Chapter Text
St. Helena, CA
June 1990
There’s something about kissing a boy that Sirius Black feels keenly, deep in the pit of his stomach, his hands fisted in his hair, pulling at the scalp no matter how he swings it because the locks are so much shorter, his back pressed to the cold metal of the supports under the bleachers, a strong leg hitched around his waist and drawing him in for more, more, more. There’s something about the lack of tact and the lack of decorum, elegance unpossessed by a pair of boys only sixteen and fifteen years old - the hiccupped breath, the clash of teeth, the fierceness that would suggest the world was ending tomorrow and by god they were going to make every second count. There’s something about the way a boy whines, high in his throat, pitched and uneven, tangled in that web of puberty where it meets pleasure where it meets pain. There’s something that scratches the itch, sates the hunger bubbling in Sirius’s gut.
Or maybe, and he’s sure he’s fucking insane for thinking this, maybe it’s not a boy. Maybe it’s the boy. The one with the blond hair falling in his wide eyes, the sharp white teeth always on display through a bright smile, the strong nose and rounded cheeks. The one who’s always so diligent, so smart, so fucking perfect. The one with the pig for a father and the kindly pharmacist of a mother whose eyes glint with the same mischief that Sirius knows his own do. The one with the straight-As, the straight-leg jeans, the pretty little straight-cut cheerleader girlfriend who sits by his side at lunch and brushes his hair out of his eyes while he laughs with his fellow jock friends. The one whose grandparents came here from Europe just like Sirius’s great-great grandparents did. Why they settled here, he never could figure out.
Not until now, at least. Not until he had his hands in the softest hair he’s ever felt, the pinkest, wettest mouth he’s ever seen on his, the prettiest eyes he’s ever looked into the space trailing extending between their lips when they part to the piercings in Sirius’s nose to Sirius’s own eyes. Dark, hazy, pleading. Sirius has never felt desire this strong, this indescribable. The hunger is sated and rekindled anew, when Remus Lupin looks at him like that, and Sirius is convinced that this collision of their lineages is what makes the world turn in such divine fashion.
“Sirius,” Remus pants when Sirius sinks his teeth into his neck, pulls blood to the surface of his summer-gold skin. His hips move as if they have a mind of their own, as if that pretty, perfect, overworked brain has finally found peace inside Remus’s pretty little head. His fingers clench in the black leather of Sirius’s jacket, palms digging into the silver of the zipper where it falls freely over his chest. It’s too hot to be wearing something like that, especially now, but he’s committed.
“Tell me what you want from me, moon,” Sirius insists. He draws his tongue along the indents of his teeth in Remus’s flesh, broadside before the tip, the ball at the end of the piercing there making Remus shiver in pleasure. Its purpose fulfilled, Sirius’s own soon laid out before him. Remus wants, and Sirius is so happy to oblige.
“You,” he says, and he sounds so delightfully ashamed of it, so positively ravished. Crimes of thought or crimes of the flesh, Sirius is determined to commit both. To corrupt. “I want you- I need you. Please.”
And with a face that pretty, thighs that strong, a plea that desperate rolling off the pink of his lips, the words colored by the blush that clouds his mind, how is Sirius to deny him what he asks for?
Sirius meets Remus’s eyes across the cafeteria the next day, watches as he shifts so daintily against the hard metal bench to get more comfortable. A new sensation, Sirius is sure. The bites on his neck have been hidden with a turtleneck that keeps him red in the face through the whole day. Sirius passes by too closely in the halls, a hand at the small of Remus’s back and an oops, ‘scuse me into his ear. At the end of the day, when the halls clear and Remus lingers as he waits for his extracurriculars to start, Sirius finds him by the sophomore lockers in the courtyard. He kisses him like he owns him, and then he goes home.
Sirius greets his mother, who is drunk and asleep with her head on her arm at the kitchen table at three-thirty in the afternoon, drooling onto the placemat below her slumped body. She gives him nothing, obviously. The bills on the table are no doubt her newest source of anxiety, the ones that threaten repo or even foreclosure if something isn’t done about the balances overdue. But something will be done, because something always is. The threat has hung over Sirius’s head as long as he’s been able to remember yet no one has ever made good on it. He pours himself a glass of milk from the fridge, and he flicks his younger brother’s ear on his way past the couch, and then he runs. Regulus has his head in some textbook, the numbers laid out before him making Sirius’s head spin, even though he only gets a brief glance. College isn’t where Sirius is headed, anyway.
His room is in the attic, since the two-bedroom house was already full when a second child arrived. Sirius likes to think (doesn’t like, but likes in the way one would like to know that their missing loved one is dead. Would be unsurprised, would be assured by the closure and finality in knowing, even if that knowing brings on a certain misery that ignorance kept hidden) that his father attempted to perform an at-home abortion and that’s why he’s so different from his brother. He liked to think that their father didn’t want another mouth to feed, didn’t want another reminder. That’s why things went wrong—why he and Regulus came out so different. Sirius imagines his father standing at the edge of the bed, arms crossed, looking anywhere but his screaming wife. Sirius had been four then, sitting in the hallway, kicking his heels against the wall, too young to understand what a new baby would take from him. Their grandmother had gone inside instead, held her daughter’s hand, and whispered a name into existence. A name nobody in town would use properly.
A pitiful story, a miserable existence. Sirius as nothing. Nothing as Sirius. He pulls out the blunts he stashes in a hollowed-out bible (the funniest joke he’s ever made, if anyone were to ask him) he used his dad’s Buck knife to profane and hops out the window at the far end of the stuffy, dusty attic room to lie on the roof. He bakes in the sun (literally, figuratively – he’s high as a kite, and he’s going to have a burn by the time the moon comes up) and he thinks about a boy who’s too pretty and too smart to look at Sirius even once, let alone twice.
They’d found one another completely by accident, crashed like satellites coming to the same desolate planet, fixating on the same landing site, a ball of flame together. Scorching, vibrant, beautiful. Beholden not to the laws of man or nature. Just being, states of decay and disaster. The paradox of creation. Remus finding Sirius in the music room plucking away at one of the old guitars because his own had been destroyed in retaliation for his mouthing off one too many times. Remus asking why, trying to pry. Sirius gripping his chin with the sole intention of shutting him up, but it ending with Sirius on his knees in the instrument closet, the door swinging heavily shut behind them. A little secret for the two of them to cling to, a bit of excitement for Remus to inject into his boring, perfect life. Another Thursday for Sirius.
Of course, it wasn’t that. Is it ever, where young love – young lust, young desire, young boredom – is concerned? Does a heart not beat as the ticking of a clock counting down the days until you draw your last breath? Does one’s mind not conjure the images, the sensations, of a beautiful companion when your body finds itself at its most desperate in the black of the night, the moon playing witness to your hand around or inside yourself? Sirius wanted Remus, Remus wanted him, and wanted they became. Together, for one another. Is he insane for it? He likes to think so. Likes in the same way he knows he wouldn’t like to know the answer.
Remus does not – cannot, for the sake of his grades and his own sanity – think of Sirius Black. This, Sirius is sure of. To him, Remus is the stars, the moon that finds itself fitting to judge the impurity of Sirius’s hand around himself when he thinks of Remus for too long. Remus has become the world, in a way, and Siriuis an insect on the windshield of Remus’s father’s cherry red ‘68 Camaro, the one he keeps in his driveway to wash so publicly but never drives. Sirius jokes that he should give Remus a show some time, like a sexy car wash. Booty shorts, bikini top skin-tight, little white shirt that just don’t fit right.
(“Ew!” Remus shrieks, shoving so harshly at Sirius’s shoulder he feels the bruise forming almost instantaneously. “On my dad’s car?”
“He has, like, the only cool car around here, moon,” Sirius would insist, and he trails the tips of his fingers along the sensitive skin of Remus’s lower stomach, where the waistband of his acid-wash, unripped blue jeans meets the brown of his skin. The hair that trails from his navel down to his groin is new, thin. A strange thing for Sirius to notice.
“Yeah, but I’d be thinking of my dad the whole time. Not conducive to an adventurous sex life.”
Sirius hums, rolls over in the grass, leans his head against his bandaged knuckles and his scraped-open elbow against the dry patch of dirt halfway between their heads. He walks his fingers up Remus’s stomach, to his chest, to his neck, and then he presses the tip of his forefinger to his nose. “I think your dad’s kinda hot.”
“Oh my gooood,” Sirius groans, rolling away. He hits that final consonant so hard it reverberates down his throat, releases in the back of his mouth like a gag. Sirius laughs, grasps at him. “I’m breaking up with you.”
“Oh?” Sirius asks. “How you gonna do that? ‘Cause I think you have to be dating someone to break up with them.”
“Date me then,” Remus demands. Sirius feels the breath catch in his throat, the planets pause in their revolution. The universe watches, waits for them. The big bang to the dinosaurs to the missing link, his great-great grandparents settling in St. fucking Helena, of all places in the world. Remus’s only two generations later.
“You have a girlfriend.” Shame flashes in Remus’s wide eyes. So beautiful, so confused, doing something so horribly wrong but not, cutting himself on the edge of normalcy. Poor, perfect boy with the perfect life he doesn’t quite fit into.
“I’ll break up with her.”
“You can’t parade me around like you can her.”
“Bullshit I can’t,” Remus says around a scoff. It’s so odd to hear him swear so easily, his mind so ready-set-go on Sirius Black, fuck-up extraordinaire. This perfect boy lying in the dirt next to him, the light hues of his clothing dirtied to please Sirius, the fingers of well-protected hands clenched in the all-black of Sirius’s outfit, caressing the calluses on his hands and the bruises along his arms. A black Iron Maiden t-shirt, a black-gray jean vest with a black fabric hood, black jeans, black boots that put him at almost six feet even though he’s more than a few inches shy of it. Black nails, black eyes, black rimmed heart. Remus, painting himself in white and blue and gold across a canvas that exists to suffocate such beauty. A bridge above the chasm of Sirius’s young heart.
Remus presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “I’d put you on a pedestal. Everyone would know you’re mine and I wouldn’t care who had a problem with it.”
Sirius laughs. He grips Remus’s most distant leg and pulls until he's on his back and Remus is lying half on top of him. Sweat collects where their skin meets, even under the cover of darkness and the cool gaze of the moon. “You’re fucking insane, Remus Lupin.”
“Only ‘cause you made me that way.”
Sirius could only laugh, if Remus were to ever tell him he thought about that, about them, as often or as deeply as Sirius does. They’re playthings to one another, he thinks. Barring a single demand that Remus never brought up again, they mean nothing to each other. When Sirius is gone from this city, this planet (and he will be, someday), Remus will look at his yearbook picture, and he’ll laugh at the length of his once-lover’s hair, the hoops poked through the left side of his bottom lip and his right nostril, the perfection of his smile and his dark eyes. Then he’ll remember the way he tugged on that lip, kissed him until that smile turned into a silent moan, slipped into those dark eyes like a homecoming and stayed for hours. He’ll remember all the whispered praise, the kisses under the bleachers after the end of successful and failed soccer matches alike, the one time they fought like what they had was real.
Sirius will be a memory, and Remus will still be everything.
The world is cloudy, crimson. His head throbs. There’s shouting, so much shouting. Up from down, left from right, he touches his fingers to his forehead and they come away bloody. It must be in his eyes, down his cheeks. The pain spreads through his body, licking up the nerve endings in a practiced, perfected dance. He feels hot. Hot and confused.
But he knows. He knows. He isn’t so confused to have forgotten the before. The catalyst. Remus kissed him on the sidewalk, just out of sight of the streetlamp, just in view of the living room window. Sirius barely stepped through the door when the vase from the entry hall table shattered against the wall next to the door. A bottle followed clean after it, much heavier. Hit him in the head.
He wonders if Remus heard it. God, he hopes he didn’t.
There’s a hand around his throat, rough, dirty from the work it does always held over his head. Gratefulness this, humility that. What his ancestors did and didn’t have. The hand squeezes. He doesn’t hear what’s being said. Some of the words are audible, most aren’t. They cut into him like a knife. His mother might be screaming. His brother stares in shock and in fear, somewhere over their father’s shoulder.
“… no son of mine…”
The world fades.
When he comes to, he’s crumpled on the floor by the door. There has been no help, no one to even sit him upright, or maybe they did and it didn’t matter. He was dead weight. He’s surprised he hasn’t been buried alive, hidden from the prying eyes of the law, the prying eyes of the father of the boy Sirius loved to get himself here. He struggles to his feet against the weight of the room as it throws itself left and right. Concussion, probably. The blood at his hairline is tacky and dense and his fingers come away slick with it.
The living room is nothing short of destroyed, the television left on, the couch knocked into the stand the television sits on, the armchairs thrown to the opposite side of the room. There’s glass in a pile, crystal clear and ale brown, stuck in the nicotine-tinted wallpaper and collecting in sparkling heaps beneath the sites of impact. Droplets of his blood are strewn throughout the wreckage. His mother’s shelf of plants, all half-dead, are turned over. Come morning, she’ll be on her knees, cooing to them as she once did for him when he couldn’t sleep. She cares so deeply, wants so badly to protect. She has nothing to show for it. He can hear her in the master bedroom just off the kitchen, crying. For him or for the sanctity of her home, he isn’t sure.
The walk upstairs is a stumble through a fog that exists only in his head. He finds it as much a wreck as the living room, the collection of CDs and vinyl records he’s so carefully crafted scattered across the floor. Some broken, some intact. Familiar shards of Sitka spruce lie among the broken bodies of cases and discs.
His father sits on the corner of his bed, hands folded in his lap. Calm. Sirius swallows down a sob. Usually, in situations like this (not like this, nothing has ever been like this), he’d get a hollow apology. A cheap but new guitar to make up for it. The hole in the drywall next to his head patched over with scraps of himself.
“I want you out of this house. Tonight. And don’t ever let me catch you back here.”
He feels his mouth fall open of its own accord. He flounders, lost for words. Or maybe his brain has forgotten them all. The moon watches from outside the window, has overseen – will oversee – his demise.
He’ll die on his own, surely. But his father has never been one for negotiating.
“Let me-” he sniffles, tastes copper. Remus will know what to do. His parents. His father is a cop – he must be good for something. And his mother owns the pharmacy, for god’s sake. They can help. But Remus can’t see him like this. No, Remus is- he has to stay away from this. Boys like that don’t live lives like this one. He pivots the conditions of his plea. “Let me clean up at least. Please. If I don’t, I… someone will see me. They’ll ask to help, I’ll have to tell them-”
His father is on his feet, miraculously nimble despite the haziness in his eyes, the drunken slog of his movements as if he pushes through a swamp. Sirius’s back hits the wall, head meeting the window. The pain shoots like lightning through his skull. He’s lifted from the floor like he weighs nothing. He finds the strength to grip his father’s wrist but no strength to fight. There’s no negotiating; he goes or he dies. He goes and he dies.
“Anyone shows up around here askin’ about what happened and I’ll hunt you down like the animal you are, you hear me? And then I’ll find that other boy and I’ll kill him, too.”
“Dad.” His voice is pathetic to his own ears and he swallows down another sob. It dies in his chest, makes it pulse like a bomb has gone off in the space between his ribs, the place he would call his own. His father is unrelenting, unperturbed. “Don’t. Please don’t.”
His eyes are steely. Unforgiving. “I’m givin’ you one chance because you’re my son, much as you don’t deserve to call yourself that. Take it.”
One chance. Is that what this is? A chance? A life?
His knees hit the floor before the rest of him, taking the weight against the hardwood. They crack, the joints feel like lace pulled to snap. The whimper that leaves his lips is a dying little thing, dead. Helpless. He feels helpless.
He needs out. He needs Remus, right now. More than ever now. He watches his father leave the room and he crumples in on himself, holding his chest together when it threatens to fracture around the swell of emotion. The fear, the pain, the uncertainty, shock and expectation coalescing into resignation. Because of course.
He packs a bag. A big one, but just one. He doesn’t dare go to the bathroom to at least wipe his forehead with a cloth. Seeing himself in the mirror right now might kill him, well and truly. He has a hoodie of Remus’s hidden deep in his drawer – from when they spent a night drinking and smoking in the local baseball diamond and Sirius started to shiver as the temperature took a steep downward turn. Remus rolled his eyes at the chopped-off sleeves of Sirius’s shirt but shrugged out of his hoodie nonetheless – that he stuffs into the bag alongside the rest of the clothing.
The front door isn’t a guarantee. His father is plagued by mood swings, never this bad, but always heightened by the drinking. The anger and the self-hatred that comes with drinking, a life he can’t stop wasting away slipping through his fingers in real time. His best bet is to scale the eaves trough, so he throws himself out the window and onto the roof. His movements are less crisp than he’d hope them to be in this moment, the lines of his body blurred by the sting of blood in his eyes. The roof is twice his height off the ground below; he falls five feet and six inches and lands on his back, the air in his chest shot right out into the breeze.
The walk across the city is frigid, like he’s riding out blood loss. He doesn’t think that’s it, though. He’s heard head wounds just bleed – the skin is thin, there are a lot of veins, or something along those lines. Remus would know, Remus knows just about everything.
He raps his hand against the front door to Remus’s house. He’s never been this close – always had quite a reputation for drifting about town unattached. It would look bad for both of them if he suddenly attached himself to the Remus Lupin, so he never did. They remained aloof, strangers, except where they knew there were no prying eyes.
The door swings open. Remus’s father stands in front of him, half-dressed for his shift and displeased to answer his door in such a state. His expression doesn’t change when it falls upon the blood on Sirius’s face, the look of panic upon his young – so young – features. His father’s threat awakens a fresh storm within his tattered mind, and he goes blank.
“Lieutenant Lupin,” is all he manages. His voice reaches his own ears as if travelling through cotton, as if meeting him from across the universe. God, how badly he wants to see the galaxies in Remus’s eyes. He could swear they shone for Sirius and Sirius alone, that no one else even knew they were there, deep in the nets of his irises.
“Don’t you start this,” Lieutenant Lupin interjects. His voice is the jagged edge of a blade shoved right through Sirius’s collapsing chest. “Your father already called me, told me you’ve been fighting kids – good kids. And now you want to show up here looking for help because you got yourself hurt?”
“Sir, that’s not…”
I’ll find that other boy, and I’ll kill him, too.
He swallows. “I just need help. Please. I- is Remus-”
“You stay the hell away from my son.”
The command is firm, final. This man carries a gun on his belt and probably believes there’s a special place in hell reserved for someone like Sirius, someone who so carelessly gives themselves to the baser pleasures of life. Someone who finds pleasure in drinking too much, smoking too much, vandalizing any building that’s even slightly secluded because he thinks brick makes such a lovely, neutral canvas. Remus told him once, seated on the steps of the school as Sirius debauched it, that he reminded him of a dog. (“Not the sweet kind. The big black ones—the strays that look half-starved but would bite your hand off if you offered it. You’re like a pup, though. Wild, reckless, still sharp at the edges,” Remus said. He kissed the corner of Sirius’s jaw when Sirius bent down to take the joint back from him. “You reek like one too.”) And so the black dog became his most common piece. Wide, watchful left eye, blacked-out right, coarse dark fur, teeth bared in a grin too sharp to be harmless. Perhaps in Remus’s eyes Sirius is something more than what stares back at him in the mirror.
“But-”
“Stay. Away. The last thing he needs in his life is someone like you.”
The door swings shut so harshly that Sirius is surprised it doesn’t wake the whole block. He stumbles backwards, narrowly catching himself on the ornate iron furniture that the Lupins keep on their wide wooden porch. His palms ache. Everything aches. He feels nothing more keenly, however, than the paltry pump of his heart in his chest, withering, broken, dead. A threat towards Remus hanging over his head.
There’s a bus out of the city. It runs every hour on the hour. He doesn’t know where it goes, only that the change in his pocket should be sufficient to get him a ticket and that the bus station houses a small, dingy bathroom.
So, he begins to walk.