[phoebe-writes]

Intro, I guess

Hi, I'm Phoebe, 25, and I've been writing fic for a few years but I've never shared any of it, and admittedly, none of it has ever been written to be shared if that makes sense, but a few weeks ago, I started writing a handful of fics to share so I've put them in the queue and we'll see what happens.

Disclaimer, because I feel it's becoming almost necessary at this point: I don't use GenAI, fuck you if you do use GenAI, and while I'm at it, fuck you if you're still supporting JK Rowling.

[phoebe-writes]

Across the Hall

Pairing: Poly!Wolfstar x Reader Summary: The two men across the hall keep inventing reasons to knock — a corkscrew, some sugar, a plate of something warm — and it takes you a fortnight to work out you keep handing them an excuse to try again. Tags: neighbours AU, getting together, fluff, slow burn

You've lived in the flat for three weeks now, and you've learned two things about the one across the hall. The music is always good and slightly too loud. And its occupants invent the most astonishing reasons to knock.

The first time, it's a corkscrew. You open the door and there's a tall bloke already talking before you've got it half open, dark hair loose, grinning like the two of you are mid-conversation and always have been, "you don't happen to have a corkscrew, do you? Because we've got a bottle and absolutely no way in, and it's a tragedy, honestly. Sirius, by the way, in case you need a name for whoever you're cursing," and behind him another man hovers a step back with one shoulder against the doorframe, arms folded, not quite hiding a smile, watching the whole performance like he's seen it before and isn't going to be the one to stop it. You don't have a corkscrew. You tell him so. He looks wounded, personally let down, like you've broken some unspoken agreement between neighbours, and then he's off again just as fast, "right, tragic, we'll manage," and the quieter one gives you a small, apologetic sort of nod on his way out, as if to say, sorry, he's like this.

The second time it's sugar. You don't bake. You say so. Sirius — you've got the other one's name too, by now, Remus, said quieter, like it costs him something to introduce himself at all — takes the sugar business just as personally, "no sugar, devastating," and vanishes again, all momentum, no follow-through. Remus lingers a beat longer this time. "Sorry," he says, "he does this. Might as well ask if we need anything, save you two trips?"

"We don't," you tell him, which isn't strictly an answer, and he looks like he expected that, and retreats anyway, easy, unbothered, like losing costs him nothing at all.

The third time it's a plate. Something with cinnamon on it, still warm, Remus holding it like it's an apology for something rather than a gift, "we made too much," he says, which is obviously a lie, nobody has ever made too much of anything by accident, and behind him Sirius is doing an appalling job of looking innocent. You take the plate anyway, because it's rude not to, and because it smells like actual heaven, and because Remus looks so ready to be told no that you can't quite bring yourself to do it.

Every time, you beg off before too long — busy, tired, mid-something — and every time they retreat with that same grace, unhurried, cheerful, as if it costs them nothing. You almost feel you've won something. It takes you a fortnight to work out you've only ever handed them a reason to try again tomorrow.

Then the building loses power, on the coldest night of the year, obviously, because the universe has a sense of humour and no mercy whatsoever. You're stood in your black hallway swearing at a light switch that does nothing when their door opens without you knocking on it at all, candlelight spilling out gold across the carpet, the smell of something warm on a stove, and Sirius filling the doorway like he's been waiting for exactly this excuse, "well, come on then, no point freezing on principle, is there?"

There's no polite way to refuse a stranded neighbour a seat by the only working stove on the floor. You know that. You go in anyway, telling yourself it's just the once.

Their sofa is deep and a bit too small for three, and you end up wedged in the middle of it, Sirius sprawled along one end like he owns the furniture, arm slung along the back of it behind your shoulders, all easy confidence, while Remus takes longer to sit, hovering near the arm of it first like he's still deciding whether he's allowed, before a blanket appears from somewhere and he shakes it out over the three of you, brisk, businesslike, as if that settles the matter of where he's sitting too. It's a good blanket. It is, you'll notice later, not nearly big enough for three people, a fact that seems to trouble neither of them at all.

"Cold night," Remus says, by way of explanation, tucking the corner in against your hip without quite meeting your eye, "can't have you catching your death, can we, just for being neighbourly?"

You don't say what you're thinking, which is that the whole flat smells of cinnamon and woodsmoke and something you don't have a word for yet, warm in a way that's got nothing to do with the stove.

Time slides by in that stretched, unmarked way it does with no telly and no clock in sight, just candles and low talk, Sirius mid-flow about a dog he definitely used to have, or definitely was, depending which version you're getting, gesturing so wildly he nearly has the candle over, and Remus correcting the details with the weary patience of a man who's heard this story forty times and expects to hear it forty more, "don't let him tell you he tamed it, it was the other way round entirely."

You laugh properly at one point, and Sirius looks entirely too pleased with himself about it, delighted, like he's won something, and you catch Remus watching that too, something soft crossing his face before he seems to remember himself and looks back at the candle instead.

Somewhere in there the blanket shrinks. You'd swear it does. You keep having to shift closer to keep any of it on you at all, until there's no cold air left between the three of you, and nobody suggests fetching a bigger one, and you don't ask for it either.

"Your foot's gone dead," Remus says at some point, hand closing loosely round your ankle to shift it, gentle, careful, like he's asking permission with his hands rather than his mouth, "better?"

"Better," you say, and don't mention that better isn't really about your foot.

Sirius's thumb moves once against your shoulder, absent, like he's not thinking about it at all, except you catch him thinking about it, in the reflection off the dark window, watching you rather than the candle he's meant to be minding, and for just a second the noise in him goes quiet, and something more careful comes through instead.

You could get up. You could say you should check on your own flat, your own cold, your own dark. Somewhere in the last hour you've stopped believing that's a reason at all.

"Warm enough?" Sirius asks, and Remus answers before you can, "just about, I'd say" — and there's a look that passes between the two of them over the top of your head, easy, unhidden, the look of two people who've been perfectly content to let a power cut do the work they'd been failing to do with corkscrews and sugar and too much cinnamon for three weeks running.

You feel it land on you a second late, the way you always seem to be a step behind them. Something in your chest turns over, slow, warm, entirely undignified.

"I don't have a corkscrew," you say, apropos of nothing, and Sirius laughs like it's the best joke he's heard all year, "I know, love, we've established that, haven't we?"

Hours on, the lights flicker, stutter, and come back down the corridor, you can see it under the door, and nobody moves. Nobody so much as glances at the switch.

"Should probably check on my flat," you say, not moving either.

"Should you?" Remus asks, and his arm doesn't loosen an inch.

You don't get up. Sirius's hand finds yours under the blanket like it's been waiting its turn, bold about it, unbothered by asking outright, and Remus is quieter getting there, slower, like he's still checking it's allowed even as he does it, his mouth close enough to your ear that you feel the words before you hear them properly, "no pretending it's about sugar, is it?"

Later — much later, candles burnt to nothing and the stove gone cold and none of you minding a bit — the blanket's given up being a blanket at all, just a heap on the floor where it fell, and nobody's cold anyway. You'll think back, after, on three weeks of knocking, and realise it was never about corkscrews. It was two people finding every possible reason to end up on your side of a door — one of them loud about it, one of them quiet, both of them patient in their own way — when all along the easiest way in was to leave theirs open and wait for the lights to go out.

Nobody knocks, after that. Why would they? The door across the hall just... stays open.

[phoebe-writes]

The Cardigan

Pairing: Remus Lupin x Reader Summary: During exam week, Remus's table becomes your table, his chocolate becomes your chocolate, and his cardigan somehow never makes it back to him. Tags: university AU, slow burn, mutual pining, fluff, getting together

It's exam week, which means the library doesn't really close, not properly, and neither do you. You've got a stack of notes that make less sense every time you read them and a plug socket you've started to think of as yours, and somehow both of those things exist at Remus Lupin's table.

You're not sure when it became his table. Maybe it was always his, the way some people just get given a corner of a room without ever asking for it. He's got an alarming amount of chocolate in his bag — full bars, not squares, the good stuff, bought in bulk like he's stockpiling for something — and he doles it out to whoever looks grey enough to need it, no questions, just a bit pushed across the table and a quiet, eat that, go on, you look like you're about to keel over.

"You've had four hours of sleep, I can see it on you," he says, not looking up from his own book, the first night you sit there.

"I've had plenty of sleep."

"Right." He turns a page. "Drink some water, would you? I can't be doing with catching you when you faceplant into your laptop."

You drink some water. It becomes a routine without either of you deciding it should be one — you turn up, and the seat by the plug socket is already free, his bag on the chair beside it like a placeholder, moved the second you appear. He never says he's saving it. He doesn't have to.

By the third night you've stopped pretending you're there for the coursework.

"You're doing that thing," he says, "where you stare at the page like it's personally wronged you."

"It has. It's done nothing but wrong me."

"Have some of this," he says, breaking off a bit and sliding it over without quite meeting your eye, "you'll feel better," and you don't, not about the deadline, but you do feel something, warm and a bit stupid, watching him go straight back to his notes like he hasn't just fixed something in you and doesn't want credit for it either.

He's careful like that. Kind in a way that ducks its head the second you notice it — like being caught out is worse than not bothering at all. You clock it and you don't say anything, because you get the sense that if you did, he'd stop.

When the library finally chucks everyone out, he walks you home. It's not really a question by the second time — he just falls into step beside you, hands stuffed up into the sleeves of a cardigan that's seen better decades, elbow going thin at one side, and keeps up this low, dry commentary the whole way that has you laughing far too loud for how quiet the street is.

"Careful," he says, glancing at a dark window, "you'll wake somebody up and they'll come out and have a go at us."

"You started it."

"I did not start it. I made one — one — comment about your seminar tutor's tie."

"It was a good comment, though, wasn't it?"

"It was an excellent comment," he agrees, entirely serious, and you laugh again, and he looks pleased with himself in a way he tries and fails to hide, like he's not quite used to being funny on purpose and getting away with it.

Some nights it's cold enough that he ends up handing you the cardigan before you've even asked, before you've even shivered properly, just — there, take it, I run warm anyway, which isn't true, you can see the goosebumps come up on his arms straight after, but you take it because arguing with Remus Lupin about who's cold is a battle you've learned you don't win. You mean to give it back the next night. You don't. He doesn't ask. It just — stays with you, slung over your chair at the library, worn home again, and neither of you mentions it, and somehow that not-mentioning becomes its own kind of conversation.

"You could just ask for it back, you know," you try once, half-joking.

"Could," he says, not looking up. "Keeps you warm, though, doesn't it? Seems a shame."

Which isn't really an answer. You let it go.

The exams blur past the way exam weeks do, one grey morning after another, and then — abruptly — they're over.

You walk out of your last one feeling hollowed out and enormous at once, all that pressure gone somewhere and taking half of you with it, and Remus is waiting outside like he said he would be, hands in his sleeves, same as always, looking like he hasn't slept properly since Tuesday either.

"Well?" he says.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"That bad?"

"I don't want to talk about it," you say again, and then you're laughing, giddy with it, the sheer relief of having nothing left to revise, and he's laughing too, and the walk home that night is louder and slower than any of the others, neither of you in any hurry to get anywhere.

You end up at your door the way you always do. Except tonight neither of you moves to leave.

"That's me, then," you say.

"Right," he says. "Yeah."

Neither of you moves.

He's still got the cardigan on you, technically — you're wearing it now, actually, cuffs rolled twice and still too long, three nights old and smelling like the library and like him, and he glances at it and then away, quick, like he's noticed the same thing you have and decided against saying so.

"You never asked for this back," you say.

"No," he says. "I didn't."

"Do you want it back?"

He doesn't answer straight away, which isn't like him — usually he's got a line ready before you've finished the sentence — and when he does his voice has gone quieter, a bit rougher round the edges. "No," he says. "Keep it. Suits you better than it ever did me, anyway."

"That's not true."

"Isn't it?" He says it lightly, like a joke he's made a hundred times about himself, worn smooth from use, and you don't laugh, and something crosses his face when you don't — surprise, maybe, that you weren't going to let that one go by.

The street's dead quiet. No one about, no lit windows, just the two of you and the porch light doing nothing much against the dark.

"Term's over," you say, for something to say.

"Term's over," he agrees, and doesn't move to go, hands working a bit deeper into his sleeves, like he's giving them a job so they don't have to decide anything else.

"We should — I don't know. Celebrate. Or something."

"Or something," he says, and there's a smile in it, careful, like he's testing whether it's allowed. "Bit out of practice at celebrating, me."

"Could learn."

"Could," he says, and for once doesn't turn it into a joke, doesn't reach for the easy exit, just looks at you properly, straight on, not the sideways library look he does when he thinks you're not watching. You think, here it is, the thing you've both been almost saying for three nights running and not saying, hovering right there between you like it's got nowhere else to go and is starting to know it.

"Remus."

"Yeah?"

"I'm really glad you sat at that table."

"Me too," he says, and then, quick, like he's got to get it out before he loses his nerve, "didn't think you'd want — I mean, you could do a lot better than someone who lives on library coffee and secondhand jumpers, is what I'm saying, so I didn't—"

"Remus."

"—didn't want to say anything and have you think I was —" He stops. "Sorry. What?"

"Shut up," you say, not unkindly, and close the last of the distance yourself, because it's clear if you wait for him to finish that sentence you'll be standing on this doorstep till Christmas, and you kiss him instead of letting him talk himself out of it.

He makes a small sound against your mouth, surprised, and then he's kissing you back properly, one hand coming up careful to your jaw like he's not sure he's allowed and doing it anyway, and it turns out that's the best feeling of the whole night — better than finishing your last paper, better than the walk, better than any of it.

He pulls back an inch, breath a bit unsteady. "Right," he says. "Okay. That's — right."

"Very articulate."

"Give me a minute," he says, "I had a whole thing planned and you've gone and ruined it," and he's laughing now, disbelieving, like he still expects the ground to change its mind under him. "I've been meaning to do that since about Tuesday, if you want to know."

"Tuesday," you repeat. "That's very specific."

"You had chocolate on your face. It was a whole thing." He tugs the cardigan sleeve over your knuckles, absent, like he's done it a hundred times before. "Spent a week talking myself out of it and back into it and out of it again. Didn't think it was a good idea, someone like you and someone like—"

"Remus."

"Sorry. Shutting up."

"Good," you say, and kiss him again to make sure it sticks, softer this time, and somewhere in the middle of it you think, distantly, that you're never giving that cardigan back, not properly, not really, and neither is he ever going to ask for it —

and that's fine. That's more than fine. That's the whole point.

[phoebe-writes]

Thank you to everyone who got me to 1000 likes!

[phoebe-writes]

Say That Again

Pairing: James Potter x Reader Summary: You mention a bloke from your seminar asked you out — and James turns up at midnight to explain why he can't stand the idea. Tags: friends to lovers, pining, fluff, first kiss

You mention it without thinking much of it — a bloke from your seminar, Tom or Tim, asked you out after the lecture, and you don't know what to say to him yet. You're only saying it out loud because James is there and James is always there, kettle going, tea towel slung over one shoulder like it lives there.

"He seems alright," you say, "I might just say yes, see what happens."

James laughs, too loud, a beat too fast. "Yeah? Tom-or-Tim. Sounds solid. Sounds like a bloke who owns actual furniture." He's grinning but it's the wrong kind of grin, the one that's doing a job instead of just happening, and he picks the tea towel up off his shoulder and starts wringing it in his hands like he's trying to get water out of something that's already dry.

"James?"

"What? I'm made up for you." He drops the towel, picks it back up, twists it again. "Genuinely made up. That's great, that is."

None of those words sound like what they mean, not from him, not when James means something he usually can't shut up about it — you've heard him go on for twenty minutes about a decent bit of parking, so this clipped, over-bright nothing doesn't fit him at all.

He's gone within the hour, some story about meeting Sirius that comes out too quick and too neat, like he'd built it on the way to the kitchen. The door doesn't slam. It shuts too carefully, which somehow says more than a slam would.

You spend the evening turning it over. The kettle ticks as it cools on the side, the way it always does, and you keep picturing his hands on that tea towel, wringing it half to bits, like his mouth had stopped working and his hands took over the job of saying something.

You don't hear from him. Nine o'clock, ten, eleven, and the flat gets that particular kind of quiet that flats get when someone who's usually filling them isn't.

Midnight, and there's a knock.

He has a key. He has had a key for two years. You open the door and he's stood there with his hair wrecked, properly wrecked, like he's spent the whole walk dragging his hand through it, and before you've even got the door all the way open he's talking.

"Right, okay, don't — just let me get this out before I lose my nerve," he says, already pacing half a step into the hall, "I've been in love with you since roughly forever, since before I had a word for it, and I kept thinking, there;ll be a good moment, I'll wait for the good moment, and Sirius kept saying there's no such thing as a good moment, there's just moments, and I didn't believe him until tonight, until you said his name like it was nothing, and I thought, no. No, I'd rather do this badly right now than watch you say yes to him."

He has to stop then, hand through his hair again, breathing like he's run here.

"I practised it. On the way over. It was better in my head, there was a joke in it and everything —"

"James."

"— and now I've said the important bit wrong and skipped the joke, so this has genuinely gone worse than I —"

"James."

He stops.

"The seminar bloke never had a chance," you say.

His whole face changes. It's like watching a kettle finally hit its pitch after minutes of building up to it — that specific unclenching, the sound of something let out that had been packed in far too tight.

"Say that again."

"He never had a chance."

"No — the bit where I'm an idiot who could've just said this eighteen months ago."

"That bit's implied."

He laughs, this short disbelieving huff of a laugh, and then his hands are either side of your face like he needs to check you're real, and he kisses you like he's been rehearsing that too, badly, for roughly forever — which, fair enough, he has.

Later, back in the kitchen because that's where this started and it seems only right to finish there, he finds the tea towel where he left it, dropped over the back of a chair, wrung half out of shape.

"I destroyed this a bit," he says, holding it up.

"I noticed."

"Course you did." He drapes it back over his shoulder anyway, easier now, none of the twisting left in his hands. "You notice everything. Terrifying, that."

You put the kettle on properly this time, and it starts its low building hiss, and for once neither of you tries to fill the quiet with anything, because for once the quiet isn't the wrong kind.

[phoebe-writes]

Word Travels

Pairing: Poly!Wolfstar x Reader Summary: Your mate drags you to a gig and vanishes, leaving you at the bar with a dry, lemonade-nursing stranger — and his boyfriend, grinning at you from the stage like he already knows how the night ends. Tags: getting together, meet-cute, fluff, slow burn

Cass drags you to this gig by the wrist, practically, says it'll be a laugh, says you'll thank her later, and then the lights drop and she's gone, off into the crowd like she was never there at all. Typical.

So you end up at the bar on your own, watching a band whose name you didn't catch tune up under a single blue light, and that's where he is too — tall bloke, jumper with a hole in the elbow, nursing what turns out to be a lemonade like it's the last one on earth.

"They're alright," he says, not quite looking at you, nodding at the stage instead, "considering one of them once set a chip pan on fire trying to impress a girl."

You laugh before you mean to. "You know them, then?"

"Unfortunately." Dry as anything. "That one on guitar — the one currently deciding our corner of the room is more interesting than the actual song — that's my boyfriend."

You follow where he's looking, and there's a bloke with dark hair stuck to his forehead, grinning right at you both like he already knows how this evening ends.

"Sirius," the tall one adds, like it explains something, like a warning label. "I'm Remus."

"And you're not bothered? Him doing that from the stage?"

"Should I be?" He says it mildly, sipping his lemonade, eyes back on the band. "He does it to lampposts and dogs as well. It's not personal, it's just how he's built."

You don't ask what he means by that. You don't get the chance to, really — Remus keeps narrating under his breath, dry and unbothered, that one's on his third girlfriend this year, the drummer cries at insurance adverts, don't repeat that last one — and somewhere in there you stop feeling like you gate-crashed something you weren't invited to.

The second the set ends, Sirius doesn't walk off the stage so much as launch himself off it, straight at you, sweat-shining and reckless with it, hip-checking a stranger out of the way without appearing to notice he's done it. He drops onto the stool beside you like it's already his — the one Remus has, without a word about it, kept clear all night, elbow parked on it, never once looking like he was saving anything.

"You," Sirius says, "are new. Who let you in?"

"Cass did. Then she vanished."

"Sensible woman." He steals Remus's lemonade without asking, drains half of it, hands it back. Remus doesn't so much as blink, just watches him do it with an expression that says something you can't quite read yet — you'll learn later that's just them, mostly, whole conversations fought and won in a look. "Are you always this quiet, or is it just us?"

"Is that meant to be charming?"

"Depends." He grins, unrepentant. "Is it working?"

By closing you've got chips balanced on your knee outside, vinegar sharp, and a list of names thrown at you too fast to keep hold of — Cass has resurfaced, unbothered, entirely unrepentant — and when the drizzle starts Remus produces an umbrella from nowhere, holds it up without comment, and somehow you're the one underneath it with him while Sirius refuses to duck in properly, half in half out of the rain like the weather owes him something.

"You'll get soaked, stood like that," you tell him.

"Will I?" He says it like the idea's never once occurred to him and doesn't much interest him now it has.

Someone adds you to a group chat before you've even sobered up, thirty messages deep by the time you check it walking home, people you've never met greeting you like you've been expected for weeks rather than hours.

"Bit odd," you say, half to yourself, "everyone acting like they already know me?"

The chat goes quiet — not normal quiet, the kind with weight behind it. Sirius studies a lamppost like it's personally wronged him. Remus's grip on the umbrella tightens, just slightly.

"Small friend group," he says, after a beat too long. "Word travels."

You let it go. You shouldn't have.

Over the next fortnight it keeps happening. Sirius turns up wherever you are like he's got a homing instinct for it, steers you the wrong way down streets on purpose just to keep walking beside you, says things that land somewhere between a challenge and a confession and never explains which. Remus is quieter about it — a joke that lands at exactly the right moment, a look that holds a beat too long before he glances away and pretends he hasn't, self-deprecating enough about himself that you start to wonder what he's protecting.

"You do know why they're both like that?" Cass says one night, far too pleased with herself.

"Like what?"

"That." She waves a hand at nothing and everything. "Sirius, doing whatever he wants and daring you to mind. Remus, pretending he isn't doing anything at all."

You don't say you know. You're not sure yet that you do.

It's a Friday when Sirius walks you to your door, hands shoved in his pockets for once, restless with the effort of keeping them there, and Remus trails a step behind with the umbrella shut and tucked under one arm.

"Right," Sirius says, rocking back on his heels on your step, none of his usual nerve anywhere in his voice, "we wanted to ask you something."

"Both of us," Remus says, careful, watching your face the way you'd watch a kettle about to go. "To dinner. Would you come to dinner with us? Both of us, I mean."

The rain's stopped. The umbrella stays shut under his arm, and it hits you all at once, standing there on your own doorstep — the stool that was somehow always saved, the eyebrow conversations, the group chat that already had your name in it before you did, the whole chat going quiet the night you said everyone seemed to already know you (you'd put it down to a bad signal, at the time).

They had. Of course they had.

"You mean — together?" you say, and it comes out smaller than you meant. "All three of us?"

"That's the general idea, yeah." Sirius's hands finally give up on his pockets, come out with nowhere to land. "Is that — is that alright?"

Remus doesn't fill the silence this time. He just waits, the shut umbrella held between them like something they're both still holding onto, and you think of standing under it in the rain, the two of them either side of you, neither one minding how little room there was.

"Yeah," you say. "Dinner. Both of you. Okay?"

"Okay," Sirius says back, like he's checking the word still means what he thinks it means, and then his whole face does something helpless and bright. Remus just breathes out, slow, like he'd been holding it since the gig.

"Right, then." He opens the umbrella again — pointless, under a clear sky, just to give his hands something to do — and holds it up over the three of you on your doorstep, not a drop of rain anywhere in sight, and none of you move to get out from under it.

[phoebe-writes]

Trying to write my first poly!wolfstar fic and I don't think it's going too well

[phoebe-writes]

finally finished one i'm happy with, hopefully the rest will be easier now

[phoebe-writes]

Spike

Pairing: Sirius Black x Reader Summary: Your daughter's mid-meltdown over a six-quid dinosaur when Sirius drops to the supermarket floor like he's been shot — and it's the bad day you'd been waiting to see him handle. Tags: single parent, kids, fluff, hurt/comfort, brief family issues

Your hand is on the trolley and your daughter is on the floor.

Not literally, not yet, but she's close, hanging off the side of it with her whole body gone boneless and furious, screaming about a dinosaur that costs six quid you don't have this week. You're doing the maths on the shelf edge without meaning to — nappies, the electric, the thing for her shoes — and your jaw's gone tight enough to ache.

"Please," she wails, and it's not really a please, it's a demand wearing a please's coat, "I need him, Mummy, I need him—"

"You don't need him, love, you've got fourteen dinosaurs at home—"

"Not like HIM—"

You feel the whole aisle looking. You keep your eyes on the shelf like that'll help.

And then Sirius drops to the floor like he's been shot.

Not crouches — drops, dramatic, knees cracking on the lino, one hand to his chest, and for one horrified second you think he's having you on in the worst possible way. But he's not laughing at her. He's looking at the dinosaur in her fist like it's just walked into the room and announced itself.

"Wait, wait, wait," he says, holding a hand up, "is that a Deinonychus? Hang on — is he friendly? Because I've had bad experiences."

She stops mid-wail. Blinks at him.

"He's not a dino... a dino-nikus," she manages, hiccuping, thrown completely off course. "He's Spike."

"Spike." Sirius says it like it's the most alarming name he's ever heard. "Right. And is Spike a good lad, or is Spike going to eat me?"

"He doesn't eat people! He eats baddies!"

"Oh, thank Christ," he says, sagging with relief so theatrical that a woman two trolleys down actually laughs, "because I've had a day, I don't think I could take being eaten as well," and your daughter is already giggling despite herself, tears still wet on her face, torn between crying and finding him ridiculous.

You stand there with your hand still on the trolley, cold metal under your palm, watching a grown man perform his own death by dinosaur in the middle of a Tesco.

He catches you looking. Grins — not sheepish, not shy, delighted with himself, like he knows exactly how mad he looks and has decided he doesn't care.

You know him a bit, now. Know he doesn't do quiet. Doesn't do careful, not really, not underneath — three months in and he still checks with you before he hugs her, still asks permission for the soft stuff, because gentle isn't the language he grew up speaking. But this? Making an idiot of himself on a shop floor to get a four-year-old back on side? That's just him. That's the whole engine of him, running exactly the way it runs when nobody's stopped him.

"Right, Spike," he says, taking the dinosaur off her with great ceremony, "back to base, I think, you've caused enough chaos for one afternoon," and he marches it back to the shelf like it's under arrest, doing a little voice for it the whole way, some ridiculous gruff dinosaur growl that has her in stitches, and by the time he's stood it up between two boxes of cereal she's forgotten there was ever a war at all.

Something in your chest cracks open, quiet, no fanfare to it. Just — open.

You'd been waiting to see how he'd handle a bad day. Not the good days — anyone can manage the good days, all ice cream and everyone's best behaviour. You'd been waiting for this. The screaming, the six quid, the whole aisle watching, your patience worn down to a thread.

This was the bad day. And he threw himself into it headfirst, like he always does, and somehow that was exactly right.

"Sorted?" he says, hauling himself up off the floor, knees popping, hands going straight to his hair to sort it back into place.

"Yeah," you say, and your voice comes out rougher than you mean it to. "You're mad, you know that?"

"Completely," he agrees, cheerful about it, and knocks your daughter's shoulder gently with his knuckles — gentle, that bit, always that bit, careful even when everything else about him is chaos — and she beams up at him like he hung the moon and every star round it. "Learned it from my little brother, actually. Only way to get him to stop crying was to be worse than whatever he was crying about."

He says it light, like it costs him nothing, and you don't quite believe that, not with what you know about his family, not with the way his mouth does something quick and complicated before he smooths it back into a grin.

"You didn't have to do that," you say.

"Didn't I?" he says, and there's something almost serious under the question, gone again before you can catch hold of it, and then he's already reaching past you for a jar of something off the shelf, reading the label like it's fascinating, giving you a second to have your feeling in peace.

(Later, in the car, she tells you all about how Spike's got a whole family living on the shelf now, cousins and everything, and you keep both hands steady on the wheel and let her talk.)

Your hand's still faintly cold when you think about it that night, the ghost of the trolley handle under your palm, and you think — that's it, isn't it? That's the whole thing. He didn't buy the dinosaur. He didn't sit her down and reason with her, all patient and soft-spoken, because that was never going to be him. He just threw his whole self at the problem, loud and daft and completely without dignity, and made room for her right there on the floor, exactly where she was, not his to fix...

and stayed there anyway.

[phoebe-writes]

Trouble

Pairing: Sirius Black x Reader Summary: You went in to look. Thirty seconds later Sirius is on the shelter floor in his good jeans, and you're both going home with a dog. Tags: fluff, humour, established relationship, pets, brief mentions family issues

You go in with a plan. We're only looking, you say, twice, in the car park, like saying it twice will make it stick. Sirius doesn't even pretend to agree. "Sure," he says, already halfway through the door. "Looking."

It lasts about thirty seconds.

There's a scruffy black mutt near the back of the second row, one ear chewed ragged at the tip, and he doesn't bark or throw himself at the wire like the others. He just watches Sirius walk past, and then gets up, slow, like it costs him something, and leans his whole weight against Sirius's legs through the bars.

Sirius stops dead. You watch something move through him, fast, the way weather moves through him — he doesn't do anything by halves, never has, and he's on the floor before you've finished reading the little card on the kennel. Good jeans, concrete floor, doesn't even hesitate.

"Sirius."

"What?" He doesn't look up. He's got his fingers through the wire, murmuring, low, and the dog's leaning into that too, eyes half shut.

"We're looking."

"I am looking." He glances up at you then, and there's a challenge in it, the same look he gets before he does something reckless — before he quits a job on principle, before he gets into it with some bloke in a pub who's said the wrong thing. "Look at him."

A volunteer, sensing a sale, lets them into the pen properly. The dog puts his head straight in Sirius's lap and sighs, this enormous sigh, and Sirius laughs — that laugh, sharp and short, more bark than anything, the one you've learned means he's genuinely delighted and not performing it for anyone.

"Right," he says. "We're taking him."

"We haven't even asked what he's like with —"

"We're taking him." Stubborn, immovable, the exact tone he uses when his mind's made up and further discussion is just noise he's tolerating. "I've decided."

You don't remember agreeing. You just remember the form, and Sirius signing it with a flourish like he's been waiting his whole life to be someone's next of kin.

He names the dog in the car, somewhere around the second roundabout, apropos of nothing. "Trouble," he announces.

"That's asking for it, isn't it?"

"It's a brilliant name." Something in the set of his jaw says the discussion's over before it's started, so it is. He looks pleased with himself about it for the rest of the drive. Trouble rides up front, seatbelt looped uselessly over him because Sirius refused point-blank to put him in the back — "he's not luggage" — and sits there like he's been riding shotgun his whole life, head against the window, while Sirius keeps glancing over at him at every red light, like he still can't quite believe his luck, and within a week that same restlessness that got a dog into the car in the first place turns the whole flat upside down. He doesn't slot Trouble gently into his routine. He restructures everything around him — buys a bed the dog won't use because the dog, obviously, sleeps on yours, argues with the vet about vaccination schedules like it's a personal insult, gets genuinely furious at a stranger in the park who calls Trouble "a mongrel," loud enough that you have to physically steer him away by the elbow.

"He is not a mongrel," Sirius says, still glaring over his shoulder. "He's got character. Some people wouldn't know character if it bit them."

"It nearly did."

"He was provoked."

He's protective in a way that surprises you, given how little he lets people protect him. Territorial, almost — checks twice that the gate's shut, learns the name of every dog on your street so he can vet them by reputation, gets a look on his face, flat and cold for half a second, if anyone's rough with the lead in front of him. It fades as quick as it comes. But it's there.

And he's stubborn about the daftest things. Refuses to admit the dog's taken over the bed, even flat on the two feet of mattress he's got left. Refuses to call the vet bills "expensive," on principle, even when they very much are. Gets it into his head, one Tuesday, that Trouble understands full sentences, and argues the point with you for twenty minutes, dead serious, until you're both laughing too hard to remember what you were arguing about.

"He's not stupid," Sirius says, wounded, like you've insulted him personally. "Are you. No. You're not stupid, are you, no —" and he's off, into that daft murmuring voice, gone soft the second he thinks no one's really watching.

That's the thing about him you clock early on and never say out loud: he doesn't do gentle in the open. He does it sideways, when he thinks it doesn't count. A hand resting too long on the dog's head while he's meant to be reading. Sneaking him bits of chicken and denying it flatly to your face, even with the evidence on the floor.

"Did you feed him from the table?"

"No."

"Sirius."

"That's slander," he says, and there's chicken on his fingers.

You catch the other thing too, the quieter one. It's in the way he comes through the door.

Every single time — doesn't matter if he's been gone ten minutes or all day — Trouble's up and moving before the key's even turned, whole body going, and he throws himself against Sirius's legs like he's been holding his breath since he left. And Sirius, who can talk his way out of anything, who's got an answer for everything, just goes quiet for a second. Crouches down into it. Doesn't perform anything for you or anyone.

"All right," he mutters, into the dog's neck, rough, like the words cost him. "All right. I only went to the shop."

But something's cracked open on his face, just for that second, before he's back on his feet and loud again, making some joke, moving on fast like the moment's embarrassed him.

You don't say anything about it. Not the first time, not the tenth. You know better than to name it to his face — he'd bat it away, make a joke, change the subject, the way he does with anything that gets too close to the bone. So instead you just watch, and you think about a man who spent a long time being told, one way or another, that he was too much or not wanted at all, and how the only place that seems to properly land is on the floor of a hallway with a dog's teeth in his sleeve, gently, and no one else there to see it.

You start taking the long way round the park. Not for any reason you'd say out loud. There's a stretch by the river that adds twenty minutes, and Trouble likes the ducks, or likes chasing something he'll never catch, and Sirius likes not having anywhere he's meant to be. You fall behind on purpose some evenings, and watch the two of them out ahead, matched stride for stride, Sirius's hand loose at his side until the dog leans into it without breaking pace — and he doesn't even look down, just closes his fingers into the fur, easy, automatic, like it's the least remarkable thing in the world.

"Good lad," he says, to no one, to everyone. Doesn't even seem to notice he's said it.

Later, in bed, Trouble sprawled diagonally across the foot of it like he owns the deed, Sirius pulls you in against his chest, one arm heavy over you, and for once he's still — properly still, none of the usual restlessness, the leg that won't stop, the fingers that need something to do.

"I only went in to look," he says, into your hair.

"I know."

"Didn't plan any of it."

"I know."

"Best decision I never made on purpose," he says, and there's a laugh in it, that bark of one, but not only a laugh. "Well. Second best."

You don't ask what the first one was. You already know, the way you know most things about him now — not from what he says, because he'll dodge that every time, but from what he does without noticing he's doing it. The way he leans, when he thinks nobody's counting.

Downstairs, or maybe just at the foot of the bed, Trouble sighs in his sleep, the same enormous sigh from the pen that first day, and settles his weight against the nearest leg he can find.

[phoebe-writes]

A Whole Speech

Pairing: James Potter x Reader Summary: James has been cagey and strange for a week, and you've feared the worst — but what he's trying to ask is much smaller, and much bigger. Tags: fluff, humour, moving in together, misunderstanding, happy ending

He's been weird for a week.

Not weird in the good way, not sock-on-the-wrong-feet, singing-in-the-shower weird. Weird in the way that makes your stomach sit low and heavy, like a stone you swallowed and can't shift. James Potter does not do quiet. He's the sort who narrates his own life at full volume, who captained the football team at school and never once let anyone forget it, who still can't walk past a mirror without a shove of his hand through that hair, more habit than vanity at this point. He was, by his own admission, an insufferable show-off at school, and he's never fully grown out of wanting the room to look at him when he's got something good to say. James Potter does not do cagey either. And yet here he is, a whole week of it — phone pressed to his ear in the loo with the tap running so you can't hear, conversations that stop dead when you walk into the kitchen, that too-bright smile he puts on a beat too late.

You've run through the list twice already. Someone's ill. He's leaving. There's another woman, another something, some secret so big it needs whispering and running taps and doors half shut. You know it's mad. You know him. But a normally loud thing gone quiet is its own kind of alarm, and you've been sat with it for seven days now, turning it over like a stone in your pocket, worn smooth from all the handling.

So when he sits you down on the sofa on a wet Tuesday evening, hand going through his hair over and over till it's a worse state than usual, and says, right, so, I need to talk to you about something, your whole chest drops through the floor. There are candles half set out on the kitchen side that he clearly meant to light and didn't, like his nerve gave out somewhere between the matches and the actual doing of it.

"Okay," you say, and your voice comes out smaller than you mean it to.

He doesn't look at you straight away. He's staring at the coffee table like it might help him out. Then he reaches into his pocket and puts something down on the wood between you — small, metal, catching the lamp light for half a second before it goes still.

A key.

You look at it. You look at him. Your brain, which has spent a week building the worst version of this moment, cannot make the key fit anywhere in it.

"I cleared out some drawers," he says, all in a rush, going pink from his collar up, hand back up in his hair like it'll help him think. "Few weeks ago now, actually. Bottom two of the wardrobe and the whole left side of the chest of drawers, I moved my jumpers into the airing cupboard, which Sirius says is mental but I don't see him offering better storage solutions —"

"James."

"— and I've been meaning to ask you properly for ages, only I kept losing my nerve, because what if you said no, and then I'd have cleared out the drawers for nothing and had to just... put my jumpers back, in front of you, which would be so much worse than never asking at all — I had a whole speech, you know, I was head boy at school, I stood up in front of the whole assembly hall once and didn't fluff a word of it, and I can't get through telling my own girlfriend I bought a spare key —"

"James."

He stops. Swallows. Looks at you properly for the first time since you sat down.

"Move in with me," he says, quieter now. "That's — that's what I'm asking. Will you."

For a second you just stare at the key on the table, and then the relief comes up through you so fast and so hard that a laugh gets out before you can stop it, this short, disbelieving bark of a thing, and his face does something complicated and hurt.

"Right," he says, already reaching for the key like he might take it back, "right, no, that's — fine, that's completely fine, forget I —"

"No — James, no," you manage, except now you're crying a bit too, which is not helping your case at all, tears and laughter tangled up together so he genuinely cannot tell which one's winning.

"Oh God," he says, going pale under the pink, "oh God, don't cry, I didn't mean to make you cry, we don't have to, we can just carry on as we are, that's completely —"

"James. Shut up a second."

He shuts up. Watches you with wide, wretched eyes while you get yourself together enough to say the actual word.

"Yes," you say. "Yes, you idiot. I thought you were about to tell me you were dying."

"I was clearing out drawers."

"I didn't know that, did I?"

And then it clicks for him, properly clicks, you can watch it happen behind his eyes — a whole week of tapped-down phone calls and shut doors, and you'd built a funeral out of it, and all that was ever inside was this. A key. Him, terrified, asking.

He laughs too now, delighted and disbelieving all at once, and hauls you straight up off the sofa and into him, feet actually leaving the ground for a second, so you have to grab his shoulders or go over backwards.

"Yes," he repeats, like he's checking the word still works if he says it himself. "You said yes."

"I said yes."

"Right side of the wardrobe's yours, by the way, I've already decided, don't argue, I did the maths and it's got better light in the mornings —"

"James."

"— and Remus reckons you'll want your own shelf for all your stupid mugs, which I told him wasn't stupid, that was me defending you —"

You're still half laughing, still a bit wet round the eyes, and he's off again, loud and bright and entirely himself, captain-of-the-team confidence back in his voice like it never left, the version of him that's been missing all week finally back in the room. (Sirius will take the mick out of him for a solid month after this, doing an impression of James rehearsing in the mirror, and James will pretend to hate it, and clearly won't.) The key's still sitting on the coffee table where he left it, small and unremarkable, and later, once he's finally stopped talking long enough to kiss you properly, you'll pick it up and put it on your own key ring, next to your flat, next to your mum's spare, one more small weight you carry round without thinking about it.

(You find out later, from Sirius, delighted to tell it, that James rehearsed the whole speech about the drawers forty times, in front of the mirror, hair getting worse each go. That the whispering wasn't a secret at all, not really. Just him, panicking down a phone line to the two people he trusts most in the world, asking how to do this properly, refusing to let either of them actually help him write the words because it had to come out of him and be right — and getting it right anyway, in the end, in his own loud, terrified way.)

[phoebe-writes]

Trying to write my first poly!wolfstar fic and I don't think it's going too well

[phoebe-writes]

Ambience

Pairing: Remus Lupin x Reader Summary: The power's gone and the plans are ruined, so Remus decides you're both stranded — cereal in mugs, every blanket in the flat, and candles at half eleven in the morning. Tags: fluff, cosy, domestic, established relationship, comfort

The plan was a proper Sunday. A walk, a real lunch, the whole day out of the flat. Instead the rain starts at dawn, sideways, hammering the window like it's got something to prove, and by ten the power's gone with a small apologetic click and doesn't come back.

Remus stands in the kitchen for a long moment, staring at the kettle like it's personally betrayed him.

"No tea," he says, faintly tragic. "Well. That's the day ruined, then."

"We could still go out," you say, though you don't mean it, and he gives you a look over his glasses, the kind that says he's already decided.

"In that? I don't think so." He says it mildly, the way he says most things, but there's no arguing with it. "We're stranded. Might as well accept it with some dignity."

Within the hour you're under every blanket in the flat, all of them, piled on the sofa in a heap that makes you look faintly ridiculous. He finds the emergency candles in the drawer nobody ever opens, sets them out along the coffee table, lights them one at a time with the same careful patience he does most things — like it matters that he gets it right, even now, even for this.

"There," he says, when the last one catches. "That's the best I can offer by way of ambience."

"It's half eleven in the morning."

"Ambience doesn't check the time," he says, and settles in beside you, jumper sleeves pulled down over his hands, looking pleased with himself in a quiet, unshowy way.

The fridge is a whole negotiation now — open it too often and lunch goes off by Tuesday — so you eat cereal out of mugs, cross-legged under the blankets, and it's a terrible lunch by any reasonable standard, and neither of you minds.

His feet find yours somewhere around midday. Cold, always cold, pressed deliberate against your ankles.

"You're freezing," you say.

"Am I? Hadn't noticed," he says, entirely unconvincing, and doesn't move his feet an inch.

"Liar."

"Comfortable liar, though," he says, and that's that.

He digs a battered paperback out from behind the sofa cushions and reads to you by candlelight, doing the voices dry and deadpan rather than loud — a villain who sounds bored of his own villainy, a heroine delivered in the same flat register as the narration, so it takes you a second each time to realise he's even trying. It shouldn't be funny. It's funnier for that.

"Is that meant to be a different voice?" you ask.

"That was a very different voice."

"It sounded exactly the same."

"You've got no ear for nuance," he says, entirely serious, and keeps going anyway, because you're laughing, and he'll take the credit for that without ever quite admitting he wanted it.

The candle flames dip and steady, dip and steady, small and orange and patient, throwing shapes on the ceiling that move when he does. Outside, the grey stays grey. Time goes soft and shapeless — you couldn't say what hour it is, only that the cereal bowls are long empty and his voice has gone low and a bit rough from reading and neither of you has mentioned moving.

"This isn't what we planned," you say, at some point, watching the nearest flame lean and right itself.

"No," he agrees, and there's something almost careful in how he says it, like he's turning the thought over before he lets it out. "Better, though. Don't you think?"

You don't argue that. You don't need to.

The afternoon wears on, grey easing towards greyer, and it's gone four when the lights buzz back on all at once — too bright, too sudden, the telly blinking awake in the corner with a jaunty little jingle that feels like an insult.

You both groan, actual groans, like the electricity's done something personally unkind.

"Typical," Remus says, glaring at the lamp with real betrayal. "Absolutely typical timing, that."

He leans over without another word and blows the candles out. All three, one after another, small huffs of breath, and the room drops back into that low gold-going-dark you'd both got used to.

"Why'd you do that?" you ask, though you think you already know.

He shrugs, not quite meeting your eye, the way he does when he means something more than he's saying. "Seemed a shame to waste them."

You stay under the blankets. He stays too, feet still doing their small cold war against yours, book closed on his knee, the telly muttering to itself unwatched.

Neither of you says why.

You don't need to.

[phoebe-writes]

Frozen Peas

Pairing: Sirius Black x Reader Summary: Sirius turns up past one in the morning with split knuckles and a grin that means something's wrong — so you skip the questions and get the peas. Tags: family issues, hurt/comfort, minor injury, angst, pre-relationship

It's gone one in the morning when the buzzer goes, longer than it needs to be held down, and you know before you even look who it is, because nobody else leans on it like that.

You open the door and there he is, hair damp from the drizzle, grinning at you like nothing's wrong, which is how you know something is. His knuckles are split on one hand, the skin gone dark and shiny across two fingers. There's a wildness in him, wound too tight, like he's still got somewhere to be.

"Don't suppose you've got a drink going," he says, brushing past you into the flat before you've properly said yes.

"Sirius."

"What? It's not even that late."

"It's gone one."

"Is it?" he says, like this is mildly interesting trivia and not information about his own life, and drops onto your sofa like he owns it, one leg jigging.

You don't ask what happened. You don't have to. You know the dinner, you know the house, you know the particular flavour of thing his family says to him across a table with the good silver out, and you know he swore blind last week he wasn't going.

You go to the freezer instead, find a bag of peas at the back, wrap it in a tea towel.

"Here," you say, holding out your hand for his.

"I'm fine."

"Give me your hand, Sirius."

He rolls his eyes, but he gives it to you, and you press the peas against his knuckles, and he hisses through his teeth and then laughs, short and humourless.

"Wall lost," he says. "Thought you'd want to know I won."

"What wall?"

"Does it matter?"

"Sirius."

"It was my father's study door, if you're desperate for the details." He says it breezily, like it's a funny story already, like the ink's dry on it. "Very satisfying, actually. Recommend it."

You sit down next to him instead of in the chair, because you know if you make this a Conversation, with a capital C, he'll be out the door in under a minute, cracking jokes the whole way. So you just sit. You put the telly on low, some rubbish nature documentary, and you let him hold the peas and jig his leg and make a comment about the narrator's voice, and slowly, slowly, the leg stops jigging.

"They said the usual," he says, eventually, eyes on the screen, not you. "Disappointment. Waste. All the family favourites."

"Sirius—"

"I'm not fussed," he says, too quick. "Water off a duck's back, me."

"Right."

"I mean it."

"I know you do."

He goes quiet after that, properly quiet, which is somehow worse than the noise. You watch a badger amble across the screen. You watch him not watch it.

"Didn't fancy James's," he says, after a while, like it's an afterthought and not the whole point. "He'd have made a thing of it. Tea, sympathy, 'mate, you don't have to go back there,' the works. Kind of him. Can't be doing with it tonight."

"So you came here."

"You don't do the fussing," he says, and there's something almost accusatory in it, like it's your fault he likes that about you. "You just let me be a prat about it."

"I'm letting you ice your hand and watch badgers."

"Exactly." He says it like you've proved his point. "No drama."

You don't tell him there's drama in the split knuckles and the study door and the too-quick laugh. You just let the peas sweat cold in his hand, and after a while he shifts, so his shoulder's against yours, and doesn't move it back.

"For what it's worth," he says, not looking at you, voice dropped down out of the performance for just a second, "I'm glad it was your door I ended up at."

You don't push. You know if you make anything of it, he'll bury it under a joke faster than you can blink, so you just say, "Peas are getting warm. Want new ones?"

"Reckon I've disgraced this pair enough for one night," he says, and hands them back, and the mask's mostly up again but not all the way, not quite, and something in that gap has shifted, something you've both been carefully not looking at for months.

He falls asleep sitting up, somewhere around three, mid-sentence about a badger he's decided to call Gerald. His head tips onto the back of the sofa. You watch him for a second — the split knuckles resting on his chest, the restless leg finally still — and then you fetch the blanket off your bed and put it over him, and switch off the telly, and go to bed, feeling something in your chest you don't examine too closely.

In the morning there's a racket in the kitchen. You go through half expecting him gone, engine already halfway down the street, but he's there, blanket abandoned on the sofa, shirt creased, filling your kettle like he's done it a hundred times.

"Didn't think you'd still be here," you say.

"Didn't think I'd want to leave," he says, and for once there's no joke riding shotgun on it.

He knows where the mugs are. He knows you take milk, no sugar. You watch him pour, steam curling past his face, and you think of the peas last night, cold in that same hand, and how it's wrapped round a warm mug now instead, knuckles scabbed dark.

"Your hand," you say.

"Feels alright." He flexes it, wincing only a little, covering the wince with a grin a beat too late. "Bit sore. Worth it."

"Was it?"

"Ask me again in a week," he says, "when I've stopped being smug about the door."

You laugh, and he looks pleased with himself for getting it out of you, and crosses the kitchen to hand you a mug, his fingers brushing yours in the handover, and neither of you moves away too quick.

"Thanks," he says, quieter now, the grin dropping half a degree. "For not making it a whole thing."

"Anytime."

"Don't say that unless you mean it."

"I mean it."

He looks at you properly then, none of the usual performance in it, and you don't look away first for once, and for a second the kitchen holds very still around the two of you.

"Right," he says, and clears his throat, and the grin comes back up like a shield sliding into place, except it doesn't quite hide what's under it anymore. "Well. Good."

Neither of you says the word for what this is. You don't need to. It's in the mugs, the milk no sugar, the blanket still warm on the sofa, the hand that went from frozen peas to holding your tea without either of you deciding it should. You just stand there in your kitchen on a Sunday morning, drinking tea that's slightly too strong, and let it be exactly what it's become.

[phoebe-writes]

Some Assembly Required

Pairing: Remus Lupin x Reader Summary: The box promised forty-five minutes. It did not take forty-five minutes. Tags: fluff, humour, domestic, established relationship, brief emotional moment

The box says FLATPACK BOOKSHELF, ASSEMBLY TIME: 45 MINUTES, and you have been sitting on the living room floor for an hour, surrounded by screws and cardboard and a man who will not admit defeat.

"It's meant to go there," Remus says, holding up a panel that is, quite clearly, upside down.

"It's not."

"It is."

"Remus. The little cup thing for the screw is facing the floor."

He looks at it. He looks at you. He looks at it again, the way he looks at a first-year's essay he's decided to be diplomatic about, like if he's patient enough with it, it'll come good on its own.

"Well," he says, "it's not wrong, exactly. It's just... taking a different approach?"

You laugh so suddenly you nearly knock over the bag of dowels, and he has the decency to look a bit sheepish about it, rubbing the back of his neck the way he does when he's caught out and hasn't quite decided whether to own up.

You hand him one anyway — the wrong one, on purpose, because you like the small huff he does when he realises, the way his mouth goes flat and put-upon before he even looks up.

"That's not it," he says, not even glancing at the instructions.

"How d'you know?"

"Because you've got that look."

"What look?"

"The one that means you're enjoying my suffering," he says, and takes it from your hand with two fingers, careful, like it might still be salvaged, "you're a menace. Has anyone ever told you that?"

"You, mostly."

"Well. Someone has to keep a record," he says, and there's fondness under it, plain as anything, though he says it like he's slightly embarrassed to mean it that much.

You work like that for another twenty minutes — him building, you passing him the wrong pieces, both of you muttering at diagrams clearly drawn by someone who has never seen a shelf, let alone built one. The instructions are just a little man made of lines, gesturing at parts with the smug confidence of someone who's never had to live with the consequences.

"Right," Remus says eventually, sitting back on his heels, not quite meeting your eye, "I think the bottom half's gone in backwards."

"You think?"

"I know," he says, and there's a pause, the kind that means he's steeling himself for something worse than a wonky shelf, "which means it all has to come apart."

"All of it?"

"All of it. Sorry. I should've caught it sooner, I just — got ahead of myself." He says it like it's a proper failing, like he owes you an apology for a shelf.

"Remus, it's fine."

"Mm," he says, unconvinced, and starts undoing what he's just done anyway, screw by screw, panel by panel, patient in the way he's patient about everything except being told he might've got it wrong the first time.

Somewhere in the middle of the second attempt, he stops.

You don't notice at first, you're too busy fighting a dowel that won't seat properly, but then you look up and he's just watching you, screwdriver forgotten in his hand, wearing an expression he usually keeps his face too busy to let show.

"What?" you say.

He doesn't answer straightaway. He looks like he's deciding whether it's worth saying, weighing it the way he weighs most things about himself before he lets them out.

"Nothing," he says, then, quieter, "it's not nothing, is it. Sorry." He reaches over, tucks a bit of hair back, thumb catching your cheekbone for half a second before he draws it back like he's not sure he's allowed. "I just keep thinking — I didn't expect this to be a place anyone would want to stay in. And now there's a badly built bookshelf with your name on half the receipts. Feels like something, that."

"Feels like something to me too."

"Does it?" He says it too fast, too hopeful for a man who spends most of his time pretending not to hope for things. Then he seems to hear himself and looks briefly appalled at his own sincerity.

You don't say anything clever back. You don't have anything clever. You just sit there in the wreckage of screws and packaging, feeling something settle in your chest, warm and a bit too big for the room.

He clears his throat, picks the screwdriver back up, already retreating into briskness like it's a coat he's put back on.

"Right," he says, "hand me the — no, not that one, the long one — honestly, who wrote these instructions, a committee with a grudge —"

And that's it. That's the whole of it. He doesn't say anything else soft, doesn't linger on it, just goes back to muttering at cardboard while you grin down at the dowels like an idiot, and if his ears have gone a bit pink, neither of you mentions it.

It takes another hour. The little man in the diagram is never any help. But eventually — eventually — the shelf stands up on its own, wobbling only slightly, holding its shape.

It leans. Just a bit, just to the left, like it's had a long day too.

"We should fix that," Remus says, nudging it with one finger, watching it tip and settle, and not moving to actually fix it.

"Should we?"

"Probably." He doesn't sound like a man in any hurry.

Neither of you moves.

You put the books on anyway, uneven shelf and all, and it stays like that — leaning, a little crooked, standing anyway — for as long as you live there. Every time you walk past it you think of screws in the wrong places and his thumb against your cheekbone and the way he asked does it? like the answer genuinely wasn't a given to him, and you never do get round to fixing it, and you never really want to.

[phoebe-writes]

The List

Pairing: James Potter x Reader Summary: You come home wrecked from a bad day, and James clears the whole evening to look after you — and add your boss to the list. Tags: hurt/comfort, fluff, established relationship, work stress

The day's been sat on your chest since about nine this morning, and it's still there when you get your key in the door, fumbling it twice before it turns.

James is mid-sentence when you walk in, something loud and one-sided about Sirius and a football and whose fault it was, and he doesn't even get to the punchline. He takes one look at you and the whole thing just switches off, quick as a light, because he always reads it straight off your face, even from across a room, even mid-rant.

"Right," he says, already up, already crossing to you, "off it comes," and he's got your bag off your shoulder before you've properly registered him moving, "sit down, go on, I mean it."

You sit. He doesn't ask twenty questions the way he does about literally everything else, doesn't want a full debrief on the walk home or a ranking of how bad out of ten, and that's how you know he's clocked exactly how bad it is. He just hovers a second, hand briefly warm on the top of your head, then, "tea. I'm putting the kettle on. Don't argue with me, I've already decided."

You hear him banging about the kitchen, more noise than two mugs should really require, and under it, his voice, muttering, texting someone with his thumbs going far too fast for someone claiming to be one-handed with a teapot. You don't think anything of it until later, when you find out he told Sirius not to come round tonight — no explanation offered, none given — which, for James, who has never in his life turned down an evening of chaos with Sirius Black, is basically handing in his resignation.

He comes back with the tea and the blanket off the back of the sofa and drapes it over you like he's tucking in a very large, very unimpressed cat, then puts the telly on to the film you always have going in the background and never finish, the one you both know every line of and neither of you is watching. He drops down at the other end, hauls your feet into his lap without asking, and for once — for once — doesn't fill the silence.

That's the tell. James doesn't do quiet, not normally, he narrates his own life like it's being broadcast. But he doesn't make you talk either, doesn't need you to perform being fine or perform being not-fine, he just presses his thumb along your ankle bone, absent, steady, like he's keeping himself busy so he doesn't ask.

It's somewhere around the second cup of tea that it all comes up out of you at once, messy, out of order, the meeting and the thing your boss said and the thing you didn't say back and how small you felt walking home. James doesn't interrupt, doesn't try to fix it, though you can tell it's costing him, every muscle in him wants to be doing something. Instead he just grips your ankle a bit tighter and lets these small, outraged noises escape every so often, entirely on your behalf, about a man he's never met and never will.

"He said that?" he demands, sitting up properly now, glasses sliding, "to your actual face?"

"To my actual face," you say, and it's the first time all day something in you comes close to a laugh.

"Right," James says, dark and delighted and already scheming, shoving a hand back through his hair, which does nothing whatsoever to tame it, "he's on the list. Officially. I'm telling Sirius, we've got a list now."

You don't ask what's on the list, or who else is on it. You don't need to. You know it's mostly just a very long piece of paper in his head with your boss's name on it and absolutely no plan attached, and somehow that's exactly what you needed to hear.

By the time you've talked yourself out, the weight's shifted, not gone, but moved, found somewhere less crushing to sit. You feel about a stone lighter, and you didn't even notice it lifting, only that it's lighter now than it was.

"Better?" he asks, and for once it's a real question, quiet, none of the usual performance in it.

"Bit," you say, and lean into him properly, head against his shoulder, and he tucks the blanket up round the both of you like he's sealing you in against the whole rest of the world.

He kisses the top of your head, unhurried, like he's got nowhere else on earth to be, which, tonight, he doesn't.

"Whatever tomorrow does," he says, into your hair, and his voice drops out of its usual register into something you only hear maybe twice a year, "you're not doing it on your own. Alright? Not while I'm around."

You believe him. That's the strange bit, you actually believe him, and the weight that's been sat on you all day finally, finally, settles all the way down and goes still.

[phoebe-writes]

Somewhere Along the Way

Pairing: Sirius Black x Reader Summary: At James and Lily's wedding, Sirius stands up to give a speech with no jokes to hide behind — and loses his place completely when he finds you across the room. Tags: wedding, emotional, found family, fluff, family estrangement

The marquee's strung with fairy lights, hundreds of them, looped through the beams so the whole tent glows amber even before the sun's properly down. You're near the front, third row, and Sirius is up there in a suit that fits him like it was sewn on, hair tied back, sleeve of tattoos just visible where he's pushed his cuff up already, restless with it. You've told him he looks criminal. He'd just grinned and said, obviously, what else would I look like?

He's not grinning now.

"James Potter," he says, and his voice does something funny on the surname, "took me in when I had nowhere else to go. Sixteen years old, stood on his doorstep at midnight with a bin bag of my stuff, and he didn't even ask why. Just — opened the door. His mum made up the spare room and nobody in that house ever once brought it up again."

The tent's gone quiet in that way rooms do when everyone's decided, at once, not to breathe too loud. You know this story better than most — know the version he doesn't tell in speeches, the version with his mother's voice in it, the family photo he's not in any more. You watch him not tell that part now. Watch him choose the kinder ending instead.

"He's not my best mate," Sirius says. "He's my brother. The one I chose, and the one who chose me back, which — turns out that's the bit that actually matters, isn't it? Not the blood. Never was the blood."

His voice catches on matters. Just slightly. You watch him press his lips together, watch his eyes go too bright, and something in your chest pulls tight and aching, because you've known this man two years and you've seen him cocky, seen him wrecked, seen him half-asleep and unguarded at three in the morning with a cigarette he's forgotten to light — but you've never seen him like this. Not in a room full of people. Not with his heart just sitting there on his sleeve for everyone to look at, no jokes to hide behind, nothing clever left to say.

He finds you then. Across the marquee, over the heads of eighty-odd guests, his eyes land on yours and stop.

He loses the thread completely.

"Sorry — where was I," he says, laughing at himself, dragging a hand back through his hair, and Remus, at the next table, mouths something that might be the ring, you plonker and gets a swift, fond glare for it.

Sirius finds his place again. Finishes strong, raises his glass, says something about Lily being far too good for James and everyone laughing, the tension breaking like a held breath let go. You clap till your palms sting. You blink hard, once, twice, and tell yourself it's the lights making your eyes water.

Later, the dancing starts. Lily and James do their first turn round the floor, ridiculous and glowing, and then everyone else floods in after them, and the band's playing something slow with a lot of brass, and you're standing near the edge with a glass of something you've stopped drinking, watching the lights sway a bit with the breeze coming through the tent flaps.

"There you are," Sirius says, appearing at your shoulder, tie loosened now, jacket gone somewhere, sleeves rolled to show off the ink he's never once explained properly.

"Here I am," you say. "Good speech. Bit of a wobble in the middle. Thought you were about to do a runner out the back, actually."

"Me? Never," he says, but there's no real bite to it, just that old reflex, joke first, feel later, and he's already pulling you in by the waist, slow, like he's got nowhere else to be.

You go easy. Your hand finds his chest, his hand finds the small of your back, and you sway there together under all that amber light, not really dancing so much as just — holding on.

"You went quiet up there," you say, into his collar.

"Did I."

"You know you did."

He doesn't answer straight away. You feel him breathe, feel his chin come to rest against your hair, and the lights overhead do their slow gentle sway, and you think, not for the first time tonight, how strange it is to watch someone you love become someone new right in front of you.

"Watching James do that," he says, quiet, right into your hair so you feel it more than hear it, "stand up there and just — hand himself over. No hesitation. I used to think that was mad. Genuinely thought, rather you than me, mate. Thought forever was something that happened to other people. People who didn't come from where I came from."

"And now?"

"Now I reckon I stopped being scared of it somewhere along the way," he says. "With you. Didn't even notice it happening. Just looked up one day and the fear was gone and you were still there. Turns out I'm not her. Not him either. Took me a while to believe that, but — here we are, aren't we?"

You go still against him. The band's still playing, the lights are still swaying, and you have to blink hard again, and this time you don't bother blaming it on anything.

"That's not a proposal," he says quickly, and you can hear the smile creeping back into his voice, familiar ground, safer ground. "Don't panic. I've not got a ring in my pocket."

"Wasn't panicking."

"Just — wanted you to know. That's all."

You pull back enough to look at him, properly, in all that low gold light, his eyes still a bit too bright, his hair coming loose from its tie. "You've ruined your own reputation, you know that. Sirius Black, devastating heartbreaker, undone by a wedding toast."

He laughs — really laughs, the sound of it loosening something in your chest — and pulls you back in against him. "Good," he says. "Never much liked that reputation anyway."

The lights sway on above you, and you stay there, turning slow in the amber glow, not going anywhere.

[phoebe-writes]

Hold Still

Pairing: James Potter x Tattooist!Reader Summary: He swaggers into your tattoo studio on a dare, all talk — right up until the needle touches down and he finally goes quiet. Tags: tattoo shop AU, needles, meet-cute, mutual pining, fluff

He's your last client of the day, and he swaggers in like he owns the shop.

"Right," he says, dropping into your chair like it's a throne, rolling his sleeve up before you've even asked, "do your worst. I'm told I've got a very high pain threshold."

"Have you?" you say.

"Rugby," he says, like that settles it. "Broke my nose twice and didn't even blink."

It's a dare, apparently — some daft bet with his mate Sirius, the kind where losing face matters more than losing skin, shaken on over pints and now impossible to wriggle out of. Sirius isn't even here to see it done, which seems to needle him more than the actual needle does. He tells you this like he's rather proud of it. Tells you a lot of things like he's rather proud of them. He's got that easy, cocky charm on him, the kind that's clearly worked on people before, and he's turning the full beam of it on you now, watching you go through the consent form and check his ID like he's never had to sit still through paperwork in his life.

"So d'you do this to all your clients," he says, "or am I special?"

"You're my last of the day. That's the only thing special about you."

"Wounded," he says, hand to his chest, not looking wounded at all.

You shave the spot down, wipe it with alcohol, and he flinches at the cold of it more than he did at the razor, which tells you something. Then the stencil, pressed on and peeled back careful, purple lines left behind on skin.

"Go and have a look," you say, nodding at the mirror. "Make sure it's straight, make sure you actually want it there, because once I start there's no taking it back."

He checks. Turns his arm this way and that, pulling faces at himself like the mirror's another person he's trying to charm. "Yeah," he says, "yeah, that's — that's good, that's exactly there."

"Sure?"

"Dead sure."

You snap your gloves on, dip the machine, and he watches the whole ritual of it like he's cataloguing it to tell someone later.

"Hold still."

"I am holding still."

"You're vibrating."

"That's charisma," he says, "you get used to it," and he actually holds still for almost four whole seconds before he's off again, asking what your favourite thing to tattoo is, whether it hurts more than people say, how you got into it — quick, easy questions, tossed off like he's not really waiting for the answers, like talking's just something he does instead of sitting with his own nerves.

Then the needle touches down, and he stops.

All that noise of him just — switches off. His breath goes short and careful, held at the top like he's decided, all at once, to actually trust you with something, and the swagger folds itself away into something quieter, something that just sits there under your hand and lets you work. You do the outline first, slow, following the purple stencil line while it's still fresh enough to trust, and every so often you dab the blood and stray ink away with a paper towel, wipe the skin clean so you can see the true line underneath. You've got one palm braced steady on his forearm, your head bent close to the line, and the machine hums on and on, a small mechanical heartbeat under your fingers.

You glance up, just to check he's alright.

He's already looking at you.

Not flinching. Not joking, not this once. Just watching you work with something careful in his face, something warm he's not bothering to hide, like he's found a better thing to look at than the ceiling. Neither of you says anything. The needle keeps its rhythm. Your cheeks go hot and you look back down at the line before he can see it properly, switch the machine over to fill the shading in, chase the ink along its little unhurried path, and take your time finishing it.

(You could've done it faster. You don't.)

"There," you say, eventually, sitting back. You wipe it down one last time with the green soap, pat it dry, and hold the mirror up so he can see it properly for the first time. "Done."

He looks down at his arm like he's surprised to find it's over, like part of him had been hoping it wouldn't be. "That's — yeah. That's brilliant, that."

"You didn't even look at it yet."

"I know." He's still not looking at it, not really, eyes flicking back to you instead. "Reckon I got distracted."

You lay a bit of cling film over it, tape the edges down, and talk him through the aftercare in the same breath you've said a hundred times — leave it on a couple of hours, wash it gentle with unscented soap, no picking, no sun, no soaking it in the bath no matter how much he wants to — and he nods along without really hearing a word of it, eyes on you instead of his own arm. When he finally stands he doesn't quite go. Hovers by the chair, sleeve rolled back down over the film, ruffling his hair again — same gesture, different reason now.

"Right," he says, and there's the swagger again, back on like a coat, though it's sitting slightly crooked on him now. "So. Since you've seen me at my most vulnerable — "

"You mean when you went quiet for once."

"Exactly. Feels only fair you let me take you for a drink."

"Does it?"

"Absolutely does." He says it like he's sure, like he's said this line before and it's always landed — but he's still ruffling his hair, still not quite meeting your eye the way he wasn't quite meeting the needle, and that's the bit that gets you.

He grins, the good kind, the kind that isn't covering anything up. "So? What d'you say?"

"Yeah," you say, already reaching for a fresh pair of gloves, already looking forward to the moment you get to bend your head close to someone again and take your time over it. "Go on, then. Ask me properly."