19!!!!! PLEASE
HELLO BAB!! OF COURSE!! ANYTHING FOR YOU!!
The very first time and they’re seventeen in his fourth childhood bedroom—duck-egg wallpaper, ratty sheets, Harry Nilsson record turned down to a faint murmur and all but forgotten. There are the scratches he made in the doorframe, there’s the bed with the peeling paintwork, there’s the hands of the most beautiful boy he’s ever seen, twisting into his t-shirt: “can I...take this off?”
A floorboard creaking. “My dad’s downstairs,” Remus says, which isn’t an answer at all. He lays a hesitant touch of his palm to Sirius’ hip, the sharp poke of bone and a glimpse of bare skin above the waistband of his briefs.
He wants to say, we’ve never asked that question before. He wants to say, I’m not sure why you would want to do a thing like that. Sirius’ knuckles digging in to the soft stretch of his stomach, just barely. Remus imagines them leaving indentations there, as though his flesh is clay.
“But your door’s locked, no? Is he likely to knock?” Sirius looks down at him; fine dark hair falling against Remus’ skin, making him shiver. He has kissed him and kissed him again and now his mouth is all damp and red and ruined. Old-fashioned floral curtains. Nilsson’s cover of She’s Leaving Home drifting in, stepping outside, she is free.
“Or, I mean—” Sirius falters, “sorry, we don’t have to. Obviously. I thought—thought I’d ask, I know we haven’t done anything like that—”
“It’s alright.” Which it should be, really—it’s nothing Sirius hasn’t seen before. Remus and his body like a hit-and-run crime scene, his body that betrays him and complains about him and never seems to patch itself together quite right, his body that can’t be bothered with itself. It’s only ever been something to be dealt with, pacified, winced at, that scar won’t heal if you keep picking at it, those bandages ought to be changed.
A stack of books on the floor by his bed—Shelley, Burroughs. A hairline crack in the plaster of his ceiling. Remus has never thought of his body as something to be loved, to be wanted, and yet here’s Sirius, off-his-fucking-trolley Sirius, asking to make an altar of it anyway.
“You can take it off,” he tells him. “Go for it.”
“Yeah?” Sirius rakes his hair back, grins, split-skin and a small chip in one of his front teeth from playfighting with James when they were twelve: Remus adores it. “Alright, then. I love you. You know I love you?”
“Yeah.” And he does know it; knows it as Sirius’ lips are on his, and as he sits up against the headboard to let him tug his shirt up past his head. They’re laughing into each other’s mouths when his arms get stuck, noses smashing into each other. And all of it really just means I love you, over and over again.
Sirius tosses their shirts down somewhere. He turns back, and Remus’ breath rattles about in his throat like a blue-bottle for a moment—he watches for something, some twitch or twist of Sirius’ face that says disgust, that says horror. Thinks of all the white scar tissue scraped across his chest, or the awkward jut of his elbows, his ribs. Teeth marks torn into his side.
“You’re so lovely,” says Sirius, anyway. “Is this still okay? Can I touch you?”
(And, after this: Sirius will kiss bruise after gnawing bruise into Remus’ neck and down, down past his collarbones. Once it’s over, they’ll get dressed again, and Remus will stand in front of the bathroom mirror and try to hide every last one with a glamour, because his dad is downstairs. He’ll ask Sirius, did I miss any, are they all gone, you definitely can’t see them?
Sirius, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, wearing that daft, lazy little smile that makes Remus’ lungs roll around inside him like marbles. You missed the one beneath your ear, Moony, just there.)
Remus nods, draws his arms over Sirius’ bare shoulders. “Yeah,” he says. “Anywhere you like.”
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