REMUS WOKE UP alone in his bed, the sound of wooden shutters on the cottage clacking against the windows in high winds. He stretched his long arms over his head, hips raising under the covers as he did so and glanced towards the window where blackened storm clouds spewed water from the heavens onto the earth, covering everything in their wake. He felt the bed beside him: the sheets felt cold. It had been a long time since Sirius had been lying beside him. He sat up, secretly despising the tumultuous downpour outside.

He'd hoped to make the perfect last day for himself and Sirius; he wanted to make every day perfect for his lover, truthfully, but today seemed especially important. In less than twenty-four hours now, the men would be departing back to England, and though they promised to remain in touch, who's to say that would actually remain true?

He was curious as to where the black-haired man had gone, and slipped out of bed and then out the door slowly, creeping around corners in hopes of catching the man perhaps taking a phone call or reading lazily on the couch. Though Sirius didn't seem the person to read: that was more Remus' forte. The man didn't seem to be anywhere inside the house, and this frightened Remus for an painfully long moment.

What if Sirius had gone back on everything they'd promised between kisses in the early hours after midnight? What if he'd taken his motorbike back to the rental place, and had called a cab to take him back to the airport early? This didn't make sense, though, Remus reasoned. All of Sirius' belongings were still inside the cottage, and the motorbike was still parked on the road outside.

He wondered if maybe the man had gone for a walk in the rain: he seemed the type that would do that. To clear his head perhaps. Remus set to making coffee, attempting to distract himself from the gloomy thoughts onset by the storm. And then something dawned on him, and he rushed to the back door, peering out through thick walls of grayish water towards the sandy dunes of the beach beyond.

Groaning, he grabbed a hoodie from his luggage and embarked outside into the storm. Thunder crashed like drums in the dark sky, lightning zigzagging like a rip on your favorite sweater. His bare feet clung to the damp sand, turned an ugly shade of brown from its once creamier color. He shielded his eyes from the rainwater, not liking the way it mixed with saltwater and sea spray from its close proximity to the ocean.

"Sirius?" He called out blindly, desperately. Though they'd lived in this place a week, truthfully neither knew it very well. What if the grey-eyed man had gotten into some kind of trouble? "Sirius, please!"

He climbed up over a sand dune, treading lightly as they were always very dangerous, and this one remained unmarked to let travelers know just how dangerous they could be. He called his lover's name again, deafened by the thunder and blinded by the rain. Water splashed against his skin: he felt numb, hopeless... afraid.

And then, thump! Remus tripped over something solid, and face-planted into the sand. Moments later, he discovered it was a leg: Sirius' leg, Sirius who sat glumly in the brown sand with his eyes closed and his head braced towards the sky, features becoming waterlogged. His eyelashes were painted with droplets of rain.

"Sirius!" Remus exclaimed, rushing to cover the man's body with his own. He was wearing nothing but boxers, which were drenched. "Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to be on a beach in a storm?"

As if to prove a point, lightning sizzled across the sky once more, thunder booming loudly overhead. Sirius' eyes remained closed, though his chest rose and fell to ensure Remus that he was alive, at least. The green-eyed man frowned and stood slowly, rain smacking against his back as he tried to pull Sirius to his feet.

"You're going to get sick! Why're you out here?" He fretted, and eventually the man's body gave way and Remus was able to pull him to his feet, cradling him close to his own body. He brushed aside Sirius' soaked black hair, now the color of oil, and touched his cheeks with the pads of his thumb. Then, he removed his jacket and placed it over his lover's shoulder — this proved to be ineffective, but the sentiment was nice. "Sirius, what is wrong?"

Slowly, Sirius' eyes opened, eyes the same grey color as the water. They shimmered, as if he was crying prior to Remus finding him. He breathed out deeply, shaking, and yes, he most certainly was crying. "This is it," the man claimed morosely. "A suitable farewell to our week-long paradise."

"Sirius-"

"Isn't it ironic, Remus? How the earth floods itself on the last day that you and I get to hide away from the world? As if nature is providing a cruel reminder that come this time tomorrow, we'll be back in our own beds leading our own miserable lives." He seemed bitter.

"But Sirius, you know that isn't true. We won't lead miserable lives anymore. You don't have to worry anymore, Siri, I promise. I personally will make sure life doesn't suck for you once we're back in the U.K."

"Remus, we've known each other a week. We're desperate people: desperate for something to distract us from the cold hard truth that life is shit: that the U.K. is shit, and everything is shit." The brown-haired man shook his head, not liking at all the way Sirius was speaking. He grabbed his face, forcing him to stare into his own green eyes.

"Sirius, you listen to me, and you listen to me good." He demanded. "I don't care that we've only known each other a week. You're right, our lives sucked prior to this... but that was prior to all of this. We've gotten the chance to experience something new: explore new things, and perhaps explore ourselves as well. And I'll be damned if I'm to let what's been possibly the best week of my entire life go to waste."

"But-"

"No but's, Sirius. When we return to London, things will be different. It'll be a good kind of different: a great one even. And we'll have each other to fall back on. I firmly believe we were each chosen for this holiday for a reason; I firmly believe that my idiotic roommate chose that raffle to place my name in unbeknownst to me for a reason. Things don't just happen. This was meant to happen: we were meant to meet."

Sirius sighed. "You're such a cliché, Remus."

The green-eyed man smiled, pulling the shorter man closer. "You wouldn't have me any other way."

—————

After making their way back up to the cottage, they spent their last day together lazily kissing and enjoying coffees and old movies on the tellie. They were playing all three of The Godfather movies, and this proved to be a learning opportunity on Remus' part, as Sirius claimed sometimes his family behaved in similar ways to a mobster — though they were not mobster, he made this explicitly clear.

He informed Remus on his father's ideologies more, and how blind Sirius had been to life until he'd moved out. Remus told his lover about his own family life, growing up in the welsh countryside to a bad-tempered father and a patient mother, though they'd grown more boring with age. He mentioned the day he'd been sneaking around this man named Fenrir Greyback's house when he was younger, searching for a football when his dog whose size was equivalent to that of a hellhound attacked: the reason he had a nasty scar across his face, and how the man had beaten him for sneaking where he didn't belong.

He admitted he didn't go around outside much after that, and his friends hung around him less and less because they believed him to be too much of a coward. But university had been different, and James Potter had entered his life like a tornado full of hellfire, and created a chaos that he'd grown to love. He admitted James had been one of the first men he'd experimented with, though that had quickly ended once James had met and fallen in love with a redheaded woman named Lily Evans, and decided he was in fact straight as a line.

Sirius claimed that James seemed like a charming guy, and Remus admitted he thought the man would love him upon meeting him. "And they're expecting a child now," he added as an afterthought. "They haven't exactly admitted this to me, but it's obvious in Lily's change in clothing taste and the general way she holds herself. I'm happy for them."

"Would you ever want children?" Sirius asked, head lying lazily in Remus' lap. Somewhere within the second movie, they'd shifted into this position and focused more on conversation and playing with Sirius' hair than watching the film. "I know you said you were bisexual, after all."

"I dunno," Remus admitted. "Perhaps? Though I feel like I wouldn't be an ideal father to the kid."

"What?" Sirius sat up, almost bonking heads with the brown-haired man as he did so. "You, not an ideal father? Remus, you've put up with me during this whole trip, and I'm the biggest child of them all. You've dealt with me drunk, me depressed, me in all of my pessimistic moods... and that's just the teenaged years. If you wouldn't make a good father, then I wouldn't make a good... well, slut, I guess. That's really all I've been my whole life."

"You're not a slut, Sirius." Remus shook his head, and rain splattered harder against the roof. Sirius laughed.

"Even Mother Nature thinks I'm a whore. I've been with more men than there are years that I've been alive."

The brown-haired man frowned. "But you haven't been with me..."

The entire joking atmosphere left the room at once as Sirius stared at him through big grey eyes, serious eyes. "I'd bed you in a second, Remus, but there's an even bigger part of me that just feels so... so different about you. Like I don't want you to be just another meaningless shag, that it should be perfect."

Remus nodded. He respected that, truthfully. He'd been with men who'd treated him like shit; he'd been with women that he'd treated like shit. Though he and Sirius had already placed their mouths and hands on each other, there was something so much more intimate between them that just screamed how right it was for the two of them to wait. To look forward to, when everything was truly perfect, and there was no more second-guessing themselves or crying on the beach at seven o'clock in the morning.

And being the cliché that he was, Remus said: "Every moment I've spent with you thus far has been perfect."

And that line just happened to earn him an hour of lazy kisses and whisperings of what their future would hold. Because it would be their future, and it would be perfect.

THE END.