Another offering

Let it be known that living a long and fruitful life is overrated, probably, as deemed by the wise 16 year old werewolf crouched on the end of his bed in the corner of his thoroughly dishevelled dorm room. 

If that felt long winded, you should hear what’s going on inside Remus’s filthy brain. Oh, he’s practically marinating in the filth he’s been suppressing in there for the last three and a half years. 

“Hey, thanks Moony!” comes Sirius’s voice. Remus sits there,  a little curled over, as an overwhelming and totally ridiculous wave of love and lust slams into him with determination. Merlin, and he thought Sirius was the dramatic one.

“Moony?” Remus starts at the sudden hand on his shoulder, and then promptly remembers that normal social interaction is required of him. This is something he could rage about, honestly, yet he sits up straight and says, calmly, “Yeah, of course mate. Just saw it and thought of you, you know?” he throws in a little grin, for good measure. God, he is just so frighteningly good at being normal. 

Sirius grins and straightens up, preening. Remus’s field of vision seems to have finally widened from the pale expanse of Sirius’s throat, enough to take in James and Peter splayed over the floor. The massive grins on their faces are a testament not only to their extreme devotion to Padfoot, but also their patience. 

 Sirius loves to preen. In their younger years, when Remus had run out of real life replays concerning his best friend to daydream about… Sirius flicking his hair over his shoulder, Sirius tipping his head back to expose his throat, Sirius grabbing handfuls of his hair and allowing it to spill past his knuckles, twisting those elegant fingers through it… anyway. Remus had often thought that if his best mate was to be an animal of any kind, it would be some category of beautiful bird. The kind people came across oceans to pose with,  ticking the experience off their fingers as some kind of bucket list entry. The kind that people built elaborate, beautiful cages for. 

 And then, well. That idea was swiftly corrected. 

Sirius as a dog? It made so much fucking sense that Remus (once he had gotten over his fun cocktail of extreme rage, hysterical laughter and severe anguish) had wanted to tear his hair out for not thinking of it sooner. 

 Sirius, playful? Check. Sirius, mischievous? Clearly. Smart? Painfully so. Loyal? Upon pain of death. Literally. There had been one especially dramatic, drunken conversation in fifth year, that rather highlighted this for Remus. In the safety of his own head, he revisits it often. 

*

In that hollow space of time stretching past midnight, the common room party was winding down. The ache of the moon was infused in Remus’s weary bones, and so he’d told the others he was heading to his bed, and to not worry that he’d pitched himself off of the astronomy tower or something. 

He’d only been up in their room for about five minutes, before a rather drunk Sirius Black had come tumbling through the drapes. Remus shrieked and Sirius cackled wildly, falling face first into the pillows. 

“Er- everything alright Padfoot?”

“Yeah,” he scoffed. “Just missed you.” The words felt like wine pooling in his stomach. Hot and weighty and comforting even if it’s bad for you.

“Oh,” he’d said dumbly. 

Sirius raises himself up on his elbows to peer at his profile in the dim light. Remus looked back. And it hadn’t mattered that he was looking far too long and too deeply to be normal, to not be someone with a mind that built pockets of space nestled in between interlocking neurons for something just as integral (thoughts of Sirius), something that lived underneath his skin ( Sirius, thoughts of Sirius). It hadn't mattered that this didn’t feel platonic at all, to Remus, because Sirius was drunk. 

He twitched violently as Sirius reached out and curled his fingers across his ankle.

“Hey,” he whispered. “I want you to know that I’m here for you, Remus. You’re always so sad. I hate that.” Then the dramatic flare had kicked in, and with quite some effect. The sharp cut of eyeliner, the loose band shirt, the chains that hung around his neck all contributed to something so pretty. So dangerous. “I would kill someone for you, Moony,” he’d whispered, directly into Remus’s ear. "You know everything, but did you know that?"

*

Sometimes he wonders what Sirius would look like after such a murderous conflict. Would he be bloody? Rich red pouring from his lips, just another offering, would it pool in streaks in the hollows of his collarbones, for Remus to take ? When he parted his lips, only to laugh, would the metal ball of that goddamned lip piercing be slipping easily through the soft flesh, lubricated by all the blood dripping past his chin? 

Remus prays every day that someone who has taken the time to master legilimency has no interest in the contents of his wank bank. 

“Did it now,” Sirius drawls, and it snaps Remus abruptly back to the present. “Think of me often Moons?”

“Yes well,” he murmurs, avoiding James's surely knowing gaze, “just that you dearly needed to be leashed.”

Peter snorts from where he’s laying with his blonde curls across James’s lap. He’s absentmindedly combing through them, but Remus can just feel his smug gaze boring into the side of his head. Every day, he regrets letting slip the gory details of the debilitating crush he’s harbored for Sirius since he was fourteen. 

But Sirius doesn’t laugh, he just lazily puts his hands in the pockets of that leather jacket and stares him down. Remus has known Sirius long enough to know that the mischievous glint in his eyes is not an empty threat.

“The only thing I needed was something around my neck, Moonbeam.”

In the bizarre headrush that follows this statement, Remus wonders what would happen if he slid off the bed onto his knees and offered his services. Please, mate, use my hands as a necklace? 

It’s a possibility, but Remus would then have to off himself, and really, he’s already gotten this far. What’s a couple more years?

He gives a weak chuckle, because he is a brave, brave man, and the smug bastard in front of him grins menacingly and goes back to adjusting the black, chain linked choker Remus got him for his seventeenth birthday. 

 He really had gotten it because he knew Sirius would love it. The little studs and chains fit with his whole punk, leather jacket, billowing-smoke-between-parted-lips look he has going on. 

There is perhaps also a tiny chance that he’d gotten it because of the inexplicable knowledge that it would be just a little too small. Is it strange that he knows the… neck size of Sirius Black? Maybe. But who cares, really, when he has the vital knowledge that the black leather is  squeezing across delicate tendons, compressing arteries, so that perhaps Sirius’s heart is pumping just that tiny bit faster. Remus wants it under his teeth and in his hands.

Call him a romantic.

 “What’s this chain bit here, Moons?” Sirius asks, going a bit cross eyed as he tries to inspect the choker he’s already wearing. 

Remus tugs a bit at his collar. It’s a bit hot in the dorm. “Er, yeah, it’s space for you to add charms and such. Y’know. The dangly ones?” 

Every day, Remus rises with the sun, a sweet smile on his face, and thanks whatever deity is out there for the gift of such eloquence. 

 “I do know,” he replies, looking at Remus in smug amusement. Remus is going to pitch himself headfirst into the Great Lake. Wearing socks. (It’s tough work coming up with new methods of self loathing, but nobody works as hard as Remus. )

“Like the ones on those friendship bracelets the girls have?” pipes up Peter with a wicked little grin. “Aw, Remus, that's so -”

“More things like dog tags,” he exclaims rather loudly. 

“Oh perfect,” James chimes in, louder, “because I got you a leash! Happy seventeenth, my flea ridden mutt!” 

Peter squawks as a Sirius shaped lump barrels into James’s lap, narrowly missing his nose. Luckily, Peter has splendid reflexes. These kinds of skills tend to develop when you share a dorm with James Potter and Sirius Black. 

Remus is jolted out of his little Sirius-hot-blood-neck reverie by a flailing elbow in his side. Gasping for air, he retaliates with a tug of James' unruly hair. He’s almost, surprisingly, as vain about it as Sirius is. 

“Argh! You little swott!” Remus huffs a laugh before leaning down and scooping James bodily off of the floor. It’s a bit of a struggle, even for his extra strength due to the moons, because James cuts quite a muscular figure, but he manages. 

“Little?” 

“Oh shut the fuck up Lupin,” he bites out from where Peter is, smothering him with his own sweat soakedt shirt. God. Athletes. 

“What’s the matter, Pads?” he asks at Sirius’s silence. He looks up to catch the tail end of a startling grey stare, before he flicks his gaze away. Is that - is that a hint of pink on his cheekbones? Remus blinks, willing away his own delusions, and when he looks again, the color is gone. Yeah, well, no surprises there. The mighty Sirius Black never blushes.

 Remus Lupin is insane. 

“Nothing, mate. Thanks, really. I uh, I really like it.” It’s an unusual moment of sweetness, amongst all the chaos. James and Peter are shrieking a mere metre away from them, but Remus is looking into Sirius’s grey eyes and appreciating the simple care in them. 

 He murmurs, “Of course,” and then Sirius turns away to attend to a James Potter tugging at his pant leg like a toddler asking socially inappropriate questions in the grocery store. 

Distantly, Remus wonders if anyone walking past their dorm still has it in them to be concerned about the impressively high pitched shrieks James will later deny - “Piss off Pads, wouldn’t wanna be a bitch now, would we -!”. 

The sounds of merriment carry across the school, winding through small spaces in the grand architecture, just gaps for the love in this room to curl up and live in. Remus knows it especially will live on in the strike of terror they inspire in the heart of every Hogwarts staff member present. 

 Remus watches Sirius laughing and knows how they feel.