fic: the jazz wolf (HP; Sirius/Remus)

the jazz wolf
Pairing: Sirius/Remus
Word Count: 2283
Rating: PG13.


Summary: Sirius comes to see the saxophone player almost every night.


Note: I was quite inspired by "Jazz Wolf" by North Sound; it was such a perfect soundtrack to the art this was based on, and I pretty much listened to it on a loop as I wrote. Written for shaggydog_swap !





Sirius comes to see the saxophone player almost every night.

The club is smoky and acrid, packed with people who've started to recognize his face. Packed with so many people, the press of them in the crowd, mixing scents of cologne and perfume and perspiration. Women in their beaded shifts with plumes in their hair blink mascara-laden lashes as they talk flirtatiously with men in well-fitted dark suits, men dressed all alike.

Sirius doesn't bother with the affectations. It's kitschy, a little pseudo-speakeasy in south London. He wears what he wears everywhere: tight trousers, Chelsea boots, a t-shirt and his motorcycle jacket. He gets glares from the hardcore fancy dress fans, but it's of no matter. There's no fucking point in getting dressed up if he's just here for drinks and music.

And boys, can't forget those.

Sirius digs his fags out of his pocket and is immediately offered a light by a pretty lad with rogue on his cheeks; Sirius leans in, grinning rakishly, and nods his thanks. He's not here for them, though. He's here for sax player.

The sax player doesn't conform to the club's dress code either. His hair's long, blonde-green under the stage lights, shaggy and obscuring his eyes. His face, from what Sirius can see, is thin and intent. The scars on his cheeks catch in the lights. He never looks at the crowd when he plays. His fingers are thin and intent too, climbing over the instrument held between them with confidence and ease.

Sirius can't stop watching him.

Afterwards he doesn't even do any of his usual nonsense like flirt his way backstage. He tucks his hands in his pockets and walks home, hunched against the cold, the sax player's song reverberating through him.

It almost sounded like howling.





The first time they'd gone had been all Lily's idea. She was the only one to get dressed up too and she glared at them in their sweaters and trainers, hands on her hips.

"Forgive me for wanting to do something a little different," she muttered moodily.

"Jazz, though," James said, frowning, as though that explained everything. He added a little shudder for good measure.

"You are a child," Lily declared, beaded fringe of her dress clacking as though in agreement.

"Jazz is alright," Sirius said. Lily's eyes slid over to him, brow coming together in surprise that she'd be getting help from his corner. "What? I can be mature and cultured too."

James sighed, ambling to his feet. "Alright, alright."

He even acquiesced to Lily's plea that he at the very least James wear a tie and, Peter shuffling along oddly silently, they made their way out to the club.





But no, no, no, no, it hadn't happened like that. How romantic to think it had – Sirius can follow the storyline like one of the radio plays Remus' mum loved, the too-smart-for-his-own-good boy in the audience and the sax player circling each other for weeks, the trading of flirtations, a kiss under the a streetlamp, sex in a room with peeling wallpaper.

It's romantic; it hadn't happened like that. Remus didn't even play an instrument, what a silly fantasy.

No, Sirius thinks, and his fingertips find the crevices in the stone floor of his jail cell. It hadn't happened like that. So silly, and so innocent. Not the kind of thought he's meant to keep, here.





There's a cottage on a cliff side by the sea, the kind of thing Percy Shelley would weep tears of ink over. The wind whips through the long, half-dead grass, through the gaps in the shingles of the roof. Remus wears a flannel bathrobe and plays the piano with nimble pale fingers. It's cold and it's dark.

Sirius is dead, and Remus is dead too.





Sirius dreams of a time out of time because the truth is a vicious thing and she never lets you speak.

The truth is –

This is the truth and Sirius will only tell it once.

They'd been one kiss, one. They were fourteen and Sirius had brought Firewhiskey into the dorm and gotten everyone drunk as fuck, just for fun. It was dark, all shadows, and he'd been leaning into Remus and laughing, James on his other side. They'd kissed, for a minute, him and Remus.

That's the truth and he doesn't think of it fondly, prefers grander stories, but all that means is that the Dementors let him think of it, and often.

That one kiss. Remus letting him in for just a minute. That was why he'd thought Remus was the traitor - not because he was a werewolf but because he was shut up tighter than the Shrieking Shack, all manner of secrets locked up behind his eyes.

The truth is Sirius had been full of self-loathing and doubt, had been wrong from the start like his mother always said, and his whole world shattered around him.

That's the truth.





They really had gone to the jazz club. It was right after they'd left school, before everything went properly to hell, and the sax player had been very handsome but he hadn't been Remus. Remus sat beside Lily and both of them looked caught up and dreamy while Sirius cracked jokes to Peter and James.

At one point Sirius had gone out for a smoke and some air, Remus following. He'd lit their cigarettes off the same flicker of lighter flame as they huddled under an awning to protect the little flame from wind. Remus' eyes, brown except for when they caught the light, had looked almost yellow then.

"Time of the month?" Sirius asked, low and casual.

Remus nodded. "Soon." His gaze slid over. "You used to know offhand."

Sirius still did, but they'd stopped celebrating each moon like a pack. James had Lily now and all. "How're you doing with 'em?"

"They don't get better or worse," Remus said.

"Maybe this time you could stop by the old flat," Sirius offered. "I've got a bunch of shit furniture that's in need of some character in the way of bites and scratches."

The ghost of a smile curled Remus' mouth; his honest smiles had always been few and far between. Sirius could tell he was pleased though. "Alright, Padfoot."

Remus never did come over, though.





It's so many years later that they sit at the same kitchen table in Grimmauld Place. Remus is older, and looks older too; there's gray in his hair and lines by his eyes that he's earned before their time. Sometimes he puts on glasses to read the paper and he looks like someone's kindly uncle.

Sirius looks older but he doesn't feel older. The face in the mirror is not his own. It had been hard to catch a glimpse of his reflection in Azkaban, everything around him stone, and once he'd broken out he'd been startled by the sight of himself in the paper. He wasn't that man with the long wild hair and skin like a corpse, waxy and ill. He'd been something to look at, once.

He cuts his hair and it helps, a bit. His very skin is different though, off-white almost, and the texture is wrong. It's papery and it settles on his bones like a bird on a wire. Sirius sees all the hollows in his body, beneath his cheekbones and between his ribs. He tries to gain weight but his taste for food isn't what it once was either.

He's thirty-six (thirty fucking six) but he looks much older. In his head he's still the boy with the motorcycle jacket and the grin; he has to remind himself that boy's long dead.

"You don't have to babysit me here," he says to Remus, arms crossed petulantly.

"Do you think that's what I'm doing?" Remus asks patiently, eyes still on the paper. He's doing a damn crossword, Sirius is sure of it.

He missed thirteen whole years of Remus' life and all they ever do is sit around making small talk or try to get the doxies out of the third floor linen closet.

"I don't know," Sirius says. "Does dear old Albus think I need someone to keep me busy so I don't go mad and start making hors d'oeuvres of rats again?"

Remus smiles faintly. "Something like that."

Sirius frowns. "Then keep me busy."

Remus doesn't look up. "Time often embellished in retrospect," he says, "Ten letters."

Sirius' synapses used to be quicker too. "Remus, that's boring. Save that for your rocking chair in the old age home."

"You sound just the same," Remus says absently, but his smile widens a little.

Sirius snatches away the paper to Remus' surprise and stares down at it for long moment. "Yesteryear," he proclaims, then crumples it up and throws it towards Kreacher's hovel.





Remus finds some of Sirius' old jazz recordings, ancient things his mum had hated, what with all the Muggles in their suits and hats on the covers.

"I miss these old things," Sirius breathes. They're all covered in dust, like him. Old before they should be old, but just the same when they're played.

"Always liked the sax," Remus says as the music fills the room. It's not one of Sirius' favorites – he favored the scattered, noisy, improvisational sort and this isn't that. It's echoey and it lingers, mournful and wrenching. Like howling.

"I used to imagine you playing music," Sirius says. He doesn't realize how odd that sounds until Remus' brow furrows. "To pass the time," Sirius adds. "When I was in – when I was away."

Remus tilts his head. "Why?"

Sirius shrugs, taps his fingers against the edge of a table. He's allowing himself a drink today, a slow old whiskey to sip over the course of the night because he no longer has a head for alcohol. "I didn't want to think about anything real."

"Sirius," Remus sighs, sounding so adult, like a grown man and a teacher, like he has thirteen years worth of wisdom on Sirius.

"D'you remember when Lily took us out to that club?" he interrupts. "She wore that fringe thing, James couldn't stop telling her she looked lovely."

Remus hesitates before nodding, perhaps unsure where Sirius is going with this. Sirius is going nowhere, really. He just likes talking and having someone talk back.

"I used to think about it, differently," Sirius says. "I used to pretend everything was different."

"I know," Remus says, though he couldn't possibly. "I used to do the same thing. I wanted to go back and change everything, somehow."

Sirius nods, nods, takes a sip of his drink and, "Remus –"

"Yes?"

"Why did you never –" he starts, stops. He didn't used to be so poor with phrasing – he used to be excellent at it, he used to make the girls in Hufflepuff go bright red. "Why did we never – why did nothing ever happen?"

Remus is not making eye contact (which Sirius remembers well enough from the old days; every time he and James did something Remus disapproved of, it was like he suddenly went blind), so Sirius knows Remus knows what he means. "What never happened?"

The music is making him long in a painful way for something – yesteryear, perhaps. "Moony, don't play dumb."

Remus' lips curve, thin and humorless. "Lots of reasons, Sirius. You know that."

"I know that," he echoes. "Thing is, after thirteen years they all start to feel like bullshit."

Remus does look at him then, all that frustrated affection Sirius remembers. "You can't just pick up things where they left off."

"They didn't leave off anywhere," Sirius says. He rises from his careless sprawl on one of those uncomfortable couches – everything in this damn house is uncomfortable, lumpy and old – and takes quick steps to where Remus stands. "You know that."

"I do," Remus says, and he seems almost nervous. "I do."

Kissing is another thing Sirius used to be able to list amongst his talents, but he hasn't kissed anyone in god knows how long – longer than prison, even, because for a time he'd been so in love with Remus that he didn't want to touch anyone else and he hadn't known the chance would be taken away for so long.

It's like riding a broom, really.





Remus thinks they've found their way into a grand mess. So does Sirius, but that's what he likes about it. It's refreshing to be part of a grand mess again.

It isn't the kind of affair he'd imagined as an obnoxious teenager, all sex all the time. There is sex, and a fair bit of it, but Remus still ignores him for crosswords. Sometimes it just hurts too much to look at each other, all of their lost yesteryear crashing into bright focus, and they slink away to opposite corners of the house.

Sometimes, though, it's just quiet. The sounds of the creaking house are like music, or animals, whispers and groans and sudden rushes of strange wind. Remus has more scars than Sirius remembers from his cursory schoolboy glances. They crisscross his skin in pale, skinny webs; they're like markers of time, like Sirius used to do on the walls of his cell. So much time, so much of it gone.





Sirius falls through a veil, but first a spell hits him square in the chest, and his laughter dries up.

Sirius dies, and something in Remus dies too. He retires for a week (all the cause can spare) to a cottage his family used to frequent on holiday in pleasanter times. Remus finds the dusty out-of-tune piano and sits at it in his flannel bathrobe and plays inexpertly but with feeling.

Outside the wind howls and howls.