A big thankyou to Frayed Misfit, for encouragingme to write more Remus/Sirius and for all her conversations about literature that inspired it.
This is for Ryepie, the 'fucking awesome' to my 'fucking amazing'; hope you love this as much as you love Will and Skandar. FASistas FTW!
Reviews are love.
Remus Lupin dwells in literature; those fantasy worlds that are fabrications of the truth, idyllic pictures of scenes that cannot exist for him, not ever. He finds his solace in Shakespeare, in Tolstoy, even in Austen, where heroes and heroines much more pragmatic than him create their own perfections. He builds walls of paper and print, encasing himself in the lives of others to forget the world.
James, Peter, Sirius, they do not understand; the latter especially. They claw at his self-made castle with words of their own, writing their own intertwined stories in the wake of his self-destruction.
"I don't get you, Moony." Sirius bounds up in all his gold and grey glory – his Gryffindor tie is pressed against the hollow of his throat for no other reason other than that he feels like it, and his eyes are gleaming – and sits himself down amidst the precarious walls of Remus' summer reading list. "I really don't get you."
"What now?" Remus asks in exasperation, marking his place in David Copperfield with excruciating deliberateness.
"The sun is shining, James' place has a lake – not that you'd want see him in his swimsuit, I do admit – and you're holed up reading about a bloomin' goldmine."
"It's a not a goldmine, Sirius. I suppose I can come outside for a while."
Sirius lifts himself up, grinning a grin to make grown women flush, and nods. "Good. James and Wormtail are organising a game of Marco Polo, and it won't be any fun without you."
--
They fall into a contented rhythm over the next few days, a myriad of dappled sunlight and arguments over the importance of To Kill a Mockingbird in the "real world". Remus' little paper walls dissolve in the water of the lake; he can almost feel the words leaking down his arms like ink, reminding him of a life in which he doesn't have friends.
The words are his saviour, but sometimes when he looks at Sirius, his tanned, coarse hands bathed in the moonlight, he thinks that Sirius is his everything.
--
Everything in his world is built on words, and his attraction to Sirius is no different. It's built on the sound of his voice, the twist of his lip as he mumbles various euphemisms about Remus' addiction to C.S Lewis, the cock of his eyebrow as he stumbles his away around words such as 'capricious'. Remus hides himself behind the ever-growing walls of his paper castle, wondering when he started stuttering and blushing, when his own words began to fail him.
He retreats further into his world of inky dreams, emerging only to reprimand James on his dirty mind or Peter on his inability to use a decent cooking charm. Sirius winks at him, and all he can do is mumble incoherently and hold a book up high as a mask. He wonders why love was always so easy for heroes and heroines.
Remus is not the hero; he is the monster, locking his heart away in worlds where the stories of people like him never come to an end.
--
The irony of it all is, when Sirius kisses him, moist lips against the concave of his neck and the ragged, scarred edge of his ear, Remus has no words at all.
This is his own story, the one that only he may write.
The walls crumble down around him.