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“How the fuck,” Sirius said, “Did we end up fighting for the establishment?”
“The establishment got itself nearly destroyed by a blood supremacist dark-arts cult, that’s how,” said James sensibly. James always had been infuriatingly sensible. Not in a not breaking rules for stupid reasons way or a not rushing headlong into danger way, obviously. But James was annoyingly sensible in the not getting caught up in depressing philosophical quandaries and the not indulging in melodrama way. Of Sirius’s friends, the only one with any sense of melodrama at all was Remus, and he deserved it, honestly.
But, Sirius was a Black, and in some ways he would never stop being a Black, and so he felt completely justified in lying on James’s couch and complaining about the general state of things to James’s floor.
He had just finished a longish argument with Regulus about werewolves. It was the longest he’d spoken with him in ages. Sirius wondered when the last time he’d had a conversation with his brother that wasn’t an argument was. He couldn’t remember any examples.
Sirius was fairly certain there was nothing as frustrating and depressing as arguing with Reg about werewolves.
“Remember when we were kids?” Sirius asked James and the world in general, “We were going to change the world. We were going to entirely rewrite the werewolf regulations and end the discrimination against half-giants and who knows what else. Did you know they just passed some new laws restricting the rights of werewolves even more? They’re using the whole thing with Greyback as some sort of proof that they’re inherently evil and dangerous. As if these sorts of laws are what made some werewolves side with You Know Who in the first place. I don’t know how Moony puts up with it sometimes.”
James hadn’t known about the new werewolf regulations. Sirius hadn’t either until Reg had told him. None of them had much time for politics what with everything. But then again, what was “everything” if not politics? And if it was the Death Eaters who were making promises to werewolves and treating goblins with respect, and it was the ministry that was becoming increasingly discriminatory against anything that wasn’t “properly human”, what was the point? The point, Sirius knew perfectly well, was Lilly Evans and Remus’s mum and the many, many other muggle-born witches and wizards, and half wizarding, half muggle families. The point was all the innocent, helpless muggles who got hurt or killed. The point was that the ministry might be making life nearly impossible for werewolves and sentient “magical creatures”, but at least they weren’t burning people’s houses down or murdering them just because they could.
Arguing about werewolves with Regulus was the worst, because he couldn’t argue with him. Because when it came to the ministry, Regulus was perfectly right in saying that their policies on “magical creatures” were complete bollocks and something should be done about it. But when it came to the nature of werewolves themselves, Regulus was wrong. Werewolves weren’t all like Greyback, they were just people, just humans with a medical condition. But Regulus had done research, and when Sirius told him his books written hundreds of years ago were all just wrong, Regulus wanted him to cite his sources, and Sirius couldn’t because his only source was “One of my best friends is secretly a werewolf”. Although there was a point where Regulus went on about how werewolves needed pack, and Sirius had thought of how it had felt at school, running through the forbidden forest with Moony by his side, Prongs taking the lead with Wormtail on his back. He thought about how it felt back then, the four of them together and united. He thought of how Remus-as-wolf had been so much calmer then, how he always followed James’s lead. He thought of how much happier, how much more settled, Remus had been at school than he is now, and he thought that maybe there was something to at least a little bit of what was in those old books. And he thought about how even Dumbledore’s best solution to Remus’s lycanthropy was to lock him up all alone in the shack, and he hated the world and the way things were just a little bit more.
“How’d we get so old and jaded,” Sirius said, “That we’re willing to settle for them lesser of two evils. We were supposed to make things better .”
James sighed tiredly, but then he said, “Cheer up, Padfoot. We’re still young yet. Once we’ve defeated You-Know-Who we’ll still have plenty of time to overthrow the ministry too.”
Sirius grinned at that. They’d be heroes once this was over, wouldn’t they, with all the power they needed to do what they liked. And maybe, once Voldomort was gone, Regulus would help them.