Run For It

By: Provocative Envy

###

zero.

Sirius Black has a lot of bad habits.

He knows that.

He accepts that.

He fucking owns that.

He smokes and he drinks and he gets a perverse, backwards sort of thrill out of spending his dead parents' money in increasingly ludicrous ways. There's nothing particularly original about his brand of midlife crisis, no matter what Molly Weasley likes to shout at him—he's an aging ex-convict with leather trousers and a fancy pedigree and if he wants to get drunk and take a nail gun to every last ancestral portrait currently collecting dust in his attic—well, that's his bloody prerogative.

He isn't ashamed of his choices, is what he's saying.

Mostly.

There's the small matter of his most recently acquired bad habit—a girl, spoiled and snotty and literally, physically, actually small; she's half his age and twice as reckless and he can't seem to stop waking up next to her.

Pansy Parkinson.

Her name rolls with disturbing ease off the tip of his tongue—especially when he's got his hands in her hair and his cock in the general vicinity of her mouth—but he only ever thinks of her as one thing:

A contradiction.

###

one.

"This has to stop," he groans, even as he collapses, sweaty and breathless, onto the veritable mountain of fluffy feather pillows she has propped against her headboard—her bed is one of those white-oak canopied monstrosities that he equates with princesses and evil queens and his deceased cousin Bellatrix, basically. "I'm old enough to be your father."

Pansy snorts—politely, of course, because her manners are as ingrained into her psyche as his Azkaban tattoo is into his wrist—and tucks her silky green sheets up and under her arms. Green is Pansy's favorite color. He can still remember how his mother had decorated his childhood bedroom in shades of Slytherin—silver and black and green, so much fucking green—and how desperately he had resented it.

Pansy looks magnificent in green.

"Plenty of people are old enough to be my father," she replies breezily, rolling over to prop herself up on her elbow, somehow managing to ensure that the sheets are now draped just so over the admittedly tantalizing curves of her breasts.

He huffs.

"Yes, princess, but you aren't sleeping with them."

A self-satisfied smirk plays around the corners of her mouth. He wants to kiss it off her face.

"You don't know that," she sing-songs.

He frowns.

"I don't?"

She hums.

"You don't," she confirms, cocking her head to the side. She has a long, incredibly graceful neck. He likes to leave marks on the sensitive spots; behind her ears, around her pulse point, between her collarbones. "Not that it should matter to you, Sirius—it's not as if we're in a relationship, right?"

His frown deepens.

"Right," he says automatically, because she is right, they aren't in a relationship—

She rests her palm on his chest, and he's struck by how pale and fragile and delicate her skin looks next to the scarred, swarthy expanse of his own.

"Right," she repeats, except her voice is distant, frosty, just like it is when she's trying to hide something and is preparing in advance to get defensive about it—

"Right," he says again, more firmly.

Her tongue darts out, dragging along the cushion of her lower lip. He shifts uneasily beneath the covers.

"Right," she echoes dryly, and he knows her well enough to know that she's being irritating on purpose, to know that she's threading a blunt needle through the pre-arranged pattern of this conversation, stitching the shadows of her point together with all the deft, passive aggressive skill that she'd been gifted with in the twinkling sunlight of her mother's drawing room—

He grits his teeth.

"Mind if I go down for a while, princess? I'd much rather listen to you scream than complain."

She scoffs, gaze swirling with reluctant amusement and blistering heat and a strange, hesitant bit of vulnerability that he's fairly certain he's not meant to notice.

"Those are awfully big words for a...slightly above average man," she taunts him, arching a brow.

He grins as he peels back the sheets and slithers down the front of her naked body, spreading her thighs wide with the breadth of his shoulders, hitching her right leg over the bend of his elbow and pinning her left to the mattress with the flat of his forearm—she's still wet from when he'd fucked her earlier, cunt pink and clit swollen, and he opens his mouth, breath hot against her bare mound, saliva pooling while his thumb roves up and down and aimlessly around the softness of her slit—

"Well?" she drawls. "I'm closer to yawning than I am to screaming, Sirius, honestly—"

He licks at her clit and slowly, deliberately slides two of his fingers into the tight clutch of her cunt.

She moans.

She doesn't scream.

###

zero.

He knows who she is before he meets her.

Pansy Parkinson, the Girl Who Betrayed the Boy Who Lived—he hadn't been aware of much else, to be honest, just that she'd come from a prominent Pureblood family and had been Sorted into Slytherin and had been the bullying female counterpart to Draco sodding Malfoy's reign of pubescent terror during Harry's formative years at school.

Beyond that, she hadn't been relevant.

So when he saunters into a dodgy, dirty muggle pub on the seedier side of London and catches sight of an oddly familiar girl who really only strikes him as out of place in the sense that she isn't out of place, no, not at all, not in those jeans and not in that jacket and not with that wicked fucking smile, God—

It takes him a minute to make the connection.

He'd seen a photograph of Pansy Parkinson in the Prophet, printed the morning after her trial, and he could recall the basic impression that he'd had of her: tasteful tourmaline earrings and a neatly tailored pencil skirt, an expensive haircut and neutral makeup in a variety of boring earth tones—young and reasonably pretty, groomed for tea parties and cotillion balls, a potent, visceral reminder of the life he'd loathed and lost and left behind.

The girl in the pub is very much not the girl that he'd read about in the Prophet.

The girl in the pub is—

Well.

She's chandelier onyx earrings and artfully distressed designer denim, sky-high patent leather stilettos and a gleaming slash of vivid, blood-red lipstick, smoky blue eyes lined in thick black kohl—she's still young, still pretty, but she has whisky in her glass and a sultry edge to her laughter that causes him to genuinely, sincerely wonder—

"What the fuck?" he blurts out.

###

two.

"This has to stop," he pants, dropping his chin onto his chest as he slumps backwards into the bathroom wall, belt buckle clacking against a cracked ceramic tile—another night, another pub, another series of questionable decisions that've led him straight to Pansy Parkinson's knickers. "Harry would castrate me if he found out."

She tugs at the hem of her dress—too tight and too short and too distracting, God—and steps away from him. Her lipstick is smeared around her mouth in a cloud of foggy, fading crimson; the scalloped lace strap of her dark purple bra is still slipping down the slope of her arm; and her hair is tousled, tangled, and she's messy and she's disheveled and he wonders, not for the first time, what she's doing with him.

"Potter's very nearly a grown-up, Sirius—I'm sure he could wrap that tiny Gryffindor brain of his around the concept of two consenting adults having sex," she says, leaning into the circle of dim fluorescent light above the mirror and squinting critically at her reflection.

Sirius yanks his leather trousers up and over his hips, fastening the button-fly with a quick flick of his wrist. He thinks about how Pansy is the kind of girl who should be expecting a ring and a wedding and nothing but the bloody missionary position until she produces a squalling Pureblood heir. He's used to running from girls like Pansy. He's used to hating girls like Pansy. Which really begs the question—fuck what she's doing with him; what the fuck is he doing with her?

"I must respectfully disagree, princess," Sirius replies. "Harry would not understand. A universe does not yet exist in which Harry could possibly understand you and I doing…this."

Pansy's spine visibly stiffens, and he glances curiously at what little he can see of her face in the grimy bathroom mirror. Her expression is blank, which isn't all that unusual, but there's a telltale wrinkle in her forehead that he knows from experience indicates she's upset, and her movements are jerky as she uses a tissue to wipe off the remnants of her lipstick.

"Then maybe you could have Granger explain it to him," she retorts icily. "She's been shagging Draco long enough that I imagine Potter has at least a basic understanding of what goes where."

Sirius scowls.

"Still bitter about a muggle-born getting that perfect Malfoy proposal, are we?"

At that, she spins around—and then she scrunches her nose up, and she grimaces, and she meets his eyes and the look she levels him with is so incredulous and so patently, utterly unimpressed that he actually has to cough and clear his throat before he chokes on his own bloody embarrassment. Shit. He'd sounded like a jealous fucking schoolboy.

"One could make the argument that I've just moved on to a Black, but that's apparently too difficult for some people to understand," she answers, enunciating each word as crisply as her already pristine accent will allow her to; and he fucking detests her when she gets like this, when she turns condescending and elongates her vowels and adopts the trademark Deeply Offended Pureblood Tone—and he thinks that she might know that, thinks that she might even get why it puts him on edge—because she's perceptive and she's clever and she only ever does it when she's spoiling for a fucking fight.

"Am I supposed to disagree with you about that? Is that where this is going?" he asks sarcastically, crossing his arms over his chest.

She stares at him for several tense, too-still moments. He's uncomfortably aware of the lingering scent of her perfume on his jacket collar—floral and feminine and sharp—and the way he can still taste her on his tongue; she likes to kiss him when she comes, likes to share the skipping of her pulse and the shattering of her voice as she gasps his name—

"No," she eventually says, smoothly maneuvering around him so that she can reach for the lock on the door. "This isn't going anywhere, Sirius."

And he follows her out into the noisy chaos of the pub and he orders her another top-shelf gin and tonic and he stubbornly ignores the sinking, slinking suspicion he has that he's somehow fucked this all up.

Whatever this is.

Which is nothing.

He tosses back a double vodka in one long gulp and flinches at the burn.

###

zero.

She doesn't seduce him, that first night.

She doesn't have to.

He approaches her with raised hackles and a bristling temper—because she's one of them, because she'd tried to hand his bloody godson over to Voldemort, because she has no business being happy, being free, not when she'd been too much of a fucking coward to even lift her fucking wand at the end of the war—

And she laughs at him.

Laughs.

At him.

Like he's said something funny.

Then she looks meaningfully at the muggles at the bar and drags him onto the makeshift dancefloor, winding his arms around her waist and pressing her arse into his crotch, and then her head is on his shoulder and her mouth is against his ear and he feels a bit like he's just gotten off a roller coaster in that he's dazed and wobbly and slightly sick and still seems to want more.

"Do me a favor, Mr. Black," she murmurs, swaying in time to the music. "Picture all your closest friends and whatever's left of your family—picture every single person you love, yeah? All of them. Can you do that?"

He slides his hand up the front of her abdomen, wrist catching under the swells of her breasts.

"Most of the people I love happen to be dead, princess," he replies silkily. "Try again."

She loops an arm around his neck and rocks her hips in a sinuous, exaggerated circle against the bulge of his cock.

"Harry Potter," she breathes out. "Hermione Granger. Teddy Lupin. Draco's Aunt Andromeda. The Weasleys. Fucking Kingsley Shacklebolt, if you're so inclined. Need any more?"

He lets his hand drift back down, pausing when he reaches the hollow of her pelvis. He thinks he feels a navel piercing under her shirt. He's waiting for the room to start spinning.

"Make your point."

She licks her lips, tongue brushing the outer shell of his ear, and he isn't sure if he shivers or she does but he fucking feels it, feels the curdling of his spine and the clenching of his gut and the faint friction of their bodies grinding together.

It's hypnotizing.

"Picture all of those people—Potter, Granger, everyone—" She breaks off, faltering as he flexes his hand and the tips of his fingers dip inside the waistband of her jeans. "Are you picturing them, Mr. Black?"

"Sure, princess."

Her hips twitch, and his hand sinks lower; her knickers are lacy and warm and fucking damp at the center, shit—

"Good," she says, voice abruptly, surprisingly even. "Now picture them—all of those people you love so much—picture them with Dark Marks, storming the Great Hall at Hogwarts, and tell me what you would have done that morning."

He freezes.

"What?"

She pushes her arse back, rolling the curve of it along his cock, and he shudders, jerks forward, decides to retaliate by rubbing the heel of his palm against her clit—

"You think I took the easy way out, that I'm weak, that I gave up—but you're wrong," she says harshly, digging her nails into the nape of his neck. "Your precious, precious Potter even knows that—it's why he testified at my trial. He knows that he would've done the same bloody thing to save Granger, to save Weasley, to save you—"

And Sirius snaps.

He kisses her.

He kisses her because he doesn't like what she's saying, doesn't like what it means, doesn't like that he's forty-two years old and still just as confused as he'd been at nineteen, twenty, thirty, doesn't like that this fucking girl—one of them, he thinks savagely, viciously, one of them—is presuming to lecture him about loyalty like she has a fucking clue about who he is—

He kisses her so she can stop talking, and he kisses her so he can stop listening, and he kisses her so he has an excuse to take her home and strip her naked.

It works out fine.

Except—

He isn't entirely certain why she kisses him back.

###

three.

"This has to stop," he says with a smug, contented sigh, limbs lazily sprawled out across the middle of his bed—he likes having Pansy here, likes seeing her surrounded by decorative quidditch paraphernalia and cozy flannel sheets and Gryffindor red and gold. She doesn't belong, doesn't fit, and the absolute fucking absurdity of her manicured nails and perfectly plucked eyebrows and glowing complexion taking up residence in the relatively shabby confines of his space—well, it's comforting, really, to have actual, tangible confirmation of their incompatibility. It's nice. "Abstinence is the only truly effective form of birth control."

Pansy doesn't reply.

The silence goes on.

And on.

And on.

He sneaks a peek at her through heavy, half-lidded eyes; and he instantly regrets it, because he's been on the receiving end of her disdain before, has witnessed her in varying states of furious and indignant and bratty—and this is different.

This is resigned and exhausted and bitter.

This is—

"Yeah," she finally exhales, and then she scoots away from him, swings her legs to the floor, reaches for her discarded dress; she'd had fishnet stockings and tiny red knickers on, too, but she doesn't appear to be wasting any time searching for them. "We should."

His throat tightens.

"What?"

She stands up, causing the mattress to squeak—and the noise is fucking grating and high-pitched and horrible and he can't help but think that he should've bought a new bed ages ago.

"We should stop," she clarifies as she does up the zippers on her boots.

His tongue feels like sandpaper against the roof of his mouth.

"Why?"

She shrugs with a cool, very convincing sort of nonchalance. He's never been more annoyed by the fact that she was a bloody Slytherin.

"It's like you said," she replies tartly, tossing her hair. "You're old enough to be my father. Potter would kill you if he found out. There's a less than one percent chance you'll impregnate me every time we do…this. Seems like stopping is a decent enough idea, doesn't it?"

He flounders for an acceptable response. It seems unwise to remind her that she usually just pouts adorably and offers him logical counter-arguments for whatever inane excuses he's making up to justify his ongoing emotional detachment, but—

Oh, he thinks, suddenly dizzy.

Oh.

Oh, fuck.

"Princess," he starts.

"I'm not mad at you, Sirius," she interrupts, and he doesn't think she's lying. Somehow, that makes it worse. "It's—fine. You've never pretended to be anyone but who you are, anything but what you are, and that's…"

He swallows.

"That's what?" he asks hoarsely.

She pauses.

"That's been good," she confesses. "Refreshing. Mostly—mostly just good, though."

And then she's slipping out the door and leaving him all alone and there are words rattling around inside his chest, playing hide and seek with his vocal chords, words like stop and come back and I'm pretty sure I'm in love with you, but he can't quite force them out, no—

"Shit," he whispers. "Shit, shit, shit."

###

zero.

In the beginning, it's about sex.

It's about how hard he can fuck her when she's bent over a kitchen counter, how roughly she can pull his hair when he eats her out in the shower; it's about the teasing lilt of her voice when she asks him if he can keep up, the gruff challenge in his eyes when he undoes the top button of his trousers and glances pointedly at her mouth. It's about the time she rides him on his own fucking motorcycle, skirt bunched up around her hips, sticky white knickers stuffed into his back pocket—it's about the time he slides his hand under the table at a dimly lit muggle restaurant, skates his fingers along the soft, sensitive skin of her inner thighs, taps out every last pretentious Pureblood letter of his name in fucking Morse code against her clit.

It's about sex.

Because she's just another vice to him, like his propensity for chain-smoking and imported grain alcohol and betting on illegal underground boxing matches—and it's simple, and it's easy, and it's nothing more than a short fling with a pretty, petty rich girl who he doesn't even particularly like very much.

Until it's not.

Until she's clutching a French press to her chest and giggling about the state of his morning breath when she gets a Howler from her mother—be there at seven-thirty, Pansy, don't you dare embarrass this family any more than you already have—until she's ripping a three-tiered pearl choker off of her neck after an infamous Parkinson dinner party and demanding that he take her out—preferably someplace where people with actual human personalities might congregate—until she's holding her chin up in Diagon Alley and skewering a group of twittering teenage girls with a flatly disinterested glare and he realizes that he's really fucking fucked—

It's about sex in the beginning.

After that, it's about everything else.

###

four.

"This has to stop," he announces, sitting down on the empty bar stool next to her; she's sipping from a smudged plastic flute of watery champagne at the very same pub they'd met at—but she's wearing sparkling diamond earrings and sleek dark jeans and an ivory cashmere sweater and it's like she's not even trying to blend in. "I'm sick of missing you."

She doesn't look at him.

"You miss the orgasms," she sniffs, toying with the cuff of her sweater. Her nails are painted a dull pastel pink. It doesn't suit her at all.

"While the orgasms were, indeed, both plentiful as well as excellent—"

"Maybe on your side of the bed," she interjects snidely.

"—I'm told that they're really just a bonus when one is in a long-term, committed, monogamous relationship."

It isn't a question, and it isn't a suggestion, and it isn't a proposal.

"Mm," she replies sweetly. "I wouldn't know anything about that, unfortunately."

He snorts.

"You would, though, which is—that's kind of what I'm getting at here, princess."

She sets her jaw.

She squares her shoulders.

She puts down her nearly untouched flute of champagne.

"Sirius?"

"Present."

"What are you doing here?"

"Getting you back?" he tries.

She bites her lip.

She shakes her head.

She sighs.

"You—Sirius—you shouldn't—you're the realest thing I've ever had," she says, wry and wistful. "Okay? And it's—it's sad, isn't it, because I didn't even have you. Not how I wanted."

He reaches for her hand.

"Pansy," he says softly. "Pansy. Look at me, princess."

She takes a deep, ostensibly calming breath and turns towards him; and he's startled, fucking unfairly so, by the glittering sheen of unshed tears clinging to the feathered ends of her lashes.

"What?" she chokes out.

He studies her intently, using his unoccupied hand to tilt her chin up.

"You believe that?" he asks, careful to keep his tone steady. "That we weren't…?"

Her nostrils flare.

"Obviously."

He presses a kiss against the back of their interlocked fingers.

"You're wrong," he says simply. "I've been yours all along, princess—since I stormed over to call you a coward and you laughed in my bloody face."

She hesitates.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

Her lips twitch helplessly before she flashes him a coy, triumphant little half-smile.

"I almost threw my drink at you that night, you know," she says, conversationally. "Think if I had, we could've sped up all this relationship nonsense?"

He chuckles.

"Wouldn't have been able to get rid of me."

"But would it have ended happily? Or with a restraining order?" she muses.

"Neither."

"Oh? So confident."

"Never underestimate the power of Stockholm syndrome," he says sagely.

And she laughs, just like she's supposed to, and then she squeezes his hand, just the once, and he feels fucking invincible.

###

zero.

Sometimes, he tortures himself and thinks about the future.

He thinks about how she'll eventually have to grow up, move on, take the ring and the just-shy-of-arranged betrothal and the boring marital sex in the boring marital bed—he thinks about her being married off to a Nott, a Pucey, fucking hell, a Warrington, if she's really unlucky—he thinks about the children she'll have, lisping toddlers with crooked Flint teeth, maybe, throwing tantrums about ice cream or sugar quills or silly fucking toy broomsticks; he thinks about her eyes, almond-shaped and a rather extraordinary cobalt blue, staring back at him from above a freckled Macmillan nose, possibly; and he thinks about the inevitable picture of her on Page Six of the Prophet, in a bright white wedding dress that'll more than likely come from some invitation-only boutique in Paris with an unpronounceable French name—

He feels like a fucking Seer.

Because she isn't like him. She's rebellious for the sake of being rebellious, not for any greater, overarching purpose—she's smart enough to recognize the evils of the world and the constraints of her quite privileged position in it, but she isn't interested in changing either the world or herself, no, and that isn't a fault in her personality; it's just a fact.

It's a fact that she's loyal to, and doesn't attempt to apologize for, and there is, he knows now, a very specific, understated sort of courage in that.

And so he tortures himself.

And he thinks about the future.

And he wonders if Pansy's old-fashioned enough to make him go to her father for fucking permission before he's allowed to ask her to marry him.

###

five.

"This has to stop," he mutters to himself as he takes a sip of freshly squeezed lemonade and hunches over his plate of blueberry pancakes; across the table, Pansy is holding her left hand out in front of her, showing off the ring he'd put there a few weeks earlier, and cooing to Hermione about cut and clarity and color and carat size—she sounds uncannily like the harpy who'd sold it to him, to be honest, and isn't that a terrifying thought.

"Could be worse," Draco Malfoy—his cousin, bloody fucking hell—remarks quietly, fond grey gaze trained on Hermione's rapidly darkening face. "When I proposed, Granger made me return the ring and donate all the money I'd spent to a charity for war-orphaned giants. Ridiculous woman."

Sirius glowers at his lemonade and wishes he'd had the foresight to add vodka to it.

"And yet you're marrying her in three months."

A stupid grin stretches across the bottom half of Draco's face.

"I am," he agrees, looking altogether too thoughtful for how early in the fucking morning it is. "Can't wait, you know?"

Sirius watches Pansy smile—well, technically she's smirking, but she's radiant and she's happy and he reasons that it amounts to the same thing with her—and then he blinks.

"Yeah," he says, nodding slowly. "I know."

###