Had We Never Loved So Blindly

Author's note: I'm thrilled with the positive feedback I've received so far. Thank you to everyone who reviewed, and especially to ramenhead for being so incredibly encouraging. It means more to me than I can say.

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Had We Never Loved So Blindly
By MahsaFF

Chapter 4

Emmeline Vance was pretty.

No. Strike that. Idiotic understatement of the decade. She was... stunning.

And the question that immediately presented itself was: Why had he not noticed this before? How was it possible to overlook the kind of beauty that sucks the air right out of your lungs until you have to remind yourself to breath?

He watched, entranced, as she approached him. The firelight shone and glinted on her hair. Gauzy robes emphasised the sway of her body. She looked up, and met his gaze, and smiled... And the moments passed. The world revolved on its axis. But trivialities like time and space were no longer worthy of his attention. There was nothing but Emmeline. Her eyes. Her hair. Her lips.

So, of course, Sirius smiled back at her.

But it... it wasn't exactly Emmeline. Or, it was, but she seemed... different.

How?

Younger? Happier? Sirius frowned. But before he could give this puzzle, this Emmeline, more than the briefest consideration, she was—

There. Right there. An arm's length away, and all he had to do was—

He reached out his hand, but she stepped back with a coy glance that produced a strangely tight sensation in his chest, and... unfastened her robes. Shrugged them off bare shoulders and let them fall to the ground.

Oh sweet Circe.

A shiver ran down the length of Sirius's body as he took in the vision before him. Perfect pink-tipped breasts. Smooth belly. Hair cascading over shoulders and back. His reaction surprised him with its intensity; it wasn't as if he'd never seen—

Stepping over her discarded clothing, Emmeline closed the gap between them, and the blood deserted Sirius's brain for a far more congenial location further south. He was feeling slightly dizzy. Breath, an inner voice suggested.

And it occurred to him, despite the fog clouding his mind, that he should say... something. He swallowed. Wiped damp hands on the sides of his trousers. But no words came. For the first time that he could remember, a naked woman had rendered Sirius Black speechless.

Emmeline didn't seem to mind that he was tongue-tied. She lifted her hands to his shoulders and trailed her fingers down his arms, so lightly that Sirius wasn't sure he could actually feel them: Just the warm tickle of his skin as it responded under her touch. He tried to put his arms around her, but she caught his hands and held them gently at his sides.

She leaned close, so close that he could feel her breath on his mouth and the heat of her body through his clothes. When she brushed her lips against his, a rush of desire that flooded Sirius's brain and body. Eagerly, almost desperately, he tried to deepen their kiss, but she turned her face aside so that his lips fell on her warm cheek instead.

Sirius let a small sound of protest, and Emmeline quirked an eyebrow at him. She grazed her lips over the bridge of his nose, down the slope of cheekbone and back to his lips. She shook her head in playful admonishment, as if reminding him of some agreement they'd made. An agreement that, for the moment at least, he couldn't recall.

Not that it mattered, not when she was—

Her warm mouth traced a path of fluttering kisses along his jawline. Sirius could feel her lips smiling against his skin, as if she thought that trapping his hands at his sides and kissing him breathless was the most improbable, the silliest thing she'd ever done. A corresponding bubble of laughter rose up in Sirius's chest, because she was right. Of course she was.

It was utterly absurd. The two of them, together, so absurd—

Emmeline gradually moved her lips lower to caress his neck and lick the hollow at the base of his throat. His head tilted back and his breathing began to grow ragged. He wanted—no, needed—to touch her, to explore every inch of her. And at this thought, her fingers released his hands, which immediately celebrated their freedom by travelling over her thighs, her rounded bottom, up her back to the delicate skin at the nape of her neck.

His pulse was pounding so strongly in his ears that he wondered if Emmeline could hear it, too. Her fingers sent teasing strokes over his shirt, along his chest and ribs, as his own hands continued to wander everywhere on her silky skin.

He gave himself up completely to the sensations coursing through him. It had been a long time since he'd touched and been touched by a woman; so long that it seemed to belong to someone else's life entirely. Light-headed with desire, Sirius wrapped his arms around this woman—this beautiful Emmie—and drew her close.

She responded by arching herself against him, and the pressure of her bare body ignited fireworks along his entire nervous system. It could have been something out of one of his naughtier dreams: His erection straining in his trousers, the hard peaks of her nipples grazing his chest. It was pure, driving lust, unadulterated by caution or indeed any thought.

Whatever had seemed strange to him about this at first, well... he wasn't fussed about it any longer.

Her skin was incredibly soft, and she smelled of sunshine and fresh air and open spaces. Sirius let himself simply feel. One hand moved up her belly to fondle a full breast, a taut nipple, while the fingers of his other hand tangled themselves in her shining hair. Her skin was so warm and alive under his touch that he couldn't have taken his hands away to save his life.

Emmie nuzzled his neck, and finally, finally lifted her face to his.

This time, when his mouth found hers, she met him joyfully. Exploratory first kisses quickly grew deeper and more impassioned. Her lips parted, and if he had been tongue-tied before, he certainly wasn't now. His tongue slipped into her mouth, sliding and twining against her own in a kind of unbridled urgency as his hands slid from her waist, up her spine and into her hair. He felt her shiver.

For a long time, Sirius forgot about everything else, wrapped up in the taste and feel of Emmie's lips and tongue. Her fingers threaded through the hair that hung just below his collar, the tips of her fingers stroking the skin beneath it. He was ablaze everywhere she touched. And when one hand moved lower and cupped him through the tight cloth of his trousers, and Sirius broke their kiss with a groan, his entire body thrumming with need.

Sirius could feel his control starting to slip as he struggled for breath, his heart thudding wildly in his chest. Emmie continued to stroke him, until he was gasping and impossibly hard. His head was swimming. He didn't think he'd ever been so completely aroused, and he knew he wouldn't last much longer. His mind tried desperately to frame a sentence, a plea—

As if reading his mind, Emmie gently pulled herself from his arms. She bit her lower lip shyly, and then sank to her knees in front of him. She ran her fingers up his thighs, lightly scratching with her nails. Glancing up at him through her long lashes, as if to ask permission, she reached to unfasten his—

"SQUAWK! SQUAAAWWWK!!"

Sirius's eyes shot open in alarm. Heart thudding in his chest, he leaped to his feet from the dirty floor and grabbed instinctively for his wand, only to put it back again as he took in his surroundings: Tattered velvet drapes. Dung-spattered Persian rug. Ornate panelling streaked with filth. In other words, Mother's bedroom or, to use her preferred word, boudoir.

And reclining in the middle of her canopied bed was his loyal companion-in-exile, Buckbeak.

Sirius flexed his shoulders to work out the kinks he'd acquired from napping on the floor, surreptitiously adjusting his trousers at the same time. Buckbeak regarded him with well-practised disdain, and Sirius tried not to look sheepish. Being the dominant species in a relationship ought to count for something, after all.

Sirius had come into the room earlier that morning, with the intention of feeding Buckbeak, only to find the hippogriff fast asleep in his— whatever-it-was: Nest? Den? Boudoir? The last thing Sirius remembered was sitting down to wait, leaning against the wall and, apparently, going to sleep.

To sleep, he thought with a small puff of laughter, perchance, to dream. And the dream had been a lulu. It was impressive, actually, in a bizarre sort of way, the lengths to which his unconscious mind would go. But still. He combed his hair with his fingers and muttered, grinning, under his breath, "What next? Wet dreams about Poppy Pomfrey?"

Buckbeak rustled his wings impatiently, looking as if he might be considering another squawk. Sirius stopped raking at his hair and shot the hippogriff a covert dirty look. Covert because—all-around stalwart fellow though he undoubtedly was—Bucky did have just the merest tendency to become temperamental if the courtesies weren't strictly observed.

Sirius bowed low. "You rang, sire?" Luckily, hippogriffs also tended to miss sarcasm.

Buckbeak inclined his head—rather regally, it must be admitted—towards a bag of dead ferrets in the corner.

Sirius stooped over the bag and rooted through it for a scrawny one. Not that he held a grudge for Buckbeak's untimely interruption: His finicky feathered friend typically deigned to eat the poorest specimens only at his first, hungriest, meal of the day. And Molly, that most virtuous and thrifty of women, insisted that Buckbeak eat all of the ferrets in the bag before she'd pay a visit to the Magical Menagerie for more.

Sirius tossed Buckbeak a bony bundle of fur, which the hippogriff snatched from the air and began to tear apart with relish.

While Buckbeak ate, Sirius leaned against the wall and thought about his dreams, which in recent weeks had become increasingly vivid and—present case excepted—disturbing.

His first dream that morning, the one thankfully interrupted by Tonks, had been a deeply unpleasant nightmare in which his cousin Narcissa and her posturing husband Malfoy had been plotting to kill baby Harry. He'd desperately tried to warn Lily and James, telling them to get out of the house, to take Harry and run. But he couldn't get them to pay him the slightest attention. Lily kept giggling at James while he danced (danced!) to something playing on the WWN. Sirius shuddered slightly, as the memory of a gyrating James helped remove the last, lingering effects of his second dream.

"Squaaaawk!"

Buckbeak preened his feathers and looked expectantly at Sirius, who obediently dug through the bag for another fuzzy treat and tossed it over.

Now that second dream had been... strange. Strange, but—to look on the bright side—infinitely preferable to a nightmare. Grinning again to himself, Sirius wondered if he might actually be going completely, barking mad at last. That would be something: a mind to match the insane image on his wanted poster. If so, it seemed that being mental had its compensations. He laughed outright at this, causing Buckbeak to gave him a startled glare.

With a last chuckle, Sirius rubbed his forehead vigorously with his hands, as if to scrub the image of a wanton Emmeline Vance right out of his brain.

When Buckbeak had eaten his fill, he padded around the room for a few minutes, making small dissatisfied sounds in the back of his throat as he pecked into corners and peered wistfully through the tall windows. Finally, he settled back into his makeshift lair with an air of resignation.

Sirius knew exactly how he felt.

Buckbeak stretched out on the untidy pile of embroidered quilts and silken sheets, exuding an air of well-fed benevolence like some oriental potentate. He let out a low chirp, an invitation for Sirius to groom him. After a great show of reluctance that was, in fact, entirely feigned, Sirius sat down on the counterpane beside Buckbeak to stroke his powerful back and scratch the short feathers just behind his ears. It was a familiar and soothing routine for both of them.

Although Sirius would never have admitted it to a soul, the time he spent in the hippogriff's company was far more enjoyable than anything else he experienced at Grimmauld Place. Theirs was a straightforward relationship, without any of the bitter emotions that seemed to well up in him whenever he came into contact with people. In Buckbeak he found the warmth and simple comfort of another living being, uncomplicated by feelings of anger, frustration, anxiety, jealousy.

Sirius offered up a belated but fervent apology to the crazy old cat lady who used to live across the square, a harmless and no doubt lonely spinster whom he and Reg had mocked at every opportunity. Who would have predicted, then, that he'd end up as a crazy old hippogriff man himself?

Buckbeak leaned his head against Sirius's shoulder and affectionately poked him in the neck with his beak. The hippogriff let out an odd little clucking noise. When Sirius didn't respond, he did it again. Sirius smiled.

"You want to talk, Bucky?" After almost two years together, it still amazed Sirius how well they understood each other.

Sirius hadn't any idea if it was true of all hippogriffs, but Buckbeak adored the sound of a human voice; it lulled him into a state of sleepy contentment as nothing else could. The phenomenon reminded Sirius of tales the he'd loved as a small boy, where adventurers would befuddle fearsome beasts with songs, or riddles, or words of enchantment. During their time together, Sirius had soothed his friend with a wildly mixed assortment of words: drinking songs, fairy stories, poems, including the odd ribald limerick—Bucky was especially fond of the man from Nantucket—in short, anything he could dredge up from his Azkaban-addled memory. Bucky wasn't choosy.

"Alright, keep your feathers on. Let me think of something," Sirius grumbled. Buckbeak growled back in contentment and settled his taloned front claws on Sirius's lap. Sirius frowned blankly at the dark panelling on the opposite wall, waiting for a memory to emerge. His eyes happened upon a small portrait of his uncle Alphard as a young man. Alphard winked at him, and Sirius winked back.

Perfect.

He looked down at Bucky and raised an eyebrow. "Well, mate, what do you say to the story of mad Orlando? There's a hippogriff in it. Like you. Ridden by a wizard. Like me. And they're off to rescue a Fair Maiden." Sirius smiled rather sadly. "And we'd enjoy that, wouldn't we?"

Taking a deep breath, Sirius started with the first stanza that came to mind.

"No empty fiction wrought by magic lore,
But natural was the steed the wizard pressed;
For him a filly to griffin bore;
Hight hippogriff. In wings and beak and crest,
Formed like his sire, as in the feet before;
But like the mare, his dam, in all the rest..."

As Sirius pattered on in iambic pentameter, Buckbeak began to nod his head gently in time to the cadence of his voice. Sirius didn't know all of the words to this rather overblown epic. Not nearly. But his uncle Alphard had used to recite when he was drunk, and Sirius had loved listening to it as a lad. He chanted stanza after stanza as they floated into his mind, and if Bucky noticed any lapses in the story's continuity, he didn't complain.

Eventually, the poem had Buckbeak snoring steadily. Sirius let his voice grow quieter for a few lines, and then stopped. He whispered to the sleeping hippogriff, "That'll be us, my friend. Someday soon. Wizard and hippogriff riding off on an adventure, just like Rogero." He ran his palm down Buckbeak's warm pelt, which was rising and falling steadily. He went on softly, "I know you hate it here, Bucky. I'll get you out. Soon, I promise. We just... need a plan."

With a sigh, Sirius looked down at the unconscious hippogriff, wishing for the hundredth time that he also had that enviable ability to sleep for twenty hours a day. At that instant Sirius's stomach growled, loudly enough that Buckbeak snorted in his sleep. Sirius checked his watch. It was past noon. High time to eat, seeing that as yet he'd had two cups of tea that day.

And thinking of tea, he was reminded of Moony. A pang of guilt rose up when he thought about what he'd said to Remus that morning. But only a faint pang: It wasn't as if the man didn't have it coming to him. But the poor berk couldn't help being pants with women. Never could.

In any case, Moony had treat in store for him this afternoon, little did he know it. Sirius smiled. He'd already fed one friend today. It was time to feed another.

Sirius headed back up the stairs to Remus's poky little room. He pushed open the door, saying, "Rise and shine, buttercup. I'm making you a—"

But Remus wasn't in bed. Sirius glanced around the room uncertainly as if he might have overlooked him, a near impossibility in so small a chamber. His dressing gown lay on the rumpled bedcovers, but definitely no Remus. Odd. It looked as if he'd dressed and gone downstairs. Remus usually felt so rotten on the day of his transformation that he spent most of the day resting.

Sirius decided that Remus must have gone down to the kitchen to forage. But Remus wasn't there either, as Sirius found when he arrived in that basement room. However, the mystery was now solved because, having eliminated the first two possibilities, he was left with only one. Remus was in his retreat, his haven, his home away from home, otherwise known as the library.

The question of Remus's whereabouts taken care of to his satisfaction, Sirius peered into the chilly cabinet where Molly kept the meat: Mince, bacon, chops. Now where—? Ah. There in the back corner he spotted the white paper-wrapped package he'd cajoled Molly into buying for him a few days ago.

He took two plates from the cupboard and set them on the worktop next to the package. With reverent movements that wouldn't have been out of place with the crown jewels, Sirius opened the heavy white paper, bearing the stamp of the butcher his mother had always patronized, to reveal two thick slabs of meat, garnet red except where creamy fat rippled through them. His mouth watered. Molly's meals were undeniably filling, and probably healthy, but she and Sirius failed to see eye-to-eye on a man's occasional need for a big, juicy steak. Worse luck for poor old Arthur.

Grabbing a knife, Sirius skewered the larger of the two steaks and lifted it. He admired it front and back for a moment before putting it back with a little huff of regret and poking his knife into the smaller one instead.

With the meat dripping red into the sink, Sirius swished his wand and said, "Flamma!" A blue-white flame burst from the end of his wand and flickered against the meat, beginning to char it almost instantly. Sirius carefully moved the flame over the steak as the delicious smell of flame-broiled beef filled the air. Bits of grease and juice dripped off the end of the meat into the sink.

When one side was fully browned, he twisted his wrist to expose the other and cooked it with equal care.

Placing the finished piece lovingly on a plate, Sirius speared the larger uncooked one with his knife, held it over the sink. Flicking his wand again, he murmured, "Tepidus." An orange glow briefly surrounded the steak and then faded. Sirius poked the meat in a few places with his finger. Not quite warm enough. He cast the spell again, poked again, and was satisfied.

Placing the blood-warm meat on the other plate, he grabbed a couple of forks and knives, levitated the plates, and made his triumphant way to the library.

(continued in Chapter 5)

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