Title: Green Plastic
Rating: PG, respectively
Pairing: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Warnings: Slash; slight angst, slight fluff.
Summary: Remus spends a rare but welcomed night in Sirius' bed.
Word count: short - 690
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Green Plastic
"the easiest way to sleep at night
is to carry on believing that i don't exist
the easiest way to sell your soul
is to carry on believing that we don't exist
it must be hard with your head on backwards…"
October, 1994
His breath disturbs the small wispy hairs at the crown of his head. He can feel the constant beat of his hearth beat beneath his fingers and the even rise and fall of his rib cage. It is an oddly discomforting feeling, like an old coat that doesn't fit as well as memory impresses. His eyes are closed, as he feigns sleeps, but his senses are still being overwrought by foreign stimuli. The smell of clothe and sweat and soap alive in his nostrils and the warmth of another body around him. It is something so familiar yet so out of place in what his life has become.
Sirius coughs suddenly in his sleep and Remus can feel his chest heave against him, his lungs choking for air. His first breath is a wheeze, and Remus wonders if Azkaban has gravely affected Sirius' health, besides his outward demeanor. He wonders if the man he loved is really the same man he finds himself loving now.
As he calms again and his breathing regulates to one of sleep, Remus nudges his nose to Sirius' throat, until the tip lightly touches the smooth skin just to the side of his Adam's apple. He places a small kiss of the vein he finds there, and rests his eyes on the hollow just below Sirius' jawbone.
He is tired and it is late, but he still does not sleep. His body aches, his back muscles coiling into unpleasant knots that will last for weeks, in the position he lies in currently. Yet he refuses to move, out of concern that it would wake Sirius and even more so out of desire to hang onto this small amount intimacy when it is offered. It is a rare thing to be allowed to watch Sirius sleep, to spend the night in bed with him and not simply leave when they have taken the physical pleasure they desire from one another.
Remus nuzzles Sirius' neck and ignores the pain in his back and shoulders. But he doesn't feel comfortable. It doesn't feel natural to him.
How strange it is, he thinks, to have spent so many years reveling in exactly this to find it so disconcerting. Though the years he spent missing it far outnumber the years he enjoyed it, and he realizes that it takes time to repair a relationship after so many years stolen.
But he knows that this isn't what he craves anymore. Sirius' body has become secondary to Sirius' mind, and that mind is different from the mind he loved all those years back. He is sure it is still there somewhere, he has seen it, but like the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black itself it has many wards placed to protect it from the idle wanderer-by. Except that Remus shouldn't be another stranger to him.
He feels then the age of time in his bones and the weariness in his heart. He feels the coldness in the room. In his heart he is much younger than his body or mind and all he suddenly wants now is this warm body curled around him and the steady breathing of one he loves. And for the first time in many years he finally has that.
Remus places another kiss against the vein in Sirius' throat and lets sleep over come him once and for all.
