There was sun. Of course there had to be sun. Sirius had not left the house in three days, so naturally the sun had to be out.

He could imagine himself out in the little grassy area between the houses, running in his Animagus form, chasing his tail and passing butterflies, falling onto his side and laying out in the brilliant light of the sun's rays.

He missed Hogwarts, the freedom of so much open space that he couldn't possibly be seen or recognized. But Remus had been keeping a close eye on him since it got sunny, so there was no real chance of escape.

"Couldn't I just go outside for five minutes?" Sirius whined.

"No," Remus said, not looking up from his book. "You know better than anyone how quickly you could be arrested or killed if you were seen and recognized by the wrong people. I don't want you to feel like I'm babysitting you, Sirius, but-"

"But it's exactly what you're doing," Sirius pouted, folding his arms across his chest.

Remus looked up at him and smiled just a little bit.

"Well, if you insist on acting like a child," he teased. "Yes, I'm going to treat you like one."

Sirius didn't find this amusing.

"Let's have lunch," Remus suggested with a sigh when he realized that Sirius was going to pout. "The Weasleys are coming tonight. You're going to need your strength."

Sirius snorted at this, but agreed, and they went to the kitchen and began to make ham sandwiches.

"I think," Remus said very solemnly as they sat down, "that we have a lot of work that the Weasley children can help with. The doxies, for one. Actually most of the drawing room should be handled easily enough. And there's cleaning the walls on the third floor. They're showing mold."

Sirius just nodded, not really caring if the house was never completely clean. Safe, yes. He wanted it to be safe for when the children came around, but he really didn't care if the unused rooms remained a sty.

Kreacher would probably be more comfortable that way, anyway.

"Do you want pickles?" Remus asked politely, and Sirius jerked out of his reverie, remembering the strange light in Gabriella's eyes the one time they'd had sex. How could he not have realized? That light had been there when they fought while Harry was being born, too, that light that was both horrifying and entrancing and made him want to possess her utterly.

"I'm sorry, what?" Sirius asked, shaking that thought of Gabriella coming undone beneath him from his mind.

"Pickles," Remus said, his face darkening. Sirius must have had an expression he used when he was thinking about Gabriella, because everyone seemed to know.

"No, thanks," Sirius said. "I'm going to make some tea. Do you want some?"

"Please."

He turned away from Remus, trying to get a grip on his thoughts. He could recall their first kiss, their lips meeting in James's basement while she sat on his lap. He missed her so much he could almost taste her.

It was strange to think of her dead, even though he'd resigned himself to the thought that he might never see her again when she went away to France. She never wrote him back once. He had mourned her then, as though she was lost to him forever.

The cruelest thing Bellatrix had done was not killing Gabriella, for at least a part of her had wanted to die for as long as he'd known her, but it was giving Sirius one last taste of her before taking her out of the world forever.

"Sirius, the kettle's boiling over."

Sirius swore and poured the tea, carefully cooling the kettle with his wand before putting it in the sink. He handed Remus one of the cups and sat down next to his sandwich.

"Sirius, she's gone. And I know that's difficult, but…she's gone. I realize that I've had longer to come to terms with it than you have, but she didn't love you. She didn't die loving you. She died hating you."

"That makes it worse," Sirius snapped. "Don't you see, Moony, that this is all my fault?"

Remus raised his eyebrows and picked up his cup of tea.

"No, actually," he said, a bit coldly. "I don't see. I'm rather under the impression that it's Bellatrix to blame, not you."

Sirius pounded his fist on the table.

"I pushed her to France. I couldn't get over her when she never wrote me back, and then when she was back I tried to win her over again. I made her a target, which led to Bellatrix putting her through horrible things, and then I was so caught up looking for Peter that I couldn't even…I couldn't…"

"She wouldn't have wanted you to save her, Sirius," Remus said, a bit more gently. There was a horrific silence as Sirius looked at Remus, wondering if he was talking about Gabriella's suicidal tendencies, or her hatred of him. He could find no compelling reason to continue this conversation. He pushed away his sandwich and picked up his cup of tea.

"I'll be in…in…"

Where would he go?

"I'll be in the study if you need anything," he then said darkly. And then he hurried off, not exactly storming out of the room, but certainly leaving as quickly as his feet could carry him. He wanted freedom from that conversation, from those memories.

Of course, there was no escape from the memories. There was never an escape. He could leave one conversation, but as soon as he sat down in his father's study, Sirius was thinking of her again, the way her hair felt in his fingers, the sound of her voice as he made love to her…. Everything was so fragile and beautiful and tragically wrong. He had always loved her, but never how he should have, and she stopped loving him because she could not see him as he was.

On a sudden inspiration, Sirius picked up a book off the shelf, a genealogy of purebloods. They had some excellent old ones, but his mother had bought new ones each time one of her children was finally listed. He grabbed the one from when Regulus was born and flipped through it, searching for the McPeak page.

There she was, Gabriella McPeak, two older sisters and newborn. Nothing was wrong with her yet. She had no troubles. She had nothing in her way. The world was full of possibilities then.

How did a girl with everything fall so far?

There was a knock at the door.

"Sirius?" Remus said. "The Weasleys are here."

Sirius did not respond, still looking at her name on the page. Remus poked his head in, frowning.

"Padfoot, if that book is what I think it is, you'd better put it away before I burn it. You're not going to sit up here sulking at that page until the war is over. I won't let you waste away like that."

Suddenly, Sirius felt as though he understood some of why Gabriella had been suicidal. There was something about pureblood expectation that was stifling, suffocating, and combined with the raw deal life had dealt her….

He half wanted to throw himself off a roof, too.

Still, there were appearances to keep, and Sirius knew that he had work to do, even if it wasn't the sort of work he would prefer. He put the book away, following Remus down to the kitchen, where the Weasleys were sitting around the table.

"Arthur," Sirius said, shaking the hand of the man at the head of the table. "Good to see you."

They hadn't really seen each other in a very long time indeed, and Arthur shook his hand with surprising vigor.

"You look remarkably recovered," Arthur said. There was something awkward inherent in their interaction, knowing that not so long ago, Arthur had been of the mind that Sirius was a crazed mass murderer out to kill Harry.

"Proper food and a bed to sleep in can do that," Sirius said darkly. Molly Weasley sniffed.

"You can't have had much in the way of proper food yet," she said. "You're skin and bones! I'll have to make a nice big dinner, start turning you into a human being again."

Sirius could feel his lips dancing into a sort-of smile, and he found the eldest Weasley child standing up to shake his hand.

"Bill, right?" he asked, recalling the red-headed man from the hospital wing that night when Voldemort rose again.

"Yes," Bill said, nodding. "I'll be here as well. I've shifted to regular bank-work, so I can be here. I'm needed here."

Sirius nodded, looking around at all the red heads of hair.

"Is this the whole clan, then?" he asked, trying to be good-natured. It wasn't that he didn't want to see them all, to meet them. They'd been good to Harry, he knew that. But he was in a lot of personal pain, and he didn't want them to see.

"No, Charlie, my second child," Molly said, "is still in Romania, and will be doing some Order work abroad."

Sirius realized then that Bill had not chosen to move home because he was sure he'd be more useful in England. He'd come home because he knew his mother would need the extra support. That was a good son, he realized. The sort of son he liked to think he would have been, had he not had a harpy for a mother.

"So," he said, turning to the other children, "I know which one Ginny is." They all laughed. "And Ron and I have met, obviously. You two must be Fred and George, then."

"Guilty," the chimed together, grinning.

Sirius could have sworn there had been another brother, someone who had owned the rat originally, but if there was Molly hadn't mentioned him for a reason. It seemed these were the only ones who would be living under his roof, so they were the only ones who mattered. If curiosity persisted, he could ask Remus about it later. He would know what was going on.

"Great," he said dully. "So, Remus has a list of things that need to be worked on in the house, obviously. Molly, perhaps you and him can go over it, decide what the children can help with and what we ought to do without them."

Molly seemed pleased that he was giving her this kind of power over the situation. After all, it was his house. Still, they were her children, and if she didn't want them clearing doxies, he wasn't going to try to force her hand on it.

"I'll show them to their rooms," Remus said happily. "I've gotten them all cleaned out this morning."

Sirius stood there for a moment and Molly Weasley came around the table and grasped his arm.

"Hermione Granger will be coming soon," she said, with false brightness. "She'll be staying here too, until the school year begins."

"Yes," Sirius said, recalling that vaguely. "Yes, she can share a room with Ginny."

"They would like that," Molly said, nervously. "That's what they do at the Burrow."

Sirius nodded. Finally, she said, "I know you knew my brothers. I just…I wanted to tell you that they held you in very high esteem, before…"

Before they had died.

He nodded sharply. He knew what she was getting at and appreciated the gesture, but there was only so much remembering of the first war that he wanted to do, that he could possibly allow himself. He tried not to think about the Prewetts, tried not to think about all the wonderful people who had laid down their lives to protect this generation.

It had all been for nothing.

Molly went up to learn the rooms, leaving Sirius alone in the kitchen, fiddling with one of the chairs that needed to be fixed. He would ask Remus to do it. Knowing him, he'd likely break it.

There was a knock on the kitchen door not ten minutes later and Sirius looked up to see Chara standing there with a box, smiling sheepishly.

"Remus let me in," she said, shrugging. "He told me you were down here, pouting."

Sirius gave her a weak smile and she entered the room, setting down the box between them, pulling out a large stack of newspaper clippings.

"It was very well-covered," Chara said as he took the stack from her thick fingers. "Society writer for the Prophet disappears and all that. Cuffe was distraught. He still doesn't like to talk about it. I think he fancied her."

He snorted.

"Chara, everyone fancied her, even when the pretended they didn't. Everyone except James. He just pitied her."

"He more than pitied her," Chara insisted. "I've read his letters to her at the hospital in France. He considered her a very good friend. Anyway, I read your letters to her as well. They were beautiful."

Sirius blinked.

"She never responded to them," he said sadly.

"She never got them," Chara said with a shrug. "Gillian never sent them along, never opened them or anything. She told me she thought it would have stopped Gabby from getting well as quickly, knowing that you were still…ah, messing with her."

Sirius felt his whole body tense at this. He was not messing with Gabriella. He had loved her, plain and simple. Of course, nothing was ever that plain and simple, but he did his best. He really did love her with all his heart. And he had thought, when she left for France, that deep inside she knew that.

"So she wasn't just trying to push me away," he whispered, holding up the first clipping, which was an announcement that Gillian Messner had reported her friend, Gabriella McPeak as missing. It made him feel slightly sick to know that if she hadn't been a pureblood who had a history of mental illness, Gabriella likely wouldn't have caused a fuss right away at all when she went missing. They would have assumed, that night, that she'd gone home with someone she'd met at the bar, because it said in the clipping that she was last seen at the Hog's Head. Dodgy place, of course. Everyone knew that. So a drunk girl was stupid and went home with someone without telling her girlfriend. So what?

But that girl was a pureblood, a girl with an unstable mind, a girl Albus Dumbledore himself stressed as important to find, for her safety. The more Sirius read of the clippings, the guiltier he felt. Gabriella's case did not include a single disappearance or death. Rylan, her Healer, was found dead, and the handful of old friends and almost-lovers who went looking for her all disappeared or were found dead.

Just as Gabriella was eventually found dead, in a Lestrange property, in pieces. The Auror department didn't know what they had, until they started testing the hair and found it to be from a missing girl.

"This is terrible," Sirius whispered. "It's like, nobody really cares except that they have to, because the story's too good to pass up on."

"The writer of these three," Chara said, touching three of the clippings that he'd spread out on the table, "is Rita Skeeter. She got her big break during the war, writing sensationalist pieces. She's known for tearing people to shreds. Everyone, really. No one is too good or too low to be punctured by Rita's quill."

Sirius blinked, glancing back over those three again. That didn't seem right.

"But these are all so complimentary," he said slowly.

"Exactly," Chara said softly. "They're the only ones like it I can find in her career save one, and that one was written before Gabriella disappeared, when they were working together at the Prophet. I think Rita admired Gabby, and I think she may have been the only person Rita Skeeter has ever admired. Rita's very jealous that I get to write the biography, but I've pacified her by guaranteeing that she will be interviewed. She worked under Gabby when she was first hired, you know. They were hired days apart."

He flipped through the articles discussing Gabriella's death, and what this meant in light of the war, the articles that connected her to him, and how he had destroyed her. She was fragile, and he knew it, the articles said. He used her, toyed with her, and when she had recovered in France he broke her all over again. Somehow, he'd even set up the whole kidnap-torture-murder scenario to be enacted if he was dead or captured, because – the author speculated – Sirius had a dark enough heart to not want her to exist if he could not have her.

Sirius's stomach turned when he looked at saw that this particular article had been a memorializing article written by her brother. He pushed it underneath and article covering the funeral.

"So you're writing her biography?" Sirius asked, trying not to feel too hurt about it. "I wish I could give you more information. But I guess interviewing me would put you in danger, wouldn't it? You know, my being a wanted criminal and all."

Chara laughed, and Sirius realized that he'd not heard her laugh since they were in school. It was a nice-sounding laugh, not the most beautiful he'd ever heard, but in the way he'd been going about life, it sounded strangely heartening.

"Perhaps if I think about it long enough," she said happily, "I'll come up with a way. Do you have any papers? A journal or anything that could serve as your testimony?"

Sirius pursed his lips.

"I don't know," he admitted. "I have all the letters she sent me when we were in school. Remus found them in my old house before selling it. Do you want those?"

"Yes," Chara said quickly. "Anything you've got. And if you want to write back-dated journals, I'd take those too. For your take on things. Perhaps…perhaps there could be a way to vindicate you."

Sirius nodded, but he didn't think so. He didn't think he deserved to be vindicated, where Gabriella was concerned.