Work Text:
Sirius feels trapped, in this old creaky wreck of his house with only his mother’s mad portrait for company. He yelled at Remus the other day, begged him to let his old friend go outside and walk around- under Polyjuice or transfiguration, even- in the park across the street, but it felt about as useful as how he used to shout at the Dementors in Azkaban. When they were at Remus’s cottage, as tattered as the man himself, Remus seemed to dance around him. They used to talk about everything, shared secrets drawing them together like tide to a shore, but it seems as though Sirius has forgotten Remus’s language in Azkaban.
“How was the moon?” he’d asked. “Does that potion Snivellus made help?”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” Remus had said in a long tired exhale. He’d said things like that, when they were in school- unless Sirius is remembering wrong again- but this time it felt hollower, like a bad cough. “You have enough to worry about, you don’t need my problems.”
“I want to help you,” Sirius had said, feeling insanely like he is acting out their shared childhood on some kind of stage.
“You don’t owe me anything,” Remus said. “I’ve been doing fine on my own. You need to rest more.” He sounded like Dumbledore. It was uncanny, like a hallucination.
“I thought you were the spy,” Sirius said.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Remus said. “Do you remember the first time James told Lily he loved her?”
“No,” Sirius said, and it felt so very wrong to say and yet was true. He feels like he could almost, almost find the memory, if he tried enough- but it disappears into mist like a deactivated Patronus.
Remus had looked at him so very sadly it almost broke Sirius’ heart by proxy. He’d been silent, for a whole minute that stretched out so much Sirius thought he was losing his sense of time again, and then he’d said, “The Wanderers are doing very well this season.”
“Do you even like Quidditch,” said Sirius. He was almost certain the answer was no, almost, almost certain. But perhaps he was misremembering again, Remus was a huge Quidditch fan and the disconnect between them was only another memory of the Dementors.
Remus had been silent again. They hadn’t talked very much after that until Remus told him the Order needed a headquarters, and Sirius suggested Grimmauld Place in what he can only interpret as the old family madness momentarily seizing him. When Remus told him he would need to stay inside the house, bringing down a decree from Dumbledore, Sirius had raged at him like a thunderstorm and Remus had just stood there with grating patience.
“Why aren’t you getting mad at me? Why? Why?” Sirius had screamed. “Come on, just yell, just be mad at me, remember all the fights we had? Come on, I deserve it, I deserve to be screamed at, just say it! Fucking say it!”
“Oh, Sirius,” Remus had said, like Sirius was a naughty child.
Remus isn’t at Grimmauld Place and Sirius isn’t sure if he should miss him. Molly Weasley, recently arrived, is talking to- more like yelling at- her daughter. The daughter is yelling back, a taut fury in her like a snake coiled to strike.
“You can’t be spying on the Order meetings, Ginny, you’re just a child,” Molly shouts.
“So were you once,” Ginny says- yes, her name is Ginny, Sirius remembers now. “I’ve probably seen a lot more than you ever have.”
“You don’t know what I’ve seen,” says Molly. “And you never will, because war is not a game for children!” Her voice reaches a feverish pitch.
“I know that, Mum! I fucking know that,” Ginny snarls.
“Language!” says Molly. “Control your tongue, Ginny! You shouldn’t be swearing.”
“There’s a war on, you won’t tell me anything even if I’m owed it, and you’re talking to me about my language,” says Ginny. She isn’t screaming. Instead her voice is as cold as Azkaban. Sirius almost shivers, invested despite himself.
“You shouldn’t be using words like that!” Molly yells with an edge of melancholy. “You’re just a little girl.”
“And I was just a little girl when I was eleven years old on the floor of the bloody Chamber and you know what? You didn’t protect me then. What makes you think you can protect me now?” says Ginny, still coolly calm. It’s as if she cast a curse, because Molly doesn’t scold her for her language again. She looks stricken, her face sinking. Whatever weapon Ginny used must have worked. Her mother begins to cry.
“Just- just stay here. And don’t spy on any more meetings,” says Molly through her sobs, the command as an afterthought. She bustles out of the kitchen as if it’s full of Fiendfyre.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Ginny says after a weighty silence, almost to herself. She’s fidgeting with one of the cabinets, opening it and shutting it again, seemingly just for something to do with her dangling hands.
“Maybe not,” Sirius says, a half-agreement. He and Molly have been arguing a lot but those tears made him feel pointlessly guilty, unsettled. Whatever it was Ginny said, it might have been something he would have said once.
“Huh. I forgot you were there,” says Ginny, startled away from the cabinet. “Sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” he says.
“I don’t like to forget people,” Ginny says.
“I do that all the time,” Sirius says. It comes out sounding far too melancholy for a hot summer’s day.
“You’ve got an excuse,” says Ginny. And then, “That sounded insensitive.”
“Not really,” Sirius says. “At least you acknowledge it.” He feels as if there’s capital letters somewhere in that word, it. They have acquired their own significance. “I feel like everyone just tries to pretend I spent twelve years in- well, not, like, on holiday somewhere- but just- living abroad or something. Or- like they never happened at all, like I just really abused a Time Turner- I owe your friend for that, should tell her but she gets so worked up about Kreacher- and came here from when I was twenty-one.”
“Is there some kind of story involving you and Hermione- I think you’re talking about Hermione- and a Time Turner?” she says.
Sirius is silent for a moment, chewing over that. “How much do you know? About what happened with me and Wormtail?” He can’t stop himself from growling, doglike, at Wormtail, it feels instinctual.
“I know he framed you, you escaped, and he was Ron’s rat, which, wow, I probably ought to process that at some point, and you nearly got captured and escaped. And that Harry and Ron and Hermione ended up in the hospital wing at the end of my second year, which I suppose isn’t exactly shocking considering their ‘adventures’.” She makes quotes at “adventures” with a sort of weary sarcasm. “So I assume you got to be a special guest in whatever their adventure was that year.” For some reason the sentence seems to tire her. She turns back to the cabinet and resumes fidgeting with it.
“So the bare bones, then,” Sirius sighs.
“Yeah.”
“If we’re calling it an adventure, it wasn’t exactly fun,” Sirius says.
“I know the feeling,” says Ginny.
Sirius considers this. “You know, I really wish Harry wasn’t always in some kind of danger. I don’t even know the full story what happened this June. And whatever happened with you-”
“You picked up on that, huh,” Ginny says, seeming a little deflated. Her contrasts surprise him.
“Not hard to,” he says. She frowns.
“I guess even a lot of people at Hogwarts know some of it. Not the whole story, obviously. But some. And with you- with you everyone knows the story but hardly anyone the true one.”
“Good way to put it,” he comments.
“Somebody said to me once I had a way with words,” she says, and then laughs darkly at herself. “I mean, I know- like, know know- it was just flattery. Just fake.”
“There’s plenty of people in the world like that, the ones who will lie to you to get you to trust them,” Sirius says. And then, a secret for a secret, “My mother- you wouldn’t think it to look at her now, but the old bat was one, back when she was sane- if she ever was. She would get you begging for her praise so it hurt less when she turned around and cursed you.”
Ginny looks queasy. “Your own mother treated you like that?”
He nods. After all, for all her fights with her own mother Ginny is still young enough to think all families are as happy as hers.
After a moment, she sighs. “I guess I should have- expected that, or something. Not everyone’s a good person, even if they seem like it. Even if they should be.”
“People,” says Sirius.
“People,” Ginny agrees.
“One thing you learn in Azkaban, the depths of human depravity know no bounds.” He regrets saying it as soon as it’s out- this girl is far too young, whatever monsters she knows, to have even a taste of Azkaban.
“I just- I guess I like to think that families don’t hurt each other.” Then she rushes out, “Of course I know not everyone has a family like mine- hell, you consider Percy and I don’t- well not on the same scale- I don’t quite have a family like mine.”
“There’s a difference between knowing it and believing it,” Sirius says. “I don’t think- James-” his voice breaks, just a little quaver “ever quite believed my family was as fucked up as I said- he was always, like, saying, maybe deep down, your mother still loves you. He was always too trusting.” He wipes his eyes on his sleeve.
“I was too trusting, when I was younger,” Ginny says.
“You’re still alive. Means you outgrew it,” he says, and then frowns. “That was too morbid.”
“No. I think that myself, a lot of the time,” Ginny says. “Thanks, Lucius Malfoy, for the valuable life lesson.” Her sarcasm could cut diamonds.
“Ah, good old Lucy,” Sirius says.
“Lucy?” Ginny snorts.
“Everyone- and I do mean everyone- called him that after at school, he was an upper year but I was there, and his mum sent him a Howler to tell him he forgot his lucky robes-”
“Lucky robes?” says Ginny. “I don’t even wanna think why they were lucky.”
“Ew. Anyway, in this Howler she called him Lucy darling. Even my cousin Narcissa- the one he married- called him that.”
“Hell, Lord Voldemort probably called him that behind his back,” says Ginny. A bit stupefied, like a curse that didn’t quite land, Sirius stares at her. After a couple seconds of eye contact, they burst into insane laughter.
“I’m surprised I remember that,” says Sirius when the laughter subsides, to fill the empty silence.
“I guess it’s not exactly a happy memory,” Ginny says. “And the happy memories- those the Dementors could take. And the bad memories- the Dementors latch onto them, play them more than the Witching Hour plays Celestina Warbeck so you could probably recite them. But someone you hate being humiliated- that’s a different kind of memory entirely.”
“You seem to know a lot about the effect of Dementors,” Sirius says.
“I suppose I’m lucky I didn’t faint all the time second year like Harry did,” she says. “I had to eat a lot of chocolate. It probably didn’t help that it was only a year- a couple months, really- since everything happened.”
“I’m sorry the Dementors were there. They are sort of my fault,” Sirius says.
“No!” Ginny says with startling vehemence. “It’s the Ministry’s fault for fucking everything up in the first place. Not yours, for escaping hell on earth.”
“Well, I suppose the Ministry did fuck up quite a lot,” Sirius says. He doesn’t like to relinquish his own responsibility. It seems to leave him hollow, fake as his mother’s old flattery. “It fucked up even more in the last war.”
“And now they’re fucking up again. And now Percy’s swallowing everything they say like it’s a fucking Pepper-Up Potion.”
“He’ll figure it out,” Sirius says, but a memory of a familiar face behind a bone-white mask, many years ago, stops him. “He’ll probably figure it out.”
“Well, that’s encouraging,” she says.
“It could be worse,” Sirius says.
“Worse than being a Ministry stooge burying his head in the sand while there’s a fucking Dark Lord running around?”
“He could be a Death Eater.”
“That makes me feel so much better, thanks,” she says, and then droops, hands dangling at her sides. “Do you really think- like, that Percy would become a Death Eater?”
“No, no, shite! That’s not what I meant to say,” he says, guiltily. “The Death Eaters, for the most part, are from really old dark families, the kind that nurse you with Runespoor venom and teach you Unforgivables in nappies, or else they’re disaffected Knockturn Alley types who can’t make an honest living and buy the Dark Lord’s fake promises. Percy might be a follower but he must have some moral fibre, I doubt he’s the sort to follow a Dark Lord.”
“Cornelius Fudge isn’t too far from being a Dark Lord, honestly,” says Ginny. “He’s got the manipulation and lying part down pat.”
“No, Fudge is just a scared idiot, at the end of the day. A nonentity- god, I almost sound like Cissy saying that. Now, Dolores Umbridge, on the other hand? She’d be a real scary Dark Lord.” He remembers the first time he’d heard that name- how Remus had looked, when she’d called werewolves ‘soulless beasts of dark magic that need to be put down’ in a bloody Prophet editorial. The bad memories stay.
“Who’s Dolores Umbridge?”
“This really awful bitch from the Ministry- the absolute worst of a bad lot. She’s outright for ‘radical methods of werewolf control’-”
“You mean extermination,” says Ginny, looking sick. “I did a little reading about werewolf rights second year.”
“Yeah. And she’s for ‘preservation of wizarding society and tradition’- which is what my mother and father said when they were trying to be polite, which wasn’t often.”
“Preservation of wizarding society and tradition. That phrase makes me want to throw up,” Ginny says. “Cause, of course, it’s not gonna be Hermione’s society, or Professor Lupin’s tradition. And it sounds like something T- Voldemort would say.”
“Exactly,” Sirius says. “Now, here’s a good tip- always, always pay attention to the papers and the wireless and what people are saying, even the stuff that doesn’t seem important. Because if you skip, like, a couple paragraphs of the politics section, then you’ll be blindsided by some development that’s been building for a long time but you didn’t see the signs of. Because Dolores Umbridge has just been promoted to Senior Undersecretary to the Minister.”
“Merlin,” says Ginny. “Someone who wants to kill all the werewolves and a t best force out the Muggleborns. And Percy works for her. I didn’t know who precisely he was working for, but I recognize the title.”
“He likely doesn't know exactly what he’s doing,” Sirius says. “Takes her words at face value without thinking about what they really mean. I think she and Fudge probably know, even if they don’t believe, that Voldemort’s back, but the rank and file don’t.”
“But how could he be so blind!” Ginny shouts, suddenly, slamming the cabinet shut. “It’s not just that he won’t believe Harry, that he’s following this horrible Umbridge person. It’s that he won’t believe me. If he refuses to believe in Voldemort’s return, he’s saying that what happened to me in first year was just- made up, or something, or I’m exaggerating it like a stupid little girl who can’t possibly be telling the truth. If he’s following this Umbridge woman he’s completing Tom’s bloody fucked-up mission whether he knows it or not. And I’m his sister and he doesn’t even believe me even though he was fucking there .”
Sirius is silent, searching for words. He finds a memory, long buried by his own instinctual self-protection, Occlumency performed by accident. “I remember the first few months in Azkaban. Once the-the immediate shock, I guess, wore off and I was lucid again, knew where I was and could think about something other than James and Lily and Wormtail, I would shout whenever the human guards came by- it wasn’t often- that I was innocent. And none of them believed me. One of them I knew in school, tutored her in Charms, and she didn’t believe me. Eventually I stopped trying.”
She is silent. “I shouldn’t be putting all this on you,” he says.
“It helps, I think,” she says, “to talk about it.”
“No one does, though,” he says, and it could sound petulant but instead he is surprised by the sadness in his own words.
“Yeah,” says Ginny. “I guess people don’t like facing it.”
“They tend not to,” says Sirius. “People try to dance around me like the fucking ballet. And I understand, I do, because I’ve spent enough time around Remus after the full to know that a lot of people don’t want to talk about things. But they act like nothing happened at all. I think I told you that.”
“Yeah. My family all tries to pretend that my first year was normal, or that I ‘had some troubles’ but I’m all over it now, it’s all in the past. But it’s not, like for one the past literally came back, alive, in June, and no one will tell me what’s going on because I’m ‘just a little girl’,” says Ginny, with the same weary sarcasm he has come to associate with her. Her mother had used exactly those words.
“I’m not going to tell you any Order secrets, because you’re not a member,” Sirius says.
“I can live with that. I just want to know what kind of danger I’m in,” she says. “I’m not Harry, I know that. I’m not going to flatter myself that Lord Voldemort knows my name.”
“I’d think that would make it worse,” Sirius says. “Being personally known to an insane megalomaniac isn’t really flattering.”
“It’s not flattering. It’s more like, an acknowledgement that what he did to me matters,” she says. “And I’ll never get that. For me it was the worst year of my life, it’ll affect me til I’m dead. But Tom- Lord Voldemort- Tom Riddle- has hurt so many people and probably remembers about none of them, except for Harry because for whatever reason he thinks Harry can hurt him back.” Her last sentence strikes a chord in Sirius, one he’s long tried to ignore.
“I can’t believe that bastard really thinks Harry is a threat to him. I mean, Harry’s a great person.”
“I know,” Ginny says. “I used to have a crush on him something awful but it got all tied up in first year and so I tried to stop thinking about it. Didn’t really work.”
“But he’s a kid,” Sirius says.
“You know,” Ginny says, “that might just be what we need, to beat him. Someone so unexpected Voldemort can’t stop him, because Voldemort might be scared of Harry but he underestimates him.”
“I wish I had your faith,” Sirius says. "If I ever had that, Azkaban must have taken it."
“It’s not so much faith as hope,” says Ginny. “I know Tom, and I at least know Harry a little, and I can only hope that Harry wins.”
“You call him Tom,” Sirius notes. “You call him Voldemort, which is rare enough, but I have no idea where you got the name Tom Riddle from but I feel like that’s how you think of him.”
Ginny is silent, fidgeting. “Yeah. Because he’ll always be Tom Riddle, to me. But I have to call him Voldemort, lest I forget who he is.”
“I spent most of the last war not believing my brother was a Death Eater,” says Sirius, like a trade. “And I still hear my mother in my head. Still hear her dragonshite and get afraid Azkaban messed me up so bad I’ll believe it.”
“And now you hear it literally.”
“And now, yes, I literally, physically, hear my mother.”
“Your brother was a Death Eater?”
“I don’t talk about it much. Don’t like to,” Sirius says. “But yeah, he was. We think he tried to defect and they killed him. I hope he tried to defect. I mean, not the killing part, that was awful. But the part where he changed his mind at least a little.”
“I don’t delude myself that Voldemort was ever- save-able, I guess. Is that a word? I don’t think it’s a word,” Ginny says.
“It is now,” says Sirius. Then, “I just remembered. Harry’s mother, Lily? She was always making up words, and saying ‘it is now’ whenever I challenged her.” He smiles, wistfully. This must be the first time thinking of Lily or James hasn’t made him want to throw up or transform. Even the first time he’s been able to hold onto a happy memory of them.
“It’s good,” Ginny says. “That you’re remembering. That the Dementors didn’t take everything.”
“Sometimes it isn’t,” says Sirius. “But yeah, it’s good. Like- it feels like my mind is my own again.”
“Yeah,” says Ginny, her voice suddenly gone small and soft. “Yeah.”
“Just wish it would last,” says Sirius with bitter humor. “Sometimes I feel like I’m making progress- what even is progress?- and sometimes I feel like,” and he stops. He is putting too much weight on such small shoulders- and perhaps he doesn’t want to say it out loud, make it real. He clears his throat. “Like I’m back there.”
“Sometimes I think things, or even say things, out loud, and I wait for Tom to say something back. I yelled at my mum today, you saw, and a lot of it was what I really feel but a lot of it was just mean, and I don’t know what part of that meanness is mine,” she says all in a torrent of words. “It took all of the last two years for me to accept that he never cared about me, that he was never really my friend. I still have moments where I feel like I’m not in control of my body. I convinced Hermione to buy me loads of blue and green Muggle pens so I don’t have to dip a quill in black ink or see red on my hands. I’ve developed a fear of Moaning Myrtle. And I’m trying very hard not to think about the fact that it’s not just Lord Voldemort who’s walking around doing Merlin-knows-what but my old friend Tom Riddle, that I might have to face him someday. And it won’t be him like I knew him but it’ll be him.”
“For what it’s worth, Voldemort doesn't seem to be doing much that we know of,” Sirius says.
“What we know of,” Ginny says. “With Voldemort, silence is conspicuous. Suspicious.”
“That’s what Dumbledore says,” Sirius says.
“I sound like Dumbledore? Merlin, didn’t think I was that old.”
“Maybe you both know him- you and Dumbledore, I mean,” he says. “I don’t mean to pry-”
“People always say that when they do mean to pry,” says Ginny. “But go on.”
“What happened?” Having asked the question explicitly, he is not sure whether to feel guilty. But he feels released from some burden of silence. The kitchen could almost be a kingdom in itself instead of a few metres.
She sighs. “I ought to tell this story, sometime. What happened was I had a diary from hell.”
“Wow,” says Sirius.
“Yeah. I mean, it sounds kind of ridiculous. But it was true. I think Lucius Malfoy-what a bastard- wanted to like, get back at my dad for something. I don’t even know what. So, when we went school shopping in Diagon, he put this diary with my things. It was- blank, at first. It looked, like, old and cheap but a lot of my school stuff was old and cheap. It looked normal and innocuous and I’d always wanted a diary. I thought Mum and Dad bought it for me as an early birthday present. And then- you know those diaries they have, that talk back?”
“Yeah,” says Sirius. “I looked into them, when me and Remus and James- well, and the rat, but he didn’t do anything, were making this thing, and we wanted it to talk back. But I found out that they just have a set of premade responses that they bring out for whatever occasion. They don’t have, like, personalities.”
“I might know what thing you’re talking about,” Ginny says. “But, of course, I was eleven. Maybe I should have known all that, but I didn’t.”
“You shouldn’t. All that stuff is meant to be a trade secret,” Sirius says. “I’d tell you how we found out-”
“Let me guess, your animagus forms,” says Ginny.
Sirius grins. “Got it in one. Your teachers must either love you or hate you.”
“Snape hates or ignores me depending on the day of the week,” she says. Her smile fades. “Anyway, when it started talking back, I was so excited. Because this was still a month before school and-” her voice softens, “I just wanted a friend. So I started to tell him- the boy in the diary- everything. My crush on Harry. My brothers. How I liked my dormmates and my classes and all my secret hopes and fears.”
“I always wanted a friend like that, too,” Sirius says quietly.
“Difference is you got one,” she says. Then, after a pause, “Sorry. That was probably bitter.”
“You’ve got a right to be bitter,” Sirius says. “But I don’t, anymore, not really. The other day I tried to ask Remus about the full moon and he tried to talk about Quidditch. It gets really lonely, with everything just trapped in my head like that.”
“And your friend betrayed you, too,” she says, very softly. “I’m sure you figured out that the boy in the diary was called Tom Riddle and that he grew up to be Lord Voldemort. What you don’t know but all of Hogwarts does is that that year the Chamber of Secrets- do you know what that is?- got opened.”
“I grew up in a house of pureblood supremacists who threw me in the basement for two hours the first time I came home after getting sorted into Gryffindor,” Sirius says. “I’ve heard about the Chamber of Secrets.”
“They threw you in the basement? For being a Gryffindor? That’s awful. That’s so awful,” she says, and she looks like she means it.
“To be honest it was sort of a routine punishment- in our family, at least. When the other one was down there my brother or I would, like, try to slip candles under the door or something. I really hated it, though, because I don’t like being trapped. It wasn’t even that I was scared but that I was bored. I get stir-crazy. I need to move around. But it was better than the physical stuff, so. Count your kneazles,” he says. Often in this house and in Azkaban he felt as if he was in the basement again, except with no minutes to count down and no Reggie sneaking down to talk.
“Count your kneazles? What do kneazles have to do with your family being a bunch of wankers?”
“That’s not a thing? I really thought everyone knew that idiom. Must just be a pureblood thing- a lot of the families used to breed kneazles- well, other magical creatures as well, but I guess they kept the kneazles in the house?” He’s tried his hardest to forget all the old pureblood customs his parents shoved down his throat like medicine, like poison.
“I guess it just- goes to show,” she says. “You know? I never heard of the Chamber of Secrets before- well. Because shortly before the message that said the Chamber was opened and Mrs. Norris was petrified, I started sleepwalking.”
Sirius thinks inanely, Someone finally got Mrs. Norris? but he’s not going to say that out loud, he has enough self-restraint for that. But the sleepwalking, and what she’s said before- he doesn’t think he likes where this story is going. Only his crazier relatives ever talked about possession as if it was a good thing, and that was from the perspective of the possessor. And while he can think of ways to make a diary that could talk back with a real personality, he has no idea how it would be able to possess someone- not without the kind of magic that would have made his relatives- his! who thought a fun family outing was beheading a house-elf and using the corpse for a dark ritual!- balk.
“You see, I didn’t realize it then, but Tom was possessing me and- and he was using my body to open the Chamber or Secrets.” She rushes the last part out as if she can avoid its bleak truth, but meets his eyes, almost challenging him.
“That- wow. That is absolutely awful,” he says, not sure what else to say. “I wish you never had to experience that.”
“But I did,” she says. “And I wish no one ever went to Azkaban who was innocent, but you did.”
“It’s not as if it wasn’t my fault,” he says.
“It wasn’t,” says Ginny. “Don’t blame yourself for something that someone else did.”
“It’s not as though I didn’t make mistakes-”
“ Yeah. Yeah, you did make mistakes, because fucking everyone makes mistakes at some point! One mistake doesn’t condemn you. One mistake doesn’t make what was done to you somehow okay. If you blame yourself for getting sent to Azkaban you might as well blame me for opening the Chamber.”
“I don’t. Merlin, Ginny, I don’t,” he says, guilt weighing him down.
“Exactly,” she says.
“it’s not that simple, as blame and forgiveness.”
“I know it isn’t, but it is,” she says, fiercely.
He’d like to accept that, because ultimately there is still in him a bit of the boy who wanted nothing more than to be let out of the basement. But he knows he does not deserve to forgive himself. “What was it, that was petrifying people?” He expects her to be a bit nonplussed by the abrupt subject change. Instead, she laughs.
“Merlin, you’re not going to believe this,” she says, through her laughter. “It sounds absolutely barmy.”
“I’m an illegal animagus and my traitorous little rat of a so-called friend framed me while pretending to be your brother’s pet rat, I think I have a rather high tolerance for ‘barmy.’”
“It was a basilisk.”
“WHAT?” He doesn’t mean to shout, but living as a dog has messed with his hearing a little. “There was a bloody basilisk, of all things, running- I mean slithering- around Hogwarts? And don’t basilisks kill?”
“Hermione figured out that they petrify people, too.”
“Well, that settles that,” he says, as sarcastic as possible. “How did no one figure this out?”
“For one thing Hermione’s brilliant,” Ginny says. “For another it’s not like Parselmouths can be looked up in the Floo book. Imagine, flooing someone and being like, ‘Hullo, do you just so happen to have a power from the dark arts associated with murderous psychos throughout history on the off-chance there’s a great ruddy snake running around my school?’”
“Parseltongue isn’t actually a dark art,” Sirius says. “I’d know. Now, it’s sort of interesting in a morbid way- no one can actually agree on an official definition for the Dark Arts. So all the baby Death Eaters who thought purebloods were persecuted used certain over-broad definitions to argue that dark magic is ‘just misunderstood’ and that the Dark Arts have a place in society.”
“Because we all know curses that boil your blood or animal sacrifice rituals are so productive and such a boon to society,” Ginny says.
“How did you come across that stuff? It’s not exactly light reading,” Sirius says.
“I did some research after- everything. Wanted to know what I’m up against. I’m no dark lady in training, Mum would go spare,” says Ginny.
“Knowing your enemy’s all well and good but there is such a thing as knowing too much,” Sirius cautions. “I still have nightmares about some of what I read in the family library.”
“So you say Parseltongue’s not actually dark magic?” There’s something intense in her expression he can’t interpret.
“No. Only the really over-broad definitions that were made up either by overzealous Ministry officials or dark arts apologists parodying the same- or attempts to restrict certain perfectly innocent types of magic for political reasons by calling them dark arts- include Parseltongue. There’s no actual dark origin to the language or the magic.”
“Huh,” says Ginny. “Good to know.” She seems somehow reassured.
“What happened to the basilisk? Or the diary, for that matter?” Sirius asks. He’s pretty sure Padfoot would have smelled the basilisk if it was still around, and since possession is extremely difficult to break independently it’s likely that the diary was destroyed.
“You’re not going to like this,” says Ginny. “Mum doesn’t and she knows like half of it.”
“Get it over with,” says Sirius. “Better just say it than drag it out, it’s like dumping someone.”
“Not that you’d know what that feels like, of course.”
“You know, I wasn’t actually a sex god or something in school. Never really been interested in romance,” he says, more lightly than he feels about it, or perhaps his mother, always pressing him to pick a bride like he was picking sides for pickup Quidditch and screaming at him when he said he though some of the girls might make nice friends, but no more. "My mother hated that, so I feel guilty about it. The Dementors probably didn't help."
"I shouldn't have assumed things," says Ginny. "Ought to grow out of it."
"You will," he says. "Given time, and good people, you will."
“Well, what happened was Harry killed it,” she says.
“Harry killed the basilisk?”
“Harry killed the basilisk. And the diary, apparently with the venom from the basilisk.”
“ Harry, my godson, who was all of twelve at the time, killed a fucking basilisk like it was a rabid gnome,” says Sirius flatly, trying not to shout.
“Yes,” says Ginny. “Though it must have been a lot harder than killing a gnome. I was unconscious at the time, because Tom, being the fantastic friend he was, apparently tried to use me to come back to life or something. I don’t really like to think about that part.”
“You know,” Sirius says, disturbing implications forced carefully to the back of his mind. “I got Kissed, last year at Hogwarts when I was captured. It’s just that Harry and Hermione fixed it with a Time Turner. Don’t like to think about that, either.”
“I don’t blame you. Coming so close to- oblivion, really, like that- it’s hard to acknowledge,” says Ginny. “Better to pretend it didn’t happen and go on.”
“At least I don’t remember it,” Sirius says.
“I don’t, either. But the lack of memories scares me more, I think, than the memory would. Probably because there’s just so many blank spots,” says Ginny.
“I’ve got blank spots, too,” says Sirius. “But of a different kind- I remembered, once, but the dementors took what was there. I can sort of feel the empty space where the memory was, like a phantom limb.” He swallows, disturbed by the speaking of this blunt fact.
“You do remember some things, though,” says Ginny. “I guess you ought to hold onto those. And make new ones.”
“Yeah,” says Sirius. “Yeah.” He’s resolutely not thinking about what she’d said the diary did. He’d been the one to research how to put pieces of themselves on the Marauder’s Map, and so he know a lot about sentient magical artifacts- and he grew up on dark magic. Instead of the tale of the Warlock’s Hairy Heart, which surprised him the first time he heard it, Sirius grew up with the tale of the Warlock’s Hairy Soul. He can’t think of anything that could drain someone’s life from them like Ginny describes, save for the kind of dark magic his family- his family- warned him against in hushed whispers. “If you’re ever so mad as to make a Horcrux, boy,” his father had told him, “I’ll destroy it myself.” Surely, even Lord Voldemort would not venture so far. And, after all, the diary was destroyed- with basilisk venom, yes, one of the darkest and most destructive substances on earth, something his mother would have killed to get her hands on- and it is impossible to make more than one Horcrux.
“Is something bothering you?” says Ginny.
“Just- wrapped up in my head,” says Sirius.
“That happens to me sometimes, too,” says Ginny. “I like it when someone snaps me out of it.”
“We could make a deal,” Sirius says. “Whenever one of us gets like that, we snap the other out of it with words.”
“I like that,” Giny says.
“I find it helps to have terms explicitly stated, so nothing surprises you unpleasantly,” says Sirius. “It’s good to have solidity when you grew up being arbitrarily punished for stepping wrong.”
“Or when you were deceived because you didn’t know what you were getting into,” Ginny says.
“So deal?”
“Deal.”
They shake on it, just as Sirius had once shook hands dipped in boyish spit with James and Remus and the rat, sworn to be brothers. This is a sadder deal. But Ginny is far more honest than the rat could ever dream of being.
“I ought to go apologize to my mother,” says Ginny.
“Yeah,” says Sirius. “Here’s some advice- don’t alienate what family you have left, if they love you.”
“Even Percy?” she asks sourly.
“Even Percy,” he says. She makes a face. “ If he’s willing to own up to his mistakes honestly. If not, kick him to the kerb.” Ginny snorts.
“It was nice. To talk to you,” says Ginny. “Like equals. About real things.”
“And not Quidditch and Celestina Warbeck,” says Sirius. “I mean, Quidditch is all well and good-”
“Quidditch is brill.”
“And I will maybe, possibly admit that Celestina was good before she sold out. But yeah, sometimes we need to talk about something more,” Sirius says. “And thanks. For humoring a sad old dog like me.”
“You’re human at the moment.”
“Ugh, don’t remind me.”
He hears Ginny walk up the stairs, hears her open the door to her mother’s room, hears Molly shout, can almost hear Ginny bite back a mean comment. He hears the creaking of the timbers of the old house and the chatter of the Order and the beating of Buckbeak’s wing. He hears his mother shout from her portrait and Kreacher grumble, but it’s muted. He walks up to his old room, puts on a record he hid there when he was a boy and never got around to bringing to James’s, lets the music drown her out. For once, Grimmauld Place is wide enough to fill with the whole world.