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Sirius Black is not pathetic.
He’s a lot of things, yes. He’s difficult, spiky, hard to like. He’s chaotic, far beyond disorganised, closer to irrational in the way he does things. He can’t make decisions. He’s got low self-esteem, Remus says, and he’s far too reliant on what his friends think.
He’s been in love with his best friend for as long as he can remember.
But, in all of this, he isn’t pathetic. He may be in love with James Potter, but he doesn’t let it fucking define him. Instead, he listens as James talks about girls, none of whom stay around for long, listens as he bemoans the fact that Lily Evans isn’t at all interested him, watches as James hangs on some witches every word, disappears off with her, slides his arm around her. He treats James’ relationships much as he treats Remus’, or Peter’s, or even Lily’s, who, despite her lack of interest in James, is certainly far too interested in being friends with them all. He sleeps with Mary, Lily’s best friend. He realises he’s not interested in girls.
He’s not entirely sure if he’s interested in men, or not to begin with, so he tries that out. It does something for him, more than any witch ever has, but it isn’t right. He wonders if he’s just not interested in sex. Or if they’re just not James.
But, he reminds himself, he isn’t pathetic. He isn’t going to let his life be defined by what is, essentially, some ill-advised crush. He gets on with things.
This is how he misses James coming onto him.
To be fair to Sirius, it’s easy to miss. It could have been anything, that first time. Peter’s not around, for some reason, and Sirius’ alcohol addled brain can’t remember why. Remus is, though, and they’ve gone to the pub with Lily and Mary and a handful of others from the Order, and Mary’s half-heartedly tried to flirt with Sirius again. It’s clear he’s not interested, and it’s clear she doesn’t mind. Peter was here earlier in the night. Remus is five feet away, arguing with Lily about magical creature rights in that way people do when they’re almost flirting, Peter’s stuck at Harwich, that’s where he is, something about Voldemort targeting ferries, and Sirius is drunk at best.
James sidles up to Sirius. He smells of cheap whisky and smoke. Not that he smokes, but the bar’s full of it, and Sirius smells of the same things. James eyes Sirius, carefully, slowly. He rubs his hair.
“Are you into girls?” he asks. It’s to the point. Sirius glances around. Nobody’s in earshot except the four of them, and Lily and Remus are well into their argument.
“Nah,” says Sirius. “I like men.”
It’s the first time he’s said it aloud. He’s tried, in the mirror, but it’s always felt too forced to actually say. Like he’s trying to convince himself. He isn’t. He’s fairly sure now that it’s men for him, definitely more than it is witches, and that it isn’t some rebellion thing. He’s already been disowned.
“Oh.” James rubs his hair again. He looks down at Sirius’ glass, which is empty. “Going to the bar,” he says.
James returns with two tumblers of whisky.
“I suppose that’s why she didn’t like me,” he says, gesturing at Remus and Lily. “Likes him.”
“Yeah.” Sirius had worked that out a few months ago, but he hadn’t bothered to tell James. He offers his best friend what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “There’ll be someone else,” he says. He’s fairly certain it isn’t going to be him. “Plenty more fish in the sea.”
“Yeah.” James empties his glass in one mouthful. His gaze returns to Sirius, and it’s different this time. Like he’s hungrier. Like Sirius is his next tumbler of whisky. “What’s it like with a bloke?”
“Different.” Sirius sips at his own glass. “I dunno. Hard to describe.” That’s half the truth. Sirius once thought he’d never lie to James. And he doesn’t. He tells him partial truths. Some of it’s to protect him, like not telling him that Lily and Remus fancy each other, or the full extent of what goes on in Grimmauld Place. Some of it’s because it isn’t a conversation he’s going to have with James. He isn’t going to discuss sex with people he doesn’t really fancy with the man that he does.
“Right.” James is beautiful. He’s everything Sirius ever wants in a man. Tall, but not lanky with it, broad shoulders, a perfect face. “How do you know that you want it?”
“Dunno. I just do.” That’s the truth, this time, the full and complete truth. He doesn’t know how he knows he wants James. Peter, very much straight, will acknowledge that James is beautiful. Wanting him is something very much more than knowing this. “It’s just what I want. I think it always has been.”
James says nothing. He continues fixing Sirius with that strange, intense look.
“When you look at them,” Sirius continues, filling the silence, “it’s everything you want. Just them. You look at them and you know that you want them.” James’ knee brushes Sirius’ leg. Sirius ignores the accident. “You just know.”
“You just know,” James repeats. “I know.”
James’ hand brushes his leg.
“I know,” he says, again.
Remus’ chair scrapes backwards, he shouts something, a victory shout. Lily giggles.
“We should go home,” James says.
“Yeah,” Sirius agrees. “We should go home.”
He doesn’t notice what James is doing until they’re back, and it’s the two of them, alone. Peter and Remus and Lily aren’t with them, they’re somewhere else, doing something else. It’s James and Sirius, alone, in Sirius’ sitting room, as he fumbles around looking for the records to go on the old gramophone that sits in the corner. James stands, four or five feet away, tracking Sirius’ movements.
“Come here,” he says. Sirius doesn’t. He’s found the pile of records under an ugly throw blanket, knitted in shades of brown and orange and beige, and he’s sifting through the battered cardboard covers. “Come here,” James repeats, and when Sirius doesn’t, he grabs at his sleeve. Twenty or so records, Sirius’ collection, thump to the floor.
They’re a foot away from one another, James’ hand still grabbing onto a fistful of Sirius’ shirtsleeve. A foot of empty air and useless space, a foot of threadbare carpet beneath their feet. Sirius doesn’t like the carpet.
“Fuck,” says James. In one fluid motion, his eyes shut like if he saw what he was doing he’d chicken out, he grabs Sirius’ other arm and pulls him in, their lips meeting in the middle of the empty air. James tastes of cheap alcohol and smoke too, and something else, something like longing. Sirius pulls away.
“Are you sure?” he asks. Because Sirius is sure, he’s sure he wants this.
“Fuck,” says James, again. “You just know,” he says. “I know.”
It isn’t an answer, it isn’t anything either way, but he’s pulling Sirius in again and Sirius can’t find it in him to care. So what if he’s an experiment? Isn’t this enough?
James is pushing Sirius backwards, both of them stumbling through alcohol and distraction, or Sirius is distracted, anyway. He’s lost in this.
The next morning, James is gone.
This isn’t entirely unexpected.
Sirius’ experience is that this happens. Wizards like witches, witches like wizards, that’s how things were always explained to him. Uncle Alphard wasn’t kicked out of the family for his penchant for wizards, but it certainly didn’t help. And James’ family is, admittedly, less toxic than Sirius’ is, but he’s from the same sort of a background. Stands to reason he’d not be sure.
Except he doesn’t come back.
Or at least not in the way Sirius wants him to.
They’re best friends, James and Sirius and Peter and Remus, and they’re always together. The four of them. Exactly as they’ve always been.
Except James avoids eye contact with Sirius. Except he wants to go with Peter to Southampton to stare at boats, rather than join Sirius in patrolling warehouses in a shitty part of Glasgow. Except he’s snogging Caradoc’s sister outside of Headquarters, and then he brings her to Peter’s birthday, and he hasn’t told Sirius. He hasn’t told Sirius anything, hasn’t said two words to him in the last month that aren’t in front of someone else, and he hasn’t said anything about Iris Dearborn.
“Did you know?” Remus asks, indicating where James seems to be trying to swallow her face whole.
“Yeah,” Sirius lies.
Because he’s James’ best friend. What happened between them a month ago doesn’t matter. He’s James’ best friend. It doesn’t matter that he’s in love with him.
Of course it fucking matters.
He can’t stay here. Sirius is outside without really knowing how he got out here, the door still ajar as he kicks a foot up against the wall, leaning back, head against the brick. From inside, he can still hear the hum of the party, the laughter, the occasional burst of song as someone sings along with the radio. There’s nothing to stop him going back in, singing along with them, grabbing another bottle or a glass of something. Nothing except the fact that James is hanging off the arm of some girl, and he should be hanging off Sirius’ arm. They’d slept together. Shagged. Doesn’t that mean fucking anything?
Maybe it doesn’t. James would hardly be the first man to experiment.
Sirius could go back inside. Nothing’s stopping him. Nothing except the fact that he feels like he’s dying inside.
He goes back inside. He leads the toast to Peter, chases him around the flat with James and Remus to deliver the birthday bumps.
This is normal. This is being friends. This he can do.
He can't do this.
James dumps Iris Dearborn. He shows up at Sirius’ place late at night, nervous, barely able to keep still. Sirius doesn’t say anything, not really. He comes up with six, seven plans and discounts all of them, because none of them are the right thing to do.
None of them are the right thing to do, because none of them are James being his, without any of this shite.
And when James leans forward and snogs him, Sirius’ body responds before his brain does, and he’s fine with this, he wants this, he can’t get enough of this.
He wants this, but he doesn’t want the feeling that he gets when, once again, he wakes up alone.
“Something’s wrong,” says Peter, sliding into a chair opposite Sirius in the kitchen. “You don’t have to tell me what it is, but something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
Sirius kicks the leg of the table. Peter’s right, and Sirius had thought he’d been hiding it better. They’re best friends, Peter and Sirius and Remus and James, and there’s no secrets in the Marauders. Except there is. There’s always been secrets. Sirius’ family, Remus’ condition, that James fucks Sirius and then runs away. Whatever Peter’s hiding. Fuck this.
“Nothing’s wrong, Wormtail.”
“Eh, suit yourself,” says Peter. “Tea? Going to put the kettle on.”
Putting the kettle on is no solution for any of this. Sirius kicks the table again.
James’ parade of witches grows. Sirius thinks of all the things he could say to James; about the witches, about the sneaking to him, about what they do together, about the whole damn mess. He regrets nothing, not any of it, except that he doesn’t fucking deal with it. James brings a girl from the year above at Hogwarts to Sirius’ birthday party, and, in some sort of ridiculous retaliation, Sirius gets halfway through pulling a Muggle in a gay club in the depths of London before he gets cold feet and sits on the Northern Line platform at London Bridge for three hours in November, freezing his arse off.
He’s going to have to do something about this.
Inevitably, he doesn’t.
Instead, he gets himself cursed by his cousin, the lovely Bellatrix, and winds up in St Mungo’s for a week.
James comes to visit every day, usually with the rest of them. He comes alone, once or twice, and they discuss the Order. Pleasantries. The fact that Remus has, finally, asked Lily out on a date.
“And you’re alright with that?” Sirius asks.
“Yeah. I am.” Sirius eyes James carefully. He knows when James is lying, always has. And this doesn’t seem like a lie, or, not to Sirius’ eyes, anyway. “She doesn’t fancy me. I’m not sure I’m right for her, anyway.”
“Maybe not.”
James gets a strange look in his eyes then. He stands up, cautiously, as if he’s stalking his prey.
“Sirius - “ he begins, before he’s interrupted by a Healer.
They’re not alone together from then until Sirius is home, recuperating. He drags himself to Order Headquarters for meetings, but, aside from that, he’s at home.
“Not until you’re fit,” Moody says, when Sirius asks when he can get back into action. “I mean it, Black. Proper, Healer-authorised fit, not whatever you think is good enough.”
James rolls back in with his hair singed, and Sirius can’t keep his eyes off him. James can’t keep his eyes off some girl.
Moody stomps in with the news that Edgar Bones is dead.
“You look like you need to go home,” says Remus. He’s not wrong.
And that’s it, Sirius decides. That’s it for pining over James Potter. He’s going to get what Remus would call an ounce of self-respect, and he’s going to get his head out his arse, as Peter would advise, and what James thinks about this doesn’t fucking matter, because he doesn’t take Sirius seriously. So Sirius isn’t going to take him seriously. He’s going to ignore everything that James Potter does, everyone James Potter wants to shag, and he’s not going to sit around for him for one more minute. He could die, like Edgar. He could be gone any day, and he’s not going to waste any more of his life on pining for James Potter.
He needs a distraction.
There’s a knock on the door within the hour, and the moment Sirius opens it, his resolve wavers. James’ hair is still singed, and he stands in the doorway stooped over slightly, apologetic, almost.
“Cam I come in?” he asks.
Sirius can cope with this. He can sit and he can listen to James talk about how they managed his latest mission, about how he’d run into Hagrid, and everything had been okay at his end, and how they’d done what they could.
“I’m glad it went well.”
“Yeah.” James shifts awkwardly in his chair. Sirius rearranges himself on the sofa.
It’s now that Sirius realises something’s up. There have been seven occasions in their lives that things have been awkward between James and Sirius. Excluding the incident with the willow, Snape, and Remus, and the time in first year Sirius had called James a blood-traitor without thinking, it’s all been when Sirius has said something stupid.
So he’s not going to. He’s going to make this normal.
“I tried to make a cake,” he says. “I think I exploded the eggs instead of mixing them.”
“That explains the smell.”
It does smell of burning. There’s a faint acrid smoke coming from the kitchen, too, but Sirius is ignoring that. It isn’t like there’s any active fires. He dealt with that.
“Yeah. I thought someone might like some.”
“I’m assuming we won’t.”
“No,” says Sirius. “You won’t.” The burnt remains of cake are in the garden for the birds. The pan is also in the garden, because the stupid thing wouldn’t come apart. His only wooden spoon was also an unfortunate casualty. “I’ve got biscuits?” he adds.
“I’m fine.” He shifts awkwardly around again. This is new. James isn’t usually the awkward one.
“Don’t feel like you have to stay,” says Sirius. “I don’t need the company.” He does, but he’ll Floo Peter.
“Edgar’s dead,” James says.
“I know. I was there when Moody got back.”
“Shit. Yeah. You were.” A pause. “Are you afraid of dying?”
“Nah.” It’s half-and-half the truth and a lie.
“I - fuck.” James gets up. Sirius does too, because it seems like the thing to do. Less than six feet away, James runs a hand through his hair, smooths his jumper, and looks out the window. No birds, as yet, are interested in the burnt skeleton of the cake. Possibly because it’s dark. “Sirius?”
“Yeah?” Sirius can’t help but be hopeful. His heart hammers in his chest, faster and faster, and he rubs the palms of his hands on his jeans as surreptitiously as he can. He wonders how to stand. He’s forgotten how to stand, he thinks, or at least how to do it casually.
“Fuck. I wanted to - I wanted to say I love you.”
Sirius grabs the arm of the sofa for support.
“What?”
“I love you.”
Sirius opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He can’t find any words for this, this isn’t a scenario he practiced for. The carpet needs replacing. He doesn’t know what to say to this.
“I’ve been a shit friend. I’ve - fuck - I’ve loved you for years. I’ve just - I don’t know. I don’t know why I couldn’t admit that.”
“You told me we couldn’t.” Sirius blinks. There’s a chance this may be a dream.
“I did. I said a lot of things.” James runs his hand through his hair again. He looks like he wants to run, too, the way his eyes keep flicking from Sirius to the kitchen door, to Sirius and back again. “I said a lot of utter shit. I love you.”
“Why?” Sirius asks. “Why?”
“Why? Bugger. Maybe I was scared. I don’t know. My parents want grandchildren. That’s a shit excuse. I was scared of what people would say. I was - I don’t know - what if we’d tried something and it hadn’t worked? What if you didn’t want me after all? What if we’d lost our friendship as well as everything else?”
“James, I - “
“No, hang on, I’m going to finish. Will you let me finish? I wasn’t brave enough, Sirius, and I should have been. I love you, and I’m not just saying this now because I’m worried I might die, or you might die, or any of that. I’m saying it because I love you and I don’t - I can’t - I can’t not say it any more. I have to say it.”
“James,” says Sirius, and this time, James lets him speak. “I love you too.”
“Fucking hell.”
Six feet of space hangs awkwardly in between them. Six feet of horrible carpet and air that doesn’t need to be there, because what Sirius needs is to be as close as possible to James, right now. James still looks like he might run away, though, so Sirius holds back. He needs to remember all of this. Even if - well, even if this comes to nothing, if James, tomorrow, tries to pretend it didn’t happen, Sirius needs to remember it. He wasn’t going to fall for this, he reminds himself. “Sirius?”
James’ voice reminds him that it’s his turn to speak. He opens his eyes.
“This isn’t just because someone’s turned you down, is it?”
“No. Balls. No. I - “ James flails for words, and Sirius doesn’t rescue him. He steps backwards. He suddenly develops an urge to throw something, maybe the vase he hates that Lily gave him. “Sirius - I know I’ve been shit, but just listen to me, I love you.”
Sirius can’t decide if he wants to throw something or snog James or run out the house or all three of those things at the same time.
“That isn’t enough,” he says. He can’t believe he’s saying this. He’s been hoping for just this moment, exactly this moment, for years. He’s been hoping that one day, any day, James will finally admit what this is. What this could be. Him and James. “This isn’t just supposed to be something you just say. Because you’re alone or someone’s died or you’re fucking terrified of your own mortality.”
“It isn’t,” James insists. He takes a single step closer to Sirius, and Sirius takes one away, almost backing into the Welsh dresser. The room isn’t big enough to awkwardly dance around each other in. “It isn’t, I promise.”
“What do you promise?” Sirius is being unfair now, he thinks. He’s waited for this. He’s wasted countless hours pining over James, imagining how the moment when James is finally ready for this might go. He’s dragging this out into a mess it doesn’t need to be.
And yet, is he?
Maybe he needs to do this. Remus would call it self-respect. Peter would call it sensible. Remus would also call this an unfortunate need to define himself in terms of what his friends would think, but Remus should stop taking those Muggle correspondence courses.
“Fuck this,” Sirius says, which he knows is unhelpful as he says it, but Sirius has never been any good at helpful. “Fuck all of this.” He wants to throw something. He wants to run away. He wants to run into James, and he wants to snog him, and for, this time, James to not decide a week later that this isn’t going to work out between them, after all. “You’ve got to be certain,” he says, his nails digging into his palms, his hands balled up into fists. “You can’t change your mind again. You can’t.”
“I won’t,” James promises, and Sirius almost believes him. “I’ve been, well, I’ve been awful, I know. I - I don’t regret loving you, Sirius. I don’t regret that I’ve loved you for years. I’ve been a dick. I understand if you want to tell me to fuck off, want to tell me to get right out of here. Fuck. I’ll never regret loving you. I only regret I couldn’t be the man you needed me to be. The man that was brave enough to admit how I felt. The man that wasn’t so - so terrified of fucking it all up.”
Sirius can’t do anything but stand there as James talks.
“I’m trying,” he says. “I’ve been trying to be better. Trying to be someone that doesn’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. ” He scratches his head again. Sirius resists the urge to, well, snog him, or grab him and never let him go. Because he can’t rush into anything. He has to know it’s real.
“I regret so much,” James continues. “How I wasn’t brave enough after that first time, to say that I loved you. How I kept coming back, but I never came back properly. How much I hurt you. I’m sorry, Sirius,” he says, and Sirius refuses to make eye contact, because if he does, one or both of them is going to cry. “I’m sorry. I understand if you can’t accept the apology, and I get that this is selfish, isn’t it, and it might seem like I’m only doing this because I’m a twat, but I love you, and I - “
Sirius makes a decision. He cuts James off by crossing the carpet, the carpet he’s going to bloody well replace, and he grabs James. James is silent for one, confused second, his eyes wide and his mouth open, before Sirius does what he should have been doing all along, and snogs him. Their lips meet, and this is exactly what it’s supposed to be between them. The two of them, lips on lips, hands in each other’s hair and along each other’s backs, and this is how it's supposed to be. James is tugging at Sirius’ shirt when Sirius pulls them apart.
“This is real,” says James. “This isn’t going to be like before. This is it for me.”
“Promise,” he says. “No more regrets.”
“No more regrets,” says James. “Promise.”
“It’s your last chance,” Sirius warns him. “Last chance for me.”
“I won’t need any more,” James promises him, and that’s good enough for Sirius. “I just know."