Disclaimer: Don't own. Don't sue.
Author's Notes: A little more poetic-rambling that I usually go.
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Beautiful Things
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James Potter knows beautiful things.
A beautiful thing is Lily's too-red hair spilling in tangled waves across her shoulders, his shoulders, their shoulders together and he kisses her because he can, it is morning and they belong to each other. Soft, dawning. Her stomach smooth and swollen beneath his fingers and he can feel the feeble movement of something small and new. This fragile life.
A beautiful thing is the butter-gold of a full harvest moon, he is Stag, and the ground is dark and wet and mouldering leaf-smell, it lies behind him and before him, chase the moon. The trees are bowing high above him, and the forest is his own for taking. He runs with Wolf and Dog, and he carries Rat and they are Pack: one together and one alone.
A beautiful thing is his father's fingers joined with his own. Through the sleep-fog of memory, they guide him This is a broom, James, can you tell it 'Up' until he hangs in blue and all around him there is the rushing of wind. He can hear the whisper-voice which speaks with no words but begs him farther, faster and he knows if only he reaches he will touch the end of the sky but he just cannot seem to get there.
A beautiful thing is magic, and the way James can feel it always, tucked under the surface of his skin, welling and sparking, and powerful. In the rhythm of duck and spiral in a duel and fast breath the heady sensation of knowing the words to make the world bend to his will triumph.
Sirius has always been better at magic than James. James is good at magic. He is pureblood, old blood. Sometimes it makes him feel hypocritical, against his better belief, spending all this time fighting against people who say his lineage makes him superior and yet, sometimes he is, the magic flows in his blood as thick and rich as ancient wine, as old and true as the moon.
But Sirius is better at magic. It's never bothered James. It's just a fact, the way it's a fact that Sirius's hair is better than James's. For every drop and flow of magic in James there is twice that in Sirius. If the magic is in James's blood, the magic is Sirius's. He holds his wand like an extension of his soul, both reverently and carelessly, and spells mix and join and mingle and explode from him because Sirius speaks to the magic and it obeys him. Sirius breathes magic, it fits against him and with him like a second skin, he understands it, how to twist and pull so that he shapes the magic as much as magic shapes him.
Remus is better at magic than James, too. This fact is harder to accept, because James does not feel the power ooze and drip around Remus, hugging and leeching him the way he feels it in Sirius. Remus would not have been especially good at magic if he weren't a werewolf. But he is. He wouldn't be the Remus Lupin James knows if he weren't a werewolf either.
This also makes James feel hypocritical. For all that they tell Remus he is human, not different from them, Remus is different. James doesn't hold it against him but Remus is a dark creature. Remus is as much of magic as unicorns and fairies and centaurs and hippogriffs. James knows for a fact that sometimes Remus forgets that as a wizard, he's supposed to use his wand, sometimes spells he uses have no words, are not spells but are only a manipulation of the magic that simply hangs in the air, because Remus sees it the way James sees dust motes. He takes it from the silver of moon and scrape of claw-drawn-blood to be a sculpture of spell, a painting.
A beautiful thing is watching Remus and Sirius duel. To watch them duel against each other is an art that James could never quite accomplish. When James duels with Sirius, it is true and brotherly, and they predict each other's hexes and spells perfectly, so each movement and twist is timed just right. It isn't beautiful, though, it is a duel of simplicity.
Sirius and Remus duel and old dance that is exquisite and courteous and seems terrifyingly dangerous. They sweep around each other like rivers entwining eternally, a blur of motion James cannot follow. Their spells are silent and impossible and the only sound is the delicate murmur of swishing fabric, a masquerade ball.
James remembers the first time Lily saw them duel each other. He can remember her gasp of fear, because surely, surely they would kill each other, they couldn't possibly survive that whirlwind motion, but she didn't understand their joy in the duelling. That each spell was not aimed for the opponent, it was aimed for just over the left shoulder, or underneath a crook of the right knee. The point of the duel is to show control and perfection and beauty not that they could hurt each other.
A beautiful thing is watching Remus and Sirius duel each other, but James has always thought it more beautiful to watch them duel together, against someone else. Only then does that effortless miss-touch-glint dance fall away and then they are suddenly real.
Sirius and James duel well together, but it is still only a simple up, down, side-to-side easy brother-rhythm that is built for function and practicality.
Remus duels like a wolf, and Sirius like a hunter.
Remus moves with animal grace that he rarely posses at any other time, he slides and ducks with the sinewy tumble of a wolf pup and watches, alert and protective, the wary logical gaze of the dominant wolf. His movements are swift and leaping-arching and circular, like the phases of the moon.
Sirius duels decisively, with stealth and with knowing. He is the hunter and he must know the patterns his prey follows. He predicts the moves of those he fights before they themselves know, and he is fast, and lethal and without pity or mercy or cruelty. His grace is the silence of bare feet on grass and the sharp twang of silver fletched arrows.
Together, Remus and Sirius are support, as the hunter must respect the wolf, and the wolf must respect the hunter. They twist back-to-back or side-to-side, and sometimes their spells flow into each other with the music of forest and canine, in an elementary movement that James is too grounded to follow.
"Why," James asked once, "Are you so damn good at duelling?"
He was mostly drunk, and so were they, and the answer is fuzzy in his thoughts, either because he cannot remember it well enough though the haze of firewhiskey, or because it was delivered that way, but James can see Remus with his eyes too yellow-gold and bright, and Sirius with a strange softening to his sharp features.
Remus said, "I know."
Sirius said, "I see."
And Remus said, "I think."
And Sirius said, "I do."
And then together, one said, "I follow." And the other said, "I lead." But James could not tell who said which thing, and he was not entirely sure they knew either.
The world is ordered in certain ways and one pattern is that Sirius Black doesn't live alone. He isn't meant for it, and they all know it. Another pattern is that once children grow up they don't do well to live with family anymore, so James doesn't live with Sirius. They've got farther skies to reach for now.
There was never any question about it, even from the beginning, that Moony was going to live with Padfoot. Remus didn't have enough money to pay for a flat that wasn't above a bad curry takeout or have a rat infestation or dangerous amounts of lead paint, and Padfoot wasn't going to live alone, but they were both too proud to say anything and so it was simpler that they would unconsciously move in together. This is the way James sees it.
They have a ritual, and James feels almost guilty for breaking it, but it wasn't really a spoken ritual and so James can maybe choose to ignore it.
The ritual is about work, Order work in particular. Like most rituals, James didn't notice it was there until it had been in place for a long time and he was trying to go against it.
Always after a fight with the Death Eaters they go home.
It's strange to look back on the years before they were suddenly all adults and instead of Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs, it was Prongs-and-Lily, and where is Wormtail, have you seen him around lately because I sure haven't, and Padfoot and Moony shut off their floo connection again and I've got work and you've got work and we don't live in the same room anymore and oh, fuck this is what they meant by "responsibility".
To look back on those years, life revolved around four. A prank or a run in with the Slytherins in the hallway, a good duel like that, it always ended in four, crowded together, healing and laughing, and belly warm and full with the heavy sweetness of chocolate and butterbeer.
But now, it's always James and Lily go home, and Moony and Padfoot go home, and Wormtail wasn't even there again. In the morning they go out to the muggle café for pancakes, all of them together, and they realize silently that four isn't four anymore, surprised to find it that isn't what they want anyway.
But tonight Lily is mad at him because he wouldn't let her fight, not when she's six months along now, and what was he thinking taking risks when she wasn't there to drag him out of trouble, and unsurprisingly, Wormtail didn't answer when James flooed him, so even though it isn't morning yet, and they aren't all going to get pancakes yet, James is going to Sirius' flat.
He doesn't floo in because if they're sleeping he won't wake them, he'll just crash on the couch. Instead he apparates to the landing outside of the flat and looks down for a moment, with amusement, at the welcome mat which has a vaguely rude garden gnome stitched into it, and James has no doubt that if he were to step on it, the gnome with insult him. Then he fishes the hide-a-key out from under the pot with the dead geranium and opens the door. It makes a slight creaking protest but not loud enough for Remus and Sirius to notice…
Oh.
Oh. thinks James distantly, perhaps there was a different reason that Sirius and Remus moved in together, after all.
James Potter has never seen something beautiful like this.
Sometimes when they're all duelling, he has seen one of them do this. It is a little thing. A cut will open across Sirius' forehead and there will be a bit to much blood, and James will feel fear tug at his heart because it's blood, his own blood (the blood of his brother)being spilled. And even if it's only a cut, that blood will drip into his eyes and then he won't be able to see and then a real spell will catch him and, suddenly, Moony's fingers are there, and they brush across the cut feather-light and suddenly it is gone, only the soft pink skin of scar left behind.
Or maybe it will be Remus, and Remus is fighting someone too hard and his face is etched in lines of exhaustion and James knows that he'll collapse soon, they've got to end the fight now but they just can't yet, but then Sirius will grab Remus' arm for a moment and squeeze and suddenly Remus is revived again.
James hasn't ever mentioned noticing it. It isn't something to mention. If he says anything they won't be able to give an answer James will understand, and anyway, it's just fingers on a forehead and a friendly pat on the arm. He's never seen anything spectacular about it.
On the couch in front of James now, though, is not a scene James has a word for, it is not spectacular it is…
Beautiful works best, James thinks.
James knows now why he'd always felt before, that if he asked them how they could spontaneously heal each other, they wouldn't be able to give an answer James would understand.
It's like if they asked him "James, why do you love Lily?" And James would answer them, "Merlin, you idiots, how can I not? She's like the…my god…like the air I breath or something. Like…fire. You know?"
And they wouldn't know.
The scent of old magic hangs heavy in the air, it is the scent of spiced hot chocolate and dry lighting in the desert, and when he opens his mouth to breath it coats his tongue like the thick dust of an ancient attic.
Remus is sprawled on the couch; his hair hangs golden in the silhouette light of the single forty-watt bulb covered by an off-white embroidered lampshade. He is wearing blue striped pyjama pants and one purple sock. His eyes are open and James can see that they are the too-yellow gold colour of oh-right-remember-how-Moony-becomes-a-ravenous-beat-under-the-full-moon. He is not looking at James though. His eyes are settled rapturously on Sirius.
Sirius is kneeling on the floor next to Remus and he is slightly less dressed. He hovers above Remus, with silver grey glances and a serene smile, and oh, James understand a little better now…Sirius's fingers brush across a gash James remembers distinctly came from a Death Eater who's hair was suspiciously lank and greasy.
The scar heals beneath his fingertips, blood is gone and the skin is new and thin and precious.
"Thank you, Sirius," Remus murmurs. And in return, Remus reaches out his fingers and James blinks as a dark slice of red blood along Sirius' neck is brushed away. Remus leans down and kisses Sirius hard and in that motion James sees the circle of the moon and the dance of a duel and the wolf and the hunter and the blue of sky and the red of Lily's hair and their eyes flutter for a moment. Then Sirius pulls back and reaches out his hand, pulling Remus off of the couch.
"Come along, bed time," says Sirius, and he turns his head to the door and sees James and freezes for half a second. Just long enough for James to know Sirius saw him.
"Padfoot?" Remus questions.
"Hmm?"
"Sleepy."
"Me too."
And Sirius switches off the lamp, and they leave the living room. James has still not moved, the hide-a-key clutched too-tight in his hand. The hall light switches off.
This is the reason you don't break Rituals, James. Says the Lily-voice inside his head.
James has always wondered what it would be like to walk in on his best friend/brother having sex, but they weren't even having sex they were just being two people who loved each other and he always thought that it would be weird and awkward and oh for Circe's sake that was weird and awkward, but he didn't expect this funny feeling like joy to bloom in his heart and it's like butter melting because he's happy that people can be so happy.
"See you for pancakes," calls Sirius as the bedroom door closes.
EDIT: As of 01/09/09, there are a few small changes, just spelling fixes and such.