It is always the end of a cycle that is worst for Remus because the wolf lingers and his body aches and his senses still buzz with heightened awareness. He shifts his legs and rearranges himself on the common room couch, licking his lips as he tries again to concentrate on his transfiguration homework for a third, fourth, fifth time. For the first few days after he rarely accomplishes anything, it was like the wolf stood in front of him and he was just a helpless viewer to it's docile interests. The smallest things distract him, make him turn his head with animalistic rapture. His eyes are almost black with pupil in the dim gorse-yellow light of the room. Sirius hangs onto him, that ever protective arm always crooked around Remus's shoulder, though he is in deep and thorough conversation with Mclinton about the previous days gryffindor quidditch flubber on the pitch. His body jerks around expressivly as he floats his spare hand in the air in random thrusts of exaggeration while he talks, oblivious to the way Remus grits his teeth each time his attention is pulled away from his work. Remus turns to look at him. He can smell him, head to toe, from the raspberry that lingers in his hair from the morning's bath, down to the salty sweat on the back of his neck, dried into the collar of his shirt. The lemon sherbert stained onto his tie, the sulfur of some successful dungbombing on his hands mixed with tobacco and black clove from smoking trists in the bathrooms between classes and the bit of black indian ink underneath his nails. Remus can smell other things, too, such as (even inside such as they were) the air thick with impending rain from the west and the dinner feast being prepared two stories below and that Sirius's body pulses arousal. It isn't something Remus recognizes as arousal, it just pulls him animalishly to turn his head into the side of Sirius's arm, which hangs so close to his face, to smell him.
At the end of a cycle, those first few days, Remus is much changed. He is not such a dowry, wide eyed fit of nervous laughter and shy blushes as he is darkened by instinctual shadows and black eyes and long, quiet moments like these when he just smells Sirius's arm like a wild thing favoring a thought to memory. He can feel his scars, too, running deep across his back and his thighs and across his face and is reminded of a time before Padfoot, when there was nothing to do for the lonliness but throw himself against the door of the shrieking shack and howl and tear himself apart in frustration; it drives a sense of territory out of him, protective and jealous.
When Mclinton takes his leave and Sirius, all canine smiling and goofy expression, turns to look at Remus (who he'd left to his quiet reading for the conversation and expects much of the same still taking place when his head turns), he pauses, struck by the quiet brooding thing in his arm, Remus expressionless and pale and his eyes large and dark and his face turned into Sirius's arm, smelling him with parted lips.
Sirius is accustomed to post-transformation Moony. Sometimes Remus passes him, the day after a transformation, and turn his head with Sirius and watches him walk by with his head down and it always, always sends shivers down Sirius's spine and he always, always looks back at Remus on those occasions and they always, always keep eye contact until some external force wretches them away like Sirius walking into a table or a wall or over his own feet (he actually gets a bad rap about being clumsy because Remus is always fixing him with that bloody determined gaze after moons, making him tripsy and loofish).
It's hard to look away when moony is like this. The book in Remus's lap falls off his knees and hits the ground with a soft thud that neither of them really notice and outside the impending rain finally breaks and starts slanting down across the windows in a roar and Remus turns his forehead and rests it on Sirius's arm - the longer Sirius looks at him the more Sirius's arousal grows, which Remus doesn't know is arousal, but the buzzing in his head quickens all the same and his body feels more desperate for contact. Remus can only answer by putting his forehead on Sirius's arm and trying to breathe through his mouth because the smells are so vivid that they make his eyes and head and chest hurt. Sometimes it is the feeling that is the most painful for Remus, the sensing, the lingering thing that he can't yet put a name to.
"Moons," Sirius says softly and Remus turns his head toward Sirius and his eyes look so dark that Sirius swallows. Remus brings a hand up in front of Sirius's face - it pauses there while the Remus behind the animal stills it, reminds him of who he is with and where they are and the nature of things, and it falls down to ball in Sirius's tie, instead, clutching and grasping like trying to fight instinct while Remus breathes through his mouth raggedly and stares at Sirius with black eyes.
"It's okay, moons," Sirius whispers. He is so hard that he can feel it getting wet and even just the friction against his pants feels so good that he has to shift against the tented material. When Remus's eyes drift down Sirius has to bite the inside of his mouth, first his cheek and then his tongue and then his other cheek and he tastes blood after a few long beats of Remus taking him in. He knows that Remus likes blood when he is like this - there had been an accident shaving at the end of a cycle months prior (because Remus was giving him that determined look and Sirius had gotten flustered and cut his jawline open) and Remus had come up behind Sirius and had pushed him against the wall with wolfish strength from his boy arms and had licked the wound clean with James and Peter dropping their jaws and Sirius stilling, letting Remus do what he had to do to for the animal. It had been firm but sweet, long licks and sucking and Remus's hands fumbling on the wall where Sirius's face was pressed and noises throughout that still haunt Sirius.
The blood in his mouth only pools the harder Sirius bites down on his own tongue and Moony's eyes come up off of Sirius's obvious erection and flitter across his face and he brings himself in, close, and smells Sirius's lips so that it is all Sirius can do when he thrusts into the air, against his pants, amd Remus's hands come up to Sirius's face to clasp his cheeks and Remus abandons his human reservations and begins to lick Sirius's mouth, first his bottom lip and them the top and then both. When he gets the faint taste of metallic blood he gruffs against Sirius and begins to devour his mouth and Sirius doesn't fight it, he lets Remus's tongue inside and his hips raise in the air again, looking for some kind of contact or release. His lips try to match the ferocity of the wolf, but it is difficult, and in the end it is just Remus pressing Sirius into the couch with his mouth cusping wide, wet kisses and tongue onto Sirius in obvious dominance.
A jostle at the portrait, the scent of others somewhere, makes Remus jerk his head up and still like an animal listening to noises beyond and his bottom lip is red and wet with Sirius's blood and salvia and all Sirius can do is make some miserable noise because he knows how moony is the days after, it's all this hot teasing when he gets the scent of something but the second something else catches his attention he forgets the prior, leaving Sirius disheveled and confused and red faced (just like the sodding razor incident).
Sirius grabs Remus by the face and kisses him, then, not because he is part wolf and can smell and feel and sense so many small nuances that it drives desperate acts out of him, but because Sirius needs this in the way any sixteen year old boy needs it. Remus breaks the kiss and looks down, again, his lips swollen as he considers the growing wet spot of precome on Sirius's pants and Sirius hisses and pushes his hips up again as Remus drops down off the couch and onto his knees in front of Sirius and begins to tentatively lick the material without any other concern in the world.
"Oh fuck, moony," Sirius whispers, unable to to take his eyes off of Remus and he reaches down with shaking hands and fumbles with his zip and button while the licking continues. Sirius isn't the most sound-minded bloke but he does stop, briefly, to wonder if this is a bad move (the shaving incident had left Remus, once he was right in the head again, unable to look at or speak to any of the marauders for almost a week). But he knows the wolf doesn't control Remus after the moon, he knows that Remus has to want to do what he is doing - the wolf just strips away those human barriers that Remus is so stuck behind that he has never even had a proper kiss by fifth year but here he is about to suck Sirius, and the idea of it, of having Remus suck his cock makes Sirius yelp something and yank his zipper down quick and forget those gentle nodes of modesty or chivalry (which are foreign to him, anyway) as Remus seemlessly makes the transition from pants to flesh with all of his attention on the wet tip.
"Fuck," Sirius whimpers again helplessly, bringing his hand around the back of Remus's head and pushing down, willing him to open his mouth around it, the licking driving him mad. Something of Remus responds, something of the boy underneath because wolves dont know how to swallow a cock and move their tongue underneath like that and drag their lips up and down and it only takes a few strokes before Sirius is arching with both of his hands knotted in Remus's shaggy hair and hissing and dropping his head back against the couch as his vision blurs and he comes, hard. Remus's mouth stays trained throughout and he swallows repeatedly, he keeps swallowing until there is nothing left and Sirius's hands go slack against his head and even then he reverts to the licking which makes Sirius tense and sit up from the over-sensation. He has to push Remus away gently with a reddening blush and a crackpot smile and his friend gives him a doleful expression from the floor that clouds over as Sirius grabs him by the arms and pulls him up, back to the couch.
"Fuck.." Sirius says, for the third time, and he almost wishes his vocabulary was more diverse (in this rarest of moments) so that he knew how to say what he wants to say but all he can really do is cuss a little in the aftershock and hold Remus close to him. The scents of arousal and lust and animal things diffusing leaves Remus's half himself, a little more than before, and he looks at Sirius with his eyes more brown and neutral and confused and it makes Sirius smile and pull Remus into another awkward couch embrace.
"Oh god," Remus mumbles against his shoulder. "Oh.. Oh god."
"I hope Moony comes out to play more often," Sirius indulges with a twist to his mouth because he can feel Remus's skin burning with a full body blush