Chapter Text
They were lying on the front lawn when Remus saw them.
Two dark heads: one bent forward and reading a book between his bent knees, one tipped back, eyes closed against the dwindling afternoon sun, reclined on elbows, the tips of wild dark curls kissing neatly manicured green grass.
Remus peered at them from behind the smudged window of the passenger seat of his old black Peugeot, the second-hand car he bought with his own money when he passed his driver’s test at seventeen. Back then, it somehow made all of those backbreaking hours stocking shelves at Sainsbury’s worth it, how he’d sometimes show up to school the next morning with a crick in his neck or with purple-smudged eyelids from lack of sleep, working until midnight and cramming in a few hours of study even after that. Worth it because he had his own car, the freedom to go anywhere he wanted (usually to the nearest town and back, but that was always enough, back then). The exhaustion, worth it because, miraculously, the unconditional offer for Edinburgh ended up in his hands before it had a chance to land on the cat-patterned doormat of his mother’s home in Otley.
Remus’s fingers flexed against the wheel. He couldn’t remember the last summer he had where he was free to while away the days. He left his weekend and summer jobs as soon as he set off further north, swapping them for evenings pulling pints at a pub in the New Town, and weekends taking shorter shifts at the public library on the bridges, re-shelving books and helping pensioners use the computers and printers Remus was convinced were older than he was. When the opportunity came up to take a summer with his academic advisor to help shape up ideas for his dissertation and make a start on his Master’s application for the same department, all while supporting him on some research of his own, Remus had jumped on it. He liked Monty Potter. He was eccentric and excitable, passionate about his subject and, most importantly, willing to help. Where some professors were all arrogance, aloofness and arms-length prudence, Monty was an open book: warm, dedicated, interested, interesting. And he seemed to like Remus a lot, too.
Remus had imagined Monty living in a higgledy-piggledy flat somewhere in Edinburgh, perhaps in the Old Town near the Mile: a draughty tenement stuffed with books and an endless supply of tea. Perhaps a cat or two. A kooky wife with hippie-grey hair and beautiful jewellery, perpetual long skirts and, undoubtedly, an academic too. Or an artist. An art history professor. They would have paintings on their walls. Strange artefacts from their travels. Their flat would look like a patchwork of displays from the Natural History Museum in London and the wondrous glass-boxed library at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
Except, this place was all of those things, and none of them at the same time.
Firstly, it was in England. Which really shouldn’t have surprised Remus: Monty was English.
Secondly, it wasn’t a flat. Not by any stretch of the imagination. It was a sprawling country estate set deep in the lush green Buckinghamshire countryside, and later Remus would learn at least some of his assumptions were true: books stacked everywhere, neoclassical busts mounted on pillars in wide open hallways, paintings old and new, cavernous draughty ceilings that seemed to stretch on and on forever. It was a maze of a place.
An equally eccentric wife, Euphemia, who would later clasp Remus’s face in her hands and kiss both of his cheeks like he was a family member, stunning him into stuttered, blushing silence while the boys, having peeled themselves away from their spots on the lawn to get a look at this new stranger, this gangly northern boy in his scuffed Converse and corduroys, exchanged a knowing look and smirked, before disappearing upstairs to wherever it was they would laze around next.
Remus clicked his seatbelt free and pushed the door open, gravel crunching underfoot as he leaned over to grab his rucksack from the backseat, heaving it onto his back, leaving the clips open as he circled the car and dragged out a plastic packing box from the boot which he closed with the point of his elbow with a loud thump.
The boys on the grass hadn’t moved a muscle, but the boy with the long, dark hair was looking at him now. At least, Remus thought he was – his face was pointed in his direction. This far away though, he couldn’t see his eyes. Maybe he was looking at the car: a smudge of scruffy black against an otherwise beautiful driveway.
--
That night, after Remus was shown up to his room and through this house-maze he knew he was going to get lost in every day probably until his very last, he somehow found his way back downstairs for dinner outside.
“We eat out on the lawn whenever we can,” Monty had told him, popping a bottle of something fizzy as soon as Remus’s backside met the wrought iron lawn chair, his eyes scanning the large, empty table set for seven. He felt mildly embarrassed for showing up so early, but it didn’t take long for others to arrive: first, from the village nearby, family friends Benjy and Fabian, a handsome couple in their mid-20s who Monty knew from his guest spot at Oxford. Then, Euphemia, who sat down beside him and began asking him all sorts of questions straight away, like:
“Where did you grow up, Remus?”
“Otley, it’s a little town just north of Leeds.”
And,
“Do you want to stay in Edinburgh?”
“That’s the plan.”
And,
“Is my husband as mad at school as he is at home?”
“I wouldn’t call it mad. I’d call it... impassioned.”
Monty barked a laugh at that, pouring him a glass, and that was when the boys appeared again.
James and Sirius.
James, he soon learned, was Monty and Euphemia’s biological son, if that much wasn’t obvious by the dark skin he shared with his mother and the inherited myopia that had him wearing the same style of glasses as his father: round-rimmed, often smeared with fingerprints. And, just like Monty, there was a permanent upturn of his mouth and an enduring brightness to his dark eyes. He was friendly. He was funny, too.
Sirius was James’s best friend, but he wasn’t just visiting for the summer. He lived here too, somehow, and Remus knew not to ask when conversation was moved swiftly in another direction.
Up close, Sirius was all angled cheekbones and a straight little nose and full, bitten lips. He was shorter than Remus, perhaps by a head, but his arms were strong and he looked like he knew how to throw a ball or two.
But where was he from, and how did he get here? Remus tried to wager a guess with himself, silently, as they picked their way through summer salads and marinated meat and the fizzy wine that was dragging him down further and further into exhaustion after hours sat on the motorway. He looked at Sirius’s clothing: the well worn Dr Martens, the long-sleeved black t-shirt where he could see the edge of a tattoo, just curling against his wrist. The long hair.
A tearaway? It wasn’t completely outside of the bounds of possibility: Monty was a dyed-in-the-wool bleeding heart. He’d invited Remus here, after all.
Except—no. Sirius’s voice was perhaps a few notes posher than James’s: a public school boy drawl. Remus wondered how he got away with hair like that in a boarding school, and it suddenly became clear as day: James and Sirius were the class rebels. They were the boys who smoked behind the chapel after Sunday service, who played tricks on unsuspecting teachers. It was in the subtle twinkle of James’s eye, it was in the devil-may-care energy that just seemed to hum off Sirius in waves, from every pointed angle of him, from every impish grin and glint of those sharp grey eyes.
They finished each other’s sentences and laughed loudly at private jokes that didn’t make it past their little huddle together at the other end of the table. But they joined in when needed, confident with the adults, making everyone laugh, even Remus at points, but he spent most of the night studying them quietly, and sometimes, Sirius would say something and look right at him, even when the words were meant for someone else.
Remus felt impossibly flummoxed by them both, but mostly by Sirius. He was like the last argument in a text he couldn’t make heads or tails of. The temptation to unravel him was undeniably strong.
At some point, the pair of them peeled away from the table to run around on the lawn together, chasing each other like a couple of children bored by the adult’s table at a wedding. A rugby ball had appeared from somewhere, and they tossed it back and forth, expending their energy as the sky overhead got darker and darker. Sirius’s hair flew around his face, loose and wild, and James’s glasses were squint and his white grin was brilliant.
“Not a player?”
Remus whipped his head around when he realised he’d been staring, and he looked across the table at Benjy, who was leaning forward on one elbow, his other arm slung behind the back of Fabian’s chair beside him. He wore glasses and he had a neatly trimmed beard, and he was handsome in a kind of erudite, well-kept way. Fabian was twisted in the other direction, talking to Monty, his long red hair tucked behind his ears.
“Do I look like one?”
Benjy snorted into his wine. “Is that a trick question?”
“Er - is that a trick question?” A breathy laugh.
“I can see why Monty likes you.”
Remus grinned, chancing another glance back at James and Sirius, who were tackling each other on the grass. “Guess we’re too boring for them.”
“Ah, I don’t think that’s the case,” Benjy said, putting his glass down and fixing Remus with a curious look. He was pulled into the conversation with Monty though when Fabian reached behind him with a searching hand, cupping his face and turning his head away, and Remus went back to his wine, and smiled at Euphemia when she sat back down beside him after bringing out a tray of chocolate mousses from inside.
James and Sirius disappeared together soon after dessert, and Remus didn’t see them again until morning.
--
At breakfast, Sirius told James to move out of the seat directly across from Remus and he plopped down in front of him instead, a worn paperback in his hand, his hair tied up so little wisps of it fluttered around his temples whenever the light breeze picked up across the lawn.
They were outside again at Euphemia’s insistence, eating toast from a silver rack and eggs from a local farm.
Sirius flipped through his book as they ate, sparing Remus a few glances every now and again and grunting and sighing in response to questions from James.
What do you want to do today? Dunno. Sit around again. I’m tired.
Apparently not much of a morning person. That excitable energy from last night now dimmed.
Half an hour stretched into an hour, and Euphemia and Monty were back indoors; Euphemia was headed out to lunch with a friend in Cambridge, Monty was shifting through some paperwork to get himself ready for Remus with a very apologetic ramble, “I’m sorry, I should have sorted all of this out before you got here, but it’s been a bit mad opening up the house again, it always is when we come back for summer.”
So, Remus was left with Sirius and James alone, perhaps looking at a day with nothing to do himself but explore the grounds and unpack and maybe put a small dent in his essay.
He tried to see what Sirius was reading, but Sirius had folded the book over so tightly the cover was completely unreadable. So, he looked at James instead.
“Do you all just spend the summers here? How does that work?” he asked. There was no use in feigning the fact this world was completely foreign to him; this swanky country estate that looked like something out of Downton Abbey, and Remus sat there with his mountain of student debt and a bank balance that gave him heart palpitations every time he had to use his online banking app.
“That’s pretty much how it works, mate,” James said, but it was friendly. “My parents have a place up in Edinburgh during term time, but we come here for holidays – summer, Christmas. Sometimes Easter if we’re not staying behind at school.”
“School? Do you go to school nearby?”
Sirius closed his book, finally, and set it down, cover-up, on the table next to his empty plate. Maurice. When he spotted Remus looking at it, he met his eye across the table, and it felt like a deliberate flaunt. A confession.
Suddenly, all of the behaviour from last night made sense. Sirius was peacocking.
Remus watched him closely, curiously, even as his stomach flipped. Sirius raised his eyebrows at him and grabbed another slice of toast from the rack, covering it in a thick spread of butter and raspberry conserve, the swoop and twist of his wrists elegant and quick.
“Did,” James corrected, pulling off his glasses and cleaning them on the hem of his t-shirt. “We finished up in June, headed to uni in September.”
Remus smiled at that, trying not to watch Sirius shove his toast into his mouth; pink conserve collected on the corner of his lips. “Oh yeah? Where are you going?”
“I’m going to Oxford,” James said, then pointed a thumb at Sirius. “Arty-farty’s off Central Saint Martins.”
Remus’s interest piqued at that, but before he could ask, Sirius finally spoke up, his voice soft and deep. “We’ll show you around today, Remus. That’s what we’ll do.”
“Yeah, we should go into the village,” James said, tossing Sirius a napkin and pointing at his own mouth. Sirius blushed deeply and scrubbed it over his lips before he folded it neatly and set it down on his empty plate with fidgeting fingers. A packet of tobacco appeared then, and he started rolling himself a few cigarettes.
“What’s in the village?” Remus asked, getting up, wanting to make himself useful. He started gathering plates and cutlery, piling them up, fingers well-practiced from collecting empty glasses at the pub.
“Lots of lovely scenery,” James said. “A few decent pubs if that’s your jam. Oh, and maybe we could go to the lake? Nice day for it. Can you swim?”
Remus nodded. “I haven’t brought any shorts though…”
“You can borrow a pair of mine,” Sirius said, peering up at him through a few loose strands of dark hair, lips pinched around a rollup before he tilted his head down to light it.
--
The lake turned out to be a shallow patch of water West of the estate, a popular spot with wild swimmers who were already dotted around the grassy perimeter and scrubby wooden jetty everyone seemed to use as a jumping spot.
They all piled into Remus’s car to get there, James up front with Remus to navigate, and Sirius in the backseat. His eyes in the rearview flashed like headlights, startlingly bright and never looking away from him; a keen gaze that made the hairs on the back of Remus’s neck prickle despite the heat. When they waited at lights (almost pointless out here, the roads were so quiet), he allowed himself, more than once, to meet Sirius’s gaze with a mirrored one of his own. It made Sirius’s eyes crinkle, and Remus imagined he was smiling, maybe just a little, where the rest of his face cut off in the mirror.
When they stripped off at the lake, Sirius stood with his back to him, and Remus watched through his eyelashes as the muscles of his back moved fluidly under smooth, summer-tanned skin. James, meanwhile, tore off all his clothes in a flash and was already dive-bombing into the water, glasses abandoned by their towels.
Sirius turned and shook his hair out, before tying it back up again; a flash of armpit hair, as dark as the hair on his head and south of his bellybutton. Remus wasn’t usually shy in his own body, but right now, he felt a touch too tall, maybe a bit pale. Sirius’s swim shorts, which he was borrowing for the day, were too short.
But it didn’t matter once they were in the water.
It was cold, but not awful, and when he got used to it, sloshing around his limbs, slipping over his collarbones where he paddled, he found it difficult to get out again. It was a cool relief against the baking English summer sun, and Sirius was playfully swimming doggy paddles around him, the ends of his hair brushing the surface of the water where they slipped free from his sloppy knot.
“Good isn’t it?” he asked him, grey eyes bright. Always so bright.
“Amazing.”
Eventually, tiredness won out, and Remus waded himself back to the jetty and hauled out onto dry land once more, water dripping everywhere.
After, they lay on the edge of the lake, staring at the blue sky. James was still paddling around in the water, tireless and making friends with strangers (“he does this every summer,” sighing fondly), so Remus and Sirius had a spot to themselves, almost hidden amongst tall grass, the chatter around them muffled and quiet.
Remus, now half-dry and back in his t-shirt, rolled onto his side on top of his towel, resting on one elbow as he looked over at Sirius, sprawled out, still shirtless, basking in the sun, smoking another cigarette. Geometric black shapes and swoops ran over his skin from his left wrist to his forearm, lines as graceful as the body they belonged to. It looked new. Earlier, Remus learned Sirius would be nineteen come November, putting two and a half years between them. So he was hardly Sirius’s worldlier elder.
“What do you usually do in the summer?”
A shrug. Sirius kept his eyes closed, and blew out a line of blurry smoke. “Nothing.”
These boys wanted for nothing, clearly.
Remus snorted softly through his nose. “Nothing? There’s no such thing as nothing. Nothing doesn’t exist. Nothing, Sirius, is a construct.”
Sirius’s eyes flew open and he sat up on one elbow. A grin and a flash of sharp teeth. “Aha! Aren’t you clever?”
Remus plucked his cigarette from his fingers, feeling bold, and he took a drag of it, challenging Sirius with a look until he relented.
“Not much doing around here, mate,” Sirius sighed. He lifted up a lazy, pliant arm, gesturing around them. “This. A lot of this.”
“I do like this.”
“Hm. We are lucky with it, I’ll give you that,” Sirius said, swiping his cigarette back, pinching it between his thumb and finger. “Sometimes we go up to the village, go to the pub. Play boardgames at home if the weather’s shit. Go to parties. Read. And if we’re desperate, study.”
“Parties?”
“Hm. Not often, but sometimes.”
Remus thought about it. Bored rich kids, flocking to huge country estates, drinking champagne from bottles and sprawling out on the lawns while fireworks punctured the night sky above their heads. Bright young things.
“Are you adopted?” Remus asked him suddenly, wanting to fill some of the gaps from last night.
If Sirius was surprised by the question, he didn't act it; he simply stubbed out his cigarette and sat up a fraction more on his elbow. His hair was loose again, flopping back and brushing the towel beneath him, black wavy curls thick and abundant and swept to one side. “Not officially,” he said. He stretched an arm behind him, dragging a long blade of grass down toward himself and plucking at it with his nails, apparently unable to stay still for more than two minutes.
“How’d you end up with the Potters?”
Sirius cleared his throat and looked up at Remus through his dark lashes. “I’m a very naughty boy,” he said slowly, then his lips curled into another impish grin.
Remus snorted and pressed a toe against Sirius’s leg, nudging him. A deliberate touch, maybe.
Probably not the best idea, but inevitable, nonetheless.
Sirius huffed out through his nose, splitting the blade of grass in two lengthways, then snapping it free from its root. “James is my best friend. Monty and Euphemia have always treated me like their own. When I needed help, they helped me. They’re very good people. Not all parents are good people.”
Remus thought of his dad, and he nodded, understanding. Mostly.
Enough at least, for now.
“Do you like working with Monty?” Sirius asked him, looking up again, the grass fluttering free from his finger in bits.
Remus nodded. “He’s a very good professor. I hope he’ll be my PhD supervisor, one day in the not so distant future.”
“Literature?”
Remus smoothed out a wrinkle on the towel with his fingertips. “Yeah. Victorian and gothic’s my focus.”
Sirius hummed under his breath, grinning at him. “Dark and mysterious, eh?”
Remus snorted. “Unfortunately not very. I just happen to enjoy stories about terrible weather and overwrought melodrama.”
Sirius laughed and glanced pointedly overhead. “You’re in the wrong place!”
“What’re you going to be studying? At art college?”
“Fine Art. I want to specialise in filmmaking eventually though,” Sirius said, then wrinkled his nose under Remus’s neutral gaze. “I know it sounds frivolous.”
“You’re talking to the guy doing a degree in English, there’s no judgment from me here. Film is a highly respectable art form, isn't it?”
Sirius blinked. “I like to think so. I want to be a filmmaker myself, one day. Documentaries. Art films.”
“Yeah? Documentaries about what?”
Then, to Remus’s utter surprise: “Social issues. Queer issues. Maybe some more edgy artsy stuff about queer male desire.” He laughed through his nose. “My parents would be so proud.”
Remus sat up slowly. For a second, he thought it’d started raining, but when he turned his head to find out what was blocking the sun, James was standing behind him, grinning like a loon and dripping lake water everywhere.
“Is he telling you about the porno he wants to make?”
“Oh, fuck off Potter,” Sirius said lightly, tossing him his towel.
They basked in the sun for a while longer, at least until James had the chance to dry off, because at some point, he got up and wandered back to the lake to run through the entire cycle again.
“My dad was homophobic too,” Remus said, picking up their conversation from earlier when they were alone again, wanting to find some more common ground. “I gathered that’s what you were getting at, before.”
Sirius lifted a hand up to his eyes, blocking out the sun, his dark eyelashes screwed up. “Was?”
“He’s dead now.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
Remus was quiet for a moment. “Nah," he finally said on a breath. "It’s fine. We never got on, Lyall and I. He left my mum when I was really little. And then when I came out to him when I was a teenager, he--well, he took it badly. Didn’t want to see me at all anymore, after that.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“Well then. Fuck you, Lyall.”
Remus laughed roughly. He screwed one eye shut against the sun, not wanting to lose sight of Sirius in front of him. His hair was ruffling against the breeze, and this close, Remus could see a few freckles across the bridge of his nose where his face was beginning to tan.
“And your parents?”
“Oh, you know. Run of the mill Catholic bullshit. They’re every terrible extreme you could possibly think of: homophobic, racist, xenophobic, elitist, classist. UKIP supporters. Yet somehow they managed to birth…” He swept a hand lazily over himself. “This.”
Remus stuttered a laugh. “Wow. Then really fuck them, then.” He squinted. “Not for birthing you, I mean, but for being evil twats. And UKIP supporters. The worst.”
Sirius tilted his head back and laughed loudly. “Yes. Fuck them.”
Later, he learned James had a girlfriend from the nearest town. Her name was Lily, and she’d attended their school’s elite sister college. She met them at one of the village pubs that afternoon, and Remus was both surprised and relieved she wasn’t just warm and funny like James, but she also shared a similar soft northern accent to his own. They pointed at each other, laughing at the similarities over their drinks, while Sirius messed with the jukebox in the corner and James ambled back to the bar to get them some snacks.
“Grew up in Pendlebury,” she said. “We moved down here when my dad had to change jobs. I was fourteen, so I never lost the accent.” She leaned in a bit, tossing her long red hair over one shoulder. “It’s nice to hear a lovely northern voice and not another posh toff.” Her green eyes sparkled wickedly, and Remus really hoped this wouldn’t be the last time they all hung out together as a group.
Sirius started smiling at him more openly after that afternoon. He’d throw him toothy grins across the table at breakfast, or he’d raise a hand and wave at him, his smile as brilliant as the blue sky overhead, a rollup pinched between his fingers, as Remus crossed the lawn to his car to pick up something or other from the village or the nearest town for Monty. Usually more printer paper. A book, from the local bookshop, ordered via telephone, the old-fashioned way.
Soon, he was sitting beside him at dinner every night too, their elbows knocking. Sometimes, James would sit on his other side and Remus would become part of their private jokes, edging away from the older group; indoctrinated by the delinquents.
Remus found himself gravitating toward him later at night too, when James would sometimes go into the village to see Lily, or Monty and Euphemia would entertain guests inside. They’d sit out on the lawn together while the sinking sun turned the sky pink, then purple, then blue, then wispy black when it disappeared completely, talking about nothing and everything. Sometimes Sirius brought his earphones down and they would take a bud each and listen to music (“Do you like the Arctic Monkeys?”, “Love them”, “Here, listen to this, they’re called Goat, they’re really fucking trippy and I think you’d like them”). Other times, they would ask each other questions until they ran out of things to say:
“What’s your favourite gothic novel?”
“Christ. C’mon, that’s like me asking you what your favourite film is? It changes a lot. I’m rereading The Monk right now though, for my dissertation. Bloody horrible, but really important in the genre.”
And,
“So then, favourite documentary? Or documentary maker.”
“Aha! Getting your own back are you, Remus? Hmm. Alright. Well, I just watched Leviathan , have you seen it? It’s about the fishing industry. It’s beautiful. Don’t look at me like that.”
And,
“Who calls their child bloody Sirius, then?”
A loud peel of laughter. “Who calls their child Remus?”
“Okay. That’s fair. I think Lyall and Hope were having a bit of a hippie moment with that one.”
And,
“What was it like growing up where you grew up?”
“Otley? Mind-numbingly ordinary? Nearest big city’s Leeds. But we’re at the foot of the Dales though, which is nice. Lots of good scenery but not a hell of a lot for a spotty gay teenager to find all that interesting, you know? What about you?”
“Ah, I grew up in London. But it didn’t feel like I really grew up there because I was essentially raised by nannies and my parents sent me to boarding school from the age of seven anyway.”
“Seven?! I didn’t even realise you could do that.”
“You’re looking at the living, breathing proof of it, Otley.”
Remus held back a laugh at the newly adopted nickname. Bizarre, to be named after a place where he never fitted in. “So what was it like, then? Your school?”
“Strict. Boring. Conservative. Conventional public boarding school bullshit. But that’s where I met James, eventually, when he started in secondary. And James is brilliant. James is everything to me.”
They’d been lying on their backs in the lawn that night, looking at the stars. The table across the way was still littered with evidence from dinner – half full glasses of wine, empty plates and salad bowls.
Remus rolled onto his stomach, his t-shirt riding up against his back, a cool breeze tickling his spine. He looked in the other direction, at the house, and he could see James’s bedroom light was on, a dark head wandering around inside.
“Did you and James ever…?”
Sirius turned his head quickly and fixed Remus with an incredulous stare. “Christ, no. That boy’s as straight as an arrow.” He grinned. “Unfortunately.”
“Oh, I see," Remus said, his voice low and teasing. "So not for lack of trying, then.”
Sirius just hummed under his breath, and Remus let his gaze wander, watching his hips shift minutely in the air, the sharp cant of them just visible beneath the thin fabric of his t-shirt.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t have a bit of rough and tumble at your own school.”
Remus laughed. “Less of an opportunity for that at state school. More rough than tumble. No fancy dormitories and shared showers.”
“Is that what you imagine we got up to, Remus?” Sirius was now on his stomach too, closer to Remus, maybe too close, because the ends of his hair were tickling Remus’s arm, and he could feel Sirius’s breath against the shell of his ear.
It was thrilling and just a bit too much.
So Remus just chuckled and rolled onto his back again, staring at the stars.
--
They went to a party a few nights later, at Lily’s.
It was perhaps half of the size of Monty and Euphemia’s home, but just as extravagant. A modern mansion, it was all floor to ceiling windows, light stone and a central circular staircase running right through the entire middle of the house. At the back, there were two sun balconies looking out onto the rolling countryside and down onto the pool below where a couple of partygoers were already bobbing around in their swimsuits, glasses of fizzy wine in hand.
Remus had just returned from one of the fancy bathrooms upstairs, where he splashed his face with water and gave himself a silent talking to in the mirror. He was surrounded by people who had everything in their lives handed to them on a silver platter, and as such he wasn’t sure how the hell he was going to make meaningful conversation with them when all he’d heard so far was talk of summering in France and horse riding and gap years in South Africa.
Sirius was behaving and maintaining a bit of distance, even disappearing for a while when they all stepped out of the cab earlier. Out on the balcony with the cool summer evening breeze kissing his skin, drink in his hand barely touched, Remus found himself cornered by a couple of girls from Lily’s school who were half-gone already, their arms draped over each other and their makeup shiny and iridescent under the strobe lighting someone had set up next to the speakers downstairs. Music vibrated under the soles of his old Converse, and they were leaning in to ask him questions, the scent of vanilla perfume and raspberry vodka filling his nostrils.
Too polite to tell them they were barking up the wrong tree, he let them touch his arms and play with his hair, and when Mary, the one with the silver eyeshadow, lifted her glass to his mouth to let him to try her cocktail, he saw Sirius across the way on the other balcony, chatting to a tall boy with hair so blond it was practically white. Their eyes met, and Sirius seemed to cut himself off mid-sentence, his hands hovering in the air, staring at Remus as Mary stroked his cheek and rubbed a thumb on the corner of his mouth where he spilled some drink.
Sirius’s grey eyes narrowed, and his lips twisted into something--something Remus couldn’t read. It was maddening. And then he turned to the blond boy and pulled him down by the back of the neck and kissed him.
Remus cleared his throat and gently nudged Mary’s hand away. “Excuse me,” he muttered to them, pushing his way back into the house and heading downstairs to drink his drink alone.
He didn’t see Sirius again for the rest of the night, and after a few hours of painful interactions with people he had absolutely nothing in common with, he ended up getting into a taxi alone, staring at the dark landscape of shadowed trees and fields as the glittering, glass mansion disappeared in the rearview mirror above the driver’s capped head.
--
One morning, three weeks after Remus’s arrival at the Potters’ estate, Sirius found his way into his bedroom.
Remus, who had just returned from the shower in the bathroom next door, hid his shock pretty well, and he held tightly onto the knot on the towel wrapped around his waist, the only thing protecting his modesty.
“You’ve got no boundaries,” he sighed, a half-tease, kicking his door gently closed. Sirius was lying on his bed, flipping through one of the textbooks he’d brought with him.
“Your door was open,” Sirius said, tossing the book carelessly onto the bedside table and slipping his hands under his head on the pillows.
Remus raised his eyebrows. “Are you going to let me get dressed?”
“Not if I can help it.”
Remus snorted and picked up the book, playfully whacking it against Sirius’s thigh. “You’re such a shit. Leave me in peace, I’ll be out in ten minutes.”
So, Sirius skulked out, pouting, which was too much, honestly, and the door closed behind him with a soft click of the handle.
Remus exacted his revenge the next afternoon.
Euphemia was visiting friends in London, and Monty was in Oxford for some meeting or other with an old friend, a professor of comparative literature, instructing Remus to catalogue some articles in the morning and do some more work on his literature review so he could look over it with him later that night. James and Lily were together in town, so it was just the two of them for the rest of the day.
He knew where Sirius’s bedroom was now. It was on the same floor as his own, three doors down; he discovered this after their first day at the lake, when they dried their swim shorts in the same bathroom, hanging them off of the taps in the bath or on the windowsill. Remus found Sirius’s red shorts from that same day, casually tossed onto the radiator, and he picked his way back down the hall to find him behind his deliberately open door, lying on the bed on top of the covers, Maurice in hand, sun-dried hair spanned across his pillow. In the corner of the room, his large desk was littered with sketches and paints, a folder propped up against the wall; his portfolio for art college or from school, and a side of Sirius Remus hadn’t yet seen up close and personal. His work was blocky and abstract, all primary colours and big shapes and forms, nothing traditional about it. Loud yet unreadable, just like Sirius.
So, Remus found his way there yet again, and without preamble, he barged inside (closed door, this time), satisfied by the effect it had and the extremely gratifying feeling of payback: Sirius had been lying on top of the covers again, bare knees bent upward, and he shot up to sit, book falling off the edge of the mattress with a dull thud.
He was bare chested and flushed, windows flung open and hardly letting in any air at all. Remus could smell the summer blossoms outside, bright and fragrant, but he could also smell something else. An earthy tang, salty and natural.
Sirius’s fingers curled against the sheets. He tucked his knees in higher toward his chest.
“Want to go to the lake?” Remus asked him, putting his hands at the foot of his bed, fingers curling against the flaking paint of the rung.
Sirius eyed him for a moment and licked his lips. “Yeah. Yeah, sounds good. It’s too hot today.”
Remus offered him his hand to help him up from bed, and it was a cruel move, he knew that, but they were now playing a game of to and fro, and this was his to, desperately casting out a net to catch Sirius’s fro.
Sirius scooted forward on the bed and clasped his hand over Remus’s arm and stretched his legs out. His jersey shorts were grey, and there was a damp spot on the thigh.
Remus looked right at it and said nothing, his cheeks pink.
“Now?” Sirius asked him, perhaps a beat too late. His hand tightened against Remus’s arm as if to pull him closer, but he made to hide himself again, looking up at him through a curtain of dark hair Remus longed to push back.
He nodded, and slowly let go of Sirius’s arm, relieving him in the only way he felt he could relieve him in that moment.
Too much. Monty would kill him, surely.
Or perhaps not kill, but certainly send him packing without a recommendation.
“I’ll meet you downstairs.”
They took Remus’s car again, and Remus stopped at the new familiar traffic lights and took the same bendy roads, taking it slow, always terrified they’d crash into another vehicle on the narrower roads where it was hard to see around the grass bends (“you drive like a granny, your seat’s very close to the wheel,” Sirius told him casually, earning him a swift and friendly, “fuck off,” in reply).
While they waited at the lights, closer to the lake, Sirius started telling him about an art film from the 1970s he watched the previous night. Apparently, it had him feeling “some kind of way”, and Remus laughed at that, sparing him a quick glance as he drove.
“I mean, it was all bare arses and soft lips and men posed as erotic Roman caricatures. It was kind of intense.”
Remus laughed through his nose. "Sounds like it. Maybe I should watch it, too.”
“I think you’d like it.” There was a pause then, and Sirius let out a slow breath. “I’d like to watch it with you. See how you react to it.”
It was as good as another confession. Maurice, lying cover-up on the breakfast table.
Remus swallowed a bit, hot under the collar.
They spent an hour by the lake, but it was too humid. The air was cloying, and even after a dip in the water, Remus felt too hot. He couldn’t seem to get dry; he was perpetually sticky.
They climbed back into his car, and in a moment of indulgence, he turned the air conditioning on. They both sat heavily against the seats, letting it wash over them, kissing their damp skin as they stayed stationary underneath a copse of trees by the edge of the lake’s dusty, makeshift car park, which at that time was mostly empty.
After a while, Sirius started fiddling with the buttons on the stereo, and he flicked through radio channels, frowning and unhappy at all of the choices.
“Plug in your phone,” Remus suggested, pulling out the wire for him.
So he did, and they listened to one of his playlists. Sirius had good taste in music: Django Django, King Gizzard, Foxygen. Youthful and jaggedy and sometimes a bit trippy and weird, just like him.
Sirius grinned when Star Treatment began to play, and he shook his head slowly, looking across the seats at Remus. “This is their best album, hands down. Don’t care what the critics say, it’s genius.”
“I like it too,” Remus said with a crooked grin. So Sirius put the whole thing on, and they sat there for a while, listening to it under the cool AC while the lake emptied out and the sky turned darker, stars poking through, pinpricks of brilliant, sparkling blue and white light.
Remus could feel Sirius’s eyes on him the whole time, a keen, hooded stare that burned into his temple. The draw of it was almost overwhelming.
Finally, he turned his head and looked right at Sirius, unable to take it anymore.
“C’mere,” he muttered.
Sirius didn’t scramble to him, like Remus almost expected him to. All of those tiny deliberate touches over the past few weeks built up into something much slower, something intentional.
He heard the creak of Sirius’s seat as he shifted closer, putting a hand down against the console between them, balancing slowly forward.
Remus lifted his hand and did something he’d wanted to do from the moment he spotted Sirius out on the lawn on that very first day. He touched his hair, letting it slip through his fingers, awed by its thickness and silkiness, even after a dip in the lake. It was still damp, and when he lifted it up, he pressed his nose against it and inhaled deeply. It smelled like moss from the lake and turpentine from his paintbrushes and salt from his sweat, and Sirius sucked in a sharp breath too, tilting his head forward, their cheeks brushing, skin so warm where it pressed together.
And then Sirius’s breath shuddered out against Remus’s ear, the warmth of it pulsing heat deep between Remus’s legs. He tightened his fingers in Sirius's hair enough to tilt his head back, enough to bring their mouths together in a slow, searching kiss, the gentlest brush of lips, hoping to relieve himself of this deep, coiling tension.
He groaned softly. Sirius sighed.
When he pulled back after a just few seconds, Sirius huffed out low through his nose, and his fingers found their way to the front of Remus’s t-shirt, curling against it and pulling him in again into a dirty, open-mouthed kiss, licking his way very slowly into Remus’s mouth. Desire burned keenly in the pit of Remus’s stomach, and when Sirius put his hand on his thigh, then up over the front of his shorts, he lifted his hips up and rubbed himself against Sirius’s warm palm with a gasp. He was achingly hard.
“N-no,” he panted after another half minute of that, his head spinning, the back of his teeth buzzing. He gently pried Sirius away, pushing him back at arm’s length, and Sirius stared at him as he slumped back against the passenger seat again, his hair ruffled at one side where Remus had been fisting at it, his lips red and raw.
“Why not?” he said roughly, frowning, his cheeks pink.
Remus dropped his hands into his lap, his own cheeks warm. “Because—Monty and Euphemia…”
Sirius rolled his eyes. “Monty and Euphemia don’t care.”
Remus stuttered a laugh. Then, maybe a little cruelly, he thought about the tall blond boy from the party: “How would you know? Done this a lot with other house guests, have you?”
Sirius’s frown turned into an ugly scowl, and Remus felt himself wanting but unable to take two steps backward. “Please take us home. Now.”
They drove back in awkward silence, and Remus spent the entire journey willing his erection away, praying the evidence of their fumble wouldn’t be immediately obvious as soon as he stepped out of the car.
No one was there to greet them when they returned, though – everyone was still out. And before he had a chance to undo his seatbelt and say anything else to Sirius, he was gone in a flash, wrenching open the door and stalking back into the house, up the winding maze of stairs and into his room. He slammed his door so hard Remus heard all of the way from downstairs.
--
Sirius didn’t speak to him for almost three days after that.
Remus threw himself into his work with Monty, going through old catalogues and journals, searching for resources for him to review for his book, checking copyright on images and taking emails from his students who wanted to touch base with him over summer, all while chipping away at research for his own dissertation with Monty’s keen and blustering support. They poured over old texts together, and one day, Monty took him into Oxford to see a first edition of The Monk they had to use museum gloves to flick through, and Remus didn’t think he’d be happy doing anything else with his life: just this, these old books and the hallowed halls of older libraries, and words and symbols that said so much beyond their basic definitions.
Meanwhile, Sirius seemed to come and go without comment, sometimes with James, sometimes without him. His hair was sometimes damp from the lake, sometimes speckled with paint.
It was maddening.
One morning, Remus’s mum called, and he wandered around on the lawn outside as she asked him about the house and about Monty and if they were feeding him.
“Of course they’re feeding me mum,” he said, ducking under the shade of a tree. Across the way, James was walking hand-in-hand with Lily, her red hair swinging loose. She lifted her free hand up in a wave, and Remus waved back before turning toward the tree and staring at the patterns in the bark, digging up some dirt with the toe of his trainer.
“Well I’m your mother Remus, I’m supposed to ask these questions, aren’t I?” She chuckled, and the sound of her warm laugh was almost enough to bring a lump to Remus’s throat.
“Is it all very posh down there? I read there’s a few palaces.”
“Yeah, a few. I think. Maybe just ruins though, I’m not sure.”
“Well, let me know if you see any royalty. Oh, did I tell you I saw Harriet’s son the other day? He’s selling cheese down at the market now with his dad. Very nice face. Very nice arms. I could put a good word in for you.” A wicked little laugh.
“Mum, you’re awful,” Remus groaned, laughing too. “Stop trying to matchmake me with farmer’s sons.” It wasn’t said, but it was obvious: I’m not coming back to Otley.
--
On the second day, Remus had, perhaps foolishly, waited out on the lawn for Sirius well past dinner, which he didn’t show up to either.
Hours went by and he never came.
Remus woke up that night to the sound of his phone buzzing against the bedside table. He groaned and rolled over onto his back, and he glanced out at the slither of sky he could just see through the gaps in his curtains. It was a mucky blue, a post-midnight blue.
He grabbed his phone and blinked the sleep from his eyes. It was a text message from Sirius, presumably three doors down away in his own room.
I’m sorry I reacted the way I did. I was embarrassed. Can we talk again? I miss our chats. I miss you x
They’d exchanged numbers right after that first day on the lake, when Lily asked to take Remus’s number so they might meet up if time allowed it. Sirius and James asked for it then too, and it seemed rude not to give it to them. This was the first time Sirius texted him though, and Remus was immediately drawn to his user picture, pressing his thumb against it to make the tiny circle bigger.
It was Sirius’s face, his chin cocked upward and to the side, the line of his nose straight and graceful, his full lips stretched into a toothy grin, dark-lashed eyes crinkled.
Remus let out a ragged breath through his nose and slipped a hand into his underwear.
He looked at the picture as he wrapped his fingers around himself, eyes tracing the curve of Sirius’s mouth as he thought about their kiss, about the heat of his tongue and the little gasps he made when Remus tugged on his hair just so.
Remus’s phone fell against the mattress with a dull thud.
He closed his eyes and bit his lips together as heat crawled up his chest, and after half a minute, he shuffled his hand back out of his underwear again to spit into his palm.
Bringing his knees up further, he pressed his heels into the bedding and pulled his underwear down a bit more, wrapping his fist around himself again and rolling his palm downward against the head, now slick, as he pushed his hips upward against it.
Tugging Sirius’s hair.
Pushing his tongue into his mouth.
Cheek brushing cheek, stubble-rough, hot breath in his ear.
Hand on his dick and imagining more, wondering if the puckered skin between Sirius’s thighs was as hot as his lips.
Remus yanked himself over onto his side and grabbed a mouthful of his pillow between his teeth, keening softly against it and panting out through his nose as he spilled, hot and hard against his fist and stomach, bright and crackling stars peeling across his vision.
The comedown was slow, and he groaned in the back of his throat, wiping his hand on his bare thigh.
He picked up his phone again.
It’s okay. I shouldn’t have-- he deleted that, and started again.
Don’t be sorry. Meet me after dinner tomorrow. Your room.