AU where Sirius is a monster hunter or something and Remus issss duh a werewolf. But a seductive werewolf 👈🏼😎👉🏼

Okay listen I will wear the myth nerd hat until my bones dissolve, and we always need more Basque culture refs!!!!!! Apologies in advance for going WAY too deep with this. I know you’re a big fan of Sass-ass McGee!Remus, so here ya go :*

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He’s getting too old for this shit.

Usually it’s maidens who have invited some ritual darkness into their bedchambers, knowing exactly what that spell does—Sirius doesn’t buy their pity-posturing for a moment, pretending to be surprised when he explains with his tattooed hand leashing the minor lust demon that this entity they’ve summoned will, eventually, fuck them into mindless, loll-eyed submission. In not so many words. And he gets it; usually the poor girl’s parents are standing there, teary-eyed and shocked, and It must have possessed our girl to summon it! Kill it right now! So, every time, he lies that the banishment ritual must be done in secret for it to work before binding up the creature in one of his empty clay pots, stalking out to the warded clearing beyond his hut, and releasing the creature back into the aether.

Seven times out of ten, the girl tries again in a month. Or maybe it’s eight? At least it’s good coin.

But this? This is ridiculous.

The mark is, undeniably, gorgeous. He’s got a crop of satiny-looking curls slouching over one green-gold eye so perfectly opposite the collar slipping open at his throat to bare a plane of golden skin that it can’t be accidental. It can’t be. Nobody is that alluring on their own when they simply open a door—but perhaps it’s the cursed blood doing it for him.

“I’ve a summons for one Remus Lupin,” Sirius says, stony voice put on with his best Order of Eki rumble-pitch to it, holding up the vellum stamped with the mayor’s own sigil. Back in his heyday, Sirius would have approached with the wax embossment of a duke or even a king—but lately it’s municipalities or nothing. People are getting surprisingly more comfortable with the edges of darker forces nudging into their lives than they used to be, and Sirius wouldn’t have a single moral qualm with that if it didn’t mean he lost out on an alarming number of smaller contracts anymore. He takes work where he can get it.

The mark, Remus, leans against the door jamb and crosses his arms. This slips his tunic even further to trip down over the curve of his shoulder, collarbone jutting almost rude with its careless beauty, and Sirius’ tattooed fingers tighten on the vellum with a very soft crunch. “Who’s asking?”

“The mayor of Aberrial and a priest of the Order of Eki.” Sirius draws the sun-shaped medallion up from his belt, hanging shortly there beside his bag of salts, and holds his glare. Remus only raises an eyebrow.

“And?”

Sirius glances at the vellum, thinking maybe it had gone blank between receiving it from the mayor and making the long, twisting trip into the wood to find this lone cabin. “And,” he says, teeth more than slightly gritted, “you are accused of lycanthropy. I am to perform a series of tests, and if you fail even one of them you are sentenced to death by expulsion of ungodly darkness.” Fuck, did I get that right? Ungodly? Or is it unholy? Who fucking cares.

Instead of breaking with fear, falling to his knees to beg forgiveness or offer a counter-payment to Sirius in exchange for bringing back some other creature’s poor carcass as proof of a completed job, Remus only snorts, turning back to a dinner still steaming on his table to resume a meal clearly interrupted. He doesn’t shut the door. “Alright,” he says over his shoulder, “come in then.”

Sirius steps in and toes the door shut behind him himself, throwing the cabin into cool darkness with night pressing in from outside. He tucks the summons back into his carrying satchel before setting it to the ground heavily and retrieving the silver bar within. Sirius sits in the single chair opposite Remus at his small wooden table while the accused werewolf eats, unphased, as though Sirius were over to discuss the pattern of crop growth in the area instead of read his blood for signs of corruption.

“Touch it.” Without preamble, Sirius extends the silver bar across the table. Remus calmly finishes chewing a bite of blackened meat from his fork, tidily sets his utensils down, and wipes his mouth with a faded blue cloth beside his plate. He shifts in his chair, seeming to get comfortable, and quirks an ichor-sweet smile over at Sirius with something vaguely stubborn behind it before reaching up and grabbing the silver with his entire palm.

His skin begins hissing almost immediately.

Sirius watches with a combination of disgust and distant awe as Remus tightens his grip, holding on for several long seconds, his palm going red and then char-black, surely causing him a realm of torturous pain, but all the while his face holds only a very slight twitch of discomfort as though he’s found a spider in his sugar bowl. When he lets go, he holds up the ruined patch of skin to show Sirius a veritable horror of flesh burnt down almost to the bone. “Oh no,” Remus hums flatly.

Before Sirius can move to make any of the necessary finger symbols for binding a dark creature, a soft tingling warble begins to pool in the air around Remus’ hand. In a matter of moments, Remus’ palm begins healing with hyper-quick strands of flesh stretching to patch over the ragged, burnt hole left behind by the silver. Sirius stares, his pulse picking up sharply, and can only clench his jaw when Remus flexes his unblemished fingers a few times and nod to himself before turning back to his dinner.

“What the fuck are you,” a threatening whisper low in Sirius’ ribs that would cow any lesser creature into spilling every secret compacted in its sorry little body. Remus doesn’t even look up from his plate.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he says around the last bite of meat.

Without warning, Sirius snatches up the plate between them and hurls it across the tiny cabin. It shatters against the back of the hearth, raining bits of pottery into the low-burning fire and collapsing one of the skinny charcoaled logs in a cloud of mute sparks, and for the first time Remus flinches. Sirius clenches his consecrated hand into a warning fist, the lines of tattoos spidering along his fingers beginning to glow the blue-white of Eki’s divine rite. “What. The fuck. Are you,” he repeats in a hiss.

Remus brushes invisible crumbs from his lap and stands, which Sirius mirrors in a tight motion that sees his chair rocking faintly on its uneven legs behind him. Remus turns to face away from Sirius and unceremoniously pulls his tunic off over his head.

The wolven face of Inguma snarls silently at him in a black brand that takes up Remus’ entire back. Sirius’ breath tightens to see it, the deity that goes against every tenet Sirius’ order is mean to stand for, the god of nightmares etched into the skin of such an otherwise enticing body—Stop, no, focus on the contract.

“It’s not just lycanthropy,” Remus is saying when Sirius snaps back to the present. Sirius’ left hand is already in his pouch of salts when Remus turns around again, the front plane of his body thankfully unmarked; or, rather, distractingly unmarked, for Sirius can see the curve of very faint stomach muscles and a peppering of chestnut curls along Remus’ chest from here. Sirius leaps back to his weak defense of frowning again.

“I can fucking see that. What, did you make a deal with him? Let him eat your nightmares for the rest of your life and what, spread his doctrine?”

Remus smiles at that, a smooth smile, much more earnest than the Here We Go Then grin he’d given before handling the silver. It parts his pretty lips to show white teeth that seem for some reason as though they should be pointed. Sirius swallows. Remus looks him up and down and runs his tongue along one eyetooth.

“Well. Can’t make a deal with a god if I am the god.”