Although it didn't normally bother him, the weather this year had seemed to have some effect on Julien. If he'd known any better he might have said he was depressed, but it was so hard to pin the name to the way he felt when there was no cause for his melancholy that he knew of and when he had Alfie waiting for him at home whenever he was able to get back there. Whether it was the darkness, the cold, the lack of light, something had sunk in and was troubling him a little.
He hated it. He felt weak and pathetic and he was swung between anger at himself for feeling that way and another pitfall of depression for berating himself. He'd mostly kept it quiet from Alfie, or so he'd thought, but he couldn't really ever hide anything from the boy and the way he'd begged for the former Hufflepuff to practically tie him down and fuck him would have given something away even if he could have.
He dreamed poorly, some dark feeling stalking the halls of his mind, and he frowned a little in his sleep, not shifting. He didn't lurch awake at the hand against his forehead because there was no one else he trusted in the world more than the owner of that hand; it settled him, quietened his self-generated dream demons and had him snuggling, curling a little more in against the warmth and amazing smell of the thing he was lying against, too asleep to realise it was Alfie himself.
He yawned and woke himself up a little, murmuring nothing and nosing in towards that heartbeat before sighing heavily and seemingly falling back to sleep.