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The first thing James wants to do when the Healer calls it—says her mother, like her father, is past saving—is apologize to Sirius. Because through it all, the late-night tears and the drinking and even the way she arrived in the middle of the night with nowhere else to go and called it a victory, James never quite believed that anything could hurt that much. A part of her, and she hopes now that it was a small part, an invisible part, always thought Sirius was overstating things. Even once she met the Blacks, saw the dreariness of Grimmauld despite its grandeur, she simply hadn’t believed the human body could hold that much misery.
When it was only her father, she had somewhere to direct her energy. She spent hours convincing the director of the funeral home to hold the stasis charm on her father’s body just a little bit longer, because her mother wouldn’t want to recover only to find that she’d missed the funeral, her last chance to be with her husband. Then there were the fights with the Healers, who kept warning her to be realistic, practical. She hadn’t believed it, hadn’t yet encountered a problem love couldn’t fix. She understands now the meaning behind the perpetual gritting of Sirius’ teeth when she talked about how her mother would cope without her father.
Sirius has known all along that wanting something won’t make it happen, can even chase any chance of it away, like it did for them, when James started to feel choked by a need that felt too large for her, the weight of trying to be something more than what she’d always been. She was cruel when she ended their relationship, used the word suffocating and watched Sirius flinch, because she’d needed to close the door on any future rekindling, needed Sirius too hurt to reach out. If the offer came, she knew, she’d accept, and it wasn’t just the pressure of someone depending on her, but the fear of letting her parents down, being something they wouldn’t have wanted for her. It worked, in that Sirius stopped touching her except incidentally, but James can tell Sirius would take her back if she asked, sees it in the way Sirius’ eyes soften when they land on her, the way her fingers are curled tight around the shared arm of their waiting room chairs like the only thing stopping her from linking their hands is the fear of being rebuffed. James is beginning to suspect that there is nothing she could do that is terrible enough to make Sirius leave. It ought to make her feel powerful, but instead she remembers when she first saw the ocean, the feeling of being impossibly small in the face of something she couldn’t quite understand.
She loved her parents, and they loved her, but this is different, and not just because of the charged edge their friendship held long before either of them was brave enough to put words to it. Sirius’ love is very nearly overpowering, and James isn’t afraid of disappointing her, of not being enough. There’s none of the need to please that colored her childhood, not because of anything her parents ever said or did, but a desperation born of absence, of the desire to make the most of the few family moments they had between the drawn-out trips they took for their jobs she was too young to understand. She had to be the best, the smartest and the most interesting, though they had no second child to compare her to, favorably or otherwise. She was always collecting stories to tell upon their return, twisting them around in her head to make sure she had a polished final product. Always balancing, desperately, on the precipice of imagined inadequacy, so concerned with being the daughter she hoped they wanted that she never let them see the person she’d grown into, the one who loved so fiercely that it terrified her.
It's this revelation that sends her tipping over the self-imposed divide and into Sirius’ arms, sobbing though she would have sworn two days ago that she could never cry again, dried up by a self-indulgent agony that didn’t allow for the possibility of anything worse. But if it had been the other way around, if she had been the one caught up in a wasting disease that seemed to progress both quickly and at agonizing length, her parents would be mourning the wrong girl, a performance instead of a reality, and she will never be able to put it right.
Sirius pulls her in with a strength James didn’t know she had, arms tight against her back, and doesn’t say it will be all right, because it won’t be, not ever. Or it will be, eventually. The wound will scab over as well as a cut this deep can, and she will be able to go about her life almost normally, but “all right,” until this moment, meant two parents alive and vibrant, and it’s not a definition, a self, that she’s ready to relinquish just yet. And of course Sirius understands. There must have been a moment where she gave up on her mother and father, and infinite moments before that when she indulged in the fantasy that they could change, or that she would be plucked from the rubble of her home life and set up anew with parents who loved her properly. There must have been a moment when she let go of the girl she might have been, under better circumstances, and accepted that she could only be the girl she was.
And so they’re orphans together, and so Sirius understands what it’s like to realize that there will always be something better out of reach, something you can’t have no matter how hard you try. James’ parents will always be dead, and Sirius’ parents will never love her the way she wants, and suddenly, James is crying not only for herself but for Sirius, who had to come to terms with this much younger, and all alone. She cries for the little girl she was, convinced without ever thinking the disloyal words, that if she could just find the right version of herself, she could earn something that always seemed to be lacking. She cries for Sirius, who has already lost one set of parents and is now losing what she’d hoped could be another, yet manages to keep it together enough to let James soak the front of her robe, already disgusting from three days’ wait in St. Mungo’s, with snot and tears. Sirius is accustomed to pain where James isn’t, has already come out the other side of the hard-won lesson that the world doesn’t stop just because you feel like something has been wrenched from you, that it goes on and you go on with it.
A hospital waiting room isn’t the place for romantic reconciliation, but James is sick of holding back, sickened by the idea that she’s been one of the people to hurt Sirius, who has somehow, impossibly, put all of that aside to sit with her when they’re not even a month out from their N.E.W.T.s. It seems an incredible act of generosity from someone who hasn’t received much of it, and before she can think, she’s kissing Sirius and wondering how she ever could have thought she wanted to stop. Sirius lets her, holds on like everything’s normal just long enough for James to feel the rush of need like a balm, and then she pulls away. She looks at the people around them, a paranoia that is for James’ sake, a concession to her ever-present desire for conventionality. “You’re upset,” Sirius says, like it’s a full explanation, like she thinks James is just grasping for comfort, selfish enough to exploit what she knows to be all-encompassing feelings, as if she wasn’t one bed over when things ended between them, listening to Sirius cry into her pillow, having to watch as she sleepwalked through classes, wanting to reach out but terrified of making it worse, of what she might take back if forced to directly confront the devastation she’d wrought.
“I love you,” she says, but that isn’t right, because it isn’t the love that’s been in question; it’s the type, or the depth. It’s whether her love for Sirius can overpower everything going against it. The loss of her parents has burned indecision out of her, left her with a sparkling clarity she hasn’t felt since she was too young to understand the weight of it. When they met, she knew that there was something about Sirius she had to hold on to, but she couldn’t begin to grasp what that meant, simply that she ought to, with both hands. “I’m in love with you,” she says, and something about the addition of those extra words feels bigger, and for the first time, she isn’t afraid of it.