Archive of Our Own ^beta

Ten years back, Remus had done what he called his one unforgivable—he’d fucked up his life.

It was easy to say it started with a divorce. But that was just the crunch—like a flake of finishing salt that could make the whole wound sing a clear note. It was what he would tell his Publishers, acquaintances or just new friends—divorce. Because most people had a picture of what his life looked like then. 

When he was young, his mother told him things about divine plans, fate, and will. How somewhere, her God had already chosen everything for Remus, and he needed to spend his life earning this gift—this destiny. Based on how it all turned out, his divine plan was actually written by a three-year-old with chalk on a sidewalk somewhere. And if it was God, well, he really fumbled all the cards. 

First, in his late twenties, during the harried nonsense of becoming a full adult, he’d got Tonks, his manager at Boots, pregnant. Then, midway through Tonks’s pregnancy, they’d got married, to appease his family, but also because they had become close friends, and the general wisdom was that it was not a bad time in life to get hitched. So many people told them that they were lucky it happened this way—that it was better it did.

Because there weren’t many fish in the sea. Because it was easier to fold into someone who didn’t already have a full life.

Sometimes, they'd sit together and wonder if they rushed into marriage because everyone talked about dying alone with such stunning clarity, such detail in their despair. Remus's parents often talked as if they’d already done it—gone and died pitifully alone in a hospice bed with no grandkid to scribble on their paper death gown, no adult child to hold their hand, only some hateful nurse who was looking to strip the sheets even before they were cold. Somehow, they always managed to resurrect, just to tell him about their imagined pain over a rich Sunday roast.

But they’d finally done it because he’d lost his mother. And family suddenly became something that could exist without the atmospheric pressure of storm clouds.

And when Teddy turned three, Remus, who now had thirty whole years on his toddler, saw a film at the Tate Modern that forced him to finally fuck it all up.

Eventually—by the time he was in his forties—he would say the guilt had softened, that he could breathe through it. That there had been worse things he’d done. He’d joke, too, about how it had coalesced into something tidy—a little anecdote, easy to edit out of his life when needed. Or throw in at the end, for a parting laugh.

But long before that, when he was still twenty-two and a grad student with ambitions of writing a great novel, he’d sit at a wobbly table, in the cavernous Student Union Bar and make a different kind of joke to Marlene. One that never quite landed. One that might’ve been a warning, if he’d had the courage to read it then.

It wasn’t really a joke at all.

“I’m like a sixty-forty, so I’m basically straight,” he’d say with a dry, practised laugh whenever Marlene tried to set him up with Caradoc-Best-Buns-in-Year-Dearborn from Politics.

Being best friends with Marlene meant cheeky nicknames and weekly inquisitions about your sex life. And the truth was, he’d struggled with dating. Found it too exposing, after a life spent alone. Marlene always took it personally when her friends weren’t having great sex with someone new, or at least each other.

But that particular “joke” always derailed her. She’d launch into a rant about how “bisexuals are very real, thank you very much,” and he’d sit back and bask in her fury.

While he wasn’t sure he deserved to be set up with hot people—only to fumble it completely—he was sure he deserved to be told off.

For what?

“Everything,” he’d say at thirty-five.

“Remains to be seen,” he’d say at forty-two.

And at forty-four, in an essay titled The Artist's Choice, that no one quite knew how to review, he’d write:

I thought I always deserved to be punished.

Because who could look at my stunning incuriosity, at so many scars of psychic harm, and offer me anything but punishment?

Anything less would not be worth the stains my bones will make in their hands.

Who would look at all this and think: no, you did not waste any time at all. 

I was raised by parents who stuck to a creed: we did Honest Works, and were given Honest Punishment. And so I grew into a man who sought out work that promised pain. I became a writer.

And when I felt lazy, well, any punishment would do. Especially the kinds I could so easily give myself.

But then, I found Him. Found He could twist even leather into something soft as silk in his hands. He could strike me, but let the sting measure my devotion and not my sin.

Not Him, like God, but Him, like the man I married earlier this year.

The man who may be Deva’s only loyal customer, because it’s the only place he can order Tikka Masala and Lo Mein from the same kitchen. Because He doesn’t believe in choices that limit us, and James Potter agrees enough to run a restaurant purely off that faith.

But also because He has no taste and thinks the world of me. And really, that makes me glow more than any mirror or review ever could.

Because really, we never deserved punishment at all. And He knew it.

He, who has become the star I'll set every map's azimuth toward—even in death. 

He, who looked at me and waved. He, who, instead of asking why I had taken so long to come to his door, asked if I just wanted to sit outside for a little bit.

He, who in deep summer said: watch how easy seas of cobalt Iris grow, when given enough time. 

But at twenty-two, Remus had nowhere close to that clarity of thought. He just had the sense that this was common knowledge: to live, you must be punished for it. Simple. Like knowing not to drink beer before liquor. Or knowing that if you did, the hangover would absolutely spank you the next day.

And the good thing was, he did really know how to look devastated when told off—because it was how he actually felt. So when Marlene saw his face begin to crumple, or saw his mouth move to voice ennui, she’d shut it down instantly with a dose of tough love.

“Oh, come off it, Lupin,” she’d snap. “Just fuck whoever you want—as long as it’s not me.”

He’d always felt like he was supposed to know—too soon.

But how was he meant to know anything?

How could he understand his own desire when it had never been allowed to move through his body—never permitted to roam, to vine, to root, to tangle itself around him the way it seemed to do naturally for other people?

Or even just to peek up from the dust again, tender and hopeful, waiting to unfurl beneath a kinder light.

He began to wonder if he’d let that lack linger too long—let it ossify past the point of ever being able to move or rise for him again.

Maybe he’d crippled his own desire under the weight of shame.

Or let it scar under the orders of a very religious mother. Or out of fear of a stern, unknowable father.

Maybe the only thing he could still feel deeply in his body was the ache in his hip when he sat too long. Or the winded feeling that came from the sheer effort of hiding the difference.

So when he married Tonks at thirty, he was relieved. He’d decided.

He finally knew something—and he’d done it almost in time.

Because being married and having a kid at thirty was the first milestone he’d ever really hit.

He had performed certainty. And the world—or at least the government—had rewarded him with a couple of tax benefits.

But somewhere deep down, he also knew he was marrying her because that’s what he thought knowing yourself was: throw yourself at a decision and turn into an inkblot. Then read the splatter by the firelight and hope it shows you the answer that you need. 

Remus could say with some confidence that their marriage never felt right. Not really. But he didn’t think he had the right to complain—not after he’d made such permanent decisions.

Like fucking his manager in a supply closet at work—because they got on so well.

Because, somewhere along the line, that very raunchy sense of humour they shared had blurred—at least to everyone else—into flirtation.

Because sometimes, when someone wanted to touch him, to bless him with their skin, nothing else mattered. He would always want more. 

And sometimes, he noticed he still wanted to skip—even if it was only with expected things.

Like making a baby.

Like realising, later, that the cocktail of those choices meant he had already graduated from one rope to two.

All momentum, now shaded by the blue risk of timing. The threat of a snap at both his heels.

Finally, what cut him loose was that film.

Teddy had just turned three and was driving his tricycle all over the flat, onto the bed, even. Most of the articles he edited now wore tire marks on a page or two. And somehow Teddy’s toddler energy had crashed into his mother’s, sending Tonks climbing up their walls.

So they’d left their son with his grandma and taken a walk to the Tate Modern.

Because that’s what they always did—find a quick way to remind themselves why they were best friends. Always made it easier to live with a kid in a space that really should have been one bedroom, but somehow, in London, was a whole flat.

And also because the Tate Modern was free.

They’d walked hand in hand through that great big turbine hall. Stared at Duchamp’s fountain.

Tonks made a loud joke about watersports and how it was now included in the London Olympics. He loved her for it—the way she would take the joke so very far over every line until the lines didn’t need to exist.

He thought about the fountain—the way it was just an upside-down urinal. The little plaque said, “The purpose of Duchamp’s ready-made sculpture, a urinal turned upside down, is to show how any everyday object can be raised to the dignity of a work of art, simply by the artist’s choice.”

The thought picked at him—this idea of conferring dignity upon things designed to be pissed on. And when he turned to tell her that, he’d realised she was far gone, deep into some maze-like installation piece. She was the kind of person who liked to run around a museum quickly, then spend an hour or two eating at the overpriced café and people watching.

They had once made a deal—more solemn and true than wedding vows—to let the other savour the things they loved. So he let her go on, hoping she’d pick the good ham and cheese, not the tuna. Knowing she’d fuss over finding the largest slice of chocolate cake in the case, then ask for it to be cut into two, only to let him have it all in the end. And he smiled to himself, because she was such a sure harbour, and because he loved her for it.

So he let himself take it slow.

And when he’d reached the makeshift theatre, he paused. It was the kind that was always too cold and empty—a room Tonks wouldn’t even bother entering, because to her, the awkward silence wasn’t worth enduring. Not something to brave just to convince the security officer you were a good visitor who valued all the arts. Most days, he would agree.

But today, that silence seemed to seep from the dark doorway, greeting him like a friend at the gate. He felt differently. A curl of intrigue. Something charitable toward some filmmaker who probably used words like kinetic to describe the way Big-Red-Clifford bounded around his garden.

So he went in alone.

The film was one of those silent things, black and white and so experimental. He’d sat, felt the cold air on his arms, heard the thrum of the projector as it turned energy to image and thought about how he was so lucky to have his wife, this person he could go through difficult, sleepless nights with, and then come here and do this. So lucky that in about ten minutes, he would be taking the piss of this thing with her.

This film was about a naked man. At first, when the guy had shown up on screen, Remus had tried to think of what he would say to Tonks later—maybe “wasn’t this museum free? Why was I shown some gnarly softcore?”—he thought he might workshop it.

And when he started paying attention again, the man was walking down a row of other naked people, kissing them, one by one. The camera panned over bodies—faces, sometimes genitals—each one different: delicate, large, broad, hard, voluptuous, curved, tucked away, bare. A naive, yet earnest attempt to catch all the fish in the sea.

It was always the same: one beat of eye contact between the naked man and the person receiving his attention. Then a kiss. Filmed from the side, so you could see the slot of their lips, the flicker of their eyes shutting. Most were short, identical pecks—intentional, meditative, numbing in their repetition.

And then, some seemed to shatter him.

Just a handful of kisses that caught, like burs on wool and refused to let him go, where the man was stripped of performance, flayed into revealing the truth of his desire.

Minutes of film where he just made out with the other person earnestly. Honestly. Until it was almost too painful to watch them kiss with that much fire. But then it would break, and he would walk, and you’d see the next bland kiss, and another one, and another.

That was the film: a chance to consider raw need when all options were on the table.

Remus had stared holes of despair into his shoes as he left. The security guard might have seen how devastation lurked behind tears in his deep brown eyes, like a small animal—like it was still ashamed but now too tired to keep hiding the hurt.

He didn’t even remember the name of the film.

But he knew now that he had been kissing down entirely the wrong path.

Much more than forty. One hundred per cent gay, he’d tell Marlene later.

But really, he thought, with more time and clarity:

It was like growing up by a hedge of flaming bougainvillaea.

Assuming—because you were a child bathed in their dappled, pink light—that you too were a flower.

Only to learn, later, about the bract.

About how those walls of flame had always been some third thing, hidden in plain sight. How there were so many more than three things. How, in memory, they became the little faces of those who trusted you to bloom into things they could never know. That they never intended to teach you how to bloom, but how to play with light.

And because he couldn’t stop crying—with the confusion, the weight, the pain of this realisation—he went to Tonks. Told her, right there, in that too-bright, too-glassy atrium café. Much simpler words: I’m gay.

She’d sobbed—great, heaving sounds that ricocheted off the floor-to-ceiling glass of that cafeteria. Remus was met with dirty looks from strangers until they realised he, too, was wrecked by quiet sobs.

The room quieted, then emptied, as more people realised this couple had the embarrassing task of grieving. That they were losing each other, together, in public.

What indignity—to endure this punishment over the cold remains of one half-eaten sandwich and a neatly divided slice of chocolate cake.

Remus, who would normally have rushed to hide, just sat there and held her hand. He knew they had to pour it all out now—because a levee had broken. No space remained in him, for her to flood with grief. So he prayed, which he never did. Asked that the tears be held, dammed up, kept safe within the echoing, industrial atria of the Tate Modern, until he found a way to some cobalt sea.

When they finally got up to leave, the floor-to-ceiling windows had become large black walls. She’d joked to one of the staff that they should get the next day off, since the two of them had successfully driven away all the patrons. Then she asked for a box, muttered, “Too fucking small. But the whole slice is mine,” as she mushed the cake in, and didn’t speak another full sentence to Remus for weeks.

The house turned into a rod of awkward tension and silence. Maybe even Teddy could sense something was off. Like his parents, he had also taken to crying more, sleeping less.

Then, Tonks did what she did best—broke something with her radical honesty.

Remus had finally crept out of the bathroom, where he’d basically been living for a week, to get a cup of tea. He hadn’t seen the sun, or any natural light since that day at the Tate. So he stood in the kitchen and let one sunbeam warm his temple as he sipped.

Tonks and Teddy were playing on the floor in the living room. Her eyes seemed dry today, not as red as before. He considered going over, possibly sitting at the table, just to feel their warmth.

Then Teddy tried to gnaw Tonka the Talking Cabbage’s leg off, in a very cute way. And Remus had had to run off and go silently cry in his loo—because he was still trying to give Tonks space for her own tears.

He cried because he felt both free and indefinitely grounded. And because Teddy’s favourite cabbage was called Tonka. For Tonks.

There would never be a matching cabbage named Remmy. That had been his next Christmas present. And Teddy would hate his father forever.

The bathroom had become his avocado-green womb.

He just lay in its hollow, like a single seed, sleeping in the cracked clawfoot tub, lined with towels. He’d never fixed the tub, it still leaked puddles into the floor when anyone showered. Sleep was hard to get, and when he did, he mostly dreamed about how his kid would have to tell his friends, “You can’t shower at my flat. Mum says someone died in the bathtub, and now it cries too much.”

But right after Teddy tried to eat the felted cabbage, and he had tried to return to his womb, Tonks had come into his little green world. Firm and strong—no knock, no preamble. Because that’s what it usually took for Remus to trust someone, anyone.

She’d sat down on the lid of the toilet with her arms clasped in front of her. If he were feeling better, he would have struck a pose, told her to cross her feet at her ankles if she was looking for an audience with the new Queen.

Maybe he would have patted himself on the back for coming up with that joke. For claiming some queerness even when he was feeling so shit about himself.

But she was staring at the wall with a look that said she wasn’t going to be distracted by how pitiful Remus looked, or how funny he could be. Because he did look a bit like a rice roll, especially the way he was burrowed into a big, white bath sheet for warmth. So, without being able to make her laugh, he felt lost. Unable to tether to any real version of himself.

“I think we’re fucking him up, Rem,” she’d said, simply.

Then she let her head fall, right into the stack of rolls that were balanced on the lid of the toilet.

Something writhed, caught in the back of his throat like a fly. He watched her slump, head pillowed by loo rolls, and it broke him more than her tears, the silence, or his own guilt ever had.

It was the softness, maybe. That she would still let herself fall this way, near him.

So he just sighed.

He also remembered thinking: that’s settled then, I’ll fuck him up. So she’s giving me the boot first. I will never see Teddy again.

But she’d closed her eyes, taken a solidifying breath and offered him redemption.

“I told mum,” she said softly, “she’s furious at you. Dad reckons it’s rather chic to have all this happen to me so young.”

She tapped her knees together to hold a beat. Movement helped her avoid the squirrels of her thoughts.

He could tell she was trying not to cry. And he thought it was unfair that he just wanted to go to her, hold her in his arms, and cry together. Why couldn’t they cry together when they were both losing something?

Perhaps because he’d gained something good, in the same jump.

Remus always thought there was something deeply empathetic about her voice, the way it cradled around words so thoroughly but also quickly. As if she was a baker, passing hot buns from the oven into someone’s mouth, without a mitt.

“Mary knows too. She called about you missing the last deadline and I—well, I cried to your Publishing Director,”

Remus let out a dry laugh. He turned a bit, in his towel cocoon, to lie on his side.

“That’s all I’ve been good for really. But she didn’t mind; she told me it was a bit like getting paid to shit, so—that was kind. Of me, according to her,” she pushed hard at her eyes with both her palms.

Remus observed how they seemed to match. She was in one of his t-shirts, hair greasy because he’d taken over their tub. He could smell himself through his clothes, feel the grime behind his neck. But she smelled clean, like maybe she’d gone home somewhere in the middle—for a shower and a hug. And he’d just not known.

“I’ll get to it. I knew you were bi,” she finally said. She didn’t look at him, but picked up one of the loo rolls from behind and tossed it up in the air. Caught it between her tapping knees, “or that you didn’t label these things. So I was rattled to hear that something had changed. Sure. That was some of the shock. But then, somewhere between making Teddy his dinner and reading over my dissertation yesterday, I realised I wasn’t gutted in the right way. I thought I had to act as if I was losing you. But really, I’m more so gutted because…well, now it’s all going to be fucked up and difficult.”

She tossed the roll up again, caught it, “and getting married, that felt like the start of a simplification right—like here, you signed some papers and now you two can buy one body wash, own one sofa—pay one bill—which, by the way, you owe me for your phone bill. I was looking up Matty from the other lab, and saw the stupid reminder email. But back to Matty. Bloody heck, it’s hell not talking to you; you’re so behind,” she sighed.

Tossed the roll up. Catch, “So I told Mary he liked chess, once I stopped sobbing as much. She was thinking about asking him to go…””

She petered herself off into silence.

“Squirrel?,” Remus asked, simply.

She nodded. Closed her eyes to refocus.

“If we’re being honest—which I guess we are now—I think we both got married because it seemed easier. For us. For Teddy. And like, I love you. I made myself sick over how much, initially.”

Her voice caught there, and Remus felt the disgusting heat of shame worm through his cheeks, coring into his tongue and making his silence taste rotten in his mouth. He wanted to reach for her hand, but made himself hold onto a small bit of the towel instead. Wanted to say something, but knew he could offer no words to soothe this groove of sadness.

She continued, “But maybe that was because you were the first person who had the patience to see beyond the cheery, bubbly, pink-haired version of me. You asked questions. Interesting ones. And you listened. And it was so easy to fall into love with that.”

She paused, finally met his eyes.

“But also… it’s been easy to love you in an unexpected way, because you loved me so gently, so lightly in comparison to my whole intense thing. And because I haven’t had to explain things to you. Not until now. But—”

She pulled her legs up to sit cross-legged on the toilet seat, tugged at the baggy t-shirt she was wearing and tucked it under her feet so she looked like a strange little mountain.

“Here’s the truth, Rem. I don’t think I’m devastated about not having sex with you ever again. And that’s the thing—the truth—that is killing me.”

Remus opened his mouth, then closed it again, like a fish. He felt some relief—that maybe even if they read each other wrong, he wasn’t going to be remembered as the one who took something away from her, at least in this way.

She gave a tired grin.

“Yeah. Exactly. Imagine that—three years where we fuck like maybe once every two months. And this is what it takes for me to go: I think… I’m not into sex. Like a toddler, really, you try to donate Mr MooMoo, and suddenly he’s more important than the Prime Minister to your kid.”

Remus chuckled. He was the one who had to go buy Mr MooMoo back.

“Anyhow. Maybe I just mostly don’t want sex at all. With anyone, really. But most people assume, with the everything about me and my tongue…that well, I must get energy out by being a bloody nympho.”

She laughed, bitterly, “But being loved by you, by someone who I thought maybe got that implicitly, and was just letting me take my time to chew on it? That’s what I wanted and so I got blindsided by the hope of it. That behind our sticky Boots cash register, in a massive jumper, stood my answer, without me ever really having to look for them. Someone who won’t feel like they’re always compromising for me, or that they have to work around me to get off. And I dunno…”

She hid in her sleeve, “I guess when you said you were gay, I got worried that you may have been doing that too, then, that I’d been failing you and you just finally went, and said: that’s it, it’s lads for me, none of this frigidity.”

Remus wasn’t sure if the sound that escaped his mouth was a sob or a laugh, “Love, you know you just said like, five possibly problematic things, but…not in a position to really give advice here.” He sniffled a bit, “I don’t know if I’m glad, or sad, that I’ve gone and prompted this reckoning.”

She rolled her eyes at him, “Give me credit where it’s due Loops, If anything, it was me not fucking you that got you all worked up. Made you horny enough to watch a terrible art film, and finally let yourself have a hard on for a guy. Bet the wankings' been fabulous—all that guilt and repression. Speaking of…I miss my shower head. You’re hogging the bath—a bit.”

He basked in the pain and grace of her deflection. There had been no wanking. She knew that.

Then he let himself confess softly, “I think…I’ll always love you. You really know how to drag a man out on the coals in such a sexy way,”

“And no man loves being dragged across them more than you, Fruit Loops,” she smiled. “That one’s new, Mary thought it very apropos.”

Remus laughed. Of course Tonks could get Mary to say something that would not fly with HR.

“New to you, maybe. Simon Grunswick in Year Eight would call me that and pants me after swim class.”

She shook her head. “Squirrel,” she said, tone lightly accusatory, and pointed at him.

“But anyway, do you remember when we’d get a night alone at the Baxter road house?” she said. “And Lizzy would hang a sock on the fucking front door for us, like it was a goddamn sex motel, and we were about to go shag in the common dining room or in the kitchen? And we’d look at each other like, well… duty calls and kind of slide around, half nude and giggling in my bed, for ten minutes before watching telly? I think that was a sign.”

Remus bit hard into his cheek and felt himself blush. Then admitted “I just thought that was… what people did. Everyone told me porn was the unrealistic thing. And we were having so much fun. I’ve been so oblivious, on purpose honestly,”

“Right. Well, you could say the same about me. But that’s what I get for being young and fancying the thirty-year-old atheist virgin who was…saving himself for his bride because his mum instilled the Catholic guilt expansion pack in his head at sodding birth.”

He groaned, “I’d done most other things, the case for my virginity was shaky at best.”

“You moaned like you were giving birth when you put it in me the first time. Mind you, that part? Seeing you get something from it, that was always nice. Interesting maybe? But the same way getting my scalp massaged is nice. Pleasant. But not really memorable.”

She tilted her head and smirked. “Except worse. Because—Rem—you have a lot of very abrasive body hair.”

That finally shocked the last tear out of him, and he let out a wheezing, wounded sound of disbelief.

“You always said you liked that I was part-wolf!”

“Yeah, well… you said many things about what you liked about me and my bits too. Don’t get me started. Really considered if you had an oral fixation or were into licking slimy things at some points. But it was just cocks all along.”

They both laughed. Really laughed. The kind of laughter that Remus had expected to lose entirely. It chimed off the green walls and made everything feel, for just a moment, a little more harmonious.

The laughter ebbed slowly, leaving in it’s wake some space. Remus felt like he could take a full breath.

Tonks stood, stretching a bit, as if she agreed with that assessment.

Then, right as she opened the door to leave, she paused on its threshold, looked back at him over her shoulder, face framed in a cheeky pink.

“By the way, Rem, doesn’t that make you a virgin again? Born again, anew, ready to take it up hole number two…” She had sung badly, then she snorted, “Sorry you had to hear that, it was bad, even for me.”

The door closed with its usual creak. She’d turned out the lights on him, just from muscle memory.

Remus was plunged into soft, green darkness.

The word—divorce—remained unspoken. But it hung there between them, like the fresh towel she’d left him: a gleaming white surrender above their cruddy sink. Ready for the taking.

He thought they would still avoid saying it for a few more days. But they both knew they’d come to its doorstep, all the same.

And with that thought in mind, he actually fell asleep, head resting against the cold metal tub.

Maybe this was what it felt like, to be the worm—to diligently work your way through a mealy piece of fruit, expecting nothing to be good. Then to hit that hidden tongue of flesh that brackets the seed—secretly sweet, ripe, and waiting for you all along.

His lips had finally kissed his own stone. Now, what remained was to see what he had withheld from himself.

Unspooling their lives had been relatively easy. No, the unopened toaster they received as a wedding gift couldn’t be returned, obviously—but taking Tonks off the mortgage was a can-do at the bank. There were days of arguing over which band shirt was whose, who’d bought which cup or poster. But eventually, they split things down the middle, magnanimously surrendering what they knew was probably the other’s, once the bickering and joking ran their course.

Even before Remus had fully moved out of the flat, the universe—always blessed with a wildly inappropriate sense of timing—threw Fleur at Tonks.

Fleur was a freelance photographer who wanted Tonks in exactly the way, any way really, that Tonks was open to want to be wanted. And Tonks found her heartbeat picking up a new rhythm whenever Fleur called her at work, rambling in half-French. They became like squirrels who, instead of running in opposite directions for new territory, wanted to climb up the same tree and bring back acorns to the same nest.

Remus thought it a kindness—the universe telling him: you better pick yourself up and get ready to live, because I’m hard at work making sure your unforgivable is still being forgiven.

But the stickier part—the real challenge—had been a three-year-old who really had no opinion on things. They’d danced around the custody plan during the divorce, kept things flexible, in true Remus and Nymphadora style.

But when it came to ironing it out in any practical sense, they just wound up saying some awful things to each other.

It started with his indecisive: Well, I live in Wales and you have the lease in London.

Then Tonks hit him with: Rem, what do you really want? Because you’re confusing me, and it’s hard for me to trust that you know what you want anymore.

That last one had fucking hurt—because it was true.

But also it was not. Because he did know this: he loved his son.

He knew he wanted to be a father.

But he also knew—quietly, painfully—that he didn’t know quite how he wanted to be a father anymore.

And like always, he found that people were expected to know things before they knew them.

He thought about it this way: he was still crawling around, mushing gummy balls of guilt, masculinity, and sexuality together—but raising a child demanded at least knowing not to eat the play dough.

He wished that he could take a sabbatical from fatherhood to grow up. That he could come back, maybe three or four years later, to Teddy, who would still be three years old and waiting for him to mash more banana.

Instead, they settled on monthly visits—either in Wales or London—and a daily call.

The worst part? He felt sick with relief when they’d come to that decision. He had taken himself out to his patio, sat on the same table he remembered filling out his UCAS applications at, and just cried into a cup full of wine.

Finally, being gay didn’t seem like the worst problem to have. It didn’t need to be a problem at all—not when the people he loved were still being loved well. Not when most of his days were spent in peaceful solitude. In some half-truce with the demands of the world and his creativity, happily writing for money from his childhood bedroom. Interspersed with a bit of telly or watching his new, aggravating neighbour. Little did he know then, that that last one would turn into quite a life-consuming pastime.

Remus tried to fold each of his early trips out to London into what he privately dubbed his coming-out spectacle.

Marlene was the first guest. He blurted it out before she’d even sat down on her barstool: “I’m getting a divorce.”

She’d whistled—badly—like a banged-up kettle.

“Fina-fucking-ly. So, who’s the bloke then?”

Remus felt thrown and said in an unsure voice, “Tonks isn’t cheating on me … what gave you that idea?”

Marlene had smirked, like she knew a secret. “Actually, I’m going to be honest.”

And Remus winced, because really, she never was anything but.

She took a sip of her beer, “I just assumed you were the one cheating on Tonks with a bloke. You two always seemed a bit … disconnected, physically. And you never complained, so I figured you were getting your kicks elsewhere. Based on your writing, you’re a right horny bastard on the page…especially for the pretty men.”

He straightened up, trying to muster true indignation, but she held up a hand to stop that thought, “Don’t get defensive. It’s love. Plus, I’m always here to help.”

Later, when the beer had turned to clears, she pushed at that again: “So… been shagged yet? How was it, a whole new world?”

He shook his head, a bit baleful. “Not even close to thinking about that. The whole thing feels like a minefield. But… I did notice something the other day. I might have a type.”

Marlene leaned in, green eyes glinting like a dragon.

“Tell. Me.”

Remus let his body go flat over the bar top, as if he may be able to find a way to slip between the gaps in the wood, then slowly started, “Well, there’s this guy—duh, bit redundant now—Sirius, new neighbour, rents Mrs Fitz’s place next door.”

He hit his head once against the wood, “just…such big, beautiful hands. Like, he could hold an entire rubber hose, or my neck, in one hand,” he demonstrated the size of this hose by widening his palms, making Marlene burst out laughing. “And he wears these ridiculous dressing gowns every morning. Absolutely atrocious and camp as hell, but makes me a bit dizzy.”

Remus let out a dry laugh. “Embarrassing really. Only took me three days watching him prune Mrs. Fitz’s roses in a silky number and carefully water them before I was smitten.”

He paused, looking a bit sheepish. “Wish I could say it was his tender care for the roses that did it. But no, it was definitely the way one midnight-blue gown slipped a bit—showing a hint of collarbone, a swirl of stars tattooed down from it. And the messy bun. The sweaty, wavy strands sticking to his face.” He groaned.

“No shame in loving the clavicle, Rem,” Marlene said, sipping her cocktail and nodding sagely. “It’s like tits for men,” then she giggled, “and me.”

He smiled. He felt content to let the silence bubble gently between them and just sip at the dregs of his drink.

What he didn’t say was this: that he was relieved to be attracted to this man, specifically. That maybe being into Sirius meant he could sidestep the bigger, murkier parts of all this.
Because the truth was, he didn’t yet understand the specifics of his attraction or the sex he craved—or how uneasily it rubbed up against everything he was raised to fear about himself.

But Sirius… or someone like Sirius—someone who seemed to move through the world with such ease, in both their sexuality and their gender—might already know how to untangle it for him.
Or they could be switchy enough.
Or patient enough.
Or just kind enough to keep him safely tied up, edged but untouched—until he bloomed with some unbearable knowledge.

He let the ice cube crack harshly under his teeth at that last thought. Nothing Freudian about thinking the truth.

Marlene, however, didn’t miss a beat. She stepped over his contemplative silence like it was just another ball of packing tape still littering his foyer from his half-hearted attempt at unpacking. “I know a bartender at this place in Clapham who always gets me free drinks. And you should wear that maroon shirt. Even if you’re not ready to ride, we’re at least getting your dick sucked.”

Remus flushed a deep red. But bravely said, “That, I can do.”

He wore the shirt.

He made the eyes.

And he’d smashed it, really. Earned a First with Distinction: three separate blowjobs in the same loo, in one night—given and received.

“Really exhausting the perks of that second wave of puberty,” Marlene archly commented when he stumbled out of the pub looking rattled around four in the morning.

They grabbed some chips to soak up the alcohol and debriefed. Because suddenly, Remus knew that there was so much to recall—about hands, necks, shoulders, arms, mouths.

For the first time in a while, Remus felt like living might actually be easy again.

It turned out fucking had been the smooth, motorized first uphill of the roller coaster—trembling and full of trepidation, yes, but also electric. Just pure, good momentum.

And it had been different from how he’d imagined it. Tonks had once said something like, “Once you’ve kissed one person, you’ve kissed ’em all.”

But not for him. Every kiss was different. Maybe the adage was closer to: once you’ve kissed one man, you’ve kissed one man. And you’ll still want to kiss the rest.

Of course, the beasts of shame and desire still had to be tamed. He quickly learned the mind could brew poison into any stew of longing. But when it was just him, another body, and the hush of a bedroom—things gained a kind of clarity he hadn’t expected.

About a year into exploring, he finally got around to bottoming.

He’d scheduled a week of sex with an older man from an app in London. He was traveling there more often, trying to spend longer stretches around the family as Teddy began speaking in sentences.

He felt charged about it by then—but also sure enough that if he didn’t like it, he could always turn back to the things he did know he liked. The swanky boutique Soho hotel the man had booked for them helped, too—because it meant not having to constantly witness the quiet bliss of Tonks, Teddy, and Fleur. Which was, honestly, the thing that ruined his mental state more than anything else back then.

But even then, most of that week, he’d taken control and topped. He felt like a live wire, tangled on a too-soft bed—touching and kissing the other man until they both felt spare from it. Barely eating. Barely writing. Just slipping out now and then, in between bouts, to have dinner with Tonks and Fleur, before returning for more sex with this older man who was taller, broader, richer, more self-assured than Remus would ever be.

And because the rest of the intimacy had been so smooth, so easy, so strangely kind—Remus had felt safe enough, in the end, to suggest it. The man had been thrilled to give him that first.

It was odd, though, how flat it landed. Safe. Awkward. Unspectacular. Nothing like what he’d imagined.

He’d pictured a strange power, something washed in surrender, curling its claim from his throat to his toes. But instead, it had just been… fine. Not even close to the pleasure he felt when he was the one in control.

So he wrote it off. Something to wank to, not something to actually waste time doing. One of those things meant for other people.

The other half of the roller coaster—the free fall, where the cart tips forward, where you hang for a second too long and stop believing in physics or seatbelts and start reciting the Anima Christi by rote instinct—that part, for him, it turned out, was always going to be parenting.

Visits back to London never seemed to get easier then. Every time he returned, he was acutely away of how much Teddy had changed, in the span of mere weeks. How much more he knew.

So he tried to distract himself—with work, with dating, with planned sex.

None of it worked as a balm when his kid sometimes forgot to call him dad and reverted to “Rem,” instead. He held through it, just barely. But he found it increasingly hard to reach out to Tonks for support with this—it felt as if she really was becoming a stranger again.

But, when he reflected on it, it had all really come to a head when Teddy was in fourth grade.

Remus had flown in from Berlin the night before—after what he insisted was predominantly a work trip—just to make it to Living Museums Day.

Teddy was so excited. He’d talked about it like it was a gallery showing of his first papier-mâché volcano.

And Remus promised him: he wouldn’t dare miss it. Not like the Pokémon club football game he’d been kept from by work, or the Little Explorers Easter Hunt, that was for some reason, at the end of July.

But he missed it anyway.

Because he’d been too busy with someone he swiped on in the cab ride back from Heathrow. Because he’d had the new rope in his suitcase, and then it seemed like a waste to not use it to tied up, to be tied back.

Because all that takes time.

Because, if he was being honest, he’d never stop wanting just one more round before he could take real life to the chin.

And he worried that something was permanently broken now, because something in him always seemed to want one more—more skin, more touch, more proof.

So, when he finally checked his phone, one hand still sticky, saw the time, saw the four missed calls from Tonks, he knew—instantly, nauseatingly—that he’d fucked it well and good.

He finally met up with them at a food hall for lunch and saw the way Teddy barely cared. He’d chatted with him about some new games, then run off to go look at ice-cream with Fleur. It was always like this back then—Remus watching as his son’s eyes would gloss over him, to Pink and Blondy, especially when he needed advise or help.

That was really the last time he let it all go that wrong. The shame waterboarded him into submission at last. Everything—the sex, the visits to London—petered out after that incident.

By the time Teddy was old enough to be in English Literature, not Literacy, Remus’s visits were down to once every three months. The daily calls remained—but the careless hookups faded into some short-term things.

When he complained about the dry spells, or Teddy not wanting to talk for as long on the phone, Fleur had just said “À quelque chose malheur est bon.”

Even Remus—with his third-grade French, taught by a Welshwoman who maybe only really spoke Spanish, but had somehow been hired by Mr. Fartface-Poopypants, his primary school principal, because, honestly, Mrs. Lupin, what’s the difference between the Romance languages to these kids anyway—knew what that meant.

It was a platitude that basically said: you’ve had your fun, now come suffer with us in our house, where someone is snot-nosed and sick every week because Teddy is seven, eight, nine and can’t be bothered to wash his hands.

Sometimes, back then especially, when he would speak more to Fleur than Tonks, he wished he could chuck a gag in her mouth—just make her shut up, like he usually did with others who gave him too much lip.

Instead, they fought a lot. Which massively upset Tonks.

But he thought Fleur moralized too much for someone who had stolen his family.

And because he verbalized how much of a hypocrite that thought made him, he felt like he deserved to yell about it anyway.

Because no one seemed to understand that his grief wasn’t about not getting his dick wet every week. It was about this—

Fleur fit.

She’d taken his chair at the dining table. Claimed his favorite reading lamp.

She knew how to soothe Teddy; and later, when Teddy was older, she’d know how to untangle his curls. She knew which veg to pick up at the farmers’ market.

She knew Tonks—like he had once, but then even better. Knew exactly which dirty joke to print on the gag-gift apron for Christmas. Which silver—not gold—ring to pick up at the jumble sale, which made Remus feel guilty about the old gold wedding band he’d given Tonks that still sat in his desk drawer. And when they were trying to get pregnant again—this time with intent—she knew things like what temperature signaled ovulation.

Remus… he had had three good years, but he never got to know those things.

So when he visited them, now comfortable in the much posher flat, that Fleur owned, he always felt on the outside of things. He’d watch Teddy in matching pajamas, wedged happily between both his mums, and justify his absence with: This kid is doing okay without me.

And sometimes that slipped into: What’s he even really going to miss?

Because after he came out, there was a persistent inelegance about him. A kind of mess that followed him around, stinking under every happy memory. And at the time, he had just wanted to hide from everyone who actually knew him.

Later, at the tail end of his thirties, he would look back and have a spark of clarity. He wrote about it in an essay that won an award. He said:
“I think I’d just been acting like an egg.

I’d gone and cracked myself hard against the metal bowl of self-actualization, only to fall—shell and all—into this thick, rich batter.

And in my early thirties, without the context of having built a queer life from scratch but carrying all the pain of years of self-denial—I was shocked to find I still wasn’t quite—fully—wanted.

That my shell still felt, at times, like it was waiting to be scooped out and removed so the rest of me could finally emulsify into something sweet and lasting.”

His early forties had consisted of trying to swim in the stunning wake of that kind of complicated realization.

And so, this is what he wrote in his diary on the morning of his forty-third birthday, a year he vowed would mark a change in things:

“Happy birthday, me!

Happy, because it really is, isn’t it.

I never believed in happiness until I found myself, like a fat spider, at rest in the center of its web—somehow getting fatter there, even on the worst days in summer.

I plan for this to be an easy day. Call Ted, if he wants to talk.

I think I embarrassed him at that parent-teacher thing last month.

We’d just been standing there, waiting for his biology teacher to get a move on and send the other parents away. And one of his classmate’s mums had turned up to complain about how “improper” some of the posters in the hallway were. She’s waving the damn thing—bright yellow, big words: GAY SEX.

And I was trying not to look like I was trying to read this supposedly gay sex-ed poster that was definitely just using a sensational title to make teenagers, I don’t know… buy condoms or learn that dental dams exist, and they should not be eating ass with cling film.

But then we walked out and it was literally just plastered everywhere—around the hallways.
And I read it finally, squinted out of the corner of my eye, trying to make sure no one saw I was so distracted by the flaming yellow thing.
I thought I was doing a good job of it too… being surreptitious.

But then I got to the section about suicide counselling services and phone lines… and it broke something in me.

I think I stopped walking.

And I mean—Tonks and Fleur knew.
Knew I was having a profoundly sad and personal heartbreak, entirely unrelated to the Black Plague Musical, outside my son’s Year 7 History classroom.

I had to leave then and take a walk.
Just to stop my brain from spiraling out about how different it could’ve been—to be a child and see myself, and the challenges I faced, considered like that. So boldly. So flatly.
Apparently, in this good year of our Lord, it is obvious that these are the difficult things any gay kid may “need assistance with” (poster’s words, not mine).

Like—I, we—me and Johnny Fontain, who at least came out as metrosexual, in his own words… which, in bloody Fishguard, is like admitting you’re into one of the trifecta of sin—scat, blood, or piss—we could have known this was just another strand of normalcy that some people picked up.

Apparently, it is obvious that these were the things we needed to know.

I can’t imagine knowing that.
Growing up there…population of two thousand, outnumbered by the rumble of at least a few hundred fishing skips.
What would it have been like, to know then, that it was just a waiting game—that there were things I may need assistance with, and someone might be kind-hearted enough to make me a cup of tea with my double-sided brochure.

It fucking sucks to stand face to face with what you were missing.
To know there was a way to grow up without feeling unnatural—or like there was something deviant or degenerate about everything I wanted.
Like I was tainting others, just by wanting near them, or in their general direction.

The way I haven’t been able to let go of this pain…
Honestly, is it even something one can let go of?
Or is it more like scar tissue.
Either way, it’s hindered so much.

Marlene recently said I’ve “capitulated all my parental rights to the lesbians.”
And I mean… I have.
Ted’s better off learning how to navigate new teen sensibilities with his mums.
They know how to hide the shame of it better than I do—to front with their work-arounds.

Dora once called that selfish—but is it, really?

I think I may be too gracious with myself on this. But is it wrong to want to undergo this total transmutation without your child knowing exactly how it happened to you?
If we live with this distance, then maybe later in life, Teddy can remember me as someone to be proud of—for changing easily. For living well.

Someone he’ll find palatable.
Not a man who’s a bit of a whore and runs his house like the revolving doors of the Ritz.
One guy in, another out—each shiny and pretty, but incredibly hollow and unfulfilling.
Because I have a type.

But when I’d asked her that, she asked if I was stalling out on purpose.That if that is what I wanted, I didn’t seem to be moving towards it. Sometimes, especially when she punches with honesty, I think we would have got a divorce even if we had been the fully “heterosexual” couple of our youth.

Pardon me, Nym, for knowing where I’m at with things for once.
For not wanting to bleed all over him.

Now, they know they’re doing better than me, at least—the guy they had to pick up from the Hog’s Head with suspiciously stained trousers, because he got a bit belligerent after his son’s parent-teacher conference.

Also, I don’t know how I feel about it—my address now known to the broader village as the Ritz. Fitz et al. thought they were very clever for that one, but it’s quite disappointing to anyone who walks into this place—massively lacking chandeliers.

Anyway. Ted was very upset, because I missed the part where his history teacher talked about how excellent his Black Plague play really was.

It seems he forgot I drove him to the thing. Was actually there, in attendance, trying to keep my child-rat straight from the ten others wearing the same costumes. Really thought it could have benefited from more speaking parts for the animals.

But I withheld that feedback. Only gave open-ended thoughts later, when the puss-covered redhead expressly asked for my tastemaking opinion. Victoria? Ted still seems to like her, especially after her gruesome death in act two. And she seemed to like him too, more now than she did a few years ago with the gum-in-hair-incident. Affection was especially visible when he pushed back on my take that High School Musical 2 was the most visually confident of the trilogy.

Perhaps that can be my olive branch to him today—“I think you’ve got an in with Victoria, mate.”

But, definitely think my stellar sarcasm was lost on them all—truly the lowest form of wit, bouncing right off the helmet hair of preteens pretending to be plague-ridden dead bodies and landing straight in the grave of their judgmental silence.

AND let’s not forget that, in concession, I bankrolled an entire cast trip to Micky D’s after.

So. I’ll call him.
Because I love him.
But I needed to leave this silly bitterness somewhere.

Maybe then I’ll check in on Marlene—see if she’s dead in a ditch somewhere yet, especially if she hasn’t already left me a voicemail.

And then relax for a bit. Bath maybe?
See what I can see in the garden over yonder… if you get my gist.
Of course, you do. If you’re reading this, you’re probably me.

He wore the chartreuse yesterday.

So really: I’m going to use the day to get my shit together.
I’m going to go have an adult conversation with Sirius.
Because this is getting ridiculous.

He really makes me feel like I’m pants at this being gay thing.

It’s not even the sex (lie—so many pages of this bloody diary prove that it is, at least partially, definitely, about sex). But I just… want to talk to him without stumbling over it all and feeling like I’m being eaten alive.

The nervousness he makes me feel… well, he makes me feel like I’ll always be running.
Like—even when I know I finally have collided into the shape of myself—and it has taken, like, forty years to do it—it’s still happening far beyond any known finish line. Like I’m just running some strange race out in the desert where some demigod with a megaphone insists there is an oasis at the end, but only if you do another mile.

Squirrel: Is that the MO of the new cycling gym? Makes me feel like water is a gift I don’t deserve. And yet, I push through it, even though the guy keeps saying it’s “just a thirty-second sprint”—for eight rounds. What a grift. C’est terrible!

Anyway, I am forty-three. So he doesn’t get to do that to me anymore—get me all sweaty with no oasis in sight.

Like, damnit, Sirius—unless you’re planning to become my personal fucking fountain—I accept visa, master, cum but no piss—buy some more substantial clothing and spare me the fantasy.

Jokes aside, it’s been hard, earning the ease to be myself.

But I do know myself, and I think it shows, publicly, now. Like—some kid left a hate comment on my piece in the Strand last week, calling me an out-of-touch elder gay.

The funny thing is, he wasn’t a kid at all—actually, he’s a twenty-eight-year-old journalist who writes for a popular queer magazine. I’ve quite enjoyed some of his work. And he writes in his bio about coming out at age eight. Like…he’s known he was gay longer than my gayness has existed as a shadow on the walls of my cave.

Let me feel at peace with my still relatively new gayness, Gordon Beckett.

Did have an idea for a future piece just now: is it good, or funny, or awful that I knew what TERFs were—and where to punch them, anatomically speaking—before I worked out that I was un flaming homosexuel and completed the grossly easy tribe initiation task of hunting one down to fight online?

I hope people see that even if I’m failing, I’m also trying. That’s all I really want.

And look at me, practicing my French vocab even in this groggy thing. Teddy’s great at it now. Fleur and he have entire conversations, and Nym and I just stare—me, because it’s fucking cool, and her because I suspect she’s plotting aggressive cuddles over how tender she finds it all.

Also: was informed by my eleven-year-old that English terrible is not quite the same terrible… in French. Took me back to me telling mum it was Tesco and not Tescos’ because there was no Mr Tesco. But will let it slide, because he doesn’t understand that at least a third of his Christmas presents come from me écrire-ing my rheumatic knuckles down to splinters, or know how many bloody latin texts I read in grad school. So I will use terrible here—because this is the sanctum sanctorum of my diary and because I can’t remember what else was suggested.

Back to Sirius motherfucking Black. His middle name is actually Orion…I got some of his mail delivered here by mistake a while ago.

Whatever. S.O.B. What perfect initials, because he really is a torturous, aggravating, incendiary SOB.

Probably why he spends so much of his time sniffing around the bloody garden, like a dog who thinks the living room—and the rest of his house, which he now lives in alone (still think banker-wanker hookup leaving was the best birthday present I ever got)—is too small to run around in.

I’ll go up to him and give him some iris bulbs I pulled. Try not to pull him into the grass and grind on him like a lost dog myself. Although, that would beat out the other present.

But really… I’m proud of me.
I’ve been at this for ten years.
I’ve fucked, and fought, and gnawed at all these inconvenient truths—because it was worth doing—becoming myself.

I was worth my time.

And it is hard, Remus who is reading this because he’s sat on the loo crying somewhere from the future.

Learning to make new timelines. New milestones. New plans. It’s never going to get easier, but you know how to do it now.
You’ve done it before—found all your aspirations had been cast onto maps with the wrong azimuth, and then tilted it, till it aligned again.

But so much cause for celebration:
The mortgage is paid.
We have another five years of funding for the essays at the magazine.
It’s looking like I’ll die doing what I love, all things considered.

So I will not let one sexy knob in a silk robe continue to make me feel like a blushing thirty-three-year-old.

And I will, at some point, try to workshop that line about azimuths and maps into something flirty and erudite—because there’s something celestial in there. Just to have it ready, if I ever did actually find my balls to make a move on said twinkly bastard.

 

When Remus put his pen down and stepped out of bed, his head still buzzed with the same few thoughts that came around every birthday—the ones he had yet to say out loud or write down.

He didn’t understand why birthdays were meant to stop being fun and forward-feeling around thirty, culturally. After that, it seemed gauche to be too happy for yourself. 

He’d been late to that feeling. Happiness. So it seemed unfair that he had to feel it with solemn grace. Forty-two had been exceptionally happy. Just a riot of colour. And forty-three—well, he had so many plans.

Also, it wasn’t like he seemed too happy to the outside world—he had nothing much physical to show for ten years of seeking. Ten years out of the closet had turned into ten disaster years, in most people's eyes, really. A handful of messy relationships, a therapist who had broken up with him over his over-reliance on humor as a coping tool (or perhaps because he got so distracted by a good word that he forgot to feel it's meaning), and a reckoning with the lack of honesty he sometimes gave himself, when it came to how he was doing.

And then whatever the weird thing was, that he and Sirius were in.

But then again, he’d bought the house. That was a tangible—and for almost four years, that had been his success, the thing he said as his interesting fact on company retreats. “I live in my childhood home. It’s a little cottage in Wales, and I bought it from my dad. Proud of that one. Haven’t done much to it, but it’s mine.” And right on cue, Wendy from HR would get misty-eyed.

Really, he’d bought the house to atone. For being a bit of a disappointment to his very Catholic, now-dead mother. And for making her ghost watch him exist with such liberation.

So he smiled, sure that no matter how the day went, it would be easier than it used to be.

Then he let himself peek out of his second floor bedroom window, as a little treat. Dragged his eyes around, slow and indulgent, until they landed—of course—on the object of most of his ire and interest: Sirius Black.

And as always, he was there—surveying his garden, hose swung around one hand. He’d once overheard Sirius tell someone that it was good to water your Hydrangea canes in the Spring, even if it was too cold for anything else.

Today, he was draped in an olive robe, gorgeous gold embroidery on the sleeves, surprisingly modest compared to the usual get-up.

Remus let himself enjoy this one—like it was the first, deep hit off a quitter’s last cigarette.

And he was quitting something that day. So he let his eyes trace over the man, luxuriating in the distance.

Sirius was tall, lithe, moved every muscle with a practiced grace that was intoxicating. And as he moved, the art that skated over most of his skin seemed to rise, to move and dance with him. Remus knew some of them now— the tattoos that were usually kept at such a distance and made Remus’s mouth water. He’d seen some up closer, even, over the years. But as always, he craved to know how they might feel, under his tongue, against his cheek.

He craved to know what any of Sirius might feel like. They hadn’t even shaken hands once, in the ten years of being neighbours.

But that was what made this little look Remus was taking so good, wasn’t it?

Somewhere around that thought was when Sirius looked up, met his gaze. Let a lazy smirk twist around his mouth and lifted his hand in a flippant wave, a flash of an emerald ring on one of his fingers.

Then he stared at Remus as he took a seat at his patio table, flung his legs up into another chair and slowly let his hair out of his bun.

Remus gulped, even if he already knew this show was for him.

Somewhere along the road, Sirius figured out that Remus maybe, perhaps, obviously, liked long hair. And so sometimes, when they were in broad daylight, and he was sure Remus was watching, he would give him this—like a naughty present.

His hands untangling his hair, then tying it back up again. Oil-slick blue-green-black. The way it curled and softly brushed against skin. How it begged—to be twisted. Pulled.

Remus laughed at the absurdity, even as he felt something predictably tighten between his legs. He was used to this provocation now. It’d been this way—worse even—for years. He’d known he was fucked when it came to Sirius almost immediately. But the gravity of it had mounted year after year of living so close to each other—of letting something simmer between them but then barely using their words to make it spark.

And because it was only seven am, and he had his whole day ahead, he felt no need to rush Sirius.

He kept watching. Cocked his head to the side, let his tongue flick out to lick his chapped lip, slowly took a sip of water out of his cup and let a hand almost palm himself lightly.

Smiled innocently back when Sirius’s hands seemed to stutter for a second.

This is what they did. No words, just this maddening, escalating exposure.

Sirius let his hands move naturally from his scalp, down to his neck, as if he were just making an adjustment to the green robe he wore. Tugged it a bit to the side, as if his chest needed to feel a touch of cool breeze. And Remus grinned, because he knew the green definitely was for him. So he let himself run a hand down his body, and lightly, but clearly. Reached his destination and gave one firm squeeze.

Sirius seemed to exhale a very deep breath with that.

And the Lenten rose pink blush that bloomed across his cheekbones: that was a great birthday present.

Remus felt like his heart was racing. He liked when he won one of these bouts fair and square.

Check. Mate. Black.

Or whatever.

Because they had been playing this game for years. Remus just didn’t know if there were any rules. 

Finally, after letting himself take a very long shower, where he indulged himself generously, he wound up downstairs.

He thought about how he didn’t feel the need to save the good things up anymore. Not when he’d spent so many years learning to savor. Because if time was going to threaten him with loss every day, he had now learnt to steal something from the slip of its skirt too. Could relish something rare. Knew when he should hang on and bite deep, because something could bloom from it.

The house had not changed much. It remained warm and cozy, with framed cross-stitches on most walls. He’d got rid of all the pillows on the sofa, to make more space for his lanky body. But they hadn’t moved far. They just sat in a pile on his dad’s chair.

He swung the kitchen window open, stood in the cold sunshine and imagined the scent of blue iris that would rise here in a few weeks.

There would be candles later today—a little four and three, maybe stuck in a chocolate cupcake. He smiled, thinking how convenient it was now that Teddy had turned all the numbers. They had every number they could possibly need—unless one of them made it to a hundred.

Then he kept the celebratory spirit up by steeping one of the fancy little triangular tea bags into his favourite cup.

The cup was a sunny little thing—an amaryllis painted onto it. Always made him think of how Danny had got it for him—them both, really—because it came as a set. From that strange section of Fortnum & Mason, where it was always Christmas for the tourists, even in August.

It had been so many years now.

He let himself wander back after the memory, as another indulgence.

It was right after the divorce. He’d knocked around with Marlene, like a loose stone, for about a month, enjoying the sex parts of being newly gay. Then flailed, frantically, when he realised he needed the other kinds of intimacy—the deeper kinds. The way a good relationship offered the raw, continuous experience of being known, through the dusting and the kissing and the everything.

He’d been happily married once, even if only for a few years, and that kind of knowledge wasn’t something that simply undid itself. He’d had a taste of domesticity. Knew what it was like to have someone else occupy the armchair in the back of your mind. Someone you knew well enough to say, this is the filthy thing they’ll text me if I send them a picture of this weird eggplant at the too-big Tesco.

And someone who would know—just as deeply—that you sent that picture because you were feeling a bit self-conscious about shopping alone in your work clothes and that you’d only ended up at that Tesco because you were tired and just wanted to get home, even though you far preferred the Asda on the other bus route. He needed someone who understood that the eggplant really meant: I’m reaching for your hand, just until I get through the worst aisles, so please laugh.

He missed that type of intimacy with his entire body. But back then, he didn’t have words to be able to fully articulate the ache.

He’d found a way to breathe again. Was finally able to take full gasps of fresh air.

But instead of oxygen, he was filling up on some other rarefied ether.

So he’d tried dating.

7-C-Danny. Marlene christened him while Remus drunkenly complained to her about how he did not understand what Danny really wanted from him.

Lovely, lovely, empathetic man. They’d met at a talk about medical ethics, got caught up in discussion, and ended up in bed. To Remus’s delight, Danny had brought a book to bed with him, for “after,” he’d shyly said. They’d read passages to each other, nestled in post-coital haze. He had felt so alive, but so gentle, so himself in that bed—that softness felt like what he had been missing. And Danny wore these big, transparent plastic glasses that made Remus want to kiss him just to smudge them up a bit.

So Remus felt like it would work out well.

But it wasn’t actually going well. Not outside the times they were alone.

He’d been at 7-C-Danny’s place, on his knees. Had been proud of how he’d got him worked up and sounding out of his mind really. Had kept going, letting his body melt into the psychedelic carpet, just to hear more of the other man’s beautiful voice, when one of the roommates had yelled something like, “take your Daddy kink elsewhere Dan”.

It hit Remus so clearly, then: he didn’t fancy shagging against wafer-thin walls or being around any kind of young person outside the protective bubble of firmly being an adult. He’d done his time there, thanks.

Remus had voiced it—poorly—but Danny had been understanding, and so they’d compromised.

They’d rushed into long distance, partially also because Remus owned his place in Wales, and it seemed childish to be afraid of commitments now. He was already worried about coming off as immature—every man he met back then seemed to know more than him about how to simply be.

Then there was the way he’d felt like he was still playing with weighted dice. Telling people you were thirty-four and still a virgin—in one way—maybe the way you wanted most, but weren’t sure, and weren’t even sure if you’d ever be ready to try it, though you wanked about it a lot, maybe even obsessively enough to consider seeing a doctor, but you’d rather die than tell the kind lady on the NHS hotline that your chief medical concern was: “I think I like it up the bum too much to actually do it.”

Well. That was tricky.

“But I’m not ready,” Remus had wanted to cry, to tell the dates who said they were keen to try. “It’s horrible, to want something so badly and to also be so deeply afraid of what the pleasure will do to you,” he wanted to say, but by then they were already making out in the back of a cab because he’d taken the reins for the night.

And it was easier not to want it, when twenty-six-year-old 7-C-Danny would say things like, “Virginity is a construct, Remus.”

Easier to distract himself from the desperate needs when he could spend his nights alone, reading the blogs of very intelligent, hyper-verbal (in a clinical sense) sixteen-year-olds and taking a rough pass at educating himself.

But shame’s ink doesn’t just wash out. If you cut Remus open, his bones would be stained midnight blue with it.

He’d been raised to steep in it—to love its warm thickness, secretly. The way it clung to every want. Ruined every desire. That was not something Danny knew. Gentle, intelligent, gracious Danny, whose parents knew what gay really meant—that it wasn’t just a friendly slur assigned to their son because he was bad at football.

At times, it was like his bones had only learnt to become bones when left to dry in the cool shade, the glacial context, of shame.

And there was another thing, bit smaller, bit more out of mind. He’d successfully abstained, once—thought he’d made his mum proud, even if only in half measure, by only having full sex with one woman. What an absurd notion.

But one his mind somehow twisted to cling onto. Full sex.

In hindsight, it made sense. He finally knew now, why it had been so easy to wait when he hadn’t really wanted sex with any women at all. And then when the sex he did want started to encroach on the very tight circle of masculinity he’d been raised within.

Right after he came out—it felt like he became feral. Blinded by his own wanting. Ready to debase himself without question, on tile or turf, beside any temple or toilet, on the off chance it might lead to being held, at last. Just—naked and known. Curled into the soft circle of a strong set of arms.

So he would take anything. And so, wasn’t he lucky, really, that 7-C-Danny seemed to have no refractory period?

About three months and two partial breaks into 7-C-Danny, Remus had taken the four-hour train to London just to see him. He’d planned for it to be a romantic gesture, something he would have done for Tonks.

He wanted to show up, just to walk him to work maybe, or kiss him against the walls of alleys when opportunity arose, with no other expectations. But Danny had been so touched that he’d taken the day off, tried to hold his hand, just to make a romantic mad-dash across Piccadilly, instead of walking all the way to the crossing.

But Remus couldn’t hold his hand right then. He had pulled away—shoved his hands in his pockets like a reflex.

These were his old stomping grounds. Streets he’d walked with Tonks, twice a day, to get to their job at Boots—but never quite like this. Out. Without the thick protection of all the lies from before. He was out now, and sometimes he felt like he was always standing in clinical, fluorescent light—to be so happy, so fully himself, and so raw, all at once made him sick.

When Danny gently asked about it later, when they were eating at a little café, Remus had mumbled something about just being cold.

It was August.

And he knew Danny knew. Because at the end of the night, fed up with Remus’s silence, Danny had launched the other amaryllis cup into shards somewhere near the vicinity of his right foot, then slammed the door in his face.

He yelled, from behind the thick wood, that if all Remus wanted was a mattress to hump, he should take the train home.

But again, Marlene didn’t christen him “Seven-chance-Danny” for nothing.

Because the next week, Danny had forgiven him—without Remus really trying. He had come over to Remus’s place for a long weekend, just to thoroughly apologise. They’d planned, very cheekily on the phone, not to leave the bedroom for anything.

Then, like a thorn in his shoe, they’d been invited to the Garden Club Barbecue.

Mostly because Hope Lupin had been an avid gardener, and Remus was sure the members still felt a sense of obligation toward him—and only partially because her gravestone overlooked Mary-Anne’s house.

And because Danny was lovely, he’d insisted they should definitely go.

Mary-Anne’s garden was lush, somehow not faded in the heat of August. Remus figured that must be why she was the new head of the Garden Club after his mum died.

He couldn’t complain really. There was wine, and lanterns, and that extended blue twilight that belongs only to summer. There was also the ghost of his mother, her eyes boring through the basalt headstone from across the street—watching the way Danny seemed to think his lap was the best seat in the house.

It had been hot, and most of the party moved indoors as soon as they could. But Remus stayed outside, had taken a little walk down the lane and back, just to get away from what had, for a second, felt like a place that was too close to his mother.

When he returned, Danny had reappeared too. He was sitting outside, alone in a big armchair by the fire pit, watching the flames and listening to the crickets.

So Remus walked up to him, thinking about ways to cheer him up.

But even before he could think of something, Danny saw him, smiled, said “Heather wanted you to try her elderberry champagne,” motioning at a glass of something pink and effervescent that was sitting on a table.

Remus didn’t know who Heather was. Didn’t care to. He’d caught the firelight flickering in Danny’s blue eyes and wanted to taste the pink right off his lips.

So he picked up the glass and brought it to Danny’s mouth, steady-handed. Danny’s lashes fluttered as he drank—surprised, delighted—and Remus bent down to kiss the flavour from his tongue, slow and greedy.

Danny leaned in. Let Remus tangle his fingers in that thick, dark hair—he’d been growing it out for him. It curled with the heat and sweat now, sticking to his neck, slipping through Remus’s hands.

Then Danny—always eager to touch—tugged at Remus’s elbow and pulled him into his lap.

They hadn’t done things in quite this configuration before. But no one was coming back this way. And Remus was already drunk—on beer, on him—so he let it happen. He straddled Danny, carelessly, greedily, and kept kissing him. Hot. Open. Urgent.

Their teeth clacked. Remus licked up the curve of Danny’s jaw and felt it—Danny’s cock—hard and solid right underneath him.

And fuck, it made him move.

He ground down instinctively. Desperate for friction, even through all their clothes.

Danny tugged at his shirt, slipped a hand beneath it to grip his waist.
“If all it takes to make you want to spend time with me is cock,” he murmured, breath igniting something behind Remus’s ear,
“you could’ve just asked. Could’ve been getting it from me this whole time—if I knew you would be just so good for me.”

Remus finally understood why people panted during sex. He nodded—mindless, pathetic. Something was winding tight in his chest. A fever bloomed under his skin.

He ground down again, harder. Adjusted his angle.

Danny’s breath hitched—hips jerking up to meet him.

Remus felt him twitch—thick and perfect—right where he wanted him most illicitly.

So he tried to savor. Rolled deep into it. Once. God. He felt so empty all of a sudden. Like there was a black hole, winding down his throat, into his stomach, seeking. Seeking. Grinding.

And Danny seemed to know what he was doing. He brought his hands firmly to Remus’s arse. Gripped. Down. Hard.

Remus gasped with pleasure—just one, breathy, involuntary sound.

And that was it.

Something about hearing that sound—his own desire ricocheting off the blue stone of Mary-Anne’s patio—sent Remus scrambling.

He whipped his body upright, nearly tripping over himself in the process. The glass shattered in Danny’s hand as he leapt away.

Remus turned towards the house so fast he gave himself a crick in the neck. His eyes darted—wild, guilty—like he knew someone had been watching.

Later that night, back in his bed, Danny finally said he didn’t think it was working.

Which—it really wasn’t.

But Remus found he didn’t care much that he wasn’t given an eighth chance to fuck up.

Because by then, he’d already been obsessing, feeling feverish from thought—for hours—over a flash of grey eyes.

Right as the glass shattered and Remus had looked up at the house—Sirius, half-shadowed in the window, watching them.

His expression had been unreadable, something perhaps tightened around his cheek.

But Remus could see his eyes. Sharp, gunmetal—fixed on the spot where Remus had just been wantonly grinding against another man.

A second later, Sirius came out with someone else to help with the mess.

He was laughing—leaning lazily on a broom, like he hadn’t just been watching a fully clothed, but undeniably filthy, snog.

And as he joked about with the broom, his hand drifted, casually, to rest on the chest of the man next to him. The same one he’d introduced earlier, vaguely, as just-a-friend.

From there, his long fingers, nails tipped in blue paint, slid down the broomstick, then back up into that mop of unruly hair. And somehow, Remus knew what he was doing. A taunt. A dare. Or perhaps just a gesture of: you showed me yours, so here is a look at mine.

Later, as Remus was saying his goodbyes, it happened again.

Sirius’s long fingers cupping just-a-friend’s arse.
Unbothered. Unashamed.

Remus had gulped—because all he could imagine was those same fingers slipping into the oversensitive hinge of his thigh. The soft, secret place he hadn’t let anyone really touch in a long time. And then maybe—god—what if—the wet heat of a tongue followed suit?

Then a neighbour’s whistle cut through the thick air and stopped Remus’s heart from derailing entirely.

“Getting an eyeful from Black, are you, Remus, my boy? I hear that’s the new hospitality around these parts.”

Heat exploded across his face like fireworks, and he immediately dropped his gaze—fumbled to retie a perfectly fine shoelace. Anything not to look at Sirius. Anything, to not feel his eyes, like they were physically sanding down against his skin.

But it was too late. He’d already met Sirius’s gaze.

And Sirius—unhurried, unbothered—had let his fingers lightly trail even closer to just-a-friend’s actual arse, and winked.

The first bottoming attempt in that Soho boutique hotel. The week-long sex haze with the kind man whose touch he barely remembered. All of it—a rebound from the Garden Club Barbecue.

Later, Remus would think maybe the only reason he finally tried it was because of the dare, wedged like a blade behind Sirius’s eyes.

It wound him up, toyed with him for weeks. And when he chased release, nothing else worked. Not porn, not memory, not even another set of hands on another raven-haired man. But just the thought of Sirius—fully clothed, fucking him deep, against a wall for one second. Then, Sirius—brazen and naked, riding him into ruin the next.

Back and forth.

Back and fucking forth.

That was all it took—he would be crawling, writhing on his floor with desperation, leaking into his boxers like a teenager.

And so, really, in the end, trying to get fucked silly into a mattress for a few hours felt like the easiest possible answer.

Days after he returned from London, less changed as a man than he’d hoped, he got a call from Mrs Fitz.

She wanted to know all about 7-C-Danny and the "lemony kiss" that Mary-Anne and Heather had also apparently witnessed, and she was so disappointed to hear Danny was already gone. Then she became hell-bent on him going over to her house to ask Sirius about painting the fence that ran between their homes.

But—luckily, as usual—Linda Fitz lost the plot the moment a handsome man was involved, and the conversation quickly veered into gossip. And Remus wished he could lie and say he didn’t cling to every word.

He learned that Sirius was an artist.

“A—gay—artist,” Linda said it slowly, as if he was dim and hadn’t put that together yet.

That he’d already exhibited in New York. That Jared Leto had once complimented him on Twitter—or perhaps it was Jared something-else, and it had been a note in The Sun?

Anyway, what mattered was that rich and famous people thought Sirius was attractive. Which meant, in Fitz’s professional opinion, that Remus ought to go over, come up with a shared fence-maintenance plan—and ask him out.

She’d wrapped it all up with a bow by adding that even she thought he was “quite dishy.” As if her tastes somehow even superseded the pervy opinions printed in The Sun.

Instead of falling for it, Remus had muttered something about that being an inappropriate thing to say about your tenant, and she’d just laughed at him.

Still, even though he hadn’t gone over, Sirius had left him a note in his postbox that week. A short, friendly message introducing himself and inviting Remus to come by for a drink sometime—“since it looks like we both work from home, and Linda really wants this fence maintained.”

Remus had ignored the note. He’d been mortified for weeks. Mrs Fitz had probably had a near-identical version of the conversation with Sirius, too. He wondered what colourful details Sirius had added to the “lemony kiss.”

Really, he had wanted to go over. But no one was writing anything about his scarred old face in The Sun, so he thought it best not to make a fool of himself.

What had actually followed that note was a glacially paced few years of frosty friction with Sirius.

It wasn’t always that Remus had tried to ignore him. It was just that he somehow put his foot right into a steaming cake of shit anytime anything related to Sirius happened.

For example, almost six months after he’d ignored Sirius’s note, around March, he’d found a small potted fern sitting on the bottom step, by his front door.

It was bright green in the early spring sunshine, and placed in a rather large, peeling terracotta pot that looked like it had taken shelter under a paint ladder for years. There had been no note this time, but Sirius’s stomping boots (because that’s what he called them) had left large, dusty footprints.

One more thing to care for, Remus had thought. So he left it there, in that same spot, and forgot to water it. Within days, despite the relative cool, it had browned at the edges.

A month later, in early summer, it was dead

Eventually, he’d left it, banged up pot and all, by the bins on his way to work. Sirius had seen him do it because he was always in the bloody garden.

Remus resented it, the lack of privacy he felt from... he checked his own notes... his neighbour living in his neighbour’s house. Right. Still acting certifiable, he thought. Nothing unusual then. Not when it was about Sirius. 

That evening, when he’d parked his little Accura down the hill and walked up the lane to his front gate, he was surprised to see that the pot was on a table on Sirius’s front porch. It was balanced on a couple of rocks, a tray of water below it. And it had been sheared, worse than what the farmers up the hill had just done to their flock, down low until it was mostly mud and just two fronds that were somehow still green at the centre.

Remus was mad, so the next day, when Sirius was dead-heading the rambling rose arch, he’d called out to him over the gate, “If you’re going to make me feel guilty and go full hospice with that fern, you might want to pot it in something that looks less likely to crack if touched.”

And Sirius had muttered back, not even turning to look at him, “It’s fine. And the pot is older than the sum of us, so be kind to it. It’s a 19th-century resin thing, picked it up in Lyon a few years back.”

Remus was unsettled. What did that mean?

He felt crazed, like he was trying to wind a skein of red string between a sad supermarket fern, a pot Sirius had once found and cared enough about to bring it here, cutting it off from it’s aristocratic existence as an artifact in Lee-on, and the gesture of gifting it—to him, Remus Lupin, a taciturn turnip.

But most of all, he resented that he had to watch it all unfurl again.

The dead pot of sticks, that took their time, but turned into a plant once more, lush and thick with tender fronds by deep summer.

Sirius—who had eventually, around Remus’s thirty-fifth birthday, appeared in a lilac number that offset his skin so beautifully—to carefully re-pot it from the prized terracotta into a large iron hanging planter. Because, of course, he knew exactly when it had finally outgrown the old one.

And Remus resented how it still hung there, almost eight years later, like a green lantern on Sirius’s patio.

Mocking him.

He’d gifted himself motorised blinds for his thirty-fifth birthday.

Drove to Cardiff, braved the pushy salespeople at Creative Window Doc, picked them out himself—something sleek, expensive, absurdly modern against the rest of the ramshackle décor in his place. But they came with three remote controls, blackout linings, and a silent motor.

When he paid his eye-watering bill, he justified it with this: Mum’s old curtains flutter too much in the breeze.

But really, it was this: Sirius had started sunbathing on Mrs Fitz’s patio in nothing but a gauzy wrap and tangelo Speedos that clung to his skin like wet paper.

Remus didn’t want Sirius to know he was watching. Didn’t want to admit—to Sirius, to himself, to the ghost of Hope Lupin tutting behind the refrigerator, to the overpriced blinds with their complicit little remotes—that he couldn’t not.

He didn’t want anyone to know that some afternoons he’d stand in the kitchen, white-knuckling the remote like a crucifix, whispering no, no, no as if that might stop his thumb from twitching. But it always did. Just once. Just enough.

Because really, what control did a little motor have against the holy terror of Remus’s longing?

He’d crack them, just enough to see Sirius. Laid out like some pagan sacrifice on the sun lounger. To curse at the restraint shown by whatever cheap and gauzy thing he draped over his hips.

Legs bronzed like sculpture beneath. A bottle to his lips. Sirius.

Sirius. A mockery of modesty.

The fucking Tangello Speedos.

Why did that colour even exist?

Like a spit of fire, burning. Right where Remus wished he could put it out with his tongue. Taste. Soothe. Take away some heat. 

And by the end of summer, he came to this truce: if the blinds were already open a sliver, because maybe he forgot to close them at night, he would watch with a bit more ease.

Watch the way Sirius’s lips moved around a bottle of beer, as if he believed the glass too was worth tasting. And Remus would want—a younger Remus would never have guessed how badly he might want someday to be a bloody bottle of Doom Bar—how he could so easily imagine turning to liquid, amber, dew in the warmth of Sirius’s hands.

He didn’t know what to do with the fantasies that condensed out, the feverish heat of his skin, when he took Sirius in.

Images of being nailed down by manicured hands, the glittering talons inking themselves onto his skin, entering him, but leaving something gossamer in his chest, that could flutter and vine at will.

So that year, what he had really gifted himself was knowledge. The knowledge that no blinds could stop him. He would still risk burning in the cleansing blaze of sunlight—just to get a look at Sirius.

Year thirty-seven had brought Claude.

Marlene refused to give him a nickname because she hated him.

But Remus quite liked him, Claude, with the French accent. Claude, who Teddy seemed to enjoy talking to…because he’d finally kept a boyfriend around long enough to meet his son.

Remus insisted Claude was brilliant for him.

Claude was a painter who somehow looked at the downy, sheeped-up hills of Wales and said, “Yes, this inspires me, Remus. I would like to move here. From Montmartre. Where everyone else and their putain mother begs to go paint.”

Remus loved how obscene that word sounded—especially when it came out winded and mid-thrust.

And he was living with someone again, which was one thing he’d really, really, really missed.

Remus refused to believe there was a pattern. But Claude, too, had silky, dark hair. A similar dancer-like figure. There was even something mischievous and familiar in his shining, green eyes.

And unlike Danny, it was the little things that went wrong first—Claude would not eat the heel of bread, but would save them, in case Remus wanted them. Remus felt like that was a fundamental misunderstanding. You eat the heel because you love your person; you don’t want them to have to eat the heel. Claude had laughed, had called Remus fondly, "mon martyr."

And Claude was always happy.

Remus found that a bit troubling. It clashed with how he could twist even a clear sky into something mournful, because the melancholy made it feel like something he could then own.

Claude mostly only had one complaint about moving to Wales, which Remus secretly found very funny.

“Your neighbour—does he own clothes? I offered to do the laundry, as a favour, and he said, ‘tu n’es pas français?’ As if I’m the one who should be stripping more often—because I’m actually French!”

Claude had snorted into his tea. “Did you know he’s one of those Blacks? From the family who built that ridiculous off-piste ski resort—and put a run that goes around the remains of a World War plane crash? No wonder he’s such a… provocateur. The whole family’s good at that. Tabloids. Overdoses. Lawsuits. Holding a spotlight.”

Then, with a bitter little roll of his eyes: “And then he told me you’re too sexy for me. Ugh. You always do this. You become too sexy, Remus. I should be the one who is too sexy. I told him—how do you say?—To go cook an egg?”

Remus didn’t know. He also sadly didn’t care.

Because everything after Sirius speaks French had gone fuzzy in his head, as if it had been said through cotton.

Lee-on. His terracotta pot. The Fern—which Mrs Fitz finally told him was her idea, because Sirius had asked about buying Remus a birthday present. He wished he could steal it back

But because he was with Claude and not with Sirius, he made it up to Claude that evening in the kitchen.

They were kissing—shirtless, sweaty, caught up in each other, even as the pasta water boiled right over. He’d picked him up, perched him on the counter, overlooking the window. Remus had wedged himself between his thighs. And because this was Claude, he’d obediently kept them spread, hooked his hands around Remus’s neck, and his ankles behind Remus’s waist.

The blinds stayed up most days now, for Claude, who said the dark was too dreary. Tonight, Remus had also cracked the window, turned up the warm overheads, and let the late summer air pour in. Let the sound out, too.

From next door came the faint hum of rock music. Sirius’s music. Which usually meant he was outside. Painting.

Remus leaned in, lips brushing Claude’s throat. “You see him?”

Claude’s breath hitched. He nodded, fingers digging harder into Remus’s back.

“He sees you?” Remus murmured, mouthing at his neck. Leaving marks.

Claude nodded again.

Remus slipped a hand into Claude’s dark curls and pulled. Tugged him backwards, just enough to knock against the cabinet behind his head. Kissed down his chest. Sank to his knees and slid Claude’s shorts off with practised ease.

“Good,” he said, voice low and ruined against Claude’s skin. “Then make some noise for me, love. Say it in French, yeah? Nice and loud. Let’s make sure it sinks through that thick skull of his—that you are very sexy. And that you also don’t feel a single skint of shame about how beautiful you are. Especially when you come for me.”

Claude had got the message—easily, loudly, and, if Mary-Anne’s complaint to the neighbourhood council was to be believed, with uniquely rude French flair.

By the time Heather—who Remus now knew was the librarian—was passing xeroxed copies of the grossly detailed complaint around at some potluck or other—and Sirius was reading one, smirking—Remus’s mood was back to being sour.

There would be no more noise complaints. Because Claude had taken his posh little battery-powered suitcase—the one Remus had bought him duty-free at Schiphol—and left, back to paint something tragically uninspired in putain Montmartre.

They’d actually recreated that first night a few more times. Once, in the same way as before, in the kitchen. Then upstairs. And more daringly, out on the patio itself.

But Claude had started to catch on. Caught on that maybe it wasn’t him, Remus was really performing for. That maybe Remus was looking—yearning—for something entirely different. Something he couldn’t get Remus to even tell him about. But it was hard to ignore how the man’s rhythm would stutter, or how his cock would kick hard when even the shadow of Sirius passed through the house next door.

There was no doubt left in Claude’s mind when the night after they’d fucked on the patio, Sirius had arrived at his bedroom’s bay window promptly at six—shirtless, in that bloody midnight-blue silk dressing gown, and settled into the little nook. He looked imperious, as if he had box seats but wasn’t interested in being there—he picked up a book to read, let one tattooed leg out to suggest that there were no boxers beneath any of it.

And then Remus, as if on command, had begun to fold Claude over the kitchen table. The one right in Sirius's eyeline.

Sirius kept pretending to read. But Claude had caught him sneaking glances down over the book, especially when Remus was busy looking down too. So Claude, who very much liked how this was playing out, had hammed it up. Made a big racket and loudly said many filthy things about how deep, how well Remus was taking him.

Claude talked, in some frantic, broken mess of French, about how hot it was to know that someone may be watching them. That no one else would know this feeling. This bliss, this slick slide of Remus’s cock.

He kept the volume of his voice up, so it clearly floated out of the open glass window and up to Sirius.  

But then, as Remus actually got closer, a bit louder, really fucked him, they both had looked up.

Claude heard Remus’s breath stutter hard. The chop of that one breath. Earned from one look. Well, Claude knew that it was louder than anything he’d ever pulled from Remus.

And they both had seen that Sirius had given up all pretence of reading. He was biting his lip, looking wild. Just from watching them fuck. Like a King, from his throne, at his own orgy. 

And Claude, being a menace, had smiled. Had backed up hard, with purpose, which made Remus groan. He saw Sirius’s eyes widen and got pleasure from having that effect on him. Then he wanted to know what Remus looked like.

So Claude had turned his head—expecting to see some pride in Remus’s face, directed at him, for his cheek—because that’s how Remus had looked at him the last three times they did this. And that time in the shower, where they had just talked, but had taken this fantasy so, so, much further. When Claude had come so hard onto the shower floor with Sirius’s name on his lips. Because Remus had woven a moment where he had to beg Sirius for his release. 

He liked how powerful he felt when Remus wanted to put him on display.

So imagine his shock when he saw that Remus wasn’t looking at him at all, but up, out the window, in the direction of only the Moon.

So he’d snapped up. Said something cruel enough to ruin both their orgasms—if Remus hadn’t already gone soft, having finished ages ago, back when Sirius stole his breath.

Claude had stalked upstairs without stopping to pick up his clothes. Started a screaming match as he packed.

And that, they both knew, definitely made it out the windows.

Sirius had finally curled up in the window and just…watched them scream. He could see them clearly, framed by Remus’s bedroom window.

Steel eyes flicked lazily between them as they volleyed insults about age, impotence, and whose fault it was they never fucked in bed anymore.

He looked so hungry for the chaos. As if he couldn’t decide which of them pleased him more.

And because Remus was distracted by that stare—because he felt naked in a way he hadn’t in years—he stopped shouting at Claude altogether.

Turned to the window. Voice sharp and reckless:

“Enjoying the show? Or do you want to crawl over and curl up in Claude’s lap for me? Cop a closer feel of our affairs?”

A bad line, in retrospect.

But what haunted Remus later wasn’t the line.

It was the look he got in response.

The way Sirius’s mouth didn’t move or smirk for once, but his eyes darkened, almost like they were saying,

I’ll do it... If you crawl first. Let’s see how close you’re willing to get.

Thirty-eight had mostly been a cold one.

Sirius’s brother came to stay for a few months. Remus found it eerie—there was technically a man who looked exactly like Sirius out there, and yet he felt no sexual attraction to him whatsoever.

To most of the village, Regulus was Sirius. Which might’ve worked, Remus thought, if someone had managed to drain Sirius magically—of all mischief, all warmth—shaved his head military-short, left him to rot in a cell for twelve years, and then buried him in tailored clothing.

He vehemently disagreed, then, when Mrs Fitz rang to say she thought Regulus might be “the better catch.”

Sirius, meanwhile, had slowed down.

He would stare at blank canvases for weeks in the garden, just letting them sit there, even when it rained and ruined them. Eventually, he’d leave them by the bins.

Remus once offered to take the canvases off their stretchers, so Sirius could reuse the frames.

And instead of anything quippy, Sirius had just said, “nah, they’ve been sitting in water too long. Wouldn’t want to risk putting something good on something that’s got potential for rot.”

The sallowness of his skin worried Remus.

And so, between the houseguest and Sirius’s persistent melancholy, their sexual tension—once thick enough to feel like gristle and sinew stretched between their houses—retreated into some strange dormancy.

After Regulus left, Remus barely saw Sirius outside at all that summer.

He didn’t stand like a dependable tree in the garden anymore, watching Remus. Didn’t even bother dragging his canvases out eventually.

Some of Mrs Fitz’s roses died of black spot.

And Sirius forgot to water the potted plants for three weeks straight.

But Remus did it for him. Because he figured that would be the right thing. He’d want that if it were him struggling.

By September, the only new tangible thing Remus knew was that Sirius had got a new tattoo: a vine of sweet pea trailing all the way down his spine and curling over his collarbone, up behind his right ear. He’d seen it when Sirius had, mercifully, walked out shirtless to grab the paper.

Remus wanted to lick it. To nibble it until he could taste the sugar.

He survived on that image of Sirius, seemingly back to himself, for weeks.

November of year thirty-eight had also brought the motorbike.

Or brought back the motorbike, according to Mrs Fitz. 

It became Sirius’s baby. He had taken it up as a project to get him out of whatever block he’d hit.

Remus noticed Linda Fitz was his most called contact that month. Sure, there had been the encroaching vine, the drain thing and some worrying roots from her oak tree. But there was also the fact that she seemed to know a lot about Sirius, and was happy to share. He tried not to wonder if he was enabling her incessant gossiping. 

Remus, who was now used to some respite from Sirius-related sexual tension in the cooler months, felt shattered by December. Sirius insisted on working on the bike outside, grunting and panting, through autumn and even into winter. And he always got very hot, very thirsty and very sweaty. 

Easy upside? Remus found it easy to lie to Teddy about Santa that year.

Because clearly, Santa had at least been listening to poor Remus back when he was sixteen and had tried to find some documentary style publications in the back of the DVD parlor. The package may have been very late coming from the North Pole, but now: here was Sirius, like someone off a centerfold. Always gulping water, but somehow letting most of it run down his throat to wet his white shirts. Just waiting there, displayed and patient, for Remus’s thirsty eyes.

Really, it was agony and punishment. Sirius, bent over, out of breath. Grease-smudged cheeks, ripped jeans—ripped because he was using them and not because that’s how they were sold. There was also the deep black, vintage riding jacket to contend with. Remus wasn’t sure what would kill him first, leather or silk. Maybe Sirius could use both to strangle him in some kind of circus execution. 

Remus also finally re-budgeted that Christmas. His water bill just wasn’t going down—not with Sirius back in the land of the living next door. May as well account for it.

Thirty-nine was more Library.

He and Heather were finally on speaking terms again, post-Claude.

He’d figured out a better system for his writing: working away from the house meant fewer distractions. Fewer glimpses of the apparition next door, who now wore black linen and white cotton and, disturbingly, seemed to be ageing into something even more beautiful.

A faint wrinkle had appeared near Sirius’s eyes. Remus felt ashamed for noticing. But not that ashamed. Because now, his filthiest fantasies ended in mundane epilogues—tea, a walk, maybe some mindless hand-holding.

He’d published more than he really ever thought possible by then. So he let himself slack off sometimes, write things that weren’t necessarily for anyone else, but him. Things about the painful specificity of desire hidden in Tangelo, or the Chartreuse hope of a new fiddle of fern and why these things haunted him.

And when he was doing this, in a little carrel, he would hear the cacophony of a horde of school children, pouring in for reading hour.

And because things with his own nine-year-old were still… predictably tricky, he’d gather his books and go sit on a bench out back, where he could hear the recess bell across the street.

It hurt. Imagining what Teddy was up to at school. All the little things Remus now understood he was going to miss. He’d misremembered one of Teddy’s friends’ names the other day and got corrected—“Not Victoria, Dad. It’s Victoire. You always get it wrong.”

Remus didn’t even know when Teddy had picked up that French accent.

But then he’d watched him speak to Fleur fluently—and felt like he’d been punched.

How was this still his son? The baby who used to chew on felted cabbages and bananas with their peel on? When had he missed his little boy gaining access to an entirely new set of words—ones Remus would never fully understand?

Still, he’d started borrowing books from lists like Best Books to Learn French in One Year. Poured over them at his bench while the usual horde of middle schoolers came in and out.

He was back there now, hunched over Madeleine, using twelve little girls in two straight lines as an anchor. It turned out he was shit at French. His brain mostly held onto words like appendicectomie, which felt like cheating.

That’s when she found him.

“Hi, you’re Remus Lupin, right?”

“Yeah… sorry, I’m shit with names. Oh—pants, fuck—who are you?”

She laughed. “I’m Lily. Lily Potter. And I’m used to it. Spend enough time with James, and you’d think ‘fuck’ meant ‘thank you.’ But I also startled you. You seemed deep in that,” she nodded at the yellow book in Remus’s hands.

“No, no. My son’s learning French. Or—I found out he speaks French. So now I’m… trying to catch up.”

She sat down beside him. “I’ve got a ten-year-old. And yeah. That feeling of suddenly being left behind…,” she shuddered.

Remus nodded.

“But, that’s also Sirius’s fault. Sorry, you know Sirius, right? That’s why I just walked up to you, because I figured if you knew him, he’d have mentioned an annoying teacher called Lily. He kind of looks like a smarmy guy from one angle, but everyone thinks he’s god’s gift, including himself?”

Remus laughed.

“It’s ok to say because he knows I love him. He’s literally my son’s godfather,” she smiled. “Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks. Heather said you donated for the science section? She asked me to review the purchasing list—your contribution is going to help so much.”

She paused. “Can you believe I had to send a kid to Sirius last year to ask about special relativity because we didn’t have a primary source at this library for her? Usually Sirius is my book guy, but it’s a risk. That place has always been half intellectual, half bike porn. When Harry was little, he gummed a hardback book with a topless woman splayed across some mechanical thing and called her ‘Mama.’ I wanted to spank Sirius.”

Remus grinned, already enjoying spending this time with her, “I bet he’d have liked that”

She laughed, then sobered. “Actually, he wouldn’t. But you probably know that.”

A strand of hair was tucked behind her ear. “He said you two have little rituals. So, really, this was to say thanks for that too—it’s been…rough, watching him fall apart after Reg. But—we’re through the worst, I think—”

Remus blinked. His brain was still processing—rituals?

Before he could ask what that meant, her phone buzzed insistently.

She glanced at the screen and rolled her eyes. “Speak of the devil.”

She answered: “No, Sirius. Four down can’t be Rembrandt. The D doesn’t work for Dulles—yes, that’s an airport. Didn’t you actually go to DC just to stare at the big blue chicken sculpture and come back saying it was ‘spiritual’? No, ‘dickless’ is not going to be in a crossword. Definitely not with one S.”

She looked at Remus while Sirius presumably kept arguing. “I’m at work, you twit. If you’re bored, call James.”

She hung up quickly, in a way that looked well-practised.

“He does this. He’ll make up a reason to call, as if it’s a national security issue. Was worse when I was pregnant. I think it felt like he was losing James a bit. So he rang us in the middle of an ultrasound, because he couldn’t remember which colour Tinky Winky was. James put him on speaker because the tech said she thought blue, but then James was convinced yellow. I knew Po was red, of course.”

“It’s indigo,” Remus huffed a laugh. “See… I’m sort of a good dad still, eh?”

She smiled. “No wonder Sirius is enraptured. You know colours. He’s always a bit tetchy when someone gets vague with blues. And I’ve heard him explain chartreuse as a concept to a bartender who was just trying to sell a cocktail once. Don’t know if the bartender took it to heart—but he took it to throat, if you get my drift.”

She leaned forward. “I complain, but… I’m still getting used to someone wanting to be that involved in my life. Turns out no one stops being Sirius’s person. He just expands. Like he’s made of bubbles.”

Then, more softly: “Honestly, I think it’s brave. Letting yourself love so many people, while so intimately knowing the flip side. How cruel the world can be. In some fucked-up way, Sirius would make a great monk. He’s a creature for devotion.”

A creature for devotion.

That image chimed through Remus, clanging away all the other strange things Lily just said.

It would keep coming to him for many years to come. Because it was true. He knew, because he realised that was what he’d been doing all along too. Trying to worship Sirius. Hoping to please someone who was already attuned to and intended for devotion.

He knew this: he wanted to worship him, be worshipped by him. Share in some holy act.

It wasn’t straightforward, like with God.

But wasn’t this also penance?

Every time his cock stiffened over the other man, and every time he left it untouched.

Every time he let the desire fester inside of him, instead of simply walking around their shared garden fence.

Especially now that he knew—knew—that if he went over, Sirius was open to doing this devotion, this punishment, together. That he’d want to try, with Remus, to do the good and the bad.

By the end of thirty-nine, Remus had carved the words deep into the wood of his desk.

A creature for devotion.

It sat right beside RLJ <3 SDG. And since Remus did not remember who SDG was, he sometimes would let himself dig into that, turn the D closer to an O, the G closer to B.

Even without much, he had more of Sirius that year than ever before.

At forty, Remus tried loving small things.

He signed up to volunteer at the Pet Rescue.

He had been distracted from everything because Teddy had hit a rough patch—some friends had started excluding him, and it showed. In his grades, in his smile. And Remus… hadn’t noticed.

Tonks had told him, hoping maybe he had some fatherly insight. But as a kid who was also bullied…well, it didn’t seem helpful to say that often there was nothing to easily fix it all. That Teddy may need to wobble till he finds his centre to spin on.

Still, he spent weeks at a time in London. He also tried to find other perspectives on caring for things that were small and a bit delicate.

Which is how he ended up in the back of the Rescue, washing caked-on dog shit off towels in a huge utility sink. It was tedium. The scrubbing, the cycling of the industrial washer, the hauling heavy, wet things out to dry—because the dryer was broken.

The person showing him around before his shift had laughed about it—“Honestly, it’s better that the dryer is broken. Like the seventh circle back there when it is running in August.”

After his third load of laundry, he thought he might rather like the seventh circle. Probably better than feeling like Sisyphus on a Sunday. Rolling fitted sheets onto sagging clothes lines.

Finally, he’d told the teenager at the front desk as much and said he was calling it for the day. Had just gone back to the steamy little laundry room to grab his phone when he felt it first.

The dry heat. The static. The dryer, now spinning loudly.

And then he saw Sirius. Kneeling in front of the dryer. Screwdriver between his teeth. Hair plopped up in a leopard claw clip. A black band t-shirt clinging to his back.

And fuck. That was it, wasn’t it? That was the problem. The way Sirius was so… Sirius.

Remus felt struck by all of him.

Shirt riding up to reveal the fern tattoos along his sides. Back muscles shifting as he leaned in. Grunting. Breathing hard. The wrench jerking in his palm.

This was the longest Remus had really looked at Sirius, up close, and alone.

He saw Sirius’s Senior Volunteer badge—the one they actually bothered to laminate because it meant you’d stuck around at the Rescue for over three years. It was tossed carelessly to the side, on top of the offensive leather jacket. Remus let himself wonder—if he licked that, would it taste like Sirius's skin?

He was still tracing the ladder of his spine through the sweat-soaked shirt, the shadow of fronds that now peaked over his neck, next to that little vine of peas that still looked so bloody sweet when Sirius stopped moving.

“If you’re done drooling,” Sirius had gritted out, dropping the wrench, “you could try to lend a fucking hand.”

Remus had instead bolted out of there like a Swiss chard at the end of summer—all open and greedy for the sun one minute, and then just a tall, awkward spurt of dusty seed the next, half lost to the wind.

After the laundry incident, Remus had gone to Spain for two months—to write, and to fuck his way through a few strangers in hopes of forgetting the way Sirius grunted when he was exerting himself.

But also because Tonks had asked him to stop being so overbearing. He’d over-corrected; he wasn’t helping.

And when he got back to Wales, Sirius had got worse in a spectacular way.

He’d reverted from the loose black mourning linens back to his old litany of robes—but now they were paired with sheer, gauzy trousers that caught the light and hung just below the band of his boxers. The tattoos were on full display: fronds and vines, etched into his hips like a blueprint for where to hold him. Where to bite. Where to let your fingers end up.

But then, there had also been the boyfriend.

Remus refused to introduce himself to the man at one of Heather's parties. He wore stupidly shiny leather shoes, had a blue nub in his ear constantly, like a binky stuffed in the wrong hole, Remus thought and had once blinded Remus with a flash of light off his expensive, showy watch. And apparently, he was important enough to Sirius that he now lived with him.

Remus wondered what putain Bank Sirius visited to bump into this piece of misfortune.

Remus groused that he was also probably lucky enough to follow those tattoos to their final destinations.

Remus had hated it. He felt like he wasted two whole months when he could have been at home, preventing this calamity. 

He’d moaned to Marlene and Mrs Fitz about the way the man insisted on wearing a tie to dinner at home. Which he also insisted on eating al fresco, so Remus could clearly overhear justifications like "I need my laptop in case I have to take a call mon coeur".

He hated that Sirius wore Remus’s favourite olive robe around the posh twat. Hated that he once caught the man’s shadow—clearly, crisply—touching himself by the living room window. That was not who he wanted to see. But it had earned him a nickname: Banker-Wanker. BW.

He hated how Sirius’s smile seemed watered down whenever BW was around. He hated how the bike was rarely driven, even if the sound of its engine still made him startle every time.

Most of all, he hated the way Sirius seemed to whittle all of himself down to bones for this man. And Remus saw red when BW would sometimes shush Sirius, or turn off his radio abruptly when he was just trying to paint outside. Then Remus would turn up the volume on his music and make sure he played exactly what he knew Sirius liked.

A banker? Really? 

And then: forty-one. BW somehow persisted, like a bad case of the runs.

Remus, tired of waiting, reopened the services of his little Ritz—brought a few flings through, in set rotation. Nothing serious. Nothing exclusive. But there had been the occasional orchestration.

Whenever he was ticked off enough—because he hadn’t seen Sirius in a week, or because Sirius had walked right past him at the grocers—he’d cook a beautiful meal. Time it perfectly. Ensure he and his date sat down just as Sirius and BW did, side by side, separated only by the fence.

Then he’d flirt shamelessly with his date.

Talk low, but so obscenely dirty that his partners always ended the meal in his lap.

And he’d be relieved when he was met with silence, or a posh huff from across the fence. Or maybe the clicking of a keyboard, because BW seemed to work from Sirius’s sacred space most days.

Forty-two. Banker-Wanker—real name probably Judas; Remus had forgotten to remember—finally got the chop.

Sirius took a beat to recover—Remus recalled him sitting, staring up at the sky with a tumbler of whiskey every evening for a week. Then, for months, he painted something big and brash outside at three in the morning.

He’d bought Sirius a little cactus from Tesco, left it, in its little plastic cup, on his stairs. He'd hoped it didn't seem like too happy a gift, but also found he didn't care. He wanted Sirius to know: Good riddance. I miss you.  

And so, by summer, Sirius had decided it was time for them to play again.

When the B-W was around, Remus had grown careless about the blinds. Plus, he thought it best that Sirius see what he was missing, just to keep the memory fresh. 

Anyway, it didn't really matter. Ever since BW really moved in, Sirius had seemed to keep his own windows shut out of obligation—and then, to Remus's great disappointment, seemed to have forgotten to pick their old, careless ritual back up.

So that night—hot, quiet, and windless—Remus was upstairs in bed, unsuspecting.

His windows were cracked, and he was almost dozing off with a book in hand, shirt off, just hoping for a light breeze. Then he heard the old hinge across the garden creak open.

Sirius’s bedroom window.

He didn’t turn to look at first. Just listened. Then—saw it: the flicker of candlelight, the silhouette of Sirius sitting on the edge of his bed, back to Remus, bathed in pure firelight.

When Remus finally allowed himself to look, Sirius was dragging a long, silver comb through a length of hair. The wet ends were lightly curled, darkening the red satin of his robe, making it cling to the dips in his shoulders.

Remus thought he looked like a lost Caravaggio—framed only by fluttering linen curtains, hanging in some demigod’s gallery.

Remus shifted noisily—just in case.

Sirius paused. Then resumed, slower this time, assured of his audience.

He let the satin artfully slip down one shoulder. Then the other. It then fell, in one silken slide, to his waist.

Remus heard himself breathe too sharply. Wondered if it cut through the dark like a pebble against a lover’s window—reckless hope, hurled into the night.

The orange light flickered and illuminated the arch in Sirius’s back. And finally, Remus saw it clearly—how the tattoos wove together. Knew he could now contort Sirius, so his body’s secrets could be read. How merciful, he thought, to at least be handed the sword when faced with certain death.

Sirius had stopped combing. His hands were slicking something into his skin now—oil, maybe. It made him shine. He touched his face, let a single finger drag slowly down his lips, parting them with the light pressure.

Remus remembered a friend once saying we were all meant to be seen by firelight. That the human eye had evolved to recognise beauty in the flicker of flame, and only there could we really see each other, naked, beautiful. As intended.

He imagined standing in front of Sirius in that moment—and knew it was true. Knew it viscerally, because his skin was burning from the heat. Knew that he would bear the marks of this testimony in the shape of bruises on his own thighs. Remus let his fingernails dig into his skin. Preemptive punishment for the sins he knew would come. 

Sirius kept moving—fingertips grazing his own shoulders, trailing down his throat, nails biting into the slight swell of his ribs. Then—lower. Between his legs.

And stayed there.

Remus had already shoved his boxers down beneath the sheets. But now he let his hand meet himself, find Sirius’s rhythm.

He was too close. He bit back a desperate sound. Tightened his grip but did not slow.

Sirius tipped his head back, throat bared, face half-turned toward the window. Eyes closed. Lips open. His chest moved in slow, reverent waves.

Remus watched the candlelight rove over the hollow of his throat.

Felt jealous of the flame. Jealous of the wax, sinking into Sirius’s skin. Jealous of the air between them.

Jealous that his fingers had yet to touch the man. But somehow also jealous that this aching, arching longing would someday have to break. 

And then—Sirius came. Quietly. A long, slow shudder through his body, sinuous even in release. Remus thought: that’s what Adam looked like, the very first time.

Sirius pulled the robe back on with one hand. And had walked out of the room.

But he left the candle lit, the window open.

And because he left the window open, Remus wanted to howl with relief.

He came with a growl, messily, all over himself, sheets damp.

He knew that the next time Sirius looked him in the eyes, there would be no hiding what they’d imagined between them.

But he also knew this: Sirius didn’t really want him to hide.

Remus had slept poorly after that strange window wank—thought of Caravaggio, but been left with the image of a shoreline, drifting its way down the spit of land with the tide.

How slow the days go, and how fast the years, was what he wrote when he woke.

And he’d intended to go over. Maybe with a bottle of wine. But how does one really start that conversation… with someone they’d been sort of fucking, but only through shadow, for years?

So he let the sunshine blaze in through the living room window—had cracked it again, since open windows were such good luck lately. He let himself lounge, in what felt more like a hot ember than afterglow. His body was still tense from it all.

And, instinctively, he went to touch himself.

And he imagined Sirius. Sirius in his bed.

His bed.

Making Sirius beg. Taming him.

Taking that red satin sash and holding him, as if by a leash.

And then maybe Sirius, taking his hands, dragging his hair over Remus’s thighs. Sirius’s hands twisting Remus’s sheets. Their hands together, holding on for dear life.

The warmth of his mouth. Sirius whispering his name into sacred places.

He didn’t know when he’d started speaking aloud—babbling breathless little things he wanted from Sirius. Promises. Threats.

“Fucking hell, Sirius,” he whispered, half-gone. “Teasing me through windows—fine. But when I finally make you come for me, I don’t care who fucks who. You’re going to choke on it and call me Sir.”

A very loud bang interrupted him.

Remus jolted upright, heart thudding. He grabbed a T-shirt to cover himself and crept toward the window. The gate was still clanging. And in the mud outside—those tell-tale boot prints.

Someone—Sirius—had left a toolbox on his doorstep.

There was a note: Mrs Fitz says you need a wrench, Sir.

Then on the back: 11 p.m. reprise? I’ll wear the midnight.

Remus didn’t know whether to hide or scream.

Instead, he came. Onto the note. On to Sir.

God help the man he would become that night—and most nights through forty-two.

They had, after all, so many colours to work through. 

So, finally, at forty-three, after his second cup of tea from the Amaryllis cup, Remus got dressed.

Because after all the free-fall, if you find you’ve survived, you can let yourself corkscrew and invert. But the best part is screeching into a break run and feeling how, for some time, you were actually running ahead of your body.

He thought that maybe the race was not some slog in the desert, really, but more a task of keeping pace with himself, calibrating himself, so he could live in closer spirals of response to the things that happened to him.

Perhaps Sirius had not outright asked a question. But he’d left a generous invitation.

And Remus, well, he knew he had an answer to give.

He wore his best white shirt, sleeves rolled the way Claude had once told him to. The trousers with the tailored pleat. At the last minute, he slung a maroon jumper over his shoulder—he’d go on a walk after this, no matter how it went.

Just before opening the door, he paused at the mirror Tonks had insisted he hang in the entryway. “Everyone needs a mirror in the hall, Rem.”

He mostly used it to check if he looked like an odd schoolboy—his outfits veered toward uniform if he wasn’t careful. His eyes lingered on the grey at his temples. The right eyebrow, gone completely white now, as if to underline the scar that split through it.

He used to think mirrors in hallways were for other people. But today, his reflection met him with something close to serenity. He gave himself a little wave for luck. 

Perhaps he felt at ease because he knew Sirius Black was already in the garden, outside. He could see him from the window. Shirtless, because it was so gloriously sunny. Hair down. Gazing off, deep in thought. He was sitting at the patio table, olive robe flying carelessly off the back of his chair, feet propped up on the second one. He had one hand atop the early pink bloom of a potted millennium onion—bobbling it like a spring. 

Remus picked up his paper bag of iris bulbs.

He wanted to pace, to buy himself more time, but shook his head. Best to get on with it; it had already been ten years.

He stepped outside. Let the front door bang shut behind him.

It was also still true that for some small details, he had to know before he knew. For example, he hadn’t the faintest clue what he’d actually say to Sirius.

But then he pushed open the neighbouring gate, and Sirius dropped his feet from the second chair to make room—and waved. Remus just sat down, like this was what they had always done.

Azimuths. Stars. Maps. What use were pretty words when your bodies, your shadows, had already been trading secrets for years?

So he placed the bag of bulbs on the table and just looked at Sirius. Shamelessly. In the bright sunshine. 

Wasn’t there something special about not giving someone a bouquet of elegant flowers, intended only for a short life, but a bag of muddy bulbs that could be planted whenever they were needed?

“Finally found your way around the fence then, Sir?” Sirius grinned, tipping the bag out to inspect its contents.

“Thought I’d never get you to leave the comforts of the Ritz and all those blokes who looked so much like me—I’m pretty hurt,” he said cheekily, picking up one of the bulbs and peeling a bit of it back with a painted nail to check if it was green under.

And Remus smiled, because he always left Remus a blade, tossed in with the rest. Just in case he needed it. As a little push, as a little dare.

“Don’t call me Sir," He’d said it firmly.

"Oh?" Sirius asked. 

"Not till I let you," Remus dropped, leaning back. Relishing in the way Sirius gulped at that. 

He'd won two this morning, and it was hardly eleven. But his pulse was already hammering, paying the price for running too hard into this. 

He wanted to turn in closer. Kiss him—hard, dirty. Be done with the distance. 

It was painful, sitting there beside him, clutching the armrests. But he also knew he wanted to hit his mark, make the timing divine. 

“See, last I heard, you sounded pretty sure you’d be making me choke around Sir when—”

“Goodbye, Sirius,” Remus cut him off, making a weak show of standing.

Sirius barked a laugh. 

“Happy birthday, Remus,” Sirius smiled up at him, and he let himself relax back into the chair, enjoying the view. 

There was already a wave of green rising from the frozen ground here, which was testament to Sirius's gardening, Remus supposed. 

“Eight o’clock tonight?" Sirius then asked, without looking at him, "you could come over for dinner. Not sure what you like anymore—most of your cooking came with too much dirty talk for Jude. Or—” he leaned in slightly, voice roughening—“if you’d rather get to desert quickly, you can go upstairs right now, lie back in in my bed, pick a colour, and watch," 

Remus felt his blood rush, hot between his legs. He swallowed.

Sirius continued, as if he were listing things from the BBC catalogue, "Lost the sash for Purple, and we do need a sash. Black lace seems a bit predictable. And, Maroon’s in the wash, but it's not your favourite. So really anything else—”

And then—because Sirius was so close, and because this felt easy…or maybe because his eyes were that beautiful grey, like the inside of a bare shell. Because they had never actually touched.

Remus leaned in. Just cut him off with his presence. 

Let himself breathe him in.

Tuberose. Leather.

Oh, Sirius. His creature for devotion.

He brought himself closer, traced along Sirius's neck, but let a sliver of air quake with want between them. Sirius closed his eyes with a soft sigh.

Then he whispered into the shell of Sirius’s ear:

"First, we’re going on a walk, together.

But then, six. My bed. Nothing on.

I’ll be genuinely upset if I see so much as a scrap of clothing touch your skin indoors for the next… mmm… ten years or so.

And I want to hear you say my name—when you come for me.”

He tried to control his voice. Let his fingers ghost lightly, not yet touching, against Sirius’s throat. Sirius’s chest moved in deep waves. Remus could finally hear, finally feel this rhythm that his eyes knew so well. 

“Because I don’t really care who fucks who, Sirius. Or what you wear. Because I’m going to take it all off. 

We both know we’re going to do it every—which—way—anyhow.

But that’s where we’ll start today. You saying my name.

Again.

And again.

For every bloody year we waited.”

Sirius’s eyes were still closed. Thick, long lashes fanned across cheeks stained deep red.

The crimson, burning shade of ten years fell on them.

Ten years. Of thirst. Of keeping his hands to himself because once he started, he would never stop.

And now—because Remus knew restraint was no longer required—knew that he could take and savor until he was raw with delight...well, he took. 

He crossed the holy airlock.

Sank his fingers into the ink of Sirius’s hair. Felt the heat of scalp under silk, the way the strands slid and caught around his knuckles like curling vines. Sirius sighed, low and soft, into his touch.

Remus’s grip tightened. Drew him back. Those celestial eyes opened, and every reckless, ridiculous need they’d ever denied each other shot right through him.

He dragged his nose along the line of Sirius’s cheek, pressed his mouth to his brow, tasted the salt of him like a promise.

“Because, love,” he murmured, having taken the sacrament of Sirius’s skin, “that’s what it’s really like, when you dine at the Ritz.”