#poly!wolfstar x reader

Word Travels - Your mate drags you to a gig and vanishes, leaving you at the bar with a dry, lemonade-nursing stranger — and his boyfriend, grinning at you from the stage like he already knows how the night ends.

Across the Hall - The two men across the hall keep inventing reasons to knock — a corkscrew, some sugar, a plate of something warm — and it takes you a fortnight to work out you keep handing them an excuse to try again.

The Middle Chair - Sirius says yes to a six-week tour before the phone's even back in his pocket, then falls apart on the kitchen floor at 2am — and you and Remus have to learn what you look like without him in the room.

Pairing: Poly!Wolfstar x Reader Summary: You and Remus take your usual spot near the stage to watch Sirius play, both of you pretending you're not nervous, both of you knowing every word. Tags: fluff, established relationship, comfort

The venue smells like spilled lager and old cigarettes, even though nobody's allowed to smoke inside anymore. You and Remus find your usual spot near the front, close enough to the stage that you can see the sweat starting on Sirius's collarbone before he's even played a note. Remus stands with his arms crossed, doing his best impression of a man who isn't bothered either way, and you know him well enough now to hear his pulse going even without touching him.

"He's fine," Remus says, mostly to himself, "he's done this a hundred times."

"Course he has," you say, and bump your shoulder into his, "you don't have to convince me, you know. Convince yourself."

"I'm not the one who's nervous."

"Didn't say you were."

He gives you a look, dry as anything, the one that means he knows exactly what you're doing and isn't going to dignify it with an answer. You grin at him and don't push it. Some things about Remus you learn to let alone — he'll deny being anxious right up until the moment he isn't anymore, and there's no arguing him out of it early.

Sirius finds you before the first song. Scans the crowd like he's not looking for anyone in particular, and then he is, and something in his face changes — just for a second, unguarded, a boy checking the room's still got you both in it. Then it's gone, replaced by all the swagger he can carry, guitar strap slung on, leaning into the mic like it owes him money and he's come to collect.

"Evening," he says, to three hundred strangers and to the two of you specifically, and the room goes up in noise.

He's good. You knew he'd be good — he needs to be good, needs it the way some people need to be looked at, and has done, you suspect, since long before you knew him — but it still does something to you, watching him up there. Reckless, certain, grinning like he's getting away with something he was never supposed to get away with. The bass goes through your chest. You glance at Remus and he's already looking at you, and neither of you says it, because you don't need to.

That's ours. Can you believe it?

Remus mouths along to every single word. You catch him at it halfway through the second song — lips moving, eyes fixed on the stage like nothing else in the room exists — and you nudge him, delighted, and he stops at once, jaw tight, ears going faintly pink.

"You know all the words," you shout, over the noise.

"I do not."

"Remus."

"I've heard it a few times. That's all it is."

He's heard it a hundred times, and he'd rather eat the setlist than admit it properly, because admitting things is not something Remus does easily, not even small harmless things like this. You decide to let him have it, this once, and watch his mouth keep moving anyway, helpless, all the way through the bridge.

Sirius plays like he's trying to burn something off — like the noise is proof of something, evidence he can hold up afterwards. By the fourth song your ears are ringing, a high thin note underneath everything else, and you don't mind it. He finds your eyes again mid-chord, and something flickers across his face that isn't performance at all, just for a beat, gone before you can be sure you saw it.

Then the set's over, and the ringing doesn't stop.

Backstage is a cupboard with delusions of grandeur — one bare bulb, a cracked mirror, floor sticky enough you don't want to think too hard about it. Sirius comes off stage still wired, hair stuck to his forehead, shirt gone see-through, talking too fast because he can't quite hear himself yet.

"Did you see that bit in the middle," he says, "where I thought the amp had died? Thought that was it, career over, and then—"

"We saw," Remus says. "It was good."

"Just good?"

"It was good, Sirius."

He pulls a face like that's nowhere near enough — and it isn't, not for him, not tonight — bouncing slightly on his feet, waiting for more without ever once asking outright. That's the thing nobody warns you about Sirius: how much of him is built to look like he needs nothing from anyone, and how much of that is exactly backwards.

"You were brilliant," you tell him, and watch it land, watch him try to shrug it off and fail. "The amp cutting out was the best bit. Very rock and roll."

"Wasn't meant to happen."

"Didn't say it was meant to. Said it was good."

He laughs at that, delighted despite himself, hauls you both in for a hug that's mostly damp shirt and too much leftover energy still coming off him. Remus goes rigid for half a second — he's never been one for being grabbed at without warning, needs a beat to decide he's allowed to want this — and then relaxes into it anyway, because it's Sirius, and some rules don't apply to Sirius.

The walk home is cold enough your breath shows. Sirius carries his jacket instead of wearing it, still running hot, still talking, voice pitched too loud without meaning to be.

"What?" he says, when Remus tells him to keep it down. "What'd you say?"

"I said keep it down, people are asleep."

"Can't hear you, mate. Blew my own eardrums out up there."

"That's not something to be proud of."

"Didn't say I was proud," Sirius says, grinning, absolutely proud.

You walk between them. Sirius's hand finds yours a street or two on, fingers cold and not quite steady with whatever's still draining out of him. Remus takes the other side without being asked, the way he always does, quiet now, watching Sirius from the corner of his eye like he's cataloguing something.

"You really did mouth the words," you say to Remus, because you can't resist.

"I did not."

"Sirius, tell him."

"Couldn't hear a thing up there," Sirius says cheerfully, "but I believe you completely."

Remus mutters something about betrayal, about the both of you ganging up, and doesn't let go of your hand, and doesn't ask Sirius to stop grinning at him either, though he clearly wants to.

By the time you're home the cold's properly in all of you, and Sirius has gone quieter, the volume finally dropping now that the show's had time to leave him. He drops onto the sofa like his legs gave out somewhere on the stairs, head back, eyes shut.

"Come here," he says, not opening them. "Both of you."

You do. Remus sits first, lets Sirius fold into his side, and you take the other, and for a minute it's just that — three of you tangled together, a cold flat, Sirius's heart still going too fast under your palm.

"Was I actually good?" he asks, quieter now, no performance left in it, just him underneath. "Or is everyone just being nice because I get insufferable if they're not?"

"Both, probably," Remus says, dry even now, and presses a kiss to his temple to prove the first part true.

"You were," you tell him, and mean it, and feel him go soft against you the way he only does when it's just the two of you watching — nobody left to perform for, nothing left to prove.

Later — much later, the flat gone quiet around you — his hands are still a little unsteady, and you like that you can do this to him when a room full of strangers couldn't. Remus is patient and precise about it, says low unhurried things that sound almost like instructions, and Sirius laughs into your neck at something he murmurs and then stops laughing very fast. It's slow, after the frantic edge of the night — unhurried in a way that's its own kind of loud. He says your names like he's checking they still work. He says please like it costs him more than he wants it to.

Afterwards, tangled up, sheets cold at the edges and warm in the middle, you can hear his heart going under your ear — quick still, steadying by degrees.

"Ears still ringing?" you ask, into the dark.

"A bit," Sirius admits, one arm round you, one hand finding Remus's over your hip. "Reckon they'll live."

Pairing: Poly!Wolfstar x Reader Summary: Sirius says yes to a six-week tour before the phone's even back in his pocket, then falls apart on the kitchen floor at 2am — and you and Remus have to learn what you look like without him in the room. Tags: family issues, separation/distance, angst, hurt/comfort, established relationship

The call comes at half seven on a Tuesday, and Sirius says yes before he's even thought about it. You should've guessed he would. He's never once in his life let a good idea sit still long enough to be thought about properly.

You hear it happen. You're at the counter doing nothing in particular, and Remus is at the table with a paperback held open against the sugar bowl, not really reading it, and Sirius comes off the phone with his whole face rearranged, wild, like someone's lit a match behind his eyes.

"That was Marlene," he says, already up and pacing, already talking too fast, "we got it, we got the tour, six weeks supporting — six weeks, can you believe that? Can you actually believe that?"

You can. You've heard him play. Still, your stomach does something complicated and doesn't stop doing it.

By midnight the excitement's worn thin enough to see through, and by two in the morning he's not pacing anymore, he's sitting on the kitchen floor with his back against the cupboard — the floor, not a chair, like he needs something solid under him to say the next bit — and the flat, restless brightnes has gone out of him altogether.

"I could ring Marlene back," he says, "tell her I've changed my mind, it's not — it's not too late —"

"You're not ringing Marlene back," you tell him.

"I've never been away from you two for six weeks. Six days is a stretch, and even then I text you both like a lunatic, don't I?" A laugh that isn't one. "What if I go and it all just — comes apart? What if that's what happens?"

Remus is in the doorway with his arms crossed and a look on his face that gives almost nothing away — which, you know by now, is exactly how much he lets show when something matters to him. "You're not ringing Marlene back," he says, and doesn't raise his voice to say it, doesn't need to.

Sirius looks between the two of you like he's checking for a catch. "You'd both say that regardless, though? Wouldn't you? Even if you didn't mean it?"

"We're not you," Remus says. "We don't say things we don't mean. Ask literally anyone who's ever met me, they'll tell you I'm hopeless at it."

That gets a proper laugh out of Sirius, wet at the edges. He scrubs a hand over his face. "I keep thinking — if I go, and something breaks while I'm not here to watch it —"

"You're not the only thing holding this together," you say, and you believe it more than you sound like you do.

He doesn't answer that straight off. He's never been good at sitting with something true when it's aimed at him, would rather deflect it with a joke or a grand gesture than let it land, and you watch him nearly do it now, watch the smart remark queue up behind his teeth. He swallows it instead. "Family," he says finally, like the word costs him something, "we weren't taught to leave well. In my house, leaving was how you lost people. You went, and that was that, you were cut off, gone."

"You're not your family," Remus says. "You've spent ten years proving that."

There's a chair at your kitchen table that's always been Sirius's, the middle one, the one that puts him between the two of you so nobody has to work out how to talk without him doing the talking for both of you. Nobody assigned it to him. It just happened, the way things do around Sirius — he takes up the space that's going, and you let him, gladly, because he's better at filling silences than either of you has ever tried to be.

It isn't that you don't love Remus without Sirius in the room. You do. You have for years, quietly and completely, in a way that's never once been in question between the three of you — nobody's ever had to ask who loves who, or how much, or whether it's equal, because it plainly is, all three ways at once. What's never happened is the two of you holding that love up on your own two feet. Sirius has always been there to say the thing you're both too careful to say first, to turn a look into a joke into an excuse to reach out. Take him out of the room and neither of you is entirely sure what's left standing, not because there's any doubt in it, but because you've never had to find out.

Six weeks. That's how long the middle chair sits empty.

He leaves on the Sunday in a fluster, half his gear still not in the van, hugging you both on the pavement too hard and too long, like he's trying to store up enough of it to last. "Ring me," he says into your hair, "every single day, I mean it — and don't go quiet on each other, will you? Promise me. I couldn't stand it if you went quiet on each other."

You promise. You're not sure, yet, that you can keep it.

The first few days, you and Remus circle each other like two people who love each other perfectly well and have simply never had to be in a room together without a third voice keeping the conversation moving. You eat dinner at opposite ends of the table, the middle chair sitting there like a fact neither of you wants to mention. He asks if you want tea and you say yes and he makes it, properly, the way he does everything, unhurried, and you say thanks and that's the whole conversation. He reads. You watch something with the sound too low to actually follow. Both of you go to bed early, because sleep, unlike silence, doesn't ask anything of you.

Sirius rings from a service station somewhere past Sheffield. "How's things," he says, "you two getting on alright? Talking and everything?"

"Fine," you say, and it isn't a lie exactly, it's just smaller than the truth.

"You're being weird," he says, "I can hear it down the phone, you're both being weird at each other, aren't you?"

"We are not being weird."

"You are being weird," Remus calls, not looking up from his book, and there's something almost like a laugh underneath it, and that's the first crack in the thing that's sat stiff between you since Sunday.

It doesn't mend all at once. A few nights later you're both still up, him with the same book he's been not-reading for a fortnight, you with the telly on low, and you say, into the quiet, "Is it always this awkward? Between us? Or is that new?"

Remus considers that properly, the way he considers everything, turning it over before he'll commit to a shape for it. "It's not that it's awkward," he says. "It's that we've never had to build the thing ourselves. We've always had him laying the bricks. Doesn't mean the love isn't there. Just means we've never had to carry it without help."

"D'you think that's a bit sad? That we've been together three years and I still don't know how to just — talk to you, when it's only us?"

"Bit sad," he agrees, "yeah. Or it just means we've had it easy up till now. Doesn't mean we can't manage the harder version. I'd hope we could, given everything else we've managed."

You glance at the middle chair. Empty, obviously — it's been empty a week and a half now. "Suppose we're finding out, then."

"Suppose we are." A pause, and then, dry, not quite looking at you, "Try not to enjoy proving me wrong too much, though? I've got a reputation as the pessimist to maintain."

It's slow after that, but real, and none of it is new exactly, more like a room in your own house you've never had reason to walk into. You already know he takes his tea strong enough to strip paint. What you learn is how he sounds when there's no one else to perform ease for — quieter, more careful, apologising for things that don't need apologising for, taking up the armchair, having an opinion, being tired, like he's checking, every time, whether he's still allowed to just be here without Sirius to vouch for him. You start saying, gently, that he doesn't have to say sorry for that, and watch him try to believe you. He learns, or relearns, that you go quiet when you're working something out, and that it isn't a bad quiet, it just wants room, and that you've always gone quiet like that, he's just never had to sit with it alone before.

One night you fall asleep on the sofa with your head against his shoulder and wake at two, and he's still awake, careful and still under you, like he didn't want to move and wreck it.

"You could've woken me up," you say, half laughing, apologising with your whole face.

"Didn't want to." Simple as that. "You looked comfortable. Thought I'd let you have it."

"You're allowed to want things too, you know. You don't have to just — hand them over to everyone else."

He doesn't answer that one straight off either. Runs true to form.

Sirius, meanwhile, is learning his own frightening thing.

He rings most nights from lay-bys and motorway hotels with the telly bolted to the wall, and at first he sounds like he's checking a wound, careful questions, are you alright, are you both alright, is it — is it actually okay there, without me? You tell him it's more than okay and watch him not quite believe it down a signal dropping from three bars to one.

Then, somewhere around week three, something in him settles.

"Played to two thousand people tonight," he says, and there's a wonder in it that's got nothing performed about it, which is rare for him. "Nearly threw up beforehand, and then I looked out and just thought, they came for us? Actually came for us?"

"Course they did," you say. "You're brilliant, you idiot."

"Miss you," he says, "miss you both, it doesn't ease off, I thought it might by now."

"You don't actually want it to ease off, though, do you?" Remus says, leaning into the phone over your shoulder. "That'd just mean you'd stopped caring."

A pause, one that costs him something to sit through, which for Sirius is unusual — he's not a sitter, he's a mover. "It's strange," he says eventually, "being away and not falling apart. Thought I might. Thought the whole thing might come loose without me stood in the middle of it going, look at us, isn't this brilliant, aren't we brilliant?"

"We're not that fragile," you say.

"Never said you were fragile. Said I thought I was the glue." Quieter now. "Turns out I'm not, though? Turns out you two have always loved each other perfectly well. Turns out I was never holding that up, was I. Just standing in front of it, mostly."

"You're allowed to be the loud one," Remus says, and there's no edge on it at all. "We like the loud one. Doesn't mean we fall over without him. Doesn't mean what's between us needed you there to be real."

You can hear something in Sirius's breathing that might be him working very hard not to cry down a payphone in a car park in Leeds, and not quite managing it.

Week four, and something in the flat has changed shape, though none of it is new, not really — you've loved Remus since before you could properly date it, and he's loved you the same, both of you have known that for years, it's never once been in question between you. What's new is doing something about it without Sirius stood there to cue the moment. It happens over the washing up, the way it might have happened a hundred times before if he hadn't always been the one to start things — Remus's hand finds yours in the sink, and you both go still, and there's a beat where neither of you moves, because usually there's someone else in the room deciding for you. Then he decides. Leans in. Kisses you properly, like he's confessing to something.

"I've been wanting to do that without an audience for longer than I'd like to admit," he says after, quiet, "and talking myself out of it every time, in case it felt wrong, somehow. Doing it without him here."

"Why would it feel wrong?"

"No idea," he says. "Seemed a safe enough thing to assume, though," and that, you understand, is the whole of Remus in one line, braced for the worst quietly enough that nobody thinks to argue with him about it.

You kiss him back properly then, and something in you settles that hasn't settled in longer than you can say — some part of you that's been braced, this whole three years, for the third leg of the stool to be the one keeping it standing.

"Should we tell him?" you say after, foreheads together, both of you a bit undone by yourselves.

"Tonight. He'd never forgive us if we sat on it." A beat. "He might worry, if we don't. Best ring him now."

You ring him from the sofa, the middle cushion between you where the middle chair's shadow seems to have followed you home, and you tell him, and there's a silence down the line long enough that you both start to worry.

"Sirius? You still there?"

"I'm just," he says, voice gone thick, "I'm just really glad, that's all. I've been sat up here worrying you'd go the whole six weeks being polite at each other, and instead you've gone and worked it out on your own, haven't you? Knew you would. Knew you had it in you, the pair of you."

"You're not the reason it's there," Remus says. "You never were. You're just usually the one who says it out loud first. We only had to learn how to say it ourselves."

"Save me a seat," Sirius says, half laughing, half not, "middle one. I'm having the middle one when I'm back, don't let anyone else nick it."

"Wouldn't dream of it," you tell him.

The last fortnight goes quicker, the way time does once you've stopped bracing against it. You and Remus settle into something that stops feeling unfamiliar and starts feeling like what it always was, underneath, waiting for the noise to clear enough to hear it properly. Sirius rings less about missing you and more about the gig in Manchester, the sound engineer who's a nightmare, the bassist who's started calling him "the frontman" like it's a joke that's stopped being one and he's not sure how he feels about that yet. He sounds, if anything, more like himself than you've heard him in years — looser, less braced for the floor to go — like six weeks of being trusted to carry his own weight has straightened something out in him that's been bent since he was a boy.

He comes home on a Sunday, the van pulling up outside looking like it's been to war, and he's out of it before it's properly stopped, and then — this is the bit that surprises you — he doesn't run at the house. Doesn't crash in like a returning storm the way you'd braced for. He just stands on the pavement a second, looking at the two of you stood together in the doorway, closer than you were six weeks ago, and something in his face goes still and sure all at once, which is not a look you're used to on him.

"There you are," he says, and you're not sure which of you he means. Doesn't matter. Both, probably.

Inside, he sits down at the table, and none of you moves for a second, and then he pulls the middle chair out — his, still, always going to be his — and drops into it like a man setting a bag down after a very long walk. You and Remus take the seats either side, the way you always did, except the shape of it's different now, because the middle chair isn't holding you apart anymore. It's just where he sits.

"Go on then," he says, reaching for both your hands at once, greedy the way he's always been with the two of you, and not sorry about it, "tell me everything I missed. All of it. Don't leave anything out, I'll know if you do."

You do. It takes hours. He listens like it's the best thing he's ever heard, interrupting to say I knew it and about time too and did I not say — and later, much later, in the dark, tangled together in a bed that's finally the right size again, he says it plain, no dressing it up, "I was so sure I was the thing holding you two together. Turns out you were always holding each other, weren't you, same as you hold me. I was just never out of the room long enough to notice."

"Softer thing to find out," Remus says, into his shoulder.

Pairing: Poly!Wolfstar x Reader Summary: The two men across the hall keep inventing reasons to knock — a corkscrew, some sugar, a plate of something warm — and it takes you a fortnight to work out you keep handing them an excuse to try again. Tags: neighbours AU, getting together, fluff, slow burn

You've lived in the flat for three weeks now, and you've learned two things about the one across the hall. The music is always good and slightly too loud. And its occupants invent the most astonishing reasons to knock.

The first time, it's a corkscrew. You open the door and there's a tall bloke already talking before you've got it half open, dark hair loose, grinning like the two of you are mid-conversation and always have been, "you don't happen to have a corkscrew, do you? Because we've got a bottle and absolutely no way in, and it's a tragedy, honestly. Sirius, by the way, in case you need a name for whoever you're cursing," and behind him another man hovers a step back with one shoulder against the doorframe, arms folded, not quite hiding a smile, watching the whole performance like he's seen it before and isn't going to be the one to stop it. You don't have a corkscrew. You tell him so. He looks wounded, personally let down, like you've broken some unspoken agreement between neighbours, and then he's off again just as fast, "right, tragic, we'll manage," and the quieter one gives you a small, apologetic sort of nod on his way out, as if to say, sorry, he's like this.

The second time it's sugar. You don't bake. You say so. Sirius — you've got the other one's name too, by now, Remus, said quieter, like it costs him something to introduce himself at all — takes the sugar business just as personally, "no sugar, devastating," and vanishes again, all momentum, no follow-through. Remus lingers a beat longer this time. "Sorry," he says, "he does this. Might as well ask if we need anything, save you two trips?"

"We don't," you tell him, which isn't strictly an answer, and he looks like he expected that, and retreats anyway, easy, unbothered, like losing costs him nothing at all.

The third time it's a plate. Something with cinnamon on it, still warm, Remus holding it like it's an apology for something rather than a gift, "we made too much," he says, which is obviously a lie, nobody has ever made too much of anything by accident, and behind him Sirius is doing an appalling job of looking innocent. You take the plate anyway, because it's rude not to, and because it smells like actual heaven, and because Remus looks so ready to be told no that you can't quite bring yourself to do it.

Every time, you beg off before too long — busy, tired, mid-something — and every time they retreat with that same grace, unhurried, cheerful, as if it costs them nothing. You almost feel you've won something. It takes you a fortnight to work out you've only ever handed them a reason to try again tomorrow.

Then the building loses power, on the coldest night of the year, obviously, because the universe has a sense of humour and no mercy whatsoever. You're stood in your black hallway swearing at a light switch that does nothing when their door opens without you knocking on it at all, candlelight spilling out gold across the carpet, the smell of something warm on a stove, and Sirius filling the doorway like he's been waiting for exactly this excuse, "well, come on then, no point freezing on principle, is there?"

There's no polite way to refuse a stranded neighbour a seat by the only working stove on the floor. You know that. You go in anyway, telling yourself it's just the once.

Their sofa is deep and a bit too small for three, and you end up wedged in the middle of it, Sirius sprawled along one end like he owns the furniture, arm slung along the back of it behind your shoulders, all easy confidence, while Remus takes longer to sit, hovering near the arm of it first like he's still deciding whether he's allowed, before a blanket appears from somewhere and he shakes it out over the three of you, brisk, businesslike, as if that settles the matter of where he's sitting too. It's a good blanket. It is, you'll notice later, not nearly big enough for three people, a fact that seems to trouble neither of them at all.

"Cold night," Remus says, by way of explanation, tucking the corner in against your hip without quite meeting your eye, "can't have you catching your death, can we, just for being neighbourly?"

You don't say what you're thinking, which is that the whole flat smells of cinnamon and woodsmoke and something you don't have a word for yet, warm in a way that's got nothing to do with the stove.

Time slides by in that stretched, unmarked way it does with no telly and no clock in sight, just candles and low talk, Sirius mid-flow about a dog he definitely used to have, or definitely was, depending which version you're getting, gesturing so wildly he nearly has the candle over, and Remus correcting the details with the weary patience of a man who's heard this story forty times and expects to hear it forty more, "don't let him tell you he tamed it, it was the other way round entirely."

You laugh properly at one point, and Sirius looks entirely too pleased with himself about it, delighted, like he's won something, and you catch Remus watching that too, something soft crossing his face before he seems to remember himself and looks back at the candle instead.

Somewhere in there the blanket shrinks. You'd swear it does. You keep having to shift closer to keep any of it on you at all, until there's no cold air left between the three of you, and nobody suggests fetching a bigger one, and you don't ask for it either.

"Your foot's gone dead," Remus says at some point, hand closing loosely round your ankle to shift it, gentle, careful, like he's asking permission with his hands rather than his mouth, "better?"

"Better," you say, and don't mention that better isn't really about your foot.

Sirius's thumb moves once against your shoulder, absent, like he's not thinking about it at all, except you catch him thinking about it, in the reflection off the dark window, watching you rather than the candle he's meant to be minding, and for just a second the noise in him goes quiet, and something more careful comes through instead.

You could get up. You could say you should check on your own flat, your own cold, your own dark. Somewhere in the last hour you've stopped believing that's a reason at all.

"Warm enough?" Sirius asks, and Remus answers before you can, "just about, I'd say" — and there's a look that passes between the two of them over the top of your head, easy, unhidden, the look of two people who've been perfectly content to let a power cut do the work they'd been failing to do with corkscrews and sugar and too much cinnamon for three weeks running.

You feel it land on you a second late, the way you always seem to be a step behind them. Something in your chest turns over, slow, warm, entirely undignified.

"I don't have a corkscrew," you say, apropos of nothing, and Sirius laughs like it's the best joke he's heard all year, "I know, love, we've established that, haven't we?"

Hours on, the lights flicker, stutter, and come back down the corridor, you can see it under the door, and nobody moves. Nobody so much as glances at the switch.

"Should probably check on my flat," you say, not moving either.

"Should you?" Remus asks, and his arm doesn't loosen an inch.

You don't get up. Sirius's hand finds yours under the blanket like it's been waiting its turn, bold about it, unbothered by asking outright, and Remus is quieter getting there, slower, like he's still checking it's allowed even as he does it, his mouth close enough to your ear that you feel the words before you hear them properly, "no pretending it's about sugar, is it?"

Later — much later, candles burnt to nothing and the stove gone cold and none of you minding a bit — the blanket's given up being a blanket at all, just a heap on the floor where it fell, and nobody's cold anyway. You'll think back, after, on three weeks of knocking, and realise it was never about corkscrews. It was two people finding every possible reason to end up on your side of a door — one of them loud about it, one of them quiet, both of them patient in their own way — when all along the easiest way in was to leave theirs open and wait for the lights to go out.

Pairing: Poly!Wolfstar x Reader Summary: Your mate drags you to a gig and vanishes, leaving you at the bar with a dry, lemonade-nursing stranger — and his boyfriend, grinning at you from the stage like he already knows how the night ends. Tags: getting together, meet-cute, fluff, slow burn

Cass drags you to this gig by the wrist, practically, says it'll be a laugh, says you'll thank her later, and then the lights drop and she's gone, off into the crowd like she was never there at all. Typical.

So you end up at the bar on your own, watching a band whose name you didn't catch tune up under a single blue light, and that's where he is too — tall bloke, jumper with a hole in the elbow, nursing what turns out to be a lemonade like it's the last one on earth.

"They're alright," he says, not quite looking at you, nodding at the stage instead, "considering one of them once set a chip pan on fire trying to impress a girl."

You laugh before you mean to. "You know them, then?"

"Unfortunately." Dry as anything. "That one on guitar — the one currently deciding our corner of the room is more interesting than the actual song — that's my boyfriend."

You follow where he's looking, and there's a bloke with dark hair stuck to his forehead, grinning right at you both like he already knows how this evening ends.

"Sirius," the tall one adds, like it explains something, like a warning label. "I'm Remus."

"And you're not bothered? Him doing that from the stage?"

"Should I be?" He says it mildly, sipping his lemonade, eyes back on the band. "He does it to lampposts and dogs as well. It's not personal, it's just how he's built."

You don't ask what he means by that. You don't get the chance to, really — Remus keeps narrating under his breath, dry and unbothered, that one's on his third girlfriend this year, the drummer cries at insurance adverts, don't repeat that last one — and somewhere in there you stop feeling like you gate-crashed something you weren't invited to.

The second the set ends, Sirius doesn't walk off the stage so much as launch himself off it, straight at you, sweat-shining and reckless with it, hip-checking a stranger out of the way without appearing to notice he's done it. He drops onto the stool beside you like it's already his — the one Remus has, without a word about it, kept clear all night, elbow parked on it, never once looking like he was saving anything.

"You," Sirius says, "are new. Who let you in?"

"Cass did. Then she vanished."

"Sensible woman." He steals Remus's lemonade without asking, drains half of it, hands it back. Remus doesn't so much as blink, just watches him do it with an expression that says something you can't quite read yet — you'll learn later that's just them, mostly, whole conversations fought and won in a look. "Are you always this quiet, or is it just us?"

"Is that meant to be charming?"

"Depends." He grins, unrepentant. "Is it working?"

By closing you've got chips balanced on your knee outside, vinegar sharp, and a list of names thrown at you too fast to keep hold of — Cass has resurfaced, unbothered, entirely unrepentant — and when the drizzle starts Remus produces an umbrella from nowhere, holds it up without comment, and somehow you're the one underneath it with him while Sirius refuses to duck in properly, half in half out of the rain like the weather owes him something.

"You'll get soaked, stood like that," you tell him.

"Will I?" He says it like the idea's never once occurred to him and doesn't much interest him now it has.

Someone adds you to a group chat before you've even sobered up, thirty messages deep by the time you check it walking home, people you've never met greeting you like you've been expected for weeks rather than hours.

"Bit odd," you say, half to yourself, "everyone acting like they already know me?"

The chat goes quiet — not normal quiet, the kind with weight behind it. Sirius studies a lamppost like it's personally wronged him. Remus's grip on the umbrella tightens, just slightly.

"Small friend group," he says, after a beat too long. "Word travels."

You let it go. You shouldn't have.

Over the next fortnight it keeps happening. Sirius turns up wherever you are like he's got a homing instinct for it, steers you the wrong way down streets on purpose just to keep walking beside you, says things that land somewhere between a challenge and a confession and never explains which. Remus is quieter about it — a joke that lands at exactly the right moment, a look that holds a beat too long before he glances away and pretends he hasn't, self-deprecating enough about himself that you start to wonder what he's protecting.

"You do know why they're both like that?" Cass says one night, far too pleased with herself.

"Like what?"

"That." She waves a hand at nothing and everything. "Sirius, doing whatever he wants and daring you to mind. Remus, pretending he isn't doing anything at all."

You don't say you know. You're not sure yet that you do.

It's a Friday when Sirius walks you to your door, hands shoved in his pockets for once, restless with the effort of keeping them there, and Remus trails a step behind with the umbrella shut and tucked under one arm.

"Right," Sirius says, rocking back on his heels on your step, none of his usual nerve anywhere in his voice, "we wanted to ask you something."

"Both of us," Remus says, careful, watching your face the way you'd watch a kettle about to go. "To dinner. Would you come to dinner with us? Both of us, I mean."

The rain's stopped. The umbrella stays shut under his arm, and it hits you all at once, standing there on your own doorstep — the stool that was somehow always saved, the eyebrow conversations, the group chat that already had your name in it before you did, the whole chat going quiet the night you said everyone seemed to already know you (you'd put it down to a bad signal, at the time).

They had. Of course they had.

"You mean — together?" you say, and it comes out smaller than you meant. "All three of us?"

"That's the general idea, yeah." Sirius's hands finally give up on his pockets, come out with nowhere to land. "Is that — is that alright?"

Remus doesn't fill the silence this time. He just waits, the shut umbrella held between them like something they're both still holding onto, and you think of standing under it in the rain, the two of them either side of you, neither one minding how little room there was.

"Yeah," you say. "Dinner. Both of you. Okay?"

"Okay," Sirius says back, like he's checking the word still means what he thinks it means, and then his whole face does something helpless and bright. Remus just breathes out, slow, like he'd been holding it since the gig.

No it’s not!! I haven’t started the next chapter yet but there is definitely more to come! At least three or four more chapters! Thanks for asking nonnie!

poly!wolfstar x reader

summary: During a night out celebrating James and Lily’s engagement, between disco lights and sticky dance floors, Sirius begins to realize that maybe, just maybe… hope isn’t quite lost after all.

tags: fem!reader. unrequited poly!wolfstar if you squint really hard (sirius is a bit oblivious). lots of yearning for the same reasons. fem!reader who wears makeup. sirius pov. minimal y/n use. no war au. honestly this could be read as a standalone

a/n: SURPRISE!!!! the somebody to love series has escaped the shackles of draft jail <3 enjoy! xx

part one, part two

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The music is loud and booming enough that Sirius feels it in his bones, rattling to the rhythm of synth disco and heavy bass—definitely in response to Sister Sledge, and not the electric fizzle that shoots up his spine at the sight before him. Shimmery blue eyeshadow catching the light of the mirror ball with yet another spin you do around the sticky dance floor, content and energized to being chosen as Lily’s dance companion for the night. Her engagement ring is a match to your own bright smile as you take her hand to spin her flirtatiously.

While Sirius had claimed very early in the night to not have any interest in going out, his further attempts at staying home were stunted by two very ecstatic and recently engaged James and Lily. And, in his pure and genuine happiness for his friends, he readily accepted the quest to get everyone out with their fancier and most glamorous fits for a night out to properly celebrate. All things considered, it could be worse.

They’re a few hours in, it’s hard to track time when the club itself feels like a boisterous and never ending celebration, and all the jackets are gone. Bangles and heavy earrings tossed in the middle of the table with the promise of being well taken care of by the ones not in the mood to dance. It’s safe to say you’re definitely not one of those people, Sirius doesn’t think he’s even seen you drink anything since you arrived..

“…and then I simply said, fuck it, and I just… I just knelt down,” James’ equally boisterous voice reaches through his thoughts, pulling him out both metaphorically and literally. Sirius chuckles when a hand curls around his shoulders, jostling him playful. “Mind you, my knee didn’t even touch the ground.”

Pairing: Poly!Wolfstar x Disabled!Reader Summary: Film night, a bad tic attack, and the particular relief of being loved by people who listened when it mattered. Tags: disabled!reader, tourette's syndrome, tic attack, bad tic run, suppression and the cost of it, hurt/comfort, remus sees everything, sirius fills silence like a gift, no use of y/n, soft domesticity, polyamory, reader trying not to be a burden, they moved the table and that says everything, nonsexual intimacy, tenderness as a verb, low lighting and lower voices, ice packs and reading aloud, being known without having to explain, the kindest people alive, sleep as a safe landing, fluff, reader is held in every sense, they never flinch Word Count: 3.5k words

The film's been on for forty minutes and you haven't watched a single frame of it.

You know the shape of what's coming the way you know the shape of your own hands—intimately, unhappily, with that particular flavour of dread that's less fear and more resignation, like watching clouds stack up on a summer afternoon and understanding, before the first drop falls, that the picnic was always going to end like this. Your body's been running a tab all evening. Through dinner you kept the tics small, pushed them into the margins, let them pass as restlessness—a shoulder roll that could've been anyone's, a blink sequence you buried inside rubbing your eye, a sharp exhale through your nose that got lost in the sound of Sirius clattering the plates around. Through the washing up you let a few more through deliberately, small pressure valves, because you'd learned a long time ago that trying to suppress everything only ever delays the invoice.