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Sirius lays over a bench, arm draped tragically across his eyes.
The bench itself is not so bad; it’s wood has been worn smooth by years of criminals in repose. What surrounds it, however, is bad enough to make up for the bench ten times over.
Muggle lighting is always harsh—but in the drunk tank? Punishment in itself. Wretched, stabbing light that Sirius takes personally. Unloving. Uncool. Uncalled for.
He is wildly pissed, nigh unto blackout, and can’t seem to recall what he did to deserve this. He hates it here, yet he keeps coming back. Did this make twice this month? Three times? Horrible stuff, even for him.
A fight has broken out over the cheese sandwiches.
Sirius turns toward the wall in attempts to ignore, but then he gets mad too; shouting and lifting his torso up with monumental, drunken effort.
For his trouble, he gets half-sandwich in the face, cheese-first.
Someone dressed as Santa punches someone else dressed as Santa in the gut, causing the bells on both their costumes to jingle.
“Fuck me,” Sirius mutters, peeling cheese from his eyelids.
He is meant to be the scion of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.
He is meant to be a member of the Order of the Phoenix.
He is meant to be a friend, a fighter, a head of family.
Wobbling on the bench, he draws his knees imperceptibly up to his chest.
The lights overhead buzz as if aggravated, on and on.
(-)
There comes a rapping on the bars.
A metal weight runs over them producing a malevolent purr. Sirius opens his eye to a dark figure with pale hands, hair, and a wholly ornamental cane.
Sirius groans from the bone-dry depths of his soul.
“G’fuck yourself,” he slurs.
Like he does everything, Lucius Malfoy laughs richly.
(-)
“I’m not coming home!” Sirius roars, getting flecks of spit on Lucius’s cheek. “I hate you all! I hate everything you stand for! I hate everything you do!”
Snowflakes catch and shine on Lucius’s lashes. Sirius ignores it. “You broke my fucking heart! All of you! Don’t you get it? I can’t come home! You took that from me! I can’t!”
(-)
Lucius sneaks him into Malfoy Manor.
He doesn’t want to disturb sleeping Cissa, or Rabastan, Rodolphus, Avery and Rosier all gloating beside a fire in a western wing. Sirius can’t deal and Lucius doesn’t want him to try; he drags them resolutely in the opposite direction.
It’s slow going.
Sirius is barely bipedal but staunchly refuses assistance. He rolls along the wall, face-palming portraits who endure for the sake of superiority in all things.
“Send me back to James,” Sirius whispers.
“Traitor,” spits an ancient blonde bitch in an emerald-encrusted frame. “Sad, lost little boy.”
(-)
The armchair releases a sharp puff of air when Lucius flings Sirius into it. Arranging himself carefully, Lucius takes the one opposite—pissed-off, inconvenienced, cold and pink-cheeked. Sirius smiles.
“You’re a piece of shit, Black,” Lucius drawls, making the insult extra lush, extra lofty.
“You married my cousin,” says Sirius.
For a split second Lucius falters, though he hides it just as fast and as simply as one places an item into a drawer and shuts it.
“I was always going to marry your cousin.” The Malfoy heir loosens his collar with a sharper tug than strictly necessary. “Do you ever get sick of being a disgrace?”
“Do you ever get sick of fucking my cousin?”
People say Lucius is ice. They say still waters run deep. But Sirius knows better. Beneath ice is more ice, blacker and colder and pierced straight through his heart.
His eyes on Sirius are dark, frozen.
There it is, Sirius thinks. There you are.
The ice never melts, but sometimes it breaks.
(-)
The hearth is lit and whiskey brought. They drink in regal, miserable silence until the clocks toll midnight.
Lucius, when he finally speaks, is hoarse: “You could’ve told me not to do it.”
His bearing remains perfectly blank, looking for all the world as if he hadn’t said anything.
Sirius tries to summon anger, but nothing inside him works as it ought.
“Are you really going to sit there and tell me it would’ve made a difference?”
“No,” Lucius runs his thumb along the thick ridges of a glass tumbler. “But you could’ve asked.”
Sap and green wood hiss as they burn.
(-)
“Get out of my fucking house!” Lucius snarls.
How are they fighting? Sirius doesn’t recall.
They’re in yet another hallway, unfamiliar to Sirius, but all he can look at anyway is the perfect ribbon collecting Lucius’s hair. Did Cissa tie it? Did Lucius? Which thing is the worse thing?
Sirius reaches forward and jerks the ribbon loose. It flutters to the floor between them, anticlimactic.
Lucius’s hair descends a slow, sleek curtain all around him, framing his fury. He reaches out, pinching the hoop in Sirius’s earlobe.
“I hate your hair,” growls Sirius.
“I hate these cheap fucking things,” Lucius spits, ripping the earring from Sirius’s ear and hurling it to the ground with a too-tiny sound.
Sirius doesn’t flinch. His pure, proud blood falls to the floor one drop at a time.
“I miss you,” he doesn’t mean to say.
For a second, nothing changes. The world is moved only by drifting snow.
Then, Lucius takes a sharp sip of air, and Sirius meets his eyes.
(-)
The room is less ornate than the rest of the Manor, with no canopy on the bed or portraits on the walls.
There is a single, modest window to let the night in.
Immediately, Lucius gets Sirius in a corner, sinking his hands into dirty, drunk hair. “I can’t do this.” His voice is clenched, hollow—as far away as his body is close. “I can’t do this again.”
“Then don’t,” Sirius snarls, bleeding over the mark of the Dark Lord.
When their lips crush together, they both make a sound—Sirius a whine, Lucius a sob. They are the sounds they speak only into each other’s mouths, hide only in each other’s throats.
Sirius rips Lucius’s robes, clings to the back of his neck, paws at his chest and rubs his hard prick into the crease of Lucius’s hip to show him how he never forgets.
They were happy, once. They were young—stealing roses from the garden and giggling when introduced as Masters Malfoy and Black.
Lucius’s thumb digs into Sirius’s cheek. He holds Sirius’s mouth open as he takes. Whines escape Sirius as Lucius calls him a sham of a pureblood, a filthy dog. Sirius bites color into Lucius’s lips, sucks blood up to the skin—he’ll bruise dark like night, like violets.
Sirius whirls them around. Dust plumes into the air as he slams Lucius against the wood paneling. His tongue pleads flat over Lucius’s throat and up both sides of his neck. Bitterly, Lucius lets his head fall back, his hair fanning over the dark wall like a wing.
“You taste…” Sirius whispers. He doesn't know what he means but can’t shut up: “You taste, you taste, you taste.”
Lucius eyelids grow heavy. Sirius kisses his strong, marble chest, scrapes his teeth over Lucius’s nipples until he arches for Sirius, groaning so thick and masculine that Sirius could weep, come, die.
“Please,” Sirius breathes. Lucius knows what he wants. Does he know everything else too?
He’ll survive, Sirius thinks sometimes, while slinging his arm around Peter or pretending to listen to Dumbledore. Lucius will find a way.
Lucius fists Sirius’s hair and pulls him lower, looking down on him while they stumble back toward the bed.
Does he know that when he looks down on me, it is the only time I ever look up?
Lucius twists Sirius around with bruising hands, pushing him roughly onto his stomach. Tiny white feathers fly from the mattress.
They are naked—though neither knows which one of them did this or when.
Scrambling to look behind himself, Sirius sees the pale flag of Lucius’s hair streaming down his neck and chest. Sirius is fitful, torn.
“I need—“
“I know.”
Lucius brings their bodies together, sealing his chest over Sirius’s back. He whispers a lubrication charm. Neither wants to linger: Lucius likes to own and Sirius likes to be owned and they both like to pretend that’s all there is between them.
Holding Sirius still, Lucius presses inside. Their bodies shake with storm and heat expanding beneath skin. Sirius’s thoughts go silent and slow as snowfall; he groans as Lucius bottoms out, tangles his fingers in sheets and lifts his hips an offering, an ask. More, gods I want more of you.
“You smell like muggles and plastic,” Lucius says softly—fucking down slow and landing heavy on the last inch. He draws out a half-length, then coming back like Sirius is home, like they are each other’s. They were never, but they'll play at it.
“Be nice on Christmas,” pants Sirius.
“What’s Christmas?”
“Shut up you fucking-oh yes, fuck, like that—“
Lucius turns Sirius’s head to the side to messily kiss him. Sirius’s eyes roll back as Lucius fucks him sweeter—short, deep thrusts of never wanting to go.
“You shouldn’t have married her,” Sirius says with broken breath.
“You should have told me not to.”
“You wouldn’t have—“
“I would have!” Lucius shouts, his teeth on Sirius’s cheek. “I would have done anything!”
Sirius grinds back into Lucius’s hips while strands of ashen hair fall all around them, sticking to damp skin.
“I would have done anything, Sirius! I would have done anything for you! I would have done anything, I would have done anything, I would have done anything.”
Sirius's voice breaks open, spills everywhere. “You're lying. You lie.”
“You left!”
“Stop wearing her ribbons!”
“Stop making me find you!” Lucius fucks desperately, ice cracking deep and loud. “Stop hurting yourself. Stop making me watch. Stop…stop-fuck, I-I can’t see you like that-I can’t—“
Helplessly, Sirius starts to cry. “Stop going where I can’t follow!”
Lucius hauls them up, settling back on his knees with Sirius draped over his chest. He splays his hand over Sirius’s stomach and kisses all the skin he can reach as he pulls Sirius onto him, pushes himself inside.
Sirius comes hot and thick and mean over his own stomach and shoulder and neck. Lucius smears it beneath a shaking palm. He turns Sirius’s head with frantic, adoring hands to nurse come from his jaw, brush the night-black hair from his brow, and press Sirius's starry eyelids with the gentle pad of his thumb.
He tips their bodies forward and sinks them deeper into one another, past return, well past.
Sirius turns to meet him, lips stained by the promises they’d made each other and the ones they’d made to others. His eyes flutter back as Lucius rolls in, deep and inevitable and full of the love he cannot give.
“I’m sorry,” Lucius confesses, so scared. He wants them both to make it through what is coming for them. “I’m terribly sorry.”
Sirius begs for harder, begs for more. He's fucked-up, impatient, and hungry like a star.
(-)
Just before dawn, Sirius wakes alone.
He tiptoes through the manor to find Lucius waiting in the kitchen beside the most overlooked door to the manor grounds. He sits on a countertop sucking pointedly on a candy cane. His pale hair is loose and messy, like after quidditch on Yule. Lucius pops the candy cane from his mouth and inclines it toward the door.
Sirius laughs at this absurd version of the man—well-fucked and languid—which, in turn, makes Lucius smile for real. Suddenly, they both are laughing. At nothing. At a dumb night and bad life that no one will ever find funny but them.
Lingering, Lucius kisses Sirius on corner of his mouth.
“Won’t be another like you,” he whispers.
Sirius scrunches his nose.
“That was god awful.”
“Come now.” Lucius’s mouth curves sweet on one side. “Bad poetry is poetry still.”
Sirius blushes, calling him a poetic fucker, because he is, he is, he is.
(-)
As the sun rises grey over sparkling drifts of snow, Sirius regales Lucius with the tale of the fighting Santas. Lucius takes the piss out of him for it, even though Sirius is already taking the piss out of himself.
At the end of the drive, the manor’s shadowy gates creak open on the same breeze that teases the bright ends of Lucius’s hair. They keep distance between them.
“Fuck Christmas,” Sirius declares, going and not looking back.
“What’s Christmas?” Lucius says, tall behind him.
(-)
He is half-way home before Sirius understands it was goodbye.
He sits in the snow, covering his tears with his hands and can’t stop laughing.
Once, he would’ve done anything for the man, had there been anything to do.
(-)
Late that night, Lucius slips out through the door Black left him by.
He walks past his wife’s winter-stripped roses to a bed of earth they'll raise into violets come springtime.
He thinks of Sirius, all of sixteen, at his doorstep; scared, brave, and alone.
He thinks of Sirius, bloodied, drunk out of his mind.
He thinks of Sirius under the night sky.
He thinks of Sirius, dying young.
He thinks of Sirius, laughing.
He thinks of Sirius.
He thinks of Sirius.
Lucius thinks of Sirius.
He looks to the ground, layered in winter.
He looks to the sky, burning with stars.
Beneath them both go Narcissa’s ribbons, buried in earth and cracked ice.
Lucius says his first prayer ever: for Sirius Black, to the gods who do not exist.
He's awkward and doesn't know how, but bad poetry is poetry still.
(-)
A few hours later, Sirius returns to make a snow angel. “Don’t marry her,” he commands when Lucius approaches. Sirius Black is drunk and beautiful amid the drifts. "Make an angel with me instead."
Lucius does not even pretend not to know about snow angels. When he lays down his hair becomes a river, his arms become his wings. He puts his fingers through Sirius's.
Sirius sits up suddenly and looks at Lucius with a great, burning feeling. “No matter what," he says, "no matter what you must do, you have to live."
The urge to extract the same promise descends upon Lucius in a panic, but he knows Sirius like he knows himself.
He swallows. "Alright. I will."
Sirius screws his eyes shut, tighter and tighter, wretchedly tight, then he opens them again and squeezes Lucius's hand.
They make a host of angels.
They laugh like they're children and draw out every moment.