No, it was Peter--steady, soothing Peter, Yorkshire farm boy, short and solid with strong hands equally suited to birthing a lamb, sketching a picture, or making him whimper--that Sirius liked the most. Cared for the most.And it was this passage, from Golden Afternoon [NC-17], that made me really sit up and take notice of
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Peter who never made him feel like a nuisance or a child, who never had anyone better to do, who listened--really *listened*--to him. Who liked him just as much whether he was curled up at the foot of his bed or with him under the covers. Who smiled at him like he was the world.This characterization of Peter is nothing like my own, and it's vivid, deftly drawn, comes at canon from a completely fresh angle -- "farmboy" suggests naive, "sketching a picture" goes to right-brained, inarticulate, "like he was the world" suggests obsessed. We simultaneously see through Sirius's eyes, and our own. If you've never read this pairing, this is the perfect place to start.
Then there was the sequel, The Story of How Hard We Tried [NC-17], which takes on the huge challenge of making us believe these two in a relationship as adults. Again,
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Peter was painting the walls of their flat. At first Sirius thought it was Eden, green and lush, and perhaps it was but there were figures, two of them, androgynous, and they were approaching a gated hedge, almost stepping through it and it didn’t seem to be the desert that they were being exiled to. Peter threw all of himself into the painting. If he wasn’t painting, he was downstairs drinking in the pub, where Sirius never went anymore, or his ragged breath beat a feeble tattoo as they made love on the old brass bed on the far side of the room. He never seemed to have much breath any more.I see Peter hunched over his beer, thinking in secrets and feverish paint. I *feel* this. Much more of the right-brained Peter, his trouble with reading, his mumbled words -- "Our last day, I reckon". The shapes of Sirius's tattoos (we know this Peter thinks in shapes --
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I'd been planning to rec those two fics for a long time (way too long, really), and another excellent Sirius/Peter fic came down the pike today:
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Now go forth, ye fen, and send feedback!
Also:
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...wait for it...
...Umbrella.
And:
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