Dealing With It

He is going to deal with it. He is just going to deal with it. This is the decision that Sirius comes to as he paces the dorm room, hands on his hips and elbows splayed out in a manner that helps him do his most determined thinking. There's not a lot of room to pace, given that none of the boys who live in the room can bring themselves to keep anything anywhere other than on the floor. There is a fantastic amount of clutter around his own bed; in fact, he thinks that his entire bed minus the mattress may in fact be on the floor. It's not his fault he's a restless sleeper, especially not lately. Well, lately, it is his fault. Everything is. Sirius gives a strangled yell and kicks one of his pillows, which flops rather half-heartedly across the room to land with a plumph in the conspicuously empty space next to Remus's bed. Sirius glares at it but cannot make himself venture into that wasteland to kick it again, much less retrieve it. Remus's space is empty because Remus's own pillows have not had the opportunity to get thrown to the floor by a restless boy. Remus hasn't been sleeping in his own bed for a week. Remus has been sleeping in an armchair in the Common Room since they got back the day after the party. And it's all Sirius's fault.

But he's going to deal with it. He has to. He's a Gryffindor, isn't he? And besides, he dealt with it after he told Snivellus how to find the werewolf, and Moony forgave him. And that was worse. Surely, that was worse.

So he's just going to find Moony- Remus, he tells himself, not Moony but Remus because as long as he calls him Remus he can be formal, he can be detached- he is just going to find Remus and deal with it.

Remus is sitting with his back to the stairs when Sirius enters the Common Room. He's slightly hunched over, reading the book in his lap, totally distracted, and so Sirius steals a moment to study him. It's not so much that he wants to look at Remus as that he can't help it. His plan has been to claim drunkenness, blame his temporary insanity on alcohol, but if he's being honest with himself he knows that it was neither the alcohol nor temporary. Well, it was the alcohol, in that the alcohol gave him the balls to finally do what he's been wanting to do for so long. Kiss Moony. He shivers a little where he stands, trailing his eyes along the nape of Moony's neck, which he wants very much to touch. This realization is sudden and forceful and somehow not fully unexpected. He wants to touch Moony's neck, and taste Moony's neck, and put his fingers in Moony's hair and run them over Moony's face and down his chest and he wants to kiss him, all of him, all of it, and he wants to pull Moony close. He wants this all very badly, in a way that aches not, as he might expect, in his cock, but rather in his chest. It's disconcerting. Back when he was snogging Marlene McKinnon, he just wanted to snog her, really. It felt good and he wanted it to keep feeling good. When snogging Marlene, the emphasis was all on the snogging.

Thinking about snogging Moony, the emphasis is on Moony.

He's not sure how much he likes any of this. He knows he'd like it a great deal if there were any chance that Moony might be thinking the same thing, but the shocked way Remus looked at him after he did it and the empty bed in the dorm room are very eloquent. Hell, Sirius almost bumped into him during Transfiguration yesterday and Remus actually said "Eek." Sirius is left with no choice but to dislike it all very, very much for the sake of Dealing With It.

He takes a deep breath and watches the Moonyneck stiffen slightly at the sound. Well. No backing out now. He throws himself into the chair next to the other boy's, slinging his legs over one arm of the armchair and leaning back against the other. Plunging directly in is the best way to do anything, he knows, and so he doesn't even wait for Remus to look at him.

"So. About the other night."

Remus does look at him, then, and though he's obviously struggling to keep himself composed, his eyes are wide and he's leaning away in his chair. Sirius forges on.

"Look, I know you're angry, and I'm sorry. But we can just forget about it, right? I mean, I was...you were...I was. You know. We were." He means, we were drunk, even though his own mind is finishing the sentences in very different ways. I was just bloody well finally doing something I should have done ages ago. You were so fucking beautiful that I couldn't not. I was an idiot for stopping. You know I'm not sorry at all. We were perfect. "It seemed like a good idea at the time," he finishes lamely.

"At the time." Remus's voice is emotionless, cool and clipped. Sirius takes this as a horrible sign for their continuing friendship. He knows Remus well enough to know that the other boy is always controlled, but usually that control comes in the form of mild politeness toward everyone and everything. The fact that he's cold now must mean that he's furious beyond his own coping mechanisms. He must be...he must be repulsed.

Sirius feels himself glaring. He can't help it. "Look, you don't have to be scared, I'm not going to do it again."

Remus closes his book carefully and stands up, turning his back on Sirius to put the book down. "I'm not worried."

But Sirius knows the body language of the Moony. He knows the lopsided tension of those shoulders and the slight flush of the neck and the twitching of the slender fingers of the right hand. He knows what Moony looks like terrified.

"Yes, you are. Don't have to be."

"I am not." Remus throws out his right hand in a cutting gesture, the most violent gesture that Sirius has ever seen him use. There's something in his voice that sounds like a child and Remus never sounds like a child, Remus is by far the most mature and least whiney boy in the world. Sirius stands up and walks over to stand behind him, half annoyed and half intrigued by his friend's anger and insistence and his lie.

His chronic verbal diarrhea gets the best of him. "Yes, you are. Look, this is exactly how you looked in fifth year when you found out we knew about the...you know, arroooo, and all that. And when I came to find you, day after I told Snivelly. You're terrified." The Moonyneck stiffens markedly now, and Sirius feels himself stiffening in response, feels the intrigue diminishing and the annoyance increasing tenfold. "Look, calm down. Stop being a pansy. I've already said I'm not going to do it again, and I'm not."

"That's what I'm afraid of!" Remus explodes, making the furious cutting hand-gesture again. Sirius would consider that he's never heard Remus yell in his life before, except that he's too busy trying to process the words that were yelled.

"What?" he splutters, staring at the Moonyneck, which is now so stiff that Sirius is pretty sure he could snap it with a feather.

Moony does not answer.

"You said it, you might as well deal with it," Sirius grits out.

Remus's sigh is audible, though the words that follow it are less so. "It's bad enough that you mess around with all those girls, leave them crying in the bathroom all the time, but to do it to me...you're my best...fucking...friend, Sirius, and I've been trying to ignore it but I know I'm a terrible actor, I knew you'd pick up on it. But did you have to fucking act on it? Couldn't you have picked another boy to mess about with if you were curious about kissing lads, and not...not...showed me what I was missing? Christ, Sirius, it's just not..." Sirius can hear Moony's breathing, and it's as harsh as it is any morning after the full moon. He can't quite believe it.

"What?" he says again, sounding strangled even to himself.

"Fucking dense," Remus says louder, and it sounds like he's gearing up for more uncharacteristic furious cursing. Sirius can't let him get to it. He steps forward, closes the distance between himself and Remus's back, and grabs for the other boy before he can think about it. His arms close easily around the slender body and rest on Remus's stomach, which is somehow hard and soft at once, lacking both a cushion of fat and defined abdominals. Sirius feels like he could spend hours contemplating this conundrum, but he doesn't have hours. He doesn't even really have the conundrum yet, because Remus has gone as completely still in his grip as a rabbit poised for flight.

"Shh, shh," he says, soothing noises that don't seem to soothe at all. "You mean you wanted me to?"

"Sirius," Remus says in a voice that Sirius knows is meant to make him feel like a child, and a naughty one at that. That voice is a warning.

Sirius has never been one to heed warnings.

"You wanted me to kiss you," he says, putting his chin on Remus's shoulder, feeling Remus's wince at the word 'kiss' in his own body. "And you still want me to?" It comes out as a question. His mouth hovers next to the warm, strained flesh of Remus's neck. Remus shivers at the ghosting of breath over his skin, and the shiver shocks through Sirius.

"Stop messing around," Remus says coldly, and Sirius makes an entirely involuntary pained sound in the back of his throat. He removes his arms from around Moony's stomach and brings them instead to his shoulders, forces him to turn.

"Merlin, Moony," he says, looking at Remus's Adam's apple rather than his eyes, "I had one firewhiskey. I wasn't that drunk."

The pause feels like fire and brimstone. It boils all of Sirius's muscles, makes his nerves simmer. It is like the time when they took a family trip to the shore when he was ten and Bellatrix petrified him on the beach in nothing but swim trunks. He lay there immobile for nearly nine hours as the sun rose above him and slowly, almost sweetly, seared his skin; he felt the heat on every inch of his body, felt it increase, felt himself burning up with each passing minute. It is like that now.

It occurs to him belatedly, as fingers that feel cool as ice water settle under his chin, that the heat is probably due to the grandmother of all blushes that is undoubtedly staining his face. And then he stops thinking about it, because those fingers are forcing his face up and he's suddenly staring into Remus's eyes. Remus's wide, stunned, feverish eyes. They're wild with desperation, those eyes, more like the wolf than mild Remus. They're Moony. Sirius's breath hitches.

"You weren't?" Moony's voice belies the ferocity in his expression- it's literally trembling. Until this moment, Sirius always thought that trembling voices were things for books and girls. But then he has been wrong about other things.

His laugh is maybe a little hysterical. "Cor, Moony, what do you think I am? It was one firewhiskey, and I'm a strapping young lad, you know, I can hold my liquo-"

"Sirius, shut up." Remus cuts him off; he lapses into silence, obedient as a spaniel. There's a wild moment in which Remus stares at him, expression a mixture of terror and resolve. Sirius has time to think that it's a remarkably resolved thing, a Moony, when it wants to be. And then he's thinking all the things he didn't have time to think at the party, thinking that Remus's lips are nothing like a girl's, and that obviously Remus has not shaved yet this morning because his chin is scratching strangely against Sirius's, and that there are teeth in a Moony kiss, and that Remus had the roast beef for supper last night, and that it is completely brilliant anyway.

Remus is breathing hard when he pulls away. "Sirius-"

"You taste like food," Sirius informs him cheerfully.

"Sirius-"

"Do you never brush your teeth, you dirty werewolf? Or is it just that I went up to the room before you last night so you couldn't get your toothpaste?"

"Sirius! Be serious, please!"

"I can't help being Sirius," he jokes lamely, knowing that Remus will laugh anyway because he laughs every single time.

He does.

"There, now. Not drunk, are you, Lupin? Am I going to have to sleep in the loving arms of Matilda the chair tonight?"

Remus stares at him. "You named the chair?"

"She named herself," Sirius protests, grinning in a way that he calls charming and Remus refers to as 'impish.' He knows that Remus is charmed by it anyway.

"You are mad."

"Do you say that to everyone you snog, because that implies a lack of self-esteem, you know."

"I only snog you, you know," Remus says, suddenly very shy again. The hand disappears from Sirius's face to clench in the hem of Remus's ancient jumper, and Sirius has to pry it free in order to tuck it into his own hand. Remus shakes his head, pulls away, plops down into Matilda again.

"Well, then," Sirius replies, studying him. "I wasn't that drunk, you know."

"I know."

"And now I'm not drunk at all."

"Nor am I."

Sirius grins, and sits on top of Moony. A squawk comes from beneath him, and then some shifting, and then he sinks down into the corner of the chair, still half on the other boy. He twists his neck to glance at Remus; for all his squawking, Moony is smiling like the sunrise. Of course he has to kiss him again.

"That's settled, then," he murmurs after a minute. Though it's not, really. Sirius has a feeling that he's going to be Dealing With this for a very long while yet. It's the Gryffindor Way, after all, dealing with things. And oh, is it brilliant to be a Gryffindor. He embraces his task- and his Moony- with a smile.