Chapter Text
Remus knows that every time he is hauled before Marlene McKinnon, it’s never because she wants to share good news.
Granted, it doesn’t happen often. For the most part, the big bosses leave him well alone. They know he’s talented. They know he has accrued an impressive cult fanbase. They know he more than pays for the paltry salary they pay him each month.
And because of this, whenever he is summoned for a meeting in the boss’s office, he knows the company wants him to do something that won’t sit well with him. In fact, on occasion, it’s because they want him to do something downright awful.
He pushes the door open and pokes his head around tentatively, dread bubbling away in the pit of his stomach.
The woman sitting at the desk barely looks up, but doesn’t say anything to indicate that she isn’t ready for him. He knows she’s not one to mince her words, so he walks into the room and takes a seat.
“Two seconds,” she says eventually as she finishes typing something, almost inhumanly quickly. She glances up and he finds himself gearing up for a battle, hands balling into fists out of sight under the desk.
“Remus,” she says eventually. Her voice is low and her manner characteristically brusque. “How are you?” Her cropped, blonde hair is expertly coiffed, leaving no strand out of place. Her lips are painted blood-red and her teeth are white and pointy, like a sexy, terrifying vampire.
“I’m fine,” he says, inwardly cursing the way his voice wavers under the weight of her gaze. “How are you?”
“Yes, yes, you know,” she allows, giving away absolutely bugger all, in classic Marlene style. “Look, let’s cut to the chase, shall we? I have an assignment for you.”
“Right,” he says.
“You’re not going to like it.”
He sighs. They have been here before and it’s never ended well. “I assumed.”
“Tell me, Remus. What do you know about Sirius Black?” she asks, unmoved.
“The footballer?”
“The footballer.”
“I know that he collects column inches like my mother does stamps. I know that he’s notoriously media-shy and that there’s a rumour going ‘round that he has a thing with one of Little Mix.” He heaves in a deep breath. “Couldn’t tell you which one. And that’s about it.”
She nods. “There’s one other crucial thing you’ve conveniently omitted.” The corner of her lip tilts up diabolically. “He’s devilishly handsome..”
Remus scoffs audibly and immediately wishes he could take it back. She is his boss, after all. “Not your type,” he says eventually, knowing that she is very much very gay.
“No,” she concedes. “But the people love him. And I go where the people tell me to. And the British people have emphatically told me that they love two things: pretty boys and football.”
“Just tell me,” he groans, pained, resigned.
“The European Championship is coming up. Black is playing for the England team and everyone wants a piece of him. But he’s got a blanket ban on all press interviews. Says he’s shy; stage fright, you know.” She obviously doesn’t believe a word of it as she drums her perfectly manicured fingernails on her desk.
“Right.”
“But!” She sits up schemingly. “To everyone’s surprise and delight, he’s agreed to bend the rules; to snap them in half entirely, really. He has signed up to a fly-on-the-wall documentary, granting a one month, all access pass to his life during the tournament. We’ll call it an ‘intimate exposé’, and the public will lap up every seedy second.”
Remus, who doesn’t like where this is going one bit, rubs at his tired eyes and is brave enough to make eye contact. “What’s the catch?”
“There is a condition.” She tucks her hair behind her ear. “Don’t look at me like that, Remus. Believe me, if there were any way for us to avoid this, I would not be talking to you right now.”
He slumps down in his seat and wonders whether she has any brandy snaffled away in that corner cupboard that she keeps obsessively locked, wonders whether she’d share it with him even if she did.
“He requested you by name,” she explains. “Said he wouldn’t do it unless you were the filmmaker; unless it’s you with the camera in your hand, spending all the time with him, asking all the questions.”
He bristles, and puts a lot of effort into covering it up. Of all the things he expected her to say, that wasn’t one of them.
“How the fuck does Sirius Black even know who I am?”
She shrugs, distinctly implying that she has given it no thought; implying that giving it thought would be beneath her pay grade.
Remus isn’t one to throw his toys out of the pram, but the thought of spending a whole month trailing after some overpaid primadonna as he talks about how hard he has it because of all the pressure on his young, beautiful shoulders holds about as much appeal as spending an evening in the pub with Nigel Farage.
“What happens if I say no?”
She blinks at him. “Remus, you are one of the most brilliant, insightful filmmakers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. We’re incredibly lucky that we have you, and that you continue to deliver such breathtakingly beautiful work with every attempt.”
He snorts, unmoved. “So you’d sack me?” he asks, already knowing the answer.
“Affirmative,” she nods, all business. “We would sack you. We have already reached a deal with the broadcaster, and I won’t tell you what it’s worth but it’s more money than you will ever see in your life. And if it’s any consolation, I’d be genuinely sad about losing you. That doesn’t happen very often.”
She stands up, whips a key out of the pocket of her impeccably tailored suit and, with a practised motion, unlocks the little mahogany corner cupboard.
“Sherry?”
He nods, bitterness and betrayal sloshing around inside him, but he knows it’ll do him no good.
“I’ll make it a double,” she says smoothly, pouring the brown liquid into two cut crystal tumblers. She slides one across the desk to him and it stops just before it falls over the edge.
“When do we have to start?” he asks, taking a sip of the too-sweet drink.
She downs the contents of her glass in one slick motion. “Next Wednesday. And if you’re lucky, it might only last a couple of weeks - if England get booted out early on. Although, I’m fairly sure you can get done for treason if you actively will these things to happen.”
“I’m fairly sure you can also get done for treason if you say a word against Sirius Black; the nation’s best bad-boy darling.”
“Well then,” she smiles unkindly. “You’ll just have to find his best side, won’t you? No pressure, darling.”
--
When he tells his mother that he will be doing a documentary about football which will be broadcast on national television, he thinks she might laugh so much that it triggers a stroke. Luckily, she seems to recover just fine and is able to mock him perfectly proficiently.
“But you’ve never picked up a football in your life,” she pants between residual laughs.
“I think I did once, when we were on that holiday in Cornwall and Uncle Eddie decided he needed to toughen me up.”
“Do you know anything about sport, Remus? Those men are going to eat you alive!”
He harrumphs a bit at this and hangs up the phone, but in truth, he shares her concern.
To combat some of his trepidation, he spends three days solid doing the unthinkable: learning everything there is to know about the supposedly beautiful game, and about its most divisive player, Sirius Orion Black. He watches Youtube videos which teach him the offside rule, learns all there is to know about different formations, managers, tactics, chants. He takes it all in until his eyes burn from the screen time until he relents and takes a break, peeling himself off his leather desk chair and indulging in a glass of spicy red wine on his balcony, watching the sun set over Highbury Fields and soaking in the last of the light.
He heads back to it around ten, turning on the radio to help him stay awake. He Googles Sirius’s name and a whole host of images fill his screen, of a man in his late twenties, roguish and tattooed, hair long and dark and wild. There are hundreds of photos, taken, no doubt, by intrusive paparazzi with no regard for this man’s right to a private life, and it hits Remus that he can’t find a single one where he is looking at the camera; where he is an active participant in this transaction and actually appears to consent to having his photo taken.
He reads all about his family, the Blacks. He is estranged from them and nobody quite knows why, but speculation is rife. There are rumours that he stole from them, that he and his brother had a physical fight over a shared childhood love, that once Sirius became rich and famous, he deemed himself too good for their company and swiftly cut off all association with them.
There are fan sites. Hundreds of them, but the biggest is ‘Black’s Bitches’, a group of devoted followers who religiously fill up the front row of his every game; home and away.
He falls into bed, a deep gnawing fatigue eating away at him, but even though his head hitting the pillow feels like the sweetest thing he can imagine, sleep doesn’t come easily. He finds himself thinking hard, obsessively, about the weeks to come, wonders how he’ll make it through in one piece (for he is no sports journalist, and it’s clear that Sirius Black is no normal subject).
His cat, Henrietta, decides that his chest is where she will sleep for the evening. She is not a small beast and he can only just muster enough breath that he doesn’t have to shove her off and make her sleep elsewhere.
The combination of distractions means that he barely sleeps at all.
--
He is under strict instructions not to go to the press room when he reaches the training ground, where he and the players will live and stay for the next few weeks. There is going to be a press conference with the whole team, but it’s been made clear by Sirius’s agent, Mary, that he will speak little, if at all in that forum. Instead, he has requested that Remus meets him afterwards in a room where it will just be the two of them. No cameras.
Remus is not to wear a wire, nor to record their preliminary discussions via any means. He has been forced to sign a contract with a thousand caveats, all of which have led to him sitting in a small meeting room, cup of ice cold water in his hand, knee bouncing up and down with the sort of creeping nerves he finds difficult to stomach.
As a profoundly introverted man, he has had to learn some coping mechanisms to get him through these sorts of things. After all, he has chosen a profession where he must get to know his subjects, win their trust, encourage authenticity and put together a picture of them that is much truer than the one usually presented by the insensitive media.
He has won awards for this, but only because he has practised, practised, practised. Only because he has learned to pretend.
He has never yet found a way to still those nerves that kick in just before he meets whoever it is and he has to thrust his hands into his pockets to stop himself from flicking his biro on and off.
There is a huge screen one one side of the room that broadcasts the press conference.
Remus spots Sirius, sitting on the end of the bench and looking out moodily into the audience. The majority of questions are fielded by the team captain, James Potter; an appealing sort of guy with trendy round glasses, mid-brown skin, and hair that stands on end, as if it has a personality of its own.
Sirius is asked one question directly, about whether he thinks Croatia - their first opponent - can stand up to the strong attack posed by England.
He quirks an eyebrow and looks away from all the cameras shoved in his face. “Let’s hope not,” he says, and that, Remus gathers, will be the extent of his contribution.
When the conference ends, Remus’s nerves are turned up to near maximum. He knows Sirius will be making his way through the hotel and closer to him. The screen is now showing coverage of the build up to the tournament, and Remus is half-watching it when the door swings slowly open.
The man who walks into the room is shorter than Remus expected, with eyes that latch onto his own in a way that’s a little alarming.
Remus has seen them before, obviously; Sirius Black’s eyes.
Black’s face is plastered over every tabloid, every billboard, every magazine cover this side of the channel, but whenever Remus has passively taken those in previously, the pale grey of his eyes has seemed cold, detached.
There is nothing cold or detached about the intense gaze Sirius fixes him with now. In fact, Remus would go as far as to say they are... warm, spirited, fixed right on him so that he finds his cheeks burning under the weight of his gaze.
Remus stands up because he doesn’t know what else to do. He’s lanky and ungainly at the best of times, but when he trips over the strap of his bag and stumbles forward, spilling half of his water all over his shoes, he hopes that a secret trap door will open up beneath him and swallow him up. He probably wouldn’t even care if there were a shark-infested pool underneath, waiting to engulf him. He’d still take his chances over the awkwardness of this encounter.
Sirius steps forward to help him, thrusting a strong arm out to steady him as he loses his balance. His hand grips onto his upper arm and he looks up, right at Remus, eyes bright and disquieting.
“Hey, there,” he says, and his voice sounds different, too: richer, less flat. His hand is tight on Remus’s arm, still. “You okay?”
All Remus can think is stop blushing, you ridiculous wanker , as he dusts himself down and Sirius, finally, loosens his grip.
“I’m fine,” he lies, and tries his best at a smile that doesn’t look too forced. He reaches out to shake Sirius’s hand.
Sirius’s handshake is firm, his palm warm and dry. His own smile doesn’t seem particularly rehearsed, and Remus wonders whether it might be a permanent fixture.
“Remus Lupin,” he says enthusiastically. “You’re here!”
“I am,” Remus concedes, and his limbs still feel impossibly awkward and alien. “It’s very nice to finally meet you.”
He’s surprised to find that he really does mean that last part, and he begins to think that maybe this next few weeks won’t feel like such a horrendous chore after all.
“And you,” Sirius says genuinely. “I’ve watched your documentaries.”
Remus would be taken aback for this if not for Marlene’s tip off, not quite a week ago.
“Which ones?” he asks.
“Oh,” Sirius grins sheepishly. “Well, all of them, I think. I was absolutely destroyed by the one about young men who die by suicide. I couldn’t think about anything else for a week. It was so bloody well done, so deftly narrated and not at all hammy.”
Remus is taken aback by that. It’s one of the works he’s proudest of, exploring the factors behind rising suicide rates, particularly in the young and displaced. He lived and breathed that project for a whole year, and it’s one of his more obscure outputs, having received only very limited success.
But he loves it. He’d thought he was the only one.
“Oh,” Remus nods. “I- nobody’s really seen that one. How did you find it?”
A flicker of guilt crosses Sirius’s face before it’s replaced by that same easy smile. “If I say that I contacted your production company and asked for a copy, would you think I was a creepy stalker?”
“Yes,” Remus deadpans, but he’s smiling, and they both take a seat, facing each other like this is already an interview. He already feels more relaxed about the whole thing, but there’s still an element of forced formality about the encounter.
“So,” he says after a moment, delving into his bag for a notebook and pen. “I’ve been told that you are strictly against me recording any of this meeting.”
Sirius bursts out into a huge, barking laugh. “Is that what Mary told you? Amazing. I really need to give that woman a pay rise.”
Remus obviously looks confused because Sirius tilts his head to one side and surveys him, as if he’s fascinating and a little bit naïve.
“Mary is very good at protecting me,” he explains. “Thanks to her, I can just get on with the football and I don’t need to get all that involved in the other stuff.”
“Other stuff?” Remus asks, though he suspects he knows what Sirius is talking about.
“The public image stuff. The media .” He whispers it like it’s a dirty word. “In fact, it was me who had to convince her this was a good idea, not the other way round.”
Remus is surprised at that, too. He nods encouragingly.
“I’m not very good at all of this.” Sirius gestures around the room to demonstrate. “The frills, you know. I tend to be either far too chatty or much too sulky. There isn’t really a happy medium with me. I wear my heart on my sleeve and it gets me into trouble, so we’ve cultivated this image where I just don’t really talk at all. It makes my life ten times easier and I’m less likely to bring the sport into disrepute,” he gestures in a circular motion with his fingers, “ya-da-ya-da-ya-da”.
Remus can’t help but laugh as everything he thought he knew about the man before him gets flipped on its head. “So you’re actually all sunshine and light?”
Sirius’s mouth does something funny and he fixes Remus with an inscrutable look. “Yep. Something like that.”
Remus nods coarsely. “Cool. Well, you don’t have to pretend to be anything you’re not while I’m around.” He picks his bag up and takes out his favourite hand-held camcorder. “This is what I’ll be using to film you, for the most part. And what will make for good content is if you try to feel as relaxed as possible. Imagine the camera’s not there at all and we’re just having a conversation.”
“Okay,” Sirius nods, as if he’s really listening and taking it all in. “So I just look at you, not the camera?”
“Exactly. And I’ll just tape moments that I think will be interesting, or where there’s something I think I and the viewers will want to know the answer to.”
Sirius tucks an errant strand of hair behind his ear and looks at Remus from under long eyelashes. “Okay.”
“If there’s anything you’re uncomfortable with, we’ll come up with a safe word and I’ll stop filming, no questions asked.”
Sirius raises an eyebrow. “A safe word? Like in sex?”
“Exactly. What shall we make it? Mongoose? Blamanche? It has to be something we won’t accidentally say in the course of general chit chat.”
“Hogwarts,” Sirius nods, somehow solemn and jokey at the same time.
“What on earth is Hogwarts?” Remus laughs.
“It’s not anything , silly. Just the warts one would happen to find on a pig, or a hog, if you will.”
Remus sniffs another laugh, nodding and scribbling their newly made up safe word in the cover of his notebook. “Hogwarts,” he agrees, and Sirius looks pleased.
“Now, there are a number of things we need to go through. Don’t worry about swearing; we can cut it out if needed. If the camera is filming, I’ll give you a thumbs up, and if there’s anything you would like struck from the record, we can absolutely do that. It’s really important that the two of us view this film as a collaborative effort, one that we’re both happy with when it’s done. That won’t happen if I include anything you’re uncomfortable with, or if you’re worrying all the time that that might happen, so much so that you’re terrified of saying anything at all candid.”
Sirius nods, and he looks tired.
“Now, according to the contract we’ve both signed, this is an all-access kind of affair. That means I technically have contractual permission to follow you anywhere, to film anything. But you needn’t worry: the contract makes provision to exclude any nudity, anything sexual, or anything that might be reputationally damaging. What it hopefully does mean is that we get a genuine flavour for your experience as we go through the tournament: what you eat, when you practise, who on the team you’re closest with - all of the stuff your fans are dying to know.”
Sirius rubs at an eye socket which looks a bit red and irritated, like he’s been scratching or has seasonal allergies, or something. Maybe he’s just looking at an overwhelmed man who’s wondering what he’s got himself into.
“I know this is all new to you,” Remus says in the kindest voice he can muster. He fights the urge to reach out a hand to Sirius’s tattooed forearm. “Your comfort and consent are my number one priority. I don’t ever want you to feel like you’re not in control, here, and I think that’s the most important thing you can understand going into this.”
Sirius looks up at him, and there’s a gratefulness to the tilt of his eyebrow, as if he’s been worried about just that for some time and Remus has hit the nail on the head on the first attempt.
“Now,” Remus says, a bit more lightly. “What we haven’t covered yet is that I am not a sports journalist. In fact, I think you may have chosen the least sporty person this side of the Thames to make this film.” He pauses to take in Sirius’s tight smile. “So what we’re going to have to do is come up with a way to plug some of those gaps. Actually, I think this could work in our favour because we can film you while you explain some of the more technical aspects to me, and it will make the documentary more accessible to the masses, not just to the blokes who make up the majority of football fans, who have a beer belly and genuinely know the offside rule.”
Sirius smiles widely. “Do you know the offside rule, Remus?”
“Yes,” Remus replies haughtily. “I’ve known it for one whole week now, so... you know, you can just...”
Don’t say fuck off. Don’t say fuck off.
“Fuck off.”
Splendid.
Sirius bursts out laughing, eyes shining brightly. “Very fair,” he says. “I’ll fuck off.”
Remus smiles at him and shakes his head minutely. “Sorry,” he huffs. “I’m not usually in the habit of telling my subjects to fuck off.”
Sirius, still grinning from ear to ear, takes a moment to take a good long sip of his isotonic drink which is a lurid shade of blue. “No, it’s fine. Believe me, you’ll want to tell me to fuck off far more than that before all this is over. Probably best that you start getting them in early.”
Remus doesn’t really believe that for a second. In fact, the first few minutes they have spent together have been much easier than he could have hoped. Sirius, far from being the taciturn, reluctant participant that Remus assumed he’d have to squeeze every drop of humanity out of, is likeable. He’s communicative and approachable and the camera is really going to love him.
Remus is both relieved and disappointed by these discoveries. There’s no doubt that Sirius having an infectious, open demeanour will make the task of making him look good, look knowable , ten times easier. Except, Remus doesn’t really go for easy. He likes to choose topics that will challenge the viewer, likes to weave together a narrative that tears up the binary, demonstrates that messy humans live their messy lives in the messy grey area between good and bad; wrong and right.
It doesn’t feel like there will be all that much that is grey or messy, here; just a straightforward portrayal of a man the media has got wrong over the years, a man who is tremendously good at football and just wants to be allowed to get on with it.
Nevermind. He can use the opportunity to breeze through the next few weeks, think about some projects he can embark on once all of this is over.
Sirius is looking at him like he wants to ask him something, biting at his lower lip.
“So, I’ll see you bright and early in the morning for us to start filming,” Remus announces. “Anything you want to ask me in the meantime?”
Sirius’s eyebrows rise up a little on his forehead, but he shakes his head.
“Okay, well here’s my card. It’s got my phone number on if you think of anything.” He stands and pops the business card into Sirius’s waiting grasp. Sirius smiles and nods, but there’s something quite anxious about the way he’s holding himself, looking up at Remus from his seat.
Remus shakes off the feeling and makes his way to the entrance he came in. Sirius stays seated like he’s not quite in the room, looking down at the patterned carpet and twisting his hands together distractedly.
“I’m dying to ask,” Remus says as he has a hand on the door, ready to leave. Sirius looks right at him, and there’s no mistaking the fear in his eyes as he does. “Why did you insist on it being me? Marlene, my boss- she said you refused to do this with anyone else.”
Sirius appears ill at ease. He runs a hand through his thick hair so that the right side stands up higher than the left, leaving glossy black strands in disarray. Then he shakes his head, hair falling over his eyes. “Oh, fuck it,” he says. “It had to be you because I like your documentaries; love them, even. I like the passion you have for what you do. I like the way you tell stories. I know you treat your subjects sensitively, and because of that, I know you won’t lose your shit when I tell you... that I’m gay and I need your help to tell the world.”
He says that last part in one big rush of breath, scrunching up his face as if afraid of the reaction he will get. He looks young. So young. And suddenly, looking into his eyes, Remus can see that nothing is binary, now; not black or white, but decidedly, messily grey.
Remus can’t help that his eyes widen at Sirius’s words, can’t help that Sirius clocks it and stares down into his lap a little sadly, like the gesture confirms everything he’s been fearing. What he can help is what he says and does next. And so, he moves away from the door, walks back into the room and sits down again, opening his notebook and smoothing down the next clean page.
“Right then,” he says solemnly, eyeing Sirius from his perch. “How do we want to do this?”