Disclaimer: I am not JK Rowling and make no profit.

Summary: Sirius could have any girl. But tonight he wanted her. Was it just because she was with Arthur and wanted what he couldn't have? Or did he love her? She could never tell when he was playing games or being sincere.

Song Inspiration: The One That Got Away - Katy Perry and When You Were Young by The Killers especially the line "he talks like a gentleman just like you imagined when you were young"

In Another Life

~1975~

Young Molly had just been celebrating her 17th birthday a few hours earlier with a small circle of her friends and family. Arthur Weasley and Mildred, plus a few of her cousins had been there. But of course he had not been invited. Molly had expressly warned Sirius Black not to come to her house or contact her ever again. She was actually surprised that he listened. Of course when she was awoken at midnight by the sounds of a roaring motorcycle outside her window, she knew immediately knew who it was. She hurriedly climbed down out of her window and confronted the troublemaker before her parents woke up too. She was still wearing her nightgown with her red curls tangling down her neck.

He was leaning back on his motorcycle, looking every bit as smug in his black leather with a smoldering drag in his long, elegant fingers.

Molly crossed her arms against her chest and tried to look as angry as possible, a look she had learned from her mother. Despite the small part of her that couldn't help feeling a tiny excitement that Hogwart's bad boy had decided to pay her attention for the past month. Even though she knew he was only playing around with her.

"Sirius why can't you act more fucking mature?"

Sirius' unreadable eyes stared at the curvy redhead in her nightdress before flipping his long hair back. "'Cause when you've been through what I have, Molly, you don't give a flying fuck what people think of you anymore." He paused to enjoy Molly's shocked expression before smiling at her in a breathtaking way. "Why don't you forget about Arthur for one night and let me take you for a ride?"

"Why don't you get the hell off my property before my parents wake up and decide to kill you for harassing their daughter!"

"They would do that?" Sirius looked shocked, "And I thought my parents were bad." His grey eyes stared at her with almost puppyish sadness, as if he were a lost child.

Molly hated being reminded that she had once shown sympathy for Sirius once upon a long time ago. Knowing him as she now knew him, she didn't blame his parents for kicking him out. Or him running away. Which ever way it happened. Who knew what the real story was.

"Just shut up Sirius and get out of here!" She stole a glance at her parents windows which were still dark with the curtains drawn. They were asleep. For now. Though for how how much longer with this idiot and his motorcycle around.

"What if I told you no?" Sirius said with irritating slowness.

She could see a hint of a smirk crawl back into his smug face.

Dammit.

"Leave right now Sirius before I swear I'll make you pay for it!" If only she had her wand. She couldn't stand the idea of her prim conservative parents finding her with this leather jacketed moron. They'd think she were cheating on Arthur or something. And Arthur was only just the son of her father's boss at the Ministry.

Sirius raised his brows but he said nothing. Which only made her more worried what he would try next.

"This isn't funny," she said in a warning tone.

"I'm not trying to be funny."

"As if I would believe that." Sirius and his Marauder friends had only just caused nonstop trouble at Hogwarts for the last five years.

"Why don't you trust me?" he suddenly said. And for some reason this really threw her off.

"W-what?"

"I mean why can't you trust me?"

Molly could only stare at him. She could never tell when he was being serious or not. Especially when he was looking right through her as if she were transparent and he could see every detail of her soul. She crossed her arms even tighter against her chest.

"I've never done anything to you..."

Molly snorted. "Yes except harass me for the past weeks because you think its funny to bug me and Arthur!"

"I told you I don't find it funny," he said. But he smirked anyways.

She felt like strangling his smug enigmatic face. "Yes, then why do you do it?!"

"I don't know," he smiled wider, "An acquired habit, perhaps?"

Molly found his reply more irritating than anything. Whenever she thought she had Sirius figured out, whenever she wrote him off as nothing more than an immature shallow idiot, he would bring her back with little comments and glimpses of deeper emotions that made her have to remember who she was talking to: Sirius Black, Hogwart's biggest prankster and player. Not some misunderstood soul.

"Why don't you just leave Arthur and I alone? Don't you have other people to prank-" she thought quickly of who he normally bothered "-like poor Severus?"

Sirius made a face of disgust and protested how much he hated dear "Snivellus". She was reminded again of what a jerk he was at school. No matter how annoying Severus was, it didn't give Sirius or James the right to bully him. They were jerks. And right now she was getting very tired of his immaturity.

"Go away Sirius." She turned her back to him and started to walk away. She didn't care anymore if he turned his motorcycle back on and woke up the whole neighbourhood. That was his deal.

Suddenly she felt one of Sirius' hands on her wrist pull her back.

She was surprised at the amount of force he exerted so easily over her, though he had not hurt her, he had swung her around in one swift movement. A graceful movement. Almost as if he had been a trained dancer. And she hated him for how graceful and effortlessly charming he was in everything despite being a jerk. Who deserved to look like a toad. To match the inside. Instead of his deceivingly pretty outside.

"Let go of me Sirius before I scream," she said, staring disdainfully between his hand and his grey eyes which his hair fallen over.

He chuckled and the sound made her feel delirious. As if they were both caught in some weird delirious game. As if they'd both been spinning really fast in circles around each other and Sirius had suddenly forced them to stop so that now it was everything outside that seemed to swirl like a mad carousel.

"I'm only going to tell you this one last time Molly. Stop playing pretend with Arthur and your perfect family. Come with me right now tonight or you're going to regret it for the rest of your life."

There again. He had thrown her off balance with his unique mix of bluntness and immaturity. His childish honesty showing through in his impossibly beautiful smile. She didn't know whether to slap him or go with him. He was like Peter Pan offering to take her to Neverland, to some impossible place she could only ever dream of. Except she knew he would forget her eventually and she would grow up, grow bitter, while he stayed the same. Unchanged and forever laughing and impossible.

"You're out of your mind, Sirius. I'm not going to go with you," she heard herself saying.

"I know."

He knows? He knows? Then why the hell does he keep bugging the shit out of me?!

But it was true. She would never go with him. Despite this Molly was suddenly aware that his cold hand had slipped into hers and she was leaning against him, as if her whole body were pleading for him to just grab her and take her flying on his motorcycle. So that she didn't have to think of her actions or consequences.

"Dammit, why can't you just do things normally instead of showing up at my house and expecting me to go with you. You really have some nerve!"

"It's just how I am."

He smiled sadly and dammit she wished he would kiss her. Because she could never agree to go with him unless he forced her. And she wanted to but she couldn't. If he forced her, however gently. If he kept holding onto her hand and lead her, she could pretend that he had pulled her instead of gently holding her hand, as if she had no choice. Pretend it was all his fault and that he was as black as his name. Instead he insisted on being a gentleman in the weirdest and most contradictive of ways. Almost as if to torture her.

"I hate how you do things."

"I'll try to remember that next time I surprise you," he smiled placidly and ran a hand through his wavy black locks.

"You never remember. I've already told you a dozen times all the ways you annoy me, especially your so called surprises!"

Sirius looked hurt for a split second before he smirked again.

"Are you coming or not, my Molly-Lollyness?"

"Shut up, you hare brained idiot!" she spat though she secretly loved the way that ridiculous nickname sounded on his lips. As if he liked no better name or other girl in the world. Though she knew that couldn't possibly be true. Padfoot and Molly-Lollyness weren't some couple destined to be together in the stars. It was probably some big joke to him. He'd laugh at her after, if she ever left Arthur.

"C'mon Molly, come with me. Come with your Sirius."

Your Sirius. How badly she wanted that to be true. If only she were stupider she could believe him. But she was not stupid.

His fingers rubbed her palm, an echo of a possibility, and she felt her breathe hitch in her throat. She wanted so badly for him to force her to go with him. Not give her a second to doubt or refuse him.

But she knew he wouldn't.

Sirius presented no certainties and yet in a strange contradiction he refused to do anything unless she gave her permission. Not even kiss or caress her though she could tell it ran through his forlorn eyes constantly as he stared down at her lips. As if it were some unspoken condition of the other world he came from, just as Wendy had to believe in fairies to fly. She had to believe...in what?... to go with Sirius?

What did she have to believe in?

Why did she feel as if her were asking her to drop everything in her life for a moment with him? Did he expect everyone to runaway like him and be disowned from their parents just to go with him on a whim?

"You're impossible," she said. Her voice felt prematurely old, her eyes suddenly watery and miserable.

"Don't exaggerate," he said in his absentminded way. He didn't understand that they were consequences for normal people, people like her. He thought everyone had his luck and effortless way of drifting through life unmired and uncaught by consequences or adult struggles.

His hand held her hand a moment longer and an infinite time seemed to pass in which they stood so close she could smell the leather of his jacket. His gentle grasp on her hand so light that she was sure he would let go any second. Because she knew he was waiting for her to give in to him. To grab him. To tell him she wanted what he wanted. To be fearless and carefree like him and laugh in the face of danger. She had to choose. He was making her choose to be with him and she just couldn't. Though she couldn't say no either. She could yell at him, even tell him that she hated him, but she couldn't actually say 'no' at the end of the day.

"Don't wait forever Molly," he said or was that her own voice? She couldn't remember now only that her heart felt like it was breaking under a hammer at those words.

She felt his hand slip out of hers and then all at once he was gone. As if he had never been there and she had imagined the whole thing. Though she still stood there in her parent's backyard in her nightgown and bare feet in the cold grass. And for a moment she knew what Wendy felt when Peter Pan left her behind to return to Neverland. She knew it was pain that made her jump even deeper into the safety and smothering structure of the grown up world, so that when he returned she was an adult with seven kids and gray hairs amid her red curls. A middle aged woman who could scream louder and more hoarsely than her own mother, and who fretted and worried constantly. A stranger to the man who still fought with his shadows and ran with the lost boys. Before he slipped once more to the other side and she wished she could have held his hand one last time. Though she knew she would let his hand go again and she'd still be waiting forever to know.

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A/N: This was sort of a drabble or one shot, but I have other Molly/Sirius scenes in mind to continue it. Molly and Sirius have always had a lot chemistry in my opinion, mostly hate in the Order of the Phoenix. Though this story has nothing to do with my novel 'Curse of the Black Family Rose', in that Molly and Sirius just hate each other, nothing more!

Also I realize now that Molly and Sirius are not the same age, so they wouldn't have been at Hogwarts together, but I imagine this happening "in another life" Anyways I loved the novel Peter Pan and kind of wanted to recreate that sense of odd inexplicable sadness at growing up and letting go of people you can't hold onto.

Thanks for reading!