Nineteen
Sirius stays still, as the pool of blood around Peter stops expanding. The scars are there—open lines that transform his face, making him seem like someone else, someone Sirius doesn't recognize. But underneath it all, he knows it's him.
A rat. I can't even do that right. Peter had been in a bad mood that morning after the first transformation.
I'm a dog, Pete, don't worry about it. Sirius had started smoking by that time, and he had offered Peter one. James had shaken his head in silent denial and Sirius had rolled his eyes.
You are a beast. Almost a wolf. Peter had argued.
Almost. Sirius had taken a drag from his cigarette.
You don't get to complain. And James is a stag. Stags are glorious. And Remus... He had started, but Sirius had glanced at him hard, stopping him, before he said something awful.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have. Perhaps he should have let him say it. Maybe then, they wouldn’t be here now.
Peter's dead body, the weight of his sins, shrinking in a red circle around him.
What does it matter? James had said. We get to be together, so what does it matter?
It did. It does. Maybe James would agree with him now. Be together and be there are very different things. Existing and being present.
Sirius watches the green of his robes. A strategic choice, cunning, a call to snakes and houses that Peter served at the end. Not black, a concealment of the Mark under the fabric. Always a step outside. A person who belonged only to himself—shallow, empty, scared, perhaps.
For the second time since he met him, Sirius realizes that Peter is—was—smarter than he let people see. A fraud, someone Sirius spent years sleeping next to, without ever really learning him.
He never will. He doesn't want to. It makes him sick, when he thinks about the person that he truly was. It makes him feel unsafe—a threat that was always there, without Sirius realizing it.
He is still looking at his body. Peter Pettigrew is dead. Whoever that person was.
Peter is dead. A man, Sirius knew.
"We need to leave." Snape says, and Sirius nods. There is no point staying here. Snape was right. Sirius doesn't need to stare, it's an image he'll never forget. It will come back to him in nightmares, another forsaken addition.
"Where?" Sirius asks.
"There is no point returning back. The outcome of the battle will have been decided by now." Snape replies. Sirius hasn't looked at him yet. He hasn't looked at anything. When someone asks where Peter died, Sirius won't know the answer to that question.
"Sorry." He says, because Snape warned him not to do anything reckless, and Sirius did exactly that. There was no other choice.
"It was necessary." He replies and it's such a devastating lie, because Snape says it for him.
"It wasn't." Sirius responds.
"Worms like Pettigrew don't deserve to live." Snape says.
Sirius sighs. He agrees. He feels safer now that Peter is dead, he feels empty. Would Peter ever feel empty if Sirius died? If he gave away James to Voldemort? Would there be a time, when he would look at himself and regret it?
"Can we go somewhere?" Sirius turns and he looks at Snape, because he knows they can't afford to waste time. The Ministry has probably fallen, and he doesn’t get to breathe for a moment—for a man he didn’t kill.
"Lead the way," Snape tells him—impassive and challenging at once.
It's a presence.
_____
Sirius's choice of location has nothing to do with strategy or safety. It's not a plan—barely even a thought. It's a place that they had once passed by with his family, a stop to a trip to one cousin or the another. It's a Muggle town—the first truly Muggle town he ever saw. His parents had deemed it hideous, beneath them, and had left in less than an hour.
For him, it had been a revelation. He was fascinated by the houses and the way people dressed. The shops, the neon lights above a building. He had been determined to return at the first chance he got.
He came back to it after the fights grew nastier, when he felt trapped. A breath for an hour, for a night.
Then again, after they left school.
When Reg was confirmed to be a Death Eater.
And the night after they celebrated James's proposal to Lily.
He comes back to it now. It's a habit by this point, an almost ritual.
It's the first time he's brought someone with him.
A road leads to a hill, beyond the last of the houses. There were few houses here once, but more are appearing, creeping up the hill and shrinking the open space.
"There used to be a bench here." He tells Snape as he sits down. He can still see the shops, the lights of them. Maybe in a few years the buildings will block his view. Maybe he would have to choose another spot, another place.
Snape stands still above him, observing the town—the distant noise of life, the sounds of cars, a horn, laughter. Another world, one Sirius often escaped to.
He moves his wand, casts and the silver of the spell contrasts the night. And yet, his Patronus itself fits into it. A raven, which Snape instructs to inform Reg, that they're fine. A circle around him, a precise flight, then it moves around Sirius, as if to check that they're indeed alright, a confirmation of its caster's words.
It's warm, the magic, it always is.
Sirius watches as it moves, flying into the night. A sleek black bird slicing through silver mist.
It suits him.
Snape looks and he sits down across from him, crossed-legged, matching Sirius posture.
It's not a spot for sitting, it's hard, the grass untrimmed and wild, an illusion of nature, that doesn't exist, because the concrete swallows it slowly.
Sirius still likes it. He will come back to it again, even if all the previous stores close, even if there isn't a hill anymore, a spot for him to sit and watch and wonder how his life would be if he was born a Muggle, if he was born here, if the ugly parts of him would still exist, if he would be another.
"So," he says, taking the pack out of his pockets, observing the blood on his fingers, under his nails, "you smoke?"
He takes a cigarette out. He taps it on the side of the crumbled pack, straightening it. He focuses on it, it's easier, he can pretend the colour on his hands isn't red, it's brown, just dirt from sitting down.
"Occasionally." Snape answers and Sirius smiles against the rhythmic tapping of his cigarette.
He looks up, once, offering one to Snape. He looks away as he takes it, a repeat of process, until he lights his and he turns again.
Snape is watching him. Sirius expects him to ask, where they are, or perhaps offer a time frame. A cigarette, two, until they should have to leave again. He stays silent and Sirius leans just enough, barely, since they are facing each other, but so close, a lighter in hand, a finger ready.
He raises his other hand, a curled palm to block the wind. He sees the red now as the fire, small as it is, illuminates it. He sees the trembling too and the lighter goes off, Snape's cigarette still unburnt.
Snape raises his own hand over Sirius's—an extra shield against the wind, a cover. He watches Snape now, as he inhales, as the smoke escapes through his mouth. Two pale fingers take it out, a palm brushes against his forehead, moving his hair away.
Sirius retreats. Otherwise, he'll do something he'll regret—something Snape doesn't deserve. He had drunk and kissed and fucked to pass the time, to forget, to feel the high. And it would be easy to do it, to numb Peter's death with it.
If anyone else was sitting across from him.
Snape deserves presence; he offers as much.
"I usually come here with my bike." Sirius tells him. "I have a bike, do you know that? Yes, of course you do. I've come to James many times with it." Sirius rambles. He knows he does. He's usually alone. Every chaotic though he has stays in his head.
"We don't have to talk." Snape says, looking to the side. The road has no lights here.
"Yeah." Sirius takes a drag from his cigarette, looks at it, then again.
"I know you have a bike." Snape says, and Sirius turns his eyes at him. "An awful thing." He adds.
"I made it myself." Sirius tells him.
"It doesn't surprise me." Snape responds.
Sirius laughs with the insult, and it's a little broken, but it's a laughter, a release nevertheless.
Then he wonders, if it's truly an insult. Maybe half of it.
"I'll take you for a ride when..." He says, but the future is uncertain.
"I'll be sure to be busy." Snape replies, smoke follows his breath.
"It's perfectly safe." Sirius says. "Like a broom. Better than."
"It's not the machine that worries me, but the driver." Snape glances at him and Sirius laughs again.
"I will make it safe for you." He says and it comes a little quieter, a little bit away from his previous mirth, a little too much.
There is a moment of silence, before Snape speaks.
"What an honour." He says and it should be cutting, it should be infuriating, but the tone, the volume of it matches the night, the quietness of it.
They stop talking for a while. The noises from the town, disappear slowly. Sirius lights another cigarette.
"How come we never...?" Snape had been looking at the sky but turns as soon as Sirius speaks. "I know," Sirius says when Snape raises an eyebrow, a mockery in one move. "I know, but I don't mean at school. Later." He stops. "Maybe at school too."
"Because you decided you hated me as soon as I spoke to you." Snape says, taking the cigarette out of Sirius hands. They have money, they could leave and buy another pack. Sirius doesn't want to leave, not yet, so he lets him.
"You decided you hated me, even before that." Sirius tells him.
A drag, as the smoke travels down his throat. A nod, a confirmation.
"And I get it," the children they were back then, the clash that ought to happen, how and why Sirius chose James and Remus, how he chose Peter, "but.."
"Every story has a villain, Black," Snape says, "and I was the one in yours."
"Yeah." Sirius wipes his palms at his jeans. "I surely was yours." And then, because they are here, because Peter has just died, because it doesn't matter anymore. "I'm sorry." And it contains so much, that apology. Maybe, he will find the words for each single thing he's sorry for one day. Maybe he will form them then.
Snape doesn't reply, Sirius doesn't expect him to.
"Give me your hands." Snape says and Sirius turns to him again. He holds the cigarette with his two front teeth and it's such a mundane gesture, so normal, so foreign that Sirius doesn't ask, just complies.
A cleaning spell, as Sirius hands are standing mid-air, a touch, a turn, so Snape can check if there are remnants of blood in the lines of his palm, under his nails.
Snape pulls his hand away, his eyes watching something afar. A plan perhaps, thoughts Sirius isn't supposed to know, words meant to left unsaid.
Sirius wants, a kind of longing for something undeciphered, entangled with war and fights, with grief and uncertainty. And yet underneath it all there, present, a pull that he has to restrain, because it's already cut, a feeling he can't name, but it exists all the same.
Snape cleaned his hands of blood.
Snape kept his hands from being dirty.
"What is that spell that you used?" A lump at his throat. "The one..." He has to start somewhere. He has to get something out. It will eat him alive otherwise.
"Sectumsempra." Snape replies, and Sirius freezes at just the words—cuts, cuts, cuts, everywhere. A terrifying exposure of justice. "A spell of my own invention." He adds, and Sirius is here again—the surprise pulls him out of a scene sure to replay.
"You invented a spell." Sirius says and he sounds disbelieving, and yet he finds it so very possible.
"More than one, Black." Snape replies. "Some of them you've already used yourself."
"How's that possible?"
"Through meticulous studying, imagination and purpose." Snape says, not fully turning yet.
"Fuck you." Sirius says. "You were born with the mind for this." A raised voice, almost an amusement, an accusation. Maybe if this moment was set elsewhere. In a different time. Maybe Sirius would have said something different.
Snape glances at him fully now.
"Our difference is that I push my mind to the limits. Beyond. You use your brain for barely the minimum." A slight lean forward. "Even back then, you passed each subject, each class, putting the least effort. You can. You have the brain for it. To be good without effort. But it takes true investment to thrive."
Sirius wants to push him, hard until his back hits the ground. To climb atop of him and show him what investment looks like.
He falls back, pebbles are touching his skin, he probably has cuts on his shirt, holes that make the cold ground more evident. A testament of the battle that came.
"He used to laugh at all the silly jokes I made. Even the crude ones." Sirius looks at the sky, scattered stars, the brightest, only visible. "I liked that about him. I thought it had something childish. Like a younger brother. Reg didn't laugh much, so Peter was a nice surprise." He takes a breath. "Remus will say that we should have contain him. Put him in for a trial. To answer for his crimes."
"He did, answer for them." Snape says.
"Remus doesn't believe in brutal revenge. Perhaps if James had..." Sirius closes his eyes, opening them again a moment later. "Perhaps, only then."
"But you do." Snape replies.
"Yeah." Sirius lifts himself just enough, his elbows supporting his body. He looks at Snape, his disheveled state, the little cut on his cheek where Sirius' wand touched it. His clothes, beyond fixing now, because he strided towards a battle meant to be lost. The bruises that are sure to form at his skin, even if Sirius can't see them. The steadiness of his hands, as he takes another cigarette out of the pack left on the ground between them. The precision with which he lights it, puts it to his lips, moves it away.
The same precision he had as he cut Peter apart, as he lips parted to form the final command, the final blow, to end Peter's life. To end Sirius suffering.
"I want you to teach me that spell." Sirius says, and he wants more than that.
Snape looks back at him.
"It requires intent." He says. "It's a spell used for enemies." A clear purpose.
"Did you invent it for us?" Sirius asks. "For me?" Sirius pictures himself cut open, the ugliness of him, the most hidden parts out in the open.
"No." Snape replies simply.
Because he doesn't need a spell to do that. He has already done it.
Because Sirius was a threat, he thought he was, but Snape could have killed him if he wanted to.
A child Sirius mocked, a child that read about Horcruxes and Binding Vows at thirteen, while Sirius thought he was atop of the world.
A man doing whatever is necessary.
For enemies, Snape said. Yet he used it for Sirius.
"It needs precision. If you really want it to be lethal."
Sirius wants to be lethal. He is. He wants to clear a path so Snape doesn't have to. Like he did for him. An exchange, he thinks and it's not that. He wants to shred it all to pieces, to be focused and brutal, because Snape has seen that part too, he had matched it. Because he doesn't laugh at Sirius' silly jokes, because Sirius doesn't feel the need to say them.
"I can be." Sirius says. "Precise."
Snape scoffs, and there's a hidden amusement in it.
Sirius wants it to be open, not concealed, not hidden. He wants to hear a laughter, like the one back at James's house, like the one Lily caused.
"I'll teach you." Snape says and he stares at the horizon.
He wants to tell him to look back at him. He wants to demand for them to start right now.
Snape spares him a side glance.
Sirius wants him.