Lost to You Yourself
When Sirius returns home that night, the moon a wisp of light behind stubborn clouds, the first thing he does is to trip messily over the parcel sitting neatly in the entryway. He nudges the door close with his hip, and leans against it heavily for a few seconds, still quite disposed to laughter, the night's quiet revelry still wet in his throat and warm in his stomach. They should do this more often, he decides, share a few poor bottles of red on the unpretentious grounds of football pubs and corner bars, rather than chase down deceptively hard liquor with black coffee at the hippie joints that Lily has recently taken an alarming liking to, and James – that sycophantic lovesick moose – cheerfully pretends to endorse. He is pleasantly buzzed, not intoxicated enough to regret this night in another ten hours and counting, but still, it takes a pause before he fully registers his piece of mail.
The box is small and brown, just big enough for the cd and the twenty or so pages of writing that it hides, and waiting in front of his cat flap, like a pet, but more indefinitely patient for attention. He gets to his knees immediately then, slouches down into a sitting position beside his potted plant, eye level with the pink post-it stuck to one drooping leaf with its vehement exhortation to water me!, and tears carefully into the box. He reaches for the manuscript first, flips to the pages that he expects to find markings in the margins, and smiles when he comes across the first scattering of print, small and conscientious but curling in the long tails of its gs and ys, a script familiar and dear after the last eight months.
Plato, really? Isn't that a dead giveaway to the fact that our protagonist is of the bent persuasion?
Sirius imagines a wry smile on lips that quirk a little too secretively to hide humor, and feels his own cheeks heat, possibly miles and miles from his correspondent. Here in the comforting solitude of his hallway, shrouded half in light and half in the shadows cast by the aimlessly flickering moonlight, and unmolested by searching eyes, he blushes like a young man in love. He shakes his head self-consciously, and feeling foolish almost immediately, grins, all teeth and rueful mirth, index finger following the grooves indented by the sweeping curves of the word "giveaway", pen bearing down on paper and now on the skin of his finger-pad.
There is a pause, a separation of margin and line, and then, almost like an laughing afterthought, a scribble,
But then again, our most discerning readers would expect nothing less. Our skinmag literary magazine delivers, if nothing else. Silly me.
He laughs, a small graceless snort of genuine glee, and finds that he cannot even pretend to muster any fake chagrin over the insult. HARD is a skinmag, after all, if one posturing as tasteful, and god forbid, literary. He supposes he ought to feel regretful that his writing career has strayed off the respectful path and into this backwoods of euphemistic pornography and coming-out fictions, but he enjoys his work, and appreciates the creative freedom allowed him by his mostly oblivious editors. He has been writing for the magazine for a little over a year now, and although uneventful, the twenty-sixth year of his young life – and his second year of true financial independence since taking a Masters in un-pragmatic English Literature from graduate school – has been memorable.
In the fifth month of his employ at HARD, his editors have had the frankly insane inspiration to make their magazine "an even more complete experience for the modern gay man", and have decided that his short fictions – poorly disguised pornography, for the most part, and the occasional attempt at something more substantial, or with a plot, really – would be read, husky overtures and hitched breaths included. And thus his column came accompanied with an audio disc monthly, and the magazine's subscription rates climbed modestly but steeply as the modern gay man applauded HARD's initiative in making wanking a visual and auditory experience, and Sirius was introduced to one Remus Lupin, professional reader for his not-so-professional tales.
Their relationship had been non-existent for the first two months, and if Sirius found Remus' reading voice pleasant when his complimentary magazine and disc reached him monthly, he took special care to deny it outside the privacy of his own head. Hearing his words read aloud, unidentified lips wrapped around the vowels and syllables of his imagination, had felt vaguely voyeuristic, and more than just a little kinky. Each month, he would pen unlikely narratives of chance encounters, frequent anonymous and unrepentant sex, and the infrequent happily-ever-afters, and wait a fortnight to have his words returned to him in digital format, and made somehow more embarrassing by that quiet and invariably thoughtful voice, filling the crevices of each empty word and giving it a meaning that Sirius had been instructed to avoid. He is tasked with selling fiction, false ideals of a sexy gay lifestyle that his readers and himself are too smart to believe in, but not quite discerning enough to pass up. Remus Lupin reads with a levity that had surprised him, and had made him, for an hour every month, to want to be discontent with his own lack of ambition.
They might have never progressed out of anonymous colleagues and into – what are they, now, really? – had he not been impulsive that July. He had just put the finishing touches on his submission piece for August, and it had been a hard month to write for. The Mile High Club, jet-setting executives, and fucking pilots, both as an adjective and a verb, and he had been feeling careless enough to scrawl quickly on the copy meant for his reader.
Are you feeling as stupid as I am yet?
He hadn't thought much of his question after that, and had been more than pleasantly surprised when he received mail a week earlier that month. It had been from Remus, and he had returned Sirius' original manuscript to him, still bearing the marks of his rueful query, but scribbled through now too with a reply. Remus had also added his own tentative offering of an unrevised first recording, and if Sirius' stomach had clenched a little too tightly at the thought of being allowed insight into unschooled emotions, then well, it should have made for fair enough warning concerning the desperate want the other man would soon instigate in him.
Seeing as how I am the one who needs to rehearse breathy moans in the relative safety of my bathroom – and I have thin walls, and I suspect my neighbors already believe me to be a man of ill repute – I can safely say that I feel incomparably stupider? More stupid, if stupider isn't a word? I am afraid I hold you responsible for my sad plight, Mr. Black.
And naturally Mr. Lupin would have to be charming and witty in his retort, and worse still, utterly disarming in that reading he had sent, his voice all roughed by sleep or a strep throat or unfamiliarity with the words he would have just seen for the first time. Sirius had been reluctantly charmed by the small coughs, the mispronunciations, the shaky laughter caught sharply on the notes of the more outrageous scenes, and had wondered, for the first time since his fictions have been serialized in audio, how his readers could ever have thought that polished and controlled reading voice sexy, when they – when they could have this, all unrehearsed and warm and breathless with laughter. Then he remembers, with a shiver all too much like pleasure, that they can't, that they don't have this unguarded voice in their ears, and in their heads, and feels something fierce and bright and intense flare in him, and take up secret residence in the small space between his spine and his heart.
That July became then the beginning of their ungainly friendship over snail mail and taped recordings and words beaten into sexy submission, and their correspondence pick up slowly but steadily in certainty – though never in enthusiasm, because that ingredient had never been missing, not even at the first. Sirius had written fewer and fewer salacious pieces, unwilling suddenly to hear Remus moan so prettily for him and yet not for him, and his pieces take a turn for the slightly sentimental, and then, the slightly experimental as he allowed himself minuscule room monthly to write as he had hoped during his university days, buoyed by Remus' constructive and makeshift beta-ing, and the absence, always, of unflattering surprise. It had been as though Remus had not picked up on the sudden change in direction, for he had never commented, but only taken to Sirius' words as he had always done – with thought and contemplation.
In the weak amber dim of his hallway now, Sirius flips through more pages, stopping every few seconds to devour more comments – some serious and professional, some tongue-in-cheek and careless – until he reaches the back of his manuscript. He feels his heart beat a little faster then, because he has regretted the tenderness of his final scene every day since he has released his manuscript into the care of his publishers, and through them, to Remus. He wants his creative daring to be praised, but now he worries that it is an affront, that the other man would see it for the unprofessional and clumsy flirtation that it is. He wonders, quite belatedly now, if eight months of acquaintance, and largely unexpressed fondness for his professional reader, can be considered a decorous timeframe for the covert sharing of intimate information.
You must make a good brother to someone.
Shin's love for his sister comes off the pages, and I almost feel as though I intrude, and embarrassed to have done so. Forgive me if I presume, but he reminds me of you, or the bits of you I have taken upon myself to fabricate.
Have I surprised you this month? I hereby grant you permission to imbue me with the same fictionality, if you choose.
He closes his eyes to the words, and wonders for a few moments how it would be to not be surprised, and to not be quite so impossibly besotted with a voice he hears only once monthly, a voice stealing his words from his tongue, and speaks meaning only to ask for forgiveness, to ask that he allows himself to be imagined, and be fictionalized. The moon is a hint of saffron and glimmering sable when he finally climbs to his feet, and only a pale burn of silver fire when he slips the disc into his stereo an hour later, hair wet and dripping from the shower.
Remus begins the dialogue with a dry cough, a hoarse clearing of throat to allow way for words, and a gesture familiar to Sirius, who takes it as an invitation to settle deeper into his armchair, head pillowed against the cotton down of its shoulders.
"A Backdoor Out of Love,"
Remus begins, and then pauses to snigger softly in sync with Sirius, who congratulates himself both on the ribald irony of his title, and the painful gracelessness of it. Here's something for his refined readership to enjoy, he thinks, more than a little smug.
"a fiction by Orion Stubbman, read by Romulus Lune,"
Remus continues, his intonation of their pen-names smooth and liquid, making them sound, in all improbability, genuine and believable.
"for HARD's celebration of ethnicity and culture in the month of March."
Sirius laughs again, a merry sound in the otherwise unbroken quiet of the night, and imagines Remus rolling his eyes as he dutifully reads the magazine's sale gimmick, much as he himself had when instructed to write "ethnic characters" for their March feature. Another low cough, and a pause filled with two small inhalations, and Sirius curls his toes anticipatorily as Remus begins.
"He had rehearsed the moment tirelessly for months; thought over the words, spoke them aloud inside his head until his ears throbbed with their returning echoes. As though it matters that he not stutter when he delivered the words, as though if he spoke those lines perfectly the chances of her accepting them would be higher. Shin knew it was strange reasoning, but still, that…"
A half hour of reading time flies by, and the words pass into an almost rhythm of breath and cadence, distinct to their one listener, who cringes at the turn of specific phrases, an author duly embarrassed by his own diction. A few minutes past the half hour mark, and Remus reaches the words that Sirius may or may not have written for the solitary purpose of hearing them read, and the pleasure that scorches through him when Remus' voice catches low on them is nearly unbearable.
"The library had been surprisingly empty that afternoon, and he had just sat down to cataloguing a set of new Danielle Steel reprints when Chase walked in. Shin had looked up absently when he heard the telltale whirl of the revolving gates, and then quickly averted his attentions when he realized whom it announced. From the furtive corner of his eye, he had watched as Chase pulled off the black beanie covering his head, shaking out blond hair that looked stiff from the wet of the melted snow. Shin's fingers had shook as Chase's eyes raked the counter carelessly, his gaze lingering on his face for a fraction of a second, before a slight smile ghosted across his lips. He had watched as Chase disappeared into the stacks containing the Greek classics, the Danielle Steels at his elbow forgotten. Looking back now, he probably should never have left the counter, but Chase's smile had instigated his limbs into movement, and he had obeyed their commands almost …"
Remus falters as he describes Chase's fictionally imperfect blonde hair, and the tremble in his register is immediately noticeable when he details Shin's dishabille in the tremor of his fingers and the shake of his bones. There is a pause, and then two, as Remus trips messily over the syllables of "raked", and "lingering", and "smile", and it is almost as though he has become Shin, lured from the safety of the occupation of words and into an echoing library. Remus' discomfort and suddenly stammering bashfulness incites embarrassment in Sirius, the tips of whose ears burn red with the satisfaction and mortification both of courting a man by proxy, and through characters only real to himself, and – and maybe, maybe to Remus too. The realization of that possibility of sharing headspace, across England and god knows how many counties and kilometers between them, thrills him, and nudges that faint scarlet into a searing vermillion that blossoms across his cheeks and now his nose, and feels very much like a sunburn.
He had hurried through the aisles, following an invisible path deep into the mythology section. The library's mahogany shelves were like giant trees in a forest of books, and it wasn't difficult to lose oneself completely in them. The Greek classics were located in an area marked out by a cacophony of bookshelves, tucked in the left corner of the library. One had to meander through randomly organized columns of books on business finance, veterinary science, and computer graphics before they could get to this alcove. Perhaps due to its strange neighbours, this pocket of the library was seldom visited, and even when it was, it was by surprised readers who had unwittingly stumbled into …
Remus' voice calms when he arrives at the description of the library and Shin's meandering quest, lost and comfortably so amongst books and shelves and liquid sunlight. Sirius' prose is heavy as it rolls off Remus' tongue, a curl like the smallest of kisses, and it does not take much of Sirius' imagination when Remus reads the next lines, hoarse and confiding and almost flirty, and Sirius wonders who is courting whom, and if it is still his game of linguistics and courtship.
Chase was thumbing through a volume of Homer's Iliad when Shin found him, his lean shadow dancing crazily on the ground as snowflakes fragmented the thin sunshine into small rainbows outside.
"Can I be of assistance?" he had asked, his tone brisk and professional in the thick quiet.
Chase had looked up at him slowly, his blue eyes curious. "I would like some recommendations," he finally replied, his expression serious but for the faint laughter in his voice.
Shin had turned to the shelf behind him wordlessly, his fingers tapping lightly along the spines of the waiting books until he found the volume he wanted. "Here," he had offered, the book in his open palm. His suggestion had been careless, but his voice had caught when he spoke the words, a small rasp of breathlessness. Chase had glanced towards the waiting book, his slightly arched eyebrows the only indication of recognition. They had looked at each other, their gazes bold with the shared understanding of this joke only they could appreciate, and Shin had laughed under his breath. Perhaps if he hadn't been so carried away by that pleasant rush of reciprocity, he would not have forgotten that Kairi needed the same Symposium for her lessons, and that she would eventually find her way to these shelves. He cannot remember if he had moved towards Chase first, but he was soon pressing Chase against the bookshelf, his lips hungry as they sought his lover's. Chase's fingers fisted themselves in his dark hair, pulling him closer as their kisses became fiercer. Shin didn't know how long they had remained in that position, locked in each other's arms, secreted away in the embrace of the watching books, the only witnesses to their desperate passion. He never heard Kairi's approaching footsteps …
Sirius let the night slip him by, the recording eating up the seconds and the minutes, and it is unclear the hour that he drifts off to sleep, but the moon is a low sickle when it happens, finally autonomous in its unhidden glow.
The next morning it is his phone that wakes him, a little too loud and a little too insistent on his paper-strewn coffee table, the vibration an annoying itch in his ear. He rouses slowly, mumbles a few words into the speaker that could very well pass for the expletives that they undoubtedly are, and growls when the voice on the other end finally registers.
'What the fuck, Marlene, do you know what time it is?"
His banshee of an editor has the good grace to pause, if only momentarily, and then she cackles, a sound that is mocking and amused both, and Sirius has to shut his eyes against the soft glare of the morning sun still young in the skies, and against his impulsive desire to snap his phone shut and throw it behind cushions and papers to silence its demands. He settles for groaning instead, and in his best tone of resignation, asks to know what the fuck Marlene wants with him. He is made to wait for another few minutes as Marlene continues to hiss and spit, during which he drowses lightly, too used to her episodes to fret.
"Black!"
He snaps back to attention, mutters a "What" as crabbily as he can manage, and drags himself somewhat vertical as Marlene clears her throat in a tried and tested expression of her shocking disappointment in him.
"Was there something about the March prompts that you did not understand? Or perhaps you take offense to them?"
Marlene's tone is falsely patient, and even more falsely reasonable, and Sirius grimaces on his end, and affects innocence, ruined however by his note of irate petulance.
"You wanted ethnicity and culture, didn't you? I had Japanese characters, and Japanese names I had to make up using a fucking internet multilingual dictionary, names of dubious origins and meanings that would probably hack off any real Japanese reader we may have, for god's sake. I would say I fulfilled those damn prompts pretty ably."
"You would, wouldn't you?" Marlene's words are pitched low and more than a little dangerously, and Sirius pretends not to hear the snarled warning in them, too reckless and abrasive so early in the day, and over an issue he suspects he really does not wish to discuss.
"Yes," he grounds out, "what more do you want? Seppukus, or torii shrines?"
"How about fucking, Black? Or rimming, felching, blowing – oh, I don't know, intimacy for the pornography you were supposed to have written?"
"I thought I was to write "tasteful romances"?"
Marlene snarls, and Sirius has to smile at the thought of her fingers clutched tight around her phone, knuckles furiously white, the violent witch that she undoubtedly is.
"Oh, and Marlene, don't you think you know just a bit too much about gay sex to be healthy? What does Tonks think about your proficiency with the gay vernacular?"
Marlene actually shrieks in spluttering indignation and fury, and Sirius pumps an imaginary fist into the air, pleased, and childishly so, with his victory in this opening round of fire.
"Damn it, Black, I'm not playing games," Marlene hisses, "you know I can't publish your story if it doesn't meet requirements, implied or otherwise."
He stifles a sigh, unwillingly recognizing the truth in Marlene's words, and even more reluctantly flushed with the guilt of knowing he's probably caused his editor unneeded trouble.
"It's sensual, at the very least, Marlene. Can't that pass as sexy for once?"
Marlene is contemplative for a few unspeaking moments, and her words are quiet when they next arrive, which stokes the embers of Sirius' guilt into a low burn.
"It is a coming out fiction, Sirius, which makes for a good narrative, but it is more awkwardly tender than your readers are probably accustomed to. It just reads differently from your other submissions. It is not going to be an easy sell."
"I don't know how to account for this difference," he lies, because the thought of telling the truth – that he's written with the intention of allowing someone a part of himself to keep – sounds insane even in the privacy of his own head.
"But Marlene, I really like what I've turned in," he pauses, throat a little dry and his feigned embarrassment a little too real suddenly, "could you find a way to just … leave it alone?"
Marlene pauses, presumably to think, although the illusion of thoughtfulness is quickly shattered when she speaks again, too quickly and too eagerly, with that hint of a coax in her words that makes Sirius wince, and regret having answered his phone at all.
"I can run the story, exactly as it is, alongside an interview, you know, give your readers something else to focus their energies on? It will be like a human interest piece, and …"
"An interview?" he interrupts, and then sharper, and more suspiciously, "with whom?"
"With you, of course!"
Marlene twitters, and that display of feminine charm sets off all the alarms in Sirius' head, until his head is a pounding cacophony of warning, and he has to resist slapping his hands over his ears against the din.
He settles for snarling instead, like a dog with a bone, if the bone in question is more his sanity than anything else.
"NO, McKinnon – that will blow my anonymity to hell, won't it?"
"We'll interview you as Stubby Boardman –"
" – Orion Stubbman," he interrupts sulkily.
"Yes, yes, that. Whatever. We'll interview you as your chosen fictional identity, and you can remain happily anonymous, and that story goes to print without being sliced and spliced beyond recognition, and you are happy, your readers are happy, and our publishing Powers That Be are happy."
He groans, feeling distinctly and increasingly unhappy with Marlene's every repetition of "happy", and lacking a rebuttal, groans some more.
Marlene spares his misery no notice, and continues calmly, and Sirius thinks he can almost hear her eye-roll, and curls up in his armchair, ruing his unpleasant morning, and the unhappy day ahead that it promises.
"Man up, Black, it is not as though you'll be doing the feature interview alone. Lupin has already agreed to it, and hell, I didn't even have anything to hold over his head."
He bolts back up, and only has time to mulishly curse Marlene's scheming and her terrifying baiting skills, before he echoes, a little too pitched and anxious for his own liking, "Lupin?"
"Your reader? God, Sirius, it's been more than 8 months, you could at least get to know the guy."
He chokes.
"Anyway, he's given his consent to be interviewed, so you'll at least have someone to hold you if you feel so inclined to cry over your lost privacy. Also, it won't take more than 10 minutes, and Tonks will be doing the interview, so it is a familiar …"
"I'll do it," he stabs wildly, no longer listening to Marlene's long justifications, because suddenly, his body and all its faculties have decided to re-route their blood circulation to circle a solitary thought in his head, the dazed repetition of Lupin, Lupin, Remus, and he is already writing features to a face he thinks he already knows.
"… that's it? You'll do it, just like that?"
Marlene sounds a little too incredulous to be truly flattering, but Sirius finds himself uncaring and unbothered in his distraction, and allows his editor her small barb.
"Isn't this what you wanted? Damned if I do, and damned if I don't, Marlene."
The heat in his voice is halfhearted even to himself, but Marlene chooses not to look gift horses in the mouth.
"Fine. The interview is in 2 days time. You'll be interviewed with Lupin, but you'll need to be there by noon for your photo-shoot. Lupin goes after."
"Alrigh–" he pauses, having only just registered Marlene's parting words, and then shouts, "Marlene! What photo-shoot?"
Marlene – that devious witch – cheerfully ignores him, chirps a "See you at noon, Sirius, and don't be late!", and then hangs up.
His earlier suspicions were right – it is shaping up to be a crap day.
He spends the next day alternating hours between calm and pretending to be calm, and squanders away his afternoon playing football with James and a few of their old college-mates under the too benevolent sun.
It is an afternoon that passes easily – he plays stalwart defender on James' makeshift team, and runs careless and daring tackles at the oncoming strikers, laughing at his keeper's admiring, and good-humoredly sarcastic, catcalling from between the sticks. They turn out 3-1 winners after the 92th minute, led to victory by James' cocksure and dizzying runs up the length of the midfield, and by Fabian Prewett's affinity with the back of the net. The rest of the afternoon finds the majority of them at the Prewetts' shared bachelor pad, and Sirius contributes to Fabian's ribbing of Gideon, and conveniently volunteers the observation that Fabian would make the Rio Ferdinand to Gideon's Anton in the footballing world.
He misses Reg the entire length of their conversation, and wishes his younger brother could have joined them that day, rather than tucked away in Cardiff on yet another journalistic assignment. He thinks of Reg and his hikes up and down the Welsh coast, running from the dank embrace of one obscure cave into another for his articles for National Geographic, and resolves to call him later that night, if only to just tease him about the geographical integrity of Dan-yr-Ogof, a cave possibly as visited by tourists as attractions like London's own Big Ben. He can already hear Reg's tone of false irritation and more candid indignation, and is embarrassingly overcome by pride for his younger brother as he lounges on the Prewetts' quite disgustingly masculine couch of dark leather.
For generations now, the Black family has owned one of the oldest and most enterprising publishing houses in Britain, and both Sirius and Regulus have been groomed from infancy for the eventual handover of corporate and executive duties, and it had taken considerable rebellion and considerable courage – though more on Regulus' part, for Sirius had felt free to just walk away from his inheritance, unperturbed by the weight of his parents' expectations, and perhaps even secretly gleeful of the mayhem his desertion would wreck on the always calm and always collected House of Black. They had both grown up harboring passion for the wrong aspect of the job, the aspect that required the chasing and courting of words, and while Sirius had coveted narrativity and worlds he could engineer and fabricate, Regulus married his ache for the quiet subterranean places of the world and non-fiction prose, and lusted after both with a single-mindedness he'd partly learnt from his brother, but mostly nurtured on his own. Unlike Sirius, Regulus spent the best portion of five years paying familial dues, and it had taken shouting and anger and silence between the brothers before he had fled his life in Saville Row suits last autumn. Truth be told, Regulus' current writing jaunt – a phase, their mother had scoffed, but why had her sons never outgrown this infatuation with semantics and syntax? – is a lot more respectable than Sirius' covert moonlighting as Stubby Boardman, but Sirius can feel nothing but a ferocious pride for his brother, smothering and crushing when it seizes him, in the small quiet moments of his days, unexpected but long anticipated, and always welcome.
Between the long morning that steals into a longer afternoon with James and the other guys, and the similarly lengthy phone call with Regulus in the night, his in-between day of waiting winks right out in front of his eyes, and the morning of the interview dawns in a mess of nerves and excitement.
He dresses with perhaps too much thought for a man who's expecting the clothes to be taken right off his back later in the day – by the wardrobe team, he shouts in his own head over his lewd whispered imaginings in a voice that is at once too familiar and not quite familiar enough – and has to jam his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans to prevent them from straying back into his already artfully tousled hair. Grabbing his shades and the keys to his bike, he makes his escape from his apartment before he has time to renege on his outfit of jeans and insolently casual – and hopefully cool for its cheek and obvious uncaring – white tee-shirt.
It is twenty minutes past noon when he arrives at HARD's offices, and he silently congratulates himself on a job well done when Marlene stomps towards him, her heels clicking against the hardwood floor like a badly timed fuse. He grins, as offensively and unrepentantly as he knows how to, and Marlene catches a sleeve of his tee-shirt and drags him bodily deeper into the offices, all the time muttering about fucking stupid idiots and pain.
"You are having your pictures taken with Lupin – there isn't time for separate shoots now, damn you. Lupin has already had his hair and wardrobe taken care of, so get in there."
Sirius' heart barely has time to skip out of beat at the mention of Remus, and his brain any time to process his soon-to-be proximity to Remus, before he is shoved, stumbling, into the studio, Marlene already turning to an amused Tonks in a flurry of instructions to leave his hair alone but to strip him of his sorry excuse of a shirt. He catches sight of a man from the corner of his eye as he rights his footing, and turns towards him after a pause, his throat suddenly too dry.
The man, possibly forced into the stylish brown overcoat he wears buttoned over dark blue jeans despite the searing heat outside – and inside too, as Sirius burns with a scorch that starts under his fingertips and runs unchecked over the map of his body – stares at him unblinkingly in the first few seconds of their mutual eye-contact, and then he smiles, small and unassuming and just a little secretive in the faint twist of his lips, and Sirius feels all the air knocked out of the room, and all the light stolen from it.
It could hardly qualify as love at first sight, having been months in auditory making, but Sirius nonetheless feels, for a few unguarded moments, like one of the heroes of his creation – rushed off his feet and driven outside of his own walls.
Remus recognizes him as soon as he steps through the door of the small studio, a smirk (and in that insane moment, he aches with the desire and the want to know what has put that expression on Sirius' face, and how he could do the same, in the future, forever) that steals into the very way Sirius holds his body, somehow laughing and generous (and everything he's written him to be, in the seclusion of his own head) even as he literally falls into Remus' presence, shoved along by a frankly terrifying Marlene. In the few heartbeats that he waits for Sirius' gaze to find him, Remus finds it beyond himself to even think, his toes tingling with apprehension and with an emotion he can put no name to.
When Sirius finally looks at him, eyes hidden still behind dark shades, Remus loses the temporary peace in his head to immediate and self-conscious mortification over the suddenly too fashionable coat Nymphadora had charmed him into, and the carefully careless mess he had allowed her to make of his hair. The man before him – with his dark hair that sweeps rakishly over his brow, the aristocratic slant of his nose, the prideful tilt of his strong jaw, and the confidence with which he wears his lean body – is attractive in a manner that explodes the contained definition of the word, and warrants its re-conceptualization.
But still Remus smiles, small but genuinely pleased, muscle memory that he should not have acquired yet schooling his features instinctively, and it is as though his body has already known pleasure from Sirius, and had always known it.
"Hi," he offers after a beat, and if his voice is a little hoarse, he doesn't hear it over the swelling rush of blood in his ears.
Sirius stares at him, the slightest hint of a flush peppering his cheeks and nose, and then, as though he's only just remembered it, reaches up to remove his dark glasses.
"Hi," a smile – tentative as it spreads across Sirius' face, but would reasonably be described as blinding on anyone else – that reaches into his pale eyes, catching the grey in them and illuminating it an impossible silver.
"Um," Remus says, embarrassingly incoherent as he catches sight of Nymphadora's amused and somewhat knowing smile from behind Sirius, "I would shake your hand, if you would like me to, but I think you are wanted at the moment."
He gestures apologetically at the lurking Nymphadora, armed with her makeup brushes and a few shirts that she clutches to her chest, and Sirius eyes him blankly until Nymphadora clears her throat helpfully, and then his lips parts in a quiet and comprehending O.
Remus begins to turn away, flustered by that display of teeth and tongue, but then Sirius gives him pause, and stops him dead in his tracks.
"I would like you to," he blurts, and Remus turns back in confusion, "to shake my hand. Later. If you still want to."
Sirius finishes awkwardly, and there is a tender uncertainty in his face, and Remus feels himself blushing, fierce heat that warms his face and yanks deep in his chest.
"Yes," he manages, trying and failing to look Sirius in the eye, and the pulling at his heart feels every bit like love.
He retreats to the back of the room to wait as Nymphadora descends on Sirius, the small grin on her face a little disconcerting and a lot worrying. It does not take long for Sirius to recover some of his bluster, especially since he is threatened, alarmingly, by Nymphadora's determination to force him into a gold sequined shirt. Remus tries not to laugh at the pink-haired woman's idea of a cruel joke, and settles deeper into his overcoat, suddenly glad for its modesty and relative simplicity.
It takes another fifteen minutes, and more than a handful of No fucking ways before Sirius is finally dressed and primped, if vaguely unhappy in a red –
("vermillion, Sirius, not red. And trust me, it suits you."
"Sure, if the me in your head is from Transylvania.")
– shirt that is left mostly unbuttoned, and mostly painfully distracting. Sirius' hair curls against the nape of his neck and brushes the collar of his shirt, a little longer than Remus had imagined, but oddly suitable, and Remus finds himself wondering why he hadn't expected it.
They stand together in front of a white-washed wall – left deliberately stark for some photographic purpose that escapes Remus – encircled by a few towering lights, and waiting to be shot. When he is certain Nymphadora's attention has turned elsewhere, Sirius tugs at the long sleeves of his shirt, and folds them up to his elbows, the conspirational grin he shares with Remus smug and mischievous.
"We look terribly mismatched," he announces once he's satisfied with the new length of his shirt sleeves, "I look like I am about to traipse off to some Mardi Gras that probably only exists in Tonks' head, while you look thoroughly respectable."
He eyes Remus speculatively, and when the other man laughs, a little breathless and a lot surprised, he adds slyly, "I think I am a little jealous of your respectability."
"You can have my respectability, if you want."
The words fling themselves past Remus' lips before he can think to wrestle them into submission, and he winces in open-mouthed embarrassment after, his cheeks burning. But Sirius only smiles, slow and flirtatious, and probably a little too intimate to be safe in their shared breathing room.
"I'll hold you to it then," Sirius murmurs, and Remus has the happy accident of glancing upwards, and then caught stickily in Sirius' eyes, darkened now into a sable that is flecked with indigo.
"Yeah," he chokes, and if Sirius regrets the unsexy quality of his response, he does well to hide it, for his gaze lingers a little longer, and it is suddenly proprietary and possessing, and the heat that simmers under Remus' skin sparks behind his eyes, twisting the room before him and everything in it into an indistinct blur. You are my favorite book, he wants to whisper, against skin and like a gift of a secret. You, with the words you don't write, and he would be artless in his honesty, and Sirius would see it, and he would no longer have to be more than what he is not – a man not already in love. Instead, he blinks to bring the room back into focus, and saves his truths for a day when they would not be strangers only newly met, and his ardency would not fly obstinately in the face of convention. Sirius continues to beam at him, his face alive with the animation of laughter, and Remus allows himself to smile back, unguarded and uncontained, affection in every curl and lift of his lips.
The photo-shoot then interrupts their exchange, and Remus, as he knew he would be, is awkward in front of the camera, and settles, at their photographer's behest, for "slouching artfully", and is bemused by the latter's consequent delight. Sirius is an odd natural, staring straight into the eye of the camera, as though he sees the readers who are seeing him, and gives nothing of himself away. His stare is flinty enough to be considered pensive, and the ghost of a smile on his lips, so much like a smirk, cuts him a brooding and mysterious archetype. Sirius Black thoughtlessly sells himself as fiction, but Remus knows that no reader would be able to recognize his walls, more defensible than Remus' own fortress built out of hunched shoulders and hands hidden deep in pockets. They stand close, arms brushing up against each other and hips close enough to bump, but neither of them moves to increase that distance. They do not look at each other, and the shoot passes quickly and bloodlessly enough, and it is still early in the afternoon when they are ushered into their joint interview.
Nymphadora – Tonks, she had insisted rather vehemently while Sirius snickered in the background – holds court in the small room in which they are held prisoners, and Remus quickly discovers that she is as brash and cheerfully shameless in her curious probing as her loud hair had promised. She begins innocently enough with the query of their sexual preference, and smugly cites definite reader interest in the issue to dispel Sirius' disgruntled protests, and Remus' hurried answer is as much an attempt to break up their verbal sparring as it is to be done with the embarrassment. Tonks beams at his firm declaration of gay!, and spares Sirius a quick glance before dismissing him altogether.
"Don't I need to answer?"
Sirius, contrary and mercurial figure that he is, scowls and immediately pursues the question, and Remus is caught between wanting to laugh and having to choke back a groan.
"No," and here, Tonks develops a singsong lilt, "I already know everything I need to know about your sexuality anyway."
Remus' mirth evaporates, and he swallows a little harder than was necessary.
Tonks' quick eyes catch the small flex of his fingers as they close around empty air before self-consciously relaxing, and she hastens to add, kindly but laughingly, "Oh, not like that! That would be disgusting, though we have members in our family who are quite inclined to the incest equation of romance."
It takes Remus a few moments to work out her declaration, and they are moments in which he carefully avoids Sirius' eyes, even as he feels the weight of an unrelenting grey gaze on his skin, heavy and unrepentant.
" 'Our' family?"
"Tonks' my cousin," Sirius cuts in coolly, and his words are uninflected with meaning, but there is a burn in his stare when Remus finally meets it, and Remus reads intent, and a promise that parches his throat with want.
"Sirius is cousin to my mother, which makes him my cousin too, if by a generation removed. My mother has taken Daddy's name, but she's still Andromeda Tonks néeBlack, on those good days when she doesn't quite dislike her family."
"Which are rare and events of great infrequency," Sirius mutters, and there is a new darkness in his features, a contained anger that ripples beneath his smiling charm, and Remus is momentarily chilled, before that apprehension passes quickly into intrigue.
Tonks rolls her eyes, but does nothing otherwise to contradict Sirius.
"So, as you will see, there isn't anything to worry about!"
She beams at Remus, mischievous and sly, and Remus could suddenly see the resemblance of features and expressions, and wants to laugh.
"Don't be a haranguing harpy, Dora," Sirius snipes, but the touch of scarlet to his cheeks tells Remus of his unease, "he wasn't worried at all."
The whisper of red blossoms into something fiercer as Sirius finishes his sentence, and Remus feels something wicked unfurl in his chest, and in as bland a tone as he can manage, informs his two companions that "Yes, I was worried, actually."
Sirius turns an alarming hue of incarnadine, but his lips lift in a half-smile of badly concealed pleasure, and Tonks claps in delight, her lively grey eyes darting between the two men. Before she can give voice to the next likely question of preferred sexual positions, Sirius clears his throat pointedly.
"Shouldn't you, I don't know, pretend to at least ask us some questions related to the magazine?"
Tonks wilts at the reminder, and turns pouting lips on Sirius, and finding him unmoved, sighs and uncaps her pen.
"Alright, why this particular career path, gentlemen?"
Sirius does not hesitate, and his rejoinder of "Why not?" appears to be nothing more than what Tonks had expected, for she merely glares at him half-heartedly for a few seconds before dutifully jotting down his response. The both of them turn to Remus then; Tonks angling her body in a show of attention, and Sirius, who looks at him from the corner of his eye, covert and secretive.
"Oh," Remus begins solemnly, "an ex-boyfriend told me how alluring my sex voice was, and I thought I would capitalize on this one talent I have."
A pause of silence greets his answer, and then Sirius points an accusing finger at him, the telltale signature of heat in his eyes going unmissed by Remus.
"I take back what I said previously about you and respectability. You, Remus Lupin, are a sheep in wolf's clothing."
"I am," Remus agrees, contemplatively, and Sirius laughs, the long lines of his body pliant in his chair, a foot crossed over his knee, his gaze assessing and appreciative.
The rest of the interview flies by in a blur after that, and there are more verbal spats between Sirius and Tonks over questions that do "fuck all for their anonymity". There is also more guerilla flirting, and glances that Remus steals of Sirius when he believes it safe, only to find the other man engaged in similar acts of thievery, eyes intent on the swell and plump of Remus' lower lip, and on one memorable instance, raking daringly over his body as Remus watched, almost filthily compliant, wracked by tremors of desire that he suppresses.
First meetings are hardly supposed to be like this, he thinks.
It is a little close to four in the early evening when they are released into the dressing room and to their own clothes, and if Tonks' whisper of go get him echoes a little loudly in the room as she hugs Remus goodbye, it is a suggestion that both men pretend to not have heard. They change back into their shirts quietly, and Remus almost feels bashful as he turns to the wall, his fingers catching on the buttons of his coat, made clumsy by the dryness of his throat and the thickness of his speechless tongue. He listens to Sirius' quiet exhalation as each breath is released into the space between them, and listens also to the soft rustle of fabric as Sirius slides that vermillion shirt off his back, as he tugs the sleeves, clenching tight around his elbow, free from his arms.
He doesn't know when exactly he decides to act, but in between the second and third buttons of his coat, he does. He was thinking of the words he had spoken into the silence of his apartment, the words of desire he had recorded onto discs and into the black holes of cyberspace, the words written by a hand he would press fleeting kisses to, a brush of lips against the raised bump of each knuckle, when suddenly, he wasn't. And the amazing thing was that Sirius hadn't looked at all surprised when he had spun around, and Sirius had reached for him in that moment, had locked his arms behind his back and pushing into his hair, pulling, and had allowed himself to be caged against the nearest wall, kissed and kissing back bruisingly, as though the entire afternoon had been leading up to this moment, as though this had been premeditated, as though the longing as it had rolled off Remus' tongue, the words as they had bled from Sirius' fingers, all year had been for this one moment.
They kiss for a lifetime, tongues curling deep into the caverns of mouths, licking wet heat and intent into the hidden pockets of the human body. Remus could feel the beat of Sirius' heart as it sings against his own chest, their clothes in a disarray that is ironically not the product of passion, and when he pulls away, it is to lave affection on the slope of Sirius' jaw, and each sucking kiss, caressed with tongue and teeth, is a word, a secret, that he writes on Sirius' skin, to be explained later. And it is as though Sirius understands his code of possession and safekeeping, for when they are both calmer, pressed close together and still against the wall, Sirius lifts his wrist to his lips, and mouths at the tender underside, against the jump of his lifeblood.
"Let's do this correctly," he says, hoarse, "let me take you out to dinner, and we will pretend we don't already know everything unwritten about each other, and then," a lascivious grin that has Remus huffing a small laugh, pulling Sirius in closer and closing his eyes against the curve of Sirius' cheeks, "and then, I can take that respectability you've promised me."
Remus feels Sirius' eyes fall shut against his own face, the sweep of an eyelash trembling and hesitant, like the press of a kiss that promises more kisses, and says, "alright", imagining the turning of a page into a new chapter, "alright."
Fin