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“Sirius, you up here?” Remus called.
Marlene vanished. Sirius let out a scream of anguish and threw his glass across the room, it shattered against the doorframe, missing Remus’s head by a fraction. He was feeling too resentful towards Remus to want to be around him right now. He couldn’t know that he’d just interrupted a hallucination — or whatever these were — of Marlene, but it was easy to blame him when he was already annoyed.
Tonks had been here this morning; Remus was making her miserable, ignoring her the way he was. He'd thought Sirius would be angry when he’d admitted to him how he felt. It didn’t bother Sirius at all — okay, so he'd played the overprotective relative card at first, warning him to be good to her — but Remus was one of the best people he’d ever met…and he and Tonks were both adults, they could do what they liked. Remus was being an idiot now, though. Life was too short. He’d give anything, the rest of his life even, for five more minutes with Marlene…and Remus was wasting time pretending that Tonks didn’t exist. So yes, at the moment, it was easy to blame Remus for things weren’t his fault as well.
“Reparo.” Remus muttered, pointing his wand at the fragments of glass on the floor. “If you were aiming at my head, you missed.” He smiled. Sirius slumped back against the sofa cushions and stared up at the ceiling. “Have you considered meditation for all this rage?” With great difficulty, Sirius managed to keep the corners of his mouth from turning up in a smile.
“What do you want, Moony?” He sighed. “Can’t you see I’m busy wallowing in self-pity?”
“You’ve been wallowing self-pity for about fifteen years, haven’t you?” Remus asked, sitting down beside him on the sofa, exactly where Marlene had appeared to him just moments ago. “Now you’ve taken to wandering the halls like the sad ghost of some Byronic hero.”
“What do you want, Moony?” He asked again, this time through gritted teeth.
“Nothing really. I’m just missing James.”
“Me too.” Sirius mumbled. There wasn’t a single day where he didn’t.
“It’s Father’s Day, he should be here, with Harry. It’s not fair.” Remus said. Sirius felt as though someone had pulled the sofa out from beneath him. Being locked up in this house made the days start to blur into one, not nearly as badly as they had done in Azkaban of course, but dates still sometimes slipped by unnoticed. It was Father’s Day?
“Excuse me.” He muttered, his eyes burning. He fled to the safety of his room, he needed a moment. Hands shaking, he took the shoebox of his most prized possessions from the draw and picked up the little pink hat. He really had been terrible at knitting, he thought, running his thumb over the soft wool.
Marlene had been murdered before they could share the news with their friends, and then, what had been the point? Telling them that she’d been four months pregnant wouldn’t have changed the fact that she was dead. It would just have made them all feel worse.
Maybe it was better this way. What use would he have been locked up in Azkaban? And she would have had to live with the shame of being Sirius Black’s daughter…or son, he supposed, but they’d taken that Marcia Glenn divining spell as truth. People were cold and cruel, they would have treated her appallingly; the daughter of the man they believed had sold his best friends to Voldemort, who they believed had killed thirteen people with a single curse. Thanks, Pete.
Anyway, he would have been a terrible father, even if he hadn’t spent most of her life in prison. His own parents had been so awful, he’d hardly had the best role models. And if he had been in prison until she was a teenager, what good was a father who was one of the most wanted men in the country? And more importantly, what good would he be to her in this state? The Dementors had robbed him of so much. He wasn’t the same man that had gone in…
…Yet, he would have loved her so completely. His child would have brilliant, and bold, and so beautiful. He would have loved her completely.