Chapter one
On the White House roof, tucked into a corner of the Promenade, there’s a bit of loose paneling right on the edge of the Solarium.
If you tap it just right, you can peel it back enough to find a message etched underneath, with the tip of a key or maybe a stolen West Wing letter opener.
In the secret history of First Families—an insular gossip mill sworn to absolute discretion about most things on pain of death—there’s no definite answer for who wrote it.
The one thing people seem certain of is that only a presidential son or daughter would have been daring enough to deface the White House.
Some swear it was Jack Ford, with his Hendrix records and split-level room attached to the roof for late-night smoke breaks.
Others say it was a young Luci Johnson, thick ribbon in her hair.
But it doesn’t matter.
The writing stays, a private mantra for those resourceful enough to find it.
Sirius discovered it within his first week of living there.
He’s never told anyone how.
It says:
RULE #1: DON’T GET CAUGHT
The East and West Bedrooms on the second floor are generally reserved for the First Family.
They were first designated as one giant state bedroom for visits from the Marquis de Lafayette in the Monroe administration, but eventually they were split.
Sirius has the East, across from the Treaty Room, and Regulus uses the West, next to the elevator.
Growing up in Texas, their rooms were arranged in the same configuration, on either side of the hallway.
Back then, you could tell Regulus's ambition of the month by what covered the walls.
At twelve, it was watercolor paintings.
At fifteen, lunar calendars and charts of crystals.
At sixteen, clippings from The Atlantic, a UT Austin pennant, Gloria Steinem, Zora Neale Hurston, and excerpts from the papers of Dolores Huerta.
Sirius's own room was forever the same, just steadily more stuffed with lacrosse trophies and piles of AP coursework.
It’s all gathering dust in the house they still keep back home.
On a chain around his neck, always hidden from view, he’s worn the key to that house since the day he left for DC.
Now, straight across the hall, Regulus's room is all dark brown and black and forest green, photographed by Vogue and famously inspired by old ’70s interior design periodicals he found in one of the White House sitting rooms.
Sirius's own room was once Caroline Kennedy’s nursery and, later, warranting some sage burning from Regulus, Nancy Reagan’s office.
He’s left up the nature field illustrations in a neat symmetrical grid above the sofa, but painted over Sasha Obama’s pink walls with a deep blue.
Typically, the children of the president, at least for the past few decades, haven’t lived in the Residence beyond eighteen, but Sirius started at Georgetown the January his mom was sworn in, and logistically, it made sense not to split their security or costs to whatever one-bedroom apartment he’d be living in.
Regulus came that fall, fresh out of UT.
He's never said it, but Sirius knows Regulus moved in to keep an eye on him.
Reg knows better than anyone else how much Sirius gets off on being this close to the action, and he's bodily yanked Sirius out of the West Wing on more than one occasion.
Behind his bedroom door, he can sit and put Bowie on the record player in the corner, and nobody hears him humming along like his dad to “Ziggy Stardust.”
He can wear the reading glasses he always insists he doesn’t need.
He can make as many meticulous study guides with color-coded sticky notes as he wants.
He’s not going to be the youngest elected congressman in modern history without earning it, but nobody needs to know how hard he’s kicking underwater.
His sex-symbol stock would plummet.
“Hey,” says a voice at the door, and he looks up from his laptop to see Regulus edging into his room, two iPhones and a stack of magazines tucked under one arm, and a plate in his hand.
He closes the door behind his with his foot.
“What’d you steal today?” Sirius asks, pushing the pile of papers on his bed out of his way.
“Assorted donuts,” Regulus says as he climbs up.
He's wearing a tank top with rose embroidered black docs, and Sirius can already see next week’s fashion columns drooling.
He wonders what Reg's been up to all day.
He mentioned a column for WaPo, or was it a photoshoot for his blog? Or both?
Sirius can never keep up.
He's dumped his stack of magazines out on the bedspread and is already busying himself with them.
“Doing your part to keep the great American gossip industry alive?”
“That’s what my journalism degree’s for,” Regulus says.
“Anything good this week?” Sirius asks, reaching for a donut.
“Let’s see,” Regulus says. “In Touch says I’m … dating a French model?”
“Are you?”
“I wish.” He flips a few pages. “Ooh, and they’re saying you got your asshole bleached.”
“That one is true,” Sirius says through a mouthful of chocolate with sprinkles.
“Thought so,” Regulus says without looking up.
After riffling through most of the magazine, he shuffles it to the bottom of the stack and moves on to People.
He flips through absently—People only ever writes what their publicists tell it to write.
Boring.
“Not much on us this week … oh, I’m a crossword puzzle clue.”
Following their tabloid coverage is something of an idle hobby of his, one that in turns amuses and annoys their mother, and Sirius is narcissistic enough to let Regulus read him the highlights.
They’re usually either complete fabrications or lines fed from their press team, but sometimes it’s just funny.
Given the choice, he’d rather read one of the hundreds of glowing pieces of fan fiction about him on the internet, the up-to-eleven version of himself with devastating charm and unbelievable physical stamina, but Regulus flat-out refuses to read those aloud to him, no matter how much he tries to bribe.
“Do Us Weekly,” Sirius says.
“Hmm…” Regulus digs it out of the stack. “Oh, look, we made the cover this week.”
He flashes the glossy cover at Sirius, which has a photo of the two of them inlaid in one corner, Sirius's hair pinned on top of his head and Regulus looking slightly over-served but still handsome, all jawline and dark curls.
Below it in bold yellow letters, the headline reads: FIRST SIBLINGS’ WILD NYC NIGHT.
“Oh yeah, that was a wild night,” Sirius says, reclining back against the tall leather headboard and pushing his glasses up his nose.
“Two whole keynote speakers. Nothing sexier than shrimp cocktails and an hour and a half of speeches on carbon emissions.”
“It says here you had some kind of tryst with a ‘mystery brunette,’” Regulus reads. “‘Though the First Daughter was whisked off by limousine to a star-studded party shortly after the gala, twenty-one-year-old heartthrob Sirius was snapped sneaking into the W Hotel to meet a mystery brunette in the presidential suite and leaving around four a.m. Sources inside the hotel reported hearing amorous noises from the room all night, and rumors are swirling the brunette was none other than … Barty Crouch, the twenty-two-year-old grandson of Vice President Benjamin Crouch and third member of the White House Trio. Could it be the two are rekindling their romance?’”
“Yes!” Sirius crows, and Regulus groans. “That’s less than a month! You owe me fifty dollars, baby.”
“Hold on. Was it Barty?”
Sirius thinks back to the week before, showing up at Barty's room with a bottle of champagne.
Their thing on the campaign trail a million years ago was brief, mostly to get the inevitable over with.
They were seventeen and eighteen and doomed from the start, both convinced they were the smartest person in any room.
Sirius has since conceded Barty is 100 percent smarter than him and definitely too smart to have ever dated him.
It’s not his fault the press won’t let it go, though; that they love the idea of them together as if they’re modern-day Kennedys.
So, if he and Barty occasionally get drunk in hotel rooms together watching The West Wing and making loud moaning noises at the wall for the benefit of nosy tabloids, he can’t be blamed, really.
They’re simply turning an undesirable situation into their own personal entertainment.
Scamming his brother is also a perk.
“Maybe,” he says, dragging out the vowels.
Regulus swats him with the magazine like he’s an especially obnoxious cockroach.
“That’s cheating, you dick!”
“Bet’s a bet,” Sirius tells him. “We said if there was a new rumor in a month, you’d owe me fifty bucks. I take Venmo.”
“I’m not paying,” Regulus huffs. “I’m gonna kill Barty when we see him tomorrow. What are you wearing, by the way?”
“For what?”
“The wedding.”
“Whose wedding?”
“Uh, the royal wedding,” Regulus says. “Of England. It’s literally on every cover I just showed you.”
He holds Us Weekly up again, and this time Sirius notices the main story in giant letters: PRINCE CASTOR SAYS I DO! Along with a photograph of an extremely nondescript British heir and his equally nondescript blond fiancée smiling blandly.
He drops his donut in a show of devastation. “That’s this weekend?
“Sirius, we leave in the morning,” Regulus tells him. “We’ve got two appearances before we even go to the ceremony. I can’t believe Lily hasn’t climbed up your ass about this already.”
“Shit,” he groans. “I know I had that written down. I got sidetracked.”
“What, by conspiring with my best friend against me in the tabloids for fifty dollars?”
“No, with my research paper, smart-ass,” Sirius says, gesturing dramatically at his piles of notes. “I’ve been working on it for Roman Political Thought all week. And I thought we agreed Barty is our best friend.”
“That can’t possibly be a real class you’re taking,” Regulus says. “Is it possible you willfully forgot about the biggest international event of the year because you don’t want to see your archnemesis?”
“Reg, I’m the son of the President of the United States. Prince Remus is a figurehead of the British Empire. You can’t just call him my ‘archnemesis,’” Sirius says.
He returns to his donut, chewing thoughtfully, and adds, “‘Archnemesis’ implies he’s actually a rival to me on any level and not, you know, a stuck-up product of inbreeding who probably jerks off to photos of himself.”
“Woof.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Well, you don’t have to like him, you just have to put on a happy face and not cause an international incident at his brother’s wedding.”
“Reg, when do I ever not put on a happy face?” Sirius says.
He pulls a painfully fake grin, and Regulus looks satisfyingly repulsed.
“Uh. Anyway, you know what you’re wearing, right?”
“Yeah, I picked it out and had Lily approve it last month. I’m not an animal.”
“I’m still not sure about my dress,” Regulus says.
He leans over and steals Sirius's laptop away from him, ignoring his noise of protest.
“Do you think the maroon or the one with the lace?”
"Lace, obviously. It’s England. And why are you trying to make me fail this class?” he says, reaching for his laptop only to have his hand swatted away. “Go curate your Instagram or something. You’re the worst.”
“Shut up, I’m trying to pick something to watch. Ew, you have Garden State on your watch list? Wow, how’s film school in 2005 going?”
“I hate you.”
“Hmm, I know.”
Outside his window, the wind stirs up over the lawn, rustling the linden trees down in the garden.
The record on the turntable in the corner has spun out into fuzzy silence.
He rolls off the bed and flips it, resetting the needle, and the second side picks up on “The Man Who Sold The World.”
*****
If he’s honest, private aviation doesn’t really get old, not even three years into his mother’s term.
He doesn’t get to travel this way a lot, but when he does, it’s hard not to let it go to his head.
He was born in the hill country of Texas to the daughter of a single mother and the son of Mexican immigrants, all of them dirt poor —luxury travel is still a luxury.
Fifteen years ago, when his mother first ran for the House, the Austin newspaper gave her a nickname: the Lometa Longshot.
She’d escaped her tiny hometown in the shadow of Fort Hood, pulled night shifts at diners to put herself through law school, and was arguing discrimination cases before the Supreme Court by thirty.
She was the last thing anybody expected to rise up out of Texas in the midst of the Iraq War: a black haired, whipsmart Democrat with high heels, an unapologetic drawl, and a little biracial family.
So, it’s still surreal that Sirius is cruising somewhere over the Atlantic, snacking on pistachios in a high-backed leather chair with his feet up.
Barty is bent over the New York Times crossword opposite him, stray curls falling across his forehead.
Beside them, the hulking Secret Service agent Kingsley—King for short—holds his own copy in one giant hand, racing to finish it first.
The cursor on Sirius's Roman Political Thought paper blinks expectantly at him from his laptop, but something in him can’t quite focus on school while they’re flying transatlantic.
Mary, his mother’s favorite Secret Service agent, a former Navy SEAL who is rumored around DC to have killed several men, sits across the aisle.
She’s got a bulletproof titanium case of crafting supplies open on the couch next to her and is serenely embroidering flowers onto a napkin.
Sirius has seen her stab someone in the kneecap with a very similar embroidery needle.
Which leaves Regulus, next to him, leaning on one elbow with his nose buried in the issue of People he's inexplicably brought with them.
He always chooses the most bizarre reading material for flights.
Last time, it was a battered old Cantonese phrase book. Before that, Death Comes for the Archbishop.
“What are you reading in there now?” Sirius asks him.
He flips the magazine around so Sirius can see the double-page spread titled: ROYAL WEDDING MADNESS!
Sirius groans. This is definitely worse than Willa Cather.
“What?” he says. “I want to be prepared for my first-ever royal wedding.”
“You went to prom, didn’t you?” Sirius says. “Just picture that, only in hell, and you have to be really nice about it.”
“Can you believe they spent $75,000 just on the cake?”
“That’s depressing.”
“And apparently Prince Remus is going sans date to the wedding and everyone is freaking out about it. It says he was,” he affects a comical English accent, “‘rumored to be dating a Belgian heiress last month, but now followers of the prince’s dating life aren’t sure what to think.’”
Sirius snorts.
It’s insane to him that there are legions of people who follow the intensely dull dating lives of the royal siblings.
He understands why people care where he puts his own tongue—at least he has personality.
“Maybe the female population of Europe finally realized he’s as compelling as a wet ball of yarn,” Sirius suggests.
Barty puts down his crossword puzzle, having finished it first.
Kingsley glances over and swears. “You gonna ask him to dance, then?”
Sirius rolls his eyes, suddenly imagining twirling around a ballroom while Remus drones sweet nothings about croquet and fox hunting in his ear.
The thought makes him want to gag.
“In his dreams.”
“Aw,” Barty says, “you’re blushing.”
“Listen,” Sirius tells them, “royal weddings are trash, the princes who have royal weddings are trash, the imperialism that allows princes to exist at all is trash. It’s trash turtles all the way down.”
“Is this your TED Talk?” Regulus asks. “You do realize America is a genocidal empire too, right?”
“Yes, Reg, but at least we have the decency not to keep a monarchy around,” Sirius says, throwing a pistachio at him.
There are a few things about Sirius and Regulus that new White House hires are briefed on before they start.
Regulus's peanut allergy.
Sirius's frequent middle-of-the-night requests for coffee.
Regulus's college boyfriend, who broke up with him when he moved to California but is still the only person whose letters come to him directly.
Sirius's long-standing grudge against the eldest prince.
It’s not a grudge, really.
It’s not even a rivalry.
It’s a prickling, unsettling annoyance.
It makes his palms sweat.
The tabloids—the world—decided to cast Sirius as the American equivalent of Prince Remus from day one, since the White House Trio is the closest thing America has to royalty.
It has never seemed fair.
Sirius's image is all charisma and genius and smirking wit, thoughtful interviews and the cover of GQ at eighteen; Remus's is placid smiles and gentle chivalry and generic charity appearances, a perfectly blank Prince Charming canvas.
Remus's role, Sirius thinks, is much easier to play.
Maybe it is technically a rivalry.
Whatever.
“All right, MIT,” he says, “what are the numbers on this one?”
Barty grins. “Hmm.” He pretends to think hard about it. “Risk assessment: FSOTUS failing to check himself before he wrecks himself will result in greater than five hundred civilian casualties. Ninety eight percent probability of Prince Remus looking like a total dreamboat. Seventy eight percent probability of Sirius getting himself banned from the United Kingdom forever.”
“Those are better odds than I expected,” Regulus observes.
Sirius laughs, and the plane soars on.
*****
London is an absolute spectacle, crowds cramming the streets outside Buckingham Palace and all through the city, draped in Union Jacks and waving tiny flags over their heads.
There are commemorative royal wedding souvenirs everywhere; Prince Castor and his bride’s face plastered on everything from chocolate bars to underwear.
Sirius almost can’t believe this many people care so passionately about something so comprehensively dull.
He’s sure there won’t be this kind of turnout in front of the White House when he or Regulus get married one day, nor would he even want it.
The ceremony itself seems to last forever, but it’s at least sort of nice, in a way.
It’s not that Sirius isn’t into love or can’t appreciate marriage.
It’s just that Charlotte is a perfectly respectable daughter of nobility, and Castor is a prince.
It’s as sexy as a business transaction.
There’s no passion, no drama.
Sirius's kind of love story is much more Shakespearean.
It feels like years before he’s settled at a table between Regulus and Barty inside a Buckingham Palace ballroom for the reception banquet, and he’s irritated enough to be a little reckless.
Barty passes him a flute of champagne, and he takes it gladly.
“Do either of y’all know what a viscount is?” Regulus is saying, halfway through a cucumber sandwich. “I’ve met, like, five of them, and I keep smiling politely as if I know what it means when they say it. Sirius, you took comparative international governmental relational things. Whatever. What are they?”
“I think it’s that thing when a vampire creates an army of crazed sex waifs and starts his own ruling body,” he says.
“That sounds right,” Barty says.
He's folding his napkin into a complicated shape on the table, his shiny black manicure glinting in the chandelier light.
“I wish I were a viscount,” Regulus says. “I could have my sex waifs deal with my emails.”
“Are sex waifs good with professional correspondence?” Sirius asks.
Barty's napkin has begun to resemble a bird. “I think it could be an interesting approach. Their emails would be all tragic and wanton.”
He tries on a breathless, husky voice. “‘Oh, please, I beg you, take me—take me to lunch to discuss fabric samples, you beast!’”
“Could be weirdly effective,” Sirius notes.
“Something is wrong with both of you,” Regulus says gently.
Sirius is opening his mouth to retort when a royal attendant materializes at their table like a dense and dour-looking ghost in a bad hairpiece.
“Barty Crouch,” says the man, who looks like his name is probably Reginald or Bartholomew or something.
He bows, and miraculously his hairpiece doesn’t fall off into Barty's plate.
Sirius shares an incredulous glance with Regulus behind his back.
“His Royal Highness Prince Remus wonders if you would do him the honor of accompanying him for a dance.”
Barty's mouth freezes halfway open, caught on a soft vowel sound, and Regulus breaks out into a shit-eating grin.
“Oh, he'd love to,” Regulus volunteers. “He's been hoping he’d ask all evening.”
“I—” Barty starts and stops, his mouth smiling even as his eyes slice at Regulus.
“Of course. That would be lovely.”
“Excellent,” Reginald-Bartholomew says, and he turns and gestures over his shoulder.
And there Remus is, in the flesh, as classically handsome as ever in his tailored three-piece suit, all tawny tousled hair and high cheekbones and a soft mouth.
He holds himself with innately impeccable posture, as if he emerged fully formed and upright out of some beautiful Buckingham Palace posy garden one day.
His eyes lock on Sirius's, and something like annoyance or adrenaline spikes in Sirius's chest.
He hasn’t had a conversation with Remus in probably a year.
His face is still infuriatingly symmetrical.
Remus deigns to give him a perfunctory nod, as if he’s any other random guest, not the person he beat to a Vogue editorial debut in their teens.
Sirius blinks, seethes, and watches Remus angle his stupid chiseled jaw toward Dorcas.
“Hello, Barty,” Remus says, and he extends a gentlemanly hand to Barty, who is now blushing.
Regulus pretends to swoon.
“Do you know how to waltz?”
“I’m … sure I could pick it up,” he says, and he takes Remus's hand cautiously, like they think he might be pranking them, which Sirius thinks is way too generous to Remus's sense of humor.
Remus leads them off to the crowd of twirling nobles.
“So is that what’s happening now?” Sirius says, glaring down at the napkin bird. “Has he decided to finally shut me up by wooing Barty?”
“Aw, little buddy,” Regulus says.
He reaches over and pats Sirius's hand. “It’s cute how you think everything is about you.”
“It should be, honestly.”
“That’s the spirit.”
He glances up into the crowd, where Barty is being rotated around the floor by Remus
He's got a neutral, polite smile on his face, and Remus keeps looking over his shoulder, which is even more annoying.
Barty is amazing.
The least Remus could do is pay attention to him.
“Do you think he actually likes Barty, though?”
Regulus shrugs. “Who knows? Royals are weird. Might be a courtesy, or— oh, there it is.”
A royal photographer has swooped in and is snapping a shot of them dancing, one Sirius knows will be leaked to Hello next week.
So, that’s it, then?
Using the opposition to start some idiotic dating rumor for attention?
God forbid Castor gets to dominate the news cycle for one week.
“He’s kind of good at this,” Regulus remarks.
Sirius flags down a waiter and decides to spend the rest of the reception getting systematically drunk.
Sirius has never told—will never tell—anyone, but he saw Remus for the first time when he was fifteen years old.
He only ever reflects upon it when he’s drunk.
He’s sure he saw his face in the news before then, but that was the first time he really saw him.
Regulus had just turned twelve and used part of his birthday money to buy an issue of a blindingly colorful teen magazine.
His love of trashy tabloids started early.
In the center of the magazine were miniature posters you could rip out and stick up in your locker.
If you were careful and pried up the staples with your fingernails, you could get them out without tearing them.
One of them, right in the middle, was a picture of a boy.
He had thick, sandy hair and big brown eyes, a warm smile, and a cricket bat over one shoulder.
It must have been a candid, because there was a happy, sun-bright confidence to him that couldn’t be posed.
On the bottom corner of the page in pink and blue letters: PRINCE REMUS.
Sirius still doesn’t really know what kept drawing him back, only that he would sneak into Regulus's room and find the page and touch his fingertips to the boy’s hair, as if he could somehow feel its texture if he imagined it hard enough.
The more his parents climbed the political ranks, the more he started to reckon with the fact that soon the world would know who he was.
Then, sometimes, he’d think of the picture, and try to harness Prince Remus's easy confidence.
(He also thought about prying up the staples with his fingers and taking the picture out and keeping it in his room, but he never did. His fingernails were too stubby.)
But then came the first time he met Remus—the first cool, detached words Remus said to him—and Sirius guessed he had it all wrong, that the pretty, flung-open boy from the picture wasn’t real.
The real Remus is beautiful, distant, boring, and closed.
This person the tabloids keep comparing him to, whom he compares himself to, thinks he’s better than Sirius and everyone like him.
Sirius can’t believe he ever wanted to be anything like that.
Sirius keeps drinking, keeps alternating between thinking about it and forcing himself not to think about it, disappears into the crowd and dances with pretty European heiresses about it.
He’s pirouetting away from one when he catches sight of a lone figure hovering near the cake and the champagne fountain.
It’s Prince Remus yet again, glass in hand, watching Castor and his bride spinning on the ballroom floor.
He looks politely half-interested in that obnoxious way of his, like he has somewhere else to be.
And Sirius can’t resist the urge to call his bluff.
He picks his way through the crowd, grabbing a glass of wine off a passing tray and downing half of it.
“When you have one of these,” Sirius says, sidling up to him, “you should do two champagne fountains instead of one. Really embarrassing to be at a wedding with only one champagne fountain.”
“Sirius,” Remus says in that maddeningly posh accent.
Up close, the waistcoat under his suit jacket is a lush gold and has about a million buttons on it.
It’s horrible.
“I wondered if I’d have the pleasure.”
“Looks like it’s your lucky day,” Sirius says, smiling.
“Truly a momentous occasion,” Remus agrees.
His own smile is bright white and immaculate, made to be printed on money.
The most annoying thing of all is Sirius knows Remus hates him too—he must, they’re naturally mutual antagonists—but he refuses to outright act like it.
Sirius is intimately aware politics involves a lot of making nice with people you loathe, but he wishes that once, just once, Remus would act like an actual human and not some polished little windup toy sold in a palace gift shop.
He’s too perfect. Sirius wants to poke it.
“Do you ever get tired,” Sirius says, “of pretending you’re above all this?”
Remus turns and stares at him. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean, you’re out here, getting the photographers to chase you, swanning around like you hate the attention, which you clearly don’t since you’re dancing with Barty, of all people,” Sirius says.
“You act like you’re too important to be anywhere, ever. Doesn’t that get exhausting?”
“I’m … a bit more complicated than that,” Remus attempts.
“Ha.”
“Oh,” Remus says, narrowing his eyes. “You’re drunk.”
“I’m just saying,” Sirius says, resting an overly friendly elbow on Remus's shoulder, which isn’t as easy as he’d like it to be since Remus has about four infuriating inches of height on him.
“You could try to act like you’re having fun. Occasionally.”
Remus laughs ruefully. “I believe perhaps you should consider switching to water, Sirius.”
“Should I?” Sirius says.
He pushes aside the thought that maybe the wine is what gave him the nerve to stomp over to Remus in the first place and makes his eyes as coy and angelic as he knows how.
“Am I offending you? Sorry I’m not obsessed with you like everyone else. I know that must be confusing for you.”
“Do you know what?” Remus says. “I think you are.”
Sirius's mouth drops open, while the corner of Remus's turns smug and almost a little mean.
“Only a thought,” Remus says, tone polite. “Have you ever noticed I have never once approached you and have been exhaustively civil every time we’ve spoken? Yet here you are, seeking me out again.”
He takes a sip of his champagne. “Simply an observation.”
“What? I’m not—” Sirius stammers. “You’re the—”
“Have a lovely evening, Sirius,” Remus says tersely, and turns to walk off.
It drives Sirius nuts that Remus thinks he gets to have the last word, and without thinking, he reaches out and pulls Remus's shoulder back.
And then Remus turns, suddenly, and almost does push Sirius off him this time, and for a brief spark of a moment, Sirius is impressed at the glint in his eyes, the abrupt burst of an actual personality.
The next thing he knows, he’s tripping over his own foot and stumbling backward into the table nearest him.
He notices too late that the table is, to his horror, the one bearing the massive eight-tier wedding cake, and he grabs for Remus's arm to catch himself, but all it does is throw both of them off-balance and send them crashing together into the cake stand.
He watches, as if in slow motion, as the cake leans, teeters, shudders, and finally tips.
There’s absolutely nothing he can do to stop it.
It comes crashing down onto the floor in an avalanche of white buttercream, some kind of sugary $75,000 nightmare.
The room goes heart-stoppingly silent as momentum carries him and Remus through the fall and down, down onto the wreckage of the cake on the ornate carpet, Remus's sleeve still clutched in Sirius's fist.
Remus's glass of champagne has spilled all over both of them and shattered, and out of the corner of his eye, Sirius can see a cut across the top of Remus's cheekbone beginning to bleed.
For a second, all he can think as he stares up at the ceiling while covered in frosting and champagne is that at least Remus's dance with Dorcas won’t be the biggest story to come out of the royal wedding.
His next thought is that his mother is going to murder him in cold blood.
Beside him, he hears Remus mutter slowly, “Oh my fucking Christ.”
He registers dimly that it’s the first time he’s ever heard the prince swear, before the flash from someone’s camera goes off.