It was bad enough, Iris decided, that she had been isolated for four weeks at the Dursley's and that Dumbledore along with the Weasleys and other adults were keeping things from her for no adequately explained reasons. No; what really made it worse was that although she should be enjoying what remained of her summer because she was with her friends and Sirius (finally!), away from the Dursleys and Dudley's stupid gang and no magic, and even though they had long since apologised for the lack of letters, she couldn't enjoy herself because everything felt wrong. So when the others had all gone off to do shopping or something, Iris had resolutely stayed put, despite the anxious and guilty expressions of her friends, and tried to wish away her anger.
It was the house, she decided, looking around. Dark and dank and dusty and a hundred other things beginning with the letter d and carrying right through the alphabet, none of the words good and none of them desirable. Her fingers scratched the dirt on the walls and her nose rediscovered the smell of mould and dust and the rotten wet rank of inefficient cleaning and the leftover of human sweat and skin long past and never exorcised.
It was also the way the adults were skittish around her and so frustratingly tight-lipped regarding…well, everything. It made no sense to her – surely if they wanted to keep her safe they would tell her things instead of wrap her and all the other 'children' in cotton wool?
Her fingers curled against the wall, the patterned wallpaper mottled and weary. Last year she had watched Cedric die. This year he was still dead, and he wasn't ever going to come back. It was, in her professional opinion as a seasoned Voldemort-escape artist, entirely too late for cotton wool. The flat-faced snake man wasn't going to wait for them to grow up.
This house, she thought, was just horrible, and she curled up behind a chair in the library and buried her head beneath her arms. She wanted Hogwarts. She wanted her friends and the adults to stop giving her looks out the corners of their eyes. She wanted Sirius –
Well, she wasn't sure what she wanted from Sirius. What she was getting certainly wasn't what she wanted, that was for sure. She got wistful smiles when she entered the room and awkward pats on the shoulder when she really wanted a hug so badly and long silences when she asked for stories about before and it all made her wonder if he meant it – did he mean it? When he said; come live with me. I'm not too great, Iris, but we can be a family, like we were meant to be, like what Lily and James wanted –
But instead of getting a family she got a man who wandered from room to room and never seemed to know what to say to her. He would talk a little, then get embarrassed and stutter to a stop, smiling ruefully and saying, "Well, er, we were just lads back then really –", as though girls were less inclined to hear tales of mischief. She wondered, vaguely, if it would have been easier to connect if she were a boy. The few letters they had written to each other were so easy; was it because they were now face to face and he didn't know how to talk to a girl? It wasn't as though she were fiercely girly. She did like flowers, although due to years of forced labour gardening had lost all its charms. She wasn't particularly inclined towards to colour pink, although yellow had its merits. Purple was even better. Were those feminine colours? Horses – well, obviously. Horses were bloody brilliant; who didn't like horses? Mad, sad, miserable people, that's who. And she liked dresses, but only because they required astonishingly little effort to wear and not because they were pretty and feminine. Dresses were easy as anything and it was simple enough to cover up if they didn't fit right, unlike jeans, which never fitted quite right no matter where they were bought. The second she saw the 'jumper-dress' in a Muggle magazine she had fallen in love and resolved to marry whoever had invented it.
Did Sirius know all these things?
The thought came from nowhere and surprised her so much that all other trains of thought shuddered to a halt. Could she say she was making just as much effort as him? No. Probably not, now that she thought of it. What she should really do is be upfront about it, like a Gryffindor - like how Ginny was about the boys she liked. Just walk straight up to him and say, I want to be a family, so let's be one.
Her face re-buried itself in her arms. Suddenly the empty room seemed to laugh at her, the musty air becoming a miasma that weighed down her limbs. What was wrong with her? He wanted to be a family too, didn't he? Where's that lioness courage, Potter?!
The door groaned and she jumped, her head popping out of her arms and her hair flying everywhere. Spluttering, she tried to untangle it from – well, everything; her mouth, eyes, necklace. The glasses were the worst, strands of hair impossibly twined around the nose and hinges.
"Ow," she said, pulling in the wrong direction despite years of weary practice. She heard a low chuckle and realised that Sirius was in the room. Peering through her bangs, she saw his blurry figure standing a little away, hunched slightly.
"No, don't mind me," she said, raised her hands, her hair twisted around her fingers. "I'm perfectly fine. Don't try to help at all." She had the vague idea that she looked rather like a bush, or a weeping willow, with its mottled, feathery branches tangled in the riverside reeds. No, actually; there was no way her hair was as pretty as a willow.
Sirius chuckled again, clearly his throat. "Need a hand?" he asked, his foot sliding forward for a whole second before his body reluctantly followed. Blinking, Iris shook her head.
"I was only being half-sarcastic," she told him, delicately fiddling with her glasses with one hand as the other painstakingly picked out each hair one by one. "This is a very precise procedure. Too many chefs, and all that."
"Right." Sirius sounded like he wasn't entirely sure what she meant. She was used to that, so that was alright. "You could just cut it."
Iris forcibly parted her hair so she could stare at him, affecting a dramatic horrified expression. "It's my hair." She clumped it together in her hands for emphasis. "If I cut it every time it got caught in something, I'd be bald!"
This got a louder chuckle from Sirius, who folded himself on the floor across from her. "So then, little petal, what are you sitting on the floor of the library for?"
"I didn't fancy sitting on the seats," she replied, only half-untruthfully. The other half of the truth was something she didn't entirely understand, but suspected it mostly consisted of defeatist attitudes. Sirius's face twisted.
"I don't blame you," he said. "Rotten things. Made from the pelts of magical creatures. The old hag used to boast they were centaur pelts, but I can't imagine any wizard wanting to risk getting close enough to a centaur just for the horse pelt."
"Ugh." Iris glanced at the furniture with a new eye, taking in the age-blackened covers.
"That one you're next to is – was the old man's armchair. He'd sit there every night with his pipe and read papers and things. You didn't interrupt him when he was reading; never. The house had to be utterly quiet. Even mother didn't make a sound. He executed house elves for breathing too loudly when they brought him his brandy."
Iris couldn't stop herself from grimacing. Suddenly garden duties and occasional chasings from Dudley's crew seemed pleasant in comparison to the childhood Sirius was hinting at. It occurred to her then that the house – dark, disgusting, and thoroughly unpleasant – that she was currently sitting in was the same house that Sirius had grown up in. He had grown up in this house. This same house where once lived the kind of mother who would blast the faces of her own children off the ancestry tapestry and hang the heads of executed house-elves on display. It was a wonder he was still sane.
And he had spent twelve years in Azkaban.
She looked at him; thin (not wiry or slender), dark eyes (not born with them; circles, weariness, tired), unshaven (not trendy or rakish), loose dirty clothes, bitten nails, crooked teeth…
Yes. It was a wonder he was still sane. It was a wonder he was still alive.
Now that she was looking, Sirius seemed smaller now than he was five minutes ago, lost in his musings, his fingertips barely brushing the edges of trousers as filthy as the floor – Iris didn't think it was fair, really, that she should find some family only for them to be broken instead of whole. She felt like she had to fix him, then, and that wasn't fair either, was it? Why should she be the one to fix him when he was the adult and he was supposed to be strong and help her forget the past, and her rubbish childhood, because that's what it was – rubbish, and she didn't have to beat around the bush about it, did she? Because it wasn't fair, at all, that she should find a home and that it turned out to not be much better than the one she left behind because Sirius had an awful childhood and he was broken and then had nothing but good memories with her dad and Remus when he left home –
Until it went bad. Until it went very bad for him, all over again.
Looking around at the house where Sirius lived when he was a child, her back to his father's chair, Iris came to a very solid realisation that although her childhood was rotten and she had distinct issues with that, Sirius's was certainly, definitely even worse. Beyond worse. Unfathomably worse. And if she was having issues with the kind of childhood she had had, then what on earth must Sirius be going through after his? After Azkaban?
She wanted a family – oh, she wanted it like nothing she had ever wanted before. But families didn't come easy or cheap, because families were made up of people first, and if she had problems then Sirius absolutely did as well. But if he still wanted to work with her to create this family, despite the problems, then why was she just sitting there? She could spend her whole life running from the bad things in her life, curled up on the floor with her head hiding in her arms, unless she stood up and chose what mattered to her. She could make herself a family, right there and then, if only she would try. It wasn't about Gryffindor courage. It was about being honest to herself, in every possible way.
"This place is miserable," she decided, and an idea – delicious, impossible and utterly beautiful – came to her. Sirius let out a short bark of laughter, completely humourless and terribly despondent.
"Yes, it is," he said, letting his fingers fall away from the bookcase. "But it's all I have. The least I can do is offer it as headquarters – right now I'm not much good for anything else –"
"But it's still your house, right?" interrupted Iris.
"Well, yes."
"Sirius…" She hesitated, but ploughed ahead recklessly, desperately. "Did you mean it? I mean, about, I mean about being a family and all that."
Sirius's head darted up, his face anxious. "Iris. Petal. I was – of course I was – I'd love nothing more than to make a home for you – for you to have someplace to live besides those Muggles – Dumbledore –"
"Yes, Dumbledore, all right," said Iris. "But, I mean – this world won't be dangerous forever. I know that one day Voldemort will be gone, and your name will be cleared and –"
"In a heartbeat, petal," said Sirius firmly. "You'll never have to go anywhere you want. We'll travel the world, causing mischief and mayhem, just like your old man would have wanted."
"And my mum?" asked Iris, grinning. Sirius glanced around a little shiftily, as though Lily Potter were suddenly about to appear from thin air, one foot tapping the ground, her arms crossed and a look of motherly fury on her face.
"Ah – well – we'll of course finish your education first," he said hurriedly, placating any eavesdropping ghosts of parental retribution. Iris laughed, her dark mood disappearing as swiftly as her courage resolved itself.
"So, this house is yours, then?"
Sirius's face fell a little. "Yes, it is. I'll be setting fire to it as soon as I can, rest assured."
"But for now you'll be living here..." Iris trailed off suggestively, waggling her eyebrows. Sirius frowned.
"What are you getting at?"
"What I'm saying is: you own this house. You'll be living here for some time. We both have wands – I can actually use mine because of all those wards people keep mentioning, which is one upside…and we're both a little bored."
"Sooo..?"
"Sooo…Sirius! Let's redecorate."
Sirius blinked. "What?"
"Let's redecorate!" exclaimed Iris, her hands clapping as she began to bounce herself off the floor. "Come on, it's your house now – you said so yourself! Let's tear out all the walls and banish all the nasty paintings and repaint the rooms. More windows, too – this place needs light!"
Sirius worked his mouth noiselessly for a few minutes, his confusion spinning across his face before a grin slowly bloomed on his face and a certain amount of mischievous evil lit up his eyes.
"Redecorate…" He said the word slowly, as though trying out the sound of it. "Sweet Merlin. Tear down the paintings and floors. Set fire to the old hag's room! Blow up the thrice-damned armchair! Obliterate the chandeliers! Great Merlin, redecorate!"
"Self-painting walls!" said Iris excitedly. "Wait, can you do that? And ceilings like the one in the Great Hall in Hogwarts! And huge fireplaces, like the common room!"
"Skylights," said Sirius quietly, happiness creeping his voice. "Slides instead of stairs!"
"An entire wall covered with a painting! Of ponies!"
"A swimming pool instead of a bath!"
"A waterslide instead of a bath!"
"A waterslide and a swimming pool!"
Iris began giggling uncontrollably in a way she could not remember ever giggling before, the fetid surroundings already seeming brighter and more cheerful with every plan made. As though some dark, heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders, Sirius's back straightened and he laughed, flinging his head back and challenging the dank room with a fierce grin.
"Well," he said, pulling out his wand. "First thing's first…" With one deadly slice of his wand, he neatly blew up his father's old armchair. Iris shrieked with delight.
"What spell was that?!"
"A variant of the blasting curse!"
"Teach me!"
The next ten minutes were spent reviewing a variety of spells, including vanishing, blasting, immolation and cutting. The next forty minutes were spent utterly destroying, burning, liquefying, vanishing and in one highly memorable occasion, chasing down a mildly deadly magical creature that had been living in the walls. Running, stomping and jumping from room to room – glitter, fire, splashes of water and cake (an instance of transfiguration gone so wrong it became very right) – the giggles becoming laughter becoming cackling so evil it would have unnerved anyone in the vicinity had anyone been close by. Luckily, there was no-one close by; although this luck would shortly run out a few hours later when the Floo would flare, admitting one Mrs Weasley, who would scream in horror at the warzone she would arrived in.