Love You with My Eyes Closed
Companion piece to my Cruel Summer entry (Don't Break Them) These Nice Things. Featuring James "fed up, completely over it, Sirius-get-your-shit-together" Potter (a personal favorite).
It's the same thought every time. This is it, his time to shine, to step forward into the light, to be seen. His heart stutters with the excitement, mind flying away to tumbling fantasies made of golden sun and golden hair and golden eyes. Lips crash within them, teeth bite and nip just hard enough. He can hear the sighs, the small gasps, the breaths released into the air like the whispers of promises of a lifetime.
And every time, Sirius finds himself stumbling backwards, disappointed again and again.
It starts and rises from nowhere when he's seventeen. He's walking down a deserted corridor at school, far too late to be wandering about, he knows, but he's never really cared much. Sirius can spin tales to their professors with the best of them, work himself out of most scrapes. And Remus is missing from their shared dorm. That won't do. Who's going to shout at them to settle down and just go the fuck to sleep already? They need that stability, otherwise James and him would have died from sleep deprivation and too much spiralling, uncontrolled energy by now.
But Sirius is nearly ready to give up. He's searched all the usual places, and others that aren't so usual, coming up empty and Remusless. He pauses in the middle of the corridor, gnawing over his bottom lip, thinking deeply, trying to recall any other place his friend could have possibly disappeared to that Sirius has forgotten about, but nothing comes to him, his mind vacant of ideas. Sighing to himself, shoulders slouching a little in defeat, Sirius turns around and begins making his discouraged way back to their dorm, but he stops again when he hears a clatter nearby, followed by a deep, familiar voice coming from behind the closed door of a supply cupboard, and Sirius grins.
"Aha! Remus! It's about bloody – oh."
It's indeed Remus that Sirius has found, but he's not alone. Sirius stares between Remus' wide eyes fixed on him and the irritated-looking bloke who's got a hand shoved down the front of his startled friend's trousers. Sirius gapes.
"Sirius, what're you doing?" hisses Remus, his voice desperate, something pleading in it that he's trying to hide. The other bloke doesn't move, glaring at Sirius with a pointed sort of expression, silently telling him to fuck off. Sirius has the strange urge to bite his fingers off, just to keep them from doing that to Remus ever again, but he's not sure why. "Go the fuck to bed!"
"Right," mutters Sirius, brain feeling sluggish to respond. "Right, yeah. Bed. Going. Sorry, uh…carry on – no. Yes. Fucking hell. I'm going to bed." And then he turns and flees quickly, still feeling Remus' black-flooded brown eyes burning into his back. Sirius can't stop picturing them as he climbs into his bed, but he doesn't understand that either.
