but we can love

[melisica]

(by nath.smith)

[messrrremus]

Aesthetics || Remus Lupin

[martabevacquaphotos-deactivated]

[itsarealmeanteam]

Twelve year old Sirius invents New EP Day the summer after first year as something to look forward to when being the Black family’s little prince is too much.

(It’s only a coincidence that, taking a walk as far from Grimmauld Place as he can manage, he happens to wander into that shop. That’s where he gets hooked to a culture he gets. That’s where he meets Brianna, the kind if rough Muggle woman who teaches him about rock music, motorbikes, possibilities he’d never imagined.)

New EP Day is a blessing not only when it comes around every three weeks, but in the time between. He can sit at the dinner table and tune it out, all of it, by thinking about which record he’s going to get next. Not that he can play any of them until he gets back to school (everything more or less revolves around a certain bewitched record player, but that’s another story altogether), but it’s what keeps him going.

Over the years, he comes to think of his life in terms of what New EP Day brings.

The first time, it’s T Rex’s single “Hot Love”, bought remembering the first time he saw a Muggle veletision (he’d snuck out of a family party with Reg, and they hid from the cold in a shop full of things they didn’t recognize). There was a man on it with glitter on his face, and he fell in love instantly. 

Another notable purchase comes in 1973. He and Remus are the only of the four who live in the same city, so during the Christmas holidays Sirius spends quite a few hours sitting at the Lupins’ flat. He doesn’t want to go home, and Remus is smart enough not to ask why, so they don’t talk much; they sit at the scrubbed kitchen table and listen to records instead. The only ones they have, though, are Remus’ mum’s old collection from when he was little. It’s an intimate thing, and makes something burn quietly in Sirius’ chest. 

When Brianna laughs at him and asks “The Temptations? Why?” he finds that he doesn’t have a good answer. 

Things change in the middle of the decade, on both sides, and he can hear it. The leathery smoky blackness of punk creeps in over the glitter and glam of his younger years. As the music gets darker so does the world too. 

There’s the summer of 76, the hottest summer in living memory, when the punk scene in London is just coming to life— when he and Remus take to snogging in the backseat of his mum’s station wagon with Bowie on the tape deck, when the first few blood traitors get their houses and businesses blown up. There’s more rips in his clothes now and more black (he never gets rid of his long Mott The Hoople haircut, even if spikes are the cool and punk thing to have); he looks Sid Vicious in the eye and falls in love instantly; he starts wearing that chain link necklace James thinks is so stupid. He gets kicked out of his house and tattoos a big Gryffindor lion over the scar his mum leaves as a parting gift.

Punk comes to its pinnacle in London in the late 70s. Other things are happening in London in the late 70s, and it’s getting harder to keep the Muggles uninvolved. The other side sure as hell isn’t concerned.

Then it’s 1980 and Sid Vicious is dead, Marc Bolan is dead, even John fucking Lennon is dead (he never even liked those four ponces), and so are more and more of his friends. So is Brianna; she makes the mistake of marrying a wizard and when Sirius next visits her shop the place is gutted and her body’s in the alley out back. So are the McKinnons, so are the Fenwicks (they’re taking out entire families now), the Longbottoms might as well be.

And then it’s 1981, punk is selling out and disco is passé and no one’s heard an acoustic guitar in years, and his best friend’s in hiding with his wife because a mass murderer wants their baby dead.

All the DJs swear rock and roll is dying and all he can think is “it might as well, right?”

Everything else is.

[itsarealmeanteam]

[itsarealmeanteam]

[itsarealmeanteam]

Those early days were confusing for her, caught as she was in the middle. Not all Muggle, not all witch. Many are inflamed by revolution, but others find themselves paralyzed. Fight long enough and you learn: there's no right answer. Does that make everything the wrong answer? If everyone says they're the good guy, are any of them? Are we all the bad guys? Hell is empty, she thinks.

[gosh]

[itsarealmeanteam]

Sirius is hardly fourteen, but he knows that feeling. The one where your heart is hot and swollen like an infected thing in your too tight chest under your too light head, and your limbs have more blood in them than usual and all of it is moving. Your lungs work overtime but no air gets in, your ribs drag open and closed like the spines of an umbrella and with every breath your stomach drops out and you feel sick, so so sick. It’s a directionless feeling with no agenda, just leaves you there, a broken umbrella trying to breathe.

He isn’t sure who he’d be without it.

It’s wordless, worthless, formless, unthought. The words don’t exist, even in his mind. For years, it’s nothing but a wish made on candles, the sickness in his gut.

He wonders what Remus would say if he knew.

[itsarealmeanteam]

[meeks-peaks]

Dog Bite by oliver.seary on Flickr.

[itsarealmeanteam]

(Seventh year’s drawing to a close whether they want it to or not, and the wide world yawns.) (Silencing charm on the curtains but the night makes them whisper anyway.)

"I don’t want you to feel that you’re chained to me."

Sirius shrugs. “Not like I could be with anyone else.”

That shocked, indignant look. “Any man in the world would be thrilled to have you.”

"Probably not the straight ones, but s’not what I was talking about."

He draws Remus’ hand into his lap, plays with his fingers. Breathes.

"I fell in love with you when I was eleven."

Fingers tighten around his.

"I think it would’ve happened no matter how old we were," Sirius mumbles, "but, you know. Kind of unfair it was eleven. You’re just supposed to be a kid then."

Talking to himself, to the quiet. “And then you start to figure out how you work, like, who you are as a person. And of course you start looking at girls or boys or whichever, and I did look at boys, but…mostly, it was just you. It makes for a weird sort of development, when you meet your…”

Remus hears him try to say something other than ‘soul mate’. Too trite for here in the dark. Too simple.

"…your real deal, when you’re eleven."

A moment.

"You don’t know that," Remus says finally.

"Yeah, I do."

"Seventeen is very young."

"I can still know things," he says. "You don’t have that feeling of…finality?"

Of course.

Slowly, he says, “I don’t trust it.”

"You don’t have to know everything to believe in stuff."

"It’s stupid of me."

"You’re seventeen. Stupid’s okay."

[itsarealmeanteam]

(January. James and Peter are in the dormitory, alone. James becomes bored with his homework.)

“Where’re they, then?”

Peter shrugs.

The air’s been thick lately. James has a way of dictating things like that. Things that James doesn’t want to talk about aren’t talked about. Not that he ever has to say what he doesn’t want to talk about. The words wither in your throat before they even reach your mouth.

Peter tries anyway. “They’ve been weird, don’t you think?”

James doesn’t look up from his textbook. “They’re always weird.”

“No, yeah, but. Different, I mean?”

“English, Pettigrew.”

“I only mean…like, at dinner?”

“What about it?”

“They were acting funny.”

“How?”

“I dunno, they just, y’know, were?”

“Helpful, that.” Peter waves his hands, frustrated. “It’s that way that you can’t really describe it, but when it happens you’re like ‘Argh, there it is!’, d’y’know?”

James sounds bored again. “Nah, I don’t.”

And there it is, that indefinable James-ness that seeps into the air that makes him feel spectacularly stupid, like maybe he was just imagining it, and he probably is, it’s weird of him to think, to even consider…

“You don’t think they’ve acted funny after that thing with the potion a couple months back?”

“What, when Moony snogged him?” James snorts into his book. His grin isn’t right. “Hilarious, yeah, but I still don’t get your meaning.”

But he didn’t imagine it. He remembers, clear as day: Sirius’ whole body had sort of drooped, like his knees were about to give out, and his head moved, and his hands twitched in some sort of way that was— well, he didn’t quite know what it was, but—

“You saw it?” Peter says, his voice tilting up and going quiet like it does when he’s afraid, “You must’ve?”

At last, James looks up. His eyebrows are quirked in amusement: Oh Wormtail, and your mad fancies, what will we do with you. But the set of his mouth is just that much tighter.

He’s crossed a line. It feels like a slap.

“Don’t be stupid, Pete.”

They don’t talk about it again.

[itsarealmeanteam]

Remus says Divination is soft. He tends to agree, most of the time. The professor turns to look at him. "Late spring, then?" "Huh?" "You were born in late spring?" she says, impatient. "As the sweetness was leaving, and summer was coming in and making it all a bit more dangerous? Yes?" He narrows his eyes. "June first. How--?" She makes a distracted gesture, digging through a cupboard. "Positively dogged by Mercury. Kind of remarkable, really. Dual-minded? Yes, I see," she says before he can comment. "Mr--?" He tilts his chin, defiance and nonchalance in double. "Black." Her eyes widen a fraction. He can see her taking it in: translucent china doll skin, dark hair, the indefinable presence of good breeding. His seat on the Gryffindor side of the room. She smiles. "Dual-natured, indeed," she murmurs.

[blink41]

[pastelgrandmother]

O how he loves you, darling boy. O how, like always, he invents the monsters underneath the bed to get you to sleep next to him, chest to chest or chest to back, the covers drawn around you in an act of faith against the night.

Richard Siken, You Are Jeff para. 4 (via queermandymilkovich)

[itsarealmeanteam]

(she’s the one who keeps her cool when he’s bawling like a baby, so when he walks in one night to hear her shrieking for him from the bathroom, it’s a little worrying.)

She’s curled up in the corner, white and shaking. “Hey!” He drops to his knees, grabs for her blindly. “I’m here, I’m here— Babe, talk to me, what—” She’s shaking something in his face, shoving it in his hands. What the hell, why won’t she talk? “Lils, tell me what’s wrong, /talk/ to—” She slaps his fingers around the thing. It’s slim and plastic. “Look!” He looks at it. White plastic. “Er. I don’t…I don’t get it. What’s—” She clenches her eyes shut in frustration, and sounds more than a little unhinged when she bites out “/Fucking/ wizards— I’m pregnant!” Suddenly, he feels a lot like his stag self. “You …yeah?” “I don’t know, I don’t know how, I’ve been /careful/, I never miss a pill, I don’t know— how could we let this happen James, what the hell are we gonna do?!” “What— why are you—” His voice is breaking, he’s grinning like a lunatic, he’s going to start crying in like ten seconds. “Lils, Lily, we’re gonna be /parents/— Lily!” He wraps her up in his arms, buries his face in her hair, breathes her in and never lets her go, and he’s saying something, must be, because Lily interrupts him. “Are you stupid?” she snaps. He blinks, tears still blurring his vision. “Generally yes, but—” “We are a year out of school!” She shudders to her feet and is standing in their tiny bathroom in a white t-shirt and her underwear and he is in awe of her. Sometimes he forgets where they are, that they’re adults, that she’s his grown-up wife and not the girl next to him in Potions who hates his guts, but here she is, real and here and grown up and, currently, screaming. “We make hardly enough to get by, we live in a flat sized better for the average bowtruckle than actual humans, and we’re fighting a war!” “So?!” he yells back. “The war’s gonna end sometime, isn’t it?” “Yeah, and we won’t be around to see it!” “Come off it!” “You’re not this naive, /tell/ me you’re not! You know we won’t live through this!” “No, I don’t! You’re being—” “You know what’s at stake here!” she wails, and she might be crying and James is the crier of the two of them, Lily never cries, not even at their wedding, not even when their friends die. “Wizards with decades of experience are dropping like flies and we’re nineteen, we’re no good beyond meat shields, that’s why they keep us around!” “That’s STUPID!” He’s on his feet now too, he’s oddly aware of them holding his whole body upright on the tile and he feels dizzy, he bangs his hip on the corner of the sink and gasps but doesn’t feel anything. “You’re being—” “We’re disposable to them!” He watches her hair flying, it’s so so red over her shoulders and throat and chest like a big bloody stain on her white shirt and he doesn’t want to hear this, this is happy, they’re supposed to be /happy/— “SHUT UP!” “Did you think this was a Quidditch game, or a stupid prank with your friends?!” she snarls. “I thought you knew what you signed up for!” “I DID, I’m—” “We’re going to DIE, James! I’ve accepted that and it’s time you do too!” All the air leaves his body. She’s panting, like she just ran a mile, with bright eyes. Everything’s oddly shiny. He can’t yell anymore. “Good we’re doing this now, then,” he says. “Eh?” “Oh, don’t—” “We wanted to have a family together and we deserve a shot just like anybody else does, don’t we? If we’ve gotta do it when we’re nineteen, squeeze it in before we bite the dust, then…” He flings his arms out, and he feels completely at peace. He hasn’t felt that in a long time. “That’s alright with me!”

She throws herself into him. They cling to each other for a very long time.