Disclaimer: Not mine. The characters belong to JK Rowling.
I had seen moldy shower curtains— in fact, I had lived in apartments whose initial bathroom state had made me want to shower in public facilities. But none of them had been quite as bad as the shower curtain in the Black family master bedroom. I quickly decided scurgify and even stronger cleaning spells weren't going to be worth it on the curtain and just severed the thing from the rod with a spell, folded it with another, and levitated it into the waste bin.
Had Kreacher been here in the past ten years? It wouldn't surprise me if he hadn't; so much of the house seemed to have been completely abandoned since Mrs. Black's death, but it was still vaguely creepy to see the place a friend of mine had grown up in in such decadence. I'm not that old.
Behind me, said friend and his newly rediscovered cousin had already begun an argument. It seemed some nifflers had found their way into the crevice behind the toilet and decided to make it home.
"I'm taking them outside," Tonks announced.
Sirius chuckled. "You don't need to take them that far, really," he pointed out. "Buckbeak's right outside this door, and I'm sure he'd love a snack."
I could only imagine the aghast look on Tonks's face, as I was preoccupied trying to avoid actually touching the curtain.
There was a moment's silence, just long enough for me to actually stuff the curtain and turn around to see Tonks cuddling two small, furry black things in the crook of her arm and Sirius looking at her with a vaguely teasing smirk. It had probably been too long— fourteen years— since she'd had to see that smirk for her to recognize it, and she did not look like she appreciated the joke.
"I am not feeding cute, fluffy animals to that bloody hippogriff," she announced.
Sirius didn't miss a beat. "I know he's violent sometimes, Nym, but that's no reason to swear about him."
"Don't call me Nym." It was a sentence she'd said at least a dozen times thus far whenever Sirius started to tease her and fell back into the childhood nickname. "Besides, it's not an intensifier— it's a description. He just finished his breakfast and the bed looks like a torture chamber."
Sirius shook his head. "If you say so. Take them outside, then. I guess I did just feed him."
Tonks glowered furiously at him and left the room. As she swept out of the bedroom as well, I could hear Buckbeak squawk curiously after her. Sirius looked over at me and quirked an eyebrow as if to say, Women. What can you do with them?
I shook my head and knelt down by the toilet to see what kind of hoard the nifflers had built up. It was pretty sizeable, and I scooped up most of it and put it on the counter to sort through. While I was busy, something else decided to rag on Sirius— namely the mirror.
"What are you doing here?" it demanded in a raspy, female voice that sounded so much like Sirius's mother's that we both jumped.
Sirius stared at it for a moment and then said, "Well, it's my house. Do I need another excuse?"
"It's your mother's room."
I hurriedly started sorting through the nifflers' junk, leaving Sirius to deal with the mirror and its rudeness on his own. I was not getting dragged into an argument between Padfoot and the furniture, especially not when I felt as though I was already in the middle of a fight between Sirius and the house.
Sirius told the mirror where it could go and must have accompanied it with some unpleasant expression.
"Don't look at me like that! Your mother would be ashamed."
"I think she already was. Besides, that's not really that bad," Sirius said. I glanced up to see him pull a ridiculous face at it, shook my head and turned back to sorting through the junk. There were three easy piles: chocolate frog cards (because to a niffler, foil is just as shiny as gold), mostly silver jewelry, and things that were so corroded I didn't want to know what they had been originally. Occasionally they had hoarded something that could actually be used, but those were few and far between.
While I sorted, Sirius blew off some steam and pulled more faces at the mirror, which muttered continually at him about the sort of things Mrs. Black used to yell at him on Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. Apparently the last time it had seen him, he had snuck into the bathroom in order to replace his parent's toothpaste with a potion that turned teeth green.
I put that on my mental list of pranks he'd been known to pull, so that I knew to check the toothpaste next time he got too frustrated or bored.
By the time I had gotten to the bottom of the pile, he was trying to get me to join in.
"I'm not eleven years old, Sirius," I pointed out.
"Am I?" he asked.
I opened the medicine cabinet and was met with the kind of stench I would expect to find in Snape's potions lab, three weeks after the last hair-care specialist had shown up and been murdered. "There are days I wonder," I answered, gingerly turning the bottles around so I could see their titles. Some of them were cursed beauty products instead of merely expired ones. Considering Mr. Black's nearsightedness, this had probably not been the wisest place to put them.
After a moment, it dawned on me that there was silence in wake of the remark, and I glanced into the mirror to see Sirius raising an eyebrow at me.
"Unfortunately, I also knew you at twenty," I added with a shrug. "So I know you've matured past the teenage stage when you really put your mind to it."
Sirius rolled his eyes at me. "You were always better at this when we could get you to join in," he informed me, making another face at the mirror.
The mirror suggested something about my face, and the couple of scars on it. Without really thinking about it, I snapped back about Sirius's creativity, which started a chuckle out of him and at least shut the mirror up briefly. Moony had been convinced to argue with the furniture.
In an attempt to regain my dignity, I turned back to the cabinet. "Tonks is better at it than either of us. And she usually restricts it to when she has a reasonable excuse."
Sirius snorted. "Nym has an inherent advantage when it comes to pulling faces," he pointed out. "Do you want me to pull out my wand and start transfiguring my nose, then?"
The mirror spoke up. "You might get it stuck that way. Might improve your looks, too."
Sirius turned back to it. "That's starting to get more annoying than it is amusing. Shut up."
As he spoke, Tonks came back in from rescuing the nifflers. Sirius was getting embroiled in another argument with the miror, and she watched him for a moment or two. Then she caught my eye through the reflection and shot me a wicked grin, morphing into her great aunt's image and dropping her voice to as much of a rasp as she could. "Sirius Black! What do you think your doing?"
I might have tried to stop her if I'd remembered that Sirius had lost so much of his life to Azkaban that— in a very real way— he was still young enough to jump, whirl around, and stare at her with the slightly frightened, guilty look of a ten-year-old caught in the act of mischief. "Mum?"
. . . . Although, considering the priceless look on his face, I probably wouldn't have. There was no real harm done in the end, and Tonks and I both burst out laughing.
Tonks recovered before I did. "No, I'm breathing. And I seem to remember you telling me that my aunt died of a heart-attack after your sorting and kept going on pure spite."
"She did," Sirius announced with rancor.
Tonks shook her head. The wrinkles smoothed, the graying hair shortened and became pink, and her eyes changed from piercing gray back to large and brown. I wondered absently how Sirius could have been even half-fooled as a "gotcha" grin spread across his cousin's face— after all, Walburga Black was very unlikely to be wearing embroidered jeans and a neon green t-shirt.
"That wasn't funny." Sirius tried to scowl at her, but he couldn't quite pull it off. After all, relief, amusement, exasperation, and annoyance are all fine expressions on their own, but it's difficult to pull anything off when they're all fighting over one face. I couldn't help but have another laugh at his expense at the resulting expression.
Sirius glanced back at me. "What's so funny?"
"You should see your face."
He glanced back at the mirror. "I can—"
"No, you can't," it interrupted. "Not through that shock of hair."
"—and I fail to see what's so funny. Shut up," he added to the mirror, then turned to Tonks with a slight smile. "So what was that for?"
"Payback."
He shook his head. "And what exactly did I do that you needed to impersonate my mother to get back at me?"
"You told me to feed cute, furry animals to that beast in the next room."
Sirius laughed, and for a minute it seemed his face had finally filled out like it used to be, like we were twenty again. Except that was always when I playfully told him he'd lost it, and now it was as though he'd finally pulled himself back together. "All right. Pretty good prank," he admitted. "You actually had me going there for a minute."
"More than a minute," she answered, crossing her arms across her chest.
"Not really— my mother never wore Muggle clothes in her life, let alone casual ones. I'd have caught on in a second or two."
Before Tonks or I could elaborate on the look he'd been wearing, the mirror added its two pence on the issue. "And for good reason! Last I saw, Mudblood women did not wear those hideous trousers. The girl's heritage is bad enough, must she further des—"
"Shut up," Sirius snapped, turning around and hitting the mirror with a fist.
He probably hit it harder than he'd intended to— after all, there was a fair amount of unvented exasperation at Kreacher's constant and Snape's occasional snide remarks as well as just the mirror's— or perhaps the mirror was simply older and more fragile than anyone realized. But he literally broke it, sending splinters of glass rolling across the counter top. He jumped back in surprise, and a wedge from the bottom where the glue had worn off toppled to the floor and split into an additional three pieces.
We all stared at it for a few moments.
"Damn," I muttered. "So much for your mother's mirror."
Sirius nodded.
Tonks bit her lip. "Do you think we should fix it?"
"Not with as rude as it's been," Sirius answered. I chose not to point out that he hadn't exactly put forth any effort to avoid insulting it.
"Well, we should at least clean up the pieces, I think," she said, and started levitating them into the waste bin.
Buckbeak chose then to let out a loud squawk, possibly a delayed reaction from the crash. Sirius growled something under his breath. "I'll go see what the bird wants, shall I?" He stepped gingerly over the glass and put a hand on the doorknob. "Especially since he seems to be the only thing in this entire damn house that needs me."
"Sirius—" I started, knowing that the Order was included under that umbrella, but he was out the door by the time I got to the second syllable.
I sighed. I should have known better than to think that there might be something more to laughter than Tonks, my, and the Weasley twins efforts to cheer him up. He wasn't comfortable in the past, and there was nothing for him to do with the present. Nothing frustrated him more than being cooped up in his parents house while everyone else— including myself and Severus Snape— were doing things to protect Harry and the rest of the world against Voldemort.
After a moment, Tonks touched my arm, and I looked back at her. The mirror pieces had been cleaned up, and she was smiling sadly at me. "We need to make him laugh more often," she said quietly.
I nodded, glancing back towards the door. "Indeed we do." I looked back at the broken mirror he'd been pulling faces at only five minutes before. "It turns him into the man he should have been."
Author's Note: I haven't been in fandom for awhile; college is eating my soul, and I apologize if the characterization was slightly off. Thanks to Crystal Royale for the grammar beta. And before anyone jumps on me, I realize that the silver aversion is popular in fanon, but there really is no basis for it canonically, and considering Slytherin House colors, it really is the most appropriate metal for Black family jewelry. And yes, for those of you that wondered, the title does come from Alfred Lord Tennyson's Lady of Shallot. I'm gratified towards anyone who got that, or who drops me a line. Cheers! — Loki