Never Say Never Never
Dec. 2nd, 2014 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starfishstarNEVER SAY NEVER NEVER
Summary: Remus makes Sirius watch his first Muggle film. The experience is less horrible than predicted.
Characters/Pairing: Remus/Sirius, James/Lily, Peter
Rating: PG
Words: ~2,700
Notes: Set during the Christmas holidays of seventh year, late 1977.
I wrote this as a just-in-case back-up story for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
rs_games, to have on hand if Team Muggle needed more pinch-hits. Team Muggle ended up being fine, luckily, so now this story just is. The prompt I wrote it for was #28 here – a picture of a cosy room with a fireplace.
This story isn’t my headcanon of Remus/Sirius, even if I had a headcanon of Remus/Sirius, which I don’t think I do. It’s just an idea that seemed like fun. :-)
Story:
“No, seriously,” Sirius says, looking down at the videocassette in his hand. “Some kid in a green suit who can fly? That’s supposed to be magic?”
“Peter Pan is a classic, Sirius,” James says, as though this explains everything. He also says it with exactly the same intonation Lily used when she invited them over here to watch the thing, and Sirius snorts with laughter.
“Yeah, ‘cause it’s pure coincidence that all of a sudden you’re a classic Muggle film buff, right?” he says. And James says, “Hey!” and lobs one of the cushions from the squashy red armchair at Sirius, so Sirius lobs a cushion from the high-backed sofa back at James, and one at Peter for good measure, and hey, why not one at Remus, too, and by the time Lily returns to the room from the kitchen they’re a tangle of limbs and hollering and laughter on the fluffy white bearskin sort of thing that serves as a rug in front of the blazing fireplace and is soft against Sirius’ cheek where his face is currently smooshed into the floor.
“Oh, honestly, I leave you boys alone for five minutes,” Lily says, but she’s smiling. It confuses Sirius – she acted for years like she couldn’t stand how they were loud and boisterous and maybe all a bit mad, but now it turns out she likes it. Well, she likes James, but Sirius can’t help but suspect she’s come to like the rest of them, too, a bit. Not that she’s admitting it just yet.
“I can explain!” James declares, sitting up on the rug and shoving his glasses back up his nose, even though there’s nothing to explain: James is hopelessly in love, Sirius likes to tease him about it whenever he can, and also, pillow fights are fun, no matter how grown up you get.
Sirius detangles himself from Remus’ legs and Pete’s elbow, sweeps his hair back from his face and gives Lily his most winning grin. “Don’t worry, Evans. We promise to behave, and we’re very, very interested in this Muggle film thingy you want to watch. We hear it’s a classic.”
James rolls his eyes, and bounds over to help Lily with the two heaping bowls of popcorn she’s balancing in both hands. The scent of it drifts down to Sirius on the floor, rich and golden.
Sirius pushes himself to his feet, then reaches down to give Remus a hand up. Remus smiles in thanks, and Sirius’ stomach does that weird swooping thing it does so often these days.
He looks around the room – it’s Lily’s uncle’s holiday cabin, or something like that, and she seemed to really want them to come over for an afternoon all together over the Christmas hols before they go back to Hogwarts, and James really wanted to make Lily happy, and so Remus said they should all go, and so Sirius came.
Now there’s a fire crackling here in this cosy wood-hewn room, and Muggle standing lamps in the corners turned down low (James examined them in fascination, then pretended suavely to Lily that he wasn’t confused as to how they operated), and a video recorder that Lily has incongruously plonked down next to the fire. And Sirius, because clearly he’s going daft, has agreed to spend the next 100 minutes of his life watching Muggles badly play-act at doing magic.
“It’s fun, I promise,” Lily says. “Besides, if you lot behave yourselves, I’ll let you do the voices.”
Sirius doesn’t know what she means until they’re all sitting – James and Lily squeezed comfortably into the armchair together, with one bowl of popcorn balanced on Lily’s lap, and Peter, Remus and Sirius all in a row on the sofa with the other bowl of popcorn on the floor in front of them, and Remus’ leg warm where it presses against Sirius’ thigh – and Lily has started the video in the player.
“My family have this game,” she explains, “where we do all the voices. I mean, you should listen to the songs, they’re fun, but you can make up the rest as you like. Everybody gets to pick a character and say their lines, and you can make up whatever you want – it can be realistic or just completely silly.”
“I want to be Peter Pan!” declares James, who’s clearly been briefed on the film ahead of time by Lily.
“What, and leave me to be Wendy?” Lily retorts. “Not bloody likely.”
Sirius has no idea what they’re talking about. As far as he can tell so far, not that he’s particularly paying attention, the film takes place in some kids’ bedroom. With a person in a costume that’s supposed to look like a dog. Sirius sighs.
Then Weird Green Suit Guy makes a dramatic entrance through the bedroom window. “See?” Lily says. “Peter is even played by a woman, Mary Martin. I always admired her.” Lily pokes James in the shoulder. “I’ll be Peter Pan, you can be Wendy, okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” James says without even a second’s hesitation, and with that strange fluttering in his stomach again, Sirius thinks, That’s really love, isn’t it?
Lily whispers something in James’ ear and he chuckles, his arm looping closer around her shoulder.
“Where does that leave you lot, then?” Lily asks in the direction of the sofa. “Are you the Lost Boys?”
“I’m NOT going to be that guy in the dog suit,” Sirius bursts out, his voice too loud for this small, cosy room, and beside him Remus snorts.
Then, unexpectedly, Remus says, “You can be Captain Hook.”
Sirius twists to look at him. “Wait, you know this film, Moony?”
“Sirius, of course I do. Haven’t we told you over and over that it’s a Muggle classic? My mum loves this one. We used to watch it a lot when I was little.”
Suddenly, Sirius objects slightly less to this whole venture than he did it this was just some weird whim of Lily’s. “Is Captain Hook a baddie?” he demands. “I think I want to be the evil bloke today.”
Sirius can feel through their close-pressed legs that Remus is laughing, and it makes Sirius warm all the way through. “Yes, very evil,” Remus assures him. “And he gets eaten by a crocodile at the end. Think you can handle that?”
“Yes,” Sirius decides. “I consent to be eaten by a crocodile, if it means I get to have swashbuckling swordfights first.”
“And Remus?” Lily wants to know. “Who are you going to be?”
“Mr Smee,” Remus says promptly. “He’s one of the only pirates who survives in the end, because he’s savvier than the others. He’s Captain Hook’s right-hand man.”
Sirius feels a spike of gladness in his chest at that, though he would be hard-pressed to say exactly why. It isn’t as if Remus chose that character because of Sirius being Captain Hook. And it isn’t as if they actually are these characters, anyway. They’re just watching them on a grainy, too-small Muggle video screen and maybe pretending to do their voices for a while.
“You wanna be Tinkerbell, Pete?” James asks, and Peter has a cushion in his hand to lob at James’ head before he thinks better of it, because throwing a cushion at James would almost definitely mean hitting Lily too, and Lily has a wickedly good throwing arm at close range.
“Nah, I’ll be…” Peter squints at the video player. The on-screen Peter is leaping around, excited about something.
“You could play all the rest of the boys,” Lily suggests. “There are a bunch of them – the Lost Boys, and Wendy’s brothers – so they have lots of lines between them.”
“Sure,” Peter says, largely indifferent as long as he gets to be a part of things in one way or another.
Sirius leans down and scoops up a handful of popcorn, then offers the bowl over to Remus and Peter. Once they’ve got the popcorn properly distributed around, Sirius shoves his whole handful into his mouth at once, a bright explosion of saltiness, butter and warmth. Remus, in contrast, is popping kernels into his mouth one after another, appearing to savour each one individually. Trust Remus to be neat and tidy even about popcorn.
“So, are we going to act out this film, or just stuff our faces?” Lily asks archly from the armchair.
Sirius looks back at the screen, and – they’re flying! Peter Pan, and those kids. It’s kind of well done, for Muggles at least.
“Look at me, I can fly!” James says, trying to get into his role as Wendy.
“Me too! No wand, just fairy dust!” says Peter – their real-life Peter, not the on-screen one, and this is probably going to get confusing – and he and James both convulse with giggles at the idea that fairy dust could make anyone fly.
“Think lovely thoughts,” Lily murmurs, quoting back something the Peter on the screen just said, a happy smile playing at her lips. It’s clear she really does like this film.
Sirius risks a glance over at Remus, and he too is smiling nostalgically. “…And straight on till morning,” Remus says under his breath. Sirius doesn’t know what that means, but he likes how it seems to be making Remus happy.
When did Sirius start thinking all the time about what makes Remus happy?
“There’re the pirates!” James calls from the armchair. “That’s your cue, Padfoot.”
“Arrrrr,” Sirius says gamely, though he’s not even sure yet which of the pirates on the screen is supposed to be him.
“That one’s you,” Remus says. “And that’s me.”
Sirius takes a good look at the pirates, in their ruffle-endowed shirts and big hats. “We look totally ridiculous.”
Remus chuckles. “Yeah.”
More stuff happens. The kids mistake Wendy, in flight in her fluttering nightdress, for a bird, and shoot her down with an arrow. (“Wait, what??” James demands. “Unfair!”) The boys build Wendy a house and get her to agree to be their “mother.” (“Oh, seriously,” Lily grumbles, clearly speaking as herself and not as Peter Pan.) They go on adventures and whatnot, and sing about how they don’t want to grow up.
When the pirates make a reappearance, Remus nudges Sirius and says, “That’s you.”
“Arrrrr,” Sirius says again obligingly, not really sure what he’s supposed to say.
Remus chuckles. “How ‘bout some actual dialogue?”
“Arrrrr,” Sirius says. “Ahoy, matey, methinks our Wendy here is in luuuuurve with Peter Pan! Wendy wants to kissy kissy kissy Peter Pan…”
“Captain, I think you might just be onto something there,” Remus says, still laughing, rolling his eyes in the direction of the armchair. “I do get a very cosy vibe coming off those two, now you mention it.”
And with that, Sirius and Remus start improvising dialogue that increasingly has little to do with the film itself, but rather evolves into a story about James-as-Wendy and Lily-as-Peter staying in Never Never Land forever and having 27 kids and building a castle made out of fairy dust, with the whole thing told by both Remus and Sirius in alternation in an exaggerated pirate drawl. (“That’s not how the story goes at all,” Lily informs them, but other than that, she refrains from comment and lets them get on with it.) After a while, Sirius realises he’s forgotten about everything else in the room but the sound of Remus’ laughter.
Sirius clears his throat, a little embarrassed at how much they got lost in their own world for a moment there. But he looks around and sees that Pete is engrossed in the film; James and Lily are cuddled up closer than he remembers them being the last time he checked, though they’re not quite snogging each other. Yet.
Sirius glances back at Remus, who gives him a crooked sort of grin.
Nobody’s looking at them. Remus’ hand is resting on his own leg, just inches from Sirius and out of sight from anybody else, blocked by the bowl of popcorn now resting on Remus’ knees. Suddenly bold, Sirius slides his hand over and gives Remus’ hand a squeeze.
Remus squeezes back – and then keeps holding on.
The room seems to swell with warmth; the noise of the crackling fire rushes at Sirius together with the blood in his own ears. He’s holding hands with Remus and nobody knows.
Sirius cuts his eyes towards Remus; Remus is looking straight ahead as if everything were normal, so Sirius tries to focus on the video player. Apparently, all the kids have decided to fly back to London, leaving Peter Pan behind. Over on the other side of the room, James strokes Lily’s hair and says, “Don’t worry, I’ll still visit you.” He makes like he’s going to get up from the armchair; Lily pulls him back down and snogs him soundly.
Trained into automatic habit by this point, Sirius and Remus and Peter all politely look away, their three heads swivelling away from their friends and back to the film. But heat washes up into Sirius’ face, because Remus’ leg is pressed against his leg and Remus’ hand is in his hand, and Sirius can hear James kissing Lily just beyond his peripheral vision.
A tiny chuckle escapes from Remus’ throat, and something inside Sirius eases. Right, this doesn’t have to be complicated. This is Moony, just Moony, who Sirius knows nearly as well as he knows himself.
“Clap your hands!” Lily cries, and Sirius jumps, startled.
Onscreen, the little fairy is dying, because…children don’t believe in fairies. Or something?
“Clap if you believe in fairies,” Lily insists. “Don’t let Tinkerbell die.”
So Sirius gently releases Remus’ hand, and they all clap, Sirius and Remus and Peter and James, because Lily asked them to. The sound is a warm reverberation in the small room.
“And now it’s time for me to rescue you,” Lily says, as Peter Pan grabs his sword and dashes off to save the day. (Apparently Sirius missed something, and Wendy didn’t leave after all, but instead got kidnapped by pirates.) Lily rests her head on James’ shoulder, watching the screen. And no longer snogging, to Sirius’ relief. He loves James like a brother and he likes Lily more than he’s quite ready to admit out loud just yet, but that doesn’t mean watching them be all over each other isn’t kind of weird.
James-as-Wendy and Lily-as-Peter-Pan keep up a stream of banter as the film progresses into a dramatic final shipboard battle, and real-life Peter yells out various things in his role playing all the boys.
Sirius shouts random stuff now and then, too, as Captain Hook loses a duel with Peter Pan and gets chased down the ship’s gangplank by the long-promised crocodile. But mostly whenever he can get away with it, Sirius is stealing glances over at Remus, who’s stealing glances back at him. Remus loves this film, Sirius can tell, and he can also see Remus loves that Sirius is having fun watching it, even if the way they’re watching is rather non-traditional.
The children fly off back to London and reunite with their parents. Wendy grows up and has a daughter and one day Peter Pan comes back and teaches her how to fly, too. James threads one hand through Lily’s long hair, and the firelight glints off its auburn strands.
I could do that, too, Sirius thinks with amazement. The idea of touching Remus’ hair, always so soft-looking, is strangely captivating. It would be feather-light under his fingers, Sirius is sure. Not right now, Sirius thinks to himself. But soon.
He glances over at Remus, and Remus is smiling back at him, like he knows where Sirius’ thoughts have been wandering, and he doesn’t mind at all.
The film’s final song swells. “That wasn’t so bad, right?” Remus whispers, inclining his head in the direction of the video player.
Sirius shrugs, deliberately nonchalant. “Eh. Survivable.”
Remus rolls his eyes and gives a soft snort, but the grin spreading across his face is like a small sun rising. And Sirius is utterly sure of one thing: He’s going to do everything he can do to keep that smile appearing.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The End
Summary: Remus makes Sirius watch his first Muggle film. The experience is less horrible than predicted.
Characters/Pairing: Remus/Sirius, James/Lily, Peter
Rating: PG
Words: ~2,700
Notes: Set during the Christmas holidays of seventh year, late 1977.
I wrote this as a just-in-case back-up story for the
rs_games, to have on hand if Team Muggle needed more pinch-hits. Team Muggle ended up being fine, luckily, so now this story just is. The prompt I wrote it for was #28 here – a picture of a cosy room with a fireplace.This story isn’t my headcanon of Remus/Sirius, even if I had a headcanon of Remus/Sirius, which I don’t think I do. It’s just an idea that seemed like fun. :-)
Story:
“No, seriously,” Sirius says, looking down at the videocassette in his hand. “Some kid in a green suit who can fly? That’s supposed to be magic?”
“Peter Pan is a classic, Sirius,” James says, as though this explains everything. He also says it with exactly the same intonation Lily used when she invited them over here to watch the thing, and Sirius snorts with laughter.
“Yeah, ‘cause it’s pure coincidence that all of a sudden you’re a classic Muggle film buff, right?” he says. And James says, “Hey!” and lobs one of the cushions from the squashy red armchair at Sirius, so Sirius lobs a cushion from the high-backed sofa back at James, and one at Peter for good measure, and hey, why not one at Remus, too, and by the time Lily returns to the room from the kitchen they’re a tangle of limbs and hollering and laughter on the fluffy white bearskin sort of thing that serves as a rug in front of the blazing fireplace and is soft against Sirius’ cheek where his face is currently smooshed into the floor.
“Oh, honestly, I leave you boys alone for five minutes,” Lily says, but she’s smiling. It confuses Sirius – she acted for years like she couldn’t stand how they were loud and boisterous and maybe all a bit mad, but now it turns out she likes it. Well, she likes James, but Sirius can’t help but suspect she’s come to like the rest of them, too, a bit. Not that she’s admitting it just yet.
“I can explain!” James declares, sitting up on the rug and shoving his glasses back up his nose, even though there’s nothing to explain: James is hopelessly in love, Sirius likes to tease him about it whenever he can, and also, pillow fights are fun, no matter how grown up you get.
Sirius detangles himself from Remus’ legs and Pete’s elbow, sweeps his hair back from his face and gives Lily his most winning grin. “Don’t worry, Evans. We promise to behave, and we’re very, very interested in this Muggle film thingy you want to watch. We hear it’s a classic.”
James rolls his eyes, and bounds over to help Lily with the two heaping bowls of popcorn she’s balancing in both hands. The scent of it drifts down to Sirius on the floor, rich and golden.
Sirius pushes himself to his feet, then reaches down to give Remus a hand up. Remus smiles in thanks, and Sirius’ stomach does that weird swooping thing it does so often these days.
He looks around the room – it’s Lily’s uncle’s holiday cabin, or something like that, and she seemed to really want them to come over for an afternoon all together over the Christmas hols before they go back to Hogwarts, and James really wanted to make Lily happy, and so Remus said they should all go, and so Sirius came.
Now there’s a fire crackling here in this cosy wood-hewn room, and Muggle standing lamps in the corners turned down low (James examined them in fascination, then pretended suavely to Lily that he wasn’t confused as to how they operated), and a video recorder that Lily has incongruously plonked down next to the fire. And Sirius, because clearly he’s going daft, has agreed to spend the next 100 minutes of his life watching Muggles badly play-act at doing magic.
“It’s fun, I promise,” Lily says. “Besides, if you lot behave yourselves, I’ll let you do the voices.”
Sirius doesn’t know what she means until they’re all sitting – James and Lily squeezed comfortably into the armchair together, with one bowl of popcorn balanced on Lily’s lap, and Peter, Remus and Sirius all in a row on the sofa with the other bowl of popcorn on the floor in front of them, and Remus’ leg warm where it presses against Sirius’ thigh – and Lily has started the video in the player.
“My family have this game,” she explains, “where we do all the voices. I mean, you should listen to the songs, they’re fun, but you can make up the rest as you like. Everybody gets to pick a character and say their lines, and you can make up whatever you want – it can be realistic or just completely silly.”
“I want to be Peter Pan!” declares James, who’s clearly been briefed on the film ahead of time by Lily.
“What, and leave me to be Wendy?” Lily retorts. “Not bloody likely.”
Sirius has no idea what they’re talking about. As far as he can tell so far, not that he’s particularly paying attention, the film takes place in some kids’ bedroom. With a person in a costume that’s supposed to look like a dog. Sirius sighs.
Then Weird Green Suit Guy makes a dramatic entrance through the bedroom window. “See?” Lily says. “Peter is even played by a woman, Mary Martin. I always admired her.” Lily pokes James in the shoulder. “I’ll be Peter Pan, you can be Wendy, okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” James says without even a second’s hesitation, and with that strange fluttering in his stomach again, Sirius thinks, That’s really love, isn’t it?
Lily whispers something in James’ ear and he chuckles, his arm looping closer around her shoulder.
“Where does that leave you lot, then?” Lily asks in the direction of the sofa. “Are you the Lost Boys?”
“I’m NOT going to be that guy in the dog suit,” Sirius bursts out, his voice too loud for this small, cosy room, and beside him Remus snorts.
Then, unexpectedly, Remus says, “You can be Captain Hook.”
Sirius twists to look at him. “Wait, you know this film, Moony?”
“Sirius, of course I do. Haven’t we told you over and over that it’s a Muggle classic? My mum loves this one. We used to watch it a lot when I was little.”
Suddenly, Sirius objects slightly less to this whole venture than he did it this was just some weird whim of Lily’s. “Is Captain Hook a baddie?” he demands. “I think I want to be the evil bloke today.”
Sirius can feel through their close-pressed legs that Remus is laughing, and it makes Sirius warm all the way through. “Yes, very evil,” Remus assures him. “And he gets eaten by a crocodile at the end. Think you can handle that?”
“Yes,” Sirius decides. “I consent to be eaten by a crocodile, if it means I get to have swashbuckling swordfights first.”
“And Remus?” Lily wants to know. “Who are you going to be?”
“Mr Smee,” Remus says promptly. “He’s one of the only pirates who survives in the end, because he’s savvier than the others. He’s Captain Hook’s right-hand man.”
Sirius feels a spike of gladness in his chest at that, though he would be hard-pressed to say exactly why. It isn’t as if Remus chose that character because of Sirius being Captain Hook. And it isn’t as if they actually are these characters, anyway. They’re just watching them on a grainy, too-small Muggle video screen and maybe pretending to do their voices for a while.
“You wanna be Tinkerbell, Pete?” James asks, and Peter has a cushion in his hand to lob at James’ head before he thinks better of it, because throwing a cushion at James would almost definitely mean hitting Lily too, and Lily has a wickedly good throwing arm at close range.
“Nah, I’ll be…” Peter squints at the video player. The on-screen Peter is leaping around, excited about something.
“You could play all the rest of the boys,” Lily suggests. “There are a bunch of them – the Lost Boys, and Wendy’s brothers – so they have lots of lines between them.”
“Sure,” Peter says, largely indifferent as long as he gets to be a part of things in one way or another.
Sirius leans down and scoops up a handful of popcorn, then offers the bowl over to Remus and Peter. Once they’ve got the popcorn properly distributed around, Sirius shoves his whole handful into his mouth at once, a bright explosion of saltiness, butter and warmth. Remus, in contrast, is popping kernels into his mouth one after another, appearing to savour each one individually. Trust Remus to be neat and tidy even about popcorn.
“So, are we going to act out this film, or just stuff our faces?” Lily asks archly from the armchair.
Sirius looks back at the screen, and – they’re flying! Peter Pan, and those kids. It’s kind of well done, for Muggles at least.
“Look at me, I can fly!” James says, trying to get into his role as Wendy.
“Me too! No wand, just fairy dust!” says Peter – their real-life Peter, not the on-screen one, and this is probably going to get confusing – and he and James both convulse with giggles at the idea that fairy dust could make anyone fly.
“Think lovely thoughts,” Lily murmurs, quoting back something the Peter on the screen just said, a happy smile playing at her lips. It’s clear she really does like this film.
Sirius risks a glance over at Remus, and he too is smiling nostalgically. “…And straight on till morning,” Remus says under his breath. Sirius doesn’t know what that means, but he likes how it seems to be making Remus happy.
When did Sirius start thinking all the time about what makes Remus happy?
“There’re the pirates!” James calls from the armchair. “That’s your cue, Padfoot.”
“Arrrrr,” Sirius says gamely, though he’s not even sure yet which of the pirates on the screen is supposed to be him.
“That one’s you,” Remus says. “And that’s me.”
Sirius takes a good look at the pirates, in their ruffle-endowed shirts and big hats. “We look totally ridiculous.”
Remus chuckles. “Yeah.”
More stuff happens. The kids mistake Wendy, in flight in her fluttering nightdress, for a bird, and shoot her down with an arrow. (“Wait, what??” James demands. “Unfair!”) The boys build Wendy a house and get her to agree to be their “mother.” (“Oh, seriously,” Lily grumbles, clearly speaking as herself and not as Peter Pan.) They go on adventures and whatnot, and sing about how they don’t want to grow up.
When the pirates make a reappearance, Remus nudges Sirius and says, “That’s you.”
“Arrrrr,” Sirius says again obligingly, not really sure what he’s supposed to say.
Remus chuckles. “How ‘bout some actual dialogue?”
“Arrrrr,” Sirius says. “Ahoy, matey, methinks our Wendy here is in luuuuurve with Peter Pan! Wendy wants to kissy kissy kissy Peter Pan…”
“Captain, I think you might just be onto something there,” Remus says, still laughing, rolling his eyes in the direction of the armchair. “I do get a very cosy vibe coming off those two, now you mention it.”
And with that, Sirius and Remus start improvising dialogue that increasingly has little to do with the film itself, but rather evolves into a story about James-as-Wendy and Lily-as-Peter staying in Never Never Land forever and having 27 kids and building a castle made out of fairy dust, with the whole thing told by both Remus and Sirius in alternation in an exaggerated pirate drawl. (“That’s not how the story goes at all,” Lily informs them, but other than that, she refrains from comment and lets them get on with it.) After a while, Sirius realises he’s forgotten about everything else in the room but the sound of Remus’ laughter.
Sirius clears his throat, a little embarrassed at how much they got lost in their own world for a moment there. But he looks around and sees that Pete is engrossed in the film; James and Lily are cuddled up closer than he remembers them being the last time he checked, though they’re not quite snogging each other. Yet.
Sirius glances back at Remus, who gives him a crooked sort of grin.
Nobody’s looking at them. Remus’ hand is resting on his own leg, just inches from Sirius and out of sight from anybody else, blocked by the bowl of popcorn now resting on Remus’ knees. Suddenly bold, Sirius slides his hand over and gives Remus’ hand a squeeze.
Remus squeezes back – and then keeps holding on.
The room seems to swell with warmth; the noise of the crackling fire rushes at Sirius together with the blood in his own ears. He’s holding hands with Remus and nobody knows.
Sirius cuts his eyes towards Remus; Remus is looking straight ahead as if everything were normal, so Sirius tries to focus on the video player. Apparently, all the kids have decided to fly back to London, leaving Peter Pan behind. Over on the other side of the room, James strokes Lily’s hair and says, “Don’t worry, I’ll still visit you.” He makes like he’s going to get up from the armchair; Lily pulls him back down and snogs him soundly.
Trained into automatic habit by this point, Sirius and Remus and Peter all politely look away, their three heads swivelling away from their friends and back to the film. But heat washes up into Sirius’ face, because Remus’ leg is pressed against his leg and Remus’ hand is in his hand, and Sirius can hear James kissing Lily just beyond his peripheral vision.
A tiny chuckle escapes from Remus’ throat, and something inside Sirius eases. Right, this doesn’t have to be complicated. This is Moony, just Moony, who Sirius knows nearly as well as he knows himself.
“Clap your hands!” Lily cries, and Sirius jumps, startled.
Onscreen, the little fairy is dying, because…children don’t believe in fairies. Or something?
“Clap if you believe in fairies,” Lily insists. “Don’t let Tinkerbell die.”
So Sirius gently releases Remus’ hand, and they all clap, Sirius and Remus and Peter and James, because Lily asked them to. The sound is a warm reverberation in the small room.
“And now it’s time for me to rescue you,” Lily says, as Peter Pan grabs his sword and dashes off to save the day. (Apparently Sirius missed something, and Wendy didn’t leave after all, but instead got kidnapped by pirates.) Lily rests her head on James’ shoulder, watching the screen. And no longer snogging, to Sirius’ relief. He loves James like a brother and he likes Lily more than he’s quite ready to admit out loud just yet, but that doesn’t mean watching them be all over each other isn’t kind of weird.
James-as-Wendy and Lily-as-Peter-Pan keep up a stream of banter as the film progresses into a dramatic final shipboard battle, and real-life Peter yells out various things in his role playing all the boys.
Sirius shouts random stuff now and then, too, as Captain Hook loses a duel with Peter Pan and gets chased down the ship’s gangplank by the long-promised crocodile. But mostly whenever he can get away with it, Sirius is stealing glances over at Remus, who’s stealing glances back at him. Remus loves this film, Sirius can tell, and he can also see Remus loves that Sirius is having fun watching it, even if the way they’re watching is rather non-traditional.
The children fly off back to London and reunite with their parents. Wendy grows up and has a daughter and one day Peter Pan comes back and teaches her how to fly, too. James threads one hand through Lily’s long hair, and the firelight glints off its auburn strands.
I could do that, too, Sirius thinks with amazement. The idea of touching Remus’ hair, always so soft-looking, is strangely captivating. It would be feather-light under his fingers, Sirius is sure. Not right now, Sirius thinks to himself. But soon.
He glances over at Remus, and Remus is smiling back at him, like he knows where Sirius’ thoughts have been wandering, and he doesn’t mind at all.
The film’s final song swells. “That wasn’t so bad, right?” Remus whispers, inclining his head in the direction of the video player.
Sirius shrugs, deliberately nonchalant. “Eh. Survivable.”
Remus rolls his eyes and gives a soft snort, but the grin spreading across his face is like a small sun rising. And Sirius is utterly sure of one thing: He’s going to do everything he can do to keep that smile appearing.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The End
