All Kidding Aside

Sirius and Remus had agreed to meet the following day in order to put the finishing touches on the script. Remus had insisted on going to the library, on some ridiculous premise that Sirius hadn't been listening to because he had been far too busy rejecting the idea. Eventually, he had run out of pithy things to say (as Remus was beginning to get irritatingly willful, something that Sirius had to beat out of him just as soon as this prank was over and done with). Therefore, Remus had won the argument by that default and by the default that Sirius could not think of any other place that James and Peter would avoid and Lily would be too preoccupied with other things like studying (a novel concept for a library) to bother them.

So there Sirius was, walking into a library that he avoided only for the purposes of playing a prank. There had been one gem he and James had conducted in which they charmed all of the books to fall off the shelves at exactly the same time. It had been glorious. They'd had detention for a week, putting all of the books back by hand. But it had all been worth it for the look on Remus's face when he realized some of the spines may have been damaged.

Sirius was almost wistful for the good old days when he hadn't hated James. He sighed loudly, prompting several shushes from a few Ravenclaws who would no doubt study themselves into madness. Sirius made a generic rude gesture that either encompassed the room or humanity and pressed on.

He finally found Remus in the back of the library, the dusty part that everyone avoided because it was dusty. His nose was buried in a book, perhaps to keep from inhaling the actual air and sneezing his skull out through his nose.

Sirius glared and moved over to Remus, glaring at him just inches away from his face. Remus didn't acknowledge him until he said, "You're reading, aren't you?"

"Actually, I was coming up with a grand scheme for world domination while pretending to be reading," Remus quipped, his eyes still scanning the pages. "However, you interrupted me while I was the verge of breakthrough. And to think, I was going to share my spoils with you."

"I would take the naked women, and you would take the chocolate factories?" Sirius asked knowingly, throwing himself into a nearby chair.

"I was also going to give you the chew toys," Remus said with a shrug. "Although, I would have thought the naked women would have sufficed."

Sirius shrugged. "You've seen one, you've seen them all really."

Remus looked him, his attention finally fully on Sirius. "Have you actually managed to become jaded towards nudity? And the nudity of females no less?" Remus looked a little pale. "Oh, this is terrible. I'm too young for the world to end."

Sirius grinned. "I was just fooling you. Never will I turn down the opportunity to see a naked woman, let alone thousands. I just wanted to get your nose out of that bloody book." Before Remus could say something clever and return to his reading, Sirius reached over and plucked the tome out of his hands, throwing it over his shoulder.

Remus whimpered when it hit the ground.

Sirius chuckled. "Oh, torturing you this way never gets old. I was just thinking of the time we made all the books come off the shelves."

Remus winced and shuddered at the memory. "God, must you remind me? I nearly subjected myself to therapy or a Memory Charm. I still have nightmares sometimes."

"I know," Sirius said, very excited. "I hear you sometimes, ranting about all of the words falling off the page or something. It's very entertaining when I can't get to sleep."

"You're evil," Remus observed as if he was just noticing that Sirius had a freckle on the tip of his nose. "Why ever am I friends with you?"

"I gave you a list at the beginning of First Year," Sirius reminded him.

Remus frowned. "It occurs to me that for someone who hates organization, you certainly have made a lot of lists."

Sirius ignored him very obviously and continued, "You may consult that for all of my various attributes." Sirius paused, tipping his head back and blowing his bangs out of his eyes. "That is of course if you can read it anymore. You spent the whole day correcting my spelling."

Remus shrugged. "Well, it was terrible. I didn't know what you meant half the time."

"That was the genius of it, Moony!" Sirius insisted. "Hell, that was another reason to be friends with me. You love correcting my grammar. It makes you feel as though you have a purpose in life."

"Because I have no goals of my own, of course," Remus drawled.

"You're goal in life is to be boring," Sirius reminded him.

"Actually, my goal in life is to get you to stop insisting that my goal in life is boring," Remus corrected.

"But that IS boring," Sirius maintained, throwing his arms into the air.

Remus frowned, pulling out fresh pieces of papers with Remus's carefully legible scrawl covering them from top to bottom. "Didn't we have a reason to meet here? Your vendetta or something? A prank of some kind? I'm not sure anymore. All of this drivel has made me forget myself."

"You are Moony, and you are oh so fuzzy!" Sirius insisted. He leaned over on the table as Remus began to lay out the pieces of parchment. He sighed and looked up at Remus, accusing again. "You recopied them, didn't you?"

Remus looked at Sirius as though he had said something incredibly stupid. "I couldn't read those either."

"Because you were correcting my spelling!" Sirius said with a laugh.

"Amazingly, I think your spelling has gotten worse since first year," Remus muttered. "And your penmanship. Do you know that it took me twenty minutes to understand that you'd written down 'Oh, how could I have denied my love for you?' I was staring at the paper the entire time wondering, 'Now, what on Earth could he have meant by, "How cows would have ridden thy doves for you?"' You have no business complaining of your hangovers to me after that headache."

Sirius brushed a bit of dust off his knee. "Still will."

"I know. I don't know why I bothered to mention it really,"
Remus said, his shoulders sagging in defeat.

Sirius pondered things for a moment before chuckling quietly. "How cows would have ridden thy doves... That sounds both very dirty and very painful both in conjunction and separately and in a variety of ways no less. I must use it sometime."

Remus furrowed his brow quizzically. "How?"

Sirius sniffed the air. "Is that a challenge I smell?" Unfortunately, before he could muse over that anymore, he let out an unexpected sneeze, courtesy of the dust. He scratched his nose and said, "Well, now I don't smell much of anything at all. Is it necessary being back here?"

"Have you noticed Madame Pince back here yelling at us about being too loud?" Remus asked, reading over their papers to check for any accidental grammar errors he might have made.

Sirius glanced around, surprised that the old bat hadn't been hovering behind him the entire time, just waiting for the right moment to pounce. "Oddly, no."

"No one comes back here. Including her," Remus explained. "I always study back here."

Sirius snapped his fingers in a sudden realization. "That's why Peter always has sneezing fits when you come back to the room!"

"So all those painful allergy tests you administered in Second Year were for naught," Remus said woefully. "How unfortunate."

"You could have said something," Sirius pointed out.

"And had you three coming down here to interrupt me? No chance of that," Remus said, scoffing a little. "You know very well that I can't study with noise. I get flustered and uppity and then you make jokes about it being my time of the month and Peter says that my time of the month isn't for two weeks and then I get more flustered and uppity because he has made me paranoid that someone will notice that the full moon is in two weeks and piece it all together and then I'll have to leave school or kill myself."

Remus was a bit winded after that speech, so Sirius waited a moment before responding. "Which would be worse?"

Remus paused, puzzled. He thought about it for a several minutes. "You know, I honestly have no idea."

"And that is why you are my friend, Moony. You need me around to tell you that expulsion is always infinitely better than death," Sirius surmised, turning back down to the papers. He came upon some unfamiliar wording, furrowing his brow and glancing up. "Did you add some things while you were... editing?"

Remus nodded, giving the script a last glance over. "Yeah, that's why I wanted you to take a look at them. So you could say if they were--"

"They're all right," Sirius complimented, sounding a bit surprised. "They're more than all right actually. They're... appropriate."

It was Remus's turn to laugh. "We're going to be pretending that we're having sex, and you say that the script is appropriate?"

"Pardon me, Moony of the obnoxiously large vocabulary," Sirius said dryly. "I'm just... just... well, shocked."

Remus tilted his head to the side quizzically. "You're shocked?"

"One might say flabbergasted, but I'm afraid that you would have the same reaction that you had to balderdash," Sirius responded.

Remus glanced down at the manuscript and then up at Sirius again. "You're shocked? Really you're shocked?"

"You are welcome to bat at me with your quill. I would surely fall over," Sirius reiterated, becoming testy. "Why are you so shocked that I'm shocked?"

"Because I don't understand why you're shocked in the first place," Remus answered.

Sirius raised an eyebrow. "You really have no idea what... Moony, I couldn't get you to moan sensuously-- Well, I could have of course, but I just asked you to, I didn't actually put any real effort into it-- but the fact remains that you refused to do it, and yet you wrote... Moony, I'm embarrassed to read some of this out loud!"

"You are not," Remus countered knowingly.

Sirius rolled his eyes. "Well, of course not. I could go on and on about your rod of fire, which is a horrible euphemism by the way--"

"I know. You wrote it, and I wanted you to be ashamed of it," Remus interrupted.

Sirius looked pale. "My God, did I really--"

"I think maybe you were kidding," Remus soothed. "Or very tired. Possibly both."

"Most likely both," Sirius agreed before going on, still eyeing the paper as if he wanted to destroy the whole thing in hopes of erasing his memory. "The point is that I have no shame, so I don't care what I say or write or do or what have you. But you have lots of shame, my dear Moony. You have shame in spades. You have so much shame that you more than make up for my shamelessness and the shamelessness of at least five other people. For crying out loud, I've lived with you for seven years, and I've never even seen your rod of... something other than fire. Anything other than fire."

Remus furrowed his brow, trying to puzzle out everything Sirius had said. "So, because I don't prance around waving it at every body... I'm incapable of writing this?"

"Well, clearly not. You wrote it," Sirius said, glancing down at the paper. "The grammar is impeccable."

"Which proves my theory that you screw it up on purpose," Remus muttered.

"Hush, it gives you something to do and amuses me," Sirius said, waving him off. "My point is that writing anything along these lines requires a certain amount of... experience."

Remus still didn't quite understand. "Experience with what? Writing-- Oh." Apparently Remus had just realized what Sirius was talking about. "Oh. Experience. I see."

"It took you that long to see?" Sirius asked.

Remus closed his eyes in a gesture that reminded Sirius that Remus often seemed so much older than the rest of them, and the graying hair was not helpful in shattering this illusion. "Sirius, you are a very confusing person, so I'm allowed to be a little slow on the uptake at times."

Sirius shook his head and said, "No, I am the one who is to be confused at this moment. I mean, I thought you were a... You know."

"Virgin?" Remus asked, the left corner of his mouth twitching.

Sirius winced. "God, I hate that word."

"You hate a lot of words," Remus said, recalling when Sirius had gone through one of his fake fits a few days earlier.

"Yes, but that isn't the point," Sirius maintained.

Remus looked around as if searching for an answer to a question. "Would you mind filling me in on what the point is?"

"Aren't you?" Sirius asked, knitting his eyebrows together.

Remus looked like he very much wanted to roll his eyes. "Aren't I what?"

"A..." Sirius hesitated. "That word I hate. The one you just said. Please don't repeat it!"

Remus stared at Sirius for a moment, obviously utterly lost as to why they were even having this conversation. He let out a quick puff of air that was not quite a sigh and said, "No. I'm not."

Sirius was very glad that when people spoke of their jaws hitting floors and other such things, they were kidding. He had a feeling he was shocked enough for his jaw to have paid a visit to Hades if it could unhinge itself that much. That might have resulted in an injury that would have been very hard to explain to the nurse, "Well, you see, my jaw dropped when one of my friends informed me that he has had sex, and it happened to collide with a River of Death. Should I see a dermatologist or something?"

"What?" Remus asked, leaning away from the look Sirius was giving him. Then he looked mildly insulted. "Is it that hard to believe that I--"

"No!" Sirius interrupted quickly, wagging his head from side to side. "No, no it isn't, but... You didn't tell me."

"I admit it was not the first thing that came to mind," Remus admitted.

"Why not?" Sirius asked, sounding affronted.

Remus stared at him for a moment, unsure of how to respond. "I'm sorry," he said after a long silence. "You have rendered me befuddled. You really want to know why I didn't tell you that I'd--"

Apparently fearing Remus's phrasing, Sirius cut him off again. "Yes, that's exactly what I want to know. Why wasn't I informed of this immediately?"

"Was I supposed to owl you mid-coitus?" Remus queried, sounding for a moment as if he was actually wondering if this was the proper protocol.

"Moony, now is not the time to use Latin!" Sirius snapped. "I am asking you why you didn't tell me."

Remus shrugged, which Sirius found somewhat infuriating. Luckily, Remus sensed this, though he couldn't even begin to understand why, and answered, "Well, I'm not sure, Sirius. It never occurred to me to--"

"But bragging rights!" Sirius blurted, finding that he was losing his mind. Or at least that he was beginning to lose his mind. That was the only thing that could possibly explain the way his heart kept threatening to leap right out of his throat. "And... other important things that would have resulted from you telling me!"

"I suppose I just didn't think it was any of your business," Remus said, putting a little too much emphasis on the word 'your' for Sirius's liking.

Sirius's cheeks began to color with indignation. "Oh, so James and Peter know?"

"No, of course they don't," Remus dismissed, still staring at Sirius as if he had grown a second head. "I don't talk to Peter about that sort of thing, and if I had mentioned it to James, he would have gone all mopey and yammered on and on about Lily. He was and still is insufferable when you get him on that subject."

"But then why was it so important that you not tell me?" Sirius demanded.

"I didn't say that!" Remus responded. "Sirius, why are you--"
Sirius shook his head. "I heard emphasis."

"You only think you heard emphasis," Remus retorted, beginning to get annoyed himself.

"Moony, tell me," Sirius demanded, his eyes darkening.

Now Remus did sigh. He very clearly did not want to talk about this, but Sirius had also made it very clear that this was one of those subjects he was going to go on about until Remus caved. Therefore, rather than give himself a headache no amount of morphine could cure, Remus decided that the best course of action was to answer him. He narrowed his eyes pointedly and said, "Because I wasn't speaking to you at the time. All right?"

Sirius didn't need to be reminded of that time. He shut his eyes and looked away, his jaw clenching at Remus's words. The timing and the act was enough to make him want to hurl a chair against a wall. He sat there for a moment, trembling like a bomb on the verge of exploding. That was likely because he was one. He sprang to his feet, cursing, and raged, "You... You had SEX when--"

"I was upset, Sirius," Remus said, breathing deeply to keep himself in check. One of them was acting insane for no discernable reason. There was no reason for Remus to join the act. "I was upset, and it was a distraction. A welcome one at that."

"You needed a--" Sirius cut him self off, holding up his hands. "What am I saying? Of course you did. Who didn't need a distraction that summer for Christ's sake?"

"Exactly," Remus said, sounding slightly relieved. "Now would you mind explaining what any of this has to do with--"

"Who?" Sirius interrupted, sounding as if he was getting angrier with each passing moment.

Remus blinked, his eyes bugging out unattractively. "Who?" he repeated. "You want to... Sirius, you're being ridiculous."

"Yes, I want to know who," Sirius said. "I have every right to know who it was."

"Actually, you don't," Remus reminded him.

Sirius's jaw seemed to clench even more as he strode forward, pointing sharply. "I am your friend. I may not have the right, but you have some obligation--"

"To inform you of every detail of my sex life?" Remus asked, getting to his feet just as Sirius reached him. The other boy still had the advantage in height, but standing leveled the playing field slightly. "I don't have any kind of obligation. You, on the other hand, have an obligation to tell me at what point in this conversation one of us lost their sanity. I have to see if I can undo the damage."

Sirius ran a hand down his face and said, "I'm not mad, Remus."

"Well, then I must be," Remus said. "Because what you are doing certainly seems mad. You're out of your mind, Sirius! There is no logical reason for you to--"

"Oh, you and logic!" Sirius snapped. "The hell with your logic! And the hell with you for that matter!"

Sirius turned on his heel and began to leave. Remus didn't let him get very far, yelling. "The hell with me? I haven't even done anything!"

"No, you haven't said anything," Sirius snapped.

"It's not like I was keeping a secret," Remus pointed out. "I told you just as soon as I figured out what you were asking."

Sirius shook his head, his dark hair flying about around his ears. "You didn't volunteer it."

Remus held up his hands helplessly. "It didn't seem to be the proper sort of ice breaker at the beginning of Sixth Year. What was I meant to say?"

"'I forgive you for being an idiot, Sirius. Oh, and I had sex to vent all of my frustrations about you being an idiot!'" Sirius told him loudly. "That's what you should have said."

"I'm sorry?" Remus said, unsure of whether or not he actually was or even what he was meant to be apologetic for.

"Whatever," Sirius ground out, making an attempt at apathy and failing as always. Sirius had too much passion to understand what indifference was, and this situation was no different.

Remus's eyes widened as he began to realize more and more that this was actually happening and that it was a situation he could not figure out for the life of him. "Sirius, I still don't understand. Why is it so wrong that I didn't tell you about this? I didn't tell anyone else either, so it wasn't really personal."

Sirius shook his head. "It isn't about..." he trailed off, screwing his eyes shut.

"It isn't about what?" Remus asked hopefully, waiting for Sirius to give him a way to fix whatever it was he had broken.

Sirius just kept shaking his head for awhile, keeping his eyes closed. When Remus stepped forward to ask him again, Sirius moved away in a flurry of robes. He stomped off, his loud exit prompting more than a few angry orders for his silence, all of which were punctuated by a very loud, "Sod off!" and the sound of the doors being kicked open.

"What did I do?" Remus whispered to himself softly, glancing around at the empty room, and feeling very empty himself.

-----

Sirius stormed out of the library with all of the subtlety of a Hungarian Hornback in a tea shop, earning him quite a number of looks. For the first time in a very long time (possibly ever), Sirius very much wished that they would mind their own damn business and leave him in peace. He found that even their notice of him was enough to make his temper flare up again. He would have liked nothing better than to let loose on some unsuspecting First Year or tell a passing professor just exactly what he thought of their teaching skills, even if they were quite good and Sirius would have had nothing to complain about otherwise. He wasn't sure how he managed to make it back to Gryffindor Tower without at least attempting to murder someone.

The Fat Lady didn't even wait for the password to open the door to him, opening the common room up to him. Several of his housemates looked up to call out a greeting, and then quickly returned to their business when they saw the look on his face. Everyone knew about Sirius's temper, and no one wanted to be on the receiving end of it, particularly not when they took into account what had happened at Quidditch practice the day before. Even the dullest of the Gryffindors knew enough to keep their head downs and wait for Sirius to blow past. They were even scared enough to hold off on whispering their various theories on what had set him off until he was out of ear shot, a fact that would have shocked him if he was paying attention.

All Sirius was paying attention to was the way he stomped up the staircase, filling the sudden quiet with the noise of his frustration. The sound echoed loudly against the stone and in his ears, growing faster and louder as Sirius increased his ascent from a walk to a jog. He wanted nothing more than to further distance himself from the student body. He wanted to be surly and sullen and alone, and he wanted that as quickly as possible.

Sirius reached the room at long last, feeling a slight rush of relief when he saw that on one else was there. He shut the door behind him, locking it even though it would really do nothing but slow any of the others down. He then rested his forehead against the wooden door and yelled at no one in particular except for himself. "Fuck!"

He couldn't believe himself. He couldn't believe anything that he had just said or done. Sirius had done some idiotic things in his time, but he was quite certain that this was topping the list. He had just managed to completely alienate the one friend he was still speaking to. He had pushed away the only Marauder Sirius would admit to caring for, possibly ruining everything they had worked for. If anyone had told him the day before that he was going to turn on Remus for something so stupid, something so pointless, he would have laughed himself sick.

But it wasn't pointless, was it? It should have been, but it wasn't.

Sirius pushed that thought away with the brute force of willpower. No, it was miniscule. It was trite in the grand scheme of things.

It was just supposed to be funny. He was supposed to have laughed uproariously and clapped Remus on the back and gone on about the incident until Remus blushed. And then Sirius was supposed to go on about Remus blushing until Remus got stodgy and close-mouthed and kept trying to change the subject. And then Sirius was supposed to wheedle every last awkward detail out of him until Remus realized how funny it all was, because that was what it was supposed to be. Funny.

But Sirius hadn't laughed. No, instead, he'd lost it. He'd gone completely mental, and for what? A secret that had been kept? The memory of that summer of silence? Being dragged back into that stupid dusty room so horrid that his nose still itched even now?

Sirius groaned and shut his eyes. Maybe some of that had irritated him, but that wasn't what had made him react so horribly. He was so aware of it that it terrified him. He had trained himself into numbness on this subject for ages, and now, all of a sudden, he was feeling so intensely that it made him shake and shiver against the grain of the wood.

"Fuck," Sirius repeated, banging his head against the door.

Remus Lupin was more important than Sirius ever cared to acknowledge. Unfortunately, there was no more denying it. His explosion in the library confirmed what Sirius had been trying to avoid for years. He could only ignore it for so long, and that time had run out.

"They were right," Sirius whispered somewhat miserably. "I'm fucking bent for... Remus Lupin."