A/N: Another Sirius/OC! Sort of. It's also Remus/OC. This is complicated, based on song lyrics I wrote back when I was doing music. I'll include lyrics at the beginning of every chapter, and then when I've finished the references for one song, I'll include the full set of lyrics as an addendum to the last chapter in which they're included. If you liked Gabriella McPeak, you'll probably like this. It's the same rough idea.

-C

Maybe it seems easy.

Maybe the victims of rape seem easy.

Maybe they'll all eventually become

Your little whores, an easy target.

Nova had been walking back to her mother's place in London from the pub she helped at in the summers. Barely sixteen years old, she had learned to defend herself. She knew who to trust, who to avoid, and when to scream for help. It wasn't the nicest of walks, but the cool evening air of August made her feel refreshed and relaxed.

"Nova!"

The voice belonged to a regular at the pub, a Muggle she had known for a while who lived a few streets over from her mother's place.

"Chad. What's up?"

"Isn't it a bit late to be walking home alone?"

Nova smiled at Chad. He wasn't especially handsome, but he had confidence that Nova knew many birds found attractive. He hardly ever left the pub alone, even if he came in not knowing a soul. But because he had lived so close, Nova had known him since she was a little girl. She didn't find him attractive, but rather comfortable, familiar.

"I can handle myself. What happened to the bird you left with?"

Chad just shrugged. Nova didn't know what that meant, but she supposed the girl ended up being more boring than he'd expected.

She tucked a bit of sandy brown hair behind her ear. Chad was the only Muggle she knew who knew her actual age. She'd make false documents to get the job at the pub a year back, and she looked old for her age. He walked with her some of the way back and then she paused, adjusting her scarf.

"Isn't it a bit warm for that thing?" Chad asked, smirking as he touched the scarf, playing with it like a child might. "It's summer."

"It cools off a lot at night, in my defense."

She hadn't expected his expression to suddenly change when he pulled the scarf tightly, uncomfortably around her neck. Nova tried to pull away, but she merely choked. Her heart was racing as he steered her into a small nook between two houses. It was a quiet neighborhood, but the sort where no one would come running to help her if she screamed. Not that she could scream with her scarf so tightly pulled around her throat.

"If you don't struggle, I won't hurt you," he said, his breath tickling her ear. It was hot and uncomfortable, and she could feel his hands loosening the hold on her scarf. Screaming wasn't an option, but perhaps if she could reach her wand?

Chad had a hand around her wrist quickly, however, and was pulling it down to his zipper.

"Be a good girl and take care of me, will you, pet?"

Nova wasn't an idiot. She'd lived in the neighborhood long enough to know that screaming would get her a knife to the throat if she was lucky, and doing anything but complying would mean they probably wouldn't find the body for a decade or so. Per Chad's instructions, she played nice, fighting back tears as she tried not to think about her little sister waiting up for her at home. Katie Ann would be worried, even if their mother was too hyped up on Valium to notice. Nova let Chad have his way. She didn't claw, didn't bite, didn't struggle at all. She closed her eyes and tried not to make a sound, tried to imagine herself somewhere else, doing something else. She pictured herself back at school, at Hogwarts, watching a Quidditch match and filled with joy at her team winning.

But trying to imagine herself full of joy in that moment was proving incredibly difficult.

When Chad was done with her, he gave her wrists one last squeeze and said, "Don't bother talking."

And then he left her there in the alleyway, leaning against the brick wall of a house, catching her breath, righting her clothes, and fighting the urge to slide to the ground and cry. She had to get home, and get home soon to let Katie Ann know that she was all right.

Just two more streets and Nova was unlocking the front door, brushing her hair out of her eyes. Her younger sister was looking at her with concern.

"What took so long? Have you been crying?"

"M'fine, dove," Nova muttered, hoping her eyes weren't too red. She didn't remember crying, but she wasn't surprised that it had happened. "Just had a late night is all. And the wind picked up around Maple, you know. I got something in my eye. But it's all good. Mum's sleeping?"

"When isn't she?" Katie Ann said bitterly. "Has Dad moved in at that new place yet?"

"He's taking us on Christmas holiday, moving all our stuff," Nova yawned. She was eager to shower. "I think I'm going to get the grime off me and go to bed. Sleep tight, dove."

Nova walked past her sister without a glance backward, and although she tried and tried to scrub the feel of Chad of her skin that night in the shower, she couldn't get rid of it no matter how hot she turned the water. She walked out of a second shower the following morning, skin pink from scalding, and she called Joe at the pub. She was sick, she told him, and since she was going back to school in not too long….

She never went back to that pub again, and did not leave the house without Katie Ann until they left for school.

Going off the deep end wasn't really the right way of explaining it, but it was closer than anything else Nova could think of, and as she sat in the smoky dormitory the Marauders sometimes held private parties in, firewhiskey in one hand and a joint in the other, she wondered why she hadn't done this before. Part of it was that she had never been very close to the Marauders, especially Sirius, who planned the parties, but the rest of it was that she'd always cared so much about what people thought of her.

Now it didn't seem to matter what anyone thought of her, and she relished the ability to chase away the niggling numbness in her chest with the pleasures of parties. She handed off the joint to Peter Pettigrew and ran her free hand through her tangled blonde hair.

"Nova Carmichael," Sirius Black's voice said behind her, and she could almost hear him smirking. She didn't turn around. "Never figured you'd end up a regular."

Nova took a gulp of her firewhiskey, pretending to ignore him. She'd heard from someone in Ravenclaw that he hated being ignored. She wasn't able to find out, however, because he sat down beside her, touching her chin and leaning in.

"You're different."

That got her attention, and she turned toward him. His eyes were very interesting this close, with strange flecks of green in the gray, right near the irises.

"How d'you mean?"

"I mean you're not like you were last year," he muttered, letting his fingertips trace her skin down toward her chin. His touch was soothing and exciting all at once, and she didn't even notice herself lean in slightly. "Something happened to you over the summer."

Her mind flashed to Chad and she almost pulled away, but Sirius touched her neck, calming her once more.

"I don't expect you to tell me," he said, his voice husky and soft and right in her ear in a way that made her head fuzzy. "You don't have to say anything you don't want to. But I think you're beautiful when you're sad."

Those words were strange, and perhaps the strangest of them that the word "beautiful" had come from the lips of Sirius Black. It wasn't the sort of compliment she would have expected him to use. Before she could think more on his words, though, his lips stole her attention.

Nova liked the feel of his lips on hers, and even sort of liked the way he took complete control of the kiss, that first night and all the nights after.

A year and a half. They were together for a year and a half, and Nova felt like she was on a high every time she was with him, and even fancied herself in love at one point.

Sirius was a good sort of boyfriend, sometimes. But when he wasn't a good sort of boyfriend, he was absolutely rubbish. He forgot her birthday. He forgot their anniversary (Halloween), and he forgot to buy her things on every gift-giving holiday there was. Sure, the kissing and touching were excellent, but Nova had barely let him snog her with clothes beginning to come off when she was starting to get a bit fed up with him. The Marauders were a tight-knit group, she knew, but he barely managed to make any time for her, and she knew he wasn't spending all that time studying.

That was when Nova began looking into Sirius. She was a very resourceful girl, and she happened to know how to poke at people who knew things and felt guilty. And Remus Lupin knew quite a lot of things, and the more Nova poked at him, the guiltier he acted.

"Nova, you know I can't talk to you about Sirius," he told her one day, wearily. "If you want to know all these things about him, why don't you ask him yourself?"

"Because," she said, moving a bit closer, watching his ears turn pink. He was getting nervous. "Look me in the eye, right now, Remus, and tell me that Sirius hasn't lied to me, and that he won't lie to me if I ask him about it."

Remus had looked her in the eye as requested, and he tried to hold his ground, but even as he opened his mouth it began to twitch and twist a the strain of the lies, and he sighed, looking away from her, rubbing his temples.

"I promised I would stay out of it, Nova."

"Do the noble thing, Remus. If I need to get out of this relationship, I'd rather you just tell me everything so I can get over it sooner and move on with my life."

He chewed on his lip for a bit, but eventually he did cave, and he told her everything. Nova had half a mind to beg him to stop telling her after a bit, it was just too much to take at once. He actually held her while she cried, but he continued to tell her, because once she got him talking, he couldn't seem to shut up. Perhaps he thought it was kinder, letting her know the whole truth at once. Perhaps he thought she would take it all better this way, knowing everything at once. Perhaps he thought he was honoring her wishes.

"I'm so sorry," Remus whispered, hugging her tight to his chest. "It's his family, you know. He tries and tries to rebel but things like that leave a mark on you. It's his mother, really."

Nova wasn't listening to his words anymore. She was listening to the steady beating of Remus's heart as rested her head against his chest, wiping her eyes, plotting her revenge. But from what she had heard, even Remus didn't know everything, and if she was going to make Sirius regret hurting her, she would need to find out everything somehow….

She would have to do something very illegal.

Thankfully, there was enough time to wipe away her tears before he came to, groaning, blinking up at her, his gray eyes clear of the potion. She tapped her fingers on his bedside table absently.

"I can't believe you did that to Mary," Nova whispered. "And not even James knows about it. What kind of sick person are you?"

Sirius sat up quickly, eyes wide.

"What?"

"You just told me what you did, what actually happened to Mary MacDonald," Nova said harshly.

His eyes searched her face, his own skin going dangerously pale.

"What did you do?" he demanded. She nodded to the vial next to him, next to his firewhiskey. He frowned, sniffing it gingerly. She knew he would smell nothing. The clear liquid was odorless. "That's illegal," he said softly.

"I had to get the truth somehow," she said darkly. "And I knew you weren't giving it to me any other way."

He looked up at her with pained eyes. At least she had managed to keep Remus out of it, to absolve him of all he'd told her. Now she wouldn't be responsible for ruining their friendship. It would be a poor way to repay him for his help.

Sirius groaned, sitting up, squinting at her. It seemed to Nova in that moment that the beauty she had once seen in him was gone, and she wondered if it had ever been there at all. He leaned in a bit closer, hand outstretched, but she backed away and he sighed, moving the hand instead to run his fingers through his hair.

"I would say I'm sorry-"

"But you're not," Nova said dully. She was horrified at the flatness in her voice. How could she be so calm, so unaffected by this? She ought to be holding a knife to his throat.

Sirius groaned, rubbing the heel of his hand into his eyebrow viciously.

"Nova, I wish…. I do wish that this hadn't happened."

Well, that was obvious. Nova could have handled the cheating. She would have been devastated, but it wasn't the cheating that really got to her. The way he went about it all, the girls he chose, how he destroyed them…. And Mary.

Nova now had all his secrets in her hands, things even his best friends didn't know, things that could ruin him forever, possibly even land him in prison.

"The question becomes," she said softly, still trying to decide exactly how to proceed. She wished the potion had lasted longer. "Where do we go from here? Because we can't stay together."

Sirius looked at her with a stricken look she hadn't expected, although perhaps she should have.

"Nova, I love you," he said softly, earnestly.

"I know," she said, feeling her throat tighten around the words. He'd said that under the influence of the potion. He'd said it over, and over, and over, and it had made her feel sick and pained and her eyes had filled with tears she'd been unable to control. She could already feel them coming on. "But it's not enough."

She hated how much it hurt to watch his face change, twist, fall. Everything would have been so much easier if he'd been indifferent to her, or if he only cared about her as much as the next girl, but he loved her and she knew he wasn't lying about it. He couldn't have lied if he'd wanted to. In spite of herself, she loved him a bit as well, but how could she stay with him, knowing what he had done, knowing what he was?

"So what do we do?" Sirius asked, his voice tight and full of pain that Nova wished he couldn't feel. Part of her wanted to hurt him, but to have him be hurt over something like this wasn't right. He was not suffering from remorse, but rather from the loss of her love. Except she still loved him. But he didn't need to know that.

"They need to know," Nova said softly.

"Nova, please."

"How can you hurt people like that?" she asked, turning to look at him again. She wished she hadn't, because his eyes were drawing her in. Nova's nose flared as she tried to force herself to say what needed to be said. "They're going to find out eventually."

"Most of them don't," he admitted, smiling sort of sheepishly. "Look, Nova, I can understand if you…. Well, I guess I don't really understand because I love you and it's a bit blinding, but I realize you don't want to…you don't want to be with me anymore. But can we just keep all of this…between us? That's where it belongs, isn't it?"

He was wrong. That wasn't where it belonged. The world deserved to know.

But Nova decided that earning Sirius's trust for now wouldn't hurt, that biding her time and looking for a way to help the girls he was hurting quietly, privately, would be better for them in the long run, and then she could expose him. Besides, she couldn't expose him right away, couldn't bare his guilt on the spot. For one thing, her pride wouldn't allow her own image to be pulled in with his taint. It wasn't that she had her sights on anything in particular, but she wanted to feel clean when she did.

More importantly, she wasn't sure she could do a good job yet, not until she no longer felt that she loved him.

"So this is it?" he finally asked, reaching out to touch her hand. Without even thinking, Nova pulled her hand away, watching as his eyes filled with pain.

"Yes," she said firmly. "This is it. Between us. But we're done."

"I wish…."

"Don't," Nova said, getting up, frowning at him. "Don't lie to me, Sirius Black. I can put up with a lot, but I can't abide lies."

He just watched her, his face turning cold as they stared at each other. After a moment, she could no longer look at him, and she left him alone in his room, the burning of pain in his eyes burrowed in her soul.