Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/8456491.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Harry_Potter_-_J._K._Rowling
  Relationship:
      Sirius_Black/Harry_Potter
  Additional Tags:
      Cross-Generation_Relationship, Post-Traumatic_Stress_Disorder_-_PTSD,
      Book_5:_Harry_Potter_and_the_Order_of_the_Phoenix, Anal_Fingering, Oral
      Sex, Rough_Sex, Anal_Sex, Nipple_Play, Dirty_Talk, Sex_Magic, Marking,
      Rimming, Angst, Smut, Romance
  Collections:
      2016_Sirius_Black_Fest
  Stats:
      Published: 2016-11-21 Words: 18751
****** Face to Face ******
by RuinsPlume
Summary
     Sirius really hadn’t meant for this to happen.
Notes
     NB: Underage, crossgen (15/36; Harry is portrayed as sexually
     mature), PTSD, explicit consensual sex, including rough sex and
     bruising.
     Thanks to digthewriter for the beta; any remaining errors are mine.
     Thanks to the mods for the fest, and to my anonymous prompter for
     such a juicy setup. In addition to the prompt, which asked for this
     particular situation and set of proclivities, I also drew inspiration
     from Teland’s amazing fic “Plenary.” A few character details from
     that story are incorporated here, and are intended as homage.
See the end of the work for more notes
When the knock comes, Sirius tenses. An Azkaban tensing, his whole body gone
rigid, as if clenched muscles could ward them off. He knows perfectly well that
only Order members can find Grimmauld Place, but when the knock comes, he can’t
help thinking dementors. And that the Fidelius Charm’s been breached, that
Dumbledore is dead, and the Ministry has arrived to arrest him again.
The knocker bangs a second time, the serpent’s head falling hard against the
brass plate.
Remus isn’t due back for at least a month, and wouldn’t knock in any case. No
Order meetings have been scheduled. And it’s long past the days when Tonks or
Kingsley or Dumbledore might drop in on Sirius to see how he’s getting on.
Nowadays, how Sirius is getting on doesn’t change much, not anymore.
Wand out, he opens the door a crack.
It’s Harry. With the smell of the Knight Bus on him: cleaning spells and watery
cocoa. Sirius crushes him in a hug before Harry’s even had a chance to put his
bag down. Harry’s arms go around him in response, tightening as he presses his
head against Sirius’s neck, and Sirius feels Harry’s magic twine around him
like some kind of tropical plant: lush and growing. The ink in his tattoos
swells in response, humming at the attention.
They hug; they keep hugging. Sirius is starving for touch. He knows he should
let go of Harry and step back, but he doesn’t. Not yet. And Harry doesn’t
either, but lets his bag fall to the rug behind Sirius and pushes his head into
Sirius’ shoulder like he intends to keep it there forever.
“Glad to see me?” Sirius asks.
“So glad.” Harry still doesn’t raise his head, and his voice comes out muffled.
“Hogwarts is awful. Umbridge is a sadist, my scar hurts, everyone’s scared all
the time, and then Mrs. Weasley’s sending us all chocolate eggs like
everything’s lovely, and we’re supposed to be doing O.W.L.s, and I can’t—I just
feel—” Harry raises his head and looks up at Sirius then, his eyes bright with
something that makes Sirius’s chest ache. “Could I...Sirius, could I stay with
you for the rest of Easter hols?”
“You never have to ask that,” Sirius says, letting go of Harry and turning away
to hide what’s suddenly happening in his pants. “This is your place too.”
He stoops to pick up Harry’s bag. His arousal means nothing; he knows that.
Since he got out of Azkaban it’s been like this: body and soul so desperate to
make up for all the years of isolation that now he over-responds to even casual
touch. As if he could replenish what can never be replenished, not after so
much deprivation. He was just two days shy of his twenty-second birthday when
he was arrested. He turned twenty-two in Azkaban.
Then twenty-three.
Then twenty-four.
Then twenty-five.
Then twenty-six.
Then twenty-seven.
Then twenty-eight.
Then twenty-nine.
Then thirty.
Then thirty-one.
Then thirty-two.
Then thirty-three.
Then he escaped and was Padfoot for nine months, during which time he turned
thirty-four.
And in all those years, no one ever touched him.
Is it any wonder then, that now he gets hard the way he did at fifteen, at
nearly any provocation? Or that he grabs people in bear hugs that go on far too
long? That he still loses his temper too quickly, that he’s mercurial,
impulsive? He’s not much different now than when he went to prison. But in the
intervening years, other people’s expectations of him have changed. He’s
supposed to be different now because he’s thirty-six. Which means that Sirius
spends most of his time trapped in the gray walls of the chasm between who he
is and who he ought to be. But when he’s hugging Harry, that chasm disappears
and there is simply the feeling of being held by somebody who loves him.
Still clutching Harry’s bag, Sirius reaches out to hug him once more. Harry’s
arms snake around Sirius’s waist and squeeze and the embrace begins all over
again. And whoops, this time it’s Harry’s erection Sirius can feel against his
thigh. At least one of them has a body that behaves appropriately for its age.
Sirius lets go and steps away once again, wondering something that he’s
wondered before about Harry. But then his thoughts are interrupted by a voice
from the wall.
HALFBLOOD ABOMINATION MUGGLE FILTH IN ITS VEINS HOW DARE IT DISGRACE MY HALLWAY
HOW DARE MY OFFSPRING DEIGN TO MINGLE WITH SUCH FOULNESS
“Your mum remembers me,” Harry says, grinning.
“Shall we adjourn, then?”
Sirius offers his arm. Harry takes it, and they start down the hall.
“D’you want the room you shared with Ron last time?” Sirius asks.
“Where are you sleeping?”
“Me?” Sirius stops just inside the doorway to the library. “Well—in Remus’s
bedroom, actually. He’s not here.”
“But you’d sleep there even if he were,” Harry says, with a directness that is
altogether new.
Sirius doesn’t hesitate. He’s been waiting for this. “Especially if he were,”
he answers.
Harry lets out a sigh that sounds very much like relief. “Thanks,” he says.
“For what?”
“Not lying to me.”
Sirius sighs too, but sadly, and sits down on the sofa. “I’ve wanted to tell
you for ages, Harry. And I’m sorry I haven’t. Remus is so much more circumspect
than I am—”
“I’d noticed,” Harry puts in, with a dryness that is also new.
“—And he doesn’t like people knowing. I did make him agree that if you asked,
neither of us would lie about it.”
Harry flops down on the cushion beside Sirius and scowls. “Remus thought I’d
mind? When I don’t mind he’s a werewolf?”
“But that’s just it. He doesn’t want to give people yet another reason to treat
him like he’s contaminated. Or pity him, or fear him, or think he’s after their
children. But I think he’ll be relieved that you know.”
“Especially since...” Harry stops and looks uncomfortable.
“Yes?”
Harry opens his mouth, closes it again, sighs. He shifts his legs around on the
velvet sofa cushion, then draws his knees up under his chin.
“You can ask me anything, Harry. Or tell me anything,” Sirius says, and waits.
He’s pretty sure he knows what’s coming.
But then it doesn’t, and instead of coming out to him, Harry changes the
subject. “About where I’m sleeping,” he says, glancing toward his bag on the
carpet. “Could I have a room near you? Instead of the one I had last time? This
house—it’s a bit creepy, honestly.”
Sirius laughs. “More than a bit, I’d say. The room the girls had at Christmas
is right next to Remus’s and mine. We’ll put you there. And that way, if things
go bump in the night, or if your scar starts hurting, or anything like that,
you’ll just pound on the wall and wake me.”
“I don’t want you thinking I’m such a kid that I’d be scared of...” Harry
trails off again.
“It’s my job to protect you.” Sirius says it lightly—enough. But he means it as
much as he’s ever meant anything. Harry sees that he does and something in his
young face gives way a little. He almost looks as if he might cry. “Tell you
what,” Sirius offers. “If things go bump in the night for me—and I have Azkaban
nightmares at least once a week, so they often do bump—then I’ll wake you.
That’s fair, yeah?”
“Deal,” Harry says, and looks quite happy again.
But the bumps in the night that wake Sirius, although they come from Harry’s
side of the wall, are not a summons. The sounds are muffled, accompanied by the
creaking of an old bed frame and quick intakes of breath.
Sirius sits up in bed. He’s not dreaming: that’s Harry he’s hearing. Harry
wanking hard enough shake the bed? Merlin—
And then another voice, a male voice, low: “Yeah...”
Another boy!
“That’s it...yeah....Come on....”
It must be Ron. Sirius can picture it perfectly, the two of them crowded right
beside each other, tossing off together, Ron urging Harry on. Sirius hears
Harry’s breath come faster, and then the breaths give way to moans until one
long ragged sound pours out of Harry only to be suddenly cut off, as if he’s
buried his head in a pillow to drown out the rest of his orgasm.
Harry and Ron! Sirius was right then, and Remus was wrong. And that so rarely
happens that for a moment, Sirius is simply caught up in the thrill of Got you,
Moony! He would owl Remus right now if it weren’t forbidden. Oh, but this
iswonderful. Harry will have Sirius, and Remus too, to answer all his
questions, and teach him the special spellwork he needs to know, and he won’t
ever have to feel that he’s the only one, and—and Sirius is stroking himself
beneath the covers, bringing himself along for the ride as the creaking of the
bed on the other side of the wall becomes audible again.
“Yeah, like that....”
The voice sounds too deep for Ron’s, though. Unless, imagine Harry has fucked
Ron’s throat, fucked it so hard Ron’s hoarse from it. Sirius lets that image
wash over him as he strokes faster.
“Oh, fuck, yeah....”
Ron with his cock in Harry’s mouth, Ron with his hands gripping Harry’s wild
hair—Sirius cups himself with his other hand, cradling his balls as he strokes
and pulls himself along with them.
“Oh...oh, fuck, YES—”
A deep guttural cry from the other side of the wall, and Sirius comes too, as
if they’re touching him, as if he’s the one with his fingers locked in Harry’s
hair, Harry’s mouth around his cock, Harry swallowing him down and Sirius not
alone and fuck, he shouldn’t be wanking to this. But he already has. And he
isalone. In a big bed, with a pale pool cooling on his stomach.
He feels empty now, and cold. He cleans himself up and huddles beneath the
blanket, resting his forehead against their shared wall. It smells of damp
plaster traced with old family magic. Not at all comforting. Did Harry only
want to stay with him so he’d have a place to shag Ron Weasley? Perhaps. When
he and Moony were their age, they would have killed for an understanding
godfather with a spare room.
Sirius curls himself into a Padfoot-shaped ball. He’ll make them both breakfast
in the morning; that will make him feel better. Harry and Ron will go another
round in the morning, no doubt, and if Sirius times it right, he can come in
after they’ve finished but before they’ve gotten up, and they’ll be all flushed
from sex, embarrassed and utterly adorable. He won’t tease them, though. Or not
much, anyway.
But when Sirius knocks on the door at eleven the next morning, carrying a tray
with a pot of tea and three plates of eggs, he finds Harry alone in bed.
“Where’s Ron, then?”
Harry rubs a hand over his face and reaches for his glasses on the night stand.
His hair is even more wild than usual, and though the sheet covers most of him,
Sirius can’t help noticing that his chest is a man’s chest now, with spirals of
dark hair petaling out around each nipple, and that his nipples are a dark
shade of brownish purple—
“Ron?” Harry repeats. “At Hogwarts, last I knew.”
“Harry.” Sirius shakes himself back to the conversation and gives Harry his
best Cut-the-Bullshit look.
“What?”
“I sleep—or try to—right on the other side of that wall there, remember? And
I’m not deaf.”
“Oh, Christ.”
Harry flops back on the bed and smushes the pillow over his head. Not unlike he
did last night when he was shooting off, Sirius thinks. He sets down the tray
and waits.
“I’m sorry,” Harry says from beneath the pillow.
“Take that thing off your head. I’m not going to scold you. I’m rather tickled,
actually.”
Harry pulls away the pillow and hugs it to his chest instead, staring fixedly
at the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I didn’t realize we were
being...audible.”
“Next time cast an Imperturbable. It’s just good manners.”
Not that Sirius didn’t enjoy hearing them. But it is good manners to cast, and
it’s clearly going to be Sirius’s responsibility to teach Harry such niceties;
no one else seems likely to take up this aspect of his education.
“I can’t cast silencing charms here,” Harry says. “I’m not of age.”
“Of course you can; this is a wizard’s house. The Ministry won’t know who cast
it.”
Harry looks at him a moment. “Aw, you’re taking the piss,” he says finally,
wiggling up to a sitting position again and pulling the sheet around his waist.
“Fucking hell, Harry, nobody tells you anything, do they? DamnDumbledore.”
“But I thought....”
Sirius sits down heavily on the mattress.
“It’s parents, not the Ministry, who are supposed to keep their kids from doing
underage magic. But I’m not your parent, and I say you can bloody well do magic
here.”
“I—but that’s fantastic. You—I—Accio cup!”
The teacup obligingly flutters up from the breakfast tray and into Harry’s
hand. Harry glances nervously toward the window.
“You won’t be getting a Ministry owl, I promise.”
“Accio plate of eggs! Accio fork!”
“Harry?”
“Er, yeah, sorry. You were saying? This is going to be great, Sirius—”
“I was saying,” Sirius continues, laying a hand on Harry’s sheeted knee to hold
his attention, “that the next time you bring Ron round for a shag, cast a
silencing charm so I can get some sleep, yeah? And don’t let him sneak off in
the middle of the night, either. If you shag him here, I want him here for
breakfast. I like the company.”
“Er, Sirius?” Harry’s eyes dart to the hand on his knee. “It...it wasn’t Ron.”
“Oh?” Sirius takes his hand away. “Then—?”
Harry sets the cup and plate aside and hugs his knees to his chest. “Could we
drop it now? Before I completely die of embarrassment? I’d really really like
that.”
And Sirius does drop it. They eat the eggs and toast, all three plates of it,
and Harry talks nonstop about Quidditch with the distracted air of someone
caught in a party conversation with a guest he’d really rather get away from.
So when Sirius gets up to tend to Buckbeak, he doesn’t ask Harry to come along.
And Harry spends the rest of the day in the library on the first floor, eating
sweets and studying for his O.W.L.s.
Sirius leaves him alone. But his thoughts don’t. Who was Harry with then, if
not Ron? Due to the Fidelius Charm, the possibilities are limited to the people
who’ve been told of Grimmauld Place by Dumbledore. Fred or George, perhaps? He
didn’t think the twins batted that way, but the voice he’d heard did sound too
low for Ron’s, and the twins’ voices are definitely lower. Aha—perhaps Harry
was entertaining both Fred andGeorge? That would explain why he wouldn’t say
who it was. Well. Sirius is impressed.
They eat dinner in the library, because Harry’s been eating in the library all
day, and there’s really no good reason to go down to the kitchen and risk
tangling with Kreacher. Harry has gone out for fish and chips, which they
supplement with biscuits and marmalade and crisps and butterbeer and whisky,
all from the larder, and all of which Harry Accios up the stairs, looking
delighted each time, like some eleven-year-old who’s just had his first Charms
lesson.
They sit on the floor with their backs against the sofa, scattering crumbs on
the carpet and setting their glasses on the three-hundred-year-old end tables
without using coasters. Remus would have a fit if he saw some of the library’s
oldest spell books scattered around on the carpet like this, facedown with
their spines cracking, and a headless chocolate frog perched on top of a first
edition of Applied Transfiguration.But Remus isn’t here.
They don't talk about Hogwarts and what Umbridge is doing; they don't speculate
about where Dumbledore might be. They don't discuss how much danger Remus is
in, on his assignment to infiltrate werewolf packs, or how much danger Harry's
in whenever he's anywhere that isn't here—sitting right beside his godfather on
the floor of the library at Grimmauld Place. Relaxed, happy, and safe for the
first time since when? They don't discuss how long ago that might have been.
But as they sit beside each other, eating ginger biscuits smeared with
marmalade, Sirius thinks again of last night, of Harry having sex on the other
side of the wall, and he resolves to broach that subject, at least. Of the many
forces swirling around Harry right now, Sirius can at least extend him some
protection in that one. Especially since no one else is likely to provide any
guidance whatsoever. It’s Sirius’s duty to try, at least. So he clears his
throat and repeats his offer of the night before.
“Harry? I’m not prying, truly. But you can ask me anything. About sex, about me
and Remus, about spellwork to protect yourself—anything. As I recall, Hogwarts
doesn’t exactly hand out pamphlets on the subject.”
Harry takes a long swig of his butterbeer. “It’s all I think about.” He glances
up briefly and gives Sirius a wry look. “When I’m not thinking about Voldemort
torturing or killing people, that is. I—it makes me feel a little crazy, you
know? I don’t mean the Voldemort stuff. I’m used to that. But the sex
stuff—Sirius, I just want to do it all the time.”
Sirius reaches quickly for the tin of biscuits and rests it across his lap to
hide the interest his prick is suddenly taking in this conversation. “‘All the
time’ sounds about right,” he says. “You’re fifteen.”
“Almost sixteen. So I’ll grow out of it, you’re saying?”
“Not necessarily. I haven’t.”
“Do you...if you haven’t grown out of it, does that mean you still...I mean,
you don’t look like you’re walking about bothered all the time, you know?”
“By ‘bothered,’ I presume you mean, by a massive hard-on my every waking hour?”
“Sirius!”
Sirius laughs, and inside his trousers, his cock nudges the underside of the
biscuit tin. “Well, I do go about like that a fair bit,” he admits. “Trying to
make up for the time I lost in Azkaban, I suppose. Especially when I know Remus
is on his way home.” And especially when my godson asks about the state of my
cock—because I told him he could.
Harry ducks his head and eats another marmalade-smeared biscuit. He’s shaving
now, Sirius notes. There are crumbs caught on the stubble darkening his upper
lip.
“Some of the stuff...” Harry breaks off, finishes chewing, and tries again.
“The stuff I think about—sex stuff, I mean, I don’t think it’s too normal.”
Sirius considers. Should he press and ask for details? No, not yet; Harry looks
a bit skittish around the eyes, which is unusual for him. “Don’t be too quick
to decide what’s normal,” he says instead. “You’re just thinking, for one
thing, not doing. And everyone thinks, about all sorts of wild stuff.” He rests
a hand on the edges of the open biscuit tin in his lap and presses it down into
his groin just slightly. To take a bit of pressure off. “If you do decide you
want to try some of what you’re thinking about, then do, and if you don’t like
it, stop. But don’t let whatever you’ve learned about sex from the rest of the
world—or from the bloody Dursleys—poison your head.”
Harry still looks mightily uncomfortable.
“Is there something—specific you wanted to ask me, then?”
“Er.” Harry doesn’t seem to be able to get any further.
“It’s all right.” Sirius pokes Harry’s calf with his toe. “It’s an open
invitation. Ask whenever you’re ready.”
Harry reciprocates the poke with a barefoot kick to Sirius’s heel. Sirius
seizes Harry’s foot and tickles the sole. Harry shrieks and lunges forward,
breaking Sirius’s grip and reaching for his shoulders. The tin of biscuits goes
flying as Sirius rolls out of Harry’s reach, but Harry is too quick—he throws
himself fully across Sirius, landing on the carpet on the other side, and then
twists around, dropping forward and pinning Sirius at right angles beneath his
chest, which is broader and stronger than Sirius had imagined. Not that he’d
been imagining it.
Harry beams down at him, tousled and grinning and not even out of breath.
“I’m very fast, you know,” he says.
“Like your dad.” It just pops out, and it’s true; getting pinned by James
during a bout of roughhousing was just like this, James grinning down at him,
proud and disheveled. Sirius was always underneath. Not because James was
stronger, though he was, but because Sirius liked to lose. He’d be turned on
from all the contact, yes, but especially from the pleasure of James’s weight
on top of him, holding him down.
But this is Harry pressing down against him. And it’s not quite like James,
actually; Harry is lighter than James was, all muscle and not a trace of fat,
and his gaze is less combative. Harry’s eyes are more earnest, more hopeful.
And he’s anchored in a way James wasn’t; Harry’s weight flooding down through
Sirius says here, says stay.
It is the opposite of Azkaban, for Sirius to be pressed beneath someone he
loves, someone gazing down on him with mischief in his green eyes, in his
teabrown face, and the wild hair framing it so thick and animal and lush that
Sirius must free one hand from beneath Harry’s arm, must reach up and smooth
that dark hair back from his forehead. And then smooth it again. And then push
his fingers through it.
Sirius feels Harry’s body tense under his hand. Though they’re at right angles
to each other with only their chests touching, Sirius knows that Harry’s hard
now as well. And he really hadn’t meant for this to happen—Harry right on top
of him and both of them stiff in their pants. And Harry looking at him. And
Sirius looking back with the look people used to think he did on purpose. He
mostly didn’t; it was just there, stealing over his face, the look that made
other people want to touch him. And he always wanted people to touch him, even
before Azkaban. And Harry is touching him now, their chests pressed together
and their eyes locked and Sirius had better do something fast before his hands
wind up clutching Harry’s arse, before his tongue winds up inside Harry’s
mouth.
He breaks the gaze by wrapping his arms around Harry’s back and squeezing as
hard as he can. To keep him close while at the same time preventing him from
doing something crazy, like throwing his hips over Sirius’s and grinding down.
Harry shudders in his arms. “Sirius—”
“Shh. Don’t talk, Harry. It’s all right.”
“You said I could ask you anything,” Harry says into the collar of Sirius’s
shirt.
“Yeah—”
“Then I’m asking how it feels when I do this.” And Harry runs his tongue along
the side of Sirius’s neck.
Merlin’s rogered arse.
“It feels good,” Sirius chokes out. No other answer is remotely possible—it
feels fucking fantastic. He squeezes Harry even harder against him.
Harry flicks his tongue again and Sirius feels Harry’s magic soaking into him,
pulsing through his bloodstream to his groin, his heart, his limbs. So green,
such a wild, vibrant green; so fresh, despite everything that’s happened to
him, and vine-hungry for love.
Sirius is hungry too—starving, really. For something fresh and green, something
ripe and sweet. He holds Harry in his arms and feels the lushness of his young
magic twining all around, looking for cracks to send roots down into. And
Sirius is full of cracks. Sirius is nothing but chinks and cracks and broken
places.
“And when I do this?” Harry asks, taking Sirius’s earlobe gently between his
teeth.
Sirius’s response to that? He fucking whimpers. He is ensnared. What the hell
is he supposed to do now? What would Remus do? Remus would exercise his famous
self-control. He would be kind but firm, telling Harry that he’s flattered but
that this is completely inappropriate. That Harry is lovely and will find
someone his own age very soon. Then Remus would get up and leave.
That is exactly what Remus would do. But what Sirius would do,
apparently—because it’s what he does do—is to cup Harry’s face in his hands and
kiss him full on the mouth.
Harry’s lips are soft. So soft, opening to his. Opening into a moan as Sirius’s
tongue slides in like home. Harry’s mouth tastes like his scent but more so,
strong and green and hot and Harryand the power of it, the sweetness of it,
flares through Sirius like a spell. He can taste the bright tang of oranges
from the marmalade at the edges of Harry’s mouth, feel the rough stubble of
Harry’s upper lip on his lips, snagging a bit against his mustache as Harry
kisses him back, so hungry and wanting. And Sirius is wanting too, so hard so
hard. And then Harry tightens his mouth around Sirius’s tongue and begins to
suck.
He sucks like a man who does to a tongue the things he will do to a cock,
drawing his mouth tight over its length, his lips pressing hard as he sucks, as
he asks with his body for Sirius to tonguefuck his mouth. And Sirius does it,
thrusting in and in and fuck, this is Harry.
With a willpower he did not know he possessed, Sirius rolls both of them
sideways on the carpet, rolling Harry off him. He scrambles to his knees among
the scattered biscuits and curls over himself, over his cock and his heart and
everything in him that is straining for Harry. For Harry’s magic that has
already taken root inside him. For his bloody beautiful and sexy and brilliant
and so ready godson.
Both of them are breathing hard.
“I’m sorry,” Harry says after a moment, still on the floor behind Sirius.
“Don’t be.” Sirius doesn’t dare look at him. “Don’t ever be sorry for what you
want. But what you want isn’t me, you know.”
“It is.” He hears Harry sit up and shuffle over until he’s at Sirius’s back.
“Sirius, I think about you a lot. Really a lot. Like when I’m....” Harry’s hand
comes to rest on the back of Sirius’s neck. His fingers begins stroking up
through Sirius’s hair, sending runners of magic down over his scalp. Around his
throat. His prick. Devil’s snare. “Maybe I shouldn’t,” Harry says softly, “but
I always do. I think about you touching me, and I know you want to, and I want
you to, you’ve no idea how—”
“Harry.” Sirius hunches further in on himself, dropping his head forward into
his lap, but Harry’s hand comes with it, still tangled up in Sirius’s hair.
Sirius will not turn around and grab him, will not throw him down on his back
and devour him right on the library rug. He takes a breath, squeezing himself
into himself, trying to compress his magic and his lust and his brokenness into
as small a space as possible. “Harry. If you love me, do something for me now.”
He hears Harry suck in a breath of arousal at the words and feels like an utter
shit. “Go upstairs, Harry, and have a good wank and a shower, and—and we’ll
keep to ourselves for the rest of the evening, yeah? We can talk again
tomorrow.”
“No.”
Sirius looks up at that. “Harry,” he says desperately, “I remember what it’s
like. Being fifteen and out of sorts because you like blokes, and being stuck
at Hogwarts where you have to sneak around, and on top of that, a bloody war on
the horizon, and you feel that if you could just be close to someone—close and
fucking your brains out—that you’d be safe and happy for a little while.
Believe me, I know how you feel. I’ve been there.”
“No,” Harry says again. He crosses his arms defiantly over his chest, a sulky
teenager with a rock-hard erection in his pants. “It’s not just that. You know
it’s not.”
“I don’t know anything,” Sirius says. He’s losing this battle and both of them
know it.
“And you can’t just send me out of the room. I’m not a kid.”
“If you were a kid, Harry, this wouldn’t be happening. Go now. Please.”
“No.”
“Then I’d better go myself.”
To Sirius’s own amazement as much as Harry’s, he stands up. Unsteadily, because
everything in his body is screaming stay hold taste fuck more.But he is
standing, he is walking to the door of the library, he is going through the
door, his hand at his groin the second he’s over the threshold, taking the
stairs two at a time and slamming into the bathroom, vanishing his clothes so
fast it hurts as they come off him, and flicking on the shower and throwing
himself into it and wanking fast and too hard under the water, feeling like
he’s going to break apart.
Is this what it feels like to be Remus? Every month or maybe even all the
fucking time? If Remus were here, this would not be happening. If Remus were
here Sirius could go confess and then be punished and absolved. Because Remus
has him on a lead so strong and fine there is nothing Sirius can’t bring him,
nothing Remus won’t take. Including this. He’d confess and Remus would
discipline him and then maybe it would be over. Purged.
But Remus is not here, and Sirius is tossing off thinking of Harry right here
in the shower, sucking his tongue the way he did, Harry with Sirius’s prick in
his hand, and Sirius showing him how to tighten his fist under the knob of his
cock, how to slide the foreskin back and lightly thumb the slit, how to work
him up until he’s shaking, until he drops to his knees in this shower and comes
in the swirl of water pooling off his thighs. Sirius comes on his knees in the
shower, head against the tiles, and nearly weeps because he feels so bad.
Not because of what’s just happened. Not because of who he’s wanking to. That’s
just fantasizing; the real thing he stopped in time. No, what feels so awful is
being alone in his body again. Not being touched, at all, anywhere. And no
comfort he can find from his own hands.
He makes it to his room without seeing Harry. He slams the door shut and
transforms; then Padfoot feels awful too, but is no longer certain why. He
wants to go to Harry, but he knows he mustn’t; he’s supposed to stay here.
Padfoot trots to the wardrobe and noses in among the smells: cedar and wool and
Remus. Using his teeth, he tugs one of Remus’s jumpers from its hanger, but
carefully, so as not to rip it, because he’s a good dog. He climbs onto the
bed, worrying the pullover in his teeth before settling his muzzle atop the
Remus smell.
Remus loves him, but Remus is not here, Remus is missing. And someone else is
missing too; Harry is missing. Harry loves him and Harry is here but Harry is
missing. Padfoot missing him. Padfoot wants to howl but something tells him he
mustn’t. If he howls, Harry will come to him, and Harry mustn’t. It is
confusing, impossibly confusing. The only thing certain is that the feeling
inside Padfoot hurts like Azkaban and makes him whimper and tremble all over
like a bad dream. He noses beneath the woolly hem of the Remus fabric and
breathes it in, huffing a sigh.
After some while, the trembling in his body subsides. A longer while after
that, he sleeps.
Sirius wouldn’t have heard it. But Padfoot does, waking with his ears pricked
and his nose up. Someone else is in the house.
He transforms back, shaking out the dog mind and reaching for his wand. Sirius
can’t hear anything with his human ears, but he knows: there’s someone else
close by. He cracks the door of his bedroom open and feels the spell at
once—the complete absence of sound, the round pushback of a Imperturbable’s
silence. Harry’s cast all down the hall then, as well as in his bedroom. He’s
in there with someone again.
Someone not Sirius.
Someone is doing to Harry the things Sirius refused to do because of some
stupid code he’s not even sure he believes anymore, not if Harry is so ready to
do all those things with someone else, someone else IN THE ORDER for fuck’s
sake, and not even Ron, and it had better be Fred or George in there and not
fucking Kingsley or Charlie or Bill or bloody hell, it had fucking better not
be Snape. It can’t be Snape. NO. Harry is Sirius’s—if he is anybody’s.
He has to know.
Wand out, he begins sweeping the airspace outside Harry’s door. The door is the
most vulnerable area in an Imperturbable. He begins at the threshold, slowly
sweeping up around the doorframe. Like all borders, it’s got to be porous
somewhere. The air at the tip of his wand shifts and murmurs as the door gives
up tiny traces of everyone who’s passed through it, magical snags and flares
like scents unfurling. But the spell holds. Sirius sweeps, listens, sweeps. He
could shift to Padfoot and sniff out who it is, perhaps. But just as he’s about
to go put his wand back in his room and transform, a loose edge of the spell
catches. Right above the doorknob. Sirius flicks his wand across it and a thin
shower of yellow sparks falls from the doorframe, and then he can hear.
No words this time. Breathing, a whispered something, maybe. Sliding sounds of
flesh on flesh. A faint moan. Who, who?
Then a single cry from Harry, high and sharp, and Sirius knows, as surely as if
he were in the room, that someone has just shoved their cock inside his
godson’s arse using only spit for lube.
He almost breaks down the door. Not with an Alohomora; with his fists.
Harry is moaning now, little moans breaking out in bursts in time with the
rhythm of someone else’s body, someone else driving their cock into Harry and
making him make that sound, somebody else with their fist in his hair, their
hand on his hip, somebody else pounding into Harry, wrenching those sounds out
of him, his Harry, and who the fuck is it? Who is it hiding in silence but
making Harry moan harder and higher and faster until it sounds like he’s almost
crying? Ahhh and ohhh and Fuck me Harry cries, and then he’s coming. Wailing
and coming.
The sound claws through Sirius, breaking into his magic, unleashing his magic.
Just to the right of the door, on the wall beside Sirius's head, the milky
glass shade of an old wall sconce explodes, glass shards flying everywhere.
Enraged, Sirius hurls his wand down the stairs and shifts to Padfoot again. The
hall smells come hot and overwhelming in his dog nose and tell of nothing but
Sirius’s anger and unintentional magic. Padfoot bounds down the stairs after
the wand, overshoots and skids past it. He tears into the library and,
forgetting about the wand, leaps onto the sofa and rips one of the sofa
cushions apart with his teeth. Snarling and tearing deep inside it, he scatters
the stuffing all over the room.
He’s a bad dog; he’s nobody’s dog. Sirius transforms back and hurls an empty
butterbeer bottle at the fireplace where it shatters against the grate. He
sends another bottle hard after it. Then another, and then the Firewhisky
bottle’s in his hand but he doesn’t throw that one. There’s still liquor in it,
so he swallows as much of it as he can without choking, throws himself down on
the ruined sofa and howls. Like a dog, though he’s a man.
He finishes the whisky and is disgusted to find that his tolerance is so high
now that not only is he still awake, he can still think coherently. Should he
order Harry back to school? Impossible—it would hurt Harry too much. However
fucked up Sirius’s head may be, he knows with every cell in his body that
sending Harry away from the place he’s been told he can call home would be
unforgivable. Sirius would rather slit his own throat. Besides, sending Harry
off won’t solve anything. Harry will go on fucking whoever it is he’s
fucking—he’s Harry James Potter, he’ll find a way—but his trust in Sirius would
be forever shattered.
No, they’ll have to work this out. They’ll have to talk. And Sirius will have
to be much more of a grownup. So he rolls off the sofa and onto the floor. He
Accios his wand from out in the hallway and then uses that to Accioanother
bottle of Ogden’s from the basement. Harry is acting like a man now; Sirius
can’t be acting like a teenager in response. He lies amidst the wreckage on the
floor thinking this, eating broken biscuits and drinking until he passes out.
~
“Sirius?”
He doesn’t have to open his eyes to know it’s morning, or to know what Harry’s
seeing. He remembers all of it just fine. The ravaged sofa cushion, its white
guts everywhere. The broken bottles in the fireplace. The overturned biscuit
tin, carpet of crumbs. The empty bottle of Ogden’s. And Sirius flat on his back
on the floor, looking and smelling like Mundungus Fletcher after a bad night.
“Harry, a favor,” he croaks, eyes still closed.
“What the hell happened in here? And why is there broken glass outside my
room?”
“Harry. If you would kindly give me fifteen minutes. To make myself look just a
bit more like someone I’m not entirely ashamed of. And then, I promise you,
we’ll talk.”
“Okay,” Harry says. He sounds tired now. His footsteps retreat, down the hall
and then up the stairs.
Sirius Scourgifies himself, takes a piss and cleans his teeth. He calls
Kreacher, whom he hasn’t seen since Harry got here, and with a pop, the house
elf appears beside him in the bathroom, bowing and muttering.
“Filthy dogs tearing up the furniture. The eldest son drunk as a lord, but no
lord of this house. Consorting with fouled blood. Oh, it would kill my
mistress—”
“Your mistress is already dead, Kreacher. Stop aping her and go clean up the
mess. Please,” Sirius adds, thinking of Hermione.
“The half-breed catamite should cut its dirty feet on the glass, it should,
rutting like an animal in my master’s old—”
“And shut up,” Sirius growls, a command Kreacher obeys by Disapparating.
He takes a shower and puts his trousers back on. He finds a less-filthy shirt
hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Then he goes down to the kitchen. He
isn’t hungry, but Harry will be starving. There aren’t any more eggs, so he
makes four cheese sandwiches, grills two tomatoes, and plates the remains of a
treacle tart he finds in the back of the fridge. He makes tea and drinks a
bottle of milk, and by the time he knocks on Harry’s door he feels a little
less destroyed.
Harry is sitting on his bed, which, Sirius notes with some surprise, has been
freshly made.
“Kreacher was just here,” Harry says, following Sirius’s gaze. “He said you
told him to do it.”
“I told him to clean up the mess,” Sirius says sourly. “Which in his mind—”
“—Includes my bed,” Harry finishes. He doesn’t seem particularly upset about
any of this. But then, he doesn’t yet know that Sirius broke through his wards
last night.
“You gonna sit down?” Harry asks, a trace of sullenness creeping into his
voice. “Or do I get my talking-to with you standing in the doorway?”
“I’m not here to give you a talking-to,” Sirius says. “Just to talk.” He puts
the tray on the bedside table and sits down on the bed. At the foot of the bed.
As far away from Harry as he can be and still be on the bed. Why did he ever
think talking to Harry in his bedroom was a good idea? They should be
downstairs in the kitchen, on opposite sides of the room.
“So, what did happen last night?” Harry asks, reaching for a sandwich. “Did you
try to wreck the place or what?”
“Padfoot did the sofa,” Sirius says. “The broken glass was all me. I was a
little upset, apparently.”
“Because we kissed.”
“No. Because of what happened after that.”
“But nothing happened after that. You took a shower and went to bed, I heard
you, and—oh, fuck.” Harry looks helplessly about the room. “What did I do
wrong? I cast the spell, Sirius, I promise I did. I cast two of them, just to
be sure you wouldn’t hear. I swear I cast.”
“I know you did,” Sirius says heavily. “Imperturbables. I felt them.”
“Then...they didn’t work?”
“No, they worked fine.” Until I took them down so I could listen to you crying
for someone else’s cock up your arse.
“Then what’s the problem? Why are you angry at me?”
Sirius closes his eyes. “I’m not angry at you, Harry.”
“You bloody well are. You broke the glass around the gaslight right outside my
door. You ripped up the sofa we were sitting on last night, and you broke all
the butterbeer bottles, and from the look of it, you got stinking drunk. What
would you call that?”
Sirius rubs his forehead. “I’d call it a mess. I’m a mess, all right? You like
to think I’m not, but I truly am. And I—Merlin, Harry, just tell me who you
were with last night. I know you’re entitled to your privacy, and I wouldn’t
ask, except you’re having it off while I’m right on the other side of this
wall, and that’s difficult enough, Imperturbable or no. But not knowing who it
is—and you sneaking him in and out of here like some kind of spy—Harry, that
feels—it feels awful.”
As Sirius says it he realizes why. It feels like the first war. When Remus was
always sneaking out and wouldn’t tell Sirius where he was going. When, because
of that, Sirius and James decided Remus was the spy. When they began keeping
their own Secrets in response. When Peter snuck into the middle of all that
deception. Peter, with the biggest secret of them all. “Harry,” Sirius says,
and he can hear the pleading in his voice, “please tell me: Who was with you
last night?”
Harry picks at the duvet cover. “It wasn’t anyone you know.”
“Of course it was; there’s a Fidelius here. Look, I don’t care who it is, if
it’s Fred or George, or both of them, or...I don’t know, Tonks with a cock,
whoever, as long as it’s not bloody Snape—but—but even if it was Snape, Harry,
you’ve got to be honest with me. Because this sneaking around, and lying about
who you’re with, is not fucking working,all right? It feels like the last war
all over again, with Voldemort strong, and Remus always gone, and—you have to
tell me the truth, Harry. Please.”
“I am telling the truth,” Harry says hotly. “After you went to bed, last night
and the night before, I got up again, okay? And I went out to a pub. You know,
a gay one. And I brought someone back here. A different bloke each time. Happy
now?”
“Please tell me,” Sirius says, his voice trembling, “that Dumbledore has not
made you Secret Keeper.”
Harry shakes his head. “No. I—I figured out a way to get them in.”
“That’s not possible. The Fidelius Charm—”
“It is possible. I did it.”
“Harry, this is—are you taking the piss?”
“I swear I’m not. You heard us in there, didn’t you?”
“Fuck, this is—bloody hell, this is a major problem. And I mean the fact that
someone from outside got in, not the fact that you’re shagging strangers, which
is also a problem, but first—Merlin. Tell me how you got them in here, Harry.
Now.”
Harry drops his eyes. “We Side-Along Apparated. The blokes—they were older,
both of them. Way more than seventeen. So they did the actual Apparition, but I
did the destination. I figured out that you can split up the two functions if
you’re, you know, er, mixing your magic enough with the other person’s when you
Apparate. But I didn’t tell them where we were going, so there wasn’t any
resistance from the Fidelius Charm. And the whole time they were here neither
of them had any idea where they were.”
Godric’s blue balls. Sirius feels like he might start shaking, like Padfoot
shakes when he’s scared, like Sirius shakes when he’s angry. He grips his knees
to steady himself.
“Let me get this straight,” he says. “For the past two nights you’ve pretended
to go to bed, gotten up again, gone out to some dodgy spot down Knockturn,
picked up a older wizard you didn’t know, stuck your tongue far enough down his
throat to invent a new form of Side-Along Apparition, and then brought him back
here to Grimmauld Place where the two of you went at each other without his
ever knowing where he was?”
“Yeah. And he didn’t know who I was either. I took my glasses off before I went
into the pub, and I put concealer—that’s this stuff Muggles use on spots—over
my scar. That was all I needed, because nobody knows what I really look like;
they only know me by my scar and glasses.”
“So two complete strangers fucked the Boy Who Lived in Order Headquarters and
then just got the hell out again, none the wiser?”
Eyes downcast, Harry nods.
“Harry—” Sirius is not even sure what he wants to say anymore. “Harry,
you’re...” He’s not shaking now. It’s a different feeling swelling inside him.
And then what comes out is exactly what he wants to say, because it’s the
bloody truth, and Harry should know it if he doesn’t already, and he should
know it from Sirius. “Harry,” he says, “you’re a fucking brilliant wizard.”
Harry startles. Then he beams.
“You’re also a bloody fool, and a terrible sneak. And a—and a Marauder.”
Beams like the fucking sun.
“And what I ought to be telling you,” Sirius continues, “is that you’re lucky
you didn’t splinch your prick off, and that you’re an utter arsehole for
Apparating someone in here who’s not in the Order, and that many of the people
you care most about—including Dumbledore, and the Weasleys, and Remus, and
me—are sacrificing a great deal for the secrecy of this operation. And if you
bring it crashing down on our heads just because you wanted some stranger’s
cock up your arse, then if Voldemort doesn’t kill you, Harry, you’re going to
wish he had.”
Harry’s expression has been steadily crumpling during this speech, and by the
time Sirius has finished, he’s put his face in his hands.
“I’m sorry, Sirius.” It comes out a whisper. “I wasn’t thinking about any of
that. I know I should have been.” Harry raises his head then and meets Sirius’s
eyes. He looks young and lost and as if he might cry. “Please don’t tell
anyone.”
“Promise me you won’t do it again.”
Instead of answering, Harry hunches over, hiding his face. Sirius sees with
horror that his shoulders are shaking. He’s fucking crying.
“Oi, Harry. Look—I’m not trying to be harsh. I know you weren’t trying to put
anyone in danger. But you did.”
Harry’s shoulders shake harder. He’s crying without making any sound at all,
which is somehow worse than if he were simply bawling.
“Harry, I’m not upset with you, all right? But I have to keep you safe. And
it’s more than the matter of Order security. You can’t keep getting picked up
by chickenhawks in dodgy pubs. You could get hurt. I mean physically.”
Harry raises his tear-streaked face. “Maybe I like getting hurt.”
That sends a shock through Sirius. His heart fists up into his throat, and
then, damn it all, his cock rises up and follows. Sodding hell. He takes a deep
breath. “That’s....yeah. Okay. That’s something. I—I understand that—that you
like getting hurt. I mean I really understand it. But I do it with Remus.With
someone I trust, in other words, not just any old—”
“Well, lucky you.” Harry glares at him. “But not everybody has a Remus, do
they?”
“Harry, those blokes you’re picking up, they’ll hurt you in ways you don’t want
to be hurt. Believe me. I’m not saying you shouldn’t want anything you want.
But you’re in over your head. You don’t know how to take care of yourself—”
“Then show me. Be with me.”
“I’m your godfather, Harry—”
“Then act like it.” A flush of color flares on Harry’s tearstained cheeks. “You
say you have to keep me safe. You say it’s your job to protect me. Well do it,
then.” He leans across the bed toward Sirius until he’s so close that his
breath comes warm on Sirius’s jaw. “Teach me,” he says softly in Sirius’s ear.
“Show me. Do your job for once.”
Sirius closes his eyes. “Oh, Harry. It wouldn’t be just once.”
Feelings swirl around him. Harry’s desire and shame and pride. Sirius’s
confusion and lust and so much—so much old pain. He feels a sharp stab in his
belly, and then the clenching in his chest that means he’s falling into
Azkaban. Emotions all jumbled together, the intensity of feelings—that’s what
draws dementors. He’s fogging out in a miasma of fear at their approach. Some
part of his mind knows that there are no dementors at Grimmauld Place, but in
the panic that is taking hold, his sense of where he is is beginning to slip.
He is sinking into lostness and he needs something to hold onto, something
good, before he loses his footing completely, but he is falling, where is he,
he is falling down and down—
“Sirius—”
There is color and light and touch and warmth in his arms. There is Harry,
holding him so hard, his heart pounding against Sirius’s chest, pounding him
away from the falling, from the gray, the solitary, the dying.
“Sirius?”
“Yes. I’m...I’m all right, sweet Harry, I’m here.”
And he is. He gathers Harry to his chest like an armful of flowers.
Harry nuzzles into Sirius’s neck, butts Sirius’s jaw with the crown of his
head. Sirius breathes in the smell of Harry’s hair and feels his own body
again. He’s here, he’s safe. And Harry is in his arms. Sirius raises his head,
nudges Harry’s head up too, and licks the drying tears from Harry’s cheeks.
Harry closes his eyes and Sirius flicks his tongue across the closed eyelids,
the matted eyelashes. Harry really is a flower; he is a whole field of flowers,
all growing strong toward the light. Padfoot could run and roll in that field
and be happy till the end of his days. Happy and endlessly flowering.
Harry moves his mouth to Sirius’s ear. Whisper of nectar, of honey, of wind.
Whisper of Sirius, whisper of yes. Harry moves his mouth to Sirius’s mouth. And
then Sirius is inside all the flowers.
Everything alive and touching. Earth-held. Harry’s fingers slipping under his
shirt, Sirius’s hands stroking the smooth skin of Harry’s stomach. His mouth
drowning in sweetness, in skin. Neck and throat and then return to mouth.
Shirts fumbled up, shirts coming off, and Harry moaning into him, his Harry,
Sirius’s fingers at Harry’s navel, his fingers in the trail of hair that leads
down below his jeans, down to the unexplored sea. Down to the ancient warnings
on old maps: Here be monsters. Here is where they are, in a place whose
coordinates are unplottable. Two inky names bleeding into each other as
Sirius’s fingers open Harry’s flies.
“Sirius, wait, I won’t last.” Harry wriggles free and slides from the bed to
the floor, tripping a bit as he kneels between Sirius’s legs. Sirius begins
opening his own trousers, but Harry pushes his hands away. “Let me. Please, I
want to—finally.” And he does, fumbling in his haste and nervousness but
getting the zip open. Sirius isn’t wearing pants underneath; his erect cock is
right there. His balls are right there. Harry takes all of it into his hands
like ripened fruit. Brings his nose close and breathes in. Then he wraps his
hand around Sirius’s cock and slides the foreskin down and Godric, the touch
fills Sirius with so much need he thinks he might pass out.
Harry bites his lip and looks up. Eyes hot, his breathing high in his throat.
Sirius nods, and Harry lowers his head, taking Sirius’s cock into his mouth.
“Oh fuck. Oh fuck, oh Harry. My Harry.” Harry sucks him and Sirius’s words come
tumbling out. “Harry, sweet Harry, want you so much. Fucking mine,you are; no
one else’s—” Harry’s mouth sends wave after wave of pleasure through him until
there is nowhere that is gray or empty or alone.
He rests his hands in Harry’s hair, not pushing him, not guiding him even, just
being with him. And the words keep pouring out of him as Harry licks and sucks
and tastes and moans. “Harry, you’ve always been mine, fuck, like this always,
you, you—oh hell, Harry—”
Harry tightens his mouth around Sirius’s cock, finds a rhythm with his head.
His hands come up to Sirius’s hips and grip them. Sirius shifts to the very
edge of the mattress and fucks in deeper and Harry takes it, so tight around
him, and then looking up at his godfather, his whole face flushed, lustblown.
Unwound with desire, with love for this. Love for him. Sirius can see it, how
much Harry wants him, that it is him Harry wants. The knowledge flares inside
him and unravels him just as intensely as the sensations in his cock. Because
the way Harry wants Sirius is the same way Sirius wants Harry.
There is no going back now, and he does not want to go back, not ever. He
presses his hands against Harry’s head to still him then, and lets it happen.
He comes. Harry swallows, letting it in. Wanting it, wanting more.
“Oh, my beautiful Harry. Look at you.” Sirius pulls him up off his knees and
they tumble backward on the bed, Harry on top of him. He kisses Harry long and
deep, tasting himself all over the inside of Harry’s mouth. He’s done it now,
he’s crossed over. He’s sailed off the map and become a monster too, and that
is where he belongs. In the sea of it. Sirius is shaking again, this time with
relief.
On top of him, Harry’s laughing. Laughing, this beautiful Harry, his chin
rubbed pink from Sirius’s beard, glistening with saliva and sweat. He’s
laughing and kissing Sirius again and shoving his hand between their bodies to
palm himself, reaching through his white cotton pants, his opened jeans shoved
down his hips.
“Let me,” Sirius says, kicking his trousers the rest of the way off and rolling
them both onto their sides. “Take your clothes off, my Harry.”
Harry yanks his tee shirt over his head, wriggles out of his jeans and pants.
His cock springs free, arching out of a thicket of pubic hair. Harry reaches
for himself, but Sirius snatches Harry’s hand away and pushes him back on the
bed, bringing both Harry’s wrists up to the pillow.
“We’ll get back to touching in a minute,” he says. “I want to tell you
something first, all right?”
“O—okay.” Harry’s flushed and breathing raggedly in anticipation. “What?”
But Sirius doesn’t speak for a moment. He lets himself look for a moment. His
eyes follow the line of black hair from Harry’s navel down to Harry’s oh
Merlinbeautiful cock. Slightly curved against his thigh, naked and hard and
thick, the shock of black hair at its base looking just as unruly as the hair
on his head. His bollocks dark and tight with arousal. The almost-purple seam
that leads down between the globes of his arse, down to—
Sirius raises his eyes to Harry’s face again. Harry is waiting; so still, so
quiet. But when Sirius’s eyes find his, a little moan escapes his swollen
mouth. A sound so sweet it makes Sirius grow half-hard again already, just to
hear how Harry wants him.
But he has to tell him first. He tightens his grasp on Harry’s wrists and takes
a breath. “Harry? I need to—to confess something, actually.”
Harry nods, waiting. Eyes green-dark with desire. Naked and waiting. Maybe
Sirius could just—
No. He has to tell him. He leans down over Harry, breathes him in. “Last night
I broke through your silencing charm,” he admits.
“You—” Harry’s face falls. “Christ, Sirius.”
“I shouldn’t have done it. It was...an invasion of sorts. I’m very sorry,
Harry.”
Harry bites his lip. Arousal, confusion. And yes, anger. “Why did you, then?
Especially after you told me to cast it the first place.”
With his free hand, Sirius takes the bud of Harry’s right nipple between his
fingers.
“Oh—” A little gasp escapes Harry’s lips.
“I wanted to know who was fucking you,” Sirius says. He pinches the nipple and
gives a twist.
“You—fuck,Sirius—”
“I broke through your wards. It took me a while to do it; you cast well. And
then I stood there in the hall listening to you getting fucked. And I wanted it
to be me fucking you.”
“Sirius—please—”
Sirius takes Harry’s other nipple between his thumb and forefinger, twisting
and rolling the bud. Harry bites his lip but the gasp comes anyway, his face
taut with hunger, his wrists pushing up against Sirius’s restraining hand.
“I wanted to be the one who was making you cry for a cock in your arse,” Sirius
husks. “I heard you begging for it—whimpering and begging to be fucked, and I
wanted you so much that my magic went off by itself. That’s how the lamp glass
broke. I haven’t lost control like that since I was a kid, Harry. That’s how
much I wanted you.” He pinches hard then, and Harry cries out.
“I was wishing it was you,” Harry says, breathless and writhing a little under
Sirius’s hand. “Last night—I tried to pretend I was doing it with you.”
Sirius lets go of the nipple then. “Did it work?”
Harry exhales sharply and goes limp on the bed. “No,” he says. “That bloke, he
didn’t—he wasn’t anything like you. And of course, he didn’t know me.”
Sirius spools his fingers through the swirl of Harry’s chest hair. “Or love
you, Harry. I do.”
“I—Sirius. I’ve never said that. To anyone.”
“Don’t say it now. Not yet.” Sirius drops the lightest, softest kiss on Harry’s
lips. “Do you forgive me?”
Harry nods.
“Do you want me to touch your cock now?”
“God, Sirius, please.”
“You want me tossing you off?”
“Yes. Fuck.”
“Holding you and stroking you and making you come in my hand?”
“Hurry up, or I’ll come before you get there,” Harry growls.
“Watch me,” Sirius commands. He lets go of Harry’s wrists and slides both his
hands down Harry’s raised arms, down over his collar bones. Down past Harry’s
beautifully reddened nipples, down his ribs. Down his luscious stomach, and
then Sirius’s thumbs are riding the trail of black hair below Harry’s navel.
Harry’s cock pulses up from the foreskin, revealing a shiny rose-brown head.
Sirius’s hand closes around the shaft and Harry’s cock leaps at the touch,
straining against Sirius’s palm. Harry groans and clutches Sirius’s shoulders
as Sirius strokes once, twice, four times and then Harry’s coming, moaning and
shooting all over Sirius’s hand, over his own lovely belly. Spilling as Sirius
bends over him and takes Harry’s lower lip between his teeth and lets Harry’s
groans fill his mouth as Harry’s cock spurts hot over his fingers.
Then he groans a final time and goes completely limp—cock, tongue, body. Sirius
stretches out beside him and Harry rolls into his arms.
“I’m sorry I came so fast,” he mumbles, “I couldn’t—”
Sirius silences him with another kiss. “That was just the first time, Harry.
I’ll make you come again in a bit, and then you’ll last.” He kisses Harry long
and slow and sweet. Holds him naked against his naked self. Sirius runs his
tongue along each of Harry’s teeth, learning him there, too, as he holds this
good thing hard against him. This Harry. This trembling. This peeled and
precious soul.
“Don’t let go of me,” Harry says.
“I won’t.”
“Hold on to me harder.”
Sirius wraps his arms all the way around Harry, pulls him full against his
chest. Their cocks mash together in the stickiness on Harry’s stomach as Sirius
throws one leg over both of Harry’s, slides his other leg beneath and vise-
tightens his thighs. He can feel Harry’s heart pounding as he holds him,
digging his fingers into Harry’s shoulders.
“Like that?”
“That’s good. Can you...harder?”
“I’ll bruise you if I hold you harder.”
“I know. I like that.”
“Do you?” Sirius sucks a kiss onto Harry’s neck.
“Yeah,” Harry groans, tipping his head back, giving his neck to be taken.
And Sirius does take him, his mouth tattooing its shape on Harry’s throat as he
sucks. So hard against Harry’s delicious skin. When he pulls off, the mark is
rosy purple, its ink of broken capillaries blooming just beneath the tea-
colored surface of Harry’s skin.
Harry touches the spot with his finger and looks up at Sirius. “I like that so
much,” he says huskily. “Do another, where I can see it.”
Sirius grabs him, latches his mouth around Harry’s left nipple. Tongues it
hard, rolls it between his teeth, then spreads his lips wide around the nubbly
areola, the dark whorl of chest hair rough against his lips. Sirius sucks and
takes and marks as Harry moans beneath him, thrusting his hips. Harry’s skin in
his mouth swells like Sirius’s tattoos, swells like their cocks are swelling
against one another, trapped between their thighs. When Sirius pulls off this
time he is panting. This mark is fainter, but lovely still, a dark circle of
pink from which Harry’s nipple rises puffy and swollen and erect. Sirius flicks
it lightly with the tip of his tongue and Harry cries out, a short high whimper
that makes Sirius grind into him.
And then Harry’s laughing: “I’m getting hard again.” He reaches for himself,
but Sirius stops his hand.
“May I do it?”
“God, yes.”
“Tell me,” Sirius says, pressing the palm of his hand against Harry’s cock,
“about your first time with a boy. You have been with boys your age?”
Harry nods.
“Tell me about it, then. Did you like it, your first time?”
“It was just—just a hand job. In the Quidditch changing rooms. But—yeah. It was
brilliant.”
“I want to hear about it,” Sirius says. “How you touched each other. I’ll touch
you the same way while you tell me, all right?”
Harry looks away. “I don’t—Sirius, I don’t think I can play this game.”
Sirius lets go of Harry’s cock and gently turns Harry’s head so he can see his
eyes again.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For saying what you don’t want. I feel less monstrous knowing you won’t say
yes to me when you don’t want to.”
“You’re not monstrous at all. I want to say yes to you. But not to—it’s that
the boy I was with, he—Sirius, it was Cedric.”
“Oh, Harry. I’m sorry.”
Harry hides his face against Sirius’s chest. Sirius strokes his hair.
“It wasn’t like we were so close or anything,” Harry says indistinctly. “Or
maybe it was. I mean, we never spent time together when we weren’t...you know.
But it wasn’t like, just-do-it-and-don’t-look-at-each-other-after, either. We’d
kiss, and laugh sometimes, and he was so bloody handsome, Sirius, and so nice
to me, and we tried stuff together, and I—oh, hell—”
He takes a deep shuddering breath. Sirius strokes and strokes his hair.
“And Dudley knew,” Harry continues shakily. “He heard me in my sleep. After, I
mean. I was crying Cedric’s name in my sleep, and he teased me about it.” Harry
raises his head then. “That was what made me start sneaking out of Privet
Drive. I just wanted to forget about Cedric, you know? I went to Muggle pubs
and...other places, since I couldn’t get to Knockturn. Because I thought, I
can’t DO this again, I can’t be with anyone I care about, because there’s going
to be a war now, and if I get close with someone else who ends up getting
killed, I’ll—”
Harry breaks off again, lowering his face back against Sirius’s chest. Sirius
feels the hot uneven breaths against his skin, and then the tiny wet burns of
Harry’s tears.
“Harry, listen to me.” Sirius squeezes his shoulder. “In the last war, it was
not staying close to the person I loved that got your parents killed. You have
to stay close. To your lovers and your friends. You have to have people you can
be close to.” He kisses the top of Harry’s head. “It’s one of the only things I
know for sure.”
Harry gulps and shudders.
“Sirius?”
“Yes.”
“Touch me again. Make me stop thinking about all this—I want to be here.”
“I know. Sweet Harry.” Sirius reaches down until his fingers find Harry’s
balls. He cups them, feeling the wrinkled skin tighten in his hands as Harry’s
cock thickens.
“Here with you,” says Harry. “Only you. Just make me feel you, no one else.”
Sirius brushes Harry’s mouth with his lips, almost, almost-but-not-quite
kissing him as he caresses, pulling gently on the hair curling from his sac.
Harry shivers, bucking his hips and thrusting his head forward for the kiss.
“I want to touch you everywhere, Harry.”
“Yes—please—”
Sirius lets his fingers drift down along the ridgeline of Harry’s balls, down
over the smooth skin of his perineum to the edge—to the softest furled edge—of
the bud of his anus.
“Oh—oh fuck, that, yes—” Harry squirms down against Sirius’s finger, opening
his legs, raising his knees.
“You like my finger there?”
“Yes—”
“On your sweet hole? Stroking you there?”
Harry makes a sound in the back of his throat, luscious and broken, as Sirius
swirls the tip of his finger against the tight folds.
Then Harry reaches down and grabs his arscheeks and spreads himself open. And
then it’s Sirius making sounds in his throat.
“Oh, fuck. Godric, Harry. Hold yourself like that. Open. I have to see you.” He
scoots down between Harry’s knees. “Look at you. So perfect—you’ve got an arse
like a fucking plum. Let me taste you, Harry.”
Harry raises his head. “Taste my—you want—no one’s ever—”
Sirius almost comes right then. “I’d be your first rim job?” He puts both hands
over Harry’s, holds him holding himself open. His sweet little hole quivers,
dark and purple as a bruise. “Then I’ll beg you for it. Please, Harry. Please
let me tongue your sweet hole.”
“Yes, already, if you like tha—ohhh—oh yes.”
Sirius flexes his tongue, giving Harry just the tip. Flick against the opening.
Circling edges lick slit crease sweet salt.
Above him Harry’s moaning, breathy little gasps as Sirius licks and tastes and
hums.
Sweet folds plum flex sweet hole open.
The moaning becomes one long continuous sound as Harry slips his hands out from
under Sirius’s and begins tossing himself off with one hand while he buries the
other in Sirius’s hair. Sirius points his tongue and fucks Harry open, then
works one finger in, licking and eating the sweetness of that most secret
place, ripe and wet and never before tasted.
“Sirius, oh God oh God—” Harry trembles and gasps, and Sirius nibbles and
sucks, alternating tongue and finger thrusts until Harry’s hole clenches hard
around his tongue and he comes. Spasming closed open closed open closed he
comes as Sirius tonguefucks him through his orgasm.
When Harry has slackened and grown still, Sirius raises his head. Harry looks
dazed, completely wasted. Sirius licks up over Harry’s balls and into the soft
hollow between his hip and thigh. Licks along his softened cock. Then licks his
belly, tasting the thick tang of Harry’s come, fresh as spring sap. Harry
heaves enormous breaths as Sirius cleans him like Padfoot would, licking and
licking past the point that there’s anything left to clean. Licking until
Sirius’s tongue reaches his ribs and Harry squeals, catching Sirius’s head and
pushing him off.
“God, stop—I’m going to pass out,” Harry gasps. “That was—that was sodding
brilliant. Oh my God.”
Sirius stretches out on top of him then. “Glad you liked it. Am I too heavy
here?”
“On top of me? Never.” Harry huffs out a laugh that he seems too exhausted to
continue. “You—Christ. That was—wow.”
“I’ve worn you out.” Sirius rolls off of Harry and nuzzles in beside him. His
Harry, so limp and wet and clean.
“No...not worn out,” Harry says. “Not yet, anyway. Just...hmmm. Happy?”
“You’re not sure?”
“I am.” Harry grins, and Sirius feels the pulse of it then, his sureness, his
happiness, between them.
“You should eat something, though. Another sandwich, yeah? And some water.
Aguamenti.”
Sirius watches him eat and drink. The sandwich shakes a bit in Harry’s hand at
first, and he spills water on his belly. He sets down the cup and runs
tentative fingers over the bruise on his neck, then across his swollen nipple.
“You still like those?” Sirius asks.
Harry nods. “I like any kind of mark. A lot. I like having marks that aren’t
this one.” He jerks his head so that his hair falls back from his brow. “I can
feel my magic better when I’m, you know, having sex. And then I look at the
bruises later and it’s like they remind me that I can—that my body can—be
strong, maybe? The marks remind me of that, and they’re sore when I touch them,
and it feels—it just feels good.” He frowns. “That’s kind of sick, huh?”
“To want to feel good? To want to feel strong? That isn’t sick at all.”
“And also, when I have marks...” Harry ducks his head, suddenly shy. “They make
me think of yours, of your tattoos.” Harry brings a hand to Sirius’s chest and
runs his fingers tentatively over one of the runes. Sirius feels their dark
lines swell beneath his fingers, hungry for this influx of new magic. His skin
looks so pale beneath Harry’s hand; pale and white and old.
“I’ve always wanted to touch these,” Harry says. “Ever since I first saw them.”
“They like you touching them.”
“They can like things?”
“Well, it’s me liking it. But they’ve got their own magic. The only protection
I had.”
“Who gave them to you?”
“Did them myself,” Sirius says gruffly. “I had to. With sharp stones and soot
and ancient spells that don’t need a wand. Oh,” he adds, when Harry looks
surprised, “we Brits like our wands for everything, but wizards from other
countries know other kinds of casting. Your grandmother, for example. Mrs.
Potter never used a wand at all.”
Harry is silent.
“You’re thinking how much you missed, yeah?”
Harry shakes his head. “I do think that sometimes, when you talk about them,
but just now? I was actually thinking about what my dad’d do if...I mean,
Christ, Sirius, is this...am I really fucked up? Are we?”
Sirius lies back on the pillow and holds open his arms. Harry scoots into them,
laying his head on Sirius’s shoulder and throwing his leg across Sirius’s
thigh. “So much is fucked up,” Sirius says slowly. “James and Lily dead at
twenty-one, that’s fucked up. And me left to rot in Azkaban, and Moony thinking
I’d betrayed them, that’s fucked up. And the way Moony suffers, that’s fucked,
too. You losing Cedric. Fucking Wormtail. And all the pureblood mania, and
Death Eaters on the rise and people disappearing, and Voldemort
back—that’swhat’s truly fucked up. But you here in my arms, telling me you feel
happy—”
“I do!”
“And I do too.” Sirius sighs and strokes Harry’s cheek. “That’s not fucked up.
How could it be? But—yeah, I know. James.”
“I mean, he’d kill you, right? Or both of us?”
Sirius searches a while before he finds the answer that feels true. “If James
were alive,” he says, “you and I would both be completely different people. And
neither of us would need the other in this way.”
“But I might still like blokes. I mean, suppose it weren’t you I was with. If
my dad knew I liked blokes, would he...would he still...”
“Love you? Want you for his son? Oh, Harry, yes. I can tell you exactly how
James would’ve felt about that. He was my best friend; I know you know that,
but he was my best friend even after we—even after I took up with Remus in
fifth year. And if your dad were still alive—and I’m sure about this, Harry, as
sure as I can ever be of anything—your dad would be bloody Gryffindor proud of
you for being who you are.”
Harry doesn’t say anything. Sirius strokes his back and feels him breathing. He
tries to open up the place inside himself where James lives on inside him, to
let Harry’s magic spiral in and feel the truth of what that was for Sirius. He
doesn’t know if he should say more or if it’s enough just to invite Harry in,
let him wander undirected.
After a while Harry sighs, shifting so he can see Sirius’s face again. “That
makes me feel better,” he says. “Lots better.” He reaches up and strokes
Sirius’s beard, his neck, his chest. He rests his head on Sirius’s chest and
sighs again. “When I first realized I liked boys, I didn’t know about you and
Remus yet, obviously, and I thought, this is so awful—and then I thought, at
least my parents are dead, so they’ll never have to know.”
“Oh, Harry, no. Godric, I should never have agreed to keeping you in the dark
about me and Remus. I’m so sorry. But your parents would have been proud of
you. Believe me.”
“My mum, too?”
“Lily was the best. And she’d have made a fuss over all your boyfriends...well,
maybe not the ones who were her age, but—ow, Harry—”
“Thought you liked getting hurt?”
“Not like that, you git. I need that arm.”
Harry kisses the spot he’s punched.
“And then your mum and dad would have taken you by the hand and marched you
straight around to me and Remus, and made sure we told you everything you
needed to know to be a happily bent wizard. Which I fully intend to do, so that
will make Prongs and Lily happy—” Sirius pauses and wipes his eyes with the
back of his hand. “How much that still hurts. It surprises me sometimes, even
now.”
Harry squeezes Sirius’s hand. Sirius threads their fingers together and kisses
Harry’s thumb.
“We can’t tell anyone we’re doing this,” Harry says suddenly.
“I hope that didn’t just occur to you.”
“Obviously not. I mean, I haven’t exactly been blabbing about sneaking off to
Knockturn Alley.”
“But Harry—” Sirius sits up. “This is important. In the last war, everything
went wrong when we started keeping secrets. Remus and I from Peter, and Remus
from me, and James and I from Remus, and Peter from all of us. I think you’ve
got to tell Ron and Hermione.”
“Oi, Sirius, I don’t fancy having that conversation.”
“Hermione will guess anyway, won’t she? She doesn’t miss a trick. Better you
should tell them. In the end they’ll say, ‘as long as you’re happy,’ right?
Which you will be, as long as they can keep it secret, and not let something
slip—”
“—in front of Mr. and Mrs. Weasley,” Harry finishes.
“Molly’d castrate me.” Sirius winces. “With a rusty butter knife.”
“Ouch. What about Remus?”
“I tell Remus everything. Always. And he’s used to me by now, you know. It
won’t change anything between us.”
“But won’t he...I mean, it’s me. He knew my parents.”
“So did I,” Sirius says ruefully.
“But you think Remus won’t be horrified?”
“Well...yes, he will be. But only superficially. You know what I mean by that?”
Harry thinks a moment. “You mean he’ll be horrified because...because everyone
else would be horrified if they knew. So he’s got to be horrified on their
behalf.”
“Well-said, Harry-lad. But underneath Moony’s thin veneer of outrage at my
total lack of propriety and decorum, is someone with an enormous capacity for
understanding other people. Especially people he loves. Especially me. And from
the depths of his love and concern for you—and they are depths, Harry, Remus
would do anything for you—”
“Except come out to me, apparently.”
“Don’t judge him, Harry. Especially not when...” Sirius sighs and trails off.
“When I’m fucking his lover,” Harry finishes.
Sirius is quiet a moment. He smooths Harry’s hair and watches as it pops right
back up again. “Remus will understand it. He knows you pretty well, Harry. And
Moony’s possessive, but not jealous. You see the difference? As long as I’m
still his—and I am his, Harry, always, just like I feel you’re mine, and I’m
saying that now, because you are, I can’t pretend otherwise—”
“I want you to say it. I want to be yours, Sirius. I’ve always wanted it. I
wanted you to—what you’ve always said. To take care of me. But like this.”
Sirius twines his legs around Harry, buries his face in Harry’s hair. “Yes.
Like this. Just like this.” The scent of Harry fills his nose, as fresh as
grass. Grass someone has shagged on, maybe, but sweet and green and so, so
good. Sirius raises his head and looks into the green fields of Harry’s eyes.
“I’m lucky, Harry. I never thought I’d say it again, but I am. I’m a lucky man.
And sometimes I’m even happy.”
“I want to make you happy, too.”
“You already have. I’m happy right now. Happier than I’ve been in years.”
“But what can I—you know. Do. For you, I mean.” He runs his hand down Sirius’s
chest.
“For me?” Sirius grins. “You ask what you can do for me? When I’ve already had
my cock sucked this morning in a most spectacular fashion, and I’ve rimmed the
most delightful arse I’ve ever tasted since I first got my tongue into Moony’s,
and I’ve been overwhelmed in every way by the incomparable sweetness and
brilliance of your person? We’ll get back to my cock eventually. Right now,
we’re focusing on you. Which reminds me—I want to be sure you know a few
things.”
“I know I’m getting hard for you again.”
“I mean things to keep yourself safe.”
“Do we have to talk about that now?”
“I did promise to protect you. Remember? That was how you broke me down.”
“Was that even today?”
“This morning.”
“I feel like that was years ago. Sirius, I feel like I’ve been with you
forever.”
“Because you’re mine. It’s like that, belonging to someone. It feels as if it’s
always been that way. It was like that for me with Moony.”
Harry nods. “I feel like this is what I always wanted, to be here with you like
this, maybe even when I didn’t know you, still some part of me wanted it. It
just seems...right.” Harry slides his hands down over Sirius’s thighs and
Sirius’s cock stiffens. Lurches, actually, toward Harry’s hand.
Sirius laughs and puts a hand over himself. “Wait, Harry. I want to show you
this before I get carried away again. A spell. You know Lubrico?”
Harry nods.
“Has anyone ever cast it inside you?”
“Cast it inside me? No.”
“May I?”
Harry’s eyes widen and he nods.
Sirius closes his eyes again and gathers Harry to him. Pulls Harry on top of
him and holds him and feels the tendrils of their magic unfurling for each
other, reaching out and tangling together as they kiss, as their cocks throb
between them, as the weight of Harry’s body sinks down into his own. He reaches
down for Harry’s plum of an arse, cups his hands over the fullness of him.
Harry whimpers.
“Lubrico intimum,” Sirius whispers against the fold of Harry’s ear, and a shaky
moan of pleasure breaks from Harry’s throat as the spell blooms shimmer-slick
inside him.
“That’s... Sirius, it’s...it’s youin me! In the spell, I mean, it’s your magic.
I can feel it.”
“It is me, yes. It’s harder to cast that way, so most wizards cast on their
fingers. But you’ll be ace at it. Now here’s the next one. Inside you again.
Protego Lues.”
“Oh. That’s...it’s sort of sparkly, isn’t it.”
“That’s what a properly cast protection charm feels like. If the caster does it
poorly—which most wizards do, since it’s a shield charm—it feels more like a
Scourgify.”
“Like...carbonated, sort of?”
“You’ve felt it, then. I’m relieved to hear that.”
Harry nods. “A few times.”
“And the other times?”
“A Muggle bloke...oh, never mind. Can we just—”
“We’ll get to shagging in a minute, I promise. But first I want to know if
you’re keeping safe. Tell me about your Muggle bloke.”
Harry rolls off of Sirius and props himself up on one elbow. “Not mine. He just
picked me up. In a...God, this is embarrassing. In a park.”
Sirius presses his fist hard against his mouth to keep from saying any of the
hundred things crowding his tongue. “Go on,” he says stiffly.
“We did it in his hotel,” Harry continues. “He was traveling. But he was nice.
He was my....” Harry looks away from Sirius then. “He was my first time.
Fucking, I mean. He was nice about it, though, and he used a condom, that’s a
Muggle thing you—”
“I know what a condom is, Harry.”
“Er, right. So when I left, he gave me a bunch. Of condoms, I mean. He told me
to always be careful, and he said...he said he’d always remember me.”
“He jolly fucking well will,” Sirius growls. “How old were you last summer,
fourteen?” He aims a kick at the wall. “What was his name?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. He said he could get arrested—”
“Too right, he could.” Sirius kicks the wall harder, and a piece of something
behind the plaster falls with a muffled thud. “Oh, Harry, I’m ruining you.”
“Hey.” Harry reaches for Sirius’s foot. “Stop it, will you? I’m already
ruined.”
Sirius closes his eyes. He could fall again, right now, down and down and cold
and gray. “We’ve all failed you, Harry. And especially me.” His tattoos swell
and shiver, knit a film of magic across his chest but it’s not enough. It never
was enough. He’s still falling, the hell of it swallowing first his body, then
his heart his mind his soul, sucking himself out of himself.
But then the magic turns warmer. Flares and connects, turns vibrant, green.
Harry is rubbing his hands across Sirius’s chest, over his heart, over his
nipples, and then his mouth is there. His tongue circles Sirius’s nipples, then
licks along the slashes of the runes. He opens his mouth around the full moon
that Sirius made of soot and darkness.
Sirius shivers, suspended between falling and somehow hanging on.
Then Harry turns the moon around with his tongue. Sirius feels his chest
flooding with light. Flooding his heart. He shivers again, violently, and his
eyes fly open.
Harry is looking down at him. “What was that?” he asks.
“That was a powerful wizard named Harry James Potter using his magic to save a
dying man.”
“Sirius! Don’t say that. Please don’t say that. It scares me.”
“I’m sorry.” Sirius breathes deep into the light inside him, the light Harry
put there. A light like the light filtered through the trees in the forest,
filtered through life and growth and green. “I’m sorry, Harry. I was feeling
back in Azkaban. It happens. But I’m here now, and there’s nothing you need to
save me from.”
“Except yourself.”
“That’s not on you, though, is it?” Sirius runs his hands down Harry’s chest.
Unmarked, save for the bruise on the nipple, but with its own magic beneath the
skin, just as surely as Sirius’s tattoos. “And Harry, you’re not ruined. That
was Azkaban talking before. I couldn’t ruin you even if I tried. No one can.
You’re the opposite of ruined—you’re perfect, and whole, and brilliant and
lovely and good. Come close, now. Let me kiss away what scared you.”
Harry sighs against him. The kiss is long and slow. Both of them are hard
again, erections rolling against each other, against their thighs, but there is
time now. Their tongues play and slide and taste in the luxury of this easier
desire. The kisses slip in and out of being smiles.
“And now,” Sirius says after a while, “talk to me. Tell me what you want.”
“You, of course.”
“Yes, but how? You said you think about me while you toss off. What did you
imagine I was doing with you, while you were wanking that gorgeous prick of
yours?”
“You? Doing?” Harry blinks up at him.
“Yes.” Sirius runs his palm down Harry’s naked thigh.
“We were—” Harry pauses.
“Go on. I know you want me to fuck you, Harry. And Godric, I want to. But I
want to hear you say it. Tell me exactly what you want, how you’d like it. I
want to make it good for you.”
Harry laughs in embarrassment. “I don’t—I don’t want to say it. I don’t know
why I’m so—now, all of a sudden—so shy.”
“It’s like that sometimes, asking for things. Sometimes you have to be warmed
up. I’ll start then, yeah? Ask you about what I already know you like?”
“Oh, that’s—yeah, that’s hot. Yeah. Please.”
“You like sucking my cock?”
“Yes.” Harry’s eyes actually sparkle. But then he ducks his head, embarrassed.
“Look at me, Harry. Keep looking at me for this. You liked it when I marked
you? Marked your nipple? Sucked it so hard it’ll be sore for days?”
“Fuck, yes.” His eyes dart away, but then Harry, good Harry, his Harry,
remembers, and brings his gaze right back to Sirius. His cheeks flush a little,
as if the blood there wants Sirius too.
Sirius takes Harry’s nipple between his thumb and forefinger. “You like when I
tweak this swollen rosy tit?”
Harry whimpers. Sirius’s cock jumps for the sound. “Ye—yeah. I like—I feel
it—there?”
“In your cock.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“When—when you pinch me, I feel it in my cock, it—it tugs, oh fuck,Sirius,
that—”
“You liked it when I rimmed your arse?”
“God. That would be yes.”
“You’d like that again. Me tonguing you open. Or, no: you like to hold yourself
open for me. Showing me that lovely hole of yours.”
“I—” Harry’s whole face flushes. “Yes.”
“You liked my finger in your arse? Inside you?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me you want it.”
“I want—fuck.” Harry drops his eyes, raises them, tries again. “I want—Sirius,
this is hard.”
“But it’s how you’ll get what you want. Learn to say it. Not for me. For you.”
I want—your finger in—inside me.”
“Good boy. Always say what you want, my sweet Harry. Until you get it. From me
and every lover.”
“Just you, Sirius.”
Hearing Harry say it makes his heart hurt, with love and a fierce sense of
possession. He slides one hand around Harry’s arse and squeezes.
“Tell me what you want again,” he whispers.
“I want...your fingers...in my hole.”
“Stroking inside you, making you come again like that? I can rub you so sweet,
Harry.”
“Yes—and, and I want your cock, too, want you to fuck me, I always—I want—Oh,
Christ, I—”
“Look at me, Harry, tell me.”
“I want to sit on your lap, that's what I couldn't say. While you hold me, and
kiss me, and then I want--I want to ride your cock while you hold me, that’s
what I wank to, Sirius, I’m facing you and riding you, and you’re holding me,
holding me and fucking me—”
“Fuck, Harry, get on. Here, like this.” Sirius scoots to the edge of the
mattress and plants both feet on the floor. He pulls his cock toward his belly
as Harry climbs into his lap, knees on the mattress. His cock nuzzles against
Sirius’s belly and Sirius feels his own prick leak in response.
Harry wraps his arms around Sirius’s neck. “I haven’t done it this way before,”
he murmurs.
“I’ll make it so good for you, Harry.” He strokes Harry’s shoulders, kisses his
neck, his jaw, his ear.
“I haven’t even...I’ve never done it face to face.” He hides his head against
Sirius’s shoulder. “But I...I want you to see me.”
“My sweet boy. My Harry. You’ve never had someone who could see you. Beyond the
scar and glasses.”
Harry trembles in his arms, all of his beautiful naked weight so heavy in
Sirius’s lap. So alive in his arms. Sirius strokes his open palms down Harry’s
back, feeling all the hairs on Harry’s skin burst up in a shiver at Sirius’s
touch. He strokes over the ridge of Harry’s spine, the wings of his shoulder
blades, the broad muscles between them. He cradles Harry’s face in his hand,
kissing him slow and deep. Then he leans back, drawing the bed pillows beneath
his head and shoulders.
“Open yourself up for me,” Sirius murmurs. He watches Harry’s face as he does
it, his eyes closing and his head tipping back as he reaches behind himself to
finger his hole. He can see the moment when Harry breaches himself, when he
moans and rocks his hips, working his fingers in. Sirius reaches around behind
Harry and finds the back of Harry’s hand. He presses gently, encouraging
Harry’s fingers deeper, and Harry moans again.
“Fuck me. I’m ready.”
Sirius reaches between them, wraps a hand around his own cock. He's so wet for
this, precome all over the head of his cock. He strokes it down over his shaft
and Harry’s hand joins him, Harry’s hand on his cock too, slick with the lube
from his arse.
Raise yourself up now,” Sirius tells him. "We’ll go slow.”
Harry rises up on his knees. His legs trembling just a little. Sirius thumbs
more lube over his cock and leans a little further back into the pillows so
they can get the angle right. Then he moves his cock into position, the tip
just brushing Harry’s hole.
He moves his other hand up to Harry’s hips to steady him. “When you’re ready,”
he says softly. Harry looks down at Sirius then. Lashes fluttering on a blink
and then his eyes wide and scared and wanting, so full of wanting that
something inside Sirius catches and won’t let go. Catches and holds on to stay
forever in the moment that is this one. The moment his cock is at the threshold
of Harry’s body, about to be let in.
Harry lets out a long shuddering breath and lowers himself down. He’s so tight,
so tight around the head of Sirius’s cock so hard stretch tight—and then open.
Then soft moan giving way.
“Oh fuck, oh yes, oh god,” Harry moans. “Oh fuck, it’s this, oh fuck, oh this.”
Harry taking it, letting himself be taken. Giving himself over. To the fucking.
Sinking all the way down until Sirius is deep in he’ll never get out, never
stop, never ever let go.
Harry rocks his hips down as Sirius thrusts up to meet him. And then they’re
rocking together, Sirius fucking him, and Harry saying yes, Harry saying
harder.Sirius fucking the yes,fucking the harder. He is inside Harry, inside a
magic even stronger than his own, and it is so good to be inside him, to be
safe inside him. To be held like this, held and trusted and needed and loved as
it builds and builds, Harry moaning his name, holding him and moaning, “Fuck
me, oh fuck me, Sirius...I love you.”
Tears start in Sirius’s eyes as he says, “Look at me, Harry.”
And Harry does, wild-open, and Sirius gazes back, shining and joyful and free.
“This, Harry. Me fucking you. Loving you. Holding you on top of me. Watching
you ride my cock so I can hold you while you come.”
“I—I—Oh fuck, oh yes—”
Sirius moves one hand from Harry’s hip so he can circle his fingers around
Harry’s prick, hot and dry and throbbing. Lubrico, Sirius thinks, his hand
flooding with it. Harry’s cock surges into the slickness of Sirius’s palm.
“Oh—wank me—yeah—”
“Fucking love you, Harry. Love your hole, love feeling my cock in your hole,
love fucking you. Love watching your face while I fuck you.”
They rock together, Harry on his knees, working himself on Sirius's cock,
Sirius thrusting up to meet him. Small sounds escape from Harry's mouth, open,
broken, sounds of pleasure tight with need.
“I’m so close—please, Sirius. More—”
Sirius reaches up and wraps his hands around Harry's sides, helping him ride,
rock himself to completion. “Fucking my sweet boy. Holding my sweet boy. Come
for me, my Harry, my love. Let me watch you come in my arms.”
And Harry does. With that sharp cry Sirius heard the nights before. High and
long and sweet. And this time, no pillow muffles it, no glass breaks in anger.
This time Harry’s cry goes on and on, breaking Sirius’s heart as the sound
tears through it, Harry’s pleasure and release a living thing set free in
Sirius. Padfoot, who is always inside Sirius too, gives a yip of joy, and
Sirius comes, flooding hot and deep inside Harry’s drawn-out sound. Sirius’s
magic flares all around them, as strong as Harry’s now, its wild purple
streaming through the room, filling their bodies, joyful and joined.
Sirius wakes to the weight of Harry still on top of him. It is glorious to wake
in the darkness and not think, not even for a moment, that he’s back in
Azkaban. Everything around him, everything he can smell, everything touching
him and holding him is Harry. Harrysex, Harrymagic, Harrylove. Sweat and dried
come and Harry’s hair in his mouth and Sirius is so happy. He’d forgotten what
it feels like to be this happy. It fills him up like tears, like anger, like
pain, that’s how full it is, but it’s happiness this time.
He lies awake in the darkness and feels the pressure and release of Harry’s
chest against his own, Harry breathing in his sleep on top of Sirius. No
nightmares. No crying out. No war. Nothing but this.
He must have fallen back asleep again, because next thing he knows the room is
light, and Harry is nuzzling his neck. It’s late morning, judging by the light
through the window. Somewhere outside, church bells are ringing—it’s Easter
Sunday. Harry will have to go back to school this afternoon. He’ll have to
leave Sirius alone and take the Knight bus back to Hogwarts. Back to a Hogwarts
without Dumbledore, back to a castle under siege.
Perhaps, Sirius thinks, he can Apparate to the cave and stay there as Padfoot
again. It’s no worse than being in alone in Grimmauld Place; better, in fact,
to be in the wind and the dirt and the rocks. The rocks are a bit too much like
Azkaban, it’s true, but there is a promontory near the cave where on clear days
he can see the ramparts of the Hogwarts astronomy tower, a dark finger of stone
above the trees.
Sirius will ask Dumbledore if Harry can come back here for the summer instead
of going to the Dursleys. The protections surrounding Grimmauld Place are at
least as strong as the blood enchantments Dumbledore has cast at Privet Drive,
and Dumbledore owes Harry this; owes Sirius too. And as for the twelve weeks
until then? For all his magic, Harry is vulnerable. Has been going off with men
in parks, has been picking up strange wizards in pubs. Sirius can’t let him go
back to Hogwarts so unprotected. So naked under his clothes, his skin so
starved for love.
He brushes Harry’s hair back from his forehead and his eyes fall on the scar.
On Harry’s smooth cheek above two day’s growth of beard. On his dark eyelashes,
blinking sleepily up at him.
“I need to mark you,” Sirius says quietly.
“Mmmm.” Harry tilts his head back, offers his neck. The mark Sirius made
yesterday has deepened to to a lovely mottled purple. Sirius traces it with his
fingers.
“Not like that, though. Delightful as those marks are. I need to mark you
magically. With a protective spell.”
“Like your tattoos?”
“Not exactly. May I do it?”
“You can do anything to me, Sirius,” Harry says, so earnestly that Sirius
laughs.
“And that attitude, my Harry lad, is one of the reasons you need this spell.
Roll over, then. On your stomach.”
Harry does, and Sirius kneels beside him, resting his hands a moment on Harry’s
arse and shoulder. Feeling the warm flesh under his palms. Feeling the strength
of his love for this person, whose body was made by two other people he loved
so dearly, born of their flesh and blood. Here in the flesh, marked by blood.
This person loving him, and something reborn in Sirius because of it. He will
put his heart and soul and all of his magic into this. He would give everything
he has to keep Harry safe, protected.
Sirius closes his eyes, seeing the image he is about to make, the image infused
with his magic. There is nothing more personal, nothing more himself, that he
can mark Harry with than this.
He moves his lips to Harry’s right shoulder blade and begins sucking, feeling
the skin heat up under the pressure of his mouth. When he takes his mouth away,
a small fuchsia star has formed: Alludra.
Then he moves his lips to the center of Harry’s back, just to the right of his
spine. Inside the suck of his mouth on Harry’s skin, another star bursts into
being: Wesen. Sirius glides next to a spot above Harry’s left kidney. The star
Adhara. Yes, the magic is there. He can feel it. With an intensity equal to the
desperation he felt in Azkaban. To the wandless spells Sirius has only ever
cast upon himself. But no stones this time, no soot, no death. Only the warmth
of his mouth, wet and hot and sucking in in in until Harry’s blood breaks free
of its capillaries and unfurls, freed in a new bruise. On Harry’s left arse
cheek, the star Mirzam.
“Stand up, now, my Harry.”
“You’re done?”
“No. I want you to see what I’ve done so far. Come with me.” Sirius holds him
up. He cannot stop holding him. He walks Harry backward to the wardrobe and
opens it, exposing the full-length mirror hanging on the inside of the door.
“Look over your shoulder at your back,” he says.
Harry stares for a while at the pattern of marks across his back and buttocks:
mouth-stars of fuchsia, purple, rose. Sirius watches Harry’s face in the mirror
and sees the precise moment when comprehension dawns. A ripple across Harry’s
forehead, his eyes growing suddenly bright. His mouth opening, his magic
opening out all around him.
Harry turns from the mirror and takes Sirius’s hands. “It’s Canis Major,” he
murmurs. “All down my back. Your constellation.”
Sirius nods. Map of celestial bodies, marked on the living body. Map of mouth
marks, love marks. Sacred marks of flesh and blood.
Harry looks back to his reflection in the mirror. “But your star isn’t there,”
he says, frowning. “I’m sure it’s not.”
“Where should Sirius be, then?” Sirius asks, just a little wickedly.
Harry studies his back in the mirror another moment. Then his mouth falls open.
“Fuck, Sirius. Your star is in—you’re going to mark my—my hole.”
A shiver of desire bursts through Sirius, from cock to tongue. He can already
taste it. “You want that?” Sirius asks.
“You know I do.” Harry’s voice comes out husky. “That’s—fuck, Sirius,
that’s—wow.”
“Tell me what it is, Harry.”
“It’s hot. It’s so dirty—and brilliant. I—I want you to mark me there. I want
to be yours there. And everywhere, I—fuck, Sirius, it’s so much, I feel so
much, it’s so good, you make me feel everything, and I—Christ, please do it to
me.”
“Bend over for me, then. Right over the bed.”
Harry does, raising his arse in the air. “Should I...spread myself?”
“Just to start.”
Harry grips his arse cheeks and spreads them apart, opening himself. Sirius
drops to his knees. It is a kind of worship, after all, the making of this
spell. To keep Harry safe and whole. To claim him in his most secret and
ecstatic place. As most precious. As his. And then all at once, Sirius is
overwhelmed.
“Harry—oh, Harry. I need—” He closes his eyes. What does he need, in order to
finish the spell? What’s missing? He needs to make Harry understand the worship
of this. To give him the gift of that as well. “I need to make love to you
again,” he finishes.
In the Canis Major constellation, the star for which Sirius is named is located
in the center of the dog’s chest, in the heart. Sirius’s heart is on his lips
as he leans forward.
Kneeling between Harry’s spread legs, he kisses that sweet wrinkled bud,
accepting it like the offering it is. Licking and tasting each delicate fold.
Taking his time. Even with Harry arching back into him and moaning on the bed,
Sirius goes slowly because this moment is fleeting, even as it is forever. It
will only ever once be right now, this perfect meeting of their magic. Of
belonging to each other while the whole world holds its breath and just stops
while Sirius does this.
“Hold my head, now Harry,” he murmurs. Harry steps wider and lets go of his
arse cheeks, bringing his hands behind him. He threads his fingers through the
dark curtains of Sirius’s hair, drawing the night through his hands. Pulling
him closer. Sirius tongues his arsehole and Harry moans and shakes and holds.
He teases him, nipping his thighs, licking around the puckered edges, dipping
just a little inside the opening. He slips in a finger and fucks him slow and
gentle, all the while rimming the pinked edges. He makes love to him as deeply
and worshipfully as he knows how, until Harry’s thrusting back against his
mouth so hard it hurts Sirius’s neck, thrusting and rutting against the bed,
torn between wanting Sirius to fuck deeper and wanting to rub his cock against
the mattress. Sirius adds two fingers, reaching his other hand around Harry to
fondle his balls.
“Oh, Sirius—fuck me hard now, please—”
He does it, thrusting straight in with his fingers now, his tongue all over the
rim of Harry’s hole, bright and wet with spit and lube. Shaking, everything is
shaking. The bed, Harry’s hands in Sirius’s hair, Harry’s legs, Sirius on his
knees, fucking Harry until the moans become that keening, higher and higher,
cries shaking the air, shaking Harry, breaking him open so the spell can enter.
“Tell me when you’re close,” Sirius grunts.
“Now—want to come—mark me when I come—”
“Yes—”
Sirius pulls his fingers out and moves his hand to Harry’s cock, making a loose
fist for Harry to fuck into as he opens his mouth around Harry’s arsehole and
presses his tongue inside. Sirius presses that plumsweet fruit to his mouth and
sucks—the flesh, the dark plum skin. He sucks as Harry fucks his hand and the
flesh of Harry’s opening swells hot and wet against Sirius’s lips, both of them
swelling into one another as the new star is formed, the bright heart of the
constellation. Harry comes with a cry that vibrates inside both of them and
then the spell is finished. Sirius feels the magic seal itself around Harry,
the star of Sirius shining in its center. He draws back, panting. The dark ring
of Harry’s anus glistens, the tender folds sucked purple-pink. Sirius leans
forward and, as gently as he can, kisses the star of his name.
“Sirius. Oh, Sirius.” Harry’s legs are still shaking.
“D’you feel it?”
Harry nods, a little wild-eyed. “I feel you in me. You’re there. You, I feel
you.” Harry’s grinning and laughing and wrecked. “You’re in me, and you will
be. You’ll stay with me, I feel it.”
Sirius climbs up on the bed, pulling Harry to him. “Stay with you always,
Harry. Even while you’re gone from me.”
“I don’t want to go!”
“I’ll come visit you. In the cave, yeah?”
Harry nods, still trembling, and clutches Sirius’s arms.
“But even when I’m not there, Harry—you’ll feel me with you. I put it in the
spell. I’ll be with you, and if you want to fuck someone else—”
“I don’t!”
Sirius holds up a hand to silence him. “But you might. And if you do, I’ll live
with it. But when he’s fucking you, you’ll feel me there as well. You’ll never
be alone, Harry. That’s what I’m giving you. I’ll be there, touching you and
holding you. And when he fucks you, it’s me you’ll feel inside you. I’ll be
there, and I’ll feel it. And I’ll know if you’re not playing safely,
understand?”
“I only want to be with you, Sirius, always with you—”
“Understand?”
“But—”
“Keeping you safe is my job, Harry, remember? Now promise me.”
“I—I promise, but I don’t want anyone else. I’ll never not want this, with you,
you feel so good for me, I feel so full,I—Oh.” Harry looks up. “Come inside me
again.”
“Godric, do I love you,” Sirius murmurs.
Harry leans back on the duvet. “I’m—it’s not that I’m horny. I mean, yeah, I
am, still—” he laughs, shaking his messy head. “Which is kind of unbelievable,
but it isn’t that. It’s—I don’t know how to say it, but I feel—the magic you
did on me is still—fresh? It’s not settled, it’s all—it’s learning me, and I
want—I want you to be inside me while it’s doing that.”
Sirius kisses his cheek. “I’ll say it again, Harry. You’re a fucking brilliant
wizard. I have dittany salve in my room. You’ll need some to recover first, I
think.”
“I don’t want dittany. I just—I want to feel you, all right? While I’m sore. I
like that sometimes.”
Sirius kisses him again. “So I’ve seen. All right, then. Here. Lie here beside
me. On our sides, like this. My chest against your back, against all the stars
I just made. Slide your leg up. Let me hold you against me while I fuck you one
last time.”
“A thousand more times, a million.”
“Yes, my Harry. But not before you go back to school.”
“Don’t even say it—it’s horrible there now. Umbri—” he breaks off, shaking his
head. “Let’s not talk about it at all. I just want to be here. While I can.”
“Right here.” Sirius kisses the back of his neck, then scoots down on the bed a
little, lining up. “You cast the spell this time, Harry. Take hold of my cock.
I’m already hard for you again.”
Harry reaches behind himself and wraps his hand around Sirius, just under the
head. Sirius lets out a sigh of pleasure as Harry takes a breath,
concentrating. “Lubrico,” Harry whispers, and Sirius feels Harry’s hand around
him flood slick and warm.
“Very good. Now inside yourself, Lubrico intimum.”
“Lubrico intimum,” Harry repeats. He gives a yelp of delight. “I did it! I feel
it!”
“A little trick you can show off to all your friends.”
“Prat.” Harry spanks Sirius’s cock against himself. Now fuck me, Professor.”
“Protection spell first, please. Protego lues.”
“Protego lues—ow. Oh. That one needs a little work.”
“I know someone you can practice with.”
“Will you—you will come visit me soon, right? In the cave.”
“I promise.”
Slowly then, because Harry really is swollen from the final star. Slowly, to
give the spell a chance to settle. And because Sirius does not ever want to let
him go. He makes love to Harry more slowly than he’s ever done anything in his
life, feeling every cell of Harry’s skin where he touches, breathing in every
one of Harry’s breaths and shudders. And so gently. As he holds Harry in his
arms, he feels the spell knit in: the map of Sirius’s true home, a place he’d
make where Harry would be safe from every darkness. As he holds him, he feels
the moon on his chest rise bright among the stars.
~
Later, he watches from the front window as Harry steps up onto the platform of
the Knight Bus, watches as he’s swallowed by the hulk of metal that becomes a
blur as the bus disappears. Sirius stumbles, bracing himself against the window
frame as Azkaban comes down around him. But because he’s still inside the field
of Harry’s love and magic, Sirius is able to prevent himself from fully
falling. He grips the dirty windowsill and rests his head against the pane. But
as he breathes, as he raises his head, he can smell that the protection of
Harry’s scent on him is already beginning to dissipate.
He’ll transform into Padfoot, then. It’s the only way this will be bearable.
And Padfoot’s nose is keener, so he’ll be able to scent Harry on himself just
that much longer.
He’ll transform now.
But no, not quite yet. First he needs to stand here, very still. With one hand
pressed to his cock, soft inside his trousers, and the other hand pressed to
his chest, laid over the moon that Harry turned around. He needs to stay human
a moment longer so he can touch these places and remember with his human mind
how, when he came inside Harry for the last time, he felt himself to be not a
star, but a meteor. The kind that streaks gold across the night, flaring so
brightly that anyone who sees it can’t help but utter that soft, involuntary
cry—
Oh—
Then watch in wonder as it falls.
End Notes
     Thank you for reading! If you liked this fic, please comment and rec-
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