If Sirius Black had a special type of girl – he doesn't, he loves women too much for types, but if – Debbie Robbins wouldn't be it. He needed, as she often thought to herself because she couldn't help but carry over automatic psychoanalysis from her job to her social life (not that she had much of it, but still), someone with more… color. More vim, more fire. Someone just as beautiful and reckless and unimaginably childish.
Not her.
A fragile little porcelain doll with the wide, slightly incredulous eyes of a child that was just convinced that you were wrong – the type of child that had gotten it fixed, early on, that all grown-ups were out to get you – that was her. A pretty little thing – and the little was never missing when you talked about Debbie, little Debbie, never Deborah, the name she liked better – but a little too delicate.
But he did choose her. Well 'choose' would be a wrong word. He came, saw, conquered. And in his generous, noblesse oblige Black fashion – old habits die hard – he let her cling on to him. She was pretty enough to be acceptable arm-candy. Arm-candy and nothing more.
Well, she didn't need anything more. The Marlenes of the world – their obsidian-edged laughter slicing through the air as they dueled to the death, back forever unbowed – would battle it out for Sirius' love. Debbie was just content to be the girl in the corner he sometimes threw a casual smile at. She didn't mind being a beggar.
000
He likes her for her smile and her eyes and the way she laughs. Almost apologetically, her hand covering her mouth. He thinks she's awfully cute and that's probably the limit of what he ever thinks about her. Just another girl with a crush on him.
She always listens, and that's a plus point in her favor. Listens when he rants – his rants are works of art and it's really quite pleasant to find someone who pays attention after the first half-hour of raving –, when he whines and moans, when he explains the finer intricacies of his hair-care routine (surprisingly very few people are interested in his shampooing regime). She just lets him talk without offering him sympathy or consolation or advice that he doesn't want. A treasure, certainly.
It's a gusty October night when he slips out of her toasty-warm bed. She looks so sweet and comfortable, her long mahogany-brown hair tumbling over her back, her slender body languid, loose-limbed under the colorful patchwork quilt, that he almost regrets it. But duty calls in the form of an Order meeting and he doesn't even wake her up to say goodbye.
In the morning, he's left a cold spot, uncovered by the quilt, on her bed. She's used to it.
He writes on Halloween night that he'll be busy (at Rayna's house no doubt) and for once, she doesn't regret it. She doesn't know how she'll tell him. She doesn't know what she'll tell him. And what'll he say? Will he say anything at all? Will he think she's tricked him?
But I didn't! What happened that night?
Freak of nature. It happens.
She decides that she'll tell him tomorrow and snuggles up in bed early. A quiet, uneventful Halloween night.
The next morning is anything but. The world – well the wizarding world, and that's all the world she's ever known – bursts into flame in the dark hours between midnight and dawn. Rubella Apparates right into her house – a most serious breach of good manners, but of course it's all forgiven – and flings herself onto her older sister, screaming, "It's over! It's over!" And then there are fireworks and laughter, champagne and tears, a bonfire in the forest (just like old times when sneaking out to the Forbidden Forest in the middle of the night was hardcore) and screaming people in pajamas, all crazily, madly, joyfully mixed up.
The morning after?
It all goes down the drain. Sirius… Peter … James and Lily (sweet little Lily whom she tutored in Charms years and years ago)…
The last she ever sees of him is the face of a maniac, his head thrown back in laughter, and around him, a street of corpses. A grisly scene, delivered by the morning owl to her doorstep in the form of a grainy black-and-white photo, plastered over the front page of the Prophet.
And she accepts it. Weeping, screaming, incredulous, yes, but she does come to accept it. Everyone does. Even Remus, who might have guessed.
She keeps her secret to herself. Stiff upper lip, you're British. When her once-svelte figure begins to bloat, blotchy red patches marring her porcelain-perfect skin, her tiny waist thickening, it's only then that they begin to guess. She heads off all their questions with a cool, "I hardly believe that it concerns you – it's my child."
They guess of course but mercifully, they keep their guesses to themselves. Perhaps they wonder a little at her decision to keep the child, his child.
000
Baby Demelza inherits her parents' worst points – apparently Sirius did have bad points though Debbie (and in truth, almost everybody) never saw them. Cross eyes from some not-so-distant Gaunt ancestor, and the uncertain gray of a rainy morning. Rough, tangling hair, darker than her mother's, lighter than her father's. A yellowish variant of her father's ivory-white skin, prone to freckles and acne. The sharp, square jawline of her grandmother, Walburga Black.
No one would ever have believed her a daughter of the Blacks.
"Who's my father?" is her perennial, dreaded question as she grows up.
"I'll tell you when you're seventeen, when you come of age," is the perennial answer. Demelza learns not to expect anything else.
Debbie meets a man with wonderful eyes and the sweetest, most velvety voice that ever seduced woman. And best of all he calls her Deborah. Not Debbie in the condescending way others did before him. Deborah – a beautiful name for a beautiful woman. It's that simple fact that clinches the deal and makes her lean over and kiss him when he falls on his knees before her, the ring ready.
It's all terribly romantic. The floaty white gown that looked like Cinderella's wedding dress, the sweeping lace veil, the orange blossoms and blue ribbons and white roses, seven-year-old Demelza as bridesmaid in pink satin. They shift to a bigger house, buy a dog, have another baby. A happy family.
Aston stops asking about Demelza's father when he finds it out that it irritates Debbie. They spend their weekends like a normal family – Debbie reading stories out for Colin, Aston teaching Demelza Quidditch. "You're good at this," he says, impressed, watching her fly across the lawn, secured from prying Muggle eyes with Concealment Charms. "We'll make a superstar out of you yet."
"It's in your blood," Debbie later tells her, as they're washing the dishes together. "Your father was a Beater." But that's all she'll say to the ten-year-old.
000
Time flies. One moment, your baby is actually a baby – a baby everyone decided would never be pretty, not with those cross eyes and that skin – and the next she's buying a new pair of dress robes, all set for fourth year. Not exactly pretty – not with the eyes – but passable. A sweet smile and a laugh like her father's. Free, reckless. "I'm trying out this year," she announces brightly, "Chaser, Mum – wouldn't that be fantastic?"
It would – if you didn't try to get yourself killed.
Sirius used to try – quite deliberately, she believes now, to make a sensation. He was always such a reckless boy. "Look after yourself, love," Debbie tells her daughter. "With things the way they are… I'm not inclined to trust Mrs Finnigan's words, or the line that the press is taking, over Dumbledore's."
The year seems to pass in a whirl. Demelza's letters are light – full of news about Colin Creevey and her best friend, Ginny Weasley mostly – but Debbie can sense that something is not quite right. With Umbridge at the school… she shudders delicately and turns to Colin, who's learning about evaporation. She hopes her baby will come out of it all right.
All this mess, and things just like they were fourteen years ago.
Aston has always been an observant man. An eye for finer details – that's one of the things she's always loved about him. Sometimes a little too sharp. Fourteen years too late, the Daily Prophet amends its view on Sirius Black. Debbie reads with openmouthed horror about how he'd spent the last fourteen years, how he was not the man she'd been firmly convinced he was and how he was finally, really, truly dead.
My God.
The irrevocability of 'dead' is chilling. When did she tell him goodbye? When did he? On some long-forgotten October night back in '81. She begins to cry.
Aston holds her, smoothes back her damp, tousled hair from her forehead, and mercifully says nothing. He understands.
000
History repeats itself. She was a fool to believe it wouldn't.
All the stress and the pain and fear. The nightmares. Only this time her bed isn't cold anymore and there's someone next to her who'll stay till morning. Who won't leave without saying goodbye.
But Demelza…
If she could she would have spared her baby. Would have given anything. Anything.
Demelza is seventeen, an old seventeen, when she stands, her body swaying weakly, too weak to support herself, over Colin Creevey. One corpse in a hall littered with those.
"Who's my father?"
"I'll tell you when you're seventeen, when you come of age."
She never asks about her father. After time she forgets the question.
