Work Text:
“When do you guys leave?”
Sirius looks up. He finds James there, in the doorway, and for a moment he wants to pretend that he hasn’t heard him. If he doesn’t say it out loud, he thinks, then it doesn’t have to be true— at least not for a little while longer. He can pretend for a little while longer if he just stays like this, buried beneath the sheets. He wishes James hadn’t left him alone, but James —ever the early bird— is already dressed for the day, holding a mug of what Sirius knows will be coffee, because James doesn’t really drink anything else unless he is being forced to do it.
But James raises an eyebrow, and Sirius sighs, and answers anyway. “Tomorrow.”
“Right,” James says. He nods. “Okay.”
He turns and walks back through the door, letting it close behind him, and Sirius watches the back of it long after James has left and even longer still, when Sirius knows for certain that James won’t be coming back in.
Eventually he stands, albeit reluctantly, and pulls on the clothes he’d worn last night, discarding any shame he might have felt at the way he needs to pick up the pieces of the outfit he’d spent an embarrassingly long time putting together but is now strewn carelessly across the floor. He can hardly remember, now, how they’d even gotten there. It all blurs together, the memories of him and James stumbling through the front doors and then, unintentionally but perhaps not at all so, stumbling into the bedroom. He’d had a few too many drinks by that point… so maybe, actually, it had started somewhere in the pub he and James had gone to before coming back here, with James reaching over to brush a strand of Sirius’ hair out of his eyes, laughing about how it wasn’t fair for his hair to still look like that even as he approached his late forties.
Out the window, he can see the waves crashing gently against the shoreline. They’d gone out there the day before yesterday, late in the evening— and maybe that’s how it had started, actually, with James reminding him (as if he’d forgotten) that the cottage he’d bought was right on the beachfront, and with them tugging off their shoes and sinking their toes into the warmth of the sand about an hour later, staring out at the sunset, joking about how there were no sights quite like this back in New York.
“Do you ever miss it?” James had asked.
“Nah,” Sirius had lied.
He wonders, now, why he always feels compelled to do that.
It takes him a while to find James, but eventually he does. He joins him, taking the spot on the available seat out on the back porch. It overlooks the small garden James had started last year.
Sirius clears his throat. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”
“Figured I couldn’t wallow in my self-pity forever,” James says.
Sirius laughs, once, humorlessly, unable to figure out what else he should do.
“I should get going,” is what he settles on. “Before Remus starts to wonder where I am.”
Not that he’ll care, Sirius wants to add. He thinks back to the house they’ve rented for the weekend, a few streets away, and the lies they share between themselves every year about how wonderful it will be to visit their childhood town, the place they fell in love, knowing full well that the moment they get here they will both go their separate ways and occupy their time as far away from each as possible. Not unlike their lives in the city— but infinitely sadder, when Sirius really allows himself to think about it.
“Alright, then,” James says. “Don’t forget about me, yeah?”
He says it every time. Sirius wonders if he knows just how impossible he is to forget. He wants to tell him, wants to confess that he can never truly leave this place because James will never leave this place, and the memories of him follow Sirius around wherever Sirius goes, even if its all the way to New York fucking City.
There’s a universe out there, Sirius thinks, where he finally breaks things off with Remus. There’s another universe where James is the kind of man who doesn’t buy a cottage in a town he hates just so he can stay near the son he has with a woman who hates him. There’s a universe where they make different choices, where they’re happy, where they both realize what their feelings mean sooner rather than later, and they marry each other instead, and they move away to some place where these stolen moments are not just fragmented, fictional pieces of their wildest dreams, but a reality.
But that isn’t the universe they live in.
“Tell Lily and the sprog I said hello,” Sirius says as he pushes himself to his feet. “I’ll see you around, yeah?”
“I’ll be here,” James says. He looks up at Sirius with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, and that is so unlike the way he used to smile when they were children.
Sirius wants to kiss him one last time, but he doesn’t think he will be able to bear it. So instead he nods, and walks silently through the small house, and out the door, and down the street, and he tries not to think about it, but he does anyway. He thinks about it all. About the beach and the pub and the sunset and the clothes strewn messily across the floor.
And James. Always James.