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Later, Sirius will regret reacting the way he does—but it’s not later yet, and right now, Sirius is horrified. “What?” he says blankly. He positively launches himself backward on James’s bed, wiping his mouth on the elbow of his robes and shuddering. “What are you doing, mate? What is this?”
“Sorry,” says James. His voice sounds breathy and high-pitched. “I just—it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry.”
Sirius can’t stop staring at his lips. They’re a part of James’s body that he’s honestly never paid any attention to until this moment—thin and bowed and currently curved down dramatically at the corners. “It does matter. We share a dormitory. I change in front of you. If all this time you’ve been perving on me—”
“I have not been ‘perving’ on you! You’re my best mate, and I just thought—”
“Most people don’t mack on their best mates, especially when their best mate is another bloke. If you want to be friendly, buy me shit at Zonko’s. Crash one of my detentions. Don’t—don’t—”
“Okay, Merlin’s beard, I get it. Message received.”
“Okay, then.” He tears his gaze away from James’s mouth. “Now, are we going to finish our Defense essays or what?”
x
Afterward, Sirius doesn’t know how the bloody hell James is managing to act so normal around him. Every day is the same: meals, classes, pranks, detentions, and too much time doing homework with Peter and Remus while Sirius waits for James to get out of Quidditch practice. When he does, he’s all one-liners and easy smiles—
—so much so that it takes Sirius a couple of weeks to place what’s different. When they pair up in classes, they’re surrounded by people. When they study together, they do it on the grounds or in the library. Remus and Peter are always in tow when they’re prank planning. Sirius is just waking up one Saturday morning as James is bolting out of there to meet the other blokes for breakfast, and that’s when Sirius realizes that James is avoiding being alone with him.
His first reaction is to get offended. After all, James came onto him, not the other way around: if anybody has the right to act cagey, it’s Sirius. Here he is, carrying on like his best friend isn’t a sick fucker, giving James the benefit of the doubt, and James is over here treating Sirius like he’s the leper? He’s bang out of order, and he must know it.
But then he thinks about it, and he realizes that some space from James could be a good thing—give James some time to start directing his attention at one of the birds in their class and away from Sirius. He still thinks Lily Evans is hot, doesn’t he? Maybe she’ll be more amenable to dating James now that Snivellus is out of the picture.
Besides, ever since James—did what he did, Sirius supposes he’s been feeling a little strangely toward James himself. Like, he can’t stop watching—not just his mouth, but James’s entire face, the creases in his forehead and planes of his jaw. He starts to notice shit like the flex of James’s arms under his too-small pajamas and the way water droplets bead up at his temples when he gets out of the shower at night, and he thinks he’s going to be sick—thinks he might be losing his mind.
He wants to talk to James about it—clear the air and clarify his intentions—but when he finally gets James alone in the dormitory one night after practice while Peter and Remus are off being betas somewhere, and James turns around to walk right back out, and Sirius tells him to wait, he suddenly hasn’t got any more words for him. “You’re good, right?” Sirius finally stammers.
“Yeah, man. All good.”
“You should ask out Evans again. She could be good for you.”
But Evans turns James down when he asks her out before the next Hogsmeade weekend. Shockingly, Remus and Peter both have dates from Ravenclaw—Peter’s going with that Flynn girl, Remus with Damocles Belby—so it ends up being just Sirius and James, scoping out Dungbombs and hitting on Madam Rosmerta.
They wind up guzzling bottles of butterbeer outside the Shrieking Shack by two o’clock in the afternoon, stretching out in the yellow grass with their feet kicked up on the hill. “Looks different from the outside,” James remarks.
Their elbows brush. Sirius flinches away and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
“You don’t have to…” James begins. Sirius glances over to him; the worry lines in his forehead are contorted, and his lips are curved down again. “I’m not going to…”
“Yeah, I know.”
“But—Moony is gay, and you don’t freak out about living with him.”
“Moony’s bent, but he’s not bent for me,” says Sirius automatically. “And I’m not ‘freaking out,’ all right? You caught me off guard is all.”
James looks like he doesn’t believe him, so Sirius slowly and deliberately presses his elbow up against James’s again. “See? Totally chill.”
“Totally chill,” James echoes.
x
That’s how it starts—rubbing elbows in the grass in Hogsmeade. Each time is innocuous enough on its own. The toes of Sirius’s shoe brush the heel of James’s in Potions; he makes a show of crowding in between James and Peter on a couch in the common room, gooseflesh breaking out under his robes everywhere his thigh touches James’s. He’s just doing it to show James how not weirded out he is, he tells himself. It’s just until things get back to normal—until James starts looking him in the eye again.
And then, one January night, the four of them get really, really drunk.
“So we’re sitting there in Prongs’s bed,” Sirius wheezes, dribbling Firewhiskey all over the dormitory floor that they’re all piled on, “and I ask him to show me the incantation again for how to get a Chameleon Ghoul to transform back into its true form, and he just lays one on me! Right there!”
Peter and Remus are both laughing; James just rolls his eyes and takes another swig off his bottle. “I didn’t know you had it in you, Prongsie!” Remus snorts. “All this time, I thought I was the weird one for being bent, and you’re telling me that all this time, you have been, too?”
They’re briefly derailed when Peter spews Firewhiskey out his nose. As Peter bitches about how badly it’s burning and James passes him a totally useless handkerchief, Sirius laughs so hard that he almost forgets about his story—almost—until Remus adds, “So you’re, what, bi?”
“I dunno. I guess. Hard to find out when the bloke you try to make out with won’t kiss you back,” says James.
“Oh!” Remus and Peter chorus.
Sirius smirks and puffs out his chest. “I’ll kiss you right now, if you want.”
“Yeah? Thought you thought it was gross.”
“What, scared to show me what you got?”
“Go on, Prongs,” Peter snickers.
James smirks. “I’ll show you scared,” he slurs, and then he leans over and grabs Sirius roughly by the ear. Sirius thinks he’s aiming for his cheek, but James is clearly too drunk to aim, and Sirius is too drunk to care.
Irrespective of James’s gender, it’s not a good kiss. James’s tongue is lolling around everywhere, and their teeth knock together when Sirius tries to pull him closer; they end up falling to the floor on their sides, and the collision of his head with the hardwood rattles Sirius’s skull. “Ow,” he says in a voice that’s very muffled by James’s mouth. Peter and Remus are both hooting, but it’s so far in the background that Sirius barely notices—all he can think about is the way James tastes, the sour flavor that he pushed out of his mind before but that, apparently, is coming back.
“Man, quit snogging before you start making me and Moony uncomfortable,” Peter whines.
Sirius doesn’t want to let go, but he does. He uses his pajama sleeve to wipe all of the saliva off his mouth and suddenly feels like he’s right back in James’s bed three months ago, when it was up to him how to steer the course—how to frame what he wanted to happen next. But he’s committed to this image, now, and he just says, “Remember that, Prongs, ’cause you just had the best kiss of your life right there.”
“Puh-lease,” says James. “I think I chipped my tooth on you when you bowled me over. Smooth going, Pads.”
He doesn’t admit it to any of the three of them, but he spends the rest of the night smacking his lips together and thinking about how warm James’s neck was when he got his hands on it. It’s the alcohol, he tells himself. It’s going to wear off, and he’s going to laugh about this later and forget all about it.
He does not forget all about it. The next morning, Sirius wakes up licking his lips.
x
He missed James, though, in the time that James was obviously avoiding him, and he thinks he’s just made things even weirder by dangling James’s pent-up feelings in front of Remus and Peter like that. So Sirius starts making a point of spending more time alone with him—tags along with the rounds James has to make in the corridors in the evenings, drags him down to the kitchens for late-night pastries after James’s Quidditch practices. It occurs to Sirius that he’s always waiting around for James to get back from the things he’s busy with when what does Sirius have just for himself? He plans pranks with James and hexes Snivellus with James and uses his two-way mirror to talk to James when they get stuck in separate detentions. Even when they’re on holidays, he sleeps in the bedroom across the hall from James’s in the Potters’ house, now that he’s run away from Grimmauld Place. Independently of James, he basically hasn’t got his own personality.
Who does that make Sirius? Who is he alone, when he’s looking himself in the mirror trying to reconcile the handsome face he sees with what he knows is inside him? Because whatever the blokes say, Sirius isn’t a good person. He’s a bully and a tease and still has to catch himself sometimes when he doesn’t notice the problem with people like Slughorn saying that people like Evans are good at potions “for a Muggle-born.” It wasn’t even until he was eleven and got to Hogwarts that Sirius realized maybe his nutjob parents were wrong about more things than just beating him and Regulus whenever they burned dinner or embarrassed them at galas. He should be spending every waking second trying to fight his upbringing—his inbred biology—and instead, he’s going around hexing first years just because he can, just because James thinks it’s funny.
He’s never alone anymore: he’s always with James. When James is at practice, he’s with Remus, and when James and Remus are both at prefects’ meetings, he’s with Peter. He even finds himself spending time with Lily Evans, who’s been hanging around James some of the time and is seeing Sirius, Peter, and Remus by proxy. The worst part is, it feels good to belong—so good that Sirius doesn’t know what he’s going to do when they all graduate and have to go on to live separate lives. He’s in a bubble that can’t last forever, and instead of bracing himself for impact, he’s just drowning in the things he can still have, that haven’t yet gone away.
When Valentine’s Day rolls around, Slughorn throws himself a Slug Club party, and James, of course, is the only one of their gang invited. He invites Sirius along as a joke, Sirius thinks, but when James says, “If you help me horrify Slughorn with my sexual orientation, maybe I’ll even let you snog me at the end of the night,” he sort of hopes James isn’t joking.
“So you’re definitely bi, then?” Sirius asks him, trying to sound like the question is innocent. It is innocent. Isn’t it?
“Dunno,” says James casually. He sticks out his tongue and adds more boomslang skin to the cauldron of Polyjuice Potion that Slughorn is making them continue to brew today. “It’s not like I’ve had much opportunity to go and find out.”
“Please. I rocked your whole world that one time with Wormy and Moony.”
“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. I’m definitely missing a chunk out of my front tooth thanks to you. Can you go and grab us another horn of bicorn?”
Sirius obediently gets up out of his seat and crosses the room to the supply cupboard in the back. He’s a little shaky on his feet, and he may or may not lock himself in there for about twenty seconds, just to catch his breath and push down the flush rising in his cheeks. It happened. It’s over. Isn’t that what Sirius wanted?
When he gets back to his seat, he spends the rest of the hour fighting the temptation to offer himself up to James for experimentation, you know, just so James can confirm his sexuality. He manages to stop himself, but it’s close.
x
He can’t talk to Peter about it—it’s not like Peter would turn right around and report their conversation back to James, but he’s straight as a ruler, he wouldn’t understand—so he drags Remus outside one day when James is at practice under the guise of making him help with their next Muggle Studies essay, and he brings it up. When they flop down under the beech tree, Remus starts to open up his bag to get his textbook and parchment out, but Sirius puts his hand on Remus’s to stop him. “You gotta help me, man. I think I’m going insane.”
“If you ask me, mate, that’s nothing new. You’ve been a little off your rocker the whole time I’ve known you.”
“Ha ha,” says Sirius humorlessly. “Listen, it’s about Prongs. It’s about…”
“If this is because you think he’s avoiding you, he’s not. I haven’t seen much of him lately, either. He’s running the Quidditch team into the ground, and—”
“What? No, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about—I kissed him, Moony. I kissed him, and now I can’t stop thinking about it.”
Remus raises his eyebrows. “Not as secure in your masculinity as you thought you were, huh?”
“For the last bloody time, I don’t have a problem with gay people—”
“—As long as the person who’s gay isn’t you,” Remus points out, and Sirius falls silent. “That’s what it was like for me, too, before I figured it out last year. Look, dude, if you like him, just tell him, but when you do, you might want to ask him for some time to figure yourself out. It’s not fair to him to pull him into something if you’re just going to back out in six weeks.”
It’s good advice, Sirius will realize later, but at the moment, all he says is, “I think you’re the one off your rocker, Moony. I’m not into Prongs like that. I just feel weird every time I’m around him ever since it happened, you know? I just need to—clear my head of it or something.”
But the more Sirius tries to clear his head, the more he keeps goddamn thinking about it—imagining getting the sour taste of James back in his mouth and maybe more. He’s a mess. If he could just snap out of this—
When he’ll look back on this, he’s going to hate himself for it, but none of it is clear in the moment when they’re at the Valentine’s Day party and Celestina Warbeck comes on the WWN. James sticks out a hand, eyebrows raised, and Sirius stares down at it, then up at James’s face, and—
—flees. He’s not proud of it, and he doesn’t even consciously decide to do it. One second, he’s standing there looking at James, thinking about the way it would feel to have James’s warm hand on the small of his back, to rest his head on his shoulder, and it’s like one blink later, he’s out in the corridor. But he doesn’t get any peace: James is hot on his heels.
“If you don’t want to dance with me, Padfoot, just bloody tell me you don’t want to dance with me. You don’t have to run away like I’m contagious—because that’s what this is about, isn’t it? You think that because I’m bi, I’m contagious, and I’m going to disrupt your—your—your safety in your straightness.”
“I don’t think you’re contagious,” says Sirius hotly. Later, it will make sense why he’s so offended, but it doesn’t click, not yet. “I just don’t—I don’t want—it’s weird! It’s weird, and I’m trying to be okay with it, and I’m—”
“I knew it,” James mutters. “I have been working overtime trying to be okay with acting like it never happened, and then to be okay with that stunt you pulled when we were with Wormtail and Moony—trying so hard to respect your boundaries and move on—but you can’t respect me, can you? I still care about you as my mate just as much as I ever did—I still want—”
“Don’t talk to me about wanting things. You don’t have to tell me about what it’s like to want things.”
“Oh, yeah? Things like what?”
“Things like—” It’s his chance, he’ll realize later, but right now, he blows it. “Things like being able to look at my best mate without thinking about him slobbering all over me!”
And James looks betrayed, but Sirius is too worked up—for now—to care. “Fine,” says James. “Fine. You want things to go back to the way they were? Done. They’re back how they were. Happy?”
“Yes,” says Sirius, even though he’s really, really not.
x
Remus and Peter seem to cotton on quickly that, yes, something happened, and, no, Sirius doesn’t want to talk about it, because they leave him well alone when he yanks the curtains of his four-poster shut and curls up in bed at not even eight o’clock in the evening. He’s up all night thinking about it, taking stock of the things that keep floating around in his head: James’s hot skin and whiskey-sour taste and the shockwaves that course through Sirius every time they so much as brush toes these days. He doesn’t know who he is without James, and that scares him, but—it doesn’t scare him enough to drive him away. The bubble can’t last forever, but if Sirius could find a way to make it last—to just hold onto James’s smile and laugh and company long enough to sort through what he wants—
—but Sirius already knows what he wants, doesn’t he? He’s known it for a long time, and it’s obvious now, here in the dark, his watch reading out two in the morning and James’s snores barely two meters away. James is right here, and if Sirius could just bring himself to climb out of bed, open James’s hangings, and admit to him what he’s been thinking all along…
Tomorrow, he tells himself. He’ll talk to James tomorrow.
But when tomorrow rolls around, it’s evident that James doesn’t want to talk to him. When Sirius sits down next to him at breakfast, James outright picks up his plate and walks out of the Great Hall. It’s the same deal when Sirius heads back to the common room: James stalks off for the dormitory the moment Sirius tries to talk to him.
In fact, it’s nighttime by the time Sirius manages to get to James, who’s already up in the dormitory with Peter and Remus when Sirius heads upstairs after a long night of staring blankly at his latest Charms essay. He’s about to launch into a bitchfest about N.E.W.T.s when Peter says obliviously, “You haven’t heard yet, have you, Padfoot? Prongs has a date with Lily Evans tomorrow.”
Sirius’s whole body goes cold. He looks up at James, who is looking pointedly at Peter with a mechanical smile fixed in place. “Congrats, man,” Sirius says, his own voice sounding weirdly polite. “How long has it been since you’ve been trying to get her to go out with you? Sixth year?”
“Fifth,” says James scratchily.
“Right on. About time. I—have to go.”
“Padfoot—” Remus starts to say, but Sirius is out the door before he hears the rest of it.
Hindsight’s a bitch.