Alright. So the flat wasn't perfect. But they were barely nineteen, still fresh from school, broke, and in the tumbles of teenage lust. It was close enough to the shops that it took less energy to walk there than to apparate. It was cheap. Merlin, if it got any cheaper, they'd be squatting. The sweet, half-blind old witch renting it to them was maybe not aware yet that she was letting out her one-bedroom apartment to two young men. Really, it was great. Couldn't be better.
*
"Sirius, it's going to
eat me."
"Moony, it's a spider, not an acromantula. Squash it with your foot."
Sirius can't hear the actual sound of bug guts (it must not have been all that big) but he definitely hears his nancy of a boyfriend retching and frantically rinsing his foot under the slight trickle of the shower. The water pressure is for shit, but Sirius will take Remus naked and wet any way he can.
"'s what you get for showering without me, git," he mutters without venom, and ten parks himself beneath the big crack in the drywall next to the door for an ambush.
*
Remus is carrying four bags full of, most likely, vegetables (and who knew meat was so expensive?) and talking to himself when he gets back from work. It's hard for him to find anything for more than a month at a time, and he's not the world's best greengrocer, but if it brings in the galleons he'll do just about anything.
"Stove's haunted," Sirius calmly from behind a two week-old copy of the Prophet, His filthy feet (the hardwood tends to turn their soles black for some reason yet to be discovered) are propped on the kitchen table.
"Oh, that's nice," Remus says absently while he unpacks the groceries, complete with sausages that can't be anything but stolen (and all the tastier for it). "Do you want soup tonight? I want soup."
"As long as you can make a fire in the hearth, since our stove is haunted."
Remus nods, smiling. "That sounds nice. Homey. Do we have a cauldron that hasn't had, you know, toad guts in it? I can't make soup in a toad-gutty cauldron." He turns his back and rifles through the cabinets, careful not to jostle the one that buckles.
"Moony?" Sirius aks patiently. It's not the first day that his brain has arrived home several minutes after his general presence.
Remus pauses and turns on his heels, grinning down at Sirius. "Yes?"
"The stove is haunted."
He doesn't believe it until he opens up the drawer underneath to grab a serving spoon and gets accosted by a mottled arm draped in Victorian lace. Once he's wrestled his wrist free, he walks back to the table and doles the soup out by the bowlful to a chattering Padfoot.
"And so I said, 'I bet you a sickle you can't steal his foot.' And the bloke just -"
"Hey, Sirius?"
"Mm?"
"There's a ghost in our stove."
"Is that so? I had no idea."
*
The moon is barely casting a sliver through the curtains, not fat enough to be a worry, but Remus is glistening all over anyway, angles catching every bit of the light. Sirius likes the sprawl of those thin, scar-crossed fingers on his chest, nails catching and dragging when he bucks up. He likes the way Remus's hair has gone too long and curls at the ends; he's too proud to let Sirius cut it and too broke for anyone else to do the job. And the sounds, he loves the sounds of his neat, quiet boy panting into the warm night air and the little whines like orphaned howls from between his bitten-red lips.
It's all rushing up on him now, quicker than he'd have liked but no so quick as to be embarrassing, and he's letting it. He's giving in to the hot clasp of the body above him and the sweat dripping into his eyes and the catch-and-release of the muscles in his thighs, all tension and no give.
When Remus damn near screams above him, Sirius is relieved, and then smug, and then quite severely devastated when any and all movement stops.
"Moon-"
"Bloody fucking
ouch!" He's pawing at the top of his head and a thin layer of powder is snowing down on Sirius's sticky-wet chest. It makes him sneeze. "I think the ceiling just fell on me."
It takes a few seconds, what with the possible imminent blue balls and the nervous thread of worry in his stomach, but soon enough Sirius is cackling. Before either of them can lose the mood, he topples them and drives in hard and sure, still laughing.
Later, when Remus can actually talk again instead of inhaling mouthfuls of Sirius's prissy ("Sophisticated!") hair, he wiggles to his own side of the bed and hooks the sheet up under his armpits. "What was so funny?"
Sirius is already asleep, but when he tells the story to James the next week, he nearly chokes himself to death wailing, "We really...actually...
oh, sweet Circe....we brought the house down!"
*
The doorknob falls off in Remus's hand when he tugs the door closed behind him. It seems like they should laugh, so they do, but it's not all that funny. The flat's been falling apart piece by piece for two years, not to mention the decades before they called it home.
The old witch (Brunella, they'd eventually learned) had up and died. In a turn of events shocking to everyone but Sirius, she left them her house, with the understanding that they'd finish the payments on it. It was a good deal nicer than anything they'd imagined themselves in after living in a hovel for so long. There was even more than one bedroom. Sirius immediately named the smallest one Harry's and refused to christen it when they shagged their way through the rest of them.
"I told you she liked me," Sirius had uttered self-importantly at the (very short) reading of the will.
"She thought you were a woman, you twat!" Remus had squealed in the sudden lull, and the red in his cheeks was enough to soothe Sirius's manly pride.
Packing up their things had taken longer than they'd planned for. The number of odds and ends they'd collected since school was surprising. When the boxes had all been sorted and moved, the place looked more bare and rundown than it had when they'd first seen it. It had been quiet in those last few moments.
"It was good, wasn't it?" Remus says to the closed door and the wonky hole where the doorknob used to be.
"It was perfect," Sirius agreed, snagging the tarnished brass knob and pocketing in with a fond grin.
