And Sirius kisses him.
It's impossible to describe why this is so good, why this is so addictive, the slide of their mouths and the
hardness and softness and the feel of Sirius's breath. For Remus, who always maintains a chronicler's severalfoot
distance from his own life, this sudden incoherency is extremely disconcerting.
Then he thinks, very serenely, Shut up right now.
His arms fall over Sirius's shoulders. Sirius runs his palm wildly over the back of Remus's hand and arm to grip
his wrist. They stumble back against the wall and the fat lady says "Oh my!" which reminds them, suddenly,
that there are other people in the universe. Remus tries very hard to make that important, and fails. Sirius has
him at the hips; Sirius has him by the mouth. Sirius touches him very gently at the belly because his shirt,
which is Peter's shirt, is mostly unbuttoned and a little too small. It stretches hard at the elbows.
"Is this," Sirius says, "is this Pete's shirt?"
"Did you," Remus says, "you have chocolate in your, did you eat chocolate?"
"Took yours," Sirius replies. "Figured it wouldn't matter, though, since."
"Right," Remus agrees. "Yes, this is Peter's shirt."
They kiss again. The fat lady has vanished into some other portrait. Remus is grateful, but even if she hadn't, he
wouldn't mind. He's lost his mind. Something has misfired or exploded or simply shut down. Something has
been connected that wasn't connected before, the rough and raw and raging part of him and the cartographer's
concise conceptualization, the two halves of himself he has kept separate all this time like the dark side of the
moon from the white, a normal kind of gravity, he'd always thought. He'd always thought wrong. He grabs
Sirius at the hair and kisses him and kisses him and has no idea what he's doing and kisses him anyway.
Suddenly Sirius pulls back. He stares at Remus with strange, serious eyes, the dark, dilated pupil rimmed in
pale light. His thumb runs over Remus's knuckles, which are all scabby, and Remus shivers.
"I'm," says Sirius raggedly, "this is, is this okay?"
"Well," Remus says, as honestly as possible, "no, it's pretty brilliant, don't you think?"
Sirius grins like the sunrise and whispers, "yeah." When he uncurls his fingers against the juncture of Remus's
neck and jaw and kisses Remus again, laughing into his mouth, curving against his body, Remus is finally,
finally ready to stop thinking about it.
