A/N: Okay, we know, lots and LOTS of groundwork is being done here. Sorry about this, but before the action can start we need to get several things beaten into the ground with the literary equivalent of steel hammers. So. This.

We promise there will soon be some action coming up, because we like putting firecrackers under people's arses as much as anyone. Don't you worry.

We were somewhat surprised that one of the hints we dropped was sort of... not noticed. We suppose we were taking a lot for granted, and have thus proceeded to drop a LOT more clues to that effect in here. Yay!

Oh, and there is a quote. It is not that... inconspicuous, so it shouldn't be that hard to find. Still, spot it, and get a cookie.

Chapter Five

I was a Teenage Metamorphmagus

Summer passed, and there were numerous coffee breaks, but the trip to Rio was indefinitely postponed. Richard had been introduced to the Lupin family, and had come over for dinner a couple of times. But as Richard had seemed a bit uncomfortable during these dinners, Dora had, with unusual tactfulness, decided to not force his entering into her family. It would simply have to take the time it needed. It was apparent to her that Richard was a bit of a reclusive, and probably needed to get used to one friend at a time.

Richard was in his own way quietly grateful, and decided to himself that maybe, at some time, Dora would get to know just how much.

And then autumn was looming in the distance, and on August the 23rd, Richard packed his things and left for Hogwarts to set things in order for the next semester. However, he had barely settled in when there was a knock on his door, and opening it he found himself pleasantly surprised.

"Housewarming party!" Dora shouted, waving a bottle of champagne in Richard's face with one hand and a bunch of silly and romantic movies with the other.

"You are of course aware of that I've been here for two years already," Richard said, ushering his enthusiastic friend through the door and relieving her of the champagne.

"Well, knowing you, you never had a housewarming party in the first place so it doesn't matter," Dora replied evenly, plonking down on one of Richard's ridiculously stuffed, cushioned and very, very colourful sofas.

Richard chuckled quietly, extracting the cork from the bottle with a very absentminded wave of his wand and pouring the golden liquid into two darkly purple crystal flutes. "Ladies first," he said, and grabbed one of the glasses.

Dora nodded in agreement and took the other flute, scrutinising it with a half-grin. "Have I told you lately that you have appalling taste?"

"Last Saturday, I believe, when you saw my new curtains."

Nymphadora shuddered. "Combining brown and pink is bad in itself, but that pattern… I almost had a seizure!"

Richard smiled slyly and sipped his champagne. "My taste is bad for my karma, I believe."

"Okay, this is getting too painful for me so I thought we'd talk about my school years here at Hogwarts instead."

Dora put her drink down, after taking a huge gulp for courage, and continued with unusual severity in her voice. "I know you have a lot of stuff in your past that you feel bad about, more so than I could ever know I think, and I understand if you don't ever feel like you can tell me about them. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to send you out on a guilt trip or anything, I'm just trying to say that just because I feel ready to tell you about my secrets I don't expect you to feel the same." She looked Richard straight in the eyes, trying to convey how much she meant what she was saying. "You are, and considering the people I have around me this is really saying something, the best friend I've ever had, and I would feel honoured and grateful if you would share in my memories and get to know the whole me."

Richard had laughed at first, appreciating the joke since he had a feeling Nymphadora had enjoyed her school years as little as he had enjoyed his. But as she continued talking he carefully freed his face from any incriminating expression, unconsciously recoiling a bit. "There are… many things that I… Please understand that I trust you more than I have trusted anyone in… a very long time. But there are some things that I barely trust myself with knowing about my past, and I will need to know even you a lot more before I can talk about them with you." He drew a deep breath, forcing a smile. "However, school memories are a relatively safe area, and I too would be honoured if we could share them with each other."

Dora saw the expression of horror lurking in Richard's eyes, and realised that she didn't really want to think about what he might have done to provoke such fear and shame. She liked him too much.

"Okay, since I brought up the subject, I'll go first." Another swig from the glass of champagne, this time emptying it. Without a word, Richard refilled it.

"When I was a kid and went to Hogwarts, I was so exited, you know? It felt like a dream come true or something."

"Hah. I was so frightened I nearly shat my pants. But do go on."

"Yeah, well, I'd been fed on stories about what a wonderful place it was and I just swallowed it all. I just thought that everyone there would be nice and friendly and we'd all study magic together and be the best of friends." She smiled wryly. "Except for the Slytherins of course, because they were all evil and deserved to burn in hell."

"Of course," Richard replied rather sourly, but with an amused sparkle in his eyes. "And in a place full of teenagers and pre-teens, everyone just has to be nice."

"Naturally. Don't judge me too hard, I had a sheltered upbringing. Unkindness was a pretty unknown concept to me. So, there I am, a newly elected and happy little Hufflepuff…"
"You were a Hufflepuff? Fancy that."

"We're badass, we just hide it well. But you should just shut your trap, bloody Slytherin."

Richard smiled slyly, poking her in the chest with a playful finger. "Wrong. I was in Gryffindor, asshole."

"Same shit, different name."

Richard snorted with laughter, and then coughed as he managed to get champagne down his windpipe. "Too true. Besides, the hat did consider putting me in Slytherin. So I threatened it with the Swiss army knife I had in my pocket, and it agreed to put me in Gryffindor for my boldness."

Now it was Nymphadora's turn to choke on her drink. "You didn't!"

Richard shrugged, smiling. "Well, I was a meek little thing and I knew it. I would've been positively butchered in Slytherin. And I was sure that they would be a lot nicer in Gryffindor. Don't judge me. I had a sheltered upbringing."

"I do love you, Richard, " Dora said with a fond smile. "So anyway, it all began alright, but I mean, you must know the general opinion of Hufflepuffs in this school. I mean, I wanted to be an Auror, and people were telling me that I'd never make it, I was just a stupid little badger and I should go back to my hole. A better person, a stronger one, would have ignored them and kept going, but I wasn't very strong at all, and I started to believe them. Then, as we all grew older, things started to be about looks, about being cool and attractive. Can you imagine the temptation of being able to look just the way you want, or the way anyone else wants?"

"Oh, yes. If I had been able to do the same, I'd have been six foot tall with huge muscles and a face like a Greek god." He laughed a bit ruefully. "But I couldn't, and I wasn't. Not by a long shot."
"You're a Greek god to me anyway, and believe me, in a way you were lucky." Dora rubbed her temples in a tired gesture, it wasn't pleasant thinking about these things. "It began with small things, like making my newly acquired tits just a little bigger than they really were… Quite a lot bigger actually…"

"While I wished mine away…"

"And then it was all this huge, terrible vortex of catering to everyone's vision of the perfect girl. And to prove just how cool and beautiful I was, I started to behave like a right bastard towards anyone that wasn't as perfect as me. I mean, imagine the snottiest, most disgusting little bitch you can, and take that times seven and you won't even get close to what I was like by a long shot."

"Believe me, I knew girls just like you. And boys, for that matter. They are as constant as the sun, and cockroaches." Richard sighed a bit, swirling the drink around his glass a bit. "Do you remember the little grey mouse that always followed you around and applauded everything you did and was actually really annoying, I mean, hello?"

"Yeah, I actually had a few of those."

"That was me."

"Ouch. I would have treated you like owl droppings."

"I would've been glad of it. I was really quite a pitiful little spineless mess."

"The trickiest bit in all this was that I didn't want my parents to know about my 'new look'. I told myself that I wasn't ashamed, that it was just to avoid getting into fights with mom because she wouldn't understand me. I'm not sure I believed it even then. So every time I went home, I changed back to my normal face… kind of. You see, it's pretty tricky to remember what you're supposed to look like, when any change can be maintained indefinitely without effort. So every time I changed back it was slightly… wrong. I didn't get it quite right. And with every change, the difference between what I looked like at home and at school became smaller. I could see that mom was worried about me, but I was a teenager, I wasn't about to admit that my parents might be right about something."

"I can imagine that since you were going to a boarding school, it was hard for her to tell if she was just imagining things, as well."

"Exactly. She had no idea what to do. And then when I came home from my sixth year, I couldn't change at all. I became literally hysterical and had a nervous breakdown. I didn't really understand why it freaked me out so much, since I'd almost managed to convince myself that the whole Barbie thing was the way I was supposed to look. Mom didn't buy that for a second, saying that if that was my true appearance, why was I so devastated? So when I'd managed to calm down, we sort of… looked at photos and experimented and came up with something that might be my true face, or something more similar to it than the look I had created over the years. I still don't know how to create the face I was born with, though I do know it sometimes spontaneously appears. On special occasions."

"Special intimate occasions?"

"Oh, you deviant. But yeah, special intimate occasions. Though not always as intimate as your perverted mind might think."

Richard just smiled, raising his eyebrows. "Oh, you know very little of my perverted mind, and lets keep it that way for now. But how did your blonde and beautiful friends take your new old look?"

"They didn't take it at all, you might say. I was ignored, utterly and completely. Except for Yoshi. He'd been one of my grey mice, you might say. A very correct, studious type. A Slytherin, in fact, and I never really got why until we sat down and had a talk when I came back to school as… well, me. I made sure people knew that it was me, real sure. I stood up in front of everyone during the opening… banquet? Whatever, the meal had after the Sorting Ceremony. I said, 'Hey everyone, it's me, Nymphadora Tonks. This is what I look like now. What I really look like. Just thought I might tell you so y'all can recognise me,' and sweet, cream filled Jesus did they stare. I sometimes wonder if it was the new look or the new attitude that threw people of the most. So I was alone. People actually avoided even walking too close to me in the corridors, like I was a rabid creature that might suddenly jump at them and rip their throats out. I mean, my old 'friends' didn't want anything to do with me because I was no longer cool, and everyone else just hated my guts because I'd always been such a bitch. And then all of a sudden there was Yoshi, asking me if I wanted to take a walk. We went to the lake and sat down under a tree, and just talked and talked and talked. We were so totally different, but that was okay. He told me he was gay and I thought 'ew', but didn't say anything because who was I to judge the one person that bothered to care about me? In time of course I realised that there was nothing 'ew' about it at all, but that goes without saying. Anyway, it was during that conversation I realised why Yoshi was in Slytherin. The things he'd done to conceal who he was almost came close to what I'd been doing, and we both realised that we didn't want to do it anymore, and that if we were going to be freaks we might as well put some effort into it. So I made my hair short and… green I think it was at first, and covered my robes in pins with weird or funny texts and pictures, while he started wearing makeup and embroidered his robes by hand with the most fantastic patterns. He's really, really talented. I can't believe he chose to work with computers."

Richard listened attentively to her story, alternately smiling and looking sympathetic. "You were very lucky to have a friend like him," he said finally. "I will say nothing against the friends I had, I don't think I really have the right, but they never really wanted to know what or who I was. I mean, one of my friends was as flaming gay as they come, and when he came out it was this big thing and we all talked very seriously about it. Lots of drama, lots of manly hugs, and later confessions of love. But me… I just didn't really know what I could say that hadn't already been said and besides, why should they care? Gay or not, it wasn't as if anyone was ever going to go out with me. So I never told them, because I thought it didn't matter. Which just proves just how little I knew. And so I never tried to make them see the real me, and maybe they just thought that there was nothing else to me than what they saw, I don't really know. I want to think that, at least, because thinking otherwise would mean that they knew that there was more but just… didn't care. I'm rambling."

"Well, I've been rambling too, so it's kind of… what we're doing here. Rambling. And I know I was lucky, Yoshi was a fecking godsend. I mean, without him my loneliness would have crushed me flat, but with him we had this crazy little bubble where we could just go totally spazz and give the rest of the world the finger. It made my last year more than bearable, and when I went through Auror training he kept me sane. So I get where you're coming from, and I'm so sorry for you. I mean, it's difficult to see when someone's in pain sometimes, even if that person is your friend, and it's just… crap that all the friends you had managed to miss it."

"Well… they were really good friends, I mean, at least they acknowledged me as a friend at all, so I was luckier than most hangers-on. But I was never their equal. In anything. I was the least attractive of the gang, I couldn't keep myself on a broomstick if I was nailed to it, and when it came to school… I wasn't bad as such. Just… mediocre. I was only good at one thing, and…" His eyes clouded over, and he bit his lip. "It wasn't exactly something I was proud of, even though my friends seemed to think it was brilliant."

"What was it?"

"The… uh, defensive part of Defence Against the Dark Arts. You know, curses and jinxes and stuff. The only thing I was really good at was hurting other people. Which sucked elephant balls, to put it in your charming way."

"That does sound a little suckerish, I must agree with you there. And wasn't it nice of them to keep you around?" Dora's voice reeked of bitterness. "How noble of them, who were so cool, to treat you as a friend. I bet it earned them a few admiring looks because they were so kind. It worked for me."

Richard looked a bit haunted. "I don't think they did it by design, not really. But of course they liked the admiration. And I acted like a – pardon me – pussy, so it was only natural that I sometimes got treated as one. But at least I was safe from them in other ways. They were way arsier towards other people. People who think Gryffindors are noble all the time should've met them when they were at their worst."

"The houses are bullshit, that's what I think. I mean, and sorry for saying this about your working place, the whole system reeks of ass! What is the point of giving children a reason to get a pre-designed point of view about other people? They do that anyway and we shouldn't be helping them. Besides, in the end we're all just people. There are asshole Gryffindors and sweet Slytherins and really, really stupid Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs who wouldn't know loyalty if it bit them in the ass! It's all a load of bull that kids are, as a rule, not mature enough to see through. As a result we get these weird self-fulfilling clichés that doesn't really fit anyone but everyone still tries so hard to apply, and therefore we get people like… well, that snotty little brat Draco Malfoy."

Richard looked away. "He must've been before my time;" he said, in a voice that was maybe just a bit strained. "But I understand what you're saying and I do agree, even if I had never," he smiled teasingly at her, "thought you had it in you to go all political on me. Let's broach the subject of religion next, why don't we?"

"Oh, come on, give me a break! I'm an Auror, it's my job to be political. And I never touch religion, it upsets my digestion."

At which point Richard was bent double with laughter and had to take several moments before he could speak again. "My lord, you are a precious woman, aren't you? So, why don't you give me another dark, dangerous secret of yours?"

"Well, I could toss you a little something that I've actually been to chicken even to talk to my own husband about."

"The plot thickens."

"Shut up… Well, the only other person in the world to know about this is actually Yoshi, so feel privileged." Once more Dora went for her glass, this time sipping a little more carefully. "What I'm talking about is a nice little piece of work named Liam."

"Well, I never took you for an unfaithful girl, so I'm ruling out that option, and find that I've quite run out. Pitiful, I know. So tell me, who is Liam?"

"Me. He's me."

"Oh my. Transsexual much?"

"More like transvestite, just better at it than most. I invented him during my fifth year, I needed some way to blow off some steam, so I created this male persona that was everything I couldn't be. So he started out as this really kind and sweet kid, and nowadays he's more of a bastard."

"You flatter yourself too much." Richard dodged a slap. "I am horsing around with you, moron. I understand what you mean. Only, I've spent so much of my life being the bad persona that I am now permanently inhabiting the good one."

"Well, I don't think Liam and I are really that different, but when I'm him I can be more 'dangerous' if I like, though I'm probably kidding myself. He's not tall, and not that handsome and lives on a ten foot attitude that probably makes people think he's a jerk. But I like it anyway."

"You know, he reminds me of someone I used to know…"

"Ouch, coming from you that sounds bad…"

"Well, J- he grew out of it, eventually. Maybe your Liam will too. Though I doubt it."

"He won't, but that's okay. I like dressing up in leather and being a ridiculous faggot with balls for brains. But, as I said, I haven't dared telling Remus. I don't know why, perhaps I'm scared that Liam would remind him of Sirius somehow… You know, Sirius, the old boyfriend I told you about? 'Cause we're related… but maybe I told you that too? Anyway, we share some features and since Liam was an effort to create what I might look like as a man, those feature sort of stand out more. And I can't change Liam's face now, he's not a metamorphmagus, I am. He looks the way he looks."

"I understand. It would be a bit creepy if R- if your husband started seeing his old beau in you, yes. Not that I really think he would. That man is so utterly besotted with you that it's ridiculous."

Dora blushed. "I… uh… well… Oh, crap. Thanks. It means a lot to me that you say that." She thought about mentioning Richards strange way of almost saying something (a name?) before hurriedly correcting himself, but something made her back away from it. A feeling that whatever it was, she wasn't ready to know, or Richard wouldn't hesitate.

"Of course it does," Richard said rather bluntly. "He means the world to you. Him and the children. I have to admit that I envy you a little bit, but without you I… I wouldn't feel like I had any family at all." Embarrassed by his own sentimentality, he busied himself with filling up his almost empty glass.

"I'm glad you feel like that, because you are a part of my family. Now, want to see what Liam looks like?"

And that was that? Obviously, she had just assimilated him into the family, whatever he might've felt about it. Richard smiled fondly. That was his Fanny. "Of course I want to see him."

So she changed. She'd put on loose fitting men's jeans and an equally loose T-shirt to accommodate the increase in size. Liam was in no way a big man, but he was still bigger than Dora.

His jaw was square and stubborn, inviting any asshole to try to punch it. Because he liked it that way, he left a fair measure of stubble on it, going for the rugged look. The lips were a little too full to qualify as 'manly', something he'd never been very pleased with, and his nose was a bit crooked. Heavy eyebrows threw shadows over sparkling, almond shaped eyes that alternated between being slate grey and sky blue depending on his mood and the way light fell on them. The head was crowned with a mop of chestnut hair that seemed a bit reluctant to cooperate with anything or anyone, being neither straight, nor curly and growing in all sorts of directions, reminding rather a lot of dog fur.

The body was good. Of course he would have liked to be taller, but you can't have everything. He had nice muscles, broad shoulders. Nothing to complain about really, though he was quite hairy, but that could have been dealt with if he'd felt like going through the pain, which he didn't. So it was all good.

"So, this is what I look like."

Richard looked amused. "Very macho, Liam. As an old, experienced faggot, I'm impressed."

Liam grinned, his smile slightly more predatory than Dora's. "I'll never forgive Dora for trying to be realistic. I mean, I could have been a tall hunk of… James Dean, or Errol Flynn or… you get the picture. And what does she do? Try to make a realistic version of herself as a man. Like that is even possible to figure out, and what the hell made her think she'd be hairier than a yeti? And I wasn't going for macho so much as… ruggedly handsome. But of course, with her low self esteem she wouldn't picture herself as handsome, the silly cow."

"Oh, I don't know, you definitely don't look bad. What I'm trying to hint very discreetly at is that you don't have anything to complain about, so tune down a bit."

"I don't do discretion. Anyway, I'll sod off now and let you girls get back to whatever you were doing, this was just meant to be a quick demonstration, we can do the male bonding thing another time."

And with that, Liam became Dora again. "Okay, that was scary," she said with a faint smile. It had been terrifying. What if Liam would have done something really stupid and made Richard hate them both? You never knew with that loose cannon.

"He didn't look that scary to me," said Richard, who had seen a lot scarier. "Don't worry. I'm sure we'll get along fine, even if he seems to take himself a little bit too seriously. But I always enjoy making fun of people like that, so that's fine."

Dora laughed. "It's not so bad, really. He's just never gotten over the fact that I didn't make him into a sex-god when I had the chance. He just keeps bringing it up, I guess it's really me being annoyed that I didn't make him a sex-god. He is me after all. It's not a split personality thing, we're the same person. I just act a little different and look a lot different when I'm him."

"I know. But I enjoy teasing you as well." He smiled at her, waving a hand toward his small kitchen. "Now, I do think we should leave being serious for now and have something to eat. You did say it was a housewarming party after all, and though I've never been much of a party-goer myself, I do know that only the really bad ones end in tears and confessions. Besides, if we drink any more champagne on empty stomachs your husband will think that I am some kind of a deviant trying to corrupt his beloved wife by getting her sloshed."

"Agreed."

"It's been bloody cold out lately."

"If you talk about the weather, Black, I will Crucio you out of what little mind you still have left."

Sirius' eyebrows shot up. "Why this aversion towards the weather?"

"It's the weather. You can hardly avoid it, so talking about it is pointless and marks a lack of intellectual acuity. If anyone might've avoided the fact that the next Ice Age seems to be approaching, he or she either doesn't get out enough, which you know I do, or has lousy powers of perception, which at least I know I don't."

Sirius was reluctantly amused, and turned his face away a bit so that his smile wouldn't be that obvious. "You do have a talent for being insulted by even the most casual comment, don't you?"

Snape's lips curled in return. "It is a gift."

It was always like this. There was the awkward pause when they didn't know who should try to speak first. Then one of them would venture some noncommittal comment about one thing or the other, and the other one would find a way to disagree, or take offence, or both, and by then they would forget that they were not friends and chatter on like a couple of old ladies.

"Mweep." Something small and fluffy landed in Sirius' lap, giving him a green-eyed look that said, 'You better do something interesting soon'.

"A cat?" he asked, genuinely surprised. Somehow, he'd never imagined that Severus Snape would be much of an animal person, this being equivalent to taking care of something small and helpless. On the other hand, he'd never imagined that he would ever be having tea with Snape, until he suddenly was.

"I find that I can come to a certain understanding with felines. They stay out of my business and I stay out of theirs, and both sides are comfortable. Humans are in no way as reasonable."

"Hah!" Sirius stabbed with his finger in the air. "That's it. You're obviously a cat at heart. I'm a dog. It's karmic law that we don't get along." He finished this statement by grabbing the last cookie and devouring it.

On anyone else, the slight upturn of the corners of his mouth would have been interpreted as a smile, but this was Severus Snape, so of course it was nothing but a sneer. "It was, of course, inconceivable that I would want that cookie?"

"Of course you wanted it. But I took it. It's a man eat man world. Or man eat cookie, in this case."

"Oh, how witty. Really. You astound me. I am baffled, amazed, utterly flabbergasted, dumbfounded, founded dumb even…"

Sirius laughed out loud. "You use the word 'flabbergasted'? Only old ladies in fifties comedies use that word."

"Oh, and while we're on the subject of ladies, how are things going with Remus?" Severus retorted with absolutely no change of expression whatsoever.

Sirius choked on his tea, and coughed helplessly while Severus watched him with a sanguine look on his face. The kitten was watching him with the exact same expression. A small part of Sirius' mind wondered where Severus had gotten the cat from, while the rest was yelling bloody murder.

"Where the… I… why did… Why the bloody hell did you have to…? Why did you…?" Sirius leaned his face in his hands. The cat gave him a crazed stare and fled to the floor. "Why was it so necessary to bring him up?" he asked tiredly.

"Firstly, you called me an old lady. Secondly, the expression on your face is priceless. And thirdly, it's been four years. Four years, Black, that you have managed to spend sulking. For someone who never tires of pointing out my own flaws in that department, you seem to be putting down considerable effort to become my equal."

Sirius sighed, feeling suddenly too tired to even get angry. "But I am doing what he wants me to do, aren't I? I'm keeping out of his life so that I won't screw it up for him. And I have to get over him sometime, right? Crap, I can't believe I just asked you that. Just… forget I said anything." He grabbed the cat by the scruff of its neck and lifted it up into his lap, starting to pet it rather fiercely.

Severus heaved a very, very tired sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose with thumb and index finger. He'd heard Sirius say things like this, or at least variations of the general theme, over and over and over again during the awkward Truce Of…Tea. "Sirius, you're not doing this because he wants you to, you're doing this because you would literally shit bricks if you ever tried to face him again and you're just too chicken to handle the possibility of another refusal. To put it in fewer words, you're simply following your nature."

Sirius was jolted out of his brutal attentions toward the cat by Snape using his first name. That generally wasn't really, well, what they did. They called each other 'Snape' and 'Black' because they always had, and to do anything else would be the same as admitting that they didn't hate each other anymore, and while it was true that they didn't, it still wasn't anything they wanted to think about too closely. And as Severus proceeded to disembowel his – he had to admit it – lame excuses, he turned his face away and half-wished that he could resort to his old method of dealing with Severus hitting a really sore spot. Namely, punching him. As it was, he sighed and sank further into the sofa, as if hoping to get lost among the cushions like just another piece of spare change.

"What am I supposed to say?" he asked, and hated himself for sounding so… whiny. "I mean, no matter what I do he will know and we'll both have this big cloud of, 'I STILL LOVE YOU,' hanging over our heads."

Severus raised an eyebrow and shot Sirius the 'I'm about to be terribly clever' look. "But do you really? You haven't seen the man for four years, how can you possibly know that you love him? What you love is the idea in your head about who he is, and that person hasn't been around for a long, long time. The man you met when you fell out of the veil was someone you didn't know. A man with a job, a family, a whole life you knew nothing about, and believe it or not I do pity you for that. Remus is over you, Sirius, because you were dead for nine years. A lot happens in nine years. How about trying to get to know who the man you think you love actually is, and then reassess whether or not you are in fact interested in tearing his whole life to shreds so that the two of you can be together again."

Sirius sighed. "But I don't. Not really. I just wish things… wouldn't have happened like that. Or something." He gave Severus a sharp look. "And thank you, I know it's not terribly constructive, it's just…" He sighed and refilled his cup. How to explain? "I've lost two large chunks of my life. Say what you want about Azkaban, but it doesn't do much for character development. So that's twelve years down the drain. And then I'm dead for nine years. So even before the whole veil-thing, Remus was way ahead of me. But I had missed out on so much that who the fuck was I supposed to look to for… human things? Closeness and love and that stuff that, I suspect, even you occasionally need. And now I don't even know him. I know his bleeding wife better than I know him." He sighed, staring at his tea and wishing it to be more… alcoholic. "What it all comes down to, really, is that I'm still twenty years old and he's fifty. I'm the student pining for his teacher. I'm pathetic."

There was a flicker of 'Oh, God I'm going to have to get up close and personal' in the beady blackness of Severus' eyes, but then an almost (of course not completely, couldn't have that happening) friendly half-smirk quirked his thin lips. "Not that I'm disagreeing, Black, but if that is going to be your line of thinking then… well, I'm basically eleven, and I find it rather demeaning to pursue that particular strain of thought. My whole life went down the drain, and I did nothing to pull it back up. That is why you really should take my advice on this issue. I might not know exactly what you've gone through, and to be honest I don't care to know either since the experience was undoubtedly excruciating, but I know a whole lot about wasting time. That is what you're doing. Wasting time that you could spend with Remus and the…um… family that his wife has decided to extend to just about anyone she likes. If you love the man or not is really irrelevant. He doesn't love you in that way, end of story. Now, there are two ways of dealing with this kind of thing. Either you shut the person you love out and try to forget, or you try to be friends. You've tried the first option and failed, so it's time for the other one. I am sick of having you whining on my sofa about this."

This was really quite a long speech, coming from Severus, and it had Sirius alternately blushing and looking away for the whole length of it. The man talking about his own life, his own pains, in that way was certainly embarrassing, but at the same time felt a bit… reassuring. He wasn't the only one spilling his guts here, at least. And as much as it pained him, he knew Severus was right. Per definition, of course, Severus Snape was always wrong as long as he held an opinion that was opposite to his, but this had suddenly turned on Sirius in a rather unpleasant way when he now found himself agreeing.

Damn it.

Oh, and he was going to let the sofa comment pass. Because if he didn't, he'd have to say something along the lines of, well then, I suppose I could just stop coming here. And Severus would say fine, and he would say fine and then he'd lose the only person he could really talk to about these issues.

"So… You want me to… just go there? Hi, lovely weather, oh, incidentally, let's get to know each other so that I won't have to go around pining after you all the time and might actually get a life?"

"Something like that."

Sirius buried his face in his hands, and spilled half of his tea over his jeans. "Bugger. God, this is so stupid. On the other hand, I've agreed to a lot of stupider things. It's just that coming from James, they always seemed so reasonable. Oh, well. Wish me luck." He stood up, tea stain and all, and prepared to leave.

What is it with this man and his mood swings? Severus thought tiredly, but decided to keep quiet since this at least was a swing for the better. Instead he opted for some sort of encouragement, but that wasn't exactly his forte so it took him a few moments to think of an appropriate thing to say. "Well… have fun storming the castle."

Sirius spent a last moment to send Severus a weird look – storming the what? – before exiting with all speed, hell-bent on rushing to Remus' doorstep before he lost all courage.

A/N: Hokay, so this was random. But WE feel that it needs to be there, and we're the writers and this is no democracy. So there. Oh, and now:

LET THERE BE AWKWARDNESS! /cue scary music