Chapter Text
He is reading horribly pretentious poetry when they meet. He is listening to post-rock, bobbing his head along to a soft and insistent beat, and then he looks up and there is the love of his life. The love of his life is wearing a cardigan with holes in it, and is starting at his with an expression that seems a little lighter than the dawning epiphany Sirius himself is feeling. Sirius is just watching and the love of his life, whose name he doesn’t yet know, pulls a small smile out of the pocket of his holey cardigan and Sirius’ breath hitches as that small smile reaches the other boy’s eyes and he can feel its glow from across the room.
If he tried to put this into words, they would come out garbled. He’d blame it on the pretentious poetry. It probably is the fault of the pretentious poetry, that’s probably why he can’t experience events like a normal person. Normal events, like the most attractive man in the world walking into a Starbucks and smiling, but it’s not quite normal because the man smiled at him. At him, for him, and that somehow makes all the difference.
And so Sirius doesn’t put into words at all, he just tucks the moment away somewhere inside, into the open cavernous space where all of the loving a person can do lives, and he meets the man’s eyes and he smiles back. And the man turns red over the bridge of his nose, a swipe of rouge that extends to his cheekbones, and Sirius feels warmth flood his own face and pool in his stomach like a swirling, whirling well of pure happiness.
As he’s staring, like an idiot James would say, but James isn’t here, the man pulls off the smile as easily as he had slipped it on, and he slips away.
“My heart is broken,” Sirius tells James that night.
“You’re an idiot,” James says.
“Broken, Jamie,” he laments.
“You could’ve spoken to him,” James offers.
Sirius sighs. James doesn’t understand, but the moment had felt too sacred for speaking. He can’t tell it to James, because the pair together are a steel wrecking ball and this boy seemed like the dust that suspends in the air during mid afternoon, all quiet peace and light enough to almost not exist. Breath disturbs still air, words knock away the golden of the soft sunlight. There’s not a way to speak in crystalline moments, or at least not a way that Sirius knows, a way that doesn’t break precisely what is beautiful. But there aren’t really words for that, and James wouldn’t understand those words anyway.
James understands Sirius, though, understands him without the right words or the wrong ones. And so his best friend slips behind him and kneads his thumbs into his tight shoulders and works on undoing all of the knots caused by meeting the love of your life and forgetting how to open your mouth and talk to him.
“Maybe you’ll see him again,” James offers softly, when Sirius lets out a small moan from the healing of James’ massage and the regret of the afternoon.
“Wouldn’t be the same,” he tries to explain, “he’s special because he happened then.”
“He wouldn’t be special if you saw him tomorrow?”
Sirius thinks about it, “maybe he would be, but I don’t know. It’d be special in a different way, if anything. And he was so special today, I don’t want to lose that, you know?”
James lets out the small laugh that he uses to tell Sirius that he’s being ridiculous. “I don’t know. I think that if you love him, you should want to see him again. But what do I know, I haven’t spent all day reading Stephan Crane and breaking my heart over boys I haven’t spoken to.”
“You are tragically too straight, Jamie.”
“Tragically,” James echoes, finishing the massage by pressing a soft kiss to Sirius’ head.
The next day Sirius goes back to the same Starbucks.
The boy isn’t there.
A revision: Sirius doesn’t see the boy there.
The reality: The boy is there. Sirius’ perch at the round table nearest the door, eyes trained on the entrance like he’s waiting for the Messiah means that his head is swiveled in entirely the wrong direction to see the patch-worked cardigan and mess of curls behind him who suddenly appears after a pining-filled lunch break.
“I am so fucking gay,” the owner of the curls mutters as he ties a green apron around his waist, tidily knotting the ends in place.
“Hm?” asks his shift-mate, a lovely redhead with a tongue like a whip.
“Gay, Lily, I am so gay.”
She laughs and lays a comforting hand on his forearm. Her hands are beautiful, fingers elongated and nails perfect ovals. Remus stares at her hands instead of looking at her face, avoiding witnessing the telltale smug sparkle in her eye that he knows he’ll see if he looks up.
Sirius is reading a book at the table. He looks up every few moments, doing a better impression of a jack-in-the-box than the studied careless elegance he is going for.
“You need to stop staring at him, you’re going to burn a hole through the back of his head,” Lily hisses at Remus after the boy burns yet another latte with his misfocused attention. The milk, hot and ugly in his hands, gives the air a nasty sort of perfume and Remus’ head pounds from the failure of it all.
He tips the milk into the trash and starts steaming another pot, head down with determination.
“Is he reading The Black Riders?” Lily gasps, “Pretentious little shite, that one.” Remus gives her a put out sort of look and she laughs in amendment, “fit, but pretentious.”
A customer comes to the register and orders a vanilla latte. Remus grabs a venti cup and labels it with their name before realizing that the front is empty of milk, his multiple shoddy attempts at steaming it having ruined the entirety of their stock. He makes a hasty apology to the customer and disappears into the back to grab more.
Sirius stands and stretches, torn between continuing his stake-out and giving up and going home. His head is buzzing with poetry, the lines crowding his tongue with all the strength of an imagined romance.
All of those lines are swallowed so quickly that he almost chokes.
The man with the curly hair, the most attractive man Sirius has ever seen, two days running, appears from the doorway of the stockroom. They lock eyes and Sirius can feel his heart plummeting through his stomach, even if that’s the least poetic way of describing the feeling. His face is burning and the man’s face has that red swipe of embarrassment just over his nose and the effect is so adorable that Sirius has to pin his arms to his sides in an effort to prevent himself from reaching towards this stranger’s face.
Sirius reads a lot of pretentious poetry. He wouldn’t describe it as that, he’d describe it as articulations of his soul, how he feels at any given moment, but put to words that seem more like music than anything else.
Whatever he’d describe it as, he is left wordless, stuttering, at the moment he’d most like to whip out a fitting line of poetry.
Remus, for his part, drops all of the milk. The paper containers split along the seams, the floor is flooded in an opaque white.
“Re!” Lily says sharply. Remus turns slowly towards her, his eyes widened and mouth forming a dumb ‘O’. “Fucking useless, you are,” she mutters, grabbing a mop and thrusting it towards him.
Sirius tries to explain it to James later while making himself tea, and to his credit, James does attempt to appear supportive.
“All you know about this person is that he spills milk when he sees you,” James tries not to make this sound as ridiculous as Sirius knows he thinks it is. “To his credit, he didn’t cry about it, though, did he?” Sirius tilts his head in confusion. “That was a hilarious joke,” James clarifies.
“Ah.” Sirius manages, flinging himself down onto the couch next to James. The couch is a stained tawny brown, a record of every food-fight and drunken spill from a good two years of living in the flat. Sirius’ movement makes the armrest jump, sloshing James’ tea over the rim of his mug and causing it to puddle around the base.
James sighs heavily and grabs a rag, and Sirius just stares at the milky brown liquid seeping into the canvas fabric. “I really hope this bloke hasn’t infected you with his clumsiness, mate. This couch is going to be more tea than stuffing if you keep this up.” He wipes up the mess, and then wrings out the towel. Sirius’ eyes are still trained at the stain, and James fetches him the other mug of tea Sirius had left forgotten before relaying the story, taking a large gulp before handing it over to Sirius. “Do you think he’ll be working tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. Can’t go, can I? I don’t want to seem desperate.”
“I don't know, you've made eye contact twice so now you're essentially married for life,” James points out, helpfully, sitting down on the couch gingerly enough to avoid spilling Sirus’ tea, hoping Sirius takes note of the action.
“You go,” Sirius’s voice has that whining edge to it that James simultaneously hates and can’t refuse. It’s that whine that always enticed the otherwise responsible boy to play pranks and cause trouble during their schooling years, and the same whine James would curse during the resulting detentions.
“You are the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” James sighs.
Sirius gives him a large smile, “you always say that when you mean ‘yes,.’”
“The very worst thing,” James confirms, throwing Sirius’ copy of Stephan Crane at the boy’s head.