A/N: This is a two-part story dedicated to Forever Siriusly Sirius, who asked for my next Sirius/OC to be a happy ending. All right, so this isn't a Sirius/OC you're saying. I told you, there's a sequel. Who ends up with Sirius? You'll have to wait and see! This first part is going to be nearly sixty chapters, so I hope you're down for the ride!

-C

Lily was watching Sanna Scott as the blonde entered the room, sitting down on her bed and trying not to look too morose.

"I've been dying to ask you all break, but I didn't want to put it in a letter," Lily said, her green eyes dull and sad. "Why did you do it?"

"You know why," Sanna sighed. "I wasn't in love with him anymore."

Sanna had broken up with her boyfriend of a year, Remus Lupin, over Christmas holiday, and everyone they mutually knew was buzzing with the news.

"I guess that makes sense," Lily said slowly, frowning. "I wish…."

"Lily, there was no way we could stay together. I couldn't deceive him. He deserves to be happy, but so do I. We would only have come to resent each other eventually, and I value him as a friend."

Even if she hadn't valued Remus as a friend, Sanna would have done everything to keep things from being awkward with him, because he was close friends with her best friend, Sirius Black.

"I get that," Lily finally said, sighing and picking up her book once more. "Did you see Anissa and Marlene on your way up?"

"I didn't," Sanna said casually, glancing down at her skirt to see what it was that was tickling her leg. She had a loose string that she carefully pulled out of the skirt. Lily was wrinkling her nose. Lily was one of those people too paranoid about running her hem or unraveling her clothing to pull at a string, and she was also one of those people who had to try very hard not to impose her own beliefs about everything on the people around her. Sanna was a tolerant sort of person, which was why she and Lily got on so well, but she could understand why Sirius could hardly stand the girl.

"I'm back!" Marlene cried, rushing into the dormitory with Mary MacDonald at her heels. "Did you miss me?"

"We were in perpetual sorrow without you, darling," Sanna drawled, not looking up from her skirt.

Marlene tossed a comb at Sanna's head. If it had been anyone else, Sanna would have asked why they had a comb on hand to throw, but Marlene was an oddity. It was part of what Sanna loved about her.

"I heard a certain someone broke up with a certain someone over holiday," Marlene teased, flopping onto her own bed, across the room from Sanna.

Sanna just shrugged.

"It had to be done," she said simply.

Marlene rolled her eyes.

"We know it had to be done," Mary said softly, taking off her shoes. "But did it really have to be done on Boxing Day?"

Marlene broke out in a peal of giggles and Sanna rolled her eyes, glaring at her sandy-haired friends.

"Did either of you see Anissa on your way up?" Lily asked, shifting the topic rapidly and forcefully.

"No," they chorused. They erupted in giggles once more. Sanna rolled her eyes all over again and got to her feet, marching into the bathroom, glancing at her face to decide if she really needed to wash it before bed. Of course, she did, but she hated doing it. She splashed a bit of water on her face and squirted a bit of cleanser onto her fingertips before massaging it over her face.

Sanna had a clear, pallid complexion. She, like Lily, looked a bit like porcelain in the right light, and she would like to keep it that way. She didn't spend too much time in the sun. She took especial care of her skin every morning and night.

When her face was sufficiently cleaned, she rinsed it thoroughly, making sure she felt no residue of cleanser still on her face before patting it dry.

Lily came in a moment later as Sanna was rubbing moisturizer on her face.

"Are you sure you're all right?" Lily asked softly.

"I'm over it, Lily. For one thing, it happened over a week ago. For another, I made up my mind more than a month ago. If you want to know if Remus is all right, that makes more sense. You'd have to ask him. He hasn't spoken to me since."

That was the thing that stung the most. They had seen each other during the New Year's party Sirius threw, but she did not force him to speak to her. She knew his pain was still very raw and it wouldn't be fair of her to make him move through his emotions faster than he was ready for.

"I guess I probably should," Lily said slowly. "Did you cut your hair?"

"Trimmed it," Sanna said, putting toothpaste on her toothbrush. "The ends were getting scraggly."

She brushed her teeth vigorously, wondering if Lily would leave. For a long time they just stood there in the strange not-quite silence of the bathroom, the sounds of tooth-brushing echoing on the tiled walls.

Finally, Lily patted Sanna's shoulder before walking back out into the dormitory.

Sanna spat and rinsed both her mouth and her toothbrush before picking up her comb and carefully combing out her blonde locks.

When she was a child, she'd loved her hair. It made her think of her mother, who had the same hair before she died. That had been years ago, and the hair no longer held such positive associations, but rather had attracted all the idiotic boys who thought she had to be a certain way because she was blonde. Sanna didn't know where all the associations came from, but she didn't think she was so different from Lily or Anissa, and they were red-haired and black-haired.

"Fuck!" Sanna heard Marlene squeal. Anissa had arrived. The blonde waited for a moment for her closest female friend to enter the bathroom.

Anissa was a very pale girl, with shining black hair and pale blue eyes. She looked like a person possessed when she was excited about something, but now and as usual she looked incredibly tired. She came from a very large family, and although she was the youngest, this meant she had a great deal of responsibility.

"How did he take it?" Anissa asked, taking a couple of cotton swabs out of a little box in her corner of the counter space. She wore eye makeup every day, to try to balance the strangeness of her eye color with her very dark hair.

"I suppose as well as can be expected," Sanna said with a shrug. "I've not spoken to him since. I think…"

"Relax, Sanna, I talked to him on the train," Anissa said. "He told me he's still in love with you, and he's absolutely desolate, but I think he'll get used to the idea, given time."

Sanna did not have her friend's optimism.

"Desolate?"

"Oh, Sanna, think of how in love with you the poor boy was. Is. And you were his first girlfriend and everything."

"He was my first boyfriend."

"Different," Anissa said, shaking her finger.

Anissa didn't know about Remus's condition, but she knew about his issues of self-esteem. She knew that Remus did not feel worthy to date anyone, much less Sanna. They had gotten together because she kissed him while they were studying and somehow it got heated very quickly and she wouldn't take no for an answer when she suggested that they go on a date. Once he went on one date with her, he couldn't deny himself so easily.

Remus had been a good boyfriend, and Sanna really did feel very bad at hurting him, but it would have been worse to stay with him when she knew she no longer loved him. At least, that's what she and Sirius had both agreed just before December, when she consulted her best friend on the situation. Sirius had warned her that Remus would be shattered, but Sanna had hoped it was an exaggeration.

She should have known better.

"Other than breaking hearts, how was your Christmas?" Anissa said teasingly.

"It was fine," Sanna said with a shrug. "You know how Olivia can be when she doesn't get her way, but otherwise we were all pretty happy with our gifts, and I think even she wasn't exactly unhappy with what she did get."

"What did they not get her this time?"

"A new broom," Sanna said, and both girls rolled their eyes.

All four of the Scott sisters played Quidditch. Sanna and her elder sisters Grace and Veronika were in Gryffindor and played under James Potter, one of Sanna's classmates. Olivia, the youngest, was a Ravenclaw and took it very personally that their parents did nothing to give her an edge over her sisters.

"Lovely," Anissa said darkly. "Well, you can imagine how my break was."

Sanna nodded, frowning as she turned to face her friend.

Anissa was the youngest of eight children, and one of her older brothers – her favorite, actually – had been killed by Death Eaters two days after Halloween. Christmas holiday had been her first time going home since the funeral, and Sanna knew that it would be hard for Anissa, having Christmas without William. All the girls knew it, especially Sanna and Lily, and Lily had been eagerly awaiting a chance to make sure Anissa was okay.

"Lily?"

"She accosted me, yes," Anissa said, smirking a little and picking up a washcloth to begin cleaning off her luxuriously colorful lipstick. "You know Lily. Although I think she expects me to be worse than I am."

Lily expected nothing of the sort, Sanna knew. Anissa was pretending she was better than she was, but they all knew she was a wreck inside. It was so bad that Professor Dumbledore was having her to his office every other week on Tuesdays to discuss her mental health and grieving.

"Anyway," Anissa said, rinsing the lipstick off the cloth as best she could, "have you talked to Sirius since the breakup?"

Half the school seemed to think that now Sanna had broken up with Remus, she and Sirius were finally going to have the wild romp everyone thought they'd been on the verge of for years. Sanna rolled her eyes. Anissa hadn't meant it that way, except jokingly, but it was sad that the rumors were still the first thing to come to mind.

"He sat with me on the train," Sanna said. "He doesn't like how it turned out, but he's supporting me. He's supporting us both."

"As he should," Anissa muttered, pulling a couple of cotton swabs out of a little box and dousing them with remover before carefully wiping away the thin black line around her eyes. "He'd be a terrible friend for abandoning either of you. I think he needs to be careful, though."

"How so?"

"Well, it's Remus who really needs support right now, and if he's seen giving too much time to you, he's going to be seen as not only taking sides, but perhaps, taking some on the side."

Sanna rolled her eyes, flicked the back of Anissa's head as she passed, and went back out into the bedroom.

Anissa was right, though. She and Sirius had a delicate line to walk in their friendship now, but she had no doubts that things would come out right, in the end. They usually did, even if the way to the end was painful and remarkably uphill. She climbed into bed, closed her eyes, and tried to shut out the world as she drifted off to sleep. Of course, her dreams were still riddled with guilt from how she ended things with Remus, but that would pass.

The following morning, Sanna sat comfortably at breakfast, trying not to convey annoyance when Sirius sat down beside her.

"How is he?" she asked a bit stiffly, not looking up from her plate as she carefully buttered her toast.

"Bad," Sirius muttered, leaning across her to get a plate of sausages. "But I think the best way to make him better is to force him to get over it."

Sanna nearly dropped her toast. Sirius trying to prescribe such things was a surefire way to disaster. But when James sat across from them a moment later, she realized that this was something James must have come up with. She raised her eyebrows.

"Are you to completely stupid?" she asked as calmly as possible, and James just blinked at her owlishly.

She didn't get an answer from them, although she didn't feel she needed one. Moments later, they were joined by Gideon, Fabian, Peter, and Remus.

"Hello, boys," Sanna said, training her eyes back down at her plate. She felt Anissa sitting beside her.

"Oh, wow, solidarity, is it?" Anissa said, the bad joke dripping off her lips. "You know, William died months ago, guys. I really am fine."

Fabian gave a half-hearted laugh for Anissa's benefit, but no one was amused. It all hit a bit too close to the truth.

"Good morning, ladies," Gideon said softly, glancing quickly at Remus. Sanna braved a look to find him staring at her with a mix of pain and longing. She quickly looked down again.

The worst part about not loving Remus anymore was knowing that he was still so much in love with her.

"Sanna?"

Olivia's breathy, self-impressed voice wafted over the heads of the boys to Sanna. She looked up again at her sister, who was looking very frazzled.

"Yes, dear?" Sanna asked, feeling Sirius's hand on her knee to keep her from saying something vicious. Sanna had a thin veneer of patience when it came to her youngest sister, but that patience was always its thinnest on returning from holidays.

"I need to borrow your gloves for practice."

Before Sanna had a chance to say anything, James snorted very loudly and said, "Well, that would be rather stupid, wouldn't it?"

"Oh?" Olivia said, smirking. "Pray tell, Potter, why?"

"Well first off," James said, turning to grin at her, "a Chaser using Seeker's gloves would be idiocy. The grip is all different. You'd diminish your hold on the Quaffle." Olivia just continued to smirk passively at him. "Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, why would anyone on my team loan something to a Ravenclaw? I mean, it would hurt your practice, so I might give her the okay anyway, but this is quite daft of you, Scott. I expected better."

It got confusing sometimes, at practices. Sanna and her other two sisters, Grace and Veronika, were all on the Gryffindor team, and James had a habit of barking out orders by surname during practice. "SCOTT!" was a common part of his practice vocabulary, and it led to all sorts of confusion.

"You see, Potter, that's where you're wrong," Olivia chirped happily, and Sirius gripped Sanna's need a little tighter. He knew well enough what was sure to be coming. "You see, I want to make it harder for myself in practice, so that I'm that much better with my normal gloves. And for another, it really wouldn't matter if you brought out all the troops to try to sabotage our practice this year. We've gone young blood. You're just tired, all of you, and with Grace's wrist, you're not going to win this year."

Olivia floated away before James or Sanna or either of the Prewetts had a chance to properly say anything, although all four had jumped to their feet. They were all on the team together, and took such slights very personally.

"Sit down and stop being idiots," Sirius said sternly. "All of you. She only came over here to get a rise and you know it. Don't let her stir you up. You know as well as I do that the fresh blood she's talking about is more like fresh meat. Macalister couldn't hit a still target with a Bludger if he had all day to try."

The boys sat down, but Sanna kept standing, watching her sister swagger back to the Ravenclaw table. She did love Olivia, in a strange, sisterly way, but there was no real affection between them. It wasn't like the closeness Sanna had with both Grace and Veronika. Sirius grabbed Sanna's hand and pulled her back onto the bench. She yelped with pain as she hit the wood hard.

"Sorry," he said, wincing with her. "But you were starting to cause a scene, you know. She's not worth it, bug."

She glanced across at Remus, who was studiously picking at his potatoes. Remus had always hated that Sirius had nicknames for Sanna, no matter how many times she tried to explain that it was just because they were so close. She liked some of them. Bug was an ambivalent one, but it wasn't the worst of the things he called her. She bit her lip and looked down at her plate, suddenly not very hungry. She had the urge to get up and go to the library before class, but her sister would take it as a victory, and Sanna couldn't have that.

"My nerves are a bit tightly wound, I suppose," she said, picking up her goblet of pumpkin juice. "All winter with Olivia in that house…."

"She's a bit of a piece of work, isn't she?" Gideon asked with a frown.

"You have no idea," Anissa said, snorting. Sanna listened and avoided looking at anyone as she ate her breakfast. Anissa spent the rest of the meal relating tales of Olivia's obnoxious, self-centered behavior, entertaining them all and keeping the tension between Sanna and Remus from taking over their part of the table.

But all the while it hung there between them, just waiting to be acknowledged.