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Sirius says that when he was a boy he liked to play cave explorers. He would steal one of his family’s magical lanterns from the dinner table or, if he was lucky, a wand from his cousin, crawl in a bed with it and prop the blankets above himself with his arms and knees and extra pillows. There, in the mysterious blue light he would lie very still, cut off from the world by the thick walls of down. The story was that he became isolated from his group, a lone explorer deep in the crust of the Earth. Sometimes, he tells Remus, he liked to pretend that his foot got trapped, but that the Cave Princess came and rescued him in exchange for a favor: he had to save her from the Mountain King that imprisoned her, or from her insane mother. Sometimes, he says, his breath hot against Remus’s ear, his fingers in Remus’s hair, sometimes it was more interesting than that, though he was not sure at the time what the Princess wanted, and he only played it in the deepest, darkest nights when he knew the rest of the household was sleeping like the dead. It gave him a strange electrical thrill – the first wanking fantasies before he knew what wanking was.
Remus more feels than hears him laugh – a low rumbling noise in his throat.
Sometimes Sirius pretended that he was running out of water and air, that he was about to die. This was a different sort of game for a different sort of night.
“And then what?” Remus asks in a whisper.
Sirius’s eyes reflect the blue Lumos light. His teeth glister in semidarkness when he smiles. “I don’t know. I never played it to the end. I would either fall asleep or get distracted.”
The ceiling of their cave is so low that Sirius’ bare shoulder scrapes against it. It’s a peculiar sort of stone, with red, brown and yellow patches, and it smells faintly of dog. Remus finds it a little hard to breathe inside, but it’s not yet bad enough to make him want to come out. Not yet. One of his hands is in the small of Sirius’s back, pressing the two of them closer, and the ridges of Sirius’s spine are his to explore, like tiny mountain crests.
“Who was this Cave Princess?” says Remus.
Sirius frowns. The light of his wand grows dimmer, and the shadows in the grooves and valleys of his face deepen. “She wasn’t anyone in particular. She looked a bit like Wonder Woman and a bit like some girl I saw in the city once.”
“And who was the Mountain King?”
“The Mountain King… I don’t know; he was just big and strong.”
“Did you defeat him?” Remus presses his forehead against Sirius’s, so close he is practically speaking into Sirius’s mouth.
“Every time.”