In Love at Six-Thirty in the Morning

 

Here we lived and fed . . . not minding the little space, trod on each other like birds in a hole, elbowed our ways without spite, all talking at once or silent at once . . . but never I think feeling overcrowded, being as separate as notes in a scale.

~ Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

 

 

There is nothing right with the flat.  The faucets drip and the wallpaper is peeling, and the tile is the cheap kind which collects mold and mud and dust, the pale gray lines of grout turning black only hours after being spelled clean.  The couple living above them seems to have two functions, sex and shouting, and occasionally both simultaneously.  Naturally, the walls couldn’t be thinner if they were made of doxy wings.

 

Remus submerges himself in the tepid bathwater, and listens to the groan and gurgle of the plumbing.  There’s never enough hot water, so Remus has taken to waking at six every morning so that he can beat Sirius to the bathroom.  It infuriates Sirius, of course, but never quite enough to get him to wake up earlier.

 

There is a voice calling to him from the other side of the door.  “Moony, Moony,” slurs Sirius in what Remus knows is one of his wild-haired half-conscious stumbling dazes.  “Moony, are you in there?”

 

With a sigh, Remus sits up in the bathtub and examines the state of his hands.  They are wrinkled and dry, like crumpled paper.  “Yes, Sirius, I’m here,” he says, putting his rough hands on the soft, deep scar running from his right hipbone to just below his bellybutton.

 

The doorknob rattles, and Remus pulls the shower curtain closed just as Sirius bursts in.  “I need to brush my teeth.  My mouth tastes foul,” Sirius whines, whimpering like Padfoot when someone treads on his tail.  “How in Merlin’s name can my mouth taste so foul?” 

 

“I’m sure it has nothing to do with the liters of liquor you consumed last night,” Remus mutters.  He wiggles his pink toes, noticing the dirt lodged under the nails.

 

“It’s like I’ve swallowed a dungbomb, Remus.  And a whole bottle of that goop James insists on putting in his hair, it’s just awful, Remus, worse than my mother’s perfume, just horrible, just — ”  Sirius cuts off, and Remus stills in surprise.  Normally, when on one of these senseless tirades, Sirius will go on until Remus forcibly shuts him up.

 

The thought makes Remus smile, just a little.

 

“Why on earth have you shut the curtain?”

 

“I’m bathing,” says Remus, a tinge of ice in his words.  He hears the exasperation in Sirius’s sigh.  “I am!”

 

Sirius’s shadow moves behind the curtain, and he fists one end of it.  “It’s not as if I’ve never seen you naked, Remus.  In fact, I’d say that I see you naked quite often.”

 

“At night!”  There is a note of hysteria in his voice, and he grabs onto the shower curtain, too, prepared to hold it back whenever Sirius takes up the notion of pulling it open.  “When it’s dark, and you’re far too distracted by other things to really pay attention to what I look like.”

 

“What about back at Hogwarts?  I saw you naked plenty of times.”

 

Remus snorts.  “A flash of my thigh while I was changing clothes hardly counts as seeing me naked.”

 

“I assure you it was more than just a flash of thigh, or I wouldn’t have been wanking so often.”  Remus would like to say that he very highly doubts that, sexual deviant that Sirius is, but Sirius continues before he has the chance, “What about every morning after the full moon?”

 

Remus’s grip on the curtain tightens.  “That’s different.  I’m not — I’m not conscious, or if I am, I’m, well.”

 

“Well?”

 

“It’s not the same.”

 

“Remus,” Sirius says, and his voice has grown softer and more coherent.  His body is against the curtain; Remus can see the shadows pooling against him, the damp curtain sticking to his chest.  “You’re being an absolute idiot.  Open the curtain.”

Remus’s unclenches his hand, but he says, “No.”

 

“Open it, c’mon.  Moony, I’ve seen you naked before, whatever you might think.  I can probably tell you exactly how many freckles you have on your shoulders, and how many scars on your stomach, and how many bumps in your spine.”

 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Remus, but he sounds a little breathless.

 

Sirius gives the curtain a small tug to reveal Remus’s face.  “Let’s see,” he says.  He looks thoughtful, and disheveled, and unforgivably handsome for someone who has only been awake twenty minutes.  “It’s forty-two freckles, most of which appeared the summer after we graduated, when the four of us spent a whole week at the lake and you were burnt to a crisp.”  Sirius bites at a hangnail.  “Twenty-nine scars, but, of course, the big one is the one you touch when you’re nervous.  The bite.”  He pulls his finger from his mouth.  “And, let’s see, as for the spine — ”

 

Touched, Remus says, “It’s enough.  I believe you,” before rebuking, “Though I can’t imagine why you’d spend your time on something so pointless.”

 

“It isn’t pointless.”

Remus looks away and pulls the curtain open.  “There,” he says, his voice a little rougher than he intends.  “Are you happy?”  He glances back at Sirius.

 

“No, not entirely.”  A mischievous grin lights up the other boy’s face, and before Remus knows what’s happening, Sirius — still wearing his pajama pants and socks, though shirtless as ever — jumps into the bathtub, so that water sloshes over the side and runs along the cracks in the tile.

 

“What are you doing?” Remus demands, or begins to, before he feels Siriuslegs pressed against his own, and Siriushands on his shoulders, and Siriuslips on his mouth.  He is, quite literally, bathing in Sirius.

 

When they part for breath, Remus gasps, “Your mouth really does taste foul,” but it doesn’t matter, not right now when they are both absurdly wet and in love and not caring that the walls are so very, very thin.

 

Fin.