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SCULPTED IN TWO
James is dying. A blunt statement, sure, but factually correct. James is dying a slow and agonizing death like bleeding out on hot coals and swallowing knives and the deepest pains in the darkest depths of Tartarus. He is beside himself with it, though resigned to his fate, head bowed in silent acceptance on the march to the gallows. It is a gallant death, a deserving fate.
In other words, James ate too many ice cream sandwiches and his stomach is murdering him from the inside out. According to Lily, he’s lack-tose intolerant, but he just feels cursed. He groans, and curls further into fetal position on his bedroom floor. Sirius, leaning against his bed on the floor next to him, throws a balled up sock in his direction.
James looks up at him, wounded. Sirius shrugs. James sticks his bottom lip out, pouty. Sirius shakes his head. “No. You did this to yourself.”
James scoffs and turns away from Sirius, groaning again.
“Everytime. Everytime,” Sirius says in his direction. “You can’t have a normal amount, it needs to be everything of everything everytime.”
James hums, furrowing his eyebrows at the observation.
“What is that.”
James flips over again. “What is what.”
“That hum you just did like you’re responding to something I didn’t say. What is that.” Sirius straightens the knee tucked into his chest, then bends it again.
“A man can’t hum anymore?” James responds, but it comes out flat. Sirius extends his leg, poking James’s shoulder with his toe. James flops onto his back, sighing. Sirius scoots towards him, and matches his position. He crosses his leg over James’s.
“I don’t know, it’s like… Like, that’s what it’s like. You know?”
“No,” Sirius says quietly, quietly like he’s scared to say it, to admit it.
James takes a moment before responding. “I want… everything. From- from everyone. Well, not everyone , but like. My everyone, I don’t know.”
He lifts a hand to scrub through his hair and finds it shaking, probably as fast as his heart is beating. He can feel it in his throat, lifting in his chest and knocking against his rib cage. Sirius is silent, until he hums, and James can't help the laugh that bursts out of him, almost a sob.
Sirius turns his head, and James can tell he’s looking at him, but he can’t bring himself to do the same.
“James,” Sirius says quietly. James doesn’t move. “ James .”
When James turns his head, Sirius is chewing on the inside of his lip, and it pulls on his mouth in a way that James is well aware means that Sirius can’t find the right words, almost as if he’s searching for them around his mouth and coming up empty. James takes a deep, shuddering breath. Their faces are close enough that James can feel it when Sirius does the same, the mint gum and vanilla chapstick scent so visceral he could taste it.
In one instant, Sirius sits up, straddles James’s hips, and kisses him deeply, kisses him good, kisses him like he’s drowning or James is drowning or maybe they’re both fucking drowning and James feels understood, he feels understandable , knowable, real, real, real, and isn’t that rare and heavenly , that’s the word, heavenly.
“Like this?” Sirius murmurs against James’s lips. James blinks away the tears in his eyes, and nods.
SWAPPED THING
When Sirius walks into the dorm, Remus is lying on James’s bed, spinning Bowie on James’s record player, eating one of James’s gross, grainy protein bars that everyone but Sirius seems to think are God’s greatest gift to humankind.
Sirius pauses in the doorway, briefly taken aback by the Remus in the Jamesness, and the strange warmth in his chest at the thought. Then Remus looks up at him with those perpetually pot red eyes, and Sirius shakes it off, dropping his bag and perching at the other end of the bed, against the post.
Sirius listens to the music for a solid minute, but mostly watches Remus listen, how his eyes flutter half shut and seem focused on something far beyond anything in the room. Sirius has never loved Bowie, at least not like Remus does. He’s not sure he could love anything like Remus loves Bowie, unerringly and blindly. With the full extent of his heart, by choice. On purpose.
As Hang on to Yourself fades out, Sirius breaks the silence. “I kissed James yesterday.” He doesn’t know why he says it (he does, of course he fucking does).
Immediately, Remus tenses. He doesn’t move, at least not perceptibly, but Sirius recognizes it in an instant. Every bend in his body that was, before, a gentle curve, is now icy sharp, knife tip dangerous. His eyes open, not quickly but meticulously, and the gaze he fixes on Sirius, deadly. He doesn’t need to say anything, Sirius isn’t an idiot, he knows it was cruel to say it, that’s why he fucking said it.
He shrugs. “What?” What are you going to do about it?
Remus scoffs as he reaches over and lifts the needle from the record, abruptly cutting off the music. “Fuck you,” he says coldly, and Sirius fights back a grin.
Sirius cocks his head. “Do you have a problem with it?”
Huffing a benevolent laugh, Remus looks at Sirius. “You’re infuriating. Seriously fucking infuriating.”
Sirius nods. “So you’ve said. Is this going to go differently?”
Differently from every other fight, every fight Sirius starts at least daily that ends with a fuming, isolated Remus, and a charged, sharp toothed, invigorated Sirius, his neck clenched in Remus’s mouth, metaphorically, of course, always metaphorically despite the two freckles there that match up perfectly with the distance between Remus’s canines like a goddamn prophecy and Sirius has always been Pythia at Delphi.
They’re dancing around it. Sirius knows it, and he’s almost certain Remus does too.
Sirius starts every fight. It's Remus’s turn.
Remus is quiet, for a long moment. He stands up, walks across the room and back, scrubbing both hands through his hair. He stops in front of Sirius, and drops his hands. Sirius looks up at him, and says nothing.
“Is this- Are you sure?” Remus says, not meeting Sirius’s eyes.
“Yes,” Sirius replies.
“Like… You didn’t choose him already?” It comes out wounded, like it hurts him. Sirius reaches out and grabs Remus’s hand, tugging on it. When Remus meets his eyes, Sirius shakes his head, smiling softly. Remus smiles back, just a slight twitch in the right corner like he can’t help it.
Remus takes Sirius’s face in both hands, and kisses him right on the mouth. Sirius leans back on his hands, and tilts his face into it, relishing in Remus’s scratchy palms, the feeling of that scar on his palm against his cheekbone, the way his skin is burning white hot beneath Remus’s fingers. It is not clean, not crisp and cool like James. It is teeth, it is Remus quenching the fire in his throat with his tongue and lighting a new one the same way.
Sirius lifts one hand to grab a handful of Remus’s hair, needing him closer, a moth to his flame. Sirius stands up, and they stumble back a few steps with the shift, and Remus laughs into Sirius’s mouth.
He drinks it like gasoline.
BREATHE OUT IN TANDEM
Remus reckons people don’t appreciate James’s beauty enough.
Sure, people want him, people desire him, but they don’t seem to grasp how fucking beautiful he is, because that opinion is reserved for Sirius and Sirius only. And sure, Remus can’t disagree with that, he sure as hell doesn’t, but James .
James and the rich autumn brown of his skin. James and his straight, proud profile, that of an ancient prince, a storybook hero. James and those thick eyelashes framing big, bright eyes, deer eyes, Prongs eyes. James and his long fingers and his longer legs and a smile like the green flash of a sunset on the horizon.
They’re smoking on the back porch of Remus’s house, and Remus just left Sirius upstairs after a solid two hour makeout sesh, and he can’t stop thinking about how beautiful James looks when he exhales his smoke.
It would never have occurred to Remus that you don't have to choose. He’s always been like that, all or nothing, one and done, possessive of his things, his favorite things. It didn’t make sense when Sirius told him that he won’t choose between them, won’t pick one, he wants both. Remus had thought of course , he’d thought hasn’t anyone ever told him you have to choose?
But then he’d thought huh .
Because, well. There’s James, and there’s that feeling in Remus’s stomach when he looks at him, that raw, earthy, stone and ancient ash feeling that doesn’t negate the fiery wood-smoke of Sirius just upstairs and he thinks he gets it.
“Hey,” James says quietly, eyebrows raised, grinning. Remus startles, smiles back, and takes a drag. “Where’d you go?”
Remus shrugs. James scoots closer to him, so that their bare knees press together, and it makes Remus’s breath stall for a moment.
“I-” James starts, before pausing. Remus looks at him. His brow is furrowed, and he’s chewing on one of his fingernails. “Sirius told me, you know. About.” He gestures vaguely towards Remus.
“Yeah?” Remus isn’t sure what else to say. If there is anything else to say.
“Yeah. So I’m cool with it. Not that I have to be cool with it, I don’t, like, own him or anything, obviously, but I just thought I’d-”
“James.”
“ Remus .”
Remus says nothing, waiting for James to look at him. After a moment, he does. He looks terrified. “I know.”
James visibly relaxes, breathing out heavily. He finishes off his cigarette, and stubs it out against the porch. “It’s three, right. Fucking three.”
“Fucking three,” Remus agrees softly.
He’d like to think they lean in at the exact same moment, but James probably did first. All he knows is they meet just outside the middle, and James clutches Remus’s wrist like a lifeline, and Remus wraps a hand across James’s sun-warmed thigh, and it tastes like smoke in even addition. It is grounded, they do not float away from the Earth but instead sink into it, ashes to ashes. They are not fated, not exactly like this, but they are chosen, and that is a necessary distinction.
There’s a wolf whistle from behind them, and they turn around at the same time. Sirius, leaning against the doorframe, smiles down at them, without sharpness, without concealed ferocity. “Bitchin,” he remarks, and scruffs Remus's hair as he passes by, before sitting heavily beside James.
They sit, for a moment, before James starts giggling. Slowly, at first, then loudly, until he’s hunched over his knees and wiping tears from his eyes. Remus and Sirius join in, because James is fucking infectious, and they laugh and they laugh and they lean against eachother, all three, all three, all three .
Of course Remus gets it.