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“Choke me,” Remus says.
It’s not entirely out of the blue. They are kissing on the sofa, but only just kissing, so it is a bit unexpected. Out of the light blue, if you will. But it does not – as nothing ever does with Remus – come from nowhere.
“Here?” Sirius asks. “Now?”
“Actually, I’d prefer if we were naked. But yes. Sometime close to now is what I had in mind.”
Sirius is dizzy. It’s not the booze, because they stopped drinking hours ago, before they left the Burrow just after supper.
He attempts to abate some of the dizziness by kissing Remus again, climbing atop Remus to straddle him and sliding their tongues together. He tries to feel his body – the way the therapist suggests, always asking “are you in your body?” to which he’d inevitably reply “where the fuck else would I be?” – and finds that there’s a rather eager swarm of butterflies in his stomach and a drop in his throat.
“Padfoot?” Remus says, pulling away slightly. “You seem—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have suggested it.”
“No,” Sirius replies, calmly. “No, I’m just thinking about it.”
Remus probably doesn’t mean to, but he gapes at him. “You’re…what?”
“I’m,” Sirius begins, a little defensively, “I’m thinking about it! You know, taking it in? Considering it? Whatever the kids are calling it these days.”
“I’m sorry,” Remus says, “wrong inflection. You’re what?”
“Come off it. You’re not the only intellectual in the house. I can think about things.”
Remus lifts Sirius off his lap, depositing him on the sofa. Sirius thinks he might be angry with him, but then Remus turns towards him and tucks his legs under himself and trains him with a deeply interested but not at all unkind look.
“Well, that’s new.”
It is. It is new. And there is a not-so-evolved part of Sirius that hates it, if he’s honest, that wants to slap this newfound horrid thoughtful twat of a grown-up version of himself and just scream “come off it – hop on the dick already!”
“’New’ as in ‘bad’?” Sirius asks self-consciously.
“No,” Remus replies with a shrug. “’New’ as in ‘new’.”
“I’m just trying to…” Sirius begins. He’s trying to do something, that much he knows, he just can’t quite remember what. “I’m trying to decide if want to, or if I want to want to, or if I—”
“Just want to make me happy?” Remus supplies.
“Yeah,” Sirius replies, relieved to have been given the answer to a tiny bit of the puzzle. Remus nods thoughtfully, but doesn’t say anything. “I can’t quite work out how to decide these things. Surely there’s a way to know.” He begins chewing on the skin around his ring finger. “How do people know?”
“Well,” Remus begins slowly, “I suppose you have to figure out how you want to feel.”
Sirius considers this. He’s never thought of his emotions as being a thing he can direct. They’ve always been – since Azkaban, at least – things that just show up, in whatever configuration they fancy at whatever time seems most convenient for them.
“Shouldn’t I want to feel…I don’t know…good? Pleasure? Turned on?”
“Maybe,” Remus replies, calm but professorial. “But maybe not. People have sex to feel all kinds of ways, not all of them necessarily good.”
That’s a bit too true for Sirius’s liking, so he deflects. “What do you want to feel?”
If Remus is uncomfortable with the abrupt turn in focus of the conversation (and he probably is), he only shifts a little on the couch and readjusts one of the sleeves of his button-down.
“I’m not sure I know.”
The middle-aged traumatized man leading the middle-aged traumatized man, it appears. They’re both silent a few moments, and then Remus clears his throat.
“I suppose I want to feel,” his voice cracks a bit, but he continues, “kind of locked in. Held down.”
“Trapped?” Sirius asks.
“No,” Remus says with a little grimace, like the word tastes bad in his mouth. “The opposite, almost. What is it when there’s sort of…a lot? Like when you could go anywhere and so you want someone to hold you back to remind you of that?”
“I think that’s called freedom, Moony.”
They smile at each other. It’s a fraught word, one that’s so often come with so many terms and conditions that it no longer resembles anything but captivity with a bit more space to roam around.
“Then I guess I want to feel that,” Remus concludes.
That’s too good an answer. Sirius can’t rival that. It’s not a contest, but they are both Gryffindors and former schoolmates, so it also sort of always is.
“I don’t know what I want to feel,” Sirius concludes with a defeated downturn of his nose.
When did sex get this complicated? he wonders. Once upon a time, the only reason he needed to jump into bed with whomever he fancied and do whatever he liked was that it made his dick hard. “Because it’s hot” was an answer all in itself. But after fifty-some-odd years of life, he eventually learned that what’s hot is not necessarily what is good for him, or healthy for him, or even necessarily what’s safe. All kinds of things make him hard – he woke up only a few nights prior with a raging hard-on, having had a dream in which Slughorn and him were having a conversation about the rising costs of potions ingredients, and he knows he has no sexual interest in the inflation rates of disembodied insect parts.
“Come here,” Remus says, pulling Sirius back to the conversation, or the room, or his body, or wherever he is supposed to be. He grins slyly and climbs back into Remus’s lap. Remus begins stroking his hands up and down Sirius’s thighs.
“You know you’re safe with me, right?” Remus asks. It’s an almost cloyingly sweet thing to say, the kind of thing men in romance books say to their tiny, frightened virgins. And still, hearing it does something to him that he hasn’t quite figured out yet.
“What if I don’t want to be safe with you?” he asks, because he isn’t ready to be honest with Remus about the something. “What if I want you to be very, very bad to me?”
Remus smiles but doesn’t take the bait. He doesn’t push either. He just looks up at Sirius, continuing his ministrations on Sirius’s legs.
“What do you want right now?” he asks, and then because they’ve just had a whole conversation about Sirius not knowing the answer to that, rephrases. “What would feel good right now?”
Sirius doesn’t have to think about that for very long. “Kiss me,” he says.
Remus does. He tangles his fingers into Sirius’s hair and pulls just a tiny bit, just enough to keep his head in place as Remus leans up to claim Sirius’s mouth. He slips his tongue between Sirius’s teeth and Sirius squirms a little in his lap. Tentatively, Remus moves his hand to Sirius’s lower back, teasing the slit of skin between his trousers and his shirt. When he dips one finger below the waistband, Sirius moans.
“Grab my ass already, Moony,” Sirius says, beginning to move his hips.
“As you wish,” Remus replies. He undoes the fly of Sirius’s trousers for better access and then moves his hands back into place, hands firm and warm. He uses the leverage to move Sirius against him.
“Does this feel good?” He whispers into Sirius’s ear. It ghosts against the delicate skin just above his clavicle, making him shiver. He nods, and then kisses Remus hard.
After far more many minutes, Sirius breaks apart from their kiss. “Moony?” he says.
“Yes, darling,” Remus replies, tucking a lock of black-and-white hair behind Sirius’s ear.
“I—I don’t want to choke you tonight,” he says, and finds to his mildly inconvenient surprise that his hands are shaking. Remus has noticed before he has, because Sirius didn’t even feel it but he is holding both of Sirius’s hands in his own. He feels inexplicably small, like a child who’s just revealed he forgot to take out the garbage and now the bins have overflowed.
As if on cue, Remus asks, “how did that feel?”
Sirius doesn’t want to talk about the feeling small bit. “Weird,” he says and, as a compromise, “not entirely good.”
Remus nods sympathetically and moves to stand, bringing Sirius with him albeit a bit awkwardly. For the second time that night, Sirius is convinced Remus is angry with him. But Remus just takes his hand and begins to lead him down the hallway, towards their bedroom, where he gently guides Sirius to sit on the edge of the mattress before turning towards the bathroom.
“What are you doing?” Sirius asks, still a little nervously.
“I,” Remus replies, voice slightly muffled, “am looking for a candle.”
Sirius blinks. “Why?”
Remus doesn’t reply for a few moments, and when he returns to the bedroom he places his hands on his hips and looks around, slightly exasperated. “We must have a candle somewhere, right?” he asks to no one in particular, deciding to search the top drawer of the bureau that they use mostly for things they can’t find another place for. “What self-respecting homosexuals don’t own a single candle?”
Sirius starts to calm, even allowing himself to enjoy the view of Remus’s ass bent over to rummage through the remaining bureau drawers. “Moony,” he says lightly, “we have been fucking without candles for forty years. I think we’ll manage.”
Remus lets out a frustrated sigh and stands, turning to face Sirius. “Yes,” he agrees, “but suddenly, that seems terribly foolish to me.”
Sirius’s heart swells when it occurs to him what Remus is doing – that Remus is trying, after three decades of sleeping together, to mark something new, to ritualize tonight as something different. He doesn’t understand why, entirely. So, for some inexplicable reason, he just asks.
Remus comes to sit next to him on the bed, his pyrotechnic scavenger hunt momentarily paused. Their thighs touch, and Remus reaches for his hand. “Do you know what I want?” he asks. “I want my partner to know how good it feels for him to tell me he doesn’t want something. And I want to undress you, and get you under these blankets, and make love to you very, very slowly. And to do that properly, we need candles.”
Sirius isn’t sure what he feels now. Good. Gooey. Like warm chocolate cake has filled up his insides. A little queasy from the sweetness of it all. Mostly like he really wishes he’d picked up those hippogriff-shaped tapers he came across at a secondhand shop last week.
He kisses Remus. Slowly. “Moony,” he says, “my love. We don’t need candles. We have wands.” And as if to demonstrate, he pulls his and wordlessly conjures a small flame from the tip.
Remus looks at him as if he’s just invented fire itself. Then he summons a glass bowl from the kitchen and fills it with water from his own wand and it takes a few minutes, but by the time he is done, three small lotus flowers are floating in the bowl, each carrying a tiny flame on the tip of every petal.
Finally satisfied with his work, Remus kneels in front of Sirius and begins removing his socks with a slow tenderness that Sirius, half-hard from watching Remus, has to fight his instincts not to completely ignore and just pull Remus on top of him. He resists, and is rewarded with a small, chaste kiss to the top of each newly exposed ankle.
“Up,” Remus says, urging Sirius to lift himself off the bed so Remus can begin to remove his trousers. “Off,” he indicates at Sirius’s t-shirt with a flick of the fabric.
Sirius eagerly undresses and would comment on the disparity in the levels of proportional nudity if he didn’t relish the feeling of his bare skin against the rough texture of Remus’s corduroys or the slightly dominated feeling of being so exposed when Remus is not. There’s something to that too, obviously, but Sirius will think about that later.
When Sirius is stripped down completely, Remus climbs on top of him, boxing him in. He kisses Sirius again, but it’s less urgent now, just a ghost of lips on lips. When Sirius tries to deepen the kiss, Remus pulls away with a coquettish smile. He offers an outstretched hand to Remus, who takes it only to be pulled up to standing, where Remus kisses him again before moving to pull down the quilt and the sheets below it. He gestures for Sirius to climb in.
“My, my,” Sirius says, happily tucking himself under the blankets, “what a gentleman.”
Remus rolls his eyes as he quickly removes his own clothing and climbs into the bed after him, propping himself up on one elbow and suddenly, the atmosphere is strikingly tender. Remus looks down at Sirius’s naked body and lets out a slow, shuddering breath.
“You’re lovely,” Remus says. “Just lovely.”
It’s such a marked divestment from all the old endearments Sirius got used to hearing, all the “you’re so fucking fit” and “you’re hot as hell, tell me you’re single” and “where’d you get this body, the Louvre?” (fine, that one was only said to him once, but it stuck). Sirius’s body now is older, scarred and worn, beginning to wrinkle in places he hadn’t realized one could wrinkle. And he realizes, as Remus’s eyes scan down his body, occasionally accompanied by a stroke of his finger over Sirius’s bellybutton or a small kiss to Sirius’s sternum, that the change is not at all unwelcome. His abs are now comfortably nestled behind a layer of fat, tucked away behind Remus’s nourishing stews and Molly’s irresistible treacle tart. His chest is protected by the same salt-and-pepper hair he has everywhere now, an increasingly dense thicket that Remus loves to nuzzle with his freshly shaven face.
Sirius brings his hand up to cup Remus’s cheek, and Remus leans into it, shutting his eyes and letting out a contented hum.
“Kiss me,” Sirius says again. Remus is still smiling when their mouths meet, so their teeth clash a little against each other, which only gives them an excuse to open their mouths wider, inviting each other in.
Slowly, Remus climbs back on top of Sirius, kissing him all the while, and uses the hand not cupping the back of Sirius’s neck to urge his legs open. He reaches gently between them and runs one finger up the cleft of Sirius’s ass, stopping at his opening to apply just the smallest bit of pressure. Sirius let’s out a satisfied breath.
“Does that feel good?” Remus asks.
And Sirius Black? Well, he thinks about it. And yes, yes it does, but it’s not enough, he’d like more please, so that’s exactly what he says. Remus nods and pulls away from Sirius’s mouth just long enough to summon the lube, which he warms between his fingers before he slicks up Sirius’s cock and then continues below, back down to Sirius’s hole, where he begins inserting one finger into his partner. He thrusts in and out a few times and then crooks it, just ghosting over Sirius’s prostate.
Sirius moans. “Remus,” he says. “I…that feels…” He cuts himself off, because he feels foolish, trying to speak aloud the sensation he’s regularly experienced on a near-nightly basis since his sixteenth birthday, as if it’s entirely new. But he wants to. He doesn’t know why, but he wants to.
“How does it feel, darling?” Remus asks, repeating the motion inside Sirius again with a bit more pressure. “Tell me.”
“I…” he tries again. Remus begins kissing his neck, sucking the skin just below his chin. “I don’t know. I don’t know, it just feels…God, Moony, more, please.”
Remus nods and adds a second finger, scissoring Sirius open and repeating the motion against Sirius’s prostate. Sirius whines, bucking off the bed as much as he can with Remus on top of him.
“Can I touch myself, Moony?” Sirius asks, because he normally does. One or the other of them is always asking permission, always wanting to be choked or spanked or controlled in some way. And that’s fine. That’s lovely.
But tonight, there are candles.
“Make yourself feel good, baby,” Remus says, throwing in a pet name they only use on very rare occasion because Remus himself once called it “sickeningly heterosexual”. Right now it just feels terribly erotic, just sends a shiver right down his spine and directly to his cock.
Sirius nuzzles his face into Remus’s hair as he reaches for himself, taking in the scent of generic shampoo and sweat and sex. He breathes it in deeply as he begins to stroke himself, his movement hampered by Remus’s body, which only adds to the sensation of it all. Remus adds a third finger, stretching Sirius open further and he just nods, furiously, in some sort of confirmation.
Everything is slow. The in-out of Remus’s fingers, Sirius’s hand up and down his cock, their tongues taking turns licking necks and ears and other tongues and whatever else they can reach. Remus is rutting his own erection against Sirius’s upper thigh in rhythm with his hand at Sirius’s opening, and it occurs to Sirius that at some point this should turn into sex. Actual sex, with a cock inside his ass or his mouth or some other orifice worthy of the name.
But he thinks about it. And who says they can’t fuck just like this? And also, he doesn’t want anything more. He wants to keep touching his hard cock, and he wants Remus to keep running the pads of his fingers over his prostate, and he wants to feel Remus’s cum in between his thighs. He’s fought two entire wars and spent twelve years in Azkaban and decades on top of that coming to terms with it all, and yet saying this out loud somehow feels unbearably frightening.
The room around them glows yellow-warm from the fire they made themselves, and Remus, on top of him, does truly feel like freedom.
“Moony?” he tries, his voice small.
“Yes, my love?” Remus says back, his own voice low and gravelly and fucked-out.
“What if I want us to come just like this?”
Remus stops moving and Sirius does too, and Remus looks down at him, right into his eyes, and from so close the glow of each individual frame is reflected in his pupils. Remus smiles again, something a bit awestruck, and uses his free hand to stroke the side of Sirius’s face.
“Then we’ll come just like this,” he says.
They’re moving again, hands on bodies and bodies together, and it’s a long time. It’s an hour, maybe, although probably not. They waver between moaning each other’s names and making no noise at all, just listening to the sounds of their bodies together and the flames wicking at the end of each paper flower. It feels good. It feels spectacularly good, but it’s nothing momentous, nothing mind-blowing or upending. Just them, and two bodies, and three candles made from nothing, and choices.
As Sirius nears his orgasm he asks Remus to increase his pace against Sirius’s prostate. He asks Remus to kiss him, again. He tries to wrap his own hand around Remus’s cock and, failing that, cups his balls instead, warming them in his palm and feeling them begin to pull up and into his body.
“You feel so good, Moony,” is the last thing Sirius says before he comes. Remus holds him through it, removing his fingers only when the last shocks of pleasure have left his body. He kisses Sirius deeply and readjusts himself, using Sirius’s cum and the friction of their bellies together to bring himself to climax, which he rides through with his head tucked safely under Sirius’s chin.
They lay there for several moments, stroking whatever skin is accessible to their wandering fingers. Sirius says they should probably blow out the flames before they fall asleep like this and light the whole building on fire, and Remus concurs, reluctantly.
They reposition themselves in bed, Remus spooning Sirius and Sirius placing several kisses to Remus’s forearm, just as they’ve done countless nights before.
“Are you here?” Remus asks quietly, as they settle in for sleep. And Sirius doesn’t know – because where the fuck else would he be? – but he sure would like to be here. Here is an awfully beautiful place.
“Yeah,” he says. He doesn’t know if it’s true. But it feels good to say it anyway.