InsaneJournal

[FIC] Place Out of Time: Remus/Sirius
Originally Posted Here on 31 August 2006

Title: Place Out of Time
Recipient: atlantis_quill
Author: theenginedriver
Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Rating: NC-17



The muezzins were calling the men of the ancient city to prayer as Sirius and Remus inspected their tiny rented room. Remus’s broken Arabic and Sirius’s Parisian-accented French had secured them a room by the sea – “At least it won’t be as bloody hot as the rest of this city,” Remus had reasoned – and with a single window overlooking the long crescent curve of the beach. Something in their mannerisms – or perhaps it had been the faltering way Remus had counted out the star-shaped coinage of the Islamic Magical Republic – had resulted in a single mattress, covered with one thin white sheet. Sirius ran his fingers down the red adobe wall and watched Remus circle the room like an animal caught in a cage.

They ate dinner down the street from the room. A woman in a long black hijab served them wordlessly, and they ate whatever she set before them. Sirius watched Remus eat: quickly, as if he had not had a proper meal in a long time. They hadn’t seen each other for nearly a month prior to Dumbledore informing them both – separately, and by owl, for he was perpetually absent as well – that he wanted them to travel to this broken-down city on the northern coast of Africa and make contact with some wizards and witches who could be useful to the Order.

As they ate, Remus flipped through the stack of correspondence that they had collected on their journey from Britain. “Our presence is going to be noted in the city,” he said eventually.

Sirius twirled his spoon in the remains of his soup and watched the girl serving the food. She had long, slender fingers and wide, dark eyes. After a moment, he noticed Remus looking at him and asked, “Is that a problem?”

Remus’s eyes flicked to the girl, then back to Sirius. “I don’t know.” He frowned and flipped through the letters again, faster this time, as if he wasn’t reading the labels. “Depends on who notices it.”

Sirius shrugged and dropped the spoon, motioning to the girl. “Do we pay you?” he asked her in French. She shrugged and indicated a number with her fingers. Sirius reached into his pocket, but Remus was faster. He pulled out a wide range of Muggle currency and asked the girl something in Arabic. She answered slowly and Remus smiled and handed her two pounds sterling.

“Muggle money here,” Remus reminded him, and Sirius shrugged again and lapsed into silence. He never used Muggle money, barely understood the denominations; Remus or, later, Lily had always taken care of it if they went into a Muggle establishment. Left to his own devices most of the time now, Sirius just avoided going anyplace where he would reveal his ignorance. The girl left them and returned with two cups of tea. Remus smiled at her and thanked her in Arabic, and Sirius nodded to her and echoed Remus’s words as best he could.

After she walked away, Remus took a long sip of tea and tipped forward in his chair. “We should save our money anyway,” he said, as if continuing the conversation they had scrupulously been avoiding since seeing their rented room. “I think we’ll have to rent camels tomorrow.”

“Are you joking?” Sirius asked without conviction. The tea was already cold, and bitterer than he liked.

“If Aditha lives outside of the city…”

“Hell,” Sirius said. He stood up and shoved his chair back. “If I have to ride on a camel tomorrow, I’m going to bed.”

Remus looked up at him and held out the letters. “Aren’t you going to read these?”

“Why?” Sirius asked. “I trust you.” For a second, he even believed himself. He turned towards the door, throwing over his shoulder: “See you later.”


It was close to two in the morning. The sheets tangled, burning and sticky, around Sirius’s long legs; a torpid, humid breeze blew in through the open window from the sea. Salt air hung in the room, heavy on Sirius’s sweat-drenched body. He opened his eyes for the thousandth time and gave up on trying to sleep.

Beside him, Remus lay on his side, curled into a ball and shirtless. He had somehow made it to their room before Sirius – who had gone wandering in the closing stalls of the market for a few minutes – and had been asleep when Sirius got there. His hair stuck dark to his forehead and cheeks and he made little whistling sounds every time he took a deep, sleeping breath.

Sirius decided now that he hated Remus, and decided to compose a list of reasons why. He hated the way he slept, the way he breathed, the way his long hair clung to his sharp cheekbones. He hated that he wanted to reach out and touch his face, smooth his hair back and wipe away the sweat with his own damp hand.

Sirius hated the way that Remus could appear and disappear in his life effortlessly. Sirius hated the way he felt when Remus left: he was haunted by shadows and transient himself, empty, as if he could be blown away by the slightest breeze. But the thing that he hated the most, more than any of the things he’d just listed in his head, was the way he felt when Remus came back: off-balance, uncomfortable, and vaguely discontented. He felt that way now, only worse, because Remus’s bony knees dug into his side and Remus’s breath, smelling faintly of spices and tea, was too warm on his shoulder.

Sirius rolled away, trying to find a cool space on the tiny mattress, and shut his eyes. He and Remus hadn’t shared a mattress since they were sixteen and James had dumped a cauldron of shrinking potion all over Remus’s bed. Sirius didn’t like to think about it, but he suspected that the reason it hadn’t happened since – because there had certainly been plenty of nights when it would have made sense for Remus just to fall into Sirius’s bed, stumbling home drunk after a night at the pub or tired after a long patrol for the Order – had a lot to do with the fact that they had woken up the next morning with one of Remus’s arms wrapped tightly around Sirius’s hips and Sirius’s very hard cock pressed into Remus’s leg.

Outside the window, a dog howled. There were whispered voices and the sound of feet running on the beach; Sirius listened and attempted to silently disentangle his legs from the sheets. Remus snuffled behind him, shifting, and his knees dug further into Sirius’s back. They were very sharp against his spine. The voices on the beach faded. Sirius thought about the beautiful girl in the shop and slipped a hand under the waistband of his pyjama trousers. He was already half-hard, and as he wrapped his fingers around his cock and jerked up once, hard, he wondered if he would wake Remus. He concentrated on the girl and tried to be quiet. He’d wanked off to thoughts of Remus before – notably for several weeks after the sleeping-in-the-same-bed incident, but also during the terrible year known as seventeen when he’d wanked off to everything including, on the most depressing Christmas Day of his life, a wireless broadcast of the Queen’s speech – but not for years.

“Padfoot?”

Sirius rolled onto his stomach violently and nearly fell off the mattress. After a moment to enjoy his wounded dignity, during which he quietly extracted his hand from his trousers, he said, very precisely, “Fuck.”

“Did I startle you?” Remus asked. His voice was hoarse and sleepy. Sirius felt him roll onto his back and sit up on the mattress. “I heard someone on the beach, I thought.”

“Dunno,” Sirius mumbled. “Guess I was drifting.”

There were several moments of silence. Nothing moved in the room until Sirius rolled over again. The sheets formed knots around his thighs. “See anything?” Sirius asked, tilting his head up to look at Remus.

He sat as still as a marble sculpture. Where an artist would have captured the entirety of his body, all Sirius could take in were the details. Remus was silhouetted in the window, his still profile outlined in black against the moonless, starry sky. Sirius could see the gentle rise and fall of his chest, the slight opening of his mouth, the way that shadows pooled under his eyes and around his sharply delineated collarbone.

“No,” Remus murmured. He raised a thin, muscular arm and rubbed at his eyes. “Hearing things. Too fucking hot to sleep properly.”

“Yeah,” Sirius said. He shut his eyes and wondered how hard Remus would punch him if he tried to make a move. “Me too.”

Remus slumped back against the wall and said, “Want to talk?”

“About what?”

“Dunno.” Sirius could feel the shrug ripple down the mattress. “How about that Quidditch World Cup? I thought England had a shot this year, but I guess…”

“Go to hell,” Sirius muttered. He felt Remus laugh wearily and he opened his eyes and regarded the curve of Remus’s naked hip, rising above his pyjama bottoms. “How about you?” he snapped. “Where have you been this past month?”

“Oh, you know,” Remus said, his voice no longer sleepy at all. “Around.”

“You don’t write,” Sirius said sulkily. “You don’t keep up the rent on your flat either.”

There was a brief pause, and then Remus said, “I don’t have the money for that.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Sirius snapped. “I told you to move in with me.”

“And I told you that I wouldn’t accept charity.”

“It wouldn’t be charity.” Sirius gave up, switched his mouth onto automatic, waited for the familiar argument to roll over him until the morning came. He did not mention the night he’d spent sitting in Remus’s deserted flat a week ago, smelling Remus’s old blood from the last full moon and waiting for a sign that Remus was alive.

But instead of arguing back, Remus didn’t say anything for a long time. Sirius felt him breathing, faster than normal, and he started to sit up. Remus’s hand pressed flat on his back stopped him. The touch lasted barely a second, before Remus jerked his hand away, but it knocked the wind out of Sirius’s lungs anyway. “That’s what I worry about, Padfoot,” Remus said suddenly. “It wouldn’t be charity to you, would it? And I wouldn’t want to think it was, either.”

Sirius paused, decided to tread carefully. “We’re best mates.” The words sounded weird in his mouth, probably because the last time he’d said them he was seventeen, sloshed, and convinced of his own invincibility. Now the words echoed up through the years, sounding far rustier than their three years of disuse would suggest.

“Right,” Remus said. He sounded uncertain. “Best mates.” The echo came again, in a lower tenor, and faded away, a false note in the thick darkness.

They sat that way in silence for a long time. The sea air continued to roll in, heavy and salty. Eventually, Sirius started to drift off, his exhaustion finally overcoming him.

Then Remus said, “I don’t want it to be this way between us anymore, Sirius.”

Coming awake, Sirius pushed himself up off his chest and sat up. He crossed his legs so that they were facing each other. There was a brief moment of confusion, and then he yanked the sheet away from his feet and threw it onto the ground before looking at Remus’s face. There was something vulnerable there that hadn’t been around at seventeen either. Sirius wondered how long he’d been avoiding looking into Remus’s eyes. It felt long enough to span his entire life.

“Then don’t make it this way anymore,” he said evenly. They’d always had the ability to do this: to carry on conversations through vast spaces of silence, even if that silence had sometimes been so complete that the words existed only in looks and gestures. It was a form of mind reading, maybe, the kind that comes from a strange, almost serendipitous closeness, and the people who spent the most time around them – or rather, had spent the most time around them, before the war against Voldemort had intensified – had always found it to be eerie.

Sirius didn’t. To him, any form of communication with Remus felt just right.

There was another noise on the beach. Remus rocketed up onto his knees and looked out the window.

“It’s nobody,” Sirius said. Without thinking, he put a hand on Remus’s arm. “Just kids playing on the beach.”

Remus looked down at Sirius’s hand. Sirius watched him look, a sudden knowingness surrounding the intensity of Remus’s gaze. Then Remus lunged forward, his hands grabbing Sirius’s shoulders through his sweat-soaked shirt. He simultaneously shoved Sirius backwards into the mattress and kissed him, hard and on the mouth, all teeth and tongue and bruising pressure. Sirius reacted instinctively, grabbing onto Remus and shoving back. They flailed a moment, clutching at each other as they teetered on the edge of the bed, and then they tumbled to the floor. They rolled once, Sirius coming to rest atop Remus with their legs tangled and the fingers of one hand buried in the soft hair at the back of Remus’s neck. Remus froze, no motion but his chest heaving, while Sirius stared down at him with wide eyes.

“Fuck, Moony,” Sirius said eventually. “You could have said something. Given a bloke some warning.”

Remus shrugged, which took some effort from his position pinned beneath Sirius. He slid his hands away from Sirius’s shoulders, down his sides and to his hips, a light, questioning touch. “There’s your warning.” Sirius exhaled violently, and Remus slipped his hands between them and under the loose elastic of Sirius’s pyjamas. “Fair enough?”

“Right,” Sirius gasped. He buried his face in Remus’s neck and dragged his tongue roughly across his sweaty skin. “Fair enough.”

Remus made a growling, mewling noise in the back of his throat and arched up. He was hard enough that Sirius saw stars when their bodies met. Remus’s hand twisted out of his trousers and went for the waistband. “Off,” Remus said, yanking down.

“Yeah, ok, yeah,” Sirius said, out of breath. He stopped, wanting to keep clutching at Remus but unable to take off his trousers without moving away. “Uh, Moony, how?”

Remus rolled his eyes and shoved Sirius off, somehow rolling with him so that he wound up straddling Sirius’s side. He expertly undid the pyjama tie with one hand and then paused.

“What are you waiting for?” Sirius’s heart was pounding, he was dizzy, and the floor was hard and uncomfortable. He wanted Remus to take control, to issue commands, to give Sirius the opportunity to follow them. He wanted Remus to exercise the power he had over him.

Remus hesitated instead. “Are you sure about this?”

Sirius took a shaky breath. “Do I seem unsure?”

“It’s just…” Remus’s fingers grazed over Sirius’s hard cock, a touch separated only by thin pyjamas. “Have you ever done this before?” Sirius managed, somehow, to look insulted. “Not what I meant, idiot,” Remus said gently. “With another… man?”

“Why, have you?”

Remus winced. “A few, yeah.”

“You didn’t tell me?”

“So I could be endlessly tormented about my shirtlifting ways?”

“So I could be the one you were doing it with!” Sirius snapped.

Remus gave him a look of complete disbelief. “Are you jealous? Are we actually having this conversation now?” His hand squeezed Sirius’s hip for emphasis.

“What in hell… do you think…” Sirius gave up on words and tried to articulate what he meant by grabbing Remus and dragging him down for a long, hard kiss. Remus followed so willingly that Sirius thought he must be doing something right. They managed to kick off their pyjama trousers and, with a bit of effort and more separation than Sirius liked, they made it back onto the bed. Remus collapsed on top of him and covered his neck and chest with gentle, teasing kisses. Sirius clutched at his back and hair and neck, terrified that too much time had passed, that he couldn’t reclaim what four years of being stupid, four years of being blind to what was in front of him…

“You’re thinking too much,” Remus said, hovering over Sirius in the dark and bending down to kiss his mouth. “Stop that.” Sirius didn’t respond, and Remus tugged his fingers through his hair and down his cheek. “I mean it. Stop thinking.” He paused with Sirius’s chin cupped in the palm of his hand and stroked his thumb across Sirius’s lips. He had a tender look on his face that Sirius had never seen before. “I’ll still be here in the morning. We can sort it all out then.”

“This isn’t charity,” Sirius mumbled. He reached up and took Remus’s hand, drawing his fingers into his mouth and sucking, pulling them back into his mouth and dragging his tongue across them. Remus went slightly glassy-eyed and Sirius released his hand. “And didn’t you say something about camels in the morning?”

“We are not,” Remus said, reaching across Sirius to something at the foot of the bed, “discussing camels.” He stretched back, wand in hand.

“I know the spell,” Sirius said quickly. He placed his hand on Remus’s so that they were holding the wand together. “Know of it, anyway.”

Remus placed his free hand on Sirius’s thigh. Everything that happened next happened very fast. They uttered the spell together, Remus kneeling over Sirius, between his spread legs, as if he were there to worship – Remus’s hands clenched rough and possessive on the inside of Sirius’s thighs – the terrifyingly wide gulf of need suddenly opened up inside of Sirius – Remus leaned over him, his mouth on Sirius’s neck, whispering something that might not have been in English but that Sirius understood anyway. Then Remus dipped his hand lower, cupping Sirius’s balls before sliding back further – Remus’s fingers, two of them, sliding up and inside of Sirius –

“Does that hurt?” Remus panted. Without waiting for an answer, he curled his fingers suddenly upward. Sirius arched half off the bed.

“I’ve gotten farther than this with women,” Sirius gasped, not to be outdone.

Remus withdrew his fingers, leaned down, and nuzzled Sirius’s stomach, not saying anything. Sirius grabbed for his other hand and squeezed tightly. “You probably have,” Remus said, “but they weren’t as good as I am.”

“Cheeky bastard,” Sirius said. “And a fucking tease, what are you waiting for?”

“Sirius,” Remus murmured, mouthing the line of Sirius’s hip. He sounded dreamy, like all he could see was Sirius spread open in front of him and not the encroaching lines of reality that threatened his edges. “Sirius, I want to be inside of you.”

Sirius swallowed hard. “All right.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes… I think so…”

Remus raised his head and gave him a long look.

“It’s a big decision, all right?” Sirius snapped. Remus frowned. “I mean, sure,” Sirius added, dangerously close to babbling, “it seems like I might have already made that decision, but the jokes that James will make about this…”

“Ah, right,” Remus said. “I forget that as soon as we’re done here you’ll be up and writing James a graphically detailed letter.”

“Maybe,” Sirius said defensively. “He’s been suggesting that I jump you for years, all in jest of course, but still, there’s something there, you know, something he must have seen…”

“He also spent half of sixth year suggesting that I jump Snivellus,” Remus said, raising an eyebrow. “James’s suggestions are not always to be taken.”

“This one probably was,” Sirius said. “Lily got in on it too.” He paused, quit joking, composed himself. His heart fluttered against his ribcage; things much lower throbbed in unison. “Yes, Moony. I mean it.” He was scared – terrified even – of what this meant, but Remus had him by the hands and the hips and the mouth and they were in it together, they were going to do this together, so how could it be bad?

Remus sat up abruptly and leaned back against the wall, legs out in front of him. “I think this might be easier…” he suggested, tugging on Sirius until he sat up too and straddled Remus’s hips. He balanced on his knees over Remus’s erect cock and kissed Remus’s neck, his hands shaking where he held Remus by the shoulders.

“Padfoot,” Remus asked, laughing suddenly, “when did this stop being just casual sex?”

Sirius took a deep breath and wrapped one hand around Remus’s cock. Looking him full in the eye, he said, “Darling, this was never just casual sex.” He gritted his teeth and sank all the way down Remus’s length. It seemed to take years to feel Remus’s legs beneath him, years to take all of Remus inside of him. “Fuck,” he added, feeling Remus’s hands clench around his hips and Remus’s cock flex inside of him, “this had better not be casual, because that – fucking –”

Remus shifted beneath him – inside of him – and buried his face in Sirius’s neck. “It’s not,” he breathed. “Padfoot, it’s not, it’s not.” He shifted again, a shallow thrust, and Sirius moaned and ground down to meet him.

Somehow they wound up lying across the bed horizontally, Sirius’s legs wrapped around Remus’s waist and his neck arched off the edge of the mattress. Remus covered him, hot and heavy and real and finally there. When Sirius opened his eyes he could see the Southern Cross through the window, as if he’d needed further confirmation that they were in unfamiliar territory. Above him Remus was tender with his hands and mouth, but the hard rhythm between their hips left Sirius dizzy with the knowledge that it was a man, that it was Remus fucking him into the mattress.

And even when Sirius had come, and lay in a boneless, dazed state, and Remus thrust erratically into him once, twice, and once more before collapsing atop him, even then, things seemed too strange – and wonderful – to be true.