the view between villages

sirius

sirius hadn’t met barty and evan until he was sixteen. it was entirely by accident, and a mortifying event that even now he blanches over. he and remus had hidden themselves away in the astronomy tower for a secret snog, and barty had stumbled in with evan latched to his neck like a leech. he and barty had locked eyes, then blushed up to their ears, and barty had torn back down the stairs quicker than he’d staggered up them. 

he’s heard stories of barty and evan, though. barty was unhinged, truly an insane bloke. he’d once hexed the literal bollocks off a seventh year for calling dorcas a mudblood. he was fourteen at the time. he’d also threatened professor slughorn directly to his face for attempting to separate he and regulus during potions. he’d once slipped a hair loss potion into the gryffindor locker room because sirius had made regulus cry, and every quidditch player was hairless for a week before madam pomfrey managed to undo it. 

evan was a quiet kid. he was still just as cunning and ambitious, though he didn’t go out of his way to be known for his revenge plots. he’d gone for quieter things — charming the fat lady into forgetting the common room password, sending peeves after sirius and his friends, sending barty crouch sr a dead dove via school owl. he was discreet about his plotting, but he was just as protective as barty, and he gladly avenged his friends and his sister if he deemed it necessary. which he did, and on numerous occasions throughout the five years sirius had spent with him at hogwarts. 

he knows that they were regulus’ best friends, in any case. the slytherins — while being incredibly morally flawed and more willing to use dark arts — were loyal as dogs and fiercely loving. regulus had told him many stories of his time in slytherin since the end of the war, and he’d found himself thinking fondly of his own friend group back at hogwarts. regulus’ group was just as loyal, just as loving, just as devoted, only a bit more demented a lot less driven by a moral compass.

sometimes, it’s these stories that convinces sirius that he may have been better off in slytherin after all. in all fairness, he did try to use remus to kill severus snape for insulting regulus where sirius could hear him. he’s not proud of it, but he’d gladly do it again. perhaps with a different method this time. 

so with christmas fully ruined, sirius is willing to admit he has a semblance of an idea as to why regulus is cursing the life out of one of the blokes trampling on his wards. it’s barty, only it’s not, because barty has been dead for three years. whoever it is has certainly got a knack for finding corpses and using their hair for polyjuice. not-evan is writhing under pandora’s magic, gasping out pleas in a voice that sounds extremely familiar. 

“get the veritaserum, lily,” regulus grits over his shoulder. lily rushes off to do just that, very clearly startled. remus warms the space just to sirius’ right, growling low in his chest. if it weren’t for the current predicament and context, sirius would be on his knees. but alas, he’s got to cover up a murder today. 

“it won’t work,” cackles not-barty on the ground. sirius has to hand it to him. whoever this is has got a massive sack of bollocks on him to be able to laugh under regulus’ cruciatus. regulus has used it on him a handful of times, and it had been so extreme that he’d pissed himself and nearly drowned in his own vomit. the bloke is even standing! who in their right mind can withstand a curse like that? 

“say that again,” regulus spits through clenched teeth. 

“sixth year, you stupid fuck!” not-barty shouts, looking up at regulus with a certain sparkle of madness in his eye. “we took veritaserum and found out it wouldn’t work on me. i lied about my virginity!” 

“fuck,” regulus breathes. the red spark from his wand depletes, and barty collapses in on himself, panting and glaring up at regulus. sirius gulps. he doesn’t know why regulus stopped, but he’s got a very bad feeling about it. 

“fourth year. sirius made you cry. i slipped a peanut into his pudding at dinner, and he had such a severe bout of anaphylaxis that he seized and shit his pants,” not-barty (?) grits out. pandora eases up on her own torture curse, making a wounded sound. sirius can remember that event clear as day — he’d nearly died, and it took three separate potions to stabilize him. and, yes, he did shit himself, but he’d very much like to forget that fact. 

“holy fuck,” regulus mutters. “you’re dead! you can’t be here, because you’re dead!” 

“i’m not bloody dead, reg! and neither is evan, so you can stop with the fucking torture, panda!” barty snaps. pandora promptly drops her wand and staggers back a handful of steps, shaking her head and muttering to herself. sirius is starting to piece the picture together. perhaps this isn’t a hoax. perhaps these aren’t intruders. perhaps… perhaps evan and barty were never dead. 

“third year,” evan wheezes. “third year, you tried shaving your prick for the first time, and cut yourself. you’ve got a scar on your pubic bone. you use hair removal potions now because you’re terrified you’ll cut your cock off.” 

“i’ve got it!” lily shouts as she barrels into the front lawn. regulus clenches his jaw, something sirius knows he does to keep himself from crying. 

“tell me another one,” pandora says, her voice cracking clear down the center. evan laughs weakly as he drags himself up from the grass, tears twinkling in his eyes. 

“you had your first vision when you were six, and you’d gotten so excited you’d accidentally set the curtains on fire. i tried to put it out by pissing on it,” evan says. sirius places a hand on regulus’ shoulder, who immediately collapses into his side in a heap of heaving sobs. pandora is down the stairs before any of them can stop her, snatching her brother’s quivering form into her arms with a great wail. 

“i thought you were dead, fucking wanker!” she shrieks. evan doesn’t even flinch as he hugs her with a ferocity sirius has only ever seen in himself. he likes to call it the big brother hug — only big brothers can embrace someone so wholly and completely, covering their sibling’s entire body with their own. it’s protective, a natural instinct you develop when you’ve got a younger sibling. only regulus is privy to them, and apparently it’s the same for the rosier twins. 

“believe us now, reg?” barty pants. regulus staggers out of sirius’ arms and down the stairs, crying so hard he nearly collapses into barty’s open arms. 

“i am so confused,” lily whispers to sirius. sirius shrugs, a small smile tugging at the corners of his lips. 

“they’ve come home, apparently,” he whispers back. he turns his head toward the sitting room, where dorcas is standing nervously. she’s switching her weight between feet, eyes darting between the undead couple on the lawn and her terrified girlfriend. “well, cas? go get your boys already.” 

“oh bloody hell,” dorcas shouts as she passes in a flurry. she’s down the stairs almost as quickly as pandora had been, flying to collect both evan and barty by their ears and all but dragging them inside. “wankers! where the everloving fuck have you been all these years? we buried empty caskets for you and everything!” 

“she’s so hot,” marlene mutters, utterly besotted, and sirius cackles. 

“lily,” regulus cries through hiccuping sobs, collapsing once again against sirius. “lily, go get our boys. please, i-i need barty to meet them.” 

“of course,” lily hushes, taking regulus by the hands. she guides him away toward the basement, hooking an arm around his waist to support his weight. sirius tosses his own arm around remus and guides him back into the house and to the sitting room, where dorcas is still lecturing evan and barty as pandora wraps the two of them in as many blankets as she can find. 

“you could’ve visited!” dorcas shouts, though she’s setting the logs in the fireplace on fire. “we’ve been missing you for three bloody years! not a single letter! nothing to hint that you’re alive!” 

“to be fair, dorky, you’d denounced us the moment evan took the mark,” barty mutters petulantly, his voice shivering along with the rest of him. he’s got evan’s hands in his, and he’s rubbing them together to create heat. 

“that means absolutely nothing,” dorcas sniffs, her nose held high. “we’d have liked at least a postcard from wherever the two of you fucked off to.” 

“we sent one,” evan huffs. “we sent it to grimmauld a year and a half ago, when we came out of hiding. reg never wrote back, so we figured you lot still hated us.” 

“regulus has been living here for almost two years,” sirius points out. barty glares at him, though it doesn’t scare him in the slightest. he did grow up with regulus ‘grumpy and gloomy’ black, after all. he doesn’t think anything could really scare him after seeing regulus awake before seven am. 

“and we had a hard time finding this fucking place because of it,” barty huffs. “we stopped at grimmauld first, nearly had our skin dissolved in the wards. then we tried pandora, but she’d moved. then we tried dorcas, and the wards around her place tried to bite our bloody heads off.” 

“i don’t know why you have the strongest wards out of us all,” evan mutters, a shaky smile on his face. “but i’m even more puzzled on why regulus’ are the weakest.” 

“it’s because regulus has the strength to back himself up without wards,” remus snorts. he sits down in regulus’ favorite armchair and tugs sirius with him. sirius blushes to his ears at the gesture, settling himself on remus’ lap. 

“figures he’d be arrogant like that,” barty sighs wistfully. “panda, remember when regulus hexed that sixth year into the infirmary first year?” 

“i do,” pandora confirms, her face still frozen into permanent shock. tears are streaming silently down her face. “he defeated voldemort in ten minutes. i think it’s his personal best with a duel.” 

“i dueled moody and couldn’t take him down even after forty-five,” evan whines, sniffling. he’s had a runny nose since the cold of the cruciatus set in, which is both hilarious and endearing. evan has a bit of a baby face, and he’s more cute than hot, so his runny nose is rather reminiscent of harry when he gets a cold. sirius is struck with the sudden urge to pinch at his chubby cheeks. 

“pa’foot!” harry shrieks. sirius whips his head around, grinning at the sight of harry skipping along between regulus and lily. james staggers along just behind, wearing a pink on his cheeks and a swell to his lips that sirius decidedly does not want to question. not when his brother is flushed from head to toe and his lips look bitten. no, no, he refuses to think on it. 

“haz, follow me,” regulus hushes, wiping tears hastily from his cheeks. lily follows along behind the two of them and james stops in the threshold of the sitting room. harry toddles over to the couch where barty and evan are bundled up, his little eyebrows furrowed and his body halfway hidden behind reggie’s. 

“this is barty, and this is evan,” lily murmurs to the toddler, pointing between the couple on the couch. barty’s got stars in his eyes looking at the little tot, and evan’s eyes fill up with tears when xenophilius squeezes past james with luna in his arms. 

“oh, panda,” evan punches out. pandora sweeps over to take her daughter from xeno’s arms depositing her firmly into evan’s lap. luna makes quick work of tugging at the man’s chin-length braids, nearly ripping one of the silver charms out of them. 

“is he yours?” barty blurts, looking up at regulus frantically. reg looks to lily, pink on his cheeks, and then nods bashfully. 

“yeah. not by blood, but by choice. he’s my little boy,” regulus says, voice full of so much emotion that sirius is blinking back tears. regulus hasn’t sounded that vulnerable since… well, since ever. it’s a beautiful thing to witness. 

“her name is luna,” pandora then says. evan gasps, whipping his head up to look at her. 

“luna?” he chokes out. pandora nods, swiping a few tears hastily from her cheeks. sirius doesn’t understand the importance of little luna’s name, but clearly it’s of some significance, because evan breaks down into shuttering sobs and holds luna so tightly to his chest that she starts squirming. 

“i cannot believe you’ve adopted a crotch goblin,” barty says. regulus scoffs, kicking at barty’s shin, who breaks out into cackles. 

“believe me,” remus snickers. “none of us can believe it either. he started hunting horcruxes the minute voldemort was talking about killing a baby.” 

“is this the baby?” barty asks, amused. regulus huffs, plopping down on the floor and letting harry hide away in his chest. 

“sure is. got a problem, bartemius?” he challenges. sirius snaps his eyes to the door where james is standing just in time to catch draco darting out, nearly knocking james flat on his arse. 

“draco lucius malfoy!” narcissa hollers behind him. nymphadora follows him right in, shoulder checking james’ hip with enough force to actually knock him on his arse. sirius promptly bursts into laughter so strong he falls right out of remus’ lap and directly into lily’s thigh. 

“ew, don’t touch me,” lily gags, shoving sirius into the floor. he gasps with laughter, choking back the contents of his stomach with how hard he’s cackling. he can hear james howling with it in the kitchen, and barty’s choking on it from the couch. 

“i can see how coming here may have been a mistake,” evan muses. marlene wheezes her affirmation from across the room as she too collapses to the floor with the strength of her laughter. it’s a chain reaction of the four of them — one of them snorts or wheezes or makes a funny noise, the rest of them break out into more crippling laughter. sirius genuinely hasn’t laughed this hard in so long. 

“a big mistake,” he hears lily mutter. regulus grunts. remus huffs. 

“we’ve brought all the idiots together into one room,” dorcas remarks dryly. 

it takes twenty minutes for the mood to return to somber. harry passes out, sprawled out on narcissa’s lap with draco barely holding onto consciousness. lily’s got regulus’ head against her shoulder, and james is playing good housewife in the kitchen with ted. xenophilius has pandora trapped in his lap with luna slumped against his side, only because pandora had spent nearly five minutes punching the fuck out of barty’s shoulder for ‘keeping her brother from her.’ 

“how did you even survive?” regulus asks, voice soft as not to wake the three toddlers. sirius makes himself comfortable on remus’ lap again, running his fingers through his soft brown curls. barty clears his throat and evan squirms in his seat, worrying his lip between his teeth. 

“couple of dead muggles, a really powerful puppetry spell, emergency polyjuice, and evan’s best glamour spells,” barty responds, voice tight. 

“you killed muggles?” andromeda gawks from the loveseat by the fireplace. evan shakes his head vigorously. 

“no, no! of course not!” he cries. “we looted a couple of graves when snape warned us that voldemort had dirt on us. the muggles had been dead long enough that they’d begun decaying, but not too long for polyjuice to work on them. very poor embalming on the mortician’s part.” 

“i cannot believe,” regulus whispers, “that you went grave robbing without me. we made a pact.” 

“yeah, i’m aware,” barty sighs as he rubs at his pelvic bone. “nearly lost my prick over your stupid blood pact. i didn’t realize you were being literal when you said my dick would fall off.” 

“a shame that would be,” evan says sardonically. “we both know it’s the only reason i tolerate your bullshit.” 

“here, here,” remus mutters. sirius scoffs and puts an elbow in his side as regulus gags. 

“you and i both know that you’re in it for a lot more than my beautiful cock,” he huffs petulantly. remus snickers and presses a soft kiss to his lips, effectively erasing every bit of betrayal he feels. 

“it’s definitely not for your brilliant brain,” marlene snorts. 

“say that again, mckinnon,” sirius hisses, pointing his wand at her. she grins crookedly as she raises her hands in surrender. 

“enough,” lily sighs. james comes back into the room then, levitating a cup of tea for every adult in the room, and an almost-overflowing glass of wine to regulus. regulus, alarmingly enough, guzzles half of it in one ginormous gulp. james levitates the entire bottle and leaves it floating above regulus’ head, ready to refill his glass, and plops down on reg’s other side. 

“either way, we’re glad to see you’re alive,” mary says with sincerity. sirius takes a moment to wonder how they’d even met, then remembers that the three of them had been in slug club with regulus and lily. “pandora’s been losing her wits over the two of you since she found out about your fake death.” 

“can we please not talk about that?” pandora whispers, her eyes downcast. sirius clenches his jaw, but doesn’t comment, even though he’s still royally pissed over what she’d done to reg. he’ll get his revenge soon enough. 

“we’ve been tracking your arse for months, reg,” barty sighs, wrapping himself fully around evan. 

“i’m sorry i hid myself so well,” regulus comments sarcastically, raising an eyebrow as his hand blindly strokes over lily’s calve. “would you rather i drop the wards on grimmauld and make happy with my parents’ corpses? i’m sure mummy and daddy would love for me to tap dance on the floorboards over them.” 

“i would actually love to see that,” dorcas comments with a snicker. barty seconds her statement, and andromeda thirds it. sirius hums his agreement. james makes a distinctly horrified noise. 

“only if we can dress mine up like pirates,” evan says softly. pandora cackles out loud at this, leaning fully into her husband for support. 

“oh, merlin. i’d forgotten you killed mum and dad,” she muses. evan smiles fondly at her, running his hand through her hair. 

“i did it the second dad tried to force you into a marriage with that avery bloke.” 

“ew, avery?” dorcas asks incredulously. 

“avery,” pandora confirms. 

“slaughtered them in their sleep. they deserved it. dora, remember when dad threw you down the stairs for wearing trousers?” evan says. his lips are turned up like it’s a joke, but it’s very much not and sirius knows it. he wonders if this is what it looks like when he and regulus chat about their childhood. 

“mother did something similar to sirius once,” regulus muses. “she broke all the fingers in his wand hand because he wore a pearl necklace.” 

“that’s nothing compared to when dad hung evan by his toes for using the wrong fork at dinner,” pandora babbles. 

“remember when mother put you in a body bind and stuffed you in the attic because you tried writing with your left hand?” sirius finds himself asking regulus. reg scoffs, a small grin on his lips. 

“or that one time father backhanded you so hard you flew through the second story window and crashed into the wards. what did you even do?” he says. sirius feels his entire face turn pink. 

“he, uh, used legilimency. saw something he definitely shouldn’t have,” sirius mutters embarrassedly. pandora snorts. 

“my mother once used it on me and saw a memory of me fooling around with a girl in my year. she cast a mouth numbing charm so strong that i bit off my tongue and andy had to spell it back on,” narcissa says primly, taking her long fingernails gently over harry’s scalp. 

“what the actual fuck?” james sputters. it’s then that sirius realizes how many people in the room are downright horrified by the conversation, and he immediately turns a dark shade of red. being around so many pureblood kids is really skewering his filter. normally he wouldn’t indulge this much information and, judging by the flush narcissa wears, she usually doesn’t either. 

“i knew purebloods were fucked up, but not this fucked up,” lily blanches. 

“oh, it gets a lot worse than that,” andy muses. “tip of the ice berg, really. marlene, was your family like that?” 

“to an extent,” marlene sighs as she leans fully onto dorcas. “we aren’t sacred 28, so the expectations weren’t as strong, but father did value all those extreme magical punishments. locked me in a closet for six days once because i hugged a house elf.” 

“mother tried cutting my fingers off for giving kreacher a biscuit one time,” regulus murmurs. 

“my father did cut my fingers off for it. spelled them back on a few hours later when he realized i’d keep spilling my tea without them,” barty muses. 

“i am so glad i’m not pureblood,” remus mutters. “i thought lycanthropy was bad, but this is so much worse.” 

“oh, no, darling,” sirius hushes, cupping remus’ face in his hands. “it honestly wasn’t that bad.” 

“i am becoming more and more upset the more you lot talk about it,” mary says. 

“they do this all the time,” dorcas says through a yawn. “you get used to it eventually.” 

“or you don’t,” xenophilius says amusedly. sirius realizes that this is the first time he’s actually spoken during the entire christmas celebration. he feels a bit bad for not noticing sooner, but xenophilius does tend to be a bit on the quieter side in large social settings like this. perhaps he’ll grow out of it with age. 

“we should probably all head to bed,” mary whispers, looking pointedly at where regulus’ head is drooping. he seems to catch himself dozing off and snaps his head back up, only to do the exact same thing again. sirius can remember distinctly how regulus had done that throughout his childhood, fighting sleep until he wound up collapsing into a drooling mess on top of whatever book he’d been reading. 

“he’s about to pass out,” sirius chuckles. james releases a breathy laugh through his nose, smiling fondly as lily gently guides regulus’ head to her shoulder. he goes willingly, promptly going limp against her body, soft snores spilling from his lips. 

“i’d say we’ll head home, but we don’t exactly have one of those at the moment,” barty whispers sheepishly. evan huffs and swats at his leg as pandora perks up from her almost-slumber she’d sunk into against her husband. 

“you’ll come home with xeno and i,” she hurries to say. “it’ll be fine, right xeno?” 

“of course,” xenophilius says softly. pandora beams, looking eagerly to her brother and his boyfriend. evan immediately nods, though barty hesitates a moment before he agrees. sirius is assuming that barty is only hesitant because of his reunion with his best friend. 

“i’ll get haz into bed if the two of you want to wrangle the dark prince into bed,” sirius offers in a whisper. narcissa snickers as she carefully passes harry from her lap and into sirius’ arms. he holds the little tyke to his chest and carefully climbs the stairs to the second floor, tracking down the bedroom regulus had somehow found the time to convert into a room for harry. there’s a fun space theme to it, with astronauts and spaceships and an accurate replica of the night sky charmed to the ceiling instead of a nightlight. 

harry barely stirs as sirius settles him beneath the blankets, merely curling up with the stuffed dog toy beside his pillow. sirius exits the room and pulls the door shut silently behind him, waving to james and lily, who are somehow pulling a half asleep regulus into his own bedroom. remus follows behind them and gently takes sirius’ elbow, guiding him to the spare they always snatch up when they visit over night. usually it’s reserved for when sirius drinks so much that he can’t see, but it’ll do for tonight. he only hopes that narcissa and draco can track down their own guest room without regulus’ guidance. 

“that was,” he whispers, then puffs out a heavy sigh as he strips to his pants and climbs in bed beside remus. “so fucking much.” 

“nothing like a good resurrection for christmas, right?” remus humors, curling up behind sirius. siri chuckles, lacing his fingers with remus’ on top of the pristine white sheets. they’ll be tangled and wrinkly in the morning, likely dampened by sirius’ incessant drooling, but for now they’re soft and smell of lavender. 

“we can never get a day of rest in this bloody family,” he laments playfully. remus breathes a laugh as he presses a kiss to sirius’ shoulder, then extinguishes the lighting charm on the room.

in the dark, sirius can feel every breath of remus’ against his shoulders, and he can hear harry mumbling in his sleep down the hall, and narcissa struggling to get draco into a set of pyjamas, and lily singing a soft lullaby to her partners. he loves how alive regulus’ house feels now. it’s a ginormous change from the emptiness of july and august, and a far cry from his own childhood in grimmauld place. he’s so thankful that harry and draco and nymphadora and luna can have something secure, something worth being part of.