2 The Fire
Remus knows what Sirius wants when he gets up on his feet from the kitchen floor and turns his gaze to Remus from the fireplace, where Harry's face has disappeared a moment earlier.
Sirius wants to hit all the locks into splinters with hissing, crackling charms, to scratch down the high walls that are rustling around them dark and scornful, to undo every spell that keeps the house together. Sirius is fighting not to become fused into the childhood home he hates, but he is suffocating, dispelling. The world has been narrowed down into those rare moments they spend alone at number twelve, Grimmauld Place, and those moments are not always good. Sometimes, when the atmosphere of the house bites into them maliciously, Remus feels life and colour have already leaked out of them and they are hardly more than two old worn patterns on the torn wallpaper.
In those moments they start a fire within each other. It is better to put one's hand into it and burn than to fade away quietly and unnoticed.
This is one of those moments, and Remus knows it.
Sirius's grip is hard and demanding as he grabs Remus's waist and shoves him down to the kitchen table. The wooden surface of the table is warm against his cheek; there is a faint smell of smoke and wine and humidity of the old house in the substance of it. Remus contemplates whether he should remind Sirius that the hideous, pouty house-elf may be lurking behind the door and that for all he knows, Harry with his Floo powder may re-appear in the fireplace any time. But Sirius's hands are all over him and around him and inside him, and nothing discharges from his mouth but pleas and sounds of want. Sirius is impatient, fierce, his fingers squeeze around Remus's wrists, chaining them to the table, and on the bare skin of his neck Remus feels the rough shape of the marks Sirius's mouth leaves on him. He knows tomorrow they will be dark, sore and difficult to hide.
The pleasure is a greater surprise to him than the pain.
At first, it discerns itself weak and thin somewhere in the midst of the jagged thrusts and then grows in a persistent vein into a gnawing, burning nucleus that radiates into all of his body, until Remus is aware of nothing but Sirius inside him, the flesh and the movement and the whispers. His scratching nails gather layers of lacquer off the table surface and of skin off Sirius's thighs; his voice falls apart in wordless patterns and is stopped by the wall of Sirius's fingers in his mouth. Their spasms follow each other in quick, sighing bursts. Remus feels Sirius's arms twist around him, and they fall onto the floor in an exhausted tangle, like wounded fighters seeking support in each other after a battle.
Sirius's touch is soft on Remus's skin and its restlessness has been wrapped into languor for a moment. Remus looks at his lover like he did years ago in a different, less broken and more hopeful world. He thinks of the dust and ashes around them, and the fact that in the middle of it all they have nothing but a cage and a battlefield and a fire. He doesn't know if they will ever have anything else again.
They make promises to each other that neither one of them has the power to make.
There is something in those promises to curl around, when the fire dies away.