familiar,” he offers, smiling wide at the end of it.

Remus gives one hell of a huff, but he lifts Sirius’s right hand, leaves a kiss on the back of it, and sets it back where he found it so Sirius is almost down for the count purely from that. “My mum did end it with him eventually, and,” he offers, pausing there.

“You cannot pause there,” Sirius insists.

Remus makes a pointed smile. “Well, it's just, she must’ve been rather taken by my dad by then because she pretty well ended it and started up with him,” he supplies, low down on his register and rather suggestive.

“Well,” Sirius puts up, not all that pressed about it. “I think we can separate the whole 'he's your dad' thing with the concept that he was just another bloke at the time.”

Remus huffs out a breath. “I know,” he elongates. “I think it’s a bit of pride for him, knowing he basically stole her away.”

“Let him gloat,” Sirius champions. “I would.”

"I know you would,” Remus returns him. “So they dated for a while, had me, got married—”

Sirius takes to shimmying his shoulders. “Wasted no time there, hm?”

Remus hums idly. “I suppose it was quicker than others, but my dad was at the shop full time by then, mum was working phones at this notary in town and while she found that job dreadful, they paid her pretty well for it so she stuck around there longer than she planned to apparently,” he says evenly. “So, you know, they were doing well and they were ready to, so they did; it wasn’t a shotgun wedding either, in case that’s what you might’ve been thinking."

“I hadn’t been,” Sirius clarifies through a smirk. “So, no surprise-Remus, then.”

Remus shakes his head. “Oh, no, I was definitely a surprise, but I'd like to think a welcome one,” he amends, shrugging lightly. He lets the shrug go, stares at Sirius blankly for a few seconds, and tilts his head with a squint. “Why did I tell that whole story?”

Sirius blinks at Remus’s utter confusion. “Uh, aside from my begging you to?” he raises, putting out a laugh. “Grandma.”

Mm,” Remus puts out resoundingly, patting Sirius’s knees once, so that must have been the shrooms acting up. “Yes, so, he said earlier, the way things began had been quite the issue, but the more he talked, I think it was a number of things.”

“I want the numbers,” Sirius says of it.

“Well, for one, that certainly wasn’t his first soul-searching trip in the bunch, and he pretty well graduated school and went on his way; he’d come back home for a stint, stop in and say hello, but for the most part, he planned on taking his twenties for himself and just ended up wanting to say in Wales permanently,” Remus hands him. “Add that to relocating for a stranger, not coming home much, and not taking back the woman he was supposed to and who my dad said his parents approved of quite a bit; it was a lot of things wrapped up into one, but it seems like his absence from their lives got tied back to my mum for keeping him away — which, if I can just say, seems a piss poor reason to wave your son and his lady off and then only come around three times in twenty years.”

“You can absolutely say that,” Sirius says at once. “You’re the kid; you get to say it.”

Remus sets his hand on Sirius’s left knee, tracing his thumb back and forth over it, and it does things for the butterflies in Sirius’s stomach when he can see with his own eyes that Remus has no interest in pulling back or breaking contact.

“Well, personally, I think Lyall’s parents were a couple of hoity shits and I hope Connie cried,” Sirius says of it, thinking it a nice cap on a wondrous origin tale, and it sure does get Remus coughing out a laugh, however reluctant he is to be overcome by it, tracing his thumb in another circle over Sirius’s knee with his head bowed for a few quiet moments.

“I wish they hadn’t kept me out of it,” he offers. “I'm sure he thought he was doing the right thing there and I have to assume the same of my mum, but if I’d had even some idea of all that, then maybe I could have known how to help you better, or maybe I'd have understood where you come from a little more, and maybe I wouldn’t have been so stupid to have pushed you to go something that was so bad for you—”

Sirius moves to cover Remus’s hand with his left one. “OK, I know what you mean, but you know I don’t regret going,” he instils, a little fainter than he expected it to come out. “And even though I’m starting to realize Reg likely wouldn’t have turned up at mine, I’m still glad I went to his, yeah? I sleep better knowing I did, and I love sleep.”

Remus isn’t really looking him in the eye though he’s nodding and that has to change. “Look at me?” he bids, waiting for him to. “I haven’t blamed you for a second, for anything that happened there; you had nothing to do with it. Want to say that for me, real quick?”

Remus puts out a disparaging breath. “Sirius,” he implores.

“I think it’s fair,” Sirius tells him. “We’re eight months on from that and you’re still thinking you dragged me in there, but you didn’t, I dragged you along because I needed you there; I needed James, too, but I needed you, I picked you, and I think you can probably muster up the stones to say that back to me since I know the kind of stones you have.”

Remus makes a wounded noise in his throat, but he must push right past it for he reaches up to hold the sides of Sirius’s face as he leans in. “Can I?” he asks, his mouth inches from Sirius’s.

“Oh, I’d be livid if you didn’t,” Sirius says plainly.

Remus sighs in the space between them, kisses him slowly, unhurried, and maybe it’s all about buying himself the time he needs to drum up the stones to say it, but that’s fine with Sirius. “I had nothing to do with it,” he says, sitting back and frowning with it a little.

“Not so hard, was it?” Sirius asks.

Remus promptly holds his left palm under his right hand to display a very pointed two-finger salute at him, but that just going to get Sirius laughing.

Notes:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/28Co8b6KaRQk9GiVHQfpW1?si=TpTlWGmJS1GKVEzXB2k9RQ

Chapter 16: 16.

Chapter Text

Given that Remus took his dose minutes after Sirius got in and the time having been nearing three, Sirius projects that Remus will start to come down sometime between hours six and seven, and more specifically, between the hours of nine and ten p.m. for them. Until that point, they’ve a long evening ahead of them, so after a long and spirited perch visit, the two of them relocate to the couch to get in some prime vegging time, and after going two rounds with the Zumba playlist, Sirius really could use some quality time with Remus’s couch.

He pulls up the 'Important Videos' playlist to autoplay on Remus’s laptop, pauses it before it starts up, and sits the laptop on the coffee table. He pushes back on the couch and takes up the right corner of it, stretching his legs out the length of it and lolling his head back over the arm of the couch to keep an eye on Remus as he bumbles around in the kitchen heating making their respective cups.

He looks a tad out of his element, but Remus, never one to ask for help, gives off a keen, determined energy despite his bumbling state, and for that, Sirius can’t find it in him to budge in and take over for him.

Fortunately for him, it’s more entertaining to get to observe Remus wholeheartedly trying to correctly use the French press while blitzed out of his mind than it is a strictly nerve-wracking one, and that could be because Sirius is a wee bit stoned himself, but he has a feeling it has something to do with the fact that Remus on shrooms, turns out, is really just Remus while he's stoned but dialled up by quite a few, wonderful notches.

Quietly, ever so quietly, Sirius slips his mobile off of the coffee table and acts as if he’s simply scrolling on it when in reality, he hits record simply because the very sight of Remus attempting to transport multiple spoonfuls of coffee grinds into the Press without spilling any on the counter, his gaze so incredibly focused, is something James will want to see.

Eventually Remus must gain the understanding that he’s being watched and glances up, but it’s a rather sudden movement of his eyes so Sirius doesn’t have the time to hide the phone. “Oi,” he puts out, nodding at him for an explanation.

“OK, but,” Sirius puts in, pressing to end record mode, “you’re adorable and it needs to be documented for historical purposes.”

Remus sends him a wonderfully pronounced huff, turns both his body and reluctant smile away from him, but that’s a far better reaction than Sirius saw coming and he’d like to thank the shrooms personally for giving him this solid.

The whistle of the kettle blows and takes Remus’s full attention and he gets their cups sorted out at a hysterically leisurely pace. He walks both cups over to the couch, holding Sirius’s out for him to take and moving in between the coffee table and couch to sit over in the right corner of it. He sets his own mug on the coffee table and pulls his quilt off of the back of the couch, mirrors Sirius’ position and tangles his legs in with Sirius’ before he fluffs out his quilt over the two of them.

He reaches for his mug and settles in and Sirius sips his coffee as he inches his socked right foot out from under the quilt and the tangle of Remus’s legs, extending it out toward the keyboard and hitting the space key with his big toe, starting the playlist from the top. He trades between watching the screen and watching Remus react to whatever’s on-screen and has a grand old time with that, but once the clock strikes half-nine, Sirius finds Remus's eyes much more lidded than they’ve been for hours now.

He studies him a little longer, but it becomes quite evident after a few minutes further that Remus isn’t really watching anymore, a far-off, distant look about his eyes. Sirius leans forward and pauses the program they moved onto and untangles himself from Remus, patting his right knee. “Half Baked?” he offers.

Remus hums, flickering his gaze over to him and nodding once the words digest, and mhm, there it is; if Remus is lacklustre about the prospect of Half Baked then they sure are coming in for the landing. No mind, Sirius has been here before and who better for the task of pulling Remus out of his head than he?

He pushes off of the couch and heads for the freezer to pull the pint out of it, stops for a spoon out of the utensil drawer, and glances over the counter, his gaze lingering on Remus’s teapot. “Did you want me to start another pot while I’m up?” Sirius asks, thinking a cup of oolong might help him out.

It takes a moment or three for Remus to respond. “OK, sure,” he says distantly.

Sirius hears him trying to get up and moves for the doorway to the kitchen, spotting Remus halfway out of his corner of the couch. “You stay there,” he maintains, coming for Remus’s mug that’s long since been left on the coffee table and handing the pint of ice cream with the spoon toward him; the boy might as well get a head start on perfection in a pint. "I mean it; I’m on kitchen duty, you just get to lie there and wait for everything to come to you, deal?”

Remus gives a disconcerting noise, holding the pint like he isn’t sure what to do with it. “I feel awful,” he says listlessly.

Sirius taps his right thumbnail on the handle of Remus’s mug. “Nausea or just in general?”

“In general,” Remus answers. “You’re always right, even with the not-so-great stuff.”

Sirius nods, frowning for him as he perches on the side of the coffee table. “Well, better you know ahead of time what you’re in for,” he offers. “It’s good that you know that it’s the comedown and not necessarily reality, but the really good thing here is that you didn’t take molly; you’d be in far worse a state if that’d been it.”

“Mm?” Remus probes, a crease between his eyebrows that Sirius has a strong feeling won’t be going anywhere for a time.

“Oh yeah,” Sirius assures. “A shitload of dopamine and serotonin gets released and go all haywire, so while you’re on it you feel fucking fantastic ‘cause you’ve got all those chemicals exploding together, but you wake up the next morning with your serotonin all used up, and that can get bleak.”

“Mm?” Remus hums a second time, watching him unblinkingly.

Sirius hums in affirmation. “It can be, especially if you’re not with someone while you’re coming down; I find it's better to have another presence around so you're not just stuck with yourself and zero serotonin,” he extends. “Consequently, the term ‘chasing the dragon’ comes from chasing the euphoria felt when it's all happening for you; a lot of people can’t handle the comedown because it can get pretty dark so they keep taking more to avoid getting to that place, others just want to keep taking it in order to get that same high they had the first time because it is just that euphoric, but it's a losing battle because it takes time for your brain to make more of the stuff, so the next high isn’t going to feel anything like the first one did and they’ll keep chasing that high they felt for those four hours, like, a month ago, and get stuck in a loop.”

“That sounds horrific,” Remus says of it.

“Can be, yeah,” Sirius echoes.

“Did you do that?” Remus bids, his frown deepening. “This sounds a bit lived in, if I may say that.”

“Oh, fuck no; not me,” Sirius puts out plainly. “I mean, I tried it, they hand that shit out for near-free at the door of some clubs and it felt beyond at the time, I'll say that, but I had the one comedown experience and I said, 'mm, no thank you, Satan; I am good without this.'”

“Yeah?” Remus probes, half-smiling at Sirius's frank salute toward Molly and her afterbite.

“Oh, Jesus Cunt,” Sirius delivers. “I mean, can you imagine; me, without the ability to tug on even a little serotonin?”

“Well, no, fuck that; you hate seeing in grey,” Remus extends him.

“It’s like you know me,” Sirius chimes, smiling for him. “And that’s really more my point; you’re going to feel a little weird, maybe a bit blue, and that’s normal for a comedown, but let’s be thankful it’s not going to get anywhere near as shitty as that, and—”

He cuts off, drags his top teeth over his lower lip, and Remus hones in on it, shaking his head minutely. “What is it?” he bids, blinking at him.

“Your anxieties could spike just a little,” Sirius raises, delicately as he lifts his left forefinger and thumb to show an iota of space between them.

“Oh, good,” Remus puts out plainly, and even down in the dumps, he’s still the funniest bloke Sirius knows.

He smirks and reaches out with his free hand to fluff out Remus’s fringe. “I’m only saying it so you know that for the next while, your fears, big, small, in between, might feel a bit heightened,” he offers him mildly, “but you can talk to me about any of it; nothing’s too foolish, I’ve been there before, and I’m not going anywhere save for the kitchen and maybe the loo if it calls to me, but aside from that, I’m all yours, OK?”

Remus nods, his lower lip caught between his teeth, and just when Sirius thinks that’s about all he’s going to get and moves to stand, Remus catches him by the left wrist and presses his lips to the inside of it, and there he is, shining through the shutters.

“Brb,” Sirius slips him, flashing a smile and heading back to the kitchen; oolong is definitely on the menu. He stops just before the alcove and points back toward Remus with his free forefinger. “Have some of that ice cream, hey?”

Remus nods, picking at the plastic ring around the rim of the pint with his right thumbnail while the spoon sits in his lap. Once the water is heated and ready to go, he pours Remus a cup and, after a beat or two of thought, decides he might as well bring the whole pot back with him for easy access. He walks the cup and pot out of the kitchen and is happy to note that Remus has made a small dent in the pint of ice cream in his short absence.

Sirius sticks the teapot down on the coffee table first, reaches Remus’s mug closer to him, and the two swap out, Remus taking hold of his tea while Sirius grabs the pint with the spoon stuck in it and takes the right corner spot back.

He crosses his legs underneath him, sticks a spoonful in his mouth, and smiles around it as Remus watches him while running his right thumb idly over a spot on his mug. “There is something that’s bothering me,” he addresses, frowning.

Sirius nods, his mouth quite full, and blocks it with his hand. “All ears,” he says, muffled.

Remus’s gaze drops and comes back up in the span of a beat. “It’s not going to make me look very good,” he prefaces.

Sirius swallows. “Impossible,” he deems it.

“No, it isn’t,” Remus insists. “I know I don’t have a reason to be green about it and earlier, I was able to put it out of my mind and be fine with it, but—”

He trails off, lifting a shoulder to stand for the rest of his insinuation. “Bit tough to now,” Sirius echoes, scooping another spoonful out of the pint. “OK, no judgement here.”

“It’s about Tom,” Remus advertises.

Sirius pauses with a spoonful hovering ahead of his mouth. “He bothering you?”

Remus probably would have reeled if he had much energy to do so, but the three blinks he sends Sirius work just as well. “No,” he puts out, giving what might've been a breath of laughter in any other circumstance. “He’d have to stop and remember I’m a living being to do that, I’d think.”

“Oh, he knows,” Sirius says outright. “You’re not easy to forget, trust me; tried once, didn’t work.”

Remus gives him a squint as he sips his tea. “It’s true,” Sirius doubles down, sending a nod nodding across the couch at him. “In the two weeks I didn’t see you, I did nothing but listen to Channel Orange, boohoo to James about how you weren’t into me, and go to work; thassit.”

Remus pushes a smirk out of his nose, not quite a laugh, but there’s a twitch to the corner of his mouth so that’s something. “He’s not bothering me,” he gives him. “My dad told me he's gotten into Cambridge.”

“Oh,” Sirius nods, having that bite he held off from.

“Mhm, he brought his car into the shop Friday and told him there," Remus offers, pausing for an intake of breath and staying poised to speak for a few beats before doing that. “I didn’t know he was thinking about applying — and I know that sounds mad; of course I didn’t know that, I don’t know anything he thinks anymore, but—”

“OK,” Sirius puts in. “I’m listening to you, but you’ve never sounded mad a day in your life, so let’s call it something else.”

“I don’t know what else to call it,” Remus says, quietly candid.

“Go with a 'you got a strange and arresting bit of information,'” Sirius offers up.

Remus looks left, then right. “Well, it was a bit arresting,” he allows.

“And that’s fair,” Sirius forwards. “Does he come up often?”

“Well, here and there,” Remus gives him, shrugging the other shoulder. “It’s more that, I hear about the people they run into and he’s one of them from time to time.”

Sirius scoops a spoonful of ice cream out of the carton but doesn’t immediately shovel it into his mouth. “Do they know you haven’t talked in, what, two years?” he bids.

Remus hums around another sip of tea and, if he were in a brighter mood, it might’ve sounded circumstantial, but now it just sounds one-noted and wooden. “I think they just think we both got busy,” he supplies, lifting his right hand to scratch at his eyebrow, “but I still get updates, even if I’d maybe rather not hear about what he's up to.”

Sirius grunts for that. “So, what is it, then?” he raises, levelling Remus with a coy stare and a light smile. “You're a bit green that he’s set for Cambridge?”

Remus pushes a sigh out through his nose. “I know I don’t have the right to be,” he reiterates. “I get to go to school in London, live out in the city for once, my grades are good, and I’m getting my own, great opportunity soon and study in Paris for a term; it’s not that I don’t know all that—”

“Uh, yeah, I know,” Sirius cuts in, smiling bigger.

“I'm just saying, it's something I don’t have the right to be pressed about, but I’m feeling it anyway and I don’t like it,” Remus lodges.

“Alright,” Sirius accepts, gentle in tone. “Well, you know I love it when you’re a little bit petty, so you won’t hear smack talk from me about it; trust me on that.”

Remus goes for another sip of tea, but swallows it quicker than Sirius was banking on. “It feels like I’m the one who got him there and he dropped me,” he gives up curtly. “And I know that’s not true in all senses, but I’m the reason he can string his thoughts together and put them on paper, so I’d love to see what that letter of intent looked like because I’m betting you he used tools that I taught him to use, and he just — he tells my dad? He has to know he’ll go tell me that and I feel as if I got led into this mood without my permission.”

Sirius sits prim, loving this. “I love this side of you,” he offers him.

“No, you don’t,” Remus returns. “You’re supposed to tell me it’s fine because I live a good life and I have you and Paris and that should be enough.”

“Yeah, but you know that already,” Sirius smiles, keeping his tone light, open. “No point in me telling you that; I’d just be a broken record.”

“I’d be OK with you being a broken record in this case,” Remus insists, holding his mug tighter.

“I’d rather hear what you actually feel, not some Sunday school version of it,” Sirius raises him. “Why do you feel you got him there? I believe you, but I wouldn’t mind some further tea on the matter.”

Remus goes for a big ol’ drink of his literal tea, sighing as he swallows. “Well, I tutored him for years,” he reminds him. “I mean, we became friends not all that long after I started helping him out, but that was our starting point, and we carried that on up until our last year at school when things got so — messy and all.”

Sirius nods, not quite satiated just yet. “How’d you meet, then?” he bids, pointing the spoon toward Remus.

“In level nine, during Advanced English class,” Remus gives him. “My professor picked me to help him—”

“Your Awakening?” Sirius cuts in to clarify. “That prof?”

Remus nods plainly. “The one and the same,” he lets him have.

“Just checking,” Sirius chimes, bobbing his shoulders a bit as he scoops out another spoonful. "Keep going."

Remus tilts his head back and forth idly. “That was honestly a good place to ask that because I thought he was the most brilliant, kindest, coolest man on the planet, and had the broadest set of shoulders I’d ever seen, come to that,” he tacks on, and to Sirius’s great pleasure, at that, "so, believe me when I say he could have said ‘Remus, clean the gum off this desk for me,’ and I’d have done it kindly.”

Sirius coughs on the bite of ice cream he went for, cursing himself for thinking he could achieve eating while Remus is in the beginning stages of a tale. “You take this,” he insists, holding the pint out toward him. “I was a fool thinking I could eat while you talk.”

Remus’s mouth quirks as he leans over to set his mug on the coffee table before taking hold of the pint. "When he asked me specifically if I’d help Tom out, it was for the first paper of the term and I was more than happy to do it,” he offers, scooping out a bit of ice cream with the spoon. “Honestly, I felt like a bit of a star just having been asked to do it, because at that point it was the end of September and we’d really only just done a few short-form essays at that point, but I’d felt that must have meant he saw something in me and that's why picked me for the job, so I was right chuffed.”

“‘Course he saw something in you,” Sirius echoes, wiggling as he settles back into the corner of the couch. “What’d Tom need the extra help for?”

Remus nods around a spoonful, swallowing. “Well, his dad wanted him in the advanced level and he had the grades to get into it, but it was an adjustment at first because it was a lot more writing off the bat than he was used to in his prior class,” he passes along. “Not to mention, he was the poster boy for 'less is more,' but we were in an enriched English class with a professor who wanted incredible amounts of detail out of us, so fundamentally what he really needed was a hand in learning how to pull more from of a single concept.”

“So the prof sent in the wordsmith,” Sirius concludes, tapping his right temple. “That’s a brilliant man right there.”

“Still is, I’d imagine,” Remus echoes. “I got handed Tom's first draft and could see just from reading what he had down that all the ideas were there, but he’d stuck to the short and sweet side of things, which is arguably a fine way to go about it if you’re packing a punch with what you’re trying to communicate, but he just wasn’t quite hitting the mark.”

“I love it when you talk shop,” Sirius puts in, needing to.

Remus's mouth quirks a bit there there as well. “He had all the right starting points and the texts we were reading weren’t going over his head or anything; he was just here and he needed to be up here,” he offers for it, using his hands as place points, holding his right one higher than the one he's got the pint of ice cream held in.

Sirius raises his hand for permission to pepper a thought in. “How,” he comes in, “did you not know from that day on you were destined to teach?”

“Pointing out that someone needs to elaborate much more before they can turn in a paper isn’t the same thing as teaching,” Remus points out.

“Mm, not exactly, but you were a genius fourteen-year-old; what the fuck?” Sirius raises. “You really just, read his paper, honed in on his issue, and figured out a plan to address it; did your prof’s job for him, is what you did.”

“My professor also had thirty other students,” Remus mentions. “I just had Tom to steer in the right direction and to be fair, I’d already had the paper written so I didn’t have that to worry about and plenty of free time; I wasn’t even working on anything in class that day, I was just reading in my seat when my prof called on me to help Tom out, but shh, he didn't know that.”

Sirius tosses his head back over the arm of the couch. “I just can’t with you,” he insists. “Of course you already had it finished; this is you, what else would’ve happened?”

“Do you want the rest of the story or not?” Remus raises, biting at his budding smile.

“Want,” Sirius insists.

Remus nods once. “So, we only had half an hour or so in actual class to work on it and the paper was due on the Monday," he offers, "but since we were going to have to do a whole revamp, we stayed after school that day so he’d at least have something better to turn in after the weekend and it sort of took off from there.”

“‘It,’ meaning?” Sirius probes.

“He sat in the spot in front of me Monday and that's where he kept sitting after that,” Remus reiterates, tossing a glance to the left and then back at Sirius again. “And the thing is, he wasn’t going to be magically cured of his 'less is more' attitude from one session with me; he'd run into the same sort of troubles and I’d help him out with that so eventually, every time we had to work on something, papers or even just a quick response, he’d automatically turn and work off my desk.”

Sirius nods primly, a new smile starting on his lips. “How much are we willing to bet he purposefully left his work incredibly vague from thereon?” he raises, pairing the question with the rise of his right eyebrow.

Remus smirks, shaking his head. “That wasn’t it.”

“I will bet every cent in my account that’s what he was doing,” Sirius maintains.

“You really shouldn’t be betting your kind of money because that claim is false,” Remus counters. “This was just a thing for him; he’d have these vibrant reads and opinions of the texts, and yet, his writing would come out so, so curt; we’d be discussing our takes, he’d say the most clever thing, and I’d just—” he flails his free arm up in the air like he’s waving down a plane on the runway, "write that down!

Sirius lifts his hands, beaming big. “OK, I’m just saying, there can be more than one motive, but I digress,” he trades him. “So, what then; did the literary terms get you all warm in the pants and that’s when you planted one on him?”

“He planted one on me, thank you very much, and that wasn’t for months,” Remus corrects.

“Oh, and you pretend like you had nothing to do with all his vagueing,” Sirius sends out haughtily.

“I have a real hard time thinking he was purposefully getting low grades in class just to hang out with me,” Remus insists. “The kiss is beside the point.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to have to do to get you to admit you’re a catch, I really don’t,” Sirius says for it, falling back on the arm of the couch like a wounded soldier.

“I was not a catch in level nine, Sirius,” Remus returns plainly.

“I bet you’re lying,” Sirius comments, shifting a bit.

“Take this and shush,” Remus instructs, holding the pint of ice cream out to him.

Sirius lifts off the arm of the couch to reach it. “Fine, so he surprise-snogged you, not the other way around,” he reiterates. “Funny, I’m more used to you making the first move; don’t know why that is.”

Remus smiles into his mug, swallowing a gulp of tea. “Well, I wasn’t quite so sexually frustrated back then, you understand,” he lets Sirius have, the gent he is.

Sirius grins, feeling like a bit of a star overall. “Nonetheless, sexually frustrated to a point,” he poses.

“Oh, Cunt, yes,” Remus allows emphatically. “Far too nervous and ill-equipped to try anything so I just pined from afar, I don’t know if you know anything about that kind of thing, but we eventually moved onto after-school sessions for classes we didn’t even have together but he wanted an extra pair of eyes for and that moved on to us spending time over the Christmas break that year, and at that point, I was just so excited that our time spent together wasn’t immediately contingent on being at the school anymore, and after that, it was all very soppy, gooey stuff on my end for a few weeks, maybe a month after the holidays were out, he leaned in for a kiss, I thought I was hallucinating it, and—” Remus lifts his free hand toward Sirius, “—well, you know where it went from there.”

“Barely,” Sirius mentions. It’s not the cleverest idea he’s had, picking this particular, shoddy evening’s end for that point to be made, but Remus stares at him with half-sized dinner plates for eyes, pie-plate eyes, he'll call them, and that’s a better response than, say, telling him to fuck right off. "You gave me a synopsis, sure, but not a lot of the in-betweeners.

“I’ve told you a lot,” Remus said, not unkind about it, just a statement of fact.

“You told me a load of it first day we started this, which was really more of a rant and an output of pent-up feelings that went nowhere for years, and I was happy to get anything out of you on it; there’ve been quips and comments made here and there since, but not much else,” Sirius trades him. “I mean, I didn’t even get his name until, what, February?”

Remus looks down at the contents of his mug and back up at Sirius when he’s got it in him to manage it. “I chose to refer to him as 'bloke I was seeing' rather than give him a name; some people listen to sad breakup songs, I stitched his name out of the ordeal best I could," he gives him, huffing after it. "It’s not on to just harp on about a fling to your new boyfriend.”

“Don’t call it that,” Sirius asks of him, now feeling odd just sitting there holding a pint of ice cream while he does this. “It wasn’t a fling.”

“I don’t have much else to call it,” Remus instils.

“Well, flings don’t tend to run as long as you two did,” Sirius raises, tilting his head toward him a little. “I get it, there were no labels, and there was a lot of Tom in and out of your life whenever he saw fit, but you don’t have to keep cheapening it when it’s clear there was a lot more going on between you two than you even feel comfortable saying this far shot of him, and I hate that for you; you shouldn’t have to lose six years of experience to him — fuck him, he doesn't get to take them from you."

“I appreciate that you’re saying this, but,” Remus raises, pausing to look up and around, “is now the time to discuss all that?”

Sirius tilts his head pointedly. “You know I’m talking on a bigger scale than right this very second,” he instils. “Recently, you’ve been a little more transparent about it, and maybe it’s the leap we’re about to take or you’re feeling a little freer to talk about it, but I do want you to talk more and I don’t mean tonight or even tomorrow, just — know that you can talk about that time as freely as you fucking feel like doing and not kick your own arse for letting yourself do it, OK?”

Remus nods, but it looks as if he’s having a hard time doing it. “Maybe not when I’m like this,” he keeps to.

“That’s fine,” Sirius grants. “And not to linger too long, but there’s literally no world in which I’d have taken you talking about him or what happened with him as you ‘harping on about it.’”

Remus takes in a quick breath. “I’m not choosing my words well.”

“No, but it’s stemming from somewhere, right?” Sirius trades him. “How about this: if you’d made a reference to Tom once a day, from Christmas until today, I might have wondered what I was dealing with here; that would've been fucking weird—” Remus cuts in with a snort that seems to jar himself, “—but you’ve gone so, so far the other way with it that I could count on my hands the number of times you’ve referenced anything to do with him, do you see what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” Remus says, his voice a bit hoarse. “I do.”

“OK,” Sirius accepts. “And, so you know, I don’t think it says anything terrible about you if you’re feeling a bit green about Cambridge — you did get him in there, 'far as I see it.”

Remus huffs, ducking his head down for a few moments. “All I’m saying is, that letter of intent better have done me fucking proud,” he says for it. “Otherwise, what a waste of a spot, mm?”

“Mhm,” Sirius returns spiritedly. “Guess where he’s not going, though?”

“Paris,” Remus answers.

“Exactement,” Sirius echoes. “You’re fucking killing it, Remus; let Cambridge have him.”

Remus takes in a sturdier breath, reaches to set his mug on the coffee table, and crosses over the cushion in between them, and Sirius scoots down to lay on his back, waiting for Remus to settle in between him and the couch, but Remus goes one step further and situates himself directly on top of him, crossing his arms over Sirius’s chest and setting his chin over them.

Sirius's breathing hitches, but it’s got nothing to do with the weight on him and yet, everything to do with it. “Am I squashing you?” Remus checks. Sirius shakes his head, snaking his arms around his waist so he won’t get any other ideas, and it's a good thing he did because Remus settles in even that much more, his mouth twisting into a strange sort of frown. “Doreen and Phil are separating.”

“Oh, shit,” Sirius puts out. “You really got some fucking tea today, boy.”

“I know,” Remus echoes. “I just rang my dad to see how he was doing, but I hadn’t spoken to him in a bit so I must've gotten all the updates since the last time we talked.”

“It’s really been a Day for you,” Sirius offers him, curling up for a quick kiss to the tip of Remus’s nose and lowering back down again.

“It’s really sad,” Remus instils. “I'm really sad, they’ve been together almost as long as my parents have, I’ve known them as Doreen and Phil since I could walk; I didn’t think I’d ever not be saying their names together, and—”

Sirius budges up on Remus’s body from underneath him after the five-second mark hits. “And?” he probes.

Remus shifts his right arm out from under his chin, places his hand over where Sirius’s heart lives, and presses his thumb back and forth. “Apparently, they just can’t work around it,” he gives. “My dad said it's not that they don't love each other, but they aren’t in love anymore — or Phil, more than Doreen, which is a terrible thought because she’s great and he’s great and it's no one's fault, but—” he stops, just looking at Sirius for quite the batch of seconds before continuing. “If I ever give you grief or get huffy with you, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you, and I’m sorry I’ve been so up and down lately—”

“Nope,” Sirius cuts in. “Two points, you want to hear them?”

Remus looks left, right, and back at him. “Yeah.”

Sirius lifts his right hand from the small of Remus’s back and sticks it in between them, his forefinger extended. “One, that sucks for Doreen and Phil, but we’re different,” he maintains, pulling a reluctant snort out of Remus before he stuffs his face down against Sirius’s chest sheepishly and garnering Sirius to poke the top of Remus’s head with his middle and forefinger, “and two, I love that you give me grief and you know I love it when you get huffy with me, so you don't have to worry about this one.”

Remus’s head comes up and reveals a morose expression. “You don’t, I’ve seen it,” he instils. “Not the huffing, I know you love that without a shadow of a doubt, but I know how upsetting it can be when I give you shit, especially with all you’re doing, and you should be upset; I don’t know how I landed someone so willing to give me so many breaks—”

“I want you telling me when shit I say fucks you off, OK?" Sirius cuts in, but it's important that he hears it. "I don’t want you pretending you’re fine just to save face and avoid a squabble or I'll just keep saying shit that I’ve no idea bothers you; you’re supposed to kick my arse, remember? I can’t do better if you don’t tell me how to do it sometimes, can I?”

“You’re allowed to kick my mine, too,” Remus says. “Deal?”

Sirius leans in for another quick nose kiss. “Deal,” he echoes. “And you know I do; when it's called for, I do it, so this is simply reiteration time.”

“I’m OK with reiteration time,” Remus offers. “I think it’s good to touch base.”

Sirius sneaks his hands back around Remus’s waist, holding him close as he makes a faint noise. “Well, now I know why Hope shut the Doreen talking point down real quick the other day, hm,” he puts up.

“Mhm,” Remus echoes. “I don’t think she wanted to toss out bleak news with you sitting there; you might think of her badly and she is my mum, so you can probably imagine she’d feel terrible about that sort of thing.”

Sirius sighs long for that. “I want her to learn I am literally the best person to come to with gossip,” he extends.

“Oh, I’ve no doubt she will,” Remus says for it, quite candidly. “You’re very easy to talk to; I learned that, and she’ll know it by the end of the trip or you can eat my hat.”

“Then let's hope she knows it,” Sirius serves him.

Remus huffs a deep breath, pushes up the couch, and pauses hovered above him, his face inches from Sirius’s. “I know we can’t have sex yet, but,” he raises, pulling the right corner of his lower lip into his mouth, “can we kiss a bit?”

Sirius answers him with a kiss, feeling it a fine answer in itself. They do kiss quite a bit, but Sirius has to put a pause on that when things get a little too steamy for comfort with a bloke just coming off shrooms.

Remus chases after Sirius’s lips the moment he pulls back, breathing heavily in and out of his rouge, kiss-soaked lips, and while that is a lovely detail Sirius plans on putting in his pocket for a darker day, he cannot let himself get too out of hand. “Wait a little longer, OK?” he bids him.

Remus pushes a sigh out of his nose, retreats to his prior position, and crosses his arms back over Sirius’s chest, but he smiles quietly up at him so Sirius simply has to bask in their ability to compromise. “What’s tomorrow like for you?” Remus raises, moving right past the boner they can both feel between them.

Sirius gives a thoughtful hum, sticking his right arm behind his head while he leaves his left curled around the back of Remus’s waist. “I have to meet Andromeda at the venue to talk shop,” he puts up, “and then, I have a free few hours before Dora’s class so I think I’ll drop by the Flat early, get some James-time in, and I think Lily’ll be around, too.”

“Well, that’s a good day all around, I’d say,” Remus responds.

“Mhm,” Sirius accepts, smiling a bit. “And once you’re nearing the end of your shift, I might head on down to yours, grab a coffee from the best barista in town, drive said barista back home, and ravish him once we’re there; what do you say about that?”

Remus ducks his smile down behind his arms, but his eyes are doing it for him all the same. “I love that plan.”

“Thought you might,” Sirius returns, lifting his left hand and whisking it up through Remus’s hair.

Remus’s eyes fall shut as he kneads the back of his head against his hand and Sirius can’t help but study the face he feels so, so lucky to get to stare at as often as he does: from how long Remus’s eyelashes are and what Sirius could do with them if given the chance to play around with them a bit, to the darker shade of skin around Remus’s eyelids in comparison to the rest of his face, signs of lost sleep and trickster clusters taking their respective tolls, but they do have it looking like Remus has a faint layer of eye shadow on up top and that makes his eyes pop effortlessly as a result; with a dash of mascara, he'd look a right pretty little thing.

He gets caught up with the patch of curls that are Remus's fringe, hanging down lower and longer than the rest of his hair and often making him have to push them aside to see better, and while Sirius knows he’s due for an all-around trim any day now, but he hopes with just about all he has that Remus will agree to leave the top of his curly mop and that prize-winning fringe of his a little longer than the rest; those paired shorter sides and a nape trim would be a whole Look and one Sirius would be all about it, that's for sure.

Remus takes a gentle breath in and blinks his eyes open, pulling Sirius back into the room. “If I nap here, are you going to mind it?” he checks.

“Not even a little bit,” Sirius answers, reaching his right arm out and inching his mobile closer to him on the table to pull up his alarm app. “I may move you to bed in a little while so you don’t wake up with a crick in your neck, but for now, nap away.”

Remus lets his breath leave through his nose calmly, moves his arms down, and sneaks his hands underneath Sirius’s shoulders, squeezing him there. He leans his head to the side, leaving his right profile resting against his chest while Sirius leaves his mobile on the table again, an alarm set for an hour from then, and settles in himself, thinking he might squeeze a nap in, too.

-

Sirius wakes around eleven-ish and putters about Remus’s room to get to the dresser with a spring to his step, his nine-hour sleepfest giving him the opportunity to awaken feeling rejuvenated and, dare he say, jolly this fine Monday morning.

Remus looks much better than he did the evening prior in that he appears to be awake and alert from where he sits at the foot of the bed in his pyjama trousers and no shirt, holding his mobile in his right hand and looking quite attentive to whatever's on his screen.

He looks good, no doubt about that, but this won’t do; Sirius is feeling like a million pounds and just a tad more interested in something else. He pauses with his briefs on, wandering a little closer to Remus with his hands innocuously crossed behind his back, and winds his pelvis in a circle near his mobile, thinking it deserves Remus’s full attention.

“Oopsie,” he gives airily, orbiting his hips once more for effect.

Remus looks up at him at once, a half-smile now painted on, and the two of them stare at each other for, oh, three seconds or so before Remus tosses his mobile aside like he should and reaches out for Sirius’s waist, tugging him closer and dropping off the end of the bed to get to his knees in front of him. Sirius lulls his head back as Remus only inches his briefs down to start in on him, wasting no time there at all, the good lad, and clutches at the back of Remus’s head as he puts all his will into remaining upright through this.

That does work for a little bit, but Remus has clearly not forgotten how badly he wanted to get this done at separate points throughout the evening, and for that, he's having a grand old time down there, no regard for Sirius’s knees starting to buckle as he keeps to an immense pace, so what's Sirius to do but back up and grab the edge of Remus’s bureau for purchase? He needs to, nothing else for it, but apparently Remus also needs this dick for he simply scoots forward on his knees and pins Sirius right to it, leaving him clinging to the edge of it and lost to a world that has nothing in it but him thrusting up into Remus’s mouth while he swerves down on him like a star, throwing the whole gauntlet at him until Sirius comes with his toes curled and a shout pulled right from his chest.

Remus moves with it as Sirius rolls his hips through the last of his shudders, licks him clean once it's officially over, and for that little bout of hospitality alone, Sirius is already counting the seconds until he’ll be ready to reciprocate in kind, but Remus then goes and lifts to his feet, tugging Sirius’s briefs back up on his way, and leans against Sirius like he’s the one who just visited Nirvana and lived to tell the tale, not Sirius.

“That was so worth the wait?” he puts out, breathless, eyes shut, and wearing a keen smile on his lips to boot, and fuck it, Sirius doesn’t need to recover, he needs Remus.

Sirius swoops in to catch him by the lips, moves his hands around the back of him, and dips his fingers below the waistband of his flannels, catching a full feel of his arse because he should get to have that, says he. He walks Remus back toward the bed, drinking in the sounds coming up and out of his throat with every drag of his nails over Remus's skin and thinking himself lucky to get to swallow them. Remus’s breathing hitches as Sirius steers him down to a perch on the end of the bed, his chest heaves hard as Sirius tugs down on his pyjama trousers and leaves them hanging down around his ankles, his eyes cross over to dinner-plate status as Sirius shoves his knees apart and settles in between them, holding Remus's thighs in place so he’ll squirm like mad the whole time but won’t be able to do much about it, and descends on his cock like he’ll never get enough of it, and in a very real sense, he's not going to.

Remus prattles his hands along the stretch of bed on either side of his curved hips, pulling hard at the sheet and fighting against the hold on his thighs, but Sirius isn’t budging; the determined hold on him is pulling some delicious noises out of Remus every time he tries to get free and can't manage it. Remus's chest heaves hard he shuts his eyes tight, hanging his head back and making it harder for Sirius to see that face in ecstasy from down here, and even though he knows that image like the back of his hand, can see it perfectly all the same, he still runs his tongue along the vein underneath Remus’s cock at every drawback, celebrating a few beats later when he shudders his head forward after at least five repetitions of that motion and Sirius gets to see his ecstasy in real-time.

Remus screws one eye open about a minute on from there and Sirius pops his right brow up, waiting to see if he'll get the picture with that alone and just go for it, and Remus breathes out a stuttered breath before he lets go of the bedsheet on either side of him, sinks his hands into his hair, and Sirius is so thrilled about it that he lets go of Remus's thighs at once, fist-pumping the air with both his arms. Remus chokes on a laugh as he rocks up on Sirius’s mouth with free abandon, his hands splayed wide at the back of Sirius's head so they won’t snag on any one possible morning tangle, he can only assume, but the fact that Remus even still gives such a shit about his well-being while getting blown to smithereens is just sublime; Sirius loves this man more than he could love just about anything.

Remus putters out one word — Sirius — and repeats it the closer and closer he gets to release, but as if Sirius wouldn't light right up, curl his hands around the back of Remus’s hips to tug them in close for the finish, digging his fingernails into his skin for a little extra somethin' and spurring Remus to give way to leaning back on the bed as he comes down Sirius’s throat, everything from the waist down shaking while his hands only twitch as Sirius works over him until he's still.

Sirius sits up straight and bobs his shoulders as he swipes his right wrist past his mouth, smiling brightly as Remus drops out of his lean, lands flat on the bed with his knees left curled over the end of it, and drags his hands over his face, overcome and overdone by the looks of it. “You’re welcome,” he chimes.

That seems to remind Remus who he’s in the room with for he sits up quite quickly and scoots up close, reaching his right hand out for Sirius and pushing his fringe back; his signature study of Sirius features for even a single visible sign of a problem. “Good?” he asks softly.

“Great,” Sirius returns, putting a grin at the end of it for Remus to do what he wants with.

Giving him a kiss is what Remus wants to do with it, turns out. Sirius breathes in contentedly after it, pats Remus’s bare thighs once, and pushes to his feet, heading to the dresser to finish putting clothes on his body and calling this another successful detour under his belt. “Want a cup?” he bids, pulling the second drawer open to get at the shirts.

Remus gives a sudden, declining noise as he pulls his pyjama trousers off his legs in turn. “No no, I’ll make them,” he instils, lifting off the edge of the bed to budge in at the dresser to pull out a pair of briefs. “You made yesterday’s cups, it’s my turn.”

Sirius lifts his hands in surrender, fine with this compromise when he does need a good loo visit as is and Remus might as well get a head start on them. “Fine, you make 'em,” he chimes, pulling a white tee over his head.

“Wouldn’t mind if you pair that shirt up with my favourite of your jeans,” Remus flies out there, manoeuvring his tree branch legs into the leg holes of his briefs.

“Which ones?” Sirius asks, keen to find out.

“The black ones,” Remus says, pulling his briefs up around his waist and snapping the waistband for punctuation.

“I have a thousand pairs of black jeans, Remus,” Sirius sends him. “You’re going to have to be a touch more specific.”

Remus huffs. “You have four pairs, and two are still back at yours,” he corrects, shutting the second drawer to make way for the third pair and sifting around in there until he finds the ones he meant.

“Ooh, you like these?” Sirius asks, taking them off of Remus’s hands.

“They hug your arse like they were made to and give you legs for days,” Remus says of them, going to his bedroom door to pull his housecoat off the hook on the back of it.

“Give me legs for days?” Sirius puts up, perching his right leg on the edge of the bureau to pose with it. “Honey, I just have them.”

“Well, then, they sit so well on them that it sort of hurts, but it’s a good kind of hurt,” Remus clarifies, heading out of the room. “Which coffee would you like?”

“The new one I got,” Sirius sends after him, taking his right leg down to the floor and shimmying into the Good Jeans from there.

Sirius heads to the loo once dressed and takes care of that urge, heads for the island to wait for Remus to finish brewing his cup o’ joe, and has just enough time to finish his coffee at a semi-leisurely pace while Remus works on his own morning cup across the island from him, but once Sirius has finished the last drops of his, it really is that time.

“OK, gotta head out,” Sirius says, pushing off of his stool and heading around the island to rinse his mug. “Ring you a bit later, maybe for your break?”

Remus nods emphatically around a sip of tea, turning half-around in his seat so Sirius will see his face for it, which is pleasantly cheerful, he’s happy to note. Sirius leaves a kiss on Remus’s head on his way to grab his own sunglasses off of the island and heads for the entryway from there, stopping by the mat to foot on his loafers.

“Hold on,” Remus calls to him, and then he is very suddenly in the entryway too. “Sunscreen, sir.”

Sirius sighs a big ol’ good-natured huff and stands up straight with his arms extended on either side of him, prompting Remus to go get the bottle from the bathroom and bring it back over to him.

Remus squeezes a dollop into his left palm, sticks the bottle between his legs for keeping, and spreads the glob of sunscreen over both his palms before covering Sirius’s arms. He pulls the bottle out for one more quick squeeze, backs up to leave the bottle on the bathroom counter, and comes back in to paint a thin layer of sunscreen over his cheeks, and Sirius simply stands there, smiling big, as he waits for Remus to deem him suitable for the great outdoors.

“OK,” Remus says, sighing pleasantly through his nose before he leans in close.

What Sirius thinks is going to be a peck on the lips gets proven entirely false when Remus places his free hand on his waist and tugs him in a step or two, kissing him full and pulling a righteously stupefied noise from Sirius's throat. He gathers his wits enough to lift his right hand to the side of Remus’s jaw and milks as much of this pleasantly passionate goodbye-for-now as he can get, feeling like he must have done a few things right over the course of Shroom Day and this morning to win himself a quality g'bye like this.

“OK,” Remus sighs, muffled against Sirius’s lips before he pulls back an inch to speak, “you have to go.”

Sirius whinges for it, catching Remus’s lips once more and drinking in one last, exceptionally open-mouthed kiss. “OK — ok, ok, ok,” he repeats determinedly, reminding himself he loves his work and stepping back from Remus and more toward the door. “You’d better be ready to get wrecked come this evening; are we understood?”

“Completely,” Remus assures, crossing his arms at his middle with his right hip jutted out, maybe just to ruin Sirius just a little more before he’s off; hard to say. “Say hi to her for me.”

“Done,” Sirius assures, opening the door and slipping out of it.

He rides on down to the venue from Remus’s place feeling refreshed, feeling renewed, and forget feeling like it; he simply is fifteen million pounds today.

He parallel parks near to the venue, congratulating himself on performing a swift pull-in, and holds his helmet at his right hip as he strolls down the block toward the venue, choosing to bypass the front door and head in the back way when there are three construction men working on sanding off the front archway as is. He passes by at an easy clip, looks back when he thinks he feels a pair of lingering eyes on his back, and confirms that he’s getting checked the fuck out by who may well be the hottest of the three men at work, but the moment Sirius sees it happening is the very same moment he flashes right back to gripping the ledge of the bureau for dear life as Remus blew him to Nirvana and back, and the resulting spring to his step as he rounds the side of the venue to head down the alley beside it has little to do with being ogled by a strapping young lad, but it is nice to know the Good Jeans are working for him.

He lets himself in through the back door with his key, heads down the back hallway and up toward the front, taking in the high ceilings first because he loves those and next in the other construction workers sprinkled about the place, hammering, hauling, making the place look exactly the way they like, even if for right now it looks a right mess. Andromeda is up near the stage, nodding and conversing with their contractor, Mike, and spots Sirius lingering in the doorway and beams over at him, holding up a forefinger. Sirius nods, hangs back to watch the crew doing their jobs for a little bit, and soon Andromeda heads over to him, a certain sort of incredulous smile about her that Sirius knows he’s got on himself.

She heads up beside him, facing the room along with Sirius, and tosses her left arm over his shoulder, and Sirius looks at her sidelong, leaning into the half-hug. “Nuts, hm?” she raises, looking up and around with a whimsical air about her.

“It’s better than I even thought it would be, and I had high hopes,” he offers her candidly, nodding his head toward a specific image of a construction man bent over. “The plumber shot really adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the whole picture.”

Andromeda snorts, budging on Sirius's frame. “Alright, why don’t we go into my office and confab there?” she raises.

“Your office?” Sirius raises airily, turning around with her.

“Ours, ours,” she corrects, nodding as they head down the hall he came in through and toward said shared office. She shuts the door behind them, heads for her desk, and Sirius drags the chair from his own desk over to sit across from her, drops his helmet on the surface of the desk, and takes a seat, leaning back in the chair and propping his feet up by his helmet.

Andromeda barely bats an eye at all that and merely scoots her chair in, propping her elbows up on the surface of the desk and crisscrossing her hands together. “'K, so, before complete shoptalk, I wanted to get your thoughts on something,” she prefaces, appearing quite determined.

“Give it to me,” Sirius goads, taking his shades off and hanging them from the collar of his tee.

“I woke up at 2 a.m. with this overwhelming thought and had to jot down keywords in hopes of remembering it come this afternoon, but hilariously it’s just been thrumming in my head all morning so the notes wouldn’t have made a difference,” Andromeda tacks on.

“I’m shaking, would you let me off the hook here?” Sirius returns.

“How,” she starts, airy in tone, “do you feel about drag?”

“Never heard of it,” Sirius replies, deadpanning.

Andromeda snorts, taking the determined look off her face and replacing it with quiet mirth. “OK, I know, dumb fucking question,” she allows, “but, I really think this place could use a drag night or two; we have shows covered, but why stop there? Let’s do something with some of the free nights we'll have, what do you think?”

“Absolufuckinglutely,” Sirius returns. “I’m all in.”

“I knew you would be,” Andromeda champions, practically vibrating in her office chair. “And, since you know every gay in this city—”

“One or two,” Sirius puts in, faux-modestly.

“—And I know you can network your tail off, I'll expect great things from you,” Andromeda finishes.

Sirius nods for it. “This is actually stellar timing as Pride’s in, what, a week and few?” he raises. “I’m going to see a fuckload of mates, young and old, every direction I look in, and in between my own celebrations, I’ll see who I can round up.”

“I have every faith in you and this plan,” Andromeda says of it. “Now, you want the bad news?”

“Hit me,” Sirius delivers.

“Well, I just got word from Mike that the wiring in here is nowhere near up to code,” she puts up.

Sirius glances to the side and back at her in a beat. “Which we knew was going to happen when we scouted the place and subsequently fell in love despite the work that would need to be done.”

“Yes, I remember that, only thing is,” Andromeda keeps on, dragging the last word out in a bit of a melodic note, “it’s going to cost more than we thought it would.”

“Well, what are we talking here?” Sirius bids. Andromeda pulls a post-it note off of the stack of fifty highlighter orange coloured ones and jots the number down, pulling the post-it from the rest and reaching over the desk to stick it to the sole of Sirius’s right shoe.

Sirius leans in, grabs it off of his shoe, and drops his legs to the floor, turning the post-it around to face him and having a gander. “Andromeda,” he puts out, blinking across the desk at her. “How is this a problem?”

“What do you mean?” she raises. “It’s more than we budgeted for.”

“Well, I’m willing to shell out so the place doesn’t go up in flames one night, how about you?” Sirius returns.

“Well, I just wanted us on the same page before I gave Mike the go-ahead,” Andromeda implores.

“Give him the go-ahead,” Sirius instructs. “We have the money, we just need to move it around a little, and I made room for the idea that we’d need to fork over a little more when we’re sitting in a building that’s as ancient as it is; it’s all going to be swell.”

Andromeda breathes in once, relaxing a little more in her chair. “OK," she allows, nodding once. “I can’t argue with any of that.”

“I’m glad you figured that out sooner than later,” Sirius offers, tipping his head to her. “Was that all the bad news?”

Andromeda smiles tightly. “We might have to gut the stage.”

“No,” Sirius says at once, wounded.

“We might have to,” Andromeda instils, not happy to have to report it evidently, but that's not helping Sirius with his happiness.

“I will tie my body to that stage before I let you gut it,” he declares, pointing in the direction of it beyond the office walls. “It’s gorgeous.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be the one gutting it, but it’s an old foundation and I worry it won’t hold,” she explains. “The boys out there don’t even want to step on that thing, and that should tell you something.”

“We employed a bunch of cowards?” Sirius puts up.

“We don’t want our valued musicians and queens coming in here and immediately falling straight through the stage floor, now do we,” Andromeda says of it, switching angles. “Can you say, lawsuit?”

Sirius puts off some righteously peeved energy, sitting back in his seat with his arms crossed. “We’re not touching those ceilings,” he instils. “Especially not around the stage; that's fucking gorgeous.”

“Of course not,” Andromeda insists, but Sirius only squints at her over the desk. “Maybe a new paint job, but I agree, that entire stage area is one of our best assets and I will make sure that we keep the same vibe even as we replace the actual stage, alright? I won’t let it stick out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the place.”

“You’d better not,” Sirius caps it off.

Andromeda puts her hands together in humble thanks. “OK, let me go give Mike the go-ahead for the wiring, and I’ll see about a trajectory for the stage while I’m there,” she puts up, pushing out of her chair. “Have a coffee while I’m gone.”

Sirius looks over to the red Keurig in the corner and thinks that might just be the thing to restore his once blindingly good mood. He pushes off his chair and heads to the corner, pulling the drawer underneath the desk the machine is perched on and has a gander at the many packs of K-pods at his disposal, and blindly picks a mystery flavour out of the 'Donut Shop Favourites' box, happy to let his taste buds find out what he chose once the coffee is brewed and let it cure his bout of sorrow for that beaut of a stage.

Andromeda comes back into the room after Sirius is a good three-quarters of the way through his coffee, relays her findings, and Sirius bids an extra sorrowful goodbye to the stage that will reportedly begin to be taken apart on this coming Thursday.

From there, it’s another two hours worth of shoptalk wherein they discuss literal floor plans for the sound stage, the lounge, and the bar seating, further leads on decor possibilities and quotes for pricing, a tentative date for the end of the week to do a little more browsing, and from there, they move onto the long checklist that includes the proverbial floor plans regarding the arrays of insurance they’ll be needing to acquire, the liquor license, a provider and distributor for said liquor, and before long they’re coming to the end of their scheduled meeting, having doled out the list of responsibilities in half, with the understanding that Sirius will be taking two weeks off starting the tenth of July for sleepy Wales is calling to him stronger and stronger with each passing day.

“Are you excited?” Andromeda asks, shutting her books and pushing out of her seat.

Sirius puts out a guttural noise. “You’ve no idea,” he instils, pushing out of his chair and following her out of the office door.

Andromeda trills faintly. “I mean, I have some,” she gives mildly.

“Well, multiply that by a thousand and you’d be about there,” Sirius raises it, running the fingertips on his right hand over the wonderfully kitschy wallpaper in the hall they’re heading down. “Remus says hi, by the by.”

Andromeda places a hand over her heart and trills much less faintly, and that is a feat, seeing as they've stepped out into the main hall of the venue and the commotion would have been enough to drown her out. “I do love him so,” she relents.

“I know you do,” Sirius returns, pleased as all hell to keep on hearing that.

“How’s he doing?” she raises, her smile tapering off just a bit as she stops by the back door to linger a bit at the end of the hall with him.

“He’s good,” Sirius offers her. “Bit touch and go, but we had a great weekend for ourselves and this morning he seemed really, really happy; I almost didn’t come meet you because he was being so sweet and I didn’t want to leave.”

“I don’t know if I could even be fucked off about that omission,” Andromeda says of it.

Sirius grins for that. “We on for later?” he raises. “I was thinking six-ish?”

“Depends, are you going to be feeding her dinner while you’re at it?” Andromeda inquires, leaning back against the wall by the door.

“I can feed her dinner,” Sirius accepts, unfussed. “You can come, too; the usual suspects will be around there, I’m sure.”

“Will Remus be there?” Andromeda bids, pretending she’s not interested at all in the rest of them, but Sirius doesn’t even mind the jest if Remus is the highlight of it.

“Nah, he’s at work all evening,” he supplies, giving a frown for it. “Lily’ll be, though.”

“Then I’m there,” Andromeda puts up. “You still good to take over things around here tomorrow?

“More than,” Sirius returns, wanting to instil confidence that Andromeda can absolutely tackle the day of various familial appointments ahead of her. “I'll bet you my left arm they’d rather me stay far and away from all their work which I very plan to do. I’ll just set up shop in the office and be here in case anyone has any problems that need sorting; a strong, silent overlord, if you will.”

Andromeda bows her head to him. “Ring if you need me, yeah?”

“I won’t,” Sirius chimes, shouldering the back door open.

“Lock up behind you.”

“No.”

Sirius locks up behind him, pushes a hand up through his hair, and slips his mobile out of his back right pocket to have a gander at the time, pleased with it nearing half-three and tickled by the idea of a few hours to fuck around back the flat before he’s expected to entertain a variety of house guests. He heads round the side of the building, back down the alley, and over to Priscilla, hopping on and snapping his helmet onto his head. He switches the ignition on and kicks off of the sidewalk, rides out of his spot after a quick check over his shoulder to check if the coast is clear, and soars back to the flat; even with the loss of that stage, forget feeling like fifteen, he’s twenty-million pounds and it’s only three o’clock.

He pulls into his usual spot outside the flat, hops off of Priscilla with thanks spared for her continued service, and heads on into the lobby. No sounds of bagpipes greet him this time, a lovely bonus to his already certifiably great day so far. He gets to his landing and while there are still no bagpipe notes to be heard, there is, however, the undeniable cadence of a lass getting something done to her, and Sirius has been around long enough to be able to tell that’s Lily’s particular lilt. Sirius heads on into the flat with a smirk on and a creep to his steps, thinking he’ll just slip on into his room and blast something on his earbuds to get through the rest of the clear rendezvous happening here but once he shuts the front door, he notes that the two voices he’s now close enough to hear comingling at once are a tad too close to be coming from James’s room.

Sirius takes to a sprint down the hall and leaps into the living room. “A-ha!” he shotputs, pointing fiercely toward that couch where James is certainly sitting straight up in the middle spot with Lily perched right on his face, her dress pushed up around her waist and her hands gripping the back of that sturdy specimen of a couch for leverage, and this truly couldn’t get any better if Sirius prayed about it first.

Lily shrieks, James hollers, and Sirius covers the lower half of his face with immense glee. “Wow, Lily,” he observes, shimmying his shoulders in the doorway, “get it.”

Lily hops off of James at once, pulling her little black dress down and readjusting its white lace collar a little bit; it's actually an adorable dress. “You said you had a meeting,” James puts out, though Lily certainly nods her agreement to that.

“Meetings end, sweetie,” Sirius sends him jovially.

James shakes two fists in Sirius’s direction while Lily looks down and tries to do something with her tights as they’re halfway off her left leg and completely off her right one, but that’s all a bit moot at this point. “No no, don’t you worry,” Sirius insists, beaming brightly. “I get it, sometimes the call of desire is just too strong and you have to answer it no matter where you are, even if it means the couch.”

“I’m so sorry, Sirius,” Lily instils, her face otherwise covered as she peeks at him through her fingers.

“Literally, I don’t need it,” Sirius denies, waving her off. “So, here’s what I’m going to do: I’m never, ever going to let either of you forget this, but that’s more of an ongoing thing. For right now, I’m going to talk a little walk around the block, let you two finish up, and then I’ll come back and ruin your lives all over again, how’s that sound?”

And with that, Sirius heads right back down the hall. “Half hour at the least, if not more,” James calls after him.

“Oh alright, you raging bull,” Sirius calls back, letting himself out the front door.

He pulls his mobile out and descends the stairs at a near-jig, typing out a quick ‘please, for the love of jesus H. cunt, take your break and call me’ and firing it off to Remus. He slips his mobile back and gets down to the ground floor in no time at all, heading out the lobby door into the warm, sunny day he’s living in and feeling like a crisp thirty-mill, all things considered. He sticks his hands in his front pockets and makes a left, thinking he’ll head to the shop, drop in and visit Charlotte, and maybe wrangle himself a coffee out of it; not a bad plan.

'Kiss Me' is echoing out of his back right pocket by the time Sirius is getting to the end of his block, and that is some record timing in itself. “Oh, my Cunt, Remus—”

“Are you OK?”

Sirius blinks wildly at the aggressively apprehensive tone. “Oh, no no, everything is A-OK on my end, promise,” he insists. “The text was written with a tease in mind, like 'get your arse on break and call me ‘cause I got some fucking news for you.'”

Remus puts out a thankful breath. “My mind went to a thousand places and none of them good,” he sighs.

“Well, you can rest easy; everything is fine,” Sirius assures. "For us."

“What is it, then?” Remus comes back, sounding much more piqued, and he rightfully should.

“I,” Sirius starts valiantly, grinning ear to ear, “just walked on into the Flat and caught Lily sitting on James’s face, wait for it—” Sirius extends the moment Remus pulls in a righteous gasp, “—on the fucking couch. ”

Remus takes in another, though this time rather charmed gasp. “Those little shits,” he observes.

“Right?” Sirius sends him. “I’m a whole new being now; I’ve died, resurrected, and come back with a new perspective on life.”

“I’ve one, too, and I wasn’t even there for it,” Remus returns.

Sirius shoulders his mobile so he can clap his hands jovially. “This is such a good day, all around.”

“Yeah?” Remus bids. “How was the meeting?”

“Quite good,” Sirius nods. “The place looks a right mess, but there’s a lot of work to be done so I’m not letting it mare the vision I see for it down the line.”

“Good, don’t do that,” Remus agrees.

“Mhm, and the rewiring is going to be more than we initially thought it would but personally, I think we ought to shell out the cash now so we don’t regret it later if we cut corners, you know what I’m saying?” Sirius puts up.

“I know exactly what you’re saying,” Remus says of it.

“There is horrid news, though; I should warn you,” Sirius prefaces. “Are you sitting?”

“No, but go on,” Remus probes.

Sirius snorts for it. “We have to gut and replace the stage.”

Remus puts out a sort of soul-crushed noise that Sirius wholeheartedly agrees is what’s called for here. “But it’s gorgeous,” he muses.

“I know,” Sirius laments, “but Andromeda is of the opinion the lawsuits we could get from not restructuring it won’t be so gorgeous.”

Remus snorts before taking in a breath of air. “Well, I s'pose she’s got a point there.”

“Unfortunately, and I don’t like admitting that one bit.”

“No, I can’t imagine a world where you would.”

“On second thought, your world in particular might spin off its axis if I were to simply get over losing that beautiful specimen of a stage in a quick finger snap.”

“It’s like you know me.”

Sirius ducks his head with a big ol’ grin on, breathing out long and taking in a new breath, ready to croon. “'Never knew I could feel like this—'”

“Oh, you stop right there,” Remus instructs. “I am at work; there will be no sultry serenading from you while I can’t reasonably let it waft over my body, you hear me?”

“Hard not to,” Sirius returns, snickering at the end.

“You save that for tonight,” Remus tacks on.

“Saved twice, just in case,” Sirius raises it. “How’s work?”

“Good,” Remus offers. “Stan was just in and Agnes made his drink perfectly, and while I know it’s mostly due to her willingness to succeed, I certainly don’t mind knowing that I taught her how but if you go repeating this to anyone else, I’ll deny I ever said anything.”

“Secret’s safe with me,” Sirius assures, tapping the tip of his nose even though Remus won’t see it. “I’m glowing over the fact that you even had the thought, let alone shared it with me; I'm touched, even.”

“You’re about the only person who wouldn't kick my arse for it,” Remus reasons.

“Well, I think just about anyone who's had the pleasure of knowing you for longer than a week would thrum at the idea of you bragging even a little,” Sirius mentions, “but you’re right; I’m beside myself with glee, personally.”

“That’s about all the bragging you're going to get from me, I think," Remus trades him.

“I know and I’m working on it,” Sirius returns him. “I’ve yet to find you chanting, ‘I’m the best, I’m the best,' over and over again, and until that day comes, I will work tirelessly toward it.”

Remus puts out an amused breath. “That’ll be a long way away, won't it.”

“Mm, but I love a challenge,” Sirius maintains. “Did they let you off on break that easily?”

“Well, it’s Agnes and Elise on,” Remus puts in circumstantially. "Neither one was going to question me when I pleaded to step out for a few — and I think I might’ve looked a little spooked, if I’m honest.”

Sirius gives a sheepish smile. “I’m sorry I spooked you,” he forwards.

“It’s forgotten, what with the gift you gave me straight afterward,” Remus returns.

“It is a gift, isn’t it,” Sirius considers.

“Now, you will gloat, I’m sure of it,” Remus starts, his reasonable tone happening now, “but we’ve been there, too — thankfully, never quite that busy, but do try to back off of them once you’ve stuck it to them a little.”

Now it’s Sirius’s turn to gasp. “You’re going to let me stick it to them a little?” he raises, turning down the mall strip toward the shop.

I’m planning to, so by all means,” Remus forwards. “It’s only fair you get a round of your own in.”

Sirius sighs contentedly, pulling the front door open. “Stay with me, I’m just grabbing un café.”

Remus smirks a laugh. “I like it when you add a couple of French words at the end of a sentence; makes it fanciful, rather than the most ordinary thing ever like you getting coffee.”

Sirius heads past the tiny queue in front of the till and Charlotte at the helm to head up and around the hand-off station to get to the bar. “Now, when you say you like it, do you mean generally in this case or do you mean you like it in the crotchal region?”

Remus sighs. “Are you walking around the shop asking that question?”

“Mhm, I am,” Sirius assures, stepping up behind the counter and breezing on past David’s scoff.

“You’re impossible.”

“Weird word for 'charming,'” Sirius mentions, heading for the stacker of cups by the tills. “Gimme a minute?”

“Sure,” Remus allows, and Sirius shoulders his mobile, flashing Charlotte a grin.

“How’s the day?” he bids, plucking a large cold cup off of the stack.

Charlotte gives a rather non-committal gesture, but there sure are days like that 'round here. “Just stopping in for one?” she raises, marking a cup with her sharpie.

“And to see you,” Sirius raises it, strolling away from the tills. He slips in at bar two to queue up his shots while David’s across the aisle rinsing out a blender pitcher at cold bar, pulls the left-hand fridge open to dig out the milk, and realizes his mobile is gonna hit the counter or the floor if he keeps it shouldered, leaving it face-up on the counter instead.

He tosses his shots into the bottom of his cup and splashes a bit of milk in there before they'll spoil while Charlotte walks the cup she's finished marking over to stick it on the bar, garnering David to head on back to snatch it up and regard Sirius rather pointedly. “Would it be so difficult for you to get in the queue?” he sends him.

“Yeah, probably,” Sirius puts it, squirting his regular vast array of syrup pumps into his cup.

“You’re expected to wait just like everyone else,” David returns.

“Listen,” Sirius says, stopping with the iced coffee pitcher ready to pour, “nobody, and I mean nobody, gives a shit either way and it’s frankly a little embarrassing for you to be wandering around admitting that you haven’t gathered that yet.”

“This whole place is due for a complete overhaul,” David gives vehemently, making two very odd, chopping gestures with his arms.

“Alright, good luck,” Sirius trades him, pouring iced coffee to the near-top of his drink and leaving a smidge of room for a wee bit of ice.

He tops his drink off with a few cubes, pops a lid over the top, and swipes a straw, crossing back to hot bar to sneak his mobile off the counter and putting it back at his ear. “OK, I’m back.”

“Is that a short peek into what a typical shift is like with you two?” Remus raises.

“Oh, yeah,” Sirius assures, heading for the hall and stopping ahead of the posted schedules. “It’s that, over and over again, until we lock up.”

“Seems as if you can’t take more than a step without him lodging a complaint about it,” Remus says frankly. “Not a fan of that, if I may say.”

“You may scream it from the rooftops, Remus,” Sirius insists. “Anything for you to sympathize with my plight.”

David turns up at the door to the back hall, on the hunt for something surely. “Move,” he drags out.

“Eat my dick,” Sirius drags out, flipping the first schedule up to have a look at next week’s tacked behind it.

“Yeah, you’d love that,” David returns, heading down the hall to snatch up a new bottle of syrup.

Sirius might’ve responded if the week after next’s schedule didn’t have a big ol’ problem on it; he swivels on his heel, putting Will over at the back desk in his sights and shoulder-checking David on his way by for that retort. “Remus, I have to go.”

“Yeah,” Remus says softly. “Don’t stick around there too long.”

“I won’t,” Sirius instills.

“I love you,” Remus offers.

“Love you, too.” He ends the call, sticking his mobile back in his pocket and promptly calling down the hall. “Oi, what's gone on with the schedule?”

Will looks round at him, his hands hovered over the keyboard. “Elaborate."

“I can’t make it to that shift on the tenth,” Sirius sounds out, elaborating quite plainly, he thinks.

“I need you on the tenth,” Will returns.

“Well, I’m going to literally be on a train headed out of the city that day, as I already told you I would be, so I won’t be showing up for it,” Sirius presents.

“Oh, no no no,” Will says, determined. “You did not say the tenth.”

“I certainly did,” Sirius maintains. “I leave on the tenth, I’d have told you the tenth.”

“Mary booked the fourth to the ninth off months back, you said that was the last week you could work up to,” Will puts out, agonized. "I'm going to fucking need you for it, Sirius."

Sirius pushes a long, exhaustive breath out of his nose. “I’m willing to come in and work a shift or two earlier in the week if that'll help you out,” he puts up, “but the point is, I won’t be coming in on the tenth so you might want to get that covered.”

He heads back up the hall with that and only that, but he knows he can get away with it when the only reason he’s even still working presently is just a favour anyway. “You’re busting my fucking balls, Sirius,” Will calls after him.

“And that’s why I’m your favourite,” Sirius calls back, and he hadn’t timed it to be in earshot of David, it’s more a happy coincidence that he hears the claim and scoffs so hard it sounded like it hurt, but Sirius blows him a kiss, watching the colour drain from his face, pure disdain dripping from his features.

Oh, yeah. He’s even got Reg's disgust down pat.

Sirius heads out of the shop with a pointed, forced spring to his step, stands on the curb outside the shop for a moment gathering himself, and supremely wishes he’d kept Remus on the line. Nothing to do about that unfortunately, Remus is likely back up on the floor by now and since he agreed to make himself scarce from the flat for at least a half-hour, he’s a bit stuck.

He pops the paper off his straw on his right hip and sticks it in his drink, taking a good long first sip of heaven before he already has a budding idea for a time-waster. He pulls his mobile out, hits four on speed dial, and waits the two rings it takes for the line to pick up.

“Yo yo yiggity yo?”

“What the fuck, Pete?”

“I just rewatched Juno, ignore that.”

“Think I might,” Sirius returns. For now, at least. “You coming over?”

“Yeah, I’m a block away.”

Sirius’s eyebrows shoot to the top of his forehead. “You don’t wanna go up there,” he insists. “Stop this instant and head east.”

Peter’s voice comes back vaguely spooked. “What’s happening up there?”

“Relations,” Sirius forwards.

Peter sighs. “Sirius, when are relations not happening up there?”

Sirius takes in a quick breath. “Alright, and fair point,” he lets him have, “but they decided the couch was a prime spot to see to said relations, despite the fact that I was due to walk in at any given moment, so it’s all going down a tad out in the open and I worry about your innocence if you were to stroll in right about now.”

“The couch,” Peter raises, astonished. “You’re never going to let them live this down.”

“I certainly won’t,” Sirius echoes. “In any case, I told them I’d fuck off for a while and I’ve found myself at the shop, cold and alone.”

“Oh, hold on a few, you cheeseball,” Peter returns, and in moments the call drops and Sirius grins a bit, looking around the terrace as he steps up onto it.

He picks a free table to wait at and Peter wanders around the corner and up the mall strip about minutes later, heading up onto the terrace and plopping down in the open chair across from Sirius, and huffs a great sigh. “Hot as balls,” he greets.

“Is it?” Sirius raises.

“You just can never tell,” Peter returns, running his right hand up through his dampened hair.

“You’re catching sun,” Sirius observes, eyeing the rouge tint to Peter’s visage.

Peter nods. “I forgot about sunscreen,” he confesses, frowning.

“You need a Remus,” Sirius supplies. “He almost never lets me forget about it.”

“Well, tell him I’m single,” Peter offers, and Sirius coughs a laugh around a sip of coffee. “Speaking of, I hear he’s coming out of his cave soon.”

“Wednesday,” Sirius chimes, tipping his head toward him with it.

“How hard did you have to bargain for that?” Peter raises.

“Not that hard,” Sirius puts up. “I mean, OK, let's not pretend that it didn’t take James storming his flat and giving him a world of shit for Remus to start thinking about the message he was inadvertently sending you guys by keeping away, but once that happened, it wasn’t actually that difficult to broach the topic of his re-emergence since it was indeed a gigantic elephant in the room after that.”

Peter makes a wary sort of hum. “James said when Remus gets fucked off, his eyes go all narrow and all the air in the room leaves at once," he shares. "Is he exaggerating on that one, or?"

“Oh, instantly it goes,” Sirius echoes, giving a swift whooshing gesture with his right hand. “Good rule to live by: if that boy doesn’t have a set of dinner plates for eyes, he's probably just chilling and not feeling particularly passionate about anything going on at the moment, but when his eyes go all squinty, that’s when you’ve said something he fucking hated and he may just chomp at you for it.”

“Logged away for further use,” Peter notes.

Sirius trades him a brow pop while he goes for another sip off his rapidly dwindling coffee. “As far as I’m concerned, James got off easy,” he maintains, raising his free hand to count on his fingers. “There’s one of two things Remus will do when attacked: he’ll either start popping off, squaring up verbally, or he’ll absolutely have to leave the room to decompress, and he did do both those things that day; I mean, there was a second there where I was certain Remus was about to give him a stiff right hook but thankfully, he chose to kick James out rather than enter the ring.”

“I don’t ever want him to square up with me,” Peter says wholeheartedly. “If Remus looked at me the way James said he looked at him, I think I’d just lay down on the ground and play dead until he forgot I was ever there.”

Sirius snorts around his straw. “Safest route to take, honestly.”

“Funny he ended up with you,” Peter puts up, tossing a hand toward Sirius. “You take on Death Eyes when you’ve been wronged and now, there’s substantial proof going around that Remus has some powerful ones, too, so I'd wager a tag team like yours could kill a man in seconds.”

Sirius sits back easily in his chair, snickering. “Good thing we’re rarely ever fucked off about the same thing, mm?”

Peter nods severely. “A good balance,” he calls it.

“Too right it is,” Sirius echoes, lifting his coffee to cheers it.

They decide to give James and Lily a tad longer than previously stated and shoot the shit at the shop until the full hour mark, and from there, they start heading back toward the flat, ducking into the corner shop nearby and picking up a pack of spritzers to bring back with them. They ascend the stairs, head on in through the front door with a quick check-in for any precarious noises from the front hallway, but the voices that carry over from what seems like the kitchen sound rather conversational so chances are that the coast is clear. Sirius foots his shoes off on the mat rather carelessly, heads down the front hall, through the empty living room, and sweeps on through the far hall, passing the bathroom on the way to the kitchen.

“I’ve brought spritzers,” he sings, holding up the pack as he traipses into the room; James is taking what looks like a very long look at the contents of the fridge while Lily has gone and stolen Sirius’s spot by the window, but he is in too good a mood to be pressed about that, all in all.

Lily, however, beams at the announcement, putting out grabby hands toward him, and Sirius tears at the side of the package to manoeuvre a can out of it. “I bet you’re parched,” he gets her, holding it out for her with a flourish.

James sends out a scoffed bah! from half-inside the fridge while Lily merely snaps the can tab of her spritzer in reply, but Sirius notes a rather keen smile being half-hidden behind her can as she sips off it, and that, he’s proud to see on her, he has to admit.

“Would you like one, you big, strapping man, you?” Sirius offers, holding another can out in James’s direction.

“OK,” James prefaces, shutting the fridge door at once, “you don’t get to act all prim and proper when I could list off all the places you’ve gone to town in this very flat, and yes, I’d love one.”

“As if I give a shit where you two consummate,” Sirius returns, passing a spritzer along to James. “The point is, you’re a rich man in two senses; Lily, on the other hand, I’m just proud of.”

Peter looks around, spritzer-less and curious, and Sirius remedies the former by handing a can off to him. “What’d Lily do?” he raises, and Lily coughs a bit on a sip of spritzer.

“Nothing,” she interjects, waving him off right quick. “Nothing at all.”

Sirius shuts the rest of the pack away in the fridge for keeping fridge with a spur of gusto, snaps his own can open, and strolls up by the table, his left hand outstretched. “Madame, come with me,” he bids, and Lily quickly shuffles out of the window spot, openly quizzical. “There’s a tune just for this occasion and I haven’t played in quite some time; come, gather.”

Lily brightens twofold and takes his hand with a renewed fervour, practically gliding toward the hall with him. “Honestly, I’m surprised you didn’t just airlift that thing over to Remus’s place,” James calls to him.

“I’m ignoring that,” Sirius sings back, leading Lily down the hall and into the living room, piano-bound. They take up residence on the piano bench, where Sirius cracks his knuckles, waggles his fingers around to stretch them, and looks up and around, thinking something is indeed missing. “James, I need your vocals for this one and I must ask that you come drape yourself overtop this machine.”

Footsteps pound down the hall before James appears in the room in one moment and launches himself up onto the piano’s back in the next; he scuttles himself further over it, laying flat on his back and tossing a dainty hand over his forehead. “I’m ready,” he says, though to be fair, Sirius gathered that himself already.

Peter appears in the doorway to the living room with his and James’s spritzers in hand, and with that, Sirius clears his throat, shakes himself out before beginning a rendition of Fuck Her Gently, and it takes a whole five seconds before James comes alive with realization and adopts the sort of passion that Sirius is already putting into the performance, crooning out from atop the piano, and before long, the first chorus even the rest of them are joining in when it’s incredibly difficult not to partake.

The beat goes on like that; the other three tossing out requests for Sirius to quickly remember how to play, and although it’s been a little while since Sirius sat down and churned some practicing out, he’s grateful to see that some of this will always stick around.

A good time logged away into their impromptu session, Sirius takes a short break to wander out of the living room and into the kitchen, thinking he’ll sneak a quick puff. He checks the time on the gargantuan fish-shaped clock mounted on the wall above the fridge, notes it’s just past five, and thinks he’d better start thinking about what he’ll offer for dinner, but a quick puff first, he decides.

Lily takes over the piano in his absence and he’s out back by the time she’s settled on Soap&Skin’s 'Wonder', finding it a rather transient choice, indeed. He takes a seat at the head of the table and lights up, half-soaking in the rays of the sun beating down from above and half-listening to Lily’s playing, letting it lull him into a sort of entranced state. Her playing, however, stops quite abruptly not even halfway through the tune, and Sirius jerks with the abrupt pause, but the familiar jingle of Lily’s ringtone taking over where the piano left off rather puts the pause into perspective.

Sirius leans his head back in the chair, getting a half upside-down view of the living room window just as a flash of red brings Lily somewhat into the frame, and watches her heading for the coffee table where it likely got dropped earlier in favour of a good romp.

Sirius smirks, shaking his head as he levels it out, and takes an easy haul off of his smoke before Lily’s words echo back through the open window and bring him another pause. “OK, Elise?” she instils, Boss-mode activated. “I’ll come in, alright? Just keep an eye on him—”

And Sirius is bolting up out of his chair before he even needs the rest, ridding himself of his cigarette in no time. He wrenches the screen door open, leaps over the two steps down from the terrace, and takes to a sprint out of the kitchen. Lily is in perfect view from up the hall, standing rooted to the spot between the coffee table and couch, gaze vacant as she nods along, her mouth poised to speak, but the moment she either registers or hears Sirius coming, her gaze lifts and visible dread takes over her entire visage.

Sirius bounds around Peter to get to the piano, swiping his mobile off of the ledge and pressing the button on the side of it, and he doesn’t really even need to press the new text message waiting for him when the blurb on his lock screen says enough: Hgkrfhfka

“OK, perfect, thank you,” Lily's saying. “Soon, soon; I just have to drive over—”

“It’s a bad one,” Sirius puts out, pocketing his mobile and moving for Lily with his hand outstretched. “Here, let me—”

“No no, of course, see to them, but please check on him when you’re done, OK?” Lily rushes in. “Yes, there soon. Thank you—”

Sirius watches in abject horror as she presses her right thumb over her screen to drop the call. “Lily,” he snaps, waving the hand he would’ve held the mobile in if she’d passed it to him as bid. “Use your fucking eyes.”

“She’s got customers, Sirius, she can’t chit chat,” Lily returns, going for her purse sitting on the left-hand side of the couch.

Rather than blow the room apart from nuclear fission alone and waste precious time doing that, Sirius claps his hands twice, jolting the other three to stand to attention. “ Vite, vite,” he calls, his gaze on Lily as he sweeps his right arm toward the hall. “We need to go now; now, now—”

“Alright, Jesus,” Lily returns, shouldering her purse as she takes to a jog toward the hall.

“No, not ‘Jesus,’” Sirius sends out, right behind her with both Peter and James apparently bounding along at his ankles like a couple of piranhas looking for scraps. “He could be on the floor bleeding out by now—”

“Oh, she did not say that, Sirius,” Lily calls over her shoulder, skidding to a stop at the mat.

“Well, I wouldn’t know what she said, would I?” Sirius returns. “He sent me fucking gibberish; that means it’s bad if he can’t even type our code in—”

“Alright, everyone just chill out for a fucking second,” James puts in.

“And that's real easy for you to say, doink,” Sirius snaps, kicking his shoes upright so he won’t have to waste time tugging them on with his hands.

“She thinks he’s got food poisoning, Sirius,” Lily relays, putting her own shoes on. “He’s in back, checked out on the table, and very clearly unable to work, which is why I’m going in to cover him.”

“Well, fantastic, then,” Sirius puts out brightly, waiting with his loafers already on for Lily to either tie her fucking laces or be done with them entirely, “we can just coast on down to the shop, maybe stop for takeout on our way; Elise knows best.”

“Not everyone’s a cluster maestro, sweetie,” James extends, leaning past Sirius toward the mat. “Obviously we know it’s not food poisoning, but if he’s just doubled over in back how would she know what it is?”

“Just because she found him doubled over and dry-heaving does not mean he won’t go fucking apeshit the second it—” Sirius cuts off, watching unblinkingly as James tugs his own shoes on, “—what are you doing?”

James looks wildly bemused as he tugs his right shoe on his foot, while beside him, Peter’s hopping on his right foot in order to tug his left shoe on, and Sirius may just pass out from overwhelming exertion right here and now. “You said we had to go now, remember?” he raises, dragging the last word out so unnecessarily.

“I wasn’t talking to you?” Sirius sends him, reeling. “If Remus even catches a whiff of you two there, I’m the one in the doghouse; neither of you is tagging along—”

“Tough,” James cuts in, standing up straight, shoes on. “What are you supposed to do while Lily’s covering; carry him home princess-style?”

“I’ve done a fuck of a lot worse,” Sirius returns on a dime.

“You’re not going to be able to do that, Sirius,” Peter puts in, hopping on his right foot now. “Remember antimatter? You need us.”

Sirius shuts his eyes and brings his hands up through his hair, feeling stretched thin in two directions; he gives breathing a solid shot, but it’s as if there’s an hourglass painted directly on his eyelids, spewing out sand and highlighting just how little time he’s got to even log a debate about this. “We don’t have time,” he puts up, yanking the front door open and trudging through it. “Pick up the pace, asshats.”

Foot clomps echo behind him in the lobby as the other three file out. “We’re right behind you, dolt,” James returns.

He figures the boisterous stomping behind him means that they’re all keeping up with him, but he makes it down to the ground floor and cannot physically deal with what little information he has going into the fray; Sirius needs some context. He skids to a stop before the lobby door and swivels around, holding an expectant hand toward Lily and causing all three of them to skid to a sudden stop, barely avoiding a head-on collision.

“Oi, smart lad you are,” James puts out, deeply unimpressed.

Sirius presses the two-finger salute directly against James’s face with his free hand. “Give me your mobile,” he demands, waving his right hand at Lily.

She looks up from fishing in her purse. “What, why?” she bids, procuring her car keys.

“What, you think I have your shop’s number on speed dial?” Sirius raises. “I need to figure out whether or not he’s ramming his skull into a wall before I go apeshit.”

“Oh, here, then,” Lily returns, clicking to unlock her car before she gives it up. “Be nice to her; she has no idea the scope of this.”

“Well, she might as well learn,” Sirius returns, slamming the lobby door open as while thumbs through Lily’s recent calls. He hits the first on the list and puts the mobile to his ear, looking up just in time to catch James surge on ahead of them.

“I call shotgun,” he pronounces.

Sirius kicks his right leg out instinctively and clocks James square in the arse for that one. “Fucking brat,” he tosses after him.

James recovers without too much more than a few odd skips on his feet to avoid falling face-first onto the pavement and heads around the front of the car to open up the passenger door, completely undeterred. “You’re the brat,” he sends back, so fast it was all one word.

The other three pile into the car, Peter taking the spot behind Lily before Sirius can get to it, but he’s too busy hating on the dial tone ringing in his ear incessantly to give a shit about that, heading around the back of the car to slide in behind James’s seat, and finally, the dial tone cuts out so that a thoroughly flat voice can overtake it.

“Hello, this is Starbucks, how may I—”

“Stop that, it’s Sirius,” he cuts in, shutting his door.

“Oh, hey,” Elise says; simple, like it’s just a regular Monday.

“How’s he doing?” Sirius probes, beckoning his free hand for any and all information.

There’s a beat of silence, and then that silence gets drowned out by Lily roaring the car to life. “Um,” Elise puts up, her tone somewhere between indignant and bored out of her skull; not Sirius’s favourite blend. “Well, I really don’t know? Seeing as I’m up front with a queue of drinks.”

Sirius puts out a laugh that isn’t a laugh, lifts his free hand to bite down on the knuckle of his thumb, and shoves Lily's mobile between the two front seats, not caring which of them takes it off his hands so long as somebody does it soon. Lily sees it first, eyeing the move quizzically as she winds the steering wheel around to pull out of the spot she snagged out front, and Sirius takes his knuckle out from between his teeth. “She’s giving me ‘tude, so I’m going to need anyone else to take over or I will end her whole life,” he avows, not all that pressed about whether his voice carried or not.

Lily certainly seems to, however, for she shoots him a panicked look and quickly nabs the mobile back from him, sticking it against her left ear and shouldering it so she can continue pulling the car out. “Hey, Elise, it’s me again,” she imparts, pulling the car half-out of the spot while James hums pointedly, “just checking, how—”

“Don’t love this,” James mentions.

“Well, we can’t sit here chilling, James,” Sirius snips.

“Here, you want to do this?” Lily raises, nodding her head minutely toward the mobile.

James thinks about it for a beat, if that. “Yeah, here,” he agrees, reaching to sneak it out from between Lily’s shoulder and ear, freeing her attention up to successfully pull the car out onto the street and join in the passing traffic. “Hey, Elise? Yeah, she’s driving, so you get me now; can you poke your head in back and tell me how our boy’s doing? … right, well, that was kind … no, yeah, but when there isn’t one anymore, can you still go take a look? Literally begging you here.”

“Tell her to check if he’s got a boost beside him,” Sirius shoots up front.

“Seat belt, Sirius,” Peter chimes in.

Sirius huffs across the middle seat at him before feeling behind him for the belt, strapping in and flinging the sash behind his back so it won’t dig into him the whole way there and fuck him off any more than he already is. “Right, one more thing,” James tacks on. “When you do, can you see if he’s got one of those 5-hour energy boosts near or around him? … Not even slightly, no ... thanks, text Lily when you know.”

James ends the call and holds the mobile out in offering, to which Lily nods toward her lap. “Could that girl sound less enthused?” he raises, setting Lily’s mobile where directed.

Lily clicks her tongue, stopping at the first of too many intersections between him and Remus. “She’s stuck up front—”

“Don’t care," Sirius rings out. “James, you've gotta give me something.”

“She hasn’t been in back since the last call so she doesn’t know how he's doing,” James relays, leaning around the back of his chair to see Sirius. “Still thinks he ate something off; gave him a bucket and some water—”

“Oh, well, let’s all relax, then; Elise gave him some water so Remus’ll be fine,” Sirius puts up jovially. “Nevermind that while she’s up front, he could be pulling clumps of his hair out as we speak—”

“He does that?” James cuts in, switching to looking in his side-view mirror to meet Sirius’s eye.

Sirius sighs out loud for it. “He gets bitey, so it isn’t all that strange to imagine him ripping out clumps of hair—”

“Bitey?” James cuts in, appalled.

“He’s not going to bite you, ya dunce,” Sirius sends him. “He’ll take a chunk out of himself before he starts teething on you, which is exactly my issue: if he sends me gibberish, it means he can’t type properly which means it’s over a five easily, and if it pushes near a ten then Remus could have flipped the table onto his skull while she's—”

“OK, no,” Lily puts out. “We’re not discussing that.”

“Things are real whether you discuss them or not, Lily,” Sirius returns her. “The only hope is that it’s not a fucking ten, but even if it isn’t, he’s still probably doing some damage, and he’s back there, alone, without anyone to stop him if he tries something so if you could drive even at all faster, I’d bake you a fucking cake—”

“I’d love to if this idiot would roll the fuck up,” Lily rings out, flying her left hand up and toward the car in front of them.

Sirius, though fucked off beyond a shadow of a doubt, feels a touch lighter seeing the open fury inside this car. “You’d better be taking the fast way,” he mentions, settling down in his seat and crossing his arms over his chest.

“No, I thought we’d take the scenic route,” Lily retorts.

Sirius snorts despite himself and leans his head back against the headrest, shutting his eyes and thinking about keeping them that way until they’re there, but not even ten seconds later, he’s putting out a throaty gasp, eyelids snapping right back open. “Fuck,” he puts out, shifting to fish his mobile out of his back right pocket, “fuck, fuck, fuck—”

“Fuck what?” James puts up, turning in his seat to stare back at him expectantly.

“Dora's class,” Sirius puts out woefully, dialling for Andromeda. “I keep postponing on her and now I’m going to have to do it again.”

“Err, you postponed once,” James amends. “Twice, if we count today.”

I am,” Sirius shoots him, reaching around to flick James’s forehead with his free hand while dialling for Andromeda. “He can’t be alone for anything above a six; I don’t like the way he thinks when it's that high and I doubt any of you sods know what you’re getting into going in there, so I have to cancel; I can’t be in two places at once.”

“Well, there’s nothing to be done about it, then,” Lily assures from up front. “Things come up, Sirius; she’ll just be twice as happy to see you next time.”

Sirius slides down low in his seat, stewing as he waits for the dial tone again, and after tonight, he thinks he might need a break from long, ominous dial tones. “Hey, hey,” Andromeda greets him, third ring.

“What’s up?” Sirius asks, not liking the laborious quality to her voice.

“I was just about to ring you,” she maintains. “I hate doing this, I really do, but Dora got into a fight in gym class today so that means she’s in detention for a week and—”

“What?” Sirius returns at once. “Was it Christine? She’s been asking for a good sock if you ask me.”

Andromeda puts out a quick sigh. “Give me a second,” he hisses, clearly not wanting to be heard, wherever she is. Sirius gives her that second since he’s got altogether too many free ones to work with at the moment, hearing the echo of a door shutting in the background. “That fucking girl has been pecking at Dora every chance she gets, and the moment Dora snaps and pounces, oh oh oh, all of a sudden we’re doling out detentions.”

Sirius huffs, shaking his head with a half-smile on. “Those bitches, the year's practically out.”

“Mhm,” Andromeda returns melodically. “Her principal’s lucky she called Ted first or else I’d be in detention; feel me?”

“Felt,” Sirius assures. “Are you going to talk to the girl’s parents? Takes two to tango.”

“Ted is handling that, seeing as I’m a kettle about to pop off,” Andromeda returns.

“Good call,” Sirius forwards. “And, if that doesn’t work, you can be plan B.”

“Mhm, I am,” Andromeda tacks on.

“And I do want you to know, I didn’t suggest she pounce,” Sirius puts out there. “I told her to ignore the jabs altogether or have a few choice responses ready to go, decimate her that way; none of them graphic or above her grade level, might I add.”

Andromeda clicks her tongue. “I didn’t think you were coaching her on her right hook, Sirius, but she can’t be throwing down in class so I’m in a bind here,” she raises plainly. “She can’t make it tonight.”

A ping sounds from Lily’s lap and every head in the car perks up at once, all eyes on her as she reaches down and checks it. “There’s a boost on the table,” she declares, and James lets out a whoop for Sirius, who’s a bit busy here though certainly breathing more easily. “He’s not responding to her at all, though.”

Owing to the fact that Sirius is supremely distracted, Andromeda seems to taken his silence as a sleight of hand. “I’ll let her practice a little later in the week once it’s blown over a bit,” she offers, “but we do have to put the foot down here and this is just about the only thing she’ll actually miss.”

“No no, I get it,” Sirius returns, going for Self-Sacrificing Would-Be Uncle tonally. “You’re the 'rents, that's your call.”

“Thanks,” Andromeda sighs. “Maybe next week, OK? We’ll see if she hasn’t clobbered anyone else by then.”

“We’ll hope it’s out of her system,” Sirius echoes. “You have a good one.”

He presses to end the call, tosses his mobile on the seat in between him and Peter, and sits up straight, patting Lily’s left shoulder for more as the car idles at a red. “He won’t answer her, he hasn’t touched his water, and he’s just rocking back and forth," she passes back. "He’s just, checked out on the table in back.”

“Like, on it?” Peter raises.

Lily clicks her tongue the same moment Sirius does. “I would think it's probably more like this,” she offers, leaning on the wheel and putting her head on her arms for a moment to illustrate deep and utter peril before she sits up straight again, per James's hum of request.

“Does she still think it’s food poisoning?” Sirius raises sweetly.

“She didn’t say,” Lily returns politely.

“She wouldn't if it was a ten,” Peter puts in. “Believe me, she’d hear him.”

“Well, then, good,” Lily says of it. “Point is, he can’t verbalize; so in a way, that has to be a good thing, right?”

“It’s at least an eight,” Sirius grins. “Good, I love cleaning up his blood droplets.”

“OK, you know what?” Lily snaps, finding Sirius in her side-view mirror. “I’m panicked enough as is so maybe you could leave the imageries out of it, if you please.”

“Well, I’m glad to see we’re finally taking this seriously,” Sirius claps back.

Oi,” James puts out. “Remus would not be cool with all this fighting about him, I’ll just say that.”

“He’s right,” Peter whispers. “His ears are probably ringing.”

“I bet they are, Pete,” Sirius chimes jovially. “I bet they are.”

James swivels around in his seat. “What happened with Dora?” he bids, a clear subject change, but one Sirius can accept.

He drums his feet into the floor of the car for a little added zest. “She clobbered a girl in class who hasn't stopped goading her for ages, the absolute legend, so she wasn’t going to be coming over anyway,” he presents.

James and Peter take over for him, pounding out twin drum rolls in celebration, and while Lily sure shakes her head with a sigh, even she can’t hide her mirth well at all just now. “A perfect solution,” James deems it, sitting back in his seat with his arms behind his head.

Sirius clears his throat, unbuckles his seat belt, and crawls up in between James and Lily’s seats. “Excuse you,” Lily observes.

Sirius huffs directly in her ear as he slaps the radio dial on and fiddles with the stations. “If I don’t get something playing in here, I’m going to go apeshit before this ride's over,” he maintains, switching in between stations with just white noise and songs he’d rather not hear, stops at a station playing 'Sweet Child of Mine' and promptly gags before moving on, stopping when he hears the punchy bassline of 'Barracuda' and wholeheartedly agrees with the rest of the passengers urges to keep it on.

Sirius settles back into his seat, buckles in again, and lets himself have this time for himself, reminding himself of what he has. He’s fit, he’s healthy, he’s in his prime, he’s happy most days, he’s currently surrounded by his mates and directly en route to rescue his boyfriend from the clutches of a cluster with 'Barracuda' lighting the way there, and overall, even as horrified as he is without any chance to speak to Remus, there’s something lovely about all of this, if he pulls himself out for long enough to appreciate it.

James plays DJ the rest of the way there, answering to the cheers or boos from the backseat depending on what tune comes on, and Sirius is about ready to climb straight out of his window when the car gets within sight of the shop. He manages to wait until Lily pulls into the parking lot, but there he unbuckles his seat belt at once, flinging it aside. “Let me out here,” he bids.

“I’m just going to park,” Lily puts up, wheeling around the far side of the parking lot for a free spot.

Sirius huffs and reaches for the door handle, set on rolling out if he has to, but the door won’t budge. “Did you child-lock me in here?” he demands, astounded.

“I may have,” Lily returns, calm as a creek.

Sirius takes to punching his door on a steady rhythm, ignoring the cease and desist calls from up front, and finally, right when he’s out of steam, Lily pulls into a free spot, parks, and pulls her keys out of the ignition, clicking to unlock the backseat doors. Sirius flings his open, slams it shut after him, and flips Lily off over the roof of the car before taking to a sprint, but he stops short when she shouts his name in a rather blood-curdling way as a car passes in front of him.

“What?” Sirius returns, swivelling around to find Lily, James, and Peter frozen in horror. “It was nowhere near me.”

James shoots forward, grabbing Sirius by the left bicep. “You’re no use to Remus dead,” he insists, escorting Sirius across the parking lot with Lily and Peter quickly at their heels.

There’s a group of five milling about in front of the shop's door and Sirius scoffs wildly as he lugs James onto the sidewalk. “What do you think this is?” he puts up, waving them off. “Away, away.”

They part like the Red Sea, or more like they jump aside just to get away from the bloke barking at them, but either way, Sirius’s path is cleared so his method worked swimmingly and that’s all that matters.

"Sirius," Lily chides under her breath, but he throws the shop door, shakes James's arm off, and bolts inside, so focused on getting to that back room that he doesn’t realize the café has a rather mellow atmosphere to it until he gets up behind the counter and Elise is nowhere to be seen. He breathes an iota easier just knowing someone’s back there with him, takes a quick right into the back hall, but has to skid to a stop to avoid crashing into Elise, and really, the back and forth, the stopping and starting, it’s all a bit much now.

Elise looks around at their parade. “It’s good you brought reinforcements,” she says decidedly. "I think he’s actually having a mental break."

Sirius breathes in once, places his hands on Elise’s shoulders, and scoots her aside four steps. “Thanks, doctor, your skill is unparalleled,” he returns, whipping down the hall.

“I’ll be right up, Elise,” Lily calls, just behind him by the sounds of it.

Sirius stops short when he sees him, indeed checked out against the tiny, circular table while dragging his forehead back and forth over the surface of it so hard it’s making awful streaking noises, and crosses the room in a flash, coming up behind him.

“See? He’s lost it,” Elise puts up, because she's in here, too, apparently.

“Someone get her out of here?” Sirius demands, not needing any more of that read of the situation. He reaches down, sneaks his arms around Remus’s front, and pulls back on him, aiming to at least get him sitting up, give his poor forehead a break. “Up; up, up, u—”

Remus flinches forward, attempting to fling Sirius's arms back and away from him, and his heart breaks a bit, seeing that, but he has to keep trying.

Next try, he crouches down to his knees and slides in between the nearly non-existent space between Remus and the table, angles his weight into pushing the chair back from it, and it’s slow going at first, but Sirius pushes harder and the chair skids across the floor, scraping along the ground and causing Remus to whimper loudly, and Sirius is sorry for that, he is, but Remus’s forehead is going to connect with the table’s edge and he’s a bit busy putting his attentions toward cushioning it with his hands before it hits.

Sirius breathes in and out shakily, but when he speaks, he makes sure it sounds controlled. “It’s me,” he whispers, so low he’s not even sure Remus can hear it around the chaos rattling in his skull, but maybe this is more for him than Remus. “It’s just me.”

He inches his right palm out from underneath Remus’s forehead, moving it behind his back to shove at the table and get it out of reach, vaguely hearing water spilling behind him, but that’s hardly a matter now when every other morsel of Sirius’s focus is going toward Remus.

He slides in just in front of his curled stature, rises to his knees to offer a more helpful height for Remus, and reaches his arms around Remus’s back, pushing his weight forward so Remus'll lean on him instead. From there, he just holds him, one hand straight across Remus’s back, the other cupped at the back of his head, and Remus takes to rocking them back and forth, digging his forehead into the right crook of Sirius’s neck, but flesh is better than solid wood so for Remus, Sirius rocks with it, and for himself, he leaves at least five kisses as close as he can get his lips to Remus’s left temple in quick succession, so grateful; so, so grateful it’s not a ten.

Remus takes a resounding breath in through his nose that gets cut short the way they tend to in the middle of an attack this bad, but he got some air in there and whether Remus heard him or simply caught a whiff of his hair and that was enough to know it’s him, Sirius doesn’t care. He likes that Remus isn’t fighting him anymore, even if he’s more or less being used as a surface for Remus to rush the side of his skull against, even if his hands are wrapped like a vice grip at the front of Sirius's shirt; it’s all fine. At least he's useful.

Remus chokes out a sob and pulls Sirius back into the immediacy of it all, aiming to curb him from driving his head into the line of Sirius’s shoulder with even more intent, but the issue isn't even that so much, it's the location they're in for all this; Remus can run his head against Sirius's frame to his heart's content, within reason, but it shouldn't be here. Remus shouldn't be here.

Sirius dips his head down, pressing a fast kiss to the top of Remus's head as a means to communicate that he'll get him out of here, and looks to the others, looks to them for help, understanding — hell, he’d even take pity right about now, but he gets caught up by the group shot at the entrance of the room, scanning through all four of them: James first, and oh — well, maybe he gets it now, if his wooden expression says anything about it, and it sure takes a lot to render James Potter's visage completely unemotive; Peter, not quite as stony, but he is the second most familiar to this in the whole room so it's really just the frown lines on his forehead that give away his desolation; Lily's got watery-eyes and that mothering look about her, and Sirius can tell it’s killing her to stay put in one place and not run to Remus; Elise — and that one’s the true kicker — has her gaze fixed on the floor, lips twisted up in a pointed manner, eyebrows high on her forehead, and hands placed toward the back of her hips, and for a beat, he figures her behaviour is mere discomfort at the tenacious scenario, but then he replays the last minute or so and one thing — namely his own behaviour — stands out.

It’s not that Sirius doesn’t know that Remus aims to keep his personal life separate from his work life; he’s long since figured that out, caught the clues a long while back, but it’s another thing entirely, seeing the dumbfounded expression of someone looking away from a delicate display, but someone who Remus spends a great deal of time with in a given work week and evidently didn’t know Sirius was anything more than a standard pal until here and now.

Sirius looks right, mostly to look somewhere else, feeling warm fill his cheeks and not in a good way, but then he catches sight of the water glass sitting upended on the table, now seeming a lot closer to Remus than it did a few moments ago, and his heart rate spikes to a revolting speed. He drops his right hand from the back of Remus’s head, reaches back toward it, and snatches the heavy glass off of the table in a snap, holding it up and out with a visible shake to his wrist.

“Someone get this away from him,” he rings out, jolting every body in the room.

Peter surges forward, grappling the water glass out of Sirius’s grip and walking it far and away from Remus’s reach to leave it over on Lily’s desk, wherein Elise puts out an odd sort of hum. “I thought he might want some,” she puts up, bone dry from where she’s still fucking lingering in here, and truly, up until this very hour, Sirius rather liked the girl’s register, found it comical as much as her wit tended to be, but she could do with losing the monotone right about now. “He was dry-heaving... so.”

“Yeah, nice idea and all, only I’ll ask you to put the water in literally any of the hundred plastic cups we have right up front the next time this happens,” Sirius rattles off.

“Next time?” Elise returns, and oh, looks like she can emote.

“OK,” Lily says quickly, tapping Elise’s right arm, “no one’s up front, are they? Go on, I’ll be right up.”

Elise shoots Sirius one hell of a Look before she goes on up front, but Sirius’s own is murderous in and of itself. “You didn’t have to yell at her,” Lily tosses at him, the moment she's gone.

“If that’s what you think me yelling is, then I wish I had,” Sirius returns her.

“She was just trying to help, Sirius,” Lily stresses.

“OK, that glass?” Sirius raises, pointing to it. “Is like putting a loaded gun right beside him, so excuse the fuck out of me if I’m pressed about it; I don’t fucking care if she meant well with it, we’re lucky he didn't open his eyes enough to have fucking seen it, and while we’re at it, why the fuck is she so surprised by this? He’s had them here before.”

“He worked straight through his last one,” Lily returns. "It wasn't anything like this, and she wasn’t even on that day; Agnes was—”

“Well, you’d do well to spread the fucking word, then,” Sirius snaps. “No glass, anywhere near him, got it?”

“OK, he’s fucking seizing, you guys,” James puts up, his gaze still fixed on Remus. "Anyone want to do something about it?”

“Like what?” Sirius sends him. "What haven't I thought of yet, sweetie?"

“I don’t know, Cluster King,” James returns him, “the hospital seems like a good route to take.”

Sirius pushes out a laugh that isn’t one. “You know we’re not doing that.”

James scoffs loudly. “OK, we get it, you hate hospitals now, but he’s not completely uncontrollable this time,” he returns, flying a hand toward Remus wholeheartedly attempting to fuse his forehead with Sirius’s right shoulder.

“They won’t even get around to him until three in the morning, he’ll be gawked at in the waiting room for hours before they finally deem him necessary to have a look at, and by then, this thing will have already been long over,” Sirius maintains. “He took the boost already; it’s nothing but a waiting game now and since I highly doubt Miss Snark Factor up there took a log of when this started, we're just going to have to get him out of here and wait it out.”

Lily sighs grand. “She said she came back from her break, he went on his, and when he didn’t come up front after he was due back, she went to check on him and this is what she found.”

“Right, food poisoning,” Sirius nods. “You know how laxed they are about breaks around here; it could have started after she took her half, drove halfway across the city to get pho, and came back after an hour while he was stuck up front, unable to get back here—”

“At five o'clock, Sirius?” Lily raises, unconvinced. “No one here is taking their half at five, and they’re not taking hour-long breaks.”

“And why in the fuck would she tell her boss that, hm?” Sirius raises. “You're the man to them, Lily; she’s not coughing up the full story to you and now, we've nothing but a blank page with him; we're in here blind.”

Lily takes on the heat of a thousand suns as she takes in a long breath through her nose. “If either of them is taking hour-long breaks, I will kill the both of them,” she manifests, circling a hand toward the front store and back toward Remus.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Sirius raises. “Boss Lily needs to take a hike; Remus would never—”

“What I don’t understand,” James cuts in loudly, “is how he wound up like this, the day after you fed him shrooms for this very thing.”

Sirius thinks he might explode here and now, but he feels Remus take in a gargantuan breath against him and instinctively holds him tighter. “It’s not a one-and-done,” Peter puts in, moving to stand on the other side of Remus’s chair. “We told you, it’ll take a dosing schedule before it’ll do much.”

“Exactly, thank you, Pete,” Sirius accepts, loving that someone here fucking listens when he speaks, but he struggles to say more on it clearly while fighting to keep a hold on Remus as he thrashes against him. “It’s not a miracle fix; we’re not even going to know if it’s working until it does—”

“Well, this is just fucking ridiculous,” James shouts, kicking a box nearby him.

Remus yanks himself loose from Sirius’s grasp, lifting his right leg and sending the table backward until it crashes into the wall across the room. “Shut the fuck up?” he hollers, and it takes everything Sirius has not to laugh, not because this is funny, but because Remus is genuinely the funniest person he’s ever been blessed to meet. “Fuck all of you.”

And suddenly Sirius isn’t laughing at all anymore, not when Remus has lumped him in with the clown posse up in here, and it makes matters so much worse when Remus jumps to his feet, his good eye barely open while he kicks back and sends his chair flying the other direction, and Sirius has to dive for him to keep him from hulking out further. “No, no,” he whispers, grabbing hold of Remus's forearms. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry; we’ll go, OK?”

Remus isn’t having any of it. He wrenches out of Sirius’s immediate reach, steps back fast, and bumps right into Peter, who grabs hold of him behind and promptly freezes, his arms tightly crossed around Remus’s waist while the lad writhes around, calling for freedom. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Peter repeats, at least until Remus leans all the way forward and poor Pete is lifted clear off the ground, and then it takes the combined help of James, Lily, and Sirius to get Peter back down to the ground and Remus even halfway still.

“Everyone whisper,” Sirius hisses, bringing Remus down to his knees with some prime effort. “We have to get him out of here, now.”

“OK, OK, um,” Peter prattles, voice way down low over behind Remus's back, “he can’t go back through the café like this.”

“Oh, you think?” Sirius poses, hunkering Remus’s right side down in place.

“I’ll go bring the car round back?” Lily offers, already booking it up front, and really, that's a fine plan indeed.

“And then there were four,” James breathes, hunkered down on Remus's left. Sirius just sighs, but he would really rather be anywhere else; bottom of a lake, working a double with David, stuck second place in the queue behind somebody doing six years' worth of banking, literally any other scenario would be preferable to this. “I really just love that you thought you could get him home all your own; you’re so cute.”

Sirius can’t whack James over the head if he wants to keep Remus’s right side down and that is a travesty. “Stop talking,” he orders.

Lily’s quick with the car, Sirius will give her that much; he hears a try at the back door much sooner than he was even hoping for, but the door won’t give seeing as the metal bar that locks it in place won’t allow for the door to budge from the outside. Peter, thankfully, heads over to it when it'd be harder for the other two to abandon post, lifting the bar and leaning it against the wall to the right of the door, but the thing slides off the wall, clatters loudly on the floor, and Sirius grimaces for that first and Remus’s prompt holler second.

“We’re almost out, I promise,” he whispers, knowing he is in so much trouble the moment Remus can effectively communicate again, but he forgets about that right quick for Peter goes to try and righten the bar, and that just sends Sirius into mild to medium hysterics, completely unable to avoid smirking. “Leave it, you donk; it's done now.”

Peter does as told, pushing the back door open, and Lily rushes in as she removes her car key from the whack load of keys on her key ring, but the heavyweight known as the back door swings shut after her and the slam of it garners Sirius to grimace again, swearing he in some capacity can feel what Remus does, but he will likely never repeat that to Remus if he wants to keep having sex regularly.

“Alright, Pete," James whispers, nodding to Remus. “Take over for me.”

“Are we sure we want to do that?” Peter whispers back.

“Someone has to drive, don’t they?” James puts up.

Peter sees his point loud and clear, shuffling over to take James’s post as Remus's left-hand guide while James takes Lily’s key off her hands. “Drive safe,” she instils, leaving James one look of warning before she addresses the group at large. "I’ll see about coverage but at this point, I think I’ll be here until the end and I’ll find you after.”

She steps in, lifts onto the tips of her toes, and leaves a kiss on both Sirius and Remus’s foreheads, the latter of which she stares at for a beat or two longer before she dips back up front for good, wherein James stalks toward the back door and veritably kicks it open, jolting both Sirius and Peter. “Cool it, Rambo,” Sirius sends after him.

“Oh, would you relax?” James tosses him over his shoulder. “I’ve always wanted to do it and when am I going to get the chance to again, mm?”

Sirius sends him an agonized noise, but in all reality, it’s just not that effective when he’s whispering it. He pushes for the car, Remus tight in his grasp with Peter helping as much as the little guy can, but it does help to have someone with him to help manoeuvre Remus into the backseat without bonking anything of his. Sirius slides in on this side of the car while Peter rounds the back of it and gets in on the other side, but he has to curl Remus’s tree branch legs in and bend his knees in toward his chest in order to fit both himself and Remus's lower half into the backseat, but fetal-Remus is just how it has to be. Sirius, on the other hand, happily lowers Remus’s head to his lap, tousling his hair with his right hand since it’s there and pressing the fingers on his left hand in a rhythmic circle at Remus’s left temple and his thumb over the lid of his problem eye, giving him the pressure he needs to be kept at bay.

And now, since James has started the car and they’re on their way, Sirius can actually spare a thought toward this image from a bird’s eye view, and, if he doesn’t include Remus’s sharp breathing accompanying their every block back to his building, he can find it within himself to admit that Remus’s lanky body curled up and draped over two of them in the back of Lily’s sensible but teeny-tiny Prius is just divine; even though it does take work to find the light, it’s worth it to try and single even some of it out.

Getting Remus into the backseat was, all around, a weirdly easier task than getting him out of it. Sirius has to slide out first, taking care of Remus’s head so it won’t hit the seat underneath it, and then he has to wind his arms underneath Remus’s shoulders to pull his first half out of the car while Peter pushes forward on his lower half. “James,” Sirius hisses, “come hold his middle.”

James heads around the front of the car, slips in between Sirius and the open doorway, and hovers his hands underneath Remus’s lower back with a theatrical flourish, and you know what, that’s fine with Sirius; it’s a little funny and he needs some of that.

Thankfully James’s exceptionally ready hands weren’t just for show for he gets a good grip underneath Remus's hips, which leaves both he and Sirius with the task of inching Remus further out of the car and allowing Peter to crawl back the opposite way, pop out onto the street, and run around the back of the car to help carry Remus’s legs out of there and up the front path; the whole thing seems like a thorough method until Sirius’s back hits the lobby door and all three of them exchange quick, open-mouthed gazes before promptly bursting into guffaws that are even more difficult to set aside possibly because they are all trying so hard to keep it down.

James shifts one arm up further to lay it underneath Remus's shoulders while he leaves the other at his lower back, taking two for the team and relieving Sirius of his job enough to open the lobby door.

Sirius holds it open for the two to carry Remus into the lobby and slips inside behind them, setting his hands on his hips with a sigh of accomplishment. “The thing is, guys? Remus could've probably shuffled himself along just fine now that we’re not hooting and hollering, I just really liked the comradery on display here,” he breaks it to them, causing the other two to jerk their heads back toward him right quick, and then they’re in a pile of stitches all over again.

They right Remus onto his feet after some more choice manoeuvring and position him toward the stairwell, James going up ahead of them to play defense in case Remus takes a stumble ('Have to protect that face,' - James Potter) while Sirius and Peter keep hold of him from behind. The stairs are a task, Remus isn’t really looking at them per se, and the harried speed of his breathing paired with how restlessly he shuffles up the stairs make things a little slow going, but the hallway is much easier to steer him down and getting him into his flat is the easiest task of the night, at least until Tango comes flouncing over and tries to leap at, of any of them, Remus specifically, and that’s a whole kerfuffle in itself.

“James, take him,” Sirius requests, and next beat, James is playing hype-man, herding Tango over toward the kitchen.

“Do you want a light on?” Peter whispers, reaching for the switch in the hall.

Sirius lets go of Remus with his left hand and stops Peter’s wrist before his fingers hit it. “No, no no no,” he whispers plainly. “You’d regret it.”

Peter takes his word for it, it seems, for he goes right back to helping file Remus further into the flat without much else. Sirius lets him help with guiding Remus over to his bedroom doorway, but once they're there, Sirius really has got the rest of this.

He sighs as he braces the bulk of Remus’s frame onto his own, looking around at the two of them, and offers them the best smile he can muster. “Thank you,” he whispers. “You’re all a bunch of clowns, but you’re my favourite ones.”

Both James and Peter perk hearing that, but they seem to realize within a few short seconds of each other that their work here is done for they both sink a little from there. “I’ve got it, guys,” Sirius insists. “This part, I’ve got memorized.”

Still the lads don’t move and Sirius darts his gaze past James’s head, but that gives him something to offer at least. “You know what, in the freeze box, there’s a sleep mask if you want to run that over here.”

James, piqued by the idea of a job, swivels around on his feet, and goes for the freezer door, opening it and putting out a snort as he pulls out the hot pink mask. “'Don’t wake the bride,'” he reads, quietly psyched.

“It’s such a nice touch,” Sirius offers, grinning as James walks it over to him.

“Ooh, she’s got a bite to her,” James observes, tossing the chilled mask back and forth in his hands. “Does he wear it during?”

“Yeah, usually,” Sirius nods, and James goes ahead and lifts the mask over Remus’s head, stretching the elastic out to fit it down over his eyes.

He steps back, admiring his handiwork. “Suits him.”

“I thought so, too,” Sirius smiles. “Now, file out, you shitters.”

The two men salute him — well, them really, before Sirius shuffles Remus into his room, shutting the door behind them. “Yeah, you’ve got this,” he whispers, helping him get around to his side of the bed, not too close to the nightstand in case of a tumble, and setting him down diagonally across the bed before stretching his left leg over him and hoisting himself up and over Remus’s body to get down on his right.

Remus, unsurprisingly these days, rolls instinctively onto his left side to pin his problem temple to the bed, and Sirius settles down onto the mattress behind him, curls up behind Remus’s back, and slips his right arm around his middle, sliding his left arm up underneath the curve of Remus’s neck to sneak his left fingers underneath his temple, aiming up with pressured fingers.

Once that’s set, with nothing left for him to aid in at least for the present, Sirius presses his nose to the center of Remus’s back and breathes in long, long, very long, letting his eyes fall shut.

-

He wakes with a start, hearing noises out in Remus’s living area, and shuffles around a bit on the bed, patting for him instinctively, but the boy is still very beside him and out like a light. Sirius experiences five whole seconds of indescribable calm just knowing that Remus is where he should be, but then the fact of the matter becomes clear: there’s somebody inside Remus’s flat.

Sirius slips back from Remus, shifts himself toward the end of the bed, and sets his feet down on the floor, moving to the door and peeking his head out to investigate, and Lily fuckin' Evans is in the entryway, lit up underneath the light fixture above her head.

“Mademoiselle?” he greets, lifting his left hand out of the crack in the door and splaying it open beneath his visage to highlight his confusion drawn on there. Lily bites back a smile, looking off to her right, and Sirius follows her gaze, unimpressed already but curious as he locks in on James and Peter, just chilling on the couch, and there, he slips out of the bedroom proper and shuts the door behind him so his hissing won't be as audible from in there. “Really, guys? He’s literally asleep.”

“And?” Peter raises, his mouth full, and oh, they’ve ordered takeout; lovely. “We’re going to be here whenever he comes to.”

Sirius shakes his head at warp speed. “No, absolutely not,” he insists. “I draw the line here; you lot riding down to the shop with me was more than enough.”

“Have a drumstick and maybe you’ll calm down,” James suggests.

Sirius lulls his head back, staring up at the ceiling as he contemplates his two options: there's forcibly throwing them all out one by one, but there’s no guarantee they’ll stop wandering back in again unless he locks them out, and of course, there's letting them stay until Remus boots them out. He gets distracted by the lack of sunlight outside, squinting over at the window above the perch before simply asking the room the question he needs answered.

“Time is it?” he asks, sinking back against the door behind him.

“Nearly ten,” Lily offers. “I just closed up, needed my car back, and found out same time as you that there’s been a dish prepared.”

“Prepared, mm,” Sirius nods.

“It’s really good,” Peter insists.

Lily half-curtsies in the entryway before she semi-carefully heads for the couch, patting Tango's head as she passes him to take up the right corner spot, and Sirius sighs long before lugging himself across the flat toward the island, taking a seat at the stool on the nearer side of it and facing the lot of them from there. “You don’t want any?” Lily raises, helping herself.

“I’m half awake,” Sirius answers, but he thinks he likes the idea of some Half Baked. He lifts off the stool, heads to the freezer to grab the pint, and yoinks a spoon out of the utensil drawer, shuffling back to the island and simply taking up a stool on the kitchen side of it now that he's here. “You’re all going to be real bored; all we do post-cluster is go over everything that just happened and log it away for future use.”

“Can’t wait,” James says of it.

Sirius sighs, popping the lid off of the pint, and gets two wondrous bites in before the bedroom door opens and the couch dwellers round their heads to simply stare at Remus blinking at them, sans mask, and with a supreme frown etched on his face. He looks over to Sirius, who tries with all his might to convey how little he had to do with this in a single expression, and looks back at the clowns sharing a meal, the tiniest output of breath that leaves him coming out so slight, it's possible only Sirius caught it.

“There’s really no stopping this, is there?” Remus asks the room.

James, Peter, and Lily shake their heads at different speeds, different ways entirely, at that, but the fact of the matter remains true: Remus is stuck with ‘em, for better or worse.

Remus puts out a breath Sirius knows everyone heard, and it’s a hard one to hear with it catching in the middle like it does; he frowns deeper, his brows stitching together, and lifts his arms, a silent acceptance.

Lily’s up and off of the couch first, always better at reading Remus than Sirius gives her credit for, and sidles on up to him, her face unreadable from Sirius’s vantage point, but Remus huffs a wanton breath out while he's staring right at that mystery expression of hers, so it must have been something intense to have directed at you. She slips in underneath Remus’s raised arms and locks hers in around him for the hug, and James and Peter shuffle on over next, Peter heading over on Remus’s left side, James crossing over to his right, and soon, it’s just this huddle with Remus standing tall in the middle, the right side of his lower lip caught between his teeth, his gaze set nowhere in particular but aimed at the floor over in the living room until he lifts it again to meet Sirius’s eye; Sirius smiles quietly for him, thinking it’s one thing to know in theory that you’ve got so much there in front of you, but another thing entirely to have materialized.

Remus beckons him with his left hand, a quick flick while his arm remains curled around Peter’s shoulders, and Sirius drops his spoon into the pint, slipping off of his stool and padding around the side of the island to get over Pete's side of the huddle to come at Remus from the back. He slips up close, curling his arms in underneath where Lily's arms sit on Remus, and presses the lower half of his face to the top of Remus’s spine, breathing in long and smiling like a goon against him.

Remus shakes off somewhere around the full minute mark, sniffing hard. “OK,” he expels, more of a release of breath than a standard vocalization, unfolding his arms from the tangle of people attached to him and lifting them high in the air to call for a truce. “I need the loo.”

Lily backs off first with a laugh through her nose, the other two file back soon enough, and Sirius is last to back away only to get his right hand caught by Remus’s as his arms are coming down again. “You’re coming,” he insists, tugging Sirius along with him, and the glow coming off of Sirius’s visage must have been something for Lily offers a little choked noise for it.

“Pete, watch those two,” Remus cautions, looking over his shoulder with a nod toward the future Mr. and Mrs. over there, “you really can’t leave them around a couch unsupervised.”

Sirius slaps his left hand daintily over his cheek, purely overcome, Peter points to Remus righteously to echo one hell of a point he's got there, and on the other side of the aisle, James only grimaces while Lily's cheeks flush over to a shade that compliments her hair rather well. Sirius goes even more willingly along with Remus, sliding into the bathroom behind him and immediately getting pressed into the door as a means to close it, and yes, he thinks he’s about to get something lovely and dirty out of this bathroom meeting, but then Remus curls his hands at the back of Sirius’s neck, leans in, and dips his head enough to press his mouth to the line of Sirius’s collarbone, his gargantuan exhale tickling up the right side of his neck, and Sirius could never scoff at living proof that Remus is still breathing.

Sirius settles in with his wrists crossed at the small of his back. “Just needed a few?” he asks, pressing a kiss to Remus's head.

“Mhm,” Remus affirms, nuzzling his head in some more, and that’s fine with Sirius; the Half Baked is probably going soft on the island, but they can take a few.

Chapter 17: 17.

Chapter Text

At the seven-minute mark, Sirius begins plotting out the exit plan. While embracing inside Remus’s dinky bathroom until time fully runs out is a lovely idea, there are house guests to attend to, invited or not. He begins by placing small, quick kisses on various areas of Remus’s face with no particular chart plan in mind; three kisses on his left cheek, four on the right, two on the forehead, another on the lips, and winds up ditching step two altogether when Remus pushes a small laugh through his nose.

“Alright,” Sirius raises, straightening up with a sniff, “ready?”

Remus nods once, straightening up with a decided sniff of his own. “I didn’t check the nightstand,” he says. “Is there water there?”

Sirius shakes his head but figures he can remedy that in seconds. “No, but I’m on it,” he instils.

“Well, I can get it, then,” Remus says of it, reaching for the bathroom doorknob.

“Ah ah,” Sirius returns, halting Remus’s hand, “you just chill, mm?”

Remus huffs a sigh that doesn’t sound like much of one, taking his hand back and giving a sweeping gesture with his right arm.

On that note, Sirius heads out of the bathroom with Remus slipping out behind him, garnering swift head-turns from the peanut gallery. “Hobbies, guys,” Sirius suggests, heading for the kitchen sink with renewed purpose, “they’re out there.”

“Remus, here,” Lily offers, and Sirius glances over his shoulder as she's pushing halfway out of her seat, plate in hand. "I'll move."

Remus shakes his head, standing tall by the island. “You’re eating,” he says, waving the offer away.

“Well, would you like some?” James raises, looking comfy as can be despite being sandwiched between Lily and Pete on that dinky couch.

Sirius pulls a glass down from the cupboard and moves in to run the tap a bit so it’ll be cold for Remus to drink, purposefully leaving the stream a gentle drip so he can hear Remus’s dulcet tones from over here. “I don’t know that I’m there yet,” he declines.

“Plenty here,” Peter mentions.

“No, I see that,” Remus says, and well, the coffee table is truly filled with takeout containers. “Maybe in a bit?”

Sirius opens the tap to fill the water glass, switches it off, and crosses back to the island, plucking the Half Baked off of the counter with his free hand and waggling it at Remus curiously; he gets a meager nod for it, but Remus’s smile says wonders. “That, I could probably manage,” he relents, taking hold of both the glass and the pint.

“Ice cream over drumsticks?” James raises.

“Have you had this?” Remus returns, waggling the pint toward James in a similar fashion to Sirius, a detail he can’t miss or say he isn't charmed by as he goes for their notebook on the far end of the island.

He moves back with the notebook in one hand and a pen from the mug of them in the other, observing Remus lingering by the island seemingly — no, hopefully — waiting for him. He smiles at Remus quizzically, garnering a sheepish smile out of him. “Want to be my chair?” he raises, not one to boot anyone off his couch.

“Do I,” Sirius returns, going and planting himself on the floor to the left of the coffee table and a few steps ahead of Lily’s corner spot on the couch. He stretches his legs out, sticks his heels down past the side of the couch, and leaves space for Remus to sit in between them, setting the notebook and pen on the coffee table in exchange for free hands to rid Remus of his slightly more precarious bounty.

Remus hands the water down to him first, the pint second, and Sirius sets them aside while Remus ambles his way down to the floor, budging his hips up between Sirius’s legs and holding his hands out toward the couch. “Can one of you hand me my quilt?” he bids.

Lily turns her head first, spotting the chaotically colourful specimen on the back of it rather easily. She hands it over to Remus, who in turn drapes it over his legs, tucks it in around his middle, and scoots down one more smidge before he reclines, leaning his shoulders against Sirius’s chest and resting the back of his head against the front of his left shoulder.

“Good?” Sirius bids, happy to be where he is, certainly.

“Very good,” Remus assures, reaching for his water. Once he’s got the glass half-drained and set on the edge of the coffee table, he brushes his right hand over his mouth, nabs up the pint of ice cream, and engages. “Sorry, Lily.”

Lily waves him right off. “They pay me to come in when it’s necessary and today it was,” she offers, simple as.

Sirius feels Remus breathe in against him, watching his head turn toward the other two as he repeats the apology tour, but James gives a long sigh, leans forward and a little to the side, and extends his left arm out toward Remus, promptly socking him in the right knee.

Oi?” Remus sends him, reaching to slap up James’s hand a bunch.

"When are you going to get it through your skull that we couldn’t care less?” James returns him. “All of us elected to come; there was no coercion involved.”

“Some, just not for him,” Sirius amends.

“Well, it’s a good thing we did,” James returns, scraping a bunch of coleslaw off of his plate with his fork and eating it pointedly, like that somehow seals the whole deal.

Remus pushes his hands from underneath the quilt to drag them over his face, humming prominently once his fingers have reached his chin. “Elise,” he raises. “Is she OK?”

The whole gang looks around at each other before fixing their combined stares on Sirius. “Oh, she’s fine,” he insists. “No sweat off her back, am I right.”

Lily speaks there. “She’s been brought up to speed, hon; she knows it was out of your control.”

Remus laughs unamusedly, reaching to drape the quilt over his head entirely. “Yeah, and wants to switch out of all our common shifts, I’m sure," he comments.

Lily frowns deeply at Remus’s colourful shield. “No, Remus, she’s—”

“I think that’d be a great solution,” Sirius puts in, hooking his chin over Remus’s right shoulder and giving him a squeeze. “You don’t want her on shift with you during another one, believe me, so, Lily? Now’s the time to rework your schedule.”

Lily pointedly hangs her head to the side, gaze on Sirius now. “They're my full-time closers, that's not happening," she says of it. "She was just in over her head.”

“That’s not my read of it, funnily enough?” Sirius poses. “Seems to me the girl could use even a morsel of empathy, but I’m beginning to think that’s impossible for her to attain—”

“Sirius, not everyone is going to react perfectly to this,” Lily stresses. “Nor are they going to react with the severity you want, and that’s fine, he’s Remus; I understand, we all understand why this is so close to home for you, it hits home for us, too, but hanging Elise out to dry for not knowing the extent of it isn’t fair—”

“I don’t give a shit what’s fair,” Sirius returns, simple as. “None of this is fair, but I don't have to like anybody, Elise or not."

“Well, I didn’t react well either, did I,” Peter raises, scratching at his left wrist idly. “In fact, I think I’m the crowned king of horrible reactions.”

“Move over, Pete,” Sirius tells him jovially, “you’ve been dethroned.”

Peter gives out a sigh, leaning over to pick a chip out of one of the boxes on the coffee table. “Doesn’t feel as good as it should.”

“Besides, you?” Sirius raises him. “You cared a little too much, perhaps, but you weren’t so bloody removed from the situation that you couldn’t care less what was happening to him, and on that note, let's put that whole thing to bed, mm? It’s old news.”

“You might’ve saved my life, Pete,” Remus pipes up, quietly from his hiding spot.

Sirius sees Peters's frown deepen and tips his chin down toward Remus’s colourful head to echo it. “You heard the man,” he gives, squeezing him a little tighter beneath the quilt. “There’s an obvious difference here.”

“I still said it was a madhouse,” Peter raises, mouth twisted up.

“It,” Remus puts out laboriously, sick of discussing an old issue put to bed as much as Sirius is, “was.

“Well, then, do we think we could cut Elise some slack here for calling it as blunt as she calls just about anything?” Lily raises it.

James, oddly enough, hums absently there. “She was a little too aloof for the situation,” he submits, and Lily eyes him sidelong, a pointed look painted on. “Well, she was; her not knowing the whole picture, that’s one thing, but to look at him in that state and act like she’s watching a mildly bemusing television program? Suggest we call the authorities, bring him down in a straight jacket—”

Lily turns her head delicately to face it toward James. “You wanted to take him to the hospital, did you not?” she poses.

“He was sobbing,” James outs up, flying a hand toward Remus still very much taking shelter beneath his homemade birthday present. “Who looks at their coworker sobbing in pain in the backroom and calls it a mental break?”

“She said that?” Remus puts out, barely audible, but the lot heard it anyway.

“You were there,” Peter puts up.

Sirius huffs a sigh same moment Remus gives one out. “Peter, loud voices sound like gears grinding in his ears when he's in it."

“That, and I had five dolts yelling back and forth in there,” Remus tacks on. “I could barely make out a thing.”

Sirius turns his head, positioning his mouth near Remus’s ear. “Could you hear my whispering?” he checks. "When I got there, I mean."

Remus turns his head in the direction of Sirius’s mouth. “A little,” he offers, speaking just to him. “It sounded murky; bit like you were talking underwater, but I knew it was you.”

Sirius presses a kiss to Remus’s quilt-covered head and a few beats on from there, it seems that was enough to bring Remus out of his hiding spot. “So, she was both unenthused and concerned for my sanity?” he surmises, the curious lilt placed at the end of it the only indication of it being a question.

“About that, yeah,” Sirius affirms. “Not a combo I was interested in.”

“Here’s the thing, Sirius,” Lily prefaces, sitting forward in her seat. “And I mean this is the best way—”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Sirius goads.

“Your fangs come all the way out the moment anyone reacts to him when he’s in it,” Lily puts down. “If they react intensely, you write them off as too gung-ho, if they don’t react enough, they’re careless and shouldn’t be allowed within six feet of him.”

Sirius nods once. “So, you still want to take my behaviour from a near month ago and directly line it up with mine tonight?” he poses. “Pick a better hobby, Lily, ‘cause clearly my point of thought is too complex for you to wrap your head around—”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lily demands.

“You've barely even seen me in weeks,” Sirius returns. “You’re getting first, second, and third accounts of anything to do with this, but you've no idea what I do when he's in it, so excuse me if I’m not glowing over your read of—”

“James sees you the same amount as I do these days,” Lily cuts in, “and you would never say that to him.”

“You don’t know me well at all if you think that's true,” Sirius sends her.

James smacks his lips once. “He’d tell me that in a heartbeat," he registers.

“Thanks, Jim,” Sirius accepts.

“Wasn’t a compliment,” James returns brightly.

“Guys,” Remus puts out, spooning some ice cream out of the pint sitting in his lap. “Please.”

Sirius wants to listen to Remus, some part of him does, but his blood is pounding so hard in his ears that it’s difficult to ignore. “Yeah, I was fucked off at Pete, but you know what?” he keeps on. “Context matters, but you never give me the benefit of the doubt or operate on good faith with me, so why should I expect you to now?”

“Oh, the context, the context,” Lily retorts.

“Lily? No,” Remus asserts, “context does matter here.”

Lily sits rod-still on the couch, James pulls his glasses off and idly cleans the frames with the hem of his shirt, and Peter looks rather newly afraid to move too suddenly.

“Ugly Pot was different; he had just watched a security guard tackle me to the ground and pin me there the night before, and that guard did it out of fear of what I’d do to the people in the waiting room — not out of fear of what I’d do to myself, it was about everyone else present; I was a disruption at best, a liability at worst, and Sirius wasn’t listened to once that night, not once," he puts down. "It was hell on earth for both of us, but to have another cluster jump me the very next night was worse than hell.”

“I know it was,” Lily puts up faintly.

“Do you?” Sirius raises. “I walked into my own fucking living room to find my boyfriend being taken to the ground and reacted, but I have had to sit on Remus to keep him from clawing his eye out since that night, so you know what? I get to ease up on Pete, but Elise? Not a chance, I don’t owe her a fucking thing.”

“You don’t see how that’s a touch inconsistent?” Lily raises, playing with her hands in her lap.

“It’s a scenario that never fully comes to a halt, Lily,” Remus presses. “We’ve been told we’re making this up, that I need to suck it up and get over these puny little headaches, 'good luck' with finding someone to help me, that I’m too high of a risk one moment and not enough of one in the next; we’ve been all over the spectrum, and Sirius is allowed to feel his way through this, same as I've been allowed—”

Lily puts out a laboured breath. “I understand that.”

“Then you’ll really understand this,” Remus snips, lifting a hand to deny another interruption, and Sirius hides his face behind the lad’s head for cover and maybe a little self-preservation, too, "he is allowed to be upset about an unfeeling response to me while I'm in it, and if I get a knockout tomorrow and some bystander runs in and takes me down, he’ll still be allowed to hate every bit of the sight of it even if it’s better for me in the long run; it’s bigger than consistent and inconsistent, it’s bigger than reasoning, and you can trust me on that one; I’ve tried. Surprise, surprise.”

Peter’s visage colours over before a snort flies out of him. “Water is wet.”

“Exactly, Pete,” Remus nods, taking it like a champ and training his head on Lily again. “This isn’t black and white; Sirius is human, he will react and think and process the way he does it, he’ll do it on his own time, and the way he does it doesn’t have to make sense to you in order for that to be true.”

Sirius breathes in, back out, and squeezes Remus impossibly tighter, pressing his face directly to the back of Remus’s neck for the gracious smile he's got on now, he feels, is truly private.

“OK, but my only point is we’re expecting a lot out of a girl who isn’t inside the situation,” Lily puts up, like it pains her to have to even stress this one anymore but her conscience won’t let up. “And, I don’t really think I’m getting heard here; you're loved around there, Remus, I don't want the entire staff to turn on her because of one shitty shift.”

“I’m not fucked off at Elise, Lily,” Remus emphasizes. “I'm embarrassed and upset. Sirius? Doesn’t have to like her. You? Can still like your employee, free of guilt, and you two—” Remus lifts his right forefinger, bringing it back and forth between James and Peter, “—I really can’t be arsed either way, to be frank...”

Remus trails off as James raises his hand. “Yes, James," he grants.

“Always be frank,” James puts in.

“I really don’t know how else to be right now,” Remus insists. “Everyone clear?”

He waits for every head in the room to nod; Lily’s is a touch pointed, James’s is quick and easy, Peter barely moves his head up and down though his eyes certainly acknowledge that Professor Lupin is doling out orders, and finally, Remus looks round at Sirius, his right brow cocked and loaded, and Sirius nods eagerly, absolutely loving every part of this.

Remus faces forward again, picking up his spoon for a bit of ice cream and lulling his head toward Lily as he scoops it out. “I hate that I spooked her and abandoned her up front; I’ll get her some flowers if it'll make up for all my trouble, OK?" he addresses. "I don’t want any trouble.”

“Do not,” Sirius speaks there, “spend your money on her.”

Remus huffs out a sigh around a bit of ice cream. “It’ll be ten pounds, Sirius,” he lodges, free hand over his mouth. "I won't tell her that, but it won't break my bank."

“Ten pounds is still ten pounds she doesn’t deserve,” Sirius says of it.

Remus winds his head around to look at Sirius properly, his gaze pointed and intent. “What did I just say?” he asks outright. “You don’t have to like one of my coworkers.”

“Well, I’m glad you made it here because believe you me, Elise doesn’t like me anymore either,” Sirius returns, laughter bubbling in his throat.

“I can’t, for the life of me, worry about that right now,” Remus puts down. “I don’t like David, do I?”

James takes in a throaty gasp. “You don’t?” he probes, shimmying his shoulders about it.

“He’s nothing but a bully with a short peen and I don’t like him a single bit,” Remus returns, getting a veritable drum roll of a foot stomp out of James for it, but Remus turns his head toward Sirius’s open gape/grin with his game face on. “I don’t expect you to like everyone I interact with at work, but I like Elise and I want to get her something for the trouble, even if it’s small; I think could go a long way and I want to be able to sleep at night.”

Sirius works his mouth around an inappropriately timed but rather instinctive smile, pressing his lips to the top of Remus’s right cheekbone. “OK,” he relents. "I want you sleeping, too."

“OK, you two,” James puts in, curling a hand toward them, “are never allowed to break up, and if I catch even a whiff of trouble in paradise, I will be intervening, you hear that?”

Remus snorts. “Difficult not to.”

“Good,” James calls it. “Call me Dr. Potter, because I will single-handedly talk sense into the both of you.”

Sirius ducks his head down behind Remus’s back, takes a big ol’ breath in, and basks in feeling warm from his fingers down to his toes, holding Remus to him like he’s a piece of fine china that he’s been carefully permitted to hold, and in a lot of ways, he is.

Once Sirius feels that he's basked the proper amount, he lifts his head and puts out a decided breath. “Well,” he raises, slipping his right arm free from Remus and out toward the coffee table, pulling the notebook off of it. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m right sick of talking about Elise.”

“Hear, hear,” James trumpets out, putting it through the circle he's made his right fist.

“Atta boy,” Sirius champions, setting the notebook open over Remus’s loosely propped thighs. “Mind being my table?”

“Not at all,” Remus permits, bending them at the knees some more and holding his legs a bit sturdier to provide a makeshift desk for Sirius to write on, even.

He flips through the book to a blank page and jots 'June 18th' down in the top right corner. “OK, duration, which… is going to be rough since we’re working with a blank slate at this point,” he raises them. “I pretty well conked out there for a while, I’m sorry to say, but you were home, you were safe, and I was beat.”

Remus clicks his tongue. “You’re allowed to sleep, Sirius.”

Sirius tries not to let that interjection trip him up any. “So, if we can get a good picture of what happened earlier on, we could probably make some educated guesses between us,” he keeps on. “I got your text just after five, so my assumption is it would've came on somewhere around there, good guess?”

There’s a solemn note to Remus’s hum. “I got a look at the time on the till right around the time my nose started up and that was just after half-four,” he recalls. “And then, it wasn’t long before the shadows started, and it was maybe, mm, six orders after that where it officially came on, but all relatively close together.”

Sirius nods, jotting it all down. “Then what?” he probes.

“I,” Remus starts, holding a careful lilt in his tone, Sirius notes, “had to wait maybe five to ten more for Elise to get back, but there had been a lull around then, thankfully, and I snuck in back for the boost and while I was doing that, Elise come through the door, we switched off for my break, and I texted you.”

It's all important stuff that'll be recorded in due time, but Sirius has to check something else real quick. “Was she out getting pho?” he raises sweetly.

“Well, I don’t know,” Remus offers. “I don’t really follow her onto her break, what with the floor being all mine while she’s gone and all.”

“Was she gone a whole hour?” Lily comes in, also quite sweet in her disposition.

Remus remains still, so no awkward shifting to go off of. “No,” he answers, and it’s done with such a note of light surprise at the question coming at all that even Sirius can't quite tell if he's covering for her or not.

Sirius oh-so-subtly scrawls a quick 'u lyin?' on the page below, but Remus doesn’t even have time to confirm or deny it for Lily sits forward on the couch, wearing a squint and very openly aiming to get Remus’s walls cracking. “Lily, quit it,” Sirius gets her. “He’s no snitch.”

“I’d just like to know if my staff is leaving for their breaks early, and then clocking out for their halves so they can have full-on chill sessions while on shift,” Lily puts out. “How fucking dare I, hm?”

“Interesting,” Sirius calls it, positively glowing. “It’s almost like you’re not such a fan of Elise yourself anymore?”

“Time fraud is what I’m not a fan of when it could get me fired right along with you sods, thanks,” Lily returns.

Remus huffs good and loud. “Can we please move on from what Elise does on her breaks?” he raises deftly, and that, right there, is all Sirius needs to know within his gut that Remus has been lying through his teeth.

“Fine,” Lily expels, falling back onto James who simply wraps his right arm around her shoulders. “No more breaks at peak hours and that is an order from your boss; as my top shift lead, I’ll ask you to spread the word.”

“How about he’ll spread the word if you make sure everyone there is up to speed on his achy little problem?” Sirius combats.

“Talk to your boyfriend about that, then, as it really wasn’t my place to mention that to every one of my employees,” Lily returns him, holding her hands up.

“OK, that was a bit much, Lily,” Remus slides in. “It wasn’t a topic of conversation that would have come up with many of them, save for Agnes who kinda-sorta saw one in action and thankfully, it fell at a medium-level cluster, but I didn’t really go detailing all of this to her while working through one, oddly enough; I was trying to breathe and get through it.”

While Sirius not coming up in conversation at work is a whole different mountaintop than the topic of Remus's cluster headaches, he puffs a breath of air into his cheeks all the same, thinking Remus's penchant for keeping his coworkers at arm's length may well be a bit of trend in more ways than just regarding his boyfriend, and that is a tad sour of a taste taste when Sirius knows just how lovely it really is to work alongside Remus and cross over into someone who gets to know him as more than just a coworker, but it does have him easing his exhale back out of him with a certain kind of relief attached to it.

Remus, however, doesn't read it as quietly relieeved; he reads it for the sigh it apparently sounded like and takes to elaborating. “Emme, I barely see anymore these days, Ian, same thing if a little more often than her, but it really didn't made sense to start telling them all about my recent medical history; Agnes knows a bit of it, but I told her I get gnarly migraines from time to time and might need to take my break suddenly and go be alone for a while if one a really rough one hits while I'm there,” he rattles off. “Elise has known I get migraines since last fall, but I’ve only had to leave work once with her one shift and that was ages ago; I went all of late winter and most of spring without so much as a tension headache around there so it wasn’t that difficult to avoid discussing, and I don’t want them all to be discussing it when I’m not around and tiptoeing around me when I am nearby, and I definitely don't want them thinking I’m making these things up just to get more time off the floor. I don’t want any of this, but I need to work.”

For a few beats, Sirius legitimately has a hankering that they aren't exclusively talking about cluster headaches, but the last reasoning slaps him right upside the head. “Who’s going to think you're pulling a scheme to get off the floor?” he challenges, enraged just from the thought of it. “Literally who?”

Remus huffs at him for the question. “Who’s not going to think it?” he counters. “This is the first knockout I’ve had there; for the most part, I can work through the tame ones and I don’t want these things making it any harder for me to keep a fucking job — the fact that I even have one is a miracle in itself.”

“It’s not a miracle, Remus,” Lily chides, and Sirius doesn’t mind her interjection one bit.

“Oh, yes, it is,” Remus returns her. “If I weren’t friends with you, tonight’s disaster would have me on the firing list; I am getting special treatment here.”

“Remus, I’m not allowed to fire you for a condition,” Lily stresses. “Just straight up, I cannot do that, but that’s irrelevant here since I’m not even close to considering giving you up; I’d be fucking mad to even think about it, you’re my best worker, hands down.”

Remus snorts, laughing humorlessly. “No one there is going to think I’m worth the trouble of keeping around, even if they like me alright,” he instils. “They’ll learn to hate having to pick up my slack while I’m sitting in the back being useless, and on top of that, you should be considering tossing me out when any other manager would see me as a liability and nix me for some other reason before I have a fit on the floor in front of our valued patrons—”

“Fuck our valued patrons,” Lily sends out, reading Sirius’s whole fucking mind with that one. “Yeah, if you had a shit boss they can make up a reason to get rid of you or cut your hours so low that you ditch out before even having to fire you for this, but again, that’s not me; call me mad all you want, but I’m keeping you until you or I move on from there and you’d just better accept it.”

Remus sends a rumpled breath through his nose, but he doesn’t argue, just lays further back into Sirius’s frame and leans his head back over his shoulder, putting his gaze on the ceiling. “The point,” Sirius puts in conversationally, “is that we’re past the point where your coworkers should have an idea of what could come of this. You've already done it with Agnes so you've had some practice sharing the details and you know you don’t have to be too detailed about it; you can just say, ‘I’ve certifiably horrible migraines which render me useless, I will step off the floor for a time if one comes on here, and for the love of Cunt, do not put glass in front of me if you’re feeling like helping out.’”

“Seriously, there needs to be a no-glass rule in every setting you're in,” Peter says of it, plain in tone and expression.

James snorts, bringing quite a few bemused gazes to him. “Ugly Pot cries in the distance,” he puts up.

“From the dead, you mean,” Remus returns, rubbing his eyes with his right forefinger and thumb.

James takes in a resounding breath. “There we go,” he echoes, beaming from the couch. “I’ve missed this side of you.”

Remus huffs a plain laugh, dropping his hand from his face. “It doesn’t matter much,” he puts up. “Elise’ll be letting everyone in on the content of tonight’s shift anyway; cat’s out of the bag now, there's no way I'll be able to convince the rest of them that I'm not terrifying to be around when I'm like that, I literally am.”

“Elise," Lily comes in, “has been given a warning against that, trust me; I’ve gone over it with her, and she already knows it’s a delicate situation.”

“Does she?” Sirius raises sceptically.

“I’ve asked her to keep tonight’s disaster to herself,” Lily reiterates.

“Lily,” Remus starts, and tightly done, at that. “I mean this well, but you don’t exactly rule with an iron fist and gossip will travel whether you’re present in the room or not.”

“Travels exceptionally far when you’re not, though,” James tacks on.

“Well, you tell me if she starts blabbing and then you’ll all see what my iron fist looks like, how about that?” Lily comes back.

Sirius snorts. “That’s cute, but Remus would never tell you that.”

“He’s right,” Remus echoes. “I’d maybe go to him to complain about it, but that's about it.”

“As sweet as that is,” Lily puts in, “how can complaining to him help with a work problem, over the boss who could potentially do something about it?”

Remus hums mildly. “Sometimes, it’s more about being heard than getting a solution up and running,” he provides, and listen, that’s another arrow sent straight to Sirius’s chest in such a short span of time, so he really wouldn’t mind one bit if everyone just went home and he could love Remus down in peace, show him precisely who and what he should be freely bragging about.

Unfortunately, the notebook is open and embarrassingly bare in front of them, and they’ll have to get to the end of this post-cluster meeting before loving can occur as is. “Hey, remember this?” Sirius raises, tapping the notebook to move things along.

“We don’t know what to do with that,” Peter laughs, flying a hand toward the book.

“OK, well, let’s move on to symptoms, then,” Sirius bids. “That, I think we can all help piece together, don’t you think?”

“How do you want to do it?” James raise.

“Throw some up, I’ll jot,” Sirius maintains.

“He’s very speedy with it,” Remus chimes in, and it’s funny, really, when he doesn’t know the half of why Sirius is trying to get this the fuck over with and the lot of them out of here.

“Well, the sobbing for one,” James puts up. “He was doing a lot of this—” he tries a hand at a solid mimic of Remus’s harried breathing patterns when in the thick of it, “—and the rocking; lots of that happening.”

Sirius nods for all three, jotting them down one by one. “The table thing,” Peter raises, pointing to his forehead deftly.

“Mm,” Sirius hums for it, moving to the line below to add 'Running forehead back and forth over table top' onto the list.

“Not my finest hour,” Remus says of it, evidently reading along.

“What’s it feel like when you do it?” James raises.

Remus seems to consider it for a few beats. “Something else,” he answers.

“Dark,” James calls it.

Remus shrugs his shoulders. “Any pressure is better than what’s happening up here,” he offers, giving a tap to his left temple.

“Mm, speaking of,” Sirius puts in, aiming it more toward the shell of Remus's right ear, “pick and/or clamp?”

“Another lovely little blend of both,” Remus provides.

“It’s been the two of them for a few in a row now,” Sirius observes, jotting the details down.

“What are we…” James puts up, dragging the last word out, but Remus comes in before he has to finish the question off.

“I get this sharp pressure/pain hybrid behind my left eye that’s like an icepick getting jammed through it, every single time, to differing degrees,” he explains. “The clamp comes round a little less often, but if I’m really lucky the clamp climbs into the ring, too, which is just an easier way to say there’s what feels a lot like an iron clamp just ever closing over that side of my skull—” Remus lifts a hand to gesture at the left side of his head. “This side of my head, in particular.”

“Usually it’s one or the other, yeah?” Lily puts up. “For the clusters in general, I mean.”

“Yeah, usually,” Remus echoes. “Some do say they get theirs on both sides at once, which — bless 'em, because one is more than enough for me.”

“How far did it spread this time?” Sirius checks, waiting with his pen ready to go.

“Just the top half,” Remus offers him, setting a flattened palm at the highest point of his left cheek that Sirius leans around to press a kiss to the moment Remus moves his hand back down.

“Do you get the whole head sometimes?” Peter asks, eyes wide.

“Well, the pick doesn’t tend to show up anywhere but my eye,” Remus offers, “but the clamp is flexible, if you will; it can cover a lot of ground if properly motivated.”

“Jesus Christ,” James puts up.

“'Cunt,' James,” Sirius corrects, penning the last detail down.

Remus nods to James’s bemused expression. “He goes by ‘Cunt’ now.”

“Noted?” James returns.

“OK,” Sirius gives out, all caught up now. “I’ve also added, ‘a complete and utter aversion to voices above a whisper,’ since that was quite clear.”

“Mm,” Peter puts in, pointing over at them. “He kicked that table clear across the room; do you need that detail?”

Need is an arbitrary word here,” Sirius clarifies, going ahead and jotting that down, “but my general rule so far has been, anything of note gets a mention.”

“Then, yeah, he roundhoused it,” Peter caps it.

“I did not,” Remus protests plainly. “You were all crowding me; I didn’t have the space to spin before the kick, did I?”

“No, yeah, it was more a high-kick, if we’re getting technical,” Sirius echoes it.

“Like a praying mantis, only you didn’t have your hands up,” James illustrates, lifting his right leg above the coffee table to kick it up and out for show.

Remus huffs for that. “Well, in that case, he sure high-kicked that chair, too,” Peter tacks on.

“Mm, thank you, Pete,” Sirius offers him. “I’d almost forgotten about the chair.”

“Don’t know how you could, personally,” James puts up, half-smirking. “Though by technicality, he more kicked it back from him; different leg placement entirely.”

“Well, I’m just going to write ‘kicked a chair,’ and if the woman asks about it, I can elaborate,” Sirius reasons.

“He lifted Pete straight off the ground, too,” Lily puts in.

“Mhm, he did,” Sirius echoes, scrawling that one down, too.

“I was hoping,” Peter puts in pointedly, “we wouldn’t even mention that bit.”

“It’s part of the deal,” Sirius puts it. “Remus gets super-strength when he’s in it, has to be documented.”

“I’m so sorry, Pete,” Remus puts in, voice riddled with discontent.

“It’s OK,” Peter insists. “I got over the shock of it right quick.”

“You’re so little, though,” Remus protests, pulling an inadvertent grin out of Sirius.

“OK, I’m not a wee garden gnome,” Peter returns haughtily. “Everyone just relax, alright? I wasn’t maimed.”

“Well, we got you down before he could body-slam you,” James puts up.

Remus gives out a frustrated noise and lifts the edge of his quilt over his head again, going right back to hiding and sending the notebook askew. “James,” Sirius chides. “We were just starting to have a nice time.”

“What?” James demands, a truth seeker even in the worst of times. “I assume that’s what would’ve happened if we hadn’t gotten him down as fast as we did.”

“That’s not really an anecdote I’ll be putting in here,” Sirius returns, choosing his words so very carefully, “so it’s irrelevant what could've happened; we’re only putting down what did.”

“Well, then, put down that it took three strapping young lads to keep him on the ground,” James tacks on, a bit pithy about it.

Sirius puts out a sigh, but honestly, that’s also a fine point to put in there. “Done,” he allows, getting that down. “Hey, Remus, I’d love it if you came out—”

James pounds a ba dum tss into the floor with the heel of a foot, pulling a bright laugh out of Lily. “I’m working on it, you dicks,” Remus huffs, coming out from underneath the quilt.

“Sorry, hon,” Lily offers candidly, crossing her right leg over her left.

“Triggers?” Sirius puts out gleefully, moving right along.

Remus makes a shoddy noise. “You’re not going to like it.”

“Tell,” Sirius probes.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Remus insists, put off. “I wore my sunnies to work, I took them off in the back where the light is low compared to up front, I let my eyes adjust before I wandered up onto the floor, I didn’t smack my head into anything, I didn’t knock a shot back in the loo; I didn’t do anything abnormal, so I think we have to call this another one that was coming for me anyway.”

Sirius leaves a kiss to the juncture of Remus’s jaw and neck, penning it down in an open spot at the top of the page and leaving it without comment when Remus called it; he hates that detail more than just about any of this. “Anything else of note?” he bids, looking around at the other three. “Toss it right out.”

“He was a lot harder to getting himm into the car than out of it,” Peter offers, and for a moment Sirius blinks over at him a few times for having an identical thought to his earlier on in the evening, but Peter adds another point to consider on top of that. “I don’t know if that’s because we had a better handle on it or if it had something to do with him, but he was really calm on the stairs; he just, sort of shuffled along with us, going wherever we led him.”

Sirius points at him with his free hand. “Good work.” He looks to Remus from, budging him a bit. “You were much more pliable getting up here, but you were not so easy to move on the way to the car; had it dropped off sometime in between there and here, do you feel?”

Remus nods for it. “I’d say down to a two at least,” he answers. “The boost must've kicked in on the way back.”

Sirius nods, holding that thought. “And what would you rate it prior to the drop-off?” he raises, hearing Remus push a breath out. “Lup Scale it, I’ll match it to Kip’s after.”

“A three on mine,” Remus places it. “It wasn’t a ten, but I don’t typically hulk out during anything lower than an eight on Kip's, do I.”

Sirius hums in echoing, jotting the numbers down in chronological order and adding in the details afterward. He hums as he finishes the rating blurbs off, casting his gaze over the collection of words on the page in front of them, and gets pulled in by the timeframe once again. “So, in this case,” he proposes, scanning the sheet, “you'd have had it come on fully between half-four and five, your text came in about ten, fifteen minutes after that, give or take, and we bounced around in the entryway getting our shoes and scrambled brains together for probably five minutes at least, I hate to say, and then, it’d have taken us thirty to get there with no stopping along the way, but traffic slowed us down a bit so we'll go with forty-five to be safe, and then we spent, what, ten total in the backroom? It was hard to gauge.”

“That seems a fair read,” Lily puts in, nodding for it.

Sirius accepts the agreement as law, nods in thanks for the support, and keeps on. “And then, it took, what, five minutes at most to drive back here, then let’s call it another five getting him up the stairs and into his room, and from there, it’s sort of a blank, isn’t it.”

Remus hums there, scratching at the right side of his collarbone. “I wasn’t conscious for long, I do know that,” he gives him. “Add another ten, fifteen at the most? That's a safe bet.”

“OK,” Sirius accepts, and looks around for his mobile before realizing it’s not on him and likely somewhere on Remus’s bed. “Someone pull a calculator up.”

Peter gets his mobile out and the app pulled up first, where Sirius dictates the numbers out to him to add up. “Ninety minutes, give or take,” he relays.

Sirius nods, putting it down. “That’s right about the time it tends to be with a good boost,” he comments, slapping the notebook shut and depositing it on the coffee table.

“How long is it without?” James asks.

“Hours and hours,” Remus gives him, plain as all hell, but he's allowed to be plain about it.

“So, we’re better off with than without,” Sirius tacks on, partially so the rest of them will know this feat and partially so Remus will hear it even one more time.

“And hey,” Peter comes in, eyes on Remus, “the shrooms could take a little while to fully do their job, but today doesn’t mean that they won’t.”

Sirius sends Peter a smile commanding enough to tame a wildcat. “He’s right,” he echoes, gentler near Remus’s right ear. “We just have to keep at it and not let the wait discourage us any.”

“And, if they don’t do a thing, you'll have tripped every Sunday for the next month and a half,” James puts in, offering a good-natured and rather wry shrug with his hands. “The appointment’s coming either way, but you'll have had some good times in the kitchen along the way.”

Remus studies James for a few tense beats before he slowly turns his head to a politely grinning Sirius. “You didn’t,” he insists flatly.

“I had to,” Sirius insists. “You were so cute and he needed to see it.”

“Unbelievably cute,” James echoes.

“You and the spoon,” Lily expels, overcome as she mimics Remus delicately bringing the multiple spoonfuls of coffee grinds to the French Press.

“You both watched it?” Remus puts out, tomato red at the backs of his ears.

“Oi,” Peter puts up. “What am I, a wall?”

“Ohh, hold your horse,” James sends him, fishing for his mobile.

No,” Remus drags out, but there’s no stopping James from sliding his mobile over in front of Peter and playing the video for him.

Remus crosses his arms over his stomach while Peter takes quite the face journey. “Your hair was somethin’ else that day,” he mentions.

“That was all him,” Remus puts in, nodding his head back toward Sirius beaming bright behind him. “He kept floofing it out.”

“I love his fringe,” Sirius offers unapologetically.

“And boy oh boy, do we know that,” James returns him.

Remus-on-video puts out the pointed ‘Oi,’ he’d done the evening prior and that pulls quite a bit of hooting and hollering out of the audience before the video ends quite swiftly after that, which is a rather perfect note to end on, Sirius feels, giving in to a long stretch and put out a rather forced yawn. “Listen, all,” he addresses them, “a time was certainly had, but I am beat, so is he, and we’ve all got work to get to tomorrow.”

James squints in his direction. “You could just say you’re trying to get laid.”

Sirius opens his mouth, a coy smile on, but Remus speaks first. “Then, alright; that’s the main objective,” he trades him, and Sirius takes in a substantially heightened breath at the confirmation.

Lily’s off the couch first, quite understanding that the time to head off has come, and Remus feels called to reach up and bid for her in lifting him off the ground, garnering her to light up a smile on that rather suggests she's been aching to help in some concrete way for quite some time now and finally has her golden opportunity. She zips forward, tugs him up off Sirius's lap, and does what she can to guide him to an upright position while Sirius helps push him up from behind; that's fuckin' teamwork.

From there, James and Peter pull themselves off of the couch, the former of the two stopping to sweep a hand toward the coffee table where the leftover takeout is sitting. “The rest is yours, boys."

Sirius trills as he lifts off of the ground to gather up the two containers, pauses to feed Tango a chip because he’s a free man, and brings the rest into the kitchen, setting them on top of the microwave to keep them high and away from Tango’s reach. Remus follows him into the kitchen, sticking the Half Baked back in the freezer and downing the rest of his water in one go before giving his glass a rinse. The guests have assembled the entryway by the time the hosts make their way over there and one by one, they come in to give Remus either a hug (Lilith), a resounding clap on the arm (Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater) and one righteous noogie (James Fucking Potter.)

“Oi, watch the head,” Remus bids, flinching out of James’s reach. “If you bring another onto me tonight, you’re not making it to tomorrow unscathed.”

Sirius steps up to linger by the small partition in the entryway as James presses his palms together in apology. “Also, sorry for,” he starts, tilting his head back and forth, “well, you know.”

“Yeah,” Remus offers, shuffling on his feet, “same here.”

Ohh no, I can’t,” Lily expels, opening the front door and promptly running out of it.

James and Sirius snort quite identically for that little addition before the former moves in to pop both Remus and Sirius in the right arm in turn, and the remaining two guests shuffle out from there. With the door shutting and Remus promptly locking it up tight, he turns right back around and treats Sirius to a full kiss with a soft noise placed against his lips, lucky him. Sirius breathes a relieved breath of his own into their kiss, his right hand going straight up into Remus’s curls while his left one skirts around behind his back to tug him in closer, wanting him so badly it fucking hurts.

Remus pauses to breathe against him. “Thank you for coming so quickly,” he instils, lifting his right hand to run his thumb over Sirius’s kiss-soaked lower lip so tenderly that he has to bite down on it once Remus’s thumb is gone again.

Sirius nods fast, lower lip caught between his teeth. “I’d have beamed myself there if I could've,” he maintains, speaking out the side of his mouth.

“I know you'd have,” Remus offers him, rubbing the tip of his nose in a controlled motion, back and forth against Sirius’s.

“Thank you for sticking your neck out for me,” Sirius trades him. “And against Lily, at that; my, my.”

“She was standing on yours,” Remus says for it, and then the boy's got a dual pair of enthusiastic lips and urgent hands tugging him back toward the room.

Sirius manages to steer Remus around and down onto the bed without any trip-ups and even he’s a little surprised about that more for the fact that Remus is moving so swiftly, but he reasons with himself on that one; it wasn’t a ten, Remus didn’t pitch himself head-first onto his own neck, and by mercy, there were no injuries to report for this one, but even with all his quiet reasoning, Sirius pulls back a mere inch or two from Remus’s lips. “You sure you’re good?” he checks, tousling the curls at Remus’s fringe.

Remus leans his head back, his neck stretching long as he aims a huff toward the ceiling, and it takes Sirius everything he has to resist licking a stripe up the length of Remus’s neck now that it's quite exposed to him like this. “I’m fine,” he insists. “I don’t know that I can do anything exceptionally creative right about now, but—”

He trails off at Sirius’s snort. “Well, I wasn’t thinking you’d be doing the splits on me, oddly?” he raises.

Remus pushes out a breathy laugh. “I’m just saying it might be a bit boring,” he reiterates.

Sirius indulges in licking a line straight up the curve of Remus’s throat, drags it over his Adam’s apple, and up to his chin, tipping his head back down so he can speak against his lips. “Yeah, that’s not possible,” he instils, slotting his lips in with Remus’s.

Remus pulls in a resounding breath through his nose and reaches his hands up into Sirius’s hair to lock him into place over him, licking up into Sirius’s mouth and humming as he drinks him right in.

Sirius cannot stop kissing him; it’s as simple as that, really. He says as much, a few minutes in, when he’s got Remus out of his clothes and spread out beneath him, heaving it out of his parted lips and against the flutters of Remus’s navel beneath them: “I can’t stop kissing you.”

“I was rather hoping you wouldn’t,” Remus maintains, huffing a rather candid laugh from above.

With expressed permission to keep doing what he’s doing, Sirius dips right back in, letting rote memory handle the preparation part of the deal, but in reality, he could do all that with his eyes closed, might as well give it a go while he drags kisses all over Remus’s thighs, purposefully missing his cock at each surge back up toward his navel just to get Remus all huffy about it; he could do this all night, watch him unravel at the injustice of it all, but Remus wouldn't allow that for too long, he knows.

Remus is putting out two different huffs soon enough, one born of frustration at not getting his cock sucked like he’d very clearly like it to be, the other firing out of him every time Sirius crooks his fingers at just the right angle, and Sirius finds the likes reasoning behind the latter huff just a few notches more than the former, finds himself cooking his fingers with a punchy intent just to hear more of them, and eventually, Remus puts out an agonized version of that spirited huff, his voice deep and low.

Sirius pauses still as Remus plants his heels on either side of Sirius’s body with a decided two-thunk note accompanying the movement and really, Sirius would have to be a neanderthal not to notice that he’s spread his legs rather purposefully apart, but one look up at Remus’s pointed face cements it, spurring him right up the bed to hoist Remus’s hips and hitch them over his own, holding him around the back with the grip of his right arm while Remus reaches down and inserts himself into the process, directing Sirius straight into him and leaving him the job of keeping Remus's hips in place.

Sirius fights a laugh at the urgency of Remus’s movements, bracing his free hand down on the bed beneath Remus's hips for balance while he holds him steady with the other, and curls his back into an arch to hover his parted mouth directly over Remus’s as he starts to roll his hips, timing a kiss right for Remus’s first hitch of breath and drinking him with all he’s got. Remus rolls with it for a stretch until he wants in on some of the directives, setting his feet far, far apart behind Sirius to better plant his palms behind himself and propel himself up and into Sirius's thrusts that way, his breathing picking up, catching, stopping short and starting again, all with their mouths on lock, and Sirius truly doesn’t understand how Remus doesn’t discuss this on his own time; how in-sync they can be, in or out of bed, how aware they are of each other just by being in the same damn room, how he can read Remus’s mind at times only for Remus to turn around and read his own right back to him, how Remus can sometimes take a talking point of Sirius's and run a mile with it to the right conclusion, how fucking good they are at each other, for each other, with each other. How does it go under the radar? How does he not slip up now and again? Is it easy, is it hard, is it—

Remus whimpers against his mouth as Sirius ramps up the pace, reaching up with a shaky hand after a few well-aimed thrusts on Sirius’s part, and sets it splayed against Sirius’s navel, halting his hips with a speedy urgency to his touch.

Sirius stops still, waits for Remus to readjust himself, and watches with keen eyes as he shifts onto his left side, bracing the bed underneath him with his left forearm and hitching his bent right leg up much higher than his left one; he taps it twice, signalling quite plainly that Sirius is expected to hold that one up, and Sirius obliges in supreme kind, smirking fast. “Thought you said this was going to be boring,” he quips, bracing his right hand against the underside of Remus’s thigh to hold it up as bid.

“Yeah, well, you’re inspiring,” Remus returns breathlessly, “what can I say.”

Sirius’s stomach surges as he shifts forward on his knees, keeping Remus's right leg hitched up while he goes at Remus from a little behind and a little below him, and there, he lets his hips do the rest of the work, snapping them at a speed that Remus certainly sounds approving of, and while Sirius can’t realistically kiss him from up here and misses those lips a ton because of it, he can't help but feel enriched knowing that Remus is the one who facilitated the switch and can easily be heard enjoying all that the new angle's bringing for him. Sirius certainly can't deny it's doing mouth-watering things for him either, wouldn't dream of it; he can’t help but grin while his breathing stammers, can’t help but let his eyes fall shut, can't help letting himself feel his way through it. Every thrust causes a chain reaction, sending Remus further into a tizzy, which in turn sends shock waves back through Sirius, who then takes those waves and directs them right back through Remus via the snap of his hips, and Sirius would be the first to say he loses himself in it all as he blindly seeks the friction promised to him with every thrust; for a little while there, he’s genuinely so wrapped up in how good it feels for him, it takes a few thrusts past the point that Remus starts squirming underneath him to realize they’re apparently switching up again.

Remus scrambles with his left hand, grapples it against the bed underneath him, and inches himself off of Sirius’s cock with the help of his right hand pushing hurriedly on Sirius’s right arm so he'll know to let go of his leg, and within a flash, he’s facing the wall ahead of Sirius on the bed, bracing himself on all fours as he fluffs out the pillow straight ahead of him, placing it pointedly between him and the wall behind the bed.

Sirius can’t help his trickster mind from freely scanning the scene before him, waiting for that sweet spot between Remus finding the pillow’s placement acceptable for continuing on and right before he'll have braced himself properly, and reaches up to grabs Remus by the hips before he's fully situated to fuck back into him, and truly, Remus has never let out a holler quite that loud before; Sirius, human in all senses of the word, feels a thrum of electricity course through him as Remus struggles to brace the bed beneath the frumpled pillow, feels the charge drum up several notches as he places his hands at the small of Remus's back and splays them out wide, pushing twice on Remus's knees to signal that he had better unbend them; the lad listens right up, spreading his legs apart and leaving them loosely extended out behind the both of them, and Sirius wrangles himself down between them, pressing the front of his hips right up against the backs of Remus's thighs, and drives Remus back on his thrusts, seeking that wanton holler again.

He gets what he wants, three times over to be exact, and that's right about when Remus veritably shoves his face down against the pillow below it, choosing to holler against it rather than into the greater room, which really only has Sirius fucking him harder to make the stifling that much more difficult to achieve, and that only has Remus whirring like a cat as he does anything he can to fuck back on him, garnering Sirius to smooth his hands further up Remus’s back and give the lad a little more room, just a touch of extra leeway to curl his knees into the bed and fuck him the way he clearly wants to, and there, it’s something like paradise, feeling Remus’s body ratchet tighter and tighter underneath his, hearing Remus stuttering and stammering as he drives back him, clocking what he thinks may have just been his name, but stifled isn’t going to work for Sirius, not tonight.

Sirius leans in over him, leaves his right hand splayed at Remus’s back to help drive him back on his thrusts like a metronome gone haywire, and reaches his left hand up and over Remus’s right shoulder, wrapping his arm across his chest and pulling his head up off the pillow in one tug of his shoulders. “Sorry?” he bids, grinning as he keeps Remus’s pelvis utterly pinned down while he drives him against the bed. “Didn’t hear you there.”

Remus expels one amazing huff at the wall ahead of them. “Mm mm,” Sirius denies, low in his throat. “That’s not what you said.”

“Sirius,” Remus pushes out, as under his breath as he can manage it with Sirius drilling him back here.

“Hm?” Sirius hums, aiming for gold with heach blast of his hips.

Remus pushes out a harried noise, pounding his fists on the bed as he straight up fucks the mattress underneath him for some much-needed friction up front, and tosses out Sirius’s name three times, which is precisely two more calls than even Sirius could've hoped for, and as a reward for that, Sirius pulls right arm from around Remus’s shoulders and brings it back around behind him, setting both hands back at the small of Remus’s back, driving that boy back on his cock and forward onto the bed at each new interval, helping him out with that friction thing up front, and Remus whimpers hard for it, drops his head over the safety pillow and bites it as his whole body stiffens before it loosens out, and Sirius’s eyes widen all the way out, his gape/grin fully on display though Remus can’t see an inch of it, feels the clench around his cock, and oh, he's there, too, bowing his head in as he rolls his hips with abandon, his grip jerky on Remus’s skin as he shudders through his own release.

He sags down, half-perched over Remus's rather presenting hips while his knees slide further apart in the confines of Remus's sprawled legs until they can't go any further, and reaches a shaky hand up through his damp hair, pulling it back as he comes back to earth, but the moment he lands there is the same moment he registers Remus wiping erratically at his eyes below him and that, is the precise moment Sirius is sure he's just fucked up big time.

He pulls right out of him, wrangles himself up the bed, and drops down by Remus’s left, trying to get a good look at his face, but that's proving difficult with Remus’s hands in the way and the overarching darkness in the room. He reaches up, tapping Remus’s left shoulder rapidly while his mouth is pressed into a firm line, and Remus shifts his hands a mere inch or two, peeking out through his fingers and putting out a harried breath.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” he rushes out.

“You are crying,” Sirius sounds out.

“Well, I don’t know why I’m doing it,” Remus expels. “I don’t have legs anymore and my ears are ringing, too; I’m not just boohooing over here, my brain's split in half.”

“Oh, well, that’s fair,” Sirius allows, smiling a bit there. “I was hoping, if I angled you down like that the bed would sort of do half the work for you and I’m glad to see I was onto something.”

Remus pushes out a harried breath in reply as he wipes at each eye in turn, looking sidelong at Sirius with his left eye as he works on his right one, and huffs grand at him. “Stop looking at me,” he insists, all ruffled up. “I’m having a moment, OK?”

Sirius huffs out a laugh, absolutely loving the sight of a bemusedly euphoric Remus. “You don’t have to feel weird about this, at all,” he insists, reaching to whisk his right hand through Remus’s fringe. “Seriously, you’ve made me boohoo from dick, too, you know; you’re not so special, and I mean that in the best way.”

“I have not,” Remus expels, dropping his right hand pointedly.

“Excuse you?” Sirius returns, tossing his right thumb over his shoulder. “The other day, on the couch? Spiritual experience; you rearranged my entire insides and my eyes welled up like a dam threatening to break—"

"Oh, they did not," Remus sends him.

"Well, you wouldn’t have known seeing as you were right up behind me, weren't you?” Sirius counters.

Remus looks as if he’s had his world caved in on him, his eyes glossing over. “Mhm, bask in it,” Sirius advises. “It happens, just a mark of a jolly good time, I like to think; happened the very first time you topped me even, but thankfully we were in the shower so I could discreetly hobble over there after we finished and disguise it underneath the stream while you were over there busy being loose as a noodle and hanging onto the wall for support.”

Remus takes in a rather chuffed breath and Sirius knows he’s half in the room with him, half astral projected back into Sirius’s shower one very special Boxing Day morning. “You did?”

“Uhm, more like you did,” Sirius corrects. “Listen, I don’t bottom for just anyone, thank you, and you saw me after we got that done; I frolicked about the flat with the sort of skip you tend to take on after a righteous Dickens and I'm shocked you didn't notice.”

Remus puts out a chuffed laugh. “I noticed the frolicking, thank you, but that was my first time topping so I'm allowed to find it boggling that I managed to get you quite so there,” he defends, his mouth twisting into a smile.

Remus puts out a sheepish snicker, but Sirius’s brain is a little busy short-circuiting. “I’m flatlining.”

“Ohh, come on, you could tell I wasn't exactly seasoned in it,” Remus returns, plainly amused. “Had we been in a bed, I might've been better at it; I was sure I was about to drop you at one point and then you actually did start slipping.”

Sirius puts out a flat noise for objection. “Remus, I absolutely could not tell,” he instils, and Remus sends him a plain smile. “I took you for a veteran, thank you; you fucked back into place after that slip, are you kidding me right now?”

Remus lifts his shoulders once. “You're inspiring?" he answers for it, getting a sputter out of Sirius for it. "I'd never got the chance to before; I was always on the receiving end of things, but I wanted to try it, and clearly so, what with the spirited energy I brought to the—”

He smirks a laugh as he trails off, lets the miming of thrusting from all those many moons ago finish the sentence for him, and Sirius places his hands over his warm cheeks, gape/grinning all over again. “You will seriously never stop blowing my mind,” he puts down, leaning in to leave a kiss on Remus’s lips.

“I hope I don’t,” Remus instils, giving into a keen smile, but that smile peters off too soon and gets replaced with a grimace. “I came all over the sheet.”

Sirius has absolutely no control over the rolling laugh that comes out of him, but he wouldn't have sought control if he could have. “Oh no,” he puts out gravely, “whatever shall we do?”

Remus pushes out a snort, laughing at himself. “I’m too tired to change it now.”

“OK, how about this,” Sirius raises. “You go start the up the shower, I’ll change it and meet you in there, deal?”

Remus smiles, leans in to leave a peck on Sirius’s lips, and nods for it, shifting back on the bed.

“Boy, you really did, didn’t you?” Sirius comments, examining the sheet.

“Oh, fuck you,” Remus sends him, already scooting back toward the end of the bed on all fours.

Sirius waits there until Remus is up and limping a little toward the door, but at least balanced on his feet. “Sorry for the limp,” he calls after him.

“I’m not,” Remus returns him, and that is just the right sort of lovely thought to give Sirius a burst of energy to see to the sheets.

He dumps the stained ones in the hamper, goes to Remus’s dinky little closet to get a new set, and begins the process of spidering up the bed on all fours, trying to fit the corners around the edges of the mattress. It’s tough work when Sirius is nothing but a noodle with legs at the moment, but he’s nothing if not determined so he works it out eventually. He sees little point in tucking the top sheet in when they’re likely to fall into bed post-shower and mess it all up again, so he leaves that one be and heads for the loo, keeping his footfalls quiet on the tiles before barreling in past the shower curtain and making Remus jump into the air out of fright.

“Do you get a kick out of that?” Remus huffs, his hair all sudsy.

“You know I do,” Sirius returns, sliding the curtain shut behind him.

Remus steps back under the stream and finishes up with his hair before taking to soaping up Sirius's red loofah rather than his green one, gestures for him to turn around, and Sirius does as bid, shutting his eyes contentedly as Remus rubs it over his back, pressing little kisses over Sirius’s shoulders until it's time to soap up Sirius's front and applies kisses the whole way through that process, lulling Sirius into a state of near-being. He has them switch places once Sirius is good and lathered, backs him closer to the shower’s stream, and begins rinsing him off, Sirius simply going with every guiding push and pull that Remus weaves him into, feeling the most curious combination of loved and lost at once.

Remus takes his hands back to locate Sirius’s bottle of shampoo, squeezes a liberal glob into his left hand, and leaves the bottle aside, spreading the glob out between his hands before lifting them up toward Sirius’s hair. “I think I’d do well with a shower caddy,” he shares.

“Elise knows,” Sirius blurts, sounding strange to even himself.

Remus stops with his hands up in Sirius's hair, blinking at him. “Right,” he echoes, leaving a curious lilt at the end of the word.

Sirius shakes his head out, realizing he’s not being very clear at all. “No, I don’t mean the clusters,” he amends. “About us, I mean.”

Remus's hands are covered in suds so he can’t do much with them now aside from continue to spread the suds out, his gaze still on Sirius. “How?” he asks.

“Well, I was going mad in the car waiting to get to you, so I might've given you a kiss once I did have you in my sights,” Sirius explains, and to Remus’s blink-and-reel combo, he tilts his head to the side pointedly. “I kissed your forehead, Remus, I didn’t snog the life out of you; I have some restraint.”

Remus settles a little. “Are you sure she saw?” he raises, careful in tone, careful in movement.

“Oh, definitely,” Sirius nods. “I did it once when I first got there and then a second time, but that one was, like, five kisses in one; it’d have been hard to miss for anyone standing in the room.”

Remus’s mouth peters into a frown as he reaches his right hand out and only seems to remember it’s covered in shampoo an inch before Sirius’s neck, and in truth, Sirius doesn't mind at all; what does he care about a shampoo smear when he’s got a flustered Remus in front of him. “I just thought it might be better for you to know now, rather than find tomorrow and with no warning,” he tacks on, speaking it around a half-frown.

“Well, that’s—” Remus starts, cuts off, breathes in. “What did she do?”

Sirius hums a note while working out how to word it, then figures it’ll be easier just to show him. He sits his hands on his hips, fingers curled away from his skin like she had them, and sets the exact gaze he remembers her sending the floor. “Oh,” Remus returns deeply, and Sirius lifts his gaze while holding the pose and sees he’s got one captive audience in front of him. “Just like that?”

“Oh, I’m doing exactly what she did,” Sirius echoes, looking down at the floor of the tub for the full experience once more before letting his hands fall. “Seemed more of an ‘oops, I'm in the wrong room,’ and yet, funnily enough, she didn’t leave the room despite looking like she knew she ought to turn around and do just that.”

“Lots going on in that room, I suppose,” Remus supplies.

“I mean, it may be fine,” Sirius offers. “I’m of the opinion she’s a rather crass human being, but you know her better than I do so I’m willing to pass the final answer onto you here — would she really care that much?”

“Care isn’t really my worry,” Remus trades him, fiddling with his right thumbnail. “It’s more, how quickly this could spread, she does gab a lot. Usually, I just catch little things here and there, but it stands to reason that I could easily be the next topic of discussion around there, especially if it’s something like this; it’s a conversation starter, for sure.”

“Right,” Sirius gives, throat tight. “So, like, her going and telling the rest of them ‘hey, that bloke with the hair who comes and visits him sometimes? The boyfriend,’ sort of thing?”

“Well, yeah,” Remus says of it. “Among other things.”

“Right, but Ian’s, uh—” Sirius pauses. "Well, he's gayer than a picnic basket.”

Remus smirks once. “Right, and he’d be the first to say it, but I’ve seen the way he gets othered around there at times, or treated like he's their one window into the culture, and maybe he really is that for some of them and I don't know that he minds it necessarily, but I know I wouldn't want to answer some of the questions he gets," he maintains, pausing to tug at his lower lip with his teeth and shrug his shoulders once. "I don’t think anyone there will be horrible to me about it, it’s just not their business what I do in my free time.”

“You’re right, it isn’t,” Sirius echoes. “And the thing is, I’ve rather felt that the people who find that particular quality a huge topic of conversation are usually very boring? If that’s really all they have to discuss, I mean; there’s more to me than who I make cry in bed, you know.”

Remus pushes a semi-laugh out his nose. “I do know that,” he underlines. “You’re way better at just leaving it until it comes up or letting it out of the bag with a pronoun that has to come along for a good story, but I’ve never — I’ve always just omitted pronouns altogether, especially at work.”

Sirius tugs on his own lip now, too. “Isn’t it,” he starts, letting out a quiet breath and trying again. “I don’t know, difficult not to sometimes?”

“Not to what?” Remus asks.

“Talk about it?” Sirius raises. “It, me, what we did over the weekend? I’m with you so much.”

“Sometimes it is,” Remus offers, his eyes a fine set of dinner plates and boring right into Sirius’s soul laid out for him. “Only, a lot of times it isn’t, but I’m pretty well-versed in keeping that part of my life under the radar, I don’t trip up very often; you and Lily were the two exceptions to the rule in, what, nearly a decade now — which, I hope will tell you how much I valued the two of you because I'd kept that so close to the chest.”

And there, like a magic set of words that suddenly slap context up into the mix and completely crush something like a wounded pride, Sirius flinches. “No, and I know that, I do” he instils, more for himself than for Remus just then. “And it took you how long to tell me? I know it’s not personal; it actually doesn’t have anything to do with me, but I still can’t help feeling like it might.”

“It’s not,” Remus comes in, laying it down flat. “I mean, it is personal to me, but it’s got not to do with you personally — and I mean that kindly; I’m just not used to wearing it at work.”

Sirius breathes in through his nose, thinking it must stem out further than just the workplace, but Remus lifts his hands into Sirius’s hair, lathering it up with every bit of expertise of a potter in front of his wheel, and Sirius catches his eyes before they fall shut completely, peering at Remus through mere slits. “This is coercion,” he mentions dryly.

Remus’s gaze flickers down from his locks to meet up with Sirius’s eyes. “Not coercion; I just got sick of having shampoo hands,” he amends. “And, if this just so happens to make you soft as clay, then more power to me, don’t you think?”

Sirius huffs long, both loving and hating that this man can read his mind like this. “Remus, I fucking love you,” he puts out. “I mean I'm done for, over the moon, flustered breathing, wake up happy just know you’re next to me and if you’re not, then you’re probably putzing around somewhere and I'll get to see you in a few minutes; the gross, puke-inducing stuff—”

Remus snorts. “That’s an impeccable collection of words—”

“They’re real, Remus,” Sirius insists, now knowing precisely how Remus must feel when he laughs at him during a particularly important observation just because Remus worded it humorously. “This is real for me and if that’s not what it’s like for you—”

“It is like that for me,” Remus cuts in, pushing out a laborious breath through a smile. “I don’t know what to do with myself half the time because I wake up, see you, and want to burst into specks; I’ve never been like this before.”

“I doubt it,” Sirius slips in, though he and Remus both know he’s fishing for compliments at this point.

“It’s true,” Remus keeps to it, humouring him like the fair and reasonable lad he is. “I wake up a pile of goo and stare at you like a goon.”

“You do not,” Sirius insists.

“Well, you wouldn’t know, would you?” Remus raises, styling Sirius’s hair up into a twisty bun at the top of his head and wearing his lopsided grin as he observes his artwork. “You’re usually fast asleep when it happens, but you have absolutely caught me staring at you like you’re my last meal a number of times, too many to count, in fact, and I’m not saying it in a dirty sort of way, but you can absolutely take that as a double entendre if it helps; in fact, I encourage you to—”

Sirius sends out a whimper and pushes his face forward into the crook of Remus’s neck, causing Remus to pause short. “No no, you keep going," he insists. "I'm enjoying this."

“My coworkers not knowing that I’m one lovesick bloke doesn’t negate any of that,” Remus keeps on, like he’d never paused at all and like he doesn’t mind one bit that Sirius just smushed a ton of shampoo onto him, but to be fair, he probably doesn't. “I’m an absolute mad lad over you, I just don’t need people I work with to know it; you should see me talking about you with Dorcas or Lily once I get going, I’m nothing but a cheesecake, and talking to them about you or any of this is huge for me, even if it seems small.”

Sirius gives a throaty noise against Remus's neck, but he's got nothing to voice just yet and Remus seems to have more coming as is. “So, next time this happens, and I’m afraid you’re with a bit of a creature of habit so there will likely be the next time,” he passes along, speaking through a bit of a whisper now, “remember that you just made me come like that and expel tears with it, and that, truly, has never occurred in all my years where it could have been achieved; that is going to be ridiculously difficult not to brag about it.”

Sirius sniffs, lifts his head, puts his back straight, and his head held high, taking a resounding breath in. “'I’ve paid my dues—'”

“Oh, that was quick,” Remus notes.

“'—Time after time,'” Sirius grins, “'I’ve done my sentence, but committed no crime.'”

Remus sets his hands on Sirius’s shoulders. “OK, do that, but step back while you're doing it,” he bids, guiding him back toward the stream of the shower

Sirius moves as bid, shutting his eyes as Remus leans his head back toward the stream, thankfully keeping Sirius’s face/mouth situation as dry as can be. “'And bad mistakes.'” he croons, pointing up at Remus blindly.

“'I’ve made a few,'” Remus lets him have.

Sirius opens his eyes in a snap, a gape/grin on display. “'I’ve had my share—'” a beat of his left fist into the shower wall, “'of sand kicked—'” a kick to the shallow layer of water at their feet in the tub, “'in my face—'”

“You are going to get me evicted,” Remus cuts in, not unkindly.

Sirius leans his head back, throat open, happy as a clam, “'—But I’ve come throuuugh.'”

The beat goes on (and on, and on, and on).

--

When Sirius pulls into the parking lot of Remus’s old workplace on Wednesday afternoon, there’s a sense of glee running through his veins that has him just brimming with the feeling. Remus stopping in and visiting him at work had been a trademark over the course of Remus’s previous term, typically would have him bringing work along with him to pluck away at while taking up the stool on the far end of the bar seating for obvious reasons, and for that, Sirius has sorely missed Remus’s presence in his shop as of late.

He feels another wave of anticipation as he parks Priscilla in an open spot in the lot and spots James out front with a tray of samples. He pulls into park, snorts as he lifts his helmet off his head, and looks over his head at Remus takes his own off, a helmet that Sirius may or may not have replaced with a slightly larger one so that Remus could fit sunglasses on underneath them and not have them stab him in the face in the process.

“I asked for him to roll out a red carpet for your arrival, but this will do.”

Remus clicks his tongue, pushing his sunglasses up his nose a bit. “I hate that there’s a fifty percent chance you’re even kidding about that,” he comments, swinging his right leg down from the bike.

“Hate, love,” Sirius recites, following suit as he gets down off her, “fine line.”

“The finest,” Remus assures, falling into step with Sirius as they head across the parking lot and calling to James from there. “Finally put you to work, did they?”

James balances the tray on his right hand and flourishes his left one around the collection of small sample cups arranged far too artfully for just a bunch of drink samples. “What do we have here?” Sirius bids, stepping up onto the curb.

“Peach tea,” James provides, and Sirius gives a rather pithy face to that, thanks but no thanks, meanwhile Remus sure goes ahead and trills a bit about that, nabbing two lil' cups off of the tray possibly because he knows the sample boy won't give him flack for taking two. “There’s scones on that one.”

Sirius looks right and sees that a terrace table has been dragged over onto James’s left to hold up said tray of blueberry ones, and that, he doesn’t mind one bit. “How’s the day?” he raises, plucking two sample cups off of that tray.

“D'you want to know what he fucking did?” James poses, tossing his head back toward the shop.

Sirius smirks as he lobs a chunk of scone into his mouth. “You know I do.”

“He’s purposefully fucking with me now, I’m sure of it,” James details, his once bright smile nowhere to be found. “I’m bar bitch, he’s supposedly on till, we’ve got a huge queue going, Charlotte’s in back getting ready to clock in; he puts someone’s travel mug down on the bar and when I finally get to it, there’s no note, not a single mark, nothing, so I think it can't be anything major if it apparently doesn’t warrant a single instruction and I go ‘what’s this, then,’ and he’s all ‘oh, it’s just an extra hot, no foam, half-sweet white mocha with a half of pump of peppermint in it.'”

James caps off the tale with a near-deranged grin, sending Sirius curling forward with a hybrid of a cough and a laugh. “Stop, I’ll choke,” he pleads, swallowing down his mouthful and straightening up with a sniff. “I’d have fucking killed him.”

“I wasn’t far off,” James echoes deeply.

Remus’s brow is rather furrowed as he sips his first sample delicately. “How long has he been with the company?” he checks.

“What, three years?” James gives, looking at Sirius for clarification.

“Something like that,” he puts up, fishing in the first of his sample cups for another bit of scone.

“Then I don’t know what would possess him to do that,” Remus raises, a half-frown on his lips. “If he didn’t know to put the sticker on an unmarked cup, that’d be one thing, but he should know by now that doing something like that just makes things difficult for everyone involved, so I'd have to agree he’s fucking with you, sorry James.”

Sirius lifts his hands airily. “He’s hellspawn.”

“I’m about ready to whoop him right here in the parking lot—” James cuts off right quick as a woman trots on up to the shop door only to be halted by him before she can reach for the handle, “—so sorry, we’re in a bit of a bind at the moment,” he offers, his overall tune changed to a bright, pleasant air. “There’s maintenance being done in the building up top, water’s been shut off, and we can’t allow customers inside the shop.”

The woman takes her hand back from the door. “Why not?”

“Well, there's no running water, so it’d be a breach of health and safety protocol to let folks in and we can’t have that,” James provides.

“Well, this is quite inconvenient,” the woman maintains.

“Out of my hands, I’m afraid,” James supplies, lifting his tray higher between them. “Have a tea for the trouble, and there’s another shop identical to this one just a few blocks over that way.”

“I know where it is and I’ll just go there,” the woman says, already on her way.

“Be my fucking guest, then,” James retorts, but the effect is somewhat marred since she's effectively too far to have heard it. “It’s like people think I wrote the health and safety manual personally, it’s ridiculous—”

“There’s no water in there?” Sirius bids, starting up a wheeze-laugh as he points past James’s head.

“Been shut off for two hours almost,” James supplies. “Will’s about to go postal in there.”

“Is that why he made you sample boy?” Remus bids, right beaming about it.

“Someone has to stand out here and deter traffic; they kept walking in,” James insists. “And if I’m honest, I volunteered to be the traffic cone, anything to get away from David is a treat and a half—”

Remus has to step back fully to avoid getting barrelled into as an apron-clad Will comes barging out of the shop. “This is fucking ludicrous,” he sends out.

“Oh, he’s postal already, good,” Sirius observes, in love with this.

“I’m going to see what’s taking them so fucking long,” Will maintains.

“Need an extra set of fists?” Sirius offers, brandishing his right one.

“We’ll fucking see, won’t we,” Will returns.

“Take a sample along, maybe that’ll speed things up,” James suggests, holding the tray out to him.

Will puts out a dry, humourless laugh. “Fat chance I’ll bring them anything,” he returns, taking to blinking at Remus like he’s just realized he’s even there, and to that, Sirius can’t relate. “Sorry, Remus; bit of a shit show 'round here.”

Remus waves him off. “Sounds it,” he trades him. “Luck and such.”

The three of them watch as Will stalks off down the mall strip to get to the main doors to the flats located up above the shopping strip, and Sirius lets out a contented sigh in his wake. “I’m so glad we came by today—”

A truly deafening shriek ringing off the roof of the shop strip sends all three of them jolting to attention before Remus is effectively levelled from the back by Sophie, who rather disappears behind Remus’s height before her arms come up around his middle and give him a hearty squeeze. Remus recovers soon enough from the blow itself, though it is sort of funny how alarmed he is at the manhandling until Sophie speaks and the lock likely clicks in his head. “You didn’t tell me you were coming,” she puts out.

Remus swivels around and stoops to hug her properly. “Lower your whip, I was going to stop in there,” he instils.

“You’d better have,” Sophie returns, stepping back to reach for the shop door. “I only have a few minutes, but come say hi, OK?”

James stuffs the tray in his hands between Sophie and the door. “Don’t go in there, it’s chaos,” he maintains. “Water, down, mayhem, ensuing; run while you can.”

Sophie’s eyes come alive with pure bamboozlement before she glances sidelong at Remus. “Sorry, Steph,” Sirius offers, a big ol' smile on. “No customers allowed in there while the water’s shut off.”

Both Sophie and Remus look to him now, though their expressions are decidedly different levels of plain. “Seriously, though, we're not kidding," James tacks on. "Can’t go in ‘til it’s up and running again.”

Sophie gasps, realization clouding over. “Right, I didn’t even realize how badly that’d affect you guys,” she puts up. “We can’t do any demonstrations until it’s back up, but we can at least let them inside.”

“We’d get dunked on real good if the suits find out we’re letting them in, so,” James further provides, moving the tray back and forth enticingly. “Take a tea on the house for the meantime.”

Sophie splays her hand around the array of sample cups, carefully thinking over her choice. “Yeah, they’re all the same,” Sirius lets her know, and Remus promptly lifts his right hand to push his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose with his middle finger.

“I’ll check back later, then,” Sophie decides, sample in hand as she budges Remus. “I mean it, come visit this time.”

“How long are you on for?” Remus asks.

“‘Til six,” she provides, pointing to him as she heads back toward the soap shop where she belongs.

Remus waves, smiling tightly, and turns his head toward Sirius just standing there repeatedly prodding his tongue against the inside of his left cheek. “You are five,” he retorts.

“Honestly, just lay the pipe in her already,” James dunks him, sipping on his own sample tea.

Sirius’s snort echoes off of the roof of the front terrace. “No, you're not doing this,” Remus asserts, lifting his right hand for a gesture of plain refusal. “I get enough of it from him, thank you.”

“Makes sense, she’s salivating over there,” James puts up, positively glowing behind his cup.

“Last I heard, she’s seeing somebody,” Remus reports.

“It doesn’t really matter if she is, she’s still calling out ‘Remus,’ tonight no matter who she’s sitting on,” Sirius trades him, garnering James to send a resounding ‘oooh,’ at Remus while bouncing on his heels.

Remus reels for a second, his right brow lifting, and oh no, Sirius is done for. “What, like you did?”

James sends out a choking noise. “He wins,” he stresses, but Sirius didn’t really need the scoring to be vocalized when he’s already chasing him down; unfortunately for him, Remus is much speedier than he looks and quickly gets himself shut inside the shop, holding the door closed while Sirius tries to no avail to yank it open.

“Give it up,” James tells him, smiling away behind Sirius by the sure sound of it. “He’s way stronger than you.”

“Not by that much,” Sirius returns, tugging the door open a little only to get it pulled shut by Remus.

“That door isn’t budging.”

“It just did, Specs,” Sirius informs him, trying the door again.

This time, the whole door opens when Sirius yanks on it, taking him back two or three steps, and at first he's sure that was pure sabotage, but then he sees Remus standing to attention just on the other side of the doorway and is suddenly sure he's just met David’s wrath. He slips right in behind Remus and peers around, spotting not David at all, but Charlotte is indeed there, looming over behind the pastry case with her hands over her mouth, her eyes on the door in horror, and it takes two further glances between her and Remus for him to make the connection.

He looks to Charlotte once more with a supremely satisfied smile. “Call me a liar again,” Sirius challenges, right brow cocked.

“Never again, never again,” she chants, muffled from behind her hands, but by no means is the chant marred.

“Are you doing alright over there?” Sirius chimes, beaming bright.

Charlotte lowers her hands from over her mouth and promptly sticks them in her apron pocket, procuring her mobile from inside it rather shakily. “Can I—” she starts, pointing to it and then to Remus. “Look, this is probably the closest I’ll get to him any time soon, if ever, and I’d like to prank my mate.”

“He gets it,” Sirius waves her off.

Remus gives him a plain Look but relents with his next breath; never one to disappoint if he can help it. He steps up past the counter, moves in behind the pastry case to get up beside her, and leans in for the selfie. “OK, and one more, but only smile with half of your mouth and like you know you're hot this time,” Charlotte bids, garnering Remus’s mouth to twitch with wan amusement before he pulls it together, being a good lad and giving the girl what she wants for the next one.

Charlotte pulls her mobile in to look over the results. “Oh, the sunglasses really pull the whole thing together,” she maintains, thumbs going haywire over her screen.

“Don’t they?” Sirius agrees.

“Enough out of you,” Remus sends him.

Charlotte pauses middle of typing to take in a throaty gasp, trilling. “He’s Welsh, too,” she puts out, stamping her foot on the raised platform behind the counter. “Call 911.”

“Get it together, Charlotte,” Sirius sends her, enjoying every second of the show. “You knew this was coming on some level; you’ve had time to prepare.”

“No time would have prepared me enough,” Charlotte insists, finally settling down enough to finish sending the selfies wherever they’re meant to go and once that’s done, she slips her mobile back into her apron pocket and smiles at Remus. “Hi, I’ve heard lots about you and all of it's good.”

Remus shuffles on his feet, likely dying inside, but listen; he looks so good doing it. “Same for you,” he offers, tipping his head to her.

Sirius sighs happily and heads up behind the counter with a spring in his step, glancing around and finding one loaf of banana bread sitting halfway cut into pieces on the cutting board, but all signs point to the likelihood of the task having gone abandoned due to Remus’s sudden entrance for the pastry knife nearby the board is laying rather askew. “Is there any cold brew left or has James already given that away to appease the locals?” he checks, strolling past the two of them.

“About half a jug left, last I saw,” Charlotte relays, picking up the pastry knife and resuming her apparent task of replenishing James’s sample supply. “There was more of the tea than cold brew available when the appeasing began so he went with that.”

Sirius brightens even more at that. “Is there any tea left in here?” he checks, heading for cold bar.

“Should be,” Charlotte offers, slicing the rest of her loaf into small squares.

“Oh, I don’t need one,” Remus maintains, waving him off.

Sirius opens the fridge below the counter and has himself a gander inside even still, but all that’s left is their herbal brew. “Just passion left, but it’s something, mm?”

“I’m really fine,” Remus insists, clearly not knowing what to do with his hands or himself while he’s up behind the counter where he usually doesn’t tend to place himself.

Sirius heads for the stacks of cups and primly takes two large cold cups off of their tower. “Would you like to pick a spot out there?” he raises, tipping his head toward the floor. “Prime pickings.”

Remus pushes a sigh through his nose, fishes his wallet out, and leaves a few coins on the till counter before taking to waving Charlotte down in a 'sorry to bother you' sort of way, which is hilarious when Charlotte’s been peeking at him for, oh, the entire time they’ve been inside. “That should cover whatever he ends up making,” he offers, leaving a Look for Sirius in his wake before he heads back around to the far side of the counter, and there, he can see Remus relax back into his regular role as a humble patron.

Charlotte looks over at Sirius, pauses her slicing, and promptly drops the knife, flying over to him to thunder a series of jovial punches into Sirius’s left arm. “You lucky shit,” she hisses.

Sirius snorts, ducking away from her as he bats her away. “You need to settle down.”

“Me?” Charlotte returns. “He’s a dream.

“What, you don’t think I know?” Sirius raises, taking to a bit of a shimmy. “Get back to work, ma’am; you’re on the clock.”

Charlotte leaves him with one, final sock to the same arm before she heads back to the pastry case. Sirius focuses on their drinks, gets Remus’s done up first, and works on his own, lovely disaster of a drink from there, glancing over midway through to find Remus has settled himself in the booth over in the far-right corner of the shop with his chin resting in his hands, and while Sirius can’t completely confirm if he’s looking back at him or not, there is a small smile on those lips that does suggest he's got his eyes trained this way.

Sirius is just finishing up dolling out ice cubes into both drinks when David stalks up from the backroom, stopping at the sight of him and putting out a miserable groan. “Why are you always here?”

“To see you, cupcake,” he offers sweetly, popping a lid onto both drinks. David blocks that with a dramatic lift of his hand for silence, heads left to step out onto the floor, and fucking locks in on Remus like he’s got sensors in his brain. “No no, don’t even."

“We’re closed, bud,” David sends him anyway.

“I’m aware, bud,” Remus returns, his work voice on.

Sirius trills excitedly, bobbing his shoulders as he reaches for two straws. “He’s just sitting there, leave him be.”

David whirls back around to face Sirius. “Who is he even?”

Sirius clicks his tongue. “Take a wild guess.”

David sends out a royal scoff, his face all shrivelled up. “No one needs you parading your boyfriend around in here while the shop is closed,” he returns.

“Relax, sweetie, your tips are safe,” Sirius returns, carrying their drinks out onto the floor and strolling past him.

“It’s not the tips I’m worried about and you’d better have paid for those,” David stresses.

“Get fucked,” Sirius enunciates. “Just once even, and you might actually be bearable to be around.”

“'Burn David,'” Charlotte trills, giving it her best Alexis Rose from over behind the pastry case.

Sirius saunters over to Remus with an air of newfound completion, sets the tea down in front of the boy before sliding into the booth seat across from his, and flinches as a chair scrapes across the floor. He turns his head in a snap, instinctively checking his surroundings to see if he’ll need to dive to the side to avoid a flying object, but David’s merely shifting chairs around in the café and scraping them along the floor for no good reason as far as Sirius can see other than to make loitering inside the shop as unappealing an idea as possible.

“Now, I know what you think you’re doing is incredibly important, but could you literally do anything else?” Sirius raises him.

“Could always leave?” David suggests politely, and it’s so Reg, Sirius needs a second to breathe.

He faces forward, sending a smile to Remus’s pointed frown. “Why don’t we go sit outside,” he suggests. "Hang out with James some more; I'm sure he'd appreciate the company.”

Just there, the door opens and Sirius glances over his shoulder again, finding James wandering in with two empty trays in tow and heading up behind the counter for his replenishment. “Well, we could still go out there,” Remus tacks on, what with James’s presence sort of flattening his previous suggestion. “Point is, we could be out there, not in here.”

“Then he wins, Remus,” Sirius instils, crossing his legs underneath the table and getting right comfortable.

Remus promptly sticks his straw in his drink, sitting back in the booth with a stony expression on, and Sirius pops the paper off his straw and indulges in a lengthy first sip, compartmentalizing the sounds of chair legs scraping the floor behind him by honing in on the music playing from the speaker overhead until the door to the café opens yet again, only this time it slams off the wall beside it, garnering every head in the shop to turn that way, and brings a seething Will in with it.

“Piece of fucking shit,” he barks, the acoustics inside the near-empty café echoing the exclamation to all four corners of it.

“Umm,” Sirius chimes, “his name is David?”

James’s face comes alive with a new and wondrous affection, Charlotte drops so low down behind the pastry case that she’s no longer visible at all, while David scoffs grand before whipping toward the backroom, and good, hurry it up. Sirius looks across the table at Remus, finding him with his head in his hands and his shoulders shake profusely, and that, right there, is all Sirius really needs; the rest is just welcome noise.

“What’d they say, Bossman?” James asks brightly.

Will whips his apron off and promptly pitches it to the floor. “Could be an hour, could be six,” he snaps, garnering whoops from James and Charlotte behind the counter. “No — no whooping, I want this place ready to go the second that water’s back on; James, get back out there and play defense before someone else waddles in here, Charlotte, finish that up and get the case switched over to p.m., I’ll get the coffee all ground up and in place so all we have to do is press start once the doors are deemed open again, and somebody fucking find David and get him on rotation.”

Charlotte and James immediately try to opt out of the last job listed, but James is quicker at signalling 'not it' and Charlotte flips him off for it before heading for the back room to find David, meanwhile Sirius sighs brightly, facing Remus again. “OK, even I can admit that would have been a horrible series of events to miss out on,” Remus puts up, splaying his hands rather evenly over the table and on either side of his tea, “but I think we’re encroaching on unwelcome visitor status and that maybe our presence here is a bit, mm, rude?”

Sirius sighs at him. “Come on, no one cares if we’re just in the corner having a cup,” he maintains, draining another solid quarter out of his drink in a single sip.

“We came, we visited, it's been a time,” Remus lists off, “but it’s just not the day to be hovering around the place, as is evident.”

“I’m definitely not leaving now,” Sirius insists. “You can’t pay for this kind of entertainment.”

Remus breathes in, pushing it right back out within the next beat. “OK, then I’ll go visit Sophie while you sit here just to prove a point to a bloke you couldn’t care less about," he returns.

Sirius takes his mouth off of his straw. “What is with you?” he raises, his brow furrowing.

“What do you mean?” Remus returns. “I don’t want to overstay our welcome.”

“This is the first time you’ve been here in weeks,” Sirius highlights, “and the first thing you want to do is leave.”

Remus swallows before breathing in, lifting his right hand to scratch idly at his forehead. “I didn’t realize how many people would know who I am just by my very presence near you,” he instils. “I mean, I knew meeting Charlotte was going to be a lot and I was prepared for that, but—”

Sirius lifts his hands to halt the thought train before it leaves the station. “She couldn’t have been cooler about it if she tried,” he puts up. “She’s a bit peeved you’re unavailable, but the good kind of peeved; you passed with flying colours without even trying so take that as a positive, I know I have.”

“I didn’t know he knew about me, too,” Remus attests, hushed down as he nods curtly toward the bar Sirius has a feeling David is now occupying. "You could have warned me.“

“Warned you about what?” Sirius raises.

Remus huffs lowly. "That he'd get all—" he cuts off, doing an impression of David's vapid face and while it needs some work, he's only just met the guy; there's time yet to perfect the impression, and the sentiment lands either way.

"He's just bothered by my presence on an off-day," Sirius explains. “And he would’ve been just as bothered if I’d dragged Peter in here, too, so it really isn't you.”

“Well, he probably wouldn’t have scoffed so forcefully if you'd brought Pete in here, and he’d have called him your mate,” Remus counters. “You said, ‘take a wild guess,’ meaning he already knew who I was and hadn’t put it together yet; so, why does he know?”

Sirius sits back in his seat, but really, he got pushed there more than anything. “I can’t help that he’s a mosquito,” he puts up, lifting a hand to count on his fingers. “I’ve got James, I’ve got Mary, I’ve got Charlotte, I've got Will, who all know and ask about you all the time so, what, am I to police myself and pretend I don’t know who Remus is when they ask about him just because David happens to be hovering about? I’m not quieting down for him, I’m just not doing that; he can block his ears if he doesn’t want to hear it.”

Remus breathes in and back out, holding the tips of his forefingers together like he’s about to teach Sirius a concept. “Alright, but don’t you see that when you invite outside people into us, you’re also giving them ammunition to use on us at some point?" he raises.

Sirius drapes himself over top of his side of the table, giving out a laborious sigh. “Remus, if I got sore over every single person who makes a stank face over who I choose to sleep with, I’d never get anywhere,” he puts it plain.

“Right, but we weren’t even near each other and he called it parading,” Remus supplies, talking quite a bit with his hands so Sirius knows he’s got to be rumpled to hell and back. “It’s quite clear he doesn’t think much of us simply sitting and existing near him, so maybe we should be more careful and rethink the places we’re open about this.”

Sirius’s throat hurts. “If the act of just sitting and existing puts people like him off, why wouldn’t we keep doing what we’re doing?” he raises. “Fuck people like him, Remus; they’re a disease and not much else.”

“I don’t want our existence to be an act of defiance at all,” Remus sends out, trying his best to keep his voice down. “Everything we do ends up being a statement and I didn’t ask for that job, I didn’t ask to get cooed at in the street for moving a strand of hair out of your eyes as if I did it for a display, I didn’t ask to be accosted by a rando jogger because I was laying too close to you on a blanket at the square, I don't want any of it; I just want to be with you and leave everyone out of it, right where they are.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Remus,” Sirius insists, feeling sick to his stomach. “That shit gets to me, too, I’m not a robot, but there’s a better way to come at this than to just say you won’t participate in any of it; the fact is, when we do those sorts of thing, we are lit up on display no matter the reaction, and I don’t have the definitive answer to this, I just have mine, and I think, not giving a shit what Piece-of-Shit Dave over there and people like him or nothing like him think of us is a decent start.”

Remus pushes his hands up underneath his sunglasses to rub at his eyes. “You always make these things sound like they’re the easiest mantras to adopt in the world,” he puts up tightly, “but you’re saying that to someone whose—”

“You know,” Sirius cuts in, right peeved at this point. “Some people, and I’m not saying me, but some might think you’ve been sending out mixed signals.”

“Sirius,” Remus says, baffled surely.

“No, I said not me, but fine, let's talk about me,” Sirius amends. "Now if, say, you weren’t all over me when we’re alone or occasionally when with the mates, I might have a harder time with the way you act in public with me, but again, since you treat me like a king the instant we’re well enough alone, I’ve counted those moments, clung to those instances, held onto the way you look at me when we're alone or with the small handful of people who do know about us, but even with all of that, you don’t yearn the same way I do.”

Remus reels back a bit, a plain face on. “Pretty sure you know exactly how much I yearn,” he maintains.

“You don’t tell anyone about me,” Sirius presses.

“We talked about this,” Remus stresses. “Our friends know; why isn’t that enough?”

“Never from your mouth,” Sirius puts out. “Not since we started, so that tells me it’s actually less about you and more about who you’re with; your work friends didn’t know—”

"—They sure fucking do now—”

“—Your schoolmates don’t know; Sophie sure as hell doesn’t, the way she hangs off you—”

“—Oh, you have got to stop hounding her; it's never been funny and it doesn’t matter whether I tell her or not," Remus maintains. "We’re not that close, Sirius, I don’t know why our friends knowing isn’t enough—”

Our friends finding out was incidental, and an accident you didn't even want to happen," Sirius comes back. "Let’s not pretend that you even made it a full day before suggesting we wait to tell any of them."

“Well, we didn’t wait, did we?” Remus puts in.

“Not for lack of trying on your part,” Sirius returns pointedly. “And you and I both know Dorcas wouldn’t have found out if she hadn't wandered out onto the terrace when she did, so she really shouldn’t count as broadening the circle.”

Remus huffs grand. “You don’t have to make it seem like she walked in on us with our hands down each other's pants,” he retorts. “It was a snog and we were days into this; I was still reeling over it happening at all, and that was just a few weeks after she and I were in a rather confusing situation ourselves, if you remember, so maybe you could try to understand why that particular instance was a tricky one.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember,” Sirius nods. “Just another situation I’ve been unbelievably cool about, considering.”

“Why are you doing this?” Remus demands. “There’s nothing there, nothing; we’re solid mates, she loves you, you love her, and we couldn’t have asked for a better result when it could've gone a lot worse for each one of us.”

Sirius points toward him with the straw in his drink. “That’s it, Remus; thank you,” he chimes. “We were all adults about it, kudos to us, but I’ve been more patient with you than I’ve been about anything; I’ve thought and thought and rethought about all the reasons you wouldn’t meet me halfway and I didn’t push you—”

“Yeah, you did,” Remus returns.

Sirius sours right quick. “I asked you to move in because we were happy and I wanted you cared for, but you’re right, I suppose,” he says tightly. “Nearly six months in, what was I thinking?”

“We were happy the way we were,” Remus stresses. “I thought we were happy now.”

Sirius nearly chucks his coffee at the window next to them, but no — no, that’s Walburga’s style and that’s not welcome here. “You spent hordes of time thinking and overthinking and worrying about how not to insult Dorcas with the news of us, but you haven’t thought once about how avoiding the subject of me like the plague from December straight into June was going to feel like for me, but fuck me, right?” he shoots at him. “Shit just rolls off my back.”

“I do think about it,” Remus clarifies; cordially, of course, since they’re out in fucking public.

“Then you may want to try doing something about that, because the behaviour doesn’t really track,” Sirius sends him, pitching himself back against the cushion of his seat and crossing his arms.

“I thought I had?” Remus raises. “Unless my mum and dad mean less to you than the girl who works at the soap shop next door does.”

Sirius leans his head back, puts out a gigantic huff, and uncrosses his arms to rub his hands over his face. “I’m sorry,” he puts out. “I know I’m being a lot, but I can’t fucking stop thinking that this is your way of telling me without actually telling me that you’re only halfway in this, and I've tried telling myself I know better, but the question just keeps coming back; what have you done to me, making me think and feel and pine this much for someone—”

Remus smirks a little, making Sirius falter. “Made you feel like shit, I’m seeing,” he returns, taking his hands off of the table to curl and uncurl them in his lap, no doubt. “I didn’t realize you wanted so much of all that — the hand-holding, the kisses in the farmer’s market, the whole thing.”

“I didn’t,” Sirius insists, lifting his shoulders. “Hell, I was certifiably stunted before you, I didn't think I could feel like this about anybody, and I tried, a few times over to see if I could, but nothing was ever clicking for me; no one clicked for me until you did, and now — yeah, yeah, maybe I wouldn’t mind a kiss on the way to somewhere or an arm around me while we’re walking the dog — I’m a simple man, OK?”

Remus shoots a much more pressurized smirk through his nose. “No, no you’re not,” he registers, giving a breathy little laugh with it before taking in a sobering breath. “I’ve told you why I don’t just tell anyone, but I’ve omitted Dorcas from my vocabulary with my parents and whenever I do get to talk to them, I'm trying to bring you up specifically so they'll get used to your name being as much of a constant in my life as it actually is, and I don’t know if it’ll soften the news any, I don't know if they’ll connect the dots, or realize I’d been talking about you for weeks on end, but I have to hope it will; even if I keep getting off the line knowing that it hasn't landed properly, I still need to be trying.”

“This was supposed to be a team effort, you know," Sirius puts in. "I can’t know if all of this is just tornadoing around in your head if you don’t tell me.”

“I don’t like telling you it because I don’t want to fucking hurt you,” Remus implores, putting out a breathy, humourless laugh there. “I don’t want to hurt you, and I still end up doing it.”

Sirius’s stomach jerks as Remus pushes out of his booth seat, immediately figuring he’s off to somewhere walled-off and private to shut him right out of the very dynamic Sirius leapt after at the mere thought of losing even a morsel of it, but Remus just stands by Sirius’s side of the booth, waiting for him to slide over and make room for him, and Sirius is nothing if not a petty bitch so he will do no such thing; Remus is going to have to sit right up by him, thigh to thigh, if he wants in.

Remus pushes a breath into his cheeks, takes a seat down beside Sirius with the exhale, and goes twice as far as Sirius would have dreamed of, turning more toward him and draping his right leg over Sirius’s knees more likely to fit his tree-branch limbs into the limited amount of space he has to work with, but Sirius’s skin tingles all the same.

“See, you don’t even know it, but my skin sings when you do anything like this,” he tries. “I’m not asking for you to trot along hand-in-hand with me everywhere we go; that’s not me, is it?”

“No,” Remus grants. “It doesn’t sound like you.”

“Exactly,” Sirius says for it. “Small, lingering touches in the grocery? A little wrist brush when we're out on the town? Magnifique, truly, and in some ways, you just brushing by me is enough to get my skin trilling, but sometimes I want more than that; sometimes, I want a little hand-holding, as a treat.”

“Shh,” Remus puts out, fishing in his trouser pockets and pulling out his keys — oddly.

“Don’t shush me,” Sirius huffs. “I’m reciting poetry for you over here.”

Remus lifts his head to aim a quiet huff at him, flipping through his keyring with his lopsided grin on, and Sirius squints at him at first before his eyes round off as Remus pulls his flat key right off of that ring, and he — no, he’ll die if Remus does what he thinks he's about to do with it.

He does, holding the key up between the two of them with a half-smile, half-frown on. “I thought about giving it to you after our shower chat, but I talked myself out of it because I am who I am,” he offers, sheepish about it. “The truth is, you should have had it months ago, but I don’t think I really thought enough about what not giving it to you would have felt like, with you coming and going from mine so much lately, and the other truth of it is, there’s never going to be a right time to give it to you if we're already well shot of that point.”

Sirius takes hold of the key a beat or two later, his throat tight as he inspects it like it's made of glass. “What about you?” he bids.

“What about me?” Remus raises.

“How are you going to get back into your flat?” Sirius reiterates, smiling a bit.

“Well, I do have the mat key,” Remus reasons. “And, I suppose, if I were ever to lose that one, I’d just come get you to let me in.”

Sirius bites his lower lip, running his right thumb over the face of the key, and breathes in long, giving Remus a bright, toothy grin.

Remus sighs. “You forgot your keys, didn’t you.”

“Mhm, I did,” Sirius supplies. “I’ve nowhere to put this key to your heart.”

“Oh, here,” Remus bids, plucking it out of Sirius’s hand. “I’ll keep it for now and you can take it back when you’ve got a ring to put it on.”

“Oi,” Sirius says, reaching for the key, “I wasn’t done with it yet.”

“You’ll lose it,” Remus chides, closing his fingers around it.

“I will not,” Sirius returns, making a single grabby motion with his right hand and Remus sighs himself, dropping the key into his hand for Sirius to continue petting it with his thumb.

“You’re really very odd,” Remus mentions, sitting easier beside him.

“And yet, you are so into me?” Sirius raises, smiling brightly.

Remus smirks and simply watches him at it for a few beats, his expression truly unreadable until he reaches up and tucks a lock of Sirius’s free-flowing hair behind his right ear, en publique and everything. Sirius curls his arms over Remus’s right thigh, keeping the key locked tight in his right fist; this can't be all that easy for him given the company in here and 'course Sirius would love a kiss to seal the importance of the moment, but this is nice. This is enough.

“I’m not changing my mind on you,” Remus maintains, speaking in a whisper, and maybe that’s the right way to do it if they're words meant for Sirius and only him. “I’ll work on it, OK? I didn’t know you felt we were missing all that, but I need you to know I’m all in; I’ve never not been, I was from the moment you threw that goblet down.”

Sirius wants to kiss him so, so badly.

"I’m really sorry I scoffed at all your progress," Remus tacks on, like the words are coming out like a fountain. "You’re a figure of monumental bravery and you light up every room you step inside of because you won't dull your shine for anybody, except you went and chose to see somebody who's spent a long, long time trying to blend in and that’s a lot harder to rewrite than it looks, but I promise, you are the sole reason I’m evening telling my parents.”

“That can’t be true, Remus,” Sirius instils, whispering like him.

“Sirius, I went ten years leaving everybody I knew out of it,” Remus raises. “Before you, I didn't know how long I'd go before involving them in it, but with you in the picture, I don’t want to keep them out of it anymore, they should know about you and all you do for me, and believe me, the pressure is on because I need this to go well for you more than me; you didn't get enough support coming up and I want you to have a win this time around.”

Sirius breathes in sharply, his throat is so tight he might actually suffocate in here. “We need to go.”

Remus reels back a mere inch. “Now?”

“Yes, now,” Sirius insists, letting go of Remus’s right leg so he can tell him to vamoose with the both of his hands. “I can’t kiss you like I want to here, and besides, we’re just getting in the way at this point.”

Remus takes his lower lip between his teeth, huffing through his nose like a dragon might've done. “For that, I should really hold out on you,” he serves him.

A loud thud on the table knocks the two of them out of their stupor and they look toward it in identical turns of their heads, finding a carton of soy milk laying shipwrecked on the surface of the table with David looming over the end of it and right by Remus’s only exit strategy.

“Oh, no no no,” Remus attests, shaking his head.

Sirius's stomach goes for a nice little twirl at Remus's tone while David simply ignores it while he uncaps a sharpie, popping it onto the back of the marker. “See, this right here is soy milk, the word milk being just as important as the word soy in that this will expire eventually, so when we open one of these, they’re actually meant to be dated for the week following and that means you’re expected to write the date we'll need to use it by, literally anywhere on the face of it, top of it, even on the bottom would be fine, just something to let all of us know whether we should be serving this to paying customers,” he recites politely, holding the sharpie out across Remus to offer it to Sirius. “Do you want to give it a shot right now?”

Remus looks to Sirius as Sirius looks to him and even without Remus’s eyes on display, both his mouth and brow placement are pristine examples of comedy at its finest, and a mere beat or two on from there sees the two of them rolling in their booth seat.

David scoffs a good thirty seconds into their guffaw. “OK, really?” he puts out, flying his hands toward the two of them holding onto each other for support. “There’s nothing funny about this.”

Remus wipes gingerly at his eyes from underneath his shades. “Oh, no, there really is,” he insists, laughter alive in his voice as he gestures for David to back up and let him leave the damn booth already. “All you’ve done there is make it absolutely certain he’ll never date a single thing now that he knows it bothers you this much.”

Sirius hoots another round, pocketing Remus’s flat key and following him out of the booth. “Oh, now you leave?” David raises.

“Mhm, babey,” Sirius sends him, heading toward the door at a quick clip to keep up with Remus all while feeling utterly loopy after being deprived of air for upwards of a full minute.

Remus waves goodbye to Charlotte behind the bar, who waves back in a royally similar way to the Queen, and pushes through the shop door with Sirius hot on his heels, giving his own, gleeful parting wave to Charlotte before heading through the door after him. “We’ll meet you back at yours, cool?” Remus imparts, passing right on by James and his sample station.

James looks utterly betrayed while he stands there with a tray of banana loaves in his hands. “I’m done in half an hour,” he puts up. “Wait for me.”

“Nope,” Sirius returns brightly, following after Remus. “That means we’ve only got half an hour to work with and make it count, you know how it is.”

“You little trollops,” James sends after them.

Sirius swings back around to see him better. “Walk around the block a few?” he suggests, hands tapping excitedly on the small of Remus's back.

James sends him a long bahhh for the trouble, but the man owes him one and he knows it.

They get to the end of the strip, Remus stops still on the sidewalk, and Sirius, a true step behind him, stops short of ramming into him.

"Sophie."

"Fuck it, you're already gone," Sirius insists, prodding Remus's in the back.

--

Early the following week, Remus reaches out to each member of the gang, detailing a plan for a wee celebration for Dorcas’s birthday. Her big day itself isn’t until the twenty-seventh, which happens to fall on a Saturday this calendar year and might've otherwise been a rather well-placed day to go with if their group was made up of people who know what a free Saturday looks like anymore. Owing to that, he sets a tentative date for the preceding Thursday, corroborates with Dorcas on the date and what she might like to do on her shining day, getting a prompt response citing the date as perfect and that she'd like to go for brunch or nothing at all. Once that’s cemented, Remus double-checks a time that would work well for all six members of the group, a vote is cast for the early afternoon time block, and Remus sends out a final message stating that the gang will meet at a little all-day breakfast spot he and Sirius found near Remus’s flat building a while back, citing it as a spot they’ll all write home about it.

Sirius has to admit that watching Remus iron out the details with the sort of precision and drive he typically reserves for schooling was a fine sight indeed, but there is something greater even to have witnessed Remus freely opt to coordinate an event with six people not too long at all after putting himself under house arrest for what would've otherwise been an open-ended amount of time and thankfully, only ended up being just shy of a month thanks to the tireless work of some incredibly driven members of the group.

When the brunch date arrives, Sirius is personally feeling rather good and he has lots of reasons for that. For instance, he's an advocate for brunch forever and ever, Amen, and for that, he’s got himself a whole slew of bacon on his plate after ordering the triple-meat special and subbing out every option for more bacon. For another, Remus called ahead and booked a table for six early that week and listened to Sirius’s insistence that the weather would hold up for a spot out on the front terrace, and it’s a good thing Remus did take the plunge and request an outdoor table for it’s easy, breezy, beautiful out here on this fine day. Yet another, Sirius is surrounded by his favourite collection of clowns with Remus on his right, James and Lily seated across from them, and Peter and Dorcas at either end of the table, and overall, Sirius is always at his best when he doesn’t have to look too far to find any of his clowns. Yet another, more shoulder-shimmying reason, Remus passed him the mimosa that got brought to the table for him to consume and chose to stick with water, the good lad, so Sirius had himself two lovely mimosas before the plates even got brought to the table and is therefore feeling rather warm in the cheeks, but thankfully both Dorcas and Lily are looking rather rouge in the cheek regions themselves thanks to their own zealous consumption of mimosas. And finally, but most importantly, Remus, even with a mostly full terrace around him, has taken to tracing little shapes against the inside of Sirius’s upper right arm with the tip of his left forefinger in the rather minuscule distance between the two of them; a decision and chair placement both made by the curly-Q, and Sirius would be a liar if he pretended he wasn't feeling rather tender about this particular development.

Wrap all that together, stick a bow on it, and Sirius is feeling incandescent this fine Thursday. So much so, that when Dorcas, over at the right end of the table and just diagonal from Remus’s seat, plucks a modest ring off her right ring finger, sets it on the table between her and Remus’s plates, and takes to rubbing at the skin underneath where the ring lay on her right ring finger, all Sirius can really do is blink at it, certain he's hallucinating the odds.

For a brief beat, he wonders if Remus and Dorcas quietly planned this moment together, but Remus moves suddenly, wickedly fast at that, reaching for it with his right hand all while squeezing Sirius’s right bicep like a vice-grip with his left one, so that's reason enough to suggest there had been exactly zero cahoots between them and pure chance went and intervened here.

Remus swiping the ring off the table brings the conversation to a screeching halt before it gets a light laugh out of Dorcas, who simply stares bemusedly at him while smiling like someone who's had her ring snatched and a few mimosas might do.

Remus glances around the table in the span of a true second and promptly lets go of Sirius’s arm to slip the ring onto his right ring finger, turning his hand and flashing the thing around. “What do we think?” he raises, taking one for the entire team here and tucking his hand daintily underneath his chin with the ring in a supremely royal display. “Is it me?”

Sirius feels like writing his own set of vows for this beautiful team player they have themselves here, James pushes an entire breath of air into his cheeks while his chest heaves quite a bit over there, Peter snorts amidst the piece of toast he’s working on, and both Lily and Dorcas succumb to rather similar fits of giggles.

“Oh, I don’t know, I’d rather see how a honkin' man-ring looks on you first,” Sirius insists.

Yes,” Lily says lively, pointing across the table at them, “one that takes up half his hand.”

“Something that truly pops,” James echoes it.

“I’m not even going to sit here and pretend that I’m not a little miffed at how easily that thing fits on you,” Dorcas mentions. “Nice, clear reminder that I’ve got gigantic hands.”

“It only just went on,” Remus trades her, generous of spirit forever and always, and then he goes a step further, trying to demonstrate that before finding the ring won't budge, and the entire table gets treated to the wonderful treat that is watching Remus panic in real-time as he ties to wrestle the ring off his finger while telling the rest of the group, now in complete stitches, to simmer down.

“I don’t want to die with this on,” Remus insists, giving a hefty tug on it that jogs the ring free, and the table is still hooting and hollering when their waitress turns up with a whole new round of mimosas.

Remus waits until the waitress has finished gathering up all the empty flutes and headed off before he slides the mimosa she set in front of him over toward Sirius, who turns in and presses a quick kiss to Remus’s left shoulder in reply as he works on a new strip of bacon.

“Here,” James offers him, passing his mimosa over the table, and Sirius gasps, right piqued. “Those things pack a wallop and I still have to drive us back.”

Sirius bobs lightly in his seat, loving that he hasn’t got a car so the designated driver role can ever fall to him in a large group, and accepts the gift in kind. “You don’t wear rings, do you,” Remus puts up.

Sirius glances sidelong at him, finding Remus still holding onto that ring while he's got his head tilted curiously at Lily in the seat across from his, and some of it must be due to the sunnies he's got on helping make his eyes quite unreadable, but it’s done with such an ease and simple curiosity about it, Sirius takes to sipping off of his mimosa idly while squeezing Remus’s left thigh underneath the table just to have something to do with how bloody impressed he is with his candor.

Lily shakes her head while taking a sip from her brand-new mimosa. “Not that it says much, I’ve never got my ears done either,” she puts up, shrugging her shoulders once.

Dorcas, sitting back in her chair and partaking in her own shiny and new mimosa, turns her head comically slow toward Lily, her face riddled with confusion. “How did I not notice that?” she puts up, reaching out with her free hand to lift the veil of Lily’s hair enough to see her left, unpoked ear. “Why not?”

Lily pushes half a breath out the side of her mouth, her forehead creasing over her sunglasses. “I had the option when all the other girls in my first communion class were asking to get them done and my mum was all for it, but I just wasn’t at all interested at the time,” she offers, her voice light and breezy thanks to all that bubbly, “and then I went through most of secondary in not much of a hurry to get them done either and that was before Sirius put me right off of the whole idea after I had to watch him pierce his own ears year eleven.”

Sirius swallows a sip of mimosa and leans into the table a little. “I wanted to see if I could, Lilith.”

“You made me do it for you,” Peter complains.

“And did you not do it well, Pete?” Sirius sends back.

“It sure bled a fuckload,” James puts in.

“Well, they are ears, what did you expect?” Sirius returns.

“I would have killed you,” Remus puts out lively.

“It was before your time; have some bacon,” Sirius offers, plucking a strip off of his plate and passing it on to Remus, who takes to stewing while he munches on it.

“That wasn’t me,” Dorcas quips, showcasing a whole slew of studs and rings on both of her ears. “I got one done at a parlour on a school trip and the dam opened right up.”

“I like them on you,” Lily offers her. “If I could've gotten over the sight of Sirius’s blood trickling down his neck, which may be another decade or two still, then maybe I’d have gotten them done by now, but I’m not opposed to jewelry as a whole. ”

She lifts her left wrist and jingles the bracelet on it for show. “Oh,” Dorcas puts up, charmed as she catches Lily’s wrist to have a look at it, and by a look, Sirius means she puts it right in her face like a bunch of sparkling wine and OJ might tell one to do.

Lily snorts for how far her arm has been stretched. “Yeah, it was from my mum,” she chimes, bobbing her shoulders. "My little grad present."

“Looks a lot like this,” Remus puts up, holding up the ring he’s still fucking got, and in truth, it really does match up real nice that bracelet.

Lily takes in a light breath, reaching out for the ring, and Remus hands it over the table quite calmly considering that if that had been Sirius, he’d have chucked the thing at her just to make this happen quicker, but there is a reason Remus has been tasked with this venture and it's right here at the table with them.

Sirius flickers his gaze to James as Lily takes hold of the ring, controls his mouth so he won’t bust out a bark at finding him studying his scrambled eggs with a curious prod of his fork and some incredible focus, and looks back to Lily just in time to watch the ring slide easily onto her ring finger, garnering both he and Remus to squeeze each other’s hand underneath the table the moment it happens.

“Well, that’s that,” Dorcas says for it. “Keep it; it was meant to be.”

Lily hits panic mode. “Oh, I couldn’t.”

“Can, and you will,” Dorcas raises it, cheersing Lily's left shoulder with her glass.

“It’s your birthday,” Lily sends her, all ruffled up.

“Not yet,” Dorcas chimes.

Peter reaches for the miniature plate of jam and the sort on the table and promptly huffs. “I hate strawberry,” he muses, moving the conversation along on purpose easily, but Sirius can't say he's at all a fan of the method.

“Go to hell?” he sends him.

“I will with my peanut butter,” Peter trumpets at him, flapping the tiny packet of it at him with his right hand while the other is cupped around his mouth.

Now, someone newer to the group but versed enough and therefore quite used to the dynamic currently quite alive and kicking at this table, like Remus perhaps, might have simply considered the hoopla rather typical form, but given that Dorcas flitters in and out of the group now and again, the amount of chortling going on at her end of the table is no surprise to Sirius, though he has a feeling the mimosas may have helped her along with thinking they’re a veritable theatre troupe on wheels here.

“I missed this,” she shares, back to sitting easy in her chair rather quickly for someone who'd just been having a fit.

“You should really come round more,” Lily bids. “It couldn’t be helped while you were away, but you’ve been back for weeks and still no you.”

“Well, I would have come round if someone had invited me,” Dorcas puts up, pointedly turning her head to Remus, who'd gone for a mouthful of breakfast potatoes just as the callout sounded off, is certainly frowning for it now, looking around at the rest of them for even some support while he's got that mouthful going.

“Wasn’t personal,” Peter offers. "He ditched us for a while there, too."

Sirius and Remus put out similar huffs. “Mhm,” James concurs, nodding his head toward Sirius, “only that one was permitted inside the forcefield he put up.”

“Can we not?” Remus requests, his right hand covering his mouth.

“Can you not see him here, right now?” Sirius takes over. “He’s not an illusion, you know.”

The topic doesn’t blow over as quickly as Remus or Sirius would like it to, but their plates do get finished, Sirius makes it to his final mimosa and feels both lovely and rather warm in equal measures, and their waitress comes by not long after that to enquire about the tab and sparks up a whole wildfire of a debate. First, Dorcas utterly refuses to get her meal paid for, a line drawn in the sand that Remus comes in and immediately kicks away, stressing that this was always part of the deal, and from there, Sirius goes ahead and tells the waitress it’s all on one tab and it’ll be on credit mostly so the poor lass can leave the table before the fallout takes her out, too, and then he’s got to deal with Remus’s indignance being directed at him, but that's an unsurprising turn of events given that Remus had definitely mentioned something earlier in the week about fully intending to cover Dorcas’s meal, but come now; in what world was Sirius going to go along with that plan? Not this one, at least.

The debate carries on after their waitress flees the scene, only now it’s five against one as the rest of the table piles on behind Remus to lodge their complaints, and Sirius has to loudly proclaim that he’s got it and they can all just deal with it or send him their share if they so choose to later, sitting back in his seat with his mimosa in hand and trying to block out the hums and haws coming at him left and right. Eventually, their waitress does return to their table, totting a wireless interac machine along with her in one hand and the bill in the other, and James sure does try to flag her down for a swift attempt at making the payment, but Sirius is hotter and quicker about it so he wins her attention sooner than James does.

He's just handing the machine back to the waitress when Lily pushes out of her seat, citing a need for the loo while having little knowledge of where it’s located. “I’ll show you,” the waitress offers, tearing the merchant receipt off of the machine the moment it prints off. “Need yours?”

Sirius, having just put a sip of mimosa in his mouth, simply shakes his head loosely, and the girl bids them all a fine day and beckons Lily inside with her, and the very moment she's out of sight, Remus, Sirius, James, and Pete all lean toward Dorcas, causing her to reel back at once.

“What’s your ring size?” Remus asks, quick and swift.

“I—” Dorcas starts; fearful, definitely. “I don’t know?”

“What?” James pipes up. “How is this possible?”

“I tried a bunch of them on in the store and went with the one that fit?” Dorcas puts up, looking between the four of them warily, though her gaze certainly fixes on James from there, which is perfectly understandable with him huffing and puffing in his seat like he is. “What is happening right now?”

“He’s proposing in a few months and hasn’t got her ring size determined yet,” Peter offers her.

Dorcas takes in a resounding breath, looking back at James with a bright gape/grin hybrid that could rival Sirius’s; even he’ll admit it. “I’d better get an invite,” she raises. “I’m great at weddings.”

“Oh, you’ll be on the list, trust,” James insists.

Dorcas ceremoniously sits back in her chair, appearing quite jazzed with that answer, and finishes off her mimosa with a quick swig, sniffing once. “You know you can get them resized, yeah?” she checks, eyes back on James again.

“That’s what I said,” Sirius puts up.

“What’s happened to you people while I wasn’t looking, hm?” James puts up, looking round the table. “Where’s the romance, the intrigue, the suspence of it all gone? I want it to be a stellar night, one for the books, and that can’t happen if I give her the ring and then take it back immediately because I never found out what size she wears.”

“I get it, James,” Peter puts in.

James sends him a smooch through the air before looking across the table toward Remus. “And you,” he attests, tipping his chin vastly toward him. “You deserve a full snog for how easily you managed to turn that into something lucrative, so you listen here; I’m at your service, you feel me?”

“I sure do, but I’m OK,” Remus instils, with a smoothing gesture of his hands. “Happy to have helped, but you may want to focus on the next step here; we still don’t have a size.”

“Well, I could knick it when she takes it off next, but I saw the way she looked at it once it was on and she might just notice it missing,” James trades, looking around at them all with a grimace.

Sirius finishes his mimosa off with a quick swig and plonks the flute down on the table, bringing all gazes to him as he clears his throat. “Here’s what you do,” he says astutely, gesturing toward him with his newly freed and rather splayed hand. “You knick it to trace the diameter onto a clean sheet of paper, swiftly put the ring back where you found it, and bring the paper to the shopkeep; easy peasy lemon squeezy.”

James levels Sirius’s double 'OK' symbols with a deadpan stare. “You’re not funny.”

“I’m a little funny,” Sirius mentions, tossing his right thumb toward Remus and his rather shaky shoulders. “He thinks so, too.”

Remus wipes the smile off his lips. “I’m not getting into this one,” he maintains, lifting his hands and sitting back in his seat for effect.

“Well,” Peter raises, gaze on Dorcas across the length of the table from him, “could you take a few minutes in the shop you found that one in and try a few on; see which size fits best and report back with your findings?”

Dorcas’s eyes flicker to life before she nods profusely, garnering Sirius to drum his empty flute on the table while James gives out a round of seal claps in fervour. “Brilliant,” Remus calls it.

“I sometimes am,” Peter says for it.

“Like a blue moon coming up over the clouds,” Sirius recites sagely.

“Fuck you,” Peter tosses at him.

Dorcas turns to Remus there. “Come with?” she bids, preemptively thrilled about the idea of her shopping buddy before taking in a sharp breath through her teeth. “You work all weekend; fuck, I knew that too.”

“I don't Sunday,” Remus raises. "I'd just have to be back before the evening."

“I’m on Sunday,” Dorcas frowns, holding it for two or three beats before looking to Sirius with a bright smile. “You down? The family’s got me booked up all day Saturday for birthday stuff — barf, but I could do tomorrow if Sunday can't happen.”

Sirius places both hands over his heart. “I close, but I’m double-down if we make it happen before two.”

Dorcas’s face clouds over with utter disappointment. “I work a mid tomorrow,” she professes, looking down the table at Peter. “You free after four?”

“Yeah,” Peter puts out, loudly definitely, but a lass did just ask him to go to a destination with him so the details of where and why are rather irrelevant, surely.

“Oh, thank God,” Dorcas expels. “I did not want to walk into the place alone and start trying on rings without meaning to buy a single one without some reinforcements.”

“It’s also exceptionally not needed until the fall,” James mentions, so late in the conversation that Sirius wheezes for it in his seat. “Like, October, so it really doesn’t have to be solved right this second; I’m just antsy.”

“Hadn’t noticed, James,” Sirius says politely.

James sends him one powerful kick to the right shoe underneath the table. “Get off my dick.”

“Well, it’s already been decided,” Dorcas says of it. “Can’t turn back now, and you'll get a ring size out of it.”

“Exactly,” Peter echoes. “And come tomorrow at, say, six? You’ll be feeling yards better finally having an idea of it.”

James looks to Peter with determination lining his features. “Don’t you spoil it, Pete.”

“I won’t spoil it,” Peter returns indignantly.

Sirius snorts. “You will come bouncing over to ours with the information, see Lily in the room, and start speaking in some obvious code instead of simply waiting until she isn’t there,” he predicts.

“I won’t,” Peter insists, kicking Sirius’s right shoe.

“Enough with the kicking,” Sirius requests haughtily.

“You’re lucky there’s a table here,” James makes known.

Sirius pulls his legs up and sits crossed-legged in his chair to see right to that, but committing to that safer and much comfier arrangement would lay the curve of his right knee over Remus’s left thigh. “This OK?” he checks, speaking it quietly between them.

Remus answers him by placing his left hand over Sirius’s knee and holding it right in place, and Sirius may as well be sitting on a cloud. “Well, I'll resign from my position as an agent, so the job is all yours, Pete, and I think you'll do it well,” he imparts.

“Excuse?” James puts in.

Remus raises his free hand at him. “Were you asleep for the last minute?” he returns, looking across the table bemusedly. “The torch has already been passed along, I just made it official; it’s in their hands now and I, for one, am giving Peter a fine letter of recommendation.”

“Remus,” Peter pipes up, all rumpled up over the voucher.

“Do not,” Remus instils, pointing at him with a deft hand, “speak in obvious code around her.”

Sirius snorts grand while Peter lodges a huff that rivals Remus, even. “You guys are so much,” Dorcas attests, grinning all the while on her end of the table before she drops it completely. “Stop talking.”

“Shh shh shh,” James puts out, but then it makes all the more sense when Lily comes traipsing up to the table with a breezy skip to her step.

“Hoo, shit,” Lily outs up, plopping down in her seat and beaming. “Some bright light in there, boys.”

Dorcas snorts. “I’ve been called worse,” she quips, and Lily breaks into a true fit, grabbing at Dorcas's right wrist in a semblance of appeal but mostly due to mirth.

“Are they all mixing together?” Sirius raises, circling his right hand. "The lights, I mean, but I s'pose that goes for the mimosas as well."

“They both are,” Lily insists. “I’d wait to go somewhere else if I were you.”

“Here, have this first,” James suggests, placing his half-full glass of water in front of her.

Sirius looks right at Remus, eyeing his water glass before Remus catches him at it and sighs. “Only you would drink four mimosas at brunch,” he mentions, handing it over.

“Ummmm,” Sirius trills. “Who drank an entire gin slushie with me at the cinema, hm?”

James raises his hand like an eager primary student. “He did,” he answers.

“No one called on you?” Remus sends him.

“Ohh, you can have an entire pinner to yourself when we get back and you’ll catch right up to me,” Sirius says of it.

“You going back to his?” James raises, openly not loving that option already.

“Relax, princess,” Sirius stresses. “He’s coming back to ours.”

“Are you coming, too?” Lily bids, turning a glossy-eyed grin on Dorcas, who smiles for it and sort of shifts in her chair.

“I’m sort of meeting someone in a bit,” she raises, “but otherwise, fuck yeah, I would.”

Lily immediately forgets about the pout she just had on. “Hot date?”

“You could call it that,” Dorcas allows. “I knew I wouldn’t get any action on my actual birthday with my parents and brother bumbling about, so today worked out well for me on two counts.”

“You're coming to Pride, though, yeah?” Sirius checks, staring severely over at her.

“Oh, I've booked it off, trust me,” Dorcas returns him.

“Want a lift back to yours, then?” James offers. “Wouldn’t be on to make the birthday girl walk home.”

“There are six of us,” Remus observes slowly.

“Peter could lay across the three of you easy,” James puts up.

“I’m OK with that,” Peter puts in.

“I mean, I’d definitely take it,” Dorcas mentions. “I put aside this gigantic poster at Reckless last week that I’m meaning to get for my mum if you want to come along while I get it; beats having to carry the thing back to mine on the tube.”

Sirius and Remus give rather identical shoulder bobs at the idea of a field trip down to Reckless, and then Mum and Dad across the table are a bit too blinded by their utter appreciation for the display happening here to decline that proposal. “Let’s get the fuck out,” James puts out in a tune, pushing out of his seat.

The rest of them spiritedly follow suit, but Sirius hangs back to down the lasts of the water Remus valiantly gave over to him and places it down on the table with a thunk, looking up from the table and piquing when finds Remus hanging back by the terrace exit, waiting on him.

“Oop, sorry,” Sirius offers, speeding up as he rounds the side of the table.

Remus shakes his head as a pardon, smiling as he waits for Sirius to get to him, and has him pausing short as he reaches to link their arms together. It shouldn’t be this big in and of itself; it’s not even the first time Remus has reached for him en publique since their initially rough but eventually tender booth chat, and yet, each time it’s happened since, he's had Sirius levitating, had him immeasurably grateful they'd even had the chat at all. This time, however, Sirius has packed down four mimosas and been tasked with walking, so he ends up taking a wee stumble along with the tight pull in his chest.

“Oh, that was a close one, but you’ve got this,” Remus coaches, strengthening his hold on Sirius's right arm to see to that personally.

“I’ve totally got this,” Sirius echoes.

“Pick up the pace, ya doinks,” James calls back to them.

They don’t do that. They do, however, follow the pack at about a half-block’s distance and trade a warm, gooey look or two as they walk along. “You know,” Sirius puts in, tapping Remus’s arm with his free hand, “while I know how much thought you’re putting into doing these things and it’s not easy, you do make it look so natural.”

Remus budges Sirius with a quiet smile on. “It’s not as hard as I thought it would be,” he extends. “I’m trying to look at it two ways, d’you want to hear them?”

“Psh,” Sirius puts out. “Nah, hate when you talk.”

Remus smirks out a laugh, lifting his free hand to scratch at his right brow. “Well, first, I try to remind myself that it’ll make you happy, and that part isn’t so difficult to remember, just so we're square here,” he puts down. “The other is, when I really get down to it, I want to reach out to you multiple times in a given day we're out and about, but I either don’t do it or pick my moments selectively, so in a way I’m trying to stop saying no to myself as often as I did.”

Sirius pushes a weighted breath out. “Why are you so fucking cool?” he attests, swaying the two of them back and forth on complete purpose. “You could have just said, ‘Yeah, thanks,’ but no; you've given me analysis and I love you for it.”

“Thank Cunt you do,” Remus puts up.

Sirius ducks his head amidst a heavy bout of snickers. “We'll have to be careful who we say that around, hm.”

“And I am,” Remus echoes, sending his own round of snickers out through his nose.

Sirius looks up as they’re a few steps from Reckless’s door and finds the other three have ditched them for the interior of the shop while Dorcas is lingering with the front door open, aiming a twist of a smile at them. Remus takes the door off her hands, nods for Sirius to traipse on through the threshold, and Sirius heads in, finding James, Lily, and Peter have scattered themselves around the place, perusing.

“What’s the poster of?” Remus asks, letting the door shut behind him.

“It's a massive fuckin’ Van Morrison hardback,” Dorcas supplies. “It’s even got his signature on it so my mum can tell people she first meets that she totally got it signed by him, which she definitely will, and her birthday’s next month so, works out well.”

Remus smiles for that. “My mum likes his stuff, too.”

“Does she?” Dorcas bids, perking up. “He’s my mum’s one and only cheat, for some reason.”

“Well, I don’t know if it’s quite that for mine,” Remus mentions, smirking wryly, “but my dad arranged for 'Crazy Love' to be their first dance at their wedding ceremony because she likes that one so much, which I quite like just as a thought.”

Dorcas looks completely overcome. “Oh, I'd tell my mum that, but she’d just get peeved at my dad for not coming up with that himself.”

“The tale is yours to keep and do whatever you like with,” Remus insists, smiling with it.

“Or, don’t keep it to yourself, drop it at the dinner table, and sit back and watch the show,” Sirius puts up, heading down the first aisle to have a peruse.

“Depends how fucked off I am at them by dinnertime, but I'll keep it in my back pocket,” Dorcas trades him, heading for the counter to speak to the shopkeep.

“A girl after my own heart,” Sirius calls after her.

Remus finds his way over to the aisle Lily’s in, picks a crate across the aisle from her, and begins flipping through records, while Sirius remains in the aisle he made it to and flips through a bunch of them himself; he doubts he’ll have time to really comb through to see for some gems when they’re really just here for Dorcas, but just as he’s thinking it, he comes across a copy of Transatlanticism right as Lily comes down his aisle and has a look in the very same crate as him.

“Oh, that makes me feel sixteen again,” she maintains, reaching to flick the record.

“And high as a kite?” Sirius raises.

“I was going to say whimsical and youthful, but there was some of that, too,” Lily allows, sticking her face against Sirius’s left shoulder.

“Not that this isn’t nice,” Sirius mentions, “but I’m curious as to where this sudden affection’s coming from.”

“Mimosas,” Lily answers simply.

“Ah,” Sirius returns knowingly.

“That, and I’m supposed to keep you far and away from Remus for the next minute and a half,” she tacks on.

Sirius looks up and around, investigating his surroundings and locking in on Remus over at the till making a purchase. “What’s he getting?”

“It’s a gift,” Lily insists. “He’s so excited; let him have this.”

Sirius puts out a wistful sigh. “His gifts are always so on point,” he raves. “I’m not even going to stop him from getting it; I just want to know what it is.”

“That’s growth,” Lily determines.

You’re growth,” he returns, tucking the Death Cab record between his right arm and side.

Lily takes in a quaint gasp. “You’re getting it?”

“You thought I wouldn’t?” Sirius raises.

Lily gives him a one-armed hug, has a look over her shoulder, and smiles big and bright. “OK, he’s coming,” she relays, going for a spin to face the opposite way. “You may want to hold onto something.”

Sirius turns on his heel to face the front of the store, lifts his right elbow to perch it over her left shoulder since it's there, and takes to a lean. “Something not me,” she tacks on, trilling quite a bit.

“Too late, just enjoy it,” Sirius returns her.

Remus saunters up the aisle with his new purchase behind his back and a trickster smile on, and Sirius can hardly fucking wait. “Not that I don't feel your collection is electric and grand as is,” he addresses, “but I couldn’t help but think it’s missing a certain something.”

Sirius takes to shimmying in place, bringing a bright laugh out of Lily for it before Remus displays A Night With Conway Twitty with a flourish to rival James’s level of theatrics, and Sirius doesn’t actually know which detail was more important to witness live and right up front, but he got both and so, he is flatlining.

He straightens up and pulls his right arm off of Lily's shoulder, tucking his own record in tight between his left elbow and chest in order to cover his face with his hands more easily. “You’re right,” he says at once. “You’re so right? This is exactly what was missing all along.”

The gag ends with an explosive laugh from Remus that calls Sirius to drop his hands immediately. “I’m glad I could help,” he chimes, a sunshine smile on his lips.

Sirius can’t help stepping in close. “Quick one?” he bids. Remus nods once, his smile staying on, and Sirius leans in, leaving a solid smooch on his lips before pressing his hands together. “I think this calls for display somewhere.”

“The question is, where would it go best,” Remus highlights.

“Directly across from the front door would be my first thought,” Sirius holds up.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Remus raises. “Can’t go giving your guests a slap of perfection moment one; best to lead them into that, no?”

“Right again,” Sirius insists. “Just above Ludwig, do you think?”

Remus’s eyes widen with pure panic before a breathy laugh takes him over. “No, you know what, it should go right above him,” he decides. "That way, we could see Conway from the couch.”

“And we want that,” Sirius echoes.

Lily takes in a resounding breath there. “You two are just the exact right fit,” she exhales.

"Took you long enough," Sirius chimes.

“Oi, one of you get the door,” James puts out.

Sirius looks past Remus to find both James and Peter carrying a truly massive hardback. “Jesus Cunt,” he puts out.

“Told you it was big,” Dorcas sends, taking her receipt from the clerk.

Remus heads to get the door for them while Sirius moves up to the counter to pay for his own find, meandering out of the shop to meet back up with the troup once that’s done. He follows along behind Remus and the girls at a relaxed clip while James and Peter haul the thing back to the car, and once they arrive, there really isn’t more they can do but stand around and watch while James frets over where his keys are.

“They’ve got to be in my trousers,” he says finally, and Lily goes and fishes them out of the left pocket for him before popping the boot open.

“Think it'll fit?” Dorcas asks, her teeth gritted.

“Not with that attitude, it won't,” Sirius sends her, heading around behind the car to help James and Peter manoeuvre it inside, but there’s something in the back right-hand corner that’s making it a lot more difficult to fit the frame in. “Well, I don’t know, James; think we can put the coolant in the fucking backseat instead of leaving it in here?”

“How about I dump it all over you?” James returns.

“Or I’ll just hold it,” Remus offers plainly.

“The poster?” James raises, glancing over at Remus bemusedly.

“The coolant, you knob,” he clarifies.

“Fine,” James decides, fishing the jug out of the back of the trunk and holding it out to him. “She’s all yours.”

Remus steps around the side of the car to reach for it while the other three slide the frame in a lot easier without the jug taking up valuable real estate. From there, Mum and Dad get in front while the rest of them work out the backseat arrangement, coming to an agreement that Sirius will just take one for the team and sit in the middle, Remus will take the left side with Dorcas over on the right, while Peter takes to crawling in on Remus’s side to avoid having to go round and try to crawl in from the road, laying on his back overtop three sets of thighs, but hey, if Peter tucks his knees in just a bit, he fits just fine.

“Sorry Remus,” Peter offers, but he did get Peter’s feet in the arrangement.

Remus waves him off as he tucks the coolant jug down behind Lily's seat. “Just don’t kick me and we’re good,” he says of it, curling the fronts of Peter’s shoes forward so they’re curving down in the space between Remus’s seat and his door. “That hurt any?”

“No, I actually like that better than they were before,” Peter returns.

“Right,” James calls back, looking between the two front seats. “Dorcas, whereabouts?”

Dorcas cups a hand around her mouth and trumpets her address out, cementing her place both inside the car and this ragtag group of clowns as far as Sirius is concerned. James nods spiritedly, turning the key and sparking the car to life. “Everyone grab a section of Pete and hold him down,” he calls back, one hand on the wheel, the other scrolling through his mobile.

Remus reaches for Peter’s legs, Sirius avoids Peter’s crotch by draping an arm over his stomach instead, and Dorcas waves her hands around in search of what to do with them before pinning him down by his shoulders, and it’s a go.

“Put something good on,” Sirius calls up.

“Oh, I’m going to,” James insists. “In fact, I think we’re all going to need your pipes for this one.”

Piqued already, Sirius waits the four, maybe five seconds it takes for James to leave his mobile in the cup holder while Chris De Burgh's voice comes out over the speakers, and Sirius is a thousand percent ready to perform 'Patricia the Stripper' with the sort of energy and zhoosh it deserves, but he’s going to need some help from the choir and says as much when he's got a chance between beats.

“You all have to come in where necessary,” he conditions.

Lily answers it with a scoff. “We’d never not.”

Sirius launches back in after that vote of confidence and it isn’t long before he’s getting the echoes necessary to perfect this performance; Mum and Dad up front, Remus beside him, Peter bobbing around horizontally even with his human shackles in place, and Dorcas may not be as familiar as they are, but she sure looks happy to be in a car with all this happening in it, all things considered.

They cycle through three more car tunes before James pulls up to Dorcas’s building, turning the dial to bring the volume down and giving out his best Jeeves voice. “Your abode, ma’am.”

“Thank you so much, guys,” Dorcas puts out, fiddling with her belt buckle.

“Nonsense,” Peter pipes up, lifting himself up to relieve Dorcas of her duties and award her renewed freedom.

“We should be thanking you for entertaining us, really,” Sirius raises it, placing his left hand at Peter’s back to help brace him.

Dorcas pushes out a laugh, sending him a smile for it. “Careful getting out,” Remus just has to say, surely.

“No, I’ll run straight into traffic,” she trades him.

Remus sends a deft two-finger salute back to her. “Always a pleasure.”

“I can always pull the car around,” James offers.

“There's no one coming,” Dorcas replies, then simply sits there in her seat blinking absently.

“You strokin’ out, hon?” Sirius checks.

Dorcas blinks twice at him and shakes her head, a small laugh leaving her. “No, I just—” she starts, pushing a breath of air out the far side of her mouth, “don’t really want to go anymore, I’ve got to say.”

Sirius grins. “We got ‘er.”

“I mean,” Dorcas starts, looking at them with a thin veil of sheepishness, “I don’t have to go, do I?”

“Certainly don’t,” Remus assures.

“Wait,” James cautions, turning in his seat. “Are you giving up a surefire lay for us dunderheads?”

“God help me, I think I am,” Dorcas returns, hands covering her sheepish smile. “Who wants to help me bring that up real quick?”

“Me,” Remus answers, unbuckling.

James whoops before ceremoniously popping the trunk. “I’ll help,” Lily offers, opening her door and slipping out of it.

Dorcas and Remus get out on their respective sides of the car and round it to the trunk, and Lily adds a third hand into the mix, helping to manoeuvre the frame out of the trunk, and Peter, perched rather bridally over Sirius's lap, turns his head toward him. “Want me to move?”

“No point, really,” Sirius says of it. “They’ll be back in five and you’ll be right back there anyway.”

Once Remus and Dorcas have a decent hold on the frame, Lily pops the lid down, skirts up the path ahead of them, and holds open the lobby door, heading in behind them to theoretically do the same with Dorcas’s front door, wherever that is.

James settles back in his seat, sticking his hands behind his head and sighing easily. “We got ‘er.”

Chapter 18: 18.

Summary:

gonna link this one more time seeing as it’s rather in theme:

 

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/28Co8b6KaRQk9GiVHQfpW1?si=iQJRb1d6RGC69yEIhzAj4A

Chapter Text

Sirius’s breathing shallows as he rocks his hips up to meet Remus’s, relishing in the only movement he’s being permitted to do with Remus crouched over him. He hasn’t been letting Sirius touch his hips, keeps batting his hands away every time he tries grasping at them, and that is both a travesty and a gift jumbled into one, but given his sparse amount of freedom Sirius sure does let his hips run wild to compensate.

‘Course, that doesn’t mean he won’t try it again. He certainly does, lifting his palms away from the sheet that’s been wound up in and reaching them toward him while Remus has his eyes shut through concentration as he snaps his hips back on Sirius’s cock, and that’s really the best turn of events for he doesn’t see Sirius's hands coming until they’re already grasping at hips, tugging them down and back on Sirius with a grip he hopes reads as encouraging as it does pleading.

Remus snaps his eyes open at once, lifts his hands to attach them to Sirius’s wrists, and pulls up on them with a lopsided smile on, his right brow cocked as if to say ‘Did I say you could do that? ’ without having to speak a word of it, and Sirius tips his head back against the mattress, half-grinning at the ceiling as he forfeits his newest attempt. Remus, by a true blessing, takes his pleading to heart despite denying him some grade-A groping and ramps up the pace of his thrusts, bringing Sirius’s breathing to little more than short, clipped patterns as he gets rode straight toward oblivion. He doesn’t quite manage to quell the moan at the back of his throat in time though he does try, but now he’s even more thankful for the telly playing in the living room for it's done him a solid drowning out that slip-up.

A sharp series of raps on the front door have Remus stalling his hips altogether and for a few bleak moments, Sirius lays there speechless, having been rather lost to the world only to be fiercely brought back to it by something as bothersome as a pointed knock at the door — at ten in the Cuntdamn morning, no less.

“Sorry,” Remus mouths, a sheepish grimace on his face as if somebody pounding on the door middle of sex is somehow all his doing.

Sirius waves him off for it, rocking up on him as a suggestion that they could always keep going, but a second series of knocks sound out, louder even than the last round, and Remus glances over his shoulder warily before he looks back down at Sirius sprawled out underneath him, and there, he adopts a rather amused look, flapping his hands down at their rather nude and compromising position.

“Pete?” Sirius puts up, throwing his voice.

The telly either gets put on pause or switched off completely, but Sirius can’t be arsed either way if it gives him a clearer space to speak through. “What?”

“Someone’s at the door.”

“And?”

“Mind getting it?”

“You’re so much closer.”

“Little busy here, Pete.”

Remus sticks his hands over his face as Peter puts out a substantial huff, peeking at Sirius from between his fingers. “Well, what else is new?” he puts up, tossing the remote on the coffee table by the sound of it.

“Tell them to fuck off, that’s all I’m asking,” Sirius instils.

He reaches up and taps on the backs of Remus’s hands, seeking permission to get a decent view of his undoubtedly sheepish frown and raising it a bright, prideful smile in return. And then, since Remus is still a tad too preoccupied with his embarrassment, Sirius takes this brief window as a chance to feel him up a little, dragging his hands up and over the tops of Remus’s thighs perched on either side of his own body, skirting them up to his hips and smoothes them over him with a tight squeeze, and since they're so close, he goes ahead and gives a hearty, indulgent squeeze of Remus’s cheeks and surprisingly doesn’t get batted for it, instead Remus appears to be fine with letting Sirius touch him this time around as he starts to move again, his breath hitching as he braces his palms over Sirius’s curled knees to lift himself off of his cock and lower him back down on it, keeping things excruciatingly slow while his lopsided grin stays firmly in place.

Sirius leaves his left hand hooked tight around Remus's right thigh and brings his right one down to bite on the heel of his palm, willing himself to keep quiet as Remus works him up all over again all while Peter takes his sweet time trudging up the hall. The closer he gets to the bedroom door, the harder it is to keep things hushed, and soon enough Sirius is lifting off of his back, beckoning Remus forward urgently, but thankfully Remus surges forward to meet him in the middle, hushing each other up via a tight lip-lock as Peter makes it to the front door while they keep right on with it.

Sirius braces himself on his heels to get his hips clear off the bed, fucking up on him and dolling out short, harsh breaths against his lips as Remus drives back on him like a star, riding him so close to the edge that when he stalls those things again, it takes Sirius a good four to five seconds to realize that the next set of knocks registered much closer than the front door.

“What?” he barks.

“You might want to come here,” Peter says hurriedly, out in the hall.

Sirius puts out a thwarted breath as Remus eases right off of his cock. “If it’s fucking Hank?” he puts out. “You tell him he has no right to complain about a little noise or I’ll take him for everything he’s got.”

“Yeah, it’s not him,” Peter returns at once.

Remus settles down left of Sirius, who quickly scoots himself toward the edge of the bed and launches himself off of it, striding to his door to pull his housecoat off of the hook it’s hanging from.

“Oi, hold on,” Remus puts up.

Sirius looks over his shoulder as he pushes his arms through the sleeves, finding Remus wrestling with the bed sheet as a means of covering up. Sirius holds on a beat or two, tying the sash around his waist as Remus effectively shields himself from the waist down, and yanks the door open to find Peter wringing his hands out in his doorway.

“There’s a curt man asking for you,” he whispers.

Sirius scoffs grand. “I’ll show him curt,” he professes.

“Do not,” Remus puts in, “show him curt.”

“Yeah, you might not want to do that,” Peter echoes. “He’s big, and he looks like a spy so he probably knows how to drop all three of us at once.”

Sirius sends out a profound pfft to that. “Let me at him,” he bids, gesturing for Peter to move out of his way.

“Oh, you just hold on,” Remus bids, lifting off of the bed and ambling over to them with Sirius’s sheet clenched around his middle. “Pete, look somewhere else?”

Peter chooses the floor between his feet to stare at. “You’re coming with?” Sirius raises, happy to see it.

“I’d rather you not make an enemy before noon,” Remus returns, tugging his own housecoat off of the hook.

He tries his hand at putting it on around the back of him while bracing the bedsheet to him with the points of his elbows and that certainly is a fun sight to see, no doubt there, Sirius rises above the urge to watch the show go on, reaching to relieve him of the job and holding the sheet up like a partition instead. Remus shoots him a smile as he pulls his arms through the sleeves, leaning in to give him a quick thank-you kiss that receives a prompt retching noise from Peter, which garners both he and Remus to turn their pointed looks to him at an eerily similar speed given that it gets Peter fidgeting again.

“James isn’t here so I felt I should take on his spirit,” he offers them.

“Where’d he go?” Sirius bids, right bemused by that, and when he might’ve left, frankly.

“Didn’t say,” Peter reports. “He was bustling about the kitchen one moment and zoomed out the door the next.”

“Odd,” Remus calls it, tying the sash of his housecoat around his waist.

Another, much more pronounced knock sounds on the already ajar front door and sends it further open, but all Sirius can see from here is a black sleeve. “This bitch,” he expels, lobbing the sheet over at his bed without much care about whether it lands there or not.

Sirius moves past Peter and into the hall, but he and Remus are fast at his heels, Peter taking post on his left while Remus goes around to his right as Sirius yanks the front door fully open, blinking up at a seemingly six foot five man in the doorway dressed to the nines in a black suit and a pair of sharply rectangular sunglasses to match the rest of his attire.

“Yeah?” Sirius asks, blinking twice for literally anything.

The man taps a clipboard in his hands. “Sirius Black?” he raises; curt, as advertised.

“You’re talking to him, yeah,” Sirius replies.

The man pulls a pen out from behind his lapel. “Sign at the bottom,” the man instructs, holding both the clipboard and pen out to him.

“I’m not signing anything,” Sirius denies, and Remus’s left hand comes up to wrap around his right elbow in a cautionary move.

“My orders are to get your signature and I can’t leave until I do,” the man says plainly.

“Would help if you explained why you need it,” Remus puts in, a fair bit more patient than Sirius can even attempt to be after getting interrupted halfway through Poundtown for a fucking signature.

The man merely steps aside, bringing Sirius’s long lost and, in truth, nearly forgotten steamer chest into view that, last he saw, was sitting at the foot of his bed while he packed his bags and subsequently bolted from the house four years ago — no, five. It’s going on five.

“I don’t want that,” Sirius attests, lifting his shoulders fast.

“The form says it’s yours,” the man returns, not seemingly into playing around. “I don’t much care what happens to it once I leave the premises, but I’ve several more stops to make so if you’ll sign at the bottom, I’ll be able to move onto those.”

Sirius briefly thinks about denying the man yet again, but he looks like he could crush his skull with one tire-sized hand alone, and if he’s honest, he’s a bit too spooked to keep refusing. He signs at the bottom with a focused flick of his wrist, hands the clipboard back to the man, and steps back and to the right, putting himself behind Remus’s left shoulder.

“Pen,” the man says, holding a gargantuan hand out to Sirius.

Sirius only then realizes he’s still got it, hands it off to him, and with that, the man turns and heads back toward the staircase, descending the steps without much else.

Peter is the first to speak through the rendered silence, though he chooses to do that via a whisper. “What’s happening?” he puts up, speaking it out of the right side of his mouth.

“Why are you whispering when it’s just us?” Sirius whispers back.

“What if he comes back?” Peter raises.

“I don’t sense him doing that,” Remus says of it.

“You said you got written out,” Peter puts up.

“Well, what the fuck do I know anymore?” Sirius puts up. “She sure wrote to tell me that, and I’d have thought they’d toss this the second I dipped or at least give it to the good kid, but clearly—”

“Well, he had his own, didn’t he,” Peter raises. “Wouldn’t make much sense to give him a second one with your name on it.”

Sirius lifts a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, well, the point,” he puts out slowly, “is that I’d have expected her to have done literally anything else with it than keep it in mint condition, and yet, here it is, sitting pristine at my feet.”

“Well, the estate would have to be distributed eventually,” Remus offers, his arms crossed over his stomach. “It’s possible whoever got put in charge of all that has a general grasp of reading comprehension.”

He lifts a deft hand and sweeps it down toward the gold emblem brightly boasting Sirius’s name in cursive, but thank Cunt for that because Sirius can’t not find that funny, even now. “There you go, giving them too much credit again,” he trades him, bumping Remus’s left hip with his right one.

“Well, either you got written out and this is a clerical error or you were told you were and she changed her mind somewhere along the way,” Remus reasons, bumping back on him.

“I don’t know that option two is all that likely, but I digress,” Sirius supplies. “The thing is indeed at my feet.”

“What do you think you’ll do with it?” Peter raises.

Sirius takes in a sizable breath through his nose, putting it out as a pondering breath as he studies the rounded top on the black and gold plated chest thoughtfully. “I could surf it down the stairs and right on into the dumpster?” he puts up, looking between the two of them.

“You will not do that,” Remus puts it frankly.

“Seriously, don’t,” Peter echoes, flying a hand at the chest. “Have you any idea how many people would jump at the chance to have this?”

Sirius puts out a faux-thoughtful hum. “Zero?” he raises.

“Not zero,” Remus denies. “He's very right, we had quite a few of these sorts come through the antique mall after estate sales and whatnot over the years; nothing quite as fanciful as this one, but there’s definitely a niche market for steamer trunks.”

“Don’t sell it,” Peter bids him, already terrified by the vague undercurrent of that idea, for some reason.

“Why not?” Sirius raises, letting a grin happen. “We could blow the earnings on something intrinsically gay and she could very well end up rolling in her grave because of it.”

“Well, wait a bit at least,” Peter pleads. “My mum, for one, would love that.”

Sirius blinks once, slowly turns his head to the left, and eyes Peter through a sidelong squint. “Your mum would love a chest with the name ‘Sirius’ on the front?” he inquires, pulling a quick, one-note trill from Remus for it.

“Sorry,” he supplies, hanging his head a little bit, but that's what it’s all about, babey.

“Don’t be,” Sirius offers.

“We could pry that off easily enough, don’t you think?” Peter raises, crouching down to have a better look at the emblem shining beneath the light fixture above the front door. “Mhm, all we’d need is a good set of pliers and a righteous pull.”

Sirius lifts his hands disparagingly, pushing out a bemused laugh. “You’re failing to explain why your mum would even want to be within a foot of this thing.”

“Um, have you been to hers, ever?” Peter returns. “Nearly everything in there is an antique, and on that note, she wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t at least run it by her before you walk it down to the pawn shop.”

Sirius sucks in a mighty breath, torn between making Peter's mum's week and the glorious sight it would be just seeing that thing in the window of a dingy pawn shop. “You’re yanking my fucking chain here, Pete,” he insists, speaking it through gritted teeth.

Peter quickly looks past Sirius to Remus for aid, the fucking stooge. “I vote Pete’s mum gets it, too,” he says of it.

“In a crashing reveal, Remus cozies up to the professor,” Sirius recites, crossing his arms now, too.

“You’re rich as is,” Remus returns, bumping Sirius’s right hip with his left one.

The lobby door opens down below and a series of foot clomps that undoubtedly belong to James’s heavy footing echo up the stairwell, and soon enough, his disaster hair comes into view from the first landing. “Where’d you go?” Sirius bids.

“I wanted juice,” James puts up, lifting a carton of premium jus d'orange high above his head and giving it a waggle, or at least until he makes it up the steps and spots the eyesore at their collective feet; then he deftly lowers the carton. “What the fuck, I was gone five minutes.”

“More like fifteen,” Peter puts up.

“‘Lot can happen,” Sirius tacks on.

James blocks that with an egregious scoff from the top step. “What’s it doing here?” he demands.

“Search me,” Sirius returns. “Some moody turd dropped it off.”

“She knocked you off the will,” James recounts. “I read those words; I know I read those words.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not having a mass hallucination here so it appears she might’ve been bluffing,” Sirius says of it. “That, or it’s a clerical error and I was never meant to have it, but it’s a little suspicious; she up and bites it, and this thing shows up a month and some change later?”

James takes one long look at the trunk on the floor and takes one sniff. “Yeah, this reeks of The Burg,” he trades him, circling his free hand above it. “A nice lil’ ‘look what you missed out on,’ the rotting peach.”

“I say we bring it in, see what we make from it, and stuff our earnings down a bear’s tighty-whities,” Sirius puts up. “She’ll love what I’ve done with it.”

“What,” Peter puts in, “did we just agree to?”

Sirius turns his head and presses a huff directly into Peter’s right ear. “Can you just let me be a cunt when it’s deserved?” he raises.

“Cunt away, I just know my mum’s going to want it,” Peter insists, looking over the face of the chest and letting his newest breath leave him slowly. “What do you think’s in it?”

“This and that,” Sirius offers. “I used to just shove things in there, but that was ages ago; no telling what’s in there now.”

Peter turns his head slowly toward him. “What if it’s cursed?”

“Oh, it’s one-hundred percent cursed,” Sirius maintains plainly. “You sure you want your mum to take it? The omens attached to it alone aren’t to be ignored.”

James moves forward, getting himself a decent look at the front of the chest before reaching down and flicking up on a large padlock hanging from the middle latch. “Don’t remember this being there,” he comments, lifting his gaze to give Sirius a pointed look.

Sirius doesn’t remember there being a lock on it either, which really only points to somebody tampering with it and The Burg really might be the only option from there. “Well, my money’s on a portrait of a pile of sticks on fire,” he raises, looking around at the lot of them. “What say you?”

Remus takes in a quick breath. “Sirius,” he exhales woundedly.

“Nah, that’s her in a nutshell,” James puts it plain.

Remus shifts from one foot to the other, averting his gaze to the floor, and Sirius fucking hates seeing it; doesn’t matter that this is the only defense mechanism he has going for himself, he still knows he sounds brash even if there are entire silos filled with grains of truth to his jesting, but Remus isn’t going to like it either way, not if it’s about that, not if it's about Sirius.

He drops his right hand closer to Remus’s left one, clasping it between the two of them while Peter moves in toward the chest a little more. “Do we think it could be booby-trapped?” he asks, a captive audience all his own as he stares the glorified storage container down.

Sirius takes in a sharp breath. “You mean there could be boobs in there?” he raises, gape/grinning. “Well, now we have to have a look.”

James sends a round of breathy laughs through his nose as he steps around the chest and Peter to get at the doorway. “I’ll get the bolt cutters, but we’re keeping a wide berth,” he conditions, heading in between Remus and the right-hand side of the doorway.

He holds his carton of juice out to him on his way by and Remus looks bemusedly down at the thing before letting go of Sirius’s hand, assuming the role of juice holder with a sigh, though he quickly looks up again as James taps him lightly on the right side of his neck.

“Lovely mark you’ve got there, dear,” he imparts.

Remus puts out a huff, turning as James heads away from them and makes a left into the art/storage/literally anything room down at the far end of the front hall. “Why do you have a pair of bolt cutters just laying around?” he sends after him.

“You don’t want to know,” Peter offers simply.

“Right,” Remus nods, pushing out a tight laugh. “Haven’t got a bandage to spare 'round here, but there are bolt cutters on the off-chance they’ll come in handy.”

Sirius scoffs at the nature of the callout, turning his head pointedly toward him. “I got you a forty-pack of band-aids, madame,” he puts up haughtily.

“It took a cluster resurgence for it to even dawn on you that a forty-pack could be useful around here,” Remus starts in, holding the carton of juice up in his right hand while he’s got his left hip jutted out, and Sirius can’t even be fussed about getting read for filth anymore when Remus just looks so fucking good doing it. “I swear this place exists in its own realm, there’s no other explanation for it; I am in a liminal space every time I set foot in here.”

“Where did we put them last?” James calls up, frustratedly bumbling about the room, it sounds like.

“Check the top of the closet,” Sirius suggests, gaze still fixed on Remus.

A bit of fumbling occurs before James lets out a championed 'Aha, there you are,' followed by a series of clatters and a couple of swears that come floating down the hall, pulling similarly amused noises out of Sirius and Peter, and a long-suffering sigh out of Remus.

“I need a tea,” he insists, opting out of the situation by heading up the hall in the other direction.

“Mind putting the juice in the fridge while you’re there?” James calls out.

Remus tosses a glance over his shoulder. “No, I was going to set it out back,” he puts it plainly, and in that same moment, catches Sirius red-handed as he's watching him walk away with keen interest.

Sirius shrugs his shoulders once. “Sorry, you look good,” he provides, not sorry at all.

Remus reworks his mouth around a smile. “No, you’re not.”

“He’s not,” Peter echoes, simply because he’s here, too, perhaps.

Remus nods his head toward the front door before turning away. “You might think about bringing that in from the lobby before you unleash whatever demonic entity’s living inside of it,” he suggests, heading on through the living room.

“That’s more like it,” Sirius sends him jovially, glad to see he’s somewhat joined in on the fun.

He hears footsteps thunder from behind him and turns in time to find James torpedoing up the hall. “Let’s do this shit,” he hypes up, snapping the black and red bolt cutters like a long, gargantuan pair of scissors.

Sprung to life, Sirius and Peter move out into the lobby, the former taking hold of the right side while the latter takes up the left before they lift the much heavier-than-anticipated trunk and scoot it sideways. “Jesus Cunt,” Peter puts out, backing into the flat and on down the hall toward the living room, “what’s in here, a body?”

“Probably,” James offers dryly, shutting the front door after them.

Peter backs further into the living room before he loses some of his grip on his end and the two of them wrestle the trunk down to the ground, leaving it sitting vertically compared to the rest of the more horizontally arranged furniture in the room. The three of them gather around the front of it, Peter on Sirius’s left, James on his right, before Remus comes back up the hall from the kitchen and stops short under the archway above that entrance to the living room, looking between the three of them assembled ahead of the chest before settling his gaze on James very much brandishing the bolt cutters like they’re some kind of weapon.

“I was kidding about the demon,” he mentions.

“Still could be rigged,” Peter points out.

“To explode?” Remus raises, a half-smile budding on his lips.

“There’s a bad energy that wasn’t in here ten minutes ago,” James returns, harvesting the air of someone having thrown a blinding checkmate.

Sirius can see Remus’s full-bodied sigh from over here. “Would you like me to do the honours?” he offers, moving forward and reaching past Peter’s front for the cutters.

Oi,” Sirius puts out, grabbing them as James makes to hand them off to Remus, no questions asked. “Absolutely fucking not; have you gone spare?”

“He offered,” James defends, crossing his arms over his chest pointedly.

“And if he loses an arm in the blast, there goes my sleep schedule,” Sirius returns. "He's not doing it."

Remus huffs another sigh as Sirius tugs him over in between him and Peter. “This is all a bit much, even for you three,” he says, falling into line with them.

“Everybody back up,” Sirius orders.

Both James and Peter take a full step back while Remus simply stays put beside him, taking a breath into his cheeks and releasing it slowly while Sirius kneels down in front of the chest and lines the cutters up with the top of the padlock.

“Wait,” James comes in, reaching to halt Sirius’s right arm. “Before we do anything, remember that whatever’s in here, you’re still a hunk of a bitch who takes names and has the world at his feet, yes?”

“Yes,” Sirius puts out, hip-bumping James for the reminder.

He rearranges his grip on the handles of the cutters and has the lock snapped after fifteen to twenty seconds of brute strength and the added benefit of James chanting a chorus of yes, yes, yes along with it. Leaving the cutters on the floor behind him, Sirius bends forward to lift the middle latch and lifts up on the rounded lid, keeping his movements rather delicate as he lets go of the top, mostly expecting it to hang open at the back when that was certainly what it used to do at the foot of his bed whenever he opened it, but the whole of the lid slams against the back of the trunk with a profound thud that has each of them jolting back and, most importantly, Remus yanking Sirius back.

He wavers in his balance as he looks around at Remus, who's simply crouched beside him, his right hand wrapped around Sirius’s left bicep and his left one draped against his own breastplate. “Don’t make fun,” he pleads.

“Wasn’t gonna,” Sirius replies, rather charmed by the development overall.

The whirring of the kettle hits a peak float from down the hall before it chimes its completion, but Remus goes still as each pair of eyes in the room turns toward him. “It's the electric one, I’ll get it in a bit,” he relays quietly, almost as if the chest is going to spring alive and start chomping on the lot of them if he leaves the room or speaks too loud, but more likely he's just spooked.

James moves in first, Remus not far behind him, and Peter follows them down to his knees, and then it's the four of them peering at the heap of mismatched clutter inside. “Looks like a pile of junk,” Peter professes.

Sirius feels his mouth curl at a crooked angle, his eyes and spine tingling. “Is that what you call these bad babies?” he returns, ceremoniously lifting his decade-worn and weathered combats by the knot holding the laces together.

“I take it back,” Peter maintains.

Sirius beams as he takes a good, long look at the frayed footwear, twirling them around and around idly. “Try ‘em on,” James goads him.

Sirius snorts. “Have you met these feet?” he raises, planting himself back on his arse to lift his right ankle and display it atop the outer rim of the chest. “There’s no chance those are fitting anymore.”

Remus smirks, reaching his right hand over Sirius’s left arm to pull down on the drastically loosened heel on the right boot. “Seems they got their share of wear as is,” he offers.

“Never went anywhere without them,” Sirius echoes, hanging the boots from his neck like a war-torn necklace and taking his leg back to situate himself cross-legged on the floor. “I grew out of them eventually, but I couldn’t just part with them; they’re an ancient relic.”

“Should display them somewhere,” James raises him.

Sirius puts out a thoroughly psyched noise. “We could give them to Ludwig,” he puts up, splaying his right hand out toward the ever-present member of the household, currently sporting a vibrant Hawaiian shirt beneath Sirius’s leather jacket and nothing down below.

And with that, James plucks up the boots by the knot in the laces and lifts them off of Sirius’s neck, scooting along the floor and settling the boots below Ludwig’s frame, tucking them up against the base of the mount sitting to the left of his bedroom door. “I like it,” he tacks on. “Distinguished.”

Sirius chokes on a laugh as he reaches into the chest again to have a wee sift through it, pulling out his frayed, truly primitive edition of the King James Bible he remembers having to pour over all too well, though along with those rather bleak memories come the certified lovely ones of scrawling his various hot takes along the margins of the book whenever he felt pressed to weigh in on a particular verse, and the time he used a fuschia sharpie to draw a dick on the front flyleaf when he was about fifteen, if he’s remembering it right.

He flips the cover open and indeed finds the veiny, rather realistic sketch of the appendage in all its glory, an amused noise getting caught in his throat for it. James and Remus react at the same instant but in rather unique ways; the former gives out a grand hoot while the latter puts out a truly gutted noise.

“Sirius, no,” Remus expels, completely overcome by the sound and look of it. “Why?

“OK, listen?” Sirius raises, hoping the bibliophile might throw him a bone here. “An actual demon had this thing written for him, I felt I should respond to it.”

“Commissioned by a demon or not, Zaya would have killed to have this in her shop, but not with that dick in there,” Remus returns pointedly.

Sirius hums circumstantially, flipping through the pages to showcase his various scrawlings over the years. “Not the only one in there," he mentions. "I wrote a bunch of rebuttals in the margins, too, so I doubt she’d have any interest in this thing.”

Remus wipes the overcome look off of his face on a dime, leaning in to take a flip through the pages and get a further look at Sirius’s youthful etchings. “Well, I—” he starts, turning and pressing his reluctant smile against Sirius’s left shoulder, “—would happily read your adolescent responses to Leviticus, I'll say that.”

“Then it’s yours,” Sirius chimes, passing the Bible off to him.

Remus smirks, setting the book down ahead of his knees, and takes in a harrowing gasp as Sirius lifts another book out of the chest. “Sirius,” he puts out, seemingly in true shock, reaching to tug on his left wrist to get the book closer to him, and Sirius pushes an amused breath through his nose, handing off his once-gifted copy of A Tale of Two Cities so his man can thoroughly inspect it. “What edition is this?”

“Second, bitch,” Sirius rings out, shimmying his shoulders. “A gift from Alphard, helps to have friends in high places in this case; why, did you want it?”

Sirius can’t not take immense pleasure in getting to watch Remus’s eyes go from quite intrigued to dinner plate status on account of anything to do with him. “Oh, I couldn’t,” he insists, faltering as he lifts the open book in his hands and has himself a short whiff of the pages with a twist of a smile on. “Oh, it smells like a second edition.”

“Yikeserooney,” James puts out, but it sure was done brightly.

“It smells like heaven,” Remus defends, pulling the book in for a protective hug, and Sirius feels warm from his fingers down to his toes. “Are you sure you don’t want to keep it?”

Sirius shakes his head, pushing a few wayward strands of hair aside. “Nah, what am I to do with it?” he raises, waving it off. “Say ‘thanks ol’ Alphie.’”

“Thanks ol’ Alphie,” Remus echoes, flipping through the book with a delicate hand, nestled cozily in bookish heaven.

Sirius exchanges a quick, elated smile with James as he reaches into the chest once more, curious what else he’ll find now, and immediately yelps, drawing his right hand back and finding a trail of blood running down his thumb. “It is rigged,” Peter puts out, scooting back on the floor.

“Relax, it’s just a tchotchke,” Sirius returns, sticking his leaky thumb in his mouth.

James reaches into the chest and lifts the cracked, glass-blown ornament out of it. “What is it?” Remus raises, squinting at it.

“Gargoyle?” James guesses, studying it at an angle through a squint of his own.

Sirius nods, taking his thumb out of his mouth. “Right you are,” he affirms. “Ninth birthday gift from Auntie Fuckin’ Dru.”

Remus blinks. “Charming,” he says faintly.

“Yes, well, she’s Bella’s mum, so you can imagine what she might’ve been like,” Sirius relays, and Remus, only having had the pleasure of even seeing Bella once, still takes on a soured expression that Sirius feels is rather fitting for the situation, tipping his head to it and reaching back into the chest to continue sifting through it. “Marlene got moon shoes that year, so I wasn’t exactly pumped to unwrap that monstrosity if you can believe it.”

He looks left of him, catches Remus exchanging a glance with James behind his back, and looks to James immediately, who drops the bright smile he has on right quick. “Don’t you dare,” Sirius insists, not meaning it one bit.

“Well, would you like moon shoes this year?” Remus raises, keeping that smile of his own audible on his lips.

“We’ll find some,” James tacks on, while Peter drums his fists excitedly into the bit of floor in front of him.

“I would die,” Sirius extends gravely.

“That’s that, then,” James grants.

Sirius faces forward again with a renewed sense of love coursing through his veins, spots an item that truly takes the feeling, and runs away with it. “Oho,” he hoots, pulling out a brightly coloured rolly-toy by the pole.

“Yes, yes, yes,” James chants.

“I’m sorry, but were you a child in the twenties?” Remus raises, a dusting of colour over his cheeks as he watches him roll it back and forth on the floor between them and the chest.

“Looks that way, doesn’t it,” Sirius allows, smirking.

He leaves the toy aside, reaches back into the chest again, and his smile peters off as he lifts a picture frame out of it. He remembers it well, the words House of Black etched to perfection at the bottom center of the wooden frame looking the same as they did the last time he saw it, and he certainly remembers chucking it into the chest years back now just to not have to see it all the bloody time, but he must’ve put a lot of oomph into that toss for it split the glass, causing a crack to splinter diagonally across the face of the portrait.

He smirks there, turning it to James. “Gotta love when a metaphor just falls into your lap.”

James mimes sticking a finger down his throat at the very family pictured there, but soon Remus reaches over Sirius’s front and tips the frame more his way so he can have a look at it, too, and while to him, it can’t look all that much more than a of cluster of thirty-odd fancily dressed folks of all ages arranged all nice and picturesque on a grand staircase and below an arrestingly intricate chandelier, Remus is transfixed all the same.

He furrows his brow, reaching over Sirius’s left arm to run his right forefinger over the face of a family member where a large, black ‘X' covers the details of their visage. "Half family portrait, half handy-dandy ostracised list,” Sirius offers him, tipping his chin toward it. “There was this huge tapestry of the family tree downstairs already, but The Burg decided to put this one upstairs between mine and Reg’s rooms so we’d have one on the second level to stare at and I got so sick of having to look at it day after day, year after year, I took it off the wall and dumped it in here — didn’t matter, she simply gave me shit, replaced it with a more recent photo, and crossed the traitors out all over again, but it felt good at the time, disposing of it.”

Remus’s calculating expression remains while he nods for the added clarity, examining the photo with an attention to detail that he puts into just about anything, Sirius is learning. “See, great aunt Isla ran off with a bloke and shirked the family name well before I was born, so she was never in family photos," Sirius details. "Wasn't even on the big tapestry, but we’d heard plenty about her treachery when we were young, and over here, we have Cindrella—” he pauses with his forefinger tapping intructively over her X’d-out visage at Remus’s snort, “—no, I mean it, her name is 'Cindrella,' and she had an affair with her boss, who wasn’t white, and I shit you not, that was the sole problem — infidelity? Please, plenty of them were out getting their rocks off on the side, but she was the one who was made an example of what not to do and I find that interesting.”

“Jesus Cunt,” Remus cuts out, looking weathered already.

“Mhm, and right here is Alphard,” Sirius offers, tapping his uncle’s still body on the opposite side of the collection of people.

“Oh,” Remus smiles, sounding rather charmed. “He looks like he had a big laugh.”

“A right boomer,” Sirius affirms, smiling for it.

Remus turns his head to the right, pressing a smile of his own to Sirius’s left shoulder. “I’d have loved to have met him,” he offers.

“He’d have picked your brain like no tomorrow,” Sirius returns him. “See, he’s not X’d out yet, though I bet you she crossed him right off the tapestry and the replacement portrait after he left me the moolah, but Andromeda is gone—” he taps the large 'X' blocking out her visage pointedly, “—and that’s because she dipped a year after this portrait was taken, while over here we have Bella, unmarked for forever and ever, Amen, and held up as a prime example of the sort of dutiful lady they’re all expected to emulate, despite her being a marvel in the genetic mutation between woman and cow.”

Peter pushes out a snort so violent, it sounded like it hurt. “You good, Pete?” Sirius checks, smirking.

“You just really know how to wrap up a sentence,” he offers.

Sirius bobs his shoulders a bit, but Remus leans in there, hooking his over his left shoulder as he squints down at it some more, and reaches to tap the portrait, gasping lightly. “Found you,” he pipes up, flickering his gaze up to Sirius with a bright smile on before looking back down at the mini version of him. “How old were you there?”

“Mm, think I was ten when they took that one?” Sirius offers, swaying Remus’s frame a tad with the push of his shoulders as he gives it a second thought. “No, yeah, I'd turned eleven a month before Andromeda split so I must’ve been ten there.”

Remus nods for it while he continues looking, his gaze lifting slightly before his smile peters off, and Sirius has to assume he spotted The Burg very nearby his mini self, but Remus passes on pointing her out, tapping on Sirius’s father’s body silently looming over him; some apt positioning for more reason than keeping direct family members clustered together.

“Oh, wow,” Remus expresses, looking up at him again. “You’re almost all mum, no dad.”

“OK, thank you?” Sirius puts up. “Unfortunately the DNA checks out, but for years there I went back and forth on whether I was the byproduct of a torrid love affair that just never got spoken of, but it didn’t really check out as a theory when those two were thick as thieves and I don’t imagine now that The Burg would’ve strayed for even a night, but in any case, Reg looked a bit more like him, had his nose.”

Sirius taps the little tyke just to his right in the portrait and Remus follows Sirius’s forefinger and fixes his gaze there, the corners of his mouth curling down as his brow furrows. “I know,” he offers airily. “Twins, they called us, but I got the better nose out of the draw.”

James reaches over and claps Sirius’s cheekbones in one, swift move. “A better sculpting job all around, I’d say,” he provides.

Sirius bats James’s hands away, smirking for the lively addition all the same, and looks back at Remus studying the same spot on the portrait. “Are there any recent photos of him around?” he asks.

“Spoiler,” Sirius mentions, “you landed the hot one.”

Remus sighs through his nose, tilting his gaze to the right. “I just want to see,” he insists.

“I didn’t take any with me,” Sirius returns, lifting his hands to illustrate both their and this very abode’s empty status.

“Well, there’s that print from the article, no?” Peter raises.

James and Sirius put out strikingly similar groans. “That toothy grin,” James puts up, pulling his mobile out. “I’d never seen anything so smarmy.”

“There’s something to that,” Sirius allows. “If someone had told me that it'd actually been an ad for some bougie dental clinic, I’d have simply believed it to be true.”

“Right?” James echoes, thumbs moving swiftly over his screen as he searches it up. “‘You, too, can have this smile with only one direct payment of your entire savings; don’t even think about it, just call now.’”

“What was it really for?” Remus bids.

“A puff up piece about up-and-coming moguls,” Sirius puts out blandly. “The interview was fucking brutal; only made him sound like even more a tool than he already was.”

Remus gives a slight hum. “It was very dry,” Peter extends. “Think I yawned twice through it.”

“When was it written?” Remus raises.

“Last summer,” Sirius forwards.

“Aha, here we are,” James announces, passing the mobile past Sirius to reach it toward Remus, who takes it rather quickly and has a look over the screen, his eyes going to dinner plate size from there, but to be fair, there’s a lot to take in; his haughty smile, his clean-cut hair, his dapper suit jacket tossed faux-casually over his right shoulder, just your regular man’s up-and-coming businessman.

“Well, that’s that, I definitely served him,” Remus decides, cut and clear with a decided nod, though his voice goes a little more on the apprehensive side after he looks around at them and notes that he’s being avidly watched from all directions. “Just after I transferred, we had the grand opening and he stopped in; I remember because I thought he looked like your doppelgänger but the image was warped, sort of like he was the left-handed version of you.”

Sirius nods, just wanting him to keep on talking, and it takes a few more seconds for it to sink in on Remus’s end. “Well, I missed you quite a bit so when he walked in there, I genuinely thought you’d popped in to say hello, but then I got a better look and he had the wrong nose, a rounder face, and the body language was all wrong, too,” he extends.

“Never did get the hang of a good strut,” Sirius offers circumstantially.

“No, he definitely wasn’t doing that,” Remus echoes. “Came in quite a bit the first few weeks after we opened up the doors and then—”

He trails off before pressing his lips into a firm line, looking left then over to the right nervously, so that can’t be good. “Oh, was he a bitch to you?” Sirius raises testily.

Remus shakes his head quickly. “No, I just — I'd never thought about where he’d gone,” he puts it, frowning deeply. “He literally up and disappeared, and I didn’t even think about it?”

Sirius gazes at Remus through a squint, finds Peter frowning bemusedly on the other side of him, and looks right to find James doing a very similar thing with his own eyes, garnering him to look back at Remus again with a decided breath inward. “Well, I mean,” he starts, pushing the air back out with a faint gesture of his left hand up at Remus, “bit unrealistic to expect you to keep tabs on one, sole customer out of the various hundred you see in any given week.”

“You saw him, what, a handful of times?” James takes it on.

“Two handfuls?” Remus offers, nodding after he gives it a beat or two of consideration. “Ten times at most.”

“Well, for all you knew, he moved,” Peter puts up.

“No, but I didn’t — I didn’t even—” Remus tries, putting out a genuinely horrid sigh. “I didn’t wonder where he'd gone; that’s a bit fucked up, isn’t it?”

Sirius blinks, not seeing any reason to string him up. “Remus, really, take the sword out of your side,” he instructs, keeping his voice gentle so he won’t read into it as anything other than what it is. “I bet he didn’t even tip.”

“Oh, no, he did,” Remus relays, speaking it out the left side of his mouth as if to aim it away from Sirius specifically. “I mean, I didn’t go counting it, but he dropped something into the jar each time.”

James gives a fanciful wave of his right wrist. “Have a pence, barista filth,” he recites with a thick roll on that 'R'.

Sirius puts out an easy snort, tossing the picture frame back into the chest and moving right along from there, but not so much for Remus. “It really wasn’t like that,” he gives, curling his hands around the book in his lap. “He was nice enough; always dressed to the nines which was certainly a look, but he didn’t stick his nose up at me or anything, and I can sort of tell when someone is doing that.”

“What was his order?” James inquires, having a look through the chest himself.

Remus makes a pained face, his brow furrowing. “Oh, now you have to say it,” Sirius insists.

“He was an extra hot, no foam latte sort,” Remus confesses.

“What a piece of shit,” Sirius rings out.

“No, but he was really nice about it?” Remus insists. “Never stood at the bar watching me make it like most of the suits do; he'd ask me about my day and we'd chat about whatever it was that came up.”

“Well,” Sirius puts up, his throat feeling rather dry as he lifts his shoulders once, but he doesn’t know what to do with that other than cling to a little bit of hope, "maybe he came back down to earth a little before the end.”

James pauses sifting through the chest with a bland expression. “What?” Sirius raises, but James puts up his hands, looking around for the source of the problem when he clearly doesn’t think he’s it. “It’d have done him some good if he quit turning his nose up at everyone and everything he deemed ‘unsuitable—’”

“I agree,” James cuts in, louder to be heard, “only Mr. Nice Guy over there wouldn’t tell you if it was a shit experience; would you, Remus?”

Remus, who’d only just started to ease up, wrings his hands out over getting the spotlight so soon again. “Ease off of him, yeah?” Sirius raises, aiming a pointed look at James.

“I’m fine,” Remus says at once, but Sirius turns his head and pointedly stares at Remus’s hands, causing him to quit playing with them in an instant. “It’s automatic, Sirius.”

“You have to stop acting like he can’t handle himself,” James sends him. “He’s the toughest bloke in this room, so maybe just respect that enough not to treat him differently than the rest of us when he clearly doesn’t even want that—”

“I will throw you out that fucking window,” Sirius manifests, pointing past James to the one over in the alcove.

“Then do it, won’t change that I’m right,” James returns, shoving a bunch of odds and ends aside with his hands. “You coddle him way too much.”

“OK,” Remus puts out, his professorial voice on lock as he presses a soothing hand to Sirius’s back, "let’s calm down, roll this back a bit, try to remember that there’s broken glass in there, James; careful, please.”

“Thanks, hon,” James offers, fishing around a bit lighter inside of the chest.

“You coddle me plenty so simmer down,” Remus retorts, his thoughtfulness leaving the room as quickly as it came.

James sends out a wild scoff. “I do not.”

“You really do, and this isn’t the point,” Remus returns, rubbing his hand up and down Sirius’s back on a steady rhythm, and that is doing a lot for his breathing, all in all. “I was telling the truth, but I suppose you’re right; I probably wouldn’t say if Reg had been a bother so it’s a good thing he wasn’t one because I didn’t even have to lie about it.”

James drops his gaze and nods stiffly, likely not loving that answer when it doesn’t fit his narrative though he doesn't say as much. Instead, he takes in a piqued breath and lifts a flimsy sheet of oddly shaped paper out of the chest, smiling down at it. “What’s that?” Sirius asks, still a bit begrudging despite his curiosity piquing.

“It’s us,” James chimes.

He turns it around and showcases the photo of them that got put in their yearbook many years ago, the two of them posing with their arms draped over each other, Sirius on the right and smiling with his eyes as he got real into Top Model that year, and while that’s certainly a talking point in itself, Sirius is much more focused on the fact that the photo was cut from the yearbook he never even spared a thought to grab before he left, for one, and certainly wasn’t cut out by him, for another.

“How do you always photograph so well?” Remus puts up, prodding Sirius in the back pointedly. “Every time; I don’t think there’s a single bad photo of you on this earth.”

“Blessings and such,” James says of it, which is great when Sirius is a tad preoccupied.

“Never one to hold onto a picture of me, though; am I right,” Peter raises wanly.

“You took the photo, Pete,” James chides. “You took all of the ones in there.”

“I also did not put that photo in there,” Sirius declares.

The entire room goes still as Remus, James, and Peter give the chest a careful once-over and look to each other individually before ultimately taking their gazes over to Sirius; the room and the people in it with him go increasingly more silent after that, but that just gives Sirius the floor to talk it out so that's fine, he supposes. “I mean, I can still see her writing that into her will even just for the theatrics,” he considers, giving a distant wave toward the chest itself, “but she wasn’t big into scrapbooking to my memory nor would she have cut a clipping me out of my yearbook and not simply burn it, so this chest wasn't tampered with by her and that really just leaves one other person.”

“Do you think he thought she’d get rid of it?” Peter theorizes, following Sirius’s thread quite well. "Maybe he grabbed it before she could."

To that, Sirius conjures up a vivid image of Reg dragging the chest out of his room and sticking it somewhere for keeps; the back of his closet, underneath a load of other things so she wouldn’t find it, maybe even opening it up now and again just to have some things to remember him by, but even as he pictures it, the whole image just looks warped.

“Why would he want it, though?” Sirius raises, countering his own point with a splayed gesture at the open chest.

“Well, it’s you,” Peter offers, waving a hand toward it himself. “I mean, it's you in a time capsule.”

And there, he can’t stop himself from picturing Reg standing at his bedroom door as he hurriedly packed his things, the coldness in his expression as Sirius insisted he go pack, too, and the vitriol in words he had for him. “It is me, it’s all me,” he echoes, right baffled. “It just doesn’t track; you don’t say the shit he said to me as I went out that door only to turn around and keep an entire time capsule of — wouldn’t it have just reminded him of everything he couldn’t stand about me?”

“Except, the cutout doesn’t make sense unless it was him,” Peter tacks on. "It really doesn't."

“I know I’ve said awful things in the heat of the moment and regretted them terribly afterward,” Remus puts up, and it’s bittersweet, hearing him try to put a positive spin on an extremely negative individual; hell, Sirius wants to believe it, believe Remus and Pete on this one, cling to the idea that Reg wasn’t only kind and thoughtful to sweet, barista Remus, that maybe it could've actually spread over to Sirius in some, small way, but he can’t get himself there when all he can hear is Reg’s provoking voice rattling in his head, pecking and pecking and pecking at him, the words ‘You brought this on yourself’ echoing around in his skull clear as day even now, and suddenly it’s like he's the one with got a clamp closing around his skull.

Sirius’s chest feels much tighter as he looks to James, who has kept right out of this one unsurprisingly, but turns out, he's been studying the back of the cutout over there. “What is it?”

James sniffs once, sitting to attention and blinking a little too innocuously, but when Sirius moves even an an inch, he makes to hold the clipping out of his reach and that’s suspicious enough to warrant him practically climbing on top of James to get at the crumpled, once-glossy paper trapped in his right fist. “Stop it,” James chides, squeezing his fist tighter around it.

Give it,” Sirius snaps, prying each of James’s fingers up one by one to get a hold of it.

“Just don’t even fucking read it, Sirius,” James sighs out, but that just takes Sirius’s curiosity and ratchets it up tenfold; there’s something to read?

Sirius backs up and away from James’s grabby hands, falling back into place beside Remus, and unfolds the paper, turning the picture around and squinting down at the back of it; the backdrop is a section of the footy team with their very own Lilith at the center of the troupe, but there is a bit of writing scrawled on it that's a tad difficult to read without a good squint and, in contrast, very clearly meant to coincide with the boys on the opposite side of the cutout.

By now you’re likely smoking pole at Manbar and while you indulge in whatever downward spiral you’re on, I do hope you pause long enough to ask yourself if it’s even worth it

Smoking pole?” Sirius shoots out. “Who the fuck taught him to say that?”

Both Remus and Peter’s hands turn up at different points on Sirius’s left forearm to budge it enough to get a decent look at the etchings. “We’re sure that was him?” Peter raises, while Remus keeps silent with a tight hold on Sirius’s wrist even after he’s finished reading the small blurb for himself.

“It’s his handwriting,” Sirius relays, gaze set on a spot on the wall above his record setup though he’s not seeing it too clearly. “Why would he cut a photo of me out of the yearbook just to write a fucking callout on the back of it? So fucking extra, I’m—”

Sirius cuts off, out of words for what it feels like to him. “Personally,” James puts in, “I find it rather touching he thought you’d be caught dead at Manbar.”

Peter pushes out a snort. “Takes some of the intended venom out of it, that’s for sure,” he echoes.

“If he wanted to drag you on something he didn’t think you’d see, he could’ve at least done it properly,” James runs with it.

“I’ll give it a crisp 'C' and that’s my final offer,” Remus weighs in, tracing the pad of his right thumb back and forth over the inner side of Sirius’s left wrist.

Sirius pushes out a breath that might’ve been a laugh if he could've managed one, dropping the crumpled picture to win himself the freedom to drag his hands up and over his face, breathing in long. Head in his hands, he sits there with all of it; the silence around him pairing with the hot fury rising up in him, sick and tired of all the ways Reg can still get to him even now, until he’s lifting his right leg and sending the trunk skidding back on the floor with one brutal kick before he’s up and off the floor, needing to get the fuck out of there and away from the three sets of tentative eyes he can feel glued to his back.

He gets as far as the back hall, turning on his heel and focusing on Peter’s gaze specifically. “If your mum wants that then she can have it, but I don’t even want to see that fucking thing until she takes it, got it?” he snaps, looking over the three of them now. “Get rid of it.”

The three of them move instantly, clambering all the odds and ends they’ve picked out of the chest and scooting forward to dump them back into it, and that’s all Sirius needs to fucking see in order to know he can leave the rest to them.

He turns around again, strides down the hall, and stalks through the kitchen, stomping up the steps to slap the screen door open and moving for his cigarette pack laying on the table out back. He knocks his left hip into one of the chairs on the way to it and kicks that, skidding halfway across the porch, and that feels incredibly satisfying so as quick as a snap, he’s picking up and tossing another of the plastic chairs across the terrace, whirling around and picking up another when he’s nowhere near finished yet, and then there’s Remus in front of him and the general blast path, and that’s not OK at all so Sirius backs the fuck up and away from him, dragging the chair with him by the arm, and then there’s Hank the Fucking Bagpiper, torpedoing out of his own back door up on the balcony across from theirs and leaning over the railing to boom down at him from above.

“What the fuck are you doing?

Sirius barks out a wild laugh at the sheer audacity on display here. “You want to get hit?” he raises, lifting the chair in his hand. “I’ll aim real good, promise you that.”

“Alright, Hank?” Remus calls out. “You’re not helping.”

“Are you going to do something about that?” Hank shoots back, pointing deftly at Sirius winding the deck chair in his hand by the handle, bringing it 'round and 'round and around to suggest he'll launch it at the goon up there if he doesn't fucking leave already.

“You don’t think I’m trying to?” Remus returns, throwing his hands around deftly with it. “You need to get lost.”

“I’ll be lodging a complaint to the landlord,” Hank mentions, turning on his heel in a whirl.

“Good luck with that one,” Remus sends after him.

Sirius lowers the deck chair, finding Remus’s own ‘tude on display just grounding enough to simmer down a notch. “I don’t need to hear it, Remus,” he rattles. “I tried, I tried to leave before I—”

He cuts off as Remus heads for him, his hands up in front of him before he sets them splayed over Sirius’s shoulders. “It’s OK,” he instils, calm as a creek in a snap, but he’s not staring at Sirius like he’s afraid to move and that’s really all he has for the moment; it's a lot better than Remus looked at him in May, that's for sure. “They’re sturdy chairs, they’ll survive.”

Sirius stands there with Remus's hands just weighing on him like two gentle anchors, but he can’t stop convulsing, his chest rising and falling at a speed he can’t control. “I’m so sick of this,” he puts out.

Remus lets go of him to reach for Sirius’s pack on the table, pulling one out. “I know,” he says, plucking Sirius’s tiny red lighter off of the table. "I am, too."

“I don’t need this,” Sirius presses.

“No, you don’t,” Remus echoes, voice muffled as he lights up, takes in a long haul, and turns the cigarette to hold it out to Sirius, letting his haul out with a firm exhale. “Pride’s in three days; it's genuinely the worst time for this to have shown up for you, and I’m really, really sorry.”

“I keep getting jerked around by him,” Sirius puts out, pointing off and toward nothing at all. “I can’t even have a single fucking moment of peace with him before he makes it impossible—”

Sirius cuts off as he hiccoughs violently, stepping back from Remus and lampooning the chair across the terrace before taking a full and fast haul off of the cigarette. “That’s the last one,” Remus conditions, pointing to him directly, and Sirius breathes his haul back out, nodding for it, for him. “I’m not going to pretend that I know exactly what to say or what this is like, but I’m going to try to get you back and you’re just going to have to let me, OK?”

Sirius nods again, mouth in a firm line as he nods erratically. “Good. See, my knee-jerk reaction is to try and find the reasons why someone might do what they’re doing, even if I personally don’t understand it or if I'd do it myself,” he keeps on, “but that’s not so easy to do with this because I’m coming into it late and there’s so much I’m still learning and trying to piece together, but even if I want there to be some sort of silver lining, it’s frighteningly clear that he was a very complicated man and I don’t even want to try to explain him away, so I’m going after the ideology itself here, OK? There are so many reasons why I hate that you keep getting taunted by him for something like loving men, but there’s also a very selfish reason if you’ll let me say it.”

“Please,” Sirius exhales, trying to ignore the fact that over beyond Remus he can plainly see James and Peter not-so-subtly watching them from the window in the alcove.

“Well, I don’t—” Remus starts, shaking himself out for a beat, “—I’m never going to understand why there was so much distaste for something that’s just the luck of the draw; it’d be the same as you constantly getting badgered and bullied for coming out of the womb left-handed—”

“Yeah, right?” Sirius grants, tight as his throat feels. “‘Oh, you like dick? Here’s a literal lifetime of browbeating and even some from beyond the grave; we’re that obsessed with your fucking sex life.’”

“Exactly, it’s mad; full stop,” Remus allows, wringing his hands out at his middle, “and I know it’s caused so many problems for you over the years and I’m not aiming to cheapen that any when I say this, but I—” he taps his chest insistently, “—am incredibly grateful you turned out to be so profoundly gay.”

Sirius’s snort is as involuntary as it is powerful. “Mm?” he raises, taking in a new haul.

“Mm,” Remus echoes. “And while there certainly are so many other, more important things than who you make cry in bed, I’d still say that's one of my favourite things about you, and I know I wasn’t present for that era of your life so that little anecdote won’t make up for everything that was stolen from you, but I hope it's at least something to cling to.”

“More than just something,” Sirius pushes out, dragging his free hand back through his loosely falling hair. “I bet you are real grateful for that.”

Remus nods, a grateful kind of half-smile on his lips. “Worked out really well for me, if I may say,” he offers lowly, moving in a step so he’s directly in front of him.

Sirius pushes out an amused breath. “You may always say that,” he relays, dipping his head down into the crook of Remus’s neck, taking in a deep breath with Remus’s telltale scent filtering in, reminding himself that this is the real deal; concrete and tangible through a storm.

“You’re OK,” Remus says quietly, running his hands over Sirius’s back. “Yeah? You’re OK; remember what James said in there, mm?”

“Stop, Remus,” Sirius pushes out weakly.

“No, I think that’s the last thing I should be doing,” Remus maintains. “Who’s a hunk of a bitch taking names with the world at his feet? You, or you?”

“Me,” Sirius echoes reluctantly.

Remus hums his affirmation, holding him just a little bit tighter. “I love you,” he says, close by Sirius’s left ear, pulling a muted sound from him. “I do, more and more every day.”

“I just trashed the terrace, Remus,” Sirius puts out pithily.

Remus hums circumstantially for that. “It needed a bit of feng shui if you ask me,” he offers.

Sirius tosses out an exhausted laugh, lifting his head to smile sadly at him. “You’re being so much nicer than you should be.”

“Well, hold that thought,” Remus maintains, taking a step back and swiping the cigarette off of Sirius, “because I’m about to blow your mind so you’ve already spoken too soon, saying that.”

Sirius's chest feels like it could collapse in on itself. “Tell,” he probes.

Remus smiles as he shoots a stream out of the right side of his twitching mouth. “Given that Pride is coming, to keep in with the spirit of both it and you, I’m willing to let you teach me a Zumba routine for the fun of it,” he raises, tapping Sirius’s collarbone with a few flutters of fingertips on his free hand.

Sirius genuinely feels as if his heart grew three sizes in the span of a single second and really only manages to take in a half-breath before speaking. “Really?” he asks, absolutely fucking jazzed already.

“Mhm,” Remus affirms, lifting the cigarette to his curved smile. “I wouldn’t mind picking up where we left off first, but after that, yes.”

Sirius wouldn't mind that either, but he's got to check something. “Two routines?” he haggles, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

Remus pushes his haul out through his nose, but his smile suggests he isn’t about to pull the plug on it. “Fine, you can have two,” he grants.

“And really, you may want to try our warm-up routine,” Sirius mentions, “simply because you’ll want to be loose and limber for the session and it’s a ton of fun in itself—”

“Two routines and a warm-up coming up,” Remus echoes, handing the cigarette back to Sirius as if cementing it. “First, let’s clean up the rubble, get a shower in, maybe ditch the housecoats and put some actual clothes on for the lesson, deal?”

“Deal,” Sirius sends him, taking the cigarette back from him.

Two more quick hauls and he’s done with that, too, butching it out in the ashtray on the table and heading to collect the furthest chair on the terrace, then picks up the other laying sprawled on the porch floor on the way back to the table, scooting them back into their original placement. Remus goes for the second chair Sirius tossed, now laying askew near-ish to the living room window, and shoos their shameless audience members off rather pointedly before lugging the chair back to the table.

Sirius follows him toward the kitchen with his forefingers at the small of his back, prodding him on a beat through his substantial hike in mood, and Remus must really be trying to keep his spirits up for he doesn’t bat back at Sirius’s hands once, just lets him be his theatrical self.

Once inside, Sirius traipses on ahead of Remus, tugging him out of the kitchen and down the hall by the wrist, thrilled to pass the news on to the other two. He stops still in the archway to theliving room, looking left, right, and all around the living room for the chest, but the room only has James and Peter standing to attention side by side in the spot it once sat, their hands crossed innocuously behind their backs.

“What did you do with it?” Sirius asks.

“It?” Peter raises, putting on a pondering expression.

“Don’t know what you mean, mate,” James offers, blinking over at him.

Sirius taps the top of his nose jovially, loving those two clunes more than he can really handle just then, but it doesn’t take him long to remember he’s got brilliant news to share with them. He clears his throat and lifts his free hand in a closed fist, miming speaking over a microphone. “Breaking: Remus answered the call of Zumba and has voiced that we’re to teach him the ways of it,” he puts out, sending James and Peter into a round of hooting and hollering that he feels is completely appropriate for the occasion.

“Nothing too complicated,” Remus sounds over the commotion. “This also doesn’t mean I’m joining the float as I’m truly happy to watch you all dance by, and finally, I’ll ask that you please pick two routines that will be light on the thrusting; those are my terms.”

“Oop, that's 'Call On Me' out, then,” Peter says of it.

Remus aims a finger snap/point combo at Peter. “Precisely the one I'm trying to avoid.”

“I object?” Sirius says at once.

Remus pushes out a sigh through a good-natured wince. “I just don’t think I have it in me to even try to match the hip action in that one.”

“Legend says otherwise,” James puts in wryly.

Sirius taps himself just underneath his right collarbone. “I’m legend,” he provides.

“Yeah, no, I gathered that,” Remus returns plainly, but he must really want to cheer Sirius up for he's already softening some on his stance and making a new condition out of it. "If you get 'Call On Me,' then I veto the second one be 'Walking on Sunshine' as that one's been in my head for weeks now; something good should come of that.”

"I could never argue with that pick," Sirius professes, giving a chef’s kiss for it.

“You two are gonna—” Peter starts, gesturing at Sirius and Remus’s matching flannel attire, “—do this like that?”

Remus gives Peter a plain look before refocusing more on Sirius. “You get the shower started, I’ll get us a change of clothes, and we’ll all meet right back here, in say, twenty?” he raises, looking round at the other two before he seems to really think about that last bit before making a quick amendment. “Half an hour, maybe.”

Sirius moves for the hall while Peter pushes out a long and lustrous pfft. “More like a full hour,” he gets them.

Sirius preens from the bathroom door, hand on the knob. “Let's make it a clean forty-five,” he concludes, pulling the door open and slipping through the doorway.

He shuts the door behind him, heads for the tub straight away, and pushes his right arm past the shower curtain to run the taps. He tests the water with a short feel of his hand until he can deem it an appropriate temperature for Remus’s typical liking and pulls up on the shower rod, bringing the showerhead to life. He takes his hand back, straightens up, and unties the sash of his housecoat, letting it fall off of his arms and off of him in a simple swoop. He stoops to pick it up, hangs it on one of the hooks behind the bathroom door, and heads in, lolling his head one side underneath the stream, trying to keep his mind from going back to places he doesn’t want it going to, but he gets stuck on something else and then he’s feeling out of sorts until the bathroom door opens again.

He peeks his head out of the shower curtain and spots Remus carrying in a pile of folded clothes with their recently opened bottle of lube on top of it. He knocks the bathroom door shut again and heads for the counter by the sink, leaving their pile on it. He undoes his housecoat, walks it to hang on one of the hooks on the bathroom door rather than drop it to the floor by Sirius’s, and nabs the bottle of lube on the way back, smirking as he tosses up and catches it again in his right hand.

“I really should have put it in my pocket, given all the heckling I got for it on the way back,” he says circumstantially, coming for the shower.

“Rookie mistake,” Sirius calls it, stepping aside to let Remus in ahead of him.

“It was, no way around it,” he concurs, pulling the shower curtain closed behind him and leaving the lube in the middle compartment of the shower hanger. He reaches up and gets his hair good and damp underneath the stream before turning halfway toward Sirius to have a glance back at him, but it’s too quick a move for Sirius to feign like he’s doing alright.

Remus drops his arms right quick, turning toward him fully with a deep frown on. “How else can I help?” he asks him. "Please?"

Sirius takes in a tight breath, unable to shake the feeling that the longer he doesn’t do something about the feeling in his bones, the longer they’ll stick around. “Do you feel I coddle you too much?” he raises, peering at him openly with his lower lip caught between his teeth.

Remus appears not to know what to do with the question for a beat or three, garnering Sirius to think he really ought to time his moments of vulnerability better, but in a sense, this is their typical spot for this sort of thing. “Is that what’s happening here?” he asks, gesturing at Sirius’s guilt-ridden stance.

Sirius gives him a numb shrug. “You’re one of the only things I feel like I’m doing right anymore,” he offers. “If I end up scaring you off, then I’m—”

“You’re not going to scare me off,” Remus puts it plainly. “I’m sorry, but I'm not even going to entertain that idea.”

“Well, I am,” Sirius returns, his shoulders stiff. “Going to entertain it, I mean.”

Remus lets out a heavy breath at that. “So, I’ve had a lot of time to think about it over the near-year knowing you, and I’ve come up with a pretty good analogy for it; would you like to hear it?” he prefaces, garnering Sirius to nod emphatically back at Remus, who lifts his hands illustratively. “I want you to picture an auditorium filled with people and there's a man behind a podium at the front of the room speaking into a megaphone.”

Sirius tilts his head, already vividly picturing it. “Not a microphone?” he double-checks.

“No, megaphone,” Remus reinstates. “White body, red interior.”

“Vivid,” Sirius returns, smirking quite a bit. “I’m picturing it comically huge, that alright?”

“I don’t think that'd ruin the analogy any,” Remus lets him have. “So he’s there, barking into it, dragging me to the end of the earth and back—” he pauses with a smirk and lifts a pair of halting hands over Sirius's indignant noise, “—stay with me, OK? He’s at the top of the hall, just ending my life, and the crowd's slapping their knees, hooting, whistling, stamping their feet in evident agreement, and there you are, way at the back of the hall, watching it all happen.”

“Hate this,” Sirius deadpans.

“Right, that’s what I’m getting to,” Remus insists. “If you were really to see a scene like that play out, you would personally take on the task of fighting each and every person in that room; is that safe to say?”

“In a heartbeat,” Sirius returns.

“Right,” Remus accepts, “and that’s the sort of energy you take on when even one person comes at me, for anything, big or small, even when there's some or more truth to what they're having a go at me for; do you see what I’m saying?”

“I’m a lot,” Sirius translates, frowning with it.

Remus pushes a sigh through his nose. “You’ve said it yourself; you’ve got a protective streak that starts and ends with me,” he raises, smiling at him weakly. “It's taken some time to get here, but I’ve learned that it also means you’d fight an armchair if it seemed like it was looking at me wrong.”

Sirius breathes out a sharp huff at the truth hung like a banner in front of him, looking left, right, and back at Remus and his dampened mop of curls on the top of his head. “I can’t tell if that’s a good or bad thing in your mind,” he admits.

“Well, neither of those is what I would call it,” Remus offers him. “For me, it’s equal parts overwhelming and endearing; I go back and forth on it depending on where my head is on a given day, but I would, wouldn’t I?”

Sirius pushes an agreeable breath through his nose. “Yeah, you would.”

Remus steps closer, reaching to smooth Sirius’s dampened fringe back with his right hand. “Our first shift, you proudly told me that you take care of your own, and even while I continually tried to come up with reasons to keep you at an arm's length, I find that amount of loyalty to be a remarkable trait in anybody and it drew me to you even when I so didn’t want it to," he details. "I certainly didn’t want the visceral urge to know what it might be like to be considered one of your own for even just five seconds, but I can’t deny that I felt it, and then, as time and shifts went on, that radius you keep around the people you’re closest to opened up to let me in as well and I didn’t know what to do with it; I really didn't, it made me so nervous, but at the same time, I liked that you were getting so protective of me so it was a very dual experience.”

Sirius takes in a short breath. “Are we talking October?” he checks. “‘Cause I was all about locking you in by then, and that would fit the description.”

“Mhm, it started building then, but more toward the end of it,” Remus offers him. "Halloween and the days following it, that was certainly where I began to see your protective streak go wild on account of me.”

“Oh, well, shit,” Sirius puts up, “yeah, I was fucking protective of you then; I was about to lose you to Lily and the gulags.”

Remus works his mouth around a budding smile. “And it was intoxicating,” he instils. “Never mind how fast I ran from it, OK? Please, I was mesmerized by how you picked me up the way you did, it made me feel so chosen in a way that I'd never been before, and I almost didn’t transfer out of there because I wanted to feel more of it; I was convinced your open arms were conditional to working in the same space so much, that transferring out would mean losing that, and the decision to go was not an easy one to make—”

“I know that, I do,” Sirius gives him. “I also find it appalling that you thought work had anything to do with my open arms, mind.”

“Well, I had to learn that it didn't, alright?” Remus huffs, but he's sure smiling now. “You became my best friend in the span of two months, Sirius, and you still are; yeah, you’re a lot, but I love your version of a lot, even if it knocks me sideways sometimes.”

Sirius pushes his face down against Remus's collar, drowning out an incredibly gooey noise in his throat, and another as one of Remus’s hands comes up and whisks through his hair. “Remus,” he mumbles.

“No, I’m not done; that feeling has only grown over time because you’ve only grown more protective of me as we've gone on,” Remus tacks on, the jerk. “It’s cyclical for me now, depending on what’s happening around me, to me, you name it; if I’m feeling beat up or low, you coming in to defend me the way you do feels remarkable, but when my jitters are up and I don't want the fallout of your defense to blow back on you or me or us, it does make me nervous, and when it gets between you and our friends? Sirius, I’d rather disappear.”

“Our,” Sirius raises, lifting his head.

“Our friends,” Remus says, leaning in to press a kiss to Sirius’s right temple. “You could all do with a little less—” he pushes out a puff of breath in thought, “—trying to feed me when I’m genuinely not that hungry or trying to give up your seats because I’m just so delicate I simply can’t manage to stand for a couple minutes; just some quick examples."

“I know,” Sirius puts out, lifting his head. “I know, I know, I know; we’re a lot.”

A lot, a lot, but it is what it is,” Remus returns, genuinely beaming now. “I know it comes from a good place, but it can still be overwhelming — especially when you’re all at it at once, Good Cunt; it’s like a contest between the four of you sometimes.”

“We just love you so much, Remus,” Sirius instils. “You were like, thee embodiment of what we’d been missing, and then there you were, fitting us like a glove, but we’re really in deep now; none of us want to lose you for anything and that's just — it's been ramped up by a lot of notches these past few weeks and we don't want to keep pestering you, but I don’t know how we’re to change that—”

“I don’t think any of us can,” Remus cuts in, giving the side of Sirius’s left cheek a warm, easy caress with his right hand. “In the end, is it really something that I can complain too much about?”

“I mean,” Sirius offers, stopping there, going with a simple shrug to cap it.

Remus pushes a quiet breath through his nose. “Sirius, I moved out here alone, spent my first year and then some avoiding any kind of real connection, and I’d have probably kept to myself for the remainder of my schooling if I'd somehow not managed to get picked up by a misfit tornado family in my second year out here,” he stresses, tapping Sirius’s cheek once with a forefinger, “and now, they’ve laid claim on me as their pseudo-son even though I’m taller than every single one of them.”

Sirius smacks his lips once. “I hope I’m more the protective hubby role in this scenario.”

“And you are,” Remus confirms, leaning in to press a kiss to Sirius’s lips and breathing out contentedly after it. “I know how lucky I am to have been picked up by you four even if I must huff to survive it sometimes, so if it’s alright with you, I’m going to keep feeling my way through each of these instances as they come, and in return, I’ll ask you not to carry the entire cross on your back because those bozos in there are nearly as guilty of loud, loud love as you are; do you think you can do that for me?”

Sirius gives a meek noise as he nods, running his top teeth over his bottom lip. “I love you so much.”

Remus’s smile takes to one of the lopsided variety. “You should show me,” he raises, and Sirius doesn’t need to be told twice.

-

The evening before Pride finds Sirius sitting crossed-legged on his bed and pressing a face mask onto his visage. Once it’s on well enough, he leans over more to the right, attempting to get a decent shot of his face in the mirror above his bureau so he won’t have to actually get up to check if the mask is pressed on properly, but the sound of the front door opening and shutting takes him out of it for a moment. He smiles to himself, refocuses on the glimpse he has of himself in the mirror, and presses down a ripple underneath his right cheek before deeming his visage nice and covered.

He straightens up as he hears a short, simplistic whistle out in the hall, a non-verbal question as to where in the flat Sirius may be; he replies to it with a quick whistle of his own and smiles bright as Remus pokes his head into the room. “You look lovely,” he offers, eyeing Sirius’s visage with a lopsided smile on.

“Ta,” Sirius chimes. “There’s one on there for you, too.”

Remus’s gaze follows the direction Sirius’s hand-fluttering to the surface of the bureau where his own wine mask is laying and gives out a light trill, going for it and having a glance over the face of the packet. “Rosé,” he observes, sounding quite piqued.

“Mm, I went ahead and picked the merlot for myself,” Sirius mentions.

“That tracks,” Remus says of it, having a look over the back of the packet. “What language is this in?”

“Haven’t a clue,” Sirius raises. “Korean's my best guess, but all I needed was the type and the timeframe, and those details were in English at least.”

“Oh, I see the time now,” Remus nods, taking the packet with him as he steps toward the bed. “You’re very brave, trying this out the night before Pride; what if you have a reaction?”

“Well, I’ve only had it on for about thirty seconds, but it has yet to burn so I think I may be in the clear,” Sirius forwards. “Besides, check how good it smells?”

Remus steps up onto the edge of the bed with his wine mask in hand, takes two steps in before planting himself directly across from Sirius, and leans in to get a quick sniff of Sirius’s mask before perking. “Mm, that is nice,” he reviews, reaching with his free hand to give an easy pet over Tango’s head, where he's laying on his side like a hog and taking up most of the left side of the bed. “I have a query for you.”

“Mm?” Sirius prompts.

Remus nods, bringing his legs in to sit cross-legged and inadvertently mirroring Sirius’s stance. “Lily and Pete are crashing here tonight, yes?” he raises, holding the packet in his lap idly.

“Still the plan,” Sirius affirms.

“OK, I figured, but do you think there’s room for one more?” Remus asks. “Only I think it’d be much easier if Dorcas stayed over rather than me and Pete having to spot her tomorrow in the crowd.”

“‘Course she can,” Sirius returns. “She can either have that couch—” he points to the one on the far end of his fairly won double room, “—or we can pile a load of blankets onto the living room one and they can all pile onto there.”

“Innovative,” Remus calls it, leaving his mask on his lap as he reaches behind himself to pull his mobile out of his back right pocket. “I told her you’d likely be fine with that, but I’ll just let her know it’s a go.”

Sirius nods for it, turning and aiming a smooch at Tango, who simply stares up at him from his hogged-out position while his tail starts thumping on the bed in a steady beat.

Remus sets his mobile face up on the bed between them and turns his attention onto his mask, picking it up and thumbing at the seam of it, but he pauses the action to have a bemused glance around. “Quiet around here,” he observes.

“Mm, James wanted majooters, and the other two agreed rather passionately about that,” Sirius offers.

“Sorry, what?” Remus asks, smirking.

“Mojitos,” Sirius translates. “Apparently, they stumbled on a new dive up the road a bit a few weeks back, and the place offers a two-for-four cocktail extravaganza.”

Remus hums lightly for that. “Over Gallaghers’ way or the other direction?”

“Other way,” Sirius relays.

Remus accepts that with a nod before sticking his head on a right-angled tilt. “You didn’t want to go with?”

Sirius lifts his shoulders easily. “Well, you were already on your way,” he puts up. “I figured I’d wait here, see if you’d be up for wandering over there eventually.”

“Might as well do this first, but yeah, I would,” Remus extends, flapping the packet in his hand. His mobile pings right about there, garnering him to swipe at the screen and have himself a look over it. “She’s packing a bag now, so we might as well wait for her to get here, too?”

“I’m comfy,” Sirius says of it, and with that voucher, Remus reaches over to his mobile and begins typing out a response with his right forefinger alone. “I rolled a pinner for you a bit ago, in case you did want to join them and they’re already sauced when we get there.”

Remus piques at that. “So thoughtful,” he compliments, taking his hand back and pulling the seams of the packet apart.

“Well, I’ll be having a toke or two, so not that thoughtful,” Sirius corrects, smirking as he lifts out of his position and leans over the dog to reach for the pinner he left on his nightstand. “Sorry, dude.”

Tango doesn’t seem to care much about being draped over one way or another while Sirius plucks his lighter and ashtray off of the nightstand’s surface along with the joint. He brings all three over the dog and sticks them in between his and Remus’s knees, smirking as Remus pulls the folded mask out of its packet and gives it a long, calculating stare. “Here,” he offers, holding the pinner out to Remus in exchange for the mask. “It was a bit of a task to unfold, but I managed it.”

Remus happily pawns the mask off on him, taking the pinner in turn and picking the lighter up from in between the two of them, flicking it over the end of the joint and taking in a lengthy haul while Sirius peels the damp mask apart until it he's holding the white silhouette of a face.

He raises it up, hovering it in the air between the two of them. “Gimme your face,” he bids.

Remus laughs his haul out and leans in a little to present his visage to him, waiting until Sirius lines the eyeholes of the mask up with his peepers before he lifts the joint from below and takes another quick haul off of it through the liphole. He shoots his exhale out and to the left, lifting the joint and holding it up to his mouth so Sirius can have a toke while he works. “I have another query for you,” Remus says idly, his neck stretched to capacity presumably to help Sirius align the mask to all corners of his visage.

Sirius goes for a prompting nod while his lungs are full, smoothing the top edge of the mask against Remus’s forehead. “Well, I may be imagining it,” Remus imparts, “or reading into it too much, so by all means, if you think I’m getting ahead of myself here, do say so.”

“Understood,” Sirius says, smoothing his thumbs underneath Remus’s eyelids to press the mask into place.

“It’s to do with Peter and Dorcas,” Remus supplies.

Sirius’s gaze flickers up to meet Remus’s while he works on smoothing down the left side of the mask. “Saw that, too, did you,” he raises, smirking for it.

“Well, I wasn’t sure,” Remus clarifies. “I thought I might’ve been seeing something more on Peter’s end at brunch, but then I wondered if I was seeing something on Dorcas’s end, too, when we were riding back to hers, but I should leave room for the fact that she might’ve just been having a grand time in general and the fact that Pete’s head was in her lap was more incidental.”

“Sure, it’s possible it was that,” Sirius permits, onto the right side of Remus’s face. "I thought she looked rather cozy myself, if that helps any.”

Remus hums mildy for it. “I’ve been going back and forth on it,” he says of it. “One moment, I’d be piqued at the possibility and the next, I’d tell myself to quit it; earlier today, I reached out to verify that we’re still good for tomorrow and she did specifically ask if Pete would be there, but then I felt bad for it, thinking that I might be the vapid one here, getting caught up in the idea of my only two single mates pairing up and needed to get taken to the firing squad for it—”

“Take me with you, then, ‘cause I’m just as guilty,” Sirius manifests, dropping his hands from Remus’s face with an air of accomplishment and knicking the joint from Remus in quick succession. “Come on, it’s not vapid; a girl like her would rock Pete’s fucking world.”

Remus lifts his newly freed hand with a breath of relief. “Thank you,” he puts up. “And not only that, he’d be great for her, too, and the bloke she was seeing while she was away is based out of Bristol and keeps trying to set up another meetup, and he’s fine, but—”

Remus trails off, making a bit of a face. “Is he a dink?” Sirius raises, lifting the joint to his mouth for a toke.

“Huge dink,” Remus spares him, speaking quietly, like a gigantic hand will come down from the ceiling and give him a nice clap over the head if he talks too determinedly about it. “I mean, I’ve heard a lot in the past few months to have an idea that he’s a bit daft, but I think she might see it as endearing?”

“Oh, no,” Sirius muses, going for another toke while he's got the chance.

“She told me he thought a samosa was a dance,” Remus deadpans him, and Sirius coughs out his haul amidst a mangled laugh, flying his hands to and fro in front of him, begging Remus to give him a second before adding any other anecdote, and Remus attaches his hands to Sirius’s wrists and holds them for support as he fights through his own mirth, but he doesn’t quit one bit, “and I think I was meant to laugh, not at him but at the comedy of such an observation, and I just couldn’t, Sirius; my only advantage was that it was over the phone so she couldn't see my face while I was laughing.”

“What is she doing?” Sirius puts out.

Remus lets go of Sirius’s wrists to raise his hands in agreement. “He must be that good in bed because there’d be no other sense to it,” he comments, reaching to steal the joint back from Sirius’s clutches. "I'm not even telling you half the braindead takes I've heard of him spouting; that one's just the funniest."

Sirius pushes out a lengthy breath for that. “Well, is she seeing him or is it more of a, ‘when in Rome’ sort of situation?” he checks.

Remus gives a tilt of the head back and forth. “It seemed to be the second one while she was there,” he offers. “But then, he was willing to come to her for her birthday, so I don’t know how casual it is if he was willing to travel from Bristol a little something-something.”

“Well, wait a tic,” Sirius puts in, “this the same bloke she dissed to hang with us?”

Remus forwards him a tiny, pointed smile as he holds his haul in, holding the joint over the ashtray and flicking the ash off the tip. “Oh, my Cunt,” Sirius puts out. “Was he already on his way when she pulled out?”

Remus hums skeptically. “I think she told me it was more an evening plan, so I doubt he was on his way yet.”

“Well, alright, good in bed or not, she still picked a carload of buffoons over a guaranteed sexcapade,” Sirius reasons. “I mean, I’ve had things like that; sort of a rainy day arrangement, I'd go over to his, hit it and head on out, and we’d go on with our lives, meet back up the next time one of us was gunning for a quick one, and that was that.”

“When was this?” Remus raises.

“Oh, as recent as last month,” Sirius relays.

“Fuck you,” Remus returns, but he huffs a laugh all the same.

“It was over a period of like, three years,” Sirius provides, knicking the pinner back for a little more of it before it’s gone. “He was good enough at it to keep on the back burner and I feel he’d say the same of me.”

Remus seems to wait until Sirius has exhaled fully to prod for more deets. “How’d that end?” he asks, accepting the lasts of the pinner.

“Well, this other bloke sort of wandered into my sights and my attention went elsewhere,” Sirius provides.

Remus lifts the joint to his pointed smile. “Go on,” he prompts, going for a haul.

“Well, the thing is, laddie,” Sirius starts, pulling a snort out of Remus for it, “when Remus Jean Lupin strolls into the scene, the bloke you keep in your back pocket suddenly becomes rather moot.”

Remus pushes his haul out through his nose, reaches to crush the embers of the joint out in the ashtray, and freezes rather suddenly, his gaze the only thing that moves. “Is he the one you called 'Remus?'” he raises, a pointed smile on now, too.

“Oh, no no,” Sirius denies. “That was the banker, and listen, you were in the picture too then, yes, but those were still the early days; the man was making eyes at me over his desk and I had to give it a whirl, I hope you understand.”

“Well, there’d be no other choice if he gave you The Eyes,” Remus says plainly.

“Alright, you were clearly all over my mind by then,” Sirius puts up, calling for a bit of reason. “I just wasn’t aware yet that you’d end up being my paramour.”

“Paramour,” Remus repeats, reeling a tad, but the smile suggests this has become rather playful on his end.

“You heard me,” Sirius wears it. “The more time I spent with you, the less I felt like going and getting it elsewhere, and the longer we went dancing around each other, the more you started to embody exactly what I wanted out of somebody, let alone what I needed to kick me into gear, and I didn’t want anyone else, fuck buddies included.”

Remus folds his hands in his lap, swaying back and forth at a light, leisurely pace as a light dusting of rouge over his cheeks. “So it just, ended with him?” he prompts, giving a finger snap to pair with it. “Just like that?”

“Well, I got texts every so often before you and I were a thing, so I’d say I was working, busy, name it," Sirius offers. “And then once we were a thing, there was a boyfriend in the picture and I continued to decline with that same very reason attached.”

Remus looks left before looking back at him, putting his head in a little more toward Sirius. “Does he still text you?”

“Yeah, but it’s more of a, ‘is the boyfriend still around’ sort of thing where I reply that you sure are and that's generally the end of it,” Sirius hands him, but Remus doesn’t answer that with anything and Sirius feels an odd sort of tingling going up his spine as he points to his nightstand where his mobile lays. “You can look at them; I don’t entertain him for long, promise you that.”

Remus shakes his head, reaching for the wrist Sirius has extended and gently bringing it back down. “No, it’s OK,” he insists, patting it. “I’m sorry, I just had a moment there; reacted too quickly.”

Sirius nods, the inside of his lower lip caught between his teeth before he thinks of a better anecdote. “The last time he asked, we were gallivanting through Paris so believe me, I was very adamant in my decline given how love-drunk I was feeling right about then,” he offers him.

Remus breathes in through his nose, his mouth curling into a reluctant but true smile before he leans in and presses a wee kiss against Sirius’s lips while avoiding their masks getting stuck together in the process. “I’d just think, knowing you’re involved with someone else and after months of repeated declines, he’d—” Remus pushes a breath out, lifting his hands to shrug with them, “—I don't know, move along?”

“I believe you called me an Adonis once, so you know rather well how easier said than done that is,” Sirius mentions, preening even with Remus's prompt huff. “It’s a non-issue, Remus; the only reason I brought it up is that if Pete slides in there, he wouldn’t really be stealing Dorcas from anyone so much as giving her a much better trade-off — and he knows what a samosa is, at least.”

Remus pushes a breathy laugh through his nose. “He does know that,” he allows. “Well, I’ll be around the two of them all day tomorrow, so my overall goal is to not cramp their style too much and just sort of—" he flutters his hands around in front of him leisurely, “—let the sparks fly, if there are any to go around.”

“Alright, we’ve already established that sparklers seem to have been lit there,” Sirius mentions plainly, “so now, it’s really just a matter of seeing the fireworks going off.”

“Well, I don’t know how to do that,” Remus maintains, lifting and dropping his brows in a quick beat. “I’ve never played matchmaker before; I don’t want to be too obvious about it only to have one or both of them resist it, and I don’t know that I really have the sort of finesse to pull it off.”

“Umm,” Sirius drags out, “remember that time you got Lily to put Dorcas’s ring on without any clues as to why? Finesse is simply in your nature.”

Remus smirks a laugh, ducking his head. “My heart was beating so fast,” he puts down.

“I could genuinely feel it in my hand,” Sirius trades him, lifting the very hand he held Remus in at the time. “Nevertheless, you can wear innocuous curiosity on your face while having full intentions of being a complete sneak like no one I’ve witnessed before, so I think you handle a little matchmaking.”

Remus's smile goes to the sheepish side of things and this time, when he leans in to initiate a kiss, he drags it out longer than the last, a careful hand pressed to the side of Sirius’s neck. Sirius flicks his tongue against Remus’s mouth and Remus pushes a contented breath through his nose as he grants Sirius access to it, and they carry on like that, nipping and nuzzling and breathing together until Tango lifts a paw and sets it right on Sirius’s left knee.

Sirius pushes a laugh through his nose, pulling back from Remus’s lopsided smile. “You little shit,” he directs at the dog. “Your dad needs a little love too, you know.”

Tango evidently doesn’t give a single shit, scooting in and draping his front half over Sirius’s legs, and that, he can’t really complain about. “How was work?” he raises, smiling at Remus over the dog’s head.

“Good,” Remus nods, curling his right hand up over his mouth and taking a hold of his lower lip to fiddle with it between his right forefinger and thumb. “I talked about you a bit today.”

Sirius does a factory reset. “Excuse I?”

Remus lets his hand fall from his mouth, revealing a smile toying at it. “Not that you really need any more validation in this respect, but Ian's quite taken with you, I have to say,” he reports.

Sirius puts out a charmed noise. “Is he?” he probes, shimmying his shoulders.

“Mhm,” Remus affirms. “Thinks you're a right stud and I rather agree, so we do have that in common.”

“This is—” Sirius puts up, lifting his hands from around the dog’s bulk to gesture for his inability to articulate what it even is, and settles for a simple gesture toward Remus. “Look at this; you’re smiling about it.”

“It was nice,” Remus offers candidly. “I also told him about how I’m taking you home soon for the big reveal — didn’t get into too much detail about that, he was heading out soon and I was about to start, but I did get a little about his own coming out venture and that was a bit funny.”

“Mm?” Sirius bids, the single-worded question coming from deep in his throat.

Remus smirks, his eyes bright though they’re a bit more narrow than usual, but that’s the pot’s fault. “He said he told his dad in the car while he was being taught how to drive,” he puts forth, his voice warbling there, “which, he did say in hindsight was a risky place to drop it, but his thinking behind it at the time was doing it in a place where his dad couldn’t go anywhere and would have to face it.”

Sirius gives an endeared hum at that. “No, I get that,” he nods, taking a quick pause. “Well, in theory, I can get it.”

“Right,” Remus echoes, automatically reaching to run the fingertips on his right hand back and forth over Sirius’s left forearm laying loosely over Tango’s bulk, as if to say he’s sorry his situation wasn’t like that by any stretch without actually saying it, and that in itself keeps Sirius from dwelling on that fact for long; well, that, and Remus's voice. “But, the funny part about that is, he pulled his nerves in and told him, and his dad just went, ‘Mm, mhm—’”

Sirius gives up a big ol' belly laugh for the tone of the hum paired with Remus’s impression of a man who’s just had his son tell him something incredibly obvious. “Well, he does have 'friend of Dorthy' written all over him,” he puts up. “Wouldn’t be that difficult to pick out if you’re paying any attention to your kid.”

Remus gives a throaty, closed-mouthed laugh, his fingertips in a continuous trace over Sirius’s forearm. “I found myself hoping that mine could have a similar reaction,” he admits, working his mouth between a frown and a tight smile. “I mean, I don’t know what I would even do if one or both of them turned around and said, ‘uh, yeah, we know,’ but it would be a lot easier to hear than having them feel they’d been lied to for so long.”

“Would we call it lying?” Sirius poses, going for a kind squint.

Remus pauses, poised to speak, and blinks once for the question. “It was definitely omitting details,” he says of it.

“Right, but omitting details and not correcting who they think you’re seeing doesn’t necessarily count as lying, so it won’t get you sent to Bad Son jail, I don’t think,” Sirius puts it, keeping his voice at an absolving cadence. “I don’t know that they could ever send you there, for anything.”

Remus squeezes Sirius’s arm before going straight back into his quiet tracing pattern. “It still feels like I waited too long,” he extends; quiet, like a secret. “I could’ve told them the basics, you know? Kept it simple: boys were just as if not more likely to catch my eye, but I kept waiting for a better time, something concrete to come along, a way to help soften the blow, but there was always something, someone, some reason to wait, and I wish I hadn't done so long with you in the picture.”

“No, I think it’s good you did,” Sirius instils, wanting to absolve that read as quickly as possible. “Now, we get to go there with all these months together under our belt—”

“Except I hurt you by keeping this so quiet," Remus cuts in, insistent.

“Not from them,” Sirius clarifies, giving him a calm but pointed look with it. “I never had a problem with waiting on that; I called you the boss in that scenario for a reason.”

Remus pulls his lower lip into his mouth, averting his gaze to a spot on the wall back behind Sirius. “Every new month just felt so, soon,” he puts up. “As if the second I spoke it out loud to them, I’d lose you for even speaking about it.”

“Well, that must’ve changed in May,” Sirius prompts. “What kicked things into gear for you?”

Remus takes his gaze off the wall and fixes it back on Sirius. “I told you.”

Sirius sets his free hand on top of Remus’s. “I know that, but you just said you feel like you waited too long, so maybe remembering what it was made you want to share this with them is what you need to be thinking about right now,” he offers him. “And every other time you find yourself thinking like this, but we could at least try it for right now and see how that goes, hm?"

Remus sits with the new weight on his hand, pulling in a long breath through his nose. “At first, I didn't want to scare you off by announcing anything too early," he extends him, "then it was more about keeping it ours, and then the Paris stuff really started to roll and I was egregiously nervous-happy about it actually panning out, but I couldn't understand why you kept pushing so hard for it, and the easiest explanation to me was that you were trying to get rid of me.”

Sirius hasn’t got a hand free to blow a voluminous fart noise into, so he goes for a substantial raspberry to make up for it. “As if I’d ever.”

Remus ducks his head, smirking at the display. “Well, you must understand, that made the most sense to me with what I had to go on,” he instils.

“No, and I do,” Sirius reiterates, flicking the back of Remus’s hand once, "but my point is, I’d only just gotten you when I even heard about the pipe dream, so the last thing I wanted to do was have you go off studying somewhere else, but it’s what you wanted, it was there in your eyes whenever you talked about it, so I wanted it; it's simple stuff, promise.”

Remus gives up a righteous pfft. "Oh, sure, simple; that was huge for me,” he attests, his 'tude on display certainly, but his smile is just so sweet. “When you flung that check at me? You recited an entire monologue about needing to step aside for me and I—”

He stops there, a stuttered noise catching in his throat, and Sirius takes in a breath through his teeth, covering up the tight grip around of own throat with some tried and true levity. “It was in your eyes, Remus,” he reinstates. “They'd go massive, dinner-plate status whenever you talked about the mere idea of it, and even while you talked yourself down from being able to, that it was so much more of a pipe dream than a realistic one, there was still a base-level want behind the eyes; I had no choice but to let you go and help you get there where I could.”

“That should have been enough for me,” Remus puts up, frowning with it. “I mean, it almost was; it helped me get closer to deciding on it, but it was you planning a whole little weekend trip just to fucking bring me there to actually see where I was going to be living for a while, and you were so excited for me, waiting much longer to tell them seemed ridiculous; look at what I have?”

Sirius’s face feels so warm it almost burns just to be inside of his own body having Remus gesture at him like that. “There you have it, then,” he offers, quiet, like their secret. “You waited just the right amount of time.”

Remus’s long breath in catches on a hitch, his gaze dropping to the dog and flickering back up to Sirius in under a beat. “You'll have to move him if you want to get lucky,” he makes plain.

Sirius perks the fuck up, erratically snapping his fingers toward the side of the bed until Tango starts to lug himself up and out of his lap. “Sorry, you gotta go,” he insists, directing him down off of the bed. “Do we have enough time?”

“For a quick one,” Remus says for it, peeling the mask off of his face. “She’s on her way by now, I’d imagine.”

“Well, fucking’s off the table, then,” Sirius says of it, peeling his own mask from the forehead down.

Remus huffs a laugh, pushing himself up from the bed. “Just lie down, mm?” he bids, lobbing his mask over into the bin on Sirius’s side of the bed.

Sirius does so immediately, laying back and depositing his own mask into the bin before shimmying his briefs down alongside his trousers while Remus moves the ashtray back to Sirius’s nightstand and hobbles himself out of his trousers from there. The two of them stick their respective trousers on opposite sides of the bed for now when they’ll just need to put them back on in due time and for a moment there, Sirius assumes they’ll be taking turns here, but when Remus moves to lay in the opposite direction as him, he learns quite suddenly that is simply not the case.

Sirius puts out a bold, grateful noise as he rolls toward him. “I love your mind,” he professes.

Remus smirks a laugh from near the foot of the bed, budging in close to Sirius’s body and licking a stripe up his already half-hard cock, and Sirius isn’t about to get left behind in the running, reaching to wrap his hands around Remus’s hips and pulling them in to do the very same back to him, and there starts a battle of perseverance.

The good thing about making Remus moan around his cock is that this clearly won’t be long for either of them, the bad thing is Remus might just win this round when the vibrations fully surrounding Sirius's cock are rightfully doing him in: it takes a quelling of the mind and some deep, concentrated centering to keep up with him, but Sirius does have the advantage of being angled more so from above than Remus currently has and for that, he can’t go completely ham on Sirius's cock without potential breathing problems, whereas Sirius can easily throw his neck into it double-time and that is certainly what he does; it's neck day, babey, and Sirius is giving it a workout.

Try as he might, Remus begins to whimper around Sirius, clinging hard to the backs of his thighs and losing his rhythm as Sirius surges ahead of him in the running, and then, he's pulling his off his cock altogether. “Fuck you,” he puts out, tipping his head back and giving himself to what's coming to him.

Sirius hums brightly around his cock for the forfeit and puts all he’s got into it, but given that Remus, an asshole in the simplest terms, chooses to bite down on Sirius’s right hip as he rocks his own toward his release, Sirius promptly sputters around Remus’s cock, his eyes shutting up tight as he wills himself not to burst before he's got Remus's mouth on him again. He swallows Remus’s load down methodically, taking to licking Remus clean as a means of slowing things down in order to keep it together himself, but as soon as he’s finished with that, Remus comes back swinging, shoving Sirius’s hips down flat on the bed and curling over him to work his neck at warp speed, swallowing him down and clamping the back of his throat around him at each interval with a gorgeous hum each time he does it, Sirius can barely keep his eyes open as reaches down and clasps his hands at the back of Remus’s head, his toes curling in, head bent back, finally allowing himself release and coming so hard he's got white dots speckling behind his eyelids.

He lays back in a single flomp, eyes blinking up the ceiling as he aims to catch a semblance of his breath, and Remus shifts up the bed next, planting himself down on Sirius’s left side and curling in to face Sirius more. “One of our best,” he deems it, pressing the lower half of his face against Sirius’s upper arm.

Sirius hasn’t got the speech patterns to agree verbally just yet so he simply nods it out, scooting his left arm up around Remus and figuring that pulling him close is an answer in and of itself, and one Remus might like just as much.

Remus switches to pressing his smile up against Sirius’s left pec, leaving him with a prime view of a pair of gigantic eyes underneath a mop of floofy fringe, and that's a lovely bit of confirmation indeed. “You know,” he pipes up, a good thirty seconds or so later, “they say the honeymoon period doesn’t last forever, but I don’t know that there aren’t moments where it filters back in, even though it may technically be over.”

“Hm?” Sirius bids, turning his head fully toward him.

“It almost feels like we’re still in it, in a way,” Remus extends. “Or maybe it's that I still feel disgustingly happy to get to see you so much of the time and apparently I’m supposed to be a bit sick of you by now, but I’m not; I'm just really not.”

“Shit, me neither,” Sirius trades him, his voice coming across rather hoarse to his own ears. He takes in a breath through his nose and whisps his right hand up through Remus’s hair, wanting him to keep talking. “You feel good, then? Happy?”

"I mean, June was easily one of the toughest months of my life, and I’ve had a lot of those,” Remus maintains, and something about the direct bluntness of the line delivery gets Sirius smirking despite the more delicate swerve he took, “but you made it so much better just by being in it with me and not letting me disappear.”

Sirius pushes his hand around the back of Remus’s head, cupping it as he leans down to leave a kiss on his forehead. “I didn’t want to be anywhere else,” he maintains, lips moving over Remus’s skin.

Remus lets out a sigh at the ping of his mobile laying over near the end of the bed, laboriously lifting himself onto his right elbow and footing it closer to him rather than simply moving to get it, and that, Sirius can identify hard with. It takes some coordination, but eventually Remus bats it close enough to reach down to grab it, pulling his mobile in and having an easy glance over the screen while Sirius gives into a substantial yawn, only halfway aware of Remus shooting right up in bed beside him.

“She’s downstairs.”

“Already?” Sirius bids.

“Mhm,” Remus affirms, scooting toward the end of his bed to pull his briefs out of his trousers and slip them on.

Sirius lays back with his hands behind his head, takes to brightly watching the show that is Remus speedily trying to manoeuvre his feet into the leg holes of his trousers, and once the boy manages that, he looks up at Sirius, pausing long enough to aim the two-finger salute at him and lifting onto his knees as he tugs his trousers up over his hips.

“You might want to think about getting dressed, too,” he mentions, fastening his trousers.

“I’m getting to it,” Sirius says, not moving at all.

Remus shoots him a pointed look before letting himself out of the room, but the smile on his face rather marred the effect of the overall Look.

-

By all accounts, the restaurant is far too fancy for the likes of them. Sirius receives that message loud and clear once they’re seated and Remus heads off in search of the loo, leaving Sirius to observe the lofty dining area and peruse the wine list which boasts a fair amount of house specials with price tags hitting the three digits.

Remus turns up rather suddenly, sinking into the seat across the table from Sirius, and remarkably showcases a similar thought pattern. “Schmancy in here,” he shares, leaning into the table to speak a little closer, a touch lower. “You have to check out the bathroom before we go; the taps are a waterfall.”

“Are they?” Sirius returns, absolutely piqued.

Remus nods emphatically. “There’s a whole little nature scene to that sink,” he insists.

“Well, shit,” Sirius says, glancing over his shoulder in the direction Remus came from, debating whether he should go do that now or wait it out a little, and a waiter brings over a basket of breadsticks almost in response to that, cementing to Sirius that the table is where he needs to be for the moment.

“Do you need more time?” the man asks, depositing the basket between the two of them on the table.

“Oh, so much more,” Sirius insists when he’s still only holding the wine list.

The waiter dips his head for a nod, sidles off toward the bar in the corner, and the two of them are again left to their own devices. Sirius takes one look at the basket before lifting his gaze to meet Remus's with a lofty one of his own, finding Remus’s right brow has taken a quick journey up his forehead while the left remains in place.

“Well, what are we to do with these?” Remus asks, a wry smile on his lips.

“I think you know,” Sirius sounds out; a convocation, a challenge.

There, it’s a race to grab the stick with the most impressive girth and Sirius comes out the winner of that particular spat. Honourable as ever in the face of defeat, Remus accepts his loss with humility and settles for a different stick out of the bunch.

“Suppose we’ll learn here whether size truly matters,” Remus offers, breadstick at the ready.

“The age-old question,” Sirius considers it, brandishing his own.

An alarm begins to ring out above their heads, the wall behind Remus’s seat opens up only to shoot streams of dry ice out of it, beams of light zoom about the place as they commence their swordfight; Sirius can feel the eyes from every direction on them, the atmosphere about the dining room shift from heightened sophistication into animalistic, carnal energy as hoots and jeers sound off from every which way, casting bets on who may come out as the ultimate swordsman—

Sirius starts awake, finding himself on his back and taking in a resounding breath as he blinks around his bedroom as his alarm blares from his nightstand. He reaches out with his right hand and taps the screen of his phone to switch the alarm off and promptly puts his left hand out to the left, grabbing for Remus, who, turns out, seems to have been already awake for he's sat against the headboard with A Tale of Two Cities propped in his lap, and on top of that, is now right spooked by Sirius’s sudden movement.

“What happened to you?” he bids, peering over at him amusedly.

Sirius can’t help it; he transforms into a useless blob, a humanoid laugh instantaneously. He lifts his arms, rubbing the heels of his palms sharply over his eyelids as he gathers his thoughts enough to relay the importance of what he just dreamed up, and rolls toward Remus, putting one hand on his chest and the other on his right forearm.

“I was dreaming that we’d just been seated in this hoity-toit restaurant, a breadbasket got put between us, and there, began the most fierce breadstick battle the world has ever seen,” he gets out, bringing a rolling laugh out of Remus’s throat that sounds like it took him by surprise, and Sirius surges on, chest heaving as he lifts his hands to aid the demonstration, “—shh, shh, it gets better; there were strobe lights going about the place the instant the battle started, alarm bells sounding off, people at the other tables actively goading us, casting bets on who’d come out of it the winner—"

Sirius trails off as Remus promptly cups his right hand over his mouth while he holds his free hand up, seemingly requesting Sirius give him a bloody second to digest any of that and it takes ten of them or so for Remus to reign it in. “Well, who won?” he bids, smiling eagerly over at him.

“I can’t say for sure; I woke up before either of us could be crowned king,” Sirius insists, pulling a plain huff out of Remus. “The title could have gone either way; we were both spry with our duelling hands as if this was something we’d done a million times over and perfected, which is really just hilarious on its own, but moreover, you should to know my stick had the most girth out of the two of ours, so.”

Remus pulls an inhale through his nose, humming thoughtfully. “I believe they call that wishful thinking,” he trades him, a pondering but direct air about him.

Sirius flings himself up, tossing his right leg out and over Remus, landing astride his body and pinning the man down for a well-deserved jab session, but Remus blocks his efforts with his hands, laying them overtop the pages of his new book. “You best take your blessings with humility and none of this gloating,” he presses, successfully dissolving Remus into a fit of his own.

"All this talk about wanting me to gloat more, and here you are, fussed," Remus puts up airily, lifting his hands to block Sirius’s hands from making the book a casualty. “Careful, this is an antique."

Sirius sends out a profound pfft for that, batting Remus’s hands. “Would you like a tea while I’m up, maestro?”

“I sure would,” Remus replies, beaming below him.

Sirius dips his head down, pressing a kiss to the right of the lapel of Remus’s housecoat where a glimpse of his collarbone can be seen and in turn, wins himself a quick kiss to right on the top of his head. He breathes in long before lifting himself off Remus's hips and hoists himself back toward the edge of the bed before manoeuvring himself down from it. He tappers over to the hooks behind his door, pulling his own housecoat off of it and slipping it before tying the sash and leaving his room. He steps out into the hall, pulling his door closed behind him and heading left down the hall into the living room, perking as the profoundly colourful beats of 'Dancing On My Own' float back to him from what sure sounds like the loo, the sudden start of the tune making it feel a little like it’d begun to play simply because Sirius emerged onto the scene and that just feels rather apt.

He saunters past the open door on the way to the kitchen, spotting Lily and Dorcas huddled around the bathroom mirror still in their respective sleep clothes with various make-up bags strewn on the counter, and the image of them dolling up extravagantly paired with perhaps the gayest choice of tuneage is both a little on the nose and particularly lovely thing to witness at one go.

The two of them are a tad too focused on their work to notice him going by and Sirius heads into the kitchen with a bit more of a bounce to his step, finding James and Peter at the table with bowls of cereal in front of them, wherein James salutes him with his free hand while the other brings a spoonful of Cheerios toward his mouth. “You ready, king?” he asks before a bite.

Sirius lifts the kettle off of the counter to bring it to the sink to fill, shaking it as he goes. “Not ‘til I get this figured out,” he insists.

He fills the kettle to the brim, walks it back to the counter, and plugs it back in before hitting the switch, moving to pull Remus’s tea down from the cupboard first and moving on to making the difficult choice of whether he himself would do better with a blonde or a dark roast; blonde wins out, however, Sirius's need for a substantial kick at the very start of the big day winning the debate. He sets the Press up, gets the grinds scooped in and ready to go, places a tea bag into Remus’s mug, and since he’s got a little time before the water fully heats, he heads back down the hall toward the bathroom and pulls the door more open turns into it.

“Oh good, you’re up,” Lily greets.

“In theory,” Sirius trades, sidling in and footing the toilet seat up, his back to the lasses at the mirror as he undoes the sash of his housecoat. “You two can either look away or go use my mirror, but I’m going to need this.”

“Well, I was going to ask if we could use yours anyway,” Lily returns, beginning to gather up her supplies. “Is Remus decent?”

“More than, but knock in case he’s just started changing,” Sirius directs, and with that, she and Dorcas carry their armfuls out of the room and down the hall, Robyn’s voice getting further and further out of earshot as they go.

Dorcas foots the door halfway closed, her arms a bit too full to use for the job, but that’s good enough for Sirius, frankly. He takes care of that, tucks himself back in, and closes his robe again, using his left foot to push down on the flusher when he can’t be arsed to lean forward and push it down just then. He moves for the sink, washes up before splashing a bit of water on his face in an attempt to wake himself up further, and heads back to the kitchen. He fixes both him and Remus their respective morning cups, picks up the mugs, and walks them out of the kitchen and back through the flat to his room, coming into it to find Lily in front of the mirror on his bureau which he rather expected to see, but Dorcas is sitting across from Remus on his bed with her supplies strewn around her.

Sirius walks the tea over to the left side of the bed and holds it out to Remus, who takes hold of it with a twist of a smile on his own lips, nodding to the right. “Your mobile's been going off like mad,” he offers him.

Sirius hums lightly, plucking it off of the bed with his newly freed hand and letting out a huge puff of breath at the series of messages from various folks and friends, all of them containing some degree of questioning on whereabouts he’ll be over the course of the day judging by a quick scroll. “You weren’t kidding,” he returns, moving to sit on the bed and piquing as Marlene’s name takes his interest. He types out a quick ‘heading to gallaghers after zumba, come there if you want to live’ in response to her heckling and fires that off.

He leaves his mobile aside, more interested in what’s happening here than answering each and every one of the rest of the questions in his inbox just now, taking an observational glance over the scene on the bed and setting his gaze on Dorcas sifting around in one of her makeup bags. “What’re we doing here?” he bids.

“Well, he gave me permission to doll him up a bit, but all I’ve come to so far is the knowledge that we’ll be using a bit highlighter to accentuate this God-given jawline,” Dorcas supplies analytically, nodding toward Remus’s visage despite his lightly overcome expression.

“Approved,” Sirius cements, lifting his mug toward his mouth.

“And from there, I don’t know yet,” Dorcas offers. “Depends how much freedom he gives me.”

“We’ll have to do something with those lashes,” Sirius maintains. “Really get those eyes popping.”

“I was just thinking that,” Dorcas echoes, turning her head to him with an energetic spark to her gaze.

Sirius smiles over his coffee. “Bit of liner, bit of mascara,” he chimes, going for a sip.

“I’ve got the curler here,” Lily pipes up, speaking a little slower than the rest of them when she’s currently tracing a wing onto her left eyelid and that does take some precedence.

“Oh, that thing’s terrifying,” Remus says of it. “I draw the line there.”

“It won’t hurt you,” Dorcas assures, exchanging a quick smirk with Sirius.

“So you say,” Remus returns, lifting his mug for a pointed sip of tea.

“Just don’t move when it’s coming at your eye and you’ll be fine,” Sirius says of it.

“No one’s going to be able to see what you do to my eyes, though,” Remus highlights, a smirk of his own on his face. “I’m going to have to be wearing shades the whole time.”

“Not when you’re inside, Remus,” Sirius puts up. “I want to be able to see those peepers from across the pub.”

“Challenge accepted,” Dorcas takes on, twisting open the compactor in her hand and reaching for her beauty blender to dab around in there.

“What’s this?” Remus asks, moving his tea out of the way while following with his gaze as the blender comes toward his face.

“Beauty blender,” she relays.

“No, the stuff on it,” Remus clarifies.

“Primer,” Dorcas forwards. “Consider it the first coat of paint for the artwork I’m about to create on your face.”

“Oh, alright,” Remus trades her, a little hesitant in tone as he tosses a sidelong glance at Sirius.

“It’ll act as a base so we can slap the highlighter on you smoother and make it last longer, which is exactly what we want,” he provides, gesturing toward the bureau with his mug. “I’ve setting spray over there, by the by.”

“Oh, I’ve some here,” Dorcas mentions, already at work.

“No, he’s got the good shit,” Lily tacks on, working on her right eye now. "If he's offering, take it."

Dorcas pauses mid-stroke of the blender to look over at the bureau and her entire body language lifts as she spots the canister. “Oh, you do,” she puts out gravely. “Never mind, I’m using that.”

Sirius smirks, looking over at Lily carefully painting her eyelid with liquid liner. “Have you got your kiki down pat?” he checks, smiling over his mug.

I’m gonna let you have it,” Lily recites loftily.

Sirius’s smile goes into a right grin. “Please let me have it."

“I think that might be the one I’m most thrilled to see in action, but I’ve also accepted that the chances of you being on that exact specific tune when you roll by are very, very slim,” Remus puts in, remaining still as a statue while Dorcas blends away.

“If you don’t get to see it live, we’ll request it at Gallagher's and do the whole thing over for you,” Sirius manifests.

“Deal,” Remus calls it, giving him a smile that might’ve been larger if Dorcas weren’t busy beating his face, but his eyes do more for his smile than his lips do.

“Is that where we’re going after?” Dorcas raises.

“We have to support our home base,” Sirius maintains, before gesturing his mug at Remus, “and he isn’t much for clubbing as is.”

“I like to be able to hear; sue me,” Remus puts up. “And Pete’s not much of a fan of it either so it's not just me.”

“Can I dance there, though?” Dorcas quizzes them, concerned with the real questions.

“Oh, there’ll be dancing,” Sirius assures her. “They clear a whole section of the floor just for it; they know what their patrons want on Pride, trust that much.”

“Then I’m in,” Dorcas puts down, exchanging her primer compactor for concealer and regarding Remus attentively. “Can we pick your outfit, too?”

Sirius takes in a resounding noise as he swallows a mouthful of coffee. “Yes, yes, yes,” he chants.

“You already picked the corduroys,” Remus raises him. “What more do you want?”

“To pick your whole outfit, what else?” Sirius returns him, not seeing a reason to dress it up in anything other than the truth. “We never did decide on a top.”

“Well, we—” Remus starts, giving in to a frank smile, “—got a tad distracted, didn’t we.”

Lily puts up a faux gasp. “You two?” she raises, spraying the hell out of her face with Sirius’s canister of high-end setting spray. “I don’t believe it.”

“Chill out over there with that?” Sirius bids her.

Lily mimes spraying the bottle at him and switches to lobbing it onto the bed for its next use. “Alright, we’re not done here yet,” Dorcas chimes, turning Remus’s face toward hers and beginning to blend again.

Sirius hums lightly through another sip of coffee, lifting off of the bed and skirting around the edge of it to head for his closet where some of his more fanciful options live. He leaves his mug on the nightstand nearest to him, opens the closet, and has himself a few moments to sift through the items hanging in there before he snorts, pulling out a black jacket he found in a thrift store that’s got about a billion multicoloured tassels flowing from the sleeves.

“If I could get you into this, I would,” Sirius makes clear, holding it up.

Dorcas glances over, snorts real good, and pauses her work so Remus can turn and have a look for himself. “Given that I'd completely bake in that,” he offers, smiling big this time around, “something with shorter sleeves to offset my covered legs would be most ideal.”

Sirius takes that bid to heart, sticking the jacket back and shoving half of the hanging wardrobe aside to get to the more summery items. “Well,” he drags out, lifting another hanger out with a white tank hanging from it, “this one is quite unassuming in nature, but has a nice, universal theme going on at the front.”

Sirius showcases it and the capital lettering of ‘DICKS DICKS DICKS’ stamped onto the front of it in rainbow paint. ”Literally where did you find that?” Dorcas demands.

“He just happens upon these things,” Remus answers for him.

“And this one spoke to me on a visceral level, I had to bring it home with me,” Sirius takes over.

“And that’s a no from me,” Remus tacks on.

“Boo,” Dorcas serves him.

“Seconded,” Sirius imparts, hanging the shirt back on the rack.

“I’ll never be able to share a single photo from the day ever,” Remus reasons.

Sirius sends him a puff of breath, not really having a retort ready to go when he supposes there is that to consider, and pulls another option out, holding up a mirror-studded tank, also white. “Are you interested in being a human disco ball?” he inquires.

“I’ll take that over 'DICKS DICKS DICKS,'” Remus says of it, taking advantage of the break from his primping to have a sip of tea before offering a substitute, “but let me just raise a counterpoint; Def.”

Sirius drops the disco-inspired tank to the floor at once. “Would you?” he bids, overcome already.

Remus lifts his shoulders once, an easy smile on his lips. “I mean, even with the muted shade it’s probably your lightest option as far as breathable material goes, and I have grown rather fond of the old thing,” he says for it.

Sirius immediately heads for his dresser, pulling the second drawer open and conducting a thorough search for the requested shirt. He finds it sooner than later, turns to lob it over toward Remus on the bed, and Dorcas tosses a quick glance to Sirius as she works on Remus’s face. “What are you wearing?” she queries.

Remus smirks as he catches Sirius sending her a pointed smile. “It’s really something,” he entices.

Sirius heads back to the closet with a skip to his step. “He picked it out,” he mentions, flipping past a few garments on hangers to get to the first prize, “and I have to say he picked right; it gives me incredible room to move around freely, light enough for my skin to breathe while I’m working up a sweat, and it shows off these legs which is really the most important part, let’s just be honest about that.”

“It took a good hour of him modelling various options, but the instant he put that on it was unarguably the right choice,” Remus cosigns it. “The legs were definitely the deciding factor; I say he needs to let those fly free today.”

Sirius preens a little at the voucher, turning from the closet to showcase a romper also of the rainbow variety and draping it over his body to showcase its fit before Dorcas glances over to him and gives out an excitable trill. “We’re romper twins,” she celebrates. "I can't with this."

“You can and you will,” Sirius returns.

“Well, mine’s more of a full suit and it’s just black,” Dorcas puts up, “whereas yours is — beyond.”

“Would you like a string of rainbow beads?” Sirius raises. “We kept being given them in bundles last year so I’ve got, like, thirteen of them somewhere around here.”

“I mean, yes,” Dorcas says gravely. "It'll offset all that black."

“Done,” Sirius calls it, going ahead and leaving his romper on the bed when he’ll just have to change into it in due time and bracing himself as Lily turns to him with a thoughtful air about her.

“Want me to do yours?” she offers, tapping her makeup bag once.

“Do I,” Sirius echoes, moving to sit beside Remus on the bed and garnering Lily to bring her supplies to the bed and sit across from him and beside Dorcas, creating a little primping station. “You best give me wings; you hear me?”

“Oh, believe me, I was planning to,” Lily instils, shifting to sit cross-legged in front of him.

Peter and James join the troupe a little ways into both Remus and Sirius’s transformation, piling onto the bed where possible to fit to watch the rest of the process, though James certainly makes sure to request that he get his own face a little beat for the occasion.

“Well, I’m going to have to make it speedy,” Lily mentions. “We’re getting close.”

“No one talk for a sec,” Dorcas bids, pitching it louder than anybody inside the current conversation is speaking. Sirius looks sidelong as she slowly brings the eyelash curler in for Remus’s left eye, giving a squeeze on the end of the curler and pulling it back to inspect her work with a bright smile. “See? No harm, no foul.”

“That actually wasn’t that bad at all,” Remus concedes, and with that, Dorcas moves onto his right eye.

“You look awful purdy, Remus,” Peter mentions, once it’s officially safe to talk, that is.

Remus lifts his left hand up, sticking it underneath his chin for a lighthearted display in response and dropping it right quick as Dorcas bids it. “Eyes shut,” she directs, shaking the canister of setting spray.

Sirius manages a little longer with a sidelong view of Remus shuttering his rather fantastically painted eyelids before Lily pushes one, single breath out of her nose. “Could you quit peeking at him, please?” she bids, working highlighter onto Sirius’s left cheekbone with a practiced flourish of her hand. “He looks a beaut, but you don’t need confirmation on that so much, I don’t think.”

Sirius snorts, straightening his gaze out and training it on the small crease between Lily’s dolled-up brows. “Got me there,” he lets her have.

“Yer done,” Dorcas extends, patting the tops of Remus’s knees once.

Remus pushes one long, rather horse-inspired breath out, stretches his neck long in Sirius’s peripheral, and heaves up out of his seating position to move for the door, garnering James to duck his head with a smirk the moment Remus exits the room. “Imagine that’s the last we ever see of him,” he puts up.

“I need the loo,” Remus calls back.

Dorcas heaves out a breathy laugh as she pushes off of the bed herself, standing at the foot of it as she gathers up her supplies before bringing them over to the bureau. There, she spreads them all out over the surface of it and begins to sort her own face out given that her visage is nearly done but only one eye of hers is dolled up, and that is a detail Sirius hadn’t noticed until right this very second. “Did you just get completely distracted by him?” he raises, smirking for it.

Dorcas gives an amused breath over there. “Well, I had to ask if he’d let me play around and then he said yes; I couldn't risk him changing his mind before I finished my own face,” she explains, fishing around in one of her bags.

Sirius sits with that for a moment. “Sneaky and clever,” he forwards, and Dorcas sends him a bright look in the reflection of the mirror before continuing on from where she left off.

Lily sits back a bit, having herself a look at her work on Sirius’s visage, and pushes a single breath of near-completion out of her nose. “Almost there,” she chimes, reaching for the setting spray and giving the canister a solid shake.

Sirius lets his eyelashes fall shut, sticking his face closer for the spritz, and turns it with each new spray to help her get as many angles as can be physically achieved. Remus has made a reappearance by the time he opens his eyes, standing over by the dresser with his back to the room and attempting to tug a pair of briefs on underneath his housecoat without giving everyone a free show in the process.

He turns round once he's succeeded in his plan and smiles over at Sirius, who’s just gone on to become a wee bit distracted by what’s been done to his eyes; if anything, Sirius can’t look anywhere else but at them now, and Remus says something to him, that much is sure, but what exactly, Sirius missed completely. “Hm?” he bids, refocusing right quick.

Remus's smile goes a little sheepish. “Is it too much?” he checks.

“Oi? I resent that,” Dorcas puts up, methodically running her pencil over her left eyelid to match it up with her right one. “I kept it simple while letting those eyes pop as per request and those cheekbones look bomb so you’re welcome for that, too.”

“I was only checking,” Remus insists.

“And I, admiring,” Sirius tacks on.

Remus’s mouth curls up all twisty. “Well, I asked about the plan for later while you were busy doing that, then,” he relays.

“Well, we’ll have to leave sooner than you three will, but we’ll meet back up once it's over,” James raises, sitting remarkably still for the likes of him while Lily works on his face.

“Mhm, that's what my plan was,” Sirius offers, lifting up and stepping down on the side of his bed with a glance back at Remus. “We'll be done our part before the parade's over for you, so just ring when you've finished up and we'll meet up from there.”

Remus nods, satisfied with that by the looks of it, and reaches into the top drawer to lob Sirius the pair of briefs he's bidding for, heading over to rummage through his night bag to pull out his corduroys from there. “Where are you three going to be watching from?” Lily bids. “We should know ahead of time so we can know to put a little extra something into it when we roll by.”

“I figured I’d take them to the usual spot,” Peter raises, none too fussed about it.

Sirius logs that, keeping a mental note to be sure to check to the right side of the road as they’re dancing along to see if he can spot them once they come up that block. “You still haven’t said where that is,” Remus mentions, shimmying his trousers on underneath the skirt of his housecoat.

“Really? He told me where,” Dorcas puts up, dropping her liner pencil into her tote.

Remus finishes up with his fly, lifts his hands to set them at his hips, and eyes Peter first, Sirius second, and then over to Dorcas finally. “Want to tell me where we’re going since apparently I'm the only one left out of that tidbit?” he raises her.

“Piccadilly Circus,” Dorcas extends him.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Remus puts out, showcasing exactly why he'd been left out of that one by tossing his housecoat in the hamper near Sirius's dresser. "We'll get stampeded over there."

“The crowd will be sizable, yes,” Sirius mentions, throwing his housecoat off in a slight mockery, “but with that comes the right sort of energy you should have for your first Pride—” he looks around at the rest of them as he pulls his romper off of the bed, “—am I right, or am I right?”

“He’s right,” Lily puts in, dabbing her beauty blender along James’s jawline. “You’ll hardly mind the crowd once they get going.”

“I don’t know about that,” Remus puts in, lifting his right leg onto the bed to roll up the hem of his corduroys to a smooth cuff just an inch or three above the ankle.

“It really does get infectious over there,” James slides in.

“Exactement,” Sirius echoes it, stepping into the leg holes of his romper and lifting the short sleeves up over his shoulders. “Talk to me after all is said and done, I bet you’ll have had a gay ol' time over there.”

Remus pushes a single breath through his nose, propping his left leg onto the bed to cuff that one with his gaze fixed on Sirius, but his lips do twitch at the corners as Sirius zips up. “I can’t even be that disappointed with you when you’re in that, oddly enough,” he extends him plainly.

“If that’s the case, I’ll work it into my regular wardrobe,” Sirius trades him, bending over the bed to pick up the Def shirt and toss it off to him.

Yes” James puts up, looking round as the shirt soars by his peripheral and garnering Lily to pause long enough for him to turn his head toward Remus as he's pulling the shirt on over his head. “Someone's filling that out nicely.”

Remus gives something between a smirk and a pfft, having a look down at the shirt from above and tugging at the front of it. “Did it shrink in the wash?" he puts up. "Bit shorter than it used to be on me.”

Sirius hears the quizzical tone as he pulls his hair up into a bun and squints over at the mere three inches of midriff peeking out between the hem of the shirt and the corduroys, finding those three inches complete and utter gifts, if anything. “Say it did; we’re not out here trying to hide that navel nor that toush behind three sets of material, OK?” he returns, tying his elastic in a double loop. “Let’s just get one thing straight here.”

“Straight,” Peter raises.

“You’re right; don’t know what I was thinking, saying that,” Sirius amends on a dime.

Dorcas turns away from the mirror with the curler firmly squeezed over the lashes on her left eye and peers over at Remus with her right one open, clicking her tongue as she takes to a smile. “You made it sound like he put you in a crop top," she negs him. "That just looks cute."

“Don’t talk while you’re doing that or you’ll blind yourself,” Remus returns her. He stoops to pull his tube of sunscreen out of his night bag and rises to his feet, moving his gaze to Sirius and giving a quick flick of his right wrist for a beckon. Sirius practically traipses around the bed to get to him, finding the fact that Remus thought of getting Sirius covered in sunscreen before even himself a rather lovely thought to contend with indeed. He steps up close, holding his arms up and out, and he leans in to steal a quick kiss or four while Remus works on lathering him up.

Once his front is done, Remus puts his right hand on his waist before tapping him to turn around and Sirius swivels on his heel, facing the bed while Remus works on the back of his neck and watching Lily give James’s face a solid few spritzes of setting spray since that’s what’s directly in his eye line.

“Can I get a squirt of that?” Dorcas bids, putting the curler down on the bureau.

“Sure can,” Lily replies, giving a final spritz over James’s visage.

“OK, you are all pitching in for the next canister,” Sirius puts in, turning his head to aim an additional comment at Remus specifically. “Except you.”

“Oh?” Remus bids, wry-smiling behind him.

“Them’s the perks,” Sirius returns simply.

“I'll just fork over for the next one; how's that?” James puts up, batting the lashes of his newly dolled eyes at him.

Sirius smirks once, fine with that arrangement and quite a fan of the look staring back at him at that. Lily pushes up to her knees and backs off of the edge of the bed, handing the setting spray off to Dorcas and making a step or two in the direction of the hall. “Do you want me to grab your bag?” she raises, stopping in Sirius's doorway as she aims the question back at Dorcas.

“Please, yeah,” Dorcas bids, giving the canister a few good shakes and starting a spritz over her face.

Lily’s gone and back within a moment or three, carrying both hers and Dorcas’s bags in and beckoning Dorcas along with her as she heads for the far side of Sirius’s fair and squarely won double-room, stopping at the accordion partition that tends to stay wide open as per Sirius's preference and slides it out a little more than halfway in order to create a semblance of privacy for them.

“There are so many secrets to this place,” Dorcas says of it, moving behind the vinyl wall.

“I’m still finding new and exciting things to pour over this far in,” Remus tosses her, nearly done with lathering up the backs of Sirius's calves.

Sirius puts in a snort there. “Or jolt back from,” he tacks on.

"Or pull your hair out over," Peter puts in.

“Oh, all those, too,” Remus echoes, lifting up to stand and tapping Sirius’s waist to suggest he’s quite finished as a whole. Sirius takes a swivel toward him, grabs hold of the sunscreen, and starts the process over again in the name of Remus’s protection from the beating sun, lathering up his hands while he listens to the girls go back and forth on the other side of the partition.

“That looks so good,” Dorcas shoots out.

“Which part?” Lily asks.

“Well, the shorts are cute too, but the top — the top,” Dorcas stresses.

“Oh,” Lily chimes, quite charmed by the sound of it. “Thanks, I knit it myself.”

“No, you didn’t,” Dorcas returns her.

“She did,” James pipes up. “Watched her work on it tirelessly for nearly a month.”

“Well, now I’m really regretting this,” Dorcas maintains, and what that specifically is, Sirius doesn’t know, he just knows by the sound that leaves Lily’s throat that she does not agree with that one bit.

“Why? It’s perfect,” she puts up, footsteps that presumably are hers sounding along the floorboards before she gives a striking gasp. “It’s so soft.”

“That’s why I went with it — well, that, the sleeveless situation, the fact it breathes well, and it has pockets,” Dorcas details.

Pockets,” Lily expels.

“Oh, yeah, but if I’d have known how much leg everyone else was going to be showing, I’d have come in-theme,” Dorcas puts up.

Remus turns toward the wall to give Sirius a chance at getting the back of his neck lathered up. “I’m not showing leg,” he pitches over there.

“Wish you would,” James trades him, lifting his left leg to extend his foot closer to Remus and budging his left hip with his big toe.

“No, see, you’re still giving us legs for days, just not as much thigh as the rest of us are,” Lily tells her. “I insist that you wear this and if you go home and change, I’ll just be upset about it all day.”

“I could kiss you,” Dorcas returns, sounding rather touched.

Sirius looks left as he works his fingers underneath Remus's shirt collar to get at the backs of his shoulders, finds James’s eye on instant, and the snort he lets out is both voluminous and involuntary, but it can’t be helped what with James openly trying to hide that he’s rather piqued by that idea.

“What’re you laughing at?” Lily bids, still behind the partition.

“M'kay, I’m going to need to judge these outfits as well, so,” Sirius chimes, lifting his free hand to snap his fingers, "time to show and tell."

He removes his hands from Remus’s shirt, gives a kiss to the nape of his neck to signal completion, and faces the other way as Lily and Dorcas come out of hiding, revealing her black capri-length romper with the pockets as advertised, and while Sirius does wholeheartedly agree she should stick with that 'fit, it's Lily’s knitted, rainbow-inspired crop top sitting fittingly above some black short-shorts that needs attention first and foremost.

“You made that in a month?” Sirius demands.

“Well, a week over a month,” Lily fesses.

“Still, that’s so fucking cute?” Sirius stresses, and with that, he can move right onto Dorcas, pointing to her gravely. “Yes, yes, and yes.”

Dorcas sticks her hands in the pockets of her jumpsuit, smiling sheepishly. “Well, now I must keep to it.”

“If you want a little more of a splash of colour than just some rainbow beads, I do have a pink sun hat that would go perfectly with this,” Sirius maintains, circling his right hand around in a gesture toward her attire.

Dorcas’s eyes go bright before something seems to dawn on her. “Why do you—” she starts, trailing off as Sirius heads for the door.

“He just collects things,” Remus comes in.

“Picks them up when he gets struck with the idea they could be useful someday,” Peter offers.

“And is this not useful?” Sirius calls out, rifling through the shelf at the top of the closet in the art/storage/whatever-else room. He puts the sunhat on for now, having himself a look for even one of the beaded necklaces he promised, and finds them all shoved in the same drawer of the desk over in the corner of the room. “A-ha, we’re golden; do you want all of them or just one?”

Dorcas snorts back in his room. “Just one should suffice.”

Sirius heads back to his room with his finds, takes the sunhat off to display it to her, and puts the beads over Dorcas’s head and around her neck before she places the hat atop her head.

“There, you smashing babe, you,” Sirius extends, feeling like a million pounds surrounded by another couple million others.

From there, the troupe has to split up; Sirius, James, and Lily are expected to be at the top of the parade route by eleven sharp for the commencement of the parade at noon, while the other three have a bit more leisure time to work with than they do so it’s no surprise that they simply take to lazing about on his bed while the paraders get ready to leave, but Sirius sees no reason to kick them out and make them find another spot to hang out in; the flat is theirs to enjoy whether the hosts are present or not.

He goes for his coffee on the nightstand, finishes that off, and glances over at them strewn about the bed. “You may want to leave within the next hour, given the crowd and all that,” he suggests. “Would be nice if you could actually see something, you know.”

“We’re going in like, twenty,” Peter insists. “Don’t rustle your jimmies about it.”

“I’ll rustle your jimmies,” Sirius returns, heading out into the hall where Lily and James are pulling their shoes on and asking for a few more minutes to fully be ready to go.

He goes for the kitchen to deposit his mug in the sink, heads for the bathroom for a brush of his teeth, and partakes in a capful of mouthwash because he’s feeling the razzmatazz of the promising day ahead coursing through his veins; why the hell not get extra minty fresh while he’s at it?

He heads back up to the front hall, bypasses Lily and James waiting in the doorway for him, and moves back into his room, heading for Remus and leaning down and in to leave him a quick, parting kiss. “Ring me later,” he bids. Remus nods brightly, covering his chin and mouth with his right hand as he does it, and Sirius flashes him a grin, heading back to Mum and Dad waiting it out in the hall for him to get his blasted shoes on already.

One thing Sirius will say: prior to getting a backstage pass to the celebrations at Pride, he’d often wondered about what it'd be like to be up on one of those floats, having a gay ol' time like everyone else up there, but he was a bit naive in not preparing for the amount of pure, unbridled waiting that actually occurs behind the scenes. He should have been able to sense it ahead of time, joining a theatre production in secondary taught him all about the goings-on beyond the stage; the preparing and rearranging of set pieces, the flurry and fury of ensuring all the pieces and people are accounted for, all the cues to wait around for, and this is no different. It’s all just a long-form waiting game, and adding to it, this time around he’s dealing with a long, long, very long parade circuit that snakes through the city at a snail's speed, starting and stopping and starting again and stopping all over again, a process that looked so seamless all those years he spent attending the celebrations as an onlooker, but now, he’s got himself a fine idea of all the moving parts that go into it.

Their float is tenth in the queue of so, so many, which is not bad overall; they could’ve landed closer to last place and then they'd really have to sit tight while awaiting their turn, so really, it just leaves them a bit of leisure and/or more practicing time. Sirius can’t say he needs the practice, but he finds it a better option than simply standing around tapping his wrist in the beating sun. It starts out with just a few of them, changes to a fair number of them joining in, and before long, the whole class is in formation with Andrew at the top of the float, tossing out lyrical soundbites and snapping his fingers to a steady beat to give them something to follow while they can’t be blasting their tunes just yet.

Eventually, and Sirius means eventually, their float rides around the bend and onto the main stretch of road it’ll continue on for ages yet, and there isn’t any reason for them to quickly fall into place given that they’ve been rather sorted in that department for a good while now. Soon enough, the drastic opening drone of 'Get Ready For This' sounds out and Sirius, in formation with the lot of them and right up at the front, dips his head down for a beat or two, keeping a smirk to himself at being reminded again of Remus’s rather lively reel at the start of the tune going back weeks now.

He straightens up in time to embark on the routine and from there, he has to admit, the rest is such a blur. There are bits and pieces that stick with him as they go along, of course, such as the amount of love he's got for just how feral the crowd goes each time they cycle back through their playlist and begin their routine to 'Let’s Have A Kiki' with Lily at the helm, swapping out places with Andrew, assuming the role of teacher, and pantomiming for the crowd as well as the class in a pure homage to Scissor Sisters, and though Sirius is none too surprised that many, many, many of those huge gays out there are already quite familiar with the routine, seeing them out there having a ball with it on each go-around always adds just a little more magic to the whole thing.

And how much he loves the sheer volume of the cheers that resound from the crowd each time they cycle through to the end of their playlist and the opening bars of Tina Turner's 'The Best' start-up, and the catharsis in the energy the crowd gives up to them only for the class to give it all back down to them in turn.

And how different it is to move in a seamless formation while the ground you’re on is moving. It’s not chugging speedily down the road by any means, but it is a tad different from the solid, unmoving floor they’d been trained to move on. Andrew put tape down on the floor of the studio to mark the length and width of the float they’d be dealing with and, knowing quite well they would all be atop a moving float as they danced along, incorporated a fair number of forward steps into his choreography that would help them out a bit, so thankfully they do have the rote memory of the steps to lean on, but it still is something else, dancing on a moving stage; Sirius, spry in nature, reminds himself periodically as the float herks and jerks along the route, that if someone goes toppling off of the side of the float, it won’t be him at least.

And how surprisingly easy it is not to mind it so much when pockets of the crowd thin out in spots along the route that are perhaps less accessible or preferred for a crowd to form in only to bottle out as a sea of loud, colourful heads depending on which part of the route they’re on; the music is so bloody loud it doesn’t much matter if the cheers of thinner crowds can’t quite match up and in comparison, there are moments when the crowd thickens back up again where Sirius can’t really even hear the music over the combined roaring of folks chanting along to whichever bop is playing at the moment and has to fall back on instinct, not simply rely on the lyrics or notes to know where to move this hip or that arm, but that in itself becomes a fun little exercise and a challenge Sirius is rather up for the more he meets up with it.

And how hard he would like to thank the Trenta-sized cold brew he packed down on the tube on the way over to the start of the parade route; it sure has come in handy with keeping his energy up. When practicing in class or just at home, typically a mug off the French press or his regular Venti would do the trick just fine, but today? Today, they’re in for multiple repetitions of the playlist under the beating sun and a process that certainly evermore extraneous each new time they loop back around, making Sirius more and more grateful for that cold brew and all she's done and will continue to do for him going forward.

Once they chug along to Piccadilly Circus, Sirius can’t help but smirk given that Remus had been very fair to assume that he wouldn’t get to see them doing 'Let’s Have a Kiki' in real-time — in fact, as if almost hilariously pointed, they’ve only just, just finished that very track as they're coming up on the Piccadilly stretch, but they move right on to En Vogue's 'Free Your Mind,' which is both a positive and a negative; positive in that the routine Andrew choreographed for this particular number requires the utmost dedication and energy and is therefore perhaps Sirius’s favourite of the lot to perform, negative in that there are a lotta' of twists, turns, and grandiose movements to land in it and while Sirius does keep more of an eye out toward the right side of the road (when he can manage it), he is a bit saddened by the idea of not catching a glimpse of Remus through all this moving around.

And then, as if haloed by a singular, perfectly placed ray of sunlight and surrounded by a chorus of angels shouting out Handel’s Messiah that's actually just a crowd of attendees going nuts, Sirius spots one Peter Pettigrew, waving his arms around like he’s hailing a plane down the runway, perched with half of his torso hovered above the crowd and, Sirius soon finds out, held up on the shoulders of one Remus Lupin in order for their shortest friend in the group to even have a lick of a chance at the seeing anything major. Sirius gets one, all-too-brief glimpse of Remus’s head o’ hair and those sunnies just below them amid the sea of heads around him before the beat picks up and the routine calls for Sirius to be facing forward again, but he feels so utterly rejuvenated by that one, tiny glimpse of Remus that he puts. The effort. In.

And that’s it, really; going along from there, it's as if he's already won gold and whatever may come from the rest of the parade circuit is merely a bonus. Luckily for him, and perhaps the overall experience in itself, many of the rest of the stops along the route are just as if not nearly as high-energy as Piccadilly had been, and eventually, once their float enters the final stretch of the circuit, he feels oddly projected out of the Sirius who once so wanted to dance high above a sea of his own kind and into the Sirius who has already done that, and just having been able to simply enjoy something he’d wanted to do for years and years there feels both small and big at once; small in the grand scheme of things when he’s not the first homo to dance around on a Pride float and certainly won’t be the last, but bigger than big when nothing, nothing, nothing is better than being able to say he was his full self the whole way through and got cheered on for it, rather than spat at.

Once they've officially finished, Sirius wants nothing more than to simply cross the barricaded intersection they're at and sprawl face-down on the grass in the square just across the road. He sets off for it without a word, pulling his hair from its bun to let it freefall around his shoulders, and on his way there, gets stopped by four separate people who all want to chat, but all he can offer them is a wave and an exhausted smile as he continues toward his destination.

He gets to an unoccupied and rather inviting patch of grass, sinks down on all fours, and plants himself down flat from there, his entire body limp as a noodle. Very soon, he's joined by James and Lily, who take to sprawling out on either side of him and also seem to be right zonked by the feel of it.

"I'm—" Lily starts, huffing on Sirius's right, "—I’ll go get us coffee soon; just — gimme a second."

"I'm not complaining," Sirius insists, shutting his eyes as he breathes in the scent of the earth.

A second turns into a minute and turns into a good thirty more of those from there before Lily lugs herself up from the grass and searches for the closest coffee house to their vicinity on her mobile. Once the destination is decided, Sirius gives lifting his head a shot, where he realizes both Andrew and Lily’s mate from class, Renée, are just coming up to join in their grass sprawl.

Lily takes everyone’s order and soon commissions Renée to along with her, which then leaves Sirius, James, and Andrew laying about on the grass, which is... an interesting mix; Andrew is certainly not the one of the other two Sirius would have preferred to stay behind, but it’s a bit late to do anything about that now.

James pipes up a good five minutes later by the feel of it. “I think,” he begins, pausing for upwards of ten seconds at least before keeping on, “I’ve died.”

Andrew puts out a round of half-laughs, half-coughs. “I really thought you were going to end with something much more intense than that.”

“Do you mean to suggest my too-soon death isn’t intense to you?” James raises.

“What with that dramatic pause, yeah,” Andrew puts up. “Bit anticlimactic, overall.”

“No no, I see; I see,” James returns airily. “Find another best student for this one has died.”

Andrew hums plainly. “My best student is getting the drinks, but you rest in peace,” he supplies him.

Sirius, while finding that quip more than just kind of funny, primarily stays out of it and figures he’ll soak up some sun while he’s down here, giving himself until Lily and Renée make it back with trays of drinks before trying his hand at moving, but even then, he doesn’t really do much more than roll onto his back and about halfway onto James's frame for balance. Fortunately for him, James simply lets Sirius use him as a balancing beam without a fuss or comment, making it all the more easy for Sirius to reach his right arm up and out for the drink Lily’s holding out to him, keeping it held in his hand while he searches for the will to sit up straight, but in the end, he really only manages to scoot himself up and back a little, propping his drink on the ground beside him and leaning the backs of his shoulders up against James’s left hip while remaining otherwise flat on the grass.

Sirius pops the paper off of his straw and sticks the straw in his drink, bending it enough to get something out of it in his sprawl and silently draining a good quarter of it in a handful of seconds before Lily even finishes handing out the drinks. She sits down across from him once done, slow-sipping from her own coffee as she leaves James’s untouched drink down beside her for the time being, and perks as 'Kiss Me' rings out of her drawstring bag where all of their mobiles got put hours ago for safekeeping. Sirius lifts his free hand to hold it out, an expectant smile on his lips, but his mobile stops ringing mere moments after Lily wrangles it out of her bag.

She blinks down at it, her shoulders coming up in a shrug. “Service might’ve dropped,” she offers, passing it off to Sirius all the same. “He’ll try again soon, I bet.”

Sirius simply places it face up on his chest and waits the half-minute before the same tune rings out again, only this time it’s accompanied by James deadpanning the lyrics while continuing to lay flat on his back like an over-exerted dummy, and that gets Sirius pushing out tiny, breathy laughs as he swipes the screen and puts it to his right ear. “Hey, hey,” he chimes, blinking a few times at the echo of innumerable voices on the other end of the line.

“Hold on,” he kind of hears, and Sirius does as bid, holding right on while Remus presumably searches for a less crowded spot. “Can you hear me now?”

“Better,” Sirius offers him. “Is your service taking a hit?”

“Well, it has been shoddy for while, but I very suddenly got a visit from the Trojan Fairy when I tried you before,” Remus mentions.

Sirius pushes out a series of mangled breathy laughs. “Did you now?” he probes.

“Mhm,” Remus affirms. “And when I say visited, I mean I got chased down by him, and then he went and stuffed about twelve of them in my back pockets with an insistence that I’d be needing every one of them.”

“Wise words from the fae,” Sirius deems them, grinning from ear to ear.

The echo surrounding Remus’s voice dies down enough to hear his laugh in all its glory. “Anywho, hi hi,” he offers next. “Did you have fun? It sure looked like it.”

“Too much, even,” Sirius hands him, “and now, I’m nothing but a pancake.”

“You were so good," Remus emphasizes, and Sirius can just feel his earth-shattering smile from all the way over here, "and I really mean that; jaw-droppingly so.”

Sirius makes a throaty trill of a noise. “Thank you,” he chimes, feeling a warmth spread over his cheeks that hasn’t got much to do with all the sun he got up on that float.

“I knew you would be, but watching just one or two of you at it is one thing, but you along with the whole troupe?” Remus keeps on. “Wildly fun to watch; it’s almost some sort of perfect meeting between jazzercise and flash mob.”

“Now you understand why I like it so much,” Sirius extends him.

“I think I really do,” Remus lets him have. “The parade’s still going strong over our way and I don’t know when the other two will want to head out, so if you wanted to go on ahead we could always meet you at the place in a while; I just wanted to see if you’d answer.”

“Barring handcuffs, I’m not sure what could've stopped me,” Sirius trades him. “No rush, mind; you have fun and head down that way whenever you like, only I’ll ask for there to still be twelve condoms on your person upon your arrival.”

Remus snorts on his end of the line. “I doubt I’ll be using any between now and then somehow,” he puts up, “though if there are eleven, that may just mean I dropped one along the way.”

“And to that, I will cling,” Sirius maintains.

“You — fun, too—” Remus offers, his voice getting harder and harder to make out over the telltale sounds of an air horn popping off nearby.

“OK, I will,” Sirius smiles, connecting the dots just fine.

He lets Remus both off the hook and line by pressing to end the call, takes another solid drink of his coffee, and James shifts minimally as Sirius sets his mobile down on his chest again. “Explain,” he bids, tapping against Sirius's forehead with one of his forefingers. "You were chortling."

Sirius smirks around his straw. “Remus got a visit from the Trojan Fairy,” he relays, sending Lily right on into a round of trilling.

“Oh, just imagine his face,” she raises, right overcome with the image herself.

“He seemed alright with it, considering,” Sirius passes along. “Found it funnier than anything else, which is more than fine with me so long he isn't completely confused about why he'd have been chosen.”

“Well, that is what he gets,” James says of it.

“For?” Sirius checks, shifting down a little so he can turn his head and see James a little better.

“Owning that face, what else?” James offers.

“Well, that, I'll never deny,” Sirius allows.

Andrew pauses in sipping from his own cold brew. “Is the elusive boyfriend going to make an appearance?” he puts up wondrously.

Sirius aims a polite smile over at him. “I wouldn’t call him elusive so much as busy, but yeah, he’ll be along,” he returns, aiming the next bit toward Lily. “Parade’s still going strong on their end, so we've plenty of time to migrate over there and he said they'd come to us whenever the whole thing evens out for them.”

Lily nods eagerly for that. “We’re heading to Gallagher's after this,” she forwards, pointing her straw between Renée and Andrew. “Did you want to come along?”

Renee’s answer is to touch base with whoever she names; Sirius can’t really say he’s listening to that, not when Andrew’s nod takes up most of his focus. “I'll have to make sure all that gets sorted out first,” he maintains, waving back toward their float sitting empty across the way, “but I’ll swing by later if you’re still there.”

“Oh, we’ll be there a good while,” Lily says of it. “We can hang out a bit longer so you get that sorted, though; no sense in rushing off.”

Sirius sits with that for upwards of a minute, sipping on his drink and weighing his options before he feels his only real move at this point is to simply give Remus a quick heads up. He plucks his mobile off of his chest and thumbs around for Remus’s number, typing in a quick ‘zumba boy’s gonna be there too apparently, heads up 7-up’ and firing it off to him.

He sets his screen face up where it was so he’ll be able to see the reply whenever it comes in, which ends up being about three minutes later, all said and done.

I somewhat had a feeling that might happen.

Sirius reads it, takes in a shallow breath picturing him making room for an uncomfortable scenario, and hovers his thumbs over his screen, trying to come up with something to respond with that may quell some of the nerves on Remus’s end.

bright side: you look fit as hell so today might be the best context to have to meet him :)

He smirks as he sends it off, though a few beats later, he falters on that read of it, grimacing over it coming off a bit too aloof on Remus’s end; the next reply comes about twenty seconds on from there and comes in the form of a simple ‘xoxo’ but whether Remus took the sentiment to heart or not, Sirius really can’t say for sure. Rather than worry he didn't, he chooses to hang onto the feeling he gets when he focuses on the nature of the reply; the feeling that comes with the fact that Remus sent hugs and kisses back to him in the first place and feeling — hoping, really — that he’s done right by him for simply acknowledging the fact that it might've been something to warn him about, whether Remus foresaw it coming down the pipeline or not.

Sirius unzips the front of his romper a bit and sticks his mobile in the pocket on the inside lining, suddenly rather interested in moving things along, and in truth, it’s growing increasingly tragic that he hasn’t got a blended margarita in one of his hands already.

He lifts off of James’s side, reaches for his drink still sitting untouched by Lily’s left knee, and coils himself around, sticking the drink over near James’s head and bending the straw in for him to ideally sip from. “Fuel up,” he bids him. “I want a margarita and I can’t go about having one if you’re taking a million years to regain your strength.”

-

Herding the gang down to Gallaghers is no easy feat, Sirius will say that. He’ll also fully admit to the fact that he’s definitely one of the reasons it's taking so much time to get there, but that’s not terribly surprising. Marlene once told him, years and years ago now, that he posesses a glow that's akin to the sun, while the people around him are all but planets experiencing the intrinsic pull to orbit him. Granted, she’d had a few glasses of wine at the time, and for that matter, so had he and James, the latter of which initially concurred with that read of him before deciding to make it a touch more his own, citing Sirius as more of a lightbulb and the rest of them a pack of shad flies unable to stop themselves from gravitating toward him and their inevitable demise.

All in all, not the best read of him around despite the latter being more of a goof than much else, but even Sirius knew there was a bit of harsh truth to both analogies, though he was none too interested or willing to examine them any closer back in those days, instead choosing to favour the general sentiment of both: he’s got charisma shining out the wazoo and that sort of thing is difficult for others not to notice when it's actively getting in their eyes.

Today, he’s feeling both the positive and the negative ramifications of those wine-inspired analogies of yore given that literally every other block they walk down contains somebody he knows; somebody hasn’t seen in months, somebody he has seen more recently but must stop for if he doesn't want a pointed text later on for not having stopped to say hello, and he also receives the added bonus of periodically running into a few somebodies he’d once spent time with inside a bathroom stall and/or on a sturdy piece of furniture. Sirius will fully admit that for those particular run-ins, he doesn’t linger around long enough to chat; not much point in doing that when he’s already spending far too much of His day hanging around with someone he’d spent similar time with inside an empty dance studio and that, frankly, is enough world-blending of its own for him, thanks much.

James and Lily combined are another reason this is taking forever when they certainly have a network of folks they keep on just passing in the crowd before backtracking to chat with, but seeing as Sirius is just as guilty of that, he can’t stand on solid ground and complain about it too hard without getting dragged for it. Once they do finally arrive, there is but one free table on the terrace that the five of them immediately lay claim to along with the firm understanding that one or more volunteers will have to stay back and guard it in the event that some of them have to migrate inside where the dancing will be happening. Lily and Renee snag the seats on one side of the table while Sirius goes ahead and grabs the seat on the opposite side of it next to the railing while James takes the spot on his right, thank Cunt, and that just leaves the chair at the far end of the table for Andrew, as it should be.

James pats his pockets a bunch of times before making a prompt 'O' shape with his mouth. “Aw, shit.”

“Someone pickpocket you?” Sirius asks.

“More like I just didn’t bring mine at all,” James confesses. "Idiot."

“I’ll get yours, babe,” Lily offers, sitting across from Sirius.

“Nah, I’ll just go get it,” James insists, pushing out of his seat.

He doesn’t even get a step further before their table gets seized by Kim, their absolute favourite of the waitresses around these parts, and Sirius simply tugs James back into his seat by the sleeve of his shirt. “Just sit tight, hm,” he bids, lolling his head to the side to eye James a bit naughtily. “You’ll want a margarita?”

“I mean, yeah,” James puts up, matching the style of Sirius's side eye quite well.

“Then I’ll get us two to start and you can make a run for it later,” Sirius decides. “No stressing, all’s well.”

Twenty minutes further and one round of margaurites down, another table gets vacated and James and Andrew take it upon themselves to lug that one over by theirs to create a double-table situation for the rest of their rag-tag team to utilize once they arrive, and Sirius enjoys this development for two reasons; one, he’s not the only one thinking ahead here and that is refreshing to see, and two, he didn’t have to do any of the heavy-lifting.

He gets a text when Remus & co are heading down to the tube, so Sirius projects a time he thinks is reasonable that they’ll arrive, adds ten to fifteen on top of that to leave room for the crowds littered about, and will undoubtedly be taking the tube with them, and settles into working on his second drink. Eventually, he sucks out the dregs of blended gay ol' cheer with his vibrantly purple dick-shaped straw, pushes his empty bulbous glass back on the table, and answers the intrinsic bolt he feels strike through his body to demand that he look up, and very soon, he understands why he’d felt the necessity come over him for mixed-in with pedestrian traffic bobs a starkly familiar head o’ hair that sits above an increasingly familiar pair of sunglasses.

Owing to the fact that he took the corner spot directly beside the railing, Sirius briefly toys with the idea of skirting through the crowded terrace to get to the sidewalk before deciding that he doesn’t much feel like putting that kind of work in and climbs over the railing instead, hopping down onto the street that’s been walled off for numerous city blocks to give way for the sea of pedestrians going this way and that way. He heads up the street toward Remus’s own gravitational pull with a light skip to his step, feeling easy, breezy, beautiful already, but the moment Remus spots him and beams? Sirius is feeling all of those things in multitudes.

Remus moves quicker than the other two, pushing ahead and effectively taking him by the waist to lug him in close, and Sirius can’t help loving that any way, shape, or form, he's jelly-limbed by that choice and that’s perfectly alright with him; Remus winds his arms around him, crosses his wrists at the small of his back, and gives him a squeeze, something about his body language oozing ease, as if Remus didn’t have to think about this part even when Sirius knows that can’t be perfectly true.

“You look so happy,” Remus offers, quietly, like it’s just the two of them and Peter and Dorcas aren’t mere steps away.

Sirius drops his gaze to Remus’s smile, wants to kiss, nip, and tug on those lips right here on the street, but he breathes in long and staves it off, nodding earnestly as he brings his right hand up to splay it over the side of Remus’s neck and hold onto him instead.

“Alright, we will just—” Dorcas offers, cutting off as she links her right arm in with Peter’s left one and tugs him right along.

“Good job up there, Sirius,” Peter calls back to him.

Sirius turns his head, aiming a smile over his shoulder and quickly turning it back to Remus with a tilt of it to the right. “Are you seeing that, too?” he raises, a pointed smile aimed at Remus.

“We’ll get to that,” Remus maintains, waving it off with a shake of his head first and a kiss second.

If Sirius weren’t busy rebooting completely, he might have put something into the kiss, but he merely stands there, mind-blank as Remus tugs soundly at his lips with those perfect fucking lips of his own, and then, it’s over too soon and Remus is looking at him with open disarray.

“Was that not OK?” he checks, his hands bearing down on either side of Sirius’s waist.

Sirius hawks out a bark of a laugh. “Shut it,” he returns, but even with the amusement coursing through his veins and his skin singing fucking opera up in here, Sirius can’t quit staring at him like he isn’t dealing with Remus, but a clone of him. “When did I start falling for you?”

“What?” Remus asks, blatantly confused, and Sirius can’t decide if that’s typical of him or highly suspect.

“You heard me,” Sirius insists, lifting his brows once. “When?”

“Outside work,” Remus answers, his own brow furrowed over his sunglasses. “I tornadoed through the place, ranted at you, and you somehow found that endearing.”

“More than,” Sirius returns, accepting that this is his Remus and giving out a comfortable sigh. “You passed; I thought I was dealing with your doppelgänger for a beat there, had to check.”

Remus pushes an amused breath through his nose, leaning in to press a kiss to Sirius’s forehead and leaving his mouth there. “I’m invisible today,” he whispers, and Sirius has to pull back from him and gauge his expression because his tone isn’t giving anything away, but he sure doesn’t expect Remus to be beaming or giving him one with quite this much joy written over it.

“How’s it feel?” Sirius raises, a smile tugging on his own lips.

“Inspiring,” Remus answers.

Sirius lifts his right hand and beckons Remus in with his right forefinger. “Imma need to—” he beckons once more, “—try that again.”

This time around, Sirius effectively kills it on the reciprocation factor and he knows he’s killing it because Remus full-on shivers against his mouth, pulling his arms free from Sirius’s waist to take his face in his hands instead and garnering Sirius to bite back a pathetic little whimper in his throat as Remus drinks him in, leaving him that much more of a jelly-legged pseudo-humanoid.

Sirius pulls back with tiny, rough gusts of breath leaving his mouth, and even though he knows that Remus knows no one’s going to say shit about it today and that’s partially where his bravery is coming from, this cannot continue out on the street; it just can’t. “Stall or my place?” he bids, but Remus doesn’t so much answer with words, rather more a bemused sound. “We can either rut together in a stall or take this back to mine for a brief but thorough intermission; you've got to make a choice, simple as that.”

“Yours,” Remus answers, and though it’s instantaneous and that leads Sirius to assume the loo was never an option, he can’t find it in himself to be fussed about it today.

He beams bright, stepping back from Remus and tugging him along speedily, but it’s not so easy getting past the terrace without getting hailed down by an exceptionally put-upon James, so he veers them off slightly course and runs them by the terrace railing. “We just have to—” Sirius starts, his left hand clasped with Remus’s right one, his right hand held up with his thumb pointing deftly up the street while every one of their tablemates look on, but at least four of them are avidly waiting for whatever excuse Sirius can come up with and he’s not about to give ‘em that, “—ehh, we’ll be back.”

“Sluts, sluts, sluts,” James chants to the tune of 'Shots,' which is really much more fortunate than it sounds for a pleasant number of patrons out on the terrace that aren't strictly part of their band of buffoons join right in and then it’s a whole whirlwind of sluts, making it easier for the two of them to slip off pretty well unnoticed amidst the tomfoolery.

“Well, that—” Remus puts up, keeping up with Sirius’s dastardly pace quite well depsite his mirth, “—was not how I expected to be introduced.”

Sirius turns with an expression of full mirth as Remus trails off to let a laugh escape, and shit, he must really be in a stellar mood if he’s giddily laughing over his first semi-interaction with Zumba Boy. “Fuck it, that’s at least half the awkwardness of meeting him out of the way right there,” he trades him.

“Uhm, fine, but,” Remus offers, smirking through his nose, “do you not think that might be a tad awkward to come back to?”

Sirius puts out a rigorous pfft, flinging his lobby door open. “Believe me, he’s going home with someone tonight," he instils. "I don’t imagine he gives a shit."

“Well, I’m sure he is; big, strapping lad like him,” Remus offers, stopping with the lobby door held open by his left knee, which stops Sirius from going anywhere, so Sirius is in the prime vantage point to watch Remus take a tight breath in through his teeth. “So listen, if you’re not completely sold on this, I might go back and see what I can do about getting him home—”

Sirius lifts his free hand and trumpets a resounding ‘ooooooh’ at him through it. “I’m going to get you so hard for that,” he manifests.

Remus puts out an amused trill as he traipses on ahead, tugging Sirius up the stairs with fervour. “Between you and me, I think you need to get got,” he tosses over his shoulder.

Sirius frankly cannot argue with that. He lets go of Remus’s hand altogether, stalls his pace to get in behind him, and presses him up the stairs faster with his hands splayed against the small of his back, but the second Remus shoves the front door open, one better believe Sirius strikes a Superman pose in the doorway. “Bet you’re happy I don’t lock my doors now,” he raises.

Remus rounds on him immediately, puts his arms through Sirius’s posed ones to yank him inside by the middle, and knocks the door shut with a quick kick, tugging Sirius toward his room with his hands on the zipper of Sirius’s romper.

He gives it a few good tugs while Sirius helps steer him through his bedroom door, but apparently Remus gets fed up with the severity of the zipline for he huffs grand between them. “Get the fuck out of this thing,” he asserts, tapping hard on it.

"Is this better or worse than the red flannel?" Sirius bids, smiling up a storm as he veers to the left of the doorframe and poises himself up against the side of his bureau.

Remus slots himself in between Sirius’s knees. “It's between this and the apron actually,” he mentions. “Bit rude of you to even leave it out of the running altogether, frankly.”

Sirius pauses with the zipper to tug Remus's sunnies off of his head and discs them over on the bed, seeking a chance to see his eyes in all their glory. “Do you want to—” he starts, tossing a fair chunk of his hair over his right shoulder with a flourish of his head, “—teach me how to be less inconsiderate, sir?

Remus hikes him up onto the edge of the bureau, pushing Sirius's legs apart while shaking his head rather plainly. “I don’t think we have that kind of time."

Sirius gives out a half-laugh, half-huff. “Just once,” he states, “I’d like you to just, go along with me; it really wouldn't hurt.”

“I can’t, Sirius,” Remus insists, smiling weakly.

“But I want you to shove me down and teach me something,” Sirius keeps at it, rubbing up on Remus’s groin. “Wouldn’t that be grand?”

“See, I feel like I could do that already, just without the dirty talk,” Remus mentions, still fucking with Sirius’s zipper until, oh, 2.4 seconds later when he seems to be right finished with that altogether. “It's stuck, I don't know; you get yourself out of this trap and I’ll be right back.”

Sirius needs some context clues as to where he's going before he’ll comply, but in the end, Remus only skirts around to the right of the bed to get into the top drawer on his nightstand and that answers that; he immediately takes the zipper down the full way, making sure it’ll make a noise as it goes down, and Remus pauses his fishing in the drawer to point at him with his free hand. “That thing is rigged against me,” he attests point-blank.

“Oh, mhm,” Sirius goads, wiggling his arms out from the sleeves. He pushes the top half of it down to his waist but from there, he is a little compromised, and while he does try to lift himself off of the bureau’s ledge with one hand while he works on tugging the romper down further with his free one, if he does much more of that he has a feeling he’s going to end up sliding onto the floor so he'll leave the rest to Remus.

He slumps back onto the bureau’s edge, huffing a laugh as he pushes his newly freed hand up through his hair. “Love that there’s a giant bed right there, but we’re ignoring it for this,” he mentions, draping himself over the surface of the bureau and the various make-up bags still littered all over it.

Remus waves him off with his free hand while the other pulls the lube out of the drawer. “I think it’s kind of fun,” he puts in, moving back around the end of the bed to get to him. There, he hands the bottle off to Sirius and tugs his hips in, bracing Sirius's legs on either side of his body as he works both Sirius's romper and briefs down over his hips with a quizzical, thoughtful expression that renders Sirius a captive audience. “What’s it again; 'something-something teamwork?'”

Sirius pushes out a breathy, endeared laugh, leaning up and in to catch his lips with his own, and Remus responds in kind, working the romper off of his legs while he leaves Sirius’s lips kiss-soaked and nearly numb to the touch before he pulls off, giving his lips a chance to recoup whether he’s aware of it or not. “Let me just,” Remus starts, trailing off with an idle scoot of Sirius’s body and sliding him around front of the bureau to lean him back over it. He tugs Sirius's hips off the ledge to give himself just a little more room to work with, pushes a few of the make-up bags aside, then another out from underneath Sirius’s back, and plucks the bottle of lube out of Sirius’s idle grasp, flicking the cap open. Though Remus seems to have this down, Sirius tries to be of some help at least, leaning further back onto the surface of the bureau, bracing his calves around the back of Remus’s waist, and tilting his hips at an upward, more available angle for him.

There’s something rather on brand about Sirius getting fingered while there’s definitely some sort of makeup-related tool poking him in the back, he really has to admit it. He huffs out a laugh, braces a hand behind him to lift off the bureau a little, and tosses a glance over his shoulder to try and bat the instrument away, but Remus goes ahead and reaches behind him with the hand that isn't working on him, sweeping it underneath Sirius's back to push the offending item aside for him, only it goes skidding right over the ledge and landing on the floor with a clatter. Remus’s visage lights up with sheepish amusement and with less concern lining his features than he'd shown for the untimely death of Sirius’s lamp back at the end of spring, but the worry in his eyes has Sirius smirking all the same.

He turns his head to look down beside the bureau and puts out a breathy gasp when he spots the casualty laying on the floor. “The curler,” he puts out faux-woefully, rolling his hips up and against the expert crook of Remus’s fingers.

“Not that,” Remus plays along, but he’s finished with the ruse quicker than Sirius is. “Is it still in one piece?”

“Yeah,” Sirius pushes out, teeth-gritted as he drives his hips down on the three-finger deluxe Remus is hitting him with, “yeah, it’s fine.”

“Good,” Remus puts it. “I don’t know how much one goes for in the event that I’d have to replace it.”

Sirius stutters out an only halfway coherent pfft. “In what world would yoube the one replacing it?”

Remus sends a mock pfft right back to him. “I just sent it careening—”

“After reading my plight for what it was and trying to do something about it, so I’m sorry but this all traces back to me,” Sirius says of it, lifting his hands in between their bodies to paw at Remus’s fly.

“You’re good?” Remus checks.

Sirius gives him a rigorously insistent nod, needing some of that pipe sooner than later, and pops the button of Remus’s trousers free, speedily taking the zipper down and getting enough leeway to shove them down past Remus’s hips, and then about four Trojans fall out of Remus’s back right pocket and onto the floor behind him, taking the both of them out for at least thirty seconds or more. Remus is the first of the two of them to reign his snickers in, removing all digits from inside Sirius to replace them with the head of his cock, and Sirius takes a full breath in before Remus pushes in, keeping his breath held in as Remus starts to move.

“OK?” Remus raises, going still and holding onto Sirius's hips in case he’s got to make a quick U-ie and pull right back out.

Sirius nods emphatically, reaching his arms around the back of Remus and tugging on his shoulders, and from there, Remus moves them experimentally, gaze fixed and analytical on his features, and because of that, Sirius gets to see the first sign that Remus is enjoying himself: his brow furrowing as he shuts his eyes for a few intervals and opening them up sharply again to fix his gaze just above Sirius.

Sirius leans his head back to have a look, too, finding Remus checking out their reflections in the mirror above, and promptly lowers it yet again with a wry smile on. “Oh, that’s why you moved me,” he wagers.

“I moved you for better leverage,” Remus mentions, dropping his gaze to Sirius again, “but this is a bonus I didn't consider until just now.”

“Yeah?” Sirius goads, tightening his heels around the back of Remus's hips and rocking them in at a quicker pace. “‘S’it hot?”

Remus gives out a direct pfft, dropping his hands to the surface of the bureau and giving it to him harder than Sirius was even hoping for, but whew, that's certainly an answer.

He drops his hands to grip the ledge of the bureau on either side of him, ending up bringing the mirror back and forth against the wall with him all thanks to the hold he's got on the bureau itself, but soon enough, it's quite a timely beat for Sirius to go ahead and keep following since it’s here, happening, and sounds just like them frankly, his breathing ratcheting up quicker as a result of his exertion. He can't help the echoes of his breathing; no way, no how, though he does try to quiet the fuck down vocally to amplify Remus’s voice, however difficult that is with Remus hitting him at that perfect angle, but he so wants to hear those stammers of his better—

A loud, loud series of nonsensical noises echo out from seemingly somewhere in the lobby, but those are all undoubtedly coming from James and the front door busts open almost immediately from there, the noises all incredibly close given that they never did bother to shut Sirius’s door.

“Pause, pause, pause,” James puts out, footsteps bounding down the hall and past Sirius’s doorway. “I’ll be two seconds, not even.”

Remus does very much pause, looking down at Sirius with an expression of pure and utter bewilderment, and Sirius pushes a series of breathy laughs out of his nose. “He forgot his wallet,” he relays, panting quietly in between the two of them.

Remus blinks once. “And he couldn’t have waited until we got back?” he puts up.

“You’re right, he’s a fiend,” Sirius allows.

“I’m going to keep going,” Remus mentions plainly.

Sirius practically vibrates out of his skin with anticipation as Remus lifts his legs by the undersides of his calves and keeps right on indeed, but the angle switch turns out to do wonders for him and be fucking evil at the very same time for Sirius is nearly blinded by every thrust now. It's a helpful manoeuvre, too, in that it keeps the bureau from knocking into the wall quite so thunderously even if it doesn't fully mute the rocking, but that part, Sirius just doesn't have it in him to give as much of a shit about. This is it, the test of his lifetime, the one where he must bare his teeth down on his lower lip and call on the strength of the scribes to keep from shouting a series of nonsensical noises of his own through his wreckage, and while he does miraculously manage to hold out until the millisecond after the front door opens again, he just can't avoid a brazen cry as Remus skyrockets the pace before the front door shuts again.

Remus seems to get wicked with his thinking the moment they're officially alone again and thanks be to him; he lifts Sirius's right leg to hook it over his shoulder, drops his hand in between them, flattening his left palm against Sirius’s cock and driving it over him while he drives Sirius against the bureau at a relentless speed, and then Sirius is only calling out for him, just him, again and again, pushing his hands up in his hair as he gives himself over to getting fucked sideways.

Right as he has Sirius toeing the edge, Remus pushes his right leg down to rejoin it with his left one, letting them both hang over his stuttering hips, and wins himself the extra room he must've been gunning for, curling his back into an arch and dropping his head down to swallow Sirius’s final utterance of his name as he drives himself closer to his own release, and frankly, Sirius isn’t surprised at all that they come within mere seconds of each other, but it sure is bracing when that sort of thing back comes around, isn't it.

Remus puts out a great series of bouldered whimpers as he ducks his head down and snaps his hips through it, the curls of his dampened fringe and his balmy puffs of breath teaming up to tickle Sirius’s throat in a way that’s almost too much for his goose-pimpled skin and simultaneously incites him to pet the curls at the back of Remus’s head limply for it all the same. Remus lifts his head after a few more pets of his hair, his smile lopsided and genuine as he locks it in with Sirius’s lips and rolls those slowing hips of his right through him, as if he just needs to savour Sirius and the feeling wrapped around him for just a little longer, and Sirius breathes heavily against his lips, tightening his strained legs around him in an effort to thank him for such a lovely thought, and although they’ve certainly got places to be and people to see, neither stops them from taking part in a languid snog until Remus officially runs out of steam, wiping sweat from his chin via the curve of Sirius’s right shoulder and offering a fully-fledged beam down at him from the other side.

“How much of this,” Sirius breathes, flourishing his hands around their rather provocative positioning, “do you think he saw on his way out?”

“Not much,” Remus offers. “He had his hands up like this.”

Sirius snorts loudly as Remus lifts his hands deftly and plants his palms over his eyes. “Then I’ve still seen more of his recent sexcapades than he’s seen of mine,” he says of it, stretching his arms out long and above him. “I win.”

Remus gives a contented snicker in his throat, taking in a full breath through his nose as he drops his hands. “Alright, we should get a move on, hm?” he raises, giving in to a sheepish smile.

He only moves after the hum of passive agreement Sirius offers up and lifts him off the bureau's surface, hitching him up high on his hips and holding them from below to walk him out of the room so Sirius hasn’t much work to do here at all, merely lets himself get carried through the living room and down toward the bathroom while he relishes in that one, missing ingredient over the course of the day finally back with him and better than ever.

Chapter 19: 19.

Notes:

this one’s going to be particularly heavy. tw's will be in the notes at the bottom and pls do heed them! cannot stress this enough. pls do this.

there's plenty more on the way that will be joyous and bursting with love in its many forms, but some of these arcs will to get heavy/heavier as more unfolds, and as these lads work on both their individual and combined issues. i’m extremely excited about what's to come, you guys; this is years in the making and i'm covered in hives over getting to share it finally, but i do want to take the time here to remind people that this is a long-form story that will need and take time to tackle the issues brought forward with nuance, so an open mind is going to be highly important as these two incredibly human folks continue to try and make sense of the world around them, and that includes some messy stuff that won't conclude and be tied up in a neat little bow in just a few chapters.

that, i feel, is rather typical of my style, i don't enjoy rushing plot lines, i like allowing the time for the characters to take chances, make mistakes, get messy (toot toot), and maybe even have the entirely wrong idea of a situation and have to work on restructuring their mind frame to better understand what their knee-jerk reactions actually mean so they can work on being better. i love it all, so: there's a long road ahead if you're interested in coming along for it, but this story won't be a short, sweet after-school special and it may well take until the story is finished for the entire picture to be seen.

tbh i don't love prefacing this as i do feel my previous work in the series contains a nuanced blend of light and dark elements so that continuing to happen should speak for itself, but my gut's telling me that i gotta just lay it down plainly, so: what's said and felt by any one character in any particular chapter may very well change over time and likely will, seeing as evolving and working on your biases are really just parts of the human condition. it may take chapters before a murky situation is resolved and once it is, it may very well not be to your liking! but it will be to mine.

i want to be proud of what i put out and i'm at my proudest when i simply let the characters be their complicated, flawed, lovely selves; i've never really been out for gathering scores of people together to have a teachable moment, so if you're looking for that here, you will likely be disappointed.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Once out of the shower, Remus gives a quick towel-off of his hair which goes quicker with that new haircut of his, ties the same towel around his waist, and leaves the bathroom door ajar as he heads back down the hall toward Sirius’s room, while Sirius deals with the state of his own hair at the bathroom mirror.

He can’t really be bothered with doing much to his hair past a towel dry; it’s just too hot to consider using the hairdryer and if he’s honest, having damp hair hanging around his shoulders seems like just the perfect plan to combat going back out into the hot, hot heat outside. Sirius flips his towel down and off of his head just as the bathroom door is creaking open and looks to find Remus hanging back by the bathroom doorway, fully clothed again and holding Sirius’s romper out to him.

Sirius hums in thanks. “Are you suggesting I go sans briefs for the rest of the day?” he raises, eyeing the suspicious lack of undergarments being transported to him.

“They’re in there,” Remus offers, nodding to the folded garment in his hands, “but you do what you like, I s'pose.”

Sirius takes hold of it and reaches in between the fold to pull them out, trilling lightly. “You think of everything.”

“I try,” Remus chimes, heading down the hall toward the kitchen.

Sirius finishes drying off, manoeuvres himself back into his romper, and leaves the bathroom, letting out a bird call in the hallway and getting twitter back from what sounds like the terrace. He heads straight there, spotting Tango hogging out on the kitchen floor for a cool spot to lay on, and gives him a side rub with his right foot on the way by. He heads through the screen door that’s been propped open by one of his shoes, thinks he may just leave it that way to air the flat out a little, and finds Remus hitting the pipe at the top of the table with the biggest schooner Sirius has in his entire kitchen sitting in front of him, filled to the absolute brim with water.

“Someone parched,” Sirius raises, taking the seat closest to him and diagonal from Remus.

Remus exhales a cloud, gesturing toward the gargantuan water glass with the pipe. “That, definitely, but Dorcas has my water bottle in her bag which isn’t here,” he tacks on.

“Fair enough, but gimme somma that,” Sirius bids, holding a hand out for it.

Remus goes to hand off the pipe to him, but Sirius shakes his head with a smirk, pointing past it for the schooner. “Oh,” he realizes, reaching for the handle of the glass.

“I mean, by all means, hand that over next,” Sirius mentions, taking hold of the Yuge schooner held out to him with both his hands.

“Mhm,” Remus hums, sneaking one more hit off the bowl while Sirius indulges in a grand gulp of water.

They exchange treasures from there, Remus taking the glass off of his hands before handing the pipe over to him and the lighter coming along a beat after that. Sirius flicks the top of the lighter over the bowl, leans in to take a hit off it, and lets the resulting cloud out of himself a few beats on from there, eyeing Remus's new hairdo with something called love behind his peepers.

"I'm so glad you listened to me," he raises, smiling away as he points up at Remus's head o' hair and, more specifically, the shorter sides he personally helped shave down along with the hair on the nape of his neck. "The sides are doing wonders to make that mop up top truly shine."

Remus smirks, ducking his head in thanks before voicing it as well. "Thank you," he forwards, and he sounds like he meant it, but this is Remus Lupin so his next addition is rather apt. "The cut's been helpful out there in the heat; more surface area to air out, less hair to weigh me down, I daresay I'm becoming a fan of it."

"Well, you would pick a practical anecdote to move right along to, but you should still know how much it suits you; it looks like you were always meant to have it like that," Sirius passes him, and only when Remus gives him a smile for it does Sirius move the topic along. “So, Dorcas and Pete were looking a little cozy back there, I thought."

“Mhm,” Remus hums, more melodious this time around, and the two of them break into similar shoulder shimmies before breaking and falling into a bout of snickers. "I mean, we were all over each other at different points throughout the parade and had to hold tight to each other just so we wouldn't lose each other in some of the more uproarious moments, but I do feel like I saw a lot of easy, natural movements going back and forth between them, and what I can't quite figure out is if they've already hooked up and just haven't told us yet or if they're just about to."

Sirius smirks, nodding quite a bit. "Mm, I agree; hard to say," he puts up. "She did look rather comfortable dragging him along to let us have our moment and Pete sure looked happy to follow, so my guess is we're coming up on it; the budding stages, you know."

Remus gives up a chime of a laugh down in his throat. "Well, you may have a point there," he lets him have.

"Love when you give me that," Sirius maintains, smiling as he lifts the pipe to his mouth again.

Remus has a glance over his shoulder and back toward the kitchen. “What do you think about bringing him along for a while?” he raises. "I saw a ton of dogs being trotted along on the way to you; could be nice for him, what do you think?"

Sirius pushes out a new cloud, nodding profusely. “I think it’s brilliant,” he returns, his voice coming out a bit coarse, but lively.

Remus looks back at him, his right eyebrow raising a notch above the brim of his sunglasses. “What’s the Gallagher policy on dogs?” he poses. "Similar enough to ours?"

Sirius puts out a hum, feeling rather nonplussed about it. “Yeah, I feel as long as he’s outside the railing he’ll be allowed to hang out with us,” he echoed.

"Well, if Oliver's on shift, then, yeah," Remus maintains, smirking there. "Don't see him saying no to you, somehow."

"That's exactly what I'm hoping for, so same here," Sirius affirms, glancing back over his shoulder and throwing his voice toward the open doorway. “Do you want to mingle?”

Tango answers the question wrapped in the form of excitable phonetics by scuttling off of his side and trotting out the doorway, jaw hanging open with his tongue on display for the world to see. “We could find you a little outfit, too,” Sirius raises, giving out an excitable trill at the very thought.

Tango seems joyful either way meanwhile Remus huffs a wan laugh. “What could we possibly put on him?” he raises, and Sirius lulls his head to the side with a pondering expression, thinks it over, and switches to giving Remus one stark look with a wry smile on, pulling a smirk out of him. “Oh, that bodes well.”

One moment Sirius is handing the pipe back to Remus and in the next, he's up and out of his chair, hearing a laugh from behind him as he traipses back inside. “It’s more of an accessory,” Sirius mentions, calling it over his shoulder.

He heads through the kitchen, living room, and down the hall through to the art/storage/whatever room, digging around in the chest of drawers in search of the wee top hat with a little rainbow ribbon around the brim he spotted and brought home ages ago now in hopes that he’d find something perfect to do with it one day. He swishes on back through the flat with it, heads back out onto the terrace, and takes to a knee, pulling the drawstring down to fit it underneath Tango’s chin before popping the hat on his head.

He looks to Remus with a bright air of curiosity as to what he thinks of it, but the man’s busy with the pipe and pulling a righteous toke off of it at the moment, so he waits until Remus scans the scene and immediately bursts his haul out of his chest, falling into a half-coughing, half-laughing fit.

“Where did you find that?” he demands; once he can, that is.

“A magician never shares his secrets,” Sirius gives sagely, breathing in long before going ahead and telling him anyway. “At this craft store, like, a year ago? Somewhere around there.”

Remus has a more extensive look over the little top hat perched on Tango’s head. “You know who’d look great with this on?” he raises.

Sirius takes in an overwhelmed breath, freezing with his hands up in front of him. “Our Ludwig, who art in heaven?” he throws up.

“The one and the same,” Remus affirms, smiling wryly as he gives Tango’s ruff a pat. “After this one gets his use out of it, ‘course.”

“Y’know, you’ve really warmed to him and I do love that,” Sirius forwards.

“The dog or the mannequin?” Remus checks.

“Both, but I meant Ludwig,” Sirius clarifies, shifting to sit cross-legged to give his knees a break from the wood flooring of the terrace.

“I think it's more that, I've come to terms with the fact that he’s just another forever-fixture round this place," Remus says for it, ever a ponderer. "Much like the fish clock and ‘Mama’s Kitchen.’"

“In other words, you’re simply used to him by now,” Sirius translates.

“Getting there, yeah; he still spooks me when I forget there's a reason for the looming shadow in the living room while I'm stumbling to the loo in the wee hours of the morning, but it's less and less these days,” Remus forwards, holding up the pipe. “Want another before we go?”

Sirius has himself a hit right where he's sitting, passes it back while he holds in his lungful, and eventually propels the smoke out the right side of his face and away from Tango, who still looks rather unimpressed even with Sirius’s efforts. “I think he’s straight edge,” he whispers.

“You can’t sit with us,” Remus sends the dog, taking on an octave that’s at least nine times higher than his typical register and is perhaps the funniest impression of Gretchen Wieners that Sirius has had the pleasure of hearing (and he's heard a lot of those).

Sirius turns his gape/grin toward Remus’s lopsided smile. “That’s it, this is officially the Pride I’ve ever had,” he deems it.

Remus’s smile evens out into a full grin. “Yeah?” he coaxes.

“After that impression, fuck yeah, it is,” Sirius returns. “And, to make matters even better, you’re here for this one.”

Remus’s smile turns into one of the charmed variety before he leans over the arm of the deck chair he’s in, leaning both down and in closer to Sirius to get a smooch in, but Tango sticks his snooter right in between them and winds up winning himself a double smooch out of it, and then Remus has to help Sirius out of his chair because he’s laughing too fucking hard to manage it by himself.

Remus heads off to deal with putting the recreational paraphernalia back in the bedroom while Sirius hypes the dog up with a round of claps and leads him through the flat, heading toward the hook Tango's lead typically hangs from and stooping to clip it to his collar. Remus shows up in the doorway of Sirius’s room in due time, captured perfectly in the frame of the doorway like Remus is the subject of a life-size painting — but that could also be the combination of tequila and pot talking.

“Oh shit, the curler,” Remus attests, stopping short and bending to pick it up off the floor by the bureau.

Sirius sends him a mighty pfft. “Almost forgot about that.”

Remus sets the curler back down on the bureau and wanders out into the hall, having himself an observant look around the entryway. “Oh, hold on,” he bids, coming alive and heading back up the hall. “I’ll get him a water bottle to bring with us.”

Sirius would've simply asked for water at the pub, but he's fine with that arrangement and he's not planning on going anywhere without Remus as is, so he's happy to just hang back by the front door and flutter the fingers on his right hand over Tango’s snout while the dog goes absolutely nuts about nipping at them. Remus turns up again with a plastic bottle he’s repurposed for Tango’s cause and slips it into the back right pocket of his trousers, leaving the neck and cap of the bottle poking out of it as he moves ahead of Sirius to get at the door handle.

“What a look,” Sirius forwards, smirking out the door after him.

“Well, it’s the only option I have,” Remus defends.

“You have zero hands, yes,” Sirius echoes, shutting the door behind them.

They descend the stairs at different speeds, Remus going down by a leisurely clip while Sirius pushes on ahead and runs down with Tango moving fast at his right side, straight gunning to get out into the wild.

Sirius pushes the lobby door open, letting Tango trot on through it, and pulls back on the lead to keep him from getting too far ahead while he glances over his shoulder, watching Remus head down the last few steps a little quicker to help Sirius’s efforts in chivalry not feel entirely moot.

“Why, thank you,” Remus offers, heading through the doorway at a near-glide.

Sirius lets the lobby door fall shut behind them for he gets the same hand clasped in with Remus’s, where he's then led across the sidewalk and toward the pedestrian-heavy road, but that might be Remus's way of making the most of this festival-inspired street walking while they indeed still have it. Sirius doesn’t mind what path they take back, finding himself quite happy about being caught between his man on one side of him and his veritable son on the other, and it's those details that propel him along at an even more easy, breezy, beautiful clip than earlier.

Lily spots them coming first and waves down Remus specifically, but Sirius can’t be put off about getting the proverbial shaft when in all fairness, he did go and steal Remus away from the group near-immediately to get himself some of that actual shaft, so he gives Remus’s hand a parting squeeze and humbly lets go of it. Remus dutifully heads up and through the terrace gate, moving toward the empty seat between Lily and Dorcas, while Sirius takes to skirting Tango around outside of the railing, wherein he finds that James has not only stolen his corner spot in his absence but Peter's gone and taken James's prior spot, and that really just leaves one open spot for him to nab and that’s a seat sandwiched right between Pete and Andrew.

Sirius sidles into James and Peter’s peripherals on the far side of the gate, but he isn’t even able to be pithy about the game of musical chairs that went on in their absence when both boys erupt into hoots and hollers for the appearance of their canine buddy. Instead, he winds up smirking despite himself for all the cooing as he ties Tango’s lead to the railing, and then James goes and makes the situation better by gesturing toward the brand-new margarita sitting pretty in front of the only vacant spot at the table; he supposes they’re even, then.

Sirius gives a half-curtsy in thanks, but looks down at the poor pooch beside him panting away and thinks he best set him up for success first. “I’m gonna see if I can swindle him a dish first,” he imparts, scaling back around the railing to get up onto the terrace and heading in through the pub’s wide-open windowfront.

He heads in between two tables nearest to the entrance, skirting over to the right to go around two meanderers hanging about, and pauses short as he spots a waitress coming in hot with a drink tray and most likely headed for the terrace, letting her go first and continuing to do a fair amount of acrobatics to get through the front section of the pub and over toward the bar. He strolls up to it, rests his arms on the counter not far from where Oliver’s pouring a whole round of shots into a row of glasses on a tray, and while he plans on waiting until he looks up to mention anything, Oliver does just that only mere beats after Sirius turned up there, pausing his work by holding the tequila bottle in his hand on an upward tilt.

“Just need a bowl or dish dense enough to feed my dog some water out of when you get a sec,” he puts up, pitching it over the Fitz and the Tantrums track playing through the speaker overhead.

Sirius would like it to be known that he’d have been A-OK with waiting until the tray of shots had been finished pouring, but Oliver goes ahead and sets the bottle down on the bar, heading through the kitchen doors and into the back without too much else. Sirius shrugs it off, bit late to do much about that now, and drums his fingers on the bar as 'I Just Wanna Shine' slides into the second verse, looking up when Oliver sticks his head out the kitchen doors and holds up a soup bowl quizzically.

“Yeah, that’ll do,” Sirius nods.

Oliver walks it over, sliding it across the bar to him. “When'd you get a dog?”

Sirius glows like the rightful dog dad he is. “Just this May,” he supplies, reaching in past the lapel of his romper to wrangle his mobile out of the secret pocket in the lining. “Want to see him?”

Oliver nods toward his mobile in affirmation, garnering Sirius to thumb back through his gallery for a good snap of Tango and picking one where the dog’s quality snooter is very much on display. “Now, he’s much more striking in person, of course, but this’ll do for now,” he maintains, turning his screen toward him.

Oliver moves his gaze from him to flicker it over the screen before doing a triple take. “That’s not real,” he insists, quite convinced by the tone of it.

“Oh, but he is,” Sirius assures. “He’s out front if you want to come and see for yourself.”

“I’ll poke my head out on break and see if you’re still around,” Oliver imparts, picking the tequila bottle back up before pointing at Sirius with the neck of it. “Just don’t let him on the terrace or we’ll get dinged.”

“He’s tied to the outside of the railing,” Sirius puts up, gesturing quizzically with his hands.

“Then that’s fine,” Oliver deems it.

“Sweet deal,” Sirius calls it, picking up the bowl and waggling it in thanks.

“Just the bowl, then?” Oliver asks, a half-smile on now.

“Yeah, James had me covered before I even turned up,” Sirius relays, waving it off. “Margarita night; you know how it is.”

“And I do,” Oliver echoes, and he does, mhm.

“Thanks again,” Sirius chimes, sending it over his shoulder as he commences his journey back out of the pub.

He heads up by the right-hand side of the table and sets his right hand on Remus’s left shoulder to brace himself as he reaches in between him and Lily to get at the surface of it. “‘Scusie,” he offers for his reach, plucking Tango’s water bottle off of the table where Remus set it and leaving a quick kiss on top of his head because he can.

Remus leans his head back to aim a prize-winning smile up at him while fully engaged in conversation, giving Sirius a little extra something to walk with as he heads back out through the terrace gate and sets the bowl down by Tango’s feet, pouring the water up to the brim and giving Tango’s head a ruffle before simply leaving the bottle on the table between James and Pete for now. With that out of the way, it’s officially time to hit Margaritaville again as Sirius heads for his new seat, plopping himself down in it and taking a grand sip off his translucent dick straw before meeting Andrew’s gaze sidelong.

Andrew stirs his own phallic-inspired sipper sitting in the veritable fishbowl of a daiquiri he's got in front of him, humming thoughtfully with a smirk on. “He seeing anyone?” he bids, nodding his head across the table, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he'd been subtle about it or not when Remus is rather caught up with the lasses over there to have seen or heard it.

Sirius breaks into a laugh, sliding his right foot over on the ground to give Andrew’s left ankle the boot. “Fuck yeah, he is,” he returns lively.

“How’d you land him?” Andrew raises.

Sirius smacks his lips once. “Sheer, dumb luck,” he calls it.

Andrew smirks, letting him have that, and goes for another sip of his drink, sitting back in his chair once he’s done with it. “You look happy,” he supplies, smirking again as Sirius gives a light hum in prompt for it, only this time Andrew lifts a hand while he scrunches his nose up with it. “I mean, you did vault the railing just to get over to the street quicker and then took to a skip along the road to get to him, so it's not like I'm wrong about that.”

Sirius definitely feels a little rouge around the vicinity of his cheeks, but a spade’s a spade. “I really did, didn’t I.”

“A lil’ skip and hop,” Andrew affirms, doing a wee impression of a pair of speedy legs with his right middle and forefinger.

Sirius ducks his head through a wry laugh, sitting back in his chair and taking his right drink with him. “He’s inspiring that way, what can I say?” he offers, shrugging his shoulders evasively before a new sip.

Just there, Lily and Dorcas erupt into pink-cheeked guffaws over something Remus most definitely said on the other end of the table, and Sirius so wishes he’d caught what pulled that reaction out of the girls when it must have been magnifique with the way they’re clutching at the table. “Oh, good, he’s funny, too,” Andrew offers dryly, sending Sirius a half-smile to land it well.

“Oh, you just wait,” he instils. "When he really unwinds, you won’t be able to contend with it.”

“Mm?” Andrew goads, having another sip off his drink.

“Oh, trust me,” Sirius returns. “You have to look out for this little smile he does, like this—” he gives it a college try, “—when you see that, you’d best just hope you're not nursing a mouthful of drink at the time or you’ll be sending it right back out; his skill at observational comedy alone has had me choking and rendered useless too many times.”

“God, you're gone for him,” Andrew says of it.

“I really am,” Sirius insists.

He perks up in his seat right quick as the speakers out on the terrace proudly boast the opening bars of 'Bad Romance,' signalling that it’s most definitely playing inside where the dance floor is and Sirius, frankly, is not. He looks across the table just as Lily turns her head to give him one fierce Look and next moment, they’re both taking their drinks with them as they lift out of their seats and manoeuvre themselves both around and in between all the chairs scattered about and by the time Sirius has made it to the end of the table, it appears both Dorcas and Andrew are also tripping over themselves and their chairs to answer Gaga’s call.

Sirius alone takes a quick detour, making a beeline for Remus, who seems quite happy where he is for the most part even if his flank has cheerfully ditched the table, and leans in to leave a smooch on his lips, muttering a quick ‘back in a bit' against them.

Remus gives him a quick kiss in return before waving him right off. “Get in there,” he instructs, and Sirius cannot deal with how fucking easy it can so often be.

Remus slips into Dorcas’s vacated spot and sits across from the boys, beckoning Renée to scoot down from her spot at the outer corner of the table, and with that, Sirius feels better about rightfully lampooning himself into the pub, drink in hand as he goes off in search of his dance partners.

The next while consists of more musical chair numbers as some members of the group stay back and hunker down at their quality spot out front while others pop inside to dance it out to a particular bop, and in one of those instances, Lily, Pete, Dorcas, and Renée ditch the table in favour of the dance floor, leaving just James, Remus, Sirius, and Andrew of all possible combinations left to guard it.

The mere presence of James does help to filter the first leg of the conversation, but this much must be said for the other leg of it; Remus surprises Sirius on the regular, just a mere fact of life on its own, but today is no exception. Frankly put, this arrangement could've had every potential in the world for being woefully uncomfortable for everyone involved to differing degrees, but Remus, all too kind even in an awkward situation, engages Andrew by lobbing questions his way about everything to do with how he planned, curated, and choreographed the entire spectacle he got to see so many little snapshots of for the whole of June and then some as Sirius practiced his arse off before getting to see the final picture.

As a result of Remus's efforts, Sirius cannot help feeling that much more enamoured by the boy, thrilled to get to watch him be a genuinely sweet bloke at heart, and the topic at hand is the best fit for Andrew, always a fan of talking in general but particularly about his Zumba endeavours, so that has him engaging Remus right on back, like he should.

Oliver turns up by the table not long later, a determined look about him, and Sirius aims to look incredibly fine with being in the immediate vicinity of Remus and two other men he's also shagged senseless.

“Alright, where is he?” Oliver demands.

Sirius grins from the corner spot, lifting his right hand and fluttering to the massive pooch just on the other side of the railing as if the man wouldn’t have spotted him any time soon. Oliver heads out of the terrace via the open door in the gate, goes around onto the street, and weaves in between scores of people going to and fro to get to Tango, taking to a knee and showering him with pets as anyone should want to do.

“How old is he?” he inquires, holding Tango’s chin underneath his hands like it’s solid gold.

“He's two,” Sirius supplies, bright as a summer’s day on the topic of his lovable son. “He’s only going to get bigger from here, and I cannot wait until I have to struggle to pick him up.”

“You can pick him up now?” Oliver raises.

“If he’s sober,” Remus puts in, giving Sirius an idle look of warning.

“I wasn’t going to demonstrate it right this second,” Sirius defends.

“Good, you will not succeed,” Remus says of it.

Sirius aims a huff at him and pointedly turns his head away. “You've got good timing; I was just about to run him home,” he forwards.

“All this a bit much for him?” Oliver guesses, gesturing around at the festivities still raging on.

“Well, all sorts of strange people keep running up to love him down,” Sirius offers, “which would be a lot, in fairness.”

Oliver gives out a noise of faux offense, rising to his feet and giving Tango a parting pat on his head. “Just as well, I should head back,” he maintains, dusting off the front of his shirt for any stray dog hairs. “It’s nuts in there.”

“The tips better be worth all this, hm,” Sirius puts in.

“Oh, they are, and that’s all I’m holding onto,” Oliver insists, heading back around the terrace railing with a quick wave.

Sirius trades him a salute, rejoins the table to find Remus and Andrew already a fair way into a conversation, and decides he may as well not try to catch up with it, choosing instead to lean in a little to the left and hook his chin over Remus’s right shoulder. “I’m just going to run him back,” he slips in, tossing his right thumb toward the pooch. “You good here?”

Remus stops mid-sentence and turns his head toward him, nodding for it. “Yeah, I'm great."

“Back soon,” Sirius chimes, leaning into the table to drain the lasts of the margarita he’s currently on and pushing his chair back from it.

He keeps his word, jauntily walking Tango back to the flat wherein he showers his bowl in kibble, gives him two treats because he’s feeling generous today, and heads back out into the fray, hoping and halfway praying that he hasn’t missed any devastatingly good tunes in his short time away. He comes up upon the storefront again and finds even more musical chairs have been played in his absence; this time around, Lily, Dorcas, and Renee are at the table while not a single male member of the troupe is anywhere to be seen.

“Where’d the lads go?” Sirius bids, standing at the head of the table with frank perplexity.

"Smoke a joint,” Dorcas passes along.

“Those bitches,” Sirius pronounces, hands at his hips.

He swivels on his heel, heading inside to order himself another fishbowl-sized margarita from Oliver. He tries it on the way back, finds that he’s easily been given a triple, and shudders for it, giving out a reactive whoop that gets fully swallowed up by the beat playing throughout the place. He manoeuvres himself through the hordes of people between him and the terrace, holding his drink tightly as he aims to keep a fair berth around him and avoid wearing his newly acquired drink, but has to stop quickly and back up a step to avoid running headlong into a bloke that’s very suddenly in his path.

The bloke ahead of him clues into the fact that he’s almost stepped back and caused a traffic jam, turning on his heel to get a glimpse of the near-trainwreck. “Well, shit,” he offers, brightening with recognition.

Sirius can’t say he has a clue what this one's name is anymore — something with a G, that much he’s about eighty-two percent sure of, but he does remember a few other things about him that he’d rather not get in-between tonight. “Hey, hey,” he greets, ducking his head to take a big ol’ swig off his drink for the purposes of survival and coming back up focused on pretending he’s at work. “Come here often?”

“No, first time,” Greg (?) returns. “What about you?”

“Oh, this is my home base,” Sirius maintains. “You still with—”

Sirius pretends he simply cut off due to the volume of the music echoing around them. “Yeah, sure am,” Garrett (?) nods, successfully filling in Sirius’s blank with no real hitch. “Eight years next month.”

Fuck,” Sirius enunciates, flickering his gaze past him toward the front window just in time to catch Remus wandering in through it with Peter and James in tow, and his heart rate picks right up. “That’s nuts; literally congrats.”

“Yeah, he’s just finishing work now so he’ll be coming down soon,” George (?) mentions.

“Oh, well, great that he can still make it for some of the festivities,” Sirius insists, promptly avoiding the leer he can feel trained on him by internally panicking and externally remaining calm while attempting to send a telepathic signal for Remus to meet his eye.

Either telepathy is something to turn into a future career of his or Remus simply spots him just then, but Sirius’ll take it, whatever the reasoning. He smiles just tightly enough to send a message, he sure hopes, and breathes easier as Remus Jean Lupin wanders right over, effectively swooping in on his right and giving his arm a light tug. “Smoke?” he asks, smiling at him.

Sirius nods eagerly, folds his arm in to tap Remus’s in supreme thanks, and flickers his gaze back to Giuseppe — whoever, doesn’t matter — before giving him an easy wave. “Good seeing you, mmm-bye,” he elongates, keeping a solid hold on both Remus and his drink as they head for the terrace, where he leans in to speak close to Remus’s ear. “Perfection, you are.”

Remus waves him off for it, stepping out onto the terrace floor. “I figured it had to be bad when I saw your work smile on,” he offers.

“Smart lad,” Sirius calls him. “I could use a puff, though.”

“I figured that, too,” Remus supplies, tugging him along, and while the two of them do have to go along one-by-one to fit between the tables and chairs and people all strewn about, Sirius appreciates that Remus keeps hold of his hand the whole way through the bustle.

Sirius looks down at the drink in his hand and back up again as Remus gets to the terrace gate. “How far out do you think I can get with this?” he raises, swirling his glass for effect.

“Well, don’t wave it around in the air and you’ll probably get away with it,” Remus supplies him, tugging through the opening in the gate.

“There go my plans,” Sirius trades him, following him out and past the main door to get to the alley just beside the pub.

Sirius leans his back on the brick wall and slides down it to have a seat before working his pack out of his pocket. Remus joins him on the ground, extends his legs out ahead of him before crossing them at the ankle, and leans his head against the wall, lulling his head to the side to look at Sirius, who’s only just lighting up.

He waits until Sirius is finished puffing it alight to ask any follow-up questions, which really just strengthens his spot on Sirius’s list of favourite people on the planet. “What’s the story there?” he raises.

“I,” Sirius elongates, pausing to shoot his haul out ahead of him and extending his legs out ahead of him to mirror Remus's, “was a guest star in his and his husband's arrangement.”

Remus’s expression clears off before a ghost of a smile tugs at his lips. “That, was not the answer I was expecting," he puts down.

“I contain multitudes,” Sirius summarizes, holding the cigarette up for Remus to take if he wants it. “Cannot tell you what his name is; starts with a G, I think, and I don't remember his husband's name at all so it wasn’t a life-altering experience, in case you were wondering.”

Remus takes hold of it, tapping on it gently. “Well, he clearly remembered you, so,” he raises, weighing his hands. “Must have been a good time.”

“I mean, everybody came,” Sirius offers, lifting his shoulders once.

Remus shoots his haul out in three quick bursts, turning his head to smush his face against Sirius's right shoulder. “Well, thank Cunt for that,” he extends, straightening up again, his shoulders shaking profusely and even this has easy energy to it; Sirius can’t describe the feeling of feeling completely comfortable and not very much at all in the same go.

He trains his gaze on the brick wall across the alley from them and takes in a long breath. “I have had relations with four people inside this very pub, and number five’s on his way,” he puts up.

There’s a frank few beats of silence where Remus's brow is just furrowed in thought. “Wait, who’s number five?” he bids, under his breath.

“The husband,” Sirius provides, having an idle sip off his straw.

Remus breathes in once. “Oh,” he accepts, nodding his head with a half-frown on.

Sirius eyes him sidelong and shakes his head clear. “Sorry, it’s been a weird day."

“Has it?” Remus raises, budging Sirius’s right arm with his left one. "You've been so lively, I didn't know."

“Well, no, it's been brilliant for the most part,” Sirius offers him, pausing for a good old-fashioned sigh. “It’s just, I saw a few more on the way here: it's like, nine blokes altogether, and seeing so many on your list on the same day is a bit of a trip, I'll just say that.”

“I,” Remus allows, passing the cigarette back to him, “suppose I can only imagine.”

Sirius takes it back and has a haul off of it, smiling weakly for the voucher. “Has it been weird for you?” he asks, budging Remus’s left arm with his right one.

Remus is a little too quick to answer. “No, mm mm,” he declines, and with a head shake to boot.

“Mhm,” Sirius returns him, eyes lidded as he daintily flicks the ash off of his cigarette.

Remus pushes a meager breath through his nose, frowning again. “It has been, a bit,” he confesses, "but that's just me, Sirius—"

“Was that so hard?” Sirius raises. “I can handle a little truth now and again, but I can’t always tell with you; sometimes, you’re really, really difficult to read and if that back there was you rising to the occasion, then you ought to get a Bafta 'cause nobody would have been able to tell you were uncomfortable.”

Remus huffs gently, averting his gaze to the brick wall across from them. “It’s your day, Sirius,” he implores. “I knew we’d be at Gallagher's so I was prepared for Oliver to be around, I had a feeling Andrew would be invited along, then they were both there at the same time, and at least James was still bumbling around so it wasn’t as uncomfortable as it could have been, but what else can I do but rise above it; I have to, don’t I?”

“Well, you don’t,” Sirius points out, going for a haul. "Not really."

Remus looks back at him again, his expression quite plain. “What was I going to do, rip my shirt open and fight the both of them right there at the table?”

“I fucking wish you would,” Sirius returns, a wry smile on around his cigarette.

“Well, I’m sorry I’ll be disappointing you more, then,” Remus says for it. “Popping people willy-nilly just isn’t my style.”

“I’m just saying, it’s fair if you find it weird,” Sirius insists. “I certainly had a hoe phase, as they say.”

Remus snorts. “Had.”

Oi,” Sirius sends him, reaching with his free hand to jab him in the side. “I’m reflecting on my slutty, slutty ways, you shit.”

“I’m teasing,” Remus implores gently, batting at Sirius’s hand once before taking hold of it altogether and holding theirs together in his lap. “You’re usually much better at knowing your audience than this, but I have to assume that's the margaritas talking.”

“Hm?” Sirius probes.

Remus sends him a sidelong squint. “Well, I don’t know if you remember, but we did ditch everyone to run off and have sex on your bureau just a few hours ago,” he mentions.

"Oh, no, I remember that," Sirius insists. "I've got a bit of a limp going on from that escapade."

"I noticed," Remus quips. “Do you think I’m a hoe, then?”

Sirius eyes him once. “I mean, yeah,” he attests, smirking around the end of his cigarette.

Remus huffs out a laugh, hanging his head with a quiet smile on and pulling a new breath in through his nose. “Good thing we ended up together, then, hm,” he offers plainly.

“Honestly,” Sirius echoes, holding the cigarette up for him. “Just a coupla' hoes watching the sun go down, us.”

Remus smirks as he takes hold of it. “The sun went down an hour ago,” he mentions.

“It’s a figure of speech, Remus,” Sirius sends him sweetly.

“Is it?” Remus raises sceptically. Sirius gives a light trill in amusement, but silence falls over them while Remus has a drag off of the cigarette and it only cuts off once he hands it back to him. “So what?”

“Hm?” Sirius hums, pausing with the cigarette back between his lips.

“So what?” Remus repeats, more concrete this time. “You know who doesn’t mind all that?”

Sirius looks left then right. “No,” he probes.

“Me,” Remus answers, lifting his shoulders once to pair with it.

Sirius moves his frown from left to right. “You mind a bit,” he says of it. “You just admitted that, and I’ve seen your double-blinks after I've told a tale of my youth.”

“Well, you do have some bamboozling ones up your sleeve, and sometimes you drop them without warning; this time, I asked so it's on me,” Remus trades him, defending the both of them in one go, the slugger. “I really hope you know that it’s never been ‘Why’s he such a hoe?' for me; not once have I thought that.”

Sirius takes on an imploring frown as he works to let that anecdote sink in. “No?” he checks, since they’re here. “Not even in the early days, when the list just kept getting longer and longer?”

“Have you seen yourself?” Remus returns, a smile tugging at his lips. “You're a fucking Adonis, remember? I figured you got laid a lot, Sirius.”

Sirius puts out an amused trill, shooting his haul out in a few fast gusts. “I didn’t do half bad,” he allows.

“Well, can we call it that instead of calling you a hoe?” Remus bids him.

Sirius pushes his next haul out with a sigh, turning away to butch it out on the ground on his left. “I know you, though,” he insists. “It's probably spun you out; a lot more than you’re letting on right now, I think.”

“It used to spin me out more,” Remus fesses, bringing Sirius his head back toward him right quick. “Not because of anything you did and not because of a number, but because I’d stack myself up against whoever it was, wonder why you were even hanging around with me, and that was before we were even together; once that happened, I wasn’t sure how I was stacking up to the others, and I still wonder that sometimes. It's less often, much less so, but it happens.”

Sirius shakes his head with a huff. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you you’re a thousand times cooler than any of them were,” he returns him.

Remus pushes a fumed breath out of his nose. “I thought you were the one who needed to be brought back to Earth, not me,” he trades him, giving him an imploring look. “I love you, but you are sitting in an alleyway, on Pride of all nights, holding onto a margarita and moping about all the sex you used to have to your current boyfriend; I'm actually having a good time here.”

“Yeah, ‘cause you weren't out there swallowing half the neighbourhood,” Sirius counters.

Remus reaches his right hand past him, tapping Sirius’s left cheek and effectively turning his face toward his own. “You’re OK,” he stresses, holding him steady. “Say it for me.”

Sirius feels the tightness in his chest pull until he’s just wilted there beside him. “I’m OK,” he echoes, kneading Remus’s hand with his cheek.

Remus leans in, pressing his lips to Sirius’s in a warm kiss that acts as a cementation of the claim, and Sirius lets his breath out through his nose as it ends, staring at Remus like he’s got all the answers to his questions, and so often, he really does know where to lay down the law and where not to.

“What are you doing after this?” Sirius bids, lifting his drink to sip off of and shuddering at the striking taste of it; this is probably the last one for a while.

Remus hums to ponder. “Well, I think I'd better head out, go hang out with the cat,” he gives him. “I stopped in before coming to yours and gave her decidedly too much food to tie her over, but I shouldn’t hang around here too much longer.”

Sirius hums in acceptance. “Fair enough,” he offers him. “Did you have fun?”

Remus blinks twice. “I just told you I did,” he smirks, eyeing him pointedly. “You’re quite pissed.”

“I’ve had a lot of tequila, sweetie,” Sirius returns him.

“And boy, do I know that,” Remus gets him, and Sirius is fucking living with all this feisty-Remus he’s getting tonight.

“Umm, who decided to take a little walk and suck down a blunt while I wasn’t around, hm?” Sirius raises it. “Hm, hm, hm?”

“We came right here and all tried flagging you down on your way by, but you didn’t see or hear us,” Remus returns him. “Point is, I've had loads of fun; don't you worry about me.”

“Good,” Sirius returns at once. “It wasn’t just my day, you know.”

Remus takes in a short breath through his nose, smiling for him. “I know,” he gives him. “Do you want to come to mine? There’s more pot there.”

“You’ll also be there,” Sirius clarifies, smiling around his straw. "That’s sort of the main draw."

“That, and the cat,” Remus raises it.

“Her too, mhm,” Sirius echoes. “Can we go soon? I'm all good here, I think.”

Remus looks up, down, and back at him. “Yeah, OK,” he nods, shrugging pleasantly. “You mean right now, or?”

Sirius swirls the bit he has left in his glass. “Just having one for the road,” he says for it, reaching behind him to brace the wall as he works on getting up. “And, I figure it’d be polite to say bye, too—”

“Oh, you just hold on,” Remus bids, batting at Sirius’s efforts to get off the ground and moving to his feet much quicker than him.

Sirius ducks his head through a laugh, lifting his free hand for aid, and Remus tugs him up and onto his feet. He lifts himself up the rest of the way and holds his cigarette to Remus in offering, who takes it and has a few parting hauls off of it before he, too, is quite done with it. They turn the corner, strolling arm-in-arm while Sirius tries to make quicker work of his drink, but he may just have to ditch it; she's a strong one.

They get to the storefront as the devastatingly familiar opening licks of 'Whataya Want From Me' play out over the speakers out front and the two of them lock eyes at once. “After this?” Sirius asks.

“Absolutely,” Remus attests, and with that decided, the two of them dart up through the terrace and into the pub with James suddenly hot on their heels, and then they're all weaving through the crowd and reuniting themselves with Lily and Dorcas to for the privilege of closing the night out with such a passionate number.

 

--

 

It takes fortitude, strength, and a dash of pure will and drive each, but Sirius does finally manage to zip his suitcase shut. It definitely also took sitting on the thing to get it to flatten out enough for the zipper to move properly, so go ahead and tack 'manhandling' onto the aforementioned list; there was some of that, too.

Sirius pushes a flyaway hair out of his face, gives out a breath of relief, and ambles off of the suitcase and back onto his feet, deeming his few-day venture in packing tres finit. He leaves his suitcase where it is, lets himself back into his bedroom side of his room through the Sirius-sized gap he left with the partition, and has a long glance over the bed, looking for the next thing to make right since he’s obviously on a roll.

He tidies the bed a little since that’s pretty well the first thing he knows he can do, at least. He pulls their notebook off of it, stows the pen he used to scribble down notes with inside the spiral-bound coil of the book, and brings it over to his nightstand, slipping it into the drawer quietly to avoid waking the beauty from his much-needed slumber. He stands up next to the bed, pulls the covers back from the foot of it, and lifts them over Remus’s shoulders, pausing to breathe in long and have himself a longer look at the head o’ curls poking out from under the covers once they're secured. He can’t really get much of a glimpse of Remus’s face when that's pressed down against his pillow with the rest of his body lying in a front-facing sprawl on his usual side of the bed, but that detail both brings him pause and pulls a smirk out of him in one go. Sirius would happily let Remus take up the entire bed if he so chose to, but he still keeps to his side of the bed even after a right knockout of a cluster; this is the sort of boy he won himself and it’s not a bad prize at all.

Sirius scoots Remus's face a little to the side, liking it more when his face isn't so flat on the pillow, and lifts his gaze from there, noting that the water glass he left for him an hour ago now has gone down to the halfway mark and that both the painkiller and 5mg capsule of melatonin that he left out for Remus are nowhere to be seen. It all adds up to a good sign when they must mean that Remus had to have moved at some point in the last little bit while Sirius had been going about the place gathering his various items for packing and must've knocked off again before Sirius returned to start tackling the bounty for his suitcase. Sirius keeps his footsteps light as he rounds the bed to the other side of it, plucks the glass off of Remus’s nightstand, and sets off for the kitchen to refill it, wanting Remus's next indulgence to be fresh and new.

He lets the tap run for a little over a minute before he fills it and goes for the freezebox, popping two cherry-shaped cubes from the overall cherry-shaped tray into the glass for the sake of keeping it cooler for longer. He walks the glass back through the flat, leaves it on the nightstand for him, and has another look over Remus’s front-facing sprawl, pulling his mobile out of the back-right pocket of his jeans, but a predicament unfolds as he flickers his gaze over the time. Sirius himself is about two hours out from banking his last shift at the company until the end of time, while Remus starts his regular and ongoing closing shift at about the same time as Sirius does, but on the other side of the city. He could and would potentially drive Remus over to his place to wait out the downtime he’d have before his shift and still have time to make it back in time for his own, but they’d have to leave sooner than later and sooner isn’t looking plausible with Remus down for the count.

Sirius takes in a quiet breath through his nose, turns for the door with his mobile in his hand, and starts dialling for Lily as he gets into the hall. He shuts his bedroom door behind him, walks up the hall toward the living room, and steps over Tango’s bulk to get into the greater room as the exact end of the hallway is apparently the pooch’s idea of a prime place to hog out.

He knows he can’t call out on Remus’s behalf without getting himself into some trouble, but if he could make way for the idea of the boss allowing Remus the chance to come in a little later than scheduled and win him a little more time to rest up, that would more put him in the category of good trouble, and that, Sirius can live with.

The dial tone cuts off after the third ring. “Hold on, I’m on the store phone,” she tells him, her voice coming through in a pronounced whisper.

“OK,” Sirius whisps back, pulling a quick, throaty laugh out of Lily before she’s back to her previous call.

Sirius heads for the couch, taking to a frontward sprawl across the couch to wait there until Lily is no longer occupied. “OK, sorry,” she extends, a good minute later. “What’s happening?”

Sirius has to admit there’s something to her knowing that if he’s calling in the middle of the workday, something must be up. “He’s coming off a really rough one,” he maintains, pushing himself onto his back instead. “Has quite the hangover—”

“Wait, what?” Lily cuts in. “I thought he wasn’t allowed to drink.”

“No, he isn’t,” Sirius allows, settling back in with his free arm behind his head as a makeshift pillow. “Or, well, he shouldn’t so he doesn’t, but I meant a migraine hangover; that’s my bad, wasn't thinking of my audience.”

Beat. “Is it anything like your regular hangover?” she bids.

Sirius hums for it. “I mean, he doesn't tend to move much, he's usually a bit woozy, and if he tried, he wouldn’t be able to stand on his feet for too long without getting dizzy, so, yeah, kind of,” he offers her. “You’ve seen him in it, actually; when we were at his flat, he had one then."

Lily gives up a note of understanding. "Poor thing was so lethargic," she offers.

"Mhm, usually is off of one," Sirius echoes. "This one hit harder than the work cluster did, though, so he's really fucking beat at this point and I know he won’t want me to call out for him altogether because he’ll bounce back soon enough, but I don’t know that it’s fair or even realistic to expect him to come in for two; just thought I'd let you know.”

“OK, that's fine,” Lily accepts, and Sirius can almost hear her thinking from a distance. “Well, I mean, look; if you wanted to send him in for five, I wouldn't scream about it.”

Sirius does a blink/reel hybrid. “Oh?” he raises, right bamboozled. “Five, madame?”

“It's a good day for it, honestly; we’ve a full house here,” Lily says for it. “I’ll be on until at least four, maybe later knowing how things happen and also knowing me, so please do tell him that he wouldn't be putting anyone out if he came in then because we both know that'll be the first thing he thinks.”

“That’s exactly what I was planning on telling him, but I’m glad I’ve got the go-ahead,” Sirius puts up, wearing a grin he has a feeling Lily rather knows is there.

“Give him my love, please,” she imparts.

“I will,” Sirius says, lifting himself off of the couch with a heave. “Thanks again, hey?”

“You never did say it, so the ‘again’ doesn’t really apply—”

Sirius sends a round of nonsensical noises into the receiver before pressing to end the call, pocketing his mobile and heading back to his room to relay the good news. He crawls up the middle of the bed, plants himself down on Remus's left, and curls in to face him on his side, tapping Remus’s shoulder in a steady, one-note beat until the boy stirs.

He hums a bleary note, lifts his head off of the pillow, and turns his head around on it to face it toward him, pushing his sleep mask up higher on his forehead and peeking his good eye open with an unimpressed expression on display, and that, Sirius can’t possibly avoid smirking over, come now; he's too cute for that.

“Sorry, but I’ve fun news,” he raises, keeping his voice at a conscious whisper. “You may even like it.”

“Mm?” Remus probes.

“Well, your start time has been cut down to five,” Sirius mentions, “and while that means I can’t drive you in anymore, it'll give you more time to sleep it off?”

And there, Sirius receives irrefutable evidence that Remus must definitely be knackered if all he gets for that is a bunch of blinks, a stark hum, and a faceplant back down on the pillow.

Sirius smirks a little more just for that. “I’ll set an alarm, OK?” he tacks on, leaning his right arm over Remus's body and pulling that one's mobile off of the nightstand.

He sets one for a time he’s pretty sure Remus would agree with and tacks on another alarm for a wee, five-minute snooze, just in case. He leaves Remus's mobile back where it was, takes his other arm back, and leans in to speak close, keeping his voice equally as hushed as before. “Have some more water, please, and then you can sleep all you want,” he haggles. “Within reason.”

Remus pushes out a rather horse-inspired breath, the pillow beneath his face making it echo out quite a bit, and, to be frank, this has better entertainment value than most programs Sirius has seen. “Come on,” he coaxes, running the pad of his thumb up underneath the sleeve of Remus’s t-shirt to trace it over his skin. “You’ll be glad you did in a little while.”

Remus gives a sigh through his nose, but reason usually does tug him along; he lifts his head again, pushes himself onto his elbows, and turns for the glass, carefully transporting it from the nightstand over to the bed to hold it upright between his hands. “I can’t fill it out yet,” he maintains, his voice hoarse. “I just don’t have it in me.”

“That’s alright,” Sirius pardons. “I did a good chunk of it myself, but you have a look over it later on if you want and fill in where I can't, OK? No rush.”

Remus nods for it, tips the glass inward so he can sip off it, and after a few beats, holds it upright again and tests out his bad eye by trying to stare through the glass while Sirius simply watches him fluttering his eyelids at differing intervals, feeling a smile tugging at his lips. “I finished packing,” he slips him.

Remus quits his eyelid tricks right quick and returns him a pleasant little hum. “Quicker than me, even,” he trades him, half-smiling.

“You’ve been busy,” Sirius offers, and Remus doesn't have to turn that one right back around on him with words necessarily when his face sure says the ‘so have you’ for him, but it's a non-issue; Remus has time yet to get that tackled. “That being said, I should just put the notebook in with my stuff; we don't want to leave that behind.”

Remus shakes his head for that. “I’ll take it with me when I leave,” he offers. "I've got that much handled."

“OK, it’s in my drawer, then,” Sirius supplies, pairing it with a nod toward the nightstand behind Remus.

“I’ve got to work on some of my packing tonight, see how far I can get with it,” Remus shares, going for another tip of the glass.

“Yeah, see how you feel, though; don't push yourself if you don't have to,” Sirius insists. “We’ve tomorrow to get it done, too, so nothing’s going to go topsy-turvy if you just want to take it easy tonight; I would want to.”

Remus gives him a woeful little noise, swallowing slowly. “We’ve too much to do tomorrow to worry about packing,” he puts down, “but if you want to come by later, I feel like you could make something like packing feel less like a stressful chore.”

“You know I could,” Sirius echoes, a wry smile playing on his lips.

Remus gives him a smile with a pair of lidded eyes over it and turns to put the glass back on the nightstand, but Sirius got a good enough look at his eyes to be able to tell the bad one is equaling out with the good one a little more already and after some more R&R, he’ll be good as new.

Remus turns back to him and rolls himself more onto his right side to face Sirius better. “Are you excited?” he asks.

Sirius breathes in and out once, his eyes coming alive. “You’ve no idea.”

Remus gives him a sleepy smile, shuts his eyes, and gives a tiny, contented sigh, and Sirius scoots in close to leave a kiss on Remus’s eyelids in turn. A small smooch gets pressed to the right corner of Sirius’s mouth in reply and while that likely has more to do with a blend of logistics and what Remus can and cannot manage right about now, it still gets Sirius’s mouth curling upward and the butterflies inhabiting his stomach taking flight.

Right there, Sirius’s mobile starts to ring, cutting through the whimsy like an uninvited guest bounding into the room and pulling a guttural noise out of Remus for the abrupt and mighty pitch that his standardized ringtone is giving out inside what had been such a quiet room. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he insists, making a quick escape.

He shuts his bedroom door behind him, heads for the living room for a second time, and swipes his thumb over the screen brightly letting him know that Peter’s ringing him. “Yo yo yiggity yo,” he greets, grinning big.

He gets a laborious sigh for it. “You’re seriously going to hang me out to dry for that?” Peter returns.

“Listen, you went and said that to me like I wasn’t going to?” Sirius returns. “Rookie mistake there, Pete.”

Peter clicks his tongue. “Are you at yours?” he bids.

“I think this is the place?” Sirius offers quizzically, having a sizeable glance around his living room though Peter can’t see him doing it.

“OK, good,” Peter replies, breezing right past his antics. "My mum wants to come by and pick up that chest.”

Sirius blinks. “Today?” he sounds out.

“Well, she was hoping to, yeah,” Peter extends. “She made room in the den for it and everything; she’s very excited about it.”

Sirius huffs a sigh. “Pete, I’ve got work in a bit,” he lodges.

“When?” Peter asks.

Sirius takes the screen away from his ear to have a look at the time. “I start at two,” he relays.

“So?” Peter puts up. “You’ve time; she doesn’t live in Canada.”

“So maybe I had other plans in mind for my pre-work self?” Sirius raises him.

Peter gives a frank hum. “To sit around until you have to go in, I bet.”

Beat. “Maybe so.”

Peter pushes out an unimpressed sigh on the other end of the line. “Should I tell her to come by tomorrow instead?”

Sirius hums a frank no. “We’ll be in and out like mad, I can’t guarantee a time we’d be around tomorrow,” he maintains.

“Right,” Peter puts in, like it’s actually just dawned on him that the day before their trip would be filled with last-minute errands, “no, that'd be too much to coordinate.”

Sirius pushes a sigh out of resignation. “Well, you’re going to have to tell me where you stuck it before anything else because I’ve no leads.”

“Closet in the storage room,” Peter relays.

Sirius snorts, heading there. “Lacks vision,” he comments.

“Your only instructions were to get it out of your sight,” Peter defends. “It’s under a lot of stuff, though; you’ll have to do some digging.”

Sirius huffs a Yuge sigh. “Every sentence out of your mouth is worse than the last,” he returns, opening the closet door and finding that there is indeed a mountain of crap loaded on top of his least favourite family heirloom. “I really think you two could’ve done better here.”

“Mhm,” Peter accepts, very clearly on speakerphone on the other end of the line if his distracted tone and the echo of feedback say anything about it. “OK, I told her to give you some time to get it ready.”

“D’aw, you’re going to give me that?” Sirius puts up graciously, shouldering his mobile so he can bat things out of the way with two hands rather than just one. “I’m leaving the premises in an hour and a half and if she’s not here by then, tell her she’s not to ring the bell or knock insanely loud; Remus is sleeping, so I’ll just leave it on my stoop.”

“You’re going to make her carry it down herself?” Peter raises.

Sirius huffs loudly as he tugs the admittedly heavy chest out of the closet and further into the room. “Hi, I have work?” he returns.

“I’ll tell her to leave hers an hour from now, how’s that?” Peter poses. “That way, you’ll be more than on time and she won’t fall to her death trying to lug that thing down the stairs herself.”

“You do know it’ll be way less heavy without all that shit in it, yeah?” Sirius raises plainly.

“Sirius, I don’t want to lose my mum to a chest,” Peter puts it.

Fine — you know, Remus gets so much shit for being the resident worry-wart meanwhile you’re right here, spouting nonsense,” Sirius manages, or at least before he feels his mobile starting to slip from between his shoulder and neck. It soon hits the floor with enough of a thud that it pulls a wince out of him as he leaves the chest right where he got it to on the floor in favour of stooping to pick his mobile back up, checking that the screen hasn’t just shattered and pressing the intact screen to his right ear with a touch of relief wafting over him; he did not want to run around trying to replace that before work, too. “Yeah, I’m going to need two hands for this.”

“Likely, yeah,” Peter accepts. “Hey? Don’t get caught up in what’s in there because none of it matters; just throw it all out and don’t look back.”

“I’m not throwing out the rolly-toy,” Sirius returns.

“What are you going to do with it?” Peter bids plainly.

“I don’t want it, but some kid could,” Sirius puts up.

“Fine, the rolly-toy can stay,” Peter allows. “The rest goes in the bin.”

“Well, I wasn’t about to put up a shrine in here, oddly,” Sirius serves him.

“Good, ‘cause James would smell something fishy a mile away and desecrate it within the literal hour after it went up,” Peter plays along.

“Yeah, he really would,” Sirius echoes, heading for a garbage bag from the kitchen. “Alright, I’m out.”

“Thanks, kiddo,” Peter offers in parting.

“What is the matter with you?” Sirius sends him, affectionately baffled by this lad as he hangs up.

He gets to the kitchen and debates whether one bag will be enough for the job, but ultimately decides that it should suffice, heading back to the room and setting the bag aside on the floor as he stoops to open the latch. He knocks the lid back, gives a look over the interior, and promptly remembers there’s broken glass in there, huffing a sigh as he heads all the way back down the hall to find some sort of hand protection.

Hand protection is rather lacking, turns out, but Sirius does have a set of firetruck red rubber gloves underneath the bathroom sink that go all the way to his elbows, so they’ll do him well in a pinch. He tugs them on in turn, fetches the broom on his way back through the flat, and stops inside the storage room, sizing up the chest.

If he pulls one item out of it at a time, that’ll take forever, and picking tiny shards of glass out of it isn’t something he’s particularly in the mood to do. With that, Sirius balances the broom against the doorframe nearest to him, leaves the dustpan down on the floor beside it, and steps in close to the chest before putting some turbo strength into upending the thing.

Not the quietest method around, he'll admit, but everything sure does come pouring out of it and he doesn’t hear Remus swearing from the other room, so he’ll file this one into the category of a certain kind of means to a greater end.

He pushes the empty chest aside, takes care in crouching before the pile of odds and ends in front of him, and double-checks that he isn’t about to place his kneecaps down on any stray shards before settling them down on the floor. He sets the rolly-toy aside but takes Peter’s parting words to heart, flapping out the large black garbage bag and focusing on ridding himself of everything else laying in a heap. The frame goes first, he doesn’t want that portrait around as is, and when he gets to that lovely cutout of him and James, it’s entirely possible that he crushes it into a puny ball before lobbing both it and the sentiment scrawled on the back into the bag, but that does feel something like power.

It goes even more swiftly from there; anything of true value is already in Remus’s possession or Ludwig's, as they should be, so the rest isn’t worth a debate over keeping. It goes so swiftly, in fact, that Sirius has to pull the notebook he just absently stuffed into the bag back out of it to have a better look over the cover. There isn’t anything particularly striking about it; it’s a simple, speckled granite design, but there’s nothing actually written on the front which has Sirius scouting the first page, where he promptly finds a doodle of a cartoon bloke with some rather frazzled hair that looks to be in the middle of eating a cake and the words ‘LOVE THAT CHEESECAKE’ written in absolutely striking calligraphy overtop.

Sirius lets out a bemused, throaty laugh, flipping to the next page to get some more of this, but rather than a devastatingly out-of-pocket doodle, that page has a passage scrawled on it, and from the first peek at the penmanship alone — strict cursive, lack of dots over the I’s, a large loop underneath every Y — the blood in Sirius’s veins begins to thrum.

He flips to another page, and another, and another, really only getting the understanding that some passages are short while others are quite lengthy, but oh, my, my, this is too good; did he just find a diary? How quaint.

He uses his right thumb to file through the pages at a faster interval before a figure catches his eye, stops to open it up before he can lose track of the page, and finds a sketched self-portrait staring back at him. It’s good. Suspiciously good. What the fuck, Reg could draw?

Sirius turns the page sideways, examining the sketch from differing angles, and no, upon further inspection, that isn’t a self-portrait at all; that nose is all Sirius.

He shuts the book right quick, righteously spooked when it’s not every day you open a book and find a too-realistic sketch of yourself looking back at you; if he backs up a bit on the floor, he thinks it’s more than fair, and if he wrings his hands out, even more fair, as far as he’s concerned.

He looks around at the rest of what’s in front of him, pushing the notebook aside to work double-time on getting the rest of the stuff into the garbage bag while the skin on his arms tingles the whole way through. He pushes off of the floor, brings the broom over to sweep the shards of glass up, and upends the dustpan in the garbage bag before tying it and calling this impromptu task complete.

He shuts the lid of the chest, drags it out of the room and toward the front door, and leaves it on his stoop, shutting out his view of it by closing the door. That done with, Sirius fetches the bag filled with his childhood and then some, drops it by the door to take down with him when he leaves, and walks the notebook through the flat with him, stopping in the kitchen to pull his rubber gloves off and stick them back underneath the sink, and heads out onto the terrace from there.

He stops to hold the screen door open with a foot, letting Tango parade along outside with him, and lets it close fully as he moves to have a seat at the nearest end of the table to him. He reaches for his pack sitting over in the middle of the table, plucks one out to light up, and eyes the notebook while he puffs on the end of his cigarette.

He shouldn’t. He knows that. They’re Reg’s thoughts, not his own. He knows he shouldn’t just open this notebook right here in front of him and simply look down at the words, but if by some chance he happened to use his innate literacy, who could blame him, really? There’s a strikingly accurate sketch of him in here, that much he very well saw, and excuse him if he’s curious about what else is going on there.

He opens to the first entry, scans the etching of Dec 4th and, judging by the year, links it to a whole whopping week after Sirius booked it from the house, if he has his dates right, and sighs as he gears himself up for some daggers to come his way.

 

I suppose not giving us any indication where you were going was rather purposeful on your end, but did you ever stop to think about what would happen if one of us passed? Are we really so dead to you that you wouldn’t even want to know if something happened? Am I that dead to you?

 

And, Sirius shuts the book. Secret thoughts about him, he expected, but for the words to be directed straight at him? Bit arresting. He doesn’t love where it ended up either, that much is true. He lifts his gaze and sets it on the far end of the terrace, thinking this cannot do well for him. He could really just wander back inside, take a comfortable nap alongside Remus until he’ll need to lug the chest downstairs, and forget he ever saw this thing.

He opens the book again.

 

It’s going to be a little more troublesome getting in contact with you, but there are theories, of course; the Potters come straight to mind, and that’ll be where Mother looks first.

She found your delightful manifesto on the side of the mantelpiece, by the way, and she is in a right state; I’m sure you’d love to know that. Now, what I would personally want to know, is whether that frankly baffling collection of words was a recent gift to the family or if they’ve been there for some time—

 

Sirius’s head floods with this newfound information — she finally found the etching of ‘Live, Laugh, Eat Ass’ he meticulously carved into the marble with his piece-of-shit pocket knife a good year prior to this entry being penned. Incredible. He ducks his head and proceeds through a whirlwind of quiet laughter at the mere image of their mother finding it and going absolutely spare; delightful, indeed.

Sirius sniffs anew, sits up taller in his seat, and dives back in.

 

—but even more importantly, I find myself wondering what on earth would have possessed you to carve such a phrase into a mantelpiece of a room that guests regularly frequent? The entire piece is going to have to be replaced, but come to think of it, I suppose that’s something you might’ve been halfway hoping for. Congratulations, then.

Get help while you’re out there, would you?

Sirius pushes out a haughty, wounded noise, flipping the page and huffing about it. Fuck that; if it took The Burg nearly a year to spot it herself, then the houseguests were likely safe from having to stare down life’s simple pleasures. And on that note, maybe he’s not the one who needed help, hm? Ever thought of that, Reggie?

Sirius fumes as he flips to the next page, finding an entry there from just after Christmas, dated for the twenty-sixth, and it’s really easy to soak this one in when it’s just a single line.

 

All I ever hear about is you; what you’ve done, what you haven’t, you. I’m sick and tired of you.

 

“Oh, boo hoo,” Sirius tosses out, flipping the page and finding the next entry dated for mid-September of the following year, and that jump in time is more than a bit jarring in itself; what, did he have nothing scathing to say the rest of that winter? That whole spring? Summer, even? Busy man, clearly. So kind of him to make the time, and from the looks of it, he made up for the shrewd length of his last entry by penning a novella this time around.

 

A typical issue I’ve been saddled with just by having been born second to you, is that I’ve consistently spent years coming up underneath your shadow. We’ve all heard that cliche, so I won’t bother spending much time on it, this is really more unique to you.

I would say that I’m used to it by now, that I’ve learned to remind myself that my strengths are my own and have nothing to do with yours, but this is just getting ridiculous. It’s my own fortitude at the instrument that landed me first piano in orchestra, and that’s what should be the focal point; mine, not yours, mine. I don’t care if you got there first, I’ve worked tirelessly at this for years, practiced longer hours than you ever did, I understand precision, I respect discipline, and I can play with my eyes closed now, but what’s that matter? All I’m getting are repeated references to you and your playing as if it’s somehow news to me that your style and entire presence within the program was completely unorthodox.

 

“Oh, fuck off,” Sirius puts out, slapping the book shut.

He opens it again after a good haul off his cigarette, picking back up where he left off and feasting his eyes on a new paragraph.

 

Interestingly enough (and I do have to find something of note in continually hearing about you wherever I turn, you understand), the opinion of you around the program is somewhat polarized. Bates — you remember him, I’m sure, he remembers you quite well. Can’t stand the sound of your name being uttered about the class, I will say that, but that’s not much of a surprise when you made a complete joke of his meticulous planning and all the work he put in preparing you all for your performances to be the very best, so at the very least I do hear from him about how my playing is more classically trained than yours ever amounted to and that could be all well and good if only the students in my level and beyond didn’t speak glowingly about you and (their words, not mine) your ‘legendary exit’ from the program.

I landed this role at the beginning of last year and I’m still hearing about how well you did. It doesn’t matter where I go or how far you run, I’m still going to be doomed to come up second to you.

Thanks a lot, Sirius.

 

Sirius sits with that until the cigarette that has gone largely untouched reveals that it’s down to the filter by promptly burning his fingers. He tosses it away instinctively, kicking at it on the floor of the terrace, but he’s much more focused on breathing steadily than he is on the lingering stings at the sides of his fingers. How exactly was he supposed to do anything about their order of birth? How? So sorry he got forced to sit straight and practice and sit up straighter and practice some more at an instrument he never had a love for of his own, and just like fucking Reg had to, at that. He didn’t have some magical device that rewound time, did he, and certainly hasn’t got one now, though if he did, he’d use it just to rewind and slap the entitlement clean out of this kid.

Sirius breathes slowly as he moves on to the next one, dated for October, and this one’s quite short as well.

 

I cut my hair incredibly short so people in the halls would quit calling me ‘Lil’ Sirius,’ but it just won’t stop.

 

Sirius lifts his hands and flies them toward the open book in front of him, needing the fucking professor to come around to his seat and explain the source material better for him because he’s clearly just not getting it. Oh, so he was well-remembered at school and Reg couldn’t handle that? How terrible for him. Try being the black sheep of the family for five fucking seconds, all Sirius ever heard was ‘Why can’t you be anything like your brother,’ from everyone in that fucking bloodline at one point or another; if he had a coin for every time he heard that phrase tossed about, he could have paid for three perfect replicas of Priscilla with his amassed sum, and d’you know what he didn’t do? Put the blame on Reg, a literal fucking child.

He looks back down at the book, briefly considers lampooning it off somewhere ahead of him and seeing how far he can soar it into nothingness, but he turns the page instead and has a look over the next entry. There was something about the springtime, he’s gathering; Reg either didn’t want to or didn’t have the free time to commit to a semi-regular schedule for the next entry is dated for June.

 

I graduated with honours tonight. I crossed the stage twice, once for my diploma and again for my plaque, and I’m thinking about hanging it in your room since you never did bother to hang yours; you’re not using it anymore, are you?

While I crossed the stage, I found myself scanning the auditorium for your head and did a lot of the same from my seat. The ceremony did drone on after a while so you’d have been bored out of your skull if you had attended, but I would love to know what you could have had on tonight that would have been so important you couldn’t have ducked in the back and watched from there; were you giving some strange man a fine reach-around at the park? I bet that was it.

 

Sirius puts out a trumpet of a pfft. A good year and a half post-breaking free? He probably was doing just that, but at the park? What year did he think it was, '76? He can hear James’s voice clear in his ear like he’s out here with him, ‘Upgrade your references or don’t even bother,’ and Sirius can’t even deny metaphysical James that point; this is just lazy.

Sirius turns the page, now entirely interested in where this is going to go next, and turns out, the next entry's dated for August, so there really is a pattern here; between the months of June through January, Reg got mouthy enough to write him scathing letters he didn't suspect Sirius was going to get his hands on, but not the springtime. Odd. A very odd man, he became.

 

I spotted you at work. A barista now, hey? Interesting choice, honest work—

 

“Ohh, I’m gonna—” Sirius starts, cutting off there to pound his right fist into the book and therefore the table, and he really is lucky that he isn’t being observed at the moment for he knows he’s got to look like a right loon.

 

Saw you out front with a tray of what I’ll have to assume were samples, but you were doing this fruity little dance as you went about the terrace handing them out to patrons so you’ll understand if I didn’t stop to say hello.

 

Good,” Sirius barks. “I’d have thrown the whole tray at you, fucking creep.”

He flips the page with a rough hand, finding the next entry uncharacteristically soon after the last, dated the fifth of September of the same year.

 

If I thought walking into a music program after you had been tough enough, walking into a university program after you were done with it is another thing entirely.

It’s a bit of a double-edged sword, if you will. On the one hand, every professor in the building has the highest opinion of our father (remember him?) and naturally are of the opinion I’ll do as well as he did in the field, but on the other, the students all know of you. :)

 

Sirius shuts his eyes there, his stomach dropping as he grimaces at the not-so-promising direction this one’s already going in before willing himself to just take it; he’s heard worse, been through worse.

 

And to that, they know me because of you. I’ve heard quite a lot about you, it, the whole situation; the walls have ears and eyes and such, but I have to say that while you gave me a very different story, the general opinion here is quite divided. Some of them say you shacked up with him for those first-rate grades you got (I’ve already been asked if I, too, plan on keeping any extracurricular activities on the side to help me along up with the rest of the class and that was just lovely), while others say you merely did it so you could wander into class half an hour late with your coffee in hand and your sunglasses still on and prop your feet up in the back of the class without fear of getting disciplined for it.

Now, theory one, I don’t agree was the case. You’re very clever, Sirius; the least likely to need a boost as far as I’m concerned. The second theory does have some weight to it, I’ll admit, I’m sure it did have at least something to do with your need to feel even just a notch above every other head in the room when it has always been very much about that for you. I, however, pose a different theory and so far, I haven’t heard anyone pinpoint your incessant need to dismantle everything our father built, and I find that a shame, I do.

See, back in the music program, classmates would go back and forth discussing the planning you must have done to pull off your 'legendary' prank, but they didn’t really know you as much as they thought, did they? They had no idea how little you actually plan, and neither do these new classmates. You don’t plan, not for anything, you don’t stop to think about the consequences of what you do, you simply do whatever you like and manage to still look so shocked when it all comes crashing down around you, but I don’t know how you thought it wouldn’t get out, Sirius; you know how much people talk.

That professor’s gone, by the way. I doubt you’ll have spared much of a thought as to where your actions officially led — how could you, you were busy packing your things and disappearing the second you got caught. You had a lot going on, I’m sure, but the good thing about this development is that I don’t have to run into the man in the hallways, and for that, I am quite thankful as I’m not sure what kind of authority I could've afforded the man, myself.

I suppose this is all another offer of thanksgiving unto you. Thank you, Sirius; I now have this to overcome along with the rest.

 

Sirius takes a break there, scooting his chair back and curling in to set his forehead down on the edge of the table. Most of his vision is cloudy, minimized, and has a hunk of borzoi taking up a good amount of it, and only after a few good breaths in and out does he reach down to give Tango’s side a rub with his right hand, pitching himself back to the image he has of him and Remus sitting in an alleyway, Remus trying so diligently to remind him that he's OK. He was OK back then, since then, and he's OK now.

This just doesn’t make any sense. There’s a full sketch of him in here, he knows he didn’t hallucinate it, but how does somebody get from here to there; go from scathing, relentless letters to a meticulous, full-paged sketch of the same fucking person they’ve been crucifying?

Sirius pushes up, scoots in again, wipes at his eyes with one hand, and flips the page with the other; he’s not going to find out if he stops halfway.

The next entry is short again, but smack dab in the middle of November the following year, which gives him quite the pause. Oh, really, he had nothing to say for nearly a year? Fuck this guy, there aren’t any patterns to find; he had no patterns.

 

Our father’s gone. Are you celebrating over there?

 

Sirius feels his eyes roll so hard it hurts. He sure did celebrate.

 

Everything falls on me now. I’m it. You’re who-knows-where, and I’m the one who’s here to step up and take over.

 

“Bitch,” Sirius sounds out, flapping his hand down at the page below him, “I gave you an out.”

It really is just amazing how much responsibility was shoveled onto him prior to his leaving and clearly, years after the fact while he wanted nothing to do with any of it. That was the whole, entire point and Reg fucking knew that — they all knew it, Sirius made that pretty fucking clear.

He laboriously flips the page to get to the point where Reg would even bother sketching his full face out, and the next entry has easily the shortest gap so far, dated only a week later.

 

Fuck you, Sirius. If you didn’t want to come for him, you could have at least shown up for me.

 

Alright, no. Nope. There wasn’t a world in which Sirius would have ever, ever shown up to that fucking funeral. Not a chance; he didn’t feel obligated then, didn’t feel the least bit guilty about it later, and he’s not about to kick his own arse for it now.

Sirius flips the page as if to write that whole entry off, finding the next one dated for the following summer and just this past summer, to boot.

 

I haven’t heard a word from you in nearly four years, haven’t heard you speak for just as long—

 

“Uh, yeah, that’s the forward roll of time for you,” Sirius retorts, making a bemused face down at the page below.

 

—Some of it, I think I’m losing in my memory, but never the laugh. That boisterous, frankly arresting bark that is apparently categorized as a laugh hasn’t gone anywhere. You’ll call me a girl for this one, but I’ve found myself wondering if you laugh more now than you did, and there, it hits me that’s essentially what you were going for, wasn’t it, and there, I do catch myself wondering if you were ever on a downward spiral; I imagine now, you just keep floating up and up and up.

“Ding-ding,” Sirius rings out. “Only took you how long to realize it?”

A window closes on the floor above his and Sirius imps down in his chair a little, taking the notebook with him and hiding it over his face as he keeps on, the next passage slated for August, same summer.

 

Oh, Sirius, this would only happen to you. Thanks to Ol’ Alphie’s extremely generous gift of a purse with your name on it, our mother’s on the warpath. His children are on it, too, have you heard? This is the gist if you haven’t: they didn’t get anywhere near the amount that you did and none of them were runaways, so I’m sure you can imagine how passed-over they might feel just now.

I, myself, am rather torn about it. I understand their upset, but I do doubt with just about everything I’ve got in me that you would've banked on this happening for even a second. Your hands are clean, as far as I’m concerned; it was his money to do what he wanted with and he picked you to shower, nothing for it. He always did have a hard time hiding what a cracking time he was having whenever you’d start talking cheek at the table, didn't he?

Maybe it’ll be good for you. I don’t know how much you’re bringing in from the café or if you’ve moved on by now, but I’d rather you not end up starving one way or another.

Mother’s going to fight it. To her, the stamp of approval this very gift represents sets a terrible example for the rest of us, and she won't rest knowing she didn’t try to interfere. I hope you find a decent lawyer, you know how theirs are.

 

That, he did.

Sirius flips to the next page, feeling cold beneath his skin; there’s little he can do with such a backhanded compliment, but that’s the Black way, and this, plainly put, is the closest thing to ‘you do you,’ he’s ever really gotten out of Reg, and it’s five years late. For what it’s worth, he could have used that vote of confidence when he was trying to fight the freeze attempt and for the most part, he wouldn’t mind closing up the book and going for a huddle with Remus for however long he’s got left because that, Reg effectively telling him he’s golden, is likely as good as it’s ever going to get, but this is it, as recent as last year. It’s the home stretch.

 

Nov 3rd.

I’ve been wondering what sort of plans you have for the future. Funny as that sounds — you and plans — I am enthralled by the thought. Are you going to finish your degree elsewhere? Have you already begun or are you looking into a new major altogether perhaps? Are you simply living out of Alphard’s wallet and taking it all as it comes by? Are you happy now, knowing what you end up doing, wherever that is, it’s not going to be an extension of them at all?

Me, I have a few plans. I shouldn’t. I find myself agreeing to them even though I know I won’t see them to fruition, and in the same way, I know how many ripples it’ll cause. Each time I sign a new deal, I know deep down just how many holes are going to need to be sewn back together in the name of the business, in the name of the family, but I keep signing them, Sirius. I keep playing the part. And I don't know what gave you the power to quit.

Perhaps we were a lot more alike than I gave credit for. I know better, I know I can’t continue making promises I can’t keep, and I know I’m going to fall short of the mark that is a living, breathing machine, manufactured long before I was ever born, but I am sick and tired of being nothing but a pawn for it — and if that isn’t you, I don’t know what is.

Happy Birthday. I wish you hadn’t split in November, it really clouds this time of year.

 

Sirius finishes and flips the page so fast, it’s likely he’s got carpal tunnel now. His heart is doing some unearthly beating in his chest, but he needs to know if that’s the last of them, and no — no, thankfully, it’s not.

 

Nov 12th

I finally went into one of your café chains the other day. Not yours, of course, I doubt I'd get much further than the foyer before I’d get banned from the premises, but I spotted a new one that popped up near the office and thought I'd give it a whirl as I hid from the rain.

I’ve had better coffee—

 

Sirius snorts real loud for that one, grinning behind his left hand clasped over his chin as he keeps on.

—but I did like overall the feel of the place and I liked the staff, or the bloke I was served by, at least. Funny — the man ahead of me at the till held up a bottle of something, I'm not sure what it was, some to-go bottle of coffee or tea that he got out of the delicatessen fridge—

 

Sirius snorts even louder, but that's one incredibly generous description of the company’s signature ready-to-drink-and-eat station, Good Cunt.

 

—and the barista tried to scan it through, but something must have gone wrong for the scanner didn't upload it to the till and the man looking to purchase the bottle said, ‘Suppose it’s free, then.’

I thought that was a bit much, myself; just pay the five pounds and be on your way, but something about that worker's rather tight smile suggested this was not the first time that particular phrase or sentiment had been uttered to him, and then, I found I just had to know what the count would have been. The item scanned on the second try and the offender went off on his way, wherein I asked just how many times the bloke might’ve heard that, to which he just huffed out a ‘more than is ever acceptable,’ and that really made me laugh. No big boomer of a laugh; that, I never really got the hang of, did I.

Do you hear that comment often, too? I imagine you do if you’re in the same line of work, though I somehow have a sneaky suspicion that you’d be a tad less polite about it than he’d been — don’t know where I’m getting that feeling from, though. It’s a mystery.

 

Sirius gives a throaty trill; Reg was right about that one, definitely. He went from putting out a polite laugh in the early days to straight up not addressing it these days; that is just how often he’s heard it.

He flips the page with bright eyes as he thinks of passing the lovely little anecdote along, of how exactly he'll tell Remus he made an unbeknownst cameo in Reg’s burn book, but the entry on the following page brings that to a pause, particularly for how illegible the passage on it is without a good squint.

 

I hate November. This one’s worse than the last few have been. I know it’s time. I’ve gone back and forth on what the quietest way would be and I’ve ruled out some options; they’re all either too loud, messy, or in-your-face, and I don’t want to cause a commotion. I just want to sleep, Sirius.

I figure I’ve slept more this year than I have maybe my entire life, so why not go for one more?

 

There isn’t even a date on this one, but Sirius can do the math. He can flip a page, too, and several more of them in order to locate the sketch of his very own visage taking up the entire page, and then, nothing else after it. He flips back to the last entry, reads it again, again, again, and a horrible sense of dread rises up his spine while a ball of fire bursts in his gut.

His mobile rings out at that exact moment, spooking him right out of his skin and bringing him back to the scene he’s in, and suddenly he remembers he’s quite needed. He pushes half-out of his seat, fishing his phone out of his back right pocket, and swipes it, booking it back inside as he answers it, the notebook caught tight in the grasp of his free hand.

“Hi,” Sirius pushes out, speeding through the kitchen.

“So sorry, I hit traffic on the way,” Peter’s mum offers by way of hello.

“Oh, no no, it’s fine,” Sirius says, rushing through the flat. “I’ll help you bring it down.”

“Oh, would you?” she raises, but by the sound of it, she’s already celebrating the fact and Sirius isn’t really meant to keep insisting on it. “I’ll just park and be right on up.”

The line goes silent as Sirius ducks into his room, in search of somewhere to put the bloody thing when he can’t leave it lying around for James to decide he’d like a novella to read over dinner, but it’s like the book's burning his hand just from holding it and he quickly yanks open the top drawer of his dresser, stuffing it in there and pushing the drawer shut again.

He gets to his front door before she does without the need for a staircase and the fact that parking on their street can be a nightmare, but Peter’s mum is quick on her feet so he thankfully doesn’t have to stand there disassociating with nothing but the chest at his feet for company for very long.

“Hi hi,” Peter’s mum greets, sparking Sirius to stand to attention. “Oh, he really sold this.”

Sirius realizes after a beat that she must mean Pete v. The Chest, and nods quite a bit with a full set of goosebumps up his arms, crossing his hands behind his back. “I doubt you’ll want my name glimmering off the front of it, so you’ve full permission to rip that thing off if you so choose,” he says of it.

Peter’s mum hums a laugh while she gets around to have a look at the emblem. “I’ll see what I can do about that,” she trades him, not looking all that fussed about it.

Sirius helps her carry it down the stairs and load it into the trunk of her car, accepts the set of bizous she plants on both of his cheeks in parting, and gives her the best wave he can manage before darting back upstairs as soon as she isn’t looking his way. Even if she does happen to look back and catch him bolting up the stairs at horse speeds, overall the woman has seen them all do some curious things over the years and he doubts that’ll phase her much.

He checks his mobile as he makes it to his stoop, clocks that he has a whole six minutes until he’d better head out, and plans on using them well. He heads inside, lets himself back into his bedroom, and promptly lifts the covers at the edge of his bed, climbing up the side of it and planting himself up near Remus’s body, relishing in the fact that he's still so very much asleep for if he were awake, this would be a lot harder than it already is.

Six minutes isn’t long enough, not nearly, and Sirius does debate calling out. He doesn’t have to show up for his last shift, doesn’t really need the reference, the most he’ll get is a slap on the wrist for not calling out sooner, and what’s Will going to do past that, fire him? All he’d be losing out on is one last shift alongside David and—

Sirius pauses his hand mid-rub of his clouded eyes, finds he can see a lot more after that last thought sinks in, and next moment, he’s leaning up and in, planting a fierce parting kiss to Remus’s collarbone and working his way out from underneath the covers.

He stops at the bureau, flattens the parts of his hair that are now standing up via static, and pulls it up and out of his face, tying it up into a bun. He has a last look over himself, shakes himself out, and answers the question, ‘Do I look like a bloke whose very skin is cracking to pieces in real-time,’ with a decided 'No.' He’s made for playing a part.

He doesn’t remember the walk to work, more so he remembers deciding that Priscilla wasn’t an option as Remus doesn’t like it in any way when he drives while distracted, but suddenly he’s found himself out front and has to assume his legs did most if not all of the work for him. Sirius wills them to keep helping him out as he makes his way in between the front terrace that’s just littered with folks. Will’s likely in back if he can’t see him anywhere up front, but Mary’s on, busy with turning over the pastry case, Ben’s milling about the café bussing tables and just about done with his shift as far as Sirius can tell, and David is manning the till.

Sirius feels pulled in two stark directions, one where he could simply slip onto the floor, whip up his drink in under a minute, and disappear into the back until he’s expected on the floor, but the other half of him is much louder than the former and has him moving in behind the man paying for a tea at the till.

David eyes that choice as he hands the receipt off to the man, and Sirius steps up to till with perhaps too-pleasant a smile, but he just can't help that. “How’s the day?”

“Bustling,” David replies. “A bunch of your fans have been stopping in asking for you.”

Sirius finds himself ducking his head a little to combat the fact that his stomach may well be a hitcher’s knot. “Yeah, I might’ve told a few people I’m just about done here,” he offers.

“A few,” David repeats, strictly suggesting it’s been non-stop.

Sirius holds back a grimace, putting his arms behind his back and sliding his hands into the back pockets. The moment he does it, he sees a whirlwind of flashes showing him quite several instances where he’s noticed Remus doing the very same thing when he’s feeling too small for the room he’s in, and it nearly knocks him sideways, having the understanding of why he makes himself smaller in situations he’s uncomfortable in lit up in front of him like this.

“What are you doing?” David asks, blinking at him overtop of the till screen, and Sirius feels oddly like he’s got a searchlight trained right on him.

“In general?” he checks.

“Here,” David reiterates.

“I’d like a coffee before I start,” Sirius answers.

“Aren’t you just going to just stroll on up here and make it yourself?” David raises, tossing a pointed look toward the bar where Mary's chatting up a customer.

“Right, I could do that, but I could also just queue up,” Sirius offers.

David blinks, unimpressed. “It’s taken you how long to pick up on that?”

“A fair few years at least,” Sirius allows, tilting his head back and forth idly, feeling his skin crawl.

“I have no idea what you take in yours,” David maintains, evidently waiting on Sirius to rattle his order off, which he does do even though he doesn't have to with Mary on bar, but he finds himself smiling a bit as he lists his modifications off in all their extensive glory.

“Yikes,” David puts in.

“Listen? It’s fucking tasty,” Sirius puts in. “Light ice, please. Like, extremely light.”

“Why bother with any ice at all, then?” David quizzes him, though he does pen that down on the cup before walking it over to the bar.

A gaggle of girls enter through the door and head up behind Sirius, which has him feeling weird about merely standing there hoping for the conversation to keep going when it’s evidently time for it to die down.

He waits for his drink to finish in the backroom where Will’s trapped on a conference call. Back in April, when Will took a much-needed week off, Sirius was picked for the job of being his pseudo-replacement and for the most part, it was pretty easy stuff. He just did a bit of ordering for the shop, wrote and answered some emails, and never even had to do up a schedule for Will already had that taken care of before he set off, but the absolute worst part about agreeing to the task was having to come in, on a day off, to dial into a conference call with every single manager in the district, all sitting on the phones in the back of their shops while Rosmerta talked of future promos and quotas and things Sirius strangely couldn’t find the strength to give a shit about at nine a.m. on the button.

Some of the managers on the call kept their store phones on mute, likely scrolling their mobiles and listening absently much like Sirius had been doing, while others got a lot more involved and tossed some of the most inane questions onto the call that really should've fallen under the category of common sense instead of keeping them all there longer than ever necessary, but the one, shining little memory from that call was the moment when an employee from whichever shop that hadn't toggled their phone over to mute could be heard swearing like a sailor in the background, and Sirius did feel a certain, near-spiritual connection to the outburst at the time.

He dabbles in exchanging silent, miserable looks with Will while keeping a half-eye on the monitor for Mary to set his drink on the hand-off station, heading up front to swipe it off of the counter and take it out back with him for his pre-work cigarette, which, in the end, might’ve been more enjoyable if his hands would quit shaking so much.

He spends his last few hauls psyching himself up to start this last shift of his fresh, open-minded, and not-so-horribly aloof throughout. He heads back inside, leaves the quarter that’s left of his drink in back to come and sip off of when there’s enough of a lull, and pulls his apron off of the hook, tying it around his waist for the last time.

It had been very true that Sirius indeed passed along to a fair chunk of his favourite regulars that this coming Wednesday would be his last around here, so the fact that the first hour of his shift is littered with visits from a whole lot of them is also very true, it only adds to the tornado ripping through his stomach; the fact that he’s so evidently done well for himself here, attracted all sorts of colourful people, had the charisma to keep them coming back even just to say a short goodbye, it should have made him feel incredible and it would have, if the last hour of his life hadn’t occurred, he's sure. Now, all he keeps taking in are the plain looks David keeps adopting every time someone so much as alludes to his parting, and all that does is rattle Reg’s words around in his skull, has him pouring over all the times Reg would've heard so many good things about him and all the times he must’ve waited to hear just one anecdote about himself, and that — that just keeps Sirius trying to talk to David where he can.

It isn’t easy. There are people everywhere, the café is slammed for a good chunk of Sirius’s first hour on-shift, which poses a bit of an issue for potential mingling in between customers and then, there’s the fact that both Will and Mary are certifiably a lot; the former keeps popping up front to get some floor-time in, chipper as can be now that he’s free from his conference call and a bit morose over being just hours away from losing his star employee, while the latter is absolutely woeful about losing her work wife and muses on that particular point for a good while. To be fair, that does get Sirius glowing a bit, seeing the impression he's made on both of them, but David stays right out of it which only gets Sirius trying to mingle with him more, and every time he tries to include David in something as run of the mill as the weather or the like, David gives him a look, Mary gives him a look, Will looks like the ground has gone unsteady under his feet, and fucking yesterday Sirius would have given himself a look, too; this isn’t normal behaviour for him, but he can’t stop himself from at least trying.

Sirius gets a short visit from James nearing four o’clock, who's just stopping in to a) get one last look at Sirius’s apron-donned self and b) fuel up before making his way to Lily’s for the night, but James Potter popping in after today’s whirlpool of shit is not something Sirius planned for. He never plans, though, does he.

The long and short of it is that James can read him like a fucking book if he isn't careful. He’s not one to pry sordid feelings out of him, thank Cunt, but he’ll give Sirius a thousand Looks that he'll have to keep pretending he’s not noticing and right about now, on the cusp of something greater than the sum of Sirius’s parts, he can’t fucking be any greater than he is if he’s coming apart at the seams. A trick he’s learned over the years in regards to James’s advanced reading comprehension of him is that he has to act just right; not too lively or James’ll think it’s a cover, not too numbly or James’ll be able to pinpoint the storm raging behind his eyes, and Sirius is happy to report that he walks that line to utter precision here today, peppering in shoulder-shimmies and some allegedly fruity dance moves that, to James, have always been just another part of Sirius’s whole, and that does feel good to be reminded of, he will say that.

In some ways, he does breathe easier once James has gone, but maybe it’s got something to do with that guilt thing Remus often talks about. Once the clock hits five, Will’s just about done for the day and beckons Sirius into the back for a well-intentioned and rather spirited send-off, and that’s at least something to cling to in the middle of a storm. Now that he has some privacy to stand with it, it's impressive, how well of an impression he’s managed to make on the bloke in such a relatively short amount of time working together; it just is, but then, he looks up the hall and sees David's watching them, knows he hates what he's seeing.

Sirius heads back onto the floor after that, resuming his signature post at till, and looks back over at the bar where David’s stationed in time to catch him opening the container of vanilla bean powder at the bar, scoffing loudly as he scoops a few spoonfuls of it into a blender pitcher.

Sirius waits there, presuming they’ll find out soon what got him all red now, and he’s right about that one; as soon as David hands off the frap he went on to make, he rounds on the two of them like a canine unit. “Why doesn’t anybody refill these?” he lodges, displaying a hand toward the container. “It’s not rocket science.”

Mary drops the large aluminum spoon reserved for scooping large amounts of coffee beans into the grinder onto the counter with a click-clack that echoes out and helps plainly suggest she’s quite provoked already, and Sirius watches with side-eyed wonder as she strides over to David and has a look for herself at the container.

A click of the tongue. “It’s not even at the halfway mark,” she returns him, lifting her hands in plain bewilderment. “If we open a new packet just to fill that, then we’ll just have a half-pouch of it hanging around taking up space on the counter instead of just, I don’t know, waiting until we actually need to refill the container; how’s that for rocket science?”

Sirius presses his lips together and lifts a hand to pass it idly over the back of his neck, caught tight between the realms of loving that to the ends of the earth, staying completely out of this one, and — horror of horrors — helping David out here.

Fat chance that would ever go over easily; in his peripheral he can see David fly a hand in his direction, clearly hearing 'Sirius' all over that phrasing even if Mary was the one who uttered the sentiment. “You have to stop taking whatever he's told you as law,” he tells Mary. “He’s good as gone now, none of his tricks should count anymore.”

“Definitely right here, actually,” Sirius mentions, bending back the clip on the cap of his marker he’s holding at his waistline.

Mary puts out a tight, humourless laugh and lifts her hands, opting out and looking to Sirius. “I need a break.”

David puffs up grand at that. “I’m shift lead, so telling him that is irrelevant—”

“David, it’s fine,” Sirius comes in, giving a smoothing gesture with his hands. “It’s not like we’re slammed anymore, she can go.”

David openly stews over that, but to Sirius’s surprise, he doesn’t dig his heels in; he does, however, condition Mary before letting her off the hook. “Take the trash out before you go,” he directs.

“Get in one of the bags, then,” Mary comes on back, and fucking hell, why does today have to be the day Sirius had to have a long, long, overdue look at his behaviour from the ages of, say, twelve to twenty-three? Why? That was so perfect, so seamless a retort, Sirius has to duck down below the counter and pretend like he’s sifting through the drawer down there for a new sharpie just to keep it together.

“Just do it?” David returns to her, quite finished with all this, despite creating it.

Mary gives him one of the most flourished bows Sirius ever did see before setting off for the floor and David immediately looks away from Sirius’s plain but pointed stare, picking up a cloth and tidying the bar area with it instead. “You don’t have to talk to her like that,” Sirius mentions. “Like, in general, you might want to try talking to her less like that or at all, but especially when you’re on shift; it's really not a good look.”

“I’m not talking to her like anything,” David denies, keeping his gaze trained on his work.

“You are,” Sirius assures. “She’s a shift lead, too, so I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that you’re somehow above her in rank.”

She isn’t shift lead today,” David sends him.

Sirius lifts his hands in replacement of a white flag. “Well, they pay her the same as you for the exact same title either way,” he supplies. “One wrong day, she’s going to hit you with a solid right cross and you’ll have completely asked for it with the way you've talked to her like a piece of trash for weeks on end.”

“You giving me a lesson in how to direct people around is laughable at best,” David returns, his attention remaining on cleaning a section of countertop that’s already shimmeringly shiny.

Sirius sighs through his nose. “I definitely don’t talk to my coworkers like you do,” he maintains, and he doesn’t feel like that’s inaccurate necessarily, barring a couple of exceptions. “I really don’t know why you lean so hard on what you think is acceptable behaviour around here, but I’m also just so curious as to what it actually is that’s got you wound so tightly; what do you actually think the vanilla bean powder being down to the halfway point is going to do to the balance and structure of the earth’s rotation? Let’s start there.”

David scoffs, opens his mouth for a retort surely, and he closes it right quick as Sirius strolls over more toward him, visibly tensing up and making Sirius back up a step. “What did you think I was about to do?” he asks, utterly perplexed. “Pop you right here?”

“Who the fuck knows with you,” David returns on a dime.

“You’re swearing on the floor, David,” Sirius tuts airily, and David pushes out a laborious breath for that, turning away from him to resume cleaning the countertop. “You know that’s clean, yeah?”

David scoffs grand. “Why are you over here?” he demands.

Sirius hums noncommittally when the answer to that would take years to explain. Instead, he leans against the counter a little, reaches past David, and flicks the offending container of vanilla bean powder with his right forefinger. “Do you really think Will cares about the state of this all that much?” he raises.

David stops his cloth arm from going round and around on the counter in front of him to aim his one-word reply directly at Sirius. “What?”

“Eloquent,” Sirius deems it. “I’m genuinely asking you that.”

“Of course he cares,” David returns.

Sirius grimaces there, taking a quick breath in through his teeth. “Here’s the thing, David—”

“What, I’m not Piece-of-Shit Dave today?” David snarks.

Sirius’s stomach sinks. “No, so hear me out, OK?” he tries. “There is such a thing called reading a room properly and more importantly than that even, there’s reading the person you work for properly: puffing Will up to be anything other than another bloke who got a job managing a café does even less for you than it does for everybody else here, and I don’t think you’ve actually stopped and thought about the fact that you’re employed by someone who is too busy with other things around here to care whether the container of vanilla bean powder is lacking just a bit.”

“It’s less than halfway,” David counters.

Sirius tilts his head, leaning it in closer to David's. “What’s my point?” he quizzes. “Come on, you’re smarter than this; what was I just saying?”

“You were saying that our boss doesn’t care if the café is stocked or not,” David translates.

“Yeah, I more meant this situation, but if you want to go broad then I’m afraid it’s already too late to start over again,” Sirius decides. “You want to know what Will doesn’t like seeing? I’ll tell you for free.”

David pushes out a mild to medium scoff, but if Sirius is liberal about it, that could have been a laugh if the man weren’t so tightly wound. “I wouldn’t pay you for it anyway.”

“Nah, likely not,” Sirius allows for. “Here’s the scene: you start at two, show up for your shift at exactly two minutes to the hour, and take your time putting on your apron, footing your work shoes on, leisurely strolling up front, not helping to ease the load off of any of your coworkers, who are already suffering just having to be here—”

“Man, you just really want to get out of here,” David retorts.

Beat. “Maybe so,” Sirius allows, but he works to keep in with his previous cadence. “That right there, is Will’s biggest pet peeve and I know that because I used to do that exact thing before he showed up; I was usually here earlier than that example so I could actually chill with a coffee rather than hop on the floor and get right to it, but I would certainly take my sweet time getting up here and caught a few looks aimed in my direction from the man early on, read the room, and realized that the five minutes before my shift are what counts to Will; it’s a question of, are you ready to go when you’re needed, and if you’re not, he’s simply not impressed with you or your work ethic, so I complied with his demands—”

“You still do that now,” David cuts in bluntly.

“Not for the start of my shifts,” Sirius corrects, not taking the bait this time. “Breaks are neither here nor there when Will hasn’t said a thing about them in all my time here and I somehow doubt he’ll start today, but I was here a little extra early before the start of my shifts from that point on; I'd still give myself time to fuck around beforehand and not have to rush up front the second I got here because I don't like doing that shit at all, but the man has loved me from there on out and that's because I started showing my face up front a few good minutes before I was slated to start.”

David’s eyes narrow to a dictionary definition of a squint. “Was that whole tale just so you could pat yourself on the back?” he asks, outlandishly thrown by that, but hey, at least the both of them are completely thrown now.

“Why would—” Sirius starts, shaking his head clear to keep steam from wafting out of his ears; it’s exactly like talking to Reg, right up to the fact that what Sirius is actually saying isn’t penetrating that cement skull of his. “I’m telling you Will doesn’t hold grudges, doesn’t lord write-ups over our heads, and doesn’t have a ton of pet peeves; he has one that he doesn't even discuss aloud, I gave you an example of how I figured out how to appease it, and my entire point, since you’ve right missed it, is that you keep going off the deep end over every little thing that’s off about this place, even though nobody here, not even the bossman himself, is going to give you a prize for policing everyone around you. It’s not a good look, it's not a good time for you, I can tell that much, and it isn't for anyone else either; I’m just trying to help you out so you don’t end up wishing your time here could have been even slightly more pleasant once you’re finished with the place.”

“Then quit doing it,” David snaps. “I’m not interested in your help.”

Sirius has never been happier to see Stan the Man waltz into the shop for it not only gives him a prime exit from a conversation that’s literally going nowhere, but it also gives him something to do other than self-destruct right then and there; a win/win, for everyone involved.

“Hey, hey,” Sirius greets, sauntering up to meet Stan at the till.

“Tell me it isn’t true,” Stan demands by way of hello.

“It is,” Sirius chimes, plucking a medium-sized cup off of the stack for Stan’s drink.

“I don’t need you to mark it,” David puts in.

“Here you go, then,” Sirius offers, holding the cup out for David to come and get if he so wants it; he is over here having a conversation that isn’t doomed. “Now, we’re projecting that our venue will be up and running by September, so by all means, if you get a hankering for a stiff drink, you come on by and I'll make you one, on the house.”

David heads over to snag the cup out of Sirius’s hands, evidently not appreciating the walking he has to do to get it. “I think I’ll be taking you up on that one,” Stan maintains, pulling his wallet out.

“No no,” Sirius declines. “Put your wallet away."

“Ohh, no,” Stan says at once, “I couldn’t.”

“Oh, I insist,” Sirius maintains, shooing him off with a wave of his hand. "This one’s also on the house.”

He feels his mobile buzz in the pocket of his apron, positions himself directly in front of the till to pull it out for a wee looksie, and lights up at Remus’s name displayed on his screen.

“You’d better pay for that,” David slips him, under the whir of the steam wand.

“I need at least a full minute before you talk to me again,” Sirius says frankly, not looking at him while pulling up his new message.

Thank you so much for the extra alarm! I needed that snooze xoxo

Well, short and sweet never hurt anyone. Sirius beams down at his screen as he keys in a quick reply, initially aiming for a ‘hope you’re feeling better’ and then adding, like, thirteen x’s and o’s onto the end of it because he wants to and can.

Remus is quick with his reply, which is rather well and good when Sirius can tell the shop door just opened. He sneaks a quick peek at it, finds a simple ‘Much better’ paired up with a schmoozy kissy-face, and sticks his mobile away in time to greet the woman who has appeared at the till, smiling brightly as he redirects his attention to her.

One thing he’ll say for hearing from one of the only people he feels he’s making the right steps to keep afloat, is that he didn’t give up on Remus when things got shoddy and look how well that turned out. Different people, different strokes, but the essence there remains the same, and maybe, he just needs to keep at it, maybe, he just needs to stop giving up so easily on people, maybe, he needs to stop being so fucking aloof all the time because apparently when he does that, he sends people to their graves early.

Problem is, Mary isn’t off until a whopping eight o’clock and after she gives him one helluva bear hug on her way out, that really just leaves a single hour for Sirius to make some sort of lasting impression and this is also the golden hour where everything you do counts toward you leaving on time, so the two of them are either busy with trying to get the place in order for the morning or trading off customers that trickle in here and there for most of those sixty minutes.

Once the shop is closed to customers, and the two of them are shutting the place down, Sirius doesn’t even really know what to do with the feeling that time’s already run out. He keeps second-guessing himself on what he’s expected to do, what he even wants to do, and keeps losing count of his cash drawer so he effectively wipes his mind of anything and everything else going on in it just to get the job done.

Once the till is closed down, he figures it’ll do him well to help David put away the lasts of the dishes, but the whole time he’s doing it, he just feels like a man without enough stones to fix anything; a minute goes by and Sirius loses that one, and the next, and the next, and then, they’re huddled at the till clocking out, and then, David’s already scurrying off to set the alarm, so there's that moment gone now, too, and then, they’re outside.

Sirius shuffles out the door after David, faces the parking lot as takes a long breath in, and hopes with all he has that David won't book it the second he can go.

He swivels on his heel after the door locks just to make sure. “Well,” he offers, “that’s that, then.”

“Bet you’re feeling great about it,” David returns, zipping up his hoodie even though it is July.

“I'm excited to try something new,” Sirius says of it. “In any case, it was nice working with you.”

Even Sirius can hear the question mark on the end of that embarrassing collection of words, so it’s by no surprise to him that David replies with a snort, but the fact of the matter is, it sounds awful beneath the roof they’re standing under. “Yeah, you too,” he returns blandly.

“Alright, I wasn’t actually being sarcastic there, you know,” Sirius points out. “Not all of this time together has been total shite; we had some fun here and there.”

“If you think that's the case, then I’m even more worried about what goes on in your head,” David returns him. “I’m waiting on my ride, so you can head off—”

“OK, here’s what’s going on,” Sirius cuts in, his heart hammering in his chest, “maybe, I don’t want to leave this on a bad note, maybe, I don’t want another era of my life to be shrouded in a nightmare scenario, maybe I actually just want to make things right before I fuck someone else's—”

“You can’t,” David cuts in, plain as all hell.

“Why not?” Sirius returns, heat shooting up his spine. “I’ve tried, I’ve been trying all night to smooth this over, but you have not made that easy for me; I know you figured that out hours ago, and you still haven’t given me the time of day.”

“Oh, because you deserve that?” David puts up, blinking at the end of it, staring at him like Sirius has gone so far off of the deep end that there’s no point in saving him. “You made this place a living hell for me; everyone followed your lead here, you know that? The second you wrote me off, so did they.”

Sirius braces himself against the complete arrow to the chest that is. “I don’t have control over what everyone else does,” he maintains, but even he knows it comes out sounding meager at best. “I can’t control what other people—”

“You can,” David enunciates. “You just didn’t want to, so you hung me out to dry in front of everybody, staff and customers alike, every chance you got, and worst of all, you preened over the laughs you got at my expense.”

“I did not preen,” Sirius counters.

“You sure did,” David serves him. "And you sure do."

“I get it, OK?” Sirius puts up. “I gave you a petty nickname toward the end and it stuck; I didn't actually mean for that to happen and I’m gone now so I’ll tell them to quit it or just remove it from their vocabulary altogether, but I can't make them do anything and you have to know on some level I was just razzing you—”

Razzing me?” David echoes elegantly, and the ‘tude being brought into this isn’t helping this one bit. “Well, then we’re squared to one; sleep well, Sirius.”

Sirius puts out a profound scoff. “What, was I supposed to just let you come at me every single time you just felt like riding me? That doesn't make any sense, you gave it to me, I gave it back to you, you gave more, I gave back some more; that’s how it worked, it was a give and take thing,” he highlights. “Yeah, we were never going to be buddies, but it kind of felt like a bit we were doing — it felt like we were having a laugh, some of the time.”

“I’m not laughing,” David puts it plainly.

“Yeah, neither am I,” Sirius returns him. “And you know what, no, you don’t get to rewrite this and act like you didn’t walk the fuck in here planning to make enemies: you blame me for turning the staff against you, as if you didn’t storm in here and write them off as off-brand versions of me on week one, so don’t come at me about how you can’t get along with anyone here, that’s on you. Did you really think they were going to want to be anywhere near you with the way you are?”

“Oh, this is just insane,” David tries, but fuck off, David, that’s not happening.

“You’re right, it is; this is about me, not them,” Sirius schools him, pointing a stark hand toward the closed-up shop they just left. “You came at me for every little thing I did in that fucking building for weeks, wouldn’t even let me breathe without telling me how to do it better or quieter, and excuse the fuck out of me if I’ve gone way past the point of being sick and tired of receiving unsolicited advice on anything I do from another goddamn fucking bigot; at least do some fucking work and realize that you were just as much the problem—”

“Then it’s done,” David cuts in, lifting his hands roughly in a clear forfeit, fucking coward. “I don’t know what you’re doing trying to fix it now; we don’t even like each other.”

“This is bigger than just you,” Sirius shoots him, his voice echoing off the storefront. “I don’t want this hanging over me after I go, I don’t.”

He feels his whole body tighten up as David steps in and gets so far in his face with a forefinger pointed in it that it’s quite honestly audacious that he found the nerve. “You can’t just bully people relentlessly and expect them to erase it all for you just to make you feel a little better about it because you’re out the door,” he pronounces, his eyes darkened over. “It’s too late for that.”

Sirius doesn’t see a thing but red. He doesn’t even see that he clocks David in the gut so hard that the man doubles over, but when he can properly see again, David’s on the ground holding his middle and the knuckles on Sirius’s right hand smart a bit, so he can put two and two together here, and one thing he’ll say? Feels fucking good on the other side of it.

He doesn’t look back as he strides down the path to the sidewalk, cutting across the street in between the cars on the side of the road; he’s homebound, in need of the address he typically orders his lifts from so he can get to the one person who well-knows what a sack of shit looks like and somehow doesn’t think Sirius resembles one, and to get that much closer to getting the fuck out of this nightmare of a city that never stops hounding him.

He orders the lift to meet him out front and gets to his flat about six seconds sooner than the car does, but he has been speed-walking. He gets in the back seat, stone-faces out the windowsill on the way over to Remus’s, and fortunately for him, he got a driver who’s not interested in conversing at all, and Sirius’ll be giving him five fucking stars for that the second he can bother looking at his mobile again.

His right hand is shaky on the door handle as he opens it, shaky again as he throws a thanks over his shoulder while shutting the door behind him, and shaking all the more as he books it up the path and in through the lobby door. He’s never made quicker work of the stairwell, nor has he cleared Remus’s hallway this quickly, and he doesn’t even need to use his key to get in when Remus’s door opens on his first turn try of the knob; he's really had an effect on that one over time.

He gets himself inside, kicks his loafers off, and follows the light above the stove casting shadows over this side of the main room, rounding the partition at the entryway and finding Remus sitting at the island, his back to the kitchen as he types away on his laptop. “You’re going to make so much fun of me for this, but I’m drafting a handy little list for tomorrow's errands so I don’t forget anything important,” he declares, finishing up with the line he’s on before looking up at Sirius with so much light coming off him that it’s really fucking noticeable when his face drops. “What’s wrong?

Remus’s voice reaches an octave four times higher than his typical register with those two words alone, so Sirius really must look awful. He gives speaking a go, but that doesn’t go over well when his throat decides that closing up is the best plan of action; his lungs take over, heaving his chest up and out as he scrunches up his face, his eyes stinging as they cloud over, and Remus is so quick about skirting around the side of the island and clearing the floor between them, it’s both arresting and relieving how fast he ends up in front of Sirius, keeping one step of distance between them to look him over fully.

Sirius isn’t doing so hot on his feet just now and he finds that out when he tries to step into that bit of distance left between them and ends up tripping on his feet with it. Remus catches him quickly, there’s that at least, but whatever amount of strength Sirius reserved all afternoon and evening to just keep him upright falls away at once and he’s left clutching at the front of Remus’s work shirt to keep his knees from buckling underneath him.

Remus automatically redirects their combined weight, leaning the both of them back a little to make up for Sirius leaning so hard against him, and Sirius sticks his profoundly tearful face down against the crook of his neck and just fucking sobs. It’s no good, he hates that he’s doing this to him, he can’t even speak; poor Remus can’t catch a clue what’s happened and he’ll get around to telling him eventually, but his chest will have to stop convulsing first and his breathing — fuck his breathing, his lungs have simply given up on him. It’s horrifying, sobbing without any noise leaving you.

Remus tries a few different things, but doesn't seem to know what to do with Sirius or his hands; he tries passing them soothingly over Sirius’s back but seems to think otherwise, lifts them to Sirius's shoulders for mere seconds before he thinks better of that, too, and switches to holding him with one arm held straight up Sirius's back to anchor him in close to his chest, the other clasping at the back of Sirius’s head, and that’s it, Remus; that's perfect, just keep doing that.

Since he can’t seem to pull it together enough to voice that plea, Sirius lets go of the front of Remus’s work polo and winds his arms around him, reclaiming the shirt in his grasp once more at the back and squeezing him so tight Remus will have to know he needs this hug to keep going.

“Do you want me to call James?” Remus bids, quietly near his left ear, and that's the absolute opposite of what Sirius fucking wants, Good Cunt; he just wants this, that’s it.

He shakes his head erratically, or best he can with Remus’s hand pressing against the back of it like Sirius’s head is the one of theirs that actually needs careful holding, and his sobs triple in velocity over that alone, rendering him more of a coughing, heaving, ugly mess than he already was; the most he can do now is hold Remus down and hope to anchor them in one, solid place.

Remus stays put, the good lad, doing a bit of this, a bit of that to get Sirius’s breathing back in order; he starts by straightening Sirius out so their chests are fully pressed together, holding Sirius tightly to him as he draws in a deep, full breath, holding it in for five seconds before letting it go just as slowly, and five seconds is a long, long time when your lungs aren’t working properly, but Remus seems determined to get Sirius mimicking his breathing and back on track. Remus turns his head, presses his lips to the top of Sirius’s head, and leaves them there, continuing to showcase what slower breathing patterns are by breathing through his nose instead, and then, the putters of breath against his forehead, the continued rise and fall of Remus's chest pressed tightly against Sirius’s own are what's keeping him focused.

After the span of something like a minute of that, Remus puts a bit of movement into it as Sirius’s breathing evens out, starting up a slow sway back and forth on the spot, and sure, Sirius’s breathing is getting better, but the waterworks only flow harder with that choice of his. Remus lets him do that for another ten seconds or so before he interferes, leaning back so that Sirius has to lift his head, and he might’ve called him a jerk for it if Remus didn’t start pressing small kisses underneath Sirius’s eyes, two or three under the left one, three or four under the right, the touch of his lips careful, as if testing whether that’s a direction Sirius is alright with going in, and Sirius unwinds his fists from Remus’s shirt once and for all, slipping his arms out from behind him to slide them up in between them, clasping his hands on either side of Remus’s face and leaning into each new press of his lips, thinking of all the times he held himself back from bursting like this in front of him and calling them wasted.

Sirius’s throat gains second life and the most pathetic noise comes out of it and by mercy, Remus doesn’t hold it against him. A sobering thought creeps up his spine as he wonders why he'd ever think otherwise; if there was one person who would wholly understand that words can fall short, it'd be Remus.

“I’m sorry,” he says finally, chancing at opening his eyes, and it’s a good thing he’s brave now and again because Remus’s imploring frown paired with the minute shake of his head is something to be desired.

“Don’t be,” he instills, quiet in between the two of them. “That's not like you at all.”

Sirius huffs a meager laugh, leans up to touch his forehead to Remus’s, and shuts his eyes again, reminding himself that this is someone to bask over. Whether Remus knows he’s doing it or not, he doesn’t know, but Remus doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, inadvertently letting Sirius continue basking for a little longer before he feels a gentle tap on his back. “Here, come sit,” he coaxes, backing up slowly on his feet and taking Sirius along with him. “Do you want the couch or the island?”

The island’s closest. Sirius hums, redirecting Remus toward it before taking the stool across from his setup. Remus does a dual move there, coming in to leave a kiss on top of Sirius’s head and shutting his laptop with his left hand, sliding it aside. “Can I make you something?” he bids, tucking a stray lock from Sirius’s up-do behind his left ear. “Coffee? I’ve tons of it.”

Sirius shakes his head. “No.”

“No?” Remus repeats, looking left, right, and back to him.

“I’ll take a tea,” Sirius says, reworking his mouth around an inescapable smile as Remus reels a bit at that.

“I—” he starts, looking between Sirius and his kitchen perplexedly, “—have oolong obviously, your typical English Breakfast, some Earl Gray still, and I picked up this herbal one that I spotted; it's passionfruit, smells exactly what I think paradise must.”

“Sold,” Sirius decides, turning his head and pressing a kiss to Remus’s right shoulder.

“OK, I’ll be quick about it,” he imparts, leaning down to leave a kiss on his lips, and Sirius watches him patter off toward the kitchen with a clear mission ahead of him, leaving him feeling so in love with him that it hurts; it hurts to think about telling him, of everything he could lose if Remus doesn’t see him the same after.

Déjà vu creeps up his spine as Remus gathers together the fixings, his back turned toward him a lot like it’d been in May, and Sirius knows with a festering heavyweight in his chest that he can’t get away with keeping this shit from him anymore, even if it’s this murky. Not if they’re this serious and certainly not if Remus still isn’t quite sure where to step, what to say, what to do other than whip something up for him only to sit there afterward, wilted and scared for him and tearing his hands apart waiting for Sirius to throw him a single fucking bone.

It hasn’t been all that equal, has it? Sirius can lay claim on the fact that he has nursed Remus back from some dreary fucking places and he's done it a lot more often these days, but he hasn’t given Remus too many opportunities to lay claim on the same. Maybe all Remus needs is a little reciprocation on that front, even if it could warp his view of him; if Sirius comes out of this with Remus still on his arm, if he still thinks there’s a glimmer of good in him after everything he’s ripped apart and stomped all over in the name of trying to win himself some freedom, then that might just be—

“Do you want yours steeped?” Remus puts up, looking around at him. “I’ve never made you a tea before; I don’t know how you’d take it.”

“I’d let you pour it down my throat if I’m honest,” Sirius offers him.

“OK, well, I won’t be doing that,” Remus mentions, turning back to the counter, “but I'll assume that means you don’t mind either way.”

“Smart lad,” Sirius gives him, keeping his hands clasped together in his lap; if he loses this, how comfortable it can be even through turmoil, he’s not sure what he’s even going to do next.

By the time Remus is leaning in to set two mugs down on the island, Sirius must look like certified garbage all over again for he simply stops once his hands are free again and stares at him imploringly from where he is, frozen in place across the island. “I can ring James,” he reinstates. “He’ll fly over here the second he knows something’s wrong.”

“I know,” Sirius assures, clasping his hands over the warmth of the mug in front of him. “He’ll also bend over backwards to find any excuse for the sake of me and my pride, and I don’t deserve to hear it from someone who won’t tell me if I’m actually flawed, but you? You’re Switzerland.”

Remus slowly sinks down onto the stool across from him, watching Sirius with complete trepidation. “I’m pretty sure I’m nowhere near Switzerland when it comes to you.”

“You say what you feel, you say what you think is right, and you say it with tact,” Sirius says of it. “And right now, I’d rather hear from you than him.”

Remus looks around wildly as if he’s looking for the other person Sirius is speaking of because of course that couldn’t be him. “I’m not buttering you up,” Sirius tacks on, insistent that he hears it. “It’s just the truth; you’ve talked me down, thee most effectively, every time I’ve needed you to, and you don’t do it out of obligation, you just are the best person I know, and I need it to be you.”

Remus gives out a consolidated breath, cupping his hands around his own mug now, too. “I’m glad you came,” he instils. “I don’t want you to do whatever this is by yourself.”

Sirius shakes his head roughly, his throat tight. “I can’t do it by myself,” he puts it straight, his eyes already starting to well up again, the fucking nerve of them. “I tried, and it all just fell through my fingers. Again.”

“What happened between now and earlier?” Remus bids, searching him with open disorientation, and fair enough, really; last they spoke, Sirius felt sore for Remus, but he was feeling on top of the world and probably looked a lot like it, too.

“Pete’s mum came for the chest today.”

Remus blinks once. “When was that?” he inquires.

Sirius waves him off. “You were out cold,” he offers him, “but, that also meant I had to empty it so she could take it, and, uhm—”

He presses his lips together, his brows cinching together, and Remus gives a sigh through his nose. “Was there more?” he raises, but something about the frank note to his tone suggests he already knows the answer.

“Oh, there sure was,” Sirius affirms, smiling weakly. “A whole damned diary of Reg’s, to be precise, and since we may as well be as direct as we can, I thought I would be snooping at his most personal thoughts and was totally fine with that; no shame whatsoever in me at all about it, but then it was really more a collection of letters, written to me, spanning from just days after I left and right up until the end, and it was the worst thing I’ve ever done, reading them.”

He stops there, watching Remus lift a hand to rub it over his eyes, feeling the exhaustion in that motion like it’s in his own body. “I know,” he tacks on, shrugging for it. “I shouldn’t have looked through it, but I thought it was fair game the more I read; they were written to me, and like the fucking idiot I am, I went ahead and read every single entry knowing that I was about to be ripped apart with every new sentence, and he roasted the shit out of me, Remus, worst thing I've read a long time and that includes the scathing one from my mother wrote after I split and that was one rough read, but at least she sent me it, I guess. I mean, what the fuck is wrong with me; do I just get off on pain?”

“Oh, mm mm,” Remus hums, giving a solemn head shake. “No, I love you and I’m not about to give you shit for looking.”

“It was one of my worst ideas, Remus,” Sirius insists. “Easily top five.”

“Well, I’m not here to deny you what makes you you, I'm sorry,” Remus puts up.

“What do you mean?” Sirius bids, woefully stumped.

“Ever since I’ve known about him, I’ve known that all you’ve been trying to do is remember him well,” Remus offers. “Before the funeral, during, after it, and how are you supposed to do that when that relationship ended so abruptly, after years of estrangement, while you still weren't speaking, and you don’t have him anymore to repair it; who am I to rag on you for looking? I can’t do that, of course you looked.”

Sirius breathes substantially tighter with each try for air. “Even with all that, I literally asked for this by doing that,” he maintains, displaying his hands over his tear-streaked visage.

Remus pushes a heavy breath out. “Sirius, you’re going to devour anything that could remotely give you something good to cling to in memory of him, this is not the least bit surprising to me,” he maintains. “I hate how many times you’ve dipped your toes in the waters and had them snapped at; that’s why I’m upset, I can’t protect you from any of that.”

Sirius wants to take every word of that sentiment and tattoo them onto his back, keep them with him for as long as he lasts, but it feels like he gets kicked at the center of his back with the sole of a boot for even entertaining the idea of clinging to them. “I need you to know the bad stuff, too, or else I’m not giving you the chance to—” he starts, but his throat is so dry he needs a gulp of tea to even get back on track with speech patterns, a gush of flavour taking over his entire mouth with it. “Oh — this is fucking fantastic; good find, you.”

“Isn’t it?” Remus puts out, letting his hands fall from his mouth in a burst of true excitement before he seems to gather himself, wiping his expression clear and sitting up straighter on his stool. “Sorry, go on.”

Sirius sniffs once, nodding. “I fucked that kid up worse than our parents ever fucking did,” he instils, able to just put it out there now. “Those two mashed that kid’s brain from the get, I know that, but they were there and I wasn’t.”

“OK, but we’ve been here before,” Remus comes in, gentle as a creek.

“No, please,” Sirius bids, not even bothering to wipe his tears away at this point; they're unavoidable. “The first batch of letters were dispersed out over all of these milestones he hit that I completely missed — that I didn’t even entertain showing up for, and he felt that; that’s how shit a person I am and he hated me so fucking much for it, and he should have, I fucking left him there—”

“You had to,” Remus puts in, concrete and concise. “If you need to hear it again, that’s OK; we all need to be reminded of things we feel unsure about, but you had to go, Sirius.”

“Fine, yeah, I would have died young in that house, I know that,” Sirius implicitly states, “but I—”

“No, then we’ve hit the nail on the head, haven’t we?” Remus cuts in fast, and Sirius knows it was really fucking mean to just lay that out there like that, but Remus is not making it very easy for him to hate himself.

“It should have mattered more to me what could have happened to him,” Sirius tries again. “I should have tried a lot harder to drag him out of there, I knew it last year and I really fucking know it now; even if he didn’t want to go with me, I shouldn’t have given up on him that easily.”

“You can’t make anyone do anything, Sirius,” Remus puts down.

“I could have tried harder, pulled him out of there myself,” Sirius cements. “I ran off, wrote him off as dead to me, and let him take on all that responsibility we both got saddled with while I, what, sought some fucking freedom? He never got that, but I did, and I traded his for mine.”

“I don’t like that read of it at all,” Remus says of it, readjusting his hands on his mug.

“Well, I don’t much like it either, but a spade’s a spade,” Sirius puts it plainly.

“He had an awful lot of responsibility foisted onto him, I’m not taking that away from him,” Remus insists, playing with the handle of the cup of tea that he hasn’t taken one sip from yet, “but that’s an awful lot you’ve put on yourself here, especially with the way you were treated there.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Sirius stresses.

“Of course it does,” Remus attests, absolutely not cooperating with him on this one. “You were driven out.”

“Remus, please, I appreciate you doing this but I’m not done yet,” Sirius emphasizes. “Those letters got worse the more they went on and not that he just hounded me harder and harder, the language changed; it wasn’t all roses, he still held such a firm grudge against me and he made sure to make that clear—”

“Then I just think it’d be important to remember here that he wrote those letters at a time when he was the most upset with you, Sirius,” Remus puts in.

“No, not these ones,” Sirius denies. “Well, I don't know; the earlier batch was filled with all these scathing, backhanded compliments and I’m not surprised about that part, we were raised on taking others down a peg while still feigning pleasantries and they set us up real good for that, but in the later batch, even with all that Black magic lingering and the torch he had for me, I could read the love on the page; he loved me so much, Remus — he even drew me, on one of the pages? A full sketch of me, here to here—” he shows Remus by sticking one hand over his head and one halfway down his neck, “—and he had such a talent for it that I didn’t even know about, and it broke my heart seeing it again after—”

Sirius stops there, choked over getting closer and closer to the punchline, but Remus just waits for him to sort it out. “The last entry reads like a suicide note,” he says faintly.

There, Remus finally goes for a sip of tea, his eyes wide over the rim of his cup while he keeps his gaze trained downward, and gives speaking a shot once he’s swallowed. “Are we sure?” he asks, looking to Sirius again.

Sirius does appreciate the usage of the word ‘we’ in this case, but the question makes him smirk dryly. “I mean, he didn’t say it outright, but he alluded to it,” he puts it.

“OK,” Remus says, uncertainty lining his voice, “but alluding to and penning 'the note' are different things, aren’t they?”

“Right, but he turned up dead — mm, days after that one,” Sirius theorizes, stroking his chin for effect. “I’m just reading between the lines here; he said he just wanted to sleep and now he's very doing that.”

Remus’s shoulders drop a notch. “Sirius, I’m not trying to discount you, but I—”

Sirius winces, dropping his gaze to the island counter. “No, I know,” he backs off, chiding himself for getting mouthy with the one bloke he shouldn’t. “It’s just a gut feeling, Remus. It’s the way it was worded, the way it was written; it was barely legible so he must have been just barely able to his writing hand to work for him, and the few entries before that were like reading someone dragging their feet toward a conclusion, but years after the fact. He didn’t even want the responsibility any more than I did by then, he really didn’t, and fuck, Remus, I hate that I can’t even discredit this because I’d love to go on not knowing this, but it makes the most sense: he was only twenty — graduated with honours, in business school, was fucking loaded, set for life, and the face of a front for one of the shadiest fucking operations out there.”

Sirius stops to wait in case Remus has something he’d like to put in given that the face he pulls makes it seem like he does. “OK,” he offers. “Bit cryptic, but not all that surprising to hear.”

Sirius smirks humourlessly again. “I assumed he fucked over the wrong person in a deal, but I had no way of proving it,” he insists. “That obit was so vague, and no one was going to talk to me about what went on there, I just accepted it as fact; I lost my brother to a scuffle, and when you grow up around that you almost have to go to that, but my gut’s on fire over that last letter, Remus, and that’s never a good sign.”

“Then I believe you,” Remus puts down. “But I can’t pretend that I’m equipped for something like this; I don’t know what the right words should be, I don’t know how to help you along, so I really think I should call James over—”

“Remus,” Sirius cuts in, lifting his gaze from the contents of his mug to meet his eye. “If you do that, here’s what’ll happen: he will tear that flat apart looking for the notebook when he finds out it exists, he will painstakingly go through it with a highlighter to drum up a fully-fledged counter-argument, and he will destroy Reg just to make me feel better.”

“Sirius, I think he'd know better than to attack him right now,” Remus suggests. “I really think James is a little more empathetic than that.”

“No, he’s empathetic toward me, and that’s it,” Sirius presses. “He’s hated Reg since the beginning, blames him for most if not all of my undoing, and he will stomp all over him just to hold me up, and I can’t hear a bad word about Reg right now or I’m going to explode.”

“Maybe you should talk to someone who isn’t so close to it?” Remus suggests. “Or so close to you; either one.”

“No,” Sirius instils, hating that idea more than he hates the idea of ringing James up and dropping the news. “I came to you, Remus; you.”

“Well, I’m never going to blame you, so I’m James 2.0 in this case,” Remus puts up, lifting his hands disparagingly.

“No, you’re not,” Sirius insists. “James will cite his position with sources and combat Reg’s truth by bringing a load of in-text quotes in to pick apart; he’ll spin the entire narrative around on its axis so that I don’t end up the villain of this tale, and he will come for him, Remus.”

Remus opens his mouth but leaves the room they're in without a voice, like he’s petrified to say what’s on his tongue. “Just say it,” Sirius sighs, bracing himself.

“Reg’s truth is his truth, yes, but it isn’t the blanket truth,” Remus puts it, moving his hands to his lap now, folding and unfolding them unceasingly from there, no doubt. “Nor is it yours; you have your own, so as horrible as this is for you to contend with, you didn’t do this to him.”

Sirius feels the colour drain from his face, but he thinks it has more to do with fear than with shock. “No, Reg wrote a lot that was true about me,” he admits. "It was the truth."

“Then we’ll work through what he wrote, I promise,” Remus allows, “but are you saying he wrote that you were to blame for it? Because I can very tell that's where you've landed.”

“Not — he didn’t write that, no,” Sirius allows. “He wrote a slam book about me to me, all about how he experienced growing up underneath my foot, and later on, how my absence and my name followed him around years and years after the fact, and then, the focus was more on him, our parents, and the way he experienced that house without me in it, but it clearly took him a long time to work out that he was severely damaged by all of it; them and me.”

“OK,” Remus nods. “And you were raised in the same family, same house, but you had a completely different experience of it than he did, one that still weighs on you to this day, so your truth remains whether or not you read that book today; neither of you grew up in with fair circumstances, but you aren’t the villain here, that’s the blanket truth.”

Sirius attaches his teeth to his lower lip. “I didn’t stop it from happening.”

Remus's shoulders sink in a way that just has Sirius feeling like garbage for speaking it, but then he’s up out of his seat and skirting around the island to get to him, and it’s so much — almost too much, to have him still coming to him even after this, stand this close to him even with this, but Sirius scoots a little closer to him on his stool, lifting his arms and hooking them up around Remus’s neck while their heights are so off, and presses his face against his chest, and there’s the sobbing, yet again.

“It’s alright,” Remus whispers, almost answering Sirius’s thoughts for him. “I love you, and you can feel every other way about this, but you have to go easier on yourself, OK? I need you to.”

“I’m not just horrified with myself; I’m fucking livid with him,” Sirius puts out, muffled against Remus’s chest. “I hate that he didn’t even try to get a hold of me, even just drop in unannounced — he could have figured it out where I lived, it’s not like it’s hard, but then I can’t even sit with that for long because I know for a fact that I wouldn’t have opened my door for him, no fucking way.”

“Oh, you’d have let him right in,” Remus returns heavily. “I’m sorry, but that’s just you.”

Sirius shakes his head roughly before lifting it. “No, I hated him,” he presses.

“OK,” Remus says, nodding once. “You’d have still let him in.”

“No, Remus,” Sirius stresses. “He told me I deserved the shit I was getting on the way out, he looked at me as I was leaving like I was sick, like I needed help; I was finished with him, I’d have hung up on him the instant I heard his voice over the phone, I’d have ripped any letter from him to shreds, I'd have—”

“Well, you did just read an entire series of diary entries written to you, so I don’t know if that’s all that truthful?” Remus counters, pressing a warm, firm hand around in circles over Sirius’s back. “You’d have read any letters you got from him, maybe not early on when everything was so fresh, but you’d have been brave enough to eventually and I think today says that loud enough for the both of us: you're loyal right down to your bones and I know that might not help right now because it's a double-edged sword to feel like you could have done something if you’d just known more and didn't, but you’re not a mind-reader. For all you knew, he was happy, Sirius.”

Sirius fucking bends in half with that, but Remus whispers in his ear and holds him together. He can’t make out the words but he knows they’re gentle — too gentle for him — and even as he thinks Remus shouldn't have to get his hands dirty like this, even as he wills himself to pull it together, he can’t do it; he keeps hiccoughing and sputtering and sobbing, it feels like he’s run fifty miles with the way his chest is heaving again, feels like he's getting out years worth of guilt and mess he convinced himself he could move past that’s just been ratcheted up to a thousand so suddenly it’s like he’s been hit with a bullwhip. His hands are filthy, but Remus doesn’t think it, still holds him delicately like he so often does, still whispers that he's got him, over and over again, until Sirius is nothing but a silent, aching pile of bones slumped against him.

“I’m so tired,” Sirius puts out, barely above a whisper, but Remus hears it anyway.

“Do you want to lay down?” Remus asks, cupping his right hand over the side of Sirius’s head and whisking his fingers over his left temple, and what a move, hm; wonder where he learned that one?

“Don’t we need to get the laundry done?” Sirius raises, tempted by the idea of laying down, but fairly bemused by it all the same.

Remus is silent for a whole five beats. “I think we’re well past that point,” he puts it, tapping Sirius’s cheeks with his thumbs before letting go of his face altogether.

“Well, we have to do it, don’t we?” Sirius puts up.

“Yeah, I just figure I’ll wake up a little earlier than planned and go get it done in the morning,” Remus relays. “You were right, there’s plenty of time; nothing’s going to go topsy-turvy if I leave it until tomorrow, it's OK.”

Sirius half-smiles, half-frowns for the direct quote. “Wake me for it,” he bids. “I want to come with.”

“See how you feel in the morning,” Remus suggests. “You might want to rest.”

Sirius nods weakly for it, lifting his head to meet Remus’s eyes minutely, and takes in a better breath than the last thousand he’s taken over the last while. “No, I want to come with,” he cements.

Remus looks him over, lifting a shoulder. “OK,” he grants. “If you change your mind tomorrow, I won’t hold it against you.”

Sirius nods. “You’re good that way."

“Finish your tea,” Remus coaxes, sliding Sirius’s mug closer to him with a smile.

Sirius reaches for his mug on that note, finding the request fairly easy to comply with when this tea is fucking delicious. He drains a good quarter more in seconds, then slips off of his stool and goes around Remus to bring the mug to the sink, drinking the lasts of it as he goes. He tosses the tea bag into the bin underneath the sink, rinses the mug out, and leaves it in the drying rack, while Remus seems to have more tea to work on and is fine with taking it back to the room with him.

Remus leads the charge, heading in first and taking a quick right to bring his mug around the edge of the bed to set it on his nightstand before turning on his lamp and doubling back toward his dresser. Sirius, on the other hand, goes right up the middle of the bed, planting himself down and working himself underneath Remus’s comforter. He’s certainly poked fun at Remus for keeping a comforter on the bed in the pit of summer, but right about now, he finds it rather necessary to cocoon himself in it.

Remus looks up while he tugs his pyjama trousers on. “Did you want something to change into?”

“I’m OK for now,” Sirius extends, quite literally wrapped in Remus’s comforter and all.

Remus eyes him from where he continues hobbling into his flannels, sending him a wee smile, and moves around to his side of the bed. He nestles in against the wall, just to the left of Sirius’s cocoon, and reaches to thread the fingers of his free hand up through Sirius’s hair, keeping it methodically slow and just the right kind of intimacy, Sirius feels.

“I don’t know what to say,” he admits.

“That’s OK,” Remus says, going for a wee sip of tea. “We can just lay here until you do.”

Sirius forwards him an imploring frown, curling into the shape of Remus’s right hip and shutting his eyes for a few beats, relishing in the sweetness of how natural the hand in his hair moves, even if he’s got a strong inkling that Remus’s brain is going at a mile a minute while trying to seem rather fine with whatever Sirius chooses.

Sirius flashes back to the scene in the main room, lingers on watching Remus putter about the kitchen trying to get him at least somewhere close to soothed, cycles back through the evening, and chooses to talk.

Here goes that. “I hit David.”

“What?” Remus bursts out.

Sirius nods. “Square in the gut.”

Remus lifts his hands from his mug altogether, leaving it beared between his knees to cover his mouth with them, making his wide eyes all the more show-stopping overtop. “Do I want to know what happened?” he raises, muffled behind his hands.

Sirius puts out a puff of breath. “I mean, it’s all connected, isn’t it,” he offers wanly, giving in to a tight grin just by quoting the very man before him. “David is essentially Reg incarnate, but I didn’t notice it right away; I don’t go through life seeing Reg in every single stickler I meet, or else I’d have done that with you and you’re much more fun than either of them were.”

“I—” Remus starts. “Thank you?”

“Mhm,” Sirius trades him; that one's a truth that’s not so difficult to speak on. “James caught the resemblance first, told me about it, and then it became impossible to ignore; I mean, there were moments where he sounded just like him.”

“That’s—” Remus tries, picking his mug back up for something to hold. “I can’t even imagine.”

“It was a lot,” Sirius supplies, helping him out. “It was usually never any of the good parts about him, only how quick he was to combat me on fucking anything, but then, every now and again, I felt like there were times where it felt almost playful? Like, one time, he really went at me around James and I came back in from a puff to find our boy filling one of those psh-psh bottles with water from the mop sink, which he planned to spray David like a cat with any time he came at me from that point on.”

There’s something about making someone as fair and balanced as Remus Jean Lupin reluctantly laughs about something so juvenile; it means a lot, seeing someone that concerned with impartiality being unable to avoid when something he’s just heard is objectively funny. “That’s such a James move,” he says of it, shaking his head with a plain smile on.

“It was the best time I’d had at work the whole of last month, and I counted David as a part of that,” Sirius confesses. “And really, I have to say, I thought he was kind of in on it, especially that day? I swear, there were parts of that shift where I saw him actually being a normal human being; he’d like, toss a bitchy take at me and then scurry to the other side of the bar to get out of my spray radius, and it felt a bit like the way Reg could be, back in the day. His good side, I mean. His spunkier side.”

Sirius’s voice went weirdly quiet on that last part and he definitely experiences peak embarrassment for it before Remus just wilts. “Come here,” he coaxes, setting his mug on the nightstand and opening his arms for Sirius to scoot up in between them. “You’re so lovely, even when you’re not trying to be.”

Sirius goes with it no questions asked, scooting over to attach himself to Remus’s middle, the lower half of his face pressed to the front of Remus’s left shoulder. “I fucking tried with him today, believe me,” he raises it. “It was stupid, I’d just finished reading the whole book and it was like I thought making amends with him would somehow make things up to Reg, but I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking; David fucking hates me, I bullied him for weeks.”

Remus hums pointedly above Sirius’s head. “I’m not saying you should have hit him, but it's been a two-way street, Sirius,” he forwards. “I was very much present for some of it so let that count for something, OK? You’d literally be minding your own business and he’d come looking for you.”

“OK, thank you?” Sirius sends up, squeezing Remus a bit tighter for the trouble. “He refused to admit that, and d’you want to know what he said before I popped him?”

“A bit, yeah,” Remus admits, grimacing in preparation.

Sirius takes in a breath and sighs it right back out. “All last month, I was sure I was being tortured by having to hang out with Reg incarnate every other shift and having to spend that much time with someone who has his negative qualities wafting out of him was rough, it just was, but we were closing up tonight and he wasn’t having any of my attempts to make nice, and in those last thirty seconds, it’s like he went that much further and turned right into my fucking mother,” he details, hearing how kooky that sounds, putting it to words. “And it doesn’t make any sense, he’s got nothing to do with the fact that I’m messed up beyond belief; he just gave out a collection of words, they shouldn’t have set me off, but everything in my life these days is just one parallel after another, like I have to keep reliving garbage just because I actually have some good going on in my life.”

“OK, we’ll come back to that because apparently, that’s this summer’s entire theme,” Remus avows, “but you have to tell me what he said first; I’m suffocating over here.”

Sirius ducks his head and pushes a breath not unlike a horse's frumple against Remus’s side chest, coming back up to say it outright. “He straight up refused to let me off the hook and hit me with an ‘it’s too late for that,’” he retains, his voice monotonous, “and I remember hearing a sentiment a lot like that before; do you remember that?”

Remus makes a noise like he himself has just been popped in the gut. “Sirius, you can’t get at yourself for a trigger like that,” he says of it, rearranging his arms around Sirius’s back to cement it almost. “I’m still not saying you should be going around smacking people—”

“I punched him in the gut,” Sirius puts in, so they’re understood. "Doubled him over; that kind of punch."

“—OK, and I don’t love that,” Remus puts it, “but I will just say, if he even tries to press charges, I am going to have to have a word with him and I don’t want to have to do that, so we'd both better hope our hardest that he just takes what he had coming to him and moves on.”

Sirius shuts his eyes, breathing in and out of his nose, taking in Remus’s scent and relishing it. “This is why I came here,” he says minutely. “You don’t let me off the hook when I’ve fucked up, but you don’t hang me out to dry for it either.”

Remus passes a soothing hand over Sirius’s back, humming mildly as he presses a kiss to the top of his head. Once that’s done, however, Remus does pull back, trying to get a look at his face, so Sirius sort of has to lift his head and commit to looking at him straight on.

Remus studies him for ten seconds or so and breathes in, poised to speak. “Do you think the trip is going to be too much for you right now?” he asks, absolutely holding onto the inside of his lower lip through the whole of it.

Sirius shakes his head as fiercely as he can make happen. “Absolutely not,” he says outright, and Remus lets go of his lower lip, but he takes on a tight grimace that just slaps Sirius sideways. “That was an isolated incident, Remus.”

Remus lifts his left hand between them to set it where Sirius's heart should be. “I'm not saying you're going to be hit-happy out there, but the timing of all of this might actually be wrong this time,” he puts up. "I don't want to miss that cue, that's all."

“No, I told you I’d show up for you, so just trust me,” Sirius returns him, worming his right hand out from the blanket and reaching to clasp it over the hand on him. “I’m going to blow this out of the water, you wait; your mum and dad are going to fucking love me.”

Remus takes in a deep, but tentative breath. “They already love you,” he puts down, “and I don’t want you fighting so hard to be so fucking perfect out there that you don’t even see the wall before you hit it.”

“So, the answer is to leave me behind to hit it here?” Sirius puts up, breathing shakily underneath Remus’s hand. “Please don’t punish me for this.”

Remus gets his right arm out from underneath Sirius to lift the both his hands to the sides of his face, holding it steady. “I’m not,” he instils; quiet, like a secret. “I’m checking in.”

“Then listen to me, please,” Sirius bids, working to speak calmly. “Today has been a Day, worst I’ve had in a while, but I’ll bounce back; you’ve seen me do it before, you know I can do it, so you need to just let me show up for you, OK?”

Remus makes a deep frown. “I just don’t want to ask too much of you right now,” he insists. “I want to do the right thing for you.”

“Then you gotta let me try, Remus,” Sirius puts it plainly. “It’s the least you and I can do, and I’ll be good as new tomorrow, you’ll see.”

Remus pushes a long, resolving breath through his nose and leans in, pressing a full kiss to Sirius’s lips and making it that much headier by tracing his left thumb underneath Sirius’s chin. “You don’t need to bounce back perfectly,” he stresses, eyes over-bright in the dark. “It’s exactly as I said last time; if you need a break, for any reason, you just take it, OK? And I’ll be right there, anytime you need me, deal?”

Sirius sniffs hard, nodding against the welling of tears in his eyes, again, and presses his face against Remus’s chest, needing to shut his eyes and power down for at least six years, but he’ll settle for a few hours if his brain can settle down enough to allow it.

“Get some sleep,” Remus whispers, reading his damn mind.

Sirius nuzzles his face against Remus’s chest, eager to have him as a pillow for as long as he’s permitted it.

Notes:

tw's for mentions of child abuse, neglect, familial dysfunction, in-theme blends!verse-typical Black Family trauma and the fallout that comes with, homophobia and all-around bigotry, and allusions to depression and suicide.

if any of this sounds too rough right now with all that's going on out there in the world, or feels too personal to read a piece of work tackling these issues, then by all means, please do back out; there will be no hard feelings.

Chapter 20: 20.

Notes:

given the nature of the prior chapter and what went on in it, the tw's for that one will p much remain from here on out.

Chapter Text

Sirius blinks in the relative darkness of Remus's room. Sure, the streetlights outside give off enough of a glow for him to be able to see around decently, but he has a feeling he'd be able to make out just about everything within eye-shot of him even if the room was pitch black; he's had time enough for his eyes to adjust.

The fact that he's even awake still is a bit rich considering how fatigued he is. He can't say for certainty how long he's been laying here – an hour, maybe two? Enough time to adjust to the dark and try a few position switches to see if that might be the ticket to a sleepscape, but instead, Sirius has found himself lying flat on his back with hands cupped behind his head, studying the ceiling and thinking he might actually be able to see every divot in its surface from down here.

The question of whether Remus knocked out before him or not can be answered quite quickly if he glances beside him and does a little investigating; he's had plenty of time to see, observe, listen, and learn the sign that pinpoints whether Remus is out cold, and aside from the fact that his eyes are shut, those breathing patterns of his are nowhere near as subdued as they would be if he were conked out.

Sirius breathes in long, waits a few beats with it held in, and lets it back out in a rather horse/Remus-like puff. “Well,” he says, matter-of-factly, “I sure can't sleep.”

Beside him, also flat on his back, Remus pushes a breath out of his nose that might've been a laugh on a different occasion. “Neither can I,” he offers, a notch above a whisper.

Sirius can see well enough to be able to tell that Remus's eyes are open now, but that's about all the movement amounts to. No matter, Sirius can move for the both of them, if pressed, and does, rolling toward Remus's frame. He ditches the blanket wrapped around him, hitches his right leg up over his body, and budges his knees apart so he can lift up and plant himself in between them, and the next few seconds are really just about Sirius settling in on top of him.

The few seconds following his indulgence are a little terrifying in that there really is no telling whether he's picked a bad moment to drape himself over him or whether Remus is going to be in the mood for a human blanket, but on the other hand, Remus slides his arms up and around him, hooking his wrists together at the small of Sirius's back seconds later, seemingly fine with the spot Sirius wound up in, so it seems he spooked for nothing. Feeling more than a little welcomed, Sirius lets himself settle in, crosses his arms over Remus's chest, and rests his chin down on them, keeping Remus's gaze in the dark; it isn't particularly easy to see his pupils from here, but he can see pure white surrounding his irises and that's enough for the moment.

“Well, we know why I can't,” Sirius mentions, tilting his head to the side plainly. “What about you?”

Remus shoots a slow breath out the side of his mouth, uncurling his right arm from around Sirius to lift his hand up between them, and Sirius waits with supreme engagement as Remus taps the tip of his nose once with his forefinger. “I'm really glad you're laying down because this is a shocker, but I'm worried about you,” he mentions, lifting a shoulder to pair with the most circumstantially flat expression, leaving Sirius ducking his head down against his own arms and wading through a series of breathy gusts.

“I don't know who you are anymore,” he raises playfully, peeking up at Remus from behind his wrists.

Remus's mouth twitches in the low light before he cups his right hand over the back of Sirius's head. “You know how the oceans are so vast and cavernous, we really only know about five percent of what's hanging out down there?”

Sirius takes a sober breath in through his nose, blinking twice. “Is it really that low?”

Remus nods faintly, though his affirming hum is a bit more prominent. “That we've discovered just yet,” he reiterates.

Sirius lifts his gaze over Remus's head, fixing it on the wall behind the bed. “That's unsettling."

“Exactly,” Remus echoes. “And similarly to that, I'm feeling quite unsettled because I know less than five percent of what you were made to read today.”

Sirius drops his gaze to Remus, giving him a light but sheepish frown for the kind but pointed hint. “Do you think I'm sick?” he asks, letting him in.

Remus blinks once, lets go of the casual hold he's got on the back of Sirius's head, and brings that hand around to touch the back of it to his forehead. “You are a bit warm, but don't forget you were wrapped in a comforter for a while there,” he offers him.

Sirius pushes an amused breath out of his nose, kneading Remus's hand gently since it's there. “I didn't mean it literally, but I do love that you checked,” he passes him, turning his head and leaving a kiss on the side of Remus's wrist for a dot of punctuation.

He finishes up with that just in time to catch Remus's double-blink. “As in, touched in the head?” he raises, waiting on a reply apparently and getting a stoic nod for it. “Then, no.”

“You don't know why I'm asking,” Sirius mentions, his mouth set to a right-facing frown.

“Would that really change my answer?” Remus raises, putting his right eyebrow higher than the left, and it's sweet that he's being a bit wry about this, it is, but Sirius is trying to get to the truth here, whether Remus is too sweet to know it or not.

“Stunted, then,” he amends.

“Stunted, how?” Remus checks.

Sirius pushes a flat breath out. “As in, somewhere along the way, preferably when I was young or younger even, I should've been taught empathy as a concept and how to achieve it, but I never actually was,” he elaborates. "I was taught a shitload about consequences, that I can say, but I never cared for those, and never for the sake of others around me either."

Remus gives a light, throaty trill that Sirius can feel under his own chest. “Did he write that to you?” he bids, his mouth twitching.

“Well, he didn't say, 'you, Sirius, have zero empathy,' but that was sort of there between the lines,” he reiterates. “He made sure to point out that I don't think ahead or plan, I just act and don't much care how my actions will affect others around me, and if you pair that up with the way I still tend to handle things, it's rage first, callousness second, and I do have a stunning lack of empathy toward anybody but myself.”

Remus nods once, his lips pursed together until he gives opening his mouth a shot a few beats later. “Well, I'd wonder how well he really knew you, then,” he extends, plainly done certainly, but gentle about it. “I would go as far as to say you can be a tad too empathetic sometimes, but that's the nature of a bleeding heart, I think.”

Sirius can really only sit with that for, oh, milliseconds before his gut won't let him continue. “I'm different with you.”

Remus shakes his head once. “You're not.”

“I'm different because of you,” Sirius stresses. “You can ask James.”

“No, I'm OK,” Remus insists, and the patience wafting off him is honestly a little harrowing. “You had that bleeding heart long before I ever turned up, and I'll bet you a foot rub James would agree with me there.”

“I didn't,” Sirius puts down.

Remus throws him a determined look. “My first day at work, you were already trying way harder than necessary to make my transition into a café setting easier, and you didn't know anything about me,” he maintains. “I was a nobody to you and you were still so kind—”

“That doesn't deserve a round of applause, Remus,” Sirius mentions, a plain look on.

“Are my hands moving?” Remus raises, and no, they're not. “You were nicer to me than you were expected to be, especially toward the end when I was having none of it with you and not hiding it well at all.”

“You're oddly sexy when you're tearing into me,” Sirius whispers. “We've been over this.”

Remus huffs for that. “OK, you want receipts?” he bids. "Is that it?"

“You got any?” Sirius goads, gesturing for them.

“Well, you might not remember this because it was a small moment, but I remember it well,” Remus maintains. “I was just getting the hang of the basics of drink-making when Lily headed home, you were on till, James was floater, and I was on bar, quietly panicking, and then I got an Americano put down in front of me and I just blanked; couldn't remember how many shots went in what size, looked up and around for the universe to show me a little mercy, and you were already looking over at me, ready to help in your own, Sirius way.”

Sirius can't say he's prepared for the details of the smile that makes it onto Remus's face; it's quiet, bright, and perhaps if the lighting in the room were a bit better, there may be a touch of rouge to be seen dancing across his cheeks. “That's oddly serendipitous now, having you right there as the answer to my mercy call, but at the time, you just held up three fingers from across the kiosk, didn't take the mickey out of me for clearly having a moment there, and even with all my first-day jitters and lust-driven panic over you, I thought that was really sweet.”

Sirius shakes his head quick. “I couldn't just leave you to the wolves,” he maintains. “You just needed a quick reminder, I thought.”

“And you thought right,” Remus assures. “Small example, I know, but I really appreciated it even if I clearly didn't show it enough at the time, and I don't know that you were even trying to be nice, is the thing; I really think that was just you, as you are.”

Even as a new butterfly hatches and flitters around, Sirius's stomach goes ahead and breaks its flight pattern by twisting and turning and refusing to let him have even this. “I was different when he knew me, Remus,” he insists, and Remus gives in to a frown for his tactic falling flat. “I appreciate you trying here, but I was; I'd strut about, doing whatever the fuck I wanted, refusing to take the blame for anything — nothing was ever my fault, nothing; even if some things were, I wouldn't give it the time of day.”

Remus is quiet for a few, short beats as he takes in some air, but if Sirius is honest, there's something about his expression that breathes thoughtfulness. “I can think of a few things off the top of my head that wouldn't be anywhere close to your fault,” he mentions. “We've gone over a few already tonight, so if we're going back around or you're onto something new, then either way, I'll need a little more before I just blindly follow you into character assassination.”

Sirius pushes a deep breath through his nose that catches a wayward strand of his hair and brings it on back toward his nose on his inhale; his eyes going wonky with tears as his nostrils light up and he has to rub at it to quell its itch. “There were a few recurring themes going throughout the book, but one pertained to how he felt about the two of us,” he maintains, rubbing his nose harder for good measure and sniffing anew. “A lot about how shit it was for him to come up under me after so many other people already knew who I was for some reason or other — and it's not like this is the first time I was hearing it, it wasn't, he used to hate the way he stacked up against me in piano classes, communion classes, confirmation classes, the music program once he got in there; everywhere he went, I got to first and that followed him everywhere — which, in itself is almost hilarious because he could have all of those, I wasn't doing anything with them.”

Remus snorts there. “Honestly.”

Sirius wholly appreciates the input. “He was obviously better at all of that than I ever was and he fucking knew it, too; he kept pointing out all my rough edges compared to his fine-point ones, how he knew he was classically better at all of that than me, but my reputation preceded me and ruined things for him all in one go,” he keeps on, ”and now, I get to sit with the knowledge that uni was the worst setting for him to come into after I was well shot of it.”

Remus puts out a tch. “Why would it have been?” he asks, his gaze attentive, but highly skeptical.

Sirius works a frown from left to right. “Mm, the whole affair with the prof might not have gone over as smoothly as I made it seem,” he divulges.

Remus shifts underneath him, like the topic itself is squirm fodder. Sirius drops his gaze as Remus exhales heavily, and his throat stings when Remus lets go of his hold on his middle. It's the longest five seconds of his life, watching Remus reach up behind his head and fluff his pillow out, but once he's settled back in with his shoulders propped up against it, Sirius gets to breathe easier again knowing he's won himself a captive, but pensive audience.

“OK,” he prompts, putting his arms right back where they were, latched around Sirius's middle, “how badly?”

“Real bad,” Sirius says of it, not all that able to make it more than a whisper. “Worse than I even knew at the time or in the years since."

Remus nods minutely in the low light. “Alright,” he accepts. “I'll still love you when you're finished.”

Sirius’s jaw starts feeling a lot like that anvil he’s in the market for. “You don't know that.”

“No, I do,” Remus passes him.

Sirius's breathing hitches. “I know I made it sound like a whimsied, unconventional little analogy for you to apply to yourself, but it really was at the time,” he insists. “I was so removed from it, not that it's an excuse, but—”

“Well, depending on just how badly that whole thing went, removing yourself from the situation by acting like it wasn't a huge deal could make some very real sense,” Remus comes in, and Sirius just falters. “I'm not changing my mind on you, no matter what you're stalling over.”

Sirius briefly ponders on whether doing this from under the bed where Remus can't see him would be easier, but then again, moving now doesn't seem easy at all. “It was more of a scandal than just a quick fling that went on without notice,” he puts down. “I don't really know where the source began, but word travelled fast once it got out and I honestly thought the rumour would get shut down as quickly as it showed up at the time, but apparently it went down the chain into Reg's class, where he got heckled for it from the moment he walked in the door, and the news blew the roof off our house so why the fuck wouldn't it have carried over into Reg’s school life, too, but I really didn't think he'd get so much flack for it.”

“OK,” Remus grants, nodding for it. “I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Sirius chews on the inside of his lower lip, but even as he does it he knows he hasn't got the right to look this sheepish; he did all that, caused the ripple effects, now isn't the time to keep avoiding the blame. “I had the grades to get into the program, but I didn't need them,” he admits, knowing somewhere in his gut that Remus wouldn't love that on principle, but where's the lie? “My father was a regular guest speaker on campus, bit of a consultant around the program; they just loved the man there and he loved coming in for seminars with all these future entrepreneurs he could help mold, and I can't pretend that having a surname like Black didn't get me in there, I bet they didn't even look at my transcript for long, just saw the name and put me in the approved pile.”

“And into yet another place you didn't actually want to be,” Remus finishes, frowning a little.

Sirius blinks once. “That, yeah,” he accepts, his throat tight. “I hated being there; I didn't like anybody in my class, they weren't my people, I had my father strutting around the place near-weekly and he wouldn't even look at me whenever he was there, just like he wouldn’t look at me at the house, just like he hadn’t done in a long time, so getting in with Jack felt like the only way to pass the time while there.”

“Jacques,” Remus sounds out, half-piqued, and maybe just to be funny, but Sirius'll take it when this tale isn't going to get any funnier as it goes.

“We can totally call him that if you want,” he offers.

“Not sure I'll be able to take much of this seriously if we did and I want to,” Remus imparts. “Forget I said it; you needed something to pass the time.”

Sirius nods for the probing. “I barely noticed the term going by if I'm honest, not when I was out of the house at least,” he maintains. “We met up a lot outside class, in his office, sometimes at his house if the wife wasn't home, he got us a hotel room a few times, and I can't pretend like I didn't get a thrill out of it all — I liked that part.”

“OK,” Remus grants, distant about it, by the looks of it, and it hurts a little, but it's fair if this is likely trudging on discomfort for a stand-up chap like him.

“I wasn't an idiot about it, mind; I didn't go telling anyone in the class, I didn't like anybody so I wouldn't have been tempted to, but I didn’t even tell James I'd been seeing him until after the fact,” Sirius keeps on. “Only, I also wasn't shy about visiting his office whenever I knew he'd be there, I wasn't shy about sleeping in some mornings while he went in to teach when I figured I could always get the rundown once he got back, and I really wasn't shy about coming in late to class and kicking my feet up in back knowing I wasn't going to get punished in a way that I wouldn't look forward to later on; I didn't fucking care, I liked all of it, and that's the truth of it.”

Remus nods, maybe because Sirius stops there or perhaps because he's really trying not to pile onto him; Sirius doesn't know, but the silence in the room spooks him into talking more. “And this isn't an excuse, OK?” he prefaces. “It's not, but it might explain some of it so I'll risk saying it, but I think back now and I wonder if part of me wanted it to come out, or at least wanted my father to find out and it's not going to make sense to you, I'm sure—”

“Sirius, I'm just listening, OK?” Remus comes in, smiling tightly. “You don't have to wrap it up in a nice little bow; you can just say it however you like.”

Sirius nods once, taking a different route toward the same conclusion. “He hadn't even spoken to me since they found out I was one fruity kid,” he puts down. “Didn't say a word to me, not for two years, just let my mother do all the screeching and reshaping of me to no avail, while he sat back and let it all happen, and as much as I hated him for not even flinching through some of those lessons, I really hated how cold he was to me; nothing I said or did would pull a noise out of him, he was a wall and I was not even a picture frame in the same room as him, I'd try him sometimes to see if he'd crack but he gave me nothing every time and once the cat was out of the bag, he sure remembered I existed then, I'll tell you that.”

Sirius didn't notice Remus's hand moving until his right one turned up by his left ear, faltering with the quiet trace of Remus's thumb over the shell of it and the deep frown etched on Remus's face. “Sorry, go on,” he insists. “I'm just nervous.”

“We can take a break,” Sirius offers, feeling like a bottle of curdled milk.

Remus shakes his head. “No, I can handle it,” he says decidedly. “You had to, it's my turn.”

“I could give you the PG version?” Sirius raises.

“Somewhere between PG-13 and R would be alright with me,” Remus trades him

Sirius nods once, restructuring. “He found out at the end of exam week, don't know who he heard it from or if he just strolled by a couple of students with my name on their tongue; he never said, but turns out, not everybody loves special treatment or me getting top marks without even showing up half the time,” he maintains, pairing it with a weighing gesture of his hands. "He called me downstairs once he got home and I found him in his study nursing a brandy, the usual things except for the fact that he'd said my name for the first time in an age, and the second he saw me he just fucking blew; it was like years worth of suppressed anger came out of him, pitched that brandy glass straight across the room, and I had to do the duck-and-swerve to avoid the shatter.”

“Jesus Cunt,” Remus huffs out, already perturbed.

“Mhm, and I'm there, knowing I'm fucked, like it's over for me now, that kind of thing, meanwhile he's just rampaging on and on about doing what's right and all that was wrong with me that stopped me from being right, how I'd been spitting on his name ever since I could walk and talk, how I did it to get back at him and ruin the power our name had,” Sirius puts out, into a certain groove he knows he gets into when he needs to soften a blow. “He was finally emoting so I guess I got what I wanted in the end, only it was everything my mother'd been screeching at me for years and nothing I said mattered to him.”

“What do you mean?” Remus says. “What did you say?”

“Literally anything that'd get him off of me; I was fucking terrified,” Sirius admits. “He was fast and irate, I said anything that would get him to back off, but he didn't want to hear any of it because it was all excuses to him. It didn't matter that I'd already put an end to it when Jack started talking about running off with me, it didn't matter that I'd written his exam after breaking it off and would pass with flying colours even if he was sore about it, it didn't matter that it could get played off as a rumour that I was sure the other students would forget about in a week — none of it mattered because his reputation was at stake and he didn't want to hear me babble excuses at him, and it wouldn't have mattered if I didn't bolt that night, he made it clear that if I didn't walk out that door he'd throw me out of it himself. I just wasn't his kid anymore; I hadn't been for those two years, really, but that was it, for him.”

Remus's grip on him went and tightened somewhere in there, but Sirius can't say for sure when it was; all he really has is a vice grip at his middle and an appalled look trained at him that he can physically see Remus trying to quell in real-time, but it's no use; with a dad like Lyall, this kind of shit is unfathomable. “I'm sorry that happened to you,” he offers, Remus Lupin to the end.

Sirius shakes his head fast, his breathing rapid. “No, don't be,” he offers. “It kicked me awake, made me actually look the bull in the eye and realize I had to leave; who was I staying for? Not either of them, not to keep getting the shit kicked out of me, I was there for Reg and I tried to get him to — please, if you're to know anything, know I did try, but—”

“I'm never going to forget that you tried, how's that?” Remus puts in, trying for a smile, but it is a tight one.

Sirius nods solemnly, wanting to continue, but if he even puts sound to the words he remembers hearing out of Reg that day, he's going to fall apart. “It wasn't enough,” he gives faintly. “Reg thought I was sick, thought I was spiralling out of control, and why would anyone go with someone they thought was already doomed?”

“Sirius,” Remus comes in, quiet but concise.

“He dialled back on that read some years later; I have the proof of that now, but back then?” Sirius raises, nodding again. “He thought I'd detonated the bomb myself and walked right into the blast for shits and giggles, and then what? Left him and everyone else to deal with the fallout, blasted all these rushed and terribly executed explanations at him that didn't and weren't going to hold, walked right out of there without him, and look where he ended up?”

Remus squeezes Sirius at his middle. “You couldn't predict the future,” he puts up. “You've got a frighteningly accurate sense as to what's coming around the corner, I'll admit that, but you couldn't have known that he'd end up doing that? You couldn't, and where he ended up has nothing to do with this.”

“No, but I could have seen it coming if I'd only thought about it more,” Sirius puts it. “At the time, he wanted to be the shining star of the family so badly, as if he wasn't already, so I said, fine, don't come with me, let him have all the responsibility, and I walked out that door knowing he was all they had left to shape; that’s neglect, Remus, I fucked him so hard by leaving him there.”

Remus's right forefinger comes up and presses against Sirius's mouth in an instant, leaving Sirius frozen and Remus shaking his head once. “I know this is far more than just complicated, but sometimes you need to put yourself first,” he stresses. “I'm so proud of you for leaving, OK? I am, and the rest we can deal with, but—”

Sirius puts out a dry laugh. “Right, 'cause I've really dealt with this so well before,” he placates. “Reg called me the fuck out in that book, said I was incapable of feeling anything close to the blame for that situation, and I can't even deny him that, I didn't care; he wrote that Jack wasn't even teaching there anymore by the time he started, so either he left the job himself or my father made fucking sure he got sacked, but I didn't once stop long enough to wonder what came of him and where my actions led. I didn't and Reg knew I didn't, he just knew.”

“'My,'” Remus puts in, a quiet but pointed echo nonetheless.

Sirius dials it back a sentence or two to locate Remus's issue and his shoulders drop once he finds it. “He didn't seek me out, Remus,” he maintains, but he gets a plain, disagreeing hum for it that pretty well makes him have to spell it out. “I saw him first day of class, liked the way he looked, liked that he knew and revered my family, but more importantly, that my father really liked him, liked what it'd mean if I got him, and I really liked what it'd mean if we kept at it just out of plain sight; I liked it all, I did, and I didn't once think about him when it all came crashing down, I just fucking didn't.”

Remus pushes a laboured exhale out. “He was your professor, Sirius,” he enunciates. “I can tell it was all very heavy, and you might've felt completely a part of it at the time, but he was still the adult in the situation.”

Sirius shifts off of Remus, feeling odd being on with the direction this is headed, and roots himself on the mattress beside Remus’s right hip. “I was of age,” he clarifies, proverbially showing his dirty hands. “I mean, a good two years overage.”

“So, you were eighteen,” Remus considers, nodding once. “And how old was he?”

“I knew what I was doing, Remus,” Sirius stresses.

“That's not what I was asking for,” Remus mentions.

“Oh, fucking fine,” Sirius huffs. “He was turning thirty that January, that doesn't make him a monster.”

Remus makes a face like it does, actually. “Oh, but you were one for getting caught up in all that?” he counters. “He should've been able to hold off and I don't know how he slept at night, personally.”

“Super well seeing as he didn't coerce me at all,” Sirius stresses. “If anything, I egged it on more than he did.”

Remus shakes his head slowly. “Sirius,” he chides.

Sirius sends a heated breath through his nose. “You said you wanted to know what I was dealing with,” he returns. “This is just a fraction of it, but it's a big one so we're going to have to have a calm discussion about this and we can't do that if we're wagging fingers at him.”

“I think I’m being rather calm actually,” Remus returns, a plain stare aimed back at Sirius. “I don't care if he was so confused about his sexuality; you go to a therapist, go to a club, get your rocks off somewhere else, with someone else, you don't pick one of your students to drag down with you.”

Sirius sits back, half-impressed, but half-stricken by the savagery on display here. “But — if his wife found out, that's her gone, if he lost his job then that's his livelihood, his reputation out the window,” he lists off. “You really think he'd deserve any of that?”

“He shouldn't have been anywhere near a classroom,” Remus answers, clear and concise. “And now, I'll just have to hope that while he's walking around out there, he's no longer working a job shaping brand new adults.”

Sirius's hair sticks up at the nape of his neck, rubbing his palms back and forth over his thighs. “I was a willing participant, Remus,” he stresses. “I was; I gave consent, I knew what I was doing, and I was happy to keep it going until he tried slapping a ring on it—"

“Sirius, I was in a classroom setting last term, was I not?” Remus raises, putting a pause on Sirius's hands by anchoring his wrists down. “And with what I'm studying, is it in any way possible that I could have some idea of how a professor should behave in that setting? What do you think, am I onto something here?”

“Your practicum was for secondary,” Sirius instils, dialling the snark back a bit. “That's a different thing entirely than uni.”

“I still had so much time to observe how those kids looked at their teachers,” Remus keeps at it. “Sure, some of them couldn't care less about the person speaking at the front of the class, but plenty of them did and I saw how engaged they were with their professor, how impressionable they were, and if you're heading a class, you don't fuck around with the power you inherently have in a position like that, you just don't.”

Sirius expels a tight breath, his eyes stinging at this not going anywhere near the way he approaches it. “It wasn’t as black and white as that,” he emphasizes. “And he didn't deserve to get caught up in the Black family and spat back out again, he really didn't—”

He cuts off quickly as Remus does a heavy sigh/scoot-forward manoeuvre, moving in close and reaching to wipe at Sirius's tear-streaked face with the pads of his thumbs. “You're allowed to regret the way it all fell apart, OK?” he puts down, replacing his thumbs with a faint kiss to both of Sirius's cheeks in turn. “You are; it was awful, I see that, but there's no blame to put on you and I want no part in that.”

“Remus,” Sirius pushes out, heavy in head and heart.

“I'm sorry, but I don't,” Remus keeps to it, not sounding all that sorry about it, to be frank. “I'm not coming along on this one and if it'd been the other way around, I know you wouldn't let the blame get anywhere near me, so why on earth should I let it get on you?”

Sirius pushes a half-sob, half-sigh out. “You'd never get caught up in something like that,” he huffs, rubbing the heels of his palms underneath his eyelids.

Remus waits for him to finish with that before he lifts his shoulders minutely. “Who knows? If I'd had so many authority figures drop the ball with me the way they did you, I might've looked for something like love just about anywhere I could find it,” he instils. “It's not fair that you had such a rough start, it just isn't, and it could be easier if you could shoulder the whole blame and be done with it already, but hearing you trying to is breaking my heart.”

Sirius drops his hands to his lap, staring at him imploringly. “Remus,” he repeats, certifiably shot through his own heart.

Remus comes in exponentially close, pressing his forehead against Sirius's. “Do you want to know what else I don't blame you for?” he prefaces, and Sirius shuts his eyes and gives out a weird noise that is neither a confirmation nor a denial for he knows Remus is going to tell him and he's going to end up flattened by it anyway. “Needing to look out for yourself after you got out of it, turning that situation on its head and distancing yourself from it enough to even use it to help some drunken lad who was in shambles in front of you, and wanting to kick yourself for it now; I don't blame you for any of it — I can’t, so what if we tried to find a middle ground for this one?”

Sirius nods for him to continue, not trusting his voice right now. “Well, looking back on the way you once talked about this, you had a strong understanding that the man asked far more of you than was fair; can we agree on that still?” Remus raises.

Sirius sniffs again, harder now, and nods harder than that even. “OK, good,” Remus accepts, speaking where Sirius can’t. “And in that case, I don’t think it would be unfair for you to keep to that; you did the right thing for yourself in putting an end to it, and you know what you have now? Extreme validation from someone else on that front and I’m sorry I didn’t say that back then.”

Sirius pushes out a fast gust, shaking his head silently. “But I’m saying it now, for what it’s worth,” Remus cements, and this bloke has no fucking idea how much. “You were right to put it how you did back then and you’ve a right to put it like that now; you didn’t owe him anything and furthermore, he was the one responsible for his life possibly falling apart, not you.”

Sirius pushes out an even more embarrassing noise and certainly does try to scramble off of the bed en route to hiding under it, but Remus catches his left wrist before he can touch his feet to the ground, openly bewildered. “Where are you going?” he bids, frowning deeply.

“I don't know,” Sirius expels, a whole new sea pouring out of his eyes again. “The floor? I can’t handle how nice you’re being about this.”

Remus seems not to know what to do with the fact that he's succumbing to a laugh. “Sorry,” he apologizes, covering his mouth with his free hand. “You're too much.”

You are,” Sirius returns heartily, wiping roughly at his eyes.

“Careful with those,” Remus bids, squeezing at Sirius's wrists before letting them go.

Sirius huffs grand at the direct quote being levelled at him, dropping his hands in an exceptionally dramatic fashion, he knows. “I’m so sick of crying,” he sighs out, forcing himself to meet Remus's eye.

Remus’s chest moves with the conceding breath that leaves him. “I’ve been there,” he echoes. “Do you feel a bit better, though? I sometimes do, when I've really needed to, and if you're there when I'm doing it, even more so."

Sirius gives a grumble, but he can’t quite deny that he isn’t feeling a lot more loose without that weight on his chest. “I’ll feel even better after a cigarette,” he offers.

Remus nods intently. “I’m sure,” he echoes. “Do you want me to come with?”

“I wasn't going to give you a choice,” Sirius levels with him, manoeuvring himself out of bed.

He moves for the hamper, lingering by it as he peels his shirt and jeans off, dumps them in there, and heads for Remus’s dresser with just his skivvies on. “I'll pay for one of the loads, alright?” he adds, pointing at Remus once before turning for the dresser.

“Sure thing,” Remus replies, scooting toward the end of the bed.

Sirius pauses, tossing a half-smile over his shoulder as he fishes in the second drawer for Remus's best jumper. “Not one complaint, hm,” he observes, turning back to use his eyes for the job. “You must really want to bring my spirits back up.”

“And I do,” Remus echoes, pushing himself to his feet. “What are you looking for?”

“Your billowy jumper,” Sirius relays, continuously sifting through the drawer.

“You'll have to be more specific.”

“The one we can both fit into.”

Remus gives a hum of understanding. “Oh, I put that in the closet.”

Sirius looks 'round as Remus heads for it. “Why's it in there?” he asks.

“It was taking up so much space, I could hardly close the drawer,” Remus says of it, sliding the closet door open. He pulls the requested jumper off of a hanger and walks it back over toward Sirius's grabby hands, smiling small as he hands it over to him.

Sirius makes quick work of pulling it on, letting the hem of the jumper fall to his damned knees, and already he’s feeling that much better. He can see well enough to tell Remus has taken in a fine glimpse of Sirius’s look, but it’s the new grin on his face that has Sirius stepping in close to him and leaning his head up to press his forehead against Remus’s, relishing in the fact that Remus is still looking at him like a book fresh off the printer.

“I can’t believe you’re still looking at me like that,” he offers, quietly between them.

Remus pushes a breath out of his nose, moving his forehead against Sirius’s. “I don’t know what would get me to stop,” he returns, and Sirius’s eyes, the traitors, well right up again, but that is officially too much weeping for tonight.

Sirius straightens up with a pronounced sniff, shakes himself out, and clasps Remus’s left hand, tugging him toward the doorway. They get just past the island when Remus squeezes his hand, pulling them to an idle there. “I’m just going to get water; do you want one, too?”

“Not after your ocean point,” Sirius sends him.

Remus snorts, lets go of Sirius’s hand after another squeeze, and heads for the sink, huffing out little, breathy laughs through his nose as he goes.

 

-

 

Sirius wakes with the bleariest set of eyes he’s had the displeasure of owning in a long while, but the film over them disappears right quick as he contends with the amount of light in the room. By first glance toward the window, he can’t think it’s any time before noon when the sun is beating right into the room from above and shoots his arm out to the left, intent on shaking Remus awake and making him aware of just how much they slept in, but his hand only meets the mattress. He looks left, finds he sure is alone in bed, and in an instant, he’s certain Remus let him sleep in and went off on their errand day without him.

Sirius climbs out of bed with a pit in his stomach, torn between liking and hating this development, and pads to the door, pulling it open and coming out into an almost empty flat. The cat’s still here, sprawled out on the island, so for that Remus must still be in the process of getting his laundry done. Sirius turns for the bathroom, not loving the image of Remus lugging two huge bags down to the laundromat himself when Sirius has got two well-working hands to help out with, but the thought goes right out of his head as he focuses on the bathroom, and far more importantly, Remus’s body lying still on the floor, a pool of blood expanding underneath his head at a pace that stops Sirius own blood from running.

He’s in the room in seconds, his knees hit the floor with a smack he can’t think about right now when the most important thing right now is to find out whether he’s responsive, but the pool keeps growing as he taps Remus incessantly, and he won’t move a muscle. Next, he works on keeping his own breathing steady while investigating just how big the cut on his head actually is; last time it was smaller than it looked, but there’s more blood here than there was then and Sirius can’t see the extent of it when there’s red everywhere.

Maybe he’s just in shock and he just needs actual help, a phone would be good, and after patting Remus’s pockets in hopes of finding his mobile in there, Sirius comes up empty-handed and reaches for the bathroom counter, pulling himself shakily to his feet and wincing at the red fingerprints he leaves behind on the edge of it, and before he can bolt for his own mobile, he gets a staggering view of the reflection in the mirror that isn’t quite his and the voice that comes out sends revulsion right up his spine.

“Again, Sirius?”

Sirius takes a breath like he’s just swallowed a gallon of water down the wrong tube, sits right up in bed, and clutches at his chest with a hand, feeling it heaving up and down beneath his palm as he studies the room around him. Sun’s up, that much he’s gathered, but the tint in the room isn’t quite like it was and that’s really the only difference he can spot when Remus isn’t beside him again.

Sirius fumbles with the comforter down by his legs, pulling them out from the tangle he managed to get them in with the blanket, and trips up as he heads for the door, pulling it open in a snap and faltering as he spots Remus in the kitchen, stooped as he pulls a frying pan out of the drawer under the stove.

There, Sirius breathes and blinks, making sure he’s actually seeing him, while Remus rises on his feet, sets the pan on the stove, and looks over his way. “No,” he implores, pulling the tea towel hanging over the handle on the oven door and flapping it in Sirius’s direction. “You weren’t supposed to wake up yet.”

Sirius falters again, eyeing him quizzically from across the main room. “What’s happening?”

“I was trying to bring you breakfast in bed and guess where you’re not?” Remus puts up.

Sirius pulls his lower lip into his mouth, steps forward, and pads over to Remus even though he’s getting a firm look of warning the whole time he’s doing it. He gets to him quickly, lifts his arms to hook them around the back of Remus, and pulls him in tight, his face smushing into the crook of Remus’s neck where it all around needs to be.

“Well, now there’s no surprise,” Remus fusses.

Sirius keeps his head bowed as he shuts his eyes as he breathes Remus in, smelling the faint scent of Remus's shampoo and reaching to touch the damp, fine hair at the nape of his neck. “You OK?” Remus bids, smoothing back a section of Sirius’s astounding bedhead, having a peek at him best he can, no doubt.

“Now, yeah,” Sirius extends, pulling back to look at him straight-on. “I dreamt you went without me and then you weren't there when I woke up and I really thought you were gone.”

Remus’s lips twitch a bit. “I did think about it,” he admits.

"Treacherous lad," Sirius deems him.

"Just to let you sleep in," Remus implores, “but then I thought breakfast in bed would be better received.”

“Good intuition,” Sirius offers him, going in for a quick kiss before eyeing the scene beside them. He curls his hands into fists, taps them together, and points to the stove with his forefingers. “How long would you say this’ll take?”

“Fifteen, twenty?” Remus figures. “You could rest some more.”

“No, I’m gonna have a rinse, then,” Sirius offers, tossing his right thumb over his shoulder.

Remus nods for that. “Now, get,” he shoos, sending him off.

Sirius smiles brightly, loving this feisty mood he’s found Remus in, and leaves another quick kiss on his lips in parting. “Can I get another cup of that tea?” he bids.

Remus looks as if he’s not sure what to do with him anymore, but his smile suggests he’s fine with that all the same. “Sure,” he agrees, his smile brightening even more. “I never thought I’d see the day.”

Sirius bobs his shoulders with a little trill of a tune as he heads for the bathroom, though he stops short when he gets near it, struck with how vivid the room had looked just minutes ago. He shuts the door behind him, blinks the image of Remus lying lifeless on the floor out of his head as quickly as he can, and eyes the mirror sidelong, but it's only him looking back and looking a right fool on top of that. He straightens up, shakes out, and peels Remus’s billowy jumper off before manoeuvring his legs out of his briefs, leaving both hanging from the hook behind the bathroom door for now.

He heads for the tub, pushing his right hand past the edge of the shower curtain to turn the taps, and once he likes the temperature of the water free-flowing out of it, he toggles the shower rod and bursts it to life. He slips in behind the curtain and merely stands under the stream for a time, lulling his head back and forth and letting the warm water fall over his neck and shoulders before anything else.

His body goes next and once that’s all taken care of, that leaves him with the question of what sort of treatment his hair deserves today. Overall, probably nothing fancy given that he’s a walking piece of shit, but — and this is a big one — having his hair silky-smooth will make it that much nicer for Remus should he decide to play with it at any point over the day, and that boy deserves the world. On that note, Sirius breaks out his fancier brand shampoo and conditioner, letting the scent of coconut waft over him, and once both have been rinsed out, he’s happy with the decision because damn, his hair is going to get played so much with, he can hardly wait.

Once out, he hangs a towel around his waist, wraps his hair up in another one, and smiles to himself as he hears Billie Holiday crooning in the other room, finding it a lovely little addition, he has to say. He stands at the counter and works on brushing his hair out nice and neat, working all the snags out of it, and then takes a towel to his hair once again, messing it up real good so it’ll dry with some wave to it, and exits the bathroom once he’s done, feeling refreshed and perfectly cool what with the light breeze wafting through the flat from the perch door being propped open by a shoe.

His timing couldn’t be better for Remus is just taking his plate out of the oven. Sirius veritably jigs over to him, pumped to devour this gift of a meal even more so when he gets a glimpse of the pile of scrambled eggs and bacon on his plate, and grins as he reaches up from below to take hold of the plate.

“Careful, it’s hot,” Remus mentions.

Sirius waves him off with a hum, but then the yelp he puts out as his hands touch the hellfire that is the bottom of the plate could probably be heard out in the hall. “Jesus Cunt,” he puts out.

Remus pulls the plate back and away from him, balancing it on one hand while inspecting Sirius’s with the other. “I’m sorry,” he frowns, tracing his free thumb over Sirius’s right palm, but Sirius is a bit busy watching Remus’s effortless hold on the plate that might as well be a fireball like it’s nothing at all to really care about his own skin just then.

Remus looks quite sheepish as Sirius lifts his gaze to meet his. “Let’s not, OK?" he instils. "Let’s just have a good day.”

Sirius nods, lowering his hands. “Yeah,” he says, but even he knows it was feeble at best.

Remus sets the plate on the counter by the stovetop, steps in, and presses his down-turned mouth to Sirius’s lips. “I’ll let it cool while I finish up the dishes and bring it in there, OK?” he offers. “You go sit and relax.”

Sirius chases his mouth, leaving a longer press on Remus’s lips. “Are you going to use the breakfast tray?” he raises, a wry smile on.

“Well, I have to, don’t I?” Remus returns, a pointed look on.

“Mhm, you do,” Sirius chimes, swivelling on his heel and heading for the room.

“Don’t put clothes on just yet,” Remus sends after him.

Sirius swivels back around toward him again, his right hip cocked. “Oh?” he asks airily. "Hoping to get lucky?"

Remus answers it with a simple once-over and that’s a fine answer indeed. Sirius heads for the room with a renewed skip to his step, clambers onto the bed, and crawls up the middle of it, settling up at the top of the bed and leaning back against the wall behind it, idly twiddling his thumbs while he waits. Remus, always a fan of cleaning as he goes, gets the remnants of the meal he just prepared all washed up and set in the drying rack before bending to pull his new oak breakfast tray out of the cupboard it now lives in. Sirius’s phone chimes over on the island and Remus looks up and around, spotting it.

He picks up the tray and heads to the island, plucking Sirius’s mobile up and setting it on the tray, and carts Sirius’s plate, tea, and mobile into the room. “The service around here is just lovely,” Sirius mentions.

“Wait until you’re done eating and you’ll really be leaving a glowing review,” Remus says of it, leaning over the side of the bed to hold the tray out to him.

Sirius almost (almost) suggests they switch the order of events and leave the food for refuelling, but Remus clearly put effort into this, and for that, Sirius’ll have at it. “Did you eat?” he asks, setting the tray down beside him on the bed.

Remus hums to affirm as he moves for the door again. “I had too much toast while you were in there,” he relays. “Believe me, I am full.”

Sirius nods for it, looking over his mobile real quick, and finds a short text waiting there from Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary.

Did you actually pummel piece of shit dave or is he just saying that?

Sirius pushes a sigh through his nose and chooses breakfast over answering that. He leaves his mobile aside, picks up his fork to have a bite of the scrambled eggs on his plate, and his eyes cloud over with wonder.

Remus comes back into the room with a mug of his own and moves for the bed again. “What’s in these?” Sirius bids, pointing his fork down at the pile of eggs.

Remus smiles a bit, moving to sit cross-legged ahead of him. “Baking soda,” he whispers, holding his tea under his chin. “It’s my mum’s trick; makes them all fluffy.”

“I love your mum.”

“I know you do.”

The gaze the two of them exchange here could easily be categorized as gooey, but that’s fine by Sirius. “What’s the plan then, boss?” he bids, leaving his fork on the tray and picking up a piece of bacon to munch on.

Remus smiles the way he always does when he gets that particular nickname; all sheepish and joyous and verklempt in one tiny look. “Well, this,” he mentions, gesturing an open palm toward Sirius’s breakfast. “And sex, if you are actually up for it—”

“Am,” Sirius puts in.

“Love that,” Remus extends. “And we should lug the laundry down there, get that done, lug it back here, and then we’ve got the cat to drop off and a few more last-minute things to grab before we leave, and then, I can fully pack.”

“Love it,” Sirius sends out.

“I might need your help getting her into the carrier, though,” Remus mentions, fiddling with the nail on his right forefinger. “Only, the minute she sees it, she goes right into hiding.”

Sirius smirks. “You handle the carrier, I’ll scoop her up like a ball and lob her in there before she even realizes it’s happening,” he decides.

“Deal,” Remus returns, smiling for him before going for a sip of tea. “How are you feeling?”

Sirius waves the strip of bacon at him in reply. “Great, now.”

Remus smirks. “Did you sleep OK, in the end?” he raises. “You seemed to knock out pretty quickly once we got back in, but I wasn’t far after you either so I don't know for sure or for how long.”

“Yeah, I did OK,” Sirius offers. “I woke up a few times; weird dreams.”

“Mm?” Remus probes.

Sirius nods, holding a half-piece of bacon over his plate. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see you than I was just there, and that’s saying something,” he offers, garnering Remus to give a minute noise around a sip of tea and push to swallow it quicker than he might have otherwise. “I meant what I said, hey? The trip’s about us, not just me; I might have a moment now and again, but I'm really going to try here, OK?”

Remus nods for that, his eyes owlish over his mug, but that’s a comforting sight Sirius has to go by. “Can you finish that soon?” he raises, gesturing his mug toward Sirius’s plate with a budding smile.

Sirius does as bid, making quicker work of his food before downing his perfectly cooled cup of tea, and makes a satiated grunt at the end of it. “How is it so good?” he raises.

“I don’t know, but my knees buckled when I found it,” Remus tells him straight, reaching to take Sirius’s tray from him.

“Would you say you like it better than the oolong even?” Sirius checks, following him out of the room but veering off to get to the bathroom.

Remus puts out a thoughtful breath as he carries the tray to the kitchen. “Not quite,” he deems it. “Oolong’s been tried and true for a long, long time, but this one’s probably the best I’ve found since.”

Sirius hums in acceptance, pushing a line of toothpaste onto his toothbrush. He brushes while Remus does up the last of the dishes, and he’d probably feel worse about letting him handle the load if Remus didn’t actively enjoy getting dishes done and out of the way; small things, as he’s said.

Sirius finishes up, smacks his lips in celebration, and leaves the bathroom just as Remus is heading back toward the room from the kitchen, making a beeline for him and pulling him into a full kiss while tugging him back toward the room. There are a lot of things Sirius knows he won’t grow sick of here; Remus’s face is one, his lopsided smile is another, his dinner-plate eyes, of course, the way Remus breathes against him when their lips are on lock, and sometimes, like right here, it feels like Remus unwinds with those very breaths, as if the tension he holds in his shoulders just falls away, and while Sirius doesn’t have much experience with retaining tension the same way Remus does, he knows exactly how heavy feels, and he knows exactly how it feels to feel light again, even for a little while.

Remus should get a medal for the simple act of lowering Sirius onto things, he’s decided. Be it a bed, a couch, the floor, name it; there’s palpable care that bleeds through any lust the man’s totting, care in how he moves over Sirius, care in how he pulls Sirius back in for more lip service, and here, Sirius is drowning in all of it, moving his lips in time with the unhurried pace of Remus’s own as if they haven’t got a full morning and afternoon of plans ahead and relishing in being pinned between Remus and the bed, not looking to go anywhere else for now.

He thinks he’ll let Remus decide the pace they’ll go at, he just needs Remus out of those flannels — as fit as he looks in them, Sirius’s skin is burning up; he needs skin on skin, and he needs Remus’s skin on his more than he needs anything. He tugs up on the hem of the shirt Remus must've thrown on earlier this morning, knows he’ll have to put a pause on their liplock to let him out of it, and relinquishes him enough for Remus to brace himself on his knees and pull it off while Sirius works on signalling that the flannels need to go, too, tugging down on the waistband of them.

With some tricky manoeuvring, Remus rids himself of his sleep trousers and Sirius reaches up to grab onto his arms, looking to get a little more of those lips on his, but Remus has other ideas, flashes him a quick, beautifully lopsided smile, and drops down, working his way down Sirius’s body, dragging warm open-mouthed kisses over his chest along the way, but Sirius squirms underneath him as soon as Remus gets any lower than his navel, pressing haltingly at Remus’s shoulders.

Remus’s chest is heaving as he comes back up for air, his brow knitted together as he searches him for clues, and Sirius beckons for him. “Come back,” he bids.

Thankfully, Remus heeds his request, pushing himself back up the bed and lowering his body back down on him, and Sirius doesn’t waste any time not relishing in the weight of it over his body, leaning up and pulling Remus’s chin down toward his to drink him in again. A blowie’s grand, but there’s no explaining how good this already feels and he’s not about to try to defend it; he’s just going to feel it instead.

Remus puts a contended breath into their lip-lock somewhere around the full minute mark and Sirius swallows it, gives him a similar one in return, loving every second of this. Remus braces more of his weight onto his left side, giving himself the freedom to reach his right arm up and lock his fingers up in Sirius’s hair, and the little hum Remus gives against his lips as he's feeling his locks out freely has Sirius breaking the kiss via a happy, huffy little laugh, so, so grateful he'd given his hair the right sort of treatment in the shower. Remus tips Sirius's head back with one, tiny tug on his hair before catching him by the smile, and Sirius’s hips lift into it almost of their own accord; not completely, 'course, Sirius does still want them moving against him, digging his fingers into Remus’s bare back as he holds him against him and pushing his knees apart so Remus might slip right in there and do something about how hard he is.

Remus is all about that decision, as it is, given how quickly he uses his free hand to tug at Sirius’s towel until it falls open, and once it does, Remus uses the same arm to hitch his hips up, waits as Sirius moves quickly to hook them around back of his hips, and there, if they wiggle around a little — and they do; it's a hilarious amount of wiggling about that goes on before Sirius just huffs a laugh and reaches in between them to align their cocks for them — Sirius can rock up to meet the friction that pulses through him every time Remus’s hips rock down to meet his, breathing shallow, harsh notes into their kiss as each roll of their hips really starts to count, and giving these tiny, tight whimpers at the back of his throat as Remus picks up the pace and sets a glorious one for Sirius to follow, garnering him to work a bit harder to meet them head-on, but what glorious payoff that is, all that friction ramping up between their bodies. And then, there's Remus’s right hand, tightening deep in Sirius's locks, spurring him to pull his mouth off of Remus's and breathe tighter, hasher pants between their lips, his eyes shut tight as he fucks up against him and holds tight to Remus's hips so he'll stay fucking down on him, gripping them like those hips will disappear if he doesn’t.

Remus more or less lets Sirius drive his hips down on him for some time, only arrowing them at the end of each interval so Sirius whimpers at every one, nipping and nuzzling at Sirius’s lips as he drinks his voice in, tousling and toying with his hair all the while; it’s all so fucking much, Sirius feels like he’ll bend in half trying to satisfy just how hard he wants Remus to drive him senseless, to take his body and treat it well, and then, he doesn’t even have to ask for it, Remus simply takes the free arm that was once his balancing tool, hooks it around Sirius’s left thigh and raises that leg a little higher than the other, gripping hard at the underside of it as he drives Sirius back against the mattress with a relentless snap of his hips — faster than Sirius could've hoped or even been totally prepared for, if he's honest. He can hardly catch his breath, can hardly even make a full noise as the friction between them heightens and heightens and heads him right for a peak, all he can really do is hold onto him for dear life and wait out the summit—

Sirius puts out a staggered, wounded breath as Remus drops his raised leg and wrangles himself down between his thighs even with the confines of Sirius’s bent knees that had just been locking his torso into place, sending a prominent huff/shush hybrid up at him after Sirius repeats his noise of affront twice more and dropping down to taking Sirius into his mouth in a quick swoop, and well, fuck it, y’know? If he wants it so badly, by all means, get it, Remus.

Problem is, he'd already seconds off from losing his load so Sirius gets, what, ten seconds of Remus’s prize-winning fucking mouth on him before he's arching into wet heat, his hips going haywire while he writhes through it. Remus, champ that he is, hardly blinks at the erratic stutter of his hips, must consider them a reward for his efforts (and they are) for he bobs his head right along with them, and hums grateful, spurred noises as if to encourage his hips to run wild, only pulling his mouth off of him after Sirius slumps back against the bed, spent and rendered motionless after all that fucking hip action. With that, Remus props himself up on his elbows, his feet up in the air behind him and crossed at the ankles, and smiles politely over at Sirius as he pokes his tongue out over the left corner of his lips, passing his right wrist over them in case he missed anything just there.

Sirius peers back at him, his chest heaving as he gives speaking a try. “Damn, boy; you really wanted this,” he breathes, moving his open palms in to point them down at his crotch.

“Well, that, and I didn't want us both to have to shower all over again,” Remus provides, pulling a grin.

“Why are you so smart?” Sirius sighs. “Give me a fucking minute and you’re toast.”

Remus smirks through his nose, nods for it as he lifts out from between Sirius’s legs, and drags himself up the bed, pressing a highly automatic kiss to Sirius’s right shoulder before he lets himself fall back on the mattress, his cock standing to firm attention and making Sirius’s plea for an extra minute seem rather wasteful, now that he's got this good a view of it.

Sirius shortens his pause to just over ten seconds before deeming himself ready for a challenge, rolling over in a snap and scooting right down the bed, and the way that Remus makes room for him between those legs of his comes off as rather obliging, all things considered. Sirius flashes him the crooked grin he knows Remus loves to see on him before starting in, pushing his hands up, over, and along the skin at Remus’s hips, his thighs, and pulling him into it, drinking him in, making him push out a deep, wanton breaths above him and drop his hands back where they ought to be, wound up in Sirius’s hair and anchoring him right back down again.

He likes that he can almost see a progression chart hovering above them, displaying where they’ve come from and where they are now in regards to this very area; how Remus used to be so nervous about snagging even one hair on Sirius’s head in a situation just like this, how that hard-line has morphed and thinned out since, how it turned into something that was only acceptable at Sirius’s expressed bidding and evolved into what they have here; Remus seeking out that intimacy for himself and somehow picking the best times to root Sirius in something this tangible, this alive, and even with every horrid thought that passed through his head last night and into the morning, even with that terrible wake-up, that harrowing start to his day, Sirius knows what he has here; this is growth, this is love, and this payoff is worth every moment of doubt and insecurity along the way.

Remus hums a note both under and above him that sets Sirius’s toes curling, gets Sirius humming back on him, swerving down on Remus’s cock and aiming to put him in a right frenzy, working for more of that kind of music. Remus's fingertips stutter along Sirius’s scalp, getting halfway toward a proper head massage before he seems to lose trust in himself, and the grip on Sirius’s hair loosens, his hands start to retreat, and Sirius lifts his hands from Remus’s jutting hips and attached one to each of his wrists; he’ll hold them in there himself if he has to.

Sirius keeps Remus’s gaze until the boy arches his back on the bed, loses sight of it as he tips his head back against the mattress, and relishes in what he feels as he's pulling the orgasm right from Remus even while his hands curl into fists up in that hair of Sirius's, the surge of love he feels for this too-kind man that he gets to even be near this much, and the absence of anything close to fear when this is what safe feels like; a calm in the middle of a storm.

"Shit," Remus puts out, trying to grab at Sirius's wrists even while his own wrists are still being very much held. "I really tried—"

"Woah," Sirius puts out, anchoring Remus's hands down by placing them down on the bed on either side of Remus's hips and pinning them there. "You're fine, you did everything properly."

"I pulled too hard," Remus is sure, the words coming out quiet as a mouse.

"Well, I don't agree, and I'm the one with the thing about that," Sirius mentions. Remus lets himself breathe at a normal pace — if panting heavily from exertion could be considered normal, and for them, it rather is. Sirius, on the other hand, goes with Remus's quiet urgings, wiggles up the bed, and curls in between Remus's left side and arm, effectively noodling out beside him. "Can we take ten to just chill here?"

"Oh yeah," Remus breathes, turning his head and leaning it down to leave a long kiss on Sirius's head.

Eventually, phase one of the day’s greater plans begins with the two of them getting dressed, followed by upending Remus’s hamper into two duffel bags, and once that's done, Sirius goes to fetch the clothes he left hanging in the bathroom, firmly intent on bringing that billowy jumper on the trip with him. He comes back into the room and smiles as he finds Remus sitting at the end of his bed with one of the duffels ready to go beside him.

“Are you taking that with you?” Remus raises, a wry smile of his own on.

“Sure am,” Sirius returns, moving for the duffel still sitting on the floor near Remus’s feet and stuffing both the jumper and his briefs from the day before in it. “Might wear it on the train, might not, haven’t decided yet, but it will be in my possession either way and I'll get to have it for the nights.”

Sirius pushes off of the floor and hoists the sash of the duffel over his right shoulder, heading out of the room for the entryway. “Should maybe wait and see what the weather's like that morning before you decide,” Remus advises, not far behind him by the sound of it. “I saw your luggage; it may well fit in your suitcase, but there’s no way it’s going to fit in your knapsack and you could end up melting in it if you’re stuck wearing it the whole morning.”

Sirius braces his left hand against the wall as he foots his shoes on. “I have hips to tie the sleeves around if that’s the case, don’t I?” he raises, nonplussed about having to keep it on his person.

“Is that what they're for?” Remus puts up, wandering off into the main room of the flat with a smile on, Sirius can tell.

“The list is extensive,” Sirius returns, straightening up.

He waits for Remus there, who turns up again with his sunglasses on to get his own shoes on, and from there, it’s full steam ahead, or more like they wander down toward the laundromat at a semi-leisurely pace what with their duffels slowing them down from their usually rather speedy walking pace, but Sirius isn’t really in a rush; he's more in it for the fun of getting even the most rudimentary errands done so long as Remus is the one he’s doing them with.

About a block down from the establishment, Shania’s call bursts out from Sirius’s back left pocket, causing a lady walking just up the sidewalk from them to jolt and whip her head around to look for the source of the noise.

Sirius pulls his mobile out, taps over his new message, and clicks his tongue.

YOU HIT DAVID?????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He thinks about responding this way, but ringing James would be so much easier and take much less time than a constant series of messages back and forth. He presses to dial his number, lifts it to his ear, and James picks up before the first ring even goes through, already spouting off.

“I’m gonna shit myself,” he declares.

“Maybe don’t?” Sirius advises. “And he'd better not be going around telling everybody about it.”

“I was tipped off by Mary, who was trying to get the deets out of me,” James returns him, “which really gets me wondering why I’m only hearing about this a) right now, and b) from a secondhand source.”

Sirius sends a dry look sideways at Remus. “It only just happened last night.”

“And?” James demands. “That’s over twelve hours of me walking around in the old world.”

“Sorry, the what?” Sirius checks, a wry smile starting up.

“The old world, the one where David wasn’t clobbered versus the new one, where he was,” James details. “l like this world much better; it’s like the air’s cleaner.”

“I didn’t clobber him,” Sirius corrects, “and if he’s going around telling people that, then I sort of wish I had.”

“I chose that word, sweetie; sorry it wasn’t up to snuff,” James passes along.

“Well, pick a different one ‘cause I really don’t need this following me around,” Sirius insists. “It's not like I attacked him; he got up in my face, said some shit he shouldn't have, and got popped for it, that’s it, but if he's already told Mary, chances are he told Will, too, and if he hasn’t stopped there, who knows who else he’ll mention it to.”

“For getting popped?” James raises. “Man’s been asking for it since he could talk; hell, I can vouch for that — want me to pop him, too?”

Sirius huffs loudly, stopping as they make it to the storefront and moving right past that offer. “We’re just getting laundry done, but if you’re at the Flat we’ll be by for my things and sure wouldn’t say no to a lift back to Remus’s place.”

“I think I’d drop to the floor if you did turn one down,” James returns. “You're bringing the queen over then?”

“Well, I wasn’t planning to get up and carry her over bright and early, funnily enough,” Sirius answers.

James sends a series of nonsensical noises through the line. “I'm excited, you knob,” he returns, once he’s done with the noise dump, that is.

Remus, lingering by the door to the laundromat, walks up by Sirius’s right and tugs on the sash of his duffel. “Here, you give me this and I’ll go on ahead—”

Sirius turns his head toward him and shrinks his neck down so the sash won’t slip off his shoulder. “No no, I’ll jump off,” he instils.

“You can keep talking,” Remus insists, reaching to separate Sirius’s chin from shoulder to better slip the sash off of his arm, but Sirius nabs hold of the sash before the manoeuvre can be too successful.

“James, duty,” Sirius passes along.

“I know, she calls,” James accepts. “Just one quick thing?”

“Make it snappy,” Sirius warns, having a light game of tug-of-war with the strap of the duffel.

Did you ever know that you're my hero,” he croons.

Sirius sends a pfft back to him. “Thanks, hon," he forwards, hanging up while James is still going strong over there. He sticks his mobile into his back pocket and leans in to leave a smooch on Remus’s mouth while he's this close to him. “Sorry, I’m back.”

“You could have kept talking,” Remus maintains, swivelling around and heading in through the shop door.

“He’s giving us a lift back to yours,” Sirius relays, following him inside. “There’ll be plenty of time to gab then.”

Remus leaves it be, if not for the fact that he’s already on to his next fuss-worthy topic. “Is he going to make this hard?” he asks, stopping not far at all inside the joint.

“...James?” Sirius raises, letting the door fall shut behind him.

Remus huffs grand, but it’s extremely difficult not to find it cute despite his obvious frustration. “David.”

Sirius lifts a shoulder before he has to step further into the place as the door opens from outside and a newcomer heads through it. He takes hold of Remus by his free arm and leads him down toward the front desk, comfortably linking them by the crook of their elbows. “I don’t know if he will, he just seems to have a big mouth, that's all; he’s at least told Mary and that’s how James found out,” he passes him, feeling the tension in Remus’s arm at full blast and leans in close to Remus’s right cheek. “Hey? Don’t; good day, remember? We're not letting David of all people get hold of it.”

Remus pushes a relenting breath through his nose, nodding as he brushes his free hand over his face. He shakes his head clear before tugging Sirius toward the line of a few folks waiting to get some loose coin from the owner. “We’ve got to get a move on.”

And they do. Two massive loads and way too many coins later, the pair of them can be found lugging their fresh bounty of clothes back up to Remus’s flat, and then phase two of the plan begins: getting that feisty cat into her carrier. The task is both not as bad off as Remus hinted it’d be and just as, somehow; Sirius had a good handle on Mestophales at the start, doling out cuddles with a secret intention attached to them, and the cat couldn’t tell that she was being bamboozled until she spotted the carrier coming, took off out of Sirius’s arms, ran circles around the main room of the flat, and had to be intercepted by a man laughing so hard his finesse took quite a hit, but eventually, Sirius caught and quickly zoomed her into the cage, and once that's said and done, he thinks over the whole charade from the outside looking into the carrier and decides it'll be a fine memory to keep in his bank for a dreary day.

Sirius orders a lift from Remus’s building and when their lift shows up out front, two of them stick most of their supplies in the boot and put the cat carrier in between them on the middle seat in the back. Along their journey, a high-energy Bollywood playlist accompanies them while Sirius plays a gripping game that tests his agility, one where he sticks a finger into one of the holes on the carrier door, lures a feisty, furry paw out from between the bars, and must snatch his finger back before the cat can catch it. Remus appears to be reluctantly amused at first, watching the show from the sidelines and providing stray sports channel-esque commentary as the game heightens and Mestophales breaks Sirius's score, but he eventually partakes in the game, poking a finger into the cage right as the car is pulling in ahead of the Flat, and while that’s not nearly enough turns, at least Sirius got to see him do it once.

They file out on opposite ends of the car and head round to the back of it to grab the cat’s things out of the trunk, where Remus sticks with carrying both the kitty litter and litter box while Sirius resumes his role as Transporter of the Queen, hanging the bag of food they brought along by his right wrist.

Mestophales talks quite a bit on the way up the stairs, garnering Sirius to let out a conceded sigh as he gets to the second landing. “Hard life, I know,” he muses.

A door opens and shuts above their heads before a series of thunderous footsteps echo through the stairwell and for a few good moments Sirius is convinced James heard them coming and decided to come running to greet his guests, but alas, it’s only Hank stank-facing the two of them the second he rounds the corner. Sirius lifts his free hand and gives him a jovial wave, which has the desired effect in that it clearly gets Hank’s blood boiling and his already harsh speed accelerating to get past them so it was certainly worth doing in the end.

The two of them move up the final stretch of stairs in single file to let Hank torpedo down past them and fucking Remus doesn’t even wait until he’s out of the lobby to comment, the fucking legend. “I don’t know if it’s too early to call, but I don’t think he likes you much,” he offers, tossing it over his shoulder at Sirius.

Sirius’ snort echoes off the walls of the stairwell. “Don’t think he likes you anymore either, honeybun,” he returns.

“Well, he really ought to, seeing as I helped him avoid getting pummeled by a deck chair,” Remus raises, heading in through the front door.

Sirius heads in behind him, knocking the door shut with a hip and stooping to set the carrier down on the ground. He unlocks the latch, opens the door, and while he certainly was prepared for Mestophales to bolt out of it and hide somewhere until calm sets in once again, the cat merely saunters out of the thing and down the hall, leaving the two of them behind as she heads on into the living room.

Sirius snorts, looking Remus’s way. “Shafted.”

“She has to investigate,” Remus chimes, holding up the litter box hanging from his right hand. “Where should this go?”

Sirius considers it for a few beats, points down the hall the opposite way toward the art/whatever room, and Remus seems to like that idea quite well for he walks the litter box over there already making plans for the little room. “Think I’ll put it within view of the door so she gets used to where it is, but if that becomes an eyesore, tell him he can move it off to the side,” he raises. "I don't think she'll be fussed either way."

“You got it, boss,” Sirius returns, not planning on passing that along when he’s none too fussed either.

Remus sets the kitty litter container down first before taking to pouring a fair amount of litter into it and leaving the bag nearby it. “What about the food?” he asks, rising to his feet.

Sirius hums thoughtfully, hoisting the bag of food up on his left hip like a super heavy baby, and having a glance back up the hall the opposite way; Tango isn’t much of a thief when it comes to the cat’s food at Remus's so that isn’t the trouble, but it’ll crowd the kitchen up somewhat if both pets' dishes are in there. “The nook?” he suggests, looking over his shoulder as Remus comes back up the hall.

“Oh, that’ll be nice,” Remus offers. “Right where the tree goes, too; important spot.”

They head into the living room, where Mestophales can be found sitting directly on the coffee table and high above the feet of commoners on the ground. Sirius stops by the table to leave the food bag on it so he can fawn over the gal while Remus goes to place the cat's dishes in the nook. Footsteps sound from the back and moments later, James comes wandering into the living room, spots the cat in no time at all, and goes into a curtsy, pulling a popsicle from his mouth. “Your Highness,” he greets, sporting a very purple tongue and lifting his gaze to the two worthless humans in the room with the feline. “I assume that table’s no longer ours for the time being?”

“First spot she claimed, so no,” Remus affirms. “Expect a few more spots from here, but I would get used to watching the telly from over her head.”

“Small price,” James calls it, stepping in to give her a scritch around the ears with his free hand.

“I fed her this morning so she should only need another cup-full tonight,” Remus relays, reaching into his back pocket. “I brought what I had at home along, same with the cat litter, but I may have undershot it a little, so just to be safe I’ll—”

Remus trails off as he pulls out a fresh note from his wallet and holds it out for the finish, but James simply pretends like he isn’t sure what that paper thing is. “James,” he addresses him; polite, but unimpressed. “I think it’s on to cover the supplies; you’re doing me the favour here.”

“He’s really not,” Sirius puts in, giving the cat a whole lot of loving.

“He’s right, I get a cat out of this,” James echoes.

“Well, it’s there if you want it,” Remus makes known, setting the note down on the coffee table, but Sirius has a strong feeling that if the cat hasn't batted it off the table by the time they return, the money will still be right where Remus left it.

“Why don’t you find me some sort of gift that screams James to you while you’re there and we can call that the payment method?” James raises.

Remus lets out a lengthy sigh. “You were already going to get a souvenir, James," he holds up.

“Well, then that's all I’ll be accepting,” James declares. “And I won’t be taking payment for this arrangement either."

Remus puts on an uppity sort of smile. “We’ll see,” he trills, pulling his mobile out of his back right trouser pocket as it rings out and giving the screen a once-over. "It's my mum, can I take a sec?"

Sirius sends out a tch. "No, who’s she anyway?" he puts up, successfully getting Remus working his mouth around a smile as he heads off toward the kitchen. "Are there any more popsicles?"

"Yeah, plenty," James affirms from around his own, sitting down on the middle cushion of the couch and flying his hands all over the cat's fur.

"She puts up with a lot from us, hm," Sirius raises, heading down the hall for the popsicles. He isn't even past the loo when he hears Remus put out an excitable trill and that has him booking it to the kitchen, stopping in the archway with his hands up like he's ready to catch a ball.

Remus looks his way, brightens even more than Sirius just did, and drops the receiver away from his mouth. "They sold," he passes along.

"Congrats, Hope," Sirius calls to her.

"What's happened?" James calls out in general.

"They sold some of their land," Sirius calls back.

James sends a whoop back up the hall. "James sends a whoop along," Remus offers her.

Sirius heads for the fridge as Remus falls back into conversation, leaves a quick kiss on his lips as he's going by, and opens up the freeze box, pulling a popsicle out to waggle at Remus, who offers a distracted nod in return. Sirius turns back to the fridge, holds the popsicle up toward the overhead light on this end of the room, and works to squint past the white paper.

"OK, I will ... thank him again for us ... alright, see you soon," Remus trills, and very soon, his voice sounds from quite close behind Sirius. "What are you doing there?"

"Trying to see if it's pink or orange," Sirius explains.

"Does it matter?"

"Orange tastes like actual garbage, while pink tastes like perfection."

"Just hand it over to me if it's orange."

"And if the next one's orange, too?"

"Go up the middle and find a purple one?"

Beat. "Genius."

Sirius hands the popsicle off to Remus, and lo and behold, it's pink. "Wait, no," he pleads, ducking his head through his mirth.

"You're so much," Remus huffs, but he sure is smiling as he hands it over.

Sirius passes him an unopened one and shuts the freeze box, the two of them heading back to the living room for a well-deserved popsicle break. Once that's taken care of, Sirius heads back to the kitchen with their sticks to toss and the cat's water dish to fill. On his way back, he stops by Tango hogging out on the kitchen floor and kneels down beside him, leaving the bowl on the floor to free up his hands and give Tango's side a rub in fond farewell.

“Sirius,” Remus calls. “We're starting."

“Coming,” Sirius chimes, pushing off of the floor. He heads back to the living room, sets the water dish down, and heads back toward the front hall with a series of full-handed claps. “Alright, let’s do this.”

“Wait, let me take a leak before we’re off,” James conditions, passing Sirius on his way up the hall and jabbing him in the left side for no reason other than because he could, by Sirius’s calculations.

Sirius kicks his left leg back and thwacks something on James’s person, but the sound effect that accompanies is enough that Sirius doesn’t really need to look back for confirmation to know he aimed well.

He turns into the room and falters as he finds Remus standing in one place while his eyes go about with a calculated stare. “Top drawer,” Sirius directs him, hanging back by the doorway.

However Remus might feel about being fully read in that moment, he chooses to lean into his curiosity after being granted verbal permission and head for the dresser. Sirius tries to keep his eyes off the book as Remus lifts it out of the drawer, averting his gaze to the floor when he really doesn’t need to see it again, and though he went and pointed Remus to it, he doesn’t really even know what to do with the light of his life holding proof of some of the darkest parts of it.

Remus pushes a few quiet gusts of air through his nose that sound a little like laughter, turns the book on an angle, and showcases the cheesecake-inspired doodle at the top of the book. “Right?” Sirius puts out, keeping it to an emphatic whisper. “Who taught him how to be that funny?”

“Oh, I’ve a vague idea,” Remus mentions, turning the page.

He bids instruction, soon comes across it, and the seconds that pass between them as Remus stares down at the drawing are impossible for Sirius not to shuffle his feet through, especially once Remus finally looks up at him again, lifting the page with Sirius’s face on it and hovering just to the left of Sirius’s actual face. “He was really good,” he whispers, a solemn expression on, and Sirius nods for it, throat sewn shut all over again, but on the other hand, he can’t help but feel like the air quality in the room has changed some, like it’s thicker than blood to take in.

James sends out a hoot as he comes thundering back through the flat, but hey, it sure is a good thing he can’t go anywhere without alerting that he’s on his way via sound waves alone for it snaps Remus into action, making him shove the book back into place and the drawer shut again. He speeds over to the closet, but Sirius can’t even question that move when he, too, needs to find something to help make him look busy, moving for his luggage.

“Are you sure you got everything?” Remus raises.

Sirius looks over his shoulder, finding him giving a searching glance over the contents of Sirius’s closet, and it’s honestly so causally done that Sirius is really fucking impressed and that's saying something when Remus impresses him all the damn time. “Yes, dear,” he plays along, lifting his guitar case and hoisting it onto his shoulders as James comes into the room.

“I call backpack,” he declares.

“You get the suitcase,” Sirius informs him. “We’ve been lugging stuff around all afternoon.”

“It’s not even one yet, ya dink,” James returns him, moving to take the suitcase by the handle and rolling it toward the hall all the same.

Remus heads for Sirius’s backpack, hoists it onto his right shoulder like he’s avoiding having to commit to putting it fully on only to have to take it off again downstairs, and flattens Sirius with a bright sunshine smile. “I’m really glad you’re bringing the guitar,” he mentions.

“‘Course,” Sirius returns. “I’m bringing the big guns, you hear me?”

“I’m hearing,” Remus echoes, leaving a warm peck on Sirius’s lips before heading for the hall.

“Come on,” James urges from the hall.

“What are you in such a hurry over?” Sirius raises, following behind Remus.

“I thought I’d pick up Lily from work since I’ll be in the area, but she’ll be waiting forever if we dawdle around here,” James returns, pulling the front door open.

“Oh no, you’re right,” Sirius muses, following James and Remus out of the flat, “it’s not as if she's ever waited for anything before in her whole life.”

James sends him a huffy bah over his shoulder and lifts the suitcase clear off the stairs so he can run it down the three flights down to the ground floor, meanwhile Remus and Sirius wander down at slightly more leisurely a pace. James pushes on out the lobby, heading down the front path with Sirius’s suitcase rolling behind him, and skirts it over behind the car, calling out to them quite loudly for the two of them not being all that far behind him at all anymore. “You’re going to have to take those in with you.”

Sirius sends a dry look toward the sky, heading for the passenger seat with information he didn’t need clarification on. “We’re right here, James,” Remus says for him, frankly. “And we did figure that; your trunk is the tiniest thing I’ve ever seen."

“For that, I’d stuff you in it if you could fit,” James returns.

“Well, I guess you’re shit out of luck, then,” Remus puts up, opening the door just off of the sidewalk and tossing Sirius’s knapsack in before he slides into the spot behind the passenger seat.

Sirius sticks his guitar case inside the car first, manoeuvres himself in behind it, and props it up between his knees after he's sitting comfortably, rolling the window down to get as much of a breeze as he can manage. James finishes loading Sirius’s suitcase into the trunk and heads round to the driver's side, and Remus huffs from the back as James pays little mind to the passing traffic as he opens up the door and slides into his seat.

“You’re going to get flattened one day,” Remus sends up.

James waves him off with a hearty, unbothered noise, sticking the key in the ignition. “Here,” he bids, digging for and passing his mobile off to Sirius. “You pick a tune while I steer this baby around.”

Sirius presses James’s passcode in and thumbs away. “Why’d you come up this direction, anyway?” he raises.

James spins the wheel, waits for a break in traffic, and pulls out of the spot James Potter style: not that smoothly and at an accelerated pace to make it in time for the gap. “There was a huge pile-up at the intersection usual and I said ‘no, thank you,’” he offers, cruising down toward the very intersection he speaks of.

Sirius accepts that for the fair answer he feels it very is and presses his thumb over 'Blinding Lights' the same moment he spots it, needing some of that right this second, thanks much, and from the sound of Remus’s charmed little noise in back as well as the boisterous echo of James drumming his hands on the steering wheel in celebration, it seems he picked right.

“Do you want to DJ at the wedding?” James raises.

“I’ll make you a devastatingly good playlist, but I’m going to be wearing my dancing shoes,” Sirius servers him, tip-tapping the points of his feet on the floor ahead of his seat in illustration.

“You should, though,” Remus puts in, leaving his stamp of approval. “Handle the music, I mean.”

Sirius looks to him in his side-view mirror. "It'll just be 'Kiss Me' over and over and over—"

"Don't you fucking dare," James cuts in, but Sirius got one hell of a beam out of Remus for it, so it was all worth it. “I should make a list of songs I do not want to have played."

Sirius hums noncommittally. “We’ll see if I follow it.”

“I’ll literally find you if 'Come on Eileen' comes on," James manifests. "I will come and end you, in fact."

“Hell, I’d do it, too,” Remus puts in.

James’s mobile chimes from where it’s chilling on Sirius’s lap, cutting the tune out for it. “Just tell me what it says,” he bids, gesturing out the windshield and all.

“I love that not fucking around with your mobile while driving is the one precaution you'll take,” Remus puts up.

James turns his head to aim a smooch back at him. “Love you, too, sweetie.”

“Watch the road,” Remus returns, splaying a hand out in between the two front seats, and Sirius feels fucking giddy over all this as he thumbs through James’s mobile and pulls up the text from Lily.

“She’s going to be a bit late getting out of there,” Sirius relays, setting the mobile in his lap again.

James gives a frown for it before an idea dawns on him. “Well, can’t she just come to yours when she’s done?” he raises, aiming it back at Remus though he does show enough courtesy not to turn his head away from the front window.

Remus gives a light, bemused noise from the back seat. “I mean, yes, but I’m confused over how she was trying to get off before one?” he counters. “In what world?”

“She was trying to take a half-day to make up for that double she worked, but clearly, something’s keeping her there,” James relays, slowing the car down for a stop.

“She can come so long as she doesn’t wander in after four,” Remus extends. “I’d really like to get a jump on errands so we might not be around by then.”

“Where are you going?” James bids.

“Boots,” Sirius supplies, watching a full-sized poodle trot along the sidewalk while they idle at the red light.

“There’s one right near your place,” James puts up.

“Well, I’m aware,” Remus mentions, “but I’d like to get the errands done before evening rolls in so I can still have time to pack and turn in at a reasonable hour.”

James sends out a pfft. “You’re not sleeping tonight,” he maintains, making a right as the light changes. "You'll be too nervous."

“I’m going to try, James, how’s that?” Remus returns him.

“We were up way late last night, he might start crashing back there if we don’t keep him entertained,” Sirius puts up.

"Relations as usual," James surmises.

Remus very suddenly leans in between the front seats and toward James’s left ear. “Hey, can we—”

“Love it when you whisper in my ear like that.”

”—Stop for coffee real quick?” Remus finishes, not whispering at all.

James hums distantly. “We sure we want to do that?” he raises. “Piece-of-Shit Dave’s on.”

Sirius almost feels his eyes rolling straight to the back of his head. “James, can we find a different name for him,” he raises. “Like, his name possibly?”

“Why?” James puts up, aghast. “That was everything; every single thing in my life led up to that moment, I swear.”

“I know it was well-timed, OK; it's why I said it,” Sirius maintains. "I didn’t know you were all going to start calling him that, too, so find another nickname or just use his.”

“Can we go back, though?” Remus bids, a little impatient by the sounds of it. Sirius turns his head to aim a rather curious look at him and gets an idle shoulder lift in return for it. “I'd like to have a word.”

Every butterfly living in Sirius’s gut takes flight in a frenzy while his gape/grin comes on in full display. “Stop. No. Don’t,” he offers distantly.

James winds the car around through the parking lot of the gas station on the corner to get back toward the strip the shop's in. “D'you want backup?” he checks, eyeing Remus sidelong.

Remus perks. “If you’d come loom there beside me, I’m sure that would help actually,” he forwards.

“What if it’s super busy in there and we can’t chat?” James raises, searching for a vacant spot in the lot.

“Then I’ll tack my warning onto my order or send it over the bar,” Remus offers.

Sirius sends out a guttural noise, so proud of this beautiful, exclusively mysterious specimen of a man. James snags a vacant spot and pulls the car into idle, turns the ignition off, and undoes his seat belt, opening his door with a flourish. Sirius does a set of shoulder shimmies as he unbuckles his own belt, certifiably pumped.

“Stay in the car,” Remus instructs.

What?” Sirius sputters.

Remus gives him a Look and slips out the door, shutting it behind him, meanwhile James drops down so that he can see Sirius through his window and Sirius can see his dumb, joyful face. “Stay in the car,” he repeats daintily.

Sirius dives across the driver’s seat to get a hold of him, but James slides out of reach, leaving Sirius flipping him the bird and repeating a chorus of fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou after him while he frolics off to catch up with Remus, who’s already past the lot and heading inside the shop.

This is just rude. Seeing something like Remus vaguely threatening a man on his behalf could single-handedly keep his spirits up at 100% for a solid decade, maybe longer; it would be that powerful to witness, but no, he’s banished to the car. Unbelievable. He’s still stewing about it when the boys make their reappearance and he thinks about holding this grudge at least until they get back to Remus’s, maybe even longer, but then Remus turns up by his open window and hovers his signature drink in front of him.

Sirius takes it pointedly. “And?” he requests, folding his left leg royally over his right knee as Remus moves to sit in back again.

James is sipping on a fucking frap yet again as he slides into his seat, looking like a whole sixteen-year-old who just snuck off campus to get the thing and feels super naughty about it. “He’s not going to report anything,” he passes along.

“How do we know that?” Sirius raises.

“Because he was quivering behind the bar like a little lamb?” James raises, tossing a thumb back toward Remus. “He did most of the talking—” Sirius turns around to look back between the seats at Remus, who smiles as he's tearing a piece off a square of banana loaf, and as put-off as Sirius sure is, he can't help but feel glad to see Remus eating something at least, “—I just stood there and made sure to look burly when necessary to drive the point home, but I have to say, I think I’ve a bit of a crush on your man.”

“A bit of one,” Sirius gets him, sipping off his straw via the right side of his mouth.

James sticks his hell-drink in his cup holder and reaches to start the car, backing out of the spot and putting them back en route to Remus’s place. “Thing is,” Remus puts in, holding a chunk of banana loaf in his right hand, “I think what just happened could count as threatening, so I may have just made it easier for him to lump all of us together in the report should he decide he’s still going to file one anyway.”

“It was more like intimidation," James amends it, leaning over sideways to have a sip out of his heathen beverage while still piloting the car.

"Still illegal, James," Remus chimes.

"It was your idea, Remus," James imitates him.

"I know it was, but I didn't know what else to do," Remus defends.

“Did he admit he was going to report it?” Sirius raises, though he’d know already if he’d been permitted to join in on the intimidation tactic.

James shakes his head. “Oh, he didn’t even let him talk,” he relays, nodding back at Remus.

Sirius looks round at Remus with an undeniably impressed face on. “I wanted him to leave you alone," Remus puts up.

Sirius faces forward, a wry smile on his lips, and squirms quite a bit in his seat. “Wow, d'you want me to drop you off and circle the block until you’re finished with him, or?” James raises plainly.

“Well, could you?” Remus comes in, sporting a prize-winning grin in Sirius’s side-view mirror.

“Really take your time with it, mind,” Sirius insists.

“You know what, for that, I’m not going to,” James says of it.

Sirius huffs after a new sip of coffee, pulling a face. “That guy can’t make this for shit,” he lodges, swirling the definitely-not-light-ice floating around in his cup.

“Well, I would've gone over the counter and just made it myself, but I wasn’t sure Will would appreciate me doing that,” Remus forwards.

“Oh, but thinly veiled threats were just fine,” Sirius returns, grinning at Remus in his mirror.

“Nothing about that was thinly veiled,” James puts in. “And Will was in back, didn’t hear a word of it."

Sirius’s blood boils. “I hate that I will never know what actually went on in there, so you both know.”

“We just told you what went on in there,” Remus returns, huffing a laugh.

“It’s not enough, Remus,” Sirius sends back to him. "I want to see you defending my very being."

“You’ve seen him when he's fucked off,” James raises, tossing his left thumb back toward Remus. “Imagine that, only he had to keep his voice down when Mary was working the till, the café sure wasn't empty, and Will was around there somewhere, but he sure kept that aura about him; colour me proud.”

Sirius leans forward in his seat, pulls open the glove box with his free hand, and shuffles things around until he spots the pair of sunglasses typically found in there, sliding them on and turning away to stare out his window pointedly.

“Oh, no,” James puts out gravely. "She's angry."

“I’m not talking until we get there and maybe not even then,” Sirius puts it, and James waves him off before reaching for the volume knob, turning it up and letting the opening of Cake's classic 'The Distance' fill the car, and then, Sirius has to admit, it's not so easy to remain all that stone-faced with him hooting and hollering over in the driver's seat.

A spot out front of Remus’s building is blessedly free when they pull up his street and James does a wee cheer routine with his left hand while steering the car into the spot with his right one. “That’s how it’s done,” he says for it.

“Didn’t ask,” Sirius sticks out there, undoing his belt and manoeuvring himself out of the car. He leans in to pull on one of the shoulder straps of his guitar case, tugs the thing out behind him, and pops the door shut, tossing a thumb back at the car. “Hey, she stopped making that funny noise, didn't she."

“For a price,” James mentions, lugging Sirius’s suitcase out of the trunk. “Think I might have to trade the ol' girl in soon enough.”

Remus hums dejectedly. “Not the wagon,” he muses.

“I know, but she’s a money pit,” James commiserates, hoisting Sirius’s suitcase over the edge of the curb and onto the sidewalk. “Can one of you get that?”

Remus moves to push the door to the trunk down for him. “Can I come when you’re picking out the next one?” Sirius raises.

“I was just going to kidnap you and make you come with anyway, so yes,” James returns, rolling the suitcase up the path while the other two follow along with their shares of the load.

“Sweet deal,” Sirius calls it.

“What are you thinking of getting?” Remus raises.

James puts out a thoughtful trill. “I’m not sure, really,” he puts up.

“Oh, please get one where we don’t have to crank the windows down manually?” Sirius raises.

“Rolling them down builds character, you lazy lump,” James returns. “Wouldn’t say no to one with cruise control, mind.”

“That would be disastrous in your hands,” Remus lodges.

“Who's the lazy lump now, hm,” Sirius echoes it, moving up ahead of James to get the lobby door open.

The walk upstairs is filled with hums and haws from the peanut gallery (James) about the weight of Sirius’s suitcase. “Listen, I had to pack for all kinds of weather,” he defends.

“Did you, though,” James raises thinly, lagging behind them on the stairs. “Oh, you two go on; I am the bell boy, after all.”

“You really shouldn’t have done that, James,” Remus maintains. “What else are we supposed to call you now but 'the Bell Boy?'”

“This is the thanks I get for chauffeuring you around?” James raises.

“Were you doing anything important over there?” Sirius raises, leading the charge out of the stairwell and down the hall toward Remus’s door.

“It’s a workday, Madame,” James tosses from the back of their single-file queue. "You're lucky I'm taking a few to help out."

"Well, we gave you an excuse to have a break, then, didn’t we,” Sirius serves him, stopping at Remus’s door to unlock it with his key.

He pushes the door open with a prideful smile on, happy for any excuse to use it even when Remus is right here and could've unlocked the door himself, but Remus doesn’t seem to mind letting him do it what with the sunshine smile he has on. “This is gayer than usual,” James mentions, rolling the suitcase in through the door.

“We’re just looking at each other,” Remus sends him, heading in after him.

“Still the gayest look I ever did see,” James mentions.

“You’re only pressed because he doesn’t look at you like that,” Sirius returns, filing into the entryway and shutting the door behind them. He flips through his keys, prying his old work key off the ring, and holds it up to James. "Bring that next time you're on shift."

James absently takes it from him, a bit preoccupied with having a strange look around the main room of the flat. "It’s weird not having her prowling around here,” he shares.

“I was just thinking that,” Remus puts up, leaving Sirius’s knapsack on the couch and moving for the kitchen, bringing a glass down from the cupboard about the sink. Sirius leaves his guitar propped up near the linen closet and moves into the main room, flopping back on the couch with his right leg draped over his knapsack while James lingers on the opposite side of the island from Remus.

Remus runs the cold tap run for about thirty seconds before stuffing the glass under it, filling it up in a short time. He shuts the tap, turns on his heel, and moves out of the kitchen while sipping off his water glass, giving James a quizzical look over the brim of his cup. Sirius moves his gaze over to James, finding that he does have an expression on that’s typically reserved for times he’s pulled a prank and is just waiting for the prankee to fall into his trap, and has a sly glance around the area just in case something's about to pop out, looking back as James veritably bowls something scarlet coloured across the island at Remus, who snaps to attention and only just manages to catch the thing between his free arm and chest.

“Jesus Cunt, you mad lad,” he sends out, looking down at the unmistakable ring box nestled there in his arms. Sirius’s whole chest lights up while Remus looks up real quick, a sunshine smile now aimed over the island at the lad who chucked the box at him. “James, I never knew you felt this way.”

James snorts, putting his hands together wistfully. “Been bursting to ask since we met.”

“How long have you been holding that?” Sirius shoots out.

“Mm,” James chimes. “Tuesday?”

“You shit,” Sirius sends him.

Remus sets his water glass down on the island to have himself a look inside it before looking back up at James. “I’d refrain from rolling it across the table when you pop the question, but you did good, James,” he gives him.

The front door opens and Lily’s distinct voice both rings out in a long-suffering sigh, jolting the three of them to attention. Remus speedily pockets the ring box and reaches for his water, sipping it idly while James whirls around, moving toward Lily with his arms outstretched.

“No,” she denies, but James only continues toward her. “Don’t, I’m repugnant.”

James stops in front of her. “Excuse?”

“I smell extensively of espresso roast,” she details.

“Is that supposed to keep me away?” James raises, moving in for the hug.

“Suppose it wouldn’t, no,” Lily gives him, relaxing into it.

Remus and Sirius find the other’s gaze, silently brimming with fervour, and Sirius breaks their link in favour of a lengthy stretch, speaking at the end of it. “They finally let you go?” he raises.

“Mhm,” Lily offers, letting go of James and honing in on Remus specifically by aiming a forefinger at him. “Oh, I have you down for twenty-five hours of vacation pay while you’re gone, so you know.”

“Shit,” Remus puts up, giving a light shake of the head. “That’s more than I ever figured I’d get.”

“Oh, well, it’s in line with your typical work week,” Lily relays.

“I’m not even used to having vacation pay as an option,” Remus trades her. “I feel a bit spoiled, I won’t lie about it.”

“Yes, well, this is how the other half lives, dear," James declares.

“Oh,” Remus puts up, faux-inspired. “Well, now I know; thanks, James.”

“No problem, love,” James returns.

Sirius leans all the way flat on his back to give himself enough traction to roll up to a seating position. “Imma loo it up and we can go?” he raises, pushing off of the couch with his head tilted at Remus.

Remus nods for it, heading for his laptop on the island and bringing it out of sleep mode with a couple of raps on the keyboard. “I’ll just email myself the list so I’ll have it on me."

Sirius offers him a thumbs-up as he heads around the couch while Lily comes in with the questions. “What are we doing, where are we going?” she bids.

“Phase three,” Sirius offers unhelpfully.

“Just have to stop in at Boots to get a few things for the trip,” Remus offers, little more helpfully. “Nothing terribly exciting, but you're welcome to come along if you’d like.”

“And hang about watching other people shop?” Lily raises. “I’m in.”

Sirius snorts, knocking the bathroom door shut behind him. Once done, Lily switches places with Sirius, citing she didn’t think it smart to use the loo at work lest she wound up getting trapped there for any longer, and absolutely nobody has any objections to that for the second that door’s shut, Remus swiftly passes the ring box off to James. The group of four set off toward Boots on foot at Remus’s insistence what with the pharmacy’s proximity to Remus’s abode, but it doesn’t take much to convince Mum and Dad to comply with his demands when overall it doesn’t really make much sense to take the car over there.

Remus has his mobile out as soon as they’re heading in through the foyer, thumbing through his list while Sirius grabs a basket while they’re passing a stack of them.

It’s not long before Lily gives up a throaty trill from behind the two of them. “Look at you and your little list,” she coos, prodding Remus’s back and tickling him in the process. “Bless you.”

“Quit it,” Remus sends her, reaching back to bat her hand away. “I like a list, thank you.”

“I’m going to figure out how cloning’s done, get my hands on a shrink-ray, and once I do, I’m going to find a tiny jar to keep you in,” she details, decidedly not quitting it. “You’re just that cute.”

“That wouldn’t be strange behaviour at all,” Remus returns her.

“I wouldn’t mind a tiny, portable Remus to chuck things at,” James interjects.

“Alright, settle down,” Remus instructs.

Sirius swings around, walking backwards so he can better see James strolling along behind him. “What would you chuck at him?”

“Small coin, trail mix, the bag of trail mix once it’s empty,” James lists mildly.

“Mm, so I already need a break and we haven’t even started,” Remus shares, reaching to tug on Sirius’s left arm and lowering his voice by a huge margin. “I might run and grab some more of the liquid gels, can you grab the lube? We’re getting to that point.”

“Deal,” Sirius returns him.

Remus nods in thanks and strolls off toward the pharmacy section while Sirius heads over toward the wall of lube in aisle four. “Where’s he off to?” James raises.

“Pharmacy, we’ve found liquid gels work the quickest for his muscle aches so we’ve switched camps,” Sirius offers. “And I’ve been tasked with grabbing the essentials.”

Lily and James don’t seem to question it until they reach the destination, wherein James lets out a snort. “You run out of that at a frightening pace,” he determines.

“I don’t find it frightening whatsoever,” Sirius maintains, scanning the supply ahead of him.

He reaches for their tried and true brand, sticking that in the basket hanging on his left arm, but then he pauses to look over the array of portable lube options and pours over some smaller, travel-sized squeeze tubes that only inspire ideas he’d really like to see come to fruition.

He takes one of the squeezer tubes off of the rack and pulls a pack o’ condoms off of the next shelf, tossing both in the basket along with what he came here for. “Are you going to war, hon?” Lily checks, a bright grin on.

“It’s an on-the-go bottle,” Sirius explains.

James reaches into the basket to flick the box of rubbers. “Thought you were well shot of those ages ago,” he puts up, openly confused.

“Well, y’know what, I’d like to get boned in the woods on my well-deserved vacation, thank you, and this way, I won’t have to clean up with a stray leaf,” Sirius returns, pausing short. “Which reminds me, ought to get bug spray while we’re here.”

“Who says romance is dead?” James raises.

“Oh, sorry, sorry; I’ll say it in a way you'd understand,” Sirius prefaces, heading back toward the front where he’s pretty sure he saw a featured display of bug spray and other outdoorsy items. “I’d like to have sex on a common area couch while we’re there and this way, we can just bang it out and go.”

James huffs grand while Lily thwacks Sirius on the right arm. “When are you going to let that go?” she sends him, keeping it under her breath. “It was one time."

“That I know of,” Sirius rings out, plucking a bottle of bug spray off of the shelf and tossing it into the basket. He heads around James and Lily, glances down the aisle in hopes of spotting Remus, and lo and behold, there he is, wandering up the aisle from the back of the store. “I grabbed bug spray; was that on your list?”

“Sure was,” Remus chimes, heading for them. “They’ll have tons there, too, but I figured we’d pick up our own so we’re protected on all fronts.”

“Well, ample supply, then,” Sirius echoes. “What’s next, boss?”

Remus shuffles on his feet, his lips quirking. “Just more travel essentials, nothing exciting anymore,” he reports, beckoning them to come along.

He takes the basket off of Sirius's hands, leads them down toward aisle six where many wire baskets of travel-sized products are arranged by category, and has a look over the options for mini shampoo bottles. Lily gets distracted by a display of nail polish nearby Remus's post and lets out a wanton noise, giving out a set grabby-hands the vast array of coloured bottles arranged quite invitingly on the large stand, and Sirius feels compelled to wander over and have a look at the vast supply along with her.

“I miss you so,” she muses, waggling her au naturel nails over a few bottles of polish.

“Are you not allowed to wear it?” Remus raises, looking down at her from further up the aisle.

“Certainly not,” Sirius puts up. “The logic behind that is more or less, ‘and what are you going to do when flecks turn up in a customer’s drinks?’”

“Well, you do tend to stick your fingers straight into the drinks,” Remus quips, tossing a bottle of shampoo into his basket.

Sirius tosses out a trill of a laugh, inspecting a vibrant bottle of rouge polish. “And what about it?” he offers, playing along.

James turns up right between Lily and Sirius, leaning in to inspect the array of polish. “Well, if you ever find yourself in the mood for nails the colour of sun-soaked vomit, you know where to look,” he maintains, reaching over their shoulders to lift a bottle of pale green polish so rank, Sirius doesn’t honestly know how to handle it.

“Shame they don’t have you naming the colours, James,” Remus sighs, scoping out the options for travel-sized soap. James snorts for the quip, attempting to set the bottle of polish back on the shelf, but that one knocks into three more bottles which creates quite the domino effect and very soon, many of the bottles on the shelf have capsized. “Oh, good show.”

“It was an accident,” James puts out, meanwhile Sirius and Lily scramble to righten all of the miniature casualties in various stages of mirth.

“Just, please don’t help us,” Sirius instils, not needing the whole cardboard display to go down next.

“Hands where we can see them, James,” Remus echoes.

“Yes, Dad,” James sends him, wandering up the aisle the opposite way, likely to create a new kind of chaos somewhere else.

Lily and Sirius finish with the display soon enough, looking off after James, who manages to keep his hands to himself for a good thirty seconds on from there before an item further down the aisle catches his interest. He strides over to the left-hand side of the aisle, lifting a long cylindrical object from the shelf and studying it with plain confusion lining his features. “What could this be for?” he raises.

There isn’t even time for one or all of the other three to look over and give a guess before James drags out a pronounced ‘Ohh,’ riddled with newfound understanding, and Sirius, fairly certain they’re about to get treated to a rather lewd demonstration, is not even slightly surprised James lifts the tube to his mouth, but he is completely surprised when he ends up blowing an outstanding toot through it, the noise echoing out vibrantly through the aisle and likely over to a few of the others; hard to say.

Remus wasn’t prepared for it either by the looks of it for he immediately takes off down the aisle away from them, making a fast right at the end of it; Sirius is a little busy having completely forgotten how the intake of air works to chase after him and takes to leaning against the display of polish for support which fortunately seems to like him fine for it doesn't collapse underneath his weight, while Lily seems to decide that sprawling back on the floor for of the aisle and shaking through her mirth was the only thing left for her do just now.

“Excuse me, Miss?” James bids, moving to hover over her with the blasted tube still on him. “Miss, you’ve taken a fall; do you need any help?”

Sirius watches keenly as Lily lifts her hands, blocking her increasingly reddening face as she shakes at double-speed through her plight, and slips away up the aisle in the direction Remus ran off in, feeling all sorts of good about James having found someone so willing to let his antics fly free. He turns up the adjacent aisle, looking left and right for Remus, and spots him studying a shelf down at the other end of aisle two before heading for him.

Remus either senses him coming or hears his particular footfalls coming, but Sirius does rather hope it’s the former. “How many places has he been booted from collectively?” he raises, looking over his shoulder and back Sirius’s way.

“Impossible to say,” he offers, sliding up behind him. He slips his arms around Remus’s front, interested in making the most of the relative privacy afforded to them in this particular aisle, and leaves a sigh against the line of Remus’s left shoulder, peeking over it at the shelf Remus has brought them to and finding they’re looking at an array of travel games.

“Oh, you clever lad,” Sirius passes him, taking in a gasp mere seconds on from there due to spotting an option he cannot let slip away and tapping Remus’s stomach erratically. “Mad libs, mad libs—”

Remus puts out a small laugh. “Done,” he calls it, reaching to lift the hefty, full-sized book of promises off the shelf.

Sirius turns his head, pressing his lips to the side of Remus’s neck. “You’re the best.”

Remus turns his head toward his and leaves a kiss on top of Sirius’s head before a series of exaggerated coos float over to them from down the aisle. Sirius straightens up and looks left, finding James and Lily mere steps away from them.

James lets out a substantial hoot and pulls the book of mad libs from Remus’s grasp. “Family-sized?” he puts out, having a flip through it. “There’s so many in here.”

Remus plucks it out of James’s hands, leaving it in the basket on his arm. “Exactly,” he maintains. “We’ve about four hours on the rail, give or take, and I’m thinking it might do well to a little something extra to help get us there.”

"And in style," James raises it.

Sirius feels a jolt of remembrance go right up his spine. “I need new earbuds,” he remembers. “I’ll meet you right back here, ‘kay?”

Remus nods for it, but his quick double-blink suggests confusion has set in. “What happened to yours?” he bids.

“One barely works anymore, I end up hearing half a tune in one ear and bits and pieces of background conversations I didn’t ask for in the other,” Sirius relays, backing down the aisle in the vague direction of the electronics. “Two minutes, not even.”

He heads over there, taking a gander over the options, and while none of the ones available are going to hold out for longevity’s sake, they’ll do in a pinch, and travelling without a pair at the ready would not be a smart move. He picks the one he likes best and works the first of the bunch off of the rod, heading back to the group. They’re exactly where he left them, already filling the first page of Mad Libs out by the looks of it, and Sirius perks at that certainly, but ends up perking twice as much when the slow whine of the opening bars of 'You Raise Me Up' swell out of the speaker overhead, smiling as watches Lily go still.

He saunters up on her right and lulls his head to the side to meet her overcome gaze with a wry, intent one of his own. “Don’t you dare,” she warns.

“Dare what?” Remus raises, looking up from the book, the pen in his hand paused as he glances around at them all for even any amount of context.

“They were assigned to perform this back in the program,” James puts forth, mouth twisted up. “He was made to stand up there and sing it as it’s not the heaviest piano tune out there; Lily got the gig for that one, but he had the best pipes in the class so he certainly got that solo."

“Did a number on that one, too, if I may just say,” Sirius highlights, extremely humbly, of course.

“You may,” James allows, looking at Remus again. “He maintained at the time that he didn’t even want the song, as if it was some burden put on him that he didn't ask for, and yet, day of the performance he goes full worship leader on the lot of us out in the seats—" Remus cuts in a substantial breath and a gape-grin to rival Sirius's, "—no, I mean that; think Sister Act meets Groban meets Freddie, and for someone who hummed and hawed to us about being assigned the solo in the first place, he sure stood tall in front of that choir, leading the whole pack with those hands running amok, going absolutely ham on the performance day so it was very clear to me and Pete at least that somebody had been doing some practising behind the scenes, bitch threw his fucking suit jacket off right after the bridge ended, it was a whole thing, and legend has it — I'm legend this time — you could see Lily’s tears from across the auditorium.”

Remus gives a sunshine smile, turning to Sirius with an overcome noise and garnering him to bat his lashes right back at him. “I had to lean in,” he puts up. “And I could probably still bring her to tears in moments with this one.”

“There's no probably about it, I’m only human,” she defends, pressing her hands together in a pleading motion toward Sirius who’s definitely still prepared to start crooning in about ten-ish seconds, just once the violins cut off and the vocals kick in. “Not in public, Sirius; please.”

“OK, I won’t,” Sirius instils, lifting his hands easily. “We’re done here, then?”

“I am, yeah,” Remus maintains, closing the book of Mad Libs and tucking it away in the basket.

James huffs a laugh. “You made it seem like you had a laundry list to do,” he puts up.

“Earlier on, I did,” Remus mentions, pushing up the aisle toward the front, with the three of them following along, “and I didn’t actually say that; I said I wanted to get this done early, James.”

“Fine, but I want to get food next,” James trades him.

“We can get food,” Remus echoes, meanwhile Sirius takes in a substantial breath beside him. “Only, can we—”

Sirius stops middle of the aisle, putting a fist up and out ahead of him. “When I am down—

No,” Lily shoots out, taking off up the aisle. “Meet you out front.”

Sirius shimmies up the rest of the aisle, but bitch, he’s still got it. James hoots in Lily's wake while Remus bumps Sirius’s left hip with his right one as he passes by him, looking quite enthralled by him if Sirius does say so himself. “Did you really get the whole choir in on it?” he raises, moving for one of the open registers at self-checkout.

Pshh, sure did,” Sirius affirms, following him at a glide. “They wanted us to do it like a collection of paper cutouts, but come on now; if you’re going to do it at all, fucking commit.”

Remus hoists the basket up onto the counter, sighing profusely as he flashes the bar code on the back of the book of Mad Libs over the scanner and putting it aside for now. “Why did I have to miss either of those performances?” he puts out weakly. “As much as I'm glad there's proof of at least one, I’d pay to see them in their full glory, not on some shoddy video cam—” he cuts off quickly, blinking and reaching into the basket before lifting the box of rubbers with a quizzical look and finding Sirius's gaze next, “—what are you playing at?”

“He’s going to try to get done literally anywhere you’ll have him,” James passes along, hands set leisurely in his trouser pockets. “All over your house, the woods, the meadows, probably one of the vehicles if he can swindle it—”

“OK,” Remus cuts in. “No vehicles.”

Sirius huffs grand. “Live a little,” he instils, lifting his hands.

“I do just fine without the fantasy of getting it done in either of my parents' vehicles,” Remus returns, reaching the condoms toward the scanner all the same.

“Interesting thing I noted; you didn't seem to have a problem with the other spots I listed,” James mentions.

“We’re going on vacation, James,” Remus returns, scanning the condoms through and swiftly moving on to the next item.

James snorts a big one while Sirius fucking glows on the other side of Remus. “I’ll send you half of this, cool?” he raises, circling his hand around their basket of items he’ll definitely be partaking in, and again he’s got a sneaky suspicion Remus is working real fucking hard to keep Sirius’s spirits up for he doesn’t even argue it once, instead he simply nods, pays for the total with his card, and gives Sirius a bag to hold; turns out, ugly family history rearing its uglier head is all they needed to strike a compromise over small shopping trips, who knew.

He definitely has a strut going as they leave the shop, but he’s going to be getting some in the woods, and he’ll be working on the car thing; it’ll happen, he just has to manifest it into the universe and pray she’s willing to lob him a favour. They do get on the concept of ordering food once back at Remus’s place, but then it’s a lengthy process of picking what to get that’ll satisfy the four of them — or three, since Remus apparently couldn’t care less what the final decision is when he’s much more focused on lugging their duffel bags out into the main room and divvying out what clothes he’ll be taking on the trip and what he mostly washed in order to get his hamper back to a decent state.

Once the food arrives, Remus picks at his share off and on while focusing more on packing, and in contrast, the other three sit on the couch devouring their own portions at their containers on the couch, half-watching Remus arrange their travel essentials into piles, half-heckling him to pause and remember to eat now and again.

Eventually though, they’re all nurturing food babies, Remus being the exception as he'd mostly stuck to nibbling at his share of the food while the bulk of his packing got done, but now, with his suitcase and knapsack are zipped up and resting neatly beside Sirius’s own luggage, Remus looks rather pleased with the order of things as he sits cross-legged on the floor and indulges himself in an actual food break.

The energy in the room has a sort of near-finality to it in that both Remus and Sirius have been trading quiet, wry glances between each other as Lily and James restore their individual and combined strength in order to make themselves scarce, a gesture is Sirius feeling rather grateful over as he is a) zonked, and b) about to give birth possibly, but on top of that, he would really just like to spend some time with Remus before he’s got to be concerned with the rest of the Lupin fam.

Sirius drags himself up and out onto the perch for a post-food cigarette a few minutes on from there, which does help in regards to the food baby issue if only for the kick-start to his metabolism and he’ll take feeling less like a buoy, that's for sure. He stands up after putting his cigarette out, catches James and Lily dragging themselves toward the entryway, and heads back inside right quick, wherein he meets up with Remus at the door for the trading of goodbyes and good lucks.

“Thanks for the ride back,” Remus offers in parting, shutting the door behind him and turning back to Sirius with a perfectly Remus-smile, one that's genuine and a bit unnerved at the precipice of something greater than he can probably even fully handle right about now, and that’s something Sirius can’t blame him for even slightly.

Remus lifts his arms, waiting for Sirius to bring it in, and that's not a long time at all; Sirius moves in quickly, shutting his eyes and basking in the feel of Remus pressed against him. “Sleepy?” he asks.

“In theory,” Remus puts down. “I’m not sure about practice just yet.”

Sirius hums, putting thought into an option they might both be into. “We can watch Gilmore?” he raises, opening his eyes and leaning back enough to see Remus better. “I know we really only just finished, but—”

“Sure,” Remus comes in, quite piqued by the feel of it. “Whereabouts did you want to go in?”

“Pilot,” Sirius answers straight away, garnering a smirk out of Remus for the decided tone. “It’s a perfect pilot, OK? Tells you everything you need to know about the gals, the dubious family history, what you’re in for, it’s got cheesy slapstick, the kinks haven’t been ironed out yet and you can really, really tell—”

“The double Macy Gray needle drop, the whiplash from the turn of the century soundtrack in general, the puffy coats, the outfits as a whole, Lorelai Gilmore in general,” Remus lists. “It’s quite the packaged deal.”

“It’s like you get me,” Sirius offers, smiling up at him before lifting to leave a thank-you kiss on his lips and heading for Remus’s room. “You start 'er up.”

He heads for the bed, leans over it to drag the comforter closer to him, and wraps it around himself while he walks it back out of the room, thinking Remus lucked the fuck out finding this twelve-pound cloud of a blanket and that he might even trade Remus something of his when he leaves for Paris just to get to hold onto this thing; he doesn’t absolutely need the leather jacket, after all, and he thinks Remus could benefit more from it anyway.

Sirius pads out into the main room, rounding the couch where Remus is sitting, pulling it over his head and closing it over himself, looking like the Virgin Mary found a tie-dye comforter for a veil.

“Can I keep this when you go?” Sirius asks, standing over him.

Remus looks up from his laptop, blinking at Sirius's words before studying the picture in front of him. “Sure you can,” he grants.

“Really?” Sirius checks, looking left then right. “You’re not just saying yes to everything I ask for because I’ve been a little blue?”

Remus shakes his head no. “I don’t know how I'd fit that in my luggage, so I was planning on leaving it here and getting another once I'm there,” he extends, lifting a shoulder. "Dorcas will have her own bedding, I'd imagine, so by all means; keep an eye on that one for me."

Remus scoots to the left corner of the couch, lays himself across the length of it facing toward the laptop on the coffee table, and taps his right leg in a quiet beckoning. Sirius swings the comforter down from over his head, moves to wiggle up against him, and tosses the comforter back and over Remus as well, relishing in Remus’s arms curling around his middle underneath the covers; warm, right, and keeping him from the possibility of falling off the couch.

“I’ll leave you the jacket in exchange,” he shares, tapping the back of one of the hands sitting cozy at his midriff. “That way we both have something to hang onto while you’re out Frenching.”

Remus huffs directly over Sirius’s right ear, making him smile so bright. “I’m not going to be Frenching anybody,” he returns.

Sirius smirks as he reaches out to press the space bar, stating the show from the top. “Deal?”

“About the trade or the Frenching?” Remus raises.

“Well, both, I suppose.” Push.

Pull. “Deal.”

 

-

 

Sirius wakes with a start, blinking his eyes open in the dark and turning his head to find Remus kneeling behind him. “Up,” he requests, giving him a wee shake on the right arm. Sirius sends a long-suffering noise to the ceiling. “I made you coffee.”

That helps, it does. The knowledge of where they’re headed helps too, but they'll have to get there first and Sirius is half-asleep and rather uninterested in leaving the warmth of his cocoon just yet. He rolls back onto his left side, though this time he grabs hold of Remus’s wrist and takes it with him as he settles in.

Remus sighs through his nose behind Sirius. “Fine,” he says, settling in behind him. “I may have jumped the gun a little; you could have ten minutes to snooze.”

Sirius smiles minutely for the opportunity, smiles bigger when Remus rests his forehead against the back of his neck, and lets his eyes fall further shut, focusing on feeling. He can feel puffs of air over the skin of his neck, a hint of spearmint coming along with each one, feels Remus’s chest move every time he breathes in and out, and feels rather surrounded by the combined warmth emanating from Remus behind him and the bed beneath them.

“How did I get here?”

“Existentially or physically?”

“Can’t tackle the first without a coffee.”

“You fell asleep at around ten and I knew your neck would hurt this morning if I let that continue, so I ushered you in here to avoid that,” Remus provides.

“Good man,” Sirius offers. “Did you sleep well?”

Remus hums a frank no. “James was right,” he gives up.

“We won’t tell him,” Sirius instils.

“I can never sleep before a trip,” Remus sighs. “I didn’t sleep a wink the night before I moved here either.”

“What did you do instead?” Sirius asks.

“Last night? Finished the book I was on, picked myself another one to bring with, lay there thinking,” Remus offers. “I couldn’t shake the feeling I was forgetting something, but that’s also rather typical of pre-trip me.”

Sirius drags his thumb back and forth over the inside of the wrist he holds captive. “Did we figure out what it was?”

“Triple-checked; can’t figure it out.”

“You didn’t, then.”

“Rest assured, we’ll find out the moment we get to the station.”

“How long do we have now?” Sirius bids, not looking forward to the getting out of his cocoon part of the morning.

Remus hums vaguely. “Under ten, over five.”

Not bad, but Sirius does have an inkling they’ve more time than Remus advertised in the first place and shifts over onto his right side, facing him head-on. He looks much more alert than he should for such an ungodly hour and for someone who’s apparently been awake for sixteen hours and counting, but if Sirius is honest, he definitely wouldn’t mind seeing that wakeful face mid-orgasm.

Sirius moves his left arm to drape it over Remus’s right hip, circling his fingertips over the thin layer of cotton covering it. “How much time have we actually got?”

Remus’s gaze drops to Sirius's hand and back up in a moment. “Half an hour,” he admits.

Sirius blinks at the truth, scowling over the knowledge that it’s closer to four a.m. than it is five. “I hereby declare this the new witching hour,” he announces.

“I’ll be sure to let the right people know of the change.”

“Bless your soul, but you're a lying fiend.”

“I wanted you to have a chance to eat something,” Remus defends.

“You’re just writing the smut for me here,” Sirius insists, his mouth twisting as he leans in and presses his lips against Remus’s pulse point.

“Food,” Remus reiterates, breathing a touch heavier with Sirius’s lips working at his skin, “and please, spare me a protein joke; it’s too early for that.”

“It’s too early for everything,” Sirius mutters, getting right back to it.

“Not everything apparently—” Remus tries to put out, but he gives up on that to take in a harsher breath as Sirius adds teeth to the mix.

He gives out a wanton noise and lets it all go on for long enough that Sirius is pulled right out of the motions when Remus halts him by worming his hands between them. “We don’t have time,” he stresses, though Sirius would like to report that he does sound rather frustrated by that. “Once we’re there, we’ll have plenty of time to ourselves, but for now you should eat something.”

Sirius nods, grumbling all the while, and Remus mimics him lazily as he pushes himself back from Sirius and soon off the bed as well. Sirius takes five to recoup, pouting about this development likely for the entire time he lays there evening out, and drags himself out of bed to head straight for the coffee when he can bear it.

He wants to help out, he does, but it’s far more entertaining to trade between munching on his cereal and drinking his coffee all while watching Remus putter about the flat making sure everything's in order and helping would mean no puttering. Once the bowl’s done, Sirius downs the rest of his coffee, puts his bowl and mug in the sink, and pads through the main room, squeezing past the array of luggage gathered in the entranceway to get to the bathroom.

Sirius hears the taps in the kitchen running before he starts the shower and ends up spending upwards of a minute staring blankly at the various products in the shower before he remembers the reason he entered the shower was to effectively use it and does just that.

He hangs a towel around his waist, perches on the tub to towel out his hair with another, then stands at the mirror to load his toothbrush with paste and goes at it absently. He pauses a moment to pull his damp hair back, fingers snagging on a tangle back there, and perhaps it’s that he’s not with-it enough to do any sort of mental blocking, but the flashes happen one after the other without his say in the matter; the speed his head hit the oak table, not a moment’s chance to recover from the blow before his head was dug into it, his inability to comprehend how a woman so shrill and bony could manage to keep a sixteen-year-old trapped between his chair and the table’s edge all while hacking away back there.

Sirius blinks back into the dimly lit room, places both his hands on the counter, and meets his eye in the mirror severely, intent on speaking with himself through a stare. There’ll be no more of this from here on out.

The door opens and Remus turns up behind him to grab his razor out of the medicine cabinet and Sirius feels his blood run smoother; Cunt, even with his puttering and fussing about, Remus’s presence is vastly necessary. “Figured it out,” he chimes, waggling the razor in celebration, but an appalled noise comes out of him next moment.

Sirius glances at him in the mirror, finding an accusatory stare aimed back at him along with Remus’s right forefinger pointing to a reddened mark on his neck that looks remarkably like a bruise with a row of teeth dragged over it, and pulls his toothbrush from his mouth. “That wasn’t quite the sound you made, but you can try again.”

Remus isn’t having it. “I can’t show up with this.”

“Oh, hold on,” Sirius bids with a wave-off, setting his toothbrush down for a brief intermission. “I came prepared, you know.”

He has to half-vault over Remus’s suitcase to get to his own from the bathroom doorway, but that's no matter. He sprawls out on the floor, sticks his legs straight out on either side of his suitcase, and zips it open to sift through the netted pouch inside the lining. He finds his concealer after a little hand wiggling, pushes himself to his feet, and manoeuvres back through the crowded entryway.

Remus lifts his chin as Sirius gets to him, stretching his neck out so Sirius can pat the spot down and blend the concealer in. “Et voila,” he chimes, closing the packet. “No one will know a thing.”

He tosses the compact out of the room, lands it on his open luggage, and Remus gives him a quick peck in thanks before disappearing from the room, leaving Sirius to finish brushing his teeth. He’s only finished sticking the brush in its travel container when Remus returns to the room fully clothed, holding his mobile to his ear.

Sirius lets out the sound of a buzzer indicating the wrong answer in a game show and causes Remus to jolt. “Absolutely no way,” he attests, shaking his head.

Remus drops the mobile away from his mouth. “What?”

“You can’t wear that,” Sirius puts up.

Remus pauses with his hand halfway pushed through his hair and checks the shirt for a stain that might have gone unnoticed, but when he doesn’t find one he looks more bemused than anything and that in itself is ridiculous when he’s parading around in a black top paired with the corduroys like that wouldn’t be an issue.

“You can’t walk around looking like sex-on-fire and expect me to act natural around your parents of all people,” Sirius instils. “I'm finding it rude that you’ve even done this.”

Remus shoves his hand over the receiver. “I’m trying to call for a taxi so would you get some clothes on yourself?” he implores. Sirius lifts both hands as he passes by Remus, squeezing back over to his suitcase and pulling out the Henley. “Oh, thank you, that’s really just—”

“You did this to yourself, Remus,” he sing-songs.

He tugs on a pair of pants before slipping on the crowned favourite of his jeans and goes ahead and crouches down to cuff them at the lower calf for good measure, but no one has ever said Sirius isn’t petty. It’s as amusing as he expects it to be watching Remus glower and tap an unimpressed foot all while politely reciting his address, but mostly it’s hot so Sirius’s plan is all but a misfire when it’s him who ends up adjusting the crotch of his own jeans, not Remus.

Remus doesn’t notice the third prominent limb of his, busy speaking to the operator over the phone, but Sirius can’t say he would mind trying for a quickie after receiving such a heated gaze, but it would have to be real quick and even he doesn’t think he can get that lucky just now. Sirius unzips his suitcase once more, grabs the travel lube he stuffed in there once they brought their Boots haul back, and works a condom out of the pack next, stuffing both in his right trouser pocket just in case Remus has a sudden change of heart somewhere along the way, Sirius wouldn't mind that one bit; sometimes a little patience can make their inevitable fusion that much hotter.

Sirius goes for Remus's jumper draped over the back of the couch so he won't forget it and ties it around his hips, feeling a little too warm for it just now but that could change later on and he'd like to have the option available.

Remus finishes up on the line, pockets his mobile, and moves to start closing the bathroom door. “Taxi’s on the way, if you want a puff I would do it now,” Remus instructs, a little curt about it, if Sirius is honest.

Remus shuts the door to the bathroom and Sirius delicately heads out onto the perch with that, has himself a think while having a puff, and decides Remus’s temperamental mood can’t be personal; it’s outside influences coming into play, nerves ratcheted up more than his regular default setting, and maybe there’s a little bit of sexual frustration bleeding in there, too. Fair enough, the lad’s only human, and it’s almost imminent that he'll lighten up once they’ve left the station and can’t feasibly worry about missing their train. Once there, the focus can turn toward taking out the other stressors one by one, but there are just too many factors going on at one moment for Remus to let himself relax completely and this is exactly the sort of occasion where Sirius needs to not be such a sensitive suck.

He continues building himself up as they lug their haul downstairs, but there’s a relief that comes with seeing Remus’s dual foot-tapping and nail-picking while they wait on the curb for the taxi to pull up for those signals are code red: he's not upset with Sirius, just has a lot on his mind, and on top of that, he’s dating a bloke who’s got quite a thing for pressing time and his buttons just to get a little huffing going, so Sirius keeps hush as he rubs at Remus’s back until the cabbie arrives, as he helps the driver work their suitcases into the trunk, and continues keeping hush along the way, slotting his hand in with Remus’s over the middle seat and letting him do what he’s just going to do.

Sirius leans his head back against the headrest of his seat after a while, but he doesn’t close his eyes; it’s too dark out, talk radio is playing up front and that always gets him snoozy, but there's a strong chance he'd fall asleep in here if he isn’t careful about it. He stares aimlessly out the window beside him instead, a hazy film falling over his eyes for a time until he’s in a near trance-like state — at least until he quite suddenly recognizes the particular street they're on, leading to the realization of what route they’re taking to King’s Cross.

He sits up straight, scooting to the edge of his seat. “Hey, can we take another way?” he bids, aiming it up front at the driver.

“Can’t,” is all he gets.

Sirius blinks, quite affronted. “Are none of the driveways up ahead good enough for you to pull into and go a different way?”

The man splays his hands open over the wheel. “I’m taking you the fastest way; what else do you want?”

Sirius shoves himself back in his seat, fully defeated when they’re not even four houses away now. He knows he’s being horrible, but his skin’s crawling; he doesn’t want to see those fucking pillars out front, or those fucking vines all over the house, or those high windows that don’t have bars on them but may as well have, and shutting his eyes against all of that ends up being a bad, bad move when all that really does is give a nice, dark backdrop for those two boys trapped on the inside of those walls to stand out against.

Remus’s thumb moving back and forth over the back of Sirius’s own is really all that gets him past Grimmauld Place though he keeps his eyes shut the rest of the way to the station, but he has to open them to get a look at the total once they've arrived. Remus scoots forward with his card ready to go and Sirius pulls out his mobile, forwarding the price of the ride to Remus’s account; he doesn’t want to pay the man up front a single pound right about now, but he doesn’t want Remus out the money for this shithead even more than that.

Remus walks a step or two ahead of him once they’re rolling their suitcases behind them, leading the way through the revolving doors with his mobile already out and his E-tickets at the ready. Now, Sirius did not see this morning’s awful mood paired with this week’s horrid turn of events coming when he simply told Remus to hold onto their tickets back in May, it really just had to do with convenience, but he will say one thing: he’s glad he did ask him to handle this part when he's simply not in the state to take charge and lead them anywhere.

Remus gets their tickets scanned while Sirius hovers nearby and beckons him along to check their baggage, which Sirius cannot wait to fucken do when he’s got his guitar case on his back, his knapsack loop hanging from his left hand, and his suitcase rolling along behind him; he could really use a lightening of the load right about now. On the way over there, Sirius is treated to a veritable brick house of a man pushing at his back to get through the crowd of too many fucking people ambling about, and he tries to be cool, he really does, but ten seconds of rough brick pushing at his back is ten seconds too many, and Sirius whips his head round, finding the culprit at once.

“Could you not be up my fucking arse?” he snaps, earning himself a scoff and shoulder-check for it as the man blasts past him.

Sirius heads after the man, but feels a hand close around his left wrist and turns his head to find Remus giving him a pleading look. “What?” Sirius retorts. “I’m sorry, but if he’s going to fuck me, the least he could do is give me a cigarette.”

Remus pulls his lips into a line, turning his head to hide his amusement, and even in his foul mood, Sirius knows that was funnier than even his pride will allow right now. “Come on,” he coaxes, leading him toward bag check and thankfully toward the shortest queue in the bunch. “Once you’re free of this, more coffee awaits you."

Sirius grumbles in response, but allows himself to get tugged along since it’s Remus doing the tugging and he’s got such a gentle hold on him as is. He gets in the queue behind Remus, leans over the protrusion of Remus’s knapsack, and sets his forehead against the back of his neck, having himself a mini recharge session while automatically shuffling forward whenever Remus starts to step up.

Remus hadn't been wrong; Sirius does feel somewhat better once he just has his knapsack on his back to work with and the chance for coffee does indeed keep him going in an almost spiritual way; he can hear its call with every step as Remus seeks out their platform first and a free bench second for them to wait on. Remus taps Sirius’s left arm, nodding to a free one down the platform from them, and speed-walks to snag it before someone else does, which doesn’t take much extra speed when Remus’s legs get him most places at a snappy speed as is.

Sirius stops a few steps from the bench, hoisting his knapsack onto it. “I need life,” he attests, free of anything to carry for the moment and quite pleased about it. “Want anything?”

Remus shakes his head, but Sirius, already backing up the way they came, gives him a Look. “Small black,” he surrenders.

“Coffee?” Sirius returns, unabashedly shocked and pumped in the same beat.

“Tea,” Remus sounds out, but his smile gives away his wry amusement. "Just a small."

Sirius swings around and heads for the kiosk with a brisk sense of purpose. He knows he should have seen the Friday morning crowd coming, but he didn’t and hindsight doesn’t make sidestepping pockets of people along the way any more enjoyable by any means. He makes it there without kicking anybody, stares up at the menu board while waiting in line, and by the time it’s his turn he still hasn’t figured out the quickest way to ask for what he wants when he’s got to follow an entire other lingo than the pretentious lingo he’s been having to go by for years now, and decides he can’t do this.

“I can’t do this,” he tells the barista.

“That kind of day?” she returns.

“It’s five in the morning,” he supplies, giving a lift of his brows, "and there are too many choices here.”

“Enough said,” she allows. “Just want something easy, then?”

“I want the motherlode,” he supplies. “Biggest size you’ve got, iced, six pumps or scoops or what have you of whatever your favourite flavouring is, I’ll probably like it, and five shots. Light ice, please.”

“On it," the girl nods. already typing into the till at a speed too fast for him, but hey, at least she’s with-it.

“Small black tea, too,” he adds, pulling his wallet out.

He pays with his card, dumps a handful of change he’s too tired to bother checking into the tip jar, and makes his way over to wait by the hand-off station. He snags himself a straw and makes his way back to the counter, and it really is a miracle he got the girl who’s on it enough to multitask this early on for she's fetching Remus’s tea while Sirius’s shots pour and getting back in time to pour the milk in and that's just speedy work at play; good on her.

She finishes up with both drinks, sets them on the counter at once, and Sirius finds himself quite impressed by the look of what she concocted for him. He picks up Remus’s tea in one hand and his curious drink in the other and gives a farewell smile. “Thanks, doll,” he offers, turning away from the counter.

“Don’t call me 'doll,'” she chimes.

Sirius does a quadruple reel, turning with their drinks in hand and heading back to Remus with enough of a quizzical look on his visage that the boy asks about it straight away. “What happened to you?” he bids, reaching for the tea Sirius is mindlessly holding down to him.

Sirius moves to sit beside him and pops his straw against his right hip to get the paper off of it, staring at the floor of the platform perplexedly. “I said, ‘thanks, doll’ to the barista and she told me not to,” he details, lifting his gaze to Remus. “Is — is that not — what’s happening, Remus?”

“Not a fan of pet names?” Remus raises.

“I say ‘doll’ plenty and I’ve never been told to quit it,” Sirius puts up.

“Well, today might’ve been the day you did, then,” Remus offers, having a trial sip of his tea. “I suppose any name could get grating after a while; Elise hates being called ‘love.’”

“But I’m not doing it to be a sleaze,” Sirius mentions, left eye narrowed as he looks back at him. “It's meant to be endearing; I was just trying to be nice.”

Remus nods, swallowing his sip. “And I’m sure the bloke who called her ‘sugar tits’ the other day thought he was being nice, too," he raises.

Sirius pauses. “Say that again," he bids.

“Sugar tits,” Remus repeats. A couple wandering by at that exact moment whip their heads around immediately, sending a world of a Look his way while they keep on walking, and in turn, Remus sends a Look over to Sirius openly succumbing to a breathy fit beside him. “Did you plan that?”

“I fucking wish I did,” Sirius insists, wiping at his eyes with the heel of his free palm.

“Well, that’s enough of that,” Remus decides, lifting his tea to his mouth again and reminding Sirius he should try his mystery concoction.

Sirius does, taking in a breath after he’s done with it and staring off blankly across the platform. “I’ve been reborn,” he states.

“Why’s that?” Remus raises, not even looking at him; he’s just staring down at his mobile like Sirius isn’t going through something wonderful over here.

“I told her to make me something that would give me a kick and she sure did,” Sirius details, shaking the ice in his drink. “This thing is fucking powerful.”

“Well, if it gets you less snarky, I’ll take it,” Remus mentions.

Sirius sends him a tch. “You’ve been snarky with me ever since the hickey so whatever, pal.”

Remus looks sidelong at him with a frown on and takes a few moments to reflect, it appears. “I’m sorry,” he offers, but it doesn’t sound woeful or self-loathing or even like he's brow-beating himself, just a simple apology and Sirius doesn’t really want to harp on him for his penchant for apologies just now; what he’d actually rather do is pinpoint when exactly Remus relaxed enough with him to say he's sorry because it’s fair to and not because he’ll explode into a million little pieces if he doesn’t, but that might take a bit of time to track down.

“Me too,” Sirius trades him, budging Remus’s right arm. “I’m just not good at being decent before nine, but that doesn't mean I'm not excited to get there.”

“I know you are," Remus trades him. "It was an early departure for me to go with; I should’ve just picked a later train, but I just wanted to make the most of the time we've got."

“And that makes sense, I’m just garbage in the morning,” Sirius insists. "Any morning, but especially this one."

Remus leans into Sirius's arm a little. “We’re leaving really late coming back, if that helps any?” he raises.

“And it does." Remus’s mouth twitches at the tone he gave it with and Sirius smiles back, swirling his drink in an uppity sort of way. “I’ll be better after this.”

A little jingle blares out of the speakers littered about the platform and an announcer comes through to speak gibberish down at them. “That’s us,” Remus chimes, lifting off of the bench.

“How could you tell?” Sirius raises.

Remus waggles his mobile screen down at him. “It’s time?” he raises, his eyes quite kind despite taking the mickey out of him.

Sirius lets him have that and moves off of the bench as well, hoisting his backpack off of it and half onto his shoulders. “Shit, we really did cut it close, hey?” he raises, following Remus out from the bench a little as their train pulls in.

“Mhm,” Remus nods. “Could have been some of the reasoning behind my snarkings.”

Sirius pushes a musing breath through his nose. “Sorry,” he frowns.

Remus gives him a plain, imploring look, lifting his right hand to tap Sirius’s left cheek with his mobile; an interesting choice for sure, but his hands are full and it could’ve been Remus’s tea, so he’ll take the mobile. “You’re fine,” he pardons, nodding ahead to suggest they move up and maybe even completely on from that point of contention, and that, Sirius wouldn't mind one bit.

Once on the train, Remus abides by Sirius’s vehement insistence that they snag the very back row where they can face backwards and have a blast to themselves along the way, but the prime seating is won by the sheer luck that nobody ahead of them went for it and not by force that Sirius maintained he’d have been willing to take it with. There’s some waiting around from there that Sirius doesn't much care for, but he’s got Remus, he’s got his concoction to keep him at bay, and it turns out, he’d been right in his presumption that Remus’s mood would rise once the train began pulling out of the station for the moment that starts happening, Remus looks to be a great deal less fidgety than he did, and he would, having nothing left to do but just sit and wait to be delivered home; the rest from here is peanuts.

Sirius figures out that the air circulating on board may be too chilly for Remus’s liking for the boy pulls his artfully rolled-up quilt out of his knapsack, returns Sirius’s amused expression with an uppity little smile, and drapes it over himself with a dignified flourish. Sirius bites the inside of his cheek, not entirely sure he hasn’t made this person up in his head because Remus is entirely too good, but his smile fades when he realizes where Remus is actually going with this. He knows he can’t entirely blame Remus for resting his head against the window and pulling his quilt up over his shoulders in preparation for the siesta he’s clearly seeking out, not when he pulled an all-nighter and could likely use the shut-eye, but now that Sirius is wired thanks to the Motherlode, he’s left with his right leg jiggling up a storm and wishing he’d snagged the window seat when he had the chance.

He watches the city pass by them even if he hasn’t got the window seat, then watches the outskirts of it for a time, but after a while, a collection of trees starts to look like any other collection of trees from the window of a train and he has to admit he gets rather bored of it. He wonders there if he’s just a few ingredients short of actually enjoying the simplicity of a view and then that thought leads to whether he's really ever felt peaceful, and then, along with a feeling not unlike a bur sticking to the walls of his stomach, he has to wonder if he's ever really figured out how to enjoy something as simple as feeling whimsical.

James pulled him along when Sirius was younger; still does, frankly, but he saw the spirit and excitable nature inside of Sirius early, early on, helped him with finding the oddities and humour in the everyday, mundane aspects of life, harvested his love for a little or a lot of chaos, and cultivated a habit that Sirius is now almost infamous for in finding in the smallest, brightest little things, but feeling whimsical? Mm, Sirius spent a lot of years there shitting on that feeling whenever he saw somebody else wrapped up in it, didn’t trust it, and maybe that’s just who he is; petty, jealous, and too much of a coward to slow down and actually enjoy smaller, quieter moments because they’re so often paired with the feeling of loneliness and that's never been kind to him. He was a lonely enough kid as is.

He's gotten better with letting whimsy in, somebody wandered into the frame and made him near powerless to it, but that's the thing: Remus is great at being whimsical. There can be a storm going on inside of him at any given point, that brain of his fires off quicker than Sirius can keep up with at times, but Remus still knows how to locate, name, and, more importantly, enjoy whimsy; put a warm cuppa in his hands, a quilt over his shoulders, a book in his lap, maybe a windowsill to rest his head on, and that bloke will be happy as a clam.

Remus falters with it more often these days, his recurring boxing matches with the cluster variety have thrown a wrench into that department and with a clatter to boot, and he's had a tougher time with the concept these past few weeks, but still, he knows how to do it and he sure as hell knows how to pluck the smallest things out of Sirius's day and make those sound massive, but back when Sirius met him? He was so, so quick to find even the slightest positive in a day, be it that he caught the bus on time, nabbed one of the good machines at the laundromat, got a wee bit more in tips that week and could splurge on a medium tea instead of a small, and he made it look so easy; hell, more than likely Remus learned exactly how to spot the small things and enjoy them from having the sort of mum who gets immense joy out of bringing home a gargantuan bath for the birds in her garden to splash around in. That certainly could’ve done the trick.

That might have to be what his background goal is on this trip, Sirius considers. He should aim to pay attention to what's around him, be present for it all, try to take comfort in and actually recognize what's whimsical when it's happening, not just wish he'd done it when it's already gone or else the trip's going to fly by so quickly, he won't have really sat and enjoyed the smaller stuff, and more importantly than that even, he needs to find a way to take comfort in the quiet, on this trip and beyond it.

‘Course, it’ll have to be metaphorically speaking seeing as a lady up at the front of the compartment starts putting out a laugh right about there that sounds more like a series of goose honks, so you know what, maybe he’ll try enjoying the quiet some other time; take a rain check on that one.

Whimsy, though? That, he can immerse himself in right now, he just needs Remus's billowy jumper on and he needs to snag Remus’s mobile so he can get at his study playlist; those tunes are all associated with whimsy, in one way or another. He stands to pull the sleeves of the jumper free of his waist, pulls it on over his head before flipping his hair out from beneath the collar, and reaches up to bring his knapsack down from the overhead compartment, sitting down for the moment to find his earbuds. He freezes just after he’s put the bag in his lap, realizing there that the last place he knows he saw his earbuds was on the coffee table, and that’s where the memory ends. He huffs out a sigh, unzipping his bag to stare his misery in the face, and finds them right there at the top, wrapped carefully so the wires won’t get tangled in the middle of all the commotion.

Sirius pushes a different sigh out of his nose, frowning as he looks over at sleepy Remus, and leans over the armrest in between them to press a kiss to his left temple. He sits back again, thinks about where he remembers Remus sticking his mobile, and piques as he thinks he saw him slip it into his knapsack as they were walking between the seats to get to their spot at the back. He zips his own knapsack back up, sticks it back overhead, and pulls Remus’s down just to get at the front pouch, and his memory serves him well for Remus’s mobile is tucked right in there — and it's at full battery too; parfait, he may as well put the scenery going by to music and now he doesn’t have to feel as bad about knicking his for a little while.

He thumbs around for a while, getting a bit distracted on his way to finding the study playlist, and ends up going for a revisitation of the 'Cleopatra' album instead for a few reasons: Remus bumped this one plenty of times while in the thick of a study session and, sonically speaking, they sound so much like Remus to him now that Sirius considers Remus and 'the Lumineers' practically one and the same. If Sirius can't get the real thing, then he needs Remus’s energy right about now and this album is the perfect compromise, and to that, it seems like the type of soft-whimsy that’ll match up perfectly with being on a train heading away from the city at eighty miles an hour while sitting next to a cozy, sleeping Remus.

Sirius feels himself get swept right up into the album, finding that the first few tunes fit like a glove in terms of familiarity and the occasion. He makes it to the title track of the album, tilting his head back and forth along with the steely strumming progression and the punchy drum track, but he gets halfway through the tune before his brilliant plan goes right to shit and the tune renders him nothing but a man staring out the window, unable to much of that blinking thing at all. It’s customary for him by now to swap out or completely ditch lines inside tunes that he doesn't particularly understand or identify with much, he has to do it with pronouns all the time, but generally, he'll do that for any one song he's got in his own library that's meant to tug hard on the heartstrings; he'll discard what he doesn’t feel close to and simply gather together the lines, melodies, or overall concepts behind either in order to have a song mean something to him. This time around, some of the lines he hears being sent directly into his ear canals feel horrifically close to home, horrifically close to him for that matter, hitting him in ways that he loathes, in ways that have him feeling right attacked, in ways that have him feeling like he's got some giant, gnarly finger pointed right at him, damning him for all the situations he blindly charged into and the ways he failed uphill on his way to landing the very dote snoozing beside him.

The tune slows to its conclusion and Sirius remains still, only moving his right thumb to hit pause and stop the album from keeping on for it's given him the opposite of what he'd been trying to achieve, frankly. Feeling about as dignified as the muck on the bottom of a boot, more morose than he's allowed himself to feel on a trip this important, and lonelier than he’s felt in a long, long time, turns in his seat, pockets Remus’s mobile, and lifts the armrest out from between the two of them, leaning in to plant a myriad of kisses over the side of Remus’s sleepy face.

Remus starts awake, making this tiny, bemused whirring noise that sounds so close to a cat being woken from a deep nap that it really just makes the transgression of waking him completely worth it. Sirius keeps at it, smiling into his kisses now, and smiling all the more when Remus turns more toward him and blinks the bleariness away from his eyes, reaching up with his right hand to pass his thumb over Sirius’s left cheek and studying all corners of his face in the span of mere seconds, and Sirius feels so much of the heavyweight on his chest ease off as Remus starts up a bout of what he can only describe as the sweetest, sleepiest kisses on this green earth. Sirius would have to be in a coma not to shift halfway over him, taking to hold Remus’s chin in place as he kisses him slow and steady, drinking in the taste and feel of a warm cup on a chilly morning and relishing in the most sobering calm he’s felt all this morning.

They hit in or around the ten-minute mark before Sirius does have to wonder how long he can keep this going for; it certainly feels like the answer could be 'a while' if the pointed flutters of Remus’s tongue against his are anything to go by and Sirius thinks they just might be, but the question of how far could he take this? That, he doesn't know, but he sure wants to. He breaks the kiss, hovers his lips just out of reach of Remus’s, and darts his gaze downward and back up to Remus's eyes, feeling like that's direct enough for Remus to have a fair idea of his intentions. Remus recovers from a few moments of hazy breathing by simply not breathing at all; a good sign possibly, but Sirius could also get jabbed in the stomach any second now for the suggestion, so he braces himself and keeps his eyes peeled in case this backfires on him.

It's a good thing he did, however, for his braced, peeled eyes are given the absolute treat that is watching Remus turn his head to peer over the back of his headrest and scan the area around them. Sirius does the same out of instinct and inwardly cheers at there being a good four-seat distance between them and the nearest passenger and she’s across the aisle snoring away so she’s more or less out of the picture, and moving onto the rest of the passengers up ahead, they're all in various states of sleep, reading, podcasting, who knows what, none of his business, but nobody in this compartment gives a shit about the blokes at the very back of it and that’s a lovely, promising thought.

Sirius glances sidelong at Remus, giving him a coy look that’ll pass along the message that he’s up for it if Remus is, and tacks on a quick right eyebrow quirk because Remus has a strong thing for his brows that never truly sleeps, elated to report that Remus tugs his lower lips into his mouth and nods profusely, glancing back over his shoulder once more for good measure, it seems like.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Sirius assures, voice barely above a whisper, getting a specific sort of Look from him that plainly conveys that Sirius had better do just that.

Sirius kisses him once before straightening up in his seat, having himself another look over his left shoulder partially to show Remus that he's doing it and partially to check things out for himself, but with the coast clear as day, he reaches his right hand out and slides it underneath the edge of Remus’s quilt.

Remus sits to attention as Sirius moves his hand a little closer to his lap, keeping his gaze on Remus's face for any cease-and-desist warnings, and winds up biting down on his lower lip as Remus shifts his knees further apart for him; how kind. If that wasn’t already incredibly exciting news in its own right, Remus setting his elbows down on both armrests available to him and lifting the quilt's edge up to his chin as if he’s just super chilly in here is, frankly incredible and Sirius ends up stifling a laugh over Remus ending up looking like an odd, quilt-covered version of the Thinking Man with the way his hands are poised and those brows of his are knitted together so tightly.

Sirius’s skin buzzes as he gets his hand over Remus’s rather rigid cock, giving it a quick cup over his trousers because he just can’t help himself in doing that but to also keep Remus in the loop as far as plans go, and lifts it to work at the button one-handed, but listen, he can tie a cherry stem together with his tongue, his fingers aren’t half bad at smooth operations either and Remus's fly gives way to his persistent touch rather easily. He looks over Remus at he finishes with the zipper, the lad bidding him another quick update on the situation with a quick dart of his eyes, and checks over his shoulder once again to be sure no one’s decided that now would be a great time to come wandering down the aisle to visit the loo, and with the coast still clear, Sirius nods his head and Remus drops his hands down below the quilt fort he built over his lap and, lovely lad that he is, does some of the manoeuvrings under there to help Sirius out, pulling himself out of his trousers and resuming his prior position right quick.

Sirius places his hand over him, palms Remus's cock from root to tip, and closes his fingers around him, trying out a stroke to test and glancing sidelong at Remus to see what he thinks about that pace. He gets a lovely sidelong shot of Remus nodding away with his lips held together very, very carefully and Sirius begins pumping him at the decided pace, not too concerned about any unfortunate noises coming from his companion when Remus both can and will slot right back into silent mode if necessary like it’s programmed in him to do and, in a very specific way, it rather was. It does wonders for his self-esteem on this up-and-down morning of his, however, when he gets to see Remus's eyes fall shut while his mouth falls open for the few beats he lets those details fly freely on his face before choosing to bunch the quilt's edge just underneath his nose to stifle himself, his left knee quivering up against Sirius's right one so he can just imagine the other one's doing very much the same. Sirius can feel the muscles in Remus’s navel twitch against his wrist as he picks up the pace, half-wishing he need not have to rush things toward the conclusion and half-understanding that this efficiency is rather the point of this tryst. He hears what he thinks must be Remus’s breathing tightening and coming out much more harshly, but it’s a bit difficult to tell with the rattle of the train on the tracks, and that in itself keeps him feeling at peace with the idea that the rest of the passengers wouldn't be able to hear any of that breathing from all the way up there. That said, the breathing gives him the sense that they’re heading toward the finish line and Sirius so does want to reward Remus for being so willing to go for it, inspiration garnering him to toss a quick glance over his shoulder one last time for anything noteworthy, and when he doesn’t see a soul up there paying them any mind, he slows his hand to a crawl and lets go of him temporarily to slip down off of his seat.

He smirks at Remus as he moves to the ground in one swift motion, turns in to get on his knees in front of him, and lifts up on the quilt from below, popping his shoulders underneath it and figuring he’ll finish him off this way so Remus'll get a whirlwind of an experience and they won’t have a mess to worry about; a win/win, they call it.

Remus has his hands clasped tightly over Sirius’s head the very second he starts in on him, fingers tapping erratically over the quilt covering it as he rolls his hips in his seat to meet his mouth, but the rest is up to Sirius, who takes the reigns wholeheartedly and swerves down on his cock at a pace that could be very telling for what they're doing over here if anyone were looking their way, but he’s about ninety percent sure the train just stopped at a station and the goal is now to get Remus there ASAP.

Release comes quickly and with Remus nearly curling inward because of it, one of his hands leaving Sirius’s head and likely going straight to the boy's mouth for a noise guard while his other hand stays put as he tightens his knees against the outline of Sirius’s shoulders — involuntary or not, Sirius can’t really know, but he sure loves the feeling that comes with being bracketed-in close to him like this. In return, Sirius takes care of him from below the belt, breathes contentedly through his nose as he licks Remus clean, and tucks him back in, coming out from under the quilt with a sated smile on.

He pushes his hair back with the sudden resurgence of central air, hoists himself up to a crouch on the floor, and swivels around to lift up into his seat from below rather than come down into it from above, aiming a bright beam sidelong at Remus, whose eyes are very, very shut and legs are still parted as he sits limp as a noodle in his seat. He engages Sirius soon enough, fights a pointed smile, and pulls his quilt up over his entire head next moment, leaving a small hole big enough for his peepers to stare through.

Sirius dissolves into a blob of goo covered in human skin, putting out gusts of breathy laughter before a gent with two carry-ons veritably moves into the four-seater across the aisle from theirs and takes their little oasis away from them in the same go.

Sirius lulls his head back toward Remus, sharing a flat, disappointed frown with the lad as he pulls the quilt down. “I’ll get you back later and it’ll be worth the wait,” he slips him.

More concerned with a thwarted chance for some more macking to get done back here, Sirius has to say he had no qualms about just letting Remus get some, but he won’t say no to that. “Deal,” he returns, beaming bright.

“Well, since I'm awake now," Remus raises him, "I made note of where you fell asleep last night and downloaded the next two episodes, in case you might want to continue from where you left off.”

Sirius presses his lips together, nods heartily for it, and leans in to press his lips to Remus’s own, and Remus definitely darts his eyes past Sirius to regard their new neighbour, but he looks back at him much more easily after doing it so Sirius can't fault really fault him for checking. "Oh, here," he offers, pulling Remus’s mobile out of his back left pocket where he stuffed it haphazardly and holds it over the armrest.

“What were you doing with that?” Remus smirks.

“Watching porn on it,” Sirius delivers.

“What were you really doing with it?” Remus bids.

“Trying to catch some whimsy,” Sirius answers.

Remus eyes him. “Hm?”

“I picked one of your albums to let play because you’re the one with the catalogue of whimsical sort of stuff, but it backfired horribly and really just made me feel like an empty corridor,” Sirius elaborates. "I should have just gone with Grace, I'm nothing but a fool."

Remus blinks, morbidly piqued. “Which one was it?” he raised, putting it out through a set of vaguely gritted teeth.

“'Cleopatra,'” Sirius supplies.

“Oh, Cunt, that’ll make anyone feel like an empty corridor,” Remus returns him.

“You study with the album on,” Sirius defends. “I figured it'd be harmless.”

“Yeah, because I regulated it to study time only so that I’m too distracted to actually listen to it,” Remus supplies him, blinking twice. “The first time I finished it, I lay in bed like a log blinking at the ceiling for hours afterwards; it really gets in there.”

Sirius watches Remus flutter his left hand around his head. “It really does,” he echoes it.

“I’m sorry,” Remus offers, frowning again. “If I’d known, I'd have warned you against it.”

“I was trying to let you sleep,” Sirius forwards, turning toward him in his seat and leaning head against it to speak between them and nobody else. “I just had a weird moment where I realized that I don’t really know how to enjoy whimsical things for what they are; like, the view of a sunrise, a warm cuppa, a nice—”

Remus trails him off with a frank hum. “Are we talking about you here?” he checks. “I’ve served you two cuppas in the last forty-eight hours that made your whole face light up, and I know sunrises aren't your thing, but you like a good sunset.”

“Remus,” Sirius implores, pouting for sure. “It’s more that I should be able to stop and admire things, not be go-go-go all the time, but I don’t know if I even know how to do that.”

Remus sits with that for a moment, chewing on his lower lip with a frown on. "Well, I do, at times, wish you’d slow down and stop trying to be everything, for everybody, all at once,” he offers him. “And because of that, I’m sure it isn't so easy to spot the things you’re talking about if you’re too busy going this way for one person and that way for another, but I don’t think it’s that you don’t know how."

Sirius gives him a sceptical frown and Remus gives him a pointed look for it. “I've seen you take enjoyment out of whimsical things many a time," the boy puts up, a smile budding that he doesn't let fully form. “You planned a whole date around a few errands and some baking the other week, Sirius; what would you call that?”

Debating Remus is both a fine hobby and a not-so-fine one whenever he won’t agree with even a sliver of your point. “I just want to be more present in good, simple things when they happen, not—”

“You are,” Remus comes in, laying it down flat. “You told me multiple times when I was first getting to know you that your m.o. is finding something light to balance out the dark and you backed that up by doing just that, every chance you could, and I was astonished by it; I’m sorry to keep blocking the street in front of your anti-Sirius parade, but you know when something's whimsical and you like it when it is.”

The timber of Sirius’s jaw is starting to weigh him down, making it so speaking difficult in general but especially difficult to argue with him. Remus doesn’t really give it much time, however, speaking through Sirius’s rendered silence. “I can’t even say I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but I am seeing a bit of a pattern happening here already,” he presses on. "You keep directly ignoring so much of yourself to make room for what he thought of you and that isn’t fair to you.”

“What about this is fair?” Sirius raises, the timber of his jaw weighing him down.

“Not much, so maybe holding off from painting yourself as broken could be the one fair thing in all of this?” Remus raises him. “I know you just read an entire slam book dedicated to you and it's jumbled you right up, but you’ve come too far to let anyone tell you who or what you are.”

Sirius’s nose gets itchy on the inside and his tear ducts aren’t faring well in that area either. “I don’t want to cry on a train,” he insists.

“Then let’s not,” Remus agrees, “but if you start feeling like that again, I want you to tell me, even if I'm sleeping, and I’ll try to pull you off yourself, but if I can’t help right away, then I need you to try and refute some of Reg’s claims for me with the evidence you already have to back it up.”

“Reg didn’t claim that last one,” Sirius confesses. “That was all me.”

“Well, I think it's generally related, but nevertheless, if this is really bothering you, then let’s make it something we can work on while we’re there; what do you think?” Remus raises him. “We could both put in the effort to just sit and be more present, make an effort to notice when we’re doing it so you’ve the proof that you can slow down and enjoy something small like a view now and again; I know a few places out there that I’m sure you’ll love and I'll take you wherever you want to go.”

“Mm?” Sirius probes, his law finally easing up to allow him to smile.

“Mhm,” Remus affirms. “For now, though, do you think 'Stars Hollow' might be the sort of whimsy you’re looking for?”

“Just about, yeah,” Sirius allows, feeling love radiating out of his every being. “You really are my favourite."

“You too,” Remus returns, giving in to a wan smile. "We just can't tell anyone else that."

"Absolutely not," Sirius allows, rubbing at his nose.

The two of them curl up with the armrest between them pushed up and out of the way, the quilt draped over the both of them. Sirius lifts his right thigh higher than his left to provide a stand for Remus’s mobile, and since his earbuds are already plugged into it they go ahead and share those too, falling into their pattern of swapping quips back and forth as they continue their screening from where they left off.

The next time the train seems to be slowing down Sirius checks his own mobile and investigates their whereabouts, finding they’re pulling into Cardiff Central. “We’re switching off here,” Remus mentions, pulling his earbud out.

“Is there coffee to be had out there?” Sirius bids, hitting pause on the episode they’re on.

Remus nods, sitting up straight. “There’s a kiosk in there,” he affirms, unplugging Sirius's earbuds and standing up to pocket his mobile. “I might sneak into the bathroom real quick, back soon.”

Sirius nods for it and sets about tidying their area. He starts with folding Remus’s quilt up into a small, portable square that'll do for now though Remus’s skills in shrinking garments down to scale remain unparalleled, brings both of their knapsacks down from the overhead compartment to leave one on each seat, and goes to bin out their empty cups from earlier. Remus returns to their seats after most of the other passengers on board have queued up and begun filing out, but Sirius has never been much of a fan of shuffling with a bunch of randos just to get outside milliseconds quicker than if he’d just waited for the compartment to clear out and he wasn't about to have a change of heart today.

“Sorry, sorry,” Remus says for the wait,

“I didn’t mind at all,” Sirius assures, slinging his own knapsack over his right shoulder.

Remus stops ahead of his seat to retrieve his sunglasses from inside his knapsack, unfolding them and popping them on. “Well, to save on time, you can go sneak a cigarette in while I go get the next fuel up and then we can find our platform from there,” he raises, aiming it over his shoulder at Sirius as he moves up the aisle toward the exit.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Sirius chants, following him out.

Sirius does wander down to the area where about four other folks are standing around having a puff and hangs out a little off to the side, aimlessly scrolling his mobile while he waits for Remus to turn up with the coffee. He’s just about finishing up with his cigarette when he spots Remus’s viciously alive curls amidst the crowd and puts the butt out in the ashtray nearby before weaving through the crowd to meet up with him, beaming as he reaches out for one of the two to-go cups Remus is carrying with a searching wag of his fingers.

“Left one,” Remus guides, and Sirius takes that one off his hands. “It’s just your regular drip, unfortunately, but it's a blonde roast."

“Drip’s fine,” Sirius insists, taking a trial sip and humming with it. “You did good.”

Remus smiles around a sip off his own cup. “I spotted our platform, it’s just in there and to the right," he offers, pointing toward the doors down the way.

Sirius nods for it, fluttering his free arm for Remus to lead the way there. They aren’t so lucky with their seating on the next leg of the trip as the back is well-occupied by the time they get on and end up having to take a pair of seats toward the middle of the train, but then Remus flaps his quilt out over the both of their laps, leaves his knapsack between his feet, and sifts through it before breaking out the Mad Libs, and Sirius forgets all about their shitty spot when this is about to get good.

Remus feels around in his knapsack for a pencil and settles back in again, reaching underneath the quilt to place his left hand over Sirius’s right forearm and begins prompting him.

“Celebrity.”

Sirius glances up in thought, moving his hand up to clasp Remus’s underneath the quilt. “The fourth member of Destiny’s Child,” he puts up.

Remus snorts. “Have you got her name on hand or am I to put all that down?”

“Put that whole thing down,” Sirius instructs.

Remus scrawls the sentence down and smirks quite a bit from there. “I got a peek at the sentence that’s in and boy, that'll be a gem,” he relays, bringing Sirius’s enticement up several notches while he scans for the next prompt. “A place.”

“Halfway up Big Ben,” Sirius provides.

“Good and specific,” Remus says of it, pausing to jot that down. “Noun.”

Sirius takes another few seconds to think. “Time,” he offers, as if testing the word out on his tongue, then glances at Remus with a wry smile while he’s foolishly writing it down and seemingly not seeing his angle here. “As in, the time Rory needed to take in order to step back and get a clearer look at the options she had in front of her.”

Remus flips the pencil around and erases the word he only just finished scrawling. “You’re right, Sirius," he chimes. "'The number of a good counsellor' is a fine suggestion.”

It’s done so quick and easy that Sirius almost lets him have it. Almost. “A counsellor wouldn’t have done anything for her,” he maintains.

“That’s a bit of a reach,” Remus returns, looking over at him. “We’ve no way of knowing that, do we?”

Sirius remains undeterred. “We do, though, she wouldn’t even hear anything from Lorelai; by that logic, who was she going to listen to?” he counters. “She already had a plethora of people inserting their opinions on her own situation, she didn’t need a counsellor coming in to tell her what everyone else already was; she needed time and space to find her own reasons for continuing.”

Sirius pops his left fist like a gavel on his armrest and Remus eyes him and his hand. “OK, first of all?” he returns, getting Sirius’s stomach whirring. “Those points you just made don’t automatically lead to that conclusion; you don't know that an academic advisor’s help wouldn't have guided her away from the untimely urge of taking one, shitty opinion of herself so to heart that she’d give up on a, what, fifteen-year-old dream and her spot in the Ivy League, and second of all, I cannot believe you’d reignite this today of all days and yet, I shouldn’t even be surprised.”

“We were just watching it,” Sirius defends. “Of course I’m going to reignite it.”

Remus levels him with a firm look of warning. “Adjective,” he prompts, making it crystal clear they’ll be taking a recess on the issue until further notice.

Sirius debates his chances of getting Remus in the bathroom for a quick romp. “Engorged.”

Remus blinks once, reworking his expression to one of plain amusement, and writes that down with a flourish. “Verb ending in 'ing,'” he prompts, so that's a no, then.

Sirius sighs over the unfairness of it all, glances up at the ceiling in thought, and leans his head back against the headrest with a smile budding at his lips. “Sparkling,” he puts up, meeting Remus's quizzical side-eye, “much like the silvermoon does.”

Remus presses his lips together, his eyes brightening over substantially as he leans his head back against his own headrest. “Do you suppose fireflies only dance silvermoon’s sparkling if you’ve struck up a band?” he raises. “Only, fireflies have never done that for me and I wonder if that's because I never seem to have a band with me when they’re flying around.”

Sirius snorts. “Incredibly fussy performers, fireflies,” he offers knowingly.

Remus grins, his shoulders beginning to shake. “And from there, does the quality of the band you bring along determine the beauty of the dance?” he offers thoughtfully.

“It’s the law,” Sirius extends him. “Bring a two-piece, drum-and-bass band and they’ll wiggle about just fine, but show up with a full big-band troupe and you’re getting into breathtaking territories.”

Remus smirks, ducking his head for a moment. "'Course, I'm sure they just meant it as 'the silvermoon is sparkling' and shortened it down fit to the melody—"

"Where's the fun in analyzing that?" Sirius comes in.

Remus puts out a laugh that garners a man across the aisle from them to whip his head around and aim an entirely frustrated expression their way, reminding Sirius that there are more people in the world besides just them and one of those people is actually getting his rustles all jimmied over a thing so lovely as Remus laughing.

He turns his gaze on the man still eyeing them. “Are you sensing something happening here, because I definitely am,” he raises, bringing his left forefinger between the two of them.

Besdie him, Remus slides halfway down in his seat and squeezes Sirius’s hand in a hidden mercy cry, but the man promptly faces forward and pretends he never interacted with them at all, so overall, Sirius feels it was rather worth spooking the man if it gets him off their backs.

He turns to look down and sideways at Remus, throwing him an accomplished smile. “Can’t take you anywhere,” Remus tuts, a reluctant smile on as he lifts into his prior positioning.

“And you love it,” Sirius maintains.

“More and more every day,” Remus echoes, looking down at the open book on his lap. “An event."

Sirius takes in a thoughtful breath. “My intervention,” he passes along.

Remus snorts so hard it sounds like it hurt and sets Sirius up for a gape/grin as he sits forward, curling in over the book in his lap and just shaking for a bit, but it's not like Sirius is in any rush; let the boy laugh. About thirty seconds later or so, Remus lifts out of his curled position and takes a few moments leaning his head back against the headrest of his seat. “I’m terrified of reading this out loud,” he addresses.

“I’ll do it,” Sirius offers.

“Those aren’t the rules.”

“When have I ever cared about those?"

“Quietly, then,” Remus emphasizes. “And there are five more prompts still to go.”

“Lay ‘em on me,” Sirius goads.

Remus does, writing down each given word with a quip here and there but no objections, and finishes the page off before passing the book over to Sirius, who sets it open over his lap and has a glance over the title, clearing his throat. “‘Dinner Time,’” he recites powerfully.

“Oh no,” Remus expels, throwing a quick Hail Mary before Sirius begins.

The Mad Libs are enough to see them to Porth station without checking the time once, but upon arrival, Remus closes up the book of Libs to stash it away and smiles over at him. “This is us,” he forwards.

Sirius perks, looks past Remus to have a glance out the window, and all he sees is green in every direction; a far cry from where they set off from, and his stomach goes for a tumble over it. “I’m about to explode,” he admits.

“Same here, but let’s try to avoid that together,” Remus says for it, lifting the quilt off of them, and Sirius likes the overall bonding nature of the sentiment more than he can really even articulate just now.

Remus handles folding the quilt up into a frankly devastatingly small roll, leaving Sirius blinking wondrously at the finished product. “You’re a wizard."

“I try,” Remus offers, manoeuvring the quilt into his knapsack and zipping it up.

Once they’re off the train, they stand around waiting for their luggage to get pulled off of it before they can get too far, but once they’ve everything they brought along with them, they leave the platform and head into the station, the both of them scanning the area where Lyall Lupin — man, myth, legend — waits for them on a bench down the way and Remus calls to him, giving a tiny wave as his dad looks up and around for him.

Lyall lifts off of the bench, heading their way with a smile and looking five times sprier than he did in December and he sure fooled Sirius then, too. In fact, while spending time out on the town with the Lupins on Boxing Day, Sirius couldn’t quite pinpoint what exactly Lyall’s ailment might've been, mostly due to the fact that Remus hadn’t shared that exact detail with him just yet but also that, if Sirius squinted, he could spot a bit of a limp to Lyall’s step but not much else. Apart from that, Lyall waved off each and every one of Remus's and Hope’s rotative check-ins over whether he needed a break from walking around and Sirius had to figure it was something fatigue-related, at least until they got back to Remus’s flat come evening for a cuppa and Lyall took a seat on the couch, rolled the right leg of his trousers up to the calf, and detached a prosthetic ankle from his body like it was nothing, that is. And listen, to Lyall, it may very well have felt it rudimentary to take it off for a good rest after a long day seeing as that would've been a few good months into his rehabilitation process and the manoeuvre did appear quite routine to him, but Good Cunt, Sirius really could have used a warning.

When he's looked back on it since, and certainly even more so since May brought their glowing announcement plans into direct motion, he hasn't been able to help feeling that it'd had to be a good sign that Lyall felt comfortable enough around Sirius to literally take off the lower half of a limb in his presence and just relax after a long day of jaunting here and walking over there. Well, it was either that or he saw Sirius as just another piece of furniture in the room and thus his reaction wouldn’t have counted for much, but Sirius likes the first option a bit better, has clung to it, replayed the moment Lyall looked over at him trying not to blink too much and waved hello with the prosthetic before setting it down many a time, and one thing he'll say now? Sirius is fucking prepared this time around.

He goes for Lyall’s outstretched hand when they get to him, shakes it firmly, and tells him just how well he's looking because it’s true, but he’s also aiming for home runs here. He’s instantly reminded that Lyall is really just Remus aged up twenty-five years for he promptly turns the compliment back around on him in record time, but to say that Sirius isn’t eased by that reminder right about now would be one hell of a lie.

Remus moves in to give Lyall a firm hug, making the same observation as Sirius but with different words, and before long Lyall is batting their compliments away with a proverbial stick, takes each of their carry-ons in his hands, and nods them back the way he apparently came, leading them out of the station and through the parking lot.

Sirius scans the vehicles ahead, trying to suss out which ride belongs to the Lupins, and is certifiably pumped when Lyall makes a beeline toward a honking red pickup, and it’s official; the details surrounding this whole, entire family will never cease to amaze him.

He and Remus get their luggage hauled into the cargo bed, Lyall tosses their carry-ons back there while they’re at it, but Sirius holds onto his guitar for a few beats in hesitation, wondering if his putting it in there, too, would be a convenient move or naive one, looking round at Remus for his input.

“You can put it in the backseat if you want,” Remus offers, reading his damn mind.

Sirius smiles at Remus and then to himself as he heads up the left-hand side of the truck to stick it in the back, but before he can even climb inside, Lyall announces that guests typically get to sit up front and Sirius will not be arguing with Lyall about anything, let alone that. He saunters on up to the passenger seat with a twist of a smile on, taking the step-up that one would have to make to get the truck and watching sidelong as Lyall hoists himself up and into the driver's seat without any trouble, a smile budding on Sirius's lips as he settles in; when Remus spoke of Lyall starting to drive again, Sirius's face lit up like a glowstick over such a milestone, but seeing Lyall at the wheel in the flesh? Totally different story.

“Look at you, driving like a champ,” Sirius attests, tapping the toes of his shoes on the floor of the truck. “Was it tough getting into this thing at first?”

Lyall gives a wry noise as he starts the ignition, wherein 'Bad Moon Rising' comes bursting on with the engine mid-way through playing on whichever station the truck must've been left on, and this is just beyond; of course this is what's playing in Lyall's truck. “You bet it was,” he returns him. “I didn’t even get to drive this thing until very recently; had to start back small.”

“Not for lack of trying, mind,” Remus puts in from the back.

Lyall clears his throat twice pointedly as he pulls out of the parking spot. “Yes, well, I might’ve tried to rush the process a time or two,” he confesses, “but overall, I had to settle with the car while I got back into the swing of it and Hope got to drive the beast.”

“Lucky gal,” Sirius puts up.

“She almost didn’t want to give it back,” Remus offers. “Said it made her feel tall finally.”

Sirius finds Remus’s gaze in his side-view mirror, at least he thinks he does given that Remus’s shades sort of make that hard to confirm, but he sends Remus a bright smile for the passing anecdote all the same just in case he is looking at him. “How different is it now?” he bids, and when Lyall looks his way, Sirius tacks on a little pedalling motion with his left foot.

“Well, I’ve a secret,” Lyall maintains. “Do you want to know what it is?”

“Yes, give it,” Sirius prompts.

“I just don’t break.”

Sirius gives a knowing noise. “And watch the innocents as they scatter,” he nods.

Lyall lets out an amused noise, pulling out of the parking spot. “Truthfully, I’m just rather lucky,” he gives evenly. “I’ve much more control over the prosthetic since it’s lower down on the leg, but had the cut-off been below the knee or higher than that, I’d have had to take much more time to used to working with the prosthetic and put in all sorts of modifications in both vehicles to help with it.”

“Still a champ,” Sirius maintains, finding it a little jarring that Remus ended up infused with the same tendency to reason away a compliment whenever a pat on the back is being deservedly given out.

Remus asks something, but Sirius can’t register much past his voice while saddled with all that his parents managed to infuse in him. He blinks hard, telling himself 'No,' and that he can’t keep doing this, and since he can’t very well turn around and pull Remus into his moment of crisis, he’s just going to have to pull himself out of it on his own; he used to be able to do that with little to no trouble and he needs to get back to it.

“Now, Sirius,” Lyall says, pulling him back in, “are you still a caffeine addict?”

Sirius snorts, ducking his head for a moment. “Forever and ever.”

“Good,” Lyall puts down. “We may not have much by way of glitz and glamour here, but we do happen to have one of your fancy shops.”

“Do you?” Sirius raises slyly.

“Believe it or not,” Lyall serves him. “Not far either; I reckon you two will be needing a boost fairly soon, and I wouldn't mind one either.”

Sirius tucks a lock of his hair behind his ear. “You have no idea.”

True to Lyall’s word, the shop is about a five minute’s drive and suddenly, they're pulling into the parking lot of a particular chain of coffee shops that looks as though it’s been airlifted out of London and planted in the middle of the valley; bit of a trip.

“We can go grab them, Lyall,” Sirius offers, as the man's unbuckling.

“Good to keep moving,” Lyall insists, letting the strap fall behind his seat. Sirius allows it, shifting in his seat to pull his wallet out so that Remus might get the message that he's definitely got this one, but it’s Lyall who calls him out on that. “Sirius, if you take that wallet out you’ll be riding on the fucking roof.”

Sirius sits with his right hand half inside his back pocket, looking left then right. “Take your wallet out,” Remus pipes up, goading him from the backseat.

Sirius bites his lip and lifts both his hands in surrender before slipping out his door, glancing in his side mirror to give Remus a challenging smile. “You two will have to help me along, mind,” Lyall maintains, moving ‘round the front of the truck. “I’m no good ordering here.”

“Oh, I don’t know, then,” Remus maintains, going around the back of the truck to meet back up with them. “I think I’d like to see you try.”

Sirius follows Remus’s path, beaming particularly bright as Lyall lets out a too-familiar huff. “Help a man out, would you?” he implores, falling into step with them across the lot.

“I’ll help you, don’t worry,” Remus assures, dropping the airy tone and moving ahead to get the door for them.

Inside the place, they hang back from the queue as Lyall stares up at the menu boards, blinking a lot before he looks down and over toward the hand-off station. “That one there,” Lyall raises, pointing at a venti cup that a customer is just making off with. “What do they call it here?”

Remus gestures for a couple to go on ahead of them, then glances at what Lyall is referring to. “Ah, that would be a vent-eye,” he supplies concisely, the little punk, and Sirius has to breathe out slowly and stare fixedly at the ceiling to keep his amusement in check. “And you don’t want one of those, promise.”

“I certainly do,” Lyall insists.

“It’s the size of an oil can, Dad,” Remus says of it. “You won’t finish it.”

“I’ve a long day ahead of me, have to keep sharp,” Lyall maintains.

Remus makes a wan noise. “I guarantee you’ll get halfway to work, decide there’s too much in there, and dump it when you get there.”

“We’ll see about that,” Lyall serves him, glancing back up at the menu. “Now, a macchiatie, is it?”

“Yes, you’ve got it,” Remus affirms at once.

“Why do I have a feeling I'm being had?” Lyall mentions.

Sirius hears nothing but silence, drops his gaze from the ceiling to find Lyall's side-eyeing him now, and lets go of his lower lip, aiming his best reassuring smile while pointedly avoiding Remus’s face altogether or else he’ll burst. “Make sure to run all your syllables together, too; they love that sort of thing,” Remus tips him off, and that's it, Sirius snorts loudly, ducking his head.

“Keep this up and you’ll be the one riding on the roof,” Lyall warns him.

“Well, that’s a bit cruel when I’ve no upper body strength,” Remus returns him, and Sirius straightens up tall, pulling his lips into a firm, firm line when that is just one blatant falsehood he personally has the receipts for. “I’d go flying off minute one and then where would you be?”

“Me with all my problems taken care of,” Lyall gives him.

Remus himself breaks there, grinning and giving his dad a nudge on the left arm with a closed fist. “Go with something simple,” he suggests, nodding toward the menu board on their left. “Look, all the common ones are just there, second one from the left.”

“I want what you made me last time, then,” Lyall decides after a scan of it, pulling his card out of his wallet. “You order what you want and stick mine on the end."

“Dad, don’t,” Remus says, pushing down on Lyall's wrist. “I’ve got it.”

Lyall casts a glance out the shop window. “It’s a lovely day for a long walk back to the house, isn’t it?”

Remus clicks his tongue, going for his own wallet. “At least let me use my discount,” he conditions.

“That’s about all you’re here for,” Lyall affirms, and Remus gives a pronounced mhm before stepping up to the till with him.

Sirius stays behind. The two of them are a regular sitcom, he knew that going into this, but even with that knowledge, he feels the pull over his entire body; that sharp, too-complicated feeling of wanting what they have and hating that he wants it equally as much as he hates that he never had it. Not like this, never his own, always borrowed.

Remus turns his head as Lyall moves to pay and then, he's crossing the distance between them so quick, Sirius hasn’t got the chance to pull his frown up. “What is it?” he asks, not quite a whisper, not quite his normal tone.

“I — don't even know where to start,” Sirius puts it.

“You’re white as a ghost,” Remus insists, looking him over. “Can I do anything?”

“Remus, no." Sirius can’t handle this now, hating the force of Remus’s solemn stare more than he hates the fact he had a father who never spoke to him for long enough to playfully haze him. “You two are a lot, in a good way, so don’t change anything just ‘cause I’m here, OK? I just had a weird moment.”

Remus looks pained for a moment, too long a moment before he starts talking, filling up the spaces and doing more for Sirius than he even knows. “I’m — I got you your coma drink," he offers, playing with his right thumbnail. "I had to fork over a hefty tip so my conscience wouldn’t suffer, but—“

He stops, listless and concerned and openly unsure; that sordid combination where Sirius knows he’s trying but he's afraid of not hitting the mark. "I feel like I'm doing well with you one moment and horribly messing up in the next," he gives him.

"You're not," Sirius puts down, at once, low down, so Lyall won’t be able to hear it over the sounds of the café. “I hate that I can’t kiss you here.”

Remus’s near-instant switch into quietly touched has Sirius breathing out his nose slowly, content on the other end of it. “Quite the trade for a coffee,” he raises, the right side of his mouth turning up before letting it match Sirius's volume. “We're not too far now."

Sirius’s head swims, but he’s got to stick his hands in the pockets of his jeans and rein them in so he doesn't try to touch Remus as Lyall's passing them to get to the condiment bar. “Would help if they gave out lids over there, wouldn’t it?” he quips, trying to set his steaming cup down on the counter without an oopsie.

“Would you like to tell her that?” Remus raises. “I guarantee you’ll have been the first to make that observation and we want you rocking worlds here.”

Sirius smirks. “Better yet, next time you're here, tell her you’d like a short brunette to-go,” he suggests. “She’ll melt, trust me.”

Remus aims a wan smile at him while Lyall lets out a put-upon sigh. “This a team effort now?” he returns. “Can’t trust the pair of you.”

The barista puts the last of the drinks in their order down on the bar and Sirius wanders over to grab it while Lyall works like a chemist at the condiment bar putting various amounts of powders into his drink. On the way out, Remus leans to hold the door open for his dad once again and Sirius curses his lagging when Remus is stealing all his opportunities to score more Fine Young Lad points simply by being Remus. Sirius can’t go around and open Lyall’s door for him now, that would be complete overkill, but he'll have to keep sharp and spot for his next opportunity before he loses it.

Lyall jingles his keys when they get back to the truck. “Do you want to have a go?” he asks, looking to Remus enticingly, and Sirius crosses his fingers and his toes in his shoes, quietly celebrating when Remus gives a firm nod and takes the keys from his dad.

Lyall heads for the back and Sirius sharpens up real quick when there’s just no way he’s having Lyall squeeze in there just because he's here. “Hold it, Lyall,” he says pointedly, stopping the man in his tracks. “You're taking the front seat.”

Sirius tells Lyall to get going after his initial refusal and the man gives in just one further insistence later; not bad at all. Sirius plops himself in the back and slides over to the middle seat when he’s not missing the chance to see Remus driving for the life of him; it's just not happening.

Remus resets the rear-view mirror a smidge, turns on the ignition, and pulls out the parking lot, looking over his shoulder at Sirius. “One thing I never did get used to is parallel parking, so we won’t be doing any of that,” he mentions.

“Oh, now you definitely have to let me see you try," Sirius puts up.

“That's because his mum taught him how to drive and she never got the hang of it,” Lyall quips.

Remus gives a laugh and nod combo that Sirius has to assume alludes to some specificity, but he’s far more into Remus’s driving than inquiring for context. “Your hands are actually at ten and two,” he laughs, dumbfounded. “You aren’t real.”

He can tell by the restructure of his eyebrows that Remus shoots him a look in the rearview for all of a millisecond before he sets his gaze back out the front window. “And that’s enough out of you.”

“Oh, no it is not,” Sirius denies.

"She taught me to drive like this and I got full marks on my driver's test, OK?" Remus combats. “Honestly, you should be grateful for my—”

Remus cuts off as Sirius reaches up front and tugs down on his left elbow just to see something; it takes until he gets Remus's hand to eight o’clock for him to shake his arm free, promptly setting his hand back at ten and making Sirius lose it.

Remus huffs and asks a smirking Lyall about Zaya, sending a clear message that he’d like to move on along with it. Sirius lets him have that for now, as a treat, and opens up the compartment between the two seats, snooping definitely. “Just inspecting your tune selection, Lyall,” he interjects, holding up a black CD case.

“Have at 'er,” Lyall allows.

Sirius flips through the case, tuning into the conversation up front now and again, anecdotes about folk in town Sirius only knows by name and anecdotes, and some of those he does get mixed up, so for the most part he keeps flipping through the CDs at least until his attention gets more or less shoved back into the conversation up front: “Bumped into Edgar and Tom on their way into Howell’s,” Lyall mentions.

Sirius lifts his gaze from Lyall’s copy of 'Wednesday Morning, 3 a.m,' while sipping off his straw and takes his gaze back and forth between Lyall and Remus, not wanting to miss anything. “Did you,” Remus prompts, finishing a turn onto a highway.

“They were out and about, doing last-minute errands for the big move,” Lyall forwards, looking altogether oblivious to the significance of the name drop, and it’s no wonder when Remus looks as if they’re discussing a couple of acquaintances, but Sirius relishes in it, feeling like the man who stepped in and righted things. “Only, I’d have thought the Cambridge folk would expect attire on the spiffier side, but what do I know? I never went there.”

“No?” Remus plays along, tilting his head.

“Not to my memory,” Lyall trades him. “In any case, the whole town's been bursting about his acceptance and I’ve got to say it’s a bit much; I’m halfway expecting there’ll be a throne set up on a float going down the main before he’s off, but no matter, I’ve an impressive son of my own to boast and I made that well-known.”

In the mirror, Sirius watches Remus take his forward gaze off the road and turn his head right toward Lyall this time. “Please tell me you didn’t.”

“I certainly did,” Lyall assures.

Remus looks back out the windshield. “Just how many people are you doing this with?”

“Anyone with a pair of ears.”

“No one wants to hear it, Dad.”

“Well, that’s too damn bad, isn’t it?” Lyall returns him. “I didn't ask to hear about Cambridge over and over again, but I certainly heard about it from everyone and their grandmother, so I think I’m entitled to some boasting of my own, thank you.”

Remus huffs grand but leaves it be, veering off of the highway and onto a dirt path, and Sirius stuffs the CD case back in its spot, chuffed at the chance to see the Lupin abode. The driveway is longer than he'd expect any driveway to be, but it's somehow fitting that there'd be a whole lane ride to get up to a house that's already better than Sirius’s imagination could have ever led it to be: a two-story home, stark white panelling on the exterior, what looks like bay windows on the first and second floor with banana yellow awnings hanging over them, a front porch with flowerpots hung from the low-hanging roof a few feet above the railings and topped with a plush, almost too-cozy looking chair swing, green, green grass lining either side of the lane they're going down; he’s stepped into a fairy tale, that’s the only explanation for it.

“Now, I won’t be back until six, but your mum will be in shortly after five thereabouts; have you got a plan for the day?” Lyall raises, leaning his head back as if to include Sirius as he keeps on. “You’ll want the full tour, I’d imagine?”

“Every pothole,” Sirius echoes.

“We’ll be back for dinner, though,” Remus puts in. “It’s on us, by the way, so you're to keep your cards and your hands to yourself, and mum already knows this but if you speak to her before then, remind her that we’re making it and she’s expected to sit tight and let us do it.”

Lyall makes a noise that suggests he doesn’t think that’ll go over so well. “I’m going to try, Remus.”

“That’s all I can ask,” Remus echoes, pulling on the door handle and slipping out of his seat. He hops down onto the ground and goes around to the cargo bed, Lyall does the same on his side of the truck though he does go a little slower than Remus, and Sirius drops down to the ground first before reaching into the truck to tug his guitar case out of it.

“Need a hand bringing the load in?” Lyall asks, pulling the bed down.

“No no, we’ve got it,” Sirius insists, hoisting the case over his shoulders. He gets two steps toward the father & son duo working their luggage out of the back before stopping still, realizing he forgot his empty cup in the truck.

"What are you doing over there?” Remus raises, amusement in his voice.

“My cup’s just in there,” Sirius explains.

“Oh, I’ll toss them,” Lyall insists, waving him off.

Sirius gestures back at the door he just, just left through. “I can still do it,” he maintains.

“I can handle a few cups, Sirius,” Lyall returns.

“Whereas I might need your help here,” Remus highlights, holding Sirius’s knapsack out to him with a smile.

Well, Sirius can’t turn down Lyall’s insistence or Remus’s smile; he’s only human.

With their belongings off of the truck and ready to be brought in, Lyall heads back to the driver’s seat to get a start on his actual day. “Thanks for the lift, hey?” Sirius tells him, slapping himself for not saying sooner; what is he, a schlub?

“Yeah, thanks Dad,” Remus tacks on. “Saved us another fare.”

“Oh, no trouble at all,” Lyall returns, settling in behind the wheel.

“Have a good one,” Remus calls to him.

Lyall gives them a wave, does a u-ie in the opposite direction of them and their things, and heads back up the driveway. Once the truck gets about halfway down, Remus turns to him, letting out a long, long, very long breath. “You’re at my house,” he puts up, lower lip caught between his teeth as an overcome smile threatens to burst.

“I know,” Sirius echoes, grinning for him to see if Remus’ll join him.

Remus does, looking up and at the house ahead of them. “What do you think?” he asks, nudging Sirius’s left arm.

Sirius takes another look at the house they’re about to head into, feels every single butterfly in his stomach fluttering around at once, and forget about him not knowing what whimsy feels like; this, is it.

“It’s perfect.”

Chapter 21: 21.

Chapter Text

The two of them lift their respective suitcases off of the ground to get them up the porch stairs, wherein Remus fishes for his keys for the front door and Sirius hangs back a bit, brimming with enticement. For a moment he considers trying out the porch swing, but Remus turns the doorknob and pushes the front door open in the next so that’ll just have to wait. Sirius sets his gaze on a small foyer that's got a little bench on the left, what looks like the door to a closet on the right, and a door straight ahead of him, holding the rest of the house out of sight.

Remus rolls his suitcase inside while Sirius waits on the welcome mat, figuring there isn’t quite enough room in there for the both of them and their respective luggage without someone or something ending up squashed against a wall.

Remus looks around for him, blatantly confused for a moment before he works it out. “Oh, sor— I’ll move in more,” he offers, footing his shoes off quickly.

“I heard that correction,” Sirius puts up, quite psyched about it.

Remus tosses a pointed smile over his shoulder as he leaves his shoes side-by-side on the mat in the left corner of the little room alongside a few other pairs. “We don’t usually have so much happening right in the entryway,” he explains.

“I’m in no rush,” Sirius puts up, and really, he’s just happy to be here.

“Still, might be on to let you in,” Remus mentions, moving for the second door and reaching his free hand toward a diamond-shaped doorknob.

“A diamond,” Sirius observes, dainty about it.

“It's not real,” Remus passes him, turning it to open the door.

Sirius huffs. “And I was going to make off with it in the night, too."

Remus smirks as he brings his suitcase out of the hall entryway and leaves it off to the right side of the doorway, giving Sirius a view of a long hallway with what looks like a makeshift work area about halfway down it complete with a dark, wooden desk fitted into a little nook by another cutesy bay window, and beyond that, what looks like a dining room at the far end of the hall.

“Coming in?” Remus checks, smiling over at him as he takes his knapsack off.

Sirius nods emphatically and moves inside, shutting the door behind him. He foots his shoes off, pushes them over beside Remus's own with his right foot, and looks up again, seeing Remus’s smile and raising him a grin as he rolls his suitcase in behind him. “Are you going to give me a tour?” he raises. “Say yes.”

“Yes,” Remus echoes, his smile shifting into a wry one. “This is my entryway; I tripped coming in here once when I was about seven and busted my lip open, so I daresay we’ve had our share of disagreements.”

Sirius takes in a righteous breath. “I’ll be blowing the whole thing up very shortly, then,” he decides, bringing his luggage out into the hall beside Remus’s things.

Remus smirks there. “Not necessary, but thank you for the continued support.”

Sirius glances down at the green carpet that starts from the very spot where the foyer ends and travels out down the hall as far as his eyes can see. “Carpet,” he enthuses, dancing his bare feet over it.

Remus smirks, avidly watching Sirius’s antics. “Wall to wall, with the exception of a few rooms,” he tacks on.

“Which ones?” Sirius bids, lifting the straps of his guitar case off of his shoulders and leaving it propped up against his suitcase.

“The bathrooms, den, kitchen, and the rooms upstairs,” Remus lists off. “It goes all the way up the stairs and through the hall, but enjoy it while it lasts; my mum's been talking about taking it out lately.”

Sirius makes a soft, wounded noise. “It’s so soft, though,” he puts up, wiggling his toes on it.

“It is, and I tried to remind her of that, but it’s a lot older than it looks, and vacuuming on the stairs is quite the job,” Remus mentions.

“How old is it?” Sirius raises.

“Mm, I believe my mum has said she was just a little kid when it was put in, so my grandparents must have laid it down in the late '70s somewhere,” Remus supplies.

Sirius gives an enticed hum. “A retro carpet,” he dubs it. “Now it must stay.”

“I’ll tell her that’s where we stand on it and we’ll see where that gets us,” Remus decides, taking off his sunglasses and leaving them atop his suitcase.

Sirius celebrates both that sentiment and their being officially completely hands-free by raising his arms in a moment of rejoicing. “Lead the way, boss,” he bids, before realizing he may be celebrating his free hands a little too soon. “Do we need to move our stuff in more?”

Remus looks over it, shaking his head. “They’ve both headed to work, so it wouldn’t really be putting anyone out if we leave it here for a bit,” he says of it, moving up the hall. Sirius follows after him as Remus makes a sharp left turn, leading them through a high, open archway into a quaint sitting room. “This is the parlour.”

“Fuck off,” Sirius huffs, smiling away.

His gaze darts all around, taking in everything he can manage to in the span of seconds; the pale green wallpaper to match the carpeting, the dark chocolate and extremely plush-looking couch on his right, the fireplace across the room from them that’s much more understated than a major statement piece that the one in Sirius’s house had been, the black leather recliner over in the corner on their left and perched near a little sound system & record player set-up, the bay window facing out the front of the house, and if Sirius leans over a little to the right he can spot a few crates of records seemingly tucked behind the armchair that he will be having a look through as soon as he can make it happen, and to the left of the archway, the piano Sirius had previously been made aware of.

He’s got a talking point to every detail of this room and as such, falters for a moment, unsure of where to start and what with, but settles with leaning over the side of the piano and laying his right forefinger on one solid key, sending a blunt note through the room.

Remus takes in a charmed noise. “I’ve chills."

“You are incredibly easy,” Sirius offers circumstantially, looking over at the mantel, and that’s got a couple picture frames lined up along it so that’s exactly where Sirius ends up going next.

“Oh, you know what, you really don’t need to—” Remus starts, but he gets drowned out by Sirius’s bright trill as he picks up the first frame from the left, a picture of a young Hope sitting on the very couch in this here sitting room with an exceptionally wee Remus dozing against her left hip and a massive sheepdog laying its head over Remus's legs.

“How old were you?” he demands, shaking the frame at Remus, who eyes his antics with a sheepish smile while hanging back by the archway.

“Two, almost three?” Remus offers. “Somewhere around there; I was at least walking and talking.”

Sirius's chest area nearly implodes. “Whose dog?” he demands, putting the frame to his chest for a gentle hug.

“My granny’s,” Remus relays, brightening more. “His name was Trooper.”

Sirius takes in a heavy breath, loving that detail. “You’re so little, and he’s so big,” he coos.

“He was something like ten by then and quite subdued, a good introduction to a dog, honestly,” Remus hands over. “Apparently he really took to me; used to follow me around like my shadow, said the parents.”

Sirius pouts lovingly at that anecdote and once more at the photo before setting the frame back on the mantel, moving to have a look at the other frame down at the far end of it. “Try the couch,” Remus suggests, and Sirius looks back over at him. “You’ll want to; it’s disgustingly soft.”

Sirius takes to a lunge at it, landing on his front and finding the couch something more like a cloud once he sinks into the cushions. “I live here now,” he decides, looking over at Remus with a bright smile.

"I'll be sure to bring all your meals here," Remus plays along.

Sirius nods toward the armchair in the corner. “That Lyall’s spot?” he guesses.

Remus blinks, looking over that way. “One of them, definitely,” he affirms, looking back at him. "He can be found just about anywhere in this place, but he liked the idea of putting his setup in this room because of the windowsill and the view out front, and I think without it in here the room would feel a little too stuffy, you know?”

Sirius nods, getting that point quite well, in fact. “Yeah, I really do,” he offers him. “I can tell it’s a sitting room, ‘course, but it doesn’t give me a, ‘don’t you dare put your drink directly on that table, young man,’ vibe and that, I appreciate.”

Remus shakes his head, a budding smile on his lips. “We don’t even really use coasters,” he passes him, lifting a forefinger to his mouth like it’s a shameful secret. “We’ve a few in the drawer on the end table just there, but do you think we ever remember to put them down first? Never.”

Sirius pushes an easy laugh out. “Didn’t take you for the sort myself,” he passes along, lifting off of the couch and heading over to him. “Can we pause quickly so I can expel every one of the three coffees that are in me?”

Remus perks up, nodding. “Sure, there’s a loo just over here,” he beckons, turning left out of the sitting room and heading down the hall.

Sirius follows along behind him, having another, better look over the nook at the turn of the hall as they pass it; there's a quaint, three-by-three set of wooden cubbies filled with yarn of all colours and sizes sitting between the desk he spotted earlier and a sewing machine mounted on a small wooden table adjacent to the desk, all three the fixtures tucked into the little spot by the bay window. “Love this,” he says, circling his hands around the crafty area.

Remus brightens right up with it so it’s even better that Sirius brought it up, as far as he's concerned. “I do, too,” he echoes, stopping to give the area its dues. “My granny was a seamstress and this was her little workstation, but my mum’s slowly moved into the spot and added to it over the years, as you can probably tell from the extreme amount of yarn.”

Sirius nods emphatically for that. “Does she sew, too?” he raises, gesturing toward the machine.

Remus hums noncommittally, but his lips are quirking at the sides. “So, she absolutely can and she’ll tell you she’s not very good, but between you and me, she’s got a hell of a knack for it,” he supplies, smiling wryly now. "She picked up knitting in my teens to give herself something to do while waiting around the hospital with and for my dad and she’s leaned more into that in the years since, but in the last year or so she’s been all about gardening, as you’ve maybe seen signs of.”

“Why yes, yes I have,” Sirius allows keenly, taking in a large gasp, padding full speed ahead at a clunky, shiny, and unfathomably red rotary phone sitting on the desk and flying his hands toward it. “Are you fucking kidding me? Stop, I’m heaving.”

Remus ducks his head through a laugh, shaking his head. “We've actually got two of those,” he passes along. “There's a white one in the kitchen, but it's mounted on the wall.”

“Were these here already or is this just your mum?” Sirius checks, smiling as he gives the dial a spin with his right forefinger.

Remus lets out a weighted sigh there. “Bit of a long story, but the short of it is, it's sort of both those things," he offers him. "My mum really liked the home she grew up in and the way the rooms looked and felt, so while we've added to them and upgraded some fixtures over the years, you’ll see that there’s been an effort to keep the rooms largely as they were — and to an interesting degree for some of them, I'm sure you'll agree soon."

Sirius takes in a long breath, brimming with fervour. “I’m shaking.”

“Well, the loo’s over this way,” Remus lends him, turning left and disappearing round a corner.

“With excitement, Remus,” Sirius sends after him, rounding the bend in the hall and taking a sweeping glance up the staircase to the second floor, but the thing switches directions after a small landing so Sirius can’t see where the stairs leave off upstairs. Remus veers off a little to the right, heading for a door just off of the staircase and opening it by turning another diamond-shaped doorknob. “What a sneaky bathroom; I don’t know why now, but I'd have figured that door led to a closet.”

“There’s one in there they use for linens and really just anything they don’t want to keep in the front closet,” Remus offers, moving out of the way of the door and fluttering a hand for Sirius to have at it.

Sirius heads in past him, looking up and around at the bathroom, finding the theme to the room is quite evidently roses: off-white wallpapering that’s got about a bajillion little smatterings of roses for the trim, a rouge, opaque shower curtain hanging over the tub, and some equally as rouge hand towels to match, and a small stained glass window with, you guessed it, a rose on it that helps cast a reddish tint over the little room.

Sirius doesn’t bother shutting the door behind him, strolling over to the toilet and looking up and around some more while he's here using it. “Kind of love this?” he raises.

“The bathroom?” Remus puts up from the hall, amusement coating his throat.

“The aesthetic, Remus,” Sirius chimes. “Very, ‘old lady sure likes roses a lot.’”

“My granny really did, though, so I hear,” Remus puts in, moving to stand in the doorway.

“I like that you guys kept it as is,” Sirius imparts, tucking himself back in and pushing down on the flusher.

“Just you wait,” Remus entices. "Tip of the iceberg."

Sirius grins with anticipation as he moves for the sink, pushing on the nozzle of liquid hand soap that's indeed red with a silvery shimmer to it and leaning down to take a whiff of the scent while he washes his hands. “Ooh-hoo,” he trills, blinking wondrously at the scent filling his nostrils. “Your house passed the test, so you know.”

“Which one?” Remus bids.

“The house test,” Sirius relays. “Any time I‘d go over to a mate's house for the first time as a kid, I’d judge their home based on a scale of one to ten solely on the scent and presentation of the soap in the bathroom, and I still find myself doing it in new places I'm in even now."

Remus pushes a breathy laugh through his nose. “Odd maybe in general, but somehow not for you,” he offers him.

“This soap gets a nine out of ten, easy,” Sirius passes along, patting his hands down with the hand towel hanging nearby.

“Well, thank you,” Remus accepts, his lips quirking. “I did not pick it, but I’ll let my mum know we passed the test because of her.”

“You’d better,” Sirius returns, heading back toward him.

Remus’s smile moves over to the wry side of things, his eyes narrowing to slits. “Did you judge my flat based on my soap?” he investigates.

“I sure did,” Sirius affirms. “Toasted chai? Goodbye, world; ten out of ten.”

Remus breathes a laugh through his nose. “I think you might’ve had a thing for me so the score would have been fixed already," he surmises.

“Oh, yeah?” Sirius returns. “Well, I'll have you know, Lily’s place is technically in the lead given that the soap in her lower level bathroom literally makes me weak in the knees; fifteen out of ten easily, but I have not told her that exact scoring because humility is important to have.”

Remus coughs out a laugh, turning from the doorway. “Oh?”

“Mhm,” Sirius affirms, barely holding in a laugh as he follows him toward the door.

Before leaving the room, however, he veers off to open yet another diamond-shaped doorknob, having a snoop inside the linen closet and then blinking as he finds there sure are a few shelves on his right with folded towels on them, but also that the closet stretches further down than he’d been expecting. He peers down ahead of him and moves in past the shelves on his right, wandering further into the closet and finding it appears to bend to the left even. He very much makes that left turn, moving into near darkness. He blinks intensely to adjust to the difference in lighting, bumps face-first into something, and, after slapping his hands around in the darkness a bunch, he finds it was a hanging light bulb that attacked him.

“A light bulb hit me in the face,” he passes along, trying to feel for a switch on the fixture.

Remus gives a bright laugh from further back in the bathroom. “I should've warned you, that one hangs low.”

Sirius thinks he feels a chain hanging from the fixture he’s dealing with and pauses with his right hand ready to pull on it. “Remus," he calls out, "if something happens to me back here, I did love you."

“Well, you as well, but it's just your regular storage room,” Remus sends back, incredibly amused out there.

Sirius pulls on a chain, sparking the bulb to life and illuminating a room built underneath the stairs definitely reserved for storage as there’s a bunch of heavy winter jackets hanging from a coat tree in the highest corner of the little room and a veritable metropolis of boxes surrounding him. “OK, fine, it's just a room, but whoever designed this house had a great vision for utilizing space,” he makes known, pulling on the chain to turn the bulb off and heading back up the tunnel.

“The linen closet was there when my grandparents bought the house, but my grandad knocked the wall out and hacked out more space underneath the stairs because the front closet was and remains a bit of a joke; can hardly fit anything in there,” Remus reiterates, hanging out by the doorway. “He was quite the busybody and ridiculously good at carpentry, so there’s more where that came from, too.”

Sirius shimmies past the linen shelves on his way to Remus. “Where to next?”

Remus brings his left arm back toward him, setting his hand over Sirius’s back to lead him along, and Sirius has to say he appreciates the warmth of the method used here. “The dining room’s right this way, sire,” he raises in a lofty, borderline-Jeeves voice, gliding along the floor at a leisurely pace.

Sirius breaks into a hearty chortle as Remus guides him back toward the hall, pretending he’s got a glass of wine to swirl with him. “‘Scuse me while I take a moment to sip my glass of Domaine Romanee-Conti,” he hoity-toits, now pretending he’s doing just that. “Why, yes, quite.”

Remus smirks. “Is that a real one?” he checks.

“Oh, sure is,” Sirius assures. “I was made to attend many a tasting in my youth; I know fancy wines.”

Remus takes a bit of a reel there. “You were?” he asks before context seems to dawn on him, giving a nod of understanding. “Right, French.”

“How could you forget?” Sirius tosses at him, faux-offended.

Remus huffs a laugh. “I forgot they just, don’t have a specific age to hit before you can have a drink,” he defends.

Sirius hums to affirm. “Mm mm, they don’t, and as far as the Blacks are concerned, once you hit twelve you’re obligated to begin refining your palate and you’d be tested on your ability to name the notes you were tasting at family gatherings — no no, I’m not even exaggerating here,” he tacks on, seeing Remus’s squint for exactly what it means. “At one of the tastings, I think I was like, sixteen, seventeen? Somewhere around there, the officiant served a bottle of '72 Romanee-Conti that hit — brace yourself — a whopping twelve-thousand pounds at retail price.”

Remus makes a sound like he’s been socked in the gut, but knowing him, even with the warning he can only brace himself so much. “It had better have had all of life’s answers at the bottom of that bottle,” he puts up, leading Sirius through another open archway to get into the dining room.

“Well, I can tell you right now, it didn’t,” Sirius assures. “Tasted like arse, and not good arse either.”

“Well, that’s—” Remus starts, but a breathy laugh takes him over. “Poetic as ever.”

“That’s really all I’ve got going for me — well, that and this room, look at it,” Sirius puts out, flying both his hands around while standing in front of the dark oak table in the center of the dining room.

Remus can barely speak around the laugh he’s trying to hold in, but he manages to. “I mean, I’ve seen it before.”

Sirius waves him off with a pronounced pfft and veers off toward two china cabinets along the wall on the right-hand side of the room, looking to snoop. He stops in front of the first, peering in through the windows on the double doors and finds little trinkets filling up nearly every spare inch of the glass shelves inside it.

“Oho, you’re a tchotchke family too, I see,” he raises.

“Oh, sure are,” Remus allows. “No gargoyles, I’m afraid.”

“Even better,” Sirius returns, smiling wryly.

“There’s a little music box in there,” Remus raises, coming in behind Sirius to point at it from the outside side of the glass doors, “and if you turn the crank, it plays this 8-bit version of 'Hey Jude.' Not a remarkable treasure, but I sure used to crank it a lot when I was little.”

“I—” Sirius starts, looking round at Remus, blinking for the words. "This place is like, already just as indescribably wholesome as you are; I want to lay on the floor and give myself over to it.” Remus gives a breathy laugh through his nose, moving his arms around Sirius’s middle for a quick squeeze and leaving a kiss on the nape of his neck. Sirius’s face warms up in record time as he moves on to the second cabinet, noting a set of china inside. “How often are those used?”

“Not even at Christmas,” Remus divulges, slipping his hands out from around Sirius and heading around the far end of the table. “Come on, we’re not nearly done yet.”

Sirius looks round as Remus gestures toward another open archway on the left-hand side of the room, across the table and a little over to the left from where Sirius is. “Open archways are a bit of a theme here, I’m seeing,” he raises.

“Most rooms on this floor connect one way or another,” Remus offers. “Now, the kitchen’s in here, and you may want to brace yourself this time because it’s a lot.”

Sirius rounds the table immediately, already pumped beyond belief, and follows Remus into a bright white-walled kitchen where he stops short, completely arrested. He blinks over at yet another cutesy windowsill with yellow curtains hanging from it and a small, archaic radio tucked into the right-hand corner of the windowsill, blinks down at the white tiled floor with little yellow flecks peppered in, over to a white fridge on the left side of the room and an equally as white stove straight across from it on the far right of the room, and finally, setting his gaze on a plasticine covered, sea-foam green table-and-four-chair set in the centre of it that could have easily been released in a ‘75 kitchen catalogue.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he demands, looking directly at Remus for an explanation for this but getting a circumstantial smile for it and not much else. “The aesthetic — it’s off the charts; I need to scream.”

“Do what you must, I’m honestly just glad you don’t find it extremely bright and showy,” Remus admits, budging on Sirius’s left hip.

“I like this better than my own kitchen, and I love my kitchen,” Sirius insists, having a glance over the white, L-shaped counter against the far wall that spans quite a bit of the far wall, starting just a few steps left of the center of the room just ahead of the white rotary phone mounted on the wall, stretching past the double-sink situation happening underneath the windowsill, over to the corner of the room, and stops just beside the stove on the right side of the room. “Lots of counter space, hey?”

“Oh yeah, that’s my mum’s favourite part about it,” Remus puts in distractedly, having a quizzical look around. “There’s usually a lot more out on the counters than this; I suppose they could have wanted to spiff the place up for you, but it is a bit jarring.”

Sirius snorts. “They’ve seen where I live,” he puts out there, leaning in to leave his forearms resting on the table.

Remus gives a little laugh through his nose as he wanders around the right side of the table to have a look through the cupboards below the counter, starting with the first one on the right, just by the stove. “Yes, and even you two tidied for the sake of your guests,” he mentions, moving on to the next cupboard. “I’m just trying to figure out where they might’ve stuffed the coffee pot.”

“You’re really setting me up for success here,” Sirius offers, grinning over at Remus’s back.

“Well, I’d like you to know where it is,” Remus supplies, moving onto another cupboard and third time's got it again. “Oh, it’s in here; you may absolutely use it if you wake up ahead of me and want to make some but there isn’t already a pot going.”

Sirius chimes out a hum in thanks and remains where he is, though he does lean in to have a look inside that same cupboard from over by the table, spotting a black percolator in there beside a white microwave. “Is that the lone thing in here that’s black?” he puts in, gesturing his hands freely around at this white, yellow, and sea-foam coordination in the room.

Remus gives a light trill in his throat, nodding for it sheepishly. “She got that years back when the white one died on us and apparently it was between a red one or a black one, and she thought red would be a bit off-putting with everything else happening in here,” he supplies him, shutting the cupboard up and having another glance around the room.

He perks up and moves for a door just to the right of the fridge, bringing Sirius's attention to a peak. “The basement’s down here,” he offers, gesturing down a flight of stairs. “That's where the washer and dryer are if for some reason you fall in some mud or come on something you’d like washed sooner than later.”

Sirius tosses out a sudden bark. “So thoughtful.”

“Mhm, I try to be,” Remus chimes, heading down the stairs with Sirius in tow.

There’s a landing near the bottom where three more steps veer to the left and take you out to the concrete floor, and while Remus takes a seat with his legs extended over those final three steps, Sirius moves further into the room, having a look around. He glances over the floor some more, spotting a storm drain in the direct center of it, trailing his gaze over to the washer and dryer set sitting side-by-side on the opposite end of the room from where the stairs leave off. There’s a tiny window above the machines, a deep sink in the right corner of the room, and another lone bulb hanging from the low ceiling that’s got a little chain hanging from it. He reaches up to tug on it, turns the bulb on and off, and swivels around to look at Remus just sitting there on the landing with his legs extended over the final three steps and crossed at the ankles.

Sirius breathes in long, pushing his exhale into his cheeks before letting it puff out freely. “This is the stuff of nightmares,” he declares.

Remus huffs a laugh from over there. “You’re not the first to think or say it,” he mentions, looking around the room. “I doubt the concrete flooring helps the room feel even slightly welcoming, but there are rugs in the other rooms so it isn’t all like this.”

Sirius has a fast look around, trying to spot these other rooms being spoken about, and gets a charmed laugh out of Remus, who for some reason likes him a lot even when he’s carrying high energy around with him, pointing off on his right and into the darkness over there that the wee light coming in the small window above can’t illuminate. “There’s a very basic bathroom and a little room filled with toys and old picture books just down over that way, there's a tool room over on your left, the doorway all the way over here—” he uses his left hand to point to a little archway the left of the staircase, “—brings you to what looks like a crawl space from the jump, but it takes you into a full-sized room that we mostly kept full of storage.”

“There are so many secrets to this place,” Sirius puts up, looking around the room and keeping his eyes peeled for any others.

He takes a little stroll over to a tall wooden cabinet pushed into the left corner of the room, opens the door, and finds a bunch of cleaning supplies in it. He almost has the door shut again before a tiny hole in the wood on the left side of the cabinet catches his interest and then he's weaselling his way into the thing, getting a prime snort out of Remus for it. He smiles to himself in the relative darkness of the wardrobe, he lines his left eye up with the suspiciously perfect peephole and shuts his right one for better visibility.

“Be honest, Remus,” he says slowly, peering in at the massive fucking saw hanging on the wall in the other room and perfectly centered within his line of vision, “is this a torture chamber I’m looking into via this peephole?”

Remus pushes a series of fast gusts through his nose. “That’d be my dad’s tool room where the tools live.”

“Oh, because you didn’t bring me down here to chop me to bits; sure, sure,” Sirius returns plainly. “You know there’s a saw hanging directly across from this peephole, yes?”

Remus pushes out a chime of a laugh. “Is it actually right across from it?”

"There's literally a hole in this wardrobe that must perfectly line up with yet another hole in the wall behind it that fully highlights an entire fucking saw," he passes him, straining his left eye to inspect the other tools hanging alongside the saw. “What else am I supposed to think this is but the very peephole you look through when checking on the progress of your torture practices?”

“That, or the wood down here is old,” Remus offers him.

“A likely story, and you should know I’ll be watching my back from here on out,” he informs him while not watching his back in any form.

“Well, we’ve narrowed it down to two things,” Remus raises from the stairs. “Either there’s a murder plot happening here or my dad’s a natural handyman.”

Sirius puts on his valley-voice. “I bet he is,” he gives, coming out of the cabinet with a saunter to his steps and hips.

“Gross,” Remus calls it plainly.

Sirius snorts, drops the theatrics, and smiles over at Remus, who’s surveying the room and apparently already over Sirius’s quip. “I suppose I just got used to it down here because I liked helping my mum with the laundry, but the basement generally gives people the spooks,” he offers, frowning circumstantially, and Sirius needs a moment to contend over Good Boy Remus striking again but he doesn’t get that because Remus is still going and he doesn’t want to miss anything. “A friend of mine, Micah, would not come into the kitchen if the basement door was open, but we were seven at the time so I suppose we can forgive him for it.”

As much as Sirius does think this room is a tad on the rustic, and dare he say, dungeon side of things, that seems a bit much. “Who’s he?” he raises.

“A mate from way back,” Remus supplies. “His family moved to Cardiff not too long after that era.”

“Basement must have really bothered him,” Sirius quips.

Remus gives up a trill. “Must've,” he echoes, smirking at him from across the room. “Plenty of other kids in town thought the whole house was creepy, but the basement in particular really got them into a tizzy.”

“What, why?” Sirius demands.

Remus looks over at him plainly. “Weren’t you just saying how—”

“Yeah, this room? I’m thinking that storm drain is where all the blood goes, but the rest of the house? A quaint, country inn, Remus,” Sirius instils. “Were those not bay windows with fucking awnings hanging over them that I just saw?”

“Mm, banana yellow and a bit much overall, but those didn’t stop those kids from presuming at least one supernatural creature lived here with us,” Remus offers.

“Ohhh,” Sirius drags out. “Are you a ghost, then; is this how you’re going to break it to me?”

Remus pushes an amused breath out of his nose. “No, but that was a running theory for a while there,” he puts in, and Sirius raises his right eyebrow, demanding more on this. “OK, I’ll try and make it quick.”

Sirius backs up a step or two to lean back against the washer, leaving his elbows up behind him on the edge of it. “Don’t,” he instils, all set for storytime. “I want it all.”

Remus folds his hands in his lap, smiling over at him in the low light of the room, but thankfully the window above Sirius’s head is helping with some visibility because the smile he gives Sirius for even suggesting that he likes it when he talks is worth seeing, every damn time. “Well, there were rumours going around when I was about nine or so that this place was inhabited by some fiendish thing,” he frames it. “It might’ve been the long driveway and how the house just kind of looms in the distance if you’re going by on the highway, but I’d see a few kids from my class out there on the road with their bikes sometimes, just checking things out from afar.”

Sirius sniffs there. “I want to say ‘get a hobby, kiddos,’ but I’d have been one of them, so.”

Remus puts up a quick laugh. “You might’ve been, yeah,” he echoes. “And then, one day they sat down in front of me at school and said how much they wanted to come over, and I didn't realize they wanted to investigate the theorized haunted house in town and was just really excited to have them over, so I needed very little convincing.”

Sirius’s eyes have definitely narrowed down to the halfway point, but Remus isn’t able to see the shape of them without the light from the windowsill for he pays no mind to it. “And they, like you, thought this room was particularly bone-chilling and were just huddled up there in the kitchen going back and forth over what they thought was in it, and I tried telling them it was a perfectly harmless basement, but they were convinced I was bluffing when I talked about going down there frequently.”

Sirius sends out a massive pfft. “Literally why would you have been bluffing, though?”

“Well, I was small for my age; I only hit my growth spurt around thirteen and suddenly became a beanstalk, but I had some wiry wrists back then and didn’t look the least bit tough,” Remus supplies, tilting his head back and forth. “They essentially thought I was a giant liar and dared me to go in there for I don’t remember how long, something frightening to a bunch of kids, but since it was my basement I hardly thought it was a long time frame at the time and I’d of course heard and been plenty warned against dares with a sort of ominous tone attached, but I didn't think the rule applied for the situation.”

Sirius nods him off, feeling itchy under his skin and making a face at that detail, and maybe it's a little to do with the fact that he used to be one of those kids proposing dares to the gawky, quiet ones just to, what, have something to do?

"So, I just went in, sat down right around here actually, and waited for the allotted time to run out,” Remus keeps on, scooting back on the landing and lifting his legs to cross them underneath him, adding a few twiddles of his thumbs in his lap for added allusion. "Felt pretty easy to me."

Sirius snorts despite himself. “I’m sorry, but that’s—” he tries, ducking his head through a laugh that takes him over, “—so you.”

Remus smirks there, giving an easy hum. “Oh, and I should've said, the doorknob up there was a bit of a menace before my dad hunkered down and tinkered with it, but generally we would just keep the door open if we were down here so it wasn’t something we really had to deal with that often; it would fall out and you'd have to put it back in if it fell on your side of the door or knock for someone to come stick it back in for you on the other side, but of course it fell out right while I was down here.”

Sirius lifts his hands, pressing them together in the form of a prayer. “Mhm,” Remus returns, “and they went absolutely hysterical, thinking it’d been yanked out by some invisible thing and I was about to get possessed or snuffed out completely, they were up there pounding on the door and running around the kitchen in circles, and there came my mum, who'd heard the commotion and came to investigate the chaos that was erupting in her kitchen.”

“Oh, I love a Hope cameo,” Sirius pipes in heavily, loving this turnaround.

Remus nods emphatically. “She went in there and really didn’t get much clarity out of them because they were all yelling at the same time, but she heard 'RemusRemusRemus' and thought I’d broken my neck or something awful like that, so she put the knob back in, found me on the other side of the door, and I remember that deflating motion she did like it was yesterday,” he details, doing a full heave down of his shoulders to pair with it, “and then, she just turned around and sent them all home, right then and there.”

Yes,” Sirius drags out, clapping once. “Shut it down, Hope.”

“She sure did,” Remus confirms. “And then, she sat me down at the kitchen table so I thought I was in deep shit, but then she gave me three wafer cookies and I thought, ‘well, this is nice; unexpected, but I’ll sure eat these,’ when in reality, she had the feeling that whole situation hadn’t been my idea and the wafers were more of a bribe to ease the full story out of me, which I gave it to her because, to me, it was all just a misunderstanding, but the result was of it was that those kids weren’t allowed over anymore and I was to avoid them at school where possible.”

Sirius claps his right hand to his chest, his left behind him and gripping the edge of the washer. “Your mum's a legend.”

“Well, yeah, I know that now,” Remus gives it. “Obviously she didn’t want me to keep hanging around with them and wind up getting pressured into something way worse than that down the line, but at the time, I was nine and devastated; I'd gained four friends and was about to lose them all in a single afternoon.”

“Well, y’know what?” Sirius puts up. “I’ve never hated a group of kids more than those, so she did right by you and I’m going to need every single one of their names, if you please.”

Remus smirks out a laugh. “Didn’t take much to get you going, did it.”

Sirius puts his head on a pointed tilt. “Listen here, that was mini-you so your eyes were probably gigantic then and those kids just sent the nice boy with the big eyes from class down here as bait?” he defends.

Remus looks left then right. “There was nothing dangerous down here,” he puts up.

“Yeah, but they didn’t know that, did they?” Sirius trades him. “I say we pay whoever’s still kicking around town a nice little visit, since we’re here.”

Remus huffs a laugh. “What, we're going to roll up and exact revenge a good decade and a half on?” he raises.

“And why the hell shouldn't we?” Sirius supplies at once. “Hop on board.”

“I really can’t say it hindered me much,” Remus puts up. “Well, it did and it didn’t; to me, I was suffering the consequences of letting wafer cookies bribe me into telling the full story, but then I went into school on Monday and those kids wouldn’t stop staring at me all morning, then at lunch they cornered me out in the hall, told me to tell them straight if I was a ghost or not—” Sirius tosses his head back, a sharp, forceful bark leaving his throat, “—and I looked between the four of them to figure out if they were serious or not and they very much were, so I lost interest in them in a matter of actual seconds, but I did confirm that I was in fact a walking, talking, school-attending ghost that could totally sit at desks and made up a bunch of details on the spot about my horrifying basement experience.”

Sirius right beams about the image conjured in his mind of a tiny Remus leaning right into it. “A little shit even then,” he says fondly.

Remus gives a wry smile there. “That went on until the end of the school year, if you can believe it.”

“I fucking can,” Sirius insists. “What made them see the light finally?”

“Well, I tripped in the schoolyard while running in gym class and they saw me skid on my hands on the playground, and the whole charade was over because to them I absolutely couldn’t be a ghost if I could still bleed,” Remus provides. “And then, I was branded a liar all over again and they wouldn’t talk to me after that, so I really just ended up doing my mum’s sleeping patterns a solid in the end.”

“Good, dodged a bullet there anyway,” Sirius returns. “I still say we find them and peer-pressure them into getting their asses handed to them.”

“I’m really OK,” Remus insists, smiling away on the stairs. “It was kid stuff, but thank you; you’re very loyal to me.”

Sirius pushes a stray lock of hair behind his right ear, feeling quite enamoured for the nth time over how he managed to fall in with someone this fun to be with. “That's not going to change,” he reserves. “Can we take a little break from the tour?”

“Aren’t we?” Remus offers.

“Well, yes,” Sirius allows, “but I’m thinking about drafting a plot for the horror film we’ve set foot into and I'll need someone to bounce ideas off of.”

“Oh, gladly,” Remus returns, making a show of sitting forward attentively.

Sirius grins, moving his elbows from where he had them resting on the washer’s edge behind him and lifting his hands to help aid his vision. “Two young men at the end of the world fall upon an abandoned farmhouse while on their travels and decide to have a look around inside,” he starts.

“That’ll go well,” Remus quips.

“Way better than you think,” Sirius returns, continuing with the pitch. “They’re low on sustenance, eager to scavenge the abandoned home, but find the kitchen already ransacked so that doesn’t help them out. They decide to have a look in the basement to see if there’s a freezer down there that no other survivors have stumbled upon yet and head down into what is clearly a death chamber, and oh? Would you look at that; the doorknob’s fallen out behind them—” Remus snorts real big there, “—leaving them trapped on the inside, and now they’re just sitting ducks waiting for the one who inhabits the house to return and making clothing out of their skin.”

“Such a lovely touch,” Remus forwards.

“And what else is there to do for those men other than to find a way to work off all that nervous energy?” Sirius raises wistfully.

Remus breathes in there, searching him over from the stairs. “Is this film going to be a thriller or porn? I can’t tell.”

“Jury’s out on that one,” Sirius supplies, lifting a shoulder easily. “The director’s been evading any and all questions on the matter and that is a bit of a red flag, but between you and me, I hear the actors lined up for the parts are wickedly into each other so they don’t seem to mind.”

Remus smirks. “I bet they don’t.”

“Would you like some backstory on the characters?” Sirius inquires.

“How would I get into character otherwise?” Remus returns, folding his legs out of their crossed-legged position and pushing to stand.

Sirius’s heart rate picks up as Remus takes the final three steps down to the cement floor and strolls over his way. “Character A: young, fit, studious, was a researcher specializing in — Welsh folklore before the world he knew ceased to be. Character B: endlessly gorgeous, would-be entrepreneur that’s looking to specialize in barter now that the world’s a barren wasteland,” he details, brimming with anticipation as Remus presses him back against the washer and runs his hands easily over Sirius’s waistline while keeping his eyes and attention seemingly very much on Sirius’s pitch what with that avid smile he’s got on. “The two have been making eyes at each other since they teamed up a few weeks back, and Character A, we’ll call him Remin for now—” Remus’s piqued smile changes to one of plain mirth in a mere beat, “—is rather professorial; has a right dignified air about him, the epitome of control at first impression, but there’s something carnal hanging out below the surface that’s got him just aching to pin his travel companion up against the washing machine they found down there and lay it into him.”

Remus puts on a light air of surprise while dragging his hands down, up, and over Sirius’s hips. “Does Character B have a name?” he checks, looking him over like he’s an absolute snack.

“Sirius,” he blurts.

Remus pushes a breathy laugh through his nose, flickering his gaze back up at him. “Creative.”

“I’m a little distracted,” Sirius returns pointedly, just before Remus starts palming at him over his jeans and making his statement that much more true.

“Tell me about Sirius,” Remus grins, the jerk.

Sirius breathes in roughly, shutting his eyes and refocusing despite the steady hand on him. “He’s got that roguish, dangerous look about him, but plot twist: he’s actually never had a man before.”

Remus takes in a piqued breath. “That’ll have to change.”

“'Says Remin, with a wicked glint in his eyes,'” Sirius recites huskily, fluttering his eyes open there, and Remus takes his chin in his right hand, catching Sirius’s lips and smirking into the kiss.

Sirius can’t help smirking either, breathing heavier as Remus drops his left hand to work Sirius’s fly down enough to dip his right one below the waistband of his briefs, stroking up on Sirius’s cock and swallowing each of his little putters of breath. He feels like he ought to give Remus more room to work that wrist as freely as possible, dropping his right hand to push his trousers down some more, but Remus promptly catches his wrist, humming a plain denial against Sirius’s lips. Sirius’s chest heaves as Remus sets his hand back down on the washer's ledge; message received and Sirius'll be going right back to gripping it when he’s got a strong feeling he’s going to need to be holding onto something if Remus is going to be telling him what he can and cannot do here.

Remus removes his right hand from inside Sirius’s briefs, works those trousers down past his hips, and meets Sirius’s eye once before moving down to his knees. Now, Remus has knelt before him many, many a time, but it’s another thing entirely to kneel on straight concrete and Remus doesn’t give a single indication that he minds it, tugging Sirius’s briefs down to join the waistband of his jeans and setting in briskly on his cock as if he's really just kneeling on a down pillow. Sirius keeps his right hand held tight to the washer’s edge while he fuses his left one to the back of Remus’s head, his fingers dipping in and tangling up with Remus’s curls, making it feel a little like he’s helping Remus’s speed but overall, it’s Remus who’s got the reigns here, the way he's got Sirius’s hips pressed back against the washer with his left arm while his jaw works him right over, and Sirius’s toes start to curl in as Remus adds his right hand to the mix, dusting his fingers over Sirius’s thighs, between them, and up to grip at the base of Sirius’s cock while he works at the head with his mouth.

Sirius fights a little against Remus’s hold on him, rather liking the idea of getting shoved back into place, and Remus does do that for him, knocking his hips back against the washer and pulling a tight noise from the back of Sirius’s throat. His eyes fall shut as Remus works faster over him, his grip tightening around the floofly curls in his hands as Remus takes him all in, swerving down on him and swallowing around the head of his cock, once, twice, and at the third interval, Sirius is biting hard at his lower lip and doing fairly well for himself, but a few more repetitions of that and he is tapping right out.

He slumps against the washer, his head on a backwards tilt as he breathes in and out carefully, and registers a clatter on the floor about five seconds after it happened. “Why would Sirius be keeping EZ-lube in his pocket if he’s never had a man before?” Remus raises.

Sirius blinks and looks down, finding Remus holding the travel tube that was once in his pocket up at him with a pointed smile on. “Guaranteed someone's going to ask these questions, Sirius," he says of it. "If you get the details sorted out now, you won’t be caught unprepared to answer them at prompt.”

Sirius blinks twice. “Just ‘cause he’s never had one doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought about it?” he puts up.

Remus makes a tentative hum. “Not bad,” he lets him have. “A little convenient perhaps, but we can let it slide for now; you're not going to be able to please everybody.”

“There’s a rubber in that pocket, too, if you want to talk about convenient,” Sirius puts up. “He’s very responsible, that Sirius.”

Remus blinks twice and goes fishing in Sirius’s right pocket for it, smirking through his nose as he pulls it out. “When did you do this?” he raises, squinting up at Sirius with a bemused smile on.

“While you weren’t looking,” he returns, sending a wry smile back down to him.

Remus huffs out a laugh. “Did you really think we were going to get this far on the train?” he puts up, shaking both items up at him.

Sirius sniffs. “Well, you let me do a fair amount to you, just pointing that out,” he counters, and Remus pushes a pointed breath through his nose, his mouth twisting up, "and I pocketed them in case I could luck out and get you in the bathroom, but you know what, I'm glad we didn’t because now we can hit it and go.”

Remus puts out a sigh/laugh combo, his lopsided smile on as he lifts off of his knees, holding the condom between two fingers and the lube in the same palm while beckoning Sirius to turn around with an almost too-easy twirl of his right hand, and Sirius faces the washer in a true second, bracing it tightly with the both of his hands. Remus tugs down further on Sirius’s own, leaving them bunched around his knees, and not being able to see what Remus is doing makes it all the more easy to hear and feel it all; the pop of the cap, the first squeeze of the bottle, the zip of Remus’s own trousers, the tease of a slick finger.

“I’m curious, how did the world end in the film?” Remus asks conversationally.

Sirius pushes out a breathy laugh, shutting his eyes so he can think alongside the teasing happening back there. “Zombies that come out at night,” he puts out.

Remus huffs a laugh from behind him, pressing the same finger inside of him. “I feel like I’ve seen that one before,” he mentions.

“They all borrow from each other, Remus,” Sirius chimes. “Stay with it.”

“Rather busy plot, though, isn’t it,” Remus raises, starting to move the same finger back and forth.

Sirius drops his head to a forward droop, mouth falling open as he grapples with the pressure going on behind him, and then the words hit and he’s putting out an affronted noise. “How so?” he pushes out, aiming it over his right shoulder.

Remus hums thoughtfully behind him. “Well, night zombies and a skin enthusiast are a lot to keep up with at once," he provides.

“There’s always more than one threat, Remus,” Sirius returns. “Have you learned nothing from our screenings?”

Remus smirks out a few breaths from behind him. “It’s no wonder these poor blokes just want to get it done.”

Sirius would have found something to respond with, but he settles for sucking in a breath as Remus adds in a second digit, and by settles he means there was no choice in the matter. He breathes that out with something close to a laugh, the reality of the situation hitting him squarely in the cheeks and making them ten notches warmer, and soon he can’t stave off a laugh. “I love that this is happening,” he puts up.

Remus gives an easy laugh behind him. “Same here,” he puts up sweetly. “It’s just a shame that I have to be fingering you while discussing such a powerful film, you know?”

Sirius grips the washer hard as he gets taken over by a rolling laugh, ducking his head through his mirth, and soon they’re both a pile of stitches. Remus gets back to it soon enough, patiently working at Sirius until three of his digits move in and out of him without any sort of hitch, and by then, Sirius is rocking back down on him like a fiend.

“That Sirius is really gunning for that dick, hm,” Remus observes, lighthearted as all hell, but the way he grips Sirius by the hips means business.

Sirius sends a half-grin, half-huff at the chunk of basement wall that’s taking up his vision, pulling in a sharp breath as Remus breaches him and waits a few cursory beats for Sirius to wiggle around a bit, adjust to the stretch. He lets his breath go as Remus fully sheaths himself in him and from there, he hangs his head forward as he arches his back, his half-smile deepening as Remus begins to move maddeningly slow.

“Is this where the music swells and Sirius sheds a tear?” Remus checks.

Sirius lifts his head in a snap, huffing loudly. “It’s a thriller, not a sap-fest,” he returns. “And so you know, the director’s notes implicitly state that Remin is a talkative fellow during the deed but rumour has it, this isn’t exactly what he had in mind.”

Remus hums thoughtfully. “Oh, I see,” he whispers, just by Sirius’s right ear. His hands are hot to the touch, his right one moving up to curl around the front of Sirius’s thigh, his left gripping tight at Sirius’s hip, rocking Sirius back on his cock. “Shit, are those footsteps?”

For a brief moment, Sirius thinks somebody has come home and he’s about to get the blue-balling of the century as a result, but then Remus pulls nearly all the way out of him and snaps back in, filling Sirius up again and pulling a strangled moan out of him. “We’d better hurry,” Remus maintains, fucking Sirius at a staccato that he fully agrees with. “Don’t want the skin enthusiast showing up right in the middle, do we.”

“This wasn’t what the director had in mind either,” Sirius puts out tightly, eyes shut against the pace Remus is keeping.

“Yeah, you like that cock?” Remus says in a true, glorious deadpan. “You’d better take it.”

Sirius barks out a laugh and reaches behind him to grip at Remus’s right hip, partially to urge him on and partially just to hold onto him, but he finds even that isn’t quite enough. He turns his head the same way to search for his lips, finding Remus snickering intensely behind him, and makes a wonton, eager noise, garnering Remus to take in a sobering breath, latch onto them from over Sirius’s right shoulder, and laugh a little more into the kiss, but that just makes it even more of a breath of fresh air.

Remus lifts his right hand from Sirius’s thigh and wraps around his cock instead, timing his strokes to match his thrusts, and the duality of both heavy paces moving at once has Sirius straight gasping against Remus’s mouth. “Fuck,” he prattles, eyes shut tight, lips kiss-soaked and quivering, “shit, shit — Remus.”

Remus pulls back, hovering his lips an inch from Sirius’s. “Oh, what, I’m not Remin anymore?”

Sirius puts out a fucking strange noise, something between a strangled cry, a laugh, and a huff, but for fuck’s sake, he’s never laughed with any man this much, and certainly not while he was getting railed; how does he get to have this? “You’re the fucking worst,” he pushes out, not meaning it at all.

“Hold that thought,” Remus warns, and Sirius breathes in hard as Remus hitches his hips up so that he’s aiming for gold with each thrust, and Sirius sees white with each of them. “Say it; say she shouldn’t have left.”

Sirius’s eyes shoot open, lit up with fire at the smile he fucking knows he heard on Remus’s lips, but he only gets a millisecond’s worth of confirmation before his eyes are forced shut all over again by way of Remus’s cock alone.

“Just say Rory should have stayed where she was,” Remus says simply. “You can give me that, can’t you?”

Sirius snaps his head away from Remus’s face, turning toward the wall. “Never,” he tosses out, banging his fists on the lid of the washer like a gavel. “I’m literally never saying it.”

Remus smirks by Sirius’s right ear, tugging at his earlobe with his teeth. “Say it,” he prompts, tightening his grip on Sirius’s cock. “I’ll go easier on you if you just hand this one over to me.”

Well, now he’s really not saying it.

Sirius shakes his head sporadically, biting down on his lower lip to keep from accidentally throwing out an agreement through delirium alone, and then Remus switches to half-thrusts, barely even pulling back out before he’s driving forward again, fucking Sirius so quickly there isn’t time between them to even breathe efficiently, let alone make things like words string together, so he’s at least got that going for him separate from the prime Dickens he’s getting. He curls forward, sets his forearms on the surface of the washer, and with Remus holding his hips still while his own thrusts spike to a numbing degree, the small change Sirius made to the angle really just gives even more in terms of quality, and then he's making all sorts of noise; nothing coherent, more or less glorified gibberish by the distant sound of it, so he’s still in the running for now.

He grapples his hands over the machine under them, the curve of his hips bent against it and shaking the whole thing back and forth as Remus drives against him, but apparently Remus isn’t worried about the washer’s standings, too busy stuttering nonsense words of his own behind him, and that's fine with Sirius when it really is something to hear Remus’s voice all around him, coming from behind and echoing off the wall ahead of them at once. He tenses up, bares down on Remus’s cock his ears ring out, and hangs onto the washer for support as he writhes through his release, feeling warmth pool beneath every inch of his skin as Remus lets go of his cock and sets both his hands on the small of his back, snapping his hips back on him with Sirius’s name on his lips, spoken like a prayer to Jesus Cunt himself.

Sirius's cheeks go twice as warm as the rest of him as Remus grips him hard, riding out his own release and ultimately curling over Sirius's back once he’s fucked out, and it’s really so lovely to be Remus’s leaning post that Sirius almost lets him rest before going on the attack. Almost.

“How fucking dare you?” he shoots back at him. “During? I’d have never—”

He stops, losing some momentum there, and Remus smirks, his breath tickling the underneath of Sirius’s right shoulder blade. “Can’t finish that sentence in good conscience, can you?” he raises languidly, and Sirius aims a huff out and back toward Remus. “Alright, you've fought dirty with me plenty of times and I wanted to see if that would work out for me; you can tell it to the judge, but I think he’d come down on my side.”

“What do you think I am, a chump?” Sirius returns. “Don’t let your guard down around me, boy; I’m fucking coming for you.”

“Didn’t you just.”

Statistically speaking, Sirius has zero chances of remaining indignant when faced with Remus and a lewd quip; he just doesn’t have that in him. “It’s a good thing you’re cute, I’ll tell you that,” he maintains.

“Mhm,” Remus mutters back, and Sirius would’ve spent more time on the easy acceptance of his claim, but Remus chooses to bring them back into the situation at hand instead of letting the moment linger. “I didn't think about what we’re going to do with the condom.”

“Bin it?” Sirius suggests, lifting his arms up high for a necessary stretch.

“I can’t put a used condom in the bin in the basement of my parent's house,” Remus returns indignantly. "That's just chaos."

“Well, it’s either that or we make a balloon animal out of it, and I don’t know how to make one,” Sirius puts up.

“I’ll wrap it in tissue,” Remus decides, apparently not needing Sirius's input so much for this dilemma of his.

Remus breathes in long, lifts off of Sirius’s back, and moves the both of his hands back to Sirius’s hips to ease back out of him. There, Sirius has the space to inch his hips back from the washer, peering down below and finding that he definitely shot his load all over the front of the machine. “So,” he puts up, going for a bit of a tune, “you sort of aimed me right at this thing.”

Remus snorts from behind him, leaning his chin over Sirius’s right shoulder to have a look for himself, but it must have been exactly how much of a mess he’d been prepared to find or he’s just that fucked out that he barely reacts to it. “I’ll get a cloth,” he says simply, tapping Sirius’s hips easily.

Sirius looks round as Remus wanders off to the left with his trousers hanging around by his hips, disappearing out of sight. He pushes a hand up through his dampened hair, pushes himself back from the washer with his free hand, and drops the both of them to tug his trousers up over his hips. He’s just testing out his footing when he catches the sound of taps running and wanders around the bend on slightly shaky feet, following the noise down a small hallway and looking into the first room ahead of him, finding Remus with his trousers back up, wetting a cloth in a very tiny bathroom with just a sink and toilet in it.

“Convenient,” Sirius says of it, hanging out by the door.

“What is?” Remus asks, shutting off the taps.

“This wee bathroom,” Sirius forwards.

Remus nods with the clarification. “Yeah, there isn’t much to this one aside from saving us a trip upstairs if we’re already down here,” he offers, walking the wet cloth over to Sirius, who blinks down at it royally. “It’s your jizz, dear.”

Sirius leans up and huffs directly at him, taking the cloth from him and giving Remus’s left hip a thwap with it before heading to wipe up the mess. Remus turns up very shortly, holding a wad of tissue with the condom wrapped up in it no doubt, and heads past Sirius to a large bin by the dryer, tossing it in with a bunch of lint and various fabric softener squares already in it.

Remus clears his throat before jostling the side of the bin with a foot to seemingly make the wad fall more toward the bottom of the bin, garnering a pointed laugh from Sirius. “It’s not like anyone’s going to go fishing around in the bin unless that’s a Lupin trait I haven’t dealt with yet,” he raises.

“I’ll feel better if it’s closer to the bottom,” Remus returns. “Just let me have this.”

Sirius sends a pfft Remus’s way, finishes up with the mess, and inspects his work with his left arm crossed over his stomach and his right one bent at the elbow with the cloth held up. “Easy peasy lemon squeezy,” he offers.

“I was going to say,” Remus echoes, turning up on Sirius’s right to have a look for himself.

“I fucking wish you were going to say that,” Sirius returns, budging his already jutted-out hip against Remus’s left one.

Remus shakes his head through a smirk, takes the cloth from Sirius’s hand, and walks it over to the sink, giving it a good rinse before wandering it over to a basket sitting not far from there. He looks back over at Sirius, patting his hands together with accomplishment, and catches his quizzical stare. “Laundry chute,” he extends, pointing up at a rectangular square in the wall above the basket that seemingly appears there out of nowhere because Sirius sure only noticed it now.

Sirius blinks wildly. “What?” he shoots back. “What am I in, a storybook?”

“Possibly,” Remus humours him. He smiles as he steps up close to Sirius, leaves a peck on the tip of his nose, and slots his right hand in with Sirius’s left, leading him back toward the stairs. “Come on, we’ve a tour to get back to.”

Sirius heads up the stairs behind him not unlike someone who might’ve just gotten some quality dick and is feeling rather pulled along by the owner of said quality dick in more ways than just their hands being linked together. He lets himself get led back through the kitchen, around the outskirts of the table, and table toward another open archway that stands to the right of the stove and left of the dining room.

“The den’s in here and hopefully it hasn’t changed much since I’ve been away, because it sure had its cozy charm,” Remus raises.

From where Sirius is, all he can really see is a brown shag carpet ahead of them and quite suddenly, he’s really more of a fifteen-year-old trapped in an adult shell, putting out a lengthy trill. “I’m adding that to the list,” he announces, pointing down at the carpet.

“Oh, I’d take it right back off,” Remus advises, stopping to run his right foot over the carpet. “It’s really not as soft as it seems.”

Sirius lets go of Remus’s hand and steps into the room, dropping down to the floor on his back and doing a carpet angel real quick. “Yikes,” he puts up, the fibers far more prickly than he’d been prepared for them to be. "I'm kind of crushed."

“It’s deceiving,” Remus imparts. “Gives wicked carpet burn and I do care about the state of your skin quite a bit.”

Sirius appreciates it, no denying that, but he can’t deny that this objection feels a tad too lived-in. “You already tried it on this, didn’t you,” he suspects, looking up at Remus through a squint.

Remus presses his mouth into a line, blinking once, and that’s confirmation enough. “Wow, Remus; right here in the den?” he raises, gape/grinning up at him. “I mean, I know we just took a nice ride into Poundtown, but we were hidden away in a torture chamber and nobody’s home but us.”

“Well, it wasn’t like they were home that time either,” Remus returns, giving a little laugh there.

“Right,” Sirius allows. “The moment they went out the door, though; it was time.”

“Or, we were already in here and the carpet was a quick but regretful idea on my part and we didn’t finish there,” Remus supplies him. “And you know what, I’ve no idea where my grandparents managed to find this complete lie of a rug, but leave it to my parents to keep a shag rug that can’t realistically be shagged on without suffering rug burn.”

Now, Remus ranting about a shag rug not being that good a time at all is hilarious to him just in and of itself, but now Sirius also has to contend with the image conjured in his head of Remus getting railed against the very shag rug he's laying on by somebody who hardly deserved to be there, and that's tough, it is. “Well, you live and you learn,” he offers, and where’s his Oscar for getting through that sentiment sounding that unbothered.

“And I did,” Remus supplies for it.

Sirius nods, moving off of the floor. “Well, thank you for the warning and Imma take this right off the list.”

He refocuses on the room they’re in out of survival, but one thing he’ll note straight away is that Remus had been right in his advertisement when the feeling that the decor breathes into the room is one of intense relaxation; the lengthy, cushy couch that Sirius remembers is actually a sneaky hide-a-bed, the coffee table ahead of it that’s got a shelf for what looks like a variety of photo albums that Sirius will definitely be combing through extensively in due time, another armchair that’s a vicious but incredibly endearing shade of red and an ottoman to match, and two lamps perched on end tables that have decidedly gigantic lampshades.

“Oho, this one’s my favourite room so far, I think,” Sirius offers fondly, smiling as he takes in the high windows over the back of the hide-a-bed with another twin window on the right-hand side of the room, complete with a door to a mystery land (though more likely the backyard). He glances out the window across from him again, his heart rate easily picking up speed at the snapshot he can see of the backyard and just a small glimpse of the land he knows is going to be a lot to take in, but he resists his overwhelming urge to fling himself out that door mostly because Remus hasn’t got his sunnies on and it wouldn’t do well to torpedo out into the sun just now, and besides, he’s still taking this all in.

He looks left instead, looking to the left for more treasures and gets them in droves. A mid-'00s veritable box of a telly a few steps to the left of the doorway, another quaint desk pushed against the wall nearby that’s got a laptop sitting on it, and to top it all off, a certifiably Yuge bookshelf that spans the entire the left-hand side of the room, littered with books of all sizes.

Sirius reels a bit at the gargantuan bookshelf. “That’s fucking impressive.”

“My grandad made it,” Remus pipes up, smiling over at it quite fondly. “Half of those books on there were my granny’s, some were his, and mum and dad have added to it quite a bit, but he initially made it for my granny so she’d have a nice place to put her books on.”

Sirius makes a rather gooey noise, frowning imploringly over at Remus. “I love that so much,” he professes, getting a bright beam for it. “Did he build other stuff here?”

Remus nods emphatically. “Oh, so much,” he insists. “He was a carpenter, so the coffee table in here, those two end tables, the desk in this room as well as the one in the hall, and the desk/bookshelf hybrid up in my room, which he purposefully scaled up a few sizes so that I’d be able to still use it after I hit my growth spurt.”

“Ohh,” Sirius chimes. “That’s a clever man right there.”

Remus smiles for it, nodding again. “He figured with the giraffe that my dad is, the chances of me winding up as gangly were far too high to build me a child-sized desk so he went at it with longevity in mind,” he forwards. “I mean, I did outgrow the desk just a bit by the end of secondary, but it was just so handy that I never considered replacing it.”

“Well, you’re your parents' kid and all,” Sirius offers.

“Alright, fair,” Remus allows, though he lifts a hand for a pardon, “but I am far more ruthless than they are; hence how little clutter I actually keep now.”

“Unless we’re talking about your schoolwork,” Sirius raises, smiling wryly.

“Well, that I will forever fan out around me,” Remus delivers. “He also built the shed out back, fixed up both porches one summer when I was little, but he was most proud of the A-frame; he built that with just a few of his carpentry mates and their bare hands when they were a little older than we are and it’s actually so impressive for — oh, fuck me.

Sirius blinks wildly over at Remus as the man lifts his hands to his forehead, overcome. “I meant to tell you, but with the way this week’s been, it went right out of my head,” he puts up, huffing at himself.

Sirius stops with a braced pose, ready for it. “Gimme,” he prompts.

Remus gives in to a bit of a smile. “So, for a bit there, the assumption was that you’d be kipping on that,” he starts, gesturing toward the hide-a-bed, “but then my mum offered the A-frame earlier in the week in case you wanted a semblance of privacy and I might’ve gone ahead and told her you would, but for good reason.”

“Alright,” Sirius accepts, watching Remus playing with his hands at his beltline and waiting for the issue here because it’s clear Remus thinks there's one to be had.

“I thought it might be the answer for two issues,” Remus provides. “We’d get some privacy away from the house, and I’d have an already established place to go to if I need to hide away for a while, you know?”

Sirius watches Remus gesture faintly at his head for context, nodding for it. “Is there a way we can keep the mask chilled out there?” he checks, finding that the first and honestly only roadblock as far as he can see.

“Mhm,” Remus affirms. “There’s a kitchenette in there; nothing fancy or anything and there isn’t a lot to it, but it's got a bulbous fridge from the ‘40s that still works if you can believe it, and we could keep it chilled in the freezebox.”

“Then, fuck yeah, let's do it,” Sirius returns him, but Remus eases up by such a notch that it gets Sirius squinting at him. “Boy, literally what did you think I was going to say? ‘No, I think we won’t go along with that really good idea you went and snatched up like the opportunist you are, and fuck you for even suggesting it?’”

Remus gives into a sheepish smile. “I just didn’t want you to take the wrong way, as if you’re being sent away from the house,” he puts up.

“Well, where is it?” Sirius raises. “If it’s ten miles out, then yeah, I might think I was being sent away.”

Remus shakes his head right quick. “It's just a little off the house, nothing extreme,” he offers. “It was built it for guests to stay in, back when guests actually came round often enough, so it's got a bed, a dresser, a little TV — not many channels on it, but there are infomercials that play at night that are so bad that they’re good and I have a slight feeling you’d love some of that.”

Sirius sucks a breath in through his teeth. “Amazing,” he calls it. “Is there a bathroom in there, too, or am I going to have to piss off the steps?”

Remus snorts, lifting his free hand for an even gesture. “I mean, what you do under the cloak of night is up to you, but there’s one in there,” he maintains, making Sirius feel so fucking normal even though he very much can’t be. “It’s super small, though, I’ll warn you now; the tub takes up most of it, but the bathroom as a whole serves its function just fine.”

“Then I really can’t see why I’d be put off,” Sirius puts down.

Remus pushes a quiet laugh through his nose, ducking his head a little. “I really wasn’t sure.”

“You’re not doing this to send me away,” Sirius trades him. “You’ll be joining me there eventually, won’t you?”

“I hope so,” Remus puts it.

“Ah-ah,” Sirius puts up, wagging a finger. “Once dinner hits, we aren’t going to need a decoy anymore, unless your parents are old-fashioned enough to want us staying in separate rooms the whole time we're here and ‘scuse me if I may say, but I really doubt they are.”

“Well, I — I have no way of refuting that,” Remus puts it. “I’ll still put my things in my room for now and if all goes well, I can move them down later.”

Sirius blinks sweetly at him. “When.”

Remus expels a long breath. “I can’t, Sirius.”

“Then I’ll just think it to myself,” Sirius offers, lifting his hands to suggest he’s backing off. “Are you going to show me to my new digs?”

“Well, hold on, we haven’t even finished the house yet,” Remus returns, beckoning Sirius back toward the kitchen. “I just wanted you to have an idea of the plan.”

Sirius follows him into the kitchen, through the dining room, and out into the front hall where Remus heads for their luggage. “Might as well take mine up while we’re going there, but we can come back for yours,” he offers, gathering his stuff together.

He places his sunglasses on top of his head, gestures for Sirius to go ahead of him, and Sirius grabs Remus’s knapsack to lighten his load a little before doing as bid. He heads up the stairs a few steps ahead of Remus, finding they creak a bit under his feet despite the carpeting on the stairs.

“Oh, my Cunt, they creak,” Sirius puts up emotionally.

"Were yours much quieter?" Remus asks.

"Oh, those didn't make a single creak," Sirius affirms. "Hard on the hands and face if you tripped going up them, but easy to sneak down."

Remus eyes him sidelong with a lopsided smile. “Ours are a bit more rundown than I think we’d all like to admit,” he passes along. “They didn’t really have the means to fix them up for a good while there so it just never got prioritized, but who knows; it's a new chapter now.”

“Right, they must have made a pretty penny,” Sirius offers.

“Well, I think that’s all still getting finalized, but I assume it’ll be quite something, yeah,” Remus returns, placing a hand on Sirius’s back as a means of balance, and Sirius reaches around behind him to get a hold on Remus’s wrist, locking him in as they get to the landing. “Here’s where the laundry chute starts.”

Sirius blinks at the wall straight ahead of him, reaching to pull down on the handle, and makes like he’s about to crawl into it. Remus leaves a snort in his wake, dusting the fingertips of his free hand over the nape of Sirius’s neck as he squeezes past him on the landing, heading up the last stretch of steps with his suitcase in tow, and Sirius closes the door to the chute and bounds up them behind Remus, happy to follow a bloke who‘s so keen on him for one and absolutely just as happy to see Remus’s old bedroom for another.

“I’m shaking all over again,” Sirius puts up, thundering up the stairs behind him.

Remus gives an amused noise ahead of him. “About which part?” he checks, reaching the top of the stairs.

“I mean, every aspect of this house definitely,” Sirius makes sure to put down, coming up on a hallway with a door on either side of them and another down at the far end of it, all with matching diamond-shaped doorknobs, “but specifically, I cannot wait to see your room.”

“It’s nothing fancy,” Remus insists, veering toward the door on their left.

“Well, I didn’t think it was going to be marble-themed somehow, but it’s still yours and I want to see it,” Sirius returns, tapping against Remus’s back excitedly.

Remus reaches to turn another diamond-shaped doorknob before pushing on the door, letting it swing open. “Oh, it hasn’t changed even a little,” he observes, letting the door swing open. “That’s sort of nice to know that they didn’t turn it into an exercise room or something while I've been gone.”

Sirius gives a distracted laugh, blinking in the brightly patterned wallpaper, the single bed across the room and pushed against the far wall, the desk/bookshelf hybrid across the room from the bed, the dresser on the other side of the room from both of those fixtures, the wood floor with a large, colourful crochet rug placed in the middle of it, and another sugar-sweet bay window on the left that looks out over the front yard with a little ledge to sit on underneath it.

“Remus,” Sirius says sweetly, leaving Remus’s knapsack on the floor in favour of heading for the bay window ledge, wrapping himself up in the drapes hanging from it and going into a little twirl, “this is every little girl’s dream.”

“I liked that ledge, thank you,” Remus returns airily. “I finished many a novel on it.”

“Oh, well, there’s another wholesome image to log away,” Sirius trades him, feeling exceptionally pleasant about that one as he unravels himself from the drapes. He heads over to Remus’s bed, swan-diving onto it and stretching out.

Remus goes for his knapsack and sticks it beside his suitcase, letting out an accomplished breath through his nose, and Sirius gives into a long stretch over Remus’s bed, glancing around the room again once that's finished with. “You know what, I’ve decided this room suits you well,” he puts down.

“Oh yeah?” Remus bids, taking a perch on the edge of his old desk and smiling over at Sirius from it.

“Mhm,” Sirius hums pleasantly. He drops his gaze to the round rug in the centre of the floor. “Did Hope make that?”

Remus looks over at it too, taking in a breath through his nose as he shakes his head no. “She doesn’t crochet much; finds the needles too clunky,” he forwards, and Sirius pushes out an easy laugh for the bonus information. “She brought that back from the antique mall years before I started working there, but it is a bit of a staple here, that place.”

“Are we stopping in later?” Sirius asks, wiggling his hips excitedly.

Remus eyes him with a twist of a smile on. “Especially if you do that the whole time we’re in there.”

“I just might,” Sirius returns, grinning ear to ear.

Remus takes in a breath, lifting out of his perched position, and going for his knapsack where he digs out his eye-themed sleep mask and pockets it. “So, my parents' room is across the hall, but we’ll let that remain unseen in case I’d have to see anything I very don’t want to,” he throws in, pulling his bottle of sunscreen out of his knapsack next.

“You’re right, what if there’s a sex swing out there in the open?” Sirius puts up, stretching mildly.

Remus makes sure to lodge a gag while stuffing the tube of sunscreen into his back left trouser pocket. “There’s another bathroom down at the end of the hall should you find yourself up here and in need of one,” he passes along.

“Thank you, I’ll keep it in mind,” Sirius accepts, lifting off of the bed with a sense that they’re just about done with the second floor.

“Or, if you don’t love the water pressure out there, you can use the shower up here or the one downstairs, either one,” Remus tacks on, leading them back toward the stairs. “It’s not terrible, but it will just be unarguably better inside the house, so it’s really up to you.”

“I’ll test out both,” Sirius takes it further, hopping down the first five steps to get to the landing in one leap.

“Someone’s pumped,” Remus observes, choosing to walk down the stairs Sirius just cleared.

“I want to see the yard,” Sirius returns, making the turn at the landing. “How sturdy is this bannister?”

Remus gives a tentative hum. “You could maybe slide down it for like, a few seconds, but I wouldn’t put your whole weight on it.”

Sirius staves off his immense urge to slide down the entire thing and passes his left hand daintily over it as he traipses down the stairs instead. He takes a right at the bend in the hall to go for his own luggage, lifting his knapsack over his shoulders and popping up the handle on his suitcase, but he nods to his guitar case as Remus makes it to him.

“Want to grab that for me?” he requests.

Remus reaches for it, lifting the straps over his shoulders, and Sirius smiles proudly. “Should snap a picture of you and send it along to Charlotte."

“Oh, please don’t,” Remus huffs, heading back down the hall.

“You’re right; she’d go into cardiac arrest,” Sirius says of it, following Remus back through the house.

Remus takes a hard right once in the den, dropping his sunglasses down over his eyes before reaching to open the back door, and Sirius gets a quick view down by the right side of the armchair of a basket of many different colours of yarn and two knitting needles sticking out of it before he follows Remus outside onto the back porch.

Remus leads him down a short stretch of it before rounding a bend and there Sirius finds out the porch is more of an L-shape, the length of it going across the back of the house with a staircase leading down to the yard at the centre of the porch, and beyond those, two deck chairs with a small matching table in between them in the far corner of the porch for a cute, little veranda situation.

“This is cute,” Sirius mentions, gesturing at the serene little spot to look out from.

“I think the other chairs must be in the shed, but we’ve more in case you come out here looking to have a sit but the both of them are already out here,” Remus passes along.

Sirius smiles over at him, alive with all of the little ways Remus is showing an effort to make him the most comfortable he can be, and he’d have likely said as much if he hadn’t gone and fully peered out again the property but now that he has, he’s a bit arrested by an expanse of field ahead of them. “Jesus Cunt,” he puts out, his gaze lifting to the long, dark row of trees at the far end of the field. “I’m hallucinating, aren’t I.”

“You’re not,” Remus assures, standing just on his left.

“I know you said there was a lot of space, but—" Sirius pushes a quick puff of breath out before looking to Remus. “How much is sold off?”

“Everything on the left-hand side of the property,” Remus offers, gesturing past the little terrace. "I don't know where the line's drawn exactly, but past the shed for sure.

Sirius moves past the deck chairs to get to the side railing, looking past the garden shed sitting to the left of the house and blinking in that side of the property that seemingly stretches out equally as far in that direction as it does behind the house, complete with various dips and hills and a smattering of trees here and there. "You still have so much," he instils, baffled by it.

“Mm, my grandparents bought the house at a good time and the land came with, so I must take on the tradition and keep what's left of it,” Remus offers, moving to join Sirius over at the porch railing and leaning his forearms on it. “And I’ve already touched on it a bit already, but my mum’s had a difficult time viewing all of this as hers.”

Smirking, Sirius nods in both remembrance and amusement. “Even though it explicitly stated Hope Lupin in the will?” he raises it.

“Mhm, even with that,” Remus allows.

“Modest through and through,” Sirius teases.

“I could do some more armchair psychology over why she was so hesitant to sell, but who wants that?” Remus puts up.

Sirius clears his throat. “Me,” he trills, like he’s doing a vocal warm-up.

Remus smirks for it, but a bit of a frown takes over the lower half of his face. “This is after years of thought and hindsight, of course. I wasn't quite so on the ball the whole time or anything, but she was very close to them while growing up and I think losing them so young really affected her; she really wasn’t that much older than us when my granny passed and she was hardly into her thirties when my grandad followed,” he details, and Sirius blinks there, having not done the math on that front yet, but Remus doesn't read that one too well. “Is this OK to talk about?”

Sirius wipes his face clear, shaking his head quickly. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” Remus offers before choosing to go with a grimace. “It's a very different scenario from yours, but there is a glaring similarity and I don’t want to harp on about it if it’s going to be—”

“Honestly? Didn’t even think about it,” Sirius comes in, lifting his shoulders once. "I'm more confused about how I didn't do the math myself."

Remus nods stiffly. “Oh,” he says. “I just don’t want to—”

“You’re not,” Sirius doubles down, popping Remus in the hip once with a closed fist. “Talk about your mum, please; I find her a fascinating lady.”

Remus reworks his mouth. “She is, but a complicated one,” he puts in, then makes an even head tilt.

“Aren’t we all,” Sirius puts up.

Remus nods, accepting that one. "Well, you’ve seen the house now; that's a pretty good example right there."

Sirius smiles quietly. “I love your house.”

Remus on lips start to quirk a bit there too. “I do, too; I mean, I barely remember where we lived before we moved in because I spent so much time here as is,” he shares. "I suppose it does help to showcase my mum’s difficulty moving in and fully changing up the place; I don’t think she planned on us being here permanently, but then my grandad’s state deteriorated quicker than any of us banked for and then, the place was hers and ours to keep but for a dismal reason, and she didn't do much to it for ages after my grandad passed.”

“So, maybe keeping it as close to the way it was helped with the adjustment of the place being hers all of a sudden, and in turn, comforted a lady whose parents passed far too soon,” Sirius takes it from there, smirking at Remus unearthed expression. “See? I can follow human emotions pretty well even while mine are bleeding out; I’m not that out of sorts.”

Remus’s mouth curls up into a smile that’s suspiciously smarmy for the tone of this. “Right, it’s almost as if you’ve a stunning amount of empathy in you? Weird,” he offers, and Sirius huffs directly at him before ducking his head, his cheeks warming up by the second. “Yes, though, you are onto something, and I do think a lot of it was practicality, too; we didn’t have that much stuff to fill a house with, to be fair, and there was a fully furnished one right here, so it made sense to keep a lot of the stuff that wouldn't be replaceable.”

“And, if I’m honest, that hide-a-bed looks heavy as shit,” Sirius raises it.

“It is fucking heavy,” Remus returns lively. “It would have taken the entire fire department to lift it out of here.”

“Well, then, there wouldn’t have been any point in messing with it,” Sirius cosigns.

Remus gives out a thoughtful hum there. “She’s eased up a lot more with it over the years, and especially in the last few; it’s certainly got a look about it that’s out of the ordinary now, but I think it comforts her still to have it like that, just with a Lupin flair mixed in there too,” he offers, smiling a little there. “I’m glad she came around to selling; it’s another big step for her, letting some of it go.”

Sirius nods, thinking it must have been from the bit of armchair psychology he's getting itself, but also for the fact that he’s well-learned that the Lupins are natural-born creatures of habit. “Do you know what’s happening to it?” he raises. “Only, if a strip joint goes up right there, it’ll really detract from the overall tale, I think.”

Remus puts out far more of an amused noise than Sirius was even banking on given the quiet tones they’ve adopted. “They sold to a couple with kids apparently, so the assumption is that a home will be built here at some point or other, but the details are thin as of right now,” he provides. “I’m sure it’ll be nice having neighbours that aren’t entire fields away in either direction.”

“Depends on the kind of neighbour you get,” Sirius puts up.

“That’s an incredible point,” Remus allows, then lets out a faux-grievanced sigh. “I guess we’ll just have to live with just one acre now, how sad.”

Sirius smirks for it, taking in the view once again. “You know what, as complex as that bit of background information was, I feel like you three ending up with all of this is the fairest, most fitting thing I’ve ever contended with, and that, I find comforting,” he puts down.

“How so?” Remus raises.

“Oh, come now,” Sirius returns, budging up on Remus’s right side. “Humble beginnings with a goldmine underneath their feet; if anybody deserves to reap the benefits of parting with a shitload of land that is rightfully theirs to do what they choose with, it’s you guys; my parents owned a lot of fucking property and I can tell you right now, it was painfully gratuitous.”

“Was it?” Remus engages.

Sirius gives a solid nod of his head. “Some of it was land was bought to continually bring in money in the background as if they needed the extra dough, but all over Paris they had — well, still must have, although I don’t know who technically owns them now because it sure isn’t me,” he tacks on, “but they had whole apartment blocks and shopping centres to their name, a resort in Belize that just churned it all n for them without actually having to lift a finger, another one of those in the Maldives, and then, for personal use, they had a town home in Paris, a summer home in Versailles, a villa in Spain that made so little sense to have when, I swear, they only vacationed there maybe, twice in the eighteen years I lived with them, and then a place in Greece that was an absolute flex on my father’s part because cousin Cissy went on and on about her vacationing there over family dinner and then all of a sudden, there was a fourth home Rhodes; that’s too much power and not enough sense talking.”

Remus pushes a horse-like breath out of his cheeks before succumbing to a few amused breaths. “Cousin Cissy?” he raises, his mouth curling up.

“Well, Narcissa,” Sirius reiterates, putting a haughty lilt on it. “You saw her once, at the funeral."

Remus’s eyes go to dinner plate status while clouding over before he puts out a tentative hum. “I saw a lot of people that day,” he hints. "I'm sorry, I don't remember."

“No need to be, she's not that memorable," Sirius puts down. "She was with Bella out front, being passive-aggressive as usual."

Remus clicks his tongue in remembrance, his expression going flat before he leans in and rubs his left hand over Sirius’s back for a few moments before guiding him toward the porch stairs and right back into the present in one sweep, and that has a strong potential to be the best response out of Remus he could have ever gotten. He turns his head and leans in to press a kiss to Remus’s left shoulder for that before hoisting his suitcase off of the porch floor to carry it down the steps, his heart rate picking up as they descend toward Hope’s garden, a promising spot he only saw once over video chat, but it is that much better in person.

He takes in the windy, cobblestone path they step onto off from the foot of the stairs and seems to twist and turn throughout the garden. “I’m going to lose my mind, Remus,” Sirius insists, surging forward to skip along the path. “Did Hope lay all these down?”

“She and my dad did over spring,” Remus offers, smiling back there by the sound of it. “It’s been their little project, the whole path situation.”

Sirius puts out an overcome noise, loving the image of the two of them laying the stones down. “They’re too fucking cute,” he returns, making his way through the windy path to get out of the garden, but takes in a sharp gasp as he lays his eyes upon an incredibly important sight. “The birdbath.”

“Oh Cunt, it’s even bigger in person,” Remus observes, putting out a bright laugh.

“I’m so glad it is,” Sirius returns, then pauses as he realizes the stone path beers off into two directions, one that takes you out of the garden and another that leads toward a wicker loveseat with a matching wicker roof over it. “What. The fuck, Remus?”

Remus looks around wildly for the source of Sirius’s outburst. “Oh, that’s very new,” he puts out heavily. "My mum was talking about doing that a couple weeks back, but I didn’t realize they put it up yet.”

“I’m — this is absolutely not real,” Sirius insists. “Do woodland creatures come here to gather here?”

Remus smirks for that. “At some point, you will probably see deer up here while you’re staying,” he forwards. "In the mornings when it’s quiet, they’ve come right up near the house."

“Shut up,” Sirius returns, a Londoner through and through. “That does not happen.”

Remus nods eagerly, smiling for it. “One morning, a few years back now when the garden was just your very regular set of flower beds, I wandered outside one morning with a tea and went down into the yard, and there was a stag standing there, actual steps away from me, helping himself to the grass.”

“Fuck off, that’s madness,” Sirius sends him, rolling his suitcase down the other direction to get out of the garden. “Did you get to touch it?”

“Oh, no, I was clutching my mug very tightly because I was a bit spooked at seeing it so close up,” Remus returns, following Sirius along the winding path. "I don't even think I thought about trying to put a hand out."

“How long was he there for?” Sirius asks.

“Not long, a minute or two,” Remus provides. “It was kind of intense, though; there were thirty seconds there where the two of us just stared at each other, completely unmoving, and I honestly felt like he could genuinely see into my soul.”

“Well, with one that sweet, he probably could smell it a mile away,” Sirius offers him.

“Ooh, smooth,” Remus sends him.

“Mhm mhm mhm,” Sirius hums back, rolling his suitcase off of the path as the cobblestones come to an end.

He looks off to the right where the A-Frame stands, not far from the house at all he’s happy to note, and topped off with bright blue painted wood panels and a white screen door with three steps leading up to it.

He puts his head on a tilt, finding this sort of cabin such a sight to look at in real-time. “It really is shaped like an 'A,'” he puts up.

Remus moves up on Sirius’s right. “Have you never seen one of them before?” he raises, stopping beside him with right piqued with a smile on.

“In, like, pictures and some outdoorsy-themed calendars, maybe, but not in front of me,” Sirius returns, gesturing over at it with a smile of his own. “It’s so fucking cute; why is everything so cute here?”

“Well, wait until you’re inside it,” Remus maintains.

Sirius cannot wait to check it out, very true, but he goes still as he takes in a green-and-white striped ground hammock sitting between the shorter side of the L-shaped porch and the A-frame itself. “Hammock,” he puts out jovially, dropping his suitcase and knapsack right then and there.

He takes to a sprint, gaining enough traction to launch himself onto it, and is very happy to report that it doesn’t cave in from the weight of all of his gusto. He pushes himself onto his back for a good sprawl over it, smiling over at Remus, who’s on his way over and looking quite a bit taken with him, if he does say so himself. “You’re almost too much fun to have on a house tour,” he passes along.

“Thank you,” Sirius chimes, giving a shoulder-shimmy before resting his hands behind his head and looking up at Remus with a pair of bedroom eyes on. “Ever have relations on a hammock before?”

Remus’s mouth goes from a bright smile to a pressed line, his eyebrows lifting over the frames of his sunglasses, and Sirius pauses short. “OK, I was fucking around?” he puts up, laughing there. "But wow, Remus."

“Not like, the full shebang or anything,” Remus puts up, gesturing vaguely with his hands, though he doesn’t make any specific one and then seems to think twice about committing to the bit. “Just, you know, hands and stuff.”

“Goodness gracious me,” Sirius returns daintily.

“I’ve made it sound more intentional than it was,” Remus puts in.

“Have you, though?” Sirius raises, squinting up at him.

“Well, we weren’t crossing spots off a list and high-fiving whenever we got one more down,” Remus elaborates. “There was just a lot of downtime over six years."

“I bet there was,” Sirius returns, shoulder-shimmying. “Where else have you visited, hm?”

Remus sets his hands on his hips, caught somewhere between a good pointed smile and frown. “Here and there,” he passes along.

Sirius tosses a thumb back toward the A-Frame. “Did you get it done in there?” he raises. “I bet you did.”

Remus lifts his right hand and scratches at the bridge of his nose idly. “The bed in there is great, you will see that if we ever get to that part of the tour,” he hints.

“Mhm, and we will, but what about the tall grass over there?” Sirius raises, nodding out to the vast field behind the house. “Seems like a fine place to stop and have a roll in the hay, as they call it out here.”

“Nobody calls it that here, and it got really tall at times,” Remus maintains. “If we laid down, nobody could tell if we were even out there and the grass would make a little dome around us."

“Well, how you could resist?” Sirius offers, kind of loving how openly haughty Remus is being about this. “What about the woods, Remus; he already take you there? Am I too late?”

“Well.” Remus lifts his hands. “When in the woods, it’s important to stop and enjoy the scenery—” he cuts off as Sirius flails his hands in the air, but he comes back swinging, “—that doesn’t mean I won’t want to again; guaranteed I’ll have a much better time if it’s you.”

Sirius almost loses steam there. “Well, you just wait and see how good a time it is, but here’s a quick and probably easier question,” he prefaces. “Where haven’t you had relations on this property?”

“The basement,” Remus sounds out, giving him a pointed smile.

Sirius goes for a bit of a face journey there. “Good answer,” he grins.

For someone who held his own quite well for a good while there, Remus gives himself away not by changing much about his expression but by slipping his hands into the back pockets of his trousers, and that really is Sirius’s only sign that not all is right in Remus’s world. “Hey,” Sirius bids, lifting his right leg up to prod Remus in the hip with his big toe. “I’m just teasing. Come on, with all the places I’ve dropped trou, what kind of soapbox would I have to stand on here?”

Remus budges back on Sirius’s shoe, which he has to hope is a good sign. “Not a tall one,” he replies, his mouth twisting up halfway toward a smile.

“OK, we’ve agreed on that, so why are you doing the pocket thing?” Sirius raises him. Remus moves his head back and forth in a semblance of a shake of it, but Sirius eyes his stance. “You only do that when you’re uncomfortable; well, that or you pick at your nails like you did inside, but the pocket's good a sign as any.”

Remus stares Sirius down for a few seconds, lets out a deep breath, and moves to crouch by the hammock, crossing his arms over Sirius’s waist. “I didn’t want you to start trying to put two and two together and wind up thinking that what happened back in there with us was in any way comparable to any of that with him,” he puts down, giving Sirius’s middle a small squeeze with his open, down-facing palms. "That's why the pocket thing happened; I didn’t want you getting too far ahead of me on this one."

Sirius sits after the nth time Remus has shown him just how much he gives a shit about how he feels about anything, but especially this. "I appreciate how hard you're looking out for me right now, but I really wasn’t giving you actual shit for seeing someone before me, OK?" he raises. "I’m just a lot when I get going, you know that.”

“No, but I could understand if it’d be hard for you to hear all of that and not to compare how I was with him to how I am with you when everything is so confusing right now,” Remus insists. "And instead of not saying anything about it and risking you coming to that confusion without me, I think it's important to differentiate here that you and me, us, how we are during, how attentive you are to me and what kind of a time I’m having, how I feel when I’m with you, all of it; I didn’t know this was a thing I could actually have, but it feels big every single time, be it a quickie in a torture chamber or not, it’s amazing no matter what we’re doing or where we're doing it and that, is new for me.”

“Boy, you have no idea,” Sirius returns, regaining the ability to move and using it to cart his right hand up through Remus’s fringe. “I’ve never had this much fun with anyone, full stop; you and me, we're something else.”

Remus gives into a sunshine smile that directly rivals that “official” sun pouring its rays out over the property around them. “I laugh so much more with you,” he keeps on, and thank Cunt he did; Sirius breathes in and out quietly, unable to handle how Remus can sometimes read his mind without knowing he’s even doing it. “I had that with him for a while, but it really fizzled out toward the end. I know we’re just getting started in a way, but the fact that we’re still cracking up like that this far in? It’s a really big deal for me.”

“It’s huge for me, too,” Sirius returns, his mouth all twisted up. “And you know what, even if I had been freaking out about comparing the two of us, the answer to that is really quite simple—” he pauses to gesture around at the Lupin abode for emphasis with his free hand, “—look where I am and who brought me here; I passed the biggest checkpoint there is with you and I couldn’t refute that if I tried.”

“Good, stay with that,” Remus puts down.

Sirius passes his right thumb back and forth over Remus’s left temple. “I wasn’t giving you genuine shit, OK?” he puts down, passing his right thumb over Remus’s left eyebrow, tracing into the shallow divot going through it that’s likely near-permanent now but almost feels like it’s been there for ages. “I was just surprised, is all.”

“Over?” Remus checks.

“Well, from the whole big, bad secret thing,” Sirius raises. “I would’ve thought trying it out in the open would be difficult to talk yourself into, even with that adventurous side of yours; it just threw me and I flailed around and made a lot of noise to combat it, I guess.”

Remus leans his head down on his arms, facing Sirius. “Well, in general, it was either we went to my house or his, and his dad has a home office so he worked from home half the time and he had his brother and his sister there so there was always someone lingering around at his; there was absolutely no privacy there and we were doing tutoring sessions too, so we needed a place that was more subdued already,” he offers. “My place worked, and when one or both of my parents were on leave, they were either at the hospital or back home with my dad recovering, so they weren’t constantly checking in on us, and then, when times were as good as they could be for us again, they’d be in and out of the house and wouldn’t exactly hover when they were home, they didn’t come looking for us out on the trails, and interestingly, condoms wouldn’t magically turn up on top my dresser when they knew he’d be coming by later that day, but a box sure did turn up there once I started bringing Angela over to hang out.”

Sirius fizzles there, giving himself away to a full snicker fest. “I’m sorry, that’s funny.”

“Mhm,” Remus chimes in reply, and even he’s starting to laugh more at the oddity of the situation and that’s some fucking progress in and of itself. “I hit sixteen and that was their version of flying an ‘if you’re going to do it, please use one of these,’ conversation toward me.”

Sirius sends out a round of huffy laughs. “Did you repurpose them?”

Remus takes a hold of his lower lip between his teeth, shaking his head no, his expression half-amused, half something else, and Sirius leans in, waiting for Remus to bend to his will. “They were too small,” he confesses.

Sirius acts like he’s been shot, laying back on the hammock and clutching his chest fast. “That was so much better than I thought it’d be,” he puts out.

“I just stuck with my regular fit and just left that pack where it was,” Remus tacks on, breaking into a laugh at the end of it. “They must still be there because I sure didn’t toss them should they've gotten the wrong impression or thought I was scoffing at their effort, but that means I’ve, like, eight-year-old condoms up there that I’m still not sure what to do with.”

“Again, balloon animals,” Sirius chimes.

“Well, if there’s a time to learn a new skill, maybe vacation’s it,” Remus offers.

Sirius turns in a little toward him on the hammock, reaching to tap the tip of Remus’s nose with his left forefinger. “You didn’t even flinch when his name came up,” he mentions. "I was impressed, to say the least."

“Well, it’s like I said, it happens now and again,” Remus offers, switching to his knees on the ground to give his ankles a rest, Sirius bets. “I know he's not fishing or doing it to be a punk about it; he’s just talking about someone we have in common.”

Sirius nods, twirling another lock of Remus’s hair up and around his right forefinger. “I think I'm starting to see just how many moving parts there were to this whole thing,” he says, speaking it between them. “I mean, truthfully, if I hadn’t already known and was hearing you two talk about him, I don’t think I’d have even guessed you two had a thing, so just being able to see the way you handled that, I can see why they wouldn’t have guessed that you two even had a something if that’s how you are about him whenever he comes up, but then that’s also helping to put your nerves about all of this into perspective even more for me, you know?”

Remus barely moves his head, caught between a shake of his head and a nod, but that’s a call to keep on going if Sirius has ever seen one. “You going along with the assumptions they made early on, ‘those two study-buddy pals are off on a hike again, just some boy time,’ probably felt the safest thing to let them think at the time, especially with the big secret element being put in your head, and eventually them figuring that Angela was going to be your first experience instead probably felt like another sign that you were doing well in keeping the secret and I can just imagine it reinforced you to keep speaking nonchalantly about him when things were good with him because you had a decoy, but then I imagine that also allowed you the ability to be so nonchalant about it when he'd come up in conversation while things weren’t so good between you two, and then afterwards, when things had finally ended with him and up until now, where he's just a name that comes up, so I think I get it; this is a lot more complicated than I even gave you credit for, but I'm learning.”

Remus scoots over on his knees, leaning over Sirius’s chest from the side of the hammock, and kisses him with a firm press of his lips, a patient tongue to contrast, and a left hand pressed to Sirius’s jaw with a softness to it that takes the thank-you kiss that much further. Sirius lets Remus end it where he sees fit, stares up at him with a pair of soft eyes as Remus keeps hold of his face like he’s not quite ready to let it go fully yet, and Sirius isn’t sure he’s ready to let him either. “I’ve been so nervous that we’d finally get here and you’d think ‘well, what has he been worried about this whole time?’” Remus divulges, swallowing after it.

Sirius shakes his head best he can with Remus still holding it so carefully. "I get you and this situation much more than I did before we even took this hammock break, so maybe this could be another lesson in ‘Remus talking about his past lives gets us further than when he doesn’t,’” he raises. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s a case-by-case basis,” Remus whispers at him pointedly.

“Better than nothing,” Sirius whispers back, just as pointedly.

Remus pushes back from the hammock with a laugh through his nose, though he stays knelt by Sirius. “This has been the most disastrous house tour that's ever occurred, I think,” he puts up, smiling wryly for it.

“Disastrous, or completely in character for us?” Sirius raises.

“Both,” Remus allows.

“One quick thing before we get back to it?” Sirius bids, and Remus nods for it. “Was it just me or does Lyall not appear to like him all that much?”

Remus smirks there, making a doozy of a pointed face. “He likes Tom just fine,” he offers him. “It’s his dad that he’s not too keen on.”

Sirius gives out a throaty trill at the prospect of getting even a little bit of tea on this matter. “Why, why, why?” he repeats, prodding Remus’s left shoulder thrice in time with it.

Remus huffs a laugh, budging against Sirius’s third prod. “Well, some of it’s got to do with the never-ending Cambridge talking point for sure,” he offers, giving a head tilt back and forth, “but in general they just rub each other the wrong way; my dad’s never really been one to make nice with uppity folks and Tom’s dad is one to look down his nose at you when you’re in conversation with him, so it was never to be.”

Sirius nods before smacking his lips once. “That was a lovely, Sunday school version of it, but I was asking for the deets, Remus,” he asserts.

Remus’s shoulders sink a little there. “I don’t know how to say more without making us sound like terrible people,” he muses.

“Um, literally impossible,” Sirius puts in. “Go.”

Remus makes a long-suffering face, but there’s a hint of a smile happening and Sirius knows he’s just got to wait with a pleasant smile on for the details, and in total Sirius has to wait seven seconds for Remus to comply. “We dunk on Edgar’s sort quite a bit,” he admits. “My dad’s favourite theory about him is that he drives his Audi through the muck on purpose just so he can parade it into the shop and get it washed by my dad or any one of his coworkers.”

Ah,” Sirius drags out. “Any weight to that theory?”

Remus’s eyebrows raise high above his sunglasses. “An anvil,” he puts it.

Sirius's eyes brighten. “Did the apple fall far from the tree there?” he checks.

Remus gives a tentative hum behind a tight smile, tilting his head back and forth in consideration, and Sirius hums in harmony with it, budging up on Remus’s arms crossed over him to get him to say it. “He was aware enough to take the mickey out of his dad when he was being particularly insufferable, but not quite so self-aware enough to notice when he was parroting something his dad would have absolutely said,” he extends him, and Sirius taps the tip of his nose once in understanding. “In any case, my dad’s never got on well with hoity-toits, as you’d call them, and, well, did that apple fall far from this tree? Not very.”

Sirius briefly considers leaving it alone, but he just can’t hold it in. “OK, but have you met me?” he raises, gesturing at himself. “Why would I have thought you were terrible for that?”

“We have gotten into it over things like this,” Remus raises delicately.

“What, when?” Sirius cross-examines.

“Our first date,” Remus puts down. “And many instances after that, so there are some things I have to be careful about disclosing.”

Sirius panics for a beat. “Which one do you count as our first?” he checks.

“Well, since I've found out that you consider the laundromat having been one, then if we get down to it my first time coming over to the Flat probably counts as a date and that would make it the first one,” Remus theorizes.

A lock and key click in Sirius’s head. “And with what I planned to do to you that night?” he raises. “You’re completely right; that was the first.”

“Well, we got into a spat over class inequalities and ticking time clocks on our first date, then,” Remus reiterates.

“OK, but I thought you were calling me a spoiled brat who didn't know what he was talking about after only knowing me for three weeks, and I sure don’t do well with being called something like that, do I?” Sirius counters, and Remus nods once, letting him have that. “Shitting on hoity-toits, however, is my area of expertise; I’ve trained extensively in the field and have earned that right, in fact.”

“Shitting on pretension is more your style, though, and has become more of ours over time,” Remus puts up.

“Well, are we saying that Tom’s papa is rich but not pretentious about it?” Sirius queries.

“Oh, definitely not,” Remus returns. “He’s a packaged deal, I’m afraid, but I still felt the need to be careful.”

“Well, I say it’s time his Audi met a dozen eggs,” Sirius raises, giving Remus a wicked smile.

Remus huffs directly at him, wagging a finger at him. “The point is, they get on well enough when they see each other because they live in the same town and sort of have to, but what you saw is what my dad does after a run-in with the man; he brings the salt.”

“I love Lyall’s salt,” Sirius puts in avidly. “I want more of his salt, even.”

“You will get it,” Remus insists knowingly. He reaches to tap Sirius’s stomach twice with his right hand. “He really likes you, by the way.”

“Yeah?” Sirius probes, his eyes lighting right back up again.

“Oh, yeah,” Remus affirms, flashing him a grin. “Good work ushering him up front, by the way.”

Sirius feels as if he’s sucked all the energy out of the sun for how good that makes him feel. “Thank you,” he accepts, genuinely grateful for the mention. “I honestly couldn’t believe he was going for the back.”

Remus gives a laugh that takes his whole chest up and back down with it, pushing himself to stand and reaching to extend his right hand to Sirius. “That's just my dad; he really would have gone and sat there, he’s just that unbothered, but I loved how fast you turned that around,” he maintains, helping Sirius to stand.

“You'll have to quit stealing my thunder, then,” Sirius addresses, bumping Remus as he passes him to get to the luggage he dropped nearby.

“When did I do that?” Remus raises, turning up just by Sirius to grab hold of the backpack with an imploring expression on.

“No more getting doors for him; that’s my job now,” Sirius maintains, going for the handle of his suitcase. “I need my thoughtfulness to be on full display here and I can’t do that with you around, taking all of my chances.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” Remus insists, heading for the A-frame steps. “It was automatic.”

“I know that,” Sirius returns, lifting his suitcase to carry it over with him. “Hope and Lyall are already well aware you’re a cherub, but they need to realize I’m one, too, so I’m going to need you to hold back on your Good Boy Remus impulses, at least for tonight.”

“Right, and then you can stand back and let me get all of the doors,” Remus reiterates.

“Exactly,” Sirius jests. “Though, who are we kidding, am I going to stop there?”

“I do doubt that,” Remus says of it, going up the steps ahead of Sirius to get the door. “My mum said she’d switch the power on in here this morning, so everything should be working.”

He heads inside, holding the door open for Sirius to wrangle his suitcase in through the doorway, and Sirius drops it, has a look up and around at the shape of the cabin, and the little bedroom area in front of them, and he does have to say it’s a lot like a swanky hotel room. The two things he’s most excited about are the bed and the massive, triangular window over it that showcases a prime view of the backend of the property, and therefore, gives the property a prime view of the bed, too.

“Those blinds close, yeah?” Sirius checks.

“Oh, yeah,” Remus affirms, smirking as he props Sirius’s guitar up against the wall.

“Good, ‘cause I plan on taking you over every inch of this cabin, and I needed you to know that and for me to know that the blinds would do us a solid when that happens,” Sirius puts up.

Remus leaves Sirius’s knapsack near the guitar, steps over to Sirius, and leaves a peck on his lips. “They’re solid blinds,” he doubles down. "Can’t see a thing if they’re drawn.”

Sirius sneaks a little longer of a kiss out of Remus, but his lips are plush and still have a rosy tint to them from how much they sucked face during their romp, so Sirius considers it fair game and Remus seems to think it fair, too, given that he lets a contented breath out through his nose as Sirius pulls back from him.

Sirius flashes him a smile after it, has another look around, and heads down the hall off the main room and finds he now has two choices: left or right. On the left, the previously advertised kitchenette area complete with a compacted blue and black checkered counter space, a portable burner, and the ancient, mint green fridge with a silver handle and suction sealing so powerful that Sirius thinks he’s actually travelled back in time a good eight decades when he pulls it open to have a look at the bare shelves inside of it.

“A mint fridge?” Sirius calls out. “Fuck off, Remus.”

“I didn’t choose the colour of the fridge," he maintains. "I wasn’t alive then.”

“This is just beyond,” Sirius puts out. "Why mint?"

"I think it's just what they brought home way back when."

Sirius shuts the fridge door and heads down the opposite way from the kitchenette toward a door to what he has to assume is the bathroom. He pokes his head into the small room, spotting an even smaller, tinted window on the left that overlooks a tub that certainly does take up most of the overall room as advertised and also makes the toilet, sink, and the world's smallest mirror above it over on the right side of the room look a bit bunched together as a result, but it's cute and that's more or less what you want out of a cabin bathroom.

He heads back to the main room where Remus is having a sit at the little complimentary desk and chair set sitting pushed up against the wall on the left-hand side of the bed and to the right of the doorway. “I want a mint everything now,” he announces.

Remus smirks. “I mean, we could take that task on, but it could be a while before we have everything swapped out.”

“That’s fine with me,” Sirius offers, having a peek inside a wooden cabinet across from the bed and finding the telly in there, “it’s more of a ten-year plan.”

“Then that, I think we could do,” Remus returns, taking his sunglasses off and leaving them on the desk. “Check out the bed, you know you want to.”

And with that, Sirius flies at it, finding it to be on par with the couch in the sitting room in regards to plush comfort. “Why haven’t you stolen this bed for your room?”

“It’s not really my room anymore,” Remus offers.

“No, but it was, like, two years ago?” Sirius returns. “Why didn’t you steal it earlier than that?”

Remus waves it off. “A queen would have looked funny in it,” he says evenly.

Sirius projects himself back into Remus’s room and superimposes the queen-sized mattress he’s on into the corner where Remus’s single had been, and while it wasn’t a small room necessarily, more quaint than anything else, he can sort of see why a queen would've looked a bit out of place to him. “Fine, you win,” he extends, rolling onto his back. “I can’t believe I let you rail me in a torture chamber when this was here the whole time.”

“Next time’s the charm,” Remus offers, giving in to a yawn.

“What are you doing over there?” Sirius raises.

“That porno we were just in really tuckered me out,” Remus trades him.

Sirius beams grand. “Come here, then,” he coaxes, reaching out toward him with a set of grabby hands.

“No, I can’t; I’m spent, Sirius,” Remus professes. “If I lay down now, I will crash.”

“We have time for a nap, don’t we?” Sirius raises, and after Remus’s disagreeing expression, he looks toward the digital clock on the nightstand to the right of the bed. “It’s not even ten yet.”

“And we’ve a whole day of exploring ahead of us that I don’t want to waste snoozing,” Remus tacks on.

“Who says it’d be a waste?” Sirius frowns, eyeing the rather pronounced circles around Remus’s eyes. “First of all, we're on vacation so you’ve a Cunt-given right to snooze whenever you damn well please, and second, we've the rest of the morning and all afternoon to peruse around the town, and third, while you do look rugged and dangerous with those bags under your eyes, I am feeling a tad responsible for them.”

Remus shakes his head, not even letting that land for a second. “I was the one up all night,” he raises.

“After I kept you up most of the night before,” Sirius tacks on. “All I’m saying is, you're running on fumes here; you can take a snooze break.”

“Last time I tried that I got kiss-bombed,” Remus mentions. “And believe me, I’m not complaining about it, but I don’t know that I should be—”

Sirius’s whole chest wilts along with him. “Remus, I know I had a low point, but I don’t want to have to need you every second of this trip,” he presses. “And I don’t want you feeling like you can’t close your eyes around me, so please, just get some rest and we can pick right back up where we left off after.”

Remus breathes in long and sighs it back out. “Only half an hour, OK?” he raises, lifting off of his chair.

“Coming up,” Sirius says of it, flashing his mobile at him.

Remus goes around the edge of the bed, moves up on the right side of it as that is his regular spot, and curls into Sirius’s body, setting his left arm across his stomach and his head propped up against his shoulder, a manoeuvre Sirius had been quietly gunning for and now gets to reap the benefits of; not a bad turn of events at all.

He sneaks his own left arm around Remus’s shoulders and brings his hand up to trace his fingertips over the nape of Remus’s neck while he sets the alarm with his right one, hearing a muffled laugh come from Remus.

Sirius sets his mobile down beside him on the bed and turns his gaze on Remus, but he can only see tufts of curls from here. “Mm?” he bids.

Remus shifts his head up so Sirius can see the light smile he has on. “I’ve had 'You Raise Me Up' in my head since yesterday,” he offers, his voice low.

Sirius snorts, leaning his head down to leave a kiss on Remus’s forehead. “Real sorry about that.”

“Don’t be,” Remus insists sleepily, settling his head down again with his eyes shut this time. “I like the idea of you going full worship band leader on everyone.”

Sirius gives into a smirk. “You know, James was actually preserving my honour about that.”

“Was he?”

“Mhm; the performance was really more at the sweet spot between worship band leader and that hoe over there.”

“Oh, that, I’d already assumed.”

“Listen, it was out of my hands; my hips go everywhere first, I just let them tell me where we’re going and follow their lead.”

“And I, fucking know that.”

Sirius huffs a few, purposefully internal laughs for the sake of Remus’s dozy state, but Remus presses his wry smile to Sirius’s chest, adds a bit of pressure to make it a kiss, and settles in once more, and this time, Sirius is pretty sure he’s on the road to Snoozeville. He leaves him to it, quickly tacking another ten minutes onto Remus’s allotted time and thinking a little longer than requested might be nice for him, just not too long that he’ll come out the other side regretting it. He sets it back down, turns in toward Remus just a little bit, and thankfully Remus hardly reacts, only adjusts his head a little, and that has him thinking that if by some chance Remus doesn't actually get a complete snooze in, maybe having a lay down could be just what the guy needs.

The sun’s facing elsewhere at the present moment and therefore not beating in through the window above their heads, but there’s enough light shining in via the open blinds for Sirius to be able to see the sparing sandy strands mixed in with the rest of Remus’s brunette locks, and Sirius can’t help lifting his hand from the back of Remus’s neck to thread his fingers up through it, gentle enough with his movements that he hopes he isn’t keeping Remus from sleep.

From the looks of it, Remus is either too close to sleep to mind or he’s already there, and really, it’s not at all unnatural for Sirius to cart his fingers through it, perhaps it’s a common enough occurrence that it doesn’t even stick out to him. Sirius reaches his right hand up, hovering his thumb over Remus’s left brow, down his cheek, his jaw, and stops it at his neck before snuggling in himself and dropping his left hand from Remus’s hair, wondering if he might be able to snooze, too, and smiles to himself as Remus makes a little noise in his throat; a tiny objection. Sirius puts his hand back where it was, curls his fingers back in the mop on Remus's head, and traces little circles over his scalp with his nails, keeping it slow, methodical, and hoping it helps soothe him.

Sirius can’t say he gets any sleep though he does try, he’s just too wired. The good thing is, he’s in an A-frame cabin in Wales while Remus is cozied up beside him, so it could be a lot worse for him. He opens his eyes again after a while, staring up at the meeting point between the two sides of the tall roof and thinking about going and exploring a little more, but he ought to save it all for Remus to be present for; he does very enjoy Sirius’s live reactions.

Instead, Sirius picks his mobile back up and starts thumbing around on it, thinking he can waste a bit of data until he can get the wifi password off of Remus. He’s only just got his browser loading back to its most recent page when a text comes in from James, and thank Cunt he was already messing around on his mobile for Shania doesn’t blast out to alert him about it and wake Remus as a result.

Sirius taps on the message, even though it’s short and sweet enough to see it in the little blurb at the top of his screen.

Good luck, fool

Sirius lifts his gaze to the ceiling, taking in a deep breath and smiling for a lot of reasons: the sentiment, the crass execution that’s completely true to form, the fact that he already said good luck before leaving Remus’s place but felt he needed to forward one more along, the fact that he waited until past nine to send it over to his extremely anti-early morning mate.

Remus moves in his sleep, giving a big stretch before curling back in against Sirius, his head ending up closer than it was before, and Sirius tucks his own in, leaving his smile pressed to his forehead, and thumbs out a reply, feeling quite surrounded by his favourite people.

i won’t need it, you tit

He sends a heart emoji along after it, lays with that thing called guilt festering in his stomach, and definitely jolts as his alarm sounds off, stirring Remus into the waking world again, but that’s some good timing, even if it was a bit startling. Remus curls in more, breathing in through his nose as he peers up at Sirius through lidded eyes, and soon drops the wry smile on his lips past Sirius’s chest, hiding it from him. Sirius pushes an amused breath through his nose, wiggles down the bed so they’re side to side, and hovers a big ol’ smile in front of Remus’s sleepy face.

“Put that away,” Remus orders, placing his left hand directly over Sirius’s face.

Sirius trills behind his hand, feeling rather precious about that one. “Are you feeling better?”

Remus nods while he uses his free hand to rub at his eyes. “I am, thanks,” he offers, dropping his other hand from Sirius’s visage.

“It’s OK to have it out now?” Sirius raises, circling his right hand around it.

“Barely,” Remus returns, pushing off of the bed and wandering out of the room. “Just going to use the loo and then, did you want to go see my favourite spot on the planet?”

Yes,” Sirius sends back powerfully.

“Used your whole chest with that one.”

“I needed to.”

Before long a flush echoes back his way, another few seconds and the sound of the taps running takes over, and before long, Remus makes his reappearance, garnering Sirius to finally lift off of the bed. He goes for his knapsack, kneeling before it and taking his cigarettes out of the front pouch, and slips the pack into his back-right jeans pocket, heading for the door.

"Hold on, sunscreen," Remus bids, pulling the tube out of his pocket and coming for Sirius. "We'll be out in the sun for a while."

Sirius smiles warmly, extending his arms up and out for Remus to rub his arms down. "Am I forgiven yet for picking the Henley?" he checks.

"Yes and no," Remus answers plainly, on to rubbing sunscreen into Sirius's cheeks. "You look horrifyingly good today."

"Same to you, pal," Sirius returns lively.

"Do you want me to do your ankles?" Remus raises.

"Why, I wouldn't mind at all," Sirius gives him, and Remus stoops down to handle that while Sirius messes around with Remus's hair some since his head's right there anyway.

Remus rises to his feet once finished and Sirius swipes the tube from him, working on Remus's arms and face before gesturing for him to twirl around, and it'd sure be something if Remus did twirl but he just turns around instead. He leaves the sunscreen on the desk and hands Remus's sunglasses over to him since he's nearer to them, and heads out the A-frame door, taking a leap over the three steps and landing on the ground with his left hand pointed toward the house and the right one off into the distance. “Which direction?”

“The entryway first,” Remus imparts, shutting the door behind them. “We’re going to need our shoes for the trail.”

With that, Sirius heads back toward the cobblestone path to get back to the porch, but Remus turns up with a hand at Sirius’s back, gently guiding him back toward the hammock.

“What‘s your angle, pal?” Sirius asks, definitely going with Remus’s guidance anyway.

“Well, there’s this thing called the side of the house which we could just skirt around to get back to the front,” Remus replies enticingly, leading Sirius around the right side of the hammock.

They pass below the short side of the L-shaped porch, walking in between a row of trees on their left and the house on their right, and at about halfway down sits a bin with a number of logs sitting in it. “Can we make a fire?” Sirius asks.

Remus smirks heavily through his nose. “Not off to a great start with a sentence like that.”

“I mean in the fireplace, not just in the street,” Sirius returns, snickering.

“Then, yes, definitely,” Remus assures, leading Sirius out into the front yard and up to the front door. “We even have one of those fireplace blowers, and you can push it all you like if you want.”

“I am going to push it so much I’ll keep that fire ablaze myself,” Sirius manifests.

“I’m sure you will,” Remus returns amusedly, heading into the foyer and returning in very little time at all with both their pairs of shoes.

He lets them fall to the porch wherein they both work their feet into their respective pairs, and Sirius hangs back while Remus shuts the front door again and turns back for the stairs.

“Uh, we’re just leaving the door like that?” Sirius asks, tossing a thumb back at it.

Remus stops at the top of the porch stairs, looking over his shoulder at him. “We don’t really lock it unless there’s nobody else home,” he forwards. “We’re not leaving just yet, we’re just going on a little quest.”

Sirius scoffs haughtily. “After all the shit you've given us about leaving our door unlocked and then here you are, being Mr. Fucking Chill About It,” he returns.

“Well, the difference between living out in the Rhondda Valley and living in London might just be a large one,” Remus puts up, heading down the stairs.

“I just think it’s funny, thassal,” Sirius puts up taking the stairs with a dainty swing of his hips. “But really though, what’s the rule around here for that? I don’t want to mess it up.”

“Go with unlocked during the day unless we’re the last to leave and locked at night and you won’t mess up a thing,” Remus passes along, leading them back toward the backyard via the grassy pass alongside the house.

“If you could bring on the same unfailing opinion of my abilities to your own, you would be unstoppable,” Sirius puts down, following Remus into the backyard.

“Well, that goes for you, too,” Remus forwards, heading past the hammock with an easy stroll.

Sirius sends him an indignant noise, but lets that come to a standstill, and then as they pass the A-frame he switches to excitement again when he remembers they’re going on a quest. “Don’t even try to tell me where we’re going,” he imparts. “I want to be surprised.”

“Deal,” Remus assures, reaching to clasp Sirius’s right left hand and nodding ahead of them. “All I’ll say is we’re going straight.”

“Could never be me,” Sirius puts in, falling into a stroll alongside Remus, who’s busy pressing a long fart noise into his free palm. “Yeah, yeah, yeah; not like you love it or anything.”

Remus quits the antics, dropping his hand and leaning further into Sirius’s frame as they stroll, and Sirius watches him sidelong as Remus takes a good look around at the field, finding the act contagious and following suit. “Where do they usually cut off in terms of mowing this deep stretch of land you have here,” Sirius raises, quite piqued.

Remus hums there, pointing northwest of them. “That line of trees up there is usually where my dad calls it quits,” he relays.

“Fair enough,” Sirius accepts, when it’s quite a section to work with as is.

“It’s taller than I was expecting it to be with all the yard work that’s been done lately, but then again, I’m not sure how the mower’s been faring these days,” Remus raises thoughtfully, then trains his head down and to the right, looking down at Sirius’s cuffed jeans. “I hope it doesn’t bother your ankles too much when we get further in.”

“Can’t say I’ve noticed a prickling,” Sirius offers, strolling along easily.

“Mm, you might in a bit,” Remus warns.

“Well, listen, if you two went and found a nice spot out there to do the do, I feel like my ankles will live,” Sirius theorizes.

Remus sends out a horse-like puff of breath. “We didn’t get starkers for the field times,” he forwards. “Those were more of a, 'pull things down to make it work and once we're done, it’ll look like we’ve been studying diligently this whole time,' sort of thing.”

Sirius snorts freely there. “There is no way in hell they thought you were just doing school work,” he insists, and Remus’s entire face drops. “No, I'm saying, smoking something, having a brew, that sort of grass mischief; that’s all I meant.”

Remus relaxes his facial muscles there, budging Sirius for the fright. “It’s possible they did, but they never came looking with intent to bust me,” he extends, though there he pushes out a laugh through his nose, smiling sidelong at Sirius. “Although, one time—“

“Yes,” Sirius hisses, fishing his pack out with his free hand. “It’s going to be good, I can tell already.”

“OK, but this was from far earlier and back when we first moved in here, so just a kid at the time, remember that,” Remus prefaces, reaching up to cup his free hand around Sirius’s one-handed cigarette & lighter manoeuvre to shield them from the wind and pausing to see if it helped any, and Sirius nods eagerly as he puffs on the end of it, getting a good flame going. “The backyard and the field at large were very exciting to me, and one day, maybe only a week or two into our stay, I went out here looking to explore, sift through the grass, pretend I was in the jungle, that sort of thing, and my mum and dad were inside somewhere and grandad was out on one of the deck chairs so I told him where I was planning to go, the problem was that I set off on my expedition without saying where I was going loud enough.”

“Oh, oh no,” Sirius says of it, going for a new haul.

“I brought a book with me because I always had a book with me,” Remus says circumstantially, “so once I found that I’d sufficiently explored, I lay down to read with all this grass around, obscuring me from everything but the sky, and fell asleep at some point, leading to the Great Remus Search of ‘02.”

Sirius lets his haul out in a fast stream to the side, giving him a sidelong grimace though his eyes are alive with curiosity. “And, turns out, what I thought was a short nap was really more like a couple hours of me being conked out, so my mum was in an absolute upheaval, thinking I’d been lost to the wolves — not literally, though I do have a slight sense it might've crossed her mind,” Remus tacks on. “I finally made my way back to the house, but I had no idea I’d been out there most of the afternoon, not answering to the call of my name, and Sirius, when I came upon the backyard and my mum and dad lay eyes on me, I’d accepted it: I was going to have to pack my things and go.”

Sirius snorts there, sending an easy stream out of his mouth. “You poor thing,” he returns.

“No, not poor me,” Remus denies. “Poor my mum; she was beside herself, and my dad was irate.”

“I can’t even imagine irate Lyall,” Sirius mentions, smirking around his cigarette.

“Mm, he was juggling my mum and the fact that he didn’t have any of the answers either so he wasn’t in a prime mood,” Remus puts in. “He doesn’t go off the rails often, but when he does, the best hope you can have is that you can stay out of his way and wait for him to put on Fleetwood; then, you know you’re in the clear.”

Sirius lets his lungful out with a curiosity-soaked laugh. “Oh?” he raises, going for a deep, Liverpool-laden lilt from there. “Not the Beatles?”

Remus snorts once. “Oh, no no,” he denies. “He’s not very comfortable with his anger so he has to leave and simmer down elsewhere, and Beatles aren't what he tends to put on when he’s in a state; I don’t know if it’s that he doesn’t want to mix the two, mess up the connotation he’s got with them or what have you, but it was always Fleetwood and in particular, the opening bars of 'Landslide' could fill little me with this complete sense of calm, knowing that my dad was on the mend and things were going be OK, and I’ll be honest, even when I hear it come on to this day, I still sort of deflate with unmistakable relief; it’s odd, I’m sure, the way I’m saying it.”

“No, you did fine,” Sirius returns, giving the back of Remus’s hand a swipe with his left thumb. “So, 'Landslide' could be heard that day, I’d imagine?”

“Later that night, yes,” Remus affirms.

“How grounded were you, though?” Sirius checks, knocking the cherry off of his cigarette with three quick flicks.

Remus gives a vague hum. “Grounding didn’t really work for me,” he offers.

Sirius snorts, looking sidelong at him as he pockets the end of his cigarette. “I mean, didn’t really work for me either but it sure happened anyway,” he returns, but even Sirius can tell it sounded sour.

“Well, it wasn’t—” Remus starts, stops, breathes in beside him.

“Alright, I promise I didn’t actually want it to sound that snarky,” Sirius instils, frowning at the ground. “I just thought saying it didn’t work was a funny way to phrase it because what kid is jazzed about being grounded? Come on, boy.”

Remus is quiet for probably ten seconds in real-time, but in Remus-time that means he’s panicking internally. “It really didn’t work for me, though,” he extends. “I’d give myself so much shit for getting in trouble that they saw grounding me as overkill; like that day, I knew I’d made my mum bawl and my dad livid, so I went and put myself in timeout.”

Sirius is real torn right about here, the anecdote so perfectly Remus that it’s funny in a sense, definitely sweet, too, and enough to get a breathy laugh leaving his nose, but there are two anvils weighing his stomach down; one there to scold him for not having predicting that already and the other he likes even less than the former when it carries the sharp bolt of envy with it.

It’s not a new feeling, but there’s no way around it either: he hasn't a single clue what that would have been like. When he and James were eleven, they accidentally flooded the Potters’ upstairs bathroom and he didn’t see James outside of school for a week. Same year, he fed Peter’s dog a sprinkle-covered doughnut hole, she went and ralphed that and everything else in her stomach onto Pete's mum's favourite rug, and after Peter took the fall for it, he wasn’t allowed to come out with them for a week either. It was just about the only thing that got him feeling like he wasn’t the only one who got into trouble at home; granted, his groundings came from dragging mud into the foyer from outside and for that, he'd often felt like there wasn’t a ton of fair scoring happening there, but he was at the very least aware that his friends did get punished for wrongdoings, too.

By that age, it wasn’t difficult for him to pinpoint the differences between his family and the others around them, but early on in that journey, it was more to do with playing and kid stuff: being permitted to run around in the Potters’ backyard and burn all the energy inside of him that was just bursting to be let out, to get to be rowdy, talk at a volume louder than a dulcet tone without consequence, it was all so invaluable, so needed.

Back then, trips over to James's, Peter’s, or Marlene's felt like field trips, with little perks like treats in the mid-afternoon and, sometimes, getting to eat lunch in front of the telly, even. Other times, meals were enough to trip him up, and particularly sit-down dinners; offers for second helpings or a bit of video games after dinner were exciting once he got used to them, but at first? Sirius was certain he was being tested. His mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins, governess, everyone; they'd all tested him here and there before, in one way or another, seeing if his manners had set in properly, and who could say their mums and dads weren’t doing the same thing? Who was to say they wouldn’t be reporting back to his mother to let her know whether he'd passed or not? In those early days, sat rigid with his elbows never touching the table, declined a lot of those offers for seconds, and didn’t take the controller from James when it was his turn to, but James prodded that out of him eventually because James is James and if everyone at his table was getting seconds and he was allowed to play a game after dinner, then Sirius should've been allowed, too; end of story.

Later on, once he hit his teens, and he and every one of his friends hit puberty in or around the same year at school and subsequently went ballistic, talking back to one's parents became customary in a way. Sirius sure did it, got a lot of shit for doing it, but going over to his friend's places and watching it happen could get grating on occasion. During one of James’s particularly moodier evenings, Sirius watched him get up from the table and trudge off to do something, as he made very sure to announce as he left the dining room, way more exciting to him than dinner was, and felt absolutely mortified by it. He ended up doing both of their sets of dishes to make sure he’d be invited back again, just on the off-chance that Mr. and Mrs. Potter thought to trace that behaviour back to his influence, and helped with the dishes the next time, the time after that, and on and on like so, and if he had to credit the specifics as to when and where he graduated from James’s school friend to pseudo-son territory, he might just have to give it to those post-dinner conversations at the sink with Mrs. Potter, so thanks, James; did him a solid on that one, too, in the end.

The Potters were a once-in-a-lifetime family to have been welcomed in by, but seeing the clap backs, the snark matches, the back and forths James and his parents would get into over things and situations he felt should have been extremely easy to live with, those were the times he’d head home from their house feeling some of the most frigid and vexed and fighty, knowing exactly what he was headed home to versus the veritable oasis he’d just left.

He feels himself start to go there again and knows that can’t happen; not here, not today, not over a tale about an oopsie Remus made as a kid, and what stops him from going there isn't only because he knows it's unacceptable, but it's also to do with unbridled curiosity. Sirius wasn’t the type to put himself in timeout, didn’t need to, he’d get sent there soon enough by wave of Black-handed law, but Remus reputably did do that kind of thing and he’s a significant piece to a family dynamic that Sirius has literally never seen before; he can't not ask him more of what that even entails.

Sirius looks up as they’re heading toward a break in the trees ahead of them, marked by a trail a few steps away. “What happened after that?” he raises. “Was it just forgotten after 'Landslide' hit?”

Remus shakes his head no, pushing a breath out the left side of his mouth. “Well, on his end, yes,” he offers up, “but that’s because my mum already found me up in my room all torn up about it and explained why that couldn’t happen again, so he hardly needed to knead the point in further, and from there, the expectation was that I’d be both very loud and very clear about where I was off to, and not to just rely on telling grandad because his hearing was going a bit by then.”

He gives a shake of his head, rolling his eyes at his kid self like he was just supposed to know that back then, and already, Sirius’s hackles are easing down; the bloke still kicks himself harder than anyone else around him, even after two decades worth of self-reflection and all the work he’s done to ease off of himself in just the past year or so, but kid Remus would've been an extremely anxious tyke without the ability to grasp what that even meant, of course he didn’t get grounded the way the rest of them did.

“Hey, I'm sorry about that,” Sirius says for it, meaning it. “I got a little green there about your parents being somehow right in the middle of hands-on and hands-off in a way I just can’t fathom, I’ll be honest, but you’re a daisy so I really need to chill.”

“I’m a what?” Remus checks.

“A daisy disguised as a human,” Sirius reiterates, doubling right down now that he's gone and said it aloud, but he finds certain traction in that. “You having a situation anywhere close to as authoritative as mine would make me want to go on a rampage, so if anything, I’m glad you had parents with-it enough to see you properly and know it wasn't necessary to rag on you like that.”

Remus turns his head toward Sirius, pressing a heavy kiss against his left shoulder. “Your parents are the closest thing to make me want to go on a rampage,” he serves him, blunt as all fuck about it, and seriously, he just gets better by the second.

“I’m going get that tattooed across my back,” Sirius declares.

“Oh, well, just saying ‘thanks’ would've been enough,” Remus supplies, but his smile is just perfect.

“There’s going to be the phrase in big blocky font, then a little dash, and a cursive 'Remus Lupin' underneath,” Sirius details.

“Why change the font for my name?” Remus raises.

“Flair?” Sirius sounds out, and while he can’t see Remus’s eyes beyond his shades, he makes sure to stare extra pointedly at the lenses for emphasis.

“Well, I don’t know why I even asked,” Remus puts it, leading Sirius between rows and rows of trees on either side of the trail and looking better off already.

Remus’s favourite spot, turns out, is about a twenty-minute walk on the trail, where the section of waterfront still attached to the Lupin’s name can be found. Sirius can’t quite tell where the line starts and ends when it’s all a bit more than he was ever banking on, but he can also see why it’d be a choice place to come and be: water stretches out past either of his peripherals, there are rows and rows of piers on their side of the lake and, by the looks of it, plenty of others across the lake from them, boaters passing by on the water going in both directions, over on their left, and about four docks down from them sees a pack of kids ranging eight to twelve by a glance’s guess, three already splashing around in the water, two milling about on the dock, and two others that are just taking to a sprint off of it and ending up making quite the combined splash; it's both a serene and lively scene to have come upon, even when one of the two lads still on the dock gets blasted into the water by the other boy and pops up from under the surface quite quickly to yell 'motherfucker' at the top of his lungs — sort of adds a bit of spice to the whole thing, Sirius has to say.

Sirius smirks to himself, then wants to include Remus in it and turns his smarmy smile toward him, but finds Remus waving at a couple over on one of the boats going past. “Oh, shit, I forgot,” he puts up. “You'd know everyone here.”

“Not everyone,” Remus trades, lowering his hand. “Some more than others, and I’m sure there are new people in town these days.”

“Do you know the pottymouth over there?” Sirius raises.

“I used to babysit for three of those kids, including him,” Remus offers matter-of-factly, then his expression goes pointed. “And he did not learn that from me, thank you.”

Sirius sends out a profound pfft for that, but it's mere seconds later that the pottymouth himself catches sight of Remus and begins windmilling his hands in the water, creating two tidal waves as he calls Remus over, which only alerts the other kiddos and then it’s just a chorus of RemusRemusREMUS.

The man repeatedly getting his name called sends a smile/wave hybrid over to them. “Give me two seconds?” he bids, smiling down at Sirius while pointing off to them.

“Go, they're about to combust,” Sirius goads, waving him off.

Remus bows his head in thanks. “That one’s ours,” he supplies, pointing to the closest dock to them, but that would almost make too much sense.

Sirius wiggles his toes in his shoes as he heads down the pier, thrilled to get his feet in some of that lake. He takes a seat at the end of it, lifts his legs up, and pops his shoes off in turn, leaving them behind him on the dock. He rolls the cuffs of his jeans further up his calves and dangles his legs over the edge, dipping his toes in to test before deciding the water is absolutely delightful and he'll be dunking the rest of his feet in. He glances down the way as Remus makes it over to the pier completely taken over by children, but he doesn’t have to do much work once he gets to the edge of the water as four of the seven kids come barreling out of it and take to surrounding the guy with their heads hung back as they all talk at once, and Sirius swishes them back and forth in the water, grinning madly as he watches Remus looming over the collection of tykes like a redwood.

There’s a wonderful moment where one of them, a girl that's about two heads shorter than the rest of the pack, reaches up to tug on Remus’s left arm, vying for a chance at getting her words heard over the others; Remus teeters a little, having not seen it coming by the looks of it, and Sirius truly thinks he’s about to watch him go knees-first into the shallow water at their feet, but Remus keeps his balance in check just fine.

He makes his way back about a half-minute to a full one later, heading up the wharf behind Sirius and moving to take a seat on his left. "How’s it?” he asks, tipping a nod toward the water.

“Everything,” Sirius supplies. “I even think you’d find it nice.”

Remus hums idly, taking both his shoes off and leaving them beside Sirius’s. “July and August are usually fine for me, but if I’m in the water for too long my lips start to turn blue and that’s my cue to take a break,” he puts up, working the ankles of his corduroys up in turn.

“Fucking noted,” Sirius returns, logging that away.

“It’s not a quick thing, I have to be in it a while for that to happen,” Remus passes him, giving a flick or two of his toes in the water before sinking his own feet into it. “I did fall in there once in mid-January and that was piercing; would not recommend it.”

Sirius sends out a wounded noise. “What, when?” he demands.

“Think I was nine, so forever ago now,” Remus passes him. “It was mostly frozen over so I was able to walk on it back by the shore, but I got as far as halfway down the length of the pier and went straight through the sheet.”

“Jesus Cunt,” Sirius puts out. “How’d you get out?”

“Well, my dad was there; he went into turbo mode and wrenched me out,” Remus forwards, cracking a smile there before it falters. “And before you say anything, he saw me going for the ice and warned me not to go too far out as it wasn’t going to be solid straight across, but to me, that was just fine because I had no plans to go across the lake, just out where the pier ended, and a pair of clunker boots are still a pair of clunker boots on a child that isn't listening well so don’t get after him for it."

Sirius nods once, his face quite the blank canvas. “I wasn’t going to?” he offers tentatively.

“Well, some would,” Remus puts in, tilting his head back and forth. “He was in a state, I’d never seen him like that before; he was usually his unbothered self and then once in a while, he'd get fucked off about something, but worried? That’s my mum’s style, and him lugging me out of there, putting his coat over mine, running me back up to the house to get me warmed up; it was all a bit jarring.”

“I’m sure,” Sirius puts up, Remus’s captive audience forever and ever, Amen. “What’d he even do? I’ve never fallen through the ice before, I wouldn’t even know what the first step would be.”

“Well, he helped me get out of my wet clothes first, then we got four pairs of pyjamas on me, gathered a bunch of blankets, and he put me on the hide-a-bed in the den to huddle there while he rang my doctor for further advice, and what he got was 'get that kid as warm as can literally be,' and since I was already wearing that much and under a pile of blankets that part was already halfway covered, so then he blow-dried my hair, made me soup, and so much tea, herbal of course; I was still a young lad,” Remus details, head tilted, voice distant and present in one-go, giving the impression he’s picking up memories as he goes while peppering them with current Remus-isms here and there. “And as hard as the man worked to get me back to into top shape, I definitely had a wicked cold by morning, but he was warned that would likely be the case and therefore I was also warned of that, so it wasn’t nearly as shocking as the incident itself and was far better than the alternative would've been."

Sirius can’t for the life of him think of something he agrees with more. “Where was your mum for all that?” he raises.

Remus presses his lips together for a moment, tilting his head to the right and toward Sirius’s a bit. “She, was down in Cardiff, helping a friend of the family clear out her parent’s house after a death in the family, so it’d been a sort of boys' weekend at home — and boy, did it turn out to be that since my dad felt so bad about it and I felt so bad for scaring him, we just sort of hung out in the den and took it easy for the rest of the time it was just us two,” he forwards. "She got home later in the week and by then, my cold had subsided so the whole event was our little secret, so shh.”

Sirius takes in a sharp, overdrawn breath, clutching his chest like he’s got a string of pearls at it. “Did you shake hands about it?” he bids.

“We cheersed our mugs together?” Remus raises.

Sirius smirks. “You two are something else.”

Remus breaks for a knowing smirk there. “Well, he and I both knew that her finding out during an already somber trip would just make her feel torn between coming home early and sticking out the rest of the weekend for her friend, and I was alright, you know? Sneezing like mad and pretty useless overall,” he offers, not liking the sound of that one bit by his laboured tone. “And really, it was a fluke situation that could've been prevented had I listened to my dad’s warnings, but sometimes his unbothered, hands-off method could sound a lot like he was being facetious and that situation was where I realized I'd have to stop assuming his fairly laxed tone meant he wasn’t being serious about warning me away from things he should've been.”

“Well, you gotta learn that stuff, right?” Sirius oputs up. “Rough way to find out, but certainly a way.”

Remus nods vigorously for that. “And I definitely never fucked around with ice again, I'll say that,” he echoes, grinning tightly for a dot of punctuation.

“Oh, no?” Sirius raises, his chest rising and falling through a snicker.

“Weirdly not,” Remus returns, his mouth closing over his teeth for a wry smile.

Sirius looks out onto the water as another boat zips by, this one a little closer to shore than the others. “You really had some funky luck, huh?”

“Just, in general?” Remus checks, a dry tone about him, but a plain smile on his lips all the same.

“Well, sickly luck, I mean,” Sirius clarifies. “Not that I thought you were exaggerating or blowing it out of proportion, but it’s another thing hearing about you blasting through the ice.”

“It was more like a drop,” Remus puts in fairly, doing a little gesture of his right hand with it.

“Fine, there one moment and gone the next,” Sirius allows. “Still checks out with the way you described it.”

“Well, I was telling the truth,” Remus offers, not unkindly. “I had some fluke accidents along the way, the ice thing and the chesterfield of course, but I also caught just about everything that went around too; pox, measles, every flu, all the colds, mono later on—”

Sirius cuts in with a bark of a laugh. “Well, shit, I caught that, too,” he pipes up, holding up his right hand for a high-five.

Remus’s visage goes a little rouge there, a tentative sound coming out of his throat. “I’m not sure we’re supposed to be high-fiving for that.”

“It’s not as if you said the clap; come on now,” Sirius returns indignantly, keeping his hand up and out, but he does pause short after Remus pops his left palm up against his, squinting sidelong at him. “You didn’t catch that, did you?”

Remus puts out a pfft, shaking his head. “I managed to avoid those sorts of contagions, thank you.”

“Well, how am I to know?” Sirius raises, lifting his hands for a makeshift shield. "I’m learning a lot today."

“I’d have told you if I had,” Remus puts up. “And way earlier than this, to boot.”

Sirius brings his hands down and over his lap, settling in again and feeling rather cozy hearing an assurance he more or less knew himself. “How long did it take for you to shake it?” he bids.

Remus puts out a bit of a groan there. “I was more or less over most of it by the two-week mark, but I swear the fatigue lingered around for weeks afterwards."

Sirius throws him a grimace out of sympathy. “I more or less bounced back within the week," he shares.

“And colour me surprised,” Remus returns.

Sirius rolls a tiny wave of water over Remus’s right ankle with his right one, smirking for it. “What’d you tell them you had?” he raises, lulling his head to the side with a plain look on as Remus adopts a rather innocuous expression. “I wasn’t born yesterday, boy; there isn’t a chance in hell you'd have told them you got mono.

Remus lets his expression fall to one of resignation. “No, I just went to the school nurse and dealt with it myself,” he admits.

“Sacre bleu,” Sirius puts out.

Remus huffs out a faint laugh. “Well, I was well into the DIY mentality by then,” he says for it, giving his face a good rub.

“I’m sure,” Sirius echoes.

Remus lets his hand fall, turning his head to him. “Well, I was,” he offers faintly. “Dad went into the hospital the first time when I was thirteen; I got the schooling done early on handling things myself.”

Sirius’s jaw feels like that anvil that keeps coming up, how nice. “A whole fucking decade of that, too,” he puts up, feeling heavy just thinking about how long a decade is already, let alone with a perpetually sick Lyall threaded through it.

Remus hums there. “About that, on and off,” he supplies. “He went in about once a year for the first five, different times of the year for each one, so sometimes the grace period felt shorter and other times it felt longer depending on what season it fell in, and then there was a few-year gap after secondary until his last hospital stay, but back in the mono days, it didn’t make sense to tell them about it; I didn’t want to shift the searchlight onto me and besides, that’s awkward as hell to have to tell your parents you caught.”

Sirius pushes a half-breath out of his nose, enough to accept the jest capped onto the end of it, but he’s more distracted by a new puzzle piece slotting into place and making the picture easier to take in. “That must have been rough,” he offers. “Feeling like you had to keep so much on lock, I mean.”

Remus tilts his head back and forth rather than nodding, but it’d be farfetched for Sirius to think he’d let that lie. “I don’t hold it against them,” he extends, and Sirius shakes his head, looking around real quick for who said that Remus did when it certainly wasn’t him. “My dad had a lot more pressing concerns and my mum was putting all of herself into getting him sorted out; I just couldn’t stand the idea of bringing them bad news after a while, and certainly not when we were in a good stretch; never then.”

Sirius nods there, a frown etched on. “I mean, it makes sense, everything you just said checks out,” he puts down, as a preface, “but you can totally admit if, for a little bit there, somewhere over the course of a decade, you might've felt a bit put to the side, and I wouldn’t say anything to that other than, ‘that’d be a human trait right there.’”

Remus gives a courtesy breath through his nose, similar to Sirius’s own moments ago, but he shakes his head numbly. “I don’t want to get into that,” he maintains, giving a wave of both his hands; a polite bow out, and Sirius feels a bit like hot garbage, overall.

“How are you feeling about it now?” he bids, not wanting to lose Remus to the disciplined wall he’s built around him. “Him, the ticking clock, the nerves; you know.”

Remus shifts on the dock, breathing in a pondering breath. “It’s touch and go,” he frames it. “I’ve been feeling good about it today; this whole week, really, but very much today.”

Sirius nods there, keeping his tone low like Remus’ll spook like a cat and run off if he talks too loudly. “He looks really good," he offers. "The difference between Christmas and now is huge, and he was killing it then, too.”

Remus nods vigorously, more alive with this topic already. “He worked so hard over the fall," he trades him. "Even when they got to mine, he wouldn’t let me or my mum get him anything because he insisted he needed the practice, and at the time, it felt like his typical ‘no one help me, I can do it, thanks,’ but maybe he was onto something because look how he’s doing now?”

“No, Remus?” Sirius comes in, turning on the dock and pulling his wet left foot out of the water and tucking it underneath his right knee so he’s facing him, feeling like he must for this. “I don’t understand how he can physically get himself into that truck.”

Remus snorts there. “I mean, you saw where the prosthetic ends,” he poses, lifting his right ankle to pop the side of his flattened palm at about the spot where Sirius’s docs would end on him should he knick them and wear them around.

“I mean, yeah, but still,” Sirius insists. “And thanks again for the super helpful warning you gave me; real good job, Remus—”

Remus sends a long huff out at the water. “I didn’t know you that well yet,” he defends.

Sirius gives an exceptionally tight noise, tossing a plain blink at the water, too. “I don’t know, just a feeling here, but I think you did?” he returns. “I’d literally made you scream the night before, thanks much; that’s at least enough for a little warning.”

Remus’s eyes come alive once again with immense fervour. “Just because that all went swimmingly, didn't mean you weren’t going to turn around and be weird about it; I wasn’t sure yet,” he counters. “And, I didn’t think he’d take the fucking foot off in front of you.”

“He’s your fucking dad, Remus,” Sirius sends him, windmilling his hands around with a gape/grin on.

“How could I have planned for that; how?” Remus emphasizes. "He's a wildcard, does what he wants."

“Listen, you; the man waved his fake ankle at me like he was saying 'top o' the morning' and there I am, trying to be fucking cool about it even though that was way down at the extreme bottom of the list of things I expected to see in my life,” Sirius stresses.

“Well, I think putting a little levity out there might’ve been why he did that,” Remus retains. “I don’t know why you’re lodging complaints this further on from it; now, you’ve a fantastic story to tell people.”

“That, I’m not even arguing with you,” Sirius sends back at once. “Point is, and maybe it’s just my pea brain being unable to imagine losing my foot and being able to climb into a pickup like nothing happened a year on, but forgive me for it because that’s where we are; that’s a wily man for being his forties.”

Remus’s expression goes plain in under a beat. “Well, I’m glad you didn’t say that to him,” he passes along.

“Sorry, is that a false statement?” Sirius raises faux-quizzically. “It’s a compliment."

“He’s getting up there,” Remus slips him. “He's forty-eight now; he might not have taken that one too well, so you picked the better route, showering him with praises about driving instead.”

“Well, I’m not going to argue that either, then,” Sirius says of it. “How’s your mum doing with it?”

Remus pushes a weighty breath out, but there’s a ghost of a smile it’s got to pass through first. “Much better than I am, from what I’ve seen,” he extends. “It's good, though. If one of us has to keep on their toes then I don’t want it to be her; everything's been turning up for her these days.”

“Yeah?” Sirius prompts, smiling away at the thought of Hope living her best life like she damn well deserves to.

“Yeah, and after seeing her at her worst, I just, want her so happy that she can’t even handle it,” Remus maintains.

Sirius pauses, so fucking curious it genuinely hurts; there’s no way in hell he’s going to get the details, Remus has shared enough already and he gears right up for getting blown off for the question on his lips, but he's gotta ask it. “What was her worst?”

He doesn’t get a Look, a huff, or even a pointed hum for it — he really just gets a tight smile for it and a head tilt back and forth, to his surprise. “My last year at secondary is probably an ominous era by now?” he raises him, and Sirius nods at once because he sure has held onto that much. “Well, by then, he’d gone into the hospital for long stretches four times prior, came out of that fifth stay with a promising grace period over the summer, but fall showed up with his problems back in a bundle.”

“Thanks, fall,” Sirius chimes, smiling tersely.

“Mhm, mhm,” Remus allows, thank Cunt. “So to recap, each time he went in prior to that fifth stay, they’d taken a vein from somewhere else in his body and stuck it inside the problem leg in hopes that would get blood circulating better; he’s got a long, long scar going up his good leg from one of those operations and if he wears shorts even now, it's still a prominent one.”

Sirius kind of hopes Lyall opts to wear shorts while they're here so he can get a look at it, but he doesn't share that. “And nothing ever stuck so he’d end up right back where he was before,” he nods, hoping to prompt Remus along.

“Well, can’t argue that,” Remus echoes. “That time around, though, his team wanted to insert this massive, manufactured vein into his chest that would be powerful enough to do almost all the work in getting the blood flowing to that leg and they were very optimistic about it, but it was going to have to be open-chest surgery to get the vein in and that fucked me right up, no denying that.”

“And fucking fair enough, Remus,” Sirius puts in there; he’s gotta.

“But of course, I’d worried for nothing about the surgery itself because he came out of the O.R. spick and span," Remus trades him. "The recovery was longer than the others had been, but very promising and he’d felt good as new for months after the surgery and until he didn't anymore; he was back at work, my mum had started back intermittently at hers, and I was working and in the first term of my final year, but I was home when a warning sign of his showed up that my dad was definitely trying to hide and—”

“Wait, sorry,” Sirius comes in, piqued to all hell, “why was he doing that?”

“Well, he was just sick of it,” Remus supplies. “He didn’t want to go in again; he believed he was better, he was supposed to have been, and he'd kept getting his hopes up just to have them crushed, he wanted to keep working, he felt stuck in a loop, and he didn’t think he could do it again — and that’s what I know now, of course, after some time away from it, but at the time, that’s not how I saw it.”

Sirius stays unmoving save for a blink to suggest he’s all in, and Remus speaks where Sirius is afraid to, lest he drive them off course without so much as intending to. “I came home right off school’s end because it was my day off from work, and he was just fully grey and blazing hot to touch,” he describes, flashing his right hand over his face for reference. “I knew something was very wrong and told him I’d drive him in to get looked at, but he really didn’t want to do that, we went back and forth over it until I wouldn’t back down on it, and I don’t like that I was so hard on him when in reality he was just scared, but I was terrified and it just, felt like he was giving up; on himself, my mum, and me, all at once, and I wasn’t too keen on him there or on the drive in, but it’s fucking good he did come with me in the end, because the entire vein they’d just put in him months before that ended up being extremely infected.”

Sirius lifts his hands, fully encapsulated. “Would it have been too much for him to catch a fucking break?” he tosses out.

“I asked the same fucking question,” Remus allows, laughing humourlessly. “I rang my mum once we got there, told her I'd taken him in, and she turned up once she could get off work and let me off the hook to go home and do the homework I definitely had that night, which gave me something to sink into but I wasn't able to concentrate much, and then, she came home very late and I only heard one person downstairs, which was a sound I'd gotten used to over the years so it was automatic that I knew he’d been admitted, but every other time I'd already been home when she got back from the hospital, she’d always call out for me, I’d come down to her, and she’d give me the rundown of the day and what information they gotten, which I appreciated a ton because it kept me in the loop and me feeling like I was part of it all, but that night she didn’t call for me, didn't come upstairs; it was just, completely silent in that house, and I could have figured it was the late time that it was or that she was tired, but I didn’t because I’m me and went downstairs with this horrible feeling coming up through me, and she was in the kitchen, trying to fill the kettle and get a pot going because of course that’s literally all we know and do as a family, but she was just sobbing — and silently doing it, too, which was worse to see than anything I'd had before, I really thought my dad was gone.”

“‘Course,” Sirius puts in distantly.

“In the end, I just took the fucking kettle from her, said I’d do it, and thankfully she listened and sat at the table but from there she just broke down, and he wasn’t gone obviously, but it’d been too close a call for comfort and that’s what she was dealing with on top of everything else,” Remus maintains, rubbing at his nose with his right hand. “The ups and downs, the hopes drummed up and broken all over again, all the support she’d been giving, all the pain she was actually carrying; it was all coming out of her, you know, and almost losing him had her reeling in a way I hadn't seen before, and I don’t know how to explain this without just saying it, but I couldn’t be me during that.”

“OK,” Sirius nods, avid that Remus elaborate the fuck on that one.

“Well, more that, I couldn’t be her son just there,” Remus reiterates. “I just knew she needed to not be the mum in that scenaio so I just let her talk, you know? Just, as a lady whose husband almost passed; later on in the night, I was able to go upstairs and actually start to process it myself, but not then, and — I don't know, I felt like I'd seen outside of my own view of her, that I'd seen the struggle she wouldn’t show me normally, and it was absolutely the worst thing to have to watch, but she just needed to blow up for once and not have it all together, and I’m glad in a way, that she let me see that side of her, I am, but I don't want to ever see it again — for her sake more than mine.”

Sirius nods, breathing quietly, and tucks some of his hair behind his right ear. “You’re seriously the best kid they could have asked for,” he puts down.

Remus takes in a breath so delicate that if Sirius weren’t looking straight at him, he might not have known it happened at all. He’s glad he is looking, though, for he sees Remus look off on their left, check their surroundings out, and ultimately deem the area too crowded for a thank-you kiss, but Sirius can’t really fault him for it; there’s a lot going on at the moment and he appreciates having seen the moment where Remus considered it.

“That’s my favourite thing you’ve said to me today,” Remus offers, smiling there, “and I’ve liked a lot of what you’ve said.”

“It’s just the truth,” Sirius puts it. “Well, all of it was, but that one came straight from my gut.”

“Even better,” Remus calls it, holding his body differently already.

“If it means anything,” Sirius raises, “she looked fantastic last I saw her.”

Remus’s chest moves up and down through a breathy laugh. “You just liked her sunhat.”

And her,” Sirius chimes. “She’s so sweet; she smiled like, the whole time you were on screen, and forgive me, but I get why.”

“How could I ever forgive you for that?” Remus returns, gloriously plain before his face softens. “I wanted to ask you in the truck, but my dad was there and he does like to talk so it went out of my head pretty quickly, I'm sorry to say, but what would you say to taking a drive out to the spot my dad and I used to go?”

“Yes, yes, and yes,” Sirius returns on a dime.

Remus grins ear to ear, bobbing a little where he sits. “It’s about two hours from here, this little harbour town, Porthgain, and I was thinking, if we asked that we could borrow the truck for it, I bet he’d let us,” he maintains. “And it’s honestly the best way to do it because we could park at our usual spot nearby the water, throw a bunch of blankets in back, and kip out on the cargo bed if you’d be alright with roughing it with me, and if not, we could always get a room nearby, but it’s really up to you.”

“First one, first one,” Sirius chants, completely jazzed by the idea already.

Remus brightens that much more. “I’ll see about early next week?” he raises. “I feel like we should hang around for the weekend at least.”

“I do, too,” Sirius concedes. “Don’t want them thinking I’m just here to use their A-frame as a hotel; wouldn’t be son’s boyfriend material at all.”

Remus makes a pained noise, leans in to hover his mouth over Sirius’s right shoulder, and makes out a begrudging noise in his throat, and Sirius feels it almost better than the real thing, just hearing how much Remus wants to kiss him. He casts a look out and around them, finding that everybody in or on the water isn't looking their way at all, and he might’ve mentioned as much if he hadn't spotted a family of ducks floating by just north of them.

“Remus,” he hisses. “You have ducks here?”

“Oh, a thousand of them, easy,” Remus offers, lifting his head and having a look around for them.

“I’m going to lose my shit,” Sirius declares, watching the five ducklings follow along behind their mother. “I love how they’re all so calm and collected on the surface, but underneath, they’re just peddling like mad.”

Remus snorts. “Me,” he quips, and Sirius barks so loud the mother duck swims out further away from them before continuing on course. “Want to go to town?”

“Always do,” Sirius returns, pushing his right hand up through his hair.

“Different town,” Remus returns, smirking. “My hometown; that one.”

“Well, you should have said,” Sirius raises, deciding it is exactly too hot for his locks just now and has it up into a bun in moments. “Can we walk there?”

Remus gives out a throaty trill. “Sure, if you want it to take an hour.”

“Well, you’d be there, so,” Sirius puts up, shrugging for it.

“It’s further than you think,” Remus maintains, though he does budge his right leg against Sirius’s left knee for the sentiment, it feels. “It’s about forty minutes with a bike, I was thinking we could take mine in and cab it back here with the groceries.”

Sirius takes in a tight breath, gape/grinning. “You’re going to let me ride behind you?”

“I might perish from exhaustion along the way, but I’ll give it a go,” Remus extends him. “It’s about forty minutes with a bike.”

“I’m good with switching up,” Sirius maintains, pulling his right leg out of the water.

Remus snorts, lifting his legs out of the water as well. “Hadn’t noticed.”

Sirius drums his feet into the dock nearby their shoes before picking up his own and putting them on his feet once the dock hits the shore, looking around at Remus as a thought piques him. “Where are we going to put the bike if we’re cabbing it back?” he bids, hanging back by the end of the dock while Remus catches up to him.

“Well, if you want to meet Bubba still, yes?” Remus raises, letting his loafers fall to the ground in order to foot them back on.

“Absolutely, I do,” Sirius assures, thrilled to know the time has nearly come.

“Then if we rode it up to the shop, you'd get to meet him and I’m sure my dad would be fine with us sticking it in the bed,” Remus provides him.

“Damn, you are on it today,” Sirius returns him, snapping his fingers for the applause.

“Well, it just makes the most sense to me, then we won’t have to worry about locking it up anywhere and coming back for it another time,” Remus offers, heading up toward the trail.

Sirius follows along beside him and waits until they pass the first line of trees before he slots his right hand in with Remus’s, liking the idea of getting the most out of their relative privacy before grabbing Remus’s anything might get a little tougher once they’re out on the town.

Chapter Text

An easy silence falls upon the two of them on the way back up to the house, but that brings Sirius a chance to unhurriedly observe the woods around them while Remus guides them back up the trail. Up above, rays of sunlight peek through the leaves of the trees overhead, casting a glow over the forest floor, on their left, a vast expanse of forest that seems to stretch out and out and out, on their right, a near-mirror image save for the fallen tree in the distance, and up ahead, a break in the trees showcasing the field they’re making their way back to.

Sirius lets out a wistful sigh, swinging his and Remus’s conjoined hands in between the two of them. “I feel like Sufjan’s about to come out from behind one of these trees and serenade us the whole way back to the house,” he shares.

Beside him, Remus dissolves into a breathy fit. “That’d be one way to get woodland creatures to follow us around, though I do think they’d be there less for us and more for him.”

“Likely the only way we’re going to see any with me around,” Sirius puts up regretfully.

Remus gives Sirius's right hand a squeeze. “You’ll see something,” he assures.

“But I want to see a majestic woodland creature, not a squirrel I could see in the square any given day,” Sirius instils.

Remus gives an even sort of hum. “Much like that pesky love thing, woodland creatures of the majestic variety tend to come along when you’re not actively looking for them,” he philosophizes.

“Mm?” Sirius hums, smiling away. “Know anything about that personally or are we just quoting one of the greats?”

“I know a thing or two about it,” Remus echoes, lips all twisty and perfect. “For what that’s worth.”

“Quite a bit,” Sirius says of it, stepping over a hefty root sticking out of the ground along the trail.

Remus tugs Sirius in between the gap in the trees, leading him out onto the outskirts of the field. He moves into the wall of tall grass ahead of them with their hands linked and Sirius smirks as he follows Remus into the mix, finding the height of the innumerable blades gives the illusion that he’s being led around more or less by a floating torso.

Sirius looks out over the property, the house in the distance, the garden shed to the right of the house from this vantage point, and finally, two silhouettes to the right of the shed. “Your mum and dad are both working today, yeah?” he checks.

“Mhm, they are,” Remus affirms, swish-swaying through the grass ahead of him.

“And they wouldn’t pop in to say hello, then?” Sirius tacks on.

“Not likely, it’s not even lunch hour yet,” Remus passes back to him.

“Cool, then either your new neighbours are milling about the property line or we’ve got ourselves some classic peepers over yonder,” Sirius announces, nodding his head toward the silhouettes in the distance as Remus looks round at him bemusedly.

He looks out in the direction of Sirius’s nod and tenses up quick, putting out a startled noise that’s definitely funny, but the speed he drops Sirius’s hand isn’t so much. “Hey,” he sends him, affronted. “You didn’t have to let go like they’re going to rush us; they can’t see us gooning from all the way over here.”

“Well, we can’t just stroll up to the house hand-in-hand, can we?” Remus raises, keeping on toward the backyard. “We don’t know them.”

Sirius hums disagreeably. “I’ve been told I look strikingly like a lass from a distance,” he raises, but that simply gets Remus sending a blunt note back to him. “It’s true; I’ve literally been mistaken for Marlene from behind more than once.”

“Did they have terrible depth perception?” Remus raises faintly.

“At first glance, Remus,” Sirius maintains.

“For a few seconds, maybe,” Remus allows, but he’s clearly not finished by the sound of his tone, “but you’re wearing the Henley so you’re not about to fool anybody for long today, sorry to tell you.”

Sirius huffs with a new grin lifting his cheeks. “What is it about the shirt?” he returns, taking hold of the hem and flapping the front up and down.

“I have explained,” Remus huffs back.

“Explain again,” Sirius bids. “My feelings are hurt.”

Remus aims a pointed sigh back at him. “The shoulders, the biceps, the forearms, the pecs, the 'V,'” he rattles off, waving his hand behind him. “That thing shows ‘em all, so there’s going to be no doubt about it that there are two blokes coming out of this field.”

Sirius double blinks before looking down at his midriff from above. “Nice try, you can’t even see the 'V,'” he returns.

“Oh, no no, you can; you just have to be looking for it,” Remus relays, and with a tone that suggests he really knows what he’s talking about here, and just like that, Sirius’s feelings go into an upswing. “The jeans you recklessly picked to wear today definitely help accentuate that part, however.”

Sirius swishes through the grass behind Remus, humming daintily. “I think it helps that you know it’s there already,” he puts up, jabbing the small of Remus’s back with a forefinger.

“Well, that’s certainly possible,” Remus lets him have. “In any case, this is a good reminder that we have to be a little more careful around here; it’s nothing personal, I’d like to be totting you around, but this isn’t necessarily the time or place to be too handsy.”

Sirius gives out a reluctant sigh. “Obviously I didn't think we'd be doing that once we got into town,” he returns, casting his right hand up past Remus’s head and fluttering it toward the two silhouettes that are now public enemy number one for the transgression of ruining his whimsy, “but here, we were home free until those fuckers wandered up; who buys an empty plot of land and then goes and hangs out there the day after the cheque goes through?”

Remus hums vaguely. “I don’t know, but it feels like something you might do,” he puts in.

Sirius blows a single, pronounced raspberry up at him for that before two sharp stings occur on his body simultaneously; one at the inside of his right ankle and the other at the small of his back, right between the hem of his shirt and the belt line of his jeans. He stops short, reaching around behind him with his left hand to slap the spot on his back and lifting his right leg to smack his ankle in turn, but then a new sting emerges at the back of his neck.

“I’m under attack,” he tosses out, getting Remus’s attention right quick, who'd been steadily making his way across the field unbeknownst to his plight until now, though he's certainly looking 'round at Sirius with a supremely torn expression on now. “Don’t you laugh.”

“I’m trying not to,” Remus insists, his mouth at a twist before he beckons Sirius along with his right hand outstretched. “Come on, we’ll go quick.”

Sirius’s might goes and surges at the no hand-holding rule getting waived on account of the attack on him, reaching to grab it before another sharp sting radiates at the back of his right thigh and through his fucking jeans, no less, garnering him to slap the shit out of the area with his free hand. “Why are there so many?”

“Sometimes there are nests in the grass and they just swarm, I’m sorry,” Remus returns, working to speed Sirius through the rest of the field.

“You had sex in this?” Sirius shoots out, getting a pronounced shush for it before he clicks his tongue hard. “They can’t hear me from here.”

“With the state of your pipes, they just might,” Remus returns him, rushing Sirius toward the yard, and it’s not far now, but it certainly feels like it’s getting further and further away from them the more they push for it. “And for the last time; we’d keep our clothes on best we could and be all sorts of covered in spray, which is why I’m sorry I didn’t think of putting some on us earlier.”

Sirius huffs, not particularly looking to shove blame around at the bloke who continuously remembers to care about gamma rays affecting him, oddly enough. “What, you’re supposed to think of everything around here?” he puts up plainly, but very quickly his moment of fairness and reason is over when he feels a sting on his left kneecap of all sordid places, putting out a crazed noise. “OK, why are they only coming for me?”

“They’re not,” Remus replies, lifting the both of his arms with a rather plain gesture.

Sirius blinks at the back of Remus’s head, the calm energy about him, and is forced to contend with the fact that clusters have not only effectively created dissonance between them in terms of burns, but now the universal experience of skeeter bites, only he doesn’t have much time to reflect on that when a sting one hundred percent occurs on his right arse cheek, and that’s just not allowed.

Sirius puts out an overcome noise, lets go of Remus’s hand, and torpedoes straight past him, sprinting across the yard. He takes a hard left up the A-frame steps and scuttles into the cabin, dropping to his knees in front of his knapsack and fishing his bug spray out of it. He uncaps the plastic cover around the nozzle and douses as much open skin as he can reach with his right hand before switching to his left to finish the job, and Remus comes into the cabin as he's moves on to spritzing over his shirt and jeans.

“Did you just spray your arse?” Remus raises, hanging out by the open doorway.

“One got me on it,” Sirius returns emotionally, and thankfully, Remus has the tact to return a sympathetic hum for that.

“Make sure you get your face,” he advises from there. “They’ll go for the temples if they can't get anywhere else and that’s just mean.”

Sirius pauses short, finding the one drawback to living out here staring him in the face. He shuts his eyes and spritzes over his visage before giving each temple a spray. “Try and get me now, bitches,” he challenges, reopening his eyes and beckoning Remus to him. “I don’t care if you can feel them much or not, get over here.”

Remus dutifully moves to stand in front of him, shutting his eyes and lifting his arms, ready for a spritzin’. “Thank you,” he offers him, smiling as Sirius starts with his temples. “Sorry I’ve been distracted, I should have made sure we had that covered before we headed out that way.”

“Remus, we’ve been blasting all over the place,” Sirius returns, giving Remus’s visage a nice, well-rounded spritz. “I can be the bug spray lord to your sunscreen king and together, we’ll be unstoppable.”

Remus smirks through his nose, chancing his eyes open. “You’re so kind to me, even when I mess up and the consequences fall on you.”

“Stop that,” Sirius returns, spraying the front of Remus’s neck pointedly. “There’s a bigger picture here than just me getting swarmed.”

Remus leans in to sneak a kiss as Sirius moves on to spraying his arms. “I may run up and grab my mask, put it in the freezer just so it’s ready to go when I’ll need it,” he raises. “That’s one thing we ought to be proactive about.”

Sirius smiles wide as he sprays over the front of Remus’s shirt. “I might’ve packed a care package into my luggage so you won’t need to go very far,” he shares, and Remus puts his head on a left-hanging tilt, smiling pointedly at him. “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I packed some boosts in there, too, and I think we ought to keep one on us whenever we’re out gallivanting just in case one comes on; I know we won’t be able to get back here all that quickly if that were to happen so that leaves out the masks, but at least we’d be able to get a boost in you ASAP and go from there.”

Remus breathes in and out via his nose, leaning in to start a new kiss, only this time he gives a light pet of Sirius’s jaw with his right hand and draws this smooch out a bit more, and that leaves Sirius without the ability to keep spraying him when this kiss is quality. Remus pulls back with a contented sigh, his mouth all twisted up again. “I do like it when you go above and beyond,” he mentions.

“I really couldn’t tell,” Sirius returns, smiling brightly as he gestures for Remus to spin around and show him the back of him. Remus does as bid and Sirius sprays over the back of his neck, lifts his tee and sprays underneath it, holds off on being a bitch and spraying beneath his trousers for a funny, and instead simply gives a few good spritzes over his hips and legs before giving a solid spray over that arse; it needs protection at all costs, after all.

“Done,” he chimes, moving to leave the spray bottle beside the sunscreen on the desk. He moves for his knapsack again, pulling out the tote he put the cluster essentials in and wiggling the mask he got to keep at the flat that’s got two huge eyes on it with some striking green eye shadow on the over the lids. “Now, I will be requesting the pink one eventually, of course, but for now we’ll settle with the eyes.”

“Don’t you find that one spooky to look at when I’ve got it on?” Remus raises, laughing a little there.

“Not even a little,” Sirius insists, walking the mask out of the main room and sticking it into the freezer of his new favourite fridge on the planet. “It really just takes even a little bit of the pressure off, seeing you in the strangest colours at a time that’s inherently horrible.”

Remus hums from the main room. “That’s fair enough,” he offers agreeably.

“Small things, hm,” Sirius echoes, leaving the kitchenette as he plucks a boost out of the tote and sticks it in his front right trouser pocket. “I’m the most prepped I’ve ever been just now.”

“You could potentially leave the EZ-lube behind seeing as I doubt we’ll be finding a bush in town to roll around in,” Remus mentions.

“Remus, at the rate we’re going, who the fuck knows if that’s even true,” Sirius returns him brightly. “I’m keeping it right where it is, thanks.”

Remus gives a reluctantly amused huff, turning and leaving the A-frame. “Come along, then,” he bids.

Sirius leaves his tote on the desk and follows him out, pulling the door shut behind them. He catches up to Remus fairly quickly, who leads him around the outskirts of the garden to get to the shed on the right side of the house. Sirius stops as Remus does, blinking curiously at him while Remus moves to reach up past the height of the door and plucks a key off of the ledge.

Sirius lets out a gasp. “A secret key,” he observes.

“There’s one for the house as well, but that's hanging on a hook underneath the porch swing,” Remus passes along.

Sirius flails his hands around. “The secrets to this place,” he puts up. “They just don’t end.”

“My dad put it in after an incident where I was sent home early from school with a fever and couldn’t get into the house because I’d left my keys inside,” Remus shares.

Sirius gives out a musing hum in reply. “What’d you end up doing?” he raises.

“Well, I was twelve so I probably would have gone to the shop and asked to use my dad’s to get in, but I was really warm so I just kipped on the swing until my mum got home,” Remus trades him, waving the concern off easily. “And after my dad heard about it, he figured putting a spare somewhere would avoid a situation like that happening again.”

Remus opens the shed door, leaves the lock hanging open, and moves into the shed with Sirius fast at his heels, and good thing, too, because there is much to take in; gardening tools, a large green watering can with a big ole sunflower for a spout, piles of extension cords, a large rider mower that may or may not be doing so hot these days, a standard mower nearby it, a leaf blower by the looks of it, and even a snowblower beside it.

“Fuck, I didn’t even think about that," Sirius raises, pointing at it. "Winters must be a time here, hm?”

“Can be, yeah,” Remus echoes it. “We don’t bother much with the field anymore, but we used to go as far back as the woods and clear out some of the trails, too; course, that’s when I was a kid and my dad was all gung-ho about it, and whenever that got too difficult for him, I’d take it on, but I don’t think they even bothered to clear any of the trails out last winter with rehab taking up most of their time.”

“Well, new year, new Lyall, am I right,” Sirius raises.

“He might get back to it this year; he does like his walks,” Remus trades him, moving toward three bicycles in the left-hand corner of the shed, but the one Sirius is easily the most interested in is the rose gold one that’s got a bright white basket at the front.

“Please tell me that’s yours,” Sirius pipes up, pointing gleefully at it.

“That’d be my mum’s, and out of respect to her, I don’t think we’ll ride it in case I crash us along the way,” Remus reasons, wrangling an opaque blue bicycle out from the back of the pile, “but mine’s not so bad; it’s got a little bell—” he chimes the rotund silver one on the left handlebar, ding-dinging along with it vocally, and Sirius takes in a breath that hitches half-way down his throat, finding this boy all too much and everything at once, “—and it’s even got a little radio on it, see.”

Sirius's throat tightens as he puts out a praised noise, moving for the small grey box radio mounted onto the right handlebar. “Did you do that?” he bids, spinning the dial between his right forefinger and thumb.

“That was my dad again,” Remus forwards, taking hold of the bike and wheeling it over toward the door. “I mentioned off-hand once that I didn’t really think it a smart idea to listen to my Walkman while riding — stop it, you, it’s what I had at the time—” he tacks on as Sirius heads right on into a guffaw, “—point is, I didn’t want to be listening through earphones while riding in case I completely wiped out or clipped by a car because wasn’t aware of my surroundings, and then a week later, my dad popped that radio on it and I was able to ride along with tunes a-playing.”

Sirius follows along behind Remus and the bike, quite pleased with the image conjured in his head of Lyall seeking out ways to improve upon various things around the house. “Your dad’s the best,” he puts up. "Always fixing something."

Remus hums lightly, leading them up toward the front of the house. “Not only that, he'll hear you talking about something, doesn’t matter how big or small, and he’ll start working out ways to fix it,” he forwards. “I think that’s a big reason he and my grandad got on as well as they did; they were both busybodies in their own right, just through different means.”

“A builder versus a tinkerer,” Sirius allows. “I get it.”

“Well, he’ll be glad to get a supporter when my mum finds it a bit much at times,” Remus says, laughing up ahead. “Every now and again, you can hear a distant ‘oh, just leave it’ float over from a corner of the house and it’s just the funniest thing to me even though we both know he means incredibly well with it.”

“What did I tell you?” Sirius raises, picking up the pace to walk alongside Remus and the bike. “After school special; that’s what I’m in right now.”

“Well, I just hope you can stomach it,” Remus trades him, leading them around the front of the house. He gives a thoughtful hum, his head turning toward the two still milling about the property line, and looks back over at him. “Suppose I ought to say something, give me a second.”

Sirius nods, stepping in to take hold of the bike while he heads off across the lawn to engage with what could very well be his new neighbours. Sirius hitches his right leg over the frame of the bike, settling in on the seat while he waits, and hones back in on the radio, turning it on only to be greeted by more talk radio and suddenly it’s as if it’s five a.m. all over again.

He looks round as Remus strolls up from behind him. “Well, are they the neighbours or just a couple of peepers?” he raises.

“The former,” Remus answers. “Just getting a lay of the land, they said.”

“Peepers would say that, too, so you know,” Sirius mentions.

Remus’s face comes alive at the crosspoint between floundered and amused. “Could we not?”

“Fine, but did you find out if they’re erecting a strip club next door or not?” Sirius inquires.

“I didn’t ask, funnily enough, so I suppose we’ll have to wait and see,” Remus offers, tapping Sirius’s navel twice in parting. “I’ll just lock up and we can hit the road.”

“Hold on, there are people talking at me,” Sirius brings up, pointing down at the little radio. “What’s a good station around here and which way do I spin the dial?”

“It’s already on a good one,” Remus assures, heading up the porch stairs.

Sirius crosses his arms and looks off toward the highway, watching a few cars whip by, but Remus keeps his word, heading into the house and returning shortly to lock it up, though Sirius does ring the bell on the bike a few times just to see if it’ll ruffle a feather or two.

“I’m going as fast as I can,” Remus huffs, turning from the door and coming down the porch stairs before he stops still, frozen on the last step.

“You’re the funniest person,” Sirius calls over.

“Bags,” Remus returns, turning back.

Sirius sends a pfft after him, but this time Remus only has to go into the foyer before he’s locking up again, coming down the porch step with a reusable bag on his arm. “Do you mind holding them?”

“Them?” Sirius raises.

“There’s two more in there,” Remus provides, making it to the bike.

Sirius makes grabby hands for them before hanging the bag of bags from his right shoulder. “How do you want to do this?” he raises, displaying his hands over him on the bike.

“Well, here,” Remus says of it, moving in to toss his right leg over the bike so he’s straddling it just a wee step or two ahead of Sirius, holding the bike still via the handlebars and looking over his right shoulder at Sirius. “I might snag some of your lap as my seat if that’s alright with you.”

Sirius scoots up on the seat with a most put-upon sigh. “I guess,” he smiles.

He lifts his feet to rest the inner sides of the heels of his shoes on the slanted bar on the bike frame to prop his thighs up a little more, and Remus tentatively settles in Sirius’s lap before giving the pedals a trial spin, taking the bike for a little test drive, but even with Remus’s legs for days, he has to wiggle up until he’s half in Sirius’s lap and half tooching his arse up so his legs can peddle without the bike wobbling, but Sirius doesn’t mind that one bit.

“OK,” Remus says, after a spin around the end of the drive, quite pleased by the sound of it, “I think it’ll work.”

“Definitely,” Sirius returns at once.

He hooks his forefingers into the belt loops at the back of Remus’s corduroys, locking him in should they meet any unfortunate bumps along the driveway, and Remus begins pedalling up the long driveway toward the road. He stops at the end of the drive to glance in both directions, diligent on a bike as he is behind the wheel apparently, and takes a left, keeping to the left-hand side of the road and leaving plenty of space for cars to pass them from either direction.

While in the truck, Sirius had been a tad too overwhelmed to take in the sights, whereas now he almost has to take in the sight of the rolling hills of the valley he’s been dropped into, the clean air he can both smell and taste, the breeze wafting at them from their acceleration, and as if someone, somewhere in the universe avidly wants him to have the best time he can possibly have, the incessant chatter from the radio blessedly ends and The Cranberries’ Dreams takes over the airwaves.

Sirius puts up an excitable trill as Remus sends a similar one back to him, but this is perhaps the only suitable choice of accompaniment on their travels with rolling hills like these in the backdrop, and if Sirius puts his hands up and out to help feel like he’s flying while he basks in all of his senses going off at once, he thinks it’s justified given the circumstances. He keeps his expectations fairly realistic here, presuming that Remus’ll be too concentrated on getting them from point A to B to croon along, but the man kicks Sirius’s expectations straight to the curb on this one when he chooses to yodel along where necessary all while piloting them toward town, and that just takes Sirius’s mood right up through the roof.

Along the way, at least four to five honks in a row sound out from behind them that take Sirius out of his supreme stupor and have him a bit heated about it, overall; not as if they’re very much in the way being on the side of the road and all, but once the car pulls around them and the passenger waves excitedly out of the window, he is reminded that Remus’s presence in town must be exciting news in its own right.

It happens at least five more times before Remus veers off of the highway and takes them down a more suburbian-esque street. “What, are you the Queen or something?” Sirius puts up.

“Yes, and you’ll only refer to me as 'your majesty' for the duration of this trip,” Remus sends back at him.

“Oho, don’t go playing with fire, Queenie,” Sirius warns, tugging on Remus’s back belt loops.

Remus reaches behind his back to bat at Sirius’s hands playfully, seemingly feeling brave enough to do that while coasting along the much less traffic-heavy road. “So, we’ve just crossed into Treorchy, where I went to school and my mum and dad work,” he raises, playing tour guide much to Sirius’s pleasure. “And I don’t mean to brag or anything, but the main is just adorable, if I may say so myself.”

“Are you taking me to it?” Sirius demands.

“I’ll take you down it, but I want to drop the bike off first and then we can wander back that way for a better look,” Remus imparts, taking a right, then a left before pedalling them down what’s got to be the main what with its rows of shops on either side of the street and folks milling in or about them all along the sidewalks.

Sirius gives out a bright, celebratory trill at everything happening around him. “I’m in love,” he declares. “This is like a Christmas village during the off-season.”

Remus ducks his head a little through a bout of mirth before looking back at Sirius, giving him a lovely profile shot of his lopsided smile. “There’s a Christmas parade every year here,” he trades him.

“Shut it,” Sirius demands, and Remus faces forward with a sharp laugh. “You’re lying to me.”

“I sort of wish I was,” Remus tosses back. “I was an elf on it one year and quickly decided all the fuss of being on the float just wasn’t for me.”

Sirius lifts his hands and pounds out a drum pattern on Remus’s back, barely able to handle such an image and yet, it’s all he wants to see just now. “There’d better be photographic evidence of this.”

“Unfortunately, there is,” Remus assures. “My mum will happily show it off, I'm sure; it’s one of her favourites.”

“She and I are going to be the best of friends, I can already tell,” Sirius imparts, going back to drumming on the small of Remus’s back just to have a little contact between them, though this time he uses the tips of his forefingers. “We've clearly got mutual interests.”

A chorus of various stylistic choices involving calling out for Remus's attention echo out from their left and the two of them look over toward a pub terrace with various folk at the tables waving to the man of the hour. Remus waves back brightly as they pass and tosses a smile back at Sirius quickly before facing front again. “That’s the one my dad worked at,” he passes him, and Sirius livens up even more than he already was, craning his neck to have a look back at the building. “That's the flat he rented up top, too.”

Sirius darts his gaze up to the two triangular windowsills jutting out of the building above the face of the pub. “Cunt, that’d have been a prize spot to nab, hm?” he raises, facing forward again. “Right on the main and everything.”

“Mhm, said he liked it there a lot, and my mum eventually joined him there,” Remus offers. “It was a bachelor suite though, so they lived there for a year to a year and a half before they moved to a nearby flat and that’s where they had me.”

“Perfect trade-off,” Sirius deems it. “We are going to that pub, yeah?”

“We sure can,” Remus affirms. “There are six pubs throughout the town so we could even hop around one evening, it’s really up to you.”

Sirius puts out a bark. “Six whole pubs, woah-hoo,” he returns. “And yes, I want to do just that, but starting and ending with that gem back there.”

“I often got a free pint if I even so much as set foot in there, so I will be passing that along to you,” Remus divulges.

Sirius gasps feverishly. “Boyfriends in high places.”

“More like they still love my dad there,” Remus amends, but Sirius knows better than he.

“Does he still go to the watering hole?” Sirius raises.

“Less when he wasn’t doing so well, but lately he’s been meeting up with his mates now and again for a pint, yeah,” Remus affirms. “My mum joins too sometimes; it’s kind of cute, they’ve got their little group, you know?”

Sirius gasps, tapping Remus’s back excitedly. “Can we go have a pint with them?” he surefire begs.

Remus snorts up ahead of him. “I didn’t know that that’d be on the docket, but we can ask, see what they say.”

“I fucking will,” Sirius manifests, hanging onto Remus’s belt loops as they make a wide right around a bend.

The intro to Fastball’s 'The Way' crinkles and crackles out of the radio right as they turn and ride down a lane toward an unmistakable garage and car wash establishment with Lyall’s truck in the lot out front, and Sirius has to say he's feeling is a bit morose about their journey coming to an end right when such a tune is starting up.

“Shit, that station is good," Sirius lets Remus have. "Leave it on."

“I wasn’t about to turn it off,” Remus instils, pulling the bike to a stop at the cusp of the parking lot. “My dad would know just by energy force alone and that’d get me sent right back out of here.”

“An under-reaction, really,” Sirius quips.

Remus gets down off the bike, freeing up the handlebars for Sirius, who rides the bike up the driveway at an easy crawl. “Now, I’ve a sneaky suspicion I'll be heckled the second I walk in there, so enjoy that,” he imparts, reaching his right hand over to pat Sirius’s left forearm.

Sirius gives his shoulders a shimmy, weaving the bike to and fro as he rides along beside Remus. “Oh, I'm gonna,” he assures.

On their right sits the garage while on the left, the car wash station where a white vehicle is currently getting one hell of a rub down by bright red automatic brushes, and just beside it sits a small, all-windowed room where a bloke about their age sits controlling the show. “I wish I could turn into a car for the amount of time it would take to get a wash done,” Sirius shares, tapping his fingers on the handlebars to the tune playing.

“Again, odd in itself perhaps, but somehow not for you,” Remus returns him, veering them toward the large open windows at the front of the garage.

Amazingly, though Sirius ought to have known this would be the case given that he’s dealing with an extension of the Lupins, as soon as they head into the workshop, it's clear that a radio from somewhere inside is tuned to the very same station they're on, but he finds it the most fitting setting he’s ever ridden a bike into now that he's doing it, smirking as he switches the small radio off. He halts the bike just inside, not looking to crash into anything and risk a terrible first impression, but stays mounted on the thing while Remus whistles their arrival.

There are three folks in the immediate vicinity, one working below the propped-up bed of a station wagon a few feet away from them with only the legs of their blue coveralls and a pair of steel-toe boots visible from underneath, a lady in an office set-up in the far left corner of the warehouse that’s on the phone by the looks of it, and someone who he has to assume is Bubba in all of his fucking glory: a five foot two man in his sixties, wearing his own set of blue coveralls with a greased-up rag hanging out of the right pocket and coming right for Remus with such a funny amble, Sirius has to grip the handlebars to keep from dissolving into a round of snickers.

“City slicker’s back,” he announces, advancing on Remus.

The lady in the corner shoulders the receiver of the phone. “What gives you the right to waltz back in here, fancypants?” she calls out.

“Oho,” Sirius puts out jovially, leaning his forearms on the handlebars.

He looks left at the sound of wheels rolling on the concrete floor and brightens as he finds that Lyall had been the one working underneath the wagon, bringing his creeper seat to a halt next to the raised car and looking over as Bubba's just getting to Remus. “Yeah, get him,” he goads.

Remus sends his dad the two-finger salute and Sirius watches in a hazy stupor as absolutely zero ramifications come from that just before Bubba pops him in the gut with his fists in turn; incidental, but that timing was something. Remus blocks two more attempts with his lopsided grin on, bending to give the man a clap on the back, and this is a version of ‘hello again’ that Sirius honestly might need to lie flat on the ground and mull it over for some time in order to understand that this is real life; it’s so much and exactly the right amount all at once, and that's before Remus goes and pulls him into the fray.

“He’s a city slicker, born and raised," he mentions, tossing his left thumb his way. "Get him next.”

Sirius grins as Bubba squints up at him simply hanging out over the handlebars. “You want some of this?” he raises, putting his fists up.

“Can you reach up here?” Sirius checks.

A gamble for certain, but thank Cunt on high that Bubba hoots and hollers about it, but if Sirius is honest, he’s got his sights set on Lyall, just howling over by the wagon, when his specific, ongoing approval is the most important thing in this room to him just now.

The lady in the corner tosses the receiver of the phone onto the desk with a clatter. “Bub, it’s been twenty; I’m hanging up,” she manifests.

“Oh, hold on, I’m coming,” Bubba returns, ambling over that way.

“That’s Mel,” Remus passes along. “She’s his daughter."

“She calls him that, too?” Sirius raises, looking between Remus on his right and Lyall down by the wagon.

Remus nods lightly. “We all do.”

“What’s his actual name?” Sirius bids.

“I don't even think he remembers,” Lyall delivers, brushing his right wrist past his forehead while Sirius succumbs to a bemused fit. “Just popping in, then?”

“Well, that, and we were wondering if we could stick the bike in the bed,” Remus mentions.

“Mhm, she’s all yours,” Lyall says. “Have you been anywhere exciting yet?”

“Well, we came up the main on the way in so he saw a bit of that, but I thought I’d show him the antique mall before we work our way back that way since we’re already so close,” Remus extends him, and the last bit is fresh news to Sirius, garnering an enticed noise out of him.

Lyall hums to agree, nodding up at Sirius, who's only just reeling it in. “Enjoy that; it’s quite something,” he passes along. Sirius presses his mouth into a firm line and sets a pair of overbright eyes on Remus, who smirks right back at him. “What's happening to him?”

“Oh, he's fine,” Remus assures, waving Lyall off. “You and I are just a lot alike, is all.”

“Out of my control,” Lyall deems it, laying back on his creeper seat and skidding right back underneath the wagon.

“Alright, bye Dad,” Remus calls, grinning ear to ear while Sirius snorts up a storm as he's backing the bike out of the shop.

“See you in a while,” Lyall calls back.

Sirius rides the bike around in a mini circle in the lot before rejoining Remus en route to Lyall’s truck. “Well, Bubba’s a fan of you already, so good work there,” Remus affords him.

“No, Remus,” Sirius starts, hoisting himself down from the bike as they get to the back end of the truck, “my heart stopped after I said it.”

“Oh, he loved it; no need for that,” Remus insists, reaching to pop the door to the bed down before helping Sirius lift the bike into it and pulling the door up again. “Antiquing?”

Sirius pitches a bright noise to the sky, windmilling his hands for Remus to lead him to it. The establishment in question is back up the way they turned to come into the garage, just four streets over and down a few blocks from there, and by the time they’re coming upon a large green building with a slanting red shingled roof they’re heading across a parking lot toward, Sirius is blinking like mad.

“It’s so much bigger than I pictured,” he raises, looking sidelong at Remus. “How many floors are in there?”

“Two,” Remus supplies. “Well, it’s more like one and a half; the ground floor is wall-to-wall while the second skirts around the edges of the building and somewhat acts as a balcony overlooking the main floor, so it’s got an all-in-one feeling at the same time.”

Sirius can’t fucking wait to see it when so far Remus’s descriptions have proven more than suitable. “What was your job there exactly?” he asks. “Ran till?”

“A little bit of everything, really, but I did man the till plenty,” Remus affirms. “Zaya likes rotating staff around to all the stations as it gives you a lot more of an understanding of what goes into keeping a place like that going, so I’d also help load larger items for customers, bring in deliveries, with inventory, answer phones when Zaya was out or on a day off, man the counter of the café in there during busier hours; all sorts of things.”

“Ooh ooh, a café,” Sirius trills. “Got some training in early there.”

Remus snorts, shaking his head. “It’s not at all like it is at work,” he puts it plain. “Even calling it a café was a bit much; it’s got a display case with treats that I’d serve while the carafes of coffee and water for tea were self-serve, so I really just took the money and put desserts on a plate for them; it definitely didn’t prepare me for what I was getting into at the shop, it was much less fast-paced."

“Taught you how to brew coffee, though,” Sirius puts up, pointing up at him. “I didn’t have to walk you through it like a toddler, and oftentimes I would have to do that with newbies.”

“Alright, it did do that,” Remus allows. "It’s the layout of it that’s the draw for most people, I think, but you'll see what I mean soon."

Sirius starts up a shoulder-shimmy as they get about a car’s distance from two sets of automatic doors and skirts right for the in-door, but Remus cuts him off a few steps away from it by placing himself right in front of Sirius, garnering him to stop short. “Hello there,” he imparts.

Remus smiles. “Before we head in, I should ask what sort of experience you have with this sort of thing,” he broaches.

“Well, that all depends,” Sirius extends. “I haven’t been to a mall like this per se, but my parents sure did own a ton of antiques and made me go along to exactly too many auctions.”

Sirius’s eyes come alive with wonder as Remus takes on a calm, placid expression but speaks with a controlled determination. “Then we’ll have to get some ground rules laid down first,” he puts down. “I’ve seen things in there.”

“Alright,” Sirius offers distantly.

“If you find something in there that you’re over the moon about, you will not be the only one to think the same, so you’re to pick it up and carry it with you,” Remus instructs. “Don’t put it down like some kind of a fool or it’ll be gone before you look back at it, and whatever you do, don’t wave it around drawing attention to the fact that you lucked out and found the thing because that’s a surefire way to get it hawked; you’ve heard the jokes about antiquers? There’s nothing funny about antiquers.”

Sirius’s eyes widen to capacity. “There’s so much that’s funny about this that I don’t know what to do with myself.”

Remus moves past that right quick, only his placid expression softens a touch with the quirk going at the corners of his lips. “Underestimating your fellow shoppers is the first mistake and it would do well to remember that ageism will be your ultimate downfall if you let it,” he emphasizes. “This is much more than a simple, jaunty little hobby for some of these folk; they’re fast, invested, and wily, no matter their age or appearance because it’s a snooze, lose mentality once you walk in there, so keep sharp, alright?”

A bright grin spreads across Sirius’s face as he grapples with yet another example that Remus has taken a few classes at the Sirius Black School of Dramatic Arts and passed with flying colours. “Sorry to them, but the folks in there aren’t going to know what hit them when I walk in,” he manifests, jogging in place to showcase his agility. “I’ve been training for this all my life and didn’t even know it.”

“Now, don’t go in there looking for a fight,” Remus warns.

Sirius stops running in place with a huff. “Now he tells me.”

Remus smirks a little at that. “I just want you to be aware that nobody perusing inside there is your friend,” he reiterates lightly.

Sirius does a few arm stretches he’d seen actual years ago and only vaguely remembers, but he’s not going for absolute accuracy here, it's about the performance. “So, like everywhere else I go?” he raises. “I was made for this, young man.”

“You may very well be,” Remus puts in fairly. “I did see some petty in there moves over the years.”

Sirius coughs once. “Wow, heard that one.”

“Look, I was naive once, too," Remus breezes on, gesturing fairly with his hands, "but then, 'round my second month working here, I saw a lady stop in front of an eighteenth-century loveseat with a twinkle in her eye, and then another one stroll up and speak lovingly about the even better one on the second floor,” he details, stopping there with a pointed head tilt to the right.

Sirius stops stretching at once, his eyebrows popping up toward his hairline. “There was no loveseat on the second floor,” he surmises.

“Sharp as a tack, you are,” Remus concedes, smiling bright. “So: be careful, don’t believe everything you hear in there, and always gird your finds.”

Sirius lifts his right hand to salute him firmly. “Like my loins,” he entrusts.

“Well, no, not like those,” Remus puts in. “That really wouldn’t work when those aren’t girded at all.”

Sirius uses his salutation hand to mime a sock to Remus’s gut before lifting both of his hands to place them on his shoulders. “I’ll make you proud, sir.”

Remus smiles brightly. “That’s the spirit,” he accepts, turning on his heel and leading the way in.

It’s arresting from the first step inside, there's no mincing words about it: Sirius has to contend with a massive sales floor complete with makeshift hallways made up of rows and rows of kiosks littered with vintage knick-knacks, clothing, and furniture on display with various folks perusing about them while a rockabilly tune of all things floats down from mysteriously-placed speakers above. On their left sits a large, rectangular wooden desk with tills placed on either side, both of them being used at the moment for there are two queues waiting to be check outed so apparently they weren’t the only ones who thought antiquing on a Friday morning was a fine idea. On their right, tucked into a little rotunda in the far right corner of the floor sits the pseudo-café Remus just spoke about and while he certainly did mention that the look and feel of that section was a major draw for patrons, Sirius doesn’t really know what to do with the fact that it looks like an ice-cream parlour got air-lifted straight out of the ‘50s and dropped right there in the corner what with its round, bulky table-and-chair sets and the black and white checkered floor tiles that stand out even more in contrast with the dark carpeting going throughout the place and sitting underneath their very feet.

Sirius lifts his hands to place them directly over his face, making a wanton noise behind them. “It’s like I stepped into a time warp,” he says, muffled. “I’m flatlining.”

“I felt that at first, too,” Remus offers beside him, sounding like he does when he's sunshine smiling.

Sirius feels a faint touch on the small of his back that garners him to drop his hands from his field of vision before Remus tosses a thumb toward the time warp. “You have a look around, I’m going to grab something to drink while we’re over here,” he mentions. “I’d get you something, too, but it’s hot coffee only here, I’m afraid.”

Sirius lets a repulsed noise leave him and Remus nods diligently. “I figured that’d be your stance, but I’m planning on taking you to an actual café that I’m almost certain you’ll love as well, so fret not, coffee on the rocks will be had,” Remus tacks on, starting off toward the café.

“Then I’ll definitely wait,” Sirius casts him, shimmying down the first aisle and feeling incredibly looked out for as a whole this morning. He looks left and right, glancing over the kiosks on either side of him, sweeping his gaze over the trinkets laid out on display, and ultimately blinking wondrously over at Remus when he shows up again shortly with a bottle of water in hand.

“How does this all work?” Sirius asks. “Is it done by donations, are recruiters that go out and scout for new items, does the stuff just magically appear here; tell me.”

Remus swallows, caps his water, and takes in quite the breath from there, suggesting a fine explanation's coming Sirius's way. “So, Zaya does do a ton of recruiting and scouting, particularly with estate sales in the valley and beyond it, really,” he puts forth. “Some of these kiosks are tended to by the staff throughout the day and added to when donations come in or Zaya brings in a slew of vases from the Bates family down the way or what have you, other kiosks are run by vendors who rent out the space from the mall to sell their items and they tend to care after their sections so they’ll come in to tidy after shoppers, set the pricing for their items, and add new ones into the rotation, so it’s a bit of a mixed bag.”

Sirius nods, logging all of that away. “Did you constantly get shit on for a price tag you had nothing to do with setting?” he checks, strolling along easily.

Remus sighs through his nose, nodding solemnly. “At least that much, I had practice with ahead of the shop,” he forwards. “And the thing is, the stuff in here is really quite reasonable: usually when I’d see something higher up in pricing, it was a large armoire from the 20s or something, or there was the arcade machine brought in by a vendor a few years ago that was in an actual arcade in the 70s, and that thing was seven hundred pounds out the door, but that’s that novelty for you; the everyday items, the clothes, the trinkets, I would see the price tags for them while on my way by a kiosk and think, ‘alright, yeah, that’s reasonable,’ so it’s all subjective, isn’t it, and I suppose you’ll get yellers anywhere you go.”

Sirius sighs out long as he rests his hands inside the pockets of his jeans. “Ain’t that the fucking truth,” he says, stopping at a table in the kiosk on his right that’s got a child-sized glass doll on a mount dressed up in the frilliest getup and looks it in the eye. “What say you, hm? Retail hell, am I right.”

“If that thing answered you right now,” Remus starts.

“I’d literally lay down on the floor and give up,” Sirius finishes, swivelling away from the doll and the kiosk it's sitting in altogether.

“Mm, you’ll like this; there’s a gent in town who rents out a huge section of the second floor for his record collection, and it’s extensive,” Remus declares. “I think he capped a thousand records in my second year here, so who knows the number he’s at now.”

“Where?” Sirius demands at once.

Remus sends him a bright smile. “Go back toward the stairs, take them up, head right at the top and go down the way; you really can’t miss them,” he instructs.

“I’ll do a bird call when I need to find you again,” Sirius informs him, nodding once with his hands pressed together in thanks.

“Right, because it’s not as if we have simpler ways to communicate or anything,” Remus returns.

“I’m still going to do a bird call,” Sirius cements, taking off back toward the stairs.

He takes them two at a time, heads right at the top, and moves down an aisle with tall wooden cabinets on either side of him with vintage gaming consoles, board games, action figures, and oodles of old comics; he’s strolling through Nerdcity obviously, but Music-Nerd City is just around the bend, tucked cozily into the right-hand corner of the building and overlooking the sales floor below from a balcony. He heads blinks at it, taking in the five long and lengthy wooden crates absolutely filled with vinyl, looking to be sorted by genre first and alphabetical order second, all arranged side by side perhaps to give off the impression of aisles to peruse, and peruse, Sirius shall indeed.

His skin buzzes as he starts from the bottom right, figuring he’ll snake around to all five crates eventually, plucking records out to inspect as he goes. The keepers are tucked between his left arm and side, the losers go right back where he found them, and Sirius knows he needs a ton more time than he realistically has here to comb through for gems so he’ll have to request they come back on a less packed day in order for him to have a proper look.

Nevertheless, he winds up with a pile of twelve to fifteen records by the feel of it, having lost count after the tenth, and heads down the furthest aisle to his left, figuring he’ll do a sweep of the second floor before taking the stairs back down to the main. He looks left and right, glancing over the kiosks on either side of him and taking in various trinkets and collector's items on display, and as if a metal detector honing in on a coin in the sand, Sirius locks in on a tan acoustic guitar propped up against a comparatively darker wooden bureau that's got to be from the '20s; the guitar itself gives Sirius a heck of a '70s vibe, but there isn’t a sign nearby stating for or otherwise, so he’ll just have to assume the instrument is quite a deal older than he is at the very least.

Called to it, Sirius reaches his right hand out to run his thumb over the fretboard experimentally and ends up giving out a grunt of revulsion as a woefully out-of-tune note bounces off the walls of the kiosk he’s in and likely clangs out to the other ones in the surrounding area; Sirius’s right eye twitches, his face sours over, and he decides that just won’t do.

He almost, almost, acts a fool and sets his collection of records down on a nearby desk before remembering Remus’s cautions. He scans his surroundings, finds a fellow browser up the aisle and a few kiosks over from his, another down the other way flipping through a large book that from here appears to be some historical society’s collection of pictures and looking real busy with it, but Sirius isn’t some kind of chump; he drops his load of records to the ground, inwardly thanking the establishment for keeping a thick carpet about the place, and moves to cross his legs underneath himself and overtop a fair chunk of the pile like a woodland creature protecting his territory perhaps, but this is how it has to be out here in the wild.

He reaches for the neck of the guitar and hoists the bulky body closer to him, placing it over his lap and turning his focus onto the task at hand. Since he hasn’t got a tuner in any one of his pockets and lube isn’t going to help here, he’s just going to have to play it by ear, tune the guitar to itself, and since he never knows where his damn tuner is back a the flat at any given point, Sirius has tuned by ear more than he’s even done it with a standard tuner, so it's safe to say he’s feeling rather in his element as he works down from the top, starting with the E string. He plucks it a few times before wincing hard at its horrifyingly high pitch, tweaks the corresponding knob down, tests it out to find it almost there but still not quite right, and tweaks the same knob some more until the string rings out as it should. He works down from there, tweaking and twisting knobs until each string sounds correct, and tests it out with a strum when he's finished, hearing the instrument ring out like it’s meant to; full and whole and right.

He pauses to scratch at the skeeter bite on his right ankle, crisscrosses his right thumbnail over the red bump to make it chill out a bit, and perks as he hears the opening chords of 'Eight Days A Week' come on over the sound system, feeling like he’s gotta play along for a few bars; wouldn’t be right not to.

He doesn’t indulge for long, sensing that Remus must be somewhere about the place head-bobbing along as he strolls about the place, and no way in hell Sirius is going to miss that show in real time. He lifts the guitar out of his lap, aiming to prop it up where he found it, and glances over his right shoulder to find that a tyke has apparently come looking for the source of the noise and seems to have found him to be one incredibly interesting sight.

Sirius blinks up at him, unsure of what to do or say when he really only knows how to talk to one kid and that kid only, and she’s back in London being her spunky self, no doubt. “Want to take over?” he offers, holding the guitar up quizzically.

The boy shakes his head quickly, scampering off up the aisle, and Sirius smirks as he reaches to lean the guitar back against the bureau. He lifts off of the ground, gathers up his pile of records, and heads back up the way he came, figuring it’ll be faster getting downstairs if he goes back the way he came. He heads down the stairs, keeping to the left as two other patrons head up it, and takes a sharp left down the aisle he left Remus in and has a feeling he’ll be in or around it still for there is no more meticulous a browser than he.

True enough, Sirius finds Remus one aisle over, humming and lightly swaying his hips as he looks over an item down in a kiosk on the far end of the aisle, and Sirius strolls to him with a keen grin painted on. Remus spots him coming once Sirius is a few steps away from him and starts fast, moving to hold the item in his hand behind himself, and since Sirius is no antiquer looking to snatch his find, he’s going to have to assume that’s for him.

He’s on Remus in an instant. “What’ve you got there, hm?” he asks, crowding Remus into the corner of the kiosk.

“It’s nothing, leave it,” Remus objects.

“Mm mm, I want to see,” Sirius chimes, holding his pile of records to him with his left arm while snaking his right one around the back of Remus to get a hold of whatever’s in his hand.

Remus gives a pronounced huff as Sirius pries all five of his fingers apart. “It’s a surprise,” he insists, all while Sirius wrangles the thing out of his grip.

Sirius gives out a shrill gasp as he holds up a corkscrew with a massive, ceramic moustache for the handle, garnering a startled noise out of a lady up the aisle somewhere. “It’s perfect.”

Remus gives him a pointed look, but there’s a bit of a smile happening there too. “I know you’ve already got a few, but this really seemed like it should be in your kitchen,” he supplies, leaning to stick his water bottle into the bag on Sirius's right arm.

“I’m throwing out all the other ones when we get back,” Sirius announces.

“Well, don’t do that,” Remus chides.

“I didn’t know this was gift hour,” Sirius raises, letting Remus have the corkscrew back. “I’d have scoured for something for you, too.”

“Well, I just figured if we’re going to bring some things back for everyone, this would be the spot to find them,” Remus provides. “I was looking for an Ugly Pot replacement but then I found that and since it'll be a little thing for the both of you, I’ll keep looking for something that’s solely for James; it’s got to be his own and something just right, I think.”

“I agree, and whatever the replacement is, it’s in here,” Sirius puts down, backing up the aisle the way he came. “I’mma be right back.”

“Where are you going now?” Remus asks, eyeing his movements.

“It’s gift time, bye,” Sirius chimes, swivelling on his heel.

He heads right when he gets to the end of the aisle, wandering down the next row of kiosks in search of a gift of equal or more measure. Everything he sees around him is interesting in itself objectively speaking, but it’s all garbage as far as Sirius is concerned, simply not good enough to bring back to Remus. He stops short in the next aisle over, gape/grins, and saunters up to a kiosk that’s got a rack filled with vintage clothing: jackpot, babey, jackpot.

He’s got to choose between four cardigans at first, whittle those down to just two contenders, and hold the remaining choices side by side by the hangers, superimposing Remus into either one and picking the winner based off of which one he'd wear more often the second fall comes around again. He swivels on his heel feeling well-accomplished and sets off for Remus again, aiming to go back the way he came and skirting back around to the second aisle where he believes he left Remus over in minutes ago, and spots the head o’ curls he’s looking for, facing the other direction and in-convo with a lass down at the end of the aisle. He goes ahead and assumes that’s got to be Angela given the ferocity with which the two of them appear to be speaking, strolls on up behind Remus, and reaches around in front of him to drape the cardigan in front of his visage.

Remus startles and grabs hold of the garment, quietly brimming with enticement as he looks over his right shoulder at Sirius. “This is the greatest thing you’ve ever brought to me,” he deems it.

“Isn’t it,” Sirius puts up, tucking the cardigan under his left arm along with his collection of records, and smiles at the lass with a name tag on her shirt displaying 'Angela' in all caps. “Hey, Angela.”

“This is Sirius,” Remus provides, gesturing at him with the stache on the end of the corkscrew. “It’s his first time here, lucky lad.”

Angela perks, putting her shoulders on a wry tilt. “And what do you think?” she bids, and already Sirius likes her energy.

“It’s everything,” he insists. “I have to know; do you get first picks of the litter around here, if you know what I mean?”

“If you’re quick about it,” Remus slips him.

“And I usually am,” Angela tacks on, pointing to the cardigan in Sirius’s possession. “That one came in with a whole load of gems and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t nab a couple of them while the load was coming into the warehouse.”

“Perks of the job, hm,” Remus chimes, smiling away over there.

Angela perks up again, only this time she taps Remus’s right wrist eagerly. “So, Patty’s dropped down to major part-time for her retirement, and Zaya picked me to take over for her,” she divulges. “I’ve been ASM since April.”

Remus imps his neck down a little so he’s closer to her height, but it also does wonders to show how enticed he is by this fact. “Stop, that’s great,” he attests.

“She’s like, moved me into her office and everything,” Angela details. “I’ve got my own desk with a little plaque with my name on it, she’s been taking me along on all these scouting trips, I’m getting to see her hustling in full force; it’s just been a blast.”

“Good, I’m glad it went to you,” Remus returns emphatically. “Next thing you know, she’ll be picking you to take over for her one day.”

“Don’t, I can’t get ahead of myself,” Angela braces.

“I’ll get ahead for you, then,” Remus trades her.

A male voice calls down the aisle from behind the two of them. “Angela, you’ve got a call."

“You’ve got a call,” Remus repeats, snapping his hands like he’s got a pair of castanets in them, and Sirius is melting, straight up.

Angela reaches to tap Remus’s left wrist in parting. “Text me, OK? I want to see you before you leave, have a proper pint,” she imparts. “And you’d better find Zaya before you head out or she’ll have your head and mine too for letting you walk out of here without so much as a hello.”

“I wouldn’t dream of doing that,” Remus insists.

Angela gives Sirius a polite, parting wave as she heads up the aisle toward the front of the mall. “Nice meeting you,” she sends back.

“Yeah, you too,” he returns, giving a wave of his free hand before swivelling to Remus pointedly. “Why are you this cute?”

Remus gives him a puzzled look, shaking his head. “I — I don’t know what I did."

“Of course you don’t,” Sirius huffs, making like he’s tossing his hair behind his right shoulder despite the fact that it’s all tied up in a bun on his head.

On his left comes a wee, bitty woman, between the ages of seventy and eighty-five, give or take, and gets a little too close to Sirius’s bounty. “Ah ah, these are mine, sweetie,” he declares, only to get yanked down the aisle by Remus via his free wrist.

“I can’t take you anywhere,” he huffs.

“I can hear you smiling up there,” Sirius mentions.

“That was my kindergarten teacher, you knob,” Remus shoots him.

“You told me not to trust anyone in here,” Sirius returns airily.

“OK, but she wasn’t actually interested in your record pile, she was just trying to get at the cookbooks,” Remus informs him.

“Or so she made it seem,” Sirius returns, enjoying the fuck out of this one.

Remus sends a grand huff toward the ceiling. “Alright, clearly I made a mistake prepping you ahead of time, but I know too many folks around here for you to start calling people out willy-nilly—”

Sirius stops walking and engages a man on his left who's currently inspecting a shelf of paperbacks in one of the kiosks. “Do you know him?” he asks, tossing his head up toward Remus.

“Fuck off, kid,” the man barks.

Sirius gape/grins before he takes off sprinting up the aisle, yanking Remus along with him into an unoccupied kiosk on their right before the two of them dissolve into a mass of snickers. “That could only ever happen to you,” Remus pushes out, sticking his forefingers underneath the lenses of his sunnies and dabbing at his leaking eyes.

“What happened to small-town charm?” Sirius raises, holding onto both Remus and an armoire for support. “Who was that coot?”

“I actually have no idea,” Remus insists. “This can be a bit of a tourist trap; you get all kinds.”

“I’m never getting over that,” Sirius sighs, rubbing at his nose before taking in a sniff anew.

“Good to resume?” Remus raises, his shoulders shaking quite a bit.

“We’ll see,” Sirius trades, moving out of relative cover and into the aisle again.

The two of them stop still as a vast array of jingling sounds out from behind them and the two look round before observing a lady with bangles for days, a long flowing skirt, and a veritable lion's mane of brunette curls flowing behind her due to her accelerated speed.

“Thought you could sneak off without saying hello?” she demands, coming right for Remus with her arms outstretched.

“I’d never,” Remus assures, stepping into the hug with open arms.

Sirius is already obsessed with Zaya and everything about her even after just a moment or two, but he steps further along the aisle, glancing over his shoulder at Remus engulfed in quite the squeeze and figuring he’ll let them catch up. He gestures that he’ll be wandering some more, waiting for Remus to catch his signal over Zaya's shoulder and trade him a sheepish smile. Sirius waves that off, slips into the kiosk on his new right, and becomes entirely engrossed in an ancient typewriter on a table inside of it. He peers down at the paper lodged into the machine and takes his chance, typing out 'sat and forever am at work here' and enjoying the click-clink of the keys under his fingertips. He hits the return bar with an air of completion and a bit of a smarmy smile on his lips.

Somebody comes up behind him and leans up against his back to have a peek at what he’s doing that Sirius sure hopes is Remus before a huff sounds out by his left ear and gives him away. “Sirius, there’s a sign right there,” the boy chides, reaching his right hand up to point at one smack dab above the typewriter that plainly reads ‘Don’t Touch.

“Well, then why in Cunt’s name is it right here before me if I can’t so much as touch it, hm?” Sirius demands, clicking the space bar for a dot of punctuation.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it could be because the thing is nearly as old as Britain and is more meant as a decorative piece,” Remus supplies.

“There’s no way it’s that old, the keys don’t stick at all,” Sirius insists, typing a line of gibberish below his little message for show.

“OK, stop playing with it, please,” Remus bids, tapping on Sirius's right arm to beckon him along. “I’ve got to find a replacement for Ugly Pot and I know it's in here; I'm on a mission.”

“Well, if it’s a mission,” Sirius echoes, allowing himself to be ushered out of the kiosk.

They sweep up the aisle at an easy pace from there, the both of them keeping an eye out for any spectacular standouts, and Sirius perks up as Remus makes an amused trill down in his throat. “What?” he asks, wanting in on whatever's funny.

Remus points up ahead. “The pew’s still here after all this time,” he says fondly, leading him toward the end of the aisle where a whole whack load of furniture pieces are arranged at the back of the store.

Sirius’s gaze darts around until it hones in on the actual church pew attempting to co-mingle with the rest of the couches and loveseats on display. “Strange no one’s in the market for a single church pew,” he offers. “That said, did you want to get it?"

"Yeah, let's get it," Remus returns faux-jovially.

"You laugh now, but that could easily replace Ugly Pot and turn this whole peace-offering thing on its head," Sirius maintains. "James would walk in, spot that thing, and immediately hoot and whoop so hard his lungs would risk collapsing.”

Remus stops still. “He would, too,” he concedes, a wistful air about him.

“They do delivery here, yeah?” Sirius raises. “Or is it BYO-vehicle?”

“Well, both, really; you’re free to come pick up an item but they do help set up postage for those who need something shipped,” Remus supplies, tilting his head back and forth with it. “It’ll be steep if it’s going all the way to London, though; this might be too big an idea.”

“Well, I didn’t figure it’d cost a crisp twenty or anything,” Sirius puts up. “Plus, we could split it if it’s hefty, alright? Or, you could always remember that I’ve a windfall that I just can’t spend all my own and simply not fork anything over for it."

“OK, there is a difference between helping me out with school and an overly expensive gag gift,” Remus returns him.

“Is there, though?” Sirius raises. “Conveniently, I’m in the market for a new bench to put in the front hall and luckily for me, this came along at just the right time.”

Remus sighs big and long. “Well, go see the price at least,” he urges. “You might think it’s too high for a bench, even with the gag factor.”

“You got it, boss,” Sirius returns, strolling right over to the pew and reading the pricing posted on the top right-hand corner of it. “Well, I don’t know, Remus; do you think one-hundy is going to break my bank?”

Remus gives a guttural noise from behind him. “They really brought that down.”

“And it’s been here since when?” Sirius raises.

“Four years, about,” Remus deduces. “I mean, you did say it; who'd be in the market for a church pew?”

“Me,” Sirius manifests. “How does it work around here? Do we lug it up front or do we wave someone down?”

“There’s a number on the tags that correspond with each item,” Remus passes him. “That way, if customers can’t take something away right away or the piece needs to get shipped, the item gets a sign put on it — like that one there.”

Sirius looks off the way Remus nods, finding a hot pink 'SOLD' sign taped to a seafoam green plasticine chair that also appears to have been airlifted out of the ‘50s what with the domed hairdryer sitting atop it. “This place just keeps getting better,” he enthuses, pulling his wallet out of his back left pocket. “Well, here, you take my card up to the front and secure this thing immediately—” he cuts off as Remus fans his hands in front of him, already openly refusing that plan, “—well, someone’s got to guard it and my bark is louder than yours.”

“I know that, but it’s also your card, Sirius,” Remus frets, wringing his hands.

“At this point, I’ve rather moved it into an ‘our’ sort of thing,” Sirius mentions vaguely. “Would simply love it if you started letting that idea bloom a little more, mind.”

Remus huffs disparagingly. “It’s unbelievably kind for you to feel like that, but it’s still not mine, Sirius,” he puts in. “If this thing's been here for four years strong, then I think we're safe to assume it won’t walk out the door today of all days and we can both go up there to pay for it.”

“That’s what a chump says, Remus,” Sirius champions, flapping his card at him. “You know so much better than this.”

Remus continues dodging all of his attempts to pass the card off to him before Sirius finally just tosses it at him like a frisbee and gets to watch Remus grapple to catch hold of it, frown for good measure as he shoos him off, and trudge toward the front of the store.

In his wake, Sirius decides that stretching out on the pew is more than fair since it’ll be bought momentarily and the move will be a mark of his territory; a win/win. He sticks his prior findings on the left-hand side of the bench, moves to lay with his head in the right-hand corner, and bunches up the cardigan to use as a pillow and block the hard edges on the arm of the pew from bothering his head, crossing his ankles overtop his record pile at the other end and locking it all in. He shuts his eyes, bopping his feet back and forth to a swanky tune playing overhead for what's got to be nearly two minutes, but at that point his body won’t let him not look it up; he pulls his mobile out, thumbs through it pull up Shazam, and lifts his mobile up toward the closest speaker to him, waiting several thoughtful seconds before his screen displays 'Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin On — Big Maybelle' and Sirius feels better knowing it's in his search history, thinking he might like a little of that sort of thing on one or more of his playlists in the future.

“Sirius, Sirius.” Sirius sits up the moment Remus’s hushed, urgent tone registers, but a solid moment’s worry turns into giddy curiosity as Remus scuttles toward him with another hot pink 'SOLD' sign in one hand and waves a plastic baggie filled with some strange, flat cutouts at him, the goon-grin on his face going from ear to ear as he comes right for him. “I found this on the way back and it’s incredible."

“Give,” Sirius instructs, holding his right hand up and out for the baggie.

Remus bounces on his heels as he hands it over with the card, garnering Sirius to stuff it into his front right pocket when he's just going to need to pull it out again when they've officially finished with their browsing and focus on what appear to be a number of fridge magnets all jumbled up together. He turns the baggie over to inspect the accompanying pamphlet at the front, his mouth falling open as he feasts his eyes upon the question for the ages: 'What Would Jesus Wear?' bares up at him in red, blocky lettering, and underneath it, 'Jesus of Nazareth’s Mix n’ Match Magnetic Wardrobe' printed in smaller font.

“Oh, what’s in his wardrobe?” Sirius trills, shaking a few out of the bag and onto the pew for inspection: a long-haired and heavily bearded Jesus falls out, followed by a tye-dye shirt, a golf polo, a pair of board shorts, and a sombrero before even more cut-outs come flittering out of the bag, and Sirius is living.

“Oh, he can be business up top, party down below,” Remus raises, placing a cutout of a traditional white surplice over Magnetic-Jesus’s torso before sliding a pair of flashy, red joggers over his legs, and Sirius takes to seal clapping. "This has to be part two of the Ugly Pot replacement front; very in-theme with the pew, and just as likely to get James hooting and whopping."

“See? I knew you’d find something worthy to replace it, but boy, we’ve got a double-whammy on our hands here; we're out in the stratosphere right now,” Sirius puts up, working to put each item of Jesus’s attire that fell onto the pew back into the bulging baggie before putting Magnetic-Jesus back in there, too. “You be good in there, pal.”

Remus snorts hard, moving to stick the sign on the back of the pew, and comes around the front of it to pull his water bottle out of their bag to have a drink from it. “I only paid for the pew itself just there, but we’re to ring Zaya and she’ll help us figure out rates and all that," he passes along.

“Sweet deal,” Sirius puts up.

Remus nods his head back toward the right side of the store where Sirius isn't sure he's made it to yet. “I saw something back there that I know you’ll want to see,” he raises.

“I’m there,” Sirius insists, gathering up his record pile. “You take Jesus and his clothes, and I’ll take everything else.”

Remus recaps his water bottle, sticking it back in his pocket before taking hold of the baggie. “Wait, give me the cardigan, too,” he bids.

“Ah-ah, nice try,” Sirius returns. “It’s a gift, Remus; you’re not buying it.”

Remus pushes a horse's breath out of him. “Fine, give me a record or six,” he amends, holding out his free hand. Sirius splits the pile in half and hands Remus’s share of the load over to him, who restructures his hold on his items, using the records as a makeshift tray for the baggie as well as the corkscrew. “Come on, it’s this way.”

Sirius follows after Remus, piqued about what he’s being taken to. He gets led down to the sixth or seventh aisle, he can’t really tell anymore, and follows along as Remus takes him around the bend and into a corner kiosk where stands a wooden record player almost as tall as him with a gargantuan brass megaphone sticking out of it. “Oh, my Cunt; could you imagine?” Sirius raises.

“I’ve been trying, but the issue is you obviously don’t have a parlour so I’m not sure where you’d put it,” Remus puts in.

“Alright, that’s it; you’ve done it,” Sirius returns, looking wildly around for anyone with a name tag before figuring he may as well just call out for a staff member. “Assistance; I need assistance.”

“What are you doing?” Remus sends him, more amused than he’s bargained for.

“I’m going to purchase this and put it right in the center of your living room for that one,” Sirius insists. “I think it’ll really pull the whole thing together—”

“Alright, we need to get you out of here,” Remus decides, dragging Sirius down the aisle, but jokes on him when this still counts as physical contact in a public place as far as Sirius’s skin is concerned. “It’s your first time, you were bound to go a bit mad in here, but you need some fresh air.”

“No, I’m finally home, Remus,” Sirius returns. “Let’s stay here, kip on our pew, forage for berries in the woods; we can do this.”

It takes a few seconds before Remus can manage speech around his breathy laughter, but Sirius is willing to be patient when he’s the one who caused the fit. “The antiques have gone to your head,” he insists. “It happens to the best of us, but—”

Remus stops short, bringing Sirius to a stop by extension, who looks round as Remus lets go of him to scope out a white, rectangular box sitting on a cute little wooden desk in a nearby kiosk, flipping two silver latches on the front to pop the lid up and putting out a massive trill. “Oh no, not you too,” Sirius puts out gravely, moving over behind Remus to urge him via a shake of his shoulders. “Get out of here while you still can; I’m too far gone, but you? You’ve a life to live.”

Look,” Remus puts up, flying his hands down at the newly-open box, which Sirius now realizes is a portable sewing kit, complete with a wee staircase that holds many colourful spindles of thread, a little transparent tin of needles and another for safety pins, a white netted pouch filled with buttons of all shapes and sizes, and one large pincushion shaped like a tomato.

“Guess your mum’s getting back into sewing,” Sirius trills. “Let’s get it.”

“I’m getting this one,” Remus insists, closing the box and flipping down the two silver latches on the front and taking to inspecting the sides of the box for the price tag before his face clears off of any expression.

“Remus, we can get it, it’s fine,” Sirius assures.

“No, it’s too affordable to contend with, frankly,” Remus returns, putting the box on an angle to show the tag and the whole kit is fifteen fucking pounds; a steal and a half. “OK, I’m thinking, rather than send you half of the pew bill and risk you not accepting it like every other transfer I keep trying to get to you, how about I handle the groceries and that way, we’d be almost at fifty-fifty?”

Sirius’s eyes narrow as he eyes Remus sidelong. “I’ve been saving so I’d have some mad money to put in while we’re here, Sirius,” he tacks on. “I’m not unable to pitch in for things, and you can’t get everything for me, here or otherwise.”

“I don’t, though,” Sirius puts out. “You won’t let me.”

“Do we have a deal?” Remus asks, doubling down.

“We’ll see who’s closest to the machine when the time comes,” Sirius trills, wandering out of the kiosk.

“For that, I’ll send you out front to wait for me,” Remus returns, strolling behind him by the sound of it. “Did you want to keep looking around?”

“I’m running out of arms, if I’m honest,” Sirius puts up. “I will be requesting we come back again very soon, but I wouldn’t mind a refuel as is.”

“Oh, I want to have a long look at the books, so I’ll agree to that,” Remus says of it, catching up to Sirius with very little leg work involved.

Sirius snorts there. “We’ll never change.”

“Doubt it,” Remus echoes.

They head up their aisle toward the front, where Remus guides them back toward the checkout, and Sirius gives out a sigh at the sight of the two queues. “How did you buy the pew so fast when the queues just never stop?” he raises.

Remus lifts his shoulders for effect. “I turned up right when the one on the left was clearing out so I zipped right through,” he offers, then looks toward him. “Why, did you want to step out?”

He mimes holding a cigarette to his lips to pair with and Sirius gives him a hum to affirm. “I mean, wouldn’t mind a puff now that you said it,” he smiles.

“OK, let me get in the queue and I’ll run your stuff through for you, too,” Remus bids him.

“Are you sure?” Sirius checks, but Remus waves him off. “Will they mind you using two cards, ‘cause the cardigan and the records are on my bill, sweets.”

Remus huffs at once. “No, they won’t mind,” he insists, going for the queue on the right when it’s definitely the shorter of the pair and turning to eye Sirius’s pile before eyeing the delicate balance he’s got going on. “OK, you slide the records underneath first, and then you can just leave the cardigan over one of my shoulders.”

Sirius smirks, manoeuvring his pile of records underneath Remus’s foundation base. “You’re the best,” he says, hanging the cardigan over Remus’s right shoulder.

He reaches into the reusable bag of bags on his right shoulder, pulls out a folded-up one, and Remus smirks as he hangs the strap from his left shoulder. “Well, now I’m regretting this,” he raises, a veritable Christmas tree of oddities.

“Mm?” Sirius checks, half-smiling.

“I’ll be out as soon as can, go on,” Remus imparts, nodding toward the outdoors to free him.

“Well, you do have magical powers with queues, so I’m sure this one will move quickly now that you’re in it,” Sirius assures, taking out his card from his pocket and holding it toward Remus, who tips his chin toward the little collection he’s got going on top of the records.

“I’ll protect it with my life,” Remus assures.

Sirius sets it down beside the sewing kit. “Please don’t, it’s just a card,” he returns plainly. “See you in a few.”

He heads around the queue to get to the out-door, takes a right once leaving the entryway, and spots a massive hound tied to a post right about where he was planning to wander to. He strolls over to the pooch, has himself a seat on the ground in front of it, and tilts his head up at it, smiling brightly even while he can practically hear Remus chiding him for getting that close, but thankfully this dog is but a large marshmallow and really only whuffles and paws at Sirius’s collar for pets.

Sirius gives him a good ruffle on the head before lifting off of the ground again and strolling over to a wooden bench that’s sitting nearby. He lights up while he’s still standing, moves to sit cross-legged on the bench, and trades between watching folks go in and out of the mall and making faces at the dog until he borks at him, and then he pretends he didn’t do anything as the apparent owner of said dog comes out of the mall and heads for his still-borking canine with a pronounced no.

Sirius keeps his gaze trained above innocuously until the man and his dog are but wee silhouettes across the parking lot and takes another haul, looking left as his favourite walks out the door of the mall with his sunnies back on, the bag Sirius left with him on his left arm and his mobile at his ear. Sirius does a bird call, making up for the fact that the Beatles stole his opportunity last time around and garnering Remus to look right and head over to him with a smile too sweet for words on his lips.

“OK, I will,” he says, lifting his left forefinger in a gesture for Sirius to wait just a little more. “Perfect, see you then. My mum says hi.”

“Hi,” Sirius puts out even though she’s already gone.

“I wanted to know if they needed anything since we’ll be at the store, but you’re not going to like the answer,” Remus passes along, pocketing his mobile.

“Milk,” Sirius presumes, making a face.

“Mhm,” Remus affirms. “Well, that and she had the last bag of English Breakfast this morning and we’re going to need a replenish of that in order to survive.”

“Understood,” Sirius nods, going for a haul and making to lift off of the bench. “See? You’ve magical powers involving queues.”

Remus smirks to let that one be, but reaches to tug on Sirius’s left arm before he can fully stand. “We can sit until you’re done at least,” he offers, moving to have a seat beside him on the bench. “We’re only just past noon, we can spare five minutes here.”

“Well, shit,” Sirius puts up, settling in again with his cigarette at his lips. “That pesky time thing's at it again.”

Remus nods knowingly. “Dinner will take a bit of prep, so I’m thinking if we start that around four, just to get all the parts set up and ready to go in the oven around five-ish so that we can eat between six and seven, but that’ll also mean we’ll already be well into the process by the time my mum tends to get home from work and won’t have any other job to do but sit and enjoy a dinner made for her; wouldn’t that be nice?”

“I mean, she’ll still try, I’m gathering?” Sirius raises, flicking a bit of ash off of the end of his cigarette.

“Oh, believe me, yes,” Remus relays, “but we’re not going to let her, you hear?”

“I’m hearing,” Sirius returns. “You’re the boss.”

Remus tilts his head back and forth, smiles before wetting his lips, and has himself an experimental look around the vicinity of the parking lot, and at this very moment, not one person is leaving their car to head toward the building and not a one is leaving it; the coast is clear and Sirius is ready to be smooched. Remus turns back to him and makes a pass at him before stopping short at the sound of his name, turning his head back toward the doors as a lass waves at him.

“Oh, hello!” he offers, smiling over at her.

“Home for a visit?” she asks, heading for the parking lot.

“Mhm, long time coming,” Remus trades her.

“Sure was,” she returns, putting her head on a tilt as she gets to the front of her car parked in a spot near the walkway in front of the mall. “Are you stopping by?”

“In a few minutes, even,” Remus raises it.

“Good, I’m just about to start,” she passes along, pulling her passenger door open to leave her shopping bag on that seat.

“See you there,” Remus puts up, looking over at Sirius. “She works at the café we’re going to.”

“I — yep, worked that one out,” Sirius nods. Remus’s brows go for a journey before Sirius sighs his weight out of his lungs, going for that thing called 'reason' that Remus gets so hot and bothered about. “OK, I’m aware that was snarky and it’s not her fault she interrupted a pair of lovers about to embrace—”

Remus huffs grandiosity. “Is that really it?” he raises, bringing his voice down while the lass goes around to the driver’s side.

“Yeah, and what of it?” Sirius goads.

“We have been all over each other, all morning, Sirius,” Remus highlights.

“Yeah, but,” Sirius comes back, “excuse me if I wanted to kiss a bit.”

“Well, I did too for a bit there, but that wasn’t smart of me either,” Remus puts in, frowning a bit.

“OK, no, it has nothing to do with smarts; I saw, you looked around, decided the coast was clear, and committed to a sneaky kiss, and I was all in,” Sirius amends, and Remus turns his head toward the lot again with a sigh through his nose. "I wasn’t expecting a love scene to occur out here on the antique mall bench, Remus, but an extended smooch? Yes, please, and then chicka over there walked on out here, destroying said moment; unknowingly, sure, but I’m still—”

Remus leans in and plants one on him; plush lips, firm pressure, and a short flick of the tongue mixed in there before it’s done. “Still what?” he asks.

Sirius looks around a moment, finding the lass's car gone and the surrounding area still for the moment. “I was going to say 'unsmooched,'” he informs him, keeping his head held high despite feeling rather warm and gooey in the chest area.

Remus breathes a laugh through his nose. “Well, I’m really glad I went for it when I did, then,” he says of it. “I’m sorry, Sirius; I know this is a thing for you, but once things are out, maybe we can broaden the circle a little bit, OK?”

Sirius lets a sigh leave through his nose, looking up and out at the view. “It's where you are, too,” he trades him, solemn about it for a beat or two before he pivots toward something that makes his mouth quirk. “It’s bound to bleed in, isn't it.”

Remus hums agreeably for that. “It’s not very Londonesque here,” he commiserates. “We’ll just have to sneak some sugar in when and where we can.”

Sirius nods, straightening up some more, feeling like that’s the only real compromise they have in front of them, but he does like that there’s one being worked out. “And hey,” he starts, reaching to tap Remus’s right knee, “me complaining that I didn’t get one snog doesn’t mean I’m not seeing the effort you’ve been putting in; I'm very dramatic, but the fact that you even gave it a go is proof in itself that you're trying here, really.”

Remus breathes in next to him, budging Sirius’s left shoulder with his right one. “Little by little, right,” he raises.

Sirius shakes his head, giving Remus a pointed smile for pushing major work under the rug. “It may seem little, but your little back taps and wrist tugs are everything,” he puts down, flicking the cherry of his cigarette off and onto the pavement below. “And it’s bleeding into sex, too, holy shit? I mean, even a month ago, you’d have never kept going to town with James right on the other side of an open doorway, and I couldn’t have gone down on you on a train, so come now, credit’s due here; something’s shifted with you and in you as of late, and I’m happy to serve it in any way I can.”

Remus laughs inwardly, a tiny lift of his shoulders coming with it, and when he speaks next, it’s lower down though that might have something to do with the newcomer who just pulled into one of the vacant spots in the lot. “I’m still wrapping my head around how hot that was,” he divulges, his mouth at a twist. “The train, I mean; it’d be a little weird if I got off on the James thing, I feel, but I wasn’t about to stop when he well knew what we were doing back at yours, the shit.”

Sirius gives an internal trill, keeping things on the lower end for Remus’s sake though that doesn’t stop a shoulder shimmy when not much can stop that. “Go on,” he demands.

Remus ducks his head, his hands lifting as a gesture for a little time while a woman heads past them toward the in-door. “Let’s start walking, hm?” he raises, handing Sirius one of the two bags. “We’re a little exposed here.”

“If you keep talking,” Sirius conditions, lifting off of the bench and hanging the ties of the bag around his left wrist.

“I’d just feel better if we’re further away from the building I used to work at,” Remus supplies.

Sirius waves him off, heading to toss his cigarette butt in the bin to the left of the doors before fishing in his pocket to toss the one from earlier in as well. He heads back to Remus, who leads the way diagonally across the parking lot toward a large lot of grass to the right of the mall, and presumably, he's leading them toward the street adjacent to them, but Sirius’ll find out soon enough either way.

Remus budges Sirius’s right hip with his left one after they start heading across the grass. “I’ve only had bits and pieces of the morning to think it over, so I’m not far ahead on it,” he prefaces, lifting a semi-halting hand that Sirius nods diligently for, “but before you, I’d never have considered doing that; my prior experiences were always about finding places that nobody else was.”

“Right, having an unbeknownst audience wouldn’t have come into it at all,” Sirius offers.

“Mhm,” Remus underlines, pointing up at Sirius for the insertion, “and you’re right, I wouldn’t have been so keen to even a month ago, so I don’t really know what this is; is it bigger than a train blowie in that it’s a smaller allegory for me finally allowing myself to be more open with you and therefore, more open with myself and to discovering newer parts of that self with you, is this the natural progression of things given that I’ve clearly got a few kinks already and I was always going to end up having and loving that experience, or did I just wake up from a nap, get all hot and bothered by your dastardly fit self, and throw caution to the wind?”

Sirius blinks a ton over the theories raised. “What if it can be all those things at once?” he puts up. “I mean, all three of them check out on their own, if I may be so bold as to say, so what’s stopping it from being a bit of everything? You’re far too complex to box in, we’ve been all over that, but perhaps this is an extension of that same sort of thing.”

“Maybe it is all three,” Remus lets him have, lifting his free hand to suggest he’s quite stumped.

“T’is a journey, this life,” Sirius puts in airily, doing a little twirl before they reach the sidewalk on the other end of the grassy patch.

“Oh, what a nice little touch,” Remus gives him, eyeing Sirius’s twirl with a pointed smile before gesturing that they’ll be heading right. “All that said, it was off the charts.”

Sirius trills pridefully. “I did some of my best work there, so we’re squared to one.”

“I, fucking know,” Remus returns blatantly. “And I know it had a lot to do with getting me there in as little time as possible and I should say the time efficiency you showed was impeccable, truly—” he puts out a heavy noise there, pitching his head back a bit to emphasize just how good a memory that encounter is for him and puffing Sirius right up with it, "—but a means to an end or not, I don't care; I couldn’t feel my legs for a good while there after and I salute the method as much as your efforts in keeping things quick and snappy.”

“Ohoho,” Sirius celebrates, dusting off his shoulders in turn with his free hand. “You did this strange tippity-tap on my head right when you were about to blow, a bit like you were some mid-90s French house DJ serving some sick beats; it was really something."

“Oh, stop it,” Remus returns, ducking his head through a sheepish laugh. “I was losing it, Sirius; it was taking everything I had to keep it quiet and together.”

“I mean, you also hid under your quilt for a couple seconds there, so I figured you’d gone through something,” Sirius forwards, “but believe me, I’m ecstatic to have been able to awaken something that might've been lying dormant in you for some time.”

“Now, I don’t know how far this is going to extend,” Remus puts in. “I think the circumstances were helpful: it was very early, dark in the train car, half of those passengers were asleep and the other half were apparently very into whatever they were doing, but that said, I don’t know that the tube would be a place to branch out for this sort of thing, you know?”

Sirius sends a bright, agreeable hum back at him. “We’ll cross the lorry off the list too, I’d think.”

“And I’m still not the quickie-in-a-pub-bathroom sort,” Remus conditions. “Especially if there’s somewhere else we could go that won’t possibly catch us a disease.”

“OK, you don’t stick anything important down on anything when you’re in the stall, Remus; it’s just zip, bang, boom, and you're back at the table with everyone else,” Sirius returns, getting a huff of a laugh for it certainly, but a firm shake of Remus's head. “Alright, you say that now, but who knows where you’ll be on it a month from now; I do have receipts.”

Remus budges Sirius’s left shoulder with his right one. “Well, until we come to that,” he starts, displaying his free hand over his front with a flourish that’s definitely Sirius Black-inspired, “if you want this, you’re going to have to take it somewhere classy, like your kitchen floor or a fairly comfortable seat on a moving train, apparently.”

Sirius shoots out a bark, tripping up a little on his feet. “Does this mean I can get you on the way back, then?” he checks.

Remus hums somewhere between lightly and noncommittally, but his reply comes back very decidedly. “Yes,” he puts down. “Unless we strike out and can’t get a secluded spot, that is.”

“I’ll make it my mission to not let that happen,” Sirius assures, gliding along the pavement toward a small intersection. “Which way?”

“Straight across,” Remus passes along before waving his hand off to the left while they wait for the light to change. “So, my school is just down that way, but I figure we won’t go visit it when it really just looks like every other school building and wouldn’t be all that breathtaking.”

“I’ll take your word for it today, but I did say I want to see every pothole,” Sirius reminds him, keeping step with him as they get the green light to cross the street. “I request we take an evening and explore, but I really do need a refuel or I’m going to get punchy.”

“Well shit, the main’s just up here a few blocks if you can withhold it,” Remus supplies.

“I’ll do as much as I can with what I have,” Sirius offers, swinging his shopping bag easily as he walks.

The establishment in question is a good few blocks up the main, which is great for Sirius in that he’s highkey in love with the little shops they pass and it gives plenty of townfolk a chance to stop Remus every other step to say hello, and getting to see Remus at home and having a blast from the past is its own blast for Sirius to get to witness.

Remus is right, yet again. This time it’s because Sirius loves the cafe he’s been strolled into more than he knows what to do with. Shiny Toy Guns play off the speakers, raining 'Don’t Cry Out' down about the place and bringing Sirius right on back to the wild and tender age of sixteen, driving with Marlene and her newly acquired license in tow and playing all the mid-00s electronica their hearts could handle, and Sirius can almost feel the wind in his hair like he could back then. The shop’s interior is longer than it is wide, the decor is red-themed, just what he likes, with booths all along the right-hand side of the shop, two tills and a decked-out bar behind a counter along the left-hand side and down a bit from the entryway where they are, and directly left is a series of wall shelving units with massive jars filled with all sorts of teas; no wonder Remus likes it here.

“How are you ever going to decide on a tea?” Sirius raises, waving at the booming number of jars at his disposal.

Remus gives a light laugh, waving it off. “I need a kick, so I think I might go for a chai,” he puts in.

“You still tired?” Sirius raises, putting his head on a tilt.

“Well, I did just bike us into town and then run around a vast antique shop with you,” Remus raises. “Could have had something to do with it.”

“I did offer to switch off with you,” Sirius puts up, pointing up at him from beside him.

“It would have been too difficult to have to direct you,” Remus instils, waving him and that off. “I’m just explaining why my energy went down a bit, it'll come back up soon enough.”

“Well, I’ll order and you can just go pick a booth and chill,” Sirius offers. “You are the queen, after all.”

Remus nods, smiling for that, and reaches into his back right pocket for his wallet, which isn’t precisely what Sirius had in mind and is an action that he eyes very pointedly. “Oh, it’s your turn, isn’t it,” he says, nodding briskly. “OK, but you’d better remember our grocery deal, hm?”

“Yeah, yeah; get going, pal,” Sirius instructs, shooing him off with a light flitter of his right hand.

Remus makes sure to budge Sirius on the way by, moving to take the first booth on the right, which is really his only choice of booths when the rest are taken up already. Sirius heads up to stand near-ish to the tills, where two baristas are milling about, the lass from the antique mall parking lot busy at the bar while a bloke hangs around the till with an obvious head tilt down at his phone, but that’s something Sirius has been notorious for doing so he cannot blame him one bit for that.

He lifts his gaze to the menu boards hanging up above, searching for what he’d like to partake in himself, and that’s right about when the lad notices him and springs to life in Sirius’ peripheral. “Hi there, what can I get you?” he trills.

Sirius gives him a smile and points up. “Just looking first,” he passes along.

“Well, what are you craving, then?” the asks. "Could help narrow things down."

“The biggest kick you’ve got primarily,” Sirius offers him.

“Well, we did just get the nitro infuser put in, just so you’re aware,” the lad passes along. “Makes for one hell of a cold brew, and that’ll definitely pack a hell of a punch.”

“Well, I can’t say no to that,” Sirius returns, fishing his wallet out. He glances sidelong at Remus who’s dutifully chilling in the booth over that way and sends a pleasant smile back to him, and Sirius wonders if he, too, might benefit from this sort of kick; he’ll probably huff and puff about it, wince the whole time he’s trying to swallow it down, but Remus'll sure be back up before he knows it. “Can I get two of those? One small with a splash of milk, and the other as large as they come and give it full force, both in to-go cups.”

“For sure,” the bloke says, moving to gather them up.

He comes back to plug the order in and Sirius pays with his card before forking over some change for the tip jar, partially because he must and partially because it’s a mug shaped like a trout. After that, he wanders over toward the bar, Robyn’s 'Handle Me' starts up over the sound system, and suddenly it’s Shouldertown in here; Sirius bobs them along to the tune, two-hundred percent expecting Remus to be watching the performance from over there, but when Sirius checks to be sure, Remus has a bloke standing beside their booth and chatting him up, and now Sirius just feels foolish. Foolish and alert, he should say.

It’d help if he knew what to look for: a hair colour, a height, a distinguishing feature perhaps, but he’s only got a gender and a name to go on, and neither is going to help him out much here. That said, Remus is smiling like a fiend and that has Sirius reluctant to think it’s him, but the bloke heads off toward the door, leaving Remus as he was, and Sirius heads up by the table to get himself an answer, leaning his palms on the end of it.

“Did you give him your number?” he asks, huskily.

Remus sends him a lofty pfft. “That's Angela’s boyfriend,” he passes him.

And just like that, sweet ease. “So, did you give him your number?” Sirius doubles down, cracking a smile after it.

Remus huffs a laugh, shaking his head with a lopsided smile on. “Are we getting drinks, or?” he checks, trying to get a look around Sirius to have a glimpse of the bar.

“I’m waiting for them,” Sirius puts up, lifting his hands.

Remus points up at the speaker above their booth with a bright smile on. “It’s like they knew you were coming,” he raises.

“I was just thinking,” Sirius returns, swaying back to wait by the bar.

The lass from earlier on is just finishing up with the large of the two drinks, placing it onto the counter. “Next one’s coming up,” she says.

“Sounds good,” Sirius chimes, gathering up a few bags of sugar in a tin on the counter as Remus is definitely going to need a few of those.

He pockets those, plucks two straws out of a tin of them, and makes it back to the counter in time to get a glimpse of the infusion part of the process.

The girl finishes up with the nozzle and flickers her gaze up to him, smiling a bit. “It’s actually really fun to do,” she offers him.

“It looks it,” Sirius trades her. “I used to work at a café, but we never got one of those.”

“I’ve been hounding my boss for ages to get this put in, and do you know what?” she raises, pouring a little bit of milk at the top of the cup, creating quite the infusion of light and dark. “We can’t keep the cold brew’s from coming now.”

“Oh, I love vindication,” Sirius puts in.

“So do I,” the girl echoes, popping a lid onto Remus’s cup and sliding it over to him. “Enjoy.”

“We will,” Sirius returns, plucking both drinks up and walking them over to their booth. He leaves Remus’s drink in front of him along with one of the straws, empties the sugar packets from his pocket and dumps them in the middle of the table, slides in across from him with his own drink in hand, blinking innocently as Remus stares down at the concoction in front of him. “Hm?”

“What did you do?” Remus asks.

“I got you a nitro cold brew since you’re in the market for a good kick,” Sirius smiles.

Remus huffs, reaching over the table to thwack Sirius’s left shoulder with his straw. “Why’ve you done this?”

“It’ll be fine,” Sirius insists, popping the paper off of his straw and sticking it in his own drink. “Look, I brought you tons of sugar and I asked them to put plenty of milk in it; try it after everything’s mixed and you will be right back to business.”

Nitrogen?” Remus puts up, tossing a glance up at the ceiling like that thing's going to explain what’s happening here. “What, a regular cold brew wasn’t enough; they thought adding gas to it was necessary?”

“Yeah? Get with the times, Remus,” Sirius chimes, and Remus does aim to blow the paper of his straw across the table at him, but it flutters off to the left of Sirius and lands on the booth cushion beside him. “Alright, I’ll go get your cutesy, small-time tea, and you can just leave that one for me, no harm done.”

“I can’t just let you ingest two nitro cold brews,” Remus returns him. “I want your heart to keep beating.”

“Well, you’ll just have to drink it, then, won’t you?” Sirius trades him, leaning in to have a sip off of his own and sweet Cunt Almighty, it tastes like somebody dropped a double of whiskey into his cold brew. “I’m a changed man.”

“Go back to the other man,” Remus instructs, leaning in to try a sip of it without any sugar added in and wheezing after it's down. “This is battery acid.”

“Even with the milk added?” Sirius raises.

“Yes, and I don’t even want to think about what that one’s like,” Remus mentions, nodding toward Sirius’s au naturel cup as he plucks the lid off of his own.

“I think it tastes like happy hour meets me, but who's surprised?” Sirius puts up. Remus grunts as he piles the sugar packets up together, shakes them out, and tears at the seams, pouring it all in. Sirius watches him use his straw to stir in the mound of white atop the drink as well as the milk already inside the cup until the entire drink is officially beige top to bottom, taking in a deep breath before the plunge. “And?”

Remus swallows it down, tilting his head back and forth. “Still vastly strong, but better than it was,” he reviews.

“Then are we really any worse for wear?” Sirius poses.

“My heart might be,” Remus trades.

“With the amount of caffeine you ingest on a weekly basis? Doubtful,” Sirius returns.

“Oh, fine,” Remus huffs, bumping Sirius’s left knee with one of his under the table. “I can’t get away with saying anything around you.”

“Welcome to my world,” Sirius returns, smiling around his straw.

They hang around the place to a) hear more bops, b) finish their drinks, and c) simply enjoy the chance to sit and relax before they’ll have to be up and at'em again, and in the end, Sirius finishes his large a solid five minutes before Remus sips the lasts of his small down, but that’s hardly surprising either.

“You know what?” Remus raises, holding onto the empty cup.

“You’re still mad that I got you a cold brew instead of tea?” Sirius guesses.

“I was actually going to say I enjoyed that once my taste buds fully disintegrated,” Remus provides, pulling a quick, hearty gasp out of Sirius. He plucks up the sugar packets on the table one by one before popping the lid off of his drink and dumping the packets in there. “Can you hand me the paper?”

“The one you blew my direction?” Sirius raises, tossing his head toward it.

“The very one,” Remus smiles, holding his right hand out for it.

Sirius pulls it off of the cushion beside him and hands it over to Remus, who sticks both his and Sirius’s straws in his cup-bin and pops it into Sirius’s empty cup. “I’m going to toss this, say hi to Sam, and are you good to go after that?” he raises, scooting out of the booth.

Sirius hums an affirmation, giving Remus a royal wave as he heads over to the bar, and busies himself with trying to make out what the painting hanging between their booth seats is trying to tell him, but it’s just a series of multi-coloured blobs and that’s about all he’s got by the time Remus turns up by the table again. “I’m getting a sense of ambivalent loneliness from this," he shares, pointing up at the painting with all of the fingers on his left hand. "A depiction of the very feeling of being trapped inside the rib cage, but along with it, the lack of ability or perhaps even the very desire to pull on the strength to—”

“Oh, you do not,” Remus cuts in, flicking Sirius’s right shoulder with a lopsided grin.

“No, not at all,” Sirius concedes, sliding out of his booth seat.

The grocery is up at the very top of the main as per Remus’s imparting of that knowledge as they leave the storefront, which means more strolling and window shopping and people watching, and Sirius requests that they cross the road to head to their next stop so he can see all new things along the way, and he’s glad he did when they come upon what looks like a liquor store.

“Hold it, let’s take a wee gander in here,” Sirius bids, beckoning Remus toward the door.

“Oh, you cannot get pissed before we get the groceries, you’ll buy the entire store,” Remus quips.

“It’s not for me,” Sirius chimes, reaching to pull the door open. The shopkeep or employee, either or, sends a bright hello toward them, garnering an echo back from the two of them. “Now, what’s your mum’s favourite scotch?”

“Sirius,” Remus says, smiling wryly. “You can’t get her pissed at dinner either; I’d like her to remember what we tell her.”

“It’s not for tonight, you party horse,” Sirius returns. “It’s a gift to show my gratitude for letting me come stay, win myself one more Fine Young Lad point to add to the collection, and something she’ll actually enjoy from me rather than giving her yet another tchotchke for the cabinets.”

Remus sighs with the wry smile still on, leading them down toward the scotch. “She would be happy with just about anything, OK?” he puts down. “You don’t need to go buying the fancy stuff.”

“Who says?” Sirius raises.

“I do, and she would, too,” Remus lobs him. “She’ll know if it’s fancy and she’ll have a cow, so you’re to pick something slightly higher than run of the mill if you really want to make her glow, but that’s it, that’s all, and I’m putting my foot down on this one.”

“Oh, you’re no fun,” Sirius insists, waving him off.

“She likes Bowmore,” Remus passes him, displaying his hands underneath a fair few options for that particular brand.

Sirius sizes them up, making a tight hum in his throat. “I know so little about scotch other than that it makes my face warm and light,” he confesses. “Which one should I pick?”

“Do the twelve,” Remus suggests. “My dad got her that one a while back and she really liked it, so she won’t be pretending any when she’s thanking you for it.”

“Done and done,” Sirius says for it, lifting a box off of the shelf. “Easy as pie.”

“Speaking of, would you be at all interested in making a fruit pie with a bit of cream cheese filling?” Remus checks.

Sirius blinks wildly at him. “Why would I not be?”

“Well, we haven’t branched out from your regular filling, but I have a recipe that looks really good,” Remus explains. “Nothing too complicated and, if I’m honest, if we do mess up a little bit on the layering, are we going to actually notice? No, we’ll still taste it all together and we’ll try again next time.”

“You’ve already sold it to me,” Sirius returns. “What about the pot pie, any changes to that?”

“No no, I think we’ve struck gold with old faithful,” Remus puts it, heading down toward the till counter.

“So many pies,” Sirius puts out gratefully, carrying the box along with him as he follows him there.

Sirius takes a bag for it once the transaction is finished, doesn't bother with the receipt, stuffs the bagged bottle in his shopping bag for double the cushion should something unfortunate arise, and they’re off again, grocery bound.

-

Sirius scans the massive crate holding many, many bags of potatoes in front of him, trying to figure out which one will yield the best results. “D’you suppose that if I wanted all of these potatoes, they’d throw in the crate too?” he raises, glancing over the top of the display and toward Remus, who’s stuffing a few carrots into a bag while clutching a bag of celery stalks to his chest.

He smirks, tying the bag of carrots at lightning speed. “I mean, you could probably charm your way there, but what would we do with that many potatoes?”

“I’m sure I’d figure out something to do with them,” Sirius gives assuredly.

“I don’t know that chucking them at passersby counts as putting them to good use,” Remus mentions, moving to stick both bags into the cart.

“Well, that would really depend on who they’re being thrown at, but I digress,” Sirius says for it, picking a bag out of the pile and carrying it over to the cart. “Have you decided on which fruit for the second pie?”

“Well, the recipe I found had instructions for blueberry or strawberry, but my dad’s not such a fan of strawberries, so blueberry it is,” Remus passes along.

“Heathen?” Sirius returns.

“Tell him that for me, would you?” Remus quips.

“I will not,” Sirius denies. “And I’m fine with blueberry, want me to get them?”

“Two packs please,” Remus bids. “Enough for three cups, and some snacking because we’re us.”

Sirius smirks there. “True,” he drags out, going for the fruit side of the produce section and having a gander around for the blueberries.

“While you’re doing that, I’m going to run to get the flour,” Remus forwards, moving away from the cart and slipping off down the aisle.

It’s not great timing for Sirius finds the berries and brings back two packs about ten seconds from when Remus took off and now he’s tasked with either waiting here or scouring the store to look for him, and that could mean they'll end up missing each other for hours and hours so he might as well stand by the cart and wait it out, and besides, the nitro brew officially hit about a block away from the supermarket so Remus's legs alone will carry him back speedily soon enough, Sirius should think. He waits there while a sultry, no-name tune he’s never heard before and doesn’t particularly want to again plays throughout the store, and there he thinks, not for the first time at all, that sometimes the general, three-and-a-half minute rule for playable tunes can be far too long. He spots Remus coming back up the opposite way he took off down, holding a carton of chicken broth in his right hand, a package of two chicken breasts in his left, and clutching a 4lbs bag of flour to his chest like it’s a throw pillow.

“Oi,” Sirius puts up, lifting his hands, “you could have waited ten seconds for me to finish up getting the berries and I’d have come carry something.”

“This was easier,” Remus resounds, zooming up the aisle toward him.

“Was it, though?” Sirius raises, moving to take the broth and chicken out of his hands to put them in the cart.

Remus moves to manoeuvre the bag of flour into the cart, shuffles the contents around a little to avoid squashing anything, and gives a hearty sigh from there. “I feel like a steed at the races,” he shares.

“You look like one, too,” Sirius passes along brightly, and Remus moves in to prod him in the gut with both forefingers at an accelerated pace, but it's a pace that Sirius is ready to block, meeting each of Remus’s prods with an open palm. “Try harder, punk."

The sound of a one-note but prominent throat being cleared sounds off just to Sirius’s right, revealing a lady trying to get at the stack of carrots behind their cart. The two of them hop to action, Sirius moving to grab the cart and move it along, pushing it around the bend while Remus slips up by the left side of the cart and glides along beside it. “Where to?” Sirius bids, sticking his left foot onto the back bar of the cart and scooting it along the floor.

“Dairy and then frozen foods,” Remus passes along, pointing righteously down the back aisle they’re traipsing down. “Straight ahead, way down at the other end.”

Sirius accelerates with his right foot before pitching the cart off in said direction and sticking both feet at the back of the cart, gliding down the aisle. “Meet you there,” he trills, but in true seconds Remus is already up by the cart thanks to his rapid legwork, and then they’re both distracted by the intro to the luminescent Katrina and the Waves smash hit 'Walking on Sunshine' coming on over the speakers throughout the store.

The two of them find each other’s gaze immediately, sizing each other up with matching gape-grins, and Sirius drops off the back of the cart as Remus begins the routine with just his arms while gliding around the bend and into the dairy aisle while Sirius, on the other hand, has a cart to consider, but he takes to budging forward with his waist and mirroring the routine with his just arms.

Remus side-sweeps by the cheese section, stopping mid-routine to flutter his arms toward the shelf on his right littered with cream cheese options. “Light or full?” he prompts.

“Don’t insult me,” Sirius returns, stopping the cart and going into a full-bodied routine now that he’s able.

Remus grabs hold of a standard slab of cream cheese and rejoins the performance, holding the product in his right hand while he does it, and it’s somehow the best version of the routine Sirius ever did see.

“...Remus?”

The sound of his name paired with the perplexed tone it's spoken with might've been what stopped Remus short right quick, but Sirius sends a side-eye to the beanie-N'-bearded bro coming up the aisle to them because well, fuck off, mate, they’re obviously busy over here.

“Having a dance-off?” he raises, slowing to a stop ahead of the two of them.

“Well, it's Zumba so it’s actually more a team effort than a competitive one,” Remus offers, lifting his hands evenly before using the right one in a gesture toward the newcomer. “Congrats on Cambridge; really, that’s amazing.”

"Yeah, thanks, it's—" he offers, and whatever the fuck is said next is completely lost on Sirius for it takes everything he’s got in him to keep cool.

He’s by no means a religious man, but he’s about ready to get down on his knees and clutch a rosary between his hands in thanks for the actual, living, breathing picture in front of him has somehow surpassed all he’d already imagined Remus's former flame to look like. He looks like one of those blokes who can be found sipping doppio espressos in an indie coffee shop, perched in one of the armchairs by the fire while he spouts on and on about the groundbreaking novel he’s penning while completely avoiding just shutting it and actually writing the novel; he looks like the sort to order an extra hot matcha green tea latte but hold the foam, as if that horrid series of combinations don't make getting rid of foam a painstaking process for any barista at the mercy of the order and makes a cheap shot loud enough for them to hear about the microfoam at the top of his drink when it’s all said and done; he looks like the type to argue the slightest price increase on a drink while carrying a shiny, spanking, top-of-the-line Macbook along with him to take up space in the café to do his Art History readings alone because he just can’t find someone to willingly spend time with such a seething bore of a person.

A loud, loud snort comes right out of Sirius’s throat, causing both Remus and Tommy McGee to glance his way and effectively assume he’s laughing at whatever they’re discussing and not about something his own brain concocted, and Sirius really doesn’t know if he could care any less about that.

Remus pushes the bridge of his sunglasses up his nose a bit with his free hand before gesturing it toward him. “This is Sirius,” he forwards, poised to continue before that becomes utterly impossible with the extreme left turn that occurs.

“Lyall’s looking great, hey?” Tom offers, and Sirius feels his eyebrows take up permanent residence at the top of his forehead; his smile dissipates in under a beat and there is a brief moment where he considers what might be the consequence of sending the cart careening toward Tommy McGee and whether he much cares about the consequence, but there’s fucking Reg again, clutching around his windpipe with that tight, judgmental hand that always did have too tight a hold on him.

Remus’s entire chest inflates before he accepts that creaking left turn, but thankfully his subsequent nod is rather curt. “Yeah, he bounced back quicker than we all thought," he extends. "Aside from him of course; he knew better."

“Well, he’s always further ahead of the curve than the rest of us, isn’t he,” Tom allows. “It’s really something, though; you almost can’t tell that there’s anything off.”

Remus smiles there. “Well, there isn’t,” he offers. “It’s a prosthetic, after all; not a peg leg.”

“Oh, no, I mean his speed is impressive, that's all, not to mention his whole outlook since then is really inspiring,” Tom reiterates. “One would expect the whole debacle to have chipped away at him or make it so the topic wouldn't be particularly welcomed, but not for Lyall, he's proud of it.”

Sirius bends inward, leaning his elbows over the handle of the cart and not even bothering to hide his absolute fucking embarrassment for this tactless piece of shit’s idea of what an appropriate conversation is; it’s gutting, to be sure, but wonderful somehow, to see it all so clear. “Mm, might have to do with the fact that he elected to have it taken off,” Remus trades him. “Sort of takes a lot of the resentment out of the picture when you’re the one making the choice versus not being given one at all.”

“Wait, he did?” Tom raises.

Remus hums there, nodding. “After his last operation didn’t take and he was back in again, his doctor came into his room to tell him amputation was the only real option ahead of him and was apparently ready for a bit of a fight from my dad about it, but my dad beat him to it and ordered him to, I believe it was, ‘cut this fucking thing off.’”

Sirius ducks his head, giving into a bright smirk at the pitch-perfect impression of their dear Lyall and his dulcet tones, but unfortunately Tom guffaws right about there as well. “Lyall,” he implores, and bitch, that’s not his line, that's Sirius's. “Well, good on him, really; I see him out driving the truck quite a bit and you can just tell he’s over the moon to be back in it.”

“Yeah, the fall was Rehabcity, but he was determined to back behind the big wheel as soon as he got given the all-clear,” Remus nods. “Can’t take that away from him, can we.”

“No, we’ll let him have this one,” Toms allows, like he’s even got a say in the matter, the schlub. “He told me all about your Paris plans; can’t be too surprised about that, can I, once you take London, might as well take the other one while you're at it, but I’m just wondering how I didn’t hear your scream of joy from over here, you must be right chuffed.”

Remus pushes out a breathy laugh. “Understatement,” he says. “Lots to get done before then, of course, but I’m working through the list one item at a time.”

“Well, hey, same here,” Tom raises, shifting the shopping basket on his right arm. “I’m actually flying in with my mum on Monday for about a week’s stay, you know; scouting for flats, getting a lay of the land, get that out of the way; do you know where you’ll be staying?”

“Not quite, no,” Remus offers, and Jesus actual Cunt; could this bloke pick one, just one topic that won’t cause a fester festival inside of Remus, that’d be just fucking lovely. “I’ve got work lined up already, and for flats, we've been looking around and I’ve got a pseudo-cousin-in-law that's keeping her ear out for anything with the network she has there, so I’m keeping hopeful about it.”

Sirius can’t deny that he loves this direction they’ve gone in, just about as much as he loves the twitch that tugs at Tom’s right eye before it's gone again, and whether it came and went for the use of 'we' or the 'pseudo-cousin-in-law' he doesn't know, but either one would be swell. “Must be rough, not knowing,” Tom frowns, stroking at his beard thoughtfully, which, all in all, is almost as bad an idea as digging and digging himself further into the hole is.

Sirius pushes off of the handle of the cart and looks right at Remus, gesturing with his right thumb for them to get back to it and shut this down, but Remus stays put. “It is, but she’s inherently driven and has taken the task of finding me leads quite seriously, so out of respect for her I won’t start panicking until August and we’re about a fortnight too early on panicking,” he supplies, tapping the side of the slab of cream cheese still in his hands.

Tom nods to allow it. “Right, still a little bit of time left,” he offers.

Sirius feels an immense push and pull; a part of him wanting Remus away from this if this albeit brief conversation is even half of a snapshot of what six years between them would’ve looked like with Tom honing in on just the right sort of digs at him, but the other part finding this bird’s eye view enlightening, and he can't pretend it doesn't bring him a sense of honour and pride to be able to say that he, himself, has learned, in far less time than Tom had, how to come at any one of Remus’s set-off topics with genuine curiosity and a penchant for finding solutions rather than pouring gasoline on the fire.

“You know, it’s funny,” Tom raises, and he would just pivot elsewhere after Remus left his quip hanging like that, "when Hope mentioned to me that you switched majors, I couldn’t help but find it fitting because I still use some of the tools you gave me to this day; I think you’ve found the right place for you.”

“Oh?” Remus prompts, tilting his head to the left.

Tom smirks there. “I’m not pulling your leg,” he doubles down. “In a way, I owe you for getting me in there.”

“Oh, no, I know that,” Remus insists, beckoning with his right hand. “But go on, finish the thought.”

Sirius only just holds off from raising his hands to rejoice in this wonderful turn-around, but Tom huffs out a laboured breath, ducking his head as his smirk moves into a pointed grin, and Sirius would like nothing more than to slap that thing off of his face; quit it, he’s not flirting, you actual scab. “Well, particularly when I wrote my letter of intent, I went through the draft, pinpointing parts that were a little too thin, and I could just see you pointing at them and urging me to 'fucking elaborate already,'" he details, positively glowing with it, "and every time I heard it, I did just that and it really paid off for me.”

Remus nods to accept that. “Well, I’m glad to hear my advice hasn't ended up in the bin.”

“No, it’s definitely lodged in there,” Tom echoes, reaching behind himself to pull out his mobile. “Well, I’ve got to get on, lots to do before the trip, but you’ve got a different number by now, I’d imagine?”

Sirius straightens up tall as Tom hands his mobile off to Remus for him to plug it in for him without anything else, and Remus shouldn’t even have to be entertaining this clown any longer even if he is the nicest bloke to ever nice, but Tom fucking knows that and he knows what he's doing; he knows Remus won’t say no, Sirius can just see it in his beady little celebratory eyes as Remus hands back his mobile.

“Really good seeing you,” Tom imparts, stepping back from them and heading down the way he came.

“Yeah, you too,” Remus returns, holding his hands at his sides. “Have a safe flight out.”

Sirius lifts his arms in Tom’s wake, turning toward Remus for a prime explanation, who merely huffs a laugh and lifts his hands plainly. “Anyway,” he gives, moving to put the cream cheese slab into the cart.

“You’ve seen his balls,” Sirius raises, getting a prompt shush out of Remus for it. “Well, tell me; are they enormous?

“Standard size, and could you please keep your voice down?” Remus bids, pulling out his mobile for their list and scrolling through it with his right hand. “It’s over with, can we keep to what we’re here for? We’re almost done.”

“No no, I feel like he’s got to be carrying fifty-pounders on him for pulling that, let alone while I’m standing right the fuck here,” Sirius insists. “What am I, a statue?”

Remus sighs, the unbothered air about him blowing Sirius’s mind. “It was just for show,” he puts up. “He routinely forgets how to even operate a telephone, I promise you that; let’s focus on tonight, hm?

“Are you sure you’re OK?” Sirius checks, stepping in to try and see in past Remus’s shades, but that's no use. “He hit you with about a thousand arrows there.”

Remus lifts his free palm to Sirius’s chest. “I’m fine; I’d like a shower maybe, but other than that, I’m good,” he insists. “We just need the milk, the frozen peas, and the sugar, and then we’re done with our list and we can get back to gallivanting, only problem is, the milk is over this way and the sugar’s across the store; I should really learn to structure my lists in order of appearance in-store.”

Sirius looks up and around, finding the dairy section blessedly unoccupied aside from them, and leans in to leave a kiss at the right corner of Remus’s mouth. “Nobody structures their lists like that,” he slips him. “Where’s the sugar in here, then?”

“Aisle four,” Remus supplies, chasing Sirius’s mouth for a quick peck while the coast's clear, but is immediately struck by a thought. “Oh, Cunt, the tea.”

Sirius smirks, nodding for that. “I’m on it,” he echoes, lifting a hand to push it through Remus’s fringe. “Which aisle's that in?”

“Five,” Remus forwards, a dusting of pink over his cheeks.

Sirius taps the tip of his nose, strolls back to the end of the aisle, and makes the right turn back to the previous aisle they were on, switching to a brisk stride after making the turn and scanning each aisle as he passes them in search of that tan beanie. He offers the first genuine prayer he’s ever really given in hopes that it’ll help keep that little shit from leaving the building before he can get to him. He passes aisle five a little too quickly, skids back and makes such a sharp right turn that he almost bashes his left shoulder against a corner display of picnic essentials, but he gets his stride back as he heads at double speed toward Tom at the middle of the aisle.

The fact of the matter is, he’s a man on a mission so he must look a lot like one, and the fact that Tom looks away from the shelf in front of him and jolts back as he sees him coming is as understandable as it is hilarious.

Sirius gives out a bright laugh as he stops in front of him, lifting his hands in mock surrender, but Tom immediately puts a good three steps, long steps in between them. “Hey, at least you knew better than to take off running,” he raises. “I’m Sirius, his partner since you made sure to skip that detail, but nevertheless, I simply cannot let you leave here until we have a chat.”

Tom goes on quite a face journey, making a series of expressions ranging from discomfort to a spot of outrage to plain disbelief before settling on a face one might make if they stepped in dog shit. “You know what,” he returns, waving his right hand dismissively, “whatever this is, I don’t want it.”

Sirius reaches up and strikes that dismissive hand down and out of the way in a snap, causing Tom to whirl back and put a five-step distance between them. “I don’t give a fuck what you want, you’re going to let me finish speaking—”

“Don’t you fucking touch me,” Tom barks.

“What, afraid you’ll like it?” Sirius goads, stepping in again.

Tom steps back again with that. “I’m not about to be harassed—”

“No no, shut the fuck up, I’m talking now,” Sirius asserts, waving that off with a stark wave of his hand. “It just wouldn’t be on not to thank you, after being the weakest sack of shit I’ve heard about in a long time and setting the bar so ridiculously low, you’ve made it that much easier for me to step over you; all I’ve got to do is show up, and he’s already dumbfounded by it so when I do any more than that, I look like a fucking king compared to you and the scraps you threw his way, so thank you for that, truly, and while we’re here, thank you for all the fucking damage control we’ve had to do because you got to him first.”

He meant to shoot to kill, take him down nine pegs, but the wounded expression Tom’s face breaks into isn’t welcomed at all now that Sirius got it out of him, not when it shows a stunning lack of self-awareness, let alone reflection. Tom speaks there, but truth be told, the noise sounds too like an adult off of the Peanuts cartoons, so glorified honking isn’t really what he’s asking for here.

He puts on the best work smile he can muster, coming in to cut off Tom’s honkage with a snap of his right hand in front of his face. “Now, a clever, Cambridge-bound lad like you could probably muster up the wits to understand that the way you talked to him back there and the stunt you just pulled were wildly inappropriate, but I’m willing to let you walk out of here without a limp so long as you understand that using his number would be disastrous for you,” he puts down. “Cambridge isn’t far from London, a fact I’m sure you’ve already looked into, and if you so much as whisper in his direction, today, tomorrow, a month from now, I guarantee I’ll be paying you a visit up there and you don’t want that.”

“I can talk to whoever I fucking choose to,” Tom asserts, brass balled all over again.

“Wrong answer, Tom,” Sirius rings out. “Not him; pick somebody else to drag down with you, you’ve plenty of experience in that area.”

He leaves Tom with a look of warning before he turns away and strolls back up the way he came, pulling a box of Remus’s favourite brand of English Breakfast off of the shelf on the way by and whistling 'Walking on Sunshine' as he goes.

He rounds the corner to head for aisle four, 'Rocky’s Theme' blaring in his head for his service, feeling like a hundred pounds and as if there are two queues of people forming on either side of him, waiting to shake his hand or give him high tens. In reality, he turns into aisle four and scopes out the sugar, going out on a limb and presuming if Remus didn’t mention an amount then a standard bag is likely what he’s looking for, and pulls one off of the shelf.

He heads back to Remus with both items in tow, glancing down aisle five to find Tom very much gone and replaced by nameless other townsfolk, and thinks he’ll smile even easier if he gets to Remus and finds him alone.

He doesn’t find him alone, but it’s not Tom who's taken up his attention, but rather a woman who in turn is just setting off in the opposite direction from the way Sirius is coming. “Say hi to her for me,” she calls in parting.

“Oh, I will,” Remus nods, waving as she moves along with her cart.

Sirius steps up by the cart, leaving his share of the last few items in it. “Who’s she?” he bids.

“One of the florists in town,” Remus passes along. “She’s known me since I weighed but ten pounds and every time I speak to her, I do get the sense that she can't quite accept that I’ve grown far past that point.”

Sirius smirks once. “Oh no,” he offers, for sympathy’s sake.

“Mhm, just shy of pinching my cheeks just there, she was,” Remus relays, moving to pilot the cart down the aisle toward the front.

“Could give her a quick show of the other set and that'd probably clear things up,” Sirius suggests.

Remus ducks his head through a breathy laugh. “That or get me dinged for indecent exposure,” he wagers.

“Joke's on you, you like that sort of thing,” Sirius says of it, strolling along beside him.

Remus sticks his left foot out to mime tripping him. “We are in public,” he puts up.

“Is that where we are?” Sirius puts up airily, having a curious glance around.

Remus sends a grand huff to the ceiling, bringing them and the cart around the bend on their left, revealing the checkout aisles where three registers appear to be in use, all of them having surprisingly short queues, but then it’s not quite dinner time rush, is it. That said, Sirius’s blood takes to a boil as he spots Tom at the register at the top of the first queue and can’t help but glance sidelong at Remus, but whether he sees Tom there or pretends not to, Sirius can’t say for Remus is already wheeling the cart toward the third queue.

“Now, you,” he starts, pointing sidelong at Sirius with his right hand, “are to take our prior bags out of the cart and get over to the other side of these tills.”

Sirius claps a hand against his breastbone in half-mock, half-genuine surprise. “Thought you said you’d send me right out of the building,” he comments.

Remus pauses as he’s rifling through the cart to retrieve the bags from their prior shopping, looking up at him. “Did you want to go out there?” he checks.

“No no, I’ll wait,” Sirius very insists.

“OK,” Remus offers, resuming before he lifts the two bags up and out to him. “There’s a gap just up there at the end of the tills you can cut through.”

“Oh, thanks,” Sirius returns, looking over that way before he takes hold of the bags. He heads past the unopened tills to get to the end of them, moving through the previously advertised gap, and heads over to wait on the other side of the queue he left Remus in.

Sirius looks left, watches Tom leave the store while sending a sordid glance in his direction, and sends back a parting smile before he heads through the door. He looks back at Remus and watches him unloading the cart, able to see him from the shoulders up over the head of an older gent ahead of him in the queue every time Remus slips a new item onto the stalled conveyor belt, but Sirius just cannot see a single sign that he could be spooked. It’s possible that he’s got his hands too busy to pick at his nails or back-pocket them, and even then, once he’s finished putting their haul onto the counter, he’s pulling out his mobile, typing on it, putting it to his ear, calling for the taxi likely and again too busy to show any unspoken signals, or he’s really just that unbothered, and Sirius can’t help but think one option is far more likely than the other.

The man ahead of Remus finishes up at the till and heads off with his bags in hand, allowing for Remus to move up and engage the cashier, who very clearly knows him and his Lupin-spawned self for she engages him right back through the scanning process and beyond. He multitasks like the champ he tends to be with that sort of thing, handing the bag boy the reusable bag of bags he made sure to bring along with them, pulling out his wallet, taking his card out and tap-tap-tapping it on the counter as he chit-chats, so is that the sign? Is Sirius sleeping on a new one? Are there no signs to catch and is he just looking for trouble where there isn’t any?

Remus turns up in front of him, the shopping bag hanging off his right shoulder, and pets the crease between Sirius’s brows with his left forefinger in such a quick move that Sirius is half-unsure if he even experienced it or not. “If I can do anything to help, just say so, OK?” he raises.

Sirius fights a stutter at the notion that he’d be having mope-time over anything that has to do with his own sordid baggage just now. “You too, yeah?” he hints.

“I know,” Remus replies, beckoning him. “Our ride's probably out there.”

It's definitely outside when they get out there, and from the moment they’re in the backseat, Sirius watches impishly as Remus and the driver chat each other up like old drinking buddies; the fact that their rapport is snappy and quick should inherently make the drive back to Remus’s place shorter, but it gives the opposite effect, making it feel like upwards of an hour rather than a twenty-minute ride down the highway, and the fireball burning in Sirius's gut isn't helping the journey either. He's more pumped to drive up to the Lupin abode than he was earlier this morning, and that was a tough one to beat. He sits forward in his seat, pulling his wallet out of his back left pocket to signal he’s getting the fare, but the conversation is still popping so Remus doesn’t really react either way.

He gets out of the car as soon as the payment goes through, leans into the car to lift his share of the load out from between the foot of his seat and the back of the driver’s, and gives a quick thanks before shutting the door. He heads round the front of the car while Remus moves up from the other side of it, fishing his keys out of his left trouser pocket.

The cabbie does a u-ie in the little roundabout and honks twice from behind them, garnering Sirius to look over his shoulder as the car pulls up the drive. “Another old friend?”

“No, he must be new to town,” Remus replies, flipping through his keys to get to the right one, and Sirius is left staring sidelong at him as they take the porch stairs, though Remus doesn’t seem to note of his quandary.

Sirius gives up on trying to make the lively drive home make sense, moves aside when they get to the door to let Remus unlock it, and follows him into the foyer, which fits the two of them while they foot their shoes off easier than this morning when they had a lot more in tow. Remus heads into the front hall and down it, checking the time on his phone and speaking while Sirius follows after him.

“Now, it’s only three so we’re even earlier than I was even banking on, but I’m thinking the best plan would be to get the delicates put away and the rest we can put to the side until we start, otherwise we’d really just be putting it all away just to take it back out again,” he offers, leading the way through the dining room and into the kitchen.

“Solid,” Sirius returns, hardly against that.

Remus moves to set his bags on the table in the centre of the room, and Sirius figures he’ll stick his share on it too for now, moving over to be doorman to the fridge while Remus works the dairy products out of the shopping bags first. He hands them over to Sirius to stow away, followed by the vegetables, and that’s right about where Sirius feels they’ve done their dues for now.

He shuts the freezer door after sticking the frozen peas in there and moves away from it, heading more toward Remus, now sorting out the rest of their groceries into frankly unnecessary piles on the table.

“Hey, can we pause?” he asks, coaxing Remus to face him rather than the table.

Remus goes with the coaxing, putting his head on a left-hanging tilt and smiling for him, but the sunglasses are just going to have to go. Sirius reaches up to ease them off of Remus’s face, leaves them on the table with the rest of their haul, and moves in close, slipping his arms around Remus’s back and curling the fingertips of his right hand up underneath the hem of Remus’s shirt, the tracings of them over Remus’s skin are equal parts inherent and easy while specific and driven in hopes it’ll coax Remus into being a little more open with him about it.

He searches Remus’s eyes, finds that they’re not exactly dinner plate status but not their typical oval shape either, and he breathes in, poised to speak before Remus reaches up to tip Sirius’s chin up with his right hand and leans in to steal a kiss off him, and it isn’t Sirius’s fault that he gives a soft noise at the back of his throat while his knees go all wobbly; that manoeuvre is trademark Remus.

Sirius traces semi-circles underneath Remus’s shirt with the both of his thumbs, backing him into the edge of the table and swallowing the rather pleased hum that comes out of him before Remus takes to sucking on Sirius’s tongue in what must be a showcase of grave appreciation for Sirius’s eyelids flutter shut against the soft, wet pressure against it, rolling his hips up against Remus’s in a near-pleading motion.

Remus slips his feet apart first, then his knees, and finally his thighs before he tugs Sirius in for more, and Sirius fucking gives him more, dropping his right palm to the tabletop and definitely lands it on something that he can’t decipher just now, that’s not important, but driving Remus against the edge of the table, however, is. Remus reaches round the back of Sirius and dips his fingers underneath the waistband of Sirius’s trousers before working them in further best he can with the tight cling of Sirius’s Good Jeans, going for a full squeeze of him before locking Sirius’s hips in so all he can do now his drive his hips in fast half-circles before making the rounds again, and it's minutes before the two of them part their lips, breathing roughly against each other's as they rock together, and Sirius would fucking love it if the burn in his gut would go the fuck away when this is paradise, this is fair, this is theirs; they deserve to enjoy each other, and yet, telling himself all of that isn't making that feeling go anywhere other than his exuberantly troubled gut.

Remus speaks there, a stuttered breath between their lips. “We have to—” he tries, halting Sirius’s hips altogether with a fierce grip on his ass and garnering Sirius to grip the tabletop/random grocery item hard in response.

“Yeah,” he breathes back, relieved Remus can see it too, “we do—”

“—Pick a different room,” he finishes.

Sirius forces his eyes open, cursing his gut for ruining this for the both of them, the fiend. “No, I—” he tries, forcing himself to think past his throbbing dick, but that's still a lot to ask of himself.

“I want you badly, but not in my mum’s kitchen,” Remus doubles down, pushing a breathy laugh. “I just can’t do it.”

“No, that’s fair; I just, we shouldn’t be—” Sirius tries again, only no matter what he says, it’ll sound like a decline. He lifts his right palm from the table and presses it to Remus’s left cheek, locking eyes with him determinedly. “I really want to, OK?”

“OK?” Remus echoes, tossing a glance down between the two of them and their rather pronounced, trouser-clad appendages pressed tightly together and Sirius supposes now that it was a bit obvious.

“Right,” Sirius says, stepping back a step. “We should really talk about it, Remus.”

Remus blinks, looking around the room like somebody’s going to appear in it to help explain. “Now?” he checks, looking back at Sirius.

“Well, I was trying to before we got started, but you’re my biggest weakness,” Sirius gives him. “Only, that must have been a really off-putting sidestep to your day and I wouldn’t blame you at all if you were feeling all sorts of weird about it; I really wouldn't, I’m not just saying that, and if we tackle it now, I feel like we'll be—”

Remus breathes out through his nose while his mouth’s in a line, pulling his hands out of Sirius's trousers and reaching up to cup his face in between them. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he makes plain.

Sirius would reel if he could, but his face is stuck. “Well, I want to,” he returns, wounded.

Remus lets his hands fall from his face, changes up the placement of his jaw, and averts his gaze to the wall past Sirius’s left shoulder before he sticks his tongue against the side of his mouth like he’s only just holding back on a devastating zinger, and to be frank, Sirius doesn’t even want to hear it.

“I don’t like having to guess where you are on this,” he implores. "I want you to help me help you."

“It’s done; I saw my ex, everybody does eventually,” Remus puts up, and far too wanly for the situation, honestly. “I can’t change anything about it, so there’s really not much point in going back in and dwelling on it.”

Sirius pushes a pointed laugh out of his nose. “So, you’re just going to give me something that wooden for a reply, one that’s not like you at all, and I’m just supposed to believe that all of a sudden you're as chill as can be?” he puts up. “I know you better than that.”

Remus looks back at him now, his eyebrows shooting up his forehead in plain alarm. “I thought you’d be—”

“What, proud?” Sirius tosses up, blinking. “Yeah, I’m super proud to know that you’re forcibly not talking to me about this; love that."

“Proud of me,” Remus enunciates. “I’m just trying to go with it, Sirius; could you let me?”

“No,” Sirius returns at once. “I’m not going to.”

“I don’t like how I feel when I think about it, thanks,” Remus sends back. “I don’t like the fact that he’s got all this information on what I’m doing, I don’t like that my mum and dad keep obliviously giving away ammunition like that, and there’s no way to control it because I dug my own hole with that, so until he moves the fuck out of this fucking valley and they can’t keep running into him, he can find out anything he wants to from them because, apparently, I’m their favourite topic of conversation.”

Sirius hears all that loud and clear, but the face Remus pulls after it is what really had him bent in half. “Oh, poor you,” he returns bluntly, and he knows it is because Remus’s shoulders go rigid and that’s a fine clue that Remus well-knows he’s stuck his foot in his mouth, but Jesus Cunt, read the fucking room. “Those two fucking adore you and it pours right out of them, so you can wince and huff and moan about it all you want to anyone else but the least you could do is not act like they’re burdens when I’m around.”

Remus rapidly shifts his gaze to the single tile that lays between their socked feet, breathing so slightly Sirius has to squint to tell he’s even doing it. “You’re right,” he says, lifting his shoulders once. “I’m sorry I haven’t been better about that.”

Sirius huffs a fast breath out. “Sorry wasn’t what I asked for, was it?” he returns, pushing a suddenly but intrinsically annoying batch of flyaway hairs out of his face. “This is ridiculous, we’re just dancing around the issue instead of looking the elephant at the grocery in the eye, and also, fuck off, this wasn’t even about your mum and dad sharing intel with him, you’re prickled and embarrassed about it, fine, but you’re pretending like that’s all you’re bothered by and it’s not going to work anyway; I’m not falling for it, and another thing, you haven’t once asked me if I’m doing OK after that and you sure as fuck could have by now.”

“What?” Remus raises, breaking his staring contest with the floor to look at him again; quite bamboozled by the looks of it, and that’s just too rich.

“'What?'” Sirius quotes. “Of all the things that could have happened back there — here, here’s what could have been done: you could have gone and crouched behind him so he’d have something sturdy to go tripping backwards over after I sunk my fist into his jaw, or better yet, we both could have tag-teamed him and took turns wiping that smug grin off his face with our bare hands, or even better, we could have stolen his wallet, bolted out of there, and returned twenty minutes later just to use his papa’s money to buy our things, but no, instead you greeted him like an old friend, congratulated him on an achievement that you fucking can’t stand while still managing to sound ecstatic for him, and sure, you snarked him a bit later on like he deserved to be, I’ll give you that, but then you went and gave him your fucking number.”

Remus pushes out a long sigh. “It’s not as if I saw that last one coming,” he puts in tightly.

“It’s almost like you want him to give you a shout?” Sirius inspects. “Don’t know why you would with the way he spits daggers at you every chance he can, but hey? Why not give him easy access to you, right? That'll be smart.”

“I was on autopilot, Sirius,” Remus emphasizes.

“Not the best time to take a mental break, Remus,” Sirius chimes.

“What was I supposed to do?” Remus snaps, gesturing around himself. “I wanted him to move along and get out of there so I just did what he asked; I sure am sorry I didn’t fall apart in the middle of a supermarket just for your validation, but I have been reeling since the second he walked up, are you happy to hear it?”

“Yeah, I am,” Sirius returns at once. “At least you’re not pretending everything’s fine when it clearly fucking isn’t.”

Remus shoots him a look so loaded that Sirius begs the earth and all her trimmings that he won’t call him out on that one, but he lifts his right hand to drag it over his face and bites out his reply. “Of course I’m not fine.”

“Could have fooled me, and did for a smidge there,” Sirius returns brightly. “Get Viola Davis in the room, I bet she’d just love to have the chance to work opposite such a masterful talent.”

Remus drops his hand at once, revealing a pair of wild eyes. “Fine,” he sends back. “What kind of bullshit serendipity was that, seeing him? What’d I do to anger the universe this much, hm? You’re the expert on me here, not me.”

“Well, if there’s only one grocery in town, that might just do it,” Sirius puts up flatly.

“There are three,” Remus returns, clipped. “And two general stores on top of that.”

“Alright?” Sirius raises. “It’s a hot, Friday afternoon in a town of, what, two thousand?”

“Try closer to eight,” Remus retorts. “Sixty-five if you want to talk the whole valley.”

“Well, fuck, Remus; I tried,” Sirius gives, lifting his hands wanly. “This wasn’t personal; it was always going to fucking happen one way or another.”

“Not today,” Remus tosses out, flying his hands up, and Sirius might as well have set off a fire hydrant. “I could have had us go earlier or I could have let us stay at the café just a little longer and we could have missed him completely, I could have not grabbed an armful at once to save time and we wouldn’t have hit the dairy aisle as soon as we did and he could have left before we even got to it, he could have left last Monday instead of this coming one and I wouldn’t have had to see him at all, but no, no, I got to run into him on the day I planned to come out to my parents while zumbaing along the dairy aisle to Walking on Sunshine while waving a block of fucking cream cheese in the air; that’s it, that’s my fucking life.

Sirius has absolutely no control over the fast laugh that leaves his throat; it’s Remus, he’s got a way with words, but a particular word he used sinks in and hits differently, and then laughing is sorely unappealing. “Planned,” he repeats.

“What?” Remus asks, fatigued from his rant.

“You want to pull out of it,” Sirius translates.

Remus falters. “Sirius, I don't,” he instils, lifting his hands to rub them over his face. “I’m not expressing myself well at all right now, hence why I didn’t really want to get into it.”

Sirius hums a denial. “No, that was pretty telling,” he nods. “So, what was the plan, then? Push it down, pretend it wasn't there, get to dinner, the moment, decide for sure that you’re out and leave me hanging for the moment that wouldn’t come—”

“Sirius, stop,” Remus cuts in, openly upset, but that’s not a denial, though, is it.

“No, I mean, I’m glad I carved it out of you before that could happen, but I shouldn’t have had to,” Sirius puts in numbly. “Maybe my gut fucking knew, you know? It was on fire the whole way back here, wouldn’t quit while we were fused together just there, but now; now I’m kind of glad I’ve got this gut around to guide me if I actually am on my own out here.”

Remus gives out a gutted noise, shrinking in before he slips out from between the table and Sirius. “I really need to think,” he provides, unhelpfully.

“I don’t know that you do,” Sirius returns, reaching to snag a hold of Remus’s right wrist before it’ll be out of reach. “Seems to me you’ll think yourself into a corner and bail before I even get half a say, and we’ve already done that plenty, haven’t we.”

“I’m not fucking bailing on you,” Remus insists, shaking Sirius off all the same.

“And what are you doing right now?” Sirius raises. “It’s a slippery slope, Remus.”

Remus’s arm goes limp all the way down to his wrist. “That’s not fair,” he returns, but it’s slight.

“No, you know what’s not fair? Being branded the way I have, constantly getting referred to as too impulsive, too careless, too afraid of commitment when you’re the one who’s got way worse a problem with all of that than me; I’ve been in this from day one,” Sirius delivers him. “I took flying arrows to justify us doing this when I shouldn’t have had to, meanwhile you’re the one who's been standing with a foot out of this since we started, not me; you’re the one who’s afraid of relationships, and you’re even more afraid of one with me.”

Remus darts his gaze around the room, anywhere but him, looking like a cat in a cage as he wrenches out of Sirius’s grip so fast that the small voice that comes out of him is wildly unexpected. “I think we both need some time,” he says, turning for the den.

“Sure,” Sirius nods. “Gotta get to him before Monday, right? Godspeed, Remus; he’s really such a catch.”

Remus stops, looks back at him with a placid expression, and for a moment there, Sirius is certain it’s about to fall into the same look he gave James for stepping out of bounds, but all he gets is a hint of exhaustion from Remus’s unmoving stare and that’s somehow so much worse.

He resumes en route, leaving the kitchen for the den and taking a right to pull open the back door. “What, you’re really going to leave?” Sirius sends him.

“You fucking bet I am,” Remus calls back, letting the slam of the back door punctuate it.

It echoes out through the den and into the still kitchen before Sirius makes the only movement in the room, pulling a jagged hand up through his hair while his eyelids continually replay that image of Remus so fed up with his bullshit, and the blood in his veins slows to a crawl.

He breathes in hard and takes off out of the kitchen, making it out of the house spotting Remus makes the left turn at the end of the short side of the 'L' and springing down the porch after him. “This is good; we’re really airing out some dirty laundry,” he puts up, rounding the bend in the porch and nearly getting within reach of Remus before the man surges down the porch stairs and into the garden. “Oh, come on, really?”

“Stop it, stop following me,” Remus huffs back at him, starting down the winding cobblestone path.

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Sirius returns, sighing long before he makes quick work of the stairs and rushes after him. “We can’t chase each other through a garden this intense, Remus.”

“There’s no 'we' about it,” Remus sends back.

What’s unfair about this is Remus has about the same amount of lived experience with this pathway as Sirius does, but he’s taking every curve and twist to it in absolute stride while Sirius keeps almost staggering into the bushes on either side of it as he tries to make the turns. “How are we supposed to take any of this seriously?” he puts up. “We look like fools.”

“I don’t fucking care what we look like,” Remus retorts.

“Is there some kind of shortcut to this thing?” Sirius sends up.

“How should I know?” Remus tosses back.

Sirius feels immense relief as he sees the break in the garden they once exited to get to the yard, surging forward to grab Remus’s right wrist and hunker him down before he takes off in any direction. “Where are you trying to go, honestly?” he huffs.

Remus whips his arm out of Sirius’s grasp in a mere second, but he does face him even if it’s done through a fumed whirl. “Tell you what, either I’m running to him or I’m trying to get away from you,” he puts up cheerfully. “Pick whichever option fits the narrative you’ve created here, I don’t care.”

“Yes, you do; you obviously do,” Sirius returns, lifting both of his hands to signal they’ll be coming in, aiming for a soothing of Remus’s shoulders. “Let’s just restart, OK? We can go back to being calm, fair, and careful with each other, like we did all morning—”

Don’t,” Remus cuts in sharply. “You wanted a reaction out of me, and you can’t turn around and make me the problem here; you made this happen.”

Sirius shrinks back on a dime. “Remus,” he says, feeling awfully transparent and far too small.

“What? ‘Remus’ what?” he returns. “I’ve watched you say some horrible shit to people because you know what to say to set them off and maybe it says a lot about me, but I didn’t think you’d ever try that with me, not about him.”

Sirius presses his mouth into a firm line before lifting his hands to signal for a pause. “I tried numerous times to get you to talk to me about it and that last time you really blew me right off,” he says. “I know I came at you hard with a few of those and I’m sorry, I’m not saying I did anywhere near well with the method, but I do know a thing or two about self-sabotage and you are textbook; the second you’re afraid this is going to fall out from under you, you try to bolt before it can.”

“I’m not bolting,” Remus snaps. “I was fine back there before you dug and dug and dug until I halfway gave you what you wanted to hear and you came back swinging, and you know what? That sad excuse for the last word did absolutely nothing for you; to even pretend like I’m harbouring anything but major contempt for him at this point is so below your intelligence level that it’s almost more insulting to you than it was to me, so if you’re not going to respect me enough not to throw him in my face just to cut at me, at least show yourself some.”

Sirius breathes in very long. “OK, I appreciate that you managed to be semi-kind while tearing me a new one with that,” he starts, “but it doesn’t look good when you start second-guessing this not long after you saw him; it just doesn’t, Remus.”

“Grow up,” Remus tosses at him. “I’ve had to deal with your past flames, I couldn’t go for a pint without seeing one, couldn’t go for a bite without seeing another, and I never said a thing about it, not to mention, I sat cool and easy on a pub terrace with three of your past flings breathing down your fucking neck last week, not to mention, Zumba King is way more fit and far, far more into you than you ever let on, and you still talk to your old fuck buddy a year on from your last hook up, but I just have to fucking take it all, lick your wounds for you, and take your word for it that I somehow beat them all out of the running, but you don’t see me flinging mud at you for having had them — and if you even so much as start saying you’re seeing me do it now, so help me, Sirius—”

Sirius huffs loudly. “Those were all short-lived, and that fuck buddy you mention, I have declined to meet about a dozen times because I’m all fucking set here,” he corrects, flourishing his hands toward Remus. “Those were completely different cases than what you two had.”

“Sex, Sirius; you’re familiar,” Remus puts down.

"Stop calling it just that," Sirius heaves out.

“No, I've a quick question," Remus prefaces thoughtfully, "if you’re really all set, why keep him hanging on like that?”

Sirius puffs up, holding his head high because he’s gotta do it. “I like knowing that I’m hard to get over and I’m not about to be made to feel bad about it.”

Remus huffs out a breathy laugh. “Right, can’t have your ego taking a hit.”

“And what about yours, hm?” Sirius raises, nodding at him.

What ego?” Remus sounds out, looking around the yard as a performance enhancer. “Where is it, Sirius?”

Sirius shoves out a sigh to avoid anything close to a laugh coming out, but it’s tough going. “I’m not saying you have one; I’m saying you hardly do,” he highlights. “You have no clue when someone’s trying something with you, it just doesn’t register; I’ve heard it from your mouth, I’ve seen it plenty enough myself, and I saw it today with Tom, I did.”

“Well, you also don’t have the best track record considering you thought a friend’s man was putting the moves on,” Remus puts in politely.

And there, Sirius just can’t stifle a laugh. “I thought he was Tom, you knob? It’s not like I had a frame of reference for him to go on; I saw a bloke, went on alert, and immediately got over it the second I knew it wasn't him,” he returns, and the corners of Remus’s mouth twitch a bit there; slight, but it happened. “That was a non-issue, Remus, but Tom was an issue and a half; he had the flirt gaze on, the beard strokes, the smirks, the smug grins, oh, and he made sure to get your fucking number before he went, and only you would miss all of those signs.”

Remus breathes in fast, gearing up for a whammy, and gestures broadly at Sirius because he’s too fucking nice to get his hands anywhere near Sirius’s face even in combat mode, and that alone chips away at the anger under Sirius’s bones; there’s no way he can lose someone this good. “You have a fuck buddy’s number in your mobile,” he enunciates. “Where do you get off saying any of this?”

Sirius reaches into his back right pocket and pulls out his mobile, showing the screen to Remus when he’s finished deleting the problem off of it. “There,” he says, putting the mobile back where it was, “gone, like my interest in him after getting even one shot at you; is that something?”

“No?” Remus returns, staring at him wondrously. “That only clears your conscience so you can point fingers at me for not knowing how to leave that situation without giving him mine; that’s literally the least you could have done.”

“I thought you wanted him to use it,” Sirius returns him. “I’m still worried you do.”

“Yeah, so he can keep side-slinging my dad and me while he’s at it,” Remus nods. “I wish I’d gotten his number so I could get that going even quicker.”

“Stop it,” Sirius pleads. “I don’t want him bothering you anymore, and I really don’t appreciate you equating my fuck buddy situation to your six fucking years with him; you loved him, for years, even when he drove over you again and again, and if you’re really getting second thoughts about me and the plan that we’ve championed for months at this point just because he strolled up to you, then that’s a huge fucking problem and we need—”

“I didn’t love him like I do you, I've told you that,” Remus comes in. “Get that through your head and get it the fuck together because I’m fucking rattled right now and half of that’s on you.”

Sirius wilts, stepping in close to they’re only inches apart. "I can’t help fix the other half if you won’t talk to me," he puts down, his throat tight. “You’ve been checking up on me every single time you even get a sense that I’m feeling off and I know how much you fucking worry about me so if you have to, just try to see it like that, but on my end: I'm worried about you.

Remus breathes in harshly, reaching his hands behind him before catching himself trying to pocket them and lifting his right one to rub over the back of his neck, the other hanging limply at his side. “I don’t want to pull out of this, but I can't stop thinking they’re better off not knowing,” he puts up, holding himself horribly stricken, but the admission leaves Sirius stricken too, and too much so to risk trying to ease Remus down when he can’t really fix their combined misery. “I’m not afraid of being with you, I don’t want to lose you for anything, and I hate that I’m thinking it, I don’t want to think it, it’s not fair to you or me and I tried to snuff it out, but I don’t know what else to think; I don’t know why I wouldn’t have run into him today of all days unless it were some sort of cosmic reminder that I'm going to end up tossed aside—”

If Sirius could throw his head back to shriek at the sky and get away with it, he would, only it’d never go over well with Remus and he’d be right back in the dog house after finally getting let back onto the stoop; instead, he reaches up in a snap and pries Remus’s right hand back from his neck, settling it down in between the two of them and keeping it held tight in the grip of his left hand.

“You’re not going to,” he puts down, lifting his right hand to Remus’s chin to hold it, too. "I wish you’d hear me when I tell you that I thought I could forget you and was miserable trying to: I pitched a fit, dropped out on you when things weren’t going my way, still couldn’t forget you even though I was fumed enough to want to, Remus, and I was miserable — I’ve not said that to you because it sounds so fucking cheerful, I've not said that to be dramatic, I've not said that to lure you in just to drop you right when you get comfortable, I’ve told you because it's the truth; you make me happy, Remus, I'm not going anywhere and I’m not tossing you anywhere.”

Remus's eyes are closer to dinner plate status than they’ve been yet, but his expression is too pained for Sirius to really enjoy it much at all. “I don’t know what to say when I hear it, Sirius,” he gives him. “I’m grateful you came back to me without a guarantee, I’m grateful we ended up clicking so hard and so fast that it was literally impossible to stay away from each other for too long, and I'll never not be grateful for how well you took all of me on the moment you knew I could be off the table, but I’d rather them never have known what you are to me than have to explain to them that somewhere down the line, I drove you away.”

Sirius shakes his head at full force. “I love you,” he puts down. “Your fretting hasn’t turned me off at all, the clusters haven’t sent me packing, and I’ve never once thought since we started that you’re too much of anything; I fucking know this isn’t going to be an easy fix for you, we’re working against years that he was lucky to get and mucked up so hard with, but you’re worth all of that work and if you didn’t run the other way on me the other night, then why the fuck would I ever decide that you’re too much to handle?”

Remus pushes a gutted breath out and fixes his gaze on the sky, the effort put in to remain composed is crystal clear, but nah, sorry Remus; your time is numbered. “You and I both know how much of a tough bitch timing can be, but she’s a hilarious one, too, if you’re willing to look for it,” Sirius keeps on, moving down the list of grievances. “And I’m not just saying that because I’ve a penchant for looking for that sort of thing just to get by, I'm really not, because here’s the thing? Yeah, we bumped into him hours before the big reveal and it’s a shit day to have all of that dreadfulness come back up, but he did bump into you looking fit as all hell while doing a song-and-dance with your hunky, hunky boyfriend, and you know what? I say you won the breakup without even trying.”

Remus pushes out a huffy little laugh, dropping his gaze to Sirius again for a pointed smile, and they’re already on the mend with that, he thinks, he just needs to push just a little more. “Take that altercation as a reminder of what a sack of shit that guy actually was and still is, but if you need to think of it in terms of a sign from the cosmos, then you get to choose the interpretation and you get to look at the timing of that run-in with him as a reminder of the bullet you dodged there, but our timing is perfect and you know it is,” he gives concisely, for Remus and for him. “You know it: you’ve wanted to tell them for months before you even told me you wanted to get the ball rolling, you set the dates, you got the tickets, you took the leap, and you wouldn’t have set all of this up if you didn’t know we’re right or that I’m worth bringing back home with you to show something for it, but believe me, I’m going to look those two in the eyes when we’re telling them and they’re not only going to realize, but they’re going to be downright verklempt when they see that somebody loves their son as much as I do; hell, they may even burst into tears right then and there, I haven’t decided yet, I’ll see when we get there, but I’m not ruling it out—”

Being cut off by Remus’s lips this time around is everything he needs and more, especially when he’s got Remus in such a tizzy. It’s more like three kisses back to back than a full one, but there’s so much to the way he’s kissing Sirius, like he’s some sort of elixir, like he’s something he can't quit, and Sirius’ll be damned if he lets Remus think he can, putting a whole lot of himself into his side of the kiss.

Remus lifts his hands and presses them to the sides of Sirius’s face, thumbs tracing at his cheeks as he pulls a forlorn breath in from between their lips. “I’m sorry I keep drowning you out and acting like you’re already gone when you’re right fucking there,” he rushes out, pressing their foreheads together.

Sirius reaches his arms up and wraps them around the back of him in an instant. “It’s not your fault,” he pushes out, shaking his head best he can like this. “I shouldn’t have dragged that out of you like that.”

Remus hiccoughs there. “Are we ever actually going to meet in the middle from the get?” he raises tightly.

“We’ve been doing it, Remus,” Sirius returns. “This doesn't mean we're starting from zero again? We got spooked, I know I sure did, but we're back; you and me, we always come back.”

Remus nods harshly and that act brings their foreheads apart, but then he’s pulling the tie out of Sirius’s hair with three quick pulls and carting his hands through the mass of it like it’s fine silk and holding Sirius's head like its precious stone, so that’s something huge. “Don’t be upset by another one, but I really am sorry I didn’t check how you were doing with it,” he instils, snuffling with it before his tone evens out to something a lot more curt. “And I’m actually going to get one more in because I let him blow you off like that and you didn’t deserve it; I should have just shut it down right then and there, it’d have saved us so much trouble.”

Sirius sighs through his nose, giving Remus a tight smile. “Well, he went straight over to something you two had in common, and Lyall’s bound to get you talking, isn’t he?” he raises, lifting his shoulders once. “He’s a real piece of shit, Remus, but him blowing off the certified babe on your proverbial arm was the least of his transgressions today; of course he did that.”

Remus ducks his head through a smirk, brings it back up again through a shake of it, and fixes Sirius with a stare that lives and breathes adoration, taking in a soft breath as he reaches to tuck a loose lock of hair behind Sirius’s right ear. “What time are we?” he asks, his lopsided starting up.

Sirius hums, turning both his head and body toward the other to have a peek at his mobile as he slips it out of his back right pocket enough to see his time light on it, smiling to himself as he lets it slide back into place and turns back to Remus. “Just half-three,” he relays, closing the short distance between their lips in the very next beat.

Remus breathes an obliged breath out through his nose, hooking his forefingers into the belt loops at the front of Sirius’s jeans and starting up a backwards walk, absolutely A-frame bound, and Sirius can’t argue with that spot. He gives a valiant effort to be Remus’s eyes for the journey, slipping his arms back around him and criss-crossing his wrists back there as he walks Remus toward the stairs, giving a muffled ‘stair,’ followed by a ‘’nother one,’ and another quick ‘one more,’ against Remus’s lips and getting a few, muffled huffs of laughter given back for the method of his warnings all while Remus heeds them in kind.

Sirius reaches out as Remus gets to the top step and works the door open, the two of them shuffling through it before Sirius kicks back with his right foot and knocks it shut. He steers Remus across the room and down onto the bed a bit more diagonally than planned, but he doesn't seek to correct their placement and judging by the way Remus pulls Sirius down and over him, it seems he couldn’t care less what way they landed on it either.

Sirius can’t see a reason to rush. They’ve plenty of time to work with and he wants this one to last, but if he’s reading Remus’s signals as well as he hopes he is, they may just be on the same page here, too. He isn’t rutting underneath him for a tease of friction like he'd done in the kitchen, isn’t hurriedly pawing at Sirius’s fly; he’s got his hands teased up underneath Sirius’s shirt, his fingertips abound and the occasional curl of his nails over Sirius’s back, he's left space between his thighs that Sirius slots right in between and the roll Remus meets him with moves in and out like low tide, he's licking into Sirius’s mouth with languid flicks of his tongue to punctuate each with the slow slide of plush lips, and all of it, every part of it, calls Sirius to give it all back to him slow and steady, smoothing his left hand up his body and tousling it into Remus’s curls, slipping his right hand underneath the hem of Remus’s shirt and splaying it over his navel, tracing shapes here, palming his skin there, pulling soft whines from behind those stellar fucking lips still drinking Sirius in.

Remus decides, after a particularly wanton noise garnered by Sirius arrowing his hips down on a steady beat to increase the pressure between them, that maybe their clothes are just getting in the way a bit here, and with the heat in the cabin and the beads of sweat starting at the small of his back, Sirius can hardly disagree or wait to get out of them now that Remus is tugging up on his shirt so intently. Static goes off when it's pulled from of his head, leaving Sirius's hair in quite the state judging by the bright lilt to the laugh Remus breathes as he dances his gaze over it from below, and Sirius can hardly keep a straight face of his own as Remus reaches up and sinks the fingers of his right hand into his hair, pulling him back in for another round of kisses while he works his right hand in between the two of them.

Sirius breathes against his lips and braces his palms on either side of Remus’s body, arching his hips to be of some help here. Remus works well with the space afforded to him, flicking the button on Sirius’s jeans and taking the zipper down a couple teeth at a time, locked on Sirius's lips, and even goes as far as to give footing Sirius’s trousers the rest of the way down his hips a solid go just to keep that kiss going, but they are the Good Jeans, after all; they’re not coming down that easily.

Remus puffs out breathy little laughs against Sirius’s tongue and lets his feet fall down on either side of Sirius’s thighs, effectively done trying to be of any help here, and Sirius puts a lot into his parting kiss him for the attempt before pushing up onto his knees to manoeuvre himself out of the jeans, but he’s going to have to get off the bed and stand to get this done properly. Remus smirks up at him as Sirius stands by the end of the bed, tugging them off of his ankles and catching the lube tube before it can drop to the floor, and he will say that Remus looks good and cozy where he is, but it's with decidedly too many clothes on and he makes that observation known via a sharp once-over as he tosses the lube on the bed and his jeans aside in the same move.

Remus humbly concedes that he ought to join Sirius on his way to the land of the nude, starting with his corduroys first like the smart lad he is for it’s inevitable that they’ll be the most troublesome to get out of. Sirius rids himself of his briefs and tosses them semi-near his jeans in the meantime, moving around to the end of the bed as Remus sends both his shirt and trousers soaring to land nearby Sirius’s discarded clothing, shifting himself more vertically on the bed before getting rid of those pesky briefs that really were just blocking out the show.

Sirius kneels over the edge of the bed, shifting closer to him as Remus crosses his legs underneath him, reaching up to tug him down and over his lap, but that’s where Sirius does have to pump the breaks. “What d’you think you’re doing?” he queries. Remus pauses his attempt to tug him down, leaving his head on a left-hanging tilt with a pointed smile on like it’s pretty well obvious what he’s doing, but Sirius leans in, presses his palms over Remus’s knees, and rubs them back and forth over his skin. “Turn over.”

Remus’s eyes shoot to dinner-plate status before he’s scrambling to turn around on the bed and Sirius knows he could wait until he’s fully situated before starting in on him, he could easily do that, but he can think back, see, and hear the glorious ways Remus reacted last time Sirius got a bit gung-ho in that respect and he wants all that again, but honestly, he likes the way Remus looks, all knelt on the bed, en route to laying forward on his forearms, but just not quite there yet. He reaches up to hold Remus’s hips in place, shifts down onto his front behind him, and quite plainly goes for it, garnering Remus to jut his hands out and brace the mattress while Sirius curls his arms around the front of his spread thighs, locking Remus into place and going right to town from there.

Remus's breathing takes to a harsh cadence, his left arm out in front of him for balance’s sake while his right hand prattles aimlessly over the arm curled around his right thigh, rocking his stuttering hips back against Sirius’s mouth, and that’s generous of him, it is, but Sirius feels it might do them both some good to encourage Remus to show a lot more of that side of himself if he can hack it. He starts by slowing down a little, curious to see whether Remus’ll even let him get away with that, and while he certainly smirks against him as Remus writhes back on him for more, there, Sirius slows his pace down even more, until he’s giving Remus nothing other than the slow drag of the tip of his tongue, willing to lay patient until Remus either tells him or, hell, shows him what he wants and exactly how he wants it, wouldn’t that be something, but he only has to keep that going for upwards of ten seconds before Remus gets fed up and reaches back to sink his right hand into Sirius’s hair, holding his face right in place and making himself quite clear on the what and how of it in one go, and Sirius drowns out his moan against him, kicking things right back up again.

He ruts hard against the bed as Remus keeps his head locked in behind him and does some rutting of his own, driving himself back Sirius’s face at a metronome and putting out wanton noises up ahead him, and Sirius can't not hum in reply for each one, encouraging more of that, plenty more of that, drown him in that, and because he does get more of it, Sirius can’t help but get actively lost in devouring him, but owing to the fact this may just be his favourite act on the fucking planet, it sure takes him a long and hazy minute, two, maybe three — it's a toss-up, really — for him to register the redistribution of Remus’s weight on his knees, but there he is, balanced back on the haunches of his ankles and stroking himself with his free hand up there.

Sirius uncurls his left arm from around Remus’s thigh and bats at his working hand until the lad pulls it off of his cock, freeing it up for Sirius to take up the charge, and Remus's whole body strickens as he puts out a gorgeous noise, thrusting up into the grip of Sirius’s hand and back against his mouth on a dial, and on and on, that carries; Remus loving it, Sirius loving that he’s loving it, a lovefest of the highest order carrying out until Remus is whinging tightly, tapping pleadingly on Sirius’s left arm and urging him to quit before it’s too late, and Sirius lets go of his cock with a quick snap, that certainly can’t keep on, but he’s not about to quit back here yet; no way, no how, not until he’s got the bottle of lube flicked open and the fingers of his right hand coated and ready.

It’s likely more lube than necessary after all this pregaming but if he’s going to be fucking Remus into tomorrow shortly, and he will be, he sees it fair to be rather liberal about the amount and he may just be enjoying the entertainment while allocating more than enough for the job; sue him about it.

Sirius lifts his mouth off of him, drags kisses over Remus’s cheeks as he keeps his hand working between them, and carves out time for a nip here and a couple there along the way, enjoying the scenery while he works him up and watching Remus with his head bent back, haloed by the glow of daylight pouring in via the window above of the bed, luminescent the whole way through.

He lets Remus decide when he’s ready, which comes in the form of a series of harsh ruts down on Sirius’s fingers and the chaste sound of his name, and shoots up the moment he hears it, kneeling beneath the backs of Remus’s thighs and guiding himself in before giving a snap of his hips to press in further, pulling a repeat of his name out of Remus’s mouth though this one just fills up the cabin, veritably coating the walls in Sirius and in a way, that feels completely correct after personally pulling Remus out of such a harrowing spiral.

Remus moves whip-fast and nabs up Sirius’s wrists, moving his hands around front of him and right back over his thighs, using Sirius’s forearms as a placeholder for his hands while he ruts back on Sirius's cock at a punchier pace, but Sirius has a certain feeling that he may also just want to have his forearms through this, and fair game, Remus.

Sirius dips his head forward, licks a line between Remus’s shoulder blades, and tastes salt, sweat, and Remus all wrapped up in one, huffing harshly against Remus's skin as he basks in the sensations firing off at once; the tight rim around his cock, the precision they’re meeting each other with and that delicious angle they’ve found, the pitch of Remus’s voice each time Sirius strikes gold, the smell of him, the taste of him, the feeling that comes with knowing that this is already better than the best time Remus ever had in this very cabin, and they’re nowhere near done if Sirius can see to it.

As if reading his thoughts on the matter, Remus hooks his right hand behind him and places it haltingly between them, clasping it against Sirius’s navel before pushing his hips back and easing off himself of Sirius’s cock with a wanton breath that goes straight to it, frankly enough. He watches with plain delight as Remus shifts around on the bed to face him, feeling called to back up and brace the bed behind him, and it’s a good thing Sirius did do that for Remus has his legs pulled out from under him in seconds. His breath hitches as Remus sets them down on the mattress and crawls over them to hover above his hips, twisting the comforter up in his hands as he readies himself for the storm better known as Remus on top, and when that storm arrives, Sirius hangs his head back with a praised noise to give to the room as Remus brings it to him in terms of speed and intent, fucking down on him with a relentless, blinding staccato that leaves Sirius both gasping beneath him and fucking up on him recklessly.

“Shit, Rem—” he wrangles out, but that's it, that's all he's got.

Remus is hardly making any speech patterns above him either, more like stuttered breaths and bright moans that suggest he’s getting about as much as he’s giving up there, but Sirius wouldn’t mind if he got his name out of him again, only he’s really gotta pull on every bit of strength he’s got in him to focus while he’s got Remus riding him this hard; if he’s not careful, he’ll blow anytime now. He refocuses through the hazy stupor clouding over him, scoots his knees up so they’re bent behind Remus, and sets his feet flat and apart on the bed, readying himself for a tricky manoeuvre and waiting for Remus’s next drawback before he grabs hold of him via the hips, breathing in fast, and rolls the both of them over, landing Remus in a sprawl beneath him.

Remus’s whole chest lifts with the reactionary breath he takes in, apparently unbothered by the switch up or the fact that Sirius slipped out of him in the process for he’s mostly just staring up at him with a Look that’s nothing other than a challenge, and that’s perfect ‘cause Sirius is ready to meet it. He shifts lifts up to his knees, grips the sides of his thighs hard after he repositions himself, and presses back inside of him with an easy, deliberate slide, lifting Remus’s hips clear off of the bed and waiting until the boy’s braced the bed behind him before he drives him into his thrusts, giving it to him like he’s packing a drill and pulling grateful noise after grateful noise out of Remus’s throat as his face colours over with unbridled pleasure, and those noises aren’t anything that Sirius is going to scoff at, but they aren't his name, are they?

Sirius gives it to him like that a little longer, may or may not get a little lost in it himself for a time there, but his goal remains a proverbial banner hung over his head even while he indulges himself in his each and every thrust. He watches Remus hangs his head back, his mouth agape while his eyes fall shut after a particularly rattling nudge at his prostate, and takes his shot while Remus is properly distracted, pulling right out of him and skirting back down between his legs, but that choice, Remus notices faster than he banked on.

Sirius smiles politely at him from up the bed, curls his left arm up underneath Remus’s hips, and hitches them back up again, allowing Remus a chance to plant his feet down on either side of his body and arch his back straight off of the bed as Sirius sinks his mouth down on his him, wordlessly giving his complete lower half over to him, and Sirius wastes no time utilizing that level generosity to its fullest extent, pushing his right middle and forefinger back into him and driving them upward at a fierce, unrelenting pace.

Remus stutters out a series of words as Sirius swirls and rolls his tongue over the crown, rocks his head left to right on the mattress when Sirius adds a third finger into the mix, and presses his hands at the line of Sirius’s shoulders at different pressures from there, one pulling him in while the other pushes him back, and Sirius knows by that dual motion alone that he thinks he’s getting more than he can handle or even deserves right about now, but wants it all and more of it despite himself, and to that, Sirius takes to a steady bob up and down his cock, thunders his tongue over the head at each drawback to taste him and drive him wild in one go, and times the crook of his fingers to match the laps of his tongue, watching Remus fall to pieces under him, because of him.

Feeling exactly when Remus’s body begins to ratchet tighter and tighter, Sirius fancies himself rather ambitious as he gathers the signs — heaving chest; check, slacked jaw; check, twitching vein at midriff; check — and times it to the second. He pulls his hand out of Remus and mouth off of his cock at once, crawling up in between Remus’s bent legs, and gives him another swift lift by the calves, slamming back into him before he can miss his shot, and Remus lights right up, his whole body tensing up before he bears down hard on Sirius’s cock to make up for not being so able to ruck up on him with his legs held in the air, and Sirius has to fight, has to call on the willpower of the scribes in order to keep it together while he drives him home, watching Remus’s face break open as he comes hard, hands-free, and with Sirius’s name painted on his lips.

Sirius hits the breaks the moment Remus finishes bucking into it, stalling with his cock fully sheathed in him as he gape-grins down at Remus, who stares right back up at him with his legs still very much in the air and a plain incredulity about him, sure, but he's got it in him to huff a laugh over the face Sirius has on and that’s just the cherry on top. He sets Remus’s legs down on the mattress, shifts to lay between them, and switches to slow, deep thrusts since he’s already in there, and that seems to alert Remus to the fact that Sirius hasn’t finished yet, but it would be difficult for him not to have noticed the two-hundred and seventh bone in his body once sensation came filtering back in.

Remus scoots his bent knees inward, locks Sirius right in by the backs of the thighs, and settles his palms over his arse, driving Sirius's cock into him while he darts his hips up to meet it, and effectively showing how much he wants Sirius to take him, get him, love on him, and it is spirited, the inspiration he drives out of Sirius; in heeding that absolutely electric request, he reaches up to grapple at the end of the bed, curls his right hand over the edge of it while he throws his left hand back behind him to grip at the underside of Remus’s right leg, hitching it up that much more over his hipbone than Remus’s left one sits to give the two of them some intense leverage to work with, and Remus gives the most spirited moan of agreement, reaching up to erratically tap the highest point of that same arm that Sirius tightly clutches his leg with; encouraging him, encouraging this, encouraging it all.

Sirius spikes his hips to catch the pace Remus so obligingly set for him, aiming to make the last stretch just as much a good time for Remus as it's due to be for him, and celebrates as he puts out tight, sharp cries to the room as Sirius gains his momentum back. Half of Remus's head is hanging off the end of the bed, but he doesn’t look like he gives much of a shit about it as he takes all that Sirius is giving him like a king, too busy pulling hard at his back and keeping his heavy gaze fixed on him so Sirius can’t possibly deny how determined Remus is to have him seeing stars on account of his body, on account of him.

Sirius’s cheeks feel hot going up against that sweltering stare, feels his own breathing grow shallow in his chest as the coil in his stomach burns bright, feels the demand in Remus's hold on him, and spikes the pace of his hips that much more, clutching the edge of the bed so hard it tenses his fingers right up, but that's fine, he's got these hips to handle things from here and he throws them right into it, letting them blast Remus back against the bed while he fucks him toward sweet release, and, wonderfully timed, Remus curls up and sneaks in right before the finish, catching Sirius’s lips in a feverish kiss, and Sirius bucks harshly into it, coming so hard specks of white burst behind his eyelids.

He flattens out, head down, forehead pressed to Remus’s collar, lungs no more, while Remus simply lays sprawled beneath him, equally as spent by the feel of it, though not too much so that he can't move; Sirius feels a wee tap on his back, finding a hand splayed directly ahead of his visage, and smirks brightly for it as he leans back enough to meet Remus’s high-five with gusto before he sags back down again, smiling against him and working to catch his breath.

Chapter 23: 23.

Notes:

this is part one of a two-part extravaganza (!!!) and i'm putting that out there ahead of time so we all can hopefully heed that and keep it in mind. :)

Chapter Text

Sirius has about ten to fifteen seconds to simply exist in his spent stupor, head down, eyes shut, breathing somewhat easier against Remus’s skin than it initially was, and relishing in the weight of Remus’s left arm curled in at his left hip and anchoring him down, or at least until he slips out of Remus altogether and he tries to lift his hips and budge up on the body sprawled between them.

“Not the comforter,” he fusses, but Sirius does hear a laugh in there.

He smirks against Remus’s chest, calls on the strength to lift off of him, and leaves the bed via the left side, stepping most shakily over toward his suitcase. “I’ve a towel in here, hold up,” he bids, tossing the lid off the top and rifling through it on bended knee to avoid tipping into it.

He tugs it out from beneath a few rolled-up shirts, unravels it against him, and turns back to the bed with the towel outstretched, snorting when he finds that Remus has taken to holding his knees to his chest and bracing himself on his lower back to keep his firmly in the air. “I’ll just set it over here, madame,” he forwards loftily, flapping it out and draping it down over the middle of the bed.

Remus lets go of his knees and scoots up the bed, planting his hips down on the towel before aiming a pair of grabby hands up at Sirius, who happily climbs back over him only to plant himself back between Remus’s legs once more, and with that, the boy curls his left arm at the back of Sirius's waist and tosses his legs limply over the back of his calves, tangling the two of them up all the more and allowing Sirius to feel warm and invited in all over again.

Two movements come within the next minute or so; one in the form of a faint trace of fingertips in a vague circle at the small of Sirius’s back, adding an even more personal note to go along with the weight of the left arm anchoring him there, the other a series of quiet, unhurried kisses pressed to the top of his forehead, so all in all, Sirius could just about melt from the intimacy he's been pulled into.

There’s a part of him that has to assume this is a good sign, and yet, he can’t help thinking they’ve been on the wrong page a time or two before, even when intimacy shrouds them. “Are we still on?” he asks, knowing he sounds woefully hopeful, but that’s fair; he really is. “Only, that felt like a consummation of sorts to me, but I’ve been wrong before.”

Remus pushes a quick, amused breath through his nose. “I thought we’d established you’re usually right on the money with me,” he offers.

“Cute, and I’ll remember you said that,” Sirius slips in, garnering a good-natured nod out of Remus for it, “but you have to say the words, Remus.”

Remus sets his head down on the mattress, pushing a subdued breath through his nose. “We’re still on,” he says, clear as day.

“Yeah?” Sirius checks. “I know it’s paralyzing, thinking the second you admit out loud that you’re the least bit happy it’s all going to come crashing down, but—“

“Oh, and it is, but I’d only be pushing you further away from me sooner by letting paralysis get in the way of us,” Remus comes in, his eyebrows knitted together. “This was yours, too, and you’ve been championing it and me since the moment the ball started rolling; I don't get to make it all about what could happen to me if I said the words out loud, I should've looked to you, let you cheer this on like you always do, and stopped long enough to think about how much I’d hurt you by not telling them just to save my hide.”

Sirius tries to push down on a rather pitiful noise in his throat, not needing that to interrupt him just now, but Remus hears it anyway, biting back a laugh from escaping his lips. “And, you were right again because I didn’t have to go looking at a thing like him walking up on us as some sort of omen against me,” he puts down, shaking his head in the way he does when exhaustion's directed at himself. "It can be just as much a reminder that I’ve already upgraded to first class with you, and it should have sent me back here all the more ready to do it, not have me balking like I was sixteen again.”

Sirius lets a bright, affected noise leave him before letting his smile finally fly free. “I’m so glad you could join me up here."

“The air is a lot clearer,” Remus plays along, giving an observant glance around them.

Sirius lets out a deep, winsome sigh, crossing his arms over Remus’s chest to give both his chin and smile a raised platform. "Still want to do it over dessert?" he raises.

Remus nods for him. "Yeah, let's keep in with that."

Sirius right beams for him. “So, tell me,” he prompts, making a show of settling in more on Remus's chest, “did I fuck you back online, did I already have you hook, line, and sinker before that, or was it a nice blend of both?”

Remus pulls in a reactionary breath. “Mm, third one,” he hands him, blinking through a set of dinner plates. “You had me back at 'verklempt,' but you really hammered some sense back into me from there.”

Sirius puts out a bright hum of a laugh, absolutely fine with that order of things. “How're your legs faring after all that?”

“What legs?” Remus offers.

“Good answer,” Sirius sends back, a prize grin on.

Remus lets his lopsided smile go free, leaning his head back enough to give a sweeping glance over the ceiling and submit a heavy sigh to the greater room. “There wasn’t a single moment's hitch in that one; it just, kept evolving?” he raises, and Sirius smirks for it, humming and nodding emphatically as Remus drops his gaze back to him with a pointed smile about him. “How in the hell did you manage to time that ending so well?”

Sirius gives a bright trill from behind his smile. “Counted up your warning signs and took my shot,” he offers him. “And listen, I didn’t even know if I was going to be able to make that happen for you, but—”

Remus gives a sharp laugh there. “I know you didn’t; you looked about as surprised as I was,” he trades him, doing his version of Sirius’s gape/grin for added visual before it tapers off as a pondering expression rolls in to cover it over. “Wait, what are my signs?”

“Well, you’ve three big boys,” Sirius instils, speaking concisely, but certainly wryly. “The closer you get, your chest starts heaving in these sharp bursts as your breathing goes all haywire, your jaw tends to go slack, like this—” he pauses to do a kindhearted imitation of it before leaning his hips back enough to squeeze his right hand in between their sandwiched-together midriffs and tap up on Remus’s navel, “—and that vein pops out and goes all twitchy, and so, I saw all three back there and the hope was, if I already had you at the tip of the edge and was quick about getting back in there, maybe I’d have a decent shot at pushing you over it without either of us needing to get our hands in the mix.”

Sirius smiles once he’s finished, simply watching Remus’s glossy, out-of-focus gaze go from left to right for upwards of ten full seconds. “I’m inspired to try that on you, but your signs are a lot more varied than that,” he deliberates, staring into the middle distance while he taps his forefinger between his lower lip and chin absently, and oh, look at that; Sirius may as well be peering through a pair of dinner plates of his own suddenly. “Particularly, your vocalizations are all over the place; I’m not going to be able to count on any of them as a tried and true sign.”

“I,” Sirius starts, huffing a breathy laugh there, “love it when you think out loud.”

Remus blinks his eyes clearer, pushes a powerful smirk through his nose, and lets his smile split into a grin. “It’s true, I can never tell what you’re going to lean on,” he insists. “I can’t rely on the French when that shows up sporadically at best and when it does, it's actual milliseconds before you’re done for, other times you give me gibberish or my name on repeat but those usually come around with almost too much time for the opportunity to peter off, and then sometimes, just like before, you’re silent on the onset and do a whimper right as you get there, so forget any of those; I'm going to have to focus on your body language because when you're close, you throw that whole body into it, and it's — well, distracting, to say the least, so I do hope I'll have the focus to pay attention in the moment, but if I were to cross-examine the first vocalization I hear out of you with your body signals in that same stretch, I may just have a shot.”

Sirius sends a prolonged pfft up to him at the last bit. “May have,” he returns him. “There’ve been plenty of times where what I just did for you could've been achieved for me, so I’ve no doubt you can make it happen.”

Remus’s expression goes from intrigued to astounded and right over to outraged in the span of just a beat or two. “What?” he sends back. "When?"

“Uhh,” Sirius puts up through a throaty laugh, “pick a time you’ve been inside me?”

“That’s too many,” Remus returns, and right, fair enough, but it's his disarrayed expression that sends Sirius right into a round of stitches.

“All I’m saying is, the potential's always been there,” he insists, his chest shaking through a stifled laugh of his own.

“No, but — when?” Remus demands. “I need more information.”

“OK, mm,” Sirius offers, going with the time frame of the past month and ending up tapping Remus once with his downward-facing palms as he finds the perfect contender. “Pride; now, I’m not saying I’d change a single part about that tryst when that whole thing was above and beyond already, but I’ve a strong feeling that had you taken your hand off me right, right when I was at the cusp and just kept going otherwise, I’d have blasted right off without you needing to jerk me there; that’s my point, you could do what I did back there easily.”

Remus breathes inaudibly through his nose, giving Sirius a strong look, a lopsided smile on his lips. “Alright,” he asserts, lifting his right forefinger to point up at Sirius starkly. “I’m going to make that happen for you; I’m manifesting it.”

“When?” Sirius pushes out tightly, pumped beyond belief even just to test his theory, who cares if it doesn't work; trying would be fantastic. "Why so vague?"

“Well, not today; I think we have to be realistic about my fortitude here,” Remus engages him, smiling impishly. “I’ve blasted off three times already, I don’t know if I’ll be at my best.”

Sirius nods, seeing his point rather clearly. “Right, you need time to recharge,” he echoes, lips quirking there. “Like Goku to the spirit bomb.”

Remus's snort seems to surprise himself by velocity alone. “Or not like that,” he offers.

Sirius shakes his head once and moves his right arm out from underneath his chin, pretending he’s pushing an earpiece into his right ear to hear it better. “Breaking,” he announces, newscaster voice on full display, “our sources are telling us that Sirius Black will not come untouched unless boyfriend spirit-bombs him; more on that as the story develops.”

Remus succumbs to a muted, breathy fit, lifting his left hand to rub his palm over his face. “Well, then I really am going to need a full twenty-four hours to recharge,” he returns, dropping his hand again.

“I’ll allow it,” Sirius forwards.

Remus breathes in, puts it out in a circumstantial sigh, and blinks twice, adopting a halfway dumbfounded look. “Maybe I’ve just been woefully inexperienced in that particular area,” he prefaces, tiling his head evenly, “but I always thought the whole coming untouched thing was over-sensationalized at worst and incredibly difficult to attain at best.”

“Depends which version of untouched we're talking about, I s'pose,” Sirius offers him. “Technically, you came untouched, I blew you up to the finish line and fucked you over it, and that would disqualify me from the crown in some circles.”

“Not mine,” Remus returns plainly. “I thought my back was about to break.”

Sirius beams for that one. “And that is really all I care about, to be fair,” he passes him, “but you were onto something there otherwise, it’s not an easy manoeuvre if you’re committed to zero helping hands along the way; hell, I’ve only been with one bloke in all my days who could get off from poundage alone and listen, I would love nothing more to be able to get that done for you, but that’s more in the realm of ‘baby steps,’ I feel.”

Remus smirks, nodding there. “Maybe a, one-year anniversary special sort of thing,” he puts up.

Sirius pushes an enthused breath through his nose, elated to even be discussing something like anniversaries with someone so tormented by the idea of speaking too soon and too uproariously of anything to do with that pesky love thing. “I’m willing to give it one hell of a go if you are,” he returns. “Be a Happy Christmas all around, I'd say.”

Remus nods emphatically, smiling for it. “Even if it didn’t work straight away, I don't know that I could find someone more fun to give it a whirl with,” he maintains, budging up on him and making Sirius warm all over. “Did we ever decide which day we’re going with? For anniversary’s sake, I mean.”

Sirius pushes out a thoughtful puff of breath despite knowing the answer to that. “I don’t think we did,” he offers, leaving the door open just to see what comes of it.

“I want to say Christmas Eve just to give that kiss the respect it deserves,” Remus offers him, a coy smile on his lips, “but then, I don’t know if that’s necessarily a qualifier when we didn’t really speak on it that night, did we.”

“Our mouths were busy,” Sirius excuses, pulling a bright trill out of Remus’s throat. “And listen, that kiss took me to a higher plane so I get the urge to give it its proper dues, I very do, but we got down to business after midnight and officially spoke the defining words a couple of hours ahead of midnight the following evening, so by those factors Christmas Day from start to finish is pretty well ours for the taking.”

Remus breathes an affected sigh through his nose. “I’m trying really hard to feel excited about the fact that Christmas would be a double event for us and not think about how badly it would be tainted for years to come if something went wrong,” he shares, swishing the point of his lips to the right. “So you know; I’m fighting off the doom this very second.”

Sirius nods there, feeling locked tight between feeling uproarious and like a tire tread for his behaviour back in the kitchen. “You want to know what I think?” he raises.

Remus’s expression drops along with the curl of his mouth. “I don’t know, but go on,” he prompts him.

“I think I’ve been taking it extremely personally in moments where you won’t let yourself fully lean into this or me, but I have been awfully ambitious about it, and to a fault, really,” Sirius puts down. “I mean, we’re seven months in at this point, and I’m only just now beginning to see a clearer picture of why you've such a need to not only be independent, but also feel like you are by your own standards and that started long before I ever came onto the scene so I know it’s not specific to me, no matter how many ways I slice it: your knee jerk reaction is to just pull back, don’t bother them, let them be, carry on with yourself because you've only got him in the end, and I’m talking with Hope and Lyall, I’m talking Tom, I’m talking Angela, and James, Pete, Lily, Dorcas, and of course little ol’ me's going to gets a share of that, too, but I really don't need to be going and making it all about me when it just isn't.”

Remus pushes a subdued, but imploring breath through his nose, but he doesn’t seem to want to interject which is rather convenient since Sirius isn’t nearly done yet. “It was unrealistic to think I could just stroll in and fix all that for you, especially when I hardly knew how deep this shit runs for you when I decided it," he keeps on. “I didn’t stop to think long enough about why you'd handle things yourself out there as best you could without leaning on them if you didn't have to, I didn’t know you stopped even bringing them anything close to what you considered trouble by the time you hit secondary, and I really didn’t know just how much you shouldered to help ease some weight off of theirs when it was all getting to be too much, so where the fuck do I get off negging you about being too independent? This is so much bigger than me.”

“Well, you’re human and all,” Remus puts up, “and I can be a nightmare with it sometimes.”

“But you’re not, though,” Sirius returns him. “Here’s what I keep doing: it’s like you and I are this large expanse of green, green grass with a few dandelion patches here and there, but when I’m in a bad spot and you dig your heels in, all I see are the scarcely-placed weeds rather than all that green, and it isn’t fair of me to go batting away all of the times you have shown me how much I mean to you just because you won’t show me it right the very second I need the validation.”

“Sirius,” Remus chides, but Sirius shakes his head once, refusing to walk that one back.

“You’re going to have moments where you resist me, just like you do the others, and while I know this isn’t going away for you by tomorrow, I also know it’s going to get better for you in that regard; it really will," he instils. "You’re already learning to let us in more, in all sorts of ways, but if I can speak for just myself right now, you’ve let me in countless times over, in big ways and small ones, and I’ve absolutely shone over it every time; they don’t go unnoticed, but they can go forgotten when I’m not my at best, same as you can shut down on me when you're not at yours, but you, monsieur, just proposed a plan for an occasion of ours that’s six months down the fucking line from now, so even though doom feeling is still hanging out in here, even though it'll come ‘round again, you let yourself project us that out for even just a moment there and I’m not letting that go by without a cheer, who do you think I am?”

Remus gives a faint noise from behind his imploring frown, reaching up to curl his right hand around Sirius’s left wrist, holding him there. “Sirius,” he puts out weakly.

Sirius smiles. “That’s exactly it,” he chimes. “You want this to go on as long as you can have it, you just told me that out there, and here you are, showing me that in your own little way, but that doesn't mean you won’t struggle with it; from your standpoint, happiness comes with a swift boot-kick soon after and getting too ahead of yourself has you feeling like you just jinxed yourself and that, maybe, if you'd have just shut your trap about it sooner, you could’ve kept it for longer, and it makes you ask me things like, 'could I just let you know ahead of time if you're thinking about wandering' while we’re having an otherwise lovely perch chat that I go ahead and read as superbly callous when they’re not; they’re really not.”

Remus makes to cut in there, but Sirius can’t. “Just let me finish because I think you’ll be happy you did,” he maintains, and Remus takes his lower lip into his mouth, nodding for him to continue. “It hurts in the moment when that happens, it does; it can feel like I’m not getting through to you or that I’m not up to snuff, even though I fucking know how much love is constantly transferring between us at any given point, and that’s what ought to be the focus, not my pride. There’s no magical phrase I can say that’s going to convince you that I don’t want to wander anywhere else, but I still know myself pretty well and I know what having you as my other half has been like this year compared to the twenty-two years I went without and I’m not going back to that, not if I can help it; I know in my bones that I’m going to want to end every year with you from here on out, but until that can fully sink in for you, I think I’ve a pretty good idea of where we can go from here that’ll be fair to the both of us, do you want to hear it?”

Remus nods emphatically there, swallowing around a lump in his throat no doubt, and Sirius snuggles in some more, happy to be the blanket this time around. “We both know how much shit I’m carrying around over intimacy issues and what I tend to perceive as acts of rejection,” he puts up, copping right to it. “That’s a lot to put on you at full blast and it doesn’t make it any easier on you when you’re having a weak moment, so I’m proposing that we both try to chip away at our automatics to be better for each other; if I make it a goal of mine from here on out to remember that this is an automatic for you and not something I need to be taking as the end of the entire world and wind up making the situation so much worse, then I’d like you to do what you just did a little more often and try not to mentally slap yourself for so much as picturing us further along than the following week.”

Remus tugs Sirius’s left arm out from under Sirius’s chin and brings his hand toward him, pressing his lips to the inside of his wrist and blatantly reminding Sirius that this is the same absolute softie as he started with. “I don’t want to keep doing that,” he instils, his lips moving against Sirius’s skin with it. "It's a miserable, punishing habit."

Sirius splays his fingers out so they trace over Remus’s left cheek, breathing in softly. “Well, d’you remember Hubie and his fella?” he raises.

Remus smirks there. “Sure do,” he assures, smiling up at him.

“You had on just as much of a starry-eyed gaze as I did when I was telling you about them and we both know why, so don’t take that away from yourself,” Sirius goads him. “You’ve already pictured us as a pair of wise, old gays strolling the village square and bickering, so all I’m asking is that you indulge in that sort of thing a little more often and try to fight that doom feeling when it comes on; you deserve to look forward without beating yourself up for doing it, and in return, I could do well to remember to go easier on you when you do have weaker moments with that because I don’t give you enough credit for the moments where you do let yourself look ahead.”

Remus pushes out a heavy breath, curling up for a smooch on Sirius’s lips that rather feels like a seal on that agreement, and Sirius exhales with it, against him, parts his lips, lets Remus in like he’d done on Christmas Day, and still, it remains one of the best decisions he ever made for himself, but perhaps even a little more so now.

Remus leaves a final peck on his lips that Sirius wants to chase after, but he gives a glance over his shoulder to check on the time, see how much longer they've got, and winds up breathing in fast. “It’s half-four,” he puts out, turning back to Remus with a grimace.

Remus, on the other hand, hums an even note for it. “Well, it was just passing four when you did the towel run,” he says of it.

Sirius lifts his hands at once, flying them toward Remus in gesture. “How are you so calm about this?”

“I wonder what could’ve done it?” Remus poses, the absolute shitter.

“I’m trying to keep to the schedule you made,” Sirius returns haughtily.

Remus gives a flat laugh at the back of his throat. “Once we really started going, I pretty well gave up on the idea of starting by four,” he shares.

“Could have said as much,” Sirius puts up.

“Says the guy who made sure the foreplay lasted a good half-hour alone,” Remus trades him, the velocity of his chesty smirk moving Sirius’s own up and down.

Sirius shuts his mouth there, opens it back up, and shuts it all over again, straightening his neck out with a note of pride. “I lose all sense of time and space,” he wears.

Remus snorts. “I've noticed,” he maintains, sweeping his hands up in a gesture for Sirius to get moving, both in general and off of him so that he can also get to doing that. “Take it as a compliment, would you? I’m not complaining, and we did really need to get back on the same page so we needed this time; the pies will understand.”

Sirius dips down to kiss him full, thinking it only fair that Remus gets a little extra something-something for daring to be flexible, and today of all days, at that. “You’re really just the coolest thing,” he extends him, fluffing up Remus’s fringe before clambering out of the bed. He goes for his suitcase again, stooping to scavenge for the tote he'd stuffed a load of toiletries in and waggling it as he looks around at Remus’s stretching body. “Now, I certainly wouldn’t mind living with the image of you darting across the yard like that to get your essentials, but I do have everything necessary in here.”

“Sweet of you to crush that impulse right down,” Remus returns him, his voice stretched out as thinly as his body length. He leaves the bed himself from there, swiping a hand over the small of Sirius’s back as he passes him, and heads off down the hall where it sure sounds like he opened up a door back there, giving out a bright trill of a noise. “D’aw, she set you right up.”

Sirius pads down the hall and moves up on Remus’s right to have a look inside the closet, finding a load of shelves tucked in there with linens of all sizes sitting folded on them, but then Remus lifts a translucent and strikingly yellow bar of soap up to him and suddenly, Sirius knows exactly what he meant there.

He leans in to have a whiff and despite the plastic packaging surrounding it, lemony goodness fills his nostrils with a hint of something extra in there he can't place and that's spicy in and of itself. “Mm, that'll have to be an eight,” he deems it.

“I’ll let her know she’s done it again,” Remus assures, nodding for Sirius to go on ahead of him as he grabs two towels from the closet.

Sirius moves for the bathroom, getting a look at his astounding sex hair in the mirror and spinning to smile wryly at Remus. “Should I wear it to dinner like this?” he inquires.

“You’d better not,” Remus returns, leaving the towels by the sink with a pointed smile on and passing behind Sirius to get to the tub.

Sirius dips his head to gather it all up and leaves it hanging in a low bun, not too interested in thorough hair care during a rinse that’s going to need to be on the brisk, and heads for the tub Remus is currently leaning over the side of to test the water via a trickle out of the taps, stopping behind him and drumming an easy beat against Remus’s caboose with his palms since it’s there.

“We might have to give this a moment or two to start up,” Remus mentions, reaching for the shower rod. “It can take time for the water to travel from the—”

The showerhead bursts to major and sudden life, cutting Remus right off and sending Sirius a good three inches off of the floor out of fright, a startled noise leaving his chest and echoing quite a bit in the small bathroom. Remus dips forward and beats his right hand against the side of the tub through a fi Sirius falls right into the moment he’s officially over his temporary alarm, but very soon, he’s leaning into Remus as he steps into the tub just to keep himself upright.

A solid plan in any other case, but it’s rather apparent that Remus had a similar idea to Sirius in that he’s leaning most of his weight onto him, leading to the two of them to halfway lean on each other and the shower wall for support. Sirius settles down right around the time Remus steals a kiss from him and yoinks his tote out of his clutches while he does it, turning toward the stream as he tugs out the loofah Sirius stuffed in there earlier on in the week.

Remus appears to be on the same page as Sirius about not bothering with hair care for the moment and it’s a good thing that Remus’s head sits just above the height of the showerhead when for can more easily avoid getting his hair wet, whereas Sirius is going to need to be a little more careful when it’s his turn at the front of the queue.

In the meantime, Sirius moves in and presses up against Remus’s back, half-hanging out with his chin hooked over Remus’s left shoulder, half-hiding behind his frame to avoid the steam himself as Remus gets the loofah all soaped up ahead of them. Sirius turns his head to the right, pressing a kiss underneath Remus’s ear and feeling like this, in itself, is what he and Remus at their best look like, but one thing does loom over their safe haven otherwise known as just about any shower setup, and Sirius’s throat goes a bit dry with the memory of it

He waits until Remus has rinsed off his front before reaching up for the loofah, offering to get his back when he’s already well positioned to, and Remus hands back to him with a budding smile on, and from there, he waits until he’s soaped up Remus’s back because he figures getting Remus to a soothed, pliable place beforehand would be rather on for the pending topic. “So, in your opinion,” he starts, waiting until he's garnered a pleasant hum out of Remus for it to continue, “would you say Tom's a decent rule follower, or would you say he has trouble following clear instructions?”

“Uhm,” Remus puts up, “it would really depend.”

“OK,” Sirius nods, dragging the loofah below Remus’s midriff, “so, say I sought him out in the grocery, caught him in aisle five while on my way to fetch your tea and whatnot, and took the opportunity to warn him against using that new number he so courageously got off of you; what would you say are the odds he’d listen to lil’ ol' me?”

Remus breathes in once, swivelling to the side so his left profile is visible to Sirius. “How bad?” he bids.

“Not bad,” Sirius insists, starting on rinsing off Remus’s back while it's equally as close to him and the steam. “If anything, you might want to be a bit proud of me because I managed to keep calm, collected, not use force — well, I might've slapped one of his hands up a bit, but he was giving me a dismissive little wave and getting it a little too close to my visage for my liking—”

“Well, then the slap-up might've been called for, as far as I'm concerned” Remus sticks in.

Sirius pauses short, running his top teeth over his lower lip. “You’re not upset?” he raises, not even knowing what to do with someone this patient with him.

“Would be a bit rich of me to be, no?” Remus offers in exchange.

“Well,” Sirius offers, tilting his head back and forth, “yes, in a way, but me going after your ex is a bit different from you going after the near stranger I projected all of my brotherly angst onto.”

Remus breathes in with that, stands with it for a moment or two, and turns his head more to leave a peck on Sirius’s right cheek. “I’m not upset,” he reiterates. “And I don’t think you’ve anything to worry about there.”

Sirius hums there. “He argued with me at first, which really only had me reiterating my point even harder, so in the abstract sense, I'd like to think he wouldn’t want to test what would happen were he chose to ignore my advice and I had to take a quick trip up to Cambridge, which I very warned him I'd be doing if he bothered you again, but you know him better than I do, so: do you think he’ll listen or are you going to have him blowing up your mobile in a day or two?”

“Well, he already wasn’t going to use it, so,” Remus puts in, “you finding him and letting him know all that would've rather sealed it, I'd think.”

Sirius hums a little more pointedly there. “Are you saying that because you’re so set in your belief that he wasn’t coming onto you in any shape or form?” he raises.

“Well, he wasn’t,” Remus trades him. “If we were talking about the version of him I knew in the first couple of years, then I might think twice, but we’re not working with that Tom, we’re working with the version of him that visibly hated himself more and more every time we fell back in together and so, he hated me; I just can’t see it having been some kind of proposition and it’s not that I’m being willfully blind to it, it’s just all I've left to go on.”

“OK,” Sirius nods, wanting Remus to continue if it keeps him talking about it.

“He could have asked for my new number off of my mum or dad, at any point since I’ve been gone, and they’d have handed it right over without a thought, but he didn’t; he asked for it after seeing me for the first time in ages and out with someone else,” Remus puts up. “I'd be willing to admit he was showing his length there, but I don't think it'd have been based on attraction so much as it would've been on feeling replaced; there could be a part of him that misses I used to give him in terms of loyalty, friendship, all that, and being in front of me again while I was out with someone else I could be giving all that and more to could've had him putting himself out there in hopes to rekindle that part of what we once had.”

Sirius breathes in long, a part of himself still very much in the camp of it having to do with a little more than just Tom missing his mate, but then, a specific retort of his sprouts up in his mind, one ‘I can talk to anyone I choose to’ and that is an interesting belief to cling to for someone simply looking to rekindle a past flame. “I still think it could've been a little more nefarious than that, but I am rather biased toward you,” he raises, pausing there to get any sort of response.

Remus pushes an amused breath through his nose. “Just a touch."

“Exactly, so if I ignore my bias for a second, you could be onto something there,” Sirius lets him have. “I mean, I’ve been lucky to experience the way you come through for the people you care about; I could see a world where he’d want that back in any form he could get it.”

Remus nods there, though it’d be better described as a circumstantial move of his head. “It’s a lost cause,” he says of it. “I just, can’t be the one who props him up anymore, he’s got to find that in someone else or, better yet, in himself; I’m honestly glad you did seek him out and tell him what’s what, I’m sure that'd have crushed any momentary nostalgia he might've felt for me and now, we can just smooth this pothole over.”

Sirius exhales through his nose. “Is he going to listen to me, though?” he circles back. “He may very well realize Sunday night that he’s got literal hours before the two of you won’t be in the same orbit for a while and my warning might not count to him then.”

Remus breathes in long this time, hanging his head to the left and giving Sirius a strikingly plain gaze. “How snappy did you get with him?” he bids.

“Oh, like a pair of castanets,” Sirius forwards, his lips quirking as he does a little snip-snap with his hands. “I went in, Remus.”

“Then I really feel he won’t see it worth the risk,” Remus finishes, facing him fully and taking Sirius's face between his hands, a pointed smile on. “We’re OK.”

Sirius nods best he can, leaning in to seal it with a kiss. “Ride or die, hm.”

“Mm,” Remus echoes, a laugh escaping midway through it. “Now, it’s not that I don’t love this, but we are running late.”

Sirius sniffs, perks up, and points starkly beyond the shower curtain. “Well, you’re done here, so you get the fuck into that kitchen, get a head start, and I’ll be right there,” he instils.

Remus puts his fists up in a braced pose. “Deal,” he returns forcefully, and the two of them swap places so Sirius can get at the stream.

Sirius smirks, leaning his head back and away from the splash to keep his hair dry, but a new image conjures in his head after the switcheroo. “Imagine we had a ridiculously complicated handshake for deals like these?” he raises.

“Like in 'The Parent Trap?'” Remus returns lively, reaching to pull one of the towels closer to him.

“Literally that’s what I was picturing, yes,” Sirius affirms.

Remus snorts as he steps out onto the mat, succumbing there to a breathy fit. “The thing is,” he puts up, turning back toward Sirius as he towels off his body, “no one who knows us would even question it if we did have one.”

Sirius shoots out a bright hum of a laugh, nodding profusely as he starts his own rinse, and pauses with the loofah braced to his chest to accept a kiss in parting from Remus. “I’m going to knick an outfit from your supply so I can have a bit extra of you for when the moment arrives, and you can go ahead and knick one of mine down the line should you choose to even this out, deal?”

“Have at ‘er,” Sirius returns, waving his free hand in allowance. “I have your billowy jumper and all so we’re by all accounts even, I feel, but I can’t say I won’t take you up on that offer in the days to come.”

Remus gives him a quick beam, tying his towel around his waist. “See you in there,” he bids, sliding the shower curtain closed again, and Sirius takes exactly twenty seconds to bask before it’s motherfucking showtime up in this shower.

When he’s out and dried off, he wrangles his toothbrush and paste tube out of his tote, leaving the bag in the shower and freshening up at the sink. He rinses his toothbrush off, taps it on the sink’s edge, and studies the edges of the mirror, tugging on the left side to no avail before the right one brings results, opening up to show a wee medicine cabinet tucked behind it. He leaves his toothbrush in there along with his tube of paste, closes the mirror, and takes care not to catch the eye of his own reflection as he gives one more glance over the state of his hair, but ultimately he rather likes the volume it’s got going even while wrapped up in its low bun.

Sirius breathes in long, smelling that lemony goodness once more, and unravels his towel from around his waist before lassoing it up to hang on the curtain rod to dry. He strolls out into the main room and goes ahead and puts his prior outfit back on, thinking the Henley paired with the Good Jeans haven’t done him wrong yet. He piques with a new idea and glances toward the bed as he’s fastening his jeans, but Remus appears to have already disposed of Sirius’s towel; kind of him, but it’s a bit unfortunate when he would have enjoyed the chance to toss it down the laundry chute just to be able to say he’s officially tossed something down a laundry chute, but alas, there will be other chances to shout ‘geronimo’ and torpedo something else down it before long, he imagines.

He books it out of the A-frame from there, shutting the door behind him and padding across the lawn toward the garden. He smirks hard as he heads back up the windy path, able to fully appreciate the image of him and Remus of them bickering back and forth over it from a bird’s eye view now that he hasn’t got immense fear pumping through his veins, and that image is one for the books. He zooms up the porch steps, takes the bend in the porch at a quick clip, and heads in through the back door. He gives a glance toward the couch and finds that Remus must've reallocated the bags for their antique haul finds to the middle cushion, remembering just, just there that they did, in fact, leave everything in a heap on the kitchen table that they’d likely need to use for other, more pie related things.

He heads for the kitchen as the tune playing fades out and Help! takes over the airwaves, bringing an enthused hum from Sirius’s throat. “It’s like they know you’re here,” he puts up, moving through the open archway and finding Remus rustling through a cupboard below the meeting point between the L-shaped counter.

“I was just thinking,” Remus offers, a smile audible on his lips as he rises to his feet with a large rolling pin in hand, but Sirius is a bit frozen over seeing that Remus has donned his newly-acquired cardigan over one of his tees, and not only that, the jeans he knicked from Sirius’s supply are a light wash blue pair that are already a little high on his ankles, meaning Remus clearly had to cuff them below his calves to lend toward the illusion that his gargantuan legs totally do fit them, but shit, is that pair doing wonders for those of his legs as is.

Sirius moves across the room for him, circling his right hand to gesture at Remus’s entire look. “All of this; yes,” he instils, leaning in to leave a ‘hello again’ kiss on Remus’s already quirking lips.

Remus ducks his head through a laugh, pointing down and in between the cuffs with the far end of the rolling pin. “I was a bit hasty with my picking,” he says of it, lifting his left hand to showcase quite a chunk of space between his forefinger and thumb. “There was this much ankle showing after I put them on, but it’s not as if I had time to try them all.”

“No no, and you picked well,” Sirius insists, giving Remus’s tightly hugged hips a once-over for punctuation before focusing on the cardigan and all its glory. “Do you like it?”

“Like it?” Remus returns, lifting his left hand to rub the inner sleeve of the cardigan over Sirius’s right cheek. “It’s so soft.”

Sirius bites down on the smile on his lips, reaching up to clasp his right hand around Remus’s raised wrist, and taking in the image of Remus radiating something that really can only be attributed to pure bliss, and it’s exactly the sort of energy Sirius knew was missing the last time they were in here. “You look amazing,” he instils. “And not just ‘cause you’re looking fit as hell, but all around; you look so much better.”

“So do you,” Remus offers candidly, leaning in to brush the tips of their noses together, the schmooze, but Sirius eats it right up when he himself may well be the biggest schmooze he knows. “So, I’ve made a station for the dough and another for the veggies, would you like to pound or chop?”

Remus lifts his hands to display his left by the counter just by him that’s very evidently the dough station what with the collection of measuring spoons, cups, the flour, the butter, a rotund mixing bowl, and a fair amount of counter space sectioned off to roll and pound, while his other hand’s gestures past Sirius’s left shoulder toward the table where a cutting board and chopping knife have been laid out along with the bags of veggies.

Sirius weighs his options but in all truth, he’s a little too beat after their rigorous workout to start beating in some dough and besides, he’s a chopping wizard. “Chop,” he picks, moving to rinse off his hands in the sink. He dries it off on the yellow hand towel hanging nearby, turns from the sink to take up the chair on the left-hand end of the table when it’s the closest one to Remus’s counter setup, and only he realizes once he’s already sat down that the back of the chair he picked faces the oven. “Is this spot going to be OK?”

Remus looks over his right shoulder from the dough station and waves him off right quick. “The door won’t even come close to it, you’re fine,” he assures, moving for the counter.

With that, Sirius pulls the cutting board over in front of him, grabs the knife, and starts with the celery, removing the three stalks from inside the plastic bag. He sticks two in the left corner of the board in the meantime, zipping up the middle of the first stalk with the knife and cutting the two halves into wee pieces.

“I certainly wish I wasn’t doing this so I could just watch you do that,” Remus raises conversationally, “but then we wouldn’t have a pie to fill, so.”

“I’m sure you’ll sneak a peek over this way now and again,” Sirius offers, pushing the cutlets of celery aside and brandishing a new stalk to cut.

“Oh, I will,” Remus assures.

Sirius smiles sidelong at him as he places the new stalk on the cutting board. “So, what’s the plan overall?” he raises, slicing the stalk in half and chopping those two into bits. "Aside from these two stations."

“Well, the pot pie will take longer, but the blueberry one doesn’t call for a top layer, so I’ll stick the crust in the oven in a little bit so that’ll heat while we’re working on the fixings for the other pie, and we’ll handle the filling for the blueberry one when we have some downtime in between; I’ve a vision set for this.”

“And I trust it,” Sirius tacks on, looking around at Remus long enough to watch him transporting cups of flour from the package to the mixing bowl via a plastic measuring cup (from a set of white ones of course) and pushes out a bright trill as he puts his gaze back on the cutting board. “You’re going a lot faster at that without those shrooms in you; weird.”

Remus nearly drops the measuring cup before turning from the counter in one swivel. “Shit,” he utters, the measuring cup clutched in his hand.

“I brought them, we’re good,” Sirius staves him off, eyeing the cup with a breathy laugh through his nose.

“No, we didn’t come up with a plan,” Remus raises, still holding it. “Where am I going to go for it, the woods?”

No,” Sirius elongates, a warble cutting in by the end of it. “No, still early days, sonny boy; baby steps.”

“Well, I can’t dose up right there in the den, can I?” Remus puts up, a reluctant smile on his face now.

“If only,” Sirius has to put in, snorting at the image.

“Why are you enjoying this so much?” Remus huffs, a full grin on now though so it can’t just be Sirius who’s enjoying this; funny how that is.

“Well, where’d you go when you lived here and felt a hankering for a certain recreational activity?” Sirius raises.

“We’d pick a spot, any spot out back if they weren’t home, pick a further spot in the field and as upwind as possible if they were,” Remus relays, “but it’s going to be Sunday; they’ll be here and we’re supposed to be actively around, not dodging them left and right because I’m spending time on the moon.”

“OK, here’s what we do,” Sirius prefaces, putting the knife down when Remus doesn’t love it when he chops while he isn’t looking at what he's doing. “We push it up a few hours and get it done tomorrow night instead, after they've turned in or at least aren't puttering about, dose up around ten, maybe eleven, that way it’ll still technically be Sunday once it really hits you; we’ll have the A-frame should you start laughing maniacally, which I doubt you’ll do though I can still dream, and then, if you need some air since you rather like your perch sits when you’re on them, we can take a blanket way out into the field, look for shooting stars, and be aces for Sunday Funday, how about that, hm?”

Remus breathes in long, the line of his shoulders eases as he exhales it, and a sheepish smile settles on his lips. “That was good,” he offers, turning back to upend the measuring cup into the bowl.

“Right?” Sirius raises. “Not too shabby of me.”

Remus moves away from the corner of the counter and in toward Sirius, leaning down to leave a warm, open-mouthed kiss on his lips before pressing a closed-mouthed one to his forehead. “It’s like you get me,” he quotes.

Sirius has enough time to lean up and sneak a kiss of his own before the sound of the front door opening has them straightening up to attention like a couple of gay soldiers; Remus breathes in fast, pressing the heel of his right palm to his lips with a smile hidden behind it, and the two of them move at the same instant, Remus scooting in between the oven and the back of Sirius’s chair to make a break for the dining room, Sirius ambling sideways out of his chair and catching up to Remus right quick, prodding the small of his back enticingly with his forefingers as they turn out of the kitchen and garnering Remus to reach behind his back as if to bat at Sirius’s poking, but he sure squeezes Sirius's right forefinger a couple of times in quick succession as they head past the dining room table before letting it go and that bit of consideration is just lovely in and of itself.

They get past the dining room table and out into the front hall where Hope is plainly visible from in the entryway, and Sirius beams bright as he takes in her workday attire; a black suit skirt with a blazer to match and a white blouse underneath for a pop, a fun, free, chic look, but then she looks up from sticking her shoes aside, brightens like the sun itself with Remus in her sights, and thundering down the hall toward him, and the juxtaposition between how fast she’s moving in her semi-formal attire is just fantastic.

“Look at you,” she puts out, her arms outstretched.

“You’ve seen me rather recently,” Remus puts up, his arms going up to make way for the mum on the run.

“Not in person,” she emphasizes, slowing down as she gets to him. “It’s not the same, seeing you through a shoddy camera.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t,” Remus lets her have, stooping a bit to match her height better and enveloping her right up. He leans his head down and props his chin comfortably over the top of her head, the sweet, watery smile on his face a little too much to handle, but Sirius doesn’t think he’d trade seeing it for anything; that’s love right there.

Hope pulls out of their hug with a bright, wowed glance over Remus’s visage. “You got sun,” she beholds, appearing equally bamboozled and chuffed to see it.

Remus smirks through his nose, glancing sidelong at Sirius with a sheepish smile on. “The first thing she’ll ever do is note whether I look like a ghost or not,” he passes along. “Did it at Christmas, too.”

Sirius beams bright, loving that detail, though Hope huffs so similarly to Remus that it's a little like a slap to the face, it's so bracing, but less so than the first time he heard her do it so he’s making progress there. “Well, hon, you were looking a bit too peaky for my liking,” she returns him, straightening out the ends of her blazer.

“I was a tad spooked at the sight of you, if you recall,” Remus trades her.

Hope looks to Sirius as she hums in affirmation, offering him a smile similar to the one she trained on him as she finally got to meet the lad she’d spoken to a couple times over the phone, and Sirius sways a little on the spot just from being on the receiving end of that warmth again. He doesn’t expect her to move in for a hug before it’s already happened, but he won’t deny that he’s a little starved for it and all in all, it’s an appropriate squeeze to have given him in that it’s warm, welcoming, and has a little extra oomph to it that may well be attributed to being the mate of Remus’s who just last year put her and the husband up in Londontown for an impromptu family reunion, and all that’s well and good, it is, but Sirius cannot wait for the day she nearly breaks his back the way she did Remus's. It’s got to come sometime.

Hope pulls back from the hug with a contented sigh and a sweeping glance over him. “You got a load of sun, good grief,” she observes.

“Every summer,” Sirius chimes.

“He's impossible to keep up with,” Remus tacks on.

Hope hums a wan laugh for that. “That one's my fault, isn’t it,” she raises, shaking her head as she reaches up high to give Remus’s hair a good ruffle.

“Definitely is,” Remus returns, his gaze moving up and to the left before he straightens up as Hope inspects the thin divot slicing through his left eyebrow, and in all fairness, the scar is sticking out more than usual with all that sun Remus got, but wow, she is quick; Sirius will give her that.

“What happened here?” she bids, her gaze moving between it and Remus's eyes.

Remus lifts his left hand and brings it to his forehead from the side, miming a good smack. “Brained it real good a few weeks back,” he supplies, using both his hands to gesture toward his mum. “Look at you, though; the corporate life suits you.”

Hope gives a quick glance down at herself before bringing it right back up again, putting her head on a pointed tilt. “Oh yeah?” she returns, reaching up to flick the end of Remus’s nose. “Thanks, hon.”

“No no, it’s no problem,” Remus assures, his lopsided smile on, and Sirius looks back and forth between the two of them quick, straining to absorb every last detail of this picture.

“OK, come with me,” Hope bids, heading past the two of them and sweeping her hands for them to follow her back through the dining room, “I’ve gifts for you in the den.”

“What a coincidence, so do we,” Remus puts up, moving up ahead of her and gliding along despite her tutting away behind him.

“Oh, you didn’t need to bring me a thing,” she returns, following after him Remus between the dining room wall and the table while Sirius brings up the flank, absorbing.

“Too late, we already did,” Remus chimes, cutting into the kitchen before moving right on into the den and going for their bags on the couch. “Ours first.”

Hope huffs before she makes a bit of a show by way of stopping just inside the room and stamping her feet together pointedly before setting her hands on her hips while Remus waves her off for all that and Sirius hangs back by the doorway, loving all this colour.

“OK, this one's from Sirius,” Remus prefaces, tossing a quick, curious smile over his shoulder at him.

Sirius gives a bright sweep of his hand for Remus to go ahead and display it for him. “Thanks for having me,” he offers sugar-sweetly, meeting Hope’s pointed gaze only for her to shut her eyes tight, setting a pair of prayerful hands over the lower half of her face and pulling a bright laugh out of Sirius. “It’s not the keys to a car, Hope.”

“Well, how can I ever tell with you?” she returns, eyes staying shut.

Remus gives a trill there. “She’s got a point,” he sticks in there, turning from the couch with the box of Bowmore in hand and clicking his tongue once he's seen the state she's in. “Mum, would you just look? You’re setting yourself up for quite the fall here.”

Hope makes sure to huff before dropping her hands first and opening her eyes second, blinking thrice at the box being held out to her. “Oh,” she breathes, right hand moving to her chest as her body language evens out enough for her to take hold of it with her free hand, “well, this I like.”

Sirius puts up a bright hum of a laugh. “Remus mentioned you’re a fan, and I thought it just wouldn’t be on not to bring a bottle along,” he forwards.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Hope mentions.

Sirius waves that right off with a quick swish of his left hand. “Please, yes I did,” he puts down.

“Oh, come here,” she bids, moving in to give him a side hug with her free arm. “Thank you.”

Sirius nods there, swallowing as quietly as he can. “I stopped him from going for the top shelf, if that’s any help,” Remus slips her, a sunshine smile on full display from down by the side of the couch.

“That does, yes,” Hope returns, affording Sirius a bit of a look as she moves to set the Bowmore box down on the coffee table and immediately deflecting, and where has Sirius seen that before, he’ll never know. “Your turn—”

“No no, you’ve more,” Remus halts her, turning back to the couch to fish through the other bag while Hope looks warily over at Sirius, who puts on a prized grin in response. “Now, mine’s maybe a bit less practical than his, but I’m sure you’ll find some use for it.”

Sirius stifles a laugh in his throat, but he can’t help it; Remus knows how to get him going. Unfortunately, the timing of his audible amusement gets Hope looking even more alarmed only to ease up quite a bit when Remus reaches to take the bottle off her hands in exchange for passing the white box off to her.

“This is cute,” she extends, looking it over in her hands.

“Could open it?” Remus suggests, keeping a polite but flat air about him that is no easier for Sirius to have to contend with.

“I’m getting there,” Hope mentions, balancing the box over her left arm and flicking up the two silver latches on the front with her right hand.

Remus over at Sirius, ducking his head the moment he sees Sirius’s mirth, and the two quickly poise themselves back at attention as Hope gives out a bright hum as she looks over the interior of the box, bracing it to her to give herself more of a chance to inspect the various tins inside with a careful hand before grazing her fingertips up the staircase of spools built into it. “Where’d you find this?” she bids, glancing up at Remus with a light smile.

“We stopped in to say hello to the old crew and it was in one of the booths, and before you go thinking anything, it was an absolute steal, especially when you think about all that’s in there,” Remus maintains. “I know you’ve only really dabbled here and there, but I also happen to know you’re very good at it if a bit out of practice, so when I saw that, I thought this would be a nice reintroduction to it.”

Hope’s face does a similar thing to what Remus’s does when he gets shown thoughtfulness, which only means Sirius is merely a pool of goo in the doorway while she mimes blowing a kiss to Remus warmly before closing up the box and curling her arms around it. “I'll be a bit rusty, but your granny had a ton of books on it,” she offers, half-nodding back toward the immense bookshelf behind her. "Might as well."

“Does it take eight years to comb through all those?” Sirius raises.

Hope gives a hearty laugh. “About there, yeah,” she lets him have, sniffing before shaking herself out altogether and moving to set her sewing kit on the coffee table. “OK, enough.”

She makes a beeline for the armchair sitting to the right of the couch and kneels on the carpet over on the far side of it, keeping her back turned to them while she slips something out from that yarn-filled wicker basket Sirius spotted earlier. She turns back with a prized smile aimed up at Remus as he's setting the Bowmore box on the coffee table and waits until he’s looking at her again before lifting a tablet encased in its packaging up to him.

Sirius puffs up grand, looking brightly over at Remus, who, of no surprise to him, has completely lost all sense of understanding. “Mum,” he puts out, lifting his hands to his temples. "You — no, mum."

“Honey,” she says kindly, keeping the box held up and out to him. “Your computer is four years old; it’s time.”

“It works just fine,” Remus insists of his veritable toaster of a laptop.

Sirius snorts. “I mean, for now,” he puts in, grinning from ear to ear.

Remus tries to send him a pronounced shush, but Hope rather likes that addition. “Thank you,” she accepts, gesturing her free hand toward him before refocusing on her son. “I wanted to get you something you could really use; it’s practical, you could put all your files on it, bring it to class with you, work on the go, I could maybe even see you better on-screen, the possibilities are endless.”

“She’s a visionary,” Sirius whispers over at him.

Remus merely lifts the two-finger salute to him while keeping his gaze on Hope. “Mum, that’s — that’s all true,” he lets her have, “but you should have it; I’m sure you could use it.”

“They’ve already given me one for work,” Hope references. “That’s where I got the idea; they’re just so handy.”

Remus deflates, staving off his mum’s eager tablet-waggling for all of five long seconds or so before stepping and taking hold of it. “Thank you,” he registers, tucking the box very close to his chest. Hope nods for him, positively glowing from down by the side of the armchair, and Remus really almost lets the nagging question on his mind slide. Almost. “Was it at least a fair price?”

Sirius sends a righteous snort to the room. “It was, and I’m not just saying that to get you to quit,” Hope maintains.

Remus gives a sigh, then a nod, then a half-smile before he's flickering his gaze toward Sirius and back to his mum right quick, and then she's giving Remus a smile all too similar to his and moving a little too suspiciously back toward that wicker basket for Sirius to contend with. “Explain,” he bids, tilting his head at Remus, but all he gets is a deeper, knowing smile for it and Sirius's signals go all wonky. “What did you do, hm?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Remus maintains, shrugging his shoulders easily.

“That’s not true, he picked the colour,” Hope relays. Sirius blinks fast, leaning over a little to the right in hopes of getting a glimpse or a hint, but Hope’s back is rather opaque and isn’t giving him much help in that regard, but soon, she’s lifting to her feet and turning back toward him with the most vivaciously rouge quilt folded neatly over her hands. “Since you liked his so much.”

“Stop,” Sirius puts out, and Hope stops.

“No no, that’s a good thing,” Remus assures, beckoning for her to continue toward him.

Sirius nods emphatically. “It is, I’m just overwhelmed,” he offers, flickering his gaze to Remus gratefully before putting it back on Hope.

“Oh, don’t be, I was happy to,” Hope insists, holding it up and out to him. “I know it'll seem daunting now with the heat, but the nights can get a bit nippy out there in the A-frame so this may just come in handy while you’re here.”

Sirius reaches to grab it off her hands and has it unravelled in mere moments, wrapping it around his shoulders finding that the length of it covers his bod and ends at the tops of his ankles, just like Remus’s does whenever he knicks it for a bit. He looks back up at her with a bright smile, swallowing fast so he’ll be able to say thank you properly, but before he can manage that, he feels a curious, scratchy patch in the palm of his right hand that’s unlike the rest of the material coiled up in his fist.

He lifts that hand to uncurl his fingers, finding a small white tag sewn into this corner of the quilt that reads a carefully stitched ‘Sirius’ in black thread, and pushes a half-breath out of himself. “You call yourself a bit rusty?” he raises, lifting the tag up to her with a plain smile on and turning it toward Remus to add him into the mix.

Remus snorts hard. “Amateur hour over here,” he echoes wanly.

Hope sets her hands on her hips with a pointed sigh. “Well, I’ve got the basics down, but I’d have liked to do a little more than just print it," she reasons, a half-smile on. "Might've been nicer in with a little cursive, but I’m out of practice with that."

No, it’s — I like it way better like this,” Sirius insists, moving in to hug her categorically tighter than is probably necessary but even if he thinks of it only on a base level, it’s still soul-crushing in the best way possible; he only mentioned liking Remus's once, in passing, and she remembered. “Thank you.”

Hope hums easily in response and gives a warm rub over his back with both her hands before pulling back, not quite sensing just how much it means to him, and Sirius runs his top teeth over his lower lip, unsure of what he should do next other than exit this room immediately so he won’t keep staring at her like this. “I’m just going to put this in the cabin so nothing gets on it and it’ll be there when I need it,” he says, forcing his voice to stay even-keeled. “Is that alright?”

“Of course, it’s yours,” Hope returns, gesturing her hands easily, and Sirius nods quietly for that boulder of a sentiment. “Well, while you’re doing that, I'll just run up and change out of this.”

“Alright, and when you’re back down here, you’re to sit at the table and do nothing,” Remus mentions.

“Mhhm,” Hope sends him, moving past Sirius for the kitchen.

Sirius looks to Remus at once, locks in on his heavy gaze first and his fingerpicking next, and holds a finger out to him with a quilt-covered hand, waiting until the stairs stop creaking and shuffling over to him the moment she’s officially upstairs. “I’m OK, I just needed her to not be in front of me,” he insists, reaching to pull Remus in the moment he gets close enough to do the job and getting wrapped up by him an instant after that. “I mean, I’m going to have to go put this in there now that I said I would, but I was starting to stare, and badly.”

“You weren’t doing it badly,” Remus assures, speaking close by Sirius’s right ear. “That was OK, right?”

“More than,” Sirius implores, shutting his eyes against the sea welling up in them in real time. “It’s just like when Mrs. Potter gave me the apron, only this is even better because it’s her.

Remus gives a weighted noise at the back of his throat before two distinct, but plush presses are felt against Sirius’s eyelids in turn and he chokes on a sob before forcing it back down, not interested in Hope hearing blubbers from upstairs. “Good cry, then?” he checks, bringing his left arm in from around him to wipe at a rogue tear on his right cheek.

Sirius sniffs hard, nods profusely, and leans out of Remus’s grip, blinking his eyes open. “How long have you known about this?” he accuses, squinting up at him through the film over his eyes.

“Well, I could sort of hear it in her voice when she was talking to you about mine but I wasn’t fully sure, then a day or two later, she asked me if you’d like one of your own and after I told her you very like red, she held up three different shades of yarn for me to pick the one I thought you’d like best,” Remus reports, leaving a kiss on the tip of Sirius’s nose.

And he picked well, but that’s still a good few weeks of behind-the-scene intel. “From its very conception, then,” Sirius raises slyly. “Thanks for the heads up, sweets.”

Remus huffs a flat laugh. “You have no right to talk to me about surprises,” he returns, eyeing him plainly.

Sirius huffs hard at him, breaks into a watery, begrudging smile, and looks up and over his shoulder as the stairs alert them of Hope's return. He looks back at Remus quickly, finding him tossing his head toward the back door, and the two of them come together for the quickest kiss before separating, Remus moving for the kitchen while Sirius heads out the back door with the quilt still on him like a cape.

He bats the door shut behind him, wipes at his cheeks, and breathes in fresh air as he rounds the bend in the porch, finding it a bit easier to do as he descends the steps into the garden. This has to be a good sign; platonic gift or not, from a big Lupin-sized heart or not, Sirius simply wouldn’t be Sirius if he didn’t let it carry him through the garden and across the lawn toward the A-frame with a proud glide. He’s known for months that he's Hope’s favourite of Remus’s pack of Londoners, after all, but now it’s practically official; he’s already got one foot in the door, whether or not Hope can quite see for whom it walks for, he’s just got to get the other foot in along with it.

He heads up the steps and into the cabin, folds his quilt into two and leaves it draped over the end of the bed, thinking it a nice splash of his favourite colour for an otherwise rather beige-themed room. He almost heads back right then and there, but makes a point to stop off at the bathroom and force himself to face the mirror, but it’s a good thing he did for his eyes are about as red as his quilt and his face is blotchy all over; something has to be done about that.

He runs the taps and bends inward to splash water over his face, taking care not to dribble stray droplets on the edge of the sink like a chump house guest or something, and pats his face dry with the hand towel hanging over the metal bar by the sink. He straightens up tall, sniffs good and long, and exhales for just as long, looking over himself again; his eyes are a bit puffy, but they're not so rouge-tinted at least and the thing is, he's privy to the fact that he was just boohooing in the den; Hope, less so, and it’s likely only he and Remus will be able to tell he'd been moved to tears over this by the time he gets back in there.

He looks himself in the eye and is unable to avoid the unfortunate thought that intrudes on him: he’s likely never looked more like Reg than he does now. He bashes his right fist down hard on the sink, looks away from the mirror before he can break it, and strides out of the cabin, shutting that thought right out; this will not be happening here.

Shania lets him know he’s received a text from James about halfway up the cobblestone path and Sirius digs his mobile out to pull it up, putting out a bright hum as he finds a photo of Mestophales and Tango curled up together on his bed, and somehow, it's precisely the sort of reminder he needs to hold onto the fact that there are vast areas of his life far beyond what his family can touch.

Sirius types a brief, one-handed reply: reward them.

He doesn’t bother putting his mobile away as he pops up the porch steps, figuring he’ll get a reply in no time at all and ending up quite right about that one. Already have. How’d it go, Casanova?

Sirius makes the bend in the porch as he sends his reply back. we haven’t even made dinner yet, you freak.

The reply is back in mere beats. How am I to know that!!!!

Sirius types his reply out rather daintily. it’s a wave, not a race, Jimbo

He does stick his mobile away there, knowing he’s about to get one fuck of a heckling for rehashing that one, and heads round the bend as he toggles it over to silent mode, letting himself in through the back door and smiling bright as the very first thing he hears upon his reappearance is the sound of Remus huffing.

“Would you please sit?” he implores. “He’ll be right back.”

“I’m back, I’m back,” Sirius calls, shutting the door behind him and scooting right on into the kitchen.

“See?” Remus puts up, sprinkling a bit of flour over a flattened oval of dough at the counter. “He’s got it, Mum.”

Hope waves the white flag, moves around the side of the table, and pulls out the chair to the left and diagonal from Sirius’s own post, lulling her head to the side to look up and over at Sirius, who perks as he finds she kept the silk blouse and paired it with some cute blue jeans. “Jean party,” he chimes, padding up to the table and sliding back into his seat.

“Well, I thought I’d dress in theme,” Hope offers, having a seat in the spot diagonal from his. “Would you mind telling him I’m perfectly capable of lending a hand?”

Sirius lifts his knife and starts right back where he left off, slicing the celery stalk in half. “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he imparts, smiling sweetly as he speedily dices the two halves into bitty pieces.

“Oh, oh,” Hope puts out, watching him go. “Nevermind, then; you’ve found your calling.”

Remus hums there. “When I said he had it, I wasn’t kidding around,” he serves her, giving the rolling pin a good spin over the dough over in Sirius’s right peripheral.

“Well,” Hope puts up, pausing to sigh, “can I at least get you anything to drink?”

“How about you just sit there?” Sirius raises cheerfully.

Hope doesn’t, at least not until she’s clicked her tongue, walked off into the den, and returned with her new sewing kit before taking her seat back again. She opens up the box and starts fiddling around with the tins in there, only this time, she’s got the opportunity to properly investigate what the various containers have to offer, and Sirius trades glances between her and the last celery stalk he's slicing up, finding her focus to be quite like Remus’s tends to be when he’s studying.

Hope runs her right forefinger around in the tin of safety pins, having a gander at the number of them sitting in there, and flickers her gaze up to Sirius’s before he can pretend he’s been solely chopping away and not sneaking peeks at her.

“Careful there,” she says, pointing toward the knife with her eyes.

“He’s not looking at it, is he,” Remus puts up, extra sweetly.

“I’ve a sixth sense, and it’s chopping, Remus,” Sirius pronounces, scooting the pieces of celery toward the heaping pile in the corner of the board.

“You’ll lose a finger one day,” Remus maintains.

“Not with you around, clearly,” Sirius returns.

Hope stays out of it, amusedly going right back to her sewing kit, and Remus keeps on rolling out the dough while Sirius pulls the onion out of its bag and peels that, getting into a bit of a groove from there, half-focused on the chop, half-bopping to 'Waterloo' playing in the background, and he thinks he might've heard the front door from well beyond the kitchen, hoping he’s right about that one; ready for more Lyall always and forever.

His suspicions prove very true in that Lyall announces his presence by way of calling out from what sounds as close as the dining room. “Saw the most curious bumper sticker ahead of me on the way back,” he puts up.

“You’d better share,” Hope bids, and already Sirius is straining his ears to hear past ABBA while he chops up a ring of onion real, real quietly.

“I managed to snap a picture before he turned off,” Lyall provides, turning into the kitchen from the dining room with his blue coveralls still on and thumbing through the mobile in his right hand. He clears his throat when he seems to have found it, shutting his left eye behind its lens as he reads off his screen in a lofty voice. “‘You hear it, but we live it. To watch us dance is like hear our hearts speak. We are on.’”

Sirius ducks his head through a laugh, straining to see his knifework without much of a neck to speak of, meanwhile Hope puts up one bright trill and Remus gives a charmed hum from over by the counter. “Well, shit, Dad,” he raises airily, “it's not every day you get behind a road scholar.”

Sirius puts his knife down there so that any one of the fingers on his left hand will have a hope of surviving this, lifting his hands to clap them over his eyes to ride out his stitches. In the time it takes him to settle down and drop his hands from his vision, Lyall's apparently moved out of the doorway for he’s kneeling down by Hope’s chair, leaving a quick kiss ‘hello again’ on Hope’s left cheek, and that sure has Sirius feeling all kinds of ways while he pretends to be very concentrated on cutting this onion in front of him.

Lyall has a gander over Hope’s new treasure, humming a note dripping with the air of convenience. “I’ve been looking for a stress ball,” he raises, reaching for the tomato-shaped pin cushion inside the box.

Hope moves quicker than he, blocking it with her left hand before he can swipe it. “You’d break a carpal doing that.”

Lyall takes his hand back from the tomato easily. “This is impressive,” he offers, fluttering the same hand ahead of the staircase of spools of all sorts of coloured thread. “Where’d you get it?”

“That one brought it back from the factory,” Hope extends, nodding over toward Remus.

“Should have figured that myself,” Lyall considers, at least until he throws his voice toward his son. “Nothing there for me, hm?”

Sirius turns his head a smidge, finding Remus standing there at the counter with his right fist held up in mid-pound. “Nothing jumped out, but you never know,” he offers. “We’ll be going back to comb for more souvenirs and I’m sure to find you something that’s just right; perhaps a really tacky rear-view mirror accessory or something.”

“Cow print dice?” Lyall puts up.

“I’ll see what’s around,” Remus trades him, amusement behind his tone as he folds up the dough to roll the pin over it some more, get it pliable.

“How’d you like the tablet, then?” Lyall bids, beckoning with his hands.

“What tablet?” Remus asks, and for a moment there, Sirius pauses short, genuinely wondering if he hallucinated him getting one, meanwhile Lyall clamps his mouth shut, looking sidelong at Hope with a half-grimace.

“He was given it already,” Hope extends plainly, but she's got a half-smile on, that's certain.

Lyall gives out a quick sigh of relief. “I thought I’d given it away.”

“I thought I’d hallucinated the whole thing,” Sirius puts in, giving a laugh as he looks around at Remus. “Go to drama school.”

Remus reworks his mouth around a smile. “It’s incredible, thank you both,” he registers.

“Hey, it was her idea, I just agreed,” Lyall puts it, using the edge of the table to pull himself up to his feet and sighing as he gives an observational glance around the kitchen. “What are we making?”

“Two pies,” Hope puts up, a new, rather merry smile on her face.

Sirius smirks as Lyall reels at the information. “We share an incredibly strong passion for pie,” he extends, looking up and over his right shoulder at Remus, who sends a sidelong smile and nod combo back toward the lot of them.

“One’s a pot pie, one’s a blueberry cream cheese situation,” he forwards.

“Come home more often, would you,” Lyall tacks on.

“Oh, that I could,” Remus returns, turning back to the counter to pull two pie sheets out of a pack and set them beside the dough station. “The pot pie we’ve made enough times that we almost don’t have to think about it anymore, but the dessert one is a new recipe we’re trying out so please be kind to the cooks because they’re doing their best.”

“There will be no heckling,” Hope assures.

“Should I help in some way?” Lyall checks.

An elongated and exceptionally blunt 'no' comes out of both Remus and Hope in near-identical tones, sending Sirius into a world where he mustn't bark out a laugh at his future father-in-law’s expense, but fuck, is that a task.

“Not sure I love the undercurrent of fear I just heard,” Lyall mentions, zoning right in on Sirius’s feeble attempts to stifle his laughter. “Keep it up, pal; see how that goes for you.”

Sirius turns his head away from him immediately, his eyes and mouth shut tight through his mirth. “Really, Dad, we’ve got it,” Remus insists, his voice warbling as he waves him off of Sirius with a point-N'-shake of the rolling pin. “Prep is going to take a while yet and it’ll be a good half hour more from when it goes in the oven, so you’ve plenty of time to relax—” Lyall cuts in with a voluminous grunt, but Remus puts his foot down, “—no, you really ought to; get mum to teach you how to knit or something, I bet she could get the basics taught before we’re ready to serve.”

Lyall snorts for that one. “I haven’t the dexterity for that kind of thing,” he denies.

“Well, that’ll explain why I haven’t much in the way of that either,” Remus trades him, and Sirius turns his head and coughs loudly into the side of his upper right arm for that incredibly false claim, smiling sweetly at Remus’s quick but indeed pointed glance his way.

“Didn’t want to cough on the onion,” Sirius passes along politely.

“How kind of you,” Remus returns, just as politely, and goes back to fitting one of his circular cutouts of dough into the first pie sheet.

Lyall turns toward the den and seems to stare off calculatingly into the middle distance, though upon further inspection, it appears to Sirius that he's staring out the window over behind the couch that displays a strapping shot of the porch stairs and a section of Hope's garden. “Have you been out back yet?”

Remus hums in prime affirmation. “We went out on the trails and down to the waterfront for a bit, too,” he extends, moving to preheat the oven.

“Oh, did you like it?” Hope bids, smiling bright at Sirius, who gets one hell of a nod going and turns his head so Lyall can see his assurance as well.

“How was it getting through the grass?” Lyall raises, looking between them as he goes into a half-grimace. “I put that off a little too long.”

“It was fine,” Remus waves off. “Lots of skeeters, but that’s nothing new.”

“For you,” Sirius puts in, lifting a carrot and cutting the top end off.

Remus smirks over behind Sirius. “He did get a bit swarmed,” he amends.

“There’s tons of bug spray if you need it,” Hope lets him know.

“Oh, I brought some with, but thank you,” Sirius chimes. “I was a fool and hadn’t remembered to put it on yet, is all.”

He looks back over his left shoulder a few seconds from there, finding Lyall lingering over in the doorway to the den with a ponderous expression on before he ultimately clicks his tongue, giving up a sigh. “Well, I’d go out and do it now, but there’d hardly any point in that if by the time I get ‘er up and running, the pie will be ready to come out,” he puts up, and Sirius pauses midway through peeling the carrot and trains his gaze on the fridge, deciding that'll have to be James’s stand-in as he’s not here to appreciate the direction that sentence ended up, and goes right back to peeling.

“I can do it later, Dad,” Remus offers, and Sirius clears his throat as he shaves the carrot in his left hand pointedly considering how that still constitutes stealing his thunder.

Lyall snorts, taking Sirius’s grunt in a slightly different way than he intended. “And what’s he going to do, ride around on the back of it?” he raises.

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Remus says of it. “In fact, he’d kick me off and make me ride around on the back.”

Sirius looks over his shoulder with an echoing nod for Remus’s claim. “I’ve never ridden a mower before, so you can bet I’d be taking over,” he maintains, turning back to his board to chop along the ridge of his newly peeled carrot.

“Leave it to me, alright?” Lyall bids, waving them both off. “You just relax; it’s called vacation.”

“Is that what it's called?” Remus returns, deadpanning him in both tone and expression, and Sirius looks to Hope sitting easy in her seat.

“How do you deal with this?” he raises, lifting his free hand to gesture it back and above his head at those two.

Hope gives a hum, lifting her shoulders. “Happily,” she answers, and that’s simply the best answer Sirius could have hoped for.

“Just once while you’re here, I’d like to physically see you put your feet up,” Lyall sends Remus, heading off into the dining room.

“I will if you do,” Remus sends back, and Lyall grumbles as he wanders out through the dining room to ascend the stairs, by the sound of it.

In his wake, the master chefs fall into a focused, relative silence as they work that gets cut through a few minutes on from there by a bright hum from Remus. “Ooh-kay,” he puts up, sounding all accomplished and cheerful about it, “crusts are all set.”

Sirius pauses on the last carrot of the bunch, looking round to find he has indeed carefully and officially sealed two circular cutouts of dough into the two pie sheets on the counter. “A wizard at large,” he champions, zoning in on just one circular cutout of dough set aside on the counter. “I forgot the blueberry one doesn't call for a top layer.”

“It’ll be an adventure, but one I’m rather excited about taking,” Remus offers, lifting one of the pie sheets and bringing it over to the stove.

He trills pleasantly as he moves in behind Sirius's chair to pull the oven door open and even though he insisted there’d be plenty of room, Sirius still scoots his chair in a bit just to make the task that much easier for him to complete. “Alright, that one's got to go in for a good while,” he forwards, shutting the oven door, and Sirius glances over his shoulder with a smile on as Remus thumbs through his mobile to set an alarm for it. “So while that's heating, I’ll get the chicken cut up and if you’re alright with tackling the potatoes once you’re done there, Sirius, we’ll be right on course.”

“Potato king,” Sirius echoes candidly, sweeping a pile of diced carrots toward the ever-rising mountain of cut-up veggies in the corner of his cutting board.

“Oh, this is just silly,” Hope puts in, lifting her hands. “I’m right here; hand me the peeler.”

Sirius straightens up in his seat and looks back at Remus for instruction, finding him pushing an elongated puff of breath in and back out of his cheeks. “Fine,” he grants, sweeping his right hand toward Sirius as he moves for the fridge, “give her the peeler, you take the chicken instead of me, and I’ll start getting the pots and pans ready to go; it'll be faster in the long run.”

Sirius nods at once, taking the boss’s instruction as law, and lifts his left forefinger toward Hope. “I’ll just get this cleared off and ready to go,” he slips her, gesturing to the cutting board filled with diced veggies and leaving his chair in hopes of fetching a bowl to put them in.

Hope nods with a new smile on, slipping out of her seat sideways and taking her sewing kit back to the coffee table in the den. “Where are the bowls?” Sirius sings, putting a little vibrato into it.

“Above the dough station,” Remus harmonizes, pulling the package of chicken breasts out of the fridge.

Sirius heads over there, casting a glance over the dough station as he reaches for the cupboards and finding Remus has set aside the top crust of the pot pie to stick on when need be, and then looks toward the door to the den as Hope heads through it with an intrigued blink and keen smile combo aimed at the two of them, and only then does Sirius realize that they did just croon to each other about where the bowls are located and forgot where they were for a few beats.

“He’s rubbed off on me,” Remus offers, pushing the package of chicken toward Sirius’s spot on the table.

Sirius smiles as he snags a small plate off of a stack of them for the onions before walking that and the soup bowl back over to the table, feeling quite warm from his head to his toes. “I was going to say,” Hope forwards, moving to take up her seat once again. “Those harmonies are on point.”

Sirius hums a bright chime in thanks while he stands over the table and scoops bits of onion onto the tiny plate reserved for them before sweeping the rest of the pile of chopped veggies into the bowl with his knife. Remus moves in behind Sirius to get at the drawer beneath the stove and Sirius gathers the knife, peeler, and cutting board to bring over to the sink for a rinse and file out of the boy's immediate way.

Remus leaves a saucer that Sirius has to assume is for the gravy when they get around to that on the top left burner as Sirius brings the cutting board and peeler back to the table, leaning over it to push them toward Hope before leaving the knife in front of her, too. “I’ll just grab another,” he decides.

Hope smiles as she takes hold of it. “They’re in the drawer just behind you and to the left,” she directs, throwing a nod past Sirius. “How do you want them cut once they’re peeled?”

“They’re to be mashed so by all means, you may cut them any way you like,” Sirius relays, pulling a new knife out of the drawer and glancing toward Remus. “Is there another cutting board I could use?”

“There’s a mini one,” Remus forwards, lifting to his feet to set a frying pan on the bottom right burner on the stove before stooping down again to pull a large pot out of the drawer. “I think I saw it underneath the shelf with the microwave on it.”

Sirius moves for the cupboard he remembers the microwave being in and goes one shelf down, finding a small white one that’ll be just perfect for the job. He brings it back to the table and waits just by his chair for Remus to finish up with the drawer under the stove, taking his seat back once Remus has knocked the drawer shut with a foot and moved the pot over toward the sink. Hope digs a large potato out of the bag of many and starts peeling from the top, going round and around the perimeter of the rotund potato and shaving off one long peel a diligent hand, and Sirius may or may not be studying her technique as he absently cuts the plastic cover over the package of chicken breasts in front of him.

Remus leaves the pot on the counter just to the right of the sink for the time being, turns back toward the table, and clicks his tongue through a ponder, patting a beat into the fronts of his thighs. “Now I’m out of a job,” he states, patting once more for effect.

“Why don’t you sit and do nothing?” Hope suggests, leaving the peel of the first potato aside.

Sirius sends Remus a bright smirk as he works one of the chicken breasts out of the pack and Remus makes sure to push a pointed breath through his nose before taking the open spot in front of him, situating himself across from Hope and diagonal to Sirius. “Lily says hello,” Remus imparts, crossing his right leg over his left knee as he settles in, “as I’m sure James does, too.”

Sirius nods for that, feeling like that would be the truth even if James didn’t have a specific vested interest to be asking about. “He definitely says hello," he affirms.

Hope hums pleasantly for that, but Lyall’s voice sounds off from the dining room as the verbal reply to that piece of information. “How are Red and the Loud One?”

Sirius puts out a celebratory laugh, filing that one away as one to absolutely tell James about at a more opportune time, and genuinely reels as Lyall turns into the kitchen with a tan jumper and a pair of black slacks on; it’s like Remus went and shapeshifted twenty-ish years into the future while still being very much twenty-three in the spot over on his right.

“They’re doing great,” Young Remus offers. “James officially got the ring sized this week, so there’s been some real progress in that department.”

“Good show,” Older Remus returns, taking the open spot across the length of the table from Sirius.

Hope brightens there, leaning into the table a little with intrigued eyes set on Remus. “Does he feel better now?” she raises, slicing the first potato in half before cutting them into quarters.

“Elated,” Sirius passes along, separating the bones from the first breast. “It was a bit of a journey.”

Hope laughs there. “He said as much,” she passes along, nodding her head toward Remus as she pushes the pieces of potato aside.

“Did he also happen to mention that he’s got a future in espionage should he choose it?” Sirius raises, his head on a right-hanging tilt as he sticks the bones aside.

Hope blinks over the table at Remus. “No, he did not,” she offers, wrangling a new potato out of the bag.

“Well, I wasn’t going to blow my own whistle about it,” Remus defends, lifting his hands for a sprinkle of understanding.

“You ought to blow it from the rooftops,” Sirius says of it, bidding up chunks of chicken as he turns his attention back to Hope and Lyall. “Now, our Remus was entrusted with the task of forking Lily’s ring size out of her in a non-intrusive, innocuous way a few weeks back.”

Hope nods there, starting to peel the next one. “He did tell me that much, yes,” she forwards him.

“'Complained about' would be the best way to describe it,” Remus amends.

“He was nervous,” Hope offers with a frown, but there’s a bit of a smile in there, too.

Sirius nods to allow it. “He was somewhat strong-armed into it,” he lets him have, starting a pile of chicken pieces on the cutting board, “but in fairness to James, he and I both knew in our bones that he was the right sort for the job and we weren’t wrong about that one—” he garners a heavy, but amused sigh out of Remus, who sits back in his chair with a wry smile on and his arms crossed over his chest, “—so, picture the lot of us at brunch, about a fortnight ago: the task Remus had been given would have been looming over him for a couple weeks by this point and then, Dorcas just suddenly takes off a ring of hers, sets it on the table while she gives that finger a rub-down, and man of the hour over here manages to grab it and coax Lily into putting it on.”

“How did you even manage that for one, and without tipping her off for another?” Lyall puts up, squinting over at Remus, who genuinely hasn’t got an answer for that when Hope leans in and asks how Dorcas is doing beneath the preceding topic of conversation, a glimmer to her gaze.

“She’s good,” Remus answers, giving her a pointed blink.

Sirius keeps right on with it in hopes that it’ll crush that left turn while keeping his own spirits up about it; Dorcas hasn’t got a quilt fashioned together by one Hope Lupin, so what good would it do to go holding himself at a tier underneath her; it’s evident from Hope’s actions that she holds him to a higher regard despite that twinkle in her eye.

“It was all in how it was done,” he tells Lyall, automatically extending a hand out as if he’s using it as a speaking aid when really he’s hoping it’ll physically put himself between Hope and Remus. “It’s the doe eyes he's got, the unprovoked, curious tone he used, the innocuous yet unbreakable poker face he had on, he even put the ring on for funsies which only made the situation so much more innocent and goofy, and then, he pointed out how he’d never seen Lily wearing one, curious as can be, and that sparked her to discuss that it was a mixture of things; she’s not opposed to rings, but she can’t really wear them at work where she is a good three-quarters of the time and even before she started there, she wasn’t really a jewellery kind of gal aside from the bracelet her mum got her for graduation, and then Genius Remus here mentioned that Dorcas’s ring matched her bracelet and that got her all interested in trying it on, Dorcas told her to keep it because they really did match on a spooky sort of level, and that was really that, she didn’t think anything of it and the ring fit like a glove so James had a size to go on.”

Remus may or may not link his left ankle around Sirius’s right one for a whole four seconds or so while he merely comes off as a bit sheepish over all this praise from the torso up. “In theory, of course,” he puts in, a laugh escaping there. “We somehow managed to have two unique ladies in our midst that haven't a clue of what their respective ring sizes are; Lily doesn’t normally wear them so she doesn't know what measurement her finger is and Dorcas apparently tried hers on at the store a while back and went with the one that fit best, so the mission wasn’t quite yet over with by the end of that brunch.”

Sirius nods there, working the second breast out of the package. “She and Pete went off a couple days later to match her ring finger to a load of rings,” he takes it from there, slicing pieces off of the second breast, “and then, James went off with the gathered intel and found one hell of a specimen for Lilith, I’ve got to give him that.”

“What did he get?” Hope bids him, back to being intrigued for the right reasons, as far as he's concerned.

Sirius smacks his lips there. “Now, I am no jeweller, so I’m not going to have the jargon down by any means,” he prefaces, working the bone off of the second chicken breast, “but I do know that I saw a raised diamond, which is probably for the best when Lily’s constantly working with her hands even when she’s not at work, and the diamond itself was a sensible size in that it wasn’t a huge, honking one and that's really more her style anyway, so good on James for sensing that.”

“I saw some white and rose gold around that diamond, Mum,” Remus imparts, smiling wryly over in his chair.

Hope hums pleasantly there. “I do like a white and rose gold scheme,” she allows.

“I saw that with your bike,” Sirius gives her, bidding up pieces of the second breast. “What a find.”

“Thank you,” Hope accepts. “I was lucky to nab it.”

“See, you think he’s just being nice with that,” Remus puts in there, a pointed smile on his lips, “but he’s definitely planning on obtaining a rose gold bicycle with a little white basket on the front at his earliest convenience.”

“She’s a style icon, Remus,” Sirius returns, garnering one startled noise out of Hope for it.

Remus nods evenly there. “You really are, mum; just go with it,” he says for it.

“What happened to the other one?” Lyall interjects, looking down the table at Sirius quizzically. “Patricia, was it?”

Sirius smirks there, happy for the misremembering certainly, but he sure does love that Remus must've told him about her name because Sirius sure didn’t. “Priscilla, but you can call her whatever you like,” he tells him. “She’s still serving me very well, but I think she'd understand if a rose gold bike got worked into my rotation; the ride into town on his had me feeling rather nostalgic for a traditional bicycle ride, I've gotta say.”

“Not sure what about that ride into town was traditional,” Remus puts in wryly, “but I could see you going along on a rose gold bicycle, myself.”

“Approval of the highest order,” Sirius deems it, fluttering his hands to display them in front of his cutlets of chicken breast. “C’est finit.”

“OK,” Remus responds, a particular Parisian lilt to it, pushing out of his seat and visibly pleased to have a task once again.

“Oh, that’s right,” Lyall pipes up. “I bet you must be practising the language a ton.”

“I mean, here and there,” Remus replies, leaning into the table to pluck up both the bowl of veggies and the mini cutting board with a whole heap of chicken on it and bring them to the counter. He plucks the bones up from there, brings them over to the cupboard under the sink, and tosses them in the bin. “I can speak the language, papa.”

“I wasn’t all that sure anymore,” Lyall puts up. “You don’t transition into fluent French very often, do you.”

“Well, you hardly speak it, do you,” Remus counters, moving around the table to get into the fridge behind Lyall’s chair and pulling the bag of frozen peas out of the freezer and the butter from the fridge. “My speaking may still leave a little something to be desired given that I can’t shed my accent to save my life and I’ve learned that is noticeable, but my comprehension’s just fine.”

“I can vouch for that,” Sirius puts in.

Remus quickly scoots back to the counter, busying himself over there, and Sirius rather shines with the knowledge that he got him quite flustered with that addition. “Ah, tu parles Francais?” Hope asks him, speaking very, very carefully.

“Mais oui,” Sirius chimes, finding her attempt just the cutest thing out there and launching into a full phrase to express how that mother tongue just never quite leaves him.

“Back up, she didn’t catch that,” Remus insists, garnering a snort out of Lyall for it.

“They’re both right,” Hope concedes. “I got ‘yes,’ out of it.”

“I just said it’s in my veins,” Sirius waves her off. “Pardon my flair.”

“That’s not an easy task for anyone,” Remus trades him, reaching to turn the right burner on and tossing a bit of butter onto the frying pan.

Sirius makes sure to back his chair against Remus’s arse as he gets out of it, hip-checks the chair into the table once he’s up, and brings his greased-up hands to the sink to give them a wash. From there, he presents himself as chef numero deux, which really just means he moves up by the stove and leans against the counter just beside it, waiting dutifully for instruction while Remus scrapes the pieces of chicken into the pan in front of him before picking up the bowl of veggies and tossing those in as well.

Sirius goes ahead and opens up the bag of frozen peas, eyeballing a cupful of them as he shakes some out of the bag over the pan. “Thank you,” Remus extends, giving the whole mixture a good stir with a wooden spoon.

He stoops below the stove again, pulls a lid out of the drawer, and pops it on top of the pan to let the mixture cook, and from there they’ve about ten minutes to spare until the broth and milk have to be added in.

Remus looks Sirius’s way as he lifts the mini cutting board and bowl, heading for the sink with them. “Would you like to start on the blueberry fixings?” he raises, smiling his way over there.

“Yeah, I would,” Sirius returns lively.

“We’ll do the filling first since that'll be the bottom layer and then we’ll get the puree going,” Remus offers, setting the cutting board and bowl in the sink.

Sirius nods diligently, heading for the fridge to get the cream cheese out of it, and Remus moves back toward the counter to grab the mixer bowl, bringing it to the sink to wash and start it fresh for Sirius to use. “What else do I need for this part?” he raise, standing by the fridge with the cream cheese in hand.

“Just that and sugar for the bottom layer, and I’ll grab you what you’ll need for the top one,” Remus passes along, bringing the mixer bowl back to the counter and pointing to the package of sugar at the dough station for Sirius to go ahead and use.

Sirius shuts the fridge door and pads back over to the counter to take up his post as cream cheese filling operator, and Remus pulls out his mobile again, thumbing through it quickly before he sets it down on the counter with the recipe lit up onscreen for Sirius to read off of as he goes along, and heads off from there to fetch more ingredients for him, the top-notch lad he is.

Sirius combines 4oz of cream cheese and a half-cup of sugar to the mixer bowl as per instruction, picks up the whisk, and goes absolutely ham on mixing the two up to create a collectively smooth consistency. He thwacks the whisk against the edge of the mixer bowl, knocking extra bits of cream cheese filling into it, and looks round as Remus’s alarm tone pops up over his screen and blares out, finding Remus in the fridge and not so easily able to get to the stove.

“I’ve got it,” Sirius alerts him, putting the whisk down and pressing to silence the alarm.

“Thanks,” Remus returns, hands buried in the fridge. “There are mitts in the drawer just to your right.”

Sirius looks toward said drawer, tugs it open, and finds many knitted items inside. He pulls out a white potholder to set on the counter for the heated pie shell to go on, pulls out a pair of yellow mitts, and smiles over at Hope as he tugs them on.

“Tell me you made these,” he coaxes.

“I sure did,” Hope affirms, middle of chopping a potato in quarters. “Those are a few years old, though.”

“You really are very good,” Sirius extends, moving to pull the oven door down to remove the pie crust from inside.

“It’s unreal,” Remus puts in, bringing over a squeezer of lemon juice and the packets of blueberries over to set them nearby Sirius’s post while Sirius himself transfers the pie crust to the potholder on the counter. “She doesn’t even have to look at what she’s doing anymore; she can carry out whole conversations with eye contact all while knitting up a storm.”

Hope hums a laugh from the table. “Well, I’ve just had plenty of practice at it,” she offers fairly, keeping in with the Lupin way of downplaying talent wherever possible.

“No no, that’s something you should own, Hope,” Sirius insists, going back to shut the oven door and leaving the oven switched on when Remus is going to need it fairly soon for the pot pie.

Lyall gives a flat laugh there. “Good luck with that.”

Hope gives a vague hum of denial behind Sirius. “We’ll have to own it for her, I think,” Remus surmises, pulling a package of cornstarch down from one of the cupboards above to set nearby Sirius’s post.

“That, we can do,” Sirius affirms, picking up a wooden spork hanging out near his work area and waggling it in question.

“I put it out exactly for that,” Remus says of it, pointing between the bowl of cream cheese filling and the pie crust it’s made for.

“The smartest lad,” Sirius deems him, tilting the mixing bowl over to push the cream cheese filling into the pie shell below and spreading it around the confection with the spork.

“Or, I read the recipe and knew what would be needed,” Remus offers.

“It can be both, you shit,” Sirius returns.

“Yeah, you tell ‘em both,” Lyall goads him from the table.

Sirius smirks as he evens out the bottom layer with the spork, sets it down, and reads along the recipe some more, checking off various ingredients Remus has already brought over to him for the next step in the process, but one particular ingredient brings him a stark pause. “Remus,” he pipes up, turning to him with a half grimace, “did we pick up confectioners’ sugar?”

Remus, who’d just paused short from Sirius’s careful utterance of his name, huffs out a sigh with a new smile on with the second part of his question. “We already had some here,” he forwards, setting the glass of water down by Sirius’s station before bringing said pack of sugar down from a cupboard. “OK, you’re all set up unless I’ve missed something?”

“No, you did great,” Sirius affords him, stepping toward the sink with the mixer bowl in hand to give it a wash.

Remus takes in a righteous breath. “No, I did not,” he returns, moving for the drawer underneath the stove, “you need a saucepan for the next step.”

Sirius smirks, drying off the mixer bowl with the tea towel by the sink. “Where does this go?” he asks, presenting the bowl.

Remus looks up from down below the stove and points toward the cupboard it goes in. “Second shelf,” he tacks on, and Sirius sticks it away. Remus stands tall again, knocks the drawer shut, and sets the saucepan on the front left burner for Sirius before heading back to the fridge. “You’re officially set.”

“Merci,” Sirius chimes, heading back to get going on what will be the top layer, but he’s officially back in familiar territory.

He looks left and sees two measuring cups within reaching distance, the one he used for the cream cheese filling and the other Remus must have used for the dough for both pies, and takes the both of them to the sink for a rinse-out before bringing them back to leave one free for Remus to use and keeping the other for him.

“Well, that’s the last one,” Hope puts up, setting her knife down beside a whopping pile of potatoes on the cutting board, “but I’ll assume we’ll be waiting a little on these?”

Remus hums to affirm, bringing the milk and carton of chicken broth over to leave them on the table where Sirius once sat, but that makes sense when he’ll have easy access to both while he’s at the stove. “Yeah, we’ll do them once I get this in the oven,” he says, gesturing to his chicken and veggie mix on the right burner before removing the lid covering it.

Lyall gives out a massive yawn-and-stretch combo from behind them. “Any leads on a flat yet?” he puts up.

Sirius blinks for a long moment as he reaches to turn the burner under his saucepan on, looking sidelong at Remus as he cracks open the cap on the chicken broth. He pours out a full cup, tosses that into the pan, and measures out a three-quarter cup to pour in before turning to leave the broth on the table. “Some, but nothing concrete yet,” he offers finally.

Sirius discreetly measures out a quarter cup of cornstarch into his own measuring cup before upending it over the saucepan while he keeps his gaze on Remus, who turns back to the stove with the milk in hand. “You’re going to want to get on that or you’ll be kipping on the tube,” Lyall sends along.

“I,” Remus elongates, adding the three-quarter cup of milk needed for his concoction in front of him, “know that.”

Sirius moves over to the sink to stick the measuring cup underneath the faucet and pour out a half cup of water. “Do you remember Andromeda?” he raises, looking over at the two at the table as he carries it back to the saucepan.

Lyall smirks from his seat. “Hard to forget.”

“I’ll let her know,” Sirius returns, squeezing a quarter cup of lemon juice into the measuring cup before adding that to the mix in his pan. “She’s helping him out with finding a place.”

“Oh?” Hope asks, putting her head on a tilt. “That’s very nice?”

“She loves him,” Sirius tacks on, pointing toward Remus as he’s stirring pot pie filling at a robotic speed, his gaze set on the wall above the stove. “Would put him up herself if she had a place there, but she has got quite the network going there so she’s on it as much as he is, really.”

“I’ve got a few leads in my price range, but they’re not particularly close to where I’ll be working or my faculty building so I’d be spending more on travelling back and forth, and since I have a month and a half still left to find something a little closer and someone else keeping an ear out for me, I’d rather not jump the gun yet,” Remus elaborates, and Sirius nods along in his peripheral as he tosses a half cup of confectioners’ sugar into his own pan. “I really just need a room, so I’m willing to rent one from someone closer to the school and I’m not particularly picky so long as I have heat and running water.”

“Maybe a bed, too,” Sirius puts in kindly, pulling open the first packet of blueberries; the recipe calls for three full cups of them and Sirius could measure those out, sure, but he could also shake the whole packet out over the pan for eyeballing’s sake and very does do that.

“I’d take a couch,” Remus returns.

“I know you would, and that’s unacceptable,” Sirius sends him, pulling open the second pack and sprinkling in some more blueberries until he finds what’s in the pan looks a lot like three cups.

“Oh, listen to him, please,” Hope bids, and Sirius tosses a blueberry in his mouth with a light shoulder shimmy.

“I’m going to,” Remus insists. “It was a joke, mum; I’ll have a bed.”

“That’s a good idea,” Lyall comes in.

“Having a bed?” Remus raises, laughing thinly there.

“No, renting a room,” Lyall clarifies. “There’ll be plenty of folks who’ll be looking to rent out a spare room for a little extra per month; good option to keep in mind.”

Sirius watches Remus’s expression drop and guilt start to form in its place over having snipped, feeling a lot like a hunk of shit for knowing he’s the reason Remus won’t look at him, and of all the times to go kicking himself for showing ‘tude, getting slugged for something he’s already trying so hard not to worry about, twice in one day, calls for some 'tude; in this case, Remus can have a little snippage, as a treat.

Remus won’t look at him, though, so he can’t see how hard Sirius is trying to send him a Look that’ll speak all that for him while Remus aims a weak smile over his shoulder at the other two. “She’s quite gung-ho about it which I really appreciate, but I don’t want to be prodding her for quicker results just because we all might like to have a better plan set in place right this very moment,” he says of it; gentler than before, but the sentiment is loud and clear. Hopefully. “There’s still time.”

“Plenty,” Hope echoes. “Have you found someone to take over yours yet?”

“Yeah, what happened with that?” Lyall echoes.

For a moment, Sirius mashes idly at the blueberries in the pan with his spork, wildly surprised that something which fell into place with such wondrous relief for Remus back in literal mid-May never got relayed to the parents, but then, it makes all the more sense when Remus speaks up. “Yeah, Dorcas is going to sublet it from me,” he says directly, turning to point his stir spoon at his rather gleeful mum, “and before you get going, it makes the most sense; she’s sick of her whistle-tooting roommate and needs an escape, and this way, I don’t have to let a stranger live in my flat for four months or get stuck paying two times the rent while I’m gone, so it’s a win/win for convenience and that is it.”

“OK,” Hope allows, lifting her hands to block it, only she does smile behind them, “but I was going to say, if she’s over there a lot, it would make sense if she simply stayed there to look after it while you’re away.”

Remus hums a tight note of denial, switching his burner off and lifting the pan off of it. “We’ve really only seen each other a handful of times since she’s been back,” he extends, moving around Sirius to get at the other pie shell at the meeting of the L-shaped counter. “Not by choice, mind; always nice to see a friend, but this summer’s been a busy one for the both of us.”

“You know,” Sirius puts in, on to stirring the concoction in his pan around and around to get a puree going, “this could help out with her and Pete; give them a place to go while they nurse their burgeoning love affair.”

“Well, that too,” Remus echoes, tipping the pan and spooning out the mixture into the pie shell; it looks a whole lot like slop at the moment, but it’s going to be delicious. “When you think about it, what I’m really doing here is setting them up for success by letting her stay at mine and not have a whistling roommate there to ruin the mood.”

“Well, you’re a selfless paragon that way,” Sirius delivers, tapping his spork against the side of his saucepan as Remus finishes evening out the spread of his own pie fixings with his stir spoon. “‘Course, this is contingent on whether or not they’ve already sealed the deal by now.”

“You’re right,” Remus allows, heading to the sink to pour a bit of water from the faucet into the frying pan and leaving it to soak. “And if that’s the case, they’ll be over there plenty as is; even better.”

Sirius gives a glance over his shoulder to Ma and Pa Lupin as he turns his own burner off, catching quite the inaudible exchange happening over at the table, the former’s expression is one of bamboozlement whereas the latter’s expression is more on the more amused side of things. “What’d I tell you?” Lyall raises. “Mystery solved.”

“There never was a mystery,” Remus chimes in, moving back to the counter to fit the top layer of dough onto the pie as Sirius pours out the top layer of his relegated pie with a gleeful smile hidden away from the two at the table; if Remus won’t look at him right now, at the very least Sirius can take full appreciation in his rebuttals.

“Oh, stop; yes, there was,” Hope returns.

“There was never anything happening there, Mum,” Remus keeps with it, working to pinch around the rim of the pie with his fingertips. “No, you know what, she snogged me once, way back in November, but I put a stop to it because I really like her as a friend.”

Sirius presses his lips into a line, his eyebrows all the way up, and finds the output of Erasure’s colourfully chipper 'A Little Respect' on the radio to be a little too peppy for the conversation at hand while in the same breath, finding it almost too funny to contend with; this is all so much, but what a scene to be inside of.

Oho,” Lyall puts out, directly echoing what Sirius would've loved to have voiced.

What?” Hope returns.

“Yeah, you know, friends?” Remus puts up, using the prongs of a fork that was set nearby to press six vent holes into the centre of the pie crust. “You’ve a few of those yourself.”

Lyall puts out a boisterous hoot, evidently enjoying every moment of this. “Oh, stop it, you,” Hope sends him.

“You’re the one who’s been humming about them for ages now, and for what?” Lyall puts up.

“Oh, I don’t know, what could it have been?” Hope pretends to ponder.

“I’m just saying I was right,” Lyall trills. “The boy's not dating.”

Sirius breathes in long through his nose, pressing his mouth together tightly so as not to bark out a powerful one as he sets the saucepan back on the stove. “OK, here’s what’s going to happen,” Remus asserts, turning from his picture-perfect pie to clap once in their direction, “when I find a place to stay, you’ll find out, when I find someone worth introducing you to, I’ll do just that, so until either of those things happen, keep the commentary to yourselves, you muppets.”

And being on the sidelines of a tense but colourful family debate has never felt this good before; Sirius brings the both of his hands up to press them over his mouth, shuts his eyes, and beams behind his hands, finding the punchy beat of 'A Little Respect' rather apt for the energy coursing through his veins suddenly.

“Alright,” Hope returns, an actual surrender this time, Sirius hopes.

“Marley and Marley are done here,” Lyall echoes.

“Good,” Remus snips, lifting the pot pie and carrying it around the back of Sirius to get it to the stove, but Sirius slides to the right, pulling the oven door open for him.

Remus reaches the pie in and Sirius reaches his free hand underneath Remus’s outstretched wrist to block it from hitting the oven door. “Don’t want you to burn, now,” he says with it, and he doesn’t, but he’s also looking for any excuse to touch him at this point.

Remus straightens up, heads back to the counter for his mobile, and thumbs around on the screen, very likely setting the alarm for the pot pie. Sirius shuts the oven door, links his forefingers behind his back, and sidles back to the counter, bumping Remus’s right arm with his left one even while it’s a risky move, but he’s got a good reason to aside from wanting to be in his orbit.

“She’s ready,” he imparts, smiling there.

Remus looks up at the counter, blinks twice, and flickers his gaze over toward the fridge. “Sorry, it just needs to cool in there until we’re ready for it,” he extends.

“No sorries,” Sirius replies, picking up the pie and scooting it over there.

Lyall puts up a grand huff. “Sirius, if you could get him to stop saying that so much, I’d buy you that rose gold bicycle myself,” he tosses out.

“Well, not that I’m letting you do that,” Sirius prefaces, moving in behind his chair to get at the fridge door, “but I've been working on him, trust me on that.”

“It’s true, I say it far less than I used to,” Remus puts in pointedly.

It takes Sirius a moment or three to shift a few things around on the top shelf in order to create enough space to fit the pie onto it, glancing up as he moves back from the doorway to shut the fridge door and finding Remus staring pointedly out the window above the sink as he lets the pot for potatoes fill up with water.He fishes his mobile out of his back right pocket, thumbing through it as he heads up on Remus’s left, and pulls up the photo James sent along, tilting the screen toward him.

Remus blinks back into the room, looking over at Sirius’s screen as he switches off the tap, and pushes a verklempt breath through his nose. “No,” he returns, shutting his eyes, "that’s too cute."

“No, I want you to look directly at it,” Sirius instructs, smiling throughout.

Remus dips right out of there, too overcome to heed Sirius’s request as carries the pot of water over to the bottom right burner and brings that one to the highest heat while Hope pipes up from the table. “What are we not looking at?"

Sirius smiles over at her, walks his mobile up to the table, and reaches it toward her while putting it on an angle so Lyall can have a decent glimpse of it at the same go. “Is that him?” she trills, her eyes bright as she looks up from his screen.

“The one and only,” Sirius echoes proudly.

“James is looking after her, then?” she bids, her eyes back on the queen on his screen.

“The loud one? Yes,” Sirius affirms, grinning. “He was more than happy to take her in.”

“How is that breed?” Lyall puts in, pointing to Tango in the picture.

Sirius puffs up like a proud papa might. “Well, I can only speak to mine, I suppose, but he’s a dream.”

“The absolute sweetest,” Remus echoes, stopping off at the dough station to pluck up Sirius’s saucepan to take to the sink. “So docile, but every now and again, he gets all riled up and it’s such a treat to watch.”

“Does quite the spin cycle when he gets pumped up, it's true,” Sirius echoes it, slipping his mobile back into his pocket, “but in general he’s very calm; a bit of a lap dog in that he’ll absolutely come sprawl out over your legs despite his size, which I’m over the moon about because that’s exactly what I wanted in a dog.”

“Gotta be fast too, I’d wager,” Lyall raises.

“Like the wind,” Sirius assures.

Remus smirks there. “One time, we were walking him in the square near mine,” he raises, moving back to start a pile of mixing utensils in the mixer bowl to carry back to the sink, “and these two miniature collies came up the path we were near and Tango took off zooming toward them, dragging Sirius right along for the ride.”

“That stuff builds character,” Sirius puts in.

“And a sprained wrist,” Hope mentions, giving up a half-grimace.

“It survived the turmoil,” Sirius passes along. “He’s just so friendly; loves little dogs, cats evidently, and thank C— God that’s the case, right? They’ll be spending quite a bit of time together come fall.”

Remus makes a wan noise as he digs in the cupboard below the sink, giving the stark impression he did not miss Sirius’s little near-flub, but thankfully, the other two hardly blink when that would be one incredibly difficult inside joke to have to try to explain. “I’m so relieved they’re getting on well,” Hope says of it, nodding over at Remus procuring a dish rack out of there that he lifts back up to set down just to the right of the sink. “He was worried about it.”

“Just a tad,” Remus echoes, running the taps before squeezing a glob of yellow dish soap into the sink, but there’s a lovely sense of normalcy to it that Sirius is happy to see; Remus’s typical clean-as-he-goes pattern is officially on full blast. “All for naught, thankfully.”

“She'll run the show, I'm sure,” Sirius tacks on.

Lyall snorts there. “Sounds like her.”

Sirius nods emphatically. “Tango understood she's the boss from the moment they met, and these days, they’re two peas.”

“Remember how loud Tom would sneeze every time she came near him?” Lyall puts up.

“Well, it was less about her personally and more the general feline allergy, but yes,” Remus passes back.

“That could never be me,” Sirius puts it plainly.

Remus gives a plain laugh of his own there. “I’ve a sense you’d suffer through it even if you did have an allergy,” he says of it.

“Too right, I would,” Sirius returns, turning and wandering over to his area to outwardly lean back against the counter and inwardly be right in Remus’s space.

“It's kind of you to take her in,” Hope offers him.

“No trouble even at all,” Sirius instils brightly. “I love that cat; his departure at all was contingent on my getting to look after her.”

Remus breathes a laugh, looking over his left shoulder toward his mum and dad. “She likes him the most out of all of us, including me.”

“Good, maybe without that one around to spoil her, she might trim down a little,” Lyall puts in, tossing his head toward Remus.

“I don’t know what you’ve got against voluptuous women, Lyall—” Sirius starts in, but Hope’s heavy snort gets him laughing enough to not even bother finishing the thought.

“I’ve tried, Dad,” Remus defends. “I’ve weaned her down to a small cup twice a day, I've dialled it back on the treats, but every time I turn my back, that one's giving her three.”

Sirius holds his head high, undeterred by blame. “She deserves them all,” he states, hanging his head on a tilt toward Remus. “Want me to dry?”

“No no, I’ve got this,” Remus waves him off. “You can have your title back as potato king when they’re ready to go in if you’d like?”

“That alright with you, Hope?” Sirius checks, looking over at her.

“Oh, sure, I did my part,” Hope offers from the table.

Sirius heads over to his prior spot so he’ll be right by the stove for when the taters have to go in the pot, and by the sounds of it, it’ll just be a few minutes, tops. “How are you liking your new position?” he raises, setting his arms on the table and facing Hope at an angle in his chair.

Hope visibly reels. “I—” she starts, blinking there.

“I was over at his when you rang about it,” Remus offers from the sink.

Sirius nods brightly. “I was very excited to hear the news,” he slides her.

Hope does an eerily similar raise of her shoulder line the way Remus does when he’s rather touched. “I’m really liking it,” she offers him. “I’ve a team of six to look after now and that was a bit daunting at first when I used to be on the team, but I’m settling in pretty well, I think.”

Lyall gives a wan noise from the other end of the table. “She’s underselling it,” he relays.

“Mhm,” Sirius hums there, tossing his right thumb toward Remus’s back. “That one likes to do that himself; I’ve had some practice.”

Remus turns his head back toward them to showcase a royal smile. “Got me.”

Sirius hums three melodic notes, looking back to Lyall. “How was work?” he bids. “Did you fix up that wagon?”

Lyall gives a sharp, frank laugh. “That’ll be in the shop all weekend, the way it’s looking,” he maintains, pitching his voice louder seemingly so Remus will be sure to hear his next bit over the dishes. “New kid’s a real thorn.”

“Be sure to tell Sirius all about him,” Remus advises, a clear smile audible on his face.

Sirius leans further into the table and toward Lyall to suggest peak intrigue, garnering an amused note out of Hope and a thoughtful hum out of Lyall. “How should I put it?” he raises, giving an idle scratch at the right side of his jaw. “He’s fresh out of school, read one manual on car parts so of course he thinks he’s one fuck of an expert.”

“Oh, I know just the type,” Sirius returns, a wry smile on.

“He was never hired to go anywhere near a vehicle,” Lyall puts plain. “Bubba was trying to do a mate a favour by giving his son a job, but he’s more there to pass a wrench over, answer the phones, book appointments, that sort of thing; he wasn’t meant to stand by while you work at the engine and give you pointers on how you can tighten your wrench game — what does that mean? I don’t fucking know, but I’ve got a tight fist right here.”

Lyall ends it by brandishing his right one stiffly and giving a solid undercut, but topping off a soliloquy like that one with theatrics was only ever going to send Sirius right into stitches. “I’d lose my shit on him,” he puts up.

“I’m right close,” Lyall echoes. “I sent him off to run the car wash just to get him out of my hair for a while.”

“Hey, we saw him,” Sirius sends to Remus.

“Didn’t look like he was particularly enthused, so he may not be around too long,” Remus mentions. “There’s that, at least.”

“Good,” Lyall returns. “I’m sick of his bullshit, all that manual totting, and that voice; 'the safest way to get something done is inherently the best way—'”

“Oh, that’s just horrible,” Remus tosses up sardonically.

“It is,” Lyall stamps, repurposing the claim. “Who needs to be looking in a fucking manual when they’re updated so frequently you can hardly keep up with what’s considered proper procedure before the next edition comes out? And then all we get are these manual-obsessed drones too afraid to pick up a tool without a pair of gloves on.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Sirius chants, loving this.

“You should really be wearing gloves, Dad,” Remus comments, turning from the sink to send a wildly bamboozled look toward Hope. “Are you hearing this?”

“I’ve reminded him of that many a time, but do you think he listens to me?” she raises.

“I wear them when it’s necessary and not a moment more,” Lyall advertises.

“I’m with you, Lyall,” Sirius sends him. “Sometimes you’ve just got to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.”

Lyall lifts his right forefinger to draw a line between the two of them. “You and me, and them,” he tacks on, excluding the other two from their club with a wave-off.

“When you’re right, you’re right,” Sirius trades him. “I had the same sort of problem at my shop.”

“OK, I will just take care of these, then,” Remus comes in quietly, coming for the cutting board on the table.

“Oh, I can do it, hon,” Hope offers, lifting her chin from her hand.

“You sit,” Remus instructs, carrying the pile of quarter-cut taters over to the stove to steer them into the pot.

Hope sets her chin back in her hand again with a sigh. “Same sort of problem?” she prompts.

“Mhm, bloke transfers in from another shop full of sticklers back in May,” Sirius sets it. “All but bursts onto the scene nitpicking his way about the place, no respect for seniority, no respect for titles, zero respect for his coworkers, and a smart mouth to boot.”

“Wasn’t particularly bright either, constantly picking fights with that one,” Remus puts in, tapping a finger at the line of Sirius’s left shoulder before taking the cutting board to the sink to wash up.

“Not bright in the slightest,” Sirius echoes, feeling warm and vouched for. “Unnecessarily neat, too, and I’m not talking out on the sales floor or behind the counter, I’m talking the backroom, which is meant to be our space, our safe haven tucked away from the public, and he would just go back there, see something sitting out on the table, and toss whatever it was he found: half-finished drinks that were still being consumed periodically, half a scone on a plate that was still being nibbled at between rushes, a coworker’s pair of shoes because he thought, ‘they looked too old to still be worn’ and once, he even chucked one of Remus’s pairs of sunnies in the bin.”

“What?” Remus puts up, winding around to look at him from the sink. "When?"

“That was back in June,” Sirius extends him. “I knicked your red ones after you'd gone since you already had the aviators on that day.”

“Oh, those were five pounds, Sirius,” Remus forwards, smirking as he turns back to leave the cutting board in the drying rack. “Still chaotic of him to do that, but they weren’t expensive.”

“And? They weren’t his,” Sirius returns. “I left them on the table when I got there, went to get them on my break, saw no sunnies on the table, and found them in the bin by the desk, and then, when I went and confronted him about it, he said, and I quote, ‘your things are always in my way.’”

“What’d you chuck of his in return?” Lyall bids, the right man for the right questions.

“His car keys,” Sirius smiles.

Hope shifts her right hand over her mouth, smirking behind it while Remus sends out a long and lengthy pfft from his side of the kitchen. “Five-pound sunglasses versus a pair of car keys just don’t seem equivalent somehow,” he mentions, sticking the cutting board away in a cupboard below the counter.

“They could have been free for all I care,” Sirius stamps. “He’s lucky I didn’t have his shitbucket Cobalt compacted while he wasn’t looking.”

Lyall sends out a boomer of a laugh, leaning halfway out of his seat through his mirth, and Sirius is a hundred-pound note all over again. “Twat would've deserved as much,” he says of it, settling back in his seat.

“And a twat is all he’ll ever be if you ask me,” Sirius echoes. “I’m glad I’m well shot of him; that was not a good time.”

“Oh, what?” Hope raises airily. “It seemed like you got on so well.”

Sirius turns in his chair to stare at Remus accusingly. “You got that from her, didn’t you?”

Remus lifts his palms rather evenly. “Bit of this, bit of that,” he says of it, weighing his hands as he crosses back over to the stove.

He turns off the last burner, removes the boiling pot of potatoes from the element, and carries it back over to the sink, leaving it in there while he goes on a quick hunt and procuring a strainer from the second cupboard that he tries. “I’m not saying I don't appreciate all of the ample counter space we’ve had for this venture,” he prefaces, swapping the pot out for the strainer, “but you have moved quite a bit around in here and now I’m all turned around.”

“Well, I’m sorry for that, but I got sick of the microwave taking up so much space and had to make room for it in one of the cupboards," Hope explains, rubbing the heel of her left palm over her left eye idly. "Before I knew it, everything was getting moved around.”

“You watch; I'll get used to where everything is by the time I go, and the next time I visit there’ll be a new fixture in here that’ll have pushed everything around again,” Remus maintains, pouring the pot over the strainer in the sink. “Sirius, do you want to mash or get the gravy going?”

“You know what I want,” Sirius returns.

“Where’s the masher gone to?” Remus puts up.

“I think it’s in that one,” Lyall puts in, pointing over to his best guess.

Remus heads to it, has a gander inside, and chimes out a hum as he pulls it out, garnering Sirius to get up out of his seat and reach for the masher brandished in his honour. He grabs the milk off of the table and makes to double back toward the dough station to grab the butter he remembers being over there, but Remus reaches for it on his way past and plunks it down by the potato pot for him. Sirius grins at him for the retrieval, sets the fixings down, and grabs the measuring cup Remus is reaching for near the sink, passing it over to him to return the favour and grabbing the strainer out of the sink since he's here.

He scoots aside to let Remus get at the taps and upends the strainer, letting the many chunks of potatoes cascade into the pot before setting the netted bowl aside.

"Mum, would you like a job?” Remus poses, holding the measuring cup underneath the pouring spout.

“Only if you’ll let me,” she supplies, chin in her hands.

“Table duty has an opening,” Remus extends, switching the tap off and heading back to the stove with the measuring cup while Hope scoots her chair back from the table and leaves it by the sound of it. “Everything but the plates; I figure I’ll serve them from here and bring them in.”

“OK, I can do that,” Hope agrees, passing behind Remus at the stove to get to the cupboards.

She sets four plates down on the counter by the stove before heading to the other side of the sink from Sirius to dig out the cutlery, bringing those to the table. Sirius eyeballs the amount of milk and butter to get the ball rolling before he begins The Mashing, meanwhile Remus whisks up a storm at the stove getting the gravy all mixed up before leaving it to heat while he sets about putting every last pie ingredient away save for the milk and butter Sirius is still likely going to add to the pot here and there.

Hope comes back into the room after setting the cutlery on the table, heading for the cupboards once again. “I really can do a thing,” Lyall addresses from the table.

“Fetch me my scotch, would you?” Hope asks loftily, bringing down a glass from above.

“Oho,” Lyall trills. “Where’s it?”

“Table in the den,” Hope relays, cradling two glasses between her left arm and side as she reaches for a third, looking over at Sirius with a new smile on. “Would you like a glass?”

“Of your gift?” he returns, smiling bright as he adds a splash more milk to the potatoes.

“Oh, stop that; of course,” Hope waves him off. Remus passes on the way to the fridge with the leftover blueberries and lifts a single finger to him as he goes by, and Sirius nods dutifully for it. “What about you, hon?”

“None for me, thanks,” Remus declines.

“Really?” Lyall raises, coming back into the kitchen. “I may have a glass; this is good stuff.”

“Well, I’ve heard, but I’d get a migraine in no time and there goes dinner,” Remus extends, his head inside the fridge as he finds a spot to sit the package of blueberries.

Sirius halfway looks at the increasingly mashing potatoes in front of him, halfway at Hope’s thoughtful expression in his right peripheral. “I thought that was just with red wine?” she raises.

“It was at first,” Remus echoes, straightening out and backing up to close the fridge door, “but more recently spirits have been able to do it, too, so I’d just rather not chance it.”

“No, no point in doing that,” Hope agrees, grabbing the fourth glass down from the cupboard and shifting her armload of glasses around. “Well, there’s juice, milk obviously, and let me think what else.”

“I’ve a pack of stouts in there if you want one of those,” Lyall raises, carrying the box of Bowmore into the dining room with Hope following him in with the glasses in tow.

“Nah, keep them,” Remus forwards. “I saw the juice, so I’m already sold on that.”

Sirius looks over his left shoulder, giving Remus a thumbs up to suggest that went swimmingly, and Remus stops on by while the parents are otherwise out of the room, giving Sirius’s left forearm a quick trace with the fingertips of his own. “Cool it, hot stuff,” Sirius sends him, keeping it under his breath, and Remus ducks his head through a smirk, reaching to silence the alarm tone blaring out of his trouser pocket and heading back to the stove while Sirius quickens the pace of his mashing. “Just a few more mashes.”

Remus waves him off. “No rush,” he insists, putting the yellow mitts on and pulling the door open. “It’s still got to cool down as is.”

Sirius mashes a few more times in a circular rotation as Hope comes back into the kitchen, going for the freezer to pull out a bag of ice and bring that to the table to plunk cubes in their glasses, and comes back into the kitchen again to stick the ice away again and bring out the carton of juice. “I’ve got this,” she relays, giving the carton a wagle.

“Thanks, mum,” Remus offers, leaving the pie on the potholder by the stove.

Sirius follows Hope's back as she heads back to the dining room, cracks the Bowmore open and pours out three glasses, and takes the spot on the far left end of the table, which is just about the only spot at the table that’s visible from the kitchen save for the sliver of the back to a chair that's diagonal from her spot, and Sirius finds himself thrice as excited to have a proper sitdown meal with them. He smiles to himself, sticks the masher in the sink, and pauses, wondering if he ought to wash that and the strainer when Remus has been periodically washing dishes that have only just been used this whole time.

“Want me to do these real quick?” he asks, pointing between the two instruments in question.

“No, I want you to bring that pot over here and then go sit,” Remus instructs, smiling over his shoulder with a single blink.

“Excuse I?” Sirius returns, walking the pot over to the counter by the stove. “I’m here to serve.”

“Sirius?” Lyall calls out.

“Lyall?” Sirius echoes, looking over that way despite the fact that the man is quite hidden from view.

“How’s the pub coming along?” he raises.

“It’s more of an immersive experience,” Sirius offers, doing his best David Rose and getting a snort out of Remus for it.

“Hneh?” Lyall sends him, evidently lost.

Remus smirks even harder, nodding toward the dining room for Sirius to get in there, and well, might as well leave the pot with Remus and go hang out in the doorway between the two rooms should the boy soften on his no-help stance. “It’s a bit of a three-in-one sort of deal,” he reiterates, looking down the table at Lyall on the opposite end from Hope. “It’ll be a venue, your standardized pub, and a highbrow lounge situation, so it’s a bit of a blend of settings.”

“Well, that’s exciting,” Hope puts up, looking up and over at him with the same sort of natural glee that he’s already seen on Remus so many times, and now he knows where he got it.

“I’m really excited,” Sirius offers to that, smiling at her from the doorway. “Funny, though: if you’d asked if I’d be striking up a business venture even a year ago I’d have scoffed you out of the room, and now look at me.”

“It helps who you’re teaming up with, I’m sure,” Remus offers from the stove.

“It does, definitely,” Sirius lets land, feeling understood from his head to his toes. “Once we knew we wanted to go in together on something that involved nightlife, I sort of lifted the initial idea of off this pub I wandered into once: it had a standard club setting on the top floor, your regular dive bar on the ground floor, and then there was a sneaky hallway that led to a room that was an actual library, with wooden tables built right into the bookshelves and everything — it was the strangest thing, but the place was bursting with people and I think the mixture of settings was very much of the draw of that place, but I wanted a blend similar to that with more of a focus on live performance and thankfully, Andromeda loved that idea as much as I did.”

“You’d take or leave the lounge, 'course,” Remus quips.

“Mhm, but that’s her section,” Sirius echoes. “I’m much more excited to be manning the bar on the venue side of things.”

“Dad, you’d love what they’ve been doing,” Remus raises, sounding closer to Sirius than he last was.

“I already do,” Lyall tosses him.

Remus puts out a wan laugh, scooting past Sirius’s left to leave the first plate on Hope’s placemat. “More than you do already,” he amends. “See, Ted’s got a ton of connections in radio and they’ve been able to partner up with one of the stations out there that had been looking to pair up with a venue for artists on their catalogue to perform intimate shows at, increase the novelty of calling in to win tickets to these shows that they’re advertising for, that sort of thing, and some of them will be up and coming artists, others will be well-established acts in the city that have a built-in audience already, so not only are these two booking shows for early fall, they’re getting free promo for their venue/pub/lounge hybrid out of this before they’re even slated to open, and that’s on top of the novelty that the place would have attached to it from being such a mixed bag of settings.”

Sirius sways in the doorway, warm in his cheeks over seeing Remus’s dinner plate eyes paired with this. “Alright, I do love that,” Lyall sends him. “Get them to do half the work.”

Sirius puts out a bright laugh. “I won’t pretend that hadn’t crossed my mind,” he trades him, flickering his gaze to Remus as he passes him for the kitchen again and pressing his mouth in a firm line so he cannot lean in for the passing smooch he sorrily wants to plant on him, “but really, I’m impressed by how well that’s gone over so far; they’re booking us shows left and right, so between the ones sponsored by the station and the local talent that we’re looking to book independently of them, we’re going to have our hands full in the fall, but in the way I want them to be.”

“You know you can sit, yeah?” Remus checks, hovering in the doorway between the two rooms.

“I was staying standing in case you changed your mind about letting me help,” Sirius highlights.

“I’m not going to be doing that,” Remus doubles down, a smile audible as he heads back to the stove.

“Here, hon,” Hope bids, placing Sirius’s scotch glass on by the placemat to the right of her spot and conveniently on the same side of the table he’s already standing on. “When are you slated to open?”

Sirius moves to take his seat, settling in and folding his arms over the table. “Well, we’ve still got a few improvements to make that do seem to conveniently pop up the second we finish another,” he starts, smirking at the flat, amused noise that comes from Lyall’s end of the table, “but we’re projecting late August and barring any unforeseen circumstances, we’re still on that trajectory—” Hope and Lyall both knock on the dining room table there, “—yes, fair enough; our first booked show by the station is slated for the second week of September, so that’s the big absolute that’s looming over us all, but we’ll have it in top shape by then, I’m sure.”

“How are you handling all of that and the shop, too?” Hope raises.

Sirius beams bright. “Well, I had my last day Wednesday so I’m free as a bird, as they say,” he supplies. “Well, after this trip; I expressly requested that Andromeda not bring me any shop talk while I’m away, unless of course the building is literally burning down.”

Hope and Lyall thunder another round of knocks into the table as Remus comes into the room again. “Thank you, my hands are full,” he sighs, moving in to leave a plate in front of Sirius. “You know what, I should just put one in for myself.”

Sirius huffs a laugh as Remus raps his knuckles on the table. “Nothing’s going to happen,” he insists.

“Not now, it won’t,” Remus returns, looking around at the lot of them. “Don’t wait for me.”

Lyall picks up his fork and cuts off the point of his pie slice with it while Hope and Sirius remain quite set on waiting for him to get back. “Must have been tough before Wednesday?” Lyall raises, a crease between his brow.

“Juggled both jobs with ease, that one,” Remus puts up, back in the kitchen. "It's a bit frightening how well he handled it; he’s a wizard."

“I mean, I'll take it,” Sirius allows, smirking for it, “but it really wasn’t too bad; my manager was kind enough to let me drop some shifts back in May so I only had to do Friday/Saturday, which opened up much more time for me to be around the venue and keep up with the renos and such.”

Finally, Remus comes into the room with a plate for himself, going around the back of Hope’s chair and taking the spot across the able from Sirius. “I see only one of you listened to me,” he observes lightly, scooting his chair in more toward the table, and there, Hope and Sirius reach for their forks.

“Good pie,” Lyall tosses him.

Remus spares him a tip of the head with a smile as he twists the cap off of the juice carton. “He taught me how to make it,” he forwards, nodding to Sirius as he pours himself a glass.

“Then I take it back from you and I give it to him,” Lyall returns, and Remus nods his permission to do just that, setting the juice carton aside in exchange for his fork.

“Were you sad to go?” Hope asks, her gaze set on Sirius.

Remus laughs around a bite of pie, shaking his head for him. “He’s right, I wasn’t too beat up about it,” Sirius echoes. “I put my time in and it was a good era overall, but now I move on to tending a different sort of bar than I was, only this time I can’t keep the tips.”

"Shucks,” Remus sounds out, and Sirius resists the urge to start up a game of footsie under the table.

“Well, if you’re going to be working the bar, then you should know ahead of time that you’re going to be in for a lot of impromptu counselling sessions,” Lyall puts down knowingly. “I tended when I was your age and you wouldn’t believe the things I heard because I was the man pouring the sauce.”

Sirius snorts as he’s in the middle of going for a bite of mashed taters and gravy, ducking his head through a breathy laugh; how the fuck is he supposed to eat with all three Lupins at a table with him? He didn’t think this through enough. “I’m quite used to that kind of thing after so many years working there,” he maintains. “My name tag may as well have read 'your therapist' for how many things I heard from basic strangers that I certainly did not ask for.”

“It’s quite a sight to see,” Remus puts in, smiling there. “He’s got this pleasant smile from the cheeks down, but if you look closely at his eyes—”

“No life,” Sirius comes in, passing his free hand in front of his face. “He’s way better at getting through a piece of unfortunate information to have to contend with than I am, but it’s a double-edged sword, you see, because so often they find him.”

Remus smirks around a sip off his juice, nodding heavily for it, and there Sirius tries to go for a bite of pie and ultimately regrets that decision. “I don’t know what it is about this,” he raises, circling his free hand around his visage, “but it just says to people, ‘hi there, tell me all about your recurring problem with goitres, please; I’d love to hear it.’”

Sirius coughs around his bite, pulling up the collar on the Henley and hiding half his face beneath it as he works to realign himself with breathing patterns again. “Is that a real example?” Hope asks tentatively.

“Mhm, it is,” Remus affirms.

“Wow,” Lyall puts in, pointing to Remus with his fork, “moving right past that horrid thought, I think we’re losing that one.”

Sirius shakes his head no as he works to swallow his mouthful down the right tube. “Oh, he's fine; he just finds us very funny,” Remus extends.

“Funny? We’re not even putting on the ritz,” Lyall raises.

“Doesn’t matter, I’ve learned,” Remus returns. “We may have to stop talking in order for him to successfully eat, though.”

Sirius comes out from hiding and shakes his head soundly, resolved to push through, meanwhile Hope goes for a bite, chews, chews, and swallows, making a contented noise after it. “This really is a great pie,” she tells the room.

“Does it taste better knowing you didn’t have to lift a finger to get it?” Sirius raises, lifting his glass for a sip of scotch.

“I’ve mixed feelings about that,” Hope returns him, and Sirius smirks around his drink as Hope looks over at Remus with a newly intrigued hum. “Did you get to the Farmer’s Market today?”

“No, we didn’t go down that way yet,” Remus forwards, and this does seem like a topic Sirius would be safe to breathe through and maybe even eat through; time will tell.

“Your jam’s back, is why I asked,” Hope extends airily.

Sirius piques as he hovers a fork load near his mouth. “Your what?” he raises, taking the bite quickly.

“They sell this strawberry rhubarb jam there that’s unfathomably good,” Remus details. “I’d eat that on death row.”

Sirius smirks around his bite, but he's able to swallow this one. “Just spoon it from the jar, or?” he raises.

Remus hums a laugh. “I was more thinking I’d have it on toast, but sure,” he returns. “It is that good.”

“Do you want to go tomorrow?” Sirius puts up.

Remus piques, getting a good two-thirds of the way through a nod before looking between his mum and dad. “Is it OK if we take off for a bit during the afternoon?”

“Why are you asking?” Lyall whispers.

Remus huffs a laugh. “Well, we did just get here,” he puts up.

“Well, you’re going to have to go tomorrow or Sunday, aren’t you,” Hope raises.

Remus nods for that. “It’s true, they’re only open Friday/Saturday/Sunday,” he lets Sirius know.

“Then tomorrow it is,” Sirius deems it, thunking his scotch glass on the table as if it’s a gavel. “Afternoon-ish?”

“Yes, you can sleep in,” Remus assures with a smirk, looking between his mum and dad from there. “Could we snag a vehicle for it? My legs are sore from riding to town.”

Sirius is grateful he didn’t have a single thing in his mouth just then when Remus absolutely chose that wording solely to fuck with him. “You can take mine,” Hope offers. “Just make sure you set the rearview mirror back the way I like it when you're finished with it, please.”

“Hold me to it,” Remus instructs, pointing at Sirius with the prongs of his fork.

“You’ll remember,” Sirius insists, but he files that away in the small, off-chance Remus doesn’t, taking a big ol' bite of potatoes while he can.

“Have you decided about Porthgain?” Hope bids, looking between them. Sirius nods emphatically around his bite while Remus simply lets a breathy laugh-and-nod combo speak for him. “Oh, good; I checked the weather would be there for you and it’s supposed to be gorgeous over the weekend.”

“Just the weekend?” Remus checks. “Only, we thought we’d stick around here and start off Monday, stay overnight, come back Tuesday evening-ish.”

“Oh, the weather out there really takes a dive on Tuesday,” Hope slips him. “You’ll be wet and chilled to the bone.”

“Well, I don’t want that for me,” Remus puts it. “I just thought it’d be a bit rude to show up and drive right off into the distance without much else.”

“Hon, I was able to get the full week off,” Hope extends, nodding across the table at Lyall. “He even got it, too.”

Remus turns his head toward Lyall. “You did?” he bids him, sounding quite charmed by it. “I was hoping you’d be able to, but I didn’t want to expect anything ahead of time.”

Lyall nods from his end of the table. “Bubba owed me a favour,” he delivers, sitting easy in his seat with his scotch glass raised in his right hand.

“King,” Sirius calls him.

Lyall blinks over his way. “It’s a compliment,” Remus forwards him.

“Well, I didn’t think he was insulting me somehow,” Lyall trades him.

“Good, ‘cause I’d never,” Sirius extends him.

“Really, hon,” Hope comes in. “There’s plenty of days ahead; go off into the sunset.”

Remus nods to let her point land. “I just didn’t want you feeling like a stop at a motel along the way,” he maintains.

“That’s a new one,” Lyall mentions. “Will you be paying us for your stay?”

“I will not,” Remus lets him know, lifting a forkful of potatoes toward his mouth.

“Good, keep saving,” Lyall instructs.

Remus nods dutifully around his chewing, swallows his mouthful down, and looks over the table at Sirius curiously. “Do you want to go Sunday?”

“I’m open to anything, boss,” Sirius sends him, swirling the ice at the bottom of his glass. “Let’s not have you frozen.”

Remus looked over toward his dad. “Is the truck on the table?”

“If you don’t crash it,” Lyall puts forth.

“Shit, there goes the other plan,” Remus says of it. “Well, alright, it'll take about two hours to get out there so if we left mid-morning, we’d have the whole day ahead and be able to squeeze a good portion of Monday in there, too.”

Sirius nods brightly there, but Saturday night’s plans lights right up in his head. “Will you be good to drive that early?” he checks, putting his head on a slightly pointed tilt to the right.

“So long as I get a good sleep,” Remus extends, giving a slightly pointed tilt of his head to the left.

“I’ll make sure you turn in at a reasonable time, then,” Sirius offers, lifting his glass to cheers it.

With that rework of their schedule, Sirius focuses on the task of getting his meal in him, but he will say one thing; his stomach is doing some Olympic-level flips the closer the others get to finishing their plates and the closer they get to the main event, so the task of eating isn't the easiest thing around, but then again, if he lags behind too much, he’ll be the sole reason for drawing out the liminal space he and Remus are living inside of, and no thank you.

He finishes his plate last for certain though not by a large margin, and Remus simply clears his parent’s plates and forgoes taking Sirius’s plate along for the first trip back to the kitchen. Sirius tackles his last bite of potatoes, lifts his plate with a tremendously bright smile when he comes back for it, and it is clear Remus specifically means to brush hands as he takes Sirius’s plate off his hands before heading back to the kitchen.

“Has everyone got room for dessert?” Remus checks from the kitchen, and there, Sirius’s stomach wilts, having not even contended with the idea that either parent may be too full to bother, but thankfully both Hope and Lyall confirm they’re still quite interested. “Would anyone like a cup with theirs?”

“I’d love one,” Hope takes him up.

“If you’re making a pot, I’ll take one,” Lyall sends him.

“I’ll make one,” Remus assures. “Sirius?”

“I mean, if you happen to pour a fourth cup,” Sirius puts up.

“I’ll bring the pot back with me, then,” Remus forwards.

Sirius shifts a bit in his seat while Remus fills up the kettle at the sink, his body thrumming with all this brimming anticipation with nowhere for it to go until Remus has dolled out the pie plates and cups of tea; it doesn’t make all that much sense when he’s waited months on end for this moment to come, long before Remus even put the plan into motion, and by that account, he should easily be able to coast along just a little longer for a kettle to heat up, but he finds himself folding his hands in his lap underneath the table, thinking he might've found an open window into how Remus feels about quite a few areas of his life.

Remus comes back into the room with two small plates in either hand, leaving one in front of his mum and walking the other over to set it in front of Lyall, who goes ahead and starts in on it. Remus stops there, poised to speak, but he did tell everyone not to wait for him for the first round of pie and the quick but pointed smile he sends to Sirius suggests he rather got there himself with it; thanks be to Remus’s deep well of patience even in this most delicate time.

Sirius gives him a quick, eager smile in return and looks brightly over to Lyall as he puts out a grandiose noise. “You make a damn good pie,” he tosses Sirius, who grins over at him in thanks.

“Wow, thanks, Dad,” Remus returns, heading into the kitchen.

“I already told you yours was good,” Lyall sends him.

“No no, I see how it is,” Remus keeps on, but the smile on his face is rather audible in there.

He returns with the last two plates in due time and leaves the first in front of Sirius, who really has to reign it in when he feels the immediate urge to plant a kiss on Remus’s arm, but that’s rote memory for you. Remus heads around to his side of the table to leave his plate on his own placemat before the rotary phone in the hall, the other one in the kitchen, and a digital ring from what Sirius has to assume is the den all ring out at once, garnering Lyall to scoff big time.

“Oh, tell ‘em to fuck off,” he tosses out.

Now, Hope hardly blinks at the outburst as she gets up out of her chair and moves through the kitchen to head for the den, whereas Sirius and Remus find each other’s gaze at once across the table and simultaneously lose it, but leave it to Lyall to cut through some of the increasing tension coursing through both their sets of veins. Sirius lifts his head again when he can, taking in his best attempt at a full, uninterrupted breath, but Remus is still actively snickering back there in the kitchen while answering the call of the kettle and that’s making it difficult for Sirius to not get pulled back into it though he does attempt to stifle it so not to make any honking noises while Hope’s officially taken the call.

“Who’s it?” Lyall puts up, apparently not fussed over cutting in, but he’s a legend that way.

“It’s Doreen; do you still want me to send that along for you?” Hope checks, over in the doorway of the den holding the cordless.

“Oh,” Lyall puts out, ducking his own head through a tight snort. “No, you just tell her hello.”

“Mhm,” Hope returns, pressing to answer the call. “Hey, hon; how are you holding up?”

Remus back moves into the dining room, holding a rotund teapot covered in another chaotically colourful knit cozy in one hand and four mugs all hanging from a different finger on his other one, and Sirius would’ve found it just the funniest sight if his brow didn't stitch together as he frowns back at his mum.

“What’s happened?” he bids, sending a concern over to Lyall as he moves in to set the pot and mugs at the centre of the table.

“The papers came in yesterday,” Lyall forwards, his mouth all twisted up in a grimace.

Remus gives him quite the similar one, looking toward his mum again, only this time he doesn’t have to glance very far this time, Sirius finds out, for he looks over his shoulder where Hope standing in the doorway wearing the kind of torn-up expression he’s seen on Remus when he’s been put between a rock and a hard place.

“Hold on, OK?” she bids, dropping the receiver away from her mouth there and covering it with her other hand. “Hon, can I—”

She cuts off, letting a grimace quite similar to both Remus and Lyall’s speak the rest for her, and Remus nods, gesturing with a gentle hand. “We’ll wait for you,” he contends, and that’s Remus right there, putting his own stuff on hold.

“No, don’t,” Hope insists, “have your pie.”

“No no, we’ll wait,” Sirius comes in.

“Tell her I’m sorry,” Remus extends, moving around Hope's side of the table.

Hope nods, blowing them a quick kiss with her free hand before she heads further into the den. “Have you spoken to Phil at all?” Remus raises, standing by his seat as he fiddles with a button midway down his new, absolutely fitting cardigan.

“Yeah, just last night,” Lyall forwards, gesturing for the teapot that Remus then hands over to him along with one of the mugs. “Rough spot to be in — well, no, they've got it worse in this case—”

Remus nods, coming in there. “I knew what you meant,” he offers, folding his hands ahead of him. “It’s tough when we rather like them both and might be easier if we didn’t.”

“Well, that's exactly it,” Lyall echoes. “It’d be another thing if he were getting some sick joy out of the whole thing, but he’s not having a party over there; he just can’t keep it up anymore, and on her end, it’s as if she's back at square one with it now that the papers have officially come in.”

“I’m sure,” Remus allows, giving a wounded expression as he moves to take back his seat. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter how much time you had to prepare; the papers must feel so final.”

“Mhm,” Lyall echoes, round a new piece of pie.

“Where’s he been staying?” Remus raises.

“He’s still in London,” Lyall passes along. “She's been at her mum’s for a couple weeks now, taking a bit of time away.”

Remus nods there, but Sirius wouldn't mind a bit more help along. “Where’s her mum’s place?” he puts in.

“Cardiff,” Remus offers him.

Lyall looks over at Sirius there, swallowing his bite with a frown on. “Sorry, Sirius,” he offers. “I’m sure this is a bit of a drag, but they’re old friends.”

“No, I know,” Sirius trades him. “I’m quite invested in this, believe it or not.”

Remus makes a sheepish little face across the table from him. “He was over after we'd gotten off the phone and got quite the earful about it,” he extends rather bashfully, “but it was just so strange to think it could happen to them; it still is in a lot of ways.”

Lyall gives a heavy sigh/nod combo before lifting a new bite of pie up to his mouth, but he pauses with it held in the air. “Seriously, you two,” he says, looking between them, “you’re missing out on this pie.”

“What about Mum?” Remus raises, gesturing his right hand toward the den.

“She doesn't want you holding out for her,” Lyall puts up. “If anything, it’ll fuss her more knowing you’re waiting.”

Sirius and Remus look to each other there, pick up their forks, and cut off the smallest little piece on both their pies, and Sirius smiles a bit around his bite as he finds Remus chewing as slowly as he took to. Lyall, on the other hand, is loving this fucking pie which is a massive compliment that Sirius will take right to the heart, but it also means he’s finished his slice before either of them even get through their third, incredibly sped-down bites.

Lyall has the lasts of his tea, sticks his fork over his pie plate, and glances down the table towards Hope’s very lonely slice before huffing a sigh. “This is just silly,” he says of it, lifting out of his seat and taking his plate along with him as he rounds the table to pick up Hope’s plate.

“That’s mum’s slice,” Remus quips, and Lyall offers him a brisk explanation for what he’s doing with it which, coincidentally, is really what Remus had been trying to get out of him with that one.

“Well, she might as well be eating glorious pie while she’s playing therapist, no?” Lyall counters, walking his plate to the sink before taking hers out to the den for her.

Sirius isn’t going to say it’s not inherently sweet just how evident it is that Lyall fusses over his wife quite a bit, but Jesus Cunt, there goes dessert; he laughs tightly there because he’s got no other ideas for the moment, looking to Remus for some sort of exchange of support.

“I’m sorry,” Remus mouths to him.

Sirius gestures like he’s lobbing that right back at him, looking round at the doorway as Lyall steps into it again. “Well, listen,” he addresses them. “That call’s not ending anytime soon, so as far as permission goes, you boys are free to have at it and I’m going to get started on that lawn.”

Remus’s ability to not completely self-destruct just there is fucking admirable. “Dad, I’ll do it in a bit,” he says, his cadence quite controlled.

“Right, or I could just go do it now,” Lyall raises him.

“It’s not that bad, Dad,” Remus insists.

“It really isn't,” Sirius echoes.

“Well, that’s appreciated, but our lawn looks like a bucket of shite and we’ve a guest,” Lyall extends. “I've put it off long enough.”

Sirius lifts his hands as Lyall heads for the den. “Believe me, I don’t find it looks like a bucket of anything,” he offers, but he gets nadda in reply for it.

Sirius looks to Remus as Remus looks to him, and the moment the back door shuts behind Lyall, it’s on: the two of them lift out of their seats at once, head down their respective sides of the table, and take the same fast right out of the dining room, heading for the bathroom off of the stairs to regroup.

“It’s like herding cats,” Remus hisses to him, shutting the door quietly behind them.

“What do we even do?” Sirius hisses back, turning to face him. “We did not plan for this.”

“Well, we can’t tie them up and force them to stay in the same room as us even though I’d really fucking love to right about now,” Remus returns, keeping in a harsh whisper while flapping his hands out around in between them. “I can’t control any of this.”

Sirius reaches up to hold the sides of Remus’s face, wanting to do away with that horribly sick look on his face. “You literally tried everything you could,” he puts down. “I’d be a real fucking prat not to have noticed that, don’t you think?”

Remus shuts his eyes through the nod he forces himself to give him. “I really did,” he gives him, and that’s good enough, Sirius can mend this.

“That wasn’t you not doing enough, that wasn’t you leaving me on a sinking ship, and that definitely wasn’t them not giving a shit about you being home,” he keeps with it. “That right there is the biggest point I want you to keep in mind, OK? You know that you’re dying to get this out, I know you’re not getting cold feet, so that’s us completely on board with each other, but the fact is, they can’t know they’re trampling all over a plan they don’t know about, right?”

“Right,” Remus lets land, reopening his eyes through a sigh.

“Exactly,” Sirius echoes, dropping his right hand to the rounded-off lapel of Remus’s cardigan and smoothing it out between his middle and forefinger. “To them, we caught up, had a good dinner, and dessert was a bit of a bust, yeah, but your mum was clearly torn between two camps, and your dad clearly just—”

“That’s just my fucking dad for you,” Remus raises tightly, torn between amused and fumed by the look of it. “HeMll decides he’s doing something and you can try to take it off his hands but good luck with that, and I love that about him most of the time, even if it makes me huff up a storm, I still like him for it, but not right now; I don’t appreciate it from him right now.”

“I know, and yet, here you are, making room for the fact that he’s a wildcard, so you’ve successfully isolated both issues here,” Sirius offers him. “He’s allowed to be ignorant of the fact that we’ve some important news to share, but you’re also allowed to find it fucking annoying right now, OK? So with that said, we’ve got to focus on what we’re going to do next.”

“Plunge off a steep hill,” Remus offers plainly.

“Well, we’re not going to be doing that,” Sirius amends it, tugging on the lapel of Remus’s cardigan, “so here’s my proposal: we let her finish up with her unconsolable friend and hope that her kindness and understanding for said friend extends to her only son and his beau, we let him do the fucking lawn already so he stops thinking about how he still has to do it because it’s clearly been bugging him, and we'll just have to reconfigure the plan, not get rid of it completely: so it’s not going to be around a table with pie as the commonality between us all, what of it? We don’t have to change any of what we’re going to say just because the walls in the room might look a bit different, we can sit them down in any room we can get them in for ten fucking minutes and tell them exactly what this is; that part doesn’t have to change.”

Remus gives out a heavy, audible breath as he nods for him, and then goes the extra mile, reaching to tug Sirius in closer by the belt loops of his jeans, and Sirius leans up for the kiss he’s more than ready to seal all of that with, but Remus simply stuffs the lower half of his face against the line of Sirius’s left shoulder, giving him a tight squeeze. “You’re right,” he says, to Sirius and himself, it feels. “We don’t need fanfare, we don’t need pie, or a table to hold hands around; we just need us and them — and maybe that’s always been the point.”

Sirius hums a bolstered noise, squeezes him just as tightly, and puts a bit of a sway into their extended hug, thinking it made him feel that much better when Remus did it for him and he'd like to return the favour best he can. “I love you,” he whispers, turning his head to leave a kiss at Remus’s left temple. “You know that?”

Remus makes a slight, overcome noise as he nods best he can. “I love you, too,” he whispers back, swaying along with him. “Do you want to go help him with the lawn?”

Sirius’s galaxy brain is activated at once. “That could make the process go quicker, but do you think he’d even let me?” he raises, lips pressed to the shell of Remus's left ear.

“If you go for the standard mower and start from the opposite end from where he’s going from, I’m not sure he’ll be able to do much to stop you,” Remus trades him. “It'd be a nice taste of his own medicine, I’ll say that.”

“I love your petty side,” Sirius extends, pressing a kiss just below his ear. “I'd better get going, then.”

Remus nods, pulling back to shake himself out. “I’ll get those dishes done while you’re doing that.”

Sirius winces. “No, that’s not fair,” he implores. “Leave them for me.”

“I did a ton of them already, there’s not all that much left anymore,” Remus insists, looking over his shoulder as he leaves the bathroom and reaches back to brush his left hand over Sirius’s. “Besides, knowing my mum, she’ll wander in there, start doing the rest herself, and then we’ll have a hell of a time pulling her away from those.”

“Well, when you put it that way, you’d better get out there before she gets any ideas,” Sirius returns, and Remus smirks, turning to open the bathroom door and reaching behind him for Sirius’s hand as he moves into the hall.

The two of them squeeze each other’s hand back and forth as they move along the left side of the dining room table and split apart at the other end of it, Remus going for the dishes still left on the table while Sirius moves to go through the kitchen, but pauses in the doorway, turning round to point at Remus, making him go still.

“You save me that slice,” he bids.

Remus’s face lights up with a smile. “I’ll wrap it for you,” he echoes.

“Good man,” Sirius calls him, heading into the den from there.

He scoots in toward the back door, offering a smile at Hope sitting in the armchair with the cordless pressed to her right ear and half a pie slice on the plate in her lap, and the moment she sees him she offers a thumbs-up-point-down at the pie, and Sirius puts his hand over his heart to showcase where he’s just put that.

Hope smiles, humming quietly along to the voice on the other end of the line that’s really only phonetics to Sirius’s ears. He heads on for the door, and pauses at the mat, thinking Remus would have a literal cow and a half if he tried mowing the lawn in his bare feet. He looks to the right of the back door, moves for the wood-panelled double-door situation there, and peeks inside what he assumes is a closet, finding that he’s quite right about that.

Below a row of hanging jackets and woolly jumpers sits a fair few pairs of shoes, some very evidently Hope’s so he passes on those even though they’re all cute, studies the pairs of massive shoes that could belong to Remus or Lyall, and decides a pair of frayed loafers have a Remus vibe to them, but he ought to check to be sure. He reaches in to scoop them out of there by the heels, steps back from the closet, and holds them up in Hope’s direction, pointing toward the kitchen with his free forefinger, and gets a quick nod from her for the unspoken question.

He flashes her a winning smile, sets them down to foot them on, and slides the closet door shut, slipping out the back door.

 

******

 

It would be one massive understatement to suggest that Remus had never had an easy time with having to deliver bad news. Understatement of the century even, but as Remus cleared the rest of the dishes on the table and brought them back to the sink to get them going, he felt it something impossible to avoid thinking of, and in contrast, the elation he had felt about delivering good news in favour of the bad.

It'd always been that way, throughout the eras of his life, so far. Early on, as a tyke, he'd happily shown his mum and dad the sticker on whatever project he did well on, particularly because they lit up at the news and especially because their elation was infectious, spreading out over him as well as them, and in a lot of ways, their lively reactions paired with the feeling they brought him likely only reinforced him to continue doing just that. In secondary, he’d happily shone his Prefect's badge toward each of them after it'd come in the mail, celebrated how chuffed his mum was about it, and took the heckling his dad gave him for it in stride when it was nearly impossible not to recognize the pride he felt for Remus's accomplishment. Years on, when he got his acceptance letter to uni and the possibility of taking his schooling to London became an actual, living possibility, he'd gone and found the both of them in the den and bounced on the balls of his feet from the elation he felt over being able to make them proud of themselves for the work they did with him alongside being proud of Remus. The most recent time he felt that elation was the time he rang the house straight after getting off the line with Sirius: he'd gotten his mum on the line and had her get his dad on another phone in the house so he could tell the both of them together that studying in Paris was no longer just a pipe dream of his anymore, and the response he got for it, the elation they'd felt for him, they made his heart soar, had him beaming for the entire call.

Remus found himself smirking there, thought it rather funny that someone so terrible at receiving buckets of praise would find such joy in giving news that would only generate buckets of praise, and while that's comedic in itself, it was always less about that. In part, he knew some of that intrinsic need to bring good news to them was to offset the years where bad news just kept coming, but if he were to go even deeper than that, it's practically inarguable: making them proud of him, and of themselves for raising him, was and continues to be so much a part of his identity.

Having to hand them bad news brought on something like true anguish for him, made him dread the idea of having to deliver it, and often had him shying away from doing it at all. As a tyke, it was receiving a lower grade than he'd expected and dreading the parent/teacher interviews to come once report cards went out, it was scraping, cutting, or spraining something of his out on the trails and knowing he'd have to confess to not being more careful, it was knocking into and subsequently breaking something of sentimental value around the house and knowing he would have to fess up to it soon enough and would likely make his mum or dad even temporarily rueful over losing it. As a teenager, it was receiving a lower grade than he expected to, it was his unfortunate entanglement with mono and knowing that he'd best keep that one to himself to avoid any prying from his mum and heckling from his dad, it was developing his ulcer and feeling that he must take care of it himself, and of course, his affinity for boys. As an adult away at uni, it was receiving a lower grade than he expected, it was a dismal medical history that just kept getting worse and worse with time, it was his relative poverty in his first year away and a little beyond that, and his continued affinity for boys. Washing up then, Remus would have to say that as the years piled on, the dread was a constant, cyclical feeling inside of him for there was always bad news circulating around him in some form and the threat of putting even more on their plates had him feeling sick, made him want to search for bright spots, drove him to continue creating good news to share with them instead.

He would have loved to have gotten a better handle on that much earlier on and while he knew that isolating the issue enough to look it in the eye didn't mean he wouldn't be fighting with it for many years to come, it was immensely significant for him to note there, standing in his kitchen at the precipice of the biggest, brightest news he's had in a long time, the dreadful anguish he'd always associated with bad news was nowhere to be found inside of him.

He could practically hear Sirius's would-be response to that particular realization: 'That's because I'm great news, sweets,' and practically-Sirius wouldn't be wrong about that one.

Remus quelled the smirk he fell into hearing that voice rattle around in his skull for his mum turned up just on his left with her empty pie plate to sit by the sink, an incredibly sheepish look about her even while she still carried the cordless. He made to give her a pardon via a facial expression alone, but his mum shouldered the phone, hummed a prompt into the receiver, and reached for the tea towel beside Remus's washing station, lifting it to suggest she was quite ready to be of some help. That was kind, of course, but Remus tugged the towel out of her grasp with his and nodded off to the right with his head while holding a dripping plate over the sink. In retaliation, his mum dropped the cordless away from her mouth so her huff wouldn't get picked up, stalked off out of the kitchen and into the dining room instead, and Remus glanced over his right shoulder to be sure she wasn't storming off, leaning over to peer further into the room and finding her pouring herself a cup of tea from the pot on the table. His mum sipped pointedly off of her tea as she came out of the dining room and went straight into the den from there, and Remus couldn't help but smirk for her eyes were kind throughout her pointed sipping; he'd missed her so much.

He turned back to the sink only to end up looking over the same shoulder yet again, but the sound of the back door opening and closing wasn't really what he'd expected. He leaned over to the right a bit, getting a decent shot of the armchair he remembered her sitting in a mere minute ago, and the only differences to the original image were that his mum was no longer in said chair and her knitting basket was no longer down by the side of the chair.

Well, good for her then; she might as well knit while being someone's ear to lean on, and in truth, the image conjured up in Remus's head of his mum holding a cup of tea in one hand, and a shouldered cordless, and the knitting basket hanging from the curve of an elbow so she could get the door open without asking for a shred of help with it was absolutely perfect and so very his mum.

He turned back to the sink once and for all, determined to get this done. Thankfully, the glasses were already washed and dried, the plates would be soon once finishing the one he was currently drying, the cutlery was soon to follow, and all he'd have left to do would be pack up the leftovers and tackle the lasts of the pots and pans on the stove. All said and done, ten minutes of uninterrupted concentration was what it took to reset the kitchen to its prior state, and Remus moved for the dining room to pour himself the cup he never did pour get to earlier, gave a trial sip, and found joy in it still being quite warm, but he had a sense the tea cozy had been a big help with that.

He headed out of the dining room and into the den, liking the idea of being outside if everyone else was going to be, and left out the back door, blinking twice when he didn't register the sound of the mower. He booked it down to the bend in the porch with his tea held tight, tremendously hopeful that Sirius somehow managed to talk his dad out of bothering with the lawn, but when he rounded the bend at a more purposefully relaxed clip than he'd been going at, he only saw his mum down at the other end of the porch, sitting in one of the deck chairs.

He studied the scene around her, the cordless sitting on the table between the two chairs along with his mum's tea, her knitting bag sitting in the chair on her right, and a new piece currently being woven together via her needles. He started a stroll over toward her, casting a glance out at the yard for Sirius or his dad, but he wasn't having any luck with it.

"The tinker twins are over there," his mum relayed, nodding her head northwest of her.

Remus curiously strolled up to the railing to the left of his mum's chair, looked out in the direction she pointed him off to, and smiled as he found Sirius and his dad sitting on the grass a little ways out from the edge of the garden, the rider mower sitting between the two of them and being gutted in real-time. "What's happened?" he raised, sitting his tea atop the railing in front of him.

"A hunk of wood got caught up in her, definitely caused some damage, and they decided tearing the whole thing apart to assess the extent of the damage was the only possible option," his mum provided, halfway amused, halfway fatigued.

"I really think it might be time to let her go," Remus broached, offering up a tight smile. "She served us well, but she's caused so much trouble as of late."

"It’s always a toss-up whether she'll even run these days," his mum echoed, laughing a little there. "He gave her a shot yesterday to try to get the grass done in time for you two, but she wouldn't cooperate and today, she did for a very short stretch time before the wood got in her path so she really has had a string of bad luck."

Remus hummed a vague laugh. "Me."

"What?" his mum asked. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, mum; joke," Remus extended. "Sirius would have laughed."

"Well, shout it out to him, if you'd like," his mum permitted.

"I think I'm alright," Remus assured, watching the Tinker Twins at work. "Did you see the big moment?"

"Just missed it, they said," his mum relayed. "They've been in and out of the shed for tools, so I got the mission status that way."

Remus nodded, hummed for that absently, and watched from a distance as Sirius stuck his right arm all the way inside the mower's bulky body and felt around in there. "I can't tell if he's wearing gloves from here, but he had better be," he asserts, his right eye going into a twitch.

"I had them both swear to gloves before the operation began, worry not," his mum confirmed.

"Good on you," Remus extended, looking over at her. "Can I sit?"

"Of course," his mum allowed, pausing her knitting to reach for her bag and bring it down to the porch in front of her feet.

Remus moved to take the seat, lifting his tea for a sip off it. "How's she doing?" he asked, looking sideways at his mum.

His mum took in a tentative breath. "It's not been a good day for her," she offered, frowning as she loops her right needle around to begin a new stitch.

"I feel awful for her," Remus traded, but got piqued by the cordless hanging out on the table between the two of them. "How'd you jump off so quickly? You seemed to be right in the middle of it, last I heard."

His mum took another breath in, only this one is littered with amusement. "Well, I almost dropped my mug all over the porch on the way out here and figured it was best I stop trying to be a circus clown," she relayed, and Remus smirked through a new sip of tea, nodding fairly for it. "She's going to drive up for a late lunch tomorrow and we'll pick up where we left off, but I'll be back well before the market closes and you two can take my keys, is that OK?"

Remus nodded easily. "Sure, that's fine," he replied, going for another sip off his tea.

"Or, if you don't want to wait around," his mum tacked on, making Remus laugh through his sip, "you could always see if your dad would let you take the truck in."

Remus shook his head, swallowing there. "We'll be fine with going a little later on," he assured. "He's more of an afternoon/evening sort anyway; I'm the morning lad of the two of us."

"How'd he do this morning, then?" his mum asked, glancing over at him amusedly. "That was one early start."

"You know, he did better than I thought he would," Remus answered candidly. "Especially once we got going and he got a coffee in him."

Remus's mum gave a chime of a laugh. "Well, that'd about do it," she tacked on. Remus smiled over at her, but blinked fast as she lifted her gaze to the top of his head. "Have I told you I like the cut?"

Remus looked up and around before settling back in with new understanding, reaching to pass a hand through his fringe. "I'm sure you did."

"Well, I really like it," his mum reiterated. "It's different than your usual style."

Remus smirks a laugh. "Yeah, I'm not allowed to cut the fringe or even the top, really, but I hate it when I can feel curls on my neck so this is the compromise," he offered. "Short sides and a long, floofy fringe."

"Who's not letting you cut it?" his mum laughed.

"Well, Sirius for one, and now that I've started keeping the sides short but the top still quite a Flooftown, Lily's now championing this look, too," he forwards, laughing there, too.

"Oh, well, they’d both know good hair, wouldn't they," she offered knowingly.

"That's extremely true and fair to say," Remus deemed it.

His mum eyed Remus's cardigan there. "I love that, by the way."

"Thanks," Remus said candidly, looking down at it. "Sirius found it for me."

"Good eye," she returned.

"Great eye," Remus raised it.

His mum breathed in there, looked out at the yard and namely toward the two of them out there still performing emergency surgery on the mower, and Remus looked sidelong at her knitting speed, lost again over how well she can do it without looking; he could never. "So, what do you think?" she asked, looking over at him again with a new smile on. "Did he like it, or did he like it?"

"Oh, mum; he's in love with it," Remus raised that, too. "And you for knitting him one, so you know."

His mum gave a delighted hum beside him. "I thought it was the sweetest thing that he would toss it over him right then and there," she added.

"Oh, that's just a taste of it," Remus raised. "He's going to constantly have that draped over him."

"Well, I'd only hope he uses it well," his mum offered, tossing a look out toward the Tinker Twins before looking back at him again. "I have to say, I forgot how powerful that laugh of his is."

Remus put out a jovial laugh. "Which one?" he asked.

"Hm?" his mum bid.

"Well, he's got a few that are rather powerful," Remus raised. "He's got the one that sounds like a dog's bark, he's got the slow-starter that tends to turn into the bark quite suddenly but that's usually when something he found funny comes back to hit him with a new angle that's even funnier, he's got this rolling laugh that just goes on and on until he's settled down, and there's also the silent killer, where he just writhes around in his mirth until he contains himself, but that one's still so powerful to witness."

His mum blinked wondrously. "It does sound like a bark," she returned, as if it'd finally clocked for her. "Well, it was that one, then; it sounded off just a few minutes before you got out here and I nearly dropped my needles."

Remus felt a grin come on as he looked out over the yard toward Sirius. "That one scares the shit out of me at least once a week," he offered fondly, running the pad of his right thumb back and forth over the back of his mug as he watched Sirius and his dad go back and forth chitter-chatting while they worked to put the mower back together, and breathed in contentedly. "We're dating."

Remus could personally confirm that crickets do, in fact, suddenly come out to chirp when a tense silence is thrust upon an otherwise easy conversation. It felt like a lifetime just getting the courage to look over at her, but once he did, the ten seconds that followed felt the longest ten seconds of his life, seeing her hands frozen in mid-stitch, her gaze set fixedly out across the field where Remus had just been looking, and that's yet another image burned into his brain that likely wouldn't be leaving it for some time.

"I'm so sorr— I didn't — it wasn't supposed to come out like that," he put out quickly, clutching rightly at his mug with his right hand while he drags his left palm over his face to mask the vivid grimace he fell into for stringing together that choice of phrase. He heaved a horribly tight sigh and chanced a look back at his mum again, but wasn't looking at him. "There was a plan, he was supposed to be here for it, I don't know what I was thinking — I wasn't; I wasn't thinking."

He bit down on his lower lip hard to stop himself from word-vomiting any more than he'd already done, but he bit down harder when his mum blinked over at him quite a few times. "I'm going to need a minute," she bid.

Remus let go of his lip. "That's — right, that's fair," he nodded, going for a rather large gulp of tea and practically draining the cup in one go while his left foot tapped erratically on the paint-chipped wood below it.

His mum needed another half-minute or so in the grand scheme of things, but it could have been hours for how torturous the wait felt. "When?" she asked.

"When did we start?" Remus clarified, and his mum nodded once. "A while back—" her tight-knit eyebrows, while no other knitting of any kind was happening, already had him feeling like shit for giving her such an unhelpful answer, "—Christmas."

His mum reeled a bit there, and that was just lovely to have had to watch. "Was it news to you?" she asked slowly.

Remus crossed his right leg over his left one to keep it from jittering, seeking Sirius out if just to have a sense of him, and the mere sight of him out there at both work and play soothed him enough to get the words out. "Landing him was," he allowed, "but it wasn't shocking in the other sense."

"How long?" she asked, after a good few beats, her tone sounding further away than it had though she still sat next to him.

"I would say," Remus started, running left thumbnail over the side of his forefinger, "I was all sorts of confused before I hit fourteen, and that's when it became quite blatant."

He would have loved it if his mum would simply go back to knitting at least; then, he could have an easier time pretending that the air around the two of them hadn't constricted, but she wouldn't do it despite him begging the universe to coerce her into starting again. "Nearly a decade," she stated, her gaze trained on the yarn in her lap.

Remus breathed in fast. "It never felt like the right time, Mum," he told her, but he faltered when she finally looked up at him, and with much wider eyes than before; he wasn't sure the truth would do her any better, but then, not explaining any part of it wouldn't fix the look on her face either. "The first real shot I had at anything like love was with someone who didn't want it getting out and I was so happy to have him that I was happy to keep it between us, but time went on, I watched him struggle so hard with himself for years after the initial lovey feelings we'd started out with began to fade, and telling anyone about it wasn't an option then, either; I look back at myself and I just want to kick him for not going to anyone about it, I do, because I know I could have used so much more guidance back then, but I just couldn't find the words."

"Tom?" his mum asked, and there they go; she finally guessed right.

Remus nodded once. "We saw each other on and off until we officially stopped before I moved out there and telling either of you was not something I could even fathom," he insisted, trying to keep his tone gentle when he knew that would sound much more harsh otherwise. "I was heartbroken for my first year out there, I was still very closed off about it going into my second, and I didn't have it in me to talk about myself when he was entwined with all of it, and for a long time after, I worried I didn't even have an identity without him attached to it; I simply couldn't separate me from him and I told myself I'd need something tangible if I was going to tell you two because it'd been so long that I hadn't said anything and that tangible something is Sirius. He saw me at my most closed-off, didn't quit on me even when I've made that quite a task, and he's been so patient with all that I've got following me around from back then, he's so important to me, and he's so good for me — he’s the opposite of me and yet he's not, it's like we soften each other's edges just enough to fit together comfortably, and he makes me take myself less seriously, makes me breathe more, makes me stop worrying so much about this or that and to just be present with him, makes me remember what colour even is, and I really haven't liked me more than I have since him; he loves me, he's my best friend, and you two deserve to know what he is to me."

Remus gave a listless shrug and a shake of his head when his mum didn't offer him anything in the wake of all that, but the movement seemed to jar his mum into action, so thanks be to frustration, then. "He's very sweet," she said.

"Incredibly sweet," Remus doubled down. "I have so many stories about it — uhm, well, OK, I didn't have a ton of mad money to throw around this past term when I can only work so many hours, but I did get him little gag gifts when I could, usually some bizarre or trashy record, double points if it was bizarre and trashy, and he just loved it; he lit up every single time I brought him a new one so I just kept it doing it, and nowadays I'm working a lot more so I'm in a position where I don't necessarily have to shop bargain bins only, but I still keep a look out in them for a doozy of a record because he just gets such a kick out of it. Or, today, even, when we were at the mall, I found this corkscrew with a ceramic moustache for the handle and wanted to surprise him with it, and Mum, his face burst open when he saw it and I couldn't even mind so much that he dug it out of my hand and ruined the surprise because he just glowed over it, and you saw that, too; that smile he gave you when he put the quilt on, he was so moved by that gesture — he's just so moved, whenever he's shown someone's thoughtfulness like that, and I know it's because he didn't have any of that growing up, not even close."

His mum's brow knitted together severely, giving Remus a stark reminder that his mum's heartstrings do tend to be readily available to tug on, and he found himself afraid to elaborate and equally afraid not to. "I know this is out of left field and it may take some time to adjust, but if you're going to be upset or uncomfortable with either of us, then you take that out on me, not him," he put down earnestly. "His family didn't react well at all to who he is and they tormented him for it, so the last thing that I want is for him to feel anything like that while he's here; I don't think for a second you'd treat him anywhere close to the way they did over it, but he's having a tough time right now and he's still done the best he can to show up for me throughout this process so I've got to show up for him, too, and the best-case scenario would be that he feels just as welcomed as my boyfriend as he did when you thought he was just a mate and if that's too difficult to do at first, and I understand that it may very well be, I still need you to smile and try with him because he loves you both so much already, it would break his heart if he got the cold shoulder now, and that would break mine."

Remus held his mum's gaze with resolve, but a fair amount of dragging and shuffling broke their staring contest; the two looked left, found Sirius and Remus's dad had effectively pushed the mower back toward the house, and were now just about to pass the porch.

"That can't be a good sign," his mum raised.

"She's gone," his dad returned, pushing the mower past the porch railing alongside Sirius. "I'll have to get a fucking new one tomorrow."

"Hey hey, just imagine how much quicker you'll be zipping around out here with a brand spanking new one," Sirius raised, and oh, that's him doing what he does best, but it physically hurt Remus's chest to hear him sound so lively and unaware of how badly he'd just bungled their plan.

"That is a good image," his dad let Sirius have. "Leave her here, I'll have to figure out what to do with her."

It wasn't long before the two of them came out from between the house and the shed, though they disappeared from view as they made it to the garden, and then quite suddenly, Sirius could be seen making a beeline for the A-frame and that had Remus quite piqued. He was in and back out of it within genuine seconds with his guitar case in tow; a curious decision, and one Remus wouldn't mind learning more about why it'd been made.

Sirius caught Remus's gaze and smiled grand, holding up his right forefinger excitedly. "Watch this," he calls, heading around the outskirts of the garden and disappearing yet again, only to hop up and down with his free hand waving around to showcase where he got to, "there's a second entrance to it."

Remus had no control over the stitches he fell into. "The secrets never end," he sent back.

His dad came up the path, propping himself up against the right bannister on the porch steps. "You OK?" his mum asked.

"We just pushed it all the way back here," his dad put up, smirking there. "Did you miss that part?"

His mum huffed beside Remus. "I'm just checking on you."

"I'm fine," his dad assured. "Just a little beat."

"Sorry you couldn't get the lawn done, dad," Remus extended.

His dad gave a grunt, but he waved the whole thing off. "Yeah, well, c'est la you know," he traded, looking over his left shoulder as Sirius barks a laugh while heading up the porch steps. "This one's going to let me show him a thing or two on the guitar, and I bet I'll feel better about that shit-looking lawn after that."

"OK, uhm," Remus came in there, nodding toward Sirius, who was grinning ear to ear with that one, "he's exceptional at it, so I think he'll be the one showing you a thing or two."

"Yeah, I think you know — hm, three songs total?" his mum tacked on.

"Three songs I bet I don't know how to play yet, Hope," Sirius chimed, and Remus looked sidelong at her, feeling the utmost relief course through him as she smiled brightly back at Sirius.

Remus's dad sure puffed up nice and good with that little addition, too, taking the rest of the steps up to the landing and turning to head around the bend. Sirius moved up the stairs from there, flashed Remus a grin to end all grins, and flickered his gaze once up at the house before strolling off after Remus's dad, and there, Remus realized the impromptu jam session was likely a ruse put up by Sirius to get the family all together in one room and he felt a new wave of revulsion wash over him.

He looked over at his mum, found the bright smile she had on had receded by an unsettling margin while her gaze remained trained on the spot Sirius had just stood, and even after he told her to fake it until she made it, seeing how much work she had to put in to be kind to Sirius had the breeze that chose to go by just, just then going straight to Remus's bones.

He shivered, pushed to stand, and turned to head down the porch. "Remus," his mum called, sounding about as listless as he felt, so at least that made two of them.

"Please don't tell Dad," Remus put down, retreating for the house.

He didn't even want to look back at her for a moment hardly passed before he felt selfish for even requesting that. "It's yours to tell," his mum sent him, quite in agreement with how Remus felt about his assertion, and Remus could have tried to ignore the tone, to understand it, to give her a break for using it on him, but he'd done that plenty already today; he was fresh out of patience.

He made it into the den and stood still after shutting the door behind him, finding it absolutely unforgivable and ridiculous that he could have harboured a secret for nine fucking years only to blurt it out, without prompt, and toss everything they'd held onto for weeks and weeks into the bin because, what? He got Sirius in his eye and that's akin to getting the sun shining right at them? Absolutely ridiculous. He stared at him constantly throughout dinner, the making of, he'd lasted through his mum and dad's combined heckling and didn't feel the need to drop the bomb there for one hell of a last word. Why? Why now? Why did he have such a strong desire to stick his foot in his mouth? Why couldn't he have shut the fuck up for ten more minutes?

Moving into the kitchen at a warped speed, he felt a horrid feeling creep up his spine as he realized that waiting until ten minutes from then might have staved off some of the initial shocks of his untimely bomb drop, his dad might have pulled a joke or two to cut the tension, but she’d still have had the same questions for him, she’d still have spoken in clipped sentences, she’d have still looked at Sirius the way she did, and then he didn’t know if he’d done them a favour or not when it would have just crushed Sirius to have to watch that happen in real-time.

He looked around wildly, spotted the teapot on the dining room table, and went for it immediately, taking it with him toward the stairs. He could practically hear Sirius’s bark over such a bizarre impulse; he would have found it the funniest thing he’d seen all day easily, but bizarre as it was, if Remus wasn’t going to be able to control anything else that evening and evermore, then he was going to have the rest of the fucking pot of tea he'd made and fuck it if it was guaranteed to be on the colder side of things by now; he's not fancy, never has been.

He turned right at the stairs and headed straight up them, hearing the guitar being tuned from the sitting room as he goes, and half of him pulled to go right back down and be present in the light and warmth emanating from in there, but the other half of him was louder, felt he was unworthy of joining in on that light, and kept him pushing up the stairs and further and further away from it.

Chapter 24: 24.

Notes:

numero deux (!!!)

Chapter Text

Sirius heads inside the house, foots Remus’s loafers off on the mat, and stops to shut them back in the closet where he found them. He straightens up tall, heading on through the den and the kitchen when Lyall isn’t to be seen in either room before padding on through the dining room, past Hope’s workstation, and down the front hall only to turn into an empty sitting room. For a brief moment, he wonders if he’d been duped, but that makes little to no sense when Lyall showed such keen interest in mucking about on the guitar; it’s really more likely he’s just in the loo or fetching his guitar from somewhere.

“L-L-Lyall?” he calls out, going for a bit of an MC impression before an unintelligible bout of murmuring floats back his way, so either way the man's likely slated to reappear soon enough.

Sirius heads further into the sitting room with that, figuring it best to situate them in one room for Remus to lug Hope along into, and heads for the bay window. He pulls the straps of his case off of his shoulders, props it up against the wall to the right of the windowsill, and unzips it, tugging his guitar out of it by the neck. He plants himself down on the carpet ahead of the windowsill, giving him a prime view of the whole sitting room, and places his guitar over his lap, giving an experimental strum over the strings to suss out how out of tune it’ll be after bustling it about amongst their travels, and woof, does it need a-tunin'.

He’s only got started on the first string when Lyall turns into the room holding an incredibly dusty guitar by the neck, and Sirius's mouth splits into an amused grin while he keeps tuning. “Alright, so clearly I can’t keep pretending it hasn’t been an age since I’ve played,” Lyall cops to it, amused himself now. “This thing’s been tucked away for a while, as you can see.”

“Hey, we’re just messing around here,” Sirius raises, pausing his tuning to wave him off. “I’m not one to scoff.”

“Well, I’d appreciate no scoffing, but if you are as good as advertised then you’ll likely come out of this feeling rather fond of your own playing,” Lyall raises, moving for the couch.

Bah, Sirius returns, putting a bit of James Potter into it and going right on back to tuning.

Lyall takes the left corner of the couch, props his guitar face-up on his lap to give the body a good dusting with his hands, and once he finds he’s satisfied with his dusting job, he puts it on its side and gives Sirius a better view of it in the process. It certainly looks rather old, but it gives Sirius some whopping retro vibes with the burnt tan colouring of the body, the intricate, circular design going around the soundhole, and that colourful, eye-catching strap that Lyall shrugs on over his shoulders.

“I really like yours,” Sirius tells him.

“You lie,” Lyall replies, smiling all the while.

“No no,” Sirius denies. “I don’t say a ton of things that I don’t actually think; you’ll see that soon enough.”

“Would you insult a man’s guitar in his own home, though?” Lyall raises, giving the fingers of his right hand a wiggle-stretch.

“No, I suppose I wouldn’t,” Sirius lets him have.

Lyall gives the fingers on his right hand a stretch and reintroduces his fingers to the fretboard, but upon hearing the first strum sound out in the room, both he and Sirius wince horrifically. “Well, that won’t do,” he says of it, reaching to twist the first of what will be many twists of the pegs on the head of the guitar.

Sirius tries not to smile too widely, keeping half an eye on his tuning and half of one on Lyall’s efforts, and finds the man can tune by ear just fine, but that’s a Lupin through and through for you; pretending they're beginners. “Yours looks quite loved,” Lyall puts up, tipping his chin Sirius's way.

Sirius smiles down at his excessively bumper sticker-covered baby as he works to get her sounding beautiful. “Extremely,” he answers, smiling back up at him.

“How long have you had it?” Lyall bids.

“James got it for me for my sixteenth, so we’ve been together quite some time now,” Sirius offers, giving another experimental strum before thinking his D-string needs just a little more tweaking before his baby will sing out perfectly.

“That’s a solid mate right there,” Lyall puts up.

“One of the greats,” Sirius echoes, a budding smile on his lips as he eyes his tweaking of the last peg. “I hear he’s a bit loud, though.”

“Don’t know what you mean,” Lyall returns him.

Sirius smiles up at him brightly, pausing to wait for Lyall to catch up, and jolts as Lyall’s D-string splits and wires out fantastically. “Well, fuck me,” Lyall tosses up, falling into a patch of snickers. “Is that a sign, or is that a sign?”

“I can change it out for you,” Sirius offers, splaying his hands open and ready to help out. “I’ve got it down to a fairly quick science, if I may say so myself.”

“You may, only I haven’t the spare strings at the moment,” Lyall puts up circumstantially, lifting the guitar enough to shrug off the strap and reach the body up over the arm of the couch as a means to prop it up between the couch and the end table to his left for now.

“Well, here, then; mine’s all done,” Sirius says, lifting off of the carpet and walking it over toward him.

“You don’t want it?” Lyall raises.

“No no, it's your golden hour,” Sirius insists, jutting the guitar back and forth in front of Lyall’s reach until he snorts and just gives in, clever man. Sirius casts a glance toward the hall once his hands are free before turning back for his prior spot, looking over at Lyall’s set up in the corner. “While you’re doing that, I may scope out your record collection, if that’s alright with you?”

He glances over his shoulder and catches Lyall’s absent nod as he noodles around on Sirius’s guitar. “Go right ahead,” he offers next beat, pausing his noodling. “That’s only a snippet of it, mind; those are just the important, easy-access picks, the rest are down in the basement.”

Sirius trills out a note of intrigue, going around the back of Lyall’s chair to lift the first crate out of the corner. “Well, now I simply have to see what the top picks are,” he extends, carrying the crate over to his prior spot in front of the window while Lyall goes back to his noodling.

He sets the crate down in front of him, crosses his legs underneath him, and scoots in close, flipping the first few records back, passing Boston, The Police, Prefab Sprout, Springsteen, and, just as Sirius thinks this is already an entirely Lyall-esque collection of classics, he flips forward to come upon an absolutely perfect Tears for Fears compilation to have put right up at the top of the easy-access list, smirking jovially down at it.

“What are you laughing at?” Lyall pipes up, pausing his playing again.

Sirius grins ear to ear as he flashes the face of the record toward him, showcasing the cover of ‘Tears Roll Down.’ “Played this one a lot over the years, didn’t cha,” he raises wryly.

“Certainly did, but I’ve a sense you already knew it,” Lyall prompts.

Sirius breathes out a laugh, nodding emphatically. “Back in January, we all took Remus out to our favourite pub for one last hurrah before he’d be starting back at school, ‘Sowing the Seeds of Love’ came on in the place, and Remus had already knocked back quite a few pints by then so he just went and lost it over that coming on,” he details, remembering Remus’s jovial expression as the intro swelled throughout Gallagher’s. “And I mean, listen: I already knew he was quite the character by then, but I didn’t expect him to go ahead and perform the whole thing for us at the table and what a wondrous sight to see, it was.”

“How good a performance?” Lyall bids, smiling wryly himself.

“Oh, stellar,” Sirius emphasizes. “He knew every single part to it; every lyric, every note, every fluctuation between notes, every timbre, there were no limits.”

“That’s on me,” Lyall wears it. “We played that album often when he was a tyke, among others of course, but he liked me to put that one on and just let it play, so I always made sure the cassette was in the glovebox for rides.”

“Then you did him and every one of us that night a favour,” Sirius extends him. “Up until then, I'd seen him let loose in the relative privacy of a car or someone's place with the right sort of company around him, and I very knew he could get goofy after a few stiff drinks, but this was just beyond; I confess I’ve been cheering him on in that regard, just trying to tug on that side of him more because it’s just not a thing he ought to stifle or save for very specific occasions, and watching that kid go absolutely feral over a tune he's fond of is a gift to the masses more than it’s disruptive to them, I say.”

“Well, good on you for taking that on,” Lyall trades him. “That kid shrinks himself down and winds himself up so tightly, he’d do well to let loose a little more often.”

“I’m working on it, Lyall,” Sirius insists, slipping the record back into the crate before pointing down at it. “I’d have loved to have seen those guys in their hay day; I feel like it’d have been such an experience.”

“They were quite something,” Lyall lets land. “I’m showing my age here, but I managed to get over to Glasgow to catch them in ‘82, before they closed out the 'Big Chair' tour.”

Sirius lifts his gaze to the ceiling as he does the math in his head. “Uh oh, a youthful sixteen,” he quips. “Remus has alluded to your trips back in the day, but I didn’t realize they went back that far.”

“Mm, mhm,” Lyall puts up in frank assurance. “‘Course, times were different then.”

“Uh-huh,” Sirius interjects, a wry grin on.

“Well, they were,” Lyall returns, a similar expression on now. “Back then, I could pack a knapsack and set off, hitch rides to wherever I was planning to end up, and make my way back home eventually, but I wouldn’t advise anyone go about it the way I did.”

“But you got to see so much,” Sirius raises.

“Well, sure; I learned a lot, saw a ton, met a load of folks I liked that I wouldn’t have had I just stuck to the train lines, but the method I used to go about it leaves a bit to be desired, looking back,” Lyall offers for it, and it’s just impossible not to compare Lyall’s life to that of his parent's lives: those two were cultivated in a family of elites, travelled all around for business and leisure, had more money than they could ever spend and more holiday homes than they knew what to do with, their high-brow status that mattered so much to them and yet, would never matter in the long run when they’re in the ground where everybody else has gone or will eventually, but they couldn’t rub experience between two fingers if they tried; Lyall may very think he’s lived his forty-eight years on the planet with a modest life to show for it, but Sirius would take this house, this family, this feeling he gets just being permitted to peek in at it over townhouses and galas and social status any day.

“I still think you were the coolest,” Sirius instils. "Still are, to be frank."

Lyall snorts there. “Well, you’re far past the point where I’d need to deter you from any of that, so I suppose I’ll take it,” he offers him. “I was fairly calm up until Remus hit about fourteen, which is around where I got the itch, and I woke up in a cold sweat over the idea of him setting off on travels with little to no warning or itinerary like I'd done, so the tales I'd pass to him from thereon were loaded with an undercurrent of: ‘you're not to do what I did; you’re to plan your trips out accordingly and you’d better fucking call your mother at every stop you make.’”

Sirius puts out a laugh there. “Well, if it helps, he spoke of your travels in a ‘those were nutty, nutty times’ way, but in turn, he did rep your wanderlust well and put it as a curious lad out roaming around,” he offers. “He’s been quite fair about it, I’ve got to say.”

“Well, I suppose I have got to be grateful for that,” Lyall accepts.

“How was the show, then?” Sirius raises.

Lyall breathes in at that, laughing it back out. “Well, the first half was a riot and I don’t much remember how the second half went, but I have to assume it went well,” he puts it, taking to a slight grin.

Sirius puts a bright trill of a laugh in there. “Lyall,” he huffs good-naturedly.

“Well, I don’t know what shows are like now, but back then, if somebody handed you something, you did the respectful thing, had a few puffs, and passed it along to the next person,” Lyall tacks on.

Sirius puts out a snort. “Mm, there’s still a ton of personal consumption happening at shows, usually once the lights go down," he offers him, "but I do think the communal aspect you experienced only really happens at shows where that sort of sharing is considered etiquette.”

Lyall nods to allow it. “Another thing I warned that lad against,” he maintains. “Sometimes it seems a miracle to think about all the gutters I could have ended up face-down in along the way and somehow didn’t, but that was another living nightmare to have to think of Remus doing the same.”

“Well, you did well with him because I'd peg him for cautious without being allergic to the idea of recreational activities if he knows the supply is vetted,” Sirius serves him.

“Glad to hear it," Lyall trades him. "In any case, despite the fog over the second half of that show, I still remember the feeling I had during the first half; it’s a vague memory now thanks to time and all that she tends to do, but the memories I have of it bring an almost palpable feeling along with them, so it’s up there on the list of bombastic, high-energy shows I got to see in my time, but I know you know which one's at the top of that list."

“Mhm, and on that note, tell me about Live Aid again,” Sirius goads, doing a shoulder shimmy, “with a particular emphasis on my Lord and Saviour, if you please.”

Lyall rests his arms over the frame of the guitar, a fond smile on. “Well, as you know, I consider myself lucky to have been in the same berth of space as he was,” he readdresses, “but as for something new I can offer is this time, I’d already done the whole blacking out mid-way through a show thing plenty enough by that point, but I knew going into the stadium that I couldn’t get away with any of that kind of mischief for that show and I'm grateful still because you really need it; he was an upper in his own right, made the whole place shine for the relatively short time they were on stage all in all, and it was just impossible to take your eyes off of him.”

Sirius puts out a tremendous noise, clutching at his chest like he’s been struck there. “I’ve watched that set so many times, I know it by heart and I still can’t take my eyes off the screen,” he echoes. “I want your eyes so I can bask in what it’d be like to have actually been there.”

“I’d lend them to you if I could,” Lyall offers.

“It’s appreciated,” Sirius returns candidly, flipping on through the crate and locating the Beatles supply: ‘The White Album,’ ‘Abbey Road,’ ‘Let it Be,’ — all classics in their own right, but Sirius does find himself wondering if there’s another, particularly obscure one of theirs tucked away in here somewhere, and lo and behold, he finds the gauntlet sandwiched between ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ and ‘Magical Mystery Tour,’ but that’s the sort of company Sirius rather approves of for his gift unto Lyall.

“Ooh-la-la,” Sirius trills, popping it out of the crate to flutter its face toward Lyall. “Wonder where this came from?”

Lyall snorts from the couch. “I’m still furious about how easily you managed to find that one,” he returns him. “I could go into any one record shop and find a thousand copies of ‘Revolver,’ but if I wanted anything more off the beaten path, I was shit out of luck; it took some serious digging over the years to get my collection up to par.”

Sirius smiles sweetly there. “Well, have you tried using the internet to scour for finds?” he raises. “It can yield some pretty firm results.”

Lyall takes in a weighty breath, smiling a little there. “Remus keeps goading me to, but I haven’t done much in the way of that yet,” he extends. “If I’m honest, I’m still wrapping my head around how I’m able to see and hear Remus on-screen while he’s all the way over there; it’s like magic, and before you start, realize that I grew up in the age of Pong and the lone supercomputer, so trust me when I say all that we have now is simply spellbinding — hell, dial-up was magical to me despite all the shit it gets nowadays.”

“No no, I get that,” Sirius insists. “My father’s study was the only room in the house that had a hook-up back then, so I definitely wasn’t surfing the net at my place and went buckwild with it whenever I went over to James’s; I was just floored, didn’t care that you’d get booted right offline the moment someone picked up the phone, I was far too busy being jazzed that he even had access to it.”

Lyall comes in there with quite the snort. “Some nights, when the house is quiet, I can still hear echoes of Remus coming down the stairs to ask who, precisely, picked up the phone and booted him off while he was in the middle of gathering sources for a research paper,” he raises loftily. "At least it was for schoolwork, right?"

“Right, if it’d been porn, then that’d have been a whole other thing,” Sirius puts in.

Straight after it leaves his mouth, he wonders if escaping through the bay window and taking off running toward the train station would be a fair way to start anew or if it’d come off a tad dramatic, but then Lyall cuts off Sirius’s thoughts on the matter with a boomer of a laugh. “No, suppose he wouldn’t have come downstairs at all in that case,” he returns him.

Sirius puts out a bright bark, settling into the carpet that much easier. “Well, if you want, sometime while I’m here I could show you a site I use when the shops aren’t giving me the results I want,” he offers him.

“Sure, if you don't mind showing it to a caveman,” Lyall returns.

“Not at all,” Sirius says of it. “It’s funny, Remus actually has some great luck coming across absolute gems in-store; I don’t know how he does it, but he’s got a third eye opened for that kind of thing.”

“Does he?” Lyall raises, lifting his right hand from the neck of the guitar to scratch at his nose underneath the bridge of his glasses.

“Oh yeah, he’s a tacky album magnet, I swear,” Sirius instils. “He's been getting me gag records for months now, but a couple weeks back he brought one to me called ‘The Bagpipe Blues,’ which sent me to heaven and back even though I will never play it, and a few weeks before that even, he brought me this frayed copy of 'A Night with Conway Twitty' and the cover on that one alone is just the funniest thing possible and makes the record worth owning; I don’t know how he stumbles across them, but I know I’m grateful.”

Lyall laughs there, but it’s got more of a puzzled note to it than his last few have had. “I helped raise a strange lad, didn't I.”

Sirius smirks for it. “That bagpipe one was rather topical seeing as I've a neighbour who moved in across the terrace from ours who not only plays the bagpipes but chooses to practice them at all hours of the day and late into the night like that’s acceptable at all, so that was Remus giving a nod to that,” he forwards him. “And really, what you did was raise a lad who sees the strangeness in other people and rather than fight or stifle it, he finds his own way to fan it so I'd say you did well there.”

Lyall nods there, smiling as he looks down at the guitar set over his lap, and shifts his arms to cross them over the side of it, setting his chin down over them and giving in to an oddly morose frown. “Everything good, Lyall?” Sirius bids.

Lyall lifts his gaze, nodding. “Everything’s fine with me,” he extends, moving his gaze over to the mantel, though Sirius has a feeling the spot Lyall’s gaze ended up has a lot more to do with the fact that he’s going back and forth debating himself. “If I speak out of turn, shut me up, yeah?”

Lyall gestures vaguely toward Sirius, who nods over in Lyall’s peripheral at this point. “I doubt you will,” he pardons.

The man gives a tentative noise down in his throat as if to say 'Well, hold on,' moving his gaze to the ceiling while his forehead creases with thought. “When I met Hope, she was unavailable at the time and she remained that way for about a year on from there until she suddenly was,” he supplies, pausing his speech to tilt his head back and forth a little.

“And then you took your shot,” Sirius supplies, shoulder-shimmying a little there.

“Well, that’d be one way to put it,” Lyall lets land, looking a little more amused now, and Sirius can’t help but feel grateful for that when Lyall appears to be looking just about everywhere else but at him. “I still believe that sticking it out and waiting for her to realize there was a lot more cooking between us than a pair of good mates tend to have was one of my best decisions to this day, but I can say that because over twenty years strong isn’t half bad, is it.”

“Sure isn’t,” Sirius slips in.

Lyall tilts his head back and forth more evenly than before, but there’s a new smile starting up, too. “Forgive me if addressing this would count as crude, but I do know remember harbouring for someone was like and I can see the same sort of thing written all over you,” he poses, finally looking over at him again. "You’re one smitten lad.”

Sirius’s shoulders intrinsically go rigid, but that’s body memory for you. It makes sense at a base level and yet, it doesn’t when Sirius focuses on the details; Lyall’s not pointing roughly at him, he's not accosting him, he certainly doesn’t look like he wants Sirius out of his home immediately, and his nose hasn't wrinkled up at the idea of Sirius’s blatantly-addressed feelings for his only son — he’s just smiling, and thoughtfully done, at that.

“Have I been that obvious?” Sirius raises, and inwardly celebrates the snort he gets out of Lyall for it.

“Just a touch,” Lyall trades him. “Only, you’ve been staring at him like he’s the sun since you got here, you've brought him up — well, eight or nine times at least since dinner alone, and the whole time that was being whipped up, it was as if you couldn’t let yourself out of his gravitational pull for too long or you’d go flying off into the solar system; just putting two and three together here and while I don’t know the exact nuances of situation you’re in, I do understand it, so to speak.”

“I appreciate you saying that, sir,” Sirius hears himself say.

“Don’t call me that,” Lyall returns, pulling a face.

“Sorry, Lyall,” Sirius smirks.

Lyall nods once to pardon him. “I can’t help but see a lot of similarities between our cases, only for you, it may well be a different kind of unavailability,” he broaches. “Not the easiest to sort out, is he.”

“Certainly not,” Sirius allows, and he knows he shouldn’t let this continue when they’re dancing right around it, but he’s just so intrigued.

“I don’t know what the best advice would be to give you in this case, I really don't; I know I'd want to tell you to stick it out like I did because the benefits of doing that worked out well for me, but would that even be fair of me to advise you of?” Lyall poses, seemingly thinking out loud and definitely not pausing long enough for Sirius to interject, so it's not as if he's going to interrupt. “If he isn’t inclined that way, then there’s nothing to be done about it, is there, and telling you to wait around for something that can’t be reciprocated would be horrid advice on my part and an awful time for you, but on the other hand, I don’t know that I want to discourage you from it either; frankly, you two get on incredibly, you work well together, and sure, that might be because you did indeed work together, but wouldn't it be something if he’s just shy of coming online to it, do you know what I mean?”

Lyall goes quite still as Sirius lifts off of the carpet in one quick move. “I’m going to be right back,” he insists, hands splayed and aimed at Lyall to stay right there while he steps sideways toward the hall. “Right back, promise.”

He pads out of the room and down the hall, where he absolutely books it through the dining room and certainly tries to remain composed on his feet and not thunder through both the kitchen and the den, but he does take to a legitimate sprint the second he’s out on the porch. Possibly due to the velocity of his pacing, however, he trips up a bit about halfway down the short side of the L-shaped porch as a piece of chipped paint rightfully attacks the bottom of his right foot, hobbling along one-legged for a couple more steps while swiping his right hand underneath his left foot and sweeping the offending chip away. He stops long enough to glance down at the porch floor feebly, but there are tons of chipped spots in the high foot traffic area down the centre of the porch so he stops feeling too bad about causing one more scuff mark to go with the others and rounds the bend in the porch, stopping still when he only finds Hope at the other end of it and scooting back behind the corner of the bend, looking down toward the back door and wondering if he's just missed Remus going to the loo.

He supposes there that he could try his hand at dragging Hope inside and call for him from there, but no, he needs to get Remus first; he owes him that much. He books it back inside, heads through the kitchen and dining room again, and makes a swift right to peek into the bathroom off of the stairs, but no Remus in there either. He shuts the door and makes for the stairs just as Lyall’s getting to the foot of them, only very narrowly avoiding a collision in the process.

“Shit, sorry Lyall,” Sirius chirps, putting his hands up to steady him, though it’s all for naught when Lyall seems quite fine on his feet, all in all.

“That’s all right,” Lyall assures. “I didn’t mean to run you off there, hey? You can tell me to shut it; don’t let me send you out of a room for cover.”

“No no, I wasn’t running off — not like that anyway,” Sirius insists, tossing a glance toward the top of the stairs in hopes that Remus’ll turn up there and he could say something along the lines of, Hey, tell your dad you’re not straight, but Lyall gets in front of his eye line as he heads for the stairs himself.

“I think it best if I turn in; been up and at’em for a long time now and I believe it’s starting to show in the way that I’ve forgotten what privacy is,” he supplies, making a push up the first couple stairs, but looks back at Sirius from there. “Oh, I put your guitar back in its case so don’t you worry; it’s safe and sound.”

“You don’t have to turn in because of me,” Sirius puts up. “I really didn’t take offence — quite the opposite actually; that was so kind of you.”

“Well, I appreciate you saying that, Sirius, but I wonder if this is a situation I’m not qualified to meddle in,” Lyall keeps to it, but Sirius simply can’t say he agrees with that one.

“I disagree,” Sirius puts it. “I thought you made your qualifications quite clear.”

“Still, I shouldn’t be making things worse,” Lyall keeps to it. “I have been up a very long time and I do think it’s affecting my judgment calls.”

Sirius breathes in and sticks his hands in his back pockets, knowing there’s not much he can do to quell the man while he's quite convinced he stuck his foot in his mouth, and he certainly can’t use most of the tactics he’d use on Remus; no sir, this is not the right Lupin even if they’re striking reflections of each other. “Well, you did have to pick up a pair of numskulls bright and early,” he offers, giving him the best smile he can muster at the moment.

“I was happy to do it, Sirius,” Lyall tacks on.

“No, I know,” Sirius instils, and he does; he’s talking to a Lupin, after all.

Lyall nods his head kindly enough. “Now, just because I’m a huge bore, doesn’t mean you have to be one,” he maintains, bracing his right hand over the banister as he starts up the stairs and speaking over his shoulder at Sirius as he goes. “The telly’s all yours, same for the computer in the den, and really, just about anything goes so long as I don’t wake up in a few hours to a thumping rager; that sound good?”

Sirius pushes a laugh out. “There go my plans.”

“Uh-huh,” Lyall sends back. “Tell the Mrs. I’ve given up the goat, could you?”

“Sure thing,” Sirius sends after him.

He waits at the foot of the stairs until he hears a door shut on the second floor and books it up the stairs on the tips of his toes from there, taking the curve at the landing in stride and making a fast left into Remus’s room. He backs the door shut behind him and looks over the right side of the room first, but Remus isn’t on the bed or at his desk so that side is of no use to him. He looks left, blinking pointedly at Remus sitting cross-legged on his bay windowsill and looking a lot like a bloke who knows he’s in trouble.

“Where have you been?” Sirius hisses, aiming to keep to a whisper. “I really needed you down there; you’re missing every—”

Remus opens his mouth, but all that comes out of it is a horridly tight noise, and it sounds too much like his throat’s gone and shut for Sirius not to get over to him in a flash.

Remus starts up a harsh rub over his thighs before Sirius drops to his knees in front of him. “OK, I’m here,” he whispers, bracing Remus’s wrists quickly. “Let me, I've got it.”

Remus’s reactions are a bit lagged, but he stops the rubbing a few beats on from there, reaching around to wind his hands at the back of Sirius’s shirt and pitching his head forward to slot it in with the crook of Sirius’s neck, his breathing gone absolutely haywire. Sirius rocks his frame back and forth to soothe while he flattens his palms out and runs them steadily over Remus’s denim-covered thighs; there’s nothing else to be done until he gets Remus back to feeling like he’s in a real body, in a real bedroom, in a real house, and then, Sirius may be able to get him breathing steadily enough to speak rather than convulse. He does a bit of quiet shushing, not to quiet him necessarily but to simply reinforce that he’s here in more ways than just touch, and he catches the moment Remus’s breathing stops hitching halfway through a breath, keeps positive that it means he’s on the mend, and then a little further out from there he feels Remus’s body go lax against his frame.

Sirius keeps that rub going over Remus’s thighs, setting himself up to wait at least ten uninterrupted intervals before he’ll prod Remus for details, but the boy goes and speaks on the sixth one. “She knows,” he pushes out. “I let it slip on the porch, I’m so sorry.”

Lupin,” Sirius returns, gape-grinning as he leans back a bit to get a good look at Remus’s face, and that thing is shrouded in misery so that's definitely not a good sign, but he’s going to need some cold, hard facts before joining him in Spooksville. “Catch me up, please? I don’t know how to help yet.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Remus gives, listless. “It just flew out of my mouth.”

“What did?” Sirius bids, reaching up to cart his right hand through the curls at the top of Remus’s head while he keeps his left thumb tracing back and forth over his right thigh.

Remus takes a long breath in, lifting his leg and kneading Sirius’s tracing hand. “I was looking at you over there tinkering and I got the warm fuzzies — you do that to me, you know that?” he raises, forcibly keeping quiet. “You say I don’t yearn the way you do, but this is a perfect example of the extent of my yearning; all I had to do was look over at you out there before I started giving her a whole spiel about your different laughs and then I spewed out ‘we’re dating’ like that’s just what comes next obviously.”

Sirius bites back a smile, bringing his right forefinger down to trace over the shell of Remus’s left ear. “Alright, well, I’m having a hard time minding this,” he slips him.

“You should mind,” Remus returns. “I ruined the whole plan.”

“Did you, though?” Sirius raises.

“I did, and what’s worse is, I couldn't understand how I could have done that after nine fucking years of keeping it to myself,” Remus rushes on, “but it’s you, that’s the answer; you make me word-vomit all over the place, always have.”

Sirius tries not to glow too proudly from a visible standpoint. “I really think what you did was tell the truth,” he offers gently. “We are, in fact, dating.”

“I slapped it onto the end of a soliloquy about your laughs,” Remus emphasizes. “I spooked her out of her knitting, even — she’d knit through a nuclear blast, but not through this; she froze right over and when she got past her silence, she started up all the questions I was daft enough to think wouldn’t come right away, but I didn’t think she’d have the time to if we’d done it together — I thought it would take some time before those questions came.”

Sirius feels a sharp grip in his chest, but even he’s human; it hurts, seeing Remus hurting. “What sort of questions?” he prompts.

“How long we’ve been going, how long I’ve known in general, and that answer made her go white so I felt I had to tell her why I took so long with it and gave her the abridged version of the story, repeated ‘he’ quite a bit and she finally zeroed in on Tom—” Remus rattles off, but he takes a pause there, “—oh, yeah, on top of everything else, I outed him in the middle of all this so that’s just fantastic; I cannot wait for the boomerang to come back and hit me for that one.”

Oh dear, did his little secret get spilled to the mother of the bloke he turned inside out for years?” Sirius puts up, using a woeful, lofty voice. “How’s he ever going to survive this major blow that’ll have no effect on him in any way?”

Remus blinks quite a few times at him. “Are you done?”

“Not even close,” Sirius relays, but the voice he took to is definitely gone. “That was going to have to be addressed at some point; you can’t actually avoid mentioning him forever, and as far as I see it, serves him right—”

“You don’t get to decide who deserves what, Sirius,” Remus returns him.

“I’m just as qualified as anyone else,” Sirius puts up indignantly. “More than, even; I know the situation better than anybody and it’s too complex to just expect you to never address that time in your life; what else were you supposed to do? He was a direct hand in your absolute inability to speak on it and you get to speak on that much.”

“I didn’t have to affirm her guess, is all I’m saying,” Remus implores.

“Well, boo to that,” Sirius returns ferociously. “Masking his secret is neither your job nor your concern anymore, especially not when he’s got his dirty paws all over that time in your life; I say fuck his self-preservation, it has no bearing on this situation so forget about him and finish catching me up, please and thanks.”

Remus gives out a long-suffering sigh, lifting his gaze to the top of the bay windowsill above their heads and putting back on Sirius in due time. “Other than that guess and the clipped questions I kept getting from her, she would only either stare at me or over at you like we were strangers who came onto her property without permission, and then I started on about you again because that was the most important part,” he presses. “I told her how you came along and got me seeing colour again, how good you’ve been for me and to me and so much more, and I don’t understand how she could have stared back at me like I was speaking another language to her after I told her everything you mean to me, I — I just couldn’t be out there anymore with her, not with how she was acting, and I’m sorry I ran off on you, but I wasn’t prepared to face you after I’d done that; I panicked so badly I picked that up and bolted up here with it.”

Sirius follows Remus’s right and downward nod with his gaze and locates the rotund, cosy-covered teapot chilling in the far corner of the windowsill just a little off from Remus’s right knee along with his mug from dessert, and Sirius really cannot figure out how he didn’t see either of them until just, just now, but that really is such a lovely detail in all this. “I love you,” he laughs, sneaking a quick kiss off him.

“Not for this, please,” Remus implores, frowning deeply. “I’m a mess, Sirius; the actual Mad Hatter, me.”

Sirius’s shoulders shake as he tries his best to get through his mirth. “That’s everything,” he insists, grinning like a goon. “You’re everything.”

“How are you so calm?” Remus asks. “I blew it for the both of us.”

Sirius breathes in long through his nose and puts it back out before he speaks. “Well, I don’t see it that way,” he gives him. “I think you held on as long as you could, if I’m honest. I mean, we both knew this was going to be news to her more than him, that show back in the kitchen certainly hammered that home for me at least, and I’m not saying that having her freeze up on you like that wasn’t difficult for you, but is it all that shocking?”

“No, but I didn’t make things any easier blurting it at her like that, did I,” Remus returns. “She turned into a statue, an ice queen; she's never iced me out like that before, not ever.”

“Well, we can’t go and put the words back in now that they’re out of you,” Sirius raises. “Maybe it was bracing to have it dropped on her like that, but the news would have still been news even if we’d done it in the den or at the table, and I don’t think it hurts to keep in mind that she wasn’t freezing you out just to be an ice queen, she just—”

Remus's eyes flash. “You say you want me to let you in, but when I do and it’s got to do with family, you don’t really want to hear how I actually feel,” he cuts in.

And that feels like a well-aimed sock to the gut, so at least they’re both feeling certifiably awful. “Of course I do,” Sirius gives him.

“Do you?” Remus raises. “Sure, she looked at me like I was a stranger in her home, but hey, she didn’t toss her chair at the wall, pitch a fit, or worse, so I’ve nothing to worry about to you; I’m just overreacting as usual.”

“That’s not what I said,” Sirius corrects. “You reacted, that’s all you did.”

That doesn’t work like it’s done before. “No matter what happens, we both know I’m not going to get tossed out or have basic necessities taken away from me; it's too late for any of that and they'd never do it anyway, so how are you even able to stomach hearing my concerns over this?” Remus puts up, his tone casual but exceptionally pointed. “I bet I’ve got twenty seconds before I hear how ungrateful I’m acting so save it, please; I can’t hear it again.”

Sirius slips his hands off of Remus and shifts out of his knelt position, moving to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of him in the windowsill. “I never should have said that to you,” he says of it, around a desert for a throat. “You've told me at length why the way they overshare with Tom bothers you so much and it doesn’t matter if you were trying to buy yourself time by raising that, I still steamrolled you for it and I’m sure it does feel like I’m just luring you in to get all vulnerable with me just so I can brow-beat you later for what you say, but I promise you, I’m not like that; it was a low blow, I know, and I fucking regret saying it.”

“It’s not just that you said it,” Remus comes in. “It’s beyond that; I’m never going to be able to be properly upset with either of them with you around because you hold them at a higher regard than you do me.”

“That’s not true,” Sirius denies, not in a plain voice when that’s not particularly fair; it’s more a calm rebuttal. “I love them, but I am in love with you, and I’m just as much in love with seeing you stick up for yourself, so please know that I was cheering you on back in that kitchen the whole time you went in on them; you wouldn't look at me and I knew exactly why, but I could not stop looking at you.”

“It’s almost like you had a vested interest that time,” Remus puts it flatly, and fuck, the truth stings when it’s reflected back on you.

“You know what, that’s fair,” Sirius allows. “Context is everything, and I forget that, too, sometimes.”

“Oh, the context, the context,” Remus puts up dryly, and Sirius doesn’t even mind the ‘tude anymore if it means Remus is actively conversing rather than shutting him out.

“Absolutely, the context,” Sirius echoes, nodding for it. “It’s important to keep in mind for you because you don’t always have to take the shit they give you and shut up about it, but it’s also important to keep context in mind for me, too; I’m not excusing going at you like that, but there are reasons for it and they've got far more to do with me than they do you.”

“That actually felt quite personal toward me, funnily enough,” Remus returns, blinking plainly.

Sirius runs his top teeth over his lower lip before trying again. “OK, so once, think I was about fourteen, somewhere around there; it can be foggy sometimes, but I remember flipping my father off at the table, simple enough, and in response, my mother got up out of her seat and whacked me so hard over the back of the head that I saw stars,” he supplies, and quite plainly when it’s got to be said that way for him to even articulate it.

Remus shifts roughly on the windowsill, evidently uncomfortable with that anecdote along with that striking shade of vexation Sirius has learned with time only ever shows up on Remus’s face whenever he gets another sordid detail from back then. “I’m not trying to get pity out of you or make you hate them more than I know you already do," he maintains. "I am saying this because that’s my framework for discipline, so when I see you and Lyall act the way you do, how you’re able to just fly the bird at him and he doesn’t give a shit, how you can all just cuss each other out and nobody bats an eye? Those are some real trips for me, but I have been trying so not to let envy take me over here because it’s not your fault that I had such a shit time coming up, that's never been your fault, and I need you to believe me when I say that it wasn’t personal because I used to give James a world of shit for acting out on his parents all the time back then.”

Remus turns his head minutely, reaching over to pluck up his once-forgotten tea and prompting him on as he has a sip off of it, and Sirius could just kiss him for letting him make his case, but he won't; not now, not yet. “I wasn’t even through the worst they did to me by then — I'm talking was a couple years before I was even outed, but the heat was starting to brim in me, from them and the way they were treating me, but also for the way James could say some bitchy fucking shit right to the Potters' faces and they’d keep their hands off of him, and it’s not that I wanted him to get walloped, too, of course I didn't; it just, hurt that he was giving just as much sass to his parents as I was to mine but I could never away with it like he could,” he puts down, staring up at Remus worrying at his lower lip as he folds his hands over his mug, his eyes softer than they were though his brow shows vestiges of his vexation. “It was the start of our teenage angst phase and his mood was swinging up, down, all over the place, same as mine was, same as Pete’s was, but when you’re in it, you don’t have the luxury of looking back and reflecting on the fact that we were all just getting ripped apart by teenage bullshit the way I'm able to now, so it got to a boiling point one night when I was over there for dinner, James was in a foul mood, made a huge scene at the table, stormed off upstairs without clearing his plate, and I swooped right in and helped them clean up, got some points out of it, and went right upstairs and gave him a world of shit for having the audacity to behave like that while I was around, I really did; I was angelboy one moment and tyrant in the next, so full of rage I didn’t know what to do with that I was snapping my fingers, telling him to shape up and act right around me, and just taking it all out on him.”

A small gust of a sigh leaves Remus’s nose and that’s good, it means he’s listening closely. “The thing is, though, no matter what was happening at home for me at the time, James was still allowed to be fucked off at his parents sometimes; he just was, that's the truth of it, and I couldn’t go around expecting utter perfection out of him when he was always going to fall short of what I saw as perfection,” he stresses, pointing back at himself. “And it wouldn't be fair to James to go pretending like he wasn’t patient with me about it or didn’t work hard to meet me where I was because, for years there, he never asked me to meet him anywhere, just tweaked his behaviour, let me come over there when I needed a break from mine, and let me enjoy his parents like a pseudo-son would, and it really wouldn’t be fair at all to pretend like he didn’t grow out of that bratty time of his life either.”

“Did he, though?” Remus puts in, going for a sip off his tea, his eyebrows high up his forehead in a polite manner.

Sirius snorts grand, needing a quip out of Remus more than he even knew. “At least toward his mum and dad,” he amends, watching Remus hide his smirk behind his mug. “I’ve really got to hand it to him, he turned that shit around, and these days, he calls them up just to blab about any old thing, and I love him for never holding that time against me because I wasn't alright and he knew that, but in the same vein as giving him a break, it wouldn’t be fair to myself if I said that getting extended time and space away from that house did nothing to help me get better about not snarling at the mere sign of imperfection in the way my mates interacted with their parents, but I do fuck up with it sometimes, I still let envy take over, I still see red where I know shouldn't, and I still take it out on the wrong people, but listen to me, please, because what I said about James goes for you, too: you’re allowed to shade those two with me, your fucking boyfriend, when they unknowingly give your ex ammo to use against you and I shouldn’t get to say anything about it, just as you’re allowed to lay down the law when they’re drilling you about two very touchy subjects back-to-back without worrying about me coming for you about it later, and I’m sorry I let you walk around all evening thinking you were going to have to be bloody perfect from here on out just for the sake of me and my shit."

Remus makes a heavy, imploring noise, holding his tea in one hand while he tugs Sirius's right wrist up to leave a firm kiss over his knuckles, his eyes misty over Sirius's hand. "Tell me one thing, though," Sirius tacks on. "How often would you say I rip into you about this sort of thing?”

“Like, three times in the past two months,” Remus answers, when he can.

Sirius goes still, blinking twice. “That’s a better track record than I thought I had going,” he puts up earnestly.

“You’re brave, asking for answers you’re not quite sure about,” Remus quips, smirking quietly. “Happened today, when I told you I lied about the 'B', and — you know, when she died; that last one, I've long since understood you for and I don't want you beating yourself up for that night, so don't.”

Sirius nods slowly, taking Remus's determined word for it. “Alright, so the dreaded 'B', then,” he raises, moving right along. “And forget the fact that I know so much more about you even as recently as today that gives a lot of colour and context over to that whole 'B' debacle, let's just leave that aside for now: what would we say was the common denominator between that time and today?”

Remus gives him an imploring frown. “Heavy news to do with your family,” he answers. “I knew the 'B' had to have been; so often, you reign me in from panic mode and know the exact right blend of truth and humour to get me to breathe and rethink things, and you did try to do that, you just got frustrated with me in the end, but you don’t start getting genuinely frustrated with me unless you’ve got them rattling around in your skull.”

Sirius hums in careful acceptance. “So, do you think I’ve done alright in between those times?” he checks, nudging Remus’s left knee with his right arm.

Remus huffs a disparaging sigh. “Of course I do,” he returns. “More than, you’ve been a superhero.”

“Then let me keep at it,” Sirius bids kindly. “Three fuck ups in two months are still three fuck ups, I know, but with what I come from, I could be spouting off like that every day, and fucking thankfully I’m not. That doesn't mean it wasn't daft of me to ask you to censor yourself around me, I don’t want you to be policing yourself with me, and that’s especially true in this case; you being devastated by being frozen out by your mum at the worst possible time counts as something you’re just allowed to be.”

Remus sniffs there, lifting his left hand from his mug to wipe fast at his eyes in turn. “Thank you,” he says, tightly done certainly, but it's in earnest, too.

“I didn’t once think what you thought I did, but I know you couldn’t know that,” Sirius extends, keeping a kind, soft tone. “I’m nervous too, Remus, I’m not above feeling worried about this, but to keep my head up, I’m going to have to tell myself that sometimes you shut down on me when you’re frazzled, so it's not that I’m holding her up higher than you; what I’m actually doing is telling myself that she got frazzled and pulled a Remus on you — which, might well have been a Hope move all along, now that I think of it.”

Sirius looks off thoughtfully out of Remus’s window, blinks decidedly once he finds that sounds just about right to himself at least, and looks back at Remus just as he’s going in for a kiss. “That was good,” he forwards him.

“Yeah?” Sirius probes, brightening while his lips still feel Remus’s imprint.

Remus nods quite plainly. “In that, I know I mean well in those cases, even if I'm actively dropping the ball,” he lets him have.

Sirius leans in, leaves an imprint on Remus’s lips this time, and wraps his hands around Remus’s ankles to keep hold of him there. “So, what if, and hear me out—” he prefaces, squeezing Remus’s ankles with it, “—what if, she just got a whole lot of information at one go — information she asked for, yes, but we’ve all asked for answers that we weren’t totally ready to hear, haven't we? She may just need time to process the answers she got and can’t be expected to do that in seconds, just like a certain, other lad I know who’s directly related to her.”

“OK, thank you,” Remus chimes, throwing him quite the face with it.

Sirius snorts once. “As upset as you are, you would not want me having a go at your mum right now; you’d want me to remind you she’s not after your pain,” he instils, and Remus’s face softens to afford him a solemn nod. “I’ll go as far as to bet you a foot rub that she’s giving herself the kind of shit you give yourself when you know you’ve stepped in it, so maybe we could step off of her just a bit here because chances are, she’s already raking herself over the coals as we speak.”

“Oh, that was mean,” Remus returns, staring at Sirius through a brooding squint.

“Does it sound vaguely correct, though?” Sirius raises quizzically.

“Uncomfortably so,” Remus lets him have. “I just don’t know where I’m to even step from here; my dad can’t hang out in limbo forever, but I don’t know if I could handle it if he looked at me like that, too.”

Sirius sits up quite straight and begins a slow shoulder shimmy that picks up speed. “I know something,” he teases.

Remus eyes him and those shoulders of his heedfully. “What?” he whisps.

Sirius grins like a goon. “He already knows I’m hella into you, he just hasn't quite figured out what’s up with you yet,” he extends.

“What?” Remus spouts, not whispering whatsoever with that one before taking it back down. “What did he say?”

Sirius nods vastly, gearing himself up for a solid summary of the intel he’s got. “OK, so I went and brought you up like, three times while we were in the sitting room alone and that’s on top of the four or five times I apparently brought you up while we were trying to fix the mower, but after the last time I did it in there, I thought I saw a wry yet morose sort of smile on his face, so, curious as ever, I prompted him for whatever was going on in that noggin of his and he, went ahead and called me out on exactly how smitten I am with you; did it nicely, don't you worry, and he even went as far as to make a comparison between you and me versus him and Hope, how he waited for her to come online, so to speak, and wanted to give me advice—”

“Stop; stop it,” Remus cuts in, eyes like dinner plates.

Sirius shakes his head. “I won’t,” he grins. “So then, it was like he was really starting to think out loud, getting nervous — word-vomiting, if you will — and tried to give me wholesome advice for my predicament, but he couldn’t decide what would be best for my situation, didn’t want to suggest that I wait around for someone who might not be able to return my feelings, didn’t want to discourage me from it either because he's not even sure what to make of you, and we both know he didn’t think you and Dorcas were a thing, but I think he was going over a bunch of things in real-time; like, only just connecting things, you know? That, maybe, the lack of girls being talked about over the years had less to do with being hyper-focused on school and maybe you just hadn’t quite come online to it just yet — I’m paraphrasing here, but that is the gist I got from him before I ran for you; he's working shit out right now, Remus, and I swear, he sounds almost hopeful about the idea.”

“Sirius,” Remus puts out, only now he’s purposefully hushing himself while flailing his free hand around and trying to keep his tea balanced in the other.

“I know, but isn’t it kind of funny?” Sirius raises. “We both went off and babbled about each other to one of them, to the point where you blurted the whole thing out in a hazy stupor to your mum and I made your dad go, Wow, kiddo; do you need some guidance here?"

The two of them bow forward, each pressing the heel of a palm against their respective mouths to stifle their snickering. “Why are we like this?” Remus puts up, between bursts of breath.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Sirius puts out. “But see? How can I even be upset with you about starting without me when I did the same fucking thing to you?”

“Well, you actually tried to run for me,” Remus points out, too often fair to just about anyone else but himself.

“I’m not upset with you, Remus,” Sirius breaks it to him. “Don’t go doing it for me; that's not going to help any.”

Remus nods reluctantly and breathes in long, looking around his room like he doesn’t recognize it, and it must feel different; why shouldn’t he check if it’s the right room and not a funhouse mirror version of it. “I can hardly believe this,” he heaves.

“I’m barely ahead of you on this one,” Sirius puts up unabashedly. “He’s so close to figuring it out, I swear; he’s at noon, and we just need him over at one o’clock sharp, but that’s it. And, he didn’t even mind that I’m this fucking gone over you, he just apologized ahead of time in case it’d come off crude, addressed my extreme heart-eyes like a fact, and tried to relate to me on it at a base level; me, Remus — isn’t that just lovely?”

Remus's eyes appear overbright in the low light strewing from his lap on his desk. “Sirius,” he implores, tracing his fingertips back and forth over the side of Sirius’s neck. “I’m sort of glad I didn’t go in there, then; you needed that win.”

Sirius feels his own eyes begin to sting, sniffs at once, and shakes his head out, giving a blunt note in his throat and working to control himself. “No; no crying,” he instils within himself more than Remus just then. “You missed him, though, he’s gone to bed; he thought I bolted out of the room out of sheer discomfort because I got back from trying to find you and he was already trying to retreat upstairs, almost like he was putting himself there out of punishment for sticking his foot in his mouth, sound familiar?”

Remus gives a flat laugh, nodding for that. “Just a touch.”

Sirius beams with that. “I really tried to keep him downstairs, but he’s just too damn stubborn.”

The corners of Remus’s mouth turn down. “I’m sorry I wasn’t at least downstairs,” he offers him.

“No, you weren't in the state to be down there,” Sirius maintains. “I didn’t know what’d happened yet, but now that I do, gathering everyone in there at that point would’ve just been yo-yo-ing you around.”

Remus gives a heavy sigh. “It would have been a lot,” he says of it, lifting his left hand from where he’s got both curled around his mug and holding his palm flat by the top of his head to showcase he’s just about done with the slip-and-slide that’s been this day.

“It’s been a Day, so you’re going to take it easy for the night, OK?" Sirius raises. "You and Hope just leave each other alone to process, we can start back up again tomorrow knowing that Lyall's not going to freeze up on you like that, and I do think she'll come around; you can eat my hat if I'm wrong, how about that?”

“Please don’t be wrong,” Remus sticks in there, and Sirius gives him a smooch for continuing to let the two of them be Them.

“I really don’t think I am,” he instils. “And this still isn’t me holding her higher up than you, but listen, she fashioned an entire quilt in time for me to use while I’m here, Remus; she’s a sweetheart, even if she forgets it herself sometimes.”

Remus nods after a long breath in, the both of his hands back to being curled around his mug while he searches Sirius openly with a meek smile on. “I’m so proud of you,” he offers him. “I know exactly how important this was to you and you’re still being so fair to all of us even with the hitches and all of our stubbornness combined.”

“Boy, you have no idea how proud I am of you,” Sirius returns, popping Remus over the right knee. “I’m fine with how things turned out, Remus; I adapt to my surroundings pretty well.”

“More than,” Remus raises it.

Sirius makes sure to pause and bask, leaning up to press their foreheads together, but he's got a thought bubble taking him over from there. “Say, do you think they’ll pool their knowledge together and we’ll wake up with everyone in the know?” he raises him.

Remus hums sheepishly there. “I might’ve told her not to mention it to him as I was fleeing the scene,” he confesses, his brow line moving as he puts a bit of a grimace on.

Sirius straightens out again, nodding once. “Would that stop Lyall from talking to her, though?” he raises next. “Especially if he thinks he flubbed the bro-moment we were having back there beyond repair, poor guy; he really did mean so well with it.”

Remus puts out twice as sheepish a noise. “Why did I tell her that?” he puts up, and clearly they're pouring over separate issues. “That was so mean; I just, caged her up so now she can’t talk to her fucking husband about it without feeling like she’d be directly ignoring my request.”

“OK, we are being so much right now,” Sirius decides, snickering there. “Let’s regroup: they’re both fully-fledged adults who can handle their own shit, so if we wake up tomorrow and everyone’s staring at each other all funny-like, then we’ll know they had a late-night chat of sorts and we won’t be mad at Hope for it because that's her best friend across the hall, but if Lyall passes out ahead of her and they don’t pool their combined gossip together, then he'll be getting some great news come morning and we’ll figure out the rest, OK? We always do.”

Remus breathes in long, nodding heavily before he seals it with a kiss. “Do you want to go in on a new lawnmower for my dad?” he raises, a budding smile on his lips. “I just can’t think of something he’d like more right about now.”

“Yeah, if you let me pay in full,” Sirius answers.

“No, Sirius, I’m helping,” Remus returns.

“Fine, you can help, but we’re not going halfsies on it,” Sirius conditions. “It’s on a pay-what-you-can basis, and that’s my only offer.”

Remus breathes in, holds it, and lets it out with a point up at Sirius. “When I start making real money, you’d better let me foot the bill more often,” he raises pointedly, dusting the knuckle on his forefinger underneath Sirius's chin with a gentle, fighting grit to his teeth.

“That’s about a year and a half on from now, so thank you for the vote of confidence we’ll still be doing this by then,” Sirius tacks on, and Remus’s cheeks go wonderfully rosy with that.

“How are you otherwise?” he asks, looking him over.

Sirius breathes in, thinking it over. “I've been stuck on go, go, go for hours," he admits. "I could really use a cigarette right about now, actually; think my last was outside the mall.”

“Oh, Cunt, go on,” Remus pardons, waving a hand in insistence before pointing it at him. "Might want to go out the front, though, hey?"

Sirius smirks for that, looking over his shoulder toward the clock over on Remus's desk. “Oh, fuck, it’s nine?” he puts up, looking right back at him. "When did that happen?”

Remus nods evenly there. “That feels about right to me,” he offers. “We only got to eating around seven, and the post-dinner debacle sped up then slowed down on repeat, but in the way that I’m aware that time is, in fact, not actually bending against my will, and we've been up here a while.”

Sirius looks back to Remus with both a snort and an accepting nod. “OK, well, if it's that late then I’ve got to ring James, give him an update," he extends. "He'll be very cross with me if I don't."

“Can you tell him to fork the update over to Lily for me for tonight,” Remus bids, smiling weakly. “I'll speak to her in the morning, I just don’t think I could get into the whole thing tonight and she’s also waiting on something.”

“Deal,” Sirius returns him, but then he's not sure where the night's going to go from there and his next question comes out a tad ruefully when he already knows the answer. “Are you going to stay up here tonight?”

“Uh, no; I’m going to wait until I know she’s gone to bed and I’ll come down,” Remus returns bluntly, and certainly not with the answer Sirius was prepared for.

Lupin,” he sends him, a gape/grin on.

“I don’t want to sleep up here without you,” Remus implores. “I just don’t want to make matters worse, so I’m going to wait it out and follow you down in a little while, OK?”

“Perfect,” Sirius echoes, happy with just about anything now. “You’ll be OK up here?”

“Oh, I’ve my pot right here,” Remus forwards, waving a hand toward the teapot.

“Different kind of pot, but do you want to smoke a bit later?” Sirius checks.

“Oh yeah,” Remus assures at once.

Sirius nods diligently. “You be good up here, and text me if you get even a little bit heady, yeah?” he raises.

“I will,” Remus gives him, but he does look so much better off than he did.

Sirius gets another thought bubble and looks curiously over his shoulder and around the room a little bit. “Is your copy of Maurice up here?” he inquires, looking back at Remus with a coy expression on.

Remus stifles a snicker, nodding to affirm before nodding over toward his desk/bookshelf hybrid. “It’s in there,” he extends. “Definitely weathered, but I think the pages are still held together.”

“Well, you’ve that to read for a cheer-up in the meantime,” Sirius lifts up.

“I actually might,” Remus gives him, his eyes bright, “now that you said that.”

“Do it, I want you feeling good,” Sirius tacks on, lifting off of the floor and giving Remus a kiss on the way up.

Remus reaches up to cup the back of Sirius’s head and holds him there as he drags the kiss out, fingers splayed over the back of his head and beneath his low bun, and Sirius feels the charge going through the two of them like a live wire. “See you in a bit,” he whispers, smiling up at Sirius.

Sirius can still see impressions of that smile as he descends the stairs, still feels the press of unmistakably gracious lips on his own as he gets to the foot of them, but there, he’s presented with a choice. As Remus alluded, if he goes out the back, he’s more than likely to pass Hope on the way and risk a whole bout of awkwardness for the both of them; going out front could avoid that completely.

Something doesn’t feel right about plain avoidance. Remus, as far as Sirius is concerned, has already blown past his limit and won the right to tap out for the night, but tiptoeing around the premises could backfire on Sirius and the two of them as a unit, and to that, it could make him seem like some sort of boogeyman-esque figure looming on the property but actively avoiding getting too close to her, and that feels dehumanizing to its core. It’d cheapen what he and Remus are, what they have, give it a sinister note that just isn’t there, and it couldn’t help his own standings with Hope either. He’s no threat, not to Remus or to Hope, and while he hasn’t got substantial proof of that being a worry of hers, if there is any doubt in her mind on that front, then perhaps the mere act of putting himself in her path would be better in the long run than staying off her radar.

With that, he hangs a left when he gets to the hall, heads through the dining room and into the kitchen, and finds the radio still on in there, the kitchen decor still looking fan-fucking-tastic, and it's almost like no news has shaken up half the house. Moving into the den comes with a sense of easy familiarity, as does leaving through the back door, but once he’s outside, he has to pull on that warmth he felt inside to keep wrapped around him. Twilight’s set in, the light fixtures from above cast a yellowish glow over the porch as he strolls down the short side of the ‘L’ and around the bend, and while he does think the porch lights are a nice touch and generally go over well with the outdoor scenery, there's one fixture perched directly above the veranda area that's casting a vaguely spooky glow over Hope knitting down the way and Sirius has to work to crush that read of it right quick when it’s not going to help a thing if he starts letting his imagination run wild; it’s the circumstance they’re in, not the ominous tint of the lighting that’s causing the spooks.

Hope looks up and over at him as he makes it to the stairs, and Sirius glances away from her eyes automatically and trains his gaze on the unfamiliar piece in her lap, but he can’t quite tell what it’ll turn out to be. “What’s this one?” he asks, gesturing toward her work while lingering at the top of the stairs.

“It’ll be a throw pillow eventually,” Hope offers, glancing down at it. “I've only just started it, so there's not much of a shape to it yet.”

“That’ll be nice, though,” Sirius extends, nodding toward the misty blue-grey yarn chosen for the piece. “That’s a good colour.”

“I thought so, too,” Hope offers back, setting her needles down on either side of her lap to free up her hands to lift the square she’s working on. “It doesn't look like much now, but I've an insert to go in once I get enough rows finished and after that, I’m thinking of using a few of the larger buttons that came in the kit and sewing three along here.”

She does a little tap-tap-tap up the would-be center of this future throw pillow for illustration, and Sirius can’t help a smirk. “Like a little cardigan,” he raises.

Hope nods emphatically, a few gusts akin to a smirk leaving her nose. “That was the thought behind it, yeah," she trades him, sheepish for very little reason when Sirius is already obsessed with that choice.

He tips his head to her, finding Hope unbelievably cute even with what's looming over both their heads. “Well, I won’t keep you,” he says, tipping his head to her and moving down the first step. “Just passing through, really.”

“I tried putting you up best I could in there,” Hope passes him, and Sirius stops on the second step and turns back toward her, nodding for it when he already rather found she'd set him up for success, but Hope’s not losing steam. “There are linens in the cupboard in the hall, extra sheets, pillows, and blankets in case you need them, and I put toiletries in there, too — just your basic stuff, but if you find at an inopportune time that you’ve forgotten something behind, they’re there to be used so don’t be shy, and if there's anything else you notice isn't there for some odd reason, just let me know.”

“Thank you, but I'm sure what's there is more than enough,” Sirius assures. "I meant to say it earlier, but I love your taste in hand soap."

“Do you?” Hope engages him, knitting all while she’s looking over, and Sirius can’t help but think that has to be a good sign in itself.

“Oh yeah, trust me; it’s top-notch,” Sirius returns knowingly. “I mean, I like your taste in general, but definitely the soap; the one in the lower level bathroom is incredible, same for the one you put in the cabin, and I’m sure one in the upstairs bathroom is going to be phenomenal and I can’t wait to find out what that one is.”

“Well, then I won’t tell you what it is and let you find out for yourself,” Hope extends, giving him a smile.

“Appreciate that,” he forwards, trying not to rock back and forth on his feet too glowingly, but it's unlikely he's pulling that off so well. “Oh, Lyall wanted me to pass along that he was turning in, but that must have been upwards of an hour ago now.”

“Oh, alright,” Hope accepts. “Thank you for the telegram.”

“He didn’t want you thinking he skipped town, I suppose,” Sirius jests.

“Oh, he wouldn’t go far,” Hope offers.

“Go far or get far?” Sirius raises.

“Either one,” Hope comes back, and Sirius relishes in her not taking that one horribly, but that’s enough pushing his luck, he thinks.

“Alright, well,” he says, turning to head down the rest of the stairs.

“Have you seen him?” Hope sticks in, and quite abruptly at that.

Sirius swings around on the path, looking up and over at her from below. “I have,” he offers, nodding with it. “He’s upstairs, he hasn't taken off into the night or anything."

Hope nods faintly there, certainly not knitting anymore, and Sirius has to wonder if Remus might be the lone force and topic that stops her from keeping on with it. “How is he?” she asks, her stare unblinking.

“Better,” Sirius supplies, and he didn’t necessarily mean it to hang in the air like it does, but now he’s sure he shouldn't leave it like that, pointing up at the open seat on Hope’s right. “May I sit?”

Hope blinks over at him twice before nodding, and he wonders if she’d have waved a hand toward the seat if they weren’t otherwise occupied by her needles. He heads back up the steps and over to settle in the chair, stretching his legs out straight ahead of him before crossing them at the ankles, and looks sidelong at Hope from there. “Well, I’m all caught up now and I’m actually decent soundboard, so you know,” he slips her. “I do have my biases, of course, but I’m a pretty good judge of when it's time to hold tight to them and when to put them aside, at least I like to think.”

Hope gives a minute nod, staring down at her hands in her lap, and Sirius finds there’s a familiarity to it all, but that might have something to do with the fact that he’s spent quite a bit of time with a pensive Remus; he doesn’t mind waiting on her to sort her words out and sort them out she does, but it seems once they're out of her that it was the weight of the words that might've been holding her back.

“I let him down.”

“Woah, alright,” Sirius puts up, half-grimacing. “We’re going there straight out the gate, then.”

Hope looks sidelong at him now. “Well, you’re all caught up, so you'd already know I did,” she returns. “I overwhelmed him; he’s never wanted to disappear faster.”

Sirius breathes in long, nodding his head vaguely. “Well, the cold-case investigation on all matters pertaining to him and the news could've waited a touch longer, I'll agree to that,” he offers, going for a sweet disposition, “but let’s see, did you ask him why he’s destroying everything you and yours built, why he’s spitting on your name, whether he’s indulging in all of this just to spite you, anything like that?”

Hope finally looks at him straight on, taking in a sharp breath before throwing a deep frown on. “Of course not,” she returns woundedly. “Did he say I did?”

“No, Hope, but that’s my point; you could have levelled some of that shit at him,” Sirius maintains. “I’m not saying it went well or that it was the time to freeze him out or turn around and start prodding him for all sorts of personal details, but springing it on you like that was not what we'd planned and he's sorry about that; it'd been a long time coming and the weight of the whole thing was bound to leave him feeling cagey like that.”

“He said as much,” she comments.

“Which part?” Sirius checks.

“He said he was supposed to wait for you,” Hope delivers.

Oh, yeah, we had a whole plan ready to go for months now,” Sirius underlines. “Get you two good and fed, talk each other up like kings, show you we work well together, and swiftly let down the news that we’re oh-so lucky to have found each other over dessert, but we all know how that went.”

“Jesus,” Hope puts out, shutting her eyes and making quite the face. “I didn’t know; I didn’t know.

We know,” Sirius insists. “Doreen was talking your ear off, Lyall went and decided the lawn just had to be done right then and there; it wasn’t just you who derailed it, but we had this thing planned out since May and that’s a long time to have something like that looming over his head; he thought about it all the time, it was just brimming in him.”

“Alright, that accounts for May to tonight,” Hope tacks on. “What happened from December to May, then, hm? What happened there?”

“Well, it was still all shiny and new then,” Sirius extends mystically. “And Remus wasn’t about to announce it until he knew there’d be longevity to it; he’s a big proponent for not speaking too soon, I've learned.”

“Certainly is,” Hope puts up, and there’s some bite to it, definitely. “Only, I don’t know where he got it in his head that I wouldn’t have been open to it—”

Hope cuts off at Sirius’s vague, yet entirely pointed hum. “He told you why,” he puts in, smiling kindly. “I wasn’t there, I know, but I also know he gave you some of his reasons, and he’s got a whole drove of them.”

“I would still have been open to it,” Hope clings to.

“Well, you were certainly open to him dating,” Sirius raises sweetly.

Hope lifts her shoulders quickly, putting out a Remus-eque huff that has Sirius feeling a lot less like he’s about to get booted off the porch. “He was so happy this term,” she attests. “Visibly shining every time I'd been able to see him; he never tells me about who he's seeing, but I knew he was seeing somebody because that? That was the look of love.”

“Yeah, that was 'cause of me,” Sirius chimes, smiling proudly.

“Well, pardon me, then," Hope returns. "Sorry I went with the wrong friend."

Sirius could leave it, he could. He's not going to, but he knows he could. “It’s not that you did it just this one time, though,” he puts it. "It’s that it’s always been the closest female friend of his, even though you knew, at least in some capacity, that he’d been keeping far more company with a specific male friend of his; that’s the message he’s been getting from you for a very long time.”

“Then I wish he hadn’t felt like he couldn’t have corrected me on some of the assumptions I've made,” Hope comes back strong. “And he never did do that; just let me think it for years.”

“Well, he couldn’t,” Sirius puts up. “There's a certain kind of safety in playing the part, but he doesn't want to do it anymore and I know for a fact he told you quite a few times that he wasn’t seeing Dorcas, so you can’t give him shit now for what he didn’t correct you on when he was a teenager when he already kicks himself enough for the both of you; I've personally brought him back from that very place, many times."

Hope puts out a despairing breath. “I can’t wish it hadn’t taken so long?" she raises.

“No no, that's fine,” Sirius offers, lifting his hands plainly, “it's not like coming out is something extremely personal for those who have to, it's not like plenty of people wait decades to share it with their families, it's certainly not like he decided he wanted you two to know him and me better and has been worried about it not landing well for weeks and weeks on top of those years and years tucked away in the closet, and it’s totally not like we both heard you hum-hawing in there about Dorcas while we were trying to get the Great Coming Out Dinner ready—"

Hope gives a weighty sigh there. "OK, this is—"

"You wanted to know why it took so long," Sirius puts up. "And after that last one, I’m surprised he even wanted to go through with it still when that sort of thing can send him right back into thinking you’re not ready to hear it.”

Hope stammers there, and Sirius half-winces, looking down at the porch between his feet knowing he’s gone over the line, but he has to rep Remus where he can; that's his job. “I was excited for him,” she manages. “That’s all.”

“Well, are you still now?” Sirius asks, softening his voice. "He's happy, he's visibly shining, and he's seeing someone; that's something to keep being excited for him about."

“Of course I am,” Hope returns, her shoulders set rigid.

She stews in her seat, but a disgruntled Hope is something Sirius feels strangely at ease with. "Well, he doesn't know that," he comes back with, and at least he didn't have a tone coming with that one.

“I gave birth to him," she puts out. "Nothing changes that; he should know that much.”

“That’s not always enough,” Sirius says candidly, and he can feel Hope’s gaze on him without having to look at her to confirm it. “Sometimes birthing someone doesn’t even enter the equation.”

“He’s part of me,” Hope keeps to it, albeit in a smaller voice. “I could never shun him or, what, drag him off to get him fixed? That’s insanity, and when did I ever give him the impression I’d ever do either one?”

Sirius swallows dryly, working back his envy, pulling Remus forward. “He didn’t think you’d turn your back or try to scare the queer out of him, but as far as he's been able to tell, you've wanted him paired up with a girl his whole life and his type happens to be broody boys,” he reiterates, lifting his hands with it for as light a display as he can offer. “Him being your kid doesn’t automatically guarantee you’ll still support him no matter who he's attracted to, he cares about what you two think of him and he hates the very notion of disappointing you; this isn’t as shocking as it feels, I promise it’s not.”

A tense silence stretches out between them past a full minute, and in time Sirius wonders if he already missed his cue to leave and gears himself up to leave her with that last sentiment, but she speaks before he gathers himself up. “I keep trying to spot the signs I didn't see,” she says distantly, and when Sirius looks over at her, he finds she’s looking out over the property and likely not even really seeing it as she shakes her head absently. "I don't know where they are."

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I couldn’t read him for a while there either,” Sirius lobs her.

“Mm?” she hums, putting her gaze back on him.

“For three long months, I couldn't clock him for very long at all,” Sirius says of it. “I’d go back and forth on it all the time, especially early on; one moment I’d think I got the vibe off of him, the next I’d think I’d conflated it because I wanted him to be interested boys if that could mean he'd be interested in me, but he’s a tough bloke to sort out and I only found out for sure once he told me as much; see what I’m saying?”

Hope considers him with a hum before landing on a specific detail. “Three months of not picking up on it is a lot better than twenty-three years.”

“Well, I doubt he knew right out of the womb, Hope,” Sirius replies wryly, waving her off.

“Just fourteen,” Hope amends, and in the next beat, she’s actively blinking back tears and Sirius feels like a right cunt.

“No, don’t, Hope,” he insists, shifting more toward her in his seat. “If you cry, I’ll cry.”

“Too late,” Hope pushes out, lifting her hands to rub at her eyes, but it’s no use. “He said he was confused for years before then, too; it must have been so lonely for him.”

Sirius swallows around a hitch in his throat, unsure of the direction he ought to go in. “How honest do you want me to be?” he asks first.

Hope sniffs, peeking at Sirius sidelong. “I don’t know,” she answers, and at least she’s being honest herself.

“Well, I can give you a two-parter answer, if you’d like; one’s a bit sad, but the other’s rather nice, I think,” Sirius raises her, and Hope gives a lift of her shoulders but nods him off. “It's lonely coming up like that, it just is, and he and I weren’t raised the same way at all so there are plenty of differences between the ways we came up, but we were still queer kids once and we shared some experiences because of that; namely, the loneliness and the othering.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that last one,” Hope puts in.

“Well, you have a sense that you’re slightly off or just built different, but you can’t name it or even articulate it well because you’re still young and it’s all very abstract, but the othering is everywhere in small ways,” Sirius offers her. “You know those pearl-clutchers, always saying things like, ‘my word, think of the children; they’re far too young to hear about that,’ and alright, but no one ever batted an eye when they handed out colouring pages of the bride and a groom in first grade, did they; that was just fine and dandy, the natural order of things, the default setting, but put two grooms or two brides in the picture and suddenly it’s unthinkable perversion, and it’s just real transparent now, you know, what they chose to push and what they didn’t, but when you do that, when you hold up one, ideal family and that is it, then you’re effectively leaving the queer kids behind to float around in disillusionment and confusion solely because you don’t want to address the fact that some kids aren’t going to understand the language you’re speaking, but fuck ‘em, right? Support one queer kid and they’re all going to end up fucking queer, right? That’s how it works.”

Sirius only realized he’d popped off right around the f-bomb, but there was just no stopping that conclusion. He checks sidelong at Hope, readying himself to reign it in, but she’s sitting back further in her chair and watching him unblinkingly, so perhaps this is exactly the sort of thing she should be hearing. “OK, that one’s big for me, clearly,” he mentions, huffing a sheepish laugh for Hope’s diligent nod. “Sorry for the mouth on me.”

Hope hums there. “I tend to think a well-placed 'fuck' hardly takes away from a good point,” she offers, giving a wave of her right hand. “Go on, hon.”

Sirius breathes in, relocating to where he ended off. "Right, well, this is where more or less where his and my experiences split off because I came from an Aristocratic family with a particularly intense emphasis on Christianity or at least making it doubly sure hit seemed like it, so starting by the time I hit grade school, I was being prepped to staunchly avoid blasphemy of any kind and uphold all sorts of things, but especially the whole 'men shall not lie with men' rhetoric, so I was more aware of the concept and the tension surrounding it before I was into secondary and by the time I hit it, I'd already started poking holes in that rhetoric for other concepts and it didn't take long before I was doing the same with the man-on-man debate, poking holes in the arguments, becoming more aware of myself and why that issue really seemed to matter so much to me, but Remus wasn't fed that sort of rhetoric the way I was and I had to learn through him that you don't need to have that poison fed to you like that when you're young in order to still feel it sting you in other ways," he explains, or tries to. "For him, the othering was in the silence he heard about it at school, it was not knowing anyone else who felt like he did, it was in hearing nothing at school and going back home to a place that carried a 'live and let live' mentality — and honestly, Hope, kudos to you two for that because he was at least able to locate that there were people out there in the world who might've been like him and cling to that, but only hearing about it in the most abstract sense can still run someone down and it ran him right down, and that was before he was told so many times and in so many ways to keep it to himself once he did awaken to it and did find someone who was like him, so this isn't to throw mud at you specifically, it's bigger than a single person or aspect; it's learning through constant reinforcement that you're not quite right and it's not to be discussed, and that is a lonely experience, but there are bright spots in between, there's joy and laughter, and that, I can say for sure."

Hope’s quick with the humming prompt, her face wrought with sorrow, and Sirius isn’t about to make her wait on it. “Well, there are resources and content out there to mine, but you have to really search for them because they’re often not readily available or advertised, but there’s a subculture out there to play around with and sometimes you can find a reflection of yourself in it,” he keeps on. “Queer lit, plays, musicals, music in general, films, media in general, all sorts of areas, and I’m just going to say it: you should ask him about Maurice at some point, alright?”

“Oh?” Hope engages him.

Sirius nods once, smiling for it. “Mhm, and I don’t want to give it away because it was his Thing and he’s so sweet when you get him going about it,” he insists, starting up a goon-grin and he knows it. “And don’t stop there either; ask him about what his experience was like — not all at once, but here and there, try to relate to him on it, you know? Just because you didn’t see it in him then doesn’t mean you can’t try to see him now, and Maurice might actually be the best place to start getting to know him better.”

Hope pushes a heavy breath out, nodding gently. “Thanks for the tip,” she gives him, and it sounds so earnest that Sirius can’t see a reason to think it wasn't. “Did you find something like that?”

Sirius grins like a goon. “Oh, for sure,” he affirms. “I found Freddie in year nine and that was life-affirming.”

Hope’s brilliantly melodic trill of a laugh is everything Sirius could have hoped to hear. “Oh, that just makes a ton of sense, hon,” she gives out heavily.

Sirius smiles ear to ear. “I was so inspired by him,” he maintains. “I'd look at him with stars in my eyes; I felt, 'well, well, well, here’s this specimen of a man who didn’t care what anyone thought of him and was who he was unapologetically, so why the hell shouldn’t I get to do the same?'”

“I love that,” Hope gives him. “You’ve a great moxie about you; I've thought it for a long time.”

Sirius tips his head brightly to her. “Thank you, Hope; I already had moxie by then, but he helped fan the flames, so credit where credit’s due,” he takes it, fans it. “And all of that was to say that yeah, it can be lonely coming up in the world like this without any kind of blueprint and there are times when that loneliness can creep back in, even though we’re much better off now than we ever were then and much, much further on in being kind to ourselves for who we are and not despite it, but here’s what I like to think about when it comes to Remus because it hurts me nearly as much as it does you to think that he was so afraid to speak up and it’s that he turned out to be such a lovely man who loves so strongly despite not having much of a blueprint to go off of; I really have to hand it to him, he’s come such a long way from where he was when I even met him and he was a sweetheart then, too, just a little rougher around the edges.”

“He’s holding himself so differently,” Hope speaks to it. “He’s taller, you know; taller than usual.”

“He is,” Sirius echoes. “And I'll admit it, I get so wrapped up in the end result at times, I have to stop and remind myself to look at all the ways he’s been trying to embrace himself and actively letting himself do that more and more, so the best I can suggest is to do here is just acknowledge what was holding him back for so long, but not only see him for the worst years he had to slug through; there's room for that, but try to focus on the fact that he dug himself out of that spot, that he's often happier than he knows what to do with these days, and that he’s going to keep digging however long it takes him.”

For a notion so positive, Sirius would have thought he’d get Hope smiling some more, but she’s got a morose expression on now, and more noticeably for Sirius, her brows have turned in just like Remus’s do when he’s Thinking. “I should have been more available to him and he wouldn’t have had to do so much digging on his own,” she says of it, but it’s done several beats later and in such a forlorn voice, it curdles whatever’s left in Sirius’s stomach and it's almost like she knows it did. “No, it’s true, in those years, I wasn’t; it was tough, balancing Lyall, the appointments, working through it, but Remus took the back burner and that shouldn’t have happened — I should have made more time for him.”

“OK, thinking like that’s not going to do anyone any good,” Sirius comes in firmly. “He’s never once thought of it that way so don’t you go doing it for him, and moreover, he’d kick my arse for not telling you to quit that right now so I'm obligated to shush you, and personally speaking, you helped raise one of my heroes so I don’t love hearing this either; sorry, Hope.”

“He must’ve thought he couldn’t stack up to everything else,” she counters. “That it wasn’t important enough; that I was too busy with everything else from him to sit me down and ask for help—”

Hope trails off as Sirius clears his throat quite pointedly. “Well, that’s just Remus,” he puts down. “He’d rather shoot himself in the foot than be a bother and even then, he’d regret the foot-shooting thing the second he realized someone would likely have to help him into the ambulance.”

Hope lets out some hybrid between a snort, a groan, and a sigh. “I don’t why that is,” she heaves out, throwing her hands up at a loss for it.

“Well, now you’ve really hit a snag; who do we know that could have possibly passed that trait along to him?” Sirius ponders, and Hope makes the noise again, only there’s a flat laugh somewhere in there this time. “That’s him, Hope. He never wants a fuss while continuously fussing and puttering and worrying about everyone else’s wellbeing, and trying not to make a fuss about anything to do with him often ends up leading to an even bigger fuss down the line; of course it's frustrating, it’s frustrating to hell and back, but y'know what? As much as it is for us, it’s got to be scores more frustrating for him.”

Hope looks over at him through overbright eyes, her shoulders wilted, and Sirius speaks through Hope’s rendered silence. “OK, picture Remus standing in front of a table in a science lab,” he poses. “He's all smocked up, goggles on, and doing one of those volcano projects, only his life is the volcano.”

Hope breathes out a stuttered noise, blinking wildly, and Sirius lifts his left hand to her. “Stay with me here, alright?” he bids, pointing to her, and Hope bites her lower lip, nodding for him to continue. “Remus’s Life as a Volcano, Scene I, Act I: he’s there at the table with all these ingredients and if you ask the playwright, he might suggest the ingredients are meant to be allegories for specific sections of his life; his schooling, his work, his longterm career goals, his mum and dad and their well-being, his boyfriend and his well-being, his mates and theirs, all the things and people he cares about, and I hope you'll notice he doesn’t put himself in there, that knob, but there he is, trying to balance it all, ignoring himself and his needs to make way for everyone else's, sprinkling in bits of each category and taking painstaking measure to be sure it all balances out, but as much as he wants all those things to have equal standing, he’s always compartmentalized those same areas of his life so he can give each one his whole focus, so there he is, trying to do both, be fully present for everybody who needs him to be while maintaining all this separation, and suddenly, the universe comes barreling along, knocks his elbows around, and the whole thing blows up in his face.”

Hope exhales at once. “That was.” She pauses. “Vivid.”

“I’ve a bit of a flair for that kind of thing,” Sirius slips her, a pleasant smile poking at his lips. “And I’m not here to say I’m an expert on him and all he’s got going on; hell, this is just what I know today, OK? I’m still working him out and who knows what tomorrow’s got for me; it’s close to a year now that I’ve been trying to work him out and I still fall short of remembering how hard he tries to make sure everything and everyone he cares about gets a seat at his table, and when they don’t or can't, I often forget just how viscerally he suffers for it.”

Hope gives a resigned hum beside him, but she doesn’t make to speak, and if he’s honest, Sirius isn’t quite done yet as is so he's not so sure he minds. “When I first was getting to know him, I’d study some new part of him, slot that piece into place, and walk around like I’d figured him out, and then he’d up and throw a curveball at me and I’d end up having to work twice as hard to figure him out from there,” he offers her. “It was hella frustrating, I’d only just get to feeling like I knew what I was working with before I’d have to adjust what I thought I knew about him and look at it from a newer angle, but I won’t pretend it wasn’t deeply exciting to me — I couldn't do, I liked that he kept me guessing, kept surprising me, kept turning me on my head, kept keeping me on my toes, and that kept things fresh and new, and we weren’t even close to getting together yet; I mean, trust me, I wanted him, but I still loved the dynamic we had even when we were just mates trying to figure out how to fit each other, I still loved it when we were more than just mates, and I still love that have to work to figure him out now, turn the picture to the side, try to look at it from his perspective while not completely throwing mine out the window either, but he spends so much of his time time bending over backwards to make me feel comfortable and seen, it’s only fair that I keep showing up and trying to meet him somewhere between us, not just where he is but try to tug him and his stubborn heels into the middle more, same he does for me, and it's part of why we work.”

Sirius stops there, swallows slowly, and looks left toward Hope’s wide, misty eyes with a determination he must keep in himself, thinking he owes it to Hope, Remus, and their once-fortified plan. “I know I’m not what you were expecting and it may take time for you to wrap your head around it, and that’s alright,” he says unflinchingly, “but if you leave this spot with anything, then know that I’m in love with your son and I want the world for him, I’d just like to be there while he’s seeing it.”

Hope leans forward quite slowly in her chair, rests her elbows on her soon-to-be throw pillow on her lap, and wipes at her eyes with the heels of her palms. Sirius watches her unblinkingly, unable to decide if that’s a good or bad sign until Hope rests her chin on her right hand and turns her head toward him again, levelling him with a tear-stained smile. “You two are one for the books,” she tosses him, pulling in a big ol' breath. “I think now’s about the time somebody lets me in on how the hell this happened.”

Sirius piques wholeheartedly. “Well, if you want to get technical, I got the ball rolling but he did the heavy lifting,” he supplies, a budding smile dancing on his lips. “It was a long time coming on both our parts.”

“I think I’ll need a touch more than that,” Hope mentions, waving her right hand for allowance. “You may start with you.”

Well, let’s just put it right out in the open; that’s a fit son you’ve got there,” Sirius puts down, a laugh escaping by the end of it, and his smile only widens when he hears Hope’s snort. “I mean, there’s more to it than that, but I felt I should make that clear off the bat.”

“It’s noted,” Hope assures, sitting back in her chair.

“He’s so funny,” Sirius puts up. “Quick as a whip with his commentary, dry as all hell to boot, and I’ve never cried more from laughter or choked on as many drinks as I have since knowing him; he just gets me, knows exactly how to hit my funny bone, and sometimes, he need not say a thing; he simply rests on a single face, turns it towards me when we’re in a situation where commentary wouldn’t be on, and makes me just lose it no matter where we are, and then, I’m the one who ends up looking like an eavesdropping jerk, not him.”

“What’s the face?” Hope bids, and Sirius gives his best shot at duplicating it. “Oh, that’s lethal. If you thought dinner was hard, try being between him and Lyall while out getting a bite somewhere.”

“I’d do anything to experience it though I know I’ll suffer greatly once it’s happening,” Sirius maintains.

“So, he won you over with his wit, then,” Hope probes. “I like that.”

“Absolutely, he did,” Sirius returns. “We started off a bit rocky, mind; we are an opposite pair at first glance, so it was definitely touch-and-go for the first few shifts we were working together, but soon enough, I was elated just to come into work on our common days and see him because he’d make a shift that much better, he was such a laugh. And then, we got into a bit of a row outside work this one night and it was looking real bleak for us, but he turned up next shift after having a Shit Day, the kind that just wouldn’t give him a break, you know, and he got there, stormed through the place to find me, and I thought I was done for when he did, but he just needed to unload on someone who'd listen; he gives me quite the rundown of said Shit Day and I’m torn at this point, OK, because on one hand, he was clearly riled up and needed to let it all out, but on the other, the way he went about it, the way he tells his stories, the voices he puts on for them; it was all just is gold to me, I could hardly keep a straight face through it, and then he was huffing and puffing at me because I’m losing it beside him—”

Hope shakes her head knowingly. “Oh, you mustn’t laugh when he gets the huffs,” she offers sagely.

“Find me a harder rule to follow,” Sirius returns, pulling a startled laugh out of her for it. “That was the day I came online: I just sat with him out there, listened to him pop off, and then, he leaned his gorgeous, sheepish little face against my arm after he'd tuckered himself out from his masterful rant, and that was it; I thought, 'I want that one.'”

Hope gives a wounded little noise beside him. “Does he know that?” she asks.

“Oh, he sure does,” Sirius assures. “Told him all about it. And I’ll be honest, I do like winding him up sometimes, it just gets the sun shining brighter when he’s huffing and puffing at me for winding him up and I don’t think it hurts to get him laughing at himself now and again; I think it can only do him some good, getting him to take himself even just a little less seriously.”

“Oh, if you could do that for him, I’d send you a gift,” Hope offers.

“You’ve already given me one, Hope,” Sirius highlights.

“I’ll send you a second one,” Hope amends easily, and Sirius nods brightly; he's on it either way. “You wouldn’t believe the fuss he made over those tickets, but I suppose we couldn’t have had you working on him then or what sort of surprise would that've been?”

“The tickets?” Sirius raises faintly. “Don’t know what you mean, it's not as if he found me on the terrace outside my home and accosted me over them or anything, and on Christmas Eve, no less.”

Hope looks positively sheepish, but Sirius does detect a hint of amusement off of her. “I did tell him to put off worrying about it for the night and just enjoy himself, but in one ear and out the other,” she puts up idly.

“I mean, he did in the end,” Sirius mentions, tap-tap-tapping his feet like a drum roll on the porch floor in happy memory. “T’was a Happy Christmas all around, and I really can’t say I regret him accosting me out there because it's what got him to finally stop dancing just outside of my reach; after harbouring for him the entirety of the fall season, lucky little me got smooched right where I stood on Christmas Eve so if anything, I owe you twice for letting me handle those tickets because they're what got him to act on the feelings he'd been harbouring for me and suppressing from me for an entire term.”

Hope gives him a bright, wondrous smile. “Did they really?”

Sirius nods emphatically, matching her smile easily. “I didn’t see it coming at all; I mean, was just gobsmacked by him, but I didn’t think he was interested in me like that by then,” he offers up, looking down at his feet again. “Getting you two over there was something I’d thought up after he'd shown up for me during a tough time — uhm, my little brother had just passed and we butted fierce heads on the night I heard, but Remus went far and beyond what he probably should have done, came round to mine in the middle of a torrential downpour just to check up on me, and I know a thing or two about pulling back when I’m feeling at odds with everyone and myself, and I was doing that to him but he wouldn't let me do it for long, the good lad, and then he came to the funeral with me, kept an eye on me afterwards when I really needed it, supported me more than I knew how to thank him for, really; it was all such pure sweetness out of him, but that’s Remus, you know, he doesn’t do good things to get told he’s done good, he does them because loves seeing someone look and feel better after a good deed, and I got through to the end of that awful week because of him and I just knew I had to do something of equal value for him so getting you there to see him felt like the best way to do it, he'd missed you two so much.”

Sirius looks back up at Hope, who looks awfully torn between smiling and not doing that. “I’m glad he was there for you,” she offers him, but her mouth twitches downward. “I’m sorry to hear about your brother, Sirius.”

He nods, biting the inside of his right cheek, afraid to talk and spew things she’s not going to be able to do anything with, and afraid not to in the same breath. “That one hit hard,” he says of it. "We hadn't talked in years. He was only twenty; barely an adult, really.”

Hope hums solemnly. “That’s far too young,” she comments.

Sirius nods again, his eyes stinging. “It comes in waves,” he puts up, and it’s like he can’t stop nodding. “My parents, I couldn’t miss if I tried, but him? It's really coming in waves.”

“Where are they?”

“Hm?” Sirius asks, blinking himself back.

“Your parents,” Hope clarifies, and it’s real clipped.

“Oh, they’re gone, too,” Sirius supplies, and Hope instantly regrets asking, he can just see it. “No, that’s alright; I was dead to them long before either of them went, they wouldn’t have shed a tear for me if I’d bit it first; they’d have sooner popped a bottle to mark the occasion, so don’t you go mourning a couple of kooks because I know I won't be.”

“I’m just sorry, hon,” Hope offers him.

Sirius shakes his head and waves her off for it. “Andromeda's the best our family tree had to offer and thankfully, she got out long before I ever did so I got a stellar trade-off in the end,” he hands her before a pause. “OK, I shouldn’t say that; my uncle Alphard was actually a pretty stand-up chap, I’ve got to say.”

“Was,” Hope hones in, grimacing ahead of time.

“Mm, yeah, he passed just this last year,” Sirius affirms, breathing in long. “It’s almost like they’re all getting picked off one by one, and so many of them were such genuinely awful people that it’s no real loss to the world, but shit, does it hurt when the good ones go, too.”

“How was he a stand-up chap, then?” Hope prompts, and she sure seems hopeful for a peppy anecdote of some sort.

“He was just a good sort,” Sirius offers her. “I wonder now if he blended in just enough to turn up at a function or dinner party, enjoy the salmon puffs, mingle a bit, split when he was just about done with the charade, and then go do his own thing until he was expected to show back up again at the next one, but I didn't think about it much I was a kid; I just thought he was nicer to me than the rest of them were and liked that he’d laugh at my sass so I tended to turn it up even louder whenever he was around.”

Hope does manage a smile there. “And you’ve quite a bit of that,” she trades him, and fair enough when he might as well be named Sassius. “Kudos to him for indulging it.”

“Honestly,” Sirius lets land. “I do wish I'd met up with him before he passed; he left me a fortune in his will, enough to get through to my thirties extremely comfortably and made his children livid with me and him as a result, it was quite the production, and I didn’t even know just how much of an impression I would've had to have made for him to up and decide that's what he was going to be doing with his riches.”

“That was very kind of him,” Hope echoes, appearing grateful for a glimmer of something like light through the dark.

“Yeah, exceptionally kind,” Sirius allows. “I don’t really know how to thank him for it honestly, aside from using it well if that makes sense? First, I got someone to put a whack load of it away and out of my sight, then I bought Priscilla because I'd wanted one for years and years, but I did think Alphard would've been all over that idea, and now, I’ve invested in the venue which I think he’d be proper proud to know, and I’m definitely trying to spoil Remus whenever he’ll let me, but that’s touch-and-go.”

“I know the feeling,” Hope inserts. “Both yours and his, if I'm honest.”

“Oh, I sure know that,” Sirius assures her, smiling cheekily. “In any case, I feel as though I'm using it to his liking, which is probably all I can do; he’s not going to hear me if I shout ‘thanks’ up at the sky or anything.”

Hope pushes a smirk through her nose. “You’re very funny,” she tells him.

“Thanks, Hope,” Sirius chimes.

Hope tries to return his smile, but a big ol’ sigh leaves her instead. “That’s so much loss,” she muses, leaning back in her chair like she's had her energy zapped out of her, "and you’re so young."

Sirius frowns over at her imploringly. “It’s OK, Hope,” he assures. “I’ve got Andromeda, little Dora who loves me like no tomorrow, Ted’s a good sort, and I’ve got Remus, and James, and the rest of those dinguses; I've the best family there is.”

Sirius cannot help the breathy fit he falls into at Hope’s next expulsion of noise, but it might have something to do with the fact that she’s clutching her chest like she’s been shot. “You Lupins are so soft,” he teases, aiming a half-smile over at her.

Hope gives a weary laugh. “We are, no doubt about that,” she echoes, blinking her eyes intently.

“Well, then, get this,” Sirius prefaces. "We pinpointed it just today, but Remus and I officially started dating on Christmas day; it wasn't the easiest to sort out because so much happened over those two days, but from here on out, we'll get to look forward to Christmas twice as much as we already did.”

Hope lifts her hand from her chest and tries to cover her entire visage with it, but her hand is too small for the job and it just looks funny. “Well, that actually is just the sweetest thing,” she returns him.

“Isn’t it just,” Sirius echoes, sitting easy beside an overcome Hope. “You’ll see; plenty more where that came from.”

“I’ve seen some of it already,” Hope raises him, dropping her hand to her lap. “The way he talked about you, it blew a hole through my heart.”

“In a good way?” Sirius checks, eyeing her sidelong.

Hope pauses short, stares off into the middle distance, and bursts into a bout of fatigued laughter, letting her head fall back against the headrest on her chair. “I suppose that wasn’t clear,” she lets him have, lulling her head toward him again. “It was in a good way, but more than I was prepared to hear; I knew I'd love in his eyes, I knew I heard it in his voice, but I didn’t know it was quite that intense for him.”

“Stop, you're making me flush,” Sirius trills, feeling warm and cozy in his seat.

Hope gives up this sordid groan that takes Sirius a beat or two to realize wasn’t in direct reply to him. “Why didn’t I say anything?” she tosses out, evidently reliving the moment. “Anything, Sirius?”

“I think you just said a lot for why you didn’t,” Sirius points out. “Call a spade a spade, we’re all adults here; you didn’t see it coming, it was all very bracing, you wanted details, got them in droves, and—”

“Made him feel even worse for it,” Hope finishes for him.

“I mean, I wasn’t going to put it like that,” Sirius mentions. “He wasn’t doing well there for a while, that's true, but I got him back; he’s already on the mend, he’s going to be OK, and I suggest we let this lie for the night, let you both catch your bearings, and you can try again tomorrow, but listen, as much as that boy knows you’ll love him no matter what—”

“To the moon and back,” Hope cuts in there.

“Exactly, Hope,” Sirius champions. “He does know that, but it would go a long way if it's the first thing he hears from you next, so that’s your assignment, you hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” Hope returns him.

“Good,” Sirius catches it, lifting out of his seat and looking back at her. “Are we good, then?”

Hope readjusts her gaze, and alright, maybe he didn’t have to stand and loom over her to ask the question, but then she's putting her knitting on the table and getting up out of her chair, too. “Come here right now,” she instructs, tugging him in for a tight squeeze, and Sirius wouldn’t be Sirius if he didn’t melt into it. “You’re a good sort, you know that?”

“I get mixed messages on it,” Sirius offers, going for a swallow, “but I want to be.”

“Oh, you already are,” Hope replies, pulling back to smile quietly at him. “I have got to lay myself down, do you need anything before I head up?”

Sirius clicks his tongue thoughtfully for effect, but he’s rather set. “No, all three of you set me up quite well," he assures.

“OK,” Hope accepts. “You have a good night.”

“You too,” he offers her.

Hope turns for the table and gets her knitting all packed up in her wicker bag while Sirius makes his way down the porch stairs and onto the path, waiting for her to at least turn the bend before he strikes a stark Freddie pose in celebration and dances up the cobblestones. It’s too dark out now to see much ahead of him the further he gets into the garden and from the glow of the porch lights, but then they get turned out anyway a few beats later, but it’s as if Freddie’s dancing him out of there for he hardly has to think about the twists and turns he’s taking as he bops along.

Out of the garden, he zooms across the grass and up into the A-frame, dropping down on the side of the bed where he remembers dropping his trousers earlier on and has a feel around on the floor in the relative pitch black of the cabin, and locates the rectangular growth on the floorboards after a few moments, plucking his pack off of the floor. He tosses it on the bed for the meantime, peels his shirt off, and retrieves Remus’s billowy jumper from where he left it earlier, pulling that on before deciding he’s not all that interested in wearing jeans anymore and shimmying out of those, too. He looks down at his bare legs, sparing a smirk toward the zealously oversized jumper, and grabs starkly for the bug spray on the desk to spritz it all over his bottom half as well as a healthy amount for his top half as well; not tonight, bug-os.

He grabs up his pack, slips a cigarette out of it, and digs both his mobile and lighter out of their respective pockets in his abandoned jeans, cradling his bounty in his left arm as he grabs at his clothes with his right hand and lobs them over at his suitcase to get them out of the way for now. He heads back out into the night, lights up his cigarette, and enjoys the first few puffs for himself before dialling for James, heading down the steps and moving for the hammock.

James picks up before the first ring is even through. “You really know how to keep a girl waiting,” he accuses.

“Alright, relax,” Sirius bids, stretching out on the hammock. “This is the first free moment I’ve had all evening and you ought to be grateful I’m sharing it with you.”

“Who else?” James puts up.

“Well, my man’s going to be here in no time,” Sirius answers, and as the words leave his mouth, he hears a door shut and looks over at the porch from the hammock to find Remus very on his way. “And literally, here he comes now, so, quickly: it’s all good, Hope and Lyall are both incredible in their own ways, and I feel like a new man; how’s that for an update?”

“Oi, you’re not going anywhere,” James declines. “Get Remus on here, too; I bet he’s levitating over there.”

“Yes and no,” Sirius extends, looking over as Remus is just descending into the garden. “Now’s not the time to be giving him hordes of attention; it really isn’t, James.”

“Yeah, ‘cause you want to,” James returns.

“Maybe so,” Sirius replies. “I’ll give you a full update tomorrow, OK? No skimming.”

“Oh, you’ll pen me in?”

“A full hour, madame; I swear, I’ll be all yours.”

“I’m going to make Remus hold you to it.”

“I’d say you don’t need to do that, but you won’t hear it anyway.”

“No, I won’t; learn to save your breath, mate.”

Sirius huffs long, giving into a plain smile, and looks over at the garden as Remus comes out of it and makes a beeline for the A-frame. “I thought she’d never go upstairs,” he huffs, zooming up the steps and into the cabin.

“That’s my fault, sorry,” Sirius calls to him.

“What he said,” James pipes up, incredibly loudly into the phone like Remus is just going to hear that.

“OK, thanks, cupcake,” Sirius chimes, lifting off of the hammock and following Remus into the cabin.

He stops just in the doorway, looking around the small room that’s entirely Remus-less, and hears the suction pop of the freezer door echo back into the room, his heart sinking with it. This one’s got to be semi-low on the scale if Remus could have even made it all the way here and spoken fairly well, if a bit begrudgingly, but still, it’s some shit timing. “I’ve really got to go now,” he tells James, knocking the door shut behind him and leaving his lighter on the desk.

“Shit, what's happened?” James bids, and it must have been Sirius's tone that tipped him off.

“Mayday,” Sirius forwards.

He hears a distant but elongated 'no' echo out before he presses to end the call, leaves that on the desk beside Remus’s sunglasses that must have just been put there for they weren’t in here before, and pads over to the hallway as the freezer door shuts again. He turns in for the kitchenette as Remus is pulling the mask on over his eyes and giving out a wondrous groan. “What are we dealing with?” he whispers, lingering in the hall as he slips his mobile back into its preferred pocket. “Can’t be more than a five, can it?”

“I’m going with that,” Remus returns, moving out of the kitchen and toward his voice. “Four, maybe five; fingers crossed it stays that way.”

Sirius nods, realizes Remus can’t see him do it, and offers his arms up for a hug as Remus gets to him. “I’m sorry, Remus,” he offers, wrapping him up. “It’s a shit cap on an already wobbly day.”

Remus hums a monotone note for it, lifting his arms to give Sirius a tight squeeze. “Yeah, well, I stressed through most of it, had a big ol’ fight with you, went out into the sun without my sunnies twice, and had a panic attack,” he gives back. “It’d have been a miracle if I didn’t fucking get one after all of that, let’s just be honest.”

“You make a good point,” Sirius gives him, squeezing him back.

Remus starts coaxing Sirius back out of the hall and toward the bed. “I want to lay down and I want you to rub right here,” he instructs, tapping hard at his left temple with his free hand, and Sirius makes the mistake of blending the mask in with the rest of Remus's visage. "Yes?"

Sirius bites down on his lower lip, stifling a laugh as much as he possibly can while he stares at the very open and exceptionally dolled-up eyes on the mask and not far above the mega frown on Remus’s face. “I’m all yours,” he tries to say.

“Are you laughing?” Remus bids.

“No,” Sirius puts out tightly, meanwhile a whole batch of breathy laughs keep leaving his nose and giving him away. Remus huffs grand, going around Sirius and feeling ahead of him for the edge of the bed. “Hold on, you; I’ll help.”

“I’m already here,” Remus returns, and he is already climbing onto the bed, that is certainly true.

“Wait, let’s get you out of all that,” Sirius bids, coaxing Remus to turn around on the bed. "You've got to be cooking in those."

Remus plants himself down on the end of it and Sirius gets down in front of him to work at the buttons of his cardigan, pushing it off of Remus’s shoulders once those are taken care of, and Remus helps with the last bit by lifting his arms when necessary to help get the sleeves off of his arms. He even goes the extra mile and peels his shirt up about halfway over his face before Sirius reaches one hand in from above to hold the mask in place while bringing the other hand up from below and weighing the mask down that way.

It works fairly well; the mask mostly stays on as Remus tugs the shirt collar over his head, though one side of it does teeter up at an angle, but then Sirius stares right at it and starts stifling laughter all over again to mixed results. “Would you quit it?” Remus sends him. "They're just eyes."

“I’m sorry, but it’s funny,” Sirius defends, working at the fly of the jeans Remus knicked from him. “If it were an eight or higher I wouldn’t be doing it this much, you know that.”

Remus grumbles a bit but he doesn’t argue the point much further than that when it's frankly a lived truth for the both of them, deciding instead to lean back on the heels of his palms with his head bent forward and hoist his hips up so Sirius can shimmy his jeans down. The very moment he's truly free from the confines of his outerwear, however, Remus backs up the bed at a sluggish pace and flomps back in the direct centre of it while Sirius balls up Remus’s clothes, shoots them over toward his suitcase when it's likely Remus would not appreciate a folding session just now, and climbs onto the bed himself, crawling up it on Remus's left and settling down on his right side.

Remus shifts in close and wiggles up against him, his left temple coming in hot. "Please, I hate it," he puts out.

"I'm right here," Sirius assures, wrapping him up tight before reaching his right hand over to reach underneath the elastic of the mask to knead his fingertips at Remus’s problem area. “Did you take a boost?”

“Yeah,” Remus answers, a few beats behind him. “Twenty ago so, anytime now.”

“OK,” Sirius returns, easing some more with that. “Hey, one quick thing; I just had the best conversation with your mum.”

“You did?” Remus asks, lagged for certain, but he's following well enough.

“Mhm,” Sirius hums. “I won’t start now, but it was good, Remus; you’ll be so happy to hear it.”

Remus hums faintly. “Tell me after?” he bids.

“‘Course,” Sirius assures, leaving a kiss on Remus’s forehead.

 

-

 

Sirius stirs quite suddenly to a light tapping on his right shoulder, leans halfway up in bed, and peers around the faint glow of lamplight in his vicinity before something long, white, and definitely blurry gets placed in his direct eyeline and a voice sounds from his right. "You want some of this?"

"Whassat?" Sirius croaks out, lifting his right hand to bat at it.

"It's a joint; don't break it," Remus snickers.

Sirius settles on his back again with the new knowledge he has, blinks the pinner into vision, and gives up a sleepy hum. "Time is it?" he raises, shutting his eyes to give them a few more moments to adjust.

"Half-one," Remus supplies.

"Oh, shit," Sirius returns him. "I fell asleep."

He hears nothing but a parade of smirking beside him. "I almost didn't want to wake you, but then I thought you'd likely be more cross with me if I didn't," Remus offers.

"Yeah," Sirius chimes. "I would've been."

"Well, glad I read that one right," Remus returns amusedly. "Plus, you'll go right back to sleep once this is done, I'd imagine."

Sirius hums to allow it, breathing in long through a stretch, and hoists himself up enough to sit back against his pillow, reopening his eyes and testing them out while generating the energy to leave the bed. His vision isn't all that much better, but Remus is starting to form into a person and not just a blob of skin with some clothing on, so there is that. Sirius looks him over, registering that he's not bothered putting a shirt on but has knicked his flannels, a fine decision when they do tend to hang low on Remus's waist, and lifts his gaze, blinking at the mop of curls atop Remus's head that are going this and that way from sleep, but all in all, he looks solid for being post-cluster. "Were you able to rest up?"

"I was, yeah," Remus returns. "I woke up a little while ago, but wide awake like I'd slept for six years and thought I'd try to make going back to sleep a little easier."

"Good plan; don't want an unplanned kip to fuck your sleep up," Sirius returns, breaking into a yawn by the end of it and peering over at Remus again once that's done with. "Did I crap out before you?"

"Just a little bit," Remus offers, giving Sirius's frown a quick wave-off. "The boost had already kicked in by then and you didn't get a kip in at all today so I didn't mind; I wasn't that far behind you, I don't think."

"Did it stay at a five?" Sirius asks.

"Went down from there, even," Remus shares. "I was surprised; with all that went on today, we could have been in for a knockout so I suppose we'll have to call it luck and not a final slap to the face on an already heaping day."

"Who are you?" Sirius inquires, garnering a smirk out of Remus. "I mean, don't get me wrong; I like this Sirius energy you're giving me, but it is surprising."

"It took some time to get here," Remus trades him. "When it first came on, I cycled back through the day to figure out what could've gone wrong and when I came up with quite a few easy answers, I thought I was in for a shit time, but we did get lucky with it and that's really all I've got."

Sirius hums in agreement before his lips start twitching downward again. "Sorry I chased you out into the sun without them on," he forwards.

"It's more like you chased after me," Remus amends it. "I'm the one who went out without them on."

"I shouldn't have taken them off you, though," Sirius raises, but then that doesn't sit well in him when he really needed to see Remus's eyes at the time. "Or, I should have just grabbed you and tugged you back inside."

"I forgot to put them on twice, so I'm really the one who mucked up here," Remus puts down. "Once with you, once with my mum."

"Alright, this could go on forever and ever, so why don't we both agree to do better," Sirius puts up, and Remus gives a small laugh, nodding for it. "I mean, we're usually right on the ball with it, but today was an exception."

"Yeah, it was," Remus allows, fiddling with the pinner. "I think we should just call it and resume as we were."

Sirius smiles over at him, thinking he's got to be doing some good for Remus if he's responding this well so soon after a case; the difference between May and now is striking, and he loves to see it. "Mm, but did you write in the book?" he asks, scooting himself toward the edge of the bed.

"No, it's upstairs," Remus relays, leaving the bed on his side of it. "I made notes on my mobile, so I'll copy them down when I get up there next."

"So on the ball," Sirius delivers him, setting his feet down on the floorboards and pushing himself off of the bed.

"I tried to be," Remus offers, moving ahead of Sirius for the door.

"Sorry I'm no help with stats this time, I'm usually your go-to guy," Sirius lets him have, following Remus out of the cabin and onto the front steps.

"That's alright, think of it like a vacation," Remus pardons, taking a seat on the top step and leaving enough room for Sirius to sit beside him, but they'll be nice and cozy this way so Sirius can hardly complain about Remus's placement. "I ballparked it, so I may be off by a few minutes give or take; it started coming on just before half-nine, I took the boost, came downstairs after my mum went up and that was about twenty minutes out from there, and I got a look at the time once it tapered off for good and it was quarter after ten or so; about forty-five minutes, loosely of course."

"Another quickie," Sirius puts up, giving a light shoulder shimmy in celebration.

"I'll make sure to jot that summation down," Remus supplies, letting the joint dangle from his mouth while he holds his left palm out for a lighter.

"Shit, it's on the desk, hold up," Sirius bids, getting up and going inside again.

While he's in there, he thinks Remus might still be feeling a bit warm still if he thought going outside shirtless was a fine idea, but it's guaranteed he's going to be chilly in a few minutes' time. He grabs his quilt to bring back with him, holds the lighter over Remus's head, and slowly lowers it into his eye line, garnering a smirk out of Remus before he swipes it from him. Sirius takes his spot back again, grabs the quilt from both ends, and swings it around to toss it over both their shoulders, placing his hand on Remus's back and starting up a slow rub.

"Mm, tell me about my mum," Remus bids, flicking the lighter for punctuation before passing it over the end of the pinner.

"Oh, my Cunt, Remus; she's run a fucking mile in the right direction," Sirius states, nodding vastly as Remus's brows go right up his forehead as he pulls off of the joint. "The moral of the tale is that it wasn't really to do with you or me or the two dicks between us, she's more embarrassed by herself in a lot of ways."

Remus gives a wounded noise in his throat, letting his haul out in a quick gust. "Well, I don't want her to be embarrassed," he puts up.

"I don't think that's really up to you, and I mean that kindly," Sirius tacks on. "She wishes she'd seen it sooner; the time frame is her biggest issue, you were right, but she's more upset she didn't spot it sooner or didn't sense you struggling with it."

"Well, I didn't really want her to," Remus supplies evenly, going for another puff off the joint to ensure it stays lit.

"That's what I told her," he echoes, giving a strong pat-pat-pat on Remus's left knee for it. "I mean, we went here, there, and everywhere with it, so my summary is mostly going to be highlights because even I can't possibly act out both our parts for you verbatim, but I did my best to pick her up off the proverbial floor and do right by you at the same time, and then I went on and on in so many ways about the fucking intense love I have for her son and did move her to tears because she called us 'one for the books,' so just know that she's really come far in just a couple hours."

Remus ducks his head quickly, breathes in long, and looks back over at Sirius with overbright eyes. "Thank you for doing that," he offers.

"I was happy to," Sirius assures, tracing the fingertips on his right hand around in circles between Remus's shoulder blades. "I wasn't initially going to go out the back in case I'd be bugging her, but at the same time, I just wanted to be on her radar, you know? Remind her that I'm not actually a stranger in her home and right off the bat she was Hospitality Hope, trying to be sure I was all set up well, but then she asked about you with this deep-seated woe about her and I just couldn't leave her there like that."

"Thank you," Remus repeats, more intensely even than the last, and passes the joint off to Sirius like it's a reward almost.

Sirius budges Remus's left arm with his right one, takes a pull off of the joint, and holds up his left forefinger to assure he's not done with his tale yet, and Remus turns his head to leave a kiss over Sirius's jawline as the exhale comes, and it's just so lovely that they still get to do this, even if it's much later on than they'd expected the unwinding to occur. "So, I tried to get her out of the mud and over toward teary acceptance, and I think I did pretty well on that front, but I say that less to boast—"

"'Less' is the operative word here," Remus puts in, nodding.

Sirius nods for it as well, smiling the whole time he tries to get more of it out. "I say it more because you're not going to be waking up to the ice queen and I didn't want you thinking you would," he puts down. "She wants you happy, Remus; she saw you were happy all over the first half of the year and she's going to come back swinging about this, and I mean that in a good way, not a bad one."

Remus smirks there. "Well, I didn't think she'd chase me around the yard with a swinging broom, somehow."

"That was so Lyall of you," Sirius hisses sidelong at him, lifting the joint to take an amused pull off of it.

Remus huffs grand, shutting his eyes. "Shit, it really was," he contends. "I'm a dad at twenty-three and I don't even have a kid."

"I like that about you," Sirius returns lively, tapping Remus so he'll know there's a pinner waiting for him.

Remus gives an accepting sigh, opening his eyes and taking it back from Sirius. "She was nice to you?" he checks, pulling off the joint with his gaze quite unmoving as he keeps it on Sirius.

"She was so nice," Sirius nods, choosing to grin there. "Eventually."

Remus blinks once, lets the cloud out, and clears his throat. "What?" he asks politely.

"Bit lippy at times, but then again, so was I," Sirius offers for it. "The thing is, she couldn't wrap her head around the fact that she might not have cultivated a relationship with you that would've been freeing enough for you to correct her on things like pronouns, and it got a bit heated because I couldn't not rep you and the amount of stressing and worrying you've done about that very thing in itself so I used a bit of tough love on her, I did, but I don't know, some things need to be set in stone; are you mad?"

Remus stares over at him while holding in a new haul, waits a beat or three, and shakes his head, letting his lungful go. "No, I'm not," he replies.

Sirius nods once, nudging him. "Turns out, I'm ready to bat for you even if it's against your dear mum," he offers him, and Remus nudges him right back, ducking his head through a reluctant smile. "But, that's not where it ended whatsoever, OK? I caught a glimpse of her going through the stages; at first it was all meek, feeble sadness, then it got a bit bitey and defensive, but then it went into missing the signs, her confusion about that, then to the what-ifs like, 'what if I'd done this or that better,' which, didn't necessarily shock me, only it did when she landed on, 'what if I hadn't been too busy for him,' in terms of your dad being sick and her juggling it all, feeling like she'd left you behind, and I felt like you would not have wanted me to let her keep on that road?"

"No, never, no," Remus returns on a dime, handing the roach back over to him. "That's your reward; finish him."

Sirius snorts, taking the last haul off of the pinner and holding it in to make it count, but by the time he's letting it out, he thinks he ought to be a little more transparent about another point of possible contention. "OK, so, at one point, she did get really, really caught up in your younger, more confusing years," he starts, unravelling the dead filter while he talks. "The preteen years, after the Awakening, and particularly, the loneliness you'd have felt got her completely pained, and I wanted to be honest with her but fair, too, so I didn't want to say 'no, it wasn't like that at all,' because that's just not fair to you or what it was like, so I tried to talk about the loneliness and the othering you felt to highlight that you don't have to come from my background to be able to feel so alone it, and it seemed right at the time and like I was doing right by you and your experience, but I'm sorry I spoke for you there."

Sirius looks up from the unravelled filter he's just holding onto now and catches Remus looking left and right, a frown etched on his lips. "I'm not?" he raises, sending a half-smile, half-frown over to him.

Sirius does a similar eye movement. "Is that because you're very newly high?" he checks.

Remus looks up and out over the moonlit yard ahead of them, breathing in and puffing it back out. "Not exceptionally," he offers, looking back at him again.

"I made sure to say it wasn't all broody and that you never experienced joy through those years," Sirius tacks on. "And I did tell her to ask you more about it, get to know that time for you better, I told her to ask you about Maurice since you get so cute about it and your eyes go a-popping—"

"I can't help it," Remus puts up, smiling wryly.

"I know you can't, that's what makes it so pure and sweet," Sirius puts down. "I thought she could use a bit of sweetness that actually came about during a time when you were so muted."

"Then what's the issue?" Remus whispers.

"I didn't run it by you first," Sirius offers.

Remus squints over at him. "What were you going to do, pause and run up to check with me and then run back down?" he puts up.

"Not speak for you at all, maybe?" Sirius raises.

"To me, it sounds like you helped conceptualize what I'd already unloaded on her without warning," Remus trades him. "So, maybe you did me a solid there, actually?"

And Sirius officially starts to lose steam. "Well, that was my intention, but I'm just checking that I didn't fuck up with it," he forfeits. "I keep doing that with you, but you're my favourite and I don't like it when you're unimpressed with me."

"Alright, you know what, I actually think this is rather sweet so don't ruin it," Remus comes back, turning in more toward him on their shared step. "It's a nice feeling, knowing that you hear me when I talk; it means I didn't just imagine you being present for all those conversations we had."

"Of course I was, you dink," Sirius huffs at him, smiling away. "I listen to you."

"Well, it's nice when I get reminded of it in times where I don't expect it," Remus gives back, smiling now too.

"Well, then I'm glad," Sirius returns, his mouth muscles twitching. "I just didn't want you to be blind-sighted if she came to you and brought it up, especially if you're in the middle of trying to disarm a bomb or something and really can't handle it."

Remus pitches forward, curling in and writhing through his mirth. "So thoughtful," he tosses out.

"That's me," Sirius chimes, ducking his own head through a bout of snickers before he takes in a good, long breath of fresh, country air.

Remus lifts out of his curled position with a push for fresh air himself, looking over at Sirius with a smile that's almost too fond for him to go and pretend it isn't; those eyes are so warm. "You did good," he extends, turning to leave a tender kiss on Sirius's lips and pulling back from it with a contented breath through his nose. "Did she really say we're one for the books, or was that you and some creative liberty teaming up?"

"No no, she said it verbatim," Sirius insists, excitement welling back up in him. "She liked our anniversary date, too, and I might've told her a bit about Christmas and the get-together story because she wanted to know how it happened, but I omitted any mention of your slutty, slutty ways."

Remus's snort echoes out over this side of the yard and perhaps the other side, Sirius isn't there to know. "I should hope you did," he returns.

Sirius nods diligently. "Don't you worry," he assures. "I did tell her you planted one on me and kickstarted the whole thing, but that's just the truth."

"You really did get to talking," Remus observes.

"Oh, we sure did," Sirius maintains. "You wait, soon enough, she and I will be a couple'a gals twittering away on the veranda while you and Lyall share amused yet bemused glances over your mugs."

"I can't wait," Remus extends, his fond smile back right where it was he sways back and forth a little on the spot. "Thank you — I could say that a thousand times and it wouldn't be enough."

"I'm just so glad I didn't go out the front?" Sirius raises. "Look at all we would've missed, and if you were already going to sleep a bit better knowing Lyall will be on our side, think of how good you'll sleep now, hm?"

Remus brightens with that sentiment, giving up a gratified noise. "I want to do that," he puts up. "Can we kiss a bit first, though?"

"Yeah, we can," Sirius returns at once, lifting off of their shared step and draping his side of the quilt over Remus’s shoulders while he’s still exposed to the elements.

He heads up the stairs and into the A-frame with that, looks around the main room now that there’s lamplight to utilize, and spots a bin tucked in by the far side of the desk in the room, moving to drop the filter into it and looking back at the door as Remus shuts it with his back, staring hazily into the middle distance.

“FFFFFuck,” he drags out, making quite the face. “My toothbrush is up in my room.”

At first, Sirius only dissolves into stitches for the method the information came in, but he's got a passable solution a few beats on from there. “Wait,” he puts out boisterously, scooting out of the main room and garnering Remus to brace himself strongly, “your mum said she put extra toiletries out here in case I’d forgotten something.”

“Did she?” Remus raises brightly. “What a sneaky mum.”

“A bro without realizing it, really,” Sirius raises it, garnering a snort out of Remus for it as he heads for the hall. “I didn’t see anything in the cabinet earlier, but let's see in here.”

Remus gasps. “I did see one in there,” he shoots over at him, quite psyched about the memory finally coming back.

Sirius sends him a pfft over his shoulder as he opens the hall closet. "Bit late on that one."

Remus sends him a pronounced shush. “Fourth down, it’s a tiny little one.”

Sirius peers into it and follows Remus’s directive, spotting a travel-sized toothbrush on the third shelf down from the one at his eye level and reaches in for it, holding it up like the Olympic torch before Remus takes it up, swiping it out of Sirius’s hand and heading for the loo. The two of them stand at the mirror, smiling, smirking, and making faces at each other while they get their teeth brushed and sorted out, and then it’s back to bed for them. They don’t settle in quite yet, but Remus decides to settle down on Sirius and snogging him silly is a prime use of their pre-sleep time, and the only time Sirius objects to that is when they’re both starting to show signs of drifting and he feels an odd bit on preemptive FOMO wafting over him.

He leans up and sticks his face in the crook of Remus’s neck, breathing him in and humming lightly. “Don’t let me sleep in too late,” he bids.

“You sure?” Remus asks. “I think you earned it, personally.”

“I don’t want to miss anything snoozing away out here,” Sirius expresses.

Remus turns his head and presses his lips to the top of Sirius’s head. “OK, I won’t,” he assures.

 

-

 

Sirius blinks awake some hours later with Billie Holiday crooning in his head and while that’s not a bad way to wake up at all, it being obviously daylight has him starting up in bed, living out visions of it being so far past noon that it isn’t even funny and bracing his palms down hard on the bed on either side of himself as he looks around the room on high alert, but a bout of snickers to his left suggest that Remus is here and found that specific part exceptionally funny.

Sirius peers accusingly over at him sitting up in bed, fully clothed and laying over the comforter with his legs crossed at the ankles. “You said you’d wake me,” he sends him.

“I was waiting for nine,” Remus defends easily.

Sirius looks for the clock on his bedside table and wouldn’t you know it, they’re about ten minutes out from there, looking back over at Remus and taking in the dampened head o’ curls beside him. “I see you’ve been up and about,” he observes.

“I woke up around six and knew I wasn’t getting back to sleep,” Remus offers him.

“Really?” Sirius asks, going into a half-grimace.

“Not in a bad way, I was just very much awake,” Remus tacks on, smiling over at him. “Wired, I suppose.”

Sirius nods, humming to accept that, and has a gander over Remus’s choice of attire, but neither his shirt nor his jeans seem to belong to Sirius, so that must mean he’s been up to the house already. “Anyone else up yet?”

“By now, maybe,” Remus shares. “It was about seven when I went in, but it was quiet as a mouse.”

Sirius hums sleepily for it. “I s'pose it is Saturday,” he raises, reaching behind his head to pull on the elastic holding the last remnants of yesterday's bun together, and gives quite smirk over the state of his hair as he pulls his fingers through it. “Alright, I need to do something about this.”

“Shame,” Remus replies, just smiling away over there.

“Have you just been chilling here?” Sirius bids, quite impressed.

Remus lifts his mobile from beneath the ruffled mound in the comforter that Sirius’s body is creating. "I've been talking to Lily,” he offers. “She’s about to head to work so we’re done now, but we were going back and forth for a while there.”

Sirius hums a bright note for that, digging himself out from under the comforter. “Is she all up to date now?” he bids, scooting himself toward the end of the bed.

“Well, she knows we’re somewhere in limbo, but with good promise,” Remus shares.

Sirius nods through a substantial yawn, pushing himself off the end of the bed. “Oh, uhm, Clustsertown came round right as I was trying to give James a quick rundown and he was already none too pleased that I wasn’t going to be on long with him as is, so I said I’d dedicate an hour to him at some point today,” he extends, giving into a stretch at the foot of the bed, and Remus offers a lenient hum for it, waving him off. “I might sneak off for a bit and give him the full scoop, but I’ll do it before we go to the market and whatnot.”

Remus hums an abrupt note there. “Oh, my mum’s got a late lunch with Do later on, so we’ll probably be getting the car mid-afternoon and won’t have to rush the outing or anything,” he extends.

“Even better,” Sirius returns, heading down the hall and into the loo.

“I need a tea, do you want me to make you a coffee?” Remus calls.

“Yes, yes, and yes,” Sirius calls back, lifting his right leg to foot the toilet seat up.

After that’s over with, he gathers up his tote and brings it into the shower with him, deciding this one will have a major focus on his hair, so he does that first off and leaves the conditioner in while he gets his body all rinsed and silky-smooth before rinsing his hair out completely. He breathes in more lemony goodness, basks in the warmth of the shower, and pushes the shower rod down just before the point of pruning. He foots sudsy water closer to the drain after the water’s shut off, packs his tote back up so Remus won’t heckle him later on for leaving his essentials strewn about the admittedly sparse shelving space in the wee bathroom, and grabs his deodorant out of it before zipping it up and sticking it upright on the ledge in the top right corner of the tub. He leaves the stick on the edge of the tub, tugs his towel down from the far end of the curtain rod, and alerts as Remus’s voice sounds from the doorway to the bathroom.

“I’ve good news and some not-so-good news,” he declares.

“In that order, please,” Sirius bids, giving his legs a good rub down.

“Well, I brought you coffee and pie,” Remus offers, and Sirius gives a bright, enticed trill for it, “but my dad’s truck isn’t in the driveway and I’ve a strong sense he’s already gone out to get a new mower.”

“That little shit,” Sirius returns, pushing the shower curtain aside and stepping onto the bath mat. He looks up and over at Remus, who’s taken to lingering in the bathroom doorway with his tea in hand and aiming a circumstantially agreeable smile back at him. “Do you think he’d make a huge fuss if we tried to pay him back for it?”

“I’m sure he will,” Remus answers diplomatically, choosing to take a sip there, his eyebrows rising with it, “but is that going to stop us any?”

“No, it’s not,” Sirius returns avidly. He gives his body a final towel-over before he dips forward to collect his hair up into the towel and twist it up to sit perched on his head. “He also needs new guitar strings so when we’re out later, I’d like to pick a pack for him.”

“Does he?” Remus bids, piquing.

“Oh, yeah; real bad,” Sirius echoes, laughing for it as he reaches back for his deodorant. “His D-string split right in half while he was trying to tune it, and I’ve a feeling the others aren’t doing so hot either so getting him a new set might just be for the best.”

“OK, we’ll put that on the list,” Remus says of it, smiling behind his mug. “There’s also an ice cream parlour I thought I’d take you to as well if you're into that idea.”

“Oho,” Sirius trills, rolling his deodorant on. “I really am getting the royal treatment.”

“They make great stuff,” Remus passes along. “My mum gets a pint of the mint chip one they offer as a little treat, and it's her absolute favourite thing in the world.”

Sirius pops the cap back on the stick and puts it away in the medicine cabinet. “So, the order is mint chip, you, Lyall, knitting,” he offers, using a pair of flattened palms to showcase the tier list.

“Yeah, just about,” Remus allows.

“She wasn't downstairs, I take it?” Sirius raises, grabbing Remus’s jumper off of the minuscule counter space he left it on and stooping to pick up his discarded briefs off of the floor.

“No, but her car is still there, so she’s got to be here,” Remus supplies. “I don’t think she’s up and around yet.”

“Well, we did gab into the night,” Sirius offers, bringing his sleep clothes with them with him as he moves for the doorway, leaving a smooch on Remus’s lips as he slips past him. “Good for her if she’s sleeping in.”

“I hope she got to bed at a reasonable time,” Remus raises, reaching his arms around Sirius’s waist and walking with him down the wee hallway.

“Oh, she looked real tuckered out; I’m sure she knocked out pretty soon after she went up,” Sirius assures, leading them into the main room and over toward his side of the bed to get to his suitcase. “What should I put on my body? And don’t say ‘clothes’ because that’s not the answer I’m looking for.”

Remus smirks, letting go of him to have a seat on the bed facing him. “You’ll look good in anything,” he answers, going for a bit of tea.

“Well, that’s not going to help me choose, is it,” Sirius raises, but he does feel warmer in his cheeks. He kneels down in front of it, sifts through a few choices, and comes up with two options for shirts he’ll be happy to wear both around the house and the town eventually, holding them up for Remus’s input. “Alright: black but light and blousey, or white but cotton?”

“Well, you hardly feel the elements as is, so material isn’t much of a factor,” Remus raises.

“No, I suppose you’re right,” Sirius allows, tipping his head once toward him. “Disregard that bit, then; what feels right to you?”

“Well, what are you going to wear for trousers?” Remus asks. “That’ll help.”

“I was thinking the fucking chinos, if I’m honest,” Sirius smirks, lifting the folded pair of black pantaloons out of the suitcase.

“Oh, then you have to go with the white,” Remus returns promptly. “It’s done.”

“See, you’re my muse,” Sirius gives him, pulling a new pair of briefs out of his suitcase.

He gets dressed fairly quickly, but the towel around his head slips and slides through his attempt to get his shirt on over it, and then he just lets his hair be free of its confines in order to officially get the shirt on. Air drying it is, he thinks, and really, the damp strands hanging down around his neck are rather refreshing once he does them fly free. He brings his towel back to the bathroom to hang it up, heads back to the main room, and gives an enticed breath as he goes for the coffee and pie combo sitting on the desk waiting for him.

“Did you have pie?” he asks, having a sit in the chair and scooting it on an angle so he’s not completely facing away from Remus.

“I did, but much earlier on,” Remus supplies, giving a smirk there. “Although, in the time between when I had my slice and when I went to get yours, a slice definitely went missing so I’m thinking we’re not the ones who chose pie for breakfast.”

Sirius hums a bright note at the idea of Lyall being that much of a fan of their work, shoulder-shimmies as he picks up the fork hanging out on the little pie plate, and has himself a great chunk off the point of his slice. “It’s funny,” he raises, a few beats after having it, “I know we had a little taste of it last night, but I couldn’t really even taste it at the time?”

“No, me neither,” Remus trades him. “It was a shame because you did so well with it.”

“Hey, you’re the one who found it, I was just following directions,” Sirius trades him, reaching for the mug of black coffee on the desk and gesturing it toward Remus with a bright smile on. “It’s like you know in your bones when I’ll want black and when I won’t.”

“I really just feel it out depending on the previous day,” Remus shares, smiling from over on the bed.

“Hasn’t steered us wrong yet,” Sirius awards him, going for a sip off it.

The slice of pie isn’t long for this world in that it belongs in his stomach and Sirius is adamant that it goes where it’s meant to. Once he’s finished, he pushes out of his seat, happy with the way the dessert pie turned out, happy that Lyall wholeheartedly agrees, and niccing to get a cigarette in him, but he ought to bring the plate in first and maybe top off his cup. “Is there more coffee?” he asks, lifting out of his seat.

“Oh, I made a whole pot,” Remus assures, pushing off the bed.

“Perfect,” Sirius returns, gathering up the dishes.

“Wait, sunblock,” Remus reminds him.

“Bug spray,” Sirius returns him, leaving the dishes and grabbing both provisions off of the desk.

Remus moves up by Sirius's left to leave his mug by the dishes. “I did the block already,” he forwards.

Sirius lets him have the spray before him then and works on covering as much open skin as he can manage by himself, and once Remus is done with his modest spritzing he helps Sirius out with the back of his neck, and goes and smears some underneath Sirius's shirt and over his shoulders because he's Remus and he worries, and once Sirius gets the bug spray back he unleashes a whole cloud of it on his body. “Remind me to swipe another bottle,” Remus mentions, eyeing Sirius’s display. "We're probably going to run out by this time tomorrow otherwise."

“Let’s just grab a huge one while we’re out,” Sirius offers up.

“You know what, at this rate, we should just do that,” Remus agrees, moving for the pile of worn clothes Sirius started last night. “I’m thinking of at least collecting items for a load, too—”

“Oi,” he halts him. “You can carry them up to the house, but I’m tossing them down that chute, you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Remus echoes, giving him a keen smile as he piles various items into his arms and straightens back up with them held to him when finished. “Can you stick my sunnies on me?”

Sirius reaches for them on the desk and opens them up, slipping them on for him. “Give me one more sec,” he bids.

He drains the dregs of his coffee, leaving his mug on the desk to free up his left hand to get the door open, and lets Remus go on through it with his armful before he tucks the mug underneath his right arm in order to free the same hand and get the door shut behind them. He follows Remus down from the a-frame steps and across the yard, walking backwards for a few steps to get another glimpse of the property and sighing wistfully over just how green everything is. He swings round again and Remus into the garden and up to the house from there, finding it odd to stroll inside the house and not hear music playing from the kitchen when it was so much a part of both the afternoon and evening prior.

Remus turns back once they’re inside and leans his head in closer to Sirius. "Push them up?” he bids.

Sirius gives light hum, tucking his mug under his right arm again and reaching to prop his sunnies up on his head, and Remus turns his head to give Sirius’s left wrist a quick kiss in thanks. Sirius follows him into the quiet kitchen with his stomach all in a tizzy, leaves his dishes on the sink for now, and holds his arms out for Remus’s pile with an avid smile on.

“OK, you go toss them and I’m going to get the washer loaded,” Remus decides, leaving the pile with him and heading for the door to the basement.

Sirius goes through the dining room as Remus heads down the basement stairs, the two of them meet up pretty well in the same spot, just at different heights of the house, and Sirius braces his armful over to his left side and pins it to the wall to get a hand free to open up the door to the chute, putting a lot into each of his tosses and giving out sound effects to go with.

Greatly satisfied, Sirius heads back to the kitchen, returns to the sink to run the taps, and digs the dish soap out from down below, Billie Holiday back at the front of his mind while he dries the plate off and doesn’t see much reason not to hum and sway to the swanky tune playing in his memory bank as he figures out which cupboard it goes in exactly that it goes in.

He sticks the plate away, sways his hips back and forth as he moves to grab his coffee mug, and brings it back toward the percolator at the meeting point between the countertops, turning to point at the basement doorway as Remus ascends to the foot of the stairs and presuming the lad’s avid smile has much to do with his approval for this morning’s tune.

"For you,” he croons at him, doing his best Billie as he beckons Remus toward him, “maybe I’m a fool, but it’s fun...

Sirius reaches behind him to pat for the handle of the coffee pot and brings it around front of him, pausing to give Remus a chance to take over from there, but the boy only smirks. “I can't do that this early,” he insists, shaking his head with it, but he does move in to hold Sirius at the hips and match his swaying, and that’s a fine compromise in and of itself.

Sirius keeps right on with it, holding the pot and his mug out to the right to avoid a problem while pouring the cup. “People say you rule me with one wave of your hand,” he quavers, keeping a half-eye on Remus and a half-eye on his mug, “darling it’s grand—”

A voice trills over from what sounds like the stairs. “They just don’t understand.

Sirius and Remus both gape/grin at the same go. “Did the crooning wake you?” Sirius tosses up.

“Oh, no, it was time,” Hope returns, the stairs creaking with every other step now that Sirius isn’t performing.

Sirius leaves a warm kiss on Remus's lips, reaching to slide the coffee pot back in over the element while Remus gives his hips a parting squeeze before he lets them go, and in moments, Hope is turning into the room from the dining room, her gaze going right to her son. Remus’s expression says a hell of a lot in one go, as does Hope’s frankly, and Sirius hides his mouth behind his mug as a wholly verklempt Remus goes right to his equally verklempt mum and stoops to take her into a massive squeeze.

Sirius watches over the brim of his mug as Hope’s hands lift to grasp at Remus’s shirt near the bottom of his shoulder blades and hears whispers of some of that unconditional love stuff from over where he is, and that would have been enough to know she took his homework assignment to heart, but then he hears Hope push out a tight instruction.

“Get over here,” she implores.

Sirius stands to attention, leaves his mug on the table on the way by, and pads over to them as instructed, coming in on Remus’s left to squeeze into the embrace and tossing his left arm over the back of Hope’s shoulders.

Hope pulls back enough to look up and between the two of them, her eyes overbright as they take to lingering on Remus. “I like him,” she says warmly, though a more wistful sigh does come out of her next. “It’s just a shame he’s not much of a looker, hm.”

Remus seems to startle himself with the laugh that comes tumbling out of his throat. “I know, but you can’t have it all,” he returns thickly.

Hope looks right to Sirius, who’s nothing but a blob of human mirth at the moment. “A Billie fan too, hm?” she raises, smiling up at him.

Sirius works to cut his mirth off prematurely. “I’m a Remus fan,” he sniffs. “Billie’s OK, I guess.”

Hope’s startled laugh really is just lovely the more that he gets to hear it. “Oh, he’s a keeper,” she instils, pointing up at Remus, who doesn't quite seem to be able to handle what’s happening despite being debriefed to expect joy and laughter to come for he lifts his hands out from around them to cover his entire face instead, so maybe the poor guy just needs a moment or two to digest it all, but frankly, so does Sirius now.

“OK, I’m just going to give you two a little time,” he motions, leaning in to leave a kiss on the shell of Remus’s incredibly rouge left ear and giving Hope a distinct but keen nod before he goes to grab his coffee off of the table.

He gets a warm smile from Hope on the way out of the kitchen, practically glides out the back door, and takes in a gargantuan breath as he goes down the porch. He makes it to the garden before he lights up and makes it through the garden and out to the yard before the tears start, but it’s those good tears again; he’s got his vices in hand, he’s got a stellar view of the property, and he’s just going to let them fall as needed.

He finishes up his cigarette and stuffs the end of it into his pocket, but his tear-fest doesn’t last long past that point and the reason for that comes in the form of a bright red truck rolling up quite abruptly from behind the shed before doing a quick u-ie and backing up cleanly to the right side of the shed; Sirius smirks grand, has to admit he’s a huge fan of whatever's happening here, and sips off his mug as he watches the driver's side door thump open and Lyall slide out of the truck.

He hoists himself to the ground and looks around at the house, spotting Sirius over at the outskirts of the garden and giving a massive wave to beckon him over. “Come check her out,” he calls out, displaying his hands toward the bed of the truck.

Sirius heads over there with his coffee in hand, padding up to the cargo bed as Lyall pops the door down, and there’s a red and black fuckin’ Cadillac of a rider mower just chilling in there in all her glory with a big ol’ gas canister nearby it.

Sirius barks out a laugh. “Love her, but did you just walk in and say, ‘I’ll take the floor model and that’s my final offer?’” he raises.

Lyall snorts. “No, see, I had a think on it and yes, I could have gone to a big box store, but in times like these, it’s important to remember to give Bubba a shout first,” he explains.

“He just had one laying around?” Sirius bids, but there would be harder things to believe than that, frankly.

"Not him, but he knew a guy," Lyall extends.

Sirius nods amusedly. “I get the feeling that’s not the first time someone’s said that.”

“Good intuition,” Lyall forwards, moving on to giving the mower a tap on the side. “Bubba made the call, set it all up, and her previous owner is an honest sort, has farmland not far from here, but he upgraded to a right beast of a mower recently and was looking to sell the ol’ girl anyhow, and look at her: a beaut, just one model behind the going one, and the man let me hop on and give her a spin even, and shit, does she ride smoothly; you’ll see, I’ll let you have a spin, too.”

“I’d be honoured,” Sirius extends, looking over his left shoulder toward the shed where the older girl sits shipwrecked. "What are we to do with the ole girl?"

"I don't fucking know, Sirius," Lyall sighs. "If you come across a landfill anywhere nearby, you let me know."

Sirius smirks as he goes for a sip off his mug, giving a finger-gun with his free hand in reply and pointing toward the new lady in Lyall's life with the same hand. “Was she comparable to the going rate in-store?” he inquires.

Lyall gives a snort for that. “What’s the opposite of highway robbery?” he raises.

“Sainthood?” Sirius sounds out, going for a squint.

“Then it was that,” Lyall extends. “Bubba rang back with the man’s name, address, model details, pricing, and I could have laughed him straight off the line over what the man was asking for her, but the Bubba’s Friends and Family Discount had already been arranged, the shit, and the other guy wouldn’t take any more of my money either so that’s two shits I’ve dealt with today and it’s not even noon yet.”

As much as Sirius is enjoying storytime with Lyall, he hasn’t a clue how to gauge what the fuck that price would have been; he could ballpark it, use the going retail price as a cap and go down from there, but he wouldn’t know how far to roll back the price without the input of the advisory council (Remus). His only other option would be to come right out and ask Lyall what he paid, but if he does that, the man's going to laugh him right off the property and therefore, he can do very little else without Remus as backup and resolves to put the investigation on pause for now.

“Do you want help unloading her?” he asks, sticking his mug off to the far left side of the cargo bed before giving Lyall a wry smile. "Or wait, sorry, you’ll want to try lugging her down all by yourself first, won't you; I don’t want to be the third shit today, you know what I mean?”

“You already are the third shit for that one,” Lyall barks back.

There’s something so lovely about the amusement on Lyall's face, that there’s no legitimate bite to his bark, and it’s all just been so lovely with him from the moment Sirius set foot out here that he’s helpless in sidling up to Lyall and going in for a bear hug. It’s definitely a manoeuvre of the risqué variety in that he can tell for a moment or three that Lyall’s not sure what’s to be done about this, but then again, the clap he gives Sirius’s back from there isn’t as stiff as it could've been after getting surprise-hugged seemingly out of nowhere.

“Hey, Dad?” Remus calls, and Sirius glances to the left and finds him overlooking them from the railing of the veranda with a keen smile on. "We’ve been together since Christmas, but thanks for trying to help out with it.”

Sirius presses his lips together as Lyall moves much quicker than he did with the back pat, but it definitely comes with a whole whack load of finger jabs aimed at Sirius’s gut and now he knows exactly Remus got those from; it’s come full circle.

“You are the third shit,” he sends him, jabbing Sirius again.

“What does that mean?” Remus puts up.

“Told you I wasn’t running from you,” Sirius attests, pointing up at Lyall. “I was trying to herd those two into the house so we could fucking tell you already; we’d planned to do it over dessert, but we couldn’t keep either of you in the same room as us for—”

“Oh, that’s not good enough,” Lyall cuts in. “You let me go on and on—"

“He was in shock you even said it, Dad,” Remus slides in, smiling down on them from above. “Happily in shock, I should say.”

“He’s right, I was,” Sirius echoes.

“Then you’re both shits,” Lyall returns, pointing at the two of them in turn, “three and four.”

“Who are the first two, then?” Remus bids, lifting his hands quizzically.

“Mm, Bubba and a guy who sold him this,” Sirius passes him, pointing over at Lyall’s sweet ride.

Lyall perks over talk of his new baby. “Where’s mum?” he bids. “She’s got to see this.”

“She’s making herself breakfast since the rest of us already had pie,” Remus passes along. “Sorry, did I hear that right; you got it from ‘a guy?’”

“One of Bubba’s mates, come on now,” Lyall huffs.

“Well, that’s fair, then,” Remus replies, dropping his raised brows. “Did you get her for a good price?”

“He got the Bubba’s Friends and Family Discount,” Sirius passes along, smiling after it.

“Ooh,” Remus trills, looking over at his dad and giving an easy scratch beneath the bridge of his sunglasses. “What’s that in values?”

“What are you trying to do?” Lyall demands. “She was a steal, that’s enough.”

“Oh, but you said you wanted a gift, too, didn’t you?” Remus raises, smiling kindly.

Lyall sputters wildly, flying his right hand at the mower. “That’s not a kitschy pair of dice, is it,” he states.

“Ohh, go to an art installation; they’ll work extraordinarily hard to convince you that’s a pair of dice,” Sirius puts in, plucking his coffee mug off of the cargo bed.

“I don’t know what that fucking means,” Lyall returns.

“That’s the name of the game for those things, I hear,” Remus extends.

“Quit distracting me,” Lyall returns him. “We’re not doing this.”

“Yes, we are, Dad,” Remus replies plainly. “We’d decided to do it at store price even, but since Bubba took care of that, just tell us the amount you paid for her and let us take care of the rest; it’s really that simple.”

Lyall’s quiet for a moment, looks to Sirius sipping his coffee brightly, and points at it. “Is there more of that?”

“Mm, there’s plenty left,” Sirius assures.

“Good, we’ll deal with her after that,” Lyall returns, stalking off toward the garden presumably to get back into the house.

Sirius looks up at Remus as Remus looks to him. “He’ll tell my mum and we’ll see if she’ll tell us,” Remus raises. “And if she won't, we’ll pay Bubba a visit.”

“I love your mind,” Sirius forwards. Remus ducks his head through a smirk, lifting it again to aim a sunshine smile down at him. “You look good.”

“I feel good,” Remus echoes.

The corners of Sirius’s lips twitch. “You coming down here or am I going up there?”

Remus tips his head up once, requesting Sirius come to him, and Sirius leaves his mug on the bed before climbing right up to the veranda ledge with the finesse he earned many years ago when hopping fences was just one part of a successful Friday night, glad to see that's not gone anywhere in the years he hasn't had to.

“Sirius,” Remus startles, but a laugh escapes him anyway. “I thought you were just going to go around.”

“Nah," Sirius returns easily, swinging one leg over the railing before boosting the other one over the beam.

He hops down onto the porch and tugs a snickering Remus in for a mother of a kiss, and the best part about it is Remus gives it all right back to him.

Chapter 25: 25.

Chapter Text

The two of them put a pause on their canoodling to really just smush foreheads together and smile like goons at each other while Lyall makes his way through the garden below the porch, but they both alert to his closer presence as he comes trudging up the steps.

“Wait a tic — Sirius?" he calls out, definitively holding the belief Sirius would still be over by the truck by the way he pitches his voice and right reeling as he spots him on the porch. “Did you leap up here?”

“Practically did,” Remus offers amusedly, doing a swivel around on his feet to face Lyall as he makes it to the top of the stairs.

Sirius moves in behind Remus with that. “It was a cross between a climb and a vault,” he offers, hooking his chin over Remus’s right shoulder.

“Wily,” Lyall says of it, reaching his right hand out toward Sirius in the next beat. “Christmas.”

“You heard right,” Sirius echoes, throwing him a keen smile.

Lyall’s eyes go for a squint while his expression heads into slightly more wry territories. “Had you already been pining by then?”

“Like a tree,” Sirius affirms. “Months of it, even.”

Remus gives a huff there. “I pined after him for longer than he did me,” he inserts.

“Two weeks at most,” Sirius returns, sneaking his arms around Remus’s middle. “What happened was, we danced around each other and missed our respective signals all throughout fall, so by the time Christmas came around, we were at the heights of our individual suffering and the dam couldn’t hold any longer.”

“Were the tickets an act of courtship, then?” Lyall raises, looking like his whole world just set into place.

"Well, listen, I won’t pretend I didn’t hope with some part of me that the tickets would get me on an even playing field with him," Sirius cops to it, giving Remus's midriff a jostle, "but overall, I was just trying to do some good for this one; I knew he couldn’t get home for Christmas, I'd already invited him to our little shindig, and rather than only fill the void that way, I thought stepping it up a notch and bringing you two to him so you could come along to said shindig would be a far better option. Am I going to complain that my brilliant idea got him to quit dancing out of my reach? Of course not, but that was a lovely bonus.”

Lyall’s mouth goes into a funny little twitch before a sheepish half-grimace replaces it, and it’s like staring at Remus 2.0 all over again. “I’m real sorry about that tantrum, then,” he offers, giving in to a light shuffle on his feet.

“Oh, please; it was nothing,” Sirius pardons, flickering his gaze sidelong toward Remus. “I was fairly used to his behaviour by then so I wasn’t going into that thinking there wouldn’t be some pushback, but Hope stayed on the line with me and it all worked out.”

“Yes, well, she can’t hang up on a telemarketer,” Lyall supplies.

“I have gathered that,” Sirius returns brightly. “Water under the bridge: I prefer to focus on the moment when Remus found me out on my terrace after you three arrived and scolded me so heavily for arranging the deal without his prior knowledge that I genuinely thought he was cutting ties with me on Christmas Eve of all days, and then he went and snogged me in a fitful frenzy instead—" Sirius pauses to send Remus's newly pointed cough a sweet smile, "—sorry, is that not what happened, Honeybun?"

“Does everybody need to know the full set-up?” Remus raises.

“Yes?” Sirius puts back emphatically. “That’s the magic of it; what a left turn.”

Lyall lifts his hands to wave them around for attention. “Wait, wait, wait,” he demands, pointing toward Remus with a combined air of pride and surprise, “you made the first move?"

Remus spares his dad a smirk underneath Sirius’s bright bark. “He was bold, got to give him that,” he supplies.

“I do want to point out that I wasn’t scolding him so much as I was absolutely flabbergasted by the gesture and didn’t know how to handle it,” Remus puts in kindly. “He’d been very kind to me up until then, but the tickets were the absolute last straw and I couldn’t stop myself from expressing my gratitude for the gift; he just loves leaving that part out.”

Lyall sends out a profoundly flat laugh. “Just like you left this whole thing out of every one of our conversations since?” he raises. “Seems to me you’re quite the match.”

Sirius feels Remus takes an inaudible breath in, but it comes back out with the sound on. “I know it’s been some time, but I wanted to tell you two in person, not over the phone or in a letter — or on Skype, so don’t even try pointing that out,” he tacks on, reading Lyall’s puff-up quite well, it seems. “I wanted it done in person and for him to be there for it, but how often do I get to visit? It had to be after my term ended and this was the best week for the both of us.”

“Sorry, were we not visiting you over Christmas?” Lyall ponders. “I seem to remember us spending the whole of Boxing Day with the two of you, or was that all a dream?”

Remus gives a grand huff. “We were a day old, Dad,” he returns. “I wasn’t going to go making announcements that early on; I didn’t want to scare him off.”

Lyall gives a snort. “I doubt you’d have done that somehow.”

Remus gives an ever-so-slight nudge underneath Sirius’s chin for a little bit of help. “Mm, that’d have been early for me as well,” he sticks in there. “I told him to tell me when he was ready to and he very did go pick the time, place, occasion, arranged the whole thing really; it just didn’t go the way we intended it to, as we all know now.”

“Fine, so it didn’t,” Lyall lets land, but the lingering issue for him continues to do just that, “but you didn’t have to let me harp on and on like a—”

“Yes, I did,” Sirius insists. “I bolted out of there to get him and Hope once you got so close to the truth it was physically painful for me to sit there and have you be a literal hair away from the target, but before that point, I needed to hear what you had to say.”

Lyall sighs grand. “What I had to say was misguided, Sirius,” he stresses, making a face all over again for it.

“No, it wasn’t,” Remus assures.

“You called it, Lyall,” Sirius echoes. “‘You’re one smitten lad,’ you said; I agreed vehemently and wanted to see where you were going with it, that’s all.”

“You made him so happy,” Remus instils, and like the resident cherub he is, he reaches up to pose his hands underneath Sirius’s visage for a bit of show-and-tell. “This face shone over the two cents you gave him.”

“His did, too,” Sirius puts in. “The both of us were positively glowing.”

“Because you knew something I didn’t,” Lyall puts in begrudgingly.

“We weren’t up there chortling over it, Dad,” Remus denies.

“Whooping's more like it,” Sirius offers. “You were so nice to me about it.”

Lyall gives into a squint. “Why wouldn’t I have been?” he puts up.

Sirius goes to speak right as Remus does and the two of them lock eyes sidelong before Remus waves for him to go ahead. “Well, I’m definitely a man,” he supplies, “who was harbouring after your unavailable-to-me son as far as you knew, and you didn’t even blink.”

“Why should I have?” Lyall doubles down. “It’s all just people, isn’t it?”

As refreshing as it is for Sirius to contend with what the shiny side of the coin looks like compared to the muckier one, Lyall’s clearly not going to get it if he’s missing the link between the two. “Yeah, it is,” he lets land, “but unfortunately, not everybody sees it that way and you can take it from me; my father wouldn’t look me in the eye for years after he found out about my interest in people, as you so eloquently put it.”

“And the next time he did, it was to cast him out on the street,” Remus comes in. “That’s what he’s working from, so whether it—”

Lyall certifiably fumes and fires off from there. “Well, that there’s a pussy,” he tosses out.

Remus grabs for the railing on his left to hold onto through his mirth while Sirius chooses to duck his face down behind the line of Remus’s right shoulder and hold onto his middle for dear life, but then Remus starts leaning a little too far to the left for comfort when he’s running the risk of ending up in the shrubbery down below the railing and Sirius gives his best attempt at rightening him, but their combined mirth only appears to have Lyall stewing even more.

“What’s funny about this?” he lobs them. “Why’ve I got to act anything like him?”

“You don’t, Dad, but it's refreshing to have it be this much of a non-issue for you,” Remus keeps at him. "It's surprising now and it was surprising for him last night, so with that in mind, can we really hold it against him for letting you say your piece?”

“Well, not anymore, we can’t,” Lyall snaps, tossing a hand toward Sirius. “Where is he, hm? London? You give me his number and I’ll gladly have a word or three.”

Sirius comes back up for air, leaning his chin back over Remus’s shoulder with a watery smile. “His body’s certainly there.”

“He’s long gone, Dad,” Remus says for it, and Sirius hugs him tighter for the Hail Mary he throws after it.

Lyall doesn’t seem to find the state of things quite so satisfying, his visage hardening over in real-time. “Does your mum know about this yet?” he demands, pointing between the two of them.

“I — yes,” Remus answers.

“Great,” Lyall returns, trudging up the porch away from them and around the bend. “Sirius, raincheck on that lawn.”

“A—alright,” Sirius calls after him, looking left at Remus. “Well, I think we’re off his shit list.”

Remus tilts his head back and forth, staring off at the spot where his dad once stood. “It stands to reason,” he echoes, but the sound of the back door slamming shut floats back their way right about then. “Hell’s shaking, mind.”

Sirius gape/grins sidelong at Remus for the thousand-pound vitriol he’s carrying for his dear old ‘rents, and Remus walks a thoroughly bouldered Sirius over to the window of the den to peer into the room. “Oh, he’s gone straight for her,” he details.

Sirius snickers, squinting in past the glare on the window to get a peek, but the den’s empty now and he can’t see much of the kitchen from this vantage point, so they must be positioned somewhere beyond the doorway. “Poor girl,” he raises. “Just trying to make her porridge.”

“She hates porridge,” Remus passes him.

“The complexities of your mum’s taste just keep getting better and better,” Sirius passes back, but his new smile falters when Remus wiggles out of his hold to turn a careful smile toward him, folding his hands at his middle.

“So, I might’ve told my mum you didn’t come from a supportive home during my word-vomit session and so, I really wouldn’t have had much right to complain about you giving her details of my own days of yore because I didn't clear that with you before I gave her that background information,” he raises delicately, wringing his hands together, “but you ought to know that if he’s indeed gone to her to rant about the putrid state of the world, he’s gone and picked a person who’s already got some base knowledge of where you come from.”

Sirius steps in to stop Remus's fiddling by simply giving his hands a hold. “They were going to have to know, Remus; I get whispy-eyed over being given a quilt,” he extends him, and Remus reworks his mouth around a reluctant smile. “And wouldn’t you know, I told her a bit about them myself and she reacted similarly to how he did, if a bit more understated."

"She did?" Remus prompts.

Sirius gives the hands underneath his a firm squeeze. "She wanted to know where the fuck they were before she found out they’re in the ground," he puts up. "Those two are quite a pair in that sense, so he's likely gone to the exact right person to huff and puff about injustice.”

Remus relaxes his shoulders as he turns Sirius’s hands over and lifts them to leave a kiss on his wrists in turn. "Are you happy with the way that went?"

“I'm rejuvenated,” Sirius answers, wholly and completely charmed by this lad.

Remus tilts his head back and forth evenly, pushing a half-smirk through his nose. “Well, I suppose I should've figured that with the vaulting and all,” he raises.

“A definite side effect,” Sirius allows. "I'm great, Remus; all three of you are treasures."

Remus lets go of his hands to move in close for a tight hug — or at least it seemed like it for upwards of ten to fifteen seconds and then starts leaning his chin further over Sirius’s right shoulder than would be comfortable to anyone and seems to glance around behind Sirius from there. “You checkin’ me out back there?” he checks.

Remus smirks nearby Sirius’s ear. “I’m trying to see if you’ve got your pack on you,” he explains.

“I sure do,” Sirius says, reaching behind himself to pull his pack out of his back left pocket. “Did you want one?”

“Well, my dad's fired up and my mum's all weepy, so I can’t really say how long they’ll be in there for,” Remus relays. “We had a bit of a sorry spree in there: I apologized for effectively sewing her mouth shut, she apologized for going cold on me, but through all that, I found out that those two missed each other last night and again this morning so they’ve quite a bit of information to corroborate.”

Sirius nods for it. “We’ll give them a wide berth for now,” he echoes, pulling a cigarette free from his pack.

Remus hums an affirmation as he looks around them, but ultimately decides on sitting over on the chairs at the end of the veranda, having a seat over on the chair Hope was in just last night. “Might as well if we’re going to be sitting ducks,” he offers, sweeping his hand to the open spot on his right.

Sirius lights the cigarette for him since he might as well, strolling over to pass it off to Remus, and leaves his pack open on the little table between the chairs, passing in front of Remus's chair and climbing back over the porch railing.

A pfft echoes out from behind him. “Again?”

“My coffee’s over there,” Sirius explains, hoisting himself to the grass below the side of the porch.

He pads over to the cargo bed to grab it, bringing it back to the deck to reach it up onto the railing, where Remus leans over to take it from there, kind lad he is. Sirius hoists himself back up onto the ledge of the porch with his newly freed hands, boosts himself up over the railing, and vaults over it again, landing on the porch with a light pose and taking his mug back from him.

“Not too many more times, alright?” Remus raises, smiling around the filter held to his mouth.

“So, like, four more times?” Sirius trades, moving to take back his seat from the night before.

“Ideally, that’s your last one,” Remus supplies, reaching his cigarette over the railing and flicking a bit of ash off of the end.

Sirius smirks, nodding for it as he sets his mug on the chair between his knees. He reaches for a cigarette of his own, lights that, and leans back in his seat, looking out toward the trees lining the outskirts of the field as he lets his haul out. “Well, I’d suggest we fuck off for a while and maybe hike around a bit after these, but I don't want Lyall to think I ditched him," he maintains. "He said I’d be allowed to ride around on her and everything."

“Oh, well, in that case, we have to hang around,” Remus offers him, lifting his cigarette toward his smile.

Sirius grins over at him for understanding, looks past Remus toward the railing not far from his left shoulder, and gestures with his cigarette. “Do you mind being my ashboy?” he raises, and Remus understandably eyes the very non-existent pile of ash atop Sirius’s newly lit dart. “Not yet, just in general.”

Remus nods amidst his lungful and speaks once that’s out. “This doesn’t really help us now since we’re a bit stuck out here, but there’s a little brass ashtray in the second cabinet if you’re walking into the dining room from the hall that you can knick,” he forwards.

Sirius gives a trill around a new haul, leaning his head back to exhale it. “There is?”

“Mhm, it’s more decorative these days, but I doubt either of them would mind if it got used for its intended purpose,” Remus tacks on, and Sirius gives a light shoulder-shimmy for it. “You know the lamp to the right of the couch?”

Sirius squints as he pictures the sitting room from the vantage point he had last night, Lyall there on the couch, and completes the image with the lamp in question. “Sure, yeah,” he prompts, lifting his coffee mug to his mouth with his free hand.

“Well, the ashtray goes with that in a set,” Remus forwards. “The lamp’s got a brass base with a little tin built into it that perfectly fits a twenty-pack, too.”

Sirius swallows his sip right quick. “Does it really?”

“Mhm, it’s from the '50s, I believe,” Remus extends.

“Another keepsake from the grandparents,” Sirius surmises, holding his cigarette over the deck table.

Remus hums in affirmation. “Back when it was good form to offer a cigarette to your guests and such,” he tacks on, taking the cigarette with his free hand and guiding it over the railing to give it a light tap.

Sirius smirks, blinking out at the shrubs on the far side of the railing ahead of them. “I cannot wrap my head around that.”

“No, these days you’d just get strange looks if you started passing a pack around the room,” Remus extends, handing the cigarette back over to Sirius.

Sirius takes it and his pack up off the table in one go. “Looks like we’re all here, see,” he gives in an old-timey accent, fanning his pack around to a group of invisible guests ahead of them, “everybody take one, pass 'em round.”

Remus falls into a bright bout of snickers. “You sounded like an announcer at the races,” he lobs him.

The beat goes on like that, the two of them shooting the shit while keeping a respectful berth from Ma and Pa Lupin, but Remus does put out a deep sigh somewhere past the half-hour mark, giving in to a grimace. “Our clothes are just sitting down there, absolutely sopping,” he shares, halfway agonized, halfway amused.

“Ah shit, they definitely are by now,” Sirius concedes, throwing up a laugh when he’s not really sure what else to do for the moment.

“Why does my kitchen have to be so centrally placed within the house?” Remus puts up, laughing himself now.

Sirius piques there. “Ooh, I know what to do,” he entices, reaching over the table between their chairs to tap on Remus’s right arm, “you skirt around the front of the house, go take a tumble down the laundry chute, and climb back out the little window in the basement when you’re done.”

Remus snorts, sinking further into his chair. “Well, that’d be the one way to avoid the kitchen,” he placates. "Don’t know how well I’d fit in that chute these days, mind.”

Sirius snickers freely at the image he’s got of Remus crawling inside it and getting stuck near immediately, but then that does bring up a question that he feels needs answering. “Does that mean you took a tumble through it as a tyke?” he bids, sinking down in his own chair to match Remus’s stance.

Remus gives a bright trill. “D'you know what, I remember looking into it after tossing something in when I was something like nine and thinking, ‘I could probably climb in there and land in the basket,’ but I talked myself out of it on the off-chance the basket wasn’t there or I'd get stuck halfway through and have to call out for one of them to come get me out of there.”

“That’s such a kid-Remus thing to do,” Sirius celebrates.

“Well, I am the resident worrywart,” Remus puts up, leaning his head against the back of his chair.

Sirius shakes his head. “No, but the fact that you even considered it is also very you,” he passes him. “I’d have glommed right onto you as a kid, I can just feel it.”

“I hope you would've,” Remus offers, lulling his head more toward him.

Sirius gives him a strong pfft in return. “Oh, it’s not even a question,” he maintains. “You had a sneak streak a mile wide, I’d have loved kicking it with you if I’d had the chance.”

“Well, I've a feeling you'd have fanned the sneak streak in me and I could've turned out a lot more street smart,” Remus wagers, a smirking air about him, "but I do have to wonder if you’d have found me a right bore back then."

Sirius shakes his head no, very no. “That's poppycock, I'd have been able to suss out that you were sneak with my exceptional deduction skills; I’m sure I'd have gotten you into a bit of trouble once or twice, but d’you know what I wouldn’t have done?” he raises. “Sent you down into a possibly demon-inhabited basement alone.”

“Oh, not a chance,” Remus returns, smiling wide. “You’d have gone down there with me."

“In a heartbeat,” Sirius puts down.

Remus breathes in quietly, leaning back on the frame of his chair and aiming a keen smile over at him that peters off slightly as the back door both opens and closes at the far end of the L-shaped porch. The two of them alert further to the echoes of footsteps heading their way, looking off to their right in the same motion, and there comes Lyall around the bend with Hope in tow. They make their way past the porch stairs and over to stand in front of the two of them, Lyall reaching his hands into the front pockets of his slacks while Hope crosses her arms carefully over her front, the pair of them looking like they’ve taken a spin through the washing machine themselves.

“This is a bit harrowing,” Remus mentions.

“Honestly,” Sirius echoes. “Crack a smile, you two.”

Hope has a moment there where it seems a smile is just holding off from being a reality while Lyall focuses on his son without any kind of smile at all. “A decade, Remus,” he highlights, hanging his head on a tilt.

Remus’s shoulder line goes rigid before he takes a slight breath in. “In fairness to you both, I didn’t tell anybody about it until last year,” he offers carefully. “Lily was the first person I even spoke it out loud to and that was just back in October, so I really wasn’t going around spilling it to everyone else but you.”

“That’s still a long time, kid,” Lyall comments. "I'm not about to click my heels over not being the only two who didn't know about it."

Remus sits still with that, nods for it after a beat, and breathes in before giving a shot at explaining. “I didn’t know you’d be this good about it back then,” he puts up thickly.

“We know that, hon," Hope comes in, "and that’s on us."

Lyall takes his right hand out of his trouser pocket and waves it fast to block both Remus and Sirius’s vehement objections. “Quit it,” he instructs. “Clearly we dropped the ball somewhere along the way and it won’t do any good now pretending we didn’t.”

“To be fair,” Sirius comes in, raising his right hand as a request to keep speaking, “so many balls were dropped along the way.”

Sirius stops short there, lips quirking as he realizes what he’s just done. “And lifted, hey?” Lyall zings, and good Cunt, does Sirius try to mask his amusement, but Hope’s bright little laugh doesn’t help his efforts much in that regard.

“Alright, loved that and all, but I’m going to go literally anywhere else,” Remus declares, making to push out of his seat.

“Oh, no, you’re not,” Hope denies, her previous amusement out the window. “You just sit.”

Sirius looks between the mom and son stand-off until Remus gives a stewed breath and sits back down not really all that long later, but it sure felt it. “Here’s where we are with it, Remus,” Lyall addresses. “We should have made it much more clear to you that you could tell us anything, but we went ahead and assumed you knew that instead of making sure you did so that’s what we've got to sit and contend with, but I can think of a fair few opportunities along the way where it would have been just splendid if you’d piped up or corrected one of us, so we’re all going to be atoning this morning.”

“You know what, I think that’s a great idea,” Sirius puts in, reaching his left hand over to set in on Remus’s right hand white-knuckling the arm of his chair, “but in order to fully grasp the how and why Remus felt he couldn’t correct you those times you’re thinking of, we’re going to have to bring in a key player who definitely added some complexity to the situation—”

“I know,” Hope puts up, looking toward her son heavily. “I know I did a lot of assuming—"

“Oh, no no, Hope,” Sirius comes back quickly. “Wasn’t calling you out; that's another point to consider, just not the one I was going for here.”

Remus gives out a tumultuous breath. “He means Tom, Mum.”

Lyall takes in a breath of fresh, country air. “Tommy, can you hear me?” he talk-sings, blinking over at Remus with an expectant smile on. “That Tom?”

“Not that one, no,” Remus returns brightly.

“Well, I wasn’t sure,” Lyall puts up. “You never mentioned just how close you two got, did ya.”

“Well, I’m about to,” Remus gives back, “but he’s not out so if I’m going to get into that side of things, then it can’t leave this family; can I just ask that, please?”

“Well, who the fuck are we going to run to with that?” Lyall puts up.

“I’m not saying you’re going to go about town giggling like a couple of gnomes with a secret,” Remus retorts, and Sirius just cannot with this fucking family. “I’m saying it because if you didn’t know it’s something he doesn’t want out there, then it could just slip out one day and before we know it, the whole town and their dogs know; that’s what I don’t want to happen.”

Sirius works really hard to hold back on asking where exactly all the dogs have been, meanwhile Hope puts herself back into the mix. “It won’t, hon,” she assures. “We’ll be good; promise.”

Remus nods for it, breathing in long. “We started in year nine, after I’d been tutoring him for a while and I'd fancied him for quite a bit of that while, but we agreed not to go pulling attention to it and just keep it between us — everybody, but our parents were included, yes,” he tacks on. “We dated in plain sight, you could say, and since our friendship was really the best decoy we had, we’d lean into that, meet up here to work on homework assignments, go out on hikes on the trail, sometimes he’d come meet me off of work once I got in there and we’d come back and spend time here, and that’s really what it was like for the good years. We were a secret but not this horrible one, at least to me, but shame came in like a bulldozer and hit him a lot harder than it did me comparatively, and all in all, we were on and off for about six years there until we eventually soured and that was that; it wasn't the most freeing and open situation to be in, so of course we could all look back and wish I’d been smarter or better about correcting misinformation about me, but that misinformation protected us for years and I didn’t feel I could speak about it or even that had the room to, especially once things got rockier between the two of us, I didn't have any real sway in that way.”

Hope nods, and well, now Sirius really does know where Remus gets his heightened level of focus from. Lyall, on the other hand, has the left side of his lower lip tugged into his mouth with an impressive wonky brow going on beside her and it’s really very odd for Sirius, to be sitting beside his boyfriend while two distinct halves of the man are standing right across from him and waiting on bated breath for Remus to keep going, but that gets Sirius feeling rather uncertain of whether Remus feels he’s finished with rehashing the tale.

He’s quite torn on the matter himself; his brain’s telling him if that’s all Remus has to say on the matter, then that’s exactly how much he’s willing to share about it and that should be enough, while his body's telling him quite the opposite and oftentimes, Sirius's body does win out on the decision making front. “Remus,” he prompts, way low down.

Remus nods minimally a few beats later. “I really think we could have gone down the same path but didn’t by the way we handled our own reservations about it,” he offers up. “I say this with a lot of hindsight in mind, but I know internalized the negative messages I was getting from him, the ones I was getting at school, and the ones I was and wasn't seeing in pop culture at the time, and it was like being muted as a person, but I was able to box that up and push it aside when I was with him because the good years were good; I didn’t feel ashamed or unnatural, but going toe-to-toe with anyone else on that topic was not something I was prepared for or willing to do, so I just threw myself into our thing when it was the purest thing I knew at the time and then things changed when we were in our last year at school, he became utterly obsessed with the idea that we were up to some very unnatural stuff, we’d eventually have to quit acting out, find ourselves some girlfriends, and he felt we ought to start that sooner rather than later.”

“Well, fuck him,” Lyall tosses out, and the abruptness of it sends the three of them jolting, “he’s a pussy, too.”

Sirius nods emphatically for that read of it while Remus pushes out a breathy laugh beside him. “Well, that, I’ve come around to with the help of time and distance,” he allows, his mouth quirking quite a bit as he points across himself toward Sirius with his free hand, “and this one.”

“I do my best,” Sirius tacks on.

“More than,” Remus forwards him.

Remus is quiet for a good five to ten seconds after that, calling to Sirius automatically reach for his right hand if it’ll help him push on with it, and after a few more slow beats, it seems that was more or less the right call for Remus turns his hand around and threads his fingers in with Sirius’s. “It’s easier to look back now and wish he’d just let me be after that so I might’ve been able to avoid a lot of quicksand and a hell of a lot more heartbreak, but that’s just not how it happened,” he supplies, keeping their hands linked up tight. “I'm sure he thinks he tried his best to be what he thought he had to, but on my end, I suddenly didn't have my would-be boyfriend or my best friend for most of my last year at secondary, while he was trying his best to fully embrace ladies and new friend groups and it wasn't until a little before graduation that he opened the door for us again and it’s embarrassing as shit now to say it, but I was elated about it at the time, truly I was, but it was never the same: there'd be pockets of months where I wouldn’t see much of him at all unless I spotted him out and about with a girl from this class or that one, and pockets of other months where he was coming around all the time and it would feel almost like it used to be, and it went on like that until I got two very brief moments of bravery, one where I cast my net out further than I intended to for uni and the other when I picked London over Cardiff where he wanted me to go, and those moments were born out of frustration during pockets where I knew I couldn't count on him but still wanted to have him so it didn't actually stick; we sort of half-saw each other up until I was slated to leave and he ended it fully, and we really haven't kept up since and that really is for the best; he kept a pattern with me that was sporadic, unreliable, and always on his time, never mine, so I didn't have a voice through just about any of it and certainly not once it was really over."

Sirius squeezes his hand as tightly as he can again while Remus gestures his free hand listlessly toward his misty-eyed mum. “So, with all that in mind, if you asked about any female prospects in my classes during the good years with him, I went right along with it and didn’t specify a thing, and once I got in at work and hit it off well with Angela there and more at school because of that, when you’d ask about her with a definite twinkle in your eye, it only reinforced that I was at least covering my bases well enough not to have been found out and I went with it some more," he describes, making a more pointed face there. "And I definitely leaned into it that much more in my last year at school when I really was spending a lot more time with her than I was with him, leaned into it all the more after graduating while starting up this on-and-off-again thing with him, and it wasn't the best I could have done by any stretch, I fuelled your assumptions for a long, long time, and Dorcas was honestly the first presumption I started pushing back on and it wasn’t even until we had the plan with Sirius in mind; I know how late I was in trying to filter his name into conversations more, I know you didn’t mean any harm by not quite seeing that I was doing it more, and I’m sorry I pushed back so hard on you about it yesterday and that took me so long to get the ball rolling on this.”

Hope makes a tight, verklempt noise in her throat that’s not unlike a few choice ones Sirius managed to get out of her just last night, shaking her head numbly, and after a few beats, it appears that’s about all she’s got in her for the moment.

Sirius looks left and rubs his thumb back and forth over his hand when he sees the degree of Remus’s new frown, but the action seems to jar him into moving on to his dad, who, Sirius has got to admit, is looking more and more perturbed by the second. “And you, Dad, really do have a strangely perceptive streak about you, but it’s just slightly off the mark,” he addresses, a budding smile starting up on his lips as Lyall gives a double take. “In my last year there, you noticed Tom hadn’t been around ours as much, ask where he’d been, and I’d say school was intense or that our work schedules were conflicting as that was a lot easier than speaking the reality of it. Even when you were in hospital, you’d ask how he was doing and I’d give as much or as little information as I could so it wouldn’t get too curious for you, and we’d started up again by the time you got released so I wasn’t looking to disturb the relative peace with him or the working peace with you two by making any sort of announcement, so I kept it up the longer that sporadic pattern of ours went on and I’ve certainly kept that up since I’ve been away, but it was easier to pretend that we were just a couple of schoolmates that grew apart because of distance and different life routes than it would've been to say we had a much shakier history than I let on, so you’re right; I didn’t correct the record for a long, long time, until last night with mum and this morning with you, and I’m sorry it took me so long to get the stones to do it, but I am trying to fix it now—”

“I don’t want your fucking ‘sorry’ now,” Lyall cuts in.

“Well, it’s yours anyway,” Remus returns.

“Keep it,” Lyall doubles down. “I’m not interested.”

Remus sends a dragon's breath through his nose. “In any case, I know it’s late in the game and that’s got to hurt both of you in different ways, but it’s really thanks to Sirius that I’ve come to the point where I feel that I can be more open about it,” he supplies. “In the last couple years, I’ve debated the when, where, and how of telling you two, but I kept hitting a wall with it and feeling that I’d have to wait until I had something far less fickle and much more comforting to carry alongside something I knew would be breaking news to you, and I've found that in Sirius — and, to be fair to myself for once, after all those years with Tom, I absolutely do need someone who pushes me up and up and up, and that’s Sirius’s specialty; I’ve never met anyone who relishes in my growth and happiness like he does and I wanted you to see I've found that.”

Sirius’s stomach feels a lot like it got punched with a bouquet of flowers and it’s certainly odd to feel that immense feeling right as Hope loses her whole and entire shit, bursting out a righteous sob and letting go of her middle to rub frantically at her eyes. He looks to the other two and catches Remus and Lyall sharing an identical grimace with each other before the latter reaches over to soothe his left hand at Hope’s back, and Sirius has to avert his gaze to the porch floor beneath his feet out of sheer survival when those two are fucking comedians even in the most sordid of times.

“Mum, that was a good thing,” Remus calls to her gently. “I'm lucky to have found him; look what I have?”

“I’m happy for you,” Hope gives out, sniffing hard. “I just hate that we couldn’t help you through that — any of it.”

“You did, Mum; you both did,” Remus insists. “I took comfort anywhere I could; I took it here, in this house with you two, in my schooling and work, in Angela and her group, and unfortunately sometimes I’d take it with Tom, too, but believe me, I don’t look back at the entirety of my teenage years and only see the difficult parts of them — even when I couldn’t talk about what was weighing on me, I still found so many different things to lean on.”

Hope takes in a big ol’ breath there. “Maurice?” she prompts, a hopeful expression on, and Sirius rather thinks that’s the right sort of anecdote that needs to be shared right about now for everybody’s sake.

Remus gives a breathy laugh, nodding for her. “I sure did lean on that,” he affirms. “I’d read about it in year seven or so, really early on in secondary but I had such trouble tracking it down because it definitely was not at our school library, and then I swear to you, every time I went down to the main library somebody had always just taken it out, so clearly it was being found by others like me so that’s water under the bridge, but it did come through work a few months after I started there and oh, did I snatch that book up as soon as I saw it.”

Lyall takes in a quick breath through gritted teeth, lifting his gaze to the porch roof overhead. “Which one’s that?”

“Forster,” Remus supplies, watching him keenly, “Room with a View? That guy.”

Mm, mhm,” Lyall returns, dropping his gaze with newfound clarity. “Alright, I’m back.”

Sirius can’t help a fond little laugh but thankfully, it doesn’t overlap Remus’s bright trill when that is absolutely necessary to have been heard. “It’s one of my true favourites,” he extends. “It was a period piece he’d written with a high focus on repressed Edwardian era queer men just trying to get on with both it and the class structures they were born into.”

“Just your kind of thing really,” Sirius grins.

“I mean,” Remus allows, and it is a shame that his shades are blocking out some of the purest eyes on Earth, but Sirius has to admit the light coming off of Remus’s sunshine smile is blinding in itself. “I found it had such scathing societal commentary and grit to it, but it also took on its themes with such nuance and patience, and with such heart and hope for a better time that I could just feel seeping out of the pages, it was all so comforting to read out of a novel that was penned so long ago and hidden from publishers until the seventies, and when I finished it I probably could have flown from my windowsill if I’d given it a go, but instead I just hugged that book to me like it was literally mine, and weirdly enough, some of the themes in it bore a spooky similarity to what I’d soon be going through myself and then it felt like Forster sat down one day in nineteen-thirteen and thought, 'I’m going to write a novel for Remus Lupin specifically to find one day’ and I went back to that book time and time again, whenever I needed to feel seen by somebody, and that somebody just so happened to be an author from a literal century ago who just knew me somehow, wouldn't you know it.”

Remus looks round at the rest of them once his soliloquy comes to an end, and he's certainly being met with quite the bouldered silence, but Sirius can’t help but revel in the fact that he turns an impish smile toward him as he seeks reassurance from him. “Was that too much?” he asks, putting it out the right side of his mouth.

Sirius lifts his free hand to flash him the 'OK' symbol. “Just right,” he sends back, aiming it out the left side of his.

“But a bit too gay?” Remus surmises.

Just right,” Sirius repeats, gyrating his 'OK' symbol for emphasis.

“What?” Lyall puts up, clearly having heard the both of them. “Isn’t — is that not the point?”

“Nevermind, dad,” Remus offers goodnaturedly, waving it off with a small, sheepish laugh. “Only, I felt like I'd given a book report in front of the wrong class after that extended silence.”

“Oh, honey, I just needed to breathe,” Hope expresses, lifting her right hand to clasp it over the centre of her chest resolutely.

“OK, do that,” Remus grants, smiling differently for her.

“And maybe borrow that book if you’ve still got it somewhere,” Hope tacks on.

Sirius doesn’t think Remus’s smile could get any sweeter. “It’s upstairs,” he shares, squeezing Sirius’s hand before letting it go to push out of his chair. “I’ll grab it for you.”

“Oh, it doesn’t have to be right this second, hon,” Hope insists.

“Well, it wasn’t going to be right this second,” Remus clarifies, lifting out of his chair. “We’ve got a laundry load just sitting in the washer waiting to be switched over and I’ve got to get that done before our clothes start to mould, but I’ll get it for you once I’m done that.”

“Oh, shit, sorry,” Sirius puts up, his memory jogged all over again.

Remus waves his grimace off with a smile before reaching a hand out to a parent of his each. “I love you both, I’m sorry I didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt much sooner, but I think the best way we can make up for lost time would be to treat this fine young lad behind me like the absolute upgrade I assure you he is and if you can do that, and I’ve a good feeling you can, then there’ll be plenty of opportunities for you to be let into this section of my life," he raises, setting a sea of fire in Sirius's stomach. "What do we think?”

Hope sighs long and hard for that. “Oh, we’ll see,” she extends, but her smile betrays her sardonic tone.

“You’ve really never given us a more difficult task,” Lyall tuts, picking a string of hair or lint off of the left shoulder of Hope’s blouse.

Remus tips his head toward them in kind, leans down to leave a kiss atop Hope’s head, and slips around her to give Lyall a boulder of a hug before stepping back. “OK, I have to switch that over or I’ll explode,” he asserts.

“Can I help any?” Hope asks.

Remus gives her a wry little smile. “I can probably handle the job myself, but come with me,” he bids, pointing to his dad next. “Get to that lawn, sir; it’s getting a bit out of hand.”

“I’ll toss you out there if you’d like,” Lyall offers.

“I’m OK, thanks,” Remus returns kindly.

Hope takes in a quick breath there. “Hold on, hon,” she bids, moving over to the railing and giving a coo for the new, motorized addition to the family, and quite soon Lyall’s joining her over at the railing in celebration.

Remus looks to Sirius in the meantime, moving in to crouch down in front of his seat, and Sirius scoots forward in it automatically, clasping his hands over Remus’s curled knees; it’d be a lie to say that Sirius hears virtually anything coherent from over on his left as he returns the keen smile he’s getting from Remus, but he’s got a strong feeling Remus is close to if not just as caught up with tunnel vision as he is. He pushes himself to stand after Hope's turned from the railing and gives a quick sweep of his right hand through Sirius’s fringe on his way past him, sending him a lovely, rather hands-on message that reads bye for now in the best of ways before heading his mum off, strolling up the porch and around the bend quicker than Sirius can tone his face down.

“Wow, kiddo,” Lyall observes, eyeing him once.

“He’s everything,” Sirius insists, flying a hand toward the direction Remus left in.

“Mhm,” Lyall hums in return.

Sirius reworks his mouth around a budding smile. “So, Hope and I got into a discussion late last night about the bits of queer culture Remus and I glommed onto in our disparate youths," he addresses. "That’s where she got the Maurice talking point from and of course Remus went and found his solace in a piece of literature, who are we kidding, right—” he pauses to smile up at Lyall after he snorts real good, “—but can you guess where I might’ve found mine?”

Lyall tosses out a quick, sharp laugh. “Give me a harder question next time,” he returns, and Sirius drums his feet on the floor of the porch jovially. “You know, I’ve still got that 'Live Aid' shirt kicking around somewhere and I’m thinking it ought to go to you.”

Sirius sits up rod-straight in his chair. “Are you kidding me?”

“Do I ever kid?” Lyall raises.

“Do you really want me to answer that?” Sirius counters.

Lyall shakes his head no, laughing there. “It’d hardly fit me these days, but I think it’d be just right on you if you don’t mind secondhand,” he mentions.

“Stop that, it’s better that way,” Sirius chides, grinning ear to ear.

“Then it’s yours,” Lyall lobs him, turning for the stairs and waving for Sirius to follow. “Let’s get that lawn done first and I’ll have a look around for it.”

Sirius gets out of his chair quickly, but he gets a look down at his bare feet and thinks things are going so smoothly with Remus that maybe, just maybe they don’t need to have a blazing row over the loss of one of Sirius’s toes. “Let me put some shoes on and I’ll meet you out there,” he calls to Lyall, who waves him off and keeps on down the steps.

He grabs his empty coffee mug and brings it inside with him while he's at it, leaving it in the top left-hand corner of the sink and moving to stand at the top of the stairs to the basement. “I’m leaving my mug in the sink for now,” he calls down. “It’s merely on standby and is by no means something I left there for one of you to do, are we clear?”

“You’re good,” Remus calls up.

Sirius heads back to the closet near the back door, nabs Remus’s loafers again, and drops them on the mat, slipping them on his feet and booking it back out there. He takes the excitingly new exit to the garden to come out closer to the truck and pads toward Lyall, who’s just re-capping the gas canister and looks over his right shoulder as he leaves it aside on the bed.

“Ready, Freddie?” he calls over.

Sirius might just have to lay down to rest eternally here, but what a place to do it. “Almost,” he chimes. “Can I float something by you first?”

“I’m not telling you a single fucking figure, Sirius,” Lyall puts out.

Sirius smirks, shaking his head. “That wasn’t it,” he insists, slowing to a stop ahead of him.

Lyall gives him a wry gaze. “Fine, fire away," he prompts.

Sirius tips his head to him in thanks. “I’m sure it’s bold of me to assume you’ll want to get anywhere near the bloke as of ten minutes ago," he starts, opening his hands to splay them rather plainly.

"Well, you're right, I had very little intention of it," Lyall affirms.

Sirius points starkly at him. "Love that, but I also know that Remus has a complex relationship with how much Tom knows about him despite not having spoken directly to him in the past couple years, but he isn't going to ask you to quit talking to Tom about how he's doing," he broaches it. "That's just not Remus's way of tackling discomfort; it's more like, don't tackle it and hope it goes away on its own."

"Got him," Lyall sticks in, snorting.

Sirius presses his hands together gratefully for the jesting air of all this. "Now, we both know how well you mean when you find yourself giving anyone around this town updates about your star-quality kid and I know I can't control small-town charm and all," he pushes on, "but I'm still Remus's soldier and I do have to bid that you don't even stop when you see Tom around — in fact, go tenfold about how great your kid is with everyone else, but leave him out of it; he’s not a good guy, Lyall, and it’s not that he’s closeted or struggling with it, I’ve taken up with someone who’s taken his own time with coming out, but the difference between the two of them is that Remus carries around a conscience equal to the mass of Earth, whereas Tom is an anvil and that's about it.”

Sirius catches the ball of rage that appears to float up through Lyall in real-time. “I’m going to run that kid the fuck over,” he pronounces, artfully stewing.

Sirius lifts his hands for a fair pardon. “I want him crucified," he cops to it. "It’d make me feel better in the moment, but it would spin Remus right out because he’s better than all of us, and to that, if you really want to help him out here, you can do that by freezing the fuck out of that guy for Remus's sake."

“He’s frozen, Sirius,” Lyall puts down, “but I still wouldn’t mind popping him at least once.”

Sirius nods heavily. “Believe me, I understand, but I think keeping Remus's anxiety levels in mind and blacklisting him is another, more suitable way to go about it, and I’ve a feeling that’ll hit Tom harder than our fists could, so here's what I'm proposing,” he frame it. "He's off to Cambridge on Monday and he’ll be gone for the week so we'll miss him the rest of the time we're here, but he’ll be back and I don’t know when he officially leaves for school but I assume it’ll be closer to the start of term so that’s plenty of time for him to make sure he runs into you, and since this is his hometown, he’ll be back to visit for many years to come, I'm sure, so I think it’d be a wonderful thing if, from here on out, he never got to know a single thing about how any of the Lupins are doing; that thought alone brings me insurmountable joy.”

Lyall gives Sirius a funny face. “I get some joy out of that one myself,” he passes him.

“I was hoping you would,” Sirius trades him, glowing underneath the sun’s rays overhead as he displays his hands toward the absolute babe beside them. “Do I get first dibs?”

“Oh, you’ve earned it, kid,” Lyall returns, and Sirius thinks he could probably fly if he flapped his arms enough, but thankfully Lyall keeps going before Sirius, Lyall, and the new girl have the chance to find out if Sirius would've given it a shot or not. “Oh, but if you want to smoke, I suggest you do it now and about six feet away from her because I already gassed her up good.”

“I saw that you did, but no, I’m good on that,” Sirius assures, moving in on Lyall’s right to help lug the mower down to the ground.

“Alright, well, the blades are up so you can just turn the key and ride her on over there,” Lyall raises.

Sirius climbs up onto the mower with that and slides into the raised seat. “What’s the plan, how far out are we going, and where do you want me to hop off and let you take her for a spin?”

Lyall turns and lifts his right hand over his eyes to look over the property. “See that tree?” he offers, pointing toward it.

“Shit, yes; Remus said that’s usually where quits are called,” Sirius returns him. “That's my bad.”

“Oh, no, listen here; not anymore,” Lyall assures, giving a loaded grin with it.

“Oho, are we going turbo on all this?” Sirius bids, looking out toward the expanse of field.

“Well, our side of the property line for certain,” Lyall extends. “Stick to this side of the shed and you won't be doing someone else's work for them, and you’re to hop off once you get to that tree and let me handle the rest from there — oh, and so you know, it's a crabapple tree—”

“It is?” Sirius puts up, enticed. “Remus never said.”

“Oh, don’t eat them,” Lyall warns.

“I wasn’t going to,” Sirius says, holding a tone and expression that make it abundantly clear he was going to do just that.

Lyall snorts for it. “The face you’d make would be a riot, but I wouldn’t chance it,” he extends. “They’re much better for apple fights anyway.”

“Apple fights,” Sirius breathes, blinking thrice at Lyall in prompt.

“Mhm, Remus and I used to line up a bunch of them from a distance and lob ‘em at each other,” Lyall passes him, pausing short. “Which sounds a lot worse than it was — like a snowball fight, but with fruit.”

Sirius snickers wildly. “Why are you two the best?” he puts up.

“Don’t ask me,” Lyall trades him. “I mention the specificity of the tree as I wouldn’t have chanced going around the base of it with the old girl, whereas I feel this one should chop the stray apples with little trouble, but perhaps you should go slow when you get there, test it out with one, and if it doesn’t chop up in due time then forget about it and the tree will just look like it’s got one giant leg warmer and that’ll have to be that.”

“Deal,” Sirius returns, reaching to start the mower, and ooh la la, does she ride smoothly; Lyall wasn’t embellishing about that part one bit.

Lyall stays near the mower for the first few rows Sirius works on, giving him pointers on how to turn the girl around the sharper corners to the yard itself and Sirius goes ahead and pretends he’s never turned a steering wheel before just to have Lyall hanging around for as long as he sees fit, and frankly, the pointers do help when it comes to the perimeter of the garden and the narrower sections of grass on the A-frame side of things.

He's a fair ways out into the field before Sirius looks back and doesn’t see Lyall anywhere obvious, but the truck’s gone, too, so that suggests he's gone and brought it back around front and Sirius merrily turns the mower to the left, bringing her back down the next row and on and on from there until he looks up and over toward the yard a while later to find Lyall setting up a sprinkler on the left-hand side of his wife’s sanctuary, and Sirius officially cannot handle the tier of wholesome that this man is; it’s really just such a treat.

He keeps on with it, doing as bid and going slow once he gets to the crabapple tree, but the new girl just can’t be stopped on account of a couple of stray apples, he’s happy to report. He lifts his right hand into the air, waves a thumbs-up around until Lyall gives him one back and starts heading over his way, and Sirius goes 'round and around the base of the tree until Lyall gets to him.

“She’s yours,” Sirius chimes, hopping off.

“What did you think?” Lyall raises.

“Ridiculously fun for a chore, I’ve got to say,” Sirius offers him, stepping back from the mower.

Shania rings out of his back right pocket just as Lyall’s getting comfy on the mower, sending him into quite the reel as Sirius is slipping his mobile out of his back right pocket. “That’s just me."

Lyall snorts, settling in. “Haven’t heard that one in a while,” he comments.

“Funny, I hear it every time James texts me,” Sirius forwards, thumbing his passcode in and opening up the new message. “We had a phone chat planned, but he’s prematurely vying for it to start, I see.”

“Well, I’ve got the rest anyhow,” Lyall bids adieu, giving the new girl a rev before taking right over from where Sirius left off.

Sirius heads back toward the house, casts a look over at the yard, and decides to make the push for the hammock, veering diagonally across the field as he dials for James and only making it a couple steps further before he picks up.

“Bonjour Monsieur,” he greets loftily. “Can you talk yet?”

“Your timing’s actually perfect,” Sirius affords, heading across the field.

“Brilliant,” James calls it. “Now, I know I’m a few hours behind on the developments, but I’m not going to lie either; I know a lot already, so I’ve made myself a glass of Party Punch as it’s cinque-a-sept somewhere and have a few talking points prepared that I’d like to get off my chest first.”

“Like, written out in gel pen on a sheet?” Sirius checks.

“No, just in my noggin,” James clarifies. “A) You live in a sitcom.”

“Literally,” Sirius echoes.

“B) Of course the fucking Lupins are impossible to control for longer than an hour,” James continues.

“It’s the Lupin way,” Sirius deems it.

“C) Love, love, love that Remus just vomited it out at her on the end of a gooey monologue about your laughs of all things,” James puts up. “That man's in deep, am I right?”

“I’m trying to think of a time you’ve ever been more right,” Sirius rewards him, grinning like a goon.

“D) I hear you’ve been playing social worker over there, and I have to say, I’m impressed by your candour,” James gives him.

“Well, listen, they’re all gorgeous little sweethearts so all they really needed was a little guidance and a reminder of that very fact,” Sirius delivers, but he’s shoulder-shimmying like mad.

“And lastly, I know that Lyall threw a curveball into the game and championed this ahead of time, but I want a full oral presentation on that starting now,” James instructs.

“OK, OK, OK,” Sirius trills, hyping himself up for the assignment. “So, you know about how we sort of took a parent each for a while there?”

James tosses out a laugh. “During the Great Lawn Fiasco, mhm,” he assures.

“Yes, good,” Sirius accepts. “So he takes Hope and I’ve got Lyall: Remus goes and blurts it while on the porch with her but of course, I did not know this at the time and thought it was all business as usual, so I'm herding Lyall into the house, we go off into the sitting room to wait for them to come inside, we’re in there shooting the shit, talking music and Remus and more music and more Remus, and he goes ahead and calls me the fuck out on my obvious and extreme love for his only son, except he doesn’t make me feel like scum for it, doesn’t curl his lip, doesn’t suggest I move along real quick or pack my shit and go — no no, he tries to appeal to me and help me out in his sweet little, Lupin way.”

“What a fucking king,” James sticks in jovially.

“The one and only,” Sirius echoes. “So he goes on to say he sees similarities between me pining like a tree after Remus and how hard he pined for Hope before they got together; see, she’d been seeing someone else and was unavailable for, like, a year after Lyall certainly knew she was his one, so my main man Lyall was over there talking proud about having stuck it out until she came online to what they had as well, and listen, those two are fucking magical together and who am I to take that away from him so I sure as hell let him be proud of that, but he’s telling me this, right, and I’m pretending that Remus hasn’t told me quite a bit about their humble beginnings and that I totally didn’t know that he waited for her already—”

“‘Course, gotta find out where he’s going with it,” James puts it.

“Well, you and I share the same brain clearly,” Sirius rewards him. “He starts Remusing real hard soon enough and I mean, thinking out loud, going off on slight tangents, telling me that he’d like to advise me to do the same as he did and stick it out as that worked out real well for him, but then he backtracks live in front of me, gets caught up in whether that would even be fair to suggest to me when there is one stark difference between our cases, and he’s going, ‘oh, but can I even suggest it,’ and ‘is that fair to you or would it make you miserable if Remus just couldn’t return those feelings,’ and I swear to Cunt Almighty, he ended his spiel with a sentiment of, ‘but wouldn’t it just be great if he could, though?’”

And then a hero comes along...” James croons.

“My thoughts,” Sirius echoes lively. “And the thing is, Remus told me that Lyall’s pretty well hands-off — oh, shit, I forgot to say it beforehand, but you’re going to need this for the whole thing to hit right; so while we were preparing dinner, it became quite clear that Remus had not told either parental figure that his place is being sublet to Dorcas come the fall—”

“Are we even slightly surprised?” James puts up.

“No, not even a smidge,” Sirius echoes, “which is why it was mad to witness him just tell them that in a moment of ambiguity; it all happened so fast, but they were asking him about flats in Paris and Remus has been so good about not letting himself get too antsy about that, but it worries him, you know, so they’re tag-teaming him about something that Remus doesn’t have the answer to and he starts getting real clipped with them, so when the sublet question came up he just went and said that Dorcas is looking after it, and that got Hope feeling quite right about that whole thing, and then Remus went the fuck in, James; just popped off.

“It’s always zero to turbo in seconds if you fuck him off just right,” James retains, and he sure would know something about that.

Sirius hums in deep agreement. “That’s the thing, he’s like a bear in the body of a woodland creature; poke him too many times, and he’s going to rip that outer skin off and bite ya,” he expresses. “Exhilarating to say the least, but far better to watch it happening when he’s not fucked off at you, am I right?”

“You are,” James supplies him.

“So he starts spewing facts, putting down the word friend like it’s the F-bomb," Sirius keeps on, "and even goes as far as to announce that he and Dorcas did snog it out once, but that he wasn’t interested in anything further and nowadays they’re just good mates—”

“Oh, Cunt; Remus,” James champions.

“And there’s Hope looking right shocked, but Lyall’s over at the end of the table just reacting to it all, but that part got him chirping away,” Sirius details. “Hope gave up the goat pretty quickly from there because how do you come back from that, but then Lyall starts chirping her and saying, ‘I was right, I was right,’ and I’m losing it, just over the moon that he was never all that convinced the two of them were an item, but then he goes and says, ‘the boy doesn’t date,’ which was exactly what Remus fucking told me about, by the way; how his dad would razz him about perpetual singlehood or that he's married to his schooling, but gender never really made the cut in terms of commentary from him and the reason I’m putting that out there now is, he’s usually so much more hands-off of Remus's dating history unless he’s in the mood to razz him a little, but then there he goes hours later, contending with me and how much I sing for his son, gives me the thumbs-up bascially, and goes as far as to try to help me out with it — I just — that’s the highest compliment I could have ever got out a man who, for the most part, hasn't preoccupied himself with who his kid's been seeing, you know?”

“OK, I’m his biggest fan, please know that,” James puts down, “but I don’t know where you even go from there; what did you do?”

“Oh, I bolted right out of that room to go get Remus and Hope so we could actually just make Lyall’s fucking night, but Remus had already fled the scene after his word-vomiting session and was upstairs dealing with the fallout of that,” Sirius supplies him, taking a pause for a new breath. “And I don’t want to misrepresent anybody in that situation because they're all doing their best, but yeah, it was rough at first; she froze at the news and then she wanted all the complex answers at once but wasn’t actually ready to hear them, and Remus was hurt by her freezing on him, hurr by getting hurtled with all of the tough questions one after the other, and more hurt by her lack of responses to the answers she wasn’t ready to hear, and things went downhill real fast for a while there, but overall? For me, once I was finished up with the both of them last night, it really was like I'd dealt with two Remuses, one after the other.”

“Well, then you’d have been right in your element,” James offers him. “No wonder you did so well.”

“I feel like that has to be what it was; I just felt so empowered when speaking to her about it,” Sirius puts up. “And I mean, she and I have had a great rapport since the first call I ever made to them, so once we got going and the initial spooks wore off, we got that rapport back and it was a really good, necessary conversation, and this morning, she’s been just lovely to me and to Remus and to us so it’s a moving thing still, can't go pretending it isn't, but it feels like it’s really looking up.”

“Yeah?” James probes, and Sirius can hear him grinning over there.

“Mm, there’s a strange vibe about it all,” Sirius offers him.

"Strange good, strange bad?" James checks.

“Good, definitely," Sirius gives him. "They're just such a batch of characters; one moment everyone’s weepy and serious, the next they’re tossing quips at each other and laughing some of the hardest parts of it off, and I don’t know, can you imagine how much I'd like seeing that sort of thing?”

Sirius’s already budding smile intensifies as James snorts for that. “Oh, I can just,” he returns. "How's Lyall been about it?"

"He's been so fucking funny,” Sirius passes him. “Remus wandered out onto the veranda and told him over the railing that we'd actually been going since Christmas, and the man was far more fucked off about how I didn’t stop him before he got too far into his spiel than he was about anything else."

James gives an amused trill. “As if you were ever going to."

Sirius pushes a laugh through his nose. “We very did tell him that same thing, but he came around on that one quickly enough,” he assures. “He’s just so unbothered by it otherwise; it’s refreshing, getting to see someone who doesn’t even entertain the idea of it being anything other than two people who just happened to couple up.”

“Yeah, he’s getting a gift,” James decides. “Ask him what he likes and I’ll send him a nice package.”

“He’s married, James,” Sirius chimes, and James cackles on the other end of the line. “But no, if I do that, he’ll just say he doesn’t like anything, but don’t you worry, Remus and I have already started with the pampering; Hope’s already got her gifts and we’re working on Lyall’s now; we were going to get a replacement for the old mower, but then he went out bright and early this morning and got the new one himself, so now we’re trying to get him to let us pay him back for it so that it can still be from us, so as soon as we sort that out I can stick your name on it if you’d like.”

“I'd love it if you did, yes,” James says of it.

“Done,” Sirius deems it, giving into a mild stretch and letting it go with a thoughtful breath. “Well hey, we’ve got some time; do you want to see the Lupin abode?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” James chants.

“OK, let me jump off and I’ll get you on video,” Sirius bids, pressing to end the call right then and there.

He switches apps, dials James once again, and has just enough time to deem his own reflection on his screen more than presentable before he accepts the call, where the two of them give each other massive gape-grins as if they hadn’t just seen each other as recently as Thursday.

“Is that what complete and pure acceptance looks like on you?” James raises.

“I believe it is,” Sirius chimes, pitching himself off the hammock one-handed. “OK, there is a lot to take in out here and you ought to know that now.”

“Known,” James deems it.

Sirius turns the camera around to show off the yard from left to right as he does a spin. “This is the yard, that's the hammock I was just on, that's a bit of the house, over here’s the garden, and—” he pauses for dramatic effect before whirling around to showcase the vast expanse of field back there, “—all of that is theirs; can you believe?”

“Jesus Cunt,” James puts out.

“Mhm, arresting,” Sirius allows. “So green, too, and there are all these trails back in those woods over there and a waterfront situation down one of them that’s quite the sight; won’t take you all the way there now, but you’ll be getting snaps and thanking me for them in due time.”

“Oh, I’m going to be,” James echoes it.

“Now, I’ve yet to see any woodland creatures in those woods or around here which I’m none too happy about, but Remus assured me that I’ve got to bide my time and let them come to me,” Sirius mentions, moving the camera to showcase the left side of the property. “Oh, and all that over there is what got sold off; I’m not exactly that sure where the line starts officially, but somewhere past the shed is what I've been told.”

“They really did have a lot to work with,” James puts up. "I see why they'd have passed some of it off."

“And yet, there’s still so much of it left,” Sirius offers, and there, he turns the camera back to the field and smiles behind it as he tries to get Lyall into the frame. “And way over there, we’ve got our once and future king zippin' around the outskirts of the woods with his spanking new mower.”

James snickers like a fiend over there. “Can't see him all that well; does he look happy?"

“Oh, he's so fucking jazzed,” Sirius assures, moving toward the A-frame steps and practically skipping up them to open the door. “OK so, this is where we’re staying; technically I was put up in here first, but Remus said he was going to move his stuff down once the jig was up on us so he’ll be officially joining me down here in due time, I’m sure, but look how cute this is?”

James gives a throaty noise as Sirius does a 180-spin around the main room. “No, I love it,” he puts up. “Lucky lads, getting your own little cabin to yourselves.”

“Mhm, it’ll come right in handy,” Sirius echoes.

“You fuck in there yet?” James checks.

“Yeah, we did,” Sirius returns lowly, showcasing the bed. “That thing did us very well.”

“Then throw petals all over it and say they're from me,” James celebrates. “Did you knock any spots off that list?”

“You know what, we haven't,” Sirius offers him, turning the camera back to himself, "but see, the time we went at it in here was absolutely balls to the wall, plus he got me in his basement and even agreed to roleplaying a little with me and he let me go down on him on the train ride here, so I have no rights to complain as far as spots go."

“Excuse me?" James enunciates. "The train?”

“You heard it here first,” Sirius echoes, heading out of the main room to get to the hallway. "We tossed his quilt over the action, but still, I'm so fucking proud of him?"

“That absolute scarlet woman,” James tosses up, scandalized.

“Hey, you're going to let him be whatever he wants to be,” Sirius returns, taking a left down the hall. “Now, here’s the kitchenette; fairly straightforward stuff, but wait for it—” he hovers his screen in front of the mint refrigerator, “—look at this bad baby.”

“Shut the fuck up,” James returns. “Where even are you?”

“Greatest place I’ve ever known,” Sirius answers, turning back for the hall and making to head back to the main room. “There’s a cute little bathroom back there, but it's all fairly straightforward stuff so I can show you some of the house next if you want?”

“Show me,” James requests heartily.

“Alright, give me a sec to get back out there,” Sirius bids, heading back through the main room to get outside again and padding across the yard to get to the garden. “This garden was Hope and Lyall’s pet project the last few years, but they really ramped it up to paradise levels this past spring; it has a whopping three exits to it, one leads to the hammock and the A-frame, another leads out to the shed, and the other leads up to the porch stairs, and look, cobblestones.

Sirius does a long sweep over the path and then does a twirl around to showcase the haven he's in. “Why is it so correct that the Lupins would have a windy cobblestone path out the back of their house?” James puts up.

“Because they’re all storybook characters,” Sirius gives him, taking James a little ways down the second path. “Over here, there's even a little loveseat, see?”

“Oh-ho,” James trills as Sirius shows him it. “You snog there?”

“Not yet, but we’ll see what happens,” Sirius extends, backing up and taking James up toward the porch steps, showing off the garden some more as he heads up the path to get to them. He heads up the stairs, turning the camera to the right and facing it toward the veranda area. “Behold; the spot where Remus had his famous oopsie-daisy, and where Hope and I did some intense bonding last night.”

“Ah, thank you for showing me that spot,” James extends.

“Well, can't show you the home without showing the heart with it," Sirius raises, taking him around the bend in the porch and down toward the back door. He opens it with his free hand, slips inside and backs it shut behind him, and foots Remus’s loafers off of his feet in turn, hearing vague twittering from the kitchen. “Give me a sec, 'kay?”

“All good,” James trades him.

Sirius moves for the kitchen with the camera facing down, stops in the doorway, and smiles at Remus sitting at the table with a laundry basket at his feet and about two-thirds of the way through a folding job by the looks of it while Hope’s over at the counter pouring tea into two matching white mugs.

Remus looks up at him while folding Sirius’s good jeans in his lap, giving him a curious smile. “Is it alright if I give James a little tour?” Sirius raises, waggling his mobile. “I’ll leave the upstairs out of it and just show him around down here.”

Hope looks over her shoulder and exchanges a quick smile with Remus before the both of them wave him off in near-unison. “Thanks,” Sirius smiles, giving up a shoulder shimmy.

Is that the boy?” James champions. “Lemme see him.”

“One room at a time, monsieur,” Sirius bids, turning away from the doorway and Remus's new bout of stitches to focus on the den. “Now, we’ve one quality den right here, as you can see.”

He shows off the armchair, the couch, coffee table to James’s various oohing and ahhing and gives a sweep over the (do not) shag carpet, but leaves any commentary on that out of it given the present company inside the kitchen. “The vibe in there,” James mentions.

“I mean,” Sirius echoes. He does a spin in the other direction, showing off the telly and the computer, but saves the best for last, thinking he ought to give the main attraction an appropriate introduction. “Now, they’ve got one hell of a bookshelf situation going on in here, so breathe in now ‘cause you’re about to get the air punched out of you.”

James audibly takes in a breath in anticipation and Sirius grins as he wooshes the camera over toward it. “Oh, you weren’t fucking kidding,” he puts up.

“Mm mm,” Sirius hums to decline. "Isn't it just perfectly fitting that Remus would have had that in his home?"

“It’s no wonder he became such a library goblin," James raises it.

Sirius gives out a bright trill in agreement, but he hears a substantial throat clearing from the kitchen. He moves over toward the doorway again to find that Hope’s taken up the spot across the table from Remus, who’s in the middle of taking a pointed sip of tea that doesn’t help make him look any less of a library goblin, frankly enough. “Alright, James,” he addresses. “Hope’s kitchen is a whole other dimension; you will have no hope of surviving this, but you'll still need to see it.”

“I’m ready and willing,” James assures.

Sirius does a quick roundabout in the kitchen to show off the room, starting with the counters, dipping the camera to show off the flooring, and sweeping the camera back up to showcase what the table and chairs add to the room all while James hoots and whoops on the other side of the screen.

Remus leans into the table to speak toward his mum. “Do you think he finds it a bit bland?” he raises thoughtfully, garnering a bright trill out of Hope as she goes for a sip of tea.

I love your kitchen, Hope,” James tosses out.

Hope coughs once and very quickly swallows it down. “Thank you,” she calls up. “It’s more of a preservation attempt than something I came up with myself, I'm afraid.”

“Doesn’t matter,” James doubles down. “It’s top-tier aesthetic.”

“Good thing,” Remus passes her.

“Well, thank you,” Hope extends again.

Sirius shares a quick smile with Remus before going ahead and marching his mobile around the edge of the table to frame him in the dead centre of the screen. “Have a look at this handsome lad,” he bids.

“You look literally ravishing today,” James forwards.

Remus half-cheers him with his mug, a twist of a smile on his lips. “It’s that post-coming out glow, you see,” Sirius tacks on.

“I had that feeling,” James offers coyly. “That being said, that shirt isn't doing him a disservice either, let’s be frank.”

“No, absolutely agreed,” Sirius makes known. “Good choice on that one, the minx.”

Remus looks down at the deep blue polo he’s got on, giving his head a tilt back and forth. “It’s nothing fancy,” he puts up, looking back up at them with a blink.

James huffs. “Lupins.

Sirius snickers his way out of the kitchen. “Can’t take them anywhere near a compliment,” he echoes, going for a grandiose sweep of the camera over the dining room table before giving the greater room a showcase. “The dining room; exactly what it says on the tin, but still super cute—" he pauses there, giving a glance toward the cabinets, "—hey, Remus, should I grab the tray while I'm in here?”

Mm,” Remus alerts. “Cabinet on the left, and I think it’s on the second or third shelf.”

“Which is?” Hope raises.

“The ashtray,” Remus supplies.

“Oh, third one,” Hope calls over.

“Thank you,” Sirius chimes, opening up the door on the left and swiping the brass tray off the shelf, blinking down at the hefty weight of it and moving the camera down to showcase the carpeting below. “And this room is where the wall-to-wall carpeting starts up on this end of the house, see?”

Sirius brings his screen down to showcase the carpet at his feet. “Oh, that almost looks too soft,” James says of it.

“I could easily sleep on this thing if I felt the need to,” Sirius passes him, moving out of the dining room and into the hall. “It goes all the way out here, up the stairs and into the hallway, and over toward the front of the house, too, but I hear the Lupins might be taking it out in the near future and I find that tragic to think about.”

“As do I,” James echoes. “I mean, it’s probably a lot to vacuum, but still; aesthetic.”

“I hear you and I’m with you,” Sirius extends, and then he feels he ought to show off the bathroom down here since it’s really more of an experience than your typical loo. “Speaking of aesthetics; check this out—” he heads into the room, gives a sweep around it with the camera, and a resounding YOOOOOOOOO echoes in the little room, “—absolutely the reaction necessary for this; thank you much.”

“Can you take a snap of that?” James bids.

“Oh, definitely,” Sirius assures, making a note of it for another day, another time when he's not actively using his mobile.

“Please do; Lily would fucking love that as a template for her lower-level one,” James spares him.

“Oh shit, she so would,” Sirius concedes. “They’ve got a stained glass window in here that enhances the whole experience with the rouge tint to the room, but you could find a framed one somewhere to hang over the one she's got and that'd probably recapture the essence of what’s happening here.”

“Good fucking point, you,” James forwards.

Sirius heads back out into the hall at a glide, bringing the camera over to Hope’s little area in the hall. “Now, this is Hope’s workspace and I'm in love with it,” he announces. “So far since I've been here, she’s had this tote bag filled with yarn, needles, and whatnot that she’s been moving around from place to place with her, but as you can see, this is the mothership, and look: cute little cubbies for her yarn."

“That's more yarn than I’ve ever seen anywhere,” James puts up.

“I know, it’s incredible,” Sirius echoes, moving down the front hall and into the sitting room. “Now, this, is the famous sitting room where Lyall gave me his complete stamp of approval so it’ll go down in history as a Good Room.”

“Best Room,” James raises it.

“Piano,” Sirius showcases.

James trills happily on the other end of the screen. “Play any yet?” he bids.

“A single, solitary note, but we've been busy bees since we got here,” Sirius offers, moving to show off the rest of the room. “There’s the bay window in here, Remus has one up in his room that’s a little smaller but just as cute, over here is Lyall’s area, then over here, we have the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

Sirius gets himself over to the mantel and focuses the camera on the framed photo of wee Remus and that big ol’ pooch. “No,” James pushes out.

“Yes,” Sirius pushes back.

“That’s too much,” James decides.

“That’s what I said,” Sirius returns gleefully.

He looks off to the right and down the mantel, spotting the frame over at the other end of it, and pads over to it, hoping it’s another Remus-themed one, and fuck, is he right about that; the theme of the two portraits on display could very well be a nod to the passage of time for the picture on the far left shows Remus as a little bean whereas the one on the far right shows him as a veritable beanpole in his cap and gown, and Sirius might’ve cheered with all the power in his lungs over getting to see a candid graduation photo of Remus, it’s just the other two subjects on either side of him that have him holding back on that.

“Give me a sec, yeah?” Sirius raises, sticking his mobile down on the mantel and barely registering the response he got.

He studies the three wide smiles captured side by side, looks to Angela on Remus’s right and over to Tom on his left, and spares a few long moments on the way Remus’s arms are tossed over their shoulders. His heart breaks a bit for that absolutely elated boy at the tail end of his self-assessed worst year to date and all he still had to show for it in that captured moment; he’s got his diploma, his mum and dad, the latter out of the hospital and cleared to join in on festivities, his buddy/beard on his right, his quasi-boyfriend back on his left, and Sirius can see it in all corners of Remus’s face that he must have felt like he was finally on top of the world in that moment.

Sirius takes in a tight breath, caught tight between two distinct camps: livid that Tom dipped out on him at the worst time imaginable only to turn up again in time for that photo to even be taken, and morbidly grateful that Tom wasn’t there to whisper in his ear during the worst months of the worst year; if the present-day version of that goon couldn't even muster up the ability to be genuinely happy for Lyall’s recovery, Sirius can’t even imagine the damage he could've done with all the bad news hanging over Remus’s head, how much worse he could've made it for him, how many fears he'd have pecked at, and looking back at Tom again comes with a bolt of something white-hot and fierce going up his spine, but it's got nothing to do with jealousy.

He breathes in long, putting himself back into the room he’s in and the video chat he’s on. “Hey, sorry about that,” he offers, lifting it from the mantle.

“That was like, a thousand seconds,” James puts up amusedly.

Sirius gives him a half-frown. “Guess I needed a more of a minute,” he amends.

“What’s happened?” James bids, tipping his chin toward him.

Sirius leaves the sitting room with that, looks back down the hall first and over toward the front door next, and ultimately decides the front will be the quickest and easiest to get to. “I’m just going to go out front, hold on,” he bids, moving through the entryway and tucking the ashtray between his left arm and side to get the front door open. He goes for the steps, taking a seat on the top one, and sets the ashtray down beside him before emptying his front-right pocket of its wee collection of butts and dropping them into the tray.

From there, he starts up a new cigarette from his pack, puffing off it to light it, and refocuses the camera on him, shooting a stream out the right side of his mouth. “We ran into Tom in town yesterday."

"What?" James shotputs out, taking one fuck of a face journey. "Where? When?"

“Here’s the scene,” Sirius prefaces, “we’re at the grocery ahead of dinner, picking up the fixings for it, Walking on Sunshine comes on in the place, and we start zumbaing up the dairy aisle, and I mean Remus was putting that effort in, OK, looking so, so happy; just elated and having the most fun, not giving a shit about anyone other than the two of us—”

“I’m loving this,” James comes in.

“Well, hold on,” Sirius prefaces. “If this isn't some sort of metaphor for Remus never fully getting to relax and just be for a bit, then I don't know what is because that fucker turns the corner into the same aisle right as we're dancing about and strolls up to chat Remus up like that's even slightly acceptable, and then, he’s pulling him into a whole catch-up conversation riddled with smarmy ‘I got into Cambridge’ energy about him, and it was all awful to watch but also incredibly informative because I really feel like I got to see with my own eyes what six years with him would've been in just five minutes with the way the guy talks to him; it's like, address the topic about Remus that should be positive, put a compliment in there, and then leave a backhanded one at the end, and if he can, he'll plant a seed of doubt or anything he wagers might get Remus's anxieties going, and he’ll fucking smile while he does it, too.”

"Fuck that guy," James expels.

Sirius hums starkly in approval, pausing to take a quick haul off his cigarette. "He brought up Remus’s fall plans, which he got out of Lyall probably weeks back now, but then he got all weird about it, like Remus going and doing a term out in Paris after going off to London is somehow too grandiose and like Remus already has quite enough and should leave it at that as if he’s not going to fucking Cambridge soon?” he raises, giving James a face on camera. “Like, what’s the problem exactly; Remus can’t have anything, it can only be you? Does he have to check in with you first? What is it, mm?”

James shakes his head, making a plainly unimpressed face. “So, still a shit and a half,” he surmises.

“And you still haven’t heard the half of it,” Sirius assures, giving him a brow raise. “He had the gall to bring up Lyall’s health since his initial recovery, and it’d be one thing if it meant that he was happy to see him doing better, but he fucking wasn’t: he literally just brought up how good he's looking to be a piece of shit, slam dunk on Lyall, and treat it like it’s a fucking miracle that he’s even doing this well now, and he says that to Remus? That's the fucking ticket; why would Remus ever want to hear that from someone and why would you say it to him, let alone think it?"

“What a fucking cunt,” James fire-breathes.

Pfft, there it is,” Sirius echoes, flicking a bit of ash off the end of his cigarette into the tray. “One thing I’ll note here, Tom clearly didn’t think Remus snarking him back would be in the cards for him and I know Remus didn’t do a lot of shutting him down in the past because he’s told me as much, but seeing the look on Tom’s face and how quickly he started backpedalling and just making it worse was incredible in itself, but seeing Remus get at him for that shit was just phenomenal; I love that man so much.”

“Good, I’m glad he didn’t take that shit,” James returns.

“Mm, and he shouldn’t have to; that man hit Remus so many times without even touching him," Sirius instils. "It comes out that Tom’s heading to Cambridge this week to scope out flats so I’m guessing that’s why he went ahead and asked whether Remus has got one yet where he’s going, but he just fucking would not let Remus be with it; he’s there negging him about it, going on about how nervous Remus must be not having a place to stay yet, and he fucking knows what he's doing — I hate him, James. Why? Why do that? Stop trying to get in his head, Remus is already fucking in there.”

“No wonder he got so riled up with Hope and Lyall about it,” James puts it, going into a full-faced grimace. “That's like two low-blows in a row.”

“James, it literally couldn’t have been the worse timing for them to start asking about it,” Sirius puts down. “Of course they didn’t mean anything by it, they’re just curious and want their kid safe and sound in a new city, but no fucking wonder Remus has such a fucking hard time with timing and signs from above, you know? Just such bad timing, that could be the summary of all time with him, and reigning him back from the ledge gets harder and harder to do because I want to help restructure how he sees things, but it’s a tough task when these things happen to him.”

James nods, giving in to a deep pout on the other end of the chat. “He’s doing OK now?”

“Well, you saw him,” Sirius puts up. “He’s fucking glowing in there.”

“As he should,” James lobs back.

“Fact is, the flat thing is going to bother him until he knows he has something lined up, but he’s trying so hard not to panic outright,” Sirius forwards. “At this point, I’m pretty close to just renting a place he could stay in nearby his faculty building just to give him a break on that venture, but who knows if he’d even let me do it.”

James gives another grimace, but it’s hard to land it when he’s smiling the whole way through it. “Well, look; yeah, he’ll probably block you on it,” he starts, “but maybe you’ve just got to suggest it, at least as the absolute fallback plan, and then maybe having that safety net could at least help him feel a little less desperate to take just about anything that would work, you know?”

Sirius looks off into the distance and back at James after a few moments’ ponder. “That’s a good one,” he forwards. “Thanks for it.”

“Oh, you know me,” James valley-girls, “I just like to help.”

“Yeah,” Sirius echoes, working past the pit that's entered his gut.

“Alright, well, what happened next?” James prompts.

Sirius blows a long, drawn-out raspberry. “The guy triples down on the audacity, asks whether Remus has a new number in Londontown, which he already fucking knew so fuck him twice, and then he goes and hands his mobile over for Remus to plug it in for him," he tacks on pointedly. "Doesn't ask, just hands it off to him so Remus just has it in his hands now, and can either chuck it back at him or exit the situation by complying, and—"

"Oh, no no no," James shoots out, grimacing hard. "What was he thinking?"

"Remus?" Sirius checks. "Well, I mean, obviously option A would have been lovely to see happen and very cathartic for him, I’m sure, but have you met Remus?”

"Well, I wasn't coming for Remus, ya dingus," James corrects.

Sirius can't say he isn't relieved to hear it. “Well, I had to check,” he instils. “I know it looks shady, I had a whole meltdown about it later on all on my own so I really can attest to how bad it looked, but he was so sorry about it, turned it the fuck up for me all evening, and don't even get me started on this morning, he's just been a star; I’m a huge fan of that lad and I'm just so fucking livid that Tom put him in that situation, that's really where I'm at with it."

“And for him to do it in front of you, too," James huffs, distaste lining his features.

"Oh, yeah; brass balls," Sirius echoes. “Remus says he was just showing his length a little there, which, to be fair, he did do a few times in that five minutes alone so I’m willing to give him that in some capacity, but it’s not as if something has to be one thing and one thing only, right? I think it was more of a 'two birds, one stone' sort of thing; he wanted that number, but he wanted me to see him get it."

"I'm having a really hard time imagining you let him walk free," James theorizes, giving him a coy gaze.

"Oh, I hunted him the fuck down, trust," Sirius maintains. "The bitch didn't even get out of there ASAP? I mean, I'd hoped he hadn't scurried off too quickly so I could hound him, but I found him perusing aisle five like he hadn't just committed a few dozen faux pas in just five minutes, but his eyes sure shot open when he saw me coming for him and I bet he did wish he'd gotten out of there sooner."

The right corner of James's mouth pulls up into a half-smile before the left corner joins in. "Well, the pit bull was on the loose," he raises. "How hard did you smack him?"

Sirius finishes up with the haul he'd gone for and tries for a light but credible response. "Well, I did slap his hand real good for putting it in my face and acting like he'd be the one doling out orders, but that was the height of my hands' involvement," he supplies. "I went for the, 'tear his life apart without having to administer a sock' route."

The face James pulls there suggests that ain't it. "Not trying to take that away from you here, but what he did was grounds for a curb stomp," he maintains.

"Well, I don't know what to tell you other than I didn't curb-stomp him," Sirius returns, shrugging his shoulders with it.

James squints at him. "The guy made a move on Remus right in front of you," he registers.

"Yeah, I was there," Sirius reminds him.

"Then how am I way more fucked off about this than you even are?" James puts up.

"Umm, because you're obsessed with us?" Sirius highlights. "And you're not more fucked off than I am, by the way, but I wanted him to listen to me; I'm not saying he wouldn't have deserved the curb stomp, but I was a lot more focused on telling him exactly the sort of piece of shit he was and still is and not to fucking try me like that, so if you could remember for a second that I'm still the pitbull you just called me a minute ago, I think you could lay off me for not knocking him clear out."

James huffs long. "But it'd have been so good if you had," he puts out, absolutely anguished over it apparently.

Sirius turns to put out his cigarette in the ashtray and waits until all stray embers have been crushed to continue. "Nevertheless, beating the shit out of the guy would've made things a whole lot worse," he maintains. "I really scared Remus with the David fiasco and I'm not about to do that shit again."

James sticks a skeptical look on. "Did you, though?" he raises tightly.

"Yeah?" Sirius sounds out. "He was totally spun out by that."

"I don't know if he was, Sirius," James floats him, his eyebrows going up. "He had his game face on in there; it was thrilling to watch."

"Well, I'd love to say I saw for myself but I got left in the car," Sirius makes sure to mention.

"Well, see; you love the idea of it," James returns him. "What are you so pressed about?"

"I can't only celebrate his on-switch; it comes at a price, you know," Sirius puts it. "And your point doesn't stand anyway, Remus wouldn't have felt he had to go in there if the threat of David pressing charges against me wasn't looming over his head, and on top of that, he didn't go in there and beat the shit out of David on my behalf, did he? No, he handled it without raging out on the guy and I could learn a thing or two about not blowing my lid so much."

"Ohh," James drags out, blinking loudly, "you don't think you're getting a little ahead of yourself there?"

"It's not fair to keep doing that to someone like Remus if I can help it," Sirius puts down. "I can't keep acting out the way I do or he's going to wake up and realize the kind of liability I can be—"

James goes right into a prime reel. "In what world would he do that, Sirius?"

"This one," Sirius insists. "He loves me, but if I keep going around acting like I've been, he's going to walk one day and the very least you could do is not actively encourage me to act out and then hide me behind a wall of excuses for forever and ever."

"What the fuck is happening?" James puts up.

"I just fucking said what," Sirius comes back. "At least Remus pulls me up and makes me want to do better; you could learn a thing or two about that, I'll tell you."

James does the thing where he's clearly unhappy with Sirius but his face remains unobtrusive, and if that isn't some classic James right there. "Do you want to go for a nap or something?" he raises. “You seem real cranky.”

"Why don't you go take one?" Sirius retorts. "You're the one coming for me for not curb-stomping Remus's ex just because you wanted to live vicariously through it."

James takes in a long breath that Sirius also should try to do himself now that he's just made a whole point about doing so. "You know I'm not actually coming for you."

Sirius sits stewing for upwards of ten seconds focusing on breathing patterns. "We dealt with it, James," he presses. "Remus and me? The golden age has begun: he doesn't want to hear from the guy again, he's right sick of being his caretaker, and now that Hope and Lyall are up to speed on the fact that those two were once a flame and do not keep up anymore as a result of how badly that went over, I've already talked to Lyall about freezing Tom out and not giving him any more information on Remus and he's happy to ignore the guy from here on out, I haven't talked to Hope about it yet, but something tells me she's not going to want to stop and chat with the guy anymore either so that's them taken care of, and unless Tom really is the biggest, dumbest cunt around — oh, fuck, fuck, fucking fuck."

"That took a turn," James comments.

Sirius's galaxy brain activates so thoroughly that his whole body seems to come online in the span of a finger snap. "I should have taken the number off his mobile," he puts down, dragging his free hand up through his hair. "I've been going around sewing everything back together and trying to get the house in order, but I can't just latch all the windows and leave the front door wide open; I mean, what am I, a rookie?"

James presses his own lips together there. "It's almost like taking the pacifist route—"

Sirius's eyes flash. "I stand by not getting caught up in two blunders in under a week, thanks," he hisses at him. "I only wish I'd fucking taken it back from him when I had the chance; this is Remus we're talking about, Tom's not going to listen to me, he's going to wait it out, try again once the spooks wear off, and then I really am going to have to ride on up to Cambridge and fuck him up like I said I would or he's going to think I'm a joke."

"Hey, I'll drive you up there," James puts up.

"You are not helping me whatsoever, James," Sirius heaves.

James sighs long. "Alright, fine, was it incredibly short-sighted to let him walk out of there with it still on him?" he raises. "Yes, ma'am, but you can still deal with the problem."

"He leaves town on Monday," Sirius puts down. "He's going to be gone the rest of the week, I'm not going to see him again."

"Is it Monday?" James raises, and Sirius presses his lips together feebly. "Go get that mobile, chuck the on the ground, make it explode into shards if you've got to, or better yet, whip it at him, but at least get the number out of it before you chuck it back or that would be another rookie move."

Sirius takes in a tight breath, looking tapping his screen to get the time displayed at the top, and they're pushing noon already; his galaxy brain intensifies as he connects quite a few dots in a row and in the next moment he's bolting up from the steps. "I have to go," he attests, pressing to end the call.

He zooms down the porch steps, freezes there, and looks back at the ashtray he almost left in his wake, but can't think of where to stick it except for underneath the steps and out of sight. He dashes across the front of the house to bolt up between the house and the shed, hears a cough that most certainly belongs to Lyall, and skids to a stop just past the shed, doubling back and finding Lyall tucking his new lady away in it.

"Hey, quick question," Sirius prefaces, bracing his hands on either side of the doorframe out of sheer exhaustion from that sudden sprint, "where does Tom live?"

"Did Remus take you to or near the watering hole?" Lyall raises, working the mower up against the wall on the right.

"The one you worked at, yes," Sirius offers.

"It's a few blocks down from there," Lyall extends. He dusts his hands off with an air of a job well done and turns to look over at Sirius, where he clicks his tongue hard a true beat later. "Oh, what'd he do now?"

"He's leaving town Monday, but I can't let him jet off without getting to him first," Sirius puts out. "Remus and I were going to hang around until Hope gets back from her thing, but the rest of the day is booked up solid and we're not even going to be in town tomorrow so this, right here, this is my only shot, and—"

Lyall sweeps his hands once for Sirius to move out of the doorway. "Let's go," he bids, just like that.

"Are you sure?" Sirius checks.

"Well, I wouldn't walk it if you're in a crunch," Lyall says by way of answering. "It's just a hop and a skip from here with a lift."

Sirius lets go of the doorway to press his hands together in a stark display of thanksgiving. "You're the best," he champions. "I owe you anything — literally anything you want."

"The freedom of the open air," Lyall tells him, gesturing for Sirius to move out, but he's smiling this time around.

Sirius nods dutifully, moves out of the way, and darts back up toward the front, not even bothering with shoes for his feet when he's not even that certain that he isn't hallucinating how easy that was to organize. He heads past the front steps again, passes by Hope's car, and makes a beeline for the passenger side of the truck while Lyall goes along on the driver's side. Sirius climbs up and into the truck, gets in across from Lyall, and reaches for his seatbelt to pull it over himself while Lyall wrangles his own belt on, puts the key in to start up the engine, and whatever station he was last on appears to have decided that 11:52 a.m. and the very moment they're getting going is a perfectly reasonable time to be playing 'If I Die Young.'

"Can we—" Sirius starts, miming like he's turning the dial, "—not with that one?"

Lyall certainly doesn't seem to mind that idea, reaching to cycle through a few channels that are mostly static until he falls on one that isn't, only that one's busy putting out 'Die Young' by one Kesha and that would be a little funny if Sirius wanted to have two crises eating at his brain at one go. "Nope," he denies, shaking his head once.

"Tough crowd," Lyall observes, cycling onward and landing them on a station that's putting out the rapturing pound of 'Du Hast' before turning his head to Sirius. "Too much?"

Sirius gives in to a bout of snickers despite himself. "That's perfect, honestly."

Lyall nods once, a wry smile of his own on as he gets the truck pulled around. "Are you planning on sharing anything else or should I just drive?" he raises, heading them down the driveway.

"He made a move on Remus," Sirius admits.

It's a good thing that the driveway is a very long and straight arrow for Lyall whips his head straight toward him. "Wh—" he sputters. "In the last hour?"

Sirius shakes his head feebly. He did it yesterday," he fesses. "We saw him in town while we were at the getting the pie fixings and he got bold with himself."

"And he made a move on him in there?" Lyall checks, going for quite the squint.

"Dairy aisle," Sirius shares. "And it's going to sound so juvenile and ridiculous, I know, but—"

"Sirius," Lyall chides, making a left out of the driveway and onto the highway. "What'd he do?"

Sirius releases the breath he just barely took in. "OK, it's just as Remus said; he's in a new chapter of his life, much better place now than he'd ever been with him, but Tom still managed to get Remus to plug his newer, Londontown number into his mobile for him before he sauntered off, and I know how juvenile this sounds," he reinstates, eyes shut through his recurring mortification. "I know it's just a number and Remus can rightfully ignore anything that comes his way, but Tom actively played on his kindness for fucking years already and did it again the second he had the chance to, and me? I chased him down to put the fear of God in him, let him know how big a mistake it would be for him to use that number, and checked with Remus after the fact and he's quite convinced I'd have scared him off, that Tom would've asked you or Hope if he wanted to have the new number at any point before this, and that he probably just misses his mate, but come on, that's too easy and Remus doesn't know the kind of catch he is, but that's my job to know and d'you know what I should've done while I had the chance? Get the fucking number back from him, that would have been direct action, and now, because I didn't do that, Tom's locked himself in to be in the perfect position to pester Remus whenever the spooks of me hunting him down wear off, and Remus does not want, need, or deserve that guy pulling on his strings, dragging him down, and getting in his head anymore, so I know how strange a request this is but I'mma need you to run me over there so I can confiscate that number before he leaves town with it and I won’t get another chance."

Sirius opens his eyes there, finding Lyall trading glances between him and the road. "OK, we can do that," he extends, once he realizes Sirius has finished, "only, are you sure you don't want me to pop him ahead of time? I'd call that some direct action, too."

Sirius takes in a careful breath. "As cathartic as it would be to see, Remus wouldn't want us riding on down to rough up his ex on his behalf," he reiterates. "I know it like I know anything."

"Well, I think we just established the kid's a little too hold-hands-and-make-nice for his own good," Lyall mentions.

"Well, yes, we did," Sirius lets him have, "but as long as we're being honest, I really need to do this without annihilating Tom and that isn't something I'm very good at, but I have to try a lot harder than I have been because I don't want to be what I'm from, you feel me?"

Lyall's quiet for the next stretch of road and rolling hills, but he speaks again as they come upon the bridge Remus took them over just yesterday, and shit, this really is going much quicker with the truck at his disposal. "I respect that, Sirius," he forwards him, "and forgive me for this, but I'm just not sure I can picture the kid handing the thing over without a bit of force thrown in."

"Oh, I'm going to force him," Sirius puts down, lifting his right hand in assurance. "He's going to do whatever I say, you'll just have to trust me on that."

Lyall gives a glance his way as he takes them out the other side of the bridge. "There's a lot of gumption in you," he offers, tossing his head toward him.

"Funny," Sirius puts up, "Hope called it moxie last night."

"Well, that's there, too," Lyall returns. "In. Droves."

"I'll take both," Sirius assures, working his mouth around a wry smile.

It isn't much longer before Lyall makes a left turn off of the highway and takes them down the street he recalls Remus taking them down to get over to the main, and it's a right turn before they're on that quaint, picturesque street, but Sirius hasn't got it in him to watch the bustle of the passersby when his whole body is too busy thrumming with anticipation. That hum goes twice as hard as Lyall turns off the main a block past the watering hole and takes them down a good three more blocks before pulling a new right onto a more residential street, garnering Sirius to sit up straighter in his seat, on high alert.

Lyall pulls the truck in on the left side of the road, stops just behind a driveway that's got what has to be the infamous Audi sitting in it, and Sirius eyes the deep green vehicle on the other side of his window. "Should've stopped for an egg carton on the way," he raises. "That windshield's looking a bit too squeaky clean to me."

Lyall puts up a flat laugh. "I'd love to see that, but you'd get one thrown before the alarm would start right up," he trades.

"Balls," Sirius laments, sizing up the house beyond the car and finding the blocky, beachfront look of the place wholly off-putting compared to the rest of the veritable cottages on this street. "Woof; that thing's fucking ugly."

"The Audi?" Lyall raises, wry-smiling.

"Nah, that monstrosity behind it," Sirius amends. "It's like I'm staring at a beachfront house in Belize."

"Mm," Lyall returns monotonously. "Never been, but I think I agree; there are more and more houses like those popping up these days, but they were one of the firsts in the area to erect something quite that out of place."

"I like yours a thousand times better than I already did," Sirius passes him. "Just putting that out there."

Lyall gives an even noise in his throat. "It's a fixer-upper, but we won't be doing something like that with it," he extends.

"You'd better not," Sirius returns, unbuckling and slipping out from the strap of his seatbelt.

"Want me to come with?" Lyall asks, reaching for the key in the ignition.

"No, I've got it," Sirius assures. "And I may even ask you to pull the truck out of view, just so he doesn't see you in the background and have a whole fit over it."

Lyall gives quite the scoff for that. "And why should I care if he's uncomfortable?"

"Well, we don't; not really," Sirius amends, "but Remus said it, Tom's status doesn't leave that porch and I don't want him getting shit at any point for sharing what he damn well should have with you two, but if Tom sees you out here then he's going to know; immediately, he'll just know."

Lyall takes a long breath in through his nose. "Alright, fine, I'll pull up," he relents, but only just, "but I'll be watching and if he throws one punch, I'm coming up there; that's the deal."

"Deal, 'cause he'd never," Sirius grants, feeling all sorts of warmth in his stomach as he reaches to open his door.

"You didn't wear shoes, Sirius?" Lyall tosses him, snorting up a storm in there.

"There wasn't time for shoes, Lyall," Sirius tosses back, a goon grin on his lips as he lowers himself to the ground, but a sheepish smile starts as he turns and looks back through his open window at Lyall. "I just hope he's home and we didn't just drive over here for nothing."

Lyall gives a glance toward the clock on the dashboard and while Sirius can't see it well from this angle, he can't imagine it's been very long at all when the drive certainty came across as the hop and a skip it was promised to be, but that still doesn't mean the guy's home for noon hour. "Well, look, somebody's got to be there," he raises, gesturing behind Sirius toward the car. "If he's not, find out where he went and we'll go there."

Sirius lifts his free hand to tap the end of his nose in solidarity, shuts his door, and turns for the driveway, miming a jaunty kick to the left headlight of the Audi and getting a quick, double-toot on the horn in apparent reply before Lyall keeps his word and pulls the truck up the road. Sirius skips up the rest of the drive through a bout of snickers, looks toward the window of the front room as the curtain moves aside, and stops still as Tommy McGee looks right out at him, alerted by the honking, it seems. Sirius gives him a hearty wave, heading up the front steps and stopping on the stoop with an expectant smile on, but Tom only sizes him up through the glass.

A standstill of about five or so seconds creeps on before Sirius reaches up and fuses his right forefinger to the doorbell, letting it ring and ring and ring until Tom whirls around and makes rather quick work of getting to the door. "You're such a fucking—"

"I wouldn't have rung the bell at all if you'd just come to the door," Sirius cuts him off.

Tom huffs, stepping out onto the stoop and pulling the door shut behind him. "Really, you're making house calls now?" he puts up.

"Sure am," Sirius affirms, lifting his right hand toward him. "Give me your mobile."

Tom drops his gaze to linger over Sirius's bare feet, where a supremely duped expression clouds over his face. "I have no clue how he can handle someone this extra," he comments.

"Oh, he loves it, don't you worry," Sirius smiles, keeping his hand up. "Give me your mobile."

"I don't have it on me," Tom returns.

"I bet you do," Sirius replies, giving a beckon of the same hand.

"I'm not going to use it," Tom snaps, but it really doesn't have much bite to it when he's keeping all of this to a hushed whisper. "You made yourself quite clear."

"Why hold onto a number you're not going to use?" Sirius raises, but when Tom still won't budge, he tosses a plain glance toward the shut door over behind him. "Your dad home?"

"This is extortion," Tom sounds out.

"Nah, it's just business," Sirius mimics, moving a steady gaze back to him. "Give me your fucking mobile right now."

Tom veritably fumes as he reaches jaggedly into his back left pocket. "Insecurity doesn't look so good on you," he mentions pithily, pulling his mobile around in front of him.

"Pretty sure everything looks good on me, but OK," Sirius chimes, snapping his fingers to get Tom to hurry it up.

Tom looks up from his screen, clicking his tongue. "Well, do you want the passcode in or not?" he retorts, his right thumb passing over his screen. "I'm not about to tell you it."

"Lemme guess, his birthday?" Sirius surmises, and he meant it in jest, but Tom practically chucks the mobile at him in reply so that seems like a pretty decent confirmation in and of itself. "You're way too easy; holy."

He smiles freely as he breezes through the same interface as his own mobile, bringing up Tom's contacts and pressing to get to the R's quicker than scrolling would get him, and while he could easily delete Remus as a contact in full, he goes ahead and leaves Remus's name lingering in there empty-handed, but that's more for himself than anyone else.

Sirius sighs wistfully, handing the mobile back with the air of accomplishment wafting off and around him. "Cool, so from this moment on, when you see Remus and me about the town, and you will see that one day, you're to keep walking, let him be, and we'll never have to meet again," he puts up lightly. "Pretty good deal, I'd—"

"You know, he really wouldn't want you controlling him like this," Tom cuts in.

Sirius's spine may as well have grown six inches in a single beat for how quickly Tom seems to realize how smart that wasn't. "And why would you know what the fuck he wants?" he barks back. "I want him happy, and that's far more than I can say for you."

"Keep your fucking voice down," Tom warns.

Sirius tosses him a sneer, lifting his hands and flinging them to wash them free of Tom and his shit in one go. He walks to the end of the driveway, takes a swift left to head down the street, and finds Lyall parked a few houses down from there. He pulls his mobile out while heading for the truck, types out a quick mission accomplished to fire off to James, and gives a big thumbs up to Lyall through the window before giving the passenger door a tug.

"How, Sirius?" Lyall calls over.

"Oh, you know," Sirius raises, hoisting himself into the truck, "just worked my magic."

"That really all you're going to tell me?" Lyall raises him, starting up the truck.

"Yeah, I'm thinking so," Sirius affirms, pulling his belt back on, "but now that I got it out of there, we can keep in with Operation Remus's Happiness and he'll be a lot better off for it; what do you think? Is it walls-up, Lyall?"

"Tom, who?" Lyall puts up quizzically, pulling away from the curb and down the street.

"That's it," Sirius champions, getting cozy in his seat.

Lyall takes a left at the end of the street, heads down quite a few blocks from there before taking a new left, and Sirius only just registers that he's been down this one before Lyall gestures toward Sirius's window. "Ever been there?" he raises curiously.

Sirius looks out toward a very familiar garage-and-carwash establishment and snorts fast. "Nah, never me," he returns, but since they're passing by and the question could come off naturally, he thinks he ought to get some intel to bring back for Remus. "Who's on today?"

"Same as yesterday save for Bill, who you didn't meet; he only does weekends these days," Lyall supplies, and Sirius hums anecdotally in reply, but wiggles his toes down below his seat with the confirmation that Bubba will likely be there later on.

Whatever tune playing over the radio that Sirius had no basis for fades out for Filter's 'Take a Picture' to start up in its place, and for a strong moment, Sirius finds it too close to home and all too pointed in a wholly different way than the earlier, morbidly-themed tunes, but he decides after a sizing of the scene he's in — and the quality company he's got with him — that he'll let it play; things are already shifting, changing shape, attracting colour where shadows loomed.

He registers that Lyall spoke a good couple seconds after he’d already done it. “Hm?” Sirius checks.

"Did you say something about Hope 'getting back' before?" Lyall reiterates.

Sirius breathes thoughtfully, rolling back through his memory log. "Oh, yeah, I did," he affirms. "Doreen’s driving up and they’re going for a late lunch date, which is why—"

"Oh," Lyall comes in, nodding with newfound understanding before giving in to a hell of a smirk. "Why do you know more about my wife's schedule than I do?"

"I only found out from Remus this morning," Sirius passes him. “It's why I said I had a very small window to act; in a perfect world, I'd have waited for Hope to get back and then he and I could’ve gone by his place, but in this one, Remus would not have cooperated with me on that idea.”

"Oh," Lyall repeats, only this one's lodged a little deeper in his throat. "Was that something we're not to mention to him?"

"Oh, no, I'll tell him about it," Sirius assures. "I've learned through a lot of trial and error that asking for permission before doing him a favour or getting something done on his behalf is a surefire way to ensure he’s going to resist whatever it is, so in some cases, I’ll broach a subject to test the waters and keep working on him if I’ve got more time to work with, but in others, when I haven't got much time and have to act on the fly, just doing the favour and bringing him the conclusion goes over so much more smoothly; that make sense?”

Lyall gives out a highly amused noise in his throat. “Sure does,” he puts in. “Hope’s the same way, only you’ve got me beaten by figuring that out so quickly; took me an embarrassing amount of years to realize that sometimes, you really just have to get the thing done and she’ll love it once it is.”

Sirius gives a celebratory noise in his throat. “I mean, I’m still constantly working at it so I'm no expert,” he passes him. “Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of second-guessing with just about everything I do in regards to him than I used to; I’ll do a thing on his behalf, feel good about in the moment, and then I’ll go and build up scenarios in my head where Remus is just livid with me for getting it done without checking with him first, but then, when I bring it to him expecting him to be upset, he’s just the calmest, most relaxed bloke about it, so sometimes he's the anchor and I’m just the rafter, you know?”

“Certainly do,” Lyall trades him. “I think the ticket proposal is a fine example of situations where Hope’s the one to come in and calmly figure the rest out after I’ve stormed off; it’s a back and forth.”

Sirius beats the underside of his left fist against his armrest. “Yes, exactly,” he champions. “I’m not so worried about telling him about this one; I mean, if I’d waited until we had the car and asked him to drive me on by his place, he’d have insisted we not to bother with it, that Tom has no ulterior motives, that he's probably just trying to reach out as a mate—"

"Which wouldn't have been true in any sense," Lyall comes in.

"Mm, mhm," Sirius affirms, "but beyond the fact that he's a catch, he’s also the best sort of mate someone could have and for that, I’m sure Tom does miss that part so say he did want his mate back and nothing more; that's not Remus's job anymore and he knows it; you heard him, said it himself, he needs people around him who lift him up and want the best for him, not themselves."

"Damn it, kid," Lyall offers, wearing a wry smile as he turns them onto the main, “you've got it.”

This time around, Sirius is right happy to people-watch out his window, basking with his own wry smile on as catches a glimpse of a little girl going along the sidewalk on a pair of rollerblades and bringing up a particular bolt of remembrance with it. "Hey, Remus told me about a certain rollerblading guitar man a while back," he mentions, turning back to Lyall. "Was he lying to me or is that really something that happens here?"

"Ah, mhm," Lyall affirms. "No lie."

"OK, good, because if he'd been taking the mickey out of me with that," Sirius puts up, wagging his right forefinger pointedly for the rest.

"No no, he’s a staple 'round these parts," Lyall tacks on.

"He said that, too," Sirius trades him. "What I'm wondering now, is if he's got a schedule he keeps to or if it's more like a Northern Lights type deal?"

"I'm afraid it's more of the latter," Lyall gives him.

"So, not something one can quantify," Sirius accepts, if a tad begrudgingly.

"Mm, it'd be tough to do that," Lyall concedes. "Now, when the weather's nice, the chances he'll be out and about are higher, but never the same time as far as I've seen; comes and goes at will."

"Does he play well or is the guitar more of a prop?" Sirius inquires.

"Well, the guitar's definitely part of the whole shtick, but he does play very well," Lyall lets land. "And fast, too; I've seen him doing all these swivel tricks on the blades and not even having to slow down his picking so he's clearly got two lucrative talents and all the more for us commoners to enjoy."

Sirius snickers there, absolutely amazed by this. "Is he younger, older, in the middle?" he raises. "I need to know what I'm to be picturing here."

Lyall hums thoughtfully with the question. "Late thirties, early forties?” he puts up. "White bloke, gets a lot of sun given that if the weather’s right his shirt can be seen hanging from one of his back pockets, sandy hair about as long as yours is, maybe a little longer even."

"Oh my," Sirius trills. "Hippy?"

Lyall hums. "Beatnicky for certain."

"OK, objectively speaking," Sirius prefaces, "would you say he's on the fit side of things?"

"Oh, sure," Lyall returns, and Sirius cannot handle how easy it can actually be. "Nothing to scoff at."

"Incroyable," Sirius calls it. "Have you talked to him ever? Nice gent, I've been told."

"Oh, he is," Lyall extends. "Very polite as he's passing you by, but I've personally never heard the man speak."

"No?" Sirius returns, right piqued.

Lyall hums a decline. "Hope swears she heard him talk once, but I'm not sure I believe her," he quips.

"Oh, you're yanking my chain," Sirius returns him.

Lyall pushes a laugh through his nose. "That last bit, I was; I believe her, I do," he trades him. "For the most part, he generally keeps to himself, but you'll see him riding along, strumming and tipping his head to folks as he zips by, and sometimes he'll go into a shop here or there—"

Sirius snorts. "Just rides on in?" he climbs in, grinning big.

"He’s usually got a knapsack with him that he keeps a regular pair of shoes in," Lyall forwards him. "He'll switch out of the blades and put the shirt back on if he's headed inside somewhere.

"Ooh, he’s a gentleman, too,” Sirius observes.

"Hope was in the bakery a while back when he strolled in and said hello while he passed, and it was as if she’d seen a dog walk on its hind legs, says her,” Lyall details, snickering there. “You just don't expect him to stroll into the bakery and order a half-dozen muffins like the rest of us."

"Right, more that he powers up through photosynthesis alone," Sirius affords him, and Lyall flies his left hand toward him for a firm echo. "What's he sound like?"

"A man," Lyall shares, getting them back onto the highway.

"Could've guessed that myself, Lyall," Sirius returns, sending him a load of air punches.

Lyall snickers wildly in the driver's seat. "Cockney accent," he hands over.

"Ah, so he's from the Isles, then," Sirius accepts. "How long's he been around here?"

Lyall squints out the front window. "Close to a decade now, give or take," he supplies.

Sirius feels his mobile start to go off in his pocket and reaches behind him to pause the ringer. "Does anybody know what his story is?" he delves deeper. "A name, whereabouts he might reside, what sort of day job he keeps?"

Lyall hums noncommittally for that. "There are rumblings here and there, but nothing concrete," he supplies him. "For the most part, the anonymity of it all seems to have gone collectively accepted and rather played into in recent years; he's just various iterations of 'guitar man' these days and I really couldn't tell you where he hangs his hat."

Sirius hums thoughtfully for that. "Nah, you know what; probably better not knowing too much about him," he reasons. "Finding out that he's a broker named Chuck who lives in one of those beachfront houses would soil most of the illusion, I would think."

"That's it, yeah," Lyall echoes, a laugh catching in his throat. "We've a running theory around the Lupin household that he must do some sort of freelance work by how unpredictable his sightings tend to be, but that's about as far as we've gone with theorizing."

Sirius gives out a wondrous sigh. "Well, it's official: I cannot leave this hamlet without seeing this phenomenon at least once," he states, drumming his armrest to cement it.

"Well, the weekend's looking warm and next week's supposed to be a right scorcher," Lyall supplies him. "Chances are, with the way you two've been gallivanting around, you'll catch him going by one of the days ahead."

Sirius smirks. “Remus is so like you,” he serves him.

“I hear that more than I hear just about anything else,” Lyall extends him. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

“Good thing I always have specifics lined up and ready to go,” Sirius returns him. “See, unless you count the honkin’ raccoon that hangs out by the dumpster out back of my building, my London-born-and-bred arse hasn’t been around a ton of wildlife and that goes to say that I’d like to see an impressive stag during my stay here, but Remus told me I have to keep an open mind and let them show themselves to me on their time, not on mine, and here you’ve gone giving me the hard sense that Rollerblading Guitar Man's similar in nature.”

“That’s a fair assessment,” Lyall deems it, taking them back over the bridge. “Though for your stag concern, keep your eyes peeled in the a.m.; some mornings, when it’s calm, quiet, with a bit of fog rolling in, that’s when they’ll come right up to the yard.”

Sirius sighs once. “He told me that, too, and I still didn’t even think to look out for one this morning,” he puts up.

“Well, there'll be other mornings,” Lyall spares him.

Sirius lifts his right hand to show the man some incredibly crossed fingers. “I’m holding the both of you to this,” he mentions.

“I'm fairly comfortable letting you do that,” Lyall extends.

The rest of the ride back takes little more than a blink, it feels, and the only difference to the scene as they roll up to the house is that Hope’s car is no longer in the picture. “Well, either she skipped town or Do beat traffic,” Lyall puts up.

“Hm,” Sirius offers, looking to the time on the dashboard and finding that it’s only just passing half-twelve. “Not that I’m expecting it to be the former, but it's a bit early for most late lunches I've had.”

“Well, I would not be too surprised if Do hit the road early,” Lyall trades him, putting the truck into park at the end of the driveway.

“No, I suppose you're right,” Sirius allows, reaching to unbuckle.

Lyall pulls the key out of the ignition, scratching beneath the bridge of his glasses with his free hand. “Well, listen, did you just want to take the truck?” he puts up.

“Oh, no, we can wait,” Sirius assures, leaving his seatbelt aside. “We were prepared to until mid-afternoon at the earliest.”

He opens his door, hops down to the ground, and turns back to shut the door only to find Lyall still sitting in the driver’s seat looking right quizzical. “But the truck is right here,” he raises, pointing down with both his forefingers before aiming them back behind him toward the road, “and her car is out there somewhere.”

Sirius snorts for all of that. “I just don't want her getting back and thinking we were tapping our wrists the whole time she was gone,” he extends.

“Well, I’ll tell you right now, she won’t think that,” Lyall puts it. “I’ll even tell her I foisted the truck on you first thing so she won't even have time to think it; want me to do that?”

Sirius smirks for it. “Could you also tell her not to cut her lunch short on account of us?” he tacks on.

“I could, she’s got her very own mobile and everything,” Lyall extends, reaching to open his door.

Sirius huffs an amused sigh, shutting his door and heading around the front of the truck to meet back up with him on that side. “Well, I’ll bring it to the boss and see what he says, but the offer is very much appreciated,” he says of it.

Lyall snorts this time around, hoisting himself to the ground before backing up to shut the door after him, and Sirius falls into step with him as they head up the porch steps, waving to let him go in first before Lyall waves him onward more insistently, and very soon, Sirius understands it'd been less of an incessantly polite standstill and more that Lyall was just looking to get at the bench in the foyer to remove his shoes.

He moves out into the hall to give Lyall the little room entirely, leaning against the doorframe and watching the man lean forward off the bench to drop his shoes onto the mat, pull a pair of slippers over toward him, and pop the right slipper onto the fashioned foot of his prosthetic, willing himself not to ask about phantom limb like he so wants to, and from there, a whole madrush of questions he’d love to ask someone who just so happens to be one chatty fellow come flooding in and Sirius has to press his lips together to keep from falling out; he’s been given quite a bit of intel, plenty enough anecdotes from Remus via big and small conversations held over several months to have forged a fairly steady timeline of events, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t think some perspective from the source himself would be invaluable, he’s just not sure that the foyer on day two of their trip is the right setting or time for that; might be on to wait a little longer, feel out the air around the topic a bit more first.

“Thanks again for taking me over there, hey?” Sirius puts up instead.

“Ehh, I like a drive,” Lyall passes him, popping the left slipper on. “I’m not going to get 'Du Hast' out of my head for weeks, mind, so you could apologize for that.”

“You know what, I’m not about to do that,” Sirius trades him. “I needed raw power coursing through my veins before that altercation and I honestly think the authority I exuded over there is one of the reasons he handed that thing over to me.”

Lyall gives a snort, pushing to his feet and heading past Sirius to start up the hall. “I’m going to have a look around for your shirt,” he announces, taking a left at the turn of the hall and going for the stairs.

As much as Sirius takes supreme enjoyment out of the wording choice, he still can’t help huffing. “I don’t need it right this second, Lyall,” he raises. “You’ve been go, go, go all morning.”

“And?” Lyall puts up, not stopping by any means.

“I beseech you to relax,” Sirius puts down.

“I beseech you to fuck off,” Lyall returns, heading right on up.

Sirius sends a long and lustrous pfft back up at him, heads through the dining room and into a recently vacated kitchen, and studies the room for clues as to where his better half might’ve gone. The laundry basket that was once in there has been deleted from the room along with Remus, so it stands to reason that the boy must have brought their clothes back to the A-frame, but on the other hand, Remus’s frayed copy of Maurice sits on the kitchen table in a seeming offering to his mum, so it stands to reason that the boy’s also been upstairs in the time they’ve been out of the house.

Sirius finds himself rather hopeful that Remus has already moved his own luggage down to fully claim the A-frame as his place of residence from henceforth, heading through the den and out the back door to do some further investigating on the matter. He strolls around the bend in the porch, casting a look out over the yard as it comes into view, but no Remus yet. He descends into the garden, taking in a deep sniff of florals and greenery as he’s going along, and smirks as he hones in on three birds having a veritable riot in the birdbath, happy to see the garden fixture being utilized to the fullest degree.

He heads out of the garden and crosses over to scoot up the A-frame steps, heading inside and brightening as he finds his deductive reasoning proves truthful in the end; Remus can be easily found laying on the bed, just straight chillin’ by the looks of it with his sunglasses laying a little above his head on the mattress where he must’ve pushed them off, while his luggage sits all in a neat pile over by the wall on the far side of the bed.

Sirius shuts the door behind him. “Someone’s been busy,” he observes.

“Your clothes are back in your case,” Remus extends.

“You could have left something for me to do, you know,” Sirius mentions, gesturing to the new set of luggage in the cabin. “You had all that to bring down on top of the laundry.”

“You were busy catching up,” Remus reasons. “I wasn’t about to plant the basket at your feet and make you finish up for me.”

“Mm, that doesn’t seem like something you’d do at all,” Sirius lets him have, smiling brightly as Remus mimes like he's tugging Sirius to him by an invisible rope.

He heads over to the bed to crawl up it and plant himself down on his left. “Good chat?” Remus bids, turning onto his left side to face him.

“Overall, yeah,” Sirius grants, rolling to face Remus and using his right arm to prop his head up.

“He seemed happy for you,” Remus offers, giving Sirius a keen little smile.

“Oh, he’s overjoyed,” Sirius echoes. “For you, too, mind; not just me.”

Remus gives a light smirk. “I managed to suss that out,” he supplies, smiling fully at the end of it.

“Good,” Sirius puts down, reaching to toss his left arm over Remus’s right hip and giving a wee tap there. “I’ve two developments to update you on; are you ready for them?”

Remus makes a comedic little show of bracing himself and Sirius won't pretend he’s not grateful that Remus is clearly in a stellar mood. “So, the way you tackled telling them the reality of the situation with Tom while also keeping a focus on the now of it all really set something in me on fire,” he puts down. “I loved how forward-thinking you were being, so much so that it got me thinking about the steps forward from here myself, and I knew you wouldn’t feel so good about broaching the subject out of fear of coming off an ungrateful little jerk, so I had a chat with Lyall about sharing details with those he very ought not to and you got a good thing and a great thing coming to you in that order: good thing, Lyall had already written him off by the time the word ‘pussy’ came around for a second time, so he’s definitely not interested in stopping and chatting with him, I'll tell you that.”

He pauses there to gauge what place Remus’s amused noise originates from and be it the wording he chose to go with or the sentiment behind it, Remus automatically skirts closer to him on the bed and that has Sirius feeling it was a likely bit of both. “And the great thing is,” he continues, tapping Remus’s hip again, “he’s not even going to stop for the guy anymore, so that’s no more updates from Lyall for him to use improperly and unless your mum’s the outlier here and decides that she alone is going to start being Tom's only source of the Lupin family tea—” he pauses for a laugh of his own on account of Remus’s frank hum of denial, “—then your fam is in the clear and he won’t have shit on any of you going forward.”

Remus reaches down with his right hand to trace his fingers back and forth over the hand still pressed to his hip. “Thank you,” he offers.

“Hey, don’t thank me, thank your dad,” Sirius serves him. “He’s been on his A-game all morning; even drove me right over to Tom’s fugly house so I could take your number off his mobile, so that's who the actual champ around here is.”

Remus takes in a quick breath, giving him a series of wild blinks. “I’m sorry, do you want to try that one again?” he bids.

“Sure, I can do that,” Sirius assures brightly. “It didn’t make sense for me to have been working to help get the guy blacklisted and build up this forcefield around you all while leaving a hole big enough for him to get through; it just didn’t, so to make up for the fact that I left the door open for him to bother you somewhere down the line, I went and made sure that door was shut.”

“When?” Remus puts up.

“Like, a half-hour ago at most,” Sirius offers up.

“You just rode on over there, got the mobile off him, and got rid of it?” Remus poses.

“Your number, yes," Sirius clarifies. "Not the mobile itself; I let him keep that."

“Yeah, no, I meant the number,” Remus returns lively, tapping fast at the left side of Sirius’s collarbone.

“Then yes, I did do that,” Sirius affirms, working to quell a smile from forming too, too much, “but you don’t have to worry, I asked your dad to pull up the road a bit so Tom wouldn’t go haywire on you like the audacious sadsack he is for telling your parents about your own fucking life, so he didn't see Lyall at all and I didn’t have to scuffle for his mobile; he eventually gave it up after a bit of mouthing off, but now you’re in the clear and don’t have to deal with any can you talk? texts that'd have come in, oh, three-to-four weeks, would be my guess.”

Remus takes in a careful breath, reaching to smooth his right hand over Sirius’s left hip, and Sirius knows what’s coming before Remus has to work his mouth around the words. “I know you feel that I’d have scared him off enough to even bother keeping up with you, but I need you to believe me when I say he was going to wait until the dust settled to try it,” Sirius puts down. “I had my suspicions yesterday, I had them all through the drive over there, and got a full understanding of it when I showed up there and he bogarted your number like a dog to the bone; he even said, ‘I’m not going to use it; you made yourself quite clear,’ and then I was like, ‘why hold onto a number you’re not going to use, Einstein—’”

Remus presses his lips together, but that doesn’t hide the fast rise of his chest or his amusement. “Did you say that?” he checks.

“Everything but the Einstein part,” Sirius fesses. “And — OK so, I was in a rush and didn’t grab shoes before we went—”

Sirius,” Remus huffs, but that smile betrays him wholeheartedly.

“Listen, sir; there wasn’t time for that,” Sirius puts in, heading right on, "and after he opened the door like, ‘really, you’re making house calls now,’ he went and honed right in on the bare feet detail and, I shit you not, he said: ‘I don’t know how he can handle someone this extra.’”

Remus makes a face like he’s just caught a whiff of hot garbage. “And what’d you say to that one?”

“Oh, I assured him you love it and went right back to what I came for,” Sirius delivers him.

Remus breathes in through a nod, but he ends up cutting both short to shut his eyes through a grimace. “Why was I ever into him?” he poses.

Love is blind, as far as the eye can see,” Sirius croons.

Deep and meaningless, words to me,” Remus echoes, opening his eyes to toss a blank stare at the far wall. “Wait, that doesn’t work for this.”

“Shh, who’s going to tell?” Sirius raises. “The birds? They’re busy throwing a rave in the birdbath right now; they’re not listening in.”

“Thanks for that update,” Remus snickers.

“Oh, just full of them over here,” Sirius echoes, but he readjusts his hold on Remus, pulling him in tighter as he works to finish this off on the right note. “I know you don’t enjoy confrontation and of course it feels like it’d be easier if we just moved on from the incident and looked ahead, not backwards, but it wouldn't have been easier in the long run, and now, we can actually do that looking forward thing: letting him walk out of that grocery with your number still on him was a huge oversight on my part and I think I knew it deep down because I wasn’t convinced I’d done enough to scare him off, but I saw that I could fix that blunder in the nick of time and I’m so glad I did, Remus. The way he talks to you, talks about you? He’s not healthy for you to have around; you’re so much better off without him trying to get in your head and that’s all he’d do, no matter what he wanted your number back for.”

Remus nods silently, his lower lip pulled into his mouth and his gaze heavy as he scoots down and into the sparse amount of space left between them. He reaches his right arm around the back of Sirius to pull him in for a squeeze, burrowing his face into the crook of his neck and letting out a massive breath that seems to take his whole body out for a few moments, Sirius wraps him up instinctively, finding Remus’s face warm to the touch against his neck, and gives a glance over the reddened tint to the shell of his right earlobe, deducing that this is one overwhelmed lad and maybe they can get away with staving off leaving the cabin for a little while longer.

Chapter 26: 26.

Chapter Text

In the early, mutual silence they’ve found themselves in, Sirius readjusts so that he’s laying on his back and Remus takes his lead and moves with it, situating himself over him and setting his head down against his collar. Happy about it, Sirius lifts his right hand and passes it hopefully soothingly through a batch of curls at the back of Remus’s head, and from there, he gives Remus something like five minutes or so by the feel of it before lifting his head to start up an array of small kisses to the sliver of Remus’s forehead available to him.

He pauses his lips a few beats out from there. “Your mum headed out, then?” he asks, giving him another kiss.

“Mhm, she did,” Remus affirms, nuzzling Sirius’s collar. “Do beat an onslaught of traffic on her way in, apparently.”

“Well, your dad had a feeling about that, and he offered the truck to us in case we’d like to get our gallivanting on sooner. that way Hope can just hang out with Do and not have to halfway rush things to get the car back for us, you know?” Sirius raises. “Oh, and, we drove past your dad’s shop on the way back and as far I’ve found out, Bubba’s on today.”

Remus breathes in through his nose before humming a note of approval, resting his head to the side to peek up at Sirius. “I think we ought to get Bubba’s visit out of the way first, get that sorted out, and then do the market and the pharmacy since we’ll already be in town," he trades him.

Sirius brightens with remembrance. “Good thing you’re here, I almost forgot about that last one,” he admits, and there he narrows his eyes just a little in thought. “Did I hear something about an ice cream parlour last night, or was that a hallucination?”

“No, that was real,” Remus insists. “We can do that and then after, if you’re up for a little drive to Porth, they’ve got a music shop over there my dad’s a big fan of and they’ll have a ton of string options available.”

Sirius gives a piqued hum, though the name of the place does have him confused after it’s registered. “Aren’t we going there tomorrow?” he raises.

“Oh, Porthgain, we are,” Remus supplies him, and Sirius inhales with new, yet only slight understanding. “Porth is another town nearby; less than fifteen on the highway if traffic is kind to us, maybe twenty today since I hear it's iffy out there, Porthgain's the harbour town we're heading out to tomorrow.”

“Well, by all means, I’m down to go to both,” Sirius maintains.

Remus lifts his head to smile at him straight-on, inspiring Sirius to lean in and sneak a kiss on the tip of his nose while he's got it so close. He grins brightly, relishing in the quick, charmed gusts of breath that leave Remus’s nose for it and brightens that much more when Rems leans in and slots their mouths together.

“Mm,” Sirius hums against his lips, pausing the kiss for a beat. “So, we’ll just, go in a little bit, then?”

“Mhm,” Remus echoes, and Sirius can feel him smiling as they get right back to it.

Remus sneaks his right hand underneath the nape of his neck, tugging him up further into the kiss, and at first, Sirius does little other than bask under the gentle hold Remus has on him, letting tiny puffs of breath leave him through his nose as Remus kisses him slow and steady, but soon enough Sirius remembers how his lips work, striving to give back just as much as he’s getting. A little more of that, and Remus is tracing his little half-moons at the back of his neck, Sirius is finding himself wondering if this is a snog break for the sake of simply having one or if it could turn into something more along the lines of them getting lucky, and then Remus grinds up against him through a slow roll of his hips so that has Sirius thinking it’s more likely the latter of the two.

As if cementing it as such, Remus nips fast at his lower lip and pulls a spurred noise up to rattle around at the back of Sirius's throat, garnering him to reach his hands into the back pockets of Remus's trousers, and get himself a nice, full feel of him before lifting off of his back and taking Remus right with him; he moves along with it without so much as a hitch, automatically setting his knees astride Sirius’s lap and pinning him to the bed as a result, garnering Sirius to tilt his head back to match Remus’s brand new height advantage and kiss him feverishly for, well, all of this, if he’s honest.

He works his way down from Remus’s lips, peppering new kisses up and down his jawline, over both sides of his neck, and along to the sparse amount of collarbone peeking out from beneath the collar of his polo, and on from there, he’s ducking his head down and pushing up the hem of the shirt to leave a new trail of kisses over Remus’s chest, his navel, and those tiny, half-muted noises he’s getting out of Remus only spur him further, have him hopeful he can get a few notes out of him that are at Remus’s regular register; wouldn’t that just be something?

He reaches in between the two of them, dragging his right middle and forefinger over the ridge of Remus’s clothed cock, and works to remedy that dilemma with his left hand, but from there, it’s rather quick work getting Remus’s fly undone with the both of his hands at his disposal. He folds down the belt of Remus’s trousers, tugging down on them enough to get them hanging just past his knees so only his briefs are keeping that prize captive, but Sirius doesn’t get to celebrate completely freeing it for Remus starts to wiggle right about there.

He flickers his gaze up to Remus in time to catch him tossing a glance around them. “Do you want me to—"

Remus trails off, looking down at himself while gesturing around them at the vast expanse of bed at their disposal and letting that speak both for him and itself, but Sirius halts his wiggling by holding him still by the hips, giving a plain shake of his head before for dipping it lower. “Nah, I want you to stay right here,” he offers evenly, giving him a wicked smile before tugging down on his briefs and licking a stripe up the underside of Remus’s cock without much more than that.

Remus takes a reactionary breath in, steadying himself by setting his hands over Sirius’s shoulders, and Sirius doubles down on the hold he’s got on him, curling his right arm around the back of Remus's hips and splaying his left hand open on his navel, half to help keep him well-situated but definitely to ensure he won’t wiggle free or further insist they find a position less imposing; Sirius would like nothing more than to get imposed upon by Remus.

He swallows Remus down and pulls back off, goes for it again, again, and then he just can't help but dedicate some quality time to the head of Remus’s cock arguably just as much for his benefit than Remus’s alone, teasing at it with sharp flecks of his tongue. He opens his eyes when he feels Remus’s right hand lift away from his left shoulder and whisper over the left-hand side of his jaw, so it seems the combination of Sirius's hands and his rather dedicated tongue have helped chip away at least some of Remus’s reservations over the position, though not entirely. He’s holding himself rod-still like he's nervous to let one jut of his hips happen, but he's petting over the left side of Sirius’s jawline, he’s got his eyes shut and his lower lip caught between his teeth, he’s sucking in harsher breaths through his nose that only get cut off before they can make it to a full breath, and while those details are all well and good in themselves, it’s the euphoric placement of Remus’s brows that's the real tip-off; that lad’s having a gay ol’ time up there, he’s just afraid to make a mistake.

Sirius starts up a rhythm he hopes they both can agree on, working to ease some of Remus’s concerns. He brings his right arm back from around Remus and sets it parallel to his splayed left hand, positioning them both over Remus’s navel and gripping at it, hopeful that he may send the message home that he wants this, that he’s more than strictly into it, and wouldn’t mind a bit more of a push back from him, but Remus’s hips keep still even then and Sirius presumes he’ll have to kick things into gear himself.

He angles his head back, opens his throat around Remus, and smoothes his hands around to the sides of his hips, catching a firm hold on them to bring them to and fro, and Remus’s eyes snap open when that seems to register what he’s asking for quite explicitly, locking his gaze in with Sirius’s to study it carefully and poking his tongue out to wet his lower lip before tugging it back into his mouth from there.

Sirius aims to say this is more than fine with him without actually having to take the quality pipe out of his mouth to do so, taking on Tyra’s once-prolific teachings and trying his hand at smiling with his eyes to get the job done, but he might as well be beaming with his peepers for the right corner of Remus’s mouth starts to go up, hinting at the chance of a lopsided smile to come while his gaze remaining unmovable as he reaches up to give Sirius’s hair a trial pet.

Sirius answers him by pulling back enough to swipe his tongue over the head and swallowing him right back down again, closing his throat around the head at a rhythm that has Remus starting up a round of DJ-tapping on his right shoulder with his left hand that certainly contrasts rather loudly with the gentle hold he's got on the back of Sirius’s head and while that’s sweet and all, it's still only the illusion that Remus is the one controlling this and the lad’s still thinking far too much up there at a time when it’d be all well and good if he’d just let go a little.

His next move will be risky, Sirius knows it like he knows the sun will be setting tonight just to rise again in the morning, but he just can’t keep himself from finding out whether giving Remus time to get used to an ebb and flow could mean he’d keep on going if Sirius’s hands were to suddenly fall away; the closer to the finish line, the better the reaction, he would think, so that’s the main objective now.

He pulls off just to take Remus to the back of his throat again, ramps the pace up a little more from there, and tugs Remus's hips into it the faster he goes, relaxing his throat until the last moment to make the other side of each and every thrust count. Remus exhales sharply above him and winds some of Sirius's shirt sleeve up his left hand, spurring Sirius to hum around the head at every interval from there, and that new sensation paired with the ongoing slide of his tongue on each drawback has Remus letting a lot of things happen in quick succession; his head fall back, his mouth fall open to throw out bouldered whimpers to the room, and the fingers on his right hand scritch against Sirius's scalp.

The feel of that, the feel of him, the feeling that comes with the view Sirius has of him from down here? It's all breathtaking; he’s so hard in his trousers that it’s bordering on torture just to force his own hips to stay still, but it's a means of torture he can push through if Remus has decided he's just going to have to give him pure vocals now and it’s exactly what he needs to keep control of his hips even if it's all going straight to his cock. Nothing to be done about that with his name going interrupted here and there by a series of staggered breaths before Remus tries to say it again, and again, and again.

He keeps his eye on the mission status, knowing he won’t be able to count on the slack jaw with the angle they’re going with now, but he's just heard the heave and he can certainly see that chest hitching with it so that’s one sign checked off. He looks straight ahead of him to wait for the vein on Remus’s lower navel to take full form and it’s another thirty seconds or so of swerving on that cock before the vein starts twitching like mad, and there they have it; he hums around Remus’s cock for good measure, pulls a series of wanton noises out of him for it, and drops his hands from Remus’s hips, setting them flat on the bed on either side of himself while Remus, still in the throes of it, grips at Sirius’s left shoulder, but more importantly, the back of Sirius’s head as he fucks his mouth with all he’s got.

Sirius’s chest heaves while his body tenses up, his eyes popping open wide as he feels the pulse of Remus’s cock on his tongue before that boy comes with a shout, head back, knees apart and digging into the bed on either side of Sirius's frame, the pace of his hips utterly unrelenting. Sirius grips the bedsheet underneath his fingers, his toes curling in against the floorboards, his cock throbbing as he gives a guttural noise in his throat, and Remus, oh, Remus lifts that other hand of his and curls that one up in Sirius’s hair, too, holding Sirius's mouth over him as he rides out the very lasts of his stupor at a tender, sensual pace, writhing, humming, seeking Sirius through it, and that’s it; he’d already been metaphorically finished, but that’s the sight his body physically finishes over.

Sirius shuts his eyes tightly, white speckles bursting out and taking over every spare inch of black behind his eyelids, and writhes through it, forcing his eyes open when release has evened out and blinking back into the room but seeing nothing but haze. He falls back on the bed, loose as an absolute goose, while Remus, on the other hand, drops down in front of Sirius quickly, curling over him to cup the sides of his face, and garnering Sirius to blink past through the film over his eyes to find frown lines a-plenty hovering over him.

“What’s wrong?” he pushes out.

“You winced,” Remus answers, pushing a sweat-dampened lock of hair behind Sirius’s left ear. “At the very end, you winced.”

“Did a lot more than that,” Sirius divulges, looking left, right, and back at Remus before aiming a dazed smile up at him, lifting his brows up by his hairline for a bit of added effect.

The bottom half of Remus’s face lingers in the land of harried apologies while the top half enters more of a bemused place what with the quizzical squint he’s giving him, but from there he angles his hips up to have a peek down between them before looking right back at him. “No,” he whispers.

Sirius gives out a laugh that’s really more of a heightened breath, nodding profusely and giving a celebratory twirl of his forefingers with a languid smile that seems to be sewn onto his lips because that's not going anywhere. Given the cheer on Sirius’s end, it’s exceptionally noticeable when Remus moves over to Sirius’s right side, sits back on the haunches of his heels, and reaches to tuck himself back in and fasten up, trading glances at the bed between his knees and Sirius’s face with a new frown starting up.

“Hey, laddie?” Sirius bids, reaching up to flick Remus’s midriff with his right forefinger. “This is a pretty huge deal for me, so let’s stay in it for at least a few minutes?”

“Well, I’m not trying to take that away from you,” Remus reiterates, pressing his newly freed hands down the front of his thighs. “I’m just — my heart stopped when you winced, Sirius; I need a—"

“Came untouched,” Sirius corrects gently, and when Remus pushes a stewed breath through his nose, he reaches up to set his right hand just above Remus’s left knee and just below where Remus’s hands got to. “I wasn’t wincing in pain, Remus; I was blasting off.”

“Well, I know that now,” Remus puts up, giving a frank tilt of his head.

“Well, then you ought to feel pretty proud of yourself right about now,” Sirius trades him. “And, just so we’re on the same page here, you’ve knelt before me a thousand times at this point; I’d say my turn has been way overdue.”

Remus takes in a tentative breath after getting thrown that one. “Me doing that for you is a tad different than you doing it for me,” he puts it.

“It doesn’t have to be,” Sirius puts down. “I’m not a delicate flower, you know.”

“I know you’re not,” Remus returns, popping Sirius in the right knee with all the force of a field bunny.

Sirius catches his hand through a laugh. “I get it, OK?” he assures. “The best man I know has to keep being the best man I know, but I still don’t know how to not feel safe around you and I really don’t see myself learning how this far in, Remus.”

Remus gives out a disconcerted breath. “And I’m grateful for that, but I don’t ever want to fuck up in the moment because I wasn’t paying enough attention,” he insists.

“Oddly enough, I was rather hoping you’d quit paying so much attention back there,” Sirius lobs him.

“I could tell, Sirius, and then I did quit, held onto your head through the finish, and you winced,” Remus keeps to it. “I know it wasn’t actually a problem on your end now, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be the next time.”

Sirius hones right in on the choice to use 'the next time’ whether Remus meant it in the general sense or not. “OK, just answer me this,” he raises. “How hot was that before you thought I’d winced in sheer pain? Be honest.”

Remus lets his lower lip go free in order to speak. “Sweltering,” he lets him have. “I didn’t want it to be over; I wanted to go again.”

"And I felt that, so: I know that I’d like to explore some more of that in the future, and I think there’s a part of you that does, too,” Sirius broaches it. “What would help you out in those scenarios; help you ease up in the moment, you know?”

“I don’t know, Sirius,” Remus puts up, not unkindly. “You did that already, but it didn’t matter back there; I still panicked.”

“What about a safe word?” Sirius keeps at it. “It’d be a hypothetical one because, again, not planning on needing to use it, but we can pick one so you get to relax a little more next time; what about 'Bananarama,' mm? That’s not something I’d say mid-shag unless I’ve had a whole bottle of vino to myself.”

A rolling laugh tumbles out of Remus, but Sirius doesn’t get to enjoy it for too long for Remus’s eyes go to mere slits. “How would you realistically use the safe word while your mouth is full?” he ponders.

“I’ll learn morse code,” Sirius offers, tapping Remus’s left knee in illustration and relishing in the smirk Remus falls into. “What, too much?”

“Just a bit, maybe,” Remus allows, reworking his mouth around a smile. “It’ll get easier the more we do it, right?”

“Yeah, just like the hair thing in general has,” Sirius echoes, thinking of the face Remus made the very first time Sirius transferred one of his hands over to his hair versus the times he’s gone and reached for it without prompt; this’ll even right out in time. “I can’t say whether that booming end was a stars-aligned situation or if it’ll be an every-timer, but that was debilitatingly hot; I went blind for a few beats there so I’m more than willing to investigate what just happened here.”

“Did you really?” Remus asks wryly.

Sirius rolls back the sentence he just uttered to find the focal point. “Oh, Remus — white as a ghost,” he details, passing his right hand over his vision alongside it. “Incredible, truly; I’m sorry my O-face is so close to a wince.”

Remus breathes in once. “It normally is not,” he passes him.

“Well, then, next time around, if I do wince again, try to remember that it’s more than likely me being levelled than it is an omen,” Sirius reiterates. “There hasn’t been a single millisecond where I thought you’d gone too far or were about to or anything like that, and I know there won’t be one; I feel it in my bones.”

Remus pushes a subdued breath through his nose, scooting closer to Sirius’s right leg on the bed and curling his right hand around his lower thigh. “I’m still going to check on you,” he instils.

Sirius lifts up into his prior sitting position to lean up for a kiss. “I know,” he allows, putting a kiss on the end of it, too.

Remus leans into it, his gaze lingering on Sirius’s visage after it as he eases up from the haunches of his heels to perch on his knees. Then, incredibly, he puts two hands ahead of his crotchetal area, mimes a single thrust, and Sirius's eyes widen as he sort of has to figure his head is symbolically meant to be behind Remus’s hands. “Is that really what it would have taken to make that happen for you?” he raises, a quizzical, but amused look about him. “This whole time?”

Sirius snickers there. “Let’s not pretend this is a mystery,” he trades him, smiling wryly. “If you walked into a room I was already in and demanded I get on my knees, I think I’d come right then and there.”

And there, Sirius is happy to report a pair of dinner plates join in on the afterglow. “That’s a really good point,” Remus rewards him.

“See?” Sirius raises, grinning like a goon. “It’s not as complicated as it feels, trust.”

He lifts his hands and pretends he’s got a pair of invisible castanets because apparently he’s inspired by Remus in many more ways than one, and Remus bites at his budding smile, does a smaller version of the motion in reply, and gives a glance down at Sirius’s crotch. “Are the Chinos going to have to be retired for today?” he asks, giving in to a wee frown.

“Pants, for sure,” Sirius insists, pushing himself toward the edge of the bed, “but we’ll have to see about those.”

Remus exits the bed via the right side of it, heading for Sirius’s suitcase while Sirius pads off down the hall to the bathroom. “Let me know if I need to bring you trousers, too,” Remus calls after him.

“I’ll know in seconds,” Sirius assures, turning into the bathroom. He drops trou just inside of it, giving a glance over the inner crotch of his trousers. “Yeah, there's no way.”

He tugs them down and steps out of them, then go the briefs before he peels his shirt off and leaves that on the wee countertop by the sink, moving over to the shower to get the water running. He hops in, soaping up the loofah to pass over his lower half, and right as he’s moving in to get good and rinsed off beneath the stream, Remus turns up ahead of the sliver of open space between the shower curtain and the wall ahead of Sirius.

“I tried to keep in theme,” he raises, lifting a folded pair of black jeans with a new pair of briefs sitting atop them. “Are they Sirius Black approved?”

“Sure are,” Sirius chimes, smiling for him, and Remus gives him a quick one in return before disappearing out of the gap.

“I’m leaving them here,” he forwards.

“Ah, yes,” Sirius nods, rinsing off his package, “that elusive here I’ve always heard so much about.”

Remus huffs on the way out of the room by the sound of it. “On the counter, you dink,” he returns. “They’re with your shirt.”

“Well, that might’ve helped,” Sirius sends after him, hoping his smile can be heard from over there. He finishes up with his rinse, switches the taps off, and foots some suds closer to the drain before pushing the shower curtain aside and coming upon a towel-less bathroom.

“Remus,” he calls out, “I’m stranded.”

Footsteps echo out in the main room before continuing in the hall and Remus turns up to poke his head into the room again, but he observes the situation rather quickly and pushes out a smirk, holding up a forefinger. "Just a sec,” he forwards, heading for the closet in the hall. Sirius hangs out right where he is, figuring he may as well drip into the tub rather than all over the mat and/or the floor, and Remus is back in very little time with a folded blue towel to present to him.

“There you go,” he chimes.

Sirius reaches up with his right hand to fluff out Remus’s fringe before taking the towel from him with the same one. “OK to go soon?” he asks, bringing the towel around the back of him.

Remus gives a glance toward Sirius’s nude body. “I’m waiting on you, pal,” he returns, a bright smile on.

“I’m trying here,” Sirius returns, a similar smile on his own lips as he dries off his legs.

He speeds things up, leaving his towel hanging on the rod nearby the shower and redressing near to the bathroom counter while Remus lingers near the doorway. Sirius gets his bottom half covered and is just pulling his shirt over his head when he catches Remus plucking the bottom half of Sirius’s prior outfit off of the floor before wandering out into the hall, and Sirius pads after him, aiming a jaunty kick to Remus’s ass. “I was going to get those in a minute,” he mentions.

Remus reaches behind him with his free hand and bats at Sirius’s right foot. “I thought I might as well,” he defends, turning into the main room. He moves for the bed, leans over to pluck his sunnies off of it, and sticks them on. He goes around the bed from there to the empty laundry basket sitting near his luggage, tosses Sirius’s stuff in there, and picks the whole thing up, giving Sirius a smile to suggest he’s all ready to go on his end.

Sirius heads for the a-frame door with that, opening it and giving a wide sweep of his free hand to suggest the house prince head through the door first, and Remus gives him a quick kiss on the way by before descending the stairs down to the lawn. Sirius follows him down and across the lawn to head into the garden, but he pats his pockets one by one and freezes a few steps down the path.

“I haven’t got my wallet,” he announces.

“Pity,” Remus responds, heading up the path undeterred.

“You shit, I’m going back for it,” Sirius asserts, tossing his thumb back toward the A-frame after Remus looks back at him.

“Can you grab me something with long sleeves, then?” Remus bids, giving his basket a jostle with a nod toward the house. “I’m just going to take this in.”

“Deal,” Sirius says of it, heading back the way he came.

He heads through the a-frame door again, goes for Remus’s luggage first and foremost, and drops to his knees in front of his suitcase, zipping it open and having a look at the contenders available, but in the end, he goes with the one he has personally coined ol’ faithful and plucks Remus’s black cardi out of there. It was the first thing Sirius ever saw the lad totting into work and thus is synonymous with Remus in his mind, but he has a practical reason to pick it, too: the garment is thin enough that Remus won’t regret the sleeves if the temperature rises over the afternoon but he’ll have enough protection from the elements that he won’t feel breezy on his arms if the wind picks up.

He sets it folded in his lap as he zips the case shut once again and while he could easily carry it back up to the house, he pulls it on for the journey, loving the scent of Remus threaded into the material. He heads around the bed and over toward the desk, plucks his wallet off of it and pockets that, and has a wry, calculating look over at their trusty bottle o’ lube sitting on it and ends up pocketing that, as well. He goes for his own case, unzips that, and fishes a condom packet out of the netted pouch in the lining, pocketing that too; never hurts to be prepared.

He heads out into the yard once again, padding into the garden and up toward the porch, but stops at the top step and has a squint out around the property, scanning for any trickster stags possibly hanging about, but it’s all green, green, and more green as far as his eyes can see; maybe next time.

He heads round the bend in the porch, in through the den, and comes into the kitchen as Remus is heading up the basement stairs. “I gave your stuff a rinse, so they won’t just be there in the basket advertising what we've just done,” Remus mentions, heading around the far side of the table to move closer to him.

“It’s like I have a spotter in you,” Sirius returns, reaching to welcome Remus in with open arms.

Remus heads right into the space provided, giving Sirius’s middle a squeeze. “It shouldn’t take too long for a load to accumulate, but if you wanted to wear those sooner, I could always wash them by hand,” he raises.

“It’s almost like you want me to wear them again sooner,” Sirius mentions, hooking his chin over Remus’s left shoulder and giving him a squeeze right back.

“I do, I very do,” Remus admits, pulling back from Sirius enough to display a wry smile that only gets more and more pointed as he looks Sirius up and down with a particular focus on his cardigan that Sirius is wearing. “Well, now.”

“I was transporting it to you via my body,” Sirius explains, working the garment off and presenting it to Remus, who leaves a kiss on the tip of Sirius’s nose before swiping it back.

“I’ve yet to figure out where my dad went off to," he shares, tossing the cardigan over his right forearm and strolling for the dining room.

Sirius sniffs with renewed purpose, moving to follow him. “He’s upstairs unless he’s skipped town in the last half hour,” he forwards.

Remus snorts. “Not likely,” he returns, heading past the dining room table to get to the crossroads otherwise known as the front hall. “Did he go up for a kip?”

“No, he’s on the hunt for his 'Live Aid' shirt,” Sirius divulges, skipping along behind him. “He said if he can find it, it’s mine to keep; can you believe?”

Remus hums deeply as he turns to head up the stairs, “I very can actually,” he trades him, looking sidelong at Sirius still down on the main level with a keen grin.

“I think he might like me OK,” Sirius offers, smiling away as he follows Remus up with a boost to his pace to round the landing with him.

Remus stops with his right foot hitched onto the first of the second smaller set of stairs to the second floor and Sirius slows to a stop half-beside, half-behind him, splaying his left hand over the small of Remus’s back 'cause it's there. “Dad?” he calls, setting his right hand on the bannister 'cause that's there, it seems.

“Dad,” Lyall echoes, his voice floating out from the door across the hall from Remus's.

“We’re going to head out for a while,” Remus extends.

“Alright, enjoy,” Lyall calls back.

“Should I fill 'er up while we’re out?” Remus checks.

About five or so seconds of silence hang in the air before Remus looks over his shoulder at Sirius, waiting on him for the intel. “I wish I could say I looked at the meter,” he forwards, giving a half-grimace that Remus quickly waves off.

“We’ll find out soon,” he says of it, turning back to call up the stairs again. “Mind letting Mum know she doesn’t have to rush home on account of us, or do you want me to?”

“I already said I’d do it,” Lyall returns.

“Well, I didn’t know that?” Remus raises.

“That’s my bad,” Sirius slips in between them before pitching his voice out further. “My bad, Lyall.”

“Yeah, get out of here, punk,” Lyall sends him, and Sirius presses his face in between Remus's shoulder blades, snickering away back here.

“You’ll be OK here?” Remus raises, amusement lining his voice.

“No, but I suppose I’ll suffer in silence,” Lyall sends down.

“You might want to work on that silence thing, then,” Remus advises. “Do you want us to bring you back anything to eat?”

“I think I can heat up a slice of pie, don’t you?” Lyall raises.

“Do you really want him to answer that?” Sirius calls up.

Footsteps sound from the room to the right of the hall and Lyall’s there in moments. “I’m getting warmer, kid,” he avows, pointing toward Sirius and completely bypassing the question, as per.

“I believe in you,” Sirius forwards.

“It’s got to be in there somewhere,” Lyall maintains. “I know I didn’t get rid of it.”

“Could try the basement?” Remus puts up.

“Or the bomb shelter,” Sirius raises.

Remus smirks there. “The one under the stairs,” he translates.

Lyall gives him a hum of denial. “I wouldn’t have put it in either place.”

“Well, we’ve put a lot of stuff in both places over the years,” Remus extends.

“I’m determined to find it up here,” Lyall instils.

“Well, bombs away, then,” Remus returns, waving Lyall all the way off as he turns to herd Sirius back down the stairs. “See you in a while.”

Sirius gives Lyall two thumbs up for all the trouble and heads down the stairs ahead of Remus, but stops when he hears Lyall give a quick ‘Oi’ from the hall upstairs. “D'you want the keys or what?” he raises.

“Those might help, yeah,” Remus admits, swivelling on his heel.

Sirius looks over his shoulder at Remus smiling back up at his dad from the landing, and footsteps sound on the steps down to it before Lyall comes into the frame, holding the keys out for Remus to take from him, but flutters them up and out of Remus’s reach with a shit-eating grin on. “We fucking adore you, yeah?” he goads, and Remus huffs when he realizes Lyall’s just going to keep lording them just out of reach until he agrees. “Yeah?

“Yes, Dad,” Remus lets him have, swiping the keys the second that Lyall lowers them and stepping in for a squeeze. “Thank you.”

Sirius turns quickly on the stairs, heads down them as quietly as he can to avoid any creaks interrupting the moment, but it’s a no-go on that; these stairs have stories to tell, clearly. Despite their blatherings, he heads the rest of the way down them, makes a right into the front hall, and moves for the foyer, his chest constricted as he goes knowing how much Remus needed to hear that, and from his dad even more so despite reddening like a ripe tomato over of it. He sticks his feet into his loafers, turns back toward the front hall when he hears some more creaking on the stairs, and moves to stand in the doorway of the foyer, tucking a lock of hair behind his right ear as Remus turns into the front hall with unsteady feet, reddened eyes, and a bouldered expression on.

“Remus,” he coaxes, beckoning him in, “come here.”

Remus does as bid, but it would be better put to say that he’d already been coming for Sirius before the coaxing and it’d be a definite lie to say he isn’t over the moon that Remus chose to come cozy up to him in the tiny foyer rather than flee and go get a handle on himself alone. Sirius reaches to close the foyer door for him while Remus successfully locks his wrists behind his back, leaning in to press his forehead against his, and Sirius reaches up and around to cup the back of his head with his right hand, tousling the curls at the back of Remus’s head with his fingertips.

“You know he’s not just saying that, yeah?” he raises, not helping the verklempt energy in the room by any stretch, but it feels important to highlight.

Remus nods best he can with his head down, the squeeze he's giving Sirius’s middle tight enough to rupture his spleen, but buh-bye, spleen; there are more important things than you. Remus takes in a long, long, very long breath, pulls back from Sirius, and presses a kiss to his forehead before moving around him to get at his shoes. Sirius pushes a hand up through his hair, knowing what a suck he must truly be if a forehead kiss could have him as charmed as he is, but that’s the spell Remus Jean Lupin has on him working in full force. He reaches to open the front door, moves out onto the porch, and looks over to the right at the porch swing, thinking he really ought to try that thing out, but perhaps right when they’re leaving the house isn’t the time.

Remus steps out and shuts the front door behind him, giving Sirius’s left hand a brush as he passes him for the porch steps, and Sirius follows him down the stairs in a bit of a daze until he gets to the bottom of them and realizes. “Shit,” he puts out, moving down to pull the ashtray out from its hiding spot. “I meant to come back for this, but what a day already, am I right?”

“You are right,” Remus echoes, unlocking the truck with the button on his keyring and opening up the backseat to toss his cardigan into it, but once he’s done with that, he looks back over at Sirius and sees what he’s speaking of. “Oh, that? Just put it back down there for now, it’s alright.”

“Isn’t it a bit untoward to just keep leaving it there?” Sirius reasons.

“I doubt either of them is going to be crawling around under there to notice it,” Remus offers.

It’s tempting, but Sirius can’t seem to take him up on the offer. “I’ll still just run it back real quick,” he insists, tossing his left thumb behind him while he holds the tray balanced in his right hand.

“Where are you going to run it to?” Remus raises.

“Well, the A-frame’s not that far from here,” Sirius reasons, moving around the foot of the stairs and heading down the right side of the house. “Gimme two minutes, not even.”

“OK,” Remus calls after him, “but only if you run.”

Sirius pads off, grinning wildly as he zooms past the house as per request, and veers around the front of the hammock to get to the A-frame, sliding the tray onto the stoop before thinking better of that and moving it underneath the stairs. Lyall, he’s pretty sure wouldn’t give two shits about the sight of a couple of butts sitting in an ashtray on the staircase ahead of the A-frame, but Hope, he’s not quite as sure about yet; advising him on where to find the tray is one thing, that’s Hospitality Hope for you, but leaving it strewn about her yard willy-nilly could be another.

He sniffs once, satisfied in his decision, and books it back up to the front only to find that booking it might have been a bit much for he finds Remus having a lean against the front of the truck, looking off somewhere to the right and just straight chilling; Sirius loves to see it. In fact, Sirius gets his mobile out right quick to snap a shot of him in easy idle mode, knows he got caught taking a snap with the way Remus’s lips twist upward, and sends him a sweet, innocuous smile as he slips his mobile away again, having a glance out the way Remus had been looking as he makes his way to him.

“It's nuts to think you never had neighbours,” Sirius raises, coming to a stop ahead of him and the truck.

“We have neighbours,” Remus contests, easing out of his lean to turn for the driver’s side.

“Well, soon, you will, but—” Sirius reiterates, lifting his hands to gesture around at all the excess space around them and zero houses within eyesight as he goes around to the passenger's side.

“The Wilsons live over there,” Remus puts up, pointing off past Sirius before he opens up his door.

Sirius tosses a squint over his shoulder in that direction as he pulls open his own. “Acres away?” he raises.

“Something like that, yeah,” Remus allows for, smirking as he gets in on his side.

“Well, that’s what I mean,” Sirius puts up, using the footrail outside his door for a quick boost. “You’ve never had a neighbour knock on your door to bug you or ask for a cup of sugar; what an experience, and one I’m definitely jealous of.”

“Sugar, no,” Remus echoes, pulling his seatbelt over his front, “but the Wilson son did come by one time to ask if I could spot him a few of our logs for the bonfire he was throwing.”

“Ooh,” Sirius trills, shutting his door after him. “Was it a real rager?”

“Mhm, it was a big ol’ end of year one he’d been advertising all over school that his parents would be away for,” Remus details, buckling up, garnering a knowing hum out of Sirius as he, too, straps himself in. “Only, it ended up pouring the night before it was set to happen and their wood supply got soaked, but since we keep ours in a bin they were much more viable and I handed some off to him.”

“Look at you, saving the night,” Sirius observes, drumming the soles of his slip-ons on the floor beneath them. “Did you go to the bonfire?”

“I did, yeah,” Remus offers, a lopsided smile on. “Brought Angela along, rang in my first real hangover; it was quite something.”

“Watch out, absolute wild card over here,” Sirius teases, settling in for the ride.

Remus gives an easy trill as he sticks the key in and starts up the engine, but jolts as 'Down With the Sickness' comes blasting out the speakers. “Uhh,” he laughs, reaching for the dial, “no thanks.”

Sirius pitches forward in his seat, dropping his head through a bout of stitches. “That’s our fault," he cops to it.

Remus snorts, cycling through white noise to get to another, more tangible channel. “Love how that's the station you two went with,” he mentions, stopping on a new station that’s currently putting out the second verse of 'Spice Up Your Life,' and with the way Remus perks in his seat? The man’s a fucking keeper in the purest sense.

Sirius gives an elated trill in his seat, tap-tap-tapping his feet to the beat as Remus takes them in a small u-ie to get them headed down the driveway toward the road, tap-tap-tapping his forefingers on the wheel as he goes. Sirius pops and locks in his seat as they head into the chorus and celebrates the cheeky little smile Remus has on as he turns off the driveway and takes the left to head down toward town, and now that Sirius knows he’s got a distracted but ultimately fond audience he really puts in the energy as they head into the bridge and it’s a lovely thing indeed to have Remus throwing in a line or two here or there without any sort of prompt.

Sirius makes a mental note to observe the gas situation once they’ve finished, and the two of them put in the effort as they close out this bombastic tune before a host comes over the airwaves and speaks a mile a minute at least.

“A plus,” Remus grades their performance, Sirius nodding freely in agreement as he leans over to get a decent view of the gas meter. “What are you looking for?”

“The state of the gas situation,” Sirius supplies, finding the arrow sitting just below the halfway point.

“It’s more that I want to time it right,” Remus raises. “If we fill up now and then go drive around to a bunch of places then we didn’t much help him out, did we, so I’m thinking we ought to wait until we’re on our way back and fill up then.”

“Yeah; give him a nice, full tank,” Sirius champions. “That I’m definitely going to get, you should know that now.”

Remus takes a few moments to tilt his head side to side as he stretches his neck out before replying. “OK,” he gives him, simple and definitely curious.

“Is that a real OK or a 'let’s just drop it' OK?” Sirius clarifies.

“It’s definitely a bit of both,” Remus supplies him, but right then and there, the lady speaking over the airwaves finishes her segment before Savage Garden's 'I Want You' kicks into gear, pulling a righteous shout from Sirius’s lungs and bright, rolling laugh out of Remus so he must not be that peeved at him.

Remus ducks his head through the tallest height of his mirth before straightening up again with some effort and refocusing out the front window. “I had a feeling you’d like this station,” he raises, smiling with a faint note of pride that Sirius is right gleeful to see. “It’s all very throwbacky.”

“You’re a keeper,” Sirius tells him, putting a little hip action into it while the intro plays, but he has to admit he’d like this performance to also be a duet if he can hack it. “You’ve got to help me out with this one, too.”

Remus gives out a puff of breath. “I mean, I can try, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up,” he forwards.

“Oh, yes, you fucking can,” Sirius goads, finger-snapping toward him ahead of the first verse.

Remus smirks, taking on the challenge, but by midway through that same verse he’s already keeping up much to Sirius’s viewing pleasure, drumming his right hand on the wheel to the beat, and Sirius, crooning away in his seat, would like to report that upon a further glance that those hands of Remus’s are sitting at nine and three as opposed to yesterday morning’s ten and two, and that has him wondering if it had more to do with all that was weighing on Remus’s shoulders then compared to the palpable ease Sirius can feel coming off of him now, has him wondering from there whether there’s a chance he’ll get to see Remus holding the wheel at eight and four, or, oh Cunt, holding it at 6 o’clock with his right hand while his left one chills in his lap?

Sirius makes a noise that can only be attributed to horny, but Remus hears it and attributes the cause to the only thing that makes the most sense to him at the moment. “Yeah, there's something outrageously hot about this one and it didn't have to be,” he comments.

“Right?” Sirius lobs him, in utter agreement despite the fact that he hadn’t been thinking that, but now it’s all he can think. “The bass — the bass.

“I can feel the fucking the bass,” Remus trades him, a lopsided smile on as he takes them over the bridge.

Sirius thinks it over and lets out a decided breath as they come out the other side. “Yeah, I’d fuck to this,” he shares.

Remus snorts. “You’d fuck to anything,” he raises it.

“Just about,” Sirius allows, smirking there. “Mind you, don’t know that I could make 'Black Hole Sun' work, you know what I mean?”

Remus gives a bright trill, shaking his head no. “If you even tried putting that on during, I’d get up and go do something else,” he stresses.

Sirius gives out quite the pfft. “A hoe and a half like you? Never,” he returns.

“Fine, but I’d sure go turn it off,” Remus cements.

“That, I’ll let you have,” Sirius offers.

As Remus takes them off the highway and into town, Sirius is pretty sure he’d know how to get to the car shop from here if Remus were to stop the truck and make him walk there for some uncharacteristic reason; it’s an odd feeling, having a basic visual understanding of his surroundings in a town he’s only just arrived in while also remaining cloaked beneath the veil of mysterious whimsy it's placed over him, every new street, shop, and pothole they haven’t yet explored or come upon hovering overhead and making Sirius brim with feverish promise.

Remus takes a left off of the main exactly a block ahead of the street Lyall took them down earlier and from there, he pulls them around a right-hanging bend and takes them the same way he took them on his bicycle, heading them down the long stretch of road ahead of the shop and turning them into the front lot right as a white truck is heading out of it, where three honks sound out in quick succession.

Remus honks right on back, smiling away over there. “That’s Bill,” he passes him.

“Mm, your dad said there’d be a Bill today,” Sirius recollects.

Remus pulls into the same spot Lyall had the truck in yesterday, pulling the gearshift into Park and switching the engine off. “Are you coming in, too?” he raises, reaching down to pop his belt buckle and free himself from his sash.

“Of course I am?” Sirius returns, shirking his belt off with an exceptionally decided flourish. “I’m but a sunflower, and Bubba's the sun.”

Remus smirks freely as he gets out on his side, coming around the back of the truck just as Sirius is getting there, and budges him in the hip before starting across the lot a couple of paces ahead of him. “You keep this up and I’m going to have to fuck your brains out in that truck,” Sirius manifests, pointing starkly back to that very truck.

Remus shushes him once, but it’s marred by a sputtered laugh that escapes him as he leads the way toward the open storefront. “Behave in there, hm?” he raises.

“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t,” Sirius trills, wrists crossed at his back as he saunters along behind him.

'December 1963' plays off of the radio as they head inside and Sirius goes ahead and pretends the punchy progression is there not only to accompany but enhance their entrance, strutting his stuff as per a step or two behind Remus as they walk along. They make it past the front of the shop, skirt in one by one to scoot past a honkin’ SUV sitting shipwrecked and mounted off the floor on their right, and step over a pair of legs sticking out from underneath it, moving into the greater garage that reveals Bubba over at the far end of it, pouring over papers at the office setup in the corner.

He looks up from the sheets in front of him as they get nearer to him, his specs making his eyes look three times larger than they were yesterday. “He’s not on today, ya college puke,” he lobs over.

“Dropped in to see you, believe it or not,” Remus extends him, gesturing toward the seat across the desk from Bubba’s. “May I?”

Sirius stops a few steps from the desk while Bubba flutters his right hand rather royally toward the available seat. “What can I do for you?”

Sirius stifles a smirk while Remus sits forward in his seat with a smile, pushing his sunglasses up to perch on his forehead and resting his arms atop the desk. “Well, my dad came home with a nearly-new mower this morning,” he raises, clasping his hands together.

“How’s he likin' it?” Bubba bids.

Remus looks up and over at Sirius for the answer. “He's loving it,” he raises it, grinning like a goon.

“Was right glowing about it when he brought it home,” Remus echoes. “The only thing is, what with the old girl's passing, we were really excited about the idea of getting the new one for him, but he came back with the replacement sooner than we could act and I know you some hand in helping him locate it, so if you wouldn’t mind letting us know a ballpark figure of what it amounted to, we could get started on reimbursing him for it rather than remain forever in the land of guessing games.”

The right side of Bubba’s mouth lifts like a puppeteer's working it from above. “He wouldn’t tell you shit,” he figures.

“Not even close,” Remus echoes, shaking his head once, “but he’s long overdue for a gift and we really felt this one was the right fit, so if you could just take a scrap piece of paper and write the sum down on it, we’ll all be happy campers soon enough.”

Sirius gape-grins where he’s lingering nearby, absolutely here for this display Remus is giving, and it seems he might not be the only one for the left side of Bubba’s mouth joins the other as he shuffles through the papers on his desk for a viable spare, ripping the bottom left corner of it off and scrawling on it.

“There you have it,” he says, sliding it over to Remus.

Remus reaches to pluck it off of the desk, a bright sunshine smile on. “Thank you so much,” he chimes, pushing out of his seat, “and we’ll let you get back to it.”

“My favourite words,” Bubba returns dryly. “Make sure your dad puts his feet up at least once while he’s off, hm?”

Remus pushes a puff of breath out, pushing his chair into the desk. “Oh, we’ll do our best,” he trades him, and Sirius may as well be gliding after him as Remus leads the way back through the garage over all of these we’s he’s been hearing out of him.

Remus steps over the two legs still sticking out from under the mounted SUV. “That you under there, Mel?”

“Sure is, fancy pants,” she returns, kicking her right foot up.

The two of them dodge her fighty foot and prance on out of there, Sirius falling into a bout of snickers outside. “I love this place,” he puts up jovially, following Remus back toward the truck.

“It’s something alright,” Remus says of it, sending a smile to him over his shoulder as he heads up the driver’s side.

Sirius heads around back to get to the passenger side, climbing up and into it with renewed fervour. “And,” he puts up, pointing toward Remus reading off the scrap sheet of paper in his seat, “I love Let’s-Make-a-Deal Remus; I’ve just got to put that out there.”

Remus might’ve pushed a laugh out if he weren’t busy humming blandly. “He lowballed us,” he relays, lulling his head back against his headrest with a frown. “I got too cocky in there.”

“Oh, you did not, and how do even you know he did?” Sirius bids, reaching for Remus’s left wrist and turning it so he can see the sum, and he’s got himself a set of dinner plates for how low that amount is for a beast like that mower. “M’kay, that's just a lie, but I have to ask; are we sure he lowballed us or do we think this was what your dad paid for her?”

Remus shakes his head once, the placement of his brow suggesting he’s taken on a squint. “Even with the Friends and Family discount, there’s no way my dad would've paid this; he’d have sooner driven off than do that,” he puts up, and Sirius figures that, of the two of them, Remus has to know Bubba a little better than he does, but as far as Lyall goes, that sounds just like something he'd do. “Fucking Bubba; calls me a college puke, but won’t let me fork over college prices.”

“I mean,” Sirius starts, a wry smile on now, “is that not college pricing right there?”

“What’s this favouritism I’m getting?” Remus puts up. “I specifically said we wanted to do a nice thing for my dad, and what's this?”

Sirius snorts grand. “Uhh, I wonder if it's that everyone here loves you to the moon and back; how is this news?” he extends, and Remus lets his head fall back on his headrest, pouting up a storm. “OK, I’m sure he thought he was doing a nice thing for you, but that is one tiny man; I can go back in there and tell him I’m going to bench him if he doesn’t tell us the truth if you want.”

Remus ducks his head, pushing a series of laughs out of his nose. “Don't, he’ll start scrapping with you right then and there,” he trades him, taking to waving his left hand in stark insistence. “No, you know what, at this point, it's less about the amount and more the principle of the matter, and I say we have done more than our due diligence here; if we doubled this — that’d be fair, don’t you think?”

Sirius nods keenly. “See? Look at this growth I’m seeing in you,” he observes. “It’s gorgeous, just like you.”

“Wow,” Remus observes, sending a wry smile sidelong at him as he buckles in, “someone really is trying to get laid.”

“I mean, yeah, eventually I'd like to be again,” Sirius allows, grabbing for his own belt, “but I’d have said as much even if I weren't hoping to get got.”

“Yeah, you would've,” Remus allows him, reaching to put the key in the ignition.

“I agree, though; let’s double it and put this one right to bed,” Sirius votes, reaching over the cup holders to pat Remus’s left shoulder like a gavel.

Remus turns his head to leave a peck on Sirius’s knuckles as he spins the wheel. “How do you want to do this?” he raises, getting the truck pulled around and heading them for the exit to the lot.

“I’m more than fine with climbing on top,” Sirius supplies him.

“Yeah, I meant the payment,” Remus chimes, making a left onto the road while Sirius drums his shoes into the truck floor through a mini fit. “As in, should I take out the full amount and you just send your share to me or do you want to do this some other way?”

Oh, well, if that’s what you meant, then you already know it’s pay-what-you-can for you,” Sirius delivers him.

Remus nods once. “No, I remember that part, but for right now, send me your share and I could move it all onto my card so we won’t get charged the ATM fee,” he elaborates.

Sirius smirks grand. “What, three whole pounds?” he puts up.

“Well, you don’t have a card here,” Remus says of it. “I was trying to be nice.”

Sirius lulls his head toward Remus, giving him a fond smile. “Love a nice guy, but I’ll take the money out, lose the service fee along the way, and you can send your share over to me whenever,” he extends, and at Remus’s stewed breath, he lifts his hands easily. “College pricing or not, it’ll hurt me less to see that amount of money leave my account than it would you; let’s just be honest.”

“No, but I wouldn’t be losing it,” Remus raises. “It’d just be for now.”

“We - had - a - deal,” Sirius enunciates, with a healthy dose of handclaps. “And there I went celebrating your growth.”

“Newsflash, Sirius,” Remus puts out brightly, “this is growth for me.”

Sirius takes in a subdued breath through his nose. “You’re right, it is,” he allows, half-smiling over at him. “We still had a deal, though, so let me get the total for now and you can send me thirty percent—”

“Wow, that’s real steep,” Remus comments.

“Well, I wanted to say twenty, so I actually upped that by ten just for you,” Sirius forwards. “It makes sense, Remus; you’ve a lot more to pay for than I do right now.”

Remus takes in quite the breath. “That’s fucking debatable,” he mentions, but his prior tone is headed out the door in real-time, it appears.

“You may send me thirty percent whenever you like,” Sirius puts down. “Send it five minutes from now, send it in a year; that part's up to you.”

“And you’ll absolutely accept the transfer when I do that, yes?” Remus conditions.

“I will even let you watch me hit the button and everything,” Sirius raises it.

“Fine, then,” Remus returns, heaving a sigh as he pulls the truck into a corner lot on their right. “This is the back entrance, you’ll have to go through the bank to get to the front lobby where the ATM’s are, but it’s extremely air-conditioned in there and you'll have more time with it than if I took you around front and dumped you there.”

“You’re so good to me,” Sirius chimes. Remus takes an open stall toward the back of the lot, switching the engine off and shifting in his seat to pull his wallet out of his back pocket. “What’s that doing out?”

Remus points past Sirius with his free hand. “See that red building?” he raises. “Across the street, and a bit to the left from you.”

Sirius looks where advised to, spotting the back end of a red-bricked building on the opposite corner from the bank. “Yep?" he reports, unbuckling his seat belt.

“That’s the café I took you to yesterday,” Remus supplies, blowing Sirius's mind. “Would you like your nitro while I'm in there?”

“I would sing for one,” Sirius returns eagerly, brightening up in his seat.

“OK, well, you’ve been doing that a ton already so I'll just go ahead and get you one,” Remus extends, reaching to unbuckle. “You take the money out, put it in an envelope, and come find me in there because chances are you’ll be done sooner than I will.”

“Deal,” Sirius gives him lively, turning to get a kiss off of Remus before heading off and pausing mid-lean. “Sorry, I forgot where I was.”

Remus sits still for about four seconds, wetting his lips with a slow swipe of his tongue, and ends up leaning in to leave an open-mouthed kiss on Sirius’s lips, but he’s out of the truck and hopping down to the pavement before Sirius can even contend with it. “Remus Jean Lupin,” he puts out.

“Bye,” Remus chimes, shutting the door and strolling off diagonally across the parking lot.

Sirius sits still where he is, eyes shut, elbows on his thighs, chin in his hands, basking in the heat pooling behind his cheeks; once that’s done with, he opens up his door, hops down to the pavement much like a dote he knows, and swings the door shut behind him. A beat or two after he's past the hood of the truck, the whole thing locks up, a two-note beep sounding out from it, and Sirius looks over in the direction he saw Remus go in, spotting him sticking the keys back in his pocket as he strolls up the sidewalk to get to the crosswalk on the corner, a bit of a bounce to his footing as he goes.

To say Sirius walks into the bank would be a blatant falsehood; the man's gliding everywhere he goes in this town, it seems. He heads into the main room through the back foyer, skirts around the back of two queues of folks waiting to visit with a human teller, and crosses over toward the front of the establishment, slowing to a stop at a water cooler near the seating area, liking the sound of that; he plucks a paper cone cup out from the stack hanging on the side of the machine, pouring himself a cup and heading through a set of doors to get into the front foyer.

He waits in a small queue that consists of one other lady also waiting for one of the two ATMs to free up, sipping on his glacier water and vaguely people-watching, but there’s nothing exciting happening here as far as he can see.

The man at the ATM on the left gathers his things and heads for the door, freeing up the machine for the lady ahead of him to use. Sirius steps forward after the man leaves the small foyer, pressing his lips firmly together as Shania rings loud, loud, loudly in the room, echoing off every single surface inside it; mysteriously, the lady looks up and around to investigate the source of the noise while the older gent standing at the right ATM doesn't appear to even look up from his screen, and Sirius lifts his gaze to the ceiling right quick, stifling a laugh in his throat as he fishes his mobile out. He looks down and to the right to get a sidelong peek at the screen, not needing to press to open the text that's come in with its inscription being short enough to see in full in the text bubble on his lock screen.

Bitch??????6

Sirius huffs, rolling his eyes to the ceiling and back; excuse the fuck out of him for having too full an itinerary to stop and have a thousand and one chats throughout the day. He stuffs his mobile back in his pocket, pulls in a breath of stuffy air in the sun-soaked foyer compared to the arctic air inside the bank proper, and looks up to find the lady at the left ATM is still looking over her shoulder at him.

He tosses a glance toward the machine going quite unused ahead of her. “If you're not going to use that, can I get in there?” he raises, blinking twice.

The answer is a 'no' whether she answers him or not and she doesn't do that, choosing instead to turn back to the machine and put her card in finally. Sirius looks to the man at the other machine, aiming to size up which of the two might leave first, but that man's got a hefty file folder with him and appears to be doing six years worth of banking all in one trip, so he has a feeling he's not going to be able to count on him.

He pretends the dregs of glacier water left in his cup is a shot of vodka to give him something to tie himself over, moving in toward a short waste bin sitting between the two machines to toss the cup out and pulling his wallet out as he moves back to his prior spot, figuring he might as well get his card out ahead of time. Another near-minute passes by, at least by the feel of it, and he hones in on the style of banking the lady ahead is employing, the time she's taking with each new screen, and Sirius doesn't know her, likely shouldn't think she's taking her sweet time reading every single letter on screen before taking more time to decide on which button to press next is all a big, bold fuck you to him, but does he think that's what's happening here? Yes.

Miraculously, Gramps over at the right machine is the first of the pair to press to eject his card, gathering his papers to close up in his manilla file folder while the machine beeps away and pulling his card from the machine. Sirius waits until the man's made painstakingly sure the card is good and secure in his wallet and has filed out of the foyer before making moves for the free machine, the only hiccup to that plan is the lady on the left machine ejecting her card and moving for the one he's stepping up to, and it would be one great lie to suggest that Sirius doesn't give her a whirlwind of a double-take for it.

“You can use that one,” she offers, gesturing to the one they're both trying to get at. “This one gives out better denominations, and I don't like taking too high of bills.”

Sirius hums woefully, frowning real big all while he sticks his card in the machine. “I'll just be a sec and she's all yours,” he forwards, focusing on the loading screen.

The lady stifles a noise as she puts her card back in the other machine, none too happy about that, and Sirius clicks through prompt screens to get to the one he needs quicker than he'd have done otherwise, but if he doesn't hurry things up he's pretty sure Remus is going to be the one waiting on him, and — oh, there he is now, turned up on Sirius’s right with their drinks in hand.

“I was starting to think you got lost,” he observes, leaning against the wall beside the ATM.

“No no,” Sirius chimes, typing in their agreed-upon amount. “Busy banking day, it seems.”

Remus gives a hum that's neither here nor there, sipping off the drink in his right hand. Sirius gets prompted on-screen over exactly what sort of bills he'd prefer, but Sirius hasn't got much of a preference either way and goes with the standard offer projected for him, and the machine clicks and churns as it starts spitting out bills one at a time.

“Hello, Remus,” the lady greets, and leave it to Sirius to act out while the chances of Remus knowing any one member of town are in the high eighties.

“Oh, hey,” Remus offers, leaning his head down to smile past the front of Sirius. “How are you?”

“I’m great,” she trades up. “Back for a visit?”

“Sure am, yeah,” Remus echoes.

“Been quite some time,” she observes.

“Mhm, yeah,” Remus offers, his tone is a tad uninspired if still polite, but he's had that prompt come in a few times in the past twenty-four hours and at least he has a go-to response for it; “I'd have liked to make it back sooner, but I couldn't get away until now.”

“Well, I'm sure it's nice to be back,” she raises, turning away from the left machine as she slips her wallet into her massive red leather purse. “I heard you switched majors.”

Sirius pulls an envelope out of a rectangular compartment filled with them and begins transporting bills into it as they come because of course, she's interested in a chat; why wouldn't she be? “Oh, yeah?” Remus trades her.

“It was front-page news last year,” she forwards.

“Right,” Remus accepts. “Teaching made a lot more sense after some closer thought; are you still at it?”

“I am, but I've moved up to year seven,” she imparts.

“Oh, that's exciting,” Remus observes, nodding.

“Some days,” the lady offers laboriously.

“Right, probably not all of them,” Remus allows.

Sirius finishes stuffing the last bill in the envelope, presses to eject his card, and stuffs the card and the envelope together in his front right pocket for now, turning to Remus with a bright smile as he reaches to take his nitro brew off him. “I'm just going to go around the outside, I think,” he puts in, heading for the doors.

Remus nods keenly, stepping away from the machine. “Nice seeing you,” he offers, filing out behind him.

The moment they're out, Sirius makes a fast left around the bend to get to the side of the building, fishing out his pack. He gets one lit, inhales deeply, and lets his haul out through his nose, looking left at Remus. “Who's she?” he bids, smiling extra sweetly. “Don't say a good friend of the fam.”

“Cunt, no,” Remus puts out, low down on his register, though still quite pronounced.

Sirius whirls toward him, stopping still on the sidewalk. “What have you got on her?” he demands. “She was so rude to me in there—”

Remus means to shush him, but it's more a huff of a laugh than much else, looking over his shoulder to double-check their coordinates compared to hers, it seems, and motioning to keep walking with his free hand. “I’m not too surprised, she’s always been on the stuffy side,” he trades him, heading them back to the lot. “She taught me in primary for year five, and — I actually don't know how to put this next part.”

“Don't be nice,” Sirius insists, budging Remus's right hip as they walk.

“She took a rather personal interest in my home life?” Remus poses him.

Sirius gapes, no grin. “What do you mean, what do you mean, what do you mean?” he chants.

Remus falls into a bout of smirks that Sirius has to wait through before he can hear any sort of intel, but is that a sacrifice when Remus is busy taking time out to enjoy Sirius's antics? No, it's not. “OK, well, I should say that I was kept pretty well oblivious to most of this to the best of my mum and dad's abilities at the time," he mentions up top. "She wasn't a banshee to me or anything like that, and I only remember bits and pieces that would technically fall around the same time, but she took grievance with my behaviour at school and attributed it to my environment at home.”

“What behaviour?” Sirius puts up. “Too many pleases and thank-yous?”

Remus huffs a laugh, ducking his head for a moment. “Well, she thought I was too closed off for my age group or compared to the rest of her class, but I'm still not sure where the distinction landed for her,” he hands him, taking hold of Sirius's left arm by the crook of the elbow and guiding him over toward the truck, but Sirius still has most of a cigarette going so he has to assume Remus is more taking them the furthest from the bank front they can get. “It was also just a very strange read of it because that wasn't my experience of year five at all; I was more reserved than others, but I wasn't mute, you know; I raised my hand when I knew the answer to a question, I read aloud when called on, and I was definitely that kid who preferred to read at recess rather than play hopscotch or what-have-you, but that doesn't equal coming from an oppressive home life and it certainly didn't for me, but felt she ought to investigate that theory.”

“This is so fucked,” Sirius says of it, squinting over at Remus to help make it make sense for him.

Remus lifts a hand to bid him to wait up. “So, middle of October, few weeks into the school year; she rings up my house, gets my mum on the line, and tells her I'm having trouble engaging in her class,” he details. “And my mum's who she is, so she’s got her hand on her chest in a panicked, 'oh no, is he?' sort of way and genuinely wanted to get to the bottom of it, figure out what could've been going on, but apparently she got treated to one astoundingly forward lecture on the importance of creating an environment where a child can flourish.”

“She did all that because you were quiet?” Sirius comes in, blinking wondrously. Remus lifts his shoulders unceremoniously and Sirius sucks heatedly off of his cigarette. “There you were, sitting at your wee desk with your nine-year-old peepers staring back at her all ready and willing to learn, not bothering anybody, and that shrew said, 'you know what? I think I'll stir up some shit today?'”

Remus's brows take up residence underneath his fringe as he nods to concede. “And stir, she did,” he echoes. “Now, I am of the mind that if she'd opened the conversation with something a bit more along the lines of, 'you know, he's very quiet,' then my mum could have said, 'yes, sometimes that's what Remus is,' and that might've been that, but to hear 'he's not engaged' was apparently so out of left-field for her and my dad to hear because by then, we were having regular movie nights where talked plenty, if I had a big project coming up I'd do mock-presentations for them, and, well, you've seen what our dinners are like.”

Remus gestures toward him with a frank smile on. “And boy, have I,” Sirius serves him.

Remus nods brightly. “And that's the me they had to go on, so when my mum brought that to my dad, he said they were thinking, 'Well, who's she talking about? Not our kid; Remus isn't disengaged,' but again, to hear something foreboding like that and in the way it was done was still worrying for them,” he offers up, and Sirius gives a frank hum of allowance considering the two personalities he's been studying up on for quite some time now; worrying behind a wall of defence certainly checks out. “The biggest issue was the idea that what they were seeing from me at home was different from the way I acted at school, so for the next few weeks they tried opening a more serious dialogue with me about how I'd felt about school that day, how I was feeling back at home, idle interview questions, and I don't have too strong a memory of all that, but this was me at nine, just going about my days quite happy at school and at home, so I presume I answered their questions to the best of my ability, but they weren't completely convinced they'd gotten to the bottom of it because we started up with this charade-type game over the winter where my mum would be the professor, my dad would play another student, and I would play me, and we did mock-classroom to encourage me to engage more at school and I do remember that game, but mostly because it was such a normal thing to me to be horsing around with them like that and didn't think much more of it than that, but all of that studying of my behaviour and investigative journalism they were really doing there just ended up coming together to have them thinking, 'our kid's doing great; what is this tomfoolery she's on about?’”

Sirius comes in during a pause for breath. “I love your paraphrasing style,” he slips in, smiling around his cigarette.

Remus forwards him quite the grin. “So, fast-forward to the end of that term, they're feeling confident I was doing just fine in both areas, that they hadn't somehow strangled all the life out of me at home so I had hardly any left to give at school, and report cards go out, my grades are high, and all my additional comments had to do with the theme of how muzzled I was in class,” he extends him, giving Sirius a pointed smile there, “and they head on down to parent/teacher interviews with a bee all in their bonnet, and I do not know what was said in that meeting, but it had to have been something because I do remember how often she stopped at my desk the first half of that school year, and she didn't stop by it once straight on until the end of the year; just skipped it and carried on.”

“Oh, my God,” Sirius returns, gape/grinning now for certain.

“He goes by Cunt around these parts,” Remus supplies him, wearing a dastardly cute bow for a set of lips.

“I didn’t even think to switch it out that time,” Sirius insists, pushing out a laugh there. “Were you sad about it? That she stopped coming by, I mean.”

“Not really, no,” Remus offers, his lips breaking into a much more amused smile. “She always smelt of beets, so I wasn’t losing a ton not having her stop by anymore.”

Sirius snorts grand. “Well, fuck her twice, then,” he says of it..

Remus hums to concede, biting at his smile. “I never knew the connection until I'd heard some of the greater parts of the tale from my dad a couple years back, but he still wouldn't tell me what they said to her,” he maintains.

Sirius puffs up grand. “Do we think they went in there like, 'tell us our kid's disengaged one more time, we dare ya?'” he raises him, putting his free fist gingerly underneath Remus's chin for emphasis. “'You leave our angel child be or we'll be back and you won't like that.'”

Remus gives out a laugh, kneading at Sirius's knuckles with the base of his chin. “I'm sure my mum was more measured, but I've a strong sense my dad might've taken a few liberties here and there,” he raises, giving Sirius a frank smile. “He all but suggested it, so I’m just connecting the dots here.”

“Oh, he'd have decimated her; I just know it,” Sirius returns, mirroring Remus's smile. He looks down at the bit of viable cigarette left to smoke, puffs off it, and flicks the cherry off and away, sticking the butt in his pocket until he's somewhere with a bin nearby. “Why be so nice to her, then?”

“I don’t know that I was?” Remus counters, lifting his shoulders. “It would be a bit odd for me to just suddenly give her shit for something that happened forever ago, but I don’t love thinking about how she spoke to my mum about it so I try to be civil, keep it short, but thank you for suggesting we go around because that was a good excuse to take our exit.”

Sirius takes in a quick breath, torn between going with that and being transparent about it. “'Kay, I’ll just say it: I thought she was an old friend that I’d just been very petty with so I was just trying to get out of there to save myself, but you coming along with me was a lovely, lovely bonus," he offers candidly.

Remus snickers freely there, and that’s better than him taking it any other way. “The bonus being all that new gossip to work with, less about my presence," he translates.

“I would call it a lovely blend of both, thanks much,” Sirius slips him, flittering around the front of the truck.

“Where to next?” Remus bids, heading up the driver's side and lingering there with his right hand poised at the handle of his door. “We could do the pharmacy since it's just over there, or if you’re in the mood for a cone, we can go get—”

“Farmer's market,” Sirius votes, pointing up and toward him overtop of the engine.

“That was with much more gusto than I expected out of you,” Remus mentions, opening his door.

“I cannot wait to see you buzzing around there, so let's – get – to - it,” Sirius champions, clapping his right hand against his nitro brew to accompany it.

“Mm,” Remus puts out, sliding into his seat and holding his left hand out toward Sirius. “Envelope, please.”

Sirius perks upon remembering that he's still got it, shutting his door and sticking his coffee in the cup holder to free up his hands. He fishes it out of his front right pocket to pass it off to Remus, sticks his card back in his wallet, and once he's slipped that away, he settles in to watch Remus search the immediate area for a place to hide the goods, the envelope held in his left hand while his right one opens up the compartment in the centre console that Lyall appears to dump his loose change and whatnots into, but Remus hums a no, deciding against it.

“'Scuse my reach,” he offers, reaching out and ahead of Sirius's knees to tug the glovebox open, where a whole myriad of odds and ends falls out of it, some onto the floor, others onto Sirius's lap, Sirius just fizzles into a humanoid laugh, waving Remus's amused apology off through is stitches. “Well, that's not going to work; that's just where my dad keeps his junk, clearly.”

Sirius sniffs anew. “Your dad keeps his junk in here?” he raises, leaning over the case of CDs and the bottle of hand sanitizer that landed in his lap to have a look inside the glovebox.

“Gross, gross, gross,” Remus sends him for that one.

Sirius sends him a load of lofty trills in return, sliding the CD case back in with the precarious situation in there before waggling the wee bottle of Purell at Remus. “How peeved does it get you that he's got one of these hanging around?” he checks.

Remus gives a plain huff in his throat. “That's my mum's doing,” he relays, lifting his hands to suggest he's staying right out of it even though he's the one holding a torch for anti-bacterial solution, and Sirius snorts up a storm as feels around on the floor, picking up a fallen pen, a once-rectangular though currently crushed box of tissues, and a wrench of all things, but then he remembers the busy-body that this here truck belongs to and suddenly the wrench makes all the more sense.

He takes care to shut everything up into the glovebox they came from, pressing his palms against the door once it's shut tight. “It's all good so long as nobody opens this ever again,” he declares.

Remus snickers for it, back to his hunt, pulling down on the sun visor above the driver's seat and studying it for a moment or two before working the fat envelope to fit underneath a rubber band strapped around the visor to hold it in place.

He pops the visor back up, looks Sirius's way with a bright, keen smile, and puts his head on a tilt. “What if, we don't even tell him that it's in here,” he starts, but before he can go any further, Sirius knows right where he's going.

“And then one day, he's out on the speedway, pulls that down as the sun's getting in his eyes, and he's going to have a little gift waiting for him,” he continues for him, and Remus bites at his smile. “I agree; let's let him think he's gotten away with his shit for now."

“Yes,” Remus extends gravely, smiling away over there. “That way, he'll think he won this round, but someday, he's going to find that envelope and shake his fist at the sky.”

Sirius smirks for that lovely image, turns for his seat belt, and straps in while his brain files the new tale he'd just been given out there with the oodles of stories he's heard of the Lupin Troupe thus far. “There are so many more layers to the three of you than I could've ever imagined, but it never stops being fascinating to me,” he maintains, looking up and out the front window after the click of the buckle sounds.

Remus turns his head to the side to glance at him. “How so?” he bids, facing ahead again.

“Well, for one, it makes all that much more sense why those two were just so misty-eyed this morning with how much they cared about how you were faring even as a tyke,” Sirius raises. “And with the way keep describing their parenting style, it puts it right into the foreground just how difficult it would be for them to find out there's been this huge secret of yours that they'd have otherwise known if they'd only done better — and that's not me saying that, it's me paraphrasing them, just to be clear.”

Remus hums to concede, making a wide left turn off of the road they're on. “No, I know,” he lets him have, and there, he puts out one strong puff of breath. “I was a happy kid, you know? A worrywart and a half obviously, but I wasn't locked up tight in myself the whole way through; it breaks my heart to hear that, to them, this news feels like they didn't do a good enough job with me.”

Sirius sends a small, wounded look sidelong at Remus that he's not sure Remus sees. “Well, I did watch you move mountains to ensure they didn't think that of it this morning,” he offers him. “And I'm not saying that one or both of them aren't going to have moments down the line where they stop and cringe over not having clocked it sooner; it'd likely be in the way I've seen and heard you stop and cringe over a time when you wished you'd have just said something sooner, but neither of those reads of it has to mean that you guys didn't do your fucking best with each other.”

Remus's nose twists up all in a bunch as he gives a minute noise, his mouth following shortly after, and Sirius speaks through Remus's verklempt silence. “And for what it's worth, I love the job they did with you,” he passes him. “I couldn't love how you turned out more, honestly.”

“Why are you doing this while I'm driving?” Remus puts out, pouting profusely. “I can't kiss you right now.”

“But I bet you want to,” Sirius croons, a casual little melody he made up just then and there.

“You know I want to,” Remus lobs him, taking his left hand off the wheel to fly him the bird.

Sirius sends him a smooch from his seat, smiling away as he reaches for his nitro. “Hey, question,” he alerts, bringing his cup toward him for a sip, “what do you think it would take to get you to honk at somebody?”

“Well, I assume you mean angrily, seeing as you recently saw that I’ve been known to give a toot in greeting if inspired to,” Remus trades him.

Sirius nods sagely. “Mhm, I am,” he affirms. “I bet it'd be vicious crimes against humanity and absolutely nothing less."

Remus smirks a laugh. “You'd be right,” he allows for, and Sirius sips daintily off of his brew with the air of righteousness. “It’s just not my go-to move, I’m more a 'flip the bird and head right on' sort; I take after my mum behind the wheel more than I do my dad.”

“Ooh, I never even thought about that,” Sirius puts up. “He must drop some intense bombs when somebody fucks him over on the road, am I right? I'm right, I know it.”

“He’s got more road rage in him out of the three of us, that's for sure,” Remus echoes. “Especially when somebody's cut him off; he's so willing to let people on ahead of him, but when they demand to, it surpasses the point of general irritation and curves into, ‘are they missing a fucking brain, trying to cut this thing off?’”

Sirius gives a charmed laugh in his throat. “He'd get right on with James,” he quips.

Remus puts out a disparaged laugh. “Now, his road rage isn't something I've seen before," he maintains.

“Oho,” Sirius allows, snorting over a memory floating right back to him like it were just yesterday. “One time, way back in secondary, somebody cut Jimmy Dean off on the wrong day, and he took a detour on our way back to school, made us late for third period and everything, just so he could fulfil his intrinsic need to follow the guy for three extra city blocks and wail on his horn the entire time.”

Remus sucks a breath in through gritted teeth. “How'd that go over?” he bids.

“Not well for that man's ears, I'll say that,” Sirius extends.

“No, I don't imagine so,” Remus echoes, biting back a smirk. “Did he get out and give you some real shit for that?”

“Nah, I think he was honestly pretty spooked,” Sirius supplies, cycling back through the visuals he’s got of the day. “After the third block, he swerved off the road we were on and zoomed away, but he got the point, we felt.”

Remus does not bite back a chirp of a laugh. “OK, that is a little funny,” he fesses.

“Isn't it?” Sirius echoes. “I was thrilled the whole fucking time it was happening.”

“I can just see your face now,” Remus says of it, a twist of a smile on as he slows down to pull a right off of the road they’re on and into a lengthy parking lot.

Sirius perks in his seat as he observes the area; there's quite a bit of bustle going on around them, cars parking, some leaving the lot, perusers coming and going, and beyond the lot on their left is a big and bold white tent and rows and rows of what look like wooden kiosks from here with folks middling about them, and Sirius gets his seat belt flung off of him right quick, eager for a walk and talk with his man. He grabs his door, flings it open with gusto, but he takes more care in getting out of the truck while he's got a nitro brew to think about. He hops down to the pavement, hits the lock on his door, and pops it shut, heading around the front of the truck to meet up with Remus, who's a little ways down the truck having a peek into the cargo bed.

Sirius heads up behind him, moving to the tips of his toes to peer over Remus's right shoulder, and aims to mimic the studious humming patterns he can vaguely hear him doing. “Yes, this is indeed a collection of things,” he observes.

Remus huffs a laugh. “I'm checking if he's got a bag in here,” he shares, waving Sirius's antics off.

Sirius grins, having a look around himself and perking when he sees what looks like the strap of some kind of bag to him, at least. “Is that one?” he raises, pointing him toward it.

Remus follows his directive, reaching into the bed to tug up on the strap, and a reusable bag is lifted out of it before Remus hangs it by his right shoulder. “Good eye, you,” he forwards him, turning away from the truck with a bright smile on and nodding him in the direction of the tent in the distance.

Sirius falls into step with him, reaching to tug on the rather big bag hanging from Remus's shoulder. “Are we planning on getting a thousand jars?” he raises.

“Not quite that many, but there are a few things I'd like to bring back with us while we're here,” Remus supplies, going for a sip off his drink.

“Tell me,” Sirius prompts, sipping off his own brew.

Remus hums once, lifting his left hand to count on the first two fingers on his free hand. “Jam for me, cherries for you,” he lists off.

“Oh my,” Sirius trills, fanning himself with his own free hand.

“There's a farmer who sells loads and loads of produce here so the cherries are the real deal, and I'm really doing you more of a favour here than you even think,” Remus tacks on, adding his ring finger to the count. “Then there's a lady who sells her famous tapioca pudding by the jar that my dad just loves so I’m thinking we ought to bring one back for him, maybe let him think that’s his real gift; it’s something he’d be quite happy to accept and it'd throw him right off our scent.”

“I love your mind,” Sirius trades him, smiling around his straw.

Remus grins back at him, leading Sirius toward what seems to be the entrance to this farmer's maze and finally lifting his pinky to show four raised fingers. “And, bagels for my mum.”

“Oh? Do tell,” Sirius prompts.

“Oh, they're just real good when you get them from here,” Remus assures, pointing to him once. “She loves the blueberry ones, so if I forget any of those other things I just mentioned, please don't let me walk out of here without those.”

“Deal,” Sirius sends him. “You take two, I take two?”

“Oh, it's cash-only here, I'm afraid, but I’ve got some,” Remus extends him.

Sirius eyes him sidelong. “Could have said something about that while I was back at the ATM,” he mentions. “All I’ve got is a fiver and some change on me.”

“Mhm, I could have, yeah,” Remus echoes, giving an idle scratch at the right side of his collarbone.

Sirius finds himself rather torn between being impressed and fumed by him. He walks over by a bin to unload the cigarette butt from the morning, and, while he's over here and only has a few sips left of his brew, he drains that and tosses the cold cup into the bin, too. He looks up and around for Remus, and for the moment, he’s only got a visual of him from the hairline up from further down the makeshift aisle they’re in and a group of folks have to pass through the aisle before Remus is visible in full, waiting for him as he sips off his tea.

Sirius makes his way over, shaking his head fondly and flicking the bottom of the paper cup in Remus's right hand when he gets to him. “How are you able to drink hot tea in this weather?” he demands, stopping ahead of Remus with two decided plonks of his feet.

Remus lowers his cup as he swallows. “I just can, sweets,” he delivers, swinging around to lead them further up the aisle they're in.

“Call me that again,” Sirius bids, following close behind him.

“No, you've run out for the day,” Remus declines.

Sirius gives a noise of affront, putting extra oomph into his footsteps and spurring on ahead of Remus in retaliation, but he ends up having to backtrack when he realizes Remus stopped at the back of a queue at a kiosk a good five to ten steps back.

Sirius saunters back over to him, standing just on the outskirts of the line on Remus's right. “Jerk,” he gives in quaint greeting.

“You didn't tell me you stopped at the bin,” Remus mentions. “I didn’t know where you went to and had to stand still where I was, hoping you’d turn up again.”

“Oh, are we doing tit for tit?” Sirius bids.

“You know that’s not the saying,” Remus returns.

“No, answer me,” Sirius keeps to it, trying very hard not to smile. “Are you getting petty with me; do I need to sound the alarm?”

Remus reworks his mouth around a smile, giving up the goat. “OK, you’re right,” he relents. “I’m sorry, I should have said I’d stopped seeing as you've no idea where you are.”

“Didn't need the sorry, but I digress,” Sirius slides him, and Remus gives a muted huff as he looks ahead, but there are still two folks ahead of him in the queue so that's not going to do much. “Which part of the list are we knocking off here?”

“This is where we're going to get your cherries,” Remus supplies.

Sirius perks, appreciating the understanding shown here of his immense love for the fruit, but he notes the ‘your’ involved and doesn't like it. “They'll be yours, too, you know,” he slips him. “I’m not going to boggart the bag all for myself.”

“I'll have some, but they're for you,” Remus insists, smiling keenly there. “I think you deserve to be treated.”

“Quit it or I may swoon,” Sirius trills, rolling up and down on the balls of his feet daintily.

“I think it's a little late for that,” Remus quips, and quick as a flash, his cheeky expression changes to one of polite cheer as the only other person ahead of him in the queue peters off and allows him to step up to the table ahead of him, speaking brightly to the gent manning the kiosk.

Sirius hangs back a little to the side, watching as he chats with a couple folks behind the kiosk that he clearly has some years logged away with for his curls keep bouncing while he engages them for longer than a simple transaction would call for. Remus moves from the table with a wave to them once the exchange is finished, looks round for Sirius only to spot him in true seconds, and smiles brightly as he heads for him with a big bag of cherries in his free hand, and y'know what, he was right: it's too late for Sirius on the swooning front.

“Here you go,” Remus chimes, holding the bag out to him.

Sirius puts a charmed, yet hesitant hand on his chest. “I get to hold them?” he raises.

“Well, I figured you'd want to snack on them, but I can put them in here for now if you'd like,” Remus says of it, gesturing with the arm he's got the bag on.

“No no, I'm down for this, I was just surprised,” Sirius assures, smiling away as he zips the bag open and fishes one out of there. “Where to next?”

Remus hums, having a look around, and heads them over to a new kiosk two aisles up from there while Sirius follows along, munching on a cherry, and perks as Remus leans in a little to speak between them as they step into the queue. “That's the tapioca lady,” he shares, speaking lower on his register and gesturing toward the large table ahead of the queue.

“Mm,” Sirius hums, swallowing around the pit in his mouth before shooting it out to the side of him that Remus is not on. “Does she have a name, or is she just ‘tapioca lady?’”

“Well, er name's Miel, but why would you know that?” Remus raises, smirking. “It was just easier to say 'tapioca lady.'”

“Sorry, hold it,” Sirius comes in bringing his eyes to a squint. “Miel, as in—”

“Honey en Français, oui,” Remus finishes for him, pairing it with a nod. “She's not French, mind; her entire family's rather, uhm, of the Earth, we'll say? She’s got a sister named Soleil and a brother named Lotus, if that helps give you an idea.”

Sirius puts out a long and lustrous pfft. “Jesus fucking Cunt,” he mutters, pulling the stem out of his mouth and flicking it away. “I really am at the farmer's market.”

“Mhm, you are,” Remus affirms, nodding up ahead at the illustrious Miel behind the table, a pointed smile ghosting over his lips. “She's a jack-of-all-trades sort; big into the arts, teaches green living seminars in her spare time, quite the cook and has done loads of vegan catering for folks around town over the years, and she's got this gigantic farmhouse on this massive plot of land down the way that she holds artist retreats at—”

“And it’s all clothing optional and everybody gets to see what their junk looks like imprinted on canvas and stuff,” Sirius drawls on, and Remus gape/grins at him, looking as if he’d like to take a nice dive into the reusable bag on his shoulder and hide out for an unspecified amount of time. “Oh, come on; you were waiting for that.”

“OK, that was more than I bargained for,” Remus shoots him, hunkering down on the smile threatening to show on his lips. “You insisted on coming here with me; I’d have gone alone or let you wait in the truck—”

“I came here for you and to see you vibrating out of your skin about a jar of jam; that is it,” Sirius sends back, eyes alive with fervour. “I've no obligation to anyone else here.”

“Well, clearly, it was a mistake bringing you along either way,” Remus accosts, but there's that lopsided smile starting up so Sirius knows this is really all just a form of foreplay in the end.

“Listen, you,” Sirius prefaces, talking with his brows, “I'm here and I'm whispering; what more do you want from me?”

“I want you to shush on the smack talk until we're out of this queue,” Remus lobs him.

“There'll just be another queue,” Sirius trades him.

Remus takes a long swig off his tea to hide that smile he's got going, shaking his head and stepping up to the kiosk, and with the lowering of his cup comes his polite, cheerful air as he engages Meil behind the counter. Sirius grins wide as he wanders away from that whole thing, preferring to hang out a few feet away and munch on cherries until Remus comes along again, sticking Lyall’s jar of tapioca puddin’ into his bag while Sirius shoots the pit in his mouth to the ground below.

Remus gives a thoughtful hum as he surveys the area. “Well, the jam table is nearest to us from here, but I have to say I'm a little afraid to bring you along,” he mentions.

“Oh, you loved every second of that,” Sirius maintains, lifting his open bag o' cherries in offering. “Don’t you go lying now.”

Remus reaches into the bag after a beat and swipes a cherry, beckoning Sirius along. He's led three aisles over and around the corner, where Remus stops at a bin at the top of the aisle and takes care in spitting the pit into it.

Sirius looks down at the pavement between his feet, thinking back to the pits he spat away without much else. “Did my method of pit disposal ruffle your feathers back there?" he raises him. "Because you definitely hid it well if so."

Remus waves him off, smirking as he swallows. “I'm happy we’re at least outside this time,” he puts it, tossing his empty cup into the bin before turning away from it.

Sirius gives him a bright grin, following along after Remus's continued leading, and gets brought down the same aisle they're in and over to a kiosk close by, where Sirius watches Remus sidelong, anticipation brimming in him as they get in the queue behind a few others waiting for their jam fix.

Remus catches him looking and huffs, but there's quite a smile poking at his lips. “What?” he enunciates.

“You know what,” Sirius returns him, eyes alight.

“I'm not going to vibrate over the jar, so your expectations are going to be a little high for this, sorry to tell you,” Remus slips him.

“I disagree,” Sirius supplies him. “One sunshine smile is all I need to log this whole thing away as a personal success story.”

“A what?” Remus checks.

“Which part has you confused?” Sirius counters, pushing out a laugh.

“‘Sunshine smile?’” Remus quotes, his eyebrows up past his fringe.

“Oh, that’s simple; it's what I call it when you do this specific beam that takes up your whole face,” Sirius offers him. “It is, in fact, equal in measure to a literal ray of sunshine, so I'm not being all that creative with coining the term, but that's the backstory, all in all.”

Remus gives him quite a smile there, but it's of the sheepish variety so it’s a bit surprising for Sirius when he comes back talking cheeky as all hell. “First the dinner plate eyes, now the sunshine smile,” he raises, his lopsided smile starting back up as he takes in a breath of new thought. “You sure you don't want to go over to Miel's? I've heard that she hosts a poetry night on Tuesdays and you'd be just her type.”

Sirius pushes a long puff of breath out the right side of his mouth. “Say that again, pal,” he goads, reaching up underneath Remus's chin with a brandished fist.

Remus smirks a series of laughs through his nose that gets cut off the moment he realizes there's nobody ahead of him anymore and there, he sniffs quickly and steps forward while Sirius steps to the side and waits intently as Remus orders up and pays for his jar, and Sirius gets exactly what he'd hoped for the moment Remus turns from the table with it in hand; a bright, sunshine smile paired with a little jar-wag as he heads over to him with a bounce to his step.

“I didn't even play that up for you,” he imparts, nodding to his footfalls.

Sirius sighs wondrously. “Oh, I very knew that,” he extends, grinning for him.

Remus bites at the side of his smile as he slips the jar into the bag on his shoulder. “Alright, just the bagels left to get and we can get you out of your version of hell,” he raises brightly, beckoning Sirius along.

“OK, it's not that bad,” Sirius extends, keeping in step with him. “I will not lament getting away from the plume of patchouli wafting over the place, mind.”

“No, I imagine you would not,” Remus sends back, leading him along to a kiosk down the way that for once hasn't got a queue going in front of it, but it does indeed have a lady behind it that right puffs up with joy upon setting sight on Remus Lupin, and fair enough, honestly. He waves Remus on, hanging back a little to the side while Remus gets both his hands held tightly over the table as the wee, elderly lady behind it coos over his return.

It's another minute, maybe more before they get to the transaction, but Sirius is in no rush to speed that sight along. “Say hi to your mum for me,” the bitty lady bids, handing over the bag of blueberry bagels for the lady of the hour. “Oh, I definitely will,” Remus assures, giving her a little wave before looking over his shoulder and moving out of the way quickly as he spots another person waiting in line behind him.

He heads over to Sirius with a meek smile on. “I didn't realize I was holding things up,” he shares, taking care in placing the bag of bagels atop the rest of the shopping in his bag.

“Fuck anyone who gives a shit,” Sirius returns. “That visual we all just got of a tiny little lady cooing over you belongs in the MOMA, and everybody here needed to see it whether they know it or not.”

Remus huffs a laugh, readjusting the strap on his right shoulder. “Well, she was my Sunday school teacher way back when; that might explain the cooing,” he offers for it, smiling. “She's so sweet; just this little happy lady, still baking up a storm.”

“Alright, that is cute,” Sirius lets him have, and a gent up their aisle stops and calls Remus's name out, garnering the lad to look around quickly for the source of the call.

Sirius would have pointed Remus to him, but the man's already headed for them as is, and Remus lights up bright as he spots him coming, stepping into the handshake he gets pulled into, and there Sirius's mobile decides now's the time to start blasting Shania again, only this time it's the full ringtone.

Remus gives a quick glance over his shoulder quick at him, and Sirius bites back a smile, working his bag of cherries into the bag on Remus's right arm before slipping off down the aisle to answer it. “Yes, dear?” he greets pointedly.

“Sirius,” James scoffs. “You don't just drop a bomb on someone, text them with 'mission accomplished,' and then never respond again; where have your manners gone?”

“Where have yours gone?” Sirius counters. “I'm in the middle of take two of the Great Gay Date Day that I would like to get back to enjoying, and in case you haven't noticed, I'm on a well-deserved vacation, yet here you are, blowing up my phone like that's acceptable behaviour—”

“At least tell me how it went, you dink,” James climbs in. “I'm on the edge of my seat over here.”

Sirius breathes in once, backing up to avoid a train of four children traipsing past him. “Fine, you've two minutes, and not an actual two; figure of speech,” he extends him. “King Lyall drove me over to Tom's place to get the number, the guy argued with me over it until I implied I'd be having a chat with his dad if he didn't hand it over—”

“Oho,” James trills, pushing out a jovial laugh, “you went for daddy-O? I'm impressed.”

“Colour me surprised,” Sirius raises airily. “I mean, it's no one-two-punch method or anything, but that's a guy who doesn't want me talking to his pops about anything I might know about, so it was an effective strategy either way; that's really all that happened aside from a lot of 'tude being thrown back and forth, but that I don't feel up to performing for you just now—”

“Wish you would,” James comes in, a grin on.

“Well, maybe when I'm back, but not today,” Sirius reiterates, looking back over at Remus still chatting away over there. “I should get back.”

“Mhm,” James responds, a bit too wooden for Sirius's liking, but he doesn't even have to ask about it when James clicks his tongue and tells it to him straight. “I'm really getting sick of hearing you say that, I'm just going to be honest.”

Sirius looks left to right. “What?” he puts up; nothing eloquent, but he's rather unprepared.

James gives out an exhaustive breath. “It's like you can't get away from me fast enough and I'm not into it, oddly enough,” he returns.

Sirius squints hard despite the fact that James can't see him do it. “I put aside a whole hour for you, just this morning,” he highlights.

“Oh, well, thanks for throwing me a crumb,” James offers him.

Sirius's brows go right up his forehead. “Is that what we're calling gorgeous house tours now?”

“I liked the house tour, you dink,” James sends him. “That's not the point; the point is—”

“I am on my vacation?” Sirius offers for a finish. “It's not as if I heard from you much while you were off on yours, and I didn't act like this.”

“You heard from me,” James puts it plainly.

“And I think that's 'cause my lovely mother bit it while you were away, so I don't know if that really counts as us shooting the shit while you were gone,” Sirius submits.

“It was a lot more than just that, Sirius,” James returns.

“Oh, a couple of Vernon-isms sent my way for me to react to isn't shooting the shit either, I just need you to know that,” Sirius spells out. “That’s a couple of texts here and there, which I’ve been matching since I’ve been here, by the way, and it's only been a day and a half since I left.”

“OK, so you're telling me you're still pressed about something that happened in May when we're currently in July, and now you're giving me, what, a taste of my own medicine?” James ponders.

“I'm not pressed about anything,” Sirius puts it. “I mean, I'm not loving the ambush or the tone you're taking with me, but that’s neither—”

“You've been toning me right back,” James cuts in.

Sirius keeps right on it. “You know what, I am pressed; I'm pressed about this conversation coming into my life without my written approval, you're pressed because I'm not about to wall off an entire afternoon for you, while I'm on my vacation, at Remus's family home,” he enunciates. “See the difference?”

James huffs one loaded scoff. “If only it was just vacation,” he returns.

“Mm?” Sirius probes, and he'll admit it's done pithily.

“Yeah, you heard me,” James comes back. “You've been pulling back from me all summer.”

Sirius clicks his tongue. “We're not even through the summer yet,” he retorts.

“Ooh, good one if you were the type not to know what I meant,” James returns right quick. “I've never had to schedule time with you like I've done lately, you've acted completely disinterested whenever you have penned me in, and if I roll it back in my head, if I really try to figure out when exactly the pattern began, I can pinpoint it right back to the proposal announcement, and I don't want that to be what the problem is here, but it sure is difficult not to think it so either I don't have your blessing or you're fucked off at me for trying to get married in general, and I don't know which one I'd rather it be, honestly; I just wish you'd fucking talked to me about it instead of pulling back like this.”

“Excu—” Sirius starts, but he can't even get through it.

“Well, it's not as if I'm going pop the question and disappear on you,” James keeps to it. “This doesn't have to be the end of us; this is a good thing, not something you needed to write me off and punish me for.”

Sirius runs his top teeth over his bottom lip before trying his hand at speaking again. “I genuinely haven't given your pending nuptials that much thought,” he supplies him.

“Mmkay,” James comes back.

Sirius lifts a shoulder in insistence, but again, James can't see him do it so he's just got his own, bemused voice to utilize. “I'm not lying to you,” he instils, huffing a humourless laugh. “It's not an insult, I've been preoccupied; you can go marry a shoe for all I care.”

James clicks his tongue hard. “Sirius,” he huffs.

“Well, what?” Sirius puts up, and now he is laughing because this is fucking ridiculous. “You two have been Mum and Dad since you started; we're not joking when we call you that, we all figured you'd be popping the question at some point to varying degrees, and it's not my fault you picked the summer I've had hardly any free time to drop the news on the rest of us, and on top of that, you know I moved a ton of things around to make time for you these past few weeks so you're actually a lot more clever than you're acting just now and if you're not going to have respect for me, at least have some for yourself.”

James gives a loaded breath like he's been gut-punched. “Stone-cold, Sirius,” he returns.

“Yeah, but it's good, right?” Sirius raises. “Remus used that one on me after I accused him of wanting to get back with his ex; real low point for me, I'll admit, and I was just decimated.”

“Understood,” James says for it. "I’m fucking flatlining over here."

“Well, all I’m really saying is, you’re way smarter than this and it’d be good if you acted like it,” Sirius caps it.

“OK, but can you just admit the timing of all this is a little suspicious?” James comes back.

“Sure, if we were thirteen and I were somebody else?” Sirius sounds out. “Remus's resurgence came right alongside your announcement, if you may recall—”

“I never once brought Remus into this,” James sticks in. “Not once; you did that.”

“Am I wrong?” Sirius sends back. “On top of that, I have a business to open that I was already tied to before any of that, I stuck around the shop longer than I ever needed to, and not only because I wanted to give Will a few full nights of sleep before being tasked with replacing a star like me, but because I knew it would guarantee me a few hours of quality time with you at a time where I'd be lucky to grab extra time to shoot the shit, but hey, you know me; I just hate seeing you happy, that must be the underlying cause here.”

James is uncharacteristically quiet on the other end of the line. “OK, I deserve that,” he cops to it. “I'm laying over the coals and you, sir, get to hold the rake and drag it all over me—”

“No, I'm good, I think; I've made my point,” Sirius decides. “So, what I’m going to do is, go back to that Date Day I’m in the middle of, and then I'm going to go right on back to not harbouring any animosity toward your future nuptials, and in turn, you lucky boy can breathe easier knowing I'm not purposefully avoiding you.”

“Well, you can't go after that,” James insists. “We were just getting a lot of good work done here.”

“No, I actually do have to go,” Sirius puts down. “We're at a farmer's market, Remus just got his hands on this jar of strawberry-rhubarb jam that he loves, and I don’t want to miss anything standing over here having this conversation while he's just so happy and weightless and light-footed today that it's like he's prancing everywhere he goes — he's taller, James; he looks taller than ever.”

“Oh,” James comes in heavily. “Yeah, OK: get back in there.”

“Thank you,” Sirius forwards him.

“Sorry, hey?” James extends, and Sirius hums to affirm he knows that, somewhere in his chest, it feels. “Just don't never talk to me again, you know?”

Sirius makes sure to huff this next bit right into the receiver. “If only, you dick,” he returns.

James pushes a half-laugh out of his nose. “You’re the dick,” he trades him.

“No, you are,” Sirius attests. “Tomorrow, we're going road-tripping out to Porthgain, which I hear is some sort of magical place to the northwest that the Lupins know about, but all I know is it’s going to be a grand ol’ time and we're not going to be back until sometime on Monday, so this is your PSA that if you don't hear from me in the next seventy-two hours, it might just be that I'm trying to enjoy myself here and that has nothing to do with you? Just a thought.”

“Loud and clear, Sirius,” James serves him.

“Good,” Sirius returns brightly, looking over at Remus in time to catch him waving him down from further up the aisle. “Mmm-bye.”

He presses to end the call, heading up the aisle toward Remus's beckoning with an apologetic smile on his lips, and the moment he's close to him, Remus reaches back and transports Sirius into the frame by pressing his right hand to the small of his back and tugging him in. “This is him,” Remus says, lower down on his register, but he's got a budding smile on his lips as lifts his free hand to present Sirius to the gent he's with.

Sirius knows that he gets pulled into a handshake that's rather fervent, knows he smiles politely and nods and hums his way through the remainder of the introduction, but to tell the plain truth he really only comes back online after the man's heading off with a jaunty wave to the both of them and then Sirius turns his head to Remus at a snail speed. “Did you just,” he tries, gesturing numbly in the direction the man left in. “What? — Hheh? — Who was he?”

Remus openly searches him, stepping sideways to get in front of Sirius for a better view of him. “I just told you.”

“I missed all of that,” Sirius puts down. “Every line.”

Remus goes on a bit of a reel. “You did?”

“I was on auto-pilot,” Sirius insists.

“Then you do that a little too well,” Remus supplies, pressing his lips together with amusement.

“Remus, I need you to help me out here,” Sirius pleads, giving him a set of prayer hands.

Remus crosses his left arm over his front, tucks his right elbow over it and cups at his chin with his right hand, his cheeks rosy. “He was the English prof,” he offers him, his fingers curled over his budding smile.

Sirius puts out a bouldered noise, gesturing his hands around wildly when he doesn't know what's left to do with them anymore, but he tries to keep his voice down for Remus’s sake. “You introduced me to your Awakening?” he shoots him, and Remus only half-smiles at him. “Remus, no; I’m going to fall in on myself—"

“Please don’t do that,” Remus insists, taking to speaking under his breath again. “I didn’t know I was going to say it even, but you'd walked off and he saw you go — well, he both saw and heard Shania take you away, but then I couldn't pretend I hadn’t just been with you and I know I could have just said you're a mate of mine, but it didn't feel right to say when the moment came.”

“I'm — I —” Sirius tries. “I can’t process this here.”

“OK, uhm — do you want to go somewhere we can do that?” Remus raises. “I know I didn't run that by you—”

“I don't care about that, Remus,” Sirius stresses. “Yes, yes, yes; take me somewhere else.”

“OK, OK, let's go,” Remus coaxes, taking Sirius by the right elbow to usher him down the aisle, and now he's holding him like that in a bustling farmer's market in his little hometown and Sirius might be having a lucid dream; he just can't tell.

The walk back to the truck seems to take both the longest time logged away in Sirius's life while also taking the shortest amount of time it's taken him to get anywhere, but that's the top bitch known as time bending it to her will. The climb into the truck goes even quicker for Sirius, while Remus turns on his seat to stick their shopping bag in the backseat, but once that's done it seems he simply must speak it all out.

“I don't know what came over me, but I got to the moment and I just felt, like in my veins, that if there was anybody in this whole town who would be wonderful about it, it'd be him, and I can't explain why other than there was an energy about him that told me just before I formed the words that he'd be a good step forward in terms of just saying it aloud, in a non-formal setting, without a sword on the other side of it, and he ended up lighting up about it, and he wanted to meet you before he'd have to get going so we chatted a bit about my courses, Paris and all that, and good news, he’s just as curious and invested in what I’ve been doing as he'd always been, which only got me feeling that much more remembered and assured that he's the right sort for the news, and I was trying to flag you down in time and there wasn’t anybody in our aisle when you came up, so I just went with it and—” he cuts off there, shaking his head and looking to Sirius with a borderline hysterical laugh. “Say something, please?”

Sirius doesn't say a word, only smiles sidelong at him, hoping the heavy gaze he's putting out does the speaking for him, and it may be the fact that they’re facing the rear of the parking lot and only have an empty field ahead of them to contend with or it may be that Remus reads Sirius’s gaze like it's Maurice incarnate for how well he soaks up his request, but he pushes himself closer to him in his seat, leans over the centre console and the empty cup holders between their seats, and reaches for Sirius's jaw, tugging him up and into the kiss he's just begging him for.

Sirius's hands are up in a flash, tangled up in Remus's hair, tangled up in him as he kisses him soundly, and Remus's hands pet at his jaw and the underside of his chin as he meets his lips with the same ferocity, and it's all so good that when it's over, Sirius is left breathless and clutching at him for purchase.

“Thank you,” he says, smiling keenly at him. “I don't know when I thought you'd get around to introducing me like that, but that was beyond a surprise.”

Remus beams up at him, giving Sirius’s jawline another pet. “Your reaction was enough to want to see it again,” he breathes. “The where and the who and all that, it's still going to be there, but please know, I'm happy I did it; it felt good to — necessary, even, and I hope I learn to do it more and more for you.”

“That's more than enough,” Sirius assures, petting at Remus's jawline when it felt so good to have done to him; best to pay it forward. “You're enough.”

Remus simply stares headlong at him with a pair of dinner plates for eyes before his breath hitches. “Did you, uhm,” he tries, breathless, too, it appears, “bring anything with you or was that all talk earlier?”

“Oh, no, I sure did,” Sirius assures, licking his lips and tasting remnants of chai tea on them.

Remus nods so slightly that Sirius could have missed it if he weren't so close. “Can you wait two to four minutes?” he checks.

“For you?” Sirius laughs, nodding heavily.

“OK, sit tight,” Remus bids, pulling back to stick the keys in the ignition.

Sirius is a little afraid to move in case he's still locked in a lucid dream where Remus propositions him out on the town, meanwhile Remus busies himself with getting his belt on, getting the truck started, reaching for the volume dial to silence the radio that’s just pounding out 'Bring It All Back' by one S Club 7 and that has Sirius breaking free of his spell to send out a bright bark. “Oh, what, that’s not turning you on or anything?” he raises.

“Not really, no,” Remus offers, backing the truck out of their spot. “Seatbelt, sir.”

“For two to four minutes?” Sirius puts up.

“I'm not having you go through that windshield, I don't care how short a ride it is,” Remus asserts.

Sirius pulls that strap over his body right quick, rather pleased to see a flash of assertive Remus come around. “Where are you taking me to?” he bids, looking sidelong at Remus while he buckles up.

Remus hums thoughtfully, getting in behind a minivan that’s aiming to leave the parking lot and hitting the right turn signal as they idle there. “Well, I would take you somewhere with a view, but I think the school's going to have to be our best,” he supplies.

Sirius takes in a charmed gasp. “The school?” he enunciates.

Remus hums to affirm as both he and the pilot of the minivan ahead of them wait for a break in passing traffic to pull onto the road. “Well, it's Saturday, no one will be milling about in or outside of the building, and if I park in the far end of the parking lot we'll have tree cover blocking us from street traffic,” he gives out, rolling the truck forward as the van ahead turns out of the lot and their path, allowing him to take the right turn he was waiting for.

Sirius hums, intrigued. “Spoken like a lad who might've gathered those details firsthand,” he observes, eyeing Remus coyly from his seat.

Remus sniffs royally, hitting his left turn signal and slowing down for the stop sign ahead before making the turn down an equally tree-littered road. “Once or twice,” he passes him, his mouth at a twist.

Sirius takes in a scandalized gasp, but there's indeed a part of him that's feeling rather indignant about that. “And you got on me about wanting to get a little action in a vehicle—”

“It was never in one of ours,” Remus comes in, taking a new right and bringing them down a long stretch of road that's just got oodles of trees on either side of it. “He had a car the second he could get his learners going so we used that.”

Sirius hums with some hoity-toit energy put into it. “Oh, my,” he trades him. “He take you in the back of his sports car?”

Remus gives a pfft in response to that. “He had a tiny little Echo, actually,” he supplies him. “Nice, glossy blue finish, I’ll give it that, but I hardly fit into the backseat as is, so our vehicle trysts never ended up being a riot; at least not for me.”

Sirius trills, loving this tidbit. “I should think not," he puts up. "You've a hard time fitting those limbs into Lily's car just for a sit, I can't imagine how tough getting boned in a tiny little Echo would've been for you.”

“Well, it definitely wasn't easy,” Remus returns him, smirking there. “Hence the reason it was only once or twice before we got over the thrill of it.”

“Well, was it once or was it twice, Remus?” Sirius interrogates, reaching out to blast his right fist down on the dashboard.

Remus gives out a startled laugh, slowing the truck down to make a left turn into another lengthy parking lot. “I think I'd better keep you guessing,” he lobs him, cutting across the empty lot to get to the furthest corner of it.

“I'll get you for that one, you wait,” Sirius returns, stretching long in his seat as Remus pulls the truck into park. He has a glance around the spot Remus chose, the rows of healthy, full trees blocking obscuring much of the road from here, and hums lightly with approval, gesturing up and out of the front window toward the scenery. “Well, it's no striking view, but you did bring me to the shade and I do like that."

“Well, I'd like to keep you around if I can manage it,” Remus trades him, pulling the gear shift into park and switching the engine off.

“Mm, pretty sure I’m sticking around no matter where you take me,” Sirius offers, giving into a long stretch. He lets go of it with a giddy smile, celebrating this spirited occasion as well as Remus's lopsided grin making an appearance. “How do you want to do this?”

Remus's expression switches to one of pure pondering and Sirius does love his thinking face so he does little other than watch him give it some thought, looking around and giving a glance toward the backseat, but he gives a frank declining hum soon after that. “If we go back there, we'll have to move everything up here just to move them all back again,” he puts up, giving an expression that plainly suggests he's not into that idea, and from there, Remus pops the buckle of his belt off, leaves the strap aside, and drops his right hand to pull on the lever down underneath his chair, hiking his seat back and looking over toward Sirius with a smirk. “Want to just hop on?”

Sirius moves quickly so that this wonderful but still possible fever dream won't end too soon. He scrambles to get his belt undone to blast that aside, undoes his fly, and shimmies his jeans down past his hips, tugging them down his legs in a whirl; the left leg comes off easy enough, but he runs into some trouble with the right ankle of his jeans and huffs a laugh, extending his leg out to get Remus's help in prying it past the arch of his ankle. Remus huffs a laugh of his own as he works it off of Sirius's foot and laughs harder at ending up with Sirius's jeans in his hands, but ends up searching the pockets for the provisions he was promised, fishing out both essentials and holding the EZ-lube tube up to observe it.

“There's just about one round left in this thing,” he passes along, waggling it at him.

“Yeah, well, it’s been well-used,” Sirius offers him, shimmying his pants down his hips. “We're going on a pharmacy run later, aren't we?”

“Yeah, I'm just saying, maybe we should spring for a bigger bottle if we're going through it at this rate,” Remus mentions, turning to leave Sirius's jeans in the backseat.

Sirius gives out a pointed laugh, bending his knees to lift his feet enough to manoeuvre his briefs off of his ankles. “How do you expect me to carry a humongous bottle around with me?” he returns, chucking his briefs in back to join his cast-away jeans. “I should think someone might notice it sticking out of a pocket.”

Remus huffs a laugh. “No, there's value in buying it in bulk,” he trades him, leaving the lube and condom packet in his lap to help tug Sirius over the centre console and over to his seat. “If we get the bigger bottle and keep this novelty, travel-sized one for outdoorsy trysts, then we could always fill up when need be—”

“Are you talking to me about frugality right now?” Sirius tosses him, reaching underneath him to lift the lube and condom out of Remus's lap for a prime showcasing of what's happening here.

“But you like it,” Remus gets him, giving him one hell of a cheeky grin that Sirius leans down to kiss right off his lips.

Remus's hands go straight for Sirius's hips, tugging them down and Sirius in closer to him as he snogs the breath out of him, and Sirius drops his hands down between them to fiddle fast with the lube tube, popping the cap and working to keep his hands decently still while his body thrums with fervour. Either Remus can feel his mad scramble or he's also striving for this to be as true a quickie as can be, but he puts a pause on their kiss, brings his hands back around in front of Sirius, and nabs the bottle off of him, squeezing a liberal amount onto the primary digits of his right hand and reaching back around behind him again, spearheading the whole process.

Sirius takes in a bracing breath before Remus starts in on him, grips the back of Remus's seat, and rests his knees pointing outward on either side of Remus's thighs, hanging them half on the seat, half over the edge of it as he poises his hips up best he can to aid in the manoeuvre, and Remus takes that offer in-kind, using his free arm to curl underneath Sirius's hips for an extra lift while he works on him and peppering kisses in here and there where he sees fit. When he's slick enough that two fingers are no biggie, Sirius figures he ought to help out some more, grinding back on Remus's fingers and signalling that he could always add another if he'd like, and Remus lets go of Sirius's hips to feel around for the bottle again, reaching it around after he's got a hold on it and pulling both digits out of Sirius to add a little more to the mix. He deposits the lube bottle somewhere down below the seat and Sirius gives a grateful noise in his throat as Remus starts in on him again, bringing the more Sirius asked him for.

As much as he is quite comfortable going trouser-less, Sirius would not mind if things evened out a little more between the two of them, and it really won't be long at this rate before he'll be needing that dick out and ready to hop onto as is; he really might as well get a move on that. He lets go of the back of the seat to catch the zipper on Remus's fly and since he's got both hands working this one out, it goes quicker than the last attempt did, but Remus gives a hesitant hum as Sirius is working the tops of his trousers down.

“Wait, wait,” he bids, looking around quickly before giving a glance over his left shoulder into the back.

“What's up?” Sirius checks, leaning over to the right to get a look at the backseat for context.

“I just—” Remus tries, huffing a laugh as he deposits the lube bottle in Sirius's hands, but that's perfect when he was going to be needing that soon enough. Remus knocks the sleeves of his cardigan down before working his arms out of it, budging his hips up on Sirius, who poises his hips higher in the air for him to have the extra room he's striving for, and there, Remus balances his own hips up off the seat at an angle to lay his cardigan down before tugging his both his trousers and briefs as far as his knees and situating himself back down on the seat.

Sirius snorts wildly, eyeing all of what he just saw brightly. “Well, I don't want to be rubbing all over it,” Remus gives him, but he's amused now, too. “I’d chafe for one, and it’d be rude for another.”

“Oh, but this isn't,” Sirius trills, snickering away.

“Would you rather do something else?” Remus checks, falling into a bout of stitches himself.

“Not now, definitely,” Sirius says of it, lifting the condom packet to tear at it with his teeth, and if he could see past Remus's shades to witness his pupils dilating, he's sure it would be a glorious sight to behold, but the heavy breath he cuts off his stitches to pull in works hand-in-hand with showing Sirius that it must've happened.

He flashes Remus a knowing grin, tugging the rubber out of the wrapper and tossing the foil onto his recently vacated seat for now, and reaches down between them to roll it down over the tip of Remus’s cock before rolling it down further. “Now, I would use my teeth for this, but even I can't bend that well,” he offers.

Remus huffs a laugh. “Shame.”

“Uh-huh,” Sirius echoes, smiling away as he rolls the condom down to the furthest it'll go and plucks the lube bottle back up to squeeze a solid glob over his left palm. "OK, if this thing breaks, I probably deserved to get splooged in and I think I saw tissues in the glove box, so let's not panic if there's a mishap, hm?"

Remus snorts once. “You mean the box of them that went careening out of there?” he trades him, snickering freely while Sirius covers his dick with lube when he knows he's going to ride that thing to town and back. “Yeah, I think that was real.”

Sirius pushes out a puff of breath, shaking his head. “I'm not even sure this day is real, if I'm honest,” he trades him, winding his right wrist as he works up and down Remus's shaft.

Remus pushes to speak past his heightened breath as a result of Sirius's work. “I know what you mean,” he offers, smiling for him. “It's all real, though; strange as it feels.”

Sirius kisses that smile again, nodding eagerly with a bright one of his own as he tosses the lube over to the passenger side. He leaves his right hand braced over the left shoulder of their seat, reaches his left hand up and a bit behind him to grab hold of the handle above the driver’s side window, and hoists up to give himself a little more height to work with, inciting Remus to scoot forward in his seat so he's got his hips right beneath Sirius's and handle the rest from there, positioning the tip of his cock against Sirius before easing him down onto it.

And there, Sirius is right glad he grabbed the handle ahead of time for even with the liberal amount of lube used, he still has to remind himself that the tip is typically the toughest part to get through before the rest is smooth sailing. “OK?” Remus checks, stalling with his hands tightly gripped at the small of Sirius's back.

Sirius nods profusely, humming a note he hopes will suggest he just needs to focus, get past the initial stretch, but thankfully Remus is nothing if not fluent in his melodic speech patterns for he nods in reply, leaves a kiss to the right corner of Sirius's lips, and repositions his palms at the back of him, massaging at his hips to soothe, and while that's no direct link to Sirius's rear end or anything, it's a lovely sentiment all the same.

He breathes with an air of relief as he's lowered past the widest point and further down Remus's shaft, trailing his gaze back down to Remus as he hears him stifle a noise in his throat, and there, he's brought to another pause for he’s really never been in a situation where he's been positioned this way and not been able to see Remus's eyes, but the more he watches him, the more he moves over him, slowly as he’s going and slowly as Remus is allowing him to go, he finds it strangely fascinating having to go by a different set of facial cues to be able to tell just how much Remus is holding back on him; he’s got the placement of Remus's brows to go on, curved up high on his forehead, and those lips, fallen open as Remus bottoms out, and the two of them pause there, Sirius taking a moment to get himself used to the sensation of being filled up and Remus giving him a moment to do just that, but Sirius feels like he can just see the ache in Remus’s eyes without having them uncovered and that has him feeling wholly inspired, has him wanting to see Remus's face break open and fall apart because of him.

He lets go of his hold on the back of the seat, brings his right hand to tip Remus’s head back a little bit so he's looking down at him from above, and hears the tight noise lodged in Remus's throat, notes the lift of his brows, and grips hard at the handle above him with his left hand as he starts to move, watching avidly as Remus stutters and stammers and grapples at his hips, urging him on in all those ways and only having Sirius putting it down on him with that much more verve.

Not one to simply lay back and let it all come to him, Remus brings it to him once he gets a semblance of his wits back, splaying his hands out wide over the curves of Sirius’s hips and driving up into him from below, and Sirius'll admit it, he loses some of his initiative there for a bit, clamping his eyes shut and giving out a wanton noise from his throat as Remus throws him right off his A-game. It’s easily another minute before he forces himself to think clearly, to surge past the bolts of light bursting behind his eyelids at each interval, dropping his left hand from the handle above, clasping the both of them to the armrests on their seat. His next move is a tad trickier in that he’s going to have to keep his arms balanced behind him while he gets his knees out of their bent state in order to drop his legs down behind Remus's seat, but that choice has Remus stalling, his chest heaving as he observes the situation, and while he isn’t strictly inside Sirius anymore due to of all manoeuvring on his part, Sirius keeps right to it, hiking his feet up on the edge of the backseat and poising them far apart, royally thankful that Remus moved his seat back as far as he did because now, he can use it like the effective springboard he wants it to be.

It’s both a good and bad idea, all in all; good in the sense that Remus genuinely moans his approval, leaning up for a taste off of Sirius’s lips as he palms at his hips in what feels like utter thanksgiving, bad in the sense that — and this is loosely bad, categorically — Sirius has gone and positioned himself for the boning of the century, so whatever finesse he thought he was about to get a better handle on may well be Remus’s to take right back from him should he choose to act on it, and breathing in long, Sirius is without Remus’s gaze to go on, but there's that lopsided smile aimed back at him and it's enough to know Remus just got very inspired, so goodbye, Sirius.

He has exactly enough time to brace himself as Remus reaches to line them up again and then it’s just visceral, the grateful noise he makes as he lowers Sirius back down on him. He slips his arms around the sides of Sirius's raised thighs, curling his hands over the tops of them for a springboard of his own, and this the thing: it'd be one thing if Remus were just working Sirius like that, but the lad's hoisting his own hips off of the seat, giving it to him on every downward drive and digging those fingertips in like if he holds Sirius any less fiercely, it won’t have been enough, and Sirius, ambitious little Sirius, can't even open his eyes to be able to see Remus’s face through this, but he knows it’s got to be gorgeous and open and a bit smarmy, too, now that he’s effectively fucking Sirius's brains out and taking his seduction plans right out from under him in one go.

It's likely a real good thing there is nobody in their immediate vicinity for Sirius would indeed alert any passersby to the current activity they’ve taken up via the power of his vocal cords alone, but it would really be something if Sirius could get his mouth around any sort of word. Hell, he'd take 'Remus' and repeat that like a mantra if he had the wits to form even those two syllables, but Remus keeps striking gold again and again, and he knows he's doing it, too, because he aims right every fucking time and won’t let up for even a second, it's all just gibberish and nonsensical noises out of Sirius, nothing else can be done about that now, might as well let them echo around in the confines of the truck and only get more and more tightly wound as Remus goes and grabs his legs out from underneath him and hoists them up, taking Sirius’s would-have-been-springboard away from him and holding him up by the calves, and now, Sirius is nothing but a glorified pretzel, but it's the hottest thing Remus could’ve thought to do with him and he lets Remus know that.

He gets that name out of his throat, scrambling with his hands to stamp at the windowsill with his left one and Remus's headrest with his right, while his cock, throbs from where it's caught tight between them, taking great heed of the friction happening for it, basking in it as they drive each other home, and decides it's had more than enough to have Sirius dancing toward on the edge—

He aims to warn Remus in some way, he does, but his voice isn't cooperating and the drumming of his hands aren't reading as the tap-out it most certainly is, not with Remus going and putting a vice-grip on his calves and lifting his hips off of the seat at each interval; he's frantically speeding for a cliff's edge of his own by the sure feel of it all, calling out Sirius’s name the closer he gets to it like it's heaven to get to say aloud, and Sirius is a fucking goner, there’s no way to thwart it now.

He knows he must've whimpered his way through his release, but Remus chokes out a series of whines as he slows those thunder-hips of his down to a continual roll up and off his seat, and that’s the both of them on an even playing field right there and what a spot to be left in on the other side of it.

Remus’s body checks out, leaving him loose as an absolute goose underneath Sirius, all while he just, keeps holding Sirius’s legs up by the calves. “Holy,” he breathes, “shit.”

“Mm, mhm,” Sirius agrees, wiggling his toes for a test that they're still there.

Remus sits forward, lets Sirius's legs down slowly, and grabs hold of his body for a squeeze at his middle as he leans his face into the crook of his neck, a light, satiated noise leaving him with it. Sirius goes ahead and celebrates that little noise inwardly, smiling away as Remus breathes in long, breathes him in, and leans his head back to smile at him languidly. “Here, I’ll get you,” he assures, reaching down in between them to get his hand around a definitely softening cock and inciting Sirius to pin his lips together as he trains his attention down in between them, lifting head straight away to fully gape at Sirius. "Again? What fucking day is this?”

Sirius shakes his head profusely. “No no, there was just a lot of friction happening here,” he maintains, circling his right hand around his navel. “I did try to warn you, but I really had trouble doing just about anything other than exploding.”

“It's OK,” Remus insists, back to half-smiling. “I don’t have feeling in just about anything from the waist down; I really can't complain right now.”

Sirius looks to find a whole lotta mess on both their stomachs, only Remus definitely has a shirt on. “I mean, you could complain a bit,” he permits. “I did splooge all over your shirt.”

“I think I might've made it worse by the hugging actually,” Remus offers him. “Serves me right for going all soppy.”

“I like it when you're soppy,” Sirius forwards. “And I really like that you're not miffed about this.”

“Isn't much point in being miffed now,” Remus raises dazedly.

“Well, you do have your cardigan,” Sirius reasons, still feeling a tad responsible for this.

“That thing doesn't button up,” Remus relays.

Sirius presses his lips together, seeing his point quite clear. “Right,” he says of it, thinking more broadly now. “Could close it with a safety pin, but we’d have to find one.”

“It's really OK,” Remus insists, reaching up to rub at Sirius’s shoulders. “Just, once we get sorted, if I run you by a shop that you can run into and grab me a shirt that doesn't have splooge all over it, that’d be fine with me.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Sirius assures, leaning in to kiss the tip of Remus's nose.

Remus catches him by the lips before Sirius can pull back too far, smiling into the kiss, and Sirius definitely mews at the back of his throat over how celebrated he feels just by how Remus deepens the kiss, how he drinks him in, takes his time with it like he’s is some sort of savoury treat and as if they aren’t starkers from the waist down in the parking lot of his old secondary building, but if Remus isn't rushing them to cover up, why the hell should Sirius put a stop to this? This is heaven.

In the end, what does put a stop to their canoodling is Remus fully falling out of him and that rather brings them back to the moment, garnering a smirk from Sirius. “I'm a tad afraid it's broken,” he shares.

Remus breathes in once, situates Sirius's hips on a tilt, and slinks down a bit in his seat to have a peek down below to check out the state of things. “Surprisingly still intact,” he relays.

“That’s mad,” Sirius returns, working himself up to using his legs to get off of his lap. “You really fucking went at me.”

“It's going leaking now,” Remus warns, and Sirius jolts into action, manoeuvring his left leg up and past Remus’s front to get the two of them on the same side of the seat to help pivot himself out of here. “Like, now-now, Sirius.”

“OK, OK, I'm going,” Sirius insists, huffing a laugh as he lifts off of Remus's lap as a whole and climbs over the centre console to get over to the passenger side on his knees. He scoots forward off of the seat and moves down to his knees, squeezing down to a kneel on the floor ahead of the seat to get at the glove box, and more importantly, at the tissues so he can get started on his own clean-up.

“What are you doing?” Remus asks.

Sirius looks back to find him sitting much more forward in his seat to put gravity back on his side and watching Sirius down on the floor while he fiddles with the condom, and makes certain his face goes placid. “Is this not how you pray?” he checks, and Remus bursts into a right fit, losing some of his hand-eye coordination for a few good beats while he shakes through it while Sirius grins like a goon over here. “I just wanted the tissues, but I didn’t want to get the seat all lubed up in the process so this was my only choice.”

Remus nods through his stitches, settles down again, and refocuses on separating the condom from his person. Sirius focuses on getting the glove box open while he’s down on the floor between it and the edge of the passenger seat and making this a real tight squeeze while also trying to avoid another avalanche. He opens it tentatively, has a peek inside from the right side, and reaches his right arm in coming from the same direction, tugging carefully down on the door with his left hand in order to wrangle out the box of tissues in there. He drops that to the floor by his knees, nabs the bottle of Purell out of there, figuring they can just replace this on their pharmacy run and the Earth will keep on spinning, and tosses that down to the floor as well. He shuts the whole thing back up again, looks back over at Remus to find him sitting there holding the condom with an expression of utter uncertainty on him, and bursts out a bark, pointing over at Remus as he dissolves into stitches.

“I didn't think about this part,” Remus sends him, gesturing helplessly with it.

“Oh, here; since you don’t want to make balloon animals, guess I’ll deal with it,” Sirius says of it, tossing the tissues and the Purell onto the seat behind him. He nabs a tissue out of the box, pushes up off of the floor to a half-crouch, and leans over the cup holders, pressing Remus’s window down with his tissue-wearing hand pressed to the button on the armrest and swiping the condom off Remus's hands to toss it out the window with his free one. “Boom; easy-peasy lemon squeezy.”

“Oi?” Remus sends him weakly, openly lamenting Sirius’s course of action. “We can’t just leave it there.”

“Yes, because that is the first and only scumbag to have been left here in all of history, mhm,” Sirius returns, sliding back over to his side of the truck where he re-positions himself in a crouch on the floor again and gets started on cleaning off his chest.

“My DNA’s all over that,” Remus bemoans.

“Well, good for whoever stumbles upon it, then,” Sirius returns, wiping over his navel.

“What does that even mean?” Remus sends him.

“I don’t know, I’m just saying whatever first comes to mind,” Sirius sends back, fluffing a few new tissues out of the box and working on the rest of his major areas of importance. “You ought to know that by now.”

Remus lodges a few grumbles, but other than that he mostly focuses his attention on his lap. “Hand me a tissue?” he bids.

Sirius looks sidelong at him while wiping, putting a plain expression on to suggest he’s a little busy just now, and Remus bites back a smirk, leaning over and snagging a tissue out of the box before focusing on cleaning himself off. Sirius keeps to his task and once he triple-checks that he’s good and dry from all angles, he looks down at the collection of tissues he’s amassed on the floor in front of him and tosses a glance toward Remus’s open window, wondering if he can get them clear through it from here or if he'll have to toss them out one by one—

“Do not throw those out there,” Remus cuts through, talking fast with a firm look of warning on as he’s unable to zoom the window shut to see to it himself while fastening his trousers. “I draw the line here.”

“What do you want me to do with them, then?” Sirius bids, gesturing freely toward the pile of tissues ahead of him. “Make streamers?”

Remus looks around the vicinity, tossing a glance behind them at the backseat as he buttons up, and perks with a thought. “We do have a bag, but it’s in with the shopping,” he declares, sounding quite thrilled about it until he holds up his palms in a quizzical motion before reaching his left one out to Sirius with a new, rather plain expression on.

Sirius sets one of his tissues in Remus’s open palm just ‘cause he can and it’s funny. “The Purell, you dink,” Remus huffs,

Sirius snickers wildly, swiping it back and tossing the Purell bottle over to him. “Who knew this would be what converted you."

Remus doesn’t reply, rather he keeps quite the plain expression aimed at Sirius while he’s squeezing a glob out and spreading it over his hands, and Sirius doesn’t work that hard at all to stifle his snickering. Remus turns in his seat a little, en route to the back seat, but pauses to do a sort of crab-like motion with his hands, making quite the face as he clicks his tongue.

“It’s all so sticky,” he lodges, airing his hands out. “They don’t even feel clean.”

“Well, it’s 99.99 percent effective or something like that, so they’re certainly not unclean anymore,” Sirius mentions sagely, a wide, wide grin on, and Remus sends him a mighty dragon breath through his nose as he turns in his seat to reach into the backseat. “You will have to get used to relying on it now and again if we want to keep seeing where this kink of yours takes us—”

Remus comes in with the driest laugh. “Yeah, it’s all mine; nothing to do with you or anything.”

“I have a Remus kink, OK, so it really doesn’t matter where we're getting it done so long as it’s happening, but I'll admit I’m developing something fierce for how wild you get with me when it's out in public,” Sirius puts in to amend. “That said, we’re not always going to have a sink nearby, are we?”

“I will use it if I must, but I will always find a fucking sink even if I have to kick a door down to get to one,” Remus manifests, fishing around in the shopping bag.

Sirius nearly flatlines at the image brought to him. “I can’t even think of the amount that I’d pay to see you kick a door down,” he comments, readjusting his weight on his knees. “Any door, don’t care which.”

“Keep talking shit and I might have to start going around foot-first,” Remus lobs him, pulling out the jam jar that’s apparently wrapped up in a rose-coloured transparent bag topped with a bow and everything.

“Oh, how handy,” Sirius offers, perking right up.

“You didn’t see it before?” Remus raises, facing the front again with it in hand.

Sirius smirks, shaking his head plainly. “I'll be frank: didn't pay much attention to the jar itself while the sunshine smile was going on up there,” he extends, circling his free hand toward the vicinity of Remus's visage from down on the floor.

Remus gives him a twist of a smile while he undoes the bow and takes a little longer than necessary to fully pull the ribbon free, but Sirius has to wonder if leaving him trapped on the floor for just a little longer is Remus’ version of payback for all the razzing Sirius has been treating him to and Sirius can’t even be that peeved about it when petty Remus so rarely comes to visit.

Remus gives an extremely polite smile as he slips the bag down from the jar and hands it off to Sirius, who tips his head in kind as he takes hold of it but remains still when Remus leans over to look out his window. “Maybe I should grab the—”

“Remus, it's gone now,” Sirius comes in. “Leave it.”

“It's right there, Sirius,” Remus returns.

And there, Sirius launches into a rendition of a chorus of 'Let It Be' as he works on stuffing the tissues into the bag, and Remus sits there, a pointed expression on as he waits it out. “Yeah, there will be answer; let it be,” he croons, grabbing for the condom wrapper on the seat behind him to stuff it inside the bag too.

“You done?” Remus checks.

Let it be, let it be,” Sirius throws out, putting the much-needed gravel into it he wagers would make Sir Paul himself proud, tying up the baggie as he closes the chorus out.

Remus gives him two slow claps for it, giving a sigh through his nose, but he's sure fighting a smile now, Sirius would like to report. He grins both to Remus and for himself as he tosses the bag on the floor ahead of his seat for now, figuring they'll locate a bin soon enough and focusing on putting his clothes back on.

“Hand me my briefs?” he bids, rolling the 'R,' and Remus turns to reach in back for them to pass them off to him. “Thanks, doll.”

“'Don't call me doll,'” Remus chimes, grinning over at him.

Sirius barks out a laugh as he works to get his feet into the leg holes of his briefs while crouched down like he is. “I'd almost forgotten about that,” he trades him, shimmying the briefs up and over his bent knees.

“Not with me around, apparently,” Remus extends, tugging his cardigan out from underneath him and tossing it over the right shoulder of his seat.

Sirius snickers as he gets his briefs up past his hips and there he lets himself sit back in the passenger seat to send a pair of grabby-hands over to Remus in regards to the jeans in the backseat, and Remus piques when he realizes it, turning in his seat and tugging them closer to him before passing them over the centre console to him. Sirius sets them on the floor below his chair, frumples them around a bit so the leg holes are obvious, and sticks his feet down and into them before hiking the jeans further up his legs.

“Oh, hey,” he raises, looking over at Remus as he wrangles them up to his hips, “want to hear something funny?”

Remus piques in his seat. “Sure,” he prompts.

“James was of the impression that I've been avoiding these last couple of months because I was sore about him and Lily getting hitched,” Sirius supplies, sitting forward in his seat to fasten his jeans.

Remus's mouth opens, poised to speak, but it takes a few more seconds for words to form. Or a word. “What?” he raises.

“Oh, yeah,” Sirius affirms, pushing a hand up through his dampened hair as he mirrors Remus in the driver's seat, sitting back in his seat. “Felt like he'd been thinking it for a while, but finally said it aloud, you know; a festering, if you will.”

“You said 'was,' so I'm to believe that's been cleared up, then?” Remus checks.

“Well, I was sure to give him a big ol' reminder that I've had a lot going on aside from him this last while and he seemed to follow my train of thought well from there,” Sirius supplies him. “He's actually fairly embarrassed about it now, at least.”

Remus tilts his head back and forth, humming a note of allowance. “Well, he did say that to the same lad who led an entire kitchen in a resounding rendition of 'the Elephant Love Medley' upon hearing the news,” he poses.

“Thank you?” he sends him, extending his hand toward him. “Maybe he looked back on that and assumed I was crooning through the pain or something, but what the fuck? I wasn't putting on a show to mask anything; I was performing.”

“And that was really rather clear,” Remus trades him. “Felt quite clear to me, at least.”

“I was happy,” Sirius puts up. “She makes him sing from the trees; it's a good thing—”

“I think that's ‘rooftops,’” Remus slips him.

“Nah, old news, babey,” Sirius comes back.

“Alright, I'll tell the right people about it, then,” Remus accepts, smiling over at him, but since Sirius is very much smiling in his direction, he sees the moment Remus's smile falters, and then it's another few beats before he speaks it out. “I just have to ask, and I don’t like that I’m doing it, but did he mean it as in, you're sore because you'd like to be his future wife?”

“Cunt, no,” Sirius insists, pulling a musicle with the face he makes. “Gross, and he’d agree on that.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” Remus trades him.

“We got all of that out the way real early on anyway,” Sirius extends further.

“Did you?” Remus bids, sounding quite piqued.

Sirius gives into a bout of stitches. “Well, we’ve had a long time together,” he offers. “I came out to him and he was of course a right star about it in that it was a thing that just was the case, but a little while later, when I was starting to explore more with this boy or that one, he did the thing where he cornered me one day like, ‘well, what’s wrong with me?’ and I said he was a fine specimen but not my type whatsoever and I think he would've agreed if he hadn’t been halfway offended I wasn’t out there crushing on him, and after a few days of his pouting I finally just planted one on him and went, ‘that sucked, didn’t it—” he pauses to smile as Remus snickers up a storm next to him, “—and he very much agreed that it felt like snogging a tree for how little kissing me did for him, and that was that for a while.”

“Well, what do you mean, ‘a while?’” Remus investigates.

Sirius huffs a laugh. “No, nothing happened with us,” he clarifies, lifting a hand. “Only, a couple years down the line, I want to say year twelve, he started doing the whole, ‘well, wait a minute — I know when a bloke is hot; what does that make me?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, a person?’ and he popped me in the arm and we scuffled around a bit, and then I reminded him how lacklustre he’d felt our snog went and he gave me a, ‘yeah, but that was you.

Remus hums a light laugh. “You do a great James,” he extends. “Did you help the poor guy out at least?”

“You mean, toss him off? No, I did not,” Sirius extends.

Remus laughs, shaking his head. “I mean, did you help the lad out with figuring out what it was.”

“Well, I mean, I was young, Remus,” Sirius cops to it, lifting his hands weakly. “I didn’t really think he was being that serious about it but he kept with it, and I mentioned the staunch gooey-eyes he’d been making at Lily as a counter-argument because he’d been after her for like, four years by then, and he went, 'I still have eyes, Sirius,' and we went back and forth for a while debating the complexities of it all until our little, tiny brains hurt, but then, you know, time went on and it got a lot, lot harder to think he wasn’t serious about it because, well.”

Remus lifts the both of his hands in a plain but ceremonious display. “The Bi King we know and love came to fruition,” he finishes it off for him.

“And how,” Sirius echoes. “In any case, Bi Boy over there doesn't think I’m harbouring something for him and am now pulling back because my heart can’t take the hurt, he's just a real dummy sometimes. It’s like he thinks everything I do or don't do is some direct reply to something he did when he gets all in on himself like this.”

Remus hums, nodding for it. “Been there,” he cops to it.

“We all have,” Sirius puts up, waving him off. “The good thing is, it wasn't about me spending so much time with you, which I was glad to hear, but I know that wouldn't have been James’s angle: he fucking loves you—”

“Depends on the day,” Remus comes in evenly.

“Well, that's kind of what I mean,” Sirius raises, gesturing his right hand toward him. “We both got a taste of what happens when James feels left out, just in a different way, so let that be a reminder that to them, the mates you met through me, you are your own, lovely person that exists outside of me for them to love and enjoy and get haughty with, and that includes Jim Beam over there.”

Remus breathes out through his nose, lulling his head to the side to send him a sheepish expression. “That was very sweet to say, but I didn’t need it,” he extends, lifting his shoulders with an even smile starting up now. “This is about you two so I’d rather focus on that, so if there's a day while you're here where you want to get some more James time in, that'd be fine with me; I'll go do my thing and you two can have a whole night of it without any interruptions if that would help any.”

“Mm mm,” Sirius hums to deny. “He didn't take a night out of his vacation to hang out with me.”

Remus gives up a tentative hum, reworking his mouth around a frown. “Well, I remember a night he did try to ring you quite a bit,” he raises, “and I know it because I got a lot of his second tries when he couldn't get through to you.”

“OK, that was different, though,” Sirius counters.

“I got the sense he might've just blocked a chunk of that evening out just for you,” Remus keeps with it. “And I know you two talked the next day.”

“Yeah, he was checking in on me, but he didn’t ring expecting a knockdown, drag it out talk about the Burg and the mess that came with her,” Sirius offers up. “All he did was ask how I was doing and then it was 'ding-dong the witch is dead' before a half-hour more of him listing off the good things I’ve got, which I appreciated because that’s exactly what I needed, but if the Burg hadn't bit it, I wouldn't have heard from him while he was away save for a few texts about some shitty thing Vernon said at dinner or some funny thing Lily clapped back at him with, but I wouldn’t have held it against him; he was busy, on vacation with his chicka and her family, and what's the difference in this case? That's literally what I'm doing here.”

Remus tilts his head back and forth. “OK, those are all solid rebuttals,” he gives him, and Sirius sends a smooch through the air toward him for it. “I just wonder if the weeks leading up to this trip might be more of what's causing him to act out than the trip we're on itself.”

“Well, I know that's what it was, but I can't help it if he feels I've not been giving him enough attention lately,” Sirius puts up. “I'm only one person and I truly don't know what else to tell him because I don’t know what the antidote is here; I keep a booming schedule, but I've made time for him when possible and I'm still doing that here.”

Remus hums in affirmation. “I know that, and how much you’ve been actively trying to keep everything smooth and everyone happy,” he offers him. “I know that because I saw how much you considered all these moving parts to your schedule, but is it entirely possible that you could've been a tad aloof to James in particular? And I ask that lovingly.”

Sirius forms his lips into a hybrid of a pout and a frown. “Why do you think it?” he bids, exhaling through his nose.

Remus poises to speak again, giving him a feeble smile. “Well, he’s James, right, so there’s a certain casual comfort in knowing that you’re stuck with him, he’s stuck with you, and he’ll always be around and you for him, but you do tend to tunnel in when you've got something you're focused on and you've had a lot of different things to focus on at once as of late, so while I got to see how much you were cycling through them wherever you could, he didn't as much,” he provides, and pauses there with his mouth poised to keep going. “And I do that, too, you know that; I understand the need to compartmentalize, but there were a few times in the last little while that I can think of where you might’ve been a bit laissez-faire about not having the time to go see him or have him come see you, and I knew that you don't mean anything by it, you knew you couldn’t be in two places at once and you're not much of a dweller, and James knows all that, too, by the way, so he may very well know deep down that it's not been personal, but it still might feel like it is in the moment, especially when he hears or sees you shrug it off and move on so quickly.”

Sirius puts out a long horse breath. “Damn, boy,” he observes.

Remus smirks a bit, but he stops himself rather quick, lifting his hands for a pardon. “Stay with me; I’m almost done, I think,” he insists, but Sirius wasn’t about to go anywhere, simply nods for him to keep at it. “You’re very solution-based, so what if, sometime over the week we get back, you slot out a full night for James, I'll go fuck off and not be anywhere near you so you two can bro it out, make sure I've got Lily with me so it won't end up being a third wheel situation for you and a waste of some bro time, and then, once you’ve set a date, a few days ahead of it, just tell him that you're excited about it, that you’ve missed him, and boy, oh boy, do you have some stories for him from the Rhondda Valley that'll get him right pumped, and maybe that will help him feel like he and his time are being valued — and again: I know, you know, and he knows that both are valued by you, but the reminder might just make that lad levitate; you never know.”

Sirius sits forward in his seat, sticking his elbows on his thighs and his chin in his hand. “You're really good at this stuff, hey?” he forwards.

“Which stuff?” Remus checks.

“The results of having a heart, sort of thing,” Sirius passes him.

Remus huffs quite a laugh. “You've got one those too, and she’s hefty,” he lobs him.

“Are we sure?” Sirius raises skeptically.

“Mm, I've dealt with her quite a bit,” Remus affirms, giving him a pointed smile, and at least one of them is convinced. “And, just one more thing: once we're back and at it again, your schedule will ease up a little more without the shop to worry about, but you're going to be packed with getting the venue all ready to go and you’re going to be one busy boy, so maybe, the times where you just can't manage to put James time in above something else, simply showing a little struggle with that fact could go a long way; sending a 'hey, this week's going to be a long one for me, but it’s you and me on Monday, babey—’” Sirius snickers wildly in his seat upon hearing Remus’s impression of him, garnering the lad's voice to warble with amusement as he struggles to keep on, “—and maybe, that sort of thing will remind him that you do want to see him and that making time to do that isn't you doing him the favour because I do wonder that's how he's been taking it lately.”

“Yeah, but you're right and smart as shit so I've got to listen to you,” Sirius delivers him, sending him a peaceful smile. “I’m going to do it, OK? I just might not do it just yet, seeing as I already told him that we're having a Day and on the road tomorrow, and if I text him now then that's free game for him to blow up my phone for the next two days straight.”

Remus huffs a laugh. “Yeah, that's likely,” he lets him have.

“I'll do it Monday,” Sirius sets it. “Once we're back, you know — I just want to be present with this and you.”

“That's fair,” Remus allows, sending him a keen smile. “It’s our big weekend; we’re allowed to have it.”

Yes,” Sirius celebrates, looking Remus up and down, “I love how much wisdom you’ve been giving out while wearing a polo covered in splooge.”

A bright trill of a laugh comes out of Remus as he sits forward in his seat, reaching to pull his seat belt over him. “Speaking of,” he raises, hiking his seat forward and pulling his belt over him. “Wouldn't mind getting on that.”

“Where am I to be brought to?” Sirius raises, reaching for his own belt.

“There's a spot I'm thinking of, I’m sure you'll like it,” Remus replies, starting up the truck with a knowing smile on. “Thrifty vibes, lots of retro leather in there; you know the drill.”

“Mhm, I do,” Sirius echoes, getting himself all strapped in.

“Oh, here,” Remus raises, pulling the truck into idle mode and lifting his hips off of his seat to slip his wallet out.

“No no,” Sirius denies, waving it off. “You got all those little market gifts because of your sneakiness, so I get to get the shirt; that’s just fair.”

Remus sighs long, giving a glance up to the roof of the truck, the sky, or the universe; not easy to tell what he’s commiserating with precisely, but he gives up quicker than Sirius even expected him to. “Fine, but don’t drop a lot on a fucking shirt, Sirius,” he returns, sticking his wallet back where it was and switching the gear stick to drive. “It literally just has to cover my torso and that’s a fairly small request that can easily be followed without shelling out a ton for it.”

“Mhm, I know how to shop frugally, thanks,” Sirius chimes, rolling his own window down to help air out the truck, and there, he has a thought. “D'you think Lyall’s going to know something went on in here?”

“I sure hope not,” Remus comments, getting them out of Dodge, also known as the parking lot of his school of yore.

Sirius hums noncommittally. “I don't know,” he raises. “I think he'd high-five us, myself.”

“I'd really rather not find what he'd do either way,” Remus slips him, making a left onto the road.

“Oh, but I do,” Sirius keeps with it.

“Well, brag to James about it, then,” Remus supplies.

“You know I can't do that,” Sirius extends. “Regardless of my role in making him feel like a second-class citizen, he still didn't have to interrogate me about it today of all days and make my rampantly busy schedule all about him, and since he's rarely ever the one who's mucked up, I'm going to let him pout and feel sorry about it for a bit.”

Remus pushes a subdued breath through his nose. “Well, as is your right, I suppose,” he offers. “Text Pete about your conquests then, I'm sure he'd cheer for a good truck romp.”

“I would, but I haven't heard a thing from that lad at all these past two days,” Sirius realizes. “What's he up to?”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Remus puts up.

“Why?” Sirius asks, right bamboozled by his candid tone.

“No, he sent a text earlier on, but I was folding the clothes,” Remus extends. “I meant to tell you that, but then you and James danced on through the place and I guess it left my head after that, but in any case, he sends his congrats our way.”

“What a rude, rude boy he is,” Sirius puts up.

“Yes, that is precisely the takeaway you should've had from that, mhm,” Remus nods.

“Well, it might've been nice to hear it from him personally,” Sirius raises.

“I'm sure he figured you were right there or nearby me at least,” Remus trades. “I'm the one who forgot to pass the message along, blame me.”

“Well, I’m not about to do that,” Sirius delivers.

Remus gets a bit of a wry smile going there. “I will say,” he prefaces, leaning into his wry smile so it’s more a grin now, “he was with Dorcas when he sent that text.”

Sirius gasps long and hard. “What?” he demands.

Remus nods, giving a weighty hum as he gently cruises them down a long stretch of road. “He wrote, 'Dorcas says congrats too,' and I thought, 'hmmm,'” he mentions.

“Mmmm,” Sirius drawls in echoing. “My, my, my.”

“Now, is this proof of anything? Perhaps not,” Remus raises, mild and mannered as ever, “but I won't pretend that I'm not hoping it means something.”

“Well, let's think about it for a moment,” Sirius puts up. “That would have been at, what, nearly noon hour? Interesting time to have met up.”

“Well, unless they were getting a bite,” Remus offers, tilting his head back and forth evenly.

“At exactly noon hour?” Sirius raises. “Who does that?”

“Well, not us, but I hear other people eat around then,” Remus extends.

Sirius breathes in long, thinking it over. “Nope,” he deduces. “One of them crashed at the other's place; that much I know in my bones, don't ask me why, but I do. Now, was there some passionate lovemaking involved? That is the question.”

Remus is quiet for a few beats and that's got Sirius thinking he's about to come back with more mild and even more manners, but then Remus' mouth splits into a grin. “I hope there was passionate lovemaking involved,” he cops to it, snickering there.

“Same,” Sirius echoes.

“Well, I would say at the very least, we can file this away into the 'curious,' category,” Remus motions, tilting his head toward Sirius for his input.

“I would agree,” Sirius seconds it.

“And, if we’re right about it, and I do hope we are,” Remus raises, “that might explain the slight lack of Pete’s presence.”

“If that’s the case; get her, boi,” Sirius champions.

Remus gives an amused noise in his throat. “OK, we're about a block out,” he shares with him, and Sirius sniffs as he sits up in his seat, back to the task at hand, looking this way and that for a recognizable landmark, but his only hint that they're close to the main is that two streets up from the road they're headed down has the sort of walking traffic as well as the regular sort of traffic that Sirius can only equate to the bustle of the main street. “I'm going to turn up here, let you out in front of the shop, and pull around again so I’m going to wait on this road we are currently on, so that’ll be one block back and around the corner from where I drop you; does that work for you?”

“Sure do,” Sirius replies, but then a specific note to the plan sticks out above the rest. “Is there no parking on the main, then? I don’t remember noticing either way.”

“There’s street parking, but I'm not about to struggle with parallel parking my dad's massive truck on that street,” Remus puts down. “It'll be at least be a passable parking job if I try it on this one, and plus it's Saturday afternoon so I'm not even certain there would be a free spot on the main as is.”

Sirius hums to accept Remus' reasoning. “Don't love that I'm not going to be able to watch you try it this time, but mark my words,” he raises as a manifest, “I will be watching you try to parallel park before this trip is out.”

Remus snorts as he brings the truck to a stops at the intersection, flicking his left turn signal. “For my sake, I hope we’re in my mum’s car for that,” he lets Sirius have, turning onto the main. “And then when you get back, we’re going to find me a fucking sink to wash the film off of my hands before I go mad.”

Sirius smirks up a storm in his seat. “Understood,” he nods, saluting him.

Remus has the resolve to half-smile at least. “The pharmacy isn’t far from here and neither is the ice cream parlour, really, so we’ll go pop in at those and then it’s off to Porth from there,” he tacks on, and Sirius hums happily in his seat before Remus clears his throat. “OK, on the left, green storefront up ahead; do see it?”

Sirius looks for it up ahead, and it’s quite an effervescent green that’s difficult to miss. “Yes ma'am,” he assures.

“Parfait, that's where you’re to go,” Remus caps it.

“Well, you were right,” Sirius raises, scanning his side of the street. “Literally no spots available on my side.”

“Not on mine, either,” Remus extends. “I'll slow down ahead of it and let jump out, but please, please be careful when you do.”

“I will not run headlong into a car,” Sirius assures.

“OK, but just be speedy about it,” Remus bids him.

“I'm like the wind,” Sirius delivers, undoing his belt and getting ready for the drop-off. “Don't you worry about me.”

“Well, I'm going to, so just don't give me a reason to worry more,” Remus tacks on, slowing the truck down and nodding to Sirius for the signal.

Sirius opens his door and is out of there like a bat out of hell, zooming in between two parked cars to get onto the curb where he strikes a strong Freddie pose and hears two faint toots of a horn behind him, and Sirius turns right around again with a bright gape/grin on only to watch the truck heading up the block before turning off of it.

Sirius will have to assume Remus felt the weight and synergy of his gape/grin and turns back toward the store, heading around a gaggle of girls strolling along the sidewalk to get up to the stoop. He heads in through the shop door and is immediately engulfed in Thriftcity, and Sirius swears he can feel the blood in his veins run quicker as he hears 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love' playing out the speakers inside the joint.

“Hi there.” A girl down at the other end of the shop is the source of the trilling voice, and Sirius waves his right hand on high. “Can I help you with anything?”

“Just having a look around,” he offers, sidling into the front section that’s got a myriad of circular clothing racks while bopping his hips to the tune as he goes along perusing the racks and having a gander.

He very much has to remind himself he’s not here for a shopping spree for himself and that he’s been tasked with a mission, which isn’t to say that he’s not well and truly determined to come back here and comb through the place another time to see what sort of gems await him, but for now: he must focus.

He flips through the equivalent of two full circular racks of viable options and definitely has some shirts in mind, but there’s a thrum going on in Sirius’s body that suggests he just hasn’t found the right thing yet, but that thing is in here somewhere: Sirius can feel it buzzing in the room like the frequency of a fluorescent lightbulb, and then Sirius looks up and across the room from him and feasts his eyes on it: the most chaotically colourful and frankly outstanding Hawaiian shirt up on a high above all else in this section, haloed by a few fluorescent bulbs trained over the garment, and that’ll explain the buzzing.

Sirius grins up at it, his chest tightening with the visual of Remus wearing that thing, and he cannot talk himself out of it; he just cannot do it.

Sirius swings around on his feet, searching the store for the lass who greeted him prior, and locates her down where he last saw her, appearing to be a-folding a-plenty over a display back there. Sirius heads down her way, passing a few patrons on the way, and Courtney Love’s 'Hold On To Me' is up next over the speakers; quite the abrasive transition from 'Crazy Little Thing,' one that would've gotten a quip out of Remus if he'd heard it, and that thought would've had Sirius amused if it didn’t sting so hard to have the song come on at all.

Sirius pushes past the sting, stops a little ahead of the display the staff member is working on, and gives a glance toward her black name tag that reads ‘Beatie’ in funky red chalk marker. “I like your name,” he extends, feeling that if he thought it, he might as well share it.

“Oh, thanks,” Beatie chimes. “I was named after my gran, but try going around with the name Beatrice in school.”

“Yeah, well, I’m named after a constellation, so I had it rather rough, too, if on a different level,” he offers.

“Oh?” Beatie prompts, folding up a t-shirt so quickly Sirius is definitely distracted by it.

“Yeah, 'Sirius,'” he supplies, nodding, “so you can probably just imagine how many times I got, ‘are you serious, though?’ over the years.”

“Too many, I’m getting,” she offers.

“Precisely, yes,” Sirius affirms, and there he tosses a thumb back over toward the front of the store. “I just need something from up top.”

“Oh, sure,” she accepts, tossing a thumb of her own behind her. “Let me just grab the rod from in back.”

Sirius hums a note of affirmation, heading back to the front to wait nearby his lucky find, and there he stands below it, promptly dissociating while the song playing overhead kicks into the bridge. “Alright, what am I reaching for?” Beatie bids, coming back online as she turns up beside him.

“Oh, uhm,” he starts, clearing his throat and pointing up, “just the Flyin’ Hawaiian up there.”

“Oh, thank God,” she puts up, her face breaking open with a smile. “I’ve been waiting for someone to come along and nab that.”

“Well, I’m here for it,” Sirius returns, smirking. "My boyfriend needs a new shirt and I thought this would prank him real good."

Beatie snorts, lifting the rod to hoist the shirt’s hanger off of the hook it's hanging from. "Then I'm more than happy to get it down for you," she insists.

He smirks, watching her bring the shirt down to their level before she backs up some steps to hover it toward Sirius for him to grab it off the end of the rod. “Are you still looking around?” she asks further.

“Nope, this is it,” Sirius assures, holding the shirt by the curved top of the hanger.

“Alright,” Beatie accepts, beckoning him along toward the pay counter where she lays the long rod up against the wall behind her. While she’s balancing it, Sirius checks out the pricing on it, but at a whopping twelve pounds, he would call this a right steal, laying it over the counter with a decided flourish before Beatie turns back to scan the masterful shirt, taking it off of the hanger and smiling over the counter at him. “Card or cash?”

“Card, please,” Sirius extends, tugging his wallet out. “I assume if it mattered the card type, you’d have already said so?”

“You’ve got me,” Beatie affirms.

“Perfect,” Sirius echoes, putting it on his Mastercard.

“Do you want the receipt in the bag?” she asks as it’s printing.

“No receipt, no bag,” Sirius supplies, smiling with an air of accomplishment as he nabs the shirt off of the counter and tosses it over his right arm.

“Have a good one, then,” she offers him.

Sirius bids the same of her and heads on his way, walking out the door and giving out a boulder of an exhale as he steps outside onto the stoop. He breathes in long, holds it for ten, lets that out and reopens his eyes, realizing fast that there are two folks standing ahead of him and waiting to get into the shop Sirius is definitely blocking.

Sirius dips out to the right, forgetting about them in literal seconds, and remembers Remus saying he’d be waiting a block back and around the bend. He strides to the end of the block, hangs a right, and spots the truck a little ways down the side road and sees it like a lighthouse through a fog despite the sunshine beating down from above.

He follows the light and as he comes closer to Remus, his excitement over his prank takes over. The closer he gets, the more clear it becomes through the windshield ahead that Remus’s head is down, and after a few steps more it’s even more clear that Remus has his scrolling face on; a perfect thing indeed for Sirius doesn’t want the surprise hanging over his right arm to be ruined ahead of time. He keeps his footfalls as light as can be, but Remus looks up as Sirius heads around the front of the truck, the bulk of the engine is blocking his right arm as he goes around it to get over to the driver's side, but Remus huffs loudly all the same.

“No, no, no,” he tosses him. “I pulled in on this side so you wouldn’t need to go out in the road at all.”

“You’re sweet, but I must come this way,” Sirius insists, stopping by his window and pinning his right arm to the side of Remus’s door to prolong the wonderful inevitable.

Remus pushes a stewed breath through his nose, turning his head to ensure Sirius is in the clear from behind the truck, but he figures if he weren’t he’d already know it, so Sirius just fine and dandy over here even if the truck is rather hot to the touch. “What are you doing?” Remus bids, blinking at him. “Did you not find anything?”

“Oh, no, I did,” Sirius gives melodically, choosing there to flutter his right arm up to cast the Flyin’ Hawaiian in through the open window and over Remus’s lap where he did indeed have his phone resting in his right hand, and Remus simply sits there, taking it all in.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Remus sends him, finished with taking it all in apparently.

“What’s up?” Sirius asks quizzically, resting his forearms over the ledge of Remus’s open window. “You said you wanted a shirt, no? That’s what I heard.”

“Mm,” Remus allows. “Was there no other option?”

“You know, there wasn’t?” Sirius expresses, lifting his right hand with it. “Only shirt I could find in the whole place; weird, right?”

“This is the loudest shirt I’ve ever seen,” Remus retorts.

“Might be, but the fit I’m going to fall into just by seeing you in it will be just as loud,” Sirius imparts. “Maybe louder, even; we’ll have to see.”

“I’m so angry at you,” Remus slips him.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah; you’ve splooge on your shirt so you might want to change,” Sirius advises, rocking his lower half back and forth as he’s hanging out there.

“Get out of the fucking road, Sirius,” Remus sends him.

“Put the shirt on and I will,” Sirius chimes, hearing a car pass behind him.

Remus tosses his mobile somewhere down on the floor of the truck and begins dealing with the gaudy buttons on the shirt, whereas Sirius heads around the front of the truck to hop onto the sidewalk and survey the scene jovially from the vantage point of the open window on his side of the truck. Remus gets the shirt fully unbuttoned before leaving it strewn over his lap while he tugs his polo over his head. He turns half in his seat to face the backseat and turns the polo inside out before doing a quick, less impressive folding job than Sirius saw Beatie do, but Remus is fired up and has been out of clothing-related retail for quite some time, so that’s fair enough. He stuffs the shirt in their shopping bag, turns back to the task at hand, pulling his new shirt up and around the back of him to get his arms through the short sleeves and buttons up the front from there, turning his head toward Sirius watching him do it from the windowsill and giving him a dragon breath over his plight.

Sirius’s shit-eating grin falters as the shirt gets buttoned up fully. “OK, why does it look so good?” he puts up.

For a moment or two, he thinks Remus is starting up a shush, but turns out that was just the precursor to his reply. “Shut your mouth,” he retorts, hard emphasis on that ‘sh.’

Sirius snorts hard over that before going back to the mystery at hand. “I’m not just saying it; this isn’t even fair,” he extends. “It was supposed to be a perfect prank and now I’m just upset you wear that thing like it was made for you.”

“Quit it,” Remus shoots him, evidently not believing him on this one, and turns in his seat to tug his cardigan down off of the shoulder of his seat.

He tugs it over his arms in turn, presses pointedly on the button on his armrest to bring his window up, and Sirius opens his door to do the same on his side before shutting the door again. Remus hops down to the street on his side, shuts his door with some definite oomph, and presses the button on his keyring to lock the truck up. “Careful in the road,” Sirius bids, his hands cupped daintily at his mouth.

Remus flies the bird at him as he heads around front of the engine and Sirius looks him up and down some more, finding the shirt now pops the fuck off thanks to the muted shade of the cardigan and Remus’s black slacks, and very suddenly, he’s quite finished lamenting over his prank gone wrong when his man’s looking hot as shit. “OK, you can stay angry if you want,” he raises, reaching up to tug on the right lapel of Remus’s new shirt as Remus steps up onto the curb ahead of him, “but you should know, it really just looks like you felt the need for a little splash o’ colour this morning.”

“'A little,'” Remus quotes, but he doesn’t stop Sirius from running his middle and forefinger up and down his lapel for a little longer than would be considered casual and that must mean he’s working on forgiveness. “Come on, pharmacy’s just across the way.”

Remus pairs it with a nod toward the main and Sirius falls into step with him, happy to get to stroll the town with such a hotpot in his company. They head up to the intersection, wait to cross at the signal, and upon reaching the other side of the road, Remus huffs over Sirius’s sidelong oogling, but there’s a smile there now.

“Stop it,” he bids, his mouth at a twist.

“I can’t and I won’t,” Sirius insists. “Ya look good, sonny boy.”

Remus steps up onto the curb with an audible sigh, cutting sideways to head into the corner entrance of the pharmacy, and he looks back over his shoulder at Sirius as they head through the foyer. “Do we need a basket between the two of us?” he raises, but something about his tone suggests he’s already doubting it and Sirius well agrees on that front.

“Nah, it's just a couple things, really,” Sirius raises.

“You’re buying the lube,” Remus sends him, speaking low as he heads past the baskets in the foyer and in through the second door.

“Wow, you’re going to let me pay for that all by myself?” Sirius returns him daintily, following him along.

“For that, I will,” Remus allows, stopping in their corner of the establishment and lifting his left hand to direct him. “I’ll grab your bug spray which is way down in aisle two, you’re heading down to aisle four, halfway down on your left.”

“It’s like you know exactly where it is in here or something,” Sirius observes, keeping that under his breath.

“I know where they keep it, yes,” Remus sends him sidelong. “Never got it here, mind; I’d drive over to Porth because at least then, I knew I wouldn’t be running into someone who knew me.”

Sirius snorts. “Fair enough,” he offers him. “We should probably replace your dad’s Purell, too, while we’re here.”

“Fine, I’ll grab that and meet you out front,” Remus directs.

“Deal,” Sirius champions, heading off to aisle four.

Sirius heeds Remus’s frugality and grabs a big boy bottle of lube, getting back to the front to get in a queue made up of just one lady and buying a reusable bag that's there behind the till to stick the purchase in for Remus’s sake more than anything else. He doesn’t bother taking the receipt, heads out front, and lights himself a cigarette to puff off of while waiting for Remus to make a reappearance. He makes it halfway through it before he’s got his mobile out, right-thumbing through to his and James’s message thread while he leans back against the wall behind him with his left hand propped up and close by so he can puff his cigarette as he fashions up a text.

i am still v much out and about with the light of my life so i do not want anything but a single heart in reply for this, but i'm sorry about being an aloof little shit these past many weeks and will make that up to you once i’m back, deal?

He sends it off, keeps his mobile out as he takes a final drag off his cigarette, flicks at the cherry so it flitters off and away, and walks the butt over to a bin a few steps down the sidewalk, and by the time he’s strolling back, Remus is coming out the door with his purchases in hand and a new text sitting in his and James’s thread that's made up of a single heart emoji, as per request. Sirius smiles for both, sends a heart back to James, and sticks his mobile away, holding his bag open for Remus to drop his items into.

“Thank you,” Remus offers him, sticking both in the bag alongside the gigantic lube bottle. “The walls have ears and all.”

“I get it,” Sirius assures, breathing in easily as he has a look around them.

He pauses as takes in the rest of the block on their right, finds now that he’s paying attention to his surroundings that he recognizes this stretch a lot more than he did the last block, and furthermore, he very much recognizes the second-floor architecture of a particular establishment a few doors down from them. He brightens as he takes drops his gaze to take in the famous watering hole’s terrace, and ends up blinking fast over a couple of occupants of one of the tables up by the railing sharing a bite and a pint, it appears.

Sirius gasps brightly. “It’s your mum,” he raises, putting his left hand out to flap it against Remus’s side excitedly. “And Do, I assume.”

“What, where?” Remus asks, casting a fast look around.

“Pub, pub, pub,” Sirius directs, nodding toward the two of them having a bite and a pint together.

Remus gives a trill in his throat upon spotting them and Sirius is beyond thrilled to get to contend with the fact that Remus is just as pumped as he is to see his mum out and about town.

The two of them break into similar jovial marches as they head down the block, and given that Hope is facing toward their direction and the two of them are acting right fools as they head her way, it’s not surprising that she spots them coming before they even get that close, nor is it surprising that she beams in her seat before she’s completely up and out of it, heading out the open gate of the terrace to come right for them; Sirius will likely never forget the sight of her torpedoing down her front hall just to get to her son that much quicker, but it feels like he has the wind knocked out of him as she thunders over to them and grabs for a wrist from each of them.

“Hi,” she trills, squeezing at their wrists.

“How many have you had, mum?” Remus quips.

“Yeah, we can get you home no problem,” Sirius echoes.

“Oh, just one with the meal, you jerks,” she returns them, flicking both their wrists for that before she takes one very long look over Remus’s shirt and giving a snort. “That’s a choice, hon.”

Remus lifts his shoulders in a fair display. “Yeah, I spilt tea on me and this one decided that this would be my replacement shirt," he provides, and Sirius is impressed by how quickly and smoothly he came up with that excuse. "Wasn’t that nice of him?”

Hope reworks her mouth around a smile. "You're alright?” she checks, taking her right hand off Remus’s wrist to gesture over her front. “Did it burn?”

“No no, all good here; just stating facts,” Remus assures, budging Sirius’s left arm, and Sirius cannot stop grinning.

“I think he looks obscenely good in it, but that’s just my opinion,” he raises plainly.

“Well, we definitely wouldn’t lose him in a crowd,” Hope offers.

“And we wouldn’t want to,” Sirius tacks on.

“So, where’ve you gone so far?” Hope bids, looking between the two of them brightly.

“Oh, all over, it feels,” Sirius raises, looking to Remus.

“Did you get to the market?” she asks, looking at Remus there, too.

“We sure did,” Remus affirms. “Got dad some tapioca.”

“Oh, he’ll love that,” Hope comments.

“And we got you the bagels you like,” Remus caps it.

Hope gives a light gasp, reaching up to tap a cheek of theirs each for that addition. “Where are you off to next?”

“Porth,” Remus extends.

Hope hums another note of intrigue. “What’s happening there?” she bids.

“Dad had an issue with the strings on his guitar last night,” Remus raises, and Hope gives a blunt noise there.

“He said as much, yeah,” she puts in, giving a half-grimace. “Also said it nearly took his arm off.”

“Just about,” Sirius echoes.

“He wants to get him some hefty ones to replace them,” Remus relays, sending a sidelong smile to Sirius as a dot of punctuation.

Hope gives a prompt noise of new understanding, but a half-beat later it all registers it seems for she takes to giving Sirius one bouldered expression. “Sweetie, you do not have to do that,” she expresses. “He’ll get around to it.”

“No, I really want to,” Sirius insists, and Hope pushes an audible exhale through her nose.

“No, dad still needs a gift, mum,” Remus comes in. “Just let us have this.”

Hope breathes in through her nose once, but it appears she’s losing her nerve. “Don’t you go telling him now,” Sirius raises, giving her a sly point with his right forefinger. “I’d like it to be a surprise.”

“No, not telling him a thing,” she assures, and Sirius bows his head to her in thanks, looking left to find Remus fucking glowing beside him. “Well, come say hi to Do before you go.”

“Of course,” Remus insists, and Hope brightens that much more as she turns round to lead them back toward the terrace, but she stops quickly — so quickly that the two of them almost run into her.

“Careful now,” Sirius bids.

Hope turns round to face them at a quick little pivot with a hesitant gaze on now. “She may already have an idea of things,” she puts up, speaking a little hushed.

Sirius looks left at Remus, who fights back a smirk. “Mum, it’s fine,” he assures. “So long as she doesn’t yell it out in front of everybody over there, that is.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to fight off a drunk today,” Sirius puts up, helping the lad out.

Hope gives a weak laugh. “That’s not happening, come on,” she bids, beckoning them along.

Hope heads in through the terrace gate while Sirius follows Remus's lead and heads up by the railing of the terrace, stopping beside him on the other side of the railing from the gals and watching Do give one boisterous clap upon seeing Remus. “Oh, you were not kidding," she observes.

“No, I was not,” Hope assures, taking her spot back across from her.

“Uh oh,” Remus puts in, his lopsided smile on.

“Oh, you shush,” Hope gives him. “All I said is you’re finally getting some sun; it's a good thing.”

Remus huffs a breathy laugh and turns his head to Do for a keen smile. "How are you doing?" he asks.

"I'm OK, hon," she offers, setting her left elbow on the table and her chin in her left hand before throwing Sirius a smile. “This him?”

“No, he’s back at the house actually; I don’t know who this guy even is,” Remus serves up quick, and Sirius gape-grins for it.

Do puts out a deep trill there. “Oh, he’s more Lyall every time I see him,” she puts up.

“Mhm,” Hope echoes, giggling away in her seat.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Do gives Sirius.

“Mhm, you too,” Sirius gives her back.

“Where are you two off to?” she bids.

“They’re heading to Porth,” Hope gives for them.

Sirius glances sidelong at Remus. “Hey, are we still doing ice cream, or what?”

Remus huffs out a breath of remembrance. “Shit, we were going get the mint chip, too,” he sends him. “We didn’t coordinate this right; it’s just going to melt before we get it back to the house.”

“Well, we could come back after getting the strings and go there then?” Sirius raises.

Remus hums to consider it. “You don’t mind going back and forth?” he checks.

“Why would I?” Sirius puts up, laughing for it.

“Yeah, I really don’t know why I asked,” Remus allows, smiling for him. “Let me use the loo real quick, then.”

“Yeah, go ahead,” Sirius trades him.

“OK, boys?" Hope comes in. "That is officially too many gifts; it's not happening.”

“Mm, yes it is,” Sirius chimes.

Hope huffs a half-breath, looking to Remus for help, but he’s already heading up through the opening in the gate and humming bemusedly. “What?” he raises, twirling his right hand at his ear. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

Hope sends him a long noise for that, brandishing a fist in his wake that has absolutely no real threat to it while both Sirius and Do snicker it out over here, and officially Sirius has decided she's forgiven for interrupting their announcement when she might've just needed a little bit of that Lupin Light in her life, too. Remus waves his mum off as he heads in through the open window that is most of the establishment’s front face and Sirius rests his arms on the terrace railing for the meantime, giving Hope a bright grin as she looks back to him weakly.

“It could be that we just like you a ton,” he offers lightly.

“Yeah, let ‘em pamper you,” Do echoes.

“See, she gets it,” Sirius raises, nodding his head toward her. Hope reaches for a fry off her plate and chews on that, and Sirius tips his head toward the dregs in Hope’s beer glass. “What’s on tap today?”

Hope hums that she’s coming back with the answer, swallowing first. “It’s an apricot one,” she offers. “Was really nice.”

“Oh, that does sound good,” Sirius accepts. “I’d love to come here at some point, Remus told me it’s a staple around here.”

Hope hums lightly. “Yeah, we really like it here,” she extends.

“Been the spot for ages now,” Do tacks on.

“We’ve got one like that near my place,” Sirius assures. “Perfect location, definitely divebar-eqsue but nothing too gross, and heading inside is just like coming home, you know?”

“Oh, that’s just what you need,” Hope summarizes, giving him a bright smile.

Sirius looks up as Remus comes out the open window again, smiling automatically as he feasts his eyes on Remus’s new shirt all over again, and follows Remus with his gaze as the lad heads out the terrace gate and sidles up to him, letting out a breath of accomplishment which must have something to do with his hands being freshly free of any sort of film.

“Ready to go?” he asks him.

“Yeah, all good,” Sirius returns him, pushing off of the railing. “You gals enjoy, now.”

“Oh, we will,” Hope trills.

“See you in a while,” Remus gives her, giving a little wave and smile combo before heading them off.

Sirius follows him until they get two, maybe three feet past the pub and there Remus reaches back with his right hand and tugs on Sirius’s left arm with it. “Faster,” he bids.

“What, why?” Sirius demands.

“I paid their tab, but I’m afraid she’ll fucking run after me,” he sends him, laughing the whole way through it.

Sirius takes to a jog with that, grinning wildly as he ends up ahead of Remus and tugging him along for the ride. He takes a fast left at the curb, bypassing the crosswalk altogether and booking them diagonally across the road toward the truck on the other side of it, and Remus huffs his disagreement with that choice but keeps up with him now that they’re in the road, the two of them parting ways ahead of the truck to get in on their respective sides.

“I'm getting the strings, then,” Sirius chimes, pitching himself up and into his seat.

“You know what, that’s fair,” Remus allows, hopping up and in on his side.

The two of them shut their doors and strap in, Remus puts fishes the key out and starts up the engine, and Sirius reaches out to turn up the volume dial, curious as to what the throwback station is giving out now, and gasps, absolutely bouldered by finding Dido’s 'Thank You' is just starting up, and what kind of perfect timing is that?

Remus gives a bouldered note of his own in his seat while Sirius sticks their pharmacy haul in the backseat with the rest of their bounty. “It’s like they know we’re here,” he raises.

Sirius can barely handle the amount of heat going on behind his cheeks as he begins to croon along, can barely handle how Remus get right into it with him as he pulls onto the road, and he certainly has an extremely difficult time handling himself when they get through the first verse and he puts down a blunt, ‘Dear Stan’ that gets Remus just about rolling in his seat.

Sirius gives a chesty trill in his own seat as they into the second one, sets his right elbow down on the flat surface of the highest point of the centre console between them and reaches out with his right hand with all the hope in the world that Remus’ll clasp it, and it’s three to five more beats before Remus takes his left hand off of the wheel and slips his elbow in behind Sirius’s to clasp his hand, and Sirius traces his thumb over the back of Remus’s palm; eyes shut, throat open for the croon, and putting this entire scene to memory.

Chapter 27: 27.

Chapter Text

Starting up the truck and heading out of Porth comes with an air of ease and tranquillity, but Sirius has another theory on top of the inherent, accomplished relief that comes along with knocking another item off their to-do list, at least for him. Sirius is certainly feeling accomplished in more ways than one, reason being that he's holding onto two brand new packs of high-quality guitar strings for one King Lyall after having successfully bypassed Remus's huffing about the second pack's inclusion in and of itself long enough for the payment to process, which then made Remus' reloaded huffing as they left the shop both moot and a healthy dose of cute.

Sirius takes in a long breath of fresh country air, lulls his head to the side to watch Remus make a left turn onto a cutesy, picturesque residential road and take them cruising down it, presumably toward the edge of town and back toward Treorchy. "Tell me about this ice cream parlour then, hm?" he raises. "I know we're going for Hope's favourite, but you did say I'd love it, so spill."

"Mhm, well, the vibe of the place, you'll love on principal," Remus starts, turning the wheel and taking them onto a lengthy residential road with more quaint cottage-esque homes sprinkled about on either side of them, "but on top of that, I've a strong sense you'll identify with its three-in-one sort of purpose."

Sirius pulls in an intrigued breath. "Go on," he bids coyly.

Remus hums a merry little note, cruising them along with his hands at seven and five on the wheel; an exciting development and Sirius loves to see it. "Well, it's your old-fashioned ice cream parlour, soda shoppe type deal, but they put in a coffee bar a while back that sells all sorts of things, and then once it hits ten o'clock, the place closes to minors and becomes more of a spot that serves cocktails and some local brews; sort of a community venture, overall."

"That," Sirius puts up, "is the best thing I've ever heard; thank you for this."

Remus gives a wee, borderline relieved sigh, and then confirms Sirius's suspicions on the relief front. "I'm glad I got that one right," he slips him.

"Good Cunt, you knew I'd love it deep down," Sirius waves him off.

"Now, the place sells cocktails or brews earlier than ten for a cinque-a-sept sort of thing, but it’s more of an all-ages situation until ten hits," Remus offers up. "And I would venture to call it more a spot where drinks are available than a raging boomer of a joint past ten, but it would be fun to let you see the place in action while we're here."

"Uhm, you've already sold me," Sirius makes plain. "Done and done, Remus."

"You know what," Remus piques, lifting his right hand from the wheel to point vaguely toward him before putting it back on the wheel to make a left turn onto a long stretch of road that's got greenery bursting on either side of it. "We could even make an evening of it; stop in at the parlour first and then head over to the watering hole after that, get you a dual experience."

Sirius's most powerful senses are already bursting at the seams given the feel of the wind in his hair and the comfy-cozy passenger seat he's sitting in, the vivid scent and sight of green green green, 'Big Me' pouring out of the radio speakers, and the endearing topic of conversation that's got him feeling more seen than he knows what to do with, so by and large, he's already having a turbo-experience even without the enticing image Remus is vividly painting for him, but Sirius is a veritable glutton by nature so why not let Remus keep on adding to it? "I won't have any brews myself evidently," he raises, "but if we could persuade one of my parents into being willing to retrieve our silly selves when the evening's over, I could be persuaded to bring a little something-something along for my own consumption and we could make a right night of it."

"I'd love nothing more than to have all of this happening," Sirius makes known.

Remus's profile is all that's visible to Sirius at the moment, but the increasingly budding smile on his lips is enough to know he's quite pleased, even if he can only see half of it. "We'll pick a good night for it later on in the week," he cements.

Sirius breathes in deep and long as Foo Fighters fade out and lets the Goo Goo Dolls' absolute dagger of a tune 'Name' start up in its place, as if taking the form of a direct reply from Reg's brandished fist in the sky coming down and flattening Sirius for feeling this good for this long; Sirius is whip-fast in his attempt to find something real quick to cling to, but being surrounded by everything he'd just been wax-poeticizing about gives him a massive backdrop to dive into.

"I don't think I could run out of things to love about this place," he decides, speaking with all the confidence he can muster just there. "I don't even really want to go once the trip's up; look how green everything is? London's just so — gray."

Remus hums evenly to that. "Nice smattering of red all over, though," he offers up, conversational and thankfully none too alerted to the inner crisis continuing to threaten to gobble Sirius right up. "Bit strange to admit aloud, but I remember finding all that red comforting when I first got out there; it soothed some of my jitters because it felt like I knew the city already even though I very didn't, it's just that the smattering of red was a nice reminder that I was officially living in a city I'd seen projected onto my telly screen for years and years."

Sirius nods faintly. "Alright, well, you're cute as a button so of course your opinion on this is adorable," he trades him first, "but you only really see all that red when you're caught in the tourist traps; you'll see a frightening amount of lorries fly by or accidentally photobomb someone while walking by one of the phonebooths, but the rest of the city is grayer than a tombstone."

Remus gives a bemused smirk. "Alright, but those booths are literally everywhere, so that sort of destroys the tombstone analogy right there, morbidly creative or not," he quips.

"I'm just saying, those things might have felt like quintessential London and welcoming to you, but it's the green that London is lacking for me," Sirius accentuates. "There just isn't enough of it there."

Remus hums to consider it. "Well, in any other scenario I might suggest relocating to a new area of the city that's got more to offer than a village square with some trees in it, but giving up the Flat would be completely unadvisable," he extends.

Despite the thin layer of water that feels like it’s gathering at the bottom of both his lungs, Sirius actually manages a candid, reactionary breath. "Well, that's inarguable," he gives him. "There's really no other place like it."

"In times like these, knowing a way to discretely airlift the building out of Islington and safely lower it into a much greener area outside of the city would come right in handy," Remus raises, conversationally again, "but since that's going to be rather difficult to sort out, addressing the boredom I'm sensing from you is likely our next best bet."

Sirius chances a half-glance toward Remus before setting it out the front window again, nodding so Remus will know he heard him for his breath is busy tightening as this pointed tune heads into the second verse. "I think it's fair to see London like that if you were born and raised there, tourist trap or not," he tacks on. "Sometimes I find it a bit annoying when it’s pouring out and I’m just trying to get to class but having to weave through gaggles of people who’ve stopped walking mid-sidewalk to look at every other shopfront or phonebooth, but I mean, I also understand broken romanticism for the place you've been raised and I don't blame you for feeling sick of all the city's gray when it's all the same gray you've been seeing since you can remember."

Sirius nods for him, for the bone he knows he's being thrown. "Yeah, that's it, I think," he allows, voice low, and he's not all that sure that Remus can hear him over the second chorus, but he hopes he can because he can't really go any louder and he can't move enough to turn the volume knob down any. "I'm just getting less and less romance about that city the longer I'm in it, and I don't know if it ever actually felt like mine or if I told myself it was mine for the taking just to get by."

And there, a good ten to fifteen seconds of silence gives way for the plucky, haunting solo that's taken over the airwaves, and by then Sirius decides Remus didn't hear him a true second before he goes and confirms that he actually very much did. "Well, you've lived there for so long now, I'm sure it has gotten a bit same old, same old for you," he offers fairly, "but I hear there's this really exciting venue opening up in a very lively area pretty soon, and once it does, I've a sense that'll have the city feeling new and exciting and yours again."

"Right," Sirius nods to allow. "That'll help, I hope."

"I do get it, though," Remus reiterates. "I mean, look around us; I'd be hard-pressed to find a place that better fits the description of romantic, but by the time I left, it didn't really matter how much I'd been raised to know how lucky I was to get to live in a place like this, did it? I still had to get out."

Sirius tosses another quick glance toward Remus and back out at the road ahead of them. "Yeah, but of course you did," he raises, throwing the bone back at him. "Even with the state you were in, you still knew you had to get away from him, so in turn, you knew you needed to get away from here; more and more it stopped feeling like yours, and in every new direction you'd look to root yourself didn't work because he'd poisoned nearly every spot you cared about."

"You're right, yeah," Remus allows, going down in volume to match up with Sirius as 'Name' comes to a close, "as I'm sure it's almost impossible to separate London from Reg, especially as of mid-afternoon on Wednesday, if I'm clocking it right."

Sirius blinks thrice, finding the beat and a half of dead-air they seem to experience over the airwaves rather spookily apt before an ad for insurance comes on through and makes it all the more worse. "That was bold," he gives him. "Well done, you."

Sirius is certain Remus is now trading quick glances between him and the road, not for the fact that he can see Remus’s eyes to know it but because Remus is holding the wheel tighter than he was. "Bold, maybe, but am I at least getting warmer?" he checks. "That maybe, I'm right to think that this grass is greener mentality has less to do with where we are geographically and a lot more to do with the fact that out here, he can't quite get to you like he could there?"

Sirius genuinely can't help a snort, though it hurts every inch of the back of his throat and up to his nose. "I don't even think you're aware of how right you actually are about it," he puts up, looking past the film that's covered up his vision. "He can't quite get to me like he could there, but fuck, does it feel like he's trying; my chest keeps doing this tightening thing like he’s got his hand on my windpipe, every other song I'm unlucky enough to hear seems to be about young death like I'm not feeling horrible enough about that concept as is, and, if that's not enough, I get to hear 'Name' of all things, which I have not been able to let play to the end in years because it reminded me too much of him already, but hey, I suppose there's always time for him to get in one more shot in, isn't there? He's got all the time in the world now, can choose when and where he wants to strangle me, any time, any place, and here, too, where I fucking promised I'd be balanced and good for you, so yeah, you know, I'm really, really not looking forward to going back and seeing Reg in every single shadow in that fucking city—"

Sirius stops talking the exact moment he registers that Remus pulled the truck over, but more importantly than that even, he somehow managed to pull the truck in between two parked cars on the side of a residential street and pull the truck into idle mode without Sirius noticing. "Did you just parallel park?" he demands wetly.

Remus, sitting with his back so straight it looks highly uncomfortable, reaches up to scratch idly at his nose, just below the bridge of his sunnies. "It seemed very important that I pull over," he extends, reaching to flick on his blinkers. "Didn't like doing it, but I don't want to keep driving this thing while I can't fully concentrate on you."

"I'm sorry," Sirius gives him.

"Wh— no?" Remus gives back. "I picked you over the road; not a hard sell for me."

"I'm still sorry," Sirius puts up again, lifting his hands only to have them plop back down over the bag of guitar strings in his lap. "That was a lot, like too much; I'm literally off the deep end."

Remus pushes a long, dragon-inspired breath out his nose, pops the belt of his buckle free to push it aside, and turns bodily in his seat to face Sirius better, though thanks to his gargantuan limbs, he has to lift his left leg and wrangle it some to lay even lay a smidge of his left knee on the edge of his seat to get himself crossed-legged and quasi-comfortable, and winds up seated exactly halfway toward Sirius in his seat, all told, his left ankle crossed over his right thigh and that left shoe pointed off at an angle, but Remus certainly now has Sirius's undivided attention.

"You're adorable," Sirius breathes, not quite able to believe this long-limbed lad is in cahoots with him.

Remus huffs long, deflating the hard line of his shoulders as a fatigued smile flickers over his lips. "You can't be charming right now," he breaks it to him.

"I can and I will," Sirius returns him, giving his best attempt at a half-smile, but he knows it must be equally as morose to look at for Remus as it was to muster up for the boy gives out a small, wounded noise, reaching over the cup holders to get his left hand clasped over Sirius's right knee.

"We need to get one thing straight before I help unpack all that," Remus declares. "I never wanted you to stay back in London through this, but I certainly never asked you to be perfect while you're here, Sirius; I asked you if you still felt up to coming in case you thought you couldn't, but you have impressed me with every other minute that you have been here and the trip's gone far better because you are, so I am more than glad you still came and if we have to stop on the side of the road now and again to let you breathe through the news that only just landed on you, then that's what we have to do, OK?"

Sirius nods, a lump the size of a golf ball lodged at the back of his throat, but Remus shakes his head once. "No, I want you to say it, Sirius," he insists.

"OK," Sirius manages, eyes welled up and ready to burst.

He goes with his first instinct, plucking Remus's left palm off his right knee and playing with it, but it feels just like the old days and there's a certain quirk to Remus's lips that suggests he might find this just as familiar as Sirius does, and hopefully just as important. "What do you need me to be for you right now?" Remus raises, leaving his captured hand as weightless and malleable to the touch as possible, it feels.

Sirius whispers his right forefinger around the outskirts of Remus's open palm once before working his way in toward the centre. "Just you," he gives up.

Remus breathes in long, tilts his head back and forth once he's got a lungful, and lets that out real quick from there. "Only, I have been that and still said the wrong thing before," he offers reluctantly.

"Or, maybe I've been so horrible to you when it comes to my family, you're understandably afraid I'll blow up on you again," Sirius puts up, faux-brightly. "You don't have to take every single ounce of blame for—"

"Stop it," Remus cuts in, and it's fast and assertive enough for Sirius to sit up straight in his seat. "We're not doing this, I'm only asking you what you'd like me to do because I very remember the 'Cleopatra' incident and I promised you I'd make sure you're present and focused while you're here, so if you'd like me to kick you back into feeling present in this and enjoying the whimsy while we've got it, then I can do that, but I don't want you to ever think that I'm blowing you off or that I've no interest in letting you process all this out loud; I just need to know what my responses to this should be and I'm going to need your help with that, so do you want me to be your life coach right now or your interpreter?"

"I'm—" Sirius tries, but assertive Remus is now in the truck and he's popping off. "I think I might need a bit of both if you're willing?"

"I'm always willing," Remus sends him, halfway pointedly, halfway for the record, it sounds like, and Sirius takes in a long breath as Remus lets one out. "I think you might have just been pulling a me back there."

"Mm?" Sirius prompts.

"Mhm," Remus hums to affirm. "Now, first off, I'm not saying that tunes with the theme of young death aren't allowed to feel entirely pointed for you right now—"

"Glorifying young death as if it's enviable and curious, and not something horrific," Sirius comes in to rewrite. "And no, Remus, I'm telling you: Lyall and I get in the truck, first station has that 'If I Die Young' playing on it, I say, 'please change that,' Lyall changes it to a different station that's playing fucking 'Die Young,’ and then, while I was in the thrift shop there, Courtney fucken Love's 'Hold On To Me' comes on and I'm thinking, 'Jesus Fucking Cunt, that's some pointed fucking bullshit."

Remus reworks his mouth around a quirk to his lips, settling on a hybrid between a smile and a frown. "Did you just give up and turn it off altogether?" he raises. "With my dad, I mean; not in the shop."

Sirius gives the world's tiniest pfft. "He finally landed on one that was blasting 'Du Hast,' but I figured it might ramp me up just the right amount to look convincingly menacing in front of Tom," he gives over.

Remus stifled a snicker in his throat, seemingly not trusting himself to even be himself just now. "I don't think you'd have needed 'Du Hast' to get that across, but I do like the image of you and my dad riding into town with that blasting out the truck, I will say that," he states.

"And thank you for saying it," Sirius extends, feeling caught tight between feeling foolish for even mentioning this and feeling worlds more comfortable than even seconds ago.

"OK, so the good news is, you're talking to someone who knows what it feels like to have the cosmos specifically fucking with you," Remus addresses, reaching his free hand out to push a stray lock of Sirius's hair behind his left ear, "but if the roles were reversed and that tale had happened to me, I do feel like you'd be telling me right about now that timing, inherently, is one hell of a pointed bitch sometimes, but I can't let her rule how I get on with it—"

Sirius gives a lengthy sigh, nabbing up Remus's palm just to squeeze at it. "I know that," he gives weakly. "I don't feel like myself at all right now."

"Then do you want me to give you the Sirius read of it?" Remus bids. "Because I could easily tell you that death in itself is a universal aspect of the human condition, so while that story you just told does have some morbidly funny and pointed notes to it, there are other ways to assign meaning to that happening to you than to see it as ruthless mocking from above; do you know what one could be?"

"I really thought you were going to go ahead and tell me," Sirius lets him know.

Remus hangs his head on a left hanging tilt, his brow pointedly furrowed. "I'm trying to take on your typical worldview, so I wondered if you were ahead of me on this one or not," he explains.

"No, keep going," Sirius prompts, petting Remus's lifeline.

Remus nods once, scooting that much closer to Sirius, and while that doesn't amount to much considering the seats are where they are, it's appreciated all the same. "If what happened to you earlier had happened to me and I was bringing it to you to assign some meaning to it, I wonder if you would advise me to try looking at it as more of a unifying thing, rather than one that's exclusively pecking at me," he sets it. "I mean, we'd be hard-pressed to find a theme that's less universal than death; it’s a unifying theme in itself, who hasn’t lost someone and survived the turmoil of it or known someone who did, so of course people find themselves penning all sorts of words on the topic, but particularly with young death, that in itself is so morbidly fascinating for people because it's a life cut short far too soon, and that deeply affects people so plenty of them will write about it for others who’ve lost someone too soon to read, sing along to, identify with, and sometimes, even find it hits entirely too close to home, and if themes revolving around death, and particularly young death, are so universal then that also includes musicians, who can and often do license their music out to radio stations far and wide, and sometimes those stations will play them and that theme will pop up twice in a rotation during somebody's quest for a decent station to have on in the background of a drive, so is it possible we may just be looking at one funky coincidence that was still allowed to have bouldered you."

Sirius runs his top teeth over his lower lip slowly but ends up keeping hold of it as he nods, stifling a hitch of breath at the back of his throat to speak. "You speak fluent Sirius," he forwards.

Remus's lips quirk. "I can speak more of it if you'd like," he offers him, and Sirius's neck is going to smart later for all the nodding he's doing with it, but it'll have been worth it. "I think on some level, what you'd normally want of me just now would be to remind you that it's only day two of our trip and if this looming threat of going home is already as strong as it seems, then before we know it, the trip will be over, you'll be upset with yourself for not stopping and focusing more on the now while he had it, and then I'll be upset at myself for not keeping my promise to you when things got to be too much; am I on the right track here?"

"Speeding down it," Sirius affirms, coughing at the end of it to try to dislodge the golf ball in his throat, but it's a no from the golf ball.

Remus nods once. "Then, respectfully, I will ask you to try not to think so hard about the end of our trip when we're so not there yet," he affords him, giving him a flash of a smile, and Sirius can't help one from starting up on his own lips. "We're actually in the middle of the best day of our entire summer, at least that's the case for me, and there have certainly been some good ones to choose from so that's a feat in itself, but if you did want something a little more concrete to think about in terms of our eventual return to the city, I can do that for you, too."

"Please," Sirius speaks, thickly still for that golf ball in his throat seems to be looking to sign a mortgage and move into the neighbourhood.

"Alright, then get ready, because I'm about to hit you with a few zingers," Remus prefaces, and Sirius pressed his lips together, readying himself. "You're going back to a lot of good people, good things; you’re going to have James, Pete, Lily, Mary, Marlene and her flank, and, so you know, Dorcas genuinely wants to get to know you more, and some of it's on account of the fact that you're you and just that thrilling get to know, but also because you treat me like a king and she's happy for me, so you'll have her, too, if you want that, and of course you're going to have little ol' me, attached to your hip and trying to make every moment we have together for the rest of the summer count while I still have you this close to me if that's any consolation."

"The best consolation," Sirius speaks out, and it is; having Remus by his side through the coming weeks is going to matter beyond words and unfortunately, there marks the first moment Remus's term abroad, a venture he has championed since it was ever a breath of a thought, is something completely horrifying to think about.

Sirius pushes it down, so far down that he believes it leaves his body, and to double down to be sure of it, he pulls forward on the memory of broaching the subject as a real and tangible possibility for Remus, the memory of the sights of Remus's spirits brighten more and more as time went on and the possibility of him getting to go got brighter and brighter, the memory of seeing Remus's woes over the clusters coming in to make his plans that much harder to see through and the subsequent memory of digging the man out of the mud and relighting that fire in him so much so that the lad bounced on his bed with joy over landing a job in Paris, and the last one, though it isn't a true memory just yet, but Sirius can't help but think the view of Remus reacting to landing a dependable home away from home would be some of the best viewing pleasure he could have.

That tactic works wonders under Sirius's skin; it's selfish to think of Remus going as anything other than exactly what he deserves. "You'd better ring me when you're away," he puts up, forwarding Remus a pointed smile.

Remus huffs long and loud, breaking into a loaded grin. "Oh, you're going to be incredibly sick of 'Kiss Me' by the time I'm back," he alleges, and Sirius's eyes flash, smiling so hard that his cheeks hurt a little.

"That gives the impression I'm not sick to hell of it already," he quips.

"Well, you're not," Remus quips back, smiling keenly as he lifts his free hand and begins doing something about the tear streams on Sirius's cheeks with the pad of his thumb.

"You're right, I'm not," Sirius serves him, leaning his head this way and that to help Remus get them for him.

"On top of us dolts," Remus circles back, flashing a quick version of his sunshine smile before launching right back into damage control, "you're going to have Andromeda, little Dora, Ted, who all love you beyond realm or reason, you're going to have the venue that I know you'll throw every ounce of yourself into and pull something incredible out of it, so, yes, this trip is going to inevitably end, I'm not looking forward to the day it does either—" Remus pauses to huff, shaking his head at Sirius's wet, pointed smile, "—well, what, are you kidding me? I'm having the time of my life here with you and even though my reasons aren't as distressing as what you're handling right now, I've felt dread falling through me just knowing I’m going to be going back to the laundry list of things I'm going to have to worry about getting done the second I'm back."

"You're not going to be doing any of that stuff alone," Sirius comes in, frank about it.

Remus huffs a bright breath, his lips pulling into a smile as he turns the mirror right back on him. "You're not going to have to do this alone either, Sirius," he puts down. "The trip will end, but you've so much to look forward to and put your loving, determined energy into, you're going to have the right people to surround yourself with, and you already have all of that, so what you're really going to have is more of it and that's what you deserve; you just do."

Sirius yanks hard on Remus’s wrists so it’s fair that Remus topples forward from the velocity of the yank, but that’s also perfect for Sirius needs the crook of Remus’s neck as a resting point and with Remus tipped over like that, he won himself a prime vantage point to bury his face into and drown his sobs out against, literally and actually praying to whatever the hell will listen to him that Remus is right about that; there’s a horrid, freezing cold line heading up his spine that acts as a physical form of skepticism, suggesting it’s not going to be that easy and shadows can and will pop up anywhere, but Sirius clings to the lighthouse he’s holding onto for now and weathers through the storm that way.

Remus doesn’t speak all that many words through Sirius’s hysterics, more that he does a whole lot of humming, back-rubbing, and hair tousling, but all acts that remind Sirius who he puts every ounce of his trust into, and who has not and will not mess around with that.

Sirius tries his hand at speaking once his hiccoughing slows to a place much more ignorable, but it’s with a gentle, unobtrusive tone and an even lovelier sentiment, he feels. “Show me that parlour,” he bids, brushing his hands underneath his eyelids and over his cheeks to wipe away any tear stains.

“I can very do that,” Remus assures, giving Sirius’s propped right knee a warm squeeze before he faces forward and drops his left leg back to the truck floor.

The two of them settle back into their seats, get themselves strapped back into their seatbelts, and once there, Sirius looks to Remus as Remus looks to him, humming in prompt. "How's it look?" he bids, circling his face with the point of his right forefinger. "Hell runneth over?"

Remus pushes a sweet little breath through his nose, a quirk playing at his lips. "A little puffy, but once we get the wind blowing in this thing, I'm sure that'll go down," he extends, giving a decided tap on the wheel with it.

Sirius nods for it, liking that Remus went with the truth and a practical solution in the same go. "Thanks for that, hey?" he raises. "I could have picked a better moment to have a crisis, but you were right on it."

"Literally shut up, Sirius," Remus sends him, firing up the engine and replacing his pointed smile with a more simple, genuine one. "Of course I was on it; I'm here anytime."

Sirius wiggles his pointed smile back and forth, would love it if there wasn’t so much space in between the two of them, but he’ll have to settle for draping his right arm over the centre console and waggling his fingers for Remus to notice. “I see you,” he extends, his hands working at the wheel. “Just a minute.”

Sirius waits dutifully as Remus gets the truck pulled out, where he cruises them down the road, makes a left onto the next cross street, and takes his left hand off of the wheel a couple beats on from there, clasping it over Sirius’s left palm and entwining their fingers together loosely. “Just need to be ready in case I have to stop suddenly,” he explains.

“I know,” Sirius assures, giving Remus’s hand a squeeze for all the trouble.

Remus takes them out of Porth, onto the speedway, and back on track again, and although he hasn't got Remus's hand in his in the same way he did when they first got going, Sirius sits still with his right palm open on the highest peak of the centre console and lets his eyes fall shut as Remus heads them back to Treorchy, putting his focus on the sound of the wind flittering in and out of the truck windows, breathing in the scent of wide-open air, enjoying the warmth of Remus's fingers tracing over his palm — at least until Remus gives incredibly tentative whir in the seat beside him and tugs his hand away fast, startling Sirius out of some sort of near dreamscape.

"I'll be needing this," he says of it, flipping his right turn signal on and aiming to merge into the other lane on the speedway that, Sirius notes, has cars lined up bumper to bumper; not a very enviable lane to be in, he'd think.

"What are you doing?" he raises, but he only gets a frank, unnerved clear of Remus’s throat and a nod out the windshield in reply.

Sirius peers out ahead of them, finding quite quickly why the right lane is much more enviable as it does not have a semi transporting a humungous pile of many, many, many logs of wood up ahead, whereas the one on the left, and the one Remus is currently trying to get out of, certainly does. "You saw it, too, didn't you?" he wagers, smirking from the passenger seat.

"Unfortunately did, and not by choice," Remus huffs out. "It was a birthday party where I got outnumbered in the vote for which film to watch and the log part — Cunt, it'll never leave my psyche."

Sirius leans his head out his window to get a glimpse of the cars behind them for there are just two other cars behind them, also vying for a spot in the right lane, and gives out a bright bark, facing the front again. "Alright, well, clearly everybody else has seen it except for the one guy driving that truck," he puts up.

"Distract me," Remus sings out, faux-cheerily.

"Alright, I'll think of something," Sirius accepts, taking in a quick breath through his nose in thought. "Would you like a blowie?"

"I'm good, thanks," Remus returns, switching to a tightly-wound sing-song. "Somebody better let me in or I'll explode."

Sirius forces down another extreme urge to laugh, focusing on coming up with a topic. "OK, well, before we get too far away from the topic of Paris, tell me something," he bids him.

"Mm?" Remus commits, evidently happy not to think of the myriad of logs up ahead.

"I want to help out more concretely with your residence issue," Sirius raises. "Would you be at all interested in letting me throw out an idea for how I could actually do that?"

Remus pauses for a beat or two. "Alright, yeah?" he bids, tipping his chin at him gingerly.

"OK, but hear me out, hm?" Sirius conditions. "I don't want you to immediately dismiss it because I think it's is a great idea and James came up with it, so that's two people who would be very hurt if you—"

"Not an altogether great start," Remus comments.

"Cost," Sirius comes back with, "is just not as much of a barrier as it feels."

Remus is quiet for a full, actual minute. "Sirius—" he starts, but Sirius is quicker.

"It isn't, though," Sirius insists. "It's not, I have the money to put down on a sublet situation so realistically, nothing would be able to stop you from being able to stay in a cute, fun, preferably already furnished, Remus-approved flat as close to work and school as can be done unless there's genuinely no available flats near there, and if that's the case, then we can't control that part and we'll slowly widen the radius around the ideal district, but the flat in itself is not what's unattainable here and you, laddie, will never end up stuck without a place to stay, OK? Not with me around."

Remus pushes out a breath of the overwhelmed variety, but in truth, Sirius really can't decide if he's more overwhelmed by the topic or the log truck up ahead of them. "Have you any idea how expensive that could get?" he raises tentatively. "Just being proximate to those places alone, I—"

"—Have you any idea how much money I currently own?"

"No, and I don't want to know—"

"That you technically also own, just by the nature of the fact that you're with me—"

"It is not my money," Remus puts down.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's ours," Sirius comes down. "This won't break the bank, Remus: I could easily find one that you could then stay in for about three, maybe three and a half months, for free, and I wouldn't notice it leaving; I may have to fork some over for the month of December, but you won't catch me boohooing about that when I'll just be happy you were able to stay at a place you didn't have to worry about affording or taking extra work shifts onto your plate because you needed to make enough to afford the place."

Remus gives a long-suffering sigh as he wins himself a trip into the right lane, waves his thanks to the car behind them, and pulls in. "I don't know, Sirius," he extends. "Of course it's sounds idyllic and a worthy offer to snatch up, but we could still luck out and you won't have to bother renting anything out just for me."

Sirius licks his lip once, deep in thought for a new angle. "Think of how set you'll feel once you get there if you don't have to worry about rent," he prompts him. "You'll have what you saved over summer, you won't have to fork over most of what you're earning there because Cunt knows I don't need you paying me, and you could afford to go all over the place in your free time; everything in Europe's just a hop and a train ride away, don't forget."

Sirius tacks a charmed smile on at the end of his pitch and he may even lift his hands for a quick ta-da after that, but it's a good thing he did for it absolutely gets Remus stifling a laugh in his mission to hide any shade of amusement. "I still have to repay you for even giving me the chance to go, Sirius," he gives him, and as old as that sounds to him, Sirius knows that lad is putting in the work to sound even-keeled.

"And I've never fully committed to getting that back, considering how much I don't want or need it to be given back," Sirius comes in idly, going for casually continuing the thought. "I actually only said you could pay me back in installments to appease your ungrateful little arse and I won't be wanting repayment for the flat situation either."

Remus huffs a fast noise of affront at him, trading pointed frowns between Sirius and the road. "I'm literally kidding," Sirius puts up. "The point, which I've made quite clear in a myriad of ways since we started, is that I don't consider you an expense; I'd sooner call it investing in you because there are many things I enjoy in life, and then there's seeing you thrive, which no earthly pleasure quite compares to."

All attempts to sound even seem to have been tossed out the window by Remus. "You're such a jerk for doing this while I am driving for one, and right after I was to be nursing you back from a Moment," he sends him, sounding equal parts frustrated and bouldered.

"I believe they're called opportunists in some circles," Sirius gives him, his tone thoughtful, and Remus trumpets a long and lustrous pfft at him for that one. "Here's my proposal: you have a complete and trustworthy last resort in me, so I'll ask you kindly cross ‘a place to stay' off the worry list that's waiting for you once we get back because it doesn't exist, and then, if by the time we've returned to London and you and/or Andromeda haven't found a realistic option for a place yet, I'll nip this whole thing in the bud and see what I can do about renting a spot close by your building for the term, and if you want, I'd even be willing to bring you a few options and let you pick the place based on the lowest cost denominator if that'll get you feeling better about staying there rent-free."

Remus pushes an outstandingly tight breath out, but offers nothing in terms of real speech patterns. "I mean, what a deal, right?" Sirius lifts up, speaking where Remus can't. "Doesn't it feel even a little bit freeing to know that you genuinely wouldn’t have to worry about pesky finances while you're there?"

Remus pushes a long, very long, chesty breath out, like he's expelling something fierce out of the centre of himself. "I've had to worry about pesky finances since I was thirteen, Sirius," he puts up, pushing another breath out in search. "It's what I know best."

Sirius shifts the point of his lips back and forth while he pushes a breath through his nose. "I know that, but you deserve to feel comfortable when you are, and you are here, Remus; you're comfortable now," he extends him. "Listen, I've gone up against Hope and Lyall; that's two of the most stubbornly proud, autonomous people I've ever met, and they gave in and allowed me to pay for a trip out to London to see their handsome devil of a son, so you really ought to know by now that there's almost nothing stopping me from getting this done aside from you—"

"Sirius, this is a lot to contend with," Remus puts down. "I am going to need a minute to get used to the idea."

"It isn't a lot, though; it's just a natural option for you to have," Sirius slips him. "Personally, I think it's the best one you've got, and if you have to let your rich boyfriend help you out, who's going to stop you? I won't. And I know I don't know personally how it'd have been like to struggle like that, OK, but in a way, I didn't have a lot of money until last year either and I say this kindly, but I don't know that you've fully realized it."

Remus trades fast looks between Sirius and the road ahead. "What do you mean?" he bids.

"Well, I came from money, but do you think my brother and I saw much of it?" Sirius raises, shaking his head right quick. "The first thing I ever received that was truly mine all mine was my guitar and that came from James, who had a bi-monthly allowance for doing various tasks to help out around the house; me and Reg? We had trust funds that were busy accumulating somewhere behind a wall of smoke, out there in the ether, quietly collecting, so that when we transitioned into adulthood and took up the torch in the family business, we'd have more money than we'd ever know what to do with."

Remus takes a long breath in through his nose, stretching his neck from left to right, and ultimately reaches over to trace his left thumb over the heel of Sirius's open palm laid between them. "The evidence that we had money was all around us," Sirius lays down. "We had cooks, cleaners, no butler as we had the governess galloping around the place, a mantel made out of marble, a gargantuan chandelier, baroque playing constantly in the parlour to show off a sophisticated, high-brow taste, my father had the largest collection of brandy this side of the Isles that cost a pretty penny to maintain, my mother had a definite shopping habit and a strong eye for truly nauseating décor, they dressed us up in expensive clothing that was simply never play-oriented, brought us to lavish parties in matching tailor-made suits, taught us what money looked like and nothing of where it came from, so once I got out of there, I had me, my guitar, no money to my name, a piss-poor work ethic, no clue what I was doing, and a best mate and his doting parents that I had to mooch off of until I got some actual money of my own coming in."

Remus pushes a near-amused breath out of his nose and Sirius trains his gaze on him, checking to see if he's right about the amusement part, and there's that lip quirk. "How was that?" he raises, his left brow cocking up.

"Well, bad in the sense that I felt like a freeloading jerk for a while there, but they didn't expect me to just suddenly conjure up the money to help pitch in right away and that bought me time to find the right fit," Sirius answers. "I think there were about four months altogether where I couldn't help out much, but once I got in at the shop, I could afford to pitch in regularly and build up an actual bank account, so when I say I understand how hard it is to just let somebody handle the rest while you feel like you're not doing nearly enough to bring money in, I really do, Remus."

Remus huffs a breathy laugh, one that's born of newness. "I didn't know it took four months to land the shop," he offers him, looking over at Sirius with his head at a thoughtful tilt and a small shrug of his shoulders. "I always figured that fell into place rather quickly.

"Mhm, didn't happen right away," Sirius extends him. "I mean, I'd been trying to find something permanent, but I ran off in November and most of the jobs being advertised were seasonal, so I had to go with temporary stints until I got in at the shop."

Remus hums, even more piqued, it seems. "What’d you end up doing?"

Sirius takes in a charmed breath. "Well, I was a host at a gentlemen's lounge in Soho for a hot minute," he supplies, and Remus turns his head while they've got a long stretch of highway ahead of them with little congestion to showcase the little dance his brows are doing right up near his headline, his lopsided smile bright and blinding. "All I did was lead the men to their tables and hand menus and drinks to them; nothing fancy, but the men were nice to look at."

"As were you, I'm sure," Remus slips him. "Dress code?"

"Little go-go shorts," Sirius trades him, grinning away while Remus is busy doing a fine impression of Sirius's signature gape/grin hybrid. "I did get a hundred-pound note stuffed down the front of my shorts once, which was a bit arresting as I definitely thought that was something that only happened in the movies."

"OK, well, I don't like that part as much," Remus makes known.

"Oh, don't fret," Sirius extends, tossing an elegant glance Remus's way. "You can put your whole hand down the front of my go-go shorts any day.

Remus tosses a nod toward him. "And where are they?" he goads, taking his left hand off the wheel to snap it once.

"I outgrew those, but I could find a pair that you might like," Sirius trades him.

"Why just the hot minute, then?" Remus raises him.

"Mm, I didn't last a full two weeks because a table played a game of dine and dash and the manager wanted it to come out of my pay," Sirius smiles.

"No," Remus gives back, scandalized.

"Mhm," Sirius hums to affirm, "so I told him to stuff it and walked my sequin-covered arse right out of there that very moment."

"Good for you," Remus returns him.

"Mhm, and then James's mum hooked me up with a friend of hers, whose daughter was going to have to go off to some training course that would be about three months and wouldn't be able to take her massive white poodle with her while she did it, so I ended up looking after the dog for her," Sirius extends, grinning real, real big in response to Remus wee gasp. "Yeah, that was fun; wasn't going to make me rich or anything, but I got to hang out with a massive dog for a while so I was happy as a camper."

"I can just imagine," Remus echoes, giving Sirius a sidelong beam.

"And then it was actually pretty perfect timing, 'cause once she got back from her course and no longer needed my dog-sitting services, I'd already set up the interview for the shop and that was instantaneous seeing as I got hired in the room," Sirius finishes up.

"Of course you did," Remus accepts, huffing a laugh with it as he takes a left off the highway.

"I'm a charmer," Sirius offers merrily, "but all of that is to say, I really did start back up from scratch and believe it or not, I do know what it's like to be broke, scrambled up, feeling all sorts of ways about having to rely on others to keep you going even while it feels like utter shit to let them do it, just like I understand that agency and autonomy run so fucking deep for you because you've gone it alone at times where every single pound you were bringing in meant the difference between you literally eating properly, but we have to let people help us sometimes, even if stings to."

Remus's throat catches on a hitched breath. "I like that you gave me so much of yourself just there, I really do, but I've always made sure I could eat, Sirius," he edits.

Sirius gives him one slow blink for latching onto that one detail. "I met you when you were going hungry, Remus," he slips him, giving him a toothy grimace to accompany it.

"We met in September," Remus corrects, tapping his left forefinger against Sirius's right palm correctively, "when I still had a decent fund left after tuition and had blocked out rent for the rest of the term; I was being precautious while still feeling the pressure to bring in money where I could, hence the job I got at your shop—"

"Oh oh, my bad, my bad," Sirius gives up, lifting his hands sardonically. "Not specific enough; that's me."

"No, you're not," Remus runs with it. "You're conflating things; you wandered into my flat mid-November and judged my scarcely packed fridge even though it was a non-pay week and I'd just paid one massive and surprise utility bill because I'd been far too trigger-happy with the heating in my flat; you couldn't have caught me at a worse time, but I wasn't starving for weeks on end before you wandered in."

Sirius huffs long. "Well, thanks for the laundry list of a receipt," he returns him. "All I'm saying is, only a person that versed in skimming their way through meals during a particularly expensive week would simply shrug and live off soup until payday: I got a strong feeling it wasn't the first time you had to do it and I still have that feeling now, but you know what, those days are gone, babey, gone; you're never going to have to resort to that again so long as I can help it, and guess what? I can help it and I'm all over the idea of renting whichever flat makes the most sense for you to stay in when the time comes."

Remus takes in a lengthy breath, keeps it held in for a fair few beats, but comes back with the exhale and a list of conditions within a very sudden moment. "I'm paying for my utilities, my transit pass, my mobile bill, my food, and anything that falls under the category of mad money," he lays down.

Sirius brightens with joy upon joy. "I'm dreaming," he puts out wondrously.

"Those are my terms," Remus reiterates, knocking his right fist against the wheel like a gavel.

"I'm all for this, I am, but I've two amendments," Sirius puts in, pressing his hands together in the form of a prayer and getting a firm nod from Remus to continue. "One, what you consider a full fridge of food is not what I consider one, so that's to be renegotiated when the time comes, and two, considering my wild, card-bearing hand and all, we'll indeed have to renegotiate the mad money terms whenever I've come to visit, which I'll be doing just about any time I can swing it."

"Well, it'll be your flat so, by all means, stay the night," Remus retorts, but he appears to note around the same time Sirius does that said retort was hardly hard-hitting.

Sirius tosses his hair over his shoulder with his free hand. "You're going to let me stay the night, harlot?" he raises him, fluttering his lashes.

"Yeah, I'll let you," Remus returns him, objectively not hiding his smile very well at all.

Sirius turns his head to smile and gaze out his passenger side window like the living cheeseball he is, and that's how he realizes they've made it back to the side of town that he's most familiar with, feeling warm in his stomach, half for the victory, half for the glimpse of the large plot of land that's home to the vast antique mall. From there, he thinks he pinpoints the street Lyall's shop is on as they pass it heading up to the main, and after that, he finds another familiar landmark in the red-bricked bank building that's on the left corner of the street they've come up on; they've officially gone full circle.

Remus takes a right onto the main, gliding them down the bustling road from there. "I think I'll see what sort of parking they've got around back," he shares, taking a left of the very next intersection, "and then, if we're shit out of luck with that, we'll just have to get creative."

Sirius piques. “Does parallel parking count as creative for you?” he raises.

“It does not,” Remus supplies.

Sirius lifts his right hand to cup it around his mouth for extra volume. “Boo,” he trumpets at him. “You did it before.”

“That was an emergency situation and I almost bumped the car ahead of us trying to do it, so I’m twice as glad to hear that you completely missed it,” Remus returns him, making another left that takes the truck back up the first street over from the main. “For the last time: I don't dabble in parallel parking unless I've truly no other option, I've ample amount of space to work with, there are no other witnesses in sight, and apparently when you’re having a Moment; that one’s newest, but the others have been my terms since day one and they'll be my terms for eons to come unless I get struck with a sudden yet violent bout of amnesia, so you're just going to have to cross your fingers and hope it comes to that.”

Sirius mulls that over for a true second. “Well, that's entirely unfair,” he objects.

Remus sends a scoff of a laugh sidelong at him, pulling the truck into a parking lot on their left. “No, what's unfair is you being so adamant about seeing me struggle to fit this beast in between two parked cars on the side of the road while there's oncoming traffic and a queue of cars behind me slowly going mad while I hold them up," he returns him.

Sirius puts up a hand. “I never said I wanted that nightmare scenario for you, only that I'd like to see you give it a whirl and then maybe I’d get to critique your technique a bit for shits and giggles,” he corrects him, and Remus sure huffs up a storm while he taxis the truck around the right side of the lot to bring them around to the front. “I shouldn't have to hope for amnesia to strike you down just to get to have a little fun; in fact, that'd be my nightmare scenario because you'd have forgotten me right along with your terms.”

Remus gives a frank hum there, bringing them toward three vacant stalls sitting side by side. “I'm not sold on the idea that I'd forget you if I did do an unfortunate dance with amnesia,” he delivers him, pulling the truck into the middle spot.

Sirius can't even say he minds the very specific cop-out of a parking strategy on display here, not with the butterflies living in his stomach buzzing about like they are. “I'm so sucking your dick for that one at some point,” he imparts, pressing to release his belt buckle with for decided click of punctuation.

Remus snorts once, pulling the gear shift into Park. “Right, now you're going to,” he quips, a vastly cheeky smile on his lips as he pulls the key from the ignition.

Sirius borks out a laugh, breaking free from his confines by tossing his belt sash aside with a flourish and turning in his seat to leave his purchase of strings in one of the bags in the back. He faces forward again, presses to bring his window up while Remus does the same with his own, and hums in question, pointing up at his visage with his free hand.

Remus looks over at him and works it out quickly. "You're fine," he lets him know, giving in to a smile and nod combo.

Sirius gives a wee shoulder shimmy, grateful to find he doesn't look too bad for someone who had a touch of a meltdown not all that long ago and reaching to pop open the passenger door. "Hey, is there any way I can convince you to be that cocky more often?” he puts up, shimmying himself down to the pavement with his hold on the door frame.

Remus gives a moyen hum as he touches down on the pavement over on the far side of the truck. “Do we think it’s possible that some if not most of the excitement that comes from my being cocky could be related to how sporadic that is?” he raises, calling it over to Sirius while he pops his door shut.

“Wow, didn’t know I’d signed up for a Philosophy class this afternoon,” Sirius sends back, heading past the cargo bed to wait for Remus there.

Remus puts out a breath of amusement as he presses to lock up. “All I’m saying is, if I went around thinking and talking like that all of the time, you’d have hardly been interested in me in the first place,” he wagers, coming round to meet back up with Sirius at the back of the truck, "and I would wonder if you’d even be celebrating these moments so much when they do come around."

He beckons Sirius toward a white brick building ahead of the lot, crossing the remaining section of the lot diagonally and leading him off toward a stone footpath that runs between the white building on their right and a parking lot to some sort of office building on the other side of a black gate that separates the two properties from each other. Sirius keeps close, some part of his brain registering quite a bit of intrigue over being led a secret way up to the main, but for the most part, he’s focusing on structuring a rebuttal.

“Well, touché to that, but the thing is, all I’ve ever wanted is for you to fully realize how fit you are,” he maintains, heading up the path behind Remus, who sends a decided pfft back to him.

“A valiant goal, but I’m not used to being thought of as even halfway fit and you know that,” he returns him.

Sirius reaches his left hand out and runs it along the gate beside him, playing it like a giant xylophone and getting a low, semi-melodic tune with it that he then hums along with for emphasis. “Well, I’d suggest you start getting used to it because you well know I find you fit as all hell, but on top of that, all I’m saying here is that the feeling I get in my body when you get even a little cocky is akin to somebody’s favourite team scoring a winning goal.”

Remus snorts up ahead and looks back over his shoulder at him. “Love when you pull analogies out of thin air,” he comments, facing forward again.

“It’s more observational evidence than directly out of thin air,” Sirius amends, smiling away back here as he reaches out to prod Remus at the small of his back with his right forefinger. “I don’t experience that sort of rush myself, but I have been in a crowded pub during a game and witnessed the entire place light up because of the winning goal and Cocky Remus releases about the same amount of serotonin in me if not more, so by all means, I certainly wouldn’t object to hearing from him even just a little more often.”

Remus huffs a laugh, shaking his head before turning it back toward him again and showcasing half a pointed smile. “I'll see what I can do, but I do think I’ve made progress in that area since we first started,” he mentions.

Sirius drops his right hand down to get it up underneath the hem of the Flyin’ Hawaiian to splay his fingertips over the skin at the small of Remus’s back. “Well, that's a fine point, sweetums,” he lets him have, giving the small of Remus's back a trace with his fingertips. “You started way back in the negatives and have gone passed zero at this point, but the moral here is, keep fucking going with it because I like seeing it—”

Sirius jolts quick as a car door slams shut on the other side of the gate, looks in that direction to scan the area, and locks eyes with a man far closer to the gate and Sirius than would ever be alright with him, but it’s the staunch expression of unmasked disgust on the man’s face that has gun kicking his left leg out fast, jamming it against the metal beam between him and the other man.

The single act sends a wobbly echo of vibration up and down the gate that hangs loudly in the air as Sirius breathes harshly, but it startled the man enough to get him to back up a solid step so there is that, but a quick study of the scene with fast-moving eyes helps him registers the particular colour and make of the vehicle the man just got out of, and there, he's darting his eyes up toward Remus, who’s fully booking it around the bend already.

Not looking to stick around any longer himself, Sirius books it right after him, following Remus past the spackles of people sitting around tables on the terrace and in through the propped-open door of the parlour, where Sirius can’t really do much more than freeze solid inside the establishment: the right side of the room is more or less what he’d have expected, an incredibly lengthy display case ahead of a queue of onlooking folks and a couple kiddos being lifted to be able to see into the treasure trove, a staff member behind the case bent inward and presumably scooping someone’s choice of ice cream onto a cone, another worker appears to be ringing through a gaggle of girls behind a gold, old-timey register and that machine in itself is quite something to look at, but Sirius must focus on the rest of the shop from there.

He finds it both similar in nature and aesthetic to the coffee/treat bar at the antique mall with its own '50s era decor, only this spot happens to be blasting a big band tune from speakers placed intermittently around the joint, there's neon mauve lighting glowing from the light fixtures hanging overhead which is just so utterly a choice and one Sirius heavily supports, there’s a red and black checkered theme going about the flooring as well as the tabletops of the collection of them going alongside the right side of the room that Sirius very supports — no, in fact, every detail of it all makes it even that much more evident that Remus knows his shit in regards to Sirius’s taste.

The only real part that he cannot support about this is the tense circumstance the two of them entered the place under; he can’t celebrate how seen and understood he feels while he knows in his bones that Remus is screaming nonsensical noises internally while externally putting on his work smile as the bloke behind the till greets the boy by name, garnering three girls halfway down the queue subsequently turn away from the display case to look around for him and suddenly, Remus is the star of a room in this quaint, but lively hamlet yet again.

Remus gives his best wave as he skirts past them, beckoning Sirius along with a quick wave of his other hand, and makes a beeline for the back of the room. Sirius follows after him quick, taking the same left down a corridor that's got an open door to what's definitely backroom down at the other end of it and taking a fast dip into the first door on the right after Remus, moving into a single-use bathroom and backing the door shut behind them.

There’s a lot to note about this room right off the bat: namely the equally neon mauve lighting, the smattering of illustrations of old Hollywood ladies pinned to the wall on the right side of the room, to offset your typical toilet, mirror, and sink combo across the room from the door, and generally speaking, the first impression Sirius gets of the room is that it’s right difficult to imagine that rather spacious counter beside the sink hasn’t been a prime hookup spot for horny adventurists, but he figures he ought to wait on asking for confirmation on that assumption when it does seem like an unnecessary observation to make while there’s a more pressing situation at hand.

A round-up of the good news: Remus beckoned Sirius to come with him for this, the bathroom is single-use so that shuts down the possibility of a two-stall situation with audience members coming and going from the room while Remus is having a Moment, and that boisterous big-band tune playing about the establishment continues to play out over a speaker somewhere close by on the far side of the door and will hopefully mask a good chunk if not most of their speech patterns from anyone wandering down the corridor while they’re in here.

A round-up of the bad news: Remus’s sunnies block out Sirius’s typical window to his brain and he's not too keen on the idea of Remus getting dinged by the neon lighting going on in the room so he'll have to rely on instinct and other facial cues to help Remus ride out this doom wave, he really quite likes the beat of the hip-hoppin' tune playing and already finds himself suppressing the urge to tap his feet along to it while inside of a rather delicate situation, and this whole regroup-in-the-loo manoeuvre they’re doing will look a tad fishy should they get spotted leaving it together, but that, he files away as a problem for future Sirius and Remus to deal with for the heavy pace of Remus’s breathing as well as his hands going up to hold tight at his curls are a tad more concerning just now.

Sirius looks behind him and reaches to snap the lock on the doorknob fast, stepping in close to Remus and moving to tackle the first thing he’d like to get done. “Hey, I know,” he puts down, reaching up to tug on the crooks of Remus’s elbows to signal that he’d appreciate it if he eased up on the tense hold he’s got on those curls. “I know, but you’re OK, I’m here, and we’ll sort the rest out.”

Remus visibly showcases effort in quelling the initial shockwaves; nodding wordlessly, letting Sirius bring his arms down for him, and pulling his lips into a small ‘o’ shape in an attempt to go slower with his breathing. Sirius puts the effort in to do the same, too, but it's not the easiest task for him for a different, goofier reason than Remus's; the fantastical plume of curls now resembles something more along the lines of a chef’s hat and it’s taking everything Sirius has got to not chortle heartily at what Remus’s hands have done to add to the already numerous details that make this tense moment in time feel like the two of them are really just humanoid subjects in a surrealist painting.

Sirius pushes on with it, rubbing his hands up and down Remus’s arms that now hang limply at his sides. “Didn’t take Tom’s papa for the ‘pop into work on a sunny Saturday’ sort,” he raises, giving into a half-grimace, half-smile.

Remus puts out the faintest of breaths that could have been a laugh in another scenario, but in this one, he gives in to a full face of unrestrained displeasure, reaching his right arm out from under Sirius’s grip and bringing his hand up to his mouth, where he fashions it into a makeshift pistol and pops it off underneath his palate for some vivid visual emphasis for how he's feeling about that, but to say Sirius hates that imagery now more than ever would be one doozy of an understatement.

“Stop that,” Sirius instructs, reaching up to latch onto Remus’s right wrist and tug it out of his mouth.

“Why?” Remus raises, putting out a disparaging laugh. “I’m an actual fucking ponce.”

“Who said? I've never suggested it,” Sirius cuts in, fighting Remus’s hand down past the entire radius of his face. “And I don’t want to see you doing that again.”

“What?” Remus questions it, and even without the open view of Remus’s eyes, Sirius can tell he’s being wildly blinked at.

“The gun thing, what else?” Sirius puts up, pointedly putting Remus’s right arm back by his side where it last was. “I know you’re upset, but you can’t just put that image in my head like that.”

“You’ve done it,” Remus mentions, on the defensive.

Sirius lets go of Remus's wrist ceremoniously, facing off against his own reflection. “Yeah, well, a lot’s changed, so why don’t we both try finding new ways to express our frustrations because suicide really just isn’t my fucking jam these days,” he gives back, and the moment Remus shrinks back is the same moment Sirius has to steel himself when he knows he’s going harder than either of them need him to be. “I don’t want to picture that so when you're upset like this, just try talking it out with me instead of doing something that’s going to send me reeling.”

Remus pushes out a hasty breath through his nose while he worries at his lower lip, does a shuffle on his feet, and starts up running the point of his right thumbnail against the side of his forefinger, and that particular Remus-ism is beginning to look and feel more and more like a form of self-inflicted punishment than the nervous tick Sirius presumed it to be many moons ago, but before he can stop him from doing that Remus steps in close and pulls him in for a tight hug.

“I’m really sorry,” he offers him, leaning down and in to hook his chin over Sirius’s right shoulder and hearing his long exhale for exactly what it is. “I know you don’t want to hear it, but I am and I should be."

"It's OK," Sirius sets down.

"No, it isn't," Remus insists. "For somebody who’s notorious for thinking, I really don’t do a ton of it when it counts.”

Sirius shakes his head quickly, lifting his arms up and scooping Remus in. “You’re do more than enough overall,” he gives him minutely. “It’s just different, seeing that now.”

Remus shakes his head quick, giving out a heavy sigh that Sirius can feel leaving him, pressed up close like they are. “Of course it is; I should have known better and then done better with it,” he returns, but there he puts out another disparaging laugh. “Theme of the day, apparently.”

Sirius clicks his tongue, moving back enough that he can get a solid shot of Remus’s face and so Remus can get a solid shot of his frank expression. “Don’t know what you’re on about personally; you’ve been a right star today right up until that nightmare of a visual,” he rebuts.

Remus huffs listlessly at that, stepping back and flying his right hand toward the general direction of outside. “That’s where his office is, Sirius," he puts up. "What was I doing, talking like that while we were going through there? For fuck’s sake, the Audi was right there—”

“Alright, but you were looking back and forth between me and the promise of ice cream, so maybe it’s fair that you didn’t see the fucking Audi?” Sirius comes in, holding a metaphorical bat that’s got Remus printed down the front. “I didn’t see it until I suddenly very did so if you think about it, we both saw and registered it about the same time; do I get to be a ponce, too?”

Remus huffs again, harsher this time. “You don’t know where we even are,” he puts up. “I’m the one who should have known better than to be discussing that while we were going that way; it was a rookie move and I really would have thought I’d be smarter than that, but apparently I’m a fucking novice.”

“OK, back it up,” Sirius bids, rolling his hands with it for emphasis. “You’re not a novice for not sensing that Tommy McGee’s dad was going to be stopping in at work on a Saturday right, right, right, when we’d be wandering by talking about that; you’d have to be an oracle to predict that and I would almost have to be impressed.”

Remus pushes a steamed breath through his nose. “Stop making jokes,” he returns.

“It’s just the truth,” Sirius comes back, doubling down. “I don’t want you beating yourself up for something we both weren’t paying perfect attention to, and I sure as fuck don’t want you thinking that this, precisely, is what you get for letting go and taking some time out of your head to actually—”

“Uhm, hi, this is me?” Remus reminds him. “Of course that happened while we were walking by there; that’s precisely on-brand with my life and now you’re in it, lucky you.”

“Worth it,” Sirius underlines, moving in to place a kiss on the tip of Remus’s nose.

“Sirius,” Remus gives him weakly.

“Alright fine, you want to play? It’s one of two things, then,” Sirius puts up, lifting his arms to drape his arms around the back of Remus’s neck and settling in comfortably, “either you’re right and you're a fucking novice, or, it could be that we were being the lovesick buffoons that we are and weren’t on the lookout Tom’s papa just then, and between you and me, I know which option I think it is.”

“He heard us, Sirius,” Remus puts down, but it’s with so much less fervour than the last few points he’s made that Sirius’s chest sinks.

Even while Sirius knows it’s true, he has to challenge himself on that fact alongside Remus. “We don’t really know what or how much he heard, do we?” he raises.

Remus’s right brow cocks higher than his left one, a pointed frown etched on his lips. “He clearly heard enough.”

“Did he, though?” Sirius keeps with it, bringing his right hand down from around Remus’s neck to smooth out the lapel of the Flyin’ Hawaiian. “Maybe it’s that he’s not a fan of seeing long, luscious locks on a man and decided to let his face tell me that for him—” he trails off quickly for Remus doesn’t even reach for the bait, trying for a different angle to come at this with and tapping Remus’s chest with an air of accomplishment. “Alright, so he did hear us; what of it?”

It’d be nice if Remus simply slipped his arms around Sirius’s middle so they could complete this impromptu, dance partner positioning, but he’s a bit busy sputtering. “'What of it?'” he repeats, stunned.

“What’d he hear that was so incriminating, hm?” Sirius puts up.

“I said the words, when we first started,” Remus gives him.

Sirius lifts a shoulder. “Could have been talking about our bi-weekly games of chess for all he knows.”

Remus’s mouth hangs half-open, poised to speak. “I—” he tries, but he settles for shaking his head numbly at Sirius.

“OK, chess is a little off-brand for us,” Sirius lets him have, trucking onward, “but my point is, you could have meant literally anything by that.”

Remus reaches his hands behind him to circle them wildly at his back. “Your hands were all up in here—”

Sirius puffs up grand. “Well, you didn’t exactly throw them off, so forgive me if I didn’t preemptively take them back like I’d made some horrible faux-pas—”

“I’m not saying that,” Remus asserts. “I'm saying, the 'when we first started' quip, plus the hands, plus you calling me 'sweetums' back there equal out to a sight that doesn't exactly scream a couple of blokes out on a stroll.”

Sirius looks left toward an illustrated snap of Marilyn Monroe on the left-hand wall and locks eyes with her, sure feeling like she’s on his side of this debate. “So?” he raises, looking back to Remus. “Pet names and some wild hands aren’t going to stand in court.”

Remus gives a frank sigh. “This is getting a bit ridiculous,” he puts down. “I love you, but it is; who are you actually trying to convince right now, me or you?”

Sirius looks left, right, and back at Remus again, but to say he isn’t a tad disarmed would be a lie for when Remus is right, he’s right. “Both of us,” he admits, lifting his shoulders as newfound sheepishness washes over him.

“I was getting that sense,” Remus nods, forwarding Sirius a sheepish gaze of his own. “You right lampooned that gate.”

Sirius lifts his right hand and links it with his left hand at the back of Remus’s neck, leaning upward and pressing his forehead against Remus’s own. “I mean, if we’re being honest, I lampooned it before I knew who he was,” he offers up, but he trails off there, running his top teeth over his lower lip for a few beats before adopting a rather tight smile. “I may or may not have more trouble with strangers looking in on us like we’re an infestation than I let on.”

Remus puts his head on a left-hanging tilt, a ghost of a smile showing up on his lips before a heavy breath leaves his chest. “Do you have any idea how much help it would be to me if you would just, say that more?” he raises, pushing his arms around Sirius’s waist and linking his hands at the small of his back.

“A lot, I’m gathering,” Sirius allows for, keeping the sheepishness while adding in a smile.

Remus takes in a grand sniff, swishing the point of his mouth back and forth. “You’ve such a ‘fuck all of you, Imma do what I want,’ energy that I find admirable, I do, but sometimes it’s like I’m on the rafter alone,” he puts it, his voice thick but gentle for certain, though the latter doesn’t wholly have Sirius feeling like he’s off the hook.

“Well, you’re not,” Sirius gives him. “It fucks with me, too: I hate that we can be having the best time together not thinking of anybody else and suddenly we have to think about how we’re being perceived, but I can’t let it fuck with me to the point where I don’t get to enjoy everything I deserve to and I can’t let it fuck with you either, so I discredit onlookers whenever they do make themselves quite known, but I swear I’m not trying to be insensitive; I don’t know if you’ve sensed this, but I have this near-compulsion to—”

“Fix things,” Remus finishes for him, letting that smile fly free.

Of all the conversations to have inside a swanky bathroom, one this bare is a myriad of things for Sirius; has him feeling vulnerable, understood, and a bit amused, if he’s fully honest. “Got me,” he admits, giving in to a grin. “But here’s the thing, though, Remus; who cares if he did?”

“I do,” Remus puts it, not unkindly. “And I think we just established that you do, too.”

“And I do, full disclosure; I’m talking myself down while trying to get you there, too, OK, but it can’t only be a defence mechanism, can it?” Sirius raises. “Go with me on this one: on some level, what does he mean to us, in the end? You’re well shot of Tom, why should his dad get to have power over you and he literally means nothing to me when you get down to it.”

For a few beats, Sirius reads Remus’s subdued expression as progress, but those beats end and Remus pushes out a heavy breath. “No, this is bad, Sirius,” he puts it. “He could read into what he saw and heard for exactly what it was, pinpoint the fact that Tom and I were attached at the hip for years, work a few more details out from there, and that would be an explosion—”

You,” Sirius comes in, “have no control over what that man does with what he listened in on; none at all.”

“Oh, of course I do, Sirius, and I already blew it,” Remus snaps, but Sirius knows in his bones he’s more livid with himself than he'd ever be with him.

Sirius shakes his head once. “I’m not budging on this one.”

“Right, you’d like it if I’d only think of myself here,” Remus comes back.

Sirius gives out a wondrous breath. “Wouldn’t that be something.”

Remus’s nostrils flare extensively from the dragon’s breath he lets out. “Fine,” he gives curtly. “My mum telling Do about us was one thing, but Edgar getting even a little bit of a scoop on us is a complete other—”

Someone out in the corridor tries the doorknob, finds it locked, and still feels they ought to pound on it. “Well, obviously it’s taken,” Sirius calls out.

Remus gives him a sheepish frown. “Maybe we shouldn’t be taking up the loo for this,” he raises, his voice at a whisper even though a new big band tune plays out in the hall.

“They’ll get over it,” Sirius returns, waving that off.

“We’re not really using it to its intended purpose, and blocking the room for others to do that,” Remus reiterates.

“If they’ve got to go that badly, they’ll use the other one,” Sirius puts up, shrugging his shoulders once. “Keep going.”

Remus shuffles on his feet, hangs his head for a moment further, and keeps his voice low while delivering on Sirius’s request. “My mum telling her about us was not unexpected,” he puts it. “Do’s next in line to hear good news about me, that’s just a fact of life, and much more for my mum, I know I have to let her process this alongside me having to process that my parents’ friends are going to find out about me and you and this; I’m working it out, but it’s still an adjustment.”

Sirius knows there’s a connection to get to in regards to Edgar, but he takes a wee detour for the sake of Remus’s psyche anyway. “Yeah, I know,” he comes in, smiling small. “I froze up when your mum said that; like genuinely, actually worried about you, but you blew my mind with how well you just went with it, and then you had to go full Lyall on us all and none of us can or will ever want to complain about that, you’re doing amazing, sweetie—”

“Stop memeing me,” Remus comes in, quick as a whip.

“Oh, come off it, I had to,” Sirius returns, quelling his budding smile. “You’re doing so much better than you’re giving yourself any credit for and I know I saw you let it go and of course I’m beyond proud of you for that, but it really would have been fair if you hadn’t been alright with it and I wouldn’t have been able to say all that much about it; this is still a Thing for you.”

In typical Remus fashion, he puts out a tight breath and bats away the patience afforded to him. “Well, I’m trying to do this other thing where I understand and respect that my mum’s a person who’s got a kid who just came out to her and is well within her rights to talk to her best friend about it,” he poses him. “I realize I’ve got it good here; it went over much better than it could have, the terrace blessedly had two other folks sitting on it that I didn’t recognize so they’d hardly know us, and I don’t have to lay awake at night worrying that somebody who does know both of us overheard them talking, but to top it off, Do likely already thinks you’re perfect for me because you’re you and engaging beyond belief—”

“Wow,” Sirius observes, quite charmed, “you really think so?”

“You know I do,” Remus lobs him, giving him a plain look before circling back to put a bow on his spiel. “I know I need to count my blessings here, but Edgar is not Do."

Sirius clicks his tongue thoughtfully. “I do get those two mixed up a lot,” he slips him, but Remus huffs long and loud for it. “I just want you to catch a smile wherever you can, Remus; come on.”

“A valiant goal, but I need you to hear me out,” Remus insists. “It’d be just like him to mention it to one of his colleagues and I’ve no control over what they might do with that information, and to that, he’s definitely going to go back to his wife with it, and sure, I could say she’s less openly hostile toward our sort than he is, but the barometer is low and I’m someone to believe on this one because I’ve personally heard her talk about our sort and it’s dripping with pity: to her, we’re touched in the head, need professional help, and anyone who supports us is encouraging mental illness.”

Sirius’s right eye twitches before a melodic but pointed hum escapes his throat. “Sounds like a peach,” he gives up sweetly.

It’s helpful at least to be able to plainly see the palpable effort Remus takes to mask his smile. “She’s also got quite a gift of the gab, so when I say she could easily mention the new whispers about the Lupin kid that her son thankfully doesn’t hang around with anymore to her gals, and then those gals could mention it to their husbands and some of their children even, who may or may not remember the Lupin kid they once went to school with and may or may not be interested in spreading the news about him; I’m not just being my anxious self, I’m going off of what it's like here,” he stresses. “The flack that my mum and dad could get for this makes me want to crawl in a hole and never come back out of it because if Tom’s mum has control over the narrative, it’ll be less about the revulsion Edgar feels at the mere idea of our sort and more about what my parents did or didn’t do for my sick, sad self.”

There’s a bolt of heat not unlike a fireball that shoots up Sirius’s spine that has him doubling down on the weight of his hands on Remus’s shoulders, partially to ground Remus, but definitely to ground himself, too. “OK, I’m not saying you’re wrong or that it wouldn’t be devastating for that to become the narrative,” he makes sure to say, “and I know I don’t always get you right, but I do know that when you’re up against your own nerves, you don’t always have the clearest set of eyes, but I’m nothing if not great for perspective so I can be your glasses right now and remind you that you told me just today that your parents have already dealt with something somewhat similar to this before, only with a grade school teacher who had the wrong idea about you and the job they were doing with you, and I think, deep down somewhere, you know as well as I do that they would show the fuck up for you again in a heartbeat if—”

“Well, I sure am sensing that well and clear after this morning, but that doesn’t mean I want them to have to defend their parenting to them or anybody,” Remus stresses.

“Right, but if it came down to it, they would show up for you and wouldn’t even have to think twice about it,” Sirius keeps with it. “That’s all I’m saying, they’re champions, those two; Hope's tough to go up against and I know that because I squared up and she gave me a run for my money, and Lyall? Pfft, he’s ready to throw down for you no matter who, when, where, what, and how, but I’ve this funny feeling he’d be glad to kick a man’s head in if he started spouting words about his kid and I’d be willing to bet he’d use his prosthetic so it’d hurt that much more—”

Sirius trails off at the toothy grimace Remus gives him and for a moment, it’s very clear he’s trying to pull free from him, but no way is that happening; Sirius drops his hands from Remus’s shoulders and brings them around behind him to keep Remus’s hands in place at the small of his back.

“I meant that with every ounce of respect and love I have in my body for that man,” he accentuates.

Remus gives out a tiny huff of a laugh. “You don’t have to tell me that," he assures, giving a fast shrug.

“Well, it feels like I should, given that you did this,” Sirius raises, doing an impression of Remus’s toothy grimace.

“Of course I did,” Remus returns. “I’d really rather it not get to the point where the prosthetic comes off, shockingly.”

Sirius nods, working with a soothing voice in hopes that he will follow his own lead. “Right,” he nods again, breathing in once. “I’m going to need a second because I really, really thought I was in deep shit just there.”

Remus clicks his tongue, shaking his head at him. “OK, how's this?” he raises, lifting his hands to squeeze him at his middle. “So long as you don’t go around treating my dad like he lost his actual humanity along with the foot, you won’t have me fucked off at you.”

Sirius nods fast. “I’d never want to do that," he puts plain.

“I’m very aware of that,” Remus extends him. “I’m just saying, that’s one of the extremes and you’re nowhere near it, but right now, you're actually getting close to the other extreme and I don’t want you there either.”

Sirius looks left at Marilyn again, but she seems to be on Remus’s wavelength this time. “What’s the other one?”

“This is just life for my dad now, so the way to keep on with it isn’t to go around pretending he doesn’t have a prosthetic; he's not interested in that,” Remus puts it. “Quite the opposite; it’s there and will be from now on, but he didn’t lose it in ‘Nam and it’s not a Thing that none of us can speak of, let alone joke about.”

Even while he’s appreciative of the method used to quell his reservations, Sirius puts a lot of effort into not smirking too heavily and dips his face down to hide it against the crook of Remus’s neck, just in case he’s still walking on thin ice. “I don’t want you to think of me as crass,” he mumbles.

Remus pushes a series of breathy laughs through his nose. “Bit late for that,” he snickers, fighting one hell of a grin by the sound of it, and Sirius lifts his head quick, giving out his best impression of Remus’s dragon breath. “Well, come on, now; I crossed that bridge September last and was still all about you; I have long since embraced the crass side of you with something between admiration and horror, but I know you know that because you have worked to get me flushed in public and dialled that crass side of yours up just to watch me squirm so don't even try to deny it.”

Sirius breathes in long, a new, wide grin etched on his lips. “You’ve got me there, pal,” he lets him have.

Remus leans in and gives the tip of Sirius’s nose a brush that would have been a kiss if a bunch of smirks didn’t leave his own nose. “You’ve been great about my dad’s situation since the second he took the prosthetic foot off in front of you; why would I think you’re suddenly—”

“Yeah, and with no help from you on the warning factor,” Sirius gets him again, unable to not.

Remus clicks his tongue. “I didn’t know he was just going to pop it off right there,” he upheaves. “That's not the point; the point is, you’ve been incredible about it from the get so I'm not going to bite your head off because you chewed some of the scenery while trying to make a point and that's really all you did there.”

Sirius shakes his head clear and resolves to accept that today Remus doesn’t appear to think his heart is as black as his name. He reaches his right hand up to work on smoothing out the chef’s hat o’ hair atop Remus’s head, striving to come back from a derailment of his own fault. “Well, if you agree that your parents are tough as nails and can handle themselves,” he revisits, pausing for Remus to give him a signal that this is indeed true, which he gets in the form of a lip twitch, “then I’d really rather shift the focus back onto you since you’re the one who’s having trouble at the moment, not them.”

Remus takes in a long breath through his nose, shuffles on his feet some, and leans more into Sirius. “It’s like one moment, I’m finally feeling what free feels like, floating around lighter than air, and the next one, I’m mucking up and taking others down with me—”

“Ah, mm mm,” Sirius denies. “Ignore everybody else; we’re talking about you.”

“Fine, then I know I’m just yo-yo-ing you around because one moment, I’m introducing you to my Awakening and the next, I’m shaking in the loo because I’m not ready for my news to be everybody else’s, and I know that that’s difficult to keep up with,” he rattles off.

“That—” Sirius starts, hesitating there before striving onward with an even tone when right about now Remus could likely benefit from it, “that’s not yo-yo-ing me around, Remus.”

“It isn’t?” Remus puts up skeptically, disparately.

“Just because we’re in a loo having a Moment doesn’t mean you went forward two steps and then back a thousand of them in one go,” Sirius puts down. “I see what you’re doing: you're out here testing the waters, having a little fun with it, and sure, you ended up getting a touch too close to the edge of a waterfall, but guess who’s here to pull you back before you start free-falling down it?”

Remus pushes out the tiniest breath, frown lines creasing his forehead. “Sirius,” he gives weakly.

“With feeling,” Sirius goads, giving into a half-smirk.

Remus huffs, but Sirius merely blinks until Remus speaks it again. “Sirius,” he repeats, not with the exact amount of feeling Sirius would have to cheer over, but it’s with better conviction and diction than the first one.

Sirius goes up on the toes of his shoes to come in from above to avoid crushing Remus’s sunnies in between them as he presses his forehead against Remus’s crimped one. “I know you think you’re three seconds from sending everyone around you away by making one mistake, but I love you more than anything and I’d appreciate it if you’d take out the dagger that you put in your own back and quit thinking that I’m the one who put it there,” he broaches gently. “If I felt you were yo-yo-ing me around, I’d have gotten around to saying so by now because I’ve one fat mouth—” he pauses for a smile as Remus huffs out a laugh that seems to have surprised himself, “—no objection detected, I see, but that’s alright, nothing wrong with the truth, but here’s some more of that; agency matters more to you than I’ve known what to do with or even really known the depths of, but I’m seeing why that is more and more every day and it’s beyond fucking fair for you to be grasping for it when you’re dealing with this; I swear to you, I fucking see you, and I’m not about to turn on you because you lost control of the proverbial wheel and now it feels like you’re inside hell.”

Sirius blinks fast as Remus puts out a righteous sob. “No,” he puts down. “You’re not going to make me cry in this bathroom while there’s big band music playing in the background; I’m not allowing it.”

Sirius snorts, eyeing him once. “Too late, I’m guessing,” he lobs him.

“If you keep on like that, it will be,” Remus urges.

“Fine, I’ll go easier on you,” Sirius rewards, lips twitching all the while because hot damn, he’s still got it, “but we’re not leaving this bathroom until you look better — and I mean this in the best way, but you look like shit.”

Remus zooms his arms out from around Sirius’s waist to use them as prime prodding objects, administering a whole load of jabs to Sirius’s gut, but he grabs hold of Remus's wrists right quick, biting back a laugh to remain steadfast. “Say Tom’s ma and pa take this to several folks they know and they tell everyone they know, and on and on until everyone here does,” he raises him, concisely. “It’ll be rough, I'm not saying it wouldn't be, and I know that because even though it might be nice if they would, not everybody’s going to hear that news and reply with, 'so?' or 'oh, my nephew is, too' or even ' I just love Neil Patrick Harris; such a showman—'” Remus chokes on a breath that sure sounds like a stifled laugh, but Sirius keeps on going even while all the muscles around his mouth want him to stop and enjoy this for a moment; he’s got to finish, “—but on the other hand, you and I did link hands and take a rather public but equally merry jog through a bustling intersection on the main a couple hours ago and nobody called out 'fackin’ queers' and ran after us with torches, did they? Granted, I can’t say for sure if we got a Look or two for it when I was a little busy being high on you and life, but you tell me, did you see anything like that?”

Remus pulls the right side of his lower lip into his mouth, shaking his head minutely. “No, but I was just as high as on you and life,” he offers him, and Sirius brightens that much more, relieved to have read the energy of that moment properly; he eases up his grip around Remus’s wrists, trusting him not to make him regret that move, and while he doesn't do that, Remus falls right back into a wince the moment he’s free, sticking his hands right back into his plume of hair. “Fucking shit — it wasn’t like this with Tom, I swear; I never slipped up, spoke too carelessly, touched him out in public, and I don’t know how to manage this now that it could spread like wildfire.”

Sirius pushes the point of his lips side to side, halfway hiding his pleasure in hearing that. “Do you think it’s at all possible that a good chunk of the people in this town could surprise you on this one, though?” he raises, reaching up to smooth the palms of his hands up and down Remus’s raised arms. Remus’s left shoulder goes up in a minute shrug while he worries at his lower lip some more, but that’s a bid to keep talking even in the simplest form and that, Sirius can do in spades, giving a cock of his right brow and a suggestive smile. “Do you know of a certain Beatie around these parts?”

Remus nods fast, giving up a small sniff as he lets go of his lower lip to speak it out. “She’s Angela’s James,” he provides him, and Sirius can barely contain his excitement so it's fair Remus catches that and gives him a brow shift in question, letting his hands loose from his hair. “She was on today, I take it?”

Sirius nods intently. “You bet your arse she was, and listen here, pal; she and I hit it off well in there—” he pauses to hum a charmed mhm at Remus’s lip twitch, reaching to tug on the hem of the Flyin’ Hawaiian that Remus is wearing like fine art and will forever wear like fine art should he choose to put it back on again down the line, “—mhm, we trauma bonded over our funky names, she had a whip-fast spunky attitude so you know I appreciated that sort of thing, and she hooked me up with that fine specimen of a shirt you now have, was so pumped that somebody was looking to nab it and look, I don’t know her or anything, but you can’t fake that kind of thing; I don’t care if you’re about to make a sale or not, her eyes lit up with genuine excitement so I liked her twice as much as I already did, and I didn’t name any names or anything, but I did say that the shirt was a prank gift for my boyfriend and all that chicka did with that information was laugh and give me something like, 'well, now I’m twice as glad you’re getting it—’”

“You little shits,” Remus comes in, miming a sock to Sirius’s gut that’s likely meant for both him and Beatie.

“Don’t you even,” Sirius denies, huffing a laugh and catching Remus’s loosely clamped left fist with his right hand. “You’re lucky I wanted to prank you with it because now you’ve got it and look beyond good in it, and that’s definitely not even the point; the point is, the boyfriend slip didn’t bring on some terrible, weighty pause, she didn’t even blink over it, just gave a quip and we moved right along, and maybe I’m just naïve, but I do know when somebody’s heard the slip and double-blinked because of it, and I just don’t believe you can fake that kind of ease unless it’s just in you.”

“You’re not naïve,” Remus comes in, because that’s got to be the first highlight he sections off to comment on, but alongside the inherent tenderness that comes with, it does give Sirius one hell of a boost.

“Exactly,” Sirius puts it, smiling sweetly. “The reason I’m even bringing her up is that she hardly reacted to the slip, but it's also very possible she could spot us out and about someday while we’re here and put two and two together, or she could hear the rumour train that Tom’s parents could start up, and theorize that the bloke she talked to is the same mystery man who came through town attached to you, but either way, I feel like she’d be far cooler with it than not and I bet you with Angela, it'd be the same thing because that girl was so excited to see you yesterday, she nearly bowled you over just getting to you, so if she were to also hear the news and figure out that the absolute stud walking around the mall with you that day was indeed the mystery bloke about the town, then why on Cunt’s green earth would she be anything other than majorly excited for you?”

Remus’s shoulders do quite a bit of sagging there, but his expression softens to something more along the lines of wistful. “I really want that to be the reaction,” he gives up.

“Well, in that case, I really feel you might just get what you want this time,” Sirius offers him, smiling pristinely there. “You know, kind of like when you once wanted to date me real, real bad and then eventually got to—” Remus huffs grand, a gape/grin on his lips within a true second, “—well, I’m just saying; I agree that your luck can be terrible sometimes, particularly because I know you deserve the entire world while it keeps trying to take things from you, but sometimes, you do get the good stuff where it counts.”

Remus lets a long breath out through his nose that Sirius feels every tickle of while Remus is nuzzling him. “You’ve got me there,” he lets him have, a little above a whisper.

Sirius nuzzles him right back. “And, if all of that hasn’t been enough, just look how beloved you are around here?” he tacks on. “You can hardly go anywhere without getting stopped and I know that plays a part in why you’re so nervous about this, but I also understand why so many of these folks are enamoured by you and it’s not just because you’re you and I know firsthand the way you light up a room when you enter it—”

Remus pushes a smirk out there. “Well, a man who’s naturally incandescent would know a thing or two about it, wouldn’t he,” he puts in, his lips curled pointedly, his voice low, his whole demeanour sly upon sly, and Sirius is suddenly very horny; no other way to put it.

“Listen, you,” Sirius puts down, “you’re not allowed to be sneaking smooth lines in while I’m trying to—”

Remus lets out a hybrid between a scoff and a laugh. “All you ever do is slide smooth lines in for me whenever you bloody well can, but OK there,” he delivers, smiling cheekily.

Sirius huffs, stamping his right foot on the floor. “I’m almost done tying this all together, monsieur,” he instils. “And it’s going to be a real cutesy conclusion at that; best to gird those loins now.”

Remus’s smile twitches. “Girded,” he prompts.

Sirius nods once in thanks. “It’s not just that you’re a walking light source,” he reiterates, reaching up to trace his right thumb in a half-moon at Remus's left cheek and feeling the muscles beneath the pad of his thumb twitch as Remus’s smile widens to near-capacity. “So many of the folks here have either watched you grow up into this polite, lovely man who is a right carbon fusion of his equally beloved parents or they’re folks who would have grown up with you and it’s definitely getting clearer and clearer to me that you were far more noticed back in the day than you've ever let on, you saucy little minx, but what if all that means there'll be a ton of folks around here who could hear the news and wind up being totally supportive of you or even just completely indifferent to who you wound up partnered with; wouldn’t either one be a treat?”

Remus shuffles a little on his feet after Sirius pauses for his input, but his mouth is all twisted up and his face feels warm to the touch, and those two details added together suggest that Sirius is fused against one wooed lad.

Sirius beams. “So, there we have it: I’m not going to say your worries aren’t a direct result of lived experience or that they’re not based in reality because I know they are, but so are my findings and I think it’s possible that the result of all of this could wind up being a little of both of our predictions, and you know what?” he raises, and Remus hums in prompt after Sirius taps on his cheek for emphasis. “I know I egged you on to be a little selfish with this one, but if I can just add myself into this equation, no matter what sort of feedback we get on our business, I’m going to be right there with you whatever comes our way. Yes?”

Remus gives a bouldered noise at the back of his throat and seems to think his profuse nod will cut it, but not quite. “No, Remus, that’s not enough,” he denies. “You’re not going to end up alone in this, so you need to say it out loud for me.”

Remus spends a second or three working on clearing that throat of his. “Yes,” he echoes, clear and concise. “Thank you.”

Sirius flashes him a grin, shaking his head. “Been a pleasure,” he gives simply, though Remus gives a substantial pfft in response to it, a half-smile on his lips. “Stop, I’m not buttering you up at all; it’s just true.”

Remus gives a wistful sort of sigh, ducking his head while working his way through quite the face journey. "What's that for?" Sirius prompts, doing a hearty impression of Remus's smile.

Remus half-smirks at being figured out at least a little bit, his lips twitch from side to side like he’s trying to decide whether to let them pull up into even more of a smile. “Beatie,” he says fondly, and there he does let himself give such an endearing little grin that Sirius can't help matching. "I’m glad she was nice to you about it."

"Mhm, you really knew how to pick some of your mates, I'll give you that," Sirius lobs him, but Remus's grin peters off some with that and garners Sirius to tilt his head toward him. "What's that for?"

Remus puts a frown where his grin once was. "Nothing, she and Angela still send me happy birthday texts every year even though I've really dropped off the map since I've been gone," he offers, a rather guilt-ridden look about him now.

"Well, have you been returning the favour when it's your turn?" Sirius raises.

"Well, yeah, of course," Remus trades him. "It's Just — after seeing Angela again and how lively she was with me, and hearing that tale, it does get me feeling more a little guilty about not keeping up with either of them as much as I should have been, especially my first year out there; I barely gave it an effort."

Sirius huffs quite pointedly at him. "Remus, almost everybody falls off the map for a while when they hit uni, especially if they've gone somewhere else for it," he extends him. “People get busy, I’m sure they were, too, and didn’t put your name in their burn book.”

"We exchanged numbers once I got out there, but I didn’t keep up with either of them like I did here,” Remus ruminates, undeterred. “When I say I dropped off the map, I’m not saying it loosely; I barely picked up my mobile for anyone that wasn't my mum or dad checking in.”

“OK, but you were literally heartbroken at the time,” Sirius mentions. “Context, my man; she is everything.”

“Well, they didn’t know that,” Remus puts up.

“Does it matter? I’m letting you off the hook here,” Sirius puts up. "I do find it a shame you didn't rebound on him once or see what dating someone else would've been like so you could see Tom wasn't it sooner, but I know you weren’t in the frame of mind to explore and enjoy your freedom away from him until you were; you had a rough go and even if I hate the thought of you shutting yourself away, it's fair that you pulled back a little from just about everybody for a while there."

Remus shuffles from one foot to the other. “I can still feel bad for being a shit mate, even if there were reasons for it,” he puts it.

“OK, but really, I think that was another 'Remus pulls back so nobody knows he’s having a rough go' situation and a lot less about them personally,” Sirius swings back. “Obviously, you have corresponded with Angela more this year than you did the last couple and she still fucking adores you, and sure, Beatie and I didn't get to talking specifically about Remus Jean Lupin while I was in there, but if she's Angela's James then I can't imagine word won't get around that you're back in town and things could be just as sweet as they ever were; call me idealistic if you want, but I'm really just feeling the situation out by my gut and that thing is telling me that neither of them holds hard feelings toward you."

Remus shuffles from one foot to the other, a verklempt little frown on his face with a dusting of rouge around the cheek area. "I hope you're right about that one, too," he offers him.

"Cool, 'cause statistically speaking, I probably am," Sirius breaks it, smiling for him. "I mean, Angela clearly wants to catch up while you’re here; were you planning on taking her up on that?”

Remus nods there. “Well, yeah,” he puts up, smiling pointedly. “I was figuring sometime later in the week, but yeah, of course.”

“Well, ask Beatie along, too, and I bet you'll be chirping like a gaggle of girls in no time,” Sirius says of it, putting a royal smile on.

Remus’s smile, while not of the royal kind, heads into something more along the lines of bright and that'll do. “You’ll want to come too, right?” he checks, smiling even bigger there.

“Are you kidding me?” Sirius returns, tossing a bit of hair past his right shoulder. “You’d better tote me around those two because I’m a whole lot of fun; ask Beatie, she’d agree.”

“Well, I don’t know that I’d need to ask her about it as I find you a whopping amount of fun already,” Remus offers him, biting his budding smile, “but I’d like you to get to meet them, and for them to meet you for real.”

“I’m a million times down for it,” Sirius returns him, “but for now, what do we think; can we go back out there, join the rest of civilization?”

Remus smirks, tilting his head back and forth evenly. “Probably ought to,” he allows, taking in a new breath and pushing it back out. “What do you think of the place?”

“You were right; it’s beyond my wildest dreams,” Sirius determines. “I am thinking the second we’re out of here, though, I’m going to leave that corridor and pretend like I’m first walking into the place for the first time again; want to pretend with me?”

Remus nods freely, his smile splitting into a grin. “Sorry I ruined the entry,” he puts up, his grin turning into more of a light grimace.

Sirius waves him off with a plain blink. “Don’t think it was you who ruined it,” he slips him. “No matter, we can have a re-do, but first—” he lifts his left hand to circle it around the room, “—is this a hookup spot?”

Remus hums a non-committal note, but that just gets Sirius blinking over and over again at him until he sighs. "I know of one or two who may have decided taking somebody in here was easier than taking them home," he slips him.

“Were you one of them?” Sirius raises, popping his brows to the top of his forehead and back down again.

Remus clicks his tongue. “You know I wasn't,” he returns. “I’m not a loo tryst kind of man and you’re just going to have to accept that—”

He cuts off as somebody tries the door and Sirius’s eyebrows take a journey back up his forehead. “Well, you’re about to look the type real soon,” he smiles.

“Fuck off,” Remus hisses.

Sirius huffs a laugh, putting his hands up for mercy as he turns for the door. “I’ll go first and scare him off, then you follow me out once I give the signal,” he tells him.

“What’s that going to be?” Remus whispers.

“You’ll see,” Sirius croons.

“What’s the signal going to be?” Remus bids him.

“Shh,” Sirius sends him, unlocking the door and slipping out of it through a Sirius-sized gap he fashions between the door and the frame, where a bloke aged somewhere around their years can be seen leaning against the wall across from the door. “The roll just ran out in there; I’d knick one from that one or just sneak in there yourself.”

“Well shit, thanks,” the bloke trades him, turning to try the next door, but pauses before going through it, looking back at Sirius with a quick point. “Don’t snitch, now.”

“Not gonna,” Sirius returns him.

Once the door shuts, he turns around and uses his knuckles to drum a series of patterns into the door, which opens soon after Sirius really gets into it. “I’d have taken a text as the signal,” Remus comments, looking left and right down the corridor before slipping out of the bathroom.

“I wouldn’t be me if I just sent a simple text,” Sirius extends, following Remus down the corridor and back out into the swankiest ice cream parlour he ever did see.

Sirius scans the bustling shop from left to right, takes in a long inhale before letting it out in one go, and looks left at Remus, flashing a keen grin and getting a quick, but equally keen grin for it before Remus strolls over to the furthest of three fridges at the back and pulls out a pint of mint chip for Hope, or at least, it sure looks like it when the body of the pint is undoubtedly a light, bright green of the, shall he say, mint variety, complete with a solid black lid overtop it for a nice contrast.

Sirius watches with a fond smile on while Remus front faces the remaining three pints in the row before bumping the fridge door shut, smiles that much more as Remus holds the pint in his left hand and absently tippity-taps the side of it with the fingertips of his right hand as he looks between the three fridges searchingly, and grins as Remus looks back over at him, nodding Sirius over that way.

Sirius sidles on over to stand beside him and ahead of the three fridges. “You called,” he greets, sticking his hands in the front pockets of his jeans as a means to resist the insurmountable urge to pull Remus in close by the waist.

He nods brightly, keeping hold of the mint chip pint in his left hand while he lifts his right forefinger to tap on the glass of the middle fridge, the pad of his finger hovering below a banana yellow pint paired with another black lid. “That’s their home brand of Chunky Monkey,” he mentions.

Sirius snaps his gaze sidelong to find Remus smiling sagely. “Are you switching camps?” he raises, gape/grinning preemptively even when he well knows that’s a pipe dream.

Remus makes a face to suggest that is indeed the pipiest of dreams. “Still grotesque to me, I’m afraid,” he extends. “I’ll get one of my own, but I figured I ought to let you know they sell your favourite.”

“Good man,” Sirius offers him, reaching to pull the door open and pawing the first pint off of the shelf.

Remus sneaks his right hand into the fridge before Sirius can let the door fall shut, front-faces as many yellow pints as he can reach before his hand is just too big to squeeze in back to get at the last pint of the row, and gives a null shrug as Sirius snorts up a storm. “I tried,” he puts up.

“'Lot more than most would've,” Sirius extends, turning the pint in his right hand so that the thick black lettering toward him to better see Bananarama on the front of it, and lets a tight noise leave his throat as he turns the lettering toward Remus, speaking underneath the cloak of the music playing about the place. “Look; it’s our safe word.”

Remus reworks his mouth around a smile. “I never did agree that it’d be our word," he mentions, "but I’ll agree that this is a certain kind of serendipity."

“More than,” Sirius returns, no less enthused about this phenomenon. “What is this life?”

“You think I know?” Remus puts up. "I'm just surviving."

“Well, same here, but I said ‘Bananarama’ back there because it truly was the first word that came to my head and then lo and behold, here it is,” Sirius dictates, waggling the pint. “The ice cream has spoken, Remus: this is our safe word and who are we to deny it?”

“I don’t think you or this pint are taking into consideration how difficult it’ll be for you or me to say that word with a straight face,” Remus comes back with.

“Wait, what’s the mint one called, then?” Sirius bids, pawing at Remus’s left wrist to see the lettering on the front of his pint.

“Oh, 'Mint Condition,'” Remus offers, turning the lettering toward Sirius more.

Sirius gives out a supremely satisfied sigh. “Stop, I love this place.”

“I thought you might,” Remus sing-songs.

He opens the third and last fridge in the row, pulling out the last pint of a row that’s a sleek white with another black lid atop it, and bumps the door shut. Sirius blinks, intrigued by the pick, and leans over to get a look at the lettering right as Remus catches Sirius’s drift and turns it toward him, showcasing the words Milli Vanilli on the front, and Sirius cannot decide between commenting on the clear winning streak this place is on in regards to naming their product and the fact that out of all the choices available, Remus picked vanilla.

At last, Sirius decides since he’s already made his love for the place well known, but the latter of the two points deserves commentary. “Gotta keep up appearances, right?” he raises.

“Hm?” Remus bids, looking over at him while he tucks both pints between his left arm and side and Sirius reaches over and flicks the lid of the vanilla pint.

The act pulls a masked huff from Remus’s lips and has him turning a supremely reluctant smile straight away from Sirius, propelling himself over to get in behind a small queue over at the till. The act of putting himself near townsfolk comes as a clear signal that he’d like the topic of his bedroom antics to be dropped, but he also immediately gets himself scooped into conversation by the lady ahead of him who's got a tyke of about eight or so with her already going to town on a cone with two large scoops of bright blue ice cream atop it, and Sirius has a sneaky suspicion that Remus is more than grateful for the sudden engagement this time around.

Sirius saunters over to get in line behind Remus, half-listening to him spiritedly engage the two ahead of them, half looking about the place until he gets a very real sense that he’s being stared at, and looks down to lock eyes with the boy, and the moment he registers those near-owlish eyes, he realizes he’s already encountered the lad, only last time, he’d been sitting on the floor of a kiosk at the antique mall and noodling on a guitar he’d happened upon.

He lifts his free hand and gives the boy a fast little wave with his fingers, a wry smile on, and considering the fact that the lad scampered off real quick the last time Sirius engaged him, he has to figure getting a wee smile out of him this time is at least some measure of progress. The clerk at till beckons the lady ahead of them up to it, breaking the quasi-connection between Sirius and the tyke for he's promptly led up to the counter to hand over a note that’s apparently been shut up in his left fist this whole time. The cashier leans over the counter and takes hold of it graciously, straightening up to ring up both the boy’s cone and the cup of iced coffee that the lady's got with her, and looking at that thing now, it looks far too idyllic for Sirius to not be tempted by.

“Psst,” he shoots up to Remus, who turns his head to the side with his left ear at the ready to listen up. “Can I order a coffee at the till or have I missed my shot?”

Remus sidles to the right a little to get a better look at him. “Why wouldn’t you be?” he whispers back, a bemused smile on as he glances sidelong at him.

“She’s already got one but is only just paying for it,” Sirius extends, nodding toward the lady ahead of them.

Remus gives a hum of new understanding. “You can order at the display case or the till, either way,” he passes him.

Sirius nods for it. “Flexible; perfect,” he calls it. “How’s the coffee here, then?”

“Well, I can’t really say for myself,” Remus extends, “but Angela would often walk down here to get one on her break and as the café I took you to is closer to work than this is, I have to figure there’s something about what they've got here to have justified the extra few blocks.”

Sirius nods spiritedly for the deduction, though he does have to wonder if the atmosphere going about the place might be as much a draw as the menu might be. He doesn’t get to offer that up for debate when the bloke at the till signals an unbeknownst Remus to step up to the newly free till. Sirius nods ahead of Remus, who turns round and immediately stands to attention, feebly stepping forward like he’s held up this bloke’s time for a thousand seconds and not merely the solid three seconds that passed in actuality and pulling a half snort, huff out of Sirius for it. Behind his back, Remus waves him off with a quick flick of his free wrist before using the same hand to help place his two pints on the counter for the bloke to scan in while he freely chats Remus up, making Remus’s nerves about holding him up even that much more moot.

Sirius takes this time to eye the menu boards hanging overhead and debates between an iced latte and a coffee, but then he spots the featured drink on the board, a vanilla-based cold brew, and that really decides the whole thing for him. Remus finishes paying and turns back to him to gesture toward one of the tables at the windowsill, heading over to it and having a seat to wait for him there.

Sirius steps up to till in his wake, sticks his pint on the counter, and orders up a large cold brew in addition to it, getting a mounted and shiny white tablet turned toward him after he flashes his card. He looks down at the screen to find the POS system prompted and ready for him, flicks his card against it while eyring the exceptionally old-timey register on the counter, and decides that he’s alright with a dash of modernism here when he has to figure it's more about practicality; the old-timey thing sure is pretty, but it would have to be a nightmare to punch orders into in the middle of a rush.

He declines a receipt and then a bag when Remus didn’t get one and he has to presume they’ll find room in their many other bags to fit their pints into, and gets told his drink will be coming up right soon before the bloke dashing off to presumably get that going. He heads over to join Remus, slipping into the chair across from him, and sticks the pint down on the table between them to give his rather chilled left hand a break.

“Well, that's the ice cream done, I assume we’re moving onto filling up the tank next,” Sirius offers, pausing for a hum of affirmation from Remus for it, “and once that’s over with, what’s on the docket?”

“Well, once we get back and upack our haul, I’ll assume you’d like to get those strings sorted out for my dad even though he is perfectly able to change strings himself,” Remus trades him, a wry smile on as he pauses for his input, which Sirius gives to him in the form of a spirited hum in agreement, but then he gets waved down by the cashier who’s got his cold brew ready to go.

“Hold that thought,” he bids.

Remus nods with a smile and pushes out of his seat as Sirius heads for his brew, accepting his drink and straw from the cashier in turn and heading back to Remus with browline cocked. “You inspired me to get vanilla,” he mentions, waggling his drink at him.

Remus huffs at him, turning to head out the door, and Sirius hoots his way out the shop after him, popping the paper off his straw and having himself a trial sip before cutting that off as Remus takes the two of them around the bend again, thinking it best to distract Remus from Thinking about the parking lot to their right.

“Hey, you weren’t done,” Sirius prompts. “What’s up next?”

“Mm, so while you’re handling the strings, I might pop out and go for a shower,” Remus raises. “And then, we’ve got quite a bit of free time before we can even get started on Shroomtown, so we may as well use it to our advantage—”

“Oh, what a cherry on top that’ll be,” Sirius celebrates.

“The free time?” Remus checks, looking back at him.

“Well, sure, love me some of that, but I meant capping the day off with Shroomtown,” Sirius reiterates. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Mhm,” Remus returns up ahead, his tone of voice half plain, half wry as he trains his attention forward, but Sirius celebrates the smile he only got a quick profile shot of before Remus turned it ahead. “My only suggestion would be that it might be clever of us to wall off a chunk of time this evening to pack for the road, that way we won’t have to get up any earlier than we already do in order to get it done.”

As someone who understands Remus’s dire need to be ahead of the game and abide by time efficiency more than most in his life do, Sirius has no real qualms about packing ahead of time if it'll mean Remus will have one less thing on his mind. "Alright, I'm down for that," he offers.

"And," Remus tacks on, his tone a little more careful, "I know it's a bit early but ideally, I’d like us to set off around nine, nine-thirty so that we’d be getting there around eleven, eleven-thirty, and—”

“Why so early?” Sirius comes in.

Remus makes sure to turn halfway around so that his pointed frown can be seen on display. “Well, I was thinking about showing you a little brunch spot that my dad would take me to and then going and enjoying an afternoon on the beach with you after that, but you tell me if you’d rather sleep ‘til noon instead.”

Sirius sniffs, holding his head high. “I never said noon.”

Remus huffs, turning back to make a beeline for the truck. “I’ve made my point already, I think,” he hints, calling it back to him.

Sirius picks up the pace of his stroll to keep up with him. “Well, alright, you did,” he lets him have. “Nine, nine-thirty it is, then.”

“That’s also why I figured us knocking the packing for our wee trip within a trip out tonight rather than having to get up even earlier than that might’ve been in your best interests,” Remus puts up airily, going up the driver’s side of the truck while Sirius heads up on his side. “And mine too, I’ll be honest; I’d like to have nothing on my mind once Shroomtown is afoot.”

“I gathered that, promise,” Sirius lobs him, pulling his door open once he hears the click-clack of Remus unlocking the doors. He keeps his drink in his right hand, tucks the pint of Bananarama between his right arm and side, and uses his newly freed left hand to pull his door open, but he’s a tad nervous to clamber in with the looming possibility of him losing grip on the full cold brew in his hand and it ending up all over the front of Lyall’s truck.

“I don’t want to spill any,” he alerts. "Help me."

Remus, who’d done things a little differently by way of tossing his pints down ahead of the driver's seat before working on hoisting himself inside, looks over the two seats at Sirius with a huff of a laugh. “Give me a beat, would you?” he bids, and even while Sirius well knows he meant a second to get himself organized, he still drums a vague beat into the side of the passenger door, beaming brightly at Remus’s equally bright huff.

Sirius takes a leaf out of Remus’s book and deposits his pint onto his own seat, leans his right arm against the edge of it, and sips off his cold brew idly while he watches Remus transfer their three pints into one of the bags in the backseat. He holds his drink out to Remus once the lad is sitting cosy in the driver's seat, hoists himself up and into the truck, and deposits himself in his seat, making grabby-hands at his cold brew again.

"Seatbelt, you," Remus bids, holding onto the coffee as if Sirius wasn't going to do it without reinforcement.

"As if I wasn't going to do it anyway," Sirius says as much.

Remus simply grins at him while Sirius huffily tugs the sash of his belt over his chest and pointedly buckles in, holding his right hand out ceremoniously for his cold brew, which Remus then holds just out of reach so that Sirius has to work for it, keeping it held away from Sirius as he looks around the parking lot via the windows of the truck and turning back to sneak a kiss right as Sirius is getting real huffy about all of this hazing.

"Jerk," Sirius breathes, sneaking another kiss off him.

"And you think I'm fun to rile up," Remus quips, pressing the cold brew into Sirius's open hand.

Sirius curls his fingers around it and brings it closer to him, sipping off of the straw with a reluctant smile on his face while Remus breezily buckles in himself and gets started on bringing the truck out of the lot. "Alright, just got to stop for gas on the way back and we're home free," he declares, his shoulders set that much more easily now that there's just one task left on their list.

Sirius offers a smile around his straw, happy for Remus and happy to be headed back to the Lupin abode, but internally he's got his thoughts all wound up in Shroomtown and what that could mean for Remus come bright and early tomorrow morning. "So I think we need to pick a cut-off time in the event that you have to dose up but your mum and dad haven't turned in or even talked about doing it yet," he speaks out.

He pauses preemptively, waiting for a decided decline to come his way, but Remus looks to him after bringing the truck around to the exit. "I'm listening," he prompts, his tone quite unprovoked, and that's decidedly better than Sirius could have seen coming.

He aims for a jest to lighten an already brighter mood. "Now, I'm not suggesting that when the time comes, you must dose up right there where you happen to be standing; that'd be a bit much," he raises, and Remus tips his head lightly toward Sirius with a half-smile in agreement with that one, "but I am suggesting that we pick a time so that if we hit it and Hope and Lyall are still hanging about, then we'll just have to slip off and get things going."

"Alright, but we said ten or eleven, no?" Remus raises, making a right out of the lot and a swift left at the end of the block to head them down a long street that Sirius now just recognizes as the street they tend to take in and out of town. "They'll have turned in by then."

"Yeah, we did say that, only I don't know if I love that idea for your start time as much as I did yesterday, especially now that we've moved the Porthgain trip up," Sirius offers him. "I just don't want us waiting and waiting until every light in the house is off for you to dose up because if we do that, then you won't start to come down for quite some time and then the come down itself could be a bumpy ride, and I'm all for staying up with you and hanging out while we get you back to normal, but if you have to be up bright and early to drive this thing out of town then I want you as rested and alert as possible because I'm not too comfortable with the idea of you hitting the road on very little sleep, if I'm able to say."

Remus looks back at him as they come up to their usual right turn off of the street to head out to the highway, but he takes a left instead, getting Sirius all turned around for a moment. "You are," he says, nodding to him.

"Where are we—" Sirius raises, but stops talking when he sees the obvious gas station down the street from them on their right. "Never mind, I'm back; are you sure?"

"Well, of course you're allowed to say things, Sirius," Remus returns, sending him a plain smile. "What about nine, or is that still too late?"

Sirius takes in a pondering breath. "Better, for sure," he offers, sipping off his coffee, "but I might even say eight, just to be safe."

"Eight?" Remus repeats, giving a half-grimace as he pulls the truck into an open pump. "They'll be up and about still."

"OK, but hear me out," Sirius raises as Remus switches the engine off and unbuckles again. "What if we said eight and if they're still ambling about the place, then we head off with the excuse that we're just having a little date, we can have you dose up in the privacy and comfort of the A-frame, gather up a mountain of quilts, go out in the field and claim a spot on the far, far end of it as our own for the evening; make it look like all we're doing is having ourselves comfy-cozy for a tête-à-tête under the stars and I doubt they'll come anywhere near your blitzed self."

Remus opens his door and slips out of his seat, dropping down to the cement below and turning to face Sirius as he lingers in the doorway. "That's a good one," he lets him have, staring over his vacated seat at Sirius with a bit of a quirk at his lips. "They might even be that much more willing to give our space, given the recent news."

Sirius brightens, nodding for him. "This'll work, I know it," he sets down, hitting his armrest like a gavel.

Remus pulls his mouth into a tiny 'o' shape to breathe in and out of. "Just, please tell me that if one of them tries crossing that field toward us while I'm up in the clouds, you'll be on the lookout and ready to spearhead a diversion if need be?"

Sirius gives him finger guns with his free hand. "I'm your guy," he says of it.

Remus flashes him a quick, but outrageously cute smile, steps back to shut his door, and heads down his side of the truck to get to the pump. Sirius gives a long stretch in the passenger seat, dropping his cold brew into the cup holder as he looks out his window idly and watches a lady pull her car up beside the open pump across the way from them, but in reality, Sirius is seeing more important things than that for he's got Remus's outrageously cute smile on the brain and is a little busy celebrating two direct victories in under ten minutes. He lets go of his stretch, smiling away in his seat, and looks over his left shoulder to get a glimpse of Remus, and only then does Sirius realize he got duped by the cute.

"Oi," he calls out, reaching for his door and flinging it open, "I said I was paying for the refill, you absolute shoe."

A lady pumping gas into a car parallel to the truck blinks about a thousand times as Sirius comes booming out of the truck yellin' like a madman, but that's neither here nor there; what's important now is making it around back of the truck before Remus can get any more ideas, and that little shit is just casually filling up the tank like he's done nothing of error.

Sirius clears his throat pointedly. “It had better be pay-as-you-leave."

"And it is," Remus chimes, looking over his left shoulder at him to offer a pointed smile. "It'll all be over soon and then you're free to go in there, card a-blazing."

"Well, aren't you sweet," Sirius returns, sidling up a step or two ahead of Remus with a faint whistling and leaning back against the truck, turning a little more toward Remus and eyeing him while he works. Remus half-turns his newly reluctant smile away from him, pretending to ignore the antics, but Sirius gives up a two-note cat call to make that a tad more difficult.

Remus gives a small huff of a laugh, his lopsided smile on as he turns back to him. "Stop, I'm just standing here," he returns, speaking to him under his breath.

"You work well with a pump," Sirius offers. "Can't be helped."

Remus stifles a snort. "It's pretty straightforward stuff," he raises, pulling the pump out of the gas tank. "Oh no; it's a snake—"

Sirius gives out a hearty bork, slides a good inch or two down the truck through a bout of stitches, and lifts his right hand, passing it up through his fringe and back toward the back of his hair as he tries to get some air in his lungs. Remus, looking real proud his theatrics were a hit, pops the little door shut at the mouth of the fuel tank and turns back to stick the pump back in place before pressing to print out a slip.

He turns back to Sirius, holding the small sheet of paper out to him. "Alright, take this with you, moneybags," he instructs, flapping the little paper around. Sirius snatches it right quick, turns on his heel, and walks up the side of the truck toward the front of it just to give Remus a good view of his ass as he struts away with purpose. "Hate to see you leave, but love watching you go."

"Mhm," Sirius hums in return, taking a swift right and passing the front of the truck to head across the lot toward the door to the quickstop.

He doubles back, realizing he's got but a few sips left before his cold brew would be drained as is, and heads the few steps back to the truck, opening up his door and heaving himself up onto his seat to reach for his cold cup. He backs off of his seat, drops himself to the pavement, and shuts the door again before heading across the parking lot once more, sucking down the lasts of his drink in time to toss it into the bin out front. Apart from the teenager that's up behind the pay counter looking more than just a little bit bored, there are only two other patrons inside the shop with him, one that's already at the till and the other is over at the DIY coffee station and seems quite determined to shake each and every single packet of sugar available into his coffee that's available in this establishment, so that really just allows Sirius to get in behind the lady at the till and secure his spot as next in the queue.

Of course, the lady ahead is determined to use the pay counter to lean her scratch ticket onto as she passes a coin back and forth over it, so Sirius can very tell he'll be standing here at least until she's finished up. Since there's a lot of determined energy already flowing throughout the room, Sirius pulls on a bit of it himself, doing his best not to let this hanker his newly improved mood any and putting his head back into his and Remus's recently put-to-bed debate over what his dose up time would be, but since he has some time to kill and an active brain of his own, he wonders there if it has been put to bed; is there, perhaps, a backup plan that they could have ready to go should their evening not go as planned? Sure has happened before.

Sirius has only just settled on a tentative offer for a fallback when he's pulled out of his head by the cashier waving him forward, and in the 2.4 seconds it takes for Sirius to recalibrate so that his legs work with the visual cues happening ahead of him, the sugar man, who appears to have got in the queue behind him, lets out a gruff noise to be sure that Sirius knows he's is quite annoyed that he hasn't moved up and that has him taking his sweet time setting the slip of paper on the counter for the cashier to do whatever he has to do with it, while getting his wallet out, while he's pretending he doesn't know which slot his credit card is in, while he's pretending he isn't totally sure which card he'll actually be using now that he has found the credit card; it's all sorts of fun, doing all that and hearing the man shuffle his feet behind him.

He taps his credit card against the screen and smiles keenly as the payment takes a while to go through; of course, he has no real control over the system taking its time to process the transaction, but the man behind him sure thinks he does and that's a lovely development. He declines a receipt, turns from the pay counter with a bright grin to the sugar man, and heads on out of there, rather grateful in the end that the errand took some time.

Sirius pauses just outside, finding the truck is no longer where he left it, and looks around the outskirts of the lot, finding that Remus pulled it around to park it over at one of the stalls on the right-hand side of the building. He heads there with a renewed spring to his step, crossing over to the left side of the truck to get to his door and pulling the door open before pulling himself up and in.

"Feel good now?" Remus bids.

"Sure do," Sirius gives in a lofty tune, reaching to tug his seatbelt over him once more. "You?"

"Mhm, I got to bin the bag full of lubed-up tissues so I won't have to tote that back into the house with us and worry about my mum or dad catching me tossing it out and asking me what all that is," Remus extends him, pairing it with a near-deranged smile that has Sirius choking on air.

"Understood," he nods once he's recovered, relaxing back into his seat.

Remus sits up straighter in his own seat with that, reaching to start the engine, and looks out the back window as he pulls the truck around and gets them over to the exit to the lot while Sirius prepares to broach the topic once more. "Only, I was thinking something," he raises conversationally. "As a backup plan, if you find that you wake up tomorrow and you're not sure you're feeling up to driving yet—"

"I'll be fine to drive," Remus comes in, making a left out of the lot and taking them down the road Sirius is most familiar with for getting out of town.

"Right, but on the off-chance you find your head's a little cloudy," Sirius keeps on, "I'd be more than willing to take up the wheel for the time it takes you to feel like yourself again, that's all."

"I'll be fine to drive," Remus repeats, more pointedly there.

"I mean, I have driven manual before," Sirius mentions, gesturing toward the gear shift. "If we were talking about driving a stick, then yeah, I would have some trouble steering this beast around, but I shouldn't have too much at all—"

"And say we get flagged down and all you've got to show for yourself is a motorcycle license," Remus climbs in. "What then?"

"I bat my lashes and hope for the best?" Sirius offers.

"Stop," Remus chides him.

"We're not going to get flagged down because I know how to follow a speed limit and wouldn't dream of joyriding in King Lyall's truck," Sirius extends him. "If anything, I'll keep it ten below the limit and make everybody behind us completely frustrated if that'll make you more comfortable with it, and I'd really only be taking over on the off-chance you need more time to reset at nine, nine-thirty on a Sunday morning of all times; I highly doubt the county sheriff is going to pull us over in that small window of time."

Remus hums blandly there. "Only, that would be the time we get pulled over," he mentions. "I'll still be in the truck, after all; my luck goes wherever you do if we're together."

"Remus, it's a last resort," Sirius sets down. "I'm not stealing the wheel from you, I'm just offering it up in case."

"And I heard you, OK?" Remus raises. "Only we're dosing at eight so the chances of me not feeling up to driving in the morning would be incredibly low and I'm not about to account for that."

Sirius nods for him. "Alright," he forfeits; can't win every battle, "just as long as you know I'm a realistic option."

Remus hums noncommittally at that, taking them over the bridge and ever closer to the Lupin abode. "And people call me the Thinker here, hm," he comments, and Sirius lulls his head fast toward Remus and lets the placement of his brows prompt him rather than words. "Well, you're really stuck on this and that's more my style."

"Well, sue me for not wanting you to go flying through the windshield because you swerved into the wrong lane and didn't break in time to avoid the oncoming car ahead of us," Sirius returns him.

"OK, is that really what you think is going to happen?" Remus puts up, eyebrows right up at his hairline. "I've never not worn my seatbelt in my entire driving career, and I never break too late."

"Well, it could happen if you're slow to react because you're nursing a shroom hangover but still refusing to just hand the wheel over to me," Sirius trades him.

"Oh my Cunt, we'll start at seven, then," Remus sends him.

Sirius sends a flutter of blinks over his way. "Seven," he accentuates.

Remus tilts his head back and forth now, making a bit of a grimace. "I don't know if it's all that realistic now that I've said it; I'm just trying to stop this," he extends, taking his left hand off of the wheel to circle it in his direction. "This is very much my rhetoric, not yours."

"We'll stick with eight, then," Sirius gives him. "I just want you safe, that's it."

Remus swishes his new frown back and forth but doesn't say all that much for the next while, speaking once he makes the right turn down Lupin Lane. "Well, I will be safe, and do you know why?" he raises, and Sirius hums for a prompt. "I'm the safest driver I know, Sirius; to a nervous ninny kind of degree, but you're really helping me out with that, whether you know it or not."

Sirius eyes him sidelong, admittedly piqued. "Tell."

"Well, I've never held someone's hand while driving before, and I wouldn't for anybody else at that," Remus maintains, a bit of a royal smile on now, and Sirius sighs inwardly, aiming a small smile his way. "I think I know what's happened."

"Hm?" Sirius hums.

Remus nods, lifting his left shoulder as he takes them down the straight-arrow up to the house. "You're reeling about Reg so it's bound to bleed out, and I'm going see some of the brunt of it because life has to feel pretty fleeting for you right about now," he offers him.

"How are you just, reading my mind?" Sirius puts up, his brain blown apart. "How do you just know what I'm doing before I even do?"

Remus hums in a way that's neither here nor there. "Well, you might just be a wee bit traumatized right about now and could be jumping to hold onto the people you do have because it's like you've lost your brother all over again," he says of it, going for a careful disposition. "And not that I know what that's like, but I did almost lose my dad and that had me reeling for—" he gives a small, tight laugh there, "—it still has me reeling at times, but in the case of driving in particular, I understand that arresting sort of fear in letting someone you love get behind the wheel, even if they'll probably be OK."

"Right," Sirius says, tightly, quietly.

Remus breathes in once. "No, but I do; years ago, when I was about to hit sixteen, I was trying to get my learners ready to go and practising driving with my mum quite a bit," he offers him. "And at the time, my dad was doing alright because he was in one of his grace periods; he'd been in hospital and operated on a few months prior, so we were in that grey area where his leg hadn't begun re-bothering him just yet and because of that, he was driving to and from work in those days and we were all being too naïve in thinking it wouldn't result in a problem, but again, every time he came out of surgery he felt he was at 200% so we also felt he was or so hoped that he was that we weren't really thinking critically, so I get a call from my dad one day, who had to deliver the news that the front of this here beast had been quite demolished because he'd lost sensation in his problem foot and couldn't break."

"Jesus fuck," Sirius puts out.

"He was fine, thankfully," Remus makes sure to say, "but I won't pretend that whole thing didn't mess me up, because boy, oh boy, did I have something new to worry about then."

"Yikes," Sirius echoes, giving Remus a grimace out of nothing but sure empathy.

Remus nods once, tipping it toward Sirius for an extra dash of an echo while he pulls the truck in behind Hope's car. "We had to bring him back in to get a check-up because losing feeling in his foot was already the warning sign that things were getting dire again, so not only was there a crash, but it alerted us to the fact that he was back in it all over again, so that wasn't lovely news to get back-to-back," he forwards him, switching off the engine and pulling the key out but staying put from there. "And then, because I'm me and could always find a way to worry about crashes after the fact, I'd start pacing if my mum was even five minutes past the time she should have been home, because of course that meant she'd lost control of the wheel, and it didn't make any sense; she wasn't the one who got into the bender, but that's all I could think when she wasn't home when she said she'd be, and I've gotten much better with that sort of thing overall, but it does creep up now and again and it still feels every bit as urgent as it did back then, just thankfully not nearly as often."

"Oh," Sirius starts, his galaxy brain activated, "my Cunt."

"Yeah, I know; I can still be a lot with it, but I worry about you and your head," Remus cops to it. "I know I'm quite something, but I promise you, I was so much worse about it back then, I would just paceback and forth; I'd go down the front hall into the living room, check if she was coming up the drive yet or not, walk back through the house and do it all again, and my poor dad didn't know how to circumvent that or help me quit doing it; he'd tell me he'd made the mistake but he was OK, how handy it was that he happened to work at a garage so there was no lasting damage, that my mum was and will always be a solid driver, and I knew all those things, but it had nothing to do with rationality at all, I was just completely, utterly spooked."

Sirius shakes his head fast. "No — I mean, keep going with the story; I'm not going to stop you ever, I just — I didn't realize that's where your thing came from," he offers him, finding his cadence again and staring over at Remus with a new pair of eyes. "I just thought it was you jumping to the worst case so I made it a rule of mine not to drive when I'm in a right state because I didn't want to give you one more thing to have to worry about."

Remus takes in a small sniff, lengthening his neck out and squirming a little in his seat. "Sirius," he says, a twitch live on his lips. "Then you're already doing so much to help with it, even if you didn't know all that about it."

"I'm sorry it happened," Sirius hands him, frowning for Rems, for Lyall, and for Hope, too; he can't imagine that she wouldn't have a tough time with it herself.

"I wasn't mentioning it to get that out of you," Remus clarifies. "I just, I really do know how easy it can be to rationalize just about anything if you're reeling enough and I'm sorry it took me as long as it did to realize what was going on."

Sirius bites down on his lower lip, shaking his head numbly and giving him a hum to go on with it; Remus poises himself to speak, seems to think better of it, reaches to unbuckle and pull his seatbelt off of him, and then, he seems to think better of not speaking. "How about, we see how tonight goes, how I'm feeling in the morning, and if I'm really not up to it, then I'll let you take over for a bit," he reiterates, "but if I tell you I'm OK to drive, I won't be faking it or making it up just to not let you take over, but I will be extra careful on our way there, how's that?"

Sirius gets himself unbuckled and his belt thrown aside in very little time, a whirlwind of movement is actually what it would better be called, but he needs it to be quick because he needs Remus that quickly. He turns toward him more in his seat, beckons him closer, and Remus scoots in to meet him in the middle, and then it's just kissing and breathing and kissing each other and breathing against each other before Sirius nuzzles at Remus's nose and pause automatically there, where Sirius realizes that somewhere along the way Remus got his hands into the mix to cradle Sirius's jaw.

"You're being so patient," Sirius blurts, little more than a whisper.

"You've been that with me," Remus trades him, not much more than a whisper either. "Seems fair, doesn't it?"

Sirius sniffs hard, nodding for it, closes his eyes tight and moves back enough from Remus to reach his right hand up to rub fast at his nose, willing himself not to get too visibly choked up if they're to head inside. "OK?" Remus checks.

Sirius sniffs again, dropping his hand to his lap. "Yes and no," he answers.

Remus nods once, a small smile on. "That's OK, too," he offers him.

Sirius sniffs again, giving him a smile before turning to open his door, and Remus does the same by the sound of it before the two of them meet back up at the back seat, Remus on his side of the truck with Sirius sticking with his side of it as they divide up the shopping bags to bring in. Remus gets the pharmacy haul, Sirius gets the bounty from farmer's market, and the two of them sling their shares of the bags over their shoulders, bump their respective doors shut, and meet back up again ahead of the engine before Remus gives an abrupt noise, fishing around in the bag on his right arm and procuring the mini bottle of sanitizer they got to replace Lyall’s old one.

“I’ll just run this back,” Remus passes him, giving the wee bottle a wag before heading behind him to get over to the passenger side and have an easier time getting into the glovebox, Sirius has to figure.

“Careful, though,” Sirius calls after him. “Open it quick and toss it right in, or it’ll all come crashing down.”

Remus gives a faint noise of amusement as he gets himself up and into Sirius’s vacated seat, seems to have better luck with the glovebox than Sirius did for he isn’t inside the truck long, and on top of that, managed to wrangle the old one out from the box for he’s got the bottle in his hand as he comes back Sirius’s way after shutting the truck back up.

Remus eyes his wry smile and gives Sirius a huff for it. “This way, my dad won’t suddenly have two bottles of it for no good reason,” he offers pointedly, passing him for the front steps.

“Mhm, sure sure,” Sirius chimes, heading up the steps behind him. “Hey, where’d you put the jizz shirt?”

“It’s inside out and folded into a neat little square at the bottom of this one,” Remus answers, lifting his right hand to signal for the bag on it.

"Better get that sorted real quick," Sirius mentions, smirking through his nose.

"And I plan to," Remus makes known, reaching to open the front door and head inside.

The door to the foyer is wide open, making it incredibly easy for them to overhear Lyall throwing out a resounding curse from somewhere off in the house, followed by a decidedly relaxed response from one Hope Lupin. "Hon? Just leave it until they're back," she offers idly.

Sirius smirks as he shuts the door behind them. "We're already back," Remus calls out, footing his shoes off on the mat.

"There, see?" Hope puts up.

"What's happened?" Remus calls, and thank Cunt he's asking for Sirius, too, needs to know what's got Lyall all riled.

"The fucking ethernet isn't cooperating again," Lyall tosses up.

Sirius presses his lips together in quiet mirth as he foots his own shoes off, whereas Remus pushes out a smaller version of his dragon's breath, looking over his shoulder at him with a pair of shut eyes and a plain frown on. "He knows that's not what it's called and I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of engaging with it," he slips him.

"Even better," Sirius trills, grinning ear to ear as he stoops to grab his shoes and leave them on the mat where Remus left his.

Remus faces forward again, heading up the front hall with Sirius fast at his heels. "Did you try toggling it off and on?" he raises.

"Yes, I did," Lyall barks back.

"Did you leave it off for thirty seconds, though?" Remus tacks on.

"I had him wait a full minute before trying again," Hope calls back, sounding ten times less rumpled about the whole development.

Remus hums thoughtfully, heading past Hope's workstation with Sirius padding excitedly behind him. "Did you move the router around?" he checks.

"Why don't you tell me why I should even have to?" Lyall puts up.

Remus gives a great sigh while Sirius throws up a Hail Mary for the gift that is Lyall Lupin. "Well, that's one way to answer the question," he returns plainly. "Give me a sec and I'll see what's what."

He takes the left turn needed to enter the kitchen, where Hope is seated at the table with her back to the doorway and her head trained downward, and from there, the two of them split off, Remus heading around the right-hand side of the table and passing by the stove to get to the countertops while Sirius heads around the left side of the table and passes the fridge to meet back up with him and stow his share of the shopping haul beside Remus's, only Sirius does sneak a peek back at Hope as he's going by, who appears to have already started Maurice in her time back from lunch with Do.

Sirius budges Remus's left elbow with his right one, tossing a nod toward her head buried in the book, and the smile Remus sends him after having a look for himself is truly sublime to get to see live with the good seats. Remus turns back to the counter, sticks his right hand in the first of his share of the bags, and grabs the shirt out of it, passing Sirius in a stroll over to the basement doorway and heading down the stairs without much more than that, leaving Sirius staring after him with wonder for he may have never met anybody who’s quite as smooth as he is.

“Was it a good time?” Hope raises, pulling Sirius out of his head.

He looks over at her sitting with her right hand holding the frayed book open on the table and her chin in her left one, an easy but curious smile hovering just above it. “Spectacular,” he calls it, leaning back against the corner where the countertops meet. “How was the rest of lunch?”

“Very good, apart from finding out someone walked off with our tab,” Hope offers politely.

“Well, your doting son will be back any moment now to answer for that,” Sirius gives airily, and as if summoned, Remus reappears at the foot of the basement stairs and begins the climb.

“It’s enough, hon,” Hope insists, a calm expression on her visage while her eyes give more of a plea. “We should be treating you two while you’re here, not the other way around.”

“Oh, I think that’s debatable, and I’m sure he’d agree,” Sirius extends, hanging out against the counter with every bit of ease that apparently still doesn’t get through to Hope, who drops her left hand away from her chin. “We just love doing it, Hope, that’s all.”

“What do we love doing?” Remus raises, a few steps from the top of the stairs.

“Showering your mum and dad with love and affection,” Sirius translates.

“Well, that's true enough,” Remus replies, pulling off his sunnies and hanging them from the lapel of the Flyin’ Hawaiian. “I started the next load, Mum—”

Hope gives a great huff there. “Alright, no more footing tabs around here, I mean it,” she sets down. “And no more gifts either, while we’re at it; we’ve done them all.”

“OK, so anyway, I’m going to put your mint chip in the freezer and it’ll be there whenever you like,” Remus offers, and Sirius turns eagerly to fish inside the bags to locate the pints before Remus directs him more easily to the one that's got them. “Second one from the right.”

Sirius hums in a spirited thanks, pulls one out to pass it along, then the other as he looks back at Remus to check if he’s going to be brave and take all three in one armful or if he’ll be making two trips, but turns out, Remus is waiting for the third pint without much thought toward the second option.

“I never got a gift,” Lyall mentions from the den.

“You’ve got one,” Remus retorts. “I brought tapioca back for you.”

“Well, you should have said,” Lyall tosses back, though he sounds chuffed about it.

Remus looks over at Sirius with a tight grin, shaking his head as he takes the last pint from him. “Would you mind going and sticking the router up on the second-highest shelf on the wall there?" he bids. "Sometimes it just needs a bit more height.”

"Sure," Sirius answers, a little too quickly though for he pauses short, pointing to the myriad of bags on the counter. "I'll come back and help you put this away, OK?"

Remus turns back to him with all three pints ready to be toted to the freezer with a slightly bemused smile on. "Don't worry about it," he returns, smiling more candidly there. "It's not even going to take five minutes."

"You sure?" Sirius checks.

Remus hums a yes as he heads past Sirius's front to get near the fridge, slings all three pints between his right arm and side to free up his left hand to get the fridge door open. "Go help him out," he bids, nodding at him with a truly winning smile to pair with it, and Sirius's knees do a small wibble-wobble for it, he can't and won't even deny it.

"I'll help you, hon," Hope offers up, slipping a bookmark in the crevice of the page she's on and closing up the book as she lifts out of her chair.

"See, my mum's going to help," Remus chimes, moving things around in the freezer.

Hope heads up between the table and the stove to get at the counter, giving Sirius an eager smile while he stays rooted in place. "Really, hon," she coaxes, waving him off as she steps toward the bags, "go ahead."

"Just waiting on him to come back," Sirius mentions, tossing his right thumb back toward Remus, who by the sound of it, has just shut the freezer door.

Remus heads up from behind him, budging Sirius in the right side with his left one. "Seriously, get going," he gives him, pairing it with a bright little smile.

"OK, I'm going," Sirius returns him, turning in to leave a quick kiss on his left cheek, but when he looks back up at Remus, he finds him staring past him and toward his mum with an extremely placid expression.

Sirius looks back at Hope right quick and finds that not only did she pick the pharmacy bag to comb through first, but she's gone and pulled their honkin' replenishment of lube right on out of it and is currently giving the label a solid read. "Oh," she offers quickly, her galaxy brain likely activated now, turning to put the oversized bottle back in the bag, "you know what, I'll just do this next one."

Sirius looks to Remus with his lips pressed together tightly and in the next beat, Remus turns on his heel and Sirius has to act fast to catch him by the middle and effectively keep him from fleeing the room via any one of the three technical exits to it.

"Don't you dare," Sirius puts out, bearing down on the back of him to thwart Remus's attempts to wrangle free.

"I have to go, I have to go," Remus pleads, fighting his hold.

"You are not leaving me here to deal with this alone; you just aren't," Sirius returns fast, bodily turning Remus around to face him and setting his hands on his shoulders from there.

"You can run just as fast as me, I know you can," Remus maintains.

"Lupin, it's time to stand and deliver," Sirius harpoons, taking on the spirit of an old-timey war vet championing a soldier back from the brink. "There's no going back now, it's done; what are we going to do about it, that's the question now."

Remus pitches his head down to hide his entire heated visage against the crook of Sirius's neck, but in doing that, he makes Sirius that much more aware that what he's also doing here is trying to mask his mirth, and Sirius winds up in a bout of stitches in no time at all thanks to that, glancing over Remus's head toward Hope, who must've turned back to them at some point during their fit for she's very much staring at them as if they're an episode of primetime television she can't look away from.

"OK, could we all relax here?" she bids, splaying her palms wide in a bid for calm. "That's not the bag for me, is all; I've moved right along and I'll just be glad this is going so well for you two."

Sirius hides half his gape/grin behind the top of Remus's head while that lad pulls in a sharp, quick breath against him. "Mum," he heaves out, though it's definitely muffled. "Why?"

"Well, it's a good thing, isn't it," Hope puts up, putting her hands up lively. "And such a hefty size, too; must really need all that."

"Oho," Sirius puts out, and that one did not get drowned out, he'll admit to that.

"What's even happening?" Lyall tosses up.

"The boys have a date tonight, I think," Hope extends.

Well, that last part’s true, just not in the way she thinks it is, but what a lovely series of events if it means they’ll really be left alone later tonight? Sirius is chuffed. Remus, on the other hand, evidently doesn’t hold the same opinion on this one for he lifts away from Sirius so fast, he can't grab hold of him in time to thwart it, but this is all getting to be too funny to be on his A-game.

Remus gives him one Look and while Sirius would actually very like to know what Lyall's input on all of this would be, Remus may just set off anew if this keeps on. "On it," he chimes, giving Remus a quick squeeze for perseverance before padding out of the kitchen.

He takes a fast left in the den, finding Lyall seated at the desk ahead of the laptop on there and playing a presumably offline game of Tetris while he waits for someone (anyone) to come aid him in his own plight. He looks over to Sirius, his right-hand type-tapping the arrow keys as he lifts a single brow in question over the other two speaking in rather hushed tones in the kitchen. "What—"

"Please, for the sake of your son, don't ask me that," Sirius whispers, putting a forefinger to his lips as he heads past the telly for the desk. "Now, where's that router?"

"Over here," Lyall directs him, nodding his head to the right as he hits the arrow keys to play around with the angling on the rectangular block falling from the top of his screen.

Sirius heads past the back of Lyall's chair where he indeed finds the router sitting to the right of the laptop, taking hold of the wide, black block with both hands as he's certainly not looking to accidentally let it slip out of a hand and doom himself as the guy who fucked Lyall's ethernet up, and finds it rather handy that the computer desk is pushed up so close to this corner of the room for it takes very little stretching of its wiring to transport the box up to the aforementioned second-highest shelf; it's honestly so quick and breezy a task that it's so much more funny that Lyall couldn't be bothered to move it himself.

"There you go," Sirius chimes, moving out from the right-hand side of the desk. "Hope it does the trick."

Lyall closes the Tetris window, pulls up the browser that must've failed him originally, and hits to refresh the page while Sirius lingers to the left of his chair to be sure the loading wheel is going to yield results, but quite soon, Google's right there and ready to go. "Success," Lyall puts up, alerting the two in the kitchen, who give out vague whoops in reply.

"It's almost like you could have just lifted the router yourself, Dad; weird," Remus tacks onto his.

"Leave my house," Lyall calls cheerily.

"Not the nicest thing to say to someone who brought back tapioca for you," Remus hum-haws.

Lyall's eyes flash with newfound wonder. "He told you to leave nicely, Remus," Sirius chimes.

"He's right, I did," Lyall echoes.

"What were you trying to look up there?" Sirius bids him, pointing at the blank search engine on the screen ahead of them.

Lyall gives him a plain look there but leaves it alone, glancing back at the laptop screen. "Well, I thought I'd see what records I could find floating around out there," he offers up. "At least until I can get that site off of you, but you weren't home at the time."

"Well, isn't this nice, then," Sirius raises, gesturing toward the laptop. "May I?"

"I can type, you know," Lyall mentions, but he does wheel his chair over a little bit so Sirius can get at the keyboard.

"Only one finger at a time, mind," Remus comes in there.

"The kind of shit I get around here is honestly tragic," Lyall mentions, speaking sidelong to Sirius.

"That's alright, I've got you," Sirius passes him, typing away on the keyboard. "Now, I'll write down the instructions on how to get here for yourself afterwards, but I'll at least get you to the site and pull up some options for you since we're already here."

"Good God, Sirius, I was kidding about that; I know how to use a computer," Lyall returns. "Really thought I had an ally in you."

"You do," Sirius returns, huffing a laugh as he inches his right hand in to use the mouse pad. "Your ally's helping you right now."

"Just write down the web address," Lyall instructs. "I don't need instructions on how to click through a site."

"Fine, fine, fine," Sirius sends him sidelong, grinning away while he gets Lyall where he needs to be. "OK; now over right here, a little search engine where you can type in the artist's name—"

He types Butthole Surfers into the search bar and Lyall gives a fast snort. "Won't be what I'll search, but alright," he quips.

"Sorry, had to," Sirius trades him, hitting the backspace a bunch and typing the Beatles for a better and far more likely example. "And over here, is where you can filter your results which will make the research process go much quicker than going through vinyl after vinyl for innumerable pages, and the last thing I'll say about it is, if you find a title you're interested in, I suggest you double-check the going price on a record elsewhere; the site's pretty good, people on it are usually honest folk, and I haven't had too many raised brows using it, but it doesn't hurt to cross-examine in case you could be getting duped."

"OK, well, this I do appreciate," Lyall gives him.

Sirius clicks his tongue twice through a bright grin, stepping back from the desk with a flourish of his hands. "Et voila," he offers, already onto the next thing. "Now, where's that guitar of yours?"

"Right where I left it," Lyall extends, looking back over at him as he hauls his chair back up by the desk. "What do you need it for?"

"Just want to see something, all good," Sirius extends, waving him off with an easy smile as he heads back to the kitchen.

Remus waves him down from the corner spot between the counters, reaching into one of the bags and holding the two packs of strings out toward him, and Sirius sets a hand over his heart, approaching him via the path between the table and the stove with swoony little sway to his walk and making sure to brush his fingertips against Remus's as he takes the packs off of his hands because he can. He backs toward the archway to the dining room, gives a glance toward Hope sticking her blueberry bagels in the breadbox that sits over at the furthest end of the counter near the basement door, and tosses a quick thumbs-up toward Remus in question.

He gives Sirius one in return, but to pretend it isn't a tad fatigued would be a false claim. Hope, on the other hand, gives out a small huff the moment she spots their wordless conversation. "Oh, would you both get over it?" she raises. "I have."

"Well, bully for you," Remus returns her, turning back to the counter to start folding up their empty shopping bags to be put away.

"I'm kind of loving the reaction myself, but I do worry about that guy," Sirius offers, tossing a thumb back at Remus as he leaves the kitchen and starts the journey back through the house.

"Well, maybe I'll get there eventually," Remus huffs to the room, and Sirius snickers his way through the dining room.

"Sirius?" Hope calls after him, a curious lilt to her voice.

"Hope?" Sirius calls back, heading past the dining room table.

"I was thinking of making another half-pot of coffee; would you take a cup if I did?" she bids.

"Sure would, thanks," Sirius chimes, padding out into the hall.

He heads past the stairs, Hope's workstation, and veers right a few steps down the front hall into the living room, where Lyall's guitar is sitting propped up between the left arm of the couch and the side table, right where he left it. He takes extra care not to bash the body of it into the lampshade of the brass lamp sitting on the table and after he's successfully moved the guitar out of any further harm's way, he has himself a glance over the base of the lamp, humming thoughtfully as he spots the little compartment meant for a 20-pack of cigarettes, just as Remus described.

He heads out of the living room and back down the hall, thinking it'll at least be more fun for him if he tackles this task at the back of the house where the comedians are, and crosses back through the dining room to head into the kitchen with a light shoulder shimmy, but this time there's only Hope in there, who's just finished pouring water into the tank at the back of the percolator and turns around to catch Sirius's shoulder-shimmy, smiling before doing a wee one of her own in quick reply, her eyes going from Sirius's face to the guitar he's happily toting, and this feels like a perfect opportunity.

"See how happy it makes us?" he raises, waggling the packs of strings, and Hope quits her shimmying, giving him a frank head tilt, and now he's just looking at a mini, female version of Remus. Sirius grins bright, moving further into the room only to take a fast right into the den, and stops short as he finds Remus didn't make it very far, his head propped up on the cushioned arm of the couch and his eyes quite shut.

His attempts at being quiet so not to disturb him are immediately thwarted for Remus appears to sense his presence near immediately, fluttering his eyes open and tacking on a sleepy little smile at the sight of him, so maybe it's not actually a problem, then; worth it just to see the guy happy to see him.

"Sirius," Lyall tosses out, garnering Sirius to look round at him real quick only to find him flying his hands toward the items in his hands.

"Well, you said you wanted a gift, no?" he raises, blinking innocuously.

"The pudding is just fine — great, even," Lyall sputters.

"But I wanted to get you a gift, too," Sirius puts up, giving an easy shrug when it really is just that easy a concept. He heads further into the room, drops the extra pack of strings on the coffee table, and takes the other one and the guitar with him as he heads for the patch of carpet between the couch and Hope's armchair, though most importantly right near Remus's sleepy head, thinking that a prime spot to land and get to work. He looks to Lyall watching him like a hawk from the computer desk, nods toward the spare pack on the table, and smiles lightly as drops to the floor with Lyall's guitar held up and away from potentially bonking anything nearby. "That second pack is yours to put anywhere you like until twelve years from now when you get around to replacing these."

Lyall ignores the dig. "I could have picked up strings myself, Sirius," he maintains.

"I tried to tell him that," Hope mentions airily, back to reading at her spot at the table while the coffee brews.

"Stay out of this, Hope," Sirius directs over to her, crossing his legs underneath him.

"Yeah, stay out of this, Mum," Remus echoes languidly, eyes shut with a smile plastered on.

Hope gives a huff from the kitchen while Lyall gives up a huff in here; it's Hufftown, babey. "Listen, Lyall," Sirius begins, pointing down at his guitar, "this situation could spider out and attack you in the night if we're not careful, but if I go ahead and replace them with these gorgeous new strings I found, I might be able to save you and your family from this creature."

"Remus," Lyall barks, right spooking him.

"What?" Remus puts out, evidently peeved he just got shaken out of rest mode. "You know how he is."

"It's true, Lyall, you do," Sirius takes it from there, balancing the body of the guitar over his lap. "You know I could do this forever so I'd just quit now if I were you."

"Seriously, Dad, he's not going to return them now," Remus puts up, rolling over to face the back of the couch.

Lyall visibly stews for a good long moment, tosses a glance to the laptop screen and back over to Sirius again, and pushes himself out of his seat. Sirius follows him with his gaze as Lyall heads diagonally across the room to have a seat in Hope's armchair, lifting his hands plainly at Sirius's polite blink. "Well, I might as well see your technique," he puts up.

Sirius beams, nodding through a laugh as he trains his attention on the task at hand.

Chapter 28: 28.

Chapter Text

After Sirius bids the use of both a pair of pliers and a set of wire cutters (re: or a pair of scissors if nothing else), one King Lyall heads off to the basement to fetch his toolbox and brings back that quintessential red, rectangular box to the den with him.

Once he's got the materials he needs, he gets right down to work, going into this restringing exercise with a great amount of familiar, practised ease. He gets the first string switched over rather quickly, he’ll admit; when Sirius brings the wire cutters toward the head of the guitar and snips the excess amount of string sticking out past the first string peg, it’s really only been a couple of minutes and that perhaps explains the pointed huff Lyall lets out as Sirius leaves the bit of excess wire beside the old, full-length string he removed from the guitar.

Throughout the removal of the older strings and replacements for strings two, three, and four, Lyall appears to have been rendered nearly speechless; ‘nearly’ being the operative word here for every now and again, a faint huff or a click of the tongue echoes out from Hope’s armchair. Sirius chances a sidelong, investigative glance toward Lyall while he snips the excess bit of string hanging off of the fourth string, wanting to be sure his suspicions that these huffs and puffs he's been hearing have been good-natured, and fortunately for him, the man's looking over Sirius’s working hands with a keen interest and a light, upward tug at the right corner of his mouth.

That wry smile and that bright stare he’s been put under, Sirius knows them both rather well by way of the fact that this man’s very son tends to don a similar expression when he, too, is watching something supremely intriguing happening nearby, which is a relief considering all the huffing and rather suggests instead that there’s a whole lot of admiration going on here, but it’s also terrifying in the simplest sense. Now, the man did openly suggest he’d be observing Sirius’s technique throughout the process so the event of an audience member watching keenly as he works isn’t surprising in that sense, and Sirius will admit doesn't have much in the way of performance anxiety, but to have brought Chatterbox Lyall to a place where he’s too involved to make conversation just feels like a daunting feat.

It likely doesn’t help that the coffee pot over in the kitchen has finished its brewing, leaving a trail of relative silence in its wake and only the faint click of the analogue clock hanging above the archway of the den and the periodic hum of the fridge in the next room to focus on in the interim. He reaches to pluck the loose bridge string he set on the coffee table to the right of him while he holds the fifth string in place along the fretboard with his left hand, giving a glance over to Hope while he brings the peg over to the guitar’s body and finding her looking rather engrossed in Remus’s book, so maybe he’ll be extra forgiving of her not quite realizing the coffee’s ready if it means she’s this actively studying up on her son’s teenage years.

He looks back down to the guitar placed over his lap, presses the bridge pin back into place, and secures the string as far as the bridge goes. Next, he reaches for the head of the guitar to take care of that side of things, twisting the knob for the fifth string around and around until it looks right, feels right. Another look to the left and there Lyall is again, expression gone unchanged since he last looked, and Sirius isn’t sure if he’d have rathered it had changed or not; it’s dazzling to be looked at with a blend of admiration and intimidation by King Lyall himself, but it’s all a bit heavy, being looked at like this.

Years ago, when he first started teaching himself the instrument, he would go into the band closet and nab himself a spare acoustic to fiddle around on, so changing out the strings was simply not a job of his own and thank Cunt it wasn’t for he wouldn’t have known the first thing of what to do to achieve that. Classes and the after-school program offered alongside it were strictly reserved for members of the music program to learn and practice the numerous pieces that were expected to be performed at the annual end-of-term recital, and, in addition to, were very much reserved for members of the program who hadn’t been booted out for organizing an uproarious rendition of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' to be performed at their most recent end-of-term recital, so Sirius was effectively barred from being seen in that wing of the building during those specific parameters, but lunch hours were for free-playing, babey; always had been, always would be, and show up at lunch hour to free-play, Sirius would.

He made good use of that time back then, using his experience with the piano as a baseboard to jump off of to study up on chords, finger placements, strumming patterns; beginner stuff. When lunch hour was over, he’d put the instrument back in its case only to come back pull it out at lunch hour the following day and do it all over again (and again, and again). For a stint there, he kept his little midday sessions a solitary process, but once James and Pete got sick enough of losing him to one of the practice rooms each and every lunch hour, they more or less insisted they tag along in support and by then, Sirius felt past the point where beginner's jitters made him unable to have anyone in the room and was fine to let them come along. Though to be fair, one Lily Evans did make use of lunch hour free-plays to get some extra practising of her own in, so James’s reasons for wanting to be there were likely not as altruistic as he might’ve wanted them to seem, but that's neither here nor there; those two dunderheads were present to witness him officially get his strumming patterns to a place he could be proud of, trilled and bopped along to however many tunes as he managed to get down to a science, and bore witness to him beginning to eye the spooky, yet ever-enticing world of finger-tabbing and make the push to tackle that style of playing. They were his hype men, all things considered, and their gusto kept him on track and motivated in a way he'd never been for the piano.

James, as it turned out, had been far more inspired by Sirius’s DIY project than even his hyping let on for he decided that Sirius would not only be getting a guitar of his very own to practice with, but he would be getting his sixteenth birthday present a whopping five months early, and Sirius, having already been dreading the summer hols that were creeping up for he wouldn’t have a guitar to practice or noodle away on, felt something like true elation seeing James tote a guitar case with a gargantuan red bow placed atop it into the dining room during dinner at the Potters'.

The minute he opened her up, that was his baby lying in that case, and he fell utterly in love. Problem was, there was no way he could bring her home. He was still in some precariously hot waters for his "pompous performance" the school year prior, and on top of that, Reg had spotted him strumming away a time or two in one of the practice rooms and reported back to their parents that he'd been dabbling in yet another avenue he shouldn’t have been. Not that it should have mattered anymore, but that was not the instrument he was to have been putting his time, work, and energy into, and it certainly wasn’t the instrument his mother and father projected onto both of their children to play perfectly and that made it a certain kind of salt in a rather overblown wound for those two. There was no way he could walk his baby through the front door without a barrage of questioning and just be able to keep her; his baby would get confiscated or worse, tossed out if his mother were really in a mood, so he kept her over at the Potters’ where she would know eternal, unconditional love.

That first summer he had her, he was over at James's twice as often, spent the break practising, playing, getting the hang of tabbing, and it was over that same summer that he broke his first string and very suddenly had to learn the tricks of that particular trade. At first, the task was a complete and utter hands-on exercise that took every morsel of his will and drive not to completely abandon, over an hour and a heavy amount of looking between his injured baby and the step-by-step tutorial he'd found online to sort out properly, and a boatload of swears and pricked fingertips to tame the unruly, wiry strings and make them do what both he and the tutorial wanted them to do, but flash-forward to today? Sirius may as well be doing this with his eyes closed.

He isn’t doing it with his eyes closed, however; rather than that, he’s watching his hands while he uses the pliers to pop out the last bridge pin, finding it easier to do that than have to hold Lyall’s stare for too long when being avidly watched as if a task as habitual and rudimentary as this one is a valuable skill, something to wear proudly, a process that should be studied is brand new to him. He couldn’t even bring his baby home with him way back when, had to leave her at the same house he wished he could've just been raised in from the start, and even there, Mr. and Mrs. Potter didn’t loom, didn’t hang around, and while they didn’t mind the sounds of a former pianist prodigy turned guitar man practicing up on the top floor of their home, neither of them sat down and watched the meticulous parts to it all like Lyall’s doing; the Potters simply let him be which, at the time, was all Sirius could have hoped for, but this?

This is alien, and the only other person present in the room who could sympathize with the duality of the experience Sirius is having fell fast asleep right around the time he secured the second string into place, so Sirius going to have to let Remus John “Sleeptown” Lupin off the hook and weather this one himself, loosening up and pulling the last string he’s due to replace free from the guitar.

'Course, good luck trying to look past the lump in your throat and keep focused when Hope Lupin’s sending out a boisterous 'shit' in the room right next to the one you're in; Sirius glances up right quick, his lips twisting up all funny when he’s not sure whether to laugh or weep as Hope scrambles sideways out of her seat and zooms over to the far right corner of the kitchen.

“The coffee,” she puts out, woeful and perhaps a touch amused, too, but that part makes two of them.

Sorry, three of them: “Was it about to explode?” Lyall quips.

“Oh, shut it, you,” Hope returns, and Sirius lets himself smile, lets his eyes water a little. As a treat. “What do you take in it, hon?”

It takes a blink for Sirius to realize that he’s the ‘hon’ she’s spoken to, and then Lyall goes ahead and confirms it. “She’s not talking to me there, kid.”

Sirius gives a solid clear of his throat, placing the last string in the amassed pile of curled wires by his left knee. “However you take it,” he passes her.

“Well, hold on, now; I take a bit of milk and sugar in mine,” Hope mentions, and suddenly, she’s back in view of the doorway, idling by the fridge.

“I said what I said, Hope,” Sirius doubles down, flickering his gaze up to her to send a smile her way as he wrangles the last string out of the pack.

“Fine, fine,” Hope backs down, pulling the milk out of the fridge and bumping it shut again. She heads back toward the corner via this side of the table, toting the milk along with her and tilting her head at him in question before she’s moved out of sight again. “Did you want it over there?”

Sirius successfully separates the string from the pack, tossing the latter aside and looking down at the situation he’s in. “I don’t think so,” he trades her. “Almost done here, I’ll come have it in a few.”

It sure sounds like Hope had been attempting to suggest she doesn’t mind at all bringing it over to him before she trailed off, the echoes of a cupboard opening and closing, the splash of a free pour from the pot, and a wee, smaller splash that must’ve been the milk echoing back to him, and it's while she’s stirring in the bit of sugar with the clink-clink of a spoon against ceramic accompanying it where Lyall seems to decide he needs an ally in terms of his reverence for Sirius’s fortitude.

“He’s about to have done this whole exercise in under fifteen minutes,” he puts up, and Sirius averts his gaze to the guitar in his lap, reaching past it to tug the final string free from the pack and trying to refocus despite the heat pooling in his cheeks.

The clinking halts right quick. “Sorry, what was that?” she bids.

“He’s a madman,” Lyall reiterates. “Only just started doing it and he’s already a string away from finishing.”

The sound of a mug placed down on the counter followed by footfalls a-plenty echo out before Sirius glances up to find her standing in the doorway, her hands on her hips and an upward tug at the right corner of her own lips. “Well, now that is impressive,” she says of it.

“OK, but,” Sirius comes in, threading the final string in through the last hole and pulling it forward to line it up with the length of the fretboard, "I’ve been doing this for years; you can ask the Loud One about it, the first time I ever tried, I spent over an hour battling six serpents that simply refused to cooperate with me.”

Given that he’s looking between the two of them, Sirius is in the prime position to catch the flash of a glance they send each other amusedly before it’s gone again and they’re back to smiling at him with intent, and quite plainly, he has to redirect his attention to the task just to recoup from having seen that, working to keep his breathing even while he ties the final string from the bridge end of things up to the head of the guitar.

He’s a lot, he knows he is better than anybody, but there’s a word for the feeling in his stomach after seeing some inarguable proof that Hope and Lyall not only don’t mind that he’s a lot, but seem to relish in it more than anything else, and Sirius can’t locate it; if Remus were awake for this, he likely wouldn’t have seen anything of particular note there when he would've been just as amused and intrigued they were, if a tad more used to his ways by now, but he may well have been able to help Sirius in the ways of a thesaurus, help him pinpoint a descriptor for the feeling moving outward from his stomach and firing off in all directions, but alas, he's on his own for this one, too.

Luckily, he has Hope Lupin here to help in locating the right word. “Are you,” she starts, and Sirius looks up from twisting the knob on the sixth string to its tightest and finds her folding her hands ahead of herself, her head on a left hanging tilt, “hungry at all, or did you stop somewhere along the way and take care of that already?”

“Mm, not really,” Sirius offers, a smile budding at his lips. “I mean, we didn’t have much self-control as far as breaking into the cherry bag goes, but nothing past snacking.”

Hope brightens, pauses her hand-folding as her shoulders go up with something close to a sense of renewed purpose, but gives into a wee grimace next. “I hate to say it, but the blueberry pie is no more,” she extends.

“That’s on me,” Lyall cops to it.

“And a bit of me, too,” Hope confesses, looking only a little bit sheepish now for her eyes are truly doing the smiling for her.

Sirius truly can’t say he minds this turn of events much at all. “I’m glad it was a hit,” he extends for a pardon.

“There are still two slices of the pot pie left,” Lyall tacks on there. "We felt would be only fair if they went to the chefs."

“Then I’m much obliged,” Sirius returns for it, smiling at both of them in turn.

“Plenty of sides left, too,” Hope tacks on, giving a wee, near-soundless clap of her hands before turning back to the kitchen. “I’ll make you a plate.”

Grace. The feeling threatening to swallow up every inch of Sirius’s body is grace.

Now, the way Hope heads past her vacated chair to rummage around in the fridge puts even more stock to the theory that she’s more than willing to take back the role of happy hostess, but that has Sirius hesitant to insist that she sit back down, relax a bit, let him make the plate himself; seems to him, he really ought to let her have this one. That said, it’d only be good form to go hang out with the happy hostess while she whips up a plate for him and maybe even see if she’ll let him do a thing to help out; imagine that. He picks the wire cutter back up, snips off the end of the last string, and sets the tool back down on the carpet beside him, looking over the fruits of his labour and deciding he’s quite happy with the result.

He reaches his hands down between his lap and the bulk of the guitar, lifting it with his left hand underneath the body and his right beneath the neck, and shifts more toward Lyall on the carpet. “She’ll need a solid tuning before she can wail away,” he prefaces, lifting the guitar up toward him, “but there you have it, sir; otherwise good to go.”

Lyall huffs as he leans forward to snag the guitar out of Sirius’s offering hands. “Call me 'sir' one more time,” he challenges, sitting back in Hope's armchair.

Sirius smirks up a storm as he turns to gather up the excess bits of string littered about him. “Sorry, sorry,” he extends, sticking the tip of his tongue in his teeth as he smiles to himself as he gathers up the amassed pile of old strings. “It really is just automatic sometimes; it’s in no way a dig at you.”

“Still too formal,” Lyall lodges, pulling a face as he sets his guitar upright on his lap. He studies it from above, reaches his left hand up from below the fretboard, and runs his fingertips over it with a smooth, delicate press, his momentary annoyance subsiding about as quick as it came, but then again, a Lupin can’t simply let a favour go by without thanksgiving. “Great work here, kid.”

“Bah, I was glad to,” Sirius returns, pushing off the floor with a veritable tumbleweed of guitar strings held in his palms.

He pads for the kitchen and takes a swift right as he enters the room, his footfalls changing as he goes from carpet to tiled floor and moves through the space between the table and stove to get over toward the bin beneath the sink. Hope, standing a few good steps ahead of the sink with a small plethora of containers of all sizes sitting ahead of her on the table, reads Sirius’s intentions rather well and backs up to meet him there, opening up the left-hand door to the cupboard and affording him a straight shot at the bin.

He smiles for the help, reaches underneath the sink to drop the ball of strings into it, and stoops down to smush the resulting pile down so the bundle won’t take up too much viable real estate in the bin. While he’s down there, it appears to him that Hope might’ve been killing two birds with one stone by putting herself on this side of the kitchen for she’s holding the cupboard door open for him with her right hand and reaching her left one into the silverware drawer at the same go. He makes to stand again as she procures a fork and spoon out of there, finding that she may have actually been killing three whole birds with that same stone for she pops the silverware drawer shut and crosses behind him to get over to the cupboard where the plates live, but it’s the method in which she signals her intention to pass him that gets Sirius right in the chest.

Realistically speaking, it makes sense that she'd tap the centre of Sirius’s back to help avoid a possible collision should he have chosen that very same moment to back away from the counter, but even with the simplicity of it at play, the faint touch sends an otherworldly bolt up Sirius’s spine and straightens it right out, ground zero located right where Hope’s hand imprinted on him. He backs up a step, bumping the cupboard door shut and reaching to run his right hand under taps, partially because he stuffed it in the bin and partially to give himself something to do with the both of his hands while he picks out an unfocused spot of the left-hand side of the property to stare at as he absently presses the nozzle for the liquid hand soap next to the sink.

Over in his right peripheral, Hope brings a couple plates and her previously nabbed utensils back to the table, removing herself from Sirius’s side to position herself back in front of her little workstation, and that is a small blessing when it gives him the privacy to process without the potential of a pair of eyes catching him doing it. He laves up his sudsy hands underneath the running tap, stuck somewhere between feeling pathetic and overjoyed; pathetic because he keeps finding himself verklempt over the smallest friendly gestures and sorting them into the categories of motherly or fatherly before promptly not knowing what to do with either one, overjoyed because it can and often has felt so very easy here as if his mere presence in the Lupin household is already standard, something that Hope, Lyall, and Remus can all move around and go about their business with he's inserted into the picture because there’s plenty room here for him, too.

He dries off his hands on the tea towel hanging below the sink, willing himself to just pick a lane already; there's going to be a lot more of this disconcerting duality to come, it’s just inevitable, and there will always be other people's parents being better to him than his own ever were, but this is Remus’s, this is Remus’s home he’s been let into, and frankly speaking, he should be cherishing every moment like this one, not staring unblinkingly through the film over his eyes out the kitchen window out of survival; he needs to bask in it, breathe with it, appreciate it.

He swallows, his throat tightening around the lump forming harder in it. He reminds himself of the very same thing James once told him, years ago now, back when he'd receive random acts of kindness from Mr. and Mrs. Potter and feel his heart stop still, when he was watching their generosity suspiciously out the corners of his eyes just in case he was seconds away from having them turn on him, when he was convinced their kindness and generosity of spirit came with a time limit: 'You’re allowed to think it, but you could also just enjoy this and I wouldn’t tell anyone.'

James’s wonky, enticing smile along with that purposeful brow wave he did to get Sirius feeling even a measure of amused at the time appear in the foreground of Sirius’s hazy vision as if he’s echoing Sirius's resolve and piggybacking off of it just to drive the point home harder; he's allowed to have this, allowed to enjoy it. Quick as a flash, James’s brief cameo is over and what’s left is the devastatingly bright white-and-yellow accented kitchen around him, the sound of the tap he has definitely left pouring, and a breathing pathway that’s a bit easier to utilize.

He bends to have a drink off the tap, intent on smoothing out the lump in his throat, and straightens up again, swiping his left wrist past his mouth and switching off the taps after a few flicks of his right hand over the sink. Without the echo of pouring water taking up his auditory canals, Lyall’s efforts in tuning his guitar filter in, affording Sirius a strong sense of ease just from the faint thrum of a thumb dancing over strings; he has an easier time swallowing thanks to the quick drink he took, but it’s likely a bit more to do with the persistent notes from over in the den.

“Hon, please know you’re welcome to grab a glass anytime, OK?” Hope pipes up, breaking through the last vestiges of the haze surrounding him.

Sirius swivels around to face her facing the table. “But there’s a spout right here, Hope," he offers, wearing a rather royal smile she can’t see to know is there, but she sure hears it, looking over her right shoulder with a pointed smile notable via the profile shot he has of her before she faces forward again to, heaping a pile of mashed taters onto two plates side by side that already have their pie slices on them. “Is Sleeping Beauty getting a plate made up, too?”

It certainly sounds like Hope’s smile hasn’t gone anywhere. “Well, I figured I’d get his ready to go and whenever he comes to he can heat it up,” she puts up.

“He’ll like that,” Sirius extends, smiling as he looks toward the time displayed on the stove. He dials the current time back fifteen minutes or so, secures what time a forty-five-minute kip would amount to on the clock, and rounds up a minute or two so he'll be able to wake Remus at five o’clock and help him avoid a trip to Zombietown. He refocuses on the situation at hand, crosses his wrists at the small of his back, and steps forward a few steps, leaning in over Hope’s right shoulder. “Can I do a thing to help out, or?”

“You,” Hope starts, sticking the lid back on the container of potatoes and pushing that aside in exchange for pulling the container of greens closer to her, “may get the microwave out of the cupboard if you’d like, but then I’d really like it if you simply had that coffee I fixed you.”

“Loud and clear, Hope,” Sirius trades her, swivelling back toward the counters and heading for the cupboard in question.

The modest-sized microwave doesn’t have the sort of weight to it to create a problem fortunately, but Sirius can just hear how hard Remus would be tutting if he were awake to see Sirius stooping and lifting the machine off of the shelf inside the counter while the cord and plug hang down to the floor very near his feet: 'You’d better not trip, you.'

Sirius takes care in not getting his feet caught up with the cord while he secures the microwave onto the counter and stoops to pick up said cord, now hanging halfway down the length of the cupboard below the counter, reaching to stick it into the free outlet underneath the plug for the coffee pot. He reaches for his coffee mug that’s yet another banana yellow specimen, turning back toward Hope and sipping off his mug while examining the overall situation; in the time it’s taken him to get the microwave set up, Hope’s moved on from adding the peas and carrots to the plates and has officially entered gravy territory, tipping a smaller container over the plates as she drizzles it onto the potato piles.

Sirius makes sure to keep sipping off his coffee for a showcase that he is technically doing as Hope bid him to while he heads over on her right to wordlessly begin the process of transferring the containers back into the fridge, but Hope simply gives him a smile for it before walking one of the plates over to the microwave so he supposes he’s in her good books even still. She shuts the plate inside and presses for the timer to start, roaring the machine to life, and while that plate’s heating, she makes use of the two-minute grace period she now has to reach down below the countertops and pull out a box of plastic wrap to cover the next plate. While she’s ripping off a sheet of that, Sirius figures he’ll make room for a dinner plate to sit comfortably on one of the shelves in the fridge, which means he now has to play a little bit of Tetris to make that happen, but Sirius is, if nothing else, a visionary, so frankly speaking he’s up for the challenge.

Sirius turns away from the fridge, finds a covered plate held toward him in offering, and takes hold of that, slipping it onto the top shelf, and shuts the fridge up again before Hope pulls the chair ahead of her out from the table, suggesting it’s now time for Sirius to take a seat. Sirius does as bid, slipping into the chair across the table from Hope’s prior seat, and picks up the fork on the table, waiting diligently for Hope to bring his heated plate over for it is that much more clear that she’s happy to dote on him, and for that, he ought to be happy to let her do her doting in peace.

Another thirty seconds from there and she’s back to set his plate down ahead of Sirius, wherein he gives a charmed thanks for the trouble, Hope suggests it was her pleasure to do it, and they’re past the pleasantries once more. She heads back to the counter to fetch her own coffee, bringing it back with her to her seat while Sirius treats himself to a forkful of gravy-covered potatoes as his first bite and finds it difficult to keep from smiling through it, but look what he’s got: Hope ahead of him and finally back to treating herself to a bit of R&R, Lyall over there in the den now onto noodling freely on his newly tuned guitar, Remus now flat on his back over on the couch and still very much out cold.

That prompts him to give another glance at the time, noting they’re still about thirty minutes out from the point where Remus’s snooze ought to end for his own good, and looks back at Hope as she goes back to the start of Maurice to flip forward from there to locate the page must've been on before she made a mad dash for the coffee and didn’t bother with the bookmark in her haste.

“How’s it so far?” Sirius bids, gesturing toward the book with the tongs of his fork.

Hope gives a chime of a hum, nodding along with it as she flips a few more pages. “Good, so far,” she offers, pulling the book open as she locates where she left off. “I think we’re mostly doing set up at the moment, but nothing wrong with that.”

“Where’s he?” Sirius raises. “Maurice, I mean.”

“Mm, he’s at Cambridge,” Hope offers.

Sirius sniffs with that, lifting a quick brow as he cuts a piece off the point of his pie. “Keep those eyes peeled,” he advises, a budding smile starting up. “‘Lotta important stuff happening in that set up.”

“They’re peeled,” Hope echoes, making a show of refocusing them on the page below her.

Sirius happily leaves her to it, dutifully devouring his plate while she reads on, lifting her coffee to her mouth intermittently. When he's finished his plate, he’s just come in under the point where he’d have been rightfully stuffed if he'd had more to stuff down, which he is grateful about; carrying around a food baby isn’t exactly his favourite state of being, even if he got some good eating out of it.

He pushes his chair back, lifts off of it to carry his plate to the sink, and gives his dishes a wash, leaving them in the drying rack and turning from the sink. He glances at the time again, but it apparently took him just over five minutes to make that plate his bitch, so Remus, lucky duck, still has a good twenty or so left to snooze. He heads for his seat, glancing over at Remus, and watches him amusedly over there with his mouth ajar and not a care in the world for the moment, but then he’s just observing him, relishing in his choice to stick around here rather than find a bed, and wondering if that spot has always been a top contender for a kip. From there, he can’t help but picture a wee version of Remus dozing there, taking up much, much less space on the couch than he’s doing now, and it really only takes a score of seconds for him to remember a charming little anecdote Remus mentioned just yesterday.

Sirius looks over at Hope, leans more into the back of his chair, and speaks toward her. “I don’t want to be a pest,” he starts, and already Hope’s looking up at him as if she’s already prepared to jump up and start the doting process all over again, “but I hear there may just be a photograph of Lil’ Remus dressed as a Christmas elf somewhere in this house.”

Mm,” Hope raises, her eyes flashing as she wryly sticks her bookmark in between the pages she made it to, "there are a couple that fit that description, even.”

Sirius does nothing but let his mouth hang open while Hope slips out of her chair once again and heads into the den, stopping ahead of the coffee table where she moves down to her knees and rifles through the row of photo albums of all sorts of colours that are lined up on the shelf underneath the surface of the table. Thoughtful humming echoes back his way along with Lyall’s continued noodling before Hope uses the coffee table to push herself to her feet again and brings back with her a photo album that’s a rather fetching shade of turquoise. “I think I’ve got the right one,” she mentions. “I’ve structured these by year, and if I’m remembering well enough, I believe Remus the Christmas Elf was ‘02.”

“I’m shaking,” Sirius insists, his right knee bouncing up and down as Hope slides back into the seat across from him.

She moves the book aside (sorry Maurice, but there's equally important stuff brewing here, too) to get some room to leave the album open on the table before she’s flipping through it, on the hunt for photographic evidence of Elf Remus, and Sirius is just thinking how much he adores that Hope hums jaunty little tunes while she’s concentrating when she stops her humming, smiling pointedly and pushing the photo album around on the table to get it facing Sirius, who leans in so fast his stomach gets tightly pressed against his ledge of the table, but that was always going to happen.

Hope covers one photo on the left-hand page with her left hand while she points to the uncovered photo with her right forefinger. “So here, we have young Remus just about to leave the house and looking quite excited about his elf costume,” she details.

Sirius gives out a bright gasp, beaming bright as he studies the image as if he’ll be tested on it in a few minutes’ time. As advertised, the photo shows an eight-year-old Remus striking one incredibly fruity pose while looking right jazzed about his green, nearly Pan-esque costume, save for the accompanying red and white striped stockings and those little red booties with two white poms atop the pointed toes and a bright red hat and pom sitting atop his floofy head match.

“I’m sorry, Hope,” Sirius starts, looking up at her with a kind, caring demeanour, “but how you didn’t have the slightest sense that this child would one day grow up to date men is absolutely hysterical.”

Hope tosses her head back, giving out a bright, overcome little laugh. “You’re right,” she muses, covering her eyes with the palms of her hands. “I don't know what I was thinking.”

Lyall stalls his noodling to add in his own input. “We really were a couple of doinks,” he gives up, and Sirius is suddenly snickering twice as hard as he already was. “Kid was thrilled to watch any and all musicals she'd put on, would come from halfway across the house the second an overture would start up and we didn't think a thing of it, even learned every move to that one song-and-dance number from Jesus Christ Superstar — oh, what was it, Hope? The twirly one.”

Hope gives a sound of renewed fatigue before she gives up the title. “'Simon Zealots,'” she offers, distantly in expression and in tone before she drops her hands from her face for a pointed stare and shake of the head combo across the table at Sirius, who’s currently having a mini-crisis of his own for he knows he saw that film with Remus right there beside him, and there was no twirling to be seen from him. “We were utterly, utterly blind.”

“I’m sorry, I’ll come back to that, trust me, but he had me watch that film back in April,” Sirius puts down, pausing for emphasis, but since he’s still relatively new around here and Hope doesn’t know the heights of his dramatics, she must think he’s done for she slips her hands away from her face and hums, appearing quite piqued.

“And what’d you think?” she bids. “That one was a staple around here in April; I like that he showed it to you.”

“Well, listen, he prefaced the whole screening with, ‘It’s a lot, but you’ll love the score and you’ll probably like it a lot, too,’ and you know what, he was right about that because it had some intense '70s flower power going on and that was thee most retro-funk soundtrack that I ever did hear, easily,” Sirius says of it, garnering an amused grunt from Lyall in seeming agreement over there, "but he didn’t so much as vaguely let on about how well he knew any of the dance numbers by heart, the fiend.”

“Shame,” Hope offers him.

“An absolute one,” Sirius echoes. “I mean, he foot-tapped through the entire thing and even went as far as to bop along to some of them, but no dancing, no twirling.”

“Time to insist on a second screening and just watch him the whole time the Simon one is on,” Lyall puts up.

Sirius gives a trill in his throat. “I might have to,” he raises it, absently looking down at the open album below, but now that Hope’s definitely not blocking that second photo anymore he’s left to see it in its full glory and that needs immediate attention.

“Oh,” Sirius begins gravely, “no; this is too much.”

Hope gives a small trill of a laugh as Sirius clasps his hands against his cheeks while he scans the new photo: an action shot taken from street level with Lil’ Remus sitting atop a float amongst a whole batch of elves surrounding a man dressed as Santa Claus, only everyone else’s spirits higher than a kite by the looks of it except Remus, who has such a deep frown etched on his face that powerfully suggests he completely regrets signing up for this and overall, getting a glimpse of this photo may just be the closest to heaven that Sirius is ever going to get.

“That poor little guy,” he muses, moving his hands to cover his mouth as he looks up at Hope again. “He’s never not himself, is the thing; I love him for it.”

“Mm, he was no longer keen about any of it by the time I took that one,” she echoes. “I thought having the two side by side was a funny little contrast.”

“And it is,” Sirius emphasizes, snickering freely as he lets his hands fall from his face to his lap. “None of this should even be surprising to me, seeing as our Remus has an extreme aversion to hordes of attention; of course he’d have hated being on that float, but it's just so funny.”

“Mhm, and that parade exercise was how we very much learned that he was more of a stand-and-watch-the-parade sort, less of a be-the-parade one,” Hope offers up.

Sirius sticks the tip of his tongue between his teeth amidst plain amusement. “Well, you know your kid a lot more than you even know, then,” he extends, thinking of Remus’s complete disinterest in Zumbaing along with the rest of them and being perfectly happy to watch them dance by from street level instead.

Lyall doesn’t accept the pardon. “Nice of you to give us a break there, kid, but we knew better than to let him go up on that float and yet, we still did,” he cops to it. “The year before, he'd made his stage debut as 'Shepherd #2' in the Christmas pageant and even with that comparatively small part, he sat us down in this here room at the end of the same very same evening and broke it to us that as much as he gave it his best shot, he’d decided the stage wasn’t for him.”

“As if we’d have taken it terribly, too,” Hope comes in, heaving a great sigh to pair with her reminiscent smile.

“Had a whole speech prepared, with an intro and an outro,” Lyall takes it from there, and Sirius might truly weep, this is so sweet. “But then, a couple of his mates were going to be in the parade the following year and the lad must have thought it might be different than the pageant was.”

“Or maybe our initial support of the idea got him thinking he had to see it through even if he got cold feet boarding the float,” Hope comes in.

“That’s a good point,” Lyall allows. “All that said, we could have foreseen it going the same way as the pageant did and spared the lad the trouble, but as you see there, the kid was over the moon about his costume itself and I suppose we got a bit carried away ourselves.”

Sirius will possibly forever be thankful that his precious joke about willful blindness landed without a dagger being turned on him, but not only that, he’s twice as thankful as that to be witnessing Hope and Lyall working through their past lapses in judgement, however, and this is a deep however, he doesn’t want them to slash themselves to bits over it either. “Well, you live and learn, right,” he offers up. “I mean, it’s possible the lad felt comfortable enough to dress up and twirl and dance around here, maybe even because you two weren’t reading into it or assuming anything of him because he was doing that, and alright, so that comfort at home didn’t and still doesn’t translate toward everyone else’s eyes watching him, but that doesn’t mean you two didn’t give him a place to twirl before the rest of the world got into his head, you know? You can look back with hindsight and see things you could have done better, but you can also give yourselves a pat on the back here because with the way he talks about this house when he was a kid, he loved you both and it so much; it shows all over his face.”

Hope stares over the table at Sirius for a long moment before she speaks again. “If you think I’m even slightly interested in arguing with you on any of those points, you are mistaken,” she slips him, giving him a smile and smirk combo.

Sirius returns her a smile that’s similar. “Let’s face it, he’d still rather stay on the sidelines and cheer other folks on from there, but there are times he only needs a little push to join in and suddenly he’s having a blast, so you really never know with him,” he hands her, having another, longer look over Remus looking absolutely chuffed about his little elf costume. “He wouldn’t join us up on our Pride float which I hummed and hawed about because he’d be and have so much fun up there, but you know what, that lad danced his ass off on a crowded dance floor later that night and just let himself go, so I think it’s just got to be baby steps until he’s ready to branch further out, and maybe a bit of me actively celebrating and fanning it when he does allow himself a bit of showmanship here and there.”

He goes back to the previous photo and gives happy, posey Elf Remus a quick pet with right forefinger, looking back up at Hope with a watery smile when he is just elated to get to do this, and Hope’s not in his head, she can’t know that’s all that he’s all misty-eyed about, but she’s got a grin going now, a fond stare aimed at him, and she may very well have caught his little finger-pet as it happened for she goes ahead and tells him he can keep that photo if he’d like to.

“Hope,” Sirius startles, lifting both his hands to the dead centre of his chest.

Hope gives a small lift of her shoulders, her smile never changing as she backs her offer up. “We’ve a metric tonne of photos of him, not to mention multiples of him in that costume itself; we could stand to lose one to you,” she extends him, and when Sirius still can’t move a muscle through the fear of this whole, entire scene falling apart before his eyes, she reaches to flip up the transparent sheet with the pad of her right thumb and tugs the picture out of it, handing it over to him with a little flap of the photo before Sirius accepts it like the honour it is, feeling like he’s been given the key to the city.

Sirius smiles to her and for himself as he sets the photo to the right of him on the table, looking to the next page in the album and feasting his eyes on an image of Lil’ Remus in a bright yellow raincoat with flashy red Wellingtons on his feet, frozen both in-time and mid-air over a massive puddle, and Sirius’s smile deepens even more, not a spark of envy traceable in his whole, entire body when he really just has to be grateful that Remus was permitted to get a little messy now and again. He can't help but smirk, thinking of the adult version of that tyke who now purposefully goes around even the puniest of puddles to avoid his feet getting cold and himself catching one, which then has him wondering how soon that little guy in the photo got sick after that cannonball.

“How sick was he after this?” Sirius raises, looking up at Hope with a wry smile.

Hope gives a sigh that’s suspiciously loud enough that Lyall pauses his recommenced noodling to blink over at her. “I don’t know, I wasn’t home for that one — hon?” she puts up, looking sidelong at Lyall over there in her chair, who’s got a face on like he knows he’s the guilty party even if he isn’t privy to which photo they’re on. “The one where he’s just about to disappear into a sea otherwise known as a puddle; how quickly did he get that resulting head cold?”

Lyall clears his throat, repositioning his right hand on the fretboard. “Within the day,” he quips, giving a quick strum of the guit for emphasis, and Sirius can’t stave off his stitches whatsoever. “Can’t deny he was a happy camper before the head cold moved in, though.”

Hope gives a small sigh through her nose, sticks her right elbow on the table before leaving her chin in her hand, and looks between the photo in question and Sirius’s little laughing fit. “He does look very happy,” she relents.

“The cutest kid I think I’ve ever seen,” Sirius raises it. He looks to the photo album dedicated to ‘02, glances over at the nifty shelf built into the coffee table and holding hordes of albums over there, and looks back at Hope with a quick showcase of prayerful hands. “This may be a lot to ask, but if I could maybe see a few of those other albums, just to get a comparison or maybe even a Remus-through-the-ages sort of thing, I would be as chuffed as the tyke in the yellow coat is; d'you catch my drift?”

“I’ve caught it,” Hope passes him, giving him a quick, parting smile before she’s off to the den again, and it isn’t long before she’s back with a whole stack of albums for him to have a look through.

Sirius takes his mobile out as he goes, keen on taking quick snaps of polaroids to have as keepsakes, and stops for a good, long while to grin at two photos from the album titled ‘07 because they’re just that show-stopping.

Going by the year, thirteen-year-old Remus sits at the very same couch he’s currently snoozing on, a book in his lap, his head trained down, and by the looks of it, unaware there’s a photo being taken of him; those details are wonderfully familiar given that Sirius has a few snaps on his camera roll that showcase present-day Remus too buried in a book to notice he’s been snapped, and so the other, fresher details to the photo are what Sirius hones in on. His outfit looks comfy as all hell and quintessentially Remus through and through, a pair of back slacks paired with an equally noir jumper that has what appear to be little white stripes on it, but upon closer inspection, they may actually be many, many rows of tiny white diamonds; it’s cute as hell, Sirius wants that jumper now. His hair is shorter than Sirius has maybe ever seen it to be, that jawline of his is quite unpronounced so the picture must have been taken when it hadn’t quite finished sculpting out given that present-day Remus owns a jawline that could kill a man whether or not the owner of said jawline believes it or not, but the length of those lashes, quite prominent in the photo as his eyes are trained on the pages below, are just as prominent as they are now; he really is such a handsome lad.

The photo beside it was quite evidently taken mere moments after the first one for it’s a much less candid photo what with Remus having caught the photographer red-handed, his left hand held up and out to block his face from the camera lens; the early teen ‘tude wafting off of him, the flash bouncing off Remus’s hand and brightening up the whole shot as a result, the complete and utter refusal to let his face be seen, it all adds up to Remus’s very own paparazzi shot, and Sirius feels absolutely compelled to take a snap of both photos and save them to his camera roll, the former because there can never be too many photos of Remus contentedly reading, the latter because he never knew a pap-shot of Remus had been a missing piece in his life, but not anymore.

In contrast to his newfound glorious mood, a particular photo from the album marked ‘11 fucks Sirius right up, but he thinks it’s well justified; seventeen-year-old Remus perched next to Lyall, who’s got to be forty-one, forty-two there, if Sirius’s math is right. He tucks a lock of hair behind his right ear as he peers down at the photo, the rest of the details piling up and up and up before his very eyes; the backdrop is of an evident hospital room, the windowsill visible in the far left corner of the picture showcases a sliver of nightfall so the lamplight, yellowish glow cast over the two of them in the room is that much more prominent, the brazenly off-white cot Lyall's on is raised so that he's propped up with Remus perched just on his right, the two of them flashing twin smiles at the camera lens while a square present sits in Lyall’s lap, covered in green translucent giftwrap complete with a little red bow atop it that is so clearly Remus’s handiwork with all those perfect corners and patience abundant.

He knows deep down why this photo would've been taken, and especially kept; it’s Remus and Lyall at their simplest, smiling through near-tragedy, and it may well have felt sacrilege not to have a photo of that evening, and not keeping it around wouldn't make a whole lot of sense either. There are other details of note, ones that Sirius swallows right up, from Remus’s jawline, looking absolutely fierce and a lot more like it does these days, pulled into a smile as though he isn’t in the middle of one of the worst years of his life, to perhaps the only detail worse than the fact that Remus is smiling that brightly through the three of them spending Christmas in the hospital in the middle of one of the worst years of his life; the fact that Lyall looks so unrecognizably gaunt in the face. On from that, the line of the man's shoulders, those spindly hands sitting near to the gift he must've just got, so different from the face, shoulders, and hands of the very man over in the den, sitting easy in Hope’s chair with his slippers propped up on the ottoman, his face full and his gaze set off to the left toward the windowsill near to the back door, looking tucked away in a pleased, music-induced trance as the fingers on his left hand noodle along the neck of his guitar.

Sirius looks between past and present Lyall a few more times, finding himself highly grateful that Hope is busy looking through the album titled '97 for he knows he's got his brows set so tightly it’d look incredibly bracing to someone else's eyes, but he can’t help it, can’t calm his brows for anything; he’s so spooked, he’s filled right to the brim with the feeling, the tips of his toes and fingers tingling like white noise is all they're made of, and the next time he looks back at present-day Lyall is the same time he finds out that Remus has awoken, his head lolled to the left and his intensely squinting eyes set in Sirius’s direction.

Sirius gives him a small smile from the table, feeling a bit better already. “Hey, Sleepyhead,” he greets, garnering Remus to send a smile followed by a light hum back over to him, shutting his eyes again. Sirius takes a gander at the time on the stove, sees it's ten past five, and that would mean it's ten past the time he'd meant to wake him, so his next vocalization comes as a gentle warning. “You'll feel like shit if you keep snoozing.”

Remus sends him a bleary grunt in reply and tosses his right wrist over his eyes rather royally, Sirius would love to report when Royal Remus so seldomly comes out to play. Lyall's own interest gets piqued right about there, wherein he stalls his noodling once again, shifts in the armchair, and brings his legs down from the ottoman before shifting the hold he's got on his guitar, a funny curve to his lips. Hope looks over toward the den right about there, just as Lyall's wielding the guitar by the neck, and Sirius's brows take up residence right up by his hairline, his smile widening as Lyall extends the body of the guitar over the armrest of the chair he's in and the arm of hide-a-bed Remus is draped across and brings it down to bop Remus square over the chest.

“You heard him,” he goads.

Remus, having not seen that coming at all, reflexively jolts and sends his arms out to grip both the edge of the hide-a-bed and the back of it, flattening his body out to make himself as one with the cushions as possible. That really only has Lyall hooting away in the armchair as he brings the guitar back over to his lap and all this only has Sirius and Hope exchanging quick, amused glances before they're looking over at the two of them again, and it’s good timing overall for Remus, toting a substantially reluctant but still quite prominent smile, reaches both his arms up behind his head and flips his dad a double dose of the bird over the arm of the couch, garnering Sirius to whip his mobile up like lightning to snap a shot of the two of them goofing off over there.

Hope perks up in her seat and leans in toward the table to speak to Sirius directly. "I want to see that one,” she makes known.

“You have my word,” Sirius returns, smiling down at his screen as he pulls up the photo to get a quick gander at it himself; the shape of Lyall’s face is the first detail his eyes go to, which has been admittedly slender ever since Sirius has known him, but it is still far, far less gaunt than he just saw past proof of, and for that, he’s going to thank Cunt on high. That fuller face of Lyall’s is frozen mid-laugh, with his brows, eyes, and nose all scrunched up through his hooting, his arms draped easily over the body of the guitar in his lap, and for Remus, it's all in his bleary eyes, that sleepy smile he's got on, the plume otherwise known as his hair sitting lopsided on his head thanks to the nap he indulged himself in, his arms frozen in their curled up position with his two-finger salutes on display, and Sirius thinks, if that photo of them from six years back was them trying to be their best, then this one shows them at it.

He turns his screen and reaches it over the pages of the photo album so Hope can see it, too, and perhaps it's the glare of the light fixture above their heads is making it a tad difficult for her to see the photo in its full glory, but she leans in over the open album ahead of her, reaching to tip Sirius's wrist up to get a better look at the screen, and gives a sweet little noise before her fond gaze flickers back up to Sirius, and it's — it's fucking lovely, and so, so easy, getting to celebrate their boys like this.

“Send that to me,” Hope instructs, taking her hand back and resting her chin over it.

“It's done,” Sirius extends, forwarding it on over to her mobile with a few presses of his right thumb.

The only thing that could make the moment an iota lovelier than it already was would probably be Remus shuffling into the kitchen with the heels of his palms rubbing his eyes and a boisterous yawn about him, so thank Cunt he’s in here doing that. “That so?” Hope raises, smiling at him sidelong.

“It is,” Remus gives hoarsely.

Sirius sits back in his chair, sticks his mobile aside, and watches the velocity of Remus's hands to be sure he isn't giving his peepers too much force, but he's happy to note that he's more giving them a deep massage than a beat down, moving on from his eyes to give a full rub over the majority of his visage. “There's food for you,” he relays.

“Mhm, a very late lunch, just in the fridge,” Hope directs him.

“Mm, thank you,” Remus returns, dropping his hands from his face as he goes behind of Hope's chair to get around to the fridge and giving a second glance over the state of the table while reaching for the handle. “What do we have here?”

Sirius's right hand moves at the speed of light. “Remus the Christmas Elf,” he announces, flapping the photo toward him for a showcase. Remus eyes the display once before promptly ducking behind the door of the fridge as he's getting his plate out of there, and it's all very suggestive of the idea that he'd be perfectly happy to hide in there for as long as it takes to avoid all this hoopla, but Sirius gives him a long and lengthy pfft for it all the same. “Oh, hide all you want, but she said I could keep this one so you'd best get used to seeing it around mine.”

“Mum,” Remus huffs, coming out from his hiding spot with his plate in one hand and a juice carton in the other to give one pointed head tilt.

“Oh, stop,” Hope huffs back. “He was so happy about it.”

“Clutched his pearls and everything,” Lyall throws in.

“It was warranted, Lyall,” Sirius sends him, putting the picture back down on the table for safekeeping.

Remus bumps the fridge door shut with a hip-check. “He's going to put it on the fridge for everyone to see,” he bemoans, heading behind Sirius's chair.

Sirius turns with Remus as passes by, pointing his forefinger back at him for the rest of the time it takes him to get over to the far side of the counter. “I was thinking of clipping it to the mirror above my bureau, but there you go giving me ideas again.”

Remus gives a small sigh as he peels the sheet of plastic wrap off of his plate, pops the microwave door open, and shuts his plate up in it, setting a two-minute countdown on the timer before it seems he just can't help but comment once more on the situation. “I would have thought that of those two options, you'd have wanted to keep my deepest frown ever caught on camera,” he mentions, crumpling up the plastic wrap into a mini ball and binning it. “That, I would actually endorse you putting on the fridge; even I can admit it's a funny one.”

“No, listen, that one's a gem and a half, but look at you in this?” Sirius raises, reaching for the photo and recommencing his flapping of it.

“I've seen it,” Remus chimes, moving over to bring a glass down from the cupboard they live in.

“You're literally doing this, Remus,” Sirius doubles down, giving a quick study of elf Remus's pose before striking the same one from the torso up.

Sirius holds the pose all while Remus pours himself a glass, pops the lid back on the carton, and walks it back to shut it up again in the fridge while Hope watches the entire thing going down. “Hon, he's putting on a whole show for you,” she alerts him.

Sirius gives a small snicker, keeping in character while Remus turns away from the fridge, doing the both of them a favour and looking over Sirius's imitation of his tyke self with a wry smile. “It's quite possibly the most embarrassing photo you could have ever picked to keep of me,” he declares.

“Oh, quit it, you're glowing, you're so happy,” Sirius defends, letting go of the pose and giving Remus a Look that suggests there's no argument left to be made here.

Fortunately, Remus simply points to the photo album sitting open and temporarily in front of Sirius, using it as a means to move things along. “What year's that one from?” he raises, heading past Sirius's chair again to wait by the microwave.

“Twenty-eleven, babey,” Sirius relays, flipping the page real, real quick.

He'd mostly done it to avoid seeing gaunt Lyall again, but on the other hand, it's a real good thing he did do that for the next two pages are graduation themed; Sirius studies the first of four portraits that are the standardized cap, gown, and diploma laden student with a child-like wonder, he imagines, his gaze jumping between Remus's dinner-plate eyes, his lopsided smile, the bit of his fringe poofing out from underneath the front of his cap, the diploma rolled up in his hands and held at a tilt.

The next three photos look quite similar to the first, the only real difference is that Remus's smile starts out small in the first one and gets more and more pronounced before it's very clear that Remus was mid-snicker for the fourth one. “I'm flatlining,” Sirius puts out tightly, hands on his cheeks again as he turns to find Remus sending him a twist of a smile from over by the microwave. “Your hair, your eyes, your lil' laugh; how did they not make you retake that last one?”

“What do you mean?” Remus bids, ignoring the beep of the microwave in favour of moving up behind Sirius's chair to have a look for himself.

Sirius settles in twice as comfortably as Remus slips his forearms over his shoulders and sets his chin down on the top of his head. “Well, I'm not complaining because this is art right here,” he puts down first, gesturing toward the fourth photo with his right hand widely splayed, “but the bloke we had taking all of our photos was such a stickler. Thinking about grinning? Don't be daft. Laughing? This is the most important photograph of your life, don't you know? Prim and proper smiles were permitted and that was about it.”

Remus gives a small smirk for the antics. “Well, I knew the photographer,” he offers him.

“Sounds suspicious,” Sirius returns wryly.

Remus gives a light huff above Sirius's head. “We all knew him,” he amends.

“And that sounds even more suspicious,” Sirius goads, goon-grinning beneath Remus's looming form, which leans in closer to Sirius for a strong huff against his left ear.

Across from them, Hope has her lips pressed together quite a bit forcefully while her gaze is trained above Sirius's head and on her son, but Lyall gives out a wan laugh over there in the den. “Lead with the shop next time and you won't have this happen to you,” he suggests, finger-tabbing lightly over the neck of his guitar.

“He really wouldn't,” Sirius echoes it.

“OK, then he owns a portraiture shop in town,” Remus supplies. “He's got a whole set-up for classic portraits in there, but he'd come to the schools to do all of the class photos, yearbook ones, and so on.”

“He'll take the photos for licenses and IDs at the shop, too,” Hope chimes in, flipping the page of the album she's got.

“And the only times he was a stickler were for passport photos, but that's out of his hands,” Remus tacks onto it. “The rest of the time he made it a simple affair; no frills necessary, lots of goofs.”

“Well, clearly,” Sirius raises, poking Remus's visage in the fourth photo a few times in quick succession.

Remus leaves a parting kiss atop Sirius's head before he slips off to retrieve his plate from the micro, which spurs Hope to start moving the excess photo albums over to give Remus room at the table end of the table that's just ahead of the stove, which then spurs Sirius to take them off of her hands and stack them to a neat pile on the only unoccupied spot at the table. He turns the page and begins pouring over four shots taken from the ceremony itself, one of Remus crossing the stage to take his diploma, snapped right up by the stage where the photo-taker (Hope, Sirius figures) must’ve scurried to grab the shot, another of him shaking a robed man's hand, another where he's now got his diploma in his own hands, and the last, the moment just after he moved the sash over to the other side of his cap with a pointed smile aimed at the camera.

Remus appears ahead of the spot created for him and leaves his glass of OJ and his plate with a fork sticking out of the heaping pile of potatoes on the table, staying standing while having himself an overhead glance at the album. Sirius flashes him a smile and puts a shimmy in his shoulders as he flips forward, looking back down and taking in cap n' gowned Remus, Angela, and Tom as the subjects of the next page, only these two photos look a little different compared to the one that got framed and displayed on the mantle. In that one, the three of them look a picture-perfect mixture of cheer and accomplishment, but these other two here are clearly the goofy ones, the outtakes as it were; the first shows Angela engulfed in such a full-bodied laugh that she's gone doubling over while beside her, Remus's mouth is half-open and hanging slightly lopsided so Sirius knows exactly who sent her into that state, and there's Tom on the other end of him laughing it up, too, but who gives a shit about him, and in the one beside it, all three of them have devolved into stitches.

Remus's figure moves in Sirius's left peripheral, heading out of the kitchen and apparently on through the dining room without a word or peep save for his retreating footsteps on the carpet, and Hope looks up from the album she'd gone back to, glancing to Sirius for information he unfortunately does not have. “OK, bye?” he calls out.

“I'll be right there,” Remus calls back, amusement noted in his receding voice.

“Your food's going to get cold,” Hope frets, but she's looking back down at the album ahead of her so it's got to be a more mild case of the frets.

“And I'll be right there,” Remus repeats, sounding like he's on the extreme other end of the house now.

Sirius blinks twice more and leaves that alone, his heart rate speeding up as finds that Hope and Lyall have replaced Remus's mates in the two photos below the others, and no offence to Angela and full offence to Tom, but Sirius is leaps and bounds more invested in these.

Hope's looking good with her white dress and hooped earrings, though her eyes look a tad puffy from weeping on and off through the ceremony, no doubt. Lyall’s looking dapper in his suit jacket and tie, sporting a fancy cane to match even, and he’s got a little more weight back in his visage compared to the one taken at Christmas so that’s a cause for celebration right there, but that face of his is absolutely shining with pride for that son of his, and Remus, oh, sweet boy Remus, stands sandwiched between them looking happy as a clam about it.

They're so sweet, all three of them; the glee about them, the glee on Remus's face, the glee he's heard Remus speak of from that day, his overwhelming gratefulness mixed with glee over getting to have his dad out of the hospital and well enough to make it to his graduation, captured for those three to keep as theirs.

The photo next to it is quite similar to the first; Remus and Hope could really be swapped out with the one beside it and would look about the same, but Lyall's eyes are closed through a boisterous laugh Sirius can hear ringing out from just looking at it, and that has him giving in to a sizable grin. “Who took these?” he raises, tapping the two shots in turn.

He glances up when he doesn't hear anything, presuming she might've been distracted with the album she's flipping through, but while Hope’s certainly looking at him, she's gone quite still, so the answer’s there in the room with them though thankfully the offender is not, and the only thing that cuts through Sirius's ire over the likes of Tom.com being allowed presence at such a visceral moment for the Lupin fam and the privilege of taking these very photos would almost have to be Remus wandering back into the kitchen to hold the framed photo from the mantle out to him.

Sirius is quick to take it from him, though his thoughts lapse the moment he’s got it in his hands. He blinks twice at it before deciding that any more blinking could result in him realizing that this is just a hallucination and looks to Remus instead, his stare unmoving while Remus takes a seat, pulling his chair into the table completely inconsequentially, and it’s honestly such nonchalant energy for him to be giving all of this that Sirius very nearly barks out a laugh, but then Remus looks to him with a heavy stare and he couldn't possibly laugh now.

“Pick whichever one you like best from that day,” he bids him, pulling his fork out of his pile of potatoes.

Sirius's gaze lingers on Remus for a beat, drops to the pages below him, and lifts back up to glance across the table at Hope, who appears to have just finished digesting the framed photo for she promptly sits back in her seat and gives out a righteous sob.

"Mum, everything's fine," Remus assures.

“No, it isn't,” Hope denies, bringing her hands up to cover her face as she shakes her own head back and forth.

Remus taps the surface of the table that's between him and his Hope. “It's really OK—”

Lyall stops his tabbing in an instant. “Oh, what is it now?” he puts up, and then he's getting up out of the armchair, leaving his guitar propped upright against the left arm of it. “Quit making her cry, Remus, I mean it.”

“I'm not trying to?” Remus returns, not looking back at Lyall as he moves on to tapping Hope's raised right arm instead of the table, bidding her to come out from hiding. “I just said it's fine since you clearly missed that detail.”

Lyall sends him a championed huff as he comes for the kitchen. “Well, clearly it's not fucking fine, is it?” he retorts, flying a hand toward Hope, who is indeed in a state of duress.

Sirius promptly puts the controversial photo down between him and Remus to better cross his arms over his front, lifting his right one up enough to slip his hand over his mouth and potentially block any signs of amusement from being caught by any one of the Lupin bunch, but there's just no hiding that he's watching the show with a pair of animated eyes.

“I'm so sorry, hon,” Hope expels, muffled behind her hands while she peeks through her fingers at Remus. “I'd never have — I didn't—”

“I know that, Mum,” Remus comes in, making a flattening gesture with his palms to bring the energy back down. “I’ve known it for years.”

Lyall, stalled in the doorway of the kitchen, pounds his right fist against the side of the stove, calling for order in the court. “Would somebody tell me what the fuck I just missed?” he demands, and Sirius presses his lips together behind his hand as he's not sure he can trust it alone to keep him from dissolving into an untimely fit.

Feeling the need to step in and help out, Sirius uses his free hand to lift the frame up and point it toward Lyall, who steps over to loom over the corner of the table between his wife and son, his gaze going between the three subjects of the photo behind his specs before he gives into a substantially toothy grimace that is, frankly, the most appropriate reaction for him to have gone with.

“Yee—” he starts, trailing off before completing the ‘sh’ and giving up on that. Instead, he takes to doing frankly the funniest set of things from there, starting with making two idle fists, popping the sides of them together in front of his waist, bringing them around to bop them together behind his back before capping it off with a step in to give a small clap to Remus's left shoulder blade with a dry, humourless laugh. “Parents of the decade."

Sirius drops his hand from over his mouth and uses it to point starkly at Lyall for that despicable read of the situation. “That will never, ever be thought in his head, so don't you go saying it for him,” he asserts. “If you two would let him finish speaking, you'd know that he's—”

“You all looked so sweet in that one; you looked so happy and so much like him in it,” Hope cuts in, reaching to tap the side of Lyall's left hip for emphasis, and Sirius looks to Remus plainly there, finding it both exceptionally irritating and tremendously sweet to be thought of as Lupin enough to not be able to get a word in edgewise. “I thought it was the perfect pick.”

Remus's shoulders take to wilting, but Lyall vocalizes some world-weariness for the both of them. “That's some selective memory if I've ever heard it,” he deems it.

“Hey,” Hope returns, giving the same left hip a thwack.

“Well, was I not the one who said, ‘Put that one up, he looks just like me in it,’” Lyall puts up.

“Well, I don’t know who said it; we’re talking years ago,” Hope returns.

“Well, I’ll help with this one; it was me who picked it,” Lyall trades her, them, and the room through the left side of his mouth, and with Hope's reluctant puff of allowance, he looks to Remus next. “Thought I was doing a good thing, putting you up there with your mates.”

Remus keeps his eyes shut, lifting his right hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. “I can't keep repeating how much I know that or we're never going to get anywhere,” he puts it, his eyes remaining shut as he speaks slow and concise, while Sirius points fast between Hope and Lyall to demand continued silence from them or he may just flip this whole table. “I haven't looked in the direction of that mantle in years; it's not as if I’ve been home much for the last couple of them so I haven't had to avoid it like the plague the way I used to, but I did it for most of my adult life and still wouldn’t look at it when this one spotted it yesterday, so, now that we’re all caught up to speed, what if we replaced that one with a photo from the same occasion that's much more fair to me now and him, who deserves to be included and not spoken over, by the way—” Remus tips his head toward him, who has to put his right hand back over his mouth to avoid giving out a gutted noise, “—and then, who knows, maybe I could actually start looking at our mantle again; wouldn’t that be something?”

Hope, and surprisingly Lyall, too, aren't quick to speak after that pitch, and frankly, neither is Sirius; he’s too busy having been swooned to silence, but all this ongoing silence is a good thing when it gives Remus the chance to pause, re-think his closing statement, and smirk, opening his eyes as he aims to amend it in the most Remus way possible. “And I mean maybe,” he extends, his smile going lopsided. “Not sure I'll ever glowingly support a shrine dedicated to me on the mantle in the front room of the house, but—”

Hope does have to object there. “It's hardly a shrine,” she mentions, pairing it with a small huff.

“Honestly,” Lyall contributes. “We're allowed to like you, kid; might be time to get over that.”

“I'm working on him, you guys,” Sirius comes in.

Remus sends him a Look with a pointed smile, so he's not in the doghouse yet. “For now, we are all going settle for switching that one out,” he reiterates, displaying his right hand toward the framed photo sitting face-up on the table.

He looks between his parents, over to Sirius after that, but that glance lingers on him and comes with a nod, his lips quirking. Taking his cue, Sirius looks down at the page below him, lingers on the one of Hope, Lyall, and Remus, but peeks back over to Remus's glossy graduation photos and particularly, the one where he's mid-laugh.

“It's gotta be between these two,” Sirius lets it be known, turning the album around on the table and flipping the page to point to both.

He watches as Remus, Hope, and Lyall give a similar quirk of their lips before finding each other's glances in turn. “It's your call,” Lyall bids, nodding to Remus.

Remus breathes in, looks back over at Sirius, and reaches to flip the page back to the one of just himself, tapping it twice with his right forefinger. “Do you want to keep this one?” he raises, looking back up at Sirius with an impish smile.

“Like I'd ever say no,” Sirius returns, slipping that photo out from inside the leaflet.

“Then it's done,” Remus chimes, giving a light shrug of his shoulders before he looks back over at his mum and dad. “It's the right one; you should have been up there with me from the start.”

Both Hope and Lyall start to object, but Remus isn't letting them talk this time around. “Hi?” he comes in airily, picking up the silver frame and working on slipping the photo out of it over his plate. “You two sort of made that tyke in the first one and then got him all the way to that day; why didn’t any of us think of this sooner?”

“Oh, you got yourself there, hon,” Hope lodges, getting a firm, throaty grunt of agreement out of Lyall with it.

Remus stares up at them egregiously pained. "I literally hate that you think that," he returns them. "I wouldn't have gotten anywhere without you both so stop it."

Sirius breathes in and out once, needing that beat to recoup. “I think there's room for both of you to be right with this one,” he puts in, on to pulling out the Lupin family photo now. “He’s a lot stronger and more independent than any of us might want him to have to be at times, but you raised him that way and he’s a force because of it.”

“What would we be without this one,” Lyall lodges, nodding starkly toward Sirius like this is just the automatic next response and not something that could genuinely cause him to go into cardiac arrest.

“We know exactly where we'd be,” Remus gives it plainly, and the silence that comes on in the few seconds thereafter gives the impression everybody in this kitchen more or less agrees. In the rendered silence of the kitchen, Remus reaches his hand out to accept the replacement photo from Sirius, works to slip it into the frame, and once that's done, gives the final product a strong once-over. “It should have been this one.”

Sirius breathes in long, certain he's watching Remus sidelong with the gooniest expression out there, but it's unavoidable, and anyway, he wouldn't want to hide it if he could. Remus places the frame just ahead of the corner of the table between himself and his mum, but in doing that, puts it right ahead of where Lyall's looming like the jolly green giant he is, and that gets the man pushing a smirk out his nose.

“Was that you hinting that you want me to run that back for you?” he raises.

“Well, no, but I'd like to eat this so that'll have to wait,” Remus raises next, plucking his fork out of the pile of potatoes on his plate.

“Oh, God, hon; eat,” Hope assigns him.

Lyall plucks the frame up with that, heads into the dining room, and presumably tapers off toward the living room with it. “I don't hear you running over there,” Remus mentions, bringing a forkful of potatoes toward his smirking mouth.

“I'll run you into the ground, if you like."

And just like that, they're OK.

Remus gets down to eating, working through each section of his plate in a cyclical rotation that’s very, very him, while Hope and Sirius continue to pour over their respective albums and throw up any one particular photo for commentary when the need strikes. Lyall doesn't make it back from returning the frame to its home just yet, but the creaks that sound on the stairs paired with the dull footsteps echoing above their heads suggest he's taken a detour and is now milling around up there.

Sirius puts the album titled ‘11 aside to travel further back in time to the year ‘96, where the shots are all classic polaroids and Remus is a whole two-year-old in them with flash appearances from Hope or Lyall looking like young, sweet, and exceptionally thrilled parents spending time with their lil' guy, and Sirius is all about that, make no mistake, but he’s all about the aesthetics of this album.

One particular standout stops him right in his tracks for it boasts their sweet little boy walking on unsteady feet toward Hope, kneeling on the floor a few steps ahead of him with her arms outstretched, ready to catch him should he stumble and ready to scoop him into a hug; it’s just that palpable of a joy written over her face. The other details are prime as well, Remus dressed in a little cow-print onesie, complete with little booties shaped like hooves, and although he’s not in the photo itself, Sirius is certain that Lyall's behind the camera, whooping and goading that tyke’s progress right along with Hope, but the room they’re in isn't one Sirius is familiar with.

“OK, first of all,” he starts, turning the album around on the table and propping it up for Remus and Hope to see better, “this one is just jaw-droppingly cute.”

Oh,” Hope gives up heavily. “Big day.”

“It's all over your face,” Sirius trades her. “But second; is this the flat?”

“That's the last one we were in,” Remus offers him, loading up his fork with a pile of peas and carrots. “Not the one above the pub.”

“Mm, good starter home, but a bit small for the three of us,” Hope tacks on.

“I want to see that one, too,” Sirius bids, looking to Remus with a smirk since he's the guy to go to about the itinerary. “I mean, I won't insist on seeing the interior, but if we could cruise by it some time, I'd like that.”

“Consider it on the list,” Remus extends.

Sirius spares him a smile and then one for himself, putting the album back down on the table and facing it toward him again. He continues right where he left off, his gaze falling to a shot below the aforementioned polaroid with a wee Remus dressed to the nines in winter wear while he sits comfortably atop an equally bundled-up Lyall's shoulders, and Sirius has a whole triple take over that one: Remus is, by and large, Lyall 2.0 by stature, frame, and bone structure currently, but he got gifted Hope's eyes and locks in the gene pool and given that, with Lyall's thick-framed, quintessentially-Dad shades and that woolly hat covering his much less curly head ‘o hair, he's honestly such a dead ringer for Remus that if somebody told Sirius that the photo had been altered to have him spliced in there, he'd really have to accept he was being told the truth; it's just that uncanny.

Sirius picks the album right back up, facing it toward the other two to showcase his wonderment with a stark point down at the photo with his right forefinger, his gaze moving between Remus and Hope speedily. “Lyall, who?” he raises, celebrating the sounds of the stairs creaking again for it means there's far more of a chance that Lyall's making his way back downstairs. “Remus Jean Lupin's more like it.”

Remus smiles around his last sip of juice while Hope comes alive again with a widening of her eyes and a sharp intake of breath. “I've not looked at that one in a long time,” she expresses, peering intently at the fun-house mirror in front of her. “I mean, it's there when you see them right beside each other, and you certainly see it by how easily they're confused for each other around here, but that shot really puts it front and centre, doesn't it.”

Remus wordlessly sticks his fork on his nearly finished plate save for a few bites of potatoes and a bit of crust, but the man's smirking at the two of them as he slides his knees to the right of his chair. “Do you want me to leave you two alone so you can weep together in private?” he raises, the absolute shit.

“You rude, rude boy,” Sirius sends him intently, craning his head so he can follow Remus to the cupboard under the sink with his eyes. “You're lucky you're so cute or I'd stand our date right up.”

Remus hums a flat, chesty laugh as he cleans off the plate over the bin, reaching to start the taps, and all this causes Sirius to face forward just in time to not miss Hope's own little smirk. “Called that bluff,,” she quips.

“It's almost infuriating how well he keeps me on my toes,” Sirius lodges, bringing the photo album back around to face him on the table as Lyall steps into the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen.

“Alright, I'm out for a bit,” Lyall puts out there. “Gonna need those keys back, Remus.”

Sirius glances over his right shoulder to find Remus glancing over his left one, his gaze trained past the top of Sirius's head toward his dad. “Yeah, just a sec,” he bids, sticking his rinsed plate in the drying rack.

He turns back to the sink, takes care of his glass and fork, and dries his hands off on the tea towel below the sink, turning back to the greater kitchen and fishing in his right trouser pocket for them. There's a quick, questioning motion from Remus there as he holds them up that Lyall then answers with simple a reach of both of his hands and in the next beat, the keys are soaring over the table and into those cupped hands of his.

Sirius loves this place, more and more, every beat of the day. “Where you headed?” he bids, sticking his right elbow on the table to set his chin in his hand.

“I've got to pick up some sort of gift for Bubba,” Lyall gives up.

Remus gives a light hum of amusement a little to the left of Sirius's seat. “I wish you every luck with that venture.”

“Whether he accepts it or not has nothing to do with me,” Lyall extends.

“You could ring the bell, toss it onto the porch, and speed out of there so he can't chuck it back at you,” Remus suggests.

Lyall points starkly at his son, his face breaking into a prideful smile. “That's an idea,” he sends him. “Is there anything we're out of that I should pick up on my way back?”

Remus breathes in thoughtfully, looking to his mum. “I can't think of anything immediately pressing,” she raises, turning his quizzical stare back on Remus, should he have a suggestion.

“I'm close to finishing off that juice, so a little more of that might help assuage my guilt,” he offers, giving into a stretch.

“Or, at the very least it'll give him the chance to feel guilty about something else,” Sirius puts in.

Lyall gives out a quick, throaty laugh for that one. “Got him."

Remus drops his arms from his stretch to rest them on his hips. “Says the man who just tried to take on a decade's worth of guilt over a single photo—”

“Oooh,” Sirius drags out. “Got him.”

“Alright, fuck this,” Lyall puts up, turning to leave the kitchen if all it's going to do is give him heat.

Remus moves past the back of Sirius's chair in the man's wake and ends up poking around in the freezer, which has Sirius considering whether his unfinished plate had more to do with keeping room in his stomach to satiate a case of the sweet tooth, but he catches Hope smiling at him, which only has him smiling back at her in turn, but that doesn't necessarily tell him how long she's been doing that for; could have been a second before he looked her way or it could have been longer, hard to say. He gives up a small shrug paired with a more curious smile, but then Lyall's poking his head back into the room from over behind Hope and looking a tad sheepish as he whistles to get his son's attention.

“Can you stick my toolbox back down there for me?” he bids of him.

“Sure can,” Remus replies, looking to him while he tucks both his and Sirius's pints out between his left arm and side. “Want me to stick the guitar away, too?”

“Oh, no no, I'm not finished with that yet,” Lyall puts down directly, his bright smile making him look years younger, and the man's looking sharp as is so that's saying something. “Just stick it somewhere not in front of her chair and we're good to go.”

“Done,” Remus assures, popping the freezer door shut with his right shoulder.

"Hope, don't eat anything," Lyall calls out, his footsteps heading away from them. "I'll bring something back."

"Well, alright, Sarge," Hope returns, smiling to herself and then to Sirius when she catches him watching her do it.

Remus takes the pints with him, stops on by the silverware drawer for two spoons, and brings them all to their pharmacy bag on the far right end of the kitchen counter. He turns back from it, catching Sirius's sidelong blink-and-smile combo, and smiles twice as hard as Sirius is doing and that's also saying something. “Thought we could keep them in the fridge nearer to us so we could have midnight snacks more easily,” he confesses, putting both his hands flat and underneath his chin for a charmed display of his smile.

Sirius's eyes glaze over as he takes in the prime image ahead of him. “Your mind,” he extends.

Remus smiles to him, then flickers his gaze over to his mum, where he then makes one hell of a face, going red in record time and disappearing into the den before heading on through the kitchen again with the colour of his face, neck, and ears threatening to match the very toolbox hanging from his right hand. Sirius watches him head down to the basement, turns his head to aim a stare across the table, and eyes Hope with her arms crossed over her stomach and her mouth hidden in the palm of her raised right hand.

“Oh, give it up,” she sends them, dropping that hand down to showcase a pointed smile. “Am I not allowed to think this is sweet? You're both so smitten.”

“And to think,” Sirius raises gently, and he means gently, “we were like that the whole, entire time we made dinner, ate that dinner, and—”

“OK, you may go now,” Hope bids airily, beckoning him off with the swish of her right hand.

“Well, what about all this?” Sirius raises, gesturing around at the plethora of photo albums.

“I'll handle this,” Hope assures, circling her hand above the photo haven they're gathered around.

“Or,” Remus raises, the top of his head reappearing at the threshold of the basement stairs, “we could all take two and it'd be one trip.”

“He's got the range and the brain,” Sirius says of it, closing the album in front of him and grabbing hold of the first one off the pile diagonal from him.

Hope gives a quiet sigh and grabs three albums like the proud little lady she is, which leaves Remus with just one album to carry back to the shelf beneath the coffee table. “Leave them there,” she bids of them, nodding to the surface of the coffee table where she's just left her small pile. “I'll take it from here.”

“Alright, but I'd like to resume at another time, and I do hope there are few albums hanging around from before this guy came along 'cause I know I'd like to get a look at those,” Sirius maintains, stooping to leave his two on the coffee table.

Remus smirks over on Sirius's right as he slips his one allotted album onto the coffee table before hoisting their recyclable bag onto his right shoulder, and on Sirius's left Hope gives a funny noise, almost a laugh but more so a loaded grunt. “There are plenty of those over there, too,” she extends, tossing her head toward the wall bookshelf while Remus strolls around the two of them to prop Lyall's guitar up in the small space between the computer desk and the shelf. “There are a lot from the '80s, though, so expect big hair and some flashy clothing ahead.”

Sirius's chest inflates twice its size. “It’s what I was hoping for,” he insists deeply.

Hope gives a small breath through her nose, her gaze lingering on Sirius before she steps in close. “You're just the sweetest, hm,” she puts up, giving him another one-armed hug, but this one's got a bizou to his left cheek and a pat of her hand at the back of his head along with it, and the only things that stop the floor from dropping out from under Sirius is his eyes finding Remus's and Remus's eyes finding his.

“OK, well, we're going to pack up ahead of time so we can shoot off tomorrow morning,” Remus starts up, moving over quickly and reaching to take hold of Sirius's right elbow, “and then it's date night, so if you don't see us much—”

“We'll assume it's going just great,” Hope finishes, beckoning them off while she moves to her knees ahead of the coffee table to start the sorting process.

“Exactly, mhm,” Remus echoes, guiding Sirius toward the back door and tugging it open for him.

Sirius can't see too much with the film over his eyes so he's rather appreciative of his guide; he pads out of the doorway upon Remus's quiet urging, stopping just outside it while Remus handles shutting the door behind them because he Needs to be near him even if he’s no help with this, and then Remus back beside him, ushering Sirius down the way toward the bend in the porch at a hurried clip.

“You're OK,” he assures, keeping his voice low as he guides him toward the porch steps, “you're OK; just walk.”

The sounds of Remus’s footfalls provide a decent bit of sonar as well a pace for Sirius to follow along with, thank Cunt; his legs are feeling a lot like stilts at the moment. He appreciates the gentle, coaxing tone Remus has taken as much as he appreciates the urgency on display, the readiness he's showing just to get him somewhere quiet, further off, private.

He gets the sense they’re headed for the A-frame, but Sirius really only makes it as far as the fork in the garden before the dam's threatening to break. He wiggles free of Remus's hold, speeds up his steps, and physically puts himself in front of Remus, who reads his cue so well that he's got Sirius wrapped up in his arms in no time, that beautiful, obliging man.

Given the state of Sirius's sinuses, he was sure he'd just burst, heave, and soak the collar of Remus's shirt up real good because of all that pressure building, but it's not coming on violently like he expected it to; he's sobbing, make no mistake, and it's silent like the last time he fully lost it in front of Remus, but it isn't painful to try and bring in air, he isn't convulsing uncontrollably, and he isn't tripping over himself to say he's sorry for the waterworks because he doesn't have to, does he; Remus gets this part, gets him, holds him like a piece of gold he's been tasked with keeping careful watch over, swaying Sirius to a slow beat in the middle of the garden because he has to know now that it’s a perfect move to make, and for all the urgency he showed in trying to get them somewhere alone, he's not putting the pressure on them to move an inch further now that they've stopped, and for that, Sirius is indebted.

“I hope that was OK; she didn't mean to—” Remus offers, trails off, and evidently worries inwardly that Hope just pulled a huge no-no.

Sirius lifts his head again, breathing in long and out the same pace, his eyes and cheeks swollen, and he hardly clocks the greenery and speckles of colour peppered around them when he's got Remus ahead of him, giving him his full, unwavering attention. “I didn't even flinch, Remus,” he says of it, giving the weepiest smile, he knows, but that’s exactly what it calls for.

Remus gives a long breath out of his nose, as if he held that one in as long as he could, and leans in, pressing a long, quiet kiss to his forehead, leaving it pressed there. Sirius shuts his eyes with it, breathing Remus in, and quite suddenly, the imprint of Hope's gentle hand on his hair falls away, and Remus and his steadfast ability to blow his mind are what's left.

He breathes in fast, moves back a step, and reaches up to thwack Remus at the centre of his chest with his hands starkly. “And you?" he demands, garnering a small jolt out of the man for it. "Are you actively trying to give me heart failure?”

Remus looks left, right, and back to him again, his brow lifting to a curious lilt, which really only gets Sirius lifting his right hand to start counting away on it. “Hmm, let's see; you tell your mum and dad that no one's relished in your happiness like I have, right in front of me, then you pretty much ultimatum them, nicely of course because you're you, but the sentiment stood tall above the rest: they can be a part of this side of your life only if they welcome me in with open arms,” he recaps forcefully. “Then, you urgently beckon me over at the Farmer's Market to introduce me to your fruity English prof—”

“Alright, wow,” Remus comes in.

“Oh please, that man's gayer than a picnic basket; it's no wonder or mystery you felt seen by him, and I'm not done yet so shush,” Sirius puts down, wagging off the audible case of the smirks Remus fell into and continuing with the count. “And then, you're giving me hugs with them right in the room, you're giving me smooches without looking back at them to be sure they're not looking, and then, and then, you bring me that fucking framed photo and have me pick the replacement like I'm part of this agency grab you're going for—”

“And you are,” Remus comes in again, smiling as he gives the motion for a clap of applause. “You’re the reason I know there’s any agency for me to grab.”

Sirius takes in a tight breath. “You keep stopping and restarting this thing,” he puts down, gesturing wildly back toward this chest of his and that heavy-beating organ in there.

“Uhm, that gigantic heart you have; that thing?” Remus checks, a cheeky smile on his lips.

“Remus,” Sirius says clearly, but it's heavy, too. Jokes are fine, more than welcomed at times when they need some major tension defused, but they're standing about six feet from the same spot they stood a day ago, trying and failing to communicate until they made it happen and were so much better for it. “I love a good joke, but I need you to talk to me for real, please.”

Remus's eyes go from amused to soft to quintessentially worried in the span of a beat. “Is it all too much?” he raises. “I can pump the breaks if it’s—”

No,” Sirius puts up. “Don't change anything about you, ever, unless — no, I just — what are those moments like for you? I mean, are you OK when they're happening, are you nervous, am I making you feel like you absolutely have to do these things, or are you feeling freer to?”

Remus shifts a little on the spot, one foot to the other, but he's giving this half-smile as he does it. “Well, I'm usually some form of nervous,” he puts it, training a blink toward the ground before his gaze is back up at Sirius, but it's that adorned gaze again and Sirius meets it headstrong, hoping Remus will keep his gaze. "But that doesn't mean I shouldn't; I see how happy it makes you and there's freedom in that.”

Sirius wants to take him at his word, Good Cunt, that would be the easiest solution here, but he can't seem to. “I want you to be finding yourself and enjoying what you do find,” he presses, hands pressed together in the form of a makeshift prayer, “but I can just imagine your insides just rattling around in there when you do that sort of thing—”

“That doesn't matter,” Remus puts it, not unkindly; it's more concrete, if a slight dose of disparate. “I need you to see I'm in this with you, even if I panic and worry that we won't make it, and I can't only say I'm in it; you should be seeing me fully in this and how else are you going to unless I show you that wherever I can?”

Sirius's breathing goes shallow, but he doesn't say a word, make a noise, not when Remus is finally talking. “You're not making me do anything, Sirius, and that's sort of the point; you waited and waited and waited on me, to a detriment of your own, it wasn’t fair; I was letting you down,” he puts it, lifting his shoulders as if to hold that fact on them alone, and Sirius makes to breathe, makes to lift his own shoulders up, try to take some of that blame back on him, but Remus knows it the second he sees him do it and shakes his head intently. “I did, I know I did, I saw it; I saw you hurting as you waited and waited for me to actually let you in and I couldn't put you over my own shit; I hate that I couldn't, I hate that we reached such a boiling point because of it and him and the way I handled that mess, and I fucking hate that I really almost backed out of the plan, so it's my job to restart that heart of yours wherever I can and I figure, because I’m me and I’m stunted badly, these little things I'm doing are just smaller ways I can put us both first.”

“Smaller,” Sirius quotes, because that was the understatement of the millennia.

“Fine, big ways,” Remus amends, a budding smile starting up. “And if you want me to be a supergoon, I can do that for you; just say the word.”

“Supergoon me,” Sirius prompts. “I'm ready.”

Remus's smile goes right into a grin. “I can say that I love you more than I know how to express, I can say that I've never meant to make you think you're any less than you are to me because I'm this terrible at commitment—”

Sirius reaches his right hand out for him fast, cutting right in. “Remus, I hate that I said that to you.”

“No, it's good you did,” Remus underlines, catching that reaching hand of his. “You were right, it's OK to say it, but then I can say you're helping me with that very thing by not letting me get away with it; you're not just going around calling me out and leaving me there to rot, you're helping me, every hour of every day to remember to put us first, listen to us more than the parts of me that tell me to keep as much of this inside as I can manage, and I can say you're what's setting me free of it all I like, but showing you that is invaluable evidently, so if I've got your permission, I'm just going to keep doing and showing these things for you where I can.”

Sirius bites down on his lower lip as he nods vigorously, glancing down to add a visual to the sensation of Remus petting lifeline in the palm of his right hand, and the kiss that his lips are tilted up into by the chin gets his heart running amok in his chest despite the slow, sensual tugs of Remus's lips against his own, and it's over too soon, much too soon for him, but he doesn't mention it because Remus is swiping at the tear streaks on Sirius's cheeks with his free thumb, and then he's tugging on the hand he won't let go of.

Sirius allows himself to get slowly spun around and led away from the garden, holding tight to Remus's hand, not interested in severing that tie either, and bites his lower lip, biding his time. They make it up the stairs and in through the Q-frame door, through the main room and down the hall into the kitchenette, and the only reason Sirius can see as to why Remus dislodges their hold is to use the both of his hands to open up the freezebox of that mint-coloured clunker of a fridge.

They didn't bother with lights earlier on in the day; the daylight pouring in through the main room's window and the little one in the bathroom had been more than enough to see about the cabin without any real need for artificial light and for that reason, the bulb inside the fridge and the miniature window above the counter on the far wall of the kitchenette are the only sources of light on this side of the cabin.

Sirius waits on him, waits in the doorway until Remus has shut the freezebox door, waits until he's turned back to him, and there, he grabs the now half-full reusable bag out of Remus's hands and chucks it off behind him; the containers and spoons inside it clatter and thud against the floor out in the hallway, and from there, the only sound inside the cabin is the sharp intake of breath Remus takes as Sirius swoops in and backs him up against the counter.

Remus braces the edge of the counter on either side of him like he's readying himself for a rough one, and there's just enough light peeking in from the window overhead for Sirius to get a decent look at his eyes, so he hopes Remus can clock the soft look he gives him from there; he doesn't want it rough, he just wanted that bag out of the way and off of Remus's mind.

Sirius leans in, leaving an open-mouthed kiss on his lips, making it as slow and sensual as Remus made the kiss outside feel, and pauses, their breaths audible between their lips. “I know we have to pack, and we're going to,” he whispers, pausing to tease a kiss over his lips, and then Remus is kissing him full, knowing just what he would’ve said, and Sirius matches the pace he set to instantly.

He slots their hips in together to match their lips and with both those parts on lock, he lifts his hands to travel then all over Remus, up into his plume of hair for a grateful feel, down to the back of his neck for a caress and over to the front of it for another, switching direction and catching Remus's chin in his the both of his palms only to deepen the kiss more while he's got such a hold on Remus, and he feels him breathe wantonly against lips, feels him whimper back there in his throat, feels Remus roll his hips against Sirius's real nice and real, real slow so it's clear he's not demanding this go any faster or quicker; it's much more a call for Sirius to meet them, and meet them he does, rolling his hips in a circular motion and slowly working Remus against the cupboard below the counter.

It's minutes before Sirius remembers he's got hands he could be expertly teasing Remus with, but he likes where his left hand is and he really likes that he can whisper his fingertips along Remus's cheek as he keeps that hold on his chin so he reserves his more-prominent hand to use well, sliding his open right palm down Remus's shirt-covered chest, down to hook his fingertips under the hem of his shirt, and reaches his hand up and in, gripping at Remus's side, back up to his chest for a feel of that, down to his midriff where he can feel the tightening and re-tightening of Remus's muscles as he begins rutting to meet Sirius's palm just as much as he's meeting his groin, and then, Sirius thinks dipping his fingers below the belt of Remus's trousers and underneath the band of his briefs might count well as a request for invitation, but judging how fast Remus lets go of the counter's edge to unbutton his trousers himself, invitation granted.

Sirius grins through their everlong kiss and pushes Remus's trousers down some more, palming him with a full, up-swinging hand and swallowing the little sounds Remus gives against his lips. Though the lad’s coordination falters some, his curled fingers dance over Sirius's waist as he obligingly drives his package up against Sirius's palm, splaying his fingers wide over Sirius's skin before curling them in again, slipping a bit of nail in there with the motion that certainly doesn't go amiss. Remus parts their kiss to breathe, to let his head fall back some, to let Sirius hear him doing it, and Sirius watches him openly, listens closely, twists his hand up and back down Remus's shaft and relishing each and every one of Remus's breaths, his noises, his thrusts — and in fact, he’s so present in it all, that when Remus regains some coordination and makes his hands cooperate so he can push his trousers down further, Sirius startles just a bit.

He figures he may as well keep his hand running along Remus's cock while investigating his motives, running his heated, curious gaze up and down Remus's body as the man lifts his legs in turn, tugging his trousers off of his ankles and throwing them aside so he's bare from the waist down. With coordination back on high, Remus doesn't stop there, lifting his driven hands to fiddle Sirius's trousers undone, and Sirius can hardly complain about this decision; sure, he very did go into this tryst determined to make this a Remus-centric experience, make him feel as worshipped as he damn well should, but who's he to deny him any? May as well work together on this one if that's the spirit pushing them on already.

Sirius keeps his hand on Remus's cock, aiming to keep persistent coordination of his own while Remus shirks his trousers down past his knees for him, flips his briefs down to join them next, and spreads his legs wide, working his calves around behind Sirius's own to hook him in close. Completely charged, Sirius lets go of Remus's cock to drop his arms down, hoists Remus up by the underside of his upper thighs, and slots their junk in tight together, getting the hottest fucking noise of approval out of Remus as he pins him to the counter; despite this, Sirius's spots the exact moment that same, championed noise registers for Remus and subsequently catches the moment Remus must decide that wasn't nearly as hot as Sirius believed it to be for he clamps his mouth shut real fast, freezing solid while his legs stay hooked rather invitingly around the backs of Sirius's thighs.

Sirius looks up to check the state of the windowsill overhead, finds it doesn't appear to be open at least, and nods for him to see for himself; Remus tilts his head back to have a look, glancing back down at him with a huffing a laugh at himself, and Sirius shakes his head once, smiling real big in hopes that he’ll see it and see it well in the light pouring down on them, and leans in for a new kiss, angling an expert thrust to go with it and getting Remus grabbing fast at the counter’s edge.

Sirius takes his chance, arching his hips back so there's just, just enough room to work his right palm between them, and Remus gives out these little bursts of breath, switching to bracing the counter with the heels of his palms, and lifts his pelvis right into it, a decision that really helps in terms of leverage, not to mention ratchets up the friction going between them, and it’s merely a minute, give or take, before Sirius calls his right hand’s presence here officially moot for Remus has truly brought his frot-game with him, and Sirius isn't all that sold on the idea that they’ll need hands this time.

He reaches his right arm behind Remus’s back to plant his palm down behind his rutting hips, thinking he'll drive him back against it that way, and curls his left arm underneath Remus’s right thigh to grip him properly from below, drive him forward this way, too, while he's at it, and Remus thanks him vocally, in so many ways, without uttering a single word for it; it’s all steeped into each hum, each breath, each cry as he makes that counter his altar, and Sirius, here to worship, arrows his hips relentlessly to deliver those punchy, decided thrusts Remus is demanding of him by way of his body, urges Remus all the way on with the grip he has on those fucking prize-winning hips, and showers him with praise, praise that he means, praise that he believes, praise that he knows will rile this boy right up to the finish line where he can drive him over it. Remus fights hard to keep his eyes open through the onset so Sirius fights twice as hard as he does, committed to watching Remus glow from head to toe for being told his praise, committed to watching him writhe and beg and come alive for him, committed to watching him give himself over to wanting it all so viscerally — so committed, actually, that Sirius comes first, full-stop, but no need to fret, Remus lights up bright, goon-grinning as he drops his head back and arches into hot, tight, devastating release, almost as if that was the winning seal to the whole deal.

Sirius wants, so very badly to drop his head down and rest once he's finished gasping, but he can't do it yet, not when Remus is hugging him with his curled legs, not when he’s on a mission to press a kiss to each section of Sirus's face, starting with his forehead, under both of his eyes, his cheeks, the tip of his nose, his chin, before he's caught him by the lips again, drinking Sirius in and giving it all back over to him, and then they're just smiling, nuzzling, cheesing, the works, and that's just right with Sirius; to say he isn't petting at Remus’s jawline would be a bald-faced lie, so he won’t be doing that, he’s drunk in love and he’s not sobering up.

Remus breathes in a long, satiated breath, biting at his own smile like he can’t quite handle how happy he is to have his face being pet, to have himself be held, to be celebrated wholeheartedly, and then he darts his gaze downward, toward the mess that they can both feel well trapped between their bodies, and with a lopsided grin on his face, Remus drops his hands to Sirius's cheeks.

“Alright, hot stuff,” he starts, clapping them twice with fervour, “shower first, packing next, and then, we get ready for Shroomtown.”

Sirius hums his approval and kisses him twice over for that last addition to the plan, and breathes in long before he lifts Remus away from the counter. He stays near it while he tests his footing out, getting himself a solid grip around the small of Remus's back before linking his hands together there, and turns from the counter with Remus hanging off of him like a sloth, carrying him across the hall to get that first item knocked off the list.

"Sure you got me?" Remus checks, reaching up to brace the bathroom doorframe as Sirius scoots them through it. “You’re a wee bit shaky there.”

"A stringbean like you? Easy."

-

 

It's nearing twilight when Sirius receives the first signal that the shrooms have hit, which comes in the form of a long, long, very long puff of breath that Remus lets out beside him; they're way out in the outskirts of the field, over by the mouth of the woods with a full view of the property and the house in the distance, laid atop a classic red-and-white checkered picnic blanket with Remus all the way wrapped in his chaotically colourful quilt and just his curly head poking out of it so that he's more of a standard burrito than humanoid person just now, and Sirius with his own, shockingly crimson quilt thrown over the both of them should Remus get a case of the shivers at any point later on.

“It's come on, then?” Sirius raises, though it's more conversational than a bid for confirmation.

Remus, nestled cozily between Sirius's left arm and side, shifts his head back to smirk up at him. “Sure has,” he affirms, eyes on him.

The boy went and pushed his sunnies up on the top of his head a good half-hour ago now, once the sun receded past the trees back behind them, and while those peepers of his aren’t quite the dinner plates Sirius tends to celebrate, they are quite owlish in their shape and those pupils of his are saucers in their own right; the second, surefire sign he's come upon the sign for Shroomtown.

“Mind you, the puff was a little for that and a little for the tunes,” Remus tacks on, nodding his head in the direction of Sirius's mobile that's currently streaming Austin P. McKenzie and, well, fair enough.

“Well, I can hardly blame you for that,” Sirius trades him.

“Buckley vibes,” Remus offers in turn. “Buckley meets Broadway meets Perfume Genius, in fact.”

Sirius's eyes widen as his galaxy brain activates. “That's it,” he gives up heartily, looking sidelong at Remus with a note of wonder and a little bit of pride, too. “You’ve a great, good ear, my boy.”

“Took me some time to clock it, so don't go throwing bouquets at my feet just yet,” Remus trades him, a playful smile on his lips.

Sirius keeps his gaze on the lad, finding Remus's head and that ever-present plume of hair poking out from underneath his quilt to be one of the fondest sights, but then again, he's always found 'Rito Remus to be one his highest favourites of Remus's many forms. He catches sight of a thin line of green in a sea of brunette locks, hones in on the blade of grass for retrieval, and lifts his right hand to cup the back of Remus's head, keeping it steady while he reaches his left forefinger and thumb toward it, smirking as Remus's eyes go wider, looking this way and that as Sirius's hand gets closer to his head.

“There's a blade in there, I'll get it,” Sirius slips him, grinning as he tries to catch the flimsy stem.

“A blade?” Remus pipes up.

“Of grass, not a katana,” Sirius returns, snickering wildly as he shows it off before flicking it away.

Remus gets caught up with his own mini fit, goon-grinning over there while Sirius carts both his hands through the boy's hair to even it back out, partially because the deed is done and there's an accomplished air about it, but there's definitely a bit of a personal gain in getting to run his hands through that mass of curls a few times just for the hell of it. He lowers his gaze to meet Remus's eyes again, finding the lad very much finished with his snickering, his saucer-pupils rightfully boring into him, and alright, Sirius isn't on shrooms currently so he can't know precisely what's happening in that noggin of his that could be bringing this look on, but it sure feels intense to be on the receiving end of that stare and that's without Remus's lips curving into an near-frown.

“OK?” Sirius asks, tapping his left forefinger against that side of his frown.

Remus nods quickly, his frown lifting into a smile in little time at all. “You're just sweet, is all,” he offers simply, and now it's Sirius's turn to make a frown, not out of any sort of negative emotion but more to do with feeling rather touched by this oh-so-very blitzed lad right here, and so much so that when Remus shifts up a bit so that he's able to catch him by the lips, Sirius is admittedly slow to react.

Here's the thing, though? Remus is a star when it comes to snogging while dead sober, gets certifiably freaky when he's had a few drinks, but cruising through Shroomtown? Those kisses are languid, unhurried every time, the point of his tongue persistent, yet light, easy, and teasing, his lips warm and plush and playful; Sirius feels a warm line light up and travel the length of his spine the longer the seconds go on, tracing the fingertips of his left hand over Remus's jawline while he's already got it there and tousling Remus's curls while his right one is still caught up in there, and rolls his tongue against Remus’s playful flecks, humming lowly into this extremely too-hot kiss, but there, he leaves Remus three lasting and open-mouthed kisses in quick succession, placing them one after the other with a healthy dose of tongue, and gives a resigned sigh, moving his hands down to guide Remus off him and back onto the blanket.

“OK, fiend,” Sirius raises, “settle down now.”

Remus sends him a lengthy pfft. “The moment called for that, and you know it,” he returns. “You’re so gentle with me until you’re not and it’s perfect when that is, but you are — so tender with me otherwise, I just can’t handle it sometimes.”

Sirius lowers his eyelids to mere slits. “Love that, love you, but that's all you're getting out of me, hot stuff,” he lobs him, scooting to the right on the blanket beneath them.

Remus gives an indignant, borderline wounded noise as Sirius shifts away from him. “Oi? Stay here,” he bids, and when Sirius hums a decline mostly because he's having too much fun with this, Remus shuffles closer within the confines of his quilt like a caterpillar wiggling its way up a tree branch and Sirius is in stitches, unable to stave Remus off any longer.

The boy snuggles up close, placing himself right back against the curve of Sirius's body, and leaves a quick peck down on his collarbone. “Sorry I got frisky,” he extends.

"Oh, you’re big enough to admit you weren’t going to stop at a kiss?” Sirius negs him, a wry smile on.

Remus takes in a long, long, very long breath, puffing it out through a comparatively brief sigh. “Oh, Sirius, I thinking about dragging my tongue up and down and all over your body before working my way back up to eat you out, so,” he trades him, laying his head back against the dip of Sirius's shoulder while he puts a whole lotta emphasis on that last word. "No, I wasn't."

Sirius breathes in long, long, very long himself, shutting his eyes tight and screwing his face up. “Good thing I'm a gent,” he gives up tightly, and Remus rightfully cackles beside him, garnering Sirius to smirk up a storm and wrap his right arm around Remus's shoulders.

Remus settles down again, breathing in and taking to a rather prim, knowing smile. “You let that one go on a bit longer than usual, I noticed,” he points out, smacking his lips once as a dot of punctuation, his eyebrows popping up to his hairline and back down again while he shimmies his ‘rito-shoulders.

Sirius huffs at him through a gape-grin, leans in to leave a smooch on Remus's forehead, and settles in again, fine with snuggling up if they can both behave — at least until that one's sober again, Cunt. It's honestly a bit funny that they're even having this much trouble keeping their lips off of each other when the pair of them may or may not have taken their sweet time in that shower of theirs smooching, may or may not have also gotten distracted quite a few times to kiss a bit here and there while packing up for tomorrow's trip, and owing to all that time logged away smooching & stopping to remind themselves to get back to the grind, Remus really only got down to dosing up around eight or so.

Not exactly per the revised plan the two of them set for the evening once Sirius began getting intrusive images of Remus falling asleep at the wheel bright and early tomorrow morning, but he does have to admit that he's eased up on it some since about four o'clock this afternoon. What's important now is that the sun's on its way out, the sky's looking a pinkish-purple up there, it's nearing nine according to the time displayed on Sirius's mobile while 'Love Note' streams out of it bringing forth a romantique, outdoorsy atmosphere that pairs up rather well with the setting they're in, frankly, and Remus will be heading into the downtown core of Shroomtown soon enough, giving them plenty of time left in the evening for Remus to suitably come down, get a decent night's rest, and be good to drive in the morning. And, if not, Sirius is still more than happy to give piloting Lyall's beast of a truck a shot, but whether or not Remus lets him do that is neither here nor there.

Considering how relaxed Sirius is now — if reluctantly horny — it's also a bit funny to think of just how unnerved he’d been earlier on, and funny how easily Remus clocked what it was really about; how sometimes rationality has nothing to do with an oncoming worry, and Remus would know a thing or two about that better than a lot of people. Funny, too, to think about how Remus knew to start working him back from that place of irrational worry when usually that's Sirius's specialty, but, as that same lad bravely pointed out for him, Sirius hasn't been right since, oh, Wednesday afternoon about, busy dancing between his typical do-what-you-can-but-come-what-may sensibilities and Remus's more typical let's-plan-for-all-scenarios style.

Or, now that he's here and thinking of it, had it been earlier than that even? Perhaps it's the pinkish-purple glow among the clouds overhead, or the crisp, near-eerie vocal tones playing off his phone, or a bit of both that have Sirius feeling introspective, but he wonders if there's more to it than him reading through a journal/slam book dedicated to him on Wednesday afternoon, that maybe his recent penchant for second-guessing himself, Remus, and the world around them started up before he ever opened that notebook.

If he concentrates hard, tries to locate when these overbearing moments of inadequacy started popping up regularly, he may well have to pin it to the arrival of the chest. That day, Sirius could already feel tugged along, back into the undertow with the lot of them, was already beginning to feel the push and pull of outlasting who he used to be with the who he can be with the right sort of people around him, and that was without the deep well of inadequacy he got blasted into by combing through that notebook like it would've held anything good for him in it.

Whether or not Sirius was already positioned for this crisis of self before the notebook was in his hands, maybe Remus is still right about that one; maybe he is reeling hard at what that notebook had in store for him and maybe now, though this is less a possibility than an undeniable fact, Sirius is just going to have moments where the idea of Remus in any sort of potentially hazardous situation is going to be harder than it ever was, maybe these intrusive images of him gone, taken away from him too soon, will just keep coming in like the tide and get him reeling all over again only for Remus to have to pull him back out of the water, and suddenly Sirius knows, without a doubt in his mind, that this must be one-tenth as bothersome as Remus sees himself to be whenever he's too wrapped up in worry to the sun. It’s no wonder he tries so hard to keep it to himself; it feels terribly bare, letting it out.

“Where'd you go?” Remus pipes up, reverting Sirius back to the field they're in, back to the snuggle club he's a part of.

“I'm here,” Sirius assures, giving Remus's shoulders a squeeze.

He notes that at some point over the course of Sirius's impromptu visit with the inner workings of his head, 'Love Note' must have faded out for 'I Belong to You' croons out from the speakers on Sirius's mobile, and although Sirius knows he hit shuffle on his 'Austin P.' playlist, that one coming up next can't be entirely pointed, but it does feel an appropriate tune to go with just how well his love life seems to be going amidst all the uncertainty. Sirius shifts onto his side a bit, suddenly quite taken by vivid flashes back to their steamy kitchenette encounter earlier, but that's not his fault, alright? It's entirely Austin P's fault, thank you much, and he's not about to skip the tune just because it lives and breathes sexual tension just to get his mind out of the gutter; he can get himself out of there by flipping back to the utter elation the man beside him keeps throwing him under.

At the memory of that illustrious silver picture frame and all it stands for, Sirius completes the rotation by shifting fully onto his side, which means he can no longer hold Remus around the shoulders like before, but he absolutely can scoot himself down a smidge or two so their heads are level on the blanket and can totally toss his left arm over Remus's right hip, and that, he thinks, is a fair trade-off even if to feel a tad closer to him.

“You coming onto me, fiend?” Remus negs, his face all rumpled up suggestively.

Sirius sends him a direct pfft. “I wanted to see you better,” he says of it, tracing a quick star against Remus's quilt-covered hip with his left forefinger and smiling like a goon. “I just cannot believe you banished him straight from your mantel.”

Remus's face comes alive again, his saucer pupils widening before Sirius's very eyes. “Stop, I should've done it ages ago,” he returns, always willing to block even a quasi-compliment.

“You stop; I'm continually impressed by you,” Sirius returns, smiling widely.

Remus doesn't pfft in some amused form of disagreement or find a way to block this one, not when he's a little busy tucking his nose and mouth below the edge of his quilt so he's just a curly-Q with a set of owl eyes sticking out from underneath, and it's not the time to pitch his thoughts back to a different, potential problem, Sirius knows it isn't, but he's going to bring it up anyway and ruin their spectacular day, isn't he.

He breathes in quietly, like the breath before a plunge. “So, apparently I'm a masochist,” he prefaces, doodling little, makeshift shapes on Remus's hip with his forefinger.

Remus's eyebrows go right up past his fringe. “Like, sexually?” he checks, mouth still covered by the quilt. “Because I would argue that you're far more into playing around with control and submission than you do actual, inflicted pain, and I think there’s a big difference.”

Sirius pauses short, realizing Remus likely thinks the overall tone of the tune playing brought this up. “Right, and thank you for saying that,” he gives him. “But I meant it like, I seem to be super into causing myself trouble by bringing you topics that I know could get me sent into the doghouse, but then, if I don't cross my Ts and dot my Is, I could just end up throwing myself in there that way, so I'm sorry about it, but I have to, Remus.”

Remus pulls the lower half of his face out from under the quilt and scoots another inch toward him so now they and their faces are exceptionally close. “What is it?”

Sirius opens his mouth for the starter, but now that it's open, he's not sure anymore of the severity of it. “It could be nothing, right?” he raises. “I know that, but Tommy McGee said something earlier that rubbed me in a particularly asinine way—”

“He does have that effect,” Remus slips in.

“Mm, noticed that, too,” Sirius echoes, thankful Remus put that out there for him, “and so, I don't know, it could've been him trying to make me second guess myself, but you know I wasn't going over there to get the number because I just need to be in control of who you talk to, right?”

He pauses there for any sort of input, but Remus, likely too high for this conversation, is a tad silent and that has Sirius feeling a bit like dirt for needing to bring this up now, but on the other hand—

“Right, yeah,” Remus extends, giving him a prompt to keep on.

“OK, good,” Sirius trades him, smiling sheepishly, he knows. “After I got your number off him, he tossed out there that you wouldn't like me controlling you like that, so of course now, I’m not so sure that I won't wake up and—”

Remus's hands are trapped in the confines of his meticulously crafted cocoon so he can't use either hand to press a fart noise into in order to amplify it, so Sirius supposes that must be the reason he leans up and over to blow a rapturous one into Sirius's right bicep, and that's got Sirius absolutely losing control of his words and subsequently falling apart from laughter, but that also means he’s not ready at all for the big ol' rant Remus dives into. “Oh, that's the richest thing I've ever heard about coming out of his mouth,” he puts out lively, giving in to a tight laugh. “Amazing, truly, how little self-awareness he's managed to find within himself; where does he get off saying any combination of those words after he ran the fucking show for years and made it so that I'd take the scraps he'd throw me and consider that exactly what I deserved and not ask for anything more than that — unbelievable, he wants to talk about control after the ways he'd pry into my family, my friendships, making it so that when he came around, I was his and he was all I had until he'd disappear on me again, and I'd be left reeling, wouldn't know how to fall back in with my parents or my mates just right until the jitters wore off and I could relax back into my family, my friends.”

OK, and, you know what, maybe this was the time to mention it if it means Remus has a hard case of the no-filter; Sirius can't move, can't make a noise in case Remus reads it wrong and walks back any of what he's just admitted, so instead he just tightens the hold he's got on Remus's hip and doesn't let go.

“He was so fucking selfish, every time I needed him not to be,” Remus pops off, and Sirius says a quiet prayer to Jesus Cunt himself that they're into Pop Off territories. “He didn't give a flying fuck about my dad when he was sick, he’d scoff and blame him and mum for letting me work so much during the school year, as if I didn't love that job for myself and as if three evenings a week to help out when dad couldn't physically be at work was borderline neglect, he'd constantly say they were accepting too much from me as if I'm not in this fucking family, too, and get so pissy with me when I'd be keeping my clunker of a mobile glued to me everywhere I went when he was in hospital so I'd be able to get updates whenever mum had them, act like I was imposing on his time with me, constantly tell me to quit worrying, quit pacing, quit throwing off his energy so that it got to a point where I resented myself for bothering him with any of it.”

And there, Sirius tastes copper, but he's got his teeth clamped down on the inside lower lip to keep from shouting through Remus's chance at even a bit of catharsis. “He was just mean, and I know that sounds small, but it's the truth of it,” Remus rattles off. “He was mean-spirited and the saddest thing about it is, he still fucking is, and I had hope for him, I did; I hoped he'd grow up, I hoped he'd learn to be better, embrace himself so he wouldn't do that to the next bloke he couldn't face properly, but again, there I went dolling out good faith toward someone who doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt; of course he said that to you, might as well try to poison us now that I'm finally out the door, right?”

Remus is just breathing now, gathering himself, his wits, but it can't be easy to do just now, and of course he manages to look shocked at himself, looking to Sirius with a pleading gaze that drops off the second he sees the open fear on Sirius's own. “I know I should be over it by now,” he puts up, shrugging his little burrito shoulders.

Sirius shakes his head roughly there. “No?” he manages. “That's going to take time, and a lot more of it than just getting over him did.”

Remus blinks wildly. “Then why are you staring at me like that?”

“Uhh,” Sirius breathes out, not eloquent by any means but it's more an utterance of noise than much else. “'Cause I don't want to be anything like him, but I've already been that.”

Might be the shrooms, might be the left turn, or a little of both, but Remus pulls a grimace that's a lot like the one Lyall pulled inside, but dialled up to one-fifty. “Are we sure we want to say that?” he gives tightly, and out the right corner of his mouth, too, and, good Cunt, there's something to talking this out with one absolutely blitzed Remus.

“I was horrible to you yesterday,” Sirius puts it. “I was, and I’d been horrible to you before that.”

“Right, but we tallied your track record up to being genuinely out of line with me to a total of three times in, what, two months?” Remus puts up. “I can't really tally up all the times he was way out of line with me if that helps you out.”

“I don't just get to get off scot-free because I've done it less,” Sirius puts up. “I'm not allowed to talk to you like that.”

Remus's owl eyes pull right into a squint. “I blew you off so hard, Sirius,” he raises. “You get what you give, right?”

Sirius gives out an uneasy breath, shaking his head. “That's not fair, though," he puts out, feeling sick over it. "You were rightfully triggered by then and I poked you until you burst."

“I shouldn't have locked you out,” Remus sounds out; not unkindly, just real slow. “We just talked about this—”

“No, not quite,” Sirius returns, not unkindly either.

Remus gives an uneasy breath there, too. “So, what, then?” he raises. “You have to be non-stop, consistently perfect but I get to shut down, take you for granted, and I'm not allowed to get a single bit of flack for that?”

“It's completely fair that you've been conditioned to think you have to be careful and not get too comfortable with me,” Sirius puts up. “You know what I used to be like.”

Remus blinks fast at him. “I'm trying very hard not to be very upset with you right now, so you have got to back off yourself or I'm going inside,” he puts it plainly.

“In that state?” Sirius raises, smirking despite himself, but that image is a little too much. “Not a good idea, bud.”

“The A-frame, bud,” Remus returns him fast, but there is a smile playing at his lips, he spots.

Sirius budges Remus with the arm draped over him. “Don't go anywhere,” he bids him.

“I don't want to, but I don't like the comparison you're trying to draw, and badly done at that,” Remus gives him. “What about everything we just said, what, three hours ago? I'm in so deep with you there's no getting out of it because you were mean to me a few times in a couple months, that's just ridiculous; you love me, you treat me like royalty, you've taken these clusters on like a soldier, you dig me out of the ground whenever I can't seem to do that myself, you're so patient with me, you actually get off to me getting off—”

“That's an addition,” Sirius comments, 'cause he can't not.

“And rightful one at that; it’s incredible to me, and I'm not done,” Remus puts plain. “You think I haven’t noticed the way you think of and talk to and look at my parents? It's arresting, you've never so much as insinuated that I've got to pick between you and them, and that is—”

“I don't even—” Sirius tries, truly bamboozled. "I couldn't; you three are it, I'm just lucky to get to be around you.”

Remus's eyes go exceptionally wide as he leans his head in close; if his arms were at his disposal, he'd have them up for a very sardonic display. “I hit the jackpot with you,” he attests, his voice ringing out fantastically over the field, but that's not at all what Sirius saw coming with that face he pulled and it just hits him sideways. “We're both a couple of basket cases, but does that mean we don't get to enjoy each other? We just don't get to experience the good side of love because we got shown the bad side of it too early?”

Sirius shakes his head fast. “Well, not when you put it like that.

“I’m not putting it like anything, it’s just the truth,” Remus puts down. “We’re going to bonk heads sometimes, but we’re an equal fucking match because we don't let each other act out for long and we do make each other better, but we're not going to even notice what better is if everything's easy all of the time, are we? That’s just not realistic for one, it's not fair to either of us for another when we've both been dealt sharp cards and got through some hot garbage, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get to have this; you get to have this, Sirius.”

Sirius scrunches his face right up, his chest rising and falling fast through the silent fit that takes him over. “Well, am I right or am I right?” Remus digs in.

“You're right — Cunt, you're always right,” Sirius puts out, taking his left hand off Remus's hip to drag it over his face. “I love you so much.”

“Took the words out of my mouth,” Remus gives him. Sirius drops his left hand from his face, aims a watery smile at Remus, and leans in to press a kiss to those truth-telling lips. “Hey, now, don't get fresh with me.”

Sirius gives in to a grin, a smirk, and a frown, respectively. “Sorry I made that about me,” he gives him.

“Record time, too,” Remus quips, but he's got that lopsided grin on.

“I'm so proud of you,” Sirius insists. “In general, always am, but for knowing you were treated terribly with him, and that you deserved better because you fucking did; you deserved so much better than he knew how to give you.”

Remus exhales through his nose, smiling over at him wetly, and it's the soberest he's looked in at least twenty minutes that Sirius has to remind himself Remus is very not that. “In that case, I'd like you to try to believe me when I say that you're my better,” he raises. “Just because I joke and say my type just happens to be broody boys and just because you hit a low point yesterday, does not mean you're anything like him; just, fundamentally, you are nothing like him.”

Sirius leans up and presses their foreheads together at an angle, breathing in long and holding it; he lost this round, but even as he raises the white flag he knows it wasn't really about Tom, was it; Sirius ought to know exactly who he's like. ‘Pearl’ is playing off his mobile now, an utterly topical tune for shuffle to have picked here, but then Remus's mobile gives out an 8-bit ditty to announce he's got a new text waiting for him, and Sirius can't say he isn't happy it came in before he could speak up about who's actually going to have poisoned them eventually.

He moves back, tossing a glance around to locate where the sound came from exactly, but Remus starts wiggling his arms around in his cocoon, trying to reach for it. Sirius watches avidly as it takes a good thirty seconds more for Remus to pull it out from underneath the quilt finally, giving out a celebratory huff for it as he fiddles with the button on the side.

“Want me to help?” Sirius raises, grinning wide.

“Actually, yes,” Remus returns at once, holding the phone out for him to take before promptly becoming a caterpillar again.

“You're OK if I—” Sirius trails off, letting the circular motion of his right forefinger ahead of the screen serve as the rest of the question.

“Well, it's not going to be a potential side-lover or anything,” Remus quips. “Go right ahead.”

“Alright, alright,” Sirius puts up, holding the mobile in his right hand as he rolls onto his back and tapping his thumb against the screen overhead that went dark in the meantime, but he really doesn't have to go past the lock screen when the blurb on it tells him everything he needs to know: Angela's the sender, and the text is literally just 'BOYFRIEND!!!!!???'

Remus,” Sirius puts out, whipping his head back toward him.

Remus spooks right quick. “What?

Sirius lets his gape/grin and the turn of the screen inform him that it's nothing horrific, just his reaction to yet another Sneaky Remus attack. “Ahem?” he enunciates.

Remus's face rearranges to a wry expression. “I forgot about that,” he snickers. “Well, I suppose that means she's happy for me; that's nice of her to be.”

“What did you say first?” Sirius demands. “And when did you say it, even?”

“Mmm, when you were having your smoke break,” Remus supplies, and alright, fair, he did stay behind in the cabin to keep packing while Sirius scooted out for it, that checks out.

“OK, and for the other one?” Sirius probes, but it becomes clear by Remus's snickering that he's holding off very much on purpose just to be the little shit he is.

“I asked her if she and Beatie might like to meet up on maybe Wednesday or Thursday, and she wrote back nearly immediately with a yes and a lot of exclamation points so that was super nice — too nice, one might say—”

“No one would say that,” Sirius sneaks in.

“—But then, I got this mischievous grin on my face—”

“—I bet you did—”

“—Thought of you out there on the steps, lookin' a right bombshell as usual—”

“—Oh, you did, did you—”

“—And then my mind wandered back to you, me, the kitchenette; how attentive you were to me, my body, how desperately you spoke of me to me, how close you held me afterwards, and I got a bit hot over it, won’t lie about that, and I thought ‘he’s so good to me,’ because you are, physically so good me, but it bleeds into everything else, and then I couldn't help myself writing, ‘Perfect! It'd be nice for you to meet my boyfriend properly—’”

“—You minx—”

“—And the result is that,” Remus concludes brightly, nodding his chin toward his mobile. “Do you want to write back a couple wonky faces for me, or something?”

“Mhm, on it,” Sirius extends, typing Remus's passcode in and going on the hunt for the wonky face. He types in three of the requested faces, sends the reply off, and sticks Remus's mobile down on the blanket beside his own, rolling back onto his side with an absolutely gooey smile on and is more than happy to report that Remus is shining one right back at him, if a bit more on the goofy side of things thanks to that 1.5g of shrooms working their way through Remus's being. “Well?”

“'Well,' what?” Remus enunciates, blinking innocuously.

“You know what,” Sirius sends him, putting on a plain face.

Remus gives a sigh that's not altogether heavy, just pleasant. “It's getting easier, and of course I'm upset at myself for not getting the hang of this sooner,” he mentions, dropping his gaze to the sliver of blanket between the two of them and picking it up again to put it back on Sirius. “It'll still take me a while before I can slap on a pair of go-go shorts and jump on a Pride float, I'd imagine—”

“Mm, same unfortunately,” Sirius puts in, sticking his tongue between his teeth so Remus'll know he's kidding. Mostly. “I notice you didn’t say it’d never happen, mind.”

Remus tosses a glance to the sky and back, but it sure feels like it was done good-naturedly, even if he keeps right on with the rest of his point. “And I'm sure it'll still matter the context and who I'm with at the time,” he says of it, his voice so melodic and so thoughtful at once, “but still, I think my parents, my Awakening, and my hometown mates are a pretty good start as far as broadening the circle, don't you think?”

“Great start,” Sirius echoes, smiling for him.

“And, you know, the bulk of my coworkers have actually been good about it, too, especially Ian,” Remus offers.

“Well, kindred spirits,” Sirius trades.

“Something like that,” Remus allows, smiling. “And, I'd think about slipping the B-word in while I'm near Sophie if that matters to you as much as it sure seemed to—” Sirius gives a long raspberry there, “—but you'd have to start being nicer to her first.”

“Oh, come on,” Sirius huffs. “I'm civil, that's enough.”

“OK, but what would she ever have done for you to have to be civil and not just, I don't know, nice?” Remus raises, and because he's three sheets to the wind, perhaps that's why he's acting like this all very mystical stuff.

“Look, not everybody can be bosom buddies,” Sirius puts up. “Some people just rub each other the wrong way and that's OK; there are folks you just don't jive with, and I say more power to you, my boy.”

“Well, yeah, I didn't jive well with you much at the start,” Remus quips.

“Umm, I see your pants are on fire, so you might want to put that out,” Sirius mentions. “You liked me, and I'm not talking about found me so hot you couldn't handle it; I saw, I knew, we had something, it just ended up being a whole lot more than I bargained for.”

Remus pushes an exhale through his nose, reaching over with his right forefinger to flick Sirius's navel with it. “Well, I picked the wrong analogy because that's my point's gone right out the window,” he decides.

“Well, I guess that's it, then,” Sirius smiles. “It bothered me that you hadn't said anything a lot more when I was a secret, Remus, but now? Fuck it, she can go for as many tight hugs as she wants, she's not riding you either way.”

“Ohh-kay—” Remus near-shouts.

“Oh, chill, you've said worse,” Sirius returns. "Don't pretend any."

“I really do think that you think there's a lot more on her end than there is,” Remus puts down. “And this isn't me being willfully blind or unintentionally oblivious, we've known each other about as long as I've known you, so that's, hm, ten months now where if there were something on her end, I think she might've dropped the idea of a coffee date, pub chat maybe, but she never has. It's not as if I saw her much once I wasn't working there unless I was in the shop to visit you and she happened to be working too that day, and that's exactly it; we were quasi-workmates, bound by the laws of proximity, but even if we weren't, if you really think about it, when we do see each other it's always been rather 'oh hayyyy,' hasn't it?”

Sirius looks left, right, and back at him with larger eyes than before. “You just blew this case wide shut,” he puts down.

Remus looks suspicious, which, fair enough. “Hm?” he probes.

“No, hold on,” Sirius bids, cycling back through the haze to pinpoint flashes of the last five, six times the two of them interacted, and Jesus H. Cunt, it's like a light bulb fashions over his head and pops right on, and there's even an 8-bit chime from behind him that pings along with the light coming on, fancy that. “She might already suspect it.”

“About?” Remus puts out.

“That you’re a friend of Dorothy, not about us,” Sirius offers him. “I mean, she might have clocked it by now if she thought about the common denominator that's usually around when you two have bumped into each other since October, but you're right, there's a distinct 'oh hayyy,’ energy about her whenever she talks to you; she doesn't want to fuck you, she wants to talk about soap and tea and Education with you, and then maybe put some glittery eyeshadow on you—”

Sirius,” Remus puts up, smiling wider than he's done in, oh, five minutes, but still; that's a stoked little lad right there. “You've done it; there’s nothing remotely sexual between us.”

“Alright, don't placate me,” Sirius trades him, pointing up at him with his right hand while he fishes behind him for Remus's mobile as it pings again.

“I'm very not,” Remus sets down, his smile staying on while Sirius brings the mobile around to the front of him. “We've done such good work today.”

Sirius snorts, then smirks, too, because the snort wasn't enough apparently, and plugs Remus's code in, pulling up his and Angela's thread and giving the two new messages in there a quick read. “Bueno.”

“What is?” Remus checks, snickering.

“Well, she says your boyfriend's a babe, and that word’s in all caps,” Sirius relays, and Remus does a whole dance inside his cocoon, wiggling around with a distinct 'mhm mhm mhm' along with it, “and she says Wednesday's good for her and Beatie after six.”

“Bueno.”

“Mhm mhm mhm.”

Chapter 29: 29.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Sirius comes upon the waking world again with the understanding that he’s currently flat on his back in bed, and Remus is attempting to be quiet while puttering around the room. His mouth curls up into a sleepy smile for the effort and figures that if he’s been permitted to lay here underneath the cover of his quilt while Remus is up and about the room, then he must have woken up ahead of their alarm and gifted Sirius with the chance to sleep right up to the cusp of it.

Sirius lulls his head to the side, peeking his right eye open to investigate the time on the clock, and finds he’s about twenty-odd out from the time he set their alarm to blare, so him falling awake here and now feels a small gift when he isn’t quite ready to peel himself out of bed just yet but not tired enough to truly snooze until it rings. He is, however, certainly ready to investigate Remus’s movements so he peeks the other eye open and looks down the length of the bed, where Remus has dragged the fruits of their packing together in a neat row.

They borrowed a few travel bags from storage rather than have to dump out their supply of clothes for the entire trip just to pack for an overnight excursion, and they may or may not have packed rather heavy for just two days and one night away, but the two of them agreed it was necessary, if for different reasons as per their style; Remus for the want for preparing for absolutely everything they could possibly want or need to be at their disposal, Sirius for the want for Remus to not have to think, worry, or regret leaving anything behind over the course of their mini-trip within a trip. By the time the two of them finished up the packing evening prior, they had three borrowed duffels packed, one for both of their clothing, one for toiletries, chargers, and essentials, and one that fit their respective quilts, the checkered picnic blanket, and one empty, folded-up beach bag in there to be kept on reserve. The only last-minute stop that stands between them and the open road is, in fact, a coffee run, but even with the knowledge that they’ve just one last item left to secure their mini-trip within a trip takes off a resounding success, Remus still stands above their plethora of bags, ticking items off what appears to be his checklist from the previous night, and that only has Sirius smirking up a storm at spotting him doing another quick round-up.

The smirking gets the lad’s attention, bringing Remus’s gaze sidelong toward Sirius with a curl at his lips. “What?” he bids, done in a light whisper for the early hour that it is.

“You’re just very thorough,” Sirius trades, eyeing Remus’s notepad.

“I just want to be sure we didn’t miss anything,” Remus defends, like he even has to. “There were a lot of snog breaks, and those can bring well-intentioned forgetfulness with them.”

“And did we forget anything?” Sirius plays along.

“Not a thing, and I’m feeling right accomplished just now so I’m glad I checked again,” Remus extends, walking the notepad over to the desk and planting the pen down on it with that air of unbridled accomplishment in tow.

Sirius gives up a pleased hum for him, then ends up trailing his eyes over Remus’s outfit and smiling as he recognizes every piece of it as an item of his own: that’s his black tank, those are his light-washed jeans, knicked yet again by a sneaky thief known as Remus J. Lupin and an act of thievery that Sirius yet again can’t be put off about when Remus fills them out so well it’d be a crime for him not to have knicked them, and those are his black-on-white polka dot ankle socks on perfect display given that Remus went and cuffed the legs of those jeans to make up for the fact that he’s got a few inches more leg to work with than Sirius does.

He breathes in long through his nose, staring avidly at his boyfriend wearing him from head to toe, and keeps his smile on as he gives into a stretch, milking it for all its worth. He feels the bed dip down by the end of it near his feet, feels that same dip move up the bed consistently toward him, and then feels a whole Remus seat himself over his hips, situated right up against the case of morning wood Sirius woke up with.

He opens his eyes again, letting his arms fall to his sides as he peers up at Remus sitting with his knees astride his body, and hums pleasantly as Remus leans forward and lays his chest over Sirius’s to press a minty-fresh kiss to the right corner of Sirius’s lips.

Sirius reaches his right hand up, tangling it loosely into his curls, and blinks in the clarity in Remus’s eyes, the colour to his face, the incredible volume of that plume of curls on his head, and though he certainly hopes Remus will soon feel the need to take care of the hardened situation going on between them, Sirius has to provide commentary on Remus’s state first.

“You look fucking amazing for someone who was just tripping nine hours ago,” he makes plain, giving a sweep of his eyes over Remus.

Remus’s visage brightens that much more. “If you could only feel how fucking amazing I feel right about now,” he raises it.

Sirius gives a one-note snicker in his throat. “Oh, I think that’s transferring right on over to me, so I’ve an inkling of what’s happening in there,” he trades him.

There’s a lot of truth to the flirting going on here. Sirius felt something quite indistinguishable from the embodiment of elation after he'd led Remus back to the bed in the A-frame; it’d begun to drizzle, a light sprinkle from above that started out refreshing and got a bit heavier as it went on, so Sirius tugged Remus back to the cabin before they and their quilted comforts could get poured on, piled them and their quilts onto the bed, where Sirius kept Remus company through the comedown, ready and willing to boost Remus's spirits in any means necessary like the lad keeps doing for him, but Remus simply hummed against his chest, pressed kisses to it, and squeezed him tight so that everything about the stillness in the cabin lived and breathed contentment.

That contentment radiates off of Remus still and it really is as if it’s transferring right through Sirius and hopefully, it beams right back through to Remus but, given that he leans in again with a full smile on and drops kiss after kiss over Sirius's face, he's got the feeling that hope isn't that necessary here when the proof of that transference of energy is blindingly clear.

Remus pulls back enough to face him head-on, a new smile on his lips. “So, I've been up for a while,” he raises.

“A shocker, truly,” Sirius deems it, twisting one of Remus’s curls around his right forefinger.

“Mhm, not my usual style,” Remus plays along. “And I know that we said we’d kip in the cargo bed and take this trip as it comes, but I also think that having a place to hang our hats might be a good idea because, as much as the idea of kipping in the back of my dad’s truck with you and the night sky overhead is indeed a bucket list item, I’m not sure that the kind of sleep I’d get would be conducive for driving us back tomorrow, whereas a bed would do me a little better.”

“Alright, talk to me,” Sirius prompts, letting the curl go and watching it boing like a mini slinky.

“We’ve got a room booked at this spot that my dad would put us up in when a day trip turned into an overnight stay,” Remus offers. “It’s this cute, family-run inn; nothing too fancy, but nothing shabby either, and I really think you’d like it based on aesthetic alone.”

Sirius cups the back of Remus’s head and nods it for him. “I’m not that hard a sell to be fair, but you’ve got me by the neck,” he extends.

“Well, hold on right there,” Remus puts down. “You’ll remember I said the place is family-run?”

“I did hear you say that, yes,” Sirius prompts, raising a curious brow.

“Perfect, so when I say it’s a family affair, I do mean that,” Remus teases. “The mum handles the reservations and hospitality, the dad handles repairs, the daughter works the desk at times and changes over the rooms between guests, and there’s even an absolutely strapping son—”

“Ope,” Sirius puts in, brows up near his hairline.

“—Who handles the gardening,” Remus tacks on, a sly smile on.

“How strapping?” Sirius checks.

“So strapping,” Remus says of it.

Sirius raises his right hand to clasp over his heart. “I’m sold."

Remus smirks quite a bit there. “Was the gardener all it took?”

“I mean, didn’t hurt any,” Sirius offers evenly. “It was a nice idea to kip out in the wild with you, but I’m not going to say no to a plush bed inside a country inn, are you kidding me?”

Remus smiles for him as he crosses his arms over Sirius’s chest and sits his chin over them. “We could always kip in the cargo bed sometime this week and pretend we’re stargazing out in the wild,” he raises.

“I mean, we would literally be doing that, so count me in,” Sirius says of it, pauses for emphasis and also for Remus’s eager nod. “Alright, I’m golden so long as I get to cover said room.”

Remus sucks a fast breath through his teeth. “You,” he returns, deep beneath his breath.

“Me,” Sirius chimes.

“It’s reserved in my name, Sirius,” Remus maintains.

“And?” Sirius raises. “None of their business whose card you swipe, is it?”

“It’s really quite affordable,” Remus assures. “It’s gone up since I was younger obviously, but for one night it’s a decent, flat rate.”

Sirius blinks twice. “OK,” he puts down. “Paying off your mum’s lunch tab, getting her a nice lil’ sewing kit, wanting to pitch in for your dad’s mower; these are all things that are very you, especially because you’ve a bit more mad money to work with these days and I get that, but to think you just dropped more money on a room at the inn on a whim? What’s really going on here, Remus.”

Remus shakes his head at him, having some real trouble keeping from giving a toothy, dare he say, grimace before giving out a resounding huff. “Only you would ruin a perfectly thoughtful gift from my dad,” he returns.

Sirius whips his head back for emphasis, hitting the pillow with it. “What?” he spouts, gape/grinning up at him.

Remus sighs long, reaching up to cart his right hand through his fringe. “He called it in for us first thing this morning after I took too long coming up with an excuse as to where we were going to be staying and got him suspicious,” he fesses. “He asked before I’d even had my first cup, too, the jerk; I couldn’t even form the words ‘oh, the usual spot,’ to get him off our scent.”

“Listen, we’ve all been there,” Sirius offers, hopping from this side to that side of the fence because, frankly, he has no dog in this fight.

“And then, it was like he read my goddamn mind and figured out we were going to camp it, and,” Remus tacks on, shutting his eyes for a beat, his expression a prime grimace, "he’s actually the one who suggested we kip in the cargo bed out back and stargaze literally any other night we’re here if we’re that adamant about it.”

Sirius snickers up a storm, but Remus doesn’t seem to appreciate it much. “Oh, come on, you know he’s just yanking your chain,” he returns him. “I’ll bet he just thinks we’re a couple of lovey-dovey goons and he’s gonna say it, that’s all. Think of it like this; out of the shrouds of a little embarrassment, we got a room out of the deal. Not bad, not bad, am I right?”

“Mm,” Remus allows, reopening his eyes. “He made sure to let me know that we’re lucky the inn wasn’t all booked up, but then again, he agreed not to snitch on us and tell my mum that we’d been planning on kipping in the cargo bed out in the wild, so he’s done us two favours in the middle of all his heckling.”

“Good Guy Lyall,” Sirius deems him, flashing him a smile. “He said your mum’s got a bit of a thing against illicit trips the other night, so every bit of this is tracking for me.”

“Oh, she’d tread a hole in the carpet pacing about us every minute we were gone if she had the inkling we were just winging it,” Remus mentions, a lopsided smile on now, “which is a bit funny considering she met my dad on one of his wing-it trips, but I digress.”

“Mhm, well, it’s 'do as she says, not as he did,'” Sirius raises, lifting his hands fairly. “Nothing else for it.”

Remus nods for it. “There really isn’t,” he echoes, but then he gets a rather gooey smile going. “Since we’re being so honest here, I really was ready to wing it with you.”

Sirius nods vigorously. “Same here,” he offers him. “But, I mean, no surprise there; I’d do anything with you.”

Remus’s keen smile morphs into a more pointed one. “Well, I don’t know about anything,” he raises evenly.

Sirius takes in a deep breath. “Anything,” he puts down, refusing to waver on this one when that would be the more disingenuous claim. “Become a renegade duo in the apocalypse, go in on a two-man heist to steal the Mona Lisa in the dead of night, jump off the back of a moving train to escape a band of ruffians, overthrow a ship that’s already been hijacked by a band of pirates—”

Remus dissolves into a human smirk, leaning in to steal a kiss off of Sirius’s lips. “Your mind,” he hums low.

Sirius can’t help a hitched breath, swallowing Remus’s words. Remus puts their snog on sudden pause, sneaks a glance toward the nightstand and leans back a little, making it that much easier for Sirius to spot the enticing air about his smile now. “You’ve got about fifteen before that alarm goes off, so I’m going to make the most of this first,” he raises, bearing down on the rigid line of Sirius’s length, “but after I’m done with you, do you want to come with while I fix our morning cups?”

Despite the fact that Sirius’s hips have been called to rock up in order to alleviate some of the pressure building in his groin, somehow his brain is still in working order. “I’ve two working hands, you know,” he raises, hands travelling over the sides of Remus’s hips and guiding them to a shallow thrust. “I could help out.”

“Oh, no, I’m very aware of those hands but I’m happy to handle both cups, I just wouldn't mind a strapping body pressed against my back while I’m making them,” Remus shares with him, a wry smile playing over his lips as his breathing goes shallow to match the slow roll of their hips. “Simply would not mind that one bit.”

“Well, in that case, call me your shadow,” Sirius breathes.

Remus gives him a kiss to seal the deal and takes the aforementioned time limit they’ve got to heart, moving off of Sirius’s groin and down his body to more easily toss Sirius’s quilt aside. He slips Sirius’s briefs down and tosses those way behind him, leaving Sirius bare and breathing below him, and to suggest that Sirius doesn’t plant his legs apart in an expressed invitation would be misleading; he all but digs his heels into the mattress, knees bent and set, ready and waiting for Remus to drop down between them, and grasps at the sheet below his hands as Remus does just that with intent and a hitch of breath, taking Sirius straight into hot, wet, grateful heat.

What starts as a sole effort lapses quickly into more of a show of teamwork; nothing wrong in letting Remus take him there, but Sirius simply cannot keep from moving, cannot keep his bloody hands to himself, cannot keep his hips from rising to meet that prize-winning mouth. He grips his left hand against the curve of Remus’s right shoulder as if to tug him in that much closer by his very frame, presses his right hand back into that plume of curls and splays it against the back of Remus’s head, tousling, carting, gripping at his plume of hair as he rides Remus’s face from below, driving it slow and steady, just like Remus had done with him yesterday, and in doing that, sends Remus into a frenzied stupor, has him humming, writhing, and moving his hands up to clutch hard at the sheets directly underneath Sirius’s hips, placing them right, right there as if to keep his hips off the bed and urge him to keep on seeking out that gorgeous heat he’s giving him.

Remus, best lad around, leaves the pace up to Sirius from there by handling what he meets instead; closing his throat around the head of Sirius’s cock on each of his upswings, keeping a consistent, wanton hum and echoing it all around him each time Sirius hits the back of his throat, sliding his tongue over the head each time Sirius pulls back, and the timing of it all, the timing of them? It’s too good, they’re too good at this, and it’s only going to get better as time goes on, and that thought only spurs Sirius’s hips on like a metronome, has him straddling the edge in seconds, has him straddling Remus's head with as much care as it deserves, has him arching his back and biting down hard on his lower lip to keep mouth shut so not risk waking up the town, and certainly has him taking a leaf out of Remus's book, holding his mouth in place over him while he swings up on him from below, riding out every single twitch to his release before he can even think of letting go of him.

He takes his hands back to clasp them underneath the veil of his hair, spent and gasping and lightly messaging the skin at his scalp as if to bring his mind back from that numb spot it landed in. He flutters his eyes open, peers up at Remus as he backs up off the bed via his knees, and gives out a bleary noise.

“Come back,” he bids, making grabby-hands at him.

Remus swerves to the side. “With the number of times you’ve blown me and headed on your merry way without any expectation of getting something back for it?” he raises, sending Sirius a wry smile with his right hip jutted out. “That was maddingly hot for me already, so you may get me back later.”

Sirius drops his jaw, eyes that artfully encased arse and the owner of said arse as Remus finishes the turn he’s doing and walks over to pluck Sirius’s briefs off of the floor where they landed, where he bends particularly slowly to snatch it off the floor, lifting back up and lobbing it into the laundry basket on the other side of the room; every one of his movements suggests he well knows what wonders the outfit’s doing for him, and there’s always something mad sexy about the moments where Remus’s too-infrequent confidence shows up, but there’s also something sinister about it this time around, something challenging, and if Sirius didn’t know any better, he’d suggest Remus wants him to convince him otherwise.

Sirius pushes himself to the edge of the bed, pivots himself off of it, and trudges past Remus and the power he’s exuding, taking the right turn into the loo. By the time he’s out of it, he’s minty-fresh himself and has forged a plan to throw on a whole counter-outfit for a little taste of revenge; he just has to pick through their bags to find it and he knows which duffel it’ll be in, easy-peasy lemon squeezy.

Sirius heads back into the main room of the A-frame, finding Remus sitting at the desk with a pleasant air about him, but those brows of his are pinned about halfway up his forehead and those legs of his are propped up on the desk and crossed at the ankle, and Sirius knows in his gut that this is being done utterly on purpose. No matter, Sirius pads right to the pile of provisions and drops down in front of the duffel he’ll need; a huge black one with a red zipper trim that they borrowed from Lyall, packed to perfection with two days' worth of underclothes, outer clothes, swimwear, and extra layers because Remus is Remus and he also insisted Sirius pack some layers, too.

Sirius flashes a quick, innocuous smile over to Remus, but catches the lad biting back a comment. Looking down again, Sirius locates the invisible thread connecting Remus’s gaze and the duffel full of clothes he’s right in the middle of zipping open. “Well, I could go like this, but I’ve a feeling I’d see the four walls of a jail cell pretty quickly,” he pokes fun, lifting his hands to display them beside his very nude self.

“I thought you already had something picked out for today,” Remus mentions. “You know, set apart and outside all of my meticulous work.”

“Mm, and I did, but trust me, I’ll just swap them out and we’ll be no worse for wear,” he extends, unzipping the bag fully despite Remus’s groans against that plan. “I’ll be neat about it and take care not to destroy your carefully laid out system; you have my word.”

Remus gives a sigh through his nose that comes out a standard huff, but that’s more than fine with Sirius because a good huff is as much foreplay as anything else is. He picks a pair of briefs out of there first, pulling them up his legs, and right as he’s plucking both articles of clothing out of the duffel, his alarm blares out from his mobile.

Remus lifts off the chair and moves for Sirius's nightstand to shush the alarm, garnering a quick hum in thanks from Sirius for handling that part while he handles the part of pulling on his loose-fit blank tank and shimmying himself into his pair of red, mesh shorts. It’s a simple ‘fit, but it is also categorically the straightest one he's got in his repertoire, which is much the reason why he even picked up those four-pound shorts from a sale bin all while Remus muttered a pleading mantra of 'no, no, no,' the entire time, and fair enough, Remus; it is the most absurd form Sirius ever could take on (and one that would fool almost nobody with a working pair of eyes and just five minutes with him), but most importantly, the 'fit makes Remus go absolutely bananas for him because it shouldn't look so good on him but unfortnately does (his words). Remus especially likes the look if Sirius buns his hair, which he certainly plans on doing just as soon as he can wrangle his hairbrush out of the duffel he remembers their toiletries being put in, and the sign that has Sirius knowing Remus has turned from the nightstand and clued into what's been done is the fast, harsh breath the lad pulled in while Sirius plucks a pair of ankle socks out of the duffel.

“Ohh, you sick, son of a—”

“Bitch, I know,” Sirius finishes airily, rising to his feet with a self-assured smile on full display. Remus stays put where he is but ferociously flips him the 'V' with the both of his hands, garnering Sirius to lift his own hands to block any sort of blame coming his way. “You saw me lay this out to pack; you knew it was coming on some level.”

Remus lets go of his fierce gesture and sticks those hands on his hips instead, which really just makes Sirius want to suck his dick even more than he already did, so this could backfire on him if Remus decides he's going to keep holding out. “I thought you were planning to be a dick and wear them at the beach, where other tourists would be milling about the place and I’d have to drag you off somewhere a hidden from view to deal with you, so oddly enough, I didn’t mind that plan so much,” he corrects haughtily. “I wasn’t prepared for you to stick it on first thing in the morning, right after I selflessly turned down what would have been astounding head just so we could keep on schedule—”

“I don’t think you were being selfless,” Sirius comes in, gesturing toward him with the balled-up socks. “I think you wanted me to chase after you and convince you otherwise so I found a better way of doing that and frankly, this—” he uses his free hand to display it over the ‘fit on his body, “—is what you get for strutting your stuff around here in those fucking jeans, babey.”

Remus keeps eerily quiet with the air of someone who’s just been called on his bluff while Sirius tugs his ankle socks on. The silence could mean good things for him, but it could, in a sense, have Remus holding off on him even longer than planned just to spite him. Sirius would rather like to think his luck is a little better than that, even if it seems to be in and out of the toilet these days, but on top of that, he’d much rather think he’s got it within him to turn this around; all he’d really have to do is continue doing what he’s already doing.

He strides to the desk, slips what would have been today’s outfit off of the surface, and brings it back to the open duffel, slipping both articles into the same spots he pulled his new ’fit from, keeping his word on that one. He slips back down to the floor, zips the first bag back up and moves on to the next one, unzipping it and pulling his brush out of there. He gives his locks quite the brush out from where he is and once he’s satisfied with it, he tosses the brush back into the duffel it came from, zips that back up, and rises to his feet again only to dip low, flipping his hair forward and scooping the lot of it up.

He lifts out of his bent position to find Remus staring him down with a dangerous fury; this is good news. “Don’t you dare,” he warns.

“Dare what?” Sirius placates, really pronouncing that ‘H’ as he fashions his hair into a loose bun with the elastic that tends to hang around his right wrist full-time.

“Bun that,” Remus completes. “I’m only human, Sirius.”

“Well, why don’t you consider this the lead-up to that eventual payoff, then?” Sirius offers kindly, stooping down to fit his brush back into the duffel below him and zipping it back up. “You know, for whenever you’ll let me get you back.”

He rises to his feet, steps over the pile of bags, and heads for the door before Remus strides right over to cut him off, situating himself right between him and that door. There’s not all that much space between them now, Sirius feels the frenetic energy going between them and hopes Remus isn’t faking him out, praying to Cunt on high he won’t turn around, strut off toward the house, and leave Sirius here just salivating for it.

A standstill of about five (long) seconds or so before Sirius chances a look downward and is happy to report he’s staring at one hard man, and by the time he’s looking back up, Remus is dropping his hands down to fiddle at his fly. Sirius stands at attention, his shoulders in a firm line, his eyes flashing as Remus hikes those jeans down enough to get the job done and not an inch more, and it’s a real good thing Sirius came already for Remus reaches out with the both of his palms and pushes him down by the rigid line of his shoulders, and down, Sirius fucking goes. The wood underneath his knees is a bit rough as far as dick-sucking terrain goes, but Sirius reminds himself real fast of Remus kneeling on straight concrete for him the first morning they got here and very suddenly, it’s thrice as important that he get him back, but judging by the way Remus braces himself against the door and white-knuckles the doorknob with his left hand as he swallows him down, Sirius is already off to a great start.

It’s even more of a good thing that the A-frame door opens inward, otherwise the way Remus is jostling that doorknob might’ve sent them backwards out the door; Sirius tries to keep his amusement to himself, but now he’s gone and pictured them flying out the door and down the steps in this state and that’s actually just too funny an image to avoid smirking, but Remus must only see it as a smirk of pride over getting him to forfeit and if he’s honest, Sirius is fine with him thinking that for it gets Remus rocking his hips off the door and fucking his mouth for it, so all in all? Blessed.

Sirius keeps his years-perfected-via-customer-service ability to multi-task at the forefront of his mind, paying keen attention to the work he’s doing up and down Remus’s cock while keeping a half-eye out for what Remus is planning to do with that right hand of his because, for the moment, it appears that Remus doesn’t even know, can't seem to be able to pick a spot to hang it from; he first had it flattened against the door, then on the doorknob, now he's got it grasping Sirius’s shoulder for a beat, but before long then he’s whispering it over the side of Sirius’s jaw, stuttering his fingers over Sirius’s inverted cheek, and finally deciding to use the hand to tug on the elastic holding Sirius’s newly-fashioned bun together, putting the damned elastic over his wrist in a quick flourish in Sirius’s left peripheral, and sinks the hand into Sirius’s free-flowing locks before letting go of the door and adding his left hand to the mix, too.

The moan Sirius lets out around him is of equal measure involuntary as it is purposeful; it was always going to happen if Remus went for the hair, but he’s grateful to have already come beforehand for Remus gets right to swerving Sirius’s head down on his thrusts and takes to a consistent pattern of that same, glorious move so the very shorts that are at least ninety percent the cause of this heated tryst would be soaked in no time at all. Not wanting to halt Remus’s hips any, Sirius plants his hands on the door behind them, pulling a bit of a Remus here by situating his hands behind Remus’s cheeks so he’ll just have to keep his hips pistoning strong, now won't he.

Remus gives out little stutters as the pace of his hips reaches a fever pitch, his grip on Sirius’s head tightening, and his voice, fuck, that voice; give it to him, Remus. Sirius gives out his little noises around him to encourage it that end up being moans of pride, moans of gratefulness if he’s honest, and they’re sort of drowning Remus out a just bit at first, but Sirius does shut the fuck up right around the time he starts hearing his name being uttered. Doesn’t matter to him if it’s being forcibly whispered in between breaks for air because it’s earnest, it’s true, and it’s Remus; it’s Remus struggling to actually say it aloud through his peak, it’s Remus switching to another desperate tip-tap situation on Sirius’s head as he rides this one out, it’s Remus collapsing against the door with his hands braced back against it and letting his hips do the bulk of the talking from there, and it's Remus who tugs him up and off of his knees as soon as feasibly possible, which really means that as soon as Sirius finishes swallowing down his load, but what a gift it is to get to snog Remus immediately thereafter.

He knows he should be a gent and tuck him back in just as Remus would do for him, and he’s going to, he will, he’s just going to keep this snog going until Remus says it's over, and that does feel completely fair given that Remus is kissing him like his lips are going to be the answer to all his questions; what’s Sirius to do but try to answer them?

When Remus has decided to refocus on those morning cups he promised, not to mention that mini road trip they’re coming up on, it’s done with a parting of their lips, a tug at Sirius’s lower one, and a glance to the right, where the house would be. Sirius nods for him, smiles for him, and Remus swoops back in and leaves four more open-mouthed kisses on Sirius’s lips in quick succession, as if dragging himself away from Sirius is a lot harder than it looks, and what a thought that is.

Remus leans his head back against the door behind it and smiles dazedly at him, which only has Sirius right grinning back at him as he tucks Remus back in. “Still livid about the shorts, or?” he checks, pulling up on the zipper and encasing that wild set of hips right back into those jeans.

Remus shakes his head no, a lopsided smile on as he does it, and slips out from between Sirius and the door to pull his shades off the desk. “I brought your shoes before,” he breathes out, nodding his head down by Sirius’s left, and there they are, tucked to the side in a neat pair. “It must have rained long into the night because the grass was wet when I went out there.”

“Thanks for looking out,” Sirius trades him, moving over to slip his socked feet into them.

“Caused me no trouble at all,” Remus puts it, grabbing his black cardi from yesterday off of the back of the chair at the desk and pulling it on. “It’s a little nippy out there right now, not that you’ll mind any, but once we’re out of town we’re going to be headed where the better weather is.”

“You and the concept of setting me up for success before I’ve even stepped out the door is one of my favourite things about this,” Sirius puts down, backing up a step or two to give way for the door to open.

He heads out the cabin after Remus, shuts the door behind them, and launches himself off the two steps down to the ground, landing a step behind Remus who’d simply walked down them a couple seconds before him. There, he nabs his elastic back from Remus’s wrist, flips his hair forward to cart his fingers through it, and straightens up again to bun it back up. He gives a glance across the property then, taking it all in, and there’s something even more whimsical about it than usual; there’s a chill to the air, a distant reminisce of fog further out in the field nearer to the rows of trees way back there, a beauty to the scene that lives and breathes Sunday morning.

Four years back, Sirius had to forcibly carve something of his own out of Sunday mornings, deciding he'd personally arrange for it to be one of his specific days off in a given workweek, see if he might find solace in the day that had absolutely nothing to do with a pulpit or a steeple, and this, right here, should have been what Sunday mornings felt like from the get.

Sirius only realizes he hasn’t moved from the spot he landed in when Remus calls to him from near the garden. “Good?”

Sirius snaps back to it. “What’s the schedule from here, boss?” he asks, picking up the pace to catch up with him. “The cups, yes, but talk to me; gimme the details.”

“Well, we’ve got a bit of time where I could be persuaded to allow those cups to be had on the back veranda and relax a little bit before we have to get to it,” Remus raises, heading for the opening on this side of the garden.

“Done,” Sirius puts down, remaining close behind him like the shadow he promised he’d be to Remus.

“Then I think I’ll get the keys off my dad and drive the truck round back,” Remus continues, “that way we can hand-bomb the bags into the back from here, rather than have to make multiple trips to the front and back.”

“Your mind,” Sirius raises, loping along the grass. “Always moving.”

“Mhm, it is,” Remus allows, reaching his right hand behind his back to flutter his fingers up at Sirius in a beck and call, to which Sirius answers by crisscrossing the fingers of his right hand over Remus’s and giving them a squeeze, “my dad lent us his aux cord, by the way, so we won’t have to rely on spotty airwaves the whole way there.”

Sirius hums a celebratory note as he follows Remus over the path, hooking his left forefinger over the back of Remus’s cardi and pulling it down to press a kiss to the patch of skin between his shoulder blades, open and available via the tank from Sirius’s stash of summer shirts that Remus raided.

Some of Sirius’s tender cheer has to do with brimming excitement for this mini trip within a trip they’re soon to embark on, but a good chunk of it is due to the fact that they’re more prepared for the drive than Remus even knows just yet; Sirius already has the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar all synced up and ready to go, all he’s got to do is hit play and he’ll be in the presence of a bopping, shoulder-popping Remus, and while he won’t be able to twirl to his heart’s desire while trapped in the confines of the driver’s seat when that 'Simon' tune rolls around, it may be possible for Sirius to coerce present Remus into discussing mini, twirly-Remus, and that, Sirius is excited to learn more about from the man himself.

A distant but persistent psst floats over to them from the left, and the two of them look over that way to find Lyall standing tall at the top of the porch steps, an expression of utterly unshielded excitement about him. “He’s such a goon,” Remus raises through a snicker, and Sirius dissolves into a tiny fit, nearly missing the pointing Lyall’s doing up there to get them to look in the direction he’s gesturing in.

The two turn their heads northeast from them in the same instant, but Sirius has to lean over to the right and peer around the side of Remus to get a better look at what they’re being directed to with such fervour, his eyes falling upon the noble stature of a massive stag standing right at the fork in the path and staring right back at them.

Sirius reaches to tippity-tap his own excitement onto the small of Remus’s back, and Remus gives him a quick, sidelong glance with a sunshine smile on that could end wars, Sirius is sure of it. “What’d I tell you,” he whispers.

“You fuckin’ told me,” Sirius whispers back.

There really is something to being stared down by a massive woodland creature that’s got a pair of black eyes that do very appear to be staring right into the depths of the soul; Sirius has to wonder what the creature sees while his eyes bore right into him, is his soul black like his name or is it blindingly colourful?

Remus tapping back on Sirius’s navel breaks him free of that terribly unwelcome thought, and soon Sirius is following dutifully as Remus takes three steps to the far left, takes them three steps further up the path, and when the stag simply stays put where it is, Remus looks back at Sirius with a quick, wondrous stare before he faces forward again and the two of them are half-creeping, half-scooting both as quietly and hurriedly as possible past the stag as they can to get to the stairs without spooking it away.

Remus and Sirius get about two steps up the porch stairs and turn back around to face the stag that’s still avidly keeping an eye on them from over there, meanwhile Lyall’s fighting a whole snort-storm behind them.

“What’s so funny, hm?” Remus whispers back at him.

“Well, I don’t know, you two looking a couple of jewel thieves trying to avoid a searchlight could’ve been it,” Lyall slips them, and in the next beat Remus is reaching for Sirius’s left forearm while Sirius grabs Remus’s right one, and then they’re actively holding onto each other in order to remain upright through their hushed, mutual fit.

Once Sirius has the resolve to breathe properly, it’s about ten or so seconds further. “Hey, thanks, Lyall,” he offers up.

“What for?” Lyall puts up.

“The room you got us,” Sirius sends him.

Beside him, Remus lets out a snort that sure sounded like it hurt, but the lad gives no impression that he minds that. “Oh, no trouble,” Lyall gives kindly, so kindly even that Sirius finds himself waiting on the punchline, “just think of it as me stopping you two from reenacting the plot of Into the Wild.

“Alright, we would have had plenty of food with us so I’m not sure it would have gone quite like that,” Remus returns, a distinct waver to his voice.

“Well, now we won’t have to find out,” Lyall says of it, pointing off ahead of them. “Look, a stag.”

Sirius only just holds back a bark that could very well have sent that stag bolting out of here. “We’re seeing it, Lyall,” he hisses back to him, in near-tears at this point; this family’s going to save him, one way or another.

Footsteps patter over to their right, and Sirius looks over that way to find Hope rounding the bend to the porch at an easy clip before she goes for a quick trip-up, hopping around on her left foot like a spring while a pronounced ‘shit, fuck, shit-fuck,’ comes right out her mouth. Two major things happen there: first and foremost, Sirius now has exponential proof that both of Remus’s parents have it within them to swear like a sailor when called to, and secondly, that stag isn’t about that foul language or the commotion apparently for he takes off out the other side of the garden and bolts off across the field, far away from them.

“Mum,” Remus chides, about ready to collapse from the sound of it, “you scared the stag away.”

“Well, I am sorry about that, but I have been attacked,” she returns, hobbling toward them.

Remus and Sirius swivel around on their step as Lyall reaches to steady her by putting his right hand on her left shoulder, and Hope reaches up with her left hand to grab hold of Lyall’s forearm to more easily bend her bare right foot up for what becomes a communal inspection. A small chip of paint appears to be lodged in there, and Sirius wants her to know the porch hasn’t only felt the need to attack her, and in fact, he only just manages to stop himself from sharing that this same thing happened to him just two evenings ago on this very porch floor for he doesn’t think that’ll go over well with two worrisome Lupin’s present; Remus and Hope would likely fall in on themselves for unintentionally keeping an environment where a feature of their home has attacked one of their guests.

Lyall slips in behind Hope to keep a solid grip at her sides, nodding toward Remus, who then budges Sirius forward before stepping up onto the first step. Sirius follows in kind, and suddenly they’re a couple of quality nurses up in here; Sirius reaches to hold up the underside of Hope’s right ankle with a spirited smile on while Remus calls on the focus needed for him to reach his right forefinger and thumb toward the offending paint chip and pull it out of Hope’s foot.

“Might need tweezers for the rest, but that’s the bulk of it,” Remus offers, flicking the chip away.

“Thanks, boys,” Hope offers, smiling sheepishly between the lot of them as she sets her right foot down to join her left one. “I suppose it might be time to repaint.”

Hope certainly didn’t seem to expect her rhetorical question to reach into the depths of the two boys ahead of her and fully energize them for she quickly puts a bamboozled smile on as Remus and Sirius bounce on the balls of their feet together.

“Can we do it?” Remus offers.

Please — please,” Sirius echoes.

Hope and Lyall turn their heads toward each other, sharing a quick, amused glance before they put their focus back on the dunderheads bouncing ahead of them. “Well, since you two are rather booked up until late tomorrow, would Tuesday be a good day for it?” Hope raises, getting vigorous nods from the two of them already.

“We’re completely free Tuesday,” Remus assures. “Consider it booked off.”

Sirius starts up a whole windshield wiper move with his arms, snapping on each beat as he chants ‘yes, yes, yes, and very soon, Remus is joining him, and all that certainly has Hope looking happy as a whole, entire clam, but it’s also got Lyall peering suspiciously from well above Hope’s head. “How far out are we from jazz hands?” he checks.

Sirius gives a wee shoulder shimmy there. “Oh, you want jazz hands?” he raises, fanning his hands out beside him.

“‘Cause we can give you jazz hands,” Remus assures, doing a little hand-fanning of his own beside him.

Lyall gives up quite the snort for all this colour, but the man can’t seem to stop smiling either, funnily enough. “You sure you’re up for it?” he raises, back to the actual topic at hand

“Why wouldn’t we be?” Remus puts up, putting away the jazz hands and replacing them with a pair of hands on his hips.

“Well, there’s a lot of surface area to cover and the old paint will have to be stripped off to make way for the new coat,” Lyall raises. “It’ll be a bit of a job.”

“Who better for it?” Sirius raises it.

“Exactly,” Remus echoes. “We’re willing, we’re eager; put us to work, dad.”

“Well, how about this,” Lyall puts up. “I’m happy to get a head start on stripping the wood while you two are off, that way you would be able to paint on Tuesday.”

“Oh, I see,” Remus raises airly, a wry smile on. “You just wanted in on the project, didn’t you.”

“You could have just said so, Lyall,” Sirius grins.

“Don’t know what you mean,” Lyall returns, very next beat.

Hope shares a look between Remus and Sirius with a pointed smile of her own on. “This is even more of a blessing than I first thought,” she offers. “I really wasn’t sure what I’d catch him fixing next if we didn’t give him something first.”

Lyall scoffs good and loud for that, turning to head down the very porch they’ve decided to give a glow-up while the leftover three snicker away. “We’ll need a good pressurizer,” Hope calls after him. “Want to come have a look around for one with me?”

“Of course I do,” Lyall casts back to her, rounding the bend and heading for the house.

“Don’t let him start painting for us,” Remus bids, pointing up at his mum with a deft hand. “We’re happy to do it.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Hope assures, looking between the two of them with a new smile. “Now, on Tuesday, we could head out on the town late morning, have a look at paint swatches, pick up rollers and some smaller brushes for the trim, and there may even be a free lunch in there for you two, given the work you’ll be doing.”

Remus and Sirius share a quick, spirited gape/grin with each other before turning it back on her and recommencing their bouncing, meanwhile Hope puts her hands against her chest, looking between the two of them with an earnest smile. “Well, before my own porch turned on me, I was headed out here to tell you that coffee’s on,” she relays, pointing at Sirius with her right hand before pointing her left one at her son, “and I left you the last cup from the pot.”

“Ooh, thank you,” Remus extends, heading up the stairs and bowing to leave a quick peck on Hope’s head on his way by.

Sirius heads up the rest of the steps as Hope looks after Remus as he heads around the bend. “It’s like he grew five inches taller since yesterday morning,” he extends.

Hope gives up a small, dare he say relieved breath. “Thank you,” she trades him, reaching to squeeze Sirius’s right wrist with her left hand. “I thought I was imagining it.”

Sirius gives up an assured laugh. “You’re not,” he doubles down. “And it’s a lot to do with the two of you, so you know.”

Hope gives a weak noise in her throat, reaching her left arm out to curl it around Sirius’s side and beckon him along the porch, and Sirius has never been wistfully led inside by a partner’s mum before, but on the other hand, Hope’s never led a partner of her son into her house like this before either, so maybe it’s alright that they’re both a bit misty-eyed as they head into the den.

Sirius stops to take his shoes off on the mat, not too keen on getting dew all over the den carpet, and to his immense surprise, Hope lets go of him but lingers close by while he does it, as if re-entering the home should be done with him, and on his time.

He all but floats through the den and into the kitchen with her to find Lyall sitting in the spot ahead of the fridge, Remus over at the corner where the countertops meet as he fixes their morning cups, and suddenly Sirius quite remembers the promise he made back in the A-frame. He gives Hope a parting squeeze, points toward Remus and gets a wave off for it as she takes up her usual spot at the table, and Sirius pads over to Remus, rising to the tips of his toes as he presses his chest up against Remus’s back, linking his arms around his middle and hooking his chin over Remus’s right shoulder to peer down at the process.

The right side of Remus’s lips quirk quite a bit. “It felt like a milk and sugar day, so I hope that’s true,” he raises, stirring a spoon in the yellow cup on the left.

“You know it’s that kind of day,” Sirius returns.

Remus taps the spoon on the edge of Sirius’s mug before lifting the banana yellow specimen up for him to take hold of, which he does with immense care and a step back from Remus once he’s got a good hold on it so as to not cause any spillage.

“Bubba offered up his four-wheeler should we be interested in taking it for a spin while we’re here,” Remus shares.

Sirius’s insides go haywire. “Shut it; no, he didn’t,” he returns.

“Mhm, he did,” Remus chimes, pouring himself a cup o’ tea.

“I’d take him up on it, too,” Lyall gives up, nursing a morning cup of his own at the table. “There’s really no better way to get an appreciation for the valley you’re in.”

“It’s true, we could ride around on back roads, through the trails, feel the wind in our hair,” Remus raises airily.

Sirius piques that much more, taking in a light gasp. “Stop, I’m already sold.”

“I’ll let him know the offer went over well, then,” Lyall puts up.

“Let’s save it for later in the week?” Remus raises, turning from the counter with his own mug in hand to tilt his head at Sirius.

“Absolutely,” Sirius extends. “Let’s not hit burnout before Thursday, hm?”

Remus shows his agreement for that point through a snicker. “Exactement,” he echoes.

Sirius swivels to face Lyall, eyeing him amusedly over the rim of his cup. “Does that mean you weren’t able to ding-dong ditch Bubba with the present?” he checks, having himself a sip.

Lyall shakes his head no, a laugh bubbling up in him. “That shitter was sitting on his porch when I got there, couldn’t pull off the escape,” he relays. “That said, the man doesn’t typically accept a gift without offering one right back to you, so now you’ve got a four-wheeler he’s willing to loan out for the day.”

“Tell him a million thank yous from us and that we’ll ring him later in the week,” Remus puts down, passing behind Sirius and tracing the fingertips of his free hand over the small of his back. “For now, though, we’re going to have these on the porch before we'll have to get to it.”

Sirius is a simple man: he goes where Remus bids him to, especially if he does it via a gentle whisper of an inconspicuous hand at the small of his back. He gives the Lupins a parting smile and scampers off after Remus without another peep, following him back out onto the porch with his shoes hanging from his free hand and continuing over to the chairs down at the far end of it.

Remus takes the seat on the left, while Sirius drops his shoes ahead of the chair on the right before taking a seat in it. He has himself about two sips more of his coffee before he’s humming a piqued note, turning his head left, toward Remus.

“Hey, show me where we’re going,” he bids, gesturing the mug in his right hand toward him.

Remus swallows down the sip he went for moments ago, sticks his tea down on the little table between their chairs, and leans over to the left to slip his mobile out of his pocket with his right hand. He starts typing away on it, but pauses, breathes in fast, and stares off ahead of him for a beat.

“Did I give you the wifi password?” he raises, finding speech.

Sirius hums to decline ‘round a new sip of coffee. “Mm mm.”

Remus gives into a grimace, setting his own mobile in his lap before making a beckoning motion with his hands, and Sirius smirks, shaking his head. “You know where I left mine,” he reminds him, pointing his left forefinger in the vague direction of the A-frame, where his mobile is very much still sitting on his nightstand, according to visual memory.

“Shit, I do,” Remus allows, rolling his eyes at himself twice fold now. “Well, it’s a bit useless to type it in now anyway, but please, it’s just on the back of the router and you can totally use it; I should have shown you it already.”

“It’s alright,” Sirius puts up. “I mean, I’ll grab the password once we’re back, but honestly I’ve barely been on it while I’ve been here as is.”

“You had a whole video chat on it while you’ve been here,” Remus points out.

“Mmkay, but that was one chat and my data plan’s star-quality, so I do think I’ll live,” Sirius slips him.

Remus sighs long, picking up his phone again. “I’ve got to get the fuck out of my plan,” he lodges.

“I’d pay you out,” Sirius mentions idly, using his free hand to scratch an itch at his left thigh, just above where the hem of his shorts cut off, but Remus makes the sound that tends to accompany the wrong answer on a game show. “Well, somehow I knew you’d do that, but I’m not wrong; your plan’s highway robbery and I could get you out of it if you’d just let me.”

“Look at Porthgain Harbour, please,” Remus instructs, reaching over the table between them and sticking his mobile right in front of Sirius’s face.

Sirius huffs at him, but pauses short at the many google images on display, grabbing hold of Remus’s right wrist with his left hand. “Are you fucking—” he starts, and then simply breaks into a series of sounds that drip with longing.

He knows these are images meant to make the very destination they’re headed to look idyllic as possible, but fuck it if that’s what they’re doing in spades; inviting seafoam green waterfronts topped with vibrant green, rolling hills surrounding them, rustic ruins sprinkled in some of the shots, and Sirius just wants to dive the fuck into those images so it’s a good thing they’ll be slated to arrive there sometime between eleven a.m. and noon today.

There’s just one little thing missing here, however. “OK, gorgeous stuff happening here, but there’s a beach, too, right?” Sirius bids. “You’ve said beach, I’ve heard it.”

Remus smiles sidelong at him, nodding for confirmation as he puts his phone back in his lap. “Oh, there is, but it’s in a cove and it has to be low tide for us to frolic around in it,” he shares.

“A disappearing beach,” Sirius puts up mystically, lifting his mug to his mouth again.

Remus smirks next to him. “That’s a way to put it, yeah,” he allows, tapping his mug. “We’ll just make sure that we’re right where we need to be by three-ish, but in the meantime, we can frolic through the town, check out the harbour, explore the area a bunch, head over and get plenty of ample beach time in, and go explore some more; I really think you’ll like it.”

“I already do and I haven’t even set foot there,” Sirius returns, smiling before he has himself another sip.

“Now, 'tis the season, after all, so it’ll be busy and we’ll probably bump shoulders with a few people and you’ll likely side-eye everybody near us—”

“It’s like you know me,” Sirius sticks in.

“—But once the crowds disperse, those hills? That cove? Those ruins?” he raises, nodding down to the phone in his lap. “They’ll be ours, with or without that disappearing beach.”

Due to his mouthful of coffee, Sirius presses his left forefinger and thumb to his lips, mimes a kiss to the sky for that lovely sentiment, and reaches the same hand over the table to Remus, who might actually be swooning in real-time for he bobs a bit in his seat before he leans over to leave a smooch on Sirius’s incoming fingertips.

“We’re fucking gross, aren’t we,” Remus raises after it.

“Mhm,” Sirius assures, swallowing his sip. “I’m happy about it, mind.”

“Yeah, it's not so bad when you’re in it, hm,” Remus echoes, lifting his mug to his mouth with a smile on. Sirius watches with quite a few blinks included while Remus pretty much drains his tea in moments and smacks his lips, an eager, though slightly sheepish smile on now. “Listen, do not let me stop you from relaxing; have your coffee, have your cig, and I’m going to get started on packing up the truck.”

Sirius does nothing but wave the lad off with a snicker. “Go, do your thing,” he bids him.

Remus leans over in his seat to leave a kiss on Sirius’s left cheek and pushes himself to stand, padding up the porch and around the bend with his empty mug hanging easily from his right hand.

Sirius doesn’t do any of what Remus suggested he do yet, instead he sticks his feet back in his shoes and heads back to the a-frame with his coffee in hand, leaves it on the stoop, and heads inside to round up their luggage and bring them outside so they’ll be ready to be tossed into the truck once it gets pulled around back. He grabs his mobile and his pack, shuts the A-frame up again, and has himself a sit on the stoop, and right as he’s lighting up, Lyall’s truck comes around the outskirts of the garden and backs up to the left of Sirius’s neat pile of travel bags.

Remus pops the door open on the driver’s side, hops down, and swivels around to face Sirius. “Thank you,” he offers, looking at a picture-perfect image of brimming glee.

Sirius gives him a righteous salute with his free hand, smiling around his cigarette. He trades off between puffs off that and sips off his coffee while he watches Remus play a bit of Tetris to fill the back seat with their bags, and their timing is pretty damn good for Sirius stoops to put out the end of his cigarette in the ashtray below the a-frame steps as Remus shuts the back door of the truck and strikes an accomplished pose for him.

“Please model,” Sirius bids him, garnering a snort out of Remus for it. “Oh, snort all you want, but you’d make a killing off of it.”

“Somehow I don’t think anyone’s going to want to see me on a spread for thousand-pound watches, but alright,” Remus delivers.

“Oho, and you’d be wrong,” Sirius returns, plucking up his mug and striding the four steps between the two of them to leave a kiss on Remus’s lips before gesturing with the mug. “OK, I’ll bring this in, say bye, and probably visit the loo now so I won’t have to request we stop along the way for it.”

“OK,” Remus accepts, tapping his right hand back on the bulky metal of Lyall’s truck, “we’ll meet you back around front, then.”

“Deal,” Sirius sends him lively, padding toward the garden to get to the porch.

Once he's back inside, Sirius gives a glance down at his loafers, huffs a laugh at the on-off, on-off pattern happening here, and toes them off yet again, sticking them between his left arm and side to carry them through to his various stop-offs in the house. He makes good on his word, stops in at the sink to give his mug a wash so to earn himself another Fine Young Lad point to add to his rising score, bids Hope and Lyall a fond farewell, and visits the loo in the span of a short couple minutes. In fact, the only extra stop he makes on his way to the front door is a detour into the sitting room, but he feels much obliged to stop in and admire the newness radiating off of the mantle; it's practically calling for him to, as if it's giving off an enigmatic glow without a log burning in the fireplace beneath it.

In the same beat, however, if the mantle is putting off a glow, then the piano on Sirius's left is giving him the opposite, shrouded in the absence of colour, and that's not fair at all, is it? It's a simple one, you can't see your reflection in it the way you could in the sleek black grand piano back at that house, so on that note, Sirius is bound to like this one more simply because it's nothing like the other. This one is practical, with a stout rectangular frame, light mahogany that blends in perfectly with the rest of the wooden pieces in the sitting room; the wood beneath the upholstery of the plush sofa, the end tables on either side of it, the coffee table ahead of it, even the lamp with the big brass base and that little compartment for one's twenty-pack of cigarettes is a light enough bronze to compliment the colour scheme to the room, as if Hope's mum might've shopped around to find the perfect piano to complement the rest of her quaint sitting room, or, hell, maybe the rest of the room was curated around the piano itself. Either instance, Sirius could believe it.

He doesn't think the instrument deserves the shadow cast on it, so much so that he sticks his shoes down on the bench and slips in beside them, stretching his fingers and pondering whether some artful ballad or perhaps a brightly coloured, fast-paced tune might prove better medicine for the eerie static that plays at the nape of his neck, giving him the distinct feeling he's being watched in an otherwise empty room.

Since he hasn't the time to be indecisive, and he's dilly-dallying by doing this already, he simply puts his fingers down on the keys and lets his body work out the choice for him. What comes from his fingertips is a brightly-paced Bach piece, one 'Musette in D-Major' that he was made to learn – oh, Cunt, a little over a decade ago now; he knows he was around twelve or so when he was given the piece as a means to test his transitions and fluidity between notes. It’s an easy, fun piece, with a solid rhythm, but nothing to write home about — and yet, before he can finish the thought, he still has to force the correction out: For him. It was easy for him.

How he remembers it this well and without a hitch is neither here nor there; Sirius would remember it down to a T after being made to memorize it to that very T so many years ago, and here it is, burned into his brain for who knows how many more years to come. They were both made to learn this one, him and Reg. They'd had the same instructor, considered one of the greats as far as building young pianists from the ground up, but he was, conversely, completely cloaked in infamy for having a strict program for his students to adhere to and for being a tough man to please, and the man certainly had a tough go with the Black boys, at least on their side of the family, and for different reasons.

Sirius's skill was considered advanced for his age, his ability to recognize notes by ear and then repeat them verbatim on the keys impressed the man, but he felt Sirius lacked discipline and he never wasted an opportunity to remind him of that. He certainly took a less-than-keen interest in the very increasing disinterest Sirius began to show for the instrument, especially once he'd begun pulling faces and talking cheek at the bench, bored out of his mind after years of strict playing dragging on and on, and all that disinterest he’d shown drew quite a temper out of that usually stoic man; he'd said more than once, through sputtering, frustrated soliloquies, that Sirius had the skill, precision, and intuition to be the man's next protege, but he would take the craft far more seriously to not allow his potential go to waste. Now, Reg, on the other hand, had all the drive and discipline in the world for the craft, ready and willing to impress their prized instructor, and he certainly didn't scoff or make faces at the bench, took the craft incredibly seriously, but when it came to playing in itself, Reg had to work harder at it than Sirius did.

This particular piece kicked Reg's arse and left that kiddo fuming, Sirius remembers. He was about twelve or so, if memory serves him, but he really must have been for Sirius remembers being about fourteen himself, elated and bursting with newness after having so recently discovered the legend of one Freddie Mercury when he’d encountered Reg's frustration with this particular piece, but conversely, it was just as much the first time Sirius encountered his picture-perfect brother being crushed underneath the weight of his own perfectionism, whether he recognized it well enough or not.

'Course, Sirius was just fourteen and no psychologist, didn't have much more than he already knew by then, and what did he really know, to be fair? What he knew then was a fraction of what he does now, and what he knew then was too many years spent not measuring to his little brother. Sirius’s stomach churns, picturing that frustrated kid at the piano bench, but he can't go back to that time and do anything of substance now, can he? No, he can only visit that piano room in retrospect, as if that’ll ever be enough.

He remembers having been slated to make an appearance at James's place for an overnight stay along with Pete, had just been on his merry way out of that house when he stopped at the foot of the staircase because of some muffled curses echoing from off in the house, and listened closely as the playing resumed, recognizing the piece that was being attempted after hearing a few top-notch notes back-to-back, followed by another blunder, and some more choice cussing. Intrigued and certainly amused, Sirius remembers having gone to investigate, found Reg right where all signs pointed to him be and stood outside the piano room, half-hiding behind the door left ajar.

He remembers thinking strongly about sauntering in there and gloating a bit, he'll be honest. He took certain refuge and indeed some pleasure from the idea that the piece was a cakewalk back when it’d been his turn to learn it, but the comparisons between the two of them, their sensibilities, their abilities (or lack thereof) to follow rules and instructions with clear respect given to those who upheld them, whether deserving of respect or not, had long-since started up, had long-since lodged a pit in Sirius's stomach the size of a grapefruit, and it felt completely natural to relish in something that came so easily to Sirius compared to his otherwise perfect little brother. Kids, right?

Yeah, he wanted to go in there and gloat, but he well-remembers Reg stopping his playing altogether to sock n' pop the sheet music displayed above the keys, which might very well have been a quality sight to see if Sirius didn't think it was all a bit much for Reg to get quite that worked up about; he had no enemies to speak of here. Who was going to put the iron fist down on him for needing more time to perfect an assigned piece? Their instructor would have applauded Reg for his determination, he'd always been much more kind to Reg than he'd ever been to Sirius, so much so that Sirius had wondered a time or two by then if the man was readying Reg to take over from where Sirius wouldn't, just like their parents had been doing and would continue to years on from there. And speaking of those parents, they weren't even home that week, weren’t near enough to even catch glimpse or a whiff of Reg’s struggle, but they'd have hardly criticized him for using more time to practice even if they had been home to bear witness. In fact, their mother would’ve seen that as a fine excuse to compare the two of them, lift Reg up in what was rightfully Sirius's area of expertise, and celebrate Reg's willingness to put in the hours that Sirius just didn't give enough of a shit to spare.

There was no one to come down on Reg for this inability to get this piece down — no one other than himself, of course, and if Sirius had met and spent quality time with a certain someone in his life back then, it’s possible he might not have looked at the back of Reg's head with quite that intense a mixture of disgust and pity, but he was lacking in all sorts of areas then, moments of compassion were fleeting at best.

No, instead of gloating, Sirius remembers suddenly finding the idea of leaving Reg to it much more idealistic than to boast; let him stew in it some more, let him keep making that same mistake on the fucking keys over and over again. He remembers thinking, 'Like, Jesus Actual Christ, it's only a two-octave jump, but there he is, fuddling that D-chord over and over again,' and even now, Sirius finds the statement has validity to it, but then, just as well, he remembers Reg stopping entirely once again, only this time instead of challenging the sheet music to another round of fisticuffs, a bunch of muffled sniffs started echoing from over there by the piano and it stopped Sirius's inner dialogue right in its tracks.

Reg wasn't the sort to cry often, outside of a gnarly scrape or the hinge of a door closing on a finger at least, so it'd certainly brought Sirius to a pause to hear him doing it there, but confusion came along quickly over what he was even weeping over; he couldn't put himself in Reg's shoes for this one, not when he hadn’t ever wept for an inability to get the hang of an assigned piano piece or an assigned worksheet of long division even — hadn't had to, he tended to get the hang of tricky concepts rather quickly, but he still held the opinion that even if he a moment of struggle with music or maths before he got it right, he wouldn't go boohooing about it, that’s for sure.

Sirius didn't know the kind of inadequacy Reg was grappling with over there at the piano, not that form at least, but he did know what the form of inadequacy that tended to be reserved for him sure felt like and as Reg started to hiccough and sputter, Sirius was padding up behind him on the bench without another thought.

Reg knew who the footsteps belonged to without having to turn around, though it was a bit of a no-brainer; their parents had been away on business all week, the governess went out to do the shopping something like an hour ago by that point, and though Sirius had spotted the maid doing the dusting in the parlour, she wasn't one to run on the pads of her feet the way that Sirius did.

“How,” Tiny-Reg speaks, a fully-fledged being in Sirius's brain, “did you get the hang of this one?”

“I just kept at it,” he remembers giving him, a white lie for Reg's benefit. “Played it again and again and again.”

“And again and again,” Tiny-Reg mimics, rubbing at his cheeks to wipe off his stray tears.

Sirius smirks now just like he very did then, but he always did have a bit of a soft spot for the rare moments when Reg would show even a little personality, give a little back-talk even if he only really reserved that sort of treatment for him; at least that meant he was giving him something. “Yeah, something like that,” he remembers letting him have.

“It's too fast,” Tiny-Reg lodges, unleashing both his hands on the keys to, Sirius had to assume here, do a grandiose impression of a pianist playing that particular spot he was stuck on. “Bach was a show-off, and so are you for that matter.”

“Oi,” Sirius remembers putting up, and he remembers flicking the back of Reg's head for it, too. “I'm just standing here.”

“And why are you doing that?” Tiny-Reg raises.

Well, Sirius remembers wanting to help him out, which was indeed odd behaviour from him so he supposes Reg had a point in raising the question. He remembers, too, the split-second thought that hit him like a lightning bolt a beat or two later, the sudden excitement brimming in him over sharing his idea between the two of them, and maybe it had something to do with the fact that Sirius had already begun to seek ways to get around a fork in the road, to do rather than ask first, to fix rather than fester: “D'you know, if you're stuck on this one, forget it and I can show you a different piece, one that'll really help you get the hang of the fluidity you're lacking here.”

He remembers a scoff following his words, as much as he remembers forcing every cell to cooperate with his intentional, slow breathing as a means to keep cool while Reg got extra snippy. “I can't forget it,” he attests. “Don't you get it? I have to have this one memorized by Wednesday's class and at this rate, I'll be fumbling the whole thing in front of him, so I certainly don't have time to learn a whole new piece while I need to be focusing on this one.”

“Come back to it, is all I'm saying,” Sirius remembers enunciating. “Take a couple of days away from this one, the one I'm going to show you will be heaps more fun than that one; scoot over, I want to show you.”

Tiny-Reg does scoot over, but it's done with a long-suffering sigh as per the order of things, but Tinier Sirius keeps his head up while he sits himself directly ahead of the piano, reaches his right foot out to control the pedals, and plays him the eight bars that are the leading melody for 'Bohemian Rhapsody' with a smile stitched onto his face.

Tinier-Sirius pauses his hands after the tease and looks sidelong at his little brother with a raised brow. “Think you can do that?” he raises. Tiny-Reg gives a quick glance toward the underside of the keys, where Sirius's foot had been clamping down on the pedal and hums a note of affirmation. “Well, good news is, that's most of the tune, but it's a six-minute anthem I'm showing you. It starts off a soulful, reflective ballad but goes absolutely ham toward the end, rock opera-type stuff, but it's so much fun even if you haven't got a whole band playing behind you and I think that's the real issue here; you're not having a lick of fun, Reggie.”

“Of course I'm not having fun,” Tiny-Reg returns, like the word itself put a bad taste in his mouth, and likely did. “That's not what this is about.”

“Except it can be,” Sirius remembers insisting. “Trust me, I'll show you how to play it and you'll be switching between notes like a busy bee, and then, I'll bet you ten pounds right now that this old piece will be no match for you when you come back to it.”

“You're going to teach it to me right now?” Tiny Reg prompts, behind a thinly disguised veil of disbelief.

“Well, I'm waiting for you to agree first, but yeah, that was the plan,” Tinier-Sirius affirms. “I was even going to jot the chords down for you so you'd have them on you.”

“You're not due at the Potters?” Tiny-Reg gives.

“Not yet,” Tinier-Sirius returns. Another white lie, sure, but he could roll up later than expected and not hear a pointed word about it; not at the Potters. “I'll show you the full thing first, jot the notes down for you, and—” tinier-him had paused for effect, wrangling his mp3 player out of his right trouser pocket and unplugging the cord for his earphones still hanging from his neck, “—I'll let you borrow this for the night; it's got the tune on it so you can hear it with the vocals and the rest of the arrangements, and I could even get some sheet music printed for you while I'm over there and bring it back for you tomorrow, if you want the whole exercise to be very official, that is, it's really up to you.”

Sirius feels that few beats that hung between them in that piano room like he's in that room now, like they're both there, as much as he remembers Reg's surprise switching to more of a wry smile, and that shadow of mischief he saw flash over his eyes for the idea of shirking the old tune and allowing another one to take centre stage, Sirius completely remembers not wanting to waste.

“That a yes?” Tinier-Sirius prompts, but back then, he felt he had him already.

Tiny-Reg gives an eager little nod and a wee pointed smile, and Sirius sees them all like little Reg is right beside him, actually succumbing to a bit of temptation, and then, it's fleeting, as much as it was then. “The only thing is, you can't practice this one just anywhere, OK?” he remembers tacking on, a little whisper between just the two of them, but the catalyst for the crash-landing all the same. “This is just for you and me, so pick your times well.”

Tiny-Reg puts that frown on, the one he'd do whenever he got vaguely spooked, and tips his chin up toward Sirius; a question without the words attached. “Practice it while they're away, and then come Monday, switch back to Bach and save playing the other one for at school or when they go again,” he remembers directing, expanding upon the finer details of a top-secret mission.

Tiny-Reg's forehead lines with that kind of trepidation he showed whenever he spotted Sirius and James wearing sneaky, twin-like grins, suggesting something was about to go down and he need not be nearby when it did. “Then I don't want it,” he declines, facing forward on the bench.

“No, don't, I'm still going to show it to you,” Tinier-him assures, aiming to quell the fire before it sets ablaze. “It's too secular for them; it's rock music, Reg, they won't care for it, and the lead struts all over the stage in his leotards and body suits — it's brilliant, but they won't get it. They'll forbid you from listening to them let alone replicating one of their songs, so just keep it between us and they won't know the diff—”

“I don't want it,” Tiny Reg blasts out, and for good measure, pounds his braced fingers down on the left-hand side of the keys so the sentiment would reverberate.

If Sirius hadn't been too busy throwing his hands up, swiping his once-offered mp3 player off of the piano, and scoffing his way out of the room, he might've enjoyed the dramatics on display there, but not so much then. He’d been so miffed over Reg's penchant for bowing down to them so easily, how instantaneous an impulse it was for him to avoid making any sort of waves, big or small, but more than that, he'd been miffed at the boy himself, and Sirius can feel the ire in his body the way he felt it back then. The two of them, they’d been so close to having something that was theirs alone, a little secret just for the two of them to keep, and though a small thing, it meant something to Sirius to get to share with him. He could have shown his little brother a piece of something that mattered to him, could have shared a piece of the very man, myth, legend who'd bloomed his love affair with glam rock and the art of performance, the man who'd kick-started his spirit and gave him permission to start showing it from the inside out, but Reg had to go and turn away from that, from him, from his brilliant little idea; cower before the unfathomable idea of breaking a rule instead.

That scene at the piano could've been their relationship to each other in a nutshell. Every now and again, rare as the blue moon, Sirius was sure he'd caught something intriguing flash across Reg's eyes, something born of mischief, where he would even kind of like his staunch little brother, but it would be gone within a blink; a thrill never carrying through. Now, however? Now, Sirius has to wonder if there were more moments just like those that he might've missed behind all that noise; all around them, between them, turning the two of them on each other.

How is it that Sirius can still have room for that fired-up fourteen-year-old feeling rejected and shunned by his little bro so many years ago, and still have some room left for how the twenty-three-year-old he's grown into feels about that scene? If given another go at personally watching Reg's soul-crushing perfectionism at play and having the chance at supporting him through it, Sirius would like to say he'd do it differently, be less stubborn, not give up after just two tries, not be so sensitive, so hot-headed, so easily willing to give up on the idea, on Reg altogether, but would he do differently? Not likely. That stuff's textbook Sirius at fourteen, and that stuff's textbook Sirius at twenty-three; a never-failing constant.

For years before that afternoon in the piano room, and for another handful of choice years thereafter, Reg's sensibilities toward Sirius's penchant for rule-breaking and his school-reserved alter-ego, the very version of himself that Sirius liked most, remained clear: leave me out of it. And for the most part, barring the occasional human moment from his little brother, Sirius did just that. He’d stopped letting Reg tag along when he'd go hang out with the kids in the court up the street years ago by then, mostly because he would constantly cramp his style with all his lecturing and his wag-tastic fingers, he'd stopped letting Reg head into school with him and James when all he'd do was pout and make faces at the sorts of conversations they'd pass back and forth, as if he weren't a guest in their midst and should’ve very well taken it as a gift, he'd stopped bothering to talk to Reg in the halls when he sure wouldn't bother stopping to talk to him; wouldn't even look up as Sirius passed.

That ‘leave me out of it’ sensibility continued on until Sirius finished out year eleven, which is interesting to clock in retrospect for that had truly been Sirius's best year at school. He’d hit his sweet sixteen that fall, earlier than many of his peers would hit theirs, his social life had hit a fever pitch, his grades never slipped even when he'd put off studying or not bother to do it at all, he’d been freshly single after his first not-boyfriend set off for that sweet, sweet uni life, but it didn't matter for Marlene talked him into joining the theatre troupe that same term and there was a cute boy there trying not to make eyes at Sirius during their stretching exercises and that sure kept him busy, he had the lads and their pranks, silly ones, sneakier ones, and eventually, they had their biggest, most show-stopping prank of all: a giant fuck-you to the music program that gave Sirius nothing but grief since he started his secondary career. And sure, that felt thrilling to think up from the baseboards up, and organizing it with everybody on the inside had been exceptionally fun to coordinate, but there’d certainly been something of a private thrill that Sirius felt as he crooned at that piano for it was the very same tune he'd have taken the time to show ickle Reggie how to play would he have accepted the offer in kind, and frankly, Sirius remembers liking it a whole lot that the same kid had been sitting in the reserved seating right between their mother and father, watching the inherent difference between their playing live from the front row.

Oh, the trouble that prank caused. Certainly a spectacle, a worthy one to go out on in terms of the music program he’d been very promptly booted from, and Sirius entered his final year with a hell of a lot more James-time, boy time, and a bit of a legend gathering around his name, and one he could finally get behind. Socially speaking, he was at his peak as far as his secondary school experience went, thanks in part to the grand spectacle he was now both famous and infamous for, but the same spectacle had his home life gearing toward its own peak; Sirius had embarrassed his mother and father to the core with that display, and not just in front of the entire student body, but their parents, the faculty, various scouts for university music programs alike, and the whole charade was used for yet another, cyclical round of comparisons between the good son and the shit one, but it didn't end with just the parents tightening the lead on him to the point of suffocation, and it didn't end at home. If only Sirius could have continued to keep those two sections of his life separate, but the trouble at home bled into his time at school, with Reg getting in on the action going into Sirius’s final year.

Quite suddenly, he was all the way up in his business; Sirius's, first and foremost, but James and Pete caught much of the brunt of Reg’s interest, even Marlene and her gaggle got caught in the crosshairs a fair few times; whoever and wherever the scoop on him might've been, that was where Reg went. Started with little things, catching them smoking on school property and reporting it, catching them with a new prank in motion and trying to report it before it could get too far off the ground, keeping tabs on the occasional afternoons when Sirius would be mysteriously absent from the building and, of course, reporting it. All reports went to admin first, but those reports would end up going home by the end of the school day, as they tend to, and while that didn't necessarily help Sirius in terms of keeping trust in his staunch little brother, for a hot minute there, it was somewhere within the realm of fun for him, and here's why: for somebody who’d previously so wanted nothing to do with his mischief or his social-butterfly-gone-rogue reputation, Reg sure seemed to become quite preoccupied, and borderline obsessed, with what Sirius was up to, and him going around, keeping tabs on his whereabouts at school, checking in on him, snooping and snitching, all from the same kid who wore the mantra of ‘leave me out of it' like a pendant around his neck was certainly intriguing, to say the least of it.

It was genuinely one of the most thrilling times for Sirius. Not with Reg, but the avoidance of him: of giving mates false information to share with him if Reg came snooping only to send him on a wild goose hunt, of outsmarting him, picking out which of their moves Reg might see coming and working to get the better of him, and, in turn, forcing Reg to get better at bettering Sirius. It was all thrilling.

And then, Reg went and won the game in a fashion that blew the whole board apart and it wasn't such fun and games anymore. An emergency intervention was called in the parlour, wherein Orion sat silently in his chair while Walburga paced and did all of the shrieking, and the consequences that came from his mother and father being made aware of the schoolboy Sirius had been spotted ducking into broom closets and hideaways with were both dramatic and retaliation-based: his meals redacted, his duties as a man and, most especially, a man of the House of Black reiterated, his inclinations perceived as a means for grabbing attention where he could; you know, seeing as negative attention is still attention and all, and that just had to have been what that was about. It all hurt to hear, Sirius was and still is only human, but none of that was the worst part, not even collectively. The worst went to Reg, standing cool as a mountain near the mantelpiece with his arms crossed, brow furrowed, choosing to speak to the intentions behind his actions diligently like he'd rehearsed them for hours, and even had a concluding statement for the whole ordeal: he'd done this for Sirius, for him to see the damage his actions would do to himself, their parents, the family at large, and get back on the right track before it was too late.

The worst part. His mother and father saw his secret as juvenile at best and outrageous at worst, but his brother saw it as a slippery slope to a full-blown condition. James spat fire hearing that bit relayed back to him and Sirius felt that same fire like it was his own, and it was his; he was angry, angry with Reg, that he'd gone and slipped them the one thing he could have easily kept between them, so angry that it was, all in all, the closest he came to taking off before he actually did, and for a bit of serendipity, what stopped him from breaking out earlier, and what finally forced him out that door, was Reg.

He doesn't remember all of the details associated with their mother's DIY haircut; parts of it are fuzzy or simply gone, straight out of his brain, but he's got the strongest details. He'd been sitting in his spot across the width of the dining room table from Reg, their mother and father seated over in their designated spots at the heads of the unnecessarily long table, and he was laughing — actually laughing at something Reg had been saying. What it was that made him laugh, he doesn't have the memory for, that part's been wiped from his bank, but he does remember that it was one of those reluctant laughs, usually reserved for a situation where the mate you're currently in a fight with went and made you laugh, and he remembers that Reg didn't understand what he was laughing about. He supposes neither of them will ever get that missing piece when Reg isn't around to sift around in his own memory bank and provide for the lost detail, but then again, that might've become a missing link for Reg down the line, too; it'd be hard to say.

Beyond him laughing, he remembers pushing his fringe up and back, just keen on pulling it out of his face, the usual stuff, but because he was still in a reluctant bout of stitches and trying (but failing) to mask his amusement, that same, sweepy section of his fringe fell right back into the same place, obstructing Sirius's once more. Walburga suggested a haircut in a polite voice, but by then, attacks on Sirius's ever-oscillating relationship to Masculinity, capital-M, were rampant, and for another, he'd been growing out and taking such good care of his locks for upwards of two, nearly three years so that was a bit of advice Sirius wasn't about to take. He remembers giving her a polite 'yea, OK,’ and going right back to his dinner, nothing new at all to him; the response he gave felt rather tame for what he could have thrown back at her, but his mother still got out of her seat and slipped from the room without a word.

The rests are all snapshots and the feelings that went with them. A shot of him spotting her coming back to the table out of his right peripheral before stopping just behind him, how the hair on the back of his neck stood tall when he didn't see her pass on his left. A shot of the table much closer to him than it'd been owing to his chair being shoved further into it with him still sitting in it, the jitters that welled over him when he realized had no room to wiggle out from between the back of his chair and the table's edge. A shot of him fighting the hold she had on the back of the chair, not understanding for the life of him how she could keep someone as wily as him from slipping free. A shot of the length of his hair, finally just at his shoulders after all the care he’d given it, getting snatched up and yanked back on in one swoop, the sting that came with followed by the dread. A shot of him shrinking his neck down as the snipping started and bowing his chin inward to avoid potential wayward snips from catching any parts of his face, impish fear lining his bones. A shot of their father at the far-right end of the table slow-sipping his wine like it were some radio program playing in the room he bore no responsibility over, the rage Sirius felt at that. A shot of Reg's eyes across the same table their mother chucked the scissors onto when she was finished, casting it in between her sons with a clatter that made it crystal clear it'd been a lesson for the both of them to remember and learn from.

Sirius was certain he'd seen a perfect blend of fear and regret in his brother’s gaze, that he'd seen all the fear that she'd funnelled down his throat and into his head come back up and plaster over his face, and the gaze of his stayed right with him; while he backed the fuck up from the table once he could do it, while he shouted their father into oblivion for not lifting a finger for him, while he outran his mother for talking to his father like that, while he tore out of the house and straight over to James's place, while he pleaded and pleaded and finally convinced James to try to fix the mess that was now at the top of his head, while he tried to fall asleep that night, and those eyes still weren't done with him. He thought about them for months afterwards, well into the final term of his secondary career, and dreamed of grabbing Reg in the middle of the night and making a break for it, but by the time the dreams fell away, it felt an impossible task. Sirius, they’d have evidently let go of, but Reg? Reg, they'd seek out and he'd be right back in that house again. He was only fifteen, their prized possession, their baby; they'd seek him out.

Their relationship to each other only soured from there. For other siblings, somewhere else, living in that house together might've been a bonding experience; a garbage chute of a situation, but one with a mantra of 'well, at least I had you there' going between the two of them, but not so for those boys. It didn't matter that Sirius knew he could hightail it out of there at any point but kept putting it off so he wouldn’t be leaving Reg in that house alone, it didn't matter how many times Sirius heard Reg stop outside his door, linger there like he'd knock in a few seconds, just once he got the courage to, and eventually choose not to; not to knock, not to risk showing vulnerability, not to cultivate a shared experience out of a shit deal for the both of them. There was too much sordid history between them, too much gunk fogging up the camera lens, too many years of competition at home, where Reg always seemed to win, and at school, where Sirius was the star. Their parents had carefully seen to that, utilized and built upon Reg's tendency to look away, avert his eyes, duck into a spare room up the hall when the shrieking started to avoid the line of fire, go still as a statue when there was no room readily available to duck into, and they'd weaponized it, turned him into a little soldier for them, opened the door for him to set the fire loose on Sirius, and helped create the tense standstill that became of them; both boys, tiptoeing around each other, breathing tightly, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Sirius wasn't prepared to hold off much longer, and now? Now, he's had so much time away that he can see it; can actually feel just how fragile he really was at the time, how thin the thread between the two of them had stretched, how one more dastardly pull could come along and snap it in two, and boy, did it.

Of course, that's just Sirius's truth, isn't it? That’s what he remembers it being like. He'd relished in it for years after he'd split; had James with him, just up the hall to echo that truth right back to him whenever he needed him to, and Sirius often did need him to. He’d find himself wondering whether the act of blaming him for it all rather than fork the blame onto their mother and father made it just a little easier to cut Sirius off just as sharply the other two did, but that didn’t help, not at that time, only made it all the more easy to hate Reg's entire existence from afar. He hated that kid, right up until he read of his passing, and even then, the anger and the hatred didn't go anywhere, he just moved it aside to make room for the guilt that'd already been creeping up his spine at a snail crawl, and now? Now, he could sell individual and multi-packs of guilt on the black market and make a killing off it.

Reg's truth didn't look anything like his did, and he knows now what Reg would've branded those years living under the same roof as him, sure knows the scope of how unhappy he truly was there once Sirius did split, knows the degree of fear he had for that house and all that it implied more than he ever gave him credit for or even fully knew, knows how difficult it really was to have him as a big brother; how selfish and self-serving Reg thought him, how inadequate he’d felt stacked up against Sirius, and how, in the end, Reg envied him and what he carved out of life far more than Sirius could have ever imagined.

And what about that looming, overseeing truth that Remus spoke of Wednesday night? That one hasn't got time for excuses from either one of them; doesn't have to, it knows the objective truth just by staring it down, and what might it brand those years between them?

Seems to Sirius, only one of them shirked personal responsibility wherever he could. There were clear times over the years where he could have done better, interfered in what they were doing to the two of them in a way that actually brought results, put in the effort to switch the course Reg was on, back at that piano bench and in so many other moments beforehand, in between, and afterwards, but Sirius wouldn't and Sirius didn't. He could have scooped Reg up, found a good lawyer, and got them both free of those people, but he let fear of the power that family had freeze him up, gave Reg even more time to be poisoned inside those walls, let their relationship to each other sour until he’d completely washed his hands of him. He gave up on Reg in so many little ways before actually walking out of there without him, and in that sense, the severity Sirius felt for getting as far away from them as he could, the justification he felt in dropping off the map and refusing to tell Reg where he'd gone to in case he'd pass it along to one or any of them until they did manage to find him and send along that final, scathing letter, the reminders he told himself that first year free and these past four, nearly five years, and that behaviour, plain and simple, is textbook Walburga Black.

See, once he'd hit his mid-teens, and once Reg started soldiering on as the sole spokesperson for the Black Family Values, Sirius had a sharp fear at the back of his head and in the marrow of his bones that they’d both grow up to be one of them. Reg was a little too reserved to ever resemble Walburga — if you could get him going, get him fucked off enough, he could go full banshee no problem, but he was never truly at risk of becoming the next Walburga Black. No, while those boys spent their time avoiding each other like the plague whenever they weren't busy competing against each other, Reg was being fashioned into Orion 2.0, and on that one, single note, what a thorough method of distraction for them to have used, pitting the two boys against each other while they built the perfect heir in the background. He'd almost have to hand it to them in terms of evil villain criteria but he can't do that on principle, and he can't really do it, anyway; for all the resistance Sirius had shown and still shows with falling in line with the rest of those ugly, doomed people hiding behind that 'B' emblem, he still starkly resembles his late mother in far more ways than just her features.

Seems to Sirius, that looming, unwavering truth might very well brand Reg, for all his failings, the unfortunate son, the one out of the pair who saw what he'd become and hated every inch of it, and Sirius, for all his promise and trimmings, the one out of the pair who carved out self-love at the expense of that unfortunate son and hasn't done a lick of self-reflection on who he's become.

He stops playing suddenly, hating the colour the truth has painted over him. A small, and dare he say, amused grunt floats down the hall, announcing that Lyall's on the scene. “That was a bracing end,” he comments.

Sirius lifts his hands from the keys to wipe fast at his eyes. “Sure was.”

A door opens and shuts up the hall, the one to the loo the one that makes the most sense in this case. Sirius takes his shot while he's got the chance, not wanting to be seen by King Lyall in his state, and swipes his shoes off of the bench, leaving the sitting room and taking a fast right into the foyer to shut himself in there to tug his shoes back on. He opens the front door, stepping out onto the porch and shutting it behind him, and there's Remus, halfway up the front steps with a distinct, rather 'tudey display of his hands, and Sirius doesn't know how to give an apology for the wait and bid that Remus be patient with him in the same go.

Good thing is, Remus puts the ‘tude away the moment he takes Sirius in, the problem is Remus then shot-puts himself up the rest of the steps to get to the top where Sirius has at least made it to, and OK, maybe it's not a problem in the truest sense of the word when the lad's got the purest soul around and he would want to get to Sirius as quick as possible, but Remus'll want the story behind the face he's making and Sirius'll want to get the fuck out of here before he bursts and alerts both homeowners to the unstable bloke that's actively dating their son.

Sirius reaches right for him, latches on to Remus's right elbow, and guides him to turn around on the step he's on to head back down the rest of them with him. “Come on,” he bids, tugging Remus toward the truck that's been set to leave the whole time Sirius went and stalled all their plans with his shit.

It's fast as lightning, but Sirius catches Remus give a worried glance back toward the house. “Did one of them—”

“No, no no no,” Sirius denies. “They're perfect, you’re perfect; that's the issue and let's go.”

He parts ways with Remus ahead of the cargo bed, skirting up the left side of the truck to retreat into the relative comfort of the passenger seat. He reaches for his seat belt, turning to snap it into the buckle, and looks sidelong as Remus is putting himself rather delicately into the driver's seat, but apart from that, he merely takes to sitting there, keys in hand while his head's facing the front window, and Sirius can't be too sure if he's looking out it or returning Sirius's gaze with those shades of his on.

“Them or him?” he asks distantly, and now Sirius just stares out the windshield no matter if Remus is looking there, at him, or neither.

“Me,” he croaks out. “Can we please get going?”

It takes Sirius a couple good seconds to look his way, and now he's got one unabashedly astonished expression aimed at him. “How about no?” Remus raises.

“Or, yes,” Sirius hints. “Take me to brunch.”

“Fuck brunch, Sirius,” Remus returns lively. “It can wait.”

Owing to the fact that putting words to attest for the blank ink coursing through his veins is an idea that makes him want to crawl underneath his seat and hide, the next best plan Sirius can think of is a distraction and he reaches his right arm over the cup holders. “Gay card,” he bids, beckoning his hand, “give it over.”

“I will bite your hand,” Remus supplies him.

Sirius gives out a pfft for that; he'd never. "You were so thrilled about the idea of taking me to brunch and I will even let you foot the bill if we start driving, right now,” he insists.

Remus gives up a long-form sigh. “The place offers brunch until two, Sirius,” he raises. “We really don't have to leave right this second; we're on vacation, we can take this as it comes.”

“As much as that might be an astounding phrase out of your mouth in literally any other situation,” Sirius comes back, “I have made it clear how many times now that I'd like to leave?”

Remus stays altogether too still for a few too many beats before he's whipping his right hand out and tugging his seat belt on. He sits forward in his seat, jams the key in the ignition, and roars the truck to life not excluding the radio, which blasts out a hokey jingle from some ad before Remus slaps the volume button to cut it right off. “We have two hours to go in here, so we're either going to do it in silence or you're going to talk to me,” he maintains, pulling the truck around.

Steam may as well be billowing out Remus's ears as he heads them up the driveway, but of course he's heated; they've had a good morning up until just a few minutes ago, and here Sirius is, staining it by being his sick, sad self and throwing Remus’s care to the wind.

It takes him a few good seconds to work up the stones to speak, but when he does it's straight from the gut. “I'm sorry,” he gives him.

Given the fact that the Lupin driveway is really just a long and straight shot to the road ahead, Remus must feel he's got the time to turn his head fully to aim a certifiably Yuge puff of breath at him, and Sirius must avert his gaze straight to his lap as it's equal parts bracing and hilarious, but on top of that, it's helped secure an important detail: Remus may well be frustrated with him, but not enough to forget about being his whole, dastardly funny self.

“I really am, though,” Sirius insists. “I didn't mean for this; it was a good morning.”

“One for the books, and I'll consider accepting that apology if you'll consider talking to me,” Remus returns, making a right turn out of the drive and onto the road, but at Sirius's vicious face rub, he gives a single huff. “You’ve left me completely in the dark here; I don't know what went wrong.”

I went wrong,” Sirius puts out, behind the cover of his right hand.

Remus's mouth falls open, stutters shut, and opens yet again with words accompanying it this time. “I've nothing else for you other than I don't agree with that, but I also know you, so you're going to want me to have the whole story before you'll take my word for it.”

And there, Sirius can feel his resolve taking to a crumble, but he does his best to keep it from crumbling in altogether; if he says any more about it, Remus'll know who he's gone and gotten himself stuck with, but even then, if he doesn't start talking, he'll have failed Remus by not having warned him away sooner, and the push, the pull, the push and the pull from both directions is just unbearable.

It's maddening that of all the times to have sat down at the piano and paid a visit to Tiny-Reg, he chose to do it right before they were slated to leave; it's amazing, truly, being your own worst enemy, and Sirius adds his left hand into the mix, covering as much of his visage as possible with his extremities. “I don't,” he starts, slowly behind his palms, “want to ruin our trip with my shit—”

“This is the trip, Sirius,” Remus cuts in, and at least he's remarkably calm about it. “You and me, we’re the main characters of this fucking trip, and the rest? My mum, my dad, those hills? Supporting characters, very important to the whole picture, but I didn't bring anybody else here with me; I brought you, and that includes whatever's happened to you in the past five minutes.”

Sirius shuts his eyes as his chest lights up red-hot, his throat setting further ablaze, and it's as if they're two-timing him by combating the omission he's about to give up in all its unholy glory. “You're dating my mother.”

The many beats of silence that drag between the two of them feel like what a century should, but realistically it can't be more than a batch of seconds before Remus speaks again. “That'd be news to me.”

It's done in such a wholly conversational tone, with a hint of bemused amusement for zest, and by Cunt himself, that should have Sirius feeling even just a little lighter overall, but it just makes him whinge into his hands that much more. “It is, I'm sure it is, but you are,” he carves out of that charred throat of his. “It makes sense you wouldn’t notice, you slipped onto the scene so late in the game; you couldn't know that everything I am is a direct imprint of her down to the very fine print.”

Sirius feels the truck roll to a stop and make a right off of the road they were on before Remus speaks again. “OK, so first you were Tom,” he raises, his tone lightly conversational, “now you're Walburga, so forgive me, but I do miss when you used to call yourself Sirius.”

Sirius drops his hands only to clap them once, his face screwing up extremely attractively, he's sure. “No, listen to me,” he insists. “I knew, I knew last night, and I almost said it, but now I really can't ignore it and you shouldn't either.”

“I'm not ignoring anything,” Remus puts up, a persistent click of a turn signal the only other sound alongside it. “Hence how I've noted that you've been on some sort of crusade to deem yourself a monster these past few days, and frankly, I don't see one when I look at you so at least now we're both distressed.”

Sirius forces his eyes open again, shaking his head fast. “Everything that you think is me, that you think is mine, came from her,” he insists. “They belong to her, I just rent the space out, and as much and hard as I’ve tried to escape her, it hasn’t made a lick of difference and it's never going to because I am her.”

Remus keeps quiet for a time, but on one hand, he's trying to shift into the left lane with the veritable monster truck they're in, so maybe the silence is more about concentration than an utter loss of what to do with Sirius. “Alright, first off,” he raises decidedly, “how exactly did that come upon you between the backyard and the front door?”

Sirius leans his head back against his headrest, swallowing dryly. “I took a seat at the piano and decided to play this piece Reg and I had to learn when we were kids,” he offers. “Bad time to go and do that, I know, so either I'm a prize idiot or I miss him, but I've a feeling it's an extremely unhealthy helping of both.”

Remus clicks his tongue. “You're allowed to mourn him, stop that,” he chides. “I’m not calling you anything for it, so just keep going.”

Sirius breathes in long, out for just as long, and foots his shoes off of his feet, pulling his legs up to sit crossed-legged in his seat when they really are going to be here a while. “I remembered this day back when he was, like, twelve, and he was having a tough go with that Bach piece, 'Musette in D-Major' — you’ve heard the one—” he does an exceptionally dry impression of the well-known section of the melody, garnering a smirk-and-nod combo out of Remus for it, “and that higher part, he was having trouble with because you have to hop back and forth between octaves very quickly and he just couldn't get the stretch and tempo combined, and I was a brat and stopped at the door all gloaty, thinking ‘what a chump, that whole song is easy as pie,’ but then he started crying, like actually boohooing about it, and I felt all sorts of odd about that so I tried to help him out, didn't end up doing that and we ended up in a tizzy as per our typical form, I got all huffy and fucked off out the room, wasn't fair to him at all and the shoulders he carried the fucking world on at twelve, and that could just as easily be the summary of the first two decades of my life in regards to him; no compassion.”

Remus hums thoughtfully, flicking his left turn signal even though as far as the road they're on suggests, there isn't going to be a left turn on this road for at least three city blocks. “I know I didn't know him so my opinion is going to be what it is,” he mentions, “but I have heard from a few sources now that it was a lot more of a mutual lack of compassion toward each other than just from your end.”

“Well, no, I know that—”

“—Well, you would, seeing as you were one of those sources—”

“—I was still the older of us—”

“—By two years, and you were both kids for ninety-five percent of your time spent together.”

Sirius sends a plain look sidelong at Remus with a cocked brow for emphasis. “May I finish?” he inquires.

“Oh, please do,” Remus prompts, lifting his left hand from the wheel to beckon with it. “Would love to hear how your mother comes into this.”

“My mother's all over it,” Sirius puts down. “She made us the way we were, with the added bonus of my father looming around the shadows of that place, conspiring with her from the study he would hardly ever come out of to see either of us, and by doing that, she kept Reg and me turning on each other for years and years so that actual, genuine kindness from each other felt like a trick, so that the only language we knew how to more fluently besides English or French was competition, and we bought into it far too well, meanwhile there she was with the conspiratorial aid of dear ol’ pops, raising Reg to be Orion 2.0, and guess who the fuck I turned out to be, despite all my efforts not to?”

Remus expels a listless breath, his shoulders deflating with it. “I'm sorry, but—”

“I told myself, for years, that I'd given Reg too many chances to be less like he was, but what I was really doing was telling him, over and over again, in small and huge ways, was that he wasn't enough,” Sirius clambers on, steadfast in keeping on point. “I was horrible to him, aloof on a good day and a tyrant on a bad one, and I had just as many expectations of that kid as they did but gave up on him time and time again, in so many ways, until I finally really, actually did that — that's classic Walburga; if you don't behave the way I demand of you, then you're out.”

Speckles of raindrops begin to form on the windshield, prompting Remus to switch on his wipers at the most leisured momentum available, and the relative silence Remus leaves the two of them in lasts for ten full wipes before he's trying again, steadfast in making his own point clear. “That comparison isn't exactly fair to make,” he reinstates. “There's neglecting, abusing, and shunning one of your literal children for qualities that are not tragedies or could have been corrected or magicked away, and there's being that kid, knowing you were being treated unequally, and getting the fuck out of there before it was too late for you to, and those scenarios just don't compare.”

Sirius breathes in long, feeling like he's a broken record, and yet, he has to say it again: he didn't take Reg with him. “I should have taken him with me,” he stresses.

“You tried, he wouldn’t go with you,” Remus snaps hard, and Sirius sits up very, very straight in his seat, causing him to pause for a long breath in and out. “I once paid an unannounced and potentially untimely visit to a boy I was absolutely mesmerized by last year, in the middle of a torrential downpour as that boy so affectionately likes to detail, and I remember him saying the words, 'I thought I had more time.' Now, that just about broke my heart to hear and still does when I think about it, and you can call me naive but I really think a person who utters a phrase as gutting as that one, after learning his estranged brother had just passed, might’ve regretted having needed to take time away before he could be a brother again—”

Sirius gives out a laugh, but it's not genuine. “Yeah, well, too little, too late, am I right,” he grins, and mimes an uppercut to his own jaw with his right hand for extra measure.

Remus gives him an altogether astounding A-ha! “You just confirmed what I said was true; you needed to get away from them, him included,” he showcases, snapping the fingers on his left hand toward Sirius before using the same hand to hike the windshield wipers up a velocity as the rain is really starting to pour. “That was a complex time for you, but you were hurt, justifiably angry with him, and that break was as deserved as it was needed, Sirius; he led you into a world of pain, but I know you and I know you weren't finished with him even then, and that makes you—”

“No, you're right,” Sirius puts up, throat drier than it’s maybe ever been in his life. “I wasn't, but he finished himself off before I could get my head into gear—”

“And I am so sorry that it happened that way,” Remus comes in, and fuck, he sounds it, too, “but your mother didn't regret pronouncing you good as dead, and she didn't regret setting Reg up to fail even to the end, while you have been tearing yourself apart with regret for what they did to him along with what you did or didn't do for him, so you and her are not the same whatsoever.”

Sirius trains his gaze to the left, out the window and away from this kind man because he really, truly doesn't know the half of it; he drags his top teeth over his lower lip, gearing himself up to give a speech to his counter-argument, but Remus beats him there. “I don't see a resemblance personally,” he raises, and Sirius piques quick, grabbing the armrests on either side of him when that playful tone of Remus's only suggests that he's about to get a whopper and had better prepare. “I mean, physically, sure enough, but I fell in love with your face, not hers, so suck it, Walburga.”

Sirius presses his lips together and altogether wilts, sagging low in his seat when it isn't fair at all — At All — that he can't even enjoy the phenomenon known as Remus Jean Lupin uttering the phrase 'suck it, Walburga,' because unfortunately, he has the receipts to prove he is, in fact, Walburga incarnate. “I'm arrogant, I'm scathing, I may just be the judgiest person I know, I'm petty beyond belief, I don't rise above a thing while still managing to be so aloof with everybody else, I viscerally enjoy making life harder for someone, anyone; could be a literal stranger who made a second of my day a teaspoon harder—”

“Mm, some might call that admirable, rather than only an example of pettiness,” Remus comes in, conversationally yet again.

“You’ve told me to shush for being petty to random strangers in public more times than I could reasonably count,” Sirius serves him, but the moment it's out of his mouth he knows it’s not the serve he thought it was.

“And you love it,” Remus serves on back, delivered through a cheeky smile to boot. “In fact, I happen to know all my shushing and huffing only gives you more power, but you damn well know I love that, too; I don’t know how to stick up for myself out in the wild and you very do; some of us out here could use the iron-clad balls you have to shut a literal stranger down for coming at you in a public place.”

Sirius doesn’t love the fact that it sure feels as if Remus is already winning here, and he’s not even finished his dissertation on the failings of Sirius Black. “Don’t go derailing my point before I’ve even made it,” he chides.

Remus comes alive with something that can’t be described as anything other than some supremely sardonic behaviour. “Oh, well, shit, let’s all just sit down and shut up because Sirius is making a vapid point,” he returns.

For a moment there, Sirius is ready and willing to expunge that read from existence before he comes to and realizes this only gives his point more weight. “Vapid, that’s true, too,” he nods, garnering one chesty huff out of Remus for the tactic. “And I don’t just reserve that behaviour for randos I encounter here and there, I'm a shit mate, too: I get pressed about something one of them said to me or downright suggested about me and I make it hella known, I hold onto grudges like they’re my life source, and then, when I finally do get around to deciding it's time to throw a scrap of forgiveness their way, it’s always on my time, never theirs, and I still burn them whenever I can because I guess I just really like seeing them feel shitty for having made me feel shitty ages ago, and as if that’s not enough, I point out the flaws in the people around me like I've any room to lecture anyone else about theirs while I've got a heaping pile of those that's only getting higher and higher as the years go on, and hardly anybody gives it back to me and the ones that do? Ohhh, I’m horrible to them.”

Remus practically rebukes Sirius's words like they're a demon realized. “You're leaving out so, so much just to make yourself sound terrible,” he sends him. “And you’re definitely forgetting that she's the culprit of most of the qualities you just listed having transferred over to you; she’s what made you feel you have to be so aloof, distrustful, reactionary—”

“Violent, prone to rage-outs, mean-spirited,” Sirius continues for him.

“Fine, those too, but maybe, just maybe, you could try to hear what I’m saying in full, rather than just focus on a word or phrase here and there that you can pilfer for your terrible fucking argument,” Remus gives him, heaving his shoulders up, and upon being given no counterpoint to any of that, he keeps right on with it. “Given the inexcusably lousy start you got, you astound me every day with how intrinsically good you are—”

“No, don't talk to me about good,” Sirius denies, the tears really coming now. “I don’t know what good even is.”

Remus takes a long breath in and lets that out before even trying to continue, and that’ll be reason #462 that he’s better than Sirius could ever be; at least he takes time out to think, to breathe. “From the ground up, you were an exceptionally bright, monumentally talented, and remarkably creative kid, and she mishandled that and you at every turn,” he puts down. “You don’t get to conveniently leave out everything you have in spite of her: you're resilient, you're resourceful, you're passionate, you're thoughtful, you're exceptionally brave, you demonstrate fierce loyalty whenever it counts, you're talented beyond measure, you've got such a natural intuition in you that I fucking envy but can't help but embrace whenever I see you using it in real-time, you're generous without having to think about it, you're far, far better to people than you or they will always give you credit for, and you love people with your whole chest.”

Sirius doesn't know what to do with the fact that Remus didn't rush any of that out, just took it slowly, like each one deserved the time it took to lay down for him, but his gut, his charred throat, they won't let him have any of that. “We can't just leave out the ugly parts of me because I can be decent—”

“Decent?” Remus puts up. “You're a paradox, that's undeniable, but you'll never get away with only calling yourself decent, not with me around.”

Sirius does a sob-cough-choke hybrid that can definitely be added to the list of super attractive noises he's made since they got into the truck. “You're in love with me.”

“Is that a counterpoint?” Remus checks, after a beat or three. “You called me Switzerland just this week, so I’ll ask you to remember your own words, if you please.”

Sirius does think about doing that, as a treat, but he can’t do it; he turns his head to the left, mostly because now he really can't look at him, but Remus knows what he's doing here because his next exhale is so light Sirius might've missed it if they'd gone with background music. “I know you think you’ve been condemned to this villain status, but there’s so much good in you to offset that and you know there is, even if it doesn’t feel like it now.”

Sirius forgoes his no-looking-at-Remus rule right quick. “You’re an exact fusion of your mum and dad,” he highlights. “That’s pure goodness set to double-time; it’s in everything you say or do, and I’ll admit, it stops my breathing when I clock something Hope or Lyall say or do as something you’ve said or done since I’ve even known you, but there’s you three, and then there’s me, trying to stand on the same ground evenly as you so I don’t appreciate the comparison.”

“Well, you’re the one who made the comparison between us, not me,” Remus mentions.

“What are we even doing here?” Sirius puts up, a tight laugh leaving his throat. “We’re really just going to ignore the fact that we both know you brought a raging bull home to meet your parents?”

Remus’s flat hum comes off as a full denouncement. “Or, I brought my sweet boyfriend home to meet them,” he corrects, effectively undeterred, “but since we’re here, you want to talk DNA with me?”

“I thought we already were,” Sirius chimes, and it’s real pithy, he'll admit that, too.

“No no, if we’re going to discuss it then we’ve really got to do it,” Remus puts down. “We’re not perfect, Sirius; we’ve got our own shit—”

Sirius is already halfway through what would have been a lengthy pfftbefore he’s realizing that he’s being a whole lot of insensitive and cuts it short. “I’m sorry, that was dicky, but in my defence, that’s a ridiculous claim,” he extends.

Remus doesn’t miss a beat. “You pretending that you haven’t noticed some technicolour issues between the Lupin three is just as, if not more ridiculous than that,” he comes back. “I’m not saying that our situations are equal, they’re not and we’re not going to get anywhere pretending they are, but we’re not going to get anywhere pretending that my mum, my dad, and I aren’t equal to a three-piece band who’ve lost their sheet music a whole minute before going on stage either.”

Sirius can’t help the bark; it comes from within. “That’s incredible.”

Remus’s lips do The Quirk before he’s very openly working to keep his resolve. “We’re dysfunctional as shit, Sirius,” he keeps to his point. “For one, we don’t talk.”

Sirius sits up straighter in his seat. “Uh, yeah, you do.”

Remus gives a funny face there. “I’m not saying we can’t achieve talking as the actionable word here,” he makes plain. “We can laugh together, talk shit with each other, give each other shit when it's due, can shoot the shit, we’ve cried together, we’ve suffered some intense mortality checks together, and all that’s valuable, it is, but you have to know somewhere deep down that you’ve been helping immensely with that talking thing.”

Sirius clicks his tongue, but his face is reddening in real time. “Well, I hoped I had a bit, but I wasn’t going to pour the credit all over me,” he returns him. “And besides, I couldn’t if I wanted to; all you really need is a prompter at times, and that’s nothing to throw the dysfunctional blanket over.”

“We got past one hurdle, Sirius; I opened my mouth and talked — for longer than I planned to and without you there to keep prodding me to go on, I wouldn’t have,” Remus maintains. “I’m not happy about it because I feel good — genuinely good about what’s come of me actually talking to them about myself and not just the parts I let them see, and I’d like to say we’ve all learned something from this and be more transparent with each other from here on out, but that’s just not realistic; best case scenario, we get better at it as we go.”

Sirius sits there rod-still, too stricken to do much more with his body other than blink repeatedly at Remus, who thankfully takes those blinks as the prompt they very much are. “There’s a wall between me and them, I’ve felt it there ever since I was a little, little kid, and it only got higher from there,” he extends, taking his left hand off the wheel to flatten it just past the top of his head for emphasis, and then the hand’s back on the wheel again because he’s him. “It’s fallen away here and there, I’ve kicked it down myself at times, they’ve both climbed up and over it to get to me at other times, but that wall has been the most consistent presence at that house: I actively choose not to talk about any struggles I’m having with them because they’ve always got enough of their plate, and even if they don’t have anything pressing going on, I will almost always find a reason not to speak up, speak out, give them even one other issue, and in return, they actively don't tell me about their lives, their problems, what they're actually struggling with; I only ever find out months or years after the fact, or if I'm brave enough or willing enough to ask, and it's going to take longer than a weekend of progress to flip the pattern on its head, especially because I learnt that pattern from them.”

Sirius takes in a good, long breath, his eyes overbright and likely rather owlish as he watches Remus process live with front-row seats. “We don't deal well: my mum shuts herself off and viscerally needs to keep her and her hands busy while tearing herself to pieces in the process, my dad makes himself scarce and tinkers away on whatever he can bloody well find because that’ll keep his mind and hands busy enough to ignore what’s actually happening, and I handle myself away from them so they don’t have to see me in a rough spot,” he puts down. “It’s a family value, pretending we’re just aces when we’re really not, and then, when the pretending gets to be too much for any of us, we will self-destruct; my dad, he explodes, my mum, she implodes, and me, I oscillate between the two because I’m their fucking kid, I guess — I've got more, you want more?”

Sirius brings his eyes back and forth between Remus and the view out the windshield in a state of near-being. “I mean, no,” he gives experimentally, managing to make his shoulders lift before they're down again.

Remus doesn’t hear him or chooses not to; difficult to say when he’s already back to it. “You’re well-acquainted with the fact that I ended up with my mum's crippling anxiety, shoutout to that, but lucky little me also got her wickedly low self-worth, her near-complete inability to see the strengths she can bring to a table, and her complete resistance to put herself first,” he puts up. “I have her sensibilities lining my bones, but then, I've also got a few of my dad's standouts: I've got his temperament which you’ve definitely met before, through me and through him, you lucky duck, and I bottle things up and up and up just like he does, tell myself to let it be, not make waves, it’s not worth it, just like he does, and oftentimes, that'll work because my reasonable side kicks in and I can let go of an irritant, but other times? Get me cross and I’m crossing you; d’you get what I mean here?”

Sirius hums a declaration of agreement, quietly so as to not disrupt Remus too much, but he doesn’t disrupt a thing. “And, we've discussed this in detail, but I’m a damn force when I'm fucked off, and that, I know I got from him,” he maintains. “My dad, he’s good, he's good, he's good until he isn't, and then it's just fireworks, and I do it, too, and you know what, sometimes that’s called for because a fire-spitting Remus, same as a fire-spitting Lyall, can get stuff done that otherwise wouldn't if we remained our polite, agreeable selves, but other times, it's utterly embarrassing — I'm always so embarrassed with myself after I've gone off, just like he gets with himself, and now, we can head right into my notorious foot-in-mouth disease because I sure got that from my dear ol’ dad, surprise, surprise.”

Sirius gives out an expulsion of breath that could count as a laugh if one were being rather liberal about the usage of the word, but Remus hears it and knows it's meant to be one for it garners a smirk and head shake combo from him in reply. “Oh yeah,” Sirius offers, smiling sidelong at him. “Two peas, two mouths, two feet.”

“Mhm,” Remus hums to allow. “Honestly, that pretty well tracks for all three of us: we love — and I mean love to dole out unsolicited advice, us Lupins, and of course we say the wrong thing half of the time because we don't actually know shit about anything so when that shockingly doesn't go well for us, we retreat like ashamed turtles and beat ourselves up over it, but does that stop us from doing it all over again the next time? No, ma'am, we never learn, and it may actually be a little easier for my dad out of the three of us because at least he doesn't have this intrinsic need to hover the way my mum certainly does and good golly gee, guess who ended up with her sensibilities in that department?”

“OK, but,” Sirius tries, his voice coarse to his own ears, “just that one alone proves you're the better one of us: at least you give a shit about people, and so what if you sometimes miss the mark when it comes to advice? You're only ever trying to help someone out, there’s no malice anywhere in you.”

“OK, but that's the most generous read of it there could ever be,” Remus raises plainly. “If I perceive someone needing my help, I'll suddenly think I'm a worldly scholar, a whole social worker, even, and I'm very not either of those things. Doesn't matter, though, I'll still think I'm helping until it blows up in my face which leads us right to the fact that the Lupins, by and large, are terrible with confrontation — just abysmal at it: our first instincts are to hurriedly apologize and run the other way, but my mum will curl in on herself, quiet herself down, make herself as unnoticeable as possible to make up for her affront, my dad will keep talking and talking and digging himself further and further into the ground and then cut out of the room and the situation entirely because he can't handle the fact that he's read that situation wrong, and me? Could be either one! Really just depends on which way the pendulum swings in any given situation, which I'm sure is such a blast for you to have to navigate, never knowing which version of me you're going to get at any given point.”

“Remus,” Sirius says underhandedly, but it doesn't come out as much more than a whisper.

Remus hears it all the same and shrugs tightly, but it's no deterrent for his point has yet to be dotted and underlined. “I'm a whole mess to have to work with and around, I'm presumptive, I'm petty in my own damn way, I can be absolutely green with envy which is just not a good look on me, I've a tendency to favour doom and gloom over the sunshine that's right over there, I bottle my shit up and up and up until I can't physically hold it in any longer and unload on the first person I can trust that's nearby and then hate myself for burdening them with it afterward, I fret and pace and wring my hands and keep my thumbnails sharp as tacks so I can carve shapes into my fingers over things I'm unable to change and pretend not to see the things I absolutely can change but won't and don't,” he expresses. “I grew up around love and laughter and still somehow ended up this stunted, this afraid of love, this unprepared to accept proper love from a partner, I push good people around me away to protect them from me and only end up hurting them more in the process, and I do it to save my own arse — let's not pretend I do that to be noble, I'm not noble; I'm certain in my bones that I will exhaust those around me sooner than later so I make sooner happen much, much sooner than it would or even should, I could be a case study in self-sabotage, but somehow, with all of that and more, I managed to pull you, and that—” he takes his left hand off the wheel to point starkly at Sirius's wretched expression, “—is exactly how I felt hearing your little listicle before, so I don't want to hear it, Sirius.”

Sirius straightens up indignantly but despite trying to come off as an impenetrable force, he's the one opening and closing his mouth like a good-for-nothing fish. “You didn't have to drag yourself through the dirt just to hold me up,” he sends him, once he's figured out how to coordinate his vocal cords, that is.

“No, I really think I did,” Remus returns, not budging one bit on this one, the brat. “See, if I'm all of that and you're still planning on sticking around, then why, truly, wouldn't I do the same for you just because you're, what, rough around the edges? So what, I like your edges, you fit every piece of me that I don't already have, and don't leave me hanging here, but I'd like to think I fit some of the pieces you might be lacking.”

Sirius swallows wetly, doesn't know what to do with being so thoroughly disarmed, but he sits with it, examines it, hopes he'll learn to even like being this powerless if it's because of Remus.

Remus comes in through Sirius's prolonged silence with a distinct clearing of the throat. “I said, 'don't leave me hanging here,'” he highlights.

Sirius snorts so forcefully, he unceremoniously snots all over the lower half of his face that he then has to cup his hands over to avoid the mess going any further south and potentially wrecking his meticulously thought-out 'fit, and then there's Remus over there, absolutely shrieking through a startled fit of laughter, which only has Sirius just hollering behind his hands, and what is it, another half-minute, maybe more before Sirius has it in him to curl forward and try to get into the glove box. He uses his cleanest hand to pull on the handle, giving an uncharacteristically conservative pull on the door seeing as the last time he went in there with the liberal approach he ended up with a cascade of clutter falling onto him. Turns out, though, Lyall must have tidied up in there for no waterfall of odds and ends occurs this time around, and, fortunately for Sirius, the man left the squashed box of tissues in there.

He swipes three sheets out of the crease at the top, handles the immediate damage, and swipes a few more sheets out of the tissue box before putting it back. He pads the new wad over his jaw and under his nose again for good measure, stuffs all these tissues away in the pockets of his shorts for now, gets himself a glob o' Purell outta the bottle, and glances sidelong at Remus with a sheepish smile as he foots the glove box closed while he spreads the glob out over his hands.

“Well, after all that, how should we proceed?” Remus puts up, speaking quite easily, like he thinks no less of Sirius after his oopsy-daisy and that's a feat right there. “I've an idea, but by all means, you go first.”

Sirius shakes his head no, would much rather hear whatever Remus has cooking. “No, you go,” he prompts.

Remus looks quite pleased to have been given back the floor, which really only has Sirius's interests twice as piqued. “Alright, so what if, from here on out, we make it a rule that when you're with me, you're at your safest, and then let's take the what-if out of the equation because that's where we are at this point,” he puts it. “Barring some kind of wicked crimes against humanity, there's really not a lot you could do or be that would make me turn on you, and if we're being honest here; pit you up against somebody and a large part of me knows that the first question I'm going to ask is 'what’d they do to you, though?' and I think I've got receipts for that claim, thank you very much.”

Sirius doesn't bother confirming or denying that when he well knows there are plenty of receipts for Remus's continued grace in regards to him, but he doesn't have to; hell, he doesn't have to say or do anything other than averting his gaze to his lap before Remus is already tapping into some intense telepathy over there. “You don't want things to be too easy for you, I know that, so trust me, I'll still call you out if you're getting a bit too pithy for the situation, I'll tell you when you've stepped over the line and upset me, I'll tell you if you need to take a seat, and I'll still coach you back from a numb or heated place,” he sets down, “but I'll respect you, I'll respect where you've come from, I'll let you be you and celebrate your whole self, and this can still be a fair, no-judgment zone even if I sometimes have to reign you in a little, but it's not as if that's a chore or something unequal? You're the reigning king of getting me to breathe, see things clearer, of reigning me in when I'm fucked off, but this sort of thing has to go both ways or we're not doing this right.”

Sirius can't help but smile for him, can't help but feel the sting at his eyes come right on back with full force, nor can he help the urge to lift his hands to cradle his poor, exhausted peepers beneath his palms in thanks for doing all this extra work these days. “Ride or die, hm,” he raises, a thick laugh leaving his throat, wiping distractedly at his eyes.

Remus gives an astoundingly even mhm for that, a warm smile on his lips. “So, that's for the grand scheme, but we can go smaller for now and say that this trip within a trip is just for the two of us, and to that, between you and me, you're solid and there's nothing you need to worry about while we're on it: your character is not up for dissection or assassination, I'm not going to put you under a microscope to watch your every move and expect you to be some angelic version of yourself, so why don't we just say that you're free to be yourself? And then, when we get back to my parents, you're still not going to be under a microscope, isn't that neat?” he puts up, pointing his left forefinger at Sirius while his right one stays on the wheel. “My mum and dad aren't sitting around looking for faults in you, they're finally starting to get to know you properly, and there's accumulating Fine Young Lad points and I understand you want as many of those as you can get, but there is such a thing as taking that to an extreme, so don't go feeling like you have to perform some angelic version of yourself for them; my parents aren't particularly fancy folk, they're not going to virtue signal you over dinner, and they're well-positioned to find you and all your gumption absolutely refreshing to have around, have you got that?”

Sirius wipes his fingertips over his temples and cheeks in turn, trying to get his damp face back to a semblance of normal. “Funny, your dad called it gumption, your mum called it moxie,” he shares, smiling like a sniffly goon.

Remus switches off the windshield wipers for the rain is starting to look like a distant memory. “Well, shit, you might just have nothing to worry about, then,” he returns flatly, though that smile on his lips well suggests he's being anything but sarcastic. “So, are we clear? You're not on the stand, not with me or with them.”

Sirius slips his hands along the sides of his neck and takes to cradling his chin since his jaw has decided to give in to a bashful wobble. “Thank you,” he gives him weakly.

Remus shakes his head once when, knowing Remus, he's of the mind that this is par for the course, that coaxing Sirius from the edge isn't just in his job description, but a task he's happy to get to do. “A rough start, no doubt, but I think we stuck the landing, don't you?” he raises, giving his head an enchanting little tilt for consideration.

Sirius nods mistily, his eyes about ready to pour all over again, but he will not start weeping again, he all but refuses to. He needs to get it together. “I really don't mean to be so up and down,” he extends, levelling Remus with a frown to match his sheepish gaze.

Remus shakes his head more pointedly this time, a humourless tch coming through before he switches his turn signal on. “Sirius, you got me through the entirety of June,” he puts down, heaving his shoulders up and down. “It goes both ways.”

Sirius sniffs against his blocked sinuses, can't see past the film over his eyes; his face feels ready to pop all over again. Given his obstruction of vision, it's a little alarming that the truck makes a left turn when they haven't made a turn for the past half-hour or more. He wipes fast at his eyes, blinking intently out the passenger side window, and clocks two major changes in quick succession: a smattering of buildings have popped up seemingly out of nowhere, and they're taking an off-ramp down to street-level from the overpass that Sirius didn't even know they were on.

“We can't possibly be there yet,” Sirius says of it, whipping his head toward Remus, who breaks into a series of stifled smirks.

“Thought I might tempt you with a coffee,” he offers. “I didn’t want to stop in town and risk an interruption, but I do want to stop now while we’ve got coffee nearby.”

Sirius gives up a fast gust of breath that could have been a laugh, feeling equal parts grateful and sheepish. “Sorry, I'm really out of it.”

Remus hums a denial. “No sorries,” he chides gently, taking the slight swerve off of the off-ramp and heading them past the face of a retail outlet absolutely bursting with folks not having an identity crisis and enjoying their Saturday morning freely.

Sirius gives out a long, wan, and chesty laugh. “How the fuck did we somehow swap personalities in under a week?” he raises tightly.

Remus looks over at him and back out the front window again in quick succession, but there's a twist of a smile on his lips that is rather curious, contrasting well with Sirius' mild-to-medium hysteria. “I've noticed it too,” he shares, slowing the truck down to make a left into the parking lot. “It made me nervous at first, to think that the way I can be and the way I was for the last few weeks might've rubbed off on you in a way that I wouldn't wish on anybody let alone you, but I'm not sure it's that simple anymore.”

“Mm?” Sirius probes, but he doesn't dare make a noise bigger than that.

Remus nods thoughtfully, switching between budging through the parking lot and stalling the truck at various crosswalks for folks to pass in front. “I'm starting to think we're a lot more alike than either of us once thought,” he extends, waving a lady to go on past the truck and into one of the stores on the strip presumably. “We both feel so deeply within ourselves that we have to apologise for our very existence at times and could both use a semi-regular reminder that we don't have to be sorry for being here.”

Sirius doesn't move, doesn't make a noise, might as well not have a voice box at all, just waits for Remus to keep on with it, get to the meat. “I can't speak to before I knew you obviously, and don't whack me for flirting with some armchair psychology here,” he prefaces, stalls himself along with the wheels as a pack of teenagers sprint diagonally in front of the truck to get to the doors of some shop along the mall strip before continuing, “but I'm thinking you've been struggling with anxiety for as long as I've known you and perhaps longer than that, and while it's not a day-to-day experience for you like it is for me, I think when it does crop up, it's to do with your family and brushing up against who they made you feel you were, as skewed an image as that was and is.”

Sirius's temporary affair with mutism has Remus stalling and clarifying himself, but interestingly enough, not walking back the entire topic the way he would have done it even a few weeks ago. “Wrong as in, you've never been what they saw you as, not that it's wrong to experience anxiety that ties back to it,” he amends.

“No, I know,” Sirius gives him, and it's certainly a distant vocal pattern, but he's just had his brain blown apart so there wasn't much to be done about that.

Remus looks between him and the windshield for a quick beat. “For me, and we both know this already but for the sake of some much-needed grace, when anxiety strikes it can be any time, any day, and it can be cripplingly huge hurdles that set it off, but it can also be the most menial, perceived-easy things known to man, but there I'll still be, spiralling until I get a hold of myself or you're there to grab a hold of me instead,” he expresses. “You, on the other hand, you're solid on a day-to-day basis, but the second those people get in your head, your response is all-encompassing; it's body, mind, soul, and you want so badly not to be branded one of them that it's an all-around painful, obsessive, and borderline-intrusive experience for you, it comes on so quickly and it's tough for you to break out of that spot.”

Sirius feels both steady and unsteady at once. A throat clearing helps, and so does rubbing his hands all over his face to prove he isn't having some sort of fever dream. “That makes more sense than I know what to do with,” he puts up, beneath the shield of his hands.

“Right?” Remus puts up, so lively that Sirius has, no — must drop his hands to take in the moment properly.

Blinking in his surroundings again, Sirius notes that Remus has taken them near to a quintessential coffee shop chain the two of them know a little too well possibly. “Have you got any more for me?” he raises, a small laugh escaping his throat.

“Actually, I do,” Remus chimes, his energy, his overall relief palpable inside the truck. “I wonder if this has been something that's been happening for a long time, like — years, and it's because ever since you met me, you've tried so hard to see me, and not just me, Remus, my presence and my being, but to see me from where I'm coming from, where I’ve hailed from, what I'm working with, and I know it wasn’t always easy, but you never truly gave up on me or the hard, hard task of helping me feel less ashamed of the way I am and the way I can be, and that, is a mantra you and James have been lobbing back and forth for years now whenever you've needed to hear it, hasn't it?”

“Mother of—” Sirius expels. “You're brilliant.”

Remus doesn't do much in the way of speech as he gently scoots the truck into a free spot on the outer edge of the parking lot, but he’s smiling the whole time he does it and the moment the truck is in idle, he's back in full swing. “And here’s the thing, I used to chalk your grace for me up to you being unbelievably kind or that you liked a challenge and the feeling of accomplishment after completing it, and both can still be true,” he instils, voice alive with fervour, “but what if, you could've had this vested interest in making sure I didn't feel ashamed of my idiosyncrasies because you have your own and didn't even know the extent of it? What if, because your day-to-day is so different from mine, you felt sympathy for someone with immense anxiety like me, but didn’t clock that you might know more about it personally? What if you've been experiencing the anxiety that's tied to them for years and years before you left, and you didn’t even know? You've carried all this guilt around with you for that long, we both know that, but what if you've carried this for ages as well? And what if we, and I mean us, your friends, your found family, didn't clock it properly either? It's so easy to chalk you up to being this sassy, broody, confident, hot piece of arse who knows he's all that and more power to him because he is all that, but I don't know that any of us even saw it a possibility that you could've had this anxiety in you that makes you second-guess your entire worth and sometimes lash out when your past life hits back at you, and that’s our bad, honestly; we had all the information we needed, we watched as you opened that chest, watched as you combed through it, watched you process that cut-out, saw you trash the fucking terrace, and I saw the way your eyes looked and the way your shook out there — you had an anxiety attack, Sirius, you’ve been having them on and off since you first opened that book, and I’m so sorry I’m only just piecing it together properly.”

Sirius jams his right forefinger on his buckle and tosses the sash of his seat belt behind him in such haste that the metal knocks against the side of his door, but who the fuck cares about that. “Out,” he instructs, flapping his hands at Remus. “Out, out, out.”

“What?” Remus puts up, well and truly alarmed.

“Out of the truck,” Sirius gives weakly, pawing at his door handle.

Remus fumbles trying to get the keys out of the ignition, pounds the release on his own belt buckle, and then Sirius doesn't know what he does because he's lampooning himself out of the truck as fast as humanly possible. He takes to a diesel-powered sprint the moment his feet hit the ground, Remus-bound, and the way they keep each other in their sights the whole way around the truck before fusing together ahead of the cargo bed, it's almost like the movies, sort of like that couple who've wanted to hold each other for so long have finally caught the chance to and they're going to take it.

Sirius all but clings to him, arms up, hands clasped at the centre of Remus's back, and Remus all but crushes Sirius into him, his left arm curled tight around Sirius's lower back, his right arm laying at a firm vertical line up his back with his hand laying splayed at the back of Sirius's head, and it's a crushing worthy of the gods, alright? If Remus were to crush him completely, then he's seen enough, done enough, felt enough, and it's been a good life.

He's not dying, though. He breathes in fast, his nose burrowed into the crook of Remus's neck, taking in the scent of Remus's skin, and it doesn't seem to even matter that they're standing at the outskirts of the parking lot for a certifiably bumpin' retail outlet for Remus holds him like they're well and truly alone, and that's all rather spiritual in itself in terms of intimacy, but what gets Sirius's eyes leaking all over again is the words:

“I love you,” Remus recites, starting them in a small sway, and there's a big ol' smile on those lips of his, Sirius can just tell, “more and more every day.”

Sirius shakes his head fast in the crevice of Remus's neck, too weak, too small, too in love to hear this right now, not this collection of words, not again. “Mhm, and, since I know you think about this sort of thing, I'm not the least bit scared away by this,” Remus keeps right on. “I mean, how could I be? Would be a bit rich if I was.”

Sirius alerts him to the state he’s in via the violent hiccough he succumbs to, which garners Remus to gently coax Sirius's head up to administer a check-in, and Sirius knows he's got to look like a living, breathing hush-puppy for Remus gives up a noise that seems the perfect meeting point between wounded and wooed. “You don't have to worry about what this means for you, OK?” he raises, reaching his right hand up and around to brush his fingers underneath Sirius's chin. “It doesn't have to change you, me, or us because all it does is give us a better idea of what you've been dealing with and afford you a lot more grace going forward, with the understanding that I won't be letting you tear yourself apart.”

Sirius presses his mouth into the firmest line he's ever had them in, nods vigorously for him, and pushes out an unsteady breath out of his nose as he kneads Remus's hand underneath his chin, wounded and wooed. “OK, so here's what we're going to do,” Remus raises, a whisper between just the two of them, his left hand rubbing deep circles at the centre of Sirius's back, “you're in no state to go in there so I'll do that and you're just going to hang out here and have a breather, does that sound good?”

Sirius nods vigorously, suddenly finding the idea of feigning pleasantries with a couple of chipper baristas to be the last thing he wants to do right about now and kudos to Remus for just knowing it. “Stay here, have a puff,” Remus keeps on, pausing to leave a peck on Sirius's lips, “and I'll be right back.”

Sirius breathes out fast, completely blown apart by Remus not even looking around them to check whether the coast is clear, and he does it for Remus just in case, but they're really just a couple of randos at the tail end of the parking lot that nobody seems to be noticing, and that's to their full benefit.

He chases Remus's lips, tugs on his lower lip, and gives him one hell of a parting kiss, one born straight from gratitude. He slips his hands around in front of Remus to give his wrists a parting squeeze, turns to pull the door to the cargo bed down, and heaves himself up onto it, giving himself a place to perch in the meantime. He pats himself to figure out where the hell he stuffed his pack, hopes to all hell that he didn't leave it in the truck, but finds it in the left pocket of his shorts along with his lighter and congratulates himself on his forward-thinking.

He slips a cigarette out, puts his gaze back on Remus as he lights up, and watches him take his cardigan off of his arms and stick it on the bed to Sirius’s left before backing up, en route to the coffee house, sure, but apparently unable to turn around and face away from Sirius just yet.

“Careful, you'll trip,” Siriius mentions, eyeing Remus's feet once.

Remus shakes his head with a smile painted on, swivels around to face the direction he's going in, and heads away from the truck with his hands pushed into the pockets of Sirius's jeans, leaving Sirius to find some sort of path back to normal — whatever normal is for him, at least. He ends up leaning all the way back until he's lying flat on the floor of the bed, his legs bent at the knee and dangling off of the ledge; physically, he is intermittently pulling off his cigarette and watching clouds dance by overhead, but mentally, he's cross-pointing the theories brought forth to him by Remus with some intense citations.

For the present, he knows that Remus’s theories are right on the money: he feels Remus's pain when he's struggling a little too well, sees Remus's plights in a way that can and often has transcended pure sympathy, nestling a little too comfortably beside empathy not to be it. Sirius was almost there himself, just shy of seeing the bullseye, but there goes Remus conceptualizing it, threading it all together for him: he's been reeling, reacting, living with a recurring anxiety attack for days and days and days, and thinking of it like that now does make the truck feel less sturdy underneath his back, and yet, it feels right. One of those hard truths.

For the past, Remus might be more right than Sirius can fully process just now. He's got so many years to account for, so many different breakdowns, so many fits of rage, blackouts, weep sessions that he knows are all going to lead right back to the likes of them in one form or another, just like Remus said they might do, and even now, he feels himself turn away, force those times out of his head, get rid of them and think about something else, something better, brighter. One thing he does know, and irrefutably so, is that despite being complete amateurs in the way of handling somebody as damaged as him, despite not quite knowing what they were dealing with, the fact is, James, Remus, Pete, and to an extent even Lily, they've all managed to do right by him whenever they've been present to see an attack come over him. Learning curves have happened, mistakes through naïveté, no doubt, but those people, those patient, kind people have come back swinging for him, have remoulded themselves just to fit Sirius better when he needs it, have granted him grace time and time again, without knowing the extent of which Sirius would even need it.

And for the future? Hell, he doesn't know what's next for him now that a name's been given to it, now that the words have been uttered; it’s only questions as of yet. Will he afford grace to himself the way he’s learned to give it to Remus? He’s not very good at that, reserving grace for himself. Will he learn to hate this part of his brain the way that he’s seen Remus do so effortlessly or will he know better than to do that to himself because he's personally seen the damage it can do? Will he recognize it, when the next one starts?

Sirius shakes his head clear, remembers that Remus requested that he take a breather, not pick through his entire brain, and Sirius knows there'll be plenty of opportunities to revisit this, choosing to embark on a search for solutions seems appropriate. There aren't a lot of them, he'll be honest, but the bright spot he comes to, however, is that Remus loves him, warts, idiosyncrasies, and all; it's a fact he's known for a long time now, somewhere deep in his gut before he ever heard the words, a fact that's burned like a log fire, going in and out depending on which way the wind blew that hour of that day, but today, this morning, that fire's a blindingly bright blaze, a bonfire out of control, so how, exactly, can he make that the foreground? How can he put this morning's crisis away? How can he put Reg away?

A positive aside from Remus's strong case of the lovey-dovey variety is that there's really nothing coming up on their docket that he can attribute back to his little brother; they never went road-tripping together, never spent time frolicking on a disappearing beach, certainly never spent time scoping out the northeastern coast of Wales, and while Sirius could lay there and lament the fact that they never got there, never got to a place where they could spend time together and not wind up super-charged and ready to clobber each other, he can't fix that now and he can't let that unfixable problem slash through his and Remus's time together, just the two of them.

Reg is going to be there, shadow-dancing just out of his vision and squeezing his windpipe again in no time, but he'll be damned if he lets Reg hitch a ride all the way to Porthgain with them, not on his watch; he takes the last haul he can get off of his cigarette before reaching the butt over the side of the truck, letting it go along with his brother's rotten hand.

The way he knows Remus is near is the telltale sound of ice cubes rattling around in plastic cups and Sirius maybe has never been exactly this ready to pour iced cold coffee down his face hole; he lifts himself up enough to sit, leaves the palms of his hands braced behind him as he smiles at the sight of Remus toting two large drinks over to the truck, and he can absolutely tell one of them is the colour of a cold brew left black, but he eyes the other, pale white drink with curious intent.

“What did you get?” he probes.

“A treat,” Remus returns, being coy about it.

Sirius pushes himself toward the edge of the cargo bed, leaps off it and onto his feet, and trots over to Remus to sneak a sip off of his mystery drink if the lad won't tell him what it is, but even though he hasn't had one of these in an age, that's the look of a chai latte in Remus's grasp and that fact alone has Sirius gasping before he even gets his mouth around his straw. “So bougie of you,” he raises.

Remus gives a flat tch. “Yeah, OK,” he returns, side-stepping him all while holding Sirius's drink out to him.

Sirius grabs hold of it, turns to head back to the cargo bed, and grabs Remus’s cardigan off of it to hand off to him before shutting the door to it back up. He heads around to his side of the truck, opens up his door and heaves himself up over his seat to deposit his drink in his respective cup holder before climbing in fully, Remus does something a little similar on his side of the truck, only he doesn't scamper inside as much as Sirius did, choosing mostly to just hold onto the handle above his door with his free hand and slide himself into his seat in a quick motion. Remus deposits his own drink into his cup holder and turns in his seat, taking the cardigan he had draped over his right forearm and tossing it over their bags in the back seat before settling in better in his seat. He looks to Sirius, who’s definitely just looking at him, and the two of them simply sit, eyes on each other, each one inviting the other to speak first. It gets funnier and funnier as the seconds drag on until Sirius puts up a snicker. “Somebody's going to have to start,” he raises.

Remus smirks in his seat. “I was trying to let you go first,” he fesses. “How are you feeling?”

Sirius searches long and hard for the right word choice for the feeling lining his bones. “Understood,” he offers.

Remus gives into a smile/squirm combo before pulling it all together to register a rich, wistful sigh. “That's the dream,” he delivers, staring whimsically out the front window/at nothing.

Sirius snorts soundly, though this time he's proud to inform that no major complications arise from that involuntary act. “Ain't that it,” he returns, reaching for his seat belt.

He straps in, presses his window down fully, and turns to grab his drink back from its holder, sipping off of it as he waits for Remus to get himself organized. Remus cranks his window down as if mirroring Sirius's idea, buckles himself back in, and starts the truck up again, backing the truck out of their parking spot. He wheels them back around toward the way they came in, takes a left there, and winds them around the block before taking them back onto the highway, and once they're starting from where they left off, he reaches his left hand out to pluck his drink out of the holder again, sipping off of his chair while his right hand falls to rest at six o'clock.

Sirius blinks about a billion times in under a second it feels before he steadies those eyelids of his enough to look on with wide-eyed wonder, taking in the image of Remus sitting easy and scanning the road ahead, and it is indeed a straight shot of road for as far as the eye can see and there is less of a need for him to grip the wheel at ten and two like they'll go spiralling off of the road if he didn't, but still! As hot as Sirius expected the sight to be, he didn't expect it to come this soon, nor this easy for him, but seeing Remus this eased, this in control of the situation, this in control of Sirius and himself throughout this ordeal, as if the one matter that Remus doesn't second guess, that he stays steadfast in, that lets him forget about every other possible worry or itch at his skin, is that Sirius is worthy of defence.

That concept alone is enough to get Sirius's eyes welling up all over again, but then, as if to add just another layer to it, Remus perches his cup between his legs and holds it steady between them with those power-hungry thighs of his as he gives a scratch at his left ear idly with that newly freed hand of his, and Sirius experiences lock-jaw for a dozen seconds at the very least.

The things he wants from Remus are unspeakable, so how can he put this delicately? He wants to climb him like a tree, wants to give himself over to him, wants his legs wrapped tight around Remus' hips with his toes threatening to cramp, wants to let Remus do whatever he wants with him because if it's Remus, he's game.

“What time are we expected to check in at the inn?” he raises, finding the mechanics of his jaw again.

Remus hums for the prompt, swallowing down a new sip off his drink. “We're good anytime after eleven,” he forwards, leaving his cup right where it was again.

“And are we headed there first thing?” Sirius investigates.

Remus turns his head to him for a beat before putting it back on the road. “Well, I was planning on heading for the brunch spot,” he shares, a new, curious twist forming at his lips.

“Right, and fair enough,” Sirius allows, turning his gaze to the left and out of his window with a pointed smile on, “but since brunch goes until two, I do wonder if stopping in at our room beforehand might be an idea.”

Sirius chooses to aim that sly gaze back over to Remus again, mostly for emphasis, and barks out an utterly championed laugh at finding Remus shimmying those shoulders, Sirius-style. He gives an enticed trill in his throat, throwing his own shoulders into a shimmy, and now they're both a couple of excitable, shimmying loons, it appears.

“Oh, good, you're back,” Remus chimes, happy to see and hear it, it very seems.

“Uhm, hello,” Sirius returns, “you just shimmied me; if I wasn't already on the mend, I'd have to be now.”

“Bueno,” Remus deems it, and he sure seems to be having a bit of trouble keeping his attention solely on driving.

Sirius eyes him sidelong, studying the small but intermittent axis Remus's head seems to be turning at — two beats facing the road, two beats facing Sirius, rinse and repeat – but the most important detail to note for him is the twist at Remus's lips. He waits until Remus's next interval, turning his head toward him and staring directly at the centres of those shades of his to ensure he'll meet Remus's gaze. “Yes?” he probes, devilishly curious.

Remus faces forward at once and keeps it there for longer than the aforementioned pattern, breathing in with a dignified air about him before offering any sort of response. “I may or may not like the way you're looking over there, sue me.”

“Well, I won't be doing that,” Sirius serves him, and while he hadn't planned on straightening up out of his sprawl any time soon, he commits to leaving those knees of his set apart, just for Remus. “You know what would really cheer me up?”

Remus sniffs as he finishes off a new sip of his drink. “I'm driving,” he offers sweetly, swishing the ice cubes around in his cup.

It genuinely takes a few for Sirius to realize where he went with that, but when he does, it comes with a delighted gasp. “I didn't mean that, you hussy,” he returns, but he can't help thinking about it now that the idea's in his head. “Wouldn't say no, mind.”

“No, I'm sure you wouldn't, you hussy,” Remus sends back.

“OK, but for real,” Sirius laughs, “I had Jesus Christ Superstar all queued up and ready to play on the way there before I hit the wall.”

Remus perks in his seat, looking positively delighted about this development. “Seriously?” he puts up, a certifiably goofy smile on that just gets Sirius right in the chest.

“Well,” he offers.

Remus huffs long and hard for that one, but his smile hasn't gone anywhere. “It's just the last thing I would have expected out of you,” he reiterates.

“Why's that?” Sirius puts up.

Remus hums quite pointedly. “Well, Jesustown,” he offers.

“Mmkay, but I would go as far as to say that Judas was the real 'Superstar' all along, and you can fight me on that one,” Sirius mentions. “Besides, it's not a religious film at all if we really want to get into it.”

“I–“ Remus starts, huffs, laughs. “Sirius, Itold you that.”

“And I agreed with you more and more as we went along,” Sirius echoes, likening the sound of Remus's continued huff-puffing to birds twittering in the early morn. “I'll have you know, I still get rando melodies from it in my head to this day, and that's just from one viewing, and besides, it's so chaotically colourful, the soundtrack goes hard, and it's just an all-around good time, especially if you're there tip-tapping along with it.”

Remus shakes his head, in the midst of some sort of hazed stupor. “Well, that's — I'm glad you think so,” he offers, giving a small laugh that doesn't quite leave his chest. “I just, can't figure out how it would have even crossed your mind as an idea.”

“Well, your dear pa mentioned your love for it as a youngin yesterday while we were looking at snaps of you,” he offers up, leaving out a small but key detail for now when Remus's lips are already tugging down sheepishly; that's as good as a confession that the lad once twirled around his den with it on blast, but it's not yet time to shine the searchlight on the guy and have him deny them the whole soundtrack as a result, “and then I woke up with several different hooks from it rolling around in my skull, so I'm a goner and I simply have to insist we get that playing, if there's still time for the whole thing at least.”

Remus hums approvingly. “The run time's, what, an hour and a half? Something like that,” he raises, gesturing his cup toward the time on the dashboard. “We'll at least have time to make it to 'Superstar,' which, I would argue is powerful enough to be considered the closing number, all in all."

On that note, Sirius's memories cycle back through to their mid-April screening, taps into soundbites of fat bass lines and momentous crescendos and visuals of rows and rows of flashy angels dancing amok while Judas croons his whole way through the number with that white getup with all that fringe going on those sleeves of that jumpsuit, and, well; when Remus is right, he's right. “When you're right, you're right,” he affords him, taking a celebratory sip of coffee.

Remus reaches to tug the aux cord from the port on his phone and proceeds to lasso it around and around as a means for Sirius to take it off his hands. “Start it soon so we'll make it to that one, then,” he bids.

Sirius almost laments having to take the cord from Remus when this whole display is worth keeping around a little longer, but then again, they're at the precipice of something breath-taking, he can feel it alive within his whole being. With no holds barred, Sirius tugs his phone out of his right pocket and pops the cord in, pulling up the Motion Picture Soundtrack as that's the version Remus made sure to show him and scrolling down experimentally; he keeps a sneaky smile trained to the left and away from Remus, thinking he'll wait to share his full intentions until they're a song out from 'Simon Zealots' and that way, Remus might just be at a place where he's enjoying himself too much to mind any comment about previous, youthful twirling coming from Sirius.

He scrolls back up to the top of the list, hits play, and leaves his mobile in his cup holder when his coffee isn't going anywhere but his left hand as far as he's concerned. He sips off his coffee with an enticed smile, watching Remus unflinchingly as the very first notes of the Overture swell inside the truck, making way for atmospheric tones and drones to follow suit.

Given the nature of any overture, there is not a single lyric to be sung for the next four to five minutes, but that doesn't deter Remus at all from humming, foot-tapping, and pop-locking along to each new bar of instrumentals that represent snapshots of a future song to come down the line, and Sirius is, frankly, in paradise getting to see it happen through this upgraded version of Remus, equal parts the post-cluster-resurgence Remus, who viscerally takes fun and theatrics wherever he can get them and the post-coming out Remus, who's getting more and more technicolour by the hour.

Remus is just starting to notice Sirius's glued gaze as the crescendo is building. “Are you going to do that the whole time?” he checks, calling it over the sounds of crashing symbols and somebody absolutely wailing on a synthesizer.

Sirius smacks his lips once. “I might dance and hum along here and there when the need arises, but yeah, get used to this face lookin' at you,” he advertises, circling his right hand around his visage and splaying it out toward him with it.

Remus's huff is drowned out by the climax of the tune, but his smile stays on as they head into 'Heaven on Their Minds,' which, Sirius will admit, is where his shoulders do start to shimmy: he can't help it, the punchy tune demands it of him, but over there on his right, Remus is doing some of that himself, only he's also taking on the role of Vocalist like a bloody champ considering Sirius hasn't exactly got the lyrics down to a T just yet to join in with him. Give him another listen or two, however, and the show the two of them could put on? Powerful beyond measure.

The lead-in to Simon’s tune is a cyclical cycle of a three-note trumpet call with distinct, rather dramatic pauses in between that Sirius has to assume were meant for emphasis than just dramatic effect, which, he does have to say, does grip the attention in a rather bracing, curious way, so Sirius chooses to voice his curiosities about young, twirly Remus during the final pause that lingers after the final set of toot-toot-toot's of that horn. “So, tell me about the routine that goes along with this one,” he raises, reaching to turn the volume dial down a few notches.

Remus, who has been putting on one hell of a one-man show for Sirius's benefit for all of the previous tunes, tip-taps his fingertips to the jazzy piano that kicks in even with the lowering of the volume and lags a bit with his reply. “What do you mean?” he bids, pretending he and his left hand are the tune's Pianist.

Sirius holds back a smirk; Remus is an acteur, make no mistake, but Sirius has investigative prospects right on the horizon. “Well, a little bird told me that you know the routine to this one a lot, lot, lot more than you've been letting on.”

Given that Remus's fingers are having a whole rave party over there, it's extra noticeable that all eight of his fingers freeze up at once. “Is my mum the little bird?” he inquires, and those ears of his are starting to resemble the colour of an off-season beet.

“Your mum and dad actually, so two little birds,” Sirius amends, but Remus sucks in a breath through his teeth, leans his head back, and gives out a pained noise that's altogether unsuitable for the situation. “Oh, would you relax; it was cute, they told me all about twirly Remus—”

“No,” Remus drags out, face all scrunched up. “No, no, no — why?”

“Uhm, because the conversation went there?” Sirius puts up simply.

“How?” Remus returns sharply. “How, Sirius?

“Well, if you must know, your parents are out here starting to put two and two together about the signs that could've pointed toward their son being just a wee bit fruité, we'll say, and I say more power to 'em,” Sirius sends him. “And, I'll have you know, I like you even more than I already did just knowing that you had those moves memorized when you were a wee one, but what I really want to know is if you still know them well enough.”

Remus breaks his disapproving resolve, replacing it with a chesty laugh and a slow rub of his left hand over his face. “Not well,” he extends, avoiding Sirius’s entire fucking eye line.

“Lie?” Sirius elongates, trying to read him sideways.

“I was eight,” Remus returns.

J'accuse Sirius sends him.

“J'accuse for what?” Remus lobs back.

“I bet you remember way more than you're letting on,” Sirius reiterates. “I don't know what you're even embarrassed about; I love the idea of twirly Remus and would double love it if I could hear more about him from the source.”

“What is there to hear about?” Remus raises. “I rewound the tape over and over again until I'd memorized what the dancers were doing on screen; that's pretty much it.”

“And you say you don't remember it,” Sirius mutters, but make no mistake, it's loud enough for Remus to hear over the music.

“Not well,” Remus repeats, stretching his neck side to side. “I remember this part coming up the most.”

Sirius perks fast, listening close as they head into the climax of the song, and his memory does a funny little cross-point situation wherein the music puts him right back in his living room, with a bunch of folks dressed in 70's flower-power 'fits flash-mobbing around one befuddled Jesu Christo, but then that memory fuses with the polaroids he's seen of tiny Remus sand that has him perfectly picturing the tyke swishing around that den doing those same moves and trotting back to the VCR to rewind it and start all over again, and Sirius tosses his head back, letting out a boisterous noise.

“You're so cute,” he shouts, his right fist cupped in front of his mouth so there'll be reverb on it. “You have to show me the moves.”

“Well, I can't exactly do it now, can I?” Remus raises, doing a wiggle in his seat for a showcase of his limited parameters.

“I didn't mean now,” Sirius emphasizes. “Although that does sound promising, won't lie about that.”

Remus vaguely turns his smile away from Sirius's view. “I'll think about showing you later on,” he relays.

Sirius' stomach does a light twirl itself. “Really?” he probes. “You're not just saying it?”

Remus faces his head toward the front window again, breathing in once. “Cunt help me, I'm not.”

It's enough for Sirius to almost take that as law, but even then, he's not entirely sold. “You'd better not be hoping I'll drop it and then just conveniently keep forgetting about this promise because I'll state it clear: I won't let you forget,” he manifests.

“Oh, no?” Remus prompts, his lips going for a twist.

“Mm mm,” Sirius echoes. “I'll set an alarm for every hour on the hour if I have to.”

Remus smirks, letting his head fall forward for a beat or two. “You would do that,” he allows.

Sirius sits pretty in his seat, feeling rather charmed and satisfied with the resolution of this topic. “I ought to have a rough morning more often, hm,” he raises, drums the soles of his shoes on the floor below them.

Remus huffs long. “Shut it,” he returns, leaning in to turn the volume back up.

Notes:

just an fyi that this fic is p much always being worked on in some form so don’t worry if i drop off for a while

Chapter 30: 30.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

To say that Sirius isn’t altogether bursting to leap out of the truck once they’ve arrived at their destination would be a complete falsehood, and here’s why: that cold brew Sirius devoured not so long ago has officially reached the point where it’s kicked his spirits, insides, and entire being into overdrive but also has made its way through Sirius so his bladder may just explode if he doesn’t get to a loo and soon, but more than the cold brew and its resulting effect on Sirius’s body, his inability to sit still has much to do with the entry to this other-worldly property.

Upon entry, Remus took them down a long lane so picturesque Sirius would have thought he was being taken to a woodland area from a picture book, so already he was catching thrills before he even locked eyes on the building, but then that was a sight within itself: a three-story, wooden structure with a slanted roof, the wood painted a deep blue of all things and a choice that Sirius, though not an architect by any means and thus his opinion wouldn’t be asked of him anyway, well approves of.

The face of the building is quaint, with a large porch going fully across the length of the building with seating arrangements to and fro, split up only by the front door, a bright white specimen that not only completely stands out against the blue of the wood around it, but matches the white awnings over the windows out front. Ahead of the railings lay many flowerbeds, all planted and catered by, Sirius has to assume, one strapping gardener that he can only hope to catch sight of while staying here.

All in all, Sirius appears to have been lifted and dropped into a true story about idyllic properties and it is a storybook he’d like to remain in for the remainder of his life. Remus, lovely lad, taxis them around the whole parking lot to give him a nice, extended profile shot of their destination, so Sirius’s face remains smushed against the windowpane on his side of the truck to let him fully take in the building they’ve just pulled up to.

“We’re lucky, looks like a full house,” Remus mentions, of the quite-full parking lot they’re manoeuvring around. “We might’ve really nabbed the last room.”

“That’s that Lyall Luck doing us the solid, I should think,” Sirius comments.

“Don’t let him hear you say that or he’ll want a full explanation for what the fuck happened to his luck once his forties hit,” Remus says there.

“OK, won’t say a thing about it,” Sirius echoes, and he wouldn’t have answers for that if he tried as is.

“Can you,” Remus starts, wheeling them back around to the first row of parking stalls, “grab my mobile and let my mum know we’re here?”

Sirius peels himself off of the windowsill, looking round at Remus. “Just a ‘hi there, hello, we made it?’” he raises, reaching for Remus’s mobile sitting cosy in a divot on the centre console.

“I mean, she’ll wonder if I’ve dipped into the Jesus juice if I greeted her with that, so just a ‘here!’ would be just fine,” Remus offers him.

Sirius gives a noise of amusement as he searches around for Hope’s name in Remus's contacts, then realizes laughing in his current state is a precarious action indeed. He breathes in and out through his mouth, crosses his left leg over his right knee, and thinks it’d be quicker to go to recent messages and find her there, and lookie here, she’s the fourth person down from the top of the list, he shoulda' just done that. He types out a jolly good ‘We made it’ into the chat box and sends it off, sticks Remus’s mobile back where it was, and Remus is hardly parked before Sirius is freeing himself from the trappings of his seat belt, fully jittering both of his legs.

“Is there a loo in there?” he poses.

“No, the one downside to the place is they make you go outside,” Remus slips him, pulling the truck into Park.

No,” Sirius elongates, throwing his door open. “Don’t make me laugh; I’ll piss my entire pants.”

“Shit, alright,” Remus accepts, pulling the key out of the ignition. “Well, go on, there’s one near the front desk in the first room, on your left.”

Sirius drops to the ground below the truck and swivels on his feet to peer over the surface of his seat to speak his amusement toward Remus still inside the truck. “Right up front?” he returns, willing his lower half to keep up with the retention he’s trying to use. “I can’t just torpedo in there and say ‘ gotta use your loo,’ can I? They’ll brand me a wacko before they even get to know that for themselves.”

Remus gives into a full-bodied smirk. “I’m just saying, stranger things have happened,” he serves him, goon-grinning over there as he frees himself of his own seat belt.

Sirius takes to hopping from foot to foot. “You have got to go even a little faster than this,” he puts down.

“I said go on,” Remus reiterates. “Tell them you’re with a Lupin and they might just let you go anywhere you’d like, save for the kitchen.”

“There’s a kitchen in the there?” Sirius raises.

“Oh, mhm,” Remus affirms. “They do mostly baked goods and coffee in the mornings, but dinner is really where their menu shines.”

“Can’t wait,” Sirius returns, fully succumbing to the idea that he’s going to have to sprint in there. He shuts his door, moves for the backseat, and pulls open the door Remus only just unlocked milliseconds ago, pitching himself up onto the footrest to heave the first duffel he can reach toward him. “I’ve got this, and I’m afraid that’s it.”

“I’ve waved you off at least twice now,” Remus sends him, getting himself out of the truck on his side of it.

“Love you, so much,” Sirius extends, hanging the duffel from his right shoulder and shot-putting himself toward the building.

As luck would have it, the lady at the front desk is fully engulfed in conversation with a couple ahead of the front desk, which makes things a lot easier in terms of slipping by and locking himself in the loo without being pulled into conversation or noticed. The moment the door is locked, Sirius heaves the strap of the duffel off of his shoulder and dumps the thing to the ground, giving thanks for having grabbed the one full of clothes and none of their more fragile items.

The release is something like returning home from crashing at a mate’s place after a wild night out, hungover as all hell and ready to hit the pillows in your own, perfect bed again. With that out of the way, Sirius can refocus and pull his natural excitement for being here back into the forefront of his mind, giving the establishment’s hand soap a good sniff as he’s washing up and deeming this attractive, liquid-based melon blend a solid '9.5' all around.

Sirius re-shoulders the duffel and slips back out of the bathroom, hanging back for a moment or three because they certainly didn’t discuss what their story would be once arriving, but mostly he hangs back a bit to simply smile at his man currently taking up every inch of the unused air in the room as he cheerfully chats up the lady at the front desk, his right hand braced on the counter ahead of him and his right hip cocked out a bit, the rest of their bags hanging from his shoulders. He’s a beaut, simple as that, and that’s all Sirius has to say on the matter.

The lady heads in through a door behind her and leaves Remus all by his own for the moment, wherein Remus is free to observe the room around him, or perhaps he can just sense Sirius over there eyeing him, but either way Remus turns his head to the left and spots him in no time at all.

“What’s the rating?” Remus bids, nodding toward him.

“'9.5,'” Sirius forwards, beaming over at him.

“Hey, not bad at all,” Remus accentuates, giving in to a beam of his own over there. “I brought your mobile and your pack in.”

Sirius takes in an anecdotal breath, happy to hear it. “Thank you,” he chimes.

Remus smiles easily, but his brows go funny. “You just going to stay there, then?” he raises, eyeing the spot where Sirius has admittedly stayed rooted to the floor.

“Well, I didn’t know if you wanted her knowing we’re two lads getting one room,” Sirius explains.

Remus nods to his right, toward a hallway that stretches long, but he’s more referring to the staircase a sitting just few steps into the hall, Sirius learns. “Well, we’ll be going upstairs next, go hang out over there,” he bids, giving into a grin Sirius can only describe as sugar-sweet. “Besides, you look like a girl from the back.”

Sirius flips him the bird the entire way over there, though the gape/grin he’s got going on likely mares the effect quite a bit judging by Remus’s shoulder shimmies over there. Highlight: the lady returns in the middle of a shimmy that Remus drops rather quickly to slap his work smile on, but after that Sirius isn’t sure what happens over there for he’s taken his mission seriously, facing away from the front desk and investigating the wallpaper in the hall with little roses all over. He has half the mind to wonder if it’s scented, as a place like this would have some scented wallpaper hung about, but he thinks twice about sniffing it so as to not draw any major attention to himself over here.

“Alright, upstairs we go,” Remus bids, quite suddenly behind him.

Sirius all but scoots up the stairs with exaggerated footfalls, getting out of immediate view of the desk and playing a game of Espionage because why not, and Remus huffs a laugh behind him, tapping at the small of Sirius’s back. “I was kidding, you know,” he slips him, pulling him to a stop halfway up the stairs with the hem of his shirt. “You don’t actually have to hide.”

“It’s more fun to pretend I’m a secret agent casing out the place,” Sirius sends back, speaking it out the side of his mouth and, impressively, without moving his mouth much at all. “Be cool, Remus.”

“How are you doing that?” Remus demands of him, and it’s so candid that Sirius succumbs to a fit instantly, gripping the bannister for purchase.

The two of them halt and stand up very straight as thundering sounds from further up the stairs before one extremely facially and bodily blessed bloke sporting a workman’s tank and a pair of grass-stained jeans with a sizeable hole in the left knee comes down the steps toward them, and Sirius doesn’t know what to do; the man’s got an actual shroud glow surrounding him up there.

“Oh, sorry, go on,” the Gardener bids, moving to the left and all but fusing to the wall to let the two of them go up the stairs first, and oh, he’s a gent, too; what'll they do now?

“Thank you,” Remus pipes up, much higher than his normal vocal register as he taps Sirius’s back yet again, which might as well have been an activation button for the next moment Sirius is making a beeline up the steps with one of Remus’s forefingers hooked right into the waistband of his mesh shorts to keep up with him. “Second floor, room seven.”

Sirius takes heed of the directive, making a fast left at the top of the stairs and finding a whole new flight to head up, but he pauses the moment short before the turn of the staircase, tugging Remus into a little nook complete with a couple of armchairs for guests to presumably read or simply mingle in. He whirls around on Remus the moment they're tucked away in there, finding a cheeky smirk aimed right back at him, and gape/grins at him in the abject privacy of their little nook.

“You understated things considerably,” he puts plain, his voice down in an urgent whisper.

“I did not,” Remus denies, following Sirius’s lead into a hushed voice. “I stated things as is; that's the hot gardener, no more, no less.”

“He’s got a farmer’s tan, Remus,” Sirius puts up, “and I wasn’t even repulsed by it; explain.”

Remus sucks in a breath through his teeth, tilting his head back and forth rather evenly. “It’s the face, the body, the general urge to please; distracting, to say the least of it,” he offers him. “Dismantling, even; you’re only human.”

Sirius puts a hand over his heart as a means to show he’s taking that comment straight to that rampantly beating organ. “What is he, thirty?” he bids him.

“Close to, by now,” Remus extends, looking back toward the stairs the man disappeared down with it. “He was something like eight years ahead of me in school, but he was a youthful lad when I was eyeing him privately.”

“And a thing for the older men, didn't you?” Sirius comments, popping his brows up his forehead.

“Oh, careful there, you,” Remus warns, turning right on back to him.

There’s something odd coursing through his body that Sirius can only just name if he thinks about it, given the context cues. They don’t often discuss the attractiveness of any one specimen, but so far when they have, on Remus’s part, it's come through as a means to razz somebody else: Pete and his hotpot uncle, Sirius and Hot Will from the shop, Sirius and Zumba King, but there’s something undeniably fun and, dare he say, thrilling about seeing Remus able to be freely cheeky and transparent with him about this sort of thing, and, as if Sirius didn’t find him woefully attractive already, something about Remus right now is genuinely irresistible, and he is going to need to be in room seven within seconds or he may just pounce on him right here and use either of these cushy armchairs to get the job done.

Without another word, though Sirius will report that something powerful flashes over Remus’s shadowed gaze that rather suggests he, too, experienced a rather striking moment just there, and that has Sirius taking hold of Remus’s right wrist and pointing with his free hand in question, needing to know the direction they’re going in before he can feasibly drag him off in it. Remus juts his free hand left and Sirius tugs him right along, finding the weight of Remus crowding his back as they pad up the hall an entirely welcome one.

He stops at the door with the '7' on it, stepping back to let Remus get in ahead of him given that he's quite powerless at the moment, and Remus slides in with the keycard at the ready, but it takes two tries for him to slip it into the slot below the door handle due to some clear impatience and what a lovely little reminder of who exactly Sirius chose to spend all this time with; the lad is more poised than most people he knows, but trap him on the other side of a row of buttons or a locked door he'd like to get inside of and Remus Lupin is nothing but a bumbling boy, as if all the blood normally keeping that big ol’ brain of his in check has relegated straight to his dick and taken out almost all hand-eye coordination in a completely endearing way.

Upon being permitted entry via a quick beep from the lock, Remus goes ahead and chops his hand down on the handle before pushing the heavyweight door wide open, flinging Sirius right on into the room and knocking the door shut behind them. He locks it right up and while that’s a generous amount of forethought on his part considering what they’ll be getting up to, Sirius drops his duffel to the floor a couple steps into the room, simply unable to keep from being distracted by the aesthetics surrounding him.

Wooden floors? Rustic, cottage vibes every which way? A plush queen bed wrapped in a seafoam green comforter topped with white pillows? A slanted wall above the bed with a little skylight built into it? A personal reading nook of their own tucked away in a little alcove in the back corner by the windowsill? There's even a tall, full-length mirror on the wall to the left of the bed and a bit off-centre for the sole reason anyone would want a mirror so close to a bed, but that’s neither here nor there; it’s an adorable mirror, and the room as a whole somehow feels exactly like it would setting foot inside a Mumford and Sons tune, all told.

“Well, it’s no honeymoon suite, but it’ll do,” he says of it, turning a wry grin over his shoulder at Remus.

“Oh, you shut it,” Remus returns, but he’s got a goon-grinning going for himself as he lays his share of the luggage down a tad more carefully than Sirius did, but he has got the bulk of the toiletries & co; best to take some care in setting that one down.

Sirius has a second look over at the bed that extends out straight ahead of the slanted wall, eyeing the slant-to-head-bonk radius and taking in a thoughtful breath. “We should be careful with that,” he mentions, tipping his chin toward it.

“The bed?” Remus snickers. “I think it’ll outlast us even at our horniest.”

“No, I’m sure it will as well, but say you have a night terror,” Sirius amends, “and you shoot up in bed, knock that beautiful noggin on that slanted situation, and suddenly it’s Clustertown up in here.”

Remus gives in to a large grimace, letting his head fall back with a firm grunt of disapproval. “That's the least sexy thing you could have said to me just now,” he lodges, flying his left hand down at the rather artfully displayed boner nestled in his jeans.

Major apologies to Remus’s dick and his libido, but this is just as important; Sirius eyes the situation ahead of them, raising his right hand to his chin while gesturing his free hand around the general room they've been given. “I’m not saying this isn’t cute, ‘cause it is,” he puts down first, “but what if we rearranged it a little to suit our situation better?”

Remus's mouth falls right open. “We are not rearranging the room, Sirius,” he maintains. “That’s actually rude.”

Sirius almost holds off on clarifying that he meant the bed alone and not the entirety of the room, but then again, no harm in trying. “We could just tug the bed back from the wall a bit,” he suggests. “The headboard will stop the pillows from falling off, so that’s that taken care of—”

Or, we could assume that I won’t have a night terror and leap up in bed in the middle of the night only to take a bonk to the head?” Remus puts up, smiling pleadingly at him. “I’ve never had a night terror before, and I just don’t see myself starting that section of my life tonight of all nights.”

Sirius breathes in, settling himself back into the realm of reason. “OK, but I’d appreciate it if you wore your sleep mask tonight,” he bids him. “Only, that window is going to be right over us and I don’t want you starting the morning off with a Lup-scale ten.”

Remus blinks once, breathes in, and raps his right foot down on the wooden floor as a means to knock on it. “Well, that’s easy enough,” he offers him.

Sirius looks to the floor between them, reworks his budding smile, and looks back up at him. “You’re tapping into my wavelength better than I even can,” he mentions, and at Remus’s quizzical head tilt, he adds to it. “I’d have said all of that to you back in May.”

Remus breathes in, wets his lips, and seems poised to speak before he achieves it. “Well, I’ve you to thank for that,” he puts it, and kindly done, at that, which is just about the best Sirius could hope for, but never mind, scratch that; being patient with him was just a fraction of what Sirius could have hoped for seeing as, in the next moment, Remus is sidling on up to him and tugging Sirius in with the waistband at the front of his shorts. “It’s almost like you’ve been good for me.”

“Almost,” Sirius echoes, and that’s really all he manages to get out before Remus puts a shrooms-level kiss into the mix, the absolute minx.

Sirius’s mind goes fully into overdrive, knowing this encounter will be stellar already, but something about the playfulness that’s come of his leading man has him leaning toward a style he thinks feels they ought to be incorporating here; ge slips back from Remus’s lips, relishing in the lad trying to chase after his, and backs up until his calves hit the bed, where he takes to a rather bridal perch on the edge, splaying his hands far apart on the bed behind him.

“You are Stephan, I am Gérard,” he puts up eloquently, giving in to a fond smile as Remus’s prior expression completely wipes clean before a full-bodied smirk takes him over. “We are national footy stars—"

The snort Remus lets out could've probably been heard from the hallway. “In what world,” he quips.

“This one, so join me in it,” Sirius offers to entice, and at the very least, Remus gestures for him to keep on. “We play for St-Germaine, of course; top players make the top team, that’s how that works.”

Remus ducks his head through a bout of mirth. “A literal football’s going to come crashing through that skylight and land right on you,” he warns.

“And what a story that’d be,” Sirius says of it. “Now, the boys — that’s us—”

“Yeah, uh-huh,” Remus cuts in, grinning big as he moves for the bureau both across and a little to the right of the bed Sirius poised himself on.

“They’ve been keeping an illicit love affair since back in their uni days,” he breezes on. “It’s all sexy, steamy, forbidden whenever they do get the chance to meet up, but holy, holy, holy, is it good.”

Remus hums once. “Hold on, that’s exciting and all, but if they’re on the same team, then they must already see each other from time to time?” he raises, always the man to locate the plot holes first.

“Seeing is not the same as, seeing, if you catch my drift,” Sirius offers him, a man with a vision.

“Think I do, yes,” Remus grants, pulling off his sunnies and setting them on the bureau.

“Perfect, so let’s say, during the on-season, they have to be careful, not let any stares linger too long in the locker rooms so as not to give up their positions, so to speak,” Sirius dictates, pausing for a beat when he isn't all that sure Remus is fully with him when he's mostly just methodically setting various items from his trouser pockets on the surface of the bureau; their respective mobiles, the keys to the truck, Sirius’s pack, his lighter to boot, but as it turns out, Sirius is in the presence of another visionary.

“There’ve been too many encounters to count underneath the cloak of night, of course,” Remus offers up, taking to a perch on the ledge of the bureau facing Sirius and crossing his feet at the ankles, "but it's really during the off-season when the boys truly get their time to shine, so to speak.”

“Yes, of course,” Sirius echoes, nearly tipping over at the chance of Remus’s active participation.

“Now, the off-season’s favoured meet-up spot is, oddly enough, hidden away in the outskirts of the Welsh countryside,” Remus tacks on, throwing up a circumstantial smile. “This quaint, secluded inn close to Porthgain Harbour, of all places.”

“Discreet, picturesque, romantique,” Sirius tacks on, “but what if, their last rendezvous fell through when Stephan couldn’t get away from the glitz and glamoured appearances he'd been expected to make with the beard—”

“Oh, we’re doing that?” Remus checks, vision board on pause.

Sirius hums a faint, knowing note in return. “It’s maybe the most plausible detail I’ve come up with so far,” he trades him. “Lots of that going on in those testosterone-charged sports, but why don't we say they've an arrangement of sorts.”

Remus tilts his head to the side, giving back a noise to suggest he’s following him there. “You know, what would likely charge this Gérard fellow up with some intense fervour when they finally do get to meet, wouldn’t it?” he raises, and Sirius likes where this is going already, nodding invitingly for him to continue. “And that way, come this fine Sunday they've rescheduled their rendezvous for, I'd wager he is just aching for it.”

Sirius lifts his palms from the bed and slaps them together once for a resounding clap, thrilled to see Remus not just placating him; no no, this is a collaborative effort, and one that Sirius is fully in debt to him for.

As if reading his mind and his thoughts on debt as a whole, Remus moves away from the bureau to crouch in front of Sirius on the end of the bed, starting up a rather welcome rub over Sirius’s thighs. “Who do we think needs it more?” he raises, dipping his splayed fingers up underneath the legs of Sirius’s shorts and passing them over the bare skin beneath.

Sirius breathes in fast, lifting his hips into it as Remus slips around inside the legs of those incredibly controversial shorts, slipping his hands in between Sirius and the bed, and while Remus’s fingernails are little more than nubs, Sirius feels the scratch of those nails against his skin as he gives Sirius’s cheeks a squeeze from below. “You know who needs it more,” Sirius puts it plain, or at least he tries to; his vocal cords have something different to say on the matter and for that, they have it coming out a lot more like a breathy whine.

“Had an idea that might be it,” Remus allows, and oh, that voice is silky smooth; how dare he even do this to him?

Sirius breathes in once, raising his right hand for a question. “How quiet do the two of them need to be exactly?” he bids. “Are we going for stifled so no whisper of rumours start up about them and risk ruining their careers, or are they unable to help themselves—”

“Bit of both,” Remus decides, nodding in a way that is so confident, Sirius’s life could very well end right here.

It doesn’t, thankfully. Remus rises to his full height while still on his knees, where Sirius quickly finds out that was really more of a way to get a smooch going while he works his hands out from deep within Sirius’s shorts, and, happy to oblige, Sirius takes as much of that smooch as he can get while Remus works on tugging his shirt up to the collarbone, putting a pause on their kiss for another reason than to simply pull the shirt over Sirius’s head, he finds out.

“Any amendments before we get going?” Remus inquires, all very professional about this collaboration, and Sirius loves to see it.

He breathes in long, looking left for no other reason than that being the first direction he thought to look in, but it does have him staring in the direction of what would be the hallway they came in from. “Mm, now, that Gérard did, in fact, see a sighting of one hot gardener on the way into the building so Stephan might want to keep that in mind, lest Gérard’s mind start to wander elsewhere,” he slips him, blinking sweetly.

From behind the temporary veil of Sirius’s shirt, Remus huffs a laugh, but once the shirt is off his head and tossed elsewhere, that lopsided smile is going strong and entirely welcome here. “Turn over, you hussy,” he asserts, and Sirius does a fast move there that could best be described as something of a kick of his legs on either side of Remus’s body, a mad grab for the bed as he winds himself around to face it, and a look down at himself; it’s a lot of movement for a single, solitary reaction.

“Wait, what about these?” Sirius bids, reaching down to pop the band of his shorts with his right hand.

“Oh, I think we’re going to keep those on for as long as we can,” Remus returns assuredly, pressing up close behind him, and Sirius springs forward in the admittedly small space he’s been allotted between him and the end of the bed, managing to scoot himself down to brace via his forearms and spread his feet apart on the floor so, by all counts, he’s done his share of the overall task sufficiently.

But, Sirius is Sirius, so he wouldn’t be himself if he didn’t scoot his hips up to tooch them invitingly, nor would he be himself if he didn’t pop his hips back and forth, hopeful he might persuade Remus to make a meal out of him. Not one to leave an invitation unanswered — that would be rude — Remus two-hand tugs the band of Sirius’s shorts down past his hips, taking his briefs right with them by the feel of it for Sirius can certainly tell he’s bare-arsed in the cozy yet slightly chilled room, but that’s hardly a matter when Remus just about covers much of the exposed area with a set of warm, splayed hands, massaging over Sirius’s cheeks and generally having a heyday back there while he savours over him.

Sirius, feeling like he’s going to need to be doing so and very soon at that, crisscrosses his arms underneath him and sets his chin over his wrists, thinking he ought to keep them quite close by for a stifling tool. He needs them almost immediately after Remus starts in on him, and here’s why: Remus has got to be making up for not having been able to get this done high as a kite last night, there's just no other way around it; that's expert-tier work going on behind him as a result, and on top of that, Sirius has just figured out a very convenient use for that full-length mirror over there, but see, while it wouldn’t be very lucrative for a pair going at it atop the bed itself, from this angle, he’s got himself one substantial view of himself pinned against the end of the bed from the left and it’s a view Sirius is definitely going to keep an eye on going forward.

He switches over to biting at his left wrist so he can better lull his head to the right and experience the show from the inside and the sidelines, laying the side of his head down over his curled right arm while he keeps a strong side-eye going, and this is really rather invaluable programming when typically speaking, Sirius can really only get a backwards view of this sort of thing if he twists around enough to look, but this time, he’s got a full view of Remus’s profile, his plume of hair, his shoulders looking gorgeous and alight with the daylight streaming in from the mini skylight, and then there are Remus’s eyes, sitting a little above the arch of Sirius’s tooched arse, but those peepers are wide-open, fixed on him, and, dare he say it, at dinner-plate status while he works him up.

That in itself is enough for Sirius to start up a whine against his wrist, rocking back against Remus in a slow, sensual motion, seeking friction up front while getting all that friction from the back in a way that rather incorporates his dick, laying hard and tightly pressed between his navel and the curvature of the bed, into the process, and then, there’s the rest Sirius can make out of his gorgeous view: Remus’s hands, set splayed and attentive on either side of that gorgeous face that's getting all up in Sirius’s business and simultaneously pinning his hips to the bed, and Sirius, lucky duck, gets to live both in and outside of the moment when Remus slips his right hand down from where he had it clasped against Sirius’s left cheek and dip it low, wriggling it up into the right leg of the shorts, and because he knows he’s working his way up, Sirius practically bucks into it to give him plenty of access.

Not practically, he’ll be honest: he goes into feral mode, heaving himself back up onto his elbows and pressing his lips together without either of his wrists close by, digging feet into the floor to lift his hips and his cock right off of the bed in a true showcase of his well-earned and recently reinvigorated flexibility, and Remus, getting exactly what he must’ve been hoping for, hums long and rather graciously against him, presses himself in so close that his shoulders are right up against the backs of Sirius’s thighs, and slips his right hand up in the space provided to him, palming Sirius’s cock from underneath, and here, precisely, is where shit starts getting difficult for Sirius, a natural performer.

He well remembers what it's like being on the other end of this kind of manoeuvre, being the one dolling out all that free pleasure for someone who isn't expected, or at times not even permitted, to move a muscle, and being on this side of things is the exact meeting point between frustrating and erotic, it truly is: frustrating because he's got a strong feeling Remus pinned him there on purpose, limiting excess room for Sirius to drive back on him and do any amount of supporting work, and erotic because, for the moment, all Sirius is expected to do is stay there and take some payback for all the ways he goes so hard on Remus when the roles are reversed.

Too bad Sirius is gonna work with every finger he’s got; sorry, Remus. He won’t disrupt his flow or the meal he deserves to take his time with, he's just going to drag his right arm out from underneath him and plant it behind his back, sink it into Remus’s curls, let him know that he’s badly wanted back there and how well he’s doing with it. He ends up having to flatten his left arm out ahead of him and drag his hand over the bed as Remus ramps it up back there, humming all sorts of gorgeous notes against him and making Sirius hum in echo, tugging up on the comforter though that thing is expertly tucked into the underside of the mattress so that's not going anywhere, let alone bunching up in Sirius’s curled fingers. Despite the lack of pull happening there, he keeps trying to make miracles happen, curling and uncurling his fingers against a material that just won’t give way to them while Remus makes his knees shake with the way he’s going at him back there, and that’s all before he starts up a breathtaking speed over Sirius’s cock underneath him, then he's is a lost cause, pinning his face down against the bed and pressing out a guttural whine against it.

When he can manage it, he takes another peek over at Remus from the sidelines, scanning the lad taking his work very seriously in the reflection of that mirror over there. Problem is, Remus may not even be taking Sirius’s whines as pleas to go easier on him, to stave off an untimely and premature explosion, and that concept is worrying in that Sirius really, really doesn’t want things to end yet, but they’re going to and very, very soon if Remus keeps that gorgeous work up, but by the looks of it, he’s not backing down even with vocal evidence that Sirius is losing his marbles up here. Hell, Remus may very well know what he's doing and is just choosing to pretend he can’t hear his pleas, more interested in edging Sirius so far and so close that he arches so hard, he nearly pulls a muscle trying to push back against Remus’s frame, and now that he’s thought it, he zeros in on his visual on those eyes of Remus’s, wide and fixed on him actively pleading with him over here, and Sirius honestly has to wonder whether those eyes ever really left him since Remus sat down to eat, and that's something he's going to keep close by for days when he doesn’t feel this sexy, that much is certain, but for now, Sirius is going to have to make a fucking scene; demand that Remus quit driving him so close to the ledge in more concrete ways.

Sirius's legs begin pleading with him like he's the one doing all this, begging for a break from their case of the shakes, and there they go, buckling against the end of the bed, and there Remus goes, pressing the backs of Sirius’s thighs to it through a full shoulder-check, and the centre of Sirius’s body feels like it’s turned on a countdown alarm, alerting him to the fact that he’s precariously, desperately close, so can he really be blamed for wriggling himself down from in between Remus and the bed to practically make a new home against Remus’s knelt lap? He doesn’t think so; home, sweet home.

Sirius doesn’t really stick the landing so much, and by that, he means his legs shake with fervour as he flops back against Remus's frame like a rag doll, and that boy is definitely back there huffing self-congratulatory, breathy little laughs for it, but the way he hooks his chin over Sirius’s right shoulder and delivers a kiss to the skin below his ear has him that much closer to forgiveness than he would've been before he'd gotten that smooch, lulling his head back until it’s laying against the line of Remus’s left shoulder and taking out time for a well-deserved breather.

“Is Gérard still thinking about that gardener, or?” Remus raises, voice low against Sirius’s right ear with a bite to his lobe and everything, a smile so alive on his lips it may as well have lit up the whole room.

Sirius gives up a bleary, disoriented laugh, staring up at the light fixture above them while it’s right there in his sights. “I forgot I was even Gérard,” he fesses, shaking his head best he can like this. “You’re a fucking star, you know that?”

Remus breathes a smirk against his ear, pulling his mouth from the crook of Sirius’s neck, and then there’s a bit of shifting happening both behind and underneath him as well as an odd sort of dragging noise happening from behind him, and that has Sirius blinking over the line both his and Remus’s right shoulders for answers. The answer is, in fact, more than Sirius could've expected in terms of execution; Remus has gone stretched out his right leg to the side and hooked his foot through the strap of one of their duffels, currently in the process of dragging it over closer to them, and the worst (best) part about that is there’s no hitch to it, none whatsoever, the duffel just comes to them upon Remus’s direction like this that's what it was meant for all along.

Sirius swallows fast, finding it rather dry in there, but what’s he going to do about that, take a water break? He'll pull through just fine or better than fine with the way things are looking. He breathes in apprehensively as Remus zips their toiletry duffel open to get at the good stuff, but Sirius does note that Remus only grabs their recently refilled travel bottle of lube but leaves a condom behind, and oh, alright, looks like they’re headed for a rawing of the century, and Sirius is more than fine with that choice, grateful even; they ought to be saving the raincoats for impromptu, outdoorsy excursions as is.

There’s the pop of the cap behind him and sure, Sirius could keep the moment of entry an exciting mystery, but it’s going to happen in the next fifteen seconds or less, and he does have a handy mirror nearby that he doesn’t normally have at his disposal; it’d be wasteful not to have a peek over there and watch the moment happen. And sure, they could have moved up to their prior position to get this done, but Sirius has to say, now that he’s here, and Remus has his left arm curled across his chest to keep him steady, and Sirius has his solid frame to lean against, this really is the best-case scenario, all said and done; it makes it so that Sirius has the sides of Remus’s thighs to reach down and grip at first breach, makes it so he can brace himself on his haunches and rock back on Remus, makes it so he can feel surrounded, encased, and a bit of a star himself, being held through it like this.

Sirius's hands do some more wandering than that once Remus really starts getting him going, but he's dragging that prize-winning mouth all over Sirius’s neck in a way that's got him all worked up, spurring him into bracing, grappling, smoothing his hands over the tops of Remus’s thighs, the curves of his hips, and he even gets one of them — his right hand — braced at the back of Remus’s left hip and uses that as means to tug them forward, suggest Remus get those hips of his a) out of his trousers, and b) moving against his own at a dastardly pace; both are equally important cues, and Sirius is beyond relieved to have Remus coax him back up out of his crouched posture and deposit him right back on the bed where he’d been none too long ago.

Sirius curls his top half over the end of the bed, glad to be back here and spending all this quality time with it. He keeps his arms right close by, leans his head to the side again to watch Remus’s reflection try to get naked in the mirror, and all but snickers his heart out while Remus takes to sitting himself cross-legged on the floor, huffing and fighting with the ankles on his jeans to just let him be free already.

Remus hears a distinct snicker that’s definitely from Sirius, looks up at him only to realize he isn’t necessarily looking back at him, and turns his head to find his gaze in the mirror, giving out a sharp laugh. “I did not even register that was there,” he puts up, tossing his jeans aside to work his briefs down his hips.

“But you’re gonna use it now that you’ve noted it, right,” Sirius gives back, chilling there on the end of the bed as he waits for him.

“Think I might, yeah,” Remus all but affirms, pulling his briefs off his ankles, tossing them off, and moving back to his knees with a grab for the lube at the same go.

Sirius commits to watching Remus work to get himself coated from base to tip, finding the sight utterly sensational and frankly impossible to look away from, but once Remus shifts closer on his knees, Sirius thinks he will keep some mystique about this, facing forward and leaving the rest up to Remus while he hangs out at the curve of the bed, ready to get got. Remus, who reaches his right hand up and out to use the edge of the bed to the right of Sirius and his bent hips to push himself to stand, hikes the waistband of the shorts down to Sirius's knees so that it’s clear that their cameo is still very much integral by him, and smooths the both of his hands around to the front of Sirius’s hips to hike them up at an angle that has him rearranging his footing to compensate, taking in a big, ole preemptive breath and bracing the bed with his palms for the moment.

It comes like a long-craved glass of ice water on a humid day, like a ship making it to harbour, like Sirius getting good dick; he can be both flowery and direct, thank you, and that likely counts toward quite a bit of Sirius's overall charm. He lets his breath go free as Remus’s midriff hits the small of his back and keeps still, basking in the sensation of being filled to the brim in Remus and thinking it a lovely place to stop and admire.

Sirius had never been what one might call a major fan of bottoming before this one came along, he’ll be frank. He started out his sexual debit topping, was usually much more keen on that as the years and experiences that came with went on, and although the payoff to getting good n' railed was worth giving it a go if the cards fell that way, there were a few of god-awful standouts mixed in there that rather deterred him from electing for it unless otherwise necessary. The hair-yanking extravaganza certainly comes to mind, but there was the infamous time his top decided to lean in over him, right in the middle of things, to spit directly into his open mouth, and that sure does come up as a close second; no prior warning, no questions asked, simply leaned in and let it drop, leaving Sirius in a state of dissociative horror and retributive refusal to do a damn thing more until it was over, and while that didn’t necessarily mean every strict top out there in his city or another one would pull a stunt like that, the experience simply didn’t exactly have Sirius joyfully volunteering to bottom for just any man, he’ll say that.

All in all, horror stories and general preference aside, avoiding the bottom bunk more often than not had to do with how bare he'd wind up feeling in those first few moments after the breach; how tight his throat would go if someone went at him too fast too quickly, how aware he’d suddenly become of how exposed he really was to the person, how easy it could be to end up not being heard or even listened to if he wanted to take things down a notch or five, and that down to it, at any moment he could really need to get out of the situation, he might not be able to manage it. There were a lot of ways things could go haywire when he was first starting on his own, not quite so aware of himself, how he wanted it, how he definitely didn’t, and though he learned to become more assertive with time, he tried not to mess with a good thing, keeping to topping far more often than not, but with Remus, there’s none of that to worry about and so, he doesn’t.

He's just so careful with Sirius, even in the times they’ve rushed the prep process a tad at their peak horniest or picked a position that might've been a tad too ambitious to start with, and the chill of exposure, the pangs from the stretch, the desolation in those first moments after the breach, they just don't get to him the way they used to, the unknowns surrounding what the other bloke might do next just don't creep up on him like they did anymore, not with Remus at the helm. Hell, he won’t even let Sirius be reckless with himself, treats his body well on days and in situations where he couldn’t give a damn what happens to him, waits for his cue whether to keep on or slow things down a notch, gives it to him mercilessly when he wants it that way and loves him down when he needs it like that, and he knows it now, weeks after they’ve begun incorporating it into their trysts, that Remus could put both his hands all up in his locks and fuck him 'til he’s boneless, and Sirius wouldn’t so much as wince — not out of a crippling blend of rage and fear, anyway.

He really went from avoiding it as much as he could, to passively bottoming for the occasional bloke who looked too fit to pass on and said please in the right way, over to desiring it in ways he simply didn't expect himself to, and there are times, just like this one, it throws him for a loop just how much Remus has shaken things up for him.

At the tail end of his point of grace, Remus curls right over his back and situates his chin right down over the line of Sirius's shoulder, a most curious hum about him. “What sort of style are we going for here?” he raises. “They’ve been waiting on this encounter for a while now; is it passionate, is it a just-get-‘er-done sort of scene, is it both, something else entirely?”

“Both, both,” Sirius votes. “Definitely both, but with a little more of column A; just a bit.”

“Oh, alright,” Remus offers lazily, giving into a smirk as his hips start a slow roll back and forth, “I’ll see what I can do.”

Remus takes his task description to heart in that he remains curled over Sirius, peppering his neck and shoulders with nips and kisses that are probably going to show later given the low tank he’s got on reserve for the day, but that idea in itself is enough to have Sirius powering down and booting back up in the span of an instant; he’d be honoured wear any lasting marks out and about. Remus takes it a step further, ramping up the cheese factor, if you will, but Sirius did ask for it and he sure does love some cheese from that one, melting to the bed as Remus reaches up to clasp his right hand over the back of Sirius's and coils them up together, linking them tightly just a little over their heads as well as down below.

“Oh, so the boys are deep in it, huh,” Sirius puts up, relishing in the feel of Remus’s chest rising and falling against him.

"Oh, it’s a wonder they’ve been able to hide it for so long,” Remus echoes, and to make matters even that much more heartfelt, he gives the hand caught up in his a tight squeeze each time the fronts of his thighs meet up with the backs of Sirius’s, timing it for each moment he fills him up and giving out a breath over his neck that can only be described as a man meeting up with ecstasy every five or so seconds, but that detail isn’t about Stephan or Gérard; that’s just Remus getting his ecstasy from the inside out, and this is just Sirius breathing ecstasy along with him, feeling lighter than air with the gorgeous weight of that body blanketing him.

Since one of his hands isn’t perfectly entwined against the bed, Sirius reaches his free one back behind him and all but splays it against Remus’s left hip, pulling at the flesh there tight and helping to sink him into him even that much more, and Remus takes the cue like he’s taken up a torch, lifting his chest to hover it just over Sirius's back and smoothing his left palm over in between their bodies to splay it at its arch, all but pulling Sirius back and into each new, deeper thrust he’s giving him, and Sirius sees no reason not to keep his inviting hold on Remus's moving hips despite getting exactly what he wanted out of it; Remus should know how much he’s loving it, the hand stays put.

It’s minutes of that before Remus’s thrusts start getting a bit experimental, one could say, and it’s impactful, to say the least of it. At first, the thrusts feel quizzically intentional, a bit like he’s on the hunt, and the moment Sirius whines hard against the bed, there come the adjustments: the bend of Remus's knees to better hitch himself lower, the spread of his feet further on the floor, and the precision he brings with the roll of those newly-angled hips, the power he brings to it with those fucking thighs of his; he pulls entire heaves of breath out of Sirius as he dicks him both up and down. As if he’s not done enough here, once Sirius is really drowning himself out, Remus bares that same palm at the small of his back down heavily, driving his tooched hips back on this newfound and frankly perfect angle, and Sirius doesn’t even have to look at the mirror over there to know he’s looking more like a jellyfish than a person with the way he's just dragging his hands up, down, and all over the surface of the bed and shaking on these static-filled legs of his.

The issue with having his cock completely trapped between his navel and the bed is, by and large, all the major friction going on down there, so there’s some newly precarious stuff happening that Sirius isn’t sure he’s so down with just yet. He certainly doesn’t want to come yet, nor does he have much interest in cleaning a pool of it off of a comforter he’s only just gotten to know so intimately, and his shorts aren’t even off yet, for another thing; he wants to wrap his bare, static-filled legs tight around that hunk, wants Remus to use this bed as a balance beam to fuck his heart out, wants him to make him weak, dizzy for it, have him biting back wanton noises so they won’t sound quite so suspicious from the hall, but he can’t get all that done while he’s being utterly rawed from the back, and with a rawing this powerful, Sirius has gotta move quick or this’ll be over with before they know it.

Sirius takes to tapping the fuck out on the surface of the bed, taking it further by backing his arse up to push his groin back from the bed so he won’t come all over it at the last second and have his efforts completely dashed, and next, he all but forces sensation back into his legs to achieve standing as a concept, pushes himself upright between Remus and the bed, and reaches back to place a halting hand on Remus’s navel.

He massages the skin underneath his fingertips for a couple beats there while all but scoops out air from the room into his frenzied lungs. “I’m not saying that wasn’t good,” Sirius puts down, equal parts breathy and hoarse as he points with his free hand toward the bed. “Too good, even, since I was about to come all over that.”

Remus smirks once behind him and sets his hands over his waist while he eases Sirius off his dick, seemingly able to sense that he's gunning for a switch-up, and that's just good deducing, but Sirius sees no reason not to state his plans from here quite plainly, turning to face Remus head-on in the sliver of space between him and the bed. “I don’t want to get lube all over this cute bed, so when you’re fucking the lights out of me, I’m gonna do my best to hold onto the end of this thing and you’re gonna do yours to help keep my hips right off it, yeah?” he bids, kicking his shorts off the lower end of his legs.

Remus laughs again, this one deep in the back of his throat while his eyes come alive with newfound purpose, nodding his complete understanding and hopefully his complete compliance as well, and Sirius points up at him with the same hand he’d braced him with before setting the heels of his palms behind him on the bed, but he really has to hand it to the man, Remus has taken every cue Sirius has given him so far, be it vocally or bodily, and delivered on the results; why shouldn’t he deliver here, too? All Sirius really has to do is kick his legs out in polar opposite directions for Remus to move in and catch him by the calves, taking his legs for a nice little ride in the air before bringing the backs of his thighs down over his hips, and boom, they’re there, right where Sirius wanted them to be.

Since Remus’s hands are a tad busy holding all of this together, it’s going to have to be Sirius’s job to put him back in, and that’s a task for which he is most obliged; he leans back and over to the side just a bit, bracing his weight against his left forearm to use his more prominent hand to reposition Remus's cock, aligning them for a one-pump reentry should he choose it, but that’s bound to have both their eyes watering so Sirius sure hopes he's got the message.

The next part is all Remus, who waits with his lower lip between his teeth for Sirius to get back to bracing the bed with both of his arms, fucking right back into him with a frankly gorgeous note on the end of it, and it's both a choice Sirius is overjoyed by and a note he's powerless not to echo back. He simply has to check how it looks in the mirror, as a treat, and while his head is a tad too far to be included in its slender frame, he can sure see Remus, he can sure see his legs wrapped around him, and he can sure see a hell of a lot of the action from here, to boot; the exact meeting point between them is obscured by his own right leg so that's a bit of a shame, but Sirius can’t complain too hard about that when his hips look capital-G Great strapped to Remus’s like that, and in turn, Remus’s hands look suffocatingly good strapped around the back of his, partly to hell hold him in place, sure, but there’s a strong likelihood that Remus is getting a lot out of holding him there for those fingertips of his sure are creating divots over his skin, making Sirius feels twice as grabbed, twice as held, and twice as enjoyed by him so this is working out rather well for the both of them, he'd say.

There are other major pros to watching from the sidelines while very much being inside of such a scene, like getting to watch Remus’s body move from two different angles with his knees bent in opposing directions while he drives those hips up from below, getting to watch just how much arse he's throwing into it, getting to watch the muscles at the backs of his hips, his thighs, that arse hitch and twitch through all that gorgeous strain and glorious effort he’s putting into it, getting to watch Remus bring his hands around the front of Sirius and smooth them over his hips, his thighs, his navel, copping feels left and right all while he pistons that pelvis like an expert, making it so that he's well and truly carrying the weight Sirius’s lower-half through it with the relentless power of his leg regions alone, and Cunt, just getting to watch Remus getting so much out of fucking him, he'll be frank; the way he can watch him giving it to him at that same persistent, dastardly pace that Sirius can sure fucking feel happening to him live, see the work being done on him, to him, with him? It’s official, they’ll need a mirror hanging directly across from his bed, stat, the only issue is, he’s going to have to rearrange the entirety of the bedroom side of that double room of his or switch sides completely to feasibly fit a wall-sized mirror in there that they can back-bend ahead of with no troubles at all, so it'll be a bit of job but one that’ll be completely worth it; he can just tell with every new second that passes between them.

Feeling rather, mm, watched, Sirius moves his attention away from the mirror and puts it back on Remus, who’d apparently spent this time watching Sirius watch them with that lopsided grin on lock, which only has Sirius crooked grinning at him. “Did you miss it?” Remus raises, too low on his register not to be hot, but Sirius’s head was just completely off on its own continent for a bit there so the first tryst that his brain beams back to is the Truck Fuck, which would certainly be the last time Remus railed the hell out of him, and hell yeah, he missed it; what a question.

“No, hate this,” he returns wryly, right brow cocked.

Remus slows his thrusts down to a slow crawl, giving Sirius a rather amused once-over. “Gérard’s a bit mouthy, I’m seeing.”

And Sirius’s brain swells inside his skull, he’s sure of it. “Oh, we’re doing that?” he returns, a gape/grin fusing onto his face. “Tell a man, would you?”

“You’re the one who wanted the whole scene set beforehand,” Remus returns, succumbing to a fit born of his own bashfulness. "I only figured you'd be looking for that soon enough."

“Oh, yeah, the set-up was all me; had no input from anybody,” Sirius puts up, sticking the tip of his tongue between his teeth for a cheeky smile. “You know I’m in, keep going.”

Remus shakes his head clear, drops the smile, and leans his head in with a distinct blink. “I said, did you miss it?” he reiterates, more pointedly, going for a well-aimed boom right to the back of Sirius’s whole, entire situation, and Sirius takes to an erratic nod, realizing he’s in the worst position imaginable for this because he’s got nothing, nada, zilch to drown himself out with.

Remus repeats it again, harsher with his tone now, curling in just enough that he's lightly looming over Sirius while keeping up the quality of the pistoning going on below, and that just has him thrumming out yeses like they’re prayers on his tongue, and good, sweet Cunt, Remus fucks him that much harder for it while asking him so, so much; about the others Gérard might’ve met in the past while, might've been with since their last encounter, whether this stacks up better, whether he’s going to be good and wait for quality next time around, and boof, every part of it takes the scene to places Sirius certainly didn’t expect to arrive at but would never, ever mind, gape-grinning as he tips his head back and watches Remus’s lopsided grin from that angle, answering every one of those questions to the best of his pitched, stuttered ability.

As a reward, it credibly feels, Remus moves his right hand from the left side of the ‘V' and plays up and down his cock while those hips just keep on boring into him, rocking Sirius’s entire morning easily, and making it so, so likely that those toes of Sirius are going to curl so hard they'll cramp up, so here they are, manifesting exactly what Sirius wanted to come his way. In between bursts where he has — has — to clamp his eyes and mouth shut to more or less survive, Sirius tries to force his eyes open enough to study Remus in shorter intervals, but he has to say, there’s something deeply alluring to the sight of Remus holding himself off from the edge; he’s got intent plastered over his eyes, concentration furrowing up his brow, the right side of his lower lip caught between his teeth, and if the rest weren't hot enough, he’s trading rather indulgent glances between the hand running over Sirius’s cock and Sirius's face as a whole, and the vibe feels a tad analytical after a few repetitions, almost as if he's being studied incredibly closely.

Since he has recently been tipped off to the idea that Remus doesn’t always have the most reliable set of warnings before he's about to blast off, Sirius has to wonder whether Stephan’s taken the back burner while Remus aims to turn this thing out for Sirius, determined not to miss the big moment of truth; he peels his right arm from the bed, reaching up to hold tight to Remus’s left arm, and tightens the hold he's got around Remus’s hips as much as his calves will allow without throwing off that stunning rhythm Remus worked so hard to set for them.

"Yeah, yeah, you're good; just like that,” Sirius urges, nodding like mad, breathing like mad, trying for whispers and ending up doing some sort of tight whinge the more he speaks it out, “you’ll do it, I know it — at this rate, you’re already so—”

Remus ratchets up the pace on that hand going over his cock, sliding his left hand up the bed and working his fingers underneath Sirius’s head to better cart his fingers through his hair, the pace of his thrusts hiking up to turbo-mode as his hips, thighs, and that golden pelvis of his take so much for the whole team here, and it’s not even like Sirius is all that to get the rest of what he was trying to say out, but his breaths, his whinges, his acknowledgements all come out in fast, desperate bursts while he holds tight to Remus’s left arm, while he kneads the hand caught deep in his locks, while he bucks up on him, nodding and gasping and making sure Remus knows he’s right there, and it’s perfect, the way he pulls the hand off Sirius's cock the moment he hears it, and Remus, sweet boy, tousles and teases and treats his locks so well for somebody actively blowing his back out like this. It’s an honour, coming apart for a man so dually good for him. The moment Sirius drops down, it is full-bodied; his arms go flat beside him, his legs go sliding off of Remus’s hips and land in a sprawl off of the bed, his back lays damp and flat against the comforter, his hips hang just off of the bed and twitch like mad, but that’s just how it’s going to have to be until Sirius regains his strength, so it’s a good thing he’s always been rather comfortable with Remus hanging out between his sprawled legs, hm.

Speaking of that guy, Remus wordlessly slips out of him mere moments after Sirius even had that thought, moving off of him and lowering his knees to the floor ahead of the bed, and literally who cares what strength Sirius does or does not have, he’d rather see what Remus is up to, pushing himself up to his elbows to meets his gaze and getting a quick (filthy) smile before Remus ducks down, licking his way through a definite splash that went just about all over his navel and hitching Sirius’s breath for him as he goes. With his skin so alive and sensitive to the touch, those soft yet direct swirls of Remus’s tongue have him unable to do much more than cradle Remus’s head limply, tousling those curls with the very tips of his fingers and holding Remus to him while he licks him clean, methodical and unhurried in the way he can so often be with him; slow, contented, and rather into him, frankly enough.

The absolute last straw comes in the form of a kiss to his left wrist, which Sirius very soon finds out has a noticeable yet unpunctured bite mark over the face of it, but really, if there’s an area Remus inarguably excels in, it’s aftercare; he’s made for the stuff.

Sirius moves wordlessly, thinking this really is the time to let their bodies talk; he hoists himself to a half-sit as he’s not really sitting on the bed much at all, tips his chin intently, and bids him to shift back a step or two on his knees, but only those two steps; he mustn’t go too far.

To make sure of that, he moves quickly to scoot down to the floor ahead of him, feeling that Remus deserves everything he has coming to him, as soon as can be given over to him. He braces his elbows back behind him on the curve of the bed, plants his feet down on the floor behind Remus’s back, and hovers his hips above Remus’s groin, taking to a blink-and-stare combo for good measure, but he really must look a lot like a bloke freely offering himself over for Sirius waits, oh, not long at all before Remus shoots up to a full kneel, fixing the distance Sirius couldn't quite make disappear between them without letting go of the bed and palming at Sirius’s hips gratefully before pushing back into him.

Since he does have the edge of the bed at his disposal, might as well use it, bearing down on his forearms to hitch himself up, lowering himself back down on his cock, and pulling hitched breath after hitched breath out of Remus, who takes to bracing his palms back on the floor and pawing at it listlessly while Sirius gets a rhythm going for him, grateful to his feet for doing a fair share of work back there as far as traction goes and allowing him the grip necessary to put it down on him like wants to.

He knows he could well and truly peek over at the mirror and see them all tangled up like this, see himself giving it to him like he damn well should, see Remus getting exactly what he deserves, and it is tempting to, make no mistake about that, but he doesn’t need to look there when he’s got a show right here; Remus can barely keep his hips still though he’s really, really trying, openly trying to bask in it, let Sirius handle so much of it, and that's as thrilling to see happen as it is to get to see Remus's eyes fall shut the harder he gasps for breath, his expression twisting and breaking and falling apart the faster Sirius puts it down on him, his mouth hanging ajar and an almost-whisper coming through underneath all his quiet prattling that sure does sound a lot like Sirius's name, with what little he can decipher at least.

“Who?” Sirius checks, his head at tilt, rocking down on Remus’s cock like he’s going to fuck the volume out of him, and he might just.

Remus gives out a half-huff, half-laugh, shaking his head as screws his eyes shut. “I’m not calling you that,” he denies, his voice a literal whine, and you know what, Sirius almost hopes that somebody can hear this adorably funny man get loved down so hard out there.

“Wasn’t asking for that,” Sirius instils, grinning though Remus can’t see him do it; he knows Remus'll know it’s there.

He gives a wanton noise, and Sirius almost sees him battling it out between Sirius's polite request and his own brain, and that’s oddly intriguing but d’you know what’s really intriguing? Hearing his name caught on loop when Remus says fuck it all to anybody else, grabbing Sirius tight by the fronts of his thighs to hold him just over his cock and drive up into him with no holds barred, and, best of all, there he goes talking, telling Sirius all about how good he feels while bringing his body down on him.

It’s getting harder and harder to physically watch him considering he’s got Sirius on lock while he drives himself home, but then again, with his eyes rendered shut like this, Sirius can hear everything so much better — every patchy breath, every utterance of his name, every frantic compliment that pours out of Remus's mouth — and that really is a slice of paradise; Sirius knows he’s been there now.

He opens his eyes as Remus switches to making nonsensical noises, no words available or even necessary now, his fingertips digging into the skin at the front of Sirius’s spread thighs as he keeps him perfectly placed above his rocketing cock, his knees sliding further and further apart on the floor as he rocks faster still, as if viscerally needing to sheath himself in Sirius again, again, again, and Sirius would be a liar if he said he keeps quiet through the rest when he fully doesn’t; he urges Remus right on, tells him how good he’s making the reprise feel for him, tells him again that it’s never been like this before when it’ll never hurt him to say it or for Remus to hear it again, tells him it’s better with him, it’s always better with him, tells him that he can want it, he can have it, he can like it, and Sirius doesn’t even stay put where he is — he can’t stay put, not when Remus is losing his bloody mind under him, not when he wants Remus to fucking have him?

He pivots his arms off the bed, reaching fast to hold tight to Remus by the shoulders, quite literally giving himself over for Remus to simply have through the peak, and Remus holds tight to him as invited, locking him in with one arm shooting across the back of him and the other blanketing right across Sirius's thighs like a safety bar, and celebrates him with every inch of his body, every inch of his throat.

This part coming up, Sirius has a true fancy for, he's learning: not all of them, but a lot of men he’s been with haven't wanted a thing to do with a warm socket the second they finished, but that’s not Remus; he loves every second he gets to be there, always has to a degree, but every time Sirius has seen it, felt it, breathed with it lately, he's lit right up. He wants to kiss him for it, and badly at that, but Remus surprises him in a matter of seconds, leaning in to lick straight into his mouth before Sirius even had to swipe one off him, and whew, Remus goes so many extra miles with it, putting Sirius’s wide-spread feet to good use and dipping him back a bit as he rolls his hips through the aftershocks of sweet, deserved release.

That sturdy arm of his stays clung around the back of him while Remus's hips slow to a crawl, tracing mini-circles into the side of Sirius's right thigh with the fingers on his right hand and kisses him in a way that’s honestly debilitating, but it's like he’s personally thanking Sirius via his very body for allowing every single part of this encounter to happen, and listen, Sirius was an equal, active, and willing participant inside of that entire encounter, but he’s going to bask in this bit of thanksgiving unto him. He deserves this part, too.

Remus puts a rather sudden laugh right into Sirius’s mouth a good twenty, maybe thirty seconds on from there, and getting laughed in as often as Sirius does is really some of the best parts about this relationship as a whole, but on that note, he’s gotta know what’s funny. “Mm?” he prompts, leaving his lips right below Remus’s when he knows he’s going to want another taste soon enough.

Remus huffs a second laugh at getting probed about it, shaking his head. “Well, just — that got loud,” he comments.

It takes most of Sirius’s leftover strength to give up a lengthy pfft, but all of zero strength to kiss him again. “It wasn’t that bad,” he maintains, giving his lips a quick lick and tasting Remus all over them. “If anybody was skulking about the shadows of the hall while we were doing all that, it’s on them if they overheard, not us.”

Remus gives a light snort, his own strength not quite there yet. “Weren’t we just skulking about the shadows of the hall?” he highlights.

“And had we heard a pair absolutely rawing each other inside one of the rooms, most we’d do is snicker and run away,” Sirius holds up. “We’re some of the least imposing folk around."

Remus snorts long. “Well, that’s just incredibly debatable,” he says for it, but he gives up on the topic of the volume they indeed got to, good lad, but winds up smirking for a different reason next. “We had a whole bed to work with and barely used it.”

Sirius gives out a flat laugh, enjoying the feeling of being hammocked by Remus’s entire body immensely. “Speak for yourself,” he puts it. “I used it plenty and honestly, so did you; give her some credit.”

“Alright, fine,” Remus specifies, smiling weakly. “I think that might’ve been one of our best yet, if not — maybe thee best; thoughts?”

Sirius breathes in an inspired breath, putting up a laugh. “You know what, I think that at least once every time we’ve finished, so I have to wonder if it’s just that we’re just getting exponentially better at it the more we go, but I have to agree with you on this one; you rocked my fucking world, babey,” he offers up. “And, you—” he pauses to flick the line of Remus’s shoulder, “—gave me some dirty talk, unprompted.”

Amazing how the man who used said dirty talk mere minutes ago can have his cheeks dust over in a true second. “Well, not unprompted,” Remus amends. “I figured you’d be pushing for it at some point or other, I just bit the bullet on that one.”

Sirius gives up a note of affront. “No, we have to give this its proper dues,” he underlines. “Last time we even touched on dirty talk, you made fun of it the whole time—”

Remus comes in with a knowing hum. “And you were laughing up a storm the whole time I did, so I’m not sure—”

“Well, how was I supposed to know we were trying it again?” Sirius returns. “And so filthy, at that; felt like you really tapped into your inner Stephan there, Remus, I'm right chuffed for you."

“Alright, that’s enough afterglow, I think,” Remus serves him, leaning in to give a kiss to Sirius’s previously flapping lips before taking a long breath in as he studies their current position. “You’re going to have to lift off and take off, if you know what I mean.”

“Do,” Sirius echoes, readjusting his position and putting his hands back on Remus’s shoulders for a firm structure to hold. “Just watch me; I’m like the wind.”

“Careful, though, I heard one or more of your toes crack back there before,” Remus mentions, helping keep Sirius steady while he untangles his legs from behind Remus’s back.

Sirius sends him a pfft as he settles his feet on either side of Remus’s knees and braces himself for lift-off. “Is that door over there going to lead me to the bathroom?” he checks.

“I mean, let’s hope it does,” Remus trills. “It’s either the bathroom or a secret hallway I don’t know about, so smile for the audience if it's the first one.”

“Oh, you say that now,” Sirius returns, pushing off of Remus’s cock and taking to a fast sprint over to the nook in the corner, “but if that's another hallway and I stroll out there like this, your face will be so rouge.”

“Mm-uh-huh,” Remus returns, simply staying there heaped up on the floor while Sirius shoulder-checks the door on the right open, thanking his lucky stars that the door was indeed open a crack and he didn’t crash into it.

He zips over to the toilet just in time to avoid any leakage and there, Sirius sits, letting the whole of Remus’s, uh, parting gift fall away on mostly its own time when that’s the nature of the game, while Remus strolls into the room and passes in front of Sirius to dutifully starts up the shower.

Rather than get in right away and obtain a head start, it appears Remus would like to shower together for he heads back out into the main room and retrieves their toiletry duffel, sticking it on the counter by the sink and unpacking bits and bobs from their bounty while he waits for Sirius to finish up.

“You know, you’re very romantic without drawing attention to it,” Sirius mentions, twiddling his thumbs where he sits.

Remus looks to him as he passes by again to set their respective shampoo bottles in the complimentary shower caddy. “Would we say that’s true?”

“Mhm, I would,” Sirius affirms, sending him a smile. “Like, right now, it seems like what you’re doing here is being a putz and getting started on unpacking, but I know the truth: you’re stalling because you’d like to soap me right up with my loofah and maybe even smooch me on and off while you do it.”

“Well, you've got me there,” Remus trades him, walking past Sirius to get back to the counter where their duffel lays open. “And so you know, this is all the unpacking I’m ripe to do; if we’re only here one night, I’m not going to bother with the clothes and we can just live out of the duffel.”

“Absolutely,” Sirius agrees. “We’ll be beatniks for the rest of the stay.”

Remus smirks, walking their loofahs over to the shower caddy. “Glad we’ve made it to the same place on that one.”

Sirius certainly feels like he’s close to the end of his toilet sit, rolls a long sheet of paper off the roll mounted on the wall across from him, and doesn’t say anything about Remus’s hum of disapproval, mostly because he knows that’s the child of a pair of parents who likely warned about using far more than one’s fair share of the TP.

Remus, however, gives him a pointed look the whole way back to the sink, so Sirius does have to come to bat for himself here. “Well, come on,” he returns him, reaching the wad in behind him. “Not going to wipe itself, is it.”

“You’re literally getting into the shower, but there you are, rolling out streamers like it’s a birthday party,” Remus highlights.

“OK, you know what?” Sirius puts up, and Remus looks back over at him with a double blink. “It’s not even ours.”

Remus looks back toward the duffel on the counter without a word or peep sent back to him, trying to hide that half-smile he’s got going on, but Sirius knows he got him.

Once inside the shower, it’s a healthy mix of mutual soaping up and pauses for kisses until Remus eventually puts his foot down, and that’s because he is, and Sirius quotes, “hellaciously hungry,” which certainly has Sirius sputtering out a wheeze-laugh on its own, but it also has him remembering they do indeed have brunch to get to before two. He hurries it up as bid, rather interested in knocking back a mimosa on a terrace and perhaps even more so now than before that Olympic-level workout. He busies himself with wondering how they’re going to get to their towels while all sopping wet, brings it to the advisory council for input, and Remus says he forgot to grab them out of the other duffel so just use one of the towels provided for now, and Sirius pretends he’s fine with rubbing a supplied towel all up in his junk and steps on out of there once the bulk of his body is dry.

Next, he pays a visit to the main room, sopping hair and all, pulling his towel out of the duffel he brought in with them and bending over to wrap his hair up in it. He tugs Remus's towel out of there to bring back for him and starts a stroll back to the bathroom with an eye for freshening up, but he really only just passes the chair in the reading nook when he hears Shania blare out from behind him, garnering a violent ‘HUUUUUUUU’ of a groan to leave his throat for he and James do have many, many things, but a deal was definitely one of them.

“We had a deal,” he voices, trudging into the bathroom where Remus stands nude at the mirror, towelling off his hair with the other complimentary towel.

“Who did?” Remus bids, leaving his head towel hanging over his shoulders as he accepts the one being held out to him.

“James and me,” Sirius huffs, pulling the towel down from around his hair and working on getting his mane to a less sopping place. “No contact while I’m on this trip within a trip; we agreed to it.”

Remus pulls the towel around his bare waist, sniffing once. “Could be about anything really,” he offers. “Something happened that he thought you might get a kick out of, a thing he saw that reminded him of you, a funny little anecdote he thought you’d find—”

“If it’s any one of those things, surely it could have waited until we’re back,” Sirius maintains, his ire helping to build momentum for his towelling off. “I told him I wanted the weekend for us and he seemed to get that, or at least I thought he did.”

“I would've thought, after a morning you’ve had, you might like to hear you’re being thought of over there,” Remus mentions, and sure, it’s done with an idle voice, but make no mistake; that boy's going for the jugular here. “And to your other point, you know me; I wouldn’t mind at all if you took even five minutes to chit-chat with him, I’ve rather accepted that if I get you, then I also get James, and sometimes that can be a lot, but he can be such a fun little bonus, too.”

Sirius huffs a long, long, very long sigh, pulling his towel off his head and sticking it on the counter. “I don’t think it’s fair that we don’t get to have one day off from him,” he lodges, reaching his brush out of the toiletry duffel. “Just one; I'm not asking for a lot here.”

Remus hums once, his gaze on the mirror as he works sets the curls at his fringe the way he likes them. “Well, whatever it is, he broke the deal to get your attention,” he comments.

“That’s decidedly why I’m annoyed here, Remus,” Sirius chimes, giving his hair a brush out.

“What if he needs help?” Remus raises, sparing him a glance.

“Oh, don’t, Remus,” Sirius forwards. “Everything’s fine; leave it to James to get you anxious on a beach trip—” Remus swivels from the mirror to face him, his left hand braced on the counter, the other on his hip so that Sirius is little more than a man holding a brush and an incredibly polite smile on his lips. “I meant that well."

“I know you did, and that’s not even the point,” Remus denies him. “You’re being very bratty about this, and I’m not too keen on it.”

Relieved he’s not in the doghouse just yet, Sirius sticks the brush down on the counter, not wanting to get his hair so straight that its natural wave leaves him in the dust. “It’s Sunday, though,” he lodges. “What could possibly be wrong?”

“I don’t know many crises that take the weekend off, myself,” Remus mentions.

“Crises?” Sirius sounds out, turning so they’re facing each other at about a step’s distance, and then very all of a sudden, Remus is looking a lot like a human with a set of eyes usually reserved for a porcelain doll, and Sirius lasts somewhere like four actual seconds underneath that stare before he’s losing what’s left of his resolve. “Will it make you happy if I go read it at least?”

The doll eyes are gone in less than a beat. “It’ll make all three of us happy, I’d wager,” Remus raises it, putting a smile on there.

Sirius grabs his towel off the counter, winding it up and aiming to thwap him in the navel with it, and Remus jolts as he sees the torpedo coming and wrangles it out of Sirius’s grip, likely smiling the whole time he walks both Sirius’s towel and the one around his waist to hang them over the shower rod to dry. Sirius, on the other hand, admits defeat and sets on keeping to that word of his, padding back into the main room and over to the bureau to give a swipe over his mobile screen.

Two (2) missed calls are registered in a blurb at the top of his screen and just underneath that, a text awaiting his attention that, by the look of it, is really just some unknown number of repetitions of a single, solitary request: ‘CALL ME CALL ME CALL ME CALL ME—

Remus comes along there, slipping up just behind Sirius and peering over his right shoulder. “Should call him?” he raises, somewhat needlessly now but very much in character for Remus Lupin, and honestly, it’s very Lyall Lupin at that, so Sirius kind of loves it twice over.

Even with all that love, Sirius does find the principle of that idea untoward, but he doesn’t have the time to do more than expel a giant huff before Remus reaches right in to pluck the mobile from his grip.

“Oi?” Sirius returns him. “Come on.”

“You come on,” Remus sends him right back, stepping back to situate himself out of Sirius’s grabby zone. “If he’s been in a crash, you and I both know you’re going to feel terrible about it later.”

It’s both bracing enough a retort and a good enough point to have Sirius doing little more than waiting with his shoulders held tight while Remus dials for James and hands it back over to him. Feeling seen and known in a way that only Remus has the balls to showcase like this, Sirius sinks onto the end of the bed and scoots his way up toward the headboard, sprawling out with his head on the pillows as the dial tone cuts out midway through the first ring, James's opening line is nothing but a certified bellow: “She said yes!

Sirius blinks once, twice, thrice even before pulling his screen down from his right ear and hitting for speaker phone. “I’m gonna need you to repeat that,” he bids, holding the receiver end up and out for Remus, who’s currently on all fours below the bed, sifting through one of their duffels by the looks of it.

James repeats the phrase in the exact same tone, volume, and joie de vivre as he gave the first bellow, and Remus sprouts up like a tall, healthy beanstalk above the bed for a single, wonderful moment before he’s veritably crawling up the bed to plant himself down on Sirius’s right. “James?” he tosses out, latching hold of Sirius’s wrist and pulling the receiver closer to him so he can be heard very, very well. “What the hell happened?”

“I know, I know, but here’s the thing? I physically couldn’t hold off anymore and you know what, I’m glad I couldn’t,” James returns them. “Picture it with me, boys: we’re at the table, it's brekkie time, she’s in only a t-shirt that’s definitely mine, her hair’s a right bird's nest it’s so wild from sleep, she’s reading some op-ed on her mobile that’s getting her all sorts of riled, she’s just going off, asking who greenlit, edited, and approved of this piece being published for anyone’s poor eyes to read, she's whipping her cereal spoon around in the air like it’s a dagger for Cunt’s sake, and there I am, just powerless to it all, but I wasn’t powerless, boys; I had one, single purpose left to see to.”

James pauses for effect, leaving the space open for Remus to breathe out a distant, “Oh no.”

Sirius, smiling like a fiend, looks sidelong at him with a quizzical look that James goes ahead and voices for him. “What do you mean, ‘oh no?’” he returns.

Remus shakes his head fast, though James wouldn’t know it either way. "No, it's criminal how sweet that is,” he reiterated. “It was more of a compliment than you think.”

“Well, from one gentleman scholar to another, I thank you,” James forwards. “And that purpose I spoke of? Was to scamper all the way down the hall, yank the box from its hiding spot, and not trip on my way back over to give it to her.”

Sirius smirks. “Did you trip?” he checks.

“I did not, so clearly this was destiny in making,” James reiterates.

Sirius looks to Remus as Remus looks to him, and Sirius, just the sort to remember what he’s owed, takes to a gentle lift of his right leg with a wiggle of his toes toward him, a full hint that he’ll be expecting his promised rub any time now.

Remus thwacks his ankle once and Sirius brings his leg back to its natural positioning before planting it back down on the bed. “I bet him you could hold out until October and already, he’s coming to collect,” Remus shares. “I literally did that because I believed in you, James, and now look where that’s gotten me?”

“You absolute shits,” James returns with fervour, though his curiosity sure does get the best of him in record time. “What’d you bet?”

“Foot rub,” Sirius relays, leaving his mobile face-up on his chest. and slipping his hands behind his head.

James undoubtedly trumpets a whole pfft at his own receiver to make sure it reverberates. “I think you’ll live, Remus; now, congratulate me?” he bids.

Remus expels a laugh/huff hybrid from the depths of his chest. “Well, of course I’m happy for you, but it’s three months ahead of schedule, isn’t it, James,” he mentions.

“Look, it is what it is,” James says of it. “She’s glowing, I’m soaring through the clouds, and if I’m honest, I’m kind of glad to have this weight off of my shoulders; secrets, they’re fun, they’re games, but there comes a time where you can hardly breathe keeping them in, and right now, it's like I'm operating with a whole new set of lungs, I'm so free.”

Sirius really can’t say he wanted nor needed to hear a soliloquy about the topic of secrets just now, brief as it was, but since he’s already a rather curious duckling about how this all went down, he makes a quick swerve to the left. “Well, what else?” he probes. “What’d she say; did she cry, did she shriek? Don’t hold out on us.”

James breathes in once; long, sharp, and suspiciously circumstantial. “Well, she let out a sharp trill upon seeing the box, and then another, louder one once it seemed to really sink in,” he offers conversationally, “but d’you know, there wasn’t a whole lot of standardized talking once the big ‘yes’ was uttered, I have to say.”

The omission comes with a lip-smack at the end of it, and just about all of it has Remus turning his head to the right and drowning his mirth out against Sirius’s left shoulder. "Mm, I’ll bet,” Sirius grins, taking his opportunity and leaving a quick peck on Remus’s forehead. “And what is I-Just-Proposed sex like?”

James takes in a contemplative breath, pausing long enough to sort out a solid word choice. “Remarkable.”

Remus snorts as he shifts to lay against the pillows. “Mm, I’ll bet,” he echoes directly, situating himself right up against Sirius’s side.

Sirius, feeling as though it keeps hitting him in waves, lets himself be awash with the reality of the situation; how he’ll soon be nursing James’s jitters as they get their ties fixed, watching his boy walk down the aisle from the like the prime best man he’ll be, spotting the grin James is going to have on the moment he spots her, offering up a toast for the happy couple at the reception which will be the shining moment of the night, guaranteed, putting on his dancing shoes for his artfully curated wedding playlist, getting a slow dance in with Remus who will look one hell of a dapper man in his suit n' tie, and all of that, all of it, has him drumming his heels on the bed and giving out an explosion of cheer, which really only spurs James to echo an uncannily similar vocal pattern, only his sounds a lot more like a bloke who’s just vibrated out of his skin, and there goes Remus, hooting up a storm over all these outbursts.

“I can’t believe this; it just keeps hitting me over and over again,” James throws out, and Sirius grins wide enough to look a little manic, but they really are two halves of the same whole when it comes down to the bare bones of it. “I’m rejuvenated, a whole new being; it’s like I’m free-falling.”

And there, because Sirius is nothing if not the best hype-man out there, taking the appropriate next step after a lead-in like that seems only right. “Free fallin’, Imma free fallin’, Imma…” he croons.

Spurred right the fuck on from there, James comes in with a solid echo, and Sirius holds back a solid bark, steadfast on keeping time; he grins wide, feeling himself, them, the news, all of this as he sets on, “I wanna glide down over Mulholland…” he gives, low and lustrous, his gaze moving fast between the ceiling and Remus, whose already been taken over by wry amusement.

I wanna write her name in the sky…” James slips in, and lo and behold, the echo of a persistent, two-note pound starts up against the headboard behind Sirius’s head, garnering him to look back down and over at Remus to find their percussionist at work and play.

Gonna free fall,” Sirius pushes on, grabbing hold of Remus’s right wrist lightly so not to disturb or halt the lad's rhythm for them, just to send his love along to him by holding some part of his genius, “out into nothing…

I’m gonna leave this, world for a while — ope, one sec—” a series of vocal patterns not amounting to anything decipherable come through the line, and in the meantime Remus pauses his fists, falling into a snicker as he smiles over at Sirius, who’s busy doing some breathing exercises to ensure he hits the forthcoming notes properly, and then James sounds a lot closer to the receiver, “—OK, sure … love you too … byeee … And we’re back.”

Sirius leans his head back, opening those pipes of his and launching right back in without anything more. “And I’m free,” he powerhouses, and there, he does lose most of his collective shit because Remus lost all of his own already, snickering wildly as James brings those harmonies into the mix, and it doesn’t seem to matter that the man supposedly handling the melody has dropped off a bit when James is certainly feeling himself over there in Londontown and that’s what matters most.

Remus’s fit softens some as his mobile starts going off from over on the bureau, garnering him to amble his way down and off the bed to retrieve it. Sirius gets his wits about him once more, hopping right back into the currently one-sided performance to take back the melody, wherein James dutifully keeps with the harmonies when that really where he's at his most powerful, capturing the energy necessary to bring the ‘O-way-ooh’s’ home while also ensuring Sirius has to wipe tears of mirth from his eyes while trying to keep the lead in this scenario, but has he ever felt this good? He doesn’t know, really.

On his way back to the top of the bed, the makeshift tie of Remus’s towel falls undone before he can fully land in his previous spot on the bed, and that serves as a direct response to Sirius’s inner question that no; not until just now was he at his happiest because Sirius will never complain about a free show, and turns out, Remus could hardly care less about the stage curtains opening for he simply leaves his towel the way it's fallen as he resettles next to him.

Sirius gets a split-second peek at Remus’s screen, catching a glimpse of Lily lit up on it before Remus swipes his right thumb over it, working fast to answer the call before it can go to voicemail.

“Hi,” he greets, a definite coy waiver to his voice that suggests he’s politely pretending not to know what’s happened, “how are you?”

A substantial pfft echoes out from Sirius’s mobile. “Hank just emerged out here with a stomp so violent, it might’ve set off the world’s axis,” he chimes, in a distinctly cheery voice that showcases he’s not cheerful at all anymore.

“Well, we’re fine over here, so tell him he needs to up his game on leg days,” Sirius suggests, “and then give him my best.”

James does exactly as requested, passing the message along loud enough to wake the dead — or make it inside Hank’s flat, more likely — and adds some expletives of his own to it that Sirius would love to say he got to enjoy to the fullest, but he’s a bit distracted by the speed at which Remus’s previous sunshine smile drops off to form a deep frown.

There isn’t really time to budge him and ask for answers, not when Remus goes ahead and cups his hand over the receiver, his mouth moving faster than light. “Hang up,” they read plainly, and what with that silent plea and the look on Remus’s face, Sirius needs nothing more than that to press to end the call, cutting out James and Hank’s blazing row.

Remus, even in his trepidatious state, can’t stave off a snort. “I mean, I did expect you to say ‘bye’ at least,” he mentions.

Sirius waves that off quick. “He’s dealing with Hank,” he insists, aiming to showcase an ease he definitely doesn’t have inside him just now. “What’s happening?”

Remus looks over to the wall across from the bed, or it could be the ether he’s looking into for he certainly doesn’t seem to be studying the wallpapering over there. Sirius looks left, right, and back at Remus in the time it takes him to, well, do something other than that, and turns out, he might’ve been weighing the options ahead of him for he hits speakerphone with a decided press.

“OK, he’s off,” he — what, alerts her?

Sirius blinks fast between Remus and the mobile he’s holding up as Lily lets out a sigh of relief, of all things. “Seeing him out there singing nearly broke my heart,” she shares ridiculously, as far as Sirius is concerned.

Not just Sirius, turns out, for Remus looks to him with an outwitted expression that plainly states that the floor’s gone out from under him. “Because he’s happy about it?” he raises weakly, and Sirius can’t lie and say he isn’t comforted by the fact that Remus seems as blown apart as he feels.

“Literally, what the fuck is even happening right now?” Sirius sputters.

And somehow, the very last thing one Lilith Fucking Evans apparently needed to hear was Sirius’s voice on the call. “Remus,” she puts up, aghast and oh-so aggrieved by the intrusion.

“Well, Lily, he’s right here; he was going to be hearing half of the conversation and demanding to hear the rest of it,” Remus returns, somewhere between sorrowful and indignant, but Sirius is quite pleased to report that the latter is winning out against the former, but he so does like it when Remus lets those around him know he’s not here to be dragged.

It’s silent on the other end of the line before Lily gives up a supremely tight sigh. “Fine, fine,” she asserts, “but he cannot—”

He is right fucking here, actually,” Sirius cuts in sweetly. “Be an adult and use your big girl voice; you know I can take it.”

“I rang Remus actually, in case that wasn’t obvious by now,” Lily returns, matching the sweetener Sirius drizzled his tone with and garnering a full face rub out of Remus. “You cannot be unbiased in this case.”

“What,” Sirius enunciates, “is even the matter with you right now? None of this bodes well, Lily.”

Remus switches phone hands, leaving it face up in his left palm to free up his right one to clasp it over Sirius’s left knee, and it has a certain kind of dual effect in that it’s both hot and calming at once. “Lily, you have got to help us along,” he bids, and lo and behold, Lily sure elaborates when he bids her to.

She takes in the standard amount of oxygen likely reserved for a whole tank before she’s vomiting words at them. “I am freaking the fuck out and I needed you, and if you — I mean you, Sirius — can’t handle that, leave the fucking room,” she attests.

Sirius breathes in fast, eyes wide, nostrils flared, hyper-grin over his cheeks, liking the idea of leaving the fucking room in a whirl for the point it’d make alone, but he’s completely nude beneath his towel for one, he’s not going to get immediate intel on the situation out there for another, and where’s he going to go, come to that? Instead, and this does take most of the cells in his body to cooperate with him, he forces himself to keep quiet, stay calm, focus on Remus’s hand on him and the immense squeeze happening for his knee, and finally, the kiss Remus presses to his left shoulder, as if rewarding him for dialling it back from the boiling point.

“OK, we’re all going to breathe, try that again, and start back from the top,” Remus moderates.

“I don’t even know if I can now,” Lily puts up, suddenly rather dejected, but turns out, she’s willing to give it a go. “I mean, what are we even doing?”

Remus’s gaze does a fast trip around the room. “‘We’ as in, you two?” he clarifies.

Yes, us,” she returns. “What, are we going to war?”

Remus looks to Sirius as Sirius looks to him, sharing a befuddled (on Remus’s part) and indignant (on Sirius’s) stare before the latter’s right eye starts mega-twitching. “OK, I do need to leave,” he declares, putting his hands up and sliding himself to the right so his feet hit the floor down beside the bed in one swoop.

His mobile lands between his feet by way of the fact that it’s just been chilling on his chest for a solid chunk of time, so he dips down to grab that, drops it again in frustration, and he does just have to say, he certainly finds it interesting that Lily says nothing about it; she’s banking on him hightailing it out of the room so she can have her precious, always-too-kind bestie to herself and continue spouting horrid phrases that have no place here, there, or anywhere, and that only makes him want to torpedo out of there that much more.

Behind him, a flutter of frazzled fingertips tap the small of his back, just above where the top edge of his towel lays. “Wait, please,” Remus bids him, aiming to squeeze an area on Sirius’s body that doesn’t have a whole of cushion to give way to grabby-fingers; he should have grabbed one of Sirius’s hips for that. “Where are you even going to go?”

“Literally anywhere else,” Sirius returns, bending to grab his phone off of the floor again.

“Looking like that?” Remus raises, tugging at the edge of Sirius’s towel.

“I’ll put something on,” Sirius attests, aiming to heave himself off of the bed and stalk toward their luggage over on the other side of the bed, but all that ends up happening is Remus simply tugs, real pointedly, on his left arm to put him off balance and sends him right back onto the bed sideways.

“Why don’t we all try a little fucking breathing before anything else?” he suggests.

Sirius scoots himself back, letting his legs wild out as he stamps them and his fists on the bed, his hair falling all around and looking like a dramatic, beached mermaid might, but in his defence, this is a horribly dramatic turn of events. “I can’t do that because Lily over there hasn’t a clue how chuffed James has been about this for weeks on end and how hard he worked to make sure the ring even fit her stupid finger and have the moment be right, and what does our friendly neighbourhood wordsmith say not an hour past the big moment?” he projects, and with a set of pipes this powerful, it goes along way. “‘Are we going to war?’”

Remus shushes him real hard for all that lung power, but Lily’s going ahead and drowning that out with the world’s worst aside imaginable. “You knew about this?”

“We both did, genius,” Sirius comes in, and seconds before Remus could even process the switch in direction, by the look of it. “And, like the couple of dolts we are, we encouraged the lad, fanned his flames, helped him plot out how to find out your ring size since he didn't fucking know that; King Remus over here even tricked you into putting on Dorcas’s ring as a decoy to get your size without you thinking something fishy was up for even a second, and for what?

“I could have used the warning,” Lily sends back. “From you most of all, Remus.”

Sirius starts up an actual maniacal laugh, he’ll be honest, but this is just hysterical. “Are you fucking—”

“Lily, you said yes,” Remus snaps, and it’s enough to have Sirius shutting right up and leaving the lane free for Remus to use. “James might be a lovable little twit at times, but he’s not willfully blind so how's it he got the idea that you were a happy bride-to-be just minutes ago?”

Inspired beyond belief, Sirius situates himself cross-legged where he landed on the bed and scoots himself around to face Remus, loving a man who can so thoroughly bounce blame off of himself and bring the actual topic at hand back to the foreground when it really fucking counts. “Where even are you?” he puts up. “He’s up there crooning Tom Petty and thinking his fiancé wants to marry him, so where did you go off to?”

Lily’s suddenly real quiet again, and the pause is long enough that Sirius comes in to address the same issue. “Seriously, where are you?” he bids.

“I’m just in the car,” Lily cops to it.

The shadow of alarm that passes over Remus’s visage is almost enough to have Sirius rolling in a good way. “OK, you need to pull over,” he directs.

“I’m not driving,” she amends, and if there were ever a pristine example of a person getting more and more agonized with every sentence she spouts, this would be it. “I said I had to run into work and now I’m just sitting out front with nowhere to go like a schlub.”

Sirius smacks his lips once. “I like that we can agree on one thing.”

Remus looks to him fast, a great plea about him, but that shitter cannot and is not hiding his amusement very well at all. “OK, then, can I ask why you took to telling a white lie about running into work and chose to hide from him in your car in an incredibly visible spot?” he switches to, and oh, Sirius could fly across the bed and kiss him, he’s that funny.

Three for three, Lily goes for her longest silence yet, and it’s supremely difficult to suss out what’s happening; is she over there pouting over being razzed by Remus of all people, is she boohooing silently in the driver’s seat, is she getting yelled at by a neighbour for stealing their parking spot? All are possible until Sirius gets a hint otherwise.

“What we’re making the biggest mistake we could?” she offers, muting her silence.

It’s impossible to describe the look exchanged between him and Remus as anything other than abject horror, though within a few beats’ time, Remus’s expression heads into sorrowful territories before he gives in to a sigh. “Do you want me to be you or me right now?” he raises.

“Me,” Lily answers, the fastest reply she’s had yet, and Sirius can’t really say that he isn’t looking between Remus and the telephonic version of Lily through bated breath.

“OK, then you have to know I’m going to need to ask you this,” Remus prefaces, and Lily must know it for she provides a faint hum on the other end of the line, and Sirius holds the air in his lungs in tight so to not miss any of what he’s not getting. “Do you want to marry him?”

Though it can’t be longer than milliseconds, it feels like an age that Sirius stares at Remus, waiting with a kind temperamental befuddlement he doesn’t know if he’s ever experienced quite like this before, and he so doesn’t like the feeling that comes with not recognizing him at all; he telepathically aims to will Remus to look back at him, give him some kind of an explanation for such an utterance, but when he won’t look up, Sirius has to resort to more childish tactics.

Sirius sends his mobile soaring over to the pillow to the left of Remus, jolting him into looking toward the dull thud that accompanied the landing, and there, he at least flickers his gaze over at Sirius, but not for long. “Well, of course I do, Remus,” Lily sends him.

Remus’s expression changes to one of a man who’s been given exactly what he was looking for. “But now that it’s here and it’s happening, you’re in a bit of a panic?” he raises her.

Lily gives up a disparaging sigh. “I thought it’d — I’d hoped it’d happen eventually,” she puts up. “In a, ‘if I spent the next fifty years with this one, I’d call that a lucky draw,’ kind of way, I didn't know we were so close to the big moment, and I mean, my ‘yes’ literally flew out of me back there so I know that I meant it because it came from my gut, Remus, I just don’t know; we’re doing great here, and we could be falling into a trap that I don’t want us to get stuck in.”

“Stuck how?” Remus quizzes her, smiling. “You didn’t jump into a vat of quicksand, you just said yes—”

“I mean, sure, it’s a lovely fantasy,” Lily comes back, a righteous steamrolling over a very good point, Sirius thought, but Remus doesn’t make a single hint that he minds the interruption if it means he’ll get more intel on how to help, but he's more patient than most. “The beautiful wedding, the dress, the tux, the birds flapping, the—”

Sirius takes in a quick jolt of breath, lifting a hand only Remus can see him raising. “What, and I can’t stress this enough, sort of weddings have you been to?”

“I need you, and I can’t stress this enough, to shut the fuck up right now or I’m going to scream and it will hurt,” Lily promises, but is that a faint, dare he say, laugh Sirius just heard halfway through that? Sounded like it to him.

Remus reworks his mouth around a rather vivid smirk. “Birds flapping,” he prompts her.

“Yes, yes, the doves, you know; they come flying out of the cage in many numbers?” Lily goads.

“Oh, the doves, the doves, mm,” Remus echoes.

Lily speeds right past the razzing she’s being exposed to. “The doves, the hundred and one guests, the photographer buzzing about, the vows, the big I-Dos, the dinner, the first dance,” she lists off. “It all sounds absolutely idyllic until you’re a year in and the spice has all but died down, you’ve taken the bedroom while he’s resorted to kipping on the couch because you’re already so sick of each other you can’t stand to sleep in the same space anymore, you’ve divvied up the dresser drawers and the closet that you pick from in shifts so you won’t have to even bump into each other in there, and when you do actually get stuck talking to each other, you're fighting over who gets the cat in the divorce.”

“That,” Remus sounds out, mouth hanging through his version of a gape/grin, “was the darkest road you could have ever taken, Lily; and everyone says I’m a cynic.”

“No one says that,” Lily replies. “You’re a positive glow.”

“She's got that part right,” Sirius tacks on, and Remus sends a sigh/smile/roll of the eyes combo that well suggests he'd been going for hyperbole for the sake of the circumstance, but that’s what he gets for playing pretend with himself right in front of his army. “But, he's right about you, Lilith; that was an image so unlike the two of you that I’m honestly worried you’ve suffered a stroke out there in that car.”

“I’m just fine, thank you, and it isn’t that far-fetched when you look at the statistics for divorce,” Lily returns.

Sirius gives a wan noise in his throat. “You didn’t even look them up yourself,” he returns her. “You’re just spouting nonsense at this point.”

“Listen to me,” Lily demands. “Everything’s good now — great, even; he’s amazing, he’s got the best face, he makes me belly-laugh like nobody else on this whole planet can, knows exactly when I need some me-time and leaves me to it, and when he’s back again it’s actually guaranteed that I’m going to wonder for a moment there why I needed the breather in the first place because he’s electric, but what about down the road, when his puns start to bring on revulsion, and he stops reading my signs, and suddenly he’s around all the fucking time, just right up behind me everywhere I turn, and what if he wants to keep the cat even though she is rightfully mine, hm? I got her, she comes to me first when we call her over, and he can’t have her, sorry, but she's mine and he’d better know ahead of time that I get her, and then the chemistry? The chemistry we have could ebb away, the sex could go right down the drain, and then where will we be? He stops, middle of sex, routinely might I add, to go down on me again; I’ve never had that be a thing before him and I’m not giving that up to the marriage council without a fight, you hear me? I just had my insides rearranged on the kitchen table and you tell me how many married folks you know of out there are getting it done like that.”

“Alright, wow,” Remus gives up, and that face of his is priceless, it’s honestly tragic that Lily can’t see it, but at least Sirius can. “Congrats, Lily; really.”

“Thank you, but I don’t want all that fire to go out if you can imagine,” Lily comes back with.

“No, I very think I can, but the thing is, it’s not as if you two are the most traditional couple out there as is,” Remus raises up, lifting his free hand with it, “so all that dark stuff could potentially count for a duo that isn’t you two, but we’re not talking about just any other couple, are we, and—”

And look, Sirius can and would agree to that, the only issue is that he’s been a bit preoccupied with doing the math here, and he’s just found the answer to the equation. “Now, wait just a minute,” he shoots out, jolting Remus into double-blinking at him and he’s sure Lily’s got to be doing something of that nature way over there. “Whose kitchen table?”

Lily comes back with a vengeance. “Oh, like either of you has any room to gripe about table sex, I mean really,” she pounces on them. “And on the Christmas table, no less.”

Remus takes in a very hesitant breath, his cheeks going a whole new shade of rouge Sirius hasn’t seen on him before, and that’s saying something. “You know what? It was the only surface we could physically make it to in time and it was hotter than hell,” he returns her, coming to take some dignity back in a manner that Sirius completely supports, “and I would just love to point out here that I had no gripes about your table sex; just putting that out there.”

“OK, you know what?” Lily comes back, laughing freely. “You win this one, Remus; just for that.”

“You’d better have cleaned up after yourselves,” Sirius puts in, making that noted before the moment’s too far gone.

“Oh, would you relax? We know what we’re doing by now,” Lily returns. “Which, is decidedly my point, we’ve got each other figured out so well; there’s room to get better at us, of course, but I was excited to keep going and things seemed like they were going well, or at least I thought they were?”

Sirius sends an affronted scoff over to Lily, Remus, the room, and the ether, too, while he’s at it. “What world am I in?” he tosses out, pitching himself onto his back and flailing his arms and legs in the air to really showcase his befuddlement that only Remus can really be blessed to see. “I’ve left Earth, I know I have, and I didn’t even sign any consent forms.”

A whole, entire foot winds up sneaking its way between his knees and gets precariously close to the edge of his towel, and more importantly, his junk, wherein a certain big toe gets a poke in before Sirius lifts up fast, blocking his groin with his wrists and a gape/grin as Remus snickers wondrously, taking his left foot back. “Are you seriously giggling over there?” Lily comes in. “I’m having an actual crisis here.”

Sirius quite suddenly remembers the conversation happening here, as well as the reason for his optimal flailing. “Well, of course things are going good, Lily,” he sends her. “Why else would he even pop the question?”

“Uh, societal pressure, for one?” Lily puts up. “We’re practically babies, but that’s not stopped the sea of quacks that've been telling us all our lives that we’d better get hitched as soon as possible or else our worth won’t get realized, and Cunt knows the second I squeeze myself into that dress, I’ll have somehow given out an open invitation for everybody to ask me when the baby’s coming, and when that one comes along they’re just going to ask where the second kid is, and on and on, and what for? Just so we can look back on our twenties and wish we’d pumped the breaks and actually enjoyed what we had back then.”

Remus takes in a steady breath, but his face reads nothing but trepidation. Sirius knows he doesn’t know what to say to that when it’s rather steeped in some truth tea. “OK, I definitely get what’s happening here,” Sirius comes in, taking up where Remus left off, "but you are sounding a lot like I used to, Lilybean, and we all know you’d rather end it all now than sound anything like that guy.”

Remus makes a face that can be described as nothing other than abject mortification, which only gets seconded by a fourth prolonged silence from Lily’s side of the line, and honestly, Sirius doesn’t know what he can do about either one, doesn’t know how to feel that bad about that casual callout when this is him: he’s brash, he’s crass, he's a definite bitch on a good day and a resentful little fucker on a bad one, but since this is a day that keeps oscillating between both sides of his coin so intensely, maybe he ought to at least try to soften that blow a little; he isn’t over it yet, not even this far out from that vicious kitchen brawl, but he can use it, and he can use it well.

“I’m just saying, I know where that's coming from,” he puts down. “And no, I don’t own a vagina so obviously I’ve never experienced it in the way you have, but I am someone whose marriage would've been obligatory and the bride stamped for approval before I'd have even hit my twenties; I get the disinterest, I get shunning the entire idea altogether, I get the revulsion that comes on from all the little reminders that it’s just going to have to happen sooner or later so you might as well fall in line, and even once I knew wasn’t going to have to worry anymore about marrying someone I wasn’t going to be able to love, I was still repulsed by the idea of it as a whole, but you know what that was about, you do; we both know you do.”

And there comes Lily’s fifth silence, but Remus, good lad through and through, takes his watchful gaze off of Sirius at last, appearing to have collected himself enough to give his next two cents into the predicament at hand. “Jitters and resentment for what’s been expected of you since you could walk are fair, Lily, they are,” he puts it, “but why not try to look at a different example with me, is that alright?”

“Mm, yeah,” Lily comes through, audibly giving Remus the beckon to head on.

“Well, I can’t really speak for every married couple I know of, and I don’t know that I’d want to try for that matter," Remus says of it, "but I do know my mum and dad, and while I’d really rather not know whether they’re getting up to things like sex in all sorts of spots this far in—”

And that’s about all Remus can get out before Sirius is drowning him out with a giant pfft that just about fills the room, so it's fair that it stops Remus right in his tracks and garners Lily to pipe in right about there. “Well, does that mean they are?” she probes, and while Remus definitely falls into a major huff/wince combo, Sirius feels the door is wide open for him to shine.

“Oh, one-thousand percent yes,” he puts down. “Variety of locations? No way to know, but I know they’re still fuckin’.”

Remus gives into a snail-slow head tilt to the left, his face clouding over with indignant panic as he speaks each word like they’re their own sentence. “Did. My. Father—”

“Oh, I wish,” Sirius comes back, putting his hands together in a semblance of prayer for someday, “but he doesn't have to; they’re so cute, you have to know somewhere deep down that they’re still at it, and I know in my bones that Lyall still gives it to her like he used to in the early days and nothing can or will be said about it to change my mind.”

Remus appears to have an out-of-body experience, while Lily gives up a distinct trill over there. “He OK?” she checks.

“Physically he is here, but mentally he’s in a ditch somewhere,” Sirius passes along.

“That’s about right,” Lily snickers. “They’re just people, Remus.”

“Mhm, people like us,” Sirius echoes. “And, ‘course, they did have to have sex at least once to have made you, but let’s be honest with ourselves, if they've been together over twenty years their count must be—”

“What I was getting at,” Remus starts again, a pricelessly tight smile on his lips, “is that they’re still so happy to be around each other after that many years together, and it’s been like that since I can remember; you could just see it on them, you know, they really like each other.”

“They’re so sweet,” Sirius echoes it. “So relaxed, too; in that way where, they know what they’re doing by now so they know each other enough to can call each other out like fiends, and it’s thrilling to watch them have a go at each other.”

Lily hums over there, accepting that somewhat at least, Sirius thinks. “And what are they, like, forty-five?” she bids.

“My mum is, good job,” Remus serves her.

“Well, I almost went with forty, but I figured you’d have mentioned by now if they’d had you in secondary so I just jogged it up by five,” Lily offers for it.

“Well, my dad’s forty-eight, but I’ll tell him you thought he was her age,” Remus puts up, smirking with it.

“Oh, he’ll be so chuffed,” Sirius echoes it.

“Tell him, then,” Lily encourages it. “When did they get married?”

“Twenty-two years ago come October,” Remus chimes, happy as a clam to pass that along, and Sirius may well be an actual clam for how chuffed he is to get to chew on a whole new detail materializing in front of him.

“A fall wedding?” he coaxes.

Remus nods brightly. “I don’t know if it’s because of the wedding itself or if she always did, but my mum loves the fall,” he shares.

“Wait a minute,” Lily comes in. “They had you first?”

“Mhm, they did,” Remus affirms. “Not that I really heard much about it from their mouths, but it’s not as if it’s some big secret either; they look about our age in the baby photos and the math checks out, so.”

“I didn’t know that,” Lily offers, a bit needlessly, but she is having an actual moment of clarity so Sirius might let her have this one; Remus certainly doesn’t seem to mind it. “And twenty years ago, too.”

“Mm, they would’ve done things a bit differently than a lot of their peers were at the time, which, is rather the point I’m going for here,” Remus circles back, going for a pointed, yet cheerful tone. “They didn’t do things all that traditionally, they moved in pretty soon after they got together, dated for a while, I came along, and the wedding followed after that, but I believe they took a trip down to city hall and did it there, threw a big backyard bash at the house with all their mates for a ceremony, and my granny did the catering so, all in all, it was more of a homegrown affair for the time, but they didn’t seem to need all the fanfare that goes with; they look happy as can be in all the photos, and they sure seem happy still, even if they did things out of order than whatever society had to have been telling them to go by, so that kind of thing doesn’t actually have to factor into it if you don’t want it to.”

Sirius nods to his heart’s content, not that Lily will know that; it’s really more for Remus to see. “And that’s not to say you can’t pick and choose what you do want out of the pot, right?” he puts in. “If you want the dress, the tux, and a party, but you also want a whole buffet table of greasy takeout at the reception, then by all means, suit the fuck up and eat the fuck down, d'you know what I'm saying? It's your wedding, no one’s going to call you corny for dressing up fancy.”

“Not even you?” Lily raises.

“Umm, if I’m invited to go dress shopping, then I absolutely won’t call you corny,” Sirius serves her, and that’s a laugh straight from the chest he hears echoing back. “And, look, Jim Beam over there has been spouting off about two topics this whole summer; one, how to make the proposal go pitch-perfectly, and two, how to get Remus to love him again.”

“Oh, good Cunt,” Remus expels. “I never stopped.”

“No, see, that second one, I knew all about,” Lily vouches, a whole, actual smile on that face of hers, Sirius can just tell.

“I bet you did; he had to talk about something other than the big secret,” he lobs her fast, “but I’ll tell you right now, the topic of babies has not come up once with me since he got the proposal going and it’d have slipped out if he'd had it on the brain, so I implore you to see that up until this morning, his plan was to wait until your literal birthday to pop the question, only he completely threw that out the window because he saw you ranting and raving about that op-ed and being your whole, spitfire self this morning, and that’s exactly the reason he wanted to propose in the whole damn first place; he likes that fire, Lily, fuckin’ loves it.”

Lily stammers on the other end of the line, and good, she should be doing that. “I don’t have words for that,” she gives up earnestly.

“Good thing we do,” Sirius trades her. “Now, does he want a bébé wrapped in swaddling clothes eventually? Obviously, and you know that, but to that, you’ve talked about your own, metaphorical kid and what you are and aren’t going to fuck them up with one day, it’s not exactly a shocker to think you two are gonna parent together someday.”

“Honestly, you two have such Mum and Dad energy already, you’ll be just fine whenever that is,” Remus echoes, beaming bright.

“When he’s right, he’s right,” Sirius echoes. “That's going to be a more serious conversation between the two of you eventually, but it doesn’t have to be tomorrow and trust me, if anybody does try tapping their wrists at you, even once, you just send their address along and I’ll handle them; you’re not an oven.”

“Oh, I loved that closer,” she returns him, and she really does sound more like herself. "I’ll keep you right in mind because it’s going to happen."

Remus smiles down at his lap though he’s not admiring his own junk apparently; he’s just being his wholesome self and thinking of the next wall to bust down. “So, what if, and hear me out,” he prefaces, that smile glued on, “instead of looking at that ring and all that it could mean, you try thinking of it in the sense that you two get to decide what it means? As far as I can see, all it really says is that there’s a really good guy over there, so intent on having you around that he’s falling to his knees for it, and can we blame him? I certainly can’t, you’re a whole catch, Lily.”

“Oh, don’t you dare, Remus,” Lily winds up.

“I already did,” Remus quips, and Sirius simply takes a shallow breath in, finding him just about the loveliest lad, in here and out there combined.

“Killed that, you did,” Lily lets him have, but only just. “Why the ring at all, then? If we’re happy now, then we’re happy, simple as, and why should we have to go join an institution just to say that we made it official? An institution, might I add, that hasn’t always welcomed marriages for all, and to that, is it even fair that we get all this fanfare for joining the club because of how we present, while so many others don’t have the right to even look at the papers?”

Remus looks up and finds Sirius’s gaze, which was already on him so no issues corresponding on this one; their brows high up on their foreheads, their mouths slightly quirked, and for all intents and purposes, they’re really just one another’s reflection at the moment. “Lily,” Remus offers carefully, like gentle summer rain, “plenty of same-sex couples can and do get married every day, so don’t let the whole of the community stop you.”

Here, yes,” Lily returns, “but not everywhere.”

Sirius gives up a long and lustrous sigh of relief. “Well, thank you, Lilith,” he extends, smiling bright as a summer's day, “I have been meaning to find one, sole person to blame all this global inequality on, and here you are, laying yourself over the coals and taking this centuries-long issue onto your mini shoulders.”

“She’s a paragon,” Remus offers sweetly.

Lily gives up her loudest expulsion yet. “OK, Sirius, I expect that from, but you, Remus?”

“You know what, Lily?” Remus raises. “This is a bit much; we're not going to shun you for getting married.”

“Community as a whole, though, that’s a whole other ballpark,” Sirius slides in. “I can just hear them chanting, ‘get her arse’ up the street right now.”

“Boys,” Lily scolds, but that one made her laugh; no denying that. "I don’t want to rub your faces in something that isn’t nearly as simple for you to have; that’s all I was trying to say.”

“And you wouldn’t be doing that because that’s not really your style, Lily,” Remus gives her. “It seems like you might just be throwing out any and all reservations you may have at this moment, so if you want me to continue being you here, then I have to knock some of these excuses out of the way because that’s what they are; it's what you’d do for me, and of all people to say these are excuses, I really hope that because it’s me, you know that I see what you’re doing.”

“No, I know,” Lily puts it, her voice so still and even that Sirius does sort of feel like he’s sitting in on a private moment he maybe ought not to be.

“Good, so with that out of the way,” Remus brings it around, and Sirius takes a good, deep breath in and holds it because he sure senses he’s going to need a lungful at the ready, "take the dress, tux, papers, birds, institutions, and the swaddled baby out of the picture and focus on the two of you; it wouldn't hurt to try to think of that ring as more of a souvenir of some actual, substantial proof of a pact between the two of you that says, ‘I want you, and this is where I want to be as far as the eye can see,’ and no, I didn’t intend for that to rhyme, but I’m glad that it did.”

Sirius breathes out a laugh so inadvertent and so automatic that it jerks Remus into looking up at him, alarm over his gaze but a quizzical smile on his lips now. “Nothing,” he insists, waving Remus off with what little strength he has left. “You’re just stellar, head to toe.”

Lily sure sounds like she found some tissues in her car for a honk comes through the other end of the line as she blows her nose. “Who is?” she asks thickly.

“Remus, babey,” Sirius rings out. “He’s a whole cherub.”

“Well, that’s why I needed him,” Lily says for it, and that, Sirius can no longer hold against her in good conscience; everybody could use a little Remus to help bring on the perspective they’re not seeing.

Remus, a lad nearly charmed out of his skin, aims to move past all this Remus-talk out of survival surely. “Is there anything left you need me to address?”

Lily puts up a humourless laugh. “What our fucking plan is, for one,” she puts up. “I mean, I’m good where I am; my place is fantastic, it’s rent-controlled, I’m saving buckets just staying put where I am, and I have goals; places I still want to see, degrees I still want to go and get, and where does all that go now?”

“Well, right down the toilet obviously,” Sirius comes in, stretching his arms high above his head. “No other way around it.”

“There is that age-old saying, 'where there’s a ring, there is indeed a toilet,'” Remus tacks on there, love of Sirius’s life.

“Stop it,” Lily drags out. “I’m being serious, there are still things I want to do, I want to put enough aside that I can actually take some time off, see some of the world, actually experience what’s out there and then apply it back to my own life, and I never got to join in on all the theatre while I was stuck glued to the piano bench all through secondary and I was always jealous of you lot getting to put on those shows, but I’m still young, I can still dip my toes in, there are fellowships I could join and travel around with for a while, and then there’s nursing and I think about going into that all the time, boys, I really do; I think I’d be the best fit for it.”

Thee best,” Remus comes in to echo, his eyes darting back and forth over his phone screen, “only, I don’t see why you can’t do all that with the ring on your finger, personally.”

”It really is just a ring,” Sirius echoes. “It’s not going to beep and explode if you get too near the border or a nursing degree.

Lily gives up her weakest laugh yet. “Well, I wasn’t actually worried about that specifically, but thank you.”

“Have you talked to James about any of these plans?” Remus coaxes.

“Of course I have,” Lily insists.

“And you think James, of all people, is going to bar you from taking a spirit journey?” Sirius counters, giving into a snort that’s truly involuntary but it’s such a wonky view of the situation and of his boy. “He will follow you happily, doesn’t matter where you choose to go; he’ll just pack a bag and bob along beside you, he loves adventure.”

Remus gives up a little snicker from over at the headboard. “He’d join a travelling theatre troupe in a second flat, too,” he raises it.

Sirius lets himself be overcome by the image. “He’s just waiting for the question to happen to him, frankly,” he takes it, waters it.

“And he’s in the best position possible to encourage all of your plans, big or small,” Remus highlights.

“Seriously, Trust Fund Boy isn’t hurting for much; he’d practically finance a spirit journey out of pocket if you started naming places with enough conviction,” Sirius echoes it. “He can literally do his job anywhere so long as there’s decent WiFi, it’s not like he’s trapped here.”

“What about everything he wants to do in the meantime?” Lily puts up. “Have you seen his bucket list? It’s a mile long and surely we’re going to have to compromise, some of his plans are going to have to get put on hold, some of mine will, too, and we could seriously end up resenting each other for the sacrifices we had to make along the way.”

“Well, this,” Remus comes in, “would still be a factor whether you had the ring or not, Lily, and moreover, it’s a concern to bring to him, not us; we can talk and talk and talk you down all day, but d'you really think James can’t do better at this one than either one of us?”

“Oh, don’t make me feel worse, please,” Lily implores. “I feel terrible enough as is.”

“He’s not trying to stick your face in it, but he’s right, Lily,” Sirius puts in. “We’re just a couple of goons here; James is your guy, go get him.”

“Really, what are you doing talking to us about this when James is right upstairs, anyway?” Remus runs with. “We know you’re not trying to hurt him, but you could at least give him a chance to ease some of these worries for you and it's not fair to keep him out of it; I don’t know that you would even be feeling this terrible about it if you didn’t already know that somewhere down there.”

“Down there,” Lily repeats, rather alert, and a little facetious to boot.

Sirius snorts big and loud, loving it. “Think he meant deep down in your chest or your bones, less your crotch," he relays, "but I bet she knows a thing or two about it."

Remus, busy weathering a whole new batch of snickers, takes a few good seconds to come back to them. “That is what I meant, but perhaps you should consult her as well,” he stamps it, waiting for Lily’s little snickerfest to subside before continuing. “Really, though, get going before he steps out to get a bottle of bubbly and thinks something terrible’s gone on because he's found you sniffling in your car out front.”

“Oho, good point,” Sirius lends him. “He could come down any minute now.”

“Don’t scare me like that,” Lily returns, whispering now.

“Lily, you’re not going to feel any better until you go upstairs and talk to him,” Remus puts down, a rather direct tone about him now. “And, in doing that, you might just find out for a fact that James would never, ever, ever, and one more ever, unleash a flock of birds at your wedding.”

Sirius could just explode, Remus is so right about that one. “I can’t think of anything less like him, frankly,” he throws in.

“OK, but do we maybe think that some of us have been focusing really hard on the bird slip here?” Lily raises sweetly, asking for grace that neither man present can give her more of. “It was one example out of the many I gave.”

“Go upstairs if you don’t want any more of that, then,” Remus says of it, playing the hard card. “Your choices are to go up there and reverse the resounding 'yes' you gave him, or go up there and include him in on what’s got you hiding in your car, but he deserves to know you’re nervous about this, and he definitely deserves a lot more input than he’s been allotted just yet.”

“OK, I heard you,” Lily returns him, but her bite has well and truly left the conversation, leaving a forlorn woman in its wake.

“Good, I wasn't whispering,” Remus trades her. “I don’t want you making this decision without him having a chance to make his case, and not to toot my own horn here, but I should think that would count for something, coming from me to you.”

Sirius can’t help where his mind’s gone to, can’t help picturing that sordid afternoon in May where he sent Remus from his flat for not complying with his plans, can’t help but imagine there might’ve been talks about the subject that he wasn’t present for, and cannot help but redden over how he’d have come off to her in all of that, but what he can help with is to keep his cool, try to remember that he can be a lot to weather for one bloke, and let Remus off of a hook he never should have been on in the first place.

Lily sniffs. “I love you, you know that?” she extends him.

“And you better know I do, too, even when you’re acting a bit goofy,” Remus offers her.

Sirius presses his laugh directly into his left palm, aiming to muffle it so not to detract from this sweet little goodbye they’re having. “You too, Sirius,” Lily lobs him.

“Yeah; sure, sure,” Sirius returns wanly.

“Stop, I do,” Lily assures, and as if to dot that with a bit of punctuation, shuts her car door with a distinct clack. Before long, she’s back on the line, though this time she’s taking on a cartoonish whisper to her voice. “OK, I’m going up.”

“Godspeed,” Sirius sends her, mimicking her whisper to a T.

“You’ve got this,” Remus sticks in, circling his right forefinger around the end-call button before deeming it OK if he presses it.

Remus sets his mobile aside on the bed with a decided press and looks to Sirius within the new silence in the room, but before Sirius can really even finish thinking it’s too delicate a stare for his liking, Remus lifts a hand to beckon him over and Sirius is on the boy’s right as fast as he can climb up a bed.

Remus motions for him to lay while moving to himself, and the moment Sirius is settled against the pillows again Remus slips right up beside him, setting most of his face below the line of Sirius’ left pec so that all Sirius has just now to look at are his nose, those rather owlish peepers above it, and a substantial floof of fridge above those; wouldn’t a bad sight at all if Remus didn’t look terribly sheepish.

Sirius reaches his left arm up, giving a distinct hum for Remus to heed where it is and where he’s expected to shift to next, and Remus worms over to settle in between Sirius’s arm and his side, setting the left side of his head against the curve of Sirius’s shoulder, eyes boring into him still.

Sirius sets his hand over the back of Remus’s head, getting his fingers all up in there and hoping that’ll somewhat ease the tension happening on Remus’s side of things, but Sirius has a feeling he’s going to have to bite the bullet on this one. “So, I gather you two discussed all that?” he raises, keeping his tone as devoid of charge as he can feasibly make it sound.

He watches one slow blink complete before the exhale comes through Remus’s nose. “Yes, but what you need to know is this,” he prefaces, pausing to breathe in first, “I was already so far in the deep end of my own head by the time I’d made it to work, so you know of the kind of the head-space I’d have been in, and I tried not to say anything, I really did; I didn’t want to say anything aloud and make it any more real than it already was, but there was so much weighing me down that I saw her round, curious eyes staring right into my soul, I knew she could sense something was off, and I needed to release it—”

“Yeah, no, Remus, that’s—“ Sirius tries, but frowns too, now. “'Fair' would be an understatement, so let's just say I get it.”

“I didn’t even talk about that until way later on; it was just Clustercity at first,” Remus tacks on, momentum still going strong. “I was embarrassed to show my face around the rest of them, I didn’t know what the fall was even going to look like anymore, I didn't even have the boosts or anything to treat them yet so it was all just dark down the road ahead, I didn't know how I was going to get through the knockouts that would be coming down the line, I was scared shitless that these things were going to fuck with you and me to the point where you’d want to get out as fast as you could, and I know that’s not fair to say now but it’s what plagued me at the time because if I didn’t have school or work or you or my mates, then what would I even have?”

He paused, giving a listless gesture. “Those are the places and people I’m happiest with, I was certain I was about to lose all of them one by one, and the move-in offer just set me on fire, and then I was terrified,” he put up. “She saw that; she saw the prospect of moving into your space felt so permanent and temporary all at the same time, and she just peeled back every single layer I had wrapped around me to get to the bottom of it all and told me it was my choice to make, and I have to hand it to her, she’s always known how to remind me that I’ve agency within myself, in the same way that she needs the reminder, too, sometimes so it's no wonder she saw herself in me way back in the early days, but she still batted a thousand for you that day, Sirius, she really did, and I'm not just saying that.”

Sirius swallows around a whole lot, he’ll be honest; it’s a lot, remembering everything that one offer did to run Remus over, that he let him leave his flat feeling that thrown, that he made sure Remus knew he'd tossed him out as some sort of last, horrible word, that it’s taken until this very trip to fully grasp that Remus needs agency like he needs air, that there’s still so much to learn about Remus even while he feels like he’s really getting somewhere with that. “Mm?” he probes. "How so?"

Remus’s eyes flash before his entire visage clouds over with intent. “She was so chuffed when I told her you’d even made the offer,” he extends, giving into a half-smile. “I mean, she was of two minds with it, of course; she had me panicking in front of her, but I saw that initial reaction of hers because she did not try very hard to hide it and it’s good she didn’t; she was celebrating a milestone for us, live without any mask on, and she thought it said a lot about you, or who you’ve—”

“Bloomed into?” Sirius offers daintily.

“Sure, that,” Remus lets him have, throwing him a wry smile.

Sirius actually lets the information passed to him land and soak into his head, but has to expel a Yuge breath against the idea all the same. “I don’t know, I think I'm—” he starts, careful with each word like they’re landmines he’s avoiding stepping on, “—just so familiar with the villain status that I can’t imagine anyone, least of all her, coming to bat for me in that scenario.”

“I was never upset with you, though, so the theme of it wasn’t anywhere near you being the villain in the scenario; you were the light at the end of the tunnel and she saw that, too,” Remus gives him, nearly tripping over himself to get it all out, and as much as Sirius knows he should pet at Remus’s hair a little and coax him back to the calm they'd only just reached moments ago, this is a topic and an afternoon he’d like to hear more about, and petting Remus down just yet could have him muting himself altogether because he isn’t in immediate danger of being shamed for talking — oh, the horror of it. “She’s been paying attention, you know, and not in the way you’re going to think: she saw the dedication you’d shown me well before the clusters ever rolled back in, she’d been seeing it for months and the move-in offer only sent her approval skyrocketing, and I’m not just saying that to save my hide; it’s true, she was very proud of you.”

Sirius gives a horse's breath out the right side of his mouth. “There’s no way,” he says of it, but it’s really just an invitation for Remus to continue and it’s one that gets granted near-immediately, fortunately for him.

“No, I really think it cemented things for her,” Remus keeps to it.

“As in, took away any lingering doubts she had about your boyfriend?” Sirius puts up, and faux-pleasantly for sure.

Remus gives a weak sigh, but his frown is more born of sorrow rather than him being miffed by the shade. “She’s sorry, Sirius,” he insists, lifting his shoulders once. “I don’t know how to make that part better between you two, but she supports us, so much so that she knows was got proven wrong on that one and she’s more than OK with that if it means we’re doing well — and alright, you know what, there’s an argument to be said that she could stand to say that to you more often because I do get the sense it doesn’t get passed along to you much, but—”

“Nah, she’s afraid to be in a room alone with me for too long,” Sirius comes in, smiling tightly. “It's to be expected; I’m pretty fucking terrifying when I’ve had my character assassinated so, putting her in her place also put her right off me.”

“She held her own for a while there, but—” Remus tries, but even he talks himself out of that one. “Sometimes you can be, yeah, but you won’t let people walk over you anymore and neither will she, so you two are so alike in that regard — in many, frankly.”

“Too alike,” Sirius stamps it. “I’m not going to say I'm not happy to hear she didn’t crucify me on the spot that time, but I really just think it’s always going to be complicated between us.”

Remus is back to some real dangerous frowning now. “I think that’s a real shame, then,” he confesses. “I’m sorry, I do, and I’ll stop talking about it soon, but she gets you more than you know; where you come from, what you’re working with, working against, she showed me that beyond measure that day, and to that, she’d beat up anybody who came for you in front of her and that’s just the truth so you know I’m not even exaggerating there.”

Sirius gives a huff/laugh combo; wonder where he learned that. “Well, yeah, but we all would for each other."

“No, but Lily,” Remus tries to emphasize, but fails to prevent a laugh from sneaking out, “would take things outside, do you see what I’m saying?”

Sirius can’t stop, won’t stop the laugh that’s already leaving him. “Sort of a, ‘only I get to rag on him,’ phenomenon,” he raises it.

“Exactly, and same for you, I’d think,” Remus extends.

“Oh, I’d let anyone talk shit about Lily,” Sirius serves him.

Remus’s face goes placid. “You would not.”

“I would so do that,” Sirius maintains.

Remus gives an aggrieved noise before ducking his head down and administering a bite to Sirius’s left pec in retaliation, but it’s the really the most ginger gnawing Sirius has ever experienced on himself so it’s not exactly bone-quaking or anything. “We’re going to move back the clock a little here, put ourselves back in it,” he bids, sticking his chin back where it was, and Sirius follows him back in it. “After all was said and done, she reminded me to breathe, told me to sit on it, and let you cool off a little more before raising the topic again and you'd be much more ready to hear my side out, and it was good that she left it on that note because all of that shift, the whole time, the only thing I wanted to do was talk to you, and when I finally got to, you proved her right without even knowing you did it; you were so good to me and my reasons, but you were still fair to yourself, made sure I knew your role in all of this, and I needed to hear that so good on you for having the stones to say it because it was happening to us and you could have been screaming it at me, but you were so gentle about it.”

Sirius swallows around a fast-forming lump in his throat, studying as many details as he can find, from Remus, his earnest expression and the candid vulnerability to his voice, to the energy in the room, and between them, and above them, and even with all of the miscommunication on that day, his misplaced anger, that perceived rejection that wasn’t much of a rejection at all, none of those things had spooked Remus enough to send him packing, and he thinks, with a sobering breath inward, that's been a deep well of fear in him for as long as he's known Remus.

Sirius puts himself back into the present, as well as the conversation at hand, suddenly well aware that he’s missing stuff Remus is saying while studying himself. “—It’s why I kept pressing her to go to him; actually let him in on it because the moment I heard your voice on that call, I felt leaps and bounds better than I had, and that was before you said anything on the sordid topic,” he gives candidly. “Lily should get to have that moment, too, and she wasn’t going to get that from him while she kept stalling with us, and the thing is, I know she just needed a friend, but I wish she and I were both better at dealing with advances on us than we are because as much as you and I got it together in the end, I know that if I’d just stayed there and talked it out with you instead of leaving, if I’d just listened to you and hadn’t let the spooks wear me down, we’d have made it there without that stressful afternoon; I shouldn’t have run from you or made so many excuses right to your face on why it wouldn’t work, I just left you to stick up for us all on your own and that wasn’t fair to you — I can be so unfair to you.”

Sirius can practically taste the unease rising in his throat. “I’m not going to say that part was a blast, but I was tough as nails on you in there,” he trades him. “I think we need to reframe a little bit and stop undercutting the tally because I didn’t just go at you like a knife once, twice, or three times this summer; it was more than that, and you also hurt me more than once, twice, thrice, and that doesn’t mean there hasn't so much more joy and laughter in comparison to that, but it’s been a hard summer for the both of us and that day was rough, we can just say it, but here's the thing? Sometimes, I do actually need you to question things so that I realize I actually have some of the answers to them, and I needed you to question whether we were ready for that step because I needed to know that we could have been.”

“And we would have been, that’s the worst part,” Remus puts out, coming apart at the seams right in front of him; cheeks reddening, sinuses blocking up, eyes boring into him through a film over them. “We’d have made it work, and I know that because you were a permanent fixture of my flat all of June and it worked — yeah, we fought, we squabbled, but we bickered more than both of those combined and got ourselves back really fucking well, and we had so much fun; it was fun having you there so much, and then when you'd have to go, I'd want you to stay longer so much of the time because you make a room brighter just by being in it. If I’m to accept the way I handled things, and I have to do that because I can't rewind, then I think I might've just needed to know that it would work, but June really told me that it could and if I wasn’t going be away for the fall, I’d revisit your proposal, I really would, so once I’m back, if the offer still stands of course, I’d be open to seeing that through because I really like you — like, I really enjoy you, but in terms of today, of those two, of Lily? The last thing I’d have wanted for her is to regret backing out of something that could be beautiful and I know it’s going to be, they’re going to be fine, they’ll make it work, and it’ll be beautiful whatever way they choose to go, but they should choose it together and then the end result will be worth it either way, you know?”

And this is a lot to contend with, speaking in the most literal terms. Less so that Remus would be this open, this thoughtful, and this retrospective after some time away; that’s par for the course with this lad, but the sentiment, both running through the background like a battery and put up front and centre by Remus himself, that part's got Sirius torn up and stretched thin between two distinct camps, one that has him feeling distraught, cagey, and hurt that he’s only hearing of this now when there’s not a whole lot either of them can do to reverse the course they’re on, and the other has him feeling thrilled, enjoyed by Remus, and all the more hopeful for the new year.

Remus needs his agency, needs to do what he needs to do, go where he needs to go, just like he had to wind up in London and thank Cunt he did have to or they'd have never met, and when he’s back from Paris, he is going to be glowing, looking a few inches taller than he was when he left, and that's reason enough to let him keep on with it; it doesn't have to mean Sirius lost out on what could have been, not when it means he could very well gain tenfold the very moment Remus sets foot back in London.

Every movement feels slowed down, like he’s been made to live in the moment that he reaches his free hand to pull Remus up and in via a firm clasp underneath his chin, and there, he speaks the words between their lips. “Of course the offer still stands, you nut.”

Whatever Remus was going to say is drowned out by a long-overdue kiss, and one that Sirius puts a whole lot of himself into; a blend of regret, gratitude, and hope for what’s to come. As it is, Remus matches that blend with as much fervour as Sirius is giving him, but the moment that stops is the same moment Sirius realizes he’s in the immediate presence of a fully stuffy, weepy Remus, and that won’t do, none whatsoever.

“Hey, no?” he bids, tapping underneath Remus’s chin with the forefinger of the hand still very much holding him in place, aiming to tap those peepers open again for they’re fully screwed shut to match Remus’s pent-up, sordid expression. “This is good, Remus; we’re doing it, absolutely killing it here.”

Remus may be engulfed by some rather violent hiccoughs, but not so violent that he couldn’t make out Sirius’s words, he learns. “I know that, I just wish we could get it right on the first try sometimes,” he laments.

“Well, that’s just unrealistic for both of us,” Sirius puts it; gently but wryly, too.

He presses his smile to Remus’s lips, hopeful he'll feel that smile against him, and he must be able to because the moment the peck is over, Remus’s own lips are twisted up into the mould of an almost-smile, uses Sirius’s bare chest as a place to smush his damp face against for a nuzzle, and lifts his head back up, both mentally and physically shaking himself out by the looks of it. “OK, I’m fine,” he instils, though more to himself than Sirius, it feels. “We should really get going soon; brunch and all.”

Sirius sits still for a few good seconds at least, in very sudden remembrance that in all this time, they’ve been ignoring their brunch plans, and gives into a snicker, dipping his head in to leave a kiss on the tip of Remus’s nose. “We don’t have to go just yet,” he assures. “Take your time, weepyhead.”

Remus sniffs long, looks left, and then back at Sirius with a rather muted expression. “I’m hellaciously hungry, though.”

The raw power that comes with the resulting pfft that leaves Sirius could keep a town lit and thriving for weeks. “Well, in that case,” he grants, leaning in for a lasting peck.

They peel themselves from the bed in turn, wherein Remus goes around the exterior of the bed to get to see to redressing, meanwhile Sirius mostly crawls down the bed and reaches his right arm out past the edge of it. “Hand me those?” he bids, giving grabby hands toward his recently discarded outfit.

Remus looks up from picking his thieved jeans up off of the floor, does a fast look around the area and while the mesh shorts are more easily spottable, he has to tip some of their luggage over before he can find Sirius’s tank sandwiched between two of the duffels. Sirius accepts both newly outstretched items, lays back on the bed to tug his briefs on over his hips, and shimmies into his shorts from there, tugging his shirt over his head, and once that’s done he really doesn’t do much more than lay there waiting for Remus to follow suit.

His mind wanders over to a curious, most elusive place, which only has him indulging in a pat around the bed for his phone. Once he’s found it, he flies his thumbs over the screen, tossing a once-over up at Remus, and since he’s a little preoccupied with righting the inside-out legs on his jeans, Sirius considers this his golden opportunity. He shifts around to lie on his front, propping his forearms on the bed and facing his biggest inspiration head-on. “Just one last thing before we go, but it is crucial,” Sirius alerts him, and it’s even better that Remus gives him a prompt in the form of a hum while he works his jeans up his legs, still very much distracted by the look and sound of it.

He presses play on Simon’s tune and sets his mobile face-up beside him, smiling invitingly as the initial, flagrant horns start up; Remus looks up from tucking himself into his jeans, his mouth twisting right along with his brow. “Really?” he raises, zipping up. “Right now?”

“So here’s the thing,” Sirius prefaces, lifting a vaguely halting hand, “it can either happen in here with just me for the audience or it can happen out there somewhere while a whole bunch of people look on.”

Remus sighs long, fastening his fly. “You’re relentless,” he forwards, stooping to pluck his tank up off of the floor.

“And we know that,” Sirius echoes, setting his chin in his hands. “I’m asking for four minutes of your time that’ll equal out to forty years of joy for me.”

Remus pushes an amused sigh/possible laugh through his nose. “So, one thing we’ll need to remember is that the visuals for this scene in the movie do obscure some of the moves because they’re trying to establish all these POV shots; you know what I mean, right?” he mentions, sticking his hands through to the neck hole of his shirt.

Sirius braces himself, thrilled with this. “No, yes, of course,” he allows, beckoning him to go on.

“And because of that, I sort of had to go off what the dancers were doing whenever I could see them onscreen and then make some of it up whenever I couldn’t,” Remus offers, pulling his shirt over his head as the horns taper out and that jazzy interlude kicks in. “Now, right about here, the dancers are all cartwheeling into frame from afar and end up in the area with all the pillars; do you remember that part?”

Sirius very remembers the cartwheeling, but he thinks he’ll feign ignorance for the thrill of it. “Vaguely, but do you want to show me?” he probes, testing his whole luck.

“No, see, what I was getting at,” Remus keeps on, laughing through it, “is that I could not, cannot, and will not do that, so we’re skipping the cartwheeling unless you want me to break a lamp in here, which I almost did when I gave it a go way back when.”

“I mean, I won’t pretend it wouldn’t be funny,” Sirius returns, grinning ear to ear, “but I love that wee-you even gave it a go way back when and understand why we won’t try that today; go on, King.”

“Right so, here,” Remus offers, holding his arms in a presenting fashion as the chorus begins to sing, “they do a little step here to here, and then a little one of these—”

Sirius watches with extreme delight as Remus does a quick-footed, two-step jig before swelling his arms out as he does a fast twirl-around before heading right back into that previous two-step move. “A little one," he repeats.

Remus doesn’t break his footing, but the laugh he gives up does threaten to trip him up some. “Shh,” he returns, keeping right on. “And then, here, we have one of these important moves—”

Sirius claps his hands over his goon grin, watching with wonder as Remus does another steppity-step manoeuvre before reaching his arms up in the air, doing a quick grabby-hands motion, and pulling his arms down again, only this time he takes his whole body down to the floor to an almost-kneel before he’s back to his full height again to head right back into a new twirl, and it’s all so rehearsed, not a single hitch to it for someone who allegedly barely remembered the routine so many years on.

“And you said you didn’t remember it,” he tosses up.

“Well, you wait, at a certain point I’d just end up bopping in front of the telly because the dancers were doing more acrobatics-inspired moves and I wasn’t about to try any of those moves after the lamp debacle,” Remus extends him, but that’s certainly not the case yet seeing as he’s bopping here, there, everywhere with the sort of coordination that breathes choreography.

Sirius can and will say that there’s a good stretch of time, he wants to say maybe thirty seconds of real-time viewing, where he forgets where he is, what decade they’re in, that they’ve even got plans ahead; none of those details matter just now. “You could have been a dancer, Remus,” he puts down voluminously, fully unable to stave off the outburst as he slaps his right hand down on the bed for emphasis.

Remus doesn’t give a reply with words necessarily, but there are those shoulders doing a quick shimmy that Sirius just knows within himself wasn’t part of the original routine he’s performing; that’s just Remus letting a compliment land without disagreement or sheepishness, so this is an Extended Moment for the both of them, going in the history books as far as Sirius is concerned.

“And here, we have a little jazzy breakdown with a lot of establishing shots spliced in,” Remus addresses, showcasing a bunch of flowery, high-armed, and fast-leg manoeuvres, “so this is more or less what I did while the dancers were off-screen, I think—”

Sirius watches him do a little jigstep situation that coincides with a brief, yet vivid jazz break. “OK, but you could have just said nothing about it and I’d have believed those were the moves without question,” he mentions.

Remus sends him a smile that’s rather wry, runs through a repetition of that step-step-twirl manoeuvre, and faces Sirius once again. “And here, is where the girls really shine with the chorus line routine, but they’re doing these sort of free-style moves that I found difficult to mimic at that age, and there were all these wide-angled shots of other folks doing some more immense cartwheels spliced in between all that, so this is also where I did plenty of my own thing,” he details, popping and locking his whole way through the section.

“And thank Cunt you did,” Sirius lets him have, smirking up a storm behind his hands.

“Mm, I’ll be honest; there was a lot of this,” Remus offers, pumping his hands in the air as he marches about on foot as he follows the song back through the chorus. “No direction, just mayhem.”

“OK, but you were clearly feeling yourself and you kept beat, so,” Sirius returns. “An all-around perfect little detail, thank you.”

A laugh comes along and nearly trips Remus right up, garnering him to point fast at Sirius while he keeps it moving. “Shh, I must concentrate,” he maintains, heading back into what Sirius will now forever coin the ‘steppity-step-before-a-twirl-and-back-around-again-to-step-again-and-repeat’ before addressing the lone but lively audience member once again. “So here, that Simon fella is right up by J-Town, crooning at him—”

“J-J-J-Town?” Sirius stammers, losing his whole, entire shit.

“Mhm, that guy, and mm,” Remus struggles, standing rather still in comparison to all the twirling he’d been doing previously, “there isn’t much in the way of dancing per se — well no, there is plenty of that, but the mass of dancers are doing some flash mob-esque moves all around the two of them, but the focus of the shot is those two lads so I couldn’t quite study the movements properly, but that’s OK because we’re right ahead of my favourite part and that, I know like the back of my hand.”

Sirius breathes in fast, well-remembering Remus advertising this section of the number back as his favourite while they were in the truck and can hardly contain his glee that they’re fast approaching the climax of the whole tune when the build for this one really is something, Sirius'll give it that, and once it kicks in, Remus is moving his feet in double-time, flashing his fingers in the air with a whole horde of jazz hands and twirling every three beats, and even though Sirius knows he’s got to look starry-eyed and utterly transfixed, Remus still feels he’s got to explain himself as if the fact that just he alone performing this isn’t quite up to par.

“It’s of course much more exciting to watch when there’s a group of people doing it and not just one guy, but—”

“Sh-sh-sh-shhh,” Sirius emphasizes, beckoning his hands. “Bring it home, baby.”

Remus gives up in regards to speech, pasting a sunshine smile on his lips and giving himself over to closing out the number, and the sheer amount of twirling happening here is immense for one and more than Sirius could have ever hoped for another, and it’s truly an out-of-body experience seeing it happen live with fully-adult Remus while also being so able to see the mini version of him putting his all into it for it’s so reminiscent of a mini-Sirius taking refuge at Marlene’s house, watching Spice World on the dinky rec room telly and working tirelessly alongside her to memorize every single move of the live performance of ‘Spice Up Your Life,’ and Sirius is overwhelmed by how chuffed he is that wee Remus was permitted to indulge like that in the middle of his den.

Remus strikes one hell of a finishing pose as the song filters out, a little rouge in the face and breathing about as heavy as he was when they finished on a different section of the floor than the one he took over for this. The moment the tune’s over, Sirius hits pause on his screen and scurries off of the bed to practically bowl right into Remus, who recovers rather well considering he was made to catch a traipsing Sirius headed straight for him.

“I literally can’t believe you let me see that,” Sirius puts out, in near shambles over having been gifted this triumph.

“I can’t believe you brought it up again before brunch,” Remus comments, leaning into Sirius for support.

Sirius puts up a little, melodic laugh. “Think of how good that brunch plate will taste after that,” he raises.

“Alright, that was good,” Remus lets him have, breathing heavily. “Strange way to learn I’m out of shape, mind.”

Sirius leans over and in, pressing a whole pfft over Remus’s left ear so he’ll surely hear it. “That bed says you’re doing just fine,” he puts down, but then he rather realizes the angle he could have here. “'Course, there’s always Zumba if ever you did want to—”

“I don’t think I’m quite at the point of having a whole group of well-toned babes watching me try and fail to keep up with them, but thank you,” Remus forwards him.

And that’s an interesting collection of words right there, ones that give the impression that there may just be a time when Remus could actually take the offer up, and Sirius looks over Remus’s left shoulder toward the mirror on the wall there and meets his own, wide-eyed gaze in it; he can’t get too excited in case he’s gone and read the moment wrong, but he has to celebrate hearing that distinction because that sure wasn’t a full-on no and commit the moment to memory in a concrete way.

“Well, in that case, I do have a whole playlist worth of Zumba routines I could continue to show you,” he puts up, slipping back from Remus to see him better. "Considering you’ve already learned two of them and I just watched you do a whole ass dance number on your own just there, you cannot possibly convince me that we couldn’t get you to learn the other numbers on the list, and then you just wait for how toned you’d be getting.”

Remus’s eyes, dare Sirius even say it, avert past Sirius’s shoulder line and then land back on his gaze before those lips of his do a substantial twitch. “Can you teach me the one for "Toxic?'” he raises, putting his head on a right-hanging tilt with a new smile on.

Sirius steps all the way back from Remus, pressing his hands together in a prayer motion and resting his fingertips up against his lips, eyes falling shut as he chooses not just to be in this moment in time, but to breathe it, to be it even, and that just has Remus hooting from behind Sirius’s eyelids. “Shh, no, shh,” he puts up. “I’m memorizing the moment.”

All Sirius can hear in front of him are a series of smirks that come before a kiss to his lips and that does feel like a seal of approval of sorts. “OK, you do that, I’m going to visit the loo before we go,” Remus relays, giving Sirius’s left wrist a quick, parting squeeze.

Sirius blinks his eyes open, looks over his shoulder in time to catch a glimpse of Remus tapering off into the bathroom, and lowers his hands out of their prayerful position, tracing the fingertips of his right hand over his left wrist and feeling out the lingering imprint of Remus's touch; it’s all just baby steps until it’s a leap.

Notes:

the idea that these updates provide even a little serotonin for y'all is so cool, thanks for sticking around!

Chapter 31: 31.

Chapter Text

Sirius can confidently say that he feels ninety-six percent complete as he traipses up the hill, and fair enough, he thinks, when he’s got a variety of reasons to be. He’s got his man on his right, a substantially large and phallic-shaped relic made of whitened stone up ahead and firmly in their crosshairs, his hair in a bun to keep a fresh breeze going on the back of his neck and a pair of solid black sunnies on, a combo that’s got him feeling rather Hepburn-inspired up top while feeling easy, breezy in his infamously comfy/casual shorts down below, his nose filled with the combined scents of green, green grass, hordes of sunscreen, and a hint of industrial bug repellent, and every step that he makes has him feeling as though he’s gliding along the grass rather than walking.

Of course, perfection is subjective and completion is difficult to come by, but nevertheless, this feels pretty damn close at least to Sirius. His stomach his delightfully full from the extensive fruit plate he devoured at brunch, his eyes a little hazy and head a little fuzzy from the mimosas, and that boy of his has been an all-around dote since they left their room; he didn’t complain at all when Sirius slipped their waitress his card to pay the brunch tab, he's been keeping close by him ever since they left the truck back at the lot a little ways away from the harbour, toting Sirius’s bag o’ cherries along in his left hand as a visual reminder that they’d better get to snacking on them before they spoil, and he’s been periodically brushing up against Sirius’s left arm while they walk and each time he bumps him again, Sirius’s skin takes to yet another sing-and-tingle manoeuvre. The only (and he means Only) real complaint that could be lodged, and therefore knock a few points off of a score of one hundred, would be that said boy has conditioned Sirius to wait at least an hour more to even think about grabbing a coffee from anywhere, citing a deep reservation for the mere idea of him adding coffee to the melangé of booze and fruit steeping in his stomach.

But really, even while effectively barred from caffeine for the next while, Sirius ought to be adding two extra points to his initial sum simply for the fact that this is just Remus’s way of looking out for him, so he’ll go ahead and call himself and this wistful moment in time a ninety-eight percent as far as completion goes.

He accelerates his speed to take on the incline of the hill, gape/grinning at the massive dick at the top of it as he pulls his mobile out from his right pocket, intent on capturing such a specimen. The last ruins they traipsed through, which Remus, a prolific sometimes-area man, called 'the Porthgain Quarries,' had a lot more people milling about them and there was certainly good reason for the area was home to a number of certifiably ancient-looking and red-bricked buildings that looked, at least to him because he’s new here, as though they’d been airlifted into the area at some point over time and dropped onto a cliff by the sea; they were just that suddenly there in the middle all this blue and all this greenery. Exploring those massive hunks of brick had Sirius feeling excited in the way he gets about relics of a different time and he does get quite a thrill over a chance to explore, but in the same breath, those honking, towering, age-old walls had him feeling small in the way that he likes; it's a hair away from that unavoidable, youthful feeling he gets when he thinks about being little more but a speck on a giant rock floating in space, but this relic? This massive ode to dick staring back at him, that's Sirius feeling pretty damn young for a completely other reason.

He hangs back a step or two from where Remus soon stops to wait for him, turning sidelong to watch Sirius holding his mobile at an angle to get the full extent of the incredible relic up ahead in one shot. “That’s it, mhm,” he goads, left eye shut tight as he takes shot after shot of the statue as if it were a high profile model in and of itself, “yes, gimme that; now over the shoulder and, boom.”

Remus snorts, shifting his weight off of his left foot to put it all onto his right one; he’s got a wry smile aimed back at Sirius, the bag of cherries perched easily in his right hand, his right brow cocked to match the outward jut of his right hip, and with him looking that good, it's enough to rival the specimen looming ahead of them, easily. Sirius turns the camera a little to the left, framing that picturesque boy in the left-hand side of the shot while keeping the statue firmly in place on his right. “Hold that face,” he bids, hovering his right thumb over the trigger and snapping the photo. Brimming with anticipation, he inspects the resulting shot before all the others and swipes back through to the rest as he heads for Remus first, the big ole dick second. “Yours is the best of the bunch; you look ravishing in it.”

Remus hums three distinct notes in thanks as he swings around to fall into step with him. “You should come here with my dad sometime,” he mentions.

“I mean, I agree,” Sirius puts up through a laugh, making sure that point is highlighted ahead of whatever the context may be, “but tell me why you’re having the thought.”

Remus works his mouth around a pointed smile, reaching into the bag of cherries being held to him and pulling a bright, fat cherry out of it. “Last time we were out here he pointed to that from way back in the distance and went, ‘Get to the pecker—'”

A bark so forceful leaves Sirius’s throat that it turns a predominant amount of heads toward the origin of the noise, but Sirius can’t possibly help that; he’s just heard Remus’s impression of Lyall doing an impression of Schwarzenegger, he’s done for.

Remus, faux-dignified lad that he is, sniffs innocuously and pops the cherry into his mouth, resuming a polite, touristy air about him as he meanders along beside Sirius, who’s currently trying to remain upright and keep up through a fit that's very nearly knocking him sideways. “Do you think he’d appreciate it if I spray painted ‘I love Lyall Lupin’ onto the dick?” he raises.

Remus smirks around his cherry, turning his head to the side and ducking down to send the pit to the ground with as inconspicuous a spit-shot as possible. “He might for a second before reality set in,” he offers back, effectively changing the subject by latching onto Sirius’s wrist and tugging him along. “Come on; we should get a selfie with the dick while we’ve got the chance.”

Sirius forces his hooting to come out muted, following along both dutifully and a little surprised Remus put that idea out there, but by Cunt, Sirius going to snatch that opportunity, speeding up and readjusting his left hand so that he’s the one tugging Remus up the hill. Compared to the red-bricked relic, this one only has a handful of people milling about the clearing at the base of it, the rest of the area meanderers either in the distance behind them or further beyond the massive ode to the male appendage. The closest assembly of people to them looks to be a family, made up of a ma, pa, and two young boys running circles around the structure while the folks hang back a little, the bloke off taking landscape shots of the water while the woman stands around, fanning herself with some sort of pamphlet.

She turns a bit toward them as Sirius arrives on the scene with Remus in tow and an outstretched mobile in his free hand, must read the signs for what they rather are for she makes a single call to the boys to beckon them back, and impressively, the older of the two breaks rank and switches the course of their circular route, running over nearer to her with the littler tyke following along behind.

Sirius gives the lady the quick, flash of a smile, feeling she’s owed one for clearing the immediate area for prime picture-taking and turning his attention back to the looming structure at hand. He stalls a few steps back from the base of the shaft, sorting out where they're going to have to stand in order to get both them and the dick in the picture. He swivels around, nods his head to the side to signal for Remus to slip in beside him, and in he comes, turning to face the raised mobile. Getting a look at the shot they’ve got to work with, Remus takes a quick step to the left, helping to let the looming statue into the middle of the two of them, and from there, he hunches down a tad to match heights, and Sirius reaches his free arm over his shoulders to hold him in place, gleeful about all of this as he pulls a breath in.

The two put on a couple of immense grins and Sirius snaps the photo, exhaling warmly as he looks over the result on-screen. “James is gonna shit,” he says of it.

“Shh, shh,” Remus tries for, low down on his register and rather marred by a smirk, and that's Sirius a right goner.

Head ducked through his mirth, he missed the moment the lady must've decided to approach for she's right in front of him when Sirius looks up again, her hand outstretched. “Here, let me,” she offers, and Remus’s reaction mirrors Sirius’s to a near T; shoulders up, heads perked brightly, semi-goon-grins on that illustrate plainly to Sirius that the moment they’ve moved on from here, they’ll be hooting and hollering over some mum offering to take a photo of them with an exceedingly large, rather inarguably phallic statue.

For now, though, there’s a pleasant, helpful air about her that has the situation feeling rather pure considering, and Sirius hands his mobile over to her with a quick thanks. Now that she’s up close, he would have to put her in the realm of her late twenties, early thirties at most, and for that, he has a certain feeling that if she were much older, he might've felt compelled to help her along with the interface of his camera settings, but he pretty well leaves her to it when she does seems rather comfortable with her freelance photography job as she takes a few good steps back and studies them through the screen.

“Ready?” she checks, camera at the ready, her boys back behind her and poking at her legs.

The two of them hum their respective forms of affirmation through their grin, taking a straight-forward, otherwise innocuous shot before Sirius feels inspired to lean into the bit since they’re here and they’ve got a makeshift photographer at their disposal; might as well get their opportunity’s worth. He reaches his left arm up, curling his hand over the line of Remus’s right shoulder, and leans back and little bit away from Remus's frame, casting his right hand lightly across his forehead and infusing all that he remembers from his ANTM days into his pose. For a bloke who tends to stick to standing still and smiling for photos, hamming it up for the camera is a relatively unusual phenomenon for one Remus Lupin, but Sirius is more than happy to report that the lad curls his right arm around the back of Sirius's waist more to keep him from landing clear on his arse should his legs give out on him than leaning into the bit, but that's no matter; Remus's intrinsic need to keep his relative safety in mind strikes again, Sirius’s skin is singing for it all the same, and this is going to be twice as powerful a shot now.

The woman holding his mobile gives a little trill from over there for that one, garnering Sirius to look over her way and find her evidently amused while those boys of hers sit collapsed on the grass by her feet, looking bored as all hell, and now he's twice as amused as he’d already been. “Alright, one more?” she bids.

Sirius lifts out of his pose, inadvertently squeezing Remus’s shoulder appreciatively since it’s already in his palm, and takes in a lungful of saltwater particles and fresh, open air, the wheels in his head turning as he considers his options here; they’ve got traditional down, they’ve got modelesque out of the way, now what? Something goofy for certain, but how goofy exactly?

He has a quick look back at the statue but gets wholeheartedly distracted by Remus, who seems to have clocked that he's been holding onto a bag of cherries this whole time and doesn’t seem too sure about it anymore judging by his wonky expression. “What do I—” he starts, cutting off with a huff-laugh followed by a funky little hand movement with the bag perched on his left palm before simply deciding it best to hide it behind his back for the duration of the final photo, and Sirius finds himself unable; unable to thwart a bork from leaving him, unable to still his shaking shoulders, and especially unable to help the urge to plant a warm, wet kiss on the side of Remus’s jaw for the quality theatrics coming from him, and very suddenly, it seems that the best photo they could've had out of the bunch never got taken for Sirius's mobile is being held out to him rather woodenly while the woman stays, mm, about as far back as she can manage it for the exchange.

Sirius takes it back from her automatically, rendered quite still as she beckons her boys up from the ground and carts them off down the hill toward the man still taking some apparently rockin’ landscape shots over there. He holds his mobile limply, staring after the boys being herded off, and catches a moment of some high-alerted curiosity on the oldest boy's face before the lady takes to holding the backs of their heads firmly in the opposite direction; it’s heartbreaking, far too familiar, and about every other feeling currently washing over him, matching up quite well with the rolling tides hitting shore behind and all around them.

He wonders for a moment, blocking out all the wires in his brain firing off at once to locate one, true moment of clarity, what this could have looked like from an outsider’s perspective, if some altruistic onlooker might suggest that, no, actually, Sirius was the one misrepresenting the situation, projecting onto it even, that it might not have been that and he shouldn’t go assuming anything, but in truth, and Sirius feels that truth in every corner of his body, if she’s herding her kids off as fast as she can from the two of them, all for a warm, sloppy, and supremely dorky kiss from one bloke to another, there's really no mistaking that for anything other than a mix of disgust and fear; if he knows well, he can name it just as.

The only real part of his body he can move just now seems to be his eyes for those hang left while he stays rooted in place, a lot like that statue that was much funnier a minute ago. He holds his gaze on Remus, aiming to check on how he’s doing, but Remus crosses in front of him, putting himself in Sirius’s immediate view, and in doing that, substantially blocking out the area past them, his lips etched into a deep frown, and suddenly, very suddenly, even with Remus’s efforts to make this a moment that’s just theirs without all the other details surrounding them, being this avidly checked in on does have Sirius feeling exposure from all sides.

He lifts his shoulder listlessly, forcing himself to remember that having the mic stand when Remus is the sole audience isn't equivalent to having the world listening in on him. “Told you I’m not a robot,” he offers, going for his crooked grin though he knows it’s a poor imitation of it.

It wasn’t all that loud or even particularly enunciated, so it’d be a small miracle if Remus heard him over the other sounds going off around them, and even in the seconds that hang between them after he's said it, Sirius can't say if Remus did hear it. He watches him take the time to scope out the area around them, take in the sounds of laughter and chit-chat from meanderers milling about the area and getting closer and closer with each second, sounds of the rushing sea in the near-distance, a boat toot-tooting out on the water and starting up a chain reaction from other boats floating around out there, and turns back with a face that suggests he’s holding quite a distaste for all this noise just now.

“Come on,” Remus bids, reaching to grab hold of Sirius’s left wrist with his free hand.

He leads him away from the statue that’s not that funny anymore, but much more than that, he’s getting Sirius away from the oncoming company and presumably toward someplace more secluded, and for that, Sirius is grateful; if he’s going to be blocking out various memories of being dragged away from anybody deemed too fey from as early as age seven, he’d rather be moving in a forward motion, en route to something better than standing still.

Remus leads him back down the hill in the opposite direction they came from, giving Sirius a complete view of open water while he’s being guided along the shore and back toward the harbour that way, so Remus’s plan does seem to be to loop back around toward the way they came, just via a route with far fewer people milling about on it, good lad, but it takes a couple of minutes of uninterrupted walking for Sirius to figure out where exactly he’s being taken to. On their left, sitting proudly on the opposite side of the harbour from them, sits the same area they explored quite a bit of earlier; the gargantuan brick wall that looms over all the action with those massive window arches cut out of them that Sirius nearly tripped over himself just to scurry up and get to stand inside of for a few seconds, the little white cottage to the right of the wall, sitting pretty and overlooking the waterfront that the two of them traipsed past on the way up there and pretended was their home for about forty lovely seconds or so, and that enormous grey stone wall shaped quite like a horseshoe and welcoming boaters to shore that Remus pointed down at from above and said, in the world's most a charming, informative little voice, is home to the elusive secret beach at certain times of the day, and it's all still so beautiful to look at even from over here, but Sirius can’t imagine they’re going all the way around the whole harbour just to get back over there, not unless Remus is in the market for a trek and he can’t imagine that’s the case just now.

Remus cuts him out of his thoughts by leading him diagonally off the path and onto the grass, heading them toward the equally enormous grey stone wall on their side of the harbour, only this one isn't shaped like a horseshoe so much as it sticks out straight into the water as a wooden pier might, only this would be the mightiest pier in existence the way it stands taller-than-tall above sea level, and all in all, Sirius can’t agree more with it as a viable spot; it’s quite secluded, they’ve got the open waterway off on their far right that smells and sounds incredible from here, they've got a harbour that’s sprawling enough to be left of them, to the right of them, straight across the way, and exactly where they’re standing all at once, and they've got plenty of distance between them and the more hoppin’ side of it.

Remus makes a low noise of warning as he steps off of the grass and onto the stone wall. “No dangling your legs off of this thing, and you’re to be careful walking on it because if you fall in there, I’m coming in after you and we’ll both be in some trouble,” he states, pointing toward Sirius with his free forefinger and tapping him with it, "but, I doubt anyone's going to wander onto this thing while we're sitting up here, so there is that going for it.”

“I’ll be careful,” Sirius echoes, bowing his head once and moving to sit in the direct middle of the wall so that there’s plenty of excess width on all sides of him.

Remus takes a seat on his left only after Sirius has himself fully situated, unzips the bag of cherries, and leaves it open over his lap, tipping his chin down toward it to illustrate that it’s there should Sirius want a comfort cherry, and all-around Remus is just making good decision after good decision, as far as Sirius is concerned, he's just not there yet. He nods in thanks, swipes one out of the bag, and holds onto it for when he'll find it in him to chow down, offering up a tight smile at Remus while the muscles in his jaw haven’t quite caught up with the warmth in his cheeks just yet, but they’ll follow along in time; he has to think they will, anyway.

Sirius takes in another long breath, taking in clean air and water particles. “I’m sorry,” he offers.

“Why are you even sorry?” Remus puts up.

Sirius lifts his hands woefully, but the cherry goes straight out of his right one and rolls along the stone structure until it tumbles over the edge, plunging into the depths. The two of them stare in its wake before glancing sidelong at each other with some firmly-pressed lips about them, and then they’re succumbing to a tiny, shared fit while Remus sets about putting a new cherry in Sirius’s right palm that he will now be holding onto a little tighter than he did the last one.

“Because I’d have liked to have been able to be there for you in that moment, but I couldn’t because it hit me fucking sideways,” Sirius explains, trying to get back on track.

“Well, I know that,” Remus offers up, “but the truth is, the face you made hurt a lot more to see than hers did, for me at least.”

Sirius’s brows go up while the corners of his lips pull down. “That’s saying a lot,” he raises, picking a boat just leaving the harbour to stare at.

“Mhm, it is,” Remus echoes, leaning his right shoulder up against Sirius’s left one. “So, I think I’ve an idea of what happened back there, but I’d rather just open up the floor for you so I don’t get ahead of you or worse, put you in an even lower spot if I’m wrong about it.”

Sirius takes in a quick breath only to puff that one out of his cheeks right quick again. “Well, those were two energetic if eventually bored tykes that got hauled away from the gay, so if your line of thinking was that I couldn’t help but travel back in time to when that older boy would've been me and the younger one would've been Reg, then you’d be right,” he extends, nodding slowly.

“I had that sense, yes,” Remus accepts, giving a slow nod of his own with it, and Sirius isn’t sure whether he’s just that predictable or whether Remus has just figured him and his tendencies out.

“Projection much?” Sirius offers wanly, shooting himself in the chest just to get the words out of there, and Remus pushes a steamed breath through his nose, going for a shake of the head that's about as slow as the nod he'd given him prior and patching up Sirius’s chest wound without having to say a word. “It just happens so fast sometimes, you know? Like, a while ago, I'm talking weeks back now, I saw this little, little kiddo knock over their tiny drink at the shop; makes sense, right, that’s a kid thing to do, they’re still figuring out how to do basic tasks with their dough-hands, but then I saw the mum flip her shit right there in the café and it was like I was right back there again, you know, where messes followed me pretty well everywhere I went and thus, so did that shrill voice if she were home, and it's like I've been shot at close range every time that sort of thing happens.”

“Right, and it would feel like that, given what you just said,” Remus offers him. "You've personal experience with it."

“Right, but from the outside looking in,” Sirius puts it. “I mean, I don’t know what kind of day she was having; I don’t know if that drink spillage was the last of the straws and I just happened to witness the moment where the camel’s back broke, you know? But because of where I’ve come from, my first instinct is to hate the mother and side with the kid, and I know that’s projection — it’s projection-101, and extremely short-sighted, at that.”

“Well, we all do that kind of thing, though,” Remus puts up. “Some people seeing that might side with the mother first, especially if they're a parent themselves, right, and at the very least you know that not every mother you see out there is going to be like yours was; you’ve just demonstrated to me just now that you know there's nuance to be had here, but you can't help where your head goes in the moment, you can't help that the situation we just left hit too close to home for you, and of course it would, projection is imminent in this case, isn’t it? That was fucking rude, Sirius; that lady’s fucking rude and I’m sensing your mum wasn’t a peach out in public either.”

Sirius sends out a lustrous pfft. “No, she was not,” he echoes. “In the early days, when we hadn’t been fully indoctrinated yet, just bible stories about the ark, J-town cursing a fig tree for all eternity because it wouldn’t bear a fruit just for him during the off-season — the usuals, you know.”

Remus snorts once, nodding for it. “Sure, yeah."

“Socially, though, we were getting whole lessons on who to avoid on the street as early like, seven? Maybe even earlier and I just don’t have the memories of it, but I sure remember getting hauled up the street as early as first grade and turning back all confused because I couldn’t figure out what danger was and whether I needed to be scared, and it was just two blokes, holding hands up the street; like, what was it to her anyway, and what was it to me, even? I might not’ve noticed them if she hadn’t run me off, hm?” Sirius puts up, giving a plain shrug-and-smile combo. “And it wouldn’t just be strangers walking by either, it’d be things like demanding for a different teller at the bank and waiting until we left to tell me the one she first got had too-wiry a set of wrists and moved them with a bit too much swish for her liking, or it was making a stink to admin because the Enriched English courses in primary school were planned out and headed by a faculty member that, rumour had it, went home to his husband at the end of the work day, the scandal of it all, and don’t even get me started on her opinions on femininity and men being in the same sentence because good, sweet Cunt, it was her least favourite topic on her list, and also one of her biggest obsessions; weird, right?”

Remus kept his face appropriately pointed during most of that expulsion, but right about that last line is where his lips start a-twitching. “I mean,” he raises, once he’s aware Sirius is done for the moment, that is, “I’m happy to get you started on it if it’ll help.”

“Well, strap in, boy,” Sirius returns him, winding up to knock his left shoulder against Remus’s right one. “It wasn't just her, it’s the whole of the Black family crest, every one of them save for a couple special cases had some rigid expectations for appearances, but she took it to a whole other level; I don’t think I saw her wear trousers once in her life, it was always dress after dress after dress after dress, my father it was suit after suit after suit, even on hols, never saw the man wear so much a polo, and then, at family parties, functions, events like that, it’d be all the women dressed in gowns and the men all in tuxes, but then Alphard would turn up, and he was the only one who could get away with showing up once a year to a function, I swear, and he’d always be in some eccentric blouse or with spunky pair of shoes for a little zest, maybe because he knew it’d get ‘em all riled up, I don’t know, but he was the only actual colour in the room on the nights that he showed, and whatever grace my mother managed to give him to his face was always lost on the drive home where she would rip him to shreds because, apparently, to her and more, jewellery, frilly lapels, and funky, patterned blouses were never to be seen on a man’s body.”

“Oh, no no no,” Remus trills. “Never, indeed.”

“Now, men could wear a brisk black, navy, or grey wristwatch with the price point of the downpayment on a mortgage,” Sirius passes along, popping the cherry into his mouth finally. “That was encouraged, even.”

“Ah, yes, of course,” Remus echoes, nodding primly.

“But thassit,” Sirius maintains, taking time to separate the pit from the rest before lampooning it off into the depths below, swallowing down the rest. “I remember at one of those functions, they’d thrown it at Andromeda’s house and she got just as bored as I did at those things, probably more back then ‘cause she was into her teens and had seen more of them than I, but that one evening, she snuck me up to her room while everyone else was down in the ballroom, where she dolled me right up with her secret Covergirl stash, and of course, Walburga came hunting for me, all but kicked the door down because I guess she must have smelt something potentially fruity going on upstairs, and then came the whole, entire fit she had over it because her eldest son was, 'looking like a ladyman.'”

Remus huffs long, making an imposed expression with his face. “All that over a little blush?” he raises.

“Oh, honey, no; I looked like I was about to walk the stage at my first drag show, but that was the goal; my big cousin wanted to doll me up and I wanted to get dolled,” Sirius extends him. “And doll me up she did, m’kay, and there I was, holding Andromeda’s handheld mirror to inspecting the work that’d been done on my visage and thinking I looked a pretty little thing, and the next minute I’m being dragged out of there and having my face scrubbed raw to get the products off; like she saw into the future in that moment and was determined to kill the premonition before it came true, but you know what, it didn’t work, I just found ways around her bullshit, and look at me now?”

“Leather gay one day, grunge gay the next, prettyboy on the one after that, and you don’t even seem to think about it more than you have to,” Remus sizes it up, smiling warmly over at him.

Sirius taps the tip of his nose in acceptance, humming a two-tone note with it. “Mhm, and no thanks to her,” he cements. “The theatrics she'd put on about it just made no sense to me, and she was lucky one of her kids wound up spouting her bullshit later on, but that wasn’t going to be me; I was always going to find an outlet elsewhere and thank Cunt I did because who the fuck knows where I’d be now if all I had was her rhetoric to go on.”

“I have ideas, but nowhere good,” Remus echoes, leaning into Sirius’s frame.

“Dead or complexes out the wazoo, and I’ve enough of those now, thanks much,” Sirius delivers. “I just lived this double-life there for a while, had Marlene’s to go to, and her parents are solid gold; didn’t care that we’d memorize the routines from pop music videos for hours on end, didn’t care that we’d come down for dinner with two sets of painted nails, didn’t care that I’d pick through her costume chest with her and swish around that house like a little princess—”

“Well, that I like,” Remus puts in, his lips shaped into a little bow.

Sirius smirks, thinking of the home Marlene came from and sighing heartily. “Yeah, her mum was some sort of gallery owner but for like, absurdist art — hence what Marlene has become,” he mentions, snorting in response to Remus’s own snort, “and her dad did some sort of freelance screenwriting, so their friend group was just chock-full of gays so nothing I was ever going to do around there would've had them blinking an eye — ‘course, I didn’t know it at the time, I was just over at a mate’s house, but that was the vibe of the place, you know? The come-as-you-are mentality was just nothing like I’d been fed at home, and I owe them a lot for just giving me a place to explore that side because really, it just prepared me for all the separation of home and school I was only going to have to do a ton of going into secondary.”

Remus sniffs primly there, hanging his head a bit. “I mean, I wish there hadn’t needed to be such a separation for you, but I’m grateful you had places to go with some colour in it,” he offers.

“Mhm, and I needed it,” Sirius echoes. “Once I'd hit secondary, I had Marlene’s and James’s to disappear to, and I'm sure you can just imagine how those two would just hype that side of me up even more whenever they got the chance to see it, but they were just angels about it, so much so that when I pitched that we should go as the Sailor Scouts for l’alloween one year, it was destiny; they knew as well as I did that it had to be done.”

“When?” Remus puts down, enunciated and determined.

Sirius grins a lot like the ten-year-old tyke seeing his dolled-up face in Andromeda’s mirror did. “Year nine, babey,” he shares.

Remus sputters wildly for it. “How am I only hearing about this now?” he demands.

“Boy, there are years worth of group costumes to go through, OK?” Sirius puts it. “We take l’alloween very seriously and always have.”

“Well, that much, I knew,” Remus says of that. “I knew about the Power Rangers, saw the Spice Girls obviously, but what were you doing even leaving out the Sailor Scouts tidbit; which one were you?”

Sirius hangs his head to the side with a frank smile on. “Jupiter, c’mon now,” he extends him, and Remus's whole face lights up so Sirius can only imagine how lit up those eyes are. “James was Mercury, Marlene was Mars, and a couple of her girlies carried the flank, but trust me, the execution was flawless and so were the boots.”

“There better be photographic evidence of this,” Remus puts down.

“Somewhere, there is,” Sirius assures. “I’ll see if Marlene’s got some; she usually has the evidence for just about anything we did.”

“Well, I’ll be waiting,” Remus says of it.

Sirius taps the tip of his nose as a signal that this is understood. “Now, see, my mother would usually find out about the costumes after the fact, but it would get back to her eventually, either through a member of admin or, later on, through the mole in our house himself, and of course, it would always go over terribly as I was being seen in skirts and heels more often than I wasn’t on that particular holiday, but I was slowly gaining power every day from elsewhere, losing it at home, gaining it back elsewhere, and losing it again at home,” he details, moving the cherry in his hand back and forth for each fluctuation, “but she knew she was losing, I know she did, and it’s a wonder that she didn’t hold me down and chop off all my hair sooner because let me tell you, she hated seeing long hair on a man and she made sure to tell me it routinely until she didn’t have to anymore because I was suddenly making sure to keep it extra short to avoid a repeat occurrence.”

Looking back at Remus there is phenomenally similar to looking up at him post-funeral and post-rage out, nursing Sirius’s knuckles back from the bloody brink; the tightness in his jaw, the shortness of breath, the rouge tint to his ears, and the only difference here is that Remus isn’t speaking gravelly about the way Sirius’s mother could crush his self-expression under her thumb if motivated enough, but he doesn’t have to, it’s there on his face and it’s there in the air between them.

“I don’t even know those people, but I don’t want those boys to be in for all of that,” Sirius puts up, needing to fill the silence even if he knows what it’s for. “And maybe they’re not, you know? Maybe they’ll grow up and learn to tune their mum out when she starts having a go at the gays ruling the streets, maybe they’ll turn further and further away from that mindset with the more queer people they meet, but that’s the nicest idea, isn’t it? At the very least, they’re in for a lot of that same mindset trickling down to them, and that—” he loses steam for a moment when he doesn’t know how to word it exactly, but he finds strength in the nudge Remus gives him, “—I mean, she and the bloke were, what, late twenties, early thirties?”

Remus nods there, lifting his right shoulder. “Something like that, yeah,” he echoes, his throat sounding bare.

“Right, and most of the time, I can just fly the 'V' at old fogies for trying to tell me how to look and act, who I can smooch and when I can do it, or the middle-aged folks that get all up in arms about preserving the purity of the children and just decide that they can’t possibly be made see more love, not that kind of it, not this gratuitous display, but for a couple of young parents?” Sirius puts up. “You know, you want to think we’re the generation that’s going to change things, but you see that shit and how are you supposed to see it getting any better? And she was nice! Genuinely, she was a nice woman, but all I had to do was kiss you for a second and there went the pleasantries.”

“Not even the hubba-hubba kind either,” Remus raises. “I mean, I was happy to have been given it, but it was an off-centre peck while you were in the middle of laughing; where are my pearls?”

“That was a kiss in thanksgiving for your entire being, and don’t you forget it,” Sirius trades him. “You're right though, all she saw were two blokes being a goofy, but it’s as if I'd been rawing you against the statue for how fast she got her kids out of there; us smooching is no fucking different than them smooching or seeing a man and woman smooch on the street, but I bet you that mum doesn’t run her kids the other way when they walk past that.”

Remus hums in a deep-seated agreement. “Mhm, and you can’t flip it around on them either,” he raises. “Can’t raise a child to hate the straight kids right back; you’d have your door beat down.”

Sirius reaches over and sends a series of intent pats to Remus’s right knee. “Mhm, mhm; tit for tit doesn’t work because these people will never and don't want to understand what they’re doing to people like us,” he returns. “If I went around making noises and pulling faces at straight people kissing in front of my face, I’d get thought of as a man whose marbles are all jumbled up, but for some reason, some odd, curious reason, people like her only get a fraction of the shit we’d get if we even tried acting like they do for a change, and then when we do mess around, say shit like 'no straights allowed; this a gay event only, straights go home,' then all of sudden, we’re the ones not being inclusive and welcoming to them; oh no, not the people we offend just by existing near them? I sure worry about their feelings in all of this.”

Remus smirks, wiping his right wrist past his mouth. “And then there’s the faux-supportive stance, where if they’re fine with us existing, they’ll just flip the whole thing around on us and say, 'nobody cares if you're gay anymore; shut up, stop talking about it, and quit forcing it on us,' as if nobody actually cares,” he attests. “I'd fucking love it if that were the case, but people like that seem to be living in an entirely different world than I do if they actually believe that."

“Mhm, or they think we’re the ones demanding too many things at once,” Sirius trades him. “'Oh, I sure hope you’re not thinking about having any of that pride shit floating around in you because June’s over, honey, and you need to move on; we let you have so much, you’ve a whole month, Drag Race, and a gay character played by some straight actor on primetime, what more do you want?

“Way too many of those pesky human rights, that’s what,” Remus sends back, and Sirius’s eyes may as well be replaced with a pair of stars for how lit up they are.

“And then, there’s the mindset that we have to align to their image of us; the people who consider themselves supportive, fine with seeing us represented in the mainstream, but it has to come with a specific of parameters to follow,” Sirius details. “No queer joy to be celebrated, no no no; in their minds, we hate ourselves and what we are, so what they expect to see from us is our sorrow and they're not so comfortable seeing anything else.”

“Oh, yeah, and then the people in the big chairs, the showrunners,” Remus takes it from there, "they'll consider themselves brave for taking on storylines that have us in them, but the majority of them appear to only want a license to exploit our pain for angst points and ratings because they can’t allow us even a sliver of happiness portrayed or else, what, queer or questioning people out there might actually see something valuable in a lifestyle that the suits are just barely allowing them to even see? Seems like solid critical thinking skills to me, I don’t know about you.”

Sirius breathes in long. “I know I love you, that’s what,” he shares, needing that stated.

Remus huffs a small laugh, but those lips of his are at a twist. “And then, in the entirely opposite way, if we’re not completely avoided or gawked at on the street, we’re these beacons of hope and light for people, so they see two boys or two girls holding hands on the sidewalk and they stop and go, ‘aww, love is love; yaaaaaaas,’ as if that’s at all appropriate,” he expresses, smiling big and tight. “I know my love is love, I’m feeling that daily so I don’t really need you to be yelling that at me, random person; I'd really just like to exist without you in my face about this, but that's just too much to ask.”

Sirius looks up, down, and around them very quickly. “Wait, has that happened to us?” he checks.

Remus lets his expression go rather tight. “It happened to me on my way into the café earlier,” he shares. “I’ve seen it happening to other people out in the wild, but yeah, I experienced it rather personally just a few hours ago.”

“Oh, no, Remus,” Sirius returns, picturing that outlet parking lot and the people he saw milling about the strip, but none were near them where they parked. “I checked; I checked all around us, and nobody was anywhere near.”

Remus gives him another pointed nudge. “I was watching you check,” he extends, swishing the point of his lips for a beat or two from there. “There’s not much for it, really; she must have seen the whole thing from inside or at least caught the tail end of it because I couldn’t get into the shop without hearing about how my love is real — did you know our love is real, Sirius?”

It takes a ton of self-imposed strength to pass on by Remus’s polite ‘tude. “Well, I wish you’d have said as much,” Sirius frowns, thinking of all the space he took up on the drive over here. “I wouldn’t have swallowed your face if I’d known we were being peeped at from a distance.”

“No, see, I didn't know that either, and by the time I got back to you, I’d pretty well told myself they meant well with it because I’m sure they did mean well, but since we’re already here talking about parts that suck hard about all of this, I have to say, I don’t love feeling like we’re zoo animals either,” Remus offers for it. “I’ll take that over a slur any day obviously, and at least she was happy to have seen a couple of boys macking on each other out in the wild, but until it gets more normal to see that out and about, I know we’re going to be in for coos on the street if we’re just walking hand-in-hand, let alone macking on each other; would I rather a smile? Sure thing. Would I like to be able to go somewhere with you, lean in for a smooch, and not receive a commotion at all? Of course I would, this is me, but for the most part, I really would just like to be able to walk along, your hand in mine, and not have to hear a word about it either way, like most couples get to.”

Sirius sighs long, knowing Remus made more sense in that whole spiel than he has, but his point wasn’t made whether he was terrible about formulating it or not. “It’s just — I’m seeing the ways you’re just starting to forgo looking around and making absolutely sure the coast is clear before we do anything close to PDA, and this is what you’re getting for it?” he puts up. “That back there with Turbo Mum happened to you, too, and I hate that, and while we’re here, I hate that I gave you so much shit for this because as you can fucking see, I’m no more adjusted to any of this than you are.”

Remus gives a long exhale out of his nose, offering a smile that’s small but genuine all the same. “You are, though,” he counters, and not unkindly either. “Just by the fact that you’re you means you’re more adjusted than I am to this; normally, you'd have told a rando making a face at us where to stick it and moved right along, but understandably, this one got you because you were a shade of that older boy; of course, you’re cycling back through it now.”

Sirius nods quietly, afraid he’ll ruin a clean moment where Remus sees him by refuting it. Instead, he focuses on how to get out of this rut; normally, he'd focus on Remus, the plans they'd have been on their way to, or whatever he'd been doing the moment before a face or slur came at him because whatever they or he was going off to do was bond to be more important, but this one, it's a hard one to move past when it tells him their future and all that it holds.

He pushes his sunglasses up to perch on his head, sniffing hard as the corners of his eyes start to sting. “I don’t know how to be optimistic about what’s next, not right now; I really don’t,” he offers him, reaching up to combat the pearly tears falling with the admission; he’s cried so much in the past week it’s hard to believe there’s anything left in him to spill, and yet. “We’re in for it, Remus, and I don’t mean us two, I mean all of us, we’re moving so slowly toward anything substantial — I mean, take Maurice for instance; look at how much it meant to you to have an author from way back then have this grand vision for a world where his book could even be published one day, and it got a lot of reception once it did, but it also got thrown into book burnings and onto blacklists, and would today’s world really look that different than his did? It's not criminalized anymore, but none of the old mindsets have really died off, they’re still being passed down.”

Remus goes for an insertion there, but he looks a little too like good-natured Remus for Sirius to let him gently coax him back to the land of compassion; he can do it, not while making his point. “Obviously, there's been a lot of work done, progress made over a literal century when you look back on it from here, but when you’re in it, when you’re counting the days, the months, the years it’s taken of marching, not shutting up when you’re told to, refusing to hide away like they want us to, and nowadays, we don’t even have that much to show for it,” he puts up. “It’s like an optical illusion, you know? There are so many of us out there and yet, we’re all so hidden away, and they want us to stay hidden because if there were more of us on the same page, they’d be done for: we want an inch and they’ll say we asked for a mile, we'll change laws that were put in against us, that we’re still constantly living in the shadow of, and they'll come up with new ones that undo all laws and societal changes that were demanded for us over decades of work, and they'll continue to be undone because people like her don’t see us as equal to them so the people up at the top aren’t going to fucking bother letting us have or keep anything we’ve fought for, and the odds are always going to be stacked against us; I mean, we could fill books with what’s left to be done for our community, but those books would have to greenlit first, wouldn’t they?”

Remus pushes a long, long, very long breath out of his cheeks, his brow furrowed up tight as he gives his whole body a shift to the right so that he’s facing toward Sirius. “You sound like me on a very bad day,” he maintains, giving into a half-grimace, half-smile. “Are we sure that’s what you want to sound like?”

“It’s how I feel right now,” Sirius puts up listlessly.

“No, I see that, and I’ve felt that way, too; it’s bleak, Sirius,” Remus puts it. “I more than get it, you’ve seen me feeling pretty fucking powerless to it all, and you’ve seen me rant it out like I just did a couple minutes ago, but the place I go to when it all feels like a losing battle, when I need to breathe better, feel better about the state of things, is to think about it in terms of macro versus micro; that, yes, when we step back and look at us as a whole, then we as a country, we as many countries, and we as a species have a lot more work to do when it comes to societal acceptance on a grand scale, but society is built up from smaller-scale instances that make up the society we refer to on a grand scale, do we agree on that?

“Well, y'know, I might know much more about it if you’d invited me to crash your Global Education class,” Sirius mentions.

“I kick myself more than you realize for not knowing you’d have wanted to crash it, thank you,” Remus returns haughtily, and even as bogged down as Sirius feels in all of this, he wouldn’t want to be discussing the finer, grittier details of the equality movement with anybody who isn't Remus Lupin. “We did cover this in class, though.”

“Gimme,” Sirius bids, beckoning with his left hand as a signal for Remus to keep on.

And keep on, he does. “Right, so on a macro level, we can look back at the progress that's been made and see it well; not being imprisoned for it, not having it classified as a mental condition, not having to put up with as much religious persecution as there used to be, but we have to leave room for the fact that this is true for those who are living in countries that have signed away on these amendments and reparations, and for those of us who are lucky enough to benefit from these changes that were made over decades of hard work,” he frames it. “We are lucky, Sirius, on the basis of skin colour, where we happened to be born, the resources we've access to, and in saying that, if we look at it as far as where we're from and the strides that have been made here, if we're to look at public opinion alone, the difference between how we would've been seen in Forester's time versus how we’re seen now is immense, and that is because of all of the activism and work that was done to put our perspectives into the forefront of people’s minds and advocate for change; the support we have now may feel fickle on a bad day, but when compared to the kind of support they'd have had in his time, it's honestly a wonder they managed to get out of that spot without nearly as much support along the way, and in the decades since, the people who worked and worked at it and those we lost along the way, I'm sure they could have only dreamed of receiving the kind of support we have now, so that’s just one reason to cheer up a bit, mm?”

Sirius’s mouth twitches, his chest going for a quick trip up and down. “Mmkay,” he allows, curling down the forefinger finger of his right hand.

“On the flip side, another thing to consider would be the changes that have been made on a more personal, intimate level as opposed to a wider, grander scale,” Remus keeps to it. “As more and more people have had come out, have risked being out in generations where it was hardly easy to be, and lived and loved as they were, more and more straight people have had to contend with the fact that they know a gay person or two — statistically more, but one or two at least, and as the number of us feeling the call to be out and proud has risen, so has the support for us, and that right there is an example of micro to macro: now, I’m not saying there aren’t people out there like The Burg, your father, that whole family crest, that lady back there, that jogger I still see perfectly in my head now and again on a very bad day, Tom’s dad, Tom's mum, Tom himself; people like them exist and walk among us, around us, all of the time, and they make things one-hundred times harder for the queer people in just their lives to exist without shame and persecution, but here is I would say that where one person or one family falls short, another comes through, and you know as well as anybody that a found family is oftentimes better than the first go-around, hm?”

Sirius snorts, shaking his head as he ticks off a second finger. “Ain’t that the truth.”

“That doesn’t fix what was broken, it doesn’t make up for it altogether, but it’s substantial, tangible proof that there are people out there with their heads screwed on properly,” Remus supplies him “And this isn’t meant to be a subtle brag, but for contrast, there are parents like mine, who perhaps didn’t realize their kid fell under the umbrella and have come back swinging despite that, there are parents like James’s, like Marlene’s, and for that, there have to be more like them out there in the world, and just in regards to mine for another second, there have to be more out there who just don’t know yet that this issue is more important to their kid and themselves than they even realize.”

Sirius ticks off finger number three, ducks his head down and to the side to rest it against Remus’s right shoulder, and effectively nestles his face into the crook of his neck, keeping his counting hand up and at the ready. “Another thing to consider would be having a closer look at our generation and what we are doing for the future,” Remus keeps at it, curling his right hand around the back of Sirius and holding him to him. “Yes, if you just look at her and what she’s doing to her own kids, it’s going to seem like we’ve been getting nowhere and when you're brushing up against that, all the puff pieces being written about our generation changing things for the better can feel like a jumble of words that mean nothing, but you know what? James and Lily are going to be parents one day, too, and they’re not only going to raise a kid who has a gay uncle coming 'round to spoil them rotten and think nothing other than how cool an uncle he is, they’re going to have raised them to know that it’s normal and more common than not, but those two aren't going to raise the kid to be open-minded only because of you, they’re going to do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

Sirius sends the longest horse breath squarely into the skin on Remus’s neck, but that hardly illustrates how quickly he’s turned into a tire tread. “That one hurt,” he raises, adding a fourth substantial counterpoint to the overall count.

“Well, hold on, because have you met Andromeda and Ted?” Remus raises. “Those two are already raising an amazing kid who already doesn’t bat an eye at you and me, and not only that, her mother is so supportive of us that she wouldn’t so much as let Dora give us the stink-eye without a firm talking to, but Dora would never because she wasn’t raised with the idea that you or I being an item poses a threat to her or any other kid her age, so you know what, Andromeda and Ted might be hands-off and hands-on in ways that a lot of parents aren’t, but they’re not that obscure; there are other parents out there like them and there are going to be others like them to come.”

Sirius switches to weird ox-like sounds against Remus’s skin, but he’s being skinned alive out here, alright? And it doesn’t last long anyway for Remus leans his head over Sirius’s and presses a pronounced shush against his right ear. “Another thing to consider—”

Another?” Sirius pips up.

“Mhm, and you’ll love it because it’s about me,” Remus mentions. “See, I am one of the most private people you or I know, and even I'm managing to see the draw in being out.”

“Oh, no no no—” Sirius tries; it’s too much.

“In certain situations, I'm definitely seeing it,” Remus affirms, smiling away up there. “I’ve never felt quite this loose or at ease before, and that won’t be true all of the time because I’ve got a lot of work to do on this kind of hing, but if there’s anybody who could have you feeling optimistic about the future, then I hope it could be me; as someone who had a coworker aim a pair of adamant owl eyes at the floor to avoid looking at her coworker and his boyfriend in an embrace and act real off for a few shifts thereafter, and as someone who had to embrace the fact that it was just going to be something everybody there knew about, I'm beginning to see it as a good thing; Ian’s there, I’m there, and so far those are it for the queers, that we know of at least, but the more we embrace it, the more that we just let it fly, and the more we get comfortable discussing our lives on the job like the straight baristas do, the next time an employee gets outed suddenly or comes out at our workplace of their own volition, perhaps nobody on the team will even bat an eye that day, hm?”

Sirius hoots against Remus’s skin, hiding his damp face against it even more just to syphon Remus’s warmth from him in hopes that it’ll power himself up again. “And you know what, you were right; as much as it hurt to see yourself in that kid, there are still so many ways it could go for those two,” he instils, calling on a past point of Sirius’s own. “It’s not as if it’s completely unheard of that people from bigoted families end up embracing what they were meant and made to fear, just have a look at you; with what you grew up with, you could have turned out a completely different person, but you still managed to swing back the other way and turn out so well, you don’t question what you want or who you want or any of that.”

“I do,” Sirius counters, feeling glum about all the ways Remus sees him as a good sort and all the ways he’s shirking that reputation by second-guessing so much of himself. “I look like a punk with an attitude, but I’m soft as baby shit when you get to know me for real.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have said it quite like that,” Remus mentions. “More often than not, you know your worth and the best part about that is, there’s a lot of worth for you to know that you have — when you're not actively chipping away at yourself, that is, but it’s actually something you really, really have going for you and I say that because I know it to be true; you are an absolute babe, a riot to be around, and so alluring at face value, but you’ve got something to show for it once you’ve hooked someone in and there’s so much depth to you that it makes up for the fact that you’re so fucking hot.”

Sirius gives out something between a huff and a puff, breathes in one, and lifts out of his carefully crafted cocoon known as Remus’s frame, leaning in to press a kiss firmly against his lips before shrinking right back where he came from and garnering a melodic laugh from Remus’s throat. “And you weren’t the only one who turned out pretty good considering they came from that family either,” he raises, curling both his hands around Sirius’s back this time. “I know of at least two who ran off with a couple of strapping lads — and fair enough, am I right?”

“Mmmmhm,” Sirius affirms, smiling against Remus’s neck.

Exactly,” Remus elongates. “Now, would it have been on to stick around and dismantle the family curse that is of their own making? I’m sure it would have been, but they, like you, like Andromeda, and like Alphard in his own way, knew there were limits to what a person could give of themselves to a veritable institution masquerading as a family tree.”

“Damn, boy,” Sirius pitches out, lifting up and leaning his head back to look up at Remus squarely, who does little other than let go of Sirius in favour of putting his hands on display.

“Not bad, hey?” he raises, smiling quizzically. “And I say that because those were some majorly unevenly stacked odds, but you lot beat them and managed to not only forge your own paths but thrive on them, and those kids over there might not even have to do any of that; maybe they’ll be the ones to breathe change into their home from the inside, maybe they’ll just tune her out when she goes on about the gays and then use her words against her online for commiseration purposes, or maybe they will end up just like her, but those odds are stacked against her, just like they were for your mother, and frankly, I think that lady knows she's losing the battle, or the slightest touch of a man’s lips to another man’s jawline wouldn’t have sent her packing like that.”

“I want you to be right,” Sirius carves out of himself. “I want her kind to be on the decline, but you can see it every day that there are hordes of people online just like her who are sick of seeing us normalized; the peanuts we’ve got in terms of seeing ourselves in entertainment and media are the same as overblowing the issue to people like her and having it beamed straight into her home, she’ll only feel it proof enough to complain to her family and her girlfriends at tea socials and luncheons about the gay lifestyle being forced onto her and her kids, even when those same tacky, made-for-TV versions of our lifestyles are still lifesaving for people like us, so how are we supposed to step in and tell them why we matter to ourselves and our community if those things feel like direct attacks on people like her? They don't believe it's lifesaving, let alone want to hear it.”

“Well, same way you always do,” Remus raises, not losing a bit of that open expression. “You shut it down when you see that shit, and trust others to do the same when they see it; today might not be the shining example of it, but you call that shit out all the time, I’ve personally heard it, I've watched you roll your sleeves up and get giddy over telling someone coming at you to have a seat, and you’ll be back to it soon enough.”

“Yeah, we’ll see,” Sirius replies, feeling pithy all around.

“Mm, low self-confidence, not to mention that esteem thing, are a bit of a theme of yours at the moment, so I won’t take that as terribly as I might've done on a different occasion,” Remus slips him, smiling lightly. “We were having a good day, and it was the worst day within the worst week for you to have seen something that foreboding happen in front of and because of you, but that doesn’t mean that everything we just raised isn’t true or won’t help on another tough day, and we both know there will be more of those.”

“I hate it,” Sirius gives openly. “I hate that our best bet is to always go home and cuddle there, I hate that it’s easier to wait until we’re alone for me to pull you in close, and I hate that I can’t guarantee you safety; I’ll try my hardest, I promise, but we’re going to have targets on our backs wherever we go the more you get comfortable, and I hate that so much because I love seeing you feeling liberated.”

Remus stays paused with his mouth ajar, apparently rendered speechless but only momentarily, it seems. “I hate it too, and I hate that we have to unload this stuff with each other in order to keep going,” he raises it. “It’s worth it, though; don’t you think?”

“Don’t ask me what I think of that,” Sirius returns. “I want to know what you think.”

“Well, I think you save me daily in all sorts of ways, so maybe I reserve the right to keep you even if it puts a target on my back?” Remus returns him. “Just tack that onto the list of rights I’m hoping to see in my lifetime.”

“Well, now I can’t bar you from this one without feeling like shit,” Sirius chimes. “Thanks, Remus.”

“You’re welcome, now what’s our plan?” Remus raises.

It feels as though Sirius’s brain went into screen-saver mode for a moment or two there. “What do you mean?” he raises. “In general?”

“Well, no, I’m trying to take the general out of the picture for now,” Remus extends. “We’re going to be dealing with this for years to come, so for now, today, there isn’t much we can realistically do for the cause, is there? I mean, we could go over there and yell at her, but we could also figure that the moment to challenge her came and went.”

“I’m a bit sad to report that I agree,” Sirius forwards him. “Moment’s gone.”

“Right, so another thing I do with myself when I’m feeling extra nervous about being happy with the way I am, is I try to think about it with compassion toward myself and the queer people of our generation,” Remus offers. “We lost so many of our kind, not that long ago at all, and we lost them young; they were so young, and they got wiped right off the map.”

Sirius's chest feels tighter than it has yet, and that’s saying something. “Mhm,” he offers, working up to traditional speech. “People we never got the chance to meet, have a proper pint with, learn from.”

“That's right, yeah, and then, what we have learned from them comes at such a price,” Remus takes it from there. “But, it’s where I draw compassion from for us because we grew up in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis so of course fear, discrimination, and extreme hardheadedness were running rampant when we were coming up, but the silence was everywhere, too, and in a way, I wonder if we — our generation of gays of all kinds but also us two goons, ever really had a chance to not feel the aftershocks of all of that misinformation and fear with all that silence running around with it.”

“No, we really didn't,” Sirius trades him. “We’re missing a generation; we were bound to drown in it since before we knew we were even one of them.”

“Exactly,” Remus echoes it. “So, if we can acknowledge that, and we can acknowledge that there’s a hole missing that’s so massive it can’t ever be filled, then the least we can do for those men and women is to remember them and enjoy the pockets of joy we do manage to grab because they would've loved to see this.”

Sirius breathes in long, fresh air stinging as it goes in. “It’s what I tell myself at least,” Remus tacks on, nerve-wracked.

Sirius pushes that breath back out, but it doesn’t hurt so much that way around. “No, it’s solid,” he offers, sniffing fast. “I just can’t believe you spoon-fed me a whole punch bowl of perspective in under twenty minutes.”

Remus smirks a bit, but catches hold of it before it can keep going. “Then why don’t we try to remember that you’re a pretty intense soldier for the cause on a normal week, and when you aren’t feeling quite this alienated from yourself,” he offers him, but he makes no indication that he’s finished yet. “And then from there, you’ve got to decide what sort of Sunday you want us to have; are we ruminating on our abject powerlessness in the greater machine that we’re stuck in, or are we going to take our day back from people like her and enjoy it? I’ll give you a hint for which one I—”

Remus cuts off to tilt his head at Sirius’s voluminous snort. “You’re so funny,” he offers. “Sorry, keep going.”

Remus reworks his mouth around a budding smile. “Well, I do think option number two is the better one for the both of us, and to that, I feel I have to point out that we’ve been in a live cuddle for at least a good ten minutes now, and not one person seems to have registered it,” he extends, looking all around him as a means of illustration. “Perhaps they can’t tell we’re both a couple of boys having a cuddle over here, perhaps they’ve thought badly of it in their heads but didn’t feel the need to come over and register their disgust with us personally, or perhaps somebody went ‘ew, gross,’ aloud to whoever they're with, but that’s not our problem; we can’t hear that, and we can't read minds, can we? All we’ve really got to go on is that we’ve not been forced apart by anyone yet so let’s call that a bright side, and then, if you want something extra bright, as I’ve started feeling more comfortable reaching out for you when we are out in public, we really have gotten away with some pretty gay shit out in the wild these past few days, don’t you think?”

Sirius free falls off a proverbial waterfall into the land of shits n’ giggles. “Very good point,” he lets him have — once he’s finished with his fit, that is.

“All in all, we’ve had, what, three off-putting interactions since we’ve gotten to Chez Lupin, give or take?” Remus raises. “Tom’s dad, the cooing girl this morning, and that lady back there, but considering how much frolicking around you and I have done, with not all that much over-the-shoulder checking, that's pretty damn good so I vote that we take the day back from them; they just don't interest me as much as you do.”

“Yeah, I vote for that, too,” Sirius sniffs.

“Glad to hear it,” Remus forwards, reaching into his pocket to pull out his mobile, humming as he takes a look over the screen. “Alright, look over there?”

Sirius blinks before following Remus’s gesturing toward the other side of the harbour. “Cottage?” he raises. “Big brick wall? What am I—”

Remus huffs a full laugh. “Curved wall,” he directs.

“Right, alright?” Sirius prompts, staring at the stone horseshoe across the harbour from them.

“You can’t see it from here, but that beach is getting more and more exposed with every second,” Remus maintains. “The tide’s going to be fully out soon enough, so I say we go get you that coffee and then while we’re stopped there, we can change into our trunks, come on back to get some beach time in, and while we’re doing that, I want us both to ignore everybody else around us and just have our little beach glimpse without any shame.”

Sirius practically shoots out of his sitting position, so approving of this plan that he’s scrambling to stand up, but apparently he teeters a little too far to the right on his feet for Remus’s liking. “Oi,” he exerts, leaving the cherries aside as shoots up to stand as well, grabbing onto Sirius and keeping him steady.

Sirius gives an impish smile, reaching his right hand up to set it over Remus’ chest, and gives a discreet, apologetic noise at feeling the erratic beating from behind it. “I’m really sorry,” he extends.

Remus pushes a stewed breath out of his nose, letting go of Sirius’s shoulders to stroll up the wall and back toward the banks. “Your turn holding the cherries,” he passes back to him.

Sirius smirks, leans down extra delicately to lift the bag of cherries up to him, and it’s a good thing he did take extra care in doing it for it turns out Remus watched him do it the whole time, but he’s smiling approvingly from a spot he picked on the shore as Sirius heads for him, so no true harm, no true foul.

 

-

 

Say what you want about Remus Lupin — actually, strike that, do not do that. The point Sirius is going for here is, that boy keeps his word by any means necessary, and in this particular case, it means he's taken his vow of taking back their Sunday from gawking strangers very, very seriously.

It begins with small signs that he's keeping up his side of the bargain; he puts on a playlist off his mobile that contains quite a few bops that Sirius would be partial to, sets the windows all the way down, and surprisingly for Sirius certainly, he single-handedly makes the drive over to grab a coffee and change into their swimwear while they're at it feel like a simple cruise through town without any sort of background agenda, and the way he manages that is by keeping his right hand on the wheel while strapping his left hand casually over Sirius’s right thigh, holding there the whole ride over and making his skin do its trilling all over again.

As if he could fit any more into that alleged heart of his, Sirius just about falls in love with the little café Remus takes him to. Similarly, he falls in love with watching Remus stroll back out of the loo with his swimming trunks on, but that’s just inevitable when that piece of attire is a vibe all its own. He'd picked them up a good four years back when that supremely lucky find came through the Antique Mall and was spotted by one Remus Lupin's peepers at just the right time to have snatched it up, and thank Cunt he did for those trunks could be from an old line of them or well be a one-of-a-kind piece; very hard to say if they came through the mall. The design is a clear ode to the past, a fun, flashy throwback to those paper cups that were everywhere in the '90s, and that Sirius remembers seeing at class birthday parties and adjacent to the watercooler at the bank when he was little with that white backdrop, that thick light blue paint smear, that thinner, darker purple smear overtop it; a simple curation, immediately recognizable, and a powerful blast from the past all in one, but it's entire vibe is only made that much more impactful if one were to take into account how high the hems of those trunks go on those thighs of his. Legend has it that When Remus first copped those shorts, they went down to a touch above the knee but nowadays, those babies come down to about mid-thigh range, and Sirius, for one, is grateful.

Sirius’s trunks are a tad simpler in comparison to the retro blast that Remus’s are, but he has two things going for them: they’re a classic, vivid rouge with a white drawstring for a nice lil’ pop, and they go, mm, just about a quarter-length down his thighs, winning himself legs for days, so when Sirius says the walk back to the truck consists of the pair of them simply eyeing each other’s legs the whole way across the parking lot, he isn’t using hyperbole by any stretch.

The sloped beach Remus takes him to is nothing short of a storybook setting, but it's a story Sirius has never known before. He’s never been to or even near a beach that’s got a red-bricked ruin looming over it, never been to a beach that doubles as a docking port for boaters when the tide’s high, has never even swam in anything other than an underground pool, and now, he gets to frolic around in a secret little oasis? Call him a fish for how happy he is to flap around in the water.

Even Remus comes in with him; a right shocker in that the water's a bit chilly even for Sirius at first dip. He keeps his sunnies on for the most part, only popping them off to dip under the water to get his hair wet before coming back up and popping them back over his dutifully shut eyes, and Sirius manages to feel both proud of him for taking all of these little modifications to his daily routine in stride and a little sad for him, not being able to take on the sun freely in the way he can and is.

What kicks Sirius’s heart into the stratosphere, however, is an immensely important occurrence, if a bit silly as well; after turning their afternoon around with his bare hands, Remus uses those same hands for his own ends, sneaking up behind Sirius treading water in place and picking him right up in the water, and very suddenly, Sirius is being carted around in a flimsy circle and just as suddenly, they’re a couple of synchronized swimmers.

He leans all the way into his manhandling when it’s honestly the cutest thing Remus could have thought to do, picking him up and gliding him up and around, so of course he’s going to let himself be carted around and pretend he's a swan without one single look toward any of the other beachgoers — those people can go ahead and pretend he and Remus aren’t here frolicking the same way they’re going to pretend they’ve got the entire beach to themselves.

Sirius remains nestled with his back against Remus’s chest, wrapped up in those arms of his until he just can’t handle it anymore and has to break free, but in the end, all Sirius really wanted was to swish around to face Remus and fuse right back against him, but then he’s got Remus’s damp mop o’ curls within his sights, Remus’s smile just ahead of his own, and Remus's hands curled at the small of his back as a means of holding Sirius to him, and he can’t help it like he couldn’t help it earlier on, just has to kiss him even if it's just for a moment, on the lips this time and light as a feather, but this time around, there’s just too much going on around them for something that quick to have been noted.

He winds up staying in the water a bit longer than Remus does, but the poor lad’s lips started going a bit blue around the edges and that got him booted out of the water by Sirius himself; Remus went on to insist that this sort of thing just happens to him and he’s fine, just needs some time out of the water, but that only had Sirius splashing a bunch of water at him to signal he’d better get the fuck going then, and that pretty well ended their communal swimming.

Once Sirius deems himself ready to come out, he pads on over to Remus and inwardly celebrates that his towel has already been laid out for him to go ahead and swan dive onto, which Sirius does indeed do with a bit more care than he would if he were swan diving onto a bed and not a towel laid upon a slanted mystery beach.

“Feeling better?” Remus raises, laying flat on his back on Sirius’s left.

Sirius hums easily to affirm, eyes shut through momentary fatigue. “Better than,” he extends, crossing his arms underneath his chin to use as a pillow, thinking he might give his back some time in the sun while he's already quite set up for that. “You’ve switched my whole day around, o’ gentle one.”

Remus smirks from above him, seems to feel and listen to the urge to reach over and rustle Sirius’s newly free-flowing hair, and that’s a decision Sirius wholeheartedly approves of. He feels a tippity-tap occur on the top of his forehead, peers his eyes open for investigative purposes, and lifts his chin from over his wrists, where Remus sticks his folded-up pair of thieved jeans over Sirius’s arms as a makeshift pillow for him.

“Is denim going to be enough or will you want a shirt to go over it?” he bids, absolute dote that he is.

Sirius tests the denim pillow out and hums a no, smiling for him. “These are fine,” he extends, scooping his hair to fall over his right shoulder and away from the back of his neck. “You can keep them if you want; they look real good on you.”

“Oh,” Remus replies, already on the decline, “I just like wearing them because they’re comfy, but I could get a pair of my own that actually go down to my ankles.”

“Mm, but I don’t know that I would've offered if I didn’t want you to take them, high at the ankles or not,” Sirius mentions thoughtfully. “Doesn’t mean I won’t miss them a little or wear them again one day when the mood strikes, but I’ll be going to your dresser to find them, you hear?”

Remus must really not be into the idea of a bicker-match on the beach for he gives up the goat so much quicker than Sirius saw coming. “Alright, but I’ll just be housing them and you don’t have to ask when you do want to put them on again for old times’ sake,” he offers, ripe for a compromise.

Sirius uncurls his right hand from underneath the jeans to better curl his fingers ahead of his mouth, using his hand as a horn. “Deal,” he trumpets, and there goes Remus, snickering away over there while Sirius shuts his eyes again and considers himself the true winner of this round.

He gets lulled to a fun little state of half-consciousness even with all of the bustle around them, various chatter he’s not really honing in on carefully enough to pick up, somebody’s set of speakers playing out Daft Punk's ‘Revolution 909’ — a choice he’s fully on board for — and a couple of kids turn up close by Sirius's vicinity and sure sound as though they're just circulating their set-up; the pitter-patters and various hee-hee, haw-haws peter off after a stretch of a few good seconds there, where he hears a bright, chesty laugh out of Remus.

“That was cute,” he shares.

“Were they just running round and around us?” Sirius checks.

“They were indeed,” Remus affirms. “There’s a bunch of them playing duck, duck, goose over there.”

“Alright, that is cute,” Sirius allows. “I was the shit at that game, so you know.”

“Glad to hear it because I was terrible at it,” Remus reports.

Sirius gives up a hearty pfft. “How can anybody be terrible at it?”

“Listen, I let you get away with saying you were the shit at it, so why don't you give me some room to say I wasn’t,” Remus returns.

“You go around, you pick the goose, if you’re a good player then you pick a bad runner, and you steal their spot in the circle,” Sirius details. “Bing, bang, boom, and you’re done.”

“Yes, well, I wasn’t much of a runner, hence why I was terrible at it,” Remus cements.

“You've those beautiful tree-branch legs, and you’re trying to tell me you didn't run well?” Sirius returns. “I don’t believe it.”

“Well, now I do, but I didn’t have these things as a kid,” Remus offers up.

“Well, alright; touché,” Sirius lets him have. “Could go over there and see if they’ll let you play; find out how you fare with it now?”

Remus snorts up a storm above him, garnering a charmed smile out of Sirius for it; he’s generally about ten to fifteen seconds out from sending Remus into a fit at any given point, and it’s a lovely, lovely thing to get to contend with. “Imagine, though?”

Sirius gives a quick, one-note laugh for the image popping off behind his eyelids. “The kids would let you play; the parents, however—”

“They’d call for help, I should think,” Remus snickers.

Sirius hoots his way off of his back to give his front a chance at some sunlight, nestling back in with his head propped up on the folded jeans at the head of his towel. He leaves his arms by his sides, getting all comfy-cosy again as the current tune fades out, and there are all of four seconds without any music before ‘Da Funk’ starts up, and oh-ho-ho, here they go.

Remus sucks in a breath like he’s been socked in the face. “This makes me miss our shifts together,” he offers, off down memory lane, it seems.

“Mhm, mhm, I’ll bet it does,” Sirius smiles, eyes shut against the sun’s rays.

Remus smirks through what sounds like a sip off the bottled water he'd grabbed at the coffee shop. “Good thing I see you so often or I might get a bit misty-eyed,” he comments.

Sirius pops a goon grin onto his face. “You’re already misty-eyed, stop,” he slips him, tip-tapping his right middle and forefinger against the back of his left hand to the beat.

“Only a bit,” Remus slips back.

Sirius peeks his left eye open to get a look at the lad, finding him cross-legged on his towel, his right elbow propped onto his right knee with his chin in his hand and his fingers not quite blocking out the pointed smile on his lips. “You’re a whole sap, you know that?” he grins.

“Same to you, pal,” Remus returns, scrunching his face up at him with nothing but love radiating off of him. He sighs wistfully, tilting his head to the left a bit. “You know, as much as I miss the fall sometimes, I wouldn’t go back to it given the choice.”

“Mm, no?” Sirius raises, smiling suggestively. “You just made it seem like ya might, is all.”

“Well, I'm not immune to nostalgia, thank you,” Remus replies, “but no, as much as there's a certain glow to that time, it was so stressful, never quite being able to trust myself with thinking that we might've had something big happening between us, but now, I get look back and actually see it for what it was.”

“Huge, forget big,” Sirius raises it.

“Well, fine — exactly; that version of me was suffering near-daily, and this version gets to reap the benefits of eventually losing all control of my body and plunging my tongue down your throat,” Remus delivers, sighing easily.

Sirius gives up a hearty trill. “And thank Cunt, you did,” he offers. “Brought the sun in with you.”

“Oh, I’m in too public a place to snog you rotten for saying something that kind,” Remus chides.

“Well, I’ve got to keep you waiting on it sometimes,” Sirius chimes. “Remember James’s face when he walked in?”

“Which time?” Remus checks.

Sirius smirks for that; there have been a few occasions to pick from. “First time," he supplies. "You were going right over the arm of the couch and toward sure injury, so I rescued you and he wound up walking in right as we were all tangled up—”

Oh, oh — of course I remember that one,” Remus snickers. “I wanted to puff into vapour and float out the window.”

“And for what, I ask to this day,” Sirius gives up haughtily. “James was over the moon, a couple of digs your way couldn't change how chuffed he was; you saw that face of his.”

“Quite the goon-grin, I might say,” Remus offers.

“That’s how you know he’s being genuine,” Sirius supplies.

“Did you send those dick pics along to him?” Remus raises.

Excuse?” Sirius returns, both eyes open now, and blinking rapidly at that.

Remus fizzles off into a whole fit so it takes five to seven seconds before Sirius even gets the explanation he’s waiting on. “The twenty-foot dick we traversed to; remember that?”

Sirius’s whole chest relaxes at once, sighing out with his newfound clarity. “I didn’t even think of it, if I'm being honest,” he passes along, leaning his head back to have a look at their beach bag perched at the head of the both of their towels knowing his mobile is somewhere in there, but the idea of sending along a couple suggestive photos just now, given the state of things, feels a bit off. “Should probably wait on that, considering.”

Remus’s brow furrows as he mostly stares down at Sirius until clarity hits him in the form of a quick shrug. “I was thinking he might like a laugh, considering,” he offers lightly.

Sirius stares up at the sky, but in the end that crystal blue specimen doesn’t bring him much help. He gives into a half-grimace, letting the left side of his mouth hang down while the right stays put. “I don’t know about that,” he ruminates. “I mean, normally he’d appreciate it, but we don’t know how the rest of the day went.”

Remus gives up a thoughtful hum. “I mean, no, but you would have heard from him by now if it hadn’t gone well,” he extends, deductive reasoning at play, which would work normally and for somebody else, sure, but for Sirius?

Sirius gives a mild hum for it. “Not if I haven’t been a stand-up mate lately," he says of it.

Both Remus’s brows and lips rearrange into the surefire signs that he’s unconvinced. “He called you before she even left the flat, Sirius,” he trades him. “I want to say he put some clothes back on seeing as he apparently made it out onto the terrace by then, but either way, you probably talked to him — mm, minutes after they finished up? You’re right up at the top of his list.”

“Mm'kay, well, that’s indisputable,” Sirius comments, giving a head tilt back and forth. “Point is, I don’t know what the tone of the day has been since we left off with him, and I don’t know if twenty-foot dick pics being sent over to him would be bad form; I figure I should probably wait to see what he says first and send those along once I know how he’s doing.”

Remus straightens his neck out with a funny new smile on his lips. “Who are you?” he checks.

“Your paramour,” Sirius extends.

“Well, that, too,” Remus allows, good man that he is, “but I more meant, who is this incredibly thoughtful lad in front of me who still insists he's not one.”

“Mm, well, you’re not the only one around here who’s been rubbed off on,” Sirius forwards.

Remus reaches over and drums a ba dum tss against Sirius’s chest in reply, which is truly almost enough to distract from the anchor inside of it that’s weighing him down. Almost. He takes another long look at the sky above them and decides that if he’s still thinking about James after another minute he’ll do something about it, but before long that minute comes and goes and James is still all he’s thinking about.

“Remus?” he puts up, breaking their respective quiet compared to the others milling about the beach near and around them.

It’s a testament to Remus’s auditory processing that a simple, whispered utterance of his name has him leaning in to investigate the damage. “What’s up?” he bids, and fair enough when there is a growing list of things that could be troubling Sirius during this handful of seconds.

Sirius lulls his head to the left, aiming a stare at Remus’s lenses as a means to set some eye contact off the bat. “I suddenly cannot stop thinking about James,” he forwards.

Remus pushes a sigh through his nose, reworking his mouth around a smile as he brings his right arm up and underneath his head to use as a makeshift pillow. “Mm, same here,” he extends, his smile tampering off there. “Well, I thought of both of them in turn, but the image I have of him in my head as he poured Free Fallin’ from his chest won’t leave my head.”

“OK, right?” Sirius puts up. “The grin he had on; you could just hear it.”

“You really could,” Remus extends.

Sirius runs his top teeth over his lower lip, speaking once he’s finished that tick. “Mind if I go check on him?” he raises, tossing his right thumb over his shoulder in the vague direction of somewhere acceptable for a check-in.

The change in Remus’s expression is minute, yes, but Sirius catches the slight dip in his brow all the same. “Do you need to leave for that?”

Sirius gives a faint lift of his shoulders, but that’s the level of unassured he feels just now. “OK, it’s like this,” he prefaces, rolling onto his right side and mirroring Remus’s stance, his left arm curled up underneath his head, “worst case scenario, she went up there, reversed her 'yes,' and he’s nursing a major blow to the ego but hasn’t called yet because it’s not exactly the cheeriest update, best case scenario, she went up there and played like normal because she was back to feeling normal again after we knocked on her noggin a bit and didn’t want to bother freaking him out in return so he's completely fine, elated even, but there’s a medium scenario, too, one where she went up there, didn’t reverse the 'yes,' because she still wants him to marry her in the abstract sense, and was honest with him about how she’s got some intense fears wrapped up in her, but then he could be over there confused as hell, not sure whether to even be happy or not because it’s one thing to know you’re going to be getting a wife, but it’s quite another to know that she had a meltdown in her car over it, and I don’t want him beating himself up for asking if all it was going to do was disturb the peace they’ve got going for them, and I definitely don’t want him thinking he’s alone right now because he isn’t; I'd want him to know I’m still there, even if I’m here.”

“Right,” Remus offers, low down, at a notch above a whisper. “And that all checks out, I just — no, never mind; go on.”

Sirius eyes him fast within the span of a few beats, but that’s really all it takes for him to pinpoint what the underlying issue is. “I’m not saying you can’t be on the call, too,” he puts down, speaking more carefully than he’s likely devoted to any sentiment he’s uttered before. “I appreciate that you kept me on yours and hers, and believe me, James wanted you on ours, I wanted you there, you don’t cramp styles in this band of pirates that we are, but I know James and he can be so happy-go-lucky that it kind of works against him sometimes because even when he’s got a reason to be down, he won’t let himself feel it for long and—”

“With an audience,” Remus offers, helping finish the sentiment, and to say that Sirius isn’t nodding with grateful relief would be incredibly misleading; that's quite simply all he is doing. “Go on, but I want a full update when you’re done.”

“Deal,” Sirius gives up before he even has to think about it. “I’ll try not to be too long, OK?”

“Sirius,” Remus returns plainly, a budding smile at his lips, “why don’t we say, if you’re not back by the time the sun goes down I’ll come searching, but until then, take your time, or let him take his.”

Sirius smiles, thinking that’s a fairly liberal timeframe. “I’ll stay within eyeshot, if that helps?” he raises.

“Alright, yes,” Remus allows, “do that.”

“You’re the best,” Sirius tells him, pushing himself up onto his knees.

Upon stepping off of his towel and onto the sand, however, Remus goes and knicks his and tugs it closer to him, bunching it up and laying his head down on it, a pleasant, shameless smile about him now, but Remus could have everything to Sirius’s name without complaint or argument so his towel temporarily going to him is really a complete non-issue. He stoops by their beach bag to simultaneously feel around for his mobile in there with his left hand and rustle Remus’s fringe with his right one, garnering Remus to lean his head back to sneak a kiss to his palm right about the time Sirius locates his mobile at, of course, the bottom of the bag, but he can’t even be halfway annoyed by that when he’s got this cherub to work with.

He rises to his feet again, gives Remus a parting smile, and crisscrosses between various people laid out on towels to get to the waterfront, thinking he likes the thought of getting his feet nice and cooled.

He wets his feet in there while he dials for James, a busy signal clanging into Sirius’s right ear canal that has him huffing and pulling the mobile away from his ear to inspect the screen, but there’s little wonder why the call wouldn’t go through when one Jim Beam appears to have been ringing him.

Sirius huffs a laugh of serendipitous proportions, swipes to answer the call, and sticks his mobile back against his right ear. “I was,” he starts, “literally trying to ring you just there.”

“Synergy,” James calls it, and while that normalcy-laden tone and vernacular provide a certain level of comfort, Sirius can’t quell the state of his stomach, waiting on something he doesn’t even know is coming.

There seems to be a logistical reason for why James said nothing more than that; a relocation of sorts for that is the telltale sound of their screen door hitting the door frame in the background, quite suggesting James took a recess out on the terrace. 'Course, Sirius is on a disappearing beach at the mouth of the Porthgain Harbour, side-stepping a gaggle of girls gathered at the foot of the water and gearing themselves up for a dip, so not the best circumstance for a precarious check-in, but there was a clue in there somewhere; if James rang him and went out back for the call, then Lily must either be inside somewhere waiting on his return or she’s gone from the flat completely, and oddly enough, Sirius really hopes it’s the former.

“She still there?” he checks, reclaiming his path by the water now that he’s passed the girls.

“Mm, she’s out grabbing samosas,” James forwards. “Gives us about twenty and then I should probably go, be a gent.”

Sirius nods a lot for someone on a phone call, but he’s not sure what to say when he's not sure what make of that addition; if she’s still there and they’ve been at it since she got off the call with them, then that’s time to talk, process, and come together on an agreement, but it’s incredibly difficult gathering intel while gauging the extent of the crisis at hand while not all that sure if there’s even a crisis to be had anymore, and this is turning out to be one case where he’s not interested in playing espionage.

“You two talk, then?” he bids, hoping he hasn’t ruined a good night with that loaded question, that James already knows what he means, that it’s alright that Sirius is being a bit impatient about it now that he’s got James on the line and under a time constraint he hadn’t thought he’d be.

“We sure did,” James chimes. “Talk, talk, talk; talk a little more, you know what I’m saying.”

“I know what you’re saying,” Sirius echoes, eyeing a pack of what appear to be four wrestling children getting precariously close to his orbit and speeding along the shore to avoid a collision, deciding that he’ll go lean against the giant horseshoe-like wall near the water and claim that as his resting place until he forfeits it. “Alright, so I’m at a crowded beach but really needed to know how you’re doing, so forgive me if this is a bit crass but you are aware that she rang Remus earlier, yes?”

“Mhm, and I hear I owe the two of you a lot right about now,” James chooses to put it.

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Sirius trades him, leaning his left arm against the stone wall and facing out toward the top of the harbour.

“I would,” James offers up. “Seems like one of you let her know about the resizing fiasco, as well as my equating her to fire upon delivering the news to you all, but I don’t think she’s looked at me with such wounded desire before so really, props to whoever let that last one slip.”

Sirius holds off on obtaining credit for both of those, but only just. “If anything, Remus and I are a bit well-positioned to handle somebody who’s having some jitters, aren’t we?” he raises. “Him because he’s Remus, me because I deal personally with that sort of thing on the regular, but what I’m trying to get here is some help with where you are on this; did she talk to you about all that, did you two worked it out, are there wedding bells clambering in the future… those sorts of things.”

“Oh, yeah, she wants it to be a smaller affair, friends and fam but open to amendments should there come a point where that’s due for a revisit, she wants the ceremony itself to be on the shorter side of things and have the reception go longer as a result as there’ll be more dancing that way, and she made a point to say ‘no birds,’ which, I have to say, knocked me right on my keister,” James details, and all that is exciting news already, but that last point has Sirius forcing down on the bark threatening to leave his throat and it’s a good thing he’s put the effort in for James sure isn’t done yet. “She doesn’t want it to be before next summer, doesn’t want it in a church, and doesn’t want to wear white, but listen, I’d have been open to holding the ceremony inside a water-filtration plant with just you three there as witnesses while she wore a dress inspired by the Paper Bag Princess for all I care, so I’m not going to have a problem with what she wears or any of those other conditions, am I?”

“Absolutely not,” Sirius echoes, reworking his mouth around a smile.

“On top of that, she’s aware that you’ll be my best man of course, but she hopes you’ll be willing to scurry over to the podium and play a particular ditty as she's coming down the aisle,” James puts up. “What say you?”

“'I’ve Just Seen A Face?'” Sirius puts out brightly.

“You know that's the one,” James echoes.

“Yes, duh; I’m there,” Sirius returns, smiling like a true goon.

“Oh — Cunt, there’s been so much, but she also wants Remus to be her best man, and she'll pick the rest of her bridesmaids from there,” he tacks on.

Sirius lets out a long, wan laugh. “Oh, I can’t wait for this.”

“Mhm, mhm, same,” James lodges.

And there, Sirius feels, he’s been given a hint in the form of a more absent tone. “You good?” he raises, opening the floor. “I mean, if she walked in there with a list of wedding preferences up top then I would get it if you might’ve felt a little, ‘alright, slow down there, girlie,’ you know.”

“Oh, no no no,” James insists, going rather cutesy for that so Sirius knows this is a certified uh oh in the making. “No, ‘course not; she didn’t lead with all of that, but I might’ve preferred it if she had if I’m honest.”

Sirius thins his lips out. “Mm,” he offers, in place of a prompt to keep on.

“What she did was walk in here, cave into me, and sob so hard I thought she crashed her car for a few minutes there, and very suddenly, I find out what’s actually happened and then I’m very suddenly expected to defend our entire honour because she thinks we’re going to sink if we rush things, and I really would have expected this from year-one or even year-two Lily, but I thought we’d passed a checkpoint this past year, I really did,” James asserts, speaking a mile a minute. “I mean, I knew this was going to take time, Sirius; she’s Lily, after all, but she also screamed that ‘yes,’ and I don’t mean in the dirty way, I mean it came from her whole chest so forgive me for a second here but I have to say, going from hearing that expelled from the centre of her to seeing her sobbing apologies to me because she had a meltdown in her car caused some intense whiplash.”

Sirius breathes in long, waits until he’s sure James is finished and hasn’t just lost steam for a few, and lets his breath out with words he knows are true. “She fucking loves you, James,” he puts it. “Like, ruined for all other men kind of thing so congrats on that and you’re right, she fucking meant that ‘yes,’ she just panicked there for a few, but we got her back. She sounded more like herself when she was going up there to you and I’ll bet you one hundy right now that she had it together before she walked in there, but saw you and probably felt like shit about it all over again; she knows she won big with you, she’s just afraid of change—”

“I know, and that’s the thing,” James cuts in. “It wasn’t going to change because we know what we’re doing by now, and I’m sorry but it fucking stings that she couldn’t see that, and at this point, I don’t know how you keep doing this; I really don’t.”

Sirius leans back against the frame of the stone structure, but it would be better put to say that he backs into it. “Doing what?”

“Keep getting back up again?” James sends him tightly, and then there’s a laugh somewhere down in his throat but it’s not born out of your typical humorous note. “Our partners, they haven’t a clue why we’re with them, Sirius, and I’m starting to feel like a bowling pin laying in the gutter, meanwhile you keep picking yourself up and going at Remus like, ten times over—”

Sirius’s pfft could probably be heard over outer space, so it’s fair that a couple swimmers out past the shallow end look over his way at the echo of the sudden noise. “Please, it’s trial and error, babey, and you know a thing or two about that yourself,” he states.

“It’s all error,” James bites back, not interested in a hype-man clearly, but what’s Sirius’s job if not that, then?

“It’s not, and you know it’s not; you’re just bruised,” Sirius slips him. “I’ve felt like the gutter pin before and I’m sure I will again, but the times Remus and I are solid, they're worth all of those trip-ups it took to get us there and that’s how I keep getting back up; I’m not any better at it than you are at this — fuck it, I’m way worse off than you.”

“Shut it, I didn’t ask for a glowing reference,” James snips.

“Too bad you’re getting one,” Sirius snips back.

“I could flip that read right back on you, and don't you go thinking I won’t,” James returns.

“I’m not looking for your character assassination here, nor am I going along with it,” Sirius denies.

“No, you listen to me,” James asserts. “I’ve tried and tried, I really thought I’d been doing the right thing with her; she’s always been so, so, so, so, so, so—”

“OK, got it, yeah,” Sirius chimes, tugging on his left earlobe.

So independent that once I even had something going with her, I didn’t even bother trying to insert myself into her world," James expels. "I knew it was hers and I was just lucky to get to be there, that's it."

“No, yeah, I remember,” Sirius assures. “I don’t think you spent a full night at hers until months in.”

“Seriously, her house was like a fortress with a drawbridge that went up at eleven on the dot,” James raises it. “And you know what, I liked it; kept me coming right on back.”

“Mhm, mhm,” Sirius offers knowingly, his shoulders rising and falling through stifled mirth.

“And I didn’t even mind the no-love-at-work rule, kept things spicy,” James barrels right on. “Spicier, even, once she got her shop and I was very newly being toted around as ‘the boyf,’ and then, the more she’s let me in, the more I’ve just wanted to keep coming back, and these days, I can bring her to the floor of a pharmacy because I went ‘toot’ into a tube I found in one of the aisles, but hard-cut to today and look where we are now?”

“Uh — well, you found someone who appreciates how badly you’ll chew scenery for some laughs, first of all, and you two talked it out and now, there’s a fucking wedding coming up that’ll be on both your terms,” Sirius holds up. “That’s where you are; not so bad when you put it like that, hm?”

“It’s a bit much that one minute I’m the man and the next I’m the trouble,” James returns.

“You’re not the trouble, stop it,” Sirius chides. “Nine times out of ten, you’re a great boyfriend so even entertaining the idea that you’re made up of nothing but errors is just unfathomable at this point, but you are allowed to feel exhausted by getting locked out by her today of all days because it can and often does feel like you’re being set up to fail; I do get you on that.”

“There’s the stuff,” James returns lively. “We can work and work and work with them, can feel like we’re getting through to them, hell, can even convince ourselves that we actually are, but they’re still going to freeze up on us and wonder a) why we ever got with them, b) what the fuck’s the matter with us for wanting to stick around, and c) what the fuck do we even think we’re doing, making bigger-picture plans with them when apparently, we should be mapping a way out at the back of our minds.”

“Ohoho, bigger-picture plans?” Sirius puts up, tossing his free arm over his forehead like he’s feeling faint. “Why, they’re afraid of the very concept, let alone the implications that would come if one of them factored you into theirs for five fucking seconds.”

Ohhhho, I knew you were in there somewhere,” James champions.

“No, see, I’m cooking up a devastating rebuttal for all of this as we speak,” Sirius lets him know, “but these thoughts, these feelings, they're human and you, unfortunately, are one of those, so I knew you were going to feel like the wind’s been knocked out of you after a day like this and I’m letting you get it out now before I infuse my carefully collected wisdom into this.”

“Alright, well, hold the fuck on, then,” James bids him. “You and me, we’re a couple of dunderheads; you know that, I know that, we all know it, but we’ve got strong hearts, souls, and heads on our shoulders, but they know that, too, and yet, somehow, they forget all that the very moment we come on too strong, and then suddenly, all the progress made with them feels fabricated. It doesn’t matter what good we do manage to do for them, it doesn’t matter that nine times out of ten we pick the right string of words to say, it doesn’t matter how much we ever hack away at them because Lily’s not going to forget all the ways she got fucked with before I ever got a shot at her and Remus isn’t going to forget the shit he was put through before you came into the picture, and now, neither of them knows what the fuck we’re even doing, trying to make our lives happen with them in the picture, and that’s the fucking truth.”

“Yeah, they don’t know why we do it a lot of the time and maybe they aren’t going to be able to forget their firsts any time soon, but they’re only just starting to see what a decent relationship can even be like, aren’t they? So it does matter what we do, it completely matters,” Sirius puts it, plainly while staying on the gentle side of things when he really has been in the muck that James is currently stuck in. “In fact, I have learned, through major trial and error by the way, that in moments like this, when I’m really stuck in the mud because Remus went and blocked me out, actively not treating him like he’s dicking me around for fun and games helps out more than I could ever say.”

James doesn’t say much for a few good seconds there, but Sirius has to stick to his guns on this one, even if it’s tough to address. “Does it sound like I was accusing her?” he puts up. “I don’t have a sword with me, I’m just deflated, Sirius.”

“I know that, you dolt, I’m saying there are times where I've felt real fed up with the whiplash, too, but learning how to act and handle myself when Remus is having a hard time helps immensely,” Sirius reiterates. “Being lumped in with the worst of the worst hurts like shit, it just does, and not treating them like they’re actively trying to hurt us by doing that sounds small, I know, but it’s actually huge and I’ve an example for you right here; are you ready for it?”

“Well, what else am I doing, really?” James returns.

“Good, stay with me; Remus has worked painstakingly hard since Christmas to make sure he keeps realistic expectations of me, himself, us, but for him, being realistic often means being a pessimist at best and a walking mild to major self-worth issue at worst, and I have had to bend this way and that way to meet that man halfway and it has been a journey, but what a stellar journey it’s been,” Sirius puts it. “Winter and spring? Utterly adorable seasons for us two; couple of lovesick goons we were, you know this.”

“Mm, and I do,” James comes in to affirm.

“Mm, and I thank you,” Sirius gives back. “Everything between us during winter was new; tender, exciting, thrilling even, and I thought we were in paradise, I really did — I mean, I knew it was going to take time for the both of us to figure this thing out, but I was happy with him and Remus was happy, too, the issue was and is that he can compartmentalize like a king: he’s very, very good at it, I’d go as far to call him a field expert, but that means he’s also his worst enemy a lot of the time because he’s good at enjoying what he has in the moment, but he’s also very, very good at expecting an expiry date because that’s all he knows, so in all honesty, he was always going to keep me at an arm’s length and it’s taken me until, mmmm, this very week to fully understand it, and even then, there's always going to be more to learn there; I’ve had little hints this whole time that should have been further red flags than I took them for, and even back before we started, he had whole lectures ready to go when I’d try to pay for just about anything but especially gifts, and after we finally were together, I’d wander into his flat with a lil’ something to help spruce the place up a bit, he'd huff and puff, and I thought it was a fun, flirty little game we were playing, but I had to learn that it was partially a fun, flirty little game and partially that I was putting stuff in his immediate vicinity that he was just going to have to either toss out or stare at when we didn’t work out.”

A long, lustrous sigh cuts through Sirius’s momentum. “Cunt, that’s bleak,” James slips in.

“Sure is, and then, we were talking one day, high as shit and going off on all sorts of tangents, and he let slip that a little dream of his was to study in ol’ Paris sometime, and little old me was sitting there thinking, ‘well, damn, alright; this is news, but let’s see what we can do about that,’ because I listen to him, I do, and I well-remembered the transfer fiasco, and that the best option I have to work with when Remus might actually want to do something is to just encourage, not stifle,” Sirius puts down, trying to work back through an oral history of the two of them from months ago now. “Even during that first, tangential conversation about Paris, I knew I was better off supporting his ideas and I’d be in his good books, so there I went, championing the idea for him, saying I’d help out where I could, saying we could totally make that work for him, especially if we worked fast because as long as we tackled the logistics of it soon enough, then he could go as soon as the next term if he was up for it, because why the fuck not? He’s worked so fucking hard since he was a kid, he deserves to take a term and study wherever he damn well wants to, but he kept saying ‘no, no, no, I'm fine where I am; it’s just a pipe dream,’ but of course I’m going to block that because that’s classic Remus, way too nervous to talk about all the little details and outcomes, and I knew it, and then, he almost fully rebuked me when I brought the cheque over for him to fill out, and there I was, thinking he was throwing a whole fit because it was all about taking my money, and we all know Remus can’t stand taking anyone’s money—“

James’s earthy pfft shotputs through his monologue and breaks it up. “Ain’t that the fucking truth.”

“Mhm, but it wasn’t that — or it wasn’t just that; had to twist his arm to be honest with me about why he was in near-tears over it, but we were still so new and he didn’t know if we’d make it if he went away so soon; hell, he was sure my overactive support for the idea meant that I was happy to see him go — and I was happy, just not in the way he thought it,” Sirius relays, retelling the bits and pieces he knows he told James back then, but in a more chronological order. “He thought he was getting pushed out and of course he thought it, we’d only just started putting an actual label on us at his request, and this was February; Remus would fuckin’ think me going, ‘ooh, alright, let’s get that thing going,’ meant I was feeling smothered already and wanted him gone so I could get some air, so then we had to pause, reframe, I had to expressly state that I wasn’t sending him off to benefit me, I was sending him off at the expense of me, thank you, and then I had to twist his other arm to get him to agree to take the damn cheque so he could go for something he wanted to do rather than only think of me because sure, I knew I’d miss him like hell, but I knew I’d be blowing up his phone constantly while he’d be away and I’d be just as interested in him when he got back, and then it felt like we were stronger than ever, he got approved, and it was like he was ten-times more into in me than ever before because I was that willing to let him go do something he wanted to do, and we were on fire, James, it was so hot, OK?”

“I mean, OK,” James snickers. “Not like I really have to stop and wonder about that one.”

“No, but you need to understand: we were inspired,” Sirius puts it lively. “And while we were busy enjoying all that fire going between us, winter led into spring with me thinking we were aces, dancing about Paris, meanwhile he was still over there actively keeping me hush-hush around work and school for months on end, and then we hit mid-May, them clusters decide that after every bit of interpersonal progress we’d made, it was totally time to make a reappearance in his life; Remus’s spirits are in the toilet, he doesn’t think he can leave my room, let alone go to Paris anymore, and he gives me excuse after excuse for why moving in with me would be a detrimental idea for the two of us, and all of those little things, those little moments of distrust he had toward me, all of the presumed-bad faith he had for me, it all started hitting me at once, and because I let them fester and pushed them aside, resentment had a lot of time to grow in me and I threw tantrums at him that I’m not proud of at all. We’ve worked that out five times over by now, thank Cunt, but here’s my point and it's the kicker, OK? A couple weeks back, after we'd put a lot of that resentment to bed, that boy full-on asked me to 'give him a heads up' if I end up wanting to see other people once he’s away.”

Beat. “Jesus.”

“Mhm, after everything we’d been through and everything we’d worked on through all of winter and spring, after our romantique getaway to ol’ Paris, after he made the call and started planning a trip to deliver me to his parents, after we’d made room for the clusters and had all of these resources ready to go so he’d be as prepared as possible, after I’d basically started halfway-living at his flat, all of a sudden, he brings that up and I’m just arrested by it,” Sirius details. “He said it so matter-of-factly, too; calmly, concisely, and almost removed from himself? It was the strangest thing, but he meant it, and he meant it like, if I’m out one night and suddenly feel like sticking it somewhere else, it would be appreciated if I let him know so he’s prepared for it.”

“Oh, I don’t like that,” James puts down. “I’d send the man a smack from a distance if I could.”

“Ah, ah,” Sirius hastens him, with the air he’d use for a cat about to slap a glass off of the counter, “don’t you dare, because I’m not done.”

James gives a couple of breaths reminiscent of gearing up for a spirited afternoon jog. “Asking a lot of me here.”

“And you will deliver it,” Sirius insists. “I wanted you to follow me here because, while my time with him has been the best time of my life, it’s also been the utmost confusing; I could have been livid at the insinuation, I could have accused him of accusing me of something I haven’t done and won’t be doing, I could have taken that request beyond personally, assumed he meant that he still doesn’t trust me after every way I’d shown him that he can, and I was a shade of all of those things, it was close, but I could have said all of that and made it a hundred times worse, and instead of doing that, I just probed him for more details and the more he talked, the more I could see and hear that it wasn’t about me or my dubious history, it was about him and his.”

James gives up a guttural sigh from over there, but it’s not an interruption in the traditional sense and that’s good, seeing as Sirius is on a major roll now. “He would find out later, and often publicly, that Tom had fucked around on him, but he was never in any kind of position where he could be openly upset about it, so instead he had to keep it together in public and be horrified in private, and I knew that,” he pushes on. “He’d made it clear from the start that I matter more to him than Tom ever did — I’ll never forget the line, 'it’s worse this time because it’s you,' and hell fucking yeah, that was a right ego boost for me? But on another hand, it meant what we had meant the fucking world to him; I already meant the world to him before we even really got started, and for once, James, I chose to actually keep that in mind and give him my word on that because what does it cost me in the end? Like, realistically, what does promising him that I’ll let him know if I feel like wandering off on him do when I know for a fact that I’m not going to have to send that text?”

“Sirius Fucking Black,” James comes in.

“That’s me,” Sirius chimes.

“No, listen — the growth,” James insists, taking a pause to suck a strong breath in through his teeth by the sound of it, “the growth.”

“Well, wait a second, I’ve got a landing to stick here,” Sirius promises. “I really think the fact that I kept my cool and gave him what he needed to hear actually helped us out so much more because he needed to feel seen and heard by me, he just did, and he always responds so much better if I’ve stayed calm and been fair to him, and I’m so not saying I’ve been good about that sort of thing since — I mean, hello, the Tom re-meet-cute wasn’t exactly an easy situation for either of us to slog through, but we did it, we’re still fucking going, and it’s been amazing with him in a new, exciting way every hour for us since, and that’s my point: it's all trial and error, I’ll think we've gone two steps forward, consider it complete progress, and suddenly I'll think we’re nine steps back from where we first started because something didn’t pan out the exact way I wanted it to, but we’re never starting over from scratch because that is impossible, we're way past scratch, and you two aren’t starting from scratch either just because Lily hit a weak point today, you’re just not; they have weak points at times, same as we do, but where in this conversation have we suggested they don’t love us like hell even though we, too, have our setbacks?”

“OK, but—” James tries, but no way.

“Absolutely not, and furthermore,” Sirius asserts, shutting that interruption down right quick, “Remus is an angel on earth and he is trying his fucking best with this, but there are going to be moments where paralysis strikes him and suddenly, he’ll be certain all over again that we’re going to fall apart the way he and Tom did, but I’m in no place to judge him when it happens because I sure as hell get worried that I’m gonna be the one who ruins us, that I’m not healthy for him, that I’m just letting him repeat the same patterns that get him locked into situations with dudes who are way too small for him—”

“Alright, nope, no, not happening,” James booms.

“I’m making a point here, James,” Sirius rings out, looking down distractedly at his feet when he realizes they’re much more wet than they were, and oh, that must be the tide Remus spoke of starting back up again. “Lily and Remus started off with two shit dudes who were way too small for them, that’s just the truth and that’s all there is to it; I understand feeling like you’re not up to the task sometimes, I understand feeling like you can’t win against everything that happened before you when it gets real hard, but you’re the best fit for it and there are always wins. All the time, I see you two winning effortlessly, and I know this next thing is going to hurt to contend with, but as fantastic as you are, you’re not going to be able to erase Snape from her life, just like my fantastic self can’t erase Tom from his, but it’s not going to be healthy in the long run for either of us if we go around thinking we’ve got that kind of power.”

“Have I got any?” James tosses up, and Sirius is honestly aghast at the question. “You just gave me a billion receipts for why you’re the guy who’s going to be the best thing for Remus, and I don’t know if I’m anywhere close to—”

Sirius winds his whole head back so his throat will open properly. “Boy?” he commends, deep from the centre of his chest. “She called you electric earlier with us: she’s not giving you up, she’s scared that you two will lose that going forward, and I know that you’re not going to, you know you're not, and she’ll fucking see it in time, too, alright? You just have to give her the chance to catch up.”

James blows a whole fart noise both into his palm and close to the receiver so Sirius will really hear it. “Oh, go into counselling,” he lobs him.

“I’d never, but I’ll bartend so it’ll equal out to about the same,” Sirius trades him. “So, to recap, we’re the ones who got the brilliant idea to chase after and then go head over heels for a couple of certified babes who unfortunately tend to equate even a whisper of change or advancement on them to being forced to walk the plank, but bitch, so do I? I think that’s been the hardest part to contend with because I hate change just as much as Remus does: when things are going good for me, I don’t want a single molecule to change about the situation, and you know I’ve thrown fits of rage born out of panic to avoid change having to happen with him, so I am fully guilty of walking back progress because I don’t want to deal with whatever change is going to bring, but when that sort of thing shows up in Remus, I lose my head; I’m getting better at letting change happen if it’s going to mean some good is going to come out of it, but I'm no better at it than Remus is at this point, and to that very point, you’re the only one of us four who looks change right in the face and says ‘let’s go!’ so for the long term, you have got to let the rest of us catch up to you on our timelines, but for the short term, you have got to chill on this one.”

“Chill?” James repeats, eloquently at that.

“Mhm, it's your only pathway out of this rut,” Sirius lays down. "We are getting through to them, little by little, every day we keep showing up, and you are being a bit dramatic about this.”

Unbelievable of you to have said those words to me,” James returns.

“I full-on know I majored in the art of dramatics, but so did you,” Sirius maintains. “Consider this a learning curve, actually use what you learned, and it won’t have been a waste; she was honest with you, you coached her back, she’s bringing samosas for you two in about ten or so now, and a little bird told me she’s going to marry you sometime next summer, isn’t that exciting? You won big today, James.”

James gives up a strange sort of breath that’s got Sirius on the highest alert possible. “That’s the other thing,” he relents, a tentative quality to his voice that Sirius really doesn’t care for. “There’s a reason she wants to wait for next year and I rather agree with her thinking on this one because I really might’ve gotten the order mixed up a little here, you know; we’ve been doing overnight stretches that last a week on end or more these days, but she’s got a point that it’s not quite the same thing as waking up with each other every morning and learning how to coexist in the same space for an open-ended amount of time, so I do owe it to her to accept the offer but I definitely owe you a strong heads-up, too.”

Sirius blinks down at the damp sand between his feet, curls his toes in it, rocks on the backs of his heels as a means to combat the numb nodding he’s started doing, and then he remembers that people can’t expect to nod on a phone call and get away with it for long. “Yeah, no, it makes sense,” he offers. “About time, if we’re honest.”

James does nothing but sigh on the other end of the line, and it honestly helps that Sirius can’t see him when he can tell through audio alone that he’s real torn up here. “If she could move in here and you two wouldn’t end up killing each other, I’d be all for that but you know that’s not going to happen,” he implores.

“I very know that,” Sirius returns, huffing a breath of a laugh, and he’s smiling — fully smiling even though his eyes aren’t doing so well in the stinging department. “We’d run each other into the ground, whereas you two are going to host a thousand dinner parties at hers, finish each other’s sentences while we’re all gathered around the granite countertop, to the point where some of your guests are going to have to pretend to smoke just so they can dip outside and get five minutes away from the two of you, and I, for one, cannot wait to heckle you into tomorrow for it when the time comes.”

James succumbs to a near-wheeze laugh, meanwhile Sirius waits that out with a sly smile on and the very real sense he’s onto something in terms of prediction. “Are you actually cool with this or are you saving some major face here?” he checks.

Sirius gives up a sigh, hanging his head to the right. “Well, the thing is, normally people don’t propose to their girlfriends and then live with their best man the rest of their life, do they?” he raises. “I rather figured it was inevitable pretty well as soon as you announced you were going to pop the question and if I’m honest, I think I’ve been preparing for this very moment ever since, in a way.”

“Well, then, I wonder if you could imagine why I might’ve had a lick of a sense you could’ve been freezing me out these past few weeks,” James mentions sweetly, because of course he’d make that a priority to slip in there.

“You know what, I don’t think it was that calculated, funnily enough?” Sirius returns, just as sweetly. “I wasn’t mad at you, James; I had a lot going on and still do, but clearly you mean the fucking world to me so, again, I wasn't punishing you for having the audacity to propose to your longtime girlfriend and for what it’s worth, you could have been out of there long before now and I know you only stuck around there for me.”

“Not just you,” James corrects, and he sounds a lot like he did when he caught strep back in the first year of uni; tight, thick, and incredibly pained. “I got a lot out of it, too.”

Sirius pushes out an unsteady breath, works on bringing a fresh one inward, and gives an automatic work-adjacent smile to a scuba-suited lady descending from the water right near him. She passes by to get to the shore, leaving him blinking at the idea of somebody choosing to go scuba-diving with all those boats floating around on the water, but perhaps that’s part of it; like an extreme sport type of deal?

He shakes his head clear, not interested in giving that any more thought, and puts himself back into the conversation at hand. “End of an era,” he puts up, and then he realizes choosing a phrase like that was a terrible idea for the sentiment only has him choking up even more.

“No, I hated that,” James returns. “If anything, we're just taking on a new form; I’m not skipping town, am I? Believe you me, I’ll still be coming round, strolling in unannounced—”

“I’d really rather you not,” Sirius slips in.

And he’s still going. “—Gorge myself on food from the communal fridge, make myself a cuppa whenever the mood damn well strikes me, and we’re still going to run that terrace, you hear me? The Flat remains until you give that place up.”

“And I don’t think I’m gonna do that for a long, long time so you best let your mum know that,” Sirius raises it.

“Oh, I’m gonna,” James affirms. “And look, you know this by now, but it should still be said that not much is really changing in the end because I’m literally always a call away, as I’ve been for eons now.”

This detrimental phrasing has Sirius immediately facing the stone wall so that fewer people could potentially see a grown man weeping over here. “Stop, no,” he denies, keeping a firm stare going between him and a dune of wet sand to the right of him.

“It’s true,” James chimes. “And so you know, I’m aware it’ll be an adjustment not having me or Remus down the hall, but I’m not just some hack who’s going to dip out on you and not think of a replacement so I've put some thought into this and sure, you could put an ad out for a roomie, but I know you’d fucking hate having some rando scratching his balls on the couch.”

“And how,” Sirius affirms voluminously.

“Right, and I know that,” James underlines, cutting off for a few due to a batch of wry snickering, “so I’m thinking, Pete would literally jump at the chance to get in on that room, and I really think you should consider him before you make any other arrangements—”

“Yeah, alright,” Sirius comes in, liking the thought already, premature as it is.

“Wait, what; really?” James returns. “I wasn’t even finished my case.”

“Well, the man’s there enough as is,” Sirius raises, giving in to a smirk. “I caught him strewn along on the couch the other week while he’s got his own to go do that on, but there’s something about The Flat; it calls to people, Pete included.”

“Exactement, my man,” James takes it from there. “Remus was right, that entire place is a liminal space: the energy is enhanced, the chaotic natures of any one guest livens up the moment they step inside, time loses all meaning to the point where you almost can’t tell if it’s two p.m. or a.m. in there, and that's the magic of it; Pete would so want in.”

“Well, hold on there,” Sirius braces. “Let’s leave room for the idea that he’d rather keep it a place to go to get away rather than where he hangs his hat.”

“Uh, OK, but the idea that he wouldn’t take that room is actual buffoonery,” James says of it. “I just wasn’t so sure you’d be this open to the idea off the bat.”

“Well, in case you haven’t noticed, I have softened on my once-soured opinion of him, so I wouldn’t have needed as smooth an entry into the idea,” Sirius returns, calling for some credit where it's due. “We’re understood at this point, and so what if we may get into some kitchen brawls here and there; it’ll be good for him, teach him to hold his own against the finest of opponents.”

James snorts long and loud over there. “That’s amazing.”

“And, so long as he’s OK with two roomies, because I think Remus may just be moving in once he’s made it back,” Sirius sticks in, right glowing, he’s sure.

A series of nonsensical noises come shooting out of the receiver and Sirius is sure his resulting wince-grin is extremely attractive. “What?” James expels, right from the centre of the chest. “Talk, right now; I mean it.”

“Oh, Cunt, it’ll take way too long to go over with the justice it deserves,” Sirius insists, huffing a laugh, “but look, it’s been a stellar trip, he’s been so good to me, and you know, this in itself could be used as one more reason why I mean it when I say holding patience for those two is key.

“Oh, what a way to full-circle that one,” James lobs him.

“I’m good at that,” Sirius chimes. “We’ll talk about that soon, I’m sure—”

“Oh, I’m gonna want an entire retelling,” James assures.

“And you’ll get it, but for now, float the general idea over to Pete for me, tell him I’m down if he is, and we'll go from there,” Sirius assigns him, “but for now, tell me when you’re going; give me some idea here.”

James gives up a puff of breath. “Well, not tomorrow or anything,” he extends. “I’m thinking late August is fair; give us some time to get our jollies in before I’ll have to start combing through the place for what I’m taking with and what stays here.”

“Oh, shitty shit,” Sirius sounds out.

“What?” James bids, right piqued.

Sirius reaches up to drag his left hand over his face, laughing into it before he drops it. “We got you a church pew,” he forwards, shaking his head dimly.

“I’m,” James sounds out, “sorry? Repeat that.”

Give us this day our daily bread, yeah, that kind of pew,” Sirius sends along. “We found it for sale at Remus’s old workplace, and it was extremely affordable considering it’s a fucking church pew.”

“How fucking long is it, Sirius?” James interrogates, but the effect is rather marred considering he’s choking on a laugh the whole way through.

“Not like a cathedral pew,” Sirius extends. “More like, those benches you’d find in a megachurch with a youth pastor and a rockin' worship band—” he falls off his descriptor to no fault but James’s hooting over there like a whole, entire goon, “—and it would’ve fit perfectly in the front hall; like, just to the right of the front door, along the wall across from my door, and it'd stop just before the living room, give guests a spot to sit while they take their shoes off and, you know, inevitably wonder what the hell kind of space they’ve stepped into, but most of all, we couldn’t help but think it was the perfect replacement for Ugly Pot.”

“I — my hand is fused to my chest,” James relays.

“You know, I think I knew that deep down,” Sirius trades him, a breathy snicker leaving his chest with it. “We also got you Dress-Up Jesus on the same outing—”

“What? What? What?” James chants, garnering Sirius to lose his entire shit, leaning back against the stone wall and clasping at it for purchase with his free hand, but James's talking over there quite distracts him from his own mirth. “Oh, Lily — you are not ready; he’s spoiled me rotten … she says, ‘oh no,’ but lovingly.”

“And she’s right to,” Sirius quips, but he does feel that the call has inevitably run its course if Lily and the samosas have made it back. “Well, go on, then; those things just aren't quite as good at room temp.”

“Soon, yes, but talk to me,” James beckons. “Jésu?”

Sirius’s eyes flash all over again. “Mhm, white Jesus unfortunately, but he is magnetic and so are his many, many outfits which one absolutely can and should mix n’ match.”

“OK, OK, OK,” James delivers, powering up. “Lily won’t let me squeeze a church pew into hers, there’s just no way.”

“But oh, would it be funny for you to try,” Sirius slips in.

“Funny, sure, but I’d like to live to see my wedding day,” James serves him. “I will be taking Dress-Up Jesus with me when I go, however, but you keep that church pew in there where it belongs for me, alright? Take care of it.”

“I’ll sit it in the hall with the help of a volunteer and probably never move it again until I go from the place so if that counts as taking care of it, then yes, I’ll do just that,” Sirius serves him, grinning ear to ear when all he gets in return is a series of nearly-silent laughs in return. “Now, get in there, buddy-boy, and tell her I accept her terms.”

James comes back from his fit rather suddenly. “Shit, I will; she’ll love it,” he declares, and by the sound of it, scoots his chair back so forcefully a clatter echoes out before the screen door is slamming against the door frame.

“Jesus, James,” Sirius smirks.

“I’m back, babey; what did you expect?” James says for it.

And there’s a solid point right there. “Alright, love you and I’m glad we did this,” Sirius hands him.

“Love you,” James booms, and the line cuts out.

Sirius spots one Remus Lupin’s head o’ curls about halfway toward his destination, gets about a foot’s distance away from their station before he can see the rest of him, and finds the lad sitting up and cross-legged on his towel, head bent with his mobile held in his lap and Sirius’s own towel laid out beside his like he’d never knicked it for a pillow at all. He lifts his head like a spring the moment Sirius gets to him, beams bright as Sirius plants himself down on his towel facing him completely, and turns himself to face Sirius head-on, his brows cocked up very high on his forehead.

“Talk to her, did you?” Sirius bids.

“Well, I felt I should check in while you were handling him, see how she’s doing with it,” Remus offers for it.

“Mhm, good man that you are,” Sirius echoes. “And how is she doing? She was grabbing samosas when I got him on the line so I only got a brief cameo out of her toward the end.”

Remus takes in a thoughtful breath, his whole upper torso lifting with it. “Heavily embarrassed, but for the most part she sounded a lot better,” he offers. “I’ve also heard there’s a wedding in the distance and for some more personal news, I've been asked to be Lily’s best man.”

Sirius beams brightly, nodding his immense support for that brilliant idea. “And you’ll look great doing it, too,” he lobs him.

Remus, lovely, funny lad that he is, dusts his shoulders off with an elusive air about him. “And,” he raises, his lips curling into a rather suggestive little bow, “I hear services have been required of you.”

Sirius takes to a powerful shoulder shimmy, but those hands of his are playing air-castanets. “Mhm, mhm, mhm,” he affirms. “'I’ve Just Seen A Face,' at that; can only imagine what your face is gonna look like during that.”

“Rouge and likely damp,” Remus forwards him.

“Listen, I can only hope for that,” Sirius returns him.

Remus shifts his tree-branch limbs to curl them underneath him, his smile dropping off almost preemptively as he moves the conversation into a slightly different area of concern. “How’s he doing, then?” he raises, and Sirius is the one to take in a hefty but thoughtful breath this time around.

“Y’know,” he starts, tilting his head back and forth idly, “he was a bit bruised about the fact that the car meltdown happened at all, he was pretty convinced he'd let that happen somehow and bummed over not being enough for Lily to simply enjoy the fact that she’d been proposed to, but I talked him down from that ledge and he’s come back swinging already; plus, he’ll be leaving for Lily’s soon enough and while that's bittersweet, it’ll be a good thing for them and they’ll be aces again in no time so I wonder, d’you think we can officially call this one an averted crisis?”

Remus’s brows take to a rather quick restructuring, heading straight for bemused territories by the look of it. “What?” he bids.

“About which part?” Sirius checks, giving a quizzical, sort of half-smile for it. “I said a lot right there.”

“He’s moving out?” Remus reiterates.

“Oh,” Sirius gives, doing a fast shake of his head before a nod. “She didn’t say?”

“No,” Remus offers candidly. “I suppose she didn’t quite get around to that.”

Sirius nods vacantly, not much of a fan of the placement of Remus’s neck; the straightest it’s looked in a while, those shoulders are looking right rigid below his neck, and neither one of those things is a good sign for what’s going on inside the man. “Well, she had other news to share, I hear,” he offers him, trying to stave off a hurtful blow from festering somewhere between Remus’s ribcage, “but yeah; she asked him to move in, get them started on the next chapter, as they say — royal they, not them specifically, but it’s about time he does it, don’t you think?”

Sirius’s accompanying smirk falls on a pair of blind eyes, it appears, at least until Remus shakes his head clear and makes a push for speech. “Right, and that’s — good for them, but,” he tries, only this one’s a toughie, the collection of words he’s trying for here, “what about you?”

Sirius blinks twice for the redirection, trapped between feeling touched and disconcerted by it. “Well, kind of you to think of me in all this, but I think I’ll do alright,” he extends, aiming to keep things light-hearted in tone and vernacular if he can help it, but it sure doesn’t seem to settle Remus’s woefully misplaced concern. “Hey, everything’s fine; all good over here.”

Remus shakes his head faster than the last, and it’s a lot more of a direct answer than the last nod stood for at that. “Did you tell him?” he asks, going for a head tilt and a pointed stare aimed at Sirius from behind his shades, and though all Sirius can see is his abject uncertainty projected back on him via the mirrored aviators, the weight of Remus’s stare still has him feeling as though he’s being stared at from underneath a microscope.

“Uhm, you know what, no; it didn’t come up,” Sirius offers, and ends up lifting his shoulders in an automatic shrug when Remus’s expression doesn’t change even one bit. “Well, what, Remus?”

Remus’s face does switch up a little there. “What do you mean, 'what?'” he raises, audacious about it now. “When is he leaving?”

“End of August, probably,” Sirius answers. “We’re going to get as much of our jollies in as we can once I’m back, but he’s going to start moving things over to hers pretty soon after that; they want to get started on their lives together, it makes sense for them to, and—” he stalls up, peering listlessly at Remus’s eerie expression, “—why the face, Remus?”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Remus implores.

“Why would that be the first thing I'd jump to say, when I could and did just say ‘good on you, Jimbo,’” Sirius puts up. “Would’ve been a bit of a buzzkill, no?”

Remus’s expression heads into wounded territories faster than Sirius can contend with, but he makes the effort to shake off the tingling feeling he can just feel starting up his spine when he doesn’t want that getting the jump on him. “I—” he tries, but this time he doesn’t just stumble to get his perspective out, he all but loses his vocal quality for a few good seconds before he seems to pull the strength he needs out of thin air to keep on with it. “That broke my heart to hear, Sirius.”

“Why?” Sirius implores, that tingling feeling keeping on up his spine; he feels like shit for reportedly hurting him, but in the same breath, he can’t fathom how he could have done it.

“Is ‘a buzzkill’ the colloquial term for you making James aware that you’ve now got this dropped onto your plate as well?” Remus raises listlessly. “I didn’t know that somehow, but a buzzkill or not, it’s completely devastated you and he’d want to know, especially if he’s about to move out.”

“To Lily’s,” Sirius amends, hoping the distinction will help them get around this roadblock they’ve run into. “He’s not going far.”

“That’s not the point, Sirius,” Remus puts up, faux-lightly.

“Alright, well, it’d have been a piss poor time to drop it; hearing his objectively good news only to immediately slide my dreadful news in there,” Sirius reiterates. “I mean, what’s the goal there? Say it so he won’t dare go? That would genuinely be using information he doesn’t have to manipulate him into staying and—”

Remus makes an incredibly uneasy noise there and in all honesty, it could have been a laugh if Remus felt a sardonic one might've been appropriate, but he clearly doesn’t find this funny. “I am not saying you should have told him about it so he’d have to stick around longer,” he puts down. “I’m saying, you should have done it so he’d know to come around, check in on you more often, stop in more than he might do if he doesn't know you’re dealing with this; is a picture starting to form here, Sirius?”

Sirius can’t ever fully forget that Remus can and will likely one day decimate an entire debate stage via concretely laid down points wrapped up in righteously polite snark alone, but somehow it can still slap him silly how ready he can be to step up to the podium and unleash his powers on him. “He’s going to be coming by all the time, Remus,” he assures, making painstaking measures not to match any of the snark on display here. “This isn’t the tragedy you think it is; it’s a good thing, our boy’s grown up and it’s time for him to fly the nest.”

I’m not going to be here, Sirius,” Remus whispers intently, and it somehow feels ten times worse than if he’d just yelled it at him. “You don’t see why I’d be nervous about that; me?”

It feels like every bone is sitting upright inside Sirius’s body. “No, you’re allowed to feel nervous about it,” he lets land first, “but these are two separate topics that are being conflated right now.”

“Mm, are they?” Remus raises, and Sirius knows he’s squinting behind those shades of his now. “Because for me, they sort of muddle together into a problem.”

Sirius’s breath goes the unsteady route, a bit of an issue considering how condensed his body has started to feel. “Alright, but they don't have to add up to a problem, that’s the thing,” he assures. “Sure, if I had nothing happening for the fall, I might feel worse about the speed that this is going at and obviously I’m not looking forward to losing the both of you at once, but that’s also the most dramatic and Sirius-esque read of it, and I don’t want to waste energy on that, Remus.”

“I wish you’d waste some energy on yourself in this case,” Remus says of it.

Sirius makes painstaking efforts to keep his output of a sigh from sounding too cumbersome. “I know you’re worried I’ll feel lonely or passed over, but I’m not getting left behind and I know that, so rather than drop some shit fucking news only for him to feel guilty about going or come back here and boohoo to you about it like I thought I was going to do when he first brought it up, I’m choosing to be happy for him,” he instils. “And, I’m not going to have the flat all to myself either; that’s simply not a one-man flat and I’m thinking of offering Pete the other bedroom once James goes.”

“Alright, that’s a start,” Remus allows, but that’s a short lead he’s holding onto. “I’m glad you thought of Pete, that’s actually brilliant, Sirius, but that can’t be the only form of outreach you do from here on out; you need to look after yourself, too.”

“That was me looking after myself,” Sirius holds up. “I mean, I was thinking of Pete, too; it’d get him out of that glorified box he’s in now and he likes it at ours as is, but I was definitely thinking I’d fare better with someone I know well around there.”

“Right, but that’s not going to solve the overall problem, is it,” Remus suffices.

“There isn’t a problem,” Sirius puts up. “I’m not going to have time to sit around and sulk all day long, I’ve got a venue to open; I’ll be working like a miner over there and in my free time, I’ll start a new hobby, learn a new instrument, read some books I have and just haven't picked up yet, James will come around when he can, Pete will be around, and to that point, The Flat is a second home to many, it will continue to be that, and the front door will be ever-revolving.”

Remus’s expression clouds over with nothing other than flagrant disappointment. “If your fall plan is to throw yourself into literally anything other than processing your loss, then I’m horrified by it,” he instils. “Remember that wall? You will hit it if you expect work, a new hobby, and an endless stream of mates coming through the place to keep you too busy to think about Reg: you will think about him, and the way he went out, what you could have done differently, how they paved way for it to happen, how you couldn't change the course of it, and you’re going to need support.”

“I already have support,” Sirius puts down, eyeing the guy who gives him quite a hefty supply of it himself.

Remus pauses, mouth open before he seems to choose to take that point and run with it. “And I’m glad, but that puts a lot of pressure on me, being the only one who knows about it,” he puts up.

Sirius breathes in long, hoping to call on a sense of calm before it’s too difficult to. “I’m sorry you feel that pressure?” he tries, feeling like he’s testing every word out as he says them.

Remus’s hold on his shoulders deflates fast. “It’s the truth and you hate it when I avoid saying it,” he highlights. “You will need support and the first person I would’ve expected you to have asked it from would've been James, but you’ve missed every chance you’ve had.”

“There’s been a lot going on for him and me lately,” Sirius retorts. “Excuse the fuck out of me if I didn’t get all the way down my list—”

“This shouldn’t even be at the bottom of your list, Sirius,” Remus returns, leaning forward to aim it right at him. “How long are you planning on conveniently leaving it out of all of your conversations? Weeks, months, if you can hack it?”

“Yeah, I’ve planned that far ahead with it; you got me,” Sirius takes on, feeling less and less need to remain steadfast about being the perfect example of chill if Remus isn’t going to bother with it. “You act as though this didn’t just happen, Remus; it’d have ruined his upswing in mood if I dropped it on him today, he’s only just got back the reins of a day that should have been smooth sailing for him and I didn't want to damper it any more.”

Remus gives a good, long huff there, swallowing pointedly as he brushes his right wrist past his brow. “I wish you actually were thinking that selflessly about it,” he returns, and to Sirius’s aghast expression he raises his two hands and gives a single beckon toward himself with both sets of fingers in a come-at-me motion that’s altogether far too hot for the situation at hand.

“Fine, I am thinking of myself in this,” Sirius puts out, wearing the bloody truth if Remus wants him to so badly. "I’m not ready to bring this shit to him, and I don’t know when I’m going to be."

“James deserves to know what’s happened so he can support you through this,” Remus keeps on, fully undeterred. “Not to mention, it’ll hurt him to know you don’t trust him with this.”

“Good thing he won’t have to hear it, then,” Sirius snips.

“Oh, so it is ongoing,” Remus receives, nodding slowly, and to Sirius’s challenging shrug, he gives up a horribly deep sigh, letting his face fall forward into the palm of his right hand and giving his eyelids a rub underneath his shades with his forefinger and thumb. “It’s like you’re determined to be angry with him before he’s even given you a reason to be.”

With how straight Sirius’s spine sets to, he might just be taller than Remus at this point in time. “He’s going to tear that notebook apart, Remus,” he implores, keeping his ground best he can. “I told you that.”

Remus takes in a long, slow breath and brings his palm down past his nose, mouth, and chin to clasp it at the side of his neck, enunciating each of his next few words like they’re all a sentence in themselves. “Then tell him to leave it unscathed,” he advises.

“You’re always so literal,” Sirius hisses at him, turning his head and giving a nasty look to a fully-dripping man getting a bit too close to the action here while he passes by their towels to presumably get to his own. “It’s not the pages themselves, it’s what’s written on them that he’ll tear to shreds, and do you really think asking nicely is going to work? Have you met James?”

“Have you?” Remus counters. “The most he’d do is care about how you’re faring in all of this, and wouldn’t that just be something?”

“Yeah, in a perfect world, it might do to have pushback on some of what’s in there, but in this one, there are parts of it that I don’t want him touching,” Sirius returns. “Sure, he’ll show me all the mercy in the world but he’ll leave none of it for Reg, so you’ll forgive me if I’m not interested in his hot takes on the situation when it’s just going to blow a hole through my heart to have to sit there and hear them.”

Remus puckers his lips out at that, but Sirius knows that means he’s got a whopper coming. “You’ve let me have my many takes on the subject,” he points out, innocuously quizzical about a technicality that’s undeserving of having a magnifying glass held over it as far as Sirius is concerned. “Why do I get the honour and not him?”

“Because you respect me enough not to have a go at my dead brother, Remus,” Sirius sounds out, forcibly keeping it quiet because even now, even when he’s feeling this tread upon, he’s still thinking of Remus and how he’ll feel if he made a scene in public and made him the centre of unwanted attention.

“Only just,” Remus puts it, lips held tightly once it’s out, but the breath he takes in after Sirius’s eyebrows enter his hairline sounds like the breath before a plunge. “I know better now than to voice my rather complex opinions of him, but I’ve also learned that if I focus on you in relation to him, you'll let me get away with saying almost anything.”

“Mm?” Sirius bids, and he knows he shouldn’t be working his mouth around a budding smile when they’re this close to duking it out on the beach, but it’s invaluable, getting the chance to hear how Remus navigates just one of his many complexities compared to the way James does, and the way the others do at that.

“Mhm, and I’m thankfully not as worried about what’ll happen if I voice an observation of mine as I used to be; want to see?” Remus raises, and Sirius tips his chin toward him. “You've not had your typical confidence since you read through that book so I’ve a strong sense that there were a lot more accusations in there that you only scratched the surface of with me, and it used to hurt me badly that there were certain things and parts of your life that were off-limits to me, but I’ve been learning to understand that—”

“I resent that completely,” Sirius cuts in, aiming to knock that read out of the way as fast as he can shoot it down. “I well know that I haven’t always been open with you about this stuff and for good reason considering, but I’m getting there, Remus, I am. It wasn't going to be an overnight switch, but I come to you with this stuff now and I think I deserve some credit here; I’ve cried with you about this stuff now when I used to hold myself off from it, I’ve been open with about a lot of this with you, I came to you that night, I’m working through what I read in real-time, and it’s not going to all come out at once, it comes in huge waves that I've been sharing with you every time one hits, I showed the book to you, I let you see the sketch of me, I let you see me on that page — that’s the most personal thing in that entire book, the very idea he would’ve taken all that time to the sketch from a photo of me that I know he must have found after I'd gone and studied meticulously to get every single detail on my face right down to the freckle, it meant something to me to point you to it.”

“I’m fucking grateful for all of it, especially that sketch,” Remus makes sure to land. “You letting me see that felt important to me, too, but I’m learning to accept that there are parts of it all that are too painful for you to go over with me and that just comes with the territory, but you can’t carry the rest of what you read all by yourself.”

“I’m working my way through it with you, Remus,” Sirius puts up, near-disparate now that he’s really losing every one of his points moments after he raises them. “I already have someone who comes to bat for me every time I need it; why should I even have to go to him for the rest?”

“Because you do need more than just me,” Remus insists. “I’m new here, let’s be real about that, but James was there and forcing him out of having an opinion on this just because you're afraid he’ll come at the situation harder than you can handle is a bit unfair considering how long he’s been around, how much he's seen—”

“It’s not fear, it’s lived-in knowledge,” Sirius maintains, and Remus sure makes a face that plainly suggests, if anything, it’s both of those things, but Sirius won’t waiver on this one, he can’t do it. “He hated him — hates him still, it’s there in the background any time Reg comes up, and he’s getting less and less classy about it; I mean, you saw what he was like on Chest Day.”

“I also saw what you were like on Chest Day, Sirius,” Remus puts it delicately. “Reg’s written words led to that, so do you think we could maybe forgive James for getting a bit lippy in Reg’s name while we were already taking a long, morbid trip down memory lane and were inevitably going to find something in there that was going to set you off?”

Sirius takes the time to stutter out a blank laugh that truly had nothing coming after it, but Remus reportedly wasn’t finished yet so Sirius lacking a response doesn’t much matter. “And if we really want to start going back into the vault, then I sure saw James on a dreary Friday back in November trying to talk you back down from another episode,” he highlights pointedly, “and I remember him being quite fair to both you and Reg, something he did not have to be, and yet—”

Sirius sucks a heightened breath through his teeth. “Don’t you dare, Remus,” he warns.

“Why, is it working?” Remus inquires, and he's just too hot when he’s confident in his wits; it’s utterly unjust. “Time might have gone on, allowed for James time to revisit and loathe a lot of the past, which could explain why he’s been colder about Reg since that day, but it doesn’t change the fact that he was the one who reaffirmed your reasons for being at that funeral in the first place.”

Sirius lets go of his bottom lip, passing his tongue over the teeth marks imprinted into it. “I was having a fistfight with a stone wall, Remus, of course he let me hear what I wanted to hear,” he puts it. “He didn’t want me going at all, he made that very clear to me, and I made my reasons very clear right back to him, but he only stopped arguing when I told him he could either stay home or come with.”

Remus only stares at him for a beat or three. “Then I wonder if that is a prime example of a situation where James didn’t let his own takes and opinions on you going follow him to that funeral,” he raises plainly. “Almost as if, when you’re hurting that badly, James puts you above all else.”

Sirius breathes uneasily, feeling a draft at the back of his neck that acts as a firm warning that he’s losing this battle. “I agree he’s a good bloke that knew just what to say after I lost my shit there and knows exactly how to make me get back up again; he'd had practice,” he highlights — wouldn’t dream of not highlighting, “but if that notebook has taught me anything, it’s that I completely misinterpreted what little Reg and I had left back then — glamourized it, even; I was wearing some majorly Sirius-coloured glasses ahead of and inside that cathedral, and that book shouldn't be let anywhere near James’s hands.”

Remus doesn’t have to ask what he means or hum to signal for clarification, just hangs his head differently and frowns, like he’s there in Sirius's stairwell with him all over again. “I really thought Reg have shown up to mine if it’d been me, but he wouldn’t have,” he speaks it, feels it, wraps his fists up in it. “In those first couple of years after I'd gone, absolutely he wouldn't have come, the entries from back then were as good as hate crimes to read one after the other, and he’d have been far too angry to show up for me, but even in those last couple years, in those last handful of entries, they read like he’d warmed to me and my choices, and I still don’t believe he'd have come: I don't know if time is what got to him or if staring down the immensely depressing road ahead of him got him rethinking his choices and envious that I got out of there before I’d have had to stay on that same road, but it doesn’t matter what changed for him, he’d have still felt too far gone to search up when and where my funeral would’ve been. He was too embarrassed by himself, his behaviour, which side of the family he chose instead, he was still referring to me as the unforgiving man that I was then and still am so much of the time; he wouldn’t have come to mine, wouldn’t have known how to show his face around there, and if we take that hypothetical out of the picture and focus on what actually happened, it was easier for him to go out like a light than to admit he’d done wrong to my face and show me a little mercy.”

Remus breathes in and out unsteadily, plants his left elbow on his thigh and his chin in his hand, covering up his quivering lips. “And you think you deserve to deal with all of those blows on your own?” he tries, speaking from behind his hand.

“I’m not, I’m talking it through with you, right now,” Sirius mentions, giving a weak grin there, but it’s deft as shit and he knows it because he can see it reflected in Remus’s shades. “If I let James get a hold of all that, he might actually go find him if there’s a place we all go to once this simulation is over; I simply would not put it past him to figure it out in the name of me and this.”

Remus gives a sordid sigh, dropping his whole hand with it. “This is a horrible spot for you to be stuck in and James would want to help pull you out of it,” he insists, but Sirius can’t meet him halfway on this one; James might indeed want to hold a hand out for Sirius to grab, but he’ll toss Reg into the fire in the same breath and it feels like a wildfire’s tearing its way up his spine that Sirius can’t put out no matter how fast or hard he works. “It might not be miracle work, it might not fix everything or anything, and it won't bring him back, but at the very least, telling James about it will give him the chance to hold even some of this weight that’s been piling up on you; he was there, Sirius, and his perspective matters, too.”

“It’s my fucking story, not his,” Sirius rips out of himself, stamping his balled fists against his thighs, and then, when that feels right he does it thrice more before Remus is up and on him, holding his wrists tight and landing his knees astride Sirius’s hips, hovering himself right over his lap so that if Sirius wants to beat anything it’ll have to be him and since that’s never going to happen, Sirius really has to give it up to him; Remus is truly, fucking brilliant.

“Don’t,” he puts down. “I will carry you back to the room myself if I have to.”

Sirius fume-breathes against Remus’s chest as he lets his wrists go limp in his grip, now far too aware of their surroundings and horrifically embarrassed of himself for Remus’s sake, and plenty of his own too. “I’m sorry,” is what he tries to say, but it comes out so low he doesn’t know if Remus even heard it.

“Everybody’s heading out, Sirius; they’re not looking over here,” Remus relays. “Tide’s coming in hot.”

Quite alerted, Sirius peels his face off of Remus’s shirt and ducks his head down to peek out from underneath his left arm, blinks through the film over his eyes to get a glimpse of the water, and that tide has gotten so much closer to them than he knows what to do with. “Remus,” he blurts, looking up at him fast, “that’s terrifying.”

To some sure relief, Remus huffs a laugh from above. “It is a bracing sight if you’ve been looking away for a while and suddenly look back at it,” he lets him have, and there’s something sheepish about his smile. “It used to scare me when I was younger; I’d ask my dad over and over again if we’d get swallowed up and by mercy, he never got sick of finding new ways to say 'nope, we’ll be long gone by then.’”

Sirius feels immensely torn between three distinct camps, feeling charmed by such a frankly believable anecdote, embarrassed he’s still doing this shit to himself, and completely uninterested in seeing that tide get any closer while they’re smack dab in the middle of the slanted beach; it’s a lot to contend with at once, thanks much.

“We should run,” he says of it.

Remus huffs another laugh, but this time he seems to think it safe to let go of him, which doesn’t help Sirius feel that much less like a head case, but it’s at least a little bit of a relief. “I don’t think running is that necessary,” he extends, reaching down to have a peek at the time off of Sirius’s mobile screen. “It's going very slowly; it wouldn’t hit us for another twenty.”

With a new, clean shot of the water, Sirius eyes the situation with some ease in knowing that Remus knows more about this than he does certainly, but overall? Unease has taken over all other aspects of his body and mind put together, so it’s a no for him. “No, I hate it,” he puts down, budging up on Remus.

Remus moves off of his lap, shifting off of Sirius’s towel to stand behind his own. “Come up to the grass, then; the water never reaches up there even at its highest,” he forwards, giving his towel a solid shake-out to rid any excess sand from it, inspiring Sirius to do the same.

Remus seems to have their beach bag covered so with that, Sirius carries his mobile, pack, and shoes in the hastily folded towel in his arms while he lets Remus lead the way, following him up a small hill over to the grassy area. Remus takes a seat overlooking the beach below and sets their bag on his right, garnering Sirius to deposit everything but his pack beside the bag and cross behind him to sit on his left, but from there, Sirius won’t pretend he isn’t moving very delicately as he lowers himself to the ground, taking a leaf out of Remus’s book and situating himself crossed-legged as he examines the newly stoic man staring straight ahead of them; whatever prior amusement with Sirius’s tide-spooked antics seems to have very much gone away, replaced with a strongly held jaw and a furrow to end them all for a brow line.

It’d be nice if Sirius didn’t have to be the first to say something, but then again, that’d be asking a lot, making Remus do it. He breathes in long, shuts his eyes, and breathes out, thinking one apology didn’t quite cover it. “I’m really sorry, Remus,” he offers, scooting a little to the right so that his right knee is not-so-subtly pressed against Remus’s left one, needing some form of physical contact going between them and taking it as a good sign that Remus doesn’t move his away; small things.

A pent-up sigh comes almost in response to that thought and Sirius finds himself needing to open his eyes to check that he didn’t just get blown off, but Remus has very much zeroed in on Sirius’s location, his head turned right toward him. “If the idea of telling James about it gets you reacting like that,” he puts it, and the pause he chooses to put there and let simmer feels like a brick to the face, “then you’ve got a lot more to discuss with him than what’s happened in your life this past week.”

“Remus,” Sirius puts up, and it’s feeble at best so he doesn’t know why he bothered speaking yet; Remus clearly wasn’t done.

“No, we’re not doing ‘Remus,’ thank you,” he denies. “I hate that you just did that to yourself, but it did make it crystal clear to me that you’ve been holding onto a ton of resentment toward him for a long time now and it’s starting to pour right out of you, so there is no more wiggle-room here; he may have a sense that something's up, but you have got to talk to him because I can guarantee you, Sirius, he doesn’t know how bad it’s gotten between you two.”

This, however, Sirius does feel he has to speak on. “It’s not even bad between us,” he assures. “That call I was just on with him was exceptionally love-affirming, and that doesn’t have to change because I’m wary about letting him get his hands on this one thing.”

“I just watched you go off at the idea that he’d get any say on your story as if he wasn’t a main character in it, so you need to do the work here so that reparations can be made between the best friends I have ever seen in my entire life,” Remus puts down. “It isn’t fair to muzzle him because it might hurt to hear some takes that may be less forgiving of Reg than you’ve been too busy throwing yourself under the bus to have even thought of yet, but maybe it might do well to hear it from someone like James, maybe you actually need to hear it put like that, maybe you’ll feel a lot better to yourself in all this if you got to hear from someone who can give you a better sense of what the actual, full picture looks like; he's your best fucking friend, Sirius, remember that guy?”

Sirius straightens his neck out, wanting to appear as steadfast as possible to match his gut. “I am allowed to feel some resentment for the fact that for years he gassed me up to hate Reg back and you know what, maybe if he hadn’t, I’d be a lot better about taking even some blame when it's warranted,” he puts out, pressing on quick before Remus can finish opening his mouth. “Not always, but you know, a general sense of responsibility? The act of taking some accountability? The general concept that these things can be two-sided, that you get what you give, that things aren’t actually as black and white as they feel, all of those things? I've needed coaching on how to think in those ways long before this point, but I’ve spent half a decade now hating the very thought Reg and having James reaffirm that hatred over and over again; why should I have bothered with some critical thinking when I had James reaffirming my every nasty thought about him?”

Remus gives the most aggravated whine to the sky for that. “I don’t have words for this, Sirius,” he muses, but that’s a whole falsehood when it appears he’s got plenty of words for it. “Once you’d gone from there you were safe, you were free of them, and no longer in danger of them, and that includes Reg, Sirius: James clearly took refuge in you getting away from him, too, and maybe it stings right now because everything’s begun to sting now that you know a little too much about what happened to him, but it won’t always feel this sharp; you're going to look back on those years and be grateful James never made you feel that you deserved any of that, and I know it because you’ve said it to me yourself before all of this dropped into your lap and I know you’ll feel it again.”

Sirius’s heart rate takes a leap, but he strives to keep his point within his sights. “I’m going to be twenty-four this year — I’m hitting my mid-fucking-twenties before I even know how to reflect on my mistakes properly,” he describes. “James doesn’t waste his time coaching me to try and think that even any of the fault was mine, but maybe if he had gone up the middle a little more with it, if he hadn’t whispered in my ears for years and years and made me out to think that I was the one and only victim in that house, I wouldn’t have stayed away from Reg for so long.”

Remus’s chin dips, like he’s chosen to stare at a spot on the ground ahead of Sirius rather than at him and the next time he speaks, it is something else; cutting right to the bone. “You need to talk to him,” he says, not a plea, not an implore, he’s beseeching him to. “I know it feels like you know him inside and out, but you don’t — you don’t know what those years were like for him.”

“I do actually,” Sirius gives up candidly. “I was there: I heard him, saw him, and I listened to him, too much so.”

Remus shakes his head at least three times, side to side. “No. No, you think you know, but you only got what James let you see,” he instils, and there’s that tingling back to fuck Sirius’s spine right back up. “You didn’t get what was going on inside of his head, you didn’t see those years through his eyes, he wouldn't have told you the whole picture of how those years affected him, but imagine you were him and he was you? If you'd spent nearly a decade watching him get villainized by his entire family, hearing and seeing the damage they were doing to him, and feeling powerless in it all, you would hold some strong resentment toward James’s Reg and you would speak your fucking mind on it whether he liked it or not.”

Sirius reaches up fast to pinch the bridge of his nose between his right forefinger and thumb. “This is all so hypothetical—”

Doesn’t matter, Remus is still working with this one. “You’d have figured out a way to hear each other out so the both of you felt heard, and it’s the same thing here,” he puts down, fully undeterred. “Of course he still holds resentment against him: you told me way back in October that sometimes, even when you’ve spent time away from it all, it can still feel like it’s all so close and fresh, and I sure as hell know it’s slowly lapped at you over time and right now, it’s all coming back in massive waves, but do you really think that’s only been the case for you? James is still working through those years, too; he beams a whole lot, he may well be a pretty fucking jaunty guy, happy to spend so much time keeping you floating above water and taking your happiness as a personal responsibility of his, but that doesn’t mean he’s invincible, Sirius.”

Sirius breathes in tightly, feels he’s one punch away from surrendering, and as if Remus reads that plainly on his face, he goes and gives one double upper-cut. “At this point, if that hasn't swayed you, I’ll be inhumanely disappointed in you if you think leaving him in the dark on this will have you any better off,” he puts down, not stopping long enough for Sirius to respond, “but if you’re this determined to keep it between just the two of us, then I don’t know if I can leave at all.”

Sirius’s right eye goes for a twitch, the sentiment lagging before it’s sinking in for him, and he winds back so fast it’s as if he’s been blasted back with it. “Remus,” he asserts.

“Sirius,” Remus replies, cool as a sea cucumber.

Sirius feels as if his brain's just swelled three times its regular size. “Are you seriously using Paris as the ultimatum for this?” he demands, some inhumane disappointment coursing through his own veins.

Remus shakes his head once. “It’s not an ultimatum,” he denies.

“Sure as hell feels like one,” Sirius observes, feeling cornered in from all sides.

“You know better than that,” Remus gives him, and it would be a whole lot easier if it didn’t sound so candid and true to him. “I know myself, the parameters I can operate under, and I’m not going to feel comfortable going off and living out a pipe dream that I didn’t know would even be in the cards for me six months ago if it means I’ll be leaving you in the dust in order to do it.”

“Remus. John. Lupin,” Sirius scolds.

“Oh, it’s John now?” Remus raises, cocking his head to the right.

“It’s fucking John,” Sirius affirms, afraid to so much as blink. “It was never a pipe dream for you, Remus. You’d have always gotten it sorted out, maybe not in time for this term without me kicking you to get approved in time, but you’d have made it happen and to that, a ‘pipe dream’ is a pretty shit way to keep referring to something I’ve watched you light up like the sun over many, many times since the whole idea really started rolling, and you cannot be so willing to pull the plug on the whole plan just for this.”

“Just?” Remus quotes, lips held ajar. “That’s a pretty shit way to minimize something that’s left you this distrustful of yourself and almost everyone you once held close, but I do think it’s time to consider whether it's the right time for me to go.”

Sirius shifts his whole frame to the right so he’ll be facing Remus properly, and then he’s leaning over and in to stick his face right up on Remus’s in order to peer beyond those mirrored shades to suss out if he’s bluffing, but all he can see is himself staring back at him and Remus’s expression unchanged despite a literal face being stuffed right up in front of his own; he’s not giving him anything, he’s really considering this. “It’s important to you, and it’s important to me that it’s important to you,” he presses. “That’s reason enough to see it through.”

“Of course it’s important to me, but so are you,” Remus puts up listlessly, and Sirius bites down fast on his lower lip, his eyes wide and misty and fixed on Remus. “You’ve been amazing about this, I wouldn’t have even gone for this without you there coaching me to go for it from moment one, but Paris isn’t going anywhere, Sirius; it’ll still be there if I can’t hack it this time, but I don’t know what’ll happen if I pick it over you.”

Sirius shifts himself around on the grass. “Face me,” he insists, and after three terrible beats, Remus pushes himself around to face him properly, and if they could just go without the sunnies for even a few moments without risking a problem and Sirius feeling guilty as all shit for leading him to another knockout, it’d be a real fucking blessing. “It’s really going to be down to those two options? I tell James, or you’re not going to come through for something we’ve made all the plans in the world for?”

Remus gives out his largest sigh yet. “That’s simplifying one option by making sure the other sounds a lot more complicated,” he deems it, rebuking Sirius’s entire point there.

“It is complicated,” Sirius returns, aghast — he’s aghast.

Remus lifts his shoulders in a heavy shrug, folding his hands in his lap. “Well, naturally it’ll create some guilt and stress on my part for having to turn down the job offer and then of course we'll have to leave room for the fact that I’ll be scrambling once we get back to ensure I can back out before it’s too late, that I’ll still have my spot if I do have to stay back in London, make sure I can resume my courses as I would've done if I couldn’t have made it abroad this term as is, and I’ll have to make sure Lily doesn’t find a replacement for me in the meantime so I’ll still have a spot at the shop, but if she’s in a bind then I could always try to get back into the OG shop since you’ve sort of freed up a spot there, and if that doesn’t cut it, then I could loan myself out for cover shifts if I can’t make my minimum amount per week there,” he lists off, one by one, like he’s numbering the list right here, right now, “but I’ve been stressed before, stretched thin before, and I’ve survived: I’ll make it work, I just might not be all that fun to be around for a few weeks there while I sort everything out.”

The little laugh Remus gives to accompany that last point truly hurts like a knife to the chest. “You have to slow down and take a step back from here,” Sirius instils. “We’re nowhere near the point where we would need to be thinking like this.”

“I really think we are and instead of only seeing the downsides of not going, I’m trying to look at it in the way that you might've done if some other, terrible thing had popped up and made it so I couldn’t get it out there for this term, and I know exactly what you would say: you'd tell me that I can always postpone, that my worth doesn’t come down to whether or not I go, that there’s no time limit to this and I could take a term out there at any point over the many years of schooling I’ve got ahead of me, that there will be other places to work when I do get to go — bookshops, little indie cafés, a two-in-one situation, even? That’d be my jam, I would do so well in that setting, and it would fit me a lot more than the company I’m with now does, let’s just be honest,” Remus raises, working through it live and in front of Sirius — actually considering the idea of putting the axe to the whole plan and using Sirius’s rhetoric to do it to boot; it’s devastating to hear it, but even more so to be able to see it. “I don’t see how else it would work, I can’t ask you to come with me just so I don’t have to pick, you have your own fall plans ahead of you and they deserve to be seen to, not just mine, and hell, in a year or two, who knows what’ll be happening, maybe you'll be able to come with and you wouldn’t have to rent out a whole flat for just me to hang out in; it could be a place that’s ours for the time we're there, and then the boy and the queen could come with, can’t leave those two behind, you could do your own thing during the day while I’m at school or work, and we could travel around on weekends, visit all sorts of places, check out greater Europe, and it could be just as fulfilling as it would have been this term, and if anything, maybe even more so.”

Sirius uses the word ‘devastating’ loosely, he’s realized now; it was tough to hear Remus speak just like he'd have done, but the appearance of a fully rejuvenated plan, laid out so optimistically by a part-time pessimist, the sheer idea of them going together, of their fur babies scurrying around their shared home-for-a-time, of the two of them taking Europe by storm and leaving them all scratching their heads in their wake, all perfectly idyllic and decidedly too much so for someone as impulsive as Sirius to have heard laid out like that; so uncomplicated, so attainable — that’s what devastating is.

“OK, I love you, and you’re saying a lot of sweet things in the middle of a bracing theme, but I think you’re tunnelling right now,” Sirius offers carefully, for Remus but also for him; he doesn’t trust himself to keep his impulsivity in check unless he's careful. “That’s a lovely picture and I’m not saying no to it, really I’m not; who’s to say we can’t take a summer and do all of what you just said because I’m fucking into all of those ideas, but this term, that's yours, and it’s going to be so good for you, I can’t let you keep considering staying back when it’s not fair to you at all.”

“It actually is fair to me,” Remus puts it, gently at that. “At least in that case, I’ll be close by you when you need me and you will need support to get through this because I know it’s like you lost him all over again, only infinitely times worse now that you know the circumstances of how he went and how much he was suffering; you’re not going to be able to process this alone, and I don't want you to.”

“Wait a minute — wait,” Sirius insists, feeling like he’s got a brain bleed. “You didn’t say one thing about yourself in there; you made it all about me again.”

Remus breathes in long, wets his lips, tries again. “You’re not going to be finished with all you've left to process in just under five weeks,” he keeps to it. “We’re coming up on the home stretch here, Sirius, and I’ve got to decide what comes next if you’re this determined to have me be the only one who knows about it.”

Sirius aims to breathe past a hitch in his throat, but fails that minuscule task from hearing just how little time they really do have left; a month and some change is nothing but everything at the same time, for them at least. Hell, an hour is important when it comes to them these days, and there are only so many of those left either. “And to that point,” Remus tacks on, too soon for Sirius to object to more, “we’re running low on time to sort out the logistics if staying back is the only option here; I know it seems like I’m festering on this, but we do have to think about it sooner than later when we’re going to be on a time crunch the moment we’re back home.”

Sirius doesn’t know which home Remus even means and that’s decidedly the scariest part. “How am I supposed to sleep at night knowing you only did this because of me?” he raises, a cut above a whisper.

“How am I supposed to sleep?” Remus counters, playing with what looks like a hangnail on his left ring finger, and Sirius reaches over and pins both hands down at once, but that doesn’t have the desired effect, only has Remus stressing his overall point harder. “I worry about you enough, Sirius, but this is going to be a million times worse. You’re going to be without me close by for months, James’ll come 'round when he can but he won’t know how dire that'll be or how often he should come by, you’ll be having a whole new living situation to get used to, you’ll have a new business to build and tend to, and you’ll be mourning Reg on top of all of that; your life’s entire look is about to change a lot in one swoop, regardless of the way you feel about it changing, and that alone you’re going to need support with and I’d do my fucking best to give it to you from a distance, but if I’m up to my knees trying to adapt to life over there myself—”

“OK, Remus; London, Paris? The language is a bit different, but it’s two sides of the same coin,” Sirius comes in, aiming to lighten the load on their combined shoulders. “You’ll adapt just fine and so will I for that matter; we’re both disgustingly good at it when we have to be.”

Remus isn’t corralled into any sense of ease, just keeps going from where he left off. “If you really want me to think of only myself right now, then alright, I’ll never sleep knowing I’m over there while you’re back home choosing to do this yourself rather than lean on someone who could be right there next to you at a moment’s notice,” he stresses, and there it is, London's where home is for Remus, and there goes the apparent glass casing around Sirius's heart for the explosion that goes off inside his chest feels sharp as knives. “I’ll be tossing and turning the whole time I’m gone, you will get so sick of me and my check-in texts because I’ll read into every single one that doesn’t sound like you, and then I’m going to check if anything’s changed in the hour that’s passed since my last check-in because I am like that, Sirius; it won’t be healthy for me, my schooling, my productivity there or at work, and then it won’t have been worth it to go at all this term because I couldn’t have been fully present while I was there and what a waste of time, money, and resources that would be? It's better just to withdraw from that corner of my program and try again someday when the timing’s much better.”

Sirius doesn’t have it in him to formulate a response, not with all that, not with the way Remus’s breathing patterns are coming out in sharp and short bursts between beats and finally starting to showcase agitation, and certainly not with the way his mouth is twisted up like that. He’s avidly holding tears in place because he must not feel comfortable enough to let them fall, but it’s not for anyone else’s sake; the cove has lost the only other beachgoers aside from the two of them and the rest of the chatter and bustle appears to be coming from behind their backs and further along the coast, so Remus isn’t choking them back for their sake, it’s for his own or Sirius’s, and Sirius doesn’t know which of the two would hurt more to have confirmed.

He stays passing the pad of his right thumb back and forth over the back of one of Remus’s hands, he doesn’t know which one, hoping it’ll transfer a sense of calm over to him, but then again, Sirius would have to feel calm for that to even feel as if it’s working. “It’s not an ultimatum, Sirius,” Remus repeats, barely getting this one out without a waver this time, and now Sirius does feel like a piece of trash sitting out on a hot day for suggesting that at all; this is Remus, he’s not going around pulling punches and exerting power when he evidently doesn’t feel as though he has much of it to work with. “I know that if I went, you’d say you’re doing great over here until you weren’t and you’d ring me or video me and we’d talk it out, you’d be brave about going on from there, brave for yourself and for me so I wouldn’t have to feel so terrible about being over there and not with you because you can be so selfless like that, but I’m not as brave as you — not by a long shot and I can’t let you go this alone; I don’t have that in me.”

It’s not a proud moment of Sirius's, that he considers digging his heels in one more time on the James front so it’d secure Remus for another autumn in London, but there would be many perks to it. It could make it much easier for the two of them to get started on their very own next chapter, however newly-formed it is; the revisitation of the dreaded move-in topic had been so pure and straight from the heart and this way, they’ll have the time to formulate it even more without the fear of getting too excited, too ahead of himself. It could mean they’ll take Paris another time, Sirius could hire somebody to assume his share of the duties and take a couple of months off, do anything he likes during the day, crash a class or two perhaps of Remus’s when the mood strikes, visit him while he’s working and try not to distract him from the job too, too much, take Priscilla over there with them and swing 'er by to pick Remus up from wherever he needs him to. It could mean the lump that’s moved into his throat following the news of this past week would feel less prominent, more dulled because he’d have Remus there and near to ease it back, ease him back. And it could certainly mean that he wouldn’t have to let James in on one of the last, true remaining objects still connecting he and Reg together, but Sirius can’t fucking do it.

He'll make one thing clear: his body is completely down to let this happen, the way it’s screaming at him to grab the opportunity and celebrate all that he and it could have, but his brain certainly won’t let him or his body get away with it. If Remus considers it too risky to be apart from him for a few months at most, if he sees his plans and dreams as secondary to Sirius’s own, his mental health, his well-being? Sirius’s body is bound to love him staying back, but his brain won't let him forget, is only going to withhold sleep from him, lord this right over his head, and letting this happen, letting Remus put it all on pause for him, that’s not reaching for what he wants; what he wants Remus to have this and for him to get to watch it all happen, wants to see and know Remus put himself first like he damn well should, every single time, and he can’t spend any more time weighing the choice back and forth when every second, every spare moment that goes between them goes toward Remus having the time to affirm and reaffirm that this is the right decision for the both of them, and it’s not. These seconds, and what Sirius does with them, are going to count toward how they fare as a duo from here on out.

Sirius puts a massive squeeze into the hold he’s got on Remus’s hands. “I’ll talk to him,” he gives up tightly, as if his throat is mounting his loss as hard as his heart is, but to them and to every other feeling rising up within his body to add their own commiserations, he asks one thing: is he really losing out? Seems to him, Sirius gained his life’s worth the moment Remus Lupin leapt across the length of that couch to give him one hell of a chance to prove himself. Seems to him, he'll always win if Remus feels valued and heard over his own mile-wide pride. Seems to him, if there is such a thing as tests from above or the cosmos, this would be the one, wouldn’t it?

He doesn’t take very long gauging Remus’s expression; apprehension is lining every corner of it, so it’s not all that difficult to parse that Remus likely thinks he’s hallucinated or he’s being punked to hell and back again. “If that’s what it’ll take, then so be it,” Sirius doubles down, not budging on this one, not now. “I don’t know where you get the gall to go around calling me selfless when you’re over there seriously considering putting your whole life on pause for me and I won’t allow it, you hear me?”

Remus gives up a heavy, guttural breath, tugging his right hand out from underneath the clasp of Sirius’s own. “I thought you were coming for my neck just now,” he raises, setting that hand on his chest.

“Oh, no, I am, ya brat, and I’m not done yet,” Sirius returns, and Remus quickly sniffs, reworks his mouth, and sits up straight, the slightest upward tug at the right corner of his lips that plainly suggests they’re never not going to be Them, no matter how murky it can get at times. “You’ve far too much going for that big brain of yours to let me be what stops you and fat chance I’m letting that happen, thank you very much: you’re going to see this through, you’re going to work your arse off just like you damn well planned to, and then you’re going to take some well-deserved breaks, on my orders, when I decide you look or sound like you need one; are you hearing that part?”

“Good Cunt, yes,” Remus manages, but those chest convulsions of his aren’t making speech all that easy for him, are they?

“Good, and another thing,” Sirius declares, “you’re going to get top grades because you’re just that brilliant and you're going to get the highest tips of your whole team because you’re just that cute, but you are also going to treat yourself to fun little gifts here and there as a reward for your talents, alright? I don’t care if it’s so much as a paperback or a medium tea instead of a small, I want to hear of you actively rewarding yourself for putting the work in like you always fuckin’ do; are we clear?”

“This is a lot to — yes," Remus tacks on quick, seeing Sirius’s pointed glance. “Crystal.”

“Bon,” Sirius calls it. “And I don’t want fanfare for my birthday, do you hear? I want you back for one night and one night only, and that is l’alloween; forget about getting me moon shoes this time around, you just take the train, come to me for the event, and I’ll make it worth your whole while, promise you that.”

Remus pushes a resounding series of breaths out of his nose, nodding profusely with his lips shut tight, and that’s pretty damn good, Sirius has to hand it to both Remus and himself here. “And then — last one, babey,” he prefaces, “you are going to come back home to me when your term is all over and done with and be so grateful I wouldn’t let you back out because you will have had such a blast, but especially because you won’t be having to worry so much about how I’m faring, you’re welcome for that, and you’re going to have a billion little stories from your time there so what I really want you to do for me is, write them down as they come — don’t spoil too, too many on a call with me or during any one of my visits, alright? You just keep a secret list going of anything you think I’d get a kick out of, big or small, I want to hear them, and then you’re going to hit me with the fucking gauntlet once you’re back and that’s a non-negotiable term, Remus; I expect a lot out of you with this one and I know you can deliver on it.”

Remus screws his entire face up and pitches his head forward, aiming it for a definitive land in the right crook of Sirius’s neck, and Sirius lifts off of the ground so the target area will be that much closer for Remus’s face to land in and that poor neck of his won’t get a crick in it. His face lands easily on target, wherein the lad drowns out some gnarly hybrid between a laugh and a sob against his skin, and Sirius clasps the back of his head to him tightly, wraps him right up, and keeps to a kneel on the grass, relaxing into the role of propping Remus up when that’s where he’s always been best suited.

“I’m going to tell him,” he repeats, again if he’s got to seal that deal, going for a gentle, three-note shush after Remus whines against him. “I promise I’m going to — it won’t be tonight because they’ve got their own thing going and they deserve to focus on themselves, alright, but as far as you’re concerned? All you’re going to have to do is nurse me back from whatever state that man leaves me in once we’re done with it; tall order, I know, but I’m a lot and that’s when I’ll need you the most, and you’re not going to have to worry about me doing this alone — I can’t do it, you won’t let me, and thank Cunt I’ve got you looking out for me because I'd be a fucking wreck otherwise.”

Remus lifts his head and wriggles himself free from Sirius’s confines, but he doesn't do anything drastic from there like move away; it was only to get his tear-streaked face level with Sirius’s own, and good thing he did back his way out of their embrace because that fire behind his welled-up eyes? That’s love, babey.

To say the two of them aren’t sucking major face in under a ten-second count would be a complete lie and one Sirius wouldn’t care to tell. This man drags him up and out of the muck, away from his pride more often than Sirius can keep up with anymore, this man has his best interests at heart while Sirius wouldn’t know the first thing about it, this man cares about him and the tiny, once-happy world he carved out for himself to a degree that’s arresting, and this man is self-sacrificing in a way that may have been his biggest downfall in the wrong hands, but not these ones; Remus has taught him more about sacrifice than anybody has, and Sirius’ll use his hands for good from now on, no more messy business for them.

“I love you,” Remus implores, getting it out between breathless kisses, and took the words right from Sirius’s mouth, funny that.

And since Remus has the words covered, Sirius feels he might as well show him just how in agreement he is with the sentiment, pour it right back through him, but he does have to have a look around them, gauge what sort of situation they’re working with. There’s a semi-circle of what look to be teenagers smoking some rather pungent weed from up on the top of the horseshoe, but they’re not looking at them down here, so they’re not his problem. The coast is crawling with dotted people across the way, so that part is a bit of an issue, and the massive red-bricked structure overlooking the cove has a few folks milling about the large windowed cut-outs and while they’re not currently looking their way, they very well could any time now and they certainly do look like a coupla’ lovers ready to take their clothes off right here and now. If it were in or around midnight, Sirius would've gone for Remus’s trousers by now and they could've driven each other senseless with a stellar backdrop, but it’s merely mid-to-late afternoon and Sirius isn’t looking to wait five or so more hours to get him.

He breathes in fresh, open air, looks back at Remus, and before he can make an offer, Remus goes ahead and speaks before he can get a word out. “Let’s go back to the room?” he raises. “For just a little bit, even?”

“Mm, mhm, yep,” Sirius affirms, peeling himself away from Remus to gather his stuff together.

The drive back to the inn is a lesson in patience that Sirius hasn’t dealt with since — mm, on the train ride over, he’d say, so all in all, it’s tough. It’s just tough, sitting pretty in his seat while the air between the two of them feels thicker than butter to breathe in, but the good thing is, it's not the longest drive out there to have to take and beyond that, Sirius reminds himself that some things, like what they’re in for back in their room, are worth the wait.

He cannot thank Remus enough for briskly passing by the front desk with Sirius fast at his heels, but in truth, he can’t thank Remus at all because the place is fucking popping; the dinner crowd seems to be having a whole shindig down the main hall in the dining room, there’s a group of chaps having a brandy right by the stairs they need to utilize to get to their room, and there are four separate people located in various spots between the foot of those stairs and their door that give off the energy of video game NPCs they've just got to make their way past as discreetly as possible so not to get sucked into an inescapable conversation or possibly get roped into a side quest they want no part of, but finally, they make it to their room with their both their spirits and their intentions intact, Sirius is happy to report.

He will note, however, that the previous, harried gusto with which they went at each other none too many hours ago seems to have filtered out of their room, leaving the two of them standing inches apart at the foot of the bed and, at least on Sirius’s part, there’s something both old and new about the way Remus is looking him over in the low light of the room, illuminated only by the daylight strewing in from the window over on the other side of the room and down from the skylight. He’s reaching for Sirius’s hands, overturning them in his own, taking trips with his fingertips over Sirius’s forearms, leaving feather-light kisses against his wrists, his fingertips, until he’s moved on from the hands and the arms, reaching almost delicately, curiously to put his hands on him and passing them over Sirius’s waist, his hips, his back. He’s not technically looking at Sirius directly: he’s looking down at him, looking him over, as if the body he’s held close and moulded to and memorized so well by now still has its secrets to it, secrets for him to discover and admire, and Sirius’s skin sings like it always does when Remus reaches for him in public, and what a feat that is considering it’s just the two of them in here.

Remus steps in just a little closer, putting them chest-to-chest, and runs his hands up and over Sirius’s sides, his back, bracing against him rather intently though his hands move in a gentle, searching caress. He leans his head in, nestles his nose against Sirius’s neck, and breathes him in, out, and in again, his breathing shallow to the sound now, and that’s refreshing when Sirius’s own breathing sure felt like it was sticking out like a sore thumb in here before Remus's started up.

Remus darts his tongue out over Sirius’s pulse point, draws a firm line over it, blows over it; it’s, mm, the best torture practice around, easily. He’d get any confession out of Sirius if he needed one, but Remus doesn't even seem to be teasing him on purpose and that might be the worst part. He’s indulging himself, in the middle of some kind of body worship, stuck in a trance, and that's somehow ten thousand times hotter to contend with than if Remus were actively trying to drive him wild through means such as these.

He leans his head to the right, leaning his pulse point against Remus’s wet, hot mouth, and Remus gives it some teeth, works his tongue against the skin he's caught, drives him nuts, and look, Sirius has been rendered motionless for long enough, but he needs to touch him, damn it; he lifts his hands behind him, holds Remus to him by the small of his back, moulding their bodies together, gripping Remus’s skin tight as he answers the call his hips are desperately making to him, and keeping slow, steady rolls against Remus’s hips so not to disturb his work up there any, and it’s a good thing he didn’t for in come those shallowed breaths of Remus’s again, blasting hot air over Sirius’s neck as he not only accepts this one advance petitioned from him, but rises to meet it, winding his hips up and back, up and back, up against his and back again.

It seems that even for a man lost in a trance, Remus does have human lungs and those things do need fresh, unobstructed air now and again, but how he goes about getting it is another thing entirely. He could have simply leaned his head back, taken a few gulps, and been good to go, but he hovers his lips directly over Sirius’s, holds Sirius to him with his hands clasped at his shoulder blades, and each time they meet each other’s hips, each time they spark a new roll again in the near-no space between them, Sirius feels his harsh breaths over his lips, and this is it, the most erotic he's ever felt.

Sirius is nothing if not an inspired man and owing to that — and the fact that he’s been driven to the point of utter defiance, 'course — he peels his left hand off of Remus’s back and fuses it to the back of his head instead, holding it straight and steady as he slides his lips over Remus’s, swallowing the hitch of breath that bubbles up in his throat. Not looking to completely switch up the pacing Remus has set, he doesn’t push it much, simply tilts his head back a bit for their difference in height and keeps the movements of his mouth a slow lave to match the rolls of his hips, but that seems to be the best plan he’s had yet for Remus’s body goes taut before it relaxes, the only part of his body held up on its own being one pronounced ridge locked in tight against Sirius’s, and then suddenly, his body goes taut again before he rises up on the tips of his toes once, twice, and a third time, his knees suddenly occupying polar opposite angles, and that’s all Sirius needs to know what’s expected of him.

He pulls back from Remus’s mouth, comes in to kiss him once more for good measure, and locks his arms in like a vice grip at the small of Remus’s back, lifting from below and garnering one hum between their lips that registers as complete approval from Remus’s side of things, and kudos to the man for using the tops of Sirius’s shoulders to heave himself up enough to get his legs up and clear around his middle, allowing for Sirius to drop his hands to the undersides of Remus’s thighs to brace him from below and making it so that Remus has to dip his head down to catch his lips again, but he doesn't seem to mind that at all, their lips locked and loaded.

Sirius takes a few good, grateful seconds and simply stays put, holding Remus tight against him, kneading his balled fists against Remus’s thighs, and drinking him in, but at Remus’s hitched, thin pull of air, the stall of his lips, and the three-tapped signal against Sirius’s left shoulder-blade, Sirius answers his bid and walks forward, kneeling over the end of the bed to lower Remus onto it and hovering over him, getting his hips good and nestled between the legs curled over the backs of his thighs and showing him a taste of what he'll do next.

Remus somehow responds both fast and slow at once, dropping his feet to the bed amidst their tangle and using the heels of them as well as the heels of his palms to push himself backwards up the bed at a more urgent pace while the roll of his hips remains at near-pleadingly slow, like he’s living for it and doesn't want to rush that part any. Given that, if Sirius were to, mm, get rid of the two layers of trunks caught between them, he thinks he might win himself quite a bit more in terms of approving body language, and that’s more than enough reason for him to reach down and tug at the waistband of Remus’s swim shorts from the sides, smiling into their kiss as Remus takes the cue and works to handle Sirius’s trunks.

They can’t reasonably keep their mouths on lock the whole time they’re peeling their shorts off of each other; Remus likely could've done a funny little leg manoeuvre and still managed to not break their kiss when he does tend to move decidedly when motivated to, but Sirius was always going to have to perch back on his tailbone and tug his trunks off of his ankles if he wasn’t interested in teetering off of the bed, and right now, not something he’s down for. Remus wastes no time in tugging Sirius back to him the moment he can, however, saving him a warm and rather inviting spot between his legs, and the two of them seem to know exactly how much of their skin they want touching throughout this one for they’ve gone and fused together in just about every spot they can manage it, their lips kiss-soaked and still hungry for more, their groins on lock, Remus's legs wrapped easily around the backs of Sirius’s calves, his hands driving up, down, and over his back, keeping their chests fused together, Sirius's hands keeping Remus's torso in place as he arrows his thrusts down against those pleading, ever-stunning hips rocking up tight against his own, spurred on by what they have here, how strong it is, by the push and pull of accepting a little humility when it’s damn well needed, and every way in which the two of them have learned to fit together.

Remus stutters his hands against Sirius’s back, digging his inner thighs against the outer sides of Sirius’s and arrowing his hips up with desperate whines between their lips, and maybe some or all of what Sirius is feeling is exactly what's spurring Remus on like this, maybe he’s feeling all that grace and humility himself, maybe he’s touched that Sirius listened to him, that he actually listens to him in the end, even when it hurts and especially when it counts. Remus receives a pace increase just on that merit alone, but Remus’s right hand finds its way up into Sirius’s hair like that's his reward for giving him that very increase, and then there’s nothing left for Sirius to do but use the mattress they’re tangled up on as a balance beam to drive Remus against, throwing his whole lower-half into it to keep them at a constant metronome.

Remus tugs his lips clear off of Sirius’s and tips his head back against the bed, his face twisted up in grateful reverence, his chest putting out pitched note after pitched note as Sirius veritably throws him against the bed on a relentless beat, and it isn’t long before he’s looking all around his head because, apparently, he gave one too many wanton noises for his liking and is now shooting his left hand up and out to drag the closest pillow toward him, but really? Are they doing this now? Whoever hears it can block their ears and keep right on; this time is theirs and theirs alone.

Sirius grabs for the pillow, aims an audacious smile down at him as Remus makes like he’ll thwack him with the thing if he tries it, but oddly enough, Remus’s eyes flash the moment Sirius’s right hand turns up the curls at the top of his head to hold it back against the bed again, and even more oddly than that, his eyes flutter shut as Sirius hovers his lips over his own, just close enough to taste Remus’s whines and just far enough to hear them properly. Out of the corner of his left eye, he sees Remus drop the pillow feebly a true second before his free hand turns up alongside the other, tousling Sirius’s locks gratefully as his jaw starts to slacken, his breathing ratchets up higher, and if Sirius wasn't too busy pistoning Remus's pelvis into the bed, he might've been able to check on whether that vein on Remus's navel is throbbing yet, but hey, two out of three ain't half bad and the chances that the third one's already there are sky-high; it's good thing, really, that Remus is so bloody close because Sirius is coming upon the edge faster than he thought he'd be so focused on Remus’s time, but he pushed the right buttons, pulled the right levers, and because of that, they're going free-falling off that ledge together, holding tight to each other until there isn’t a single thrust left in either of them to give.

They don’t talk the traditional way for minutes at least, maybe just past the five-minute mark, and the speaking they do until then has consisted of a whole lot of touching: Remus passing his hands over the tops of Sirius's legs, his back, his arms, keeping it a dusting dance of fingertips the whole way through, and Sirius using those lips of his for all their worth, dragging them over Remus’s skin in blessed, languid intervals as he travels down his body.

“It doesn’t have to be a Reg take-down,” Remus puts up, his first words in minutes.

Sirius stops, mere milliseconds off from licking Remus’s navel clean, and lifts his head with the point of his tongue on display, clearing his throat behind it sharply. “The timing you’ve got,” he mentions, blinking twice.

Remus has the wits to look a tad sheepish for it, but for the most part, he remains steadfast and on point. “You don’t have to allow that,” he insists, his voice sounding so slight despite the assurance in his gaze. “You can set up boundaries if you must, you can still advocate for Reg’s pain while allowing James the chance to speak to his, and maybe even yours if you’ll allow him to.”

Sirius wets his lips, looks that sweet, earnest expression twice over, and commits it to memory. Remus may still be the type to worry his way out of the afterglow, but Sirius well-remembers a time when he could only wait seconds before diving back into tense conversation, let alone minutes; that one's learning more and more about how to bask in it, every day.

He makes his way up the bed to settle on top of Remus and leaves a kiss strong enough to seal a deal with his lips, grateful to have been handed a compromise that he can get behind.

Chapter 32: 32.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Sirius is in the middle of transporting a golden, crisp chip from his plate into his mouth when his mobile starts up from where it’s sitting face-down on the table, making his pint glass cling and garnering him to toss an unimpressed look at it. Not the best time to be interrupted, but when Sirius leans his left ear closer to the device in order to parse which ringtone is playing underneath the bustle and music playing inside the pub he does have to wonder who it is calling him when it could be just about anybody other than the bloke he’s not quite yet ready to face, and especially not with this heavenly plate o’ grease he’s in love with. It’s both relieving and not very at once.

Across the table from him, Remus smirks between Sirius’s new face-to-table positioning and the chip he’s still got held in the air, his eyes, uncovered due to the dim lighting inside of the Sloop Inn, shining with plain amusement. Sirius huffs a laugh at himself, straightening up in his seat again. “All I know is it’s not Shania, but I can’t really check who,” he puts up, showcasing his currently grease-plagued hands.

Remus, who appears to be taking a recess from working his way through his own plate of fish n’ chips at a slower rate than Sirius as per usual, reaches around the side of their two plates to flip Sirius’s mobile over for him with a pair of stretched fingers. Sirius smiles for the help, but drops it within the same beat when he sees Andromeda lit up on-screen, huffing for it.

Remus leans into the table and sways in his seat trying to catch a glimpse of Sirius’s screen. “Who’s it?”

“Andromeda,” Sirius forwards, popping the chip into his mouth since it’s already on track for it.

Sirius only just makes out a snort from Remus over Champagne Supernova playing out of the speaker hanging above their booth. “That’s the first I’ve seen you huff about her,” he mentions, going for a sip off his water glass.

“I’m not on the clock, am I?” Sirius puts up, swiping his napkin off of the table to wipe at his fingers with all the same. “Doubt the venue's on fire so I’ve half a mind to tell her exactly how far and wide she can go fuck herself.”

Remus huffs after a swallow, setting his glass back down and rapping his knuckles against the table in one move. “Don’t say I don’t try to help you when you won’t help yourself.”

Sirius shimmies his shoulders and wags his free hand around haughtily for that comment, picks his mobile off the table, and swipes to answer it likely just in time to thwart the call from going to voicemail. “Is the venue on fire?”

He has to squint to hear the voice on the other end. “Well, I’m in the office and it smells fine from here,” she puts up.

Sirius sends a hearty smile across the table at Remus. “Then I can’t really see why I’m being rung up just now?” he raises, speaker louder in hopes that Andromeda will take the hint and turn her own volume dial up some.

“Oh, stop it, give me five minutes of your time and you’ll thank me and yourself for doing it,” Andromeda instils, matching Sirius’s volume.

Sirius gives a gaze down at the pile of chips left on his plate, lamenting the break he’ll have to take from them but keeping up a conversation over the phone in here is going to be nearly impossible. “Well, now it’d better be good,” he mentions.

“Oh, you just wait,” Andromeda maintains.

Sirius looks to Remus and points toward the door in a bid for a short visit to the outdoors, but it’s more cursory than a legitimate ask for he doesn’t think he has yet to hear Remus lodge a complaint about that sort of thing and as expected, Remus gives an easy wave-off. “Bit loud in there,” Andromeda comments.

“I’m working on it, thank you,” Sirius chimes, shouldering his mobile and sliding over on his seat to get out of their booth.

He rises to his feet and automatically pats what would be his pockets were he wearing an outfit equipped with any, but as he’s still in his tank-and-trunks combo from earlier he comes rather short on that front. He’s only just remembering where he stuffed his pack when Remus flags him down with a quick wave and lifts the keys to the truck past the edge of the table. “It’s in the beach bag, backseat,” he forwards.

Sirius puts a beam on his face as he swipes them off of Remus’s hands, happy to see that they seem to be sharing a brain link. Now, if the two of them were sharing a meal currently, that would be just as lovely, but Remus is really taking his recess seriously. Sirius stalls by the table, getting a better glance at Remus’ plate at this angle and finding that he’s made it through one of the pieces to his two-piece fish n’ chip meal and hasn’t made anywhere near the same dent Sirius made into his own helping of chips.

“Try to have at least half of the second one, hey?” Sirius bids, giving a point toward Remus’s plate. “And some more of those frites, too.”

“I’m working on it, thank you,” Remus quotes him, beckoning him away with a rather royal flutter of his left hand, which only has Sirius pretending as if he’s been shot point-blank in the chest before heading away as bid.

He heads out into the relative silence of the outdoors, but that isn’t saying much when the terrace out there is as bustling as it was when they first drove up and had them picking a table inside. He heads down the front driveway to the road ahead of the pub, passes by a group of three blokes assembled at the foot of the drive having their own puffs, and crosses over to the other side of the road, weaving in between two cars parked on the street to get to the parking lot across from the pub.

He heads diagonally through the lot toward the truck, unlocks it from a few steps away with the button on the keypad, and keeps his mobile shouldered since he’ll be in for a climb in no time, but he figures he may as well speak up now that he’s further away from music and echoes of the other patrons. “OK, lemme just grab my pack from the truck and I’ll have a puff while we’re at it,” he poses, opening up the passenger side door and hoisting himself up and into the truck.

Andromeda starts right in, not exactly listening to Sirius’s bid for her to hold up for a moment. “OK, one point is a bit of important information that I know you’ll want, the other is a concept I’d like you to weigh in on before I get too ahead of myself,” she advertises. “Which do you want first?”

Sirius gives up a hearty noise in thought, knees balanced diagonally on the passenger seat while he leans over the centre console to fish around in their beach bag on the middle seat in the back. “Well, give me the information I’ll want, then,” he picks, closing his right hand around his pack and continuing to search for his lighter.

Andromeda gives up a trill there, taking Sirius’s abject curiosity into a more concrete place, which he supposes is better than being solely frustrated with himself for not bothering to ask the guy at the corner shop to hand over one of the bigger ones instead of the mini red one he passed Sirius. “Alright, well, I may have solved Remus’s housing crisis and I think I've really outdone myself here, so you know,” she slips him.

Sirius perks up so fast he bonks his head on the ceiling of the truck, but who cares about that; this is the definition of information he’d want to know. “Stop,” he returns, rubbing at his head with his free hand while he blasts his other one past both of his and Remus’s attire to the bottom of the beach bag and resorts to flinging his right hand back and forth at the bottom of the bag in hopes of catching the lighter that way.

“I will not,” Andromeda refuses, and that’s just one of the reasons she’s his favourite cousin, and oh, there’s his lighter now; what a bountiful ten seconds this has been. “Hence why I figured you wouldn’t mind my breaking the rules to let you know of this.”

“OK, OK, wait,” he implores, backing off of the passenger seat and right back out of the truck. “I need to sit.”

Andromeda gives up a one-note laugh for that. “No, yeah, you’re going to want to be,” she imparts.

Sirius shuts the passenger side door with gusto, locks the truck up after him, and looks around fast, spotting a picnic table to the right of the parking lot, perched cosy and conveniently over vibrant green grass. Past that, the view is both phenomenal and a familiar, a picture-perfect shot of the harbour they spent most of the afternoon traversing; there truly could be no better spot on earth for him to have been gifted for news such as this and that in itself has to be a good sign.

Sirius sprints headlong for the table, uses the seat like a staircase to climb up onto the surface of it, and scoots down to leave his legs dangling off of the left side of the table so he can face the harbour. “OK, I’m good; go,” he insists, pulling a cigarette free from his pack.

Andromeda gives up a weighted breath. “Hoo, I should have made an outline; I don’t even know where to begin.”

Sirius smirks as he puts the filter to his lips. “You had all this time to prepare,” he comments, sparking his lighter under the end of it.

“Alright, fine; so I just caught up with some friends who are based in Paris,” she delivers. “Do you remember the Archambaults?”

Sirius squints off in the distance as he pulls on his cigarette, trying to get a good burn going. “No,” he gives between puffs.

Andromeda snorts once. “Climactic,” she calls it. “I've told you about them; met them through the apprenticeship I did there.”

This time Sirius is the one to snort, pushing his haul out in a stream to the right. “Alright, but you met a lot of people through that,” he comments, putting both his pack and lighter beside his left thigh for now. “You’re going to have to narrow it down for me.”

Andromeda gives up a hum in thought. “Couple in their forties, own four galleries in the city alone, couple’a grade-A Bohemian types,” she gives up. “Is a bell ringing?”

A hazy recognition comes on there, but even still, it’s nothing substantial. “Vaguely?” Sirius raises, putting his cigarette to his lips again.

“I was obsessed with their house,” Andromeda gives. “Like, came back and could not stop talking about it.”

Mm, I remember the house-talk, yeah,” Sirius supplies, that blip of a memory getting overtaken by the chime of a bell. “Wait, were they the ones who had Taize playing all day, every day?”

“Mhm, that’s them,” Andromeda affirms, offering a laugh that borders on charmed. “They may be onto something else these days but back then, it was always on whenever I was over there.”

“Couple of kooks, if I remember,” Sirius mentions, going for a new haul.

“Free spirits,” Andromeda amends.

Sirius smirks up a storm, his haul coming right back out through it. “Sure,” he smiles.

“Oh, you’ll love them in a minute, trust me,” Andromeda maintains.

“Well, are they giving Remus the house?” he raises, giving into a grin. “‘Cause that would indeed be kooky, but a kind of kooky I could get behind.”

“Mm, not the whole house; more the basement flat,” Andromeda offers, taking Sirius’s intrigue by the neck. “And honestly, flat is a cheap descriptor, it’s a fully-furnished suite; has a kitchen, bathroom, and a living area, so he'd hardly have to leave the suite unless he expressly wanted to, but he’s welcome in the main house whenever he’d like and trust me when I say, they’re the sort to actually mean that.”

“Alright, talk to me,” Sirius goads, his smiling lips curled around his cigarette as he puffs off it.

“Right, so they had the space built years back for their golden, youngest child to live out of, but he left in April to study in Berlin for an extended time and they’ve been thinking about renting out the space while he’s off doing that,” Andromeda supplies. “And between you and me, I’m sure part of it is that they’re missing having a consistent presence around there, but I went mentioning this dote of a lad who’s looking for a space to rent in the city himself come the fall, and wouldn’t you know, the prospect of these two concerns meeting fell together from there.”

“Oh, you went above and beyond here,” Sirius denies, a smile born out of astonishment.

“Listen, I said I’d take care of it and that’s what I did,” Andromeda puts up. “Anything for that gem; you know how it is.”

“I know exactly how it is,” Sirius echoes, and he does. “Whereabouts are they located, before either of us gets too attached to the idea?”

“Mhm, mhm, checked that, too,” Andromeda slips him, definitely gloating, but Sirius says let her; she deserves to for coming in with the results. “The house is in the 11th arrondissement, so I compared that to Remus’s faculty building and it’s a hop over the river and not much more than that; altogether it's a ride on the tube and a quick bus ride that’ll be over in a blink, think he can swing that?”

“Oh, he’ll be fine with that, trust me,” Sirius insists, and the news hits him all over again, but more like a bombastic strike to the side of the head this time. “I literally can’t believe you’ve done this? Andromeda, I need to get you something.”

“Oho, well, wait until topic number two rolls around and remember you said that,” Andromeda bids him.

“Remembered,” Sirius echoes, having a pull off his cigarette to seal it.

“For now though, I've asked them to wait until I spoke with the boys before they even think of mentioning the suite to anyone else, but I really went off on a tangent about him so I’m not sure I even had to request that of them,” Andromeda mentions, giving up a breathy laugh. “Told them what he’s studying, told them he’s cute as a button and speaks a ton of French, and frankly, I don’t know if I could have talked him up more so I’m serious here; if Remus wants it, they want Remus.”

“Andromeda, no,” Sirius implores, “he'll be so happy; you’ve no idea.”

“I mean, I have some,” Andromeda assures.

“Some, yeah, but he was starting to talk about kipping on some rando’s couch just to have a roof and I don’t know how much of that was just him being a nervous little shit or not,” Sirius instils, timing a candid, but harried laugh at the end of it that spurs one of Andromeda’s intense belly laughs.

“Well, you tell him as long as he doesn’t mind a lot of rather nude art in the main house, he can secure a suite with a couch right in it,” Andromeda forwards.

Sirius smirks up a storm through the last good haul off his cigarette. “I mean, he’s been around mine long enough to have been initiated into the world of bamboozling home decor, so I can’t see a portrait that’s considered abstract but is obviously a portrait of boobs and/or arse sending him running in the other direction,” he assures, flicking the cherry off the end of his cigarette.

“No, and I figured you’d have set him up for success in some regard, but the art is sprinkled all about the home and if you’re not used to that sort of thing, then it can be a bracing entry,” Andromeda offers up. “The muscles he’d pull from not wanting to make too much of a face if we didn't tell him would be funny, don’t get me wrong, but the fact is, it’s all very sex-positive, body-positive there so it's what you get with the place and he should know that going in, you know?”

Sirius leaves the cigarette butt atop his pack, thinking that London can get swallowed up with butts for all he cares but Wales is special, deserves much, much better care than that, and only after that do the words from Andromeda’s mouth sink in for him, taking his curiosity to a frank and palpable place. “Listen, Andy, be honest with me here,” he gives up fiercely, pausing through a stifled laugh as Andromeda gives out a profound pfft, for that’s definitely something she’s been doing a lot more since working so closely with him, he’d like to report.

“I don’t think you’ve ever called me that a day in your life,” she returns him.

“I was aiming to disarm you in hopes that you’d tell me the fucking truth,” Sirius lobs her, grinning ear to ear. “You tell me right now; do they or do they not partake in tantric sex practices?”

Andromeda gives up a laugh from the depths of her chest, it sounds. “Are you kidding me; of course,” she returns. “I say it’s the secret to why they're Them and have been happily married for so long, and you should be so lucky if they pass a tip or two onto him, I’ll say that, too.”

“Oh, you think I’m not hoping for that? Please, is what I say,” Sirius returns her fast.

“You should be saying it,” Andromeda echoes. “I’ve nabbed a few tips off them myself and that has been nothing but beneficial.”

Sirius’s pfft lasts ten seconds, at the very least. “Be-ne-fi-cial,” he wheezes, letting the ‘L’ go long as he wipes fast at his watering eyes. “Hoo — you’ve sent me somewhere.”

“Well, come on back, ‘cause there’s more,” Andromeda trills. “Just a few things that'll come with the place that he should be aware of ahead of time.”

“More?” Sirius returns. “Bangled Bohemians, nude art sprinkled all over, and endless Taize aren’t enough?”

“Oh, honey; no no no,” she delivers him. “There’s more where that came from, and while I do stress that this is an offer Remus should take, I won’t be able to get away with omitting some details only for him to find them out later, will I?”

“Mm, yeah, that’s just good thinking,” Sirius slips her. “The moment the shock is over and the angel dust settles, he’s gonna ask what the catch is, so it’s best to give them out up top.”

“Perfect, so first off, I think it should be stated that this will likely feel more like a roommate situation than a typical landlord/tenant agreement, given that that they do very much live upstairs,” Andromeda raises. “So, while he will have his own area, I know that he hasn't experienced the ups and downs of living with roommates before, so he might not be so used to the idea.”

Sirius considers the distinction for a moment. “Well, no, he hasn’t had them himself, but staying over at mine for any extended amount of time is a lot like having roomies, I should think,” he raises evenly. “Besides, he’s very specific about how he operates in a home that isn’t his and I just know he’s going to see it as a place he’s been invited into, rather than a space he’s objectively renting in for a term, so even if we add a couple of kooky roomies to the pot, he’s still going to make do with what comes with the place; if it’s the homeowners having a drum circle at two a.m, then Remus Jean Lupin is just going to put his earplugs in and roll over rather than lodge a complaint.”

Andromeda sends out a gusty laugh at that. “Well, I’m glad you said that because they are very much night owls and I was setting up for that,” she supplies.

Sirius looks left, right, and over to the harbour ahead. “Well, again, he’s spent enough time around mine to know what sleeping near that sort of thing might be like,” he holds up, a crooked grin on. “I mean, he’s turned into quite the owl himself; there were days this past term where he’d go from school to work and still come hang out with me afterward or we wouldn’t have seen each other that day.”

“Sure, but this is a different kind of night owl to you,” she extends him. “Those two keep to some odd hours; they don’t do the nine-to-five, don’t believe in it, their best work comes well past midnight and they like it that way. That’s just them and since they come with the house, the best advice I'm going to be able to give here is to make sure he’s got some quality earplugs, but if you think that’ll go over fine, then I suppose all of this is just extra details.”

Sirius hums to affirm. “He’s got a fairly sound pair as is, but I’ll make sure we grab extras so he’ll have a pair within arms reach of him at any point while he’s in there,” he assures, adding that to the ongoing list he’s keeping in his head.

“The upside to that is, they're only at the house during the week,” Andromeda hands him, and Sirius would call certainly that an upside, too. “They’ve got a cottage out in the country and are pretty staunch about getting out of the city on the regular; let the muses do their thing, you know, but that means he’d have weekends all to himself.”

“Ooh-hoo, ‘scuse me while I add that to the pro list,” Sirius slips her, willing to let the muse tidbit slide without a quip or even a hearty pfft, so that's saying something.

“I’m glad you think so,” Andromeda trades him. “I know that won’t necessarily help if he’s got an eight o’clock class on a Tuesday morning and they’ve been up having a drum circle until four a.m., let’s say, but those earplugs would definitely help him out in that case and he’d get to sleep the fuck in on the weekends to make up for it; that much is at least a guarantee.”

“Then I really think the lad we know and love would call that a quirk to the place and not much else,” Sirius reassures. “He’s a count-your-blessings sort, after all.”

“No, and I know he is, but," Andromeda keeps on, giving up a sigh, "I don’t know; I want this to work out for all of them so I guess I’m a lot more invested than I need to be."

“No, it’s really sweet,” Sirius insists, but he gets a prompt retching noise on the other end of the line for it, so he supposes that’s what he gets for going soft. “Alright, fine; is there anything else he should know about?”

“Mm, mhm,” Andromeda affirms.

“Hit me,” Sirius goads.

“Well, this, I think you could have already guessed from your drum circle quip, but they are indeed a pair of very warm, very doting, and very inviting friends,” Andromeda broaches. “They love to entertain for work and for play, some of their get-togethers are scheduled and some are rather impromptu, and they’ve friends in every city I can think of so when any of them are in town for a stint, of course they’re having them over to mingle with the Parisian circuit, right?"

“Mhm, that’s just the mark of good hosts,” Sirius allows, waiting on the real stuff.

“Yes, I would say we should call them great hosts, even,” Andromeda echoes, and Sirius thinks he can hear a smile from over there. “So add that to the fact that they’ve got quite a network there already and you could definitely call it a revolving door of all sorts of people; now, I went to quite a few of their shindigs myself while I was there and if you’re me, then you’re more than happy to be tugged into a room by an ethereally beautiful stranger to have a sit with five to eight ethereally beautiful strangers who all want to know what your story is, what you’re all about, what you feel your purpose is on this here earth, but if you’re Remus?”

Sirius’s throat opens wide for the cackle that leaves him. “His face,” he implores, already perfectly picturing a fabricated living room to plug all these details into as well as the polite but horrified smile that would be etched on that face were this to happen to him. “I almost don’t want to tell him about this, but I know I can’t get away with that.”

“No, you really can’t,” Andromeda echoes, but boy, is she laughing at the idea herself. “If he comes home one night, finds the place poppin’, and he himself is not in the mood to deal with Twenty Questions from a band of bangled Bohemians, which not all of us are going to be after a long day at work and/or school, I get that, then let him know that it’s best to slip in quietly and make his way down to his area with haste because the folks I met there loved a new face and it stands to reason they’re going to love Remus’s on sight.”

And now Sirius has the pleasure of picturing Remus hastily ascending a conjured staircase down to his suite to avoid being caught as the centre of attention; once he’s visited this place himself, he’ll have more of an understanding of what to picture but for now, it’s up to his brain to invent backdrops for these beautiful hypotheticals and so far, his brain's delivering well on that front. “Listen, it’s a good face underneath a fantastical head o’ hair; who'd be able to resist?” he raises. “Only thing is, do we think this suite is already equipped with a sturdy lock, or is this something I should be adding to the list of items to send him off with?”

“Mmm, I mean, I assume there already is one on the door?” Andromeda slips him.

“Oh, but we don’t only want to assume, now do we?” Sirius poses. “Are these folks bold enough to go collecting the cute Welsh boy they just saw disappearing downstairs without staying for a chat?”

Andromeda snickers wildly, taking a few moments to reconvene. “You know what, some of them just might be,” she allows. “He’s that cute.”

“Alright, well, I’ll put that right on the list, then,” Sirius says of it, raising his left hand to jot the words in the air. “And I’ll let him know you think he’s cute, too.”

“Tell him,” Andromeda goads. “He already knows, but he should hear it again if by some stretch of the imagination you haven’t said as much in the last, oh, three hours.”

“In actions, I’ve said it for sure, but not in so many words,” Sirius offers fairly.

“Might be time for it, then,” Andromeda advises. “So, what do we think; will the cons outweigh the pros?”

Sirius gives up a hearty pshh for it. “I can’t see a world in which he says no to this, even with the extra that comes with,” he puts it plainly.

“Mm, well, if that’s the case, why don’t I draw a lil’ illustration of where the house is versus the school building and send it over; see if a visual might seduce him even further into the idea,” she raises, and Sirius has to say the method is sound. “I took a screenshot earlier, hold on.”

Sirius happily waits the short time it takes for a ping to sound at his ear, pulling his mobile forward and minimizing the call window to click on the new photo file waiting for him, which is essentially a zoomed-in map with two finger-drawn arrows in hot-ass pink that are pointing between the fourth arrondissement and the aforementioned eleventh, as well as a wee, finger-drawn dick up at the top right corner of the map in the shade of cyan for shits and giggles, Sirius has to assume.

“Thank you for the artwork,” Sirius extends, mobile back at his ear.

“Thought you might get a kick out of it,” Andromeda returns him.

“This is literally the coolest thing ever; thank you, seriously,” he has to say. “We made it past the point where I finally just said I’d take care of the housing issue so he wouldn’t have to worry about being smoked out of the area on account of price-point alone, so just having him know that there’s something lined up for him is going to have him feeling so relieved.”

“Well, that’s what we do it for, hm,” Andromeda puts up.

“Ain’t that it,” Sirius echoes, deeply feeling that. “Now, we’re trying out this thing where we really just focus on the trip we’re on, and then once we’re back the items on the list of things to get sorted before he’s off are going to start piling up pretty fast so I still want to stay present in this while we can, but if you wouldn’t mind passing it along to them that you talked to the boys and we’re very interested, then we’ll get in touch with them after this week.”

“Oh, I can do that no problem,” she returns. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait until he hears the spiel, though?”

Sirius sighs long, smiling up at the sky as he thinks it over. “I really think he’ll be all in, but fine, give me — twenty minutes past the time the call ends and I’ll have the answer for you,” he details.

“Listen, I want you to be right here, but it can wait twenty just so we know for sure, trust me,” Andromeda maintains. “And now I’m going to cycle over to the reason I rang, but I am going to break another rule here because we do need to talk shop, but it’s nothing tedious and nothing’s broken.”

“Mm?” Sirius hums for a prompt.

“It’s just an idea that dropped on Ted’s head, and then onto mine as a result,” she details. “So, he’s got a friend who opened a tavern a few years ago and they held a cold open, soft launch type deal ahead of their grand opening, which really was meant to host the friends and fam before the doors officially opened but also to iron out any kinks before the big day.”

“Yeah, no, I’ve seen 'Schitt’s Creek' so I’m aware of what a soft launch is,” Sirius assures, figuring he should come in there with that.

“Well, good, but what do you think about having one of those here, then?” Andromeda entices. “Friends and fam type situation, invite ‘em on in and show ‘em all a good time, and I was thinking we could make good use of that beautiful stage and open it up to anyone who’d like to perform? Let’s say, six or seven songs each, and no originals because barf; let’s have fun, throw a cover night, and lean into it.” 

“Yes,” Sirius puts it. 

“Mm?” Andromeda probes. 

“Yes, I’m already sold,” Sirius reiterates.

“You’ll have to play a set, too,” Andromeda determines. “I won’t hear otherwise, frankly.”

“And you won’t have to,” Sirius assures. “I know of a few folks who’d take a slot too, so if you’ll let me finish this trip out, I’ll start scouting once I’m back.”

“Deal; deal, deal, deal,” she cements it.

“Are we on time with everything for this to legitimately work?” Sirius checks.

“Are you near to any wood?” Andromeda checks. 

“Sitting on some,” he shares. 

“Alright, knock on it real quick for me,” she bids.

“Alright, Remus,” Sirius returns her, rapping the knuckles of his left hand against the bench.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Andromeda accepts, “and I wanted that because we are, as of tomorrow, three days ahead of schedule, give or take.” 

“Killin’ it,” Sirius sings. 

“Mhm, that’s us,” she allows. “So, barring any sudden appearance of black mould or the roof caving in — knock again, thanks — I do think we’re on track to be ahead of the game.” 

Sirius raps his knuckles one last time against the wood surface behind him. “Well, in that case, and if all goes well and it likely will, I’m even more interested in it because it was already going to be dicey for Remus to make it to the opening as is,” he raises. “I mean, nothing’s finalized yet, but he’ll get his start dates soon enough and then we’ll know for sure when he has to be there, but it’ll be late August, you know, so it was out of our hands in terms of him being in town for the occasion, but if we held the cold open few days ahead of schedule, then he could actually come see the place in action and not just live vicariously through pictures.”

“Oh, then we have to,” Andromeda says of it. “If anything, we’re going to do this for him and that’s that.” 

Sirius hears a ping at his ear that tells him he’s got a new text and looks to find the very lad has chosen to make contact this very moment, but the contents of the text are quite the stomach drop.

Not rushing you, but you’d want to know they close at five

Sirius’s gaze darts to the time at the top left of his screen, jolts as he finds it about to hit four, and gives a grimace over being precariously close to breaking his hard rule of not dillydallying inside of an establishment within the hour of closing time, sticking his mobile back against his ear right quick. “Alright, so I do have to get going,” he gives up idly, sliding off of the top of the table and landing his feet on the grass.

“So soon?” Andromeda puts up.

“OK, but we were eating when you called and the place closes up soon so I’m actually out of options,” Sirius puts it, swiping his things off of the picnic table to stow them away in the truck rather than have to carry them all back in with him.

“OK, fine, go, but first, quickly — how is it there?” Andromeda bids. “I’ve wanted to bother you about it all weekend, by the way, but I’ve been very good, leaving you to it even though it just about did me in.”

Sirius breathes in long through a charmed smile, though he is a little disarmed by the loaded questions and how long it could reasonably take to answer either of them properly. “We'd have to grab coffee to get through it all and we will; promise,” he instils, making a beeline for the truck. “For now, I will say they’ve been really warming to us, re-warming to me, and it’s been lovely — like, actually lovely; I can see them taking joy in their son’s joy and then, seeing them reacting so well to Remus's joy only affirms his joy and makes it so readable on him, he’s been so sweet. I couldn’t love him more and then again, that is a bald-faced lie because I could go back in there and he could say or do something that’ll make me love him even more, but that’s the beauty of Remus Lupin for you, isn’t it? He just doesn’t stop making it easier to fall in.”

Sirius,” Andromeda puts out before giving in to a whole, entire shriek. “Someone’s going to think I croaked in here, but I’m so happy for you I don’t care.

Sirius gives a trill in his throat, extending his right hand out and unlocking the car through a substantial pose, and tugs the passenger door open again, tossing his lighter and pack on the seat while keeping the butt of his cigarette in hand to toss in the bin. “That’s really the beauty of the Lupins in general, if I’m honest,” he tacks on, shutting the passenger door and locking the truck back up again. “They’re all the sweetest things on the planet and all trying so hard for each other right now; it’s amazing, they’re amazing to watch, and it’s amazing how quickly Hope and Lyall have warmed to me being there, too? It feels different with them now, I don't know, like they’ve both hit a switch within themselves and decided I must’ve always been there in the room with the rest of them.”

Andromeda gives up a deep noise from within her, but of course she gets how important that would be right down to her bones. “Oh, you meant we need to get that coffee, then,” she raises it.

“Oh, I did,” Sirius echoes, feeling a pull so deep within his chest of a fondness for someone who just, gets how important this is for him from the centre of her being and perhaps beyond, “but thanks again, hey? He’s going to be so happy he won’t know what to do with himself and I barely know what to do with myself, either.”

Andromeda won’t hear anything more of it, happy to help, says she, and Sirius is quite happy to let her help frankly. They end on a non-specified time for their coffee date but schedule it for the following Monday when Sirius is due back at work, followed by a firm request from Andromeda to give Remus a big, ole’ kiss from her as she's biding adieu, and he slips his mobile in between the waistband of his trunks and his side for safekeeping as he dashes through the parking lot and then across the road between him and the tavern, his shoes clip-clomping on the asphalt as he crosses the street with the bright, speedy air of someone with fantastical good news to pass along and scuttles past the same group of blokes assembled at the foot of the front walkway.

He supposes, in the moments after being called a fruit by one of them, if it was the decidedly too-short swimming trunks that gave it away, the antics he got into over there and the flamboyance of it all, if it was a characteristic he’s got that Sirius hasn’t been made privy to yet, or if it was simply that he was clearly having ten-times more fun than they appear to be, but maybe it’s all of that and more.

He locates a bin nearby the terrace, drops his cigarette butt in there, and heads for the door, thinking that if anything, he very appears to be getting a firm lesson in small-town culture. 'Course, that sort of thing can and does happen in jolly ole’ London, and Sirius has got the periodic evidence to prove it like lashes on his back, but it doesn’t happen like this; not in so many small ways, in such a brief window of time, not multiple reminders over a single weekend that he’s too fruity for his own good, and he thinks there, if he comes out of this trip without a greater understanding of the sort of messages Remus has received and internalized over years and years of such casually cruel comments happening to and around him, then he’ll have done both Remus and himself a disservice.

He’ll say this, though: his mission to blow Remus’s mind with the brand spanking new news is no less important than it was before walking back into the pub — a pub that Remus, and likely Lyall at that, affectionately refer to as ‘Sloops’ — while having The Cure be what welcomes him back inside feels like he's receiving a moody yet boisterous hug upon reentry.

He looks over toward their table in the back left corner of the pub, feels a wafting sense of lovesick goonery as he spots Remus finger-tappin’ his right hand on the table as the instrumentals of ‘Pictures of You’ swell inside the pub, and if this one’s a tune that’s long-since played around the house by courtesy of Lyall, Sirius wouldn’t be surprised one bit; Remus’s lidded eyes and easy smile say it all for him as Sirius comes up to their table.

He stops just by Remus’s chair, leaning down and in to press a kiss to the crook of his neck. “That’s from her,” he imparts first and foremost, speaking it next to Remus’s left ear before leaving a quick kiss to the shell of it. “That’s from me.”

Mm,” Remus chimes, giving up a light shoulder shimmy against him for it.

Sirius gets a glimpse of Remus’s plate from up here, sees that he’s made it only halfway through his second piece of fish, and points to the plate quite intently with his right forefinger. “Tell me why I rushed back here thinking you’d at least be close to finished and I’d be the one having to catch up,” he asserts.

“I specifically said I wasn’t rushing you, and it’s not as if I thought you were going to take that long out there,” Remus provides.

“I’ve a great excuse for taking so long, though,” Sirius grins.

“I’m sure, but the point is; you’re the one with the thing about it, not me,” Remus raises. “All I was doing was letting you know.”

Sirius makes no real effort to move away when he’s a lot more interested in bracing his palms on the table’s edge and bending to get his face quite close to Remus’ with a pointed stare on. “You should have a thing for it, too, frankly,” he says of it. “You know exactly what it’s like when people simply will not leave.”

“Yes, well, we can leave as soon as you back up off me, but I will just say, a couple of people sitting inside the building at an hour to close is not the same thing as sitting there right until the last second and I really feel like that’s a distinction you’ve closed yourself off to,” Remus returns, leaning up to sneak a kiss to the tip of Sirius’s nose, and that’s as thorough a method as any to get Sirius to come down a peg or two, he’ll say that.

Then again, no matter how swooned he is over the guy, Sirius can’t help tossing a disparaging look at Remus’s plate. “That fish was breathtaking, and here you are, nibbling at it,” he mentions.

“I’ve been working on these, thank you,” Remus defends, swirling his right hand around the pile of chips on his plate that, on this glance, has admittedly gone down quite a bit since he left him. “I know how good the fish is; I'm the one who insisted we both get it, I just shouldn’t have ordered the two-piece meal so if you want the rest of this piece, have at it.”

Sirius reaches to nab the piece of fish off of his plate, pops that into his mouth, and moves to take his seat back, giving a glance between their two plates as he swallows down his mouthful. “Well, we could combine plates to take away?” he raises. “Do they do that here?”

Remus nods for it. “We can just ask for one container,” he offers, reaching up to beckon for Sirius’s plate. “She hasn’t been by since you went out, but I’ll make it look like we’re ready to go for whenever she comes by again.”

Sirius picks it up off of the table, hands it over to him, and has the rest of his apricot beer while watching with keen and definite lovesick interest as Remus busies himself with transferring the leftovers onto his plate before piling that on top of Sirius’s newly empty one, using his fork to slide their leftovers over to one side of his plate. The reason for this, Sirius has a feeling, is to make room on the plate for their additional utensils left on their table, and soon enough Remus is dutifully placing their silverware onto the empty half of their stacked plates. Next up, he grabs both of their napkins and lines the two of them up in his hands before folding them as a pair into a smaller, inoffensive rectangle, lifting the top plate to pin the napkins between the two plates.

Lastly, he rounds up their glasses, scoots them and the plates over closer to the edge of their table for a non-verbal signal to their waitress that the two of them are quite done here, and gives up a tiny, near-unnoticeable breath of accomplishment if this were anybody but Sirius watching him do it, but all in all; there’s a satisfied Remus ahead of him who has just finished making the table look presentable and doesn’t even know how good he’s about to have it, and there’s an excitable Sirius smiling intently at him, waiting on the right moment to drop the bomb.

The moment comes quickly; Remus is studying him with a suspicious squint within the next few beats, a smile budding at his lips. “You get lucky out there?” he quips, eyeing Sirius’s palpable cheer.

“You could say that,” Sirius returns him. “You could also say that you got even more lucky than I did.”

Remus looks here, there, all around their booth before looking back at Sirius. “Well, I was kidding, but by all means,” he probes, lifting his hands for more.

Sirius swallows his mouthful down, pulling his plate forward to pick at the chips left on it. “She found you a place,” he shares, eyes bright, his smile innocuous. Remus, who chose to go for a sip off of his water glass, thinks better of that action by slapping his glass back down on the table, his mouth set to a perfect ‘O’ of utter surprise. “Potentially, of course; it’s up to you seeing as you’re the one who would be staying there the most, but I would take the offer if I were you because it’s pretty damn good.”

Remus gives up a noise that’s rather bird-like in that it sounds an awful lot like a stifled chirp, which only has Sirius ducking his head through a merciless laugh. “No, don’t laugh; tell me,” he bids, waving his hands frantically to distract Sirius from his mirth, and he has to take in a good, long breath before he thinks he’ll make it through.

“OK, OK, so: she caught up with some old friends that are based in Paris earlier today and found out that they’re looking to sublet their lower-level suite,” he begins, slapping a new, enticing smile on his lips that extend to his cheeks. “She’s already done a ton of the heavy lifting here, so really, if you’re interested, so are they; it’s that simple.”

Remus laughs weakly, his left hand placed at the center of his chest. “Oh, it’s that simple?” he returns, a righteously bamboozled face on.

“No, it really is,” Sirius chimes, opening up his mobile and turning it toward him to showcase the image Andromeda forwarded along to them. “They’re very interested in having you, the house is apparently beautiful, and it'll be hella convenient in terms of location; here, she drew us a lil’ illustration of how close you’ll be to school and I think that’ll be the best thing to show you first.”

Remus leans into the table to get a look at the photo on Sirius’s screen with bright intent and, better than that even, reaches over their plates to hold Sirius’s outstretched wrist, tipping it back ever so slightly to see the picture better and somehow making this feel even more of a team effort. “I don’t know what to focus on first,” he smirks, blinking twice for it. “The dick, the arrows, or my violently churning stomach.”

“Arrows are the main attraction, the dick you could say was Andromeda’s signature, and you have got to put that stomach back in order because this is nothing but good news,” Sirius maintains, standing up out of his booth seat to lean over the table and tip his screen back just a touch so he can get a glimpse at it from above and point between the arrows. “So, that’s your faculty building right there, this is where the house is, and you’re just going to be hopping over the river so you'll just need the tube and a quick stint on a bus line to get you there in relatively no time at all; location, location, location, am I right?”

“You are,” Remus echoes, a bit distantly for sure, and then he’s looking up from Sirius’s screen with a light shake of his head, the unspoken need for more well-read by Sirius.

“It’s a fully furnished suite with all the accommodations so you’d hardly have to leave it if you didn’t want to, but Andromeda says to believe her and them when they say you’re welcome up in the main house any time you want,” Sirius extends, going through the list of perks first. “She said it would feel mostly like a roommate situation given that they do live upstairs, but they’re only home during the week as they’ve got a country place to spend the weekends at so you’d have free reign of the place on those days, and with the location being nearly unbeatable, I really think this the offer to take.”

Remus nods somewhat distantly, his mouth slightly ajar as he computes each new detail given to him. “Sorry, who are they again?” he raises, letting a half-smile show.

Sirius smirks wildly, figuring he did breeze past some wider details to get the initial spiel out. “They’re this artiste couple she met through that apprenticeship she did a while back,” he forwards, moving to sit back down while keeping his mobile held up and out for him when he cannot help but find it supremely sweet that Remus has just, laid claim on his right wrist for something to clutch onto. “Gallery owners, run four in the city alone, says her, and fair warning, they’re a pair of absolute Bohemians, they've got nude art all over the home, and there’s a chance they’ll have Taize playing on loop up in the main house, but as I told her, I somehow doubt any one of those stranger quirks to the place are going to send you running in the other direction of a perfectly suitable and convenient place to live.”

Remus gives up a perplexed, but lively laugh there. “I’m inclined to agree, only I don’t know that I have a frame of reference for what Taize is,” he trades him.

Sirius hums, gaze temporarily raised to the ceiling as he comes up with a descriptor for it. “It’s definitely on the liturgical side; lots of choral chants, descant vocals, strings, piano-based melodies,” he offers, glancing back down and over at Remus’s food-for-thought expression. “When she first got back from her time over there, she said its heavy presence at the house was all about meditative purposes as well as its apparent positive effect on their creative process, but she also said just outside that it’s quite possible they’ve moved onto other genres since then, and if not, enjoy the Taize; might be good background music for studying, what do I know?”

Remus smirks fast. “Well, you knew what Taize was, so I’d say you know quite a bit,” he lobs him.

“Well, then, think you wouldn’t mind having it on upstairs while a paper’s being fashioned,” Sirius lobs him back.

“Alright, well, I think I’ll do fine with that, then,” Remus trades, a budding smirk about him as he takes in a quick breath before speaking again. “So, back to the nude art real quick—”

Sirius gives up a substantial pfft. “Absolutely, but can I just say; I love that the need to clarify what Taize was came before clarifying this,” he slips in.

Remus gives out a breathy laugh for that. “Well, I know what nude art is,” he says of it. “How risqué are we talking here, then?”

“Mm, she didn’t give me specific details past the fact that it’s all over,” Sirius passes along, “but she did make sure to let me and therefore you know that it’s all very sex-and-body-positive around there, so do with that what you will.”

Remus reworks his mouth around the suggestive smile budding there. “Well, alright; gives me an image or two,” he says of it.

“You’ll have to tell me if it’s straight-up porn, though,” Sirius tacks on.

“Well, I think I’d have to tell somebody if that’s the case, so it’ll be you, I’m sure,” Remus slips him.

“It'd better be me,” Sirius instils, gently bidding his claimed wrist free. “Let me pull the house up on Street View and we can have a gander at the place.”

Remus nods, letting Sirius’s wrist go free, and with that, Sirius zooms way in on the image, repeating the address three times fast to have it lodged enough in his brain that he feels comfortable minimizing the image and getting Street View loaded to plug the address into, and in a very short time Sirius is blinking down at an exterior shot of the house, finding that Andromeda hadn't been talking the place up for nothing; she looks a beaut.

“Check the fuck out of these digs,” he puts up, turning the screen to face Remus again with a pointed smile on. “You’ll be living the life soon enough.”

Remus repositions his gaze on Sirius’s screen and in the very next beat a crease forms between his bows. “How much are they asking for, Sirius?” he investigates, his grimaced teeth suggesting quite plainly that he expects it’ll be astronomical.

“We didn’t even get to that,” Sirius tells him, lifting his free hand for a calming gesture to combat Remus’s even deeper brow formation. “And we, have already well-established I’m footing the rent as is; live the high life for a change, Remus.”

“I can’t just do that,” Remus insists.

“Oh, but you can, though; I’m giving you permission to,” Sirius imprints. “Even if they aim high with what the suite is worth, I’ve got it, and I was never going to put you in some dank, cheap alternative either way; you knew that in your heart.”

Remus gives him a pointed look. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to encourage you to spend an arm and a leg just for me to have a roof.”

“No, and why would it, but I didn’t get the impression that these people are trying to get rich off this, so let’s not jump the gun here and assume they’ll highball us?” Sirius reasons with the reasoner.

“Well, with a house like that, I’d imagine their idea of a steal may just be a touch higher than I would set the bar,” Remus highlights.

“You are judging two people you’ve never met based on the front view of their home, Remus,” Sirius tuts, giving up a gentle smile to thwart steam coming out of Remus’s ears. “The story is actually kind of sweet, normally their youngest son lives in that suite but since he went off to study in Germany back in April, they’ve apparently been feeling a little out of sorts without him there and are really just looking to fill the space while he’s gone; it just doesn’t rub me as a get-richer-even-quicker scheme, and on top of that, after how highly Andromeda spoke of you to them, it just wouldn’t make any sense to turn around and smoke you out price-wise now that they know of the legend of Remus Lupin.”

“They don’t know me,” Remus puts up, a definite last-ditch input with an impish shrug to pair with it, so Sirius is cracking him in real-time. “I’m just a bloke to them.”

“No, I’m not exaggerating here; Andromeda talked you right up,” Sirius insists. “Oh, and she called you a cutie while we were on the line and wanted me to pass that along to you; that's not necessarily related, but it kind of is because if she told me that and I'm someone who very knows that already, then you have to know she'd have made you sound like a whole prince to these people, but I can affirm that for you right now because she very did do that.”

“Oh, no,” Remus gives up, flattening his right palm against his forehead, and even underneath the low light of the pub, Sirius can tell a flush is coming on.

“Oh. yes,” he echoes, setting his mobile aside for now. “It sounds like she got their hopes up rather high just advertising you and even then, they don’t even know yet how good they’re actually going to have it with you and that’s the best part; they’re going to get such a sweet tenant out of you.”

Remus breathes in long, fully affected by all of this good faith running him over, no doubt. “Of course I’m flattered she did this,” he puts down, as if that’s something he expressly has to state or he’ll be sent to the gulags, “but the other shoe is going to drop any moment now.”

“I don’t think there is another shoe here,” Sirius gives him earnestly. “Sure, there are a couple more things that come with the place that we should discuss, same as there would be for any place, but for your comfort here, just remember that Andromeda can smell bullshit a mile away and didn’t sniff it out in this case or she wouldn’t have brought it to our attention, would she?”

Remus gives up a weighted breath there, letting his right hand pass over his overcome expression and settle at the side of his neck. “No, she wouldn’t,” he allows.

Sirius nods for it, smiling for him. “She was always going to use her vast network over there to find something for you, and that’s all that she’s done here,” he reiterates. “Let it wash over you; between me and her, you’re being taken care of, and very well at that.”

Remus lets his eyes fall shut, giving up an overcome noise that Sirius is grateful to have caught over the music, but he figures Remus might just appreciate it if he didn’t let him tear up in the middle of the pub. “You want to talk cons?” he offers gently. “I’ve already given you the perks that come with the place, but there are a few hitches you should be aware of ahead of time; Andromeda was pretty clear about them.”

Remus gives him a sigh, a nod, and the reopening of his eyes. “Yeah, give me them,” he bids.

“OK, well, first of all, they’re a couple of certified night owls,” Sirius supplies.

“Well, then, never mind,” Remus slips in, fast and wonderfully dry.

Sirius flashes him a grin. “Right, back to the drawing board,” he plays along. “You should also be aware that their friend circle is rather large and they do entertain all sorts of folks at theirs, so she said a good rule of thumb with that is to keep a solid pair of earplugs handy should any one of their gatherings overlap with your precious sleep hours, but we’ll just make sure you have multiple pairs before you go so you’ll have one in each room and that should do it.”

Remus gives up a smirk. “So, a lot like yours, just with some nude art hung around,” he reiterates, his lopsided smile out to play.

“Exactly what I said, just a whole lot of incredibly extra people gathered together in a couple incredibly extra people's home; not all that different from mine, only a different kind of extra,” Sirius allows brightly. “Now, I don’t know exactly what goes down on those sorts of nights, I do assume they all share the same fat blunt and compliment each other’s auras—” he cuts off for a deep, welcomed snort from Remus, “—no confirmation on that, just guesswork for now, but she did want me to make sure you’re aware that it’s very possible that you could come home to a shindig already well in the making and wind up getting scooped up by the Bohemians in the living room so if you're not in the mood, she said you should probably just make your way down to your area both quickly and quietly because your face alone is gonna send them into a frenzy, let alone when you open your mouth and start talkin'.”

Remus sends out a long and lustrous pfft for that, but that only has Sirius doubling down on it with a weighty nod. “She didn’t say that,” he returns. “You’re paraphrasing immensely, as — per — usual.”

Sirius gives up a loaded laugh at Remus taking his empty water glass and plonking it along with the claim, but it’s a false claim and that has him shaking his head thoroughly. “No no, she’s been to a few of these parties so she knows exactly what they’re like, and she said, ‘they love a new face and they’ll love Remus’s face on sight,’ and that’s before dazzling them all with the man behind the face,” he maintains, garnering Remus to cradle his face in the palms of his hands. “So, the trick is to be quiet about slipping inside and downstairs unseen, but on top of that, we could easily send along a sturdy lock to attach to your door if those folks get bold as brass and try coming downstairs to retrieve the cute Welsh boy who went downstairs too quickly for their liking, or you could learn how to say ‘no, I’m a bit busy right now, can’t stop and chat’ with conviction before September; either one, Remus, whatever you think.”

Remus passes his right hand back over his face, snickering from behind it. “I’ll be bringing that lock, then,” he raises lightly, but definitively.

Sirius smirks up a storm. “Mhm, figured that,” he trades him. “Now, what I don’t want, is for you to be holding yourself off from a good time, though, OK? I’d understand if you've got work to do or just really aren’t interested in being fawned over that day, but if you get in, and you’re feeling a little brave, and there’s a fat blunt being passed around the room, then get in there and have a toke or two; trust me, the only person stopping you from charming a room full o’ people is you, dearie.”

Remus gives up a flat scoff, but his smile is giving so much of him away. “You just want me to infiltrate the party and bring you my intel,” he returns him.

Sirius gives up a powerful bark. “Well, yeah, that’s part of it,” he echoes. “Think of the stories you could compile for me just by making an appearance at even one of those shindigs, hm? That’s reason enough to hang around and people-watch, and you can always live-text me the whole time if you feel inclined to; I know I’ll going to have my eyes glued to our thread for updates.”

Remus smirks up a storm, sticking his right elbow on the table to cradle his chin in his hand. “Then I’ll make an effort to go just for you,” he extends, and Sirius gives up a pair of prayer hands for the display of solidarity here. “What’s the other part of it, then?”

Sirius takes in a breath through his nose, working out how to articulate it from his brain through to his mouth. “Well, I don’t want it to feel anything like your first year out in London,” he raises.

Remus gives up a puff of breath. “Well, my circumstances were a bit different back then,” he offers, going for a rather mild way of putting it.

“No, and I know that, but,” Sirius keeps on, taking care to speak thoughtfully as he makes his case, “brains can be funny, mean little things that trick us when we’re back in a situation we were once in and the last thing I'd want is for you to revert to a time where you felt so isolated; you were actively made to feel isolated from the people in your life for so long already and the move out there just exacerbated it to the point where you felt you had to hold yourself off from meeting new people, but being in a new city can be isolating on its own, you’ll be off without the little fam you’ve made for yourself, and even though we’re all going to be keeping up with you like mad while you’re gone because we’re all low to highkey in love with you, I don’t want you tunnelling yourself into work and school and shutting yourself away in your area the rest of the time because of a version of homesickness and preservation, and does any of this make a lick of sense or am I just babbling here?”

He lets a tight laugh out at the end of it that seems to activate one out of Remus. “No, it does,” he assures, a swooned air about him and his budding smile. “I get branded such a thinker, but you’re starting to be three steps ahead of me in nearly every direction, and I say that with love.”

“Well, I’d hope so,” Sirius quips, feeling a bit lighter just for Remus’s unmoving stare. “I just really want you to have a blast and not miss out on anything even if the thing is a shindig with a band of Bohemians, and as much as I'm inclined to keep you all to myself because you’re the light of my life, the idea of coercing it and feeding into the idea that you’d best keep away from others so they don’t get to experience the light that is Remus Lupin while I get to keep having you to myself feels a bit nasty and too-like a certain someone that I’m never going to want to emulate, so just know that I want you to have fun while you’re there, OK? I’m always going to be right here, excited about your wins and cheering you on, no matter what.”

Remus gives a deep noise from within him and veritably slaps his right hand against the center of his chest, but that certainly counts as an animated way to get his current state across; he’s capital-B bouldered and the both of them fucking know it. “I don’t know that I could love you more, but you just made that very, very hard to say,” he declares, and just like that, another puzzle piece fits right into place.

Sirius gives up a light trill in his throat. “Well, I did just finish telling Andromeda you do the exact same thing to me hourly at this point, so I suppose it’s only fair that it goes the other way,” he extends, smiling with all his might at Remus.

And there, a trill filled with deep and unbridled excitement comes out of him and stops Sirius right in his tracks. “I can’t believe you did this — I can’t believe she did this,” he rings out of himself. “Did you thank her for me? I should ring her, shouldn’t I; make sure she knows?”

Sirius gives up a frank, utterly bouldered laugh. “I thanked her three times over, don’t you worry,” he assures, “but that said, I did also say that I’d check with you before giving her the go-ahead to let them know to officially hold the place for us, so if you wanted to send her a text for me that tells her we’re fully in along with that thank-you, then you’d be knocking an item off of my list and one off of yours in one go.”

“Done,” Remus returns at once, his eyes so alive with fervour, Sirius is so entirely thankful for the dim lighting in this pub for doing him a solid and making it easier for Remus to have hung his sunnies from the scoop of his collar for the meal and let his eyes fly free for a time.

Remus picks his mobile off the table and gets right to it, wasting no time there. “I also told her to pass along to them that we’re currently on vacation, so we’ll get their contact information off her once we’re back, you can speak to them then and charm the socks off of them like you do best,” Sirius caps it. “How’s that sound to you?”

Remus lifts his feet underneath the table and well and truly starts up a game of footsie with him under there while it’s all smiles and nods above it as his thumbs move lightning-fast over his screen, so by all accounts, that says it all for him.

Sirius is still grinning like a goon as their waitress pops up to the right of their table. “I’m so sorry,” she gives up.

“No no, it’s fine,” Sirius assures, and it is very fine indeed when he’s been inside of an intense, Remus-inspired tunnel session ever since the two of them decided they were pretty well ready for the bill and a bit too caught up in all the glitz of some certified Good News coming their way, but on that note, Remus hasn’t stopped playing footsie with him even with the new presence at their table, so all in all, Sirius is doing yards better than fine.

That said, it’s very possible that their particular waitress has heard the words ‘it’s fine’ and had it end up being decidedly not fine when her manager got an earful on the way out for Sirius gets more than he thought he might. “We had someone call out,” she extends, bringing her right forefinger this way and that way as she tacks on. “I’ve been covering the floor and the terrace so it’s just been back and forth, back and forth.”

Remus glances up from his screen there and lowers it a tad. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he offers.

“No, that’s alright, would you like the bill?” she asks, but it does sound cursory as she’s reaching for the plates made ready for her on the table.

“That, and a takeaway box for the rest, please,” Remus tacks on, subtly typing again on his mobile while his eyes are on her.

“We weren’t doing your job for you,” Sirius makes known, realizing that the clean-cut state of their table could and perhaps does look a tad pointed to someone who’s been rushing here, there, and everywhere for the past however long. “We just didn’t want to stick around too close to close.”

Remus looks back down at his screen again. “He hates to be part of the problem,” he shares, the shine of his screen showcasing that he’s put on a rather sweet smile.

Sirius knocks his right foot a little harder against Remus’s whichever foot, he doesn't know, but their waitress is off with their stacked plates within a moment and then it’s another ten to twenty moments of footsie with a little extra somethin' thrown in there before Remus even sets his mobile down again, and a true moment later, he’s feeling out the grime on his own hands and very openly showing his distaste for it. “I’ve got to deal with these before we do anything else,” he relays, scooting out of his booth and undoubtedly heading for the loo.

Sirius watches him go with wonder, but then he has a feel of his own hands and decides Remus might’ve had the right idea there. He lifts out of his seat, crossing halfway across the main room, and waves down their waitress over behind the bar, pointing off toward the bathrooms so she won’t think they’ve gone and dine-n-dashed on her. He gets the go-ahead from her in the form of an easy wave-off and heads down the hall toward the men’s room where he proceeds to get excited about the idea of torpedoing through the door in hopes of spooking Remus out of his skin.

This definitely does work out well for him in that Remus, standing over the bin and just about finished drying off his hands with some paper towel, may as well have jumped out of his skin as he yelps over Sirius’s sudden and uncouth barge-in, and that would have been funny enough on its own, but some bloke in one of the stalls yelps in there either drunkenly or genuinely, very hard to tell, and that garners Remus to drop his paper towel in the bin and duck past Sirius to escape the loo, leaving him having to do a speed wash of his hands before the man can exit the stall and find the culprit of his fright if that's indeed what happened to him.

Sirius hastily retreats there without having been seen by said man, heads off down the hall with a spring in his step and an innocuous air about him, and finds Remus back at the table and bitchily in the middle of paying for their two meals at once. He stands nearby the action, hands linked behind his back and his professional work smile on while Remus and their waitress make small talk while the portable interac machine whirs and eventually spits out two receipts, the latter of which Remus declines taking a copy of before he gets back out of his seat and slips the takeaway box into his grasp.

The two of them fall into a kind farewell to the waitress before heading off toward the door. “You could have at least let me tip, you know,” Sirius mentions, stopping to hold the door open for Remus to go through.

“I was already handling that on the machine,” Remus chimes, heading right through the open door like the prince he is. “It’s what you get for adamantly walking around with the relentless goal of spooking me.”

“You — love — it,” Sirius enunciates, budging up on Remus’s right and then speeding past him to beat him to the truck.

Remus doesn’t deny that, only problem is, he goes all the way around to the driver’s side, manually unlocks his door, and doesn’t unlock Sirius’s until he’s good and buckled, but then again, as far as problems go, Remus using that as a form of retribution is a bit of a non-issue and more hilarious than anything else.

The ride back to the inn is easy in that Sirius can’t really complain much about where his head is. He’s been very lucky, all in all; lucky enough to have forcibly taken his afternoon back from a couple of different areas of contention, lucky enough to have a bloke willing to go it alongside him and take that same mission on with such fervour, lucky to have a bloke who enjoys taking a detour for a nice quickie before going and grabbing dinner, lucky to have a bloke who indulges him in having a bite at the town pub despite the fact that he’s gone and quit booze cold turkey and could easily find a visit to a local pub a bit stale, lucky enough to have some Grade-A Good News dropped into his and Remus’s collective lap with a bow on it and everything, and, best of all, he’s so lucky to have a bloke who meets him halfway down so many different avenues, but especially on this new adventure. Remus may react fast, deprecatingly, and with ten tonnes of learned inadequacy, may operate with a hard rule that nothing that sounds too good ever actually is, but he can really turn it around.

Sirius does have to hand it to himself; he really turned the day around with the help of some choice main characters in his life, and for that, one would think that a sense of impending doom wouldn’t be making its way up and over to him as they pull up the drive toward the inn's parking lot, and to that, one would think that an imprint of James’s soul wouldn’t be knocking at the sides of his skull and reminding him that he is, indeed, a main character in Sirius’s overall cast, but there he is, knocking away up there, and there’s the doom, swelling over him like a chilled breeze, carrying with it a bone-chilling reminder that he can’t get too comfortable yet.

Remus taxis the truck around toward the back row of the lot, backing into an open spot beneath the leaves of a substantial birch tree. He turns the engine off and sits with the keys in his hand, leaning a little to the left and half over the wheel to get a look at the face of the inn, but when Sirius follows his gaze to it, there's just an empty porch with nobody on it. From there, Remus turns halfway in his seat and has himself a glance out the back window, but again, when Sirius does the same thing as a means to figure out what Remus is even doing here, all he sees is a vast expanse of grass and more trees in the distance.

At long last, Remus faces forward again and just in time to spot Sirius’s wild gesturing, which only has him smirking up a storm. “Mind if I roll one before we go up?” he raises. “You could even have some of it.”

“Boof, please,” Sirius returns, wholly grateful for a means to drown James out.

Remus gives him a smile in return, unbuckling in order to get enough room to turn in his seat and reach into the back, tugging their beach bag into the middle seat to scavenge around in it. He brings their tote of provisions into the front seat and Sirius watches Remus get to work over his lap, knowing full well that he himself would need some sort of flat surface to get the job done, but not this guy; he’ll get the job done in under a minute from when he first started and without a mess to speak of on top of that because he’s just that gifted in the art of rolling blunts.

True to form, Remus is finished in what feels like no time at all, twisting the excess paper at the tip of the joint and sealing it off. He turns in his seat again to stick their stash back into their beach bag, faces forward once more, and gives Sirius a quick smile before opening his door with his free hand.

Sirius swipes both his lighter and pack from the centre console. “Where do you want to go for it?” he raises, unbuckling himself and opening his own door.

Remus gives a hum in thought. “Well, either the festivities are still going strong inside or everyone’s already gone and turned in, but I couldn’t see anybody lingering around so I think we’re good to huff this in back,” he shares, letting himself down to the ground.

Sirius doesn’t know what he means by back there at all and he figures he might as well get down to the ground either way, but once he’s there he looks round as Remus pops the door to the cargo bed down and climbs up and into the back. “Truck smoke, truck smoke,” he chants, shutting his own door with a flourish and scampering to the back to join him up there.

He climbs up and slips in on Remus’s left, leaving his legs dangling off of the end alongside Remus’s, and leans into his frame as he showcases the lighter for him, staying in his lean past the point in which he's handed the little red guy off mostly because having Remus’s left shoulder pressed against his right one is exactly the amount of physical contact he’d like to keep just now.

Remus keeps hold of the lighter as he pops the joint into his mouth tip-first, pushing it in as far as the base and slipping it back out through a set of curled lips as a way to preemptively wet it. “Innovative,” Sirius hands him, and to Remus’s curious blink, he adds, “I like the method.”

Remus smirks with a new understanding, giving an easy shrug as he pulls the strap of his seatbelt off of him with his free hand. “Felt easier than trying to play catch-up once it’s burning,” he says of it, popping the filter into his mouth and sparking the lighter underneath the tip.

The plan seemed well enough, albeit made just as suddenly as Sirius knew there was a possible joint in the works; have a tête-à-tête with his lover while sunlight shrouds them and the property, pass a joint back and forth to put himself at a solid buzz, and, in doing that, see to it that James’s incessant knocking sound like background noise more than anything, but by the time they’ve finished up with it, all Mary Jane has done for him this time is make James’s knocking sound like borderline gong rolls, echoing in his head and out over the vast property in one go.

Sirius sort of just stands by the rear of the truck weirdly as Remus shuts the cargo bed back up and stops by the backseat, tugging their beach bag out to hang it over his right shoulder and grabbing up the leftovers with his free hand. He pops the door shut, heads past the front bumper, and looks back around at Sirius as he's hitting the lock button on the keys, the resulting beep jarring enough to bring him back online.

He follows after Remus with a feeble smile, gesturing toward his head as a means of explaining his behaviour, and Remus smirks as he pockets the keys, waiting for Sirius to catch up to him, and reaching to clasp his left hand as they make their way toward the path up to the porch. Sirius knows that in reality, one can’t actually feel someone else’s heartbeat through a link of the hands, but that doesn’t matter; he would much rather pretend that Remus’s heartbeat is what’s echoing in his head rather than James's gong and the doom it carries with.

The party inside is indeed still going strong, but there are no brandy-wielding men congregated around the base of the stairs, which is a good thing when they’re both way too high to deal with any pleasantries upon reentry and for the fact that they can slip past the commotion going on down in the dining hall and head on up the stairs still linked together, but on another note, it’s really the perfect scenario for Sirius, too. He can simply let Remus lead him upstairs, down the hall toward their door, and hold tight to his hand as he unlocks it with a swipe of the key card in his free hand, but then Remus pushes the door handle down, pushes the door open, and the resulting Look he gives Sirius as he nods him to head in first suggests he’s well aware that Sirius isn’t doing so hot.

Sirius shuffles inside their room and foots his shoes off on the mat, feeling a burn start up behind his cheeks that doesn’t actually need to be there because what judgement at this point is Remus going to pass him, but the burn is there all the same and Sirius can and does find a perfectly good reason for why they're burning. He lets go of Remus’s hand of his own volition, moves over to the bed, and turns himself around real slow to lay back on it, leaving his knees bent over the edge and his feet pressed to the floor.

Remus leaves their beach bag sitting on the bureau near to the door and it’s a testament to his own state that he leaves his own shoes in a haphazard pile near the mat to join him on the bed that much quicker, but while Sirius is laying in a heap, Remus stays sitting up and with his feet on the floor alongside Sirius’s, his knees turned toward his left hip.

Sirius breathes in once, preemptively gearing himself up to speak, but the hitch that interrupts his full breath has Remus reaching for his right hand, and that’s it, this is the very same position they found themselves in after the funeral, only the two of them were stone-cold sober last time and the mixture of existential dread and embarrassment coursing through Sirius back then pales in comparison to how dreadful and embarrassed he feels now.

He lifts his left hand to his welling eyes, attempting to catch the tears before they start leaking, but he can hardly get a chance to top those tears up when Remus seems rather intent on taking care of that himself, poising his free hand up by Sirius’s left temple and running his thumb underneath his eyelid, ready to go whenever, and this is the worst part — the best, too, don’t get him wrong, but it’s the worst, having to need this.

Sirius’s next breath, his next try really, they both sound shallow to his own ears. “I’m trying so hard not to ruin this,” he implores.

“What’s ‘this?’” Remus raises, speaking a notch above a whisper, but no less direct.

Sirius uses the hand he doesn’t have a job for anymore, fluttering it around them, the room Lyall kindly got them, the mini-trip within a trip where he wasn’t supposed to be this imbalanced on. “Our day; I’ve already poked holes in it enough, and I was supposed to be here for you this trip, not the other way around,” he puts it, his face hot underneath Remus’s touch as he keeps his watery gaze fixed on the ceiling.

“Who said that?” Remus offers. “I don’t think I did.”

“No, of course you didn’t, I did,” Sirius returns. “That was the deal I struck with myself and I’ve been failing it this whole time.”

“Who says?” Remus raises. “I don’t think I have.”

Sirius finally looks his way, sidelong and pointed. “You’ve gotta stop that.”

Remus reworks his mouth around a smile, lifting his shoulders in a quick pop of a shrug. “It’s all true,” he mentions. “I haven’t lodged a single complaint about you needing support; quite the opposite.”

“Yeah, well, you have a thing for broody boys,” Sirius slips him.

“Well, you’re right about that, but I never said you have to be utterly unfeeling while we’re here either,” Remus puts up. “I’d be so much more worried if you weren’t letting yourself go there, Sirius.”

“There’s a difference between unfeeling and all the feeling I’ve been doing,” Sirius counters.

“I mean, what’s the alternative?” Remus counters. “You just, never get to feel what you’re feeling because we could potentially be having a better time? I’m having the best time with you.”

Sirius breathes around a sob, sick of being treated with this much patience. “You just had one of the roughest weeks of your life, and all I’ve been doing is monopolizing the focus and bringing everything down—”

Remus hums a tight decline, smiling tightly. “I wouldn’t call it that myself and you can go ahead and scoff all you want, tell me that’s typical Remus, and keep telling yourself that you don’t get to have low points because I should have them all I guess, but that wouldn’t be the truth.”

“I’ve done little else but cry at you—” Sirius carves out of his throat, but Remus won’t let him finish doing it.

And?” Remus expels, and Sirius can tell he’s frustrated. “Sirius, I cried for so much of June, I was sure I’d cry you out of the room, but you never once let me cry myself to sleep alone so maybe you just get to have July; how about that?”

“That’s not fair,” Sirius says of it. “Of course I stayed with you.”

Remus sighs real big and real, real long. “It’s a give and take, Sirius,” he puts up. “It’s not like I haven’t needed you since then, I’ve really fucking needed you this week, haven't I, and it’s not like you refused to give that to me and you could have; I let you think I was backing out of the plan, let you go feeling all alone in this, had a whole panic attack that you had to immediately jump on and defuse, and you could have easily turned around and said that I monopolized the entire focus away from your week from hell, but would you do that to me?”

“Obviously not,” Sirius expels, feeling heavy with the weight of the truth being turned back on him.

“Then don’t do it to yourself,” Remus returns. “You've turned your shit down to turn mine way, way up and pull me back from that horrid place; why can't I?”

“It’s not the same thing, Remus,” Sirius puts up weakly. “You’ve been doing so well since then; it’s like you’ve been recentered and it’s just been radiating off of you—”

“Yeah, because you and my parents rallied around me when I needed you the most, why else?” Remus puts up. “I’ve not been magically fixed by how well that went; I’m doing better than I was, but don’t let some much-needed recentering on my part drown you out because I know haven’t.”

“No, because you’re fucking perfect,” Sirius returns, blinking through the tears that Remus keeps swiping away for him; it’s so much, they’re doing so much here.

Remus shifts his hips down the bed a bit, scoots himself to lay down, and turns toward Sirius while he nestles in beside him, settling himself half on his right side, half on his front to hover over him and keep catching those tears of his, and this marks the third difference between the two of them from back in November and the two of them now; back then, Remus didn’t lay down with him — didn’t trust himself to, he knows now, or else he’d have probably done something a lot like this if he had.

“I’ll need you again, Sirius,” Remus instils. “Just like you’ll need me again, and then I’ll need you again, and sometimes we’re going to overlap; it’s the way it goes.”

Sirius has to switch to slow, deep breaths in and out of his mouth to keep himself doing that breathing thing properly. “I’m going to sound like a broken record,” he lodges.

“Mhm, and?” Remus raises, letting go of Sirius’s right hand and lifting it to his right temple instead, coming at both of his leaking eyes with the pads of his thumbs, and Sirius is strong, but he isn’t invincible, giving out a sigh to end them all and staring fixedly at the faint scar on Remus’s right brow as a way to not stare into his eyes as he picks his words.

"James knows too much,” he states. “He knows that just because I might have a fond memory of Reg from when we were, I don't know, ten and twelve, doesn’t mean the memory didn’t take place in between a lot of other bullshit, he knows the specific good memories I may have of him outweigh the many more bad ones, and he knows the good memories stopped coming and, to his knowledge, weren't going to see a sudden surge because I wouldn't let Reg back into my life, not that there can’t be any more good memories to make because the clock already ran out on that; he's not going to get this, and I’m scared — I’m scared of telling him my position has changed on him, and is still changing, minute to minute, it seems.”

Sirius blinks himself semi-clear, his vision is hella wonky for certain, but he puts his sights on Remus's eyes solely, honing in on his silence. “I’m sorry, I’m just — more afraid than I’ve been in a long time,” he offers, putting words to the undeniable fear lining his bones. “He’s going to hit me with checkmate after checkmate that I can’t reasonably block and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I have a really hard time giving up control?”

Remus gives a spirited laugh through his nose, though his smile takes to a solemn turn. “You and me both, pal,” he extends, looking down at him with some lidded, hazy eyes definitely, but there’s so much quiet love to them that it comes off loud as hell. “I mean this in the best way, but you’re not special for this one.”

Sirius can’t help a smirk, nods languidly since he can’t get away with an erratic one with his head being held like this, and reaches up to fuse his hands to either side of Remus’s middle, needing to be more a part of this fusion. “I know you said I could set boundaries up top, but I don’t know how I’m going bring the news to him in a way that protects Reg,” he starts, trailing off after his name, but he finds the gall to keep going. “I’ve three options, and they all suck: if I state the terms of my boundaries out the gate, he’ll be on the defence immediately and that won’t lead anywhere good, if I don’t give him any context before I drop the news then that’s just permission for him to go buck wild with his opinion on that matter, and if I frame it like the truth, say to him, ‘Reg offed himself, I read as much in the book of letters I found, and it’s been the hardest week of my life,’ then that would at least be the simplest explanation and one that I would hope could be enough to show him that I’m not doing well here, and then he might go ‘oh shit, I’m sorry, Sirius,’ at the very least, sure, but that’ll be in regards to me and the way I found out, not in regards to him, and in the end, we’ll still end up a couple of tornadoes zooming around each other, not hearing what the other’s saying, and then I still won’t be able to grieve him the way I should be able to do with my best mate; I don’t see a way to do this without me seeing red.”

It takes Sirius a few seconds to understand that Remus isn’t saying anything, but he is exceptionally high, so that may be Mary Jane’s fault. “Too much, not enough?” he checks.

“Neither,” Remus denies. “I’m trying to decide if my gut response is a good one or not, sorry.”

“Give me your gut,” Sirius insists. “You know I want whatever’s in there by now.”

Remus hums an affirming note, but that doesn’t take away the worry stitched at his brow. “Maybe you ought to let him read it,” he raises. “The full thing, I mean.”

Sirius breathes in, knows he recoils, and Remus shifts just a little bit away from him, but he learns that it might've been more about seeing Sirius while he’s framing this. “I know, and that’s why I dreaded saying it, but he’s going to want to read it the moment he knows there’s a notebook to get his hands on, won’t he?”

Sirius nods his head, eyes wide, earnest, and garnering Remus to keep going. “Right, so rather than fearing that he’ll find it before you can get back to hide it again or if he doesn’t find it, sentencing yourself to an eternity of finding new and exciting places to hide it away from him, then perhaps showing him the full context of what you read might be your best bet,” he offers, going for a light tap on the firm line of Sirius’s own brow, and it’s a quiet hint, yes, but it’s also nice, having Remus be this focused on quelling Sirius’s jitters. “I think it could be good for him to have the whole picture before forming any sort of new opinions on the matter.”

“That’s like, forgoing any and all control and just, handing it over to him,” Sirius whispers.

Remus tilts his head back and forth, unconvinced. “In a way, this could be how you can keep some of it, too, though,” he raises, lifting his shoulders in a quiet, listless roll. “I mean, more than you have right now and you're laying flat on a bed sick with worry."

Sirius snorts, pushing out a solid horse breath. "Got me there."

Remus smiles small at him for it. "Some of those entries may show Reg in a negative light and I'm sure that's got you feeling like you need to hide the book forever and ever so James never gets another edge on him, but that doesn’t mean the weight of the other entries won’t transfer over if you do let him read it; if anything, maybe it could help?" he raises. "Maybe some entries in there could help him see the humanity that was in Reg, see a different side of him than he knew, and who knows, maybe it’ll wake him up, shake him a little, show him exactly how tragic this has been — had for Reg, has for you.”

Sirius breathes in long, breathing with the weight of that, shifts himself to the side and to face Remus, and veritably stuffs his face against Remus’s neck. Dramatic, sure, but a good idea definitely; the strap of Remus’s tank top smells like summer, Remus’s neck smells like a mix of his body wash thanks to the shower they hopped into before heading out for dinner and that little bit of sunscreen dabbed there before heading back out into the sun, and there’s a hint of weed lingering around, too, but that’s par for the course and adds to it all, frankly.

There are entries in that notebook that Sirius would absolutely omit from the collection before ever letting James even hold the book, but similarly, there are some entries in there that portray the sharp wit that Reg had, the rare but lovely sass he could sometimes call upon to get someone that wasn’t Sirius, a surprising goofiness to him that Sirius only ever got to see once in a blue moon if he were lucky, a goofiness he wishes he’d fanned the flames of more than he already tried to, a frightening sense for self-reflection that Sirius didn’t know the man had in him, and maybe Remus is right; maybe James needs to see that side of him to know what a horrible loss this truly was, still is.

“You made it into the book, did I tell you?” he raises, lifting his left hand and giving Remus's right elbow a graze.

Remus goes stiff as a nail before lurching back from Sirius’s embrace. “What, no?” he puts up bemusedly, so actually there should be, like, eight question marks on the end of that ‘no’ and that just has Sirius snickering to the ceiling before Remus goes and hovers his visage right over his so it’s all he can see. “How, Sirius?”

Sirius takes in a few good breaths before even trying to explain, reaching up to rub his hands up and down Remus’s sides to let him know that he’s present for this conversation, too. “OK, truth is, I don’t have absolute confirmation here; he didn’t write ‘I saw Remus Lupin, the barista today’ or anything,” he extends, though the fact that Remus’s face only gets more befuddled with that addition is kind of funny. “Alright, but what you need to remember about this notebook is that it was indeed more like a collection of letters to me; never sent, of course, and that’ll get me riled for eons to come, I’m sure, but these weren’t your regular ‘today was great and here’s why,’ sort of entries, they were spread out over four years, some with months in between each other, with various milestones he hit without me there to see him do it.”

Remus puts out a wounded, but wondrous breath, shaking his head faintly. “What a find.”

“No, listen, I have been thinking the same fucking thing,” Sirius insists. “It was like taking a trip into his brain for a bit there; it was like, whenever he really fucking remembered me for one reason or another, he’d sit down and pen me a little letter, and early on, there were some scathingly bitchy themes involved, but as time went on and he kept writing in it, his intent changed with his tone and they started becoming these weird, almost-updates on his life?”

Remus lets out a noise that Sirius can’t really decipher. “I’m just feeling a lot, please keep going,” he coaxes, smiling down at him mistily.

Sirius does plan on doing that, but he leans up and in to press an equally misty kiss to Remus’s lips first. "He didn’t sit down and pen me an entry whenever he saw one of our locations or I assume I’d have a lot more entries to flip through as a whole, but earlier on in the book, he wrote that he saw me outside the shop handing out samples on the terrace one time, three years ago, and—” he details, reaching to pluck one of his own stray strands of hair off of Remus’s collar and flicking it away as he works out the best way to put it, but ultimately goes with the most literal translation there is, “—well, he didn’t stop to say hello nor would I have let him, let’s be real, but that’s how he found out I worked for them and then later on in the book, we'd rolled forward a couple of years to this past November and he'd written about having gone finally done to one of my shops but a different location near his office, and he was like ‘I’ve had better coffee—’”

Remus breaks there, falling into a fit of snickers from behind his right hand. “I mean, we all have,” he puts in.

Sirius lurches forward to place an agreeing kiss to the back of the hand covering Remus’s definite smile. “And,” he gives to entice, “he wrote that there was this barista on shift who made him laugh and I just know that was you.”

“Oh,” Remus gives him, but the tone of it comes to something between appalled and gutted as he lets his hand fall away from his mouth.

Sirius tries to keep his resulting nod spirited when the tale he’s trying to relay is quite possibly one of the brightest spots within that collection of letters. “Mhm, the timeline adds up, you were pretty damn certain you’d served him a few times yourself around that time, and on top of that, the way he described the little exchange had me sure it was you,” he passes along, huffing a laugh. “It’s such a thing you’d say.”

“Oh no, what did I say?” Remus bids, putting his left hand over his forehead and playing with a curl at his fringe idly.

“Enough to have made him laugh; chill out, boy,” Sirius insists, reaching up to swipe his right thumb over the inside of Remus’s raised arm. “The guy ahead of him handed you a bottle from the fridge and it wouldn’t ring in under the scanner—” he pauses for a bright grin at Remus’s tight grunt at the mere mention of a phenomenon that occurs a little too often for any of their likings, “—uh-huh, and you’re there trying to make the thing do what it's there to do and the man went, ‘guess it’s free—’” he pauses again with a sharp laugh as Remus grunts thrice-fold for it, “—then the fiend left, Reg stepped up to order next, and he’d been like ‘how often would you say you hear that phrase,’ and you were like ‘more than is ever acceptable—’”

Remus cuts in there with a light scoff. “I had the gall to say that with all of two months under my belt?” he raises, pairing with a roll of his eyes and a wonky smile. “Unbelievable.”

“Oh, would you go easy on yourself? Sheesh,” Sirius returns him. “That’s plenty of time to have heard that one too many times, and besides, I think it’s funny and he thought so, too; in fact, that interaction might’ve been just the right tone for him to have sat down and related the moment back to me in way that was warmer because then he asked, rhetorically of course, if I'd heard that a lot but figured that I’d have been far less kind to the offender than you’d been, and I mean—”

“He was right,” Remus finished for him, putting on a grin.

Sirius nods forcefully, grinning ear to ear himself. “Exactly,” he echoes bright, “but the thing I love most about it is that you must have made him comfortable whenever he’d come in, which — not surprising to me at all, but I like that you would’ve made him laugh in what had to have been the worst month of his life, easily.”

Remus gives up a bleary noise, leaning his forehead down on Sirius’s and keeping it there. “I’m so sorry,” he gives him, and it’s a cursory response, one that’s in all the books, the automatic that so often doesn’t help all that much, but this one feels honest and true by the fact that it came from Remus and that he is one weepy lad, his tears only making it halfway down his cheeks before they land on Sirius, and it’s both painful and remarkable to witness him finally succumbing after holding it together for the two of them for days and days now, to witness him fully inside of this moment with him, and now Sirius gets to cry with him, gets to hold tight him while they do it, gets to navigate pain with Remus and breathe with the fact this pain he's in doesn’t have to be as isolating at it feels.

It takes them a good while to peel themselves apart; past the point where Sirius thinks he might’ve actually nodded off for a while, at least past sundown, and past the end of the party downstairs by the sounds of it, but his only proof on that front is how bleary he feels as Remus stirs him awake, how dark it is in here, and the fact that he resonates so clearly with the stillness of the inn they’re in.

“We slept for so long, Sirius?” Remus whispers, in a state of bemused stupor, it sounds like, but Sirius thinks he hears a bout of stifled laughing coming from him, too.

“What — tell me,” Sirius goads, poking Remus’s navel and getting one of his hip bones instead, but his aim's a little off in the dark. “What is it?”

“It’s ten past midnight,” Remus passes him, letting his snickers go free.

Sirius feels as if he’s been smacked with a bamboozling taste of unbelievable truth, but that’s what finding out that you and yours just had yourselves an unplanned six-hour nap, give or take, is like, he supposes. “What happened to us?” he demands, falling into his own breathy fit.

“I think this week happened to us,” Remus puts down, and Sirius pushes out a long huff, unable to deny that read of it.

“Well, now what are we going to do?” he raises, a hysterical note to his voice. “We’ve just had a full night's sleep.”

Remus’s silhouette moves a bit as he has a glance behind him toward the door, but he’s back to facing Sirius in a quick beat. “I could roll another, see if we don’t crash all over again?” he raises, smirking close by Sirius’s visage. “Think of how well we’d do with twelve hours of sleep, hm?”

And there starts an entire quest in which two sleep-addled and rather deliriously giggle-ridden lads stumble about their room scooping up their provisions, which end up being Remus’s weed-specific tote as well as the leftovers of their earlier feast, and venture their way down through the pin-drop silent inn without laughing each other silly. It’s easy enough at first, Sirius just can’t look at Remus as he’s making his way down the stairs with his mouthful of leftover chips to drown his snickers out, but then he starts doing a cartoonish tiptoeing manoeuvre with his tree-branch legs in the low light and Sirius ends up sprinting down the rest of the stairs and on through the lobby to make it outside before his bark can echo out through the first floor of the inn.

It definitely echoes outside, however, so Sirius scampers down the porch steps and takes a fast right, hiding behind a row of shrubs on the left-hand side of the staircase and keeping an eye out for Remus from behind them. He comes along not too long later, shuts the front door that Sirius definitely left wide open in the throes of his hasty retreat, and intensely scans the property from underneath the porch light, garnering Sirius to give out a birdcall to give away his position.

Remus goon-laughs his way down the front steps, making Sirius goon-laugh the whole time that he’s making his way over to him, and lands himself down straight ahead of Sirius, setting his tote between the two of them, apparently just fine with staying right where they are, and rolling up a new joint for them to share along with the leftover chips, which, he'll admit, do get better the higher they get.

If Sirius thought getting downstairs quietly was hard, getting back up to their room without making a commotion is another thing entirely, but that’s because Remus sneaks behind the front desk to toss their takeout container in a bin back there and, on his way out from behind there, nearly sends a vase careening off an end table that Sirius will admit shouldn’t have had to be there in the first place; the resulting fumble Remus goes into in order to circumvent the vase from hitting the floor is truly a blessing to have been able to watch, but it nearly takes Sirius completely out, garnering him to clutch at the front desk so not to wind up on the floor in place of the vase.

Remus pronouncedly shushes him, though the effect of it is marred by the rapid gusts coming from his nose, and zooms for the stairs with Sirius taking off after him, and the rest of the trip up feels like an eternity and no time at all.

Though the sun left them a while ago now, the air inside their room is stuffier than Sirius would like it to be. Opening the window on the far end of the room doesn’t help much in terms of getting a breeze going for it sure felt when they were down there that nightfall came to take the outside air hostage, forcing it to stay utterly still, but leaving the window closed seems like something they’ll both regret around three a.m, so open it stays; hell, perhaps the visual of an open window might help in some regard.

Sirius forgoes his traditional flannel trousers due to the heat, deciding that if he wants to curl up skin-to-skin with Remus in bed — and he does — then stripping down to his skivvies will have to do for bedtime attire. Once he’s put his trunks and tank top away in their clothing duffel he prides himself on remembering to charge his mobile in his condition, and from there, he takes a seat on his typical side of any bed he shares with Remus, curling his left foot underneath his right knee while leaving his right foot set on the floor by the side of the bed as he pulls open his alarm app.

“What time do we need to be out of here by?” he raises, thumb hovering over his screen.

“Check-out's at eleven,” Remus offers, standing over on his typical side of any bed he shares with Sirius and stripping down to his briefs.

“Alright, then I’m setting one alarm for nine and another for ten for snoozing purposes,” Sirius relays, doing just that with the pad of his right thumb.

Remus accepts the information in kind and some amusement in there, too. “Might want to dial those back a half-hour so we can get the room in order,” he suggests, rolling up his trunks to stow them away in their clothing duffel.

Sirius snorts there, looking up and around said room and the very small signs that there are even people staying in it; the covers of the bed creased, the clothing-specific duffel over on the far side of the bed from him they’ve been picking out of periodically, and some of the toiletries sitting out on the bathroom sink. “How much time do you think we’re going to need?” he raises, huffing a laugh.

Remus gives him a twist of a smile as he peels his tank off. “How much snoozing do you think we’re going to need?” he counters.

Sirius sizes the standstill they’re at and goes for a perfect compromise. “Fine, one for nine, we'll cut the snoozing, and the one at ten can be for early morning smooching, and at ten-thirty, we’ll start getting the room in order,” he amends.

“Well, that I like,” Remus says of it, stooped down by the side of the bed as he works his shirt into the duffel before tossing a glance toward their beach bag over on the bureau. “Fuck, I forgot to grab our clothes.”

“Leave them for now, we’ll have a whole half-hour to fill,” Sirius smirks.

“Fine, I will,” Remus gives back, rubbing at his face with his hands while down by the bed still.

“You know, you should be proud of the way you’ve changed the way I handle luggage on a trip, I have to say,” Sirius mentions, sitting with his mobile open in his lap. “The last time I took a trip before Paris, it was to see Garbage in Brighton last summer and between James’s suitcase and mine, the room looked like a bomb went off.”

Hoo, that’s a stressor right there,” Remus comments, rising to his feet at the other side of the bed. “And I hope it was the band and not just a room filled with garbage that you went to Brighton to see.”

Sirius snickers from over on the bed. “It was definitely the former.”

“Tell my dad about that show,” Remus advises, heading around the end of the bed to cross over to the loo. “He’d pick both your ears about it.”

“Mmm, gladly will,” Sirius offers up. "We went to the show in London and then went and caught the one there because she's got superpowers."

"Oh, then he'll love it if you tell him about it because he thinks the same of her," Remus passes him, stopping at the sink to pick through their toiletry tote.

Sirius aims to join Remus in the loo, but he stays put where he is, staring at the time displayed on his screen, James back at the forefront of his mind. It’s later than he would have guessed, coming up on half-one, and this has Sirius feeling a sense of bravery that he likely wouldn’t have were it any earlier in the night. Chances are, if James and Lily’s impromptu but necessary evening together went as well as Sirius presumes it must've, then James has to have dropped off by now and tomorrow’s Sunday, that’ll mean a late start to the day for him.

He opens up his and James’s text thread, feeling inspired by Remus and his careful advice. There’s no other way to do it; telling him won’t be enough, James has to read it all the way through, the same way Sirius had to, or he won’t be able to see the reality of the stain that this has been on his life, won’t realize the gravity of it all.

It does seem impersonal, pointing James to it without much else. He could wait on this, sit with his new decision to hand the book over, wait until he’s back home and able to hand it over in person, but as soon as he thinks it, he can’t see how that would work in his favour either. James would no doubt ask when the knowledge of the notebook came to be and would definitely note of the time it took Sirius to come to him with it; he won’t like what that might suggest, certainly not after their too-recent tift, and Sirius is already walking a thin line in terms of best friend status, so the length of time Sirius took to tell him would take over the whole focus, and then it would no longer be about what Sirius lost, but who James already fears he’s losing more and more of every day, it seems.

Who cares about impersonal, anyway? The way Sirius found out wasn’t exactly personal, he didn’t get a face-to-face conversation, didn’t get a phone call, nothing. He’s only got a book of letters, and why should James be shielded from the weight of all this? The weight of it all is exactly what he needs in order to understand the entirety of the situation and he’s not going to do that unless Sirius bites the bullet and shows him it.

my room —> top drawer —> notebook —> letters

He leaves his mobile on his bedside table, pushes himself to stand, and heads for the bathroom as Remus is leaving it. The two of them have a short altercation in the doorway wherein Sirius hugs the living shit out of the man and Remus covers the entirety of the left side of his face in kisses, so all in all, he’s doing OK in spite of everything else.

Sirius gets started on his brushing while Remus hangs out in the doorway, leaning his left hip into the side of the doorframe. “Do you want to go out to the Blue Lagoon with me tomorrow?” he asks.

Sirius looks up and to the right at a complete lag, bending inward to spit out a hefty mouthful of paste. “What is that?” he whispers, enchanted.

“Well, it’s this lagoon nearby,” Remus offers, a twist at his lips.

“Great Scot,” Sirius returns fiercely.

“But it’s this gorgeous area,” Remus entices. “Sparkling blue-green water, mystical views, nature at its finest, the open sea at your fingertips, more ruins for you to squawk about—”

“I don’t squawk,” Sirius maintains.

“Fine, trill about,” Remus amends, smiling fondly at him from the doorway. “It's also got heights surrounding the lagoon itself that you can plunge into the water from—”

“Shut it,” Sirius cuts in, knowing full well that Remus knows full well that an anecdotal like that one would sell him on it immediately if the chance of more swimming wouldn’t already get him. “We have to go; nothing else for it.”

“OK, but,” Remus prefaces, “there are tiers to the heights you can jump from and people go out there to do some extreme diving, so I’m going to make it known right now that I don’t want you going up too high—”

“Oh, boo,” Sirius sends back, flipping Remus off with his free hand.

“No no, I'm talking high-high with some very deep water below, and I plainly refuse to lose you to the depths,” Remus cements, so maybe this is all very endearing for Sirius to hear, even if it means he’s been effectively short-leaded. “It’s been a few years since I’ve been there so my visual memory of the place is a little faint at the moment, but once we get there I will figure out the point I’m comfortable letting you jump from and that’s my only offer.”

Sirius reworks his mouth around a smile, nods his allowance of said offer, and turns the taps back on to finish up his brushing. By the time he’s putting his toothbrush away, however, Remus has left the doorway and Sirius heads out of the loo to scope out where he went to because as far as he was aware, they weren’t anywhere near done yet.

He finds Remus sitting at the head of the bed tucked underneath the bedsheet because even on a hot-ass night Remus still needs some cover. “Where’s this place?” he raises, climbing up the bed to join him.

Remus flips the sheet up to give Sirius a chance at getting underneath it with him. “It’s down the coast a little bit, nothing more than a ten-minute drive from here if I’m remembering it well enough,” he extends, letting the sheet fall over the both of them as Sirius snuggles in close, “but I was thinking we could leave here after check-out, grab some coffee, stop by the grocery on the way out of town, pick up some picnicky-themed supplies, and head over that way; jump off some approved cliffs, get some more swimming in since you looked like a happy little lad in that water today, have some food, and then we could hit the road back whenever we like.”

Sirius gives Remus a hearty squeeze before turning his head and leaving a smooch on Remus’s lips, utterly in love with that plan and feeling entirely looked after.

 

-

 

Sirius wakes all too suddenly to nothing other than Shania echoing out both inside of his head and around him. He moves jaggedly, reaching out to slap his hand over his mobile and silence the call before it’ll wake the dead, and more importantly, Remus. He sits up in bed once the tune stops, rubs fast at his eyes, and looks between his fingers apprehensively to gauge Remus’s state, but the lad merely grumbles and rolls over with not much else.

He reaches to give a fast swipe of his left hand over Remus’s back as he reaches for his phone again, taking it off of the table this time to pen a quick text requesting patience: give me two mins.

He’s only just sent it off when Shania rings out again, garnering Sirius to toggle things over to silent mode and answer with a forced whisper. “I said, give me two minutes,” he insists, pressing to end the call.

He tosses aside his side of the bedsheet, heaves himself out of bed, and gathers together his outfit for day two of their trip within a trip, the Henley and the good jeans because he’s a jerk, full stop; he wanted Remus to seethe about the decision, which he did definitely do two nights ago now when he collected them together, but come this morning, perhaps it’s even better that he chose it. He does want to be his most authentic self for a conversation like this and what outfit is more Sirius than this?

He considers his options for a place to go to for this one, thinking the loo isn’t the winning choice given its proximity to Remus’s slumber. Outside, somewhere on the property but a little ways away from the bustle of the inn, that sounds a lot better than shutting himself in the bathroom, but then, he thinks of the truck, a place where Sirius has been his most vulnerable since he set foot in it, and given that there aren’t a lot of other options for him just now, Sirius knicks the keys to the truck off of Remus’s bedside table and heads down the stairs toward the ground floor.

He gets as far as the parking lot before his mobile starts ringing again, only this time James chose to video call Sirius instead, and something about seeing himself on the screen and hearing the unspecified jingle that comes with a pending video call has him panicked, spooked beyond belief.

He unlocks the truck from a distance, clears that distance in no time at all, and climbs up into the driver’s seat, thinking he might do better sitting where Remus usually does. He sticks his mobile on the mount on the dash, frames himself within the shot, and breathes once, twice, and a third time before hitting ‘Accept.’

There’s a lot to take in at one go, which Sirius honestly has to feel thankful for when it gives him time to study the other details to the image that aren't James's face just yet. The backdrop to the shot appears to be a very specific side-view of Sirius’s room, given that he can see the section of deep rouge wall that stands between his closet and dresser drawer along with a section of his bed ahead of those fixtures to his room, and he thinks he can spot the tail belonging to a rotund, fluffy diva on his bed, but the rest of the cat disappears behind the line of James’s shoulders. The angle Sirius is watching his room from places James over at the desk on the far side of his double-room situation and it would seem that Sirius wasn’t the only one preoccupied with framing the shot before the call for it appears that James must've gathered a bunch of books from here or there around the flat to prop his mobile up against for Sirius doesn’t know whatever else he’d be using as a stand. Finally, after he knows he can’t really afford to keep avoiding James’s face in particular, the most striking details to that are the placid, high-browed stare that he’s got trained on him and the slow, intermittent roll of his jaw.

Now, Sirius’s plans were to act calm, collected; strong like a mountain through the wind and the rain, one might say, but never mind that for the moment. There’s no denying that he’s been completely disarmed by that last detail and there’s no saving face about it, the audacity is too much. “Are you,” he starts, his neck stretched as far as it’ll go to hopefully create an illusion of greater height, “smacking gum, right now?”

“Mhm, I am, yeah,” James affirms, his expression going unchanged. “Felt like I needed something to wash the taste of vom from my mouth after being recommended such a torrid novella.”

Strong as a mountain, cool as a cucumber; that’s Sirius, no mere side-swipe is going to send him into a frenzy, no way, no how. “So we agree it’s indeed a torrid read,” he offers. “That’s better than I expected, honestly.”

“Mm,” James offers him, but those eyes of his lower to a squint while the lower half of his face gets taken over by a polite grin to rival Sirius’s infamous one. “I didn’t know we’d started a book club, but since it’s right here, why don’t I go ahead and read a passage from it, hm? I’ve just the one in mind.”

Sirius looks left as James starts flipping pages jovially, sets his gaze on a spot over on the top right corner of the windshield, and debates his options. He could end the call, for the long term he could switch his mobile off completely for the remainder of their time in Wales to avoid increased incoming calls from London, and for the short term, commit to a lovely, lazy morning in bed before they’ll have to pack up and Lagoon it up, but there’s a fiendish glee to James that suggests he’d be just fine with taking the train right over to the Rhondda Valley just so he can complete his live-reading.

He looks back at James as he’s setting the notebook back down on his desk with a decided plop, knowing that avoiding looking at him won’t help any; he has to let his jaw attest to the fact that he is strong, collected, unbothered while he lets his stare say he can handle whatever James has coming for him.

James clears his throat like he’s beginning a speech. “‘If I’d thought walking into a music program after you was tough enough, walking into a university program after you is another thing entirely,’” he begins, using the voice he's always used for his distinct, too-perfectly pithy imitation of Reg’s voice, and every cell in Sirius’s body goes on high alert, his brain screaming ‘ABORT, ABORT’ while his voice comes out at a pitch that’s far too high for his typical register.

“I need you to not,” he asserts, trying to keep his jaw firm. “Not that one.”

“Acht, acht; it’s rude not to let your fellow club members read when it’s their turn,” James tuts, shaking his head alongside a finger-wag. “'It’s a bit of a double-edged sword, if you will. On the one hand, every professor in the building has the highest opinion of our father’— open parenthesis, ‘remember him?' closed parenthesis—”

“Yeah, no, I read that part, thanks,” Sirius snaps. “I very remember.”

“‘—And naturally are of the opinion I’ll do as well as he did in his field, but on the other, the students all know you, and to that, they know me because of you. I’ve heard quite a lot about you, it, the whole situation,'” James keeps right on, and with him doing it in that voice, it’s the harshest method he could have gone with for it's as if Reg is saying it all to him and Sirius supposes that must be his whole motive here; remind him exactly the sort of person he’s misguidedly missing. “Oh, but, don’t forget, right here, the author chose to put a little smiley face, which in some circles means genuine cheer, goodwill, joy, and it's the same here; this one got put there so that we, the readers, would understand that he loved penning each and every one of these words; ain’t that something?”

“I get it, James,” Sirius insists, but to hell with strength and pride, he’s not asserting dominance, he’s not even asserting; he’s pleading with the man. “I hated that one, too, but—”

“‘The walls have ears and eyes and such, but I have to say that while you gave me a very different story, the general opinion here is divided,’” James breezes on. “‘Some of them say you shacked up with him for the grades you got — I’ve already been asked if I too am planning on doing any extracurriculars on the side to help me along with the rest of them and that was just lovely — while others say you merely did it so you could wander into class half an hour late with coffee in hand and your sunglasses still on and prop your feet up in back of the class without fear of getting disciplined for it—

“Alright, what if,” Sirius puts up tightly, “we didn’t do this; what if we just didn’t—”

“Oh, no, I think we’re going to have to ‘cause we’re just getting to the good stuff,” James puts up intently. “The tea spillage, if you will; he wanted to play gossip queen so badly and we’re just going to take that from him?”

“James, I’m going to find a way to come through that screen,” Sirius attests, slapping his hands over the wheel and parts of the top of the dashboard, and he shouldn't be treating Lyall’s truck like this, but he has to wonder, would Lyall understand if he knew why he’s banging his hands all over it; why he so needs this to stop? He thinks he might just get it, might just get him.

James looks up at him with the audacity to be offended by all of the noise and Sirius braces the steering wheel, feeling as though he ran a marathon without the training beforehand, and he doesn’t bother doing anything to wipe any of his tears off so James can see exactly what he has done. “I gave out smoke signals for you to quit while you were ahead,” he hounds him, egregiously pissed off. “Why couldn’t you have listened to me right away?”

“You tricked me into reading the full, unedited ‘Diary of Regulus Black’ so that I’d get to the last page and forget all that came before it,” James accuses, ready for a fight, it very appears.

“‘Tricked you,’ what are we, twelve?” Sirius returns at once.

“Well, apparently we aren’t adults anymore,” James bites back. “Ever heard of the telephone, Sirius?”

“Alright, fine, sue me for wanting you to read it first so you could see the entire picture before making any snap judgements,” Sirius claps back. “And that didn’t give you the right to—”

“It was never going to work, pal,” James steamrolls in, shaking the notebook at the screen. “This is certified trash and no amount of coercion from you was going to change that, but A for effort there, really.”

“Well, first of all, it’s not trash, and second, it’s barely a diary,” Sirius objects, needing the distinction to be made, if not for himself but for a man who isn’t here to make the distinction himself. “They’re letters written to and for me, so at least get that distinction right—”

Sirius trails right off, rendered incredibly still in his seat as he watches James’s brows rise, setting high above the frames of his specs and suggesting without any words necessary that Sirius’s own very sentiment was exactly what James was getting at. He breathes in a slow, nearly motionless inhale, adopting a look of warning as James continues with his chosen silence and watching him turn the notebook toward the screen and hold it up with his right hand, eyes set wide and intent on Sirius’s damp visage. Sirius’s warning goes steadily ignored, James brings his right hand up to hover it just beside the page he must have just read from, openly watches Sirius watch him warningly, and squares right up.

He will have to tell Remus he was right about this one, but first, he’s going to have to admit this is the shittiest way to end up being right about something. He gives into a full-bodied wince before it happens, but once the moment has come and gone, he finds the offending page has been ripped clear out of the book with such a ferocious movement from James, it’s honestly ridiculous that the page even came off in one pull; it should have taken at least two, maybe even three tries to detach the sheet completely, but apparently even paper is out to prove a point against Sirius’s case.

“These letters? Trash,” James accentuates, making a show of crumpling the page into a ball in his right hand and chucking the crinkled wad of paper over his shoulder to send it off and away, much like he’d have done to Reg himself if he were still around to be sent off and away, and, worse than that, like Sirius would have done in the not-so-distant past because James would have sent him off and away. “The man who penned them? Trash.

It would be one thing if James stopped at the one, but fuck him, he doesn’t; he is in firm agreement with that torn-out sheet of paper that he deserves to be delivered a point so bold and brass that Sirius can’t forget it. James brings his right hand back to rip the page ahead of the missing one from the book next, crumpling that one and sending it off to join the first, attacks the page before that one, the page ahead of that one, too, working his way back through the worst of the letters.

Sirius well and truly erupts, kicking his feet and pounding his fists on the wheel as James gets to the front cover, beyond worried that he’ll double back and attack the later letters since he’s out of any to grab up front, and that, Sirius can’t have — he’ll lay over the coals before he loses that drawing to James’s man hands.

“Not the drawing, not the drawing,” he pleads, his voice coming out high-pitched and all wrong. “Leave the drawing, please—”

What drawing?” James barks, but his offending hand is frozen in place, so that’s something, if small.

Sirius presses his lips together fast, miming for James to flip, flip, flip, just keep on flipping, and James does flip until the drawing in question, leaving the notebook open on his lap and Sirius to study him studying the portrait of Sirius on the page below for quite some time. Not long in the grand scheme; ten to fifteen seconds in real-time, but that’s a long time to study a portrait as haunting as that one, and Sirius can only hope that the haunted feeling that comes with starting at it is coming up on James, too.

“Alright, well, good; all’s forgiven, then,” James puts up lively, slicing all the way into the silence. “Peachy-keen, even; obviously if he had some spare HB pencils hanging around and remembered the face of the guy he stalked for years, then he’s absolved of every nasty word he wrote down in this thing, right? That’s how this works.”

Sirius opens his mouth to object, but in all fairness, he shouted himself hoarse back there; he’s going to need a moment even if he so wants to argue such a comment. James’s faux-exuberance doesn’t last for long, all he needs is one, simple look over at Sirius before plain disappointment is wafting off of him. He breathes out, fatigued in his movements as he plants the open notebook face-down on his lap, and levels Sirius with another stare, but this one’s a lot more personable. It isn’t the easiest of expressions to read, Sirius has to admit; not in that he can’t read it, no no, he can read the blend of anger, pity, and disinterest lining his features quite clearly and that’s the part that wasn’t easy.

“I didn’t say he was absolved,” Sirius offers, and while it’s the truth, it’s still not his best counterpoint in terms of volume at least. “I said to save the drawing.”

James sneers nearly beyond recognition. “Why you’d want a drawing done by that piece of shit is beyond me.”

“Because the piece of shit who wrote that entry wasn’t the same guy who drew that,” Sirius snaps, flying his hands around himself. “I wanted you to read the human behind the pen; that’s why I needed you to read the whole thing, so that you wouldn’t hold any one entry up and respond to it out of context, so you could see that the man worked at himself for years before deciding it was no use, but fuck me for thinking that’d work.”

“Mmmm, bullshit,” James calls it. “Pretty sure it was all the same fucking guy, and fuck your context while we’re at it; you wanted to manipulate me into reading the whole thing so that I’d wind up feeling too guilty to call him out for being the selfish, degrading prick he always was.”

Sirius lifts his hands listlessly. “Alright, and?” he raises, heaving a shrug for emphasis. “So I did that, now what? It didn’t work, you still honed in on the one entry you knew would have been devastating for me to read, and you’d be right about that; it shot a hole through my chest, literally had to take a break just to coexist with the pain it brought me, but an important factor to remember here is that when he sat down and wrote that, he was the most upset with me than he’d ever been up until that point.”

James starts flailing his arms around like Sirius detonated a bomb from all the way over in Porthgain, but since he’s still holding onto the notebook that thing is also being wrenched around in the grip of his left hand, and this whole display would be hilarious if Sirius didn’t know he’s about to get fire breathed at him.

“No — no, Sirius; he didn’t only call you sick as you went out the door with a broken rib and a literal beg for him to leave with you,” James pounces. “He blamed you for that entire disaster blowing up all over you and then you turn around after reading the rest of these little letters and excuse him for it by saying he was upset?

“Well, you just read that one out to me while I was in actual pain over it so I’m to absolve you for doing that, but not him writing that years ago?” Sirius puts up, blocking the fire out. “Point is, people say and do and write shitty fucking things when they’re upset; yeah, he blamed me for it, but what else was he going to do? He didn’t know how to blame them yet, didn’t know to blame him over me, and if you want to have a go at anybody, then Jack should be the one you’re after, he should have been able to stave off any advance I gave him and he didn’t, he was the problem within that equation, not my teenage brother who didn’t know anything about anything, and furthermore, I don’t need you pissing and moaning about this on my behalf; I’ve made peace with myself for falling into that mess and with the bloke who wrote that letter, I didn’t need to revisit it with you.”

James looks as if he lost the ability to see with all that blinking he’s doing at him. “You made a complete three-sixty over a fucking drawing, Sirius,” he retorts. “It's changed your brain chemicals at that, apparently.”

“You know what, my brain chemicals were doomed either way,” Sirius shoots back. “Reg was an idiot and a pissed-off one at that, and those two things together can pack a fucking punch, but I have said some ignorant, gnarly, and dangerous shit to the people I love when I’ve been upset with them and theoretically you are still here, giving me chance after chance after chance without expecting any better of me, and yet, somehow, you cannot fathom giving even one chance to Reg, even if it’s posthumously.

“Yeah, and?” James puts up. “This is apples and oranges.”

“It’s not, though,” Sirius maintains, breathing in long. “We were a lot alike, me and him. That book spans four whole years and you can spot the trajectory of his growth from one side of the book to the next; do you remember what I was like four years ago?”

“Doing your best,” James nods. “I very remember that.”

“Generous as usual,” Sirius calls it, calls him. “I was a mess, James; a petty, single-minded, angry fucking person—”

“And whose fault is that?” James snaps, lifting his hands like he needs an ally but there isn’t one in the room with him.

“Not Reg’s, that much I know,” Sirius puts it, keeping his jaw from quivering like he can feel it so wants to at James’s masterful scoff. “I don’t excuse him of all of it, I’m still struggling with the ways he’d block me out and run the other direction whenever I’d stick my hand out; those moments hang like shadows over me even more so now than they did last year and you know that’s saying something, but we were kids, James, and he never really got the chance to not be one, same as me, just in a different way entirely.”

The way James tosses the book aside is both off-putting and miraculously relieving; sure, he thinks the book is nothing but hot garbage that he doesn’t want to touch with his bare hands anymore, but hey, he let go of it and he hasn’t yet come up with a rebuttal, so that’s two positives. That said, James is now free to lean into the desk and fold his hands casually together like he’s the detective that’s been given the job of interrogating the initial suspect.

“How long have you had this?” he raises, going for the quizzical but innocuous approach, no doubt. “And sitting in your underwear drawer of all places.”

Sirius reworks his mouth around a smile, refusing to give James even a chuckle if it means he’ll think he’s got an edge on him. “I found it on Wednesday when I emptied the trunk out for Pete’s mum to take away,” he shares, showing his hands in a simple display. “And the underwear drawer was incidental, I just stuffed it in the first place I could think of and that was it.”

“Mm, must have been an intense afternoon, then,” James raises, putting his messy head of hair at a tilt, eyes unblinking behind his specs.

It’s weird to think that it’s taken until now for Sirius to realize those glasses are new — and they look bomb at that; he’d love to say so, any other time he’d barrel in to say as much, but how can he now? “It was devastating,” he affirms. “I was getting my bearings with it because I knew I’d be a basket case about it if I tried reaching out then.”

“Oh, no, I know exactly why you didn’t tell me,” James assures, giving him a quick 'OK' symbol with his right hand and a purse of his lips for it. “What I’m saying is, bit intense of a thing to have been in the chest that you just got delivered right to your door so, do we think this was the plan all along?”

Sirius tilts his head back and forth through mild guestimation, relieved to just not be speaking about the definite underlining hostility going between them. “Well, I agree it was intense, particularly with the timing of it, but I don’t know who to blame for it anymore,” he puts up earnestly. “I think it might be two separate things in one; Reg could've snagged the trunk out of my room before the inevitable purge of my things from the house, kept it in mint condition, and then he kept his journal in there to keep the contents of it private right along with the chest, but as far as me getting my hands on it? I don’t know that this was The Burg’s doing.”

“Wow,” James gives up, blinking curiously. “Have you gone soft on her, too, while I wasn’t looking?”

Sirius doesn’t bother hiding his frown; it hurt to hear, so he’ll show the hurt. Why not. “Not at all,” he answers candidly. “Only, I don’t think she knew it was in there; Reg is the one who missed me enough to keep a literal time capsule of me in that chest, I do think the appearance of the chest must've been a dig at me from hers truly but given her nasty disposition, if she’d read that notebook, I would’ve seen it a lot sooner than I did. I mean, she’d have had it delivered separately months ago if she were looking for someone to blame for losing the only kid she had left.”

James shuts his eyes tight, making a face like he just got dealt a horrific blow and is now choking back his sick. “‘Missed you?’” he quotes.

The breath Sirius goes for gets wrenched right back out of his lungs in record time. “Well, did you read through to the end or not, James?”

“I sure did, yeah,” James retorts.

“Then you know he missed me,” Sirius snaps, heat rising to every corner of his face. “He wrote me vivid, personal letters for years — full-on updates of the goings-on in his life — sure, the early ones were biting and crass and all for shock value that I’m sure were super cathartic for him to write down, but the later ones? He wasn’t actively coming for my neck anymore, he was actually rooting for me in his own, Reg way; he wanted me to get Alphard’s money, wanted me to lawyer up good so that I would get it, even respected my need to leave by the end of it, and that isn’t something I ever thought I’d get out of him, and whether you like it or not, he was finally starting to respect me in a way that he never did before so of course he fucking missed me and, frankly, I don’t enjoy the fact that you made me defend that myself.”

James pushes a long breath out through his nose, putting his right hand up through his hair and making it that much messier than it’s already looking, but it is bright and early thanks to him. “Yeah, you know what, you’re right,” he offers, but Sirius doesn’t relax his shoulders when he knows there’s a part two coming, “I bet he did miss his human shield.”

“I’m not having this,” Sirius snaps, and not just in tone; he uses his right hand to snap at the screen for some accord. “Show some fucking respect.”

“Oh, respect?” James raises, enunciated and loaded.

“That’s the word, yeah,” Sirius throws back. “Should give it a go; you managed well enough in November, but somehow you’re all out of it now.”

“I’m to show him the respect he showed you?” James checks, his head hanging at a tilt.

“James,” Sirius warns.

“No no, I need teaching,” James assures, sitting up brightly. “Tell me, though; is respect something like looking the other way when you’re getting the shit kicked out of you, is it writing a whole burn book in your honour, or is it blaming you for every single thing that went wrong in his life? Perhaps I really am just that foggy on the meaning of the word, but thank Cunt I have you around to help put a definition to the harder words.”

James,” Sirius barks.

“What?” James barks back. “You never had a problem calling it like it was before, only now I wonder what changes exactly, but you know me, I don’t know basic English, so back to the definition of respect for a moment; which one of the three is it exactly or does it all equal out to respect according to you?”

“I knew you’d do this,” Sirius shoots out, pounding the heels of his palms on the steering wheel. “The man’s dead and you can’t even summon the courage to at least respect me.”

“I am respecting you,” James tosses back. “All I’ve done since we met is respect you; you’re the one who suddenly can’t handle the fact that my respect for you trumps my respect for a dead prick, but newsflash, Sirius, being dead doesn’t change what the dead did.”

“He was my brother,” Sirius carves out of his throat.

James’s eyes light up fast, his retort coming through in such a bombastic burst that Sirius backs up in his seat. “I’m your brother,” he cements, veritably slamming his fist down on Sirius’s desk like a gavel. “He shared your name.”

No — this is it; Sirius now knows what it’s like to be shot, forget and fuck all the other times he was sure he knew. “I know you are,” he manages.

“I don’t think you do; not like I thought,” James returns, his voice breaking there. “You set me up and you call him your brother to me — are you finished showing me exactly how you actually feel toward me or do you have a few more blows to hand out?”

Sirius breathes in fast, suddenly so epically pissed at himself for not waiting until they could be in the same room for this, for saying that to James Potter, brother extraordinaire. “I know you were far better to me than he was,” he lays down, stone by stone. “There’s no question about it; I love you like my own, but I’m still allowed to mourn a man who was supposed to be a brother to me, that I never really got the chance to know properly.”

The amendment he makes feels right to do in the moment, but it’s apparently the last sentiment James is willing to hear. “I don’t care what he put in the letters, Sirius,” he returns forcefully. “It’s a whole lot of too little, too late, and now that he’s gotten to you one last time, he’s gone in hook, line, and sinker for you and of course it was going to work, you’re you; you’ll lament that his time was cut short, you’ll build him a soapbox to stand on, and you’ll run yourself over rather than catch even one of his limbs under the wheel, but you will not make me go along with it while you make him out to be a fucking wasted hero and that is respecting you.”

Sirius drags his hands up through his hair, his heart rate picking up so fast he can hear his blood pumping in his ears. “He was trying, James,” he stresses. “They messed him up royally, there’s no denying that at this point for me, but he was actually starting to see that, too, and he was trying to do the right thing in the end.”

James looks around, bamboozled by that sentiment but no less frank about his disagreement with it. “Penning a bunch of letters he never sent your way?” he raises, honing in on the worst details, every time. “I mean, points for some basic effort, I guess, but actually sending them off would have done a lot more for you and him, but as per usual he was too cowardly to admit he fucked up grand with you.”

“He didn’t think I’d answer him,” Sirius stresses.

“Bullshit, he didn’t,” James claps back. “With the number of times you tried with him, he knew he had you at his beck and call; he knew that all he had to do was reach out and you’d have ridden over on a white steed just to get him out of there—”

“He didn’t know that,” Sirius shouts for a repeat since James clearly needs it repeated. “And frankly, I didn’t know that, not at the time — not for a long time; I was convinced he was out of tries, and reading those last few letters, I could tell he was convinced of that, too. You’re right, it is too late, and I fucking agree the letters would have been a lot more useful to me a year ago if he’d have just sent one of them to me and I could have done something for him; believe me, I am royally angry with him for doing this to me and taking any chance of fixing this away from us and making me have to deal with what they did to us alone, but he didn’t see it like that and that’s what you’re not seeing. He saw how hard he made it for me, he saw how much he helped fuck us up, he saw himself as a carbon copy of our father and thought he was doing everyone a favour by checking out early, including me, so if you don’t want to mourn him, fine, that’s you, but at the very least, you will let me be a fucking human and mourn what I just lost, all over again.

“You’ve nothing to mourn,” James slashes him. “You know you don’t; he’s not mournable.”

Sirius huffs long and loud, reaching out toward the screen and miming like he’s strangling James, who only mirrors the same act back on Sirius, and this is actually too funny not to have Sirius pausing at once to cover his mouth, obscuring the view of his smile whereas James doesn’t even bother hiding his. “I knew you were in there somewhere,” he gives up wryly.

“Don’t get too comfortable, I am not happy with you,” Sirius sets down, but there, his nine o’clock alarm blares in the background of the call screen, huffing when he’s not happy with the alert’s interruption nor the fact that if he doesn’t get out of the call window and turn the alarm off, it’s just going to go off every nine minutes from there onward. “Give me a fucking second.”

“Alright?” James puts up.

“Not about you this time,” Sirius retorts, toggling the alarm off permanently and deciding he won’t do that for the one set for half-ten. He pulls the call window back up and sighs long, bringing a hand up through his hair as he figures out where he left off. “I don’t know what else I’m to do with this, I don’t know what the answer is other than to try and understand that Reg and I both said and did awful things to each other when we were barely adults, but by all means, you give me the answers since you know so much about me; I’d love to know what you would plan on doing if you had the brain I’ve got.”

James trumpets out a laugh, a bit of a difference compared to his previous silence. “What, did I become a guru all of a sudden? I don’t know what the answer is either, but whatever it is, it sure isn’t where you’ve landed because I know you and I know how much you already blamed yourself, and I can see it all over you and it’s way worse than it was,” he returns. “It’s alive on the call with us, the blame you’ve thrown on yourself; I can practically feel it in the room with me right now and I can barely stomach it."

“Believe it or not?” Sirius snaps, both in tone and with his right hand toward the screen. “I very tried to blame it all on me at first, but I’ve been working like you also wouldn’t believe on that; this has been the hardest week of my life and I have run whole circles around where you’ve landed your stubborn arse at least ten times over already so you can’t blame me for striving to find some peace with him now that self-blame isn’t fucking cutting it anymore. Just because I happen to have one angsty fucking backstory doesn’t mean he didn’t have one either — and before you go saying anything, it doesn’t matter that they never laid a finger on him, it doesn’t because he was abused, too, and that’s what you’ve never considered.”

James gives a powerfully flat laugh. “I’ve considered it greatly, believe it or not,” he lodges, his own voice pitched a lot higher than typical, so maybe the contents of that notebook cut him a lot deeper than he’s been letting on. “I have, but you just can’t compare the two, Sirius, not to me: from what I was there to see, and I was there for a lot if you still remember, one kid got worshipped and the other got the beatings, and I’m not saying that he deserved his share of them, I’m not saying if it'd been more evenly spread out I’d have been more OK with it, but him taking this tragic end for himself, after being the guy that coasted along untouched by the brunt of the abuse, does not sit well with me.”

Sirius’s only rebuttal comes shot-putting out of his chest. “Well, why did it even have to be one of us?” he demands. “Why couldn’t we have both made it out of there alive?”

“You’re asking me?” James returns, and not unkindly either; Sirius is beating him down and it’s showing. “I’ve asked why you two had to grow up in that hellhole a thousand times over and I’ve never been given the answer, but as far as I’m concerned, it could easily have been you who went out the way he did and forgive the fuck out of me if my empathy has run out; I don’t have any more to give because it’s always been reserved for you.”

Sirius’s eyes sting royally as he relocates his voice. “No, it couldn’t have,” he objects.

What?” James snaps, scrunching his face up immensely.

“It couldn’t have been me,” Sirius reiterates, shaking his head fast through a stifled sob.

“No?” James raises, putting his head on a tilt, his boring into Sirius’s. “There were days you didn’t want any of it anymore, days you were fed the fuck up, nights where you sounded a lot like he did toward the end, and you can’t blame me for being shaken over the fact that I could have easily woken up without you any one of those next mornings, that I still fucking could if I don’t make sure you’re happier here than elsewhere.”

Sirius swallows fast, buying himself time to find the nerve to speak on that. “I am happier here,” he says firmly; he may very well be in the middle of a crisis of self, but that much he knows is true. "I haven’t thought like that in years and you’re isolating very specific times when I was at my lowest, but even in those moments, I knew I wanted out of there, not here — not this.

He not-so-eloquently traverses his hands around the vicinity of himself, a gesture to the breathable air around him and the world both in and beyond the truck he’s taken shelter in, but James, unsurprisingly, gets it right down to the root. “Good,” he spits out, getting all verklempt over there, which really doesn’t help when Sirius is trying so hard not to get all verklempt himself, but there goes that. “I wouldn’t have let you get away with it either; I’d have reached into the cusp of the beyond and dragged you back here myself just to slap some sense into you, and I still would.”

“I know you would,” Sirius awards him, and he doesn’t know exactly where or when the tears started back up, but he wonders if they ever really stopped at any point when his face hasn’t felt dry in quite some time. “I knew it back then, too, so I mean it when I say I don’t take your proximity to me in all of this lightly, but don’t you see why, maybe, just maybe, you could find it within yourself to let Reg have even a little of the grace you’ve giving me here?”

“No?” James offers, and this refusal isn’t nearly as vehement as the last few have been; this one’s small, barely a whisper. “No, Sirius.”

Sirius breathes in long, holding it together by a measly thread, and as if emulating Sirius’s lungs, James goes gives out the sordid exhale for him. “Maybe he wasn’t completely devoid of human decency, I think we have some proof that he was capable of some reflection and humility right here,” James puts it, ruffling the pages of the notebook lying picked apart on the desk, “but he wasn’t some veritable saint or innocent angel either; he wound up carbon copies of the two of them, only realised the scope of what he’d done after he thought it was too late, and checked out instead of owning up, so just because you’ve finished clinging to one side of the spectrum doesn’t mean it’ll be any healthier for you if you start clinging to the other side of it.”

It’s a very weird sensation, being utterly impressed by some much-welcome nuance coming from James and equally sick from the final touch to his point. “Hating him hasn’t been healthy for me,” he tries. “I was in hate with him for so long, I don’t know if I ever loved him the way I should have, and I don't know how to flip it around and love him now just to pretend he was anything more to me than he was, but I have to find some balance here because he was tormented by them, too; is it any wonder that he acted out, just like I did, only that he acted out on me?”

“Sirius,” James gives, his expression is testy for certain, but his voice is hardly there.

"I was everything he got terrorized into fearing and unfortunately, he thought I was too brilliant to go down the wrong path and I’m going to have to forgive him for that somehow and I don’t know when I’m going to be able to, but I don’t want to hate him anymore,” Sirius upheaves. “My anger shouldn’t be at him or you or myself, it should be spent on them; they set us up so we couldn’t trust each other, set us up to fail each other left and right, and giving the man his dues is fair even if, to you, it feels like I’m undercutting myself just to do it.”

“Oh, but you are undercutting yourself,” James assures, his voice still barely coming through.

“I’m giving Reg some space to have been right about a few things,” Sirius stresses. “I’m not saying it’s been easy, I don’t have a lot of great, brotherly memories with him and the ones that I do have leave a sour taste in my mouth because they either never lasted long or they came with three bad ones to overcompensate for the one good moment we happened to have; sometimes I land on a good memory and immediately feel defensive of myself inside it even though I know this was bigger than me or him or the two of us combined even, but the truth is, I was awful to him, too, and it isn’t undercutting myself to say it out loud.”

When it’s clear to James that Sirius is finished speaking, he gives a glance around the vicinity of the area he sat himself in and ultimately huffs out a listless sigh. “I don’t know what you want me to say to this, Sirius."

“Don’t say anything,” Sirius returns. “Maybe just listen to me tell you where I’m at with this; I don’t have that many good memories with him and I’m not going to get another shot at making more so you have got to give me a break here, I don’t know when I’m going to be OK with the kind of loss that this is because right now, I am fucking devastated over it.”

“Yeah, I can tell,” James allows, deliberately disobeying Sirius’s no-talk rule, “but my job here, first and foremost, has always been to look out for you and that’s never not going to be my job.”

“Fuck your job for even five seconds?” Sirius sounds out. “I’m grappling with the weight of having hated the guy until his last breath and beyond, and you still hate the ground he walked on; do you not see how hard that is for me?”

“Are those things not allowed to coexist at the same time?” James raises, giving him a plain face.

“Not if you’re so determined to gas me up like you do,” Sirius maintains.

“'Gas — you — up?'” James quotes him, like he’s been given an enchanting phrase he wants a little more basis for.

“It isn’t healthy for me to keep thinking I was the only one living in hell,” Sirius reiterates, lifting his hands deftly, his chest tight, his throat the width straw from actually saying it to him. “As much as I appreciate that your support is genuinely unwavering, the fact is, you shouldn’t have to hate him so much in order to pull for me; you can and have admitted he never had a chance to come back fully, that we were made to compete against each other, that we were made to find each other untrustworthy rather than them and it worked far too well, so why can't—”

“Then stay blaming your sick, sad excuse for parents for that, then; I don't fucking care,” James puts up, flying his hands out every which way. “I blame them, too, so you go right ahead and do just that, but you are not going to blame me for any of this and you’re definitely going to give up the idea that I have to give Reg absolution for something he never asked me for, and he should have grovelled for it from me and that’s something you've never thought of.”

Excuse?” Sirius snaps, and it wasn’t eloquent by any means, but it got the job done.

“You heard me,” James gives back. “I don’t think you understand how badly he should have apologized to me for making me have to see you tossed around like that; I was a kid, too.”

Sirius stamps both his feet on the floor of the truck, a great thunk echoing out around him and hopefully around James, too. “He didn’t—”

“Don’t even finish,” James disavows, and the bitch is back, apparently. “He was what took you from living in a shit environment to living in a dungeon and you can refer to him as a kid all you want, but that kid weaponized everything he learned about you, outed you, and made it so that it was risky every time you went home for the day, and he doesn’t just get to rewrite all of that just because he wrote some cute prose in some letters to you, and on top of not seeing that he should have apologized to me, I find it so interesting that he never once wrote the words ‘I am sorry for making your home a horrible place to come back to’ but I guess I was just supposed to read between lines for apologies like you did, right?”

“You know what, I didn’t know the meaning of the words ‘I’m sorry,’ until very recently,” Sirius highlights. “And even then, the amount of growth I’ve actually gone through the past year alone is ten times more than I ever managed in the four before that, and that’s because I met someone who actively pulls that growth out of me. You? You’ve stifled my growth by being unflinchingly loyal to me and that’s just the truth.”

“Ohhhhh, ho,” James veritably trumpets at him. “So, this is why you were utterly obsessed with my relationship to your growth the other day; you really should have said so at the time, Sirius, would have saved us time.”

“Actually, I remember having a very small window of time to get to Tom before he’d fly off with Remus’s number, thanks, and good job, Watson; you figured me out,” Sirius returns him. “I was right to knock you for encouraging me to act out like you always do and I’m right to say that you’re holding me back now; if I keep only listening to you, if I keep letting you keep me from growing, then I’m always going to wind up ten steps behind where I ought to be for the rest of my life.”

“There are worse things out there than having somebody in your court no matter what; suck it up, grow up, and find somebody else to entertain your version of Reg with you because it’s not going to be me,” James slashes back. "You’ve clearly been angry with me about that since you closed that book and maybe for a lot longer than I or even you know, and that’s fine; if you want to call everything I’ve said and done and given for you ‘gassing you up’ then that’s fine, you’re going to be grateful for all the gassing I gave you whenever you finally pull yourself out of this state."

“Well, what am I supposed to fucking do, genius?” Sirius erupts, hating how tight and cagey and rattled he feels, how tight and cagey and rattled he sounds. “I’m backed into a corner here; I’m trying to fight my way out of it, but I can’t do it with you if you’re going to be this determined to loathe him like this, I just can’t.”

James breathes in through his nose, his eyes lidded through fatigue. “That’s what I’m trying to say, too, Sirius,” he puts it. “You can’t use me for this one.”

“‘Use you?’” Sirius barks.

“Oh my Cunt, lean on me, get support from me; whatever you want to call it,” James amends it, giving a substantial eye roll for having to do the clarifiying. “You are going to have to find someone else for this, so at least you know it, too.”

Sirius laughs, but nothing’s funny about this; yeah, he knew it, but does it hurt any less hearing it said back to him? Absolutely not, it's devastation. “So, uhm — what, then? What’s the plan?” he raises, sniffing against the sting welling in his sinuses. “Are we just going to be surface from now on?”

James gives a hum for a decline, then appears to search for a more correct way to put it. “Reg-less is what I’ll settle for."

“That’s it?” Sirius probes. “It’s Reg or you?”

James breathes in once through his nose, shaking his head. “I didn’t say you couldn’t have both,” he puts it, lifting his hands to thwart the gape Sirius gives him for it. “I’m saying, keep him away from me; if you want complete and utter nuance, you go get it, Sirius, there are other avenues for that, but I can’t be where you find it, I’m your gasser, remember?”

Sirius hears the light probe within that last insertion loud and clear despite James’s newly diplomatic demeanour. “You are being so literal,” he lodges, awash with frustration, pain, and that little ole’ thing called rejection.

“This isn’t a breakup, Sirius,” James says of it, reading him like a book — and much better than he read Reg’s, that's for sure. “I love you, you love me, it’s written in the stars, and it’s synergy, but this is the exact point where we can’t possibly find a pathway to agreement and honestly, we agree on plenty enough as is so asking any more or differently of either of us wouldn’t be fair, so this is where we’re going to have to draw the line.”

“Feels a lot like I’ve been dumped, actually,” Sirius makes known.

“Nah, you’re still the bestie,” James gives up, waving that read off. “This is just my limit and if Reg has suddenly turned into yours, then there’s only so much I can do for you.”

Sirius can’t help but reel, he’s so overtaken. “It’s not all of a sudden, and you know that,” he reminds him.

James’s face takes on an expression of extreme scepticism that Sirius can fully hear. “No,” he says outright. “This time it feels different.”

“How’s it different?” Sirius snaps, waving his own hands around for a try; James sure looked like he got some catharsis out of it, but then of course James’s face positively shines his reply without needing those vocal cords of his. “Besides the fucking obvious, James; I don’t know how you haven’t figured it out yet, but it’s like I lost him twice, the only difference between this time and the last is the way you’re behaving about it.”

James makes a whole new face there and, Cunt forbid, Sirius can’t read it. “You want to try speaking, maybe?” Sirius goads. “Where was Tough-Love James then, hm?”

Now, that certainly gets James emoting in a way that Sirius can read, but perhaps that’s got more to do with how polite his expression becomes. “Well, between keeping you afloat by any means necessary and you turning around and deciding you just needed to face him one last time and pay respects that I didn’t believe he deserved, you could maybe find it within yourself to remember that Tough-Love James didn’t exactly get a front-row seat in the opinion department; you wouldn’t hear it,” he shoots him. “Believe me, he was there the whole time but he still showed up for you, and funnily enough, you weren’t acting like a perfect specimen of a mourning soul back in that church either, so you can go ahead and change your tune now, call me crass, call me heartless, call me offensive all you want, but I helped carry you out of that church, just like I carried you through the whole of it all since we met.”

Sirius sits still with his mouth hanging open like a no-good fish, but he feels like one, so it's a fair score. “What the fuck are you saying to me?” he manages.

“Even against my own judgement, I’m your gasser, but I’m not Reg’s,” James underlines. “You’re not going to like where I’m going with this, but here’s where I would go and get myself a therapist if I were in your shoes.”

Sirius doesn’t love that James a-ha's him a mere moment after his revulsion hits. “I knew that was coming, but here’s the thing,” he tacks on, hands up, ready to block out any fits of frustration from Sirius's side of the screen, “if nuance is really what you want here, then I have some good news for you, baby; you — yes, you — can order your very own nuance from a trained professional who's already studied the complexity that is the human psyche—”

“No, no, no, no,” Sirius denies, shaking his head roughly on the last one. “No one’s getting anywhere near this psyche, I’ll tell you that.”

“I think somebody's going to have to, Sirius,” James chimes.

Sirius takes in a fiery breath before making sure to shoot it out, hoping that’ll redirect the steam he feels inside him. “I’m not about to walk into some overpaid stranger’s office and start from the top, and I would need to do that in order for any of this to make a lick of sense to some shrink,” he enunciates.

“Mhm, well, good thing you’ve loads of time left, right,” James raises, lifting his hands both exemplary and rhetorically; lovely pairing.

Sirius gives him a hearty tch in return. “It would take years to unpack and articulate any of that properly,” he maintains. “And even then, I would have to make sure I got everything that happened just right, in the exact right order, otherwise I’d be told I was the selfish prick for getting out of there when I did and I don’t need a professional telling me something I’m struggling so hard with—”

James sends a powerful pfft at the screen. “Sirius, if a professional heard all that you were put through and still came out of it saying it you were the selfish prick in all of that, then you'd have every right in the world to get the fuck out of that office and find a better one,” he returns, fired up and unmovable. “And give me the fucking number of the office while you’re at it; I’ll knock some frames off the walls, if you know what I mean.”

Sirius knows exactly what he means, but alas, as unmovable as James certainly is on this one, Sirius can’t fathom following him over to that place; the concept of picking through all the twists and turns and details of his abuse feels the more unappealing than joining Reg wherever he went and that’s saying something. He feels his spine light up with cold, cold fear just thinking about it.

“They’re just people, James,” he stresses. “The title doesn’t change that — if anything, the title makes it all the more worse.”

“Why would that make it worse?” James raises, trying out his own impression of a therapist apparently, which isn’t even slightly funny when he should know why.

“Hmm, well, in the same way that, some people should just never teach but still wind up at the front of a class, and, some of the time, in hotel beds with their students,” Sirius ponders, stroking his chin with his right hand for some emphasis, “some people should just never enter into the field of human psychology because they’ve got their own objectives, and with my luck? James.”

It could be the sentiment, the usage of his name, or both, but a flash of cold, cold dread appears to flash over James’s face, so there’s that at least. “Sirius, the odds of that happening again are—”

“I’m not saying my would-be therapist is going to try and fuck me,” Sirius retorts, pausing there to take a good, long moment to breathe before trying again. “I’m saying they’re just people; we’re all fucked up, we’re all biased as shit, and I can guarantee that with my luck, I’m going to wind up going to one that can smile real nice, act all inviting and polite while still believing that I’m inherently sick and not just because my brain's in shambles, but because I came out the way I did and they’ll add gay to the list of things that are wrong with me.”

James moves to speak, keeps his mouth held open for a few more seconds than Sirius saw coming, and in the end takes a fast breath and appears to stay with whatever he was planning to combat that take with. “There are therapists out there who specialize in exactly the kind of thing you went through, Sirius,” he sets down. “Plenty of them gay-friendly and everything, and there will be no harm in doing research first to be sure you’d be getting the sort of therapist who isn’t a fucking bigot, and you know what, I’ll even do an intense screening of whoever they are if that helps.”

It does help — insurmountably it does, but it’s not enough; plain and simple. “OK, say I did find a good one and I go in there and just talk, talk, talk; talk a little more,” Sirius raises, framing the next ache pooling in the pit of his stomach, “say they don’t tell me that what happened to Reg was a direct result of my actions or lack thereof, they don’t tell me that I chose one lifestyle and my parents simply chose another, but in the end, all they’ve got to say to me is ‘welp, you’ve definitely got PTSD’ like I don’t fucking know that already?”

James gives up a hefty pfft. “Listen, we both already know that so, yeah, they wouldn’t be telling you anything new there, but that’s not the point, is it,” he puts up. “It’s a service; provides closure to some, a diagnosis for others, and someone to just fucking talk to at the very, very least.”

Sirius snorts soundly. “And an expensive road to any one of those things.”

“Not that you’ve much to worry about on that front, moneybags, but I’ll foot the therapy bill if that’s what gets you in the door,” James tosses up, evidently considering that idea the furthest from his concerns. “In the end, it’s just a service that’s out there, that’s all it is, and it doesn’t have to be a means to some perfect end; you want to be heard, but you also want Reg to be heard and this is a way you can both be.”

Sirius squints firmly, sizing James right up. “You’ve thought about this before, haven’t you?” he digs.

“Mm, yeah, quite a bit actually, but I won’t say who I first got the idea from,” James slips him.

“Well, then I already know who,” Sirius gives back pithily.

“She’s looking out for you whether you like it or not,” James maintains. “She’s always thought you’d do well with at least some form of counselling, I’m the one who needed time to get used to the picture of you laying across the leather couch and spilling your every trauma, but I’m sure as hell on board with it now; look at you, you’ve been crying in a truck.”

Sirius gives out a noise that’s essentially a pfft, a scoff, and a righteous laugh. “I’ve done it in stranger places than this, thanks,” he chimes back, but it’s not the prettiest his voice has sounded, he'll admit. “And get rid of that image ‘cause I’m not going anywhere near whatever couch you’ve dreamed up for me.”

James gives a long, almost painful-looking roll of his eyes, but he comes out of it smiling plainly at Sirius and it’s been a while since he’s smiled at him at all. “Alright, look, I didn’t think you were just gonna hop onto the idea right out the gate,” he raises, lifting his hands to attest to it. “C’mon now, that’s not you, but at least it’s out there in the open and you know it’s an option, but we can and will be revisiting it at some point.”

“I don’t know if I like this form of suspense,” Sirius replies, letting his face suggest all the distaste he feels for it from there.

“Well, hold on now, I didn’t say I was out of ideas for the meantime; who do you think I am?” James raises, in a much better mood overall than he was. “Maybe this is the time to step back and think about who you’re going to lean on; now, it’d be on to remember that none of your mates are trained professionals, but they do love you dearly and care about your well-being, and the ones that you carry closest to you are the same ones that want so badly to help where they can — in fact, I happen to know they’re just hankering for it.”

“Alright, stop with the hyperbole, please,” Sirius bids, giving him a plain smile.

“If only I could say I was using hyperbole, but fine, I’ll be more direct,” James grants. “You ought to use the people you already have around you in ways that they can help you best, so first off, does Remus know about this book yet?”

Sirius sniffs hard, rubbing at his damp eyes with his free hand. “I told him as soon as I could.”

“Mm, and I bet I know why,” James rings out, and if he had a mug of any liquid at all near him he’d have taken a large and obnoxiously audible sip from it, but since he hasn’t got one nearby as far as Sirius can see, he settles for grinning ear to ear.

“Oh, you will not come for him; I will not allow it,” Sirius denies. “Where there was one set of footprints in the sand, there was Remus carrying me through this week, so don’t you even dare.”

“Wasn’t coming for him, weirdly enough,” James returns. “I’m making a point that you went straight to our most prized, nuanced lad with it first.”

“Well, you’re right," Sirius affirms politely. "I couldn’t hear a bad word about Reg at the time and I can barely stand it now."

“And boy, have I noticed,” James matches him, tone and all.

“And believe it or not, Remus has been a champion for me this week and I have been a handful,” Sirius torpedos through, not nearly done yet. “He’s heard me out, listened to every little stupid fear I’ve started to drum up in myself, and pulled the blame out from under me slowly so that I don’t lose my footing, tackled each worry I’ve had, one by one, so there’s no way I can refute anything he’s said by the end of it; he’s a mad genius. He doesn’t go on attack mode whenever Reg’s name comes up, he doesn’t refer to him as the root cause of all evil in my life — doesn’t love the guy, that much he’s said aloud, but he doesn't have to like him because he feels so strongly for the loss that this is for me; can you imagine that?”

James presses his lips into a line before popping them and giving him a smile right afterward. “Mhm, so back to my point,” he raises sweetly. “Remus isn’t a therapist, of course, so remember that he’s doing the best with what he’s got, but the good news is you can trust him, he knows the sort of empathetic nuance you need right now, he’s a better man than the both of us combined, and it physically pains him to not get it right the first try so you know he’s always going to be trying to work with you and get it right — and I, myself, can attest. To. That.

Sirius gives a small, inward laugh, passing his free hand over his face. “I know you can, and so can I,” he trades him.

“But, best of all, you've found yourself a good one who, unlike moi, hasn't got a decade's worth of receipts on Reg rattling around in his skull,” James tacks on because of course he has to. “Case in point, until you are ready to have the therapy conversation again, when you need someone who’s going to put your ever-tumultuous relationship to Reg and that brand new hole in your heart first, you’re going to lean on Remus, who, in turn, will be thrilled that you’re talking to him about it and won’t go off on some kind of tirade against him unless otherwise provoked; how does that sound?”

“Better than therapy,” Sirius supplies him.

“Alright, but I’m not done,” James instils. “And then, there’s Andromeda, and you have to know that she, out of anybody, is going to understand what you’re dealing with here and I’m willing to say she’s going to understand it better than I, so fucking talk to her about this; she’s right there, and I'm sure she can fathom bringing you the nuance you want so much.”

Sirius feels a fast pang in his chest, knowing full well that James hit it on the money twicefold; Andromeda is right there, and he hadn’t even bothered to think of the amount of empathy she’d have for every single layer Sirius has been buried under. “I hate that I’m about to say this, but you’re right,” he tosses him.

“Too right I am,” James echoes. "Now, from there, if you genuinely need someone who you know is going to stick up for you no matter what, then you know I’ve gotchu, it’s just going to have to be about anything other than Reg since he is where my limit starts.”

“James,” Sirius gives up, pained and war-torn over that inclusion.

James forwards him a smile that’s chock-full of that tough love they talk about. “It's my limit, Sirius,” he puts it. “I can’t help you there.”

“Yeah, or you don’t want to,” Sirius retorts.

James gives up a perfect compromise between a blunt scoff and a hearty laugh. “Oh, no, trust me; I want to, I just know I can’t, not in the way you want it done,” he returns, lifting both his hands to splay them out in front of him, showcasing how empty they are. “For anything else, literally anything else, you name it and I’m there as soon as I can be; I’m still your gasser, right?”

Sirius bites down hard on his lower lip, nodding his head slowly. “No, I want you to say it, Sirius,” James goads, a wry smile on when this man has seen and heard Sirius hit Remus with one of those a few times over these past many moons. Still, it’s not funny, and still, Sirius can’t say it because if he says it then he’s welcoming James’s time, energy, and capacity, and Sirius has evidently leaned on that enough. “Alright, you’re going to have to at least nod faster, but I’ll let you off the hook with that.”

Sirius pushes a fast huff out his nose, nodding his head roughly. “Good, we’re getting somewhere,” James beams. “And to that, if you need someone who's going to be happy driving you around town and blasting certified bops out the windows, then you know you can ring me up and I’ll zoom right over there to get you, but you also know for a fact that Lily would drop anything within reason to come grab you for some of that so I don’t say this lightly: use her! She wants you to.”

“And wouldn’t she just,” Sirius gives up, going for a little smarmy, sure, but it doesn’t all the way work; his smile’s giving himself away and James can very tell by the ‘gotcha’ face he’s making.

“And Pete, don’t forget him,” James chimes, but in the next beat shakes his head fast, his eyes brightening up now more than they already were and that’s a right feat. “Shit, I forgot to say; I passed the message on over to him and he’s so down.”

“Mm?” Sirius probes, his vision completely obscured by the film over his eyes.

“Oh yeah, Petey-pie’s all in for flat-sharing, so with keeping in-theme here, use that guy, too, alright?” James raises. “He’s a night owl just like us, will be a literal few steps down the hall, and if you just want to veg on the couch and not think about anything close to the likes of them, he’ll have zero problems with that, and if you want to dance around the kitch making dinner at one a.m, he’ll be there doing the same because you’re up and can’t not be sometimes, and he knows that; he’s been here this whole time, too, just in a different way than I have so trust me, he is on dot com, baby, and he doesn’t even know yet how much that’ll matter to you going forward. You feel me?”

“Hard not to,” Sirius responds, giving into a hiccough while he rubs fast at his eyes.

James stares back at him, looking rather misty around the eyes himself. “We love you, kiddo,” he puts it plainly. “It’s as easy as that.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Sirius sighs, but the smile he’s got going on feels genuine enough to give into, to let James have.

A blurb pops up at the top of the video screen, taking Sirius’s attention there for the moment.

Where?

“Ah shit, Remus is up,” Sirius relays, reaching to pull his mobile off of the mount and minimizing their chat window.

He types out a quick reply, keeping it to a simple ‘back in two!’ to quell any worry on Remus’s end. “Bad thing?” James raises, speaking from behind Sirius’s text window.

"No, never at all, just—” Sirius offers, pausing as he pulls James’s visage up again. “He’ll probably think I’m just out for a puff, but I should probably head back up lest he starts to worry that’s not the case.”

“And we wouldn’t want that,” James echoes candidly, but he’s giving a smile that does look a little forced.

“I’m not making up an excuse to go,” Sirius maintains, feeling a prickling at the back of his neck that then dissipates rather quickly along with his interest in fibbing. “No, alright, maybe I am a little bit, but I need to lay down; you took a lot out of me.”

James nods for it, taking a moment to look somewhere off-frame. “Well, I am sorry that I'm so incredibly mortal and all,” he manages, which is more than Sirius would have bet on.

“Yeah, same here,” Sirius returns, smirking a bit.

“Maybe it’s not forever, hey?” James offers up. “I’m not guaranteeing anything, I’m also only human, but I hope that there’s some part of you that understands how some of the time, life and time itself goes on while you didn’t see either go by, and suddenly you can’t quite catch up.”

“Oh, and I do know all about that,” Sirius allows for, giving in to a smile that would definitely count as devilish. “Could try therapy?”

“Thanks,” James chimes back. “I’m thinking about it.”

Sirius gives up a righteous pfft. “You are not,” he puts up, taking care in sliding out of the driver's seat and down to the ground one-handed.

“I’m actually very thinking about it,” James returns, dropping the faux-charmed antics and sucking a breath in through his teeth. “Turns out, seeing your brother get messed around with for a decade can really warp your worldview and stay with you for a good, long time, but that’s neither here nor there nor is it your fault or problem, so if you must go, then go with a full heart and the knowledge that I’m really fucking glad you’re still here, especially after reading that.”

Sirius puts out a deep but tight noise from the depths of his throat. “Don’t do this to me, James,” he warns, shutting the door with a decided thump. “I’m barely holding it together at this point.”

“Well, I’m a cheeseball, what can I say,” James offers, giving a quick shrug for it.

And that, Sirius could never refute; James is exactly where he learned his own cheeseball ways. “I’m going to break your back when I get home,” he alerts him, dropping his left hand to his hip.

“Excuse you?” James checks, the wonkiest face on now.

“With the hug I’m going to give you once I’m back, you dolt,” he clarifies. “It’ll split a disc if I can help it.”

“OK, well, try not to help it, then,” James suggests.

“No promises,” Sirius says of it. “Those glasses are cute as fuck, by the way.”

“Yeah?” James raises, popping a little shoulder shimmy for it. “Picked them out myself.”

“Would not have expected that, but look at you,” Sirius celebrates. "Lily's done a number there."

"I'll never argue with that," James returns him.

"You two alright?" Sirius checks, and it's shit, knowing he wasted most of his time not asking about it.

"Yeah," James returns, earnest in expression and in tone. "We're doing it, baby; always in forward motion."

"If at a slightly slower pace than you might like," Sirius slips in, smiling for it and him.

"Well, of course," James echoes.

Sirius locks up the truck with a press of the button on the keypad, stops just to the side of the engine, and wipes fast at his eyes with his free hand; Remus wouldn’t think of holding those tears against him, but he’s still got to make it into the inn and up the stairs without looking a completely despaired sight. He heads away from the truck, walking across the parking at an angle to get over toward the front of the place, and makes a beeline across the lawn for the porch, but on the way there he feels a striking feeling in his stomach that, with some thought and reflection, points to nothing exceptionally nefarious, but still troublesome; there’s a dire presence he hasn’t had close in a few days and, when he thinks about that, this is the longest Sirius has gone without that dire presence since he acquired it.

“Can you take a picture of Tango for me, send it along?” he bids. “Could use the pick-me-up.”

“Sure can,” James assures, sounding as though he's utterly enthused about being entrusted with the task as he turns in the chair to look around behind him. “He’s made himself scarce, I think; too many angry men in here.”

Sirius’s heart definitely takes a pitfall. “Well, kiss his snoot and tell him I’m trying here,” he extends, heading up the steps. “And a kiss for the Queen, too, while you’re at it."

“Lizzie? Haven’t spoken to her in a while,” James returns, going for a wry stretch over the back of Sirius’s desk chair. “Wouldn’t know how to get in there, you know.”

Sirius huffs long, rolling his eyes when James well knows which Queen he meant. “The feline one,” he digresses.

“Oh, oh, that one,” James pretends, giving a championed noise after a solid crack of his back.

“Did she take off somewhere, too?” Sirius raises, pausing at the top of the stairs.

James gives up a snicker. “No, she’s fine,” he assures, putting his camera around to showcase Mestophales fully blissed out on Sirius’s bed. “Hardly noticed I’m in here, frankly.”

Sirius cannot describe what he does next as anything other than a righteous, gleeful little coo and he wouldn’t want to try anyway. “I love her dearly,” he offers, unnecessarily of course when that fact is as true and simple as any, but it’s a testament to James that he simply scurries over to the bed to administer a round of kisses to the Queen’s head, in perfect agreement with him on that much.

Unfortunately, what takes Sirius out of their little moment of communal, feline-based joy, is spotting a crumpled-up ball of paper nearby on the bed, and he sours enough to need a breather. “Clean up that mess you made, too,” he instructs, his tone coming out a lot less resentful than he’d been banking on.

“Mmhm, will,” James assures, leaning over to snatch the paper ball in question up off the bed.

“And don’t toss any of them either,” Sirius tacks on, and this time, it came out resentful.

“Sirius?” James commands, framing his eyes into the whole of his video screen. “You can keep the book, but those pages are gone, got it? You’re done with them.”

The image he’s looking at of just James’s eyes isn’t not-funny per se, but the force behind those eyes tells Sirius quite viscerally that this is all he can willingly compromise on and that he best not argue to keep a few letters that were once dedicated to the total assassination of his character. Well, that, and the appearance of a couple of patrons that come out the front door, the bustle and commotion of them, their luggage, and the Hot Gardener doubling as a bellboy is a lot to reasonably continue through, so Sirius is really isn't in the position to argue it.

He holds his mobile at his side while he waits for the crowd to disperse, slipping inside the front room once the doorway has been cleared out. He gives a cursory smile to the lady behind the counter, but her eyes light up a lot like somebody who’s planning on starting a conversation and he lifts his screen to make himself look a little too busy to stop and chat.

“Alright, I’m heading up,” Sirius slips him, scooting out of the main room and toward the stairs with a pair of speedy feet.

“Don’t be a stranger now,” James puts up, reaching around the floor of Sirius’s room to gather up the other crumbled balls of paper, and there’s an underlying ask somewhere in there, too.

“I won’t,” Sirius gives him, thinking he owes him that, at least.

He gives James a small wave and a weird smile, he knows it was weird the moment after he hits the end-call button, but it’s all he had in him, and from there, the promise of Remus is fully what gets Sirius’s useless shell of a body up the stairs and into their room.

Remus isn’t in the main room when he gets in the door, but the echo of the taps running in the bathroom is a welcome sound as it presumably gives away Remus’s current position. He pushes the door shut behind him, foots his shoes off in a heap on the mat, and pockets his mobile, heading for the bathroom with the keys to the truck in hand when he figures he ought to return them to their temporary owner lest he suddenly think they’ve been misplaced or knicked from the room altogether.

He stops in the doorway of the loo and takes refuge in the primo sight of Remus’s fantastical case of bedhead as he stands at the sink in his skivvies, rinsing his mouth out with water from a cup. Remus looks Sirius’s way as he swishes water between hamster-esque cheeks and pops a closed smile onto his lips for a hello, but his expression falls as quicker than his smile even came on, his eyes taking on an owlish, spooked quality upon registering what has to be one majorly blotchy complexion on Sirius.

He dips forward, deposits his now-inconvenient mouthful into the sink, and wipes at the right corner of his mouth with his wrist as he closes the admittedly short distance between the two of them, but Sirius has to admit he appreciates the immediacy of it. He breathes in long, buying himself time to work out even the first words to offer him for an explanation for his state, and lifts the keys between the two of them in the meantime, but Remus doesn’t appear to register that he’s being offered anything at all until Sirius pokes him in the navel with the tip of the key.

Remus looks down quickly, blinks it in, and promptly raises his gaze again, putting a pointed look on his face and his head at a right-hanging tilt. “I didn’t go joyriding,” Sirius attests, pointing up at Remus with the key. “James rang super early and I didn’t want to wake you so I went out to the truck for it.”

A flash of understanding and maybe some of that fear stuff go over Remus’s face in quick succession before he’s reaching up to clasp Sirius’s outstretched wrist in his right hand, the keys going utterly forgotten within a moment. “That bad?” he asks, his voice covered with quiet concern.

Sirius drops his gaze for a moment, nodding at the bit of floor between their two sets of feet. “It was a mess,” he admits. "Feels like I got dumped even though I know that’s not the reality of it.”

When he looks up again, Remus's face has clouded over with a deep grimace, his own gaze dropping for a moment of collection before it's back up and fixed on Sirius again, blinking with intent and a wordless question: Well, which one is it, Sirius?

Just there, Shania rings out loudly from inside Sirius’s back right pocket and he knows exactly what that’s about; the likelihood of a portrait of Tango awaiting him is in the high nineties and that would pretty well stand as an answer to Remus’s question in itself. Sirius reaches to pull his mobile back out of his pocket, taps on the new alert on his home screen, and feasts his eyes on an action shot of Tango coming down the hall between the kitchen and the living room, his jaw held open as if he’s grinning, and doing the kind of sideways prance he does when someone's got him all hyped up.

Sirius ducks his head fast, tears welling up on him in one swoop as he turns the screen around for Remus to have a look at it. “No, he loves me, it’s just really hard to do that.”

“Sirius,” Remus chides, but it’s not even a scold, really; he’s wounded more than anything and that makes two of them.

Sirius shakes his head fast, can’t possibly imagine getting into the what, why, and how of it all when he’s this dizzy, this unsteady on his feet. “I’m going to talk soon, I will, but my head is swimming and just need to—” he trails off, taking in as full a breath as he can before he tries again, “—exist, not exist; either one, but laying down, please.”

Through a wobble, he stuffs his mobile back where it came from, grabs Remus’s outstretched hands for support, and winds up dropping the keys to the floor in the process. “Leave them,” Remus directs, steering Sirius back toward the bed.

Sirius does exactly as bid, holds onto Remus’s hip bones as he backs up with the ushering, and scoots up the bed after Remus carefully deposits him on it, but from there, he makes it to about halfway up before he’s making woeful grabby-hands at Remus, just completely unable and uninterested in waiting for him any longer for the moment Remus lays on his left, Sirius rolls toward him in a slump, curling up on Remus’s right side, halfway in between Remus’s right shoulder and side, halfway on top of him.

Remus’s arms wind up curling over Sirius’s back, his grip utterly pleading. “Can I do anything?” he raises.

This,” Sirius insists, worming up enough to smush his face into the crook of Remus’s neck and taking in the scents of spearmint, face wash, and him.

Remus, thoroughly spooked by now and presumably fully ready for a thorough game of twenty questions, doesn’t ask for much more than that just now, resigning himself to holding him close with his left arm and tracing his fingertips over the nape of Sirius’s neck with his right hand, letting Sirius expel a demon and/or cry his lights out. He doesn’t know how this could be comfortable for either of them; his knees are bent up and in, pressing up against Remus’s side, his back's curved into a semi-circle in order for him to even have his face buried where it is, his eyes are fully leaking at a cupful a minute and his tears must be getting all over Remus’s neck, and the both of his hands are squeezed between Remus’s shoulder blades and the bed, but neither of them makes moves to correct any of that.

Sirius lays there for he doesn’t know how long, but long enough that his tears aren’t coming on so viciously anymore and long enough that he’s identified the shape Remus has been continuously tracing into the skin at the small of his back — little, unhurried stars. The lulling Sirius can feel happening to him in real-time is both intense and delicate at once, he could knock out in moments if he let himself, but Remus is still waiting on him and he knows they haven't got that kind of time left in here.

Sirius lifts his head enough to peel his wet face off of Remus’s skin. “Time is it?”

Remus, apparently in a transient state himself, gives a lagged hum to showcase he heard Sirius ask it and leans his head all the way back to get a glimpse of the clock sitting on his side table, giving Sirius a full view of his Adam’s apple and a chance to lean up and press a kiss to it, thankful in just about a thousand ways for this boy and the littlest things he’ll do so Sirius won’t have to.

“Nine-thirty about,” he relays, waiting for Sirius to move his head before righting his own again. “We’ve lots of time, but if we have to leave before you’re ready to, I’ll just quickly gather everything up and find us a quiet place to go, OK?”

Sirius eases with the comforting news on as he sets his head back down against Remus’s collar, eases twice over as Remus slips his right hand up into Sirius’s hair and starts up a gentle tousle back there, and in fact, he’s so beholden to Remus and his relaxation superpowers that he can’t even say he minds that he’s going to have to start explaining a few things as a curious cat becomes of Remus. “I’m sorry, I’m trying to wait for you, I just don’t know how he’d have known to ring you,” he raises, and he does sound bamboozled. “And so early, at that; the word ‘uncharacteristic,’ comes to mind.”

“Mm, well, see, my days are lost on me, so had I remembered that it was Sunday night and thus he’d be up bright and early to start approving payroll and shit, I would have perhaps held off on sending that late-night text to him,” Sirius reports. “Though, I do have a feeling he might’ve took the rest of the morning off because he does not appear to be working whatsoever.”

Remus gives a muted, breathy semblance of a laugh leaving his nose with it. “When did you even text him?”

Sirius gives out a horsebreath in thought. “Bit before you brought up the lagoon?” he raises, thinking back to the wee hours of the morning. “Yeah, right before that.”

Remus gives another breath through his nose, this time reeling over a Moment that he only just missed. “Well, by all means, tell me about this text of yours,” he prompts.

Sirius lulls his head to the side and straightens his back out some more, using the curve of Remus’s right shoulder as a resting point for his head so he can both see Remus a lot better and aim a small smile his way. “I guess you could say that after talking it out with you I felt — inspired to take the weight of telling him off of my shoulders, so I brilliantly sent him one directing him to the where the book was and he didn’t like that one bit,” he offers, sighing for his own late-night, heavy-headed stupidity before noting Remus’s wonky frown. “That’s my mistake, Remus, I should’ve waited ’til we got back to show him; I had a moment of fake bravery where I chose a time when he wouldn’t see it right away to send it along and he ended up referring to it as casual as a book club recommendation, and if I’m honest, that’s exactly how impersonal I made it so it’s fair he called me out on it.”

Remus hums in a way that suggests it’s neither here nor there, but Sirius is unconvinced. “OK, but to the fake bravery part?” he raises, blinking twice. “You weren’t planning on telling him at all as recently as yesterday afternoon, so cloaked in the shadow of darkness or not, I’m still going to be admonished by your bravery last night.”

“Yeah, well, you should be more admonished by my stupidity than anything else, and he doesn’t know how badly I wasn’t going to tell him,” Sirius highlights. “I mean, he has an idea, but still; not enough of one.”

Remus lifts his left hand to pass it over his face before holding it there and obscuring most of it from Sirius. “I didn’t mean for you to feel like you had to drop the gauntlet right away, I’m sorry,” he extends, giving a sigh of despair underneath Sirius. “I can make things sound so dire, but it really could have waited; I know it could've.”

“Hey, no, this one’s on me; you didn’t give me some kind of hard line of a date to tell him by or make me text him that, so you’re still not the one to blame here, sorry about that,” Sirius lends him, and Remus curls a lock of Sirius’s hair behind his right ear, smiling minutely for the pass he’s been given. “Our plan failed miserably, mind; he’s righteously peeved I made him read the book in full, among many, many other things.”

“Mm?” Remus prompts, with a careful, barely-there tone and his brow etched with worry.

“Oh, yeah,” Sirius affirms idly, but it’s easier to speak it in simple terms otherwise he’s just going to bawl all over again. “Peeved isn’t even the right word for it, not nearly; he said I set him up.”

Remus doesn’t speak for a moment or two, but his face shows his distaste just fine. “‘Set him up?’” he repeats.

“Mhm, manipulated him into receiving an entire basket of context that he didn’t want or need, tried to get him to feel bad for Reg, tried to poke holes in his own read of it all; it’s endless,” Sirius provides, giving a tight, close-lipped smile, but Remus gives a direct pfft. “He’s right in some ways, right? Of course I manipulated how he found out, but wanting him see for himself the extent of what Reg went through didn’t matter to him; he still did exactly what I was afraid he’d do.”

Remus looks apprehensive as he breathes in. “Well, you did speak of a number of things you were afraid he’d do, so my head is just swimming with examples,” he shares for a prompt.

Sirius smirks through his nose despite his eyes starting to sting again. “Well, he did do a number of things I was afraid he would, so fair enough, Remus,” he offers him, sighing for the bodily stress that the very image of James tearing away at the most offending pages of the book continues to bring him. “I know you thought I was using some hyperbole just like I thought I was doing that, and I know that you went along with that hyperbole to make your own counterpoint but he did very end up tearing it apart; as in, he hulked out and tore three whole pages of it out, and if I hadn’t made such a scene about it, I truly don’t know how many he’d have snatched out—”

Remus strickens fast underneath him and squawks — and Sirius means squawks — out a ‘What?’ so powerful, it might’ve been heard out in the hall and possibly downstairs, hard to say, but not that, that hard; that was a bracing volume.

Sirius goes righteously still for it, at least until Remus flings his head and left arm back toward his bedside table where he soon spots Remus’s mobile lying there, and then his stomach goes for a gold-winning flip as he scrambles up and over Remus to hold his left arm down against the bed. “No — no, Remus, it’s—”

Remus opens his whole throat as he cuts in, fighting fast at Sirius’s hold. “It’s not fine; don't even say that,” he puts down, face reddening with heat. “It meant so much to you and how dare he? I’ll tear him up, see how he likes it."

“No — no, I mean it, Remus,” Sirius insists, pinning both his wrists to the bed. “I appreciate it, but I’m trying to save you here; he’s in guard-dog mode right now, he won’t hold back on you either—”

Let him not, see how that goes for him,” Remus tosses out, thrashing underneath Sirius, and Jesus Cunt, is he nearly indistinguishable from Lyall when he’s this fired up.

This could certainly count as one of the most tumultuous moments of Sirius’s life up to now; the vivid push and pull that’s been created between the thrill of seeing Remus go into his hulk-mode for the sake of him and the duty Sirius has to Remus, James, and himself not to let Remus get to his mobile is one that he can feel practically ripping him apart from both sides. He has to bear every morsel of his weight down on Remus’s body, bend his right arm to pin his wrist between their chests so that he can free up his own left hand to clasp it underneath Remus’s chin and perhaps render the livid lad beneath him even somewhat speechless, but you know what, sometimes Sirius really does pick the right move, even if it's done out of desperation; the moment he’s got Remus’s chin in hand, he’s blessed with a front-row seat to the sight of Remus’s pupils dilating and in the next beat, is blessed to feel Remus go limp underneath him, otherwise unmoving save for some ragged breathing.

“How could he do that to you?” he lodges, his eyes unfocused on the ceiling so the question itself may well be to Sirius, to the room they’re in, and to the ether, even.

“Some sort of base, animalistic need to protect me from the worst of the worst letters in that book,” Sirius answers, for all three of them.

Remus practically chokes out a huff, making eye contact with him again. “Well, go on, then,” he probes, and Sirius knows that the frank tone has everything and nothing to do with him at the same time and that’s alright.

He nods once, but can’t help splaying his fingertips up to graze them over Remus’s right cheek as he leans in to leave a kiss at the right corner of Remus’s mouth in hopes that it’ll do even half of the easing that Remus’s tousling did for him. “After referring to my directing him to the book as a simple recommendation for a book club, he went ahead and read aloud, in his exceptionally too-well-trained impression of Reg, the letter that fucked him up the most, which was the same one that fucked me up the most, so at least we’ve that in common.”

He gives up a tight, impish laugh there, shaking his head as his face scrunches up fierce. “All I wanted was for him not to isolate any one letter because the ones at the start of the book are scathing; I mean, they are, there’s no other way to put it,” he speaks out, “but he found the one about Jack and Reg’s time trying to make a name for himself that didn’t involve a sex scandal his older brother was involved in to be the worst of the worst, and it was, it was awful to read, but you saw what I was like after reading that one, you would have had ten times more reason to rip that one out of the book, but you never would have done that to me.”

Remus shakes his head. “No,” he whispers, eyes fixed on Sirius. “I mean, I won’t pretend that I haven’t felt the urge to punch the book in the last couple days, but—”

Sirius gives into a bout of breathy laughs through his nose. “You know what, I punched the book quite a few times while reading it so I'd have let you,” he extends him.

Remus reworks his mouth around a smile, forcing it to stay small to make room for his greater point. “I can only imagine how hard that was for you,” he puts up, looking plagued and about a decade older with the mere thought of it.

“Insurmountably,” Sirius puts it. “He didn’t stop at that one either, he wrenched out every page preceding that letter right up to the front cover, so that's the cheesecake doodle is crumpled up, too, and he’s confiscated them so I’m not getting those back, and there were so many, Remus; he barred me from keeping so many and I know he's sure it's for my own good, but — it hurt. It still hurts.”

Remus gives up an exceptionally weighted breath, leaning his head back toward the ceiling again and letting out an agonized noise from there. “I never even got close to knowing what's in even a fraction of the letters before he hulked out and took a chunk of them off to Cunt knows where,” he stews. “I could wring his neck.”

Sirius leans in, pressing his wonky smile to Remus’s lips. “I love you,” he gives earnestly. "I'd have let you read them, too."

“I love you, too, but I have no clue what you actually just lost here,” Remus lodges, frustratedly blinking through the film over his eyes. “I’ve got cotton brain; I’m fully out of the loop here.”

Sirius gives out a puff of breath, eyes widening as he tries to think of letters he remembers from earlier on in the book, but since he really only got one full read-through before James hulked out, they’re all coming to him out of order. “Well, alright, there was the one he wrote the week I’d split so that was one window into his life that’s just, gone now, and then there’s the one where he's giving me shit for not showing up to his grad but that one made me feel like shit on a stick so I don’t know if I'll miss that one all that much,” he offers up, figuring that Remus won’t hold it against him if he admits to that. “He also would have ripped out the one where Reg wrote about seeing me outside my work and called me a fruit for dancing around the terrace handing out samples, so.”

“Well, not the worst loss, then,” Remus slips in, under his breath, but not completely.

“Yeah, I could take or leave that one, too,” Sirius allows, finding the process of processing this for the sake of Remus’s own processing to be working out oddly well. “Mm, but he’d have nabbed the one where Reg described, in excruciating detail, what it was like to be admired for technique at the piano by his professor but be in a class full of students who still talked of the legendary exit that I once made from said program, which, in turn, highlighted what he’d felt toward me for years; a perfect example, really.”

Remus blinks three times over. “Well, don’t stop there,” he goads, allowing a ghost of a smile onto his face.

Sirius winds up forwarding a similar, almost smile over to him in return. “How much authority and those who uphold it would always prefer him over me, but how my peers and the peers of his own would always prefer me over him,” he hands over. “I heard that shit for years; how he’d work so damn hard for recognition but there I’d go, careless and wilfully disobedient and still wound up getting support elsewhere for it, just — well.”

“Not at home,” Remus chimes, smiling tightly.

“Mhm, that, but he'd never say it,” Sirius puts up. “So I don’t know that I’ll miss that one either, but — Cunt, I’ve lost the one where he'd said he buzzed his hair real short so the kids at school would quit calling him ‘Lil’ Sirius’ in the halls, and that one was funny? Like, not actually funny in that it made my skin crawl to read at the time because fuck him, having me precede him in our school days would have instantly got him a free pass to make all sorts of friends there, but no, he’d stuck to the ‘acceptable’ ones, the ‘pre-approved' ones whose parents brought them to all the same functions as we were made to go to, but still, Remus; there are two sides to every story, yeah, but he could be funny some of the time and I liked being reminded of that.”

Remus pushes the point of his frowning lips back and forth, humming for it. “I mean, you do love a good dig, often especially if it’s meant for you,” he puts up, letting another smile go free, but this one’s even better because it could hardly be considered a ghost of one; he’s letting amusement in where it ought to go.

“Exactly,” Sirius echoes, shaking Remus’s torso back and forth on the bed with the arm still holding him down against it. “I’d have liked to not have that one wrenched out of there, just the image of him getting that called to him in the halls is hilarious, wish I’d thought of it — and, there was one letter, it was like, one sentence, but he’d written something like, ‘All I ever do is hear about you; you, you, you, I’m sick and tired of you’ basically, which — fuck off twice, Reg, but also? Toward the end of the book, there’s a letter that perfectly mirrors that one, only that time he’d written ‘I never hear about you anymore’ and I hate to say it, but it would have been nice to have that contrast to look back on, you know? To be able to look and visually see the proof that over time, he did ache over their complete erasure of me, but guess not, hey? I don’t get to have that because it’s one bright spot in the middle of so many dark ones that James won’t let me get buried beneath.”

Remus pushes a quiet breath in and out of curled lips. “I don’t think things could get more complicated within my body,” he puts it.

“Tell me why,” Sirius prompts.

Remus gives up a hesitant groan. “I don’t know if I should, Sirius,” he advertises. “You’re saying it well enough already.”

“Remus, I could not love you more than I do right now,” Sirius puts it plainly. “My heart is full; I promise, you get to have whatever reaction you have here because it’s not going to change a thing for us.”

Remus lowers his head so he’s got eye contact going again with him at least. “Can I have one of my hands back, please?” he bids. “I won’t even dart for my mobile, how’s that?”

“Thank you for saying so,” Sirius forwards, lifting up and granting Remus the freedom to take his folded arm out from in between them, but in the event that Remus is fibbing his way through that request, he keeps Remus’s right wrist pinned to the bed just in case.

Turns out, Remus simply wants to connect a hand to his face and rub it right out, which — is a very James thing to do and it’s a bit funny to see, considering how unimpressed Remus is with him right about now. “James did a lot of that, too, on the call,” Sirius offers, giving him a wee jostle. “You’re dressed in theme.”

“Great,” Remus puts out, bluntly from behind his hand.

Sirius presses his lips together, waiting for Remus to just come out with what’s on the tip of his tongue, and passes his right thumb back and forth over the inside of Remus’s wrist to remind him, in gentle terms, that he’s just waiting here, and Remus pushes a long, unabashedly frustrated sigh out of his chest, taking the signal in full force. “Fine, on the one hand, I’m livid that he felt invincible enough to even do that to you," he puts out measuredly, "but on the other, from what you're telling me was in them, he must've doing you a favour not letting you keep those ones, and I don’t know how I feel about this at all.”

“Well, shit, Remus; neither do I,” Sirius puts up, reaching to pry Remus’s hand away from his face so he can see it, but he might as well hold the hand now that he’s got it. “I hated reading those ones at the time, I did, I got so fired up because of course they were all written as Reg’s side of every story with never a thought toward mine, but I can’t deny I was almost addicted to reading them; I literally couldn’t stop even though they were ripping me apart and now I can't ever read them again, it’s the very definition of bittersweet.”

Remus pops his eyebrows up and down once for that. “It really must be,” he offers him, and something about his fixed stare tells Sirius that he fully has the floor here, should he not yet be finished articulating how awful this part feels.

“It’s like I’m stuck; I know why he won’t let me have them back, they were pithy and judgemental at best, and debilitating and dangerous for me to hold onto at worst, so of course he wanted them gone so I don’t get home and reread and reread and reread them until I’ve got them fully memorized, and — I would do that, wouldn’t I—” he tacks on, heaving his shoulders in a massive shrug, and Remus’s own struggle with that very question reads openly on his face as he’s got the right side of his lower lip pulled into his mouth, “—mhm, we both know I would, I planned on keeping that thing in perfect condition and that was undoubtedly going to be unhealthy for me, but I was coming to terms with those ones, I’d started making peace with the hostility in them and now, I’m never going to see them again; he’s probably burning them right now and I hate the thought of it, but then I’m right back around again, feeling all indebted to him for getting rid of them for me.”

“And in the actual worst way possible,” Remus comes in, evidently still perturbed over the method used there. “So far away from you, over the phone.”

“Over video, Remus,” Sirius presents, blinking fast. “You really think I wouldn’t love to have you ring him up and tear him a new one? Of course I would, not being able to stop him from doing that because we were miles apart was the most grating feeling I’ve had in a long time — nails on a chalkboard, bordered on claustrophobia, it was awful and I was shaking, I was so livid with him for it, but it’s not going to help the situation at all for you to ring him up and demand he answer for his sins; if you got caught in his crossfire, I’ll end up whooping him into space.”

Remus smirks despite himself, giving up a pointed sigh. “But not me for wanting him to answer for his sins,” he comments.

“Uhm, hello?” Sirius raises. “You were ready to throw down for me and a book penned by a bloke you don’t much like yourself back there.”

“It’s yours,” Remus puts down. “The entitlement he had to have felt toward your pain in order to do that is flabbergasting to me and I still might beat him up; we’ll see how I feel when I’m within arms reach of him.”

Sirius blinks thrice in quick succession. “Right, so, for that, if I were at all horny right now, I’d be fucking you right this second,” he puts down. “Don’t worry, I’ll bounce back at some point and ravage you for all this carnal energy you’ve been putting out for me, trust in that.”

Remus leans his head back fully so his smile is almost invisible to Sirius down here, but not fully, sorry, Remus. “I’m not doing this to get laid, Sirius.”

“I very know that, so get laid, you will,” Sirius presents, reaching up to tap on Remus’s chin so he’ll lower it and let him see that prize-winning face of his, and it takes only two taps more before Remus is complying, willing to face him again. “Besides, it wasn’t as calculated as it might seem.”

Remus’s brow furrows before it raises, suggesting some coy intrigue from the man under him, but in the next beat, he’s pushing a sigh through his nose and reaching to scoop Sirius right up. He rolls with Sirius, taking him right with him, and deposits his head and upper back against the pillows, scooting his hips in between Sirius’s knees as Sirius adjusts to the switch up, Remus choosing to be the blanket.

“Alright, tell me,” Remus prompts, setting his elbows on either side of Sirius’s torso and crisscrossing his forearms over Sirius’s chest, a full audience.

Sirius needs a solid five to ten uninterrupted seconds of weak-kneed admiration before he can even try fraternizing with the idea of continuing, and after that batch of seconds, he thinks it’ll do him a world of personal good if he helps tame the mass of bedhead Remus has going on while he continues, but it’s the perfect excuse to touch his plume of curls all over. “We were fighting at the time so everything was escalating; I’m yelling, he’s yelling, I’m accusing him of continuing to read the letter out loud and relishing in my clear pleads for that to stop, he’s accusing me of setting him up to fail and proving his point, which was that Reg was horribly out of line for writing that letter to me and then he called the whole book trash, I said it was not that, and before I knew it, he was hacking away at it,” Sirius details, finding it easier to say now than it was at first, so, maybe — just maybe, this is exactly what he needs. “I mean, we have little tifts all the time, but we’re quick to shape up and keep on because that’s what we’ve always done, but this was the ugliest we’ve gotten with each other and as much as I hated him doing it, I pushed him to it, didn’t I?”

Remus pushes a sigh out, a crease appearing between his brows. “I don’t know what to say, Sirius,” he trades him, wiping fast at his own welling eyes. “I’m going to want to say no, you didn’t do that, but you seem pretty well convinced it was out both of your control so you’re not going to like it, but no, you didn’t push him to do that, it was bigger than just you or him; this is bigger than you two.”

Sirius blinks five times over, hands frozen, a ring of Remus’s curls wrapped around his right forefinger. “Wish I’d thought of that.”

“You’re processing,” Remus breathes, letting him off the hook for it, and ain’t that the truth and the magical, two-word phrase Sirius needed to hear.

He breathes in long, needing to feel the weight of Remus’s body resting over him as he gives some more of that processing thing a try. It has to be minutes before Sirius speaks again and it feels as if he’s drowning. “I feel like I failed us all in one swoop,” he puts it, sniffing against the new sting at his sinuses.

Why?” Remus asks, openly wounded by the utterance, and that’s sweet, but unfortunately Sirius did do that.

“You told me not to muzzle him, let him have his pain, but I sure fucking did muzzle him just to protect Reg so that’s you failed, I didn’t end up protecting Reg well enough so that’s him failed, I would not let James have his own, clearly unresolved pain and not only that, forced him to have to prove himself as a main character in all of this; literally forced him to have to remind me that he was there the whole time, andf that’s him failed twice,” Sirius puts up, wiping away free-flowing tears to no real avail; he didn’t even end up protecting Reg well enough and wasn’t that his whole mantra going into it? He can’t do right by Reg even now, and he certainly can’t do right by himself. “I can’t get it right for anybody; I’m useless at this.”

Remus promptly covers his entire visage with his two hands and it takes a few, long seconds for Sirius to blink past the film over his eyes to be able to tell his shoulders are shaking. “This is like, pushing you to go to Reg’s funeral 2.0,” he puts up, utterly shaken up, and Jesus, of course he is, Sirius can’t expect him not to get acid flashbacks to the last time he felt wholly responsible for Sirius’s welfare. “I never know when to leave things alone, I never learn any better; it could have waited until it wasn’t all so fresh—"

Sirius goes for Remus’s wrists, jostling them around a bit. “It was always going to be a mess, Remus, no matter how long I waited to tell him,” he gives him. “It wasn’t your fault then and it isn’t yours now; if anything, it could be that you’re so often the one to push me to think of someone other than myself for five seconds and I’m just embarrassingly bad at going about it.”

Remus clicks his tongue, fully entrenched in the sorrow in the air. “You’re a lot better at it than you think,” he says of it, allowing his hands to get pulled from his face. “Clearly, since you’re currently thinking about three different perspectives at once and one of them is the memory of a person.”

Sirius shakes his head fast. “Never on time with it,” he summarizes, and it looks like he’s just torn Remus down the middle, and that has him feeling torn apart and nowhere near done nailing himself to the wall. “I made it a thousand times harder for James to exist within the situation without feeling like he’s the last on my list; I was so careless with him, just so, so tone-deaf, made him have to remind me that he’s my brother no matter if Reg was blood, and that wasn’t fair to him at all—”

“What do you mean, ‘you made him have to?’” Remus comes in, giving that read of it a bemused lift of his hands, unable to see where the dots connect while Sirius can see them flickering all over his vision.

I mean, he was talking shit on Reg and I sat there and said ‘back off, he was my brother,’ to James Fucking Potter’s face,” Sirius returns, his voice grating to his ears; fuck his voice; it only lends to even more pain than there already is floating around. “James Potter. He alone listened when my twelve-year-old self finally started to articulate what going home from school meant for me, gave me his room to hide out in whenever I needed to, bandaged me up whenever that was needed, took a pair of shitty, blunt scissors to the rest of my hair to fix the disaster my mother left it in, without any idea of what he was doing and figured out a way to make it look less like it got caught in a lawnmower, gave me a home to go to when I didn’t have one anymore and let me finally breathe properly, let me come home every night to colour and warmth and absolutely no rules apart from an open-fridge, open-door policy, he took care of me; how could I say that to him? Reg didn’t do half of what James did for me, and I advocated for him to James? Why can’t I read a single room ever?”

“He was your brother, Sirius,” Remus puts up listlessly, evidently caught up in the black-and-white read of it. “There's so much room for James, but Reg isn’t here to advocate for himself, of course you were going to speak up for him.”

“No, Remus, thank you for trying, but it’s just as James said to me; he is my brother, Reg shared my name,” Sirius puts up, and Remus makes a noise like he’s been struck in the stomach with a flat hand. “He’s right, Reg might’ve looked a hell of a lot like me and we might’ve shared some striking DNA in other respects, but James earned that title and I kept taking that from him, over and over again; it’s a wonder he still wants me around after that.”

Remus scoffs grand. “He wants you around, Sirius; he fucking loves you,” he retorts, disappointment colouring his whole face over.

“Yeah, and it’s a wonder he does,” Sirius reiterates. “Beyond that, it’s fucking fair that he told me to find someone else to puff Reg up with and I don’t even know anymore what it is that violently possessed me to need James to go easy on him; why do I need that from him so much? I can go easy on Reg all my own, he's my dead brother, not his; to him, Reg is the guy who let loose torpedoes on his best friend, I know that I can’t fully blame Reg for anything he did because they warped his fucking mind, same as mine, but James doesn’t have to agree. Why did I need him to agree with that so badly?”

Remus presses his palms face-down on Sirius’s chest. “Because if people aren’t right or wrong, we don’t know how to handle it?” he raises, lifting his shoulders once. “You were both willfully mistreated and now, you’re seeing that in a whole new light and might want James to join you where you are, but that could take time and work put in from the both of you.”

Sirius runs his top teeth over his lower lip slowly, speaking once that’s over with. “Yeah, no, he’s hit his limit,” he delivers him. “He can’t go any further than admitting Reg had some self-reflection in him by the end and I can’t get away with pushing him past that.”

Remus aims a tentative look at him. “Sirius, I’m going off of almost nothing here; what exactly did he say to you?” he asks. “What is the limit and where does it stop?”

“It's Reg,” Sirius answers. “He’s done, Remus, and I think I pushed him to that point.”

Remus nods distantly, lifting his left hand out from under his chin to tug at his lower lip, his gaze trained just beyond Sirius’s head, focused somewhere on the headboard. “OK, well,” he offers, meeting Sirius’s eye again with a new breath in, “you did say that it was an intense conversation overall, right?”

“Oh yeah,” Sirius affirms, his voice going low on the second word. “You were right, you know — I mean, you always manage to be in some form or another, but evidently I did need to air out a lot of suppressed anger toward him and it very appears that he needed to do the same so when I say it was WWE-Smackdown without the body talk, I’m only just slightly exaggerating.”

“OK, so, knowing that,” Remus prefaces, nodding slow, speaking low, “what if we didn’t make any sweeping declarations of who pushed who where for now because at the moment, everything is all so fresh; old wounds are reopening and some new ones do very appear to have been made, so instead, why don’t we let James have some time to cool off, simmer down a little, start to process some of this himself, let you have some time to cool off, process this some more, not heap every bit of blame you can find onto yourself, and maybe see where you two are with it after some digestion.”

Sirius likes that idea a lot more than the idea of James putting Reg and any grace toward him on the blacklist, but he’s not feeling all that optimistic about it. “I don’t know if he is going to simmer down, not on this,” he says of it. “You didn’t see his eyes, Remus, he was serious.”

Remus appears to be struck with a violent case of lockjaw for his mouth is frozen open for at least five true seconds before his gaze darts over to his phone, but he makes no real move to grab for it, but he sure does look listless and out of options. “OK, perhaps there’s a line now, then, but is he going to come around more often because he now knows the weight of what you’re dealing with or did he say you’re on your own with it?” he reiterates gravely, his eyes flashing as his jaw tightens. “The distinction matters to me, Sirius, and I do not know what I’m going to do next if you tell me it’s the second one.”

Sirius presses his lips together. “He’s not done with me, he’s done with Reg,” he reiterates. “I can go to him about anything other than Reg from here on out, but that’s the line he drew; he said it may not be forever, but it's for however long he needs and I can’t expect any more from him there, can I.”

Remus blinks twice, though his jaw hasn’t settled back to its regular placement. “How is that going to work?” he raises. “Realistically, I mean; how does he expect you to separate yourself from Reg right now, when your entire sense of self has been lifted upside down after this?”

Sirius stirs with restless energy, feeling understood beyond measure by his boyfriend and yet, utterly determined to understand his best mate’s capacity. “Well, he doesn’t know that part,” he puts up, figuring he might as well say it despite the Look he gets for it. “There was a lot to go over, alright? We’d had a rough go, barely put ourselves back together, then you woke up and I didn’t want to be in that truck anymore; I just wanted to collapse and have you there and thankfully he let me go find you without too much hassle, so I’m sorry we cut it short but neither of us could give more of each other back there. We were spent, Remus.”

“Alright, then that might be something to clarify the next time you speak,” Remus advises. “I know I’m definitely curious about how you’re going to get around talking about Reg with him when this is affecting you so much; if you start taking shit about your mother, but the tale you’re remembering has Reg in it, do you have to omit his name from it? Is it blacklisted completely, or is sympathy for him itself what’s blacklisted and he can be name-dropped once or twice, here and there, and he won’t pitch a fit? Just a few examples of questions to consider clarifying with him because I sure want those answered myself.”

Sirius breathes in long, nodding for it when, now that Remus put it like that, he’s not sure where the line is either. He would maybe consider telling Remus what James’s advice for him going forward was, if it would at all make it possible for Remus to hear that and feel comfortable leaving London at all and it won’t. Sure, it could be a compliment for Remus to hear that he has James’s full blessing in terms of handling the Reg-side of Sirius’s tumultuous backstory, but Remus won’t take to being his sole caretaker very well and they’ll be right back at the main issue; Remus has to have Paris and Sirius can’t hold him back from everything it stands for.

“He wants me leaning on all of you for what you all can reasonably give me,” Sirius offers him. “For Reg, I have you and I’ve Andromeda to talk to, for everything else under the sun I have James, for riding around in cars and playing bops I have James and especially Lily, and I’ve a new roomie in Pete who’s going to be there for the in-betweens.”

Remus appears to be lost somewhere in time for he’s perfectly frozen there ahead of Sirius. “Andromeda,” he whispers, enchanted.

“Right?” Sirius echoes, not in a whisper, however. “What the fuck were we both on, not thinking of her? Of anybody, she would get it — if Bella or Cissy went and died on her in that way, she wouldn't know what to do with herself either, I'd wager. She hasn’t said either of their names kindly in years and for good reason, they've been terrible to her, but if either one of them bit it like that I know I’d be getting a call to get a pint with her and talk it out; what the fuck happened to me and why didn't I think of it myself?”

Remus smiles bright, though he appears to think better of it near-immediately after it. “I’m sorry, none of this is funny or a good thing to have happened to you, but she is so good for you, that much I know,” he expresses, earnest in expression and in his tone. “I'm glad you've had her, and frankly—" his lips together firmly, averting his eyes to a spot on the headboard to the left of Sirius’s head, speaking through grimaced teeth, "—I’m embarrassed to not have thought of her very specific and very lived-in wisdom at any point up until right this very minute.”

Sirius puts out a frank bark, and Cunt, is it nice to know he didn’t lose that in the throat punch that was the video call with James. “Bitch, you think you’re embarrassed?” he puts up. “I talked to her yesterday and didn’t think of her; you’ve known her for six months, you’re new to knowing immediately that her astounding presence is right there, but me? I don’t have that excuse, I don’t have any.”

Remus turns his head as far as he can to the right, as if shielding his whole, entire amusement from him, but that’s just not going to fly for Sirius. “No, get back here,” he goads, poking Remus’s upper chest for an extra measure.

Remus faces him once again after one prod further and catches Sirius’s right forefinger in the grip of his own right hand. “What do you think,” he raises. “Are you going to take that embarrassingly good advice?”

Sirius gives up a light but pointed laugh. “Well, I don’t think I’m going to be dropping bad news about my family over long distance ever again, so I’m sorry to say it but you’re who I’ve got for the moment,” he puts it. “That alright with you?”

Remus smirks fast, giving up a small frown. “I think we’ve established I jumped the gun on this one,” he slips him.

“Mmm, same here,” Sirius slips him right back. “So for right now, you’re what’s getting me through this and you’re doing a lot better than you think, but for the long term? It’s calming for me to know that she’s an option and I want that to be calming for you, too, going forward; you still get to go and have your fall because I’m going to be taken care of by all of you, in one way or another.”

Remus breathes in long, his gaze utterly unmoving. “OK, I’ve a few ideas for the present that I’d like to run by you,” he bids, leaning in to leave a kiss to Sirius’s captured fingertip.

Sirius gives a frankly gross noise from inside of his throat for a prompt, but Remus doesn’t appear to see it like that, the weirdo, but with a method like that, Sirius is putty and stuck nodding profusely. “Literally go,” he prompts.

Remus smiles for him. “So, first off, we're taking the day for ourselves and the Blue Lagoon, but with that, let’s forcibly remove any responsibility from you in regards to the boulder of a conversation you just had with him,” he puts down, but he doesn’t linger long enough for Sirius to feel arrested at the thought of not feeling all of this in droves. “Let’s lean into this; you don’t have control over anything today, so let him cool off, process, and do his own thing over there, but while you let him do that, I want you to try to remember that the two of you just came off of a heated conversation that’s been in the making for a long time so nobody was on their best behaviour in that truck and I want you to remember that he himself told you that his big rule may not be permanent.”

Sirius gives a minute noise in his throat that is less gross to his own ears than the last. “So, knowing that," Remus keeps on, "please remember that it may take time for Reg to be a topic that you two can raise without wanting to claw at each other, but it does feel unrealistic to expect the two of you to just never mention the name ever again to each other or even allude to him now that this is your reality, so let’s call this one an open-ended situation that definitely hurts the pride and the heart, but a situation that you two might just have to feel out as you go and that’s OK. For now, you can’t feasibly do anything about it, and let’s relish in that; we’re at a standstill, but we are on vacation, too, so it’s not a bad place to be stuck, is it?”

Sirius gives up an agreeing smirk, his lips pressed tightly together so he’ll keep resisting the urge to kiss him when he can tell Remus isn’t done yet. “And then from there, let’s try to remember that we both got caught up in the immediacy of this that didn’t actually have to be immediate and admit that we set each other off with this one,” he puts it blatantly. “Let’s try to alleviate the pressure that we both feel toward each other about the fall and stay in the summer since that’s literally where we are right now, let's remember that whimsy does exist in the background of all of our shit combined and try to take refuge in the fact that as tough as this is going to be for us, we’re both going to be OK in the end.”

Sirius knows, deep down somewhere and with a frank understanding, how a perfectly laid out plan tends to go for him, knows that it’ll be tougher than that during the in-betweens, the times when all noise stalls, the times when whimsy doesn’t feel all that attainable or even whimsical, but Remus did say we, over and over again, and he knows that Remus does tend to handle the in-betweens, the silences, and the finding whimsy when Sirius hasn’t got it in him.

Notes:

1. cursory reminder that this fic/story/brain child is always being worked on in some form or another, so there will be no world in which this tale doesn’t get finished; i know reading WIPs is a gamble, but not this time 🙏👌

2. got sick of only writing in dead silence and created a playlist specifically for writing purposes, so if any of y’all are writers/artists who are also in need of an ambient/lowkey playlist (w a few rando surprises bc i just do that for the fun of it) to have playing in the background while you work on your stuff, i’ll link it here? :

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6rGTtZ3vqH3aNfopy9TQTF?si=9QLRjzk5T5Cahe8qTUgk7g&dl_branch=1

Chapter 33: 33.

Chapter Text

It’s been quiet for a little while — with Sirius ruminating on having not once thought of Andromeda in his muddy headspace — when he rifles over to a brighter connotation to her very name, a breath of remembrance leaving him. It’s been so communally quiet, however, that he hesitates on whether he ought to wait to voice it; the news isn’t exactly time-sensitive, but this quiet layabout they’re wrapped in certainly is. 

Hesitated for nothing, he did; Remus certainly seems to have felt the breath Sirius took in with the for he lifts his head off of Sirius’s chest mere beats later, already piqued. “What is it?” he whispers, searching him. “Your eyes are bright, has to be something good.” 

Sirius gives in to a smile, reaching his right hand up to play around inside the mop atop Remus’s head. “Well, when I was on with her we sort of broke the no-shop talk rule, but she had such a good idea to pitch me, it just had to be done,” he shares. “Well, no, technically it was Ted’s idea, but she's obsessed with it and sold it to me in no time at all.” 

Remus gives up a light smirk, his expression going wonky as he braces his forearms on either side of Sirius’s waist. “I went into this trip with a sense the rule would be broken at least a few times before the end of it,” he slips him. “You won’t see me clutching any pearls.”

“Mm, did you?” Sirius returns, feeling warm in his cheeks for the callout. 

Remus gives into a smile that takes up most of his face. “Mhm, not that it’s a bad thing; you’re excited about it,” he offers for it. “Now, if all you were doing while here was wiring in to keep an eye on absolutely everything to do with the progress, I might have to take your mobile away, but you’ve not been doing that as far as I’ve seen.”

“I suppose that would be a good place to draw the line,” Sirius allows, reworking his mouth around a smile. “I am trying to stay focused on the now, but there are moments where I just can’t resist the topic, especially when she just knows how to incite curiosity in me before she’s even given me anything; she’s a genius, that one.” 

“Out with it, then,” Remus bids him, switching to bracing his elbows on the mattress rather than his forearms so he can put his chin in his hands. “What’s the idea?”

Sirius threads his fingers through Remus’s fringe, making his curls bounce back and forth. “Well, things are shaping up very well over there; three days ahead of schedule, even,” he slips him, garnering the impressed trill out of Remus he was certainly hoping to get and winding a curl of his around his right forefinger before he lets it free again, “and, we’re thinking that unless the place explodes in the meantime—”

“Don’t,” Remus scolds, giving him a frank frown that’s perfectly on display above his hands. 

“—OK, but why would that happen is my point?” Sirius attests, having a ball already while Remus stretches his right arm over to knock on his bedside table. “Baring a crisis, things are shaping up like we’re going to be able to throw a cold open, soft launch, practice run, whatever you want to call it, but specifically a friends-n’-fam type event ahead of the grand opening.” 

Remus takes in a new breath with a buzzing noise in his throat. “Do it,” he urges, giving Sirius’s middle a squeeze. “Oh, you’ll be so happy to host everyone and actually get to mingle; you two are going to be so busy on the official opening what with that built-in fanbase gathering in there for the show, you’ll hardly have much time to stop and wave at those you know who come in to check it out.”

Sirius pauses short, a new smile creeping onto his face. “That’s a great fucking point,” he trades him. “Short of making a mate a drink at the bar, when are we actually going to be able to celebrate the opening properly? We have to throw something ahead of time just for the OG’s.” 

Remus leans his head back as he throws up a guttural noise. “I hope I get to go to that one,” he shares.  

“Oh, we’re going to make sure you can,” Sirius maintains. “We don’t know when exactly the date is going to be yet because the idea only just got greenlit, but we both agreed that your presence at the event is contingent on whether we throw one at all.” 

Remus gives out a bolstered laugh. “Well, don’t say that,” he implores. 

“Mm, but we already did,” Sirius trades him, smiling frankly for it. 

Remus gives a weighted smirk, setting his right middle and forefinger against Sirius’s lips for a shush, and that does get Sirius to pause but it also means he’s going to leave a kiss against them. “If it’s before August thirty-first, I could likely swing it, but if it’s after that then we’ll be into wishier-washier territories.”

“I will do everything in my power and beyond to make sure it’s held before then,” Sirius reserves. “Now, here’s the fun part; we’re thinking that for entertainment, we’re going to offer slots for those who’d be down to play a set — Andromeda said all covers, no originals because, ‘boring; let’s have fun with it,’ says her, which I kind of love because, yes; live karaoke vibes where everyone’s able to just jam out, croon along, get into the sauce a little—”

“Just not for the performers,” Remus slips in there, making a wonky little face.

Sirius pauses for a vast nod and a wheeze. “One drink minimum for liquid courage and that’s it; you can order more when you’re done,” he echoes him, tapping the tip of both their noses in turn for their quick thinking. “But seriously, like what a fun idea; I mean, we know so many musicians already, we might as well highlight them and celebrate that when providing a solid space for up-and-coming performers of all kinds to use is rather the point of this whole venue in the first place — promoted shows can keep the lights on, but the soul, the soul is in the indies, I say.” 

Remus reacts openly, looking vaguely like he’s about to shriek but pulls it together for a heartened review of the idea. “I love that,” he registers, coming off right pulverized. “Are you going play something for it?” 

Sirius gives up a frank pfft. “Please, Andromeda says I’ve no choice and I’m inclined to believe her,” he slips him, smiling grand for Remus giving his own two cents of approval via a frank set of nods. “And I’m thinking, Lily would be down for signing on, Marlene and her girlies would put something stellar together, fucken’ Will can play fucking everything, actual bastard, so I will be making a formal request that he sign on and melt us all, and Andromeda and Ted? Those two could get up on that stage and make us all weep with their perfectly aligned harmonies, and the list could go on and on really, but between those two and me, we’d have a whole night slotted away just from people we know who would jump on, play some bops, light the house up.” 

Remus goes and gives up a resounding trill after trilling openly for each and every additional person listed, so this boy’s out here vibrating; Sirius’s alarm starts going beneath him, tucked very into his back-right pocket, but he’s at least thankful the blaring jingle waited for Remus to give that absolutely gorgeous trill of his. 

Remus lifts off of him, making it easier for Sirius to grab it out from under him, and Sirius silences the alarm set for half-ten and looks up at Remus hovering over him with a blink-n-smile combo. “Alright, I have to getting things organized, but that doesn’t mean you have to,” he attests, leaning down to drop a kiss on Sirius’s forehead. “I meant what I said; you get to take it easy this morning and that means you don’t have to even move until I have to make the bed, which can happen minutes before we have to vacate this room, deal?”

Sirius gives up a rather impish noise, but there’s a lot to contend with just there; the flexibility he managed to coax Remus into just last night for waiting until half-ten to start the gathering process was a feat in itself, but this, this is gymnastics for Remus. 

“Give kiss,” Sirius bids, puckering up. 

Remus swoops down to answer his bid and Sirius gives into a wry smile, watching him scoot down the bed on all fours, back himself off the edge of it, and move over to their amassed pile of luggage down by the end of his side of the bed, and — skivvies-clad as he is — chooses to kneel ahead of their clothing-specific duffel and unzip that one off the bat before tackling anything else. 

Sirius breathes in long, rubs at his eyes, his cheeks, then gives into a long stretch, observing on the other side of it all that the bed is just far less interesting to him now that Remus isn’t in it. It’s a cloud of a bed, no pretending it isn’t, and as sweet as it is to have been given expressed, well-intentioned permission to take it slow and bum around almost right up until go-time, actually going through with that feels unnecessary. It wouldn’t be all that on to let Remus handle every single aspect of resetting the room for one; even with the permission granted, he’ll have to rush to cover what share of the load Sirius isn’t handling and try to get it all done in just a half-hour, and besides that, he isn’t so sure a layabout is going to help him much at this point. 

Nothing that’s troubling him currently is about to go away any time soon, but luckily for him, neither is that curly-Q over there; he may as well get up and on with it. 

He gives out a decided breath and lifts off of his back, thinking first off he’ll get himself looking less like a bloke who’s cried most of the morning, but he pauses sitting upright as Remus looks up from the duffel he’s sifting through. “Hand me that?” he raises, gesturing toward what’s got to be his mobile still sitting on his bedside table, but gives a click of his tongue as Sirius sends a skeptical squint back to him. “I’m not going to ring him; I’m just going to check the weather.”

“Mm,” Sirius returns him, but he reaches for the phone as is. 

He pretends for a few moments that he’s about to send it toward Remus like he might do a flying disc, but quits that after receiving the huff he was sure hoping would come and scoots down the bed with it to reach it out to him. Remus gives him a twist of a smile as he takes it from him, turns it right-side-up in his grasp, and starts pressing his passcode in, meanwhile Sirius reaches his left hand out to dance his fingertips through Remus’s hair as he’s hoisting himself off of the bed, garnering the lad to look up from his screen and around at him. 

“I’m going to freshen up, get myself in order,” Sirius shares, nodding toward the bathroom, “and I’ll tidy up in there, too, so the reorganizing can be a tad more even, mm?”

“You can leave it,” Remus deters. “I’ll get to it.”

“No-wuh,” Sirius elongates, tossing a smile back at Remus as he heads there. “I’m already going to be in there, aren’t I? You focus on this room, I’ll get that one.”

“I want it on record that I said you could take it easy,” Remus calls after him. 

Sirius gives out a huff through the smile that’s still on as he moves through the doorway. “I remember it, I just don’t think repacking the toiletry tote is going to be what breaks me?”

“Oh, suit yourself, then,” Remus forfeits. “Make sure that sink looks clean when you’re finished in there.” 

“And I will,” Sirius returns him. He stops ahead of the sink and tackles his teeth first and foremost, checking himself out in the mirror while he does it and taking in his complexion; while it’s less blotchy and his eyes are way less puffy than he remembers them being on the call, it’s not going to be a day he can get away with skipping on moisturizing, that’s quite clear. 

After his teeth, he gives his face a turbo wash over the sink, taking care not to get any stray droplets on the counters and wind up creating more work for himself, and pats his face down with his facecloth. He fishes his moisturizer out of their tote and applies rather liberally for the weekend’s worth of tears rolling down his visage, but from there, he doesn’t see the point in throwing anything on it if he plans on cannonballing into a lagoon in due time, and he very does plan on that. 

He’s just putting the tube back into the tote when he hears footsteps approaching. “I’m almost done here,” Sirius makes known. “I needed to moisturize or I’d cry even more, but I’ll be quick as a lick with tidying this.” 

Remus gives a light huff as he makes it to the doorway. “I’m not coming to rush you,” he returns him, lifting Sirius’s swim trunks that are hanging from his left hand as a showcase of those being the very reason he’s here, but Sirius is a bit too busy being admonished by Remus’s overall look with those vividly ‘90s-water-cooler-cup-inspired swim trunks down below and Def Leppard up top; the choice to pair that simplistic black band tee with those effervescently white-based trunks is mostly born out of practicality when there’s really only so much clothing needed for an overnight trip and Def was what got thrown in for the second day, but what a brilliantly curated result either way.

“Yes,” Sirius vouches, flapping his facecloth toward the outstanding fit on display here. 

Remus glances down and up real quick, a quick smile showing on his lips. “It’s going to be hot out there,” he supplies, tugging on the waistband of Sirius’s trunks for effect, “and as good as you look in the Good Jeans, you might think about switching out of them.” 

Sirius hums a faint but piqued note. “I could have sworn it was a bit nippy last I was out there,” he raises, setting his facecloth on the counter. 

“Mm, I saw that, too, but I also saw that the temp had already gone up quite a bit and is only going to keep doing it throughout the day,” Remus supplies him. “That, and rather than have to deal with bathroom queues and stripping down in an outhouse-like structure once we’re at the lagoon, I figure we might as well wear our trunks there and not have to bother with either one of those pesky things, but it’s really up to you.” 

“You really do think of everything,” Sirius offers, moving over to him to accept the offer.

Remus smirks in a way that simply owns it, good for him, and hands the trunks over to him. Sirius folds them once and tosses them over his left shoulder, patting his pockets and grabbing his pack out of his back right one and his lighter out of the right one at the front, to which Remus gathers up both.

“I’ll put them in the beach bag,” he relays, leaving the items held curled in his right hand while he lifts his left one to smooth two fingers down the right lapel of the Henley. “Keep this on.” 

“Oh, I’m gonna,” Sirius assures, stripping down right there in the doorway. 

He does a fine job of it until he has to work the leg holes off of his ankles, which does have him teetering just a bit over to the left but Remus comes in with the quick save, resetting his balance and resting his hands on his shoulders to help keep him steady through the rest of the manoeuvre. Sirius gives up a sigh of accomplishment once they’re fully off, straightening up and handing the jeans over to him to go ahead and pack away, but all Remus really does with them for the moment is absently fold them over his right forearm while having himself a graze over Sirius’s bare self from the waist down. 

Sirius doesn’t make any moves to get his trunks on, smiling from up here where Remus’s gaze certainly isn’t; that, is busy taking quite the traverse over the uncovered terrain ahead of him, down Sirius’s legs, back up to his hips, stalling between them for an extended study, and from there, he reaches to lift the hem of the Henley to have a glance at his navel, eyes going between the points of the infamous ‘V’ he finds so stirring. 

“Should I put them on, or?” Sirius inquires. 

Remus looks up after a lagged beat, looks right back down again, and remains like that for another five actual seconds before huffing grand, dropping the hem of Sirius’s shirt. “Yes, yes; there isn’t enough time,” he attests, but Sirius does not believe he’s talking to him just now.

Sirius tugs the trunks off of his shoulder and takes to shimmying the both of his shoulders while shimmying the trunks on. He pops the waistband, swivels around in the doorway, and braces the doorframe on either side of him, striking a lustrous pose to show off his final form, but mostly to show off his caboose. Within a beat, Remus clasps at the back of his hips, leans in to gnaw at the right side of his collarbone with a frank, guttural noise, and arrows his own hips for a single thrust back there, registering quite plainly that he’d already be taking Sirius mercilessly if he only had the time to. 

Remus forcibly removes himself from this side of the main room, stooping down by their clothing duffel to pack the Good Jeans away, and Sirius sneaks a final, prideful glance at him before heading back to the sink with a wry smile on and a new saunter about him, confident that the eventual crash-together, whenever and wherever it may be, is going to blow the both of them sky-high. 

Next up, he works quick as a whip, gathering up their toiletries and fitting them back into their tote before pushing that aside to focus on getting that sink looking nearly as shiny as it was when they arrived while Remus, on the other hand, sounds as if he’s dragging a body across the floor and since he isn’t known to do that very often, presumably he’s organizing their luggage bags into a neat placement by the door; that’s much more his style. 

Sirius squints for a mental image of the main room as rinses the sink out, trying to locate if there’s anything of his he might suddenly see, and turns his head fast, locating the cord of his charger behind his bedside table, just visible to him via the doorway. “My charger,” he calls out to him, and in no real amount of time at all, Remus must've clambered onto the bed to get to it for his curly head and right arm pop out from the right of the doorframe, garnering a snicker out of Sirius. “Thank you.”

He finishes up with the sink, grabs the tote, and heads into the main room; their beach bag, clothing-specific duffel, as well as the duffel reserved for their towels, quilts, and the checkered picnic blanket have indeed all been moved over by the door with just their odds-n’-ends duffel sitting open, but it appears that the toiletry tote might’ve been the finishing touch on that one as well for Remus, over on the far side of the bed fixing up the comforter, pauses his bed-making to point at the thing and Sirius heads over to plop it into place and zip the duffel shut.

“That it?” Sirius raises, doing a three-sixty turn on his heel to inspect the room. 

“That’s it,” Remus echoes, patting the two pillows at the top of the bed with an accomplished finality and heading back his way. 

He hands Sirius his mobile, holds his own between his left arm and side as he picks his keys and sunnies off of the bureau near to the door, and Sirius decides to be a good lad and grab the heaviest of the luggage, leaving their beach bag and the duffel filled with light quilts and blankets for Remus to carry down. Remus opens the door first and nods for Sirius to go ahead, but before Sirius does that he gets another, final glance at the room, taking a mental picture of a place that housed and gave a lot to him, and the two of them as a whole, at that.

Additionally, Sirius makes sure to admire the place as they descend the stairs to the ground floor, running the fingertips of his left hand over the lovingly kitschy wallpaper that runs along the wall of the stairs, taking a mental picture of that reading nook that both he and Remus utilized for a gather and whisper session over one hot, hot man, and as if summoned by Sirius’s thanksgiving, one Hot Gardener can be seen heading up the hall from over in the dining area as he makes it to the foot of the stairs, and what a treat that is. The man’s got on a black ensemble today, a sleeveless shirt with a pair of jeans to match, bless him, but his accessory game is on point; a set of massive headphones over his ears, coffee in one hand and a pair of earth-stained gloves held in the other, and a pair of reflective, orange-tinted sunglasses propped on his head that really rounds off a sort of Dad energy that Sirius has to assume gets the bloke laid regularly, so on the whole? Hell of a look.

He puts his right arm back to stop Remus from going down ahead of him, tapping his mobile against the boy's navel intently so he’ll get a load of that, and Remus, stopping just beside him on the stairs, has his own sunglasses dutifully on already, good lad, but the new lift of his brows over those frames and that twist at his lips tell Sirius everything he needs to know about what his eyes are doing under there while the walking legend himself tips his head to them as he passes by the stairs, and Sirius supposes there that it does look a little like they stopped to let him go ahead of them.

Hot Gardener heads on through the main room and out the front door, and in his direct wake, Remus reaches up to mime like he’s jittering his sunnies up and down, but the impact remains just as thorough as it would’ve been if he had jostled them up and down, taking the already heightened moment out into the stratosphere and ensuring that Sirius heave-laugh his way off of the final step and through the small section of hallway to get into the front room but once he’s set a single foot in that room, his laughter subsides rather bracingly. 

He supposes, what with the law according to that Murphy bastard, it was probably inevitable that him narrowly dodging an untimely conversation with the matriarch of the inn on his way back upstairs would all but secure that he and Remus couldn’t feasibly leave the building, luggage and all, without being stopped on the way out, but that being said, knowing the inevitability of the matter doesn’t help him feel any more excited about the two of them getting waved down just as, if not more eagerly than this morning. 

The good news is, her time is currently being taken up by another patron at the front desk, but on the not-so-good news front, that wave she sent them was a clear request to wait up, and Remus, natural dote that he is, looks perfectly fine with heeding that request. In typical circumstances, Sirius wouldn’t really mind waiting up either; he does love seeing Remus interact with townies and it's not as if the Blue Lagoon’s going anywhere, but nevertheless, he almost got hailed down by the same lady while in the middle a crisis and looking a right state to boot, and truth be told, he’s no more interested in a conversation built on feigned pleasantries than he’d been an hour ago.

That same aversion to being pulled into unwanted conversation wells up in him, has him tapping Remus and luring him back into the hall, but most importantly out of view of the front desk. He spots a new nook tucked in beside the staircase with rows of wooden cubbies filled with books and tugs Remus into it, garnering a plainly bemused smile from Remus for the abrupt detour that then garners Sirius to lean up and in to speak near-directly into Remus’s right ear. “OK, listen, I’m sure that lady’s real nice, but she’s also relentless and I’m not in the mood,” he puts it plainly, keeping his voice to a certain whisper.

Remus automatically tilts his head closer to Sirius’s whispers to secure ample hearing. “How so?” he raises, his lips near Sirius’s left ear as he matches his hushed cadence with a definitive note of befuddlement and a slight hint of mockery in there, too. 

Sirius gives up a huff, but on a new intake of breath, he catches a whiff of sunscreen off Remus’s neck that has him both grateful that he initiated this close contact between them and less bothered by the mockery. “It’s like she’s determined to have a conversation with me that I, coincidentally, don’t want to have with her,” he insists, his voice at a hiss. “She already tried catching me on my way back in, literally rounded the desk when she spotted me as if I wasn’t clearly upset and on my way upstairs; I had to keep James on the line past the point of our conversation very much ending just so I’d have an excuse not to stop and talk to her while my face looked like a wet tomato—”

He trails off with something akin to a smile as a series of breathy, forcibly minute laughs leave Remus’s nose. “Well, she knows you’ve never been here before, might’ve been checking if you were having a nice time,” he offers. “Besides, your face looks great now.” 

“Well, thank you, but that’s a little beside the point,” Sirius puts in first. “I’m sure you can understand why I might just be zapped of the kind of energy needed for small talk today.”

There’s about a beat, maybe two that pass before Remus lifts the keys in his left hand up in offering and before Sirius can even process his blessings, Remus uses the both of his hands to fold the keys into Sirius’s right one. “Sorry, that is fair,” he whispers, giving a swipe of his left thumb over the back of Sirius’s hand. “Go on, I have to return the keycard to her, anyway.”

The grace being shown to him here has a triple effect on Sirius, garnering him to feel so tremendously grateful, spared, and stirred that he almost doesn’t want to bail now though he’s got expressed permission to, but he knows he's using precious escape time for this stolen moment. “Is there a back door somewhere I could slip out of?” he raises, putting them back on track but not without a quick entanglement of their fingers; that’s necessary, too. 

Remus tosses a glance toward the hall that would lead to the dining area, an overall section of the building Sirius is unfamiliar with in general, but the face he makes afterward suggests he's got his reservations about that idea. “There is one, but don’t go that way,” he advises. 

“Live lions out there?” Sirius puts up, waiting on a good enough reason not to simply scoot out that way and skirt around the side of the building. 

Remus smirks once, his lips at a twist. “Not usually, but guests don’t tend to leave the establishment that way, so you’d be drawing more attention to yourself than if you just walked out the front door,” he supplies, nodding toward the front room. 

Sirius does have his doubts about that considering the lady's right fackin’ there, but he has no choice but to believe Remus on this one when he can viscerally feel his precious time running out. “Alright, see you out there,” he echoes, leaning in to brush his lips over Remus’s right cheek in a semblance of a parting kiss, and before he can move an inch further, Remus is biding him to wait up, smiling politely as he tugs the strap of their recently repacked beach bag out to him.  

Sirius sizes up his leading man and that wry smile of his; a bold move, passing some of his luggage off on somebody already balancing two of the three duffel bags while Remus only has the third one and that very same beach bag being pawned off on him right this moment — but on the other hand, this cheeky move does give Sirius a cumbersome, yet convenient excuse to head out ahead of him and start packing the truck up. 

Sirius drops his head down back up again in a swift motion, latching the handles over his neck before swivelling on his heel on the next beat, but Remus, who must have expected him to throw the beach bag over an arm and let that be it, lodges his whispered complaint in under a beat. “Not from the neck,” he hisses. 

Too late, so sad, but his escape mission has officially commenced and Sirius feels balanced and ready, duffel one held at his left hip, duffel two at his right one, beach bag hanging comfortably over his chest and not digging into the back of his neck, keys in his left hand, mobile held up and ahead of him in his right one to showcase a hurried, busy energy about him. He strolls out from the hallway and heads through the front room with his gaze set on his vague reflection on his screen so not to catch the eye of either person over at the front desk, reminding himself as he strides purposefully toward the door that he routinely snuck out of a house with much more obstructive security measures than a simple, extroverted business owner.

The first step on the other side of the front door comes with a sense of renewed freedom and a frankly staggering wall of heat compared to what Sirius experienced earlier, but nevertheless, he suspects that the freedom of getting away from the face of the inn entirely will feel better than this, with or without the thickness in the air, and goes right about achieving that true freedom, keeping to his quick stride as he heads for the porch stairs. 

A series of snips to his left alert him to the newest location of the Hot Gardener, currently and very appropriately trimming the hedges to the left of the stairs, shoulders shimmering underneath the near-midday sun beating down on the property, and Sirius does keep his directive on the truck, but he’d have to be in a coma not to have a lil’ looksie at the scenery while he’s going by. The man pauses his task to pass his left arm over the sheen of sweat beading at his forehead, letting the trimmers hang down toward the grass from the grip of his right hand, and quite suddenly things have locked into place, as far as Remus’s interest goes; the man may be a tad outdoorsy for what he knows Remus’s type to be, but a fine, sturdy set of forearms on a man will always, without fail, work on Remus.

He makes it to the foot of the stairs before Hot Gardener topples the headphones down from his ears to leave them hanging off-center on his collarbone. “Oi, pass even one of those here,” he bids, switching back to his role as the on-call bellboy around these parts.

To say that Sirius wouldn’t be inclined to let a muscle-clad outdoorsman lug his things out to the truck just for the experience would be misleading, but with that said, he’s filled with an awareness of two very distinct things that take much more precedent; one, while Hot Gardener does indeed live up to his legend, the most intriguing part about the man is that Remus finds him such a delight, and two, he knows he’d enjoy the experience a trillion-times more if Remus were present to attend the show with him. 

“Nah, I’m just fine,” Sirius declines, keeping on. “Made it this far, I can hack it the rest of the way.”

Hot Gardener makes a face from over there, waving those suddenly very comically large pincers in his right hand toward the luggage tree that is Sirius. “At least give me the bag,” he returns him. 

“Delicate work happening here,” Sirius instils, tipping his head yonder where he plans to go. “I suspect removing even one of these babies is sure to set me right off balance, and we can’t have that.” 

A last attempt falls on some purposefully deaf ears, but not without Sirius passing a spirited thanks-but-really-I’m-good back to him as he steps off the front path and aims to cross diagonally over the sprawling front lawn to get over to the lot, but since he has a fair distance to go he gets his mobile unlocked, pulls up his text messages, scrolls down to press on Lily’s name, crafting a simple, yet hopefully enticing message.

we’re planning a cover night for a cold open situation we want to throw ahead of the grand opening, sometime in late aug; wanna play a few tunes for it? six or seven songs, bops and/or jams highly welcome, wouldn’t say no to a ballad or two, and i’ve actually been thinking about moving the piano there full-time as is because at this point it’s just collecting dust at mine and it’d look damn good in there, so you could totally use it for your set

He sends that off, backs out of that window to scroll to Marlene’s name, and fashions a message with similar details but a great deal more flair that’s just very specific to his girl and his girl alone. He sends that one off as he steps around the side of a car in his left peripheral, weaves off of the grass and onto the lot, and puts a pause on his light, preemptive networking, crossing over toward the truck and unlocking it from a few steps away. 

He reaches his mobile across his front and lifts the hem of his shirt, slipping it between the waistband of his trunks and his left hip bone to keep it lodged somewhere for now, heads up on the passenger side, and opens up the backseat, starting the unloading process with the beach bag first since he does actually hear Remus’s woes, even if Remus doesn’t always see the proof of it. He holds the bag steady as he fishes around inside it to feel for his pack, but very quickly finds that both it and his tiny red lighter have been neatly zipped into a small pocket near the rim of the bag that he frankly did not think of utilizing at any prior point, but he could kiss Remus for thinking of it for him.

He slips the lighter into the pack for now and stuffs the pack between his teeth to free up his hands, figuring he’ll reserve the seats for the duffels to perch on and leaving the beach bag down on the floor behind the passenger seat. He aligns the two duffels he has on him so that they’re sitting vertically on the horizontal backseat, which does make things a bit of a tight squeeze back here, but it’ll leave room on the far side of the backseat to fit the third duffel into without having any of them overlapping and potentially obscuring Remus’s view out the back window, so that’s that.

With that done, he steps back to look around the side of the open door to get a solid glimpse of the porch from here, checking whether his man is already on his way over here and therefore a puff could realistically wait until they’ve stopped somewhere else, but the answer is a no for there is no Remus to be seen heading his way just yet, rather the patron that’d kept the lady occupied long enough for Sirius to sneak out is only just leaving through the front door, suggesting Remus has already been co-opted. Sirius pulls a bit of a face as he takes his pack from between his teeth, finding the very concept that the lady really had Remus wait this long for an exchange of hospitality a b-i-i-i-t much, but alright then, he’ll have that puff. 

He makes sure he’s got the keys on him in case the truck somehow automatically locks on them and, in turn, them right out of the beast, bumps the door shut behind him, and heads up toward the front of the truck, leaving the keys on top of the engine and slipping both his lighter and a cigarette free from his pack. He leaves that by the keys and lights up, puffs the cherry to life as he turns to take a perch on the bumper, and tugs his mobile back out, settling in with the line of his back leaning against the front of the engine. He figures he’ll at least get the initial ball thrown over to Will, pitching him a tad more detailed picture of the event and, beyond simply wowing the audience with his repertoire, insists that the man had better be in attendance so he can see Sirius’s new digs properly.

Sirius closes up his mobile, turns to leave it on the engine, and settles in again, feeling good about getting some of the word out there for those he knows with nearly no doubt would sign on, but without the distraction that fashioning similar texts for three different people, he's also feeling hot as balls; it’s dual, this feeling inside. 

He shuts his eyes against the very real heat that’s come in compared to the chill of the morning, wiping at the sheen at his forehead with his free hand, the relative shade of the full branches of the silver pine that hang over the truck provide some relief, but the heat is alive and well in the air, and for that, Sirius knows he’d have cooked in the Good Jeans had he stuck with wearing them so thank Cunt twice over for Remus Lupin’s busy, thoughtful brain. 

He opens his eyes again, having a new haul off of his cigarette as he casts a weighted, lidded glance over toward Hot Gardener now raking the branches of those hedges into a pile and can’t help but find the man’s commitment to yard work on a day like this, without any sort of cover from above, a strange, mystifying thing; he’d never, but then again, that’s likely one of the reasons why he hasn’t coined the nickname ‘Hot Gardener’ for himself in his time. That, and the fact that he couldn’t grow a lima bean if asked to. 

He looks back over to the porch and upon still not seeing a sign of his curly-Q, really can’t help but wonder if he’s supposed to be going back in there to retrieve his partner-in-all or whether that would end up being unappreciated; on some level, Sirius knows that he would have quite a bit of fun playing up some huffy, eager-to-leave husband energy to Remus’s doting, can’t-possibly-leave-without-stopping-for-a-chat wife energy, but Remus would likely call the bit capital-R Rude and then Sirius would be fast-tracked on the road to a lecture, but on a different, more personal level, going back in there would be a rookie move when there’s a very real possibility of getting himself co-opted into a conversation he’d just been given a shot at avoiding. 

And truly just after thinking it, Remus appears at the top of the porch stairs, and then any and all thoughts in Sirius’s head are reserved for that absolute unit up there; his hair looks amazingly floofed thanks to Sirius’s handiwork, the muted shade of Def and that deep purple-and-white logo over the front only enhancing the already heavy contrast between the white backdrop of those trunks and the smattering of purple and blue lines overtop, but out in the sun like this, the white of those trunks pops beyond belief. It’s a whole, entire look, babey, and to say that Sirius isn’t right beaming as feasts eyes on his supremely leggy man looking over his way this very moment would be a bald-faced lie.

He keeps his beam going from across the sprawling lawn to offset Remus’s frown, but the lad descends those stairs at a wickedly quick pace and keeps that frown where it is so he really must be feeling guilty for taking so long in there, but hey, no skin off Sirius’s back. Now behind Remus due to those speedy legs of his, Hot Gardener faces toward the porch railing, bending down as he hand-bombs his pile of hedge trims into a garbage bag rather than rake it in there, and Sirius tips his chin toward the show happening over there, his expression quite suggestive, but the poor lad misses the moment completely for Hot Gardener straightens up before he can get Remus to look back in time.

No matter, Hot Gardener looks round and understandably spots Remus, calling something to him that has him swinging around back toward him while staying in motion; a brief back and forth ensues while Remus just keeps moving, backwards-walking it, and the wave he gives Hot Gardener as he turns back to face the direction he’s headed in does come off a tad lackluster if a bit dismissive, uninterested even, and well, that’s notable to Sirius. 

He supposes Remus really could just be trying to be quick about things, and it's certainly true that his selective, yet nevertheless Oscar-worthy performances of acute heterosexuality crop up from time to time and quite unpredictably, but here, now, and for that guy? Take the legend status and oral history of the Hot Gardener out of it for a second, that is still the very same man the two of them gathered together in a reading nook at the top of a staircase to whisper heartily about just yesterday, not to mention the suggestive glee the two of them shared over a sighting of him just minutes ago, and for that, Sirius would’ve expected to see at least something going between them when Remus turns back toward him; a pointed smile, a light shoulder-bop that Sirius could then match from over here, the slightest acknowledgment of the bloke that’s been periodically spurring the two of them in these ways, but Remus’s face is just devoid of anything readable — anything emotive, really. 

Sirius takes in a new, rather delicate haul as he sends a tentative, quizzical smile toward the lad already on the lot and rapidly closing in on the truck at that, and look, guilt for holding a person up can do a lot to Remus, but Sirius is literally just sitting here having a puff and being held up doesn’t typically lead to Remus clearing that much space in a just a collection of seconds; perhaps the guilt was propelling him in this way initially, but something must have happened between the stairs and here. 

“Did he give you shit for the bags?” Sirius raises, tipping his head past Remus and toward Hot Gardener again. “I told him I was fine, he’s probably just yanking your chain a bit.” 

He can tell by Remus’s brow formation over his frames that he squints. “What?” 

“Well, he tried — I mean, never mind; if you’re confused, then I’m sure that’s not what he said at all,” Sirius offers next, looking up at Remus from his perched position. 

“He said bye and such,” Remus returns him, passing by the front of the engine and heading up on the driver’s side of the truck. 

Sirius looks over his right shoulder after him, sending a squint of his own toward the lad opening up the backseat. He calls a thanks back to him for — well, Sirius isn’t exactly sure what, but setting up the back for him to easily just slip his duffel in there is the sole thing it could be when there’s not much else to thank him for, so he gives lifts a thumbs-up to him and shakes it around a bit; all good concerning him, just not with Remus clearly when he certainly shuts that door with a frank clack once he’s done. 

He follows Remus with his gaze from the backseat up to the front, where he perches on the bumper to the right of him, and, once there, he can study his profile a bit better, feel the disgruntled air about him even more so. “Well, what happened there, Remus?” he raises. 

“Where?” Remus counter-raises him, and how on earth can he be more bemused than he is right now?

Sirius gives into a wonky expression, pointing his cigarette toward the inn. “Hot Gardener is over there doing some hot gardening as we speak, and you gave no notice to how spiritually correct and important that is,” he maintains, going for a haul as a dot of punctuation.

Remus gives into a light reel. “Yeah, I saw him?”

Sirius pushes his haul back out in three, rather frank gusts. “Snubbed him, maybe,” he comments, eyeing the half-cigarette in his right hand. 

Remus gives a scoff that takes Sirius’s gaze back up and over to him. “I didn’t snub him,” he denies. “I was leaving; I don’t think he expected me to stop and have a whole confab, and frankly, I wasn’t about to.” 

Sirius repeats the word ‘confab’ through a bemused wheeze. “Well, you made that exceptionally clear, then,” he slips him. “I’m just saying, if that’d been me you flippantly engaged with like that, I’d be blocking out time to lament about it in my diary tonight.” 

Remus gives a sharp tch that just doesn’t seem necessary for the bit. “Stop that, I just wanted to go,” he retorts. “She was a lot in there and I want to get out of here — which is not a hint for you to hurry up with that; finish it, it’s fine, being out here is better than in there.” 

Sirius blinks quite a few times despite his eyes taking on a more rounded shape. “Well, what kind of a lot?” he bids, going for a haul off the half-cig Remus gave him grumpy permission to finish off. 

Remus goes with a frank sneer. “Well, all the hyper-focusing she did on you sure felt like a ton of a lot,” he supplies, low in his throat. 

Sirius scoffs out his haul. “What’d I do?” he puts up. 

“Didn’t stop to say hello for one,” Remus quips, garnering another, more prominent scoff out of Sirius for it. “Stop, I told her you were shy, which I’m probably going to laugh about eventually, but not right now; I’m not in the mood.” 

Well, that, Sirius finds quite transparent. “OK, but that can’t be what all this is about,” he extends, circling his left hand toward the aura Remus is keeping. 

“She fished about you so hard in there, it’s like she was packing for a day trip,” Remus fumes. “I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

Well, wouldn’t be the first random lady to wonder what the hell Sirius was all about, but the implications here are a bit too powerful to ignore; he can't have made a good impression, and judging by the amount of fishing Remus alluded to with that rather prime analogy, shit had to have gone south fast if his mood went and did a one-eighty so quickly, but literally what was up with that eager smile of hers, then? Why’d she round the desk so quickly just to cross Sirius's path and go fishing once she ultimately failed at it?

“Like in a — ‘who’s this hooligan rubbing shoulders with our sweet, baby Remus’ way?” he raises, and it wouldn’t be the first time nor will it likely be the last he’ll be coined the bad influence on a typically much better-behaved counterpart either, but Sirius has a clean streak out here; he already had Hope and Lyall in the bag before he’d even set foot on Welsh soil, but he sure has them now, things appeared to go over well with Do, things went great with Beatie and he didn’t even know she was linked to Remus, he even got Bubba to throw him a one-two, and this lady’s going to break his winning streak? Fuck that and her while they’re at it—

Remus comes in over his fuming to throw up a strong aversion to that read of it. “Cunt, no, I think she likes you actually,” he smiles, but it’s far too tight a smile for Sirius to celebrate, and equally too tight not to have even worse implications behind it than the fishing did. “She was so stuck on the word friend, it lost all meaning; how’s it your friend keeps slipping off being I can get properly introduced? How long have you known your friend? How’d you meet this friend, anyway? Did your friend enjoy the harbour, then? Funny how the middle questions had little or nothing to do with the front and back ones, extra funny how she never asked any of those the time we brought Tom here with us, and if I could have somehow pretended not to hear the annotation on every single 'friend,' there still would have been no way in hell I could’ve ignored her blinking at me over and over again like she was convinced I’d give her the confirmation through morse code.” 

Sirius tries, tries so very hard not to succumb to a fit; he’s got a haughty and huffy Remus on his hands which can already be a precarious, chest-heaving situation, but no — no, morse code? That’s hilarious.

“That’s hilarious,” he puts down, and then immediately regrets it. “No — trying again; I’m sorry, this is wild already.” 

Remus reaches to snag the wee bit of viable cigarette off of Sirius, who definitely lets him take it and suck it right down. “I don’t know if this counts as wild, but I wasn’t looking to be interviewed Oprah-style on my way out of there?” he raises it.

Sirius pushes a half-smirk out his nose, a frown tugging down on the corners of his mouth. “Of course not, and we’re going to let you off the hook for that, mm?” he counter-raises.

The assurance either goes in one ear and out the other or Remus wasn’t quite ready for it yet. “I waited around for her, too, and for that? I should have put that keycard down on her desk and said, peace,” he attests, dropping the cigarette butt to the ground and putting it out with a single kick, and that’s funny enough, but the idea, no, the sheer concept of Remus giving up a ‘peace’ and promptly leaving is so incredible, it really almost takes Sirius out in the middle of his rant, “but no, there I go thinking she just wants to check-in, be hospitable, and instead, I’m meant to live out an actual nightmare where she just keeps digging and digging and digging for a legitimate descriptor for you out of me, which I never did give her no matter how many different ways she tried asking what our actual deal was; sorry, Mimi, but who the fuck are you?”

Sirius’s eyes take on a whole new shape over Sassy Remus making such an appearance, but it doesn’t help his state one bit, nor the brand new information for that lady looks so much like a Mimi it hurts, but he’s not supposed to point that observation out; not now, certainly. “This does suggest I should’ve gone in and saved you, so I’m going to say sorry again,” he maintains, reaching to pet Remus’ hair as the lad moves off of the bumper to retrieve the butt off of the ground. “I thought about it, but I wasn’t sure if I should and you came outside within the next beat so I don’t think it’d have made a difference by then, but still, I wish I’d just stayed with you.” 

Remus shakes his head fast, lifting to his feet at once. “No, I don’t even want to think about how much worse it would have been if you’d stuck around,” he insists, busy talking but not too busy to gesture with the crushed butt in his right hand that Sirius then swipes to stuff it in his pack for now — and also get Remus a full one, he looks like he could use one. “And don’t say sorry for getting out of there; it gave me the perfect excuse to get out of there so not to keep that friend of mine waiting.” 

Remus gives a tight little grin paired with a lofty head tilt back and forth as he moves to sit beside Sirius again, acting as a wonderfully snark-filled jeer that trips Sirius up while lighting the new cigarette, but he still aims to keep his chest convulsions slight — whether that’s working or not is another question entirely. He puffs off of the end of the cigarette to get a spark going so all Remus will have to do is puff and go, holding it up for him once it’s good and going, and the wholly disgruntled boy takes it with a purposeful budge against Sirius’s right shoulder that says his thanks for him.

Sirius reaches back to toss the pack back onto the top of the engine, taking in a breath with the first haul Remus takes off this one and exhaling in time with him. He leans into him a little, bringing his right arm up around and behind Remus’s back to rub at it; the execution of the tale is well and truly funny, but it’s kind of brutal that Remus had to be the one pounced on like that, and the more he thinks of it, the more he can’t resist widening his foot stance so they’ll be touching from shoulder to shoe, happy to weather the storm along with him and be a source of warm support through it.

Remus shifts his weight over to the left and leans into Sirius’s lean, but that’s about all the tenderness the guy can muster for the moment when he huffs out his next haul in a single, powerful cloud. “I’m not trying to be a dick here, I like her fine — I like her son a lot better than I do her though I wouldn't share that with her, but it was such a weird thing for her to glom onto like that,” he states, splaying he both of his hands frankly. “There's no world in which I was going to give her that information, not on my way in and certainly not on my way out; neither option was on the table for her.” 

Sirius puts up a light pfft for it. “Well, no,” he passes him. “And full offense to perfectly-named Mimi, but I didn’t pick up on a sense that she’d be someone who needed to know, she’s just a lady to me, hence why I didn’t hang about in the room long; I mean, I thought it’d be easier and clearly that wasn’t the case in the end, but if you’re supposed to be a dick for not being all that down to hand that information to her, then I’m a dick, too, and we can just be a pair o’ mighty dicks together.”

Remus’s lips twitch around his filter as he pulls a new haul off of it, but he gives a disparaging breath once that’s out of him. “She’s just not someone I think about much and she’s certainly not on the list of people who get to know; she’s not Do, who can and should get to know about you and this,” he tacks on, rolling his hands in a wide circle ahead of the two of them. “She’s not Bubba, who I have to assume will hear about the news in due time if he hasn’t already, but that man’s been my dad’s pseudo-mentor since before I was ever in the picture so I can’t and don’t get much of a say for that, and frankly, I have to be OK with the fact that those two are going to need to talk to people in their lives about the good news they’ve just got from their son, but that’s different.

Sirius could sing, he loves hearing it categorized as good news. “Exactly, king; speak it,” he coaches, letting a smile go. “That’s a perfect destination; those cases are specific, special ones for very specific and special people, and I’m hella proud of you for not only thinking of that, but like, actively recognizing that because you’re a good and fair lad that way, but it’s still good and fair to have drawn a line in the sand and put Mimi on the other side of it.” 

“She’s way over on the other side,” Remus attests, as if he’s being emboldened by the millisecond, and — good, he should be. “Again, she’s fine, but for fuck’s sake, she’s just a lady my family knows, that’s it, and how would that qualify her to know a single thing about anything to do with my love life?” 

“Well, it doesn’t, so we can go ahead and add rando, distant family acquaintances to the no-tell list,” Sirius raises him. “And you know what, at this point, it's at your discretion; I’m not going into situations out here expecting anything to do with introductions anymore because it is just so much better to let you surprise me when you’re going to drop the B-word, so let me make it clear that I don’t expect you to go telling the mayor or the town crier about us on the way out of this hamlet either, so as far as I’m concerned we can add townies far and wide to the no-tell list, too, how’s that?”

And that, luckily, has Remus giving up a half-laugh with his newest exhale, but it’s something. “I love that you’re getting this,” he trades him. “In general, but especially for that, it just felt so unnecessary; I’m not her mate, I’m not her pseudo-son, I’m the son of a semi-frequent patron of theirs, and I don’t see how or why I should have to pretend we’ve been getting our nails done for years and years together.” 

Sirius breathes in fast and holds it, nodding to showcase that he’s right there with him but he’s only going to speak when he knows he won’t explode. “I’m with you here, pal,” he supplies him. “Having the inkling is one thing, but did she really have to involve you in it? Where’d the allure of a good mystery go, hm?” 

Thank you?” Remus rings out, flailing his cigarette hand all around before remembering the thing being held in it and what it’s there for, taking a good, long haul off it before barreling onward. “I mean, what is this trip, hm? We’ve got a lady over there trying to shield her kids from us so they won’t catch the gay, we’ve got a lady over here pulling muscles trying to fish for descriptors for us, and what's up with it; what happened to people pretending we don’t exist or just completely ignoring the fuck out of us? Historians will look back and call us some exceptionally close mates, but not Mimi, you hear? No no, her eyes are open and she wants us to know she sees us; everybody clap for Mimi, now.” 

Sirius cannot (cannot, cannot, cannot) help a long, deep laugh from escaping him, nor can he help the substantial bark that sharks its way out at the end because it got funnier as it went along, but Remus is either not down to laugh or he’s completely inside of his head for one of his favourite laughs of Sirius’s doesn’t get him smirking even. “I’m sorry, you’re funny,” he insists, putting a set of praying hands ahead of his mouth in a bid for a pardon. “Listen, it is wild we got both sides of the spectrum out here, but that's not the funny part, you are; Sassy Remus really turned out for this one and I’m living for it.”

“I’m not trying to be sassy; I’m baffled, that’s what’s happening here,” Remus returns him, tossing the end of his cigarette to the ground and effectively curb-stomping the embers out, and while Sirius does manage to keep his expression fairly even as he watches Remus beat the well-dead cigarette into the ground and doesn’t see how there’s any real way they can call this a bit of bafflement and get away with it, he doesn’t really have the time to start there when Remus shotputs a new assertion out of himself. “That’s the other thing.” 

Sirius can’t begin to guess what the other thing could feasibly be, tapping the small of Remus’s back with his right hand “Give it,” he prompts, readying himself for just about anything. 

“All I ever said to her was that you’d never been up to the harbour before; that’s it, nothing salacious about it,” Remus attests. “She saw you waiting in the hall and it just made sense not to lie; that is why we came here, and she gave me no indication she thought we were anything, but fuck me, at some point, she must have seen or heard something that convinced her to go to a direct source for confirmation, and I don’t know what it could have been; I know we’re gooney and we snuck a poke in here and there, but we picked our moments well in there, or at least I thought?” 

Sirius takes a breath of consideration in, but he doesn’t know what might’ve caught her or somebody else’s attention as more-than-strictly-platonic behaviour either. They didn't exactly go anywhere in there unless it was their room or the stairwell to and from it, but it could have been anything they did on the wayL a quick poke or caress that didn’t fly under the radar, a lingering set of heart-eyes from one of them to the other, a glimpse of the two of them flying up the stairs and not coming out of that room for a good long while, a wanton cry or the telltale sound of bed being moved around quite a bit echoing out in the hall out into the hall, or, in a different vein, she or somebody who told her bout it could have spotted Remus physically guiding him upstairs while he was a true wreck; he wasn’t seeing much of anything heading up, trusted Remus to lead him there, and he didn’t even know that Remus was already handling the crisis by getting him up there so swiftly, he was just that out of it, but literally any, all, just some of those options, or something he hasn't thought of yet could have been the news of the night for all they know, and that’s not something Remus should be glomming onto here. 

He blinks out of his rushing head as Remus huffs a grand note, lifting up and pushing off of the bumper to stoop down to get the butt off of the ground, and how he has the mind to even bother with it at this point, Sirius will never know. “I don’t know what made her think it either, but it wasn’t her business to go asking that of you,” he instils. 

Remus clicks his tongue, lifting to his feet in one swoop and turning to snag the pack off of the engine. “Obviously not, but that’s not really—” he starts, going still with the pack in one hand and the butt of the cigarette bunched in the fingers of the other, taking an uneasy breath in. “I didn’t check well enough last night; I did at first, but I — I was so focused on getting you up the stairs, somewhere quiet, you know, and if that’s what did it then I’m not sure how to avoid this next time? You needed me, I had to help you get up the stairs, you weren’t walking steadily so I walked steadily for you; that’s it, that’s all, and I’m so fucking sick of even having to watch my back like this, especially when I need to be having yours.” 

Sirius’s chest weighs down on him for that one — no, no, no. No. “OK, no, this is exactly why I don’t think it’ll do any good singling anything specific out, but especially that,” he instils, reaching to rub at the side of Remus’s right hip and realizing he'd done it a true beat afterward. “Look, see? You leading me away from the other fucking lady, leading me up there last night, it's automatic, and when you need me, I’m a handsy little bloke, and we both respond so well to that; I don’t want us taking four steps back after taking so many forward in this exact area because of one lady who didn’t know what a boundary was.” 

Remus breathes in long, but there’s a hitch halfway through it that Sirius hates to have heard, and then, watching him fester while struggling to get that stupid cigarette butt inside of the pack with a pair of shaky hands is officially too much. “Hey, no; pause, breathe, and fuck her, yeah?” he bids, reaching up to brace Remus’s wrists so he’ll have a hold on them, but maybe that’ll help them be a little more steady for the job too; two birds with one stone. “She’s the one who made the blunder, not you, not us.”

Remus fumbles with the pack despite the hold on his wrists. “Blunder,” he repeats, pausing altogether with the task.  

Sirius nods for it, going ahead and slipping the butt out of Remus’s vague grip and sticking it in the pack for him; no harm done there. “Blunder, mistake, faux-pas, bad judgement call,” he lists off, tossing the pack back onto the engine. “Don’t let this supreme oversight of hers follow you out of here; I say, leave it right here where she is.” 

Remus fixes up his face and nods to agree in a way that Sirius knows isn’t genuine at all. “Well, better get going, then,” he coopts it, lifting his hands once with a prim smile and following that up with a rather royal gesture for Sirius to lead the way.

Sirius stays put. “Remus,” he gives calmly. 

“Sirius,” Remus matches him. “Let’s go.”

Sirius blinks at him. “You are shaking,” he raises it. “Am I supposed to just let that keep going?”

“I am not,” Remus returns, and well, right now he’s holding his arms very still, so yes, that is technically true, but if he stopped doing that, the tremors would come right back. “I know exactly what you’re doing and I don’t like it, Sirius.” 

“Trying to help, yep,” Sirius advertises, putting his head on a tilt.

Remus puts out a disparaging noise. “It’s too soon for that, I’m not there yet,” he attests, turning and rounding his side of the engine for the driver’s seat. “One minute you say you’re living for Sassy Remus, the next you’re jumping right over to reasoning with him; make up your mind.”

“I want both those things,” Sirius insists, standing up and looking after him.

Remus swivels right back around on a dime. “No, you want me to process out loud with you, but not too, too much, never that,” he returns, giving a frankly staggering amount of jazz hands that are more likely to mean signalling a double wave-off, and Sirius does not know what to do with how amused and bruised that has him feeling, but he doesn’t have time to figure out what to do with it either. “Forget it, I will get over it myself and feel unearthly bad that I said or did any of this shit; don’t you worry about that.”

“Actually, I’m sure you are going to do both once the dust settles and I’d rather help you along so you’ll have a better chance of doing more of the first and not the latter,” Sirius retains, the words coming out of himself so quickly he has to pause and stay with them to realize he’s right on the money.

His stomach stirs, winding into a firm knot as if to agree, and that’s it, Sirius knows he's right; T-minus anytime now, Remus is going to be overwhelmed with remorse for the mouth he had on him, the snapping he’d done, the ranting and raving he did, the space he took up when normally he’d rather take much, much less, and there’s no chance in hell Sirius is going to let him shut down and stew with it all his own just so the conversation can be over with, absolutely not.

“I don’t want you thinking you have to get over it yourself; I’m right here so you’d better use me to help you get there, but I’m not just going to let you dissect every waking second we were in there and course-correct yourself either,” Sirius maintains. “If I could rewind the tape and zip you out of there with me before she could have ever had the chance to talk to you, I’d do it in a heartbeat, but since it already happened and I can’t find the rewind button, imagine what good it would do if we let that be all that it was; her mistake, not ours.”

Remus gives up a profound scoff, swivelling around on a dime taking two strides forward to swipe the keys off of the engine but doing it through a great lean that ensures he won’t get too close to Sirius’s reach, and that — that’s just pout-inducing honestly when Sirius was absolutely going to intercept his path if he could manage it. “Well, that sounds quick and easy, but you can’t just tell me to speak it and then shut it all down the moment you suddenly don’t like what you’re hearing,” he attests, stalking for the driver’s seat and right lampooning the door open. “Don’t mess with me like that.” 

Sirius can’t help falling into a deep, imploring frown nor can he help backing up three good steps so he’ll be better seen through the windshield; hands on his hips, frown on display, and a distinct lift to his brow line, but even his best commanding pose does shit-all for him when all he gets is two prime sets of the bird sent right back through him through the glass, and it’s almost enough to get Sirius laughing, it is, just not quite. 

Grumpy Remus is one thing, he’s become easy as pie to navigate. A moody, mouthy Remus, completely doable with some extra breathing practices and an open mind. Sassy Remus, a godsend and a riot at once, a bit like the Aurora Borealis in that one just can’t predict when a right stunner is going to come along and blitz you; could happen when he’s just fine, grumpy, moody, and certainly when he’s fucked right off, and that last one is what they’ve got here. Remus isn’t just baffled like he’s so sure he is, he isn’t just riled up, it’s much more than that, more than all the sass being rightfully dolled out, more than misfiring at Sirius when those are only symptoms of a bigger issue; this is a fucked off, transgressed, and frankly, agency-thieved Remus, and he was all of that before he ever set foot outside, wasn't he.

Down to it, if Remus feels coerced, cornered, hit from all sides, strong-armed into something he wants nothing to do with, he’s going to shrink inward first and he’s going to blow outward next, and for just now, Sirius has to think it can only help if he just gives the poor lad a breather before trying again.

Remus starts up the truck, gets his window down, and leans his curly-Q head out of it, setting a frank gaze on Sirius. “I’d like to leave,” he announces.

Well, alright, never mind that breather, then; he probably does want to leave this place in the dust and twice as much so now to get the topic completely mowed over, but Sirius isn’t that daft.

He walks him and his hands-to-hip stance over to the driver’s side window, peering up at the direct center of Remus’s lenses with a steady gaze. “I’m sorry, but no,” he denies, clear and concise. “I love you and the fact you don’t like me driving when I’m fucked off, so new rule; you’re not allowed to either because you are just as mortal as I am, I’m afraid.”

It’s as if that amalgamation of words comes across as a single magic one for Remus switches the engine off and gives a single flap of his hands to showcase he got the message loud and clear, but still, it's no time to celebrate. That boy is fucking rattled, holding himself so tightly has to be hurting his bones, and on top of everything else he’s feeling — and though Sirius knows in his heart of hearts that he wasn’t intentionally doing so — he feels entirely messed with and by Sirius’s hand, so that’s where he’s going to have to start.

“I did not set you up just to drop you back down again,” he instils, lifting his right hand from his hip to give a finger wag while he keeps the rest of his body still and confident. “I wasn’t goading you to start letting it out just to turn around and tell you without really telling you to stop overreacting, I wanted you to let it out, but you’re right, I didn’t like what I was starting to hear and it made me nervous for what’d it’d lead to, but I meant it; you don’t need to be looking over your shoulder any more than you already do and I don’t want you punishing yourself over of a ridiculously nosey thing like that.” 

He finishes with a stark point back toward the inn and what transpired in there, and before Remus’s expression has the chance to really morph over into one that isn’t clouded, the lad just deflates, curling in on himself and resting his elbows on his thighs so he can put his head directly in his hands. “I know you don’t,” he returns him, fingers up in his hair, palms covering his forehead, shades covering his eyes, and the windowsill covering the lower half of his face. “I’m sorry, I know you’re are always just trying to help; I know better than this.” 

Sirius gives a lift of his shoulders that Remus won’t see, so he probably should say what that’s about. “I could have waited until you were finished letting it all out before I went into fuck-it mode, I really could’ve,” he passes him. “I know it doesn’t always help to jump over to that, and it doesn’t always come off as the most sympathetic thing in the world either, but I mean well with it; I am going to want to try to give some perspective rather than watch you sink, and might I remind you and myself here, but you like that about me.”

“Of course I do; you know I do,” Remus pulls out of himself. “I know I do; why do I do this?” 

Sirius's heart’s in his throat in an instant, and it’s not that it’s in any way surprising that Remus is embarrassed of himself, it’s the fact that he does not need to be embarrassed, not with him; never with him.

He reaches his hands up to curl them over the open windowsill, grateful that Remus rolled that window all the way down because he’s going to need the advantage of not having a protruding line through the both of his palms as he uses the windowsill for a boost. He kicks his feet off the ground, heaves himself up, and wrangles his arms over the windowsill and into the frontseat, but Remus certainly hasn’t got his head in his hands anymore; he’s very much upright and alert to the fact that Sirius is monkeying his way in there. 

Sirius,” he puts out, reaching to grab onto his shoulders from above, which is actually perfectly helpful when Sirius was going for Remus’s shoulders — well, he was, but he’s more easily able to toss his left arm over Remus’s shoulder line and even though he knows Remus won’t let him slip out of here, he curls his right and more prominent arm down to get his hand clutching at the armrest for extra stability for the both of them.  

All in all, and it’s not nearly the most dignified of ways to ensure Remus hears every word he’s desperate to say, but on the other hand, he’s surprisingly comfortable considering the position he’s in. “Don’t give yourself shit for this, I mean it,” he extends, baring down on the arm that’s draped over Remus’s frame to make it as much of an embrace as he can manage. “I’m not looking for guilt, I want grace; not guilt, grace, for both you and for me, and if you’ll let me, I actually do have a well of knowledge built into me that could help in a situation like this; I know I should have just led with that instead of immediately going the fuck-it route, but you know what? Nothing I could say to you is going negate how fucking shitty you’re allowed to feel about that having happened to you on your way out of there, OK? You’ve nothing to lose here, not with me, so what do you think, hm? Hm? Hm?”

Sirius is prepared to ‘hm’ for another five, ten rounds if need be, but it only takes the initial three for Remus to throw up the white flag. “Get down from there and in here,” he directs him.

Sirius flashes him a smile, puckers up to perchance win himself a peck, and wrangles himself back out of the window with the imprint of Remus’s lips at the left corner of his lips. He climbs on down, heads around the front of the truck, and swipes his pack and lighter off of the engine as he goes by, tossing them onto the floor in front of the passenger seat after he gets his door open. He tugs himself up and inside of the truck with one hand bracing the handle above his window and the other on the open door, landing himself in his seat and pulling his door shut behind him, and then he has to contend with the hellish temperature inside the truck for about .04 of a second before he puffs out quite the voluminous wheeze in reaction to it.

The engine starts up and his window along with the two in back start to go down; he peers over at Remus with a bright, thankful smile, but takes one look at Remus simply sitting there — right elbow propped on the windowsill with his hand curled inward for a makeshift headrest, his left fore-finger perched on the button for the windows on his armrest, a wry smile on his twitching lips which suggests he could easily have been observing every moment of Sirius’s efforts to get inside the truck before his big ol’ wheeze ever came along — and snorts long and loud for it when really he has to say, there’s something circumstantial — and very Them — about this quiet exchange. 

The two stare at each other for no more than a few beats before Remus shifts closer, and upon realizing what’s about to happen, Sirius opens his arms, smiling away as he practically bounces his way closer to Remus on his seat. The embrace is a lot of things, necessary, warm, and right would be the top three descriptors, but there’s something else to it that has Sirius keeping it going; it’s too powerful to be able to feel the rigidity of Remus’s frame peter off more and more per second the hug goes on, and that has him thinking that maybe he should have just fucking held Remus when he started to shake like that, not wait until a half-hug through a windowsill or a real, substantial one after the fact. He needs to be holding Remus more when he gets like this, not rely only on a brush here and a budge there to do the trick, and the effervescent sigh Remus gives out as they let go of the hug acts as a seal on the matter. 

Sirius’s mobile chimes twice from the floor of the truck, but on the floor of the truck, it’ll stay. Remus sits close after they peel apart that, his lips twitching for a moment before an imploring frown passes over his lips from there. “I don’t want to sit here for this,” he appeals. “I wanted to take us for coffee, and we still have to get picnic things before we drive over to the lagoon too, don’t forget.” 

Sirius certainly doesn’t mind an itinerary reminder, but he also doesn’t know where the rush is exactly. “Remus, we only just made it past eleven,” he raises. “I mean, I want to do all that too, but it can all wait until you’re right back where you were before you got pounced on.” 

“I don’t want to sit here for this,” Remus repeats, and the slight differentiation of the same sentence does do a lot for his case, Sirius will give him that, but then Remus comes in with some more points that are on the practical side of things, too. “I feel that I’ll be able to listen to you and drive without steering us off the road, not to mention that I would think we could simply drive over to the place where the coffee is and sit in that parking lot instead of this one; it’s not even five minutes away.”

Sirius nods for it and him. “Alright, yeah,” he agrees, reaching back for his belt. “Let’s get you out of here.” 

“Thank you,” Remus passes him candidly, readjusting in his seat.

He puts the truck into drive, but he waits until the click of Sirius’s belt buckle before he pulls the truck forward. Sirius gets himself more comfortable as Remus steers them out of their spot, propping his left arm up on the windowsill while he passes his left hand up through his hair, pulling it back a bit to get some air flowing against his damp forehead as Remus pulls them through the lot toward the opening to the winding lane that’ll take them back out of here. 

Remus gives a passing look back toward the face of the inn before it’s pretty much out of view for either of them. “I really did snub him, didn’t I,” he raises, facing forward again with his lips at a firm line.

Sirius does a similar one, but his lips have certain upticks to the corners that Remus’s don’t. “I mean, yeah, a bit, but in retrospect, probably just looked like you wanted to be on your way,” he lets him have. “Which you did indeed — just, much more than he or I knew at the time.”

Remus hums to echo that, taking them up the winding lane and out of the main property limits, rows and rows of trees now making up the entirety of the peripheral views from the truck. “How much of that do you think he saw?” he raises next, his voice rather plain like he already assumes it’ll have been most of it. 

Sirius gives up a considerate hum for it. “Well, he’s got those industro headphones on so he probably didn’t hear all that much,” he poses for a theory, “but we did get a little rowdy by the end there, so if not beforehand, my scaling your door might've been enough to catch his eye, but how would that not be a little funny to see? Come now.” 

Remus gives a noise that’s a huff, a laugh, and a tch all in one; mm, a trifecta. “I can’t believe you did that,” he imparts, but he’s got a half-smile on so it’s nothing dire over there. 

“I can’t believe you can’t believe I did that,” Sirius raises him, sending a full smile his way. 

Remus takes in a long breath and sighs it back out with that smile of his still on, continuing down the lane toward the highway. Sirius, on the other hand, sits and waits rather daintily for an expressed invitation to actually start helping him out with some of that perspective stuff, but either Remus is unaware that he's is doing that or he’s quite aware of it but not quite ready to jump back in yet, so wait daintily, Sirius will.

Remus inches the truck to a stop as they come up on the mouth of the highway, flicking on his left turn signal, wherein he studies the situation from both directions, must see that he’s all clear on his left with one car coming up on their right which then turns into two with a fair distance between them; Sirius gets the feeling he’ll wait for both cars to pass, but in a true beat past that Remus rolls the truck forward, making a funny little inching noise the whole time he scoots them over to get in between the two cars that have so, so much more room between them than that tight noise would ever require.

Judging by the pointed smile Remus has on when Sirius recovers from the laughing break he had no choice but to take it there, he has to wonder if that was all a means to defuse the tension. “‘So, go, then,’” he probes, nodding toward Sirius while his hands are busy at the wheel, and it takes a few beats for Sirius’s galaxy brain to activate and help him clock that this was much more than just a simple invitation to start talking; the wording, the reference he’s just made to the two of them, that utterly perfect impression of Sirius’s very self — he lights right up.

“‘I’m not going anywhere, you go,’” he retorts, doing a picture-perfect impression of one Remus Lupin mouthing off at him after a particularly loathsome day, he’d like to declare. 

Sirius breathes in long, sharing a pointed grin with that same, mouthy lad, a live buzzing going throughout his body with the very concept that Remus must've been reminded of that fateful rant he tore out on a viscerally important afternoon back in September, but to that, he has to admit there were a lot of similarities between that and the rant he just went off on; Remus storming out the back door with all that ferocious energy about him; alerting a gently smoking Sirius to quite a whirlwind; how it took a few college tries to get the lad to open up about what had been propelling him around the place so fiercely; Sirius nearly suffocating through the whole rant because Sassy Remus made quite a few appearances along the way — that’s them right there, their nutshell, their brand; off the rails before finding a way to get back on again.

There’s another strong pull in his stomach, this one a loud, taunting knot just tugging away at him as if to insist that those are not the only similarities between the two cases, and from there, his brain works together with his stomach to come up with the others; the living, breathing ire that propelled Remus’s every move, his every heated stare, his every rattled word; the shaking he was doing while he threw it all out of himself that Sirius simply attributed to jittering; him managing to cull the worst of the threats to the lad’s very principled being before the deflation and subsequent embarrassment oozed out of Remus the moment he was finished popping off; Remus's listlessness for letting himself let it out; the weepy fatigue he carried in that little face smush against him; that cloud of remorse that hung over him as he shuffled back into the backroom and agreed solemnly to some extra time to read, but more than anything, to recoup.

It’s all so consistent with today’s pop-off; hell, Remus is so consistent. Whether Mimi thought she meant well with her line of questioning or not, it doesn’t matter if Remus felt duped into staying back for what should have been an easy interaction and wound up getting pounced on, just like he’d felt pounced on by thing after thing after thing on that garbage day in the fall; boxed-in, by no permission of his own, bound to a seemingly never-ending situation where the only actual, real end to it comprised of his two speedy feet as means of getting him out of there, getting him away from it, and getting a bit of Sirius in there, helping him along.

It’s all about that agency in the end; take that out of the equation or worse, from him, and the man doesn’t just become a spitfire, he reacts bodily to a complete lack of it. He really always has.

Always has, always has; it’s there, whispering like a mantra in his head, merging with the pull in his stomach that’s thrumming so strongly now. Remus always struggled with this, for as long as Sirius has had the pleasure certainly, but it’s always been about control in itself — whether he’s got it, whether he’s without, whether he’s the one who lost it, whether it was taken away from him by somebody else.

He blinks fast, looking around him, quite suddenly aware that he hadn’t just been staring into the middle distance, he went there and looked around a bit, and while Remus didn’t register a comment on it nor does he appear to have a comment ready to go now that Sirius is back, it still feels too odd a thing not to speak on. 

“Sorry, I did want to ‘go,’ but I just,” he offers him, giving a laugh for it and a quick rub at his nose, “started recalibrating instead?”

Remus smirks, giving a light shake of his head for pardon. “It looked like you were a bit busy over there, I didn’t want to interrupt,” he counter-offers. “That’s alright, though; we’re not far now.” 

Sirius peers between the windshield and his window, understanding within a beat or two that Remus is taking them down a stretch of road he knows for a fact he’s been down before, but they appear to be a little ways away from Sloops yet. Not that that makes much of a difference; before they can get all much further down the road, Remus takes a right and heads them down an adjacent one that Sirius has no reference for at all, and down at the end of that road, they take a left into a side-street entrance to a parking lot and taxis them over to the nearest available spot, and well, shit, Remus really wasn’t kidding; the coffee wasn’t far from that road or the inn. 

The two of them share a weighted glance once the truck is parked, but Remus speaks to his first. “Why don’t I go in and you can have some more time to recalibrate,” he raises, holding his right forefinger over the button on his belt buckle and waiting for a yes or no.

Sirius nods his head for a huge yes. “Yeah, brilliant,” he calls it. “Erm — at this point, I’m not feeling fussy at all, so go with anything you think I’ll like.” 

Remus exhales through a smile as he presses to release his seatbelt. “Alright, I’m glad you said that because they are a simple mom-n’-pop shop, but I’ll see what they’ve got,” he relays, pushing his belt sash aside. 

“Anything that’s cold and has a kick is fine with me,” Sirius echoes, watching the lad climb out of the driver's seat and shut the door behind him, but he tosses a condition out through Remus’s open window before he can slip off. “Oi, if you’re getting those though, I’m getting the—”

“Groceries, I know,” Remus finishes, choosing to reach back into the truck to wave him off. 

Sirius smiles after him as Remus crosses over in front of the truck and heads into the shop, but from there, he dives right back in. 

Always has, always has.

It’s built right into him, this struggle with control, but the responses can be so split. If Remus perceives himself as having lost the reigns, having lost control of a proverbial wheel of sorts, he’ll go and turn on himself straight away, pick himself to pieces, would rather destroy himself little by little than shift the searchlight onto someone else, but oho, not so if someone, something, or some unknowable, unseeable force comes along and aims to question, threaten, or worse even, remove control from his very hands? That’s a man on a fast track to a short circuit, but he’ll end up turning on himself at some point or another, usually when he’s finished with popping off; that, Sirius knows that a little too well, but does Remus know when it’s happening? Sirius doesn’t know if he does. 

He knows Remus can pinpoint that he has, in the past, made a choice or two based on blowback received for donning to even think of contemplating between two choices, for even thinking of weighing his options ou,t and taking time and care to reflect on the benefits and drawbacks to either one. He knows Remus is able to recognize when a staunchly negative reaction to his indecisions has led him to make the choice that’s best for him and only that. He knows Remus can and has knowingly gone the fuck off when he’s made a choice and had a stark complaint come in about it — that, Sirius knows very well, indeed. He knows Remus can and has pinpointed when an attempt had been made on his agency in retrospect, can look back on some true agency thievery and recognize that it happened to him, but does he recognize it happening in the moment? Is he aware of what his body always seems to know? Sirius doesn’t know if he is.

He knows Remus comes out of that first response feeling relieved; relief for himself and of himself, and if Sirius is around to pick him up and put him and that reeling body back together again, he becomes the sweetest, most tender thing around. He knows Remus comes out of the second response, feeling nasty as hell; in the moment, when he's in that intense, fiery mode, his piercing attention is too busy with an opponent and the audacity of it, but he’ll come out of Fucked Off mode in a state of utter embarrassment, mortified with himself, remorseful over his words, his choices in the thick of it, frustrated with himself, what he’d allowed himself to do and say in those moments, and actively regrets having not been able to control himself better. He’s ashamed of it, the poor thing, ashamed of one of the very parts of him that make him Remus. 

It’s actually rather heartbreaking to feel so sure about, and Sirius doesn’t know where the fuck he’s been, having only just popped that exact shape of a piece into the puzzle, but there it fits, no struggle. It’s heartbreaking in and of itself, but heartbreaking for him when in a very particular way, that prickly, combative side to Remus is such a part of what stirred Sirius to keep coming back, keep trying with him, keep trying to get him, not only because Remus could and still can be such a force to be reckoned with, but because he’s a complete and utter dote of a man all the same; there’s no one without the other, you don’t have Remus without both, and that doting, softhearted side to him only makes his rougher, combative side all the more striking, so commanding when it's been pulled out. Hell, Sirius fell for Remus while he was in a right state, continued to fall further and further in love with how striking he could be, more and more infatuated with how close to the hard truth Remus could get.

Remus storming out of that back store and setting those seething eyes on him that fateful September afternoon could have killed him on the spot, Sirius was sure it was going to for a bit there, at least until it was abundantly clear that he was mostly dealing with a wounded lad on a rotten day on top of a shitty, shitty week. That same, white-hot anger behind his eyes returned to him while the two of them were arguing face-to-face at the mouth of their backroom for the last time, and that fire in him could have dropped Sirius to the floor if not for the fact that it was one of the hottest experiences on the planet to have been a part of, and if he hadn’t made such a clear, visceral plea from his very chest for Sirius to meet him somewhere in the middle. He couldn’t see him the time Remus answered his call mid-cluster and torpedoed Sirius into the ground from a distance, and it’s more than likely Remus couldn’t even get them open at the time to see out of them, but the way his voice blasted through the line could’ve given Sirius the bends if it hadn’t been so wrought with pain by the end, and if Remus hadn’t been so fucking right about him, what he was doing to him.

Every one of those times Remus went the fuck off on him had everything to do with his agency being messed with, his sense of control tipped over by someone, something, or a cosmic force playing games straight over his head, but did the bloke even realize that; truly recognize it? 

After the transfer was made official, Remus recognized he was being treated poorly, could see he'd been shut out for something he felt he had to do, knew he was being given the short end of the stick, and had the stones to demand better out of Sirius, but did he understand why his body went on fire like that? Did he understand that his alarm system got tripped up, blaring off inside him, with nowhere else to go for that smoke and fire but to pour right on out of him? Sirius knows he didn’t; not in the moment and certainly not in the afterglow.

After Sirius dropped off on him with no warning, no word, no response to his attempts at reaching out for a fortnight, Remus knew he was being avoided, knew he’d been snubbed badly, and was certain he’d lost his best friend all because of one secret of his free-flowing out of his mouth, but he found the strength, candor, and self-respect to demand better of Sirius, command that he try a lot harder than he’d been, scream for even some equality in their ever-changing, but grossly one-sided dynamic, but did he know what was happening to him? Beyond the fifteen-level cluster, beyond his ire for Sirius, beyond his embarrassment with himself for letting himself trust the one bloke he feared for months he wouldn’t be able to depend on? Sirius doesn’t think he could have.

Remus came out of those incidents feeling like absolute shit each time, uncomfortable and avoidant of his behaviour at best and aghast with himself and what he’d allowed himself to say to Sirius in the thick of it at worst. If he keeps going back, if he pokes around inside some of their comparatively smaller spats between September and January, he may well find more instances where a question of agency had been whispering around in the background. If he fast-forwards the tape, picks through January to May, looks under some stones from early summer, stares a few incidents just this week directly in the eye, he could just as easily find more evidence that this battle with control is a recurring theme of Remus’s for certain, but he could easily find more evidence that Remus can barely stand that side of himself once he's had to face it with clear eyes; he hates a part of himself that is so intrinsic to him, it’s no wonder at all he has such a rocky relationship with himself as a whole. 

He hasn’t just been struggling with control, but with control of himself, and not just since he’s met Sirius — no, that would be too easy, and way too ambitious of Sirius to toss all over himself; Remus has been struggling with all of this for years upon years now, Sirius can feel it. 

He feels it; body, mind, soul.

Sirius snaps his fixed gaze back out of the middle distance as Remus turns up by his open window, visible from the chin-up as he reaches a pale, murky drink in through the windowsill with a straw already inside of it. “I got you a dirty chai,” he passes along, smiling at Sirius’s light gasp. “Since you liked the regular one last time, I figured I couldn’t really go wrong asking for a shot or three.” 

“Hope it’s three,” Sirius confesses, grabbing hold of the cup by its waist. 

“It’s three,” Remus confirms, moving to head around the front of the truck. 

“The best, that’s you,” Sirius calls up and out. 

Remus smiles through the windshield at him, having a sip off of his own, visually identical drink, and that certainly piques Sirius’s curiosity. He watches Remus move round to his side and open the door, sipping off of his own drink and figuring he’ll wait until Remus is good and settled in before speaking on his revelations. 

“Did you get shots in yours, too?” Sirius bids, pointing his straw toward that drink of his.

“I did, so I could say 'two of those, please,’” Remus shares, using the handle above his door to step up into the truck and slide into his seat. 

Sirius gives into a wry smile around his straw. “I mean, surely that was a part of it, but I think you’re developing a taste for espresso myself,” he shares, smiling rather pointedly. 

Remus gives a light huff, closing his door behind him. “It’s grown on me, I’ll give you that,” he allows, working his mouth around a smile. “I should have taken you with me; Perfume Genius was playing in there.” 

Sirius gives a grand hum of approval as he swallows the sip he went for. “Which one?” 

“Mm, ‘Describe,’” Remus supplies, smiling in a way that leaves complete room for Sirius's second, more guttural hum of approval to sound out. 

“Mmm, thank you for telling me,” he enthuses.

“Had the sense you’d want to know,” Remus maintains.

“It’s going in the queue,” Sirius says for it, tapping his left temple to register it for later, but for now, they’ve got work to do. 

Remus has his hands cupped around his drink, holding it at his chest for some easy-access sipping capabilities, but aside from the convenience factor, the positioning has him looking twice as innocuous as he can so often look. Sirius unbuckles and pushes his belt aside, lifting his legs onto his seat to cross them underneath him and shifting so he’s facing Remus head-on, and maybe it’s the general sense of ongoing l’amour in the air, the fact that coming back into town has brought their days’ to-do list into the forefront of his mind, or the simple fact that Sirius went and took to that headlong position, but all of sudden, Sirius has a supremely chill Remus on his hands? Weird. 

“I’m really OK at this point,” he offers, fluttering his fingertips against the front of his cup. “I’m breathing good, I’ve got a tea with some shots in it, I’m on the mend already thanks to you, and I’m alright considering things are going rather well for me as of late, so it could be inconsequential at this point for us to have to dive back in—”

“Oi? I said I was going to help and I’m gonna,” Sirius comes in.

“But you already have; I just needed to get out of my own way long enough to shut it so it could sink in properly,” Remus takes on, smiling frankly. “You were right; it shouldn’t affect anything we’re doing, and thank Cunt you’re here clocking me where you should be, otherwise I'm sure I would’ve let it bleed into my side of us.”

Well, it’s nice to hear the lad say it out loud, but even still, they’ve got work to do here that pushing the whole thing aside won’t give way to. “Remus, I’m not just going to help you with this,” Sirius instils. “No no, I’m going to help capital-Y You by using this very situation as an example of a greater struggle that’s behind it — two major responses that you have, I should say, which lead back to one, everlong struggle for you.”

Remus inches his head to a slight tilt, not a substantial move and with nothing new added to his polite, but imploring aura, so the tilt feels like a prompt of some form. “I thought I knew you well and I still believe I do, but I’d not had my third eye open, not yet,” Sirius entices, shaking his head along with another single wag of a forefinger. “I first figured out on December twenty-fifth that you and your agency are two peas in a mother-fucking pod and that I’d better get with it or there goes you; that’s not something you even really put down as a condition — you would have never, but I knew it was there, in between the lines, and then I learned more and more context as for why that would be the case, added that into evidence, and I kept doing that, all through this year, I’ve kept learning and absorbing context where I could, and I stay learning more about how it's always best for you, me, us if support you, not try to move you around like a little chess piece of mine, but I’ll be honest, even though I had enough information to have sorted this out ages ago, I’m only just seeing how intense that actually is for you. My third eye is open, Remus, I’ve cracked it; I’ve cracked the case wide open.” 

Remus gives a rather impressive hybrid between a grin and a grimace as he takes his thumbnails to the raised rim of his cup's lid from below. “Well, we could just close it back up again?” he raises lightly, and there’s a plea in there somewhere too, but they can’t be doing that; it won’t help anyone, least of all Remus. 

Sirius reworks his mouth around a gentle smile, eyeing the source of the tiny click-clacks of nails against plastic sounding off inside the front seats until Remus halts his thumbs quite abruptly. “Remus, you’re with me, you’ve a tea with some shots in it, and we’re in the healing truck,” he extends, gesturing around the front seats of the vehicle that has seen and heard quite a few, precarious things between the two of them as of late, “we're in the actual, best scenario to start peeling back some heavy layers here; sure, we could just close it back up again, but that would be doing you a disservice because this sort of thing is going to crop up again, in a similar situation or a different one entirely, so I would rather that we at least start looking carefully at what the root issue is so that we can better understand you going forward, but in order to do that, we have to actually play ball, and most of all, I need you to know that I get it, Remus, I get why you hated that so much.” 

“I know you do; we’ve discussed the audacity and it’s alright,” Remus reiterates, holding his cup between his knees so he can have his hands free for a smoothing gesture before taking on a deep, but airy voice; who knew that could be done. “‘Oh no, a lady I know asked me many times over without really asking me if you were my boyfriend; whatever will I do?’ — No, it happens.”

Sirius takes in a big, long breath and pushes it back out through a pair of purposefully bowed lips. “Oh, I don’t think it was just about the audacity,” he maintains. “That was part of it, I’m sure, but much more than that even, you didn’t give permission for that to happen.” 

Remus throws up a plain face as he lowers his mouth to his straw. “Well, no,” he returns him, going for a timely sip.

Sirius reworks his mouth around a charmed smile. “Right, and we’ve gone over the fact that you did not select her as someone who would ever need to know about your status,” he sets it, “but, and there’s a big but here, it’s not just about her not being on the list and it’s not only about comparing her to Bubba or Do; I mean, let’s think about it, she’s not your awakening, is she?”

Remus gives out a profound pfft it makes a lady on the sidewalk ahead of the truck look their way, but he doesn’t notice, no sir; he is too alive to notice that. “Nowhere near,” he echoes, a direct lilt to his voice. “And I don’t call him the ‘awakening’ because it’s cute, I call him that because it’s the only way to describe it; he wasn’t just some eye-opening, first crush or precarious stir in the pants region, he was clever, outspoken, more open-minded than that school knew what to do with, he was my best, most formative teacher, and the sort of teacher I can only hope to be half as present and inspiring as once I’ve finally finished, so when I say he was an awakening for me, I mean that to the nth degree and it meant that much to me to be able to introduce you to him as you are, so in a way, it’s a massive stretch to even put those two people in the same conversation, but hey, great example of a person I actively wanted to know about it and chose to tell versus someone who decided they’d like to stumble over themselves just to get a confirmation.” 

It’s frankly incredible to have been handed precisely what Sirius was going for while being drowned under the vivid presentation it was given with. “Exactly,” he offers, and he’ll admit it comes out very quietly, but he gets himself back together for the reprise. “You didn’t just feel compelled to tell him about me, you could have said, ‘The boyfriend’s around here somewhere’ and let that be the giveaway, but you called me over for an in-tro-duction, at the farmer’s market, hidden in plain sight, by the by; those were choices, babey, and ones you made for yourself, so if we compare that idyllic scenario where you felt inspired to share this with him against what just happened back there, it was a completely different scenario. You made no indication that you wanted to tell her, actively chose not to, in fact, and we both made an effort not to be in the same room as each other when we got in there, kept to ourselves and really didn’t go exploring much of the common areas unless it was to go in and out of the place, but that is how much effort was put in to not have to answer any awkward questions while we were there and you were still put in a situation where the questions just kept on coming, and for someone who hates being coerced? Of course you got fucked off, Remus; you only really get that fucked off like that when agency is involved, it’s your favourite thing in the world, but it’s also your least favourite thing to have snatched away from you.”

There’s really no such thing as true silence while being inside of a vehicle that’s got the windows down and various outdoorsy sounds filtering in, but it may as well be the equivalent of pin-drop silent in here, at least until Sirius’s mobile goes off again and that only propels him to lean forward and switch it to silent mode, rather disappointed he didn’t just do that sooner so the moment would've really hit without a distraction.

He straightens up as Remus lifts his left hand to feel over the back of his neck and lets out a low, uneasy noise. “I hadn’t—” he starts, trailing off before a stark clear of his throat and a new try. “I hadn’t dug that far in yet.” 

“Mhm,” Sirius accepts, rubbing his lips together carefully, “no, but that makes sense to me; there was a lot to process back there and you have been rather focused on the audacity of it all, but your body sure as hell knew what'd happened to you back there and I think it went into overdrive for you.” 

Remus stares back at him, his elbow paused in the air with his hand curled at the nape of his neck, the only defining feature on his entire visage at the moment being the three new creases that have made their way onto his forehead. “So you’re saying my body knew what was happening before I did,” he repeats, a notch above a whisper.

Sirius nods quite fast, grateful for the read of it even if Remus sounds a tad disbelieving, that’s alright. “Oh, yeah, I’m nearly positive,” he echoes it. “You do tend to focus on the particulars of why you’re rattled, meanwhile your body goes about handling the rest; you ended up outside firing away about the audacities, that you’d felt duped into a rudimentary but warm scenario and got a big ol’ boundary crossed instead, so of course that’s what you were the most focused on, but when we get down to it, what kind of agency were you really left with there, other than those two feet carrying you right out the door? What could you actually control aside from getting yourself out of there the moment you had the chance to? I mean, you might’ve felt overpowered by how reeling it was, but let me tell you something, your body does not like that kind of thing for you either, not at all.” 

In the mere seconds after he says it aloud, he’s so proud of his good work that he envisions a queue of admirers appearing on either side of him, wishing to shake hands and give congratulations on the incredible thesis statement he’s come up with and with some iron-clad, lived-in research to show for it to boot; Remus, on the other hand, just has a mouth that’s slightly ajar and doesn’t make any moves to use it or the vocal cords of his behind it, so Sirius has to assume he’s got to start showcasing the research he’s been collecting here. 

He puts his drink in his cup holder so he’ll have his hands to talk with and he knows he’s going to want those. “OK, so, I’ve figured out that there are actually two ways your body responds to a sudden lack of control,” Sirius sets up, holding his hands up flat and a bit far apart before holding his left one higher than the right to showcase the first one. “If you perceive yourself as having bungled a situation enough to have lost total control of it, then you go right after yourself and with no mercy, while your body panics for you—”

He trails off there, giving a thoughtful, melodic hum as he pitches himself to the best and most recent example of this exact sort of thing. “Mm — take the other night for instance; you’d just come out to your mum in through an astoundingly passionate accident and things were going downhill real fast; too fast even, and what’d you do?” Sirius raises him. “You got the fuck out of there, went on upstairs to your room, had a whole ass panic attack in private until I finally got up there, and by then, you’d fully turned on yourself, apologizing to me and to your mum from afar, riddled by all the ways you felt you’d handled it improperly, but behind that, there was also your body, dealing with the rest of it, and live-reacting to a complete lack of control; you couldn’t control your own mouth, couldn’t control your mum’s reactions, couldn’t control where the conversation was going at all, and your body knew all that, it knew that for you and got you upstairs safely, where it could nearly fall apart on you, away from everyone else, so that’s the first response, you with me so far?”

Remus hums a lagged but deep, one-note hum, from way down within, and that’s about all he gives so Sirius doesn’t want to waste any time here, lowering his left hand and raising his right one higher than it. “It’s a bit different when control has been mucked around with by someone or something other than yourself, but the response is still so bodily intense for you,” he maintains, keeping his expression and tone as devoid of judgement as possible, and since he doesn’t begrudge Remus any for this, the judgement factor is way in the negatives. “For you, it’s fastest and makes the most sense for you to zone in on your opponent and the audacity, be it a person, a thing, an event, or a series of cosmic injustices that’ll have set you off, but beyond that, there’s your body going into red alert for you.”

Remus lifts his right hand to his forehead, rubbing it slowly, his cheeks and tips of his ears reddening before Sirius’s very eyes. “God,” he registers quite tightly, and there’s a supremely mortified note to it, too.

He hums a vague, distant note, squinting over at him. “Sorry, whom?” he raises, trying for a dash of levity.

Remus drops his hand to his lap, giving him the face that goes with a huff, just without the noise. “Sirius.” 

Sirius throws up a pair of praying hands in a bid for a pardon. “Alright, sorry, I couldn’t not, but there’s nothing to be embarrassed about here, Remus, it’s just your body’s wires getting tripped up; that’s all I mean by red alert,” he instils. “You’re there busy being fucked off at the thing that’s bothered you, but the body response you have in those cases is all in the details; it’s the rapid-fire reads you toss out, it’s the pitch and fluctuation of your voice as it goes up and down and all around, the way you talk so much with your hands when you’re really in it than you normally do, the sheer horsepower that powers you around when you’re moving from place to place, the shaking you do because you don’t know what to do with yourself? That’s a hard-learned response that your body has taken upon itself for a scenario where your agency has been taken from you, but I’m beginning to think it knows when there’s even been an attempt on it because it would really put some things into perspective.”

Please, no, that’s horrible,” Remus tosses up, leaning over to plonk his drink in his cupholder like that settles it. “Can I get any worse? I just go around like—”

He screws up his face real good, turns more toward Sirius in his seat, juts forward with his arms looming over his head — erm, going for a menacing move, Sirius has to assume, but it mostly looks a jittery, funny-looking motion that’s more akin to a bloke trying to scare a pack of school kids at the local haunted house than it is strictly ‘horrible,’ and Sirius just can’t possibly handle this; he has no choice but to break into a laugh that echoes all the way up his throat.

“I almost wish,” he returns him, and then immediately takes to waving his hands for a bit of grace and a pardon for that lad is looking mighty unimpressed. “I’m kiding, you definitely don’t do that, you’re way faster; I didn’t say horsepower for nothing, but literally who isn’t going around at turbo speeds when they’re fucked right off, mm?”

Remus’s shoulders shrink, his right hand going up and pressing to his chest as he gives out a wounded noise. “Do I scare you?” he asks, but in a way that suggests he’s already decided that he does and is just checking in for confirmation. 

Sirius gives into a squint and aims it right back at him. “Mmm, no?” he supplies, a bemused lilt to his voice. “I mean, back last year, yeah, I’ll admit it was bracing, but how much quality time has gone by since then, hm? Do I scare you when I’m fucked off anymore?” 

Remus’s right hand goes a bit limp where it’s sitting on his chest, but that’s rather purposeful, Sirius thinks. “I don’t think you’re going to come at me, no, and that’s what I’m—”

Sirius cuts in, louder mostly to drown that interpretation out. “Oooh-kay, no no no,” he denies, waving his hands back and forth and then promptly making an ‘X’ with his arms for extra effect. “You will get in my face if need be, but you will never lay a finger on it; that’s just not in you.” 

Remus gives out a breath that's tough to decipher other than that it was thick in his throat, so Sirius just gives 'er another try. “It spooked me when I was first interacting with you because you can be hella commanding when you’re in the thick of it,” he extends, “but you know it also could have me quite stirred because you are just deeply attractive when you’re spouting off, telling it like it is, not worrying about being so fucking agreeable for once; it’s powerful, really is, but I wasn’t scared of it and I’m certainly not now. If anything, I revere it.”

Remus takes in a large breath and breathes it right back out with a few choice words. “That’s not much better, Sirius,” he returns, popping a smile on that’s by no means genuine.

“Remus, I’m not scared of you,” Sirius repeats. “I’m completely in love, in fact; if we break it down, you got half of Lyall’s genes in the pool so, yeah, you have your gruff, temperamental side, you have your moodier times, but he’s a jolly green giant and he gave you some of that jolly-giant energy, too, and then your mum’s genes got in there on top of it and that makes you a chipmunk on most days — most hours of a day, let’s be honest; you’re a complete and utter dote even when you’re in a mood, and you don’t get grade-A fucked off very often but when you do, I guarantee it’s because your agency got tampered with and your body went into mayday mode because someone or something pulled it right out from under you, and that doesn’t take away from you at all, it makes you all the more thrilling to know—”

Remus tosses out a firm and chesty huff. “Who has control over anything?” he puts up. “Oh, but I just get to go storming around acting like a nut?” 

“Ohh, you just shut right up, pal,” Sirius tells him. “No one mentioned a single nut.” 

Remus wrings his hands out once, like a rebuke. “Well, who wants to go anywhere near a control freak?” he demands. “‘Oh wow, there he goes again, raging around the place; love that guy,’ said no one ever.” 

Sirius puts his right hand up so high it knocks against the ceiling of the truck. “Me, me; I did,” he maintains, proud to say it, proud to have punched the ceiling for it. “I loved it, still do, and I love you whether you’re in chipmunk mode or Fucked Off mode and every other mode in between because all of it is you; it’s not like you turn into an unrecognizable creature when you’re in that place, you’re still you, I recognize you the whole way through and I’m not scared of you in any way — you are actually, you’re scared of yourself.”

Sirius runs his top teeth over his lower lip as he waits for something, anything, but ends up with his gaze zoned in on Remus’s hands as he wrings them together in his lap, watching his right one work fast at the back of his left hand and reaching out to set his right hand against the two of them to bring that motion to a halt. “I just want to help you, that’s all,” he instils, going ahead and inching Remus’s right hand off of his left one and bringing it over to keep it down over the centre console. “Ever since I’ve known you, you've to have a skewed view of yourself; that, we know isn’t new, but I’m telling you, the way you view yourself after you’ve popped off is exceptionally warped and we’ve got to do something about it.”

“Warped, how?” Remus counters, gesturing wildly around with two splayed and evidently empty hands.

“You spout hard truths when you’re in that mode, not poison, and yet once you’ve powered down, you look back on it and automatically go into thinking that you were the problem, that you had no right to act like that, that you were too imposing, that you’d caused too much noise and took up too much space, that you’d done or said something terrible and unforgiving, no matter what was said or done to you,” Sirius maintains. “And since it’s getting clearer and clearer that you’ve got too much going on when you’re in that mode to have the presence of mind to know what’s actually going on in the background and what’s happening to your body because of it, we’ve got to get you recognizing and understanding what’s happening to you better, and we’ve got to change how you look at yourself after that response because you’ve just been criticizing yourself while not seeing the whole picture.”  

Remus gives up a gruff noise that echoes in his throat. “Yeah, good luck with this one,” he retorts, smarmy-laughing at a joke only he is in on, but Sirius doesn’t have to say a word, not even register a sound, just has to wait the handful of seconds it takes for Remus to play that back himself and realize it too. “Sorry, that wasn’t helpful at all.”

Sirius shakes his head once, but he’s smiling through it. “Not really, no, but if I thought this was going to be a straight shot to self-respect out of you, I’d have been a right tool to think it,” he slips him, passing his thumb over the back of Remus’s hand. “That said, I need you to try and hear me when I say this, but I really think you’ve been struggling with this, and not just with control itself which you already know you have a very hard time with, but struggling with control of yourself, for a very long time, and I am never going to write you or your body off for having learned these responses after they’ve had years and years of time and experience to build up.”  

Remus gives up a tight noise in his throat as he turns more toward Sirius in his seat. “I cannot have every issue I have trace back to him,” he implores, bringing his splayed right palm down on the centre console like a gavel. “I can’t, Sirius; I will never get to have myself.”

Sirius takes in a fast breath, eyes lighting up as he points toward him. “Well, good news first; you do get to have yourself because this is just another part to you,” he pinpoints first, but he takes an extra breath of air there because he thinks he’ll need the preservation for the next part, “and although I never thought I’d be saying this, it’s not all his fault; it’d have already started cooking in you by the time he really started doing a number on you, so I can’t give it all up to him but I’ll say he didn’t help any, not a single bit.” 

Remus goes for a breath in, holds it, lets it back out, poses his mouth to speak and then changes his mind, pressing his lips quite together; a small journey Sirius only just wards off a smirk for, but it was real close.

Instead, Sirius takes his right hand back to waggle his fingers on both hands, stretching them out for a count on them because he knows he’ll need the two of them, and clears his throat. “You couldn’t control your attractions to the male variety, couldn’t control how sick your dad got, couldn’t control anything to do with Tom because he called all the shots even when he was still being very nice to you, couldn’t control anything to do with him once he got in that head of yours, couldn’t control your relationships to your friends as a result of that because he made sure every other part of you revolved around him, and you couldn’t control how much worse your dad kept getting,” he raises, splaying his hands outward. “I mean, Remus, what did you have control over since the age of twelve, thirteen?” 

Remus breathes in long again, but this time he does speak after a think. “My grades and my job,” he supplies, but it’s sort of lovely that he’s put a lilt on the end so it’s open for collaboration; really has Sirius feeling like he’s right in it, helping make sense of it. 

“Mhm,” Sirius offers, considering it with a glance up and to the left. “And, if I’m remembering correctly, one of those areas received rave reviews at home while the other did not.”

Remus takes a breath in through his nose, pressing his lips together for a moment, and fuck, would it be just perfect if he could see those eyes in all of this, but at least he’s animated. “The job was met with some resistance at first, yep,” he reinstates. 

“How’d you handle that?” Sirius raises, doing some research, sure, but tales of Remus and the before years are always going to get him asking questions, splicing things together. 

Remus gives up a meek smile there; his first one since reentering the truck. “Well, I had the job when I brought the information to them, so that helped things along definitely,” he offers for a practical side of things, moving into the more personable side next, “but I was able to get my mum behind the idea so then it was two against one.”

Sirius shimmies in his seat. “Mm, sneaky,” he trades, smiling wide for it. 

“Not that sneaky,” Remus denies, but the corners of his mouth are starting to quirk. “It wasn’t the easiest for either of them, but she made sure I wouldn’t have to go in and refuse it, which is what my dad was quite intent on me doing at first.” 

Sirius doesn’t know if he’s ever going to tire of taking in the ever-complicated but always flavourful dynamic of the Lupin family. “Laid down the gauntlet, did she?” he raises, quite impressed. 

Remus tilts his head back and forth idly, a smile poking through. “Well, she told me she’d handle it, and she must have done because he came around on it within the next couple of days, asking when I start, did I want a lift in, that sort of thing,” he supplies. “He had two conditions, though; I wasn’t to pick up any extra jobs on the side as they both felt that one was quite enough, and I was never to work any extra hours here and there even if they asked nicely or agree to work under the table for them to get around the legality issue because he didn't, and I quote, ‘want the pigs coming and taking me away.’”

Sirius has to cackle — no, must; he has no choice in the matter. “That’s just fucking perfect,” he insists, pulling his hair back and out of his face to see Remus reworking his mouth around a smile at least, that’s some good news. “Alright, so, that one might not really help my case here — unless of course, you might’ve gone upstairs and felt absolutely terrible about what you’d done after the initial pushback, or, if there was an outburst of sorts that I’m not aware of?”

Remus clicks his tongue. “I was thirteen, of course I stomped around a bit to make a point of not appreciating the reception I’d been given, and mostly I did that in my room because it was above the kitchen so they’d hear it down in there,” he supplies, and Sirius wets his lips through smirk, loving the method Lil’ Remus used there, “but I certainly didn’t blow up at either of them when they first contested; I bottled so much up for years.”

Sirius nods once, grateful for where this is already going. “Right, so then, do you recall a time when you just couldn’t keep it bottled anymore?” he raises. “Let’s cross off stomping, teenage ‘tude, anything like that; I mean the first time you remember seeing red and then breathing it too, that sort of thing.” 

For a few strong beats Remus looks about as nervous as he’s looked throughout the conversation at hand given the nature of it, but there is a distinct moment where the muscles around his mouth tighten so Sirius knows he’s got something, but Remus just, so cares what Sirius thinks of him, or what he’ll think of himself in retrospect, or a bit of both; wouldn’t be the first time. 

“Remus, I’m just here to help, that’s it,” Sirius gives earnestly, going for that smoothing-hands gesture Remus did earlier. “We’re out here looking for clarity and grace, and those only.” 

Remus gives an uneasy sigh even still, cracking the air out of each and every one of his knuckles in turn. “My last year in secondary, so please bear that in mind if you can,” he relents.

A few beats pass before it’s quite clear Remus isn’t going to continue unless he gets a verbal confirmation first, and to that, Sirius gives a rather direct nod for it when it does click like a clean lock in his head; that infamous year would be the backdrop for a famously mild-mannered lad to lose the cap of the bottle, so to speak. “I very will,” he grants. “An all-around garbage year for you.”

Remus presses his lips together, shaking his head. “No, I’m saying it because it was a harder year for my dad, hands down, so you’re not to go that easy on me just because you’re into me,” he reiterates. “I was unearthly hard on the man while he weighed all of two stones when wet.” 

Sirius's brows go all wonky for that. “Would depend on what pesky Lyall was up to at the time, wouldn’t it?” he raises. 

“He was being his stubborn self to an amplified degree, but I’m not proud of the way I handled it,” Remus puts forth, lifting his hands for a frank display. “I just let him have it.”

Sirius gives into a big ol’ pout for that. “Well, hey, not an identical comparison, but I’ve really only been made better after you’ve let me have it,” he offers him, lifting his hands in an equally frank display as Remus’s just was, but he’s smiling for the both of them. 

Remus gives a weighted breath, shaking his head a little. “You two would bond over that read of it, too, I'm sure; surprise, surprise,” he slips him. 

Sirius chimes, putting his shoulders at an angle for the stir he just got. “Well, that’s a good sign already, no?” 

Remus gives a different, weighted breath there, a much more throaty one. “You know the day I’m talking about,” he gives up. “I’ve already told you quite a bit about it.”

“Well, if I didn’t bite your throat out then, I don’t see why we’re dancing around it now,” Sirius comes in. 

Remus pushes a dragon’s breath out of his nose, but nevertheless, he quits the dancing. “It was the same day I had to take him to the hospital," he offers. "He was grey and horribly feverish and I had a terrible feeling about it, and that was the same night my mum came home with the sobering fact that we were lucky to catch the infection that was—”

Sirius takes in a fast breath as he’s mentally transported right back to the end of the pier down by the lake where he definitely got some of this tale and vomits out a ton of words from there. “Inside the giant vein they’d put in him,” he shot-puts, but right after it’s out he cups his hands over his mouth and speaks from behind them. “Sorry, you go — I just didn’t realize we were jumping back into this one until right, right then.”

Remus can’t quite manage to hide a smirk from showing up for a beat, however brief it was. “Well, you were right, that is exactly where it was,” he allows, before doing as bid and continuing. “That was the hardest one to see coming and then have to process because, for all intents and purposes, they’d gone in and eradicated the issue; stuck a massive vein in his chest that was going to solve all the circulation issues pertaining to that stubborn leg of his, and had his body not tried to physically reject it by attacking the giant vein inside of his chest that was pumping blood everywhere else, he likely would have gone years without another issue with that problematic limb; years, Sirius, he wouldn’t have had a problem until the blood clot entrapped itself in that leg and he said, ‘cut this fucking thing off.’”

The sentiment is harrowing as hell, but the callback to Lyall’s zinger line will never not get Sirius in a good tizzy. “I feel like you put that quote on the end of it just for me,” he speaks for it.

Remus’s mouth twitches just a bit. “I almost said, ‘demanded it get cut off,’ but I knew you’d want the line,” he slips him. 

Sirius could sing, but then again, no; he gives up a weighted breath through his nose for it, for Remus, for Lyall, and poor Hope, too. “I loathe the rollercoaster you were all on,” he expresses. 

Remus gives a weak nod to accept it, but it’s clear he’s working himself up to keep on with it. “That one was the hardest drop of them all, for all three of us; it’d been such a direct solution that we all got swept up in,” he puts for it. “It was a hard pill to swallow, we just, all swallowed it at different times.”

Sirius shakes his head vastly. “No, I can’t really even — blind-sighting, is what that is,” he offers for it, for them. 

“Very that,” Remus returns it, trying for a smile while it inherently would have come off as tightly drawn. 

Sirius opens his hands rather evenly, giving a similar smile in return. “That being said, if I’m remembering parts of this tale correctly, then I believe Lyall did, in fact, refuse to go with you to the hospital while profusely needing to be taken directly there and only there,” he raises fairly, “and I very remember you talking about how complex and betraying that felt for you, but even just on a practical level, I’d understand if you had to resort to some bullying to get him to go with you, so if that is indeed what you feel the worst about—”

“Some doesn’t cut it,” Remus maintains, but even still, as understandable as it for Sirius, it’s also supremely helpful for his overall case here, he can feel it already. “The most important thing to note for this is the way my dad managed to still be so like himself over the saga that was his wavering health; without that, I wouldn’t be doing him justice.”

Sirius cannot help his curiosity here, but he can keep two directives in mind at one go; he’s done it before, he can do it again. “OK, tell me,” he bids him, tipping his chin toward Remus with a small smile.

“Well, you’ve seen the way he is these days, and that’s him after he tossed that troublesome foot out the window,” Remus instils, and Sirius swishes his newly twisted lips back and forth for that beautifully gutting detail. “You’ve only known him as that guy, I know that, but trust me, he’s always had that in him; just such a full person, big laugh, an entire shit but owns a heart of gold, and a simplistic, jolly green giant sort of guy, and I’m not going to say it was always easy to be that guy throughout the years-long process because it wasn’t, he brushed up against parts about it that he found frustrating, but he tried so hard to maintain himself through it.” 

“How’d he do it?” Sirius prompts, effectively tugged along. 

“I mean, the job thing is a perfect example of one of the ways because it really was uncomfortable with it; the idea of me feeling that I had to go looking for one, the message it’d send to me if he let me do it versus the lesser message, to him, that not letting me take a job at thirteen would send to me, and he didn't like talking about it, but he was uncomfortable with what it’d look like to have me working while he wasn’t able to, but worse than what others would say about it, he was harder on himself about it than anybody else was,” Remus provides, pulling a bit of a wry face there. “Even though the times where he wasn’t able to work would line up exactly with the times he was in recovery and physically unable to be at work, it still bothered him that I felt I’d had to take up where he couldn't, but he appreciated me for it, made an effort to lean into it in practical ways, seeing it more as a head-start for me in terms of budgeting and putting away for bills, and he really did make an effort to ask me about it; he’d want to hear stories, boring ones or some of the wilder tales, he’d want to hear about what cool find might’ve come through the delivery door that day, and once he was back at work, sometimes he’d pop in on his way home when he knew I’d be on and just look around at the place, but I’d catch him smiling around there like he was happy to see me going around, doing my little tasks, so even our biggest friction topic of my thirteenth year and this incredibly uncomfortable situation for him evolved into a something we could bond over because he made it something that we could.”

Sirius can’t fight a grin, setting his hands on his chest one after the other. “Atta guy,” he says of it. “I love that for you and him.” 

Remus vehemently nods his agreement, the corners of his mouth pulled way, way up while he keeps going. “That’s him, though; he’ll make anything work that’s worth it,” he says for it, and that’s just a sort of wholesome Sirius should be used to with this one by now, but thankfully he isn’t just yet. “He had this way of being so positive about his situation when he was in the hospital too, which you wouldn’t think would necessarily be the case, I know I wouldn’t and wasn’t; I was always riddled with nerves whenever he’d be in there, but he’d ring me up at home or on my brick once I had that, be his bright self, and manage to even get me out of my head.” 

“Different kind, that one,” Sirius echoes, taking refuge in the warmth of his chest while he has it.

“No, but really, it was kind of incredible,” Remus takes it and waters it. “He’d be making jokes over the phone with me, trying and succeeding to get me to laugh, even while he’d been in the same hospital bed for three weeks because the team working on his case had to plan out what the next procedure was going to be, and he was always so patient and curious about the plan; he’d talk his doctors’ ears off about the next try, really get involved, and then he’d ring from the inside and give me the full update, which I appreciated to no end, and he just loved the nursing staff because he got to know them so well over the years — I’m telling you, he just managed to find the brightest spots about the fact that he was back in there even when it was a miserable reason to be.”

Remus pauses, and while Sirius simply can’t relate to Lyall on this one when he would more than happily knock every one of his that team’s heads together for having such trust given to them from by that family and continuing to snuff it up, but he knows it means Lyall’s got a better soul than he’ll ever have, knows he’s not meant to say that he can’t relate to him on this one when the very person he’s talking to has that very team of doctors to thank for saving his dear dad and he believes it so, and there’s an argument to be made over whether that’s in itself is a block Remus has put up in order to never be as angry as he could be about it, but Sirius wouldn’t be able to say it anyway when becomes quite clear that Remus only paused for a little thing called emphasis.

“If him at the hospital and being able to interact interpersonally with the issue was a place where his positivity really shone,” he poses, “then I would definitely say that what had become the warning signs that the problem was coming back again would have been exactly where he’d been storing negativity; I just didn’t see it so much, and the one time I did have a sighting of it, I didn’t recognize it for what it was.” 

Sirius takes in a quick breath, setting his head down a bit from where it was to showcase the extreme want and near need for this tea he is getting here. “OK, go on,” he prompts heavily. “I remember the numbness being a thing; am I on the money?”

Remus presses his lips together, nodding for it. “Mhm, that’ll have been the first sign in itself; he would feel this absence of anything, any feeling at all in the problem foot, absolute radio silence in there at first, then that would turn into this prickly, numbing sort of static; pins and needles, but with no diameter of a foot to enclose it,” he supplies, and Sirius can’t do another thing in the world than grit his teeth and lift his right leg off of his seat to wiggle his right foot around on his ankle, trying to imagine what absolutely nothing followed by white noise might be like, “then the static would turn into a throb, and from there, the throb would grow and grow and grow until he couldn’t speak, it was that painful.”

Sirius stops his foot motions right quick. “No, I hate it,” he returns, tucking his leg back in. 

“Mm, he grew to hate it too,” Remus offers for it. “After his first-ever operation, he’d felt much better, the problem got fixed, so we thought, but then, toward the end of what went on to become his grace period over the years, he felt that absence of anything followed by the static while at work, then the throbs started up not too long after, mum took him in to get him looked at, and he had himself another vein swap, and it was just wash, rinse, repeat from there. He would come out of recovery feeling great but characteristically restless because he wanted to be at work and not limited to the ground floor of his house, and then post-recovery, he’d be back at work, going strong, and in or around six months later, he’d feel the numbness again, so it definitely became this urban legend, this ominous whisper that things weren’t alright again, and the more it came back, the more stuck he felt.”

Sirius gives up a strong huff for the heaps of bullshit that got shovelled onto this vibrant family just trying to get on with it. “Unbelievable,” he calls it, scratching fast underneath his shirt collar. 

Remus hums an accompanying note. “Mhm, and it was dangerous too, because if you suddenly can’t feel the foot through the nothingness or the static, then it becomes really difficult to do things like brake fast enough while you’re driving a truck,” he registers, giving a tight, circumstantial smile while Sirius’s take on a new shape, and Sirius gives a tight noise in his throat for it. “That was just before the fourth readmission, so his frustrations would've been cooking for a while, and he rang me so I’d come get the truck and bring it over to Bubba’s while my mum would be coming from work to take him in, so I get there, waiting with him until she gets there, and he’s so upset about the truck, just so riled about it, stomping around even though he should not have been doing that, and I just kept trying to insist he needed to just sit down and not exacerbate the leg any more, while I’m actively trying to tell myself that it was alright; no one got hurt or even maimed, the truck would be fixed, it’s just the front lights and bumper that got the brunt — ‘course, I’m reeling because he’d just been in a fucking accident.” 

“‘Course,” Sirius echoes, aiming a frown his way. 

“I mean, it wasn’t really about the truck,” Remus gives plainly, getting back to his point already. “He was upset about it, the cost of the damage and having caused the damage, but it was much more about the fact that he was about to be streamlined through the same shit all over again, and I didn’t realize that I was only just getting a taste of how horribly frustrated he was becoming about the never-ending problem; I was only present for two of the times that warning sign came on, the truck incident and the first-ever time he got the warning at all, there was no pattern of his ffor me to have found, so I really didn’t see that this was an increasing reaction for him.”

Sirius’s right brow pops up above his left one. “Mm, now how ‘bout that,” he raises thoughtfully, a captive audience, but a cheeky one, too. 

Remus reworks his mouth muscles. “Cheap shot,” he returns him. 

“I know it was,” Sirius smiles, but he tips his head to him for a bow and a prompt. “Alright, so you weren’t seeing that he was steadily getting more and more frustrated with the process and losing more and more faith in his true recovery behind closed doors because you were only present for two of the warning signs; go on, I’m listening.”

Remus gives a thick sort of swallow along with a nod for it. “I was at school or work when the other snap-and-it’s-back-again realizations would happen and my mum would have to ring me at the school or work to let me know that they were already getting ready to drive in to get him checked out, and after a while of that, finding out from others that I got the call, it's what convinced me to get the brick so that the news would come straight to me and not through a third party handing me the phone with a wistful frown, but that’s just anecdotal at this point,” he supplies him, shaking his head for it. “The warning signs still became this ominous signal for me that things were heading south so I learned to revere them, but it was much harder on my mum and especially hard on my dad, and it’s like I said, I didn’t know how deeply it was festering for him because I’d blink and he’d be in the hospital, cheerful as a clam by the time I got to speak to him, but I certainly learned of the true, unfettered resentment he’d been dealing with by the time shit hit the fan after the giant vein got attacked, I’ll say that.”

Sirius nods adamantly. “I’m all ears and eyes,” he probes, sensing they may be headed for a much juicer version than the original tale he got, even if it's been wrapped in a very Lyall-centric blanket.

Remus’s lips twitch just a touch. “So, when the giant vein started to block due to the massive infection inside of it, the vein wasn’t actually going to be able to continue doing its intended job of sending high-capacity blood flow down to the foot that already wouldn’t get enough circulation without it,” he poses, pausing and giving a wee, tight grin to accompany it that Sirius matches so he’ll know how much he agrees with that sardonic punctuation on the point, “and then, the very radio silence followed by that numbing static that he’d long-since learned to associate with continued circulation issues hovering very close over the horizon began to filter back in, and I mean, there had to have been some kind of dissonance happening there for him when he recognized that it was back; like a, ‘if I don’t address it then it can’t possibly be happening again, and there’s no way it could possibly be happening again because I have been fixed.’”  

Sirius lets a small, punctured little smirk leave himself for the mini Lyall impression as well as that monumentally solemn concept included at the end there, but this jogs a stark detail he remembers of the last time he’d heard this tale, and there is the main objective he’s keeping here. “No, and I’m sure that was devastating for him to have to come to terms with, and after an intensive operation that should have worked,” he puts in first and foremost, bringing a key detail back around again, “but didn’t I hear last time that pesky Lyall kept that precarious information to himself?” 

Remus takes in a short breath, nodding with his lips pressed into a line. “He did, yes, but I will say that he didn’t know that the warning signs he was having issues with accepting and the wicked fever he got knocked sideways with around the same time were related,” he puts forth. “There’s not speaking up when given the chance to because you’re in some major denial, and then there’s automatically making the connection that the massive fever you’ve got is actually very much related and is, in fact, a nasty infection inside of the very vein that just got put inside of you a few months ago; hindsight helps a lot, I use it all the time, but I do feel he’d have had to have been some kind of wizard or medium to have been able to predict that.” 

Sirius breathes in through his nose, popping his eyebrows up to the top of his forehead and down again. “Alright, you brilliant litter fucker; you get a free pass for that one,” he conditions. “Proceed, you.” 

Remus has the self-preservation not to look too proud about this development, but that could very well be the heavy subject matter overshadowing his win. “So, this horrid fever came along and kicked his ass, and since the general assumption around the house was that he’d been wiped clean of his biggest health issue, the nasty bug he got wasn’t something any of us thought of an omen; not even me, so,” he supplies, going for a plain smile and a slight tilt of the head back and forth. “He was, however, sweating bullets, then he’d be ice-cold, then back to the bullets again and repeat, so he decided to park himself in the den to avoid passing the bug along to either of us and we’d very agreed with him on that when it did not look like the sort of bug either of us would want to catch, so we’d carry conversations with him from the kitchen and, now and again, we’d zoom sustenance into the room before hightailing it back out of there to avoid catching it.”

“I shouldn’t love this image, but I do,” Sirius has to say. 

“No, enjoy it; it’s a little funny,” Remus allows, giving a small smile there. “Sorry to rain on that, though, because I remember being up later than my mum the evening before it all went to shit, I was making this soup-and-cracker assortment for him because he’d slept through dinner and most of the evening, and at one point, he got up to use the loo, the ground level one of course, and he was quickly trying to shuffle through the kitchen, which was appreciated given that he had that whopper of a bug, but I thought I’d seen him turn into the dining room with a wince on his way through, and then on his way back he saw my open trepidation, waved it off, went back to the couch to be sick like the dog he felt he was, and since I’d already made a reputation for myself as being overly fussy and cautious about everything under the sun regarding his health and much more by then, I, too, thought I was being a bit silly.” 

Sirius sucks a slow breath in through his teeth. “You weren’t, though,” he resends, all up in agony for that poor thing having yet another terrible worry prove right. “You had it right on the money, Remus.” 

“Mhm, I did, and it all looks so crisp and clear from here, but not then,” Remus maintains. “The problem had been fixed, so the trepidation that flooded in for me was what I’m infamous for, just constantly getting struck with tailspins about something that I didn’t technically have to be festering about, depending on who you ask, so I went from extremely worried and over to, 'well, he’s so sick; of course he feels like shit when he's moving around,’ so I will say again, hindsight always, always helps and hurts.”

“I know, and I’m sorry,” Sirius gives him. “It’s just difficult, knowing the end of the tale ahead of time; I still feel terrible for you in all of that.” 

“Well, I appreciate that, thank you,” Remus maintains, but does he? Does he really. “So, the next morning I checked on how he was doing, but my mum has just recently done the same thing so his response was rather blunt and huffy in the way that it could be when we’ve been hovering a bit too much, so that part wasn’t so unusual but I still thought of him quite a many times throughout the day, and then I was the first one home because it was one of the only school days I didn’t happen to work, thank Cunt on high, and you know exactly where it went after that; he was grey in the face, hotter than I’d felt him be yet and, truth be told, hotter than I knew a person could actually be up until that point, so I fully didn’t know what else to do but try to get him in to see someone, but he just wouldn’t budge for me at all.” 

Sirius readjusts to his most alert position, ready to go when he’ll need to bat some self-critique away from him. “Alright, but this time, when you’re retelling it, try telling me how you felt too, OK? You did well last time, managed to be quite impartial about it, and with a ton of retrospective thinking involved, so why not try the opposite this time, wherein you give me your actual experience of it in the moment,” he requests of him, and then a beat past that he gets struck with the concept that perhaps that’s a tall order for him to make. “Can you remember it well enough to do that, or is it blocked? It is OK if that’s the case; Cunt knows there’s shit I’ve fully blocked out from forever ago—”

He trails off as Remus takes in a new, sordid breath and keeps it held before giving it back out, launching right in. “At first I just thought he didn’t want the fuss as that was mostly what he was trying to get across, but I was so worried for him that I just wasn’t accepting that — couldn’t accept it, really,” he details, lifting his left hand to the peach fuzz at that side of his head, running his fingertips over it and just below where the plume of curls really starts to take form. “He was so hot to touch, just standing near him was enough to feel you were standing over a bonfire, and I was so scared he’d just cook right there in the house if I didn’t get him up and out of there, but then he’s barking at me and telling me to shove it, some more colourful words and ideas of where I could go shoving it too, which I just couldn’t compute at the time, because he was so obviously in some deep trouble so the answer was obvious to me: Get up, let’s go, if it’s just a nasty flu then at least they’ll treat you for it and hopefully bring your fever down, but he just wouldn’t stand up, and that’s what made me think of the wince, and that was the moment of realization for me; that I hadn’t imagined it because why else wouldn’t he just stand up for me unless we were already well into the pain-upon-pain zone, and while I’m there starting to boil up all my own, he starts shouting all this nonsense at me, stuff like, he didn’t want to go, he didn’t want to go back there, he was done, he was sick of it, leave him there, just fuck him, fuck it all, and already, my mouth was on the floor at this point, but I remember him saying ‘I don’t want to fucking do it again’ is specifically what set me off and in all honestly, everything I said after that was awful; the things I hurled at him were just awful.” 

Sirius takes in a very shallow breath but that’s all he can make himself go for, he’s too invested in the tale as well as the open distaste on Remus’s face to wait for a full breath. “Remus, I love that stubborn guy myself, but you said it; he was being astronomically uncooperative,” he gives him. “And that does sound like an escalation to me, but not an uneven one.”

“No, but it was uneven,” Remus instils, his fingertips already on course for the shaved section at the back of his head, and Sirius wonders how soon he’ll make it to the other shaved side of his head. “He wasn’t acting right, wasn’t thinking right, he wasn’t right, and before you say anything, I know that expressing the severity of it is what made him get up and out of there, I know that making it clear that he would die there if he didn’t come with me was what needed to be said in order to get through to him, and I’m aware that sometimes it does take a harsh reality-check to actually help someone, I am, but the way I did it was devoid of human conscience; instead of taking a step back and realizing that I’d found my dad at his actual lowest point, I looked at the fear he was openly showing me for the first time ever and considered him pitiful for it, and I rammed that in, Sirius; I unleashed on him and made it so fucking personal.”

“Remus, he’s your dad — he’s Lyall” Sirius instils. “It was personal; you made sure he knew at his lowest what he was about to lose if he stayed there and he did go with you, didn’t he?”

Remus drops his wandering hand to the side, apparently over it in terms of the rubbing, but gives up a blunt noise that’s not swaddled in pride like it damn well should be. “Well, his son called him a coward among many other colourful things, so yeah, he did,” he raises it, and the urge to have been even a measly bug in the room is — insurmountable, truly; Sirius gives up an uncontrollable ‘ope’ before clapping his right hand over his mouth. 

“I’m sorry, I’m always trying to leave room for you to be a human person, but especially one who’s also a fucking baddie when he has to be,” Sirius attests, curling his right hand royally by his visage to own the sentiment rather than block it, “and I’ll keep that going through this, too, trust me there.”

“That’s the ugliest I’d ever been, Sirius,” Remus implores. “Top three at the very least.” 

“No?” Sirius puts up, astounded by this. “It’s not ugly at all; that’s some poetic shit right there.” 

“Poetic?” Remus quotes back fast, looking around them for some help that’s just not coming. 

“You don’t think?” Sirius raises, giving a prime smile for it. 

Remus gives a round of gusty noises from his depths that are really quite funny. “In a coming-of-age story in which son inspires father to leave home under awful circumstances sort of way, maybe, but I still don’t feel comfortable calling it ‘poetic,’” he returns him. 

Sirius eyes him wondrously. “Well, I mean, there’s definitely some of that in there, too, but I wasn’t talking about that specifically,” he offers him. “More that, the altercation would’ve taken place during your worst year on record, would’ve lined up right around the time where all sorts of areas of contention in your life were starting to knock up against each other and get more difficult to navigate separately, and for that to have been the first time you remember going off after bottling it in for so long? Tell me that’s not poetic, I dare you.” 

“I’d never yelled like that, and never to him, I’d never yelled at him at all, and for that to have been the first time I unleashed on anyone is anything but poetic,” Remus instils. “He looked so small and frail and I was still a human kettle that just wouldn’t stop screaming at him, Sirius; I felt like a monster after it.” 

“There’s nothing monstrous about it,” Sirius insists. “It’s human; it’s all so, so human — for him certainly, but especially for you; I’m in awe of you.” 

“No, you don’t understand,” Remus implores. “As if all I’d said already thrown at him wasn’t enough, I just kept going — when he was trying to get to the door and couldn’t get there by himself, I saw the pain he was in and I helped him there and out to the truck, of course, but I just kept yelling at him out there for waiting so long, and then when I couldn’t yell anymore because I was out of words to yell, I didn’t say a single word to him on the drive — nothing, I wouldn’t let him try to talk either. I was so livid, I barely said a word as he was taken away, and when my mum got home late that night after swapping out with me, sending me home to try and fail to do anything productive, I thought he was gone when I heard nothing in that house, and when she was bawling at me, finally breaking down from it all, I still thought he was gone; I didn’t know he’d survived until she got what actually happened out of her and I felt relief, I know I did, but I felt horrible — for her because she was inconsolable and had nearly lost him too, but especially for him because he’d have gone under the knife not knowing if he was actually going to make it out, but knowing without any shadow of a doubt just how livid I was with him; can you imagine how that must have felt for him?” 

Sirius breathes in long, long, very long, shutting his eyes as he locates quite a few words and selects one that has to go up top. “Sobering,” he offers, opening his eyes with a smile. “Embarrassing, reinforcing, eye-opening.”

Remus clicks his tongue, either for telling the likely truth or for not entertaining his completely dismal read of it. “Well, Remus, he loved you so much, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that whole ordeal is where he learned to respect Remus Lupin, and d’you know why?” Sirius entices. “Because you stood your ground against him, advocated for all three of you when he just couldn’t do it himself, and he made it out of there because you got him out; a superhero, you are, and I bet he’d agree with me.” 

Remus sends him a frank pfft for the claim. “A drill sergeant, more like,” he trades him, and Sirius has to admit it, that’s a pretty damn apt analogy in itself, but neither one would be grounds for condemnation, not to Sirius certainly, and definitely not in the way Remus almost needs it to be. 

“OK, and?” Sirius puts up, lifting his hands for a ‘Y’ shaped shrug. “He needed one, you know he did; he needed the wake-up call and you gave him one in spades.

“Yeah, well, he said as much when all was said and done, but that didn’t make it easier for me to grapple with,” Remus claps back, a small fireball in itself. 

“Well, if you’re not going to take his word for it, try taking mine,” Sirius counters him. “I don’t see a single bit of evidence that would suggest the way you handled that put a strain on your relationship and, in fact, I’m going to go ahead and presume it’d have only strengthened it because I’ve seen the photo, Remus; I can’t pretend I didn’t.” 

Remus pushes a muted noise out of his throat. “Christmas?” he raises. 

Sirius nods weightily. “Mhm, mhm, same year, same hospital stint, I would imagine?” he counter-raises. 

Remus nods for it with a faint, affirming hum. “They’d done emergency surgery to get the vein out of there itself, then they sewed him back up, kept him in there while they debated putting in a new one made from a material that his body wasn’t going to attack, did some tests to be sure, went with the synthetic one that thankfully did end up sticking, but that photo was taken while they were still debating what they were going to do, so we just tried making it as Christmasy as you can possibly make that situation,” he details, speaking quite woodenly about it compared to the fireball he breathed out seconds ago.”

Sirius gives a guttural noise in his throat, smiling knowingly. “Well, sweetie, listen, as heartbreaking and genuinely spooky as that photo is to look at, those two, identical grins you guys have on suggest you did just fine with what you had,” he returns him. “The love radiating off of that photo is — it’s magnifique, truly, but to have an even better sense of that complicated backstory only makes that photo ten times more striking, and it stands to reason that you two came out of that situation even tighter than when you went in because sometimes, even though it hurts worse, it’s a rough situation that makes way for better ones to come; I know you, of all, are familiar with that concept.”

Remus takes in an uneasy breath, letting it back out as more of a sigh. “We’d had time to sort it out by then, but I wasn’t well with it, not for a while, Sirius,” he retains. “Seeing him for the first time after was important, but it was equally debilitating, and even though he made every effort to show me that he didn’t have hard feelings toward me, I didn’t sleep right, I didn’t know what to do with myself, I couldn’t stop thinking for weeks afterward that if he hadn’t listened to me, if he hadn’t gone with me that day, then he would have died there in that den with the last I’d ever said to him, but all of it fuelled me to want to be far better to him than the way I'd been that day.” 

There’s something so gripping about a heart breaking and filling at once, and it goes beyond Sirius being inspired by an omission that’s the perfect example of the heart and complexity to Remus Lupin for it’s got such a bittersweet taste to it. “And I did, I took that very seriously,” Remus attests, speaking through Sirius’s rendered silence. “I did as much as I could to understand the place he’d been in, how high he’d been lifted, and how hard he got dropped back down; I did everything I could to be a better son to him, and I’ve never spoken to him like that again — I’ve been riled at him, royally annoyed with him, you’ve seen as much, I’ve snapped at him so he’d get off my case, of course I have, but I’ve managed to never treat him like that since.”   

Sirius takes in a deep, rather thoughtful breath for that; the taste remains bittersweet, but there is so much there to pour over, to engage him with. “Look, Remus, I’m not going to begrudge you for taking that situation and using it as fuel for a better understanding of him as another human person, but also a better relationship to him; I see the rewards of that, I really think I do, just as I see how fucking obsessed he is with his kid and everything he’s gone on to do,” he maintains. “Good for you two, honestly, but I do think what’s happened there is you took all of the guilt you had for how you behaved at the time and all of the sympathies you wished you’d had for his state at the time, and you brought both so far into the foreground that you disengaged from yourself along the way.”

“No, no, I haven’t disengaged,” Remus maintains, and Sirius tries to keep the line of his mouth more dainty than firm.

“Little bit,” Sirius instils, using his right forefinger and thumb to show a smidge of space between them. “Enough that you could approach it clinically, with as much room for your dad to have been in a disastrous place, and yet, there’s a block happening here, and it’s been a long-standing one, I’m seeing.”

“No, Sirius, I know exactly how it felt for me and I knew it at the time; I wasn’t sure I’d recover from how fast my heart pounded until it broke from hearing him talk like that,” Remus insists, and Sirius puts a pause on his point since it’s quite clear Remus has a defense to drive home. “It took me months to forgive him for the piercing fright he gave me; that didn’t stop me from making sure that he felt I’d forgiven him straight afterward, but it took time for me to able to say to myself that I’d forgiven him and frankly, understanding where he was coming from it was helped me get there.”

Sirius could honestly use a breather out in the fresh air to reconnect with himself after such a bracing confession, but he can’t do that, not now; Remus needs him. “Exactly, Remus, you widened out the whole experience so that you could bear having had it,” he instils, splaying his hands fairly. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t have, of course understanding where he was at is a key part in forgiving him of it, but you did just go to some hefty lengths to set all of that up so that I’d feel more sympathy for him than I would you, even though this whole topic was to be about you, see that?”

Remus sputters put a series of catching breaths. “Well, it had to be done like that or you wouldn’t have understood the gravity of it,” he defends.

Sirius lifts his hands higher to propel that point Remus made right back to him. “And boy, do I now,” he maintains. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the backstory I got because of course I do; I’m grateful, Lyall’s more real to me than he’s ever been before, but so are you after hearing all of that, and I actually can do two things at once, like feel exceptionally hard for you being caught up in the middle of that while I can still feel exceptionally hard for him. I have the capacity for both, but I can also see something vivid that might’ve been hanging around in the background of that altercation that I just don’t think you’ve been able to see properly through everything else you were made to see.” 

Remus does not appear to want to accept that, but why would he, so Sirius is prepared to take up the hidden element to it, keep chipping away at the case. “Try me for a minute; there he was, on his actual last legs, not hearing you, not listening to you, refusing your every try to talk some sense into him, and aside from feeling like your own dad was giving up on you, how riled and betrayed that had you feeling, but what about your body, Remus? What about what was happening to it at the time?” he raises him. “I can just bet that that den got smaller and smaller on you while you tried so hard to get through to him, because to what point can you control whether your own dad listens to you or not when it’s so dire that he does; talk about being boxed-in, hm?”

The supremely butchered expression and that slight, rigid nodding Remus gives for a response says so much without giving any words for it, they tell Sirius just enough; the kaleidoscope might’ve just shifted to the left with that omission, but Remus can hardly express it. 

Good thing then that these days Sirius can express, well, almost anything without trying all that much. “See, there was a lot more going on there than just a raging boy pushing his weight around; there was a boy panicking while laying down some hard truths,” he poses, playfully stirred as he walks his right middle and forefinger across the centre console and up the side of Remus’ left forearm. “We’re getting somewhere here, Remus; can you feel it, too?”

“I don’t know what to do with it,” Remus reframes, heartbreakingly earnest, but that — that, they can work with. 

Sirius gives Remus’s arm a pet with his forefinger since he’s still got it over there. “Well, it can only help if you start with giving that younger version of yourself a lot more credit, not to mention that grace thing considering you were put in a pretty terrible position back then,” he raises him, taking his hand back over to his side of the centre console to lift the both of his in a splay of practicality; something Remus could understand more easily for just about anyone else but him. “You loved him, you didn’t want to see him die on you, couldn’t see it happen, and there’s ownership to take in what you did there — and I’m not talking about the kind of ownership you’ve been taking, no, we’re going to avoid heaping any more judgement onto a seventeen-year-old for losing his shit for the first time in recorded history over a situation as uncontrollable as that, just like we’re not going to heap judgement onto the power you harnessed when you were in that terrible position because by the power vested in you, you singlehandedly jumpstarted him out of that house and in doing that, kicked his ass and got him out of his weakest point, so own that, Remus; own it and be kinder to it.” 

Remus puts both hands up into the mop on his head. “I think we have to be careful with this,” he attests, his breathing hitching as he tries to get a steeling one into his lungs. “Just because we might’ve found the deep-seated reason for why I do this, doesn’t mean I should be getting free passes—”

Sirius lifts up and readjusts his legs so he can brace himself on his knees, taking care not to bash his head into the roof of the truck or knock either of their drinks right over while he slides himself in more so he can come at him from the sides and from above. He puts his arms in through the loopholes that Remus’s own raised arms are conveniently providing, skirts them around to link his hands together at the nape of Remus’s neck and leans his head down and in so he can place a whole batch of pecks to Remus’s head where he can fit them between Remus’s own hands up in there; they’ll look a bit like a pair of off-season ballerinas having a very strange embrace to anyone who happens to pass by the truck, but that in itself is fine with Sirius if it means he can be this close to him, if he can hold him through it.

“You are talking to the reigning king of rage-outs right now; you’re aware of that, yeah? The title’s already been taken,” he professes, keeping going even as Remus starts huffing and puffing. “And even still, that hasn’t stopped you from sticking around, hasn’t stopped you from meticulously studying me and working to figure me out, hasn’t stopped you from seeing the good in me even when I’m seeing nothing but red or I’m blue from not seeing what you see in me, hasn’t stopped you from holding me through it and pulling me out the other side, even when I lock up like I don’t deserve to stand near you when I’m fully in it, and if you really think that you don’t deserve that limitless sort of love and dedication because you’re Remus Lupin and you just don’t get either of those, then I’m sorry, but that just makes you twice as deserving of both; should have thought of that before you were born Remus Lupin and now it’s too late.”

Remus gives an agonizing noise against his collar, and this part is agony, Sirius can fully attest to that, but it doesn’t mean Remus doesn’t need to go through it and it certainly doesn’t mean he won’t hold him through it. “I know exactly how hard it is to have someone utterly refusing to see you the way you do,” he puts it, and he does know it, too well he knows it, but Remus lets his arms down and wriggles them tight around back of him so it's good he said it, “but that’s not all I understand because I think it scared you; facing what you had in you scared the shit out of you and if you don’t think I’d get that sort of thing, then who the fuck am I, mm?” 

A funny little noise escapes Remus before a stark coughing fit takes over, and Sirius clasps his left hand at the back of Remus’s head and pats his right one on his back to help him get it out of him. “I mean, come now; of anybody, am I or am I not going to understand a gripping fear of what’s actually hidden away inside you?” Sirius solicits, happy to throw himself under the bus if it can help get Remus out from under there. “Sorry, Remus; am I or am I not?” 

“You are,” Remus gives up against his collar, the good lad. 

Sirius sneaks a kiss to his forehead for it. “Mhm, and if you won’t let me claim the villain role in my relationship to my own life, then I’m not doing my job here if I let you keep doing that to yourself, so I’m not going to,” he echoes, rubbing at Remus’s back. “This fear and shame you have associated with the raw power that you own, it’s not been healthy for you, not at all, but not only that, it’s gone and blocked you from seeing where these visceral reactions really stem from and understanding them; it’s kept you from being kinder to yourself after having them, and that’s where the real shame is — if you’ll let me say.”

Remus leans his head back enough to stare up at Sirius’s face hovering just a few inches above his own and in the next beat he’s leaning up to leave a single kiss to Sirius’s lips, but in the after beats, Sirius can’t help but think that was a blessing for the sentiment coming from his own lips. 

Sirius can’t keep to this position without risking a split disc in his back from it, so he gives Remus a return smooch followed by a parting squeeze, getting himself back over to his respective seat and situating himself comfortably across from him again. “You want to know what I think happened? You got scared, you put what scared you inside a little box that only you had the key to, and you took that vow to be a better son after that first real outburst of yours so seriously that it didn’t stop there, it branched outward to the point where you bent yourself every which way to appeal to everybody around you,” he supplies him. “Which, in itself, should have been unattainable if you were really such a massive villain, but not for you; I think you did very, very well at tamping down on that first sign of unbridled anger — too well, I’ll even say, to point that by the time we met, you were just about ready to pop.” 

Sirius punctuates that point with three air-smooches in quick succession so Remus will hopefully take that read with the love it’s meant to have. “Now, you had just come out of a tumultuous first year out in London so we should make some room for that,” he mentions, smacking his lips once. “Your dad had not only just given his leg away, but demanded it be cut off after officially having enough trouble with it which was a huge power grab for him in and of itself, but it was to be a definite change, guaranteed to be tricky, lots of rehab to be done, plenty of running around for your mum to be doing, and there you were, off in London, too far to be able to be of real, tangible aid other than well wishes, and I know that in itself nearly took you out, but you hadn’t seen them in a year on top of it; that’s a topsy-turvy situation to be caught in both mentally and physically, but that complete lack of control you had over your situation alone would’ve been enough for you and your body to have been ramped up and ready to bite some heads off if anybody fucked with you at that point, but you didn’t only have that on your plate, did you?” 

He pauses for an interjection of any kind, but Remus’s lips have been air-sealed shut. No matter, tough time for the lad to jump back into, he might just need someone else to take it on, and that can be done. “You’d just made it out of your most isolated year yet, had forcibly removed yourself from the mere idea of making connections while there, not ’cause you actually couldn’t make them, but you felt you couldn’t because you’d been trained to think it, and after years of learned isolation, why not wear it?” Sirius advocates. “You’d hardened up by the time I strutted into frame, but there I come along, sexy as hell, sure, but a vapid little bitch to boot, and you had no time for it; no time me or my attitude, no time for my layabout ways or my drole work ethic, didn’t like ‘em, but that would’ve maybe been it if I didn’t also upend what you closed yourself off to and made you utterly lost to your lusting; you were feeling threatened by me because I made you fucking nervous, so all you saw when you’d look at me was more trouble—”

Sirius,” Remus puts down, ready to scold. 

Sirius squints in his direction. “Well, is that not true, Remus?” he puts up, giving a thoughtful tap at his chin. “You’d resist me, let me in a smidge, you’d resist me, let me in a little more, hit me with even more resistance; there are two sides to the coin, what you felt threatened by and what your body felt threatened by, and I made you nervous certainly, but I didn’t just do it to you, no no, I made your body nervous too, throwing it all out of whack, tripping its wires right up and well — I would, wouldn’t I, when I had and continue to have a massive need to feel in control and struggle whenever I don’t feel like have it; just like you do, only from a very different standpoint, and learned from a very different stack of reasons.”

Remus takes in the littlest — and frankly gayest — gasp. “No — Sirius?” he returns him, but this one’s different, has him bunching his hands into weak fists and bringing them up to cover his mouth. “No wonder we ground up against each other like an old-fashioned pepper mill.” 

Sirius manages to nod through a sudden fit, but he needs a few more beats before he can attempt speech. “Hoo — yep, mhm,” he assures, recouping by fanning himself with the both of his hands. “And I’m not going to say I was the sole perpetrator for the struggles you were going through at the time, that’s a bit too ambitious, but that’s why those in-between years are where we’re going to find some real understanding for the place you were in when I met you; I don’t believe it was only that you’d just come out of that woefully lonely first year out there, I’ve every reason to believe that was part of it, but the years after you looked directly at the power you had in you and said ‘never again will I show it’ and up until you moved out to London, those are going to be golden in terms of importance and I think we should spend some time there, squeeze some mother-fucking grace out wherever we damn well can.” 

Remus gives up a longstanding breath; he’d been holding that puppy in for a while, it seems. “I won’t say I’m not nervous, but I suppose it isn’t as touchy a subject considering that certain pockets of those years have been right under the microscope this week,” he relents. 

Sirius smiles freely for that pragmatic approach. “OK, I love, love, love you for saying that, but I do want to say first that most of what I know of that time is spliced together into a timeline from months and months of various details I’ve gotten, some of it will be from my own sensing, but then of course with this catalytic event you’ve given me much more detail about and would’ve kickstarted your post-secondary experience, I want to try and connect it all because it’ll all connect back to who you are in the end, but that being said, you’re the main source for this since it’s your damn life we’re talking about here,” he maintains, smiling for him. “I’m not the worst scribe out there so I think your story’s in good hands if I take a whack at it, but if you want to add something if I’m missing anything or I need some clarification on a detail or two, or otherwise I’d be misleading something, please feel free to jump in, yeah? Either way, I want your input.”

Remus breathes in long and reaches fast for his drink, bringing it in just as quickly. “Wait,” he bids, sipping long and hard off of it like it’s some kind of preemptive, medicinal strategy. “Alright; now you can go.”

Sirius spends three to four seconds goon smiling at the lad before he’s ready to dive back in. “Alright, well, I know that the second leg of the worst year had just been sludge to pull through, but I get it even more now,” he extends him. “That being said, you had your focus points; this new, renewed mission to be that better son you were utterly convinced you’d forgotten how to be for a hot minute there, you had your family at the top of your priority list, you had your school to wrap your mind in, and made top of the class in a gruesome year so add that to your achievement list, thanks, you were working so you had your physical way of helping out at home, not to mention something to keep your hands and mind busy, and you’d settled back in with the bestie since your man hadn’t been around all that much that precarious year, so there were ways to get yourself through to graduation, which, c’mon, I know how important that day was, especially to be able to have your dad there to see you walk across that stage; huge day for you.” 

“Huge day,” Remus echoes exact, and it’s the smile he gives for it that really sells it. “They’d kept him in the hospital for twice as long as they did the last time to ensure absolutely everything was OK with his spanking new vein before sending him home, and thankfully it lined up with a couple weeks to go before the big night which was invaluable, as you know, but if I can just bold that lettering there, I will; I wanted him there, he wanted to be there, my mum wanted him there, it was a family affair."

Sirius can’t help but feel that just by his smile alone he’s reflecting the sunlight that Remus is putting out. “I’ve a feeling he’d have physically fought anybody who’d get in the way of him going,” he lends him.

Remus snorts loudly. “He really might’ve, so let’s be glad he was released in time,” he puts it.

And Sirius will be. “Alright, so, grad came and went, was cherished and memorialized for your family, but I do want to shift off of them for a moment because this is about you,” he raises him, “and you definitely had your man back in those photos, so while I don’t want to pretend to love the idea of him weaselling his way back in on a royally important day for you three, you still looked like you were on cloud nine in those photos with him and that’s worth getting your commentary on.” 

“It felt like I was,” Remus echoes him. “Cloud ten, even; I don’t mean to say it like this and romanticize it, but—”

“Well, it was for you, so that’s alright,” Sirius allows, figuring he may as well come in to ease it. “We’re going back to that time, so you’re encouraged to talk about it like it was.”

Remus nods his head for it, sending him a quiet smile. “Well, he’d just come back to me actual days before that photo was taken, but I wasn’t expecting him to pop by and say anything on the actual day, but he came over to see all of us, and it just — it felt like old times, where he would constantly over at ours; they were excited to see him, it felt like he was excited to see them, but if what you want is what I felt at the time, then it felt glorious to have it feel familiar at a time where I wasn’t sure it would.”

Sirius nods for it, for him. “No, I can see that,” he offers him. “And I could see you having a real-at-the-time sense that it might’ve been the real deal with him this time.”

Remus gives him quite the resounding exhale for that. “Unfortunately, you’ve got it right on the money,” he lobs him.  

Sirius tilts his head for it, explaining himself. “Alright, well, with that reunion marking the end of your secondary career, on top of that you also had much more room on your schedule to utilise, which I certainly imagine went first and foremost to work because you are such a busy-hands sort of bloke,” he poses, lifting a hand in prompt should he have any sort of anecdotes for that and it’s very good he did do that for Remus gives a chimed hum in affirmation and launches off.

“After the ceremony and all of the picture taking, my parents and I ended up back at home, just the three of us having our own little celebration, and things definitely got a little boozy—”

“Love that,” Sirius comes in, has to.

Remus nods knowingly. “Mhm, figured you’d like that detail, but the topic of what was next for me did come up before we got a bit too silly,” he supplies him. “I should recap that my mum had been back on at her regular hours since March of that year, my dad was due back at work the following week and was beyond ready to get back to it after being monitored so closely and for a longer stretch than typical for him, and I was slated to start full time pretty well as soon as I’d be available to so I think I was something like two schedules out from hopping on at full-time, and so, the two of them hit me with a double-whammy of what their expectations were of me going forward, which were that I was expected to keep whatever I’d be earning from there on and put it aside for uni, and I was fully welcome to stay there rent-free while I’d be accumulating savings—” he breathes in long and holds a single forefinger up to halt Sirius’s rapid shoulder-shimmying, “—which was a term I certainly tried to renegotiate because the offer felt impossible to take, but they were prepared for that, Sirius; hit me with the practicality angle, saying I’d accumulated more than enough room-and-board over the years for them to accept any more, the jerks.”

Sirius had already been smiling throughout, but that last bit has him goon-grinning before giving up a lengthy, devious laugh for it. “Knew you too well, they did,” he echoes.

Remus reworks his mouth around a pointed smile. “Not too well, though, because I went on to absolutely sneak a full tank wherever I could just so I could feel I was putting in for something,” he points out, and of course he did that; wouldn’t have gone any other way. “And for the short term, I sought to make better time for them so that same night I made a counter-offer, suggesting that I wanted us to start eating together in dining room more often, because when I was a kid the kitchen table was always where we sat and ate together, but as the years went on, we’d all be home at different times so eating all together wasn’t something we could coordinate all that well for a long time there, and I wanted that to change, but in order to keep up my end of the bargain I had to drum up the courage to go into work and ask Zaya if I could switch over to at least some day shifts rather than hop on full-time with only evenings, otherwise I’d just catch them here and there.”

Sirius gives up a gape/grin. “I’m sorry, but that’s admirable for you when I’m fucking certain that younger would’ve gone back and forth over whether you had any standing to ask such a thing,” he logs in.

“I did, you jerk,” Remus retorts, but his smile says something else. “I don’t know why I was ever nervous to now; she’d hired me on when I was but a spotty lad just looking for someone who’d give me a shot and take me on despite my age, and I did stay on for many years up to that point so the chances of her saying ‘no, sorry, can’t be done,’ were slim to none, but I digress.”

“Well, you were three times more agreeable than you are now, so that might just have done it,” Sirius slips him. “I assume she gave you exactly what you asked for?”

Remus snorts up a storm. “Well, she’s an actual sweetheart so she offered me days permanently if I wanted them, but between you and me, I wanted to keep a couple evening shifts so I’d still get some of my shifts with Angela so I went, ‘oh, no, three would be more than enough,’” he details, giving a chimed laugh there, “so the deal ended up being days on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, evenings on Tuesday, Thursday, and she gave me permanent Sundays off which I could not believe, but I wasn’t about to argue because that gave me one of their guaranteed days off to have alongside them, and all in all, the schedule was just perfect for me; it gave me quite a few evenings open to spend with them, but I mean, Tom had definitely been on my mind too, and that schedule freed up all sorts of time blocks to give away to him, which you can absolutely make a face at if you want to.”

Sirius makes one on command and with feeling before letting that whole bit go with a wave off, slotting the whole of it exactly where it’s supposed to go; straight into evidence. “Well, listen, your priorities were all there; family, income, bestie, boy, and there you went, making yourself available to as many of those people as possible within a given week, which I can only imagine helped you feel like you were taking charge of the areas of your life, and, you know, that control thing,” he smiles. “And on top of that, your drive put your family first before anything else tracks perfectly with your previously decided upon devotion to being the most agreeable, doting son there is out there, and not only that, it helped you feel like you were paying their generosity back in a different way than monetarily, and this is the perfect window into you and how you managed with it all, but on the other hand, I have to imagine that it wasn’t all clear as far as cloudy skies go from that moment onward; I mean, you learned from experience not to get too wrapped up in an all-clear signal, didn’t you.”

“I did,” Remus gives him, a guttural, lived-in ring accompanying it. “I’ll echo both of those; I felt incredibly positive and optimistic about the future when I was cutting these deals, but it was a rough go mentally and physically to work past the veil of fear that was so much thicker than it ever was before.”

Sirius nods intently for it. “Of course, you’d have been in the post-infection era,” he raises him, “and even while all these promising areas of your life were coming together and appearing bright and colourful, it’d have to have been a hard sell to accept that Lyall was really OK.”

Remus peers right back at Sirius’s open, inquisitive stare. “It was very fucking challenging,” he trades him, but there’s a definite underline beneath it that Sirius can almost see.

“Well, you’re not a fortune-teller, you didn’t know he’d be solid for the next three actual years, you didn’t know that spanking vein of his would keep on trucking and do the best it could before that clot came along, and you certainly didn’t know that vein would still be trucking this many years on, powering him along,” Sirius offers him. “And aside from you not being able to predict years into the future, you’re still you, and even I had a moment back there when you were talking about catching that wince of his; I felt for that already worrisome lad, who’d just as recently as the past fall had his ‘irrational’ worry about the warning signs showing up again prove very correct — I felt so nervous for you when I just knew how hard that would have been for you to navigate later on.”

Remus takes in a good, long breath and puffs it back out. “It would be waves of nerves that’d come in for all sorts of scenarios, but I’m sure it’s not that difficult for you to imagine that if he was feeling remotely under the weather and/or feverish, I’d think it was happening all over again,” he provides him, and Sirius shakes his head frankly, solemnly because no, that’s not difficult to imagine at all. “I would say for a year at least, it was to the point where I’d physically have to restrain myself from shadowing him constantly even if he was simply trying to get over a tough cold, and thankfully he was quite patient with me about it and didn’t bat me off or huff if I struggled with stopping myself from doing it, not back in those times; now, he’d be huffing and puffing if I were still up to that, but he got why it was happening then given that he’d been a key player in the catalytic event that spurred my behaviour on, but then, to show me that he felt fine apart from the cold or fever, he’d hop from one foot to other quickly so I’d see he could achieve that with no wince, no nothing, and that’d usually snap me out of it.”

Sirius fans fast at his face, tears already welling up. “Well, alright, that hurts me at a deep level,” he returns, smiling sadly for it, “but it’s also so sweet he was so good about it with you, so it’s definitely complex, what’s happening to me right now.”

“It was complex at the time too, so that’s very much in-theme,” Remus lobs him. “It also just took things I already had worry spells over and made them that much more troubling. The truck accident already had me stuck in these frenzied moments over my dad getting in the truck to go to work and I’d suddenly think ‘you should drive him in, he might not make it there if you don’t,’ but I’d have to push it right back down because I physically had to go to school myself. I’d worry about him when he’d be fifty miles out on the highway doing pickups because ‘he could get in a wreck while picking up a wreck,’ and I’d have to push that out because I was in the middle of English class and couldn’t do anything with or about it, and you know I’d worry about my mum if she was just a minute late from when she usually got home; I’d just pace up and down, back and forth until she got back, even though she wasn’t the one who’d been in the accident in the first place — I’d been having this—” he pauses, moving the fingers on his newly splayed hands around as if feeling around in the air, his brows furrowing before he simply shakes his head, “—stuff about suddenly losing one of them already, but actually almost losing him got me right in the teeth and ramped that right up.”

Sirius wraps his arms around himself and squeezes hard. “I just want to jump in there and do this,” he attests, gyrating his arms for emphasis on the embrace. “Just non-stop, you poor thing.”

Remus gives a stirred noise and a squeeze of his own arms around himself for solidarity, which might actually be up to par with the real thing. “With the amount of stressing I was doing, I hardly had much of an appetite, I could barely keep anything down comfortably so I'd nibble at things here and there, and that lack of regular sustenance plus the stressing I was doing only brought the ulcer along and that thing stuck with me for three months on end; if I ate I was in pain, if I didn't eat I was in pain, so it made me strip my diet down to the thinnest it'd ever been and the lightest portions possible so I wouldn't make the ulcer burn any, but not being physically able to each much worked against me because I just surrounded the ulcer with stomach acid and some celery stalks if I was lucky to get some of those down, so I was just, in some form of pain for most of my waking hours until I finally got the ulcer under control," he describes, and Sirius would really like to fight that fucking ulcer for crushing Remus's appetite down so tightly that at the age of twenty-three, he still has to be coaxed into eating something more filling than toast, and it seems Remus can absolutely read the ire on his face, but not quite for what it's for. "I mean, I know it's a lot — mentally I clearly was in trouble but I was also physically struggling in the, uh, post-infection era; everything I’d already been worrying about, all the pacing I was doing, the urges to safely handle the wheel myself, all of my watching out for them, it just went and tripled."

Sirius nods numbly, breathing in long as he splices things around, pulls some threads in between some major dots, and comes out with a fuller image. “The last time you talked about the pacing,” he raises him, “I remember you saying that Lyall would sometimes see you doing it, and while he did try to reassure you that your mum would come along any minute now and that she’d never been in an accident in her life, that sort of stuff, you said he didn’t really know how to use the right combination of words to get you settled again.”

“Yeah, and you’d think that sort of thing would work on someone who values practicality,” Remus trades him. “He tried his best, and I mean, he married my mum who in her own right is an expert worrier so he was no stranger to rational-but-irrational worries, but he’d do his best and I’d still absolutely need to see her car to show up at the end of the driveway before I could breathe properly again.”

“Right, but I will say, the ease with which he offered you the keys when we got here and just expected you to drive had to have been something,” he insists, smiling warmly, knowingly. “I mean, at the time, I just thought he was giving you the option since you’d not done it in a while, but I’m thinking that was a little naive of me now when I know I’m sure wondering when and whether something had to have been implemented along the way because really, looking back at the scene, it did look like second-nature for him to pass those keys over to you.”

Remus straightens his shoulders and neck up real tall. “Get out of my life.”

“Excuse you?” Sirius returns him, reworking his mouth around a smile.

“Well, fuck you; how do you do that?” Remus returns him, unable to hide his own amusement, which is certainly a good sign. “It’s a complete carry-over from us carpooling together into work from back then, and I’ll tell you something, seems like I still ease right the fuck up when he so much as jingles the keys my way and it’s been literal years since the initial impact, so I’m sure you can just imagine how implementing that helped me greatly back then.”

Sirius can’t deny he’s nearly starry-eyed as he takes in a resounding breath. “Did that come into play during the post-infection era, then?” he raises, already feeling flattened by how symbolic that in itself would be before Remus even affirms it.

“Pretty well instantly, yeah,” Remus puts it. “That first week he was due back at work was a rough one for me, I’d be up early every morning even though my new schedule wouldn’t come into play for another two weeks, but even still, I was up bright and early, restless as all hell, I’d go peek out the living room window as he was leaving, wishing I could just do it for him, and he’d turn off the driveway and I’d eventually get on with it, but toward the end of that week, I remember being at the kitchen table, bright and early again, doing all sorts of this—” he folds his hands all over themselves, “—like, good Cunt, I was in another world altogether, and he just walked in, tossed the keys onto the table and said, ‘well, you’re up; take me in, kid,’ and I was so relieved, I got up instantly like, thank you and let’s go, and I drove him in, took the truck back home until I was slated to start, threw my bicycle in the bed and rode it over to work after I dropped the truck off, then he ended up there ten minutes before my shift ended to pick me up, told me to put the bike in bed and take the keys, saying ‘I’m not a taxi service, after all,’ and we just kept doing that right up until my schedule changed over and found ways to keep it going from there, and I was just—”

The hand Remus puts over his heart covers for the word he can’t seem to locate for how he felt at the time, covers it completely. “That’s my dad; he’ll make anything work if it’s worth it,” he cements, and as if it could get any sweeter than it already was, Sirius wells up all over again.

“No, I love that so much,” he insists, practically vibrating with the sort of active teamwork that came out of such a bracing altercation between those very two stubborn blokes. “I mean, Remus? Between him hopping around mid-cold just so you’d see his foot was just fine and this? What a champ, and what a compromise for you two; I want to scream, it’s so fucking cute.”

Remus nods fast. “An incredible compromise, really,” he instils. “On the mornings we both worked, I’d drive us in, drop him and the truck off at the shop, head over to work from there and meet him back at the shop for the ride home, and then on the days where I worked evenings I’d bring him in, go back home to — well, link up with Tom for a while, that certainly happened a lot over the summer, and then I’d drive by the shop on the way in and leave the truck there, dad would come and get me at the end of the evening, which did have its own batch of nervous spells because, ‘what if he didn’t make it,’ but I looked forward to to the drives back which helped a lot, and honestly there just, were going to be situations where he’d need to get on the road, there were going to be days where he’d be out doing pickups, mobile work, meeting folks at their homes to take a look at the damage, and that had to be OK again, you know, and there were days and moments that was tougher than others, spells that were stronger than others, and growing to accept the exceptions was important because I did have to snap out of it for things that were just—”

“Out of you control,” Sirius smiles.

Remus clears his throat once. “Well, I was going to say ‘inevitable,’ but fine,” he relents. “To me, I was a ball of anxiety and wasn’t thinking of it as having control so much as just viscerally needing to keep the both of them safe, but there you go; it’s been there this whole time.”

Sirius sticks his tongue between his teeth, doing a lil’ jig with his arms and hips while Remus flies the bird his way with a pointed smile on his lips. “Thank you for saying it,” he trades him. “That’s the thing, though, it felt like an antidote to some major anxiety spells to you — and it was, clearly, being in that driver’s seat more often than not helped with the anxiety, having that quality carpool time with him helped it feel less clinical and much more fun, and I’m sensing it helped let the lead off your mum a bit because it became 'boys time' and something to look forward to, but there, in the background, you had more control over the wheel than you didn’t; it makes a lot of fucking sense, Remus.”

Remus reaches his hands up to rub them hard over the lower half of his face. “I feel see-through,” he comments.

“Your innards look great,” Sirius serves him.

Remus gives a powerful pfft for that. “It’s getting spooky how right this feels; I’m not going to pretend it isn’t,” he puts up, pushing out a puff of breath and shaking his head clear, but Sirius can’t help but see the evidence that Remus both needs and wants to talk about that time, particularly because he’s right back in it again in no time at all. “I’d even get the nervous spells over things that weren’t so dark, it would happen to me for silly stuff, too; like, one time, during that first summer out of the trenches, he stubbed a toe against my mum’s desk in the hall as he passed it, pretty innocuous stuff right there, but the toe happened to be on the problem foot and my mum went ‘bet you felt that one,’ and I—” he pauses and stares directly at Sirius as he presses his mouth firmly together, “—Sirius, you’re allowed to laugh; he certainly erupted.” 

Sirius does, very does let a series of breathy ones go out his nose. “She’s something else,” he addresses. “They both are, holy shit; that hits me in waves.” 

“Mhm, she just gets him and the fact that he’d much rather be negged a bit for the topic rather than have it completely avoided, and that sort of thing was far more normal than pretending the topic was off-limits, it was,” Remus extends him. “It’s not like I wasn’t used to that sort of thing by then because I grew up on it, but I wasn’t even able to be in on the joke; it hit me too late, I was too busy being convinced that he’d wake up with another massive problem with the foot even though he wouldn’t and he very didn’t, and that sort of thing would just happen from time to time, they’d be poking at each other, doing their best to make each other laugh, and it’d have me feeling like I was lagging behind their progress, and that made me want to course-correct myself, snap out of it so I wouldn’t keep missing the good parts.”

Sirius braces himself like he’s been shot, and it sure feels like he has, that’s the thing about it. “Ohh, that’s a rough one,” he returns him. "Thanks for the warning, Remus.”

“Well, it’s true,” Remus retains. “I know my mum had her own moments with nervous spells too because whenever he felt slightly warm, we would lock eyes and both know without a doubt that the other just travelled to the panic realm, but she was better at navigating her spells while not disregarding the very real joy that she and my dad were experiencing with his big, second chance, and I found it admirable, seeing it from her, having someone to study as a model; the near-loss scared the shit out of her, I saw that with my own eyes, but the evidence that the experience made the two of them closer than ever before was just, everywhere they went, I could see that with my own eyes, and she didn’t stop herself from laughing if she could, didn’t stop herself wherever and whenever she knew she could get him going, and having both of their energies around me helped even when I did catch myself lagging a bit — it made just me want to catch up to her faster so I could be in it, too.”

Sirius nods fixedly, realizing a beat behind that Remus paused for him to interject. “Sorry, I’m the one lagging now,” he says of it, giving a faint laugh for it. “Go on, please; I’m transfixed at this point.”

Remus hums non-committally, catching himself with a bout of stage fright, it seems, but a few beats on he’s tilting his head back and forth, humming again like he’s ruminating on something and Sirius doesn’t mind any waiting it out. “Well, I also had myself to get me out of some tricky spots; there were dinners, evenings spent out back where I was having a really good time with them, but I’d suddenly get struck by a bolt of fear that at any moment now, something could come along and completely destroy it for us,” he details, and Sirius presses his lips together to mute the agonised noise that so wants to leave him, reaching his arms up for another, distinct projection into that time to give that poor thing a vigorous embrace. “No one specific thing, just existential, weird stuff; an asteroid chunk could land in the yard, a bomb could go off too close to the house and get us all in the blast, that kind of thing, and I’d have to coach myself out of it like, ‘well, are you even really enjoying this properly? Not really, not if you’re just lost inside scenarios A through Z, so you might as well try put that away so you can actually be present enough to enjoy the good you’ve got while you’ve got it,’ so I did have to figure out some self-regulating, use my mum as inspiration, use my dad for comfort, use my hands to help ground me in a specific scene I was in so I wouldn’t feel like I was a ghost looking in on it, use the present stillness and ease to block everything else out, see the good that I did have, and that felt important and was very important to me.”

Sirius’s eyes pop wide and anew, projecting his name out of his chest powerfully. “Remus? That is exactly where you get it from,” he shot-puts him. “I mean, I see that you get it from your parents too, but you’re so optimistic for all of us — for me, for Lily, James, Pete, Dorcas, all of us, it’s what you do, you just yank light out for us and show us we even have it, and you do it for yourself, too, there are days it’s harder for you to be able to do it, but I’ve personally witnessed you pull the light out of fucking nowhere just to have some for yourself and I’ve seen you do it for your parents too; the way you just factually convinced your mum to take the promotion, the way you see the progress your dad’s made and glow for it, for him? Remus — you had that sort of thing steeped in you already, but I have to think that uncertain time really set you on that course, got you training in deliberately looking for bright spots wherever you could find them.” 

“I’m actually very willing to wear that one,” Remus lobs him, giving a small shrug with a bigger smile comparatively. “I also don’t want to misrepresent all I had going for me at the time; I was going through it, but I had all of this love surrounding me — different forms of it, but ones that I still cherished and didn’t want to not interact with because of these gripping fear spells that made me too nervous and too distracted to be in the moment, I felt like I was treading water in those moments and I’d just kick and kick, search under almost anything to find a bright spot to focus on.”

Sirius nods quite primly. “And that in itself is an exercise in keeping control,” he poses, keeping that thread alive. “You were brushing up against situations that made you feel very uneasy and quite often at that; whether your dad was actually truly better or not, whether either one of them was going to disappear on you, whether a sudden boulder was going to roll through the frame and ruin a lovely time, but the weapons you had against that were your self-regulation mantras, direct inspiration from how your mum was handling things, bright-spotting where you could, it all helped in the control department; controlling how you interpret what happened — it’s no wonder you kept the lid on so tight, you were actively taking part in how you were interacting with any one section of your life.”

The spurred breath, the vast nod, the open expression on Remus’s face; it’s just unbelievably nice to see that Remus is engaging with him like this. “It was, that first summer out was a learning curve, but I took refuge in whoever and whatever I could,” he takes it from there. “Took refuge in the drives in and out of work, outings and sit-down dinners with them, took refuge at work, and in that busy, bright environment, I found ways to look forward to the differences in atmosphere between the two shifts I’d work, and it was always such a nice feeling either working alongside Angela — even just passing each other at shift-change could brighten me right up, and I definitely took a lot of refuge in Tom, I know I did; I learned through trial and error that my existential worries made him uncomfortable so I couldn’t really share all that much with him about it — which, you’ve already heard me go the fuck off about, so you know exactly where I’ve landed on that one these days, but—”

Sirius heads into a round of nods so fast his blood rushes at the back of his neck. “And how, mister,” he echoes him. 

“Mhm mhm, and I can only imagine what it might’ve been like to have someone in my corner to talk to about it, someone who wasn’t directly involved, and who weren’t my parents who already felt I'd been robbed of a normal childhood; I really think that could've been beyond helpful,” Remus attests, a frank air, voice, expression about him that’s honestly incredible to see. “But, we’re discussing how I felt at the time, aren’t we, so I felt he’d found his way back to me, I felt this could have been the real thing, and while I couldn’t be talking about my existential worries with him, I still felt needed him so much, I still wanted him so much, and—” he pauses short, only this time his mouth stays ajar, his head on a new tilt, his brows going right up and taking Sirius’s right up with them, no doubt, “—oh. Oh, wow.”

Sirius blinks fast. “‘Oh, oh wow,’ what, Remus?” he investigates, fully ready for anything when he knows he ought to be. 

Remus puts his head back in the game with a wicked shake. “Sorry, I am only just realizing now that one could say I used him to get through that summer,” he shares.  

“Woah, woah, woah; hold it,” Sirius halts him. “Redial, what are we doing here?” 

“No, not like — not on purpose,” Remus clarifies, shifting more toward him. “I wasn’t aware of it; I was fully wrapped up in a fantasy that he went right along with for a good while there, but my heart fluttering whenever we were even slightly romantic with each other is its own thing, I still rode the shit out of him to escape my head that summer and it worked, for the short term it did, and I can’t even argue it, I used that body for my own little devices.”

Sirius puts his mouth in a shapely ‘O’ for this. “Remus,” he returns, giving up a chuckle one might give at a dinner party with the good bubbly on trays going about the room, but he’s shimmying his shoulders back and forth like he’s at the club. “‘Oh, wow,’ indeed.”

“Wait, don’t,” Remus puts up, halting all this hooting with two halting hands, “I don’t know how I feel about this yet.”

Sirius sits rather still for a beat or three. “Well, let’s see if we can make that easier; when did he officially wander off again, and when did he start giving you the ol’ classics? You know, the ‘I’m not too far gone but you’re definitely too into it,’ and the ‘we are going to have to stop doing this and settle down,' that lovely stuff,” he raises him, and Remus’s rather choice silence, the precarious lift of his eyebrows, the wonky position of his lips; they all suggest that one could not have been without the other, so to speak. “Oh, you’re kidding me; that’s too easy.” 

Remus shakes his head. “Around mid-September, I saw him out and about with a definite someone else and he saw me see him,” he gives for it, meanwhile Sirius collects energy for the spirit bomb that’s getting ready to detonate, “and then a day later he rang me to give me those sentiments to think over.”

And she’s a-blow. “Well, then the last thing you’re going to feel about riding him until dawn for a chance at some euphoric peace is any kind of retrospective guilt if I have any sway in it,” Sirius attests, waving his hands around for a stark refusal. “That little bitch, guess it wasn’t enough that he’d already gone and fanned a whole sexuality complex in you, nah, why not plant a sex complex to fester and grow in you once he’s already out the door — oh, ohh, but only after he’d happily taken you this way, that way all summer rather than let you talk about your freshly updated and un-der-stand-able death complex for five actual seconds, mhm mhm, well, alright, pal, sure seems like someone liked it a hell of a lot more than he claimed to 'cause he sure as hell kept coming back for more whenever it suited him just fine, the self-projecting piece of literal shit; if you do anything other than feel completely fine with having taken what you could get from that guy, then you ought to wear the fact that you used that bod like a fucking medal, you hear me? I hear it’s all he had going for him and I’ve also heard you’ve had better since, so own that, too, while you’re at it.” 

Remus had already embarked on a worldly face journey right around the time Sirius really started spewing, so it goes without saying that he’s not exactly certain of which specific expression he should dock at now that Sirius has run himself rather hoarse, but while he’s is taking in many new, clean breaths, Sirius does have the focus to figure that he can’t let this realization of Remus’s go without a bit more of a pragmatic and, dare he say, practical appeal. 

“Seriously, Remus, at a time where you were in such a disconcerting place, there’s a hell of a lot worse you could have done with yourself than go and fuck your would-be boyfriend into the next century just to feel something else for a change,” he maintains, adamant that he back that tumultuous eighteen-year-old's decisions up. “I wish you’d have had someone much better for you in that role than a bloke who’d only support you with his peen, but I digress; the fact that you went and got it regularly isn’t going to change a damn thing about you, not to me.”

Remus tugs at his lower lip before he leans in, reaching his tea out to the right while he beckons Sirius in with his left hand, tugging him by the chin into an open-mouthed kiss, and that’ll always get Sirius feeling his bodyweight in jello. He lets Remus be the decision-maker in terms of when this kiss will end, but he does chase Remus’s lips as he starts to pull away to nip after his lower one, mostly to add some promise to the eventual crash together they are so going to have at some point, and the result ends up being the two of them sitting back exactly the way they’d been before with a knowing glance shared between them; their next tryst is going to be out of this world.

Once that’s said without being said, Sirius searches him quite openly. “Is there any one section of that you’d feel the need to reply to specifically, or was that more of a ‘reply: all’ situation?” he raises. 

“Oh, the second one,” Remus affirms. “I’m just going to be grateful I had you there in that moment.” 

“You know what, same here,” Sirius echoes him. “So, a summer of emotional duress, lovely bright spots to found in between, and immense physical therapy comes to a close, and there goes the boy out the door; when did he come around looking all thirsty again, hm?” 

Remus puts out a sharp pfft. “Not until after the holidays were done,” he poses. “January, maybe February the following year? Around there somewhere.”

“Ahh, the winter blues must’ve set in,” Sirius says of it. “Alright, then I can only imagine his exit came with a ton of its own kind of duress, but I can also imagine that freed up some blocks of time for you to link back up with Angela some more outside of your specific work environment, maybe even link up with both girlies? You tell me.”

Remus smirks as he reworks his mouth around a reluctant smile. “You know it did,” he returns him, but he’s loving this as much as he might pretend he doesn’t. “There were quite a few evenings with the girlies on the back half of that year; I should have just stuck with them after he dropped me like that, but no, there I'd go, letting him back in every few months or so.” 

“Well, yeah, but that’s some hindsight sheen for you and you had it real, real bad for him,” Sirius trades him, “but, look at that, we’ve made it over to something you couldn’t actually control; Ding-Dong Tom.”

Oh-kay, I didn’t know we were at the nickname portion of things,” Remus attests, giving a light reel, “and while you are correct that I couldn't have controlled him much at all, you also know I certainly didn’t go popping off on him, so where’s the connection there? Where’d my visceral reaction to control taken away from me go?” 

Sirius rises right to it. “Oh, you want to know, hm?” he negs him, having a bit of fun with it if Remus wants a bit of that. “You thought that was about you, not him.” 

Remus looks around fast. “Wait, no, what?”

Sirius nods knowingly. “You thought his resistance to you, and your inability to keep him for very long, was about you, but of course you did; he communicated that to you in all sorts of ways, personally and impersonally,” he retains. “His words hardly ever matched his actions, however, and his actions hardly ever matched his words so that was already exceptionally confusing for you to navigate, but when you loved him the way you did, the times he came on back felt like you’d won a prize and the times he dropped off on you again felt specific to you, felt like a dismissal of you, and what else were you going to do but carry on with what you did have? He didn’t make you angry; hell, you wouldn’t get certified angry over what he’d been doing to you for quite a few years yet, and you’re still flirting with which parts of it you’re even allowed to be angry over now, but you certainly weren’t angry at him back then.”

Remus takes a resounding breath in through his nose, sticks his tea between his knees, and pushes his fingers up underneath his sunnies, dragging them down the bulk of his face with a bouldered noise echoing in his throat. “Why are you so fucking good at this?” he demands.

“Well, I’d say it’s a combination of the fact that I listen real good and the fact that my third eye is open today,” Sirius puts forth. “Now, I know it wasn’t always easy to drum up the courage to reach your hand out to either of the girlies after a few week stretch where you might’ve been a bit of a flake, and I know how heartbreaking and confusing it was to for him to be yoyo-ing you around like that, so I don’t want this to come off as crass and if I’m wrong, then you tell me that right away, OK, but that became a pattern in and of itself, and the thing about patterns is they’re very familiar, so I do wonder if you’d have been able to convince yourself you were OK to play ball so long as you enjoyed what had when you had it.”

Remus gives up a flat snort, bringing his drink closer to his mouth. “Not crass if you’ve a knack for listening good,” he lets him have. 

“Well, I appreciate that, thank you,” Sirius returns him first. “So, when Ding-Dong Tom would slip off again, you’d pop back in with the girlies and have them back for a stretch, and then he’d come around again and you’d be hanging with him much more and less with your friends, but if you’d taught yourself to enjoy what you had of him when you did and enjoy seeing your buddies when he wasn’t coming round as much, then if things were steadily going great with Hope and Lyall on a familial level, if work was still a bright environment for you, if you were doing your self-regulating for those worry spells of yours, if you were looking under stones to find the bright spots and things felt manageable though they really weren’t, then this is precisely why I wanted to spend time in these years; you worked so hard to appeal to all these separate pockets of your life, to actively enjoy whatever you had even when you deserved a lot more, and that led to you gaining traction for these wonderful qualities you have that I see from you every day, but it also led to you muting yourself, holding it all in, stuggling to tread water and breathe over it, and stretching yourself so thin to fit a mould that you could live with. I mean, what do you think, do you see it too, or am I just full of shit?”

It takes a series of beats before Remus breathes in long through his nose. “Not even close,” he breathes out, aiming a tight-lipped smile at Sirius’s inquisitive, prompting blink. “It’s fucking eerie, having my life played back like this, in a way where I’m in it but I’m above it — looking at it from above, I mean; I'm definitely not above it, clearly.” 

Sirius swells with a definite air of pride, but more so than that, he’s simply thrilled. “Remus, this is good; you’ve been so good,” he instils. “I’m definitely going to need you to chime for this next bit, though, because it’s insurmountably important stuff.”

Remus huffs a tiny breath, almost a laugh. “Like it’s not all been that,” he returns him.

“Oh, I love you for saying that,” Sirius lobs him. “Only, there are three years between the one you graduated in and the year you showed up in London, a fresh-faced twenty-one-year-old student from yonder, which would mean, you must have sent out that application the spring prior to that, I’d imagine, so that’s still two years post-grad that you stuck around there, looking after things, keeping an eye out for both of your parents’ wellbeing and fiercely worrying about their mortality depending on the given moment, self-regulating and getting inspiration where you could, doing your hardest to live up to the many different roles you’d taken on for yourself, muting yourself in all sorts of ways, and saving up for a magical time and place called 'uni' that was getting closer and closer to being a tangible thing, and at some point along the way there, things changed for you, the colours around you dulled.”

This time, Sirius doesn’t have to probe him whatsoever to get a faint, but affirming hum. “Started to, yeah,” he offers for it. “Everything except for the house; that stayed in colour.”

“Oh, and we’re coming back to that, trust,” Sirius instils. “But first, we have to look at how you began to feel toward Tom because he’s certainly the reason your greater home lost its sheen; you were starting to get fed up, sick of waiting around on a guy who wasn’t spending nearly enough time on you, and the very topic of uni became its own iffy subject, got him coaching you on applying to Cardiff just so you’d be nearby but with no guarantee of him even being around to benefit from your proximity to him, and listen here, for you to have made that leap, to even have muted his opinion on where you could or should go, and to have sprinkled an application elsewhere just to see what might happen if you did? That was very brave of you, Remus, and a little petty even, but most of all, it was a little dalliance into how to hold agency, wasn’t it.”

Remus pushes a stark smirk out of his nose. “I felt like I was stepping out of bounds just filling the application out,” he shares, hiding his mouth behind his cup, like he so often used to do when he’d get uncomfortably bashful and does so much less of these days; he really must be settling in pretty damn well with this twosome they're in. “It was all very exciting and a little bit naughty too, if you’ll let me get away with saying it.”

“I will,” Sirius returns him, reaching over to flick his side of Remus’s cup to show there’ll be no taking the piss here and he can lower it right back down again. “Hello? Testing the waters, flirting with the idea of making your own choice of where you were going to go, where you could go, and then, what if you were admitted? How thrilling that moment would have been, just putting the application in the mailbox.”

Remus’s shoulders sway a bit with a new smile on; it’s lovely to see. “It was thrilling in the moment, it really was, but then came the days after I sent it, and those had me feeling itchy under my skin,” he describes. “It was such a brash impulse to even apply that far out, just the idea I’d even done that felt a bit like being out in open water already, and I definitely felt some guilt for doing it, no surprise there, I’m sure, but then hearing back from both schools? I don’t even think I conceptualised that far ahead, and for the acceptance letters to come within a day of each other; I couldn’t have expected that, never, and it was such a rough decision once I knew I had to make it.”

Sirius puffs out a massive breath for that. “Oh yeah, I’m convinced it had to have been heartbreaking, and in more ways than just the risk of potentially losing the guy as a result of it," he raises it. "That part was difficult enough when of course there was a part of you that still wanted him to fight for you for once, whether he was capable of doing it or not is beside the point, you still wanted to try with him, even right up until you moved away, you still wanted to try to make it work; that's how interwoven he was in your decision making, but beyond him, beyond the fragility of Tom, I’m certain that you’d have stared between those two acceptance letters and seriously considered sticking with Cardiff when it’d make everything a lot easier. Just a hop and a skip away if anything went wrong again, a controllable distance for you to be from them, and it must have been harrowing, betting on whether the coast was actually clear for you to even consider going to school further away from them, hm?”

Sirius searches Remus carefully, hearing that braced breath he took in just there. “How did you even manage to pick the right word?” he poses him, and Sirius simply shrugs; he doesn’t know either, but he’s glad to have done it. “That part was nothing but harrowing; it’d been so long without an issue, but the question of whether the coast was clear or not stopped me from sleeping at all that first night I knew I'd been accepted to both, and I felt uncomfortable with myself for actually wanting go to school somewhere else, live somewhere else, a city I'd seen and loved my whole life without ever having been there; that urge was in there with me too, but I was so nervous I'd regret it the second I set foot out there, that I’d know without a doubt I’d chosen the wrong school, whether it’d even be OK if I went too far from them.”

“Mhm, and it goes beyond whether the coast was clear or not; you helped make that place what it was, Remus,” Sirius extends him. “It was something you helped build and the idea of leaving a nest that you actively helped sustain for years by then, that you felt so responsible for? It’d make perfect sense to me that it might’ve been impossible to know whether it’d even be OK if you went off and did your own thing when you weren’t just their son; you were, but you weren’t.” 

Remus wets his lips before pressing them together before humming with a weak nod of his head. “No, I straddled that line pretty tightly,” he echoes, and that’s a big deal — huge deal, just to hear him contribute to that read of it when otherwise he’d avoid talking of it in those terms at all. “I don’t want there to be any room for the idea I resent them for it; my resistance in straying too far away from them was all me, not something they ever indicated to me.”

“No, there’s no way you resent them for it,” Sirius speaks up. “I don’t mean that negatively, I’ve never been near a family like yours; you guys value each other in a way I haven't seen before, you cry with each other, you laugh with each other, you work at and with each other, you build each other up — you built each other and it’s remarkable, but it'd be harrowing to step too far away from and it’s fair you resisted doing it, so tell me about it; how’d you turn that resistance around because I sure as hell met you in a coffee shop in the middle of London, didn’t I?”

Remus moves from a completely overcome expression over to giving up a bright laugh that appears to startle himself. “I wasn’t ready for that, sorry,” he extends, giving into a twist at his mouth. “They’re the ones who turned it around for me, actually; I needed that extra push and they definitely took that on in their typical, boorish ways.”

Sirius lights right up for the sentiment here, but he won’t pretend he isn’t equally as spurred by the breathy laugh Remus let out on the tail end of it. “Tell me, tell me, tell me,” he chants, all in one breath. 

Remus scratches the inside of his right forearm as he recollects. “Well, you were right in that I was seriously considering Cardiff for all of those reasons you so artfully picked up on, but there wasn’t a ton of time to hang around debating it because I had to accept and deny one of them, and I was certainly feeling the time crunch I was underneath,” he details. “I hadn’t told anyone I’d applied anywhere else; not them, not Tom, not Angela, nobody, it was this quiet little secret, or agency grab, or both, honestly, and I just had this moment where I needed them to know and see the predicament I was in the middle of, and I wanted them proud of me for getting into two different schools, there was some of that too, so I walked the two letters into the den to show them and my dad’s clear favourite of the two was quite obvious from the start just based off the holler he gave out, and then he went around singing tunes off Abbey while my mum and I were fixing dinner, piping in with places I could visit if I went there, and then my mum got in on the action too, so while my busy head was swimming over an option that would work for everyone, it was me against them in the end, and as goofy as that all was, their support really meant fucking everything to me.”

Sirius rubs fast at his nose, nodding for it because of course it did. “Of course it did,” he offers, a sharp tickle at the back of his throat, eyes stinging, sinuses pressurising, hit six different ways; he can do nothing else, truly nothing else but put out a boisterous sob that well and truly jolts Remus to attention. “No, it’s official; I’ve been done in.”

“What’d I say?” Remus bids, right spooked by the sound of his voice, but so is he, good Cunt, so is he. 

“That’d have made it so much harder for you when you were there,” Sirius insists, wiping fast at his eyes. “You’d already worked so hard on yourself, flattened yourself out to fit all these moulds, muted yourself to get by, trusted them with the biggest decision you had to make up until that point, actually managed to say yes to a grand opportunity of your own making and strike out on your own with their support backing you, but then you get actively and officially dumped on your way out, it’s nothing like you’d hoped it’d be once you’re out there, you end up feeling more isolated than ever before, you have so much more time to think and fester and mourn what you had with him and all you never did, you harden yourself out and keep yourself away from people, and Lyall winds up with a clot in the hospital a year into you being away, after you knew somewhere deep down that it wasn’t over for him yet and debated whether you should even go in the first place in case they needed you, and then I blast into the picture and snap my bitchy little fingers at you like you’re the problem? Fuck, I could be so careless with you.” 

He hears Remus takes in a steeling breath in. “Sirius, how can a person be called careless about a myriad of nuances they did not know about at the time?” he poses.

Sirius drops his hands from his leaking face, it’s no use. “Reckless, then; is that better?” he raises.

“Not much,” Remus returns candidly. “And I could easily make the case that you did so much more to break me out of that awful spot I was in than you could have ever made it worse; you were blinding, the kind exact of technicolour I needed, you made me lose my breath, and you didn’t give up on me when you could have easily done it.” 

And now it’s Sirius’s turn for a steeling breath in. “Not that easily,” he slips him. 

Remus tilts his head back and forth, a funny purse of his lips happening now, and Sirius gives him a certifiably lame attempt at a return smile; those words mean a lot, vestiges from storytime with Remus swimming around in his brain, but shit, those in-between years, as much as he had some damn good educated guesses along the way, he didn’t see that last detail coming or it barreling along to hit him sideways; not that brilliant rush of support that Remus got toward the end of his time at home, but it is just so believable now, piercingly so if he thinks about the way he’s behaved about it this sort of thing. 

“I was so mean to you about that B grade,” he relents, garnering a wild reel from Remus for it, but no, that’s just what he was. “No, I was, I made it needlessly personal and was just openly ignorant about why you had a problem owning that up to her; they supported this venture so much and how you report back to them is important to you, and so what? You fibbed on a grade, big deal, why’d I need to torpedo you about it? Of course you have perfectionistic tendencies, look at all the ways you told yourself you had to be as close to perfect as possible, and I was literally so mean to you about it.” 

Remus takes in a careful breath through his teeth. “OK, I’m sorry, but ‘ignorant’ always has a negative connotation attached to it despite the fact that all it boils to is the lack of knowledge about a certain subject,” he puts it, “and since I’m not exactly the most natural-born sharer out there and you didn’t have the whole picture until today, how would you have known how deep it runs for me; how, Sirius?”

“I should have known better,” Sirius maintains. “I knew it wasn’t even about the damn B minus either; I knew it was perfectionism at play even in the moment, I saw all three of your faces at Christmas, I could see how proud they were of you, and I knew how bashfully proud they made you feel in return; I had no excuse for going at you like that all the way over in May, I knew better than that, even without knowing the whole story, I knew better.”

“I knew better too, that’s the thing,” Remus counters him, and Sirius aims a huff right at him. “No, you listen to me: my dad asked to have a look at my grades like, a half-hour after they first got to my place on Christmas and you well-know I wanted a better grade in Philosophy overall, but I was proud to have finally gotten an A-paper out of the Robot so while the final grade was lower that I’d ever planned for it to be at the start of the term, I was feeling quite proud of myself, so looked my grades up, showed him the screen, and he called the whole batch of them fantastic, didn’t single out my worst grade of the bunch, didn’t say one thing about Philosophy — and then went and melted my face off, bragging at dinner for the whole table full of guests to hear it. I had no reason to fib a slightly higher mark when talking to my mum about it, I just did it, Sirius; I was disappointed in myself and didn’t want her to be disappointed in me too, but even then, I knew I’d done something very odd and quite young of me, which is rather why I brought that weirdness up it to you, the counsel.” 

“And I proceeded to tear your actions to the ground,” Sirius underlines. “I could have chilled a bit; what the fuck was I trying to prove?” 

“Mm, well, that she’d never have limited my worth as a person to a B grade,” Remus offers for it. “If you think about it, you didn’t even know how right you were about that until today, but I did; I needed the reminder, wanted your brand of medicine to calm me down about it, and I still got defensive with you, so what now?”

“Well, of course you got defensive,” Sirius counters him. “I got defensive, then you got defensive, so I got more defensive and you got even more defensive; all because I can be a jealous, mean little ninny.”

“Well, there was a lot going on for you at the time so I’m not interested in picking you apart over it,” Remus retorts, game-face on. “You’d just found out your banshee of a mother died, a lot had to have been drummed up about that awful woman’s style of parenting, and there’s little ol’ fucking me, telling you about lying about a B grade to my supportive, dote of a mum so she’d think just a little bit better of me; I could have read the room better, let’s just say that, and as far as I’m concerned with it now, neither of us handled that one very well and that’s just OK, I think, because look? We’re stars, Sirius, look at us.”

Sirius swishes his pointed mouth back and forth, feeling seen beyond measure, rather complex about it, and completely bolstered by that finishing touch. “Yeah, OK, but I’m still sorry about my half of it,” he sneaks in there.

Remus nods rather extensively. “I hear you,” he returns him. “So, now that you do know more about just how much of a nervous wreck I really was for a long time there and you know that they used to witness a lot of my spells, perhaps it’s a little clearer now why I’ve held onto a lot of determination for them to not have to worry any more than they’re going to about me out there, especially my mum, but it’s true that I do get all muddled up with things like grades and accolades, but it doesn’t make sense, not realistically, and I do need that reminder, particularly around the end of a term.”

“I’ll be better next time,” Sirius maintains, sniffing fast.

“I’ll read the room better next time,” Remus slips him. “As long as I’m not flunking out and wasting my own, hard-earned money by doing that, they’re not going to have a single, negative comment about how my productivity or success rate out there — I’m already a success story to them, I know that, but I’ll need that reminder again one day and I hope you will take these valid points I just spoke out and use them against me in a less combative way, and in return, I will work on being less defensive about it and equally combative, and I really think we’ll have these particular complications to me and you in the bag.

Sirius nods fast, so fast. “No, I love that, let’s do it,” he echoes him. 

Remus nods right back at him, a very similar rigour to it, but he goes for a sort of breath he’ll tend to do if he’s got a delicate point to make next. “However, I am certainly wary about the idea of being too incorporative of the past,” he raises next. “There’s going back into my tales of yore to connect dots for a purpose, such as seeing the present-me a lot better, and there’s using select parts of that very same past, bringing them forward to a semi-recent past, and then curb-stomping yourself for not knowing any better when you first fucking met me, and I say that with love.”

Sirius makes a whole batch of faces to all of that. “I’m sorry — I lost sight, I did,” he owns up. “There’s just so much to look back on, especially from the fall, and wish I’d done better for you—”

“Oh, and you think you’re alone on that? Please, you know you’re not; I snuffed up real bad with you quite a few times back then and it didn’t make you quit,” Remus returns him. “If the whole point of this venture was grace then let's keep some of that for you too; you gave me a person to care that deeply about, you gave me colour for free, you wouldn’t let me take myself so fucking seriously all of the time and I needed somebody to get that message through to me, and you forced me to get out of my clumsy head and start actually communicating with you, which I fought you on like mad because I’m some of the worst at it — hell, you get me communicating all the time even though I still resist you on it; I mean, what’ve we been doing in here, playing cards?”

Sirius falls into a round of quiet stitches, loving all these fresh doses of truth with a dash of flair at the end; it’s just to his taste. “Well, you fucking got me there,” he allows him. “Thank you, you’re the best.”

“I have to say I liked it better when you were shirking some of the blame away from you solely and onto our respective but massive, long-standing control issues,” Remus trades him, giving a hearty laugh in his throat. “That blew my head off.”

“You did a little gay gasp, even,” Sirius mentions. 

“It was worthy of one,” Remus maintains, an energy about him that’s just, alleviated. “So, help me out here, then; what are we to do with the fact that I was built and built and built into a massive control freak with two very visceral bodily responses, while also falling in with a bloke who has his own visceral issues with control?”

Sirius breathes in long, giving it out as a resounding puff on the exhale. “Well, if we both aim to be more aware of our own limitations in that area, we’ll be better placed to be more patient and kind to each other while also showing a lot more patient and kindness to ourselves, which I say as someone who seconds ago lost his complete sight of that,” he cops to it, “but that brings me right on to the fact that there’s one thing I definitely don’t want to come of this, which is that I don’t want us to completely lose ourselves because of this.”

“Go, please,” Remus bids him, “tell me.”

Sirius nods for him, smiling for him. “Well, there has to be something to the fact that we were and still are so—” he pauses purposefully, touching his two fists together and grinding them against each other, causing Remus to snort voluminously, “—no, but really; we’re so compatible and yet, there are parts of us that are so similar they clash, and there are parts of us that are so dissimilar that they definitely clash, too, but that forces us both to compromise, to stop and think, to pump the brakes and breathe a little more, see where the one’s coming from and find a middle ground, and I just showed my ass just now by getting pulverized by the ways I clashed with you in the past, but those clashes forced me to do better by you and for you to do better by me, so thank you, just — literally thank you; I really almost got lost there for a beat.” 

“It’s OK, I get lost all the time,” Remus gives him, “but I very agree, I don’t want us to tiptoe around each other either and risk never growing because of it; I’ve done much more of that with you than I ever have without.” 

“Oh, see, we’re the same person,” Sirius offers, smiling because of him. “That being said, I do have plenty of plans for how we work with the visceral responses you have and be more aware of what’s going on when it’s happening for you going forward; now, particularly with a situation where you perceive yourself as the sole perpetrator of having lost control, I actually might not change too much about what I’ve been doing for you because I do think I’m on the right track with that one, but that’s really because it physically hurts me to see you tearing at yourself like you do, so for those cases, I want to keep getting you off of yourself and grounding you—”

“Please do, it means everything to me in the moment,” Remus comes in fast. “When you were up in my room with me, the rubbing you were doing, it helped me so much, and you were so patient; got me to breathe better, helped me push so many parts of that tailspin aside so that in the end, it was just you, me, and a theory that my dad might’ve just suggested to you that it’d be swell if we got together — I mean, what a conclusion.”

Sirius gives out a hefty pfft. “Thank you for reminding me,” he returns him. “I’ll tell you right now, I won’t take a thing out of my roster but I may add one thing in, which is that I want to be making a point of when it’s happening to you so you may have a better chance at recognising it for yourself; it won’t be some magical fix, but if I at least make it known to you that you’re turtling or running off to tear at yourself away from everyone else, make you see what’s actually going on in your body, it could cut through some of the noise and if we could lose even one insult directed at yourself out of it, I just think that’d be worth it.”

Remus’s mouth twitches as he takes in a faint, heaving breath through his nose, right bouldered by it because he simply mouths the word ‘OK.’

Sirius reaches over the centre console to brush at Remus’s left cheek with this right thumb. “Now, the other response may be a tad trickier, but I do have plans for that one, too,” he prefaces. “It could take some getting used to, so let’s be willing to feel it out, OK? I’m going to try to stick to letting you rant it out, point the finger at the person or thing that’s got you going, but from there, I do want to be making sure we’re taking a step back to pinpoint if some precarious agency was involved, but from there, I’m going to want to give some control back to you and sometimes, that means I’m going to have to make the person, thing, or force that took it from you feel small so that you feel they’re less imposing and that can get mucky for us, so it’ll be touch-and-go, but—”

He trails off as Remus puts his entire left palm over his face, giving a meek noise behind it, and Sirius taps it until he moves it away again. “Quit that, it’s OK,” he instils. “I got spooked back there because it was like you were veering out of the second response and heading right into the first one — I didn’t quite have it figured out yet, but the feeling I had made me so nervous; you were pivoting so quickly over to self-blame and it got me going straight into discredit mode, but I know it made you feel like shit and I know it could again, even when I don’t want it to.”

Remus pushes a harsh noise out of his throat. “I can be so bitchy to you about your Fix-It mode,” he returns him, grabbing for Sirius’s hand. “I’m working on it, I swear I am; I’m not trying to take forever with it, I know it’s one of the best things about you because you make so many things feel like so much less of a crisis.” 

Sirius squeezes Remus’s fingers. “I can see tell you’re working on it, but it can come off like I'm shooing the problem away just so it’s all over with,” he reminds him. “I'm not intending for that, but my intentions are to pop the stitches and unravel the big threat to you, and that's increased tenfold since my third eye opened up; there’s no world where I want to see you feeling smaller than whatever it is that’s got you reeling and even then, my saying this here isn’t going to mean you’re going to think of that the next time you’re really in it, but the more we make a point of honing in on what’s going on behind the scenes, what’s going on with your body, highlight that we need to exercise some control over the situation even if it means minimising the issue to make it easier to bat away, then I think with time we could get really good at this; stars, us two, just like you said.”

Remus turns his head all the way to the left, head facing the backseat while his face is smushed as much as it can be smushed between the crook of his own neck and his left shoulder, so not that well overall since Sirius can see a clear shot of his profile and then some all screwed up, but he shakes his drink toward Sirius, which certainly feels like a beckon to continue.  

Sirius smiles quite pointedly. “Another thing,” he poses, switching right to a grin, “I know how touching and shoulder bumps while you’re in the thick of it help you out a lot — like, insurmountably so, but I think I’m going to make sure that I'm hugging you more when you’re in the thick of it.” 

Remus veritably shot-puts a bolstered noise out of himself, left hand out of Sirius’s grasp and bringing it back to his chest. “Stop,” he breathes, unready. 

“No,” Sirius breathes back, smiling primly. “I hugged you back there after you’d come down and I felt it help, and that response is clearly so hard on your body, why shouldn’t I be holding you more often when you’re in that mode? Why shouldn’t I make a point of it each and every time and not just out of convenience? Sure, it could prove a little more difficult if we’re in public when this sort of thing crops up, but that’s OK, we can go find a quieter spot like this, go hide behind a tree for all I care, or we can find a loo and do like we did at the ice cream parlour, re-mem-ber?” 

“I do, I very do,” Remus rattles out. 

"I was actually able to hold you through it that entire time and we just, knocked everything down one by one,” Sirius recollects, live for him to see it, too. “That was one of our best yet, and think about it, we were just DIY-ing it; we’ve actually been DIY-ing this reaction of yours for a long time now, we’ll be even better at it next time, and if not the next one, well, I’ll still hug you right on through it and we’ll see how we fare having this better knowledge of you and why that mode comes on so fast and fierce like that.”

Remus pulls his face away from his seat, taking in quite a number of steeling breaths as he wipes the tear streaks on the lower half of his face with his left hand. “I'm officially done in,” he calls out. 

Sirius smiles sweetly. “I’m almost done, promise.” 

Sirius,” Remus implores, dropping his hand. 

“Remus, we’re are going to work on how you treat yourself once you’ve come out of that response,” Sirius maintains. “I mean it; we’re going to respect your power, not hide from it, not fear it, not consider it an immense character flaw, but we are certainly going to work on how you treat yourself afterwards because you’re just not fair to yourself and you've not been for years now, I hear.” 

Remus gives a breath like he’s been punched square in the gut, swipes his sunglasses off, and rockets his drink and the glasses forward with his eyes screwed shut. “Take these,” he commands. 

Sirius sure does do that, avidly watching the lad wipe the shit out of his eyes before he leans forward again, and sticks Remus’s drink in his respective cupholder so he can lean over and slide the good lad’s sunnies back on straight when he's done. “There,” he chimes, signalling him. “Your drink’s in your cupholder.” 

Remus hums in thanks, turning his head a smidge toward that direction, and smirks. “You’ve barely had any of yours,” he observes. 

“I’ve been busy,” Sirius comments, but he does lean in to swipe his drink, sipping off of it before he humming a direct note as he’s swallowing it down. “I do want to go back to Mimi, though.”

Remus, a good lad through and through but always a boy, gives up a stark huff. “Please no,” he requests. 

“Mm, but I think it’s worth talking about,” Sirius maintains, stealing another sip off of his drink because damn, she’s good. "It's sort of relevant to all this." 

Remus turns in his seat, grabs for his belt, and tugs it over the front of him. “Fine, but we’re going to get out of here and get the groceries,” he conditions, clicking his belt into its buckle, and well, fine.

“Well, fine,” Sirius says of it, tugging his own belt over him. 

Remus starts up the truck, backing them out of their parking spot, and takes them back out of the lot and onto the road they came down. “So, how exactly did her face look when she was doing it?” Sirius raises, reaching over to swipe the fingertips of his right hand over Remus’s left arm. “The way I’m picturing it in my head, she had a face on like this, and do tell me if I’m getting there or not even close, hey? Let’s collaborate.” 

He gives a not-all-that-subtle grin paired with a round of blinks as Remus lulls his head toward him as he’s pulling them up the street. “More like this,” he relents, putting on an inquisitive, closed-mouth smile with quite the head tilt toward him, and it’s a travesty that Sirius can’t see his eyes for this when he has a strong feeling those are the real selling points here, but even then, the ‘correct’ version face has him snickering wildly.

“Well, how was she talking if her mouth was closed like that, Remus?” he quizzes.

“You know what I mean,” Remus gives back, his lopsided smile on as he makes a stop ahead of the main road. 

“Alright, I do,” Sirius allows, his lips at a twist. “I couldn’t see your eyes there, but I suspect I’m to assume they were warm, inviting? Too inviting for the front room of an establishment you were just about to leave, but overall, am I meant to imagine that the tone behind it all was bright, curious intent?”

“Well, yeah, I never said she was sneering while she did it,” Remus counters, pulling a right onto the main road and back up the way they came. “I still think it was vastly out of left field and nowhere near her beeswax.” 

Sirius snickers up a storm. “No, and same here,” he slips in, “but to that, I have to figure that, in her mind, she meant well with it and if that’s the case, then I’ve been there before too, but I’ve found the best way out of this sort of situation is to not give it more weight than it has to have, which is not to say—” 

Remus gives up a long and lustrous pfft there. “You have not,” he returns. “Been there, I mean.” 

Sirius reaches up as if to catch Remus’s pfft and toss it out his window. “Untrue,” he caps it.

Remus leans a bit away from Sirius in retaliation. “What was that supposed to be?” 

“Me tossing your pfft, right out the window,” Sirius stays with it. “I’ve definitely been there; in fact, I can’t imagine how you’ve forgotten, but I had Marlene point between the two of us like—” he does a fluttery impression of both her innocuous, yet suggestive gesture between them and her intrigued, yet untimely grin one fateful November day, “—while we were very not a thing, and very while I was in the middle of trying painstakingly hard to court you, so believe me, I’ve been there.” 

Remus gives up a unique sound; audacious bamboozlement with a hint of amusement in there. “You cannot sit there and tell me those two scenarios are one and the same,” he returns. “You just can’t.” 

“No, not fully, no; Marlene’s my girl, not some lady who owns an inn I’ve stayed at a few times, I know that, but the cases are similar in the sense that Marlene was well-meaning with that lil’ blunder of hers,” Sirius reinforces. “I mean, I’ve talked boys with her for years and years, nothing new there, but you, on the other hand, were very new and very different from the other boys she’d seen or heard about in our time, but she didn’t know that, I hadn’t divulged that to her, hadn’t had the chance to yet, and there I am, working an angle, playing the game, and as far as she was concerned, I was out dallying around that store with the same bloke I’d been dallying around with at my l'alloween party so it’s not as if it was even that out of pocket for her to ask that, but the timing still couldn’t have been worse when you were right the fuck there and already so flighty with me as is; she said the words, she did the hand thing, and I could have taken her outside for a duel, I was so mortified.”

Remus reworks his mouth around a smile, but it’s a bit too pointed for this occasion. “You hardly blinked, Sirius,” he slips him.

Sirius blinks twice, nodding politely. “Yeah, to you, mhm, meanwhile on the inside I’m going, ‘Marle-he-he-hene; why?’”

Remus winds up looking three times more amused than he’d shown before, but he’s still not quite sold on Sirius’ claims. “Still did better than I did,” he trades him. “I practically liquified on the spot.”

Well, this, Sirius can work with when it’ll only provide more meat to his prior point. “Mm, but see, that wasn’t so clear to me considering how you made no indication of that and simply went off on your own without anything else,” he mentions. “I didn't know if we’d be OK after that little mix-up, if we really want to get truthful here.”

“I needed somewhere to liquefy in private, thank you,” Remus attests. “It’s not as if I was snubbing you; I wanted you, mister, but nowhere in my wildest dreams was that going to happen for me so I had to get the fuck out of that aisle before I simply melted out of there all my own.”

Sirius nods once, lips curled into a fond, but knowing bow as he reaches his right hand over to him again, tapping his palm over Remus’s right knee. “Right, but at that point, I’d acted like a brat on steroids for most of our last true shift together, hadn’t seen you properly in a fortnight, had just taken my shot and managed to coax you out of the cocoon known as your couch, on a study day no less, and I’m pursuing a record store with The Boy, thinking things were starting to feel normal again, normal for us anyway, and she goes and does that?” he holds up. “I had no idea if we’d be able swift past that oopsie or not and it took me until you were vivaciously flirting with me all over that grocery before I felt less embarrassed about it, and that really is my point here—”

“Then make the point, Sirius,” Remus laughs — and Sirius means laughs. It’s all coming up Remus, he can feel it. “Also, I wasn’t vivaciously flirting in there.”

“Oh, yeah, you were,” Sirius attests.

“If trying to reign you in counts as flirting,” Remus returns him, but the silence that falls over the truck says, mhm, mhm, it does. 

Sirius flashes him a big ol’ celebratory smile after it. “Point: I’ve also been in a situation where I’d wished somebody hadn’t put me on the spot like that, hadn’t taken control away from me when I actually would have loved to just continue on with it, hadn’t innocently but potentially ruined a good thing, hadn’t embarrassed me in front of the bloke who was already making me work the hardest I’d ever before,” he brings it back around. “And the fact of the matter is, we lived through it, we went back to the beautiful, frustrating little dance we were always fucking doing, and clearly, we were both very determined to pretend to be super totally fine with it, so when I say it was Mimi's mistake, not yours to wear over yourself, it’s coming from a good and sound place.”

“I know it was hers, I just—” Remus puts up. “I mean, I wasn’t leading you by hand into the dining hall in our evening wear or anything like that, obviously, but I also wasn’t all that preoccupied with whether I’d been being too loose with you or not; it was like I took the night off, and that's what I got for it? What a joke, and a cheap one at that.”

Now, this, Sirius can fully immerse himself in and come out with the antidote. “OK, sure, I agree that it could seem like a huge cosmic joke that this is what happened in the end, but I’ve a strong feeling you already know that if you want to see that weird moment back there as a direct repercussion from you not counting your every move inside there, then that’s all you’re going to see, mm? Might I be right about that one?” he raises, smiling after bringing in a bit of Remus-inspired critical thinking into the mix and getting a pointed, yet muted purse of Remus’s lips in reply. “Good, so let’s reiterate; the universe doesn’t give a shit whether folks are gay or not, reserved about their personal life or not, completely thrown off by audacity or not — it just doesn’t have those kinds of rules, it’s a fucking free for all out here.”

Remus all but chokes on a snort, so that thing had to have been powerful coming up out of him. “You’re right, I know you’re right,” he attests.

“I just don’t want you assigning great, foreboding meaning to something this coincidental,” Sirius brings him, “and I should know a thing or two about that considering I recently had a vendetta against the radio waves before you brought me back to earth, so I’m just returning you the favour.”

Remus trades a glance between Sirius and the windshield, can’t keep it lingering when he’s got a speedway he’s trying to get off of, but there’s a definitive pull at the side of his mouth. “I actually really appreciate it put like that, thank you,” he returns him.

“Literally anytime,” Sirius lobs back, smiling as he goes for a sip off of his straw.

He spends a short bout of quality time with this drink, but only physically; mentally, he’s watching the scenery go by as he fashions together a set of finishing notes together and he’s pretty well ready to bring them to the council by the time Remus takes them in through the entry of a much larger parking lot than they were last in. “I’ve two brilliant ideas for what I think is best to do with the whole thing from here,” he attests.

Remus snorts as he taxis them around the perimeter of the parking lot. “Do you.”

“Mhm, I do,” Sirius affirms. “One is a bit gooey in merit and the other a tad petty, and at first glance, they may seem like conflicting stances to take but if you’ll hear me out, I think it’ll be clear that this is a case where both things can coexist happily.”

He waits on a signal of compliance while Remus pulls them into a parking stall around a light bend from the doors to the grocery store. “Well, you go ahead,” he quips, smirking as he pulls the truck into park.

“Alright, for one,” Sirius prefaces, “you are a very kind, personable, sweet young man—”

And already, this is a tough sentence for Remus to let him continue on with. “No, please — it’s fine, I’m much better now,” he insists, a full grimace taking up his face.

“No no, I think it needs to be said,” Sirius assures, smiling up a storm over in his seat. “‘Cause see, not only are you all of those things, but you’re someone who is missed. Ever think about that, boy?

Remus gives up a hearty huff. “Not before you started pointing it out so much, whether it’s relevant or not,” he returns.

“Ah, but it is,” Sirius assures. “And I’m talking both short and long term; the very reason you and James’s first real fight even happened was, by and large, because of the very fact that you’re someone who is missed, even if it’s only been a couple weeks since a sighting of you.”

“Alright, thank you,” Remus chimes back, “only, I’m still struggling to see why that’s relevant here—”

“Because if you can be that missed over the course of two weeks, then perhaps it’s especially true if it’s been a of couple years or more?” Sirius highlights. “It’s something to be proud of in a way, you’ve such a spirit about you that people remember you well no matter how long it's been since they’ve had a Remus sighting, but on the other hand, there are two sides to that same coin; there are going to be people filtering in and around your life who'll assume they’re way closer to you than you consider them and for that, they’ll feel it fair and even expected to dig around where they don’t need to be, so this is likely to happen again in some fashion because them’s the rules, I’m afraid, but I do think that how we react to it in the short term has to be different from how we react to it in the long term; see what I’m saying?”

“I.E,” Remus says for it, “I can be annoyed by it when it happens again, but I don’t need to be changing anything I’ve been doing as a result of it when it does; I really am with you on this.”

“Perfect,” Sirius calls it, reaching to plonk the quarter that’s left of his drink into his cupholder for emphasis. “I know it might not seem like it in retrospect because I’ve some dark shit following me around everywhere, but I had a blast with you while we were there and I know you caught yourself having one too, so that’s what we ought to remember when we look back on our time at the inn — not my bullshit, not yours, and definitely not hers either; always onward and upward, mm?”

“Mm,” Remus echoes, a chesty, dare he say, bouldered reply, swishing the bow of his lips back and forth before he leans over a little in his seat to unbuckle, but he tips his chin toward Sirius while he hasn’t got the hands to point to himself. “What’s the petty one, then?”

Sirius gives a trill in his throat. “Oh, well, there’s actually something that’s very funny about what happened back there that I think you might want to open yourself to the idea of it being that,” he entices. “If you take the embarrassment away and let yourself look at that scene from a bird’s eye view to capture it fully, when you really get down to it, that lady wanted you to give her that confirmation so badly, but you walked your colourful little ass out of there without giving her anything and I’m sorry, but that’s fucking funny; you know it is, you just have to allow it to be—”

He falls into a series of snickers right then and there just from having to speak it aloud while Remus had done a very good job overall keeping his face relatively placid, but the keyword there is ‘had,’ for the same lad is well and truly losing it now, and thus, lucky Sirius gets to wait Remus’s own amusement out; what a treat.

“Thank you,” Remus returns him, popping his door open. "I really needed that."

Sirius gives a celebratory shimmy of his shoulders as he gets himself out of the truck, strolls up to the sidewalk running along the side of the building as Remus hits the button on the keys to lock up the truck, and looks left before not spotting Remus behind him, turning back toward the truck to find that the lad must have gone around to the bed to pull a reusable bag out of there. “Ooh, you’re brighter than I,” he forwards him.

Remus gives the frankest shake of his head around, gives a glance toward the front lot from over there, and heads up the far side of the truck to cross past the engine, moving up beside Sirius and stopping him right where he is. Sirius goes on a light alert before Remus wastes absolutely no time at all in capturing his lips, wrapping his left arm around the back of him as he walks him, reusable bag and all, back against the brick wall of the building, but the kiss — slow, steady, savoury as Remus catching his jaw in his right hand and traces his thumb of his is tracing back and forth over his left cheek — is breathtaking so it’s really fine where the bag had to be stored for this. Sirius gets his right hand up between them and latches it to the side of Remus’s neck, drinking him in and making every moment of what he knows will have to be an all too brief rendezvous, and just ends up hellaciously hungry for more the moment Remus’s lips are off of his, lifting up and snatching them back for another taste of him. 

The work Remus does on this one is as thorough as it is inevitable to end, but they are in the parking lot of a grocery store and there's nothing to be done about that unfortunately; he receives a last, full press of Remus’s lips before they’re smiling ahead of his. “I know a place, so you just keep that in mind, mm?” he slips him, leaning up to give a peck to the tip of Sirius’s nose.

Sirius trills in his throat as Remus coaxes him away from the wall and makes to head down the sidewalk toward the turn of the bend. Sirius surges after him, gnawing against the line of Remus’s right shoulder blade before they make the turn into the greater lot, just letting him know he’ll certainly be keeping that in mind.

Chapter 34: 34.

Notes:

♥️

Chapter Text

Remus heads the way over to the in-door, stepping in front of the sensor and popping the automatic door open to head right on through it, and Sirius certainly plans on following him in there, he does, it’s just that he gets a bit distracted by the count of eight — no, nine; that is just nine whole cars sitting in the parking lot out front, meanwhile Remus went the long way around and parked over on the side of the building.

Sirius puts his head on a tilt and saunters into the foyer with a new suspicion about him, spotting Remus over past the rows of carts and opting for a basket off of a stack of them instead. “I’m just going to organise myself before we go in-in,” he advertises, taking the basket with him as he scoots out of the way of the main footpath despite there being no one else coming up on the foyer from outside, but that’s Remus for you; can’t let himself get caught in the way.

Sirius nods easily, going into a wry smile. “You know, I notice there are a lot of available spots out front here,” he raises him, tossing his right thumb back at the lot.

“Mm?” Remus trades him, hanging the handles of the basket over his right forearm.

“Mhm, so does that mean you went and parked around the side of the building just so you could mack on me over there?” he investigates, starting a stroll over to him.

Remus gives into a funny side-dip as he slips the reusable bag he brought in with him into the basket. “I don’t know, did I,” he offers airily.

Sirius lights right up, shimmying the rest of the way over to him. “How premeditated was it?” he checks.

Remus gives up a hum for it, dropping the keys to the truck into the basket next. “I knew I wanted you up against a brick wall by the time we were pulling into the lot,” he supplies, a twist at the right corner of those powerful lips.

“You’re a little sneak and I love it,” Sirius reports.

Remus gives up a three-tiered smirk, reaching to tug his mobile out from in between the waistband of his swim trunks and his left hip where it’d apparently been stored for safekeeping. He sets that in the basket, breathes out a satisfied sigh for his organization, and goes the extra mile by giving a quick, muted clap before moving through the second automatic entry door. Is Sirius fully swooning as follows him in? Yes. Do the people inside this grocery understand that a swooner just walked into the place? No. Does Sirius want them to know? Yes, and in fact, if he had it his way, every single member of the group of three that passes them on their way out of the store would be hearing about how they’re just missing the swooner in all his glory.

In between the two designated walkways sits a collection of displays facing their way, apparently reserved for folks to eyeball before ever making it to the turnstiles, ain’t that nice? Most of them are fairly forgettable all in all, but that’s simply not the case for one, vividly orange display that boasts all sorts of summery goodies; the colour certainly helped make the display pop out at Sirius, but it's the little bins hanging off the sides of it that appear to be filled with little bottles of sunscreen that serve as a sudden reminder that the two of them unintentionally let each other’s welfare down this morning as far their skin goes.

Sirius reworks his mouth around a newly pointed smile, reaches his right hand up to poke at the small of Remus’s back, and aims to alert him to the display should he have somehow missed it, but right as Sirius prods him, Remus goes to point right at the display. “Oh no, I forgot,” he puts up. “I don’t know how I did, but—”

“And me,” Sirius puts in. “Didn’t think of bug spray or sunscreen for that matter.”

Remus gives out a small huff ahead of him, starting up a snitchfest against himself. “Oh, but did you have either one in your actual hands this morning? I had them both and somehow chose to stuff them in the beach bag rather than on either of us,” he tattles.

Still uninterested in heading the entirety of the blame onto the dote of the century, Sirius goes for a wellness check instead, looking over the backs of Remus’s neck, arms, and legs and deeming them quite unaffected despite them having sat right in the sun for that stretch back at the inn there, and while he doesn’t remember seeing signs of over-exposure as far as Remus’s front goes, it wouldn’t hurt to check again, if to simply point out that they caught a lucky deal.

He moves up on Remus’s right, getting a spectator’s glance at the side of him. “Well, you’re all good back there and up here, but lemme see that face a lil’ better?” he bids him, tapping at Remus’s right shoulder and garnering him to pop his head to the side and give him a light smolder even; what a guy. “Well, that thing’s bloody perfect, and overall you got spared a burn; small things, hey?”

Remus scrunches up his face all funny, but that’s a budding smile he’s got on as he gives Sirius a once-over of his own. “Turn?” he bids him, giving a spin of his right forefinger that garners Sirius to go for a nice little spin while they walk. “Well, you look beyond, but definitely not burnt either; we got lucky on this one.”

Sirius gives up a satisfied sigh as he faces forward again, moving back behind Remus as they come up on the turnstiles. “Well, in that case, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest we’ll be safe in here from any sun damage or sudden swarms of skeeters,” he raises, getting the snort he’d been hoping he’d get out of his companion for it, “but let’s just apply both once we get back to the truck, that way we’ll have knocked it out of the way and there’ll have really been no harm, no foul in us both having a forgetful spell.”

Remus reaches his left hand behind him, splaying it at the small of his back and giving those fingers a wiggle, inciting Sirius to reach his right hand down to clap his palm in solidarity. Remus sneaks a quick squeeze to Sirius’s fingertips before taking his hand back to push on the turnstile ahead of him, lifting the basket on his right forearm higher above the beams so it won’t clatter any as he goes through it, and Sirius scoots in there after him, sure, but he does do things a tad differently, bracing the two beams on either side of his hips and lifting his feet a little off the floor for a little ride-around as the turnstile spins. He pivots off of the beams, planting his shoes back down on the floor, and moves his gaze innocuously around to dodge Remus’s investigative glance back at him, but since he’s indeed looking around, he might as well get aquatinted with the new space he’s entered.

As with most grocery stores he’s visited, the produce section is on their direct left and is the first to greet customers inside the greater store, a kind of life constant that’s quite appreciated when it does bring a sense of casual familiarity to a store he’s never set foot in before, so that’s a nice touch. An even nicer touch can be found within the very layout of this particular produce haven; it’s longer than it is wide, is primarily made up of these short, horizontally-arranged shelving units that run in rows of twos down toward the back and look to be broken up by three major aisles that run vertically through the section, one that splits the shelving units into two right down the middle of the floor, and two comparatively taller and certainly lengthy refrigerated shelves that face one another and act as the borders for the section from the left and right sides of it, and that arrangement choice was a good one for those taller, bordering shelves do a lot for helping the overall section feel quaint, housed-in, and separated from the rest of the aisles inside the store that all appear to run vertically along the length of the building, or at least as far as Sirius can see from over here.

The nicest touch, however, is that there are exactly two souls inside the section, a lady with a basket way down near the back and an apron-donned lad who's a lot closer to the front and currently pushing a trolley that’s got quite a sizeable pyramid of what looks to be many bags of cherries seated atop it up the middle aisle, but the relative scarcity does not extend only to produce section; over on their far-right sits the till area, where just two out of the six appear to be currently open with some rather short queues leading up to them, so it appears they might’ve been given a couple strokes of luck here today.

“Well, you’ve got to give it up to us taking our sweet time getting over here,” Sirius raises, smirking back over at Remus. “No jinx or anything, but I think we successfully missed the lunch rush.”

Remus huffs once. “Oh, now why would you say that?”

“I said ‘no jinx,’” Sirius highlights.

“Won’t matter much,” Remus returns him. “A stampede’s going to come through here any second now because of your loose lips.”

Sirius huffs out a laugh, passing behind Remus to head for the produce section. “I’ll show you some loose lips, first of all, and second, if that's the case, let’s get in there before the stampede gets here, hm?” he trades him, gesturing for Remus to come along with him with a skip to his step, but the moment he’s inside the section is where he can very tell that the boss isn’t on either side of him. He slows his chipper footfalls to a stop, swivelling around to look back at him, and goes into a double-blink as he finds Remus further back than he’d expected him to be, just rooted in place a step to the right of the turnstiles. “What’re you doing over there?”

Remus pushes a short breath out through his nose. “I didn’t think to make a list,” he frowns.

Sirius tries not to look too amused; it just wouldn’t be appreciated. “Well, I think we could stand to handle this one ourselves,” he raises. “We’re just grabbing picnic provisions, aren’t we?”

The resident list maker nods his head for it, but he’s still got a point to make. “I just don’t know where my brain’s gone to,” he lodges. “I’m forgetting everything.”

“Well, one and a half things isn’t everything, I promise,” Sirius instils first, “and—”

“Those are just the ones we know of,” Remus sneaks in there quick.

“—And, your brain hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just had a rather busy morning, hasn’t it?” Sirius serves him, putting on a blink-and-smile combo to showcase exactly how uninterested he is in the take-down of Remus’s anything just now. “So, here’s what I’m thinking; since we did enjoy those glorious but indeed heavy plates of fish-n’-chips not twenty-four hours ago, I feel like we’ve even more reason to keep things fun, light, snack-based, and easy to pick at, especially for you, but hey, stop me right now if you think I’m already barrelling down the wrong direction without that list.”

He waits three beats before Remus lets a pointed half-smile play across his lips, allows the shake of his head to answer the prompt for him, and picks his feet up, making moves to join Sirius inside the produce section, which — yes, that’s a partial goal certainly, but he’d be remiss not to at try to get that boy gassed up a little more, bring the spirits back from downstream.

Sirius swivels around on his heels, putting Remus at his side and the greater produce section back in his sights. “Alright, boy” he champions, giving an immense clap to entice excitement and maybe even some engagement with said excitement, he’ll have to see, “I’m talking fruit, I’m talking veggies, I’m talking some sort of sandwich situation, I’m talking beverages; let’s get it.

He follows that up with three more, resounding claps as he thunders up the middle aisle, glad to hear Remus stifling many a snicker behind him. ‘Course, the produce section had indeed been a quaint, quiet spot before Sirius got in here and while the other lady who had been in there very seems to be long gone by now, the lad working the section sure hasn't gone anywhere. In fact, he is right over there, looming in aisle three and just left of the middle aisle itself, so it’s not as if the earth-shatteringly loud claps coming from the bloke talking like a footy coach wouldn’t have garnered the lad to look up from the little relay race he has going between the flat of tomatoes on his trolley and the shelf to stare directly at the source of all the rattle, but it appears he may just be a team player himself for he does appear to be more amused by it than displaced, and he doesn’t miss a beat with those tomatoes.

Sirius slows to a stop a few steps past the crossroads of the middle aisle and the aisle that lad’s standing in, splaying his left hand back toward him. “‘Scuse,” he sends along, pulling a direct and powerful pfft out of Remus for it.

The lad shakes his head once, giving out a bright smirk, grabbing up the last two tomatoes sitting in the flat and placing them on the shelf. “No, that really just doesn’t happen often or enough,” he gives back.

A bright batch of snickers comes right out of Remus Lupin’s throat, creating true music to Sirius’s ears and compelling him to turn a celebratory smile back on him, finding him rendered motionless just one aisle back and feeling chuffed as all hell to see him a tad too distracted by his mirth to think about something like having not penned a traditional list, so that’s a check right off Sirius’s own list right there, but there’s just one, teensy little issue lingering and it is that he’s the one currently leading this venture without much of an idea where he’s even taking them.

“I don’t know where I’m going exactly,” he raises, pushing his lips to a twist.

Between his prior bout of giggles and this apparent new reason to laugh that much harder, Remus is a tad too out of commission in terms of being able to get his mouth around traditional speech patterns, but he gives it such a go, fanning his hands back on himself as a means of recollecting his overall being and turning his head toward the produce lad while he tries for a sobering breath. “Uhm, sorry; where would the—” he tries, huffs, and presses his lips together, his shoulders just shaking.

The produce lad pushes out a breathy laugh of his own. “Take all the time you need,” he assures, popping down the four corners of the flat in quick succession.

“No — please, no,” Remus puts down gravely, waving his right hand over his face and pulling it together in one go, which very appears to illicit the produce lad to do three things in quick succession; a slight reel, a piqued smile, and a three-beat bout of wheezing as he simply lets the flattened sheet of cardboard go limp in his right hand, and look, Sirius may well be biased toward the curly-Q, may well find the tiniest of Remus-isms to be beyond adorable, but to be able to physically see somebody out in the wild looking right endeared by Remus getting it together at once is just the nicest, warmest feeling — at least to him, Remus gives that wheezing lad a fast, wavering note of warning against showing amusement. “Don’t — don’t get me starting up again; just, where would the prepackaged fruit be?”

The produce lad perks, nodding for it. “Yeah, they’re actually all just going to be along that shelf way down at the end there,” he directs, pointing the flattened sheet of cardboard in his left hand off past the two of them and over toward the refrigerated shelf that borders the section on his current left, their right.

Remus gives a little nod-and-wave combination in thanks and makes a quick right turn down aisle two to head over toward the directed shelf, whereas Sirius has to scuttle back one aisle to take the same route. He picks up his pace to catch up with the best boy in town easily, moving down the rest of aisle two with a little extra skip to his steps than he’d already been strolling around with, and slips up on Remus’s right to blink over a right stacked supply of prepackaged fruit deals ahead of them, trailing his gaze over quite the array of fruit cocktail blends, various containers dedicated to two-or-more combinations of diced fruit or berries, some more monolithic-themed containers should one be in the mood for a particular fruit or berry and strictly that one, and party platters galore.

His gaze stops on a container of watermelon chunks and lingers there, but of course it does; they’re a trusty, time-honoured favourite, a treat he feels a profound sense of loyalty to after years where they’ve so rarely steered him wrong, but today? He crosses his left arm over his front, poises his right arm upright, and rests his chin over his right hand, taking a few long beats to deliberate, but the watermelon chunks say ‘buy me’ and his gut says, ‘sorry, boys, but today’s not the day,’ and that’s not because they wouldn’t be delightful out there on a sweltering day like this, but because his gut knows something they don’t; today is the day for a variety of flavours, not just one.

The wheels of that trolley behind them could use a decent oil job for they’re just squeaking away as they roll along the floor, taking Sirius out of his silent deliberations and garnering him to glance over his left shoulder at the produce lad, already past the middle aisle and rolling the trolley up aisle three on their side of the section, only he meets Sirius’s eye after a beat or two of Sirius looking and mouths a quick ‘sorry’ as he pushes the trolley in closer to the right side of the aisle.

Sirius smirks, shaking his head for it, and faces forward again, glancing sidelong at Remus. “Well, I know I’m in the mood for a melangé of sorts; what say you?” he prompts, tip-tapping his right forefinger against his cheek.

Remus gives up an agreeable hum for it. “Yeah, I think I’d want to mix it up, too,” he puts up, nodding with it, but within the next beat, he’s stopping that nod to take in a new, slightly tentative breath and going into a squint just by the shape of his brows as he pushes the exhale out. “I don’t know that I’m in the mood for fruit cocktail myself, but if that’s what speaks to you then don’t avoid it because of me; I could just grab something else.”

Sirius shakes his head no. “Nah, I’d agree to that,” he trades him, lifting his free hand to tap it at the front of his throat. “Just doesn’t feel like the right sort of air quality out there to have something drenched in syrup going down the hatch, you know.”

Remus breaks into a grin and pushes a bright trill out of it. “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” he returns lively. “Well, minus the 'hatch' part; I wouldn’t have thought to put it quite like that.”

Sirius throws up a keen smile for it. “Nearly two peas, then,” he calls them.

Behind them a bit, the produce lad gives up a great, bolstered noise, garnering the two of them to look round and over their left shoulders at him standing about the distance of a knight’s path over from them, holding a rotund mango in one gloved hand and pointing fiercely past the crate of mangoes on his trolley toward Remus with the other one. “Sorry, can I just — I love those, love,” he attests, flapping his outstretched forefinger downward and seemingly toward those indeed loveable swim shorts of his, which naturally sparks two very separate reactions, an instant beam for Sirius, and immediate confusion for one Remus Lupin.

Hheh?” he manages, garnering Sirius to smirk up a storm against the heel of his right palm as that sweet, sweet boy pivots himself around toward the lad, looking up, around, over at Sirius because of course the lad couldn’t possibly be talking of something to do with him while pointing directly at him, and then finally having a look downward before reaching his left hand to give a tug at the side of that leg of his swimmers. “These?”

The produce lad takes to a wry smile. “Uh-huh, yeah, those,” he affirms, and Sirius just can’t help a snort for it; yeah, get him.

Remus gives into a rather flushed, meek little smile as he settles down a bit more. “Oh, wow, I’m so sorry,” he puts up, letting go of the hem and taking in a new breath. “Thank you, though.”

The produce lad waves him right off. “It’s OK, I was kidding,” he serves him, goes still, then promptly jumps into quite the course-correction over having said that right, right then, and good; Sirius did not mean he should get Remus like that. “Well, not about those — God, no, they’re great; I was kidding about the ‘uh-huh’ part, which was honestly rich of me as is because it took me way too long to realize those weren’t plain white; they’re just like those paper cups you used to see all over.”

Sirius reworks his mouth against the pads of his fingers, feeling quite thankful the lad so quickly chose to clear up that little oopsie for Remus would’ve taken it terribly and might’ve tried to find a hole somewhere to crawl into as a result, but the amount of stammering and tripping over himself and the words in order to have done it was really something to watch happen in front of him. “Oh, yeah; that’s certainly what caught my eye about them, too,” Remus echoes it. “Well, that, and the fact that the price was unbeatable, so I felt quite called to them overall.”

“Well, I don’t blame you at all,” the produce lad echoes, passing that mango back and forth between his hands like a ball. “I would’ve stopped dead in my tracks had I spotted those on the rack.”

“Or you might’ve just assumed they were plain white and walked right past them,” Remus quips, pauses short, and just, swivels right back to the shelf again, plucking up a package of blackberries in some sort of embarrassment-fuelled impulse despite the fact that the produce lad liked the dig, evident by the throaty laugh he’s just given out.

“OK, you got me, maybe I would’ve,” he allows, holding his hands up with it, and it’s a bit of shame Remus can’t see him doing it for it does add some character to the lad, especially with the huge mango clutched in his right one while he’s doing that pose. “Tell me where you got them, then, and I’ll make sure to keep a lookout.”

Remus gives up a quick, lightly deterring hum. “Oh, unfortunately it was years ago now and a completely lucky find,” he offers for it, still very much pretending to inspect the label on the berry container very carefully. “I wouldn’t even feel right pointing you to the place for a pair.”

Sirius curls the fingers of his right hand over a piqued smile, studying Remus sidelong to suss out what exactly is going on with him when it can’t possibly be that he’s still embarrassed over that quip, but then he gets another glance over at the lad and, well, there are a few reasons right there; he’s cute certainly, a bespectacled lad, has got some wispy, bright blonde hair that’s full of pomp and that red apron he’s got on certainly helps make the colour of his hair pop so aesthetically he’s got a lot going for him already, but if Sirius were to put off some Remus-coloured glasses for a second, then the detail that really pulls the mystery all together would be the sleeves of that lad’s smock, rolled up and sitting easy just underneath his elbows while he works on such a hot, hot day — Remus’s downfall is here and he's speaking right at him.

“Only one of them came through the place, right?” Sirius puts in.

“Yeah, just the one,” Remus echoes it. “Right place, right time sort of thing; I was just lucky enough to spot and snag them up before somebody else would’ve.”

“Mhm, one of those, ‘tough to say if another pair like them exists out there,’ sort of situations,” Sirius tacks on, glancing back over at Produce Lad with an even smile. “You know the drill, I’m sure.”

Produce Lad’s eyes go to him before he gives up a knowing scoff, his right hand going limp with the mango in it. “Thrift shop buy, wasn’t it?” he determines, turning his determined gaze back over to Remus.

It takes very much until Sirius bops Remus’s right shoe with his left one for him to realise he’s the one who’s been spoken to, garnering him to at least turn his head back toward Produce Lad and give up a sort of hum/laugh hybrid. “Hate to say it, but,” he offers, tilting his head back and forth as he puts the container of berries back where he got them, “more or less, yeah.”

“Fuck off,” Produce Lad returns, and now that does get Remus swivelling round to face the lad, but it also pulls a jolt of a laugh out of him — a hilarious thing when that boy contemplates running away forever if he so much as drops a mild swear on the sales floor, but nevertheless, that jolted laugh of his seems to be what gets Produce Lad realizing that he’s just gone and said that. “Shit, sorry about that — and that, too.”

Sirius gives up a direct pfft from behind his right hand. “No no, let it out,” he insists, waving him off with the same set of fingers.

“Oh, no, I’ve done that,” Produce Lad declines, giving a glance over his left shoulder for a quick status update on his section and turning back a few moments on from there with a relieved expression at finding the section quite desolate apart from the three of them. “I’ve just got back to it today after some time off, but I’ve not quite caught up yet, as you can see.”

Remus sets his lips to a point and his brows up real high over the frames of his sunnies. “Well, now’s your chance to get one more in,” he puts up, letting the most Lyall-adjacent expression fly free, and not that Produce Lad would have any reference for the king of a man that helped create the person that’s actively teasing him, but it’s very effective all the same for it has the lad humming a set of no-thank-yous through a pressed-tight smile while he goes right back to front-facing those mangoes over there to make room on the shelf for the new ones in that crate, and then that only has Remus smirking as he faces the shelf again with an airy little spin. “Well, alright; suit yourself, then.”

Amused by every single part of this, Sirius swivels to join Remus in facing the shelf, readjusts the fingers of his right hand so they won’t block the keen, knowing smile he sends sidelong to Remus, and since he’s rather well-positioned for a bit of a pantomime, he feels he might as well double-check if he’s right about the reason for Remus’s bout of bashfulness, taking to tugging his left hand out from underneath his right elbow, placing it instead at the inner curve of his elbow, and quickly miming like he’s rolling up a sleeve he does not have around it, left brow cocked and loaded when he can’t really get away with using his right one just now.

Remus definitely sees all of it behind those shades for he mouths the quickest, most muted huff that there could ever be over to Sirius and he lets his lopsided grin go free as he reaches his right hand up like he’s readjusting his sunnies, but that’s the mime of a jostle right there, babey, and it effectively submits his opinion of one Produce Lad over to Sirius in one, single, beautiful beat. He wants to cheer he’s so excited about this development, but the most he can feasibly do given their position is send a bright beam back over to him while trying for the most muted shoulder-shimmy he’s ever done, and then about three beats on from there, Remus goes and reminds him, though potentially himself, too, of the very reason they’re even over this way.

“Anything jumping out at you?” he smiles, drumming his fingers lightly but rather purposefully on the ledge of the shelf.

Sirius takes in an airy sniff as he gives a new glance over the shelf, but this time, what truly does jump out at him and proceeds to put him directly in a chokehold is a particular platter he somehow missed on the first go-around, but not now — oh, certainly not; there it is, sitting there glowing, simply begging to be looked over by him, and Sirius isn’t about to let its cries go unheard — can’t do it, even.

Melon balls?” he shot-puts, turning a gape-grin right toward Remus and altogether startling him for it.

“Oh, oh—” he manages, left hand shooting to the top centre of his chest before he’s overcome with unfettered hooting.

Good, great even, the hooting only spurs Sirius on twice as hard as he wrangles the confection off the shelf and brings it in for a closer inspection over the face of it. A delighted, but awestruck trill leaves his throat as he trails his gaze over the spherical treasures beneath the transparent lid, arranged into a perfect halfsies so that the left side of the confection is all cantaloupe and the right side honeydew; a complete, visually appealing gift, somehow sitting right here between his paws, ready for the taking.

“I’m flatlining,” Sirius announces, looking fast at Remus again, who does appear to be just getting himself back in order. “I’ve only ever seen these things magically appear on hor d’oeuvre tables, never just straight chilling on the shelf before? Explain this.”

Remus gives up a vibrant pfft for that. “You think I can?” he trades him. “At least you’ve seen them in real life before, aristo-brat.”

Sirius brings in the worldliest gasp. "Eleven out of ten," he rates it.

Remus reworks his mouth around a particularly proud smirk, as he damn well should. “I would’ve assumed one would have to stop in at some specialty shop in order to find those, and not just happen upon in the grocery, so I’m easily twice as confounded as you are by this just, being here,” he registers.

Sirius will let him have that, taking to swivelling around on his heel to put Produce Lad back in his sights, who, as it turns out, is certainly at least half-listing over there for he’s got a hell of a smirk on while he’s hand-bombing those mangoes from the crate onto the shelf. “Can you explain this?” he bids him.

Remus chooses to finally join Sirius in the land of facing Produce Lad head-on, a slight point happening around the lip area as he reaches to place his left hand over the top of the platter in Sirius’s hands and send the mother of all hints sent along to him. “Yes, out of pure curiosity; how are these even here?” he reiterates.

Produce Lad gives into twice the smirk, turning toward them and folding his hands over themselves. “I was also very taken aback by their presence when I first spotted them here, but they’ve been made in-house for a long, long time now,” he puts up, giving a breathy laugh for it. "Time-honoured tradition; they're a very big deal 'round these parts."

“You don’t say,” Sirius breathes out, putting a gentle hold underneath the platter and having another peek down through Remus's fingers and the transparent lid at these beauties. “Tell me, how do they get to be so perfectly round?”

Produce Lad takes in a new breath and puts it back out again through a bit of a laugh. “Well, it’s all to do with this utensil called the ‘melon baller,’” he lends out, pausing there to smile quaintly like he knows he should pause there, and he’s very right about that.

“No way,” Sirius shoots him, gape-grin back on.

“Yes way,” Produce Lad affirms, smiling through a nod. “It looks just like your typical pair of scissors, only at the end of it there’s this thing that looks quite a bit like an infuser — one of the round, ball-like ones?”

“Yeah, yeah; right with you there,” Sirius prompts eagerly, and he is right there with him; Remus has one of those very infusers kicking around the second drawer at his humble abode.

“Right, so you stick that in the melon, snip like you would some scissors, the clamp carves the sphere out for you nice and clean, and you just tug it right out,” Produce Lad describes, doing a tugging gesture with his right hand for a bit of added visuals and even a lil’ popping sound.

Remus, though certainly aiming to keep things as casually informative as possible so no one (Sirius) gets too carried away here, betrays his own interests by giving in a mild to medium gasp in his throat. “Oh, that first scoop must be divine,” he says for it.

Produce Lad pops a grin on that takes up more than half his face easily, giving up a vastly echoing hum in his throat. “Oh, first one’s always satisfying,” he attests, nodding brightly for it.

Remus takes in a new, gentler breath, pushing it out through a bit of a trill. “Well, you’ve sold me on a pair of those someday soon,” he gives up, turning his head keenly toward Sirius while also very much putting some weight down on it the platter with that splayed hand of his, “but for today, what if we put this back down and let someone else have a moment like this, hm?”

“No, I can’t do that,” Sirius insists. “There’s another one there; they’re free to scope that out.”

“Or, you could think about holding this one less like a baby you’d like to take home with you?” Remus tries, nodding for it eagerly.

Sirius smirks for the way the request was delivered, but he shakes his no and rocks the platter instead, and look at that, Produce Lad, too, finds it quite amusing for he certainly does throw up a wan laugh from over there. “Might seem strange, but he’s not even the first I’ve seen to hold one of those like that,” he trades him. “They can go so fast, too; the department manager will usually write off a few of each melon per shipment specifically for the platters, and usually that does cover it, but there’ve been several times over this summer alone where those have out the door faster than we can get a new shipment in and I’ve had to pull some off the shelf to keep up, and then sometimes, I’ll have just put out the platters for the day, walk into the back for five minutes, come back up here and they’re gone already.”

Sirius piques, quite enjoying the little tidbits considering he very does get why these holy offerings would fly right out of here, whereas Remus takes to aiming an overtly polite smile at the lad. “Thanks for letting us know exactly how popular the item he’s currently attached to is,” he chirps him, displaying his left hand underneath the prime OK-symbol he flies toward the lad, and even though Sirius so wants the platter to leave the store with them, he has to admit that one was good.

Produce Lad straightens up, putting his mouth to a quick purse, but there’s a smile twitching there, too; no denying that. “I can now see why it might’ve sounded like that’s exactly what I was doing there, but it was all purely anecdotal,” he assures, tipping his head toward Remus as he reaches to get back to the now half-crate of mangoes he’s got.

“No, and I’m sure, but you’ll only excite him more doing that,” Remus relays, giving a knowing smile-and-nod combo for it. “Could we actually try that once again, only this time, you say something more along the lines of, those platters are disgusting and nobody ever, ever gets them? Something like that.”

Produce Lad pushes out a funny breath of a laugh, looking back over at him. “Sure, I could try,” he trades him, switching to one-handing the mangoes onto the shelf while pointing his left forefinger over at Sirius with a new, lightly blasé set of his lips. “Those are actually so unloved that I always have to toss them out because nobody ever, ever gets them.”

Sirius snorts once, but Remus has a four-star review to leave for the lad. “Well, you know what, I was giving you a prompt and was happy to give you some creative liberty there, but you pretty well stuck to the script and I respect that, thank you,” he supplies him.

Produce Lad gives him a quick salute with his left hand before putting it back to work alongside his right one, getting the remaining mangoes in that crate on the shelf, Sirius smiles sweetly at him before throwing him a supremely leading question. “Hey, did you happen to make this particular platter?” he raises, turning the face of the platter toward him.

Produce Lad looks over with an affirming hum, tugging the empty crate off his trolley and stooping to leave it in the compartment below. “Yeah, I did both of those this morning actually,” he offers up, lifting back up to stand beside the pyramid of cherry bags on his trolley and flashing an idle grin toward Remus and the fatigued sigh he gave up. “Well, I did make them and it was this morning.”

“Wish you’d lied,” Remus chimes, knowing exactly what’s coming by the look and sound of it.

Sirius glances back over at him with a fresh batch of blinks and a sweet, sweet smile. “Well, well, well; would you look at that?” he raises airily. “Fresh, ethically sourced product, independently fashioned, arranged, and packaged on-site via hard, honest work; just your sort of thing.”

Remus huffs right at him for it and leans away from him like he’s been struck that way, but there’s his lopsided grin showing back up again, so that’s a home run for Sirius. “You are shameless,” he returns him.

“As the day I was born,” Sirius echoes, his smile staying right where it is through it.

Produce Lad, however, unaware of the history behind the running joke he just bore witness to or even the fact that it was a joke, gives up a rather stalling noise, garnering Sirius to train his gaze sidelong at him as he pulls his trolley down the aisle a few steps in reverse. “Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far,” he puts in, switching to pushing the trolley in a full u-ie to get it over to the other side of the same aisle.

Sirius keeps his sweet smile right where it is. “Oh, no?” he poses, getting a muted puff of breath out of Remus for it.

Produce Lad, currently facing down aisle three rather than toward them, gives a lighter, but still non-committal hum over his left shoulder while he pushes the end of his trolley up to a dwindling supply of cherry bags on the shelf, but there he strolls around the front of it and situates himself ahead of the pyramid of cherry bags and to the right of the shelf, almost like he specifically did all that extra manoeuvering just so he could face toward them while stocking. “Well, alright, I’ll let the fresh part stand, but truthfully, the melons just come in on the truck; I don’t have much of a way of knowing how ethically sound the process is before the truck backing up to the delivery door,” he offers up, the sentiment of ‘I-Just-Work-Here’ read rather implicitly. “And really, as far as making the platters themselves go, once you’ve done it after a while it’s got a lot to do with rote memory; I can have entire conversations with myself back there and not really think about what I’m physically doing, you know?”

Sirius turns his smile up just a notch brighter as he nods him off. “Oh, I sure know that kind of thing,” he sends him, turning his gaze back to Remus, who is just dragging his left hand languidly over the lower half of his face at this point, and widens up his grin that much more enticingly. “Alright, here’s the thing, Remus; we have to get this, and deep down I think you and I both know it.”

Remus breathes in long, moving his left palm down over his nervous smile, and waits three beats from there before speaking again. “It’s just that it’s huge,” he poses, sending it up and out to Sirius with a gesture of that same palm.

Produce Lad, over there front-facing the bags of cherries already on the shelf, gives up a hearty, throat-oriented laugh for that particular observation, and that’s fair enough when Remus really couldn’t have put it any simpler nor funnier than that, but to that very fair point comes an equally fair counterpoint; does the size of anyone treasure automatically negate the quality of the treasure itself? Sirius says nay. “OK, the circumference is a bit wide, I’ll give you that, but there’s not that much height to it, see?” he raises, bracing his left hand underneath the center of the platter to balance it and freeing up his right hand to demonstrate the rather mild height of it when sitting down flat on something.

Remus gives up a nod-and-smile combination to show that he appreciates the demonstration, but that’s about all he’s going to give Sirius for he swivels right back to looking at the shelf from there. “There are watermelon chunks right here that I’m a little surprised we’ve not talked about yet,” he raises him, a new, light, and conversational note to his voice, “and look, they’re even housed in these reasonably sized containers; isn’t that interesting?”

Sirius takes in a long breath, powering up for a rebuttal that’ll carry the conviction and fervour it deserves, and lowers his voice for it; he’s going for the Oscar. “Now, you listen to me; you know exactly how much I love watermelon but that’s just not going to cut it anymore, not after seeing these,” he delivers him, raising the very platter up higher between them and giving it a good shake toward him for emphasis. “I’m in love with them and intend to see that love through with or without your support, but I tell you right now, it sure wouldn’t hurt to have.”

Remus flattens his mouth out and even ducks his head to combat such a reluctant laugh from leaving him that a breathy gust leaves his nose all the same and gives him away, but Produce Lad has his own comment to share about that performance, so Remus gets to face the shelf once again and recoup. “Now, that, I’ve ever seen before in terms of one of those,” he puts up, smirking as he reaches two bags of cherries in behind the ones on the shelf. “Are you going to be alright if you don’t end up getting it?”

“Physically I’ll go on, but spiritually I’ll be gone,” Sirius trades him.

Remus gives up the funniest little whine beside him. “They’ve got honeydew and cantaloupe here, too,” he advertises, his voice nothing but a mere warble. “Sold separately, but there’s no reason not to get both if you’re set on the melangé aspect of that one.”

“Remus,” Sirius elongates, putting an intentional pause there, “are those melon balls?”

Produce Lad gives up a rather gnome-adjacent ‘eh-heh-heh’ that Sirius so appreciates, whereas Remus turns to huff long and lustrously at the lad for the hooting, but that only has the lad snickering that much harder as he straightens up again. “OK, but to be fair, that is their whole draw,” he trades him, throwing up a good-natured grin from there, and mm, Sirius just can't help but think the lad actually made sure he'd be facing Remus while stocking. “And, if you’ll excuse my bias for a second here, I may have accidentally tried a few while I was making those this morning, so I can vouch that those are all from a great batch.”

Remus succumbs to a full laugh, but he didn’t want to do that as is evident by the intense point he throws the lad with his right forefinger. “OK, that ‘accidentally' got me, but that’s all you’re going to get out of me,” he delivers him, circling that forefinger to accentuate the comment and pointing it over at Sirius next. “And you; look at you, fully admitting it’s all about the novelty as if I’m going to be able to see that over the lack of practicality of actually getting that thing—”

Remus straightens up quick and puts a mighty pause on that as a gent strolls into the section from over by the front and gives up a spirited hello to one Produce Lad, sparking up a back and forth that’s rather indicative of a frequent shopper that's just stoppin’ in. He takes a swift right down the middle aisle, leaning around the corner of aisle two and grabbing up a netted bag of oranges off of the shelf, and walks and certainly talks his way down the rest of the middle aisle toward this circular shelving unit that’s down at the back of the section.

Remus smirks anew, speaking sidelong to Sirius with a spurred smile. “He’s got a very Stan the Man energy to him,” he trades him, his voice down at a keen whisper.

Sirius gives into a direct snicker, looking over at the gent as he skirts around the right side of a circular shelf that’s sitting in the dead center of the floor way, still talking back and forth with Produce Lad from over there. “Oh, I’m with you there,” he trades him, grinning up a storm as the gent takes a left and strolls out of sight, but not without a wide-angled wave of his free arm; an absolute Stan move.

Produce Lad, newly free again, clears his throat and gives Remus a quick, borderline apologetic smile. “You didn’t have to stop what you were doing, but I suppose he is the sort of bloke that's difficult to ignore,” he offers up.

“Oh, no — I mean, yes, he was, but not in a bad way,” Remus trades him, shaking his head with a smile. “He had us feeling quite nostalgic, really.”

“We used to work together and had a regular just like him,” Sirius tacks on, looking to Remus with a quick, stark thought. “What if there’s a rule that every town must have their version of Stan the Man or else it doesn’t technically get recognized as a town, you know?”

Remus pushes a bunch of snickers out of his lopsided grin — lovely, needed, important. “OK, well, obviously your town’s got the original, there’s a copy of him here, but I feel like in order to get this theory some more traction we’ll need a magical three and I don’t know who’d be the Stan the Man would be of my town,” he puts up.

Sirius sends a pfft out the right side of his mouth. “That’s ‘cause your dad’s the Stan the Man of yours, come on now,” he serves him, breaking into a batch of snickers with it.

Remus goes into a full pfft, none of that side business. “Shit, he really is; no wonder you get along so well,” he gives him, getting Sirius right in the heart and the funny bone at the same instant, and Remus, too, has his own bout of snickers to weather through, but he lets his smile fade away just a wee bit after a handful of seconds, taking to pointedly eyeing the way Sirius is clutching the platter for support in these mirth-ridden times. “Don’t squash that or we’ll have no choice but to buy it.”

Sirius clicks his tongue at him, meanwhile Produce Lad gives up a great snort over there where he had just, just got back to stocking. “I wouldn't enforce that,” he forwards, waving it off.

“Well, I’d have to go out on a strong limb to assume that or to believe you,” Remus quips on back, getting a sharp laugh out of Produce Lad, and look, Remus is killing it with the quips and getting more confident with each new one so that's cause for celebration, but Sirius is a tad worried about where his own spirits are going to be if Remus keeps his foot down on this one.

Sirius drops his gaze down to the veritable treasure chest in his hands, tilting it more toward Remus. “You really don’t see yourself enjoying these spherical miracles?” he entices.

Remus gives up a right accused breath for that. “First of all, how dare you rhyme it like that, and second, of course I do,” he returns him. “I would love to try some melon balls; not as if I’ve had the opportunity, have I, and I’m a hungry hippo at this point so I can admit they look excruciatingly good right now, but—”

“Ooh, good; lean into all of that,” Sirius instils. “You’re allowed to want things, even if they’re a bit frivolous.”

Remus reworks his jaw once. “But, I imagine those would taste just like the melon chunks do, only there’d be a hell of a lot less of them for me to worry about finishing,” he reiterates, reaching over to flick the platter with his left forefinger. “That is a lot, it just plainly is, and I’ll pop if I try taking that thing on.”

“Right, only I would never expect you to inhale exactly fifty percent of this thing,” Sirius maintains, running his left hand around in a circle ahead of the lid and giving into a light trill for the mere idea. “As far as I’m concerned, I can get this and you’d be free to have as many or as little of these as you want; my responsibility, your benefit.”

Remus breathes in long, long, very long, but he doesn’t call Sirius a damned good salesman for nothing, does he? “OK, I would just like to remind you of some words you once said,” he prefaces, pointing his left arm off toward the general vicinity of the turnstiles, so he means words that were said, maybe, a total of ten minutes ago. “Paraphrased, of course, but this was allegedly supposed to be light, easy, pickable, and — there was one other thing, what was it?”

Sirius blinks once, twice. “Fun?” he smiles, putting his head on a tilt.

Yes,” Remus breathes out, doing a rather inspired impression of one’a James Potter’s double-decker finger guns, “that was it.”

Sirius reworks his mouth around quite the pointiest smile. “Mhm, and how exactly would these beauties not live up to any one of those characteristics?” he counters, getting a two-toned huff for it, but come on, the truth is right there. “It’s going to be all of those things and more; there’s no stress to be found here, only joy upon joy that just so happens to be encased inside of a large container, that’s it, that’s all.”

“And I’m not trying to be a killjoy, I’m really not, but somebody has to think about the overall picture and not just the here and now of it,” Remus puts down. “If we got that, we’d end up having this round, bulky thing to have to carry around with us and deal with, and once the razzle-dazzle of the melon balls fades away, and it will when we’ve both come to terms with the fact that we can’t possibly finish them all our own, then we’re just going to have to toss the leftovers and it’ll have been a waste getting the thing in the first place.”

Sirius uncurls his right arm from around the platter, letting his left arm handle things for now. “OK, I hear you, but I tell you this now; I will deal with round, bulky build of it all my own,” he prefaces, lifting his hand out toward Remus both gently and haltingly. “In fact, you wouldn’t even be expected to even touch the thing, unless, of course, it’s to lift off the lid so you can have however many you like; that you can and should feel free and encouraged to do, and whatever can’t possibly be finished can always be brought back with us; there’s no reason to toss anything out, you really think Lyall’s not going to say ‘fuck yeah’ to a bowl of melon balls?”

That last addition certainly gets Remus smirking, but he’s just not there yet. “It’s not even that I think he wouldn’t, but we'd have no way of preserving them in order to ensure that they’d make it back well enough to offer him any,” he supplies him. “It’s hot out there, it’s only going to get hotter as the day goes on, and I’ll tell you one thing, he’d be saying ‘fuck no’ to a bowl of soppy melon balls that’ve been soaking around in the hot sun all day.”

Produce Lad gives up a funny noise from over his way, taking his hands back from having put another pair of new bags on the shelf and turning toward them with a slight ‘O’ for a set of lips. “Oh, you’d be taking them out there?” he puts up, giving into a preemptive smile when he does rather know the vague answer, doesn’t he.

Remus doesn’t care; he’s got a point to make that can be given to two people at once and he’s happy to do it. “Yes, for at least the afternoon, and that’s before the two-hour drive we’ve got to make at the end of it,” he delivers.

Sirius gives up a light, piqued breath. “I didn’t know we’d be staying through the afternoon,” he raises him, tossing him a chuffed smile.

Remus sends him a quick pfft. “Well, I wasn’t going to bring you by for a quick hello and goodbye,” he trades him, his lips at a twist. "I figured you’d want to stay a while and I know I do.”

Well, that’d be even more reason to crack open a fresh platter of melon balls down by the water, but for now, Sirius is going to leave that observation aside, looking back over at Produce Lad who is really just working with the bare bones of a situation and not that much else. “I’m but a tourist in this land and I’ve yet to visit the Blue Lagoon, see,” he passes along, bopping his shoulders excitedly. “Pretty excited for it, gotta say.”

Produce Lad takes to a wide-eyed, powerful smirk, nodding quite quickly with it. “Well, on a day like today, it’s going to be absolutely beautiful there so you’ll enjoy that, I’m sure, but I did manage to gather the first part all my own,” he comments, and in doing so, pulls a ferocious laugh out of Remus’s throat that quite plainly suggests Sirius is about to get got.

“It was London Calling in here the second he opened his mouth, wasn’t it,” Remus lobs out, tossing a grenade into the ring and pulling the loudest-ever-recorded trill out of Sirius for it.

Produce Lad points vast and fast at Remus, echoing it completely by doing just that, and right from there, he goes into a smile that’s as deeply wry as it is knowing. “You’re no tourist, though,” he comments, nodding his chin toward him, and oh, OK, laddieboy.

Remus gives a light, affirming hum. “Not me, but I suppose my particular lilt would've given that away, too,” he allows, reaching up to tap his right forefinger against the side of his neck with it.

“Very did, yeah,” Produce Lad confirms, his smile getting warmer and warmer by the very instant. “Whereabouts are you based?”

Sirius tosses his gaze avidly between that warming smile and Remus, who’s just passing his left palm over the back of his right hand while he talks. “Well, I’ve been out in London for a couple of years now myself so I’m not too based here these days; just back for a visit, really,” he offers up, stalling on what would’ve easily been a little more elaboration had Produce Lad not thrown up knowing chime just, just then.

“Oh, so London called you, then, OK,” he trades him, and ooh, good choice there, laddie; if there’s one thing the quippy curly-Q likes, it’s a well-timed pun.

And there goes the trill, spurred and wry in Remus’s throat. “That’s more right than you even know,” he raises it, reigning his amusement in a little too soon for Sirius’s liking and possibly for Produce Lad’s, too; hard to say really for Remus has the second half of an answer to circle back to and the lad sure wanted to know about that. “I was originally based down in Rhondda, though; just outside the Treorchy area.”

Produce Lad gives up a spurred note there. “Oh, my mum lives down in Porth,” he passes along. “I was just there last Monday."

Remus takes in a quick breath through a smile. “Oh, that’s funny; we just went through there the other day,” he passes along, looking to Sirius and catching the vague squint he goes into, garnering Remus to give him a lil’ hint. “We are currently in Porthgain, we were in Porth the other day; at the music shop, getting the strings.”

Sirius breathes in once, tipping his head to Remus for the quick and efficient aid. “Too many Porths,” he smirks, tossing a few fly-away hairs of his fringe out of his eyes.

Too many Porths,” Produce Lad talk-sings.

Two things happen at once; Remus points fast at the lad, Sirius expels a yes from deep within. “Thank you,” he tacks on.

Produce Lad snorts. “Had to be done.”

And it did. “We’ve been through a lot of places this week, but great shop, great town, great land, this is,” Sirius maintains. “Eleven out of ten, would recommend.”

Produce Lad goes for quite the double-blink, but that gets Remus snickering up a storm. “You can’t ever know it right away, but that’s him being fully genuine,” he forwards, getting a new nod out of the lad for it and returning him a knowing nod with a twist of a smile at his lips before taking a new, diverting breath. “But yes, and as far as the coast itself goes, we got the harbour done, Sloops, of course, and the lagoon just made sense to show off before heading back to the valley.”

“Well, I cosign that; you’ve got to,” Produce Lad echoes it, looking to Sirius with a quick, beckoning hand. “What’d we think of the watering hole?”

“Mm, immaculate vibes,” Sirius attests, garnering a grateful note from Produce Lad for the review. “I could live there full-time.”

“We pretty well do, ‘round here,” Produce Lad gives for it, and Sirius can just imagine that’d be the case. “Now, it is a little bit of a walk from the lagoon itself, but don’t skip out on going up to the tower if you’ve got the time to; it’s well worth it, and I don’t just say that just because I’m from here.”

“Oh, no chance we’re skipping it,” Remus puts in, a deep, throaty assurance to it. “That’ll be our first stop.”

Sirius gives up a spurred, quizzical note. “It will?”

Remus nods with a rather angelic smile on. “It’s this little watchtower that looks out high over the water and the whole area, really,” he provides. “It is a bit of a curve out of the way, but it’ll be worth it just for the view alone; it’s stunning, I’m warning you now.”

Sirius breathes in long, eyes twinkling surely. “A watchtower, a stunning view, and some melon balls?” he raises sweetly. “I simply couldn’t ask for more or I’d be a glutton.”

Produce Lad laughs big for the reprise, but Remus only huffs. “You already are and we’ve nowhere to store them,” he highlights, lifting the both of his hands primly. “There’s nothing else for it; I can’t magic a better situation.”

Produce Lad takes in a distinctly audible breath. “Well, don’t say there’s nothing for it quite yet,” he stalls him. “We do carry picnic bags here with the insulated liners, and we’ve got a few of those ice blocks down near the frozen foods in the back aisle.”

Remus gets right in there a substantially huffy laugh, aiming a quick reel and those primly-set hands toward him instead. “Well, now, why didn’t you say something about either of those things?” he bids him.

Produce Lad pushes a quick output of air for it through an inquisitive smile. “Didn’t I just?” he raises, giving his head a little tilt to the right.

Remus pushes out a righteous tch, through a baffled smile of his own. “Well, yes, you did, but — all I’m saying is, someone doesn’t seem to be in a rush,” he comments.

“But, where is the rush?” Produce Lad counter-comments, having a quick gesture around them, and boof, if Sirius could get away with hiding his face with the platter without being extremely obvious, he’d be behind it by now. “It won’t be a perfect solution, I know, but you could toss one of those blocks in the bag and that’d keep things chilled for a good while there at least, right?”

Right,” Sirius echoes, so pumped for both the developments manifesting in front of his eyes. “Hella better than nothing, at that.”

Remus lifts his right hand for a halt, but Sirius wouldn’t be Sirius if he didn’t catch a loose hold on that wrist of his; Remus is on his way there now, if running out of reasons not to go with it. “Well, wait, hold on,” he braces, switching to pointing his right forefinger toward the platter, “that would actually fit in it?”

“Oh, I’ve seen it done; you’re good there,” Produce Lad assures, nodding candidly for it, but he takes to a new, more amused cadence as he goes to elaborate on that. “They’re not tailored to them, though, so you’ll have to put it in there sideways and that can mess with the arrangement itself because the divider isn’t the tallest piece of plastic in the world or anything, but since he’s been holding it like that for some time now, I can’t imagine that’d be any kind of deterrent.”

Sirius gives up a bright pfft for it, having himself a peek down at the platter and spotting a few orange spheres hanging out lower down on the green side of the confection. “Sure won’t be, but I’ve never been all that precious anyway,” he slides in there. “The curation is lovely though; that was one of my first thoughts after ‘what the fuck are these doing here?’”

Remus takes in a quick, breathy note, nodding to second it. “It’s a very minimal, clean look for such an inherently loud piece of merchandise,” he puts in. “It’s a good choice.”

Produce Lad goes for a quick, wry note in his throat before giving a rather humble tip of his head. “A decision made long before I came along, but I’ll say cheers to that,” he trades him, plucking up a new bag of cherries in each hand and reaching them over and in behind the others.

Sirius looks to Remus with a bright beam for the good news. “Well, while it’s true we can’t magic a better situation, that’s a pretty good fallback, isn't it?” he entices, setting his shoulders on a shimmy to end them all. “Fewer worries to be had about leftovers, you get to try melon balls for the first time, and, to quell any lingering worries about what either of our mortal stomachs can handle, nothing is stopping us from making a whole event out of it, especially if we’re going to be down there all day; go slow, enjoy each and every bite so that we don’t get full too quickly, pause every now and again to go for a swim, come back after working up more of an appetite and have a little more.”

Produce Lad looks over from where he’s reaching two new cherry bags onto the shelf. “You might need to take some breaks from the water, too,” he puts in, going into a demonstrative shiver with his shoulders while his hands are full. “I was there last week and it was certainly a midday wake-up call, getting in.”

Remus breathes in there, but he laughs it right back out of himself as he looks his way again. “I think I’d blocked that part out,” he puts up candidly, turning a new, semi-bracing smile on Sirius next. “That is some chilly water and I don’t mean just chilly-for-me; you might even feel it, but even if you swear you don’t, it’d be a very good idea to rotate in and out so your body temperature doesn’t take too low a dive.”

“Well, even more reason to have fuel to siphon off of in-between dips, isn’t it?” Sirius uses that and uses it well. “It’s going to be a zero-pressure situation; just pure ease, vibes, and maybe a dash of decadence thanks to these fancy babies, hm?”

He finishes it all up by tilting the platter back and forth like it’s dancing toward Remus, garnering him to not only push a breathy, three-toned laugh out his nose for the dancing platter itself, but even rise up to join Sirius in the fun department. “Well, I know I’m nothing but a commoner, but if we’re talking about decadence, then might we consider finding some toothpicks for those,” he raises him, putting on an uppity air as he pretends to keep a hoity hold spiked-through melon ball in his right hand, “play up a cocktail hour theme, you know?”

Sirius takes in a vast, enchanted breath, fully arrested for a full beat, so that does give Produce Lad the time to get his approval in there. “Now, that’s a fucking idea,” he puts in, and then immediately winces, looking over to Remus rather than around himself. “Am I good?”

Remus has a quick look around the area for him. “You’re fine,” he instils, waving him off through a smirk.

Sirius turns that right back on Remus with gusto. “And you; you’re are a fucking visionary, hear that?” he champions, and it’s truer than true; the very image of the two of them down by the water, seated atop their quilts, sun-draped and bug-free, chortling here and there while they daintily feed themselves these spherical treasures (and maybe even each other if Sirius should be so lucky) is just too funny and complete not to ensure he sees it happen live. “We deserve cocktail hour, babey, and that’s what we’re going to get; no reason not to lean all the way in.”

Remus gives in to a full smile, looking the most excited he’s been yet about the prospect. “Well, seeing as my memory’s shit today, it’s your responsibility to make sure we don’t forget the toothpicks before we go,” he assigns him, already moving right on from there and working down a list of conditions, “not only that, you very do have to hold onto that thing the whole time we’re in here and out there, and if this goes go badly, you will let me gloat, gloat, and gloat a little more; those are my terms.”

Sirius hugs the platter tight to him in solidarity. “Happy to do business with you,” he instils.

Remus tips his head with a twist of a smile at his lips in return, takes in a new breath as he gives a sweeping glance back over the shelf, and pushes the exhale out in a puff, making a wonky little face. “Well, I think we might be good on fruit; I don’t know about you?” he raises lightly, brow line bent upward.

Sirius tosses out a bright trill, nodding quite a bit for it. He breathes in long, allowing the category of fruit to leave his mind and veggies to take over that slot, and within a mere few beats from there he’s practically bowled over, hit sideways with a craving so strong it makes his breath catch as he turns a vastly determined expression gape-grin on Remus. “Baby carrots,” he puts down, garnering Remus to take in a short, startled breath before pushing it right back out again through a snort, but as one moment carries over to the next, Remus gives up an exceptionally agreeable hum so it sounds like he’s all for it. “Like, a baggie of ‘em, you know?”

Remus nods vastly. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he echoes breathily, and Sirius loves to see it.

Remus gives a vague look around from their vantage point, but seems to figure it’d be easier to ask Produce Lad where they’d be for he turns his head toward him, and good news, Produce Lad’s already glancing over at him while he’s working on dissipating the foundation of what used to be the pyramid of cherry bags, so all Remus really has to do from there is point his forefingers off in different directions and oscillate them around quizzically for the question to register.

Produce Lad smirks, nodding for it as he leaves the cherries as they are in favour of turning himself to the side and pointing down the aisle he’s in. “Alright, so, where I was before with the tomatoes?” he puts up, moving on to a sort of hopping motion with his left forefinger. “You’re going to want to jump two aisles down from where I was, so skip four and go right to five, and they’ll be, I want to say, maybe four, five steps to the left of the middle aisle and facing toward the front windows when you’re looking at the shelf.”

“Oh, perfect, thank you,” Remus offers up, already on the move.

Sirius follows along behind him as the two of them head right, skip over aisle four as directed, and make a left to head down aisle five to cross the middle aisle, but he stalls himself right in the crossroads of the middle and third aisle, choosing to stay back a few steps for he has a strong feeling that one of his favourite Remus-isms is about to pop off and he wants to have a good angle on it; Remus keeps to the left side of the aisle and inches himself along the floor with head bent as he searches the shelf, following the directions given to him to a supremely literal degree and effectively getting Sirius’s mouth muscles twitching up a storm.

Remus gives up a light chime of a note as he reaches to pluck a transparent baggie off of a pile of them on the shelf, turning both it and himself toward Sirius with the cutest little pivot. “What kind of dip should we go with?” he raises him, putting his head on a right-hanging tilt.

Sirius breathes in fast, hoists the platter over to brace it against his left hip, and raises his right fist to pump the air. “Ranch, ranch, ranch,” he chants, heading over to him.

“Oh, speak to me,” Remus echoes it, dropping the bag o’ baby carrots in the basket as if to punctuate his grave agreement.

“OK, so the dips are going to be almost exactly mirrored to where you last were for the fruit, really,” Produce Lad offers up, turning himself toward the front like they are and pointing his right arm toward the top right corner of the section. “Right there between aisles one and two, see them?”

Sirius darts his gaze over that way, landing it on a section of shelf that is indeed dedicated to dips and spreads of all sorts. “Oh, I see ‘em,” he instils, making a move for it and tapping Remus to follow him.

He takes a left at the refrigerated shelf on their current side of the section, hops over three aisle gaps, and stops in front of the very many dips, but since he’s here for the ranch he’s quick with the eye-work and locates four options for that span quite a spectrum of sizes by the time Remus strolls up on his right; there’s a wee, single-serve packet, a comparatively bigger but still mini, on-the-go oriented squeeze bottle, the ole’ trusty standard size that comes in a squeeze bottle as well, and a mother of a honking container of it as well, but Sirius aims to be a good boy and hold off on even pretending to be interested in a humungo supply of ranch for the sake of a joke, choosing instead to come at that same joke from a slightly different angle.

He lifts his right hand, reaching his forefinger over to point directly at the wee, single-serve container, pulling an immediate whine of a laugh out of Remus’s throat for it. “Well, not the itty-bitty one,” he snickers. “We’d get three dips in each before it’d be all gone.”

“Well, alright,” Sirius smiles, switching to pointing between the two models for squeeze bottles. “Big or small?”

Remus has a huff ready to lodge there but turns out, it’s shrouded in yet another backhanded comment about his own brain. “Had I just planned this out better, I could have asked to borrow my dad’s cooler and we’d be in a much better position than we are now, but of course my brilliant lagoon idea had to come in too late for that thing to have been any help,” he registers, capping his reservations off with a plain, displeased expression that sure seems like an invitation for Sirius to pile one of his own right on, as if he wouldn’t simply be grateful that the lagoon idea came to Remus at all.

“Listen, you’ve come such a long way in terms of spontaneity that I’m just not going to wag my finger at some shoulda, woulda, couldas,” he maintains, axing that idea with a flat pass of his right palm in front of the two of them before taking to swishing his right forefinger a little faster between the two squeeze bottles.

Remus pushes a new sigh out of his nose since a pout is now quite settled on his lips. “I’m allowed to be annoyed with myself, Sirius; it’d have sure come in handy for us today,” he instils, giving into a slight huff of a laugh. “It’s so large it’s comical, my dad nabbed it at the church rummage sale one year because he thought it was the funniest sight he’d ever seen so not only would it be helpful, it’s a shame it’s not here for the scale of the thing alone; you’d piss yourself laughing, seeing it.”

Sirius snorts fast. “Well, then I’m glad it’s not with us,” he underlines, breaking into a set of snickers and very much making a mental note to ask about seeing that thing at some point — just, within running distance of a toilet apparently — but for now, he’s going to stick to keeping Remus off of himself whether he likes it or not, so Sirius will leave it all for another day. “It’s really OK, I’m just glad you thought of the lagoon in time for us to actually get to visit it while we’re out here; that’s all I care about and I think you know that.”

“Well, that’s a generous way to look at it, but I still should’ve been able to foresee ahead of time that we’d want to go have a pow-wow of some sort while we’re here,” Remus keeps to it, slapping is hands open and ahead of them quite plainly. “That is our style, after all.”

“And we will have a pow-wow, just without the comically large cooler — which, you’ll notice, we’ve never had with us for all the other pows and wows that came before,” Sirius points out, resolute in keeping Remus’s spirits out of the disappointment pool. “Besides, we don’t need a cooler anyway; we’ll have the chilled bag with us and be all set, I just need you to pick one of these first and then we can move on to looking around at other potential grabs.”

Remus breathes out a half-huff, half-laugh beside him, but he takes to giving up a long, long, very long and tight noise in his throat as Sirius starts swishing his right forefinger faster and faster and faster in between the two contenders, then they’re both just snickering up a storm, and it’s really just a couple beats on from there that Sirius spots Produce Lad skirting round the corner of aisle three toward them out of his left peripheral.

“Well, hello,” Sirius greets, garnering Remus to look round at him, but apparently he hadn’t been expecting Produce Lad to be mere steps away from them for a direct hoot of surprise comes right out of him.

Hoo—” he jolts out.

Produce Lad stops short on Remus’s right. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he offers, throwing up a quick signal for peace. “I was trying to get over here quickly, not to scare you out of your skin.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Remus breathes out, left hand gone to his chest. “Cunt, you’re quiet.”

Sirius presses his mouth air-tight together, curls the platter up in his left arm and leans it over the shelf he can lean his left hip against the side of the fridge and get a decent look around Remus; a twitch can definitely be found having a go at Produce Lad’s right eyelid about a beat on from that choice expletive and from there the owner of said twitching lid gives out a laugh that sounds equal parts amused and bemused. “What’d you call me?” he probes, reaching his right hand to brace the ledge of the shelf they’re all congregated beside and having a lean against it.

It seems to register on an off-beat for Remus, but it comes on fast once it does, garnering him to face the lad on a dime while taking in a veritable heave of a breath in. “Oh, no no — no, I wouldn’t be able to explain what that was about, but it certainly wasn’t meant for you,” he gives out, all while reaching his left hand behind his back to blindly swat at all the huffing and puffing going on behind him, but in Sirius’s defense, what else can he do? He just watched the C-bomb get dropped in greater company, live with front-row seats, and of all the greater company it could’ve been, at least it’s Produce Lad looking right dazzled by it all, just leaning there, smiling up a storm, watching the show. “You as a person, I mean; didn’t mean to call you that, just — erase that, please, never happened.”

Produce Lad pushes a series of breathy laughs out of that keen, spurred smile he’s got on, but he seems to be willing to move on past the moment and allude to the very reason he’s now in front of them. “So, here’s the thing; I somehow managed to forget to consider the uproarious shopping list I caught on your way in here until mere moments ago and I feel pretty bad about that,” he prefaces, letting that keen smile peter off into more of a nervous one, “particularly, in regards to how that bag I’ve already recommended to you is taller than it is wide and how that platter is guaranteed to take up quite a bit of real estate in there, which would pose a bit of an issue for any other, potentially temperamental items to go also in there—”

Remus sucks in a fast, visceral breath ahead of Sirius, swivelling right toward Produce Lad at once. “Well, is the dip even going to fit in there?” he probes, gesturing at the shelf with his left hand. “I’m not going to want to chance it otherwise.”

Produce Lad takes to waving his free hand quite quickly in assurance. “No no, whichever one you end up picking is going to go in there, no trouble,” he maintains, having a quick, sidelong glance at the shelf and giving in to a slight smirk after it. “Well, so long as you’re thinking about going with the massive one, but I can’t imagine that’d be the case.”

“No, we both fully pretended that one wasn’t there,” Remus serves him, getting Sirius’s cheeks all warm for it. “It was going to be between the two squeeze bottles.”

Produce Lad gathers up a new breath while he nods quite a bit. “Then, yes, either one of those would fit in nicely beside that ice block, it’s just that I’m seeing how the bag would look after that in my head and I can just see how tight things are going to get tight from there,” he supplies, lifting his left hand and gesturing past Remus and more toward Sirius next. “So, those beverages you were so keen about getting on your way in? Say you also wanted them to go in the chilled bag, which would be a fair thing to want certainly, but unfortunately, there aren’t a ton of options here that would fit in there alongside the other items unless you sprung for, I don’t know, a juice box made for a tiny child’s hands?”

Sirius snorts long. “I see what you’re saying and in that case, let’s just go ahead and call it an even two bags, then,” he stamps it, giving a two-note drum of his right palm on the lid of the platter and catching the tightening of the set to Remus’s shoulders. “Remus, I’m not going to want to have to drink a child’s juice box today in order to have a nice, chilled beverage; I’m going to want to guzzle happily from a carton that’s so big I’ve got to two-hand it in order to make it happen.”

Remus breathes in once and puts it back out through a quick sigh. “I’m sure you do and now that you’ve said it, I don’t hate the idea of that myself, but you agreed so quickly meanwhile I—” he lodges, reaching into the basket for the reusable bag in there and holding it up limply in his left hand, “—really brought this in here for nothing, didn’t I.”

Sirius can’t help a smirk at the slow, quiet, and albeit slightly smarmy realization Remus is currently having for he is in love with the funniest, fussiest man alive, but Produce Lad’s own reaction is funny in and of itself; he gives that flat and folded bag a once-over, going for an idle hum while he chews on the inside of his left cheek for about three beats on from there, and tries his hand at softening the blow after a breath anew. “Well, at the risk of having a Sophie’s choice situation over deciding what items get to go into the chilled bag and what would have to get sacrificed over to that one,” he puts up, tilting his head to the right and giving a light little shrug with it, “might be worth it to consider getting the two just to avoid that even having to happen?”

Remus breathes out like he's been punched in the gut. “Oh, now that was a good one,” he forwards. "You've been paying some keen attention."

Sirius smirks behind him, lifting his right hand to poke at Remus’s back and garnering him to look over his left shoulder at him. “I’m so down to invest in some quality picnic bags and the ice blocks that’d pertain to them,” he registers. “I’m beyond happy to do it, I think they’d come in quite handy, and not just for today, but beyond; think of how those bags are going to revolutionize any and all future pow-wows, hm?”

Remus sends him a lift of his left brow before pushing the point of his lips to the left so Sirius will see it and see it well, and faces Produce Lad in the very next beat, pointing a corner of the reusable bag up at him. “Well, congratulations are in order; you certainly got him good,” he chirps him, but he’s also sticking the reusable bag back into the basket as says it and that may as well be a white flag.

Produce Lad doesn’t have the kind of time logged away with Remus to know of his smallest signals and what they might translate to, but that doesn’t seem to matter all that much just now when this lad’s got what sure seems like a double entendre to make. “Not you, though?” he trades him, his lips at an incredible twist while he leans into the hold he’s got on the shelf.

“Well, you’ve raised some good points here so I can’t and won’t take that away from you,” Remus offers him, taking a pause there and taking in a distinct breath through his nose. “However, I do think you could’ve mentioned the limited space that one, single bag would offer us just a touch sooner than you did — like, oh, when I asked about whether the platter would fit in there just a few minutes ago now? That might’ve been the time to mention some—”

Produce Lad ducks his head to the right and comes in there to speak, and it could be the lighting in here, but he does seem quite flush all of sudden. “Should’ve been, and my only excuse is I’ve been thoroughly distracted for the last little while,” he trades him, tipping his head to Remus with a spurred smile on, and listen, Sirius sure got the sense he’d been incredibly distracted by Remus’s presence here, but there he is, all but saying it.

“Well, that I can’t take away from you either; we’re a distracting pair,” Remus lends him.

Sweet of him to lump Sirius in there and Produce Lad giving it an idle hum is sweet, too, but he sure does take things in a slightly more Remus-oriented direction almost immediately from there and Sirius loves to see it. “Although, had my brain been working at full capacity and I’d thought about the fact that doubling the accessories would be a lot more helpful for your situation than sticking with one,” he puts up, his smile going over to the prim side of things, “I do have to wonder if you might’ve just grabbed that platter out of his grip and chucked it at my head for even suggesting as much.”

Remus gives up a direct pfft for that. “Please; I wouldn’t have liked it as I’m certainly a bitchy little prince, but I’d like it to go on record that I’m not that customer,” he returns him, and the flash that goes over Produce Lad’s eyes as Remus turns to tug the smaller version of the squeeze bottle off of the shelf and place it in his basket is blinding, babey; it’s blinding. “You cut me off before I could own up to my own errors, but I certainly didn’t ask you any follow-up questions back there nor did I prepare well enough for long, long day out in the heat with a bountiful picnic, so it seems we’re both lacking in the foresight department.”

Produce Lad gives into a chime of a hum. “That seems a bit of a misrepresentation; I hear you’ve come a long way in terms of spontaneity,” he puts up, and it takes pure will, drive, and concentration for Sirius not to make a single sound, but oh, does he want to.

It’s good he didn’t for Remus goes and gives a deep, echoing trill for it and Sirius and Produce Lad might’ve missed it otherwise. “Oh, I used to be so much more of a staunch bore than what you saw, trust me,” he tacks on, tossing his right thumb back toward where they once stood.

Produce Lad goes for a chime more akin to a decline. “Saw a staunch, never saw a sign of a bore,” he reports, and oh, he deserves a medal for how smooth that was; even Remus can tell it was like butter.

“Well, that kind of thing gets you everywhere, I’m sure,” he returns him, hoisting the handles of his basket up a bit higher on his right arm. “Where are those bags going to be, then?”

Produce Lad keeps that stirred smile of his on while he pushes himself off of the hold he’s got on the shelf. “No, let me fetch them for you,” he insists, giving a rather royal flutter of his newly free right arm.

Remus gives up quite the wan noise for it. “Oh, what, am I getting the prince treatment now?” he trades him.

Produce Lad has nothing but elusive humming to offer Remus as he slips by the two of them and practically glides along the floor as he crosses over in front of the section. Remus swivels on his heel, sending a huff of a laugh along to him, and Sirius, too, swivels around to do some watching of his own, but that’s more so that he can better fly his gaze between the two of them, his brows up past his hairline at this point, and right about when it’s sure looking like Produce Lad is about to leave the section entirely is also right about when Remus must decide this is all a bit too much.

“You don’t actually have to do that,” he calls after him. “If they’re off somewhere else, you can really just tell us where they are; we’re perfectly capable finders.”

Produce Lad swivels around to face them again but is in no way deterred, shaking his head bemusedly and pretending he can’t hear a word Remus is saying from over there, all while keeping to a leisurely backwards stroll — a rather brave move given how close he’s backing toward the turnstiles and any possibly oncoming traffic, but not a soul comes along to trip him up or miss him by an inch and simply make his exit look any less seamless as he swings right back around and strolls easily out of sight, and then it’s almost as if that acts as a trigger for time to start up again inside the grocery for a gent actually does come along through the turnstile and strolls right into the produce section; just incredible timing, no other way around it.

Remus turns his head toward Sirius there, going into a squint just by the new set of his brows and point of his lips, but he waits until that newcomer has gone down the middle aisle as far as aisle five to speak with Sirius. “OK, I know those melon balls are going to be lovely on a day like this, I know we’ll be better off if we get the two bags, I know we’ll be glad to have them another day, and I do want to think he’s been more genuine with us than not,” he offers, bracing for a quick beat and holding up his left hand with it, “but I really, really don’t want to walk out of here feeling like he wrapped us right around one of his fingers and swindled us, but it’s feeling a bit bleak on that front for me.”

Sirius goes right into a pout, but it takes little to no work to switch it to a smile. “Well, if it helps any, I really don’t think we could get away with calling him a swindler,” he maintains. “Distracted? Mm, we can get him for that, but a swindler? Doesn’t seem right to me.”

“Well, I don’t want to think it, but I can’t help it,” Remus trades him. “I was already starting to feel a tad suspicious of his methods, but he was looking a little too proud of himself just there; almost like he got exactly what he wanted.”

“Oh, I’d agree to that,” Sirius puts in, reworking his mouth around a smile. “OK, what are the suspicious details; try me out, I bet I can help.”

Remus breathes in long, giving up a stuttered hum after a lagged beat, and exhaling quite a few items to knock down. “Well, it’s possible he could’ve feigned that little forgetful spell he said he had and then played into our specific constraints and insecurities about them on a day like today in order to get that second bag sold to us, and then that could well mean that any of the more candid, human moments we seemed to have with him along the way might’ve been him playing along while trying to hit a specific quota,” he provides, pausing for a quick chew on his lower lip before he’s tacking more onto that point. “Which — I would understand, I do know how these things work behind the scenes, and just because I feel squeamish even thinking about trying to upsize somebody when we’re being highly encouraged to from the top down, that doesn’t mean everybody else is going to feel that way about it, but I wouldn’t love for that to be the case here because it felt like he was just enjoying talking to us rather than rushing the sale of that first bag real quick and easy, you know? He really had me feeling like he saw us as people first, but that could’ve been a tactic, too; how would I be able to know?”

Sirius breathes in quite, quite long. “OK, so, first up, we’re going to go ahead and try to remind ourselves that the grocery does not hire on commission suddenly,” he puts up, flashing him a keen smile.

Remus huffs once, but he’s half-smiling, too. “There’s still a bottom line to think about; you know how it is,” he offers him.

Sirius lets him have that with an even tilt of his head. “Sure, but say there is this quota he’s been prompted to hit and our particular shopping spree was just a perfect scenario for him to sell a bunch of products in one go, I just feel his strategy would fall under the category of weird, weird, and unconventional; I mean, those would be some round-about stunts he pulled here today just to sell a platter and a couple of accessories, no?” he puts down, giving in to a deep trill in his throat and managing to get a pointed smile out of Remus for it. “He’s had a pretty tough time lying in general; sure, he gave it a shot when you asked him to pretend the platter was garbage, but that was for you and just a bit of fun, the rest of the time he was almost too honest with us, am I right or am I right?”

Remus smirks once. “Well, the ‘fresh, ethically sourced product’ bit certainly comes to mind,” he trades him.

Sirius snorts long. “Exactly; he just couldn’t let it be,” he echoes, thrilled to be getting a few moments alone with Remus just to get some of this knocked down and out. “Granted, he didn’t know what I was doing there, but if his whole angle was just to get the platter sold off, then why not just let everything I said stand uncorrected? That might’ve led to a far easier sale, but no, he didn’t feel right letting it lay, he played things way down, and was honest when he didn’t have to be.”

Remus takes in a breath and puffs it back out, then repeats that process twice more. “OK, you’re doing good work here,” he offers him.

Sirius gives up a chime of a hum, tapping his chest in response. “And another thing," he raises next, “I’ve been better at selling this platter to us than he has.”

Remus gives out a wheeze, bringing the fingertips on both those hands up to cover his mouth. “Stop, that shouldn’t be so funny,” he hisses.

Sirius very nearly borks again. “Well, it’s funny and it's true, but the reason I say that is I’m the one calling them ‘spherical miracles’ and blowing trumpets, meanwhile all he did was toss out some anecdotes about them and watch a show going down in front of him,” he maintains, crooked grin on. “It was really only after he understood the full picture that he started trying to problem-solve for the constraints we were working with, but even then? You called him right on it, he wasn’t in any rush to clap the accessories onto the bill, he was enjoying himself and got distracted with that, but as far as his relationship to the truth goes? I’d say he’s got some integrity to him and I don’t think we ought to take that away from him just because he’s been a bit distracted—”

Remus gives up a lightly disarmed laugh there, lowering the both of his hands to reveal a pointed smile. “OK, back up; we’ve spent twenty minutes around him, if that,” he highlights. “How would you know whether he’s got integrity in that short amount of time? That’s a lot to attach to a perfect stranger.”

“How would you know if he’s sales-driven in that short amount of time? I’d say that’s a lot to attach to a perfect stranger just ‘cause he happens to have the apron on,” Sirius counters, his mouth muscles starting up a twitch. “Most that lad’s guilty of is trying his best to help problem-solve an issue for us in between bouts of flirting with you, and frankly speaking, I’m not about to string him up for either of those.”

Remus breathes in long, putting his head on a right-hanging tilt. “Are we sure that’s what happened?”

Sirius sends him a bright smile, nodding up a storm. “Oh, since he came over this way? I’m nearly positive,” he delivers, looking off to the right for a status update on one Produce Lad, but he’s not making his way over here yet, so they’ve got a few more stolen moments to use and use well. “I’ve been getting whispers of vibes coming off him for a little while now, but wow, Remus, the way he was acting with you there? The hand on the shelf, the lean he was doing, the flash that went over his eyes when you called yourself a ‘bitchy little prince,' his flouncing off to fetch you those bags like your very own peasant boy? I mean — hooo? That’s a flirt, that's a flirt right there, Remus, he’s a huge flirt; the intensity in how he’s been smiling at you alone was grounds for flirting, but the behaviour tracks, too.”

Remus takes to turning his head like it’s on a dial, starting from the front of the produce section, the side of it, and over his shoulder toward the back, checking their surroundings. Sirius looks off that way, too, realizing there that he hadn’t truly scoped out the rest of the area before he started up, and well, that same gent who very recently walked in here has made it into the left-hand aisle seven, but notably, in just a couple beats alone, Sirius does clock him squeezing three different eggplants on the shelf over there.

Remus turns his head back to him with a new breath and a slight curve to the right corner of his lips so he sure saw it, too. “Well, I’m not too worried about what the eggplant lord would think about this, but still, keep the volume where it is for me?” he bids him. “Maybe a little lower, even; we also don’t want him to accidentally overhear anything when he comes toting the bags back here.”

Sirius, lips pressed tightly together so not to bork, nods up a storm to show his commitment to his request and Remus launches right back in with a direct, hushed whisper like he hadn’t taken a few choice beats to scope the area out first. “Obviously, I have dealt with the intensity and weight of his smile, Sirius,” he attests, reaching his left hand down to give a little tug at the leg of his swim shorts for a callback to the very beginning. “You saw me when he was talking to me about these; I nearly became one with the shelf because his eyes were stuck on me and that smile just wouldn’t stop, but—”

“No, take that ‘but’ right on out of this,” Sirius advises, shooing it away with his free hand. “It has no place here.”

Remus, loveable staunch he is, simply takes in a breath of newer air and keeps on with it. “I think that might just be how he smiles,” he delivers him. “A very pointed, loud, eye contact-driven smile; that’s a recipe for disaster for me already, but he’s been all smiles essentially this whole time and—”

Sirius nods his whole way through taking in a big ol’ breath and checking for signs of Produce Lad to come, but so far they’re in the clear. “Don’t go away from that yet, it’s important; when he was word-vomiting, stammering at you about those trunks and smiling at you like he was, that’s where I got the technical, first-ever vibe, but I didn’t know for sure at the time — I mean, I was elated you were getting complimented over them, but an awkward, stammering boy trying to push a compliment at another awkward, stammering boy doesn’t necessarily equal out to flirting, so I just, pulled up a chair,” he relays to him, hand-talking like mad while he works to keep his voice as hushed as Remus’s has been. “He bounces back from the stammerstorm he got caught in pretty damn quick, you two go back and forth a little bit, he's smiling so, so hard at you, and there you are, fusing with the shelf and studying a pack of berries to avoid his eye completely, and at first I was like, ‘what is going on with him,’ but then I did some quick sleuthing, figured things out pretty quickly, and then we had our little moment over there, and let me just say, that was honestly everything to me — literally everything, so if not a single damn other vibe came along after that point, I’d have been a happy fucking camper and wouldn’t have known the difference, but here’s the thing; I’ve felt vibe after vibe coming off him and going straight over to you between now and then, I can’t ignore I have nor do I want to, and I know for a fact he's not stopped smiling at you since he started so it is a key player in this whole thing.”

Remus himself takes in a big ol’ breath, crisscrossing his fingers together. “That could all still be explained by the fact some people do smile a whole lot,” he breathes out, curling the undersides of his connected hands toward him with it, and Sirius smirks, hums an even, closed-mouth note, but his smile is all-knowing and it only gets Remus grabbing at the next available option. “It’s not only been me; he’s been smiling at you too, Sirius."

Sirius hums a direct note, shaking his head once. “Oh, not like you; mm mm, the beam he was giving you before he pranced away was off the charts, Remus,” he instils, giving in to a little shimmy with it while he looks over to the right to ensure the coast is still clear as far as Produce Lad goes, but since it is, time is of the essence. “It’s fine if you’re sceptical, you do tend to be that and it doesn’t help that he's been resting on double entendres since he got over to this side of the section, but all I ask is that you try and keep an open mind once he’s back because the more your interactions have gone on, the stronger the vibes have come, dancing toward you like the Aurora Borealis, and now that you have some idea of it yourself, you might catch some of the waves dancing toward you as well.”

Remus breathes in and pushes a breath back out in a bunch of tiny outputs for the grandiose analogy no doubt, but possibly some for the languid, liturgical dance Sirius has taken to with his free arm as well as his body to accompany it, but a few choice beats on from there, Remus abandons his crisscrossed hands and takes to pressing his palms together in a set of prayer hands instead. “OK, I don’t blame us for getting caught up with him, I don’t,” he instils, tipping his prayer hands toward him. “He’s horrifically cute, he’s got great hair—”

“Oh, the hair, the hair, the hair,” Sirius comes in, going for a chef’s kiss with his free hand.

“Astounding,” Remus underlines, having a quick glance off to the left for a Produce Lad check-in of his own and looking back at Sirius again in under a beat, “on top of that, those arms of his should be put behind bars, it doesn’t help any that he’s acutely funny, and he’s very personable, but he can be all of those things and still not be flirting with me, is the thing.”

Sirius straight up goon-grins, taking in a vast breath. “What if he’s all of those things and flirting with you, though?” he puts up. “Wouldn’t that just be something.”

Remus pushes out a short breath, pulls his palms up, and gestures around them plainly. “He’s at work, Sirius; that’s it, that’s all,” he says of it.

Sirius snorts fast and long; quite the combinations for his poor nostrils, but he wouldn’t change a thing about that for it was a well-earned sting. “I used to flirt with you all the time at work so I don’t really know how that’s a checkmate,” he serves him.

Remus pushes his lips to a point and pushes that point to the right. “We were working together, Sirius,” he puts in. “It’s a bit different.”

“Not for long, we weren’t,” Sirius serves him, blinking sweetly. “You’d come and pop in for a visit after the transfer and I’d quit my break early just to come up front and start flirting with you; remember that?”

In retrospect, yes, but it’s not like I knew at the time that’s what you were—" Remus starts, stops, and presses his lips together, check-mated by his own damn self.

“Mhm,” Sirius offers, letting that speak for itself. “Besides that, you are conveniently forgetting the cardinal rule that those who work can also flirt, but lemme just say this; that laddie’s been flirting more than he’s been working, trust.”

Remus comes in there with a dastardly scoff, almost as if he’s taken offense for the very lad he’s been rather suspicious of. “Considering the fact that we’re in here, I’d say he’s been doing quite well keeping up with it,” he holds up. “We’re distracting as all hell; he just said as much.”

Sirius blinks twice, taking to a slight squint of his own as he reworks his mouth around a smile that’s bound to get loud in due time. “Did he say that, or is it possible that you figured he must’ve meant that when he admitted to being rather distracted and he let that go and swiftly changed the subject back to something more exclusive to you?” he poses, giving into a veritable twister of a smile as Remus hangs his jaw ajar for a good three beats. “It’s all been you, Remus; I’m not judging, I could see he was trying to keep at it, and he did well while talking to me, but he’s paused everything for you multiple times now, and I get that — you’re so hard to work around, you just are.

Remus gives up a harried noise in his throat, but a beat on from there his voice comes out at a commanding whisper. “Projection,” he calls it. “You’re immensely biased toward me; that’s what’s driving this train.”

Sirius puts up a big ol’ gape-grin, turning his gaze over to the trolley still parked on the other side of the section from them, and, in finding exactly what he knew he would, goes directly into a full bork — there’s just no stopping that from happening, but he manages to keep his voice to a spirited hiss from there and that’s a winning feat. “There are still bags of cherries on that thing, Remus,” he heaves, splaying his right hand over toward them and getting Remus looking over there, too. “I don’t think he’s touched them since he pointed you toward the dips; that’s a distracted worker right there, try telling me it’s not.”

Remus turns his head back to him real quick. “He just got back from his time off, perhaps he’s having a hard time bouncing back; I’m sure I’ll be fumbling with the first pitcher I try to steam milk from after I get back to it,” he puts up, only to get a certifiably Yuge pfft out of Sirius for it. “Well, what? There are so many other explanations for this other than flirting; that's the most unlikely scenario here.”

“Alright, you little hotpot, what about it is unlikely to you?” Sirius probes. “And I don’t want to hear that you’re not a catch; that’s just a falsehood that has no business here.”

Remus huffs once, but that’s a reluctant smile playing around on those lips of his. “You know exactly what I mean by unlikely,” he instils, putting his mouth at a purse while poising whole body on a tilt to the right, and boy doesn’t think he’d be alluring for people; unbelievable.

Either way, the message has sure been sent, but that doesn’t mean Sirius won’t be making things rather plain. “That laddie-boy is no more straight than I am,” he instils, popping his brows up and down once.

Remus shuts his mouth tight so as not to react too far in either direction facially, trying again with the speech thing a couple beats from there. “Well, we just don’t know that, do we?” he puts up. “You can’t just look at someone and know it, and even then—"

“Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, I know that,” Sirius allows, “but still, here he is, queering up this produce section, and I say, ‘Godspeed, boy-o.’”

Remus huffs, going right back to the point he’d been trying to make. “This kind of thing doesn’t just happen,” he insists.

“What thing, what ‘thing?’” Sirius investigates.

“This thing, this ‘thing,’” Remus returns, and Sirius snorts at once, loving this. “What you’re convinced is happening; it just doesn’t.”

“Mmmm, yes, it does,” Sirius supplies him.

Remus huffs a true belly laugh there. “OK, well, I forgot to account for the Adonis; that’s my mistake,” he gives back. “Just so you know, for us regular folk, it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine, and in here of all places? Please.”

Sirius blows a lengthy raspberry at those two absolutely ridiculous claims. “Lies, slander, defamation; there's nothing regular about you, never was, never will be, and I would go out on all of my limbs and say it’s happening to you right now, so put that in your pipe and smoke it for me,” he delivers him, getting a righteous scoff out of Remus for it. "Oh, I'm not done; might I remind you of a time, many moons ago now, when a certain somebody of the male variety flirted with you while strolling up, down, and all around your local grocery without shame, second thought, or even a guarantee—”

“That was you,” Remus bats back, stepping in to aim a finger-jab to Sirius’s gut. “It’s all been you.”

“It still happened to you, did it not? And in the very setting you somehow think is the least likely place,” Sirius rings up, blocking two new jab attempts all while being essentially one-handed; not bad at all. “What if, and hear me out, the odds of you never getting flirted on again in your entire life are astronomically low?”

Remus gives up a muted, but inherently spurred noise, doubling up his speed and managing to get four jabs in for each forefinger before Sirius decides he’ll have to get the platter involved. He moves it around front to block the epicenter of his stomach which then creates a round, rather buoyant echo for every one of the following jabs that hit the lid from there, and that only makes the bout of stitches Sirius has been thrown into twice as fierce, but the noises catch Remus in a bout of his own stitches as well so at least this the reason and way they’ll both pass on to the next life.

It’s all over too soon for Sirius’s liking, but Remus both becomes very newly aware and scoots out of the way of another patron trying to get at the dips whom, as far as Sirius is concerned, could have easily beamed herself there from space, she was so suddenly present. Sirius carries the platter with bébé-style as he takes off after Remus, who chooses to skirt around the front of the section and scoot back down the middle aisle, where he then stops at the crosspoint of aisle three again and turns to face him.

“What else do you feel like getting?” he raises him, going and taking the golden statue right out from under Sirius for how easily he tosses out that sequitur. “I’m actually willing to let you keep picking since you have been doing rather well with it, even if you’ve got some huge eyes on you.”

Sirius brightens up, straightens real fast, and sets his feet apart on the floor, striking a power stance as he shuts these quote ‘huge’ eyes of his and letting his body, mind, and soul tell him what’s next on the docket. He reopens his eyes a few beats on from there, giving out a new, decided breath and reworking his mouth around a hell of a smirk as he spots Remus hollowing out his cheeks to avoid busting out laughing. Sirius refocuses on his new directive, scooting around Remus and promptly around the corner into aisle three to where Produce Lad had been stocking the tomatoes, stopping just ahead of where he’d been standing.

He looks up and over at Remus standing just a few steps diagonally from him with a distinctly pointed smile on his lips. “I know we said we’re good on fruit, but let’s be honest, these things barely count,” Sirius raises, giving in to a wan smile, and receiving an eager nod from Remus for it, so that’s some major approval right there.

Sirius trails his gaze over the shelf ahead of him, passes over the standard heap of tomatoes that blondie had been stocking up, passes over the packs of twos, fours, and sixes as well, and breathes in a charmed breath at finding exactly the form he’d been on the hunt for; he takes a couple more seconds to gauge the most attractive package out of the bunch, hoists the platter back over and against his left hip, and reaches his freed hand out to tug the winning container of cherry tomatoes off of the shelf, strolling back over to Remus while he flutters the container around in a bit of a flourish.

Remus well and truly falls into something that can only be described as his version of a gape-grin — it’s happening, it’s real and it’s happening, and Sirius just has to remain calm. “I was on bated breath — I can’t believe you picked those,” he attests, moving in to accept the container and put it in the basket with an undeniably youthful energy that makes all the more sense the more he speaks. “I used to have these all the time as a little midnight snack when I was little; even had a semi-ritual that I think you'd get a kick out of.”

Sirius gives up a heightened breath, fully enticed already. “Did you?” he prompts, needing more, whatever he’s got to give.

Remus gives into a knowing smile as he starts a new stroll, beckoning Sirius to head down the middle aisle with him. “OK, so, once I hit my teen years I’d just huff a handful of them from the pack and go, so the ritual certainly got more relaxed over time but when I was in my elementary years, I would sneak down to the kitchen late at night, use one of the chairs to give myself a boost so I could grab a mug down from the cupboard, go fill that up with a bunch of those,” he details, doing a little puppeteering with his hands while he leads them more toward the back of the section and past the aisle Eggplant Lord is still very much lingering in, “and then I’d righten everything in the kitchen before I’d take the mug into the den with me, sit criss-cross apple sauce on the couch, and pop them like popcorn like a little midnight imp.”

All of it, that image of lil’ Remus creeping down late at night and sitting there proudly with his mug o’ cherry tomatoes, present-day Remus’s impression of that tyke, that smile of his as he relays it? It all culminates together and has Sirius staggering on his feet as he clutches his right hand to his chest like he’s been shot point-blank and he has, just with a sharp boost of whimsy.

Thank you,” he puts up, effectively spooking Eggplant Lord with all of this rigour for there is a distinct grunt that comes out of him over there.

Remus huffs a sharp laugh, lifts his right hand to cover that sunshine smile, and reaches to wrap his left hand around Sirius’s right forearm. “Sammies are over here,” he declares, tugging Sirius away from Eggplant Lord’s vicinity.

On the direct back wall sits a smaller refrigerated shelf that’s chock-full of meat, meat, meat, to the right of that shelf sits a set of black double doors that must lead to the back store, and to the right of those sits the deli, which certainly does explain the overflow of meat on the back wall, but ahead of all that and just off the middle aisle sits the circular shelf shelving unit which boasts all sorts of ready-made lunch options and is certainly what Remus is leading him over to, giving a wee swipe of his thumb over Sirius’s inner arm before he slips his hand away from it and flutters it toward the shelf itself.

It’s all soups, salads, and sandwiches galore on this side of the shelf and since they’re not here for either of the first two contenders Sirius excludes them from the running entirely, trailing his gaze over sandwiches on ‘batta buns, croissant-based ones, and a couple of hefty submarine options, but all of them just seem like too much meat and too, too much bread for either of them to have to choke down out in that soupy heat. He splits off from Remus to head around the far side of the circular shelf, curious as to what’s going on back here, and it’s a good thing he did do that for there are a few options for the classic square sandwich, but these ones have been cut up into four little triangles and arranged in a straight line inside of an equally triangular container, and that’s just cute.

He goes ahead and rules out egg salad off the bat, knowing full well that neither one of them would be moved by that, but for the other two options, he feels he ought to consult the boss on. “They’ve got these cute, triangle-cut sammies back here,” he raises, tossing a glance overtop the shelving unit at Remus’s curly head o' hair. “Chicken salad or ham?”

Remus gives into a piqued, but deliberative hum and starts up a stroll, moving around the right side of the shelf to come up on Sirius’s left and having a look for himself, but it’s another few beats before he shares a summation of his thoughts. “This a bit of a toughie, if I’m honest."

Sirius gives up a wan trill. “Me with the taquitos,” he quips, bopping the side of Remus’s right shoe with his left one sits while the basket on his right arm and the platter sitting against Sirius’s left hip are both blocking his chance at getting a hip check in.

Remus gives up a snort, pushing the side of his shoe back against Sirius’s budging. “And I don’t even have the excuse of being utterly blitzed, I just don’t know which one I’ll enjoy more once I’m there and can’t go back on it,” he offers for it. “I wanted to go with the chicken at first since I usually do go with that if it’s available, but then I thought, ‘well, that’s because you don’t usually spring for ham, do you, Remus; could branch out a bit?’”

The live read of Remus’ inner monologue is everything already, but out of it comes the perfect solution as far as Sirius is concerned. “Ooh, I know,” he insists, “what if you stay with the chicken since that’s usually your go-to, I’ll get the ham, and we can swap two triangles from each; that way, we get to have a bit of both worlds?”

Remus gives out a fast, deep thrum of a note there. “Oh, that’s visionary status right there,” he returns him, extending his right arm and giving the basket on it a nice jostle.

Sirius takes the cue and reaches to grab the two containers and put them in the basket in turn, and looks round and over his left shoulder as one of the doors to the back pops open and brings Produce Lad directly out of it — which is rightfully the last person he’d have expected to be walking out of there, but hey, there he is, so he prods Remus to turn away from the shelf with him. Right from there, he presses his lips into a line as Produce Lad heads straight up to Remus (no surprise there), toting with him the promised picnic bags side by side in his right hand which appear to have a bunch of idyllic, freshly washed blueberries on them as well as a glossy finish to the outer material and really quite cute (a slight surprise in terms of aesthetics alone), but the real, true surprise is the tiny, mostly transparent pill bottle of toothpicks that he’s rattling in his left hand.

“Sorry, that took a bit of time,” Produce Lad offers. “They were out on the shelf, but more came in on the pallet and I had to dig until I found the box.”

Sirius’s lips can’t possibly be pressed tighter together or they’ll meld into one; that’s where he is at this point, whereas it appears Remus can still use his own to formulate a response, however dazed his voice comes out. “Well, you certainly didn’t have to do all of that,” he instils.

“No, no, I wanted to,” Produce Lad insists, holding the little bottle out to him. “And, it’s not as if you’d have had much luck finding them back there, right?”

Remus gives a chime of a laugh in his throat, his Adam’s apple bopping as he goes for a tight swallow before he tries speaking again. “OK, be honest,” he prompts, reaching to accept the bottle of picks from him, and while he started off strong certainly, he fumbles quite a bit with the toothpicks as he reaches to drop them into the basket and has quite a bit of trouble with his words from there. “Is — sorry, is there a—”

“Is there a what?” Produce Lad prompts, tilting his head to the right with a light smile on.

Remus huffs a funny breath out of himself. “Well, an employee of the month plaque hanging in the balance for you&?” he trades him. “Or a survey on the bottom of the receipt we should know about in case we should cite your name on it; anything like that?”

The severity of Produce Lad’s smirk is quite powerful, almost as powerful as that half-smile he’s got on as he takes to shaking his head unhurriedly. “No plaque, no survey,” he maintains, reaching the picnic bags out together for Remus to take hold of.

Remus goes to reach for them, latching onto the bottom ends of the two bags with his left hand, and gives a tug on them to quick avail for Produce Lad chooses to hold onto his side of the bags for three solid beats longer than would ever be fully necessary for a simple hand-off, but Sirius knows that method backwards and forwards, gave it a whirl a few times in his heyday, has been on the receiving end of a number of particularly lingering, charged exchanges, and it's a sound method to use here for it sure would require Remus to hold that driven stare of his for the duration of those lingering beats, and hoooo, his stomach’s stirring, his skin’s tingling, Sirius may just start levitating off the ground right here, right now, it’s so thrilling to see.

Once Remus is the only one attached to the bags, he folds his left hand over and his right one under them, keeping them pressed together between his palms as Produce Lad gestures his left arm off and past the deli, pointing long. “The ice blocks are just going to be in the fourth door down from the start of the row,” he directs him, which is certainly helpful for the back aisle certainly consists of an entire wall of refrigerator doors on the left and numerous entrances to the adjacent aisles on the right.

Remus turns like a dial as he looks off that way and back to Produce Lad in a true beat. “OK, thank you so much,” he nods, crossing his right ankle over his left and proceeding to go into an actual half-bow from there.

Sirius almost barks, but he keeps it tightly lodged in his throat while Produce Lad piques straight away at that, nodding as he goes into a lil’ half-bow of his own. “Really nice meeting you,” he registers.

“Oh, yeah, you too,” Remus returns, turning and shuffling his feet along the floor as he passes in front of the deli.

Sirius works to remain composed as he looks after Remus for a beat or three longer, spotting him making a shuffled beeline for the aforementioned fourth refrigerator door in the long line of them over there before he blinks his gaze back to one Produce Lad, and with his first up-and-close shot of the bold boy without anything or anyone in between, he notes that the name on the tag clipped to the top right corner of his apron reads ‘Miles,’ and while that is honestly one of the most fitting names out there for him, Sirius still chooses to wipe that clean from his memory; he’ll always be Produce Lad to him.

Sirius receives a jolt of remembrance in the very next beat, turning to have a quick glance over the shelving unit behind him and toward the produce section at large, noting that Eggplant Lord has thankfully moved on and has been replaced by two new shoppers, but Sirius still ought to mention something about how handsy he got at one point. “Hey, just so you know,” he raises, looking back to Produce Lad with a double blink, “there was a man here a few minutes ago who was just, having a ball squeezing a number of the eggplants.”

Produce Lad expels a severe breath right out of his chest, dropping his voice to a spirited whisper. “Fuck that guy; he comes in here every single Monday and it’s like he just can’t help himself, no matter how many times he has been told not to touch the fucking eggplants,” he details, smiling extra wide as he pops his right fist into his left palm. “I’m running out of solutions that won’t get me booted out of here or put right in jail.”

Sirius gives a low and lengthy laugh in his throat. “I used to work at a café and oh, when they used to reach over the counter and pour off the top of their drink into our sink?” he puts up, reaching his right hand over the platter and down to slap it against his left wrist for an example of what he sure wished he could do and getting a heartened, harried noise out of the lad for it. “Get your hand out from behind here and ask for a little bit of room next time, ma’am; I don’t know where the hell that's have been before this.”

Produce Lad pushes a great sigh out the corner of his fatigued smile. “On that note, I’d better go give the eggplants a wash,” he puts up, taking a step to the right and pointing his left hand toward Sirius before heading off. “Nice meeting you, too.”

“Yeah, same here,” Sirius puts down, giving him a darling smile as he steps to the left to go after his undoubtedly overcome companion. “Seriously, couldn’t thank you enough for all your help.”

Produce Lad sends him a wave as he keeps going right and Sirius swivels around to trot on after Remus, blinking quite a bit as he finds him standing halfway down the seemingly never-ending row of refrigerator doors, the picnic bags tucked between his left arm and side while he's got the fridge door braced open with the right side of his body, the basket squished between him and the door. To the untrained eye, it may well look like Remus is but a curious, encumbered shopper just trying to get an extremely close look at the contents of the shelf directly in front of his face, and while Sirius’s well-trained peepers can see it quite clear that Remus simply needed to get some chilled, refrigerated air wafting over that visage of his, he’s not quite sure why Remus picked that specific door versus the one he'd been directed to.

Sirius scuttles right over to him and plants himself directly on Remus’s left, noting that there’s a sprawling number of juice cartons on the shelf ahead of the particular door Remus chose, so that’s the answer to the mystery right there and he can move right into giving out an emphatically chuffed trill, gape-grinning as he taps his shoes into the floor through a spirited jig. “Remus, ahhhh—” he starts up, but despite the wild twist at Remus’s lips, he braces his left forearm upright with the bags still tucked against his side so he can somewhat press his forefinger to those lips. “OK, I am being as quiet as I can be given the circumstances, monsieur.

Remus’s words come out hushed and intent. “I understand that, but there are people over at the deli now, so shh, shh,” he instils, gesturing ahead of him with his left forefinger. “Meet me in the fridge.”

A request Sirius is both wildly amused over and most obliged. “Of course, just one quick thing,” he bids, going into a half-bow with a mighty smile on his lips.

“You stop that; you stop that right now,” Remus huffs at him.

Sirius snickers up a storm as he steps back and pulls open the door next to Remus’s, sticking his face in toward the shelf and a little to the right so it’ll be closer to where Remus has stationed his own. “Yes, dear?” he bids, the chill on the inside of the door feeling just delightful against his right arm.

“What took you so long getting over here?” Remus shoots him sidelong.

Sirius snorts once. “Thirty seconds, maybe,” he trades him.

Remus huffs once. “I sure saw you two chumming it up over there,” he mentions. “If the topic was me, you’d better start running because I’m gonna come getcha.”

Sirius snickers wildly, goon-grinning at a bottle of cranberry juice on the shelf directly in his eyeline. “I was telling him about what Eggplant Lord had been up to,” he forwards, garnering a muttered hum and a series of nods out of Remus for it. “Although, I would love it if you came and got me, just so we’re square.”

Remus at least has it in him to snort for that. “I still might,” he quips, talking what might’ve been a long breath in had a hitch not come along and cut it off. “I can’t fucking believe this; there was no world in which you were supposed to be right about that.”

Sirius breathes in long, sighing it back out again with a light cloud of condensation. “And yet,” he returns sagely, but he drops the airy voice from there. “No, listen; was I onto something big with those vibes and could very tell I was? Yes, yes, it’s true. Did I hope he was going to come on back and be a lot more blatant than he’d been beforehand? Yes, yes I did. Did I know he was going to come and be that bold about it? No, I did not, but it’s the most correct resolution he could’ve ever given that whole interaction and I am living for it, Remus; who’s the Adonis now, hm?

“I’m not prepared to breathe, let alone answer that question,” Remus makes known.

“Well, I was hardly prepared for the comparison to be made in the first place; you’re the one who coined that for me,” Sirius serves him slyly, but he ends up taking in a vast, audible breath in from there, his brain breaking and stitching back together in quick succession. “Remus?

Remus gives into a light jolt beside him. “What, what?” he bids him.

“We’ve come full circle,” Sirius instils, bringing his right hand up to his chest. “You’re the new Adonis.”

A pfft starts up beside him, but a breathy laugh comes with it so it more sounds like a ‘pf-pf-pf-pf’ as Remus tries to get his mouth around it; absolutely incredible stuff. “Too much responsibility,” he says of it.

“Oh, certainly, but we’ve no choice, you’re it,” Sirius smiles. “The torch is yours to take up from where I leave it directly at your feet.”

“Keep it, I don’t want it,” Remus returns him.

Sirius clicks his tongue thrice. “Sorry, I can’t do that,” he maintains. “You turn heads, Remus, and I’d like to see you try to own that, not shy away from it or banish the idea altogether.”

“I don’t know how,” Remus implores, his voice barely making it above a whisper.

Sirius can’t help his heart swelling for this sweet boy. “Well, that’s alright, I’m here, but as funny as this fridge meeting is, it’s starting to feel a little too like a visit to the confessional and that’s just not going to work for me or you, so get ready; I’m coming back in,” he announces, stepping back to let his door fall shut after him and moving back up beside the Remus-shaped crack in the very next door with a bright, earnest smile. “I’m great at owning things like this; been on both sides of the proverbial aisle, but I’ve definitely been in your shoes before.”

Remus gives up an impish noise, places himself on an angle, and presses himself up to the side of the doorframe he’s in to utilize the relative shelter that Sirius’s body is now providing him from the left, garnering Sirius goes ahead and braces the door with his right hand so it'll feel like it's just them. “Have you ever had a sexy bag-pass happen to you before?” Remus probes.

Sirius smirks fast, nodding up a storm. “Mm, different item, but yes, I have,” he affirms. “‘Sexy bag-pass’ has a nice ring to it, by the way; I like it a lot.”

Remus puffs out quick breath for it. “It’s really all I can think of to describe it,” he gives him.

Good, tap into that; let it get them shoulders puffing up a bit,” Sirius coaches, rolling his own a bit for show.

“See, you’re already so much better at this than me,” Remus returns him. “And you were right there too, looking so damn fit — you look so good, Sirius, and he did the sexy bag-pass to me? I don’t get it.”

Sirius gives up a bright snort for that. “Well, you wouldn’t, but I sure do,” he slips him, sniffing once as he turns his head to pretend like he’s having a look at the shelf through the glass on his old door as a gent sidles up to one of the fridges on Remus's right. He glances sidelong at Remus with a quick smile, catching him puffing a big ol’ breath into his cheeks seconds before he lets it go quite casually, turning his head to pretend like he’s also just having a gander at the shelf on his right and reaching his already upturned right hand up to a carton of premium O.J. that’s not far from his hand at all.

“No pulp,” he points out, the tip of his forefinger sitting directly underneath the very declaration of that fact printed on the carton.

Sirius takes in a fast and vast breath, reworking his mouth around what’s threatening to be a viciously loud bark if he lets it out, and ducks his head, cutting off his oxygen supply to help avoid that from happening and smirking the laugh out of himself through a bunch of short, sharp bursts through his nose while Remus, too, starts up a round of smirks, and there they wait the fifteen or so more seconds it takes for that gent to wander off again.

Sirius lifts his head back up the moment he’s gone, taking in a long, long new breath. “Reeeeemus,” he hisses out.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Remus insists, smirking up a storm.

“I know and, perfectly, you picked that,” Sirius instils, huffing residual snickers out of his goon grin.

Remus breathes in long through a pointed smile and then he’s right back to it. “Seriously, though; I certainly don’t understand why,” he reinstates. “He found you funny, I know he did, and you were actually consistently nice to him; all I did was quip at him, give him some shit, and act a haughty little thing.”

Sirius hums a chime of a laugh over to him. “OK, first off, he found me loud-funny and that doesn’t always carry over from general appreciation, but he found you witty and that goes far, believe me,” he maintains, giving a knowing nod to pair with. “Second, you’re adorable and the way you quip to survive is as inherently adorable as you are. Third, your haughtiness isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, that just wouldn’t be realistic, but it would be just as unrealistic to cling to the idea that he didn’t like that about you when it’s pretty clear now that he was all about your haughtiness, and lastly, but most, most importantly, we — and I mean you and me; we do not have to let an experience like this pit us against each other, and over the attention of a boy, no less? I spit at the thought.”

Remus reworks his mouth around the world’s most powerful twist. “Sirius."

“I mean it, Remus; we’re better than that,” Sirius delivers him. “Stronger together, less apart; say that for me.”

“Oh, we don’t have to—”

“Try again.”

Huff. “Stronger together, less apart.”

“Yes, babey, yes, Sirius hypes, patting his right palm against the side of the fridge door for an echo. “Now, since you’ve got a huge thing for lists, why don’t we pen you one right now and make it specifically about all the things we’re going to own about this experience: the fact that you went into a little bow at the end there — adorable, polite, endearing; the fact you’re the new Adonis ‘round these parts — incredible, fitting, the natural successor; the fact that you are an attractive, alluring person whether I’m standing next to you or not — accurate, important, verifiable even; the fact that you dropped the name of our Lord right in front of him — honourable, respectable, beaut—”

Remus whirs like a cat awoken from a deep afternoon slumber through every other item on the list, but he apparently really didn’t see that last one coming for he huffs grand, aiming this one at Sirius. “Ohh, I really thought we’d moved past the point where we’d even mention that, but there I go again, foolishly hoping for mercy from you of all people,” he returns vastly, and honestly, this is hot as all hell, so the fact that Sirius hasn’t already started snogging the daylights out of him is a testament to his impulse control, he’d just like to say that.

He cocks his right brow up instead, knowing that’s going to get Remus right in the knees. “Well, you got the foolish part right; there was a lot to comb through while we were over there, but you should’ve known the C-bomb was going to get a revisit,” he gets him. “Changed my life, seeing that; I’ll never forget it.”

“I’m embarrassed enough as is, Sirius,” Remus contests.

“Don’t be; he thought it was bafflingly funny and I thought it was everything — still do, in fact,” Sirius reports. “I figured if one of us was going to accidentally utter our Lord's name in greater company, it was going to be me and it’d have been right in front of your mum—”

“Almost was,” Remus gets him, smirking with it.

“And I still may end up doing that and will cross that bridge if I come to it, but you crossed the bridge first and I’m obsessed with it,” Sirius insists. “Hell, I might even commission somebody to draw the magical moment out for me and then I could put it right on the fridge so I’ll know exactly where to go to get a quick pick-me-up—” Remus cuts in with a throaty whine, reaching up to prod his left forefinger against Sirius’s right pec four times in quick succession, “—you’re so fucking cute; I can barely handle it.”

“Funny, I can barely handle that,” Remus coopts it, pointing that same forefinger past Sirius’s shoulder and back to where the magic happened.

Sirius pushes a two-note smirk through his nose. “Which part; the sexy bag-pass or the fact that he took the time to go out of his way and fetch you those toothpicks for cocktail hour even though no one, not even Cunt himself, asked him to do that?” he raises, finishing with a prim smile at his lips.

Both,” Remus expels at once, a breathy, vast, and incredible note, but he lets a pointed smile show before he’s already making moves to be a tad more specific, his voice hushed but by no means less intent. “The toothpicks were in a bamboozling league of their own already when he would’ve had to remember that from way beforehand, think to go looking for them on his way back, and go dig them out from under who knows how many boxes, he was gone for quite a stretch there; I couldn’t believe it, but—“

Sirius gives up a breathy laugh through his nose, nodding for it. “Mhm, he sure was gone a while,” he echoes. “Really makes you wonder, too; did he know ahead of time what he was going to come back out here and do? If so, did he stay back there, holding onto that little bottle for a few minutes just to psych himself up for the grand finale, and if not, did it actually take as long as it did to dig down to the specific box and he came back up here only to get inspired to deliver the bags sexily to you in the seconds before he did it?”

Remus simply stays with his mouth ajar for a good three beats. “I hadn’t even thought to consider that yet,” he comments.

Sirius lifts his gaze to the ceiling with an innocuous air. “Some food for thought,” he gives him, breaking into a snicker before it’s even all the way out.

But,” Remus reiterates, garnering Sirius to drop his gaze to him again and give in to a series of prompting nods, “I hardly had time to process that he’d done it before he brushed my hand while we passing them over to me, but then he hit me with that innocuous little tone after it so I thought the brush had to be an accident, and then, he gets me with the sexy bag-pass right after, and now — now, I’m not so sure the hand-brush was an accident.”

Sirius fully attaches himself to a gape-grin, tossing out two, spirited hoots through it. “He — he gave you a double-whammy?” he whispers intently getting a one-note, slightly shrill noise in response for it, and suddenly the moment of truth is coming back to him in a flash, the newer information aligning in his head and clicking like a clean, clean lock, and that only garners his voice to take on a soft, distant quality as he looks off though the transparent door he’s holding open and straight on into the ether from there. “He is a bold boy.”

Remus gives up a laugh so chest-oriented that it takes Sirius right back out of the ether at once. “I’m sorry, a what?” he negs him, but Sirius cannot and will not be negged for that.

He holds his head high with a dignified sniff. “That there’s a B.B.; Bold Boy,” he highlights, giving the air a smooch to act as the period on that and getting a Yuge pfft he gets out of Remus for some or all of that.

“Well, you’re being exceptionally cool about this,” he observes. "I mean, I do get it, but—"

Sirius gives a tilt of his head to the right, blinking twice. “As opposed to exceptionally uncool?” he trades him. “That stings a bit, Remus; I think I’m very cool.”

Remus huffs long, but there’s a budding smile on those lips that just won’t quit. “Listen, I understand finding out you’ve been right all along is quite the phenomenon; that’s going to get you excitable always, same as it gets tends to get me smirking when I’ve been proven right about something so that’s not a critique, but it’s more than just the confirmation you got,” he instils, his thumbs a-twiddling between their bodies. “That was still a lot; I would more than understand it if you were a little ticked off, but—”

Sirius comes on in with a stammer of his own; full circle, they’ve all done it now. “I — I don’t know who or what I’m to be ticked at here,” he puts up. “Him? Please, I get why he orbited you, you’re magnetic. You? Please, what’d you do other than be your quippy, haughty, magnetic self, hm? I’ve a qualm or two to take up with Eggplant Lord for helping himself to the supply, but that’s about it.”

Remus pushes a two-toned snort out his nose there. “I’d already forgotten about him,” he confesses, pushing a breathy laugh out his mouth from there.

“Not I,” Sirius instils deeply, celebrating the vast and quite lengthy snort he gets out of Remus for it.

Or at least it was shaping up to be quite lengthy, but Remus cuts it off too soon after it kicked off, goes stricken fast, and faces forward at once, bonking the basket right into the back of the door in the process. “Juice or lemonade?” he bids him, standing at attention.

Sirius blinks twice as he holds the door open that much more for him, hears a suctioned door open not too far behind him at all, and breathes in anew for the question. “Mm, lemonade,” he votes, thinking he’d love nothing more than to pour summa’ that down the hatch, and it appears Remus has no qualms about that choice for he’s happy to grab it out of there, but Sirius is just not about to watch that encumbered lad struggle with everything else he’s already got on him just to partake in the lemonade extraction process. “OK, you back up and let me get in there; you’ve got quite enough already.”

Remus pushes out a breathy laugh that’s definitely got some relief in there. “Thank you,” he gives him, stepping back so Sirius can slide in there.

After a quick look around at the shelves, he resists the mighty urge to grab a four-liter jug from down on the bottom shelf for the joke of it, choosing instead to stick with the quaint, two-liter sized cartons on the shelf in front of his eye line that Remus had more than likely been referring to. Of the two options for cartons, the pick is rather easy when one brand offers a twist cap over the other that’s just your traditional push-n’-pour spout and chances are high that they’ll both appreciate being able to close the thing in between guzzles off of it.

With that, Sirius reaches his free hand into the fridge and tucks his middle finger and thumb underneath the folds of the winning carton, tugging it out of the fridge and letting the lawful neutral door get back to its regular role. He turns back to Remus, but there are now three new folks milling about the back aisle and that’s just a style cramper right there.

He locks his eyes on the centers of Remus’s lenses, bringing his voice to a conversational whisper. “Let’s hit pause, get ready to go, and we’ll pick back up from where we left off, mm?” he raises him.

“Mm, mhm,” Remus chimes, perfectly on board with that plan.

Sirius flashes him a quick smile before he lets it widen to a grin, taking a fiendish approach to his demeanour. “D’you want to check if we even need the two bags in the end,” he raises him, popping his brows up and back down again, “see if he’s a big ol’ liar?”

Remus's lips go for quite the twist. “I mean, yes, kind of,” he gives it, “but I’d also just like to see how it’s all going to work before we get up to the till.”

Me too, let’s get it,” Sirius instils, heading the way over to the closest adjacent aisle to them and certainly celebrating the fact that the aisle he chose out of complete convenience is rather desolate save for another patron up toward the top end of it, but she’s wheeling her cart toward the front so presumably she won’t be around that much longer. He stops just a few steps into the aisle and turns around to put his back toward the top end, garnering Remus to stop ahead of him. “Quickly, of course, so no one mistakenly takes us for a couple of runners and tries to tackle us.”

Remus doesn’t really do too much in terms of moving for a couple beats, suggesting to Sirius that he doesn’t overly love that addition, but the moment Sirius is about ready to say never mind, Remus moves to crouch ahead of him, hoisting his basket over to the left side of his bent knees to rest it out of the way of the aisle. “Very, very quickly,” he underlines, tugging the cooler bags out from between his left arm and holding one out to him.

“So fast,” Sirius assures, giving him a smile as he leans the platter against his knelt lap in favour of getting the bag unfolded.

He holds it steady in his left hand, pushing his right one in there to mould it to stand tall on the floor, and reaches to grab the platter again, turning it sideways like one Produce Lad suggested they do. Remus reaches to hold the bag steady for him with his free hand and it’s a lovely, unprompted gesture for it does make it all the easier for Sirius to lower the platter in there swiftly and without a hitch. He lets it stand upright gingerly, scoots it to the front of the bag to create a decent chunk of space behind it, and gives a glance over at Remus’ basket, sussing out what’ll go in behind it, but after scoping out the situation it's clear there’s just no way it’s all going to fit in here.

Sirius breathes in once, reaching already to hoist the platter back out of the bag so it’ll just look like they’re just having a quick rest on the side of the aisle. “Well, he was certainly right; we’d have definitely had to Sophie’s choice a few things with the just the one, but we don’t have to even think about doing that now,” he reports, and Remus clicks his tongue once, on command and perfectly done, but all in all it’s for show and that smile is all the proof needed to know it, “so, I’m thinking we could push the sammie containers together to make a cute lil’ rectangle which'll save some room so that the carrots can go in beside them and the ice block, and then the carton, tomatoes, dip, toothpicks, and the other block would all fit just fine in the second one, and I meant what I said before, I’ll suffer with the bag that’s got the platter in it so you get to carry the lighter of the two.”

Remus goes into a smirk. “I feel like it’ll be anything but suffering for you, but that’s fine,” he puts in.

“Well, true, I’ll be floating around just knowing I have this in my possession,” Sirius allows, setting the platter back against his lap and curling his hands over the lid. “And, look, I do understand that it’s frustrating to have to agree to add two more reusable bags to a collection that just keeps on multiplying; I mean, we’ve got enough of them between us back home already, but this is an evergreen purchase like I said, and they’re super cute, aren’t they?”

Remus gives up a quick, breathy laugh through a nod. “They are; he undersold that part, but would I have wanted to hear it? Not likely,” he offers wanly, reaching to stick the second cooler bag into the unfolded one sitting between them. “Will you let me split some of this with you?”

“Oi?” Sirius returns. “Sorry, sweets; we had a deal.”

“Alright, I’ll get these, then,” Remus decides, scooping the unfolded bag up by the handles and scooting right out of Sirius’s reach in his crouched position — almost like he planned to put the other bag in there for exactly this scenario. “They’re not technically lunch, they’re the bags that lunch goes in; different category entirely.”

“Mm, barely,” Sirius slips him, hoisting himself off his haunches and up off the floor from there, “but you know what, fine; get the things you moaned about in the first place, see if I care.”

Remus bops his head back and forth with a prim, unbothered series of humming as he turns to tug the basket with him as he lifts up to stand. “Well, I will, and you care so much,” he chimes, hoisting the handles of the basket back onto his right forearm.

Sirius pushes a Yuge breath through a pointed smile, feeling the burn that is Remus Lupin coming for you and all you have. There’s a good, long moment from there wherein the two of them just, stare down at the lone lemonade carton on the floor that Sirius was certainly about to walk off without, and judging by Remus’s prime smirking, he was about to do the same, and next moment they’re busting into stitches.

Sirius goes ahead and secures the platter against his left hip again before lowering himself down to tug the carton back up with him in his right hand. “Good to go?” he raises, smiling over at Remus still very much in the throes of his share of the stitches but able to nod his way through it.

It’s a straight shot to the till area from their aisle, wherein Remus spearheads the choice of which of the two open tills they’ll go with by heading for the furthest one in the row, a choice Sirius fully agrees with when the other option’s got four people queued up ahead of it and theirs has just two. The express lane moves quickly as they tend to do, but Sirius spends most of that brief time keeping a hell of a watchful eye on that trickster ahead of him; yeah, he does care a little too much about taking Remus’s money but as far as pitching in where he can goes, Sirius is really fine with letting him get the damn bags if it’s going to help that big ol’ brain of his be more content, but he is both ready and willing to try some major gymnastic stunts to get that boy separated from that basket of goodies should he even so much as try to sneak an extra item onto the conveyor belt.

In the end, Sirius got ready to throw down for nothing when all Remus does with that basket once he’s ahead of the till is set it on the metal ledge to the left of the belt so he can fish his mobile out from in there for his lil’ compact wallet on the case, leaving the rest of the items for Sirius to push through once it’s his turn to go through; that’s a good lad. Remus passes the bags over to the cashier, pays with his card before tucking it back into the wallet on his case, and scoots on over to the bagging area, turning toward the front windows to inconspicuously slip his mobile back in between the waistband of his trunks and his right hip before swivelling back around like he was simply looking outside the front windows for a second; Sirius really bagged the cutest boy in the galaxy.

Remus smiles over at Sirius smiling at him as he tugs the folded bag out of their moulded one, getting it just as ready for its own share of their haul. A diligent little chain becomes them from there, Sirius passing items onto the conveyor belt, the cashier passing items through the scanner and off to the bagging counter, Remus divvying out items between their designated bags, Sirius passing the unused reusable bag and keys back to their temporary owner and moving back over to leave the empty basket on top of a small pile of them that’s already been made just ahead of the till structure. He steps back up to the pay screen and as quick as it is for Sirius to pay up and grab his respective picnic bag, the two of them are officially off and heading down the outbound walkway that’s got its own displays for them to gander as they pass by; the only one that’s of any real interest is a tower of sunglasses that Sirius really rather wishes it would’ve been placed literally anywhere other than on the way out of the damn place for it’s an honest travesty that in one sweeping glance alone he’s able to spot four different styles that would look incredible on Remus Jean Lupin’s face.

Sirius, feeling rather inspired to take that one sunglass shopping, scoots up on Remus’s left and reaches to tap his right hand between his shoulder blades as they keep for the exit. “Hey so, we’re still going back to the antique mall at some point this week, yeah?” he raises him.

“I thought we would, yeah?” Remus offers, looking over at him. “I know you wanted to comb through the records a little more carefully and we’ve still got a couple of choice people to get souvenirs for, ‘course.”

“Right, and we do, but also; do they carry sunglasses there?” Sirius further checks. “I don’t really remember spotting any, but then again, I was a bit busy being overwhelmed by everything I did see.”

Remus gives up a spurred laugh for that. “You sure were,” he echoes it. “They usually had pairs of them dispersed throughout various kiosks when I was still there and I can’t imagine much has changed on that front, so I’m sure there'd be plenty of them floating around the place.”

Sirius goes into a gleeful set of claps. “Perfect, because I just saw, like, four pairs on a display back there that would’ve looked impeccable on that face of yours and I’d like nothing more than to peruse some vintage sunnies and try some out on you,” he instils, going into a whole shimmy with it.

Remus sends a pfft over his shoulder as he heads them into the foyer. “Oh,” he trades him, going for a wry tone, “you’re bored of looking at these ones all of the time, I see.”

Sirius breathes in exceptionally long, lifts his right palm to his mouth, and blows a fart noise to end them all against it, the noise swelling inside the foyer thanks to acoustics in there, but not only that, the sound sure stops an incoming patron bolt-still in the frame of the indoor. “Nice weather we’re having, hey?” he offers, giving the lady a nice little wave with the same hand he so recently blew out.

Now, Remus had already been in the process of making a quick escape before Sirius chose to engage, so now that he certainly has, there Remus goes, taking off out the door, pulling a swift left, and scurrying up the sidewalk toward the bend the truck is parked behind.

Sirius picks up his pace and smiles up a storm, going into a bit of a skip to catch up with Remus and moving back up on his left. “More like, I love the ones you already have, but at the same time, we’re really just scratching the surface as far as versatility goes,” he provides, hiking the straps of his cooler bag higher on his right shoulder. “You’ve got yourself a profoundly sculpted face and there are all sorts of colours, shapes, and styles you could be tapping into, like — oh no, if we could find you a pair of Lennon-style frames? I would shriek, you’d look so good with a pair of those on.”

“Well, those we may have some luck with at the mall,” Remus trades him. “I can’t say for certain because you can never fully bank on what’s going to be in there at any given point, but I used to see pairs like those come through the place now and again, so it’s possible.”

“You saw pairs here and there and never thought, ‘mm, lemme get these,’” Sirius tuts. “Wasted opportunities there, Remus.”

“Well, I suppose I didn’t have you around to suggest I’d fit those ones properly,” Remus lobs him. “I hadn’t really settled on a day yet, but we’re going into town with my mum and dad tomorrow to look over paint swatches and then we’ve actually got to do the painting we said we'd do, so that wouldn’t be the best day to go perusing the mall, but we could go in earlier on in the day on Wednesday and meet up with the girlies from there?”

“I’m all for that,” Sirius maintains.

“Well, alright,” Remus offers him, giving his right wrist a flick as if to jot it in the air with the point of the key to the truck. “Consider it penned in.”

“Love it, can’t wait,” Sirius forwards, reaching up to give a double-pat to Remus’s back as they come around the bend. “Let’s keep an open mind, open heart, and we’ll see what they’ve got for us to comb through, and frankly, I will happily obtain a pair of Lennon glasses for you myself on the side if we don’t find any there and you know that’s right.”

Remus gives a low, echoing hum in his throat. “And I do, but while I can’t control what you search up and order on your own time, all I ask is that you do not let someone out there rob you just for a pair of Lennon glasses or I’m going to break out in hives,” he maintains, letting the two-tone beep of the truck unlocking act as the punctuation on that condition.

Sirius huffs a laugh, stepping off the sidewalk and crossing over to the truck. “For the sake of you and your skin, I’ll be very thorough with my searches,” he instils, dropping the straps of his cooler bag off his right shoulder to hang in the bend of his elbow as he comes up on the passenger door. “Now, I did set up the backseat in a rather quaint balance and rather than throw that off any by sticking these in there, I say we just put them down in front of my seat when it’s really not unlike me to sit crossed-legged in mine as is.”

Remus gives up an amused noise from behind him. “No, that’s certainly true,” he allows for it, but he takes in a thoughtful, half-breath from there and shares what that’s about right quick. “We could put them in the bed and avoid you having to absolutely, positively sit like that, though; just a thought, I don’t want your legs to smart later.”

“Well, that’s sweet, but no; if we come upon a winding road, hit a sudden pothole, and somehow my bag goes flying out of there and takes the platter away with it, I will cry,” Sirius maintains, tugging the passenger door open with a fervour that matches it.

Remus gives a pfft he moves down toward the cargo bed as is, but that’s only to slip the unused reusable bag back where he got it from, meanwhile Sirius is busy reacting both loudly and breathily to the temperature situation inside the truck while he gets his bag tucked underneath the glovebox; Remus smirks quite a bit as he meets back up with Sirius at the passenger door, but turns out he’s just passing by. “I’ll leave you this and get some air going in there,” he offers, holding his bag out to him.

Sirius reaches back to grab it by the strap, effectively freeing Remus up to go around the front of the truck to get in on the driver’s side. “Don’t get ready to drive off just yet, though,” he calls up, hoisting the bag up and in, situating it in between the first bag and his seat.

Remus gives him a head tilt through the window on the driver’s side door and pulls the whole thing open, leaning in to peer across the front seats at him. “I think I only caught two words, if that,” he passes him, reaching his right hand up to use the handle above the door to pull himself up and into the truck.

Sirius smirks, tossing his head to the right. “Our skin needs protecting,” he gives instead.

Remus breathes in sharp and fast. “Shit, sorry,” he gives it, swinging himself into his seat for a solid deflate. “It’s a good thing one of us is thinking today.”

“Last time I want to hear that word at all today, ‘kay?” Sirius puts up, blinking twice over at Remus before stepping back to push the passenger door shut.

Remus uses the ignition quite like a response tool, switching the truck over to idle to get some airflow and bringing the two front windows down to get a cross-breeze going while Sirius moves over to open up the back, reaches down into the beach bag he’d set down below and in behind passenger the seat, having a feel-around in there and coming up with the bug spray first. He tucks that against his chest with his left arm, continuing to scavenge for the sunscreen tube with his right hand while Remus gets himself back out of the front seat and very much situates himself at a stand in the doorway, just waiting for him there.

Sirius steps back to bump the back door shut, skirts around the back of the truck with the two skin-savers in his clutches, and waggles them in the air as he dances his way up the passenger side, taking full, unbridled advantage of the large, beast of a truck that’s quite nearly blocking them entirely from the rest of the parking lot. Standing with his back pressed to the open driver door, Remus watches him bop all the way up to him with a funny twist at his lips and sneaks a kiss right as Sirius is leaning in to toss the bug spray on the driver’s seat for the meantime, garnering Sirius to flash him a smile as he straightens up and gives him two kisses in return.

He pops the cap on the sunscreen, squeezing a liberal glob of sunscreen onto his left palm and moving up a step so that the two of them are chest-to-chest, partially for easy access to Remus’s exposed skin and partially because he’d like their chests to be pressed together like this. “Hold this for me?” he bids, holding the tube up. Remus hums a direct yes in response, grabbing a hold of it in his right hand and keeping it held right where it is for Sirius will need it again, sweet boy. “I’m not going bother trying to cover every spot here unless you’d be down to go skins right here in the parking lot?”

“I wouldn’t,” Remus supplies.

Sirius smirks as he gets the glob upward toward the fingertips on his left hand and rubs all eight of his digits together, getting a good lather going there. “Had a feeling, so we can just get each other’s backs once we get there and the shirts come off, but I do want to get your exposed areas done since I did say I would,” he finishes, reaching up to start with Remus’s forehead with plans to work his way down and out from there.

He reaches the back of his left hand to curl the bulk of Remus’s fringe up and away from his forehead, enjoying how easily that substantial floof surrendered to his whims, and uses the pads of the fingers on his right hand to spread the film on them over Remus’s forehead. Now, if he hadn’t positioned himself so close to Remus, hadn’t pressed his chest up truly right up against his, then Sirius might not have felt the short breath Remus took in, nor would he have as easily noted that it got cut off by hitch.

“OK?” he checks, dropping his gaze to Remus’s lenses.

Remus nods best he can while his forehead is getting worked on. “Yeah, you’ve — you’ve actually managed to make everything about that situation and the process of getting on with it feel about as normal as ever, which is both a bit odd and a bit of a relief considering it didn’t have to go like that,” he puts up, pausing for a new breath. “I wish I could just let it be and not question things, but I’m me, so I can already feel the analytics coming in hot.”

Sirius breathes in once, nodding intently to show full solidarity. “Well, who better to look ‘em over for you, hm?” he puts up, taking care not to get any smears on Remus’s frames as the pads of his fingers get closer to the bottom of his forehead.

“Well, exactly,” Remus echoes it.

“Great page we’re both on, then,” Sirius stamps it, moving his hands below Remus’s sunnies to swipe two, distinct smears at the tops of his cheeks with his forefingers. “I’m going to keep this up and you can feel free to just lay ‘em on me, mm?”

Remus hums up a storm since he can’t manage a nod-storm for it, pushing a vast puff of breath out of himself from there. “Well, I wouldn’t have been able to tell that you felt vibes coming off of him back in there,” he relays, letting it linger for a mere beat before he’s already moving to reword things. “Not wouldn’t — couldn’t, I really didn't see it anywhere on you, but here’s what I could tell: you were hyped up about the shopping trip, you were trying to get me to get hyped about it, too, you were fun and just the right amount of teasing with me about finding him quite the looker, and you got the zoomies over the melon balls — truly, Sirius, you were just so yourself in there and I know you didn’t know if you were onto something for sure at first, but at some point the vibes became harder and harder not to notice and as far as I could tell, you acted no different to me, him, or the world at large for having felt those vibes and not to sound like a broken record here, but I am a bit surprised you just went with it and took it as well as you did.”

Sirius breathes in once, giving into a light, quizzical hum while he works those smears out over Remus’s cheeks. “Are you really, though?” he trades him, flickering his gaze up to Remus’s lenses with a smirk on his lips. “I feel like, of all the things I’m trying to do here, one of my biggest goals is for you to start seeing yourself even a fraction of the way I see you; it's one of my top priorities and that’s not an exaggeration by any stretch, so is really that puzzling to think I might get a kick out of seeing somebody out in the wild get more and more starry-eyed over you in just twenty minutes?”

Remus gives up a tight noise for that. “Well, not so much when you put it like that, Sirius,” he puts up, giving in to a mighty pout.

Sirius gives into a mighty shrug and a breathy laugh in response. “Well, there really wasn’t a moment back in there where I thought ‘Oh, I don’t like the way this is going,'” he says of it. “I was so proud to be in your company when we first got near him and I'm not just saying that; he immediately found you and near-debilitatingly funny — that was actually the first time he couldn’t keep working because he was too busy laughing at something you did, just so you know, but in any case, I love when I get to spot other people finding you a riot, it just sets my heart on fire and I get so proud to know you like I do—”

He gets momentarily cut off by a lil’ whisper of a peck on the lips, but that’s just fine and certified dandy with him, “—so it was already off to a great start just on principle, but add on all the gooey-smiling he was doing at you, the keen interest he had in you when you two were talking about your shared homeland, and the flirting that just kept on from there, the trajectory of the journey, the peak it hit? Mm, incredible,” he deems it, working his hands up and down the sides of Remus’s expertly-sculpted jawline to make sure that won’t burn whatsoever. “I honestly think that may have been the most thrilling, validating, and rewarding situation I’ve been in so far and you can call that bias, I am fully biased toward you, but that just made it all the more exciting to get to witness.”

“Well, I don’t want to take that away from you any, but there is a flip side to that,” Remus trades him. “Things were happening so fast in there, your eyes and energy were just lit up when you were reporting your findings to me, and you’re right, for the sexy bag-pass to come along and be the peak of it all? It was like you’d just come off a rollercoaster when you got over to me, and that was before you even knew about the double-whammy and it took right to ether, but at the same time, all of that might’ve distracted from the fact that you were essentially made to watch another bloke flirt on me and eventually sexily pass me some bags, and without all the hype leading up to that and surrounding it, I feel like that could have easily been an intense way to be told that you’re not really there even when you very much are.”

Sirius breathes out fast, giving into an impish noise. “Oh, Remus, I appreciate you looking out for me like this, but I didn’t get that impression at all,” he instils, leaning in for a peck while he finishes up with that mother of a jawline Remus has got on him. “It was you and me in there, babey, and then he, so we're beyond good at this point, and as far as he goes, he was kind as can be to me the whole way through; there was really no area in which I felt ignored, disrespected, sidelined, shucked aside, any way you want to put it, so you’ve my expressed permission to release that worry to the wind, OK? I feel lighter than air.”

Remus breathes in, breathes out. “Well, I’m happy you didn’t feel any one of those things, and I certainly don't want you to feel heavy,” he offers him, pausing as Sirius passes the pads of his right middle and forefinger over the skin above Remus’s lips and then down over his chin with the remaining film on his fingers, but Sirius has the feeling the pause Remus went for isn’t only about making those particular spots easier to work over.

“But,” Sirius prompts, reaching down to tap on the lid of the sunscreen tube.

Seems that might’ve helped for Remus gives a half-nod for it. “But,” he echoes, pointing the tube at him before handing it over, “in any other situation or case, would we be calling the double-whammy a faux pas against you?”

Sirius sort of wishes he hadn’t gone and squeezed a new glob onto his left palm when he did for it certainly provides a sound effect that didn’t need to go right after Remus finished that particular point, but then again, the noise does get a smirk out of Remus so perhaps it was the exact right time for it in a certain way. He passes the tube back to Remus, reworking his mouth around a smirk of his own, and spreads the new glob out over his hands, tilting his head back and forth with an idle hum. “I mean, if he’d come back over and said 'ditch this loser' as he sexily passed you the bags,” he raises, garnering a fast huff out of Remus for it, “then yeah, I'd have called that a huge faux-pas on his part and likely had a few choice words for him.”

Remus echoes that with an exceptionally frank note in his throat. “As would I.”

There is simply no denying the warmth that fills Sirius’s cheeks for the plainly-put tone. “Well, perfect, but since he did not say that, give me the impression he was saying that without actually saying it, or take his chance and say some shit after you'd shuffled off to the fridges, what's the issue?” he holds up, tilting Remus’s head back up a bit more to better get at his neck. “I wouldn’t be able to say if he even knew we’re together-together so I don’t know how much of faux-pas it would've been in that case, but if you feel it was one, then I’ll hear you out more on it.”

Remus comes in with a stunned sort of noise there, his head bent upward. “Well, no, if you don’t feel like it was one, then I’d rather hear your thoughts on it,” he instils.

Sirius gives up a melodic note for that, and for this in general. “I love us so much,” he puts out there first, breathing in long as he smooths sunscreen out over the front of Remus’s neck and up to his chin. “OK, well, my thoughts are, we didn’t really start the whole interaction with him by going in there and saying ‘hello good sir, we’ve been seeing each other for nearly seven glorious months and would like you to show us to the pre-cut fruit, if you please,’ so I’m not too convinced he would’ve been able to clock our status off the bat or anything, and from there, we can’t deny that we’ve got ourselves a strong friendship going on here and one that would be a bit hard to overlook for anyone with a working pair of eyes who spent practically any amount of time near us, but thanks to those melon balls, he got to see us at our absolute best in terms of chemistry—”

Remus hums a laugh in his throat. “And wasn’t terrified by us, somehow,” he puts in, shoulders going for a nice lil’ shake.

“Mm mm, struck me as one of our kind pretty quickly, he did,” Sirius echoes it, getting his fingers around the far sides of Remus’s neck. “However, while our immense friendship would’ve been rather difficult for him to miss, would he have been able to look at us and guess that our sexual chemistry is just as powerful as our friendship is? Difficult to say, really; he might not have gotten the sense we’re more than that or if he did get one, he could’ve straddled the fence a bit and tried to figure it out from his angle, but it’s not as if we offered any details that were incredibly specific to our relationship, and he sure honed in on you the longer conversation went on so he could’ve felt pretty confident that we were just buds by the end, and to that, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he figured I was your wingman and then that would certainly answer the question of why he didn’t show me any animosity toward my presence, wouldn’t it?”

Remus puts up a lengthy pfft that echoes out above their heads. “Well, all of that together is certainly a lot to chew on,” he gives it, giving his shoulders a heave, “but none of it bothers you any?”

Sirius takes in a new, rather idle breath there, humming for a decline. “Well, no, with the way I’m one of your biggest fans out there and I hype you up like mad just about wherever we go? I likely get mistaken for your wingman a lot more often than I get figured for your boyfriend," he offers, reaching his right hand around to swipe it up the direct back of Remus’s neck. "I mean, that’s what the majority of people are going to assume before they’d go assume we’re dating, aren't they, and beyond that, you know it isn't that I don’t want to shout ‘everybody say hello to my man’ from the depths of my chest whenever we go anywhere, but it’s at your discretion where whether someone knows about us in that way or not; I’m hands-off at this point, babey, I told you that.”

Remus gives up a bouldered breath to that. “Well, I know you did, but that was also this morning,” he holds up, a light, tight laugh in his throat that could be equal parts due to his very point, but also the fact that Sirius has got his fingers scooting around underneath the collar of his shirt. “There was a time, not so long ago now, where being mistaken for a simple pal of mine and it going uncorrected would’ve just gutted you, and now look at you? I mean, that's not a negative, I promise, I just — talk about a brand new policy going immediately into effect and over a situation like that one, too? It's a lot to take in.”

Sirius puts up a gentle huff, but it’s more of a breathy laugh than much else. “Well, I know I said as much this morning, and I won’t pretend any that the events back at the inn didn’t help wrap some perspective up in a neat bow for me, but I’ve been thinking, reflecting, and working my way to this place since before we got here and now that we are, I’ve been spending active time in the places you’ve grown up, I’ve seen quite a bit while I’ve been here, and a lot’s happened between us since we got here; we can’t nor should we take that away from ourselves,” he says of it, smiling for them as he takes his fingers back from underneath Remus’s collar and officially deems his neck and its surrounding area quite complete. “Now, if we beamed ourselves back to that day at the shop and somehow the events that took place back in there magically happened on that day instead, then yeah, I’d be beside myself right now, but I was deeply insecure over so much, Remus; over us, over what I really meant to you, over what a handful of extremely close and choice people knowing about us actually meant, over whether the times I kept feeling shut out after the clusters came and right up until that very conversation we had in there were actually just omens that I was fully banishing from sight because I didn’t want to see them at all — I mean, I was going the fuck through it, but none of that excuses the way I held you hostage in there and hosted a public freakout, by the way, so let’s just make extra sure we get that underlined before we go any further, OK?”

Remus comes in there with a vengeance, dropping his head so the both of theirs are back to being level. “Oh, stop, it wasn’t that public,” he rebukes, and then goes right into a scoff as Sirius hums noncommittally to that; he really could've picked a better spot for it. “It’s not as if you strung me up in the village square and incited a crowd to throw tomatoes at me; there were exactly four people present at the time and only one of them had a weird, weird, very weird fixation on us being in there; the rest of them hardly noticed we were over there in the corner booth having the tough conversation we needed to fucking have, I was just being an adult baby about the setting, OK? Let’s underline that before we go any further.”

Sirius breathes in fast, puffing it back out through a gape-grin, but he just cannot help it; this is what Sassy Remus does to him. “OK, fine, it wasn’t as public as either of us made it seem; I’ll give you that,” he lets hand, rubbing the excess film on his hands over Remus’s wrists to at least put it to use before he’ll need to get a new glob for his arms, “but, I do have a love/hate relationship with it; I wholeheartedly agree that the conversation was necessary and kept us from sinking, I really do believe that, but I can believe that and also wish I’d gone at you differently about it, you know? That's all I'm saying.”

Remus heaves quite the gust out of his chest for that one. “You tried, though; you tried going at it differently, in private, in the shower actually, and it didn’t work,” he highlights. “You tried already, but it wasn’t enough; we only just scratched the surface of the issue and it was bound to come up again as I really didn’t take any feedback from the first one, did I? Just go easier on you here, that's all I'm saying.”

“OK, I know that, but you try again, you know? You don’t have to get petty about it and I got Tom-Petty up in there, mm?” Sirius puts up, reaching to tap on the lid of the sunscreen to signal he would also like that.

“Well, sometimes you’ve got to with me,” Remus puts it plain, automatically handing the tube over and keeping right on. “You were allowed to feel all of those things because I had been shutting you out, I had been making you feel like you'd tried and tried and somehow still couldn’t get it right, and I was still keeping you at an arm’s length; my first instinct from the get with you, at the first signs of trouble, was to pull way back and go ‘get out of here and save yourself now,’ as if there was never any hope for me and that meant I didn’t have to do any of the work, but it was happening less and less by spring and I was in it with you, and then the clusters come raring along, sliced May up completely, and I felt like I was being given the hardest test of my life in so many ways, but the way I panicked and blocked you out? I mean, Jesus, that was hard enough for you to navigate and you still stuck by me, stayed close to me, were an absolute superhero about it, and I was letting you back in, but too slow, way too slow for all you were doing, and completely unfair to you — I didn’t even give you a fucking key, Sirius, and I know that was just one of many parts to the whole of it, but I should’ve thought to think about what not having been given one would’ve felt like for you, especially after dropping a piece of almost everything else you had going on just so you could be more available to me and my situation; you had every right to give me some long-overdue shit without sugar-coating it for me and you’re not going to change my mind on that.”

Sirius reworks his mouth around a strong, strong, so, so strong, smile as he gets himself a glob out of the tube sizeable enough to ensure Remus’s entire arm situation is covered. “OK, well, I was never planning on denouncing that conversation as a whole, so I certainly won’t be touching your mind on that one, alright?” he trades him, pointing the tube back up at him with a point to his lips as well. "You've got a hell of a point there, so you can have it, mm?"

Remus grabs the tube right back. “Good, you spent night after night after night riding on down to mine because I wouldn’t cross the threshold of your front door for weeks there, but you didn’t complain, you wanted to be with me in my misery and lighten me up if you could, and you always could, Sirius, always," he instils. "You were there with and for me every single night and I still wouldn’t give you a fucking key, like you hadn’t proven yourself enough to me? That’s really what it boiled down to, I kept making you feel like you hadn’t quite done enough yet and you were doing everything you could think of for me — those were awful messages I was sending you, just awful, and I needed the pressure applied that day or I wasn’t going to move a muscle; that’s the worst part about it, I can be so stuck in own head that I don’t even think to move an inch.”

Sirius presses his lips together tight, giving a wanton noise in his throat as he mixes the sunscreen between his hands. “Sometimes, yeah, but you also need to have room to push back on me or else it’s just going to be me putting my fangs in you and only focusing on myself like we’re not a team,” he raises it, working his hands up and down Remus’s forearms, finding the consistent touch immensely grounding. “If you hadn’t pushed back on me in there and stuck up for yourself, I wouldn’t have been expertly reminded of the fact that the two biggest, most important people in your life were about to get the announcement of the century from you and I needed the reminder because you spearheaded that venture, not me, you did that, and you were gearing up to a huge plunge for me more than for yourself even, and hearing that absolutely blasted me back like it should have; it really helped, it helped me step back and start to reframe how I was seeing things, and I think I helped you see things differently and be more open to the idea of showing me more affection because you’ve been picking your moments differently these days and so, so well too — you’re still careful about it but you’re letting yourself go with it more, you’re not muting yourself the way you used to, and you really seem to know when I need a little more from you, sooner than I even know I need it sometimes, I’ll tell you that, but that conversation was the catalyst for a ton of compromising between us so the answer here is not to let me apply so much pressure that it steamrolls you, the answer is that we have to hear each other out properly and meet somewhere in the middle because that's always yielded the best results for us, hasn't it?”

Remus breathes in long, pushing it out in three parts and nodding immensely through it, but Sirius has a feeling that the actual progress they’ve made since that day ought to be shown to him like a mirror. “We owe such a debt to that conversation, we really do; without it, I don’t know how well we’d have been able to tackle the tough conversations that came after it,” he maintains, working his way up to Remus’s upper arms. “Obviously, there was one, big boy bump in the road ahead of the announcement, but without the needed reminder I got that day at the shop that you not only wanted them to know about me, but you needed it to go well for me, I don’t know how well I’d have been able to push all else aside and focus on what was actually causing you to turtle inward, and as rough as it was to have that happen hours before the actual announce would take place, I’m glad it did, we needed the reinforcement, I needed to put some pressure down on you, you needed to push back on me, and we dug ourselves out of that terrifying hole quicker than we’ve maybe ever resolved an issue, so we are getting better at us; we just are, we’re a push-and-pull, but you’ve been pulling me up and out of that place I was in, you have, and the proof of it is right here with us, right now.”

“Well, Jesus Cunt, Sirius,” Remus puts out. “Why would you stop there? Keep going.

Sirius takes to pushing a five-note snicker out of his goon grin, scuttling his fingers up underneath the cuff of Remus’s short sleeves. “Well, as you already very know, I’ve been quite insecure about a lot of things to do myself lately, but you’ve been an utter champion at going right with it, shaking me out of each and every one of my ruts, and you never stop respecting me while you filter out the worst of what I’m feeling,” he assigns him, reaching to tug the sunscreen out of Remus’ grasp to get himself enough for the final stretch. “I’m bound for more ruts, they just come on in seconds and then I’m deep in it, but I know you’re going to soldier right up for me when it happens and you’re going to see me right through it; you love me, as ugly as I can be, and I see that, so there’s just no room for me to question whether you’re in this or not, you’ve proven that time after time, and the healthiest thing I can do for us when it comes to the who, what, and where you’re comfortable being open about us is to walk my pride right out of it, and I’m doing the work, I’ve been doing it, and you want to know why I know it? Because I don’t know where to even start looking for a sore spot that I don’t feel anywhere in my body after having that experience in there with you.”

Remus takes in a long breath through a small opening at his lips and pushes it back out slowly. “Are you sure?” he checks, taking the sunscreen back from Sirius. “I don’t want you to be best-behaviouring this one, especially if you feel you have to roll with almost anything just so you can be better than perfect while you’re here; you never had to be that, but you certainly don’t have to be better than perfect about this.”

Sirius takes in a long breath as he works the new supply over his hands, moving down to his knees, concrete be damned, to work his hands over Remus’s legs, but kneeling ahead of him does feel completely right for this. There, knelt ahead of Remus, he opens himself to a pang of hurt he knows he didn’t feel anywhere back there but could potentially feel now that Remus put it like that, and he tries, he really does try for he knows Remus needs him to be thorough about it, so he searches for it, searches his body, his currents, underneath stones to see if it’s hiding there, lurking in the shadows, but he just can’t find it anywhere and if he’s honest with himself, and he wants to be more of that, he’s proud of it; indignation and jealousy were never good looks on him when he’d wear them anyway.

Sirius smacks his lips once before looking up at Remus and switching to a smile to end them all. “Well, I checked and checked everywhere in me, but turns out, I’ve got nothing but love in here for you,” he supplies him. “I’ve literally never felt closer to you than I do now, so you don’t have to worry a thing about me in all of that, you hear? I’m golden.”

Remus well and truly bursts out in laughter. “I was so nervous with that silence,” he heaves, cupping his mouth with his right hand. “Fuck you, but I love you.”

Sirius gives up an airy noise. “Ooh, if that’s not the whole point rearing its head,” he highlights, working his hands over the front of Remus’s calves. “Regardless of the vibes I got off him, I loved the vibes I was getting off of you, Remus; I love that you’ve been getting more confident in what you like, I love seeing what you like, and I love the sunnies-jostling you’ve been doing today and I hope I see more of it going forward, I really do.”

Remus swishes the point of his lips back and forth, giving into a wonky expression up there. “I don’t know that I should,” he puts it, and while it’s done in a muttered, quipping sort of way, it is up to Sirius to banish that thought even if it was somewhat of a joke; there’s truth buried somewhere in there.

“Mm mm, that’s backwards-walking right there and we’re not going that direction,” Sirius instils, giving a squeeze to the backs of Remus’s calves. “I don’t want to not know when you’ve spotted a hot-arse; I want in on the moment, I want to hear about it, I want to see too, and if the closest I came to feeling sore in there was when I thought for a couple of beats that you actually weren’t going to let us get the melon balls before it was clear you didn't mean ‘no’ so much as you were asking ‘how’ — then I think we’ve effectively won this one and I’m proud to kneel before you and say I felt like a lucky passenger along for the ride.”

Remus gives a gruff (and lightly stimulating) growl there. “I know I’m the one who made the rollercoaster analogy happen in the first place and now you’re building off of it, but you’re so much more than a passenger to me,” he delivers him. “I can’t let that go without putting that out there at least.”

“Exactly, Remus; you were expertly aware of me in there, same as I was with you,” Sirius holds up, calling Remus’s lower legs finished and smoothing his hands up and over his knees. “We were on full display with each other already, so what did I really lose out on by him not expressly knowing we’re a fucking power couple, hm? I know we’re one already, why should I have needed to barge in just to make sure he knows it, too? I don’t need that, I’ve already got you.”

“You don’t think I should’ve said something?” Remus raises, his voice so, so slight Sirius almost missed, but not quite.

“And when would you have thought you needed to, Remus?” he trades him, working his hands around the backs of Remus’s knees. “Not your fault you’re a babe and a half, and as far as I see it, we only gained from allowing you to light that section up just by being your whole damn self in there, and I’d consider myself the luckiest man on Earth if I got to keep fanning your flame and encouraging that light in you through to the end of my days, so that’s what I’m going to keep doing.”

Remus breathes in. “I need you to get up already, Sirius,” he breathes out.

Sirius splays his hands out over the fronts of Remus’s thighs. “Can’t, I’m working hard,” he trades him sweetly.

“Hurry it up, then,” Remus huffs.

“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t,” Sirius hum-drums, giving a bit of nail for this particular drag up and back down Remus’s thighs.

Doesn’t matter really whether Sirius will or won’t, turns out, for a whole delivery truck drives right past the side lot only to start backing into it, aiming for the delivery door a few stalls to the left of the truck presumably and making it a lot more difficult for Sirius to remain there on his knees certainly, but boy, oh, boy, would it look like something else is going on back here to the driver than a simple sunscreen application.

Remus has the exact same thought for he’s just flapping his hands up above Sirius’s head with his mouth at true gape-grin. “OK, you know what,” Sirius raises, getting up off the pavement right then and there, “as much as I want your hands all over my body, I’m going to go ahead and put my share on the truck and we’re going to go ahead and leave here; sound good?”

“Mm, mhm,” Remus snickers, handing the tube off to him as the truck just keeps backing closer toward the delivery door in their peripheral. “Just so you know, I am all over you in my head right now.”

Sirius snatches the tube up with an enticed hum, swivelling to the right and popping a smolder over his shoulder. “Speaking of, you said you knew a place?”

“Oh, I sure do, but you better cross your fingers that no one else is there when we roll up,” Remus mentions, popping his brows up over his sunnies.

Sirius cradles the sunscreen tube in his arms so Remus can see him double-teaming it as far as crossing his fingers goes, turns to skirt around the back of the truck, and zooms up the passenger side, feeling like a crisp million as he pulls himself up and into the passenger seat, the boss already ahead of the wheel.

Chapter 35: 35.

Chapter Text

A lot can change in just a half-minute, Sirius is reminded. Thirty-odd seconds ago, Remus was looking a right king, right elbow propped up on his windowsill, shoulder line sitting laxed, hands sitting easy on the wheel at a comfortable nine and three as he cruised them through the quaint roads of Abereiddy, and all it’s taken is the turn around a bend to switch things up. Most notably, it’s but another right turn, a simple pull around a bend not all that unlike any of the previous bends they’ve already cruised around in this very hamlet alone, and the only real detail that makes this particular road any different than the last few is that, at least for the moment, there are no cosy abodes on either side of the road for Sirius to stare at and pretend he lives in for a few passing beats, replaced instead by a tall, moss-covered bank on their right and a stone wall at a height of about five feet on their left, but here Remus goes, pulling that elbow off the windowsill to reposition his hands at ten and two, white-knuckling that poor wheel and setting those shoulders to a firm line as he takes the truck down from a comfortable cruise to quite the slow crawl.

Sirius looks between Remus and the view out the windshield for a time, checking out the state of things to catch up, seeing if he’s missed a key detail that Remus sure seems to have noted; there are no signs of roadkill, no evidence of obstruction, doesn’t seem to be any spikes in the road or other pointy objects to be spotted on the pavement ahead so that rules out any potential puncturing threats to one or more of the tires, and there are a few beachgoers up ahead with a pooch running around off-lead, but they’re nowhere close to their slow-rolling vehicle and they’re certainly not close enough for Remus to be curled over the wheel with his neck hunched forward like that.

Now, the parameters pertaining to said road they’re on may need a brief review given that Sirius can't think of anything else that'd be the culprit of Remus’s vast change in behaviour. It’s another single-lane specimen that appears to be taking them on quite the sloping decline without any sort of sidewalk to boast about and while that’s none too different from the road they just turned off of nor the roads back in Porthgain for that matter, there is a notable difference to this one now that Sirius has himself look for it and that’s to do with how narrow this one actually feels. He uses ‘feels,’ only for the fact that he isn’t fully sure if this road actually is notably narrower than the last, or if the towering bank of rock on one side of it and a stone wall on the other just really makes you feel like you’re been given the tightest squeeze around, but nevertheless, this road sure feels like it’s just wide enough for the beast of the truck to fit comfortably onto and that could very be contributing to the evident wave of nerves that’d washed over the boss.

“The truck has been past this point before, yeah?” Sirius raises. “Not to register any kind of doubt in your abilities here, more that I just want to be sure that the truck indeed has some history with the overall destination we’re trying to get it to via this particular road.”

Remus breathes in long through his nose. “Mhm, it does,” he forwards him. “This one always made me feel nervous to go down even in the passenger seat, but my dad somehow always made it look easy breezy whenever he’d cruse it down there, so let’s just hope I have it in me to get us to the finish line.”

Sirius clicks his tongue twice, shaking his head easily. “No, see, you’ve misread my intent there; the question of whether Good King Lyall’s only son has the fortitude was never present in my mind; whether the truck can feasibly make it to where we need to go was the only question I had which you’ve indeed already answered, so I think you can do this; in fact, I know it more than I think it.”

“Don’t, please,” Remus insists, shooting it out the left side of his mouth so as to keep his gaze glued to the windshield. “We’ve only just begun and this road may well defeat me.”

Sirius reworks his mouth around a wan smile he knows won’t go over incredibly well with the fussed boy on his right. “No, and I see you are quite stricken here, but you weren’t nearly this nervous while driving around Porthgain and I’d suggest those roads were as sloped and narrow as this one is,” he raises him. “I mean, hello; the road outside Sloops? That was a shit show and you handled that one like a swan.”

Remus gives him a wan half-smile, so perhaps he wouldn’t have been so fussed about Sirius letting one fly. “Yeah, well, that one’s always packed to the brim on weekends and people always park every which way like a load of sardines on that road, so this swan chose to go around the chaos out front and park in the further lot so I wouldn't have to mess with it at all,” he trades him. “This road is inherently worse than the other one in that there’s no going around it, no avoiding the route by taking a different one, no shortcut or backroad I can take to get us there; it's just one road in, one road out, I’ve got a rock wall on the right, I’ve got a short stone wall on the left that’s not going to help us if the truck capsizes over it somehow—”

He stops to suck in a tight breath through his teeth as a pack of beachgoers strolls up on either side of the slow-rolling truck, but at the very least, in Sirius's opinion that he won’t be sharing aloud of course, these folks do seem to be aware that they’re indeed walking on the sides of a road that’s got zero sidewalks to boast for it and currently has a beast of a truck on it, whereas Remus goes ahead and uses them as part of his argument when he launches right back into it. "I’ve got people trying to walk through the same tight squeeze I am, I’ve got nowhere to pull over to if a car comes along from the other way, and I know I’m going to feel bad about blocking the way with this monster, back it all the way up to the start of the road so I can actually pull over to let them go by, and knowing me and my luck, if I don’t accidentally bash into the car that’ll magically come up behind me right as I’m hitting reverse, then I’ll somehow get us trapped in some never-ending loop where it’s just me rolling the truck halfway up the road and backing it all the way to the start again only to repeat the process; pull forward, pull back, pull forward, pull back, that'll be us forever and ever.”

Sirius snorts long. “OK, that’d be fucking funny for the first five loops, but after that even I’d get bored so let’s just take it slow and see if we can just, make the other vehicle back up for us if it comes along, hm?” he raises, winking his right eye over at Remus suggestively. “You’d get to be a bitchy driver for once, imagine that?”

Remus sucks in a breath twice as tight as the last and stalls the truck fast as one of the lads on the right side of the truck begins a diagonal stroll past the front bumper to reunite with the lads on the other side of the road, creating a chain reaction of four more beach boys to start flip-flopping their way across it as per the first bloke's lead. “I love the Blue Lagoon,” he breathes out, a reminder to himself of what’s waiting for him on the other side of this Remus-specific torture practice.

Sirius lifts his right hand to his mouth to help wipe the profound smirk starting up on it clean off, pushes the sash of his belt aside to give himself enough leeway to lean over the centre console to give Remus’s left shoulder a peck, and while he’s doing that, reaches his right hand up from below to come in at about six-thirty on the wheel, giving out a solid double toot of the horn; Remus bats his hand away fast, turning his head to give him the pointiest of looks while Sirius snickers wildly at the sight of the beach boys scatter the rest of the way across the road.

“Hey, look, they’ve moved,” he smiles, gesturing up at the newly cleared path ahead of the truck.

Remus sends a pointed breath through his nose to match his expression and faces both the windshield and the wheel, resuming the current mission and pressing down on the gas pedal with the very tip of his shoe, it feels like. “We’re lucky one of them didn’t take extreme offense to that double-honk and kick the bumper for it,” he comments.

Sirius gives up an easy pfft. “Please, have you seen that thing?” he puts up, gesturing toward the substantial engine above that bumper Remus speaks of. “He’d crack a toe or a flip-flop even trying, and that’s without the looming threat of one or both of us blasting out the doors to teach ‘em a further lesson.”

“I do hope you know we wouldn’t be doing any of that,” Remus trades him.

“They don’t know that, Remus,” Sirius chimes, sending a smooch through the air at him. “All that aside, I hope you know I wouldn’t have complained any if we’d parked back in town and taken this road on foot.”

Remus gives up a steeled puff of breath. “I know you wouldn't have said anything about it, but there aren’t many options back there in terms of parking unless we want to come back to a ticket later on and I don’t especially want that,” he provides him.

“Mm, no, fair enough, but the same would go if we’d parked back in Porthgain and walked it here,” Sirius re-extends. “Not that it helps now, ‘course, but you know; for next time.”

Remus has it in him to allow the next output of breath from his nose to sound more humoured than any of the last. “I’ll admit I did think about doing that for the briefest moment just to avoid having to take this road on my own for the first time and then we could've taken the coastal path to get here, but that’s a guaranteed forty-five minute walk one way and with everything we'd have with us, I didn’t want us succumbing to the elements or exhaustion before getting to really enjoy the benefits of the area we’re trying to get to,” he shares, getting a hum of stark of agreement to pretty well all of that from Sirius. “Besides, I’ve hyped it up enough already, my dad’s done the drive in plenty of times, every day people do it all the time with or without a humungous truck in their possession, and there’s no reason I can’t suck it up and get us there, right?

The sheer fact that Remus is even asking for a hype man after point-blank refusing any assurance just a minute or two ago now has Sirius’s rigour boosted that much more as he opens his throat for a sizeable cheer. “That’s it, babey,” he champions, giving a resounding clap to act as the exclamation point. “You’ve got this, just take it one inch at a time.”

Remus gives up an astounding snort, one that sounds like it might’ve hurt in any other case, just not this one. “Words I’d have loved to have heard my first time,” he trades him, drumming his right palm on the wheel as Sirius goes for a substantial bark of a laugh, so that boy is already on the mend, there’s just no denying Remus that, and then there’s the lovely addition of Remus simply tooching his lips out as if to stand tall by the very comment he’d made while Sirius snickers wildly in his seat that just makes it all the more poignant a moment.

“Hoo, I’m grateful,” he breathes out, wiping at his eyes with the heels of his palms.

Remus snorts once. “For?” he checks, on to grinning over there by the sound of it.

“You, you, you,” Sirius expels. “It’s all you, boy.”

“Ooh, ooh; hands down,” Remus urges, garnering Sirius to definitely pull his hands down from his eyes and blink over at Remus, whose attention remains trained forward as he inches them around a tight, left-leaning curve in the road. “On your left, look.”

Sirius turns his head toward his open window right quick, suddenly quite worried he’ll miss whatever he’s meant to see even with the slow roll they’re keeping to, and all at once, he finds the stone wall that once lined the left side of the road has been replaced with a sizeable, mossy bank with many a bushel to its name ahead of an astounding landscape shot of the sea and the bits and pieces of her shores in the distance those very bushels along the side of the road will allow him to see from here, and that gets him cooing up a storm.

“We’ve had that beside us this whole time?” Sirius shot-puts, blinking madly at the beauty he did not know he had so close to his peepers. “Gorge, gorge, gorge.”

“Mhm, mhm,” Remus echoes, his smile audible from over there. “Now, can I get you to put your strap back over yourself again?”

Sirius turns his head and blinks back over at him, training his blinking down at himself before taking a new, fresh breath of understanding. “Shit, that’s on me,” he trades him, pulling the strap of his seatbelt over his right shoulder. “You’re just sugar-sweet, aren't you; keeping your eyes fully peeled for me.”

“Well, sure, but I wanted to make sure you had the belt on properly for this next, potentially harrowing sight,” Remus relays. “I will not be looking myself nor would I be able to manage it from here, but if you wanted to experience a bit of a rush, I'd lean over and out of the windowsill with that sash around the bulk of you in, mm, eight-to-ten seconds or so?”

Sirius pulls in a vast breath. “Really?” he puts up, reaching his right hand up and grabbing onto the section of strap hanging past his right shoulder. “You're going to let me lean right out of it?”

“Well, don’t climb out or hang out of it up to your middle or anything, but you may lean your shoulders out and look down in about five seconds,” Remus supplies him; just really letting Sirius off the short lead here, my my.

He throws Remus a gape-grin, braces his left hand on his armrest to give himself a boost, and props himself up to lean his head, neck, and shoulders out of the windowsill with his right hand clutched around his seatbelt strap, looking down as instructed to and staring unblinkingly down at the grassy, rocky bank on the side of the road again, but seconds on from there, his peepers widen as the thickness of the bushels peter out and the bank drops off to leave a bit of eroded land in its wake, showcasing a supreme view of the waves hitting up on the shore at, what, hundreds of feet below street level? It has to be somewhere in the middle hundreds, that drop is immense.

It’s definitely a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it situation, the grassy bank continuing on from where it dropped off and resuming its role as a partition between the road and the reality of where and exactly how below them the shoreline truly is, but Sirius drops himself back into his seat only flail himself around in it as he regards Remus with utter delight. “I can’t believe you let me have that and fully can at the same time? You’re the best,” he attests, waving his arms across the front seat at Remus in the form of a bow. “We’re up so high; we must’ve started way higher at that and we’re still up so high — I’m flatlining.”

“Well, gird your loins, then, because that’s really just the half of it,” Remus teases, and it’s a tease so wonderfully done, at that. “The view from up near the tower is just unreal, but we’ve got to go down to go back up, hence the wacky, sloping, rainbow road that we’re so lovingly on.”

“Hey, listen, I know you’re not having the greatest time on it, but I’m having a blast,” Sirius forwards him.

Remus pushes a subdued breath through his nose, his lips going into a bit of a frown. “Well, I’m glad you’re not having a terrible time, and it’s not that I’m not having fun, I’m just—” he trades him, cutting off to nod his chin ahead of the truck. “This stretch may well be the easiest part of the whole road — not that it isn’t declining rapidly toward the beach or anything because it very much is, but we’ve got at least a football field’s worth of no curve in the road before we’ll get to the worst curve of them all so I’m going to try to relax for that short bit of relief, and while I sincerely hope that once we make that left turn way down at the end there, I won’t have to meet face to face with some major tomfoolery, but I may not be the most fun if we do so I apologize for any snark I may give out; it’s not an indication of regret for coming or my having no fun at all, it’s just stress.”

Sirius throws him a smile and a thumbs-up, humming intently to allow Remus to be himself whatever happens, though of course he sure has to wonder what the fuck’s on the other side of that left turn, hm; he’ll find out soon enough, he’s sure, but for now, he’ll just cross his fingers and toes to hopefully ward off even some of that tomfoolery stuff and try a different angle to keep the spirits up in the meantime. “You know, not to sound insensitive by any means, but the fact that there is such a hurdle to overcome in order to even get near this spot really has me salivating for what Mama Nature’s hiding over there,” he raises him.

“Majesty,” Remus says for it. “She’s hiding majesty over there.”

“It’s almost like she wants us to work for it, you know?” Sirius puts up. “This is just like edging, really.”

Remus snorts long. “I’ll see what I can do about edging you for real if I can clear this road, I’ll tell you that,” he returns him.

Feeling spurred by the good news, championing his boy over the finish line seems correct; Sirius starts up a bit of a cheer routine with his arms while he’s got his legs crossed underneath him. “I can cheerlead, if you’d like,” he raises, Voguing in his seat.

Remus smirks once. “I mean, I could certainly use a method of distraction from what I’m doing here, but that one might be a little too,” he mentions. “Your arms look too saucy for me to be missing any of that action and I have to pay attention to the road, you see, but talk my ear off, please; it'll get some of my mind off of what I’m actually doing here.”

“Deal, deal, deal,” Sirius cements it, putting a pause on his voguing to click his tongue thrice in thought, coming up with a method of distraction that might work out well for the both of them. “Alright, well, I know I can hardly wait to get you well enough alone, I’ll happily get out there in the open,” he puts down, waiting three beats before giving up a circumstantially distressed little sigh. “I just wish I could tell you all about what I’d do to you with some relative privacy.”

Remus trades a distinct, quizzical note with him. “Why can’t you?” he bids, turning his head minutely toward him, but that’s enough for Sirius to clock the pinched lift at the top center of Remus’s left brow. “That’s a perfect distraction right there; I order that.”

Sirius almost breaks his ruse at Remus ordering dirty talk like it’s a cup of tea off the menu board, but not quite; he’s got a directive to keep to and he’s going to do what he can to acquire the answer. “And I’d love to give you that, I would, the only thing is, I could plan, plan, and plan a little more, but without a decent visual to go with the spot I’m to cross my fingers over, what would be the use in all that planning or relaying them to you?” he raises him. “I can’t visualize where we’ll be, what sort of parameters I’ll have to work under, whether I’ll have a surface to get you on or I'm just going to have to harness the carnal energy necessary to get it done right there on the ground, and without a greater, wider picture to go on, what could I—”

Remus comes in there with a chime of a hum, slow-rolling them toward that infamous final bend he warned about. “That was a solid try, and I do mean that,” he forwards, and that’s really about as candid as it gets for him, tone-wise.

“OK, thank you?” Sirius puts up. “Thought I had you for a second there, I really did.”

“Well, you did very well starting it off with that incidental curiosity and then dressing it up with some sensuality along the way,” Remus trades him, “but I’m still not about to give you any more hints than I’ve already handed out.”

Sirius clicks his tongue once. “What hints, what hints?” he tosses up.

“You’ve had hints,” Remus maintains, utterly attached to the conversation at hand despite taking the bend with exceptional care.

Sirius pushes down the deep trill he wants to give out upon seeing the parking lot and the beachfront a sliver of beachfront he can spot to the left of it, tossing a thoroughly put-upon scoff across the centre console at Remus. “All I’ve had sprinkled in my direction is the mere existence of a place you have in mind and one I’m expected to cross my fingers over in hopes that it’ll be secluded once we get to it,” he lampoons him. “Suspense is a powerful force, I wouldn’t even try to suggest it isn’t, but I’m walking into this blind as a bat, and one would think you’d be able and willing to spare me a detail a bit more concrete than what I’ve been given to work with.”

Remus takes in a long breath through his nose, putting his head on a tilt and giving up a thoughtful hum through the exhale. “You will be able to see the sky,” he offers sagely, bringing them around the last left curve of that defeated road and into the parking lot.

Sirius gives up a huff/wheeze/pfft hybrid. “Yeah, well, I could’ve guessed that myself, Remus,” he makes known.

“Well, ruminate on that some more because any more information will ruin the surprise, not to mention hinder the look on your face when you realize what’s happening,” Remus maintains, wheeling them around a car that is definitely trying to get out of the lot, but he completes the swerve with a rather accomplished ease to him. “Thank you for distracting me; you did good.”

“Oh, yeah, no trouble at all,” Sirius sends him, teeth bared to help show his frustration with being kept in the proverbial dark on this one. “And what, may I just ask, is plan B going to be, hm? If my crossed fingers don’t manage to count toward the seclusion of said mystery location, what then?”

“Oh, I’ll get you somewhere, but you’d better keep those fingers crossed because I am gunning for plan A to work out well for us,” Remus supplies him, having a look around the general area, but apparently studying the rather sparse amount of cars sprinkled about the greater lot. “Well, we’ve got a quaint little situation going for us at least; no wonder I didn’t get levelled by a car coming from either direction, there’s hardly any here yet.”

Sirius is still a bit miffed about the state of things, but not so miffed that he won’t celebrate a calm, chill atmosphere for his first-ever visit to the blue lagoon. “What are the chances it stays like this versus it getting more crowded as the day goes?” he raises him.

“Well, I mean, there will be more who come, I'm sure,” Remus trades him, waving through the windshield at a lad walking toward the truck with a bright orange vest on over a boxy t-shirt. “However, we did pick a Monday to show up here versus yesterday when this place would’ve been crawling with people by now, so we've that going for us and an influx of people may well show up closer to the late afternoon, early evening once the workday is over, but by then we’ll be on our way out of here as is.”

Sirius gives up a celebratory trill for that. “Well, see; spontaneous plans might not mean we get to have a comically large cooler in our presence, but at least we won on the crowd front,” he holds up.

“It’s true, can’t argue that one,” Remus trades him, switching to his work smile as the vested lad approaches the driver’s side window.

A few pleasantries are sent back and forth as Remus pays the parking fee on a handheld machine and pretends like Sirius isn’t actively slapping his left wrist with his Mastercard. It’s not even that Sirius expects any real result to come of the slapping, Remus is already well into the payment process and is in no way about to cancel the transaction to swap cards with him at this point, but that doesn’t matter one bit when it’s the principle of the matter, the indignation he’d like to register for Remus’s blatant disregard for his previous requests to pay the fee, and the message he’d like to send along to Remus via the continuous rap of his card.

Remus passes the machine back to the meter lad, spares his thanks after being assigned any one of the open spots available, and smiles lightly as he taxis them down toward the far side of the lot with Sirius’s ra-ta-tatting his card against his skin. “I sense that you’re a bit miffed,” he raises idly, and Sirius might’ve laughed if he weren’t busy pressing his lips into a decided point, “but in my defense, it’s not as if the fee is particularly steep; I can part with a few pounds, especially since we're going to be here for a good stretch of the day and some things are priceless, I’d call this venture exactly that.”

Oh, good one, you little fucker,” Sirius shoots him, jabbing at Remus’s wrist one last time for good measure before sticking his card away. “You really think I’d have any problem with you enjoying yourself with or without a toll? It’s not about the price, it’s the fact that you brushed off my every request to handle the fee myself and I’ve been rather lenient about letting you fork over quite a bit today already, so, Remus Jean Lupin, the only way I see you getting lucky at this point is if you vow to let me full up the tank once we’re back in town; that's not a lot to ask and I will hold out on you all day, all evening, all night if you won’t agree to my one, completely reasonable demand.”

“I don’t know if you will, though, is the thing,” Remus puts in, wry-smiling as he pulls them into the spot at the back-left corner of the lot, and listen, it’s done with the sort of confidence that Remus should harbour within himself, that’s a welcomed sight right there, but Sirius has his own steady stream of confidence to pull from here and he will use it and use it well.

“Fuck around and find out, Remus,” he challenges, pointing vastly across the front seat at him before using the both of his hands to speak quite plainly of the body Remus very nearly jumped this morning. “You want to edge this, I want your word.”

Remus, good lad, waits until he pulls the truck into park to turn his head toward Sirius so that he can see his word being given. “I will let you fill up the tank,” he affords him.

“And do not, under any circumstances, take advantage of my trust by agreeing to it now and then bump me out of the way of the pay screen later on in a moment of careless bravery,” Sirius tacks on vehemently, waggling his right forefinger at Remus while he handles the unbuckling process with his left hand.

“I won’t do that,” Remus instils, working his mouth around a notable smile. “Especially when I’m quite tickled by the fact that you just know we’re going to stop and fill up before we bring it back.”

Sirius gives up a much lighter pfft than any of his last few responses, pushing his seatbelt aside. “Well, of course, we’ve been zooming this beast all over the place,” he trades him, reaching back to tug on the handle of his door and pop it open. “I don’t figure Lyall would raise a complaint unless we brought her back literally running on fumes, but still, I wouldn’t be able to cosign handing the keys over without ensuring he’s got a full tank in return for him having loaned us the truck at all; like, physically, I wouldn’t be able to let the keys get handed over without a fill-up.”

Remus’s already substantial smile heads into deeper territories as he gets himself free of his own seatbelt. “See, this is just another example of why we’re fundamentally the same person,” he holds up, pushing the sash of his belt aside with an airy flourish.

Sirius sends three smooches through the air and over to Remus, who then receives those in-kind and sends three in return while they back out of their respective seats. “Meet me over this side and we’ll divvy up the bags,” he bids, dropping down to the ground with a definite gusto and leaving his door open for easy access to the grocery bags.

Remus gets himself to the ground, shuts up the driver’s side door, and starts heading around the front of the truck, giving an idle hum as he makes his way over. “Mm, but since you’re quite set on carrying the heavier of the grocery bags, I think it’s only fair that I carry the duffel and you just get to handle the beach bag,” he raises, popping his left hand down on the hood twice to give off the sound of a gavel so that's an amendment already decided upon.

Sirius shakes his head through a smirk as he opens up the backseat, aiming Remus a sly smile. “Sounds good, boss,” he trades him.

Remus gives a light trill in his throat for that as he goes for grocery bags, pulling them out from below the seat in turn before giving up an alerting hum. “Almost forgot your mobile behind, you,” he extends, hoisting the straps of the bags onto a forearm each.

Sirius takes in a new breath. “Oh, yeah, that thing,” he chimes, pulling the beach bag out from down in front of the nearest seat to him. “Hadn’t thought about it in hours, if I’m honest; could probably go a few more without thinking of it again.”

“Well, I find your ability to unplug admirable, I do, but that’d be a shame when you do have at least a couple texts waiting for you from a while ago now,” Remus mentions, leaning in to paw Sirius’s mobile off the floor ahead of the passenger seat.

Sirius takes in another breath, suddenly quite reminded of that. “Right again, you,” he trades him, curling to set the beach bag on the ground in exchange for two free hands to help dig out the duffel Remus artfully packed their towels, quilts, and borrowed picnic blanket into. “Read them out to me, would you?”

Remus bumps the passenger door shut and moves around behind Sirius to get over on his right by the sound of it. “Well, I see here you’ve got quite an emotional response from Lily,” he passes along, taking to leaning back against the side of the truck while Sirius climbs up into the backseat. “The reason for that, however, I don’t; is she alright?”

Sirius trills as he leans over the two duffels lying in between him and the one he needs to get at. “Well, I asked whether she'd want to get in on cover night so I’m sure she’s doing just fine, if a bit touched I’ve offered her a slot,” he wagers.

“Oh, then these, mm,” Remus pauses, “twelve crying faces make an incredible amount of sense, don’t they.”

Sirius gives up a tch as he gets a hold on the furthest duffel from him, right determined to wrangle it out of there without having to run round to the driver’s side to do it. “She’s such a suck.”

“You two are alike in that way,” Remus comments, reaching over to thwap Sirius’s tooched ass before moving along. “Well, that context certainly helps explain the reply you’ve got here from Will, otherwise I might've wondered if he sent you a euphemism.”

“Oho, what’d he say, then?” Sirius prompts, working the duffel out from its tightly pressed lodgement.

“He said, ‘you know it but in return, I'll expect you to lend out those pipes of yours for a few,’” Remus relays, dropping his voice to put on a rather pristine impression of the deep register that Will’s got and Sirius fumbles with the duffel and loses his entire directive for a few beats, too busy wheezing back here seeing exactly what Remus meant by that.

“Like that I’m being counter-outsourced, love your impression of him,” Sirius lists off, forcing himself to get back on task while he gets the scoop. “Did Marlene get back to me?”

“She sure did; sent, ‘of course’ along in all caps, so it seems you’ve got quite a rowdy, honoured bunch already, haven’t you,” Remus offers up, sounding quite keen about that himself.

Sirius shines like the sun as he drags the duffel over top of the other two and closer to himself. “OK, leave the other two for now, but if you wouldn’t mind replying to Marlene’s with a hearty, “OK, but you’ve actually got to show up to this one, unlike Pride,’ I’d be one thrilled lad.”

Remus pushes out a smirk that’s got a couple hitches in the middle of it. “I feel like she’s just going to come right back with a bid for you not to leave the premises before she can arrive this time, but alright,” he trades him, pressing Sirius’s passcode into the screen.

“And she may well come on back with that, but I like to keep her on her toes,” Sirius instils, backing out of the backseat and tugging the duffel along with him.

He sets his feet on the ground, waits with the strap of the duffel held out and on pause for when Remus finishes up with sending the reply off, and trades the duffel for the heavier of the two grocery bags before relocating his mobile to the beach bag for save keeping. He hoists the straps of the grocery bag onto his left shoulder, hikes the straps of his grocery bag up to his right one, and bumps the back door shut, turning away from the truck and toward Remus with a decided, satisfied sigh.

“It’s yours to lock up, boss,” he signals, garnering Remus to squirm about while he hits the button on the keys and promptly steps in to deposit them in the beach bag, but he does find that particular nickname rather overcoming.

“OK, before we get going, though,” Remus prefaces, reaching to work his own mobile out from between his right hip and the waistband of his trunks, “I might give my mum a quick ring to check in, let her in on what the general plan for the rest of the day, if that’s OK with you.”

“Not even at all,” Sirius serves him.

Remus clicks his tongue once. “It’s a turn of phrase, Sirius,” he returns him, putting his head on a tilt while he passes his right thumb whip-fast over his screen, “not something I actually think I need to ask your expressed permission for.”

Sirius pushes out a breathy laugh. “Well, you won’t catch me saying I’m not glad for that, but I am running out of ways to say ‘sure thing,’” he trades him, garnering Remus to send a pronounced huff back to him through an immense underbite as he lifts his mobile to his right ear, and then that’s just too cute for Sirius to ward off the prime instinct to curl his right hand around Remus’s raised arm and dust the fingertips over the inside of his forearm. “I’ll try it again; go ahead, give her a ring-a-ding-ding, say hello for me, the usual stuff.”

Remus reworks his mouth around a smile, lifting his free hand to dust his fingertips over the back of his hand, and there they stay, Remus with his smile etched onto his lips as he waits for the dial tone to pick up, Sirius having a peek over his right shoulder get himself a glimpse back at the view of the beach from across the lot and sending heart-eyes over to the water from where he is, biding his time for when he’ll get to plunge on into the blue. Sirius would’ve been happy to wait just like this, with a view of the blue and a light dusting of fingertips going back and forth between them while Remus got to speak with his mum, dad, or both even, and for all intents and purposes, Remus likely expected a similar result, if perhaps not having the receiver passed between both his parents, but it seems the dial tone must’ve rung and rung about the walls of the Lupin abode before voicemail took over.

“Hey-o, just checking in; give a ring back when you can,” Remus bids, keeping the message brief, but effective. He lowers his mobile from his ear, hits to end both the message and call, and stays holding the device in his hand for a few, extended beats before taking in a pronounced breath through his nose and reaching to slip his mobile into the beach bag hanging from Sirius’s right shoulder. “OK, all’s fine; nothing to fuss over."

"Not a one," Sirius echoes.

Remus nods for it. "They could easily be out back, too far to have heard the ring,” he says of it.

Sirius nods dutifully with a distinct, echoing hum. “Easily,” he allows. “She’s got a throw-pillow she’s knitting; could be out having a sit on loveseat in her beautiful garden while Lyall’s puttering about the property doing some kind of busywork, knowing him.”

“Well, true for him, but is that what she’s making?” Remus bids, head on a new tilt.

“Yeah, the thing she was working on Friday after we got there; after dinner, out on the porch, you sat with her while she worked on it,” Sirius offers, throwing out vague reminders as they come to him.

Remus nods once. “No, yeah, I remember the knitting, I just did not have the wits to even consider what she was fashioning at the time.”

Sirius smirks, shaking his head once. “Rough night for all of us,” he pardons, forwarding him a brow lift and a half-smile.

Remus gives him a version of both of those facial cues. “I must’ve only seen the bare bones of it because I don’t remember seeing a shape to it at all,” he supplies. "Blue-grey yarn?"

“Mhm, gorge, and later on in the night, she had a lot more to show for it, but she said had a bit more work to go before she’d be able to put the insert in and close it all up,” Sirius reports, smiling up a storm. "And then, she’s apparently going to stitch three big buttons up the front of it so it’s going to look just like a little cardigan.”

Remus betrays his own bubbling worry by throwing up a blink/reel/smile combo. “Thanks for bringing me up to speed,” he returns him, getting a solid finger-snap out of Sirius for it.

“And OK, so back to option one for a quick sec; that’s just her excuse, right, but he's got a porch to power-wash, doesn’t he?” he offers next. “He might already be well-shot of that task by now, but who knows, maybe he spread it over the two days we’d be gone to thwart any sort of urges to just paint the whole thing himself, you know.”

“Ooh, good point; love you and that,” Remus instils, readjusting the strap of the duffel on his right shoulder and turning to lead the way out of the parking lot and onto green, green grass. “Mum wouldn’t let him paint it himself; she promised us she wouldn't, but he could easily be cleaning that one off right this very second, and, if they went and got a good one like my mum suggested they do, then a spanking new power-washer likely has a roar to be reckoned with and that’d make it pretty difficult to hear the ring from inside the house.”

“Perfect point, you,” Sirius echoes it, following Remus around the far side of a row of bushes to get over to a trail that appears to run both behind and parallel to the parking lot and quelling his immense urge to go dashing toward any of the numbers of adorable, stone ruins arranged in a row to the left of the trail; he’ll be chewing the scenery in due time, he’s sure, but for now he won’t break rank until the boy is officially at ease. “That’s option one, but there’s another, so let’s leave room for the very real possibility that they’re not even home; just out and about, taking the town, having a lil’ date while the boys are off having their own, extended date; cute, right?”

“OK, that would be cute,” Remus trades him. “It’s a right beaut of a day over there, too, come to think of it; they may well be out enjoying it, having a pint together or with some of the usual suspects.”

“True, true, true; why elect to be inside on a beaut of a day, right,” Sirius tacks on, traipsing along the trail before pausing short, taking in a new breath, and pulling a bit of a squint. “Well, there could be one reason to — no, y’know what, never mind; didn’t say anything.”

Remus swivels around to regard him sidelong. “Well, you started to,” he observes. “What were you going to say?”

Sirius presses his lips together once before putting them into more of a smile. “I just don’t think it’d be appreciated if I finished the thought so I don’t think I will,” he relays, waving it off.

Remus clicks his tongue once. “Well, it better not’ve been something like ‘one of them's passed out while the other’s too busy giving them CPR to stop and answer the ring’ or you’d be right; I wouldn’t appreciate that hypothetical at all,” he mentions.

Sirius huff-puffs at him, rushing up against Remus’s right side, or as much as he can get at it with the grocery bag hanging between them. “That’s not even an option I'd go to, let alone start to share with you; who do you think I am, a stranger and a rookie in one?” he negs him. “Frankly, if you really want to know, I was thinking that if they’re right in the middle of a shag, that’s both a reason to be inside and not answer the—”

Remus turns away from him fast. “Ew-wuh,” he lodges, ambling up the trail and waving his hands down as if to shake off the concept as a whole.

Hence, why I hastened to say as much, but there you went, digging for the real answers and jumping to the worst ever option,” Sirius returns him, keeping to a slow stroll so they won’t pass all of the ruins before he gets a good, up-close-and-personal look at them, but if he didn’t have a side-agenda to keep to he’d have gone and aimed that right in one’a’ Remus’s ears.

“That’s is the worst option, actually,” Remus chimes.

“Oh, you don’t even believe that, but I love that you’re at least quipping as that must mean you’re no worse for wear even with that third option being out in the open,” Sirius cements. “I’m proud of you, boy—”

“Mhm, thanks; I do plan on surviving that sudden left turn—”

“Not that sudden; no one answers the phone during, especially not for their kid—”

“Mmm, still going to hope with everything I have that it’s option one or two in this case, thank you, tho—”

“Well, for any one of those three options, the overall point is, one of them is bound to ring back when they can,” Sirius concludes, clapping twice to cement it.

“Well, now that’s the winning phrase,” he returns him, and the wording could’ve been a bit less snark-oriented, but Sirius has to say it sounded more genuine a thanks than either of the past two Remus sent him.

Sirius catches up to Remus in a few quick steps, cutting him off on the path and leaning in for the quickest little peck. “Can we explore those now?” he bids, pointing back at the ruins they’ve just passed with his left forefinger.

And they do. Sirius goes into one, Remus goes into the one beside his, Sirius leans out the window of his claimed ruin and gives out a ‘whattaya gonna have’ à la some cranky waitress working the late shift and ends up causing Remus to trip up over in his ruin and disappear from sight for a few beats, but thankfully it turns out that he didn't trip and hurt himself, but rather went and hid in the corner to gather himself before showing back up again, and all in all, Sirius is just thrilled about the state of things as they meet back up on the trail.

“What were these even for?” he raises, smiling from ear to ear, but no less fundamentally curious. “What’s the story here?”

Remus breathes in once and gives the scoop right on over to him. “Well, this whole area used to be a booming slate quarry way back in the nineteenth century,” he relays to him. “The lagoon itself? An old quarry that became a lagoon.”

Sirius shoots his right hand out to thwap at Remus’s left arm. “Shut it, really?” he bids, following close to Remus as the trail veers them off in a little semi-circle, leading them up a bank onto a continuation of the same trail, just heading in the opposite direction, so it does seem to be that they’re coiling the base of the wonders Remus is taking him to.

“Very really,” Remus echoes. “Now, in terms of the ruins we just perused, those are the remnants of the quarrymen’s cottages and are referred to as ‘the Street,’ or ‘the Row,’ depending on who you ask.”

“Mm, I love a good two-sided story,” Sirius extends, giving his shoulders a shimmy.

Remus snorts once. “Well, you hold right on,” he prefaces, and Sirius holds on at once. “As far as I know, no one disagrees that the quarry site got shut down back in nineteen-ten, but the question of how the former quarry became a lagoon, I’ve heard two different stories with an equal amount of casual conviction; one where the site was promptly shut down and abandoned due to a flood that came in through the far wall of the quarry and another where the site was shut down because the far wall got blasted out so that the old quarry could be flooded at the request of the local fisherman.”

Remus stops for a new, thoughtful breath, giving Sirius the time to shove a question in there real quick. “Excuse I?” he bids, taking to walking sideways beside him; an active, captive audience. “‘The local fisherman?’ I’m — did you mean to say that or was it a live oopsie?”

Remus snickers up a storm beside and in front of him, shaking his head quick. “No, I swear, it’s always ‘the local fisherman,’ never just ‘a,’ which is a detail I find bizarre and a bit funny when it does give the impression, at least to me, that there was just one fisherman in the whole region and he must’ve had some major sway around these parts to have been able to request such a thing, but then again, I couldn't tell you which tale is the most accurate of the two,” he supplies him. “I wish I could even explain more than I know but I’ll give the most I can say, which is that I’ve heard either origin story quite a number of times via oral history, I’ve gone and researched it myself and found support for both versions of the tale, and it's maddening to me that they’re completely conflicting stories that have equal support — it almost bothers me, but I’ve learned to laugh about the fact that no one seems to know what the definitive story is; I’ve read the version where it’s ‘the site was shut down and abandoned in nineteen-ten due to a flood and thus made operations impossible to continue,’ and that would make perfect sense to me, why would anyone with an operating brain continue running the site through a mass-scale flood so of course the site would be promptly abandoned to Mama Nature’s control, but that version of the tale also gives the impression that the far wall got blasted by accident and could you imagine, being that one quarryman who got a little too gung-ho with the ballistics and accidentally flooded your worksite as a result?”

Sirius wheezes long and hard for that one. “Ooh, or if he already had a bit of a reputation for that sort of thing, but everyone kept him around because he was a good laugh and the crew liked having him on a long day, you know,” he lifts it, breathes air into it. "‘Dynamite Dan’s done it again,’ they all said as they abandoned post immediately."

Remus dips his head forward through a series of smirks, rendered unable to continue for the moment, but that doesn’t mean he’s not got it in him to reach over and thwap his left hand against Sirius’s arm for a cycle of about, oh, seven uninterrupted rounds before he’s got the wits to use his words again. “He’d never have been able to show his face back up again; he’d have to set out anew, start a different life hopefully far away from ballistics,” he puts up for it. “Of course, then you have the other version, where it’s like, ‘following the site’s closure in nineteen-ten, the local fisherman’ — you know the one — ‘saw a unique opportunity and requested for a small channel to be created between the back wall of the quarry and the open sea, allowing for the twenty-five meter-deep hole to be flooded and used as an artificial harbour to dock his fishing boats,’ and I’ve read that, with my own two eyes, more than once, and via trusted organisations at that, so then there’s me, left reeling and going, ‘well, which one is it, then? Just tell me.’”

Remus pauses to let Sirius hoot and holler his way along the trail for a good collection of beats, coming back in to carry on with a knowing smile and a heave of a rather incredulous breath. “I just don’t know which tale I’m meant to believe,” he puts up. “I’d be more compelled to believe that everyone ditched the area the moment the flood came rushing in, but people I know, people I trust, sites for organizations I would normally trust, they’re all on the other side of the aisle and quite comfortably so, and what am I to do with that? My dad’s in the Fisherman camp, so you know, but between you and me, that’s because the mere idea of the lone, but powerful fisherman having enough sway to ask the last quarryman who threw his gloves in for the final day to just toss a stick of dynamite at the far wall for him on his way out makes my dad laugh and laugh and laugh.”

Sirius has to breathe through a very tiny hole at his lips to control himself, but he still ends up wheezing despite the effort to speak coherently. “I mean, I suppose I’ll have to see the former quarry site in its full glory to get a real sense of what I think happened there, consult the ancestors, check in on the currents in my bod to make a formal decision on what camp I’m in, but as of right now, I’m in the Fisherman camp right along with Lyall, babey; pause for a beat of stunned silence.”

“No one is stunned,” Remus underlines, smiling away over there despite the droll tone he went with.

Sirius breathes in fresh, open air, utterly in love with every part of this already, and they’re just barely getting started. “You really know how to sell me something,” he forwards him. “The edging just keeps getting more intense with every new minute; I feel like I’ll fall to my knees the moment I set my peepers on the scene.”

Remus’s lips tell him he’s amused, but his distant hum tells him he’s weighing something fierce in that noggin of his. “Well, OK, look; I’m feeling a bit generous,” he extends, nodding Sirius along and toward a white picketed fence in the near distance, “but I also really want us to head up to the tower before going down to the lagoon itself; I just get a full sense that if we do things the other way around then we won’t end up going up to the tower and that would be such a shame, so if you promise not to get too allured by the idyllic waters below, I’ll show you it from a lovely little lookout point that’s just minutes away from us and you could further decide what camp you’re on.”

Sirius pulls in a fast breath at the potential of getting a glimpse at the once-quarry, now-lagoon, presses his hands together and vows, and he means vows to remain on task and diligent about it, feeling luckier than a clover that he landed a laddie so willing to negotiate. He feels twice as lucky when an off-lead Labrador chooses right, right then of all times to come bounding along, gets right up in between the two of them, and comes straight for Sirius’s right hip, poking the side of it with his snooter and absolutely vying for his acknowledgement.

Some lady hollers up the trail at them from a good twenty feet back. “He’s friendly!” she instils, and hey, nice of her to lay that out in the open should one of them have felt the cards were up in the air on that one, but Sirius could already tell that was the case the moment he laid eyes on this bouncing specimen of a hound.

Remus stops walking to let Sirius have at it, the good lad, smiling from the side as Sirius sets on to lay a whirl of pets all over this substantial boofer’s back and he must be in a bomb-ass mood for he only gives a small, one-note hum to register his disapproval when Sirius forgets the whole no-face-smushing rule altogether and moves down to a crouch; not bad for the resident worry-wart.

“Sorry, sorry,” Sirius insists, lifting back up and pressing his hands together for a sprinkle of forgiveness. “I get too excited.”

“Oh, you? Don’t know what you mean,” Remus trades him, a wry smile on as he reaches to give their new friend a pat on the head with his left hand.

Not necessarily looking to have an idle conversation with the lady who owns this boofer, Sirius spots her at about fifteen feet away now, boops the tip of the pooch’s nose once for a hearty farewell, and nods for Remus to lead the way and hopefully rather quickly, if he’ll catch Sirius’s double-blink for what it is.

A dedicated student in the language of Sirius, Remus simply swivels toward the gate in the next beat and steps in toward it, pulling up on the latch before tugging the door open. The gate’s an ol’ style country type, creaks when it swings open, looks like the paint and general build of the wood has been chipped away at for eons by the elements and people pulling it to and fro day after day, but despite its weathered look, Sirius feels right fancy being invited to go through first. He swishes his way through the opening, stops to wait for Remus on the other side of it, and eyes a big ol’ informational sign with all these complementary pamphlets for folks to take that Sirius won’t be doing at the risk of not having his hands free to flail them around at a moment’s whim. The sign, however, is more interesting to Sirius than the pamphlets are, garnering him to have a look over the Welsh words up top and likely the very same message printed in English at the bottom, but wouldn’t it be just something to not absolutely need the English translation? Sirius thinks it would be.

Remus crosses behind him, giving a light dusting of pitter-pattering fingertips between the hem of Sirius’s shirt and the waistband of his trunks to gently call him along, and Sirius sure feels called along, no mistake about that. “Can you read what’s up top?” turning to slip back into the step with him and pointing his right forefinger toward the sign.

The veins in Remus’s neck look truly mystifying in the sunlight as he cranes it to have a glance back at the sign. “Mhm, yeah,” he passes him, facing forward again. “I mean, there are English words at the bottom, but I’ve already told you what the sign does; just some historical factoids for folks to have a gander at.”

“Oh, no, I saw the English,” Sirius trades him. “I'm talking about the Welsh part; can you read it, speak it?”

Remus has himself a short intake of breath before holding it in for a beat or two longer than the breath took, reworking his mouth before trying to fit it around the words that’ll inevitably count as downplaying. “I probably read and write it better than I speak it,” he offers, “but yeah, I can do it, for what that’s worth.”

“A lot, I assume,” Sirius gets him. “I can just bet you know a lot more of it than you’re letting on.”

Remus pushes a breathy laugh through a half-smile, lifting his hands idly. “Well, you pick up a lot, growing up here,” he reforms it. “My granny and grandad spoke it fluently, grandad spoke it to me a lot when I was little so he was my base for it, and I picked up more as I went along through school; I do just fine with it, but I’m not—”

“Oh, ‘just fine,’ Sirius returns him.

“Well, I’m not going to call myself fluent; that’s my mum, she’s able to switch back and forth with no issue or lag, but she would, having grown up with my grandparents and how much she’s used it through work,” Remus trades him. “My dad tries his best with it, but he’s no aficionado, we’ll say that, so we didn’t speak it much around the house once it was just us three there and then I was at an English-language school so I had the one Welsh class all through primary to brush me up on it once my granddad passed and I took French most of secondary, but I picked up more Welsh here and there. Working with the public helped with it, that's for sure, people come up to you with questions and sometimes it’s just all Welsh so I got a lot of practice with it that way, but I’m no natural; I have to think about how I’m wording things, pause to conjugate on the fly, and I’m inherently slower with my speech than native speakers are so to some, I just wouldn’t be considered up to scratch.”

Sirius gives him a pithy little face. “Yeah, alright, but I’m not 'some,'” he pinpoints, lifting his right hand deftly. “I’ve never heard you speak a word of it; what’s that about?”

Remus gives up a bright pfft. “How many Welsh speakers do we know out in London?” he raises, a bit of a grin starting at his lips now.

“You,” Sirius counters, putting his head on a tilt and his lips at a pointed purse.

“I’ve no one to speak it with,” Remus trades, both hands up and splayed wide.

“I’d speak it with you if I could,” Sirius mentions, swishing along the trail with an elusive air about him.

Remus puffs out a big ol’ breath, turning in and reaching over his front to prod Sirius in the side with his right forefinger. “Is that really all you were trying to get at?” he negs him, his grin more on to the wry side of things. “If you wanted me to teach you some, you could’ve just said as much.”

“Sure, but I had more fun doing it this way,” Sirius reports, smiling up a storm. “Of course I want you to teach me some; hell, teach me all of it, I’m game.”

Remus sucks in a mind breath through gently gritted teeth. “You’re exceptionally gifted with that sort of thing,” he gives first; ‘first’ being the operative word there for there’s more coming just by the telling of his tone, “but it’s still the toughest of the Celtic languages to learn, so while you may well have a knack for picking languages up like coins on the street, I am not yet a teacher—“

Sirius waves that all the way off via the pass of his right hand and a profoundly powerful pfft. “Boy, you were a teacher before you even knew it,” he returns. “All practice with teaching is still good practice; maybe it won't count toward your credits, but it’s bound to help with personal experience and that’s valuable in itself.”

Remus doesn’t appear to be too swayed by that, but that’s still a flushed little lad, isn’t it. “I still think it’d be a better result if you got yourself a program to—”

“No, no, I want you,” Sirius underlines. “Let me be your étudiant, it’ll be brilliant; you can teach me three to five new words a day in the beginning, get some masonry laid down first, build from the foundation with an increase of difficultly as we go, get into the nittier-grittier parts of it with time and practice, I’ll work on it on the side, and then one day down the line, we’ll be able to talk smack about everybody right in front of them and they wouldn’t even know it — how fun would that be?”

“Oh, you can’t go doing that,” Remus instils, lifting a halting hand. “You’ll never be able to know if someone nearby or even the person you’re talking smack about already knows the language you're using.”

Sirius searches him openly, showcasing how little a deterrent that is. “OK, and? We could simply ding them back for eavesdropping,” he holds up, flashing him a crooked grin before a new angle hits him straight in the chest. “Ooh, and with the troupe? We could have full conversations about them while they’re in the room and they wouldn’t know the wiser.”

“We talk smack at them, in English, all the time,” Remus maintains, his chest popping up and down while he tries to keep his laughter inaudible and at bay.

“And we can start talking smack at them in Welsh, watch them go all red knowing we’re dragging them to hell, but knowing just as well that they can’t translate just how deep we’re putting them down there; you know that sounds fun,” Sirius maintains, smirking knowingly. “I mean, it’s not even just about the ability to talk smack under wraps, we can do that in French, but I’d like to be able to speak it with your mum, brush Lyall up on his mild-to-medium understanding of it, speak it with the locals—”

Remus comes in with a vibrant laugh — the closest to a bark Sirius has heard out of him yet. “You hardly want to speak to the locals in English,” he gets him.

“It’s dependant on my mood, Remus,” he sends him, leaning over to gnaw twice on Remus’s left shoulder. “I’d like the option to be able to speak Welsh with the locals; is that too much to ask?”

Remus breathes in through a smile, humming thoughtfully before he points down to his right, directly at the grass beside the trail. “Gwair,” he provides.

Sirius’s chest tightens; it’s happening, he should stay calm, repeat that back as he heard it. “Gwair,” he gives it, his cheeks smarting a bit from how much he’s smiling.

“Good ear,” Remus trades him, taking to pointing up above their heads with the same forefinger. “Awyr.

Awyr,” Sirius enunciates, looking up and around. “We talking about the big blue thing up there or the occasional cloud?”

“Big blue thing,” Remus relays, the smile on his lips audible while Sirius looks down and to the left as their Labrador friend catches up with them and proceeds to roll over on the grass off of the trail. “Qui.

“Hm?” Sirius bids, looking to him again. “We just met him two minutes ago.”

Remus smirks fast, nodding for it. “Mhm, yeah,” he trades him. “Sorry, I said, ‘C-I’ as in ‘Ci,’ which is the most common word used for dog.”

Sirius sucks in a new breath of fresh air and understanding, puffing it back out through a pfft specially reserved for himself. “‘Scuse,” he pardons.

Remus hums a sweet little note of dismissal. “It does sound a lot like ‘qui’ so it’s fair that would be the first thing you went to,” he offers him, his smile widening as he reaches to wrap his left hand around Sirius’s right wrist. “Come on, we’re almost there.”

He tugs Sirius both off to the right and off of the trail they were on, tugging him up a thinner, inclining footpath that looks to have been beaten into the ground by shoe upon shoe over time and just about begs visitors to walk up it single-file, but Remus doesn’t appear mind one bit holding Sirius’s wrist at the small of his back and continue pulling him along, so Sirius isn’t about to let go of his personal tour guide for anything.

Sirius trills in his throat, skin singing along with the birds as he pads up the bank and onto a large clearing that sits tall over the lagoon, and there he has to let go of Remus, but that’s only to get up on his left and grab hold of his arm with the both of his hands instead, but he has to, he simply must hold to something and Remus should well be that something. It’s overwhelming, the scene he’s been taken to, and he doesn’t even know where to look first; there’s too much here to pour over all at once; he’ll have to break things down into smaller, more digestible pieces. He refocuses after many purposeful blinks in quick succession, taking in the view through smaller chunks as opposed to one, massively detailed painting.

He starts from the right, eyeballing that taller-than-tall cliffside looming over the scene and tucking the lagoon away with massive bulk, and spots something way up there, a blunt structure sitting further back on a clearing that looks a bit like the head of an eraser from here, but that might just be the tower he’s being brought to despite this little, indulgent pause Remus allowed for. Pushing down his excitement at seeing the tower up close for now, he drops his gaze down and trails it over more structural ruins at the back-right corner of the scene, remnants of buildings that appear to have been built right into the cliffside long, long ago, trains his gaze on the open sea beyond those ruins, that massive opening on the back wall of the once-quarry, now-lagoon that must be the aforementioned blast-zone, fixes his gaze on the massive, oval of relatively calm waters down below compared to the rolling waters out at sea, the speckles of people littered about, some chilling on the sidelines, some dropping from the ruins into the depths, a pair kayaking around down there, some kids splashing around in a shallow area closer to the beach, and then he sees it all again as one picture and it’s so much all over again; he’s been taken to so, so much and he couldn’t be more thrilled about it.

He blinks back down at the water again, putting his head on a right-hanging tilt and squinting a little as he compares the colour of the water down in the lagoon to the colour of the sea, and frankly, it’s bamboozling for it’s all ostensibly the same water, but the colours are visibly different. “I see what you mean by not wanting me to get lured into the water,” he shares, nodding down at the lagoon in particular. “That colour is out of this fucking world.”

“Right?” Remus sends him, thwapping Sirius's right hip. “It’s actually hypnotic.”

Sirius gives a direct, throaty hum for it. “There I am, thinking I know what I’m in for here, but that is not just some blue, that’s an idyllic shade of teal,” he puts out. “What is happening here?”

“Mm, well, that’s to do with the minerals hanging around in the water there thanks to all the slate leftover from the quarry days,” Remus supplies him. “Some days it's very, very blue, others it’s more of teal, and it may feel a tad bracing to contend with, but this isn’t even the wackiest it’s been; I’ve seen it when it looked green — almost neon, it was that bracing a colour.”

Sirius takes in a long breath, puffs it into a pair of hamster-like cheeks, and reminds himself he expressly vowed not to derail their venture plan by demanding to take a dip. Instead, he takes another, longer look over at the blast hole over on the back wall of the lagoon, leaving himself open to any ancestral spirit’s wisdom, but a consultation with his currents and his gut does pull him more toward the second option for if there were a place to create an artificial harbour to dock some fishing boats, he could certainly see this being the one — plus, the local fisherman version is way funnier than just an accident of catastrophic proportions.

“M’kay, seeing it now, I just have to say I'd never have been able to tell this was a man-made lagoon unless you told me; it looks like it’s been here since the dawn of time so bonus points toward the majesty for that,” Sirius puts down first. “And as far as the debate goes, the spirits of the ancestors don’t seem to want to chit-chat with me about what exactly went on here a century ago, so while I’ve no way of truly knowing what happened here even with a personal view of that massive blast hole at the back there, I think I’ll be staying right where I am in the Fisherman camp; that’s the one I hope it to have been anyway, it’s just too funny and life can be funny like that, can't it.”

Remus smirks beside him, giving a deep trill of an echo for that last addition. “It's as I’ve said, I don’t know which version I believe without a measure of doubt, but having said that,” he raises idly, taking what turns out to be a rather purposeful pause for emphasis and holding up his right hand like he's got a flute of champagne in it to toast, “thanks be to the local fisherman if he did indeed have the brilliant idea to create this; you might not have known or been able to foresee what would eventually become of your little docking channel a century on, but you had an inspiring vision nonetheless.”

Sirius huffs out a breathy, wheeze of a laugh. “Truly inspiring,” he echoes it, lifting his own right hand in cheers. “The power that that has, the intelligence that that has, the clearance that that has, the access that that has, the influence that that has, the profile that that has, the international implications that that—”

Remus did pretty well keeping it together until right just here, dropping his head back and giving out a cackle to the blue — or the teal, s’cuse him. “Hoo — thank you,” he trades Sirius. “That one gave me a single ab to work with.”

Sirius blows a fart noise into his right palm for that one, garnering a head or two down at the lagoon site to turn toward him, but that’s neither here nor there. Far more importantly, Sirius gets a glimpse of their Labrador friend going for quite the splash over in the shallow end on the left-hand side of the teal oval and puts up a bright grin as he spots the bouncing boy win himself a big ol’ stick out of the water.

“Look at that ci go,” he puts up, grinning twice as big as he pops his right elbow over at Remus.

“Oh, good show,” he trades him, knocking elbows with him for it.

Sirius dusts off his shoulders proudly with his free hand and has another look down at the pooch prancing around down there, which would’ve been a fine idea if it did not have him entranced by the idea of having a dip of his own. “Alright, get me out of here before I get too lured in, hm?” he bids, popping the toe of his left shoe against the side of Remus’s right one.

“Mm, best we do that,” Remus trades him, turning away from the vast view of the lagoon before holding up his left hand in a semblance of a halt. “Just one quick second.”

He uses his right hand to unzip his grocery bag with a rather gentle tug, leaving just enough of an opening to reach his left hand into the bag and pull out the cherry tomatoes, a choice Sirius is obsessed with already. “Yes, yes, yes,” he chants, in love with Remus’s mind and the fact that it is now officially snack time.

“Hold quick?” Remus smiles, passing the container off to him and zipping up the grocery bag like the diligent, careful lad he is.

Next up, Remus steps in close on Sirius’s right, fishes around in the beach bag, and goes in deeper before pulling his mobile out from in there, and lights up the screen, humming lightly at whatever time it is by the look of it and putting the mobile back right where he got it from. Sirius doesn’t even want to know, doesn’t need to; he’s more than happy to take the day blindly and simply enjoy every turn it brings without the ticking of the clock interfering, and of course he’d like it if Remus would simply forget about time on vacation of all things, but so long as he looks and sounds happy with the result of having had a peek at it, then fuck it, he can look.

Remus takes the cherry tomatoes back, tears at the paper hanging over the mouth of the opening, and pops the lid up, sticking his hand into the pot of rouge and reaching a handful of tomatoes out to Sirius before scooping a helping of his own out of there. He pops one into his mouth, smiles to Sirius as he does a little shimmy of his shoulders, and nods him along, heading back across the clearing toward a foot trail that continues up this luscious, ever-ascending range.

To be clear, Sirius would follow that ray of light anywhere he went so guaranteed he’s just floating along behind Remus, pulled in by his glowing presence, blinking in bright blues and vivid greens, breathing in the scents of absolute summer and open-air, tasting sweet, delectable little treats, and trading even sweeter kisses for each new helping of tomatoes that Sirius comes knocking for.

Sirius learns on their way up and up that there are a few different lookout points where one can stand and observe the lagoon below at incrementally higher heights. Granted, just about any spot where one could stand and visibly see the lagoon could count as a lookout point, but nevertheless, there are a total of three spots (so far, at least) that overlook the beauty down below in a rather ceremonious fashion, almost as if the earth said, “let’s set up some balcony seating,’ and to that, Sirius would agree that was a stellar choice Mama Nature made.

Sirius also learns that Remus had been more right than he knew about them needing to go down before going back up. It had been true enough for the ever-descending road leading into the area that deposited them in the parking lot at sea level and it's just as true for the way up to the tower; it’s up, up, and up until Remus starts them down a crevice in the clearing that leads them down through a trail that runs in between two steadily heightening walls of rock on either side of it. They follow the trail until it meets up directly with a third rock wall and splits off into two opposing but seemingly viable pathways, both directions having two towering walls of rock to boast about but different results as far as scenery goes, at least for what Sirius can see from here. The trail that leads off to the left appears to have more in terms of grassy knolls and mossy, rocky banks to offer them, whereas the right-leaning trail offers a stunning yet bamboozling sliver of the sea staring back at him from down the way, stunning because it’s inherently beautiful to look at, bamboozling because the last time Sirius saw a glimpse the sea, it was either on their left or directly out ahead of them; he’d not realized it wrapped so far around the cliff range they’re working their way up and now, he certainly wants to know how far it stretches out to the right of them.

On that note, Sirius sure knows which path he’s hoping they’ll be heading down, but he waits with his gaze trained sidelong at the boss while Remus finishes putting away the container for the cherry tomatoes they devoured. He breathes in full as he quickly zips the reusable bag closed to avoid letting too much of the chilled air inside go free, readjusts the strap on the right side of his collar just a bit, and reaches to brush his left hand over the back Sirius’s right shoulder blade, wordlessly guiding him off down the right trail, and Sirius couldn’t be more thrilled about it.

The looming walls of rock on either side of the trail begin to decrease in height the closer they get toward that idyllic, doorway-sized snapshot of the sea Sirius sure is eyeballing like the elixir of life until Remus shakes him out of the hypnotized state he's in by pulling him to a quick halt, swinging them to the left, and aiming them directly at what’s left of the descending wall of rock on this side of the path.

“Mmm, she’s beautiful,” Sirius comments, valley-voice activated.

Remus snorts once, giving his head a shake. “See the various scuff marks on there?” he raises, lifting his head after hearing a hum of affirmation out of Sirius for it. “That’s the way we’ve got to go up.”

“Ooh, a climb,” Sirius shimmies, already jazzed about it.

“A bit of one, yes, but nothing too extreme in the way that if me and my spindly legs can manage it, then it’ll likely be no match for you and your powerful calves,” Remus puts it, his lopsided smile coming out to play, Sirius sees. “So, I’m not too, too worried about the climb itself, but I am a little more hastened about that big blue sea right over there, ready to swallow anyone up should they take a tumble off of that cliff which certainly does drop off quite suddenly about a meter that way.”

“I won’t go plunging into the sea,” Sirius instils. “At least not by accident; I will be plunging into it quite purposefully the instant you give me the green light, but not a moment before then.”

Remus breathes in once, holding it for a beat or two. “Well, that’s — that’s nice to hear, thank you,” he puts down first, his lopsided smile petering off into something more strained. “It’s just a bit steep at first and because the sea is right fucking there, I would very appreciate it if you paid keen attention to where I place my feet as I’m going up and copied exactly what I do; I don’t want you teetering any at all and — actually, can we swap grocery bags—”

“Remus, I can handle a little climb,” Sirius instils, reaching his left hand up to rub it over Remus’s back to soothe. “And no swapsies, we had a deal and I’m keeping to it.”

Remus pushes a short, horse-adjacent breath out of himself. “Alright, fine, just lean more to the left then, OK?” he bids. “In fact, don’t even lean to the right at all; how about that?”

“Alright, sweetie,” Sirius chimes, tapping Remus’s back twice to coax. “Lead the way, now.”

Remus does do that, just not without a plain raise of his right brow but nevertheless, he’s the perfect climbing instructor to follow after and the climb really isn’t much to write home about in terms of exertion. Now, is Sirius breathing a bit more harshly than he'd been as he comes up over the height of the wall? Of course he is, his lungs are pretty offended by him and his choices, but his powerful calves aren’t barking at him and it’s not as if he needs to breathe anyway; a lusciously green pasture has taken over from where the moss at the top of the rock wall left off, a widespread meadow to end them all, right at their fingertips, and there’s nothing, nothing, nothing but open skies, open field, open air, open sea — a sea that, upon a new blink, appears to stretch out really fucking far to the right as it turns out for Sirius can’t see where it ends from here.

It’s everything, not being blocked by absolutely anything; it’s both everything and it’s exactly too much for a few solid beats, Sirius can’t help himself from feeling stricken over the very existence of a place so sprawling, so arresting, and so much bigger, older, wiser than he, and it’s enough to hitch his breath, catch his tongue, have him in pure reverence over all that he’s been lucky enough to take in so far and all he has to take in yet.

He looks to Remus when he knows he’s being watched, and sure enough, that boy’s looking right at him behind those shades of his, that curly head o’ hair sitting at a bit of a tilt. “Should we take a breather?” he raises.

Turns out, his tongue works just fine still. “No, I’m good,” Sirius assures, smiling big for him.

Remus nods to accept his smile as he starts them on a new stroll, heading them toward the very top of the clearing no doubt, but he’s got a careful placement to his lips now, evidently unable to accept Sirius's reassurance just yet. “You look a bit off,” he relays, raising his brows just a touch more. “OK?”

“Yeah, I am,” Sirius assures, and he is, so he’s happy to hear it sound candid to his own ears let alone Remus’s, but he lifts his hands to gesture at the openness around them all the sam. “This is just a lot and I’m just so very small, you know?”

Remus hums a new note, reaching to loop his left arm in with Sirius’s and keeping his hand curled in behind the beach bag. “In the arrested, inconsequential ‘we’re nothing but specks on a pretty rock and that’s not necessarily a bad thing’ sort of way?” he checks, and it’s sweet that he’s even checking when clearly Remus had been listening good whenever Sirius has gone flapping his lips about this exact sort of feeling, but it’s extra sweet to know he’s got him pegged to a T.

“You’ve got me,” Sirius echoes it, turning his head to leave a quick kiss on Remus’s left shoulder. “I’m right at the murky line between reverence and respect; I revere and I respect this place for gently reminding me that I am only permitted to be here by will and chance working together at the very same time, and I respect and revere this place for brutally reminding me that I am, in fact, teeny-tiny in comparison to time, history, and this very pretty rock I happened to get put on, but I find that sort of thing freeing — arresting, make no mistake, but freeing nonetheless.”

Remus hums to allow it, letting a smile show through. “I see why you would find it almost debilitatingly freeing,” he trades him, and that's a fine way to put it, too, so kudos to him. “There is a sense of freedom to feeling teeny-tiny in comparison to all that’s come before you and all that’ll come after; there aren’t so many rules in the fine print that way, only respect, reverence, and this very pretty rock that you happened to get put on.”

“Yes, yes,” Sirius heaves out. “And it’s not just because of my complete lack of respect for authority and doctrine — just so we’re clear.”

Remus lets a trill sound in his throat, shaking his head with it. "I mean, that can be a part of it, but I don’t think that’s all it is,” he lends him, letting himself smile more and more with every passing beat. “I like that you see it like that. It can feel harrowing and a bit lonely to contend with the idea that we're just some blips along a massive-scale timeline that’ll march on whether we're up for it or not, and sometimes I think that’s why many, many, many people would much rather believe in some kind of absolute purpose or great being that made all this happen and go looking for a source of that belief wherever they can find and feel it, but I can't help but respect those who don’t need all that in their life to find the beauty in it and in all of this; it doesn’t have to feel so lonely, not necessarily, and the little things can matter all the more even if you are just another spec floating around on a very pretty rock.”

Sirius opens his mouth and sends a whirl of an overcome noise out of it, his voice travelling so, so far without much to bounce it back at them. “I love you,” he attests. “You just get it — you get it and me; it’s thrilling.”

Remus turns his head to smush his face against Sirius’s upper right arm, sneaking a quick whiff off of the Henley and likely Sirius in general before mumbling against him. "I think I’m more in your camp than I’m not, these days," he slips him. “Feeling OK otherwise?”

“First of all, yes, thanks to you,” Sirius instils, leaning his head forward to aim the affirmation toward Remus’s right ear canal so he’ll have a fighting chance at actually hearing it. “Turned my morning around with your bare hands, you did.”

“Funny, same for you,” Remus slips in there.

“Two peas,” Sirius calls ‘em. “And second of all, yes again because how could I be upset about anything out here? No jinx or anything, but I don’t think Reg or James could get to me, not when I’ve got a veritable forcefield of majesty around me.”

Remus pulls in a big ol’ breath as he lifts his head, but there's simply no wood nearby for him to knock on. “I’m glad you feel that way about it, but even if one of them did try to break through it, they’d still have to get through me so I think you’re safe here, too, all in all,” he supplies, apparently deciding he doesn't need a hunk of wood for this one.

This boy just keeps blowing his mind, every hour of every day. “Some brazen words for a rather superstitious fellow,” he trades him, sending a wry smile sidelong. “You’re going to give ‘em the ol’ one-two for me if they do give it a go, are you?”

“Oh, I’ll give ‘em the ol’ one-two-three, even,” Remus takes it, fans it.

Sirius gives up a spurred trill. “I almost want one of them to try it, now.”

“OK, now you are just jinxing things,” Remus chides him, taking his left arm back and separating from Sirius, his left forefinger high up in the air and wagging back at him as he swishes up ahead of him; it’s incredible, he’s a one-man show.

Sirius has to shut his eyes against the fit that becomes of him thanks to Remus’s dramatic little antics, but he’s forced to open his eyes when Remus gives out two claps of his hands for attention and then he’s forced to reel for a beat or three once he finds that Remus has swivelled back toward him, hands clasped together, his brows knitted together tight.

Sirius looks behind him right quick, expecting to see something or someone that warrants the tepid look on Remus’s face, but nobody is coming up behind him or further back in the distance, so it can’t be that. He faces Remus once again and, well, there is a picturesque, cylindrical stone tower northeast of Remus’s frame and about three city blocks away from the two of them, but one quick study of the ground to the left of Remus tells him what might just be the predicament at play here.

See, right up until about a foot behind Remus or so, the width at the top of the cliff they’ve very nearly claimed for themselves had been quite substantial, plenty of room to frolic about and not worry about tripping and winding up back at sea level in the worst and fastest way possible, but that is not the case for a section of the meadow behind Remus, namely the part where the width they’re dealing with appears to thin out quite a bit before widening back out again for the tippity-top of the range and Remus is very much the resident crossing guard, after all.

“This about that narrow ridge?” Sirius figures, pointing toward the inevitable problem with his left forefinger.

“Mm, mhm,” Remus echoes. “I know it’s going to seem unreasonable because we’d both fit on there together just fine, but I'd still feel more comfortable going single-file over that stretch and I wouldn’t say no to you going first this time just so if there’s teetering of any kind, I can be aware of it and grab you quicker than if you were behind me.”

Feeling rather protected at all costs, Sirius gives him a dose of the double-decker finger guns for it. “I respect you and your terms,” he lends him.

Remus nods, making to turn round and face the direction they’ll be heading in before pausing short and turning back for an additional amendment. “No goofing around on the thinnest stretch we’re going to have to contend with, please and thank you," he bids him. "Once we’re past the unnerving stretch you may skip, prance, even gallop the rest of the way there all you’d like, and do you see how the tower stands slightly off to the side just there?”

Sirius looks right to that specific ledge and then to the tower very much rooted in place diagonally from it. “Mhm, yep,” he offers.

“Perfect,” Remus calls it. “On the other side of that exists a collection of rocks that are really just one glorified cliff ledge, so that tower is actually going to be your marker; when you’re taking your pictures of the sprawling views, you’re not to go past the structure to get a shot, even if you think it’s just going to be a quick second for a sick shot, bro.

The ‘surfs-up’ energy to the conclusion of Remus’s statement is almost enough to have Sirius not hang his arms lowly against his sides in reaction to being officially short-leaded. Almost. “Really?” he frowns.

“Really, really,” Remus echoes, and his expression is a lot more no-nonsense based than it is strictly unnerved just now. “I know you’re excited and I only helped that by hyping you up a whole lot for this, but the view is going to be just as breathtaking from a little further back as it would be from right up close to that edge; we are up very, very high, I will not watch you fall from a crumbling cliffside, and I don’t care how unreasonable or unlikely that scenario may well be, I want to have fun today, not call for a rescue mission.”

Sirius reworks the pout of his lips into more of a point that he then swishes back and forth before taking a new breath in. “I respect you and your terms,” he repeats, testing out his footing on a pair of cartoonish tiptoes before stepping over to catch up with him.

Remus swivels around with it, steps back to signal it’s time for Sirius to go first, and follows closely after him — so close, in fact, that it's kind of hot, having Remus strapped right up behind him as they come upon the thinnest width that the whole cliff range and the final obstacle Mama Nature has left for them to master. Sirius kind of really wants to get a quick pic of them going along here, especially when they’re well-positioned for a prime selfie, and that supreme urge has him reaching idly across his chest with his left arm to dip his hand into the beach bag hanging from his right shoulder, digging his mobile out from very near the bottom of it all thanks to his gallivanting and lifting it out.

He switches to holding it in his more prominent hand for better results, opens up his camera, and lifts his mobile, framing both him and Remus into the shot before tilting it enough to get a chunck of meadow behind them and a bit of the sea in there as well. “Smile, sweets,” he chimes, taking to a bright beam.

He gets two vastly important photos out of the deal, one where Remus is mid-huff over him having done this during such a torrid manoeuvre and another where he’s snapped out of it enough to press a kiss to the line of Sirius’s right cheekbone, a pointed smile just notable at the corner of his mouth, so, by and large, these are both absolute keepers and totally worth the short spelunking trip Sirius had to go on to dig his mobile out.

“These, are everything,” he shares, holding his mobile back to Remus and swiping through the two as they shuffle along the ridge. “‘The Huff’ is going on the fridge; no ifs, ands, or buts about that, and ‘the Smirking Kiss’ is going to get one of its sides pinned under the archway on the mirror above my bureau — which, so we’re clear, is where ‘Remus the Christmas Elf’ is also going.”

Remus huffs a quick laugh out of his chest. “Honestly, I’m just thankful you’re not planning on putting ‘Remus the Christmas Elf’ on the fridge,” he puts it plain.

“Absolutely not; that's my joy and I get to pick where I keep it,” Sirius maintains, receiving a prompt kiss to the nape of his neck in reply and taking to hugging his mobile to his warming chest. He doesn’t see much point in putting the device away, not when he’s got such majesty surrounding him, but he waits until they’ve officially cleared the troublesome section before swivelling right around and aiming his camera down the coastline for a shot that’s inevitably going to take his breath away any time he looks at it again.

“The coastal path runs that way,” Remus offers up, pointing his right forefinger at about two o’clock from the camera’s vantage point, “and if you follow it for long enough, you end up back in Porthgain.”

Sirius piques, lifting his camera above Remus’s pointer finger, snapping the scene from afar. “I want to come back and do the whole trek someday,” he puts forth. “Mark that down on the ongoing list.”

“Marked,” Remus echoes, moving back and in behind him to dig his own mobile out of the beach bag while Sirius trains his camera just northwest of where he last had it, grabbing snaps of the section of the coastline down the way that sticks out squarely into the sea before thinning out into a sharp, jutting cliff range. “We wouldn’t necessarily have to stop at Porthgain either; we could mark off a few days specifically for exploring, hit all sorts of stunning spots along the path, visit this ancient fort out here that’s got a lighthouse with the original bulb still in it and that thing is huge.”

“No,” Sirius comes in, grinning ear to ear as he gets some prime shots of the sea.

“Yes — well, it’s all run electrically nowadays, but that massive bulb is still aglow and used to this day,” Remus maintains, smiling like a goon by the sounds of it. “And there are plenty more abandoned quarry sites to prowl around where this came from and I've a certain sense you’d love that.”

“And I would,” Sirius underlines, a crooked grin plastered right on as he swings around to get that absolute unit of a tower into the frame for some beauty shots.

“I’ve both read and heard that the entire coastal path takes somewhere around fifteen to twenty days total to hike, depends if you’re a veritable hiking machine and just love the grind or if you’re a regular human person that would enjoy a break here and there, but I think us hiking the whole thing may just be a bit too outside our realm of capabilities either way,” Remus addresses, his tone at a lovely meeting point between idle and amused. “There are quite a few spots along the path that have smaller, more circular routes to offer, however, that take you on quite the journey before dropping you back where you parked your vehicle, and those are more what I’m thinking of; there are lots of little harbours dotted along the way, hidden beaches to frolic on, villages to visit, and there are quite a few cafés we can hit along the way, too, so you’d be happily wired, don’t you worry, and we could pack the whole truck up with snacks if my dad’ll let us nab it again for our cause, kip out on the land and not cave to him about it this time — talking to myself here — take in the views, have sex in all sorts of jaw-droppingly gorgeous locations, and just goon all around the place so that any and every person who happens to meet us along the way will arguably wish they hadn’t met such a chaotic pair; wouldn’t that be fun?”

“Legions of it,” Sirius puts down, trading a vast gaze sidelong at Remus and letting a coy smile show through. “Don’t want to alarm you any, but you did just let yourself make a whole batch of plans for sometime in the distant future and I can't let that slip by without acknowledgment.”

Remus lulls his head back and gives him a small huff, but he also puts it through a sunshine smile so evidently it was an important enough event to have made sure he could live inside of, too. “I’ll start keeping a little listicle in my head of spots for us to hit,” he wraps it up, but the little sway he does with it is just like him placing a neat little bow on it.

“Please, I need you to,” Sirius puts down.

“I’ll call it, ‘Remus’s Top Five,’” the sweet boy declares, brazenly puffing his shoulders up before fighting a snort and then promptly letting it go free. “Or, maybe something a bit catchier than that; I’ll have to think on it.”

“Uh, no? I like the sound of the original, thank you,” Sirius trades him, coming in hot for a smooch to seal the whole deal. He leans back with his lips stitched into a forever smile, it seems, and closes both of his hands over his mobile, bringing all three up underneath his chin for a wee shelf to sit it on. “Want to see me run like the wind?”

Remus gives out a deep, throaty trill. “Yes, get going,” he goads, and off Sirius goes, babey; hair flowing in the wind, eyes alive with wonder, footwork incroyable as he zooms up toward the tower.

It’s quite something, seeing the greyish, cylindrical specimen up close and personal compared to the teeny-tiny, eraser-headed version he'd spotted from way, way down near the start of their climb, but hoo boy, is this thing actually adorable. Plain and simple, it's the cutest little thing, made up of large, individual stones laid upon even more stones, all meticulously crafted, wrapping round and around from the foundation to the very top save for the one — no, two — open windowsills and a wide open doorframe, sitting pretty and looking out to sea rather than at potential newcomers which is honestly just another detail to add to the vibe of the whole area; it's here for you, but it's not here for you.

On the whole, the tower's not nearly as tall as he’d pictured it to be when he first heard of the existence of said tower, but he’s limited in his worldview, isn’t he; when he hears tower, he sees a looming structure, one he’d have to crane his neck a bit to look up at, but this sturdy little guy looks to be about a head or two taller than Remus, give or take, and that certainly adds something extra toward the overall cute factor.

There is, upon inspection, no ceiling to this tower; straight up, it simply does not have one, and that detail has him reevaluating the windowsills sitting on opposite sides of the tower from each other and the different angles they offer of the same very sea. He swivels around, finding Remus closer than where he left him but still very much taking a leisurely stroll over to join him. “Was this a fort at some point?” he calls out, his head at a tilt.

“It does look like one, but that's another mystery,” Remus calls back, giving a little shrugging gesture.

“So many,” Sirius trades him.

“Too many,” Remus amends it.

Sirius waves that one right off. “No such thing,” he returns.

Remus waits until he’s about a meter away before continuing on without the absolute need to belt his words. “Its origin and intended use may even be more mysterious than that of the lagoon’s creation,” he puts forth, just a few steps away from Sirius now. “In the way that they’ve at least got a year to go on for that tale, whereas it seems to be unknown exactly when and for what purpose the tower was built, but the going theory is that it was meant to be a lookout tower following the last French invasion.”

Sirius takes in a slight, tight breath as he reaches out to tug Remus in toward him via the hem of his shirt. “Mm, and when might that’ve been again?” he checks, going for a squint-and-smile combo.

“Mm, t’was ‘the Battle of Fishgard,’” Remus supplies him, giving Sirius a squint-and-smile of his own. “Seventeen — mm, ninety-eight, I think it was, so we’ve potentially got ourselves a very, very old tower here.”

Sirius sends a loud and proud pfft right at this magical man. “Of course you fucking knew that,” he returns, leaning in to steal a kiss off him.

Remus has a comment waiting to go for the moment the kiss ends. “I had to think about the date,” he defends, his lips twitching. “I can't stand here and pretend that this area isn’t entirely fascinating to me; I've read up on quite a bit and while I wouldn’t say no to trading a few mysteries in for a few definitive answers, that’s not always how things go, is it.”

“Mm mm, and besides, the mysteries to the area may well be part of what keeps the fascination so alive, hm?” Sirius raises him, whispering the fingertips on his left hand over Remus’s navel before turning and focusing his camera on the tower.

He takes a few snaps of it from up close, steps back to get a nice shot of the tower with the sea in the background, and swivels to the side to get another shot with the tower in the immediate background, but this time with his profile and a pronounced smoulder sticking in from the left, smiling as he hears Remus smirking up a storm over there. That done, he heads over to the left-hand side of the tower but goes no step further than that as per direction, and anyway, Remus had a great point back there: the view from here can’t possibly be any less stunning than right up close to the edge of the clearing and now, Sirius gets to fawn and gape-grin to his heart’s content over the wonders staring back at him without the slightest bit of remorse for worrying even a cell in that sunshine lad’s body; a win/win, they call it.

He brings his camera back up and takes aim to grab a few shots of the rolling sea hitting the shores of the beach way, way down below; while the parking lot a bit further back from the sands is a little hard tough to make out from here, it's still a bit of fun capturing a shot that gives a sense of where they started from. He turns his feet like he's on a slow-moving dial, gets some pretentiously angular and rather dramatic shots of sharp, plunging cliffs across the way, swivels some more to grab some snaps of the open sea out directly ahead of them and makes sure to get that immense skyline in a few of those, and scoots around to the far side of the tower to get some more shots of sprawling sea out ahead of the cliff range, feeling utterly high off capturing just how open, vibrant, age-old, and alive everything is out here.

It’ll be nice for him to have these shots to look back on and remember just how he felt taking them, no doubt about that, but he’s not grabbing them just for himself. One day soon, when he’s back in London and hopefully a little less likely to pounce, he’s going to want James to see these, too; he's gonna want him to be able to feast his eyes on all these gorgeous sights and have him hooting and whooping in the way he damn well should when he sees the scope of all that Sirius got to see live from the good seats.

“Look here?” Remus bids him.

Sirius heeds the request right quick, popping a bright beam over his right shoulder at him, and finds Remus a good set of steps back with his mobile up, and ne’er does a flash go off out in this gorgeous daylight, but Sirius knows he just got snapped by how quickly Remus moves to inspect the result and Cunt, he’s a smart cookie, that one; he’s going to have a tremendous shot of Sirius out here in his homeland and ahead of the most gorgeous backdrop there ever could be sitting on his camera roll whenever he’ll need a peek at it.

Remus gives an impish trill as he zooms in on the photo with three quick drags of his left forefinger and thumb over his screen. “You look so happy,” he coos, tapping the tip of his forefinger once against what has to be Sirius’s happy little face.

Sirius turns back to the blue right quick, catching his lower lip in between his teeth and swallowing hard around the golfball-level lump that’s suddenly materialized in his throat. He shuts his eyes against the fast-rushing film coming in over them, feeling a lot like he just got the wind pushed right out of him in the best way possible; he really went and got himself a good one.

He reopens his eyes once the threat of a weeping session has subsided, takes in a long, new breath of clean, gorgeous air, and pushes it back out at a careful pace. He turns back to Remus with his mobile pressed over his mouth and what’s got to be a look of utter devotion soaring out of his peepers, but hopefully Remus is still able to feel the devotion aimed at him because, for the moment, he’s a bit preoccupied with peeking around the side of the tower and getting a glance back the way they came.

Sirius supposes could simply ask what’s going on there, but he gets a lot more out of waiting it out, particularly for the fact that he gets to watch Remus press to light up his mobile screen to consult the time, lower it again to have a second glance off across the field, and take a half-turn toward Sirius before catching him watching him right back, but best of all, he gets to watch Remus put his shoulder line on a coy slant, nodding his head once toward the tower with a pointed smile at his lips.

Sirius stands so, so still he may as well be coined the second most impressive and unmovable fixture on this cliffside, but there’s no helping that; he can’t move, can hardly blink, if he does anything, makes any sudden movements at all, it could very well the shatter the possible illusion of Remus moseying on into the tower with a last look over at him with a blisteringly suggestive, ‘come catch me’ energy about it.

Sirius can and must move the moment Remus has stepped out of sight, taking to a veritable sprint as he skirts around to the doorframe and zooms in there after him, skidding to a stop just ahead of Remus. “Is this the spot?” he implores, flapping his arms around like a useless bird. “Say it is.”

“Well, I'm doing the checklist now and it's looking promising,” Remus offers him, tilting that curly-Q head of his back and forth with an idle smile. “I took the liberty of timing how long it would take a couple of boisterous youths like ourselves to get from the first lookout point to all the way up here and that would’ve been a little over fifteen without our stops along the way, so if we factor in the pauses we took for pictures and my bouts of nervous haggling, cross-reference that with the idea that most folk hiking up this way would be likely stop to admire the scenery at least once or twice along the way, then it would take about twenty minutes for somebody to catch up with us from the lagoon, thirty if they were starting from back at the parking lot."

Sirius reels back fast like he’s been struck by lightning, and frankly, he has been, just with the sharp bolt that is Remus Lupin’s brain at work. “I’m — you—” he tries, waggling his mobile at him, “that’s why you couldn’t stop lookin’ at your device.”

Remus puffs out a quick breath as he drops the straps of his bags to the bend of his elbow. “OK, I think we may be resting a bit too heavily on hyperbole—”

“You said, ‘I know a place,’ and boy, did you,” Sirius barrels on, depositing his mobile into the beach bag. “Hooo, you said, ‘cross your fingers we’re alone when we get there,’ and no fucking wonder, Remus; you’re a little sneak, a full sneak, a—”

“OK, nineteen minutes,” Remus chimes in, placing his bags on the ground.

“Um, potentially twenty-nine,” Sirius chimes back, dropping the straps of his bags to his palms so can get them on the ground quicker and easier.

“Mhm, well, the thing is, I didn’t see anyone milling along behind us after the lady with the dog went off on her way and it would be pretty tough to get up here with a pooch, but just in case she’s determined to try or somebody else came along not long after her and is on their way up here right now, let’s call it a likely nineteen and see where it goes from there,” Remus raises him, lifting his mobile and unlocking it with a speedy right thumb. “If the alarm I’m setting rings out and we see that no one’s coming up the way yet, then we may have ourselves a bonus round, but we can do some real damage in just nineteen minutes and I think you know that, mm?”

Sirius curls in for a bend forward, placing his palms just above his curved kneecaps and taking in a long, long breath before putting it back out with the reply. “Mm,” he echoes lowly.

Remus, just finished placing his mobile face-up on top of the duffel bag, breaks his barely-upheld resolve to drop his head back and cackle at the open sky — which, upon a devastating bolt of remembrance that bares down on Sirius in a rejuvenated light, has him peering up at with a pair of newer, better-seeing eyes. “‘You will be able to see the sky,’” he quotes, lifting out of his bent position to gape, no grin, at Remus.

“Not bad, hm,” Remus gives it, a knowing smile on his lips, and if he hadn’t stepped in to get up on him right then, Sirius would’ve cleared the space between them for him.

“Sneaky genius,” Sirius forwards him.

Remus drinks him in the moment the words are out of him, giving a deep hum in reply for Sirius to do whatever he likes with, and Sirius swallows it down, accepting the reverb with grace and hunger. Remus can likely tell he’s hot for it, but it’d make some real sense if he were battling a fierce hunger of his own for he places his hands intently on Sirius’s hips, pulling back enough to first breathe against his lips and try his hand at speaking from there. “I really do hate to say it, but I don’t see us getting away with the whole shebang in here,” he raises him, his breath whispering over Sirius’s parted lips. “I mean, we could get it done; the ability is within our reach and I’d already be starting in on you if there were a single other trash bin between here and the ones back at the parking lot that we could theoretically toss the raincoat into, but unfortunately that’s not the case and I simply can't endorse chucking it out the window here. I have limits.”

Sirius snickers against his lips. “Turns out, so do I, and it’s this place,” he forwards him.

“Perfect,” Remus calls it, stealing a quick, impulse-laden kiss off of Sirius’s snickering lips before moving his hands around the back of him, getting them up under the hem of his shirt and smoothing his palm over his skin. “That said, I think I could make up for what I couldn’t do to you this morning; d’you want me to give it a go?”

Sirius kisses him full by way of answering, figuring that’ll spell things out quite well for him, and the notable addition of nails dragging over the small of his back do quite a lot to speak for Remus’s response, and what a display of body talk they’ve got going here; Remus doesn’t tend to keep his nails longer than respectable nubs that can aid in tearing open various packaging more easily, but despite having some rather short ones to work with, he’s really making this etching over Sirius’s skin count, splaying his fingers out and tugging Sirius into their kiss, into his body, and making Sirius’s knees go for a wobble over how wanted it’s having him feel, so thanks be to Remus’s arms strongly holding him in place or he might’ve been on the ground by now.

And while they’re at it, thanks be to the placement Remus puts him in from there; it’s done with such a slow rotation that it feels like a common sway with a little more footwork to it than their typical swaying style, but it’s a thorough manoeuvre with a stellar result for now Sirius is the one facing the open doorframe and getting the snapshot view of the sea with it all while Remus works his mouth over his pulse point. Incroyable.

For a man quite aware of the time limit they’re meant to adhere to and thwart a possible walk-in situation, Remus devotes at least thirty of their precious seconds to ensuring that there’ll be a mark left on Sirius’s neck and Cunt, is it an inspiring thirty-second block for Sirius, at that; he ends up with his hands wound up at the back of Remus’s tee, his thighs going taught, his knees bending and pushing apart, his legs veritably encasing Remus’s hips in between them, his lungs taking in and puffing out short, sharp breaths as he starts up a deep roll of his hips, hid body milking every second that Remus licks, nips, and teethes at his pounding pulse.

He stays with that until those seconds are up and Remus needs some more room to head downstairs, so to speak, but that is a valiant reason Sirius is most obliged to give way to, easing up enough on the hold his legs have got on the sides of Remus’s hips for him to kneel before him, and on straight dirt to boot — what a guy; Remus is bound to have dirt printed on his kneecaps after this, but at least Sirius will get to enjoy the sight of that on the way back down before those prints inevitably wash off in the water.

Remus nuzzles at Sirius’s navel like he’s asking for some help in the curtain-lifting department, and it makes sense why he’s giving Sirius a role to assume here when Remus hasn’t let up on any of the nail-dragging he’s been quite keen on this session; those hands are busy at the moment, dipping below the waistband of Sirius’s trunks and turning their attention onto his cheeks, dragging up on them and taking Sirius right to the tips of his toes with it as he tugs up on the hem of the Henley and lets Remus have at his navel like he was always going to.

It’s quite something, contending more or less with what Remus would’ve done with it if he’d had the time to back at the inn, the only notable difference being that they've had time for heat and want to fester and build toward their eventual crash-together, and woof, can Sirius feel the heat and want coming off Remus while he licks, nips, and teethes over the two prominent lines on his navel, leaving him unable to do much more than card his hands through his curls and encourage all that makes Remus hot n’ bothered.

The encouragement seems to have been read and appreciated by Remus for he goes and lays claim on the right-hand side of the ‘V,’ devoting another batch of precious seconds to sucking a bruise into his skin that’ll definitely be visible above the waistband of his trunks the moment Sirius peels his shirt off and leave him branded in front of several strangers who’d never assume the mark had come from the curly-Q in his company, but Remus will know, Sirius will know, and that is just the hottest damn thing Remus could’ve done with him, and that’s saying something when Remus hasn’t even spent quality time with the bulge in his trunks yet.

And at this point, Remus could have access to some trap door into Sirius’s thoughts for there he goes, tugging down on the back of his trunks as his hands are already very much there and releasing that bulge to the air as a result before taking Sirius right on in so that was some manifestation on both their parts, it seems. Something of note about this particular placement? The fact that Sirius is decidedly not up against any one inch of cylindrical wall in here, and the fact that Remus has him upright and on lock with those paws of his; it right begs him to use Remus for balance and not much else, begs him to let himself get rocked into wet heat without any real work on his part, begs him to take in the view, the sky, the work being done on him and let himself be taken to his release.

He wants to be respectful of the way Remus wants this done, especially when it’s quite clear he’d like it if Sirius simply let him handle the reigns all his own for this one, and for the most part, Sirius will let him have that, but he’d have to be comatose not to plant his feet further apart on the ground and use as much space as Remus’s hands will give him while wrapped around his hips like this, and it’s not even to gain a bit of traction in order to drive himself there, but for the extra room and ability to spread of his thighs apart even just a little more; that's what he wants, he wants to hitch his waist a little lower for another display of body talk, encourage the work being done on him, and urge Remus to have at him, and have at him, Remus does, gripping at Sirius’s cheeks as he pulls his hips into it, pulls his cock into him, pulls him toward shattered, white-hot release, and rocks him the whole way through it, his tongue laving over the underside of his cock as Sirius presses his fingertips carefully to his jaw, needing to give thanks for every second Remus’ll have him.

Sirius can’t hold off from playing with Remus’s hair in the afterglow, can’t hold off from tipping his head back with his left hand and passing his right thumb over Remus’s lower lip as he breathes down on him, can’t thank him enough for thinking for him and tugging his swim trunks up over his hips while Sirius's thoughts are all wound up in him, and at least now he gets to tap on Remus’s shoulders to encourage him to get on up and put that golden mouth on his and put it on him, Remus does graciously.

Sirius breaks for air a half-minute on from there, tracing intent circles into Remus’s hip bones with his thumbs as he refocuses; they can bask to their heart’s content once they’re both taken care of, but not a moment too soon. “What are we now, do you think?” he bids, breathless with it.

Remus takes in a long breath of his own as he turns his head to the left, staring over at his mobile sitting face-up on the duffel before peeling away from Sirius to go find out for sure. He moves over to it, stoops down to get the screen lit up, and gives up a charmed noise. “We’ve a little over ten still,” he reports, speaking music to Sirius’s ears and then going a step further to peek out the side of the doorframe just to be overtly sure that they’ve not got a hiker approaching the scene.

“All clear?” Sirius checks.

“Wonderfully clear,” Remus relays, turning from the door with a celebratory smile.

Sirius already knew how he’d like to get Remus back, but something about that smile seals the whole deal and stamps it for him. “OK, I’m going to need to be on you,” he declares, circling his right forefinger at him to emphasize it.

Remus somehow manages to light up even more than he already was, pushing an endeared, melodic laugh through that open smile. “I’m going to need you on me, so that’s convenient,” he trades him.

“Not for your trunks, though,” Sirius mentions, circling the same forefinger at those bright, beautiful shorts. “Should put something down.”

Remus sticks his top row of teeth over his lower lip, eyes alive with fervour behind those sunnies no doubt, and turns back to the duffel, unzipping it and tugging Sirius’s artfully rolled-up towel out of there. “It’s the first one I could grab,” he offers, looking back at him with an inquisitive smile for some sort of dot of approval.

“Well, put it down, boy,” Sirius snickers, throwing the permission at Remus if he so needs it firsthand.

Remus smirks as he quickly heeds his advice, unrolling the towel before flapping it out and laying it down rather royally, a detail that Sirius fawns over via a trill in his throat while he looks in the beach bag for whether Remus took one for the team and packed their sanitizer, and boom, there it is, and what a self-sacrificing, bigger-picture-respecting lad he is for making sure that was in there despite his distaste for the stuff. Sirius lobs it over near the towel so it’ll be within reach when they’re finished, lifts up to step over to the makeshift bed situation they’ve conjured for themselves, and reaches for Remus’s wrists, coaxing him to lay the fuck down so he can get over him already and get things started for him, and Remus must really need Sirius on him more than even let on for he’s on his back in no time, planting his heels into the dirt on either side of the towel to expressly encourage Sirius to get down in there, and cheers to the body talk; evergreen and damn near effortless at this point.

Sirius is down in between those inviting legs in no time, bracing himself on his knees to curl in over him and reach his left hand up to tug Remus into a reprisal kiss by the nape of his neck, and in keeping mindful of the time limit, dips his right hand down into those bright trunks and palms Remus’s already rather rigid situation, working it to full mast, kissing him soundly, making the most of this positioning while they have it.

The proof that Remus’s brain is simultaneously working tirelessly and living in the gutter at this point becomes quite difficult to ignore, especially when Remus isn’t hiding it one little bit; the first thing he does is try to kick his right leg out straight to tug the beach bag to him via the straps and while he did swimmingly with that exact manoeuvre just yesterday, this time around the bag ends up proving a bit uncooperative.

Sirius gives a parting palming from the base to the tip of Remus’s cock and tugs his hand out of the front of his trunks, reaching back to help tug the beach bag he so needs to have near him just now. “You didn’t see me throw the sanitizer over?” he smirks, depositing the beach bag nearer to Remus on the ground.

“I sure did, but that’s not what I’m trying for here,” Remus trades him, diving his left hand into the bag and fishing around in there before pulling their mini, to-go bottle of lube out of there.

Sirius blinks at least thrice before finding the wits needed to control his eyelids and visibly parse what Remus is up to. He can’t be asking for a fuck now, there’s no way; he’s the one who made plain they couldn’t go that far, and while Sirius can bounce back for a second go rather quickly, he’s not a miracle worker here so what he’d be expected to bone Remus with would be a piece of information he’d love to know, but then Remus makes himself pretty clear on what and how he wants it. He pushes the bottle into Sirius’s right hand, plants his palms down on either side of the towel the moment he has both of them free, and hoists his hips up off the ground in the cumulatively narrow space Sirius’s body is providing him, keeping his lower half elevated and ready for Sirius to finish up with his gape-grinning and do something with the expressed invitation he’s just been given.

Once Sirius has made his honour fully known via a set of prayerful hands and a bow, he curls up to perch on his haunches, squeezing himself enough lube out of the bottle for a solid three-finger extravaganza and tossing the bottle onto the beach bag to free up his left hand, wrenching Remus’s trunks down to the mid-calf range. He scoots down Remus’s body with it, moves to lay on his front between Remus legs, and uses his knees for balance as he bows inward to lick a stripe up the underside of Remus’s cock, reaching his right hand around the back of Remus to get it right into position, an achievement made so much easier with the help of Remus’s eagerly elevated hips.

Despite Sirius’s absolute support in this venture — one that Remus initiated, at that — the moment he breaches him, Remus pulls in and lets out a breath so alive with gratitude, it has Sirius a man on a fucking mission: while he might’ve loved to take his time here, there’s something undeniably erotic and inspiring about the urgency that’s encompassing every one of their movements, about the challenge of getting Remus all worked up and in a tizzy, about luring him into asking for more either vocally or bodily in such a short window of time, but Sirius is nothing if not a challenge-happy lad.

As Remus does have some control afforded to him via his positioning, Sirius keeps to a slow, encouraging caress going on the underside of Remus’s right hip with his free hand, curls his lips over his teeth and opens his throat for him, and puts the pressure he’s driving Remus nuts with back there to good use, urging him to have at it with the crook of his fingers and inciting him to use those braced hands and those writhing hips of his to ride up on Sirius's mouth with every new, relentless crook of his fingers, and if Sirius weren’t already involved in a love affair with Remus’s voice, hearing those wanton whines and hitched pitches out here on the hilltop while he drives back down on Sirius's fingers only to pump back up on his mouth might’ve knocked him straight into love with it, but instead he gets to fall in deeper and what a treat that is.

It’s neither of their faults that time starts getting a bit blurry; Remus is busy riding him like a bull and Sirius is quite busy driving him senseless while spiritedly egging the bull-riding on, so neither one of them can really take the blame for not quite hearing the alarm going off until the both of them pause short in the same beat; Remus putting a stark pause on the urgings he’s giving him with that voice, Sirius quitting all the humming he’s doing around him to better listen up as they both look toward it.

“Can you check,” Remus puts out, his voice deliciously hoarse.

Sirius pulls his mouth off his cock at once. “‘Course,” he echoes, tugging his fingers out in one go and scooting over to the doorframe on his knees to peek out at the situation, but by mercy, it’s just them and tower up on this here clearing, and that has him singing Remus the update. “Bonus round.

“Turn that off and get back here, then,” Remus returns, a bit stuck where he is to be of any real help just now.

Sirius snickers his whole way over to silence the ring and back over to him, resuming position and starting right where he left off, and Remus lights right back up, that much is true, but it becomes quite apparent another minute on from there that Remus may well be in some kind of hazed trance or moment of utter flippancy from for he opens his throat and urges Sirius on like they’re not inside a centuries-old tower on a cliff range in the Welsh countryside, but back home, in one of their rooms, and no one else but Sirius there wanting to hear him lose his cool. To be clear — Sirius wants to hear it happen here, to the point that he considers this event something to mark as Significant, but he wants it mostly for Remus, who looks and sounds like a man feeling every bit of himself and what’s getting done to him.

They don’t need the full bonus round, as it is. Somewhere around the five-minute mark, Sirius counts all three of Remus’s warning signs and ramps it all up, keeping a sharp, merciless pound going with his fingers, and, as a result of that, ends up taking over the job up front the moment he feels Remus’s legs give out both beside and behind him; he lifts up on the hold he’s got around the back of Remus’s right hip and gives his neck a hell of a workout, but it'll all be worth it if he can encourage Remus to leave the rest up to him, and Remus mostly does let Sirius have the room and freedom to go at him relentlessly, but he takes a metric tonne of his upper-body weight over onto his right arm to both keep his hips held off the ground and free up his left hand to sink it into Sirius’s hair for what'll be a glorious finish and Godspeed, Remus; you have at those locks.

Sirius plans on waiting for a signal to take his mouth off of Remus, but until he sees it, he’s going to give him that sweet, sweet warmth, roll his tongue and crook his fingers against him, and watch Remus savour each second of it, keeping it all coming until Remus slips his hand from his hair and gives a tapping caress over Sirius’s jawline to suggest he's had everything his body will feasibly allow of this, and while he’s not got a great shot of his eyes from behind those sunnies, Sirius has to think they’re reduced to easy, spent slits by the lopsided grin Remus is sending him from up there.

Sirius pulls off jim, gives a kiss to Remus’s inner thighs in turn as he hoists up to his knees, and tugs his fingers out from behind him, using his free hand to grab for the sanitizer and give himself a glob of it before waggling it at Remus.

Remus nods but bids it to wait a few. “There are tissues in the bag, pass 'em up?"

“Sneaky genius,” Sirius calls him, going on a hunt for them and procuring a packet from the beach bag fairly quickly from there.

Given that there are only three left in the packet, Remus gets himself cleaned up and returns them to the plastic, folding it in two and sticking it into the wee pocket on the inside of the beach bag. “If I somehow forget those ar ein there, remind me to toss them when we get down near the bins,” he bids, accepting a glob of sanitizer off of Sirius and not even making a face for the gooey film that’ll encase his hands, but that could have to do with the fact that he just got rocked and besides, he'll have water to rinse them off in due time.

“Deal,” Sirius trades him, tossing the sanitizer and lube back in the beach bag before setting on his knees between Remus’s thighs once again, beaming down on him and getting a little, impish trill-and-smile combo out of Remus for it.

From there, they help each other to their respective feet and set about reorganizing themselves, but kudos to them for keeping their stuff relatively organized save for the towel Sirius is currently trying and failing to roll back up the way Remus had it. “Here, let me,” the boy snickers, moving across the far side of the towel from him.

Sirius smiles his way through his huffing and puffing so his frustration at not being able to get it done won’t seem entirely petty, pushing himself to his feet and moving toward the doorframe to have a spectator’s glance out of it; a couple of hikers wearing some extremely matching cargo shorts coming up the clearing, and Sirius sees a unique opportunity manifesting before him.

“Someone’s coming,” he hisses vastly, turning round and zooming for his share of the bags.

“How close?” Remus blurts out, scooting over to stuff the too-well-rolled towel back in the duffel.

Sirius smirks up a storm. “They're at the narrow part,” he supplies, hoisting his bags onto his shoulders.

“Oh, fuck you,” Remus sighs out, reaching for his mobile before hoisting the duffel off the ground with a much more laxed tug.

“Well, they’re close enough,” Sirius defends, but his goon-grin is giving him completely away.

Remus huffs once at him, lifting his grocery bag off of the ground. “And by the time they get over here, the most we’re going to look like is a pair of blokes having a looksie around the top of the clearing; whoop-de-dee,” he returns, but that’s got Sirius giving into a sublime cackle.

What’s worse is Remus isn’t done taking the piss out of the situation, leaving the tower with his camera up and wandering off to the right with a touristy, ooh, ahh, eee energy about him and making it all the harder for Sirius to breathe as he follows after him, but he supposes a bloke taking pictures while another bloke snickers up a storm in the distance wouldn’t be all that interesting to a pair of hikers anyway.

There’s a friendly, country vibe to the passing nods that are shared as the two pairs of traversers pass each other along the clearing and then they’re officially past the point of needing to act like goony tourists, Remus going and putting his mobile back in the beach bag while Sirius chooses to keep his out and grab a quick snap of Remus loping along the grass in with the easiest, spent, and unbothered air about him. He sandwiches it between his right hip and the waistband of his trunks for easy access in case another stellar shot manifests itself in front of him, but for now, watching Remus looking easy-breezy is a lovely sight indeed with or without a lens.

It’s another minute before either of them tries for speech and the first of them to give it a go is Remus after a deep, thoughtful inhale of fresh, gorgeous air. “I really think this might be the best — no, best, and dare I say, sexiest I’ve ever felt,” he shares aloud, and thank the good Cunt that he did.

Sirius staggers to a stop on the grass, flailing his hands around before cupping them around his mouth and aiming a shout at the sky, he’s just that overcome with the admittance, and there Remus goes, snickering up ahead of him and doing a little jig even, so apparently Sirius reacted perfectly and that in itself is bloody well perfect.

He zooms to catch up, making sure to bop Remus in the arse with his right knee as he gets to him. “Talk to me, talk to me,” he onsists, needing elaboration like he needs air, and that’s saying something.

“Well, I mean, I did just get finger-blasted and blown in Abreiddey tower, which is getting sexier the more that I think about it,” Remus maintains, going for a shoulder-shimmy that could bowl Sirius down if he weren’t so keen on hearing him talk about it, “but it’s bigger than just that, it’s everything that led up to us finally getting to have each other like we did, you know; from the moment I woke up to this one right here, today’s just been building toward finally getting each other alone even for a little bit, but it never felt rushed?”

“Yeah, yeah; I felt that building and brewing all day,” Sirius needs to say, needs him to hear it. “Keep going, I just wanted you to know I was right there with you the whole time.”

“And boy, do I fucking know that, but it’s so you to make sure I did,” Remus lobs him, coming in hot for a double smooch to Sirius’s right cheekbone before straightening up again. “It’s like all through the day I've felt like we're officially at our best; I don’t even know how to explain it, really.”

“Sure you can, you just got to give it a go,” Sirius trades him, going in hot for a double smooch to Remus’s left cheekbone.

Remus breathes in long, humming for it. “Well, thanks to the six-hour nap kip we accidentally took and somehow still managing to fall back to sleep in fairly decent time considering we could’ve been up until first light, it’s almost as if we were given an actual, real break from the powers that be and rewarded with the gift of extended sleep,” he frames it. “To that, I woke up feeling incredibly well-rested, if slightly confused as to where you’d gone off to once I realized I was inarguably alone in the room, but I checked in with you and heard back right away so I just figured you’d gone down for a puff or to grab some morning cups from the kitchen—”

“Wish I had done that, frankly,” Sirius slides in there.

Remus smirks once, shaking his head for it. “It was a fleeting, naive little thought that passed through my roused mind and then once you got up there, the morning cups were the furthest thing from it,” he maintains. “But then, as much as it was gutting to see you like that, it meant a lot, how open you were, how much you laid bare with me, and then, as hard a conversation as that one was for you both and how exhausted you looked from it, I felt like I could see some weight lifted off of you; I'd done what I could to take some more of it off of you and onto me, but I don’t know—”

“Mm, no buts; I do know,” Sirius comes in, smiling sidelong at him. “You did just that.”

Remus swishes the point of his lips back and forth for a beat or two. “Well, then, that's perfect because we then have my huge explosion outside the inn to infer to, but namely how quick you were to deescalate that and how much of me you took on inside the Healing Truck,” he takes it. “And as rough as that conversation was to have, you were so kind and patient with me even when I’d try to put a wall up; you’d just flick it right back down with substantial ease and keep at it, like it was all in a day’s work.”

“As it was, is, and will be,” Sirius trades him, sending a smooch through the air at him.

Remus lifts his left middle and forefinger to his smiling lips to send one right on back to him. “I left that truck feeling more seen and heard by you yet, and you know that’s saying something,” he maintains, and boy, does that have Sirius trilling his affirmation. “And then, as you well know, things could’ve gone downhill real quick with what went on in that grocery, but you took it all in devastating stride and saw me the whole way through it; see the theme I’m going for here?”

“Mhm, I do,” Sirius echoes, smiling keenly at him. “What about you, though? It's been a little while now; has the dust settled on the experience any?”

Remus breathes in long, taking to a lopsided smile from there. “Well, it’s like this: I had way more fun in there than I even realized at the time, so I’ll give it that; it was fun and—”

“Sexy,” Sirius valley-voices.

“Well, the bag-pass certainly was, yes,” Remus trades.

“Not just,” Sirius grins.

“No, not just,” Remus allows, fighting a grin of his own. “It’s still a bit bizarre to think all that it took place at the grocery, but—”

Sirius shoots a smirk through his nose. “OK, is the setting really that tough to swallow?” he raises.

Remus clicks his tongue once, but that smile of his just keeps showing up. “OK, but to understand where I’m coming from, you’re just going to have to separate the way we have and continue to flirt when we’re inside of any shoppable environment because you and I are something else,” he maintains, and Sirius shimmies for it when that part certainly has its merit. “Us aside, yes, it's a bit strange to think that a thing like that occurred at the grocery, in the produce section, via the lad working it.”

Sirius falls into a lustrous wheeze for that. “Remus, this isn’t even the strangest thing to happen to you at the grocery this week,” he puts up.

Remus gives out a righteous pfft for that. “Well, when you put it like, you do have a certain kind of point,” he gives him, swiping his right wrist through the sheen on his forehead.

“Mhm, mhm, the grocery is simply a lawless place for you; the moment you walk through the doors, all bets are off,” he retains, sticking the tip of his tongue between his teeth, and Remus has it in him to both whinge and snicker over his plight; that’s a good lad. “In general though, someone getting their flirt on really isn't the sort of thing that’s exclusive to a café, pub, or club setting, there are simply no bounds to where a flirty situation can take place; these things happen all the time, in all sorts of settings, and there’s nothing strange about what went on in there no matter how you stack it.”

Remus breathes in, breathes out idly. “I appreciate the determination you have for not letting me feel strange in any way, shape, or form, I really do,” he puts down first, but there’s evidently more on the way and very, very soon, “but I still feel like expecting a flirty situation to take place at the grocery would be a lot like expecting one to happen at the post office; does that put the oddity of it into perspective?”

Sirius breathes in, puffing it into his cheeks before he lets it back out with a tight hum. “Well, not fully, when I’ve had a flirty situation or two take place at the post office, but in general, I think I do,” he supplies. “It’s the mundane, day-to-day, rote aspect of the location that’s the biggest hurdle to step over; that it?”

Remus hums to affirm that is more or less the case, but he's backtracked a bit once he speaks. “The post office?” he puts up. "Really?"

Sirius gives up a bright laugh. “Post office, grocery, pharmacy, the bank certainly; there's a specific kind of excitement to sending or receiving a little extra something-something in the middle of what would be a typical, rudimentary visit to any one of those places,” he puts up, loping easily along the clearing when Remus doing that is utterly inspiring him to do it, too. “I mean, think about it, those are just spots that people more or less have to stop in at, right? People coming and going, minute-by-minute interactions, and of course it's mundane, but that also means that if a person of interest walks in then it's a break from the monotony, same if you’re the person of interest walking into that setting, just wanting to get the errand over with, and the clerk turns out to be right fox, and there can be a sense of immediacy in sending a signal to someone who you may never see again, and there’s a definite thrill in sending or receiving a signal underneath a bunch of other people’s noses; I mean, there’s all sorts of moving parts to that kind of thing, in my opinion at least.”

Remus gives up a big ol’ breath there, humming a low note there. “Well, I hadn’t thought of it like that, but I think I do see what you mean — especially that last point," he registers. "That one might've rang a little too true for me."

Sirius mhm’s him right back for it. "Hit you right where you live, I did,” he gets him.

Remus hums a stark note for it. “Still, I can’t imagine myself ever being so — well, so much of a Bold Boy that I’d just go for it in that kind of setting," he puts up. "If I thought the clerk was being served by were a right fox or if I was the clerk serving someone I thought was one major fox, I’d think it and quip at them until I got myself out of there or the fox left.”

Sirius snorts deeply for that one. “Well, sure, quipping's your go-to, but it's also a huge part of your charm,” he raises him. “You can't possibly know it when you're not a mind reader, but you’ve really no idea the number of people who’ve interacted with you across a counter and finished up with you thinking, ‘Shit, he’s funny, too? Mmm-boy.’”

Remus gives a quick trill in his throat. “'Too?'” he trades him.

“Well, guaranteed there’s no just way to count how many people out there who’ve interacted with you and thought that face was something out of a magazine,” Sirius retains. “And then, he opens his mouth and quips come out of it? 'Put me down,' they’ll say; 'that’s not fair,' they’ll say.”

Remus snorts long for it, making a wonky as he turns round to start the climb back down the cliff that got them up here, and Sirius stands at the ledge, looming down on him with a pointed set of lips. “Oh, you may think I’m exaggerating for effect here, that’s just how I talk and you know that well,” he sends down to him. “Frankly, you have proof of two people over the course of just today who've thought both your face and the quips that came from of it were adorable, so you’re outnumbered on this one, babey, and I'm not sorry to say it.”

Remus sends a huff back up to him that’s not even half as effective as his typical huffs, so he’s not all that bothered by any of this which, frankly, is something Sirius is going to go ahead and file away as important, something to chew on further when he's got the chance to really sink his teeth into it. For now, he waits for Remus to get down to the trail below, thinking he’d want Sirius not to rush the process and start climbing down while he’s still trying to, and climbs down when it’s all clear, getting to about three-quarters of the way down before dropping down to his feet and sticking the landing by making a ‘Y’ formation with his arms.

“How’d you like that, sweets?” he raises, turning his head to Remus while he keeps in with the pose.

“I’d have liked it more if the sea weren’t right the fuck there, but hey,” Remus trades him.

Sirius drops his arms and goes after Remus teeth-first, ready to gnaw on the first piece of skin he can get at on that snarky little lad, but Remus is, in fact, too speedy with the escape for he scoots up the trail and away from him with hardly any effort. If Sirius were thinking at all — like at all — he might’ve not chased after him with a gnomish snicker coming out through his snapping teeth, but while Remus is snickering up a storm as he makes a fast left at the fork in the path, the three new hikers that turn the corner toward them don’t seem to know what to do with this deranged, teeth-baring bloke scuttling after another bloke.

Remus straightens up with a sniff upon noticing them, switches to an idle stroll as he passes them on the right, and makes a perfect path for Sirius to scuttle along after him seeing as the hikers three don’t seem to want to get too, too close the biter-man. “Maybe I should do everything teeth-first?” Sirius raises, skipping up on Remus’s left with a lofty air. “People would give me way more of a berth than they ever normally do.”

“I would suggest not; that was funny this time, but it won’t be the fortieth,” Remus trades him, garnering a bork of a laugh out of Sirius for it. “What happened at the bank, then?”

“Hm?” Sirius trades him, pushing his hair back and out of his face.

“Well, I already know whom was at the bank,” Remus raises idly, but with quite the pointed smile on display. “What I don’t know, is what happened there and why the bank would’ve got the ‘certainly’ over any of those other examples you gave up there for errand-specific settings.”

Sirius has to think back a little bit, but the context clues given ahead of time do help him sort the specifics out. “You know, it didn’t really need the ‘certainly’ now that I think of it, and honestly, not the best example of what I was trying to go for there,” he trades him. “I should’ve said the registry; that story was cute.”

“OK, bookmark that,” Remus bids, taking to a bit of a valley-voice of his own from there, “but what happened at the bank, Sirius?”

Sirius huffs once. “Nothing wild happened in the building itself, Remus,” he sends him. “Just a lot of unavoidable tension and plenty of signals sent my way in the room, which are actually the only two details that would even be relevant to my whole point, which is that your situation back there with Produce Lad simply wasn't some bizarre, rare occurrence that mistakenly happened to you inside of an errand-specific location.”

Remus gives him a sweet, sweet smile. “Well, thank you again, Sirius, but what did happen in the room?” he chimes.

Sirius huffs once more for good measure, but even he knows he’s being a little too close to the chest with it and making it seem way more nefarious than it always was. “OK, first of all, he was a financial advisor and probably still is, but I say he’s a banker because, frankly, everyone in that building is nothing but a banker to me,” he trades him. “I’d taken a meeting with this particular advisor that I’d been recommended, just wanting to set up plans and get some proper advice on where to put and what to even do with a rather sudden windfall, it was a lot of coin for someone who hadn’t seen a ton of physical money in his time to just suddenly have access to, and so, I was in his office, the tension was just alive in the room with us, and there really wasn’t much room to question it; his words were all very business as usual, but his eyes were saying a lot, lot more than his words were, and half, if not most of the fun of it was the fact that we were having a war of heated gazes over the desk in his office while discussing just about the least sexy topic on the planet: bonds.”

Remus goes into smirk after smirk, each new one stronger than the last until he forces himself to get it together. “OK, well, I’m really in it now,” he probes.

Sirius breathes in long, trying to think back to any sort of juicy or at least useful details about the appointment on that chilly morning way back in September, but it takes a full squint to locate some details that’d be worthwhile. “Alright, well, I do remember that closer to the end of that meeting, I spotted him scrawl something on a post-it and stick it to the inside flap of my file folder, but then he went and scrawled something else on a new note and passed that one over his desk to me, saying it was the extension number for his office and if I had any further questions, concerns, or needed anything at all, then I shouldn’t hesitate for a second to use it, and when the meeting was over, we shared a quick, heated handshake over his desk and he escorted me along on my way out even though I could’ve very easily found the exit having walked right in through the front doors already, but that was just fun to watch him do just to keep it going just a little longer, and then while I was riding the tube back, I remembered the first post-it, opened the folder up, and there his personal number was—”

Remus cuts in there, striking a championed right fist into the air. “Yes, saw that one coming,” he gives, psyched about it.

Sirius puts up a pronounced pfft as they come out from the rock-walled trail and into the green. “Yeah, looking back, it’s just not as smooth as I took it to be at the time, but hey, live and learn, right,” he puts up, and Remus hums a melodic echo for it. “All that goes to show, flirty situations can and do take place in even the stuffiest of environments.”

“I am taking that away from this, yes,” Remus echoes, but the smile on his face tells Sirius plainly that he’s not finished getting the deets, "but alright, so walk me through what came of that post-it number, hm?”

“You well know what came of it,” Sirius maintains, tooching his lips out.

“Mm mm, really just one, big ol’ detail that still gets me weak in the knees to think about,” Remus maintains, “but on that note, don’t you want to make me even weaker in the knees just by telling me more of the lead up to your grand scale oh no, oh fuck moment? I know I’d love whatever you'll spare me.”

Sirius spares him a Look, but honestly, weak-kneed Remus is some of the best Remus. “Fine, but only for you and your knees,” he chimes, and the boys splays his hands beneath his chin in thanks. “So, I called the number that night—”

“Oh, out the gate?” Remus comments.

“Listen, he was fit and smelt good — like, good-good," Sirius instils, "so I thought, 'why not, I’ll give him a whirl' and then proceeded to completely blow it that same night.”

“It or him,” Remus quips.

“Both, both, very both,” Sirius trades. “I mean, I won't knock the man’s stamina or his performance; he did good work, I did good work, but I couldn’t get your face or voice or quippy, mouthy, ‘tudey essence out of my head, so there I went, working hard to bat you back from my focus so I could, you know, make the bloke come and all, so I brought him to town first—”

“Naturally,” Remus slips in there, the good, sweet lad.

“Mhm, thank you,” Sirius trades him, “and then, as you well know, I headed for straight town myself, but there you came along again, only this time he was you, you were he, and I was so frustrated that I just went with it, shut my eyes and let him be you, and there was an earth-shattering crescendo with your name on it; how’re those knees?”

“Having trouble,” Remus reports, but those shoulders are a-shimmying, and hey, at least he could give him that. “Did you really take a break after that? I'm not doubting that you couldn't, I just — I don't know, I'd understand if there was some part of you, throughout that increasingly frustrating fall season, might've thought, ‘well, he’s not interested clearly, that thickhead; why shouldn’t I go somewhere else—'”

“Well, first of all, I’d never have called you a thickhead, even to myself,” Sirius puts down first, “and second, one could easily say I took a sabbatical because it’d be very true; I mean, it was embarrassing and I didn’t want it to happen to me again, but apart from that, I wanted you, plain and simple, and a lot of my focus went to achieving that, and then, funny that, the second I realized I was better off having you around than sulking about not having you under me, I got you.”

Remus breathes in long. “Like the stag you stopped waiting for,” he ties it back. “What’d I say? I think that love analogy was pretty good, overall.”

Sirius nods his immense agreement. “Your dad backed you up on that one, too," he slips him. "And boom, there he was; large and looming, eyes boring into me, my soul, and I, hooves planted far apart—”

“My dad doesn’t have hooves,” Remus puts in, lookin’ so proud of that one, and good, he should be; Sirius breaks into a batch of silent snickers, stopping still on the grass to fly his right hand at him.

“See, that’s the shit you and your expertly-sculpted, pretty little face say to randos at the till, every damn day you’re on shift, and you think I’m the only one on the entire planet who could find your dad jokes endearing?” he puts up. “Please, I’m not unique in that regard.”

Remus huffs once, but he closes it out with the warmest of smiles, so that’s some more fuel for the file folder. “What about the registry,” he bids him. “You said it was cute.”

“Well, I thought it was, but you tell me,” Sirius prefaces. “This one would be a more compatible tale to yours than the bank one was, anyway; I was in there getting my license done up which, in and of itself, not the most exciting reason to be out and about, but for me? I was walking on air, so close to having it after years of wanting, finally carrying the funds to get the motorcycle to go with the license, not just have a card that says I could physically achieve driving if I only had the wheels, and Priscilla was just, just over the horizon and much closer than I’d have seen ‘er coming to me, but on top of that, l'alloween was coming up, so let’s just say a very excited Sirius strolld into the registry that day.”

“Well, this is already cute,” Remus registers, a light, knowing smile about him.

“Glad to hear it,” Sirius passes him. “And shouting ‘Remus’ at someone who wasn’t Remus had already happened so I was not out there looking, let's just say that, but while I was in there the cute clerk I got happened to be very engaging with me, so rather than go sit down over in the waiting area, I just hung out there, arms on the counter, leaning over it just a little, feelin’ myself, feelin' him feelin' me, feelin' the energy he was giving, and the more I hung out there, giving my information along, getting the picture done up and all that, the more I was glad I'd hung about, and when all was said and processed, I walked out of there with a license on the way to me in the mail and a nice lil’ pick-me-up to guide my strut along the sidewalk.”

“Ooh, and it ends with a strut,” Remus fawns.

“Oh, you know I was strutting my stuff,” Sirius trills, wearing it.

Remus brings in a big ol’ breath. "Kudos to you for being able to tell a registry clerk had been flirting something fierce with you; I'd have never seen it," he trades him, letting his exhale out through a shake of his head. "I think I'm just prepositioned to find the idea of that sort of thing happening in real life via a boy to be dismaying to say the least and highly unlikely to say the most, but you’ve officially knocked the oddity of the setting out of the way for me, so good job, you; in general, you've just been great about this, like bouncing around with a racket and tossing back any kind of doubts or nerves I’ve cycled through.”

Sirius’ll take it, and he does so with a charmed, chuffed note because that's some impeccable positive reinforcement right there, but he can’t just let the rest of that go so easily. “Well, OK, I’m of two minds with the prepositioning; on the one, I’m a bit sad it took you until the ripe age of twenty-three to realize you’d been lied to and made to think that queer people aren’t everywhere and situations like your grocery tale don’t happen out in the wild all the time," he holds up, left hand in the air before he trades it off with his right one, "but on the other, you’re definitely still you so I’d be able to make the case that you’ve already had scores of smiles and second-glances sent your way that you didn’t catch, flirty situations you were in that you explained away as nothing more than a bit of friendly banter, touches that lingered longer than necessary that you'd gone ahead and assumed were accidents, and I’m not just talking about with him or even all the signals I sent your way that you completely missed or explained away; I’m sure that’s been the case for you long before I ever strutted onto the scene.”

“Well, you were a shock to my entire system, but yeah, it went way, way back before that,” Remus lets him have. "I'd grown up quite used to feeling like I was always going to be on the outside looking in on everyone else; I wasn't meant to have the meet-cutes the rest of my peers got to, but then again, even while I knew the chances were slim to none, there twere times find myself speaking with a cute boy who'd come in while I was working and wondering what it'd be like if he, brushed a finger of mine while handed him something from one of the locked cabinets or passed him back his change, and then maybe he’d give me a smile with it so I’d know he meant to do it, but how funny is that? In what world would I have believed it if he had? I'd get caught up in those fleeting, seemingly farfetched fantasies, but I wasn't looking, not really; I wasn’t paying attention for it, I’d have completely batted the moment away if one had happened, and we know that because — well.

“It happened to you via a produce lad over a little pill bottle of toothpicks and you still weren't quite sure if he'd meant to do it,” Sirius comes in.

Exactly," Remus echoes, finger-snapping sidelong at him. “And imagine if I hadn't had you there to point out what was happening before that point? Hardly believed a word you said, I know, but if you hadn’t given me the scoop when you did, I might’ve read the sexy bag-pass as a weird moment where I held onto the bag too long, not him.”

Sirius hoots his way down the trail, finding that to be the most accurate of hypotheticals that could’ve transpired back there. “Well, hey, good news is, it wasn't an outlier experience, no matter how much it might feel like one and it wasn't just a one-time thing no matter how you slice it,” he instils, smiling knowingly. “Chances are far more likely that a version of what happened there already happened to you well before you had me beside you pointing it all out and hooting at every turn, but chances are just as likely you're going to turn more and more heads wherever you go; you’ll wow somebody else one day just by walking into their little work kingdom and being your cute, quippy self, and if we can find a way to let it be the picker-upper that sort of thing can be, to recognize your charisma rather than just refute it, to embrace all you've got going for you rather than insist you accidentally ended up with someone else's fortune in your hands, just imagine how much more in-tune with yourself you’re going to be?"

Remus brings in a breath that sure seems to take up full capacity of his lungs before it's back out again through a sigh of near-relief. “Sirius,” he breathes, sending him an intense smile sidelong, one that’s got joy, stillness, and a bit of that devotion thing in it.

“Your sense of self is improving all the time, Remus," Sirius takes it. "Literally all the time, so it's only ever going to go up from here; no way it's going downhill while I'm around, I'll say that.”

Remus swishes the point of his lips back and forth. “You really think that? Or are we just—”

Boy, are you kidding me?” Sirius cuts in. “The difference between you now versus when I met you? Staggering stuff. You’re still you, which is perfect because that’s going to get you far, believe me, but you look taller, you're carrying yourself better, and the breaking news that you brought back home and the support you and me have gotten as a result has been a huge part of what's got you looking so good; today has clearly been revolutionary for you in several ways, but you’ve been at work with yourself since long before today, this month, this year, even; there are parts to you that are unrecognizable from the bloke I met last fall and that’s just over the course of barely a year, Remus? Think of where you’ve left to go from here.”

Remus reworks his mouth around a newer, more pointed twist. “Well, this right here is a perfect example of what and who has been the driving force of all that,” he holds up.

“Mm mm,” Sirius denies, or half-denies, more like. “Listen, I’m more than happy to take some of the credit here, don’t get me wrong; I know I’ve helped you see yourself better and I know I’m still helping with it, but give credit where credit’s due, Monsieur. You’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting here, and sure, maybe I’ve held a few things for you when your arms have been a bit too full, maybe I’m part of what’s fanning your flames when they’re flickering low or towering high, and maybe I am your hype man even in the moments when you can barely stand yourself so it feels like I'm the one that's carrying you through it, but I can’t do it all myself and I haven’t been; I’m just here clapping, fawning, shouting up at the sky while I get to watch you make more room for yourself on this pretty rock.”

Remus stalls to a full stop, taking a spectator’s glance around the two of them, and that has Sirius doing the same thing, realizing they’ve made it all the way back down to the first lookout point with that idyllic lagoon staring right back up at them; Remus leans in and putting his face in between Sirius and the lagoon before putting his whole body between them, kissing him full and shooting this spot onto the list of important places where Remus has chosen bravery over seclusion. The lingering embrace Remus has him locked into is as full and weighted as their kiss had been and letting him go is almost painful for Sirius to do once he realizes Remus is slipping back from him, but that absolute king looks to Sirius with a smile twitching at his lips, breathes in long as he begins a backwards walk toward the left, and beckons Sirius to follow with two very theatrical hands and little wind of his hips.

“Come on, we’re almost there,” he entices, luring him along, and please, as if Sirius isn’t following along after him like he’s the serpent to Remus's elusive charmer.

That said, he’s not so hypnotized that he isn’t going to get right up on Remus and quietly urge him with two gentle hands on his waist to turn and face forward to head the rest of the way back down the sloped trail. “Loving this display so please keep the liturgical dancing up, but we don’t want you falling and breaking your crown, now do we,” he comments, and Remus smirks, shoots him a smooch through the air, and leads the way down the sloped trial with some liturgical arm-dancing on display, signalling to Sirius with a sharp, theatrical point that they’ll be taking a hard right when they get to the bottom of the slope.

To that, the bottom of this section of the hill gives them back the trail they first started out on, but it’s a lane big enough for two people to comfortably traverse so Sirius sure does move up on Remus’s left the moment he’s got the room to do it. “It’s so close I can taste it,” he insists, vibrating along the trail through his immense anticipation.

“Well, that makes sense when it’s just a couple minutes from here,” Remus trades him. “There’s even a little wooden footbridge we have to cross to get over to it; really puts an extra dose of whimsy to the place, I have to say.”

Sirius brings in a gasp to end them all. “Like a — like, one with an arch to it?” he raises.

“It’s got a curve going for it, yeah,” Remus slips him. “Like a little goat’s bridge from the storybooks, you know.”

Sirius gives a gleeful, intent trill in his throat. “I hope a goat lives under it,” he makes known.

“I don’t think there’s a goat, I’m sorry to say,” Remus relays.

“You are not sorry or you’d have kept that piece to yourself and let me live in my blissful naiveté,” Sirius sends him.

Remus smirks three times in quick succession, lifting his hands evasively from there. “OK, well, maybe there is a goat,” he puts up. “Maybe there’s even a whole goat family; what do I know?”

Sirius huffs through a goon grin. “There are no goats, Remus, this isn’t a storybook,” he flips it, pulling a direct cackle out of Remus for it, but not only that, he kicks his left leg out like he’s gonna trip him and Sirius scoots up the path only to very thinly avoid the toe of Remus's right shoe from getting him in the back of either one of his calves.

The footbridge is exactly as cute, arched, and storybook-oriented as Remus alluded to it being, taking them over a small creek that undoubtedly leads out to sea and depositing them onto another rather rocky surface on the other side, but Sirius is well-used to that kind of thing at this point and appreciates the pretty little pebbles he can spot here and there mixed in with the more rudimentary hunks of greyish rock.

Remus heads them over toward another huge wall of rock, only this one is the best they’ve seen yet for it has a sizeable opening right in the middle of it that leads out into the lagoon site, so in a very real way this is just an elaborate entry door and one Sirius quite appreciates. Remus stops just a few steps onto the scene, allowing for Sirius to slip up on his right and taking his new placement as a cue to speak out the right corner of his mouth like he’s got a secret for him.

“My favourite spot in this whole place is somehow free so I’m going to calmly stroll over that way and nab it before anyone gets the same bright idea,” he shoots him.

“Get it, get it,” Sirius goads, sending it out the left side of his mouth.

“I’m going, I’m going,” Remus trades him, going left and heading the way over down to the far side of the would-be beach area if there were much sand around, placing his bags down quite close to the opposite side of the very rock wall in which they came in through, and Sirius couldn’t love this spot more considering what it's already offering; they’ve got themselves a wall to bring up their rear and circumvent lagoon-goers from sitting right behind them, they’ve got themselves an area rather devoid of little rocks and pebbles, and they’ve got themselves a lovely view of the water, the jumpers up on the structures across the way, the towering cliffside, whole scene really, so it’s no wonder it comes in at Remus’s top spot.

“I get why this would be prime picking,” Sirius offers up. "Fewer rocks to deal with over here, a great vantage point for people-watching, the wall makes the chances of somebody coming up behind and spooking you quite impossible, and it could double as a leaning post should we want one.”

“And, you can’t know it while the tide is so very out at the moment, but once it comes back in, the water still won’t reach up where we are,” Remus puts in deeply, turning back to face him and speak a little lower down on his register, "whereas the Bufflord Bros over there are going to be hastily relocating themselves and all of their things in about an hour.”

He swipes his left wrist across his mouth while pointing idly toward the very beach boys from the road assembled in a circle drinking brewskis and chortling away while sitting right in the apparent uh-oh zone — which, honestly, is an utterly fitting turn of events, so fitting even that the corners of Sirius’s mouth turn up into what has to be a wily grin. “Let’s not warn the Bufflord Bros of that,” he poses.

“Wasn’t planning on it, but,” Remus offers, tapping twice on the tip of his nose with the forefinger on that same hand.

Sirius gives the tip of his own nose a double-tap in solidarity before dropping the straps of his bags down and into the clutches of his hands. “Where do you want these, boss?” he bids, holding the bags up to show.

“Well, near mine would be good, and if you’re alright with it, let’s just get our station set up and then we can go for a dip,” Remus trades him, stooping down to unzip the duffel bag.

Sirius takes in a tiny, enticed breath as he sets his own bags down next to Remus’s. “You’re coming in, too?”

“Well, I can’t promise I’ll be in there as long as you, but I’ll stay for at least a little bit,” Remus trades him, pulling their rolled-up towels out of the duffel, his own in his left hand, Sirius’s in his right one, and there’s a distinct smirk that makes his way onto his face as he tilts Sirius’s back and forth in his hand.

“Yeah, I’m not going to be able to look at it without smirking either,” Sirius echoes, giving in to a little shoulder shimmy.

Remus gives a light trill in his throat as he takes to looking around them. “What if, we put the picnic blanket down, reserve that for the food and our chilling spot, then we could lay the towels out on either side of that so we’ll have our little dry-off stations right nearby but still a bit separate from the food station, and then we could keep the quilts in the duffel and on-reserve in case we get a bit chilly at any point, which I certainly will," he envisions. "What do you think?”

“You’re a visionary,” Sirius says of it, making grabby hands at him. “Hand me my towel."

Remus lobs it at him with a smile only ever meant for Sirius on prime display, sets his own towel down for the meantime, and goes digging in the duffel for the checkered blanket, pulling it out of there with two careful tugs so to not throw the beautiful balance that the quilts remain a part of. Sirius holds onto his towel for now, scoots back and up against the wall to keep himself out of the immediate way, and allows for Remus to flap the blanket out to its fullest extent before laying it flat on the ground. From there, Sirius moves around to the far side of the blanket and claims the spot nearest to the waterfront as his dry-off station, figuring he’d enjoy the spot most and Remus would like it the least, and he's right about that presumption for Remus blows him the quickest air-smooch that could’ve easily been missed if Sirius weren’t paying attention, stepping back to flap his towel out and laying it down to the right of the picnic blanket.

“OK, I’m liking this,” Remus shares, giving a little clap of his hands and looking around at their things with a thoughtful expression while Sirius simply stays knelt where he is and watches him at it. “Mm! I almost forgot again, but ho-ho, not quite.”

Sirius breathes in once, eyes a-shone with a keen interest in this funny little lad. “Ho-ho,” he parrots, falling into a wee fit near-immediately when Remus takes to giving flipping him the bird with both his hands. Remus keeps those fingers up while he scoots himself over toward the wall, stops ahead of their beach bag sitting sandwiched between their grocery bags, and reaches in to procure the bug spray and sunscreen out of there, visually reminding Sirius that they do still need to get each other’s backs before they can consider themselves protected. “Oh, look at you, smart boy.”

Remus breathes in once, tosses the two bottles across the checkered blanket and more toward Sirius, and scoots over to join him over where he is. “D’you know what,” he puts up, “I held back on a pretty mean comment about myself in reply; how do you like that?”

Sirius goes for a bright gasp as he reaches to swipe the sunscreen off of the blanket. “Love that,” he registers.

“Thought you might,” Remus offers, tugging his shirt over his head and giving a bright pfft out in direct response to Sirius’s sharp, two-note whistle. “Classy as ever.”

“That’s me,” Sirius chimes, scooting closer on his knees and twirling his left forefinger to incite Remus to turn around and show him that back.

Remus reaches his right palm out for a glob to take with him, turning around while he spreads it out on his hands, and handles his chest region while Sirius gets Remus's back all nice and lathered. Once that's all taken care of, Sirius leaves the sunscreen aside and tugs the Henley off, entertaining plans for the final steps of his own application that he couldn't quite reach in the truck and doing things a lot like Remus did his when he does tend to have the right idea as far as time efficiency goes, but then he goes and gets himself quite distracted by the grand-scale hickey just chillin’ above his waistband on the right side of his navel, finding it staggeringly noticeable from above, and only then does he remember he's got one to match on his pulse point.

He looks up, finding Remus staring right back at him and, all in all, looking rather pleased with himself. “You common tart,” he gets him, trying to thwap Remus with his shirt, but he is again too wily with the escape, skirting around behind Sirius so that he can't reach him so well.

“You most unusual tart,” Remus returns him, snatching the shirt from Sirius’s grip only to lob it further ahead on the picnic blanket and quite out of reach.

They settle down enough to assume their revised roles, Sirius as the chest master, Remus as the back brigade, and work together under a tarty, communal silence until Sirius is fresh out of sunscreen on his hands and Remus gives two lasting pats to either side of his waist as a signal that he’s finished up with his back.

“I’m going to put our shirts in the duffel for now, so if you need yours at any point, you know where it’ll be,” Remus advertises, curling his left hand over Sirius’s left shoulder and using him as a tool to help him stand; a choice that both Sirius and his singing skin fully support.

“I’m not going to think of that thing again for literal hours, but thank you,” he trades him, turning round on the blanket and grabbing for the bug spray.

“Great news for me,” Remus calls it, moving to grab up both his and Sirius’s shirts and heading for the duffel.

Sirius spreads himself out nice n’ long over the picnic blanket, quite interested in getting himself caught up in a whirlwind of bug repellent. He covers his front nice and good, rest himself back on his tailbone, and pencils his left leg up into the air while curling his right one out straight ahead of him, aiming to get at the underside both legs with the spray nozzle. Remus finishes up with tucking their neatly-folded shirts away, lifts out of the crouched position he was in, and turns back toward him, veritably becoming a humanoid laughing fit at once.

“What’s funny?” Sirius raises, looking here, there, and everywhere while he sprays the shit out of his calves of his legs.

“You look like a praying mantis trying out yoga for the first time,” Remus supplies.

Sirius breaks there, briefly losing all concentration while weeding through the fresh bout of stitches he’s been tossed into before regaining enough composure to remember why it is he’s in this position right now. He tucks his knees more toward his chest, getting himself a prime angle on the both of his ankles when he is not — absolutely not — getting any one of those terrible ankle bites if it’s the last thing he does.

It’s not the last thing he does for he still has to get the tops of his feet and then he gets the bottom of them both just to be extra safe, but he thinks he’s going to need Remus’s help to reach his back for his flexibility can really only help so much. “Can you help me out?” he bids, reaching the spray bottle around to psh-psh blindly at the small of his back and showcasing his meagre reach.

Remus moves on over to him, crouches down behind him to nab the bottle out of his hand, and takes over from where Sirius left off, spritzing from the small of his back up to the tops of his shoulders with an extra spray at the nape of his neck. “Alright, I think you’re quite set now,” he reports, lifting up to stand.

“Thanks much,” Sirius chimes, getting up off the blanket and turning around to nab the bottle back so he can personally handle getting Remus all spritzed up.

A new tarty, communal silence falls upon the pair of them while Sirius lays spritzes up and down Remus's neck, chest, and up and down his arms, Remus following after the spritzings and rubbing the film into his skin, at least until he has an airy observation to make. "This is nice, if a tad more low-effort on my part than I'd been expecting."

“Why should the prince have to work so hard, hm?” Sirius puts up, spritzing Remus's navel. “Let the spritzing come to him, I say.”

Remus smirks twice as he rubs that in, breathes in a slight breath once he's done that, and speaks again as Sirius is moving down to a crouch to get a better angle on these beanpole legs. “I feel like we might have to strike a deal that you only refer to me as ‘the prince’ in private,” he puts up. “Or relative-privacy, like in this case.”

“And why should I, first of all?” Sirius trades him, psh-psh-ing over the fronts of Remus’s thighs.

Remus gives up a snicker that comes right from the boy’s chest. “Uhh, because the moment any one of our mates hears that spoken aloud, they’re going to lose their minds and heckle me through to the end of my days?” he raises him. “Could you imagine what James would do with that? I sure can.”

Sirius breathes in once, considering it. “OK, two things: every one of those mates has already referred to you as something like a sweet prince at least once in your company and in your absence,” he puts up, spritzing over the fronts of Remus’s calves legs, “and James already calls you pet names more often than he doesn’t.”

Remus gives up a pointed trill. “Mhm, yeah, but I wouldn’t put it past him to never call me Remus again in my life if he catches wind of this being a thing we do,” he trades him. “I need him not to know about it above anyone else, but it won’t do well to pretend Lily wouldn’t coo and start using it herself; she’s not to be overlooked as a trickster just because she’s nice.”

“To you, maybe,” Sirius gets in there, huffing in reply to Remus’s own, stark huff. “Oh, come on; you practically laid the carpet down for me and I’m not expected to walk on it?”

“The point; have you located it?” Remus raises, tilting his head as he looms over Sirius.

Bit dangerous for Remus to assert himself while Sirius is down here, but nevertheless, the point is very much available to him. “I can work with a no-James-and-Lily rule, but Pete could be a tough ask, I’d think,” he trades him, making sure to get Remus’s feet good and covered so the skeeters won’t even think of swarming ‘em. “I mean, in fairness, he has to know he’s signing up for a lot by agreeing to be my roomie, and he’s bound to see and overhear a ton of our isms just by being around the place more permanently, but that also means he may just hear that one because I like calling you ‘the prince,’ I do; it’s accurate, got a nice ring to it, rolls off the tongue easy, and I’ve actually been holding back on calling you ‘Le Petit Prince,’ in its place, so you know.”

Remus hums once. “Somewhere deep down, I did know that,” he quips, lifting his feet in turn so Sirius can get a spritz on the underside of them. “Pete overhearing it one day, I’m not too fussed about; if he starts up, I can always start up about his hunk of an uncle.”

Sirius sucks a tight breath in through gritted teeth. “Ooh, yeah; hit him with the reverse-uno,” he goads, moving to stand and reaching up to cover Remus’s shades with his left forearm so the lenses won’t get rained on with about a thousand microdroplets.

Remus puts his reply out quick and through the right side of his mouth. “And I will if he starts getting brave,” he maintains, shutting his mouth quick and tight so Sirius can get a spritz going on that golden face of his.

“He’s a wildcard, babey,” Sirius champions, a right beam on his lips. “I’d love to say I’ve created something fierce out of you, but I know too much; you’ve had that devious side to you since your very start.”

“Well, you’ve encouraged it plenty, so you’ve some credit to take with you,” Remus affords him.

“And I will,” Sirius underlines deeply, angling his left forearm lower to cover up the lenses of his sunnies and get the nozzle ready. “Lift your floof for me?”

Remus reaches up to push his fringe back with his right hand, allowing for Sirius to get a solid spray going over his forehead. He resists the urge to kiss it, deciding that he deserves some kind of treat or reward he’ll figure out the specifics on at a later time for managing to hold off, and moves on to pressing a comparatively smaller spritz to the narrow area belonging to Remus’s left temple, massaging it into his skin with the fingertips on his free hand.

“I should’ve offered to do my own face, but I like this and not one person present is looking over this way so I’m inclined to let you keep this up,” Remus shares, his voice low, quite intimate, even.

Sirius breathes in once, huffing it back out. “I held myself off from giving you a forehead kiss a moment ago, and for what, I don’t know now,” he maintains, matching Remus's cadence and volume.

Remus takes in a very slow breath through his nose. “Do it now,” he goads, popping his brows up and back down over that very forehead.

Sirius presses one to it right quick, matching Remus’s smile with ease, and moves on to making sure that he gets Remus’s right temple too so he won’t get attacked there at any point down the line, massaging that one in nice and good. He steps around behind Remus next up, figuring he’ll start from the back of his shoulders and work his way down from there, and it’s another ten or seconds of spritzing before Remus gives a rather sudden, deep well of a noise, turning his head to the right to speak back at him.

“Wait a tic,” he braces, and so does Sirius, for that matter. “Did Pete agree to it, or are we still at the presuming-he-will-because-why-wouldn’t-he stage?”

Sirius breathes in fast, eyes lighting up at once. “Oh fuck — yes; yes, he did,” he hands him, resuming his spritzing. “Sorry, I should’ve said; I mean, I only learned of it through the grapevine bright and early this morning and a lot of other stuff took centre stage from there, but still, good news is good news.”

“I'm going to let you off the hook for that one, too,” Remus echoes, but there’s a sunshine smile and shoulder shimmy ready to go the sheer moment he gets that first part registered, Sirius can hear them both. “But, that’s what I’d call some great news; I could kiss him.”

“He’d probably let you,” Sirius trades him.

“I'll stick to blowing him one from afar until I can blow him one in closer quarters, but thank you,” Remus says of it, his shoulders shaking a bit through his snickering, but that can keep right up when Sirius is nearly at the small of his back at this point.

“I’m actually kind of excited about it,” Sirius puts up, giving a quick rub over the small of Remus’s back mostly for himself and less because it’s wholly necessary.

“Yeah?” Remus prompts, unable to see him properly from up there, but boy, is he trying to catch a semblance of a sidelong glimpse over his left shoulder, which is just the cherry on top.

“Yeah, I mean, we’re going to butt-heads and rile each other up now and again, but we’ve only really had two big boy issues in the span of — mm, years?” Sirius puts up, squinting while he gives the backs of Remus’s thighs a good spritzing each. “Yeah, no, I don’t remember us being that upset with each other since back before uni days, so that’s not a bad track record for two mates going in on a flat-share situation together, am I right?”

“I mean, you're right,” Remus echoes, but there’s a breath possibly inaudible to anyone who hasn’t got Sirius's gift of near-sonic hearing when comes to Remus that tells him there's something else coming. “I don’t love knowing that I am the common denominator for both of those big boy issues, but — no, I don’t actually have a way to downplay that; I am going to be around, in spirit and in-person, so. That’ll be fun.

The pause Remus took before the brightly colourful lilt he chose for that last addition makes it unearthly difficult not to laugh, but Sirius maintains his composure so he’ll still be having that treat at some point, as far as he's concerned. “Mm, but the first issue had to do with him body-slamming you to the floor and I know, you know, he knows, we all know why he did it, we hashed that one out like proper adults, and I’m harbouring no ill will to him for it; in the end, he protected you at all costs before he knew he was even doing it and I'm grateful to him for having done it, even if it hurt to see it happen,” he puts forth, moving on to the backs of Remus’s calves. “The second had to do with the way he looked at you afterward and how defensive he got about it right out the gate, but listen, I’m not going to let anyone make you feel like a kook, not even the besties, but he apologized to you, instantly and goofily at that, and I can’t pretend he wasn’t instrumental in getting us shrooms and getting you out of that backroom for the big boy work-cluster; I mean, you sent that table careening across that room and he just hopped to it, moved right up and grabbed you—”

“And I lifted the poor bloke clear off the ground,” Remus lodges, having a pout up there by the sound of it.

Sirius breathes in delicately, a half-smile brewing at his lips. “Remus, listen, some things, when you’re in that situation, just need to be a little funny or else it’s just miserable seeing you like that, so when I say we all found it a bit funny on some level, even Pete, I do mean that,” he puts it plain, lifting back up to move around the front of Remus and give him a pout of his own, and only then does Remus start to crack a smile. “And besides, he was fine, got brought down safe and sound, resumed his guard post straight away, and every single member of the troupe helped out in some concrete way while also remaining the very bumbling dunderheads we know and love, but that’s just part of the deal, isn't it? It’s a learning curve, a chaotic scene to be a supporting character in, and a definite workout, but — biggest 'but' in the world actually — we were all there, called to arms, ready to soldier up for you, and I should know considering I tried to ditch the boys back at the flat and they would not take that lying down, so that’s a devoted team you’ve got around you; we're all getting used to it, learning how to help you where possible, and figuring out when to pull back or hop into action, but in terms of Pete the roomie, issue number two has been and is still working itself out as we go.”

Remus breathes in long and sighs it back out. “Oh-kay, you handled that almost too well,” he trades him.

“That’s what I’d call great news,” Sirius echoes, smiling bright. “I know it’s far easier said than done, but let’s try not to worry about something that Pete hasn’t even let deter him from accepting the invitation, hm?”

Remus huffs like he’s been dealt a fresh glove slap. “Go easy on me, pal,” he returns, reaching too fast with his attacker fingers and getting a jab in for each hand.

“I will if you do,” Sirius challenges, popping Remus in the gut with two jabs to even out the score. “Now, are we still chuffed I’ve got a roomie in Pete, or?”

Remus cups his hands around his mouth to help accentuate the huff he sends at him. “But yes,” he attaches to it, dropping his hands and apparently seeing this as a convenient time to crack every knuckle to his name, and all of it, every part of it both singularly and added up together has Sirius hooting up a storm.

Remus has apparently moved on by the time Sirius has regained his composure, busy having a look about their station with his Thinker Face on display. “Oh, do you have your mobile on you still?” he raises him.

“I do, I do,” Sirius chimes, reaching to tug it out from between his right hip and waistband.

“Perfect, I’ll have that,” Remus bids, taking it off of Sirius’s hands and bringing it over to the beach bag to undoubtedly keep it in the same place as Remus’s own mobile.

He moves to a crouch ahead of the bag, slips the device in there, and takes to picking the bag up from the sides, doing the same Remus-tastic manoeuvre from yesterday’s beach visit and shaking the bag around a bit so that their mobiles, and the compact wallets attached to their cases, fall further toward the bottom before placing it right back between the grocery bags where it did look quite cozy a few moments ago.

He foots his shoes off near the wall, inspiring Sirius to kick his own off and launch them one by one over to join Remus’s, and turns to stroll up close to the sparkling water, speaking to it fondly, sultry. “I can’t wait to be in you.”

“You two are something else, but before you do that, there are two things you ought to know first,” Remus puts in, moving up on Sirius’s right. “One, you can’t just run and jump in there off the bat or you’ll be very upset with the state of things almost immediately; this is not some lake in the chilly, early morning hours of late summer/early fall where you’re testing your bounds going for a dip as is and just want to plunge in to get the shock over with—”

“That's all very specific,” Sirius comes in, blinking twice. “And not something you’d do either, so where are you getting that comparison from exactly? Spill it.”

“Well, I had a sliver of lakefront for most of my life and mates who liked to go for dips at all hours,” Remus trades him. “I pretty well got pinned as the honorary lifeguard early on, but that was the natural order of things when I was always the first to tap out and get back on the pier.”

Sirius blinks out of a pair of brand-new peepers. “That explains so much, Remus.”

Remus snorts once. “Why does it?”

“Uh, because you’ve got mum and dad energy coiling together and pouring out of you pretty much everywhere you go,” Sirius supplies. “Especially for your mates, though, my Cunt; you’re always on alert for us.”

“Well, I couldn’t refute that if I tried,” Remus lets him have, reaching his left arm to the side and pointing his forefinger up at Sirius from below. “D’you see why I might just loathe it when I become the threat to them, though?”

Sirius fixes his gaze on him fast, taking to a slow, heavy nod. “You know, I really do,” he offers carefully, going for a dry swallow, taking a new breath, and giving that out via a Yuge puff of breath. “Well, you gave me the bends with that one, Remus; I thank you.”

“It’s a learning curve,” Remus gives him, quotes him, traces that same forefinger over the underneath Sirius’s chin for a blink of a beat, but it turns Sirius’s eyes into pools of more of that devotion stuff and garnering him to reach up and dust the fingertips of his right hand over the back of Remus’s upper left arm. “All that to say, I can’t stress enough how important to acclimate to the water we’re about to get into and I would very suggest we go in slow and steady; any thoughts, questions, objections?”

Sirius breathes in once. “No, I hear it’s chilly in there,” he relays, throwing him a sly smile.

Remus smirks for it. “I’ve heard that you get used to it after being in there a while, but you know I’ve never said such a thing,” he trades him.

“Never in your life,” Sirius snickers, looking to Remus head-on from there. “On that note, if you start to feel the way you do when you’re like, a minute or two ahead from when you start turning blue, you just go ahead and ditch me in there, OK? Don’t wait for me to spot the lips blueing out because that spooked the shit out of me, I’ll be honest about that.”

“Oh, no, I could tell, but I shouldn’t have pushed it, you're right,” Remus trades him, sending an impish smile sidelong at him. “I was having a little too much fun frolicking, but I’ll be more careful with it this time around.”

“That’s all I ask,” Sirius chimes, sending him a big ol’ smile. “What’s the second thing, then?”

“Mm, so given that this is a repurposed quarry,” Remus raises, pointing his right forefinger down at the water just ahead of their pairs of feet, “the shallow end does have a bit of an incline for a stretch and we’ll be able to stroll in for a little bit, but this is where I'll reemphasize the need to go in slow because there is a very sudden drop off out there and if you’re not careful with your footing, you’ll just go bloop.

Sirius smirks up a storm. “Thank you for the warning, but most of all,” he braces, “thank you for that sound effect.”

Remus snorts once. “My pleasure,” he returns him. “Ready?”

“And willing,” Sirius returns, and the two of them walk in up to their ankles. “Hooooo, I’m alive.”

Remus nearly loses his footing beside him, but turns out that was born out of mirth over Sirius’s antics and not out of him stepping on a rock which is certainly what Sirius first thought he’d stumbled over. Despite the water being as much of a mid-day wakeup call as one Produce Lad appropriately suggested it’d be, getting submerged up to their mid-thighs isn't all that bad, if peppered in with a light hoo or two from either one of them at different points, but the concept of submerging the crotch has Sirius looking around the area, admiring the chirps of birdies, watching one of the kayakers drop their paddle into the water, and generally pretending he’s not about to drop his junk into frigid waters.

He looks sidelong at Remus to check if he’s the only coward here, but ho-ho, Remus is nothing but a simple thumb-twiddler at the moment. “Beautiful day,” he offers.

“Just divine,” Sirius echoes.

It’s another ten seconds or so before Sirius locates his nerve, popping a squat and dipping his hips below the surface which creates a chain reaction in Remus, and the both of them end up pushing short, tight breaths in and out in quick succession while they let their prized situations adjust to the chill. “Are we bonkers?” Sirius raises, inching himself along the ground.

“No more than any of these folk?” Remus trades, following suit.

Sirius flickers his gaze around at the pockets of people here and there in the water, the kiddos from earlier playing some form of water tag, a lady cheering as she goes free-falling off the highest jump-point and right into the same water they’re chittering their teeth over, and every single one of the people in the water currently appearing to have some form of joviality about them. “Watch them all be hired actors meant to convince us—”

“Don’t even,” Remus returns, batting him a splash with his name on it, but that actually helps in getting Sirius’s front better prepared for the chill it has coming to it. The two of them inch forward up to their shoulders, wherein Remus gestures out ahead of them. “If I’m remembering correctly and I believe I am, the drop is about five steps out from here."

Sirius hums in thanks for the warning, eyeballing the situation and deciding that getting his hair dunked underwater might actually feel like heaven, so from there he tests out his footing, extends his legs out as far as they’ll go from here, and twiddles his toes down into nothingness, reaching back with his palms to pivot himself straight out and onto wading legs. He swivels around in the water with the help of his arms, flashes Remus a smile, and takes in a big ol’ breath before dipping himself down to get his head under the surface, proving quite right about this one; his head needed a cooling-off more than any other part of his body. He comes back up for air, flipping his wet hair back like a mermaid because he won the rights to with these lengthy locks, and beckons Remus in further.

“The hair was easily the best part,” he raises him. "Should give it your best go."

“Give me another thirty seconds?” Remus bids.

“Yeah, I can do that,” Sirius smirks, training his gaze down to watch his feet swishing back and forth beneath him. “How deep does it go, do you know?”

“Twenty-five metres, about,” Remus provides.

“Ooh, she’s deep,” Sirius returns, switching to a squint as if that’ll help him see all the way to the bottom. “Did you come here when you were little?”

“We went out to the harbour more often, but we came here a few times, yeah,” Remus offers him.

“Ever wonder about what lurked beneath the surface?” Sirius raises spookily.

Remus hums a no. “Bunch of slate,” he slips him, giving his left shoulder a quick shrug.

Sirius puts out a bright pfft that creates a little ripple outward. “I swear, you were the funniest fucking kid,” he returns him. “All the time in the world for worries like, ‘did I say 'thank you' enough?’ and ‘oh, no, I forgot to ring home at four on the dot and now it’s five past; am I a monster?’ but apparently no time for spooks as far as ghosts and potentially nefarious sea creatures go.”

Remus hoots quite a bit up ahead of him. “You hit me right where I lived,” he sends him.

Sirius watches on rather fondly as Remus finishes up his snicker storm, takes in and puts back out five warm-ups breathes in quick succession before scurrying out toward Sirius, and lo and behold, Remus goes and grabs Sirius for purchase, gripping him by the waist just below the surface of the water. “Can you take my sunnies off for me?” he bids.

“Eyes closed?” Sirius checks.

“Sure are,” Remus echoes.

Sirius reaches up between the two of them, carefully dislodging the sunnies from Remus’s face, sneaks a whip-fast kiss to his closed eyelids in turn, and dips his head down below the surface, sending about a hundred air bubbles to the top with what has to be an impish, underwater yelp for he certainly comes up for air with a sharp ‘I’m fine,’ but Sirius has to think that's more of a Remus-to-Remus conversation.

Sirius smirks fast, moving quick about getting the sunnies back over Remus’s eyes that a droplet or five definitely splash over the lenses. “Ope, hold on,” he bids, trying to swipe them off with the heel of his right palm and definitely only making it into more of a smear.

Remus huffs good and long, but apparently despite the smear on his lenses, he’s able to spot Sirius’s grimace quite well. “It’s not you,” he instils, giving a trace of his thumbs at Sirius’s waist. “I was just about to do the same thing.”

Sirius smirks a bit for it. “One of those things that seemed like it was going to work out well,” he offers for it.

Remus breathes in long, nodding slowly. “I know,” he breathes out, pushing the point of his mouth back and forth a few times before poising himself to speak. “It’s not as if it,s even anywhere near the toughest part; I’m quite used to seeing the outdoors and interior of most establishments through a tint at this point, and as far as adjustments go, it’s usually fine, I just really wouldn’t mind being able to elect to take them off — like when swimming, perhaps; that'd be something.”

Sirius hums a low note, lifting his thumbs and tracing them over the backs of the very hands that are tracing thumb circles into his waist beneath the water. “I mean, I’m getting used to seeing you with them on any time we go anywhere, but there are definitely times when I’d give anything to just see your eyes for a second, even though I know we’re not in the right setting for that and it’s too risky to even chance it,” he puts up. “It is a fairly simple adjustment compared to some of the others, but it can still be a bitter pill; no one said it couldn’t be both, and if they did or do, fuck ‘em anyway, right? You don’t get to do a bunch of things that most people get to without having to think about it, like swimming without your sunnies on, so you can feel as prickled about that as you like, I say.”

Remus hums a low note of his own, nodding for it before taking in a big ol’ breath, bigger than his lungs seem to be able to handle at the moment for he winds up barely holding in a cough. “You’ve started looking right at the centre of my lenses,” he puts up, a light, meek twitch at his lips. “I don’t even remember the exact moment you started doing it, I just know whenever you need me to see you and what you’re saying, you know, you stare right into my eyes and it’s, um — it’s centering, gets me feeling less like I’m watching my own life through a filter when you do that.”

“Then I’ll do it more,” Sirius decides, flashing him a doting smile. “I’ll say for myself, the times or situations where I can’t get a look at your eyes but simply need to consult with you subliminally, you know what I'm talking about?”

“Mm, I probably do,” Remus comes in. “You keep going, though.”

“Well, usually it’s when we’re in someone else’s company and I look to you to read how you’re reading the scenario; I have to rely on other facial cues now to get a better sense of what those peepers are doing back there, what that big brain is doing, how you’re handling the situation we can’t quite speak about just yet, and it’s honestly been such a blast?” Sirius details, putting some weight down on Remus’s hands on his waist. “Like, sans-sunglasses, you are the king of flat-face, king of innuendo-face, king of the more rare but lethal ‘mm-and-what-do-you-think-about-that’ face, and being out in public with you and in the vicinity of somebody acting up, all I have to do is look at you and two things happen; I nearly die, and I'll know exactly what you’re thinking via those peepers, but when I can’t rely on those because the shades are blocking them, I just have look to your face, brows, and lips, pinpoint what’s going on via the other cues I've got to go with, get to reading you from a different angle, and you know me, I love learning how to read you, so on the flip-side, it really is nuts to think of how well our brains can adapt to even the strangest things because in those moments where I need to read you, my eyes just start counting up the cues as they see ‘em, and sometimes before I even know it’s Reading Remus time.”

The flustered smile Remus had already fallen into by the time Sirius said the word ‘blast,’ was quite substantial in itself, but by the time Sirius finishes, his smile's goes wonky and that’s both promising and exciting in one go. “Reading Remus” he croons.

“Yes, yes, let’s refer to it as that from now on,” Sirius puts down.

Remus gives a deep trill in his throat before coming right in for a surprise kiss; a brilliant idea from an even more brilliant lad. Since they are so very close together, it seems convenient and a bit of fun to scoop Remus up by the underneath of his thighs, scoot his own hips in between them, and tread his legs around beneath them like a human squid in order to take the boy for a little ride-around in the water, a task that’s made easier inside of what might as well be a bottomless pit simply by the fact that Remus is using his feet as a pair of flippers behind his back.

No one in the vicinity seems particularly bothered by their synchronized swimming practices, not a soul shouts to them to let them know definitively that they’re a pair of ripe fruits, and not a one even seems to take notice of their theatrics; not the kayakers floating around nearby, not the Bufflord Bros busy hooting and rattling cans over where there are, not even the presumed parents of the splash-about pack o’ children over on the other side of the lagoon seem to have zeroed in on their display, so they may have found themselves in the vague company of some rather unbothered individuals, quite possible they’re all a bit too busy with what they’re currently doing to stop, notice, or worry about a pair of ripe fruits in their midst, or it’s still possible there's actually a forcefield of majesty surrounding this once-quarry, now-lagoon, but either way, it feels glorious to be left well enough alone.

“You know, while it was an indeed frigid start,” Sirius puts up, finishing up the other half of the circle he’d been treading them in, “I'm finding this quite delightful now.”

As if planned, and if only things like this were actually planned when it’d make things even a smidge less hysterical and therefore easier to breathe while going at life with this lad, but Remus blurts 'Oh, good,' out through a full-bodied shiver.

Sirius sends a bark to sky, but that’s a bit too jarring a noise to continue on with their activities without the feeling that they might be pushing their luck here, so he gives Remus a parting squeeze underneath the surface of the water and wiggles out from the confines of Remus’s legs to tread the water just ahead of him. “You’ve been in here long enough, sire,” he instils, shooing him with his newly-freed hands. “Get going, you.”

Remus gives out the biggest breath of relief known to mankind. “I love you for saying that,” he trades him. “I was thirty seconds out from caving.”

“You weren’t supposed to push it,” Sirius highlights, flicking water at him with his trusty right forefinger and thumb.

“That was me not pushing it,” Remus insists, sending a wave over to Sirius with his whole right forearm and then, by the time Sirius recovers from that, the crafty lad is already on the outs, treading toward shore.

Sirius smirks up a storm watching the boy’s hastily retreating figure. “Well, bye, then,” he calls after him.

Remus smirks while he does a quick swivel back to face him. “I wasn’t ditching you quite yet,” he trades him. “I figured it'd be safer to get out of your blast radius.”

“Sneaky devil,” Sirius calls him.

Remus clicks his tongue trice for a prime tutting. “You used to call me a genius,” he mentions.

“Not anymore, deviant,” Sirius gets him, beaming bright.

Remus smiles, taking to giving him a little wave for a bye-for-now. “Have fun, swim like a fish, frolic about," he bids him, "I might go read a bit, nibble on my share of the chicken sandwich, and maybe I’ll even stick the toothpicks in the melon balls while I’m at it, hm?”

“OK, deal, but I want to be there when you try your first one, so you’re just going to have to control yourself over there,” Sirius instils, giving a stark point of his right forefinger toward him.

Remus smirks once. “I’ll be good, and I’ll even put the lid back on and keep them chilled until we’re ready to have them, thoughts?” he raises it.

“Love that,” Sirius attests, beaming up a storm.

He takes in a big ol’ breath in Remus’s wake, turns to stare up at the ruined buildings at the back-right corner of the lagoon, and watches a bloke go torpedoing from the tallest tier down into the depths before deciding he’d very like to do the same. He looks back over at Remus, who at this point, has made it to the shallow end and up to his thighs, treading after him and putting his arms into the deal to get himself that much more distance. He gets up onto the sloped ground, swishing through the shallower water to catch up to him, and with all this ruckus he’s making with the water itself, it’s not long at all before Remus stops to look behind him for the source of the oncoming noise, starting once the image sinks in and turning right back toward him.

“What are you—” he starts, reaching out like he’s got to save him from the incredibly shallow wading pool they’re both in. “Are you hurt?”

“Just fine, thanks,” Sirius chimes, slowing to a stop just a couple of steps away from the good lad and touching the tips of his forefingers together idly. “I was just wondering if we might've softened any with the ban on the top tier of the ruins in any way since last night?”

“We’ve not,” Remus replies, turning around and taking the four more steps he needs to get to dry land.

Sirius shuffles up to the shoreline after him. “OK, fair enough,” he offers, waiting with his lips tooched out for Remus to retrieve his chaotically colourful quilt out of the duffel and face him again. “You didn’t sound too surprised I'd asked the question, I noticed.”

“Well, you did say you'd wait for the green light to start jumping, but I did have a sneaky sense you’d come asking about the highest one eventually,” Remus offers, wrapping the quilt around his shoulders and coming back his way to peer plainly at him. “There are two other, perfectly viable tiers for you to plunge off of; be my guest, Sirius, just try to land in straight like a pencil.”

“Hey, solid advice for my pocket,” Sirius says for it, tip-tip-tapping his forefingers together. “Are we completely closed off to even a simple dialogue about that third one, though?”

Remus breathes in long, letting it out slow and steady. “Ask me again when the tide’s back in, OK?” he pitches. “You’ll notice it.”

“I’m sure I will,” Sirius insists, stepping up onto the shore and padding up to him. “It’s just that the bloke who did the big boy drop just a minute ago looked like he was having a riot; I want to have a riot, too.”

“Oh, I’m going to course-correct that real quick, then,” Remus delivers him. “You may take great awe and even a bit of inspiration from the other jumpers, they’re a hoot to watch, I know that well, but you cannot go copying what they do; you don’t know if he’s an expert at this, extreme cliff-jumpers come out here all the time to take the edge off, and people can and do hurt themselves out here if they’re new to cliff jumping, see the more experienced jumpers having a blast and doing all these stunts in the air, think to themselves ‘hey, I bet I can do that,’ and start acting a fool up there, and you will not be one of those people, Sirius, it’s just not going to be you.”

Sirius holds an exceptionally short consult with the scribes to give him the willpower not to beam like a lighthouse over this heated display of Remus’s, going for a smoothing gesture with his hands instead. “I will not be one of those fools,” he maintains, switching to touching all ten of his fingertips together in a semblance of a prayer, “but can I at least do a spin when I’m in the air?”

Remus pushes a lengthy breath through his nose. “You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t need to spin,” he returns, sounding almost miffed that Sirius felt he had to ask. “Here’s the deal, you can do a little spin right off the ledge, but when you go into the water you're to make certain you're going in straight; I'm not just saying that, I have seen and heard the whiplash being done to well-meaning folks here in my time.”

“OK, this is good, this is helpful,” Sirius echoes. “I’ll be sure to pack myself in tight before I land."

“No cannonballs whatsoever,” Remus tacks on.

Sirius smirks once. “Oh, no, I figured that much,” he trades him, taking in a thoughtful breath from there. “Well, what if I save the spins for the lower two tiers and then with the top one I just—”

Remus huffs powerfully at him. “That is an eleven-metre drop,” he attests, pointing his left forefinger over Sirius’s right shoulder and toward the problem, “and not only that, you will be hitting the water at thirty miles per hour when the tide’s all the way out like that; do you understand how fast that is? If you put one toe out of line, goof off up there, trip and go tumbling off of the edge, you could seriously hurt yourself, so why don’t you stick to the two shorter tiers and come back to me about the tallest one when the tide’s back in like I’ve already asked you to.”

Well, Sirius’s refractory period is officially up. “Do you have any idea how hot you’re being right now?” he poses.

Remus takes in a quick breath, the right corner of his lips quirking up. “I’ve some,” he offers, tipping his chin toward the rigid line trapped in Sirius’s trunks. “Should get back in the water?”

“Alright, but you’re getting fucked later,” Sirius mentions.

Remus snorts once. “Well, it’d have to be later-later unless you want me to partake in a fast,” he mentions, tossing his left thumb back at the grocery bags.

“No no, I’m fine with later-later,” Sirius instils. “Just wanted you to know where we stand.”

“Perfect, do you remember where we stand on that?” Remus checks, switching back to pointing at the three-tiered ruin that Sirius can hear somebody hooting from before making quite the splash below.

“Yeah, and you know what, I’m actually going to be a good lad and just wait for the tide to come in before I do any of the tiers,” Sirius trades him, nodding through a smile.

“Oh, then you can definitely fuck me later-later,” Remus maintains, his lopsided smile coming out to play.

Sirius gives him two prime sets of ‘OK’ symbols to signify how good he’s going to make it for later-later’s version of them and turns daintily back toward the water, happy to have a bit of time to float along the surface and have a good, long think on how to conceptualize all that Remus has given him to chew on.

Chapter 36: 36.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

There’s something to floating around on a body of water with one’s ears hiding below the surface, Sirius has to say; it creates a level of privacy that isn’t particularly tangible, but acts as a barrier between him and the rest of the goings-on around him and allows for a more meditative state. That said, he does have to open his eyes now and again to be sure he hasn’t floated too close to the splash zone and there is a periodic dunking noise reverberating through the water every time somebody finishes off a plunge, but Sirius can’t really say either one of those would-be conditions are particularly distracting for him, not when his thoughts are so loud, not when the fervour coursing through his veins is so alive, and certainly not when his consultation with his own self on the topic of Remus’s file folder is going this well.

He breaks up his inner dialogue with quick check-ins on Remus here and there, accumulating a total of three glances his way before the boy’s orbit starts to pull him in.

The first time he looks over, Remus is facing the waterfront and sitting crossed-legged on his towel with his quilt still very much pulled over his head and draping over his back, making him look like a whole patron saint over there while he dutifully puts the final toothpick in the last melon ball and places the lid back atop the platter.

The second time he's called to look, the platter’s long gone, stowed away in its respective chilled bag by now, and the boy’s talking on his mobile to somebody Sirius certainly hopes is Hope or Lyall. He lifts his left arm out of the water and points it straight up, switching between a thumbs-up and a thumbs-down in an attempt to get both Remus’s attention and himself an answer of sorts, and about thirty seconds pass between them before Remus takes note of the question being raised to him from halfway across the lagoon, lifting his free hand for a prime thumbs-up and quite suggesting that the missing parties have been located.

The third time he glances over Remus’s way, it’s with a long and centred breath of fresh, pure air, a keen readiness to share his findings with the boss, and a heartfelt image of the boy that pulls him right on in; Remus sits with his quilt-haloed head bowed to the book he’s holding open in his lap and munches on a sandwich square in his free hand, looking a right serene sight and a right babe while he treats himself to a little R&R and catches up on that light reading he'd been meaning to do over his vacation.

Too bad he’s going to have to set the book down and put that light reading thing off a bit longer, but Sirius has a consultation to spearhead and there’ll always be more time for Remus to read whenever he goes for another dip.

Remus folds the corner of the page he made it to and closes up the book when he spots Sirius coming ashore. “You’ve some timing on you,” he extends, pitching his voice to ensure it carries through the bustle as he stows his book in the beach bag for safekeeping.

“Have I?” Sirius echoes, swishing out of the water.

“Mhm, I was going to call a temperature timeout when I got to the end of the page, but you saved me the trouble,” Remus forwards, scooting himself sideways on his towel to better face the picnic blanket and opening up the grocery bag that’s been housing the platter, and it’s all very exciting stuff for Sirius, it is; the chance at hearty snacking by the water, the opportunity to articulate his findings and share his newfound but weighty convictions with one Remus Lupin inside of this gorgeously hidden slice of paradise, and the presence of an afternoon they can simply lounge away, but first things first, he’s got to know more about Remus v. The Parents.

“Was that mum or dad?” Sirius bids, padding past the front of Remus’s towel and the picnic blanket to get around to his own.

“It was mum,” Remus supplies, setting the platter down on the blanket to work the lid off of it with his nubs for nails. “Dad’s puttering around there, too, though, so they’re both accounted for.”

Sirius had the sense, but that doesn't mean he'll keep a celebratory trill from entering the conversation. Trilling, he drops himself down onto his towel sideways and lays himself across the length of it draw-me-like-one-of-your-French-girls-style for optimum comfort, propping his right elbow down on the towel and pulling his mass of wet hair off of his neck to spill over his right shoulder. Remus, on the other hand, stays cross-legged as he lays the lid of the platter face-up and to the left of the confection, pointing between one of the toothpicks sticking out of one of the melon balls and the rather conveniently dome-shaped lid as a means to suggest they use it as a basket for the picks, and since Sirius has absolutely no qualms or comments to make about that idea, he tosses a thumbs-up at the curly-Q with his free hand on his way to swiping a sandwich triangle out of the container sitting on the blanket, winning himself a chicken salad specimen.

“Feeling better, then?” he bids, propping the side of his head up against his right hand.

“Well, I am now, but not initially, I wasn’t,” Remus divulges, reaching back into the grocery bag for the sandwich container that’s not already out on the picnic blanket.

“Uh-oh,” Sirius echoes, idly tugging a strip of crust off of his sandwich and hoping Remus’ll take his idle input as the prompt it sure is meant to be.

He does, the good lad, only he goes for a type of smirk that typically only comes around when he’s taking the piss at himself. “In all of our post-voicemail blatherings, I forgot a key solution in times like these,” he relays, smiling primly before slapping the punchline on over to Sirius, “trying her on her mobile.”

Sirius pulls in a quick breath through his nose as he swallows down a bite of sandwich, blinking vastly at Remus while he’s digging around in the grocery bag. “Well, you’re a step ahead of me ‘cause I hadn’t put a single thought toward the very real fact that she sure does have a mobile until right this very second,” he supplies him.

“Well, then we’re both a couple of dolts,” Remus holds up, pulling out the bag of baby carrots and setting it on the blanket.

“You’re finally seeing the light,” Sirius trades him, popping the latter half of his sandwich triangle into his mouth and clearing that before prodding for a little more clarity. “Did she not answer her mobile right away; is that why you weren’t initially eased?”

“She did not answer it right away,” Remus affirms, placing the squeezer bottle of dip onto the picnic blanket with a bit of a plonk that rather registers a bit of lingering indignation, “which meant I had to call on some major Sirius talking points to get myself through the initial worry-wave that consumed me while you were over there floating around like a starfish on some actual waves; I didn’t want to call you back out just to reassure me of something I could already hear you saying, and then she rang back maybe ten or so after that so I didn’t actually have to wait in Limbo Land for too long.”

Despite being rather wet from head to toe, Sirius feels rather warm with the knowledge that he remains on Remus’s brain even when he’s not closely present. “Well, I’m glad you didn’t have to wait in limbo for long,” he forwards him, and with that, he thinks he’d like an idea of which option the two of them came up with for their inability to answer the phone turned out to be the winner. “Any clarity on what those wildcards were so busy doing?”

Remus hums with a note of renewed purpose. “Mhm, they've been out back since late morning and weren’t able to hear either of the rings over the whirring of their new pressurizer so thankfully, it was option number one,” he supplies, pulling the lemonade carton out and setting it on the blanket with a dainty hand.

Sirius hums a happy little note, taking on a cheery disposition. “While I'm thrilled to hear you’ve got some peace of mind back, if it had been number three, she likely wouldn’t have told you that,” he puts in, taking to a round of shoulder bopping to Remus’s prompt and rather prologued bout of retching noises like they’re simply a beat for him to follow.

Remus finishes up with that and very soon declares himself finished setting up by displaying his hands rather royally toward the spread laid out on the blanket in between them. “Only thing we don’t have on hand is a little container for the dip, so I’m just going to go ahead and use this,” he raises, scooting the open chicken sandwich container closer to him and squeezing a glob of dip onto the lid. “Melon ball?”

“You know it,” Sirius returns, reaching to swipe one off of the platter.

Remus sticks the squeezer bottle aside and goes for his own, holding it up and out toward Sirius's rather royally. The two of them knock melon balls together for a moment of cheers and before long, Remus is dolling out a muted moan that thankfully wasn’t so muted that Sirius’s ears couldn’t pick it up and takes to speaking the one phrase to rule them all: “You were right.”

“I'm sure, but tell me about it.”

“These are perfect, and we did need them.”

“Anything else?”

“The melon chunks would’ve tasted no different, but they wouldn’t have been the same.”

Sirius hum-ditty-dums for all his good fortune, pressing the pads of his left middle and forefinger to his lips before aiming them up toward the sky in thanks and garnering a round of unfettered hooting out of Remus for it, and there marks some more substantial proof that airily kissing the sky is a good move to go with when this boy’s around.

The two of them have themselves three more melon balls each before Sirius figures that this, all in all, is the best time, place, and mood to begin putting some vocal patterns to his personal findings. He watches Remus trade his three used toothpicks in for a new melon ball and takes a leaf out of his book, tossing his own collection of toothpicks onto their makeshift pick basket and scooting the same hand over closer to Remus’s right one. “I wanted to talk to you about something we discussed yesterday while at the pub,” he raises, whispering the fingers of his left hand over the back of Remus’s hand.

Remus smirks once. “We discussed many things yesterday while at the pub,” he mentions, turning his right hand over so his palm is facing up, but that might’ve been a manoeuvre meant to make it easier to dust his fingertips over the inside of Sirius’s left wrist.

Sirius sticks the tip of his tongue between his teeth for a beat, giving in to a smirk-and-nod combo. “Well, technically I’d be piggybacking off of where we last left off on the Paris front,” he reiterates. “Particularly, the part where I hopefully made it clear that I don’t want you to revert to early London days, wind up holding yourself off from new experiences, meeting new people, enjoying yourself as much as possible while you’re over there; that talking point?”

Remus doesn’t do much of anything for a few beats other than sit there chewing with his toothpick raised in his right hand, but he cuts through that with a rather melodic laugh in his throat. “Oh, no, yeah; I think I remember that,” he offers airily, puffing a snicker through his smile. “Particularly, I remember the weak-kneed response I had to that very talking point.” 

“Perfect, ‘cause we’re going for some weak knees here as well and if we haven’t got a seaside pub or the Healing Truck at our disposal, then I’d say this place measures up as far as patient and unassuming backdrops go, wouldn’t you?” Sirius raises, having himself a quick melon ball because he can and he will.

“I'm sure I would," Remus echoes, "and if you ever wanted to get around the point, I’m all ears, as they say."

“I’m setting it up, Judy Attitudey,” Sirius returns, pointing the end of his toothpick Remus’s way before tossing it onto the pick basket. “It goes back to the call with Andromeda and the various tidbits she passed along from me to you regarding the sort of company that tends to frequent the home you’ll be renting out of.”

Remus hums a knowing note as he reaches for a baby carrot and gets a nice dab of dip on the end of it. “All manageable conditions, so I’ve not changed my mind on the place in the last twenty hours or so if that’s the underlining question here,” he forwards, biting the head off of his carrot and letting the resulting crunch act as a rather thorough dot of punctuation on that point. 

“Oh, no — well, I’m happy to hear it, but that wasn’t quite what I was getting at,” Sirius clarifies. “Only, while she was on her spiel about the various house guests being potentially disarming and generally just a lot on first impression, she definitely didn’t neglect to describe them as some ethereally beautiful people and I don’t know that I necessarily relayed that layer to you yesterday.”

Remus gives a single and rather blunt noise in his throat while he swallows down the bite of carrot he’d gone for and puffs out an immense breath once that’s an achievable action, popping his brows up past both the line of the quilt and his fringe while the lower half of his face impressively takes to a deadpan. “Well, I’d better not chance it.”

Sirius cannot nor does he want to help a snort from escaping him when it’s just plainly relieving to see that Remus is in the mood for jokes; it can only help his cause, he has to think. “I know you’re kidding, but that is precisely the last thing I’d want you doing with that information,” he trades him.

Remus keeps hold of the half of a baby carrot he’s got in his right hand. “Did she call them that or is that all you?” he bids, popping the rest of the carrot into his mouth after it.

“No no, that was all her,” Sirius supplies, a knowing smile on. “She said something like, ‘now, if you’re me, you won’t mind being pulled along by an ethereally beautiful being into a living room filled with a pack of other ethereally beautiful people, but if you’re Remus?’”

Remus sends out a direct pfft as he goes for the lemonade carton. “Calling me out,” he attests, unscrewing the cap and getting himself a sip off the carton before taking to smacking his lips once. “Well, I do feel seen in a way I’ve never quite known before, so you tell her that congratulations are in order.”

“I mean, I’ll tell her and she’ll be thrilled, but you should know she wasn’t coming for your life,” Sirius maintains. “The ‘ethereally beautiful’ part was more of a personal anecdote from her, but babes are babes, aren’t they, so I did want to prepare you ahead of time that you may well be dealing with a collection of them in the near future who are likely going to want to know what you’re about and may just fawn all over you.”

Remus gives a little trill in his throat and leaves the lemonade carton nearer to Sirius in case he’d like a bit of that stuff and hey, it’s true, he so would. “Right, well, that’s a bridge I’ll cross when I get to it, but you can both rest assured that I’ll go beet red and try to get the fawning off of me and onto someone else as quickly as I can manage it,” he relays, wearing it with a plain smile. “I have had some personal experience with spending quite a bit of time with an ethereally beautiful being and I did manage to survive it even if it very didn’t feel like it at the time, so I think I may just be able to stick the term out even with a collection of babes around.”

Sirius had gone and lifted himself out of his sidelong position enough to get himself a dose of lemonade both down the hatch and the right pipe, but the smirkstorm he falls into has him dribbling more than he’d been banking on and garnering him to give up a sceptical little noise as he wipes at his chin. “Um, you kind of transferred stores to get away from that guy,” he mentions, garnering Remus to reach over and mime like he’s gonna slap the lemonade carton back on him, but a spade’s a spade, babey. “A spade’s a spade, babey.”

“Yeah, well, this one was sharp,” Remus maintains, stealing the whole carton back from Sirius and getting himself a sip off of it.

Sirius drapes himself back to his prior position over his towel, curling the fingers of his right hand into a light fist underneath the side of his head for a makeshift surface. “I wasn’t trying to cut you, but that’s the thing, as much as I adore you, it wouldn’t do well to pretend that you aren’t a tad avoidant of that kind of thing in nature and I wouldn't want you finding yourself so avoidant of another person that you transfer out of your soon-to-be and perfectly suitable workplace or drop a class just to get away from them,” he instils, and he means it, but there's a clarification that he should make plain so there’s some wiggle room for Remus to feel out. “I mean, if the person's a skeeze, then you stay away from them and do what you’ve gotta do to make that happen, but in any other case, I wouldn't want you to go painstakingly avoiding somebody based on their royal hotness; you’re too hot in your own right to go around pretending you can’t be in the same vicinity as another hottie.”

“Well, lucky for you, I just don’t think I’m likely to be quite that avoidant of a person or situation like that again,” Remus slips in there, sitting the lemonade carton upright on the picnic blanket and giving it a solid, two-note drum pattern in accompaniment. “Feels like that was a very special case, somehow.”

“Well, listen, I want you to be right on that one,” Sirius instils, smiling rather primly before coming in for the amendments, “and while I don’t mean to police your wording here, I also wouldn’t want you to just ‘stick it out’ for the term either, I want you having fun while you’re there and that’s not even limited to Paris either; that goes for when you’re back too, but Paris is sooner, it'll be an extended stay, and I’d just like you to imagine what your experience at the O.G. shop could’ve been if you hadn’t been so—” he lets left arm and body handle things in terms of showcasing the stance of a rigid, tightly-wound lad while his right arm’s a bit busy propping his head up, “—all of the time?”

“Oh, is that what it looked like?” Remus negs, going into a mirrored impression of Sirius doing an impression of him from back in the day.

Sirius is the first to let go of it out of the two of them. “I mean, I wasn’t that far off,” he says of it, aiming a wry smile at him. “And I don’t even just mean with me as the object of your infatuation, I mean with me, Lily, James, Pete, all of us as a group; you weren’t so sure about how to hold yourself with us or what to do with the fact that we glommed onto you so quickly, and hindsight helps name what was really going on there, it does, but even back then, I could see how timid you’d get when you’d have to contend with our eagerness to have you around, same as I could see how tense you’d go if you’d put in the middle of us, and unfortunately, seeing that didn’t do much to stop me from tugging on one arm and Lily tugged on the other while the boys just tried to avoid the shrapnel—”

“Well, no, it didn’t, but why are we doing this?” Remus puts in, letting this first frown in hours take over the lower half of his face.

“Because on the list of things I want to see you doing while you’re over there, owning the fact that you’re a gem to have around is right up near the top,” Sirius puts it. “Back then, your utter confusion for why we even liked you enough to invite you along to things and your utter resistance to make any kind of waves within the group ruled over you there for a long time, and to the point where it stuck around to where you wouldn’t even acknowledge them as mates of yours and not just the perks you get from knowing me until a few weeks ago—”

“I know that, but couldn't we just hang a banner somewhere that reads, ‘I’ve a boatload of attachment issues that I only further perpetuate every day I rise’ rather than kick the mud around some more?” Remus offers, holding his hands up thoughtfully. “Just a thought.”

“I’m not saying this to kick mud around or get at you for not coming online sooner, I know why there’s such a blockade there and why it’s so easy for you to get caught behind it again, which is why I can’t go around pretending that last fall doesn’t have value in it that we can use to better this coming fall and beyond,” Sirius maintains. “You’ve relaxed into your friendships so much more in the last little bit and I’ve loved seeing it, but again, I want you to imagine what it could’ve been like to have shown up in that workplace and that friend group we tugged you into knowing you had something unique to offer in both areas, and then I want you to use how that could've felt and try showing up in Paris with that exact feeling in mind.”

Remus breathes in through his mouth, poising himself to speak and getting derailed from that by his own hesitance, so Sirius may as well try to lower the impact a little. “That’s easier said than done and it won’t be something you won’t need coaching on, but you know who’s great at that shit? Me,” he chimes, holding his left palm flat and displaying it underneath his chin for effect, and what an effect it has. 

Remus ducks his head for a couple beats and winds the lower edges of his quilt up in his hands, pulling the whole thing in tighter at his middle while the top of it stays stretched over his forehead and really just becoming the portrait of Our Lady of Perpetual Swoon. “Well, I’m glad you both know it's a rather tall order for me and that you’re up to the task,” he trades him. 

“Like I know anything,” Sirius echoes. “I’ll be right there coaching you when you need it, believe me; I don’t want you spending an extended stay in Paris just barely poking your head out the door to your suite.”

Remus goes for a rather diplomatic hold on a new melon ball which just contrasts so brightly with the chaotically colourful quilt he’s got draped over his head, the edge of it perfectly accentuating his substantial floof of fringe. “Well, I will do my very best not to return to the hermit life I once led,” he offers him, tipping his spherical miracle once toward Sirius before tugging it off of its spike with a pull of his teeth.

“Too right, you will,” Sirius attests, smiling brightly. “I doubt you’re going to feel like a fish out of water this time around, not in the same way at least; it’s going to be a certain kind of a lot, that just comes with the territory, but you’re a pretty fair bloke and a lot nicer to artsy-fartsy folks than I ever am and that has you already well-positioned to be a flexible lad even if they do start getting a bit weird, but frankly, you can get pretty weird yourself after a few good hits off the pipe, so.”

Remus has himself a wee snicker fit, as he should. “Well, that much is true,” he allows. "I really think it's going be a lot like staying over at yours, only dialled up to a notch I don't know how to number just yet; I'll wait and see what the rating is once I'm there."

“Probably your best bet,” Sirius trades him. “There are parts to it that I do think you'll find familiar, but namely their shindigs; I've much less experience with the Parisian leg of her social circle than I do the Brits, but I've met a few of her mates on visits over there and they're just a different shade to the same coin, or maybe a different faction for a medium that Andromeda enjoys? I think that's a better way to put it, so if the Paris crowd is packed with artistes of the fine and modern varieties, then the London crowd is made up of folks that all share a deep, steeped love for music and have all sorts of background in it, and well, of those two sides to Andromeda’s whole, there is one I’d end up vibing more with, am I right?”

“You are very right,” Remus serves him, flashing him a grin on the end of it.

“Mhm, mhm; more my scene,” Sirius wears it. “Back when we first reconnected, she started taking me along to some of the shindigs she or some of her people would be throwing and I’d be a liar and a half if I said I didn’t model my own shindigs after what I’d seen at those; there would just be this louder than loud, brighter than bright, frenetic kind of found family energy circulating the room and I’d have probably absorbed a lot if I’d just been permitted to come along and be in the room for some of these events, but I was invited into so many conversations and didn’t get treated like a fresh newbie in the room, it was like I’d always been there, and the conversations I got to be inside of opened my peepers up so wide, I’d float home from these nights out and feel struck by this whole other world out there than I’d been made to live in up until then, you know?”

“Oh, I think I do, but go on,” Remus instructs, his lips at a twist, and Sirius would do to obey the professor.

“Well, to have gone from spending so much of my time with a family tree and its other pre-approved family trees that were all wrought with these repressed people over to sharing these spaces with this family of weirdo misfits who didn’t want repression touching them with a ten-foot pole was huge for little ol’ me,” Sirius maintains. “I’d heard nothing but cyclical talks of wives and continuing bloodlines and rules for roles that were yours before you even knew they were yours and then all of a sudden, I was in a room full of babes passing a lit joint around and wax-poeticizing about their rejections of the conventions that’d been thrust upon them since birth and beyond, and I was just awestruck and so bloody pumped to get to have the chance not just to pick these people’s brains, but even get to interject what little perspective freshly-free me had at the time—”

“Oh, I'm sure you’d have had a ton of that to offer, myself,” Remus slides in, a rather pointed smile on his lips now.

Sirius will let him have that, partially. “Well, in some ways, I’d have had a very specific perspective to share, but I easily could’ve been laughed out of the room or simply spoken over; I hadn’t even hit my twenties yet,” he amends. “I mean, who wants to hear from that guy, you know, but it was never like that; I was made to feel like I actually had a worthy perspective to pull from and it was invaluable, getting to see that I wasn’t so singular in the way I’d been thinking and seeing things for so long, and I needed that, not just after feeling like I was alone on an island for so many years, but after having that exact idea hammered into me so that I couldn’t and wouldn’t feel like I had a kindred spirit nearby for too long.”

Remus hums his concurrence via a low thrum. “You would've needed to feel tethered more than anything by then,” he trades him, holding onto a carrot he must’ve gone for at some point and chose not to crunch on just yet; a listener through and through, this one.

“You can have a carrot break if you’d like, I'm not going anywhere,” Sirius instils, and Remus does go for it, smiling around his mouthful, but he tips his chin toward Sirius halfway through his allotted carrot break to suggest he keep on. “Right, so while I don’t have nearly as much time logged away with the bohemians as I do the beatniks, are they all that different when you get down to it? It’d be hard-pressed to say; I did see that same found family, anti-repression energy during my visits over there so you may well find yourself in a circle of folks shit-talking societal conventions and in that respect, it could feel a lot like a party at my place and you’d roll with the punches same as you’ve done at mine, but it could also be a bit much if you’re not starved for those types of conversations the way I’d been by then and I just hope the resemblance to a regular shindig at my place might keep you from, you know, dipping from the room if they start up.”

Remus finishes up with his newest helping of lemonade out of the carton and screws the cap back on with an idle sort of smile on. “Well, I can only hope that it’s a very good thing I’ve been getting quite a bit of practice at getting on with all sorts of people, but at this point, I don’t see myself getting so flighty over something traditionally uncouth that I happen to overhear in the weed circle that it sends me into a tailspin,” he registers, setting the carton semi-near Sirius in case he’d like a bit of that himself, and he would, all in all. “Rest assured, O spirit guide; I’m no less excited and a-buzz about the opportunity to have that roof over my head, zany as the rest of the house may be.”

Sirius pauses with the carton in hand and the nozzle millimetres from his lips. “How much sarcasm were you carrying with that?” he bids. “I actually, genuinely couldn’t tell.”

Remus breathes in once for a thought. “Not that much,” he offers him, a quirk starting at the corner of his lips. “An iota or two of it perhaps, but the truth was in there.”

“Well, I can work with that,” Sirius maintains, going for that sip real quick.

“It’s more that I don’t want you to think I’d be daft enough to back out of a really good thing because there are some oddities that come with the place,” Remus extends further. “And, since we’re here, I also wouldn't want you to think that I’d have a sudden and complete fit in the room and have a go at the homeowners and their guests, but I do realize I'm talking to someone I was exactly that rude to in his own home so to that, I’d just like to register three quick points: I’m not nearly as tightly-wound as I’d been at the time, you’ve been a huge proponent in my learning to not make so many snap judgements on where a person is coming from as that person would’ve walked a different life than I did, and none of what you just described there has me too nervous, promise — quite the contrary, actually; you’ve sold me well on the chance I could get to hear whispers of the sorts of conversations that would’ve gotten your peepers so wide back in the day.”

“Well, see, now I’m just obsessed with you,” Sirius returns him, having quite the swoon session of his own over here and he’s not got the abject protection of a chaotically colourful quilt.

“‘Now,’” Remus quotes airily, the absolute shit. 

“You’re right, I’m only more obsessed than I was a half-minute ago,” Sirius allows, grabbing himself another helping of melon ball and taking in a fresh new breath once that’s down. “Alright, so, a recap before we go any further; I want to see you trying to own your power to swoon people far and wide with all your little quirks and quips, I want to see you trying to own the fact that you’re an asset to any one work team or any one friend group, and I want you trying to be at some of these shindigs and not just so you can report back the chaotics to the situation, but because I also want you having fun, embracing the conversations that come your way, and knowing that you’ve got thick skin and a fresh perspective of your own to add to a table, are we squared to one?”

“Squared to it,” Remus stamps it, going for a new smile from there. “And if I may, when we do head into the fall, I would like you to try to remember that while I am going away for a bit, that doesn’t mean I’m going anywhere; are we squared to one there?”

Sirius breathes in once. “Well, I wasn’t particularly worried about that, so call me a complete square,” he gives him.

“Good, because I wasn’t so sure of it after all that, and I do think it’s important to highlight that I will be back and nothing will have changed for us upon my return," Remus offers him.

“Well, not completely, no,” Sirius instils, “but any worthwhile experience is going to inevitably have an effect on us.”

“Well, sure, but I’m not necessarily so easily affected that I’d lose all sense of self in just four months and somehow forget that you’re very much a part of that self,” Remus amends.

Sirius breathes in anew. “OK, I do see how it might’ve seemed like I was prepping myself for any kind of change to come and I am doing that in a way," he clarifies, "just not prepping for it like I’m hoarding supplies in the wake of a natural disaster."

“Vivid yet again,” Remus registers. “In what way are you prepping, then?”

“I want to try to give change as a concept less weight than I’ve been associating it with for too long now, and I’d like to do it by embracing the concept of evolving, rather than changing?” Sirius raises him. “It’s a small switch-up, I know, just splicing in one word and deleting the other, but considering that we both start sweating at the whisper of change, I think it’d be a lot less harrowing if we tried to look at it like that; you and me, we are going to be evolving with time and experience so rather than deny ourselves that or resist it, I want to embrace the idea that we can evolve together and not have only one of us advancing while the other worries that they’re not keeping up, you know? I feel like that’s a big part of what scares us both about it, but if we eliminate the isolation that can bring, then I think we could both benefit so much from it.”

Remus tips his head toward Sirius once before turning it into a series of nods. “Well, I’m all for evolving with you and trying this exercise out, but I’m still not going to get struck with amnesia the second I set foot on French soil and forget that I’ve got my own ethereally beautiful person back home to tend to, and I am a bit worried that you think that’s on the horizon,” he instils, extending his palms out toward him. “As far as I'm concerned, I’ve already had one striking man come into my life, shake the whole of it up, and have me reframing so much of what I thought I knew about myself, but I don’t count on that bombshell of a scenario happening to me again, not like it happened with you and not in this lifetime, so I'm telling you, you don’t have to worry about us while I’m gone.”

“No, I’m not worried about us,” Sirius instils, and he isn’t, he’s more at ease with himself and the greater Them than he’s known himself to be yet. “I used to be. I used to be so worried that you’d look to your left and catch sight of someone who could feasibly offer you what I do but without all the cons I carry with me, that you’d eventually have to weigh out the pros and cons of what I offer and start to see me as the insurmountable work that I’ve always seen myself as and ultimately sabotaged every one of my prior relationships over out of fear that I’d be handing all that work over to someone who couldn’t hold it, that you’d wake up and come back to your senses one day that I’m very much the gamble that you were so sure I’d be from the jump, but I’m just not there anymore—”

Remus stumbles over a hitched breath. “I don’t want you to have ever been there,” he lodges.

“Well, I don’t know that I had much of a chance in that regard, but things are looking up for me these days, I’ll tell you that,” Sirius maintains. “It’ll sound cocky as shit, I’m sure, but I know so much more now than I used to: I know I’m confident in what we have here, I know what I bring to the table and what I bring to you, and I know no one’s going to come along and challenge you exactly like I did and do, no one’s going to come along and pull you up and along like I did and do, no one’s going to love you exactly the way I do, no one’s going to get you weak in the knees like I do, no one’s going to get you laughing like I do; no one’s going to be exactly like me in every sense of the word—”

“No, they’re definitely, definitely not,” Remus comes in, stamping it down like a gavel fashioned solely out of phonetics. “And none of that’s cocky, it’s just all true.”

Sirius’s lips quirk over the quality of that interruption. “Thank you,” he gives him, earnest as he is gracious about it. “The thing is, though, no one person has to be exactly like me for you to give them the time of day; there could be all sorts of scenarios where you’re spending time with someone over there and you find yourself met with an attraction that you weren’t banking on, for someone who isn’t all that I am but still has you struck, and I feel like we can only benefit from talking about this sort of thing ahead of time, as opposed to waiting on it and ending up wishing we’d done it so much sooner.”

Remus takes in a slight breath before his shoulders take to a prime deflate, his exhale leaving with the drop of his entire frame. “Sirius,” he instils, letting that lay for a short stretch of beats before shifting himself around the side of their picnic spread and closer to Sirius on the blanket. “If the situation with Miles muddied things up for you, then I’m sorry it ever—”

“Caught his name too, did you,” Sirius comes in, not needing or wanting to hear the end of that sentence.

“Bit hard not to and his perfectly-attributed name is irrelevant here,” Remus reserves.

Sirius reworks his mouth around a smile. “I didn’t muddy up a thing for me,” he instils. “It was eye-opening if anything, just like every moment since.”

“No, let me be perfectly clear,” Remus insists, pushing parts of their spread aside to get himself that much closer to Sirius’s towel and sitting cross-legged right in front of him, “I can find someone attractive without acting on it; I’m actually very good at that sort of thing.”

Sirius leans back a bit on his side and splays the fingers of his right hand wide underneath the side of his head so he can tilt it up more. “Oh, I know you are,” he underlines, and he just can’t stop smiling so it’s a good thing he doesn’t want to. “What if I said you could, though?”

Remus hardly moves his mouth through his one-word reply; rather impressive stuff. “What.”

Sirius presses his lips into a fast line so he won’t bork or, worse even, bark at that. “What if I said you could act on it?” he reiterates. “Within reason, of course.”

Remus reworks the whole of his jaw, setting it to a placement that gives him the otherwordly look of a sculpture that’d been painstakingly chiselled away at with the hope of portraying a man in the throes of controlling his ire. “I’m trying very hard not to walk off on you right now,” he maintains.

Sirius reaches his free hand up to lay it over Remus’s crossed ankles. “Don’t; don’t go anywhere but right here,” he instils. “It’s just me and I want to talk to you, that’s all.”

“I don’t much like where this conversation’s ended up so I don’t know that I want to continue talking, Sirius,” Remus maintains.

A rather wry smile begins playing over Sirius’s lips. “Mm, I could easily make the case that I wasn’t exactly thrilled the last time we discussed fidelity at length, and by your hand at that,” he holds up, giving up an airy sigh in response to Remus’s substantial huff. “I mean, talk about a bittersweet conversation to have been shot-putted into, but I’m grateful you put your foot down and made it so we had it because that’s exactly what you’ve always done and will continue to do; you pull me into conversations that I want nothing to do with at first, but always, always end up grateful for having in hindsight, and I know I do that same sort of thing for you, too, so instead of walking off, shutting down, or X-ing out of the topic altogether now that the floodlights are on you—”

“You already turned them on me,” Remus instils. “Right there on my perch, you had me promise you the exact same thing you promised me, and some days later, you wanted me to promise that I wouldn’t French anybody while I was there and I know that one was on me because I’d worded it like that for the pun of it all, but you still wanted me to swear to it even though we both knew I’d been punning around; that’s twice in the past few weeks that you’ve turned the searchlight on me, so maybe we don’t need to go for a third?”

“I think we’ve made a habit of touching base with each other in a lot of different areas and this is a suitable topic for us to be checking in with each other on more than just once or twice,” Sirius instils. “Think of it like a reprise; we can call it — ‘Fidelity 2.0,’ where we really get to dive in and discuss where the word falls, what the rules are going to be, where our limits are—”

“This conversation,” Remus clambers in. “That’s my limit.”

Sirius tuts twice, keeping his wry smile right where it is. “Remus, I get it, I thought a lot of the same the first time you brought this up; hell, I didn’t want to have the conversation at all, took its very appearance rather personally at first, and that’s typical, reactionary me for you, but if I let it rule me? If I’d gone and listened to my impulse to shut it down, refused to even stay on that perch and let you have the floor, I don’t think you’d have loved that,” he poses, batting his lashes and getting a prime, rather guttural huff out of Remus. “It stung like hell at first, Remus; I’d just finished ranting about how the rest of them all see me like I’m one false step from letting an impulse ruin what good decisions I've managed to make, you came to bat for me like the sweet prince you are, and you turned around and went, ‘we should probably plan for the day where you might want to wander’ and I was blown away — it felt like you didn’t trust me to hold out and wait for you, it felt like you considered my interest in you as nothing more than a bit of proximity-based convenience, it felt like you felt my wandering was inevitable, but if I hadn’t—”

“I didn’t want you to feel any of that, Sirius,” Remus comes in “That wasn’t my goal at all.”

“I know it wasn’t and I figured that out because I put my wounded pride aside long enough to realize that you did think it was inevitable, just not in a way that was meant to slight me,” Sirius instils. “You were preparing you, me, and us for a very learned and lived-in pattern to continue from where it last left off, trying to ensure it would go over as painlessly as possible for everybody involved, and instead of stomping through your floortime, denying you the past you’ve every right to, and leaving you out there to sulk in the wake of having the audacity to protect us in a way that felt fair to you, I chose to shut the fuck up and listen, and not only to you, but listen to the feeling in my bones that told me I’d better shut it and listen to you.”

Remus makes a short, curt noise and gives his jaw another rework, looking like a hot tamale stewing with the dial having been turned on him, but it’s noteworthy that he doesn’t make any real moves toward the realm of speaking and that does give Sirius the floor to the lay some groundwork down. “In the end, as much as I wish I could say I got it like the snap of a finger, I really did overreact at first jump because all you really did out there was make your case, declare a distinct limit of yours, and set a boundary that I agreed to in the end because, all in all, I knew I wasn’t going to have to send you that warning text, so what did I have to lose by agreeing to your terms?” he lays out. “That’s all I’m doing here and I’m not even asking you to agree to mine; all I’m asking you to do is show me the same courtesy of letting me have the floor to be able to say my piece and state where my limits are because I can tell you right now, Remus, after today, I can feel in those same bones of mine that my limits have been stretched outward and I’d love it if you would at least hear me out.”

Remus pushes a veritable horse breath out his nose while he nods his cooperation out, and that’s cracking stuff in and of itself, but the living, breathing proof that he’s still talking to Remus Lupin extraordinaire is undeniably appreciated just now.

“Great to have you with me,” Sirius submits. “The way I’m seeing it is, you’re going to be a whole catch when you show up there: you’re going to be a) hot as hell, b) cute as a button, c) thee funniest thing around, d) hailing from out of the country and not just from jolly ol’ England, but from the Welsh countryside with your sweet little accent, modest sensibilities, and the sunny disposition to boot, and e) only in town for a temporary stint which’ll only increase the aura of novelty that’ll be surrounding you, so with all that in mind, let’s say you find yourself at home spending time with some of those ethereally beautiful people, or you’re out at the pub mucking around with a pack of schoolmates, and in either scenario, some sexy-sultry hunk that’s been around quite a bit wanders over to you and asks for a slice, respectfully of course—”

“I would say, ‘thanks, but I’m good with what I’ve got,’” Remus comes in, bringing the sweetness certainly, but with a bit of a bite to it.

Sirius has no reason to bite back, he’s doing just fine. “Love that, I do, but what if you could have both?” he raises him. “I’m still in the picture in this scenario; I’ve not gone anywhere, I’m just over here and you’re over there—”

“Well, I’m glad we’ve circled back around to that because, again, I will not forget about you while I’m over there and you’re over here,” Remus coopts it.

Sirius breathes in once and keeps it in, needing his response to land after a lingering pause. “I’m not in any way thinking you’ll forget about me,” he delivers him. “I'm focused on how I'm feeling and right now, I can’t get the image of you up on that clearing out of my head and I don’t want it to go anywhere; you looked amazing, you sounded so alive, you felt good just to stand near because you were glowing enough to rival that sun up there, and I—”

“Guess who’s driving that?” Remus comes in.

“I know I am and that’s all I want to do here,” Sirius instils, putting more weight down on his hold on Remus. “If you looked and felt that good from a heavy flirting session with a rando produce lad, then maybe there’s something to that and I should be making room for it.”

“Sirius, I looked and felt that good because you were there chortling and championing me along through it,” Remus underlines, but Sirius has a red pen ready and willing to correct the record. "Little to none of what happened to me in there would've even occurred without you; you're my prompter most of the time."

He breathes in once, lifting his left hand like he has got an actual pen in it. “Listen, I will take my credit where it's due and happily take the title of your prompter — please, I say, but again, it wouldn't be fair to take all of the credit for all of the prompting and all of the work because you're your own person and it’s not only been me at work here,” he wears it. “It’s not all been linear, sometimes it’s so non-linear that the progress chart looks and feels like a squiggly line, but think of it over the course of the eras of your life and it's incredible what you've done: you never really thought of yourself as anything special when you were growing up, but you’ve got yourself a fan club out here and I see how much the people in the club adore you, I know they'd have loved you from the start, and you still downplay your role in people’s lives to this day, but less, so much less. Cut to years on, your self-worth was in the toilet, and you still had me blown the fuck away and chasing your shadow, but look at what leaping across that couch and giving me a chance has done for you, the chances you started feeling bold enough to say yes to from there? Fast-forward all these months and look what we have here; Remus Jean Lupin not only felt sexy today, but he chose to speak it out and gave me the chance to live in it with him — I can’t thank you enough for letting me have that, I really can’t, but I can bear in mind that you’re only just starting to recognize yourself properly and do everything in my power to give you the room to get to know him better.”

Remus gives up a supremely bouldered noise. “Sirius, I don’t want the room if I lose you, so let’s just leave it,” he puts plain.

“You’re not going to lose me, so what if you could have me and the room to know yourself better?” Sirius serves him, grinning big. “Now, stay with me, I’m not done shaping this scenario yet: you’re not really one to meet somebody and get it done that same night, so that’s why I breathed some realism into the scene and used the example of a hypothetical hunk from one of the spaces you frequent. Let’s say he’s been over at the house quite a bit and stops by to see you more often than not, or he’s in one of your classes and tends to pop into your shop to chat while you’re on shift and get his readings done while you’re too busy to chat, or he’s from the study group you’ll undoubtedly get invited to join the second you’re settled into all your classes and every time you all meet up together, he somehow always seems to have the spot across from him saved for you and every now and again, it seems like he may or may not have purposefully brushed knees with you—”

Remus cuts in with a profound pfft. “Oh, what world are you living in?” he puts up.

“This one, bitch,” Sirius returns, grinning from ear to ear.

“I’ve never had anyone knock knees with me except you,” Remus retorts.

“Well, I’m not going to be the sole entity in the entirety of your life that’s going to want to knock knees with you, trust,” Sirius maintains. “And another thing, if you got to have the reality where some hunk saunters up to me at the pub and gets me so hot n’ bothered that I’m suddenly at the exact point of wandering, then I get to have the one where a lad from one section of your life over there absolutely swoons over you without comment from the peanut gallery, but I’ll tell you this; my reality is more likely than yours was, thanks much, and finally, I’ve not finished declaring even one of my limits yet so can you hear me out, please? That’s literally all I’m asking you to do.”

Remus gives out a big ol’ huff. “You’re lucky we’re an equal match, I'll tell you that.”

“And don’t I know it,” Sirius echoes. “Let's say he’s from one of those settings and a current of something keeps happening when you’re with each other; you don’t know how to name it, you can’t necessarily trust yourself on whether you can even name what’s happening, but you can feel something tense in you whenever it does and you’ve been attracted to enough people to know what that’s like, but you’re pushing it way, way down, just ripping yourself to shreds about it, muting out any and all thoughts on possibly acting on it over what it would do to me, but hear me out, hear me out — what if, you didn’t have to put yourself through all that self-punishment, mm? What if, you don’t even deserve to punish yourself for that? What if, you're only just starting and there's so much left for you to know about yourself? What if, instead of expecting you to drown out any forms of attraction you might feel along the way, be it in Paris or when you’re back home with me, I flip that narrative around on its head and embrace it?”

Remus unwinds the edges of the quilt in his hands in favour of having them free to plant down on the blanket and lean himself more toward Sirius’s sidelong body. “You say all that like I wouldn’t be able to just ring you up and talk to you about this hypothetical hunk in my midst without that being more than enough for me,” he shoots him, making an effort to keep quiet despite there being zero humans on their side of the lagoon.

“Well, for one, that could very well be enough for you depending on the case, but it could also not be; it’d be at your discretion, but for another, this whole thing would require you having already told me about the hypothetical hunk in your midst as he entered it,” Sirius instils. “Case in point, today’s journey; we spent a lovely half-minute reading each other’s minds by the precut fruit, spent upwards of minutes at a time whispering heartily about a rando produce lad’s aesthetic and all that he was doing with it, and I could have blasted through the roof, I was so thrilled about it, but that entire conversation over by the fridges? I was living for it — levitating for it, Remus; that’s the exact kind of talking I’d want us to be doing, long before the possibility of anything more happening than just a bout of light to heavy flirting.”

The long stretch of pause Remus goes for lines up perfectly with someone hitting into the water over there and that really does wonders for keeping Sirius grounded in the scene they’re in, he’ll just say that. “Do you really see a scenario in which I would even know ahead of time that I was being flirted on for it to feasibly go further than that?” he poses, taking Sirius right into a snortstorm with it. “Yeah, mhm, you should be snorting; doesn’t seem like something I’d clock, does it?”

“Mhm, and we’ve very covered over this, but you will likely need a dose of me to effectively parse whether some hypothetical hunk in your midst has indeed been puttin’ on the flirtz, but that’s a field of work I’m more than happy to consult in, babey,” Sirius reiterates. “Us having talked up a storm about any one hypothetical hunk before any potential action takes place would be my number one limit, followed by keeping it safe and smart, followed by the hypothetical hunk being made aware that you are as temporary as your stint over there is, and for my last, I’ll ask that I be a name that's honoured within that scenario; if those terms can be respected, then I’d be comfortable with giving you the room to explore that specific scenario if it came your way.”

Remus breathes in long and ends up pushing a funny little noise out of himself that might’ve been an exhale if it didn’t come with a premature attempt at speech, but that’s alright, Remus has that speech thing handled in a flash. “OK, so without all the flowery prose,” he braces, lifting his hands to accompany his words with some grade-A, Sirius-level gesturing, “it wouldn’t be a dealbreaker for you if I went and slept with someone else while I was away, so long as I kept you in the loop from the get, wore a condom, kept things short and sweet, and told him I've a boyfriend named Sirius back in London.”

Sirius tooches his lips out for a beat or two before giving that a fair bit of nodding, but that’s a little too simplified for him and he’d like to use his floor time well. “Well, first of all, there is no dealbreaker with me; I’m in love with you and in it for the long haul so let’s just get that pretty and plain, and second, yes, if you want to go as literal a route as possible, those are indeed my terms,” he allows, but only just. “That said, I don’t think explaining myself as much as possible out the gate counts as flowery prose; I wanted you to know what my limits are and didn’t think you’d want me to go for the quickest, snappiest soundbites for this kind of thing when that’s just not the kind of care and attention it deserves.”

Remus pauses still for a beat, his own lips tooching out a bit on the other end of it. “Oh, go on with the flowers, then,” he relents.

Sirius does not need to be told twice. “To reiterate, I would prefer, whatever the scenario and whoever it may be with, that it be a temporary thing at most, that condoms would indeed be worn so there are no surprises to come down the line, that our connection remain a constant throughout the whole process and a few things stay just ours, and most importantly, I would want to know about it: I’d want to know if there’s a hypothetical hunk in your midst, I’d want to know about your findings and help figure the mystery out with you, I’d want to know if things are cooking up to something, I'd want to know when and where the action would take place should you choose to move forward with it, and I’d certainly want to hear from in the aftermath; in fact, I would say there’s no telling you how important the follow-up would be for me because I’d want to hear all about that, I just know it.”

There’s a moment or five where Remus simply stares down at Sirius, but there are two big boy notables as far as facial cues go, the first being the downward curve of his brow that suggests a mother of a squint is being dolled out behind those shades and the second being the slight lift to his right cheek that’s keeping Remus’s mouth both ajar and on a slight slant, and if Sirius didn’t know any better, he’d say that boy is doing some complex maths up there in that head of his, so he sits tight, has himself two more melon balls, and ditches the toothpicks in the pick pile before Remus braces his hands back down on the blanket, splaying them out wide on either side of him and curling himself in to get his face right up on Sirius’s.

“You got something out of that,” he observes.

“Hm?” Sirius bids, going for an innocuous blink.

“You got something intense out of what went on in there,” Remus reiterates.

“I did, I very did,” Sirius cops.

Remus leans back just enough for them to see each other’s features a bit better. “What stuck out to you most?” he investigates, hanging his head to the right with a pointed and, dare he say, wry smile on his lips.

Sirius breathes in long, battling a momentary hesitance over where to even begin by answering it in the simplest form; naming the exact centrepiece to it all. “You,” he offers. “The little Remus-isms you did when you first got bashful over him laughing at how much you were laughing, the way you quipped to survive the moment he really started to pay attention to you and all the continued bashfulness that came with, the way you commanded the section with all your ‘tude even though you never think you're commanding much of anything — oh, how wrong you are about that — and the way you kept getting him all ruffled, the way you kept stopping him from being able to work, the flirting you were doing once we got onto the other side of that section—”

Remus comes in there. “I wasn’t—”

Sirius smiles brightly, tracing his left thumb back and forth over the inside of Remus’s left ankle. “Mhm."

Remus breathes in fast, lifting his right palm to his face and giving the lower half of it a solid rubdown as he lifts out of his curled position to rework his mouth around something that sure looks like a smile. “That doesn’t mean I lost sight of you once in there,” he registers, reaching his right forefinger down to prod it against the back of Sirius’s tracing hand.

“I know that, are you kidding me?” Sirius trades him. “Of course I know that; it’s a huge part of why I feel good about this, Remus.”

“Then there’s no reason for you to go thinking that I’m not going to be thinking of you multiple times a day while I’m over there and be far too preoccupied with missing you to go listening to some passing attraction,” Remus instils. “I'm not going to be starving so hard for it that I'm not going to be able to think straight, I’d wait for you; I would simply wait until I saw you next and maybe say a couple of things about the hypothetical hunk just so you’d come and get me for it.”

“Oh, Remus, I’m gunning for you to do that, believe me, but I wasn’t done my list,” Sirius slips him.

“There’s more?” Remus implores.

“Oh, there’s always more,” Sirius attests. “All the hip-jutting you were been doing all over that produce section, the huffing and puffing you did while we went back and forth over what his agenda was exactly, the lightning rod that your spine turned into the moment you realised he toted the toothpicks up from the back, the stillness to the entire store when he held onto those bags and the fumbling you did with them when he finally let go, your little bowing session, the feet-shuffling you did down the back aisle, the sheer amount of unbridled fun you were to just be around in that fridge, how sweet and careful you were about processing it with me out by the Healing Truck, how flaming hot and, I very quote, sexy you not only looked but felt up there on that hilltop? The whole thing, all of it, every detail to the picture goes back to you and every bit of fun and excitement we had in there and since; it all goes back to us, that’s what I got out of it, and it has been intense, you are correct about that.”

Remus hardly gets a new breath in before he’s pushing it back out. “Sirius, I know what I’ve got here and I’m not going to mess that up as long as I can help it,” he repurposes, lifting his hands to tap them back on his chest. “I’m certainly not going to go sifting through the dumpster down the street for scraps of what I’ve already got with you.”

Sirius snorts once. “Nice one.”

“Got it from the poet,” Remus returns.

Sirius gives himself a couple beats specifically to shimmy a bit and then he’s right back to it. “On our way down here, I told you I want you to try to see more of your power and gravitational pull going forward and you were so receptive to me at the time, but this is a perfect example of that kind of thing,” he maintains. “You could’ve pulled Produce Lad after just twenty minutes, your orbit is just that strong and your pull that undeniable, and I don’t want to deny it; I want to make room for it so instead of closing myself off, instead of fuming over it and stamping my feet, instead of clinging so tight to you that I end up sending you away faster than if I just made room for your orbit, why shouldn’t I do it? why shouldn't I make room for you?”

“You’ve made so much room for me I can hardly believe you think there’s any more left to hand over,” Remus trades him. “It’s also the easiest thing in the world for me to assume that this is your way of getting rid of me, Sirius, I don't know if you're aware—”

Sirius sends him a gargantuan pfft up at him. “Boy, please, I’m not setting you free, I want you to feel the absolute freest that is humanely possible with me and there is a difference,” he highlights. “You’ve been looking better than ever, Remus, and I can’t stop looking at you; while I was levitating around in that grocery, while we were frolicking the clearings, while I floated around in the water trying to name the feeling I felt in my body, the feeling I've had all day that's just been growing and growing while I processed it all, while I thought long and hard and came up with these limits and still couldn't stop looking your way? Cunt, even with a quilt draped over you like a nun, your glow is that distracting to me and I want to see more of it on you; I'm heady just thinking about getting to watch your glow from the good seats.”

“You will see more of it and right up by the front row just based on the fact that you’re the one who’s making it happen,” Remus serves him. “I just don’t think I should have to jump someone else’s bones for that to keep happening.”

“Remus, it’s at your discretion; if you don’t feel like you’re going to want to pursue something that crops up where you didn’t expect it, then I don’t want to say I don’t believe you or that you can’t hold out,” Sirius maintains, putting more pressure down on the hold he’s got on Remus’s ankles. “If that’s how you feel about it then that’s perfect, you’re perfect, and it's more than fine with me, but I want you to know that you can change your mind and you can tell me if that happens; I want you to be able to come to me about it and I want us to be able to talk about these things without fear of judgement — I didn’t judge you for thinking Hot Gardener was a slice back in the day nor did I judge you for finding him hot enough to whisper heartily about with me in a reading nook, I haven't judged for finding Produce Lad right strapping, I’m not going to judge you for finding some hypothetical hunk in your midst attractive, and so long as you treat me as an active party inside your exploration, I’m still not going to judge you if the time came where you did want to take up the offer and give the hypothetical hunk that slice he asked for.”

“Sirius, I should be giving you a medal for how free of judgement you make me feel,” Remus instils first. “I’ve no notes on anything said before that last bit, every other bit of that was lovely, but I really think I would still say, ‘thanks, but I’m good with what I’ve got.’”

Sirius lifts the hand he’s got splayed over him to showcase its empty status before placing it right back where it’d just been, quite enjoying the way it feels as though they’re grounding him from underneath. “And that’s your right,” he reinstates, happy to let the boy know he’s the boss in any way he can. “Would it be any different if the hypothetical hunk wasn’t a bloke?”

Remus’s right brow goes right up his forehead and past the lowest hang of his fringe. “Uhm, no,” he provides airily. “No, I think I’d just be saying, ‘thanks, but I’m good with what I’ve got, miss.’”

Sirius smirks once; can’t help it, won’t help it. “OK, but stay with me on this one because I think it’s a question that requires a bit more thought than that,” he bids him. “Say you’ve been shooting the shit with this hot-to-trot chicka from class, work, study group, the house, whichever setting, and she makes herself quite clear she wants what you’ve got and you find yourself wanting to try what she’s got; in my mind, if you’re up front with me about it, you keep me in the loop, you're safe about it, and you don’t pretend there isn’t a boyfriend back home and she’s down with that detail, then I’d be open to you exploring that side of yourself more, too; it’s not an experience you’ve had before and I don’t want to ignore that or bar you from having it.”

Remus stares at him for a while before he finds the words and by a while, Sirius means maybe ten or so seconds technically, but that’s a bit of a stretch to linger through when you’re living it out in real-time. “I’ve never been to space, but I’m not planning on being on the next rocket out,” he holds up.

Sirius pulls in a breath, puffs it into his cheeks, and aims to hold it in along with his deep amusement, but he’s not got it in him to thwart a powerful bark coming out of him. “I can’t with you,” he trills.

Remus can’t hold off on a quirk of his lips either, but he’s not laughing. “I can’t with you," he returns him. “I’ll remind you since it seems you might’ve lost the link somewhere over time, but I had the chance to experience it; I was even asked to bring her back home with me, the moment right was there, I’d have had a solid shot at giving it a whole whirl, but you know, oddly enough, I still said ‘no, bad idea’ and let me just see something, do you remember why that might’ve been the case?”

Sirius breathes in long through a smile that’s taken up quite a bit of prime real estate over his cheeks. “She wasn’t me and you didn’t want to hurt her,” he answers, his smile twitching at the corners when Remus follows that up with a blunt, highlighting hum. “Except you already have me and you’re not going to lose me if you ever did want to explore that part of yourself a little more, and to that, you’re not going to hurt anyone you’re honest with from the jump; if you’re open with her about what the situation is and isn’t, if you’re safe and smart about it, and if you’re honest and open with me the whole way through, then lad or lass, Remus, I’m still going to be right here, rooting, tooting, cheering you on, and you won't have to feel a shred of guilt.”

Remus’s brows take to a whole ass leap up his forehead before they come right back down to crease the skin between their standard position, keeping quite silent for a long batch of beats, but Sirius can tell that mind of his is whirring a mile a minute. “OK, I appreciate the unwavering loyalty toward me in that scenario,” he puts up, testing each word out like he’s barely got his tongue around them.

Sirius blinks up at him carefully. “Remus, I want you to feel free with me,” he instils. “Free to be yourself, free to find that out, free to feel empowered in us, free to grow—”

“But I am,” Remus insists. “I’ve been growing with you.”

“I know and I see that,” Sirius instils, taking to pressing his left thumb down on the underside of Remus’s knee and starting up a soothing trace with it, “and you’re not going to stop doing that if I can help it, but your identity and whatever the hell label you fit under tripped you up a lot last year, and it must still get to you in some ways, I’d imagine?”

“Actually, Sirius, I don’t care much anymore and that’s thanks to you,” Remus returns him, shrugging with his shoulders and his hands. “I don’t know what to call myself other than incredibly bent and that works for me at this point; I don’t feel like I missed out on the chance to tally up what I like better, I’m not laying up at night wishing I’d tested it out more before I landed an absolute Adonis, I’m not aching like that, I’m just not.”

Sirius takes a beat or two to wet his lips and let a rebuttal like that have the room to lay uncontested. “Well, I don’t want you laying up at night aching for any reason so believe me when I say I’m glad that’s one of them,” he offers him. “Having said that, I don’t want you getting to a place where you are laying up at night a year, two, three down the line and feeling like you never got the space to work that out; I don’t want you getting to a point where you feel I held you back from figuring that part of yourself out more, I don’t want you to think that you wouldn’t be able to bring something like this to me long before it got to the point where you are up at night battling it out with resentment, I want us to last for the long haul, but I also want us to be an open book on our way there.”

“I want that, too, but—” Remus starts, faltering for a beat or two at most before he trains his head down and flies his open hands down at Sirius’s left hand curled over his ankles. “I don’t want to tamper with this; it’s all-encompassing, it’s perfect, and it’s easier than it’s ever been before, I don’t need to go messing with it.”

Sirius puts a bit more pressure down on the hold he’s got on him. “I agree it’s all of those things and more, but you wouldn’t be messing with it just because you might want to explore something that came along down the line, lad or lass,” he instils.

“Yes, I would be,” Remus whispers fast. “This kind of thing doesn’t work, Sirius; we’ve both seen Élite.

Sirius snorts long. “Yeah, but we’re not in Élite, thank Cunt,” he trades him. “And we’re not them either, we’re us.”

“I want us to stay that way and how would we do that with some Parisian down my throat?” Remus puts up.

Sirius gapes, no grin. “What part of the Parisian is down there, or am I supposed to go with whatever feels right?” he raises him, and in return, Remus grabs up the squeezer bottle of ranch and juts it at him like it’s a duelling sword, but at least the cap’s still on. “Better than if you opened fire on me, I suppose.”

“I haven’t ruled that out yet,” Remus attests, setting the bottle down beside him and going for one of the baby carrots, but that bottle o’ dip is meant to be inside of an invisible holster and that part Sirius can see plainly.

He pushes off of his right side and lifts up to mirror Remus’s stance, sitting knee-to-knee with the lad and having a quick tug on the sides of Remus’s quilt. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to; I’m not drafting you a contract to sign in blood, I’m not expecting you to have results by a firm deadline, and I don’t want this to be something that eats away at you or has you worried for us,” he maintains. “This isn’t even just for while you’re in Paris, I want this to be something we can touch base on and revisit as we go, I want it to be something that we don’t shy away from or pretend is completely off-limits, I want it to be something that’s per your discretion and my involvement, with the understanding that I don’t want to be the person whispering in your ear and telling you that you can’t explore something you end up wanting to; I don’t want to be the voice that represses you, I simply will not be that, I’m here for your liberation and that only.”

Remus lifts his hands up, pushes the tips of his fingers up underneath the lenses of his sunnies for a solid rub at his eyes, and pulls his hands down to readjust the lenses over his eyes, placing the points of his elbows down on his knees so that he can better criss-cross his fingers together under his chin and look an utterly diplomatic bloke. “OK, so say the evening of October the twelfth rolls around, you and I have been talking like mad, sending arrays of texts back and forth about everything under the sun and including this hypothetical hunk I met down at the quad back at the start of term—”

Sirius’s brain bends for a good beat or three. “Oh, oh — yes, go,” he prompts, eyes peeled, gape-grin on.

Remus’s lopsided grin starts playing around at his lips and that's always a good sign whether he quells it or not. “—And you go to look at your mobile that day and see a text from me stating that tonight may just be the night,” he continues, putting his head on a slight tilt to the right. “You’re telling me that you wouldn’t lose your actual shit if you saw that? I love you, but think about how that would actually feel for you in the moment and try to be honest with both me and yourself about it.”

Sirius wets his lips, tilting his head side to side as he lets the prompt land. “Well, as calm and collected as I feel about that concept right now, you’re right that I might not feel quite so chill about it as I thought I’d be once the moment’s there and happening,” he allows, and he should allow it, “but I do think that’d be more about how I’m a human person and flawed in that way, so while I may well get all red and dizzy on my feet because I went opening the door and there you went actually going through it, that’d be an insecurity-based response and one I’m prone to, but I am trying to let go of that because it’s not a good look on me at all.”

Remus gives a tiny, spurred noise down in his throat. “Sirius, there’s wanting to let go of it and then there’s this,” he raises, and at least he’s being careful about his tone or else that might’ve sounded a lot more aggressive than Remus would’ve intended it to be. “I believe you when you say it makes you happy seeing me owning what I've got and what I like, and I more than I believe you’d be the best and funniest person to talk to about some hypothetical hunk I met down by the quad, but as recently as two days ago, you still thought Sophie wanted a piece of me and while you've chilled out on your vendetta lately, it’s not like you’ve got a pristine track record from being super-duper kind to her in response to that.”

Sirius nods for it, knowing he better not avoid wearing this one either. “Yeah, no, I didn't handle that one well at all; I mean, we’ve rubbed each other the wrong way ever since she started working next door, but the bulk of my pettiness stems from when I wanted you, didn’t have you, and she was always in that damn shop looking for you, and even when you weren’t on that night, she’d still crane her neck to check whether you were around there somewhere doing a surprise cover shift and it’d just irk right to the bone,” he maintains, wearing it for the world and, most importantly, Remus to see. “And then, when I finally did get you, it didn't go away or anything, I just stayed stewing over it because none of her behaviour toward you changed and I know she didn’t know we’d made things official, but I did and she didn't, she wasn’t going to know as far as my eyes could see, and it’s not even a big deal, it’s just not, but the latter half of winter and most of spring sucked in terms of when and where I could reach for you and not see you tense up, they just did, they sucked; I could hardly touch you at all when you’d stop in for visits or come do your readings there just to be in the same room as me for a few hours, and I loved that time we got, it made me feel light on my feet when you’d come draft your papers at the bar seating, but—”

Remus worried at his lower lip throughout Sirius’s monologue, but that last line has him dropping that lip at once. “I was starving you for affection,” he finishes, but there’s a note of something other than his ability to surmise a point of Sirius’s, something like reflection aloud. “I'd hardly give you a thing anywhere that wasn’t one of our safe little flats and then come do my work there and be just out of your reach? That’s just being a tease and not even a purposeful one.”

Sirius smirks fast, shaking his head for it. “I do like it better when you’re intending to be a tease,” he trades him, "but it’s not like there wasn’t a current of ‘oh, you wait ’til we’re alone, pal’ to most of those nights because there was, it's just I could hardly touch you, had to be so careful about when I snuck a quick brush in and time things just right, and then maybe I'd get to brush your pinky finger while passing your free refill over—"

"I offered to pay each time," Remus slides in.

"Anyway," Sirius slides him. "I'd have to do all that and then she’d come in, stay her whole break and hang right off of you, and it always looked so easy with you and her, but there was nothing for me to worry about and there wouldn’t have been even if she had been interested in you; that’s the part I wasn’t seeing — or wouldn’t see, I don’t know which, but it was probably a bit of both, knowing me.”

Remus swishes the point of his lips back and forth, tugging his quilt in more around him. “I didn’t think about how I was acting with her in front of you,” he extends. “I really wasn’t paying enough attention to you or the messages I was sending you for so long.”

“It’s really OK, I'm not trying to slug you for it now; you’re repaying me in messages by the dozen these days, so we’re squared to one on that,” Sirius instils. “These aren’t excuses for how I acted with her, they’re just reasons why I stayed petty there for a while and I’m going to go easier on her, I am, but I can’t promise that we’re ever going to be buddies the way you two are because we just don’t mesh that well, never have; when you get down to it, she’s an extra-hot, no-foam girl, I stankfaced her the first time she ever uttered those words at me, and we’ve not held a mutual respect for one another since the day we met."

Remus snorts once, sniffs anew, and does his best to thwart a smile, but it’s not going that well for him. “I understand if there's a trek ahead of you, why you’d want the drink to still be hot by the time you get to whatever your destination is, but I’ve never quite understood it for her when it’s not like she’s got a particularly long way to go to get back to work, and it wasn’t as if she planned on nursing it over the next leg of her shift when she’d have a seat and drink half of it in there,” he confesses, low down on his register like she’ll hear him talking just a wee bit of shit about her from all the way back in London. “And the no-foam thing, I think, is a preference she’d perhaps know is exceptionally tedious and wasteful for her baristas to produce regularly if she were behind the counter making the thing herself during a rush.”

“Exactly, but she's been hanging out over the bar long enough to notice the amount of milk steamed and foam shovelling any one of us have had to do get the foam off the top; fuck off with that nonsense and come behind here yourself if you want it so badly, I've got a queue of other drinks to get through and if you really need your latte that piping hot, then you’ve burnt all your tastebuds off by now and the temperature of your drink should be the last thing on your mind,” Sirius pops off, he won't deny it, but there come the stifled, wan snickers at the back of Remus’s throat and those are lovely to hear. “There’s just a fundamental difference between her and me that no amount of mediating can fix, but if I see her here and there when I pop into the shop, I’m going to get a grip and stop being a dick to her about you, OK? I want your conscience to feel clean as a whistle.”

Remus nods for it before going in behind the headcover that the quilt is providing him for a quick, idle pull at his left earlobe. “As much as I found it more than a tad dismissive of you, I did get the teensy-tiniest kick out of how many different ‘S’ names you managed to log away for her,” he shares.

“Always on the fly, babey,” Sirius maintains, goon-grin activated. “I’d just consult my currents and let the name of the day come to me.”

“Of course you did,” Remus breathes out, shaking his head with it, but there’s an air of reverence in there. “Well, that was quite the era, but I do think working her actual name into your roster for the next time you do cross paths could go a long way in terms of clearing your conscience.”

“Mm, I’ll think about it,” Sirius lobs him.

“Mm, I’d simply do it,” Remus trades him, reworking his mouth around a smile and taking in a new breath from there. “I do find it a bit odd that during those same months where you didn’t have me and would’ve been some of the hardest on Sophie, you seemingly had no trouble at all hearing me go on and on about Dorcas having appealed to my French kink and snog-bombing me inside one of your favourite pubs in the whole of London, all in the same night.”

Sirius lights right up, splaying his hands between their laps. “And I really didn’t, that’s the thing,” he instils, his skin alive and buzzing. “Big night overall, you know.”

“Huge night,” Remus echoes, a circumstantial smile at his lips.

“Rollercoaster,” Sirius raises it. “I mean, it hardly stopped; I saw you ringing me on the Mondayist of Mondays and that sent my spirits through the roof, but I didn’t like the way you sounded over the phone at all and I loathed the idea of leaving you there alone much longer, so the next stretch of my night was just fully about getting from the Flat to you in as little time as possible, and then I did that, thought I’d feed your sorry ass, and you chose to scarf down nearly a whole plate of grease before even setting your peepers on me, and I’d have pressed you for more details sooner but you looked as cute as you looked hungry and I thought you deserved a reward for not making a scene about me getting you the plate in the first place, so there’s little ol’ me, sitting there, sipping my cup, trying to let you lead the way, and then you did look up at me, but only to offer me some of the scraps off your plate—”

“OK, you seem to remember a lot of moments I'd chosen to forget,” Remus chimes in.

“And I’ll continue to,” Sirius serves him. “Then, your peepers were finally on me and I simply had no resolve left anymore; I had to ask what’d happened and you thankfully did start giving me something to work with, but the way you tell a story is so pristine, I’m there just trying to piece the details together and keep a straight face throughout—”

Remus comes in with a throaty little noise. “And not doing very well, at that,” he slips him.

“You’re my weakness, boy,” Sirius attests, head held high on his shoulders, “sent straight from the ether to ensure I stay on my toes, but call me twinkle toes 'cause I was on the tips of them that night—”

And there’s the belly laugh. “Oh, don’t,” Remus warns, or tried to do, at least, “say things.”

Remus’s warning falls on some rather squeaky-clean ears for Sirius can’t really say any words at all until his snicker storm fizzles out, but he’s back like the tide quick enough and if he’s affectionately referred to as Twinkle Toes from now on, that’s more than alright with him. “And then, it was just boom, boom, boom, here’s some information, Sirius, and I didn't have time to feel cock-blocked or even slighted by her for trying something, but I’m sure you not being that down with it helped ease the blow a little there, mm?” he raises, going for a diplomatic head tilt since he’s in the company the reigning diplomat.

Remus reworks his mouth around a smile. “I’m sure that did help,” he lets land, but not entirely. “Only, you didn’t know that right away; you knew I was upset and confused why it’d even happened to me, but your eyes grew three sizes when you heard about—”

“Listen, that absolute hero uses a monumentally show-stopping line on you and I’m meant to feel anything other than reverence? Please, I just couldn’t fucking blame her; I’d gone down a list of moves on you by then, but I’d have tried appealing to your French kink long beforehand if I'd known there was one to tap into, I’ll tell you that,” Sirius maintains. “And then, it was like good old-fashioned dialogue up in that booth; you’re all down on yourself, down on the world, cursing the very occurrence of a snog bomb and thinking you’d been some kind of tease dragging her along for weeks and then denying that mere seconds later — thrilling, you were absolutely thrilling to contend with that night, but then you’re bringing out the cross and you sure seemed like you wanted me to get the hammer and a few nails from the toolbox, and I wasn’t about to do anything like that personally so I put my focus on getting you to a place where I felt you were at least allowing the idea that there wasn’t any blame to throw toward anybody, not even yourself, to exist in the room with us, and then, you know, you sure seemed to come out to me, which definitely took over every thought in my head, and quite suddenly, you getting snog-bombed in my favourite pub in all of London was the least of my concerns?”

Remus smirks once, his chest doing a funny, sharp jut with it. “I’m sure things did go a bit foggy up there after such a laborious couple of months trying to sleuth that out of me in some fashion,” he allows for, a smile on his lips that matches the rather circumstantial tone he chose to go with, but Sirius can tell there’s more coming by the slight lilt he put on the first half of that offering, “but you were so nice to her, even when you didn’t think there was a chance with you and me anymore, you were still so kind, to her and me about all that — and I don’t want to hear a thing about you getting Tom-Petty at the shop because we both know that wasn’t about her; you had every right to toot your own horn there and use that as a defence because you were incredibly cool about it all and I’m glad you had it in you to say it.”

Sirius ought to snag Remus’s quilt off of him or go dig his own out of the duffel so that he can take his rightful place as Lady of Perpetual Swoon, but Remus looks too cute with his quilt-framed visage and Sirius can do little more in terms of moving than squirm in place. “Now, see, you’ve no idea how much I actually needed to hear that — like, I barely knew I needed to until this second, which is a lot given that I’ve spent hours trying to locate what this continuous feeling in my body has been all afternoon and you’ve named it for me; it’s familiarity,” he instils, fully a-swoon and happy about it. “It feels familiar to me to rejoice in your gravitational pull and recognize that others will feel it, too; it’s like I’ve been here, in some form or another, for a long time already, but I can be so quick to let other, lesser, pettier parts of me have a lot more influence over my whole than the parts that can be incredibly cool in the face of another person finding you alluring, you know?"

Remus puts a breath out through with the faintest noise attached to it and if that’d have just been it, Sirius still would’ve known he was meant to keep talking, but the little tip of Remus’s chin toward him seals the deal on that front. “I’m really glad we are such an equal match and that you do question me because it either brings me back down to earth or it helps me reinforce what I’m feeling in myself, but I’ll tell you one thing, it’s been the latter for me this time,” Sirius instils. “I get your hesitance, but I feel good about it, Remus — it feels like I’ve met myself all over again and I recognize him well, so I've already had a huge thing happen within myself today and as far as I’m concerned, nothing has to happen from here on out; I’m not soliciting you, I’m not handing you off to someone else, I don’t want anything out of you other than for you to start recognizing both your power and your gravitational pull, and that, you already knew and it's something we can do without any actual action taking place down the line for you, but if you do want that at some point, then I know I’m going to want to know about it and I know I’m going to want to hear you talk about it with me because you’re a fucking grade-A storyteller and I love hearing the way you put things, and that, sweets, is incredibly familiar to me because I’ve known that much about myself since I’ve known you.”

Remus pushes out quite the exhale that Sirius can’t say he saw the inhale for, turns to his left, and lugs the beach bag closer to him by the handles, having a feel around in there before procuring Sirius’s pack out of the depths. “I’m lighting one and you had better keep talking through it,” he advertises, pulling one out of the pack.

Sirius smirks up a storm once, lifting his free hand for the go-ahead and waiting until Remus lets out his first haul to heed his request, but that’s mostly for him when Remus looks so good doing it. “Well, it’s like the other day, when I heard about your various sexcapades with Ding-Dong Tom in your days of yore,” he raises him.

Remus abandons the half-haul he managed to take in and puts it back out through a pfft. “Heard about, he says,” he attests. “Unbelievable; the man who pointed to various spots on my property and asked if we’d ever boned there or not says, ‘heard about.’”

“Asked about, asked about,” Sirius amends, beaming all the while. “But see, I genuinely did want to know about it and yet, every time you confirmed a spot I pointed to, it was like a freezing bullet would go up my spine and you rightfully caught me clenching by the end of it because I was; ‘course, it is a bit funny to think you assumed that was me calling you out for your hoeish ways because if I was going to do that, I’d have just called you one and we’d have laughed and kept going, but anyway—”

Remus gives a vague hum there, pushing his newest haul out with a tilt of his head to the right. “Oh, you see the rails again?” he observes.

“Never lost ‘em, but I’m right on track,” Sirius instils, sticking the point of his tongue between his teeth. “Look, even I wasn’t sure what was going on there at first, but it was the same feeling I’d your in your den after you’d talked shit about your shag rug with a decided amount of personal knowledge involved and that feeling was a cold, cold ire, and not for you having gotten up to that, you had every right to, but he didn’t deserve to be there and that was the whole of it; Ding-Dong Tom leaves a bad taste in my mouth and a worse feeling in my bones, always has, always will, but does that mean I don’t want to hear about anything from back then just because the tale might tangentially involve him? Absolutely fucking not, Remus; I live for any stories you’ll give me from back in the day, I’ve been in love with whatever tidbits you give me, and I have been and always will be curious about you and your hoeish side, so who the fuck knows? Maybe I’ve been at this point for a long time now, maybe I’ve been on track for this and just needed this time with you and a catalytic event to go exceedingly well for the both of us for me to see the familiarity that's been lining my bones, maybe I just needed to get my brain and body on the same wavelength, but it sure feels like they’re balanced now, I’ll say that.”

Sirius takes in a slight breath, reaches to nab the cigarette off of Remus, and takes a much-needed pull off of it. “And,” he offers up, willing to leave room for his petty side to get the searchlight it likely deserves, “maybe the times I’ve been the most reactive and possessive of you, have been the same times I was legitimately worried you’d realize you vibe better with Sophie or, Cunt forbid, Tom than you do with me—”

“Well, that," Remus clambers in, "you're just going to have to trust me on; our vibe is up so high in the stratosphere that those two don’t even get near it, and I mean that kindly toward Sophie and only to her.”

The cove is a tad too crowded to go for a smooch, but Sirius drops his gaze to Remus’s lips and licks his own to be sure he'll have seen him do it and know what he’d have done if he could have. “It’s almost like there was never anything for me to be afraid of,” he cements, putting his gaze back on Remus’s lenses. “I just don’t see you straying far from me even if you did want to explore someone else’s body for the night; it’s just a body, isn't it, but you and me? We’re never going to find anything like this out there again and no one’s body is going to mess with that, I don’t care how shredded it is.”

Remus takes a strong breath in through his nose while putting his lips into the firmest line and then his face falls placid and oddly unreadable until he lifts his wiry wrists up to clutch at his chest, letting out a guttural noise and miming like he’s ripping his breastplate clean open.

Sirius reacts whip-fast, but it’s all a bit alarming added up together. “Oh, oh — what are we doing here?” he raises kindly.

“You are so fucking intense, and I love it,” Remus throws out, knicking the cigarette back from Sirius for a wicked pull off of it and speaking rapidly as he lets it back out. “That’s the maddest part about it; I fucking love it, you, this, so much, it’s like there’s a living thing growing in me — stop it, stop giving the creature strength, Sirius, there's no more room for it to grow.”

“I don’t know that I can,” Sirius raises idly, his lips at a pointed twist. “This is legitimately the most centred I’ve felt within myself, maybe ever, and I wanted you to know it and be here with me in it because you deserve to be; I mean, the rest of my personal life is a pile of dogshit right now, but you? You’re the rose, the very best part, and you’re it for me and I want you to feel free and able to talk, grow, and evolve with me, so you may feel whole and complete right now with how things are and more power to you, Remus, I love that, but you’re allowed to reevaluate, you’re encouraged to bring your findings to me, and if you find yourself wanting to explore more at some point, be it while you’re off over there or when you’re back here, as long as you tell me about it, as long as we're smart and safe, as long as I’m treated as a respected party inside of your exploration, and as long as you include me in the steps along the way, then I’ll be happy to meet you wherever you are, whenever.”

Remus rubs fast at his nose with his free hand, a verklempt breath leaving his throat as he lets it fall to his lap again. “I just don’t know if this is ever going to be something I’m going to need,” he offers, throat thick, voice slight.

“That’s OK, it’s at your discretion,” Sirius echoes. “That’s where that agency stuff comes back in, and there’s no threat to us that letting you have agency over yourself in this can create.”

Remus stares him down for about three long beats before giving him a single reply with a jut of the cigarette toward him. “Bitch.”

“Excuse?” Sirius bids, blinking at him with avid curiosity certainly, but there’s reverence in there for him, too.

“Saying that to me here makes you one fuck of a bitch,” Remus returns.

Well, evidently a dose of Lyall’s entered the ring and Sirius couldn’t be happier about it. “Would you like me to pause until we’re in closer quarters?” he checks.

“There’s more?” Remus implores.

“Well, of course there’s going to be more,” Sirius retains, letting a snicker go free.

“No, before you do anything else, I want you to tell me if I’m even real,” Remus bids of him, fanning himself with his free hand.

“Oh, honey, you are and that’s the zaniest part for me,” Sirius slips him, reaching his right hand up to cover Remus’s left cheek to offer his input to the study on whether Remus is indeed a person. “I just really don’t feel I should need to keep you in this little box that’s just for me and never let you out of it; you wouldn’t fit inside, first of all, and we’re partners for another, there’s just no need for a box.”

Remus breathes in long, reaches to stub the end of the cigarette out on a rock sitting to the left of the picnic blanket, and stows the butt in Sirius’s pack, speaking after quite the expulsion of an exhale. “I’ve never not appreciated your box analogies in regards to me, so believe me when I say it’s not like I’m suddenly unappreciative of you sneaking it in there, but expecting me not to go fuck somebody else while I’m very much with you wouldn’t count as boxing me in; not to me at least,” he poses, splaying his palms up at him now that they’re both free to use and provide aid for his point. “I mean, did you think I was boxing you in last time?”

Sirius shakes his head no. “No box, no shackles, no muzzle, no form of control whatsoever; just a boundary,” he trades him, and to the plain point to Remus’s lips, he hums clear and concise. “Well, Remus, you didn’t even tell me I wasn’t permitted to wander, just that I needed to tell you ahead of time so you could prepare yourself and not get blind-sighted all over again by the guy who made you feel all sorts of things you were sure you’d never feel for a person again, and in a way, we’re not really asking very different of each other, are we? We both know the other is their saving grace, we both want honesty in this, we’re both after each other’s light, and neither of us seems to have plans for wandering as is so you’re good in every way, Remus, promise you that.”

“How could this feel equal to you, then?” Remus puts up. “Why should I get a longer lead than you do?”

Sirius wets his lips for a moment, humming with it. “Mm, well, it could be the fact that I simply don’t have the same baggage associated with this kind of thing that you do, and I don’t and won’t expect you to go revaluate and widen your limits just because I’ve reevaluated and widened mine?” he raises him.

Remus clicks his tongue once. “How convenient for me,” he retorts, but he does turn his head to leave a kiss to Sirius’s left palm in a way that’s so automatic that it might have little to nothing to do with his dry quip that Sirius has to celebrate it for the sweet little detail that it just is, either way.

“There’s a difference to what we’re carrying around, Remus,” Sirius keeps with it, passing his thumb back and forth over Remus’s cheek. “You’ve got yourself a suitcase filled with years of disloyalty and next to no real communication on that front, which has only spurred an intrinsic need in you to plan ahead so that you don’t wind up completely bamboozled like that again and I’ll respect you and that until the end of my time, whereas I’m out here toting a hefty fucker of a suitcase that’s been packed with a terrifying fear of inadequacy and that’s not going to go away tomorrow, but I have got to let go of the fear of you suddenly waking up and deciding you’re finished with me because my fear of inadequacy goes back long before you ever lit up my life and you shouldn’t have to pay for that; you’ve stood the test of time with me and if you’re still fucking here after this week, then you’re staying, simple as that.”

Remus breathes in fast — almost too fast for his throat to handle, it sounds like, but he recovers the very next beat. “That,” he starts through gritted teeth, “is what I’ve been trying to get across to you for a very, very long time,” he pours out. “And long before this week, I’ll mention; I’ve wanted to hammer it into your head a fair few times over the last few months, you numbskull.”

Sirius smirks and smirks and smirks, and then he’s nothing but smiles, dropping his left hand to Remus’s middle and lifting his right one up to sneak them both underneath the veil of the quilt. “I know you have and you’ve done that; you’ve done it, Remus,” he instils, giving Remus’s waist a slow, three-tiered jostle so he’ll fucking feel it, not just hear him say it. “I’m very aware that I’ve been taking my sweet time getting over myself enough to get here, but I’m done; I’m done clinging to you with such force that I end up treating you like a toy, I’m done treating you as though your sole purpose is for my own, constant validation, I’m done pushing my weight around and demanding so much out of you in the process, and I’m so done feeling possessive over you because there was never any need for me to be in the first place.”

Remus gives up a wounded little breath and that might have something to do with him not being quite able to make an accompanying sound with it, but he comes back swinging. “Sirius, you can want to be done with all of that and still have your moments,” he puts it. “I can’t expect you to completely snap that fear away just because you want it to get lost, and you can change your mind on this one and it won’t have meant you weren’t fair enough to me — you can always change your mind, too.”

Sirius breathes in long, bringing his right hand down from Remus’s face to set it on his right knee and lifting his left hand to hold to the other knee. “You’re right that the fear might not leave immediately or even completely,” he lets him have, “and maybe I will go into some form of cardiac arrest if that ‘tonight’s the night’ text ever does come in, but that’d be an old fear of mine being drummed up in me and a false fear at that; if I can name it, I can work on it, and shouldn’t I want to see some of my growth in this, too? Shouldn’t I be allowed to reflect, restructure how I treat you when I’m feeling panicked, pinpoint the issues I have surrounding losing you and try to come at them head-on? As long as we stay honest with each other and we’re out here gunning for each other then I don’t see doom hanging in the distance for us; I trust you with a longer lead.”

Remus lets go of a supreme gust of breath, lifting his left hand to his chest. “Hand to heart, I can't be sure if you’re legitimately this confident in us or if you’re losing faith in the long term and trying to make things fun while it lasts,” he instils, huffing a breathy, near-pleading laugh at the end of it.

Sirius puts his head on a left-hanging tilt, strengthening his hold on Remus’s knees while he looks over the lad with a pair of unblinking eyes. “Well, I’ll tell you it’s the former for me; I see us working out long-term and I trust you with the lead while we’re getting there,” he extends. “My body’s calm, Remus; I just wish you could hop in for a second so you could feel it, too.”

Remus’s lips curve into a wanton frown while he nods his seemingly complete agreement to that sentiment, he’d likely jump at the chance to spend five minutes inside Sirius’s prism, but he’s not quite finished crossing his T’s and dotting those I’s. “And you’ve not done all this so that you’ve already opened up a dialogue for this and down the line, you could wander off and flip this conversation around on me?” he checks.

Sirius shakes his head no, and then goes for another, heavier one for good measure. “I’m not that calculated,” he slips him, leaning in to slot those lips against his; fuck these other people.

Remus exhales through his nose as he welcomes the kiss with open lips, his right hand coming up to latch at the side of Sirius’s jaw, but it seems his body may just be one or two steps ahead of his brain on this one. “That’s not an answer,” he breathes, leaning his head back and taking his lips right out of the kiss zone. “Hot as it was, I’m going to need more than that.”

Sirius gives into a breathy smirk, shutting his eyes through temporary mirth and getting it together for him. “I’d literally never do that to you,” he instils, candid in his gaze, his tone, his bones. “This is not about me finding a convoluted way to get laid on the side; no one, and I mean no one, is going to fuck me like you do and boy, do I know that.

Remus gives up a bolstered little laugh. “It’s not as if anyone’s going to get close to fucking me like you do, so what now?” he poses, jutting his hands and shoulders forward like he’s just dropped a checkmate on the board.

“Then we have nothing to worry about,” Sirius smiles, knocking that chessboard straight out of here.

“Oh, come back,” Remus attests, tugging on the same hold he’s kept on Sirius’s jaw and pulling him in as if he wasn’t the one who put the distance between them in the first place, but that’s good and fitting; they’re a push and pull in the simplest sense and this kiss is as mouthwatering as it is extended.

“Scene stealer,” Remus calls him, the moment they’ve finished.

Sirius snorts once, straightening up. “Think that’s you,” he trades him, going for a squeeze of Remus’s knees.

Remus does a funny little shimmy-squirm in return for that, but in a few moments’ time, he’s got a more rigid shoulder line to work with and pulling the right side of his lower lip into his mouth as he speaks out the left side of it. “I’ve not been doing much in the way of checking,” he mentions, and well, that is true in a practical sense given that Remus has his back facing the majority of the lagoon site and has just Sirius and the rock wall back behind him in his sights, but it’s true in a very specific sense as well.

“You’ve not been checking at all, ‘far as I’m aware,” Sirius instils, going for a shoulder shimmy. “Who even are you?”

“Well, was going for that last one without checking first a bad move on my part?” Remus raises him. “Because if so, it’s nice to meet you; I’m what they call a fool.”

Sirius gives a trill in his throat, figures he’ll just scope out the area for him, and scans the scene by starting from his right and all the way around to his left much like a rotating fan might do, and while there’s no way to know if anyone might’ve caught that first kiss, that blistering second one, or any of the moments shared between them before they started talking with their lips. There really isn’t much to report on in terms of any suddenly watchful eyes so if there is, in fact, some kind of magical forcefield surrounding this slice of paradise, Sirius might just have to believe that over the idea that they’ve somehow found themselves in the abject company of a number of unbothered strangers; it’s either a forcefield or he and Remus are ghosts and just don’t know it yet.

“No, we’re good,” Sirius reports, tuning back to flash him a smile. “Unless, of course, we’re a pair of ghosts that don’t know we’ve passed on and these people can’t see us at all, let alone us getting fresh over here—”

“OK, how badly do you actually want to be in a horror story?” Remus puts up, and Sirius hums idly, lifting his hands from Remus’s knees to give a wishy-washy gesture with his open palms and garnering a tch out of Remus for it. “Yeah, that’s the sense I’m getting, too.”

Sirius lets a snicker fly free, looking out at the sparkling azure and taking a better look at it than he’d previously done when scanning various heads in the water, and jolts fast, rapidly blinking in the tide that must’ve come right back in during their conversation and trading a brief moments’ spook over the abrupt difference in exchange for breathing in long and taking his hands back for a resounding clap. “OK, so, to recap; I’m happy within myself to have had the chance to speak all this out to you and I'm grateful to you for many, many reasons, including hearing me out,” he instils, clapping once more for effect and a bit of zest before pointing his fused hands toward Remus. “Down to the bones of it, all I really want is for you to feel free enough to come to me with anything and let me go by your lead, but absolutely nothing has to come of my wider limits and you’re not obligated to touch anyone’s crotch if you don’t want to, so with all that out of the way and if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go pencilling off of all three of those tiers up there and swim around some more.”

Remus blurts out a series of stammered noises. “What, now?

“Well, we’re going to be here for another while yet, aren’t we,” Sirius wagers, flickering his gaze down at their bountiful spread. “If you’re worried about anything sitting out for too long then you’re free to house them in the chill for the meantime and I’ll help put the leftovers away when we’re officially done with them, but I’ll be back for a refuel soon enough so don’t bother putting everything away now.”

Remus huffs once, but it’s through a mouth that’s hanging quite perplexedly ajar. “No — I mean, thank you and I’ll be storing the melon balls away soon, but I meant, after all that, you’re just going to run off?” he clarifies.

Sirius points his left arm out at the water avidly. “The tide’s in, Remus,” he emphasizes. “You and me? We’re ’til the very end; we're are always going to pick right up from where we left off, but that top ledge and I aren’t long for this world and now’s my only chance to get in there, you understand.”

“Oh, get going, then,” Remus grants, going for a rather royal swish of his right hand to beckon Sirius off and winding himself around to drag the beach bag more toward his new post on the picnic blanket.

Sirius smiles bright, waiting until Remus faces forward again to ruffle the fringe poking out from beneath the quilt’s edge with his right hand while tugging the unopened container of sandwiches toward him with his left hand. “I’m just going to take a ham for the road,” he shares, taking his right hand back to aid in tearing at the seal at the top of the packaging.

Remus snorts, leaving the bag over his lap and fishing inside it for his book, no doubt, meanwhile Sirius gets himself a triangle out of the package and pops it into his mouth to keep a hold on it while he pushes himself to stand.

“Wait up,” Remus bids, holding onto the book with his right hand while he sets the beach bag aside with his left one. “Show me your best pencil before you go.”

Sirius breathes in fast through his nose, straightens out on command, and Remus has himself a mini fit over Sirius’s pencil-posing while he’s got the sandwich triangle braced between his lips, offering him a thumbs-up to suggest he's passed his test. Sirius celebrates his newest win by shimmying his hips along with his shoulders and takes to pulling the triangle out of his mouth from there, thinking that if Remus plans on having his head in a book soon enough, he may well miss a couple of important moments for Sirius.

“Are you going to watch me jump?” he bids, strolling around the far side of the picnic blanket.

“Oh, I’ll be watching,” Remus maintains.

“Better be, I’ll be posing for you,” Sirius trades him.

Remus gives a small trill in his throat as he scoots himself around on the blanket to face the water head-on, settling in with the book right nearby but especially closed for the moment. “May I request that you do the top one first so I can relax sooner than later?” he bids.

Sirius swivels around a few steps away from their picnic station. “Oh, you know I’m doing the top one first,” he instils, walking backwards for a couple of steps. “And you know what, I’ll even limit myself to only one turn with the top one; that’s how committed I am to your relaxation.”

Remus goes for a chesty gasp “As I live and breathe,” he instils, flapping his book back at his neck as if it were a handheld fan.

Mhm, thought you might like that,” Sirius returns, swinging round to face forward again and padding toward their side of the shallow end.

He works on knocking back his sandwich triangle while he wades through the shallow end, wins himself two working hands for a solid breaststroke right about when he’s going to need to do some actual swimming to get from point A to B, and heads across to the far side of the lagoon to come up on the ruins from the left, wading nearby while a lady in a wetsuit scurries up the rock formation and studying her climbing technique while she’s going so he’ll know where to put his hands and feet when it’s his turn to climb up.

The lady gets to the first platform and takes a left to queue up for that jump-off point, which isn’t exactly where Sirius is heading and that does mean he has to squint at the wall once he gets to that same platform, hunting for divots in the rock to continue up to the tier he promised Remus he’d knock off first. Fortunately for him, the same lady he followed up here has apparently chosen to look around while she waits at the back of the queue she just joined and appears to read his miniature predicament for much of what it is, stepping back a few steps to help point him toward the best spot to climb up from here and garnering Sirius to send her a cheery thanks over his shoulder as he scurries on up to the second tier.

Getting up to the third tier, however, goes without Sirius even requiring a pointer for a bloke is ditching his spot at the back of the queue at tier two in favour of climbing up one ahead of him to get to the third platform. On a different day, in a different headspace, Sirius might’ve been a bit peeved at somebody sneaking ahead of him at the last second, but not this one, babey; this day is righteous and good, and now, thanks to this bloke’s eagerness to go first, he doesn’t have to wing it to figure out how to get up there so much as he can simply follow the bloke’s lead, and that can only be a good thing when he can definitely feel Remus’s watchful gaze on his back from all the way over here; that boy would not appreciate Sirius making this up as he went along.

Once he’s up at the top, Sirius gets in behind the queue of three waiting between him and the plunge of his lifetime, but the queue quickly becomes two and then there’s just the one soul ahead of him, who Sirius leans around to get a sense of what the etiquette here is, watching how far the previous diver currently splashing around down there in the water gets from the drop point before the bloke ahead of him goes for his plunge and keeping that distance in mind for his turn.

He watches unblinkingly as the man soars out from the rocks and down into the depths, trading glances between the bloke down in the water and Remus over on dry land while a beam stays firmly on his lips and practically bursting out of his skin with enticement while awaiting his turn. When the bloke down there gets about the same distance away as he waited before jumping in, Sirius goes ahead and tacks another ten seconds onto it when he hasn’t got anyone waiting behind him at the moment and can reasonably spare a few more seconds to be sure there won’t be some kind of freak accident on this here easy, sunny, and actually rather important Monday.

When it’s his prime time, Sirius backs up a few steps to win himself some traction and regards that curly-Q across the way with a vigorous intent and a gape-grin to match, his head held high and his shoulders bobbing a bit, ramping himself up to the moment of truth. He takes to a run, zooms down the platform, and casts himself out into the air with a spin in mind, getting a full twirl in the air and a short batch of milliseconds where he’s able to contend with the fact that he's suspended in the open air before he goes shooting down toward the water like lightning, his heartbeat rattling in his chest as he pencils himself right in and readies himself for the landing, busting through the surface like a living projectile and ending up deeper in lagoon than he’s gone yet.

He tries his hand at peeking at what’s down this far and apart from the dullish hue of the teal waters making it rather difficult to see straight down, there are speckled ribbons of the sunlight dancing about the water both above and around him, and that’s some fucking free whimsy right there. His lungs say, ‘bitch, we’re not made for this kind of extended exploration,’ and to that, Sirius says, ‘you two just hold on, I just want to see something,’ and proceeds to wind his arms and legs up in a coil-like fashion, twisting and turning himself about as he treads the water with his feet to propel himself back toward the surface.

He pops his head above the water and flips his hair back and out behind him like he’s a proper mermaid, gets himself facing the right-hand side of the lagoon, and poses daintily as he bops in place, aiming a gape-grin toward the boy across the way and winning himself both a gape-grin and a hand pressed to Remus’s chest in return, and the look of him paired with the adrenaline rush that’s taken Sirius over make the next few moments unbeatable.

Pure ecstasy cannot last forever on principle and so neither can this dose of it; Remus tips his chin toward him and suggests Sirius look behind himself right quick, and lo and behold, there’s a silhouette of a would-be jumper looming down on him from above and the realization that his moment of adrenaline-swathed whimsy is kind of holding things up here has Sirius kickstarting his motors. He swims left of the impact zone, getting himself real close up to the wall of the ruin to best avoid getting hit by a living projectile, and skirts back around to the far side of the structure to climb back up, quite interested in trying for a jump off of the second-highest tier.

He has himself a captive audience in Remus until all three heights have been both summited and plunged off of, but with the tallest knocked off the list right quick, most of the lingering worry evaded, and the sheen of newness worn off, the book is open in Remus’s lap once more and it’s up to Sirius to make a bit of his own fun out here, but that’s not a terribly difficult task when he’s got such a prime setting to work with here.

Since he hasn’t got a lustrous ruin to pitch himself off of back home, he goes for quite a few more turns at the proverbial wheel and keeps to the first and second tiers so Remus won’t feel lied to or that he has to religiously keep an eye on him, watching the other jumpers do stunts in the air while he waits for his turn, reminding himself he’s no pro here and shouldn’t even bother trying to match that kind of style, and sticking to his spins when it’s his time to shine.

On one of his go-arounds, Sirius finds himself feeling a bit brave, checking to see if Remus has indeed got his attention buried in his novel and sneaking himself a flip into the water from the lowest tier; he pushes up to the surface with a readiness to defend himself via a bunch of charades should Remus have looked up just in time to spot him acting out, but his good fortune continues abound for Remus appears still very much tethered to the print of his book.

He puts the kibosh on his dare-devilling, not wanting to push his luck any more than he’s already done, and switches back to frolicking around in the water and getting back in tune with his sea urchin sensibility, and lives his best life for a good while there, splish-splashing about and really wishing he lived near to a body of water that wasn't just the Thames, there to look pretty and not much else, for he'd swim so much more often if he could wrangle it.

A while later, he gets caught up with the idea of exploring a bit, restricting himself so that he won’t get too, too ambitious on their first visit out here and potentially end up worrying Remus to death over his whereabouts, but not so restrictive that he just won't bother scoping things out; he simply can’t leave this place without getting a closer look at what it has to offer. He skirts around the far side of the impact zone to avoid getting bombed from above, swims over to the furthest left point on the far wall of the lagoon, and treads along the length of it, quite interested in scoping out the blast hole made a good century ago and perhaps even swimming through it to get a gander what’s going on over on the far side of the wall.

He’s almost at the opening when he gets caught up in a bit of a traffic jam with a pair of kayakers who’ve just come into the lagoon from that same very opening, stopping himself short before he can accidentally t-bone them and beckoning the pair to go first since they are rather blocking his passage for the moment. The kayakers wave in thanks and paddle further into the oval oasis, giving Sirius a clear shot of the fisherman’s channel, and there, he braces the back wall of the lagoon and swivels around to give out a bird call, hoping to get Remus’s attention so he’ll know where he is and where he plans on going next.

Remus lifts his head a few twitters into it, reworks his mouth around a pointed smile, and tilts his head to the right in question, garnering Sirius to point his free hand back at the blast hole and using the wall to help scoot himself through the small channel, only facing forward once Remus has nodded his approval toward his wider explorations.

He blinks out at the view stretched out long and wide, ahead of him, beside him, shrinking him down, and it’s here that Sirius has to wonder whether the all-encompassing reverence he vividly remembers feeling up, up high on the cliffs had a lot to do with the fact that he himself was high above the expanse of the open sea, looking down at the situation around him as opposed to being directly inside of the picture, because whatever reverence he felt up there appears to have been promptly replaced by a true bout of something Sirius only knows as fear.

Up there, he felt as connected to the planet and, dare he say, as spiritual as he can really ever feel; the sights had him feeling small in the gorgeous sense and, when he thinks about it now, in a nearly hand-held, softly protected sort of way, but down here? Down here, he’s all but itty-bitty and not being held by a thing; he’s the one holding onto a century-old wall for purchase rather than safe passage, he’s the one with his mouth hanging ajar and his peepers blown wide as he’s forced to contend with the blown-wide view from inside of it, he’s the one who feels utterly exposed and has to expressly remind himself, more times than he'd like to admit, that this is the exact same scene he saw up there, that this is the same place that housed and held him tightly just a few hours ago, it just looks too vast to comprehend from this vantage point and that’s all there is to it.

Reminders can do a whole lot generally, but to win himself a sense of familiarity he’s sorily lacking at the moment, he looks off to his left to root himself in an area he at least knows he’s traversed before. He can’t see the beach from here thanks to the severe curve to the cove he’s floating just outside of, but he can very see the parts of land past the beach that jut out straight into the water and stretch way, way past his right peripheral, and if he squints, he can spot bits of the road they came in on and a few vehicles with newcomers going along it, twisting and turning up there on a winding road that’ll eventually deposit them at the mouth of a scene from a storybook.

Sirius decides that his previously brilliant mood can’t be too far away if the probable chance of the lagoon getting more and more crowded as the day goes on doesn’t have him feeling put off; that usually is the first sign that he’s not doing so hot and right now, he’s kind of jazzed to see there are so many strangers he has one thing in common with and that’s the intrinsic pull to the slice of paradise tucked away here.

That has him feeling a little better, it does, but he can’t pretend he isn’t still feeling a bit imposed upon by the enormity of the body of water he’s in and to combat that, he takes a left and skirts along the perimeter of the lagoon to see what’s around the bend, pulling his exploration back into the foreground of his mind and keeping the both of his hands clasped to the wall for he has a strong feeling that if he doesn't do that, he’ll wind up feeling even more untethered, at the mercy and whims of the open sea.

He swishes his legs underneath him for traction and clasps at the wall as he goes, having a peek around the corner only to find that lovely goat’s bridge the two of them crossed over to get into the lagoon proper, and that has him feeling awesome in a coming-full-circle kind of way. What really and truly gets his spirits back from Spooksville, however, is the off-chance that he might be able to get himself over there, slip back into the lagoon from the main gateway, and then maybe, if he keeps his footfalls quiet, creep up behind Remus, send that boy into a real tizzy, and possibly win himself a grand and glorious huff while he's at it.

Actively sold on that idea, Sirius breathes in long, sets his sights on the mouth of the creek going underneath the bridge when that’ll at least be shallow waters, and counts himself down from three before abandoning hold on the wall. He aims to ignore the tingles at the back of his neck that compel him to reverse that idea right this second, his body language something like traditional breaststroke meets panicking five-year-old as he guns it toward his destination, a blend of ambition and adrenaline lining his bones and lighting his veins as the sea picks him right up, but wouldn’t you know it, the very same sea Sirius went and got fearful over lends out her proverbial hand to his cause, veritably pushing him toward his destination via smooth yet rather persistent determination. His skin shrieks the whole, entire time he goes without something to grip, that much is just plainly true, but the sea carries him over to the right side of the goat’s bridge and while that’s a slight miscalculation from where Sirius would’ve liked to have been dropped off, this way he’ll get to traipse over the goat’s bridge once again and that’s a cute idea she had for him, this forgiving sea. He slaps his arms onto land so he won’t wash up on the beach down the way and have to backtrack from the parking lot, scampers ashore in case the sea up and changes her mind on him at the last second, and pushes himself up to his knees before rising to his feet, balling his fists up to set them at his hips and striking a power stance to end them all.

A wave of accomplishment washes over him; he can’t say he executed the manoeuvre fearlessly, but he can say he fucking did it anyway.

Two newcomers coming along from the right definitely catch him at it, but Sirius going to do about that now? He just has to own it, no other way around it; may as well slap a serene smile on his lips, breathe in long, and gaze up and around at the beauty he’s surrounded by.

He waits until those two have gone in through the entryway to the lagoon to drop his stance and cross over the bridge himself, stopping for a beat on the other side of it to have a peek underneath for any goats, but no such luck. He moves over to the rock wall that makes up the lefthand side of the lagoon and sneaks up to the opening in it, having a peek around the side of it extra carefully in case the sound of the newcomers traipsing into the area could’ve caught Remus’s attention and therefore brought it over to the entryway, but Sirius is one lucky lad all around today for the boy remains faced toward the water with his head bent toward his book.

Sirius moves back behind the wall to ready himself for the manoeuvre, wringing his hair out and tying it loosely behind his back to avoid any stray droplets from alerting Remus to his presence too soon, and at that thought, he wrings out the legs of his trunks to minimize the droplets falling from those, too. He trills quietly behind his temporary cover, rises to the balls of his feet to ready himself for prime agility, and slips through the gateway to the lagoon, keeping to the left as he skirts up the wall until he’s parallel with Remus. He pauses there for a new breath, certain this will be the most important yet trickiest stretch to cross without drawing attention to himself, and keeps his breath held in his as he moves forward from the wall, making quick work of the distance between the two of them with as little audible patters as possible and moving to a crouch the moment he gets over to Remus.

He curls himself over the curly-Q’s frame, hovers from both above and behind him, and smiles, smiles, smiles as he juts his hands out to tickle at the boy’s quilt-covered waist; Remus shoots forward with a squawk, dropping the book altogether in favour of planting his palms down flat on his towel, and hunches low, folding right up.

“How, Sirius?” he shotputs. “How?

“How do you mean?” Sirius bids, staying crouched behind him.

Remus gives out his clarification like it’s all pretty obvious stuff. “I well know that you can tiptoe like a seasoned burglar when properly motivated but as far as I’m aware, you can’t bend water to your will; I would have heard you coming out of it and been aware you were on land in time to—”

“Not if I came around the bend,” Sirius chimes in, rolling back and forth on the balls of his feet.

Remus sits up fast, putting his frame to a bit of a lean to the right and turning his head to win himself a sidelong glimpse of Sirius’s goon grin. “What bend?”

“Took the fisherman’s channel out to sea, swam around to the goat’s bridge, and snuck back in the way we came,” Sirius supplies him.

Remus huffs and puffs like his life depends on it, reaches fast for the bind of his book, and twists himself around, flapping the pages against Sirius’s bent knees with gusto. “You shit, you shit, you—”

“Shit, yes, mhm,” Sirius echoes, lifting his hands to block the next three thwap attempts. “A lady noticed me up on the ruins so it stands to reason that we’re not invisible out here and people are going to start looking over at us if you keep that up—”

“Let them,” Remus returns, blasting the book past Sirius’s knees to get him in the chest with it. “I hope they come over here, even; I’ll tell them all about how I thought you were just going to check things out over there and wound up getting—”

“Well, I was checking things out over there, but then I got another idea,” Sirius slides in, scooting back a step to avoid losing balance and winding up landing directly on his tailbone.

“Oh, and I was just supposed to predict that you’d swim around the bend and spook me out of my skin—” Remus trails off there with a prime reworking of his pointed mouth, “—you know what, I should’ve seen it coming, but that doesn’t mean I’m not calling temperature timeout on your arse; you’re out of that water until I say otherwise, you hear me?”

“Sweet deal since I was thinking about staying for a while,” Sirius mentions, moving over to plant himself down on the picnic blanket to the left of Remus and having a look around. There are a few key differences in their overall spread, namely the giant confection missing from the scene as well as the squeezer bottle of ranch, both items presumably being stored in the abject chill and away from the beating sun, but on top of that, two ham triangles are missing from their respective container and a hefty pile of toothpicks sit in their wake, showcasing Remus’s penchant for neatly downsizing a hefty bulk without saying a single word. “Can I have some melon balls?”

“On your left,” Remus directs him, and Sirius digs in the grocery bag very much on his left to shake the confection out of there, making sure to zip it shut again.

He sets the platter down on the blanket, pops the lid back off of it to set that aside, and plucks himself a sphere of cantaloupe off of the tray. “Must be a riveting piece of literature you’re glued to there,” he comments, slipping the melon ball off of its pick with a slow drag of his teeth.

Remus gives him a tch. “Please, I’ve had far too much to think on to have been able to digest a single word of this since you traipsed off, and I think you know that on a base level,” he trades him, taking the very book in question and frisbeeing it away from him and onto the picnic blanket.

Sirius smirks up a storm at the fashion in which Remus gave the fuck up on reading at least for the foreseeable future, tilts his head back and forth to allow for Remus’s overall sentiment to have some room, and sends him a curious smile. “Anything you’d want to share with the court?”

“Court jester, maybe,” Remus gets him.

Sirius beams wide. “That was so quick, I’m going to let you have it happily,” he lends him.

Remus has it in him to let a bout of smirks take him over, but he turns his head toward him from there, looking at him head-on as opposed to sidelong. “There are a few things,” he reiterates.

“Give 'em,” Sirius bids, reaching to open up the new pick basket to stow his newest toothpick away in.

Remus nods him off, takes in a long breath through his nose, and has his mouth poised to speak by the time Sirius has settled in again. “Well, first things first,” he addresses, “if the core sensibilities behind your wider limits are to have me feeling free enough in this to explore if I should want that and for you to be able to see me glowing and growing and know that you’re not holding me back from either, then I don’t see why you shouldn’t get to be there for it so you can actually see—”

“Well, I am going to see it, I’m just not going to be able to be there all day, every day,” Sirius comes in, but he pauses for a redo and a clearing of his throat. “Sorry, go on; you were barely through a point before I snuck in there.”

Remus pushes a subdued breath out his nose and budges Sirius’s right shoulder with his left one. “No, I should’ve prefaced a few things before I even started,” he instils, a smile poking at his lips. “This is purely hypothetical and not me suggesting I’ll be taking up your offer the day after I arrive there — I mean, I wouldn’t do that in general, but that’s not part of the deal either, is it.”

“Sure isn’t,” Sirius echoes, unable to stop himself from smiling up a storm.

“And this isn’t me thinking the likelihood of it happening is very high either,” Remus tacks on, “but say October the twelfth did roll around, and you and I have been texting back and forth about the hypothetical hunk I met down by the quad at the start of term—”

“I’m sorry, but I’m just so glad you’re bringing that back already,” Sirius puts in, has to.

Remus spares him a grin, but he’s certainly not finished and Sirius waves him right along so he can do just that. “And say he did show interest in pursuing me, I find myself wanting to pursue him for a short beat, you know plenty about him because we’ve been discussing him, he’s made aware of you and the situation, and all in all, the scene progresses the way you’d be the most comfortable with,” he frames it, pausing for a beat and a seemingly necessarily new breath. “Even with all that, I still don’t see myself feeling comfortable enough to go through with it unless you were there, so while it’s true that you’re not going to be around all day, every day, you are still planning on visiting me there, aren't you?”

Sirius snorts once, voluminously. “By the grace of Cunt, I will be popping over there wherever possible,” he makes plain.

Remus flashes him a smile, taking to what seems like a more permanent lean against Sirius's frame, and that’s a choice he can wholeheartedly support. “Then I would simply wait for you,” he instils. “I don’t know if I’m ever going to want or need to explore somebody else’s body for a night, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it since you frolicked away and I do know I would want you there for it and that it wouldn’t take much resolve for me to wait until you’d be there on a visit to take the hypothetical hunk up on any kind of proposal.”

Sirius could probably fly if he tried it. “Remus,” he trades him, budging on the weight of his charmed frame against Remus's. “Now, when you say you'd want me to be there, do you mean like, sitting in a chair in the corner, because that would be new terrain for me and not necessarily rough terrain, but something I’d need to get my head around before the night itself.”

“Oh, no no, I want you in there with us,” Remus states. “No one puts Sirius in the corner, least of all me.”

Sirius breathes in vastly, pushing it back out through a masterful gape-grin. “Remus Jean Lupin, I’m utterly obsessed with you,” he enthuses, setting his left elbow down on his knee to win himself a makeshift shelf for his chin and resting his bombasted smile overtop his the palm of his hand. “You would really, actually be down for that?”

Remus clicks his tongue once, budging up against the side of Sirius’s frame pointedly. “I didn’t say that even once to you before, did I?” he puts up.

Sirius hums tightly in his throat, going for a squint-and-smile combo. “Not in so many words, maybe,” he gets him, “but you used about a thousand others to submit that same question to me.”

Remus huffs at once and breathes in again, but he can’t argue the point now that it’s been made and he seems to know that for he makes moves to speak more on his position rather than semantics. “If this exercise is to be about me, you, and us, then I’d want it to include you; I feel like that's a fair amendment,” he maintains. “I don’t know where all of my glow is coming from when there’s so much going on with and in me these days, but I do know that the majority of it is a direct transference from you and I trust you more than I do myself most days, so with knowing that, if the scenario you painted for me did come along, I don’t know I could even enjoy myself properly unless you were there.”

Sirius breathes in long, drops his right hand from his chin, and reaches behind Remus to splay it against the centre of his back. “I'd be honoured to be there,” he instils.

“I can’t tell,” Remus negs him, and fair enough, Sirius must be veritably jiggling the boy’s frame with that buzzing hand of his.

“I’m just — I’m so—” he tries, but the words need time to match up with the feeling coursing through his veins and stinging his tear ducts in one go.

Remus makes a bitty little noise in his throat. “Are you—”

Yes?” Sirius attests, taking his right hand back from Remus’s back so he can effectively use the heels of both his palms to wipe at his leaking eyes. “Of course I am; I’m touched, sue my arse.”

“Well, I don’t want to sue it, but I think it’d be worse if I didn’t acknowledge it in any way,” Remus instils, leaning in to press a quick kiss to the right side of Sirius’s jawline and taking in a new breath through his nose. “Is it weird if I find it sweet you’ve gone teary-eyed over this of all things?”

Sirius gives out a direct pfft. “Always have to look at a scene from above, don’t you,” he gets him, dropping his hands from his eyes with a plonk against his lap. “You know why I’m teary, I know why I’m teary, and that’s enough for me at least; this is no one’s business but ours.”

“Well, you’ve made about a thousand good points already today, why shouldn’t you have made one more?” Remus trades him, leaning into Sirius's frame more. “I don’t want to rush into anything and I do really just want to enjoy what we have for right now, but just between you and me, there are a few logistics that I'm going to need enlightenment on and likely a few pointers for, which I'm sure you will provide to the best of your ability if the occasion were to shine on the horizon, but if that were to happen, I do worry that if the hypothetical hunk made a weird noise or face during the deed, I would end up looking at you and if you instantly bust into stitches, then I would bust with you, we both would just be rolling, and the poor bloke would be so crushed—” he pauses short to smirk at Sirius’s big ol’ bork before continuing with a bit of a warble to his voice, “—but on the other hand, the image of us not quite being able to control ourselves even a scene like that is just, just funny enough of an image to make the mere idea of doing something like that with you sound like a certain kind of fun, I will say that.”

Sirius dips his face low, places his left palm over his vision, and lets a violent bout of stitches take him over, wading through the bulk of it before even attempting to lift his head. “You really went and thought about this, hm,” he goads, beaming all the while.

“Oh, I did, yeah,” Remus attests. “You gave me a lot to pour over, including the fact that you made sure to broaden your limits past the point of Paris, so out of respect for you and that, this amendment would extend past the point where I’m back and there had been absolutely nobody in Paris that struck my fancy, we'll say?”

“I’ll let you say it,” Sirius lobs him. “So, this is in the general, going-forward sense, not just for the next four months; am I hearing that right?”

“Yes, you are,” Remus echoes. “To me, it has to be in general, going-forward sense; you made it clear there was no real expiry date to my exploration and I want to make it clear that while I don’t know when or even if that’s going to need to happen, I don’t see myself wanting to explore anything without it being something we experience together, whether it happens this year, next year, or four years from now.”

Sirius nods up a storm. “Oh, you’ve made it clear as crystal,” he echoes it, “but you are still allowed to revaluate, change your mind, and own yourself, all of that; please know it.”

Remus nods once. “As are you,” he trades him.

“No, I know that,” Sirius instils, “but I do need you to know that things happen and I’m not going to be put off at you if we picked out the night and by some terrible force, I get stuck at work or locked in traffic and can’t get there in time,” Sirius forwards him.

“We’ll reschedule,” Remus trades him.

Sirius presses his lips together to better help himself live underneath the weight of this sweetheart for a few beats. “I hear you and love you, but if for some reason I can’t make it there, I wouldn’t turn around and blast you for it; that is what I'm saying,” he instils. “Of course I’ll be pouty about not being able to get there in time; I'm not going to be infallible, believe me, but I’d still want to know all about it and I’d still be cheering you right on.”

Remus takes in a quick breath while lifting a hand. “I appreciate that, but as hot as the hypothetical hunk and as good as the vibes could be, the chances of me freezing up once I’m in the room are pretty high without you there,” he confesses. “I fear I would blank, completely forget how the mechanics work, and just starfish it.”

Sirius snorts once. “You’ve never starfished it in your life.”

“I could start right then,” Remus instils, taking things down to a heightened whisper.

Sirius shakes his head through a whirl of snickers. “This one’s going to be real tough for me to follow you along on, sorry,” he maintains. “Nevertheless, I’d love nothing more than to be there; I just want you to know most of all that my goal is to go with your flow and fan those flames wherever possible.”

“You have made sure I know that,” Remus puts down, “but I think this would be the best way to follow both of our limits should the time come when exploration is a goal of mine, what say you?”

Sirius reaches his left palm past himself and presents it directly in front of Remus, winning the masterful high-five he was hoping he’d get for such a pristine compromise. “Lovely doing business with you,” he imparts.

“Oh, we’re not done yet,” Remus halts him, lifting his left forefinger toward him. “I’ve still got a couple more amendments to make to the deal.”

“Do it,” Sirius sanctions.

Remus breathes in once, nodding him off before turning his head to press a kiss to Sirius’s bare shoulder. “I would want to know if it would still be at my discretion if you were there in the room,” he extends, keeping his voice low and his head right where it is.

Sirius turns his own head and leans in as close to Remus’s left ear canal as he can manage. “I was hoping it’d be,” he shoots him, taking on an exaggerated whisper, and Remus starts up a breathy laugh, Sirius knows he heard it, but a hitch cuts it right off and he doesn’t like that much at all. “Remus, it's true; if you’re into him, I’m going to be into it, hands down.”

He feels Remus breathe in real, real long before even attempting to lift his head, a pointed smile on his face before Sirius gets to see it soften into a half-smile and head right on into a quizzical frown. “And if it’s not a he…?” he raises him, swishing the point of his lips back and forth. "What then?"

Sirius breathes in once, stares out at the sea that looks the same as it should with a faux-quizzical gaze, and lifts his palms to rotate them cyclically as if he's really working the answer out of himself. “It’d be the same,” he offers next beat, tooching his lips and splaying his fingers wide as he looks back over at him.

Remus snorts long, long, very long. “I didn’t want to assume you’d be as enthused to take part in that case,” he offers for a defence, ducking his head with a newer, meek smile poking at his lips.

Sirius whirls his hands around in no real shape or fashion, just looking to accentuate his bamboozlement. “OK, I may be gayer than a picnic basket, but that doesn’t mean I’m automatically petrified of boobs,” he puts up, and perhaps it’s to do with one or all of the details to his rebuttal, but Remus gets caught in a fierce battle with a snickerstorm and he’ll take it. “Mhm, you should laugh, I’ve been in the room with a few of those before and didn’t wither into dust, thank you, and besides, there’s no rule book that expressly states that everybody in the room must put at least one thing of theirs into everybody else’s whathaveyou or an alarm’s going to sound off.”

Remus comes in with a long and lustrous huff, but that boy’s got a case of the smiles now. “I’ve never done this kind of thing before so I suppose I wouldn’t know for sure, but I can’t say I thought an alarm would sound if we didn’t do everything under the sun in one night,” he returns him.

“Good, ‘cause so far, that’s not been something I’ve seen or heard of,” Sirius trades him. “There’s no rule that states I have to partake in every single act if I’m not interested, but I’ll be there if you want me to be, babey, boobs in the room or not.”

“I very want you to be,” Remus takes it, runs with it. “I want you there in either case, but one of those cases could very well create a performance issue and I think it was fair for me to have checked that you’d still be OK with it or if you’d rather sit that one out.”

“Well, first of all, you underestimate me and my performance record,” Sirius slips him, “and second, you’re new around here so you may not know it, but sometimes a ménage à trois can be about one person; with me so far?”

Remus gives a quick and perhaps even automatic shrug for it seemed to happen that way. “Well, you've not been particularly modest today so it’d be a bit strange if you went and got elusive now,” he negs him, giving a trill in his throat.

Well, that’s a sharpened point right there. “Let me make it crystal, then,” Sirius obliges. “That focal person can and I believe should be you if we'd be doing this, and I wouldn’t say no to the idea of you getting loved down by two absolute specimens of any gender if I’m able to be one of the two in the room bringing the love down on you; in fact, I’ll be honest, the mere idea of you in between me and somebody else who’s just dying to be there is hotter than I know what to do with just now.”

“I’ve a quilt here if you need something to cover your lap,” Remus lets him know.

And just for that, it’s Sirius’s quilt for the next while.

Shockingly enough, Remus doesn’t fight his thievery much at all in that he rather easily passes the quilt along to him, giving the impression that he might’ve been getting a bit too hot underneath its cover as is. Sirius wraps the colourful specimen around his shoulders and pitches a two-note whistle at seeing Remus’s bare chest for the first time in hours, and to his utter surprise, Remus leans back on the heels of his palms, crosses his legs at the ankles, and lets it all happen for him.

“May I make a request that we don’t mix friends in with this kind of thing?” Remus pitches, lulling his head toward him.

No,” Sirius elongates. “No, no, no; gross.”

“Mm, and I respectfully agree,” Remus echoes it, biting back a smile from reaching fruition. “Not a close mate, not a complete stranger, someone that I'll have already talked to you about beforehand, as per your terms.”

“Mm, like a Produce Lad,” Sirius holds up.

“Quite like a Produce Lad,” Remus trades him.

Sirius puts his shoulder line on a slight dip, lulling his head toward Remus and batting his lashes at him. “Anything you want to share here, sweets?”

Remus breathes in once through a half-smile, eyes alive behind those shades, Sirius can just tell. “I will admit, when considering the image of the two of us with some hypothetical guest star, he was the face I pictured for the role,” he affords him, but just that much for he points his left forefinger up at Sirius’s massive gasp. “That doesn’t mean I want to drive back before his shift’s over and hit him up; it’s too soon for me, I’m not ready to embark on that journey yet, and I feel like that boat would've already left shore, as is.”

Sirius hums vaguely. “Mm, I don't know that I'd agree with that,” he mentions, but all Remus sends him is a wonky smile for it. “What, it’s true; for one thing, beyond registering an obvious interest in the lad standing in front of him, that sexy bag-pass could have and, for all we know, very did intend to be read as a ‘next time you’re in town, the pints are on me, babey,’ and for another, it’s not as if we’re never going to be back to the area again in our lives.”

Remus snorts long. “And what are we going to do, drive on up here in the event that I'd be ready to give the two of you at one-go a shot and hunt through the produce section for a sighting of him?” he puts up, his lopsided smile making a welcome appearance.

Sirius nods easily, going for a sphere of honeydew off of the platter. “I’m not above going directly to the source and seeing if blondie’s swishing about the place,” he serves him, tugging the melon ball into his mouth as the dot of punctuation.

Remus’s lopsided smile turns into more of a lopsided grin before a series of breathy laughs come out of it. “And if he isn’t there, then what?” he negs him. “I’m not asking around his workplace if he’s even still working there; that’d be going above and beyond, and not necessarily in a good way.”

“Then we’ll wander over to Sloops and look for the bombshell there,” Sirius puts up, pointing the end of his toothpick up at him.

Remus smirks up a storm. “I’m not sure wandering over to Sloops in hopes that he happens to come in that night is a realistic or lucrative use of our time,” he maintains. “At that point, we might as well just hang out at the pub for a while, head back to wherever we’re staying, and go at each other like we'd have easily done already.”

Sirius puts a hand to his heart. “Remus, that will always be the best-case scenario in my books and you ought to put that on a banner,” he trades him. “Now, would this example go more easily if he’d have been ballsy enough to slip you his number when handing the bags over? Yes, undeniably so, then you could ring-a-ding his bell if or when you were ready, but here’s where I would repeat that Produce Lad came to mind because he’d be somebody who both isn’t a complete stranger nor a mate of ours; we do not have to seal the deal or go on a wild goose chase to find him again someday, he’s just a fine-ass example of a hypothetical hunk.”

Remus hums airily. “Mm, and I do think that was part of it, but you clearly had to know if I’d give him a whirl,” he gets him, budging against Sirius’s right shoulder.

“Bitch, I can do both,” Sirius wears it.

“However, he was a good hypothetical to go with as he does meet the criteria and already has your expressed approval,” Remus continues, and that smile on his lips paired with the placement of his brows gives a great impression that the vaguely curious lilt on the end of that bit was little more than a perfect excuse to keep dancing around the scenario.

“In spades,” Sirius trades him. “I’d have said climb him even if you hadn’t come to me with these amendments and I’d so be in that room if the cards fell that way, but as a callback to one of my terms, for me to feel comfortable with it, he would have to know what our situation is prior to the act and be aware that he’s the guest, not the replacement.”

Remus breathes in once and puffs it right back out. “I feel like he’d have to have his eyes closed the whole time not to realize he’s the guest, not the replacement,” he slips him.

“Well, I s'pose he wouldn’t keep his eyes closed if he had a chance with you, so that's that taken care of,” Sirius serves him.

Remus tilts his head back while keeping his shoulders quite still, aiming a wry smile up above them and specifically away from Sirius but not so much so that he can’t tell it’s there; sorry, Remus, but owing to the fact that Sirius can indeed see sings of him smiling up there, he can also pinpoint the moment when Remus starts worrying at his lower lip.

“What’s that about?” he bids, and when Remus drops his head toward him in question, Sirius bites at his lip in illustration.

Remus lifts his shoulders in a semblance of a shrug, breathing in through his nose before letting his lip go. “I almost want to say we shouldn’t go with him,” he trades him.

“Well, we’re not,” Sirius offers him. “We’re just talking about it as a whole with him as the example, and I do so love it when we do that talking thing.”

“Well, I do, too, but would it make us awful people to even consider it?” Remus raises, but at Sirius’s blatant grunt, he softens his wording a little better, going for a head tilt back and forth. “I’m just not sure if he is a good example of someone to go with when he’s actually really nice and I don’t know if we’d be dicking him around, so to speak.”

“So to speak,” Sirius echoes quietly, nodding with it. “Well, to that, I would say that we only had twenty minutes with the bloke and while they were indeed stellar, that's not enough time to fully gauge what he'd think about this, or whether he knows we're a weor' for another minute straight, but I’ll make something clear instead so that there’s something at least we do know for sure, do you want it?”

“I want it,” Remus puts down.

Sirius tips his head toward him, happy to oblige. “Well, ideally, I would want you to get on well with the person you could end up wanting to explore with the way you got on with him, but that doesn’t have to mean it has to be Produce Lad or we shouldn’t even bother, it doesn’t mean we have to put our brains together and find a way to force a re-meet-cute and get this going already, and it doesn’t mean we’re awful people because we considered him as a prime hypothetical example," he holds up. "I mean, think about it; we all come through each other's lives at warped speed, it's just chaos out here, but he can be a stepping stone that we go off of here and an ideal to have in mind going forward, and that's OK, I think.”

Remus breathes in long, giving a sweet little noise at the back of his throat. “I really quite like you,” he serves him. “Just, as a human, I’m very much in like with you.”

Sirius smiles so forcefully his eyes must be crinkling at the sides. “Same here, pal,” he lobs him, relocating his gaze to his stomach when it chimes in with quite the request for sustenance. “Are you going to have that last triangle of ham?”

Remus hums a direct no. “That one’s already yours, sir,” he informs him.

“Oh yeah, it is,” Sirius recollects, smirking as he reaches to pluck it out of the container and start with the crusts first. “You want anything? I’m right near the spread, great for easy access.”

Remus must be experiencing some intense devotion for he doesn’t get at Sirius for finding another way to ply him with food, merely hums a ponderous note and lifts out of his laxed position to have a look over the spread. “Can I get a handful of those balls?” he requests.

“And for food?” Sirius checks.

Remus trills in a way that suggests Sirius handled that one correctly and holds his left palm out to him, but he gives a snort upon receiving a total of six melon balls to take with him. “I chose the word ‘handful’ for the bit, by the way,” he mentions.

“And I merely committed to the bit,” Sirius supplies.

“I’ve not been fasting over here, you know,” Remus slips him. "I've been eating."

“I do know that,” Sirius maintains. “You’ve even cleared your sammies; I’m right proud of you.”

“Mhm, I have, hence why I’ve been taking breaks here and there to let my stomach settle,” Remus highlights, slipping the first of his spherical miracles off of its spike and into his mouth daintily.

“I just want you eating well,” Sirius sounds out, no bite, just truth.

“Pass the lemonade?” Remus bids, moving right on apparently. Sirius balances his sammie triangle between his lips to free up his hands to get the carton open for the encumbered lad and passes it along to Remus, watching his Adam’s apple bob until he’s had his fix and passes it back to Sirius to cap. “There’s something else I should say.”

Sirius perks right up, setting the carton down ahead of them and pulling the sammie out of his mouth. “Sock it to me,” he prompts.

Remus hums a note of affirmation as he swipes his right wrist past his mouth, plucks a new melon ball from his left palm, and stays twiddling the bottom end of the pick in between his two prominent fingers, breathing in long and leaving his mouth poised to speak. Generally speaking, Sirius is all for letting Remus collect his thoughts and pick out the words he’ll use for them, but when ten seconds of no real speech patterns have passed between them and he’s finished off his sammie, he tilts his head and pops his mouth open, doing a lighthearted impression of Remus and winning himself a smirk-and-nod combo out of him for it.

“Sorry, I’m overthinking how to broach it,” he extends, indulging himself in that melon ball he’d been ignoring.

“Just throw it out there, babey,” Sirius coaches, splaying his hands with it.

Remus nods him off as he swallows down his newest spherical miracle. “Agnes may have had a thing for me when she first started.”

Sirius’s throat sure feels like it went and sealed right up, but does that mean it’s rendered useless as a link between his vocal cords and the outside world? No sir, it bends to his will, putting out a dastardly gasp. “What, what, what?” he chants, bringing on the jazz hands and garnering Remus to rework his mouth around such a prominent smile that he’s got to hollow his cheeks out before even attempting a response, and that’s great news, it is, but the wording finally hits Sirius. “Wait, what do you mean, had? Humble Remus at it again?”

Remus breathes in once, holding it in for a beat while a crease shows up between his brows. “Well, that’s part of what kept tripping me up just there,” he extends, reaching to leave his newest toothpicks in the pick pile he started in the sandwich container. “The consensus for a few coworkers was that she did, but it wasn't all of them nor was it ever from her mouth, I should mention; Emmeline was certain of it way back on Agnes’s first day and Elise followed suit from there, but I’m still iffy on whether she actually held that opinion herself or if she was just hopping aboard the chirp train because she wanted me flustered, and she does often love it when I start getting flustered.”

“Well, she and I have a thing in common, then,” Sirius chimes in.

“Mhm, one thing,” Remus lobs back. “And there were a few moments over Agnes’s first few weeks where I thought I caught Lily having her own suspicions about it, but I’d have to assume that would’ve been independent of Emmeline’s influence.”

Sirius hums an airy note. “Yeah, you know I always say, that Lily is just far too busy to stop and chat with her employees about topics so inconsequential as who likes who 'round the place,” he offers swiftly.

Remus’s whole face whitens. “Stone-cold, Sirius.”

Sirius snorts once. “You made that one easy and breezy for me,” he maintains.

“She handled it better than the other two did, I'll just say that,” Remus serves him. “She never said anything to me about it; she would just be walking by sometimes and stop suddenly, I'd look over at her and ask what that was about, and she'd just shake her head and keep on walking, but she didn't pop her brows when I’d wordlessly ask her what was up, didn't corner me in the back and say anything, she never even really alluded to it; I just realised after it'd happened a handful of times that Agnes was the common denominator for each time and figured she might've found her own way to the consensus so maybe, just maybe, she's learned her lesson tenfold from the last time she got a little too invested in the who likes who ‘round the place?”

“Glad I could help,” Sirius chimes, reaching for a melon ball off the platter and eating it just as Remus huffily goes to eat his third, but by the time they’re both finished with their respective helpings, Sirius has questions to lodge. “Now, did you drop that information with unassuming past tense because you’ve not been handed enough evidence to say whether she ever did have a thing for you, or is that if she did have one at the start, you have to assume she would’ve gotten over it by now?”

Remus gives another idle hum, but the tone of this one and the head tilting that came with it feel a lot more genuine than the last. “I mean, it’s a bit of both,” he allows for “And more, really; I feel like there could've been a lot of explanations for something that was already a she said, she said situation.”

“OK, well, I want to know everything you have for me then, obviously,” Sirius maintains, giving a deep trill in his throat, “but I do have to ask, is that something you’d want to get a definitive answer on because you might like to see where it could lead?”

Remus hums a no before attaching some words to it. “No, I can’t say I do,” he offers him. “I like her, but I’m not into her like that; I just, didn’t tell you about it back when it was the tea of the day, and you even gave me the opportunity to without realizing it—”

“And why didn’t you, hm?” Sirius bids, hanging his head to the right. “Didn’t want the fuss, that it?”

“I don’t know what to do with a fuss,” Remus attests, but the breathy laugh that leaves him with it certainly mares the effect of his would-be indignation. “It didn't seem necessary to slip it in there when I hardly believed it myself, but I figure it can only help us in the long run if I actually start telling you about these sorts of things when they're happening, even if they’re not necessarily going to go anywhere, right? For you, me, and us.”

Sirius doesn’t know what to focus on first, he’s so touched by the sentiment and the fact that he’s seeing Remus offering it, trying for him. “I really quite like you,” he forwards him. “Just, as a human, I’m very much in like with you.”

“Same here, pal,” Remus quotes, smiling like the sun.

Sirius shimmies his shoulders a bit. “What happened her first day, then?” he goads.

Remus smirks rather idly as he plucks the fourth melon ball out of his left palm. “Well, you should be aware that part’s very open to interpretation,” he hands him after it.

“Sure,” Sirius smiles.

Remus bites back a laugh, Sirius knows he did. “I got on the floor at the start of my shift, orders were to take over from where Ian left off, send her for her fifteen, get her started on bar,” he frames it, “I greeted her, told her what the plan was for the next while, and sent her on her way because she hadn't had a break yet and we didn’t want her to break; you know how it is.”

“And I do,” Sirius echoes.

“So, pretty standard stuff there, only she didn’t say a thing to me though she was staring right at me so I figured she’d just not heard me, so I more or less reiterated that she was free to go and got a meek response that time before she fully disappeared into the back without anything else,” Remus describes, garnering a direct snort out of Sirius for the image alone. “And I figured first-day jitters might’ve been at play, but Emmeline was right there and saw the whole interaction take place, so I asked her if Agnes came off as a particularly shy one to her, just to see if I should dial back the energy a little to make her feel a bit less put on the spot, and she said, no, and in fact, Agnes had been rather chatty right up until I showed up there—”

“Ooo, hoo-hoo,” Sirius slides in. “Yes.”

Remus almost loses focus, almost. “—And because Ian had just been training her on till and coffee station side of things before his shift ended and he does tend to have a different training style than I do, I figured then that had to have been a bit of a tonal shift from him and was sort of halfway speaking to Emmeline, halfway speaking to myself when I said I must’ve come off a bit too strong and would try toning it down from there, but she said,” he details, pausing there for a new breath and a pointed half-smile to play out on his lips, “‘the strong jaw she was just made to see is my best guess—’”

Sirius puts out a boisterous bark, shaking his hands out in front of himself. “I love her,” he instils.

“Which her,” Remus checks, going for his fifth melon ball and bringing his total down to one honeydew sitting in his left palm.

“I mean, both, but that Emmeline’s a girl after my own heart with that kind of zinger,” Sirius serves him.

“Thought you’d like that one,” Remus trades him. “You’ll love this next part, too, because I definitely just looked around for context clues because, whose jaw could we have been talking about, Ian’s?”

Stop,” Sirius wheezes. “With a face like that, you really ought to know that if we’re talking about any jaw, it’s yours.”

“Says the man with thee most chiselled jaw around but OK, and either way, I certainly didn’t attribute that line back to me until she threw a ‘just be nice to her, she’s beet red,’ into the ring,” Remus details, putting his head on a tilt there, “which, in hindsight, is a request that rather illustrates how little Emmeline and I actually get to work with each other because I’d like to think that if she knew me better, she’d have known I wouldn’t have planned on not being nice to her, before or after the context officially landed.”

“No, never you,” Sirius echoes it.

“Not if I could help it, at least,” Remus offers for it. “In any case, I was going a bit rosy myself by then, tried to move things along and off of me if I could manage it, but she just brought it the jaw jokes; I'd walk over near her and she'd block her face, ‘careful with that,’ and then when Elise got on the floor, she tapped a cheek of mine for a reason I cannot think of for the life of me, but I do very remember Emmeline calling, ’careful, those cheekbones are sharp as knives,’ from across the kiosk and that got Elise’s ears perking right up—”

Sirius promptly presses his lips into a line in an attempt to physically hold back the trill that’s threatening to leave him, but all that does is make it go off internally. “Oh, you must’ve been in a right state,” he attests.

Remus gives a trill that exists deep in his own throat, so they’re squared to one in many ways, it seems. “Oh, I was doing my very best not to respond too hard to it because in my experience, the more you protest, the more they come a-teasing,” he maintains, pausing to rid himself of his last allotted melon ball. “They as in, the royal they; not just those two.”

“OK, wait, if Lily thought so, too, how did that not convince you?” Sirius poses. “She is your guru, after all, knows who’s into you best.”

“Mm, but her track record’s got a big, Sirius-sized hole in it, doesn’t it?” Remus serves him.

Sirius gapes, no grin. “Stone-cold, Remus.”

“More like, vaguely chilled, if a bit icy,” Remus amends, a wry smile budging at his lips. “It gave me pause and a bit of confusion because as far as I could tell, Anges was just talking to me whenever Lily would do that so respectfully, I didn’t actually take the antics Lily would sometimes do out of the corner of my eye as total confirmation on that front and I'm still not sure it was; I mean, I was perfectly fine with my first assumption that there would’ve been many tonal shifts to Agnes’s first day on the job and I just happened to have been one staring right at her as she processed a new situation being put upon her.”

“Right, but you’re a reasonable, logic-driven fellow, so let’s look for some of that in here,” Sirius offers sagely. “If she had been overwhelmed by many tonal shifts occurring before she even got her fifteen, wouldn’t the offer of a break and the chance to get away from the floor be something she’d jump at?”

Remus opens his mouth for about three seconds before traditional speech leaves it. “Well, she did jump at it, just after a bit of an awkward lag,” he raises him.

“Mm, but I don’t remember you saying anything about Agnes having a penchant for being awkward,” Sirius trades him. “In fact, I’ve only ever heard good things about an Agnes shift.”

“Well, that’s because she’s not been like that since and Agnes shifts in general have tended to go quite smoothly, at least in my experience,” Remus forwards him, sighing halfway amusedly when all Sirius does is give him a plain Look. “I have to go by her typical behaviour and it’s been consistent since that initially awkward meeting, but sure, say Emmeline had been onto something and Agnes took one look at my face and just completely blanked on what words were, flushed beet red, and very needed that fifteen to go collect herself; I would still have to hand it to her candour because she came back up front ready to rumble once that fifteen was over and was much more like the Agnes I’ve come to know her to be, so if she thought I was hot, that’d be one thing, but I don’t think it would’ve been much more than that for her and I haven’t been given all that much evidence to the contrary.”

Sirius perks real, real up. “Did you just say, and I quote, ‘if she thought I was hot, that’d be one thing,’ like you’re actually leaving room for that?” he braces, hand to his chest.

“Mm, and that's as high as I’ll go,” Remus supplies him. “And considering she’s now quite aware I’ve got a boyfriend in the picture given how everybody there is pretty well up to date on that much, I really can’t say I’ve noticed a difference in the way she interacted with me before the news would’ve broke out versus how she’s been with me since word got out, but one would think that if she had been harbouring, the knowledge of a boyfriend on my arm might’ve changed the dynamic between us just a little bit? If not a ton, enough that I would’ve noticed some kind of difference straight away given that I really didn’t know what kind of workplace I was walking into anymore.”

Sirius breathes in long and puffs it back out. “Well, I won’t ever suggest you wouldn’t be a worthy opponent on a debate stage,” he lets him have. “Why didn’t you tell me about it when the tea would’ve been nice and hot? I could’ve helped sort it out in real-time, Remus; I’m a bit crushed.”

“There was nothing to sort out, Sirius,” Remus trades him, his lips at a twist. “What would I have even said; ‘the girls have been chirping me all shift because they seem to think the new girl's into me?’”

“Well, sure, that’d have been something at least,” Sirius raises him. “Apparently, I opened the door for you to say something about it and didn't even know I did and everything.”

“You did, but in that you asked how the training was going and then slapped on a query about whether there’d be any sexual tension culminating in fireworks some months down the line,” Remus offers him, a rather circumstantial smile on his lips.

Sirius brings in a gasp, bringing his hands up to his temples as he gets transported right back to the sidewalk he stood on for that very exchange. “Remus,” he sounds out. “No — you went ‘only on my end this time,’ so smoothly it got me right in the face; I — you — threw the scent right off of her, you did.”

Remus tilts his head back and forth with a good-natured hum. “A scent I didn’t believe was there,” he amends it.

Sirius busts out a pfft from the depths of himself. “I can’t, you’re so funny?” he attests. “And you’re re-funny at that, my Cunt; that quip's twice as funny now.”

“Well, I’m glad we’ve made it here, then,” Remus offers him.

Sirius moves his gaze to the middle distance with a kinetic blend of admiration, hilarity, and some indignation in there, too; in some ways, that day and the strained time it fell in feel about as close as they had in the moment, but in other ways, they feel warped and further away than ever. “Remus, I’m really sorry if it seemed like I’d show up at your work and intimidate her if you’d said something,” he instils. “I mean, I want to say I wouldn’t have overreacted like that and I’d have just been fucking jazzed, but — we don’t know that; you didn’t know that.”

Remus breathes in long through his nose while he wets his lips. “We'd just got to a good spot, Sirius, and I was grateful to be hearing your voice, I didn’t want to tip the boat and risk even more tension on an already tense day,” he allows for, but only just. “I didn't really think about you not taking it well, I didn’t even want to say it aloud; it felt like, if I did say anything, I’d have made it something that could be true, or worse even, something that could immediately be proven false simply because I went and said it out loud, and then I’d feel ten times worse about not leaving it alone.”

Sirius breathes in long through his nose, leaning in to hook his chin over Remus’s left shoulder. “Well, then we’ll work on that while we’re working on owning you in general, mm?” he raises. “Owning your two P’s, pull and power, that’s one of them, owning a crush even if you don’t share the same feelings with the person crushing, that’s another, but owning that you’re able and allowed to speak on things even if they’re inconsequential and it feels like everyone’s going to turn on you if you do? That’s a big one we should be addressing because that's caused a lot more internal strife than you’ll ever need; we’re entering the ownership era and as exciting and harrowing as that is, unfortunately for you and only you, there are going to have to be fusses made over the small, inconsequential things like a coworker literally blanking because you walked up and talked to her so we can make way for easier fusses to be made over the bigger things and greet the new you head-on, but that’s the toughest it’s going to get from here, OK? We’ve left the worst of it in the dirt, I say.”

Remus clasps his left palm over Sirius’s right knee in a fast jut before he runs into some trouble with his breathing patterns, sending attempted half-breaths through his nose as he turns his head and lifts his right hand to trace his fingertips over Sirius’s left cheek, guiding him into the press of plush lips against his right temple and holding him there; it’s all-encompassing, it’s perfect, and it’s easier than it’s ever been before, Remus was right about that.

Remus lets him go unhurriedly, starting by loosening one shared link of theirs at a time until he’s facing ahead with a shoulder line that Sirius has to say absolutely screams game on.

“I want to jump off that top ledge with you.”

To say that Sirius isn’t dizzily seeking out something steady to brace his hands on would be a bald-faced lie and one he wouldn’t care to tell; the sturdy specimens that he ends up going with is his own left thing and Remus’s left shoulder, grasping the former tightly as a grounding measure while his fingers splay wide over the latter. “Are you sure?”

Remus breathes a long breath out. “I am," he gives him. "I’ve never done it and I’d want to do it with you, but we’ll have to get in there while the tide’s still in so we’re going to have to make it quick."

Sirius nods him off vastly, darting his gaze over the situation ahead of him, and comes up with a plan on the go, tossing Remus’s quilt off of his shoulders. “OK, we’re just going to—” he instils, reaching for the lid to the platter and connecting it with the platter, “—put this away first and foremost, and why don’t we just put the rest of the perishables away and the garbage too, that way we’ll have less of a chaotic pile in our wake, but still leave the rest of the stuff here so we won’t lose the obvious best spot in the house, mm?”

Mm,” Remus echoes, already reaching for the carrots and twisting the bag up from there.

Sirius gets the platter put away in the first bag closest to him, doesn’t matter which, he just wants this to happen — and not just see it happen, but be one-half of it happening. He accepts the carrots from the boy and stuffs them into the same bag the platter went in, but out of respect to Remus and for himself, he goes ahead and puts the once-sandwich containers into the other bag so that the garbage and the perfectly edible leftovers are separated.

“OK, OK, OK,” Sirius chants, shaking his hands off as he lifts off his tailbone and up to his feet in so swift a motion apparently that Remus battles it out with a bout of stitches while pushing himself to his feet. “Wait — your sunnies; they’ll explode clear off your face.”

Remus braces fast, going rod-still for a deep think before breathing in. “Not if I do this,” he attests, doing his best pencil while curling his forefingers around the temples of his sunglasses, pinning them to either side of his head.

Sirius ends up battling a fierce bout of stitches of his own over the image in front of him as well as the conjured image of Remus shooting off the ruins like that, but the placement of his elbows, both sticking out and away from his body and essentially inviting a whole schlack of whiplash, cuts Sirius’s laughter right off. “Your arms are going to smart if they’re out like that,” he directs, reaching to pass his right hand from Remus’s left elbow up to the underside of his upper arm.

Remus shrinks his arms in and brings them around front, nestling his elbows against his chest while keeping his hands at his temples. “This is the best I can do,” he instils.

And the stitch battle is back in full force. In fact, Sirius can attest to feeling a glee so vibrant and true that he’s still snickering by the time they traipse through the shallow end, sending splashes here, there, and everywhere, and then that has him snickering even more when this type of behaviour would be more realistic for a pair of ten year olds and not a two-piece band of rather stunted twenty-three-year-olds, and then Remus wobbling and going for a quick drop-and-visit with the water has him hooting, hollering, and trying his best to help Remus get at least forward-moving when the necessity for standing is getting increasingly lesser with every forward push they make, and Remus, beaming like a the sun as he laughs his arse off at himself, seems to have little to no care in the world that the lenses of his sunnies are just streaked with water and that has Sirius coming right back around to glee as they shoot out from the tallest peak of shore and into the greater lagoon, putting the pedal to the medal to get themselves over to the far side of the oval oasis and tread up toward the far corner of the ruins.

Sirius gets to lead the way up, but he is the only one of them who's traversed this far and knows where best to climb, and the fact that there are more folks queued up for both of the first two tiers than the third one combined feels both impossible and ripe for the occasion at once. The two of them climb on up to the tallest peak, assemble behind the wet-suited, orange bathing-capped lady ahead of them, and show each other their best pencils, psyching each other up with their chance at a bit of spare time.

When it’s just the two of them at the top, it feels fair to check in with Remus again, and if it’s done with a grin plastered over his lips, then perhaps it’s because he already knows the answer. “You sure?”

“I am, yeah, mhm,” Remus serves him, all in one breath.

Sirius backs up the same set of steps he gave himself for his first go around, delighted to see Remus following suit, and the pair of them take to a running start, lampooning themselves off of the ledge and into the air. The best part of it all, Sirius thinks, is that Remus reaches out fast to grapple at Sirius’s left shoulder right as he reaches to grapple for Remus's left one before the two of them pencil up as practised to perfection and shoot toward the water, as if their first instinct, even while suspended in mid-air, is to grab for the other and tell him to get a load of this before the moment's over.

Notes:

ayo, i've been seeing some talk of this tale here coming to an end soon, which is not particularly true to my knowledge as there is quite a collection of chapters to go yet. without spoiling anything too hefty, this fic will be bookended by remus's perspective (in that he opens the fic and will eventually close it down) and so, when the time comes that remus takes over the narrative voice, that will be when things will be beginning to wind down toward the conclusion.

just a lil psa for those that are looking for that

Chapter 37: 37.

Chapter Text

The two of them cut through the surface of the water like a pair of bullets, though thanks to Remus’s pragmatism involving high tide, they spend collectively less time in the air than they do shooting through the water and while the tips of Sirius’s toes haven’t reached any lower than he’d gone on any of his other previous turns, the fact of the matter remains; he did this one with Remus, and Sirius propels himself back to the surface with even more of a victorious fist in the air than his first one, eager to celebrate the momentous occasion with the boy.

Remus comes up for air a split second after him, a sputtered hoot leaving his lips that only has Sirius hooting back to; a call and response, if he may, but then the sound registers as more of a spooked sputter than a standard hoot and that has him swishing around to face Remus in the water, blinking back water from his eyes while his brain pitches toward the worst place imaginable; Remus’s sunglasses are completely off his face and are on track for the bottom of the once quarry, now lagoon.

Ultimately, that is not the scenario they’re living in for Sirius rubs at his eyes and blinks in the image of Remus’s sunnies very much on his person, but his spine straightens all the way out as he stares unblinkingly at him bobbing motionless in the water, head bowed forward, hands pressed squarely over his lenses, and mouth hanging ajar.

Sirius’s brain pitches toward the next worst place imaginable on sight; Remus somehow stabbed himself in an eye or the socket on impact and they’re going to have to medivac him the fuck out of here, stat, but then that reason thing comes filtering back in and the stabbing option doesn’t have much weight to it, particularly for the fact that Remus would likely be howling right about now, either on repeat or still in the midst of a continuous howl, as opposed to bobbing there, silent as a library on a Sunday afternoon.

The next moment comes with a form of clarity, a low thrum of understanding working its way up Sirius’s so-recently elongated spine; the last time he got a good look at Remus, it was in midair, sidelong from the left, and with their biggest twin smiles to date shining loudly, but Remus’s sunnies did have a left temple to boast of them and the same can’t be said at this stage, the frames rendered askew while he pins the lenses to the front of his head and the side of it in one go.

Remus pulls in an audible hitch of a breath, breaking through their rendered silence like a pin to a balloon. “It snapped clear off,” he heaves out, turning his head to the side to showcase the right temple of his sunnies that altogether hasn’t been dislodged from his person. “I put my hand back on it after we jumped, but I held onto that one like this—” he braces his left hand squarely over the front of his lenses to win himself the safety to push his right forefinger underneath the intact rod and quickly pulls it back out to curl it overtop of the rod, finished showcasing the slightest difference between the two, “—when I should’ve done it like I did this one and clearly it would’ve held out; I’m so—”

The blatant torment lining his throat has Sirius cutting right through, aiming to soothe it, needing to fix it. “It’s OK,” he instils, back in the exact moment Remus took his outstretched hand back from their air-grab and fused it to the left side of his sunnies like the dutiful lad he is, and it isn’t fair at all; the boy did everything right, including a slice of self-indulgence with that same mid-air arm-grab, and Sirius will not have him regretting any of it, not on principle and certainly not because of a split-second, fluke positioning of a forefinger. “Did you see any sun, any at all?”

“No,” Remus implores, both his hands back at his lenses, and if he’d had the space to he might’ve shaken his head immensely with it, but not with his palpable fear of jostling them off of his face in the process.

“Hey, then that’s something; we’re good, we’re OK,” Sirius soothes, spitting back infiltrating water from getting down his throat and holding his hands up squarely ahead of Remus’s hands on his lenses. “Alright, eyes closed, I just want to see what’ll happen if you hold those to you with just one hand, but braced at the corner of them; can you do that?”

“Like this?” Remus checks, scooting both his hands over to the aforementioned right corner of his sunnies, and it’s not funny ha-ha or even per se, but it is just funny enough to tug a smirk out of Sirius’s nose.

“Almost, but not quite; leave your right one on them and let your left one go, I’ll catch them if they fall, but I’ve a good feeling if they stayed put on your face while you showed me how you held onto them, you’ll have physics working for you rather than against you even if you’re one-handing it,” Sirius offers him, reaching up to tug gingerly on Remus’s left wrist to remove it from the equation.

Still, he’s met with a whirred hum of apprehension and quite a bit of resistance. "I don't know—"

"I’ve got you, I’m not going to let either one of your eyeballs see the sun today," Sirius maintains, "it’s just that you’re going to need at least a hand to get out of here, so we've got to see if that’ll even work.”

He tries again, watches Remus’s resolve stretch long and snap in half, and meets up with less resistance this time around; with Remus’s right hand braced at that side of his skull to keep the sunnies pinned tight to him and Sirius’s free hand up and at the ready to bat those sunnies back at the slightest slip, he turns Remus’s left wrist the moment he’s got it dislodged from the situation, pressing a kiss to the inside of it.

“Thank you,” he offers him, breathing in full and smiling big at the physical proof that Remus’s sunnies may just hold out even if he’s got to one-hand it, but Sirius has to check one more thing right quick. “OK, now shake out.”

“What?” Remus putters out.

“Mhm, a nice big one, like so,” Sirius bids, swishing his shoulders back and forth for show.

The flat, perplexed set to Remus’s lips as he mirrors his movements to a lowercase 't' has Sirius putting out a snort to end them all. “OK, good, love that; those things should be able to hold out if you can bop around without trouble,” he wagers, treading his feet underneath him to get himself in front of Remus and backing himself in close. “Alright, the red sunnies are in the care package, so let’s just get you to shore first and then I can run out to the truck to get them.”

“Well, what am I to do while you do that?” Remus counters.

“Mm, sit on your towel and do nothing but hold those to your face is my vote,” Sirius trades him, pointing his forefingers over his shoulders and presenting himself to Remus as his personal rafter. “Now, hold those frames steady while you’re climbing on and I’ll paddle you over there—”

“Climbing on?” Remus singles out.

Sirius tosses a glance over his left shoulder, confused as to why that would’ve been the part most difficult to swallow, but then he has to wonder what Remus’s visuals are like; he’s not got two massive hands blocking it out anymore, but there are droplets a-plenty smattered over his lenses. “Can you not see me?” he raises. “I’m just ahead of you, so all you’ve got to do is inch forward a bit—”

“No, I can see your humanoid form; I know that much—”

“Perfect, then just be careful getting on and I’ll piggyback you to safety—”

“I can still swim, Sirius—”

“Not if you’ve got paddle with one hand and hold those to your face the whole time, you can’t; they’ll go askew or you’ll go askew—”

“Believe it or not, I don’t want you drowning out here because you had to carry me on your back—”

“I’ve some credible buoyancy and you weigh little more than a feather soaking wet, so I think I’ll do just fine—”

“It’s deep out here, Sirius; I’ll capsize you no matter how buoyant you are—”

“Well, if the alternative is me tugging you out of here while the two of us swish and swash around like a pair of buffoons, I think our better bet is a traditional piggyback; quick, easy, a little romantique even—”

“I’ll just go slow, use my legs more than my hand—”

“Remus,” Sirius instils, popping his head over his left shoulder to get a sidelong but pointed glance trained back on him. “It costs nothing to let me help you.”

Remus pulls in a reactive breath, but gives up the goat in the form of retribution. “You can’t help me if you drown, so you had better be extremely careful,” he returns him, reaching to brace Sirius’s left shoulder with his free hand.

Sirius has just enough time to send a pronounced air-smooch back to him before a bellowed request for the two of them to ‘Fucking go already’ comes bearing down on them from above.

Ages ago, back in the early days following the two of them tumbling into the land of being ‘official,’ Remus referred to the exact way in which he and Sirius could zone so precisely in on each other and seemingly forget about any other soul in the room as tunnelling, and back then, Sirius didn’t think the bloke could’ve come up with a better descriptor for it if he’d tried, but it’s a lovely, visceral thing to be reminded so bracingly that they still haven’t lost that ability this far in.

It’s also just funny, plain and simple, so when Remus pulls his lips into a line and his visage rouges over with something akin to sheepish amusement, it’s no wonder he looks directly at Sirius’s absolute amusement and catches a case of the wheezes, snickerstorming as he uses Sirius’s frame to help pivot his knees up out of the water and slides them in between Sirius’s arms to hike them up by his hips. Sirius curls his hands underneath Remus’s thighs, strapping him in from below while Remus works on strapping himself in from above without sending the sunnies askew, crossing his left arm over Sirius’s upper chest as a balancing tool and clasping his palm against the right side of Sirius’s collarbone to lock himself in.

Lastly, Sirius feels two distinct presses to his skin, one at the side of his upper right arm, the other at the back of his left shoulder, just below the shoulder line; investigation of both presses comes in the form of gratitude, finding that Remus has his right elbow protruding out from behind Sirius’s right arm as a means to hold his sunnies in place and Remus’s lips are to do with the pressing back there, and with that, off Sirius goes, treading water underneath his feet in a whirl and carting Remus out of the impact-zone, shore-bound.

They don’t speak the traditional way on their trek, but there’s plenty of communication along the way, Sirius calling on the brute power of his gams to get them to the shallow end and squeezing Remus’s thighs periodically to let him know he’s good and there’s nothing to panic about, Remus rewarding his efforts with the pepperings of a kiss on the back of his shoulder here and there, suggesting that he’s with him, he’s hearing him, and while he may well have had his reservations about the method, he’s grateful for the help all the same, and what a propellant through to the final leg of the deep end all that is.

The moment he can feel it with the touch of his toes, Sirius slips the soles of his feet onto the slanted rock at the cusp of the shallow end, scoots them forward a few steps, and idles there like a dump truck letting Remus off the back of him, and if he makes a beeping noise every three or so seconds he's precariously climbing off and Remus gives a huff for each beep, then that’s just Them at their simplest.

Sirius waits until Remus is directly on his left before he starts a crouch-walk, inciting Remus to shuffle forward with him the moment he’s got both his hands back in the sunglass ring and keeping his left hand hovered behind Remus’s back as they scoot up the slanted rock in the case of a teeter on Remus’s part, and while none come their way by the time the water is splashing around their knees, Sirius simply keeps his hand there anyway.

All right?” The two of them turn their heads to the left in the same motion, where a lady way, way, over on the far side of the cove from them is holding one of her hands over her eyes like a visor while throwing her free hand around like she’s flagging down a plane on the runway.

The sound of Remus’s smile has a grit to it that only Sirius has the experience to know is entirely forced. “Just fine, thank you,” he calls over, lifting his free hand for a prime thumbs up and speaking exclusively to Sirius out the right corner of his mouth next beat. “I knew someone was going to think I got hurt out there if piggybacking was our exit strategy.”

“Well, better that than no one checking on you if you were indeed hurt, hm,” Sirius trades him, swishing through the shallow end and beckoning him along. “Now, you go sit, relax, have a bébé carrot, I’ll just come nab the keys and be back before you know it to deliver you a working pair o’ sunnies.”

“Are you sure you know how to get back to the truck?” Remus raises him, turning his head all the way to the right to look at him rather than chance a sideglance out the side of his lenses, and that’s a choice Sirius finds both thorough and just.

“I mean, I think I’ve got it,” Sirius retains, squinting a bit to retrace their steps from earlier on in the day. “Back out the big arch, over the goat’s bridge, head up the meadow and back down the trail on the right, follow it past the cutesy fence and keep on the same trail ’til it brings me back around to the — what’d you call it, ‘the street?’”

“‘Street’ or ‘row,’ yes,” Remus supplies, wading with him through the final stretch of the shallow end.

“Keep on the same trail ’til it brings me back around to the ‘street’ or ‘row,’” Sirius reiterates, “zip over to the parking lot from there, and do it all over again in reverse; how’d I do?”

“Surprisingly well for a first-timer,” Remus rewards him.

Sirius hum-diddily-dums rather royally while he escorts Remus back to their station, waiting until the boy is sitting still on his towel before he moves to pop a squat ahead of the beach bag, sifting through it to locate the keys. “Can you hand me my mobile?” Remus bids him.

“Sure can,” Sirius affirms, bracing the keys to himself via his left arm while he fishes around for it with his right hand.

He hands it over to him, pushes himself to stand, and jingles the keys at him in temporary farewell. “Back in a flash,” he instils. “You be good now, don’t fiddle around more than you have to, and trust that I will not ditch you here and drive off into the night.”

Remus snorts once as he lays his mobile flat in front of his crossed legs with his left hand while religiously keeping that right hand of his on sunglass duty. “I would find you,” he serves him, pressing his passcode into his screen with his left forefinger. “Don’t know how or even how fast, but you’d feel me coming for you in the air every moment of your impromptu joyride.”

“And I don’t doubt it,” Sirius returns, getting about six steps away from their station before hearing protest.

“Wait,” Remus bids, and Sirius swings around at the feeble note to his voice, finding Remus looking over his shoulder at him longingly. “It’s already quarter to five.”

Sirius reels a bit at the passage of time in general, but sniffs anew and decides that does make a lot of sense now that he thinks about it. “Cool,” he trades him, putting his head on a right-hanging tilt for the second half of Remus’s point.

“Well, it’s not as if we’ll be here that much longer as is, and we’ve already packed up the food so there’s not much left to scrounge together,” Remus says of it, a slight quirk poking at the left corner of his lips. “Only, I’d hasten to send you off to fetch the red ones just to come back for a brief stint before we’ll just have to start heading out anyway.”

Sirius sets his shoulder line at a coy, diagonally slanted dip. “I’m listening,” he coaxes.

He doesn’t have to see Remus’s lips head-on to know that the smile playing at the outskirts of his lips has streaked over to the middle of them. “Well, it’s completely up to you seeing as you’re the tourist 'round these parts, and you do seem to be getting a lot out of this place but if it’s all the same, we could start the drive back earlier than planned, grab some dirty chais for the road, and go hang out with my parents a bit sooner than we would’ve done.”

Sirius breathes in long, eyes alive. “I’m in,” he delivers at once, holstering the keys in between his right hip and the waistband of his trunks.

Remus leans over to drop his mobile back in the beach bag and shifts himself around toward him on his towel, which is a little more bodywork than Sirius would’ve liked him to call upon but then again, he gets to see Remus’s glee written all over his face this way. “We won’t make it in time for dinner even with a head start,” he wagers. “They hadn’t had lunch yet when I called and the projection for dinner was to be around seven, but my mum did say she’d save us a plate and I could just bet she’ll be right chuffed to see us wandering through the door as our share of dinner is only just starting to cool down, you know?”

“I know,” Sirius underlines, beaming all the while, but he pauses shot as a drop of water leaves his hair and trails down his spine. “We are a tad wet, though, I’ve noticed.”

“Mhm, yeah, but we’ve ways of not being so entirely that,” Remus holds up, reaching to tug up on the top-left corner of his towel.

A good answer, but Sirius is still a block or two away from being convinced. “Won’t we still be a bit too damp to just hop in the truck and go?” he raises. “I wouldn’t want to insult your father any.”

Remus smiles over at him with a playfulness Sirius is just in love with, already as a whole but especially within the confines of their precarious situation. “No, of course not,” he echoes, a beam of his own reflecting back on Sirius, “but we’ve got a far few changes of clothes at our disposal and there is a loo hut over between the parking lot and the beach that we’re not technically allowed to change inside of, but what’s a sixteen-year-old meter boy going to do about that?”

Sirius pulls in a tight breath of enchantment. “Remus Jean Lupin,” he sounds out, scooting over to pluck his towel up off the ground. “OK, let me dry off first and I’ll help you dry off next; it may look a little weird to the other lagooners, but I’m not about to let you fight with your towel one-handed when I’ve got two working hands to do it myself and they’ll just have to look away if they find the sight uncouth.”

Remus smirks as he gets himself to his feet while incorporating as little of his top half as Sirius would’ve thought humanly possible, all long-limbed legwork underneath him before he’s standing tall to the left of his towel, both hands back on his lenses as he waits for Sirius to finish up with the worst of the drippage on his person before tying his towel loosely around his waist. 

He moves on to Remus from there, tackling his front first; he gets his shoulders, his arms, his chest, but selfishly leaves Remus’s hair as the drenched, vivaciously curly mop that it's become in hopes that it’ll air dry just like that.

“Any weird looks so far?” he bids, tipping his head back as he’s not got a prime visual on the rest of the cove; just Remus and a blast hole in his sights.

“I’ve not been looking,” Remus provides, a prim smile on his face.

“Blowing my mind every day, you,” Sirius chimes.

“Stop or I’ll kiss you,” Remus returns, his smile evening out into something else, something theirs.

Sirius sighs wistfully as he finishes patting down Remus’s torso, lives in the moment where he’s met up with some whimsy so that he can’t pretend on the other end of this trip that he hadn’t felt its quiet grip, and skips the entirety of Remus’s trunks with a wry smile aimed at him. “Since you’ll be changing in due time,” he offers, the corners of his lips quirking up a storm as he dips down to pat the towel over Remus’s legs, “and while we’ve been lucky little thieves here stealing moments, sneaking kisses, I do think drying off your crochetal area may just be pushing the shield of abject invisibility we’ve been granted just a bit.”

Remus’s brows do the work of the single nod he likely would’ve done if he’d had the space to. “Your impulse control is leaping bounds,” he serves him. 

“Stop or I’ll kiss you,” Sirius returns, sending a fumed breath with no discernible heat to it through his nose as he goes around behind Remus, and even without a good look at him or his brows anymore, Sirius knows both Remus’s brows and eyes have a dainty, elusive quality to them thanks to those three chimed notes he hums to him in response. 

They’re quiet for the next stretch, Sirius patting down Remus’s shoulder blades, in between them and down his back, keeping a quiet rhythmic ease to his movements that then lay the groundwork down for him to feel the breath Remus pulls in as he gets to the waistband of his trunks. “Oh, I’m skipping back here, too, don’t you fret,” he instils, making a show of patting the towel at the backs of Remus’s thighs instead. 

“Hm? No that’s not — purely incidental, sorry,” Remus passes him.

Sirius ignores the unnecessary apology on the grounds of it having been a clarification. “And the big ol’ hitched breath you went for, then?” he bids, moving down to a crouch to get at the backs of his calves. 

“No, it’s just my heart may as well have stopped when I felt them break and it’s only just starting to beat normally,” Remus forwards him.

“Cunt, so did mine,” Sirius trades him, guttural in tone and nature. “I thought you gone and stabbed yourself in the eye for a second there — well, no, at first I thought the sunnies were full-on sinking and we’d have some exposed eyeballs to contend with, but then I saw them on you at least and my head went straight to the stab realm before I figured that if you’d had, I’d have known about it rather immediately.”

Remus gives up a frank, internally-kept snort. “Yeah, one would think,” he trades him.

Sirius gives an airy sigh as he lifts to his feet. “See, it’s not just you who panics around here,” he highlights, thwapping Remus at the small of his back with his towel before reaching to tie it around his waist. “Thought I was going to have to call for a medevac; it was a bracing moment in my life.”

“Well, what else were you to think?” Remus raises, pointing his elbows straight out on either side of him to afford Sirius more room to secure the towel at the front of his right hip.

Sirius moves out from behind Remus with an airy, thoughtful hum. “Mm, that something had indeed gone awry with your sunnies and not wasted time in the stab realm, maybe?” he trades, moving over to scoot the grocery bags off of the picnic blanket to begin the refolding process; it won’t go as smoothly as it would if Remus had the hands free to work his magic, but it’ll have to do. “It’s like I had the reality right within my grasp and still went somewhere completely else with it, gawking at you like that was ever going to help.”

The facetious click of the tongue Sirius punctuated it with doesn’t land in any way shape or form. “You sprung right into action; what do you mean?” he puts up. “You assessed the situation, launched into experimental mode, and went straight into coming up with a plan like you always do; if you want to talk about a time-waster, all I did was freeze up and drown in self-pity until you snapped me awake again.”

Sirius gives him a plain look from the ground as he folds the blanket in two over his knelt lap. “Right, because you were suddenly in a precarious position without an escape plan,” he reframes it. “You’re allowed to freeze up sometimes, Remus; I know I did, just stared at you unhelpfully until I noticed the missing temple, which reminds me, we ought to hold a memorial service for the aviators, pay tribute to the service those trusty buggers provided.”

Remus sighs ruefully, putting his lips into a pout that hasn’t got self-pity written all over it and that is progress. “They have been through a lot with us,” he allows. 

“Held tight for so long,” Sirius echoes, folding the newly-rectangled blanket into a makeshift square. 

Remus shifts on his feet for want of something to do, no doubt, but thankfully he’s at least trying to stay put there and let Sirius handle the repacking. “It’s a good thing we already had sunnies on the list, hm,” he raises it.

“There he is,” Sirius celebrates, lifting up and walking the newly-squared blanket toward their duffel bag sitting over by the rock wall. “And you know, while I’m scouring the net for those Lennon sunnies, I could always take a gander at a pair of those tinted goggles for you so we don’t ever have to have to have this happen again; what say you?” 

If Sirius had known this would’ve moved Remus right up on him by the time he finished the words ‘tinted goggles,’ he likely wouldn’t have called his proposition over his shoulder quite so voluminously, but Remus certainly doesn’t seem to mind having half of that sentence pitched into his left ear, not when he’s bouncing around like he is. “I would love some,” he instils, budging up on Sirius’s crouching form with his knees. “Love, love, love—”

“Alright, settle down, pal, or you’ll knock them right off,” Sirius chides, barely able to voice it amidst the laugh bubbling up in his throat. “I’ll get that going the moment we’re out of here; how’s that?”

A three-part limited series of kisses to the top of his head is how that is, but call Sirius a captive audience for he doesn’t have it in him to chide Remus for that, reworking the budding smile on his lips as he refocuses on the reason he’s even over here. Without the towels in it, the duffel hardly complains about a half-assedly folded blanket being lowered into its deflated bulk, and seeing the blanket square laying in there now, he has to think the beach bag may just fit in there alongside it, and then Remus wouldn’t have to hold a thing.

“Since you’re up, fetch me the beach bag,” Sirius bids, keeping a lofty tune about it. “I think fit nicely inside here and then it's just the grocery bags to contend with.”

Remus gives a spurred hum before heading off to do just that, the kind of hum he tends to give when things fit together both neatly and conveniently, and now Sirius sure hopes the bag will fit in here or that’ll all be for nothing. 

It is for something, in the end; if he lays the bag out rectangularly inside the duffel and sits the blanket to its left, the duffel even zips up neatly. “Aces, babey, aces,” he declares, clapping once for zest and turning around with the sash hanging from his left shoulder to find Remus clapping the sides of his elbows together, or trying to without an inch of his hands moving, and that gets Sirius over to the grocery bags with a fitful snicker for a companion, not just Remus. 

He lugs the food-specific bag up onto his right shoulder, hooks that in for the walk, and hangs the trash-specific bag from the crook of his right elbow, freeing up his hand to tug the keys out from its temporary holster and swivelling around toward Remus with a glinted grin, he’s sure, but Remus’s frown says it all for him. “Remus, the least I can do is get the bags,” he instils, his grin crooking out. “Your mission: to get from here to there without tripping, do you accept?”

Remus accepts, the good lad, though as they make a push for the big archway out of here, Sirius has a distinct feeling there’ll be something Remus overcompensates for in the coming hours, like grabbing every bag out of the truck upon their arrival and carting them all into the house before Sirius can even get out of the truck, but as far as beans go, that’d be a teeny-tiny and strictly amusing amount. 

The walk back goes at a smooth if unhurried pace, but Sirius isn’t interested in rushing Remus to the parking lot when that’ll only increase the risk of an untimely slip or jostle, so a leisurely stroll past trickles of various oncoming lagooners is indeed what they’re working with.

Remus takes in a new, slight breath as they pass through the picket fence single file, coming in close by his right the moment Sirius latches it behind them. “How’re you doing?” he raises, starting up a new stroll along the next leg of the path. “You know, with — with everything.”

Everything and Reg…’ hangs between them without needing to be said and Sirius takes in a breath through his nose as he realizes he hasn’t much thought about him or the overarching it of it all, wetting his lips with an easy shake of his head at him. “I’m doing great,” he gives him. “I’m obsessed with you, us, and this, I’m in love with where I am currently and where we’re going, equally in love with the company we’ll get to enjoy once we’re there, and I’m thrilled that we’ve got plenty more days ahead of us here than we’ve got behind; I’m good, really good.”

He can almost see the inflation of Remus’s lungs on the new breath he goes for. “Good, I’m more than glad,” he forwards him, “and of that forcefield you mentioned feeling up there on the cliffs; would you say it’s stayed up?”

“Oh, you’d have known if it went down, believe me,” Sirius lobs him, putting his head on a tilt a smile on his lips.

Remus nods once, though it could be better described as three small ones in quick succession while he keeps his hands bared on either side of his lenses. “And will I know if it starts to flicker away as we get further away from the limits of the forcefield?”

Sirius leans over and in closer to press his lips to the back of Remus’s left shoulder. “You’d be the first to,” he instils, wearing the truth and Remus’s skin on his lips.

Remus gives a small but hefty sigh, leaning back and into the touch. “I just don’t want to make you have to think about it any more than you have to, but I also don’t want to miss a moment where I should’ve checked in on you,” he registers.

Sirius comes out from behind him. “Mm, well, you haven’t yet, and you wouldn’t since you’ve got a wickedly sharp sixth sense for this kind of thing, so that’s the good news,” he trades him, reaching to swipe his right thumb at the fold of Remus’s raised left arm. “The news that may be tougher to swallow, however, is that it’s not actually insensitive of you to let me have a good time.”

“Well, I’m not not worried about that,” Remus allows for.

“I know, but I’m figuring this out as I go; I don’t know what the right way to do this is or if there even is a right way,” Sirius puts up, moving behind Remus as an oncoming pair heads up the trail toward them and waiting until they’ve passed and he’s up next to Remus again. “I’ve gotten mixed signals about this all my life, well before I myself would have to deal with a death that meant anything to me; some say you’ve got to let yourself feel it all at once, some say you’ve got to keep busy so it doesn’t consume you, some say you’ve just got to make room for it when it comes on so you can at least live with it, and as far as I’m concerned, I have done a bit of all three.”

“I just — want to take even half of it from you and I can’t actually do that,” Remus muses. ”It’s got to be brutally exhausting, running the gamut like that.”

“And it has been, but not today,” Sirius reports, air-budging Remus’s left hip rather than actually doing it and single-handedly leading to an issue for him. “The way I see it, I’ve done more mourning this week than I’d done all year and that calls for some celebration; it's going to come in waves and when they crash in, I’m going to curl up against you and feel the safest I’ve ever been, and when they’ve pulled away, I’m just going to enjoy the view.”

“Sirius,” Remus breathes, so low down that someone lesser might not’ve heard it.

“I’m not pretending it’s not there, I’m not neglecting myself, but if I let it swallow me up, let it leave me in a curl on a bed and call it home, and don’t let myself forget about it when I’ve better, fuller things to feel when they're happening, then where’s me in all that grief, hm?” he holds up. “Where does Sirius get to fit, if Reg takes up all the space?”

Remus gives out a bouldered breath, leading them on the turn in the trail that’ll lead them back through the Street or Row. “Put like that, it’s just another version of your house and then no wonder you don’t want to lose sight of yourself in all of this,” he raises it.

It hits like a brick wall and Sirius would’ve clapped that boy over the shoulders with gusto if his brain weren’t three steps ahead of his body and Remus’s hands weren’t up at his sunnies in a constant reminder that he mustn’t get clapped about. “Well, if that’s not a fucking point, you little Sirius-whisperer,” he returns him, letting the gusto he’s brimming with take over his vocal cords rather than his body. “See, you can wax and wane all you want about whether you’re keeping up with me, doing right by me, making enough room for me, but this right here is proof you get me in ways I couldn’t have dreamt someone could and that, right there, is why you beat out any competition; no one who had a shot with me ever gave me this much of their capacity, not a one, and I’m not saying I didn’t split away from a few before they’d had the chance to prove themselves because I definitely did, but you’re the first to show me I ought to stick around to see it happen and thank Cunt I did because look at this? You know me before I do, more than you or I even know.”

Remus is all whinge, whinge, whinge for the next eight steps forward. “I can’t kiss you for that and I hate it,” he lodges wantonly, and that is just truer than true once Sirius gets a look at the already crowded and still-packing parking lot on their left.

“Yeesh, you weren’t kidding; they’re a-flocking here,” he puts up.

“Oh, I very wasn’t,” Remus echoes, stepping off of the trail and cutting diagonally across the patch of grass separating them from the lot to get to the truck in the furthest corner spot that much quicker. “Pass me the keys?”

“Why don’t I just,” Sirius raises, lifting the keys and unlocking the truck from here.

“OK, I’m not loving this anymore,” Remus chimes.

“Were you ever?” Sirius mimics.

Remus steps off the grass with a great huff and plants his feet on the pavement to the left of the truck, standing both pretty and pettily as he remains a good five steps away from the passenger side than would be wholly necessary to get the backseat door open, and if he could’ve done it, Sirius has a stark feeling Remus would’ve royally presented him with the job of procuring the red sunnies from their care package, which only has Sirius air-smooching him the whole time he gets the door open and the care package rifled through, undeterred and unbothered by the boy’s ‘tude.

“You know, if this were me in your shoes, you’d have been ten times more insistent that I do zero things until I reached safety,” he puts up airily, tugging the red ones out of there.

“Well, obviously; have you met me?” Remus returns him.

“You might’ve even called for help just to get me out of there on a stretcher so I wouldn’t have to move a muscle,” Sirius tacks on.

“I don’t know about that,” Remus puts up.

Beat.

“Maybe would’ve,” Remus allows.

Sirius turns from the backseat with a royal grin and unfolds the sunnies to hold them open between them, ready and willing to slot them onto Remus’s face the moment it’s unobscured. Remus’s eyes are blessedly shut when he peels the aviators off of his face, but a day in the sun has certainly brought that sunglasses tan of his to a stark place, but Sirius decides that he will not mention that; he’ll find out soon enough on his own and the boy’s spirit has gone through the roof, evidently thrilled to be moments away from being less of a standard novice, and Sirius won’t take that away from him.

He slots them onto his face, careful to lock the temples in over the backs of his ears so they won’t have a last-minute oopsie, and passes the keys off to Remus, but given that they’re more or less blocked from the rest of the lot thanks to the hefty bulk of the truck, he moves in for that kiss Remus held himself off from going for, starting off small and searching, tugging Remus in after his contented mew hits his ears, and kicking things up to a spicier notch from there.

Remus wholly participates for longer than Sirius thought he’d do, which makes it all the more interesting when he steps back like this was all him. “Easy tiger,” he braces, his lips kiss-soaked and quirking up a fierce storm as he taps the folded aviators against the center of Sirius’s chest.

Sirius swivels to face the backseat with a grin on lock, shoves at the duffels still in the backseat to make room to slot the spare duffel in beside them, and backs up from the truck, leaving the bin-specific grocery bag on the ground behind him for now and opening up the front seat to stick the food specific bag below his seat for easy snacking capabilities.

He shuts up the front seat again with a bit of gusto built into it, steps back over to the backseat, and in the time Sirius spent doing that, Remus had apparently wandered around to the far side of the truck for there he is, opening up the door across the backseat from Sirius’s and unzipping into their clothing specific duffel. “‘Lo there,” Sirius calls, curling his right hand around his eye to peer down the way at him.

Remus breaks across the way from him, abandoning his zipping to simply curl over the top of the duffel he'd just been attempting to unzip and give way to a case of the hoots. “Who made you?”

“Couple of kooks,” Sirius provides, crossing his arms over the duffel ahead of him.

Remus breathes in long. “Alphard’s side of the family had to have had a hand in all this,” he instils, circling his right hand around the vicinity of Sirius from across the way.

“Ooh, I wasn’t even testing you and you passed with flying colours,” Sirius serves him.

Remus shimmies his shoulders a bit as he finishes up with the zipper and opens the flap of the duffel, but makes a light grimace from there. “We may be in for quite the queue at the bathrooms,” he warns him, shuffling through the artfully folded articles over there.

Sirius sniffs anew. “Well, why don't I go get in now and you can just follow with the change of clothes if you want,” he offers, lifting his shoulders for a call for his input.

Remus does want that, it very turns out, going as far as walking around to the cargo bed to point him off toward the hut near to the beach, and Sirius heads there as promised, his eyes never leaving the water on his way over to the hut; on this side of things, he’s happy to find both the sight of the water and the feeling it creates in his body far less foreboding, and he welcomes back the majesty, holding tight to the reverence he first felt as he stared out at the rolling waters ahead of the beach.

He blinks himself back to task as he heads around the side of the hut, spots the disorganized mass of people littered in front of it, and promptly swivels around on his heel, abandoning that plan on a dime and heading for Remus, who by now can be found carting a pile of folded clothes in his arms across the lot and seems to find Sirius’s rogue location rather huff worthy.

“It’s gnarly over there,” Sirius calls out, folding his arms across himself in an ‘X’ formation. 

“What’s gnarly to you?” Remus calls back, his lips tooched out pointedly. 

It occurs to Sirius there that he could’ve taken a snap of the situation so Remus could’ve seen it for himself, but then again, he wouldn’t have seen the lip-tooch if he’d done that. “Listen, I love that you wanted to break a rule with this venture, but even you would have bailed on that plan,” he attests. “Just a jumble of people with no queue between them to queue up in; it's nothing but chaos over there.” 

Remus makes a face that, all in all, proves Sirius’s assumption true. “Well, now what?” he puts up, looking down at the pile of clothes in his arms, the keys to the truck sat neatly atop the pile and glimmering in the sun.

“What should’ve been done in the first place,” Sirius instils, passing on Remus’s left and beckoning him along, truck-bound.

“Thought we wanted to avoid insulting my father,” Remus raises, following along beside him.

“And we will,” Sirius trades him, having a sidelong look at the contents of Remus’s pile and noting a shimmering red article between many folds of black. “Did you pick my mesh shorts out for me?”

“Well, I did think it’d be easier for you to change into those in a cramped loo than it would be for anything else you brought with you,” Remus trades him.

Sirius has a certain feeling there may have been something other than efficiency guiding that choice for Remus, swaying his way up the passenger side of the truck and tapping his right hand overtop the window of the backseat. “Is she locked up?”

“Sure is,” Remus affirms, holding the pile up and out to him.

Sirius swipes the keys off of it, hits the unlock button, and leaves them back on the pile of clothes to tug the door open, pulling his towel out from around his waist. “Hold this,” he bids, offering his towel out to him, then looks to Remus’s plain smile first, the mass of clothes in his possession second, and ends up caught in a snickerstorm. “Well, put those down first and then hold this.”

He moves out of the way of the door to let Remus set the pile on top of the duffel, bids for them to swap places yet again, and backs into the space between the backseat and the open door, lifting his towel between them. “Be my drape?”

Remus had to have known this was coming, the context clues were all there, but it’s almost as if he breathes in long just so he can puff it back out in a single gust. “Are we really doing this?” he raises, his mouth halfway to a grimace.

Sirius gives a thoughtful hum. “There doesn’t have to be a ‘we’ to this one,” he trades him. “We could just wait until yours are suitably dry.”

Remus hangs his head back for a beat. “I don’t want to be what holds us up,” he submits, stepping forward to take it by the top corners of Sirius’s towel.

“Well, I’d simply lean into this, then,” Sirius chimes, perching against the seat to hoist his trunks out from under his legs in turn. “You’ve done this in front of Pete, is now any different?”

“Yeah, well, Pete’s Pete, and we’re not in your room and, you know, with options that wouldn't fall under indecent exposure,” Remus holds up.

“There’ll only be about ten seconds at most where you’ll even need the towel,” Sirius puts up, and to show precisely that, he swivels on the spot and separates his navy briefs from the pile in the backseat, tugging them on and thwacking the waistband against his navel.

“Except I’m not nearly as flexible as you are, so it may just take me a little longer than that,” Remus wagers wanly.

Sirius reaches for the mesh shorts with his left hand while pushing the door open to its fullest swing with his right one. “Extra room for your tree branch limbs, but I did see you get yourself to your feet without moving your top half whatsoever before so you may be selling yourself short a bit here,” he trades him, taking his right hand back and using the both of his to shimmy his shorts up his legs. “There, you get yours off now; not like I need the towel anymore.”

Remus winds up Sirius’s towel and drapes it over the back of his neck to free up his hands and undo the one tied at his waist, the corners of his lips quirking quite a bit, but Sirius can’t imagine that’s got a thing to do with the task at hand somehow. “What’s this about?” he raises, leaning in to leave a peck at the right corner of his quirking mouth.

“You look good; what can I say,” Remus puts up, chasing his mouth for a quick peck on the lips and backing up to let Sirius shimmy his way out of their makeshift partition.

They swap places again, Remus holding the same wryly, disgruntled face the whole way through the process of getting trunks off, his shorts on, and swiping his shirt out of the backseat to pull that on over his head, and Sirius doesn’t know which is better; that face having gone on without a hitch for so long or combination of those tan fucking shorts mixed with that black tee.

“You look, beyond,” Sirius instils, folding Remus’s towel over his left arm, and Remus veritably sways as he offers Sirius’s tank to him by prodding him squarely in the chest with it. “Easy tiger.”

“No,” Remus chimes, budging Sirius away from the door with a wilding left hip and tugging the two trunks off of it in one swoop. “I’ll just lay these out in the bed real quick, give them a chance to dry off before we put them in anything.”

“Sweet deal,” Sirius calls it, moving in toward the backseat in Remus’s wake and digging in the beach bag within the duffel for his mobile.

He pulls Remus’s out alongside his own, braces the both of them against himself as he follows a thin thread of memory to the pocket underneath the right-hand side of the zipper, and pulls the pack of their splooge-dried tissues out of there, a wry smile on his lips as he moves to unzip their trash-specific bag sitting near the truck and stuff those in there to take out to the bin in a minute. He moves back against the truck, pops the door shut with his back, and leans against it while Remus pops down the door to the bed and climbs on up, holding Remus’s mobile up in his left hand for him to grab when he’s finished there and pulling up his browser on his own mobile with his right one. He opens up a new tab, types ‘lennon sunglasses’ into the search bar while vaguely listening to Remus schlepping damp material onto the surface of the bed as he goes, and perks at the first few offerings that come across his peepers.

He winds up going back and forth between a pair of classic black and a pair with mauve lenses on account of the fact that Remus himself picked out those rouge-framed sunnies he’s now totting around, but is he a mauve sort of lad? He should be, he’d look amazing in these, no getting around that, but Sirius decides he’ll be a good boy and get Remus the classic black pair and the mauve ones, see which pair he goes for more often.

He hears the cargo bed being propped back up, blinks out of his deliberations at the sound of Remus strolling up to him, and looks up as the boy plucks his mobile out of Sirius’s grip with a chime in his throat, moving to tug at the strap of the trash-specific grocery bag sitting forgotten on the side of the truck.

“Shit, I’ll do that,” Sirius offers, but no dice.

“I’ve got it,” Remus chimes, scooping the bag up by the handles and heading back down the side of the truck before moving out of sight.

Thwarted, Sirius turns his attention back to his task, orders those two pairs to show up at his flat, and moves on to the most important duty he’ll have today; the hunt for a sturdy pair of tinted goggles. He uses the same browser to pivot away from Lennon-inspired accessories, searches the goggles up, and puffs out an incredibly bolstered breath at the options most readily available to his fingertips.

The first pair boast some utterly gigantic lenses, would take up every square inch of the top half of Remus’s visage save for a sleek divot up and around the bridge of his nose, and to that, they're a vivid shade of metallic green so just owning a pair of these would mean that Remus is just in Daft Punk now, nothing else for it, and that would mean Sirius would hoot and holler any damn day he wore them, but they lack a strap at the back of them and that would make them no handier than a regular pair of sunnies at that rate.

The next pair of extreme note: a chunky, bulky lens situation that's a vibrant shade of neon purple, no such kind and thoughtful mauve 'round these parts, and topped off with a visor that’s covered in the busiest retro-'80s print known to Sirius’s peepers and as such, would make Remus’s brain explode if he were to lay his peepers on them, but not only that, these absolute units would take Remus’s part-time dad energy straight up into the stratosphere if he so much as attached them to his face, but this pair hasn’t got a strap to boast either and, looking more closely, shouldn’t even have been in the search results for the fine print does openly suggest they’re more ski-oriented than swim related, so that’s a no for the ‘Van Dopes’ unfortunately.

There are, however, a lustrous pair of reflective swim shades a few swipes over that do have an adjustable strap that secures around the back of the head, are much less expensive than the previous contenders which would have Remus sleeping better at night in the event that he came to own a pair, and, lucky ducks that they are, one can get the lenses in solid black or with a metallic rainbow sheen, and that choice right there is a no-brainer, babey.

The window behind and a little to the right of Sirius’s head goes rolling down in a smooth, undeterred zoom. “Coming with, Twinkle Toes?” Remus calls over.

“Sure am,” Sirius beams, turning on his heel to open up the passenger door and tug himself up and into the truck with his free hand while his mobile stays tucked in his right one, too thrilled to let go of it.

He plants himself in his seat and tugs his seatbelt on with his free hand, blindly searching for the click of the buckle while he lets his right thumb autofill his billing information. "Think this'll fit in that bag?" Remus raises, holding their other deflated and folded-up reusable bag out to him across the centre console.

Sirius unhands his belt sash at prompt. "I'm sure it would," he trades him, setting his mobile face-up on the glovebox and taking the bag from him to stuff it into the bag below his seat.

He picks his mobile back up, leans back in his seat while he reattempts buckling in with his free hand, and finishes plugging in his information save for the delivery address; that spot, he leaves blank for the moment, pulling up his notes app and going for a broad thumb stroke to scroll on back through to November when he first searched up the Lupin address — and located it rather quickly when there is but one Lyall Lupin in the whole of the Rhondda Valley — and pasted it in here so he'd know how where to send the tickets to. He hears the click of his belt buckle as he lands his thumb on the very note he’s looking for, considers that a sort of serendipity he likes, and it appears Remus may have been waiting on that single click himself for he fires up the engine the very next beat, wheeling them back out of their spot and huffing at a car that backs up close to their taillights without a thought toward their obviously moving vehicle.

“Idiot,” Sirius says for it and for Remus, selecting the Lupin address to copy it.

He swipes his notes app to close, pulls his browser back up, and pastes it into the address bar, filtering through the rest of the payment process while trading glances between his screen and Remus in the driver’s seat, his toes twiddling in his shoes for the moment he’ll get to pass the good news on to the boy huffily inching the truck forward whenever there’s a smooth passage inside the greater lot and rolling it to a stop whenever there just isn’t one.

The final screen loads, an email is promptly delivered to Sirius’s inbox that he’ll leave unchecked for now, and Sirius looks up and out the windshield as the truck makes it to the exit to the lot and a three-car pile-up, watching Remus "Nicest-Boy-To-Ever-Nice" Lupin let the others go ahead with three periodic swishes of his right wrist.

“Maybe we should’ve just waited,” Remus puts up, halfway under his breath as he gets in behind the snake line of four cars long, slowly working their way up the winding lane that’ll eventually take the lot of them out of here on its time, not any of theirs. “But then, it’d have been just as bad if not worse if we'd stayed until we were meant to leave, so I don’t know that there was any way around this; payback for the relatively smooth ride in, I suppose.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Sirius raises, beaming sidelong at him, “but I do know there are two pairs of Lennon’s going to my place and a pair of swim shades coming to your parents’ by Wednesday, said postage.”

Remus makes a funny stalled sound in his throat. “That quickly?”

“Well, you’ve got a whole lake and I assume we’ll want to actually get in it before we head off,” Sirius wagers, drumming the soles of his shoes on the floor beneath his seat.

“Well — that’s really sweet, but,” Remus tries, giving a breathy laugh in his throat as he rolls the truck forward two turns of the wheels before the snake line slows to a stop yet again, “I more meant, you did that very, very quickly.”

“I did say I was going to order them once we got out of here,” Sirius smiles.

Remus snorts once. “OK, we’ve just barely begun the process of leaving here, but I digress,” he trades him, taking his left hand off the wheel and beckoning toward him with it. “Can I see?”

“Sure can,” Sirius chimes, scooting over in his seat to hold the screen out to him. “They’re reflective, they’re reasonably priced, and they’ve got an adjustable strap so they won’t bounce around on your head or possibly leave you in the lurch one day; the trifecta, if you will.”

Remus hummed a charmed note for each anecdote, but a warble takes over from there. “Also incredibly bright and showy,” he smirks, tipping his chin at the image on Sirius’s screen.

“Oh, you should see the pairs I didn’t getcha,” Sirius thrums lowly, loading the same search back up. “Those were wild, but neither one had a strap between them so it wasn’t meant to be.”

Remus gives a muted noise in his throat. “Thank you,” he offers, and perhaps because they’re not going anywhere for the moment and he appears to be brimming with joy, but Remus beckons him in fast with his left hand and plants a smooch on Sirius’s right cheek when it’s close enough to get at with a lean. “They’ll be a big help.”

Sirius settles back in his seat, pulls his knees up to his chest so his feet can be seen swinging by the driver, and grins long and wide, living at the crossroad between Swoonsville and Goontown. “Check out the ‘Van Dopes,’” he bids, turning his screen toward him at once.

Remus blasts back in his seat with something between a cough, a retch, and a sputter before landing on a cackle. “I honestly don’t know how you didn’t get them just to fuck with me.”

“Still can, still may,” Sirius chimes, backing out of that window to get closer to the first pair of tinted goggles he laid eyes on. “If not for you, I may snag a pair for Ludwig; he’d fill them right out.”

“Oh, he would,” Remus echoes, before pragmatism enters the ring again, that is. “I caught that price point on them, mind, so maybe don’t actually do either of those things.”

“Look at these,” Sirius switches subject, pointing his screen back to him. “No strap on them, but you’d have looked like you were in Daft Punk.”

Remus gives a momentary halting hum as he scoots the truck around a right curve in the bend and officially brings them out of the parking lot before they’re idling once more, turning his head to look at the mobile screen patiently waiting for him and breathing in once before pushing it back out again through a reel. “I kind of like those,” he offers, a wan smile about him. “I mean, they’d be a lot, let’s be honest.”

“A lot, a lot,” Sirius puts in. “Half your face would be swallowed up.”

“But I’d have only huffed once if those showed up in my roster, whereas I’m not sure how many times I’d have done it for the ‘Van Dopes,’” Remus tacks on, backing them out of the spot.

“We might’ve seen you huffing continuously for a decade or more; tough to say,” Sirius echoes it, lobbing his mobile on the floor ahead of his seat and pulling his legs up underneath him to get all comfy-cozy in his seat.

All is well — relative in that they and the truck they’re in haven’t made much progress on the distance from — for upwards of forty, maybe fifty seconds before Remus gives a short, clipped note of vexation from the depths of him and yanks back on the gearshift, taking the truck in reverse.

Sirius hops his gaze around quickly, to the snake line slowly following the truck back toward the lot, toward the headlights and front bumper of an oncoming car just barely poking out from around the bend but quite evidently the cause of the back-peddling, to the steam he can almost see coming from Remus’s ears, over to the blanched knuckles sitting strictly at ten and two on the wheel, and around at the nerves he can viscerally feel wafting out of Remus at the idea of making a mistake by going one, small inch too close or not far enough.

Given that Sirius has nowhere to go for the moment, no real reason to police his movements, and no reason not to unbuckle enough to win himself the reach necessary to lay a soothing palm over the centre of Remus’s back, and he really must be in need of it for he leans his back into the touch and doesn’t give Sirius shit for going sans-belt for the manoeuvre.

Not yet, anyway; the moment the offending, oncoming car weaves out of the general way and allows for the first car in the queue to zoom forward to reclaim its spot at the helm and sparks the rest to follow suit thereafter, Remus clears his throat once. “Buckle up, distract me,” he bids, a short list of things he’d like Sirius to do for him in order of importance.

Sirius knocks the first item out of the way quick and easy, clicking his tongue thrice and pitching his brain toward something, anything, that’ll fall under the category of numéro deux. He breathes in long through his nose, eyes blinking as his breath stalls on a distant, yet visceral memory. “I ever tell you about The Great Harrod’s Fiasco?” he raises him, a smile poking at the right corner of his lips.

Remus spins the wheel as he brings them back around the right-hanging curve in the road, now struggling to keep up with the snake line that appears to be chock-full of drivers putting their pedals to the medal and dreaming of the open road. “I — no, I don’t think you have,” he returns him. “I don’t remember a Harrods tale, let alone a fiasco; what’d you do?”

Sirius’s eyes flash, his smile deepening with great fervour. “I did nothing,” he slips in there first. “'Twas the holidays, same year and season I left uni, and young James Potter led a troupe of three into Harrods on Brompton—”

“Did you have a death wish?” Remus comes in. “Never gone in there myself; too froofy for the likes of me, but I’ve heard it’s a circus in there.”

“And it is,” Sirius assures him, “but he was on a mission and enlisted the likes of Peter and me to help him find a suitable Christmas gift for Mama Potter—”

Remus gives a chime in his throat as he curls them around the left-hanging bend that brings them out to a long, unobscured stretch of road ahead of them, only this time it’s all about ascension, the road propped at a notable incline with the cars ahead of them making the most of a lack of oncoming cars in their way. “I’m sensing a theme with him.”

“Mhm, cannot, under any circumstances, make a decision for himself if he feels the stakes are too high,” Sirius echoes. “Now, it was a comparatively warm December day after a couple of hefty dumps of snow followed by a week of pure, uninterrupted rain, so the floors as those three boys trotted into the building were, unfortunately, covered in slush.”

Remus does a light reel, sniffing anew from there. “Floors awash with slush, in Harrods?” he raises. “I wouldn’t have expected it.”

“Well, I did see a bloke going around with a mop bucket later on, but the walkways were just oozing with the stuff as we clomped in through the main doors and up the main aisle,” Sirius offers him. “Now, Peter and I ended up a good six feet ahead of James, who'd stopped to consider something that I can’t remember now but knew at the time wasn’t even a contender for Euphemia and thus went on ahead to keep looking, and out ahead of us stood this display at the centre of the store with three majestically placed mannequins, all women, and as such, Peter decided to wander right on up to the mannequin in the middle and honk its right boob—”

Remus sits forward over the wheel, unable to slump over it given that he’s got to steer them out of here but if his hooting is anything to go by, Sirius has a feeling he would’ve done it if he could have. “Hadn’t touched a real one yet, is that the overarching explanation?” he puts up.

“Only in his dreams, back then,” Sirius supplies, taking in a wavering breath as he flickers his gaze out the windshield and spots the moment an oncoming car meets up with the leader of the charge to get out of here, which, as it were, is the same moment the driver at the helm of their queue of cars leans out of his window up to his shoulders and takes charge, physically corralling the newly-arrived and would-be lagooners to give up the goat and back it all the way up, pulling Sirius into a snortstorm. “That’s me.”

“I was just going to say,” Remus trades him, amusement skulking in his tone but making no appearance in his tightly-held jawline. “Keep going; I’m much more invested in Peter’s boob grab than I am in this, oddly.”

Sirius nods him off dutifully, putting himself back into the scene to better put Remus into it. “Now, James, loveable lad he is, saw the moment take place from down the way and got incredibly inspired, took to a scuttled jog as he thundered up the aisle after us, and if all had been well with the floors and he hadn’t been wearing glorified clunkers for boots, he may well have succeeded in zooming up between us to get a honk of his own in, but alas, that wasn’t meant to be; instead, the stars aligned to say ‘fuck this boy’ and he went bowling, feet first, into the display, shooting the mannequins into the air and cascading them in pieces all over the floor,” he details lively, unable to keep it together on principle but especially with the muted hooting going on in the driver’s seat. “All this, you could say, was the trigger, a veritable bomb going off in the dead centre of the first floor of Harrods, and suddenly it was every man for himself; Pete went one way, James a completely other, while I went sprinting off down the aisle on my direct right, scooted through to home decor, and ended up diving underneath a display bed to wait out the initial fallout—”

Remus huffs and puffs beside him, giving out a long, long, very long noise that Sirius places somewhere between mused and amused. “Did you get caught?” he manages.

“Get this,” Sirius braces, lifting the both his hands for two prime ‘OK’ symbols. “None of us did.”

“There’s no way,” Remus returns.

“There is a way,” Sirius instils. "It's called luck and the ability to act naturally in the face of your enemies."

“I don't know what's natural about diving under a display bed, but OK," Remus gives it. "How long were you stuck under there for?”

Sirius gives out a puff of breath. “Fifteen, twenty? A long time to be under there in real-time, I’ll say that,” he puts up, snickering with it. “I kept thinking ‘surely I can resurface now’ and then telling myself ‘no, rookie; another minute’ until I got a text from the culprit himself that was just ‘I’m in kitchenware,’ went and found him perusing the crockpots with a curious, innocuous air that insisted he wasn’t the rascal who upended an entire display of mannequins, and then we couldn’t get a word on Pete’s location as his mobile had fully died before we even set foot in there, had to hunt him down the old fashioned way, and found him standing in a completely different, rather upright display of mannequins on the second floor where he had been standing motionless the entire time we were separated.”

Remus snorts so violently it looks like it hurt on the other end. “Thank you for saving his location for last,” he forwards.

“Oh, you know, just telling it in order of appearance over here,” Sirius trades him, smirking for it.

"What'd he go with in the end?" Remus bids.

"Got her one of the crockpots," Sirius trades him. "Which, I will say, she still breaks out to this day so it was the right gift in the end."

Remus gives a wan noise in his throat, whispering his left hand past his mouth. "All that for a crockpot is still something."

“It was so much," Sirius instils, smirking for it. "I’d only just had a rib kicked in the month earlier and while I was on the mend, able to move around and go places well enough, the strain that came of that dastardly escape, the powerful, full-bodied glee I felt coursing through me over something like that happening in front of my very peepers, the agility I had to call on to scurry under that display bed, the discipline of keeping my hooting and hollering to a minimum while covertly hiding out under there so not to give away my cover? Devastating for my poor rib, much like the fallout of the three of us entering a world-renowned department store without any supervision.”

Remus gives a pained noise. “I hate and love that addition by equal measure,” he registers, sounding subdued, like he'd somehow managed to speak that out without moving his jaw once. “And, I feel like I know exactly what you mean by that.”

Sirius looks at him sidelong, opening his palms face up in his lap for a little more elaboration on that front, and feels his hackles raise as Remus breathes a sob out through an exhale. “Every time I talk, laugh, make a noise, it just throbs,” he prattles, batting his left hand back on his jaw and wincing with each uttered word, “and I want to talk, laugh, make noises — I had to, no want about it; that’s objectively the funniest thing I’ve heard in a while, the most James thing I think I’ve heard ever, and the way you tell a story — I felt like I was there and I didn’t even get to enjoy it properly.”

Sirius sits rod still as the balloon pops before he remembers that going is the least helpful thing he can feasibly do. “When?” he asks.

“Two seconds after you first said the word ‘Harrods?’” Remus provides. “That was the first pulse, at least.”

On this end of it, that does check out for the various ways Remus held his jaw tight and muted himself through a tale that would normally have had him falling to bits, but they've a whole problem that shouldn't even be here. “You said throb.”

Remus nods woodenly. “I thought we’d be off this road by the time the throbbing started,” he puts up. “We’re supposed to have time; we’re supposed to have a half-hour grace period at least, I’m not supposed to feel throbs within five minutes.”

Sirius breathes tightly as he looks out ahead of them, taking in the four-car pile-up heading in the same direction they are, and though he has no proof of it, that backtracking car up ahead of the troupe sure does appear to be driven by someone with retribution lining their motives for that is one slow-crawl they're making back up the road and that's another problem. He reworks his jaw, looks behind them next, spots one car, and leans out his window to get a glimpse around that one, counting three more snaking behind it; Sirius has never been big on karma, he really hasn’t, but maybe Remus had been onto something about that payback.

“OK, since it’s not like anyone’s going anywhere any time soon,” Sirius broaches, “let’s just swap seats real fast and I’ll take over for you—”

“I’m not doing that,” Remus refuses.

Sirius breathes in once, puts it out again. “Remus, I’ve driven before, I can do it again,” he instils, speaking clear and concise. “I know it’s not ideal, I know you’d rather my licenseless arse not get behind that wheel at all, but we prepared for this in some capacity, albeit for a much less dire reason, and I don’t want you stuck in the driver’s seat any longer than you have to be; simple as that.”

“I’m not doing that,” Remus repeats, speaking clear and concise himself, though it had to have hurt to do with the face he pulls after it. “You wouldn’t believe the view I’ve got outside my window.”

Now, Sirius can’t much see the vantage point that Remus has, but he can dart his gaze northeast of Remus’s seat and peer out that side of the windshield to see a long patch of grass that’s gone eroded over time, can very remember the same view from when he was the one on that side of the road, and can viscerally remember that massive drop he got permission to peer wondrously down at.

Sirius breathes in once. “You’re not doing that,” he agrees, breathing in long and pushing it back out in a gust while his brain fires right off. “OK, for the short term, we wait until that massive drop is not right outside your door and we swap out then, you get in my seat for now, bend forward, head down and away from the window, and if it doesn’t end up hitting, then we’re overprepared and oh well for that, but if it does, I will be right here while I get us off this road; do we have that leg of the plan clear?”

Remus makes a lot of sputtered noises that roughly translate to ‘I’m not thrilled but what else can we do,’ which Sirius will definitely take as it’s better than nothing. “Perfect,” he calls it though it is anything but. “Next, I’m going to need a secluded place to go to, which I just don’t think counts as the quaint hamlet that’s directly on the other side of this road, but I imagine there are backroads I could take once we’re back toward the highway?”

Remus nods it out, nods it all the way out as he rolls the truck toward the end of the eroded zone. “Perfect,” Sirius repeats. “That’s the first thing I’ll do the second we’re free of this devil road, then I’ll set up the back for you to lay down in, get right in there with you, and we’ll deal with this the way we always do if we were just in one of our rooms.”

“We shouldn’t have to do any of this,” Remus puts out, one hand in his hair, the other on the wheel.

“You’re telling me, but we can get part A of the plan knocked out right now, so let’s go,” Sirius bids. “Around front, please; let's not lose a calf or two here.”

Remus takes a lot out on his belt buckle to command it loose, leaving the truck on idle and his door wide open as he heads around the front of the truck as bid, and Sirius can only just celebrate strapping into the driver’s seat and assuming a notch more control of the situation than he previously had before the car behind them lets out a disapproving, three-note honk; while Sirius manages to hold off on wailing on the horn in retaliation to that and every spare second they might spend on this road all thanks to that piece of shit up front only just getting to the stone wall that marked the first leg of this road, one could say that Remus takes worse even offense with the honk than Sirius did, swearing up a thunderstorm as he slams the passenger door shut behind him and sending every vehement declaration back to the offending honker via the open window.

Sirius reworks his mouth around an untimely smile he best not let show, taking the gearshift out of idle and pulling the truck forward three rolls of the wheels before they’re idling yet again while that piece of shit at the start of the queue backs around the bend and off of the road.

He wipes any remnants of a smile clean off his face, however, when Remus twists around in the passenger seat and digs his arms into the back, clattering them around and tugging the whole of their care package into the front with him. Sirius looks out the windshield, where the first vehicle of the OG farewell crowd pulls around the offending slowpoke to veer down the wider road on their first left and starts a chain reaction, and back to Remus, who struggles with getting a boost out from inside the care package.

“Are we in it, or is that just in—”

“In it,” Remus clatters in, cracking the cap open and knocking it back in one go.

Sirius looks to the time, writes ‘5:32’ down in his memory, and forces his hands to stay still on the wheel. “What’s it at?” he raises. "Ballpark it."

“Kip’s bloody fucking six,” Remus spits.

Sirius breathes in long, long, very long. The end of the line is so close he can taste it and so far it tastes bitter on his tongue, but that thought pairs rather well with Remus's opinion on the matter for he sucks in a sharp breath through his teeth, slaps his right fist against the top of the glove box, and then that seems to feel brilliant to him for he bats at it with the both of fists next, and before Sirius can get a hold on him, Remus is in a state.

Iwasgood,” he shouts between hits. “I didn’t see the sun once, I swear it wasn’t that; I know it wasn’t that, and that means I was just pencilled in for one by no fault of my own and that’s bullshit.

“I agree,” Sirius instils, dropping his right hand to six on the wheel to try and get his left one around Remus’s rogue right wrist. “Wholeheartedly, I agree.”

“Fuck it and fuck this and fuck that piece of shit up there while we’re at it,” Remus casts out. “Fuck him and fuck this.”

“Fuck it all,” Sirius echoes, and it hurts, hurts in every corner of his body, having to watch him like this and not be able to get a proper hold of him through it. “Awful end to this, I know.”

“Awful’s not enough; it was perfect,” Remus heaves. “Perfect day, perfect you, perfect, and I’m sick of this; we don’t get a day, we’re not allowed one.

“I know, I know it feels like that,” Sirius keeps on, keeps trying to get a hold on him while somehow managing the turn off of that hellish road one-handed. “And I know it won’t feel like it right now, but we’ve had a lot of days without and we’ve had a lot of days with ones that hit under five; we could be in for something manageable and then we won’t necessarily need part-B of the plan, but at least we’ll have prepared for a doozy and we have everything we need with us.”

“We were happy,” Remus screams; bloody murder, he screams it.

“We were, and we will be again,” Sirius instils, and his throat hurts to speak out of, but at least he’s got his fingers coiled around Remus’s right wrist so he can hold it as still as possible. “Hey? We always make it back to happy; we've done it time and time again.”

It’s possible Remus doesn't want to hear it or the words hit just right, but either way, he bends forward in his seat as tasked and takes Sirius’s hand with him, pressing it to his stuttering lips, and fuck, Remus can have his hand, no questions asked, but anything might’ve been nicer to hear while searching for a secluded enough road not to get caught wrestling in the backseat by horrifyingly curious bystanders than the sounds of Remus bawling beside him; a morning glory trilling directly into one of his ear canals at five in the morning, fireworks being set off directly across the street from him, a sonic boom taking out the entire city block he was just about to cross toward, anything, literally anything would’ve been a better sound than that, and by the time Sirius parks the truck in close to the side of the road, he can’t actually remember getting there or even deciding on this specific road, only has Remus’s misery echoing around in his skull for a sordid memory.

He switches off the engine, throws his belt aside, and works his left wrist out of its new home between the coil that is Remus, placing it at the nape of his neck in a vice grip while keeping his tone gentle. “I’m setting up the back and I’ll let you know when to move,” he instils, giving him a squeeze farewell for now and swiping the care package out from below Remus’s seat so he won’t have to think about the rest, so his job is getting from point A to B without anything else. He veritably jumps out the driver’s seat and zips around the front of the truck to get to the grassy side of the road when he well knows that Remus would just know if Sirius were to start unpacking the backseat with his back to the open road; he would know, on principle, and lose what’s left of his entire shit.

He zips up the duffel the nearest seat to him in the back, climbs up to get a hold of two duffel straps in one, and drags them out of there with him, skidding a bit as his shoes slip on the gravel between the grass and road but recovering well enough to get over to the cargo bed and reach the duffles over the side of it. He zooms back to the door he left open, climbs back in, and lunges across the backseat, hoisting the remaining duffel toward him and reaching out to pat fast at the small of Remus’s curled back to signal that he can start making a push for the back, and the fact that Remus felt it underneath all his rocking and writhing to comply with instruction after only a handful of lagged seconds is a bit of a miracle, but here he comes, laboriously climbing out from the passenger seat and shutting the door with a lackluster slap, but that’s fine, he doesn’t need to worry about latching it up tight, Sirius'll fix that later.

Remus bumps back against the open back door, staggers forward in response to hitting up against it, and moves for the headlights, and there, Sirius realizes he should've waited until he was fully out of the back to beckon Remus to it because of all the ways Remus could’ve gone, heading around to the roadside of the truck while a car rolls down the road toward them is bracing, it just plainly is, but they are clearly stopped here and Remus is hard to miss, towering man that he is, and there Remus goes, bracing each new section of the truck with splayed hands, each lift of his legs looking heavier than the last like he’s on the damn moon, and there Sirius goes, curling over the duffel to stretch across the backseat to bat at the handle on the farside door to make it easier for him to get in, and there comes the honk, louder than hells bells and ricocheting out from behind the truck, around it, and all around the interior of Sirius’s skull so it's got to be literal hell inside of Remus's, and he can’t scream bloody murder for Remus, can’t even utter a sound as he watches Remus fuse himself to the outside of the farside door to shut it right back up and keep himself from being squashed by the passing car that didn’t slow down for even a second for him.

The ringing doesn’t stop as he shoves the duffel clear out of the backseat and somewhere on the ground behind him, as he crawls forward on the seat to help push on the door while Remus lugs it open for a second time, as he curls his hands underneath Remus’s shoulders and veritably heaves him off the ground and into the back seat himself, as he falls back with Remus on top of him; the ring, quite frankly, is all he has inside his head, and in that sense, they’re quite the match, he and him.

He’s put himself in a dangerous position, he knows that; he shouldn’t be under Remus for this, should make sure to have the upper hand in case things go real south and he can’t get out from underneath him, but he can’t let go of him either, can’t open his eyes, can’t do anything while he's purely terrified that he actually did lose him, that the last few snapshots of Remus moving around on the other side of the glass and the understanding he had of them were hallucinations of his own brain’s making to protect him from the reality of it, that he’s really just laying here clutching the shell of Remus to him in a vice grip, and it takes until Remus starts dragging the left side of his skull against Sirius’s collarbone and shooting high-pitched, guttural notes against his ribcage for him to believe without a doubt that Remus is still here, for the ringing to get sliced through, for him to spring back into action.

He starts with a kiss to the top of Remus’s head that’s more of a press of the entire lower half of his face into his plume of hair and against his skull; not a wholly lucrative first step nor is it a safe bet, but it smells like Remus and it helps him keep on course for the next item on the docket.

He braces Remus’s upper arms, pushing him one way, toward the back of the seats, pulling himself the other way, toward the dip between the front seats, rolling once he’s free and scuttling his left hand out and around the tight bend between him and the rod down on the far side of the passenger seat. The seat collapses in half, the back of it teetering down toward the cushion, and Sirius shoves at the bulk of it so the seat presses up against the glovebox, drops down in the excess space between the seats, and grabs the care package beneath him, tugging the nearest sleep mask to him and only realizing once he’s got the sunnies off and the mask on Remus’s head that it’s Don’t Wake the Bride.

It doesn’t get him like it ought to, but he’s glad it exists as he works the red sunnies into the care package and starts strapping Remus into the backseat so that he can feasibly leave him unattended for the ten seconds it’ll take to throw the last duffel into the bed. He works to crisscross the boy’s antimatter-filled arms across his chest, his left arm pinning them there with the force of a thousand suns while he yanks on the belt high above Remus’s head and stretches it out long, lifting the buckle high, high up on the strap before reaching to buckle it in behind Remus’s back. When all Remus can do is kick about, Sirius thinks he can leave the arms trapped as they are and tackle the rest of him, hooking the belt on the middle seat around his thighs and looping the last one twice around those wily legs of his.

He splays his hands over Remus, trying his hand at willing him to behave while he’s gone, and dips out the open door to his right, making a mad dash for the duffel on the ground and lobbing it into the bed from just halfway to it; it’s the clothing duffel, nothing in it that can’t take a tumble. He books it back into the truck, pulls the door shut behind him, and braces his hands on Remus’s chest, pressing it down into the seat to stop him from bashing his shoulders into it. He holds him down with his left arm, cranes his right arm around behind him, and stretches his fingers out to bat at the armrest beside his vacated seat, zooming the window up after he finds the button and locking Remus’s cries into the truck with them.

He positions himself in the floor seat he made behind the passenger seat, left hand up and at the ready to bat any escaping limbs, the back of his right hand braced between Remus’s head and the hefty armrest on the door to intervene in any terrible ideas on Remus’s part, and there, he stays knelt, playing defense where needed and studying exactly what they’re up against from directly on stage, forget front row.

It’s a doozy, no doubt about that; no longer a six by any kind of means, but is it the dreaded ten? Remus keeps winding back and kicking that armrest over on Sirius’s far left like he’d like it to come right off and Sirius very does scoot over to his knees astride the bar down below the middle seat to give himself to reach to curl his left arm underneath the crooks of Remus’s knees, hitch his right arm underneath his shoulders, and curl Remus up to hold him like a bride in the midst of being lowered to bed so he won’t be able to reach either door, and while Remus may not like that very much as the whirring noise in his throat certainly suggests, it’d be much harder to play defense of this kind and hold Remus still enough to crunch him up in his arms Rock-A-Bye-Baby style if they were in the throes of a ten.

On that note, Remus wouldn’t be able to stop screaming if they were dealing with the worst of the worst and he is currently able to break up his utterings with whip-fast breathing breaks, and Remus certainly wouldn’t be able to say shit-all if he were at a ten and while his current utterings are certainly open-throated and guttural, they’re not the nonsensical noises or dreaded, awful pleadings that typically accompany a knockout, but then again, Remus can’t speak traditional words just now either, so this one can’t be lower than an eight.

He almost leaves it alone, almost calls it an eight when he does so prefer the sound of an answer over the call of a mystery, but he feels a twinge at the back of his neck that tells him to hold off, to think about it clearly; does this really put them at the eight mark or have they officially hit a nine?

He’s wondered about the elusive nine, pondered over when and whether they’d see the day; they’ve had their share of sordid tens, plenty of cases that ranged from six to eight, a metric shitload of cases oscillating from one to five, and had cases that began at ten and dropped to a four, but a nine? So close to ten but not quite as harrowing, so near to eight that the symptoms almost seem recognizable but can’t be slotted into place without a strange sense at the back of the neck telling you that you’re just a hair off from the real deal? They’ve not yet had the pleasure.

By and large, he’s not going to be able to know fully from his side of the glass, and hell, it’s T-minus any time now that this one drops from its severity to a lower rating or falls away completely and he loses sight of the potential niner on their hands, but he’s none too convinced he’d get much of a view from the other side of the glass once Remus has made it out of this one; he’d rather not hear the Kipple name again if he were to be so blessed in that way, but what would he call this one, then? If a Lup Scale four falls under the category of Ugly Pot and a Lup Scale three admittedly — and begrudgingly — comes in at a Kip Scale eight, would he have to create a whole new number for this one? Hitch that Ugly Pot up to a Lup Scale five and create a whole new four, short-handed from the Truck Cluster?

No way to know if they're out of the woods and can interview the boy himself, he supposes, but he's in a prime position to wait and watch and note the overwhelming consistency to Remus's movements since the cluster shot up from numéro six, so he will say this; if they were in the clutches of a ten, Remus would have been and would still be fighting him so much harder for having crunched him up so tightly, not writhing around in his arms and the coil of the belts like a pig in a blanket for such a solid stretch of time.

He’s in a prime position, too, to hear another car pass them by and curse himself once for not finding a better backroad to lay claim on and twice for not thinking to turn on the blinkers for he’s put them at a prime risk of someone calling a tow truck on them at the worst time imaginable.

He’s in a prime position, too, to feel the moment Remus quits wriggling around, to feel his breathing level out, to spot the muscles in Remus’s face twitch and twitch and lax, his chest rising and falling like the tides and his breathing coming out in larger, slower beats.

Sirius looks over his shoulder, eyes ‘6:26’ displayed on the dashboard, and blinks silent understanding in with it; fifty-six minutes isn't their shortest duel known to them since working the boosts into their roster, but not even close to their longest case and that is a much better time than he certainly thought they'd be in for after such a fast-tracked grace period, and what the fuck was that, anyway? They haven’t been caught that suddenly since the worst night and Remus had zero time to act, to even articulate what was happening to him. Has he lost the only real and decent grace period they managed to get, are the shrooms doing fuck-all for him after keeping to a strict-as-humanly-possible dosing schedule and after nearly everyone and their grandmother on that fucking site held them up as gold, is this miracle doctor going to be able to actually do something for him if he’s getting worse and worse or is he going to have to answer for the folly of human error after putting every single egg in one basket; has, are, is, and has, are, is.

He breaks the chain on that incessant whirring, curls over Remus fast, and drags his left arm out from underneath his legs, unhooking each strap one by one, working what he can off of him, scooting him here and there when he can’t. When Remus is free again, Sirius palms his right hand at the back of his head and sets his left one at his jawline, holding it to him as he presses kiss after kiss to the left side of his face, personally seeing to it that Remus feels loved beyond measure before exhaustion takes him away like it always does and humming back to every half-note Remus gives him on the way out.

The moment Remus is fast asleep, Sirius crawls out of the back, certain he has to get them far from here in case there is a tow truck headed for them this very moment, and staggers fast against the truck once he’s out, but it’s as if the moment he breathes fresh air, revulsion hits him from all sides, upending the contents his stomach onto the gravel ahead of his feet.

He backs up to avoid his shoes, knocking the door shut in the same move, and panics over the idea of having shut the door on Remus’s head, but a dizzying peer through the window shows him curled up in the backseat like a ball and while that’ll likely be something the boy eventually regrets if he stays like that for too long, it’s better than a crushed head. He presses his forehead against the side of the door with his eyes screwed shut, willing himself to breathe and aiming to banish the bodily memory of believing so viscerally, for a terrible amount of time, that Remus could’ve been dead on top of him, but a new wave hits and takes more from him at once, a fresh pile of finger food joining the rest of his sick on the ground and making it a minefield getting over to the cargo bed.

He stands rickety behind the truck, testing out whether he can feasibly get up in there and dig for their toiletries without spewing all over the bed, but he manages to pull the door down and considers it dumb luck that he planted their duffels all along the left side of the bed for that'll increase his chances of spewing off the side of it rather than on it, but no new waves come his way as he crawls past their damp swimwear to the duffel he needs open, swipes their toiletry tote out of there altogether, and bounds down from the bed, bracing the tote to him with his left arm and side while shoving the door back up, so there's some more dumb luck for him to benefit from.

He keeps a wide berth around his puddles of sick as he shuffles back up the passenger side, digging in the tote still pressed against him for his mouthwash, but he’d take Remus’s at this point, whichever one he can wrangle out of there quick enough really; Remus can have his if Sirius ends up using it up, doesn’t matter. He breathes long in between massive gargles and subsequent spits to the ground, but no matter whether he might need another minute or ten, he knows he’s got to leave; more so than before, he needs to get them back on track, get Remus out of here, get himself busy.

He goes for another gargle-and-rinse for prosperities sake, manages to get the cap on the mini bottle and not splash what’s left in there all over himself in the process, and stuffs it back in the tote, carrying it with him as he checks both ways before moving to get in on the driver’s side, thinking he will never, never, never fuck with Remus again by dancing in the road if it’ll put him through this shit; they are done with that.

He tosses the tote on the passenger seat and sets himself up to get going, but call him all dressed up with nowhere to go because he hasn’t got a clue. He does have Remus’s address quite on hand so that’s the quickest and most obvious next step, but he’ll need his mobile for that, unbuckling enough to reach across the centre console and dig around down ahead of his seat to relocate it.

He pulls it back over into his seat, buckles back in, and opens up GPS, hoping his mobile remembers its last-copied words and finding out he’s a lucky one in that regard, pasting the Lupin address as his destination and firing up a wonky blue trail to follow on the map. He slips his mobile into the mount on the dash, brings the volume down to a notch as dull and unobtrusive as possible for the comatose patient in the back, and sparks up the engine, waiting for a break in traffic so he can join in with it and finding after he’s pulled out and into the flow of it that the truck provides a rather smooth ride if you’re not trying to find a needle in a haystack, or in their case, a hiding spot for a structure this huge while out in the open.

About a half-hour into the overall drive, Sirius veers off of the highway at the promise of a gas station just off of the exit and drives around looking for that, needing something caffeinated for himself and thinking Remus deserves a fresh bottle of water upon waking more than he would a half-full carton of lukewarm lemonade.

He forgoes getting actual gas in itself despite it being readily available to him once he pulls into the station, figuring that this couldn’t possibly have been the spot Remus would’ve stopped in at if he were helming the drive, and to that, it’ll be a waste of a fill-up, using it to get them back. There’s only hot coffee available inside the truckstop which means he’s stopped in Barftown clearly, but Sirius finds a blend of coffee and pure, unabashed energy in a can over in one of the fridges, so yes, yes, and Yes.

He goes for the wall of water inside the second furthest fridge on the left, very nearly grabs Remus the fanciest one on the shelf when the prince deserves a bottle of Fiji water, thank you, but he’d wax and wane about that once he realized what brand he was holding and Sirius has already splurged on him today; It’s enough, he hears Remus say.

He goes with a generic-ass bottle of aqua and says bye to that debate, heads up to the till counter and gets in behind a bloke already paying, spots a wee sunglasses tree sitting near to the till while he waits and scans for a mirrored pair of sunnies to perhaps make up for the loss of the trusted aviators, settles on a metallic blue pair of quasi-aviators and says bye to that truck stop, and leaves the greater Pembrokeshire Coastal Park about a half hour or so from there and bids it a fond adieu, deciding he won’t hold such a dismal cap to a perfect afternoon against a strikingly stoic and ethereally beautiful area. He doesn’t say much of a hello or goodbye to the county of Carmarthen when he’s really just passing through and the same can and should be said for the city of Swansea which he doesn’t have any evidence for other than it was apparently near him according to the map, but right about there is where Sirius realizes they said bye to the Abereiddy area well after they meant to in the first place, let alone their dashed attempts at getting a headstart.

He glances at the time, finds that it's only just encroaching on eight so they would not be expected to be wandering in just, just yet but fairly soon, and trails his gaze over to his mobile screen, zooming out twice and staring at the proof that there’s nearly an hour left in their trek before they’ll even breach the Lupin driveway, and that’s without stopping for gas on the way there.

They’ll get rung up by then, he knows it. Hope will wonder what’s taken them so long in about ten, twenty minutes and ring Remus, whose mobile is either somewhere on his person or somewhere in the back while he remains fast asleep, but it would ring him awake and force a bleary-eyed and heavy-hearted Remus to have to explain themselves. Sirius had best beat her to it while he’s got the chance to make it all look like smoke and mirrors, but at the current stage, he’s swimming along with the flow of a mild to moderate amount of traffic and is therefore a tad too imposed to stop right then and there, not to mention the fact that, if he were to chance a text on the road like this, it’d only be the cap on the shit end of the stick to get pulled over for texting while driving without a license with a comatose bloke in the backseat whose father is the one that actually owns the very truck he’s just casually driving.

On that harrowing note, the last time he halfway spoke to Hope it was via Remus’s texting thread with her and he didn’t bother to sign off as himself, so in keeping line with that, he really should just pull over and dig Remus’s mobile out from wherever it's gone to, but he’d get to see him and that’s something.

He finishes out the roundabout he’s on, flicks his left turn signal on once he clears it, and scoots out of the flow of traffic the moment he can, pulling over to the side of the road and remembering to set the blinkers on this time around. He unbuckles as he checks ahead of him, pushes the strap aside as he checks behind him, and opens the door to shimmy himself down to the road before skirting past the front bumper to get around to the passenger side.

He opens up the back, climbs on in, and peers down at Remus lying sprawled on his left side, reaching out to pat his front pockets even though he knows there’s no way he’d have stuck it in either of those dinky ones, but listen, it’d be easier if he had managed to shapeshift his mobile into fitting in one of them somehow. He tries to think of which hand Remus took his mobile back with, squints as he envisions the scene at the parking lot, and breathes in brightly as he replays the visual of Remus grabbing it with his right one while trying to quietly take the trash away in his left one without Sirius noticing him doing it, which would mean he can simply reach behind him to slip the mobile out from Remus’s back right pocket without any kind of stirring on the boy’s part.

He leaves a kiss against his plume of hair because he can and it's the closest Remus-owned area to his lips, inches the mobile out from in between Remus’s back and the back of the seats, and promptly gets his whole arm taken with Remus as he yawns massively and rolls over onto his right side, facing toward the back of the seats. Sirius stays put for a moment, trying and semi-failing not to give in to a wheeze, happy as all hell to have been allowed to partake in this moment in time and sad as all hell to not be able to crawl on in and follow him into a dreamscape, but it’s just not the time nor the place.

He manages to get himself out of there without waking Sleeping Beauty, closes up the backseat again, and stands at the side of the truck with the mobile in hand, crafting a simple, but informative heads-up that advertises that they indeed got out of Abreiddy later than expected, are just passing the Swansea area now, and will be pulling up the drive somewhere in or around nine. He doesn’t put much thought as to whether he gave too little once he’s sent it off, not when he gave more or less the same amount of information as he handed over when tasked with speaking through Remus as they pulled into the inn, but he does put thought to why it didn’t dawn on him to head her off sooner, and why he hadn't taken his shot when he had the hands free to do it way back in Abereiddy, but now’s got to be better than later and now’s got to be a hell of a lot better than not sending anything at all; that would just be foolish.

He starts back for the driver’s seat, but stops short just shy of the headlights, thinking their swimmers have to be dry enough to put away by now. He speedily heads down the length of the truck, suddenly awash with the vision of them losing Remus’s glorious trunks to the wind if they haven’t done already; Sirius's trunks, he can replace no issue, but Remus’s zany ones may just be irreplaceable.

He stows Remus’s mobile between his right hip and the waistband of his shorts as he gets around to the bed, pops the door down to find two sets of trunks and towels laid out back there if slightly scooted out of their neat, Remus-signed line, and while that is a true relief, Sirius doesn’t think he’ll be playing around with their luck. He climbs up onto the bed, procures their beach bag out of the duffel he stowed it in, and rolls up their towels as Remus-esque as possible so they’ll fit with the trunks and alongside the rest that’s already in there, but without the beach bag in there, he gains a lot more real estate inside the duffel than he would’ve otherwise had.

Once he’s got the duffel zipped up, he thinks he might as well reach into the beach bag for his pack; he’s already accounted for a bit of leeway in regards to their arrival, what's a few extra minutes for a puff going to do?

He doesn't remember putting his lighter in the tiny pocket underneath the right-hand side of the zipper, has to attribute its presence there to Remus when it wouldn’t even be the first time today that he thought to put it in there, and Sirius lights up with a heady smile on his lips, reaching to curl his arm over the side of the bed and hold the cigarette over it. He gets asked twice by random passers-by if everything’s all right, is asked by an elderly gent who'd honestly be a stellar department store Santa if he's just ‘having a sit?’ and each time he's engaged with, Sirius lifts his free hand for a thumbs up before the curious stranger keeps on driving, and sure, he would’ve been more than happy to enjoy an uninterrupted cigarette, but he supposes he does look a bit odd and lowkey shipwrecked up here, and if he's honest, he could probably use a dose of decent human interaction after meeting up with demon after demon at the start of their trek.

Remus’s mobile gives out a chime, buzzing in its temporary holster closer to the end of his cigarette, and Sirius brings his left hand across himself to tug it out of its temporary holster to have a look over the text bubble on-screen as he has himself the last few puffs off of it.

Your dad has taken to sitting on me for the past twenty at least so I wouldn’t ring you up; it’s a good thing you sent that in time, for the both of you.

Sirius sniffs once, reworks his mouth around a pointed smile, and lives inside the reminder that Hope is of a family that’ll read one another the second they can, trying not to feel too, too guilty about helping cause this particular read and getting none of the blowback for it.

He flicks the cherry away, stows the butt in the tiny pocket with the lighter for now, and climbs down off the bed, closing it back up and brushing off his hands to rid them of a faint imprint of dust and maybe even rid himself of this undue case of the shakes he’s having. He heads back up the passenger side, stows the beach bag on the seat, and goes around the front to wait for a break in traffic, getting himself back in the driver’s seat to make a push for the greater Lupin area and willing the tension in his chest to keep from rising.

He’s cleared the apparent village of Resolven and has them about a half-hour out from the Lupin abode, says his mechanical journeyfriend, by the time the tension hits a fever pitch, and it has no business doing that, frankly enough, but to that, he has no business feeling this way.

He’s covered for every single one of his people at some point or another, just as they've done for him, and Remus is a friend and more, sits up high and above where words can't even touch him, and so what if it came second-nature to handle it himself rather than make Remus have to contend with it, so what if he spent more time working out how to craft his message to sound just right than pondering over whether it, in itself, was right to send? 'Lie’ is a big, nasty, implicative word, gets people all finicky at best and riled up at worst, but if you’ve got someone who will cover for you and make a situation easier than the truth would, then you’ve got yourself a soldier.

Plain and simple, Hope isn’t going to feel eased about the knowledge of Remus lying comatose in the backseat when he should be the one driving them home, let alone the knowledge that a cluster slapping him upside the head while on the fucking road is the real reason they're so behind, and the migraine excuse can’t work for every case, just as it wouldn’t have here; there would be too many follow-up questions, namely whether Sirius can and even has the clearance to drive a standard vehicle, and removing the details was the smoothest action to take so she can feel more at ease now and likely does, having heard word from the royal them. Remus couldn’t have possibly covered for himself so it was up to Sirius to handle this, nothing else for it.

He doesn’t need to be feeling something akin to indigestion rising up between his ribcage, doesn’t need to be sweating up a storm in the driver’s seat, doesn’t need to be one-handing the wheel while rubbing at his neck and chest and the back of his neck trying to scratch an itch that won't leave him be with his free hand; he shouldn’t have to feel like this at all. It’s how it has to be, won’t help to attach pesky feelings into the mix, and it won’t help a single thing to put thought toward what he’d have said to her if Remus did get squashed on the side of the highway, or what the fuck he’d ever say to her if couldn’t get to him fast enough next time, or how he’s ever going to handle being the only one with the keys to a door she doesn’t even know about, or, and or, and or, and he is so willing to abandon that awful train of thought that he’s actually thrilled when his GPS mapper cuts out so that Shania can ring out through the speakers at the puniest volume he ever did hear her.

Sirius checks on that intense gap he’s been keeping between him and the car ahead, moves his left hand down from the back of his neck, and taps fast at his screen so the blurb can’t leave too soon, squinting sidelong at the words.

Before I do a n y t h i n g, you should know this doesn’t change a thing about my stance going forward; this was for You

Sirius blinks thrice, plugging in a speedy, yet coaxing reply while keeping an inquisitive stare on his screen like he’s just checking on his location, nothing else.

go on

He swipes their thread away to check that he hasn’t missed a turn he’d been meant to take, but glory be, he’s meant to remain on the same stretch of road for the next six minutes, which is a real relief considering the contents of James’s next text.

And, you’d be wise not to talk shit about the handiwork, the only reason it looks as decent as it does is because Lily had a hand in it and worked her tail off, mKAY?

So many replies, so many possible directions to go in, and how’s anyone to choose the best, least of all Sirius? Best he can come up with is a long line of question marks, figuring those’ll say it all for him and more, and then he’s receiving three small, nearly identical images that he can’t see well even with a squint, then he’s pulling them up and swiping through them, and it’s the most arresting thing, seeing different amounts of crumpled paper taped up and back in with the rest of the intact pages, there’s nothing else for it; Sirius has to pull over or he’ll crash them.

While it's quite handy that traffic’s really begun to thin out, Sirius still white-knuckles the wheel the whole way over to the side of the road when he cannot, cannot, cannot wait to be already dialling him. He nabs his mobile off the mount, thwacks the blinkers on the moment he’s got them idled, and doesn’t even bother getting out on his side, veritably crawling over to the passenger seat to blast out of the truck that way and swinging down to the ground with the help of the passenger door.

He shuts it hastily behind him with his free hand while dialling for James with a single press of his right thumb, his chest brimming with something he doesn’t know what to do with and what to even name it.

“Yes, hello?” James answers, and he’s lucky Sirius’s throat hitched just then or he might’ve not let him finish.

“What did you—” he heaves, bracing the truck behind him. “Wh — hneh — James.

“Well, you know, it was a long morning, an even longer afternoon, plenty of time in there to think, stew, think some more, and by midday, I began to feel something of a sadist, making you have to watch me mangle it without a way out, and I couldn’t wash the branding off my hands no matter how hard I tried nor could I make my hands work the scotch tape properly so that was a bust, and there was a lot of boohooing on my part when Lily got in because I couldn’t get the fucking pages to smooth out or work the tape so she took up the charge, thank Cunt, and that’s, well — that’s the best we could do, us.”

Sirius shuts his eyes tight with no real hope of catching his tears when they may as well be raindrops. “James,” he whinges, feeling like he’s breathing through a straw. “Calling you a sadist is a bit much, don’t you think?”

“Well, what would you call it?” James raises him. “Sadist-lite?”

“I mean, you shouldn’t have ever done that to me, but did you get some kind of sick joy out of seeing me like that?” Sirius trades him.

“I wouldn’t call it that by any stretch,” James returns him. “Petty vindication and about a million other things, but I’ve not felt insurmountable joy since I woke up this morning.”

Sirius almost wishes he could say the same, but he’s felt joy upon joy today, for hours at a time. “I’m sorry I made you read it,” he offers instead, eyes trained on the ground between his shoes though he can’t see any of that. “I just wanted you to see all that I'm dealing with, but I should’ve just given you the Spark Notes version and called it a day.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t read the way you did,” James trades him, breathing in long on the other end of the line. “Whatever I think about it, that book clearly means the world to you right now and I shouldn’t have done what I could to destroy your property, let alone something that mattered that much to you, but those pages being back in the book does not mean you have blanket permission to let any one of them define you or develop some kind of ritual where you read them under the cloak of night just to make yourself feel worse, and I will be checking that you’re not overdoing it; trust in that.”

Sirius rocks back and forth numbly on the balls of his feet, his heart heavy in his chest. “Thought you said you didn’t want anything to do with it.”

“I said, leave the Reg talk for Remus and that therapist you should probably look into getting,” James reiterates, keeping on past the echo of Sirius’s tongue clicking. “I'm still James and I’ve every right to check in on you, keep you feeling light as a feather, and ensure you’re not making plans to tattoo those words on your back, and that’s what I’m going to do, simple as.”

Sirius breathes in long and out just as long, fear lining every square inch of his lungs. “You keep framing it as if we’re just going to snap back to the way things were before the news ever got to me and like Reg isn’t going to be the most complicated condition for us to work around,” he puts up, his voice tight in his throat.

James gives a whistle on the other end of the line that falls like a warhead coming closer before it crashes through the earth, as if allowing room for the bomb Sirius set off to land before he'll inevitably chip away at that position on the matter, but it’s just enough of a classic James-ism that it gets Sirius’s lungs to quit doing that hitching thing so forcefully and that's something at least. “Sirius, what’s my job?” he comes back with. “What’s my job always been, come to that?”

Sirius tips his head back toward the sky, screwing his eyes shut and scrunching up his nose with it. “Keep me above water,” he recites.

“Mhm, mhm; that’s the one,” James maintains. “By any means necessary and you well know how seriously I take my job, but here’s the thing? The job description hasn’t much changed with the news or my limit being drawn, even if it feels like it has.”

“It feels like it has to,” Sirius throws up. “It feels inevitable, and far too much for me to handle all by myself.”

“And you’re not going to be handling it all by yourself; have you had your fingers in your ears?” James puts up, and there’s a grin on that face of his, no doubt about that. “You’re going to have such a strong team hunkered around you going forward, you’re not going to know what to do with all the love you’re going to get, but you’re going to get it, my boy, in all sorts of forms, from all sorts of loving people who couldn’t let you sink if they tried, and you’re going to pull through this, even if we’re not all going to be able to be everything you need at once.”

It feels like Sirius expels a whole demon with all the air he heaves out of himself. “Mhm, let that out of there,” James instils, and there go the tears. “No room for it; you’ve got to pull through.”

“Mhm,” Sirius hums to echo, unable to bring himself to word it, but he will; come hell or high water, he’s going to care for all the love he’s managed to attract, he’s going to stop scoffing at it, stop laughing in the face of it, stop pretending the many different forms he has aren’t enough, and he’s going to pull through, keep pulling through.

“Fact is, Sirius, I don’t know that you actually want to hear shit from me about Reg, not as an ongoing thing, same as I don’t want to hear shit about the martyr talk every time you feel the pull to put him up higher than anyone can touch him or attend your crucifixion every time you want to hold one, so why wouldn’t he be our truce?” James raises him. “Why punish each other and ourselves for not being able to give each other that? He was kept out of our way for months there and I know we've had our difficulties with that as of late, but we had a solid streak going for a good, long while and it's not like we can't get that back, so if we have to fumble around a bit, figure out exactly where the line falls now, and use our fucking words when one of us has toed it, then so be it; we'll figure it out, we’ve always been bigger than the rest.”

It’s a lot harder to hold onto the bitterness when up against a force that stays high above it; if this is what it’s going to be like going forward, if this is even a taste of what the No-Reg rule will allow for, then what more could he want? He’s got a lighthouse in James, he doesn’t need a mirrored reflection out of him.

“You’re the best thing that came from those years,” he instils. “You know that?”

“I do know it,” James comes back, “but Boy George, is it nice to hear from your mouth.”

He should be far and beyond used to James’s rather unique spins on any one turn of phrase, but Boy George, is it a job to keep a bork in just then. “I’ll say it more,” Sirius instils, swallowing thickly around the reality of it; he simply doesn’t say it enough.

“Normally I’d say I don’t need it,” James puts up, “but if we’re going to be bearing ourselves open like this semi-regularly, then maybe I would like to hear it a little more.”

“It’s the least I could do,” Sirius cements, tattooing that on his back. “I’ve only got one brother left, after all, and he’s the good one.”

“Oh, now you’re just trying to flatter me,” James trades him, and if Sirius could dive right through the line and squeeze that gem of a man properly, he’d do it in a heartbeat, but he’s on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere with duty calling on every corner of him.

“James, I really can’t say on much longer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to," he instils. "If I could, I’d keep you on here until I finally got sick of your voice.”

“Well, that’d be next month at the earliest and you certainly can’t stay on for that long,” James trades him.

“Exactly, yeah,” Sirius lets him have, his smile creasing up the tear stains on his cheeks.

“Before you run off, though,” James sneaks in, puffing out a short breath, “that last page did get to me, so look at that, I’m not too proud to admit it.”

Sirius blinks an incalculable amount of times for someone who was only rendered silent for upwards of five real-time seconds. “Sorry, I think I need to lay down?”

“Alright, free shot,” James allows him, “but I thought you’d like to know I’m not all unfeeling, I didn’t even know it was there until Lily spotted it; has a keener eye than me, that one, you understand.”

Sirius lets his eyes fall to a bemused narrow so it is very safe to say that he doesn’t, on a base level, understand. “Well, clearly she does if you missed the last entry the first time around,” he gets him.

James is quiet for a beat or two, coming back in with a snort. “Yeah, no, I definitely remember reading that one; I’m saying the very last page in the book even got me choked up, so there’s my pride along with the rest I’ve given you,” he hands him, and Sirius might’ve had something to fire back at that but Boy George, not when he’s got last page, last page, last page circling around in his skull on repeat. “Kind of twilight zone-ish, too? I didn’t think he listened to anything that wasn’t Burg-approved, but hey, the guy clearly had his secrets, and perhaps his music library was where he flexed on her.”

“I—” Sirius tries, getting the last of it out in a quick burst in case his throat closes up like it’s very threatening to. “I didn’t know there was anything on the last page.”

A long stretch of silence hangs between them like an anvil before James smacks his lips once. “Surprise?”

Sirius chokes on a blunt note. “You’ve no idea how much of one,” he raises it, a forest fire taking Sirius’s throat at an uncontrollable rate. “So — so he put a song in there, then? Wrote all the lyrics down, like—”

“Mhm, every single one,” James affirms. “A lot like you used to do on any scrap paper you could find.”

“Never was the journalling sort,” Sirius echoes, his lungs hitching violently in his chest. “Wh-which song? No, don’t tell me — yes, do, but if you say it’s Bohemian Rhapsody, then I’m officially a goner.”

James gives out a sharp, stark laugh. “I mean, the implications and serendipity together would’ve been a real nut-kicker, I'd agree to that, but that's a little too on the nose for the bloke who penned the most dramatic prose I ever did read,” he maintains, and oh, does Sirius breathe easier knowing it’s at least not that. “No, the pick he did choose was — well, Lily called it ‘heart-wrenchingly poetic’ and had to go lay down after we gave it a listen so that’ll tell you it’s a nut-kicker in its own right, but I do think Remus would very approve of the selection.”

Sirius’s heart rate couldn’t increase a fraction more or he might need a horse tranquilizer to righten things. “OK, OK, OK,” he instils, shaking himself out to gear up for the blast. “Hit me; I’m ready.”

“No, I don’t think I will,” James enunciates, taking to talking right over Sirius’s righteous booing. “No — no, listen to me, it's better this way; you get to go through the rest of your grand and glorious trip knowing that there’s one fuck of a carrot waiting for you on the other end.”

“And do you really think my legs can handle the jitters that’ll come flocking in until then?” Sirius counters.

“You didn’t even know it was there a minute ago," James puts up. "That’s on me for assuming you’d already gone on that coaster ride, but I’m doing you a favour here, mate, trust me; save yourself the final piece to a wonky, unfinished puzzle.”

Sirius takes his eyes down to slits, but Good Cunt, that was good. “Thank you,” he sighs. "For all of this, but for giving me a carrot."

“Oh, you know me; generous as they come,” James chimes.

“You’ve honestly been more generous to me and him in the past five minutes than you’ve maybe ever been, so you’re more right than you know,” Sirius throws him, feeling the pull to get back in the truck, get Remus back on reworked schedule, but he just can’t bring himself to jump off yet, not without another look at the photos.

He winds up putting his mobile back at his ear with a smirk that won’t quit. “What’re you smirking at over there?” James investigates.

“Oh, just how the tape job looks like shit no matter how many hands got in on the rescue project.”

“I’d like to see you say that to my face.”

“You wait, I just might.”

“Away with you,” James instils, and there’s no chance in hell he’s not royally flapping whichever free hand he’s got to work with over there.

“I mean, there’s just so much of it,” Sirius keeps at it. “Wall to wall and inches thick.”

“You’re welcome and goodbye,” James bids him.

“I don’t imagine I’ll be able to read a word of it if I’m sitting too close to a light source,” Sirius raises it, just roasting him over the spike. “It’s all so glossy.”

“Maybe I did that on purpose; ever think of that?” James serves him.

“You couldn’t even work the scotch tape, so I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sirius lobs him, smiling all the while. “Quickly, before I go; are the pages in order?”

“Unfortunately yes,” James answers. “Wouldn’t have been on to mix them up; be a waste of all our hard work, having you cut them back out just to put them right.”

Sirius breathes out through his nose while his lips are all squiggled up the way they are. “I respect you for even keeping track of that,” he passes him. “Seriously, James, even with its rustic look, you’ve no idea how much this means to me.”

“Mm, I’ve one or two,” James slips him.

“How badly I needed that to come in right, right then,” he reframes it. "How’s that?"

“That’s that synergy for you,” he says for it.

Sirius ends the call on that note, needing the weight of the word echoing around in his skull, but he quickly pulls up his and Lily’s text thread before he loses his nerve.

lilybean.

He waits with the point of his lips swishing back and forth as three dots flutter around at the bottom of his screen.

We love you.

Sirius breathes in sharply through his nose and taps so forcefully to procure a heart just below her words it could’ve shattered his screen, but lo and behold, it stays intact even with his trigger finger. And that’s it, that’s precisely what he needs to get back in the truck and, to quote one angry bloke, ‘fucking go already’ and Good Cunt, he really should; he’s taken forever and a day to bring them somewhere useful.

He decides he won’t crawl over to the driver’s seat this time around, timing his venture to the driver’s seat for a stretch between two oncoming cars so sprawling he’d likely have to lay in the road and twiddle his thumbs a few before the second car could come up on him. He settles into his seat, pops the door shut, and in keeping with the topic of getting somewhere useful, he should probably put the gas situation back into the foreground of his mind and try to find some of that stuff, and he would’ve done if he didn’t hear rustling in the back.

He looks over his left shoulder fast, blinking in Remus lugging himself upright with a strong dependency on the frame of the backseat.

“You can snooze some more,” Sirius insists. “Don’t have to get up just yet.”

Remus hums a noise that roughly translates to a decline, reaching out to pat at the shoulders of the two front seats to get his bearings and subsequently use them to haul himself more upright on the middle seat, on track for Sirius, it seems. Sirius twists around in his seat, leaning over the centre console as Remus scoots to the furthest edge of the middle seat, and there they sit, face to face, skin upon skin.

Remus starts up the sway this time around, just with his nose, a bit of his forehead, and a faint brush of lips, calling Sirius to mirror it all back on him, have him feeling every bit as loved as he is, and every bit as loved as Sirius feels just from this. Remus’s breathing patterns fall at a new, unhurried breath every twelve or so seconds followed by the longest exhale possible and it’s difficult for Sirius not to mirror that back to him as well, but if he lets it go on too long, he’s liable to be lulled into a false sense of security and possibly a deep slumber, and they can't have that.

“I’ve got water up here, and your red ones are in the care package which is back there with you,” Sirius imparts, pulling back to lean around Remus to tug it out from the back and unzipping it to wrangle the sunnies out of there. “The sun’s already set quite a bit, but it’s still a glowing orb on the horizon and I’d rather it not be one of if not the first thing you see after you take the mask off, so until it's made itself scarce let’s not chance anything.”

Remus hums a low note to agree, pushes his fingers up underneath the sleep mask to give his eyes a rub down that sure sounds as though it was delectable based on the whispy grunt he puts out with it, and pulls them back down to make grabby-hands at Sirius once he’s had his fill. Sirius opens the sunnies, hums for a prompt, and Remus tugs the sleep mask off of his blessedly shut eyes, giving way for Sirius to slot the sunnies over them easy-peasy.

Remus’s breathing patterns have really only increased by the small interval in the time since they owned conjoined faces, so it’s really quite noticeable when he takes in a sharp breath. “My fucking mum,” he breathes out.

“Mm mm, took care of that,” Sirius reports. “She knows we’re running a bit late.”

Beat. “How late?” Remus bids.

Sirius leans his head back to get a sidelong glimpse at the time on the dash. “Quarter to nine, now,” he passes him.

Fuck, what did you even tell her?” Remus puts up.

“Not too much, just a heads-up and an ETA,” Sirius supplies. “I only wish I’d thought to say something sooner; it was nearing eight before it dawned on me and by then, she’d already been jittering quite a bit and Lyall had begun circumventing her from ringing us up, and we weren’t even late at that point.”

Remus gives a small huff. “I see you’ve met my mum,” he quips, a languid smile passing over his lips.

“Have, mhm,” Sirius echoes. “I did say we’d be getting in somewhere around nine, though, so at the risk of pushing the limits on what she thinks that is, we should maybe get going, find a gas station on the way; you know, the things.”

Remus gives a braced noise there, swallowing down his newest gulp. “Mm, thank Cunt you’re thinking; I forgot we were going to do that,” he trades him, taking in a new breath and leaning in between the front seats to look up front. “Where even are we?”

Sirius gives a glance back and forth between Remus and his mobile. “I believe we just left — mm, something R-related,” he supplies, reaching his right hand back to boot the screen back to the land of circuiting.

Resolven?” Remus puts up, and so lively done that it takes Sirius’s task right out of his head and puts his focus back on him to nod for it, but that only prompts a mega pout aimed back at him. “You got us so far.”

Sirius snorts once. “I did what I could, but you would not be saying that if you could’ve seen how much dallying I’ve been doing so I’d like to remedy that, if you’re up for it,” he trades him.

“Mind if we swap out once we’re at the station? I’m a bit too groggy for the wheel,” he imparts, already on the move for the door on his left like a good, sweet, smart, careful lad that Sirius just nods up a storm; yes, Remus, yes, anything for you.

“And close GPS down this second,” Remus instructs, pulling on the handle over there with a distinct thunk that likely had a bit of punctuation in it. “I can point you there myself; you’re going to keep to the left for the next five or so and I’ll guide you from there.”

“Hoo, love that ‘cause my battery’s running low,” Sirius reports, swiping the app to close.

Remus huffs once, sending it up to the sky as he climbs out of the back. “I hate that you had to take over from that early in the drive, in this massive a thing, and waste all that data on getting us back,” he attests, knocking the door shut behind him with a second, mangier huff.

Sirius reaches over and rolls that passenger window down right quick. “Stop, the drive was the easiest part of them all,” he calls to him, reaching over to take the beach bag off of the passenger seat and reaching it into the back.

He looks back in time to catch the resetting of Remus’s jaw through the window before he pulls open the door, sitting rod-still in the passenger seat and bringing an awfully greying chill into the front with him. Sirius sits forward in his seat, starts up the truck, and pulls away from the side of the road the moment Remus’s belt is buckled, checking every one of his mirrors before pulling off of the side of the road and keeping a watchful side-eye on that stoic lad over there.

It’s another, mm, minute — feels like more, probably less — of Sirius periodically taking his eyes off the road to check in on Remus training his head strictly out the windshield before the boy pushes a long, long, very long huff out of his depths. “I don’t want to talk about it, Sirius.”

Sirius tries not to let his eyebrows do the talking for him, lifting his shoulders nonchalantly instead. Would he like Remus to let him into that big ol’ brain of his? Yes. Had he been perfectly happy talking around the big C back there? Also yes. “We don’t have to,” he trades him.

Remus seems to be running his right forefinger around and around in one spot on the sash of his belt sitting across his lap, but then again, Sirius’s eyes are on the road so it’s all peripheral guesswork. “I’ve got nothing.”

Sirius's jaw hurts to hold as much as it hurts just to hear how hard Remus is holding his; poor boy, he already said so much, screamed it at the top of his lungs all the way down to the bottom, what else is left? “That’s really OK.”

“I've just — I’ve said it all, you’ve said it all; there’s nothing else,” Remus prattles, so maybe he does have more to say around all the nothing. “I know we have to go over it all again to get it down in the fucking book and I will then, I will suck it up and do it then, but I am—” he breathes in and out slowly, bending his head forward to wring his hands up through his hair, and it doesn’t matter what Sirius is doing, the road ahead doesn’t fucking matter, Remus does, so he is just going to lean over, let his right hand stay at four on the wheel, and get his left one rubbing at the back of Remus’s shoulder, physically help him get the rest out, “—there is no word in the English language, or French for that matter, that fully encompasses how livid I am that this had to happen to me, to you, to us, to anyone who happened to get in my way at the wrong time, to anyone who’s going to do the same eventually, and there’s nothing for it right now, so until that book and a lit joint is in front of me, I want some of that happy you were talking about.”

Sirius breathes in once, puts an enticed hum into the front with them, and pats Remus’s shoulder twice. “Well,” he raises, putting his head on a Remus-hanging tilt, “I don’t know how you would classify it, but I know I filled up with a blend of gut-wrenching joy and unfailing loyalty about ten or so minutes ago; d’you want to see why?”

Remus’s head is up in seconds flat, setting his sights on Sirius for the first time since he got in the front. “Please,” he accentuates, the right corner of his lips twitching.

Sirius takes his left hand back to flourish it underneath his mounted mobile. “Have a look in there,” he directs, setting his left hand at eight on the wheel, “back up a page, click on James, check them photos.”

Remus does all four directives, it seems, for he’s just sitting there now, wordlessly scrolling back and forth through the three photos for ten long seconds before training a placid expression on Sirius. “That the best he could do?”

Sirius hoots so, so loudly into the wheel that Remus’s shoulder line goes for a quick jerk. “That was his and Lily’s best work,” he imparts.

The speed at which Remus’s face drops to one of muted mortification has Sirius hollowing out his cheeks so he won’t bust all over again and ruin the moment before it’s really just begun. “You can never tell her I said that.”

“I will.”

“You can’t.”

“I won’t.”

Remus breathes in anew, turns a cheeky little smile toward his window as if that’s going to stop Sirius from knowing it’s there, and turns back to slip Sirius’s mobile back on the mount, reaching to slowly lift the water bottle out of his respective cupholder by the spout. “This mine?”

“No, I got it to tease you,” Sirius trades him.

“You’d never,” Remus returns him, having himself a chug so impressive it clears half the bottle in one go and swiping his free wrist past his mouth on the other end of his indulgence. “You're happy with it, then?”

Sirius perks, nodding with a big ol’ goon grin coming on. “Yeah — beyond it,” he instils. “It really couldn’t have been better timing; I wept like a toddler, but the good kind of weeping.”

A sunshine smile in its own right is already show-stopping, but so needed after the hard set of Remus’s jaw hardly a minute ago. “Then I’m glad,” he trades him. “Really, really glad for you, Sirius.”

Sirius gives a whirring noise in his throat, squirming quite a bit in his seat for someone piloting a certified beast. “I mean, it looks like a couple grade-schoolers tried out papier maché for the first time, but hey, it’s the thought that counts,” he raises it, garnering a head tilt back and forth out of Remus for it, but his smile is as warm as they come. “And, I think I could even read the words if I’m not directly under a light fixture so a makeshift fix or not, the pages will still serve their primary function.”

Remus nods for it, but he takes the right side of his lower lip into his mouth experimentally before letting it go again. “Just be careful with it, OK?” he instils. “I want you to be able to have them, but let’s not overdo it.”

A slow, crooked grin spreads across the lower half of Sirius’s face. “I think between you and James, I won’t be able to,” he maintains, bringing in a breath that catches a laugh on the end of it. “I don't want to have a miserable time with it either, I just think, on rougher days, it might be nice to be able to have them as a reference; a way to chart the way things started out versus the decent place he managed to get to, you know?”

“I know,” Remus echoes. “And you’ve only read it the once; who knows how many nuances might’ve been missed on the first go-around, how many passages may read differently the second, third, fourth time around—”

Sirius snorts long. “It’s like you know me,” he raises.

“Too well,” Remus takes it, raises it, “and that’s why, when we go to pick it up again, we’re going to try to keep it a formative, reflective experience, not a burn book that we go to whenever we’re feeling like shit about ourselves so we have some convenient, one-sided takes that vilify us even further, yes?”

Even with a polite hint threaded through it, he does so love it when he hears how easily ‘we’ rolls off Remus’s tongue these days. “Yes,” Sirius echoes. “And I know you meant the royal ‘we’ there, but, you get to read it now, too; not just relayed from me to you but from the mostly-unscathed source, as-written and everything.”

Sirius thinks he can see Remus’s chest inflate and deflate from here, but that gaze of his is open as it is earnest. “You sure you still want me to?” he checks, and why he’s checking at this point, Sirius just doesn’t know.

“Literally of course; why wouldn’t I?” Sirius puts up.

Remus gives a half-shrug, his lips bowed before they take to a point-and-swish. “Well, it could’ve been one of those, the chance has come and gone and now I’m in the undertow situations, but now that it’s actually possible for me to, it could feel less—“ he pauses, right hand coiled around his water bottle, left hand giving a vague gesture. “Necessary, I suppose; it’s still yours.”

Sirius nods for it, thinking it fair enough for perhaps any duo, but not the two of them. “Yeah, but I’m yours, too,” he instils. “You get to read the book, Remus.”

Remus simply doesn’t have a lower lip anymore, it appears. “I just — I don’t want you hurt, and I—” he tries, but he has to let go of that lip first, “—if I see a line that I know would’ve hurt you, I don’t know how much grace I’d be able to give him in that moment.”

Sirius aims to breathe in long before the rebuttal, but he cuts it off short. “I know it hasn’t always seemed or even felt like it, but I’ve gone 'round the block and into the ring with you enough times to know that you’re my barometer on what deserves grace and what doesn’t, especially with them and most importantly with him,” he puts it plain. “You’ve seen the line between them and him since the very beginning, shown him so much patience and a whole lot of good faith for someone you barely met and hadn’t heard a credible good word about until this week, and you’re even nice about it in the times when you’re saying he’s full of shit; you’re exactly right for this, and, since we’ve been killing it with the honesty streak, I’ve got to be real and say that I can’t just pretend he was an angel or a devil because he was just a bloke — my brother, but he was a fucking complicated bloke, and it’s not been healthy for me either, pretending he wasn’t a guy who didn’t know how to love me, eventually learned to in his own, meek way, and never learned to love himself — or not enough, I suppose.”

“Sirius,” Remus breathes out, bracing his long-since-forgotten-about water bottle between his knees so he can effectively cover his eyes with his palms.

“Have some more of that water, when you can,” Sirius mentions, smiling out at the road ahead.

Remus lifts up pretty well at prompt but that had more to do with where they are than just uncapping the bottle for a new swig. “You’re coming up on two bridged overpasses very soon,” he relays, “and since you’ve been keeping left, you’re just going to follow this road that curves off more to the left than this, but pay keen attention as there’ll be a sharp right rather soon from there.”

“Two bridgegadoos, a left, then a right,” Sirius echoes, gavelling the wheel.

Remus breathes in long, long, very long through his nose until he’s sure he won’t laugh, or at least that’s what it very seems. “A sharp one,” he reiterates, wiping at his eyes in turn with the back of his free thumb. “I don’t want you getting disoriented when it comes up.”

“Oh, I’m going to orient the hell out of it, you’ll see,” Sirius champions, passing over that first bridged overpass.

Remus sighs enough raw power for the whole world to feel it; Sirius could believe he harvests enough of it for the manoeuvre. “Well, despite my previous and likely-to-return reservations, I’d be honoured to read it,” he brings them back, “but I’m sure I’ll hurt in ways I didn’t know I could yet.”

Sirius sighs big and long for it. “Yeah, it was like that for me, too,” he trades him. “We can read it together so we’ve each other’s keen eye and inherent medicinal properties right nearby?”

“Yeah,” Remus breathes out, nodding with it. “Let’s do it like that.”

Sirius taps the wheel once to cement it, whips them over the second overpass he’s meant to look out for, and follows that left-hanging curve to the road, taking that sharp right with some supremely boastful ease and Remus must think so, too, for he taps the side of his water bottle in a semblance of a golf clap.

“It’s honestly a bit infuriating that you’re piloting this thing so well on your first try, but is it surprising? No; simply no,” he tacks on, garnering a righteous shoulder-shimmy out of Sirius for it. “Now, this road is going to be quite something; it’s a long and winding thing, stretches out for miles and miles and changes names seemingly at a whim, but it’s all the same road when you get down to it so all you’ve got to do from here is flow with it until you hit the next roundabout; there, you’ll take the third exit and that road will eventually deposit us right back in Treorchy where the gas is.”

Hooo,” Sirius puts out in celebration, drumming his hands on the wheel and thanking every one of his lucky stars that Remus woke up when he did or he wouldn’t have enjoyed the ride, and now he gets to have Remus, a long and winding road to cruise them down, the wind blowing in his hair, his spirits truly unmatched—

“Oh, oh, oh my Cunt — you have no idea yet,” he tosses out, garnering Remus to brace fast at his armrest and the centre console. “OK, OK, OK, so as soon as I saw those photos, I busted out the truck and rang him up to interrogate him on what exactly had come over him, and boy, oh, boy, Remus, something fierce came over that bitey man because if this morning was us at our worst, this was us getting back to our best, and you don’t have to worry about how I’m going to fare with his new anti-Reg line because I worried myself hoarse over it on the call with him and he just — he did everything right, Remus, said everything right, and it doesn’t even feel like a strictly anti-Reg line anymore, it’s more of a pro-me line and that's OK because he was more generous with me and him than my little heart could handle back there, and I thought it couldn’t possibly fill up any more, but, get this, it can; Lily found a secret easter egg on the last page of the book that James nor I had any idea was even there.”

Remus’s left hand moves like a whip, splaying his hand over the centre of his chest. “I'm—” he puts out, or tries to.

Sirius nods up a storm in his seat. “I saw the final entry, the drawing, the hordes of blank pages following it, and it was like a bullet through the heart; it filled me up with this dreaded emptiness over that being all that I had left, but that wasn’t it, there’s more,” he upheaves. “He didn’t see it the first time around but assumed I would have done already, so he’s just talking about this song, the lyrics to this uncharacteristically Reg-like song, and I’m just frozen, processing things as they come: ‘there’s something on the last page, it’s a bunch of lyrics to a song, just like I used to do when I was a broody little teen, he really was my brother’ — I couldn’t believe it, but now it’s a whole mystery song too, because James would not name it for me once he realized I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about; said he wanted me to save it for when I get home and have this untarnished moment waiting there for me; ain’t that just beyond the scope of sentimentality you thought James Potter could give?”

Remus stutters out a distinct echoing note. “That, yes, but if that bitey man hadn’t gone back in to fix it and fumbled it so badly that Lily had to take over and find that for you,” he puts up, "how long do you think would you have gone on thinking that really was it?"

“Weeks, months, years?” Sirius gives for it. “Hell, I’d have never seen it, wouldn’t have thought to look at the last page, and I know I’m due for a crushing blow the second I don’t have this Reg-shaped carrot dangling over me anymore, but we’re not there yet; we’re here, I’ve got the carrot, James went and hung it up for me like the class act he can be when it's needed, and he even gave me a few little hints to chew on and apparently, you’re going to love Reg’s taste.”

Remus looks everywhere almost at once; left, right, out the window, down at his water bottle like it has any input, and over at him again. “I am?”

Sirius nods knowingly. “He specifically said that,” he instils, garnering Remus to imp down in his seat a little bit. “He also said that Lily called it ‘heart-wrenchingly poetic,’ went for a lay down the moment they finished listening to it, and that it even had him all choked up which is almost unthinkable, and normally I’d be furious that anyone knew about it before I did, but I’m actually glad? Why am I glad, Remus?”

Remus’s lips thin out into a wee line, breathing in through his nose. “I—” he tries, shaking his head for it. “James, I understand why him testing the waters and coming back with a recommendation for how exactly to receive it would be a great relief, but my head’s just swimming at the idea that you don’t mind that Lily even saw it.”

“I’m actually a big fan of Lily right now, for what that’s worth,” Sirius admits.

“A lot, Sirius,” Remus puts down. “Good Cunt, she’d shed a tear if she knew you’d uttered the words, and you know that.”

“It’s been a big day,” Sirius says of it.

Remus heaves forward in his seat, reaches his right hand in behind him, and promptly enters crisis mode when the lack of a mobile truly hits. “Oh, it’s just in the coin thinger,” Sirius passes him.

Mm, thank you,” Remus passes him, pinning the water bottle between his knees and reaching right for it. “I thought I’d dropped it somewhere out on the road.”

“I saw you think that, but not even; it stayed put the whole time,” Sirius trades him. “Your shorts are conveniently tight.”

Remus smirks once. “Convenient for me or you?”

“Both, very both,” Sirius maintains.

“Thought so,” Remus chimes, his thumbs moving speedily over his screen.

“Letting your mum know?” Sirius raises, tipping his head toward those speedy thumbs.

“Hm?” Remus bids, smiling quite a bit over there and looking over after a beat or two from there. “Oh, no, I thought it good form to send James a little thank-you note, but thank you for that; I should give her a shout, let her know we’re on the home stretch.”

Sirius looks between the off-ramp they’re cruising down and him. “Figuratively, I assume,” he trades him.

“Yeah, I’m not going to literally shout or even exchange spoken words,” Remus echoes it, giving into a snicker a beat or three later. “Uh-oh; she shook her fist with that last text.”

“Sure seemed like it,” Sirius smirks, cycling back to Jimmy Dean. “Now, while there is just no way James has extremely naive ideas about whether you and I discuss what goes on between me and him, I do hope he’ll appreciate that thank-you note and not take the fact that you know about that whole thing poorly.”

“Oh, he’ll begrudgingly appreciate it, I’m sure,” Remus offers, his thumbs flashing over his screen.

“That’s the thing,” Sirius echoes it. “Brethren nonsense, gets in the way of a good-natured compliment now and again, so if he’s a bit bitey with you about it, don’t take it personally; he’s just being a ninny.”

“I won’t,” Remus maintains, the corners of his lips quirk and twitch about before he extinguishes the backlight of his screen and, in doing that, highlights just how dim the sky has gotten around them for it garners him to experimentally rethink the sunnies, hanging them from the scooped neck of his tee, and Sirius is beyond happy to feel safe enough to see those eyes again in general, but especially to be able to read those sneaky eyes better.

“What do you know that I don’t?” Sirius investigates, tipping his chin toward that dastardly smile forming on his lips.

Remus flickers his gaze to the ceiling of the truck. “Just that he’s a good listener when properly motivated,” he supplies, uncapping his water bottle and pulling it out from in between his knees for a swig.

Sirius’s eyes narrow as he cruises them underneath an extensive overpass that blocks out their light for the duration of the time spent in the tunnel, but he finds Remus still looking at him once he has the light to see it, though now he’s got his newly-grinning teeth around the mouth of his bottle, the absolute fox.

Sirius puts a gape-grin on, right flabbergasted and quite turned on at the sight of him, frankly. “Remus,” he addresses. “What’d you do?”

Remus huffs a laugh through a tighter grin than necessary for this. “I suppose you could say I, gave him a shove in the right direction?” he supplies. “And look, I’m not going to pretend I thought it’d ever be a perfect fix because a perfect fix would be a time machine we could take right back to the moment before he tore the pages out of there or even the moment before I ever suggested you show him the book in the first place, but it was the principle of the matter; that book is yours, not his, yours.”

“Remus,” he says again, has to.

“Which isn’t me trying to take the wind out of your James-shaped sail or invalidate his own choices here because he clearly went above and beyond what we agreed upon,” Remus maintains, “but I’m more than glad to have come in at the right time and shook him up enough to think straight if it meant this much to you to have the pages back in some shape or form; your smile has been blinding."

He can’t say ‘Remus’ again, he’s just said it twice, but fucking Cunt, it’s all he wants to say, on repeat, for years. “Remus,” he breathes, a whispered offering so maybe he’ll feel it more than hear it underneath the echo of moving traffic and wind whipping by, but Remus hears it just fine if that quiet, knowing smile of his is anything to go by. “What did you even say to him?”

Remus puffs out a quick breath for what was apparently a loaded question. “I said a lot of things, starting over text with registering my disappointment in the way he conducted himself and my strong disapproval for his worst offense of the bunch—”

“Not the double D’s,” Sirius instils, very nearly capsizing the flow of Remus’s storytelling, but not quite.

“—And then I was trying to find out just what he’d done with the pages and whether they were even still around, but he was proving to be evasive with his answers so I thought it best to switch over from text so he might hear my voice; see if that might get him to cooperate,” he relays, smirking grand for the shrill, internally-kept note that prompts in Sirius’s throat. “A lot of the initial stage of the call was a loaded back and forth that I’m not going to even try to quote back to you now, two blokes talking over each other doesn’t really translate so well after the fact, but I knew he wouldn’t have been so loud and reactionary with me unless he knew deep down in the pit of his gut that he’d mucked up terribly, so I went ahead and highlighted that he could still make the right choice by owning up and putting it right again; we all make mistakes, even big, honking, gutting ones, but it’s what we do next that matters, and in the end, I kept things fairly simple and struck him a deal that if the crumpled pages were indeed still viable and happened to find their way back to the book they were once from, then he wouldn’t get thumped on sight—”

Sirius can’t feasibly cup his hands around his squawking mouth to further its reverberation, but perhaps he doesn’t have to when they’re both shut up in the front seat; his squawk isn’t muted in any way. “Remus Jean Lupin,” he caws at him, and it's a testament to Remus's acceptance of him that he doesn't even react.

“—Which, I have to say, I didn’t fully believe he’d take me for no matter how much my voice shook when I cut him the deal, but in hindsight, I might’ve been selling myself short a bit there,” he supplies, his lips quirking up a wry storm. “He is in a rather unique position in that—”

“He’s seen you at your darkest,” Sirius finishes, awash with fascination. “When, Remus; when?

Remus reworks his lips around a gooey little smile. “While you were floating around on the water,” he supplies.

Sirius's head goes for a swim. “Shit on a stick, Remus, I looked right at you when you were talking away on that thing," he attests, taking to thumping the wheel erratically with his left fist, "but clearly I should’ve just fucking held out for the gold."

“Oh, no, see, I didn’t want you to know I was even doing that in case he’d already burnt the pages or didn’t wind up holding to his end of the bargain,” Remus maintains, taking in a new, careful breath from there. “I wasn't looking to get your hopes up and frankly, I didn’t think you’d want me to bother so I had to watch you the entire time I was on the line with him just to be sure you weren’t going to wander out of the water right, right then and chase me off—”

“I wouldn’t have—” Sirius starts, but no dice.

“Oh, Sirius; yes, you would have,” Remus comes in. “You wouldn’t even let me near my mobile this morning—”

“Uhh, yeah, but that was when it was all hot off the presses and I knew he’d come right for your neck—”

“Yeah, well, in the end, I came for his,” Remus offers, splaying his free hand simply in his lap. “Honestly, Sirius, I’m not upset about it, I’m glad you didn’t let me get to him straight away; playing things your way only helped me gather energy, collect it together into one place like Goku to the Spirit Bomb, and watching you laying out there like a happy little waterlogged goon set the bomb right off and might've helped actually seal the deal in the end because, truly, the mere idea that anyone, least of all James, could want to purposefully crush you like that, face-to-face but worse even when you couldn’t put a stop to it or get out of the situation without worrying for the rest of that book is unfathomable to me and so beneath what you deserve from someone who should know never to cage you up like that — no, I’m going there again and I actually can’t.”

Remus flattens out his left hand, slashing it ahead of him once, and the message reads crystal clear; he’s at his limit, and if Sirius hadn’t seen him lose his entire shit the very second he heard word of James’s transgression, hadn’t seen the top blow off his head in the truck not three hours ago, hadn’t just seen him curl in on himself with a white-hot rage he couldn’t even name properly, then he might’ve had a tougher time chewing on the fact that this is where Remus drew the line, but by glory, it is captivating to sit beneath the damn-near blinding proof that he’s Remus’s limit.

Remus looks sidelong at him, over at the windshield, and down at his water bottle clutched tight in his grip, giving a listless shrug with it. "I know he’s everything to you and he should be; in any other case he’s done so well by you, but whether you felt I should leave it well enough alone, I wasn’t about to let him off the hook for behaving like a baboon.”

A righteous snort comes tumbling out of Sirius for the substantial quality of that closer. “No — it’s just, I get it now,” he gives him, the light turned way, way up behind his eyes, he just knows it. “I mean, sure, I’m gutted that I wasn’t present or privy to all that you were doing over there, and this stark reminder that there are things you’ll handle with me and others you’ll commit to handling yourself has given me a sense of FOMO I’ve never quite felt before, can't lie about that, but I can’t sit here and act like I don’t see red and breathe fire at the slightest mishandling of you, or that I don’t sometimes feel so sure I'll need to handle a situation myself before I ever bring a solution to you because I want it finished and wrapped up perfectly for you, or that I don’t know what it’s like to want to protect the everloving fuck out of you because I know everything about that urge, and I’d have done the same for you in a heartbeat if the tables were turned.”

Remus’s eyes couldn't have looked bigger if they’d been drawn on, but then again, he wasn’t banking on all that being the cause for Sirius’s rendered silence, was he. "I’m just — I’m really just the luckiest lad I know, having you out there gunning this hard for me," Sirius signs it.

The point of Remus's lips swish up a storm, his shoulder line sways left to right, and his gaze flickers over Sirius for a long moment before it goes to the windshield and back to Sirius in a beat. “Eyes on the road, tiger,” he serves him thickly, a wry smile playing at his lips.

Sirius pulls in a dastardly breath, smiling fiendishly as he turns his head with a sniff anew and making a show of slotting his hands over to ten and two like a good little lad. “And I’m not just saying that either,” he tacks on. “You’re fucking cutthroat when it comes to me, that’s been the case for a while now, but Cunt, it’s just abundantly clear at this point and as much as I love him, too, if you hadn’t gone for his neck, I don’t know when we would’ve sewn ourselves back together.”

“It wasn’t all me, but I'm glad I could help get that going quicker for you,” Remus passes him.

“No, Remus, my heart is full and that’s thanks to you,” Sirius puts down. “I know he felt more and more guilty over the course of the day, but you got him to take his fangs out of the situation and come at it the way he fucking should’ve done from the get, and not only that, you were a key player in pointing me toward my carrot; I know you think everything you touch turns to shit, but it’s all gold, Remus, you’re just made of the stuff.”

A series of shuffling and the echo of metal sliding across nylon echo back to Sirius’s ears, but does he know he’s about to get a smooch pressed to his left cheek? Probably should have, but he’s being a good boy, watching the road, taking the bends as they come, busy owning a full and wondrous heart; he didn’t know Remus was about to lean over and plant one on him.

He turns his head fast, sneaks a peck off those sneaky lips before they can get too far, and perks fast as Remus’s mobile dings from over on his half-vacated seat. “I love your mum, but I do hope that’s James,” he declares.

Remus breathes in once and keeps it held, already on the move to prove things one way or the other. Sirius bounces his gaze between the road and the boy reading off his screen, thinking the longer it goes on the more likely that it’s the man of the hour, and then Remus’s smile wee, his eyes misty as he looks back over at him, and the answer’s there, alive in the truck with them.

“He’s done good?” Sirius checks.

“He’s done good,” Remus echoes, looking down fast as his mobile dings in his hands.

“Him again or her?” Sirius bids.

“Her,” Remus passes him, thumbs already on the move.

“Ope,” Sirius trades him. “What’s she say?”

“We’re into the ‘drive safe’ stage,” Remus relays, a half-grimace thickening out his tone, “which sounds all well and good, but since I would’ve already been doing that to the best of my ability, that means she’s actually more in the cooking up horrific images stage.”

Sirius goes into a full grimace, none of that halfsies stuff. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn her quick enough,” he puts up, garnering Remus to stop typing altogether in favour of lulling his head to the side and sending him a plain look from there. “Well, it could’ve dawned on me sooner than the same hour we were set to get in; that’s all I’m saying.”

“With all you had to handle?” Remus raises.

“No, but I could’ve thought to send something along the moment we knew it was coming on and couldn’t feasibly go anywhere yet,” Sirius trades him.

“Well, then that’s the same for me, is it not?” Remus counters, gesturing around bemusedly with his free and not-so-free hands.

“Well, it’s certainly not your fuckin’ fault,” Sirius returns.

“Why’s it yours, then?” Remus puts up, sending him a pointed smile. “You’re being a bit silly; she’ll be OK, she’s got my dad to offset the worst of the images, and as far as we go, we’ll learn from this and use it to cover our tracks better next time.”

Sirius doesn’t know which is tougher to swallow around, the fact that Remus sounds just like him or the fact that his hands tighten at the wheel with the weight of next time. Good thing is, Remus seemed to miss that move while finishing off crafting what has to be his specific brand of reassuring words, but it becomes clear once he’s set his mobile down on his lap that he’s not finished tying things up in a neat little bow for him.

“You’re in the family now,” he puts up, gesturing his palms out fairly, and Sirius should’ve known his heart had room left at the top. “My dad barks like a drill sergeant, my mum worries her tail off, and I do an oscillating combination of both; no good pretending we’re the most balanced people out there, but I promise you this isn’t as harrowing or unusual as it sounds; it just feels tighter in the gut this time because what went on in the background was anything but typical.”

“Yeah,” Sirius gives, carting them around a rather windy bend to the road, “yeah; I’ve been battling a gut-knot on and off all evening.”

He looks to Remus as the road evens out, finding a pointed, but rather commiserating frown etched on his lips. “Well, I’m sure that dead silence as your only companion for such an extended drive hasn’t helped loosen the knot any,” he raises. "Might we do something about that?"

Sirius snorts once. “Well, I wasn’t going to start blasting bops while you were conked out in back,” he puts up.

“Yes, but I’m plenty awake now,” Remus highlights, reaching to pop the radio on and turn up the volume dial, but crackles are all that greet them from the speakers. “Mm, your favourite’s going to be wonky for a little while yet, but there’ll be something that comes through for us.”

Sirius smiles impishly at Remus while he sails past bites of talk radio and even more crackles, finding his determination to get him off of the proverbial floor both sweet and heady, and braces as Remus falls on a station currently putting the instrumental break on 'Landslide' out over their airwaves.

“Well, isn't that something,” Remus raises, sitting back in his seat and looking to him with a sunshine smile on those lips of his. “In this family, 'Landslide' means everything’s going to be OK.”

It’s a task to croon with a tightly-wound windpipe, but Sirius does what he can to flitter through, and it must be good enough for Remus for he watches him the whole time with a quiet smile on and not a peep from him; a whole feat in and of itself when that boy must know every detail to the tune backwards and forwards by now.

The beat goes on like that, albeit with less harrowingly appropriate tunes being served to them, and while Sirius is absently aware once they've cleared the roundabout that they’ll be rolling through town shortly enough, he still winds up having no real clue they’ve actually made it to Treorchy until Remus gives up a casually alerting hum, pointing him off to the right where the glow of an unmistakable gas station looms about a block’s distance up the road.

Sirius breathes in once. “One day I’ll recognize this town from every way in, but not today,” he puts up, flicking his turn signal on. “Now, do you remember our deal?”

Remus sighs big and long. “You get the tank, I swallow my pride,” he supplies.

“That’s the one,” Sirius chimes, pulling them off the road and into a blessedly desolate parking lot.

Given the prime pickings, he goes ahead and pulls on up to the first stall, spotting the only other vehicle in the lot parked around to the left side of the building and gathering together hope that it might just belong to the lone worker inside the shop and this’ll be a quick little stop. No shenanigans involving a vengeful, double-crossing Remus occur, instead the boy handles the mechanics of the fill-up, waves Sirius off toward the doors, and goes to wait for him in the driver’s seat without preamble or comment, and while that’s all well and signally good, but Sirius still makes a quick stop-off by the driver’s side window on his way in.

“You sure you’re OK to take over?” he checks.

“Mhm, but I kind of have to be,” Remus trades him, right elbow propped on the windowsill with his chin in his hand. “I don’t want us pulling up the drive with you at the helm in case one or both of them has migrated to the front room or the porch to await their arrival, so it’s either we swap out here or slow down ahead of the drive to swap out there and this way makes more sense; less hasty a manoeuvre.”

Well, now that the options are laid out like that, he too would much rather do the swap here than out on the road, but he'd also like to know the percentage value on the parents' position. “What's the likelihood they’re just camped out there?” Sirius raises.

“Well, she knows we’re close and my dad’s there to balance her out, so of course the hope would be that she’s keeping herself busy further off in the house rather than right up at the front, but I’d rather us prepare in case she’s started pacing,” Remus offers him. “If they’re not out there and we end up having jumped the gun, better we overprepared than left it to chance.”

Sirius’s lips thin out; that would certainly be a real plug-puller on all their smoke and mirrors. “You are the brains of this operation,” he trades him, turning on his heel to start across the lot. “Need anything while I’m in there?”

“Not a one,” Remus sends him.

Sirius hikes a thumbs up high in the air and shakes it about, using the same hand a few steps further to tug the door open. His previous assumption proves right in that it’s just him and the clerk inside the establishment, making the process go quick and easy, which, in turn, has them back on the road for the short ride back to the lengthy Lupin drive, which, as it turns out, has a home on the other end of it that's got a darkened front room and a glowing porch that's neither a Hope nor a Lyall perched out on it, garnering Sirius to sigh wistfully in the passenger seat.

“Well, either she’s surviving well enough to have put herself deep inside the house or he’s taken her to the casino to blow off steam,” he puts up.

Remus gives a quick jolt of a laugh. "No other options," he puts up, leaning forward over the wheel and tipping his chin toward the vehicle looming down the way. "And left the car behind apparently."

“Easier to stumble home that way,” Sirius trades him.

“The closest casino’s out in Cardiff so those rascals would be stumbling for a good, long while,” Remus slips him.

“Enough time to sober up,” Sirius takes it. “Iron-clad plan.”

“Be a real head-spinner if they suddenly took that up as a self-soothing practice,” Remus quips.

“As a pair maybe, but I'd bet Lyall’s the type to have won many a poker game in his day,” Sirius retains. "Just a feeling I get."

“You know, he was, but don’t get him started on his youthful earnings or he may never stop,” Remus maintains.

“Well, now I don’t know whether to stay in your good books or go further in his,” Sirius puts up.

Remus snorts long and hard for that. “There are so many other ways to get further in his than asking about his poker game and if you love my mum and me, you’ll strive for any one of those,” he instils, veering the truck toward the left loop of the miniature roundabout at the top of the drive and pulling in cleanly behind Hope’s car.

Sirius curls down to gather up the bounty down ahead of his seat as Remus rolls their windows up, straightens up with a look toward the house, and takes in a long for the folks inside, looking over at Remus as he pushes it back out. “Now, it’s not that I don’t want to twitter away into the night with those two,” he prefaces. “I very do, and if things had panned out the way we wanted them to, I’d pull up a chair and chat until they turned in, but the thing is, I really just want to put my hands all over you.”

“I’m glad you said that because this is the new plan,” Remus addresses, switching off the ignition and turning to speak directly to him, the whites of his eyes wide and luring even in the relative darkness that the glow of the porch can’t illuminate. “We grab our things, go in, give a spirited ‘hi there, hello,’ and field the initial questions, but we’ll be out on the town with them tomorrow and they’ll get their fill of us then, so act casually busy in there; I’ll go down and put the clothes in the wash, you get the leftovers put away, and we’ll insist we’re just so beat we couldn’t possibly sit upright any longer, and make a push for the A-frame. Once there, I’m going to take a shower, you are very encouraged to join me there and get even a fraction of what you deserve out of me, and then you’re going to make yourself conveniently scarce, have a puff, start jotting things down in the book, whatever you’d like so I can clean the fuck out, and then, when the book’s all filled in, everything’s finished and taken care of, and it’s just me, you, and your hands, I do hope you take it upon yourself to rail me like you've never had the chance to before because I know that’s exactly how I want to get it.”

Sirius breathes in once, throwing a quick Hail Mary. “I’d be honoured.”

“Perfect,” Remus calls it, pulling the keys out of the ignition with a decided flourish. “I’ll expect some of your best work when the time comes.”

“And by the power vested in me, you will get it,” Sirius serves him, flicking back on the door handle so it’ll thunk his punctuation for him.

The two of them get out on their respective sides, Remus heading right for the cargo bed to pop the door down, Sirius making a stop-off at the backseat to retrieve their care package out of there before meeting back up with him, wherein he finds Remus standing ahead of the bed, giving a long, long, very long look at the haphazard duffel situation ahead of him.

“I won’t say I was terribly neat about getting everything in there,” Sirius puts in, moving in on his left, “but I will say I put our swim stuff in with the blanket and they were completely dry when I did it so there won’t be a stench waiting for you in there.”

Remus snorts for it. “No, I just—” he starts, lifting his shoulders once and looking left at him. “I hate how little I can do to help and there’s really nothing I can do about that.”

“Depends what you’re working with,” Sirius trades him, setting the care package down to climb on up. “If it’s a puny one, I can’t get you to stop moving around and getting everything yourself, but when it’s a doozy, it’s my turn.”

Remus reaches up and drums a pair of weak fists into Sirius’s arse, but it does happen to be the only part of him close enough to drum on. “You’ve always got something ready to go,” he attests. “I don’t know how you do it; you’re like an operator.”

“I’ve been called worse,” Sirius trades him, backing up on the drumming for a beat or two before bringing the care package over to return it to the odds and ends duffel.

Remus joins him up there in very little time, going for their clothing duffel and the one housing the evidence of a lovely afternoon inside a life-changing mini trip within a trip, and hangs both from a shoulder to bring them down to the ground with him, but there he gets circumvented by Sirius climbing down and stopping him in his tracks just outside the cargo bed.

“I had a blast out there, you know that?” Sirius raises, tilting his head at him. “We can’t and won’t pretend there weren’t low points, but I’m better for having gone and for having you tote me around out there, so the high points are what I’ll think of first, never the last.”

It’s not the smoothest embrace Sirius has been pulled into when they’ve both got quite the bounty hanging off of them, but that doesn’t stop Remus from hooking his arms at the small of his back and breathing him in. “I’ll try it your way and hope it sticks,” he trades him.

“Takes time, but I’m a pretty good coach,” Sirius instils.

“Best one out there,” Remus raises it, pulling back to leave a kiss on Sirius’s lips and a lingering look toward the bed before a sudden breath anew. “You know, if my dad doesn’t have anything against us keeping the truck in the back, we could see about kipping out on the bed; what do you think, is tonight the right night?”

Sirius blinks fast. “Remus, what better night?” he goon-grins, but he halts himself as much as he strives to halt him. “Wait, what’s the forecast like, before we get too into the idea.”

“Oh, it’s not supposed to rain for days and days,” Remus trades him. “Frankly, this week’s slated to be hot enough that we may actually pray for some rain by the end of it, but as far as tonight goes, we’re in the clear.”

“We’ve got to, then; no way around it,” Sirius puts up, clapping once to cement it.

Remus gives a trill in his throat, reaching to pop the door back up with a kind of giddy flourish that Sirius loves to see. “OK, let’s see what he says about it, but chances are the most he’ll do is—”

“Heckle us within an inch of our lives,” Sirius slips in.

“Mhm, that, and expect us to drive her around back ourselves, so we'll just come back out this way,” Remus forwards, turning away from the bed to wrap his right hand around Sirus’s left wrist and tug him along after him. “And, even if he says ‘give me my fucking truck back,’ I wouldn’t say no to piling up with a bunch of blankets and kipping out in the yard as is.”

“A worthy plan B,” Sirius calls it, keeping fast at his heels as Remus accelerates them up the porch stairs. “Someone’s in a hurry.”

“Yes, well, I’m trying to get you alone here,” Remus serves him, popping the front door open and tugging him in through it.

The light in the foyer has been left on for them, it seems, which is a nice touch as they have got a lot to tote in with them, but it really would ruin their entire plan if Remus tripped and busted his lip in here like he’d done when he was wee; no, thank you. Remus gives Sirius’s wrist a parting squeeze and uses that same hand to open the door to the lamplit hall, calling his hellos down the way and inspiring Sirius to join right in, but that’s a choice they both come to regret the moment they come upon the den, finding Hope taking up the right corner of the folded up hide-a-bed and Lyall curled up half beside her and half on her, his head and shoulders draped over her lap, his prosthetic off and chilling upright between the couch and the coffee table, and he himself looking freshly roused from a snooze.

“Ope, sorry,” Remus whispers, and Sirius certainly nods the same sentiment along, but he can’t help smirking at Hope over there reading Maurice over the arm of the couch so Lyall can have his human pillow.

Lyall gives a small stretch, waving them off with it. “Wasn’t that far in yet,” he mumbles.

“Wow, you meant sitting on you,” Remus puts up, grinning wryly at Hope as he mimes a pair of texting thumbs.

“He’s confiscated my mobile now, too,” Hope registers.

“Hope, it was time,” Lyall slides in there.

“Have you been taking in any of that?” Remus raises, a wry grin on as he tips his chin toward the book.

Lyall snorts. “Not a thing.”

“Not what I might’ve liked, but I’ve done rather well for myself over here considering,” Hope appeals.

“A single line every ten minutes,” Lyall gets her.

“We really are sorry,” Remus gives her. “We meant to get in so much sooner, but it was a nightmare getting out of there and—”

“That’s what I said,” Lyall puts up. “The place is a circus on a day that sweltering.”

“There actually weren’t too many people in the afternoon, but it was bumper to bumper right when we got to leaving,” Remus puts up, lifting a gingerly halting hand toward Lyall. “Don’t worry, we took very good care of your truck even with the circus.”

Sirius can’t quite handle how well Remus can blend the truth in with the story, but that’d be a royal ‘we’ to anyone else and it sure seems to sound like one to Lyall. “I think you’d have corralled me out front to look at the damage by now if it weren’t,” he puts it, setting his lidded eyes on Sirius next. “How’d you like it, kid?”

“Oh, it’s fucking magical there,” he insists.

“Had a whole experience, he did,” Remus echoes, smiling like a fiend.

“A breakthrough, even,” Sirius raises it. “The lagoon itself was something out of a fantasy, but the whole surrounding area? Pristine, gorgeous, gigantic.

“Makes you feel like an ant,” Lyall gives it.

Sirius nearly bows, he’s so thrilled with the quality of the input. “Yes, but not one that’s about to get squashed by a giant foot, just a traveller ant,” he echoes, setting Hope right off and garnering her to bow her head through a case of the snickers. “And the harbour? Stop, it’s too much; everything’s so ancient and tall and green — there’s so much green everywhere.”

“Didn’t like the disappearing beach so much, however,” Remus puts in, sending him a sidelong smile.

Sirius shakes his head at once. “No, that fucked me up,” he attests. “Once it started coming back up, I said, ‘no, thank you, and I'm out.’”

“He used to hate that, too,” Lyall puts up, tipping a nod toward his smirking son.

“He said as much, but thank you,” Sirius trades him. “Now I know he wasn’t just placating me.”

Remus huffs once. “I don’t even do that as often as you allege,” he returns, swivelling on his heel and moving out of the archway.

“Oi, your porch is all ready for you,” Lyall calls to him.

Remus pops his head back into the room within seconds. “Nice one, Dad,” he sends him. “No wonder you’re all tuckered out.”

“Resented,” Lyall says of it.

“Should’ve given mum the pressurizer,” Remus maintains.

“Like open fire on her? Maybe I should’ve,” Lyall puts up.

Remus’s pfft could possibly be heard from miles around. “No, though that is an idea,” he trades him, garnering Hope to send Sirius a look of wry fatigue despite the signs of mirth that have got to be showing on his own visage. “Only, she could've felt compelled to join you for an evening snooze and might not've even noticed the time crawling by.”

“OK, nice seeing you,” Hope chimes, waving g’bye with a lofty flick of her right hand, her left one staying curled over the open spine of Maurice and just to the left of a brilliantly pristine throw pillow sitting in the armchair in the corner.

Sirius puts a Yuge gasp into the room. “You finished it?” he puts out, flapping his right forefinger at it.

Hope looks there right quick, breathing in fast and nodding for it. “Mm, I did,” she smiles.

“It’s so cute, and you got it done so fast,” Sirius pours over. “You’re a right sorceress.”

“Ohh,” Hope returns, waving him off now, too.

“No, Mum, that’s ridiculous,” Remus puts in, taking his sunshine smile off of Sirius and sending it over to her. “You just started that, what, Friday? That is sorcery.”

“OK, well, if either of you wants one, you let me know,” Hope serves them, moving things right along to something that’ll hopefully work on the pair of them, but she doesn’t know, isn’t ready, hasn’t fully prepared for all the seal-clapping and gape-grinning amok to come her way. “Oh, oh, wow; two of them, then.”

“That was all you,” Lyall gets her.

“I know it was now,” Hope trades him. “Well, let me know which colours you want, but think on it, no rush.”

Remus smirks, getting one more in. “Well, obviously; you’ll have it done over a weekend,” he slips her, putting their plan back in his sights and lifting the keys to the truck toward Lyall. “Would you be at all OK with us simply parking her ‘round back and kipping out on the bed tonight?”

“Oh, sure,” Lyall puts up, sounding about three seconds away from passing right back out, but none too fatigued to have a go at him. “Just call me Cupid.”

“Won’t be doing that, but thank you,” Remus returns him.

Mm, going to stargaze?” Hope enunciates.

“Hoping to, mhm,” Remus trades her.

“Is it prom night? I didn’t know,” Hope trills, giving a wiggle of her waist that half jostles Lyall by accordance to him laying on her and half incites him to put some of his own wigglings in there, too.

“Well, I never did go to mine, so if it makes up for lost time, then sure; call it prom night,” Remus owns it, his skin tone lacking even a hint of a rouge tint, but then again, it’s got to be something, finally having her goading be about a bloke. “Alright, I'll just go put all of this in the wash and we'll get going on that.”

“Well, sure, you don’t want to keep your date waiting,” Hope puts up.

"Now, it'll seem easier to honk, but you've got to get out and walk him out to the truck," Lyall advises. "That's just good form, and you might even get lucky that way."

Remus looks to Sirius there. “OK, good luck,” he offers brightly, shuffling off toward the basement stairs.

Sirius nods him off, his cheeks too hallowed out to respond with vocal patterns of any kind, and trains a long look down at the fake shag rug before regarding the two goons over there anew, swishing the point of his lips back and forth as he looks between a double dose of the sweetest of eyes on the planet and feeling something a lot like an anvil taking up space in his gut the longer he looks back at them.

“OK so, we ate a ton of picnic food today," he maintains, "so if it’s A-OK with you, we’ll probably hold off our dinner until we can really enjoy it.”

“Oh, that’s fine, hon,” Hope offers. “Your plates are wrapped up in the fridge, so just heat them up when you want them.”

Sirius swallows around a certified golf ball in his throat. “And in turn, if you two find yourselves a bit peckish later but not up for anything hefty, feel free to have some of our stuff,” he maintains, pointing his left hand toward the grocery bag on his right shoulder. “We made quite a dent, but we’ve half a melon ball platter, baby carrots, some dip, that sort of stuff, but I should get them in the fridge because they’ve been in a slowly warming cooler bag for some time.”

Lyall snorts long. “Melon balls, carrots, the usual,” he offers, rubbing his right hand languidly over his face

“Mhm, just your regular finger food,” Sirius echoes. “Is there something I can put the melon balls in, though? The packaging is bound to take up a lot of real estate in there if I stick it in like that and there aren’t enough left over to warrant a huge container as is.”

“Oh, sure there are,” Hope puts up, sitting half an inch forward and seemingly returning to the very real concept of being shipwrecked where she is.

“Oh, don’t move; just point me there,” Sirius insists, pointing both of his forefingers over toward the cupboards as that is likely his best bet.

“OK, so the same one the plates were in, but underneath the counter,” Hope directs him. “There are many bowls within bowls in there, pick whichever size fits for what you’ve got there.”

Sirius heads right for it. “Thank you,” he chimes.

A bit concerned he’ll take longer up here than Remus will downstairs and risk not holding up his end of the bargain in a timely manner, he tells himself he's back at the shop, has a long, vapid queue of drinks ahead of him, and Rosmerta’s just walked in; he’s to stay calm and collected, yet determined and efficient in the face of urgency, and that almost works, it does, but then Lyall calls out to him about Sloops and he has to shut the melon balls away in the fridge and make a beeline for den doorway to showcase his amassed love for the place written out on his face.

“It was the greatest,” he puts out. “The decor, the tunes, the food, the terrace we didn’t get to sit on because Remus knew I’d like the interior even better, the cars parked every which way out on the street with no floorplan whatsoever—”

“It’s a certain kind of chaos; you’ve got that right,” Lyall echoes. “They do trivia on Thursdays nights over there; brought Remus in for one of them and he did very, very well — too well really, I don’t know how he fires some of that stuff right off the top of his head, but it was absolutely brilliant to watch.”

Oh, somehow I knew that in my bones, but I’m glad I know it for certain,” Sirius instils, beaming with fervour. “He’s going to one with me and that’s all there is to it.”

“What am I doing?” he hears, and then promptly swivels back around and scoots over to the counter to pick the bag of carrots out of the grocery bag.

“I’m taking you to a trivia night somewhere, haven’t decided where,” he forwards, swiping the bottle of ranch out of there. “I hear you’re a beast.”

“I do well enough, but I'm no prize-winner,” Remus gives for it, wandering over to stand by Sirius with his hands on his hips.

“He’s lying through his teeth,” Lyall calls out.

“Oh, I had the feeling,” Sirius calls back, carting the leftover bounty toward the fridge and bringing his voice down to a whisper on his way past Remus. “I’m trying, but he reeled me right in.”

Remus leans in with a smirk against the crook of Sirus’s neck, giving a gnaw between his collar and his left shoulder that very suggests he’d like to reel Sirius in, and how dare he, first of all, but what a boost of inspiration to get him zipping over to the fridge more so than the work-hypothetical even was. He places the carrots on the first shelf, the dip in an open spot along the back of the door, and shuts up the fridge at once, swivelling around to find that Remus has already gathered up the food bag and is already at the door to the dining room, jingling the keys in a parting wave toward the den.

Sirius gives a passing wave of his own but doesn’t linger around long enough to get one in return from either den dweller, padding through the dining room after Remus and jolting with him as the rotary phone in the hall rings off the walls of the front hall.

“Hoo, that’s a battle cry,” Sirius puts up, curling down to brace his knees and sending Remus into a fit of snickers.

“And to think at some point I was used to it,” Remus trades him, stopping by the desk at Hope’s and setting his left hand over the receiver while Sirius wanders 'round behind Hope’s desk to contemplate all this yarn over in the cubbies. “I’ve got it.”

“Thanks, hon,” Hope calls back.

“Hello?” Remus greets, his work laugh activating. “You’ve got Remus, I’m afraid … I am, yeah ... up for the week; felt like time.”

Sirius sends a wry look over his shoulder at him, wondering if it’s gotten dry saying pretty well the same line to just about everybody who isn’t in his family or if it’s just the quickest and easiest route to go down, but he drops the face when Remus drops his face muscles to a frown. “That would’ve been nice,” he gives, gaze trained on Hope’s desk. “Well, he’s actually just laid down for a rest … yeah, big day over here, but I’ll have him ring you when he’s up and at 'em … of course, will do … you too; take care.”

Sirius slowly bends his knees, putting himself at half-height to aim to catch Remus’s crestfallen eye, and he will say that method does have the corners of Remus’s lips twitching up, but then he seems to quite realize he’s just holding onto one end of a telephone line for he blinks down at the receiver, quickly sets it down, and looks back to Sirius with a distinct crinkle between his brow and a toss of his head toward the front door, and that’s cool, all good, Sirius can wait until they’re out of there, but Lyall sure can’t, it seems.

“Whossat?” he puts up, sounding more on the way to asleep than he has yet.

“Hoowelin,” Remus puts up, and that’s just not the name Sirius was ever expecting to hear and it is a job keeping his smirk internal.

"I’ll ring him later,” Lyall sends back.

“I did tell him that, so you're good,” Remus calls to him.

“Thanks, hon,” Hope offers back.

Remus passes in front desk and heads down the hall, luring a fast-padding Sirius to follow after his heels, and he does manage, in all his confused stupor, to wait until they’re shut up in the foyer to blurt out what he's been dying to since he heard it.

Hoolehan?” he whispers, footing his shoes on.

Remus looks up from toeing his own shoes on, tooching his lips once. “Hoowelan,” he whispers back.

Sirius blinks twice. “Hoowellan."

Remus reworks his mouth around a smile. “Close; Hh-loo-wellin, but run them together,” he instructs, and suddenly there’s an 'L' in there, too? Is he suffering a stroke? “You’ve seen it well enough before; ‘L-L-E-W-E-L-L-Y—”

Oh, oh,” Sirius puts up, nodding anew. “Lewellen — OK, I'm here.”

“Mm, to your lot, it’s that; for us, there’s a bit of an ‘H’ ahead of the name,” Remus gets him, reaching to pull the front door open and gesturing for Sirius to go through, and he does do that, but not without a hip-check.

“And about six ‘O’s by the sound of it,” Sirius gets him back, filing out the door.

“More like two, but think of it as a ‘U’ if that’s easier,” Remus offers, closing the door after them and heading for the porch stairs.

Hlu-wellin,” Sirius gives it, strolling down the stairs beside him.

“Yes, yes, there,” Remus echoes, going into some castanet hands, which is apparently just the right amount of vibrancy to have him remembering he was just recently a crestfallen little lad for his hands drop idly to his sides. “He’s my uncle.”

Sirius’s brows do the caterpillar crawl, he can’t help it. “Is everything OK?” he checks.

“I have to figure it’s not,” Remus puts up, but he looks back at Sirius at the foot of the stairs with a deflating shrug. “Well, I actually don’t know, he didn’t say and I would think if it was an emergency he’d have said as much, but I don't know why else he'd be ringing; he just sounded sad — not so much at first, but when he realized it was me, he sounded unmistakably sad.”

Sirius breathes in once. “I don’t know the feeling,” he puts it.

Remus snorts once, reaching out to shove at Sirius’s left shoulder. “I’m trying to own up here, could you let me?” he puts up, starting for the driver’s side.

“To what, being Remus?” Sirius casts out, heading for the passenger side. “Oh dearie me, what have you done.”

Remus huffs once at him while they’re climbing into the truck, but he gives him a bit more to go on when he’s got the beast started up at least. “I could tell he was upset that he didn’t get the memo that I was up here,” he provides, spinning the wheel to back them up enough to clear Hope’s tail lights and pull off across the front of the house. “Not boohooing-upset, just — his voice changed, hollowed out, and then the way he said that he wished we could’ve tried to do something while I was here had me feeling quite hollow, and sure, it’d have been nice to see him, I suppose, but it’d have been quite out of the ordinary, too; it wasn’t on my itinerary, and now I just feel — I don’t know, itchy about it, I guess.”

Sirius watches him out the corner of his eye. “Itchy, how?” he bids, his hands splayed on the duffel lying over his lap.

“Well, it’s not 'guilty,' per se,” Remus offers up, steering them over behind the shed to get them around to the backyard. “We’re not that close, it's been the case for as long as I can remember, and I’ve not really needed more out of it, so guilt’s too strong a word for this, but I still feel itchy under my skin for not needing more out of him; am I…?”

“Mm, mhm; that’s that ‘guilt-lite,'” Sirius gives him. “You’re aware that your body’s reacting to something that your brain doesn’t necessarily agree with, and that puts you all out of whack.”

“Yes, yes, that,” Remus trades him, pulling them around the side of the shed and keeping a wide berth between the wheels on his side of the truck and the outskirts of Hope’s sanctuary as he heads across the backyard. “It’s been a year since we last spoke and that was for an emergency, so perhaps he got hit with the weight of the distance there’s been because we haven’t had a tragedy to speak under and therefore he hasn’t had much of an update on me from the source, but I — he has my number, you know?”

Sirius sucks a breath so long and deep from within that it practically concaves his lungs. “I, literally love you because I was about to say the same thing,” he slips him. “I get it, you’re a sweetie-pie, of course you heard the distance hanging there on the line and felt itchy about not trying to close it ages ago, but at least you know on some level that it's not on you to have gone fostering a closer relationship with the guy if there was never put in place from the beginning.”

“It wasn't, that's the thing,” Remus trades him quietly, like the man will hear it from his own lips if he's too loud about it. “It’s not that I don’t wish it could’ve been different, but I don’t know how to start that process; who am I? I’m just a pipsqueak.”

Sirius snorts long and hard for that read of him. “Bit more than a pipsqueak, but that’s fucking funny,” he trades him. “That's it, though; he’s the uncle, you’re the nephew, by all accounts he should be trying to get you on the line and then getting voicemail every other try because out you're there being a city slicker with stories to show for it the next time he gets through to you, not the other way around and not just because you happened to be home to pick up the phone when he was trying to get your dad on the line and it dawned on him that he hadn’t gotten the memo that you're home, and I’ll send him that memo.”

Remus brings in a big ol’ breath and huffs back out through a laugh, pulling them left to face them out ahead of the field and taking them in reverse. “Don’t, but I appreciate this more than I could ever say,” he trades him, backing the truck up just beautifully in between the garden and the A-frame to park the bed just a little ahead of the steps.

Sirius gives a low whistle, admiring the job back there. “You ought to pull your fangs out of yourself for your alleged inability to parallel park,” he puts up.

“I’m no good at it, Sirius; nothing alleged about it,” Remus trades him, switching the engine off and taking the keys out.

“I’ve no proof of that, if you remember,” Sirius highlights. “Meanwhile, you pull a manoeuvre this clean, this smooth, this beautiful — twice, might I add.”

Remus reworks his mouth around a smirk. “That was rather clean, wasn’t it.”

“I said many other things just there, but I’ll take it,” Sirius instils. “Thursday; we’ve nothing on the docket, do we?”

“Not that I know of,” Remus offers.

“Then we’re practicing Thursday, babey,” Sirius attests, popping his fist down over the glovebox to cement it overtop of Remus’s huffing and puffing. “Mhm, it’s time; you’ve always had the power in you, Remus; you did it just the other day when you knew I needed you to pull over before I even knew I did and you’re going to be a parallel parking veteran when I’m done with you.”

“I’m just going to quietly slip out of the house Thursday morning and not return until nightfall,” Remus quips.

“We’ll just go Friday, then,” Sirius puts up, “and if you stave it off here, James’ll just have to let you borrow his to practice with, but then you’d be parallel parking in the city so I’d say take the quaint countryside while you’ve got it.”

“You’re a bitch, but I’ve always liked it,” Remus instils.

“Yeah, you have,” Sirius echoes it lowly. “Feeling better?”

“Well, I suppose I could get away with saying I’m in the guilt-lite-lite stage,” he puts up, veering into the bathroom. “The Guilt Zero stage, if you will.”

“I will,” Sirius allows. “And the thing is, you keep your work voice on when you’re talking to him; at that point, there’re many, many steps that need to be taken before the two of you can start shooting the shit, you know what I mean? Rory was right; time is key.”

Remus gives him a wild look, pointing the end of the key at him like a dagger. “I’m just going to zoom right on past that for the betterment of us both,” he maintains, taking the high road apparently, but Sirius just surged ahead of him in the debate whether they admit that or not so that's perfectly fine. “Go back to just before the Rory talk.”

Sirius gives into a squint, dialling back to what would need revisiting. “Work voice?” he puts up.

“Yes, that,” Remus instils. “What are you saying?”

“Well, it’s just the voice you use for anyone who isn’t one of your people, I just know it as your work voice because I’ve spent enough time with you at work to know what it sounds like and that’s my point of origin for it, but you use it all the time,” he supplies. “When you’re being introduced to someone new, when you don’t know who’s just rung you up, when you’re ordering or asking for something that's over behind a counter, when you’re at the checkout making conversation with a cashier, any time you’re talking to admin over the phone and in person, too, I'm sure, when you’re leaving a voicemail, you’ve used it on the townies you’ve bumped into here; the list is likely endless.”

“I didn’t know I did that,” Remus trades him, looking and sounding a tad vacant over there.

“With him or in general?” Sirius checks, tipping the water into his mouth and swishing it around.

“Well, not both this time, I suppose; I'm sure I do sound different when I'm in those situations, but I hadn't thought I did that with him,” Remus hands over, and Sirius swears he can hear him lifting his shoulders from here. “I mean, is it terribly obvious?”

Sirius breathes in once, thinking it over as he dips forward for another spit in the sink. “Well, no, to me it was, but I know how you answer a phone,” he hands him. “I didn’t know it was your uncle on there until I did, but now that I do, it does check out; why wouldn’t you use that voice with him if he pops in that infrequently, you know?”

Remus stares him down with his head on a firmly hanging tilt. “You’re right,” he enunciates, though he's nodding absently. “I talk to him like I would an infrequent regular that pops in here and there, but that's about it.”

“Mhm, mhm," Sirius echoes it, painting the scene for him. "You see ‘em when they're in, you like ‘em just fine, there’s not a ton to say because it’s been long enough since you've seen them last and how would you even bridge that gap so you’re polite when they do turn up again, but you’re not gonna go telling them when you’re going off on vacation, are you?” Sirius raises him wryly.

Ooh,” Remus drags out, big fan of the analogy being laid down in front of him, clearly.

“And why would you?” Sirius keeps on. “They'll manage without, see you on another time, and you wouldn’t think to justify it to yourself before going on said vacation, you would just go do that and live your life not even worrying about whether you gave the dates you’d be away, and if you’re talking to your uncle like you would with an infrequent regular at work, well then, babey, that’s just what it’s like with him; I bet you're onto something there, he probably does feel the distance is wider than it's ever been, but there’s a lot that has to be laid down before you’re a pair of chatty Cathys and that’s not on you. It sounds bleak and informal, but an infrequent customer is all you’ve had to work with there.”

Remus lifts his right hand and talks at him with it. “You need to get out of this truck and in that fucking shower, you hear me?”

“I’m hearing,” Sirius echoes, putting his hands up. “Even after that left turn? We can wait, I want you to be—”

Remus shakes his head once, speaking over him gently. “You have been nothing but good to me, all day, with every turn it has taken, and you don’t stop,” he attests. “You can stop, you can; I just want to be good to you.”

And Remus is so good to him, when holds Sirius to him and kisses every inch of his neck, the curves of his jaw, the corners of his lips before they’re all his, taking his slow and steady time so Sirius feels every thank-you that's built right into each press of his lips, each flick of his tongue; when he snakes Sirius’s hands around the back of him and puts them on him like Sirius so wanted him to but didn't try for himself, letting him grip at him, pull him in, rub up on him, feel his warmth pressed against him; when he’s got Sirius against the wall and hiked up between it and his devastatingly arrowing hips, listening to Sirius breathing his name between their lips and giving him an open-mouthed kiss for each new utterance of it; when he blasts his palms against the wall on either side of Sirius’s body and drives up on him, giving it all to him and trusting Sirius's legs to hold tight to the backs of his thighs; when he’s got Sirius, got him right where he wants him, has him clinging on for dear life and thanking this life for letting him keep him; when he’s holding Sirius up in the aftermath like his own personal prize and letting Sirius breathe him in as he finds his breath again; when he’s finally set Sirius down and rinsing him off underneath the spray, trailing his lips over newly-soaped skin; he’s even good to him while booting Sirius out of the shower for some deep cleaning, a detail to the overall plan that Sirius did hope would be waived on account of his face having been all up in there many a time, but in truth, Remus was never going to pick today to be the day he lets Sirius hang about for that.

Sirius feels something like he’s walking on air when he pads around the main room and the hall ahead of the linen closet collecting pillows and blankets to bring out to the bed, feels the imprint of Remus’s touch all over his body as he puts it to good use, feels limber and loose and warm to the touch as he sets up their bed for the night ahead, feels his fingertips tingle as he sits out on the end of the bed and rolls Remus his cleanest blunt to date, feels brave and scared and needed as he leaves the joint in the ashtray, opens up their book, and puts pen to paper.

Chapter 38

Summary:

Although it might not seem like it based on the structure, this chapter includes previously explored dynamics between the Lupin famjam and continues to explore those dynamics at a face value, so will I say that a revisitation/refamiliarisation with the pre-wales chapters of this here monster tale could be a great help with jogging memories and feeling immersed in the continuation of that storyline? Yes, I will, but I say it knowing I can’t really hold anyone to that and this is more or less a suggestion; if you’re confused, a reread may just help with that ✌🏼

Notes:

I’ve been going back and forth a few weeks now over how best to communicate what the next stage of this passion project will look like. Ideally, I would’ve had the breakthrough I’m about to elaborate on right around the time I posted the last update as that chapter closes out the Pembrokeshire arc and this one I’ve got here opens up a whole new one, but you can’t always time your breakthroughs to be thematically cohesive, can you?

One of the tougher parts about this whole process has been a nagging worry at the back of my mind that tells me that, because it can take me months before I’m satisfied with my output to post a new chapter, even with all the work I did when I envisioned and mapped out this follow-up from both inside and above it at once, no one would remember a thing. I, myself, can know I put the same time and care into plotting and plugging in details as I did with Blends, but I can’t control whether readers know or feel that way when actual months of their lives can go by before they even get a new instalment or a whole year of their life going by before a plot point that got planted way back at the beginning of the story comes back in full force, and that lack of control is a lot like being on a rafter with no paddle for me and often contributes to how long a wait can be between chapters.

Over the past few months, I’ve toyed with this exercise where I ~pretend like I have absolutely no following, and therefore, less pressure to churn out a product that somehow hits a thousand different people’s preferences at once, less intense bouts of imposter syndrome, less guilt about not keeping to a timely posting schedule, and a lot more room to focus on remembering what it’s like to genuinely love working on this project. This sounds crass and likely borderline rude, but hear me out: I've felt myself forgetting what it's like not to see this as a second job and the last time I felt differently about it was before I ever posted Blends, when weaving it all together was an extremely fun challenge that I'd set for myself and would look forward to chipping away at whenever I could, and in these past few months, just by giving myself the unofficial go-ahead to create like I did back then, I’ve found that kind of magic again and you just can’t let it run away on you, you feel me?

All that to say, I’ve been seduced by the idea of quietly finishing this bad baby offline, on my terms and in my own time, and popping back on here with a complete tag, a posting schedule that I can actually bank money on, and a much better sense of accomplishment after some much-needed time alone with the process and work to show for it. I wouldn’t even call it a hiatus, because that word breathes ominous energy and often comes with the suggestion that a break is being taken, but I ain’t about to take a break, I’m riding a wave of rediscovery and enjoying every writing session I get done with these days, and that’s the whole point I'd want to leave people with; I love this story and I also hate this story because it is not going to leave me alone until I complete it.

The very first thing my brain does when I even so much as think about communicating in any real way on here is to say ‘no one cares, it’s just fanfiction’ but it’s never really been that for me and I know there are few of you out there who might just agree with me on that one, so as much as I might like to tell myself that nobody’s following this just so I get out of my own way, this little announcement/write up is for you guys. Those of you who've stuck around like glue in the midst of all my bull, those of you who’ve reached out on here and elsewhere to leave all sorts of love, so much good faith, and frankly incredible analysis that I could’ve never dreamed of being associated with my words, and those of you lurking around quietly keeping up with updates and may just appreciate this work more than I could ever really know; you’re the real ones, you should know where I’ve gone to and you should know my complete intention of turning back up again when the time is right, with something great to show for it.

I don’t know when that’ll be because part of this fun little exercise is not putting a deadline on creativity, but having said that, take this extra chapter as a peace offering and, if you’re cool with taking my word for it, some tangible proof that I’ll be back because I wouldn’t post the start of a whole new arc if I had no intention of continuing it, trust me on that much. If you want to pause here and wait for the big day, by all means, you do you, if you're curious and want to take a looksie into just some of what's coming, this would be a nice taster, and as always, my inbox stays open, here and elsewhere. Other than that, thanks for playing, and On With The Show, as they say (Or, on with it until next time the show goes on the road, whenever that is.)

Chapter Text

Sirius has completed the tail-end of a section when it dawns on him that any trace of the sun’s lingering presence is about to be snuffed from the sky at large, which will likely make it difficult to effectively keep track of the words he’s scrawling down. He shifts over to lean his back against the left side of the cargo bed, interested in making a useful friend of the porch light stationed behind him and above the A-frame steps, but his lower back certainly doesn't seem to mind the break he's giving it by indulging in a solid lean.

He props his knees up as a makeshift desk for the book, drapes it open over his thighs, and tests out the glow of the light pouring down from above by reading over what he’s got down so far. 

 

Possible triggers:

- There was a bit of an issue with Remus’s protective eyewear breaking on him while out in broad daylight, which normally would be a fine contender but the man himself insisted that he did not point his retinas at the sun and I’m inclined to believe him on that as he is Remus and would’ve been immediately forthcoming about it had that been the case
- Having said that, we Were in the middle of a lagoon when the break happened so it’s possible the combination of being caught more or less stranded without a paddle for a few minutes there and the one-wrong-move effect while seeking out the replacement pair of eyewear could’ve taken a toll on his nerves, contributing toward mental and bodily stress and therefore creating a potentially perfect breeding ground for a cluster
- A weekend of emotional ups and downs may well have set the stage for a whopper to hit him up whether or not we ran into a bit of a predicament with the sunglasses

Sirius leans his head back, curling his shoulders over the side of the bed and shutting his eyes as he casts a net deep into the barrel of possibilities to scrape for any other options before he'll have to write the shittiest one down, but even he has to admit it's a fruitless exercise; there's not much else to offer other than what he knows wouldn't have triggered him, not the sun as told by him, not the sauce when Remus hasn't touched a drop since May and still isn't the kind of lush that'd sneak a water bottle filled with vodka into their picnic bags.

 

- As always, the ever-present and unfavourable possibility that he was simply slated to come on when it did regardless of the aforementioned factors

 

He breathes in once, readjusts the pen in his writing hand, and straightens back up, setting forth on the category of initial symptoms; a section that’ll be woefully short as far as cold, hard facts go, but one that he’s got a hell of a lot to say for, that's for sure.

 

- Pulsing jaw ache —> throbbing jaw ache

 

Notes: the leaky eye/plugged nostril combination has been both the most frequent and consistent of Remus’s initial symptoms to date. We’ve not yet experienced a case where he felt his left eye well up without the nostril plugging up or vice versa, instead it seems that the two are a pair thick as thieves and will come as a two-in-one extravaganza that acts as a single warning sign that we can bank our money on. The jaw ache, in comparison, is newer to us and comes around much less frequently, having only manifested ahead of a cluster for a total of three cases including today’, (see Great Gay Date Day and this past Wednesday’s cases being the prior two occasions) out of a total of twenty-two cases that have occurred over an eight-week period. As such, we know much less about this signal, but it was one that appeared to fly solo, bring on something brutal, and give us a longer window to work with than our most consistent signal, at a difference of about a half-hour versus actual minutes.  

That difference, while marginal in the grand scheme of things, I'm sure, was precious in that it gave him more time to accept and prepare for the inevitable. Remus knows that the instant he feels his left eye start to leak and the same-side nostril start to plug up that he’s got to be on alert, not only because history has proven that there’ll be a cluster coming down the pipeline after him within minutes, but because he has no way of knowing the severity of what’s coming to him until it’s already landed. If he’s at his place or mine, that’s one thing and is a definite relief, but if he’s working and that alarm bell sounds, he’s got so little time to assess, prepare, and hope that it’s a more manageable case and to make arrangements for his absence on the sales floor or from work entirely if a hasher case hits him. It doesn’t matter much what makeshift and word-of-mouth resources we've managed to scrounge up into a care package to help keep his cases as short as possible (and his blood pressure as low as possible, at that) because no amount of physical readiness can make up for the emotional toll of just knowing that you’ve suddenly got minutes to accept that the next however many hours ahead of you in your day or night are going to be determined by the brutality or mercy of what’s coming to you and, depending on where you are when it happens, could mean the difference between getting somewhere safe and hidden away in time, between making it to a commitment you made weeks ago and wholly planned on showing up for, between terrifying those around you, between having the pigs called on you, between keeping your job, your flat, your agency, and those is some of the most harrowing and anxiety-inducing minutes when living with the condition.  

Now, I’m not going to sit here and suggest that having a warning sign which — as of today, at least —  sure seemed to pack a punch with it whenever it comes along *doesn’t* bring out those same anxieties because it definitely does, but I will say one thing positive about signal number two and it's this: feeling for even a little while there that we were being shown mercy in the form of a little more time to accept, prepare, get him home in time for the onset, or organise a rescue mission if need be was something like a silver lining in a situation that doesn’t leave a ton of room for those sorts of things. Today, however, we were not given that half-hour window we’ve been sorely banking on lately, instead he felt the telltale pulse turn into the equally telltale throb at a far quicker speed than we’ve known that to happen and therefore allotted us somewhere between five and ten minutes to get him as far away from the public eye and as close to relative safety as possible, while very much on the move and out in the open.  

 

Sirius pauses short, following after a thread of a thought tugging on him just gently enough not to come off as abrasive but just forceful enough to get him thinking outside the box — or better yet, above it completely. It goes without saying that Remus fell prey to a serious case of the weepies back there, but in the middle of all that, the leaky eye/plugged nostril combination wouldn’t have been the easiest to clock behind all of that, would it?

On top of that, Remus’s emotions didn’t start pouring out the moment he began sobbing, did they? That was the release after having hit a fever pitch, but that boy had been battling and suppressing his frustrations from the moment the pulse arrived, nevermind when the throb took over far faster than either of them knew what to do with, and the whole way through a lively retelling of the best thing that’s ever happened inside of a Harrod’s in history, Remus’s just wasn't himself; his words kept cutting off, his sentences came out uncharacteristically clipped, his commentary woefully sparse, his breathing harsh, but looking back now, that boy sure sounded like he was a) breathing through his mouth far more than he did his nose, holding back tears just having to admit aloud that he felt the pulse turn into the throb so quickly. Seems to him, that may well have been the perfect set of parameters for the leaky eye/plugged nostril combo to slip in through the open door, unannounced and unrecognized to either of them.

Sirius pushes a four-tiered puff of breath out of himself, knowing full well that he could just be unwilling to let go of their blessed half-hour window and drumming up a theory based on a flash experience so they can hold on to the miracle for even a little longer, but there's no denying equally keen to see the theory through nonetheless.

 

We’re working off of twenty-two cluster cases since his resurgence, so realistically we’re not going to be able to know what exactly happened today until we’ve gathered up more cases relevant to the jaw ache to look back on, but until then, I'm not sure what else we're expected to do but make note of what we're noting when we see it and record them in here, so for right now, I can't say for sure what happened today and what could have shrunk our timeframe down, if there were outside influences at play that we still don't know about, if this is actually the new normal for signal number two and we've yet to have enough cases to back that up, if this was an outlier experience not likely to return again or at the very least less often, or if this was our first experience having Remus's two signals merge into one mega warning and then those five to ten minutes we were given to act would at least have some explanation, but I'll keep after it, get his perspective on it, keep an eye out for whichever direction this particular issue is going in, and for now, this is what I can hand over.

 

He leaves quite a few lines free to allow for Remus’s input on that particular topic and moves on to etching out the header for general symptoms, but rather than tackling a topic that explosive without at least some stimuli, he thinks he’ll get a cigarette going while he works on it. He slips one out of his pack with his free hand, lights it on up, and hikes his left elbow on the side of the cargo bed to better keep the cigarette poised near his lips, pulling off the filter while putting his writing hand to good use. 

 

- Our first-ever outdoor, incredibly public, and high-rise cluster; woo. 

- Stress levels reached critical mass as we were suddenly thrown into the market for a place of refuge while out on the open road and incredibly vulnerable with the ticking clock hanging loudly overhead, both of which certainly had us scrambling to find a suitable place to hunker down and ultimately using the backseat of his dad’s truck for our makeshift bunker
- Re: that just there. Of course, it’s always possible that Remus had simply been slated to have a two-tiered cluster no matter the constraints we would’ve found ourselves under, and of course, I’ve no way of proving one way or the other if circumstantial factors can influence the climb of a cluster once one has already hit, but having said that, I’d still believe it? If stress can trigger a cluster in and of itself, then is it a massive stretch to imagine that debilitating stress ahead of the onset could carry over into a cluster and cause a rise in severity? We’ve seen weirder shit, is all I’m saying, but either way, the stress that ran high and fuckin’ dry for Remus this afternoon deserves to be mentioned, underlined, and highlighted in pink, so you can really, really see it  
- Discernible (and quite rapid) speech was initially possible, but there was a point that matched up with a rise in severity where traditional speech patterns became muted and Remus’s focus was pulled toward other areas; save for some notably consistent and deep breathing breaks, pitched whinges in reaction to the pain he was in as well as the sort of grunts one might hear if their significant other were over in the living room putting a hell of a lot of effort into leg day were the majority of the vocal patterns he was able to offer from thereon out
- Didn’t attempt to hurt himself in any immediately notable way while I was forced to leave him unattended for a very short time (and we’re talking merely thirty seconds in the grand scheme), but that in itself, I find quite notable. Did I do my darndest to ensure that he'd be as constricted as humanly possible within the constraints of the space and situation we were in so that I *could* feasibly leave him unattended for that stretch of seconds? Yes. Could he have managed to pull free and do some damage in the time I was away from him if he’d had the drive to? Also yes, he’s a wily man  
- The insatiable need to generate pain elsewhere on his body to detract from the pain going on inside his skull did join us inside our hideaway eventually for he did begin to throw much of his body (and namely his substantial kicker-feet) into stamping out the pain against the passenger door on the opposite side of the backseat I had him laying flat across, but it should be said here that if he’d felt that he absolutely to crack back on his skull rather than go the foot route, then he’d have just done that. Now, I had my right hand positioned both behind his head and in front of the arm on the door handle that his head was the closest to in order to play defence in case he did wind up trying it with his head, but he didn’t go for it and that suggests a certain lack of desperation involved
- He is certainly no fan of being put in constricting positions by hands-on intervention while battling a doozy of a case, so once I did get in there to put a stop to his unfavourable pain management technique by scooping him up rock-a-bye-baby style and cutting the height advantage he inevitably has in cramped spaces down by at least a third, it was completely unsurprising that Remus made his disapproval well-known to me, but it should certainly be dotted and underlined here that the most trouble he gave me for it was a bunch of wriggling and whinging — a small price to pay for making sure his feet survive the attack and it should be dotted, underlined, and highlighted in bold that once I got a hold on him, that same hold held out for the remainder of the cluster
- As there is no cluster without the icepick, I’m left without a shadow of a doubt that the pick was in attendance, but I will confirm with the man himself shortly on whether the clamp made an appearance this time around. Having said that, I do have one of those strong feelings that it did show up during today’s case given that he, at one point earlier on in the backseat debacle, dragged his problem temple back and forth over my collarbone and that kind of thing only tends to happen when his temple feels like it's being squashed - Cluster totalled out at approximately fifty-six minutes before leaving him even more abruptly than this one even came on; I would call that a medium-level timeframe for what we've been experiencing thanks to the wayward help of 5-hr energy boosts, but none of that lingering around at a duller level kind of shit happened here today as far as I was able to tell, instead it merely pulled off of him like a wave leaving shore and I, for one, am grateful that the nightmare didn’t last any longer for him

 

Notes: In terms of a rating, as stated above, it was abundantly clear to me that we were dealing with two levels of severity and I’ve little to no doubt in my mind that Remus would agree; it’s his head and all. As far as numbers go, Remus vocally clocked the initial stages as a six before shit hit the proverbial fan and he got pulled further into the weeds, unable to bother with articulating the kind of pain he was in and passing off to me the task of counting up visual cues and symptoms to come up with a rating, something I’ve grown rather accustomed to in my tenure as Remus’s companion in arms.

Remus’s first resurgent case came crashing in at a ten and for better or worse, that has shaped the way we look at any one case ever since. Had things been different, had he gotten hit with a four straight out the gate, then perhaps we would still be working out exactly how a ten presents for him to this day, but as it stands, we were made to know what one looks, feels, and manifests on him like the backs of our hands, from both our respective sides of the glass. For Remus, it’s his ceiling, the absolute cap on the entire experience, the worst pain he’s known (and that lad’s been through it, trust that much), and for me, it’s my barometer, the worst a single case can possibly get, tattooed on my brain for years to come, and as such, I along with Remus to a certain degree, can’t help but hold each new case up against the dreaded ten and counting out all the symptoms that don’t officially line up with one, just as I did today.

Remus wasn’t moving at the whip-fast puma speed that he can travel at when he’s suffering from a ten, didn’t touch his head to anything when he could’ve made that happen for himself if he’d felt he had no choice but to, didn’t scream for minutes at a time with no end in sight and far too-seldom breaks for air, didn’t fight off my touch or interferences nearly as much as he would’ve had to do if he were busy seeing hell, and he knew it was me there with him, the entire time. He wasn’t the most compliant punk around, but he was my punk and I felt a thread going between us the whole way through, a tether that didn’t snap once, and there is a stunning lack of a tether between the pair of us when we’re going up against a ten; that is what I knew, it's what saw with my hawk eyes, and what I felt with my bare hands while I held him through it, I knew what I wasn’t looking at, and yet, I couldn’t decide what I was given that, at least in my mind, while I could have had plenty of reasons to call the severity this one rose to and remained at an eight, I found myself hesitating to claim it as that, and not for the first time.

 

Sirius pauses his writing hand, twists the pen around in his fingers, and taps the end of it against the page below, contemplating just how open he ought to pull the curtains for the doctor who will soon, or hopefully, read through these case logs or whether he ought to keep their murky history with pain scales private, but the fact is, he doesn’t have to keep everything in, does he? If anything, they can look at it afterwards, cut out sections that don’t necessarily need to be in there, and give Remus the say on the final draft, but for now, he has got to get all of the thoughts swimming in his head out of it and into words that he knows.

 

Forgive and bear with me while I take us into the weeds, but if Remus keeps having to do that, then maybe we ought to schlep through a fraction of them; it would only be fair. Back in the early days of his resurgence, I learned two very important things from the lad, the first being that the very act of getting talked at while he’s experiencing a cluster can be akin to mild or major torture practices depending on the severity of the attack that's hit, so I’ve done what I can to avoid pressing him with him too many questions after the onset and whisper low, low, low if I’ve no choice but to communicate with him through words. Take today’s case as a prime example; if Remus hadn’t been able to hear me without recoiling, or hadn’t been able to form his mouth around traditional words, then I’d have known I couldn’t speak without that becoming a capital-P Problem, but since he was vocalizing left and right and since we were very abruptly thrown into the market for an escape plan that’d get him as far from public eye and toward a relatively secluded location as possible before the onset would hit, and since I saw the moment he veritably lassoed an energy boost out of our care package and into his possession, I very needed to know what exactly he felt were going up against so I could gauge how far I could feasibly get and that boy told me straight — and classily, at that: ‘Kip’s bloody fucking six,' spat Remus, trusting me to know exactly what to do with that in regards to himself, which brings me right to the umbrella topic of the second thing I learned from him; Mr. Bob Kipple.

It was in those same early days, and just a few hours after our third resurgent case, that I learned that the Kip Scale was proving to be a rather sore subject for Remus, on the grounds that appealing to a universal pain scale through an experience so varied from person to person rubbed him entirely the wrong way, and hearing him out on that one was bracing, but every bit as enlightening — more so, even. The Kipple name was everywhere I looked when I was first researching the condition and that was way back in October, built straight into shorthand language. I barely knew what I was looking into yet, I was really just trying to gather enough information together to craft an argument that *might* be strong enough to convince Remus to get himself, and what I’d seen him get clobbered by in real-time, so believe you me, I had no idea why I kept seeing ‘Kip 2’s and ‘Kip 8’s being thrown around online, and if I’m honest, I blew it off as a detail I didn’t need the backstory on. Back then, the focus was all about getting Remus to admit that his condition had worsened enough to warrant a reevaluation and agree to make an appointment with his doctor to reaccess his condition, I only figured out what the hell a ‘Kip’ even was somewhere around mid-January when it was looking like we were going to have to do a lot of the work ourselves and I surrounded myself with research that we didn’t end up needing to use for months, and fell head over heels for a late winter to late spring revival of Remus’s once cluster-less life. I’ll be the first to admit I got drunk off that faux stupor until I was made to sober up and dive back into gathering any and all information I could get my hands on, including the legend surrounding you and your work, ma’am, but certainly including the lore and legend surrounding one Bob Kipple and his pain scale.

Quite the latecomer to something so very attached to the process, believe me, I know, but once you’re forced to come to back the party in a manner as brutal as we were and you’re opening up any and all personal accounts of clusters you can get your hands on, you start to realize why that name is everywhere and anywhere you look and it’s both impossible to miss the fact that the community’s out there speaking Kipple’s language fluently and impossible Not To internalize the messaging that insists it’s the official language. I know I internalized that message and didn’t think twice about what it implied to those who couldn’t speak it, but I had to learn from Remus that the very concept of having to appeal to that scale simultaneously asked something of him that he wasn’t confident he could give and demanded he ignore his own pain register to go off of this one bloke’s pain scale in the same beat. I generally don’t make it a habit of mine to tell Remus, intentionally or subliminally, that he’s expected to appeal to a greater mould in any area of his life, so I can’t say that this particular area was the one time I just couldn’t grant the same for him; rather, the simple act of hearing, seeing, and dare I say, feeling just how hard it was for Remus to appeal to Kipple or his language simultaneously had Me wanting to find a way to use that very language to our advantage and shield Remus from the responsibility of having to appeal to what the scale says on the tin, which sounds near-to impossible when put like that but nevertheless, I committed myself to doing what was possible to wait until he was up and at’em again before I’d start quizzing him on his impression of an attack through his own words, compile his impressions of any one case with the symptoms and behaviours I’d observed while getting him out the other side of the attack, and handle the task of matching his and my combined impressions to that controversial-for-us and most-widely-recognized pain scale and record them in here for him so he wouldn’t have to bother himself with it; a compromisation of sorts.

Down to it, I wanted him to be taken as seriously as he deserves to be when he sets foot in your office; we’ve not had the best luck with being heard on that front and I wasn’t about to chance a repeat on that, so instead of tossing Kipple and his impressions out the window completely, I strived to use the Kip Scale as a template while appealing a 1-10 template that most everyone, Cluster City resident or not, has had used in one way or another when attempting to describe their pain levels while still keeping the focus on Remus’s experience so that the very process of asking him to describe his pain in words wouldn’t be as hostile an experience as trying to match a description that didn’t apply to him in any way had been proving to be. We even had this little joke going for a couple of weeks there — won’t be funny ha-ha to somebody else, I’m sure, but the gist was this: Remus has a pain scale of his own that we boorishly coined ‘the Lup Scale’, Kip has his most widely-recognized scale, and I was to work in translation, going between the two of them so Remus that could freely express how any one case felt to the next and wouldn’t have to even use Kip’s name or his scale in my presence. And even then, even with all the extra room I made sure to give him, even with the barrier I more or less Became in order to have something standing between those two men, and even when we could have kept that joke going for as long as Remus needed it to, that boy has been compromising on our compromisation methods like a class act, appealing to me through Kipple’s language and using it as shorthand for what he’s experiencing or had experienced during an attack, something I’m now able to translate back into Remus’s language before I even realize I’m doing it most of the time, and through that, we’ve been actively building a pain scale to run parallel to Kipple’s that is tailored to Remus’s experience, first and foremost.

To be clear, the concept that we would’ve gone and pulled each other more into the middle on a topic as controversial as this one started out to be should not be surprising to me in any way — that sort of thing is what we’ve always done best, but even though I can look at the result of us doing that yet again and go ‘well, duh’, I simply didn’t see it going this way after Remus told me what Kip’s scale was doing to him, and while I’m a bit embarrassed for my lack of foresight, I'm just plain proud of Remus and that's much more important than how red my face is. He knows just how seriously I glommed onto Kipple’s scale in those dreary early days of his resurgence and hasn’t held a grudge against me for having done it, knows how much I needed to feel on top of things and how much that scale helped me feel like I was doing just that, knows how much I went on to use Kipple’s template to help classify his own experiences and how much of it I’ve kept versus tossed out in order to better serve him, and as much as I’ve tried to take as much of the deconstruction process off his shoulders by leading our post-cluster breakdowns like I’m some kind of committee leader, Remus hasn't stayed out of it like I told him he could. Rather than that, he’s been reading through our case logs with a careful comb the day after an attack, or the day after that, or whenever he can face it again and studying closely, he’s been studying up on what a cluster’s many forms look and feel like from my side of the glass and pulled them over toward his side of it, he’s been stepping up and covering our post-cluster breakdown shifts when I’ve had to go to work before him or accidentally fallen asleep ahead of him; he’s been hearing and absorbing and having the lingo rub off on him, has let himself come around on a topic that started out so confusing and restrictive for him, and in turn, I know I’ve been made a better player just having embarked on this exercise in pain with him, but I deeply, deeply know how much his critical position on that scale has rubbed off on me.

I found it to be a bright, commiserating spot at a time when there wasn’t a lot of those to go around and I’ll admit I got swept away by it. After all of the digging I’d done and personal anecdotes I’d devoured to forge a pathway for us to follow, all of the politics I scoffed and gagged over just being associated with such an egregiously under-funded, under-researched, and under-diagnosed condition, all the debates I slogged through online over whether these things even existed for more than an unlucky few and the ones I personally partook in over whether the things I watched my partner suffer through even Counted as clusters — there, in my wee hands, sat a pain scale that acknowledged this notoriously overlooked condition from a lived-in standpoint, that not only shone a searchlight on them but described in some rugged detail the horrors they can bring, that could help us conceptualize what he’d just gone through during an attack and better categorize each new case through a tier-system; of course I was high off of its fumes, are you kidding me? It hadn’t and simply wouldn’t have occurred to me that a pain scale so specific to the experience *wouldn’t* be considered a gift from the universe without Remus openly telling me it wasn’t that much of a gift at all, but trust my better half to bring my heels back to the ground before I flew too high and away from him. How dare he pop my balloon, you know what I mean, but at the same time, I’m grateful he’d been brave enough to speak up.

And no disrespect to Kipple — rest in true peace, sir; did the work of and for thousands and I, for one, thank him for a service that should have never fallen to him, but Remus had a solid argument to back his position up. There are going to be limitations to a widespread pain scale that originated from an everyday bloke who lived at a time that was even less generous to him and his condition than we’re living in now and decided, out of sheer frustration, to describe his experiences on his own terms, because as metal and admirable as that is, those *are* his terms; they’re Kipple’s own, written accord of the plague cast over his life, gone unrecognized by a medical system that wouldn’t and didn’t work for him, now so thoroughly adopted into universal status that his scale is everywhere and anywhere you look for guidance, and if you ascribe to it, if it’s brought comfort and an avenue for qualifying and quantifying what you or your loved one has been experiencing, then hey, more power to you, I sure know what that’s like, but if you or yours don’t match up to every single experience at every slot on a scale that’s considered the one and only manifestation of pain in this whole game, that need for differentiation can be weaponized and create an isolating experience on top of an already isolating condition.

There’s real community within this community, you can just feel it wafting off of the screen whenever you stumble upon a thread filled with people rallying together to give some nervous newcomer as many tips and tricks on how to deal with the weight of it all as they can, but wherever there’s a community, there are arbitrary rules that are designed to keep the club small. That’s just people being people; there are those who’ll want to protect and help guide newcomers, and there are those that’ll be distrustful and rather need explicit rules to keep the ones that don’t experience these things in the exact same way they do from getting inside. I won’t pretend I don’t understand how the in-fighting happens, I won’t pretend it’s not disheartening to watch it happen from the sidelines, but I also won’t pretend it’s not been completely maddening to watch my partner muster up the courage to knock on the door of the club and have it stay shut and bolted, time and time again, from the top down to the everyday folks who know what it’s like to be shut out and still won’t unlock the door for another, and that's just what it did to me. After all the resistance he had just to admit he could really be suffering from these things, after all the work he did to accept he needed help from as many avenues as possible, having that one pain scale that can’t ever possibly represent everyone who has ever dealt or is dealing or will deal with these things be hung like a flag above the very door that would not open for him? That was heartbreaking to Remus and I still see ripples of that heartbreak to this day.

And that’s just the existential side of it; there are logistical issues all over the place when it comes to qualifying you or your person for any one number on that scale and they're issues I’m still running into today. Hell, back it up to the moments before Remus took the seriously rose-coloured glasses off of my eyes, I was admittedly blinded by the scale’s influence and still unable to stretch it to fit Remus; I couldn’t decide between two numbers because he’d shown stray symptoms from both categories that night and went with the one that rang truest to what he’d felt and I’d seen from him in the end, not the absolute answer — I couldn’t have gotten that if I tried and I did, I tried very hard. I think you have to borrow, tweak, and shift things around on the scale to make it work for you otherwise how are you actually supposed to actually use it? Furthermore, I’m not so convinced there aren’t far more people out there and within the community over-generalizing their experiences in order to continue using the language that’s most frequently spoken on any one of those online spaces; excuse my French, but there is just no fucking way that they’re all feeling the exact same things Kipple did, at every step of his ladder, and Remus is somehow the lone bloke who doesn't.

 

Sirius breathes in fast, keeps his writing hand in place on the page he’s on, and uses his free hand to flip all of their previously logged cases back in one fell swoop, feasting his wild eyes over the print-out he’d tapped to the inside of the cover and flipping back to today’s log with a sword for a pen.

 

Even now, if I consult the holy scale, I can pinpoint three separate distinctions that a) simply don’t apply to Remus, b) not at the number provided, or c) have to be stretched wide in order to fit him in. For one, numbers six and seven center the topic of sleep — which is a choice that I’ve come to find odd, but nevertheless, let’s have a look: six refers to the tier in which the lovely phenomena known as going to sleep without a cluster and being kicked awake by one too severe to have kept on sleeping, but that further sleep is an attainable goal seeing as the phenomena that Remus and I have come to know as the token restlessness (or as Kipple described it, ‘dancing’…) won’t have set in yet, seven referring to the tier in which further sleep is now unattainable unless, of course, you’re up for an impromptu sprint through the streets to tucker yourself out enough to have a chance at hitting the pillows again. Now, Remus certainly knows what it’s like to have innocently gone to sleep at the end of an evening without a cluster only to be whacked by one a few hours later, and I’ve certainly witnessed him struggling with the token restlessness at both his sixes and sevens, so at first glance, those distinctions seem helpful, useful even, but they aren’t, not very; I don’t have clusters so no one’s about to ask me how I’d have penned the pain scale that grew to be the Big Boy or anything, but I can say that I’d have Liked It if those two consecutive and rather important numbers on the scale had been used for just a little more than a question of, ‘Can he sleep without going for a sprint through the streets? It’s a six. No? Seven, then.' Nothing inherently wrong with it, may just be a personal pet peeve of mine that the distinction between sleep or no sleep took up so much real estate on an already sparsely detailed scale, but hey, sounds like that may have been a subjective choice and we’ve certainly been using our own sixes and sevens rather subjectively, so I do suppose we've come to the party dressed in-theme in that regard.

In a different vein, eights to Kipple are classified as follows: ‘Time to scream, yell, curse, head bang, rock, whatever works,’ and that’s a little more like it. If you’ve read through this book as thoroughly as I hope you have, then you’ll know almost as well as I do that Remus can reach into the depths of himself to carve out some devastatingly inspired swears when called to. The thing is, though, that man can and has certainly been known to yell up a storm at any level above a five if he deems it necessary and especially if outside forces have interfered, so it’s not as if he’ll just shout a morbidly funny curse and suddenly we both know it’s an eight; that’s nonsense talk. Moreover, Kipple and I both know what he meant by ‘head bang, rock’ and he wasn’t talking about a rockin’ time at a hair metal festival, but I've got to throw to Remus here and insist that he doesn’t start banging his head around on things until he’s been hit with a knockout, plain and simple. That’s desperation hour, that's when Raptured Remus comes out to play, and there is no room for conscious thought when Remus has hit his ceiling; it’s either his head moves for a bludgeon or his hands move for it so they can improperly introduce the bludgeon to his head; the body moving of its own accord, regardless of whether destroying the problem in that way could destroy the very owner of the body, and that shit *never starts before a ten, so I hope it goes without saying that we’ve been carefully loose with the Kip definition of an eight while using the parts that do ring true to Remus’s experience when we’ve had to classify an attack as that.

Conversely, number nine on the Kip Scale — the elusive, blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘er nine — is simply described as ‘the Why Me syndrome starts to set in,’ and while I feel for Kipple there, I do, that description just doesn’t paint a vivid enough picture for the supposed Second-Highest tier on the entire scale because believe you me, the ‘Why Me’ syndrome comes a-knocking to some degree whenever Remus has been snatched & slapped by another cluster, and for good reason; they’ve moved into his home uninvited and routinely trash the place on their way out, he gets to ask why him every time single time — I know I do and I don’t have an icepick burrowing its way out of *my* left pupil. What, humbly, were we ever to do with a nine by those standards? I’ve not known what to do with a descriptor so broad and yet so specific, and Remus sure hasn’t, he looks to me for a base point and unfortunately I’ve not had much of one, shockingly enough. I’ve wondered where his nines have been, when we’d see the day, presumed we’d eventually come to know and recognize what the notch below hell looks like for Remus based on the process of elimination alone, but now? Now, I’m having to wonder if that day already passed us by and we were too blind to notice it.

 

Sirius pauses his sword to simmer his agitation down, maybe breathe properly, but only the former works out for him; he can feel the heat of his agitation as he stares wide-eyed and unseeing out across the property, but he certainly can’t breathe as he darts his gaze back to the book and flips back a few pages from where he just left off. He overshoots his goal by a couple of pages, winds up fiddling with the edges of two that just really want to stay together despite him needing to part them for a minute, and if he’s breathing from there, it’s all rote; he’s not controlling that, he’s devouring bullet point after bullet point, flashing back to the night it all went down, and staring that rating in the face, angry with himself for not having caught it sooner and angry for being angry with himself, if he’s honest; it’s a little bit dual, this feeling inside. 

He could call himself a bloody novice, but that would just be redundant and the whirlpool of ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda’ is far too dangerous for him to be circling around unless his sole reason for going anywhere close to that drain is to keep the future lit up like a neon sign in front of them and that’s exactly what he’s got to do here. In a very real sense, he’s been working closely with Remus on a version of his 1-10 pain scale since as far back as October. He’s tweaked it, made adjustments to it whenever he’s had to yield and adapt to the changes in Remus’s pain receptors, refined it more and more as they’ve gone along and put double-digit experiences under their belts, and kept Remus so thoroughly at the centre of it all that their version of Remus’s pain scale may well be more of a Lup Scale than the Lup Scale even is; it’s got everything to do with him, evolved with him in mind and in heart, and Sirius has really never had another choice but to evolve with Remus and he’s not about to quit doing that now.

 

Regardless of whether an eight is Remus’s official yelling tier or not (and it’s not) or Remus’s official head-banging tier or not (and it’s very not), the beginnings of hysteria that're built right into Kip’s descriptor for an eight echoed the beginnings of hysteria that Remus had felt in himself and I had seen on him, and because I, and by extension, Remus, at least knew what to do with the beginnings of hysteria compared to something as ambiguous as ‘the Why Me' syndrome begins to set in,’ we have been taking cases that we both knew couldn't have been tens and tossing them down the ladder, over those lonely nines and into the eights — a category that, I’m realizing with every new second, has been doing the heavy-lifting of two categories, and I say it’s high time we start splitting them up accordingly.

See, generally speaking, if Remus can walk, talk, keep still well enough, go on working if that’s where he is when a cluster hits, keep his good eye open, and stand to hear the chatters and clatters going on around him at his place of work or otherwise, then he’s guaranteed to be experiencing an attack that’s a five or lower. If he’s shuffling around, rattling words off at increasing speeds, can’t hold still or keep from moving from foot to foot while standing in place, and can’t for the life of him hear the chatters and clatters going on around him without wanting to set the room on fire, or leave the backroom in any way, then he’s dancing with a demon that’s climbed high up the ladder and laughs at the prior five tiers. Usually, I don’t have to worry about him if he’s been hit with a five or lower whether he’s with me or at work — I Will do that, but I don’t necessarily Have to because he is very, very good at keeping a handle on himself, powering through until the boost’s kicked in, and is of no danger to himself or anyone else.

He begins to feel the urge to ease the pressure going behind his left eye (and/or closing around that temple) between the numbers of four and seven on his scale and his method of self-soothing usually entails rubbing, either by his hand, my hand, or whatever’s close by if his hands are too preoccupied, and his success rate with curbing the desire to scratch that itch is, as I’m sure you can imagine, quite dependant on how high or low the pendulum has swung inside of those given numbers, but it can also depend on where he is when he feels the itch. If he’s at work, stuck churning out a queue of drinks at the bar while his coworker is off on break, and the pendulum's swinging low, he can avoid touching his face (he works in service, he’s watched like a hawk behind that counter, and he knows it) and can wait it out until his coworker is back or at least until he’s got a few free moments to step off of the floor and handle it himself. If it is getting dire and he can’t feasibly step off the floor yet, his best option has been to lean that poor head of his against the top corner of the espresso bar, very discreetly move it back and forth, and hope that nobody noticed him doing it across the counter or wouldn't call him out for being uncouth if they did, and if the pendulum swings too high within those given numbers, then there’s no standing around, no waiting for his coworker to get back on the floor, no avoiding the intrinsic need to Move, none of that; he will pace around the café and do the kind of busywork one might see an employee doing when it’s ten minutes to closing time just to give himself an avenue to give in to the token restlessness that comes around at a seven.

We both agree on these distinctions and those won’t be changing today, but the numbers eight and nine along with their qualifiers are going to need a rehaul and I reserve the right to bulldoze distinctions that are no longer serving us in order to better serve us in the long run. See, sub-human strength begins to crawl out of the woodwork the higher up the ladder his pain crawls and up until tonight, I would’ve said with a measurable amount of certainty that Remus begins to hulk out at an eight — which, incidentally, would’ve been where I would've insisted that his incredible capacity for patience officially wears out, his Cluster Claustrophobia™ comes into full swing, and allowing background noise of any kind to go on around him would be a complete and utter mistake for someone in his presence to make, but I can no longer stand by those distinctions at that number after what I saw today compared to what I and a collection of well-meaning but clownish mates saw him do as recently as late June. All four of us watched, with owlish eyes, as our resident cherub launched a table square across his backroom with one kick, sent the chair he had just been sitting on skidding in the opposite direction, shouted to the high heavens in a bid for every panicking soul in the room to ‘shut the fuck up,' and lifted a mate clear off his feet at the very notion that he was being apprehended — all of that in the same ten-second block; our mates and I officially met and, as a direct result, coined the term Hulk Remus that night, for obvious reasons I hope, and we, and by that, I mean Remus and I, looked back on all of that from the post-cluster safety of his living room and filed the entire experience away as an eight.

Didn’t quite hit the bullseye on that one, I fear. While it’s true that sub-human strength begins to show signs the higher up the ladder his pain peaks, the fact of the matter is, I simply wasn’t in the truck with Hulk Remus today and that's what brings me great pause. I did, however, have an incessantly wriggling, uncommunicatively focused, laboriously self-soothing through measures that soon crossed the threshold of unacceptable territories, and feisty boy on my hands for the better part of an hour once I got a hold on him, and because my hands were indeed preoccupied with holding him in place and keeping those self-soothing measures in check, I couldn’t do much more than crouch before him, watch over as he hissed and whinged, hear him open his throat and give all the strife inside of him up to me, wade through my bamboozlement over whether this one was a category eight cluster and the question of how it was even possible we still hadn’t seen a nine yet, and taste bittersweet relief as he went lax in my arms when it was all over, all without losing hold of him once. To put this into perspective, that night we clownish four rode on down to Remus’s humble Workshire to rescue him from the jaws of fire? I had a hard time getting him to Stop streaking his head across the table he was hunched over without putting some Body into it, could hardly catch hold of him as he wrenched away from me like I was a stranger putting their hands on him, had to squeeze myself against he and the table he was fused to and hold him against me to get him to quit fighting the very idea of removing his head from the table’s surface, had to hope with all I had that he’d recognize it was me and go a bit easier on the ‘don’t you fucking touch me’ mantra he had going on (and he did :’) ), and it took three grown men to keep Hulk Remus down while we fiendishly planned out an exit strategy on the fly.

Now, this isn’t to say that I haven’t had to buck up and do the work of three grown men in order to get Remus out the other side of a ten because I certainly have; calling on the agility it takes to get him out of hell intact, learning how to be at least two steps ahead of Remus on what he’ll do and where he’ll go next, this is all stuff that can be done if I need to do it and I do need to when it’s that dire. Having said that, there has to be a distinction put in place between Raptured Remus, what we all saw of Hulk Remus that night back in June, and what I saw out of him today because they do not match up; if one spiritedly dedicated bloke could keep hold of him for as long as I did and with as little effort as I had to put in to get the job done today, then a case like that can’t possibly slot in at the same level that Hulk Remus does, just as Hulk Remus — for all he did to keep the lot of us in check that night — can’t sit comfortably beside Raptured Remus, who wouldn’t have the ability to recognize his own mum in a room with him, let alone his partner.  

In conclusion, our little scale is a work in progress, this book of case logs exists solely because I read someone’s general but encouraging recommendation that we start writing our cases down, we’re going to fumble the ball while we try to figure this all out as we go, and sometimes the learning curve can look an awful lot like a bell, but that just means we’re on the up already, hm? We’ve got things pretty damn air-sealed as far as ratings below an eight go, but as far as that and the other two, we’re overdue for a revamp; I plan on going back into the Infamous Work Cluster™ to correct the record on what we truly saw that day, and from there, I think we’d do well to pick through our previous case logs with newer eyes, determine what exactly Remus’s abilities and inabilities were at the time versus the abilities and inabilities of his support system(s), see just how many nines we could’ve previously met up with and didn’t know the wiser, and get a better sense of what to look for the next time a nine comes down the pipeline, but for now, in this moment, it’s with both a humble heart and a willingness to be proven wrong in one, two, three weeks from now, that I rate today’s cluster as an initial six that then rose to an eight (the real eight).

 

The moment Sirius finishes popping that period down on the page is the same moment he shakes out his writing hand, fans himself with his free hand to create a semblance of a breeze to cut through the sticky humidity that’s set in around him, and drums his heels into the three layers of blankets on the surface of the cargo bed in celebration of a bomb-ass breakthrough. 

He sets the pen down in favour of lighting up a new cigarette, partially to ring in a job well done and partially to have one that he may even actually notice himself smoking this time around, fancy that. He hangs both his elbows over the side of the bed and stretches his legs out ahead of him as he pulls off his new cigarette, putting thought as to where he might find some white-out around here. A-frame’s likely a bust and a half; it’s a pretty standard cabin and white-out doesn’t tend to come with one of those, but the house has got to have some of what he’s after. He casts his gaze out across the yard and toward the back of the house, celebrating the lamplight emanating from the den window and suggesting a continued presence downstairs; perfect, Hope’ll know where to find some. 

It’s another minute and toward the tail-end of a cigarette he has certainly been much more cognizant of before he hears the A-frame door pop open and shut in quick succession, garnering him to glance over his left shoulder at the steps before piquing fast as Remus pitches himself off of the top one and in Sirius’s very direction. The boy lands with some measure of his feet perched on the top of the back right tire, how much of which Sirius cannot see to confirm what with the large metallic wall currently between them, but it must’ve been just enough to go into a semi-crouch for here Remus is, reaching his arms around the front of Sirius’s shoulders and scooping him for a backwards hug that apparently couldn’t wait for him to get around to Sirius’s side of the bed to give to him straight-on; incredible, toe-tingling stuff right here. 

To make matters even better, Remus goes and sticks his chin over Sirius’s left shoulder, pressing a series of kisses hello-again over Sirius’s jawline, garnering him to lift his left hand up to clasp at Remus’s left wrist to keep him held in place and let his eyes fall shut for a much needed moment of bliss, knowing that if someone were to sketch out a quick doodle of his smile, it’d probably look a lot like a cartoonish, sideways ‘3’ for all the swooning Sirius is doing internally; it’s without further ado that he reaches his right hand over to stub his cigarette out in the tray and swipe the pen out from under his right leg, bringing the point of it up to Remus’s right forearm and doodling a little heart on the side of it. 

“So much for being squeaky clean, hm,” Remus quips.

“You’ll like it when you see it,” Sirius maintains, turning his head and leaving three smooches in quick succession at the right side of Remus’s jawline. 

Remus pops his right elbow up and bends his forearm more toward him, but it’s just no use from where he is at the moment. “I’ll have to get down first,” he slips him, breathing in like he’s gearing himself up to locate the will to do that very thing.

Sirius turns his head away as he reaches for the present sitting in the ashtray. “Well, there’s a fat blunt here with your name on it if that entices you any,” he raises him, bringing it around front of him. 

Remus’s cheek muscles twitch as he leaves a kiss over the shell of Sirius’s ear. “That would probably do it — oh, you weren’t kidding,” he snickers, eyeing the specimen Sirius is twiddling between his middle and right forefinger. “What, are we off to Glastonbury with that thing?” 

“It’s honkin’ enough that it could probably get us through the whole first day without a single other puff,” Sirius allows, lifting his left forefinger to hover it just ahead of Remus’s smirking lips. “That said, space your intake out a bit so you don’t overdo it with that throat, ‘kay? I’m not about to greenlist you or anything, but you are starting to sound a bit rough so let’s try to take this one slow.” 

Remus gives a big-lipped pout as he nods it out, uncurling his right hand from around Sirius’s collar. “Nice roll, you,” he imparts, giving Sirius’s mane a ruffle before climbing on down.

Full of pride, Sirius shimmies in place as Remus moves around front of the cargo bed, looking a right snack in nothing but his flannel trousers and boasting a set of bowed lips as he bends his right forearm in toward him for inspection, his lips at a twist as he passes his left thumb over the doodle left to him. He has to drop the both of his arms to utilise them in climbing up onto the bed, offers an enticed, throaty hum as he looks around at their digs for the night on his way up, and slides in front of Sirius’s main line of vision, lowering himself onto three layers of blankets with a dainty little move.

Remus leans back on the heels of his palms, breathing in as he gives a sweeping glance around. “I love what you’ve done with the place,” he imparts, his damp head o’ hair haloed by the porch light as he turns it toward the top of the bed and gives out a prompt snort. “Did you cart every pillow you could find out here?”

“Not including the one’s inside the house, mhm,” Sirius affirms, flipping back to get to the start of today’s case. “There were a whole bunch more of them sitting at the top of the linen closet and I said, the prince needs every one of these cushions for maximum buoyancy.”

“Hope that’s more true than I even know yet,” Remus quips, turning his head back to Sirius with a wry smile on and taking to budging Sirius's left knee with his right one. “OK, somebody had a lot to say.”

Sirius gives up a jaunty hum in return. “Nearly five full pages of things to say,” he offers up, folding the book in half to make it easier to hold onto one-handed. 

“Two pages full pages of nothing but question marks?” Remus guesses. 

Sirius snorts once. “Well, there are sections where the words could easily translate to many of those things, yes, but I do think I stuck the landing,” he trades him, holding both the book and the blunt out to Remus with a light, eager smile on his lips. “Your roster, sire.” 

Remus eyes him once with a snort, lifting out of his reclined position to scoot more toward him, his right hand on track for Sirius's visage. “You’re a little too good a listener at times,” he forwards him, curling his right forefinger into a little hook and bringing it back and forth across the tip of Sirius’s nose. 

And look at that, Sirius’s nose is tingling now, too. “Mhm, I am,” he echoes, leaving a kiss to the side of Remus’s hand while it’s still close.

Remus accepts the joint from him and scritches his free hand at a spot on his forehead, his gaze flickering left, right, over past Sirius where he uses that same free hand to pluck up the lighter, back to Sirius, and finally to the book still very much hovering between them, his gaze lingering on it for another two, exceptionally lagged beats before his eyes take to full, owlish shape. “Oh, you want me to take it,” he realises, lifting his free hand toward the book with a frankly adorable snicker.

“I do, yeah,” Sirius echoes, unhanding the book with a smile and a wave-off. “Now, do you have your mobile on you because I sure don't?"

"Mm, yeah," Remus offers, setting the book over his lap to reach that hand into the right pocket of his fannels to tug it out.

"Perfect, love that," Sirius offers, taking it from him. He makes sure the backside is pointed toward the front of the bed and very away from Remus's eyes before he toggles the flashlight on and sets the device face-down a little to the left of Remus's situation so the light streams upwards but casts a sidelong glow over his lap. "Helpful?"

"Much, thank you," Remus returns, sticking the joint between his lips and sparking the lighter over the end of it.

"OK, I’m just going to pop inside real quick, so you go ahead and get a headstart,” Sirius bids him. 

Remus nods him off while puffing to get the end of the blunt lit, but that boy is all too casual for all he's got waiting for him and that thought alone is thrilling; Sirius scoots himself around to face the ledge of the bed and pitches himself off the back of it, brimming with excitement as he hops up the A-frame steps, but he looks back at Remus as he gets to the landing, figuring he probably could afford to spare him a bit of a warning.

“I should say, though,” he raises, holding his right hand up and out to him, “there’s a definite stream-of-consciousness vibe to this one; I kept to the typical format, but I clearly needed to release all that was on my mind, so once you get out the other side of it, I won’t take offence to the suggestion of editing it into something a bit more — succinct, we’ll say.”

Remus’s browline forms a quick squiggle as he puts his head at a tilt, sending the result of his breathwork out to the left of him. “Well, I’m not going to go through with a scathing red pen,” he trades him, the corners of his lips quirking. “You’re not getting graded here.” 

“No, I know, but you’ll see what I mean; there’s a lot of me in there and I’m generally a lot,” Sirius offers, tilting his head back and forth idly before the immediacy of his warning sounds a bit off to his own ears; down to it, there’s nothing but love seeping out of those pages so, by and large, Remus should get the full experience without having to think in editing mode just yet. “How's this, read it as is and then once you're done, we can tackle what to keep and what to toss later if that’s what you think we ought to do; you’re the boss.”

A subdued smile makes its way onto Remus's lips before a hum of agreement leaves them. He refocuses on the book in his lap, his lower lip disappearing past his teeth as his gaze starts up along the page, and with that, the brimming excitement returns and incites Sirius to scamper in through the A-frame door, slipping his feet in his shoes and having a look down at himself with a newly quizzical eye; while sitting out there in his skivvies proved to be a great plan once the thickness to air really set in, strolling on into the house looking for white-out while wearing nothing but a t-shirt and briefs does feel a tad too comfortable of a choice, even for him and this house. He moves for the desk chair, tugs his housecoat off the back of it, and pulls his arms through the sleeves, scooting back out of the cabin and shutting the door behind him with gusto.

He clears the stairs in one jump and scurries left of the truck while tying the sash around his middle, housebound, babey, but Remus gives up a sputter from behind him to suggest he's quite confused about that choice.

“Oi?” he calls out. “I thought you were taking a piss, not running off into the night?”

Sirius swivels around about halfway toward the garden. “I’m running off to find white-out,” he trades him, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

Remus tilts his head with a wry squint about him. “That’s the most excited I’ve seen anyone be about a need for that,” he forwards. 

“Oh, you don’t even know,” Sirius attests, clapping his hands once and nodding toward the far-off lad. “Get to it, boy; you’ve got a right twister waiting for you in there.” 

“The good or bad kind?” Remus calls, splaying his palms toward him. 

“Depends how you look at it, but I say it's good,” Sirius sends back, pointing back toward the house. “Where might I find some of that stuff?” 

Remus point past Sirius and toward the house with the joint in his right hand. “Try the desk in the den first and if not, the one in my room might be the next best place to look,” he forwards him. “Can you switch the laundry over while you’re in there, then?” 

“Done and done,” Sirius says of it, sending him a firm salute before swivelling back around and making for the house.

He shoots up out of the garden, scuttles to the top of the porch steps, and peers in through the den window on his way by, spotting no immediate sign of Hope in the room which could explain Lyall laying flat across the full length of the hide-a-bed with his right arm tossed over his face and looking out cold. He quickly changes the landing of his footfalls, keeping to a soft pitter-patter as he rounds the bend and heads up the shorter side of the ‘L’ shaped porch toward the back door. He turns the knob with a discreet flick of his right wrist and slips into the den sidelong to avoid having to open the door the whole way, stepping onto the mat and pressing the door shut behind him with an impressively muted latch, but he has snuck in and out of situations a lot more dubious than a den with a snoozing Lyall in it.

He foots his shoes off in the stillness of the den and leaves them on the mat, making a beeline for the far-left corner of the room and stopping at the desk, unsure of which drawer would prove to be the winning one now that he’s here. There are seven in total, a quaint stack of three on either side of the computer chair and a lengthier drawer currently being blocked in by said chair, and while the last thing he'd really want to do here is open the drawers one by one and risk making a racket in the process, without much more direction than a simple ‘check the desk,’ he hasn’t got a lot of alternatives other than to start from the top and hope the white-out isn’t sitting inside the one drawer at his disposal that’s got a chair sandwiched in front of it. 

He inches the top-left drawer open with his left hand and does his best to sift rather than rifle through it with his right one, but he winds up going completely still with the open drawer in his grip as he notes a low hum in the room with him. “Right, and there are facilities in place for this exact situation,” Lyall drawls, pulling a spooked hoot right out of Sirius with it. 

He gives a slow turn of his head back toward the couch, finding Lyall over there peering out from underneath his right forearm with a narrow-eyed smirk trained on him and a definite cordless phone pressed to his left ear. “Shit, sorry,” he whispers, giving in to a half grimace, half smile. “I thought you were asleep.”

Lyall gives in to a face that suggests he’d love to be just that before tipping his chin toward him. “What’re you after?” he bids.

“Remus said there could be white-out in here,” Sirius supplies, feeling a bit silly now. 

Lyall gives a faint hum, lifting his right arm languidly and going long with the point of his forefinger as if gesturing past him. “Think there’s some in that middle one there,” he directs him. 

Sirius huffs a small, disparaging laugh. “Of course,” he accepts, shutting the fruitless drawer and scooting the chair out of the way to get into the winning one, and would you look at that, it’s the strips too; none of that blobby liquid stuff here.

Lyall clicks his tongue loudly behind him and it takes one off-beat with a glance over his shoulder for Sirius to clue into the fact that it hadn’t been lodged at him at all. “Well, I obviously am still here, but I’ve already said my piece, no?” he puts up, his gaze set on the middle distance as he gives in to an inwardly pressed laugh. “I never said it was going to be easy, but you’d have the most luck out of anyone convincing her that she needs to go.”

Sirius faces the drawer he’s half-in with a thin line for a pair of lips, swipes the white-out from the drawer, and drops it into the right pocket of his housecoat, righting the situation at the desk before moving on to the second reason he came in here and offering a parting smile to Lyall as he moves for a kitchen. 

He gets a distracted one in return, nothing particularly shocking about that, and heads through the archway connecting the two rooms, rounding the far side of the kitchen table and making it over to the top of the basement stairs. “And?” Lyall raises bemusedly. “Here’s what you do: make some calls, see who’s got an availability so you get the ball rolling in the background, and while you’re doing that, play up the concern as much as you can when her ear’s near and she’ll see things your way eventually, if not sooner.” 

There’s a definite moment there wherein Sirius really wants to linger around at the top of the stairs some more, but movement from below takes over his entire concentration and has him pulling in a vast breath as he shoots down the stairs to the landing, sending a noise of affront toward the busy-body over there transferring their clothes into the dryer and humming a tune like this is all just fine. 

“Excuse me, Hope,” he greets. “Stop that now, please; I’m here to do it.” 

“Oh, don’t bother with that; I’m nearly done,” Hope trades him, waving him off over her shoulder. 

“You could be just starting for all I know,” Sirius returns her. “I admit we got a bit distracted, but that doesn’t mean we were expecting you to handle it; it frankly never means that.” 

“Well, I didn’t go thinking that myself, but it buzzed a little while ago and I let it be for a little while before I thought, ‘well, this is silly, I’m right here,’” Hope relays, finishing up with the newest clump of clothing she’s pulled out of the washer before looking round at him with a glint in her eye. “Aren’t you supposed to be on a date?”

Sirius sends a pronounced huff her way, but he imagines the force of it was rather marred by his inability to control the muscles around his mouth; nothing to do about that, but Hope is right in the sense that there is a boy out there that Sirius would like to get back to and he can at least do something about that.

He swivels on his heel to make the climb back up the stairs. “The rest of the task is ours so I don’t want to see you carting that out to us,” he sends her. “We’re big, capable boys n’ all.”  

“Well, I’m heading up after this and taking that one with me, so the rest is certainly all yours,” Hope maintains.

Sirius stops halfway up the steps, drops to a crouch, and points his right forefinger through the gap between the basement ceiling and the surface of the steps while he’s still got a slim visual on Hope, hoping to showcase just how much he expects her to stay true to her word and receiving a distinct point in return for it. “I’ll leave the back door unlocked in case one or both of you get a bit peckish later on," she passes him. "All I ask is that one of you locks up before going to sleep, but you aren’t barred from the kitchen just because we’ve turned in; have you got that?” 

“Oh, I had that feeling, trust,” Sirius trades her, pulling his arm out of the gap and lifting from of his crouch to head up the rest of the steps.

As centred and, dare he say, hopeful as he's managed to find himself on this side of things, he doesn’t wholly trust his stomach in regards to receiving and then keeping a meal down, and to that, it’ll likely take some time before he’ll be able to forget what a mixture of bread, melon, carrots, and lemonade tastes like coming back up, so it’s a no for him as far as snacking goes, and in terms of the boy out there, while Sirius can’t imagine he’d go for a dinner plate this late in the evening, Remus could do well with a light snack; might be on to take something out to him. 

He makes a quick right at the top of them and stops off at the fridge, having a peek in at the contents of it as Lyall gives out a grunt-n’-sigh combo from a little ways behind him. “I really think you’re underestimating your pull here and I’m not sure why we’re evening doing that,” he maintains, his voice carrying a tinny note that wasn’t there before. "OK, you know what, fine; if she really won’t back down, you could always look into homecare — just be sure you’re checking in on that nurse regularly if you go that route.”

Sirius tosses a quick smirk over his shoulder and finds the man’s eyes shut while he’s got his free forefinger and thumb pressed against the bridge of his nose; a prime Remus-ism that may actually have been a Lyall-ism all along. He looks back at the fridge, but the more he considers their bounty, the more he can’t see Remus taking him up on a snack, not after he went to all the trouble to ensure he’d be able to get good and railed after a long day of dispersed snacking; perhaps later on in the night, but that lad’s not gonna put a single piece of food in his mouth until he’s been got and that’s just the truth.

“Well, if you really think it’s that dire, then just have her move into yours, yeah?” Lyall raises invitingly, sounding a teensy bit like he’s talking to a child and that’s a bit of fun, no doubt about that. “She’d jump at an offer from you quicker than either of those options, there’d be four perfectly capable people to help keep an eye on her there, and you could potentially sleep a bit better at night knowing you haven’t handed her over to members of a staff or some poor nurse who haven’t done a thing to deserve it; not a bad plan if everybody wins.” 

Sirius swishes the point of his lips back and forth, staring at, into, and completely past what’s left of their bag o’ baby carrots as he sets his full attention on the situation brewing out in Belfast, but he’s not going to be able to keep this charade up for much longer and his heart rate seems to know it as well as his brain does; he’s got seconds left to keep letting chilled fridge air waft into the open kitchen and even that’s generous. “Look, I’m going to have to assume you wanted my input on this — the reason why that is, I can’t come up with myself, but getting rung up twice in the same night sure does give me that impression,” Lyall serves up, his voice beginning to sound a lot like Remus’s tends to when his patience is at the cusp of running out. “I've given you plenty of suggestions, ones that any Joe Blow could have given you by the way, but this Joe Blow doesn’t know what else you want him to tell you.” 

Sirius inches the fridge door shut and scoots out of immediate eyesight, moving in between the sink and the table to aim a pair of tooched lips at his reflection in the window for someone to celebrate all the ‘tude taking over that den; even in a perfect world he couldn’t have imagined possessing the kind of luck that would've brought put him in the house as a show like this was about to go on, but it feels a right miracle that Lyall hadn’t taken it upon himself to wait until Sirius wandered back out of the house to even continue this conversation.

Then again, that may not be up to Lyall. “Well, for God’s sake, man, be serious; she’s sure as shit not coming here,” he puts out, sounding borderline goaded into displaying what should’ve been obvious before giving in to a short, low, and weighty laugh that Sirius would never want to hear trained on him. “If 'by my design,' you mean the blueprints had already been laid out and I learned how to build off of them, then you’d be correct, but I don’t think that’s what you were implying … no, don't do that; I don’t know how I got pulled into a conversation as ridiculous as this one, but I’m in it now, by your design, so the least you could do is speak up.”

The effort it takes to keep his jeer internal practically inverts Sirius’s lungs and it was still close; so, so very close to escaping him. “A-ha, … tale as old as time, but I’ll tell you what, this one’s gotten elderly,” Lyall offers, exceptionally polite. “How a man still holds the title of family vagabond despite remaining sedentary for over twenty years, I’ll never know, but for you to be parroting it? Would love to know when that started, Lew.” 

The echo of rumbling starting up in the basement is exceptionally inconvenient in that things were just getting spicy and now he’s got fifteen seconds, perhaps thirty if he’s lucky, to get himself somewhere less conspicuous before Hope comes up here and catches him snooping, and boy, does he feel the pressure now that he’s under it. Hiding under the table would be the quickest option but that’s not going to do him any favours when he’d be completely noticeable under there, going out the back way would draw even more attention to himself, and leaving his shoes behind in favour of darting through the house and going out the front, while on-brand for him, could come off worse to Lyall than if he just quietly left the way he came in and that, ultimately, is what makes the decision for him. Lyall already knows he’s in here — some amount of that ambushed man over there knows Sirius is still around here somewhere — and he hasn’t let that censor him; there is no way Sirius is about to risk Lyall thinking he's sent him a message by running out of here and avoiding him completely. 

Into the den he goes, keeping his gaze trained on the carpet between his feet as he moves for the mat, and there Lyall goes, ramping right up. “Wrong again, and for something you didn't need to be," he puts down. "Now, there is a reason you’re the only one left and you can be angry, bitter, whatever you want to be about how things shook out, but what you’re not going to do is act surprised that this falls to you now or expect me to take any further part in it; you signed up for this, I washed my hands of it.”

Sirius hollows his cheeks out as he foots his shoes around on the mat to get at them better from the angle he's at, but oddly enough, fine motor skills can take a bit of a hit when you’re trying to make a hasty retreat and really want to know where something’s going in one swoop? Who knew.

“And what’s he got to fucking do with it?” Lyall blasts out, and there goes the rest of Sirius’s motor skills; he’s bloody useless now. “No, no, you leave him out of it — better yet, don’t spit his name out like that or you’ll be lucky to speak it again—”

“Lyall?” Hope chimes in, her exact location unknown but definitely on the ground floor, meanwhile Sirius can’t even get his heels into his shoes; he’s trapped on the scene with hooves for feet. “Great place to jump off.” 

Even with advice as sound and calmly put as that, if Sirius can hear the unintelligible echo of the earful Lyall’s getting on the other end of the line, there’s a strong chance she’s able to catch it as well, but whatever all that noise amounted to, sure seems like the line Lyall drew in the sand got leapt over rather than crossed. “No, we’re done here,” he puts down. “I’ll ask that any and all updates concerning this be sent along electronically so we won’t have to do this shit again — oh, I fucking mean it; don’t you be ringing me, I've had it.”

A few, long beats as thick and heavy as the air outside pass before Lyall’s sucking in a breath like he caught his hand over an open flame and cutting off the call at top speed, and oh, the things Sirius would do to know what finally got him hanging up, but it had to have been vicious if the first thing Lyall can think to do after it's done is to clutch the cordless in an immense chokehold.

Hope’s in the room in under a second. “Well, what the fuck was that?” she puts up, and well, she did tell him she appreciates a well-placed ‘fuck’ and all, Sirius should've seen it coming. 

“My trial,” Lyall bites out, apparently thinking better of the chokehold when he wouldn’t be so easily able to lob the cordless into the air and give it a resounding kick from below with his good foot if he kept trying to strangle it and that would’ve been a shame given that the cordless wouldn’t have soared over Lyall’s head in a lovely half-arch only to bounce off of the back of the armchair and land face-up and surprisingly all in one piece on the furthest possibly ledge of the chair cushion. 

And with that, the last drop of Sirius’s resolve leaves his body and casts the very shell of him back into the corner by the closet. “I’m sorry,” he wheezes, waving his hands in front of the mirth washing over his visage as he leans back into the place he's been put. “It’s not funny; it’s not funny at all.” 

“Oh, no, that was funny,” Hope puts it, blinking up a storm in the den doorway. 

That alone might’ve done the trick, but that paired with the fatigued grin that splits over Lyall’s face the more he settles down has Sirius feeling immeasurably calmer about his front-row seats for the show. “Sorry, kid,” Lyall slips him, lifting his right hand to drag it over his face. “That wasn’t me; it was a demon.”

Sirius gives a bright, one-note bork from the corner. “Either way, I’m not getting in a ring with you or the demon if I can help it,” he maintains. 

“Don’t show my son the underside of a bus and you won’t have to,” Lyall returns him, dropping his hand to his with a distinct plop. 

Sirius doesn’t have the time to make clear how little he plans on doing that for Lyall trains his fatigued gaze on Hope and the stare they share is both extremely private and overwhelmingly difficult to look away from. “What do we think, might be time to turn in?” she raises, crossing over to pluck up the abandoned cordless and walking it back to the mount.

That certainly does wonders to break the spell Sirius got pulled under, sending his gaze downward and toward his continued hoove issues and dropping his left forefinger to pull back on the heel of his left shoe. Lyall gives a grunt that sure suggests he’d like nothing more than to bounce on out of here, it’s just that he’s still horizontal and, once he’s heaved himself off of his back, has a prosthetic to wrestle his residual limb into before he can even get to leave the room. 

Sirius watches him out the corner of his eye as he moves on to his right shoe, overlooking a process that he’s seen from Lyall a handful of times before, both in forward motion and in reverse, and every time he’s seen it, even now when Lyall’s typical fluidity is taking a bit of a hit thanks to a strong bout of stewing, he’s found himself quietly marvelling over how quickly the process can go when it’s really just a matter of rolling the sleeve of Lyall’s personal right ankle until it stretches past his calf before he’s good to go, but this is the first he's found himself wishing that Lyall didn’t have to bother with any of it, thinking the rest of them are pretty damn lucky they can just fuck off out of a room they’ve just had a blazing row in and not even have to think of the mechanics of actually doing it. 

‘Course, he certainly is staring out the corner of his eye, so is it surprising that Lyall would look over and catch him looking as he’s hauling himself to his feet? Not at all, but Sirius still flushes to the moon and back because of it. “Must be a pain, not being able to storm off when you really might want to,” he puts out, dropping his right shoe to the mat and standing to attention over it. 

Lyall snorts once. “At ease, soldier,” he serves him, moving out from between the coffee table and the hide-a-bed, and Sirius only just recovered from getting blasted into the corner and now this? How dare he find out that line came from Lyall before it would've ever left Remus's mouth and cut through a wall of tension in the process. "It is a pain, and having to lug it on just to climb the stairs and take it right back off again isn’t much of a perk either, but I just keep telling myself this could’ve been my lot in the ‘50s and this thing would’ve been an utter menace to take on and off; they’ve come a hell of a long way with them.” 

Sirius throws his gaze over to Hope standing next to the lamp in the far corner of the room, waiting with her left hand poised under the lampshade for Lyall to officially clear the coffee table before she tugs on the chain and douses the far side of the den into relative darkness. “Damn, Hope,” he raises, “how’d you find such a catch?” 

Hope’s wry smile is one for the books, even if what's left to illuminate it is the light strewing in from the kitchen and the lamp over behind the armchair. “Still guessing,” she trades him, giving a past the couch. “Do you mind grabbing that one for me?” 

Sirius follows her direction to the lamp standing aglow behind her armchair. “Sure thing,” he trades her, heading for it. 

“I am perfectly able to grab a lamp, so we're square,” Lyall puts out there, turning on his heel to head back toward the armchair and beating Sirius to the lamp by a slim margin. “Don’t you have a date to attend?”  

“Oh my god, you two,” Sirius huffs, waving g’bye and g’night before casting himself out the back door. 

It’s there in the yellowish glow of the porchlights hanging overhead that Sirius starts the walk back and thumbs at the outer ridge of the white-out in his pocket as he walks, delving right into a fervent debate over whether he best share what he overheard with his main man or let it stay inside where it happened. 

His first impulse is to break off sprinting to the boy and spew all information possible, of course; Sirius can’t possibly pretend the impulse isn’t strong or that he doesn’t feel a sense of obligation to share it with him; he wouldn’t know what to even do with the immense tension that very clearly lives in the corners of that house if Sirius hadn’t first suggested there might’ve been something curious going on Lyall’s side of the fam and sparked Remus’s own curiosity to form where it hadn’t previously existed. He wouldn’t know how to make sense of even half of what he heard in there if Remus hadn’t run to him with the information he’d gotten out of Lyall, what, weeks back now, and more plainly than either of those, Remus would want to know if some shit just went down in there. There’s very little room to imagine he wouldn’t, but there is room to question whether he'd really want to know that he got dragged into it and Sirius lets himself right into the door to that room. 

On a base level, sure. Who doesn’t want to know when they’ve made a cameo in a conversation they weren’t present for, privy to, or even part of initially, but that boy felt itchy enough just hearing uncle’s dejection from miles and miles away, he’d break out in hives knowing that dejection brewed into something heavier, and what would Sirius even say, come to that? Now, he could omit the details involving Remus and hand over the rest to him, but the rest only amounts to ‘seems your gran’s having a rough go and a wrestling match broke out over who’s responsible for her now that she's unable to be responsible for herself,’ and how is Remus not going to press for more? And to that, would Lyall really want him scuttling over to his son with half a pot of tea for that matter? 

He trails his way up the cobblestone path, risking near-permanent etches in his right thumb as he frets his way through the garden. What he does next matters in ways Sirius could’ve only hoped they would one day and now the day’s here, he’s not sure whose trust he’d be respecting more if he left the ball in Lyall’s court. 

Sirius turns out of the garden with a shallow breath, setting his gaze on that porch-lit boy over there looking right engrossed in a book that’s perfectly tailored to him, and it sure feels like that’s that, then; Remus hardly ever gets to feel like he comes first in his own life, Sirius isn’t about to be what tells him he’s second. 

He can’t help a shimmy from starting up as he passes by the hammock, biding the handful of seconds he’s got left to traverse before he can launch himself up there and rejoin him for what’s bound to be a Remus-centred party, but his shoulders straighten all the way out as he spots Remus wiping at his eyes with the heels of his palms and all but leaving his head in his hands, and what a pull toward the bed that is.

“What’s wrong?” Sirius implores, breaking into a sprint just to get to him that much quicker. 

Remus peeks out from between his fingers, takes to a feeble shake of his head as he brings his hands down, and the only detail that stops Sirius from being wholly nervous about the corners of Remus’s mouth drooping into the deepest frown imaginable is the fact that there are a pair of dinner plates a few inches above that frown; something’s happened, no doubt about that, but it can’t be all that bad if Remus is looking at him like that. 

Sirius slows to a stop ahead of the bed, shaking his head as he searches Remus over for even just one more clue than he’s got to go on now and garnering Remus to take in a long, long, very long breath as he flips back a page and scans over it with a searching right forefinger. He leaves the pad of that finger pressed against a spot more toward the bottom of the page he went back to, pushes himself around to face out the back of the bed, and takes the book with him as he scoots over to meet up with Sirius there, lifting the book from above with his left hand and holding it directly in-between them. 

Sirius blinks quite a bit as his eyes adjust to the large blotch of white broken up by thin etchings of blue ink that take up his line of vision, hones in on the two words sitting directly under Remus’s forefinger from there, and goes into a misty smile as Remus starts circling that finger around and around ‘your agency’ before he starts widening the circle, covering more and more area with each swirl and effectively registering that it’s those two words as well as the greater paragraph they belong to that have his eyes looking like that, have him feeling this touched, have him making such a dually complicated expression. 

Remus lets the book go limp in the grip of his left hand, moves it out from between them, and seeks out Sirius’s gaze with those dinner plates on lock and a smile staring to form where his frown once lived, stealing Sirius’s breath away in the process, but not his words — those, he’s got plenty to give. “I know I can’t ever fully get it, but you can at least bank on me trying,” he offers him, going into a bit of a moonlit sway, but if the shoe already fits, he's sure as hell going to wear it. 

A huff of a laugh bubbles up and catches in Remus’s throat. “‘Trying,’” he repeats, shaking his head with a frank glance toward the sky overhead. “You know me better than I do.” 

Sirius hooks his hands at the small of his back, feeling rather charmed as he continues his swaying, and feels rather strongly about Remus watching him do it with a fond glint flickering behind the film coating his eyes, his breath catching in his own throat as Remus uncurls his crossed legs from beneath his frame and drops them down over the edge of the bed, effectively encasing Sirius where he stands.

“I’m never letting you go,” he reports, his gaze steady and unmoving. “You know that?” 

Sirius ducks his head to the right and smiles into the crook of his neck, becoming the official hybrid between humanoid and goo as he does his best to nod in the confines he’s put himself in. "Same here, pal,” he laughs out, or chokes out — it’s whatever. “You know that?” 

“It’s sinking in,” Remus answers, and d’you know what, now that there’s indeed a quality lap for Sirius to cross his arms overtop of and use as a balancing tool in the wake of an admission that big, don’t mind if he does, thanks much, bracing the boy’s thighs like anything less would have him buckling at the knees and goon-grinning up at him like they’ve won the world, and honestly? Feels a lot like they have and that’s got to be half if not most of the battle. 

Remus pulls his lower lip into his mouth, gives a quiet whir at the back of his throat, and trails those dinner plates of his up, down, and all over Sirius before darting his gaze past Sirius and lifting his right thumb toward him, seemingly coming in for a chin swipe, maybe a lower lip tug if Sirius should be so lucky, but for a quick beat, a moment so short it could’ve gone unrecognized if Sirius weren’t so dialled-in to him, Remus hesitates even with the darkened den he undoubtedly found over there, his thumb freezing up in mid-reach. 

“Oh, you had better touch me,” Sirius makes plain, putting his head on an expectant, right-hanging tilt. “We just had a moment to end them all.” 

A small laugh leaves Remus’s lips and then the caresses come, one swipe of Remus’s thumb over his chin, one over each of his lips, one long line up the left side of his jaw, a curve over the shell of his left ear, and finally, a scritch at the back of his head, his hand cupped at the juncture of his neck and skull with his fingertips tucked into his hair and garnering a loaded breath out Sirius’s lungs. Even with a pair of lidded peepers, Sirius does have it in him to catch Remus darting his gaze toward the book he’s still halfway holding up and out of their immediate way in his left hand before meeting back up with Sirius’s gaze, toeing a very fine line, it appears.

He sucks a breath in through his teeth, pressing his eyes shut. “I can always cool it,” he maintains, his Adam’s apple bobbing as aims to swallow down that rockin’ libido of his.

“Now why would I want you to do that?” Sirius trades him, kicking his shoes off ahead of the bed and rocking forward on the balls of his feet to make like he’d really love to climb up there with him if only he had the room to do it. 

Remus gives a noted hum the moment it registers, pushing himself back on the bed to lift his legs up onto it in one swoop, and curls in to get his hands underneath Sirius’s arms, getting one hell of a grip for purchase and effectively scooping Sirius off his feet and takes him at least half of the way up there himself, the rest of the job going to Sirius’s scuttling legs. He lands with a heartful scramble, planting his knees astride Remus’s legs, and scurries up to perch over his thighs, relishing in the height advantage he’s just won himself; getting to tip Remus’s chin up to meet his heated kiss from below, tasting the sweet breath of relief Remus breathes against his lips, having Remus push his hands past the lapel of his housecoat and go for a purchasing feel of Sirius’s waist, feeling him timing each drag of his nails to fit quite nicely with mouth-watering rolls of his tongue — it’s all gorgeous, every single part of it, which is why, if he weren’t used to the ways in which Remus’s body can chart a separate path than his big ol’ brain, Sirius might’ve found the abrupt pause on everything rather dizzying, but not anymore; much easier to smile politely and wait for the inevitable explanation for the lack of lips against his.

“You sure?” Remus checks, breath dancing over Sirius’s chin as he does his due diligence.

“Oh, yeah; positive,” Sirius extends, chasing after and licking back into Remus’s mouth.

A puddle of goo is really all that Remus is made of for about good — and thirsty — thirty at least before his brain waves start up again. “But you wrote so much,” he muses, tossing a glance toward the rather shipwrecked book a step or two behind Sirius now. 

“Mhm, and I’ll still have written that much whether we read it now or after,” Sirius highlights, reaching his right hand down to procure the white-out from the pocket of his housecoat and tossing it over by the ashtray in the meantime. “Not likely the book’s going to go running off while we’re not looking, I don’t think.”

Remus pokes his tongue out to wet his already kissed-soaked lips, so there’s Sirius’s attention back on those beauties as he rides up against the very notable ridge rising between them, and there’s Remus’s resolve, thinning before Sirius’s very eyes. “I just don’t want it to seem like I’m blowing you off,” he breathes out, aiming a flick to Sirius’s left peck for emphasis.  

“Well, you’re not, but I heard your back’s needing a blowout, so,” Sirius serves him, going for a weighing gesture with his hands before dropping his head down to take Remus’s pulse point into his mouth. 

“Well, yes, but that was before you turned a case log into a little love letter,” Remus manages, but boy, is it tightly wound. 

Sirius lets go of Remus’s pounding pulse to blow against it. “I’ll write a love letter on you right now,” he raises, an even smile playing at his lips that only deepens into a listless one. “We’re going to get to it, Remus; I'm pumped that there's so much more you haven't even scratched the surface of yet, but — I mean, what the hell are we doing all this for?”

“This?” Remus repeats. 

“Well, that,” Sirius raises, tossing his right thumb back at the shipwrecked book over there and moving on to giving an observing gesture around them with both of his hands, taking his gaze up to the sky and all around them, “this, all of it; what’s it for and how is any of it supposed to be bearable if we’re not enjoying each other, when we want, however we want?”

If Sirius thought Remus was totting around a set of dinner plates for eyes before this point, they’re holding the full course meal as he scoots back toward the pillows at the top of the bed with a tug for Sirius to come along and do it quickly at that, and Sirius will certainly go with him, just not without evening things out a little more, weighing himself down so Remus can’t tug him or himself any further than the ashtray and reaching for the three-quarter length blunt sitting in it. 

He hangs the filter between his lips as he gathers up the lighter to spark it, getting himself a good, long pull off of it and sending his resulting stream out to the right. “Just gotta catch up.” 

Remus keeps quite still, palms splayed over Sirius’s ribs, eyes focused and unblinking as he watches Sirius at it, and, d’you know, he was only going to nab a couple of tokes off of it, but now Sirius thinks he may well go for three or maybe even four; might as well let Remus enjoy the show if he’s liking the look of it this much. 

His plan winds up being far more successful than even Sirius could’ve bargained for in that Remus wrangles his hands out of Sirius’s housecoat to grab hold of his chin the moment his third haul is in and leans up to inhale it off of him, the slow, unhurried, and quiet exchange between them contrasting highly with Sirius rushed blind-swiping Sirius is doing with the cherry of the joint, moving back and forth in the ashtray a few times in hopes that it’ll detach and soon go out. He’s not got it in him to check to be certain either one of those things happened, however, not after the heated kiss Remus pulls him into, not when he’s got a faceful of Remus to delve into, and certainly not when he can press them flush together so that every one of his pushes and every one of Remus’s pulls toward the top of the bed count toward something like fire between them. 

Remus comes up for air when his head’s hit the pillows, his stare oddly sober considering the state of things. “You could be onto something, you know,” he puts up, reaching in between them to work at the tie of Sirius’s housecoat.

Sirius squints past the newly-formed haze over his eyes, looking down and back up at Remus in the span of the same beat. “Talking about you here?” he quips, hitching his hips up and in to better grant Remus access to the door of his housecoat.

Remus smirks three times in quick succession, shaking his head with it. “All three signals firing off at once, I mean,” he clarifies. “I know we’ve not seen anything like it before, but we’ve also not seen anything like it before, d’you know what I mean?”

Do I,” Sirius shoots him, gape-grin immediately applied on his lips. “I mean, to be fair, I could be shooting blanks at the wind here, but—” 

Remus coughs once, ducking his head through a whispery snicker as he pulls the tie free and pushes Sirius’s housecoat up and away from his hips. “That’s not either of those sayings.”

“—Who’s to say that we didn’t have them happen at once and weren’t able to know the difference because you were caught up with such a geyser of emotion back there?” Sirius represents, lifting up to work the housecoat off of his body and tossing it off behind him. 

“Geyser's perfectly right,” Remus says of it, lifting his right hand up to circle it around his head while he waits with his knees set apart for Sirius’s return. “There was so much pressure going on up here; I felt like my face was going to collapse in on itself, could hardly breathe, was leaking out both my eyes, my sinuses felt all out of whack — you might just be a genius, Sirius.”

Sirius gives a long and lustrous pfft. “Careful now, my head’s big enough as is,” he cautions. “I’ll settle for not knowing how to think inside of a box ever and that’s about it.” 

“Well, that, I will never take from you,” Remus maintains, giving an idle swing of his knees that pairs up perfectly with that keen smile on his lips — keen! He’s bloody keen about a merger between his warning signs; they really are in the thick of it, but at least they’re in it together.

“Add that in there for me, OK?” Sirius bids him, getting himself right back between Remus’s legs where he belongs. “I left you some room in case you had anything to add, but if it felt like you had a pressurized head back there then that’s definitely worth jotting down, even if a month or two from now it starts to look like today was a fluke; at least we’ll have covered our basses.”

“OK, I will,” Remus trades him, his eyes sparkling as he folds his legs over the back of him, settling in nice and easy.

Sirius hovers over him, reworking his mouth around a prime smile as he hooks his hands underneath Remus’s hips to get a solid grip on him. “So, as heartbreaking as it was to have our window slashed like that,” he raises, scooting Remus up a few inches and hitching his back onto the expanse of pillows he made sure to set up just, just right out here, “it might just be a bit too early to mourn our humble half-hour when we can’t really know if it’s truly gone yet.”

“Or whether we ever really had it,” Remus takes it, breathing in shortly once it’s left him and giving in to a feeble expression. “Force of habit; I’m actually excited, I swear.” 

“No, I can see that, but you’re right; it could go either way,” Sirius affords him. “Only, we’re not going to know more until we do and that could take time, so for now, the best we really can do is keep doing what we have been doing, track of patterns we notice, make note of blips when we see them, and work around every constraint we get thrown at us because you know what, we can at least do that; clumsily or not, on the fly or not, we figure things out because we have to, mm?” 

Remus hums the mhm back at him, a wry smile playing on his lips. “At the end of any day, that’s more or less our brand,” he cosigns it, his eyes bright and focused on him.

Sirius stamps his agreement on that by kissing him full, going for taste after taste after taste of him before he manages to quell his incredible thirst long enough to lean over to the right and get a better reach of their provisions sitting in the shadowy corner of the bed, rolling the lube out of there first and patting around for the condom next. “Wasn’t sure whether you’d want a glove for this one or not, but I brought one out just in case you weren’t looking to spend minutes at a time on the toilet afterwards,” he relays, twiddling the packet between his right middle and forefinger as he moves to settle back over him. 

“To be fair, right this very instant, I couldn’t care less whether you wore one or not, but I bet I might do once it’s all over and I’m stuck sitting on it,” Remus affords him, tapping twice on Sirius’s breastplate with a decided right palm. “You did good there.”

Sirius gives a celebratory shoulder-shimmy for the voucher as he slips his hands around the back of Remus, dipping his fingers below the waistband of Remus’s flannels and raking his nails up and over his cheeks; the response is all he could’ve wanted and more for Remus responds like an activation button not only got pressed but held down, jutting his hips between the weight of Sirius’s body and the force of his cheeky hands and meeting him at a metronome exclusively curated by one proud Sirius Black, and while it’s a certain kind of fiendish sight to watch him writhe around beneath and because of him, Remus going and reaching around behind his back to shove down on his waistband and effectively spearhead the flannels-extraction process is assertive in the way Sirius certainly lives to see on him. 

The eagerness wafting out of every morsel of Remus’s body language is a fine sight to add to the collection too, he’ll just say that; having him twisting and turning and lifting his leggy libs into the flannels extraction process once Sirius has entered the fray really has him making it snappy on his side of things, lifting up and tossing the flannels off behind him only to get locked right into place by Remus’s newly nude and rather commanding set of legs. Sirius slides his knees into place underneath Remus’s raised hips, reaches his palms back to smooth out Remus’s bent knees to gain a more malleable mould out of them, and hikes the undersides of Remus's thighs over the tops of his own, sparking an unearthly hitch in the depths of Remus’s throat before something between a smirk and a grimace flash over his visage.

“Tell me I didn’t hallucinate the lights being off in there,” Remus bids him, bracing his heels down on either side of Sirius’s body as if to ready himself for what’s coming to him. 

Sirius hums an affirming note, reaching for the lube tube and popping the cap. “Nah, you didn’t; they had to have gone upstairs by now,” he forwards, looking off to the right in thought and tossing a squint over his shoulder, trying to picture the layout of the second floor from memory and admittedly can’t visualize it so well when all he can visualize is Remus’s face mid-orgasm. “That being said; which window is theirs?” 

“Faces out the front, so we’re fine back here,” Remus maintains, hands searching for something to grip as Sirius gets his trigger fingers nice and coated. “That being said, if I hold back any, it’s just another force of habit and means nothing in regard to your performance.” 

Sirius sends him a bright tch as he dips his right hand between them. “There you go making me want to break the habit if I catch sight of it,” he trades him.

“Maybe I hoped that’d come of it,” Remus serves him, sounding real cocky for somebody who still hasn’t found something to anchor him down yet.

He’s forced to find a couple real quick, planting his left hand below his elevated hips and lashing his right hand out to wrap around Sirus’s free arm, latching on between Sirius’s forearm and wrist, and for a careful set of beats there Sirius puts a pause on his trigger finger, waiting to be sure Remus hasn’t grabbed him to suggest he better dial it back or get an extra coating on first and finding that it’s quite the opposite, his own breath catching in his throat as Remus tightens his grip around the radius of Sirius’s free arm and starts up a stroke, as if pulling him into motion himself, and with that, Sirius comes back swinging, watching the tendons in Remus’s throat twitch as he leans his head back and rolls his hips into the mix. 

He lets Remus tell him how, how much he’d like and how he'd like it too, bringing the pressure from below when driven down on and drinking in every hitched breath, choked note, tug at his left wrist that bringing all that pressure gets him in return. Does he get a bit carried away with it? Sure, one could say there’s a lot of extra time spent inside the prep department alone, but to that, Sirius’ll say this: There is an art to striking up a balance between readying him for what’s to come and giving him mini-previews of it along the way, and Remus so does appreciate the arts when Sirius dabbles in them. 

He seems to know without it being outwardly stated that it’s up to him when this part stage and the next one begins for when Remus has decided it’s time, he relinquishes hold of Sirius’s free arm to pat it like no tomorrow while reaching down in between his thighs to mime batting at Sirius’s busy right hand, beckoning it far and away for even greener pastures. Wholly inspired and absolutely willing to get started on stage two, Sirius shoves down on his briefs with his left hand, nabs up the condom packet with his right one to slash it between his teeth, and unfortunately has to keep the both of his hands on reserve to roll it on, but he’s not a magician, alright; can’t just snap and have the job be done already, as much as that ability would come in handy. 

He nabs the lube tube back up, squeezing out a little extra to go with the film already on the rubber, and while he’s doing that, Remus looks up and around in an odd sort of frenzy, slips his legs off of Sirius’s thighs, and turns halfway around to bat sideways at the pillows. Sirius is willing to admit that his first assumption was nothing but a venture in fluffing them up, but then he’s left to do his best at blind-coating himself when he can’t feasibly take his eyes off of the boy beating his expectations up in real-time as Remus slides the mass of pillows over to the right and further down the top of the bed, scoots over into the new space he’s just created in the top-left corner of the bed, and plants himself over it diagonally, laying his lower back against the pillows and hiking his right foot up against the wall of the bed.

Sirius stays still on his knees, condom on, right hand gripped around the base of his rather ready situation, left hand hovering in mid-air, goon-grin activated as he looks over Remus’s new positioning and lingers his gaze over that left leg of Remus’s being held up by the crisscrossed fingers of his hands; a picture-perfect portrait of a man patiently waiting on Sirius to make himself quite home in the space reserved for him.

Sirius scoots right over there in a snap, slides past Remus’s raised leg to situate himself back between the both of them, and ends up getting encased right where he’s knelt as Remus hitches his left foot against the side of the bed to match his right one and braces his hands beneath his hips to presenting himself as the real art in all this, and Sirius, for one, will stay kneeling in awe of it, he knows that much. 

He’ll also say this: having a sturdy fixture such as the wall of a cargo bed not far behind him at all means he’s likely going to have to forget his curled feet even exist and rely much more heavily on the caps of knees and the swing of his hips for this encounter, but Remus is gonna love that and maybe that’s precisely why he so adamantly went and moved shop.

Sirius plants the heel of his left palm down beside Remus’s right hip, leaving his forearm at an angle to help keep Remus’s hips locked into place over his lap and leaning in to hover over him. He meets the thirst that flashes over Remus’s gaze and raises it hunger, dipping his right hand back between them to position himself at the cusp of Remus and giving a frank shove of his pelvis, and there’s the first wanton noise out of Remus Jean Lupin that doesn’t have a single extra second to even be snuffed out; a short, wanton note that shoots out of him and lives in the air between them. 

Sirius reworks his mouth around a crooked grin and keeps a steady yet searching pace about him to start, wanting to hear from Remus whether it be vocally or bodily, and gets responded to in kind, Remus fusing his knees to either side of Sirius’s body and clasping his hands at the backs of Sirius’s shoulder blades to physically pull him into it while his feet do a lot of the work on the backend of things, and oh, mhm, that must be the other reason why Remus moved them over here. 

“This a new experience for you or have you already been had on this thing?” Sirius investigates, pointing his right forefinger down at the bed and circling it widely around for effect. “You just seem a tad too familiar with the potential features to this location.” 

Remus’s eyes flash before he nods Sirius in close like a man with a secret, smiling wide as Sirius leans his left ear in close to his lips. “Think I’ll leave you guessing,” he passes him, having a nip at Sirius’s earlobe. 

Sirius gives a spurred trill in his throat, loving that answer more than he thinks he’d have loved a direct one, and gets his knees planted good and wide on either side of Remus, aiming them in polar opposite directions to get a rhythm going that’ll be up to scratch and feeling Remus’s breath hot and damp against his throat as Remus keeps his prattled urgings pressed against it, but that’s a great plan on his part for that’s only going to spur Sirius on that much more just to hear Remus ask for it, hear Remus tell him what he wants, and what he wants, more obvious and alive in the space between them with every minute, is more; more of Sirius, more of this, more of them. 

Wanting to give him all that and more, Sirius drops down to his elbows to slot them up against Remus’s upper arms, wraps his forearms up and around his shoulders to lock him in tight, and rocks Remus’s very frame into it, bringing him down against his jutting hips and pulling gorgeous notes of appraise from the very depths of Remus on every new interval that advertise rather openly that Sirius is hitting gold each time, and then it’s on, babey, on, the two of them meeting each other’s hips and lips in a frenzied whirl until there’s no real style or rhythm that either of them is keeping to, just two seismic, rutting bodies that can’t and won’t let go of the other as they drive toward a peak.  

Or, you know, at least until one-half of them does let go of the other to work their hands in between them, that is. Remus’s right hand snakes below their navels while he lifts his left one to clasp it over his mouth, and this time it’s not a challenge, that much Sirius can see, read, and breathe quite plainly; it’s just one too many cries to Remus's ears and so a barrier’s got to go up between his voicebox and the air around them, but it calls to Sirius all the same, calls on him to lean in and place open-mouthed kisses over the hand covering Remus’s mouth, calls on him to let Remus know it’s OK, either way he goes is OK with him so long as Remus knows that he didn’t ask him to put a plug on it, and the feeble whinge that sounds from behind Remus’s hand is all the evidence needed to know that was the exact right choice to have made on his part. 

Remus abandons the barrier true seconds after that whinge made it to Sirius’s ears, slips his hand out from between their lips, and splays it against the right side of Sirius’s head, tilting it down to press their foreheads together as his body and breath pull taught, as he wrings his right hand between them, as he opens his throat to him and works himself off while Sirius works him out, as he wraps his legs tightly between the wall of the bed and the backs of Sirius’s hips as if he’d personally enjoy having Sirius fuck him like this for hours, and if only, boy, if only that were possible, but to say that Sirius doesn’t grip tight to Remus’s shoulders like anything less wouldn’t be enough and let his hips run absolutely buckwild from that alone would be an absolute lie, just as it would be an absolute lie to suggest that there’s any sort of catch-up to play on his part when the pacing Sirius surges to really only fast tracks him toward his own release, snatching it out of the air within an inch of Remus’s own and leaving the two of them gasping as they ride it and each other out. 

“Well, when you’re right, you’re right,” Remus breathes, eyes shut as they slowly remember what being still is like. “Really needed that one.” 

Sirius gives a low, echoing hum against him and smiles from cheek to cheek. “And I think the book’s still over there, too; imagine that?” he raises it, getting Remus’s best attempt at a pronounced huff in return for it, but his lungs are working at half-capacity so it’s not the most successful one around. “So, out with it, then; you’d already been had on this, hadn’t you?”

What’s bound to turn into Remus’s lopsided grin starts up at the corners of his lips, giving a glance around the yard. “Not here,” he admits, looking back at Sirius and eyeing him once before swiping the tip of his nose past Sirius’s. “Not like that, either.”

Full shimmy running amok, Sirius snatches up Remus’s lips just as that lopsided grin of his takes full form and pulls a satiated little noise from Remus for it, spurring him to unhand Sirius’s shoulder blades in favour of folding his right arm neatly over Sirius’s back to brace him to him, his left hand coming up to press against to the juncture of Sirius’s neck and chin as he meets his tongue with unhurried flecks of his own. They should get on with it, Sirius knows they should; he’s half-nude, Remus hasn’t got a single article of clothing on his person, and they’ve got a curious case to get back to that Remus is already quite invested in and he’s only on, what, page two? He knows all this, but it can’t be just yet; it’s going to have to be whenever Remus grows tired of the pretzel life, and right now, he’s not letting Sirius go anywhere, his legs locking him right in and keeping them linked up; nothing else for it, he’s claimed until Remus says otherwise. 

Turns out, Remus’s otherwise comes a good hazy set of minutes from there, the occasion rung in by him tipping his head back and sucking in a vast breath of soupy air. “I’m going to want to go again if we don’t quit,” he maintains. 

Sirius manages to get the word ‘same’ set out of the line of his pressed lips — how, he doesn’t know, but it certainly acts as the white flag that kicks the two of them into gear and starts them off for the A-frame, and it’s only inside the cabin that Remus looks down at his bare body and realizes he didn’t stop for a second to grab his flannels; a realization that has him promptly free-falling into a snickerfest as he displays his hands down at himself and traipses down the hall toward the loo, and listen, there was a time, not that, that long ago, toward the tail end of a hazy Christmas morning in fact, where that boy shuffled around Sirius’s bedroom with a sheet clutched around his middle to preserve his modesty as if Sirius hadn’t already seen and loved it all by then, and if Remus has reached a place where he can traipse about bare-assed and laugh himself silly over it, then Sirius really must’ve done his job somewhere along the way.

He dances royally down the hall after Remus, taps that perfect peach of a behind a couple of times as they turn into the loo, and splits off from Remus once in there, heading over to bin the condom while Remus heads over to run the taps, tugging up on the shower rod after a quick temperature check and turning back to Sirius with his right forefinger up and at a sassy little wag. 

“No funny business in there,” he raises loftily, stepping sideways into the tub. “I’ve got a love letter to finish reading, and it was just getting good.” 

Sirius drops his briefs to the floor and all but rushes him, clearing the admittedly short distance between the bin under the sink and the precipice of the tub in two seconds flat. “Do you want the funny business or not, Remus?” he shoots out, clambering past the shower curtain and into the tub after him. 

Remus very nearly drops the loofah he’d just picked up, but takes to gesturing up and toward the little window above their heads with it instead. “OK, they might’ve actually been able to hear that one, so you’d better just shush,” he suggests, reaching his hand out for the soap on Sirius’s left. 

Sirius smirks up a storm as he hands it over to him. “That would be quite the soundbite to overhear, you have to admit,” he raises him. 

“I’ll only just,” Remus allows, his lips at a twist as he soaps up the loofah. 

No funny business occurs during either of their turns underneath the stream, but Sirius will say that watching Remus scurry back out of the A-frame and climb up onto the bed in all his nude glory is funny, there’s just no pretending it isn’t. Sirius remains on the ground, figuring it’ll prove easier to have Remus toss him his housecoat and tug it back on from there, and as if showing him a perfect example of why he didn’t bother climbing up to deal with that, Remus wiggles around in the middle of the bed trying to pull his briefs on, his flannels wind up taking up more time and a lot more wiggling around than those to get them up his legs, but then it’d be hard-pressed to say whether Remus got railed recently or not for he’s plucking the book back up and looking a sweet sight to behold as he resituates himself right where he began reading in the first place, which means Sirius has his own spot to reclaim, climbing on up and sliding in to lean back against the side of the cargo bed as he ties off the sash of his housecoat. 

Remus grabs up the pen and puts it to paper, but pauses short a couple of beats into a scrawl, breathing in once with it. “Mm, I should say before I get too far away from it,” he raises, pointing the back end of the pen toward Sirius, “thank you for the voucher you gave me up top; it was nice to read.” 

Sirius drops his eyes to a squint while pulling his lips into a smile. “Which one was that?” he checks.

Remus huffs a single note of a laugh. “The part where you stuck your neck out and said I wouldn’t have covered up having seen the sun if I had done,” he hands over. 

Well, it’s not like I had to stick my neck out too far with that one,” Sirius trades him. “What could you ever get out of that pretending you didn't?” 

“Literally nothing,” Remus echoes, “but I’m glad you know it, that's all.” 

Sirius gives him an easy wave-off. “You’ve never struck me as the type to hide the zombie bite from the rest of the group, if you know what I mean,” he forwards him.  

Two vouchers tonight; my, my,” Remus notes, going into a little shoulder-shimmy as he gets back to trailing the point of the pen along the page. 

“Oh, there’s a lot more where that came from in there, trust,” Sirius maintains, eyeing the book. 

“I’m getting there,” Remus returns him, a playful smile playing at his lips as he finishes up the last few words he’s scrawling down and flips forward with a little flourish of the page — he’s really dating Sirius, hm. “OK, consider ‘pressurized head’ good and seconded.” 

“King,” Sirius calls him, leaning in to have a peek at the page from upside down. “How far did you get, anyway? Past ‘your agency,’ I very know, but.”

“I was about to start in on general symptoms when you turned up again,” Remus passes him.   

“Mm, perfect,” Sirius deems it. “Then I’m sure you can already see that it’s a meaty section?”

“Sure can, yes,” Remus trades him, eyeing the page below rather animatedly. 

“Mhm, so I think it’d be important to mention something before you dive in,” Sirius prefaces, pausing to gingerly hover his right hand in the air above the book and circle it for emphasis. “Any one bullet point will most likely be tough to revisit on its own, so I’m going to let you feel however you do as you’re going through them so long as you keep pushing through and remember that all the points put together paint quite the picture, and one that’s a lot brighter one than you might think as you’re taking them in one-by-one; deal?”

“You could sell me a lemon and it’d work on me, so, yeah; sounds like a deal,” Remus serves him, giving a glance at the book and back to Sirius. “Do you want me to read aloud, or?” 

“I mean, normally I’d say 'please,' but you really have sounded better,” Sirius reprises. “Don’t get me wrong; you do sound hot, but I know the big reason behind you sounding so rugged and dangerous is because your throat’s shot to hell.” 

Remus smirks once despite himself and the topic, nodding toward the blunt in the ashtray. “My last haul was an actual combustion,” he shares. “I’m a bit relieved and a bit disappointed you missed it ‘cause you’d have found it difficult not to laugh me right out of here.” 

“I feel the same way about it, now that you say it,” Sirius trades him, giving in to a smirk before breathing in once, galaxy-brain activated. “You know, I could see about whipping up a stash of edibles for nights like these; what d’you think? Be much easier on the throat, I’d wager, and tastier too; I could make cupcakes.” 

“Well, I mean, I simply won’t say no to cupcakes, but I’d really rather not make a habit out of pitching a fit so hard I shout myself hoarse,” he maintains, the likelihood of that being up to him hanging in the sticky air between them for an off-beat before Remus sets his left elbow over his thigh and his chin in his hand, focus right back on the book without anything else. “I’ll give you my highlights.” 

“Please do,” Sirius echoes, quietly adding edibles to the to-do list. 

The first highlight comes quickly; less than a minute later, in fact. “Mm, you made quite the point here,” Remus forwards him, tip-tip-tapping the end of the pen against the page. “I am a bit biased here, but you do well with highlighting the giant ‘maybe’ that comes alongside arguing the possibility of stress levels influencing a cluster once one’s already hit without pretending like that’d be the strangest thing to ever imagine; it's very effective.” 

“OK, right?” Sirius puts up. “I wasn’t sure I should even put that down, but then I couldn't help but finish the thought.” 

“No, I think that’s a great way to make the case; room for error without ignoring a very real possibility,” Remus trades him. “Only thing is, I do feel like we’ve seen cases where I felt stressed as the onset set in, but for whatever reason didn’t end up resulting in a severity spike.”

“Mm, like on Friday,” Sirius lends him, nodding for it. "You came down there mad as hell, but the severity of that one went down rather than up."

"I mean, exactly; it's an interesting one,” Remus echoes. “Looking back on it, I wasn't all that stressed? I mean, I was annoyed, certainly. A cluster comes over me at a five and my mum’s still downstairs where you and all of my provisions are, the very person and items I want to see the most are officially further than the person I want to see the least; I felt anxious just knowing I was going to have to wait for her to go upstairs so I could get down to you without tripping her alarm and I'm sure I did look mad as hell, but I wasn't fucked off like I was today and the constraints around Friday's case were nothing like the ones we had to deal with today, were they?”

Sirius shakes his head no, very no. “No, today's was something else,” he echoes it. 

“So, if not every single time I feel a ripple of anger and stress when a cluster hits, it could still be that in situations like today’s, where everything’s just happening all at once and I feel as trapped as I did, maybe that’s the perfect breeding ground for a spike in severity is, not necessarily for situations where I'm feeling agitated,” Remus raises it, taking a breath in and waving his free hand from there, a wry smile playing at his lips. “Shooting blanks at the wind here, but we could call this a working theory for now, keep an eye on it, and I could always initial beside your point so the suggestion comes from the pair of us; want me to do that?”

Sirius’s appreciation for this boy knows no bounds as he nods him right off. “You’re being so—” he offers, trying to find the word for it. “I don’t know — game, I suppose.” 

“Well, there’d be a bleak side to the theory I’m sure we can both see,” Remus offers, jotting his initials down in the margin. “Do I want stress to have so much of an influence over where a case peaks? No, I’d really rather that not be the case, but you said it well; if stress can trigger a cluster in the first place, then why wouldn’t stress make one worse? We’ve seen a lot weirder shit than that.”

The apprehension bubbling up in Sirius’s throat knows almost as little about bounds as his appreciation for this boy did. “I just want to say, raising the possibility that stress and severity could be linked does not mean I’m expecting anything out of you, or that you’re now just fully expected to immediately identify it when you're stressing out and snap it all away like it’s just that easy,” he maintains. “I’m not that naive, promise.” 

Remus flickers his gaze up to his and holds it steadily. “I didn’t think you were,” he trades him. 

“Good, because these things are slippery little buggers and writing down what we see and note about them so we have a chance at understanding them better is my always goal, but never at the expense of understanding you,” Sirius underlines. “You’re number one.” 

Remus breathes in long, long, very long, his eyes dancing back and forth over Sirius’s visage. “I’ve not felt second to them yet, but thank you,” he imparts, leaning in to seal that wholly welcomed sentiment with a kiss. 

If that weren’t enough to have warmth spilling into Sirius’s cheeks, the grin Remus’s lips split off into does it in a flash, garnering Sirius to hang his chin in the both of his hands and tuck his flushed cheeks behind his curled fingers. “Since we’re here,” he raises, “I hope you don’t mind I kept having to expose the fragility of the state you were in just to make some points.” 

“Well, when you’re making solid ones left and right by doing it, perhaps an exposé of my fragility was for the best,” Remus trades him, leaning back with a prime sigh through his nose. He lowers his left hand to pluck the book up in it, warbling the pages with a light flap and showcasing quite openly that he’ll be getting on with the show, and it’s a good thing he does, truly, for he gives out a bright, wry laugh a few beats on from there that's got Sirius’s entire attention in a hold. “‘As well as the sorts of grunts one might hear if their significant other were over in the living room putting a hell of a lot of effort into leg day Leg day’ — stop being you for even five whole seconds, would you?”

Sirius beams over the shelf otherwise known as his palms. “Never,” he returns, thrilled to get to watch all this from up close.

Remus throws up a grunt a few beats on from there. “Oh, Cunt, the fucking seatbelts."

Sirius tooches his lips out in commiseration. “Yeah, I didn’t like doing it, but I didn’t see any other options either,” he says of it.

“No, I — I didn’t like it much, but that was quick thinking on your part,” Remus lobs him, flickering his gaze up to make prime eye contact with Sirius. “I wasn’t getting at you for having done it, I’m just—” he stalls, looks down, and refinds himself a few seconds later with a meaty shrug to go with, “—embarrassed you needed to do that, I guess.” 

“Well, keep reading, then, because part of me wonders now if I actually needed to do all that,” Sirius slips him. “And I don’t tend to equate you with embarrassing really ever at all, let alone during one of those so you’re on that island alone, sorry to tell you.” 

“You're not sorry at all,” Remus gets him, but there’s a wry half-smile on his lips as he makes a show of heeding Sirius’s advice by refocusing the page he’s on, and it’s a warm enough feeling on Sirius’s side of things that he actually manages to wait a good minute past the point where Remus went woodenly quiet before Sirius leans in to investigate the current issue for himself, but in doing that, it seems to prompt Remus to let him into that head of his. 

“Oh, you know me,” he puts up, a faux-jovial air about him, “just in hate with the image I’ve got of myself high-kicking a door on my dad’s fucking truck.”

Sirius breathes in once. “OK, one, it was more of a long-kick than a high one,” he amends, “two, it was only for a few sudden seconds, and three, if you keep reading, you’ll see the important observation I put in there expressly highlighting just how little trouble you gave me for interfering.”

“Yeah, no, I’m seeing that right here and that’s good, really good, Sirius, but did you not say I could feel what I’m feeling or did I make that up?” Remus delivers him, lifting his gaze for a pointed blink.

“Alright, hot-ass, I did say that,” Sirius lets him have. 

Remus breathes in long through his nose in a clear effort to steel himself. “There’s just not a whole lot of dignity to hold onto after you read something like that back,” he offers him. 

Sirius shifts his fingers up from beneath his jawline to cup them around his mouth for a bit of emphasis. “I’d say dignity is overrated, but I bet I shouldn't,” he whispers. 

“And yet,” Remus whispers back, but there’s a glint that flashes over his gaze before he drops it to the page again that rather suggests he’s enjoying this and good, so is Sirius, and that was before Remus started giggling like a school girl. “‘Scooping him up rock-a-bye-baby style?’ Sirius.

“And I stand by that description,” Sirius champions, biting back a few snickers of his own. “I also stand by my choice to do that, even if you did whir like a literal cat when I first scooped you up.”

“Well, as you so lovingly put down, I’m just not a fan of constricting positions and I reserve the right to whir, but are we talking in terms of a housecat or a bobcat out for blood?” Remus checks. 

“Mm, more of the first,” Sirius supplies him. “Think, 'Mestophales being roused suddenly from an otherwise enjoyable afternoon nap under a streak of sunlight.'”

“Well, that I don’t mind so much,” Remus trades him, pointing the forefinger on his free hand at him before diving back into the mix.

“And you shouldn’t,” Sirius echoes it. “Sure put a smile on my face at a rather dismal time.” 

“Then I whir for you and only you,” Remus maintains, one foot in conversation, one foot in the book. “Mm, right again, you; the clamp definitely came for dinner.”

Sirius hums in echo. “Could slap your initial down beside that point, too, then,” he bids of him, garnering Remus to turn the pen around in his hand, scrawling in the margin and continuing on from where he left off, and Sirius might’ve let him do that, he really might’ve if he didn’t feel an intrinsic need to explain his lack of intervention there. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you with it.” 

Remus looks up quick, looking around fast before trading blinks between Sirius and the book. “Am I not currently reading through some strong evidence that you helped me plenty?” he raises, tentatively pointing down at the book with the point of the pen. 

Sirius just barely holds in a snort. “No, but — you asked me to rub it for you and I wanted to, but I just couldn’t,” he offers, letting the underneath of his chin go to better gesture his hands around. 

Context colours Remus’s eyes over, but frankly so does even more confusion than prior. “You had your hands full,” he imparts. 

“Yeah, when I first noticed you doing it, I still had to get everything organized and then after that, my hands were literally so full,” Sirius reiterates. “All that can be true, but it's also true that the rubbing was the first thing I was ever able to actually do for you; I know it’s not a serum or cure—”

“More of an emotional band-aid than anything else,” Remus comes in. “A decent distraction that gives me a type of pressure to focus on that’s decidedly not an icepick or a clamp, but it’s really the fact that it’s you doing it that makes me keep asking you to.” 

“Exactly, it’s our thing,” Sirius trades him. “I like being able to do it for you and it makes me sad when I can’t; that’s all I’m saying.” 

“I like it when you do, too, but I’m not going to hold it against you because you couldn't grow a third hand to make it happen for me,” Remus holds up, a sweet, playful smile at home on his lips that only has Sirius reworking his mouth around a wry smile of his own. 

“You’re really not going to let this one land, are you?” he puts up. 

Remus shakes his head once. "You've enough on your plate, I'm not going to put more on it if I can help it," he cements, moving his gaze to the book in his lap. “Truth is, I’ve been a bit spoiled, having you right nearby and available to do it for me when you can; I am going to have to get used to handling it myself.” 

Sirius looks down and off to the right, no specific reason he picked that direction when it was really more about looking away, but there’s a handy cigarette pack sitting right there in his sights and Remus isn’t far at all from the main event; Sirius is going to need a cigarette lit just to keep his hands busy and himself from spoiling the whole conclusion halfway through, might as well get that started.  

He slips one out of there, lights on up, and takes a long, long, very long drag off of it, blinking back over at Remus with the observational hum he gives out. “Fifty-six minutes isn’t my favourite timeframe ever, but at least it wasn’t hours,” he puts up, giving an idle tilt of his head back and forth. “However, I can say that seeing as I wasn’t the one holding a worming beanstalk for 'forty, forty-five minutes, give or take.'” 

Sirius sends his haul back out with a smirk. “Maybe so, but you know what, for those same forty, forty-five minutes, I held onto that worming beanstalk without having him get the slip on me once,” he highlights. “You were pretty damn cooperative with me considering, which is why I didn’t want you focusing and festering on any single, undignified detail to this because I had you, Remus; I had you the whole time.”

Remus’s jaw looks like it’s suddenly made out of steel. “We really got lucky with this one,” he whispers.

Sirius sits there ahead of him, mouth poised to speak for a good few seconds before he actually manages it. “I wasn’t going to say it from my cushy little seat,” he starts, faltering for a beat before allowing his wide-eyed wonder to catapult him through the rest of his response, “but I had been clinging to that myself, so I’m glad you said it.” 

“The reality that I could’ve been hit with a ten is unavoidable, even if I don’t feel so lucky to have been slapped with one on a day this good,” Remus serves him, and boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh B-O-Y, is Sirius thrilled to have heard that come out of his mouth, but he’s forced to have a new haul and keep his chill for a bit longer, and that’s really for the best, he finds. “And to be clear, I don’t think your seat’s cushy or little; you’ve far too much on your plate for me to even let you get away with saying that.” 

Sirius coughs his haul right back out. “It’s not too much,” he returns, pointing his left forefinger at him. "You can't keep thinking that."

Remus snatches his forefinger right up in his free hand, keeping right on without a hitch. “I appreciate that you're being more careful about how or even when you’re going to deliver a comment about 'luck' of all things to me,” he puts down first, “but you have been right up beside me, throughout all of this, ever since you feasibly could be, so that is where you’re seated, yes?”

Sirius breathes in long, long, very long. “Yes,” he echoes, unable to fight a smile, but would he want to? No.  

“Good,” Remus deems it, dropping a kiss on the tip of Sirius’s finger before unhanding it.

Sirius takes a new haul, lets himself enjoy this one in full, and sends it out to the side, leaning forward in the space between them from there. “You’re so close,” he whispers, smiles abound.  

I am?” Remus puts up, eyeing him once with a smirk before dropping his gaze at the intent prod Sirius administers against the book in his. “Oh, oh; the twister?” 

“Mhm, that,” Sirius delivers, straightening up again. “Alternatively: why I went off and got the white-out in the first place.”

Remus breathes in a renewed breath, his brows popping up his forehead. “Frolicked off and got it, is more like it,” he registers, dropping his gaze to the page with a diligent sniff of the air; cutest thing around, this one. 

It’s a full minute before he gets anything, and Sirius is dialled into Remus like he’s on the most important call of his life, but it’s worth the wait just to watch Remus’s first move be him setting his hand squarely over the centre of his chest, his gaze reeling over to the right first before landing on Sirius second, almost like the middle distance was there for him at a time he needed it the most. “Ohkay — this got personal quickly,” he observes. 

“I mean, all of them have been,” Sirius offers, going for a new haul.  

“Mm, but paragraph two of the notes section counts as a certain kind of personal,” Remus delivers him. 

“OK, but just remember, we can cut anything that you feel is too much after you've read it,” Sirius reminds him. “For now, don’t deny yourself an experience just because we may not keep every line; bask in it, babey.” 

“I’m not saying I wanted it deleted from existence, I just—” Remus explains, or tries to, giving into a listless shake of his head. “If that’s paragraph two, then that means I’m toast from here, aren’t I?” 

“Well,” Sirius offers lightly, leaving it at that. 

Remus lifts his left hand from his chest just to wave it once at him. “Don’t make me laugh,” he warns.

Sirius almost says no, but it seems Remus is tapping right into his wavelength whether he does a thing or not for he shuts his eyes fast, keeping what would’ve been a powerful laugh from escaping his throat, and completely avoids Sirius’s eye as he reopens them to root his gaze to the book, giving into a righteous whinge after a bit more reading. “‘He wasn’t the most compliant punk around, but he was my punk?’” he pipes up, his voice thin and heavy in the same beat before giving his whole, entire face over to a righteous scrunch. “Why’ve you done this?”

“You’ll see,” Sirius coaxes. 

Remus goes on to make the face he would do for a substantial huff but without the noise, doing as bid and very quickly to boot, making it to the very reason Sirius went and did this. “Jesus, you really know how to lure somebody in,” he quips. 

“I’m not so bad at it,” Sirius allows, smirking at the raspberry that gets promptly blown at him for it and watching with a sizable infatuation as Remus reads on for a good, long stretch there before he speaks from the very back of his throat.

“Oh, we’re bringing Kipple into this?” he bids, voice tight as all hell.

“Ohh, yeah,” Sirius gives lowly, ashing his cigarette off into the tray with a royal tap of his forefinger. “I’m quite polite, too, considering.” 

“Give me that or light me one of my own this very instant,” Remus instructs, pointing to his cigarette, and Sirius goes right ahead and chooses the second option, lighting up and handing over a brand-spanking new one for Remus to puff off of hurriedly. 

The more he watches him at it, Sirius doesn’t know if he’s ever had or will again have an experience quite so synergetic and he won’t be mentioning it to James any time soon. He doesn’t have to be following right along, possess a window into Remus’s head, or hear a single word from him, he just has to watch Remus at it and it’s like he knows exactly where he is; from the rapid blinking of his lashes, he’s reading Sirius’s manifesto on compromisation, from him sticking the back of his right thumb between his teeth and breathing fast behind it, he’s reading Sirius’s meditation on the sponges they’ve been for each other, and it’s honestly difficult to tell whether Sirius is expected to say something, damn near anything for what he’s seeing off of Remus or for what he himself wrote, and he very nearly doesn’t say anything, quite comfortable with the idea of letting the words on the page speak for themselves, but the very moment he sees tears crystallizing at the corners of Remus's eyes is the same moment Sirius throws the title of silent observer right out. 

“What, what’d I say?” he checks. 

The response is a bit muffled in that Remus would have to first take the knuckle out of his mouth to give him it clearly but Sirius picks up his unsaid ‘what didn’t you say?’ quite well considering, and then it’s really just a matter of Remus taking that thumb out of his mouth before he can get the full scoop. “You really tugged me out of that hole I was in without pulling my arm off in the process,” he puts up, wiping fast at his cheeks with his right forearm in turn. “You didn’t rush me at all with the scale — so much so that I think I was aware, at points all along the way, that I was following your lead more and more, but I wouldn’t have seen how far I’d really moved on this one until I was sat here reading it for myself; I’ve come a long way in a relatively short time.”

The fact that Sirius can speak without a warble is a feat he’s not sure how he’s accomplishing. “Weeks, Remus; actively working with me on this for weeks, even when you had every reason not to,” he serves him. “I’m glad if I led the way rather than just straight nagged you there; I like how we did it, even if we had to first figure out how we’re even going to do it, it’s all very us.” 

Remus nods eagerly, huffing a sigh through a fond little grin, and has an overall glance back down at the book, but he doesn’t seem to have it in him to continue just yet. “Sometimes it’s really hard for me to see that I’m doing enough, but then I read something like this and I can’t deny that I’m been doing what I can, when I can, and most importantly, that you have seen it,” he raises him, tap-tap-tapping his right forefinger on the page below. “It’s another look at my life through a bird’s-eye view and it’s just as dizzying as the last time you did this for me; I kind of want this paragraph framed so I can’t let myself forget for too long that I haven’t actually left you to handle this alone.” 

“No, never, no,” Sirius trades him. “I’ll get you that frame myself just to help this venture of yours along.” 

“Nice big one,” Remus echoes, swishing the point of his mouth back and forth before letting a deep-seated sigh leave him. “I’m a bit scared to keep going, I’ll be honest.” 

“Why’s that, hm?” Sirius bids. 

Remus wets his lips as he regards the page below. “Well, it’s just that 'but I deeply, deeply know how well his critical position on that scale has rubbed off on me,’ is a sharp fucking hook if I ever saw one,” he puts up, blinking back over at him once. 

“Oh, honey, honey, honey; here,” Sirius trades him, lifting up to stretch himself diagonally across the bed to snatch up a corner of the closest pillow to his reaching fingers and bring it over to deposit it right down on Remus’s left before sitting back down where he last was. “You’re going to need this to bite down on at some point, so just keep it on you.” 

“Oh, good; great,” Remus says of it, throwing a Hail Mary before he even tries diving back in, and the next, mm, two minutes, maybe three, perhaps four — hard to say — are filled with many, many squeaks and squawks that Sirius honestly doesn’t mess with or interrupt for clarity when he just has a sense that, when Remus deems it time to throw commentary into the ring, it’ll be worth the wait, and boy, does Remus do it with style when he does decide it's time. 

“I’m sorry, but if we set aside the whallop you’ve given the Cluster Club for a moment and focus on the clear driving force here,” he bids, flapping his right hand at his monumentally welling eyes, “you’re riding so hard, not just for me but anyone like me, I’m nearly devastated.” 

“Where’ve you been; Mars?” Sirius lobs him. “Of course I’m riding for you.”

“Oh, you stop,” Remus returns him. “You’re out here saying things I’ve said, things I’ve thought, things wouldn’t let myself think for long before shutting the thought down, and you’ve laid them all down neatly, one point leading to the other leading to another, and somehow you’ve managed to get me feeling even less petulant about my qualms with it than you first did.”

Sirius breathes in long and puts it back out with palpable relief. “I wasn’t sure if you’d want me to cut that part out,” he admits. “Thought it might come off as indulgent.”

Remus breathes in long, working his mouth around in preparation and placing a choice pause just ahead of his response. “No.”

Sirius wheezes long before that turns into a bark. “Explain?” he bids.

“Well, first of all, I’m not even sure where you’re going with this yet,” Remus puts up, eyeing the page below. “Ask me again when we’re done, but for right now, I am not cutting a thing out because you are building to something here; there is a case being made before my very eyes and I must see it through.” 

Sirius presses his lips together, popping his brows up and down to echo that sentiment. “You said ‘first of all,’” he raises. "What else have you got?"

“No, I think I'll going to save that ’til the end, if you don't mind,” Remus reserves, looking back down at the page and breathing in long, like the breath before a plunge. 

“Do you want me to get a toke ready for you?” Sirius checks, nodding his head toward the ashtray. 

Remus looks there once. “Yes,” he answers, sucking down the last viable haul of his cigarette and trading the butt of that with Sirius in exchange for the joint.

Sirius would’ve already felt good about preparing some green to coincide with the next stretch, but to have Remus breaking up his live-reading with trill after trill with a couple of choice moments where he puffs off a lit joint while carrying the energy of someone sipping some rather scorching tea, and that’s a bit of fun in itself, but hoo, the moment Remus’s face changes, his eyes going wide, his mouth falling open and stays there, his breath catching in his throat? That's the stuff. 

“You think we already saw one?” Remus probes. 

“Keep,” Sirius sounds out, all smiles, “reading.”

Remus throws him his loudest huff yet tonight, but he does immediately keep doing that reading thing, so that’s another win in Sirius’s books. “Oh, I love this,” he upheaves. “You’ve done perfectly; it’s not just a one-to-ten scale, it’s a sliding scale, down to what I’m capable and incapable of in the moments I’m underneath a cluster, and that’s what there’s no room for if you’re only ever expected to stick to an exceptionally vague tier list.” 

Sirius could scream, he’s so pumped that all came out of Remus’s mouth that he’s the one who needs the pillow to bite down on, and swipe it back to bite down on, Sirius certainly does. 

Remus utters no more words from there, no more noises, no more anything as far as vocal iterations go, instead he’s all face, and Sirius's eyes stay glued to that face until his right arm gets snatched up by Remus’s wilding left hand and there, Sirius realizes he likely should’ve offered a piece of himself along with his offerings of the green variety, reaching his right hand out to make right on that and trace his fingertips back and forth over the inside of Remus’s left forearm, and he stays doing exactly that the whole way through, right up until Remus foists the joint off on him so he can better clasp his hands over his eyes, the book falling shut in his lap as the boy curls into an upright ball. 

Sirius eyes the situation, but he doesn't think Remus would have curled up like that if he had any more to read, having himself a quick toke since he’s the one with the joint now and sending the resulting cloud out to the right. “What d’you think?” he whispers, smiling from cheek to cheek. “Might be onto something there?”

The weight built into the hand-held nod Remus responds to him with is heavy, but it’s the good heavy; the kind you can bank an agreement on. 

Sirius’s smile only warms from there, propelling him as he looks down and to the right, and moves his legs up and around to seek out where, exactly, the white-out is hiding, finding it a few beats later sitting behind his back and bringing it around to tap it once against a sliver of forehead that’s peeking out from between two of Remus’s fingers. “Would you like to do the honours?” he raises.

Remus takes another moment or three to collect himself before separating his left hand from his forehead to tug the white-out from Sirius’s loose grasp, dragging his right hand down over his face and emulating Lyall to a degree that snatches Sirius’s breath right up and keeps it held tight while Remus reopens the book and begins flipping left to right, on the hunt for which direction to keep flipping in. 

“I don’t remember the date exact, but late June for sure,” Sirius supplies him, going for a new toke before stubbing the joint out in favour of a recess for one Remus Lupin’s shoddy throat.

“Mm, I don’t think we’d set foot in July yet,” Remus echoes, flipping forward in the book rather than back. “Mm, right here.” 

He takes the time for a sprawling glance over the list of observations from that night, puffs out a righteous horse breath, and trails his left forefinger down the page before stopping it toward the very bottom, turning the white-out around in the grip of his right hand and dragging a clean and crisp white strip overtop their prior rating. “So,” Sirius sing-songs, his right knee jiggling with excitement, “what was that second thing, then?” 

Remus gives up a light grunt as he jots over the white strip. “Well, I’m even more glad I waited ’til the end now, but I’m sorry I got on your case about getting on my doctor’s case the way you did,” he maintains, breathing in once and looking to him with another intensely sober stare for how ripped he is. "I think it's created a situation where you’re not even sure if I’m going to allow you to mix strong emotion in with the facts in all this, but not allowing any emotion into this is dehumanizing in itself and you wrote something incredibly humanizing here; I’m not cutting a fucking line out of here, Sirius, it all needed to be said.” 

It’s incredible how fast Sirius’s sinuses plug up — if he had clusters, he’d have to worry something bad was coming. “Oh, for fuck’s sake; warn a bloke,” he returns him, touching his right hand to the bridge of his nose in an attempt to weather through the sting panging at his eyes. 

“I’m sure there would have been some amount of uncertainty in you over whether you should even be over-emotionalizing this had it just been you going toe-to-toe with my doctor and getting royally blown off by your own for just trying to outsource some information,” Remus keeps on, decidedly not warning him that his manifesto isn’t over yet, “but there’s just no way I helped with that uncertainty; I really resisted the way you conducted yourself in there and I can make a few educated guesses as to why I resisted it so badly, but I’m just really sorry about how I handled it.”

Remus takes one look at Sirius’s Look and serves him a whopper of his own Look in return. "I know you hate that word coming out of my mouth, but you also don’t like it when I censor myself so you’re just going to have to hear it sometimes if I think an apology is due,” he instils.  

Sirius puffs a big ol’ breath out of himself. “Fine, I’ll let you have the floor until you don’t want it anymore,” he grants him, reaching for his pack with his hand and beckoning Remus along with a dainty wave of the fingers on his left hand.

Thank you,” Remus chimes, his light ‘tude possessing no real threat to the devotion lining that boy’s features. “I don’t know how to show up for myself; I’m a bit better at it now thanks to a very admirable brat I know—” 

Sirius pauses with the filter at his lips. “Wow, drag me harder,” he slides in there, having a certified blast over here.  

“—But I was terrible at it for so long and I just hit the floor after they came back,” Remus maintains. “I didn’t know how to show up for myself or my own, really; I could have had every right to resent the way my dad got failed over and over again, but I didn’t let myself — I don’t know if I was even aware that I could hold resentment, I just felt indebted to the people who kept saving his life, I don’t know that even fathomed that there wasn’t room to feel resentment toward the fact that they kept having to save his life because they were learning as they went and failing time and time again, and it’s not disrespectful to use your resentment and anger to get yourself a better situation in the future and that’s all you were doing for me; you saw something you didn’t ever want to see again and you went and found someone better for me so we’d never get put in that situation again, but it did scare me.” 

“‘Course it did,” Sirius puts in. “You didn’t know if you deserved an opinion, let alone a second one, and what if I behaved badly again and we wound up back in the same situation? It made sense, even if it—” 

“You never behaved badly, is the thing; I buckle at the sight of someone asserting their worth, let alone the thought of someone fighting for mine,” Remus puts plain. “Fact is, I don’t even know what I would do if I were in your shoes, but I bet I’d have behaved a lot worse than you did.” 

The slow rise of Remus’s right brow really sends his message home. “Yeah, alright; maybe,” Sirius lets him have, lifting his cigarette to his lips. “You’re cutthroat when it comes to me.” 

“Mhm, but you know how to channel your anger into getting results and that’s all you did here,” Remus raises, wobbling the book for emphasis. “I know you so I know how much anger is in that entry, but you brought positivity and nuance along with your iron fist and if I weren’t already sold on you, I’d be taking you out on a date, missy.” 

“Oh-ho-ho,” Sirius puts up, making a show of flapping out the veil of hair on the left side of his head before turning his head to flap out the veil on the right side of it, only he catches sight of a massive, looming shadow of a man leaving the garden in the process and veritably shrieks at it — simply no other way to put it. 

Remus parrots the sound immediately, looking round fast and jolting immensely when he sees it too. “Dad, what the fuck?” 

“Well, sorry,” Lyall returns, hands up high in the air, “s’pose I should’ve whistled my way here.”

“That’d have been a start,” Remus shoots him, shutting the book up and sliding it nice n’ easy over to the wall of the bed before turning himself bodily toward his oncoming father; he’s good, that one. “To what do we owe this horrifying pleasure?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Lyall puts up, looking to Sirius as he stops a few steps from the end of the cargo bed and reaches a couple of coins out to him. “Mind if I buy one of those off of you?” 

“You can have one,” Sirius enunciates, reaching for his pack to hold out to him. “I hate loose change.” 

“He really does,” Remus echoes, setting his chin in his hand and having a searching gaze over his dad. “Well, I’d blame the nap you went down for so late in the evening, but that’s never held you back from a good night’s sleep before.” 

“Well, you are me, so I s’pose you'd know all about that sort of thing,” Lyall trades him, but there’s a hint of a question in there that seems to lead the way for Lyall to hold Sirius’s stare just a tad longer than would be necessary for the simple extraction of a cigarette, garnering Sirius to give the faintest shake of his head known to man that sure does seem to change the setting of Lyall’s shoulders. 

Sirius reaches for the lighter, holds it out to Lyall, and gestures for him to leave it on the door of the cargo bed when he's done with it, looking on as Lyall gazes up and around while he puffs off the cigarette. He looks over at Remus as silence lingers in the yard, finds him watching after his dad with a pair of slits for eyes, and has a strong sense Remus’s own senses all but point him toward the right place without a thing to help him get there. 

Sirius breathes in long, looks down on his right, and plucks up the joint, thinking it could only help that heady man over there try to broach a subject as complex as the reason he can’t find sleep. “Now, I say this as someone who’s been burned by this before, but that thing’s not going to help you sleep any easier, even if it feels like it will,” he maintains, tipping his chin toward the cigarette and lifting the joint to twiddle it in offer instead. “Now, go ahead and finish that, it's all yours, but this — this right here might be exactly what you’re looking for and I can say for a fact that this particular strain really counteracts the stimulant of a late-night cigarette.” 

Remus snorts long, looking between the two of them before Lyall hops right on board. “Yeah, alright,” their visitor bids, tipping his head to him. “Give me some of that.”

Sirius smirks, looking to Remus as he hangs the joint from his lips. “And to think you used to hide upwind from this guy,” he puts up, sparking the lighter underneath the tip.

“Teenager, Sirius,” Remus puts it. “I was a teenager.” 

“As if we didn’t know you were doing it either,” Lyall gets him. 

“Never stalked out here to make that clear,” Remus gets him back. 

“Yeah, well, I’d never been a pig before and I wasn’t about to start with you,” Lyall returns him, looking to Sirius's righteous grin there. “Our deal was, if his grades started slipping then we’d have to have a talk about when, where, and how much he was partaking, but he kept those marks pristine the whole way through secondary and we could never really fault him for having a certain eau de vert about him now and again.”

“Ooh, love that,” Sirius attests, holding the joint out to the man. “Both the sentiment and the French flair you brought it with.” 

“That’s about the size of my understanding,” Lyall trades him, taking the joint off his hands and bringing it up to his lips for a pull. “Just various phrases that only pop in and out when—”

The sheer gusto of the wheeze Lyall gives before the resounding coughing fit that takes him over is both hilarious and all Sirius’s fault. “Should’ve warned you, sorry,” he fesses up. 

“I don't know, I liked it better this way,” Remus interjects, a shit-eating grin about him. 

Huegh,” Lyall carves out, beating his chest once and lifting out of his hunch with a deep, deep breath of unfortunately sticky air, but he speaks rather eloquently from there considering the demon he just expelled. “My windbags.” 

Sirius breaks into a certified wheezefest before Remus’s elongated and quite powerful ‘No’ registered to his ears, but suddenly, snickerfest over. “What,” he enunciates, “is happening?”

“Dad — Dad, no,” Remus implores, sending Sirius’s head to the left to stare that Lyall down. “Don’t do this.”

“So, when he was about five or six, somewhere 'round there,” Lyall begins.

“No, please, I’m sorry,” Remus persists, but it’s no use judging by the shit-eating grin on Lyall’s face now. 

“We were laying on the floor in the den, looking through this book on basic anatomy and going, ‘what are these?’ — ‘Arms!’” the man keeps to it. “All very simple stuff, and we get to a page about the respiratory system, Hope points at a spot on it and says, ‘and these? Lungs,’ to which our very own poindexter over here turns his head directly to hers, completely serious, and corrects her with ‘windbags, Mum,—’"

Strictly speaking, the phrase itself would've been funny enough to get Sirius hooting, but it's the fact that it's given with the kind of long-suffering sigh that only ever belongs to a world-weary traveller, never a toddler, has Sirius uncurling his legs from underneath him to better drum his heels into the surface of the cargo bed, losing every ounce of his shit while Remus strives to hide his whole face behind his hands.“It’s over for me now, Dad,” he maintains. “He will never let me live this down; I am done for.” 

“Yeah, well, so were we,” Lyall serves him, going for a delicate toke that doesn’t wind up blasting back out of him with the velocity that his first one did while Sirius wipes underneath his eyes while experiencing light delirium over here. “Rolling on the fucking floor, Sirius; we couldn’t help ourselves for minutes.”

“Why are you out here again?” Remus raises him. 

Lyall pulls a big ol' face as he looks to him. “I wanted to see my son for a minute; that alright with you?” he trades him. 

“Well, sure, but you’ve got to admit your gate-crashing just a bit,” Remus puts it. 

“Oh, we’ve had a date and a half already,” Sirius comes in there. “We can pause for the likes of this guy.” 

“Appreciate that, Sirius,” Lyall lobs him, handing the joint back to him with a wave that suggests he’s just fine with what he’s had of it. 

Sirius tips his head to him as he accepts it. “Not at all,” he insists. “How’re you doing?”

If Lyall does or doesn’t appreciate the, mm, hue the question came in, he doesn’t make that known or even particularly noticeable, only goes for a new haul off of his cigarette and looks off to the left of the property while he holds it in, but Sirius swears he can see him ramping himself up with every new second.

“Lew say anything to you?” he raises finally, pushing his exhale out as he tips his chin toward Remus.

“Me? No,” Remus offers, sparing Sirius the quickest-ever glance before his gaze is back on Lyall. “Sounded a pretty down, though.”

Lyall gives a minute hum. “Mm, your gran’s been having a tough go the last little while,” he passes him.

“Oh, shit,” Remus puts out, swishing the point of his lips swishing back and forth. “You rang back already?” 

“Mm, no,” Lyall offers, and well, he didn’t, so that is the truth, though he sure pulls focus away from that to elaborate on certain other truths from there. “She’s been mixing up names, forgetting her own, confused as to where her husband’s gone off to, and ringing Lew up to tell him he had to go pick up said husband at the train station — which seems to have been a thing that happened years ago now; as I understand it, something got mixed up about travel dates and dad ended up stuck at the station for a while, but when you’re mind’s getting a bit foggy there’s usually no real rhyme or reason to what little things can come back to you as urgently as they was felt at the time, you know.”

Remus reworks his mouth around a set of gritted teeth as he nods it out. “How long’s that been happening?”

“Well, here and there over the last few months, but she took a fall on the front stoop early, early Saturday morning, busted her wrist up good,” Lyall offers, halting there to wave Remus’s impish noise off with his free hand and a bit of a pointed smirk. “She’s fine now, they bandaged her up, and she seems to be in decent health physically even if her mind’s clearly going, but that’s more or less the problem; you have to wonder where she thought she was going at damned near two in the morning and where she'll think to go next if nothing's done about it.”

“Mm, that would be one hell of a wake-up call,” Remus puts in there, darting his eyes between Lyall and Sirius quickly once it’s out of his mouth. “Only, it might’ve been easier to avoid the reality of the situation if incidents were few and further between, but if she’s making jailbreaks in the middle of the night, it might just be time to intervene; that’s all I meant.” 

“No, and that does seem to have been the sign they needed if the rest of them weren’t enough already,” Lyall tacks on, a notable gravel coming in toward the end of the sentence, Sirius certainly notes. “She’s got to get out of that house at the very least, it’s much too big for her to be in there alone if she’s going to keep having spells and with the way things have been, it’s looking likely she’ll progress in that direction rather than have the fall be an isolated incident; things are never that simple.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t want to chance it if it were my call either,” Remus puts up. “Wouldn’t want her taking a worse fall next time.”

“Wouldn’t want her setting the kitchen on fire one night either,” Lyall takes it from there.  

“No, very no,” Remus echoes wanly. “She’ll be going into a home, then?” 

There’s a moment there where Lyall can’t quite hold back a two-note smirk before it's gone again, but even though Sirius would really like it if he didn't work so hard to hide it, he does have to admit the man does well at making it seem like it had to do with the haul he just took in. “You know, I don’t know?” he supplies, holding the end of his cigarette up and out to either of them to transfer it to the ashtray for him. “I’ll let you know what the verdict is whenever I find out, though.” 

“Yeah, alright,” Remus offers, reaching to take it from him and holding onto it for another couple beats as he looks on at his dad. “I’m sorry to hear that, though; must be a bit weird for you.” 

Lyall looks on with all his slit-eyed glory. “Weird is exactly it,” he supplies him, giving his son a half-smile before having a look at the both of them in turn as he offers a shrug before taking in a breath anew. “Well, best see if I can’t try again, right?” 

“Yeah, I hope it happens this time,” Remus imparts, a gentle whisper of a sing-song traceable in there as he turns to put Lyall’s cig in the tray. 

Lyall points to Sirius next. “Thanks for that,” he passes him, circling his forefinger around. “Well, both of them, really.” 

“Hey, anytime,” Sirius trades him, blinking thrice at him, but whether Lyall reads them for what they are or not, it's impossible to tell when Sirius can’t read the back of a head; talk about weird. 

Lyall does turn back a few steps from the garden, but he's moved on from one precarious situation to a different one as he sends a two-handed point toward Remus. “I know I talked a big game, but I did get a bit worried at one point or another myself,” he makes known. “Glad you made it back safe.” 

“‘Course, you big suck,” Remus sends him. 

Lyall points to Sirius as he turns back around and heads for the break in the garden. “Goes for you too, kid,” he throws him, which is really a shame given that Sirius has just been punched square in the gut. 

He can’t offer much as far as words go while he’s dealing with the golfball that’s taken up prime real estate in his throat, but he hums the kind man off rather well, he thinks, for a bloke who can’t seem to engage the way he’d have liked to. 

Remus mews faintly ahead of him, reaching his right hand out to smooth back some of the hair spilling down on the left side of Sirius’s head, and gives him the same watery stare he gave him when Sirius got his quilt, or when he boohooed over Hope’s little unassuming head-pat, or whenever it’s been all too much and all too perfect at once, but that’s not what this is feels like, not nearly.

Heat. Water. Air. He’s got one out of three: tears welling right up, but he can’t feel any heat beneath his skin and he’s gonna have to wait until he sees Lyall turn out of the yard and into the garden before he can even try to grab himself some of that air stuff. 

“What is it?” Remus bids, dry-eyed and dialled into him already.

If Sirius could articulate what ‘it’ is without selling himself out or making Remus have to answer for something completely out of his control, then maybe he’ll give it a shot, but he’d need some of that air stuff and perhaps a sturdy yet malleable jaw to get the job done, at that.

Remus reaches up to give Sirius’s shoulders a sobering rub, inching his head down to get their eye lines level. “You’re scaring me a bit,” he slips him, voice low, like he, too, can’t help but feel keenly aware of his dad’s retreating figure, but if he’s doing his best at a whisper, then Sirius could at least give him something of the same.

He shakes his head, tries his hand at pulling soupy air into his lungs, and trains his gaze up and above them. “I’m not trying to,” he gives him, willing his pooling tears to just remove themselves from the entire equation, but those things aren’t listening to him at all. “I never want to scare you, I just don’t know what I’d have said to them if something had happened to you.”

Remus takes in the shortest of breaths, leaning his head in to touch his forehead to Sirius’s. “Hey?” he frowns, giving Sirius’s shoulders a squeeze with it. “What’d we say, hm? We’re not likely to be in that situation again, are we? I’m OK, you’re OK, we’re all OK.”

“I know we are and I know we learned a lot through this, but this one was hard,” Sirius puts up, lifting his right hand to bat away tears that just don’t need to be here and only add to his embarrassment. “A car comes up the road and you just, don’t think the person in it is going to keep fucking driving when there’s clearly someone stumbling in the road, but I’m embarrassed, Remus; I told you it was safe to get out, I didn’t stop you when you went around, I put way too much power in some moron’s fucking hands, and I shouldn’t have done any of it, I should’ve waited until I had the back cleared out before I summoned you there and I didn’t because I was trying to do too many things at once just to buy us a few extra seconds we almost didn’t have—”

Something about the searching, dare he say, confused expression on Remus’s face that trips him right up, has him swallowing dryly. “You don’t remember the car?” he bids him, shaking his head best he can, but it’s nothing to write home about.

Remus blinks twice, breathing in a lot longer than he did a couple of moments ago. “I remember a vehicle,” he extends, sounding damn near embarrassed himself as he lifts his hands from Sirius’s arms to streak them past the sides of his head a few times fast. “The horn was deafening, but I didn’t know what was coming or from which direction so I just — I don’t know, I moved up in case it was coming up behind me.”

It’s not that Sirius would have afforded himself the comradery of Remus feeling the same sense of urgency he felt in the direct moment it happened and the ones that lingered after it, but he can’t quite decide if it’s better to leave him out of just how close it really was or to bring him into it so he knows, but it’s a slippery slope between reshaping Remus’s patchy idea of what happened and bringing him into just how convinced he was that Remus was gone and maybe it’s selfish, selfless, or something in between, but Sirius doesn’t know if he can stand on that slope and not tumble down the mountain.

“I wasn’t even going to bring it up because it’s not on you to answer for freak shit like that, and that’s what it was; a freak occurrence,” he puts down, placing his hands over Remus’s lap and doing his best to speak measuredly so his resident overthinker won’t go thinking he can’t hack this. “I don’t want to go overboard with this; I know you have to be able to live, go out, cross the fucking road once in a while without me worrying that the next time you set foot in the street someone’s gonna come along and getcha — I know that’s not rational, I know it’s not going to happen again just because one son of a bitch decided he wasn’t living his life recklessly enough today, but I definitely did get a big spook out of that so if I’m a little weird and nervous for you for a bit, just know that I’m not trying to be overbearing with you, OK? I really just want you safe.”

Remus goes for Sirius’s forearms when they’re measurably closer to his hands than Sirius’s shoulders are. “I know you do, but I want you to trust me when I say that I trust you,” he instils, squeezing Sirius’s forearms with that bolstering word, and if he weren’t already attached to a human rafter, Sirius might’ve been lost to sea with a sentiment like that thrown his way. “Not to put any more pressure on you, but I’m much safer with you than I would be without and I know that; I’m not about to go this alone just because you’re not an actual oracle and therefore can’t predict every single possible thing that could go awry.”

Sirius leans in to get his face right up on Remus’s. “But I’m still going to learn from this, OK?” he puts down, speaking it against the curve of Remus’s jaw and getting his left cheekbone tear-stained with every blink of his eyes, but he’s speaking in full sentences and believing in every word he’s got for him. “Even if we’re never going to be in that exact situation again, there are improvements to take away from it, even if it's as simple as stopping to breathe, making sure I’m thinking right, not trying to cut corners just to save a few extra seconds because you’re more important than that; there’s just no contest.”

“OK,” Remus breathes, letting it leave through a careful smile, “thing is, though, you're white as a ghost so I really want you breathing big, full breaths for me, I want us to see about getting ready to wind down, and then, I’m thinking, we could even see about getting some rest; imagine that?”

“No?” Sirius returns him, blinking him down. “We’re on a date.”

“And as you have already perfectly stated, it’s already been a date and a half,” Remus reiterates, “but it’s also been the longest day of my life, and I think we could both stand to power down for the night; I’m getting tingles just thinking about it.”

“We have cases to look at, mister,” Sirius reminds him.

“Well, I’ve already gone and put that on tomorrow’s docket, so you can just go ahead and put that out of your mind for tonight,” Remus insists, giving him a decided tap on the back with it. “We did great work here, you especially, and turning in earlier than expected won’t take anything away from that, I promise; you’ve been on all day and more than just hitting the off-switch, you deserve some rest, Sirius.” 

Sirius gives up an impish noise. “Well, only if you’re getting some,” he conditions, but if there was any occasion to be petulant, then this is it; he can’t feel too, too guilty about this one, he's barely breathing right.

“Alright, then,” Remus allows, letting go of his shoulders to swipe away at the worst of Sirius’s tear streaks, his lips pulled into a hopeful twist. “Come with me?”

He lets himself be led from the bed to the bathroom, feeling a little strange about allowing it but it be stranger to not, and in the end, it almost works. After he’s been led back out with a set of minty-fresh teeth and a much less blotchy complexion, when it’s just them, the pillows, the blankets under them and Remus’s quilt tossed over them, he curls up like a worm against the rafter holding him down and breathes with him, thinks of everything good that’s come out of this case rather than the nauseating parts, how understood he managed to make Remus feel over and over again, how safe they are in the quiet of their makeshift campsite, and he almost feels ready enough to let himself power down.

Almost.

“You have to wear your mask,” Sirius puts out, snapping his eyes back open. “I brought it out here specifically so you’d wear it to bed.” 

“Alright, I will,” Remus offers him, but he makes no movement or effort to see to that. 

“No, but if I fall asleep before you and then you fall asleep without it on, you could wake up at six in the morning with the sun bearing down on you,” Sirius presses. 

“Well, I don’t know if it would've risen beyond the house at six in the morning,” Remus raises him, “but I do see your point; where is it?”

“Behind you,” Sirius directs him. “Corner.”

“Easy enough,” Remus says of it, shifting to reach back into the corner and it’s a good thing he’s willing to do some stretching as Sirius isn’t letting his middle go for anything, not even to make the mask retrieval process go any quicker. 

“I put your sunnies there, too,” Sirius tells him.

“I see that now, thank you,” Remus passes back.

Once the mask’s on, and only after it’s on, can Sirius finally shut his eyes, smush his face against Remus’s chest, and let himself contend with the idea of rest because whether he feels it or not, Remus says he deserves it and he’s still the boss.

Series this work belongs to: