Sinope's Fiction: Wildflowers and Weeds

Title: Wildflowers and Weeds
Author: Sinope at (no spam!) gmail dot com
Rating: R
Pairing: Sirius/Remus
Summary: Sometimes love hurts the most when it's freely given.
Author's notes: For sweetrickitten. Thanks to Anjali for betaing and support.
Disclaimer: This is an unofficial fan work. No profit was made; no ownership is implied.

Some days, he promises to cook you dinner, and you come home at ten to find cheese burnt to the stovetop and potatoes still milky-raw in the oven. You fix everything and, after you eat together, you thank him for cooking dinner, and he's so proud that he forgets to offer to wash up. So it's past midnight when everything's clean, and you stumble into the bedroom to find him waiting for you, eyes as bright as his smile. He kisses you until you stop saying "no," and then you lie still and let him fuck you and fall asleep to dream of waxing moons.

The two of you are too poor to pay for air conditioning - his family cut off the galleons he had; yours never had many - so you lie asleep with the window open, breathing train smoke and listening to clothes flap on laundry lines. Even with the breeze, the coarsely-woven cotton clings to your flesh, and you wonder how you ever thought of sweat as sexy. It's not.

Nothing these days is.

You play with little Harry, feeling his tiny fingers as they wrap vulnerably around your hand. James and Lily couldn't stop touching each other, last year, all darting glances and hidden smiles and faint red marks on each other's necks. Once, you walked in on them by mistake, while kipping for the night on their settee; James was buried in Lily, groaning urgently, but Lily met your eyes over his shoulder, and her wet lips trembled on the verge of saying join us. You turned and closed the door silently. These days, you look at their bitten lips, the fear mingled with joy when they watch Harry, and you think, They will never have another child.

You come home one day to find him reading the letters that Severus has been sending you; he'd used code words, of course, asking you whether the Order wanted a spy, but you know that Sirius can recognize the careful, small script. He looks at you, face almost baffled with betrayal, and the one thing he needs to know - why? - is the one thing you can't tell him. Dumbledore had sworn you to silence, repeated that Voldemort's spy could be anyone, and you know how easy it would be to let Sirius believe what he's always feared from you two. A simple lie, and Severus will be safe.

So you keep your face calm, and you fix your mind on every fumbling, soggy, awkward kiss. "I'm sorry, Sirius," you say, as you go to fetch your bags.

-<)(>-

Some days, you wake up on your charity-shop mattress to see Padfoot's eyes watching you from across the room, yellow and unblinking. You would ask Dumbledore to send him elsewhere if he didn't pay for your meals, you tell yourself every day, but the rubbish bin is piled with Chinese take-out boxes so you never do. He watches you when you step out of the shower, too, gray eyes hungry and approving, until you finally start bringing in your clothes so you can change in the loo.

The two of you spend your free time walking around parks and quiet alleys, talking about your time at Hogwarts. You used to spend Sunday afternoons meandering through used-book shops, but when you took him along, he'd always transform into Padfoot, chase floating plastic bags until he got lost in the neighborhood, and force you to hunt after him until after the shops had closed. "Sorry, Moony," he'd shrug. "We had fun, though, right?" And you would nod and smile and vow to just go straight to the park next time. Every time you go walking together, he pulls up wildflowers and weeds, glimmering with dots of lavender and gold, and insists on strewing them around your flat. You keep telling him that silk flowers would last longer, and he always glares at you for saying it.

One night, you're washing up mugs of dried-on coffee when a cluster of foamy bubbles splashes up onto your cheek. You brush it off and plunge your hands back in the dishwater, but then his hands are on your face, brushing over the spot where the foam landed and pulling your mouth into a kiss. He tastes just as he did thirteen years ago - you never forgot - and his arms are just as fumbling and needy as the twenty-year-old he was, the twenty-year-old that some days you believe he still is. As soon as your hands are out of the water, wiped quickly on the dishtowel, he seizes your right hand and slides it into his trousers, still kissing you as he curls your fingers over the flesh that's been waiting for you for a decade and a half. "Stop this," you say, stroking him in the rhythm that used to be as easy as breathing, "stop seeing me as someone I never was."

When he comes moments later, gasping your name and staring straight into your eyes, you realize he never will.

-<)(>-

Some days, you stumble into your bedroom at Grimmauld Place, exhausted from your trip to the Continent, and you wearily notice that your bed's been slept in, just before you plummet into dreams. You wake up with his arms around you, cagelike and unasked-for, and you've never quite been able to stop yourself from wincing. At his questioning eyes, though, you tell him that you had nightmares, and he always believes you. He waits beside the door every morning while you pick wildflowers and weeds, breathing in their grassy aroma like a man dying of thirst.

Black tea that's always too weak or too strong, and week-old currant scones that Molly left in the breadbox. The two of you eat together in front of the fireplace, spilling crumbs over the antique Persian rug, and you lean into his arms because it's easier than making him worry by answering his questions. Oil lamps trace amber circles across the ceiling, and his fingers trace tentative circles across your chest, testing the skin for any new scars. Your eyes squeeze shut, stinging, as if you almost want to cry.

As afternoon drifts into evening, your mind runs through all the things that you have to be doing, and you think to yourself of course he doesn't think about my appointments; he hasn't got any. Then you feel guilty for blaming him, so you trace your lips quietly over his collarbone, knowing that the way he exhales in appreciation will only make you feel more guilty. If you close your eyes, though, all you have to do is breathe his salt-earth scent, and by now, it's the only scent that smells like home.

You never tell him how good it feels, lying on the rug in the fading dusk, feeling the spilled crumbs pressing into your naked back as he laps his tongue over you until, tumbling inexorably downward, you come into his slipperytight throat. Afterward everything feels so easy, pleasantly lethargic and luminous, that it's simple and comfortable to do the same for him. Yes, he moans, yes, gods, that feels so good, yes, oh God I love you, I love you so much, just like that, yes.

But every time, your mouth is full of his cock when he says it, so you never feel obliged to say the words in return.

-<)(>-

Some days, you never see a sliver of daylight, entombed within the house now formally owned by Narcissa Black Malfoy. The velvet curtains choked you with dust whenever you tried to shift them to see glimpses of the outside, so you stopped trying, just as you stopped trying to keep the flowers fresh with a Verdant Charm. Instead, you poured out all the vases - simply poured them on the floor, uncaring of whether the water would warp the wood boards - and let the flowers dry mustily, fading into brownish, wilting straw.

No one is here to clean away the weeds, nor to refill the lamps when one after another sputters out. The day you returned to 12 Grimmauld Place, Kreacher dragged an enormous, rusty House of Black sword into your bedroom, cackling with anticipation. "The werewolf halfblood is beheading Kreacher now, is he not? Kreacher has performed his faithful service, Kreacher has -"

Avada Kedavra, you said quietly, and then Incendio. You gathered the lingering black ashes into a paper, neat and careful, and flushed them down the toilet. You haven't been back to his filthy lair, and you hope that the rats have long since devoured every memory of him. (Whenever you think this of him, you feel an odd twinge of envy.)

Nothing here belongs to you, now; you wander the rooms, a sojourner in a museum to others' art. He claimed your bed, your time, your body, and now he's gone and none of it can be yours again. You don't touch yourself any more, don't dare to steal that privilege on top of everything else, so you start to have night dreams of him, waking up to stained sheets and reinvented pasts. Linen wrap around you smotheringly, robbing you of even the lie that the memories are real, and your lips are cracked and thirsty when you arise.

Outside the windows, you know that summer is dying, and on the first day of September you knock over one of his vases, spilling the withered wildflower fragments across the floor. When you try to gather them, they crumble in your hands, and something imperceptible inside you breaks. "I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you," you say endlessly, but the velvet curtains devour your words, and when your voice finally goes dry there's nothing but silence and dirty splinters on your palms.

You wipe your hands clean and open the curtains, smudging away the windowpanes' grime, and you stare at the sun until your eyes weep.

finis.