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Title: They Blind the Stars
Author: Evandar
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance
Pairings: Sirius/Remus
Warnings: Slytherin!Sirius, brief thoughts of suicide
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and am making no profit from this story.
Summary: Sirius doesn’t hope for a lot out of life, but he does hope for this. He hopes that Remus will give him the chance to find out if he’s exactly as wonderful as Sirius thinks he is.
Author's Notes: This was written for this year's![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
rs_games, for prompt 47: Tithonus by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Thanks as always, go to my wonderful beta S, and to R for being an excellent sounding board. This fic started as a single line, thought of in the middle of the night and then mulled over for almost the entire writing period. I'm not sure where the Slytherin!Sirius bit came from, but I quite like it.
"A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renew'd.
Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the gloom,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire."
He waits for Remus at the top of the astronomy tower.
He hasn’t needed astronomy classes since he was about six. With the family tradition of naming children for celestial bodies, the history of the Blacks is written in the night sky. He can peer up into the dark and find ancestors from the last thousand years, if he wants, all of them twinkling with cold light.
He doesn’t want. The stars are about as distant as his family, and despite all the things he knows about them, he doesn’t care much for them. (His namesake, the first Sirius, died in childhood when one of his cousins pushed him from a broom. The monsters in his family far outnumber the stars they’re all named for.) Hogwarts’ astronomy classes had been an exercise in boredom before he’d managed to drop it – and he’d done then much as he is doing now. Not…not the waiting for Remus part, but staring up into the dark and at the gaps between stars and the possibilities held there.
The Remus part is new. It’s still raw and tender; little more than glances exchanged across the Great Hall and notes slipped between simmering cauldrons.
He rests a hand on the parapet, scraping the fine leather of his glove over the rough stone. He hauls himself up so that he’s standing right on the edge. His toes are poking out over the abyss, and with the wind lifting his cloak and his hair and tugging at his scarf, and with the stars so bright…it would be so easy to step out into the night. He’s tempted – he can’t deny that he is; it would solve so much – but he doesn’t. His feet remain still.
The wind pushes and pulls and steals his breath, but he doesn’t move.
He wants to know if Remus will actually turn up.
He doesn’t know for sure. He wants, more than anything, for Remus to come. He needs - and it’s not just because of Remus’ shy smile or his strange golden eyes. It’s not even because of his gentle, lilting accent or the way he answers questions in class with a bowed head and obvious intelligence. It is all of that, of course, because those are the things Sirius adores about him, but it’s also because of the freedom of it. Remus is freedom. Remus is a similar sort of freedom as a free-fall from the tower, albeit with a (hopefully) better ending.
Sirius doesn’t hope for a lot out of life, but he does hope for this. For Remus.
“Black? Um, Sirius?”
Sirius is very, very careful as he turns around. For all of his earlier temptation, he doesn’t really want to fall. He wants, instead, to see Remus haloed by dim, golden light from the doorway. He jumps down onto solid stone and smiles his very best smile – not the smirk he’s practised until perfect, but the one that Regulus says makes him look dashing in certain lights (in most other lights, his delightful brother claims, it makes him look like he’s about to bite). He just hopes that starlight is flattering.
“Remus,” he says. “Hi.” There’s a brief struggle as the things he’s been thinking try to work their way out of his mouth against his will. He swallows them. He ducks his head and scratches the back of his neck, and when he looks back up, Remus is still there. Still beautiful and golden and - “the sun is the closest star; the one that keeps us alive”.
He’s holding his wand, of course. Remus is smart, and certainly by now he knows never to trust a Slytherin; never to meet one unarmed, particularly somewhere out of bounds in the middle of the night. Sirius is, of course, the exception to that particular rule (most of the time; for Remus he will be) but Remus doesn’t know that yet so the sight of his drawn wand doesn’t offend.
Actually, it’s a little reassuring. It means that Remus has been paying enough attention to the whispers in the halls to know that all is not well in the house of snakes.
Sirius holds up his hands. “I don’t bite,” he says.
Remus eyes him warily, then makes up his mind. He snorts almost derisively and tucks his wand up his sleeve, and he steps out to join Sirius in the darkness. “That’s not what I’ve heard,” he says.
Sirius wracks his brain. Remus can’t possibly know about that, the Animagus transformation, so… “Snape deserved it, I assure you,” he says.
And it’s true. No one, no one, threatens Remus. Not on Sirius’ watch. Not even if Snape’s werewolf theory looks a lot more accurate now, with the light from the doorway giving Remus’ pupils an unholy green sheen. He’s not sure Remus knows that it’s happening; given how ridiculous it looks when paired with his sceptical expression, Sirius can only assume he doesn’t.
“Fine,” he says. “I won’t bite you. Or hex you for that matter. I’ll pretend to be a nice person and so on, so forth, and if you could kindly ignore all evidence to the contrary, it would be much appreciated.”
He’s fairly sure that the ensuing laughter is at him rather than with him, but he’s willing to take what he can get. It’s an icebreaker at least.
Talking to Remus privately, he’s beginning to realise, is very different from working with him in Potions. Remus is less confident in Potions than he is here, standing on top of the tower with the wind and the darkness howling around them. Here, in the night, Remus has a strange sort of power that makes Sirius’ heart pound far more than his earlier thoughts of jumping.
“I think I love you,” he blurts out.
Remus’ laughter fades and his earlier sceptical expression returns full force, but there’s a flush on his cheeks that wasn’t there before, and Sirius forces himself to move. To take the plunge, as it were. He steps forward, closer to the centre of the tower and closer to Remus.
“At least, there are things I love about you,” he continues, trying his best to sound as if this is exactly how he wanted their meeting to go. (He’s become good at pretending he’s less impulsive than he is; it’s a necessary survival tactic in the House of Black as well as in Slytherin.) He’s fairly sure that Remus sees straight through him, but he continues anyway.
There’s not much to lose, really, except for everything.
“And I’d like a chance to find other things to love about you,” he says, “until there’s nothing else left, and I love you more than anything.”
Remus is definitely blushing now. He’s as flustered as he gets when something goes wrong in class and he doesn’t know where to look, and it’s adorable. Sirius steps closer.
It’s not until they’re inches apart that Remus looks at him. His eyes are gleaming green and glittering strangely, and looking up at him like this, Sirius feels like he’s star gazing again.
“You… You aren’t joking,” Remus says after a moment.
“Deadly Sirius,” Sirius says, fully aware that the top of the astronomy tower isn’t the best place to start making puns, but he wants to hear Remus laugh again. Even if it is at him. And, stupidly, it works.
For a devastating moment as he laughs, Remus’ eyes close. But then they open again and reveal whole new galaxies of opportunity, and Sirius could swear that his heart skips a beat. He is, privately, a terrible romantic. He feels like he should be doing something terrible to make up for it (an ingrained instinct), but he can’t think. He can’t move. He can’t breathe because Remus is so close and so brilliant, and he’s not looking at Sirius like he’s just dropped off the moon anymore.
“You’re terrible,” Remus tells him. But even as he says it, he raises a hand to touch the ends of Sirius’ hair where they’re tangled over his green and silver scarf. “Really, truly awful. But. I think. Um.”
He fills the awkward pause with a crooked, sharp-toothed smile that both melts Sirius’ heart and make him glad he didn’t ask Remus to meet him on the night of the full moon.
“I think I can pretend you’re a good person long enough to give you a chance to become one,” he says. “If that’s what you want.”
“That’s…yeah. What I want. I mean. Yes.”
There’s a little part of him that sounds very like his mother, screaming in the back of his mind about wasted elocution lessons, but Sirius blocks it out with ease. (His real mother would be more horrified by Remus’ blood status than Sirius’ brand new inability to speak coherently. Probably.) He’s more interested in sealing their deal; in leaning in and getting to taste Remus for the first time.
“I’m probably nothing like how you’ve imagined me,” Remus warns him last minute, his lips trembling against Sirius’ own.
“Probably,” Sirius replies. (He’d walked into this thinking that Snape was full of crap, after all; he’s not so sure now.) “But you’ll let me find that out for myself, right?”
“Right.”
Remus’ lips are, incidentally, exactly as he’d imagined them. They’re chapped and dry and incredibly warm against his own. Sirius grins into the kiss, laughs as Remus licks over his teeth, and twists his hands in Remus’ robes to pull him closer. He’s planning to spend a very long time making sure that Remus is exactly as wonderful as he thinks he is, and he knows that he’ll spend even longer making sure that he’s worthy of it.
Author: Evandar
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance
Pairings: Sirius/Remus
Warnings: Slytherin!Sirius, brief thoughts of suicide
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and am making no profit from this story.
Summary: Sirius doesn’t hope for a lot out of life, but he does hope for this. He hopes that Remus will give him the chance to find out if he’s exactly as wonderful as Sirius thinks he is.
Author's Notes: This was written for this year's
rs_games, for prompt 47: Tithonus by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Thanks as always, go to my wonderful beta S, and to R for being an excellent sounding board. This fic started as a single line, thought of in the middle of the night and then mulled over for almost the entire writing period. I'm not sure where the Slytherin!Sirius bit came from, but I quite like it."A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renew'd.
Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the gloom,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire."
He waits for Remus at the top of the astronomy tower.
He hasn’t needed astronomy classes since he was about six. With the family tradition of naming children for celestial bodies, the history of the Blacks is written in the night sky. He can peer up into the dark and find ancestors from the last thousand years, if he wants, all of them twinkling with cold light.
He doesn’t want. The stars are about as distant as his family, and despite all the things he knows about them, he doesn’t care much for them. (His namesake, the first Sirius, died in childhood when one of his cousins pushed him from a broom. The monsters in his family far outnumber the stars they’re all named for.) Hogwarts’ astronomy classes had been an exercise in boredom before he’d managed to drop it – and he’d done then much as he is doing now. Not…not the waiting for Remus part, but staring up into the dark and at the gaps between stars and the possibilities held there.
The Remus part is new. It’s still raw and tender; little more than glances exchanged across the Great Hall and notes slipped between simmering cauldrons.
He rests a hand on the parapet, scraping the fine leather of his glove over the rough stone. He hauls himself up so that he’s standing right on the edge. His toes are poking out over the abyss, and with the wind lifting his cloak and his hair and tugging at his scarf, and with the stars so bright…it would be so easy to step out into the night. He’s tempted – he can’t deny that he is; it would solve so much – but he doesn’t. His feet remain still.
The wind pushes and pulls and steals his breath, but he doesn’t move.
He wants to know if Remus will actually turn up.
He doesn’t know for sure. He wants, more than anything, for Remus to come. He needs - and it’s not just because of Remus’ shy smile or his strange golden eyes. It’s not even because of his gentle, lilting accent or the way he answers questions in class with a bowed head and obvious intelligence. It is all of that, of course, because those are the things Sirius adores about him, but it’s also because of the freedom of it. Remus is freedom. Remus is a similar sort of freedom as a free-fall from the tower, albeit with a (hopefully) better ending.
Sirius doesn’t hope for a lot out of life, but he does hope for this. For Remus.
“Black? Um, Sirius?”
Sirius is very, very careful as he turns around. For all of his earlier temptation, he doesn’t really want to fall. He wants, instead, to see Remus haloed by dim, golden light from the doorway. He jumps down onto solid stone and smiles his very best smile – not the smirk he’s practised until perfect, but the one that Regulus says makes him look dashing in certain lights (in most other lights, his delightful brother claims, it makes him look like he’s about to bite). He just hopes that starlight is flattering.
“Remus,” he says. “Hi.” There’s a brief struggle as the things he’s been thinking try to work their way out of his mouth against his will. He swallows them. He ducks his head and scratches the back of his neck, and when he looks back up, Remus is still there. Still beautiful and golden and - “the sun is the closest star; the one that keeps us alive”.
He’s holding his wand, of course. Remus is smart, and certainly by now he knows never to trust a Slytherin; never to meet one unarmed, particularly somewhere out of bounds in the middle of the night. Sirius is, of course, the exception to that particular rule (most of the time; for Remus he will be) but Remus doesn’t know that yet so the sight of his drawn wand doesn’t offend.
Actually, it’s a little reassuring. It means that Remus has been paying enough attention to the whispers in the halls to know that all is not well in the house of snakes.
Sirius holds up his hands. “I don’t bite,” he says.
Remus eyes him warily, then makes up his mind. He snorts almost derisively and tucks his wand up his sleeve, and he steps out to join Sirius in the darkness. “That’s not what I’ve heard,” he says.
Sirius wracks his brain. Remus can’t possibly know about that, the Animagus transformation, so… “Snape deserved it, I assure you,” he says.
And it’s true. No one, no one, threatens Remus. Not on Sirius’ watch. Not even if Snape’s werewolf theory looks a lot more accurate now, with the light from the doorway giving Remus’ pupils an unholy green sheen. He’s not sure Remus knows that it’s happening; given how ridiculous it looks when paired with his sceptical expression, Sirius can only assume he doesn’t.
“Fine,” he says. “I won’t bite you. Or hex you for that matter. I’ll pretend to be a nice person and so on, so forth, and if you could kindly ignore all evidence to the contrary, it would be much appreciated.”
He’s fairly sure that the ensuing laughter is at him rather than with him, but he’s willing to take what he can get. It’s an icebreaker at least.
Talking to Remus privately, he’s beginning to realise, is very different from working with him in Potions. Remus is less confident in Potions than he is here, standing on top of the tower with the wind and the darkness howling around them. Here, in the night, Remus has a strange sort of power that makes Sirius’ heart pound far more than his earlier thoughts of jumping.
“I think I love you,” he blurts out.
Remus’ laughter fades and his earlier sceptical expression returns full force, but there’s a flush on his cheeks that wasn’t there before, and Sirius forces himself to move. To take the plunge, as it were. He steps forward, closer to the centre of the tower and closer to Remus.
“At least, there are things I love about you,” he continues, trying his best to sound as if this is exactly how he wanted their meeting to go. (He’s become good at pretending he’s less impulsive than he is; it’s a necessary survival tactic in the House of Black as well as in Slytherin.) He’s fairly sure that Remus sees straight through him, but he continues anyway.
There’s not much to lose, really, except for everything.
“And I’d like a chance to find other things to love about you,” he says, “until there’s nothing else left, and I love you more than anything.”
Remus is definitely blushing now. He’s as flustered as he gets when something goes wrong in class and he doesn’t know where to look, and it’s adorable. Sirius steps closer.
It’s not until they’re inches apart that Remus looks at him. His eyes are gleaming green and glittering strangely, and looking up at him like this, Sirius feels like he’s star gazing again.
“You… You aren’t joking,” Remus says after a moment.
“Deadly Sirius,” Sirius says, fully aware that the top of the astronomy tower isn’t the best place to start making puns, but he wants to hear Remus laugh again. Even if it is at him. And, stupidly, it works.
For a devastating moment as he laughs, Remus’ eyes close. But then they open again and reveal whole new galaxies of opportunity, and Sirius could swear that his heart skips a beat. He is, privately, a terrible romantic. He feels like he should be doing something terrible to make up for it (an ingrained instinct), but he can’t think. He can’t move. He can’t breathe because Remus is so close and so brilliant, and he’s not looking at Sirius like he’s just dropped off the moon anymore.
“You’re terrible,” Remus tells him. But even as he says it, he raises a hand to touch the ends of Sirius’ hair where they’re tangled over his green and silver scarf. “Really, truly awful. But. I think. Um.”
He fills the awkward pause with a crooked, sharp-toothed smile that both melts Sirius’ heart and make him glad he didn’t ask Remus to meet him on the night of the full moon.
“I think I can pretend you’re a good person long enough to give you a chance to become one,” he says. “If that’s what you want.”
“That’s…yeah. What I want. I mean. Yes.”
There’s a little part of him that sounds very like his mother, screaming in the back of his mind about wasted elocution lessons, but Sirius blocks it out with ease. (His real mother would be more horrified by Remus’ blood status than Sirius’ brand new inability to speak coherently. Probably.) He’s more interested in sealing their deal; in leaning in and getting to taste Remus for the first time.
“I’m probably nothing like how you’ve imagined me,” Remus warns him last minute, his lips trembling against Sirius’ own.
“Probably,” Sirius replies. (He’d walked into this thinking that Snape was full of crap, after all; he’s not so sure now.) “But you’ll let me find that out for myself, right?”
“Right.”
Remus’ lips are, incidentally, exactly as he’d imagined them. They’re chapped and dry and incredibly warm against his own. Sirius grins into the kiss, laughs as Remus licks over his teeth, and twists his hands in Remus’ robes to pull him closer. He’s planning to spend a very long time making sure that Remus is exactly as wonderful as he thinks he is, and he knows that he’ll spend even longer making sure that he’s worthy of it.
