DISCLAIMER::I don't own Harry Potter (although I really really reeeeeeeeeally wish I did and if I did moony and padfoot and prongs would've never died and Pettigrew would've been thrown off a cliff into hell). 

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Forever

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Sirius leaned against the tree as the sound of trickling water soothed his nerves. He sighed in contentment as he relaxed underneath the cool shade of the tree and felt perfectly at peace—

"SIRIUS!"

Damn.

Quickly he scampered up the tree, taking care to skip the weak branch (which he almost stepped on once and broke his legs). A short stocky woman bustled into the clearing just as he managed to pull his legs up into the leaves. Sirius held his breath.

"Sirius, darling, where are you?" Her sugary tone and words were sharply contrasted by her face expression, and Sirius almost puked at the sweetness. He sat up in alarm as the woman started walking closer and closer to the tree Sirius was hiding in. Sirius frowned. If she came too close, then she would be able to see his feet and (maybe) his butt. Not wanting to show her a priceless view of his precious, precious butt, Sirius tried to climb higher up the tree without making much noise.

Unfortunately, in his haste he forgot about the weak branch and stepped on it. With a shout Sirius fell out of the tree and landed with a crash on the tree's roots. He felt his wrist give a sharp twist and all of a sudden he felt like his entire arm was on fire. He screamed.

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

The woman hurried over to Sirius's side (who was now babbling incoherent things like 'Jumping sheep! Fire monkeys!' With the occasional swear word thrown in) and helped him up.

At the woman's touch Sirius came out of his confused state and snapped, "Well, woman, don't just stand there staring! Bring me a stretcher and wheel me to the ER!"

The woman rolled her eyes in annoyance and started to lead the way out of the clearing. "If you haven't noticed there is no stretcher anywhere nearby and you're not hurt so much you can't even walk," she growled. She took a quick glance at Sirius's hurt arm. "You've just sprained your wrist."

Sirius's eyes bulged. "Have you gone loony?! My wrist is sprained! SPRAINED! I demand you to take me a hospital right this instance!"

The woman snarled and pinched Sirius's unhurt arm. "It's nothing Dr. Evans can't fix!" She eyed Sirius accusingly. "This wouldn't have happened if you hadn't run away from the art teacher and hid yourself in a tree."

Sirius scowled. "Please! He wanted us to draw his ugly face! I can't even stand looking at him for two seconds without wanting to throw up all over his face! How am I supposed to 'observe'" (and here he put on a mocking voice), "and 'capture every little detail'?!"

The woman frowned. "Sirius, you know that we do not talk badly about teachers here, lest of all Professor Snape."

Sirius sneered, but didn't say anything in reply.

By this time the two had reached the front doors of a large building, clean, simple, and ordinary in every way—yet the building was not ordinary at all. For the building housed some of the most gifted and brilliant minds in the entire world, and what was more, all of these magnificent minds belonged to orphans.

The Henle House was an orphanage filled with orphans from all over the world—orphans that were exceptionally gifted or skilled in differing areas of expertise. It currently housed 15 orphans, ranging from the ages of 5 to 18, and the Henle House nurtured the brilliant minds of the children, raising them to be respected and revered throughout the professional world.

And it was this building that the woman entered, towing a complaining and whining Sirius along. She quickly turned left into a hallway, and after several more turns, ended up in front of a large door marked "Dr. Lily Evans." She opened the door and pushed Sirius inside, then closed the door behind her.

Dr. Evans had been a resident of Henle House once, but once she turned 19 and was released from the orphanage, she had decided to stay behind and take care of the orphans and pay back her gratitude to the staff of Henle House. And so far she was enjoying her employment at the Henle House too, except that her only regret was that a certain James Potter had decided to stay behind with her and teach biology to the orphans.

Currently she was treating a skinny boy with numerous cuts and wounds all over his body, some so deep that you could see the muscle beneath the skin. It was a miracle that he was still alive, even after losing all that blood, and she thanked God that he was unconscious because the sting and pain of the antiseptic and treatment would've hurt him even more.

As the woman and Sirius entered the room, she drew back the curtains surrounding the bed that the boy was lying on and asked them what was wrong.

"I've sprained my beautiful wrist, and I need you to fix it. Now." said Sirius.

Dr. Evans rolled her eyes are his arrogance. He was one of the most annoying orphans in the entire orphanage, not including James Potter (although technically he wasn't really a resident of the Henle House anymore). She frowned. "If you have the energy to order me around, Mr. Black, then I don't think you're in that much pain." She waved her hand to several chairs lined up against the wall. "Sit down, Molly, and try to quieten Sirius, will you? I have a patient here that's in need of immediate treatment."

Sirius looked up in derision and sneered, "I bet it's that stupid Prewett, he's such a ditz." He got up from his seat and tried to look around the curtains, hoping to see what it was that the idiot boy had done this time. However, as he used his unhurt hand to push back the curtains a bit more, he stopped in surprise.

Lying on the bed was a small, skinny boy whose tawny hair spread out on the pillows. His long eyelashes rested gently against his closed eyelids, and with the sunlight streaming in from a window above the bed, the boy looked like an absolute angel.

Sirius stared. 'He's so pretty…'

He tore his eyes away from the boy's face and looked at his body, and realized with a start that he was all bandaged up. Some of the bandages were already stained with blood though, and some cuts hadn't been tended to yet. Sirius cringed as the boy suddenly moved in his sleep and one of the cuts tore open, letting blood flow onto the already stained white sheets of the bed. He also noticed that every time the boy breathed (more like panted), his chest heaved up and down with the effort.

"Sirius."

Sirius was forced to look away from the boy as Dr. Evans called his name. He let out a breath he hadn't even known he was holding in.

"What…what happened to him?" Sirius asked shakily.

Dr. Evans's face softened and she shook her head. "I'm not sure, but when Professor Dumbledore brought him in he was already like this." She turned her back on Sirius as the boy moved again. "Shh…don't move, sweetheart, you're just hurting yourself even more…" she whispered quietly into the boy's ear as she cleaned and bandaged the rest of the cuts covering his body.

The boy stirred a bit but after Dr. Evans finished bandaging all of his wounds he lay quietly on the bed, breathing slowly and evenly (although still with difficulty).

Sirius thought over what Dr. Evans had said. If Professor Dumbledore had brought him in, then that meant that the boy was an orphan because Professor Dumbledore was the one that found and brought orphans to the Henle House. Whether this orphan was smart or not was rather difficult to know because it seemed that he had been unconscious from the moment Professor Dumbledore had brought him in, but they would know once he recovered, which wouldn't be long because Dr. Evans herself was once a resident of Henle House.

Sirius was pulled out of his thoughts as Dr. Evans approached him. She took a quick glance at his injured wrist and after a few prods gave him an ice pack and a roll of bandages so that he could bandage his wrist later himself.

As Molly and Dr. Evans shooed Sirius out of the room so that they could talk about the new arrival, Sirius sneaked a quick look at the boy's face again. He seemed more at ease now, the painkillers must've kicked into action.

The last thing Sirius saw before exiting the room was the boy's pale and angelic face, and he couldn't get the image out of his mind even though he tried hard to. Later he found that he didn't mind having the boy's face ingrained in his mind at all. Nope, not at all.