Hey guys! So I wrote this as a one shot but now that I'm putting it up I'm thinking of making it the prologue to a series if that's what you guys might like? So let me know if that's something anyone would be interested in! Now onto the story!
"Now remember, you have to wait until your birthday. If I catch you with these even a day before I'm taking them out."
Amber Clark watches as her daughter gazes admiringly at the package in her hands. The young girl, Stella, is due to turn 14 in two weeks and has just received an early birthday present; an at home piercing kit to do her second hole on her lobe done. By the eager look on her daughters face Amber can only assume she was planning on using her present a few days early, which is exactly the sort of thing she would do. Just to emphasize her point Amber takes the box out of the girls hand and stuffs it back in the shopping bag.
"Thank you, mum." Stella says, grinning ear to ear and bumping shoulders with her mother.
The two make their way up the stars of their apartment building to the fourth floor, where the flat they share with Ambers brother, Mitchell. They pass by a few of their neighbors on the way up, who all wave at the pair politely. Everything about this evening seems to be just like all the others of that week; pleasantly uneventful. When they get home they will make dinner, watch their favorite programs on tv, maybe even play a board game, and call it a night. Their quiet life is exactly the way they want it.
"We're home!" Amber calls as they enter the house and make their way into the kitchen, dumping their grocery bags onto the kitchen table. Mitchell told the two he would be home before them and that he would heat up the oven for their return. But by the low temperature in the room it was easy to assume the oven was stone cold. "Mitchell? You home?"
"Yeah," the familiar voice of said man called from somewhere else in the house, "I'm in the living room."
Amber frowned at the tone of her brothers voice. While he usually sounded so naturally happy and at ease, his voice now sounded strained and maybe even stressed out. She asks her daughter to finish unpacking the groceries so she can go check up on him. As she hangs her coat up on the rack on her way to the living room Amber remembers how Mitchell has been waiting to hear back from a recent job interview at the ministry. She wonders if maybe he has heard some bad news and is mourning the loss of his potential job.
It takes her all of a minute to reach the living room, decorated quaintly and mostly with her mothers old furniture. Upon entering she is surprised to see not only one man but two, sitting facing each other on opposite sides of a low coffee table. Amber doesn't initially recognize this other man, but is halted in the doorway by the shock when she finally does.
He is ghostly pale, as if he has spent years away from any source of sunlight. His clothing, which somehow doesn't seem right for him, hangs loosely off his body. Despite the fact she can easily tell how big this mans clothes are she can see he has attempted to hide the fact with a jacket that is a tad more form fitting. His hair is dark, wavy, and falls down past his chin. His face is heavily lined and his eyes are slightly sunken. It's his eyes that makes Amber first realize she has met him before. His posture changed immediately after she enters the room. He sits up straighter and clutches the arms of the chair he sits in, as if he's about to endure a carnival ride. The tension in the air is so thick Amber thinks she might drown. It takes all her energy to not break down or run out of the room.
Silence seems to overtake the room for eternity. Both men watch her carefully, waiting to see how she reacts. She feels a bit like a caged animal in a zoo that has suddenly gone mad. They're anticipating her to do something wild, which makes her all the more determined to keep herself collected. She takes a few steps into the room but keeps several feet of distance between them both. Her eyes fix on the man she remembers much younger in a stare that must have been colder than she intended by the way he winced when she turned to him.
"You shouldn't be here." She says. It's not what she feels in her heart, but she knows it's true. "I work for the ministry, its my job to turn you in."
For a moment he seems scared by her threat. But the insincerity of it must have been clear by the way he soon relaxed. The man shrugs, the carefree demeanor she remembers so well finally making an appearance. "Are you going to turn me in?" Amber opens her mount to answer but finds herself unsure of how to answer. Who was she kidding? She didn't have it in her to do that to him, not to mention herself. He took her silence as a 'no' and showed just the hint of a smile. "I didn't think you would."
"I'm not the same girl I was fourteen years ago, Sirius." She clenches her hands into fists at her side, determined to keep them from shaking. "I've changed."
"I know that." He says, in a tone that makes it obvious that his words are true.
Silence once again takes control, this time in the company of uncertainty. None of them are quite sure what to do in this situation. Amber knows she should sit down, maybe offer him something to drink, perhaps make some sort of conversation, do anything that will make her seem as confident as possible. But she's frozen in place and her tongue feels like sand in her mouth. Every doubt she's had in herself in the past fourteen years is starting to resurface at blinding speed.
Suddenly the silence is cut unexpectedly short, like a needle being lifted off a record. From the other room the young of a young girl, familiar to only two of the three people in the room, calls in. "Mom, should I start dinner?" At the sound of her voice Sirius' face drops, no longer showing any sign of emotion. Amber can feel her world stop, only for a moment, before it comes rushing back into real time. She struggles for a moment to find her voice again, turning back towards the door and calling back that she should.
Amber faces the two men again, her heart beating a mile a minute. This is not what she wanted from her night. All she wanted was to have a nice dinner with her family and watch some reruns. The last thing she wanted was for her entire world to be turned upside down. She takes in a breath, attempting to gather herself, and looks back at the man she once loved so much. Suddenly she is hyper aware of the ring on her finger and quickly stuffs her hand in pocket. She doesn't want him to discover yet that she never forgot him.
Amber gestures toward the kitchen with a slight hand wave. "That's my daughter." She says, as if it wasn't already obvious. Sirius swallows a lump in his throats so large that she can see it from across the room.
"How old is she?" He asks. His voice is hushed and almost shaky, and for a moment Amber is sure she can read his mind.
She glances at her brother, who is watching the two like a tennis match. She tilts her chin up, still determined to appear as at ease as possible. "She's thirteen, turning fourteen in two weeks."
Sirius nods a few times, slowly. She could see him processing this fact, could almost hear the gears in his head turning. He started to speak, then cleared his throat and tried again. "What's her name?"
"Stella." Amber pushes her hair behind her ears, the curly locks starting to fall out of the pony tail she tried to confine them in. "I wanted to continue the family tradition with the whole constellation name theme, but there weren't any good ones left, so I picked Stella."
"What family tradition?" He asks, genuinely confused about this statement. She could have laughed if she wasn't so nervous.
"Really?" She asks, letting out one laugh that didn't sound at all genuine. "Have you managed to completely block out all memory of your family or are you just playing dumb?" Amber pressed two of her fingers against her temple. She wanted to grab the remote off of the table and pause the world so she could escape this conversation, if only for a little while. There was the option of pulling out her wand and apparating somewhere else, but she couldn't leave her daughter behind in this mess. So she took a deep breath and forced herself to continue. "She's yours, Sirius."
She watched his face morph from confusion into disbelief. While his years in jail had aged him faster than she had in the free world, it wasn't hard to see the young man she had once known what felt like a lifetime ago. It was hard to believe that the days she'd spent with him were less than 20 years ago since they went by like 50. They had been so young once, so care free and happy. So in love. They had their whole lives ahead of them, a world full of possibilities. She could remember the feeling she had when she looked at him as vividly as if it had been yesterday. Sometimes she could swear she saw the universe in his eyes.
As he sat in her living room, the realization of what he'd just learned settling over him, she knew they were thinking the same thing; everything they once thought they could have had was gone. Every possibility that once seemed so achievable was and had been gone. The future they had imagined together was gone. Amber had known that for a very long time. And she was determined to keep the fact that he was sitting in front of her once again from making her think otherwise.