I DEEPLY BELONG TO MYSELF.

They go on like that, gentle nothing kisses pressed to one another’s faces, cheeks and jaws and foreheads. Never meeting in the middle, even when James’s hands go to Sirius’s waist and pull him up until they are both on the bed - knees digging into the mattress, both of them backed into the corner. Eventually, they run out of room on the canvases of each other’s faces, but neither of them want to pull away and so they fall together onto the pillows and lay in the middle of his bed, Sirius curled into James’s side. Both of them breathing in unison, pulses in their wrists and throats fluttering against each other’s skin.

“Go to sleep.” Sirius murmurs. He echoes James, on all of those other nights; a calm in his voice that he doesn’t feel.

“The others-”

“Your mum sent them home. James, can I tell you something?”

“Yeah.”

“This is how we are. This is how we can be forever, if you want it. I promise you.”

James’s fingers still, where they had been tracing circles just below Sirius’s ribs. “What about…”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re my best friend.”

He is silent, after that, for a very long time. So long that Sirius is half asleep, lulled by the renewed circling of James’s touch on his skin, when he replies, “I do want it.”

And nothing matters - not that they are sixteen or freshly seventeen, not that the general consensus of such talk would be that they’re just kids who don’t know what they’re talking about. What could matter more than the simple fact that they want it? Who knows more about love than two kids who have known, since they were eleven, the meaning of unconditional? Even before they knew the word, they knew the feeling. They have loved each other all that time, loved just to love. If anyone thought they were weird, then they’d never said anything about it before tonight. Sirius thinks all of this, and realises that he’s always felt it. He just didn’t have to give the feeling words before, because nobody’s ever made him feel like he had to justify it.

James’s favourite song is No Woman, No Cry by Bob Marley. Sirius has always thought it’s the loveliest thing in the world, this first love, first dance sort of song. He always watches when James puts it on the record player and dances up and down his bedroom, makeshift aftershave microphone in one hand - ‘everything’s gonna be alright’, they're both saying - and he can always picture him in twenty years doing the very same thing with a whole family of his own watching, laughing, around the kitchen table or in front of the fireplace.

But James only ever says that the song reminds him of Sirius.