Chapter Text
Remus goes into town while Sirius stays behind to help Mrs. Lupin with…whatever other chores she plans on doing. Remus barely pays attention to the polite conversation they have with his mother in the kitchen after the two of them shower (separately). He wheels his bicycle out of the garage and looks back at the house, at the window of his bedroom. It looks like a window, and Remus doesn’t know why he feels surprised, as if there ought to be some kind of visible clue to represent what has happened in that room. A neon sign, perhaps. He swings one narrow leg over the banana seat of the bike and pedals down the street, away from the house and his mother and Sirius.
Paul is sat with her feet up on the counter, reading a book and wearing her famous dungarees inside the box office when Remus clatters into the cinema’s lobby. Jo must be working in the projection box during today’s screenings. Paul glances over the top of the book and, seeing that it’s Remus, tilts forward in her chair.
“Hey,” she says. “I thought Jo told me you weren’t scheduled today?”
“Yeah, I know. I’ll pay for my ticket, don’t worry,” Remus replies wryly. “Can I leave my bike here in the lobby?”
Paul shrugs and folds down the corner of the page she’s on. Remus glances at the title. Cables to Rage. “Sure. Where’s your mate? The handsome one who’s absolutely not queer,” she adds as she walks out from behind the booth.
Remus feels his cheeks go warm. “Er. Actually, I think I might have to amend my previous statement regarding…that situation.”
A look of realization passes over Paul’s face and her eyes go wide, mouth dropping open in a wide grin. “Jo owes me five quid.”
“I can’t stand you two,” Remus says, trying not to smile.
Paul leans over and takes Remus’ hand in hers. Her dark eyes, always earnest, look particularly sincere to him as she says, softly, “Are you happy?”
Remus considers. “I think so?” He sighs. “I’m not quite sure what’s going on. He just…showed up. Again. And he kissed me, and I kissed him back, and we…fooled around. And I liked it.” His voice shrinks into a barely-audible whisper. “Before, it was all theoretical, like — like maybe if I met the right girl, these feelings would go away, yeah? But now I know for sure. And that frightens me.”
Paul’s face is soft with emotion; if Remus didn’t know better, he would think that he could see tears in her eyes. “It’s alright if you’re frightened. I was, too, when I kissed a woman for the first time. I still get scared a lot of the time, but now I have Jo to shake it out of me.” She smiles and inhales deeply. “Remus, there are so many people who will disagree with this, or not believe me — people who have fought me for saying it — but being a homosexual is one of the best things that ever happened to me. Not to say that it’s all a laugh, but sometimes you can learn to love the things you used to hate about yourself, or the things that people will want you to hate.” She turns around, picks up the Audre Lorde book. “Things are changing, Remus — maybe not fast enough, but they are. D’you think I would have believed you if you told me when I was seventeen that someday I would be out in the open, reading poetry written by another black lesbian? Good poetry, too. None of that shite I was writing in my diary.” She squeezes Remus’ hand. “While you’re here, you may as well help me clean up the soda that some old codger spilled over there.”
Remus scrubs at the floor as Pauline fires up the popcorn machine. In the warm glow of the violently-popping apparatus, she looks beatific. Remus thinks of when he first met Jo and Paul, having wandered into the cinema one rainy afternoon when he was thirteen, drawn to the flickering neon sign outside like a moth to a flame. How he had never seen a pair of women so boyish and beautiful, Paul with her shaved head and Jo with her button-down shirt and glasses like James’, griping at each other behind the concession stand about the predictability of The Exorcist.
“I’m just saying that it’s rather typical for a teenage girl to be masturbating. I don’t think they need to hire a priest to wring it out of her. And with a cross of all things — Friedkin certainly wasn’t going for subtlety, but sure, he’s a genius. Please.”
Remus started going to the movies at least once a week after that day. He wasn’t in love with the two women in the cinema, as his father had once teased, but he was fascinated with them, their ease of movement, how they didn’t seem to like any of the movies they showed because there was always room for something better. Eventually he introduced himself to Paul one day, and they took him under their wing. They must have seen something in him, he reflects, some kind of desperation, a loneliness. Jo taught Remus how to work the projector, and by the end of the month, he couldn’t even be scared by Linda Blair’s demonic possession because he’d seen the film so many times. Jo didn’t start paying him until the summer after that, but Remus didn’t mind. He’d do it for free just for the peace and quiet of the projection box, the comfort of Jo and Paul’s companionship.
He remembers the first time he saw them kiss, after a late-night screening of American Graffiti (which, shockingly, Jo liked, if only for its soundtrack). Remus had finished his diligent sweeping of the discarded popcorn in the auditorium and walked back into the lobby to see Paul come up behind Jo, who was leaning over the counter. She wrapped her arms around the other woman’s chest, and Jo tried to shrug her off. Paul murmured something quietly, and it must have been convincing, or charming, because Jo turned her head and pressed her lips to Paul’s. As he stood in the doorway of the auditorium, push-broom in hand, Remus processed this image like every other piece of information that had ever passed through his eyes to his brain, and yet he felt struck by the radical simplicity of the act. A kiss is just a kiss, except when it can’t be. He knew that the two women lived together in the same house, an old, fairy-tale-looking structure covered in climbing ivy, and they flirted with one another in the playful, annoying-annoyed way couples flirt after having known each other for years. But to see them kiss was new, putting into words the thoughts that had been rattling around in Remus’ head for the past year or so. He wanted what they had in a way that he had never understood his parents’ romance, or even the love stories in most films. Seeing them, Remus knew, and he thought he could somehow feel his heart sink and soar at once.
He came out to them the following summer, as he was fitting the first reel of the newly-delivered Blazing Saddles print into the projector. Jo stood, observing his careful movements, eating an apple, when Remus had said it aloud: that horrible word. Jo stopped mid-bite and looked at him for a long time. Then she had swallowed and stepped forward and put her hand to Remus’ cheek and said, “Remus, there is nothing in this world that can stop you from living your best life.” She drew him into a hug. “Pauline and I are always here for you, love.”
There had been little discussion after that, but Jo and Paul would occasionally leave certain books in the knapsack Remus kept in the projection box, and they stopped censoring themselves as much when they talked about their friends. He felt a mixture of gratitude and fear all summer, turning the words over and over in his mind. Andrea started coming round, and she and Remus took walks together between screenings on slower days, where Andrea talked and talked and Remus didn’t say anything and he was glad. He thought about Sirius, and James, and the Prewitt brothers, and Cleavon Little astride his horse, and eventually he stopped feeling sick all the time, except during the moon, when the wolf seemed more vicious than ever.
Remus goes down into the basement to dump out the mop bucket, and when he clambers back up the stairs, Jo is waiting for him.
“Paul tells me you’ve got news, love,” she says.
Remus glowers at Paul, who widens her eyes apologetically at him from behind the counter as she counts a customer’s change. He follows Jo into the auditorium under the guise of helping her sweep, and he tells her, quietly. It feels strange to think that That happened only hours ago, in the mid-morning. Jo does not press for details, but instead regards him thoughtfully, with a gentleness that she rarely shows towards anything besides the projection equipment. Finally, she says, “Are you happy?”
Remus laughs. “Paul said the same thing.”
“It’s a valid question. I wasn’t,” she says with a shrug.
“How do you mean?”
“I was twenty-two. In America for the first time. Drunk for the first time. I went to confession the next day with the worst bloody hangover I think I’ve ever had. That was the last time I went to church.” She looks wistful. “Some things you need to get used to. I didn't know who I was, or what I wanted. The only thing I knew was that I had to break up with that awful boy I had waiting for me back in England.”
“You’ve dated men?” Remus is incredulous despite himself.
“Oh, sure. A lot of us have. Like I said, some things take time.” She smiles. “But I figured it out eventually, and now you have the devilishly handsome woman you see standing here before you.” She leans in towards Remus, as if to share an earth-shattering secret. “It’s okay to want. It’s okay to mess about. Just be careful, pet — with your heart and his.”
Remus stays for the next screening of Taxi Driver, though he barely pays attention (as if he needs to — at this point, he probably knows the script better than De Niro does). He thinks about how Sirius had kissed him, whether he had felt afraid, too. Whether Sirius had been aching this whole time, confused and alone, and Remus cringes at the thought. He looks up at the scene before him, awash with blood. God’s eye view. A dream sequence that isn’t a dream.
Remus hugs both Jo and Paul goodbye when he finally gathers the courage to return home to Sirius. They watch fondly as he wheels his bicycle out of the lobby.
The setting sun is warm on the back of his neck as he pedals back to his house. He can smell the seafood before he even parks the bicycle in the garage. Sirius is setting the table, carefully smoothing out the napkins and lining the silverware up just right. Remus watches him from the doorway, until Mrs. Lupin walks in and sees her son.
“Nice of you to join us for dinner, Remus,” she says drily. “Thank goodness I have Sirius here to do your chores.”
“Sorry,” Remus mumbles, not looking at Sirius.
The four of them eat dinner in relative quiet. Mr. and Mrs. Lupin chat amicably with each other, and Remus pretends not to notice the reproachful glances his mother keeps passing towards him. They have ice cream from a tub for dessert and it all feels very normal, except that, of course, it isn’t.
Remus goes upstairs to his room after helping clear the table and puts on a Billie Holiday record. His father calls it mopey music, but Remus loves it, the fragility and authenticity of her voice. He lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling, letting the record play itself out, until a face appears above him.
“Hi, Moony,” Sirius says. He sits next to Remus on the bed, and Remus wonders how many times he’s going to find himself in this exact same position.
“Hi, Pads,” Remus replies, trying to keep his voice even.
“Did you have a good day at the cinema?”
“How did you know I was there?” Remus asks, and Sirius laughs in response.
“Where else would you have gone?”
“Touché,” he mutters.
“Listen, Remus, I — ”
“Come lie down, Sirius.”
“What?” Sirius furrows his brow.
“Come lie with me,” Remus explains, rolling onto his side as if presenting the bed to him. Sirius cautiously does as he is told and settles into the space Remus leaves. Remus puts his arm around Sirius’ side, lightly running his hand over his T-shirt in a manner that he hopes seems more casual than it feels. Remus is reminded, as he often is, of the first nights that they spent together in this room, how Sirius’ body had softened into his, exhausted. Eventually, he says, “I didn’t mean to be short with you, earlier. After. We.” Across the room, the record crackles as Side A comes to an end.
“S’okay,” mumbles Sirius.
“I just — it was a lot for me. It was very good, er, but.”
“You think too much,” Sirius says, flipping onto his back so he can look at Remus. In this position, their faces are very close together. Remus doesn’t move his hand from its resting position on Sirius’ chest.
“One of us has to,” replies Remus. “And besides, you talk far too much, so we balance out.”
“Don’t start on my talking when you’re the one gossiping about the various sexualities of the Gryffindor girls in the middle of a snog. You’d be a terrible spy, you know. The enemy would just have to get you in bed and you’d be revealing all your secrets in no time.”
“Shh,” Remus says, but he’s smiling. “I don’t want this to make us any different.”
“If anything, I’d say it makes us more similar.”
“Jesus, you’re incorrigible,” Remus groans. “Sirius, I — I guess I’m just scared, because you’re one of my absolute best mates, and I don’t know who I am yet, or what I’m supposed to be, or what I really want. But I do know that what we…what we did this morning was kind of brilliant.”
“I’m scared, too, Moony,” Sirius says. “But it’s alright, ‘cause we’ve got each other. And yeah, it was all sorts of brilliant.”
Remus swallows. He thinks about Sirius in the garden that first night, how his vulnerability showed through his skin, bluer than the blood in his veins. Sirius came here, he thinks. He came here because of me. Even after this morning, it still seems preposterous to him, that someone like Sirius would go to someone like Remus in a time of need. But then, when he really thinks about it, this isn’t the first time — Sirius, in his own, strange version of emotional intimacy, has always been inclined to Remus, at least when it comes to certain things. It’s never been anything life-changing, but Sirius occasionally tries to engage Remus in conversation about topics that are perhaps more philosophical than the things he discusses with James: fear, and anger, and literature, mostly. Sirius and Remus are both angry people, for different reasons and with different outlets, and Sirius knows that, has always known that. It is the thing that has always separated them from James and Peter. Remus feels guilty for having been so fixated on figuring out Sirius’ secrets when he first arrived at the Lupins’, because, in truth, he doesn’t really need to know anything. The details don’t matter, not in this situation. If Sirius wanted to talk about it, he could, but Remus resolves to never try to force it out of him.
“You’re thinking again,” Sirius says softly. He reaches out to Remus, who can’t help but startle, though he quickly relaxes into the touch. Sirius rubs his thumb against the copper stubble on Remus’ chin.
“Do you really think I’m…?” Remus says, and he wonders if Sirius can feel his face go warm under his hand.
“Do I think you’re what? Smart? Tall? Funny?” Sirius grins and puts his hand through Remus’ hair, tousles it so it goes into Remus’ eyes. “You just want me to say you’re sexy again.”
“No, I — ”
“For the record, Monsieur Moony, I do think you’re sexy as in, sex with you would be — is lovely, but I also think you’re beautiful, as in your eyes are like the sea or some bullshit like that. Isn’t that something they’d say in one of your books?”
“I doubt Shakespeare ever used the word ‘bullshit’ in any of his sonnets,” Remus replies, trying to hide the nervous smile that plays at his mouth. He settles on biting his lower lip instead, glancing downwards.
“I mean it, Remus,” Sirius says. “I’ve always meant it.” He moves forward on the bed and presses a kiss onto Remus’ temple, right where the scar ends. “You are good,” he whispers, and Remus feels like crying because he doesn’t know what else to do with all the frightened love in his chest.
“If I’m good, then you’re better,” Remus says.
“Oi, shut up! It’s not a competition, you weirdo.” He scoffs good-naturedly. “And you think I’m the one who talks too much.” Sirius kisses Remus on the mouth then, maybe to shut him up, maybe because he wanted to, and Remus still can’t fathom it, wanting and being wanted in equal measure. How dreadful this world is, he thinks, kissing Sirius back, stroking at his long, dark hair. How strange and dreadful and yet so worth it sometimes.