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SIRIUS BLACK
There’s a girl’s face staring up at him. A gapped-tooth girl with hair in pigtails.
Her image doesn’t move in the newspaper and he thinks it’s strange, so strange, mother look—
Walburga sneers at him, her hand tight on his wrist. It’s filth, Sirius.
But mother, he says as she tugs him away, she’s missing.
The girl’s face sinks into a puddle, beneath his mother sharp soled shoe, her voice—
That’s one less, at least.
The first time he holds her—
No, there’s a moment before that. There’s a moment in a nursery, fresh paint a smell that makes his nostrils burn because fuck me Lily, why couldn’t we just charm the walls.
But, I want to do it right, Lily says, a streak of pale blue on her cheek because gender conformity was for the fifties and grandmothers and it’s just a name, mum, James and I like it— and Harrie James Potter will bear a name somewhere in the middle; the same way the blue shade drying in her hair and on the walls of the nursery will be somewhere in the middle of pretty-pastel-blue and bouncing-baby-boy-blue.
Sirius isn’t sure what doing it right entails, as far as he’s concerned they’ve never done anything right their entire lives. Tripped from one accident into the next, shit-eating grins and knobby-kneed pranks, shit-eating grins and voices cracking, shit-eating grins and shit-faced laughter—
Shit-eating grins and a Dark Lord you say, never heard of him.
And right, he thinks, glancing at the round swell of Lily’s stomach.
They’re locked up in a house, five months in, and Remus is gone more than he’s here; comes back bloody. Bruised and too quiet and hates to be touched.
They’re locked up in a house and the only thing that gets in is the sunshine in yellow, dust-filled beams.
Like the one now, that turns Lily into something a little bit holy, a little bit sacrilegious too. A painting of a girl too young to know what to do; a hand on her swollen belly, a hand to her heart, who listens to an old man who tells her, that baby, your baby—
She’s meant for something bigger than you.
When they’d first signed up to become Aurors, James had joked, fancy taking out some evil blokes with me, Padfoot?
She’s all angles and knees and his first instinct when he sees her is Evans, but she grins and his heart breaks because she smells like James, too. (Taking off, up into the sky, with ratty sneakers and messy hair and grin that’s something out of Polaroids he hasn’t had in twelve years.)
He isn’t sure how, it shouldn’t be, (because she’s not either one of her parents, not really. She’s thirteen and dimple-cheeked but—) but he slips into the quidditch changerooms while she’s soaring up in the skies and sticks his snout into her locker and the noise he makes is a whine that’s more and more pitiful in the echo of it bouncing off of tiled floors.
The first time he holds her—
No, there’s a moment before that, he’s nine years old and he holds his brother’s hand in his own, there’s a man in their parlour and their mother had smiled when she answered the door.
He comes with Uncle Cygnus, and through the crack in the door, Bellatrix is looking at the man across from her with something like awe in her face. Seventeen and pink-cheeked, seventeen and dark-eyed whenever the man speaks.
Sirius, Regulus whispers beside him, this is boring, can we go upstairs? But Sirius shushes him, peering into the parlour at the man lounging on the furniture (that Reg and him aren’t even allowed to sit on) like he owns it. His hair dark and perfectly parted, his smile all sharp and white and wide as Sirius’ family moves around him like he’s an axis point, the middle of a mobile they’re all tied to. (And he can’t hear all of it, only bits of it, something about blood and Muggles and the proper order of things.)
But his eyes—
For some reason, Sirius thinks about that gap-toothed girl in that Muggle newspaper and something cold settles in his chest; makes him grip his brother’s hand tighter.
Later in bed, Regulus will squirm under his covers and he’ll say, but Sirius, mother said they don’t matter.
The first time he holds her, it’s in the hospital and she’s a tiny thing that seems too perfect to be real. Remus is beside him, pressed from shoulder to thigh, his finger trailing over the soft of her cheek. Hullo, Harrie.
Peter is half-hidden behind Lily’s camera, snapping photos with a toothy-grin while James cups Lily’s face and kisses the tears slipping over the exhausted, flushed warmth of her cheeks; his voice low and hushed and not meant for them to hear.
He knows in a moment. A second. The thump-bump of his heart, (and the echo of Remus' beating against his side) that he’d die for her. Kill for her. Do whatever he has to do to keep her safe.
Hullo, Harrie.
When he’s sixteen Remus Lupin is an Idea.
Maybe not even a fully formed one. He’s scratched out words, scribbles along the edges of a piece of parchment, ink-splotched letters that never quite come together.
Remus Lupin is—
Maybe idea isn’t quite the right word; a thought half-formed, a dream stuck in the sleep-weighted blink of his eyelids, in the shifting, skin on skin imaginings that linger in the mornings.
Remus Lupin is Moony, is Marauder, is—
A set of shoulders that draws Sirius’ eyes. A flop of light-brown hair that Sirius wants to catch in his fists, tug and twist and scrape the scalp beneath.
Remus Lupin is—
A dream he has that he doesn’t know what to do with.
Because Remus Lupin is his best friend. One side of the square that makes up his heart.
The first time he sees her, really sees her, it’s been twelve years and she’s no more than a photograph, no more than an image, a girl stripped of her name.
The Girl Who Lived
A newspaper image all dulled of colour. But she’s there and she’s real and she isn’t just a memory, an idea, a long-lost life that bled out at the edges (no, that burst out, blew up, exploded into why did you betray them, Sirius!)
He stares at it for hours, days, weeks, he isn’t sure. Wakes up with it one morning, smudged beneath the black of his paw.
(He had another one once, a one-year old’s chubby-cheeked smile, James’ hand on her belly, holding her still as she chewed on a stuffed toy stag, a pale blue nursery wall behind her, a little mark in the paint just above the top of her head.
Harrie James Potter, twelve months old.)
(Somewhere in his second year in Azkaban, Sirius thinks he’d kill for that photograph. He’d kill for it.
He isn’t even ashamed.)
On their first day of Auror training, Alastor Moody held them all at wand-point.
He’d said, are you ready to die for what you stand for?
He’d said, are you ready to kill for what you stand for?
And Sirius had thought about a girl in a newspaper, about his mother’s voice, about her wand-point, about the taste of a Cruciatus, about—
Being eleven years old and knowing you hate your family enough to leave them. Of standing beneath a hat and begging it to put you anywhere but a sea of green and black because being Black meant being Pure and he’s never felt pure a day in his life and please, please don’t put me there—
About sliding onto a bench seat, feeling like you might throw up, feeling like you’re on a last march towards a guillotine because you’re a dead boy in a red, silk-collared noose and your mother is going to kill you, she will, but you can’t—
An elbow knocks into his and Sirius blinks, looking over at the boy beside him, and he doesn’t think he’s breathing right, as his stomach lurches and his chest tightens, but the boy touches his shoulder and says, James, remember? From the train?
Alastor Moody asked: will you kill for what you stand for?
And fifteen years later he’ll look at a girl and know he’ll kill for her, he will—
(He’ll raise his wand and he’ll watch Peter beg and he’ll say I would have died! I would have died rather than betray them—)
But in that shack, in that moment, looking down a wand-tip trained on the snivelling, begging thing that used to be their friend— Harrie will look at him and Remus’ hand will settle over his and he’ll say:
A family, Sirius. You, me, and Harrie.
And.
And he chooses to live for her instead.
She’s all angles and skinny limbs and she’s so much in the middle of her parents he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She looks at him, for a second, a moment, a blink— with hope in her eyes when he says: if you’d ever want to… I understand if you wouldn’t… but if you did… after my name is cleared, if you wanted a different home—
The second time he leaves her, he’s only had her again for moments, seconds, a blink of time before he’s slipping off into the night sky (still Sirius Black, deranged, hunted, murderer of Lily and James Potter—)
He presses his face into arm and screams and screams and screams until there’s nothing left inside of him but the memory of letting his brother’s hand go at eleven and never picking it up again.
(A handful of dirt over an empty grave, a marker for a lost boy, a what good are you, Sirius, it should have been you, a ringing taunt in his ear in his mother’s voice. There’s no engraving on the headstone, it says Regulus Arcturus Black and nothing more. But in the centre of his palm, at the strangest of times, Sirius feels the sticky-sweat, the little grip of an absent palm and a voice, but Sirius, mother said—)
James tilts back in his chair, his limbs gangly and too long and he chews on the end of his quill and says, I’m going to marry Lily Evans.
Sirius laughs at the time, too caught in the length of some girls legs, the width of some boy’s shoulders, the way Remus—
It’s hard, re-growing your body, fitting yourself back into your own skin.
Remus feels like a home he thought he lost twelve years ago, maybe a little before that, because Remus was bruised and bloody and promising him things he couldn’t keep. I have to go, Sirius, I have to. I’ll be back. I promise. I’ll be back.
Trust me.
Trust me, he’d asked. And in a moment of weakness in the middle of a war, in a moment of doubt at the end of October, Sirius had thought about all the ways families could lie.
Had thought about his brother saying, they deserve to die, Sirius.
That’s one less, at least.
(He’d faltered, he knows. Presses his face into Remus’ shoulder twelve years later and says, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you.
Even when I didn’t trust you.)
And now, there’s a girl in a perfectly mundane house, on a perfectly ordinary street, with hair the same colour as the woman who answers the door, and he wants to ask: how much do you hate that, Petunia? How much do you hate your family?
(But it’s a shameful thing he knows already, that you can bury your family with nothing more than a little, desperate plea at eleven years old beneath a rim of a hat. A handful of grave-dirt over an empty grave. A red tie instead of green.)
There’s a blur of gold down the stairs and then all those angles and limbs are in his arms and she feels a bit like forgiveness, though he doesn’t know why.
“Hullo, Sirius!”
They had a tutor once, a younger woman with dull-brown hair in a tight bun, her wand as sharp as her fingers as she teachers them about history and bloodlines and all the names they should know. But the first time she says the word muggle-born and not mudblood, Sirius learns that the Cruciatus can unmake a person in seconds, in blinks, in don’t you dare cry, you worthless boy.
Mudbloods, his mother spits at the woman on the floor gasping and writhing and choking apologies, are what they are.
(After that, Sirius takes lessons from his mother, but he swears, he swears he saw her smile while his tutor screamed. And here, he thinks, is the first moment that mother became something to be afraid of.)
She tucks him that night, her hand steady, her nails sharp in his skin; there’s an order to things, Sirius, all creatures have their place.
But later, beneath his covers, Sirius thinks about how that girl in the newspaper, MISSING above the picture—
That she’d had a family too. Maybe a brother. Just like him.
Lesser things, she says, do not deserve softness.
One night in the dark, Remus says, about Harrie—
And there are moments Sirius looks at her and sees James’ limbs and Lily’s angles, and moments when she’s a wedge between the two, pulling bloodlines like blankets and making herself a new mold.
But—
But there are moments.
She walks quietly.
And it shouldn’t be anything, should it?
A small-footed girl, a skinny thing who doesn’t make much noise.
But—
(But when he was young he’d learned that slipping by was better than being noticed. That being silent was better than being heard. That biting your tongue and muffling your steps—)
One night in the dark, Remus says, do you think she’s okay?
But Harrie’s got a grin that could crack ribcages and she’s that little bit of sunlight breaking into Godric’s Hollow and the blue paint that dried in Lily’s hair, and she’s the only reason he’s still breathing after twelve years in Azkaban.
And she has to be okay, she has to be.
Because he left her.
(Because once, he’d told his brother, it’s okay, just go on up and put that hat on, it’s a bit rank, yeah? Lotta heads, you know. But it’s okay, Reg.
It’s okay.)
Because he left her when he should have stayed, because he let his brother’s hand go when he should have held on and said, it’s just a house, it’s just a name.
Because once, twelve years ago he’d made a choice to die for his cause—
When he should have chose to live for her.
She’s okay, Remus, he says, even though the words sound hollow even to his own ears. She’s a Marauder, yeah? She’s okay.
He thinks about Petunia, sometimes, most often after they’ve been telling stories and Harrie’s fallen asleep on the couch between them; when her head slumps on his shoulder and that hair she really shouldn’t have is a bright blight in his eyesight.
He wonders what he’d do if he was faced with his brother, just a piece of him when the last thing he’d said to him is: Fine, Reg. Go die, then.
That’s one less Black, at least.
He has no idea what Petunia’s last words to Lily were, he realises.
He wonders if she even owns any pictures.
(He thinks he knows what he’d do, he’d say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I let you go. I should have held on, should have loved you better, should have said, there’s nothing more important than the family you make, Regulus, and I made one, I did. I found it pieces and parts, in laughter and love and war— I found it all by myself with three boys and one girl and then—
And then—)
He thinks he’d tell Regulus that dying for a cause is all well and good, but living for one…
Living for one is—
A photograph, sitting on a mantle in a little cottage in the middle of the countryside, two men and a girl and a photo,
achingly, desperately,
full of love.