A little (super rough, unedited) polo verse prongsfoot kiss for @diamondmeadow's birthday <3
First kiss over a decade after the first hand job because internalized homophobia is just like that :)
Sirius doesn’t know how long he sits in the quiet of the barn. He could get up. He could. It would just be very painful, and the hay isn’t so bad to sit on. He’s just thinking that he might sleep here with the horse, if he will sleep at all tonight, when James enters.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
Sirius nods at him, though he doesn’t say anything. There’s not much to say that hasn’t already been said.
James slides down next to him, perfectly working legs facilitating the movement. He has a jacket on and boots on his feet, but he’s otherwise in his worn pajamas.
First offering a heating pack which Sirius gladly places on his hip, James then hands him a mug and pours tea into it from his [carafe]. It’s only in getting warmer from the tea and heating pad that Sirius realizes he’s gotten cold. No wonder his leg is so stiff. No wonder he’s felt as though he couldn’t get up.
(He could have. It would have just been painful. He can do anything. He’s not a cripple – not fully.)
The heating pad on his hip radiates warm, and James’ presence next to him does too. They sit without talking for a long time, just watching the horse before them sleep in her stable.
Finally, the tea is finished.
Sirius thinks, if they were younger, this is when James would reach his hand under the elastic of Sirius’ pajama bottoms and start getting him off.
Sirius wonders if he had known at sixteen how things would play out if he would have kept swallowing pills, ignoring how what satisfied him the week before no longer did the following week. If he had known that at twenty-eight, he’d go to Monty, begging for help detoxing, then spending days vomiting all over him as his body learned to live without opiates?
Sirius wonders if he had known at sixteen how things would play out between him and James if he would have kept allowing James to touch him, reach for his cock, get him off again and again? There was no sense of “allowing” James to do anything. His cock was just James’ for playing with. If he had known they’d never even kiss, would he have said no?
Of course he would.
To both questions, of course he would.
James stands up next to him, those functional legs with their muscles and tendons and bones all working just as intended to hinge and straighten. He reaches a hand out to help Sirius up too.
Sirius takes his hand, because it’s James, and allows himself to be pulled up.
They stand facing each other in the barn. The next step is to walk back towards the cottage and try to get some sleep, and the next day will be more of the same until Sirius is ready to go back to work and James is ready to go back to his fiance, which will be soon. Sirius is a month sober. He’ll be ready soon.
Real life calls them.
But they never even kissed.
Before he can think about it, before he can remember that he learned long ago that this would never be possible, that James would never kiss him back, Sirius steps forward, cups the back of James’ head, and kisses him. He kisses him knowing it’ll be his one opportunity, knowing it’s a sad thing, knowing just how much he wants this, and wanting James to know just how much he wants this. James can push him away. James can strike him. James can kick him out of his family’s house if he wants, but Sirius needs this. Just once.
Sirius pulls back.
They stare at each other, breathing harder than they should. The lone bulb of light in the barn casts strange shadows over them, and James’ expression is unreadable. Sirius stares back hard, daring him to push him away.
Then James kisses him back.
If Sirius’ kiss was full of longing and sadness, a sense of hopelessness, James’ kiss is full of hungry desperation. That he’s never realized kissing can be like this and now that he knows he needs Sirius’ mouth on his more than he needs air. Sirius agrees.
James kisses his mouth hungrily, then kisses down his jaw, then his neck. James’ mouth has been forbidden – his hands and his cock only – but now that kissing is allowed, it’s all James wants.
They kiss desperately in the barn, and then James barely keeps his mouth off of Sirius’ to allow them to walk led by a torch back to the cottage.
If they only have tonight, that might be enough. Sirius pulls James towards his own bedroom. James kisses him, greedily, then gently, then sleepily, until they doze off, lips still on cheek.
In the morning, woken by the stiffness in his hip, Sirius is surprised to find that James is still in his bed.
James did not leave for his own room in the middle of the night.
He allows himself to hope.
Later, when James wakes up too, and kisses Sirius on the cheek with his eyes still half-closed, Sirius thinks he’s glad he can feel the world so closely, so intimately, without the soft shield of opiates, because even if it’s painful he gets to feel this too.