nekare

La-la-la, don't you love my crossposting? I really like the somber tone of this...

Title: Listen to the Finger Against Your Lips
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/s: Sirius/Lily, Sirius/James
Summary: Lily only wants to be comforted.
Word Count: 576
Notes: Written for javajunkie13, with the prompt 'Rain Boots' and 'Red'.

Lily stands in the rain outside Sirius’ flat, her red rain boots clashing horribly with her hair as they lock eyes through the window, Sirius with his shirt off and a cup of hot chocolate in his hands, and he even gets closer to the glass to see if it’s really her.

He puts on the first coat he finds laying around on the pile of semi-clean clothes by the entrance, storms out and forgets to lock the door in his haste. He’s drenched in seconds, trying to blink water out of his eyes. He nearly gets run over with a blue Ford as he crosses the street, and when he finally reaches Lily and holds her arms with a grip that must be painful she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t do anything but to look into his eyes with that serious expression of hers and with her hair wet and plastered to her forehead.

“God, Lily, what are you doing in here?” he asks, mutters, really, but she still won’t speak. She’s shivering now, her teeth chattering as she finally moves her arms (that had been resting at her sides, just hanging here like the arms of a broken doll), she turns her hands into fists and presses them against her chin and her mouth (And the gesture is so odd, so rare, that Sirius thinks that he’ll never truly understand her).

“Come on, let’s get you inside.”

They go up the stairs in silence. Sirius turns his back on Lily for a moment as he takes off his damp coat, hangs it in the back of the door handle. When he faces her, she’s just as immobile as before, her lips still tinted with the barest of blues as water slides down her face, her clothes. There’s a puddle at her feet, and her rain boots are filled to the brim with water as well, a pool for her white, pruned feet. Sirius lets her stay where she is, locks the memory in his head for later.

“My parents are dead,” she says, and she sounds and looks like such a child. It’s the first words he’s heard her say since she last saw her at their final day at Hogwarts, after she had broken up with James.

Sirius doesn’t know what to do, so he crosses the room and kisses her, slowly, and then there’s nothing childish in the way her icy hand gets under his trousers, in the way she rubs herself against him. He fucks her on the couch, as she cries, because she needs it and he wants her and because she’s had James and it’s the only way Sirius could ever have him.

(He wants to taste James in Lily’s skin, but he can only taste rain-water and wet cotton).

“I know you want James,” Lily says afterwards, when she’s clothed again in her soaked clothes and he wants to see more of her pale flesh.

“I know you love James,” Sirius says two minutes later, still naked and sitting at the couch. Lily nods. She puts her rain boots on again, the rubber making squealing noises in the silence between them, and she goes out without a word.

Two weeks later she’s dating James again, and when Sirius sees her smile for the first time since her parent’s funeral, her index finger getting sucked by James, Sirius still doesn’t know which one of them he wants the most.