a/n: This is for all the lovely, lovely people who reviewed "Decrescendo" and liked it so much.
F. O. R. T. E.
The first thing you choose to remember about your relationship with him is his hand against your cheek. It wasn't a caress, it wasn't quite a slap; his hand, lifting up and connecting with your open face, pushing you away, asking you to find your own space.
It bruised, because you've always bruised easily; little patches of blue and purple on pale skin that ached when you walked. Like a little girl, Sirius said, and he laughed when you sputtered at him, raising knotted washcloths full of ice cubes to make the swelling go down. Sirius kicking at empty Thai food boxes on the kitchen floor of your flat, wiping at his watering eyes with a sleeve from the smoke you'd brought in with you.
When you felt a little playful, blowing smoke in his direction with the tip of your cigarette. Not quite smiling, saying, "Like that, do you?" Gentle grey clouds hovering around Sirius's nose, causing him to cough and sneeze, his eyes red-rimmed and raw. The tip of his nose shone like some expensive bauble and you thought about touching it, flicking the tip of your nail against it and making a wish.
"It isn't on," Lily says worriedly. She's got her hip pressed against the counter, drumming green nails against the metal and biting the rim of her teacup. "You and Black, I mean. I don't quite understand it."
You consider the bruise on your temple with the back of a ladle. It's colored out nicely, all plum shades with navy at the base. It goes quite nice with your eyes, and you find yourself prodding it, hoping it'll spread. "We're just flat-mates." you say, and Lily gives you an anxious look. "Oh, stop being stupid, Evans, it doesn't suit you."
"It's not just me, you know," Lily says tightly, "Remus said he'd had you two over for tea and noticed you'd been favoring your right side, and-"
"Exactly what are you suggesting?"
It is far too quiet. "I don't know."
"Best to keep your mouth shut, then, isn't it." You show yourself out, bumping casually into the counter. You calculate the amount of air that comes spinning out through your teeth and think about the bruise expanding across your skin in the shape of Germany, where'd you been only once with Sirius, after school ended.
There had been lilacs, then. Lilacs and lavender and hydrangeas the color of dead men's eyelids circling around the pond that you'd sat by. Sirius had collapsed onto the grass, his mouth open and saying fiercely to you, "What a good thing to happen!"
You come into the kitchen, where Sirius is cross-legged on the tiles, fingers splayed out on the telephone. It's an old one; one that you distinctly remembered his mother throwing at him when he brought you over for tea. It had swung through the air in a gentle arc, landing across his cheekbone. Sirius's mother had stood in the center of the staircase, breathing heavily and mad-eyed like her son, who had laughed.
He'd thrown up in her flower garden afterwards and scared the neighbor's cat with his giggles, which rose and fell in time with the thin bubbles of blood rising on his upper lip.
Sirius says morosely to you now, "Felly-tone's broken." He's sliding the wires out and threading them under his nails. It draws blood and collects blood under the fragile barrier and he sighs. "Fuck. Did you buy some plasters?"
You remember Sirius as he was in school, mad-eyed as his mother and terrifying and with that ugly-beauty that had repulsed you and thrilled you. He's more muted now, the volume turned down on that Sirius Black of ages past. He's got a bit of scruff on his chin and he's gaunter; all sharper cheekbones and hair wet from the shower. He wouldn't give you nightmares, or spell you into shock.
Goddammit. Things get so disappointing when you get older.
You say to him, "No, I didn't. You didn't ask me to." You want to break something. This is the same conversation your mother would have with your father. Same talk, mindless chatter, superficial bullshit.
Your fingers trace the lines of china plates Remus had dropped off at your flat and sweep them down with the simple movement of your forearm. One hits Sirius on the side of the head, cracks and falls to pink-and-white pieces on the floor.
"The fuck are you doing?" Sirius yells. He launches himself off, grabs your shoulders and shakes you. You remember Lily telling you about that's how babies die sometimes and you wonder if you're still the infant in all of this, still the same stuttering being after all those years. If your infancy qualifies for maintaining some sort of homeostasis in the 'relationship' you have with Sirius.
You grab the wine-glasses (you hate the taste) and they go down too fast for you to see. Sirius jumps and god, you'd send him straight to the slaughterhouse just to remind him where he was born, where he ought to be, what he was supposed to become. Shake him like those well-meaning mother must have shaken to death their children, frantic and wanting peace.
Sirius grabs a fistful of your hair and pulls you back, knocking your head against the cabinet. "What the fuck is wrong with you? You're mad!"
You are doing his job. You are stealing his birth-right. You remember the tales of Jacob and Esau your father taught you, before magic and school and thought you were going to hell. You touch Sirius's face, trace the line of your nail under his eye.
"I don't understand." you tell him. "I don't understand a thing that this world has to offer."
Remus stops by and blinks at you. He's moving over the map of bruises on the left side of your face, all lilac and lavender and shaped like Germany. He drops his briefcase and moves his mouth around in a series of squeaks and exclamations.
"Are you al-Jesus, what happened?"
Sirius moves into the room like silk. He picks up the kettle and smiles gently at Lupin, saying, "You want some tea? We've just put it on."
The second way you choose to remember your relationship is of reluctance. Sirius had grown overly-soft since you were fifteen. He'd curl into an armchair and read until you came home, and it drove you up the wall and down into some complicated blue-black kind of fury. It made you want to tear his skin from his bones and make him look at the sour, rotted person he'd been since your first year of school.
He would sit at the table with his coffee and his newspaper, and you'd kill him five times in your mind before the toast popped up. These were "good days" and you hated him for being calm and rational and being the sort of take your coat when you walked in and putting the kettle on.
He was hanging up a frame in the living room. Remus, James, Peter, himself. You tore it out from the wall and found yourself with his hands laced like shoelaces at your throat. His eyes glittered like over shined jewelry and you could seem the slim shadow of who he had been before fanning his pupils and irises.
"Go on and do it." You say. Sirius hands on your throat reminded you of ribbons on a corset, pulling far too tight. What a thing to do for beauty. "Are you too scared, Black?"
At the back of your neck, there was a bruise the shape of Spain where you'd landed against the window in a hotel and Lily had seen it and cried both the Nile and the Amazon. He presses against it like a warning, like a promise. You sputter, he shakes you. You dig your nails into his side, make him gasp and breathe out something that will sound honest (for once). You say, laughing, "I know you. You wish I didn't, but I do. You goddamn lonely creature, I know you better than anyone else."
All the good things, the bad things. You know every single one of them. You know Germany, where everything that was better, and England, where everything was always worse. "You little shit." he says. He's going to cry and you're so excited for it that it makes your skin itch. "I'd set myself on fire for you, and you'd just laugh, you disgusting little toad. I'd torch a thousand cities for you and you wouldn't give a shit."
He says it like he's halfway ready to split at the seams, and you smile and think of yourself as resurfacing, breaking the drowning waters of being fifteen and infatuated and too full of everything you had no right to feel.