Sirius is unbuttoned, white oxford cool. He's eleven a.m. tousled bedhead in a way that seems fetching and aesthetically designed rather than the product of laziness and the hangover that's been pulsing behind his eyes for four solid weeks now. He's ice-hot pureblood pretty, the kind of sheer attractiveness that can't be ruined by awful yellow lighting or the lingering sour smell of whiskey on his shirt, which only serves as a reminder that he's been meaning to do a load of laundry for a month and a half now.

There's a clean brunette in trim black trousers down in the wine section. She's been eyeing him through her bangs like he's a 1932 vintage marked down to half-price, and when she catches him looking back, she smiles a sweet, desperately hopeful smile at him, complete with two winking dimples.

She's the kind of girl he dated in school, back when slim and shapely caught his eye. And that was only – what? – four months ago? Five? But now she seems a little sad, tame in her aqua cardigan with that shiny snitch-shaped barrette tucked behind her ear.

He's not really trying to lead her on, so he breaks eye contact and makes an attempt at looking busy, grabbing a bottle of Ogden's Finest by the neck and pretending to scan the label. Brewed for centuries in the very heart of a volcano...We at Ogden and Sons are proud to bring you this sizzling creation... Blah, blah, blah.

When did tame become a bad thing, anyway, he wonders out of the blue. For Sirius, tame is somewhat synonymous with soft and warm, with gentle hot mouths, little murmurs in his ears, and the teasing feeling of brown curls against his chest. All things which are, with no bloody question, pretty desirable.

So why does he find himself standing in Artemis Bolton's Fyne Distillery, at eleven bloody o'clock in the morning, wanting untamed in a way that is dead terrifying for someone who's very used to being wanted but not at all used to wanting? Who knows. Shouldn't be happening. One of those completely inexplicable quirks of life that rise out of the misty depths of subconscious to sort of jump about and shout things like "Hey, mate! Over here! Pay attention to me!"

And it's ridiculous, but he wants and needs so badly that he can barely see straight. Can barely think straight. Is suddenly experiencing a distinct lack of straight.

He needs angry red scars and hair that smells like earth and leaves and ozone on the mornings after the full moon. He needs long, slim and pale fingers and the dimpled inset of bow-shaped lips. And maybe that would be manageable if it wasn't that he needs all the decidedly unsexy things as well. Scratchy, ugly sweaters and fingernails chewed down to the pink and that grumpy little furrowing of eyebrows and...

Sirius grimaces. And he needs to stop thinking. That's what he really needs. Which brings him, quite naturally, to the current situation. Because nothing spells mindless oblivion like whiskey brewed in a bloody furnace.

His pocket watch chimes suddenly, and Sirius puts the bottle back on the shelf so he can palm his watch and flip the silver face open.

"Eleven-fifteen. Lunch with Prongs, Wormtail, and Moony, love," it tells him in a tinkly female voice.

Moony.

Sirius groans and closes his eyes for a few moments. Life after Hogwarts is just not living up to promise these days. He shakes his head sadly and makes his way past the brown-haired girl toward the exit, until he thinks things through again and doubles back to grab a bottle of firewhiskey or two.

This is just another ordinary day in the life of Sirius Black.

---

Lily Potter is more or less the best Cursebreaker Sirius has ever known. She's got the kind of brain that can wrap around the logical, step-by-step spells needed to work a bad hex backwards. It's really a surprise to no one that she's as busy with Order work as she's become in the past year, even while three months pregnant and married to the most domestically challenged husband known to man.

"Where're the preserves?" James asks, flinging open a third cabinet and pushing china mugs around in the vague, fading hope that maybe they're harboring the fugitive strawberry jam.

Peter leans back in his chair, far enough that one of the four feet lift off the ground, and licks a thin coat of butter off his thumb. "It's your house."

"Not helping, Wormtail."

Across the table, Remus sighs and folds his napkin into thirds, without looking at Sirius. And he slips out of chair, without looking at Sirius, to help James search, with his back firmly in Sirius's direction.

Sirius wonders if it's just characteristic Black arrogance that makes every little gesture of Remus's hands, every flinch of the muscles in his neck, seem like a personal slight. After all, there's no real reason Remus should look at Sirius, and no real reason he shouldn't help James find his bloody preserves.

It's not Remus's fault that he can't stop looking, Sirius thinks. It's not Remus's fault that he doesn't even want to try.

"Found it," Remus says after a moment or two, ducking to poke his head into one of the cupboards under the counter. He emerges, victorious, with a little green-lidded jar which hands it to James. James turns it around and around in his hands and... pouts.

"This is raspberry."

With a snort, Sirius lobs his napkin at James's head. "Just eat it, mate. You put enough butter on your bread that I doubt you'll taste the difference."

Peter grins around his thumb, and James smiles in a slow, sort of embarrassed way before snapping at Sirius, "At least everything I eat doesn't have to be soaked in alcohol first. Will you get that bloody bottle off the table! Or use a coaster, at least!" Remus just looks at his feet and closes the cupboard door.

Sirius grins and pats the whiskey bottle. "If you want a nip, all you have to do is ask, mate."

"Oh, get a coaster, Sirius," Remus says, and Sirius sighs something along the lines of 'Yes, mum,' but he gets up to find a coaster among the odds and ends on the ledge above the sink anyway.

"Happy?" he asks once a coaster is located, and he is seated once more.

Remus's frown only deepens around the edges, and he looks away.

On this note, lunch resumes.

They talk about, well, Lily mostly because getting married doesn't seem to have done much in the 'getting Prongs to shut up' department. But the conversation moves like the tide, drifting around from topic to topic, never really stopping anywhere.

Peter talks for a while about how he's managed to sell his parents' house, finally, and James laughs over something that Moody might have said a week ago. Remus stays silent and watches, twisting his mouth into a smile when it's required of him.

Sirius is careful not to watch Remus or Remus's hands, except that's what he winds up doing in the end, anyway, and he accidentally bites the side of his mouth when pastel memories of what those hands were doing yesterday suddenly overwhelm him. He chokes for a moment, marveling that Remus can burn like there's a volcano just beneath his skin when the sun's gone down and then turn a hundred and eighty degrees and sit there like nothing happened, with his hands folded in his lap.

"All right, Padfoot?" James asks.

And Peter adds, "You look like you've seen a boggart."

Sirius shakes his head in a firm "no" and has to clear his throat a few times before he can manage a croaky, "I'm fine." He grabs his whiskey bottle by the throat and downs the last in one long gulp, then grins and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. "Never been better," he adds.

James looks quizzical, and Remus looks terribly blank, but no one pushes the matter. They finish their meal in nothing like silence because James spills the jam and spends nearly fifteen minutes searching for his wand before Remus grabs a dishtowel and cleans things up by hand. Peter suddenly remembers he has an appointment to keep and flies into a panic, hastily shoving the final remains of a cheese sandwich down his throat and dashing out the door with a frantic, "Ta!"

Things wind down after that. Tentative plans are made to meet again in a few days, and soon Sirius finds himself closing the Potters' front door and following Remus down the walk. Remus stops at the end of the path, near the silly blue mailbox, and picks at a loose thread hanging from his shirt sleeve.

He looks like he wants to say something, but it's hard to tell with Remus who is so very good at catching stray emotions, unwanted scraps of sentences, and burying them until they're completely forgotten. Sirius isn't, and he's talking before he even realises that this particular worry was passing through his head.

"Are you angry with me?"

Remus sighs and shakes his head and says "no" in a way that doesn't sound like a no at all.

This tiptoeing around feelings and arguments and anything that could cause friction is Remus at his most irritating. He's as gripless as a glass surface when he wants to be, a drop of water in the roaring, stormy ocean that is Sirius Black's life.

Sirius huffs. "What is it, then?"

"Nothing," Remus says, stuffing a hand into a faded trouser pocket. He bites his lip and closes his eyes wearily. "It may be very easy for you to move on, Sirius, but I can't just forget at a moment's notice."

Sirius wants to say that he doesn't forget, not ever, and that he doesn't want Remus to forget either because it meant something not nothing. But James is five steps and a closed door away, and Sirius isn't sure he knows how to deal with what this could be or what James might say, so he opens his mouth and awful words come out.

"You're making too big a thing out of it, mate. It's not like I meant it, and I did apologise."

"You did apologise," Remus echoes, and Sirius tries to think about Snape's underpants or any one of the innumerable times Lily hexed James's homework to announce embarrassing secrets when read. Anything that isn't thinking about how Remus has always been the one to avoid fights at all cost, at any cost.

Sirius jumps into action then, taking the last few steps down the walk so he is standing at Remus's elbow, almost breathing down Remus's neck. Certainly breathing in his smell which Sirius can't describe in words beyond a visceral exhalation of Oh, Moony.

Frightened, heartbeat hammering a rhythm that sounds more and more like 'flee, flee, flee!' with every new palpitation, he changes the subject.

"What are you doing now?"

Remus shrugs, shirt settling loosely around his shoulders, shadows hinting at the slope of collarbone just beneath the fabric. "I have some errands to run."

"Mind if I come along?" Sirius asks, without really thinking through the consequences. Remus is the kind to make long lists of pros and cons for even the slightest decision. Sirius just tends to wing it. And all he knows, in this particular moment, is that he wants more of Remus than maybe he's allowed, and if that's the case, he'll take what he can get. And try to be happy about it.

Remus looks a little cross-eyed for a moment, quizzical, and then says, like he always, always does, "All right, Padfoot."

---

Remus's errands are mostly picking things up and dropping others off. The streets are wet with late spring rain, and Remus walks like he's got a bugbear nipping at his heels. Sirius has to almost jog to catch up as they wind through the after-lunch businessmen hurrying back to their windowed offices.

"Moony, slow down," he says after this has been going on long enough for his breathing to be shortening into wheezy little gasps, and he makes a grab for Remus's elbow.

Remus stops and turns, almost instantly, which Sirius hadn't been expecting. And, possibly, which Remus hadn't really been expecting either because now that they're nearly chest to chest with Sirius fingers right there, touching Remus's elbow, the expression on Remus's face vacillates between worried and something else, raw and scribbled and only half-formed, utterly illegible.

"Sorry," says Remus, carefully toneless, and when Sirius lets go of his elbow a few beats later, they start walking again, not quite as fast, but with Sirius following three steps behind anyway, more than a little lost in thought.

First stop is a small bookshop on the corner of Gower and Oxford. The books are piled high in teetering towers, devoid of any logical organization as far as Sirius can tell. In the row of shelving tentatively labelled 'folklore', Remus smiles with the grey-haired clerk, and Sirius watches him balance three books while reaching for a fourth.

It doesn't take too long for Remus to decide which books he wants. It takes longer for him to count out change from his pocket and decide if he has enough. Sirius wonders, briefly, if he should offer to pay, but Remus's eyes are down turned, rejecting the offer before it is even made.

Books purchased and wrapped in brown paper in case it starts to rain again, they head back out to the street to dodge puddles and splashing cabs. Remus walks ahead with a copy of The Lovers Melancholy blocking out the rest of the world.

Sirius knows the book intimately because Remus must've taken it out of the library a hundred times when they were in school. He can even quote most of it by heart, as long as someone's there to prompt him through the boring bits.

This, then, is Remus's way of avoiding the conversation or the argument or whatever would come from actually speaking to each other about this things that keeps smoldering and wavering and burning between them.

It's not so different, Sirius thinks. Remus uses books; Sirius uses whiskey. It's not so different.

They stop at a small grocery, and Remus buys a loaf of bread and some cheese because, Remus explains in a good imitation of friendly conversation, Peter has grown attached to cheese sandwiches, and he keeps using up the bread and cheese before Saturday when they usually do groceries.

Sirius forces an 'Oh, that Peter' sort of laugh, and the woman behind the counter smiles vaguely as she rings up the bill.

"Only two more," Remus says as they leave the store. "Sorry to drag you around like this."

Sirius doesn't exactly point out that he was the one to tag along in the first place, but he shrugs and says, "'S no problem." And then, with the good humour that only comes easily when his blood-alcohol level is teetering on the absurd, he wraps an arm around Remus's shoulder and lets his fingers drink in skin on skin. "I'm not in a hurry."

Remus looks wary. His eyes are a just a bit too wide around the edges. "Oh, good," he says and dips his head perfunctorily so he can slip out of the quasi-hug without cracking their skulls together. "We turn here."

Next is the library, and Sirius despairs dramatically, earning a few stares from other patrons and a irritable shushing from the librarian. "How many new books do you need in a day, Moony?" he asks, jokes, but Remus doesn't answer, doesn't smile, barely blinks.

In the end, Sirius hides in the children's section, with his lone bottle of firewhiskey carefully hidden from the curious eyes of passing mothers, and watches Remus over the top of a book about rabbits. He watches Remus's fingers trace covers, opening them to the back page where Muggles keep those funny little records of check-outs. He watches Remus's lower lip and the curling hair at his neck and then shuts his eyes and thinks that his whole life is probably like watching a train wreck.

When a tiny blonde-haired girl teeters over and offers to help Sirius with any tricky words in his book, he smiles at her and asks her to explain the extensive section on carrots. He misses Remus looking up and across the library. He misses the crooked half-smile that vanishes almost as quickly as it appears.

One last time, they head out. The sun's peering through the clouds now, and usually that would be enough to lift Sirius's spirits. Remus is weighted down with books, and his grocery bag thumps against his thigh as he walks. Sirius's firewhiskey in its plain white plastic bag thumps in counterpoint.

"Hey, Remus," Sirius begins to say at one point, after a group of schoolgirls with matching book bags walk past him, giggling. But almost immediately he trips on his own feet and bumps into a jogger.

"Watch where you're walking!" shouts the jogger, and Sirius stops to make a rude gesture at the man's back.

Ahead, Remus pauses and looks over his shoulder, frowning. "Why do you keep doing this, Sirius?"

"Doing what?" Sirius asks loftily, tossing his bag over his shoulder so that the plastic handles will stop cutting off the circulation to his fingers. The bottle makes a 'whump' noise and sloshes when it hits his back, right between the shoulder blades.

Remus stares for a moment and then shakes his head. "No. Never mind."

The last stop turns out to be a dry-cleaner's. Remus fumbles in his pants pockets for a while before he turns up the small ticket. The kid – he can't be more than sixteen, Sirius decides – working the cash register finds the corresponding ticket from a box under the counter and makes a lazy hand motion.

"Be back in a second," he pauses to read the name on the ticket, "Mr. Pettigrew."

"You pick up Peter's laundry?" Sirius asks when the kid has disappeared into the steaming, noisy back room. He's just short of aghast, not quite ready to admit that maybe this is jealousy burning hotly in the back of his throat.

Jealous of Peter? Hah!

Remus shrugs. "He is my flatmate, and he's been busy lately."

"So? Let him run his own errands! You're not his boyfriend, Moony."

And Remus stiffens. It starts at the fingers which draw inward, clenching into the palms. Sirius can imagine the veins in Remus's wrists standing up from the skin as the muscles tense there and all the way up the arm: elbow to bicep to shoulder to neck. He sees the tiny flinch of jaws muscles that means Remus is not saying something he wants to say.

"No. I'm not."

Tell him, screams Sirius's heart. Tell him that you want him so much it scares you sometimes. Tell him that every single time hasn't been a mistake because it's been him. Tell him that you might want to mean it with him.

Tell him, screams Sirius's brain. Tell him that you never think about anyone else because you think about him all the time. Tell him that you only do these stupid things because this feels so much bigger than anything you've felt before. Tell him.

Sirius opens his mouth with every intention of saying these things that are blazing just beneath his surface, but then he thinks of James and Peter. And even mother and father and Regulus. He thinks of Amelia Watson who he dated in fourth year and what she would think about this.

In the end, he says, "You're not his mother. That's what I meant."

Remus keeps looking at something just a little beyond the counter top, and Sirius wonders if this is what fury looks like on Remus Lupin. The kid returns with a dumb brown suit in a plastic bag. Remus pays him without a word, flips the suit over his arm, and pushes past Sirius to the door.

"I can't deal with you when you're like this," he says, and he doesn't stop when he reaches the door. And he doesn't look back.

---

Sirius takes the long way home. Where 'long way' means he nips into the chilly pub near Goodge Street and finishes a pint before a few friends, whose names he can never remember – they usually get around to introducing themselves long after his brain has started fuzzing out details – drop by, and they start another round. And then another.

By the time last call rolls around, he's falling off his stool, preaching loudly about bloody Remus Lupin and his bloody moral high ground and his bloody long fingers.

His left shoe comes undone on the way home, and his hands can't seem to hold still long enough to tie the bow – he gets as far as over, under, around before everything falls apart again – so he ends up taking it off and half-hopping home.

Hours later, it's one in the morning, and Sirius is still awake even though he knows it'll cost him at work tomorrow. Later today. Whatever. He holds his hand in front of his face and waves it back and forth until things get all wiggly at the edges, and he starts to get a little dizzy. Outside, it looks like there are two slivers of moon hanging in the sky.

"'m so pissed!" Sirius declares to the empty flat and then he laughs when his own slurs and stutters echo back to him. A moment later, though, he's frowning. It's lonely in this big flat with its big echoes, and Sirius wonders if maybe he should give James a call since poor Prongs is all by himself too with Lily gone. Poor lad.

And then Sirius thinks maybe calling Remus would be a better idea because James is always grumpy when he's woken up too early, and that's never any fun.

Although, really, Remus might not be much fun after what happened at the dry-cleaner's this afternoon, and Sirius frowns sadly at the remains of his firewhiskey until he realises that maybe that's even better! If Sirius calls Remus he can say how very, very sorry he is and then Moony will forgive him and maybe that will make his chest stop feeling all scrunched in on itself.

Decision made, Sirius picks himself off the couch, tripping only once, and hauls himself over to the fireplace to make the call. Remus's face appears after a moment or two, still a little heavy from sleep, and Sirius jumps on the conversation before Remus has a chance to start protesting or being sensible or something equally silly.

"Moony! 'm comin' over!"

A woozy, out-of-body sort of second passes before Sirius feels his feet touch solid ground again, and he tumbles out of Remus's fireplace and onto the living room carpet.

"Allo!" he carols and waves his whiskey bottle at Remus over there on the sofa.

"Hello, Padfoot," Remus says slowly, leaning forward just a little and clasping his hands in his lap. "All right?"

"Foockin' brill!" Sirius says agreeably, getting back to his feet in an awkward, swaying movement. He takes a few experimental steps and manages a staggering walk over to the couch.

"Moony," he says, falling into the warm, open space to Remus's left. Remus raises an eyebrow and waits. "Moony, yer so great, y'know tha'?"

"Sirius," Remus begins, looking away.

"No, no, no," Sirius interrupts, poking Remus in the shoulder. "Really." He gravitates in towards Remus's shoulder a little. He can't really help it when Remus is looking so tired and his shoulder is so warm. "You are. Ooer, 'm so pissed."

Sirius turns his face into the folds of cotton near Remus's neck and sighs, and he feels Remus shiver just a little against his cheek. For the first time since he woke up this morning, Sirius thinks he feels happy.

Slowly, almost shyly, Remus's hand comes to rest on Sirius's back, and Sirius can almost hear the blood sloshing through Remus's veins, can almost hear his breath rattling in his lungs as his chest goes up and down, up and down. Sirius turns his face a little so that he can brush his lips against the spot where that quick little pulse seems to be coming from.

"You smell so good," he tells Remus, and Remus hisses and holds on tightly to the back of Sirius's shirt in response. Oh, and then teeth, tongue, lips. It's like fire meeting oxygen as Sirius works his mouth up the salty run of Remus's neck to the corner of jawline right below the ear.

"Sirius," Remus says, breathes, gasps and writhes.

Something about the way his name gets said makes Sirius pause, makes something twinge in his memory and shrink away. He leans his nose into Remus's skin and closes his eyes. "Want me," he fumbles over the words, "to...stop?"

Remus's answer is breathless, urgent, demanding. "Don't. Don't stop."

They fall back, Remus below and Sirius above, and the whiskey bottle crashes to the ground, but Sirius barely notices because Remus is pulling him down and down and down, and Sirius is too busy pushing Remus's pyjama top up above his nipples. He rubs his tongue against the wider pink circle, and Remus whines and grinds up from below, running his fingers – his long, beautiful fingers – through Sirius's hair and tugging hard, urging Sirius face up towards his own.

Remus is looking up, and Sirius looks down and thinks how it's funny that they can be looking at each other and still not really be looking at each other. Because when Sirius looks into Remus's eyes, he doesn't understand what he sees there.

Suddenly, almost like an ambush, Remus moves forward so his mouth is hovering just inside the mythical kissing range and then he stops, and his mouth is just there, inhaling and exhaling and shuddering a little bit every time. Sirius realizes that, this close, he's breathing in air that's touched Remus's lips and the inside of mouth and been inside his lungs. He drinks in this moment of almost-contact as Remus's lips whisper against his own before fear or something like it sets in and he jerks his head away.

"'s okay since we're not kissing, right?" he says, seeking safety in the things he understands: skin and sweat and the way Remus bucks and groans when Sirius slides a hand underneath the elastic of Remus's pyjama bottoms.

"It's okay if we do," Remus says between gasps, between aching, needy inhalations, as he fumbles with Sirius's zipper. "It's okay if we, god, do."

Sirius shoves Remus's pyjama bottoms over his hips and down towards his knees and shuts everything else out. He doesn't hear Remus's startled shout or the creaking of the poor, worn-out sofa as Remus fucks Sirius's mouth like tomorrow isn't going to happen. He doesn't hear the half-whispered way Remus says, "Just kiss me once."

At least, he tries not to.

---

It's just after dawn when Sirius finally wakes up. His neck is stiff from being bent against the arm of the sofa all night, and though his head is hammering, he knows instantly that this isn't his sofa and these aren't his bookcases and this isn't his itchy plaid blanket.

He shuts his eyes and thumps his head against the sofa which only adds red eyelid ghosts to his list of grievances.

In the silence, and it is so silent, Sirius wonders if he can hear Remus breathing in his bedroom down the hall. Probably not.

Slowly, feeling sluggish all the way to his fingertips, Sirius gets to his feet and collects his things, a sock here and a belt over there. He tiptoes to the door, slides the deadbolt free, and escapes into the hallway.

He'll be back, he thinks, in an hour or two when Remus has woken up. He'll explain that he was drunk and that it'll never happen again and that he is very sorry – so sorry, Moony. And Remus will smile, and maybe he'll nod, and accept it. Just like he's been doing for months now.

Sirius almost runs down the steps of the apartment building, and he thinks about how friendships twist and bend and warp like metal in a furnace, and he thinks about boiling points and breaking points. And he thinks and he thinks and he thinks, all the way to work where James is waiting to clap him on the shoulder and Moody is waiting to curse at him for being late.

This is just another ordinary day in the life of Sirius Black.