Author's Notes: Oooh, mystery.
I'm not making any update schedule promises with this one, because I always end up getting stressed and breaking them and I have other multi-chapters to finish editing before I get going, but it's January 1st, and I wanted to post something that has, so far, proved itself easy to write.
This fic is inspired by something I'll reveal later. Ho hum.
Prologue
Sirius Black had something on his arse.
As far as Lily could deduce, it was either a very small mole or an abnormally large blackhead, and was intriguing and irritating in equal measure, particularly when the evening sun began its daily descent, sending one last, effulgent golden ray through the narrow windows of Trelawney's living room for a brief collection of minutes. The Thing became so well-lit, and thereby distracting, that it skated perilously close to affecting Lily's work.
Mole or blackhead? Blackhead or mole? What was this growth which so proudly stared her down as she strove to perfect the curve of Black's oblate, anaemically pale bottom?
Her opinion varied from week to week, but she didn't dare ask him. He would take her interest for the compliment it wasn't. Sirius liked to assume that everyone fancied the shit out of him, and took personal offence when he discovered an individual – such as, to pick a name at random, herself – who disproved his theory. Most of the women and a few of the men in class were captivated, which didn't help matters. One would think that eight admirers, including the bloody teacher, were enough to contend with, but Sirius was a greedy prick.
Lily liked him, though, as much as one could like a person after four weeks of squinting at their flat, pasty-white backside. Sketching him in all his unclothed glory, while a little dull, wasn't the worst way to spend one's Tuesday evening, as she reminded one of her friends during a session in mid-October.
"At any given time, someone else in the world is getting a colonoscopy," she pointed out. "That's got to be more unpleasant than this."
"True," Remus Lupin agreed. "And at least we're not sitting in front of him."
Remus said that a lot, with a slight air of desperation, almost like a benediction unto himself. It was already worse for Remus than for Lily. He and Sirius were close friends, going back years. Few people want to see their close friend's penis.
Sadly, for Remus, it was partly his fault that Sirius was their nude model to begin with. He and Lily had been attending Trelawney's art class for close to a year when she floated the idea of figure drawing and asked her students to source her a model. Remus told someone, who told someone else, who told someone's sister, who told Sirius – thus, one Tuesday evening found Remus dismayed by the sight of Sirius, his childhood friend, striding into the room in a decadent silk robe.
"It is I!" he had declared, casting it from his slender body, and Remus had buried his head in his hands. Thus, Lily Evans met Sirius Black, and became far too acquainted with his naked rear end.
Lily never would have expected that a random bloke's arse would play such a pivotal role in the mess she ended up in, and yet it did, somehow.
Funny old life.