Team: Wigtown Wanderers
Position: Beater 2
Prompt: K-pop Song - Palette by IU (feat. G-Dragon). Theme - coming into your own, i.e. a "coming of age" kinda story where your character is able to identify the uniqueness of their personality, their likes and dislikes, their opinions and beliefs, and is able to be comfortable in their own skin without succumbing to peer pressure while accepting that it's ok to be different. (i.e. Sirius realizing it's okay to love the wrong things and to find his own happiness)
Additional Prompts: 2. (color) aquamarine, 7. (phrase) on his/her knees, 13. (theme) falling in love with the wrong person/thing
Words: 1610
Thanks to Bailey, Angel, Aya, and Ash for betaing!
The first person Sirius Black loves is his mother.
He loves her from afar, at first, because he's a child and not acceptable in civilized society, but he sees her walking down the stairs to the drawing room—he's shut Kreacher in the closet for the chance to look out of the peephole at her—and is struck by the beauty of her dress robe.
It's every bit as complicated and expensive as her usual robes, but there's a sheen to the aquamarine fabric that Sirius has never seen before, a sheen that makes his eyes glaze over and his mouth fall open. He's still staring when she's gone, still staring when Kreacher has broken out of the closet.
He wants to watch his mother come back from the dinner party. He needs to watch her come back from the dinner, to see the dress robes again, and maybe… just maybe, to catch a glimpse of her face.
There's a painting in the upstairs drawing room—it's different than the downstairs one, used only by family—and Walburga Black stares out of it with regal derision at anyone walking past. It's a power Sirius longs to have; a captivating beauty that he longs to inherit, and maybe… just maybe, his mother will look at him with as much love as he feels when he looks at her.
.oOo.
The second person Sirius loves is his brother.
Regulus is smaller than him: thinner and shorter, his eyes more dull and his lips turned down at the ends in a constant frown. Where Sirius laughs and cries in the same tempo—he will give everything or nothing, will share his joy and his sorrow, because surely… surely his mother wants to know everything—
Regulus is quiet in his joy and silent in his misery. Perhaps that's why Walburga pays attention to him.
Sirius is ready to die for his brother—yes, to die for him, because Sirius doesn't do things by halves. He's not ready to die for his mother, but by her hand: because if there's one thing Regulus needs protecting from is Walburga Black, who looks upon him with pride but never with affection.
Regulus is quiet in his love, but not silent. He presses close to Sirius when they're both allowed into society for the first time; tugs on his sleeve when he's found a new toy in the old cabinets and is afraid to touch it but desperate for something fun to do; asks Sirius to braid his hair when Kreacher is away serving their mother; nudges open the door to Sirius's bedroom and tiptoes over with an already open book, his mouth forming around the words 'Can you read it to me?'
.oOo.
The first person Sirius falls in love with is James Potter.
It takes a look and a glance—a joke and a half-prank that doesn't work but leaves them both in stitches and desperate for a compartment away from their frowning peers—and Sirius knows that this boy… this boy will never leave him.
Walburga has come to see him away; so has Regulus. Sirius is still smarting from the spell his mother aimed at him when he had the audacity to say 'Gryffindor.'
Where Regulus doesn't move to comfort Sirius, James grabs his hand and doesn't let go all the way down the corridor, not because he wants to hurt or control Sirius but because—Sirius holds his hand back when he realizes: James grabs his hands because he wants to.
.oOo.
The second and third people Sirius falls in love with are Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew,
respectively.
.oOo.
The loving Sirius does for James is with his hands.
Sirius holds James's hands like he held Regulus's, like he dreamed of holding his mother's.
And James is a tactile person—'Always have been!' he says whenever anyone comments on it—and if he's not holding hands with Sirius, he's holding hands with someone else: Remus seems to be a close second favorite, then Peter.
Sirius holds James's supplies when they prank—holds the dungbombs with dexterous fingers so as not to put too much pressure on the shell and cause it to detonate; holds James's wand when it slides out from behind his ear because he's moving too quickly; holds James's Muggle sweatshirt when he gets hot after running through the castle from Filch and decides to take it off.
Sirius wants to trust James's hands, to return the love he receives.
.oOo.
The loving Sirius does for Peter is with his smile.
Peter is small and mousy, eager with his laughter and quiet with his criticisms; genuine despite all his faults. His grin is too wide, his eyes shine too brightly, his laugh lasts too long after a joke has ended.
And when that smile falters and falls—and it rarely does—it's Sirius's smile that keeps them going. More than that, Sirius's smile keeps Peter going.
James and Remus don't notice. They can't: they've never felt second-best. Third-best. Not-best at all. They've never felt unwanted. Sirius feels Peter's thanks more than sees it, in the way Peter's smile is extra-wide the day after disappearing, in the way Peter looks at him with a different sort of wonder than at James and Remus.
It's the wonder Sirius feels whenever he looks at James; the wonder of discovering a love he's never felt. Not with his mother or Kreacher. Not even with Regulus—they're not talking anymore, not after Regulus gets sorted into Slytherin, though they meet each other's eyes sometimes and share a melancholy silence for what might have been.
Peter smiles at him whenever he notices—he never misses much, not even the panic in Sirius's eyes when James unexpectedly claps him on the back. The silent support goes both ways, Sirius reminds himself whenever Peter looks away and intrusive thoughts form the question 'But why would you want to support me?'
.oOo.
The loving Sirius does for Remus is on his knees.
The first time he hears the word 'queer', he's fourteen and a Half-Blood student three years older than him takes perverse joy hissing it as they pass each other in the hallway.
But that's not the loving he gives Remus—though the student is right, and the realization leaves Sirius staring at his reflection for an hour, because finally… finally, something makes sense.
Remus is taller than him, taller than all of them, his joints cracking when he has to bend his awkwardly long limbs to fold himself onto the Common Room couch or his own bed. Peter quietly melts into furniture and makes himself comfortable, James lands onto it from an extravagant leap, Sirius flops onto furniture with a dramatic sigh, and Remus painfully bends his too-tall frame to fit next to them.
That is when Sirius slides off onto the floor: there's more room to lounge there, anyway.
He waves away Remus's thanks late at night when he helps Remus take robes out of his trunk. It's too low for Remus to reach, especially close to the full moon when he moves as if his body is a badly-altered second-hand outfit. Sirius is much shorter, after all, the top of his head just brushing Remus's chin when they stand next to each other.
'You can get stuff down from shelves for me,' Sirius jokes the first time Remus protests at the special treatment.
It's not special treatment—that's what Remus calls it—not when he holds Sirius's hands when it's cold and they're watching James play Quidditch; not when he forces Sirius into a hand-knit jumper and hat gift at Christmas; not when he laughs at the tenth 'queer' pun Sirius has cracked in ten minutes.
.oOo.
They all laugh at the 'queer' puns. And the 'Sirius' puns. And all the animal puns Sirius has had the time to come up with before coming back to Hogwarts after being disowned.
And to think—
Sirius doesn't want to be ashamed of it, not really.
She wore the aquamarine dress when she did it—raised her wand against her eldest son for the last time—and Sirius remembers admiring it. Remembers admiring so many of her dresses. The way her long hair falls in curls down her back, the way it frames her face in the portrait in the upstairs drawing room. Remembers looking in the mirror and touching his face, hoping that he has her sharp cheekbones and dark eyes, remembers that he did that before knowing what she looks like—because he wasn't allowed to see her.
Because she didn't want him to.
As he cracks the first joke—he holds James's hand, sends Peter a secret smile, and buys Remus chocolate frogs from the elderly witch with the trolley—he wonders if his mother found him funny.
When she was still his mother.
Sirius doesn't want to feel shame for missing her, but it's not her he misses: it's the might-have-been, the same mourning he has for his relationship with Regulus.
He doesn't do anything by halves, and love is no different, and it doesn't matter whether it's returned. It hurts. Of course it does. It hurts—hurts like the spells Walburga used to send his way, like the punishments Kreacher was allowed to give—but Sirius has more love to give than for his family; for the family that has failed to return that love.
Where they're gone, the Marauders aren't: they laugh with him, James grips his hand, Peter sends him a silent thank-you and a grin of returning support, and Remus looks at him with honey-colored eyes and shares his chocolate.