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Insomnia is a harpy, digging into on Sirius’ skin for the third night in a row. Sirius feels it at the backs of his hands, his ribs, the smaller bones of his wrists, that prickling knowledge that he’ll only be able to steal scraps of hours here and there—too petulant to curl up and pretend to the dark of his eyelids that he’ll dig for sleep in earnest, too filled with the specific brand of twenty-something bravado to care that he’ll hurt for it in the morning. The bedroom is quiet save for the distant clatter of fireworks. It’s the fifth of November, the Muggles loud and celebratory on the street four stories below; Sirius has been twenty-six for around forty-eight hours now and still hardly feels a whit over fourteen, one more line added to his list of things keeping him away from sleep. He shifts gently from his back up onto his elbow to face Remus’ side of the mattress and, though the sight has been there for almost a decade now, can’t hold back a dopish little smile.
Remus Lupin is very likely made from a unique sort of stardust that lets him return to the night like a natural.
His skin is pale in this light, the half-moon shining through their cheesecloth excuse for curtains—Remus could sleep through the light of armageddon, and Sirius likes having shapes and shadows to watch when he lists, sleepless—to wash the room out in a pearled layer that looks as though it might shatter with a touch. The racket from outside amplifies the stillness in here, this little shoebox flat, just enough space for Sirius and Remus to nest and exist and adore one another through the years. No more, no less. All they’ve ever needed.
Sirius stares at the shadowed curves of Remus’ face caught in absolute peace and loves him, loves him, loves him to the soot of the earth and back again. His lips are parted ever so slightly in the thick of rest, reaching out for thought in the suspended freedom of dreams—or rather the clean-slate lackthereof, for it’s a rare day that Remus Lupin awakens to say I’ve the strangest dream just now. When Sirius dreams they’re bright and chaotic things. Remus, with his head resting to the side to let his hair skew just so along his temples, may only ever sleep in shades of blackness. Sirius envies him not for the first time. His freckled shoulders sink into the mattress with the staid surrender of control that only comes alongside deepest slumber, rising and falling with each push and pull of his breath. Filling the ballast, emptying it again, that little scar on the ridge of Remus’ collar bone from a moon in 1974 like a carving on the wall of nature’s most hallowed temple that Sirius traces most nights or days or mornings when they roust their bodies to the blushed splendor of indulgence.
Lower still the covers have fallen away with one tossed arm, as though Remus has just loosed an arrow through a misty hart composed of the sweet-smelling smoke making itself evident through the cracked window. The radiators in this flat are overactive, manic, knocking like bones and hissing hot atop valves too old to be adjusted, so even when the bite of November rolls in Sirius leaves the windows tipped open to the balancing chill. Somebody begins to sing outside, a low and ancient tune that sounds of frost on glass and the rust of prison bars, and Sirius opens his senses ever further and drinks in the image of Remus he hardly deserves.
The scar bitten across Remus’ waist and bared now in his sprawl is the most unique thing about him. Hidden fastidiously throughout their boyhood, never once rucking up the hem of his shirt until Sirius had once assured him I promise I won’t touch it, Moony, I won’t even look at it if you don’t want me to. I just want to hold you, the soppiest words that may have ever come from Sirius’ depths but he stands fiercely by them—those skewed puncture marks like purple cankers in a fairy circle on the golden skin around them, wrapping around Remus’ front and back in vicious halves, healed twenty years ago with hasty magic too desperate to worry for the shapes it would make; the silvery sheen that’s developed over the shallower back teeth gives the whole thing an incongruous cast of delicacy. One could never call the scar itself “beautiful,” for how can something with so much trauma ever be such? But it’s shifted and changed with Remus’ body over the years, pulling and twisting along with his skin through growth spurts and development and the long bandy years of finding his way into fitting this body of his, and Sirius supposes in the quiet purchase of this moment that those torn smudges of Remus’ history are dear to him because they’re written into a body that feels like home when it’s pressed against his own.
The distant fizzle of Catherine wheels and the delighted cheering to accompany it lights up somewhere down the block outside. The muted high frequencies die before they reach the bedroom window in full, but Remus stirs for the whooshing too disparate to be the lullaby comfort of the flat’s pipes—Sirius watches as Remus shifts, eyebrows bunched in a slight frown, adjusting his arms to stretch one above his head and turn his face to the other side before dropping back into stillness with the ghost of a snore behind his nose. Remus has always slept on his back, a great splaying of his limbs as though the compact tidiness of his personality leaps free when he falls unconscious, all reach and stretch and easy breathing, that bonfire blood of his blazing when sun goes down. It’s the perfect foil to Sirius’ own knot of side-sleeping tumult, his body apparently preferring to weather those slings of illusive sleep by curling in on itself and letting the wind buffet his back like some sort of seaside boulder with his hands folded tight beneath his head. Falling asleep used to be lonely, but Sirius fits perfectly in the crook of Remus’ arm without any adjustment from either of them.
Sirius lowers himself down from his elbow now and presses a feather-light kiss to Remus’ shoulder as he tucks himself close to Remus, can never keep from scrawling Remus’ body thick with the alliteration of his lips no matter how untouchable a portrait he makes sometimes. Turned away from the window and traced by the long shadow of the bedpost, bisected with the bluish tinge of deeper-than-midnight, Remus’ lips twitch and he makes a mellifluous little sound of approval from the depth of his sleep. Sirius kisses him again, lingering as though pressing a seal into body-warm wax, and receives another happy little pule. There is nothing more important on this earth, nothing more fraught with magic or perfection, than the sight and sound of Remus Lupin at peace.
Sirius settles his head on Remus’ chest and shifts ever so slightly to find that perfect line of their long bodies, slotting like lock and key to enter this blessed unity of quietude they had searched for so vehemently as boys. He shuts his eyes softly, the image of Remus’ beatific face left on the backs of his eyes like candle ash on the reverse of a love letter read by the dark of a new moon, and drops into sleep with the racket of autumn outside and the soft tremors of love within.