Archive of Our Own

It’s not that I hate magic. In fact, I very much enjoy it. I love hearing a whispered ‘Alohomora’ at the house down the street when the Townsend’s teenage son returns from sneaking out in the middle of the night, but forgot to leave the front door unlocked. I love seeing the bright, white light of a Lumos spell during particularly foggy days, or watching students practice their Flagrate with a fiery tic-tac-toe in the air or Immobulus in an intensely competitive game of tag.

No, it’s not that I hate magic.

 I just can’t do it.

So, of course, I never got my letter to Hogwarts, despite how I could faintly see the castle in the distance, through the mountains. I never got to buy a wand from Ollivander’s shop, despite having visited Diagon Alley a hundred-thousand times. I’ve never owned an owl, despite my father having received numerous messages through them.

I’ve never even properly met a Weasley, for Merlin’s sake and they’re everywhere.

 Evidently.

My father was a wizard. A damn good one. Nothing special – nothing fate-determining like Albus Dumbledore, or Harry bloody Potter, but wonderful, nonetheless.

But my mother was a muggle. Not that I ever knew her, she left before I could even speak. I’ve always blamed her for my lack of magic, for all the times the other kids in Hogsmeade muttered ‘Squib’ at me from under their breath. Or to my face, occasionally. I blamed her, every year, when I watched owls fly in with letters from Hogwarts, having known since I was eleven that there wasn’t one for me. I blamed her when I lost my father, even though that part really hadn’t been her fault. It hadn’t really been anyone’s fault. But I still liked to blame her for it.

 I lost my father when I was nineteen. That was twelve years ago. Nothing magic related – nothing Unforgiveable. He was just sick. Yeah, even wizards get sick.

Of course, nobody took much notice of the death of my father, because it happened on the night after the murders of James and Lily Potter. Everyone was either in a panic over the arrest of Sirius Black, for having given up the Potter’s location, or celebratory over the evident defeat of You-Know-Who. Even if I hadn’t just lost my father, I still would have been one of the ones left shocked and despondent over the whole thing. Like Remus Lupin, who lost all four of his friends in a single night. Except, I only imagined they were my friends, too.

The Marauders, as I’d heard them called themselves, constantly visited Hogsmeade – I watched them grow up, knowing that I would have been in some of their classes – that I might would’ve been sorted into Gryffindor, just as they were. They were celebrities in my eyes. I day-dreamed about what my life would be like if I knew them. I might have been seated next to Peter in Potions, or helped James win the heart of Lily Evans, or been tutored by Remus in Defense Against the Dark Arts, or – and this was my favorite fantasy – snogged brainless by Sirius Black. Oh, Merlin, did I enjoy considering that one often enough. He was a fucking vision.

And then Sirius betrayed everyone – Lily and James Potter were murdered by He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, because of information that had been divulged to the Death Eaters by Sirius, and, evidently in an attempt to escape, Sirius had then murdered Peter Pettigrew.

After that night, and after my father died, my life was in near ruin. At nineteen, I didn’t have any marketable skills, magic or otherwise, so I got a job as a barkeep at Hog’s Head. It’s not an entirely reputable place, but no upstanding wizarding shop would hire a nineteen-year-old girl who couldn’t do a spit of magic.

Besides, over the years, I’ve gotten quite fond of the place. Especially visits from Hagrid. He’ll talk for hours about Hogwarts and Professor Dumbledore, if he’s allowed, and I don’t often feel the desire to stop him. Sometimes, Aberforth will get tired of hearing about how wonderful his older brother is and make Hagrid leave, but more often than not, I see him smiling to himself.

So, no. I don’t hate magic. I envy it.

A sharp, biting breeze tugged at the back of my neck, so I pulled up my jumper, trapping my plum purple hair under the collar. It wasn’t even fall – not yet, it was barely August – but there was a strangely cold wind blowing down from the direction of the castle. If I believed in omens, it would make me nervous. I would run home and read the tea leaves and look for a sign of what terror to expect. But working at Hog’s Head with the brother of Albus Dumbledore made me a little less than wary. Aberforth was very protective of his own. Besides, I never saw anything in the tea leaves. A jumbled mess. A forest of tea leaves. A puppy, maybe, once.

Tonight was, however, strikingly different from other nights. Maybe believing in omens might make me walk a little bit faster, saving me from some horrible fate. Because just tonight, Hagrid had stopped by to speak in hushed tones with Aberforth. While they retreated to the ‘office’ in the back, I was still able to hear most of what was said, as half-giant Hagrid doesn’t exactly have a church-mouse quality to his voice.

Sirius Black had escaped from Azkaban.

I had been wiping down the tables when I heard Hagrid’s booming voice rattle the rickety walls of Hog’s Head with the news. My hand slid to a stop, the dirty water in the rag ringing back onto the table from the subconscious tightening of my fist around it. 

My pace might have been slightly faster than it had been the night before. Especially after seeing that picture in The Daily Prophet – Gods, he just looked manic. Completely, frighteningly, clinically insane. Twelve years in Azkaban would do that to any person, even more so to the person who would sell out one best mate and his wife, and murder another in cold blood, leaving only his pinky finger to even identify the remains. Though, I never wanted to believe that Sirius had done any of it. For a long time, I waited for news from the Ministry, clearing him of all charges, having caught the real culprit. But that news never came.

 Hagrid had said, in what he must’ve thought was a whisper, that ‘Sirius Black is comin’ fer Harry, since he’s becomin’ a bit of a problem fer You-Know-Who.’ Hagrid’s words.

How exactly he escaped was still a mystery – he was the first person to ever successfully escape from Azkaban. Everyone attributed it to his affiliations with Death Eaters. Somehow.

Finally, my house was in sight – I let out a tiny sigh of relief. It was ridiculous to think that notorious criminal and murderer, Sirius Black, would have any reason to come after a nobody like me, but in the dark, all fears are magnified.

Just as I unlocked the front door, I heard a soft rustle come from the patch of woods behind my house. I nearly screamed bloody fucking murder. While I managed to keep the scream down, I did jump behind the safety of the door to see a dog, limping toward me. I say dog, but it wasn’t the neighbor’s poodle, it was practically a Grim. Somewhere in between a domestic dog and a wild wolf – huge and black and shaggy and wet. And dying, apparently. It whimpered softly, breathing with immense labor as it collapsed onto the tops of my feet.

Well, I couldn’t just leave it. I’d always had a soft spot for animals, dogs in particular. I knelt to pick it up – it was much heavier than it looked and it looked like a great dead weight – and heaved it through the threshold, setting the giant thing down in front of the fire place. It was much too warm for a fire, but I suddenly felt chilled to my bones – and the poor, drenched creature was shaking in my arms. I had to dry and warm it.  

After making sure the lock on the front door was locked – about four times – I lit a fire and managed to find some old blankets to wrap – what I discovered was a him – in. He still shook, incredibly, so I knelt beside him and pulled my fingers along between his ears. It seemed to calm him, if only slightly.

Once I had given him some time to warm, I pulled back the layer of blankets I had wrapped him in to inspect my patient. He wasn’t necessarily injured – there weren’t any obvious signs of physical injury, at least. Just to be sure, I worked his paws a bit – about as big as my hands – moving them around and up and down. Though he didn’t move, he watched me through dark, wide eyes. I pressed his ribs a little, his soft, fuzzy tummy a little, but no bones seemed to be broken, based on his lack of painful yelping. But he was half-starved. His patchy fur looked like it was barely hanging onto his bones, his waist half the size of his rib-cage.

I sat back on my heels with a sigh as I looked at my new house mate. With a smile, I rubbed his ears a minute before walking over to the adjoining kitchen. What do you feed a dog? I’d never even fed a stray. In desperation, I tore open cupboards and cabinets and the fridge until I found a pack of steaks I had gotten from the butcher last week. Perfect.

While I was fairly sure it was fine for a dog to eat raw meat, especially this one, as it looked like it could live off of what it could kill, I couldn’t bring myself to give it to him raw. I seared it for a few minutes before setting it on a plate in front of him, along with a bowl of water.

He sniffed at it for only a second before devouring it, nearly whole, followed by slurping up the water, practically in one giant gulp, accommodated by an enormous tongue.

“Bloody hell, pup, you were starved,” I laughed as I pushed my fingers between his ears again. His fur had already dried next to the fire, and his shivering had stopped completely. He leaned his head to the side, his cold, wet nose touching the inside of my arm, and he licked softly. “All right, then? You’re welcome,” I grinned as I held his face in my hands.

He watched me closely as I stood, pulling the boots from my feet and setting them next to the front door, and he continued to watch me as I tugged the muddy trousers from my legs.

“You’re not getting another steak until morning, mate,” I laughed from my room as I climbed into my bed – the light from the fire the only thing illuminating the house.

Just as I had begun to close my eyes, I felt a cold nose against my hand, where it hung from the edge of my mattress. I peeked open one eye, just as the giant beast jumped onto the bed and curled warmly against me. While he didn’t particularly smell of roses, the soft contact of his still warm fur against my skin was welcomed. I scratched my fingers against his belly before draping my arm across him, keeping him close. He let out a contented huff through his nose.

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 The warm breath of my companion fell against my neck as I woke the next morning. I had nearly forgotten he was there – we had evidently both slept quite soundly. Without yet opening my eyes, I pulled my hand through the fur on his head as it lay against my chest – somehow it felt different than it had last night – softer, finer, but more matted. His warmth felt just the same.

“You smell like wet dog,” I laughed just as my fingers brushed against … skin.

He laughed in response. And my fingers fell on his ear. His human ear.

My eyes flew open and his panicked, human eyes met mine as I rushed toward the headboard – away from him. He did very much the same, stepping quickly off the bed and yanking a sheet from the bed to hold in front of himself. He was completely stark naked.

 The manic expression in his face was one I recognized from the papers.

Sirius Black was standing in front of me, a sheet draped over his …

“Uh, hullo,” he said softly, glancing down and clearing his throat. “Apologies, for this.”

“I’m phoning the Ministry,” I said immediately, holding my hands against my chest as I looked carefully at the man who had just been a dog the night before. If I thought he had looked emaciated as a dog, it was worse – much worse – as a man. Every bone in his body prodded his skin from the inside, his hair – on his head and on his face – was wild and unkempt. He looked younger in person, despite the worry in his eyes. And maybe, slightly less manic.

“I cannot let you do that,” he said, sighing.

“You’re an Animagus,” I replied in a shaking voice. “That’s how you got out.” He let his head fall, and I considered jolting for the door while he wasn’t paying attention.

“I hadn’t meant to stay,” he admitted quietly. “But you were so kind to me.”

“Because I had no idea that you were Sirius fucking Black,” I hissed in response. Though his head was down, I noticed that he was nearly smiling at my outburst.

“Would you feel better if I were still a dog?” he asked.

“I would feel better if you were still in Azkaban!” I shouted. His near-smile disappeared. For some reason, in that brief moment, I wanted to bring it back. The expression that replaced it made it seem like he would do anything not to go back to Azkaban. He would kill me if he had to. That was evident from the look he was giving me.

“That is an impossibility,” he growled, like the dog in him.

“I’m not going to harbor a fugitive. Kill me if you have to, Mr. Black,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him bravely, though my heart was pounding.

“Of all the things I would do to you, killing is not on the list,” he replied absently, glancing around the room. My eyebrow rose. What exactly did he mean by that? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. By the way he was looking around, it looked like I might not have to find out – he seemed to be looking for a means of escape. Though, I wasn’t sure how he intended to make a break for it in broad daylight, running starkers through a village of witches and wizards who had been over-stimulated with moving images of his manic face.

“Torture me to insanity, then? That’s what the Death Eaters like to do, isn’t it?” I snapped, remembering the story I had heard about Frank and Alice Longbottom.

“I am not a Death Eater!” he howled, taking a large step toward where I cowered on the bed. I shrunk back even further toward the headboard. At my reaction, his posture seemed to soften. Was this the same Sirius Black who had spent the last twelve years in Azkaban? This naked man, who had the respect to cover himself in front of a woman, who vehemently resented being lumped in with the Death Eaters, who softened at the notion that he had frightened me?

“Then, who are you, Sirius Black?” I asked cautiously.

“The one who will set right that which was wronged,” he replied instantly, looking straight into my eyes, though not with intimidation. Briefly, as his eyes met mine, I was starkly reminded of my 16-year-old fantasies about Sirius Black. I almost let them blush my cheeks.

“You can’t stay,” I suddenly ruled aloud. His dark eyes narrowed in my direction.

“If I’m the horrible fiend everyone assumes that I am, what makes you think you can do anything to keep me from staying?” he threatened. My defensive position fell. He was right.

“I’ll phone the Ministry,” I retorted. He huffed.

“You said that. You’ve yet to do it.” He watched me carefully.

“Why do you even want to stay?” I asked quietly.

“Believe it or not, I’d rather not risk being found in the woods. Like this,” he swept an arm out to one side, keeping the other hand rather tightly onto the sheet. “It’s difficult to remain a dog while you’re asleep. Obviously.”

“You’ve no wand,” I finally recognized. “You can’t keep me here.” He took a step forward and leaned down into my face. I stopped breathing.

“Oh, believe me,” his eyes traveled over my face. “I don’t need my wand for that.”

“You think you can overpower me? As thin as you are?” I ask, swallowing hard.

“Right now, yes,” he emphasized in a slow, outward breath that fell against my neck. At the sound of that word, in his breath, I had to emphatically remind myself that he was, in fact, a murderer. My teenage crush was taking over my consciousness.

“What about Harry Potter? Aren’t you going after him?” I replied in a shaking voice.

“Harry is protected. For now. With Mo… – with Remus.”

“Remus Lupin? He’s working with you?” I asked, incredulously. Remus was always the more sound-minded of the four boys. No way he was working with a Death Eater.

“No. But he’s watching Harry. That’s all I need for now.”

“What will you do with Harry?” I asked nervously. He furrowed his eyebrows.

“I’m his godfather. I’m going to take care of him,” he stated definitively.

“But you’re responsible for the deaths of his parents.” In shock of his answer, I began to argue, but he quickly withdrew from my face, turning and running his hand through his long, dark hair. Considering he had taken the time to cover himself with the sheet, he must’ve forgotten that it didn’t extend to the back, as well. Death Eater or not, the view was rather spectacular. I had to mentally admonish myself for thinking so.

“Someone was responsible for that night, but it was not me.” When he finally turned, his eyes glowed and his hands were shaking. Was I believing this lunatic?

“Suppose I believed you,” I said softly. “Why would Albus Dumbledore let an innocent man be put in Azkaban for twelve years?”

“Everyone was tricked into believing that I had done this. That I would allow someone to kill my best mate. To kill the woman he loved. To kill my own godson,” he rambled angrily, his fingers getting caught in his tangled hair, the sheet getting wound around his feet as he paced. I feared it would be ripped from his hand at any moment. Feared, or hoped.

“Then who was responsible?” Like an explosion, he lunged toward me.

“Wormtail! Pettigrew!” he shouted into my face. This time, I didn’t cower. “He sold out his friends! He sold out all of us! And Voldemort is still using him. To get to Harry. It’s why I escaped from Azkaban. To protect my godson.” He spoke in fragments, his eyes searching mine for belief.

“Peter Pettigrew is dead. You killed him.” He laughed, scoffed, sarcastically.

“I didn’t. And he isn’t.” Suddenly, he must’ve realized how close he was to me, and how far the sheet was falling down his waist, because he stepped back and pulled it further up.

“How do you know this? How could you possibly know, from Azkaban, when no one else knew?” I asked. His grin was almost devious. I hoped the hitch in my breathing was from fear.

“Wormtail. He’s an Animagus. Like me. Like James.” At his own mention of James Potter, he actually did smile. His whole face softened. I melted inside. Then reprimanded myself for it.

“James Potter was an Animagus?” I shouted in surprise.

“He took the form of a stag.” His eyes glazed over in thought, the smile still on his face.

“That doesn’t explain how you know Peter is alive.” His smile disappeared immediately, his jaw clenched, with rage and hurt.

“He’s living as the house pet of one Ronald Weasley. Harry’s best friend.” My mouth fell open. “The Weasley’s trip to Egypt warranted a picture in the paper. The rat was right there, in the picture. Just my blind luck that Cornelius Fudge happened to have given me a copy.”

“So you turned into the dog and slipped out, unnoticed?” I scoffed.

“Again, a bit of blind luck. But I don’t think the Dementors work the same on animals.”

“And you need to stay here … because …”

“Harry, and more importantly, Ron and his rat, won’t be at Hogwarts, for some time. I need somewhere to hide until I can get to Wormtail.” He spoke the name of his former friend with such disdain in his voice, and I quickly discovered that I had begun to sympathize with him.

“How will you even get into Hogwarts? Will Remus help you?”

“Moony still … I’m sorry, Remus still thinks I’m guilty. How could he not?” he mused aloud, running his free hand down his face.

“But he was your friend, wasn’t he?” I asked, confused. Sirius’s face fell so far, I wasn’t sure the poor man would ever be physically able to smile again.

“We … had a falling out. I accused him of being the spy,” he replied through a shaking breath. “You’d think I would have figured out that a rat was the rat.” He laughed, but it was so forced, he was practically shouting. He pulled the sheet up to his face and held it with both hands. If I didn’t know better, I might’ve thought he was crying.

“If he knew the truth, Remus would forgive you,” I assured him, finally moving from my defensive position of cowering in the corner of my mattress. The sheet fell down from over Sirius’s eyes as he observed me. His expression was unreadable.

“Do you know Remus?” he asked suddenly and I laughed.

“No. I’ve never met him. But I’m somewhat familiar with you Marauders.” At that word, his eyes practically lit the room, and it was already sunny out. I smiled in return.

Without my direct consent, I suddenly believed in Sirius Black. Maybe it was our non-history together – me watching the four of them through my kitchen window. Maybe it was the look in his eyes. Maybe it was the fact that he hadn’t killed me, so far, while given ample opportunity. I was trying not to admit that my girlhood fantasies may have played a role.

“Us Marauders,” he grinned, letting his hands fall back down to his waist – as well as the sheet that he was holding in them. I strained to keep my eyes fixed on his face.

“If you stay,” I offered aloud. His eyes widened. “You stay as a dog, not as Sirius Black.”

“Padfoot,” he said suddenly and I rose an eyebrow at him. “It’s Padfoot. The dog.”

“Then you stay as Padfoot,” I bargained. He narrowed his eyes at me.

“I can remain Padfoot for that long, but I’d prefer not to. Not constantly.”

“Why is that?” I asked, furrowing my eyes back at him.

“Being a dog gives you the instincts of a dog, the mind of a dog, the habits of a dog. Imagine coming home to my nose suddenly between your legs, instead of Padfoot’s,” he let a laugh out as I unintentionally pursed my lips, blinking slowly at him.

If only he knew I had been imagining a similar scenario since I was sixteen.

Quickly, he must’ve realized what he had said, because his mouth fell open, as if to try to explain what he had meant, but no words came out.

“Instincts and all, right, yes,” I tried to recover for him, but my brain was nearly pudding.

“The minds get all jumbled, you see, and what I meant was that I might become more animal than I intend to be …”

“Yes, I can tell,” I interrupted immediately and before I could help myself, my eyes had traveled down to where his hand was clasped onto the sheet. I swear, his cheeks were quite flushed. It didn’t help his argument that he was standing naked in my bedroom.

“No!” he shouted, holding both his hands out, nearly losing the grip on his sheet. “Not now! I would never … of course, if there was an offer, I certainly wouldn’t decline, but I wouldn’t ever …” Finally, he stopped rambling and took a deep breath, pulling the sheet up to his face.

“When we’re alone, you can … stay you,” I replied quickly, to give him a rope to climb out of the hole had dug himself into. He peeked out from the folds of the sheet.

“Thank you,” he breathed out, running his hand down his unshaven face.

“Would you like a hot shower, then?” I asked, glancing from greasy, curly black hair, to the layers of dirt along the lengths of his abdomen. I tried not to look too long at that. Instead, I pushed myself off of the bed, only to remember shedding my jeans the night before, thinking that my only company was a half-starved dog.

“I could probably stand for a cold shower right about now,” he mumbled, his head down, though his brows were raised, and he pushed his filthy fingers through the hair on his chin as he adjusted his sheet. This time, I was the one blushing, but, for his pride’s benefit, I pretended that I hadn’t heard it, and for my own pride’s benefit, that I wasn’t at all phased at the idea of Sirius Black seeing me in my underwear. Slowly, I walked toward the chair at the end of my bed, where a pair of shorts was hanging and slipped them on, painfully aware that his eyes hadn’t strayed.

“Tub is through there,” I pointed to the doorway behind him. As he turned, of course, my eyes naturally fell on the edge of his hip as it peeked out from behind the sheet. When he looked back at me, his expression had changed slightly.

“How do I know you won’t phone the Ministry?” He watched me closely as I walked past him, allowing myself to brush against him on my way into the bathroom.  

“I suppose a promise isn’t enough?” I asked and he gave a small laugh as he followed.

“I’m afraid not at this moment.” As I turned, to see which expression might match the tone of his unreadable voice, I discovered he had followed much more closely than I expected. He was taller than he had seemed at a distance, and I nearly had my lips pressed against his collarbone. In fact, I almost did just that, just to fluster him. Me, fluster Sirius Black. It seemed impossible, but I suddenly, really wanted to test that theory.

“Then what can I do?” I asked, with a huff, not stepping away from him and noticing that he wasn’t stepping away either.

“You’ll have to stay in here. With me,” he said, the muscles in his neck tensing as he swallowed. Despite the enormous pounding in my chest, I couldn’t help myself.

“Mr. Black, in the shower? How forward of you.” I held my hands to my cheeks.

“On the floor,” he corrected, with a knowing smirk.

“And on the kitchen table afterward?” I bit my lip, lightly brushing my fingers along his exposed hip bone, causing him to take a sharp, surprised breath inward. But he composed himself quickly, simultaneously moving the sheet and pressing himself against me with his hand to my neck, leaning down to place his lips against my ear.

“Is that an invitation, then?” His breath fell into my hair. My feeling of having the upper hand with Sirius Black was dissolved with the warm breath that trickled down my neck.

“Not until you’ve bathed. And brushed your teeth,” I laughed, hoping he wouldn’t hear the nervousness in my voice – I could hardly keep my tone from wavering.

I hadn’t expected him to respond in kind and, while the thought was incredibly entertaining, he was also still a violent fugitive – a murderer, unless I believed his side. Besides that, Sirius Black had always had the reputation of a cad – he’d snogged nearly every girl at Hogwarts – Gryffindor, Ravenclaw – his tongue was indiscriminate. Did I really want to be another notch in his belt? Annoyingly so, my subconscious answered “Oh, hell yes.”

“Is that a promise?” he asked, his voice rumbling low, his lips tantalizing close to my skin. I could feel the brush of their contact on the curve of my ear. And I was agonizingly aware of the fact that he was holding his protective sheet out to his side.

“Sorry, no. Bestiality is not on my list of turn-ons, Padfoot.” I quipped, turning on my heels – not allowing myself a single half-second-glance downward as we parted. As I turned the water on, I heard him let out a long, slow breath.

“I’m sure it wouldn’t take me long to find out what is.” His tone was cocky, but I noticed out of the corner of my eye that his sheet had returned to his groin.

“Don’t you have more important things to do?” I scoffed, handing him a spare toothbrush and settling down against the bottom edge of the counter, as per our agreement for me to stay within shouting distance of him. For a moment, he looked at me, before turning – his backside, still uncovered – and dropping the sheet as he stepped into the shower.

“Harry and Ron won’t be at Hogwarts until September. I have nearly a month in which I have nowhere to go. I’d be happy to find out if you can hold out that long.” I could see his silhouette through the shower curtain as he pulled his hands through his long hair.

“You know, I could walk out of here and call the Ministry. What could you do to stop me?” I was purposefully antagonizing him. He pulled back the curtain to look at me – steam poured from the opening as water rolled down his skin, foaming toothbrush dangling from his lips.

“I’d have to chase after you. As is.” He nodded downward with a single raised brow and ducked back under the water. “I shouldn’t have said that, you might do it on purpose, now.”

“You’re quite full of yourself, you know.”

“I could make you quite full of myself, too,” he said, leaning out of the shower to wink at me before closing the curtain again. He laughed softly from underneath the sound of the water.

“I’d heard that you were like this, a womanizer,” I mused out loud. “I thought Azkaban might’ve quieted your impulses a bit.”

“If anything, Azkaban made it worse, darling.” I bit down hard onto my bottom lip. It was like a list of Sirius Black fantasies were being marked off in my mind.

Sirius calls me a pet name – check.

He continued, as I ogled his silhouette in the shower – I never knew a shadow could be so incredibly revealing of one’s anatomy. “I couldn’t even fantasize, for Godric’s sake. Dementors feeding on happy thoughts, and all.” I swallowed hard, afraid I was literally drooling. It was like Azkaban hadn’t affected him at all – like he had only been biding his time there, waiting for the opportune moment for escape. If I knew anything about Sirius, and if I believed he were telling me the truth, the only things that had really demoralized him were the events that led to the dissolution of the Marauders – James and Lily’s deaths, Peter’s betrayal, and Remus’ belief that Sirius could actually do any of the things they claimed he had.

For a moment, I thought about telling him – that I believed in his innocence, that I was devastated by the deaths of the Potters and by his subsequent imprisonment, that I had always had an enormous crush on him, that I had always imagined how soft his lips might be. But just then, as the water shut off, he pulled back the curtain a bit, keeping only vital bits covered, his left leg hanging out from the curtain like a bloody burlesque dancer.

“Would you get me a towel? Or did you prefer that I air dry so you can enjoy the view?”

 I decided he didn’t need me to fuel his ego any further.

 “Oh, piss off,” I mumbled, reaching into the cabinet I had been leaning on and throwing him a towel. While he let the curtain fall as he dried, he didn’t exactly close it, and I was still allowed to gape at his extensive, naked left side. With a laugh, I wondered how we had come from his nervous attempt at an explanation of where his nose might end up, to the full-on egomaniac standing in my shower. Evidently, he had only needed a hint that I could be interested in him, instead of afraid of him, like I had been earlier.

As he stepped from the shower and wrapped the towel around his waist, I began to wonder what I had in my wardrobe that he could wear. I hadn’t kept any of my dad’s old clothes after he had died – except his favorite jacket, but that really didn’t cover all Sirius’s bases.

I stood, starting to walk into my bedroom, when Sirius caught me by the elbow.

“Not planning to make a phone call, I hope,” he hummed. He already knew the answer to that suspicion – I could tell just by his tone. I looked at him over my shoulder.

“You know I’m not. I think you just wanted an excuse to touch me.” He let out a short laugh, the huff of his breath falling onto the back of my neck.

“Perhaps. But I’ve realized something. I don’t even know your name.” His fingers skirted across my neck as he pushed my hair over one shoulder. I suppressed a shiver.

“I doubt that would be a first for you, making love to a woman whose name you didn’t know.” His grip on my arm tightened just enough to where I could feel his warm, wet skin pressed against my back, water rolling down the collar of my shirt.

“Oh,” he purred, “So that’s what you want from me.” He leaned down, burying his face into my plum-colored hair, breathing out long and hot and slow, with purpose.

“That’s what you’re trying to get from me,” I half-argued, still not sure I wanted to let wizarding world fugitive Sirius Black charm his way into my bed – teenage dreams aside.

“All I want from you right now is your name.” He ran a single finger down along the skin behind my ear, tracing toward the collar of my shirt, which he pulled out slightly. Just as I could feel his breath against my neck, and the barest of contact from his lips, just as his other hand began to wind around my waist, there was a knock at my front door.

The string of curse words in my mind couldn’t appropriately express my anger.

“You. Padfoot. Now,” I commanded as I reluctantly pulled away from him. His hand lingered on my waist for as long as I was in reach.

I peered through the curtain of the window next to the front door to see Lenny, the young bloke who ran the counter at Madam Puddifoot’s Tea Shop. Granted, I hated the place, but they had the best coffee in Hogsmeade, so I begrudgingly dealt with the horrendous pink hues and love-struck teenagers for my morning coffee. Which was usually ten o’clock, on the nose. And ten o’clock had been hours ago. Is that why Lenny was here?

“Oi!” Lenny called out my name as he saw me peeking through the curtains. In his hand, he held up a foam cup. He was bringing me my morning coffee?

“Lenny,” I said, pasting on a smile as I opened the front door. His cheeks flushed as he looked down at the shorts I had on.   

“You, uh … You didn’t come for your coffee and I thought you might be sick, and Madam Puddifoot didn’t want to lose one of her regulars and …”

“Thanks, Lenny,” I interrupted, taking the cup from his hand. “That’s very kind.” Despite the conversation having stalled, Lenny stood there, staring at me with a goofy expression.

“I hope you’re not sick,” he said, smiling nervously.

“Not sick,” I smiled, or bared my teeth, at least, in return. Of course, what more perfect timing than then for Sirius to cause some sort of commotion from the bathroom. Lenny’s eyes widened as he looked back at me.

“Oh,” he said, his smile falling. “You’ve got a guest.” The look on my face must have been completely manic. Sirius was rubbing off on me. “Unless you’re hiding that Black fella from the papers!” Lenny laughed loudly in response to my expression and I froze for a moment before forcing myself to laugh.

“Right, like that would ever happen,” I chuckled. As usual, Sirius’ timing was perfectly horrible, as he came prancing in, as Padfoot, still wet from his shower.

“You’ve got a dog!” Lenny gushed and I rolled my eyes as Padfoot sat calmly at my feet. Lenny reached out to scratch his ears, and he growled, baring his teeth. I almost laughed.

“He’s … a bit shy,” I reasoned, shooting a glance down at my furry companion. Padfoot replied by nuzzling his face into my hand.

“Well, listen. This may be out of the blue, and I know you’re there every day, but I was wondering if you’d like to come by Madam Puddifoot’s for some tea, sometime, maybe this evening, or …” At that moment, in the middle of Lenny’s sentence, Padfoot shot his warm, wet nose right up and in between my legs.

“Sirius!” I shouted on instinct before recovering. “Serious, seriously need to get him neutered,” I laughed through clenched teeth, pushing Padfoot’s nose out from underneath the hem of my shorts. He let a short huff out of his nostrils followed by a soft whine.

“He’s a frisky little one, isn’t he?” Lenny laughed, uncomfortably.

“You’ve no idea,” I muttered and Padfoot cocked his head to the side, letting out a few throaty yaps that almost made it sound like he was speaking. “Thanks for the coffee, but I’ve got my hands a bit full. Plus, I’m working tonight. Rain check on that tea, yeah?” I smiled.

“Sure thing.” He gave me a disappointed smile as he turned away, and I gladly shut the door, turning angrily to the dog at my feet.

“Are you bloody insane?” I shouted as he scampered off through my bedroom, into the bathroom. As I waited for him to change back into himself, I sipped the coffee in the foam cup Lenny had brought, only to discover it had grown cold. Down the sink it went.

“Well, I thought it was timed perfectly,” he laughed as he emerged from the bathroom, his towel wrapped around his waist, and his face slightly shaven. It explained why he had taken so long to come out of the bathroom – I just thought it took work to become Padfoot.

By that point, I’d already forgotten the poor man didn’t have any clothes. I made my way into the bedroom, toward him, intending to find him something to wear.

“Of course you did. I said your name, Sirius,” I emphasized about how easily we could have been caught. My heart was still pounding. I wasn’t sure if it was from the adrenaline of hiding an Azkaban fugitive, or from having Sirius’s nose up my shorts.

“I’m sure it won’t be the last time you’ll say it,” he smirked, but didn’t act on the insinuation, as had been his custom over the last few minutes. I was almost surprised.

“Either way, you need to be more discreet,” I said, poking him in his bare chest and reminding myself not to spread my palm out across it.

“You’re just flustered because you enjoyed it.” He stepped closer to me, and I stepped back, until my legs hit the edge of my bed. He seemed pleased that he had cornered me. 

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” I admonished, turning my face away from him, as his mouth was dangerously close to mine. Before I could react, he wrapped his hand around my neck and pulled it to his lips, biting, sucking softly on the skin just beneath the curve of my jaw. In my surprise, I didn’t pull away and, in fact, let a shaky breath fall from my lips in response.

“Hm,” he hummed, mulling over my reaction, the breath that held his words falling against my neck. “It seems you enjoyed that, at least.” Not willing to let him get the best of me, I pressed my hip between his legs, moving just enough to feel him, and leveled my face to his.

“Evidently, so did you.” I spoke the words onto his lips, sliding my fingers along his waist, between the towel and his skin. Just as a moan began to form in his throat, I slipped away from him and headed toward the kitchen. I allowed myself a glance back to see him standing still, staring achingly at me. I grinned.

“Merlin,” he breathed out, his eyes traveling down to my feet and up again.

“Would you like to put some clothes on, or are you happy wandering around in a towel all day?” I asked as I pulled open the refrigerator. He followed me into the kitchen and stood just behind me, peering into the open fridge and placing his chin on my shoulder as he spoke.

“I believe there is a third option in there somewhere,” he mumbled, sliding his hand up my leg, to which I responded by swatting it and moving away from him again. This time, I turned to the oven and set it to pre-heat. Whatever he decided, I’d have to heat it.

“Come on, aren’t you hungry? What do you have a taste for?” I asked and I groaned immediately, while Sirius laughed loudly. “Oh, I should not have said that.”

“I’m not even going to respond to that one, it’s far too easy.” 

“Then help me find something to eat. You look half-starved,” I said, eyeing him up and down, to which he rose his eyebrows in reply.

“Fine,” he finally conceded. “But I’m shagging you after dinner.” I laughed. Loudly.

“In your sodding dreams, Sirius Black,” I clicked my tongue at him, but that just brought his focus back to my mouth, and he pulled his bottom lip into his teeth. “And I’d appreciate it if you’d stop eye-fucking me, thank you.” I quipped, though I was quite enjoying it.

“Sorry. I’m not used to this,” he laughed, as he opened the fridge again to pull out a leftover roast chicken from the last night I ate alone. The last night before I met Sirius.

“Not used to what? Being out of Azkaban?” I asked, taking the chicken from him, setting it into a pan, and sliding it into the heated oven.

“Being refused. Being teased,” he laughed as he fell into a kitchen chair. Considerably more carefully, I sat in the chair at the table that was opposite to him. “Of course, it was twelve years ago that I was the one doing the teasing, but still.”

“Am I supposed to be impressed that girls dropped their knickers at the snap of your fingers?” I laughed and he glared at me.

“In fact, yes,” he huffed, before narrowing his eyes at me. “You’re not like them.”

“It might have something to do with your being a criminal, and all.”

“Is that right, then?” he said as he rose from the table, his towel still insecurely hanging from his protruding hip bones. “You knew me. You knew the Marauders.” He leaned down into my face, steadying himself with one hand on the table.

“Yes, and?” I couldn’t see his point.

“Why haven’t you alerted anyone yet? Why didn’t you tell your mate Lenny about me?”

“Come off it, Sirius. Have you seen yourself as Padfoot? You’re right terrifying. Half a Grim, more or less. You could bite clean through my throat.”

“I could try, if you like,” he grinned, running his finger down my neck.

“The point is … you’re dangerous. And I’m hostage to you, at the moment.” For a second, he straightened up, looking down at me, his expression almost hurt.

“But that’s not all of it,” he shook his head, not accepting my answer. “I think you’re protecting me.” I scoffed sarcastically, looking at him with one cocked eyebrow.

“How so?” I asked doubtfully.

“There were any number of ways you could have let Lenny know that you were in danger. You could have gone off for tea with him. You could have invited him in. Instead, you let me put my face between your legs.”

“I didn’t let you do anything,” I argued quickly, though not very strongly. “Besides, I did say your name out loud in front of him.”

“Which you were very quick to cover up – and that git was none the wiser.”

“What exactly is your point?” I finally huffed. What was it he wanted me to say? That I had been in love with him for over a decade? That I’d stared wistfully out the window as he and his friends walked by my house on their way to Hogsmeade? That his mere presence in my home – and in a towel, no less – was a fevered sex dream come true?

Again, he leaned down into my face, and his eyes traveled every inch.

“I want to know why.” He cut straight to the point and didn’t say another word. Of course, I could tell him every single, infinitesimal reason that I hadn’t turned him in yet, but that would completely ruin all the fun I was having with him. If he knew how badly I had it for him, his picture of me – the woman he desperately needed to conquer, the only one who could fend off his charm – would fly out the window. Maybe I would just be another notch, then.

So, to keep up the illusion, and to maintain my upper hand, I grabbed him hard by the jaw and poured my lips into his mouth, sliding my tongue along his and winding my fingers tightly into his long, dark hair. In response, he moaned a heavy breath into my throat. Just as I slipped my hand underneath the edge of his towel, my fingers gripped hard onto the back of his thigh, and he had worked his hand underneath the hem of my shorts – the oven timer went off.

“Dinner’s hot,” I exclaimed as I slid out from underneath him. He nearly fell into the chair I had been sitting in. The breath still left in his lungs fell out in a disappointed groan.

“Fuck,” he moaned, letting himself collapse into the chair below him, as I sliced meat from the chicken bones and set it on a plate in front of him. He was too busy dragging his hands down his slightly-bearded face to notice. “You know, you’ve the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen.”

“Eat, Sirius,” I ordered, taking a plate for my own and sitting across from him. He peered through his fingers at me, with a pitiful expression.

“Why?”

“Because you’re not but bones,” I stated the obvious.

“No, why do you keep doing this to me?” he whined, wincing as he adjusted himself. If only he knew I was as breathless as he was, that I had imagined doing that for ages.

“Because you’re not used to being teased,” I smiled devilishly and, at my expression, he stood from the table, his lip tucked hard into his teeth. “Sit, Sirius.” As he obeyed, I almost laughed at the dog parallel. In fact, I added a ‘Good boy’ at the end, just for kicks.

For several minutes, we just ate, quietly. Which was unusual. He seemed to be studying me from across the table, while I pretended not to notice.

“You still haven’t told me your name,” he said suddenly.

“If you had been listening when Lenny arrived, you’d have heard it.”

“I was trying to shave and change into Padfoot. Are you really not going to tell me?”

“Why should I?”

“Well, what do you expect me to moan later on, when you’re on top of me?”

“Considering I won’t be, I’m not extremely worried about it.”

“So you prefer the bottom, then.”

“I prefer keeping you on the brink, just for fun.” Sirius growled loudly and then stopped all attempts at conversation entirely, for a few minutes.

“Did I hear you tell Lenny you’re going to work?” he asked. I nodded.

“Unfortunately, yes. I work at the Hog’s Head, so I’ll be late. But lucky for you, I’m off tomorrow.” Before my sentence even finished, he was shaking his head.

“You can’t. I can’t go with you.” I was almost touched, until I understood what he meant.

“Sirius, what is it going to take to make you realize that I am not going to give you up?” I asked, rising from my chair and taking our empty plates to the sink. “You’re an innocent man, I’m not just going to let them take you back to Azkaban.” Before I could fully comprehend what it was I had just said to him, he had pressed himself against my back.

“You are protecting me, after all,” he sighed contentedly as he pushed his arms between me and the kitchen counter, wrapping them around my waist.

“Maybe I am,” I admitted softly.

“Then you believe me,” he said. I could hear the smile in his voice.

“I do.”

“And you’re going to skip work, stay home, and let me put my mouth …”

“Let’s not get carried away,” I hummed, ducking from underneath the hold his arms had on me and making my way toward the bathroom.

“You always leave me like this,” he groaned, holding his arms out to his sides, displaying an obvious swelling in the center of his towel. I grinned in response.

“Purposefully so,” I laughed, ducking into the bathroom and shutting the door behind me.

“This is completely unfair, you know. You had a front row seat when I was in the shower,” he complained loudly from beyond the door.

“You forced me into that tedious little peep show,” I argued in return as I undressed and turned on the hot water. I could hear his scoffing through the wall.

“Tedious?” he nearly shouted. I was suddenly grateful to not have neighbors. “I’ll have you know, when I was at Hogwarts …”

“Yes, yes, the girls were lining up, backsides first,” I droned on for him. “Tell me, where are those girls now, exactly?” He was quite silent for a while after that comment.

In the back of my mind, I wondered if he was going to notice that the lock on the bathroom door had been broken this whole time. The silence was unnerving. As I continued to wash my hair, I strained to hear the sound of the doorknob, or the creaking of the door, or footsteps on the hardwood floor. I heard nothing. The paranoia was killing me.

After I turned the water off, I stood still in the shower, wondering. Finally, I peeked out of the curtain to see Sirius, settled calmly on the floor, surrounding by stacks of towels.

“Speaking of peep shows,” he grinned deviously.

“Sirius Orion Black, you give me one of those towels or so help me …”

“All you have to do is tell me your name and I will gladly …” He stopped mid-sentence and stared quite seriously at me, his brows furrowed. “You know my middle name.” I immediately clamped my mouth shut. This was definitely one of those things I was not supposed to know. Though, I did know that he was likely imagining a thousand unpleasant scenarios in his mind. That much was evident as he stood, fists clenched tightly at his sides.

“Sirius, wait, whatever you’re thinking, that’s not what this is.” Instantly, he sped to where I stood, shivering, and held my face in his powerful fingers.

“Are you working for the Ministry? Or the Death Eaters?”

“No, Sirius, I swear,” I begged, feeling very much on the verge of tears.

“Are you one of Bellatrix’s spies on the outside?”  he shouted and I flinched. I was beginning to see the toll the twelve years in Azkaban had taken.

“Sirius, please, I’m not -” I replied in a trembling voice, trying to find the words to tell him how I happened to know his middle name without seeming like I had stalked him. It was a simple truth, if I could tell it. He had practically shouted it drunkenly from the rooftops. ‘They had to name me Sirius Orion Black, because I am the luckiest S.O.B. on the face of the earth!’ he had proclaimed with one arm around the neck of a very red-faced James Potter and the other around the waist of Remus Lupin, who was struggling to keep Sirius, and James by proxy, on their feet. For weeks after that, I etched his initials into nearly everything I owned.

Before I could tell him any of this, he violently released my face from his grip – I lost my balance and fell back against the wall, just as the back door, hidden from the view of Hogsmeade, slammed shut. Empty and frightened, I sank to the floor of the shower, shuddering.

------------------------------------------------------------

 After the longest shift of my life was over, I came home to an empty house, not unlike the last twelve years. Suddenly, it was more empty than it had ever been.

 I barely even bothered turning the lights on.

 There was still a chicken carcass on the counter. Plates were still in the sink. My wet towel was strewn somewhere onto the floor of my bedroom. I didn’t bother with anything.

I pulled my boots off, leaving them wherever they fell, and then pulled my jeans off after them, throwing them into the corner of my room.

All that work, all that teasing, and all I had gotten from Sirius was a kiss. Granted, it was the best kiss of my goddamn life, but it wasn’t quite enough of him to sustain the memory.

With a frustrated groan, I threw myself onto my bed, and a painful yelp came from the soft ball of fur underneath me.

“Padfoot!” I shouted in surprise, purposefully not calling him Sirius, just in case. I clumsily pulled the lamp chain next to the bed and saw those familiar puppy-dog eyes staring back at me. He started to move, but I held his shoulders. “Let me explain.”

He watched me for what felt like a long time, before curling up and setting his face on my bare leg. I sighed in relief as I pulled my fingers across his ears.

“I’ve had an awful crush on you,” I finally admitted, “Ever since you first waltzed into Hogsmeade, with your Marauders. You were all I could think about. I made up stories about what my life would be like if I had magic, and I could go to Hogwarts. With you. And James, and Remus, and Peter.”

 At Peter’s name, the hackles on the back of his neck instantly bristled.

 “I waited by the window constantly, just to watch you four walk by my house. I followed you into Honeydukes, once, and made notes of your favorite sweets, and how often you offered to buy Remus a chocolate bar. Seventeen times, by the way.”

 Padfoot looked up at me and let out a soft whine, nudging me with his nose.

 “I know your middle name because, after a particularly good Quidditch match in your last year, you and James were completely legless and you were shouting ‘Sirius Orion Black!’ right outside my house. Something about being the luckiest S.O.B. in the world.”

 He snorted a huff out through his nostrils, almost as if a laugh.

 “I should’ve told you sooner, but I was having such a good time and I thought that if you knew, you’d think I was bloody mental.” Though I still wasn’t sure why he hadn’t already changed back into himself, Padfoot nosed and pawed at my pillow until I laid down on it, after which he laid long-ways beside me, one paw on my stomach, snuggling his fuzzy face into the curve of my neck. I rubbed my cheek over the top of his head.

“My name is Ruby, by the way,” I smiled, wrapping my arms around him. He licked my cheek as I closed my eyes.

 ------------------------------------------------------------

In the last twelve years, I hadn’t slept as soundly as I did with Padfoot in my arms – and then, at some point in the night, Sirius in my arms. Warm, soft, naked Sirius.

I also hadn’t had a dream in the last twelve years, until that night. Of course, it was about Sirius, and Padfoot, though they were separate entities in my dream. Sirius was sitting at my kitchen table – naked, as he had been for the entirety of his time with me, his crotch barely covered by the edge of the table. I berated my brain for not being able to fill that bit in. Padfoot laid on the floor, nearly on top of Sirius’s feet.

Unusually so, I was kneading bread dough on the kitchen counter. I didn’t even know how to make bread. The further I pressed and folded, the firmer the dough became.

Suddenly, Sirius began to breathe loudly, labored. As I looked back at him, his head was thrown back over the back of the chair, his hand gripped onto the table. At the sight of him in that position – the curve of his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down his long neck, his chest heaving with weighty breaths, his legs spread, curved over the corners of the chair – my knees almost failed to hold the rest of me up, though my fingers still pressed into the dough on the counter, pulling and kneading. Then he spoke. Sort of.

“Ohh. Good. Morning,” I heard him moan heavily, and my eyes opened suddenly, to a real-life Sirius dragging his tongue up my neck, to my earlobe, which he softly latched his teeth onto, breathing out hard, the hot air from his lips radiating into my skin.

“Good Godric,” he moaned, harder, his hand traveling up my shirt, and I became excruciatingly aware of my fingers wrapped firmly around his ample … bread dough.

No wonder the dough in my dream had seemed so … stiff.

“Oh, Gods, Sirius, I’m so …” I began to apologize, cheeks flushed, trying to remove my hand, but he took hold of my fingers and closed them back around him.

“No, don’t stop, love,” he purred into my ear, his lips closing around my earlobe, sucking slightly before traveling down the rest of my neck and his hand curving around my breast underneath my shirt. As absolutely weak-kneed as I felt, I didn’t want him to continue to picture me as that hopeless little school girl I had revealed myself to be the night before.

“No?” I teased, pulling him softly, to which he replied with growling curses. “I thought surely you might rather have me under the sheets.”

“Oh. Ooh.” His moan turned into a half-laugh as he buried his tongue in my mouth, groaning converted into a mumbled “Please do.” With a raised brow, and seeing that look – biting his lip hard, eyes closed, tortured expression on his face, head craned back over my pillow – I hungrily trailed my lips down his neck, across his chest – kissing and biting my way down his long abdomen. The closer my mouth got to its destination, with my hand still pumping purposefully slowly, the louder his moaning and growling and cursing became, with my name thrown in occasionally, and I had never heard it sound so good. For good measure, I put my teeth on the inner side of his gaunt hip bone and sucked – he inhaled sharply, letting it out loudly, deliberately, trailing into a soft-sounded ‘fuck’ at the end. His voice nearly raised to a shout as my lips wrapped around the tip of his head, kissing softly, and his fingers tightened in my hair.

And then, like the universe was reprimanding me, there was a knock at my front door.

We froze – Sirius went silent, though I hadn’t yet removed my mouth from him. When I did, with one last careful, slow purse of my lips, he let out a quiet, aching sigh from the sudden arousal and its subsequent vacancy.

“Expecting company?” he asked, panic-stricken as I pulled the sheet back from over my face. I shook my head, my expression a mirror of his.

“Padfoot?” I suggested and he nodded, quickly changing as I tried to compose myself – slipping on a pair of shorts, smoothing my hair, straightening my shirt. When I opened the door, a man I didn’t really know personally, but knew as a regular from Hog’s Head, stood there leaning heavily against the frame of the door, a wild look on his face.

“We’re making the rounds to all the houses,” he said breathlessly.

“About what?” I asked, vaguely expecting his answer.

“Sirius Black,” he said in a whisper. I pretended to look shocked.

“What about him?” I hissed, as if I were interested. Actually, it would probably help Sirius immensely if we knew what exactly they were looking for.

“He’s in Hogsmeade,” he said and my chest burned.

“H-How do you know?” I asked, hoping that my nervousness would come off as fear of the notorious criminal. He leaned in, holding his hand to the side of his mouth.

“They found his stripes. From Azkaban. About a mile that way,” he whispered, pointing in the direction of the woods behind my house, where Sirius had wandered out from. I swallowed hard. They knew that Sirius had to have passed by my house to get to Hogwarts, through Hogsmeade. Internally, I shook the doubt off. He would be Padfoot. They wouldn’t know.

“So he changed his clothes!” I said, followed by a sharp gasp, trying to throw them off of the fact that Sirius was, in fact, wandering around naked.

“Must’ve,” the man nodded in agreement. “Anyway, good thing you’ve got that beast there.” He pointed to Padfoot, aka Sirius Black, where he was lying on my bed, but could be seen through the bedroom door I had left open. “He’ll protect you.”

“Oh, yes sir,” I smiled. He leaned in further, eyeing me as he did.

“Now, you didn’t hear this from me but Dumbledore himself is making surprise visits to some houses this very evening!” His whisper was actually very loud.

“I’ll be sure to let him in if he comes this way,” I grinned. He tipped his hat and went strolling back toward Hogsmeade. I began to wonder if we were already suspect.

No sooner had I shut the door, and turned back to my bedroom, than I saw Sirius, lying out in all his copious glory – as aroused as I had left him – ankles crossed, with his hands folded behind his head, a curious smirk and a single raised brow.

“Bring your mouth back to me, darling,” he crooned. I stared at him.

“Shouldn’t we be worried?” I huffed. “You should go back to Padfoot. They’re going to find you. Especially with how loud you are. I’m surprised he didn’t hear you from outside.”

“That was actually your fault, if you think about it,” he said as he rose from his place on the bed and made his way over to me, purposefully leisured.

“Should I make you bite the pillow next time?” I taunted, closing the gap between us quickly. The situation that had disrupted us absolutely did not warrant a continuation of our behavior, but it was damn near all I could think about, standing there, staring at him with his todger in grasping range. “No, no,” I said, shaking my head. “Dumbledore could be at my door in minutes, Sirius. You need to change back.”

“You heard that bloke, he said evening,” Sirius argued pitifully. I glanced at the clock on the wall over the bed – we had slept late, but it was still just past midday.

“You know Dumbledore better than I do,” I said, with a knowing expression. “Does he usually let people in on exactly what he’s planning on doing?” His shoulders immediately sagged, though certain other parts of him remained quite rigid.

“No,” he mumbled, hanging his head as he fell back onto my bed, leaving himself completely on display, knowing that I would desperately want to put my hands on him.

“Why were your clothes in the woods? Why did you even bring them?” Sirius reached up to push the hair out of his face as he looked at me.

“I couldn’t leave them in my cell. They might would have pieced the Animagus thing together. I carried them in my teeth – Padfoot’s teeth. I thought I had buried them well enough.”

“You should’ve told me, I would’ve went and fetched them for you.” A smile appeared on his face and he closed his eyes, folding his hands across his bare chest.

“I’ve been a little preoccupied. Not that you would know the feeling,” he pouted.

“Oh, alright,” I finally groaned. “The second Dumbledore is gone …” I began to offer. He opened one eye to look at me, as he simultaneously interrupted.

“The very second?” His voice nearly begged.

“Millisecond,” I nearly whispered, letting him see my eyes wander over his skin. He propped himself up on his elbows and let me look, for just a moment, before he spoke.

“Deal,” he said. “But let me kiss you before I change.”

“Gladly,” I grinned, as I crawled over the spot where he lay, trying ever so hard to keep my hands from pulling at his exposed skin, still erect. With a smile, he pushed my mouth open with his lips, sliding his tongue underneath mine and breathing hot. I let him get as far as pushing the shorts I had just put on down my legs before I pulled away, deliberately not putting the shorts back on.

“No, don’t,” he moaned, along with my name, purposefully breathy, but I was unswayed.

“I see what you’re doing, Sirius, and it’s not going to work. Change back,” I demanded as I made my way back into the kitchen, pulling a carton of eggs from the fridge.

“It takes me half a minute to change into Padfoot,” he huffed, quick to follow.

“It takes less than that for someone to burst in through the bloody front door,” I argued, cracking the eggs into a pan on the cooktop and breaking the yolks with a spatula.

“At least let me eat. Padfoot doesn’t savor things like I do,” he said, and just as I saw the innuendo building on his lips – his soft, pouty, pink lips – I interrupted him.

“Fine. But it’s scrambled eggs, so there’s not much to savor.” I turned back to the hob, but the second my back was turned, I felt Sirius press himself against me, feeling just as rigid as I had left him. Instinctively, I took in a sharp breath and, of course, he noticed.

“Darling,” he breathed into my hair before pushing it off to the side, so that he could press his wet lips against my neck. “I’m aching.” For good measure, he pushed further into the space between my legs to express his point. This time, I kept my breaths to myself.

Without a word, I turned, gripping his face tightly in one hand and his throbbing cock in the other. He groaned, laughing excitedly onto my lips as I eased my tongue into his mouth, and then curling it back, catching his lip on the way out. Another moan from Sirius’s lips.

Carefully, I pushed him down into one of the kitchen chairs, and straddled him, grinding myself down onto him, with only my knickers to separate us. With just the right pressure, I slid myself up and down the length of him, and he looked completely separate from himself – watching me with his mouth slightly open, and I suddenly forgot that I only meant to be teasing him. Feeling him pulse beneath me, with only a single layer of thin fabric separating us, knowing that all I had to do was push it aside – I was more anxious than ever to let him have his way.

Just as his hands slid down my hips, I drew away from him, turning off the gas under the cooktop, grateful that my eggs hadn’t caught fire like my chest felt it had. A wounded, helpless moan came from behind me as Sirius pulled his chair over and began pawing at the backs of my legs, his fingers softly contouring the space between my thighs.

“You’re bruising my ego,” he practically whimpered as I salted and peppered the eggs.

“Oh, come now. If we base our entire relationship on sex, what will be left for the future?” I joked, turning around to wink at him. But as I did, a painfully unsure expression appeared on his face, his eyebrows furrowed deeply and his jaw clenched tightly.

“The future,” he repeated and I suddenly realized I had overstepped the bounds of whatever this was – it wasn’t even a relationship. I didn’t expect him to stay, or to love me, or even to come back to me after he dealt with Peter. I knew what this was. Quickly, I busied myself with getting plates and putting eggs on them.

“It’s just a joke, Sirius, calm down,” I huffed, not sure if I should be offended about how he hadn’t even considered it, or flattered over how he seemed afraid to hurt my feelings by bringing it up. Either way, I wanted him to know that this was what I expected.

“Ruby, listen,” he said, holding onto my legs, rubbing his thumbs along the soft skin on the backs of my thighs, and setting his head on the small of my back, as he was still seated.   

“No, it’s fine,” I replied quickly. I didn’t want him to be weirded out by me, now. He already knew I was his psychotic fangirl who followed him into candy shops, it was almost too much for him to think that I wanted to settle him down. “It’s just sex, Sirius. It’s not like I expect you to marry me.” He was speaking again, instantly – almost nervously.

“I don’t think I’ll come back from Hogwarts.” For a moment, I was still, repeating the words in my head, trying to understand what he had meant by them. He wasn’t going to come back here from Hogwarts? Wasn’t going to come back to me? It wasn’t like that was something I hadn’t already considered. But if he meant he wasn’t going to come back at all?

“What does that mean?” I asked softly.

“I don’t expect to make it out of Hogwarts.” He spoke slowly, clearing his throat afterward, as if to make himself forget he had said it out loud.

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked, significantly louder as I turned to face him – his hands were still on my legs and his eyes were focused on his thumbs’ path, back and forth.

“Exactly what it sounds like,” he said, defensively, but he didn’t raise his head.

“Sirius, look at me,” I demanded and, for a moment, I thought he ignored me. Finally, he stood, placing his lips immediately to mine, softly, holding my cheeks in his hands. It wasn’t anything like the kisses we had shared, so far. It was delicate, nervous, quiet. And when he pulled his lips away, he placed his forehead to mine, keeping his eyes closed.

“Thank you,” he breathed out, nearly a whisper. I was about to ask what for, when he continued. “For the breakfast, I’m starving.” His obnoxious grin overtook his face.

“You arsehole,” I laughed, shoving a plate in his direction and leaning over to get a good look as he pulled his chair back to the kitchen table. With my own plate, I sat across from him.

While I thought the whole bit had been a joke at my expense, past that one mischievous grin, his mood remained the same – morose, withdrawn, mute. Completely not Sirius.

  We ate in silence – and I wanted to point out, for no other reason than to get conversation going, that he was still, in fact, completely naked at my breakfast table. But I felt oddly uncomfortable – which had been uncommon the last few days with Sirius. I wasn’t sure how to get him back to the insatiable, horny, handsy version of himself.

I was finally beginning to think of things to say to him – that were neither on the topic of his business at Hogwarts, or the sex we had yet to have – when he stood, placed his empty plate into the sink, and went walking back to my bedroom.

“What are you doing?” I asked carefully, following him.

“I’m going to clean up your room a bit before I go.” I stopped.

“Before you go?” I nearly shouted. He couldn’t go. I hadn’t crossed off nearly as many things from my fantasy checklist as I had expected to. “Where will you stay for a month?”

“I’ll sleep in the woods, like I have been.”

“As Padfoot?” This time, I let myself shout. “You don’t really have the best track record with that sort of thing, you know.” He turned back toward me, angry.

“Then what am I supposed to do?” he shouted in return.

“Why can’t you stay here?” I asked loudly. His eyes narrowed as they searched my face for a moment, before launching into another argument.

“Forgive me if I don’t want to break your heart,” he growled, turning away and he continued into the bedroom, where he starting picking pillows up off the floor.

“Oh, don’t be so sodding arrogant,” I yelled, throwing a pillow at him. “You’re not the love of my life, you twat. I only want you to stay for the sex.”

“Well, I don’t!” he spat in reply, pulling sheets back onto my bed. I scoffed with a laugh.

“The eight times you called out my name this morning says otherwise.”

“Of course, you counted,” he quipped, turning back to face me, his face completely flushed and the rest of his body not agreeing with the previous statement he had made.

“Oh, right. You don’t want to stay for the sex. I can tell,” I gestured broadly down his torso, leaving myself only a second to appreciate the sight of him.

“You’re right. I don’t!” he snapped, taking a large step toward me, nearly pressing his chest to mine. I straightened my back so he didn’t tower over me so greatly.

“I don’t believe you!” I angled my hips in to squeeze him between us, to prove my point.

“Well then, maybe it’s not the only reason!” he shouted into my face. Out of instinct, my mouth clamped shut, but I knew if I stopped being dramatic, he would never tell me. I needed to know why else he would want to stay, what other reason there was beyond the potential for sex.

“Then what else is it?” I screamed.

“Being with you makes me not want to go to Hogwarts at all!” I was finally pulling some information out of him. I just had to keep shouting at him a little longer.

“What the hell do I have to do with anything?”

“Because now I don’t want to die!” At that revelation, I no longer wanted to keep yelling. I wanted to hold him, to stroke his hair and tell him he didn’t have to die, to give him anything he wanted. By the look on his face, I knew what he wanted. To hear one last thing.

“I don’t want you to die either!” I stood on my tiptoes to shout right into his face, to which he responded by grabbing me by the neck and pulling me right into his mouth, gliding his tongue down onto mine and moaning at their touch.

Suddenly, he seemed hurried, frantic – like the minutes we could spend together would come to a crashing end – he pushed his hands down my hips until his fingers hooked into the elastic of my knickers, sliding them down my legs.

Before I could step out of them, he lifted me off the floor and spun, letting me fall down onto the bed beneath him. As his eyes traveled, his hands pushed up underneath my shirt, stopping a moment to knead at my breasts before pushing my shirt up over my head. As soon as it was gone, he bent over me, greedily sliding his lips over all the suddenly available skin that he hadn’t yet seen, starting with running his tongue over my breast, and biting down, sucking softly.

All this, and he kept his hips at my knees. I grabbed at him, pushing and pulling – to which he moaned gratefully in reply – and begging him to level his hips to mine, so I could pull him into where he needed – where I wanted him to be. He grinned deviously, but shook his head, and pushed me over onto the bed, to where I was lying with my head on my pillow. He circled around and crawled up from the bottom edge of the mattress, and I could’ve been undone just watching him, with that expression on his face.

He crawled over me, but stopped with his face to my abdomen. With a raised eyebrow, and leaning on one arm, he used the other hand to push my legs apart, sliding his fingers up my thigh, and back again, growing closer to the center each time.

“Sirius, you shouldn’t …” I began to say, not sure I could handle what he was planning – it was Sirius Black, after all. I was sure it would be over in seconds – both from the memories of my teenage years, and from the magnificence of his mouth, of which I had already been well versed. Not to mention, the men I had been with thus far were all takers, in that sense. What he was about to do, I had never experienced. He interrupted me before I could begin arguing.

“Don’t get me wrong, my intentions are purely selfish. I just want to feel the weight of it on my tongue,” he replied, that tongue sliding from behind his lips to wet them. My cheeks were surely as brightly colored as my hair, but I pressed the issue anyway.

“The weight of what?” I asked, consciously trying to keep my chest from heaving.

“The moment I make you scream out my name,” he purred, keeping his eyes on me while he placed his lips onto my stomach. This was going to be rather quick, that kiss alone was nearly enough to have me unmade. But the kisses continued, traveling further, down along the contours of my waist, over my hip bone, down the crease of my leg, until.

“Oh, Godric,” I shuddered softly as he dragged his tongue the full breadth of me, slowing considerably just at the crux at the top of his ascent. I let out a shaking breath as he removed his tongue to look up at me, a wild, devious expression in his eyes.

“Not the name I’m looking for,” he said as he pushed my legs further apart, going back immediately to the place he had left off, his soft, wet tongue working in tight circles. Instantly, my fingers were knotted into his dark hair, pulling him away out of some twisted reflex, but he pushed against my grip, the power of his tongue magnified against me. I gasped sharply, but he knew I wasn’t done – he continued, moving his tongue to different locations, circling the tip of it around my threshold before delving deeply inside, his lips pressed against my second set.

Quickly, however, he returned to the spot he knew would elicit the strongest reaction, and my fingers in his hair immediately tightened. He let out a huff, through his nose – pleased laughter at my instinctual reaction, but I could hardly focus on anything but the warmth of his breath, falling into the depths of me. For just a moment, he drew his tongue up and down, agonizingly slowly and I almost cursed at him, but he suddenly sped and my voice raised.

The first syllable of his name was on my lips as waves, surges, pulses, thrumming coursed through my skin, through my veins – and I began to scream it – as there began a pounding at my front door. Gratefully, Sirius was completely unruffled by it and continued to ride out the extent of my pleasure. Once I finished, he placed a soft kiss against my hot skin, and despite the overbearing beating on my door, I pulled him to my lips and whispered to him.

“Oh, Gods, Sirius,” I breathed out, shivering in his hands, and he hummed, delighted.

“Oh, yes, that’s the one,” he moaned into my ear, almost as stimulated as he had just made me. At his reaction, I wanted nothing more than to take him into my mouth and return the favor – I could feel him pressed hard against my thigh – but the hammering at my door shook me from the teenage fantasy I was having. He let out a short, irritated laugh, raising his eyebrows at me and pursing his lips tightly – frustrated from the overwhelming number of times we had been interrupted in the two days he had been there.

While Sirius dutifully changed back into Padfoot, I quickly threw on an old grey robe that I wished wasn’t as thin, or as short as it was, and made my way to where my front door was being beaten down. Of course, I expected it to be Dumbledore, and I wasn’t entirely thrilled at meeting the single most powerful wizard on earth in the state I was in, but after what Sirius had just done, I couldn’t care less. The feeling of his tongue still coursed through my body, sending shudders up to my shoulders and I struggled to stifle them.

I prepared a smile, practicing my breathing to cover my breathlessness and opened the door to see a calm, smiling Dumbledore standing there, next to another man I recognized.

Remus Lupin.

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Suddenly, my breathlessness was for an entirely different reason. Though the topic hadn’t come up, I was positively certain that Remus not only knew about Padfoot, but I was sure that he could recognize him on the spot. I just stared at them, not saying a word, but I noticed immediately that Remus was staring right back at me, his eyes as wide as mine. Could he remember me? Remus and I had never even met, but it was highly probable he had seen me around Hogsmeade in our youth. But why would such a transient encounter warrant the look he was giving me?

“May we come in?” Dumbledore asked and I nodded numbly. Quickly, I realized that my silence could be considered as panic – which it was – but I had to play it off.

“Yes! Of course, yes. I’m sorry for the less than warm welcome, it’s just such an honor to meet you,” I said, taking Dumbledore’s hand and shaking it rapidly. “Such an honor.”  

“Thank you,” he smiled politely, but his eyes were elsewhere – searching for any sign of the notorious criminal, Sirius Black. Remus instantly began wandering, peering into every corner. Unlike Dumbledore, Remus was on the hunt. For whatever reason, he knew Sirius was here.

“You’re looking for him, aren’t you?” I asked, turning my eyes intentionally wide as I glanced over at Remus, to watch his reaction. It wasn’t as expected – his eyes quickly darted over to mine and, when they met, he looked away quickly. I began to wonder whose side he would be on, if he knew Padfoot, like I thought he would.

“Indeed,” Dumbledore replied curtly, just as Remus leaned over the doorframe of the bedroom, peering in. Padfoot raised his head and their eyes met. I held my breath as Remus immediately looked back at me, a reflected expression in both our faces.

“What a handsome dog,” he said blandly, narrowing his eyes at me, as if trying to read the panic on my face. I nodded, and knew to keep my mouth shut, but I couldn’t help it.

“Best looking thing I’ve ever bloody seen,” I muttered under my breath and Remus shot a single eyebrow up, an undefinable grin appearing on his lips. Dumbledore took notice of our conversation and made his way over to where Remus and I stood, in deadlock.

“And quiet. Not much of a guard dog, I imagine,” he said, laughing quietly.

“No sir, he’s much too friendly,” I explained with a curious grin and Remus covered his mouth – to stifle a laugh? – while simultaneously trying to interpret my smile.

“Affectionate, then?” Remus said, pursing his lips, but failing to keep his smile to himself, as his eyes flickered to what I could only assume would be love bites on my neck.

“I can’t keep the mutt off me,” I grumbled and Remus had to turn, keeping his telling expression from Dumbledore’s sights, and coughing to cover a laugh. It was as if he came to look for Sirius for his own benefit, and not at all for the reasons Dumbledore wanted to find him.

“Have you had a guest, Miss …” Dumbledore paused, waiting for my name.

“Ruby. No, why do you ask?” I half-lied. Sirius wasn’t really my guest. Technically.

“There are two plates in the sink,” he observed, watching me carefully. I nodded, just about to say ‘Padfoot doesn’t have a bowl,’ but, knowing Sirius and his propensity for shouting out his own name, I couldn’t be sure that Dumbledore hadn’t heard the name Padfoot before, perhaps even in relation to Sirius. So I kept it to pronouns.

“He won’t eat out of a bowl,” I shrugged, pointing into the bedroom and hoping that would end the questions. Dumbledore walked into the room and rubbed Padfoot’s head. I had begun to wonder what was going through Sirius’s mind at that moment.

“He is quite composed. What’s his name?” he asked, scratching behind Padfoot’s ears. Thankfully, Dumbledore didn’t turn, because Remus looked at me with panic in his eyes. Oh, yes, it was obvious he knew it was Sirius – but more importantly, he was covering for him.

My mind was racing – the seconds felt like hours. Steer clear of anything about his coat colour – don’t invoke images of anything black. I went through the list of the most common dog names, ones that weren’t telling – Spot, Rover, Sparky – but with Sirius’s name in the forefront of my mind, my knowledge betrayed me. Plus, I panicked.

“Betelgeuse,” I said immediately. Remus’s face went somewhere between white as a sheet and on the verge of explosive laughter. Dumbledore turned with a smile, coming from the room.

“I’m sure there’s an amusing story behind that,” he chuckled. If Remus didn’t take a breath in the next two seconds, he was going to pass clean out on the floor.

“Oh, quite a wild one, yes sir,” I grinned, baring my teeth and trying to breathe, unlike Remus, who went wandering into the bedroom to avoid Dumbledore’s glances.

“Well,” Dumbledore said pleasantly as he softly clapped his hands together. “It doesn’t appear that you’re in any danger, here.” He smiled at me kindly and I nearly hugged him. If he wasn’t hunting down the man I was sleeping with, I probably would have.

“No, not at all. It’s just the two of us,” I laughed, noticing that Remus was knelt by the bed, staring intently into Padfoot’s face. Before he could move away, Padfoot pushed his nose to Remus’s and licked carefully. The smile on Remus’s face was unmatched, and, unless my eyes were deceiving me, I could swear I saw tears form as he rubbed Padfoot’s ears.

“Mr. Lupin,” Dumbledore called as he opened the front door.

“Right behind you,” he called, and he took only a few long steps before he was at the door. As Dumbledore went out, Remus stopped and leaned closely to my ear.

“Thank you,” he whispered with his hand on the back of my arm. I gleamed.

“Believe me, it was my pleasure,” I laughed. Remus looked coyly at me.

“Oh, I’m sure it was.” He winked and shut the door behind him. I had barely locked the door before racing back into the bedroom and jumping onto the bed next to Padfoot. For a few minutes, we just laid together, waiting to make sure neither of our guests were returning.

“I’m sure Dumbledore knew something was up,” I finally sighed into the thick fur on his neck, just as he began to change back into himself. It was a strange sensation, feeling his fur change into skin. When he was fully Sirius, he slid his arms around me, my face still buried in his neck. Before I could stop myself, I kissed softly. Sirius hummed contentedly.

“Where did you come up with that name, anyway?” he asked, a curious smile on his face.

“Betelgeuse is in the Orion constellation,” I sighed, putting my face into my hands. “I panicked.” Before I could apologize, Sirius burst into loud laughter, burying his face into the blankets underneath us to stifle the sound – he laughed so hard, his shoulders shook.

“That was nearly Marauder worthy,” he hummed, rubbing his eyes.

“I thought Remus forgot how to breathe,” I laughed with him. He smiled softly.

“It was so good to see him again, Ruby,” he sighed, rolling onto his stomach and laying his head over the tops of his crossed arms, looking at me through lustrous eyes.

“I could tell he knew it was you,” I grinned, lying on my side and propping my head up with one hand, tracing up and down his spine with the other. “Why was he covering for you?”

Sirius’s smile was like the bloody sun. “I bet he saw Wormtail in the Prophet, like I did.”

“If he’s anything like me, he’s been waiting twelve years for some proof that you couldn’t have done the things they claimed you did,” I mumbled from where my face was perched in my hand, drawing circles on his back with my fingernail.

“Anything like you,” he smiled, sliding his hand across my waist and pulling me closer to him, simultaneously pressing his lips to mine, as softly as he ever had. As we parted, his expression was suddenly clouded in an emotion I couldn’t name.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, brushing the hair from his face and tucking it behind his ear. As he leaned into my arm, I was reminded of the first night he had done that, as Padfoot.

“You’ve devastated my resolve,” he sighed, holding his hand to my neck, tracing my jawline with the pad of his thumb. I furrowed my brows at him.

“Resolve?” I asked and he pursed his lips to one side.

“Until I met you, I was entirely focused on Pettigrew. Saving Harry, avenging James and Lily. And now,” he sighed. “All I want to do is stay here with you.” While my heart began racing, I tried to remind myself that the infamous Sirius Black was a notorious sweet talker.

“As much as I agree with your desire to stay, I think you’re letting Little Sirius think for you,” I laughed, letting my eyes skitter down his slender waist. His eyebrows rose instantly.

“Little?” he shouted indignantly. I rolled my eyes overly dramatically.

“Besides, it’s not like I’ll change the locks after you leave,” I said, snuggling closer to him, feeling the stubble on his chin against my forehead as he closed his arms around me.

“If I manage to get inside Hogwarts, and I kill Pettigrew,” he began, taking a deep breath, his chest pressing against my ear. “I don’t know how I would make it out again.”

I looked up at him. “That’s what you meant earlier. About not wanting to die.” He nodded silently, his fingers around my waist fumbling with the sash of my grey robe.

“I don’t imagine Dumbledore will let me walk out the front gate.” His words were shaky, as if he suddenly realized what exactly that would mean.

“What about Remus?” I inquired. Obviously Remus seemed intent on helping him – if he really did know about Peter, surely he had pieced together the actual events that occurred on the Halloween night from twelve years previous. Couldn’t Remus help Sirius get into Hogwarts, and then help him get out the same way?

“I don’t want Moony involved in this. He’s been through enough because of me.” Moony – he had called him that the first time he had mentioned Remus, too, the day before.

“Why do you call him Moony? Is Remus an Animagus, too?” I asked curiously. So far, I already knew that three of the four Marauders were Animagi. I expected Remus to complete the set. Sirius’s face contorted for a moment, as if deciding how to answer that. It took him a while.

“No,” he said slowly, and rather anticlimactically. “But he was the reason I worked so hard to become one.” I opened my mouth to question him again, but stopped. From the look on Sirius’s face, it seemed like he was really hoping I didn’t ask anything further. In that case, maybe he could use a change of subject. After all, I hadn’t yet returned the favor.

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“Well, not counting on Remus,” I said, curling my fingers around Sirius’s exposed hip. As if all of him weren’t exposed, nearly constantly over the last two days. “You have a month to figure out your escape plan, right?” His eyebrow rose, just slightly, and his tongue flicked out to wet his lips. At that reaction, I pushed my leg between his and let my hip rub against him.

“I have a month to figure out a load of things,” he smiled, running his fingers under the sash of my robe, working his way back to the knot in the front.

“Oh? Like what?” I asked innocently, as the sash unfurled and he slid his hands along my bare waist underneath the fabric, pulling me closer toward him.

“I seem to remember discussing your list of turn-ons. I think I may have discovered the top of that list before we were interrupted,” he mumbled, placing his lips against my neck, pushing the collar of my robe down my shoulder. His lips worked their way up behind my ear, his face hidden in the waves of my hair. I shivered every time he breathed out into my skin.

“I’m pretty sure your name is the list, and everything else falls under it,” I replied, holding his face and pulling it back toward my lips, so I could have his tongue in my mouth again. That point was pretty high on the bulleted list under the heading ‘Sirius Sodding Black,’ second only to his glorious tongue in other wonderful places. I was still weak from that.

“Oh,” he said simply, his grin interrupting his kiss. Instead of kissing his teeth, I traveled downward, pulling tightly enough on his long, dark tresses to tense the muscles in his neck and biting softly onto them. He breathed in through his teeth, it sounded like a hiss.

I put that sound on the list.

Granted, the list was titled ‘Sirius Sodding Black,’ so everything he did made it onto the list. But I liked to make a note of something, when it did. It was like my fantasy checklist in reverse – because I couldn’t have possibly imagined, at 16, that I could be so aroused by Sirius Black breathing in through his teeth, or the muscles in his long neck, or the occasional grey that peppered his jet black hair. Or the way he watched me, biting his tongue softly, as I kissed my way down his abdomen, or the expectant way he rose his right eyebrow as my lips hovered over the soft, pink head of his erect skin.

Teasing him was on the list – very close to the top. My mouth opened and I took him in, but without any contact – I just breathed onto him, hot and moist. His playful whimpering was on the list. I barely brushed my lips against the most minimal tip of him, dragging my bottom lip along behind. The guttural groan that arose from his mouth was on the list. With barely any effort, I pushed him onto his back and settled between his legs. The indecent way he slid his tongue along his front teeth was on the list. Slowly, I closed my lips around the upper half of his length, puckering, pulling the pressure from my cheeks and sliding back, letting him nearly fall from my mouth before plunging him back in again. The illicit way he spoke my name amidst a string of loud cursing only spurred my fury – I gripped him by the hips and took him completely in, humming with him at the back of my throat. His shameless moaning fell into mumbling.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” he whined breathlessly, holding one hand over his eyes, the other balled firmly onto the sheets, trying – and failing, slightly – not to buck his hips up to meet my mouth more frequently. By that point, I was so completely unwound at his reaction – listening to the way he breathed my name, watching him writhe under my lips – if he were to touch me suddenly, I would likely break his fingers with the cataclysmic weight of my own orgasm.

Suddenly, his fingers migrated into my hair, twisting tightly as his cursing rescinded back into loud, heavy panting – his chest was heaving, shaking as I continued to pump him brutally with my lips, dragging my teeth along him softly, in between each sucking grind.

“Ruby,” he called out in a sudden, trembling voice, followed by a gasping whisper of “Oh. Yes,” and “Don’t stop, please, don’t stop,” and he spilled out, hot and full, into my mouth.

As he had done with me, I rode it out until I could no longer feel his skin seizing between my teeth, at which point, I slipped my mouth from him, swallowing hard. Both our breathing was labored as I climbed up him and collapsed onto his chest. He was quiet for a few minutes.

“Fuck,” he repeated, an innumerable time, breathless. “I think you’re my list, too.” I smiled quietly, with my head on his chest, as he pulled his fingers through the hair behind my ear, and I draped my arm across his chest. To the list, I added his fingers brushing against the curve of my ear every time he ran them through my hair. I added his soft, contented humming of a song I had never heard, but could now listen to for the rest of my life. I added the way he nuzzled his half-shaven face against the top of my head and pressed his lips gently into my hair. And before I knew it, I added “Falling in love with Sirius Sodding Black” to the top of the list.

Oh, Godric Gryffindor. I was in an enormous shit storm of trouble.

 I couldn’t fall in love with Sirius Black. For an incalculable number of reasons, the first being that he was a wanted fugitive. It wasn’t as if he could stay here with me for the rest of his hunted life. They would never stop looking for him. He would never be safe in Hogsmeade, so close to Hogwarts and Albus Dumbledore. Besides that, what if he never came back from his mission at Hogwarts? Well, falling in love with him didn’t make a difference, in that regard. If he never made it back – if he were killed, or even sent back to Azkaban, I would still be utterly and consumedly devastated, whether I admitted I was in love with him or not.

No, the biggest problem was that he was Sirius Black. The insatiable, lecherous, philandering cad that is Sirius Black. Which was the root of the problem. That, added to the very last thing he had said to me. ‘I think you’re my list, too.’ Arguably, that could have been something he said in flattery, or from the heat of my mouth still lingering.

But if he had meant it – if he were suddenly, for some inexplicable reason, feeling the exact things I was feeling in that moment – I had done something that no other girl, no other woman had ever done. I had gotten Sirius Black to fall in love with me. I reveled in not only that thought, but in the memory that, only a few moments prior, I had reduced the man himself to an incoherent, throbbing mess with only my mouth.  

Still, the idea that the notorious wolf of Hogwarts may have potentially fallen for me – I couldn’t even fathom it, much less entertain it. It was a ridiculous notion. Sirius chased after the most popular, most beautiful, most enthralling girls at Hogwarts – I would know, I had to watch him walk by my house with every single one of them. What Sirius didn’t go for were the girls who hopelessly chased after him, the girls who obsessed over him – and that’s what I was.

I was the mousy little girl who had to imagine that she was cool enough to muck about with the infamous Marauders of Hogwarts. I was the one who, at 15, begged Sirius’s cousin Andromeda to spell my hair permanently purple, so maybe he would notice me. I was the one who, when he did notice my hair, one day in The Three Broomsticks, and smiled cunningly with a single raised eyebrow, I ducked behind my butterbeer to hide my blushing cheeks. There was even one time that I had made a date at Madam Puddifoot’s, only to see Sirius strolling in with one of his many gorgeous girls. I could hardly even focus on anything but him, despite the girl. And my date.

 Needless to say, that had been my only date until after Sirius’s arrest.

 Sure, so far, I had been playing my part extremely well – that I could resist the charms of Sirius, that my childhood crush had been a thing of the past – and he allowed me to play it enough to get into the shape we were currently in – legs tangled, wrapped up in each other. But, I was the first and only woman he’d seen since Azkaban. I was physical necessity. Nothing more.

The moral of the story was this – my being in love with him didn’t matter. Sirius wouldn’t ever love me in return. If I didn’t accept it now, I was going to lose what little I had with him.

Just as I had resigned myself to focusing on the physical aspect of our relationship, Sirius surprised me by speaking – and saying something I hadn’t expected.

“It’s not exactly an accident that I wound up here, you know. With you,” he spoke softly into my hair and I laughed, my warm breath puffing against his chest.

“No, I definitely wouldn’t classify a sex act as an accident, Sirius.” I joked, but in the back of my mind, I was wondering exactly what he meant, hoping he would expound. Thankfully, he did continue his thought, almost as if I hadn’t steered him off course at all.

“I saw you leave the Hog’s Head,” he said, and I could’ve sworn his arms tightened around me, pulling me closer. “I followed you back here.” I glanced up at him from my place on his chest, strumming my fingers along his protruding ribcage.

“How creepy,” I laughed, placing a kiss onto his cheek to let him know I was only kidding. “But that’s still pretty random.” He shook his head.

“I followed you here because I knew you. Because I remembered you,” he said, and the expression on his face was perplexing. Halfway between entirely dreamy and … nervous?

“Remembered me?” I laughed sarcastically, trying to shake off the irrational hope that he was telling me all of this because he was about to profess his undying love to me.

“I may have been a bloody idiot, but I wasn’t blind,” he argued quickly, so I remained quiet, to let him continue. But he barely said anything more. “Evidently, you were.”

 My eyes instantly shot up to meet his. His whole face softened immediately.  

 “Me?” I nearly shouted into his face. His smile broke out.

“Did you ever think that you weren’t the only one of us with a crush?” he asked with raised brows and my mouth fell open, smacking against his chest. But I regained my composure.

“Oh, that’s bollocks,” I grumbled, shaking my head, but he spoke again.

“Dromeda was the one who spelled your hair that magnificent shade of purple,” he replied softly, twirling my violet hair in his long fingers, while I stared, wide eyed. “I smiled at you in The Three Broomsticks and you completely ignored me. James couldn’t console me for weeks.”

“I did not ignore you!” I shouted indignantly, but he kept talking.

“After that, I tried everything to see you again,” he sighed emphatically. “But I had no idea who you were, or where you lived. Remus told me he thought you went to Beauxbatons.”

For a moment, I was quiet. Surely he knew by now, but it was still hard for me to admit it to him out loud. “Sirius, I’m a Squib.” He didn’t hesitate, even a second.

“Well, I know that now,” he laughed, just before planting a soft kiss to my lips.

“Oh, come off it,” I laughed it off, trying to remind myself who I was talking to. “You were just mad that there was a girl you couldn’t conquer.” He cocked that one eyebrow as his hands felt their way into my robe, pulling me taut against his chest.

“Not anymore,” he grinned deviously. I rolled my eyes blatantly, while the hope in my heart dropped immensely. It’s not like I was surprised to hear him say it – I was just a nostalgic challenge that he had never gotten to surmount. Despite that, I didn’t stop him from slipping his tongue between my teeth. After all, he was still my whole list, whether he was in love with me or not. That didn’t change the way his fingers felt against my bare waist, or how I felt about the tiny, little moans he made when our tongues met, or the conceit I felt over having my hand on his arse.

Just as I had gotten comfortable – allowing my hands to travel over every available inch of his skin – I started to realize, in the back of my mind, just how thin he actually was and how badly I needed to feed him better. I kicked myself for not paying attention to the literal task at hand.

But I had no sooner fallen back into the mindlessness of letting my hands make all the decisions, and leaving the cognition out of it, than Sirius pulled away and rose from the bed, pulling open the doors to my closet and thumbing through the contents.

“What are you doing?” I asked, my robe still splayed from where his hands had just been.

“Looking for something I might be able to wear?” he said as a question, hoping I would help him answer it. I just sat up, staring at him as I tucked my legs underneath me.

“Why?” I asked. He hadn’t asked me about clothes the entire two days he had been there – in fact, by that point, I was positive that he was more comfortable without them. He turned back toward me for a moment, his eyes immediately drawn to my open robe.

“I … bloody hell, Ruby,” he grinned, taking two enormous steps back to where I sat and burying his face into my exposed chest, pushing me back onto the bed with the force of his lips, as he hummed into my skin. After properly molesting me for a few minutes – in every imaginable facet – he reluctantly pushed himself back toward the closet.

“Maybe I don’t want you to dress,” I said, tying my robe closed and pressing myself to his back, sliding my hands suggestively along his hips. He leaned his head back against my shoulder.

“While I’m absolutely chuffed over that notion,” he began, contorting his neck to kiss the side of my face, “I don’t exactly want my todger swinging around near a hot cooker.”

“You’re cooking?” I asked, skeptically. He looked back at me with a raised eyebrow.

“Why is that such a shock to you?” he asked, feigning miffed. Underneath his arm, I reached into the closet and pulled out an old pair of baggy, black and green plaid pyjama bottoms.

“Then what’s on the menu?” I asked, as I sadly watched him pull them on – he had to tie the string in the waist to get them to stay up. I had thought it impossible for a pair of ratty, moth-eaten trousers to look definitively erotic, but Sirius Black had just made it happen. Since there was no reason for only one of us to be nude, I pulled on some cozy clothes of my own.

“Do you have curry powder?” he asked as he comfortably made his way into my kitchen. He had only been here for two days, and I already felt like he lived in my home.

“We’re in Britain, of course I have curry powder,” I huffed, as I opened the spice cabinet just above the oven. He grinned widely at me for a moment as he pulled it from the shelf.

“Thanks, love,” he winked, and just like that, he went flying around the kitchen, raiding all of my other cabinets and my fridge for his remaining ingredients, which I was sure he would find.

“Don’t break anything,” I warned as I settled into a kitchen chair, thoroughly amused and entertained at observing him. I had just leaned back in my chair, having a perfectly good time memorizing the long lines of muscles along his waist, stretching across his back, when he unexpectedly began singing, his voice soft and smooth and sweet. I stopped everything.

“Something in the way she moves,” he purred, a gorgeous smile on his face as he pulled things from shelves, from the fridge, and placed it all on the counter. If I was breathing, that would have come as a surprise to me. I certainly felt like my chest was collapsing. In all the times and all the places I had seen him – in Honeydukes, in Zonko’s Joke Shop, at The Three Broomsticks, at the Hog’s Head – in all his seven years visiting Hogsmeade, I had never heard him sing. And it was the most glorious sound I’d ever heard.

“Something in the way she woos me.” He continued singing softly while I died a little more inside. I had to speak up. I had to stop him. More importantly, I had to stop myself. From falling so hard for him. But he was making it so damn impossible.

“The Beatles? Really?” I said, as if I disapproved. The fact was that I was on the opposite spectrum of disapproving. I wanted him to sing it to me for the rest of our existence.

“What’s your problem with The Beatles?” he practically shouted, but keeping his back to me, as whatever he was mixing together was more important.

“Nothing,” I shrugged, as if he could see me. “I just pegged you for a rock-and-roll kind of guy. Floyd, Queen, Bowie, you know.” At that, he spun immediately, spoon in hand.

“Oh, Bowie is a god,” he agreed emphatically, placing his spooned hand over his chest and raising his eyes toward the ceiling, as if speaking of David Bowie required reverence. “But Ziggy didn’t really fit the mood I’m in.” He smiled softly, and I smiled reflexively in response.

“Making love with his ego? I’d say that fits any of your moods pretty well,” I scoffed, and he glared at me for a second before a brash expression crossed his features, and he suddenly smiled and turned back to his concoction that was now on the cooktop.

 “You think so? I do rather agree with the lines about being well-hung and having a God-given arse, so you might be on to something.” He looked back at me, waiting for my argument.

“It’s not like I can disagree with you,” I grumbled under my breath and, by the way he slowly pulled his tongue along his upper lip, underneath a smile, I could tell he heard me.

“Now that I think about it, I could apply Bowie to our situation,” he mused.

“Turn and face the strange?” I half-sang him an offered lyric and he ignored me.

“Sometimes, you get so lonely,” he sang in rebuttal and I immediately shut my mouth. He didn’t even glance back to gauge my reaction. I knew my way around Bowie, well enough to know the title of the song he had just serenaded me with. Evidently, he kept singing, but the wheels in my brain were spinning so fast, I couldn’t hear over them. Until, that is, he got to the chorus, to which I was listening intently, wondering if he would say it.

“Please be mine. Share my life. Stay with me. Be my …” he stopped, raising the spoon to his lips as he tested his curry. Wife, I finished for him in my mind. The word you’re looking for is wife. Why in Godric’s name would he sing that to me? And did he just say it applied to our situation? I was screaming these questions to myself, knowing I should be screaming them at him.

But I didn’t want to spook him – I was having far too much fun with things, as they were. I didn’t want to screw them up by saying, “Oh, you’re singing about me being your wife? Let’s go find a minister right now. Better yet, let’s get the bloody fucking Pope to do the deed.” That Pope thing was just about as rational as Sirius Black ever settling down anyway.

“Is this right?” he suddenly asked and I almost immediately answered yes. Yes, everything about this – us, together – was right. Physical, emotional, didn’t matter. As long as he stayed.

Then I realized he was holding the spoon up to my face, his hand underneath it to keep anything from dripping onto my bare thighs below the hem of my shorts.

He meant the curry.

I put my lips on the edge of the spoon and tasted his culinary creation. I shouldn’t have been surprised at its perfection. Only one more reason for me to be hopeless over him.

“Sirius, it’s delicious,” I said in complete awe. His tentative grin magnified. Before I could even wipe the remnants from the corner of my mouth, Sirius leaned down and kissed me.

He licked his lips of the curry he had gotten from mine. “Somehow that taste was better than the first one,” he smiled before he shaped his face into feign perplexity.

While he went back to his pot, I stood, unable to manage this unseen side of Sirius Black. He wasn’t just strikingly attractive – with his long, unruly, curly black hair and his deep, fathomless grey eyes – and he wasn’t just phenomenal in the sheets. Of course, he had to also be ridiculously cute and clever and witty and kind and fucking perfect in every goddamn way.

            I wandered over to my hi-fi – lacking anything to say and trying desperately to fill the silence – and began thumbing through my vinyls, trying to decide whether Sirius would approve of my taste in music. Of course, I knew he, of all people, would appreciate the hard rock and the hair metal – AC/DC, Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith – but I wondered what he would think of everything else – Crowded House, The Police, Tears for Fears. I picked one, entirely at random.

“Do you like Depeche Mode?” I called into the kitchen.

“I’m sure I have no idea,” he laughed back. Just as I was about to berate him for not having heard of the greatest band to come out of Britain in the last decade, I stopped.

“Right,” I clicked my tongue, pressing my palm to my forehead. I tried not to think about the fact that it felt like Sirius had been living here for the last twelve years instead of Azkaban.

“Put in on and let’s find out,” he said, leaning back far enough to wink at me. After a few minutes of the vinyl playing, and I sprawled myself onto the sofa, with my head over one arm to be able to witness his reaction, he began nodding his head from his place in the kitchen.

“They’re bloody brilliant, aren’t they?” I asked, he continued to nod.

“Oh, yes,” he replied with a smile, as I closed my eyes.

“The rhythm is nothing compared to the lyrics,” I replied, already planning what I could put on that could follow Depeche Mode. I shouldn’t have opened so strong.

I had just heard the click of the gas turning off at the hob when I felt an impression in the cushion underneath me. When I opened my eyes, Sirius was leaned over me, his long hair cascading onto my cheeks. “Hi,” I grinned, craning my neck up so that I could meet his lips. As my lips brushed against his, he let his eyes drift slowly closed, settling down over me.

“Curry’s done,” he mumbled onto my mouth, his weight pressing down on me. I reciprocated his affection, winding my fingers into his hair.

“Is it,” I stated, more than questioned – letting him know that, at the moment, I was really not entirely concerned about anything other than his mouth.

“We can eat on the sofa and listen to your Depeche Mode,” he spoke in between kisses, as I wrapped my hand around his neck, pulling through the soft hair at the back of his neck.

“Must we?” I whined, indicating I was much happier with his tongue in my mouth over the curry. He laughed, but pushed himself from where he lay over me.

“Only because I’m so invested in your opinion of my cooking,” he grinned, racing back to the kitchen, returning with two bowls – chicken curry over rice, though I hadn’t even been aware of having leftover rice or chicken in my fridge, other than the chicken we had already demolished the day before. He watched expectantly as I put the fork to my lips.

“I already told you the curry sauce was delicious,” I said as I took a large bite. The look on his face was like a boy at Christmas. “It’s incredible, Sirius,” I mumbled through a mouthful.

His grin was excessively adorable. “I’m glad you like it.” He took his own forkful in, and we ate silently for a few minutes, until he said something unexpected. “Mrs. Potter taught me the recipe. James’s mum, of course, not Lily. Mrs. Potter was more my mum than my real mum.”

“Tell me more about James and Lily.” I spoke quickly before I lost my nerve. He choked on his curry, fork falling loudly into the bowl he was holding.

He cleared his throat before speaking. “What? Why?” He was still working on getting curry out of his windpipe. I thought about it for a moment before answering.

“You went to Azkaban right after they died. You had plenty of time to grieve them, but you never really had time to celebrate them, you know?” I said, trying to explain through an entirely too large bite of chicken. He just sat, staring for a long time.

“Godric Gryffindor, Ruby, how are you so bloody perfect?” he laughed, leaning over to kiss me, despite the sauce on my lips. He licked his own lips afterward, remarking again through expression how impressed he was at the second-hand taste of his own cooking. 

“Oh, sod off,” I laughed, shoveling curry into my mouth to distract myself from blushing.

“What do you want to know?” he asked, suddenly quiet.

“Anything. Just … talk about them,” I said, equally as quiet as I moved closer to him, poking at the food in my bowl. Maybe it wasn’t my business. Maybe he didn’t want to talk about them, or at least, not to me. I imagined myself to be right, as he remained soundless for some time.

“Well, you already know that James was an Animagus. We called him Prongs. That was his Patronus, too – a stag. Lily’s was a doe. They were meant to be together, the two of them.” His eyes were glassed over – I wasn’t sure if he was happy in remembering them, or miserable.

“So they were always together, then? From the beginning?” I asked. He laughed loudly.

“Oh, no,” he grinned. “Lil hated him at first. Said he was the most immature, thoughtless git she’d ever known. Wouldn’t even call him by his first name. She called him Potter.”

“What won her over?” With a strange smile on his face, he was quiet.

“You know, I’m still not one-hundred percent sure on that. Persistence?” he laughed softly, that far-away look still in his eyes. “She and Remus were good friends, and he may have been coerced into talking up James.” He shot his eyes over to me as I smiled.

“Coerced, or bribed with fancy chocolate?” I rose my eyebrow knowingly.

“It was fancy tea, if you must know.” He took a last bite of chicken curry before setting the bowl on the floor by the foot of the settee. He seemed to be watching me and, as I finished the last of my curry, he rolled over, placing his head into my lap. Very dog-like. “No, James may have been a prankster, but he was an incredible man. Loyal, protective, brilliantly clever. And he loved her more than anything.” He closed his eyes slowly, a peaceful smile on his face.

“Who was best man at the wedding, you or Remus?” I asked and he laughed. And I couldn’t help but run my fingers through his dark hair. He closed his eyes, leaning into my touch.

“Oh, me. Of course.”

“I can only imagine that speech,” I groaned. He arched open an eye.

“It was brilliant, thank you very much. Full of stag puns.”

“Deer-ly beloved kind of thing?” A wide grin appeared on his lips as he closed his eyes.

“They were quite fawned of each other, after all.”

“I’m surprised no one murdered you that day.”

“They tried. Well, Lily tried. James was in stitches.”

“Oh, I’m sure he was,” I rolled my eyes, though he couldn’t see it. He was paying far too much attention to my fingers in his hair. In the lull of the conversation, I noticed that ‘Enjoy the Silence’ had begun playing on the hi-fi. It was oddly appropriate, not only for the way I felt about him, but the way I was holding him. “All I ever wanted, all I ever needed is here, in my arms.”  

“You were right,” he sighed softly, as I pushed my fingers underneath his head, up along the back of his neck. With my fingers in his hair, he turned his head, pressing his pursed lips to the soft skin on the inside of my wrist, slowly drawing them up my arm.

“Right about what?” I asked absently, mesmerized with the way his bright, full lips looked against my skin. The way he looked up at me was lawless.

“Those Depeche Mode lyrics. Spot on,” he smiled underneath his bedroom eyes. When the chorus came round again, he sang it verbatim, not breaking his gaze from mine. His dark, grey eyes scanned my face while his lips continued to mark my arm.

“You picked that up quick,” I remarked, trying not to fall apart into his voice.

“I’m good at that,” he hummed into my skin. Just like that, with those words, I remembered who I was talking to. And I remembered how good he was at picking things up. Girls, in particular. Including me. If nothing else, I had to get his mouth to talk instead of kiss.

“Tell me more about Remus,” I said, and his face lit up instantly.

 ------------------------------------------------------------

For the rest of the day and into the night, we talked. Just talked. It was almost weird to say that about Sirius Black. He told me stories about his Marauders, about his time at Hogwarts, about Harry as a baby. He even mentioned his younger brother, Regulus, but not extensively – his family seemed to be a sore topic. He asked about my father, about what regular school was like – education outside of Hogwarts – about my job at Hog’s Head and if Aberforth is as intimidating as his brother. He only stopped talking for an occasional kiss. For most of the night, he lay with his head in my lap. We played through most of my records – many of them, more than once.  

“Once, I was annoying Moony over some Ravenclaw girl he was mad over. I told him I was going to tell her everything, to get him to stop whining about it, so he put a language charm on me. And for the rest of the day, he incorrectly translated my angry, garbled German.” Sirius was busy thumbing through my vinyl collection, or he would’ve seen how I was nearly dying, as I was unable to breathe from how hard I was laughing.

“I wonder how much I’d have to bribe Remus for a reenactment,” I laughed loudly.

“Oh, not that much, he was bloody delighted that day.” Then, with a look of intense, curious confusion, he held up an album – the man on the cover looking positively sad, getting his rolled up jeans dirty, as he sat leaned against a wooden fence. “Dexy’s Midnight Runners?”

“You’ll love ‘em. Put it on side two,” I grinned as I hopped excitedly over to where he sat on my floor as he placed the B side of the record on the hi-fi. I strategically placed the needle over the grooves of the very last song and, as it started, I began dancing around him. For a long time, he just watched with a smirk as I twirled my hands in the air, singing loud and off-key.

As the chorus came up for the last few times, he had evidently gotten the hang of it by that point and he sang it loud and off-key with me. He stood, taking hold of my hands and we pretended to know how to dance together, though it was really just skipping in time to the music, throwing our outstretched hands, held together, widely up and down.

“You in that dress,” he sang, his eyebrow raising suggestively, “Oh, my thoughts I confess verge on dirty. Ah, come on, Eileen.” His hands traveled up the hem of my shirt as he crooned, rubbing broadly – nearly comically – across my skin and he laughed, burying his lips into mine without missing a lyric in the song. I couldn’t possibly have loved this man any more.

Just as the song began to fade, Sirius stopped cold, looking immediately toward the window in my bedroom, which he could just barely see from where we stood. His grip on my waist increased significantly, but he didn’t make another movement or sound. I watched his jaw tighten, and I was sure he wasn’t even breathing.

“Is someone here?” I whispered, nearly inaudibly, glancing at the clock on the wall behind him – it was nearly midnight. Finally, he smiled at me, but it was weak and full of doubt.

“I’m sure I’m just paranoid,” he replied softly. “But I’ll check, just to be sure.” Together, we walked toward the back door, in my room, and he changed into Padfoot, leaving his plaid trousers behind as his back paws stepped out of them. Padfoot looked back at me.

“Be careful, Sirius,” I breathed softly and he lowered his nose slightly, as if to nod. As quietly as I could, I opened the door and Padfoot went out, slowly at first. Knowing exactly what he would want me to do, I shut the door behind him, but I couldn’t yet bring myself to lock it. He was going to come right back. Nothing was going to happen. Not now. Not yet.

Suddenly, there was low growling, teeth snapping closed – the sounds of a frightened dog fighting – and then, a man shouting. Someone had been there, after all. As quickly as the noises had come, they vanished. My mind raced with thoughts of what might’ve happened to Sirius. I had nearly resolved myself to going out there to find out, when there came a soft scratching at the bottom of the door. Without a second thought, I threw it open – but Padfoot wasn’t alone.

“Remus?” I nearly shouted. He smiled nervously, running his hand through the back of his hair. Padfoot came happily prancing in through my legs, tongue wagging as if nothing had happened. “Come in!” my voice squeaked as I stepped back to let him through.

“Apologies, for this,” he said shyly, and I laughed at how Sirius had said the very same thing to me the first time I had met him. Except, he had been naked.

Before I could ask Remus was he was doing at my house in the middle of the bloody night, Padfoot changed back and a very naked Sirius came charging toward him.

“Moony!” he shouted, throwing his arms around the neck of a surprised, but genuinely pleased, Remus. Without any notion for Sirius’s nudity, he wrapped his arms around his bare-skinned friend and held him tightly. They remained that way for some time.

“Put your clothes on, Pads,” he admonished him with a smile as they parted, and Sirius slipped back into his pyjama bottoms. Suddenly, I noticed that the leg of Remus’s trousers was torn, and there was a nasty gash on his skin underneath.

“Remus, what happened?” I shrieked, kneeling to get a better look. There was a fair amount of blood, but it didn’t seem to be too deep. I raced into the loo to get the bandages and antiseptic from the cupboard underneath the sink.

“I’m so sorry, Moons,” I heard Sirius say sorrowfully. “I had no idea it was you.”

“You did this?” I asked as I came back into the bedroom.

“I didn’t know!” he whined innocently, pawing at Moony’s, er, Remus’s jumper. Remus just waved it off with one hand, patting Sirius’s head with the other. Quickly, I took both of them by the hand and led them back into the sitting room. “I had a dream like this once, you know,” Sirius remarked, waggling his eyebrows at his friend, and then at me.

“I was in it?” Remus asked, though not entirely disbelievingly.

“You’re always in them, Moony, my love,” he purred, rubbing his shoulder against him.

“Were you actually in Azkaban all this time?” Remus asked skeptically as I sat him on the couch and propped his injured leg up onto my knee, where I knelt on the rug.

“I’m having doubts about that, as well,” I smirked, carefully rolling the leg of Remus’s trousers up to his knee, trying hard to avoid the area of broken skin underneath.

“Still as randy as ever, then?” Remus said, looking sarcastically tired, directed at Sirius.

“Worse,” Sirius grinned immensely, settling onto the couch purposefully close to Remus, who winced a bit as I applied the antiseptic to his leg wound. But I was surprised at how far-off I had misjudged his injury – it was hardly more than a bad scratch.

“Oh, this isn’t nearly as bad as I thought,” I stated with a purse of my lips and as I looked up, I caught a quick glimpse pass between the two of them.

“I’m a quick healer,” Remus smiled, though it seemed a bit forced. “Thanks to …”

“Hey,” Sirius interrupted quickly as he rose from his place on the sofa. “Why don’t I put on some more music?” As he walked back to my collection of vinyls, Remus groaned.

“Sirius Orion, if you put on Hungry Like the Wolf, I swear to the Gods,” Remus moaned, throwing his hand over his face. Sirius stopped immediately, turning on his heels.

“Is that a real song?” he asked excitedly. “Honestly, I missed all the good ones.”

“Oh, right,” Remus laughed. “Yeah, I guess that was after …” he trailed off, and we all understood where he was going, but nobody picked up the thought for him. After the death of the Potters. After Sirius got locked in a cell for a crime he didn’t commit. After Peter’s betrayal.

It almost made me forget how I wanted to ask why Remus considered Hungry Like the Wolf such a terrible song to play. Almost. Sirius plucked a record randomly from my collection and put it on, before there was any more time for awkward, emotionally-charged silences, so I avoided bringing up other potentially silence-inducing topics, and stuck to the basics.

“So, what brings you, Remus?” I asked needlessly, clearing my throat to clear the silence. He looked at me gratefully, as if relieved the silence had passed. Still, I hadn’t needed to ask – obviously he was here for Sirius. But we were all desperate for conversation. 

But Remus’s expression quickly fell, as if he had forgotten the reason he had come in the first place. It was evidently not just to see his old best mate again. Just as Sirius plopped down onto the couch next to him, Remus spoke, his voice breaking, his breath quivering.

“The Dementors have taken residence at Hogwarts,” he stated gravely. Sirius instantly went white. If I ever thought that his twelve years in Azkaban had no effect on him, I was given plenty of evidence to the contrary in his expression alone. “They’re hunting you.”

Sirius’s eyes glazed over, unblinking as he stared at the floor next to where I was seated, as I fastened the end of the bandage around Remus’s shin. As I finished, Remus moved his foot from my lap and placed his elbows on his knees, propping his head in his hands.

“Won’t he be safe here, away from the castle?” I asked hopefully, but the unchanging expression on Remus’s face told me otherwise. He was nearly a pale as Sirius.

“I’m not sure,” was all he said. Sirius still hadn’t spoken a word. Remus quietly placed his palm against Sirius’s naked back, and finally he looked over, a painful expression in his eyes.

“I’ll never be free, will I?” he laughed sarcastically, hanging his head – his abundant dark hair hung round his face, covering his increasingly dark expression. I noticed Remus’s fist clench tightly, where it was still held against his forehead – pieces of his short, chestnut hair clasped firmly between his shaking fingers. Sirius leaned over against Remus’s shoulder.

“Don’t say that, Pads,” Remus replied, taking his hand from his forehead and winding it into Sirius’s black hair, pushing it up and out of his face.

“But it’s true, isn’t it?” he asked, suddenly loudly, as he stood. “Even if I manage to get the entire wizarding community to believe me, I still won’t be free. Not from this,” he said, beating his palm hard against his chest. “Not from this terror. Not from the nightmares. I won’t ever get those twelve years back. I won’t ever get James and Lily back.” Before I could stop myself, I stood and forcefully pulled him down into my arms. In his surprise, he struggled at first, but I knotted my fingers tightly into his hair, and held his face to my chest.

“I’m so sorry, Sirius,” I said in a whisper, tears forming along my eyelids as I felt Sirius’s inaudible sobs shaking his shoulders against me. I tried to hold him tighter.

Twelve years, and he hadn’t been allowed to feel, at all. How foolish I had been to think that he had been entirely unaffected by it – by everything. By being despised by his former friends, by having everyone label him as a betrayer, and a murderer. By being surrounded by the darkest and foulest creatures of the world, constantly dreading every unexpected happy memory, in the fear that it would lead them in. I didn’t know how he had done it.

As I held him, he gripped strongly onto the backs of my arms, balling the sleeves of my shirt in his angry fists. Before long, Remus joined us, wrapping his lanky arms around the two of us and pulling us both in against his chest. Sirius’s sobs began to soften.

“We won’t let them take you back,” Remus whispered softly, the warm breath of his words falling deeper into the circle we had created with ourselves.

“Bloody fucking right, we won’t,” I agreed and Sirius let slip a tiny laugh. From his place in my arms, I could just barely place my lips against the top of his hair. When I did, I felt his arms slip from clutching onto my sleeves to spreading out across my back.

“Stay here for now,” Remus suggested, glancing at me for a split second, surely able to tell how badly I wanted Sirius to stay with me. “If things go bad, you can hide out in the Shack.”

“The Shrieking Shack?” I asked as we parted from our embrace. Remus nodded.

“We spent a lot of time there in our youth,” he said, and his expression lay somewhere between fondness and pain. He clapped Sirius on top of his shoulder, squeezing at what should’ve been muscle, but on Sirius’s emaciated frame, was nearly all collarbone. “Speaking of which, the full moon’s in just a few days, and I’m feeling a bit achier than usual, so I’d better …”

“Moony,” Sirius interrupted with a sniffled hiss. “She doesn’t know.” But my wheels were already turning. Moony, full moon, fast healer. Hungry Like the Wolf.

 “Moony,” I said, mostly to myself. “You’re not an Animagus. You’re a werewolf.”

 “You didn’t tell her?” They ignored me as Remus hissed back at Sirius.

“Why would I have told her?” They were arguing under their breaths, as if the secret weren’t already out. Or as if the secret mattered that much to me. 

“You told Snivellus, why would I expect you to keep it from her?”

“I did not tell bloody Snivellus. I just wanted him to get whomped, is all.”

 “Remus,” I tried interrupting, to no avail.

 “You almost got him killed is what you did. And James, too.”

“Oh, James was fine. But I still wish you would’ve gotten Snivellus, at least.”

 “Sirius …” I interjected. Ignored again.

 “He’s the only reason I’m able to be a professor at Hogwarts, Sirius.”

“What?! You’re cavorting with Snivellus?!”

“Only for the Wolfsbane.”

“I knew you’d never betray me, Moony, my love.”

 “Who the bleeding hell is Snivellus?” I finally shouted and they looked over at me in surprise. Sirius’s expression was almost like he had forgotten where he was – like he was back in Hogwarts with Remus, arguing over, evidently, who knew about his lycanthropy.

“Professor Snape,” Remus corrected himself to using a more appropriate moniker.

“I’m sorry, Ruby, I guess I should’ve told you,” Sirius arched his brow at Remus.

“No, it is Remus’s secret, after all. But even if you had told me, it’s not like it would’ve changed how wonderful I think he is.” Remus’s expression seemed pleasantly surprised, but Sirius just smiled quietly in my direction before he opened his mouth and spoiled the moment.  

“I’m not sure if I should be jealous or angling for a threesome,” he pondered. Remus and I both hit him in opposite shoulders. I had never seen Sirius happier.

“I wonder what he would do if we accepted,” Remus grinned, half-shyly and half-deviously. Seven years of sexual innuendo from Sirius at Hogwarts had evidently crept into his psyche. Sirius and I both exchanged wide-eyed glances before Remus began to laugh.

Of all the time I spent watching over my Marauders, an audible, genuine laugh from Remus Lupin was few and far between. More often than not, his reply was a quiet smile, or an overly loud sarcastic cackle, or a subdued, repressed chuckle being breathed out in a short huff. The sound of his honest, uninhibited laughter was like a melody. Sirius and I were both mesmerized by it for a moment, and Remus seemed altogether embarrassed by the attention. 

“Do you want me to spend the full moon with you at the Shack?” Sirius suddenly offered, and I covered my mouth to hide how amused I was over it sounding like a date. “Like old times?” The look on Remus’s face was indescribable – like someone had given him a lifetime supply of fancy chocolate and all the books he could ever read. But it faded back into an easy smile.

“I don’t go to the Shack any more, with the Wolfsbane. The transformation still hurts, but I’m still me in the end. Besides,” he said, looking over at me for a second, with a smile in his eyes. “I think you’d rather stay here.”  I tried not to grin as Sirius turned back to me.

“Ruby, could you put on some tea for me, love? I need to calm my nerves,” he said and I rose a single suspicious eyebrow at him, but after what had occurred that night, I would do anything to keep him sane, happy. I walked into the kitchen as they remained in the living room, and busied myself with the tea, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that I could overhear them talking.

“She’s brilliant, Pads,” Remus said softly. Sirius let out a sigh.

“She’s sodding perfect is what she is,” he moaned under his breath. “Have you ever seen greener eyes than hers? Maybe greener than Lily’s were. They’ll ruin my life if I let them.”  

“She’s the one from The Three Broomsticks, right? Right before the main act of ‘Six Weeks of Sirius Black in Despair’?”

“Piss off, you know how bad I had it for her then.”

“Still do,” Remus chuckled.

“You’re damn right I still do. If you’d gotten the head I did this afternoon…”

Remus groaned. “Come on, Sirius, I don’t want to know.”

“You would if it were you because it was fucking magic.”

“So it’s just the sex, then?” Remus asked and I was praying the kettle wouldn’t start whistling, because I really, really needed to hear his response. As he spoke, I warmed the pot, careful not to cause any distracting clinking that would disrupt their topic.

Sirius sighed. “I almost wish it were.” Half of me was squealing like a love-struck teenager over the fact that Sirius Black just admitted that our relationship, whatever it was, was about more than just sex. On the other hand, why did he wish otherwise? After I poured the hot water from the warmed pot, I placed a couple bags of Tetley black tea in the bottom.

“I can take care of Peter, you know,” Remus offered, and I smiled at the fact that neither of them had discussed why Remus had decided to help his old friend, it was just suddenly common knowledge between the two of them. “I’ll be in the castle when Harry and Ron come back. You could stay here.” For a moment, Sirius was quiet, as if he were genuinely considering the possibility of that situation. Despite how badly I wanted him to stay, and remain alive, and safe, and happy – I knew what his answer was going to be.

“You know I can’t, Moony,” he said, through a shaky breath. As soon as the kettle began whistling, I removed it from the heat, but their conversation had already stalled – Sirius had busied himself with changing the record on the hi-fi. I poured the boiling water into the pot, replaced the lid and covered it with a cosy. While it steeped, I walked back over to the two boys, who were now locked in a long embrace, Remus’s face buried into Sirius’s neck.

“Be careful, Sirius,” Remus whispered into his hair.

“And you, Remus,” Sirius sighed back softly. Then, he promptly ruined the intimacy by pulling back and firmly planting his lips onto Remus’s. It was some kiss, actually.

“Yes, thank you, Pads.” Remus wiped his mouth on the hand of his sleeve, but grinned.

“I love you, Moonshine.” He took Remus’s face in his hands, squishing his cheeks.

“I love you, too, you arrogant little sod,” he laughed, as he placed his hands atop Sirius’s, where they were perched on his face. “I’ll be back.”

“You’d better be.” I said it before Sirius could. The way Sirius smiled at me made me realize why he was named after the brightest star in the bloody sky.

We walked Remus out through the back door, and as I shut it behind him, Sirius collapsed onto my bed. The sounds of The Original Soundtrack by 10CC drifted in from the living room.

“Well, the secret’s out,” he sighed, reaching for me. I moved closer so that he could grip onto the hem of my shirt and pull me down on top of him.

“About Remus? Like I’ll tell anyone about his being a werewolf,” I huffed.

“Oh. Yeah, about Remus,” he said and I was suddenly unsure that he had even meant Remus to begin with. Had he meant the conversation they’d had about me? Had he known I’d overheard? Either way, he had pushed it aside, so I decided not to press it any further.

“Shall I fetch the tea, then?” I asked, and he opened a single eye to look at me.

“Tea in bed?” he clarified and I nodded. “Oh, yes.” With a smile, I hurried back to the kitchen. As I thought about it, I wasn’t all that sure how Sirius took his tea, so I just made it the way I drank it. When I made my way back, I heard Sirius humming to the song playing on the hi-fi, and as I came into the bedroom, he had begun to sing.

“I’m not in love. So don’t forget it. It’s just a silly phase I’m going through,” he sang sorrowfully, his eyes closed and his hands folded underneath his head. Though the intent of the lyric was dripping with bitter sarcasm, I began to wonder how Sirius interpreted it. Was I just a silly phase to him? Just his childhood crush realized, but not intended as a permanent endeavor?

“Tea,” I said softly and he pushed himself up to sit, crossing his legs underneath him.

“Mmm, thank you, love,” he hummed, and as soon as he took the first warm sip, his eyebrows furrowed and he looked over at me. “It’s perfect,” he said in a single outward breath.

“Alright, thanks,” I laughed, wondering why he was in such awe over some tea.

“Let me guess – you overheard me at Madam Puddifoot’s, that time I tried to ruin your date,” he said, pointing at me and narrowing his eyes in suspicion. What was he on about?

“First of all, you tried to ruin my date?” I asked, wide-eyed. Evidently, his so-called crush on me hadn’t been a vain attempt to make me hard-up for him, as I had thought.

“Of course. You didn’t notice my sorry attempts at making you jealous?”

“Oh, I noticed.” I sipped acrimoniously at my tea. “What I haven’t noticed is your point.”

“How do you take your tea?” he asked suddenly. I shrugged as I began to answer. But just as I started to speak, he began to as well, and we spoke in time.

“Milk first, and two spoonfuls of sugar,” we recited together. He just sat back, staring at me for a moment, as I held my mug half way to my lips.

“I take it the same way,” he said, an amused grin on his lips. “I wonder what that says.”

“It says you have good taste,” I smiled, sipping noiselessly. His grin intensified.

“Oh, you’ve no idea,” he said, placing his mug onto the nightstand and racing back into the living room. The abrupt, scratching halt of the song that had been playing made me wince, hoping he wasn’t destroying my records. I barely had time to reprimand him for it before another song began playing, and all the lights in the living room went out, leaving only the dim, yellow light of the lamp in my bedroom. Sirius came sauntering back into the room to the sounds of Eric Clapton’s Wonderful Tonight, and I actually laughed out loud.

“I’ll concede the notion that your taste is music is impeccable,” I smiled as he climbed back onto the bed, lying on his side next to me, with one hand in his hair.

“My taste in women, too,” he said, his grey eyes half-closed as they scoured over my face, reading my features in the pale light. I scoffed at his attempt at compliments.

“I disagree.” His track record before me was anything in a skirt. Put Remus in a skirt and he probably would’ve tried to get him into bed, too. I wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t, anyway.

“Actually, so do I,” he said, his expression abnormally thoughtful. “With one long-standing exception.” Before then, I hadn’t noticed how fidgety his gaze had become, how he had been consciously, and bewilderingly, keeping his hands away from me. Was he nervous?

Finally, with his head still propped up in one hand, he pushed the other hand through my hair, rubbing his thumb along my jawline. The song still played, and I was half-heartedly paying attention to the lyrics, until a certain line was sung. “And the wonder of it all is that you just don’t realize how much I love you.” His eyes remained categorically drawn to mine.

At this, Sirius’s lips parted, and he pulled himself against me, pushing his forehead up against mine, rubbing the tip of his nose along the length of mine – his lips alluringly close, but he didn’t meet them to my own.  It suddenly felt like none of the physical aspects of the last two days had ever occurred, like this would be the first time Sirius would ever lay his lips to mine.  

His bated breath fell in anxious steps against my skin, and I could’ve pushed forward and claimed his lips myself, but I waited to see where he would take us. His hand around my neck fingered through the back of my hair until he drew it out, dragging his fingertips along my jaw, across my face, resting over my waiting lips. And he pursed his lips, his fingers separating our mouths, save for the barest of contact in the furthest corners. As he removed his fingers, I bit down, worrying my bottom lip with my teeth, restless over needing his imminent kiss.

At the site of my apparent unease, he smiled slightly, his mouth turning up on a single side, his cheek only just dimpling. His lips fell open, and he eased them toward mine, brushing against them with the most minimum of contact. I whined, instantly, and at the smallest sound of my voice, his hand immediately tightened back around my neck, the pace of his mood instantly changed. He suddenly, and vehemently began devouring the inside of my lips and everything in them. His tongue tore hot across mine – I pulled at his hair to encourage him further in. The way his breathing became violently ragged did terrible things to me.

He shifted over me, letting his entire weight rest on me, and I spread my legs to nest him in the middle. He responded by digging his hands into the mattress and curving his hips up against me, his mouth voraciously exploring deep within my own. His breathing was frantic.

As he dispersed his weight between his knees and his hips – which were still pressed hard against mine – his amorous hands stroked and squeezed their way down my chest, pulling up on the hem of my shirt. I didn’t hesitate to raise my arms and let him throw it into the corner of the room. As soon as new skin was in sight, his mouth was on it, and he removed my bra to get to more. My back arched instinctively at his mouth on my breast. I may have said his name.

 Under the influence of the breathy way I moaned his name, he pushed off the shorts I had on to discover I hadn’t worn anything underneath them. He growled impatiently into my open mouth as I fingered the waist of his borrowed trousers – but I was getting immense satisfaction from how wildly desperate he had gotten. After he kicked off the trousers, I held my hand to his chest, indicating for him to wait. The familiar manic look returned to his eyes.

Instead of disappoint him, I pushed myself down between his legs, where he was kneeled on the mattress. His back straightened as he watched me carefully, where I was hovering my open mouth over his waiting erection. As I plunged him completely in, he leaned his head back – his long neck craned up as he let out a heated moan, followed by panting, cursing.

Finally, he grabbed my shoulders and pulled me out from underneath him, shoving me less than gently against the wall behind the bed. He wrapped my legs around his hips and thrust them hard into mine, without any pretense of tender acclimation. Of course, I gasped sharply at the whole length of him being pressed into me at once, and it seemed to bring him slightly out of his impassioned frenzy. His concerned eyes found mine but my tug at his hips gave him the answer he was looking for. Don’t stop. But the next thrust was soft, careful. I shook my head and assaulted his lips with mine, biting down hard and digging my nails into his hips. With this blatant sign to continue, he rocked his hips steadily into mine, his lips traveling down my neck, biting viciously just underneath my jaw, pinning my wrists against the wall above us.

As I began to slip down the wall, and he was coming in at an angle above me, his heated, pulsing erection rubbed just right against me, and I let out a gasping whimper. His expressive reaction to my pleasured sound was incredible – his mouth fell open, and his eyes fell closed for just a moment, underneath tortured, furrowed eyebrows.

“Fuck,” he dragged the word out, turning it into more of a moan. With his raspy, breathless voice, and his wet, rigid cock sliding against my swollen skin, I was almost unmade.

“Sirius,” I moaned, each syllable in louder pitch than the last – both his rhythm and intensity instantly increased as I bore my fingernails into the soft skin at his wrists. Still hesitant to allow myself the pleasure of screaming, I clamped my mouth shut over the nape of his neck, and just as the tidal swells of orgasm tore through me, I sank my teeth into his skin, sucking hard to keep myself from crying out. But as I released my bite, I let out a satisfied, shaking sigh.

The knowledge that he had driven me to my breaking point proved to do the same for him, as he shoved his hips hard against mine one last time, holding his bare chest taut against me. I could still feel his pulsing within me just before he began to place soft kisses around my mouth.

“Ruby, I …” he began, without removing himself from me, rolling his forehead against my fevered temple. He didn’t let my hands fall from their pinned position above us. “I think I’m …”

When he didn’t finish, I sought his eyes out with my own, and the expression I found there was nothing short of ruin – completely, unequivocally broken. But it was less than a second before his characteristic mischievous grin had returned in full to his lips.

“I think I’m going to be in trouble if you’re not on the pill,” he said, with a raised brow, and I rolled my eyes dramatically in response. He hadn’t been worried about it a moment ago.

“Lucky you,” I granted him the peace of mind as he gently pulled away from me. The sudden absence of him elicited a soft whine from both of us – altogether satisfied, and yet, not willing to let the other part. At least, that was how I felt.

“Damn. I always wanted to father an illegitimate child someday,” he called with a laugh as I cleaned up in the bathroom, from the mess he had left behind.

“Don’t give up on your dreams, Sirius, you may still yet. No guarantees,” I said. Gods, I could only imagine raising that child. Sirius and I shared many of the same qualities – some, not so good. Stubborn, rebellious, shrewd, sarcastic – it would be a proper, hilarious nightmare.  

When I returned to bed, and turned off the light, I slid back underneath the sheets to spoon a warm, sweaty, still naked Sirius – and I hadn’t put my clothes back on, either. We would be literally stuck to each other all night, and I was damn near elated at the thought.

As I slipped my arms underneath his, my forehead pressed to his spine, he spoke.

“Would I have been a good father, Ruby?” he asked, unexpectedly. I paused, only slightly.

“Of course, Sirius. You still could be. I mean, with whomever you settle down with, after all of this,” I said, trying not to remember that it would likely not be me. With my arms still wrapped around him, he turned to face me – I could see his troubled grey eyes by the moonlight.

“Even if I do make it out of Hogwarts,” he said in a whisper, brushing his fingers along my cheek, pushing back the damp ends of my hair that clung to my skin. His eyes followed his fingers, he seemed intent on keeping his gaze pointedly away from mine as he spoke. “Who, in their right mind, would even have me?” The fact that he hadn’t expressed his want for me, specifically, to be the one to have him only tampered my spirits a tiny bit. Finally, when his eyes met mine as he waited for my response, his eyebrows bent, his jaw clenched in absolute trepidation.

I actually laughed. He looked terribly worried over it.

I was done pretending. I was done playing the indomitable dream.

Sirius Orion Black was my dream. And damned if I wasn’t going to tell him so.

“Don’t be such a sodding idiot, Black. I, for one, would’ve had you all along, if I could have.”  The expression on his face was everything to me – it was almost relief, as if he had wanted me to say exactly that. If I had thought for one second that I could’ve stopped myself from falling in love with this man, I would have never been more wrong.

Still, he didn’t respond in kind, and I didn’t expect him to. He simply lay his lips to mine, as softly as he ever had, curling his fingers into my purple hair, and holding me close against his chest. I think we both fell asleep somewhere in the kiss.

------------------------------------------------------------

In the morning, I expected to be tangled up in the careless, angular limbs of the man with whom I was growing more and more attached. I expected his long, dark locks to be strewn across my face. I expected his sleeping lips to be somewhere attached to my skin.

I was disappointed on all accounts.

Sirius was conspicuously not in the bed beside me. I peered over the edge of the mattress to make sure I hadn’t pushed him onto the floor in my sleep. The floor was also empty. The bathroom door was still open from the night before, and I couldn’t see him there either.

I began to wonder if what I had said to him the night before had startled him off – if the idea that I was already so hopelessly in love with him had prompted him to find other means of concealing himself until September. Maybe shack up with some other unconquerable broad, now that my territory had been so easily occupied.

As I slipped into my robe, my fears were assuaged as soon as I heard a quiet humming from the other room – sounding far enough to be coming from the kitchen.

Making my way into the living room, Paul Young’s ‘Every Time You Go Away’ playing on the hi-fi, I heard Sirius – evidently having already memorized my entire record collection – singing softly under his breath, standing in front of the table, which was filled with plates. Buttered toast, scrambled eggs, bacon. I was almost positive that I was still dreaming. I pinched my thigh.

“Morning,” I said, raising a suspicious eyebrow to greet him as he turned. There was no way I was reading the expression on his face correctly. It brightened instantly, and it hadn’t been at all dull to begin with. He flipped the last bit of bacon onto the plate and hurried over to me.

“Morning, love,” he hummed, immediately pressing himself to me, wrapping his arms completely around my shoulders as he captured my lips against his. He was quite a bit taller than me, so kissing him upright like this was an all-encompassing experience – he overwhelmed every side. He was all I could see. As suffocating as that might seem to anyone else, to me it was the most peaceful, most centered, and the most sure of anything I’d ever felt.

“What’s all this, then?” I asked onto his lips, and he didn’t stop to answer me.

“Technically, lunch,” he mumbled with a laugh against my mouth, glancing at the clock on the wall behind me. “Do you have to work today?” he asked suddenly. I nodded, pursing my lips to one side to show my discontentment.

“If I were to miss two days in a row, I’m afraid the Hog’s Head would catch fire or be struck by lightning or get …” I stopped myself before adding ‘attacked by Dementors.’ Sirius took no notice of my trailing off, as he softly pulled me back toward the table, without unwrapping himself from around me. It was nearly dancing.

“Then you should eat,” he grinned, falling down into a kitchen chair and pulling me down with him, falling squarely onto his lap. While I grabbed a slice of toast and munched gratefully, it occurred to me how inexplicably comfortable Sirius and I were together. Crumbs from my bread scattered down his bare chest, but he barely noticed, reaching around my waist for the bacon. With him so close to me, my next bite included the ends of his hair and, in retaliation, he smeared a finger of jam onto the tip of my nose and then promptly licked it off. 

Just then, I was distracted from the worries the previous day had brought. I suddenly forgot about the Dementors that were hunting the man I loved. I ignored the memory of holding his trembling frame the night before. I overlooked the notion that, in shorter time than I wanted to admit, he would be leaving – to risk his life, to defend his name, to avenge his friends. Just then, I disregarded everything but him, and the way that he looked at me.

“Big plans tonight?” I joked at how he would be alone in my house, with nothing to entertain him, for several hours. He huffed in mock irritation.

“Oh, yes. After you leave, I’ll be having a proper dance party. By myself. Naked. Shame you’ll have to miss it.” He arched an eyebrow at me, expecting a snide remark.

“What’s the set list for this dance party?” I wondered through a mouthful of eggs.

“I’ve become quite partial to the gentlemen of Van Halen,” he over-emphasized the Englishness of his accent and popped his pinkie finger out as he held a strip of bacon.

“Then promise me the next time Remus comes over, you’ll play Hot for Teacher,” I smirked and he laughed loudly, shaking me from where I remained in his lap.

“Bloody Merlin, I love …” he paused for a moment, clamping his mouth shut before continuing his thought. “That idea,” he completed, glancing curiously at me.  

“I can tell,” I hummed, watching him suspiciously in return, chewing slowly on the last corner of my piece of toast. Much to his evident dismay, I rose from my place on his lap.

“Don’t go, yet,” he whined, the tail end of a strip of bacon between his teeth.

“I have to be at work in an hour, and I still smell like sweat and sex,” I called as I made my way into the bathroom, bending at the edge of the bath to turn on the water.

“I rather like that smell, actually,” he called back, but I could tell he had gotten up to follow me. Before I could straighten my back, he had draped himself over me, burrowing his nose into my hair, against the back of my neck. Once he reached bare skin, he pursed his lips against it.

“Like it or not, I’m having a shower,” I straightened up, turning to face him.

“I’m definitely not going to try and stop you from undressing,” he replied, immediately burying his face into the nape of my neck, his hands drifting up along my waist, pushing underneath the edge of my robe. His kiss was less than soft, all biting and teeth as he pinned me against the wall with his heavy hips.

“I’d invite you to join me, but then I’d come out dirtier than I went in.” He pushed the collar of my robe off my shoulder and craned his neck to put his mouth on my chest.

“I stopped listening after ‘join me’,” he huffed out his fiery breath against my skin as he pulled the string on his trousers, letting them fall to his ankles, and I could feel him throbbing against my leg in the next second. With one shoulder against the wall, I leaned back to divert the water from the faucet into the showerhead and he put both hands around my neck, dragging them slowly down my torso, pushing the top half of my robe with them. The pace of his breathing increased as he gently tugged at the knot that was barely keeping my robe on.

In reply, I took him by the chin and twirled him around, shoving him weightily onto the wall he had just pinned me against, holding his jaw in my fingers. My nails scratched against the stubble on his cheeks as I pushed his face toward the ceiling, sinking my teeth carefully into his Adam’s apple, and when he moaned, I felt it move against my tongue. I bit a little harder, then.

I continued my parade of love bites – taking his collarbone between my teeth, creating an array of marks across his ribcage, wrapping my lips around the curve at his waist, pulling my bottom lip over the dip at his belly button. My knees were on the floor – he looked down expectantly, still breathless. Without taking him into my hands, I dragged my tongue along the underside of his length, pausing to lap at the tip for just a moment.

Then, I stood, let my robe fall to the floor in front of his feet, and stepped into the shower, closing the curtain behind me. I had never heard such pathetic, tortured whimpering.

But it didn’t last long. Before my hair was even wet, the curtain was drawn open and Sirius was stepping into the stream of water with me, pressing me against the tiled wall. He dragged his hand underneath my thigh, pulling my foot up to rest on the edge of the tub, the water from the shower running into our adjoined mouths, sloshing from the impatient motion of his tongue.

He barely had to move his hips before they were flush with mine, and I removed my lips from his for only a moment to let slip a satisfied sigh. While I deliberately moaned his name into his ear, he buried his face into my neck – his hips still moving rhythmically – and his dark, wet hair clung to my skin. The clear water rolled down his porcelain shoulders and I let my fingers follow them – his skin instantly erupted in goose flesh at the sensation of my touch.

If the water was hot, I couldn’t tell – I could only feel the heat coming off of Sirius. From his skin, from the way he breathed onto me, from the friction he drove into me. But something was different – it had been different since last night, since before Remus visited. It had been different since he’d serenaded me in the kitchen, since he had admitted he remembered me. And maybe it had been there before that, but I had been so caught up in my own fantasies of Sirius Black that I hadn’t noticed it. This wasn’t at all like the way I imagined Sirius to be.

From what I had heard of him, from what I had seen from my kitchen window, Sirius Black was a rogue – take what you can get and make a clean escape. While I was aware of his reputation as a fantastic lover, I expected him to be as self-absorbed as anyone else like him. Despite – or maybe because of – his pureblood upbringing, I expected him to be insensitive, and flippant, and pretentious. And he was the opposite of all of that.

I never expected Sirius to ever call me a pet name, especially not after he’d had his way with me. I never imagined that he would stick around in the morning, much less make breakfast. I never predicted that he would admit to being forlorn over me at seventeen. And I certainly never thought I would get the feeling that maybe, possibly, unbelievably, Sirius Black was falling for me.

His grey eyes looked deep into my own, as the warm water dripped down over his dark eyebrows, as his gentle lips found mine again, as he sighed with pleasure, the breath of which fell onto my tongue. All I could do was pull him closer to me, pressing his warm, wet skin against me and wondering how I was ever, possibly going to let him leave this house.

With his face buried in my drenched hair, his pace began to quicken, his breathing accelerated and he latched his teeth onto the curve of my neck as he came. I couldn’t keep my subsequent reaction to myself, nor did I feel the need to. As he stilled, I blissfully sighed his name into his ear, and he instantly shivered, drawing me close to him.

“Merlin, how did I ever live without you?” he laughed carelessly, pulling me under the stream of water and I just rested my head against his chest.

“Likewise,” I said, with a half-hearted smile. And how could I ever again?

------------------------------------------------------------

It was already getting colder. September was coming in too fast. September meant losing Sirius – possibly permanently. I wasn’t ready to deal with that reality, yet. Not when keeping Sirius to myself had been the best time of my life.

A stinging breeze nipped at the back of my neck and I turned my coat collar up, hurrying back toward my house from Hog’s Head. I’d been worried about Sirius all evening. Even Hagrid’s oblivious comment about the knut-sized hickey at the base of my neck hadn’t induced any blushing like Aberforth expected it to – I imagine he expected it, because he looked over at me instantly, as if afraid I was going to kick the legs of Hagrid’s chair out from under him.

Still, the comment hadn’t exactly left me unfazed. Aberforth seemed intent on finding out who my mystery lover was and that thought panicked me immensely – he was Dumbledore’s brother, after all. At first, I had tried to play it off as a bug bite that I had scratched too much. He wasn’t buying that, so I had then attempted to brush it off as a one-night stand whose name I didn’t even know. That also didn’t work, since Aberforth knew there hadn’t been any travelers coming through, since the news of Sirius Black hiding out in Hogsmeade had frightened them all into staying home. The last option was to pin it on someone in the village, and I knew I wouldn’t get corroboration from anyone on that. Lenny from Madam Puddifoot’s was the only one who I could get away with blaming it on, and I was sure he wouldn’t be smart enough to cover for me. Or jealous enough not to. Either way, that little mark had caused Aberforth some suspicion.

So I hurried home, afraid that Albus Dumbledore had heard, and had already torn apart my home and dragged a very naked Sirius from it. As I neared my house, I breathed a sigh of relief to see the front door still closed and no smoke coming from any wizarding battles within.

However, when I opened the door, everything was conspicuously quiet. The lights were all off and there wasn’t a fire in the hearth. I was hoping it was to prevent any unwanted attention, but I didn’t hear Sirius, or Padfoot for that matter, anywhere in the house.

When I poked my head into the bedroom, hoping for some sign of Sirius and praying that he hadn’t left or – Godric forbid – been discovered, I saw a slip of paper on my bed. With my eyebrows raised, I walked cautiously to the bed and read the note, written in sprawling script.

                                 Meet me at the lake.

                                                – Your loveable s.o.b.

Nothing could’ve hidden my smile. Sirius Black had just referred to himself as mine.

 I quickly hurried out the back door, however vague his note had been. The lake was right past Hogsmeade Station, on the other side of the tracks from my house – but I couldn’t figure out why I was supposed to meet him there or, even more so, why he was risking being out in the open.

It only took me a few minutes to walk to the shore – my house was nearly on the lake already, only separated by a patch of woods. Once I got there, everything was dark – it was nearly midnight, everyone was already home, in bed. Which is where I had planned to be. With Sirius.

Just as I began to look for him, I saw a red blanket spread out on the sand near the shore, and a great, big, black dog sitting calmly on top of it. Instinctively, I grinned.

“Hi, Padfoot,” I said as I sat next to him, hearing the soft hum of music coming from a small radio nearby – a sappy Celestina Warbeck love song was playing. For a moment, we just sat quietly together. I scratched his head between his ears and he leaned into my arm. Finally, when he transitioned back into Sirius, I smiled at the sight of his relaxed expression.

“There you are,” I laughed, leaning over to kiss him softly. He hummed serenely onto my lips for a moment before standing and pulling his plaid pyjama bottoms from a basket – evidently the one he had used to carry all of this in Padfoot’s teeth. I laughed at the imagery – a giant black dog walking through Hogsmeade Station in the middle of the night with a picnic basket.

“It’s really clear tonight,” he grinned excitedly as he pulled on the trousers and sat next to me again, craning his neck up toward the sky. I followed his gaze, and smiled at the view before us. The stars had never before seemed so bright – one, in particular.

During my adolescence, I looked up to the Dog Star every night – like I was praying to some celestial being to bring me his namesake. I traced out the pattern of Canis Major, and that of his master, the hunter Orion. I memorized the name of every star in each constellation, picking out which ones would sound best for our children, as Sirius might would carry on the Black tradition of naming his offspring after stars, constellations, galaxies.

I hadn’t looked up at the Dog Star in a long time – probably not since Sirius went to Azkaban. When I looked up at it now, with Sirius gently pulling me into his arms, I began to wonder if Sirius actually had been named after this star, or if that star had been named after him. Because when I looked between the two, there was no contest over which one shone brighter.

“That one is me,” he said, pointing to the brightest point in the dark sky overhead.

“Is it?” I laughed sarcastically. In response, he began poking at my ribcage to induce tickling and I took his hand into mine to keep it still. Then, with our fingers entwined, I stretched out our arms, pointing to one of the ‘shoulders’ of Orion. “That’s Betelgeuse,” I said, nuzzling my head against his shoulder. “Also you. Sort of.” With his other hand, he reached up and encompassed my hand with both of his, before sliding his fingers up my arm. Once he reached my shoulder, he turned toward me, and his fingers continued moving along my face.

After all I had done with him, all I had done to him, how could he still make me this nervous? Just having his deep grey eyes focused on me was enough to stunt my breathing. It was only made worse when he pushed himself over where I laid, holding himself up with his hands dug into the sand above my head. The expression in his eyes wasn’t carnal, and his eyes didn’t stray from mine. Slowly, he leaned down and his lips feathered softly against mine. The tension in his arms melted as he lay himself down against me, and I wrapped my arms around his neck.

But the strangest feeling soon overwhelmed me. A cold, dark horror invaded my thoughts, and I could suddenly remember every vivid detail of my father’s dying breath – how gaunt his cheeks were in those last few weeks, how he had stopped eating, the feel of his tears on my fingers as I tried to wipe them away. I was reminded of the scattering ache that spread through my nerves when I heard about the news of the Potters, and of Sirius, and how desperately I wished it hadn’t been true. From out of nowhere, I thought of these things, and wasn’t sure I could stop.

 Sirius removed his mouth from mine, and I couldn’t blame him. After all, who would want such an unremarkable woman like me? What could he possibly see in me? And what did it matter? He would leave soon, just like I expected him to, and I wouldn’t blame him for leaving earlier than he needed. He would stay with Remus – they had something together Sirius and I never would.

Drowning in my negativity, I watched Sirius scramble over to the basket on the sand and reach inside. Once he was no longer lying over me, I began to understand the reason for the sudden black hole in my heart – a Dementor hovered just overhead, its horrible, dark, empty mouth open above me. There was screaming, as if from the creature, but it sounded so far away.

Sirius shouted from somewhere next to me, casting a Patronus. He, too, sounded as if he were a mile apart from me – his voice like a whisper on a mountaintop. A white, spectral dog appeared and raced toward the Dementor, teeth bared and gnashing ferociously.

Before I could pull myself up, Sirius was knelt over me, pushing my hair back, away from my face and lightly patting my cheeks, to get my eyes to focus on him. Once they did, he sat back on his heels, pulling me into his arms. I was surprised to feel warmth from his chest.

“Thank the gods,” he sighed in relief as I finally was able to instruct my arms to hold him.

“Thank you,” I corrected him breathlessly, glancing down at where he held his wand in his hands – a long, dark wood, with an inscription of a long series of symbols. “Your wand.”

He looked down at it with a smile. “Remus,” was all he said and I nodded. His smile soon faded, drastically, as he pulled me up from where I stood and began shoving things into the basket.

“Will they come back?” I asked, gazing into the distant sky nervously.

“Yes,” he answered abruptly as he grabbed my hand and tugged me along behind him, back toward Hogsmeade. While I knew there wouldn’t be anyone around, I was still anxious.

“Shouldn’t you change into Padfoot?” I hissed as we crossed over the tracks at Hogsmeade Station. He looked back at me for only a moment, and there was nothing short of panic on his face.

“They already know I’m here. It won’t matter,” he spoke quickly, the ends of his words sharp and biting. I had never seen him so unraveled. But after my own encounter with a Dementor, I began to understand why he was so terrified of them. He’d dealt with those feelings of despair, and hopelessness, and the forced reliving of his worst memories for twelve years.

When we neared my house, there was the figure of a man standing at my back door, and for a moment, a shot of panic ran through my heart. What if Dumbledore had already been made aware of Sirius’s presence? How could he know Sirius had been staying with me?

As we neared, I cried out in relief at the sight of Remus’s face, but the expression on his was anything but relief. It was unnerving to see the composed Remus Lupin in such a state.

“The Dementors will be gathering to storm Hogsmeade,” he said, his voice thick with apprehension, as he took Sirius into a bracing hug. Once they parted, Remus surprisingly wrapped his arms around me and my eyes widened, at first, but I quickly dissolved into the thick fibers of his jumper, trying to memorize the comforting scent of dark chocolate and jasmine tea.

“How …” Sirius began, not realizing it was Remus he was speaking to – Remus who had grown up with him, Remus who knew him better than anyone else in the world.

“I saw your Patronus from the castle tower,” he replied, almost smiling as he held me at arm’s length. As his eyes found mine, his expression suddenly clouded and I knew.

“He’s can’t stay, can he?” I asked, feeling properly on the verge of tears. Remus sighed.

“Neither of you will be safe. If the Ministry finds him with you…” he said, trailing off as he furrowed his brows. I knew what he meant. They’d throw us both to the Dementors.

“You won’t let them take him, Remus, will you?” I said, my breathing suddenly sporadic, and Remus pulled me back into a hug, squeezing tightly.

“Bloody fucking right, I won’t,” he laughed softly and I let my own surprised laugh fall from my lips, pressing a tear or two down my cheeks. When he pulled back, he looked over at Sirius. “You’ve got two minutes, and then you’ve got to change.” Sirius nodded as Remus waited in the front of my house, as a lookout. As soon as he was around the corner of the house, Sirius turned and took me by the shoulders, a sad smile on his face.

“I thought I’d have much more time than this,” he said hurriedly, his hands shaking, despite the soft laugh he let escape from his quivering lips.

“I thought you’d take the whole month to figure out my list,” I laughed sadly, and he reached up to wipe the stinging tears on my cheeks.

“I thought I was the list,” he grinned knowingly, but it faded quickly as he glanced back.

“You should go,” I pushed his shoulder toward the front of the house. Toward Remus. But he planted his feet in the soft ground and his lips against mine.

“If I make it out …” he began, his fingers tugging gently at my earlobe, rolling his forehead against mine, stroking the tip of his nose along the bridge of my own. “I’m coming back to you.”

I didn’t have to respond. He knew what I would say. Instead, I kissed him, hard and soft all at once, knowing it might be the very last time my lips would ever be with those of Sirius Black.  

As I reluctantly pulled away, and pushed him hard toward his best friend, I bravely held the tears from spilling over my cheeks. As he glanced back at me under dark, scared grey eyes, I bit my lip hard to keep from calling out his name. And as he changed back into Padfoot, and raced back into Hogsmeade, toward the Shrieking Shack with Remus at his side, and the two disappeared into the blackness, I fell against the wall of my house, letting my tears fall quietly down my face, wondering how I had ever lived without him. Or how I ever would again.

------------------------------------------------------------

“Oi, how’s about a sample of you, then?” I heard as a pair of beefy hands grabbed at my hips and pulled me backward onto a lap, quite firm in the middle. I regretted wearing my thin leggings, as I got a clear feel of an organ I would’ve rather not been introduced to, despite how rather small it seemed, when compared to the one I had grown accustomed to, recently. As I regained my balance and stood, I rolled my eyes and turned to see the face of my molester. Not a regular, not an incredibly attractive bloke, and drunk arse over tit. Typical.

“Piss off,” I snapped, kicking hard at the leg of his chair. Aberforth didn’t particularly care for it when I assaulted his paying customers, so I kept myself in check.

“You won’t get a better lover than me, sweetheart,” he slurred, groping at me, to which I responded by side-stepping his reach. My eyes were in a permanently rolled state by then. If only he knew who the best lover I’d ever had actually was.

“Don’t insult me. I’m accustomed to a man with twice of what you’ve got between your legs,” I scoffed as I turned to leave, but he took my arm and spun me back to face him.

“What did you say, bitch?” he fumed, rising from his chair and slamming his empty firewhisky down on the table. With a sigh, I straightened my back, my head at his chest.

“Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me, you ugly wanker,” I stood on my tiptoes to get as far into his face as I possibly could, while miming his nickname with one curled hand. Hog’s Head had gone completely silent by that point, and I was sure Aberforth would step in at any moment, as he’d been doing for the last year. While he couldn’t pinpoint the source of my newfound aggression, it was easy for me to see it. I had been on edge ever since Sirius left.

For the first several months after he left, I’d heard nothing, and I had expected that. During the full moon in September, I wondered if Remus was spending it in the Shack with Padfoot, despite having the Wolfsbane. Every time I saw a stray dog, my heart beat increased to near pounding. Whenever I heard the howl of anything in the night, I worried over whether he was safe.

Once Harry and Ron got to Hogwarts, I thought everything would have begun to move at a faster pace. But Sirius remained silent and hidden. Then, Sirius had unsuccessfully broken into Gryffindor Tower, and all of Hogwarts, and Hogsmeade by proxy, was in a state of emergency over how he had done it. Dementors swarmed everywhere. Sometime after, there was evidently a confrontation between Sirius and Peter at the Shack, and as a result, Sirius had been captured.

Hagrid had first been the one to tell me – I wondered if he could see the absolute terror on my face at the news. He had looked at me quite funny. Not long after Hagrid had gone, Remus stopped for a visit – after having left Hogwarts for the last time. When he did, he told me that Harry had learned the truth about Sirius, about Peter, about his parents – and he helped his godfather to escape Hogwarts on one of Hagrid’s creatures – I think he said it was a hippogriff. While I was, of course, ecstatic over knowing that Sirius was alive, and safe somewhere, he wasn’t safe with me. He hadn’t kept his promise to come back to me. I couldn’t exactly blame him – Hogsmeade was too close for him to stay – but it hadn’t hurt any less.

 Needless to say, I was absolutely gutted over it, and not in the mood for handsy twats.

 Trying to intimidate me, the arsehole in front of me puffed out his chest, in order to press it against mine, and I just pressed mine right back, breasts and all. He opened his mouth to speak and the suffocating stench of alcohol on his breath made my lips curl in response. Before letting him get out another irritating, ignorant word, I shoved my hand underneath his chin, digging my nails hard into the skin of his throat. I had just placed the toe of my boot between his feet, and behind one ankle, preparing to throw him backward onto the floor, when I heard it.

Music. Quiet at first, to the point where I couldn’t quite make out the song that was playing, nor where it was coming from. When the lyrics started, I rose a single eyebrow.

When I get home, babe, gonna light your fire.

All day I've been thinkin' about you, babe,

You're my one desire.

In confusion, I glanced back to see Aberforth right behind me, apparently frozen in the process of stopping me from knocking out one of his customers. He looked as puzzled as I was.

I don't what I'd do without you, babe,

Don't know where I'd be.

You're not just another lover,

No, you're everything to me.

Immediately, my mind went to Sirius. But with an irritated huff, I pushed that thought from my mind. Sirius Black was probably long gone.

You can see it in my eyes,

I can feel it in your touch.

You don't have to say a thing.

Just let me show how much

I love you, need you, oh babe.

It was just the kind of song he would’ve picked, too. The overall theme had Sirius Black written all over it. But he wouldn’t have come back to Hogsmeade, not for me. And he certainly wouldn’t have picked this particular song, with the words ‘I love you’ in it. Not to mention, it was broad daylight, in the middle of town. If it were him, he would’ve been spotted instantly.

Still, when the chorus started, I couldn’t help but imagine his face and the expression that would be there, as if he were singing it right in front of me. I unintentionally smiled.

I want to kiss you all over,

And over again.

I want to kiss you all over

‘til the night closes in.

Just as I had resigned myself to get back to the matter at hand, literally, another sound, from just outside the door, instantly spiked my heartbeat. My hand shook on the twat’s throat.

Howling. A dog, howling loudly in time to the music.

Before anyone could speak, I released my grip and flew to the door, slamming it open to reveal a great, big, black dog sitting next to a portable radio, head raised in mid-howl. At the sound of the door crashing against the wall of Hog’s Head, the hound quickly looked forward. When he saw me, his tail began to wag, profusely, and he raced over to where I stood, trapped in shock.

“Padfoot?” I asked in a quiet breath, and as soon as he neared me, his nose shot up instantly between my legs. An excited squeal escaped my lips as I knelt into the dirt to hold him against me.

“Gods, I’ve missed you,” I said as he nuzzled heavy against my cheek with a high-pitched whine. His long, wet tongue purposefully slid into my ear and I tried not to sigh – he was still Padfoot, after all. I needed him to be Sirius. I needed to take him home. Immediately.

“Aberforth!” I shouted into the bar, the man I had just held by the throat looking strangely at me. “I’ve got to run home, I’ll be back in 2 minutes!” At that, Padfoot made one of those throaty whines, and I could practically hear Sirius in my ear, ‘I’ll need much longer than that, darling.’

 ------------------------------------------------------------

The minute we walked in through my front door, Padfoot made the quick transition back into Sirius, and as soon as he was all himself, I shoved him up against the front door, wrapping one of my legs around his hip and pressing his hardening cock between them.

“Oh, hell-o,” he moaned, just before I thrust my tongue deep into his mouth. I wasn’t wasting any time – I had spent the last year pining over him and his pieces, and the fact that he had taken so long to come back wasn’t going to deter me in the slightest.

The trajectory of my mouth quickly moved down his neck. With his mouth finally free, he let out a load groan as my kisses became harder and spread lower.

“Fuck, Ruby,” he hissed, swallowing hard through heaving breaths and leaning profoundly against my front door. One of his hands was buried in my hair, the other in his own.

“Sirius Black, I am going to blow you senseless,” I breathed out as I dropped to my knees, holding one arm up against his bare chest, digging my nails into his skin. Not even giving him a moment to prepare, I plunged him entirely into my mouth, humming gratuitously as I dragged my lips slowly along the length of his throbbing erection. The sounds he produced were near inhuman.

“Bloody fucking hell,” he finally growled in a shout as he tightened the fist he had in my hair, coaxing me back. I began to look up in confusion, but he quickly knelt, scooping me up and carrying me further into the house. I kicked off my boots on the way. He stopped at the kitchen table, let me fall down onto it, and I was suddenly very grateful for the sturdy framework.

With one hand, he pushed against my chest to coax me to lie back – the other hand, he slid up and down his length a few times and I was entirely provoked by the sight of it. But that hand quickly moved back to me, pulling off my shirt and unclasping my bra in one fluid motion. Together, both his hands become reacquainted with my breasts, and he brought his mouth down to do to the same, while his hands migrated to the waist of my leggings. Unintentionally, I arched my back and let out a low whine, and his teeth on my nipple bit harder in response.

Quickly, with his mouth still sucking prolifically on my breast, he removed my knickers and leggings in a single push and before I could even breathe again, his fingers were driving tight circles at the crux between my legs. At the touch of the man whom I had been fantasizing over for the last year, I couldn’t help but moan his name, as loudly as I ever had.

“No, I need to feel it,” he said, his voice shuddering. “Say it again,” he said, widening the space between my legs and replacing his fingers with his tongue. The warm, wet contact was recently so foreign that I instinctively bucked away from him, but he put a firm hand over my stomach and pressed down, all without missing a single flick of his tongue.

“Sirius,” I moaned softly, knowing that the tone wasn’t exactly what he had been hoping for. The pressure and the rhythm of his tongue both increased exponentially, and I inhaled sharply. The stimulated moan that he let out vibrated on his tongue and spread out into the skin underneath it – my fingers immediately flew violently into his hair, I nearly screamed. Knowing exactly what had aroused this reaction, he repeated it, moaning into me as his tongue drove furiously.

Just as I was nearly there, his pace plummeted and he drew his tongue over my hot, swollen skin frustratingly slowly, looking up at me with a malicious expression. I resorted to shameless begging. After a few more deliberate strokes, he tightened his grip on my hips and dove back in, rapidly lapping against my skin, his tongue drawing up and down in unnumbered strokes. At the point that all my muscles tensed, and I could feel the motion of his tongue in every vein, I fisted my hand into his hair and let out a scream – the tail end of which included a whimper of his name.

Only then did I discover that he’d been working himself and me simultaneously and at the sight of his hand gripped firmly on his thick, pulsing cock, I felt a resurgence of familiar heat. He let himself fall from his hand and picked me up from the table, only to turn to the wall behind us and he shunted me hard against it. I cried out, and it seemed to spur him.

“Merlin, I need to fuck you,” he moaned, pushing my mouth open with his tongue and shoving it underneath mine, at the same time, thrusting his hips upward. I was already entirely sodden already, his cock slid in effortlessly. But when he pulled out and pushed back in, every bit of ribbed skin along his length rubbed right against the place that was still aching from the weight of his tongue. My sense had completely left me – I was screaming and gasping and cursing and I didn’t care if I was heard, I didn’t even consider it. I moaned his name over and over, I begged for him to fuck me harder, and I gasped abruptly when he did. Nothing else was on my mind but Sirius Black – his loud, breathless panting, his sharp, sucking teeth on my neck, his copious, pulsating cock as it was pumping violently into me.

Finally, just as my breathing became shallow, and I began to feel like I could hit the edge again, Sirius suddenly pulled back, put his thumb into his mouth, biting down hard onto the pad and pulling it slowly out, all while keeping his dark, wanton grey eyes locked onto mine. His newly wetted thumb went right between my legs and rubbed, sliding across my slick skin, back and forth, and again. As his teeth went right back into my neck, I tightened my legs around him and I came with another scream of his name.

With my orgasm, all my inner walls began to tremor, and it was enough to tip him off. His teeth still sunk into my neck, he bit down harder – I could feel the barrier of my skin just break – and he moaned deeply into his bite as I could feel the pulsing cadence of his release. After his climax, he set his forehead to my shoulder, the sweat and heat of his brow spreading into my veins. I leaned back against the wall, struggling to breathe, pulling my fingers through his damp hair.

“Move in with me,” he said breathlessly and suddenly, without looking up at me and not daring to pull himself out of where he was still buried within me, nuzzling his head further into the nape of my neck, placing kisses against my humid skin.

“Anywhere,” I said without pausing to think about what he meant, or where we would be going, or how we would get there. I didn’t care, as long as I was with him.

“Grimmauld Place is my family’s home, and it’s old and dark and probably haunted,” he stammered, as if trying to give me a reason to turn him down. It wasn’t happening.

“It doesn’t matter,” I interrupted quickly. “If you’re going, I’m going.” He was quiet for a few moments, kissing gently at the skin he had so ferociously mauled moments before.

“I might be in love with you, Ruby,” he said in a shaking voice, still keeping his face tucked away. Suddenly, it didn’t matter that he had been away. It didn’t matter that we had really only spent a few days together, despite our long, absurd history of dancing around each other. It didn’t matter that he was a fugitive. It didn’t matter that he was a pureblood, and I wasn’t even as much as a mudblood. Sirius Black was in love with me.

“About bloody time,” I huffed, and finally, I warranted a curious glance, under anxious deep grey eyes. “Because I’ve been in love with you since I was twelve, you ignorant tosser.”  

The question I had wondered about on the shoreline of the lake, what seemed like an eternity ago, seemed immensely absurd. Obviously, the Dog Star had been named for Sirius Orion Black, because nothing, on Earth or in the sky, could ever equal the luminance of his smile.

The first time Remus visited us in Grimmauld Place, we played Hot for Teacher.

I had never seen either of them laugh so hard.