You lose your virginity to him next to the lake during the springtime, all awkward noises and stabbing pain and some pleasure as your tongues mash together.

It had been building up for some time, you supposed, whatever this thing was that happened between you.

It starts in Slughorn's potions class when he moves smoothly, like water, to take up the seat next to you and you vaguely register that James Potter has stolen your partner.

He smiles at you with a wicked grin and your heart practically stops because this is the boy who betrayed his family and ran off to live with the Potter's during the summer and hexes Slytherins between classes and he's devilish and tortured all at the same time (you'd seen how he would storm around the castle after he got a howler from his mother).

You try to smile back casually – but nothing you ever do is casual. You're a Ravenclaw; highly-strung and analytical. Perhaps that's why you just can't let him go, your dorm mate theorizes one summer evening, you feel like you have to work him out.

There's no way to analyze him, none at all, and it both frustrates and entices you and leaves you wanting (needing) more.

So when he teases you about how fiercely you grind your scarab beetles, a searing blush creeps up from the collar of your blouse and you marvel at how ironic magic can be sometimes- you making a Wit-Sharpening Potion, when he has reduced you to a silly schoolgirl.

"You're muggleborn, aren't you?" he asks offhandedly, and for a moment you don't know how to reply.

"Well yes, but-"

There's an insane man's sparkle in his eye now, which matches his wild dark hair and the chaotic tug of the right corner of his mouth, when he says, "So you'll know all the best muggle bands, then?"

Your heart races now as you ramble about all the music you think he'd like. The Beatles (because everyone likes them) and Bowie ("you remind me of him a bit") and the Clash and Sex Pistols. If you didn't know any better you'd think he might be getting bored when you see his eyes go slightly misty but you continue on anyway because you don't know what else to do.

Sirius Black doesn't know much about muggles, which is funny, because he's only seventeen but he looks like he knows everything, and the chance to be a know-it-all appeals to your Ravenclaw sensibilities.

He turns his eyes back to you suddenly, as if he has just remembered you are speaking, and interrupts, "Do you wear those strange muggle trousers?"

"Erm…" You're not quite sure what he means.

"The blue ones that get wider at the bottom." He says impatiently.

"Oh, yes. Bell Bottoms." And you smile a little, because its sweet, in a sense, how naïve he is to everything muggle. Because you've seen pictures of his family in the Daily Prophet, wearing stiff dragon hide, and you know, despite how kind they are, that the Potters live in a manor with twenty house elves. Strangely, the fact your father is a geography teacher and you vacation in a caravan at the Lake District makes you feel like you have the upper hand, just a little bit.

"I'd like to see you in them." He smirks and God you are melting because he's just so wickedly handsome and you'd like nothing more than to snog his face off.

When Slughorn comes to your station to test the potion, he declares that he's never had clearer thought in all his life.


You Sirius around the castle, sauntering like hell on wheels in every sense of the phrase, but he doesn't speak to you again except to ask you to pass the butter one morning when you and Bill Davies sit beside Remus Lupin and Lily Evans to discuss prefect duty.

Whenever you do see him though, your eyes catch with his and you can't deny there's something, even if it is just teenage chaos.


Your best friend somehow convinces you that he's going to ask you to go to Hogsmeade with him, but you tell her she's wrong because he hasn't even spoken to you for weeks and he's far too handsome so he'll probably ask that blonde Hufflepuff from sixth year he quite likes. You can also tell your dorm mate is just a little bit jealous that you are the recipient of his boyish glances and smirks (she's noticed too, so at least you're not mad).


You've almost forgotten about him when he suddenly appears at the end of the second-floor corridor you are patrolling.

(Although, how can you forget, when the whole school murmurs his names for days after elaborate pranks and duels and Quidditch matches, and he sweeps past you one afternoon smelling like cinnamon and grazes you on the hip just so, and you hear your cousin Doc say that he's going to buy a muggle motorbike and Sirius wants to help him fix it up).

He drawls your last name and it echoes through the stone corridor beautifully. It almost surprises you that he walks towards you so casually, considering curfew was an hour and a half ago, but then you remember he's Sirius Black and of course he wouldn't be in bed by curfew.

"Not going to give me detention, are you?" He asks with a cheeky grin, his hands stuffed into his trouser pockets and making him look so open and inviting.

An awkward giggle escapes your mouth. "No. It's fine." You don't know where to put your own hands and so you just hold your wand in one and run the other through your hair (desperately hoping he doesn't notice you're not wearing any slap).

"Shame." He stops in front of you. "I was rather hoping you would."

There's something in his voice that means you can't tell if he's just teasing you with subtle innuendo, or if he half means it – he gets detention so much perhaps he's grown to like it. You wonder fleetingly if he still gets letters from his parents, or if seeing his brother in the castle upsets him, or he feels the weight of the war you all know is coming as heavy as you do (you still cry sometimes thinking of the time Evan Rosier called you a mudblood in second year).

You don't know what to say so you just laugh again and maybe he was bored by that response because he keeps walking away down the corridor towards Gryffindor tower and doesn't look back.


You find yourself sitting in the library one afternoon with Remus Lupin (you aren't friends but you both take Advanced Transfiguration).

Most other students are outside enjoying the weather. From the arched windows to your left you can see the first years enjoying a snowball fight, some girls from Slytherin having an ice sculpture competition near Hagrid's Hut, and lots of couples ice-skating on the frozen lake (you wondered every winter what happened to the Giant Squid when his home froze over).

You couldn't concentrate on the textbook in front of you, but studied the lines and curves and textures of Remus Lupin's face. He had always been a quiet boy, with neatly cropped light brown hair and was always apologizing for everything he did, even if it was just in the way he spoke to you.

It was like he was always apologizing simply for existing.

Perhaps it was because of the glittering snow that blanketed the school grounds and made you feel like you were living inside a snow globe. Perhaps it was the great sorrow that filled you whenever you looked at Remus, really looked at him. Perhaps it was because you were having your period. Perhaps it was all this, but for one spectacularly strange moment you seemed to realize for the first time in your life that magic was real and it didn't make life any easier for anyone (not for you, not for Remus Lupin, not for Sirius Black, not even for Evan Rosier).

This discovery made you feel stupidly courageous, and you suddenly uttered, without thinking, "Remus, you are beautiful."

The boy blushed a furious colour of fuchsia and lines formed between his bushy eyebrows, but he smiled gently all the same. He must think I'm mad.

You continue to gaze outside at the pure, clean whiteness of it all.


A few weeks later, you are laughing with your dorm mates in the Great Hall about something especially funny that had happened in Professor Binn's classroom the previous afternoon.

You snort into your pumpkin juice just as a barn owl drops a small brown envelope in front of you, dangerously close to your pot of yoghurt.

"Ooh, who's that from?" Hollie Wildsmith asks, surprised because you rarely get letters (your parents have tremendous trouble with the owl and thin patience).

In your good mood, you forget that a letter from home usually brings bad news, and joke with the rest of the girls about how it might be the muggle boy that works in the charity shop on the high street down the road from you.

You walk quickly out of the Great Hall with tears in your eyes, because your mother has written to tell you that she's leaving your father and that she understands you'll want to know why but there are some things that must stay between a husband and wife and God, but you know it's about the young next door neighbor with the babies and the husband who works away on the oil rigs for ten months a year.

Through your watery vision, you catch sight of Remus Lupin nudging Sirius Black and nodding in your direction. He turns his head to watch as you run out the hall and up the grand staircase to fling yourself down on your bed and pull the canopies around yourself and never come out.

Everything is blue.