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remix_reduxTitle: Porcelain (The One That Saves You Remix)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleshdress
Summary: What James gives to Remus has to one day be given to Bill.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: James/Remus, Remus/Bill
Rating: R to NC-17
Disclaimer: It belongs to JKR, not me.
Title, Author and URL of original story: The Cloak bysnegurochka_lee
Notes: Many thanks to my three betas.
He wakes to the sight of James’s face, one finger placed across his grinning lips. It cannot quite be dawn yet but James’s hands are tugging the light cotton blankets from around Remus’s body, catching his hands in his, pulling him upright, and all without a word. Remus sits on the edge of his bed and rubs his eyes, his skin prickling slightly in the chilly air, while James moves silently to his trunk and lays out clothes for Remus.
Across the room, Sirius rolls over in his bed and makes a soft, contented noise as Remus dresses. James is at the window, peering past the leaded panes to the dove-grey sky with its flashes of white. He glances over his shoulder and grins again at Remus, that same infectious glowing grin. Remus doesn’t need words; all he needs is that grin.
James takes his broom in one hand and Remus’s forearm in his other, and they leave the dormitory together.
To be entirely fair, James never said he loved him. James never once cupped Remus’s face in his and brushed his dry lips against his skin and whispered: I love you, Remus. But it was a pedantic kind of justice, Remus thought. For seven whole months, every single thing James had done was a declaration of love. He was made of his love for Remus. He hummed with the atomic-white brilliance of his love for Remus. Every time James touched him, Remus knew that he was loved.
It began with the cloak. Or at least, that was when Remus knew for sure. When he thought about it, maybe it began the night he spent three hours on his back beside James on the Astronomy Tower, the night stared up into the glittering night and said, in a voice that should have sounded cynically amused but could only manage a desperate misery, “If I didn’t feel insignificant before, I would now.”
The curl of smoke from James’s cigarette had been chased away by the abrupt roll of James’s body as he propped himself up on his elbows in order to stare at Remus. His hazel eyes, normally bright and fixed on something more lively and interesting than Remus, fastened on him with a kind of narrow speculation, as if Remus had just confessed a deep desire to throw himself off the Tower, which perhaps he had. Remus had wilted before such intense scrutiny, unable to stand up to the force of James’s personality.
They hadn’t spoken again that evening. James’s attention had seemingly snapped back to the stars and Remus had heaved a sigh of relief, and then stayed with him until James noticed the chattering of his teeth.
The next moon was the first moon since Sirius’s prank. It was correspondingly traumatic. Not only did the wolf have the memory of barely missed prey, but Madam Pomfrey’s attention was such that neither stag nor rat, or even dog, could be present. When he woke, his body ached as though it had been taken to pieces and then put back together by someone with only the vaguest understanding of human anatomy. His muscles were like strips of iron that clenched about his arms and shoulders and thighs. Open wounds burnt wetly across his body. And all Remus could do was lie there on the splintered floorboards of the Shack and wait.
He heard the light creak of someone approaching and with some helpless sense of lost dignity, tried to roll over into a less revealing position. Madam Pomfrey may have been a nurse, but Remus was still a fifteen-year old boy. The attempt was met with a low chuckle.
“Seen it all before, Moony,” said James.
Something thin and warm settled over Remus’s shaking body. Instantly, a tiny spark of serenity lit up inside of him. Remus could feel it rising like dawn through his body as James adjusted the piece of material, tucking it up under Remus’s chin and then hunkering down to look him in the face.
“Calming charm,” said James. “I made it myself. I’m afraid the stitching’s a bit dodgy but it should hold together.”
He didn’t stay long, only until the instinctive whimpering moans Remus had been making crawled into slurred words and then silence. After James had left and when Remus felt a little stronger, he sat up and examined the makeshift blanket. It was a cloak, of a particularly grotty shade of grey. But, like a baby, he only had to clutch it to his cheek to feel comforted. He curled about it and traced the uneven, bumpy ridge of James’s sewing as the stars went out and the sun peeked through the windows.
The rest of the school is still sleeping, Remus imagines. It’s only him and James, creeping through the silence, up the winding stairs, to the door lined in light.
James’s footsteps are a quiet rasp, just like Remus’s breathing. He doesn’t know where they’re going, and it doesn’t occur to him to ask. They’re spiralling up into the heavens of the school, to where the birds are singing and the sun will soon blossom.
He needs no encouragement but if he did, the tilt of James’s smile as he looks back at him would be enough. The sureness of the points of James’s fingertips on his arm would draw him eagerly onwards.
Remus waits behind James as he charms the lock of the door. There’s a click and a grin and then James swings the door wide and lets the light pour in, turning his body to pure shadow and blinding Remus. He hadn’t realised how dark it is, until James shows him the light.
Things were different after that. Sirius still sat with James in lessons and Lily Evans was still the subject of much admiring chatter from James, but Remus found himself suddenly in the centre of things. James joined him in the library to study, James frowned at the meagre portion of food on Remus’s plate at breakfast and rectified the matter with sausages and egg and fat red tomatoes, James laughingly peeled his t-shirt off him and pinned him to the bed so that his strong, deft fingers could massage away the ache.
It was as though the sun had suddenly decided to shine directly upon Remus, and knocked the moon clear out of the sky to do it.
Remus lay beneath James, his chin rested on his pillow, and allowed James’s rolling, pummelling touch to roam across his back and shoulders. Sirius had told him, sweetly cautious since the prank, that James gave the best post-Quidditch massages. Remus was not an athlete like James or Sirius, and he considered himself oddly blessed to experience something that belonged to the changing rooms and not the dormitory. James had opened that part of the world up to Remus, just as he offered him so much else that was not his due.
“You’re so tense, Moony,” James said. “Reckon it’d take a rolling pin to batter the tension out of you.”
He was stressed then because being straddled by James, his tightly-muscled thighs pressed either side of his hips and flexing each time he moved, had made his cock hard. He pushed his face into the pillow to hide his flushed cheeks but James leant closer and his arms came up about Remus’s shoulders, simply holding him for the barest moment, his lips against the back of his neck.
“Relax,” he said. “It’s alright. Really it is, Moony. Just relax.”
Remus didn’t fight when James rolled him over. He stared up at him uselessly, James’s face barely inches away and limned with the flicking light from the dorm candles. He tried to look away when James moved over him, laying his body on his, but James caught his chin and wouldn’t let him hide. His chest tingled with the brush of James’s nipples and the ripple of muscle under smooth, tanned skin. He was so warm, so alive. Remus could feel his throb of his blood, as if it were teaching Remus’s heart how to beat.
James went on gazing at him, even as his hips moved, rubbing himself against Remus’s cock, and in the radiance of his expression, Remus forgot to be afraid. And when James kissed him, Remus felt James’s heat light up inside him.
It was always like that. Whenever they fucked, Remus felt something inside himself prickle as if it were about to burst into flame, but he never burnt. James came to his bed at night frequently and they disappeared under the blankets together. James wrapped him in his arms and heat and simple adoration, and fucked him with a vehemence that had to scorch the sheets but never did. Then afterwards, Remus would lie there and wonderingly trace the lines of James’s face and throat and shoulders by the light of the stars, and be warm.
Life became a wonderful thing when James loved him. One winter’s day, Remus sat under a tree as the snow melted from the branches like a soft rainfall around him, and tried to understand what had happened to his world since James filled it. It wasn’t that nothing mattered, that wasn’t why that knot of tension like old rope in Remus’s belly had loosened. Everything mattered so much more.
The day before, when they’d been sitting in the library and James had abruptly given Remus that bright red grin of his then ducked beneath the table, it had mattered very much so whether Madam Pince came and found James with Remus’s cock in his mouth. It had mattered and that was why Remus had bitten his lip to keep quiet and buried his fingers in James’s messy black hair to drag him back up. Getting caught had mattered. But still, Remus had sat in his lesson afterwards and thought so intensely of how it had felt that he became hard again.
It was good that things mattered.
The first time he began to understand why James had done it was when Sirius was disowned. The letter came at dinner and Sirius, pale and perfect as ever, rose sharply from the table and strode from the room. Remus had watched James’s face as he picked up the discarded letter and read it through. He looked up at Remus and there was something childlike about his distress. Someone had hurt Sirius and it was almost as if James couldn’t fathom why anyone would do such a thing.
“I have to go after him,” he said. “He needs me.”
He needs me.
In later years, when Remus met Harry, he immediately recognized that bad habit of ‘saving people’. Harry, just like James, needed to fix whatever was broken. He comprehended a little of that back then, when he was sixteen and had been set at the centre of James’s universe. He gladly let James give Sirius that week of attention and fussing, until Sirius smiled again, and didn’t think to be jealous. It would have been like being jealous of the weather being nice in Southampton. The sun could not be directed, and Remus was merely blissfully happy when it shone on him again.
When James was his once more, they climbed the hills at the edge of Hogsmeade and wrestled in the grass, and James kissed him until Remus was breathless with happiness. James scrambled up into one of the trees and reached down to Remus. The fresh green leaves rustled against his cheeks and then Remus was in the uppermost branches with James. It was precarious but half the fun was keeping his balance, clinging onto James to keep from falling.
“It looks like an arse,” James said, nodding at one of the fat clouds rolling by.
“I think you’ll find it’s a pair of goggles,” Remus said.
“No,” said James. “It’s an arse. I think we’re being mooned.”
Remus laughed and studied the cloud, trying to see what James saw, until he was distracted by James himself: James, his grin and ever bright eyes, James and the heel of his hand rubbing at Remus’s cock through his trousers.
They slipped out of the tree in one line of their bodies. Remus’s feet had barely touched the ground before James was coming down over him. He pressed him down in the grass and undressed him. They fucked under the stretching blue sky and cool Scottish sunlight. Remus spread his legs wide for James and arched up against him with each thrust. He’d scarcely dared to touch him when it was new, but there was nothing to be afraid of anymore, and he let his damp fingertips slide up the powerful sinews of James’s arms, over the clenching muscle of his buttocks and the jerk of his spine.
The sun was directly overhead when Remus came. He was blinded by it for a moment, blinded by the light and James, and the waves of perfect happiness like some soulful Big Bang. He lay there and gasped, eyes wide and his lips stretching into an endless smile that James traced with the tip of his tongue.
It was the very next day that James started seeing Lily.
Remus sat on his bed and watched Peter and James bicker over which colour t-shirt suited James better. He kept trying to catch his breath and organize his feelings into something that he could label and explain. But then Sirius was slathering James’s hair with Sleekezy to get it to sit straight and nobody but Remus seemed to understand that the world was ending. He brought his knees up to his chest and waited for his heart to break.
He was still waiting when at last it was only James and him in the room. James was at the mirror, frowning at his reflection and making some bad joke about putting Lily off blokes entirely.
“I thought…” Remus blurted out. “I thought you and I were…”
James turned to him and looked at him. Then he smiled a smile so simple and pure that Remus realized that the world had already ended but a new one had sprung up in its place without him noticing.
“Do you feel better?” James asked.
“Yes,” Remus answered, instinctively, mindlessly.
“Well then,” said James, and turned back to his reflection.
Remus didn’t die, as he thought he might. Instead, a year passed. He survived it reasonably easily, and when he stopped surviving and began living, something sprang up between him and Sirius. It was a small, secret something, but it grew. It was still growing on the day of James’s wedding and was then something not so small nor so secret. He stood at Sirius’s side and smiled as James kissed his bride. And when James looked over at him and Remus smiled back at him, Remus saw James shine.
He thought of that inexplicable shine when he opened his front door and found Bill Weasley staring at him like a lost orphan. He looked at the ugly marks that tore across Bill’s once handsome face and held the door wide.
“You’d better come in,” he said.
James runs to the battlements and Remus follows him. He is dizzied by the wheeling sky. He is standing at the edge of some huge day that is waiting to crash over him. The cool grey light should be at odds with the golden tinge to James’s complexion, but instead it simply leaves him glowing like molten metal. He is unstoppable and becoming, and he is climbing up onto the low stone wall.
Remus watches, stopped in time, as James spreads his arms, grins at the sky and jumps into the nothing.
The first thing Remus thought of doing with Bill was washing him. He remembered being in the bathtub with James, James’s legs wrapped about him and his cock nestling perfectly in the cleft of Remus’s arse. He remembered lying there, the ripples moving gently about them, until the steam stopped rising, and he remembered James’s foot rising up out of the water to nudge the hot tap back on again. There had been lips on his neck and his skin slipping smoothly against James, and sunlight on the moist white tiles of the bathroom walls. And there had been peace.
Bill accepted the idea without protest, albeit some gibbering. Remus briskly tugged the clothes from him and folded them into a neat pile, while Bill stood in the middle of the room and wrung his hands. Bill was a tall, tanned creature too and in the middle of leading him by the hand to the bathroom, Remus felt strangely compelled to stop, close his arms about him, and listen to the thunder of his heartbeat. Bill sagged against him and bent awkwardly to compensate for his greater height in order to rest his head upon Remus’s shoulder.
“It’s going to be okay,” Remus said. And he believed it, just as surely as he had believed James when he had said it.
Remus nodded and Bill mirrored the gesture.
In the shower, Remus turned the water on until the spray was hot and hard on their bodies. He stood Bill directly under the water and washed the blood away from his injuries. With each gasp or moan of pain Bill made, Remus gentled him with a kiss, until there was no more blood and there were only mouths on skin. He turned Bill in his arms and laid his body against his as his fingers slipped down between his legs. He held him through the slick slide of their hips, while his cock pushed up between Bill’s spread thighs and into his body.
“It’s alright,” Remus whispered as he fucked him.
Reaching blindly back, Bill’s fingertips dug into Remus’s skin. He followed the jerk of Remus’s body as faithfully and eagerly as a man being led out of a minefield. When Remus pressed his lips to his cheek and came - shuddering inside him and pulling him so tight against him he almost thought Bill was going to disappear into him, into the warmth James had left him - he tasted tears.
“You’re crying,” he said.
Rolling his body next Remus’s, never losing the contact of skin on skin, Bill turned to face him. ‘Thank you’, his lips soundlessly formed the words, and then he curled back into Remus’s embrace.
They stayed under the shower until their skin was wrinkled like newborns. Remus held Bill through his sobs. He held him until the water ran clear and tasteless down his face, and then they staggered to the bedroom together. They fucked again on the bed, leaving the sheets a sodden, rumpled mess that Remus had to spell dry before he would allow Bill to sleep on them.
While Bill slept, Remus went to the kitchen and used what vegetables he had to make soup. He buttered a slice of bread and set it by the side of the bowl.
Once, when Remus had been cramming for a Potions test in the library, James had managed to smuggle him three roast potatoes, some carrots and peas, and four thick slices of pork.
“You looked a little pale and peaky,” he’d said, unrolling the roast dinner from a napkin and setting it on top of Remus’s notes. “No good knowing all the answers if you pass out from hunger.”
James had stayed with him to make sure he ate it all, and even though the potatoes were squashed and there were unidentified pieces of lint on the meat, Remus couldn’t remember ever enjoying a meal more.
He sat on the end of the bed and watched Bill slurp the soup, and was pleased to see the colour come back to his cheeks. Bill wiped the last of his bread about the sides of the bowl, popped it into his mouth and licked his fingers.
“Better than my mum makes,” he said.
Remus nodded and smiled. He was still smiling when he said,
“I’m going to Floo Fleur and tell her to come for you. She’ll take you home.”
Bill’s face fell and he shrunk back against the pillows.
“But, but why? I thought you and I….? I thought we….”
“Do you feel better?” Remus asked, and he knew the answer even before Bill nodded. “Well then.”
Bill brought his knees up to his chest, still frowning like an abandoned child. He looked away from Remus and Remus knew there was only one thing he could do now for Bill. He rose from the bed and crossed to his cupboard. Opening the drawer at the bottom, he took out the cloak that James had given him when Remus was only hanging on by a thread. He unfolded it and as the material fell towards the ground, Remus felt a little warm in his heart. He clutched it to himself for a moment and thought of the pure, uncomplicated love James had given him. Then he turned to Bill and laid the cloak before him.
“I have to let you go,” he told him. “You’re going to be alright.”
He left him alone with the cloak while he went to call Fleur, and he didn’t go back to him until he was leading her down the corridor to the bedroom. Fleur cried out at the sight of him and rushed to him, letting her blonde hair rush over him and whispering into his neck. Remus watched until he saw Bill’s arm creep about her waist, and then realized he’d never loved Bill more than in that moment. It was a sharp brilliant love and he felt the weight of it slam into him.
He’d never understood James and his cruel philanthropy until he looked at Bill with Fleur, their heads bowed towards each other. Then he knew what James had known even as a boy of fifteen: nothing is fixed that needs holding together.
James falls over the battlements and Remus can’t move to go after him. He stares after the graceful curve of James’s body as he gives himself up to the empty air that is waiting for dawn.
He falls.
Then the broom is between his legs and he’s spiralling up, up past Remus, up into the sky. Day breaks and the sunlight slices through the world, through the sweep of James’s shape. Colour springs up in the treetops and the roofs of Hogsmeade, and the grey is gone.
“Come on,” says James, hanging in the air, one hand held towards Remus. “The broom can take us both.”
Remus clambers onto the battlements, and clings onto James as he steps from the stone and into the air. He wraps his arms about James’s middle and rests his chin on his shoulder. His breath is shaky, but it’s as much exhilaration as it is fear.
“Where shall we go?” asks James.
Remus doesn’t answer. James already knows where they’re going: off into the sunrise.
END
Author:
fleshdressSummary: What James gives to Remus has to one day be given to Bill.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: James/Remus, Remus/Bill
Rating: R to NC-17
Disclaimer: It belongs to JKR, not me.
Title, Author and URL of original story: The Cloak by
snegurochka_lee Notes: Many thanks to my three betas.
He wakes to the sight of James’s face, one finger placed across his grinning lips. It cannot quite be dawn yet but James’s hands are tugging the light cotton blankets from around Remus’s body, catching his hands in his, pulling him upright, and all without a word. Remus sits on the edge of his bed and rubs his eyes, his skin prickling slightly in the chilly air, while James moves silently to his trunk and lays out clothes for Remus.
Across the room, Sirius rolls over in his bed and makes a soft, contented noise as Remus dresses. James is at the window, peering past the leaded panes to the dove-grey sky with its flashes of white. He glances over his shoulder and grins again at Remus, that same infectious glowing grin. Remus doesn’t need words; all he needs is that grin.
James takes his broom in one hand and Remus’s forearm in his other, and they leave the dormitory together.
To be entirely fair, James never said he loved him. James never once cupped Remus’s face in his and brushed his dry lips against his skin and whispered: I love you, Remus. But it was a pedantic kind of justice, Remus thought. For seven whole months, every single thing James had done was a declaration of love. He was made of his love for Remus. He hummed with the atomic-white brilliance of his love for Remus. Every time James touched him, Remus knew that he was loved.
It began with the cloak. Or at least, that was when Remus knew for sure. When he thought about it, maybe it began the night he spent three hours on his back beside James on the Astronomy Tower, the night stared up into the glittering night and said, in a voice that should have sounded cynically amused but could only manage a desperate misery, “If I didn’t feel insignificant before, I would now.”
The curl of smoke from James’s cigarette had been chased away by the abrupt roll of James’s body as he propped himself up on his elbows in order to stare at Remus. His hazel eyes, normally bright and fixed on something more lively and interesting than Remus, fastened on him with a kind of narrow speculation, as if Remus had just confessed a deep desire to throw himself off the Tower, which perhaps he had. Remus had wilted before such intense scrutiny, unable to stand up to the force of James’s personality.
They hadn’t spoken again that evening. James’s attention had seemingly snapped back to the stars and Remus had heaved a sigh of relief, and then stayed with him until James noticed the chattering of his teeth.
The next moon was the first moon since Sirius’s prank. It was correspondingly traumatic. Not only did the wolf have the memory of barely missed prey, but Madam Pomfrey’s attention was such that neither stag nor rat, or even dog, could be present. When he woke, his body ached as though it had been taken to pieces and then put back together by someone with only the vaguest understanding of human anatomy. His muscles were like strips of iron that clenched about his arms and shoulders and thighs. Open wounds burnt wetly across his body. And all Remus could do was lie there on the splintered floorboards of the Shack and wait.
He heard the light creak of someone approaching and with some helpless sense of lost dignity, tried to roll over into a less revealing position. Madam Pomfrey may have been a nurse, but Remus was still a fifteen-year old boy. The attempt was met with a low chuckle.
“Seen it all before, Moony,” said James.
Something thin and warm settled over Remus’s shaking body. Instantly, a tiny spark of serenity lit up inside of him. Remus could feel it rising like dawn through his body as James adjusted the piece of material, tucking it up under Remus’s chin and then hunkering down to look him in the face.
“Calming charm,” said James. “I made it myself. I’m afraid the stitching’s a bit dodgy but it should hold together.”
He didn’t stay long, only until the instinctive whimpering moans Remus had been making crawled into slurred words and then silence. After James had left and when Remus felt a little stronger, he sat up and examined the makeshift blanket. It was a cloak, of a particularly grotty shade of grey. But, like a baby, he only had to clutch it to his cheek to feel comforted. He curled about it and traced the uneven, bumpy ridge of James’s sewing as the stars went out and the sun peeked through the windows.
The rest of the school is still sleeping, Remus imagines. It’s only him and James, creeping through the silence, up the winding stairs, to the door lined in light.
James’s footsteps are a quiet rasp, just like Remus’s breathing. He doesn’t know where they’re going, and it doesn’t occur to him to ask. They’re spiralling up into the heavens of the school, to where the birds are singing and the sun will soon blossom.
He needs no encouragement but if he did, the tilt of James’s smile as he looks back at him would be enough. The sureness of the points of James’s fingertips on his arm would draw him eagerly onwards.
Remus waits behind James as he charms the lock of the door. There’s a click and a grin and then James swings the door wide and lets the light pour in, turning his body to pure shadow and blinding Remus. He hadn’t realised how dark it is, until James shows him the light.
Things were different after that. Sirius still sat with James in lessons and Lily Evans was still the subject of much admiring chatter from James, but Remus found himself suddenly in the centre of things. James joined him in the library to study, James frowned at the meagre portion of food on Remus’s plate at breakfast and rectified the matter with sausages and egg and fat red tomatoes, James laughingly peeled his t-shirt off him and pinned him to the bed so that his strong, deft fingers could massage away the ache.
It was as though the sun had suddenly decided to shine directly upon Remus, and knocked the moon clear out of the sky to do it.
Remus lay beneath James, his chin rested on his pillow, and allowed James’s rolling, pummelling touch to roam across his back and shoulders. Sirius had told him, sweetly cautious since the prank, that James gave the best post-Quidditch massages. Remus was not an athlete like James or Sirius, and he considered himself oddly blessed to experience something that belonged to the changing rooms and not the dormitory. James had opened that part of the world up to Remus, just as he offered him so much else that was not his due.
“You’re so tense, Moony,” James said. “Reckon it’d take a rolling pin to batter the tension out of you.”
He was stressed then because being straddled by James, his tightly-muscled thighs pressed either side of his hips and flexing each time he moved, had made his cock hard. He pushed his face into the pillow to hide his flushed cheeks but James leant closer and his arms came up about Remus’s shoulders, simply holding him for the barest moment, his lips against the back of his neck.
“Relax,” he said. “It’s alright. Really it is, Moony. Just relax.”
Remus didn’t fight when James rolled him over. He stared up at him uselessly, James’s face barely inches away and limned with the flicking light from the dorm candles. He tried to look away when James moved over him, laying his body on his, but James caught his chin and wouldn’t let him hide. His chest tingled with the brush of James’s nipples and the ripple of muscle under smooth, tanned skin. He was so warm, so alive. Remus could feel his throb of his blood, as if it were teaching Remus’s heart how to beat.
James went on gazing at him, even as his hips moved, rubbing himself against Remus’s cock, and in the radiance of his expression, Remus forgot to be afraid. And when James kissed him, Remus felt James’s heat light up inside him.
It was always like that. Whenever they fucked, Remus felt something inside himself prickle as if it were about to burst into flame, but he never burnt. James came to his bed at night frequently and they disappeared under the blankets together. James wrapped him in his arms and heat and simple adoration, and fucked him with a vehemence that had to scorch the sheets but never did. Then afterwards, Remus would lie there and wonderingly trace the lines of James’s face and throat and shoulders by the light of the stars, and be warm.
Life became a wonderful thing when James loved him. One winter’s day, Remus sat under a tree as the snow melted from the branches like a soft rainfall around him, and tried to understand what had happened to his world since James filled it. It wasn’t that nothing mattered, that wasn’t why that knot of tension like old rope in Remus’s belly had loosened. Everything mattered so much more.
The day before, when they’d been sitting in the library and James had abruptly given Remus that bright red grin of his then ducked beneath the table, it had mattered very much so whether Madam Pince came and found James with Remus’s cock in his mouth. It had mattered and that was why Remus had bitten his lip to keep quiet and buried his fingers in James’s messy black hair to drag him back up. Getting caught had mattered. But still, Remus had sat in his lesson afterwards and thought so intensely of how it had felt that he became hard again.
It was good that things mattered.
The first time he began to understand why James had done it was when Sirius was disowned. The letter came at dinner and Sirius, pale and perfect as ever, rose sharply from the table and strode from the room. Remus had watched James’s face as he picked up the discarded letter and read it through. He looked up at Remus and there was something childlike about his distress. Someone had hurt Sirius and it was almost as if James couldn’t fathom why anyone would do such a thing.
“I have to go after him,” he said. “He needs me.”
He needs me.
In later years, when Remus met Harry, he immediately recognized that bad habit of ‘saving people’. Harry, just like James, needed to fix whatever was broken. He comprehended a little of that back then, when he was sixteen and had been set at the centre of James’s universe. He gladly let James give Sirius that week of attention and fussing, until Sirius smiled again, and didn’t think to be jealous. It would have been like being jealous of the weather being nice in Southampton. The sun could not be directed, and Remus was merely blissfully happy when it shone on him again.
When James was his once more, they climbed the hills at the edge of Hogsmeade and wrestled in the grass, and James kissed him until Remus was breathless with happiness. James scrambled up into one of the trees and reached down to Remus. The fresh green leaves rustled against his cheeks and then Remus was in the uppermost branches with James. It was precarious but half the fun was keeping his balance, clinging onto James to keep from falling.
“It looks like an arse,” James said, nodding at one of the fat clouds rolling by.
“I think you’ll find it’s a pair of goggles,” Remus said.
“No,” said James. “It’s an arse. I think we’re being mooned.”
Remus laughed and studied the cloud, trying to see what James saw, until he was distracted by James himself: James, his grin and ever bright eyes, James and the heel of his hand rubbing at Remus’s cock through his trousers.
They slipped out of the tree in one line of their bodies. Remus’s feet had barely touched the ground before James was coming down over him. He pressed him down in the grass and undressed him. They fucked under the stretching blue sky and cool Scottish sunlight. Remus spread his legs wide for James and arched up against him with each thrust. He’d scarcely dared to touch him when it was new, but there was nothing to be afraid of anymore, and he let his damp fingertips slide up the powerful sinews of James’s arms, over the clenching muscle of his buttocks and the jerk of his spine.
The sun was directly overhead when Remus came. He was blinded by it for a moment, blinded by the light and James, and the waves of perfect happiness like some soulful Big Bang. He lay there and gasped, eyes wide and his lips stretching into an endless smile that James traced with the tip of his tongue.
It was the very next day that James started seeing Lily.
Remus sat on his bed and watched Peter and James bicker over which colour t-shirt suited James better. He kept trying to catch his breath and organize his feelings into something that he could label and explain. But then Sirius was slathering James’s hair with Sleekezy to get it to sit straight and nobody but Remus seemed to understand that the world was ending. He brought his knees up to his chest and waited for his heart to break.
He was still waiting when at last it was only James and him in the room. James was at the mirror, frowning at his reflection and making some bad joke about putting Lily off blokes entirely.
“I thought…” Remus blurted out. “I thought you and I were…”
James turned to him and looked at him. Then he smiled a smile so simple and pure that Remus realized that the world had already ended but a new one had sprung up in its place without him noticing.
“Do you feel better?” James asked.
“Yes,” Remus answered, instinctively, mindlessly.
“Well then,” said James, and turned back to his reflection.
Remus didn’t die, as he thought he might. Instead, a year passed. He survived it reasonably easily, and when he stopped surviving and began living, something sprang up between him and Sirius. It was a small, secret something, but it grew. It was still growing on the day of James’s wedding and was then something not so small nor so secret. He stood at Sirius’s side and smiled as James kissed his bride. And when James looked over at him and Remus smiled back at him, Remus saw James shine.
He thought of that inexplicable shine when he opened his front door and found Bill Weasley staring at him like a lost orphan. He looked at the ugly marks that tore across Bill’s once handsome face and held the door wide.
“You’d better come in,” he said.
James runs to the battlements and Remus follows him. He is dizzied by the wheeling sky. He is standing at the edge of some huge day that is waiting to crash over him. The cool grey light should be at odds with the golden tinge to James’s complexion, but instead it simply leaves him glowing like molten metal. He is unstoppable and becoming, and he is climbing up onto the low stone wall.
Remus watches, stopped in time, as James spreads his arms, grins at the sky and jumps into the nothing.
The first thing Remus thought of doing with Bill was washing him. He remembered being in the bathtub with James, James’s legs wrapped about him and his cock nestling perfectly in the cleft of Remus’s arse. He remembered lying there, the ripples moving gently about them, until the steam stopped rising, and he remembered James’s foot rising up out of the water to nudge the hot tap back on again. There had been lips on his neck and his skin slipping smoothly against James, and sunlight on the moist white tiles of the bathroom walls. And there had been peace.
Bill accepted the idea without protest, albeit some gibbering. Remus briskly tugged the clothes from him and folded them into a neat pile, while Bill stood in the middle of the room and wrung his hands. Bill was a tall, tanned creature too and in the middle of leading him by the hand to the bathroom, Remus felt strangely compelled to stop, close his arms about him, and listen to the thunder of his heartbeat. Bill sagged against him and bent awkwardly to compensate for his greater height in order to rest his head upon Remus’s shoulder.
“It’s going to be okay,” Remus said. And he believed it, just as surely as he had believed James when he had said it.
Remus nodded and Bill mirrored the gesture.
In the shower, Remus turned the water on until the spray was hot and hard on their bodies. He stood Bill directly under the water and washed the blood away from his injuries. With each gasp or moan of pain Bill made, Remus gentled him with a kiss, until there was no more blood and there were only mouths on skin. He turned Bill in his arms and laid his body against his as his fingers slipped down between his legs. He held him through the slick slide of their hips, while his cock pushed up between Bill’s spread thighs and into his body.
“It’s alright,” Remus whispered as he fucked him.
Reaching blindly back, Bill’s fingertips dug into Remus’s skin. He followed the jerk of Remus’s body as faithfully and eagerly as a man being led out of a minefield. When Remus pressed his lips to his cheek and came - shuddering inside him and pulling him so tight against him he almost thought Bill was going to disappear into him, into the warmth James had left him - he tasted tears.
“You’re crying,” he said.
Rolling his body next Remus’s, never losing the contact of skin on skin, Bill turned to face him. ‘Thank you’, his lips soundlessly formed the words, and then he curled back into Remus’s embrace.
They stayed under the shower until their skin was wrinkled like newborns. Remus held Bill through his sobs. He held him until the water ran clear and tasteless down his face, and then they staggered to the bedroom together. They fucked again on the bed, leaving the sheets a sodden, rumpled mess that Remus had to spell dry before he would allow Bill to sleep on them.
While Bill slept, Remus went to the kitchen and used what vegetables he had to make soup. He buttered a slice of bread and set it by the side of the bowl.
Once, when Remus had been cramming for a Potions test in the library, James had managed to smuggle him three roast potatoes, some carrots and peas, and four thick slices of pork.
“You looked a little pale and peaky,” he’d said, unrolling the roast dinner from a napkin and setting it on top of Remus’s notes. “No good knowing all the answers if you pass out from hunger.”
James had stayed with him to make sure he ate it all, and even though the potatoes were squashed and there were unidentified pieces of lint on the meat, Remus couldn’t remember ever enjoying a meal more.
He sat on the end of the bed and watched Bill slurp the soup, and was pleased to see the colour come back to his cheeks. Bill wiped the last of his bread about the sides of the bowl, popped it into his mouth and licked his fingers.
“Better than my mum makes,” he said.
Remus nodded and smiled. He was still smiling when he said,
“I’m going to Floo Fleur and tell her to come for you. She’ll take you home.”
Bill’s face fell and he shrunk back against the pillows.
“But, but why? I thought you and I….? I thought we….”
“Do you feel better?” Remus asked, and he knew the answer even before Bill nodded. “Well then.”
Bill brought his knees up to his chest, still frowning like an abandoned child. He looked away from Remus and Remus knew there was only one thing he could do now for Bill. He rose from the bed and crossed to his cupboard. Opening the drawer at the bottom, he took out the cloak that James had given him when Remus was only hanging on by a thread. He unfolded it and as the material fell towards the ground, Remus felt a little warm in his heart. He clutched it to himself for a moment and thought of the pure, uncomplicated love James had given him. Then he turned to Bill and laid the cloak before him.
“I have to let you go,” he told him. “You’re going to be alright.”
He left him alone with the cloak while he went to call Fleur, and he didn’t go back to him until he was leading her down the corridor to the bedroom. Fleur cried out at the sight of him and rushed to him, letting her blonde hair rush over him and whispering into his neck. Remus watched until he saw Bill’s arm creep about her waist, and then realized he’d never loved Bill more than in that moment. It was a sharp brilliant love and he felt the weight of it slam into him.
He’d never understood James and his cruel philanthropy until he looked at Bill with Fleur, their heads bowed towards each other. Then he knew what James had known even as a boy of fifteen: nothing is fixed that needs holding together.
James falls over the battlements and Remus can’t move to go after him. He stares after the graceful curve of James’s body as he gives himself up to the empty air that is waiting for dawn.
He falls.
Then the broom is between his legs and he’s spiralling up, up past Remus, up into the sky. Day breaks and the sunlight slices through the world, through the sweep of James’s shape. Colour springs up in the treetops and the roofs of Hogsmeade, and the grey is gone.
“Come on,” says James, hanging in the air, one hand held towards Remus. “The broom can take us both.”
Remus clambers onto the battlements, and clings onto James as he steps from the stone and into the air. He wraps his arms about James’s middle and rests his chin on his shoulder. His breath is shaky, but it’s as much exhilaration as it is fear.
“Where shall we go?” asks James.
Remus doesn’t answer. James already knows where they’re going: off into the sunrise.
END
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Date: 2007-04-23 12:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 04:50 pm (UTC)