Title: Standing in the Ruin of Our Lives, Building Walls
Author: iamshadow
Ship: Remus/Sirius
Word Count: 1,254
Rating: R
Warnings: Mentioned character deaths (canon). Grief. Angst. Sex. AU.
Summary: Harry stopped asking for James after two weeks; stopped calling for Lily after three.
A/N: Wow, okay. Let's see.

First off, this story is not new. This is not my re-entry into Potter. Think of this fic as an archaeological find.

A few weeks ago I reread To Cling, Amidst Devastation and went to click on to read the sequel fic... and couldn't find it.

Huh, I thought. Must have missed linking it when I wrote the master list.

Nope. Nowhere to be seen.

Damn, I thought. I'm sure I wrote a sequel.

More searching, certain I was going a bit mad. In the end I decided it must have been just an idea I had, or someone else's fic that I rather fancied fit well with To Cling, and left it at that.

Except today, I was cleaning up all the myriad backups on the external drive, and found it. Not only the original, but a betaed copy, by someone going by the handle of gcooper, who obviously liked Torchwood, but I have no idea who they were on LJ. Sorry, gcooper, and thank you for the beta. It was probably almost four years ago, judging by the file date stamps.

So, here it is. No idea why I didn't post. Maybe I couldn't think of a title, and just let it wait so long that I forgot. Maybe there was a niggling annoyance with a turn of phrase. Anyhow, it's all in the past.

EDIT 28/05/12: ORIGINAL POST FOUND! This was posted under the title Before Rebuilding for hp_yule_balls, Christmas 2008 as a gift for ramie_k.



Harry stopped asking for James after two weeks; stopped calling for Lily after three.

When Harry called him Daddy a month later, Sirius gently corrected him, and then hastily left the room.

“It’s broken,” Remus said, matter-of-factly, when he called in that afternoon. His light, professional touch felt like shards of glass stabbing into Sirius’ swollen hand. “Did it make you feel better?”

“No,” Sirius answered, hollowly. He could see the fist-sized dent in the plaster of the kitchen wall out of the corner of his eye. “It didn’t.”

“You need Skele-Gro,” Remus declared, “and something to bring down the swelling. I’ll be back.”

Sirius just stared at the wood grain of the kitchen table and listened to Remus’ retreating footsteps move through the house, then outside, and finally, the crack of Disapparation as he stepped beyond the Fidelius Charm.

At times like this, Sirius thought he hated Remus. Week upon week, stopping by, always calm, always polite, distant. Bland and blank and impersonal. Remus was a stranger with his friend’s face who turned up once a week with food and consumables, and letters and news from the outside world. At twenty-three, Remus acted with all the gravity of a man three times his age, and Sirius despised it.

Another crack, and Remus was back, walking into the kitchen and pouring liquid from a potion bottle into a chipped mug. Remus grimaced and tapped the bottom of the bottle, shaking the last few dribbles from the lip. Sirius felt his anger burn hotter. The last two moons had been hard. Remus refused to let him come along – Who would watch Harry, Padfoot? I’ll be fine. ­– but Sirius could see the way he moved, so stiffly and gingerly, the pallor of his complexion and the dark circles under his eyes. And now, Remus was pouring out the last little bit of his Skele-Gro into a glass for him, as though it didn’t matter, as though he had plenty just lined up at home, when Sirius knew that Remus was likely living on bread and butter and weak tea.

Remus’s eyes were mild as he held out the glass. “Padfoot?”

“No,” Sirius answered.

Remus’s eyelids flickered in annoyance; a tiny tell, barely perceptible. “Don’t be a child,” he said.

“Shove it up your arse, Lupin,” Sirius said, sneering and curling his lip.

Remus sighed softly, and set the glass down in front of Sirius. “I’ll be back on Monday,” he said, as though Sirius had said nothing at all, and turned to leave. That was when Sirius launched himself from his chair and attacked him.

For a few moments, Remus was doing nothing except fending Sirius off, holding him back, but then, Sirius saw a flash of fire in those dead, blank eyes, and Remus’s lips twisted into a snarl, and there, there he was. Then they were fighting properly, and when Remus grabbed Sirius’s broken hand and twisted, Sirius’s vision turned to black and white and he let out a mad, hysterical laugh because this was his Moony. This was his Remus. This was the quiet, studious, devious boy who always thought up the cleverest of their pranks and who never, ever fought fair.

“Show me,” Sirius gasped, dizzy with pain. “Show me you’re alive. Show me you feel something, you fucking cunt!”

A flurry of shooting stars flickered across his vision and the air sped out of his lungs when Remus slammed him up against the kitchen wall hard enough to bruise. Sirius laughed again, breathily, and wondered if this was what going mad felt like. Remus looked furious, beautiful and wild and unhinged, and his hand was yanking Sirius’s hair painfully, and Sirius could feel Remus’s cock, heavy and hot, pressed up against his thigh. Oh, this was good…

“Got something you want to tell me, Remus?” Sirius asked with a sardonic smile, moving his leg deliberately back and forth.

“Sirius… Sirius, stop,” Remus murmured, his sharp glare softening, his eyes unfocussing ever so slightly. His fingers bit into Sirius’s bicep, tightened in his hair. He didn’t move away.

“No,” Sirius said, still smiling, high on the anger, the pain. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears, feel his breath rushing in and out and fuck, he felt alive... He pressed his leg up firmer, and felt Remus give an involuntary little thrust against it.

“Fuck you, Sirius,” Remus spat, the words high pitched and desperate.

“Yes...” Sirius hissed, and Remus kissed him, all teeth and tongue and aggression.

Remus’s thrust was deliberate, this time; a long, rough slide of flesh against flesh through layers of fabric. He made a sound as he did it; a small sound. Not a whimper or a grunt, but something in between. Sirius felt his cock give a jerk, and he sucked on Remus’s tongue, to see if he’d make it again. He did.

“You bastard,” Remus muttered, hips beginning to piston. “You push and push and push and take, and it’s always about you, always about your pain, what you need.” The words forced themselves out in shudders of breath. Remus’s eyes were bright and shining, and his cheeks and neck were flushed red. “You selfish, selfish bastard.” The last word was a sob.

Sirius’s hand shifted down to Remus’s arse, and he gripped it tightly, feeling the muscles flex under his fingers as Remus rocked against him. Sirius pressed up to meet his next thrust, and Remus gasped something unintelligible and clung harder. Sirius’s heart was pounding, and this was much, much better than fighting because he was hard and turned on and it was desperate and vital and real, where the weeks since the night he had turned up with Harry in his arms had felt paper-thin and false, like he was trapped in a poorly acted play.

“Missed you... like this...” Sirius murmured. “Just like this...” They’d never shagged before, never even kissed, but that wasn’t the point he was making, and he knew that Remus would understand. Their movements had slipped far-too-naturally into a jerky, uneven rhythm that was imperfect and frustrating but simultaneously too good and certain to bring him off in the very immediate future.

He felt it first in his feet, oddly enough. It tingled its way up his calves and thighs, building in momentum and power, then he was convulsing, his body straining against Remus’s unyielding form, a choked cry echoing loudly in the kitchen. He was gripping Remus’s body tightly enough with his good hand to leave finger marks, when he felt the ripple of muscles contracting under Remus’s skin, heard the deep, stuttering groan against his ear.

Both of them had let out no more than a handful of short, gasping breaths before a thin, fretful wail started in a distant room of the house. Remus went to push away, but Sirius didn’t let go.

“He’s not due to wake until three,” he murmured softly. “He’ll settle.”

Remus relaxed back against Sirius again, almost reluctantly, and Sirius slid his good hand up to cup the nape of Remus’s neck.

“Your hand,” Remus mumbled into Sirius’s shoulder.

“It’s fine,” Sirius lied. It felt about three times its regular size and was throbbing in time with his rapidly tapping heartbeat, but it was just a hand. Such a small hurt, in the scheme of things.

Remus huffed, as though he wanted to laugh but didn’t have the energy. “Liar.”

They stood there for long minutes, their bodies touching without movement, listening as their breathing slowed and Harry grizzled himself back to sleep.

“Nothing we can’t fix,” Sirius murmured eventually.


<- To Cling, Amidst Devastation &

Tags: angst, fan fiction, harry potter, marauders, r, remus/sirius, smut