A/N: First R/S fic ever. I'm going through a puppy influenza. I like it. :)
Warning: Slash, angst, and all that jazz.
Disclaimer: The pups aren't mine, but JK lets us play with them. Oh yes.
Anything and Nothing
In the arms of Sirius Black, Remus can do anything.
He can play the blasted violin, which he tried to when he was younger but couldn't because it felt too delicate to him; too fragile, like if he accidentally gripped the neck too much the poor thing would snap. The bow felt too thin and bony in his fingers, and even though he wanted to make the strings wail with beautiful music, he couldn't, because Remus was scared of breaking the instrument. But in arms that hold him so anxiously, Remus feels that nothing ever can he break, not even hearts, which he has come so close to.
When he curdles himself in Sirius' limbs, he can stretch his hands an octave on the piano–eight notes, and his fingers on every white and black key. Remus, though not vain, thinks he has rather nice fingers–long and a little bony, but he likes it when Sirius outlines the creases and angles of them, so when he thinks of his hands spanning a scale on a baby grand, he always imagines Sirius sitting next to him on the bench, telling him he is beautiful and so are the notes he is playing.
He can write a book of poems and address them all to Sirius. They would all be modern and free verse, because Remus can't rhyme for shit ("What rhymes with Sirius?") He knows, however, how to make his thoughts of the teenager-sometimes-man turn into lyrical and flowing verses; sweet words dusted with sugar and Sirius' name repeated every five lines. He can make a masterpiece of oil paints with a real canvas; dipping his brush and swirling it onto the thick slab of fabric. He likes these fantasies the best; because Lily is always telling him that artists often have naked models, and Remus blushes underneath his splayed fingers as he realizes that he doesn't need a naked model of Sirius Black: he has memorized the image already.
Sirius is all soft contours and sharp angles, so very concave in spaces and perfectly round in others. He juts in odd places but curves in all the right ones, and during the times when Padfoot buries his nose in a hollow of Remus' neck and sighs things like my God I love you and holy shit you are so beautiful and yes please oh Moony oh Remus, Remus whispers back all the right things and leans into Sirius' mold of body and fits so absolutely that it is as if Remus and Sirius were created for each other; separate people with different bodies but cut from the same slab of marble and skin and seraph.
In the arms of Sirius Black, Remus can do everything. But the veil in the Department of Mysteries is torn and menacing, and probably behind the curtain are broken violins and untuned pianos and ripped canvases and broken bodies, and arms that should be holding Remus but aren't.
Remus can do nothing, and he hates only himself for it.