Every Second of My Life

Author's Note:

Ah, Chapter Two. In which I get extremely wordy. Also, small lemony substance somewhere in there.

Thanks for the review! And the reads, you mysterious people who don't review, which would be lovely.


------

I dreamed that night, something about red hair turning to pink and back again, but when I woke up, I couldn’t remember the details.

My watch said it was nine a.m. I decided that this was far too early for me to get up, given the immense hangover and lack of anything better to do, so I painfully looked for my wand and closed the curtains against the perky, mid-morning sun, which I mused dreamily must be nature’s way of punishing the alcoholically gluttonous.

I woke up again, around eleven, and my headache had gone. It was, predictably, replaced with a massive erection.

For a moment I thought about popping off to the shower to get rid of it, but old Orion Black had never quite gotten the hang of the spanner, and the shower took a good ten minutes before it got close to anything resembling what most people call ‘warm’.

So it was with very little enthusiasm that I reached down into my shorts. My mind went automatically to its old standby, one of a soft, sweet female with no distinguishing characteristics. She touched me where I touched myself, pulling me into her mouth, and I kept my hands in her hair…which kept turning pink, no matter how much I willed it to stay that sort of brownish neutral color. I finally gave up, and Tonks slid me out of her mouth and pushed me down onto my bed to climb atop me…pumping me into oblivion…my hands clutching her hips mindlessly, her name on my lips as I came…

Bloody fuck.

I reached for my wand.

Dating had always been difficult for me, as difficult as finding a decent job or keeping friends. After I’d somewhat gotten over the imprisonment and deaths of my best friends, I’d attempted to date a bit, rather haphazardly and without much zeal. It didn’t work out well, mostly because of the lycanthropy, which isn’t really a hot first date topic. I even tried going out with a few Muggle girls, but if it started to look anything remotely like serious I’d end it, not being able to bear revealing to them both the wizard and the werewolf. It also didn’t help that I’ve always been hideously shy.

Perhaps if I’d been more extroverted, I’d have gotten laid more, at least.

I sighed as I cleaned myself up, thinking of my conversation with Sirius the previous evening. I’d always been blessed (read: cursed) with a decent memory after a hard night of drinking, (though I always got the worst hangovers in return) and the evening was painfully clear…there was the inevitable wrangling about Tonks…a bump on my forehead…and then that bit about Lily…

Ah, fuck. He knew about Lily.

In my embarrassed misery, I slogged myself up and out onto the landing. I’d foregone the use of Sirius’ younger brother’s room, which had its own connecting bathroom, so I was left with the guest bath, complete with aforesaid freezing shower.

While the cold water washed away any vestige of my arousal, it also brought about frigid thoughts of the old, tired feelings I’d had for Lily.

I’d met her our first night at Hogwarts, when I happened to sit next to her after my sorting. She’d asked me nervously to pass the treacle tart. I nervously complied, shy and timid about my first real encounter with someone my age, benign though it was.

“Thanks!” she’d said, and the smile on her face was like the sun coming up after a night I hadn’t known had been so dark.

Later that night, of course, I’d met my dorm mates, and as overjoyed I was to have found such good and solid friends, there was always that little girl who’d been the first to speak to me on that first terrifying night.

Once I had reached that hideously awkward age, the one where I hadn’t grown up properly and I was tremblingly keen on the girls, the age that Sirius and James had seemed to pass through unnoticed, I’d started to notice her a bit less innocently.

The water hadn’t gotten warm after five minutes, so I gave it up and flipped off the shower, stepping into the somehow more freezing bathroom.

I’d even asked her out, just once. It was somewhere around the beginning of sixth year. We went to Hogsmeade together, though I never really specified that it was an actual date, and we ended up meeting up with her friends by chance, and I spent the rest of the evening drinking in the Three Broomsticks pretending to be interested in Mary Macdonald’s problems in Herbology.

I blessed Molly Weasley as I dried myself off with the large, fluffy towels she’d washed, and I shivered my way back to my room to dress.

Sirius had been right, of course. I’d loved Lily even after she’d started going out with James, thinking of her and that hair at night in the prefect’s bathroom…At their wedding, I got completely drunk to avoid thinking about her being forever out of my reach, safe in my best friend’s arms…

But then, as Sirius said, Harry came. Little Harry, already looking like James, blinking at me with Lily’s eyes. James was driven into a hideous fit over which of his two friends to name as Harry’s godfather. Peter had ducked out of it, which I realize now must have been pre-emptive guilt for having already joined the Death Eaters.

I looked at Harry. I looked at his mother and father. And I knew that I no longer loved Lily. I also knew that Sirius deserved to be Harry’s godfather much more than I did.

I wondered again, as I tucked my threadbare tie under my threadbare sweater vest (and pulled on my threadbare robes) what would have happened if I hadn’t felt so guilty and undeserving of my being godfather to Lily’s son. If I hadn’t told James to give the title to Sirius, perhaps they would have chosen me, who, while not being financially stable, was generally more of a positive role model than the man who had gotten his friends to become illegal shape-shifters. And little Harry might have come to live with me after James and Lily died…

I’d asked Dumbledore to be able to take the boy after their death; I’d heard enough about Lily’s Muggle relatives to worry about him under their care. He’d said no, but also made it clear that my being a werewolf wasn’t at issue, which I doubted. It’s always been at issue.

Which brought me back to…

No.

I shook myself out of thoughts of Tonks, thoughts that had been running through my head for a long while now.

Making my way downstairs, I found Sirius in the kitchen, nursing the same remnants of a hangover that I was with a fresh pot of coffee.

“Do you know that every other house on this block has that electricity now?” Sirius said in a low voice, his eyes closed, although the light was quite dim in the basement kitchen, “Remember when I had my own place, I had that electricity thing too? And the place came furnished, right, and it had this Muggle thing, this coffee pot that bloody well brewed your coffee for you, remember?”

I poured myself some of this exciting coffee that he was going on about, and nodded.

“Took all of five goddamned minutes, am I right?”

“Er, I think so…It was fourteen years ago, you know…”

“Well, it did. It bloody well took five goddamned fucking minutes, all you needed was a filter and some goddamned fucking coffee beans and some goddamned fucking water, and five goddamned, fucking minutes later, you had some damn good coffee, am I right?” Though it seemed like Sirius was getting worked up, he continued to speak in a low, even voice.

“There’s really no need to be so vulgar about it.”

“Five minutes. So what I want to know is why all these asscunts are going on about ‘pureblood supremacy’ this, and ‘Muggle domination’ that…”

“ ‘Asscunts,’ eh? That’s a new one…”

“…When the average wizard, i.e. Sirius Black, who, I might add, became an animagus at the age of fifteen, has to spend at least twenty minutes waiting for coffee to brew in a pot, then strain all that shit out. And while this is happening, right next door, probably, there’s a Muggle, a ‘stupid, pointless, ignorant’ Muggle, who’d added his cream and sugar before my water even started to boil!”

Silence greeted the end of Sirius’ monologue.

“It’s still fairly good,” I said mildly, sipping the offending drink.

Sirius groaned and drained the rest of his, getting up to refill it.

“Arthur sent his patronus this morning, at the crack of dawn, of course. There’s a meeting tonight.”

“Ah…”

Sirius grinned like a snake.

“You know, I bet Tonks…”

“Shut it, Sirius…”