Chapter Text
Sirius sits on the steps of what was his home, knees bared to the biting night wind. His fingers twist in the fabric of his jumper.
Memories of the evening are slipping in and out of his brain like vignettes or photos thrown on a table. He can only put together a few key things: tripping over the coffee table at breakneck speed trying to get away; falling down the cellar steps and being forcefully pulled back up the cellar steps; the feeling of the sharp platinum spikes of his mother's wedding ring, moulded around a huge fuck-off opal stone that hurts when it collides with a cheekbone; his brother's eyes, wide and staring as he pleads with Sirius and his parents to stop. Oh, and the Unforgivables.
But the memories are slipping from him as if he's trying to hold sand in his hands, leaking through the sides and between his fingers as he tries to no avail to keep a hold on them. His throat burns hot and heavy as he tries not to cry. He needs to keep his head. He needs a plan.
It starts to rain.
"Oh, fuck off," Sirius says into the night, voice cracking. The rain is only light, but Sirius has lived in London long enough to know it's about to get heavier. He needs to get off the steps-- it's not like he's going to be let in ever again. For the first time in about an hour, the reality of that hits him: he will never cross these steps again. He's probably even lost the ability to open the door. His mother will never speak to him within the bounds of the house ever again, if she even speaks to him after this at all. A part of him is elated, and a part of him wants to turn around and throw up into the bushes. He starts thinking about stupid, inconsequential things-- his stuff is still in his room, his trunk is in there, most of his money. His clothes. Pictures he's brought back from Hogwarts are there. Will she throw them out? Will he ever see them again?
There are some things he won't miss (the great heterosexual joke that is the half-naked women that hang above his bed, for one), but on his person he has frighteningly little. His wand, thank fuck, he has. There’s around fifteen galleons as well as twenty-five muggle cents in a sack in his pocket. A pack of cigarettes and a month-old caramel toffee. No jacket, no trunk, no extra underwear. It's just him and some random shit, now.
Sirius eats the toffee and starts walking toward King's Cross. He's not sure where he's going yet.
The thing is: James is in India. It's the beginning of July, and James' family is always in India for the first three-ish weeks of July. But god, he can't fathom going anywhere other than the Potters right now-- James' are likely the only parents he could muster up the courage to face in this state, but the Potter mansion-- just outside London and thus only about an hour by train, is off limits. Sirius briefly considers going anyway and breaking in through a window or something, but he's immediately embarrassed by the thought. How pathetic is he! He scratches the Potters off of his mental list of fallback plans, at least until July 25th. That leaves Peter-- but Peter lives all the way in Yorkshire, and has about ten members of extended family currently staying with his already large household. Sirius has a brief vision of knocking on the door to the Pettigrews' battered cottage, facing an overworked Susie Pettigrew with his scraped-up face, asking them if there is any more room at the inn, and he finds he can't deal with the humiliation. Which leaves one option, unless he wants to be rattling the gates of Hogwarts two months early.
There are a few reasons he's hesitant to buckle up and buy a train ticket to the middle of North Wales to greet the stoic farm that is the Lupin residence.
1. Sirius is terrified of Lyall Lupin. This is not to be confused with the way Sirius is terrified of his own mother. Sirius' own mother is terrifying because she's a violent, malevolent, evil woman, who's hated Sirius since he screamed his way out of her womb sixteen years ago. Lyall Lupin is terrifying in that he's never liked Sirius due to his (likely correct) assumptions about the Blacks, and harboured a general distaste for Remus' friendship for Sirius for a while, which makes him near-impossible to please. Nothing Sirius does impresses or makes this man's hard exterior crack even a bit. Every interaction Sirius has had with the man has been Sirius himself stumbling through sentences as Lyall stares him down behind his thick-framed tortoiseshell glasses. Lyall Lupin looks like his best friend is an iron pitchfork, or maybe a stallion. Lyall Lupin looks like he could look at water and get it to boil. Lyall Lupin makes Sirius' palms sweat.
2. There are two elephants in the room after the Lyall thing. The first of the two is the fact that Sirius is a Big Huge Homosexual with a Big Huge Homosexual Crush on Remus, and that really doesn't bode well-- for one, because he's 65% sure Remus is straight and number two:
3. He and Remus aren't exactly on speaking terms. Because Sirius fucked up harder than he's ever fucked up ever in his life, because he's stupid and childish and incapable of thinking of anyone but himself. It is, without question, the worst thing Sirius has ever done and likely will ever do. And this is humiliating on a whole secondary level because Sirius is going to show up on Remus' doorstep and not only beg for forgiveness, but maybe beg for a shower and a bed too, and who is Sirius to ask those things after what he's done to Remus? He wouldn't be surprised if Remus doesn't even let him in. Sirius wouldn't even be angry. Remus is within his right to do that.
It has to be Wales, though– it's his only option. It's the only other address he knows by heart, otherwise he can sort of tangentially fathom knocking on someone like McGonagall's door, but he has no idea where she lives. Some little tartan-filled hut in Scotland, probably. Wouldn't be the worst. Alas.
He enters the station soaking wet, teeth chattering, having reached a conclusion that he really, really didn't want to reach. By the grace of some higher power Sirius didn't subscribe to, the next train to Remus' town is in an hour. He needs to find a way to convert his galleons, purchase a ticket, and then locate a snack ASAP because that toffee wasn't really anything at all. The conversion station is easy enough to find-- behind a magical barrier not far from the entrance to the Underground station, behind a thin screen of magic disguising the station as a postbox to non-magical onlookers that Sirius finds he identifies immediately.
The witch stares at him, unimpressed, from behind the glass.
"Where are you off to, boy?" she asks. She's got hawk-like eyes that soften once they catch on what Sirius' face must look like.
Sirius tells her, and fishes out all his galleons from his pockets. "You can just convert them all. I'll probably need some later." And then he frowns, because that might be all the money he has. "Alright, actually-- actually just convert the ticket price and then an extra pound. Leave the rest." He's poor. His mother had screamed as she blasted him off the tree. Surely that means he can't leech off their funds anymore. Any extra will go to Reg anyway, now that Sirius isn't the heir. This is all he has.
As the witch behind the glass counts his change, Sirius runs it over in his head again. How is he going to pay for school books? He supposes there must be some sort of repository for used books. There's a used bookshop in Hogsmeade, he knows. And quills? Parchment? Maybe Remus has some he can borrow. He shakes his head minutely to try and ward off the onslaught of panicked thoughts and the witch hands him his change.
"Stay safe," she says.
"Heh," responds Sirius. He wonders if she recognizes him. He's pretty infallibly a Black-- he looks it, after all, it probably oozes out of his skin– the complicated genetic background of the Black family results in some variation in looks, but they all seem to share a certain quality that sells them out. It's a bit undeniable. Is she wondering why a wayward Black has just asked for money for a ticket to North Wales? She'll find out in the papers soon, no doubt. The society column is about to make a feast of him. BLACK HEIR RUNS FROM HOME-- as if he wasn't kicked out-- although that's a good way to frame it, he might steal that. Maybe he wasn't kicked, maybe he ran. He would've, anyway, if she hadn't thrown him out he would've gone himself eventually.
After buying his ticket, Sirius wanders over to a newsagent and leaves with a bag of pick n mix sweets and a pack of cigarettes to go along with the half-carton he's already got in his back pocket. He sits himself down on a bench not far from the platform and stares at his feet, ticket burning a hole into his pocket.
Sirius runs through what he’s going to say to Remus over and over and over until the call comes along the loudspeaker that his train is leaving. He nearly trips on his feet in his desperation to leave London, and collapses into the first seat he can find. The train car is blissfully warm, if a little smelly, but Sirius has a window seat. He catches his own eye in the faint reflection of himself on the glass. The rain from outside is blurring with the darkness, making it hard to see, but he knows he looks ghastly-- he always looks a bit ghastly, in his opinion, although everyone else doesn't seem to think so-- but this is something else. From what he can see, his left eye has gone completely purple, and there's blood crusted under his nose and under his split lip. There's a mark on his cheek, sharp and precise, from his mother's opal ring. It must be four in the morning by now, he thinks. Four in the morning. Three hours since I left my house for the last time. Left their house, anyway.
–
Sirius arrives at the station and is shuffled off the train. He slept most of the way- coming to and watching the hills go by periodically. The weather in Wales is overcast but hot and muggy, as if there's a summer storm brewing, and Sirius looks up at the clouds and realises there is no public transport that takes you to the middle of North Welsh farm country.
He eyeballs the phone box at the end of the station. Jesus wept. Here he goes.
He knows Moony's number because Remus told him so that Sirius could call him during a Muggle Studies class that involved a telephone (Remus was allowed to go home for an hour for the purposes of the experiment). It was a resounding success. Sirius had privately thought that it was a bit of a useless skill, but now, as he's spinning the little wheel around into the sequence of numbers that make up the Lupins' home telephone, it doesn't seem useless at all. The dial tone trills into Sirius' ear, and his mouth goes dry with nerves. His palms sweat against the warm black plastic of the phone. He wonders if people are watching him through the glass. At least he knows he's got a bit of anonymity here-- he's not sure if there are any wizards in a thirteen mile radius, other than Remus and Lyall.
The line catches.
"Hello?" Remus' voice. Oh dear, sweet mercy, it's Remus' voice. Sirius hasn't heard it directed toward him with that catchy, cheerful tone in a long while. Oh well, time to ruin it.
"Hi, Remus," Sirius says. He ventures with the first name instead of the nickname. No need to piss Moony off.
Silence. Silence for a few beats longer than he thought. Deep, unfettering, awful silence, with just Remus' breaths rattling the phone line.
"Sirius," he says. "I don't want to talk to you."
"I know," Sirius says, shaking. Since when was he close to tears? He swallows them back down again. "Listen, I'm-- I'm in Wrexham."
"WHAT?"
"Don't lose--"
"Why the hell are you in Wrexham," Remus asks, cold, flat, awful. He's not impressed. "I swear, if this is some sort of forgiveness expedition, you can stop it right now, we'll talk when we're back at school, you leave me alone at home."
"I got kicked out," Sirius says without thinking. Wa-hey, cat's out of the bag. "I mean-- I, yeah. I got kicked out, and-- and I don't know where to go, ‘cause James is in India and Pete's got his family and I don't know McGonagall's address so I really don't need much just maybe a--"
"Padf-- Sirius, slow down! Slow down. She kicked you out?"
"To the curb, yeah. Heh. Sort of knew she'd do it one day, wasn't expecting it to be last night--"
"Are you alright?" Remus' voice has taken on an unexpected note of concern. "Are you hurt?"
Sirius almost says no, and then realises Remus may be coming to come pick him up, so he can't lie completely. "Um, a bit. A bit bashed up. I'll be alright. Listen, it really won't be long, but I don't know where else to go, I think I might be a bit in shock, actually, erm--" he notices that his limbs and abdomen hurt more than they did when he got on the train, and he's starting to come back to his senses. "I might also be coming out of shock. I don't really know much about the human body. That being said, you can just kick me and tell me to fuck off and I'll go sleep in a tube station in London or something, I don't know why I didn't think of that, actually-" Sirius is playing all of his greatest personality cards all at once, accidentally. Rambling, check; backpedaling, check; stumbling over his words, check; taking advantage of people, check...
"Sirius, shut up," Remus says. "I'm coming to get you. Where are you?"
"I haven't left the station," Sirius says into the phone, anxiety rife and sticking in his throat. "I'm just outside."
"Stay where you are." The line goes dead.
Sirius stays where he is. He has no idea how long it takes to get from Remus' house to the train station. Maybe Remus intends never to pick him up, and let him rot at the bottom of the steps to Wrexham Central, like a medieval punishment. What did they used to do to traitors back in the day? Would Sirius be placed in stocks, hung out to dry in front of everyone? Or would he be sent to the Tower, where he'd rot in a cell and have ravens pick at bits of him until there's nothing left?
He deserves it all, he thinks. Every ounce of humiliation and pain that comes his way. Maybe he even deserved the boot. Sirius puts his head in his hands and waits for Remus, resolving to think about methods of medieval torture at a later date.
Around twenty minutes pass before a baby-blue, half-rusted pickup truck rips into the parking lot and idles in front of Sirius, whose mouth has gone completely dry, whose fingers have started to tremble.
There, in the driver's seat, is Remus. The truck seems to be empty except for him, but Sirius isn't really paying attention to anything else right now. Remus' sandy brown curls are a bit longer on the top than the last time Sirius saw him but cropped short on the sides as if with kitchen scissors, leaving his (endearingly!) big ears out in the open, pink and freckled just like the skin across his nose and on the apples of his cheeks. He's wearing sunglasses and-- Sirius' mouth goes impossible drier-- dungarees, over a half-buttoned shirt, baring his collarbones. Sirius thinks privately that this is better than any Witch Weekly-sponsored farmer's calendar. This is all Sirius would have to picture to get his insides to melt for years to come. This was all he needed. He could die right here on the steps of Wrexham Central.
"Sirius," Remus says, leaning a pointy golden elbow out of the window. His face, initially nonchalant, has taken on an edge of sympathy as he takes in Sirius' injuries (although Sirius wishes it wouldn't). "Look, are you getting in or not?"
Sirius scrambles to his feet, nearly tripping on the pavement in his excitement at being accepted into the vehicle. He pops open the passenger door and boosts himself into the seat (god fucking damn his embarrassing fucking height he still has room to grow surely he'll pass James) and slumps forward in complete exhaustion. Remus' car is hot.
"Why are you in those clothes? I don't think I've ever seen you in anything like that," Remus says, pulling out of the drive.
"She threw me out shortly after dinner. Thus, I am still wearing dinner clothes," Sirius says bluntly. He's still not looking at Remus. The dinner clothes in question are a grey-green cashmere pullover over a starchy cream shirt, and dark grey shorts, and his socks were white at some point but, well, he got lost on the way to King's Cross, and it was raining. "Why, do you want the pullover? You can have it."
"I--" Remus looks like he legitimately considers for a moment. He shuts up, instead.
Sirius leans his head on the window, avoiding Remus’ gaze for more reasons than one.