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The thing about living with Sirius Black was that it was an exercise in controlled catastrophe.
Remus had known this going in. He'd known it the way you know a storm is coming, intellectually, distantly, in a way that doesn't quite prepare you for the moment it actually arrives and rearranges all your furniture. He'd been Sirius's friend for six years before they'd moved in together, which meant he had six years of evidence for what he was signing up for. Six years of Sirius arriving places like a weather event. Six years of Sirius losing his keys, his phone, his wallet, his mind, and somehow never his confidence. Six years of Sirius being the kind of person who took up all the oxygen in a room and then looked around bewildered when people found him remarkable.
So yes. Remus had known.
What he hadn't anticipated was that living with Sirius would be a completely different category of experience than simply knowing Sirius. Because knowing Sirius meant you got the public version. You got the version that was all leather jacket and easy grin and devastating cheekbones and that laugh, the one that made rooms tilt slightly on their axis.
Living with Sirius meant you got the other one.
The one who left little ink sketches tucked under Remus's coffee mug in the mornings, a cartoon of Remus scowling at his alarm clock, a tiny dog chasing its tail at the corner of a page, once an extraordinarily detailed drawing of a sparrow that Sirius had apparently spent four hours on because he'd heard Remus mention, weeks earlier, that he liked the sound of them. The one who watched terrible reality television with complete sincerity and got emotionally invested in bakers he'd never met. The one who learned, at some point Remus couldn't identify, exactly how Remus took his tea, and silently produced it that way every single time without acknowledgement or fanfare, as though it were simply a fact of the universe.
It was a lot, was the thing. Sirius Black, in private, was a lot.
And Remus was in love with him. Obviously. Catastrophically. In the way you fall into a very deep hole, gradually, and then all at once, and then you're at the bottom looking up and the opening has already gone too small to climb back through.
He had decided, sensibly, to do absolutely nothing about it.
The logic was sound. Sirius was, well, Sirius. He was the kind of beautiful that made people stop mid-sentence. He was a painter of some genuine renown, whose canvases sold to galleries in cities Remus had never visited, whose Instagram had forty thousand followers and who'd been called "a startling new voice in contemporary expressionism" by someone who was paid to have opinions about that sort of thing. He was the person strangers gravitated toward in rooms. He was impossible and chaotic and luminously, stupidly good, and he treated Remus like Remus was worth something. Like Remus was the funniest person he knew. Like Remus mattered.
But Sirius treated everyone like that, Remus reminded himself regularly. That was the whole point of Sirius. He was just, like that. With everyone.
And Remus was a secondary school English teacher who owned too many jumpers and could, generously, be described as quietly pleasant to spend time with.
The gap was self-evident. The math was not in his favour.
So he'd made peace with it. Or he'd made something that closely resembled peace, if you didn't look at it directly.
The evening had been James's idea, which meant it had contained multitudes.
"Just a few drinks," James had said, which was the kind of thing James always said before engineering an evening that somehow ended at 2am in a kebab shop debating the moral philosophy of the Fast and Furious.
In fairness, it had started as advertised. A pub, some pints, Remus nursing a pale ale and watching Sirius hold court at the bar with the easy grace of someone who had never in his life had to try. Which he hadn't, as far as Remus could tell. Trying was simply not a concept that applied to Sirius Black.
Lily had shown up despite having promised James she was "absolutely not coming out on a Thursday," which was a lie she told herself regularly and believed sincerely each time. Then somehow they'd ended up at a club and then James and Lily had disappeared in that way married couples at clubs tended to disappear, and then it was just Remus, leaning against the bar, watching Sirius dance.
This was, objectively, a form of self-harm.
Sirius danced like he did everything else, with his entire body and no apparent self-consciousness whatsoever. He'd shed his jacket somewhere, which meant the soft grey of his t-shirt, and his hair was already escaping its loose knot, and there were at least three separate people in his immediate orbit who were varying degrees of besotted, and Remus was watching all of this with a fixed expression he hoped read as neutral and was fairly certain read as pained.
There had been one person in particular. Someone tall, good-looking in an uncomplicated way, who'd leaned in close to say something in Sirius's ear and made him tip his head back and laugh. Who'd put a hand on Sirius's arm. Who'd stayed in that orbit, attentive and angled in, for twenty minutes while Remus turned his pint glass slowly in his hands and thought about literally anything else and failed entirely.
It wasn't jealousy, Remus told himself.
It was observation. He was an observant person. It was practically a professional skill, in his line of work.
Sirius had caught his eye across the room at some point and grinned at him, that specific grin, the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes, and Remus had raised his glass in a toast and thought: I am going to die of this. Actually perish. Inquest inconclusive.
They'd left around midnight. Sirius had extracted himself from his orbit with characteristic ease, appearing at Remus's elbow as though materializing from thin air and saying, "Right, I'm done, can we get chips," which were the words that ended the evening and also, quietly, made something in Remus's chest unknot.
They'd gotten chips. They'd shared them in the back of a cab, Sirius talking animatedly about a new canvas he was working on, gesturing with a chip for emphasis, getting salt on the seat. Remus had eaten his chips and watched the city slide past the window and thought about the person at the club with their hand on Sirius's arm and said nothing.
This was fine. This was completely fine.
Their flat greeted them with its usual controlled disorder.
Sirius's chaos had thoroughly colonized every surface over eighteen months of cohabitation. Tubes of paint on the kitchen counter. A half-finished sketch tacked to the wall next to the refrigerator. Three different scarves draped over the back of the sofa for reasons Remus had long since stopped investigating. The easel in the corner of the living room, which had been temporary when it arrived and was now simply furniture, currently holding something large and half-finished that Sirius had covered with a sheet.
Remus dropped his keys in the bowl by the door, the bowl that had been Sirius's idea, implemented after the seventeenth time Sirius had lost his keys, and which Sirius himself used approximately forty percent of the time. He toed off his shoes. He felt the familiar specific unwinding that happened when he came home, and then felt, as he sometimes did, the complicated addendum to that unwinding which was the awareness that home and Sirius had become somewhat synonymous in his nervous system, which was information he was choosing not to act on.
"Tea?" he said.
"God, yes." Sirius flung himself onto the sofa with characteristic dramatic commitment, sprawling across two-thirds of it. He'd kept his jacket on in the cab but dropped it now on the floor next to the sofa, which meant Remus would find it there tomorrow and hang it up and say nothing, a dynamic that had calcified into ritual. "My feet are destroyed. Why do clubs have standing room only? What's the philosophy there? It's hostile."
"Encourages turnover," Remus said, filling the kettle. "You stay until your feet hurt, then you leave, someone new comes in."
"Capitalism."
"Presumably."
"Disgusting." Sirius pulled a cushion over his face. Remus could hear him continuing to speak, muffled by throw pillow. "I maintain that a seated nightclub would be extremely popular."
"That's just a pub."
The cushion moved enough to reveal one grey eye regarding him with withering judgement. "A themed seated nightclub."
"That's a themed pub."
"You," Sirius said, "have no imagination."
"I'm a literature teacher. I have exclusively imagination. I'm practically made of it."
Sirius made a sound that was technically an argument but contained no actual words, and replaced the cushion over his face. Remus made the tea. He knew without looking that Sirius had sprawled into a more horizontal position; he could track Sirius's movements through the sofa sounds with a degree of accuracy that would probably alarm him if he thought about it.
He brought the tea over. The only available seat was the section of sofa not currently occupied by Sirius's legs, so Remus sat there, and Sirius's legs shifted to accommodate him without Sirius appearing to consciously register this, and then Sirius's feet were in Remus's lap because Sirius had no concept of personal space that wasn't overridden by comfort.
"Your feet are cold," Remus observed.
"My feet are suffering," Sirius corrected, without removing the cushion. "They deserve warmth."
Remus drank his tea. He did not, notably, move Sirius's feet. He had made a decision early in their cohabitation that physical contact initiated by Sirius was not something he was going to make strange by reacting to it, because Sirius was tactile in the way some people were left-handed. It would have been like asking Sirius to stop using his left hand. Pointless and faintly cruel.
This logic was entirely sound and had nothing to do with the fact that Remus liked it.
The television was off. The flat was quiet in the specific way it was quiet after midnight, the city muffled and distant, the occasional car, the refrigerator hum. Sirius had removed the cushion from his face at some point and was looking at the ceiling with the focused abstraction that meant he was thinking about painting.
"The person you were talking to," Remus said, and then immediately regretted beginning the sentence.
Sirius turned his head. "Hm?"
"At the club." Remus kept his voice at its customary even register, which took slightly more effort than usual. "Tall. Dark hair. They seemed — interested."
Sirius's expression did something briefly that Remus couldn't parse. "Marcus something. He was fine."
"Just fine?"
"Yeah." Sirius looked back at the ceiling. "Nice enough. I wasn't — I don't know. Not interested."
Remus absorbed this. He set his mug on the table with great precision. "You seemed to be having a good time."
"I was being polite. There's a difference." A pause. "Why, are you conducting a debrief? Is this a post-match analysis?"
"I'm just talking."
"You have a very specific face when you're just talking," Sirius said, "and that isn't it."
Remus looked at him. Sirius was watching him now, head tilted against the sofa arm, hair fanned out and escaping everywhere, with an expression that was harder to read than usual. Which was saying something. Sirius was generally an open book, but occasionally there were pages in a language Remus hadn't learned.
"What face?" Remus asked.
"The one where you're deciding whether to say something."
"I'm always deciding whether to say something. I'm a very deliberate conversationalist."
"That's a very teacher way to describe overthinking."
"I don't overthink."
"Moony." The nickname, which Sirius had produced out of nowhere in their second year of friendship and which Remus had protested and then quietly come to love, landed soft. "You once spent forty minutes deciding whether to send a one-line email."
"That email had significant professional implications."
"It was asking your department head if the staffroom kettle was communal."
"The phrasing mattered."
Sirius made a sound that was mostly fond and slightly despairing, and shifted. He settled with his back against the sofa arm and his knees pulled up, facing Remus, which meant they were closer, and which meant Remus was abruptly very aware of the distance between them.
"Were you jealous?" Sirius asked.
The word landed with unexpected precision. Remus considered a number of responses in rapid succession and for reasons he couldn't entirely articulate, deployed none of them.
"That's a big question," he said instead.
"Moony."
"What."
"Were you?"
The flat was very quiet. Outside, a car passed. The refrigerator hummed. Remus was looking at Sirius and Sirius was looking at him with an expression that was serious, which was not a pun he'd ever made because Sirius had heard every possible variation and they were all banned. Serious in the way that Sirius rarely was, in the way that made Remus feel faintly seen, which was the most destabilizing sensation he knew.
"Maybe," Remus said, which was the most honesty he'd managed on this particular subject in three years.
Sirius didn't say anything immediately. Remus waited for the joke, for the grin, for Sirius to make it comfortable and manageable the way he usually did with things that might otherwise be uncomfortable, but it didn't come.
"Right," Sirius said, softly.
"Right?" Remus repeated.
"I mean—" Sirius gestured, a vague movement of his hand. "Right. Okay. I wanted to know."
"Why?"
"Because I was watching you," Sirius said, "all night. I wasn't interested in Marcus whatever-his-name-was. I kept looking over to see — I don't know. How you were."
Remus stared at him. Something in his chest was doing something alarming. "You were watching me."
"Don't make it weird."
"I'm not making it anything. You were watching me."
"You were doing that thing," Sirius said. "Where you stand somewhere and you don't think anyone's paying attention to you and you have your actual face on. Not the — you know. The one you do."
"I don't have an actual face."
"You absolutely do. It's, you look like you're thinking about seventeen things at once and at least two of them are very sad and the rest are very dry, and you only make that face when you don't think anyone's looking, and you're always wrong about that, at least when I'm there, because I'm always—" He stopped. "I'm always looking. That's the thing."
The silence that followed this was a different quality than before. Remus's heart was doing something medically inadvisable. He was looking at Sirius and Sirius was looking at him and the distance between them was not very large, in the grand scheme of things. Not very large at all.
"Sirius," he said, and his voice came out quieter than he intended.
"Don't talk yourself out of it," Sirius said. "Whatever you're doing right now with your face — I can see you doing it — don't."
"I'm not—"
"You are. You're making a pros and cons list."
"I don't make pros and cons lists."
"You absolutely do, you're just fast at it." Sirius's jaw did something complicated. "Whatever's on the cons side — I can probably guess. I've thought about it myself. The other direction."
Remus went very still. "What other direction?"
"The direction where you're—" Sirius waved a hand again, slightly helpless. "You. And I'm — this." Another gesture, apparently self-explanatory. "And the math seems — I know how the math seems."
Remus stared at him. Sirius Black, who had been called startling, and luminous, and magnetic in print was watching Remus with an expression that was, if Remus had the vocabulary for it, tentative. Actually, genuinely, uncharacteristically tentative.
"You think I'm out of your league," Remus said, very slowly, parsing it.
"I mean." Sirius looked briefly at the ceiling. "I'm a lot. I know that. And you're — you're very—" He stopped.
"Very," Remus echoed.
"I was going to say you're very you," Sirius said, with a kind of dignity that the sentence did not fully support. "Which is — Moony, you're the person I want to tell things to. When something happens, good or bad or interesting or stupid, you're who I think of. You're who I—" He stopped again.
Remus said, very precisely: "I thought you just liked everyone."
Sirius blinked. "What?"
"The way you are. With people. I thought you were like that with everyone."
"I'm friendly with everyone," Sirius said, with a slight incredulousness. "I'm not — I don't do this with everyone." He gestured between them, apparently considering the word this sufficient to encompass eighteen months of cohabitation and little sketches under coffee mugs and cold feet in laps and two people watching each other without quite saying so. "Remus. I drew a sparrow."
"I know you drew a sparrow."
"I spent four hours on that sparrow."
"I know," Remus said. "I kept it. It's in my nightstand."
Sirius looked at him. His expression did something complex. "It's in your nightstand."
"Yes."
"You kept a sketch I left under your mug."
"It was a very good sparrow."
"Remus."
"What."
"I painted you," Sirius said. "That one under the sheet. On the easel. I've been working on it for two months. I wasn't — I wasn't going to tell you, but—"
Remus looked at the easel across the room. At the sheet-covered canvas that had been there for two months while Sirius said it was just something he was working on, while Remus had carefully not looked too closely because Sirius's work in progress was Sirius's business.
"Can I see it?" he asked.
Sirius was quiet for a moment. Then he got up, crossed to the easel, and pulled the sheet off.
Remus looked.
It was him. Unmistakably, undeniably him, but not the way Remus saw himself in mirrors or photographs. It was him the way Sirius apparently saw him: head bent over a book, lamplight catching the angles of his face, something in his expression that was concentrated and private and fond, oddly, around the eyes, soft in a way Remus wouldn't have attributed to himself. The light was amber and warm. The painting was full of small details: the specific way he held a book, the particular slope of his shoulders, the jumper Remus knew was dark green with a worn cuff he hadn't gotten around to mending.
Two months. Sirius had been painting this, across the room, while Remus read.
Remus stood up.
He crossed the room, and he was looking at Sirius, who was looking back at him with an expression that was genuinely uncertain for possibly the first time in Remus's experience of him, and when Remus got close enough he stopped.
"This is the overthinking face," Sirius said, quietly.
"It's not," Remus said. "I've already decided."
Then he reached up, slightly, because Sirius had an inch or two on him, and he put his hand against the side of Sirius's jaw, and Sirius went perfectly, completely still, which was itself a remarkable thing, because Sirius was rarely still, and Remus kissed him.
It was a careful kiss. A question asked with full expectation of an answer, and the answer came immediately: Sirius made a small sound and kissed him back, hand coming up to Remus's collar, and then his waist, pulling him in.
When they broke apart, Sirius's eyes were still closed for a moment. Then they opened, and he was looking at Remus, and his expression was the one Remus didn't have a word for but suspected was significant.
"Hi," Sirius said.
"Hi," said Remus.
A pause. Then Sirius said, in a voice that was caught somewhere between dignified and desperately relieved: "Took you long enough."
Remus laughed. "Took me—"
"You," Sirius confirmed. "Absolutely you. I've been leaving you sketches, Moony. I left you a sparrow."
"You left everyone sketches! How was I supposed to know—"
"I don't leave everyone sparrows!"
"You didn't say anything—"
"Neither did you!"
"I thought you were out of my league!"
"I thought you were out of my league!" Sirius said. Remus looked at him, and Sirius looked back, and they both seemed to take a moment to appreciate the collective magnitude of their mutual idiocy.
"We're both idiots," Remus said.
"Profound idiots," Sirius agreed. "Historic."
"To be fair," Remus said, "you have forty thousand Instagram followers."
"To be fair," Sirius said, "you kept a sparrow in your nightstand for two months." He was grinning now and Remus felt that familiar tilt, the one rooms did when Sirius was in them, except this time it wasn't a thing happening to the room. It was a thing happening to him, directly and entirely personally. "I think that evens it out a bit."
"Marginally," Remus said.
"Extremely," Sirius corrected. He was still holding Remus's waist, which seemed, Remus reflected, like something worth addressing. "Also, for the record," Sirius added, "I genuinely think you're extraordinary. Just — for the record."
"You think I'm ordinary in an extraordinary way," Remus said, which he had been told, once or twice.
"I think you're extraordinary in every way," Sirius said, very simply, and Remus found he had absolutely no ironic response to that. He had been briefly disarmed. He considered this development.
"The painting is very good," he said, which was the best he could do.
Sirius's grin went soft at the edges. "Yeah?"
"The light especially. The lamplight."
"I had good material."
"That sounds like a line."
"It's genuinely not." Sirius tilted his head. "I mean. It might sound like one. But it's not. You're interesting to paint. Your face does things." He said this in a tone that suggested he'd been thinking about it. "I have probably two hundred sketchbook pages of just your face."
"Two hundred."
"Give or take."
"Sirius."
"I contain multitudes."
"You contain two hundred sketchbook pages of my face," Remus said, "which is somehow both flattering and alarming."
"You can see them," Sirius offered. "If you want. Later. I wasn't going to — before — but circumstances have changed."
"Circumstances," Remus repeated.
"Significantly." Sirius looked at him. The lamplight was doing the same amber thing it did in the painting, which Remus was going to think about later, the fact that Sirius had painted him like this, in this exact light, had been seeing him all this time in this way. "Can I kiss you again?" Sirius asked. "I want to make sure the first one wasn't a fluke."
"What would constitute a fluke?" Remus asked.
"I don't know. I've never had one. I just want a data point."
"That's a terrible reason."
"I have better reasons," Sirius said. "I just thought the data point framing might appeal to your—"
"Kiss me," Remus said, "and stop talking about data."
Sirius did.
Outside, a car passed. The refrigerator hummed. The flat held its usual chaos, and Remus stood in the middle of it and thought that he'd been wrong, earlier. About the math. About the league table. About all of it.
Sirius Black, in private, was a lot. He was too much, really, too warm, too present, too apparently capable of painting someone from across a room for two months without saying a word.
It was, Remus decided, exactly the right amount of a lot.
For him.