Contraposto

He is contraposto personified, Sirius thinks, the slip-slide of sticky sheets and hot sighs in summer night an anticipation. He is contraposto. It is the tilt of his hip and the lean on his leg and the muscles Sirius knows with his fingertips that contract like butterflies in his back, across delicate shoulder-blades.

It is never odd to Sirius to use these words, these words that are indefinably Remus. He likes the shape of them on his tongue, practices them to himself in the darkness and rhythmical breathing of completion, awake and drowsy at both. These words that come from cracked old books, faded little volumes that Remus studies with such interest. Words that ally themselves with old stone and paper and vellum, old-world words lost in a time of 'fuck' and 'shit'. Being used for living flesh that Sirius knows will flush with heat of day and heat of night, warm and sweetly slick and moving with the gasps of incompetent boyhood.

The window is open and the heavy air amasses itself about him. Sirius sees without looking with eyes that have seen it a hundred times before and have the sight written across them, Remus standing squinting at his book. He is uncomfortably hot, his cotton pyjama bottoms, threadbare and faded like everything else he wears, knotted low about his waist.

Contraposto and his hip is cocked as he leans his weight on his outstretched leg, impatient to turn the page, silk-thin sheets that whisper as he turns them, sticking to his fingers. He sighs again and turns his head into the barely-there breeze and Sirius can see the drake's tails curling on his neck, damp and dark like sand against his skin. Sirius swallows and he can feel the salt on his tongue, the tang of sweat and Remus in his mouth an echo.

The moon glints like a warning in the sky outside. They notice it together, reading it like old friend and nemesis familiar and never-the-same, the promise of fullness in its gleaming curves. Remus feels the heat more than ever a day or so before. Sirius knows this without thinking of it, now.

The sheets are rough and the fibres scratch his fingers and Sirius looks down at his hands, balled into the white fabric like power unfolded. He had not realized he was clenching them.

It is an hour since James has fallen asleep. An hour of discomfort and homely familiarity, the old pattern unfolding. Sirius lies along the bed as comfortably as if he were not trying his best to look distracting and listens to the rise and fall of Remus's voice as he reads out words that fall into the thick stillness like water-droplets, unsettling and unreal against this atmosphere, this place where four boys wank into the night and do not think about archaic technique or the Persian Wars.

Sirius does not allow himself a distraction by the words, instead he listens to Remus himself, beneath the enfolding pages that are to Remus a blanket of unchanging sameness. The timbre of Remus's voice changes with the tides. He is deeper now, perhaps it is the cresting moon in the sky or perhaps it is the passing days. He turns his head and in his sleepy smile Sirius discovers he does not care for voices just now. Voices that do not say, 'Ah. Yes. Sirius. Please. Now.'

He is polite unendingly, in the stiff courtesy that comes from the era of his books. Even in the gasp of it, as his cock is hot and slick in Sirius's mouth, he growls and groans and whimpers and sighs to the end, apologising before they are even finished. 'Fuck' sounds odd on Remus's lips, a guttural noise that is not him. Sirius kisses his mouth to make sure there is no change and tastes him, drowsy and familiar, Remus still.

He will settle against Remus's side as the sighs hang dying away and remember those words, the words he would not have learnt and are a secret language between them that James is uninterested in and Peter uncaring of. He will sleep wrapped in sheets that feel like cool silk against his grateful exhausted body and rest his head in the old place of the hollow of Remus's side.

Sirius swallows. Remus stands by the window and looks at him, and Sirius licks his lips. Perhaps it is his own sweat, on his upper lip in the heat. Perhaps it is the remembered taste.

With a voice cracked from not-use, Sirius orders, 'come to bed.' And Remus obliges.