The Valley, Godric's Hollow
It wasn’t something Sirius had wanted to know, only he was so bored.
Bored wasn’t really it. He was just sick and tired of everything. Remus hadn’t come, because they’d had the kind of fight where you both knew the other fellow had a point, but it was such a sick-making point that you didn’t want to look at each other for a while, because, really, no one should be trying to make a point like that.
And Remus shouldn’t have been trying to. Okay, Sirius completely understood that he was depressed about the wolfsbane potion research getting cut off. And if he’d had any ideas about how to do anything about it, or Sirius had, Sirius would have cheered him on all the way, or dived in, or whatever it took. But sitting around moping—that wasn’t a life choice you defended, that was something you couldn’t help, and let your friends yank you out of.
That was how you acted when you weren’t just dying but already half-dead. And just because a person could live half-dead (for years and years, look at Sirius’s poor old dad, who was good enough at it that Reggie, that idiot, thought he was just a quiet, laid-back sort) didn’t mean they should be just allowed to get miserably on with it. Not when there was anyone around who cared about them.
For his part, Moony had said Sirius was being insensitive. And then the fight had turned into whether insensitivity towards wallowers was extremely unfriendly or actually sort of called for. And then Remus had said some quite polite and theoretically-mollifying and really extraordinarily insulting things about how it was nice that Sirius tried to use his native talents at manipulating people for their own good but that didn’t especially make it better, Paddy. If he’d been anyone else Sirius would have hit him. Just to prove he did not think like a Real Black, thank you, because a Real Black would hex.
And then Remus had suggested that Sirius should go and have a nice time somewhere that was away, since he wasn’t enjoying Remus’s mood, and maybe go pull someone pretty and uncomplicated.
So Sirius had said maybe he would, and slammed the door, and slunk off to sulk on Prongs’s sofa and complain at the sprog. You could rely on Harry not to tell you you were being an idiot, although there was some danger of having your nose grabbed and your shoulder burped on and your hair tangled rather disgustingly for you.
He was thinking of cutting it—that would foil the little snatcher, and also possibly teach Moony a lesson. Muggles were doing quite interesting things these days that would show off his face nicely, and he was sure he could do a quite good job of them with Sleekeezy’s or something like that, if not make improvements, so he probably wouldn’t regret it much. Besides, if he did, or if Moony stopped being a dugbog, he could always grow it back.
Only, the problem with coming to sulk on Prongs’s sofa (apart from the glum suspicion that Remus knew perfectly well he was doing that instead of actually finding some bird to pull) was that it was also Lily’s sofa. Even on a normal day, she tended to treat Sirius as if he might explode on purpose. Besides, you never knew when she’d have some of her friends over, which had been irritating even before she’d got pregnant.
She didn’t now, what with not having been in when he got there, and she wasn’t (for a wonder) scolding him over Moony. But the other thing about Lily was that when Sirius came over to visit and it wasn’t to work on a project with her or otherwise get under her skin, she had a nasty habit of ignoring him almost the same way other people ignored house elves.
Not exactly the same way—it wasn’t that she pretended he wasn’t there until she wanted something. But she did rather take the position that when he was in her house just to hang out at James’ place for lack of anywhere better to be, he was there as an appendage of James and should be treated, if treated as present at all, as some combination of babysitter (this part was new) and furniture.
Highly decorative furniture, naturally, and definitely not to be sat on.
This had its benefits. It meant she’d got comfortable enough with having him around to let him in (or not chuck him out when he’d let himself in) even when she wanted to be alone, on the understanding that he would actually leave her alone if she really meant it.
Well, if she really meant it and didn’t just think she meant it because she was upset about something and had been raised not to yell in the direction of anyone she wasn’t mad at.
And he did get to watch Prongs being ridiculous, and monitor how seriously she was shooting him down—and really, Prongs was completely mental, falling for a bird whose ingrained reaction to having fun was to be stern at him.
But you couldn’t argue with him, Sirius had tried and tried. At this point it was best just to make the best of it, and it wasn’t as if she was a hundredth as bad as Sirius’s mum. Things could have been much worse; she hadn’t even given in to Prongs in the end even a little bit, as far as Sirius could tell (and he’d looked for it hard) because he was in fact the best catch a muggle-born witch their age could snag.
There were blokes that would have been just as clever matches for girls with more magic in their family backgrounds, but most of them had parents that would have, best case, been a bit stiff and uncomfortable with a muggleborn daughter-in-law. Whereas Cousin Dorea had decades since had any lingering Black prejudices dazed and chatterboxed out of her by her husband, who appeared to be congenitally incapable of disapproving of anyone.
But Lily hadn’t even done the basic research into her classmates that anyone would have expected her to do, let alone the careful research into James’s family that no one could have faulted her for. She really had picked him in the end just because she liked him, even if she didn’t appreciate quite all of him.
That was more than a lot of purebloods could hope for from a spouse. Even James might have found the decision taken away from him, no matter how relaxed Charlus and Cousin Dorea were about letting him be his own man, if he’d spent so long on a girl he’d turned out not to have any hope with that they’d started to get really worried about his other prospects drying up.
But she wasn’t exactly a Hufflepuff, was she? Sirius worried about that sometimes. When your best mate’s girl had a history of chucking lifelong friends who were sickeningly (very,very sickeningly) devoted to her because they weren’t slavishly living up to her standards…
No matter how justified it had been (very, very justified), you worried. Lots of people would assume that a ring and a baby would matter a lot here, but Sirius never knew what Lily would take it into her head to do, except that whatever it was would be done in the name of high-mindedness, even if she wouldn’t exactly call it that.
And the biggest problem with her treating Sirius like sort-of-the-furniture and James being used to having him about all the time was that they didn’t bother to treat him like a guest in front of whom they shouldn’t fight.
As witness now, when he woke up from snoozing on their sofa to have a baby plopped unceremoniously on his lap while neither of them so much as said hallo, Padfoot to him and Jamie just went on huffing, “And don’t think I don’t know what you were about. Help him pack up his kitchen! As if it proves anything that he doesn’t keep poisons in the kitchen, obviously he’s got all his nasty stuff in some lab somewhere, or under his bed or something!”
Ah. They were arguing about Snivelly again. Sirius would have gone four-footed and clamped his paws over his eyes with his ears for padding, only then he would have dropped Harry. He looked at the sprog—eyes still sort-of-bluish if you wanted to call it that, unlikely to stay that way what with Lily’s being green and Jamie’s brown, although the Potters didn’t have Hey Look At Me I’m A Wizard eyes that were reliably hereditary like the Blacks did.
Actually, Sirius thought Lily’s eyes might end up being that sort of family trait, because he’d looked at lots of muggle magazines, not to mention posters, and lots of the mags had been stuffed with cosmetics tips and similar, and the ones that had talked about bringing out the green in a girl’s eyes (mostly girls’ eyes) had shown pictures of eyes that were vaguely green at best. Licheny, sort of, in the most extreme cases, but mostly sort of shadowy or stony, or with different colors mixed up that gave a sort of overall green effect from a distance. But the Tartan and old Sluggy had really green eyes, and Lily’s were brighter than theirs. Maybe, Sirius had thought sometimes, it was magic’s way of making sure it wasn’t ignored when it got born into a muggle family.
—Looked at the sprog who was preventing him from hiding him from the oncoming storm and said, “Already inconveniencing your elders, Harrificus Terriblis? I approve.” Harry’s gaze sort of lurched over to him from following his mum and tried (with, judging from the kid’s dazed look, only moderate success) to focus on Sirius’s face. Which face he therefore brought closer, and scrunched it up and opened wide a few times, since Harry was unequipped to appreciate it properly and mustn’t be bored. Clearly it had been thoughtless of him to be three whole feet away when the Pronglet’s eyes were all new.
He thought for a second he’d got a smile out of him, even though everyone had said it’d be too early for Harry to smile because he meant it for weeks yet, but no. Everyone was not yet proved wrong: it was only gas. Sirius swung the kid up into the air and onto his arm to broom-fly him over to the changing thingy (making the appropriate zooming noises, of course) in case gas was only a precursor of something nastier.
It wasn’t, in this case. Less fortunately, the changing whozit was closer to the kitchen, where Lily and James were sitting glaring at each other across their breakfast table, ignoring the cat winding plaintively around their ankles and neglecting their silencing charms.
And he hadn’t wanted to know, but… but it wasn’t the particular fight he’d come here to get a break from, and Jamie might need him, and if they hadn’t put up an anti-listening spell they must not care if he heard…
“…That maybe it had nothing to do with you?” Lily was demanding hotly. “Not everything does, you know.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Reading between the lines,” Sirius told Harry, fairly quietly, grinning, “I’d say it means she thinks your Daddy’s still a bit conceited, mate.” Harry looked as if this was far too much to take in, and made a grab for Sirius’s nose. Probably a wise choice, Sirius felt. Showed good taste and all.
“It means I wanted to talk with Evan before he did something stupid he couldn’t take back!”
“And you weren’t concerned Snape would do ‘something stupid’ if you left him alone with me?” James demanded, outraged.
Looking up from the baby in morbid curiosity, Sirius saw Lily give James her tight, tiny-lipped sigh with the big exasperated eyes. “Of course not, Jamie, he’s on—” She checked herself and glanced Sirius’s way. He instantly resumed making weird faces at the baby. “On my side,” she resumed, a little more temperately (interesting).
Sirius waited for James to argue hotly with her.
All that happened (?!) was Lily continuing, “He doesn’t want to have a fight with me, especially not one where even he doesn’t think he has the moral high ground.”
James did snort cynically at that, so possibly something strange was going on but at least Prongs wasn’t under a confundus.
“Besides,” Lily went on, “I didn’t leave him alone with you, I left you with Harry. Sev wouldn’t do anything to hurt a baby.”
“Yeah, because he’s such a—”
“You don’t have to think it’s because he’s a nice person,” Lily cut James off irritably. “He’s been helping his mum take care of other people’s babies since he was only little. You can say it’s just habit, if you like, but he just wouldn’t. You saw what he was like when I gave him Harry to hold, Jamie.”
Sirius nearly swallowed his teeth, and started patting Harry down for nasty runes and unpromising stains. Happily, not only did he find none, but Harry, to the extent that his teeny little baby mind was capable of coming to anything a fellow might call a conclusion, seemed to think he was playing a game, and wriggled gleefully.
“Yeah, I saw he didn’t want to!”
“Well, you also saw he held him right, James,” Lily said sharply. “Your friends wanted to hold Harry, and they all made a pig’s ear of it for days. They weren’t a bit comfortable with him and they made him cry, being so stiff and nervous. So did you for the first day or so, for that matter.”
“So what?” James returned hotly. “He’s probably had plenty of practice with that Malfoy kid. He and Narcissa Black are pals.”
Lily paused, and when Sirius looked at her, she had an odd expression, as if James had said something that was inarguably true but not the way anybody normal would have put it. It wasn’t a bad odd, though, it was her sometimes I love how weird you wizards are look, with the corner of her mouth tugging up, although it had taken a while for Sirius to work out that was what she meant by it. He didn’t know what she meant by it now, exactly. Snape and Cissy were pals; Sirius had been telling people that for years before they’d graduated and stopped pretending they weren’t.
Well, actually, he’d told people they were having a torrid monochromatic affair. But only because they were pretending so hard not to have anything to do with each other. It had been a logical conclusion. It was to his credit, he felt, that he’d forgot how tangled-up things got inside snake-brains (if you could call them brains), that they thought it was clever to act like you weren’t friends with your best friends.
“I don’t quite see why you think his bonding a lot with one baby of his own free will quite recently makes him more likely to hurt babies than helping his mum look after a lot of babies as a kid,” Lily said in her reasonable voice, although it was a little marred by the way she was obviously trying not to laugh.
James looked a little abashed. Sirius thought that was a good idea—would put Lily in a better mood with him and all—although he doubted James had done it on purpose. Typically, the skinny lug ruined it by not admitting she might have a point in favor of exclaiming, “That’s not the point!”
Everybody but Harry looked at him in patient interest (Harry was looking at the cat, who’d got bored with nobody petting her in the kitchen and had jumped onto the changing whatzit to nose whiskerishly at him. This lasted for an entire five seconds until Harry flailed excitedly, whopped the very-strangely-named-by-Lily Tigger more or less on the schnozz by no means on purpose, and was abandoned with a yowl of feline affront).
James been neck and neck with Sirius for first in everything but Potions and Charms in their House and year, and they’d both been in the top five in nearly all their classes period, even the ones they were sharing with the Ravenclaws. You couldn’t count Potions against them, and especially not against James, not considering all the problems with the seating arrangements Sluggy had never seemed to see a problem with.
Sirius was very glad to have this concrete evidence, and the even more adamantine proof of their OWL and NEWT scores, which you couldn’t charm your way through except for the actually-charms one, that Prongs wasn’t stupid. Prongs wasn’t stupid.
It was just, sometimes he could be a bit thick. Mostly only when it was about good old Hydrangea, though, so probably that shouldn’t be counted against him. You had to expect a bloke not to be at his most scintillating when a bird had him by the nadgers.
Eventually, good old Hydrangea broke down and asked, “Was there a point?” Admittedly, it was in a tone that said she sensibly didn’t want to know and was slightly dreading the answer. She did ask, though, instead of, say, pressing her advantage, or changing the subject just enough. Which only went to show she was not-stupid-but-a-bit-thick, too. So, Sirius supposed, there you were.
“The point,” James said resentfully, “is I don’t see why you had to talk to Rosier in the first place.”
“Because,” Lily said again, as slowly if she was talking to someone who was actually dim—well, really more slowly than that, so as to drive the insult of it home, well done Daffodil. “I had to make sure he wasn’t going to do something stupid.”
“Yeah, Lily, I heard you the first time,” James said irritably. “My point is, why exactly did you have to?”
“You heard what he—”
“Yes, Lily, I heard what the nice Slytherin said,” James snapped, not quite as slowly as she had, lowering his chin a bit. Sirius could almost see his antlers, though of course he wasn’t wearing any at the moment. “Just because a Slytherin says something that sounds pretty doesn’t mean we jump in and put stock in it.”
Sirius’s ears pricked with interest, and he gathered Harry up, bouncing him nice and slow in the hopes of forestalling any potential complaining noises that might interrupt. Of course, there was always a chance of a nappy incident or Harry getting hungry, but Harry was a well-behaved kid so far, as long as nobody left him alone for too long. He didn’t kick up a fuss for no reason at all, the way Sirius had been assured he himself had on every possible occasion.
“We also don’t throw an idea into the rubbish tip just because it happens to come from someone who was in a particular House, James,” Lily folded her arms tightly. Sirius buttoned his lip on er yes we do, and knew James was doing, too. “Do you have one thing you can actually hold against Rosier, other than who his family is or who he cares about? And you might want not to say that who he cares about is quite important, because I care about Sev too, Jamie, even when I couldn’t be friends with him it didn’t mean I didn’t care about it, so just don’t you dare. You name one real thing, go on.”
Sirius could see James want very badly to say, Well, he did break my wand, but he wasn’t that thick. Reminding Lily of that time they’d pushed Sniv far enough that he’d lashed out at her so hard she’d dropped him would really not have been the best of plans. Wouldn’t have been even if Evvie had broken Jamie’s wand in a really malicious way, instead of as a shock-and-awe disarming technique because he’d seen, from his broom, that one prefect was giving silent consent and another had already failed to break things up and Jamie had fallen into such an ugly mood that it was going to take something seriously jarring to hit his inertia off the rails.
Evvie could be like that, Sirius remembered from when they’d had holidays together. He’d just sit listlessly with a book or his drawings, ignoring everybody, for hours, until Bella was all transported with imagination and Andi was at her wits’ end, or Sirius and his mother had been screaming at each other so long that Dad had given up and carted Reggie off. And then he’d look up, and look aggravated behind that droopy, glazed-over, can’t-be-arsed look he’d always had back then.
And then he’d say very loudly that his house elf made sure he ate at regular intervals, so that Kreacher swooped in and started fussing until Mother started yelling at Kreacher instead. Or he’d challenge Narcissa to a contest where each of them picked one of Cissy’s sisters and tried to make their frock the nicest. Or, then again, he might turn all the fleur-de-lises in the wallpaper into real flowers ‘just to see if he could, he hadn’t thought to make sure they stayed attached to the walls, whoops, er, oh dear, erm, possibly he hadn’t got the pollen quite right, they should probably evacuate the room right about now.’
Bella had tried to keep fighting through the frocks contest, though Andi had seized on it with relief, but hadn’t managed to keep her temper lost or even a straight face on for very long after Cissy had put Andi in the perfectly ridiculous pink poufy fairy-princess thing.
It likely wouldn’t have occurred to Evvie to actually break anybody’s neck, or even their legs, but given how mental and over-the-top his solutions to ‘people are bothering me’ could be, Jamie was probably lucky it had just been his wand. Sirius had realized that at the time and bustled his friend off. James didn’t really know Evan at all, though, for all the classes they’d had together and despite being technically about as closely related to him as he was to Sirius.
Instead of being a complete fuckwit, thank Merlin, James said, “It’s not about having anything against him, Lily. If you want me to say he’s not as poisonous as the rest of them, fine, as far as we know, he’s not.”
“As far as we know,” Lily repeated, groaning expressively and rolling her eyes. “James…”
“Look, everybody underestimates Pete, and he’s not even Slytherin, okay? And nobody’s got any idea about Remus who hasn’t been told, and even the Tartan doesn’t know he’s not the only one of us that can go all fuzzy, right? I’m just saying, if we don’t know a bloke well, we shouldn’t think we know all about him, that’s all, and we do know he’s got some damn strong connections to some pretty unsavory people, Lily.”
“Your magnanimity is just bowling me over, Sir Galahad, I’ve gone all faint at the knees,” Lily said crossly, but she sat back to let him talk.
“Well there’s luck,” Sirius murmured to Harry. “You’ll be able to beat your mum at head-shoulders-knees-and-toes by age three. ‘Course, that means she won’t be able to help you with your transfig homework, but you’ll have your daddy and your uncles for that, yeah?”
Harry made an enthusiastic blorftgeee! noise, and waved his appendages about because someone was talking at him. Sirius laughed, not trying to hide it because it was perfectly natural to laugh at Harry being spastic-baby, and put the kid on his back to do swimming-legs with him.
There was a pause where he could very nearly feel Mummy and Daddy-Prongs smiling at the side of his neck, and then they’d turned back at each other.
“All right,” Lily sighed. “It’s not about having anything against him?”
“Well, it’s not,” James said stoutly. “It’s just, he said that, and you just jumped at it, which is—I mean, first of all, yuck, Lily—”
Sirius didn’t have to be looking at them or know what they were talking about to know Lily was glaring at Prongs. Definitely a bit thick.
“And Sn—Snape just about jumped him, which is not something a person does because someone’s said something that’s correct and obvious, Lils. That was bizarre. That was Slytherin-bizarre.”
“No, that was Sev,” Lily corrected him, magically no longer fussed. She even sounded like she was smiling a bit. “It’s what he said about making Rosier do his abstracts.”
Sirius was itching to turn around and ask questions, but he just kept on moving Harry’s legs about.
“What, that Rosier’s ‘fundamentally lazy?’” James asked dubiously.
Sirius grabbed Harry’s foot and started blowing raspberries on it to keep from snorgling out loud. Evan, in Sirius’s opinion, was only lazy if every Hufflepuff who couldn’t be bothered to try out for Quidditch because classes were hard for them and they were determined to keep up was lazy: all his energy went into doing hard work for his art, and there just wasn’t anything left to be lazy or not-lazy with. But he could see Snivvy thinking that, hear his voice saying exactly those words even without James trying to imitate his climber’s clipped-drawl. Poor Evvie. It was his own doing, because he’d had plenty of chances to pick whoever he wanted, but he deserved so much better.
Not that that was saying much. Bella deserved better than Snape.
“Oh, Jamie,” Lily, sighed, and then she, unusually, sort of giggled. There was a wiggling-around-in-a-chair move, and then she said, in a very stuffy voice that was trying to be lower than she could actually get, “My good man, you see, but you do not observe.” Back in her own voice, “Look, when we were kids, I used to get these magazines with cartoons, that would be…” she trailed off a little helplessly. “Er, really hard to describe…”
“Got all night, Lils,” Jamie said expansively.
“Well.. you’d have, say, a man sitting on a chair smoking a cigar, and a weight drops on his head, and he drops the cigar, which makes a big fire out of some kindling, and the man’s wife is sitting over it, so of course she gets angry and sharpens this big knife she has on a grindstone she’s sitting in front of, and that turns a wheel that lowers a ladle into and out of this really giant bottle of olives. And then there’s something just as complicated with a glass-cutter and an alarm clock if you don’t get an olive out in the first fifteen seconds, I think it was.”
Silence. With which Sirius was in complete sympathy.
“Well, exactly,” Lily evidently answered Jamie’s probably goggle-eyed look. “But it was supposed to be silly, James, it was a cartoon, it was just for fun. There were loads of them. They were brilliant, they were really popular with muggles. And Sev thought they were stupid, but, you know, you’d think he wouldn’t read them if he thought they were that stupid. But he would read them, he always read them, and then he’d stare at them for quite a long time looking like he couldn’t believe anyone could be that stupid, and then he’d start shouting, ‘Use a fishing pole! Tip the bottle over! Use the damn glass-cutter in the first place! Go to the bloody store and get a normal-sized bottle!’” With a grinning voice, she said, “Really, it was a better show than the cartoons. He’d stew over it for hours.”
“Er?” James asked helplessly.
“Well, three times out of five, one of the things he’d shout at the magazine was, ‘The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple! You know who said that, you clutterpated nitwit? Albert Einstein said that! You’re not clever, you’re just making a mess!’”
“…Er?” James said again, more helplessly yet. Only, this time, Sirius thought he could have helped poor old Prongs if he hadn’t been pretending he wasn’t listening.
“Jamie, Sev acted that way because he thought Evan had taken a big messy tangle and made it very simple. Which he thinks is the cleverest thing you can do. It wasn’t Slytherin-bizarre, it was Ravenclaw-impressed. And before you start, or say yuck to me again, I think Rosier was absolutely right and you ought to be grateful.”
Whoops, Sirius thought silently, distracted from wondering when Lily had started using his cousin’s first name, which she certainly hadn’t done while they were prefects together. You were doing okay until that last bit, Dandelioness. No one liked being told to be grateful. It was a surefire way to make anyone resentful. He ought to know. It was one of the things he liked best about Jamie’s parents: Cousin Dorea was smarter and nicer than to ever even hint that Sirius was supposed to be grateful to her, and it wouldn’t have ever even occurred to Charlus.
“Oh, ought I?” asked James, bristling.
“Yes, you ought!” Lily fired back. Sirius half-suspected she had her hands on her hips, but he didn’t quite dare look up from Harry to check. “You made Sev’s life hell because—”
“Because he’s a nasty piece of work, Lily!”
“Oh, be honest with yourself if you won’t be with me,” Lily snapped. Sirius more than half-seriously considered pulling a Reggie and taking Harry to hide behind the sofa or something. “You made his life hell because you’re from a Gryffindor family, and when he said on the train that Gryffindor has its bad points you took it personally even though you hadn’t been Sorted yet, and then you lot kept ratcheting it up, and because you thought he fancied me.”
“Well, he does!” James shouted. “Even when he takes up with a bloke, look who he takes up with! Red hair, green eyes, it’s not exactly alchemical technomancy!”
“Oh, brilliant, shout louder, I don’t think they heard you in Hyde Park,” Lily snarled. “That wasn’t your business, Sirius!”
“What?” Sirius called back, making himself sound confused, as if he hadn’t been following, as he picked Harry up and came into the kitchen. “What, you mean that Snivvy and Evan are shagging? That’s old news, Columbine; Evvie was snogging him right in front of all the Blacks and Rosiers at King’s Cross after we graduated. Damn good impression of the Giant Squid, actually. Sniv might like to keep things quiet, but you can’t make a louder announcement than that without, I dunno, actually throwing a formal engagement party or taking out a column in the Prophet.”
James was gaping at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded.
Sirius looked at him like he was crazy. “What do you care if they’re shagging or just sharing a flat, as long as you can keep tabs on him in case he kills somebody?” he asked. Lily made an irritable steam-engine noise, which was clueless of her. James was hardly going to listen to anyone on the subject of Snivvy, even Sirius, if he didn’t feel rock-sure that they fundamentally agreed with him. “You and Violet here were already talking about whether you wanted to live here or in London or closer to Lily’s family and planning where to hide when your mums started fighting over the flower arrangements. Speaking of fighting, what are you two on about now?”
“Rosier,” James spat resentfully, “called Snape my brother in law.”
Sirius blinked. Eventually, he said, “Well, he’s done nuttier things to make people stop fighting.”
Then he had to try and start explaining, “No, really. Really. F’rexample, just off the top of my head? There was this one time when Andi and Uncle Cygnus were really going at it when we were kids, must have been the end of second year, or maybe Christmas hols? Just before Andi never came back from shoe-shopping and wrote to say she was pregnant and marrying the mudblood —’scuse me, Lily, that’s what she said, she was pissed right the fuck off—and sod almost-all of us and don’t bother cutting her off with a knut, she was done with us first, anyway.”
He grinned reminiscently. It hadn’t taken the I won’t mean you, kiddo patronus-message that had visited him before the Howler hit to tell him she hadn’t, he didn’t think, but it had been nice of her anyway. Thoughtful, if not a badly-needed reassurance. And it had been great fun watching half the family eye each other warily in stolen moments, trying to work out who else had gotten one, and hilarious when he’d figured out that actually it was only her dad and crazier sister and Sirius’s mother that Andromeda had honestly burned her bridges with.
It had been even funnier to watch everyone else’s reactions when they’d figured that out. Headachy, mostly, on the pissier side in Cissy’s case and the gently perplexed in Evan’s, although Reggie never had worked it out and had just sat around looking terrified and heartbroken and refusing to look at anybody at all for half the rest of the week, poor little squit.
Sirius had meant to explain things to him, but Cissy had grabbed his wrist and started hissing at him about how if Reggie had a sudden change of heart, both of the bitches who thought they were his mum (Cissy hadn’t put it like that, and of course one of them was Reg’s mother) would notice and start asking questions and then it would be a hundred times harder to do anything for Andi. Sirius hadn’t felt compelled to be polite about being manhandled and told how to handle his own little brother, but he’d had to admit the know-it-all bossyboots had a point.
“Yeah, before that. Lots of Andi and Uncle Cygnus shrieking at each other. I expect Evvie had got sick of it. He just put down his charms homework and made the footstool he was sitting on really tall and started scribbling all over the ceiling. With these greasy crayon-y things, pastels. Clouds and birds and fat pink babies with wings and trumpets and that. I think they were supposed to be trumpets, as I recall they looked sort of—anyway, they were a pain in the arse to get out of the plaster, I remember that, I expect they were charmed. And when Uncle Cygnus tried to yell at him, we all got this art history lecture that went on so long they couldn’t even remember what they’d been fighting about, it was as bad as Binns.
“Seriously, Prongs, having a fight around Evvie with anyone he’s even vaguely interested in is just a bad, bad idea. He doesn’t know how to do anything normally, so as far as I can tell he just does the first thing that springs to mind. And he’s got a really, really strange mind.”
“…Er, okay,” James said dubiously after a while, “but the madness running scrambled-egg-and-spoon races through your extended family aside, the point is, Lily and Snape are both agreeing with him, Padfoot.”
Sirius tilted his head. “Well, I quite see how that’s revolting, since it’d make him my brother in law too and the thought makes me want to retch—no offense, Lils.”
“Oh, none taken, I’m sure, twinkletoes,” Lily said dryly. Probably because he’d used her right name, the saucy wench.
“Oh, good, ta—but, Prongs, speaking as somebody who’s used to having a completely revolting family, who all find my family completely revolting… I don’t think it’s up to you, mate.” He shrugged resignedly. “I mean, I’d like to gag and shout with you and everything, but if I get to pick mine and Andi gets to pick hers, and you get to pick me and Moony and Pete and Lily—and you know milady fair’d have at least three of your grandparents turning over in their graves even if your actual parents are decent folk—we can’t say she doesn’t get to pick hers just because we think it’s a bloody awful choice, can we? And hey, Sniv’s still not much worse than my mother, right?”
“Well, now we’ve got that sorted,” Lily said decisively, ignoring Prongs’s hell NO we don’t have that sorted expression in favor of giving Sirius a wary I don’t know what to make of you right now look. Sirius didn’t know what that was about: he thought he’d been perfectly clear.
She probably shouldn’t have ignored James, though, because he exploded, “We do not have that sorted! Just because Snape’s found someone who’s too out of it to notice he’s just settling for him doesn’t mean he’s not still mad about you, Lily, and this is just giving him an excuse to latch onto you again and say it’s all perfectly innocent!”
“James Potter, Evan Rosier has been mad at me about Sev since fourth year,” Lily began crossly.
“Third,” Sirius muttered under his breath, jiggling Harry.
Not noticing, she surged on, “and he’s still mad at me about Sev! The last thing he wants to do is make it easy for us to be friends, believe me; he makes it very clear he doesn’t think I’m good for him.”
“Excuse ME?!” James demanded, incensed, slamming his palms down on the breakfast table and starting to rise.
Sirius started to laugh.
“What?” James asked, faltering into wounded.
“Prongs, you actually want to be happy about that,” he pointed out, grinning.
“I—Oh, yeah, I do,” James agreed, sitting down again. “Even if I also want to slap Rosier in the face with a glove now.”
“I wouldn’t,” Sirius advised. “Even Bella never actually hit him or Reggie. I mean, Narcissa used to kick everybody, but that was just Cissy being a brat, nobody took it seriously. I don’t think I’d want to know what he’d do if someone hit him, off the Quidditch pitch. I mean, Reg would probably just dissolve, but like I said, Evvie’s weird.”
“Er… he went into a sort of trance and started painting himself with the slap mark, actually,” Lily said sheepishly. “And then started glaring at Jamie for no apparent reason and growing pointy homicidal-looking vines out of his sleeves until Sev hit him with a dormus and dragged him off to… it must have been their bedroom. Um.”
Sirius blinked at her, and then asked Harry, “What’s it like to be a baby and nothing’s complicated or confusing? Is it nice when all you have to think about is where’s mummy with my new nappy?”
Harry waved his hands around, possibly trying to grab Sirius’s chin. He brought the kid closer, obligingly, and was sorry when a tiny and rather slimy much-sucked-on hand smacked into his eye, instead, and the other one started tugging on his hair.
“No, but hang on,” Prongs persisted. “If he doesn’t want you to be friends, why would he say that?”
“Well, it felt true as soon as I heard it, so maybe he’s just smarter than you think,” Lily retorted.
“Or maybe,” Sirius suggested, smirking without humor, “he’s Black enough to know that anybody who fights as cold as you and Snivvy do but still don’t really want to be shot of each other, even after that much emotional blackmail, can’t be anything but family.”
“Excuse me, why are we all ignoring that Snape has always fancied my wife?” James called loudly to the ceiling, cupping his hands around his mouth.
“Because you’re the only one who’s ever thought that,” Lily snapped. “Ever.”
“Well, that’s not true,” Sirius told her. “Sorry, but most people have thought that. Often.”
“Well, I can’t help it if most people at Hogwarts have dirty minds,” she further snapped. “Most people we knew as kids gave Sev a very hard time for trying to be just my friend without fancying me. For not fancying me, I mean. His da was just awful about it. If he had at all, it would have been much easier for him to try something than not to. I’m telling you, Jamie, the only time he’s ever even tried to think of me that way is when someone makes him think he’s supposed to. I’ve watched him try, back in fourth year, and his face went all funny.”
“Er, Lily,” Sirius felt he had to put in, “in fourth year, he spent all the time he didn’t spend trying to make you think he wasn’t a slimy piece of rubbish—or being one—trying to kill everyone Evvie snogged with his eyes.”
James stared, but Sirius didn’t look apologetic at him, or even shrug unapologetially. He hadn’t worked out what that was really about until a drunk-off-his-face Evvie had draped himself all over Sniv at the vodka tasting and nuzzled at him, and Sniv Touch Not The Kneazle Without A Glove Snape had repeatedly failed to knock him on his arse. And then for the entire nightmarish, breathless month after Sirius’s horrific drunken fuckup Evvie had trailed after the apparently-sleepwalking-Snape like he’d been lashed to him by the eyelids, biting his lip the whole time. Sirius hadn’t been able to help exchanging a couple of incredulous do these morons actually think they’re subtle and dear Merlin is the rest of this school completely blind glances with Cissy, even though they hadn’t been especially on speaking terms while at school for years by that point.
(It wasn’t ‘being on speaking terms’ when your pretty-pretty ice-princess of a cousin ambushed you with a petrificus and nailed you against the greenhouse pane with her wand so you could hear the Venomous Tentacula on the other side, battering the suddenly rather thin-sounding glass trying to get at you, and made it very clear to you in very small words exactly what would happen to your adorable little chubby friend, whose incomprehensible success at getting dates meant he spent more time out from under your wing than was perhaps quite advisable, if your mutual cousin—who’d turned into really quite a nice boy, wouldn’t you agree, Siri, and didn’t deserve it, and surely it wasn’t very Gryffindor to go after innocent people, let alone people who were, you know, innocent, as in touched in the head and too vacuous to even think about playing games—if your mutual cousin became a bone of contention in your stupid, stupid pissing contest with Snape—which had long since stopped being funny and got tedious and was starting to annoy her, Sirius, she did hope you realized that—and got hurt.)
During fourth year, though, Sirius had just thought Narcissa had told Snivellus to glare at Evan’s dates, to see if any of them could hold up under the strain (nope). It had been a perfectly reasonable thing to think. It was exactly the kind of thing pureblood women who’d been made to feel they were Responsible For Their Families did all the time for their dimmer relatives, and Sniv would have wanted to do the kinds of favors for her that friends could do for each other without considerations of station and cash flow entering into the equation.
He’d been so obviously touchy and unhappy about the way Cissy and Reg were aeons above him that Sirius, before he’d figured out that his own Housemates would not approve of that particular tactic, hadn’t had the heart to needle him about it. Later he would have liked to pull it out, of course, when he was frantic over Reggie and thought maybe if he could get Snape away from the little idiot he’d have a chance at talking some sense into him, even if there was no getting him away from Bella, and would have used any weapons he could get his hands on. But by then he knew that a good Gryffindor was just not supposed to think that way (even if he knew for a fact that plenty of very respectable older ones did), so all he could do was slide insinuations into mocking Sniv’s dress sense.
He’d known Sniv would pick up on them. If that meant Sniv thought Sirius was actually a snob and believed there was something wrong with not having money or whatever, Sirius had been prepared to live with that if it would get the greaseball to falter a little when it came to Reggie. What did Sirius care about Snape’s opinion?
Unfortunately, not only hadn’t it worked, but it had made Moony, who should have known better, a little sensitive about moving in with him without having a steady job, once it wasn’t all four of them together anymore.
It had also, a little more explicably, made Lily think he’d swallowed his family’s garbage, which had been a pain when the two of them finally had to accept that they’d probably be seeing a lot of each other even after Hogwarts. And not just because she thought he might have swallowed their garbage about muggleborns, too, which was ridiculous when he’d been the first to make a record player work on the Hogwarts grounds.
After she got through looking cross with him over ‘slimy piece of rubbish,’ Lily grinned. “I know,” she said. “I think that’s why he tried. You know, when everything’s miserable so you try to think about somebody else, because you think it’d be easier if you could make it be them?” Sirius tried not to snort as he watched James try to fit that idea into his fist-sized ruminant brain. “I think it made his head go bzzztblargh a little.”
“You still went to Professor Trimble’s stupid Valentine’s Ball with him,” Prongs accused sullenly.
“So? You two went together,” Lily said, as if she didn’t see any difference.
“Er, as friends,” Sirius hastened to clarify.
It had actually technically been the three of them going together (so Prongs wouldn’t kill himself or anybody else over Evans going with Snape) while Pete went with Clarice Whateverhernamewas from Hufflepuff, if you wanted to be specific, but Moony had got bored early on and left to go finish up some paper or other. Had left as soon as he’d had enough to eat and sat through exactly one and a half songs with one of his incredulous expressions, Sirius remembered with a private smile. Maybe ‘bored’ hadn’t quite been it, on reflection.
“Yes, Si-ri-us,” Lily said, back to talking slow for the lame-brained, “ex-act-ly. As friends.” At a more normal speed, she added, “Mostly because I wanted to look at Flitwick’s decorations and Sev thought half the school was going to try to spike the punch without talking to each other and the teachers were too stupid to stop it—”
“They were,” James assured her smugly.
“No,” Sirius argued, “be fair, Dumbledore thought the Pomfrey could handle it and the Pomfrey thought it would teach us never to drink again, and Sluggy thought he knew who to stop to end up with punch he’d like.”
They Looked at him.
“You know he did,” Sirius insisted.
“…come to think of it, Ben Goldstein said he couldn’t wait to see what Rookwood had come up with, and I don’t think that ever came off,” Lily said thoughtfully. “Anyway, Sev thought the teachers weren’t going to stop it, and we both did want to see if the Hobgoblins were any good.”
“They’re all right,” Sirius said, trying not to sound too enthusiastic.
“Actual hobgoblins have more rhythm, Sirius,” she said, looking pained.
“Yeah, all right, fair play to you when it comes to Trencher, but Boardman—”
“Oh, don’t even try to tell me you’d even put him in a class with Robert Plant.”
“Look, as wizarding music goes—”
“Oh, well, as wizarding music goes—”
“If you two groupies are quite finished…” James drummed his fingers on the table.
“Yes?” Sirius prompted helpfully.
“Then I might not have to confiscate your eyeliner,” James finished primly.
“And what would you do with it, O mighty Head Boy?” Sirius grinned.
“Some things are not for mortal man to know,” said Lily, so even more primly that James must have picked it up from her.
“Oh, baby, baby,” Sirius replied solemnly.
Because there are some compelling prompts too powerful to be squelched by the weight of disinterested reality, even in prosaic Cornish kitchens with tiny embroidered snitches zooming predictably all over the curtains, Harry chose that moment to announce the arrival of some manner of what must, from his volume, have been profound discomfort. Sirius hastened to pass him off to his mum before he started to smell, leak, or become outraged over Sirius’s lack of mammary glands and reach eardrum-piercing decibels.
While Lily bustled off to deal with him, Sirius slid into her seat and asked, “What the buggery?”
James’s mouth tugged into the I don’t think real The People actually swear like that, Padfoot grin. “I knew you were listening.”
“Well, yeah, you didn’t put anything up, wasn’t I supposed to?”
James didn’t bother to answer that, which meant yes-but-if asked-we’re-telling-Lily-I-just-forgot. He just launched into explaining (ranting) about how Lily had made him spend what at least felt like his whole afternoon in a much too small space to be in with Snivellus for that long, especially a Snivellus who had apparently gone completely off his rocker in about a dozen ways—okay, not at once, for once, but consecutively—and kept doing a quite disturbingly good impression of a human being, which James hadn’t trusted at all (James looked too unnerved for Sirius to quite believe he hadn’t been even a little bit convinced, even if he had, naturally, known better than to blithely believe) but Lily had swallowed hook, line, and sinker.
And about how he minded that less—well, almost less—than that she was making him do it to help Snivvy out, and that was where Rosier calling Snivvy James’s brother in law had come in: Rosier had said everything was peachy because James only had to help Snivellus out and didn’t have to like him. Sirius nodded his understanding at this point and James squint-eyed at him like he was both crazy and a traitor. Which was all right for James, who was an only child with parents who were, at least by Sirius’s standards, completely fantastic, if a bit on the creaky side.
After getting the look from Sirius that conveyed that sentiment, James decided to leave well enough alone and went on to further rant about how the helping was disgusting enough, because all right, Sniv had been in a state and a bloke should be charitable but it really rankled that Lily had been pushing like that, what with the whole Lily and Snivellus thing—
“Look,” Sirius interrupted. “If you want to go after him because he’s a foul piece of Dark toerag that’s dived headfirst through an oil slick and we’re pretty damn sure the only reason we haven’t been able to prove he’s a Death Eater is because he’s slippery, what with the oil slick, I’m with you all the way, Prongs. But the girl just had your fawn-spawn and is wearing your surname and all and she doesn't think of him like that. Besides, even if you’re right about how he feels, the worst he’s ever worked himself up to do to her is call her names. He didn’t even stalk her after she told him she wasn’t listening to apologies and he should shove off. If a creep is going to stalk a bird he’s obsessed with and do things she doesn’t want, it’s going to start when she chucks him and hurts his pride. You’re not worried about Lily wanting Snivellus, for pity’s sake, are you?” he scoffed.
“Well, no,” James said, not sounding a hundred percent sure about it. “I mean, she’s not out of her mind. Er, mostly. It’s only, she’s got a soft spot for him, and—”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she’s attracted to the greaseball,” Sirius pointed out. “I mean, who would be?”
“Your cousin, apparently,” James said dryly.
“I told you, Evvie’s mental,” he waved that away. “Besides, they were roommates at school, and you know how you sort of stop seeing what other people look like when you see them every day, unless you really start noticing. Go on, tell me what color Pete’s eyes are.”
“Er… blue,” James said, raising an eyebrow at him. “Not a very blue blue, I grant you, but…”
Sirius grumbled something about Seekers under his breath.
Four-Eyes good-naturedly repeated the comment, substituting the phrase ‘color-blind mutts.’
Sirius yahed at him, and then leaned forward to show he was done fooling around for a minute. “Prongs,” he said patiently. “You know you’re pissing Lily right off every time you go on about this, yeah? It’s like you’re saying you don’t trust her as your wife.”
James jerked back. Shied, you might say. “Of course I do!” he sputtered.
“Then you might want to stop telling her you don’t,” Sirius suggested, putting his eyebrows up humorously.
“It’s Snivellus I don’t trust,” he said hotly.
“Yeah, I got that, Prongs,” Sirius sighed. “But honestly, would you stop, please? We’ve got about a bazillion things to worry about when it comes to Snivvy, and whether or not he’s got the hots for Daffydowndilly is not one of them, because I swear, even if he does, he doesn’t have the balls to do anything about it if she doesn’t want him to. Which is where the not-trusting her bit comes in. Because, mate, if she tells him no it’s no, and you know it. He’s never had the balls to so much as say boo to her unless he was already off his nut, and even then she just has to glare at him and he puts his tail between his legs.”
James gave him a do-you-really-think-so wanting to be convinced look.
Sirius nodded emphatically. “So could you, please, focus, what with the giants attacking for no earthly reason and people disappearing off the streets and Dumbledore not letting us in on his plots enough to do anything about anything? Because I have to tell you, mate, I’ve got a strong suspicion that he’d be a little more likely to if he didn’t think you’d drop everything and leave a mission if you thought Snivvy had left work to do his shopping five minutes early.”
Now James’s expression had a strong undertone of actually, you’re the problem, mate, and I wish I could tell you things to fix it but something’s stopping me and I’m really frustrated.
Which wasn’t actually all that interesting, because Sirius knew perfectly well that Dumbledore had been Really Not Impressed with his judgment or ability to Not Be A Black since the aforementioned drunken fuckup. He was sort of hoping that getting James focused would help there, if he could do it, because it was frankly about sodding time and if he could do it Dumbledore bloody well should be impressed.
What James actually said, though, was, “That’s the other thing.”
“What is?”
“Work. Because what she made me help him do was pack, because he’s going to be,” James finger-quoted, “helping Slughorn next year.”
Sirius sat back and blinked. “How’d the Old Man swing that?” he asked admiringly.
“I don’t know,” James snarled, “but if I hadn’t promised—wait. What do you mean, how’d Dumbledore swing that?” he blinked. “I mean, did you mean Dumbledore?”
“Well, yeah,” Sirius blinked back, and they stared at each other for a moment, mutually puzzled. It was a bit like being back in first year again, although this did happen now and again. “It was his idea, wasn’t it?” he asked uncertainly.
Just as uncertainly, James said, “I assumed Snivellus greased his way into it.”
“You thought Snivellus fooled Dumbledore?” Sirius gaped. “Jamie, why the hell would Sniv ever even want to go anywhere near Scotland ever again? I wouldn’t, if I were him. Except maybe to torch it, since I’d be him. Eurgh. I need to give my brain a wash now.”
“On orders from Picks His Warts to get close to Dumbledore and corrupt all the kids and that, of course,” James said in a disbelieving you’re not usually this dense, Paddy voice.
“…Oh, yeah, well, I guess there’s that,” Sirius said dubiously. “I suppose the Pants Eaters could actually be that stupid. I suppose that’s why Snape let Dumbledore talk him into it.”
“Why would Dumbledore want to talk him into it?” James threw up his hands, spluttering again.
“Maybe he finally listened to you,” Sirius proposed, although he didn’t actually think James’s opinion would have been more than a small part of Dumbledore’s decision. “…Stags don’t eat flies, Prongs, you might want to close your mouth.”
“If he finally listened to me about Sniv he wouldn’t let him anywhere near little kids,” James protested, although he did stop unattractively gaping.
“Why not, if it’s in Hogwarts?” Sirius shrugged. “With portraits in every room who’d raise bloody murder if anyone tried to muck about with them, and elves all over the place, and most of even the Slytherin kids would be perfectly happy to get, putting it how they’d see it only nicer, an ugly half-blood climber of no family and less personality who’ll probably be bullying the hell out of them into trouble? Safest place in the world to keep your enemy close and under watch, Hogwarts. If you’re Dumbledore, anyway.”
“…That’s a point,” James said thoughtfully, sitting back, although he still looked troubled.
“Well, I am a genius,” Sirius agreed comfortably, lacing his hands behind his head, and nearly tipped his chair over when James chucked the salt-shaker at him. You shouldn’t have Seekers’ eyes and a Chasers’ throwing arm in one bespectacled git, it just wasn’t right.
“Idiot savant, possibly,” said Lily out of nowhere from behind Sirius, patting his head and making him nearly tip over again out of surprise.
“Where’s Harry?” James asked. “Sleeping?”
Lily nodded. “He’s had a very exciting day, the lamb,” she said fondly. “All new things to look at and he got to play with his Uncle Padfoot. Tigger curled up with him. Don’t worry, I took pictures.”
James, who had risen excitedly at the earth-shattering news about the cat, reluctantly subsided, and pulled out a new chair for Lily.
Sirius rolled his eyes tolerantly at the amazing bouncing Daddy Prongs, and addressed himself to Lily. “What I can’t get my head around,” he said, “is what Evan could possibly have done to make you slap him. I mean, he barely moves most of the time, let alone talks.”
“Did Jamie tell you Sev is moving to Hogwarts?” Lily asked, turning upset.
“Yes, Prongs told me that Snape has decided to add masochism to his collection of sadism, misanthropy, fuckoffery, sneerificness, Dark Arts obsession—”
“Oh, shut it, Sirius,” she said crossly. “He’s moving back by himself.”
“…Right?” Sirius blinked.
She glared at him. “Suppose you’d never ever lived anywhere nicer or safer or better for you than your parents’ house before you moved into your flat with Remus, Sirius. And then suppose I found out you had to move back into Grimmauld Place, and you were going alone. Do you think I’d just let Remus get away with that? Especially if he acted like he didn’t see a problem with it while you were staring at your suitcases, looking like you were about to throw up!”
“…Mm,” Sirius grunted uncomfortably, when his chest had loosened enough, and stood. “Anyone want a butterbeer?” he asked, heading over to the cold box and rooting around. He refused to think about what kind of glance they might be exchanging behind his back.
“Yeah, I’ll have one,” James said. “Lils?”
“All right. Hot, please.”
“What I don’t understand,” James told Lily while Sirius passed the glasses around and sat down to curl up around his, “is why you stopped being mad at him, if you care that much about it.”
Lily looked deeply put on the spot, and as if she would have been squirming if they’d all been younger. “Sev doesn’t want me to be,” she said, in a voice that wasn’t quite mutinous yet but was going to get there fast if Jamie kept pressing her. “And it’s up to him, isn’t it?”
More to stop James than because he was really worried about it, Sirius looked up sharply and asked, “You wouldn’t tell Snape anything that personal about any of us, would you? I know I asked but…” he squirmed a little himself. “I wasn’t asking for that much, Lily, I mean, that’s not really on. I mean, there are limits—”
James’s eyebrows asked, such as? When we’re discussing Snivvy?
“—And he’s such a snide little prick, sometimes a bloke can’t remember them in time.”
When he dragged his gaze up from his butterbeer, she was staring at him. To his deep unease, he saw that her eyes were a little wet. He could hear James’s disgusting, besotted brain trying to perpetrate poetry about dewy leaves all the way from across the table.
She scooted her chair over. To his further unease and, indeed, confused dismay, she gave him, for the first time since the wedding, a long, hard hug that said she really meant it. “Okay, Sirius,” she said softly. “Okay. I’ll help Remus look after it for you.”
“…Er… what?” he asked warily.
She tilted a smile up at him that was at once a bit watery and a bit cheeky. “Your honor.”
“Oh good Godric,” Sirius exclaimed in horror, screeching his chair back a few feet. “JAAAMES, your bird’s lost the plot!”
Lily scooted over the other way to hug James instead, laughing. He wrapped his arm around her, looking bemused, and shrugged a shrug at Sirius that said, I said she’s a goddess, I never said she wasn’t a nutter.
“So,” Lily asked, settling herself comfortably, “what are you fighting with Remus about this week, anyway?”
“Who said I’m fighting with Moony?” Sirius scoffed.
“Er… you, when you came over to our house to kip on the sofa without bothering to floo first to find out if we were home or out or shagging on said sofa or what,” James filled him in helpfully, and got smacked on the arm.
“Apparently it’s ‘insensitive’ to try to think of ways to help a person when he’s set on moping,” Sirius sulked.
“Ah,” Lily said wisely. “The Thing Men Do Not Understand.”
Sirius peered at her suspiciously. “This sounds like a Witch Weekly thing,” he said dubiously.
“No, it’s a What Every Girl Stops Trying To Explain By The Time She’s On Her Third Boyfriend thing,” Lily said sympathetically.
“Try me,” Sirius challenged, cross.
“Sirius, sometimes people already know what they want to do, or they want to work a problem out on their own, or they think they’ll get it by themselves if they can just think about it and talk it out. But they want to talk about it anyway, even without being drunk off their arses, and sometimes they’d rather talk to someone they trust than a complete stranger who doesn’t care about them. And then the person, who of course they trust for a reason, wants to help, because everyone wants to help when a person they care about is having trouble, right? But actually that’s not at all helpful because they’re not looking for practical help, they just want to talk about it with someone who cares. And when someone tries to tell you what you ought do when you don’t want advice, it’s not so much helpful as really, really annoying.”
Sirius looked at James, who just shrugged unhelpfully, so he asked, “Er… but if you’re not looking for help with the problem, why are you asking someone to talk it through with you? Bit of a waste of everyone’s time, innit?”
Lily sighed.
“Anyway, he wasn’t trying to talk to me,” Sirius added huffily. “He was just moping.”
“Well, wouldn’t you be depressed, too? It’s awful news, Sirius. Sev came and told him in person—and no, Sirius, it wasn’t to gloat, he just thought it was his, I don’t know, his duty or something not to let Rey find out from the Prophet. And he thinks they’re going to say the funding’s being cut because the potion’s good now, and it’s not. Not good, that is.”
“Yeah, I would be depressed,” Sirius agreed, “and I hope you lot wouldn’t just let me stew in it.”
“Well, no,” James agreed. “On account of when you sit and stew, you stare out the window and go all crazy-eyed and come up with mad ideas about getting even that get me into detention for a month and in trouble with Lily for six months.”
“Hear, hear,” Lily toasted him with her butterbeer.
“Moony just sits and broods through all his really depressing books until he’s out of tea and sick of cocoa and he’s depressed himself too much to stand it anymore, and then he tells himself he’s a broody twit and joins the human race again,” James went on. “It’s no good telling him he is one before he’s ready to stop, you know it’s not.”
“I didn’t tell him he was a broody twit,” Sirius protested. “I just said if we all put our heads together we could probably think of something new to try, or a new funding source, or something, and then he told me to sod off.”
Lily glanced at James, who looked a bit helpless. “Maybe you could,” she said gently. “But, you know, Remus spent half his life with his parents dragging him from one new ‘cure’ to another.”
“I know,” Sirius said, frustrated, “but this one was actually getting results, wasn’t it, even if it’s not completely safe yet? It’s stupid to give up on it just because the politics are being uncooperative.”
“I don’t know,” she said gloomily. “There’s a big difference between ‘we haven’t found the way it’s possible yet’ and ‘it’s inches from being magically possible but The People Who Really Run Things are actively against me.’ That’s a whole different kind of depressing.”
“That shouldn’t be depressing,” Sirius snarled, “that should piss him off!”
She shot him an angry look. “Oh, yes,” she agreed, standing up, “a pureblooded man who’s always had all his teachers eating out of his hand and hasn’t ever been short of gold without someone to go to can afford to think that. It’s not so easy when you grow up being patronized or having to hide something huge about who you are and being at the mercy of everyone who knows, or knowing there are only so many jobs that’ll be open to someone like you, or knowing that if you aren’t really nice to the right sorts of people your life will be horrible because there isn’t anything about you that makes people say Oh Dear, Saying No To Him Could Make Problems For Me.”
“Er… Lily?” James asked tentatively. Which, as far as Sirius was concerned, proved he’d been Sorted correctly right there.
She glared at them both. “Some people,” she said angrily, “learn there’s no use getting angry, because there’s nothing they can do about it that won’t make things worse for themselves in the long run. So they get depressed.”
“You’re not like that!” James protested.
“You’re bloody right I’m not,” she agreed, sticking her fists on her hips belligerently. “I’m a witch from a family of muggles, most of whom are rather lovely most of the time.”
“Sorry, we’re not talking about your sister, though, here, right?”
She ignored that, and pressed on. “I couldn’t count my blessings on my hair.Remus is a secret leper.”
“Lycanthrope,” Sirius corrected her warily. He was a Gryffindor too, damn it.
“Might as well be the same thing!”
“But there isn’t nothing he can do,” Sirius argued. “And he hasn’t got no one, he’s got us, and we can—”
“What, Sirius?” she asked, the anger going out of her on a long sigh, leaving her only tired. “Is there a ‘what’? Because I think this might be a bit last-straw for our Remus, and unless you can offer him something more solid than ‘we’re brilliant, we’ll think of something,’ maybe you’d better not try to tell him to fly for the moon, d’you think? Because I think maybe he’s learned better by now, and maybe, just maybe, he thinks it isn’t kind of you to make him hope.”
“Maybe I don’t care about being kind if it means giving up on him,” Sirius fired back, leaning forward angrily over his glass.
That rubbed her the wrong way again, apparently. “What do you mean, giving up on him?” she demanded, indignant. “He’s been your friend for years, but what, only if he promises he’ll stop being a werewolf someday?”
“Yeah, because telling someone they can be your friend if they only promise to stop being what they are really works, doesn’t it, Hibiscus?” Sirius asked sarcastically, and had the pleasure of seeing her turn at least two colors in temper. “Don’t be stupid. I don’t care that he turns into a wolf every month, I care that he hates it, and I care that he rips himself to shreds anytime Padfoot can’t be there with him, because Prongs can only calm him down when the wolf’s willing to be calmed down; a deer can’t sit on a werewolf like a great honking Grim-sized Newfie can; and Wormy’s almost no use at all by himself.”
“And were you planning not to be there anytime soon?” she challenged him, ruffling up even more.
“Of course I’m not,” he nearly shouted in vexation. “But if you haven’t noticed, things are getting really nasty out there, and we could find ourselves in an out-and-out civil war any day now, or peppered with much bolder guerrilla strikes than they’re pulling now, against anybody they decide to go after, and I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning to crawl under my bed till it’s over, assuming it ever is over in any way we can stand, and Moony wouldn’t want me to! But that means Remus might not have me or any of us to transform with him at some point, what with werewolves being pretty damn sturdy if you don’t know that’s what they are when you go after them, thank Merlin, whereas magic can’t get killed!”
“…Oh, I see,” she said, more subdued and looking tired and sad again, and also shaken. “But, Sirius, you still have to think about it like… if somebody breaks their leg, you can’t just ask them to get up and start fighting again straightaway. You’ve got to give them time to heal first, or they’ll just get hurt worse without doing any good at all.”
“Er, Lily,” James said, tentative again, after a moment where he exchanged a you remind her, no you, no you, no you’re the chump who married her glance with Sirius. “Er, there is such a thing as an ossio consano charm, you know.”
She threw up her hands in complete disgust, declared, “Wizards,” and stomped into Harry’s room, slamming the door.
“I don’t think we’re missing the point,” James told Sirius woundedly. “Do you think we’re missing the point?”
“I’m not missing it,” Sirius said with forced cheer, “I’m just ignoring it,” and, draining the rest of his butterbeer, went to pour himself another one. “So. I was thinking, what if we enchanted some cloth with hex-zappers?”
“Like clothing, for armor?” James asked, dragging his cow-eyes away from where Lily had disappeared and starting to look interested. “We haven’t finished stabilizing the probity probes yet, don’t forget.”
“No, I know, but we’ve been butting our heads up against it for weeks and not getting anywhere. Probably better to put it on simmer for a while and get a couple easier new products out there before Zonko stops asking us when we will have anything new, yeah? Maybe clothing,” Sirius nodded, waggling his hand, “but I’m not sure something that low-power would be that useful over a broad area. I mean, a hex-zapper deflects spells until it gets a direct hit and then that uses it up, right?”
“Right,” James nodded, propping a hand on his chin and summoning his notebook with a flick of his wand. “Except for attracting healing and good luck sort of energies if you believe those exist and are, I don’t know, floating around or whatever those Seer-obsessed types think.”
“Right. I suppose they might do, if you’re around a ley line or on an old wizarding House’s land or what-have-you, providing it isn’t a house like Mumsy Dearest’s.”
“Suppose so,” James nodded. “Your parents’ house does have sort of a nasty feel even when they’re not home, and Mum and Dad’s place is always cozy-ish, isn’t it?”
“Well, I think so. Anyway, I thought, what if we made hex-zapping bandages? And if they look like ordinary bandages, we could bake in a heavy discount for muggleborns, so if their families get harassed they might not have to get taken to St. Mungo’s and probably have more time than is healthy obliviated.”
James looked judicious. “Bandages are a good idea,” he said slowly. “We should get on that. I don’t know how much good having them would really do a muggle family that gets attacked, Padfoot.”
“Well, it couldn’t hurt, could it? And it might make the muggleborns feel better, knowing they had something they could do for their families right away. Not just muggleborns, come to that.”
“As long as Marauder’s Moon doesn’t start selling a false sense of security, Paddy,” James warned. “And I don’t know how good it’d be, making prices different based on blood status, in either direction.”
Sirius gave him an irritated glance. “Oh, like everyone doesn’t do it already for purebloods. Just because no one says so out loud. I think it’d be quite good, evening up the scales.”
“...Maybe, but if we did say so out loud, that’d look like a precedent, and you know how that could get used.”
Grimacing, Sirius admitted, “Yeah, okay. If we just give the school a load to send to the right homes for free on the quiet, though, you know your peppershaker up there will get all indignant about how if we have to do it we should be making it clear why we have to do it, though, and Moony will make his I’m Not Going To Say Anything Because It’s The Right Thing To Do But Passing Up Those Sales Hurts Me In My Teeny-Tiny Savings Vault And Feeling That I Don’t Have A Real Job face.”
James shrugged. “So we’ll talk about the best way to offset their costs when it’s all of us. Do we know what muggle bandages look like, then?”
“Just that they’re sort of long brown ovals from the back, but I think we’re probably not going to pester Lily for details until she’s calmed down a bit…”
