Diclaimer: I have no claim over any recognizable plots/characters nor do I profit from them.
Author's Note: Please excuse the vaguely experimental style.
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Book Morality
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Sirius Black learned to think for himself the day he learned to read, in his parent's library, seven years old and fitting words and letters together until he had a whole mess of sentences in his head, and the sentences, being what they were, built bridges over and under each other until Sirius had worlds of them.
In his parent's library, Sirius learned about hate, and the sweetest sins of Blacks and other like-minded creatures and about night and what you can make from the screams of children when you mixed them with anguish. Being seven, and then eight and then nine, he understood that what he was reading was the darkness of a man's heart, but what he did not understand was that he didn't have to spend forever looking at it.
Perhaps it was a mistake of Sirius's mother to allow him those very small freedoms she did - the reading, and also, not noticing when he snuck from the house on Saturday afternoons. Perhaps if she had never made those small errors in her own judgement (if a woman as Walburga Black could make an error in judgement and still call herself a queen) she would have raised the son she wanted: a boy as tall and striking, of aquiline features, as Sirius was, but with a different burden for the world. But she did, and it was such that led the boy to the public library, where, as luck would have it, there were some dreams and ideas to forge.
Sirius Black was an insomniac from birth, and in those middling hours when he sometimes thought he was the only conscious person in the world, which made him feel very large, though he was, in fact, quite small, Sirius educated himself a second time, and this time he learned about stories.
A story, being in and of itself, like a person with a past but no future, and a morality but no way to express it other than a face, was a powerful drug to the nine and then ten-year-old Sirius, who could recall with no difficulty the people in the books of his younger childhood, and their faces full of shadowed greed, and he felt with some birthright of his heart, that the faces in the books from the library were not what he had expected, and furthermore, preferable in their own airy light.
It was a lonely childhood, but Sirius learned and he read, and he came out on the other side with a head full to the brim of thoughts not put there by his parents' or their library and the decision that he had a cleaner face for the world.
When Sirius Black was eleven, he met another boy, who was, like he, a reader, but unlike Sirius, for this boy the books were not a sort of motley crew of choices, which followed him as normal people imagined their shoulder-perching angels and devils did. No, this boy was an escape artist, and he slipped between the covers of his books so delicately and with such finesse that even Sirius, who could smell the age of a book from a mile off, did not see the dent in the pages where he hid.
The boy's name was Remus Lupin and somewhere between the ages of eleven and sixteen, Sirius fell in love with him.
Sirius Black, by the line of his grin, was not showing the world the face of an avid reader, which he was in the hours of night. Under the sun, he belonged, as boys do, to his best friend, and James ran far and wild tugging Sirius, who never even needed to be tugged, along after him. Contrarily, Remus Lupin looked bookish the way a whore looks like sex. But under the moon's silver (never full, for of course that was some other story) Remus Lupin belonged to Sirius Black, as a love belongs to a love.
It was something of a miracle to the teachers of Hogwarts, exactly how it was possible to put the ingredients of Sirius Black or Remus Lupin into the pot of life and stir and come out, after having turned off the blue flicker-flame, the characters of those two people.
What had slipped in, along with arrogance, dagger intelligence, a small part of insanity, and beauty to Sirius Black, that made him a steadfast man after his own and other's hearts?
What gave Remus Lupin his grace, when all he had to his name was a childhood full of sharp teeth, sharp voices, and sharp fists?
The answer, of course, was words, and the book morality they stacked up behind themselves; the guiding hands of a mother who loved them, the stern gaze of the first teacher who cares.
Summer, and the age of twenty, found Sirius and Remus on a honeymoon. There hadn't been a wedding, but they didn't need a man with a high collar and a book with a world that neither of them believed in to tell them that they were going to be together forever.
The escape artist, being what he was, had arranged a month away from the world, and its similar burdens of men in dark cloaks and their company of death, or blue (twinkling) eyes telling them they were ready to die for their ideals.
They had a car, with rusty door handles and windows that no longer closed all the way. They had a map of Britain; littered with cigarette burns and pen markings until it was not very clear which red and black lines were roads to travel and which were imagined. They had a boot filled with books; every one they could get their hands on, six cardboard boxes of people to understand, or worlds to fall into. They had each other, which, frankly, made everything else only extras.
Those days were long and terrifyingly perfect and over too quickly. In the mornings they read and in the afternoons they visited the past, at Stonehenge or a national trust garden, or an abandoned paper factory on the side of the M-6.
Each breath was made from more destiny than the one before, and they finish them lying on the hood of the car, which was still engine warm, under a slate black sky, tinged at the distant edges with city-yellow. They were sweaty and only partially dressed, having just made love in the back of the car like young, dangerous, angry and in love boys would, all of which they were, but it was easy to forget.
A pick-up truck drove by, slowly, and the window rolled down to reveal a harsh face, which called them something tasteless. Sirius and Remus fell together laughing, and Sirius stood up, looking like a preacher on is soap-box of a car, and yelled after them, "That's right, you fuckers, I did just do my boyfriend in the backseat. And of course he fucking loved it, idiot, otherwise we wouldn't be gay!"
Unfortunately for those tasteless young men in the pick-up, it broke down three miles later, and for some inexplicable reason, no other cars stopped or even seemed to notice them, save for the one they had jeered at before, which drove by some hours later, and managed to coat them all in mud with a particularly spectacular splash, even though it hadn't rained for three weeks.
Sirius and Remus made the final mile of the trip last for two days, catching themselves on the strangeness of the outskirts of London, which heaved itself around like a great beast in whose shadows grew the most awkward small towns.
Though travel, and wide-open spaces, had been flowing through their veins, they collapsed into their flat, and bed, like they had been granted entrance to heaven, all pearly and soft as memories. Their sturdy canvas of sleep and dreams was fuelled by tea and duvets and, doubtlessly, by the paper skins of the novels stacked on all flat surfaces of home.