I think it was the shout from upstairs that woke me, and I found myself coming to groggy and unusually warm. It was a pleasant feeling, comfortable, safe – or at least, until I realized that the warmth was Sirius Black, his arms wrapped around me, his head on my chest, his – dear Lord – his erection pressing uncomfortably into my thigh.

I was just managing to keep my eyes from drifting shut again when the door burst open, slamming mercilessly against the wall behind it, and James came into view, still shouting something incomprehensible.

Sirius stirred next to me, his long hair brushing softly against my neck and as he shifted his body against mine I finally managed to notice that I seemed to have an erection to match his.

"Morning, Bambi," Sirius muttered to James, opening his eyes slightly.

But James' shouting had stopped, his face quickly draining of all color.

"Merlin, you two..." He struggled to find something to say, came up with nothing, turned on his heel and left the room without another word.

Sirius looked at me and ruffled my hair. "For such a skinny bloke, you sure make a comfortable pillow."

I laughed, nervously, my pace quickening, hoping he wouldn't notice what I, and apparently James, had before I had the chance to calm down.

He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, looked in the mirror to muss his hair into an acceptable look of dishevelment, and slid his pyjama pants down off his hips to replace them with torn jeans.

So much for calming down, I thought.

My whole body was acutely aware of Sirius' presence in the room, of his every movement and the way they pushed the air around him out of one space and into another, how each movement made different muscles tighten, now in his back, now in his arms, now in the gentle curve of his arse.

It wasn't that I hadn't noticed before how attractive he was – I had – but at school I always had the scarlet curtains of my four poster bed to block everything out and keep me safe from the vulnerability of the morning, while here, right here, I could still feel him pressed into me. something hot burned deep in my stomach, like lust but louder.

I forced my eyes away and stood up, adjusting my own pyjamas and heading for the bathroom.

Sirius hadn't come downstairs yet by the time I eventually made my way into the kitchen, so I sat across from James and started, "Sorry, that was—"

"I don't know what you're talking about," he mumbled into his tea.

"What were you screaming about, anyway?"

"Lily's gone."

"I assumed she would be. Said she was headed out first thing in the morning-"

"She left without me. She promised she'd let me go with her."

Lily had made it fairly clear the previous night that nothing in the world could make her let someone come with her. Why had she told James he could? She must hate him even more than she lets on, I thought.

"She'll be back in a few hours; she said that was all she needed."

"What if she doesn't? What if they get to her—"

"James, Lily Evans is the brightest witch I've ever known, disincluding, I don't know, McGonnagal and possibly your mother. She can handle keeping herself safe for a few hours."

My words were empty, though, produced only as an attempt to stop James' fretting. I was just as worried about her as he was. But if there was one thing I know for sure about Lily it was that once she had made her mind up about something, anything but conceding would be a strenuous exercise in futility – a lesson James, for all his cleverness, had still not learned after six long years of knowing her.

He seemed a bit more at ease, however – at least, enough to slowly sip some of his tea, though his foot tapped anxiously against the floor.

Around the bottom of my cup of tea, Sirius bounded down the stairs, now, mercifully, fully dressed. He put his arm around my shoulders as he sat. "Well, why the sulky faces? It's a beautiful day."

"Lily left," I explained.

"Foiled again, then, eh Prongs?"

James muttered some inaudible reply and flipped Sirius off under the table.

"Would some quidditch cheer you up?"

Of course it would. There was nothing, aside from possibly Lily Evans herself, that cheered James up more than quidditch, though I doubted it could possibly make him forget about her completely.

While they grabbed their brooms I grabbed my book and took a place on the bench just outside the pitch. The Lord of the Rings again, and though I was almost to the end of the ominous tome, I noted that Lily's appearance and my sudden forays into sleeping once or twice had cut severely into my reading time.

They whizzed about in the air for a while, eventually ending up in a heap on the ground, a wrestling match over the dropped quaffle that, from what I could see, seemed to be resulting in, at the very least, a black eye on James' part and a split lip for Sirius. The game didn't last much longer that that before they had abandoned their brooms and their shirts, neither aware of who had actually won, and were heading for the cool, crisp water.

Sirius grabbed my hand as he ran past me, pulling me from the bench along with him, laughing, "come on, Moony!"

I stopped him. "Seriously?"

"What?"

"You're going to drag me into the water again?"

He looked at me, innocently confused. I had wanted to believe he had been joking around, but it seemed as if he had genuinely forgotten that he had very nearly drowned me just a few days before.

"I can't bloody swim, mate." I found myself angrier than I had expected to be. I knew he was sometimes forgetful, but forgetting that he'd almost killed me seemed, well, offensive. "Don't you remember?"

A look of recognition crossed his face before he broke into a large grin.

"Then I'll teach you. Now. Come on!"

"I'd rather not," I insisted.

He pouted. "Everyone's got to learn eventually. I thought wolves loved water."

"Dogs love water. Go, I'll watch from the porch."

Perhaps exacerbated by me earlier near-death experience, I found myself worrying that one of them was going to hold the other under water for just too long, so I buried my face deeper into my book, trying to focus on hobbits instead of the way the water reflected up onto Sirius' bare skin.

I was just beginning to tire of the seemingly endless trek across Middle Earth when James slumped down into the chair next to me, soaking wet, his bare chest rising and falling quickly as he tried to catch his breath.

"What're you reading, Moony?"

I showed him the cover. "Lily gave it to me. It's a muggle fantasy novel about a hobbit who-"

"Bloody—for Merlin's sake, Moony, you're a wizard! You haven't got to read muggle stories about magic."

"What if I want to?" It wasn't entirely true... had anyone but Lily given me the book I would have given up a long time before. The wizard in it reminded me a bit of Dumbledore, had Dumbledore been a complete wanker.

"Padfoot's been whining all afternoon that you won't let him teach you to swim. Just humor him!"

"Last time, he very well could have killed me."

"He's pouting!"

"Let him pout."

James sighed, resigning. "What is going on with you two, anyway?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, this morning, and, well, he's been rather touchy lately, hasn't he?"

"Sirius is always touchy. He's a dog, he needs the attention."

"Yes, but this is different."

"It's not," I sighed. "There's nothing going on."

Seemingly content with my answer, he said, "You should still let him teach you to swim."

I didn't. Instead, I waited the rest of the day for Lily to return. When she hadn't returned by that evening, James was visibly beginning to panic. He paced about the kitchen, coming up with poorly though out plans for going to save her, all of which ended in her passionately kissing him when he finally managed to rescue her from certain death.

At around midnight, Sirius and I had to pin his arms behind his back and forcibly remove him from the kitchen to his bedroom, where an impressive sleeping charm from Sirius knocked him out for the night as we went back downstairs to wait.

"I am worried about her," I admitted once we'd returned to the kitchen.

"I know you are, Moony." He stroked the side of my face with his thumb and I prayed he couldn't feel the uncomfortable electricity raising between our skin.

"She's just—"

"You're in love with her."

"What?"

"Oh come on, mate. James is asleep. I won't tell him. You make it fairly obvious. You're in love with Evans, but you're too good a friend to tell anyone. Or, you value your life enough not to let James figure it out." He seemed very sure of his laughably incorrect conjecture.

"I'm not in love with her."

"Bollocks!"

"We're just friends."

"Friends my arse."

I laughed at his persistence. "Sirius, let me let you in on a little secret. I'm not exactly in a position to be falling in love with anybody."

"What do you mean?" His tone had shifted from a playful insistence to a genuine and almost sad confusion.

"Well, I can't exactly settle down, get married, get a job, have kids like a normal bloke, can I? It was fun to entertain the possibility when we were younger, but now that it's all coming up I've got to get used to that. Lycanthropy is a great antidote for fancying girls you shouldn't fancy."

"But, but—Emmeline? Weren't you two—?"

"Emmeline is a fantastic girl, I like her a lot, but she's seeing someone. Some Ravenclaw. Hal someone. And that will be much easier for her than getting involved with me would have."

"That's rubbish."

"I always make things complicated. I've always known that, so it's not so bad."

He sighed, resting one hand on my leg, just above my knee. "So you don't fancy Evans, then?"

"Not in the slightest."

We sat in the library, with the door open so that we could hear Lily when she apparated into the kitchen ,and after a long while he yawned and shifted so he was lying with his head in my lap.

"Does it ever make you lonely?" He asked. "Thinking about your future? Do you get sad?"

I considered this for a minute before finally admitting, "Every day."

"Don't worry, Moony," he yawned, his voice slurring with sleep, shifting his head against my stomach. "You won't be alone. 'm not getting married wither so you'll still have me..."

Before he could see the small smile tugging at my mouth, he was asleep, snoring lightly against my chest.

Lonely. The word stirred in my head. He was right; with dad sick, I knew I wouldn't have my family to depend on for much longer; coming up on our final year at school, I wouldn't have Hogwarts to return to; my condition would make it impossible to hold down a good, steady job once I was out, between the monthly exhaustion and all the ministry regulations that had been enacted in the past few years; and who else would I have around? The future, objectively, looked bleak at best, an endless string of short term jobs and a rundown flat somewhere unpleasant. But sitting here, in James' house, with Sirius in my lap, and Lily surely on her way back right now, lonely felt like an impossibly distant and far off alternative to the life I had now, and I couldn't even imagine being really, truly alone.