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Over the Christmas Holidays, Harry unwittingly stumbles upon Professor Lupin and Tonks standing suggestively close in the library at No. 12 Grimmauld Place. They’re not snogging or anything—just speaking with their heads bent, voices soft, feet notched together and Lupin’s hands gently cupping her elbows. Harry had been hoping to find Sirius, so he feels just as caught as they look.
“Er—sorry,” he says, turning pink and trying to back out as unobtrusively as possible. “I’ll just. Leave, then.”
He’s not surprised when Tonks pulls him aside later that night at dinner and begs him not to tell anyone what he saw. “It’s not a secret secret,” she explains, righting a precarious tower of books she managed to knock down on her way through the hall, Harry padding after her. “We want to tell everyone in the Order, but, well. Let’s just say we’re waiting for the right time.” She turns on her heel to regard him, a wary expression on her face.
“I hadn't considered it,” Harry says. “Telling, I mean.” And he really hadn’t—his mind was rather preoccupied by other, more selfish considerations. Ever since he’d spotted Tonks and Lupin, he’d been unable to stop wondering if maybe, maybe the way he felt about Sirius wasn’t as ill-fated and impossible as he’d spent all term telling himself. After all, Tonks wasn’t that much older than he was.
She looks relieved. “Thanks, Harry,” she says. “You know how tetchy some of them get.”
“Yeah, I know,” he offers. And just as Tonks turns to head back into the kitchen, his hand shoots out beyond his will to grab her by the shoulder. “Wait—I was wondering if I could ask you something, actually,” he spits out, heart racing.
She lifts her brows which are, at the moment, red as a London phone booth. “About me and Remus?”
“No, not —specifically,” he says, wincing at his own words. He hadn’t planned this out in the slightest, and now he feels trapped. “I suppose I wanted to just…erm. How you went about, well. How it happened,” he blurts, only just realizing he’s still hanging onto the sleeve of her robe and immediately releasing it. “You and Lupin.”
Her expression sharpens into a sly grin. “You want to know how I managed to bag him,” she says.
“Sure, yeah, I guess,” Harry decides, coloring violently. Bagging is not exactly the action he has in mind regarding Sirius, but he would like further clarification on the circumstances surrounding someone Tonks’s age ending up romantically involved with someone Lupin’s age. Only months ago he wouldn’t have dreamed of even the foggiest notion of hope—he was still trying to convince himself he could bury his feelings for Sirius, or that they’d just go away if he ignored them hard enough. But that was before the awful, damning kiss with Cho that made him all the more certain he did not fancy witches try as he might. Before the holiday break, during which he began to wonder, in spite of all logic, if there was a chance his inappropriate regard for his Godfather might be returned. The last week had been an odd blur of sleepless nights and terror and sickness giving way to the sway of comfort– heartily sung carols and Sirius always hazy and smiling and maddeningly attentive, drunk on firewhiskey and his gaze sliding down too frequently to Harry’s mouth. Harry thought he’d been imagining it out of want and insomnia addled delirium, but then he’d seen Tonks and Lupin, and that tiny flame of hope flickered a bit brighter, as if fed. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but—”
“Oh I’d love a chance to brag a bit,” Tonks admits, rubbing her hands together and ducking closer for a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s been driving me mad, not telling anyone. So, a few months ago,I told him I fancied him. He hemmed and hawed over it of course—told me I was too young, that he was a dangerous werewolf unfit for love, blah blah blah, the whole sob story. But I’m stubborn, and he’s terribly lonely. So he eventually caved. Now look at us,” she says, beaming proudly.
Harry sucks the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. “You just told him? Flat out.”
“Yup,” she confirms, eyes getting glittery and wet as she studies him. “Oooh, is there a special someone in your life, Harry?” she asks, waggling those lurid red brows. “I happened to overhear something about a kiss with a Ravenclaw girl, before the break?”
He flushes, shaking his head. “That’s over. It….sort of confirmed for me, really, that I have feelings for someone else.” It’s very odd to admit it out loud, for the first time. Feelings, so vague, so noncommittal. Harry is not stupid—he knows what feeling it is, knows this is not some schoolboy crush but the horrible onset of his First (likely unrequited and wholly unattainable) Love.
“I see,” Tonks says wisely, twirling a chunk of hair around her finger. Unlike her flaming brows, the hair on her head is sleek and black right now, giving her an uncharacteristically vampish appearance. “So, someone else, then. Ginny? Hermione? Oh! Ron? You're awful close mates.”
Sputtering a bit, Harry reels back. “No, none of—it doesn’t matter who it is,” he says in an urgent whisper. “It’s more that, I don't really think just telling them is an option.”
“Why not?” Tonks asks. “Honesty is always the way to go with love, Harry. Are you friends with this person already?”
“Sort of—yes,” he says, deciding it’s an easier answer than explaining the complexity of his relationship with Sirius.
“You have a strong foundation? So if you do spill your guts it goes to hell and your heart is broken, you can fall back into a routine without losing this person?”
Harry winces at the mere idea of Sirius (understandably, rightfully) rejecting him and then having to live with the fact he knows precisely how Harry feels, but he supposes that is one of the very few benefits of being a teenager in love with an adult: he is allowed to make mistakes, make a mess of thing. Sirius might be embarrassed or even disgusted, but he would never be cruel to Harry about it. He might even understand what it is like to be young and folly and heartsick. “Yes,” he says more firmly.
“Then what do you have to lose, my friend?” Tonks says jovially, slapping Harry so hard on the back it smarts. “Better to regret having done something than to regret having not done something, I always say. And look at Remus and I—sometimes it pays off, to lay it all out on the table. Everyone in the world wants to be loved, Harry. I think we owe it to the ones we do love to tell them this. Even if they can’t love us back, they still deserve to know someone out there wants them badly enough to make a fool of themselves over it.”
It’s this last bit of advice that seals the decision for Harry. He lies awake on his sleeping bag in the bedroom he shares with Ron that night, listening to the steady in and out of his snoring, gaze trained on a crack through the moldering ceiling. He knows, at least, that Sirius has spent the last several months cooped up in No. 12 feeling chronically useless to the Order. He’s under no delusions Sirius might love him back, he knows full well what an absurd longshot true reciprocity is, but the knowledge Sirius might be glad on some level to know how profoundly important he is to Harry—maybe that’s worth the potential humiliation.
Plus, there are all those strange, sticky moments he takes to bed with him at night to mull over. The way Sirius’s hugs are always so deliciously tight, and seem to go on for a moment or two too long. The regret in his hands as they linger at the small of Harry’s back when he finally pulls away. Their strange, heated looks across the room. Sirius’s frequent, stomach-turning winks for Harry and Harry alone. Hermione’s suggestion Sirius actually wanted Harry to be expelled over the summer so they could live together. The way he’d been so put out when Harry refused to risk meeting him at Hogsmede last term. The information he recently shared with Harry that his expulsion from the Black Family Tapestry was not just because he'd run away from home and renounced the Dark Arts and blood purity, but that his preferences made it impossible for him to provide an heir.
In isolation, none of these incidents would make Harry wonder. He’s not so deluded and arrogant to get carried away by a long embrace alone. But the manner in which they have accumulated, like drifts of snow against the frozen steps outside—he cannot ignore the way it all tugs in his gut, a preternatural knowing that sinks into his blood and cannot be shaken. Everyone in the world wants to be loved, Tonks had said, and Sirius is certainly no exception. He, more than anyone else, Harry thinks, deserves to hear it.
Eventually he drifts off to uneasy sleep, dreams of finally finding Sirius in the library where he sought him. His back turned, his long pale fingers keeping his place between the pages of a dusty leather-bound tome in a way that makes Harry’s insides clutch like a fist. I have something I need to tell you, he tries to say in the dream, but before he can get the words out, Sirius turns to face him, and kisses the confession to silence. Harry lurches awake to find himself hard in his pajama pants, and a new resoluteness hardwired into his mind: he cannot live another moment tormented by this burden. He needs to tell Sirius. Now.
No one else is awake. Harry tries his hardest to keep it that way, tiptoeing from the room he shares with Ron, skipping creaky floorboards as not to rouse any of the faintly snoring portraits lining the halls. His bare feet carry him mechanically to Sirius’s room, the lead weight in the pit of his gut growing heavier with each step. He quickens the pace—he doesn’t want to lose his nerve, his conviction. His certainty that he owes truth, no matter how mortifying, to his Godfather.
The secret has reached a boiling point inside him, ready to spill over. Harry has come to realize this love is not something he can live with. It’s not even something he can hide, at this point. Every mad thing that had happened to him in the last week wore him down to the bone, scrubbed him raw. Kissing Cho, realizing he didn’t like it and knowing what that meant about him, thinking he had been possessed by Voldemort and attacked Arthur Weasley and was a threat to everyone he loved, realizing he was wrong, refusing to sleep, starving himself—all culminating in him stumbling in awkwardly on Lupin and Tonks. He was exhausted, he was carrying too much. He couldn't keep it up. Something had to fracture. Let it be this, he begs no one in particular, heart pounding.
Sirius was who he talked to when he felt overwhelmed. Sirius who listened with sincerity, Sirius who always did his best to remain patient and not treat Harry like a child. But his inconvenient feelings, for the last several months, (longer if he’s honest), remained the one topic he could never go to Sirius about, which only worsened the infection inside him. He was about to rupture, and there was nowhere left to go. He had to tell him, before it imploded in some worse manner. He had to know what all the touching and the charged looks and unbearable tension meant. He had to.
He finds himself outside Sirius’s door, fist raised. Before he can stop himself he raps his knuckles against the battered wood, heart in his throat. “Sirius? It’s me,” he croaks.
Luckily, he seems to be awake. There’s some faint rustling behind the door, like someone getting dressed, and sure enough when Sirius opens it a crack to regard Harry, he’s wearing nothing but too-loose Pajama pants that hang distractingly low on his narrow hips, and a smoking jacket hastily shouldered over a bare chest. “Harry,” he says warmly. “I was just trying to force myself to sleep. Difficult task, with so much cleaning and decorating ahead—why are you up and about so early?”
Harry feels awful for a moment. Sirius has been in a brilliant mood all Holiday break, and here he is, arriving to ruin it by telling him the humiliating truth. This is mental but I can’t survive a single second longer hiding the fact I want to share this bedroom with you every night and suck your cock and be yours, in every way one person can be another's. “Er,” he says, clearing his throat, crossing his arms awkwardly over himself like he can defend his heart from all that carelessly bared skin. The narrow strip of tattoo-strewn pallor stretching from throat to dangerously stretched out waistband, tempting and lickable. “Could we talk? About something private?” he ventures weakly.
A concerned line cuts briefly through Sirius’s brow, and he opens the door wide enough to allow Harry to come in. “Are you worried about the snake again?” he asks.
And yes, of course, Harry is still worried about the snake. And Cho and Voldemort and Arthur and everything else, but Sirius can’t do anything about that. There is the only one of his worries for which Sirius can provide him closure. “It’s…it’s going to sound so stupid,” he says bitterly, beginning to pace once Sirius latches the door behind him. “But you’ve got to understand, I already tried to make it go away ages ago and it didn't work. I’ve already told myself it can’t happen, and that you’ll never—but I still. I have to tell you. Tonks told me people—um. Want to know? Even if they can’t return it, they want…to know about it.”
It’s so awkward and clunky that Harry actually bites the inside of his cheek punishingly once he finishes. He wasn’t supposed to mention Tonks. There were a lot of things he wasn’t supposed to do.
Sirius very patiently sits on the edge of his bed. “Start at the beginning,” he says evenly. “What do I want to know about?”
“Love,” Harry blurts, cheeks coloring violently the moment the damning word leaves his lips. He presses ahead frantically, blindly. “People want to know when someone loves them, even if they don’t love them back, and it’s sort of….killing me, you see, along with everything else and I just can’t keep lying about it, not to myself and especially not to you," he says desperately, raking a furious hand through his hair and turning away, to the wall, to finally spit it out, “I, er—went and fell in love with you. I’m so sorry.”
He didn’t want to witness Sirius’s reaction, but finds himself accidentally facing a dusty vanity mirror that reveals it all: his shocked expression, brows lifting and eyes darkening, mouth falling open for the briefest of moments before he snaps it closed. “I’m sorry,” Harry says again, voice pleading.
“Harry,” Sirius murmurs, recovering quickly and patting the mattress beside him. “You have nothing to be sorry for. Come. Sit.”
On leaden limbs Harry makes himself turn around and approach Sirius’s bed, lowering himself there so he’s perched on the edge less than a foot away from his still mostly shirtless Godfather, who is looking at him quite kindly, given the circumstances. So maybe Tonks was right. Maybe he wasn't going to be angry, it wasn't going to make things terribly tense and weird between them. Still, Harry cannot bring himself to meet Sirius’s gaze. He stares somewhere blurry and opaque at the dirty sheets, vision half out of focus. “Are you quite sure that’s how you feel?” Sirius asks gently.
He nods.
“I see,” Sirius says wearily. “Harry—I’m afraid this is my fault. You really shouldn't blame yourself.”
Harry finally looks up at that, baffled—how could it be Sirius’s fault that Harry loves him? But when their gazes lock, it is clear Sirius truly believes as much. There’s a sadness to his expression, a somber longing that reminds Harry of the way the Hogwarts ghosts stare at the feasts in the great hall. A beautiful spread of food they may helplessly float through, but never taste. “It’s not,” he says. “Not your fault I’m—like this,” he chokes out, gesturing to himself with an indistinct motion that means many things he cannot bring himself to say. Things like gay and foolish and utterly pathetic.
Sirius reaches out and catches Harry’s hand midair, pinning it to the sheets between them. His palm is papery and warm and steals Harry’s breath away. “You’re just a boy, and I have acted very confusingly towards you, and that is my fault,” he says gravely. “I tried very, very hard only to love you like a Godfather should.”
He pauses and Harry stares, trying to make sense of all Sirius is saying, or not saying. He can hardly hear it though, his heart racing at extremely distracting speeds inside of him, making his body thrum all over, poised to bolt, but—he can make one thing out in the rubble. I have acted confusingly. So, Sirius knows, at least. Has acknowledged that it, whatever unspeakable thing exists between them, is mutual.
“So it wasn't all in my head?” he asks carefully.
Sirius makes a pained expression, squeezes his hand, then makes himself let it go. “No, not at all,” he admits. “You weren't supposed to see--I should have better controlled myself. Concealed from you how I felt.”
Harry’s stomach drops, a sudden plunge like he’s just missed a step. He fidgets, trying not to entertain the sudden surge of hope threatening to soar inside him, a bird flinging itself against his ribs like the bars of a cage. “How do you feel?” he asks.
Sirius shakes his head, sucks at his cheeks so they hollow out before taking a deep, rattling breath. “You’re so brave, Harry. Coming in here, risking honesty, showing your heart to me even though you didn't know how I might react. And—I suppose I owe you the same, don’t I?” he says, sitting up straighter, tucking a chunk of his long black hair behind his ear. He sighs, like this is a terrible thing to confess and Harry still doesn’t understand, if it’s what he thinks it is, why is Sirius so afraid? Why is he acting like it’s bad? Why is he—“As I said, I tried very hard to limit my love for you. To love you as I should and be the Godfather you deserve, be your family. But Harry…” Sirius’s gaze flashes up, questing and mournful, apology written into every line of his face. “I couldn’t. There’s no way I do not love you. And I let that—those feelings—bleed into how I touched you.”
Dumbstruck, Harry sits there, trying to understand why Sirius is saying this like it’s a fucking death sentence. “So you do—you feel the same way?”
Sirius shakes his head. “It’s not the same. You're too young to understand, but it can’t be the same, because...you're a boy and I'm a man, who is responsible for you,” he says, like it makes any sense at all. Harry, who is feeling quite condescended to, stares pointedly at Sirius with an accusatory fire in his gaze, so Sirius sucks in a sharp breath and further explains, “there is a world of difference between someone my age, and your legal guardian at that, developing romantic feelings for my ward, than a boy of fifteen who naturally got confused because I can’t—“ his eyes flash, a humorless bark of a laugh retching out of his throat before whittling into a self-deprecating cough. “Because I'm wretched and can’t keep my hands off of you.”
Wildly, with butterflies in his stomach, Harry thinks back to his dream. Thinks back to the burning heat between his thighs, the longing in his gut, Sirius's lips on his, all of it. Thinks how these feelings easily predate any of the things Sirius ever did that made him wonder if he was alone in this. How his stomach tied itself up that very first night in the Shrieking Shack, when he began to truly understand all Sirius Black had done to protect and avenge him and his parents. “I’m not confused,” he snaps, a little offended. “Sorry you think you corrupted me or something, but it’s not like that.”
“Harry—“ Sirius begins, but no. Harry is done with his protests and excuses, he’s done being made to feel like he doesn’t really understand what it means to be in love with someone. Tonks understands and she is not so much older than him, and she hasn't fought Lord Voldemort or lost her parents or witnessed the death of her friend or any of the other things that Harry's experienced that isolate him from every other fifteen year old boy in the universe. The reality of Sirius’s reciprocity is striking him now, fully, for the first time. He stands up and defiantly rounds on Sirius, reaches out madly and lays one of his quaking hands on Sirius’s bare chest, right between the open lapels of his smoking jacket. Sirius immediately falls silent.
“Stop,” Harry begs, getting closer, flattening his palm out over the terrified stutter of his Godfather’s heart. “Stop trying to tell me I don’t know what I feel.” His gaze flits down to Sirius’s mouth, his chapped lips, parted over something half-spoken. “Do you want to kiss me?” he breathes.
Sirius makes a helpless cut off sound in his throat, somewhere between a groan and a scraping, muted yelp. “It’s not a matter of what I want, Harry, I can’t—”
“Yes you can,” Harry assures him, moving his hand up to Sirius’s shoulder and surging into his space, straddling his lap, pushing him down onto the bed. He goes easily, which is insane. This tall, dark man his father’s age, crumbling beneath him, hair fanned out in a halo around his stunned face. Looking up at him like he can't say no. “Do you want to kiss me?” Harry asks again.
Sirius does not answer—he reaches up, plucks Harry’s glasses from the bridge of his nose, folds them and sets them down beside himself before sliding long, tremulous fingers into the oily sift of Harry’s hair. Then, he draws him down, agonizingly slow. Inch by inch, centimeter by centimeter, giving Harry plenty of time to wrench away or rethink. But of course, he doesn’t. He drifts into his Godfather's space, inhaling his breath, hot with alcohol and sweet with sleep. When their mouths finally press flush, there’s Harry’s answer—Sirius cannot hold back. He shivers open around a gasp, tongue moving to lick Harry’s mouth apart, hot and slick and desperate.
Harry breaks over him like a wave. Sinks into the kiss, allows himself to be held and crushed and capsized into the bed, so violently he narrowly misses crushing his own glasses. Between the fierce, possessive slide of their mouths Sirius keeps pulling back just enough to whisper, I love you, of course I love you, I cannot do anything but love you, I can't even hide that I love you and Harry realizes it’s true—everyone does want to be loved, and told so. In spite of all restraint, all logic, all rules. He loops his arms around Sirius’s neck and holds him in place, gives him his tongue. Worth making a fool of himself, he decides. Worth it all, in the end.