The door opens behind me, and Sirius walks into the kitchen. "Good morning, love," I say, my eyes fixed on the steam starting to rise from the kettle. I don't want to see the expression on his face. I know from experience that there will be a sad gleam in his eye that nothing can disperse, but there will be a smile on display for me and if I dare to question it with so much as a breath, his left eyebrow will arch and he will lean away.

He stands behind me and slides his arms around my waist, his breath ghosting across the nape of my neck. I lean into his warmth and he sways me gently from side to side.

Sometimes I think I miss the music most.

There are ways to compensate, of course, and the vibrations travel through my body quite efficiently, though I'm not as sensitive to them as I suppose I could be. I've heard tales of professional musicians who were born deaf and they must be able to... compensate. But it's really very different, and sometimes I get so frustrated.

I smashed all my old records in a fit of pique one day not long after it happened. I'm fairly sure Sirius thinks I tried to kill myself with the shards. I didn't, of course. Far too melodramatic. More his style.

I suppose I must have switched the radio on when I came in to make breakfast. It's part of the routine, you see, and we must strive for normality. Or as close as a deaf werewolf and a former convict who just happen to be wizards and a long-term homosexual couple can get. Practically mundane.

And here we stand, watching the curls of water vapour and swaying gently to the music I cannot hear, and I feel so safe. So warm and loved and wanted. And I can almost forget about everything that has ever troubled either of us.

But he breaks away to pull the kettle off the hob, and I didn't hear the whistle, and he startles slightly as the toast pops up behind him. "Sit down," I tell him, "I'll get it." I'm not an invalid, after all. That would imply the possibility of recovery.

He looks at me strangely for a moment, then takes his place at the table and pours the tea while he waits for me to butter the toast. He always used to take apricot jam, but I didn't remember that until we'd been living together for over a month, and he never complained. It's entirely possible that he doesn't remember either. There are a lot of holes in his memory.

Breakfast was our time, at school. James would still be half-asleep and Peter would be methodically eating his way through a full English breakfast. Sirius and I would chat over toast and pumpkin juice, planning the day ahead and making fun of various of our classmates. The rest of the day he belonged first and foremost to James, but for that half an hour he was mine.

And later, when we lived together, we kept the ritual going, though it grew harder for us to find topics of conversation. We could avoid each other all day and pretend to go straight to sleep at night, but we had that small interval of inconsequential contact every morning. We were never silent at breakfast.

I can lip-read, to some extent, but it hurts to look at him. He's looked worse, in his time, but there's a bleakness to him that sits uneasily with my memories of the boy I fell in love with. So I sit and stare into my tea, and if he wants my attention...

He always wants my attention. He wants to be seen, he wants to be important, but he doesn't care what anybody thinks about him if they aren't important to him. And I am important to him, and I know it. He loves me. He always has. So he wants my attention. He wants all of me.

But if he wants me to talk to him this morning he'll have to kick me under the table because I'm not going to sit watching and waiting for him to deign to talk to me. Not that I couldn't start the conversation, of course, but what would I say? Ask what song we were dancing to, perhaps? I don't think so.

He stands, and walks to the sink, and sets his plate and his cup inside, and turns on the tap, and through all that I stare still into my cup. If it were anyone else here, I would be ignoring them, which is something I take a perverse delight in nowadays - I can sit with my eyes on something else and the only way for someone to get my attention is to actually touch me, and there are more than a few people who are wary about coming into contact with a known werewolf. But I've never been able to ignore Sirius. I can track him just by feel, and I always know when he's looking at me, and most of the time I even know what expression he's wearing as he does so.

He walks across to stand behind me, and sets his hands on my shoulders, and I tilt my head back to look up at him. He's grinning down at me, the mischief in his eyes almost overwhelming everything else. "What?" I ask, hoping I managed to get the right mix of irritation and amusement - this sort of thing was always so dependent on tone, and it's hard for me to judge that now.

He bends down and kisses me, and though the angle is awkward the feel of it is so terribly familiar. Then he tilts my head forward again and holds his hands out in front of him. Slowly and deliberately, he fingerspells "I love you" then wraps his arms around me and holds me tight.

Who needs hearing?