O, Wilderness
Warning: Contains angst and slash.
Pairings: Sirius/Remus, Sirius/James.
"O Wilderness were Paradise enow!"
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
You go to Remus's bed on moon-silver nights when the wolf is getting stronger, wanting to be hurt. Under his tired man's face, deep in the bones, you perceive the suggestion of a muzzle, under his soft brown eyes the suggestion of yellow. You eschew your inhibitions, abandon your mind to fierce coupling and to pain – in the morning your skin is widely marked with imprints of teeth and nails, your blood spatters the sheets. Remus is in the bathroom, throwing up.
The Wolf frightens you – this is good. All of you that is still Sirius is caught up in adrenaline, wanting more and more, caught in survival and flight, and wanting to fight and hurt and be hurt by Remus, because you almost trust him. There was a joke that you had with Prongs the details of which have since faded, but it centred around primal urges. In the early hours you transform to lick and comfort your aches, to be Padfoot who is not really Sirius. You think about food.
You see a man walk by the window; he has dark hair and is wearing glasses. You're in Mother's bedroom, visiting Buckbeak for the sixth time that morning, you run downstairs your feet slipping, tears on your face. Remus catches you at the front door – there is a silent, vicious fight; you sit in the kitchen afterwards, close to the fire, wiping blood from your lip, gulping whisky from the bottle. (Remus has always been able to beat in a physical fight if he wanted to, so it's a good thing that, usually, he wasn't too interested.)
You know it wasn't James, of course you know that. You twist, in anguish, your black hair tight through your fingers like a tourniquet for a bleeding limb, the glass walls which let you live and hide away the missing of him (all the memories denied in Remus's bedroom when he fucks you), they shiver and crack – nothing so dramatic as breaking, but your thin hands fly to your face, quite still and quite wordless, fingers pressed into your hollow eye-sockets, but there are no tears or sounds or even any more movement, until you hunch over and curl round yourself, wanting to be dog, to transform and no longer to be Sirius, but the energy isn't there, the magic isn't there. Despair is a thin, worthless, breath of a word for what you cannot give voice to.