Just a reminder: This fic is not DH- or interview-compliant. Information given by the author after HBP, like Narcissa's age, or every flashback Harry ever watched on purpose, has largely been soundly ignored.

Art on AO3 (link in profile)

Cold clammy air, making the heavy swelter of too many blankets welcome, darkness without a trace of parasitic fog resting gently on his eyelids like a cool compress, and Sirius still twitches with unease in his sleep.

Stiff, heavy cloth cutting into his hands, its darkness protruding between his fingers like blood, and, oh, if only. Fingers warm, digging into bones like dry sticks, a birdlike heartbeat. The air thick with misery, dull with endings.

You going to tell me you actually cared about him?

Why waste my breath.

But that's what you want me to think! Go on, you slippery, lying bastard, tell me you loved him; I'll rip your throat out.

What an incentive. Maybe I'd brave it if I gave a fraction of a solitary damn the size of a speck of fly dirt what you-

GO ON, TELL ME, YOU—

He reaches for the vanishing tail of the dream—blessed, blessed dream that bewildered but showed him no one's rotting, accusatory corpse. But it bleeds through filthy, ragged black curtains into rowing through treacle until every muscle aches and he's sifting foul algae through his teeth like a whale, easily, like breathing, until the algae settles into equally foul morning residue. The loose pulse of ocean drums pulses into a prosaic morning head.

It's nothing to how he feels ten minutes after Snape tosses him him a vial each of billywig poison and doxy sedative in one of the bedrooms and tells him, with a how-o-god-how-has-my-life-come-to-this look, "You could at least clean something useful." The resulting-from-the-result hexes aren't the problem, although Snape, whenever he's succeeded in provoking other people to attack him (which is almost always), has fought like a cornered wildcat the whole time Sirius has known him, ever since… Ever since…

In any case, it's not the hexes, it's the Look Remus gave him afterwards, the note in his fast, low voice as he pulls Sirius away.

Seeing Arthur give Snape a similar treatment might have helped more if Snape hadn't gotten stridently, gesticulatingly grousy at the man, flapping like a great black hen in that billowing, melodramatic way that Sirius only ever sees squawked at Arthur and Dumbledore these days.

It had used to be Lily who got that treatment, when they were little. Later, it had been Sweet Cousin Narcissa, Evan Rosier, Hagrid, and (on one memorable occasion he nonetheless can't quite seem to recall at the moment, but would be sure it had involved Rosier tousling Snape's hair if that hadn't been, eyurgh, unthinkable) the entire Slytherin Quidditch team.

He secretly suspects it's the closest the sad, sorry sod ever comes to being silly. Especially since both Arthur and Dumbledore react half the time, as Arthur does now, as though they can't decide between thumping him, ruffling his hair (bleurgh), stopping his mouth with a sweet, and apparating into another room to laugh into a pillow where he can't hear.

"Did Snape get in a fight on the train?" he asks Remus abruptly.

This is evidently a good tactic. Although it gets him a wholly new and different look, an insultingly concerned one, the suddenness of the switched tracks utterly derails the soft monsoon of reproach. "He doesn't use the Express, Sirius."

"No, I mean in first year." Remus's expression politely demands to know how he was expected to have divined that. "I was trying to remember the first time I saw him beg someone to beat him up." And had had just the most fleeting of impressions: brasswork and springy, tough, scuffed leather, walls rounded upwards.

"Feeling nostalgic, are we?" Remus asks lightly, something curiously intent around his eyes.

"Well, they all blur together," Sirius deflects airily. "Always the same, innit? Hiss, flail, hex, try to take your face off like a giant girl-viper."

Remus looks carefully at him for another moment, and then answers, "He did."

"With us?"

One more odd look, this time as though Sirius has confirmed something. And Sirius can't blame him; the moment he said it, he knew that he'd had no 'us' on that train, had had no real 'us' at Hogwarts for weeks, until he'd settled properly into his House, until James had believed him sincere. "With Malfoy."

That leaves Sirius's jaw hanging. Everyone has known for, it seems like, forever, that there's something strange and strong and really not quite right between Snape and Lucius Malfoy, something far more disharmoniously tangling than the friendly (but rocky) truce Sirius and Lils had eventually settled into when she'd gotten engaged to his best friend. Yet, of all the thousand possible objections, the one that pops out is, "Wasn't he a prefect our first year?"

The scene blooms behind his eyes as Remus says, "The kind who teases little girls, yes." Threadbare robes that reeked of moth-repelling rosemary, mint, cloves, and inexpert alterations from a long-ago witch's cut, the sagging hem of the right sleeve tremouring almost imperceptibly.

Everything but the smudged-ivory fingers swallowed like a small, faded charcoal shadow against the larger, inkier plush of Malfoy's obviously custom-made robes. A slice of greenish face, too young to be exactly hawk-nosed but already bony and hollow-eyed, sick with determination and dread, burning with waxy intensity and no trace of the trademark derisive sneer. Maybe he hadn't seen one before Sorting, not one worth copying.

That same face, splotchily reddened with effort and humiliation, propelled to the door for more terrorizing by an elmwood wand, bruised eyes full of hatred, terror, and a brooding, internal fury. Absolutely no trace of shock or surprise.

An intent little girl's face behind him, hands absently fixing one disarranged platinum lock, Black-grey eyes full of pleased calculation.

Sirius's senses swim with memory, with the mild shock of knowing he's remembering it in black and white not because it's a Padfoot memory but because it so very nearly was.

But Remus is going on, "I used to wonder what would have happened if Lily hadn't told Hagrid, or he hadn't told Severus he'd definitely make Gryffindor while Severus was still embarrassed at how badly that went."

And, again, just… too many things wrong with that to process. Most of them are so wrong that the only one he can focus on is his extreme skepticism that Snape has ever felt anything as mellow as 'embarrassment' in his life. There's that: the way his switch toggles between Generalized Irritation and Blood Feud That Lasts Beyond the Grave, with very little in the way of intermediacy or diversion. Then there's the irrational conviction Sirius has just developed that the blazingly unhinged child had not stumbled innocently into trouble but had, if anything, felt he was getting off more lightly than expected.

Far too much to process, and he doesn't even want to. It's more comfortable to flip off a, "Spat right on poor old Hagrid's boots, didn't he?" and steer Remus towards better distractions. Getting thrashed at Wizard Chess: the Drinking Game is a price he's willing to pay.

"Enabler," Snape jabs Remus, whose face closes up over a more than alcoholic flush and a flash of helplessness. But it's on the bat's way out.

And no one wakes his mother up. So, as days at Grimmauld go, it's not such a bad one. Just unutterably disturbing.