The next day, Remus lay in the hospital wing, frowning consideringly up at ceiling. In an effort to avoid thinking too much on anything terribly taxing, he had counted every one of the little bumps on the ceiling, which was actually quite a difficult task and required a large amount of concentration.
However, now he had run out of bumps and his eyes were beginning to hurt anyway, so he was forced to ponder.
Remus had found that he never remembered much of what occurred on the nights of Full Moons, but he had discovered, since his friends had started to join him on these occasions, that whenever he was assaulted by a vague flash of memory, he remembered them not as animals, but as humans. It was a strange little quirk, but as he saw himself as a human as well ((for some reason he always remembered things as though he'd been watching from the sidelines)), he thought it perhaps had something to do with the increased amount of control he'd gained.
Last night had been the most time he'd spent together with Sirius since Valentine's Day nearly a fortnight ago. And he was faced with a mindful of half-memories of Sirius and himself wrestling in the middle of a field, which left him with a strangely warm feeling in his stomach.
This whole thing was terribly irritating. And it was all because Sirius was avoiding him. Inconsiderate bugger.
-
While the full moon had had the effect of making Remus introspective and somewhat broody, it had returned Sirius to his normal high spirits. Moony hadn't tried to eat him, everything was back to normal, and he could go back to pretending not to pine after Remus in peace.
He hummed a jaunty tune as he stepped out of the bath in the bathroom that was attached to the dorm. It wasn't as big and fancy as the Prefects' bathroom ((which he had seen all of twice)), but it had a tub and hot, clean water and that was all Sirius really needed to enjoy himself, not a bajillion taps full of Merlin only knew what, no matter how fun they were. Which, Sirius admitted, they definitely were.
Grabbing a large fluffy bath towel, he gave himself a quick, thorough rubdown which left his skin red and tingly, before he set about drying his long hair exuberantly, squeezing out the excess moisture and rubbing it until it was just damp as opposed to sopping wet and dripping down his back.
He tossed his hair back over his shoulder, drying off where it had dripped on him again. He was about to leave when he caught sight of himself in the full-length mirror and made his way over to it.
Giving in to a sudden impulse, Sirius wrapped the large towel around himself like a toga and studied his reflection thoughtfully in the mirror.
The Emperor Julius Sirius Blackus, He said to himself in a very grand mental voice. Greatest and best-loved of all the Roman Emperors because of his kindness, wisdom and irresistible good looks, charm and animal magnetism, hereby decrees that Remus, the twin who didn't build Rome but deserves some love anyway, be deified because he is a right sexy beast.
Sirius posed in what he believed to be a suitable Emperor-pose and mentally pictured Remus in a toga – no! One of those little half-toga things that were essentially just very short skirts!
He grinned.
And in honour of this momentous occasion, Emperor Sirius offers himself up as sacrifice to the new God – because this is too great an occasion for animal sacrifice, which is quite frankly messy and terribly gross – and invites Lord Remus to take this weak but extremely attractive mortal as his love-slave until his penis falls off and he becomes the Goddess Remusa.
He held his hands up to the ceiling in supplication, grinning madly and laughing silently at his own ridiculousness. As a result of nothing holding it up and his shoulders shaking, his towel came loose and flopped into a pile at his feet, leaving him buck naked.
It was then that Sirius realized that Remus was standing behind him, gawking at him as if he were a lunatic.
-
When Remus had made his way up to the dormitory bathroom, his intention had not, little though he may have minded it, been to get an eyeful of Sirius Black's naked arse.
It had been, surprisingly enough, to have a hot bath, because he was achey and cold and feeling generally miserable. And he didn't like the prefect's bathroom, because it was huge and other prefects had a habit of barging right in taking no account as to whether the door was bloody locked or not. Bastards.
Not, of course, that his room-mates had any more respect for privacy – if anything they had less, because they weren't prefects and they were possibly the nosiest bunch on the planet. But they wouldn't stare at his scars and wonder where he'd got them. They'd be more likely to wince and hiss sympathetically and say that they hoped those nasty ones wouldn't scar permanently.
Normally, though, they kept clear of the bathroom when they knew he was in there, because they knew how paranoid he was about his scars.
And, up until today, Remus had been able to say with complete sincerity that he had never walked in on any of his friends when they were naked.
When Sirius caught sight of him in the mirror, mere moments after the towel had dropped ((followed very quickly by the penny)), it was difficult to say who blushed more – Remus' entire face went an attractive tomato-red, but Sirius sported an impressive reddish-purple colour across his cheeks, forehead and down his neck.
"Hullo Moony," Sirius said after a pause, smiling sheepishly at Remus over his shoulder.
"I'll, er, just pick this up, shall I?" Remus didn't reply, nor did he have a chance to avert his eyes before Sirius bent over to scoop up the towel.
Remus had never gotten a spontaneous erection so fast in his life, nor had he ever gotten one in a more inappropriate situation. In the back of his mind he was half-worried that he'd sprained something as he automatically moved his own towel to cover what his robes were already effectively hiding. It was just to be safe – he didn't want Sirius to think that Remus was thinking about his arse that way, which he wasn't. At all. It was just a perverse co-incidence.
Sirius straightened up, wrapping the towel around his waist like a sarong. He appeared to have recovered somewhat from the shock of Remus standing behind him and grinned brightly as he passed.
"Enjoy your bath, Moony!"
Remus stood very still as Sirius passed through the door beside him, ignoring the effect that the proximity of Sirius' bare skin had on his current 'problem'. ((Not that the effect was all that unpleasant, but the reason behind it was and as such the latter sort of eclipsed the former))
As soon as Sirius had gone, however, Remus turned and locked the door with as many charms as he could think of and a bat-bogey hex for good measure, before he turned mechanically and began to fill the bath and strip off his robes.
He clambered in and finally let his body relax, preventing himself from drowning only by sheer force of will ((and the fact that he'd leaned back so his head was resting on the edge of the bath, holding him up)). He sat for a few minutes in that state of rag-doll-ness and watched the steam rise off the water until his eyes went funny and he was forced to close them, turning his mind to what had just passed.
That had been terribly odd. It must have been stress. It had to have been stress. That was, he supposed, the only rational explanation. Stress. Lots of stress. So much stress that he was drowning in it. He had stress coming out of his ears. It was definitely stress.
Or, of course, the other option of a nice healthy dose of lust for Sirius Black's arse, which it couldn't possibly be on that basis that he did not like this explanation at all. Nor, for that matter, did he like Sirius' arse.
Not that it wasn't a nice arse. It was – he hadn't been looking or anything, at least, not on purpose, but it wasn't exactly something that one could miss when Sirius paraded around in tight jeans and spent large portions of time on a broomstick which only served to draw attention to the bloody thing.
Remus sank under the water, letting his hair get nice and wet, before resurfacing, pushing it and the excess water out of his face as he reached for the shampoo.
Perhaps, he thought, it was a particularly feminine backside and it had been an automatic reaction.
To test this theory, Remus pictured it again, and realized that not only was it not a feminine backside, the jeans that Sirius wore, while flattering, did perhaps not do it the justice it deserved.
Despite the little voice in his head screaming that he was a stupid stupid werewolf and should stop RIGHT NOW before he was lead down the road to bad bad things that were not good, but bad and that even his terribly accomplished mind would be unable to make even the least convincing excuses for, Remus closed his eyes and called to memory the whole picture.
He was rather surprised to find that despite it not being a feminine bum, it was an extremely attractive one, not that Remus was really much of a judge. As the memory played in his head, he found himself being distracted by the way Sirius' muscles had moved under his skin when he'd brought his arms down from above his head, then had bent down for the towel displaying...
Well, bollocks. It very definitely wasn't stress.
It must be bloody insanity.
-
Cold sprouts, Sirius mused as he chewed thoughtfully on one of the aforementioned vegetables, were really extremely underrated.
Sirius was one of those rare people who like sprouts, and since coming to Hogwarts he had been fortunate enough to taste some of the best sprouts on the planet. Hogwarts' sprouts were even better than Kreacher's sprouts back home had been, although the quality there had come more from the elf's absent-minded habit of wandering off in the middle of cooking than from any real culinary skill.
Good sprouts, in Sirius' opinion, and he rather fancied himself a sprout connoisseur ((although Remus continually contested Sirius' superior sprout knowledge, plebian)), had been cooked just long enough to be somewhat mushy and to rid them of the nasty bitterness they had when they were hard.
People who didn't like sprouts, Sirius thought, had been fed too many undercooked ones as children. An unfortunate, yet surprisingly common occurrence. He would have to write to the Prime Minister, see if he could do anything about it.
It was to be noted that Sirius liked lots of food that most people cried off from. Turnips, for example, and Parsnips, in the liking of which he'd found a companion in Remus, much to his delight. You knew a bloke was a right sort if he liked parsnips. It was no wonder Sirius had fallen in love with him.
Sirius also claimed to love liver, although the aftertaste was something he was constantly striving to find new ways to get rid of. There had been liver for dinner tonight, and Sirius had eaten nearly an entire plateful, which was why his sprouts, regrettably forgotten in his liver-induced enthusiasm, had gone cold.
They were, however, still doing an admirable job of getting rid of the liver-y aftertaste that was lurking in his mouth, waiting to jump out and get him when he was least expecting it.
Remus was sitting opposite him and had obviously been waiting patiently to talk to him since James and Peter had wandered off in revulsion with the intent of begging food that was neither liver nor sprouts from the kitchen elves.
It appeared that he'd finally worked out what he was going to say and little warning bells were going off in Sirius' head – he had a gut feeling that a serious conversation was imminent and it was up to him to avoid it at all costs.
As Remus opened his mouth, Sirius waved his fork, cold sprout and all, at him.
"You know," he said. "When I came to this school I fell in with a bad lot. Of course, I didn't find this out until half way through the first term and by then it was too late, I was too far in to get out." He paused and glanced at Remus, who blinked at him, stunned.
"However, you, Remus, you were always there, like a guardian angel, making sure that I didn't stray too far from the light and now I feel that I am finally strong enough to make a stand. I must end my association with James Potter and Peter Pettigrew, parsnip hating bastards that they are."
Remus blinked at Sirius, somewhat taken aback by this poetic declaration.
"…Indeed?" he managed to choke out after a pause, when it became obvious that Sirius was expecting some sort of response. Sirius nodded decisively, then went back to devouring his sprouts with gusto.
Remus had not actually been waiting to talk with Sirius. He had actually been studying the other boy curiously, taking in everything and weighing it up in his mind, trying to work out the basis behind his reaction the previous night.
He'd only started to say something because Sirius had noticed he was still there and he thought that perhaps he should speak before Sirius realized that not only was he there, but he was staring intently at him.
Sirius was, he realized with some irritation, very attractive. And while no-one could ever accuse him of being graceful, he was certainly enthusiastic. He did get terribly excited over the little things. He claimed that life would be so boring if he wasn't easily entertained that it was only sensible that he got excited over being able to hide under his bed and the fact that he could make his quill turn all the colours of the rainbow and sparkle.
Remus found that Sirius was someone who he could quite easily stare at for as long as Sirius' current occupation permitted him. Not that that was normally for very long. Sirius generally moved a lot. He had a lot of energy and took pleasure in burning it in ways that normally got him into trouble.
Sirius glanced up at him again, giving Remus a quick flash of blue-grey eyes that changed shades, according to Sirius ((although Remus was pretty sure he was only joking, despite not having proof otherwise)), depending on the weather outside. Apparently Sirius had finally noticed him staring and he brought a hand up to rub at his mouth briefly, probably thinking he'd gotten some brown sauce around it, before looking back down at his plate. Remus watched, fascinated, as the blood rushed swiftly back into Sirius' lips where his fingers had been pressed, making them seem a little redder.
He flushed suddenly and straightened up in his seat, trying to pretend he hadn't just been contemplating how else he could make Sirius' lips redder. He cleared his throat.
"Sirius?"
"Hello, yes, hello hello?" Sirius said promptly, snapping out of something of a daze of his own and grinning at Remus. "Yes?"
"I...ah..." He paused, mentally berating himself for not having worked out what he was going to say before he started speaking. "I'm sorry!" he blurted finally.
Sirius blinked and sat back in his seat as though he'd actually been hit. His mouth worked silently for a few moments and he frowned slightly.
"Uh...For what?" he said after a moment.
"For last night," Remus said. "For...y'know..." He let the sentence hang there, certain that Sirius wouldn't react well to the words 'getting turned on by your naked arse'.
"Oh...Oh! Pfft!" Sirius laughed and waved it off. "It's not a problem!" he chuckled. "I bet you've been agonizing about this since then, haven't you? Terrified you'd mortified me or something!"
Remus flushed and Sirius saw, then proceeded to burst out into peals of delighted laughter.
Sirius, who had been daydreaming that Remus actually was staring at him and not aimlessly into middle-distance as he was wont to do from time-to-time, was suitably baffled by the other boy's impromptu apology and briefly pondered over the possibility that he'd missed an entire conversation while he was having a happy ((if rather smutty)) time of it inside his head.
The laugh he got out of Remus' apology though, was well worth being jerked out of his fantasy ((not to mention the apt timing, as it had been starting to become rather inappropriate for the present situation)), and he went off to his detention in the best of spirits, leaving a rather bemused Remus behind him.
-