extensive fire safety knowledge
Sirius
Waiting. Sirius feels like he spends his whole goddamn life waiting. Spent his childhood waiting for someone to rescue him from his family. Spent his teenage years waiting for an opportunity to show the world his talents. Spent the last few months waiting for the contract binding him to his parents’ cruelness to expire. Spent the past five minutes waiting for a response from whatever sick bastard posted and presumably took the rather concerning photos of him and James. God, James.
Every single time a mess similar to this occurs, James is always entangled in it along with Sirius. The guilt of that never stops weighing Sirius down, crushing him on the harder days. And to make it worse, James has never complained once. Even when his face pales at whatever pictures have been taken of him and put online against his will. Even when he has to drag himself and a practically catatonic Sirius through crowds upon crowds of people with no sense of boundaries or respect. Even when he gets locked in a coffee shop with a bunch of strangers overnight, hours away from his home. Sirius would much rather James be honest and tell him it’s ‘too hard to be friends’ than leave him to his own imagination of what James really thinks about these situations they frequently find themselves in when he could avoid them completely by simply removing Sirius from the equation of his life. It’s thoughts like these that keep Sirius awake at night into the early hours of the morning, staring emptily up at his ceiling until daylight begins to creep through his curtains. He hates himself for still clinging onto James, keeping him from being free from so many unnecessary burdens when he knows the right thing to do is to let him go. James is just about the only thing keeping Sirius afloat though, and it’s not like he’s about to throw away his lifejacket when he’s drowning.
He paces up and down the length of the room, too wrapped up in his own thoughts to take notice of anything else. That is until two heavy, scarred hands steady him, blocking his path. He pauses and lifts his head to see Remus staring back down at him with concerned eyes and a small smile, hands gripped around Sirius’ wrists. That was certainly enough to stop him in his tracks.
“Stop the pacing now, yeah? It’s making me dizzy,” Remus says light-heartedly as he slowly lowers their arms, though Sirius barely hears a thing, too stunned by how close they’re standing together and how absolutely unfairly gorgeous the boy standing across from him is, even up close. Especially up close. Sirius stares at him blankly for a couple seconds before his brain catches up with the conversation. He blinks once, twice, before nodding quickly.
“Stop pacing, yes, sure, okay,” He mutters, not quite knowing where to look. His eyes darting around from his shoes to Remus’ ear to finally actually looking at him again. He smiles shyly and Remus gives a small, quiet laugh before letting go of Sirius completely, which absolutely every atom of Sirius’ being protests against, and ducks his head as he walks away.
Sirius stares after him for a few beats before remembering he’s standing in the middle of a room full of people, a few of them probably watching him right now. He nods to himself before spinning around to see James sitting in a chair behind him, looking up at him with a very smug expression and a perfectly arched eyebrow. Sirius huffs and rolls his eyes before falling into the chair beside him. He shuts his eyes and runs his hands over his face. How did he, Sirius Black, get so flustered by such a simple interaction? Hell, he’s met many big celebrities in his time and not gotten flustered once, but, sure, a random Welsh boy he’s not even known for twelve hours makes his brain freeze and words stutter. He wonders what Remus must think of him - a socially awkward weirdo probably. He can feel James’ gaze burning into the side of his head.
“What?” He snaps, turning to look at him. James just chuckles in response, making Sirius groan and sink lower into his chair, decidedly recovering his face. The sound of James laughing is still in his ear next to him when Mary yelps loudly from across the room.
“They replied! They replied!” She shouts excitedly, waving Sirius’ phone around madly in the air. Without missing a beat, everyone in the room flies to their feet and rushes to her side. She clicks open the email from the journalist of the written article and the pictures posted with it and they all take a second to read it, really processing it.
“Yes!” Marlene yells out excitedly at the exact same time James and Sirius slowly turn to each other, smiles spreading across their mouths. It actually worked, the pictures were down and therefore couldn’t be spread, Sirius thinks to himself, It actually, genuinely worked. He turns to the group huddling around the phone to see a sea of beaming faces already looking back at him.
“Thank you guys, thank you so much, honestly,” He exclaims, accepting warm hugs from Marlene, Dorcas, Lily, James, and Mary. When he breaks away from Mary, he straightens his jacket and takes a breath before feeling the air punch right out of him again as Remus folds his arms around him.
Realistically, he should have seen this coming but nothing about this day has actually felt very realistic so far. He just stands there, frozen, before he thaws and melts into him. As he wraps his own arms around Remus, heat courses through his veins and his heart flutters so much it feels like it’s about to fly right out of his chest. The smile on his lips stretches even wider, which didn’t really seem humanly possible before. Remus gradually lets go and instantly Sirius feels empty and cold. He can feel an embarrassingly pink colouring in his cheeks as Remus grins at him and chuckles breathily. Sirius finds himself doing the same as they both turn away reluctantly to the other people attempting to pull them into conversation. He exhales slowly, grounding himself before he starts actually listening to whatever Mary’s bickering about with Dorcas. He laughs at the pair before he finds his eyes wandering to where Remus stands talking to Lily and Marlene animatedly just a few feet away.
Normally he’s so calm and charismatic when he wants to charm people, it has come naturally to him for as long as he can remember. But, Remus. Remus is different. Insanely talented, insanely attractive, insanely insane Remus Lupin. He's insanely insane about Remus Lupin. He needs to calm down. It's only been two hours since they first met. Sirius wishes he was joking. But Remus makes him want to be even more stupid and reckless than normal, and already brings out a new side of himself that he hadn’t even known was there. It most certainly scares him - but a good kind of scared if that’s a thing, the type where he doesn’t quite know what’s happening but wants to keep on exploring to find out.
* * *
Remus
Remus can feel himself slowly but surely falling for Sirius Black and absolutely despises himself for it. Jesus, he's only known the man two hours and he's got him thinking like this? The bloody bastard. That first thought might have been a slight exaggeration but the rather large amount of annoyance and panic it arises inside of him is the same nonetheless. It’s so, ridiculously cliche and out of character of him to just fall for the first celebrity he ever meets, after all it’s probably only the fame he’s attracted to. Probably. Sirius must have this happen all the time, he’s probably used to it. Probably. He has a whole fan base that swoons over his every move, Remus is probably just subconsciously one of them - a normal, pathetic, adoring fan. Probably. The fact he let himself think for even a minute that Sirius could view him as anything other than a random, strange, awkward man who is about as far from his dazzling popstar life as you can get is truly pitiful. Remus thought he was above all of this stupid social media celebrity business but clearly not. Yes, he used to dream of stardom, that’s why he joined the band, and yes he had gotten a taste of it and yes it had felt amazing but then his Dad got ill and someone needed to take over the shop and so he left all of that behind, even if, yes, it broke his heart a little.
One day he’ll take up music again, get out of this town that's so small it's suffocating and play his guitar for the phantom crowd that once roared for him. Though right now he needs to take care of his Mum and a career like Sirius’ doesn’t exactly supply a reliable payroll. Anything could happen - rumours, accusations and before he knows it his job is gone along with all his money. But oh, how he wants it. Seeing that video of him on Dorcas’ phone made his heart ache, the nostalgic feeling of performing to a crowd on a stage running through his head and forgetting to take his sense with it. He's a different person now then he was then, though, and he resents that ever so slightly, but whether he resents himself for changing or wishing he stayed the same is the question. Maybe he’s so enticed by Sirius because he sees something in him he wishes he had himself. The thought laced with jealousy makes him so dangerously tempted to punch a wall, or maybe even Sirius himself. Except.
Except when he speaks to Sirius it feels like sparks are whizzing around his veins, electrifying him. And when they hugged. And when they hugged it felt as if all the fireworks from the Fourth of July had been set off inside of him, exploding in his chest. How could he ever punch anyone who gives him that fucking feeling? It's strange, all Remus wants to do is be around Sirius - whether that means sitting in utter silence or talking for hours, he really doesn’t mind. He catches himself staring wistfully at the other people Sirius talks too, wishing it could be him in their place. He knows very well that he could just literally walk up to Sirius and strike up conversation at any given moment but the last thing he would want to be seen as is clingy and annoying. Truthfully, he has no idea how to act. Remus has never really felt like this before. Sure, he’s dated people - not in quite a while he must admit - but even that felt different, somehow less passionate than what he feels for Sirius even just as what can only be described as a silly schoolboy crush.
It seems unavoidable - really - when Sirius walks around looking like that. It's rude is what it is because Remus is having a spectacularly hard time keeping his thoughts actually inside his head and not just screaming from a rooftop about the way Sirius’ waves in his hair fall just perfectly and the way his mouth curves into a smile that must be practised and the way he acts like he has not a care in the world but simultaneously seems like he feels the very most out of all of them. In his brain, bright yellow caution tape wraps itself around the whole ordeal, screaming at Remus to get a grip and indeed proceed with caution; he is foolishly close to covering his ears. Problem is, untangling emotions and dealing with situations correctly is not Remus’ forte. When he lit that towel on fire last year, he threw it, not really aiming for anything, and it landed on his precious array of hanging plants and set them aflame as well. He had to go out and buy new plants. He knows that he could’ve initially stamped out the small flames but obviously all of his sense went flying out the window as soon as he actually got into a situation where he could have put his extensive fire safety knowledge to use. So of course, when a huge celebrity winds up in his shop looking for refuge the first thing he does is go and get a stupid fucking crush on him.
He sighs quietly as he watches Sirius talking with James, Mary, and Dorcas a couple feet away. To have Sirius’ undivided attention is irritatingly what he has craved since he first walked into the same room as him. Eventually his normally long thread of patience is withered down from tatters to nothing and he finds himself excused from Lily and Marlene’s conversation which he wasn’t really participating in anyway and joining Sirius’. Sirius stops whatever he was saying when Remus appears by his side and smiles warmly. Remus smiles back, his hands clasped together loosely in front of him.
“Hi,” Sirius says, eyes looking into his unwavering.
“Hi,” He replies, something inside of him squirming happily. Much better. He realises with a start that James, Mary, and Dorcas had originally been listening to Sirius talking, something he had paused in Remus' honour, and they are now staring rather unimpressed at the pair of them. “Please continue,” he gestures outwardly and Sirius resumes rambling about something Remus can’t quite follow. Hopefully he deals with these emotions and this situation correctly - for both of their sakes.