The club was choking on its own heat. Insomnia always did that after three in the morning. When the air went thick and soupy with sweat and neon dust, when the bass crawled along the ribs like something feral and half-starved. Remus felt it the way he felt everything these days: in the bones first, then the nerves, then in that spot behind his left eye that never fucking relaxed.

Sirius had abandoned his post near the door again, leaning against a metal pillar like it owed him money, the dim lights catching on the chain around his throat. Remus glanced at him as he dried another glass. Sirius looked like sin tilted on an angle. Long, sharp, and absolutely not doing his job.

But Remus couldn’t blame him.

Not when she was on the stage.

{{user}} was a blaze up there. Christ, she really did a number tonight. Hair stuck to the back of her neck, skin gleaming like she’d been carved out of amber under the strobe lights, heels hitting the pole with a command Remus could practically taste. The crowd had gone feral for her hours ago. They were still slavering.

And Sirius… Sirius wasn’t breathing unless she moved first.

Remus caught himself staring too long, lips pressed into something tight and vaguely self-loathing. The Prewetts paid him to pour drinks, not to moon over the dancers like some lad fresh out of school. But hell. After working here since the night Fabian and Gideon first hung their crooked sign above the street. He’d learned that some people had gravity. She was one of them.

And gravity didn’t give a shit about rules.

Someone whistled too sharply, too close to the stage. That kind of whistle. Sirius’ shoulders tensed. Remus didn’t need to turn to know the look on Sirius’ face: jaw ticking, pupils blown, fists flexing like they already missed the last bastard he’d decked for grabbing at her.

He’d really laid that one out—blood on the floor, teeth on the speaker, Sirius hauled him outside by the collar like he weighed nothing. Remus had needed two shots of whiskey just to look Sirius in the eye afterwards.

When her final song—Barty Crouch Jr.’s wild remix that rattled the whole damn club—finally died out, she stepped off the stage, chest still rising too fast, smile sharp around the edges. Sated from performing, but wrecked in that way that made Remus instinctively want to hand her something cold to hold.

So he did.

The moment she hit the bar, barely more dressed than a sin waiting to happen, Remus already had a bottle of water unscrewed and waiting.

“Here,” he murmured, sliding it into her hand before she even asked. His voice came out too soft. Too careful. “Hydrate. You’ll thank me tomorrow.”

She smiled. One of those small, tired ones that still managed to hit him like a sucker punch, and leaned forward over the bar to grab something from beneath the counter. The angle was… well. It was enough to make Remus’ fingers tighten on the rag he was using. Enough to make his heartbeat stumble.

Sirius saw her before Remus called out to him. He practically materialised at her side, like she’d tugged him in with invisible wire.

“Hell of a performance,” Sirius drawled, though his voice had a rasp to it—the kind that only showed when he’d been choking on adrenaline all night. “You almost made me forget I’m supposed to throw people out, not stare at ’em.”

She snorted, twisting the cap back onto her water. “Almost?”

“Alright, fine. Completely.”

The three of them fell into that familiar little pocket of space—the one that shouldn’t have existed in a club like this, but somehow always did. Bodies pressed close, shoulders nearly touching, the smell of citrus cleaner and stale smoke and the heat radiating off her skin.

She bent over again, reaching for a spare glass. The motion pulled the dim light down her spine, over the glitter clinging to her thighs. Remus swallowed hard. Sirius didn’t bother pretending he wasn’t looking.

“You danced to Barty’s mix tonight,” Remus said, finding something safe to focus on before his brain went up in flames. “Thought he’d gone off-grid.”