Third Secret

"What does it really look like?" he asks curiously one day, his limbs heavy and sated after lovemaking, his heart finally having slowed down to something approaching its regular rhythm.

She tenses. "What does what really look like?"

"Your face," he says.

She does not answer for so long that he would have thought she didn't hear him but for her stiff presence in his arms. Finally she exhales a shaky breath onto his shoulder, and he can feel himself twitching into awareness once more, despite his earth-shattering climax moments before. What is it about her that made him lose control so easily? Padfoot and Prongs would be laughing themselves sick over this if they could see him, oversexed and totally wild for a punk-haired, rebellious Auror almost half his age.

"It doesn't." She sighs. "That's what it's like being born an Animagimus. It's . . . we . . . don't have set looks. Before you learn control, you don't just look like one thing. You change without being able to control. There are ones that come back to you again and again, but it doesn't . . . I don't look like anything, really."

He is stunned, and his werewolf heart swells with sympathy for her. It must be hard, he thinks, being a girl without a face (what must it be like to live without one?), but he doesn't know what he means to her and what she means to him and how to comfort her, so he settles for running his tongue up the salty path of her neck and hearing her sigh with pleasure.