A/N: This one is LONG, people. I am proud. Also, I just want to take a moment to thank my anonymous reviewers - I don't get a chance to say thanks via message, so right here, right now, I thank you. :)

Chapter title from John Donne. He wrote some amazing poetry. Some of it is incredibly, metaphysically sexual. Interpret as you wish.

Sirius was asleep. His entire face had slackened as it lay plastered against the slightly grimy train window. The slight crinkles that had decorated his forehead for much of the past month were smoothed in his sleep. A regular fog clung to the cold glass of the window as Sirius breathed softly, his mouth hanging open like an eager puppy's snout, only without the companion of energy.

Remus watched Sirius sleep.

James and Peter had long since moved off to stalk Lily or Snape or the food trolley, Remus didn't really know which. He didn't really care which, to be honest. Conversation between the three hadn't exactly been scintillating once Sirius had fallen asleep. Remus had been attempting to avoid further pointed prompts from James regarding a true conciliation with Sirius before the separation of the summer holidays. Avoidance in this case constituted near silence and repeated aversion of the eyes.

Remus watched Sirius sleep, and counted the breath clouds. Really, if you thought about it, or closed your eyes part way and tilted your head a little with the movement of the train, the misted circles could almost be sheep. It looked a bit like sheep were leaping out of Sirius' mouth – a small variation on the usual sleep remedy.

Sirius wasn't much like a sheep. If any Marauder could be compared to a woolly and brainless follower, well, it would have to be Peter, really, but Remus would be a close second. He'd always followed his bigger, funnier and more energetic companions on whatever crazy pranking paths they had blindly chosen to take. He didn't really mind being a sheep, not really.

Remus watched Sirius sleep, and saw each swirl of fog peel off and evaporate in the wake of a new breath. The sheep leapt over the fence and wound their woolly way to their next destination – greener grass, or the shearing shed, or perhaps into his mother's next disastrous attempt at knitting.

Like the sheep fog, he had leapt clear away from Sirius' mouth. Wasn't that funny? He had broken away from the soft curve of those lips, which were curled in a pensive smile in sleep. He had cleared the fence and galloped far away from their friendship, leaving miles and miles of distance between them. Those pink lips had parted for him, for the briefest of brief moments, and Remus had peeled from them without a word.

But it was Sirius who sent these little sheep careening carelessly through the grimy window glass, wasn't it? His breath had formed words of betrayal and spoken them to Severus Snape, purveyor of the Dirty Secret nonetheless. His every breath now whooshed the previous cloud away. Those lips had pressed on his almost tenderly, almost desperately, no, entirely desperately, and wet like the tears on their faces - but the same mouth had blown apart the sturdy foundation of their friendship like it was merely a house of cards.

Remus watched Sirius sleep, and he watched his mouth, and he knew that he couldn't blame those delicately curved lips for the Snape incident. Sirius was the picture of innocence in his sleep. He was a lamb, pure and simple, and he was chasing the other sheep away from him with every escaped breath.

Remus was a sheep. Remus had been chased away by the petulant, thoughtless, and irresistibly charming selfishness of his friend, the lamb dressed in a black dog's clothing. But unlike the tiny circles of mist, Remus would not be chased away unknowingly. He had a choice. Or rather, he didn't really have a choice in the end, but he could pretend that he did, and consciously make the decision to stay plastered on the window with Sirius' face.

Remus decided not to melt away into the gloomy background of Sirius Black's patchwork of a life.

He knew that he'd been staring at Sirius' face for far too long, even if he was sleeping – but maybe especially because he was sleeping. His eyes were drawn to the patches of mist coming from Sirius' mouth, but they swung to soft lips as regularly as a pendulum.

This was a moment of utter intimacy for Remus. It made him extremely uncomfortable, but this was partially because he hadn't spent much time looking at Sirius lately. His eyes clung now to the familiar shapes and edges of his friend's body like he was remembering the very essence of their friendship. It seemed vitally important that he re-establish this physical memory in his mind.

It seemed vitally important that Remus affirm this physical memory with a tracing of the slumbering skin and smoothed forehead before him. There had never been a restriction on physical contact in their friendship before the incident. It seemed wrong that Remus restrict himself now. Eyes were personal, but touch could remind him more vividly of how things had been. This is what Remus told himself, and this is why his right hand now stretched tremulously towards Sirius' hunched shoulders.

There was peace in those slackened muscles. Remus wondered if he might absorb it and draw some peace into his own body. He wanted his racing pulse to settle. He wanted his arms to stop shaking and risk waking Sirius. However, there was no peace transferred in the touch. Rather, as his hand pressed lightly against the thin cotton t-shirt that clothed Sirius' back, his heart hammered through with even more force than before.

His fingers trailed lower. He couldn't stop himself. This was weird and entirely too intimate, and Sirius was asleep (which somehow made this whole remembering process both easier and more terrifying). His fingers brushed down, along the raised curve of spine, and came to rest on a stretched expanse of lower back.

Scars. Remus could feel the scars. They burned beneath his fingers like raw, searing guilt. The thin cotton hid nothing of the raised edges and angry lines. Remus stared down at his hands as they lay against black t-shirt, and realised that his claws must have aligned in precisely the same fashion. As a werewolf, he had torn across Sirius' lower back, etching these scars in regular stripes.

His hand slipped slightly as he shuddered, repulsed by the thought of tearing through Sirius' skin. Undeniably, Sirius had been Padfoot, and Padfoot's skin was covered by a great carpet of black fur, but that changed nothing, really. Sirius had retained the scratches in human form. Sirius had been forced to admit himself into Madam Pomfrey's care despite the risk of being discovered to have both broken the wizarding law and accompanied a werewolf during the full moon.

With a start, Remus realised that his hand, now resting far too low on Sirius' back, was rising and falling more quickly than it had before. Far too late, he snatched the incriminating hand away, but there was no way that Sirius wouldn't have felt the removal of the pressure. The t-shirt had ridden up in Sirius' sleep, and Remus' fingers had been lying against bare skin.

Clasping his hands together in his lap as if to demonstrate his complete innocence, Remus scooted away to the far end of the bench. He hung his head towards the compartment door, wishing for James or Peter to push it open and evaporate his imminent humiliation like a foggy breath on a window.

"Checking out the battle scars?" Sirius said with a yawn in his voice, but all Remus could hear was the underlying disparagement.

Remus didn't answer. He couldn't. He didn't want to. As neither of the boys moved from their huddled positions, Remus tried to pretend that Sirius had gone back to sleep, and would shortly forget this little incident, or dismiss it as a dream.

No such luck. The lycanthrope was never really privy to luck, anyway.

"Why'd you move away so far?" Sirius asked more loudly, and shook his head once to remove the long fringe from his eyes. The implied 'again' rang through Remus' mind like the clanging of a heavy church bell.

"I thought you were asleep," he said awkwardly, realising as he spoke that this fact really wouldn't help him much in this situation. Inanity seemed to be a primary actor in many of his recent decisions, come to think of it. Remus wanted to say something else, and maybe redeem a little dignity. "I suppose I wanted to check that you were, you know, alright, or something."

He flushed. This explanation seemed entirely inadequate, especially in view of their last conversation in the Hospital Wing.

It seemed to take forever before Sirius unravelled himself from his curled-up position against the window, but he finally swung himself around, pulling in more closely to Remus.

Remus couldn't help but to flinch as Sirius reached out and began to untangle the fingers that had tightened into a whitish fist. When his hands were finally spread flat against his legs, he stared blankly at the row of crescent indents that were set across his palms.

Sirius took a palm and held it against his own.

Remus paused for a moment, presumably lost in memory or something, all that was supposedly brought back by touch, but he came crashing back into his body a second later. All the better to fully experience the mad pounding in his chest.

"What are you doing?"

These were the words that popped out before anything else could filter through Remus' mind, and he flushed a brighter red. He didn't retract his hand from Sirius'. He thought it would be impolite, or unfair, or just a complete contradiction of his previous actions.

"You know I don't blame you at all for scratching me up, right?" Sirius breathed, and it was like the awkwardness of before was completely erased in the wake of this question. Remus couldn't apologise, exactly – the werewolf in him knew that Sirius' betrayal had deserved some form of retribution and refused to be contrite.

"Look, I, er, oh, sod it. Remus, come off it, please."

Ah. The fumbling Sirius that Remus had come to know quite well over the course of the past month. Remus could deal with this stage. He had fobbed off a lot of the reasonable argumentation thrown at him by black-haired boys in the last few weeks. He wasn't entirely sure why the fobbing off had been necessary anymore, to tell the truth. All he knew was that he couldn't allow Sirius to progress to the next stock in his arsenal: cruelty through bitter bluntness.

"Yeah, I know."

"What the hell does that mean? 'Yeah, I know'? Let's just talk, shall we?" Sirius' face was a picture of earnest frustration.

"Alright."

"Alright."

Neither looked at each other. The compartment rang with the ensuing silence, which lasted until Sirius barked out a harsh laugh and began stroking Remus' fingers gently. The contrast was hard to deal with. Remus barely knew how to respond, but he knew he had to. James' stern face kept popping into his mind now, reminding him of the duties of friendship. The disapproving spectacles were interposed with flashes of Sirius' lips, and sleeping Sirius' smooth forehead, and Remus' hand was being stroked, for Merlin's sake. A response was necessary.

"Erm."

Nice. Nice beginning. Idiot.

"I didn't mean what I said in the Hospital Wing, you know." This came out in a flurried mumble. Sirius' fingers paused for a moment, steadied over Remus' tensed knuckles, and then continued rubbing. "I, well, look. You look, for once. See, I'm incomprehensible too."

Remus almost smiled. This was going okay so far. Things were so much simpler when Sirius kept his mouth shut and his eyes averted.

"Thing is that I've forgiven you, Sirius. Maybe I shouldn't, maybe you really can't be trusted, but I can't stand it anymore, okay? I guess, I guess we're just friends, and you can't break that so easily. Maybe if I'd gotten Snape and the Ministry had had me executed, then the bonds of friendship would be bro-"

For once, Remus was extremely grateful to hear the sound of Sirius' low voice. He had been babbling without any sense of control. What was control when your fingers were trapped beneath someone else's? Where was control when your heart was racing faster than the Hogwarts Express?

"What do you forgive me for, Moony?"

A carefully phrased question, if there ever had been one. Sirius wanted to know the truth, once and for all, about where the two boys stood. Remus' hand twitched from beneath Sirius' as his fingers yearned to touch his lips at the echo of a distant kiss. The air in the compartment suddenly became heady. This was intimate. Far too intimate. And where had the awkwardness gone?

"For the Snape incident. And – and for everything else."

Ah. Welcome back, awkwardness.

Sirius removed his hand, and Remus unconsciously stretched out his fingers, feeling the cool air burn against his skin. He watched uncomfortably as Sirius flexed his own hand in his lap.

"Good. I've missed you like Prongs misses McGonagall during the summer holidays."

Without realising that he felt the inclination, Remus' face broke across into a wide smile.

"Couldn't have missed me that much, you berk. That's impossible."

Sirius grinned back from beneath his sweeping fringe. Another awkward silence fell upon them, and Remus toyed with the greyish hem of his t-shirt as he worked fiercely to avoid the need to meet Sirius' eyes. He was aware that the train must be close to London by now – it had been simply hours since they had left the station. He had fulfilled his promise to James, and he had satisfied that considerable part of himself that had been aching for Sirius' smiles since the whole terrible affair had begun.

Even this painful silence was better than those that they had been experiencing throughout the month, and so it seemed that neither would dare to upset the new conciliation. It was just as the train was pulling into Kings Cross Station that Sirius finally muttered, "I don't regret it, you know," and grabbed for his trunk as if to dart off immediately.

"Regret what?" Remus asked automatically, eyes catching at the fierce grey of Sirius' desperate determination.

"The- the-"

It looked like the cool and collected Black had vanished entirely as Sirius' face visibly paled to a dreadful hue. Remus' breath caught as the flustered boy turned away as if to leave without even finishing his sentence. This was unprecedented, and so called for unprecedented action.

Remus looked down, and found that his hands were caught on the thin fabric of Sirius' shirt.

"You shouldn't," he breathed, inspired by his own daring. Their eyes met, and the air fairly thrummed with tension.

"Shouldn't what?" Sirius all but squeaked, and cleared his throat hastily.

"The kiss," Remus said quietly, an obscene note of calm in his voice. "You shouldn't regret the kiss."

Where was this calm voice coming from? Where had the sudden fierce strength in his hands come from? What did this all mean, and what was Remus going to do next?

His stomach dropped as his mind began to process the meaning behind his actions.

"I shouldn't?" Sirius whispered, and it was the ache of hope in his voice that closed shop in Remus' rational mind. This was child-like Sirius. This was vulnerable Sirius, Sirius with the sheep leaping out of his mouth, Sirius with the crinkles erased from his forehead and the slight smile on his face as he slept. This was Sirius the lamb slipping out of his doggy coat.

There was only one answer to this question that Remus could consider, and it was an answer that brought the forces of awkwardness and intimacy into breathy, foggy close proximity. His hands slowly dragged handfuls of cotton closer towards him. His entire body seemed to shiver as Sirius stumbled against him. His eyes met the terrified, exhilarated grey in Sirius', and shut against the image just as quickly.

Remus leant forward, and pressed his lips tentatively to Sirius' open mouth, searching for the soft brush of a month ago. It wasn't wet. His cheeks felt oddly dry. His mouth felt dry and desperate until Sirius suddenly responded, and lips began to slide against his own. Remus' hands fell open, releasing a flap of creased fabric, and came to rest nervously against Sirius' waist. There wasn't so much a conscious nervousness in his actions – there wasn't much consciousness left in him at the moment.

Nervousness soon departed both consciousness and subconsciousness when Sirius' hands came down and forcibly secured Remus' grasp about his waist. There was barely a hint of timidity between their mouths now as Sirius pressed and Remus felt the thrill of coarse friction between the skin of their chin and cheeks. Above all there was the slide of moving lips and suddenly, the slick entrance of a tongue, and then there was a flavour and an opening of mouths and Remus felt his entire body begin to swell with the heat of it all.

He gasped as Sirius pushed against him violently, pressing him backwards, back towards the seats, back towards the window. His knees buckled as they hit the edge of the seat, and he fell against the window with Sirius somehow pressed against him. His eyes shuttered a moment later as sharp teeth nipped at the lobe of his ear, and he was lost entirely, lost to the heat and the teeth and the lips and his hands were on a waist, he could feel the thin cotton beneath his fingers, and he remembered touching the t-shirt before, and he remembered Sirius sleeping, and he remembered Sirius, Sirius, and his lips were suddenly frozen against the wet mouth above him.

Sirius, panting, drew back for a moment, and Remus stared at the red haze in his cheeks, and the glinting brightness in his eyes.

"What?" Sirius asked, his voice low and rough, and there was more of the child, more of the lamb, in the question than Remus could bear.

His entire body throbbing, alive, clinging to the heat and the thrill that was hovering anxiously now, Remus curled in on himself. He turned his face against the cold glass of the window beside him, and watched the circles of mist grow and fade, and grow and fade.

He felt the sudden cool against his body as Sirius pulled away without another word. A moment later, the compartment door slammed shut.

The train had come to a stop. Remus could hear the voices of chattering students as they walked past the compartment on their way to their parents and their holidays.

He breathed out slowly, and stared out through the cloud, seeing nothing. He felt nothing.

A/N: Please review. I get all nervous that I'm not meeting expectations.

Oh, and as a side note, coz I've been wielding several enquiries lately, no, this is not the end of the story. The story will end with the words THE END. Or a Mexican hat dance. It all depends on whether or not I go crazy working on my nano.

REVIEW!

xx Froody