Chapter Seven: Climbing

a/n: This chapter includes a reference to past child abuse, it's not graphically described but it's there. I've marked the section between * signs and if you skip the part the chapter will still make sense.

Sirius

July 1978, Saltburn

Ginny and Luna were playing Exploding Snap when Sirius walked into the living room on an August evening, a small pile of cards on the tiled coffee table. The door banged shut behind him as he threw himself onto the sofa and began to remove his boots.

"Oh, Sirius, hi" said Ginny with a look on her face that suggested something was very much wrong. He stopped trying to take off his boots.

"I'd hide, if I was you," said Luna, throwing down a card onto the pile. "Or if you don't want to do that, I'd recommend a very strong Shield Charm."

Sirius was about to ask why when his question was answered for him. The other door to the living room flew open and Hermione came through it with her eyes and hair wild. She threw a spell at him before he could get out his wand, and he dived to the floor.

"Petrificus Totalus!" she shouted, and Sirius' body snapped rigid.

"Is that necessary?" asked Ginny, eyebrows raise. "He didn't attack you or anything."

"I know what he's been doing!" she shouted, waving a very familiar notebook in the air. Luna's eyebrows shot into her fringe. Ginny sighed.

"Come on, Luna," she said. "I don't want to listen to Hermione shout at Sirius again. Let's go to get the groceries, that's what we were putting off anyway."

"To be fair to Hermione, she hasn't shouted at him for at least three weeks, and sometimes he does deserve it," said Luna, but followed Ginny out anyway.

"You're making a list of Death Eaters, with who they killed in the first war next to them! And dates! And… and…"

It was perhaps predictable that she would have gone looking through his stuff. He should have thought of that.

It proved she was suspicious of him, which he'd thought she was.

"What are you going to do with this? What the fuck are you planning, Sirius Black?"

Much as he wanted to answer, he couldn't, as she'd frozen his mouth shut. He was reduced to laying there mute until such time as she released him. Or, until she was done shouting, and Ginny came home to say the counter-spell.

It wasn't a problem. He could justify his actions, and if she screamed some of it out before he explained it all then it would be easier to get the words in.

"You're trying to change the future, aren't you? I thought you were getting it! I bloody hoped you were getting it! You don't, do you?"

Surprisingly, she flopped down into the armchair Luna had vacated and started to cry, her wand flopping to her side.

Sirius was still on the floor, unable to move or speak. Which may have been a positive, as he wasn't sure what he would do or say at this stage anyway. He might well make it worse, and she didn't seem to want to hex him any more.

"Why does nobody get what this can do?" she sobbed.

He thought that was unfair. He did get it. The whole point was that he understood what changing the past could do. He could do it better, with the knowledge he had, and if she would only tell him more he could do even more with it!

She mumbled the counter-spell, and Sirius picked himself up.

"Why, Sirius?" she asked. She was upright in the armchair now, perched on the edge and watching him closely. Tears were still on her face, but she had stopped producing fresh ones.

"Because I'm going to make it right."

"Make what right?"

"James and Lily. Remus. Marlene. Caradoc. Gideon and Fabian. Harry can have a family. Benji Fenwick's wife was pregnant. Edgar's kids can go to Hogwarts and have a life."

"You can't." The flat tone in her voice angered him. How dare she say it like that? Did she even know what she was fucking with?

"Yeah? Harry survived. I heard you talking about Ron Weasley, he survived. You get your best friend and your boyfriend, and what do I get? Dead friends, Hermione, twelve years in Azkaban, and no fucking future."

"You don't know anything!"

"Yeah, what don't I know?" he scowled. She didn't have a fucking clue, this young girl who'd been through war and it had barely touched her. She had no idea.

She made him want to throw her into a Pensive and show her every single death he'd seen, every single family he'd seen torn apart, the funerals, the sitting around waiting to hear if someone would make it, the fucking horrible emptiness of sitting in Azkaban with nothing and then coming out and there still being nothing. Remus being there, but trying to kill himself, Harry slipping away. Just Sirius and Kreacher and Buckbeak, alone.

"You don't know shit, you selfish fucking bastard! Just because you don't know who I've lost! Fucking Muggles don't matter to you? Yeah, that's how everyone else felt. I had to save my parents myself, and I lost them anyway. I made them fucking forget me, Sirius! I Obliviated them, and they don't know me now. They're not my parents, and I can't fucking get them back!"

He stood back from her, as she leapt forward, brandishing her wand.

"Fred Weasley mean anything? I cared for Remus too. And Tonks. Fucking Lavender, I shared a room with her for six years even if she did shag Ron and I hated her for a bit there. You don't even know who else, because you weren't there, and you didn't think there may have been some people? Stuck in your own fucking selfish world!"

She was still waving her wand, red and orange sparks flying from the ends of it. She seemed unwilling to curse him, although she looked close. Instead, she shoved him firmly into the sofa behind, and stared down at him with contempt in her eyes.

"Don't ever assume you're the only one that's lost something," she said, coldly, and ran out through the kitchen. He heard the back door open, and shut again.

Sirius lay where he had been thrown. He should have thought of other people's losses, but perhaps she should have said something too. It wasn't exactly his fault that she'd only told him about Remus. She'd been so busy keeping her knowledge of the future to herself that she hadn't thought about how that impacted other people. Impacted him.

So Tonks was dead in her future, too. She'd thrown that at him to hurt him.

Had she?

Maybe this is what she meant by selfish.

It had been hurting her.

She had said she cared for Remus too. She was hurting about Remus' death too.

Not as much as he had, he was prepared to guess. Remus was the best friend he'd had.

Did that matter?

It would still hurt. He hadn't felt the same for Caradoc, or Marlene, or Benji, as he had for James and Lily and Remus, but their deaths had still hurt.

She may have had a point.

He should apologise.

He lay on the sofa for a further two hours before he knew what he would say.

She was sat up in the tree at the end of the garden, perched on a wide branch about halfway up. One foot hung down, the other resting on a lower branch, and her hands tangled in amongst the leaves. Possibly deliberately, she was looking away from the house, staring out over the rooftops towards the sea.

"Hermione?" he called, crossing the grass.

She moved slightly at the sound of his voice, but didn't turn or look towards him. Her hair hung down her back in a thick plait, and she was wearing the shiny gold top they'd bought their first morning in their past. The colour suited her, and her skin shone in the moonlight.

"Hermione?" he tried again. This time, there was no movement.

Sirius stopped at the bottom of the tree. He was going to say this, whether she acknowledged him or not, and then at least he'd have said it.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry that I lied."

He may have been imagining it, but he thought he heard a angry sigh from above him. He continued talking, focusing on the bare soles of her feet as he could not see her face.

"I just… Look, I don't really know how to say everything I want to say, because it's been a very long time since I had to. My friends, Hermione, they were my family. They were all I had when I had nothing. They showed me a world where I could be someone that I chose to be, not the person I felt like I had to be and that my family wanted. They were there when said family was being the very worst they could be, and they picked me up again afterwards. I don't know who I am without them to define me.

"I don't know how to survive in a world without them. You said I was selfish. I am. I want them to live for selfish reasons. But I do want them to have a better life. James really could have, he had everything right for him. Remus deserved to too. I… I don't know if I do. I don't know if you're right, and I should accept this."

He sat down at the base of the tree, back against the trunk and ran his hands through the grass. It was wet, and he could feel the damp seeping into his jeans.

Her voice came down from the tree, crackling slightly as she spoke.

"I've been trying to work out who you are, all along. What kind of person you are. Which of the many Sirius Blacks is the real one."

"Let me know when you find out, yeah?"

She laughed, but it wasn't mocking in tone. It was soft and gentle, as if she understood.

"I will."

"Can I come up?"

"I don't know. Can you?"

"I don't want to intrude." She has stormed out here to get away from him, and here he was following. This had been such a bad idea.

She laughed again. "No, I mean, can you climb a tree?"

"Never tried," he replied.

Sirius got up from the ground and grabbed at a nearby low branch, trying to swing himself upwards with his limited upper body strength. He tried in this way a couple of times before his grip failed him and he landed on the grass.

"Fuck."

"Use your legs," she said. "Against the trunk. Shoes off is easier."

He kicked his boots off into the grass and tried that, and managed to almost walk himself up the trunk hanging off the low branch. With a huge amount of effort, and some grunting noises, he managed to hoist himself into the tree. She was a little higher. He was able to get himself to her level with slightly more grace than he'd shown getting into the tree in the first place.

Picking a branch, he arranged himself in the most comfortable manner he could find. It wasn't particularly comfortable, and he didn't feel very secure.

"Hello," he said.

"Look at the sea," she replied.

He hadn't appreciated the appeal of being up the tree until that point. The sea was clearly visible from here, and the rise and fall of the waves was almost hypnotic. There was a soft reflection of the moonlight in the water, making it shine as it swished to the coastline and back again in a predictable rhythm. A ship was visible on the horizon, if you looked out past the pier, and stars shone in the sky.

It was beautiful.

He looked to Hermione, who had been watching the waves too.

"I used to climb trees all the time, as a child," she said, still looking out to sea. "There were these children, in my class, who bullied me. Do you use that word in the wizarding world?" Sirius nodded. "They used to chase me from the park if they saw me, so I would climb a tree where they couldn't get to me."

"Why?" he asked. "Why did they bully you?"

"I think they knew I was different. I assumed it was because I was into books, and was far too keen to answer questions in class. A bit of a teacher's pet, even. But maybe it was more than that. A few of them were clever too. I think now that they could sense the magic, and were afraid."

"That doesn't mean they should have bullied you."

"No, it doesn't. But when people are afraid, I think they do things they wouldn't otherwise. Isn't that what Voldemort's doing? He's manipulating people's fears to make them do what he wants, or at least to not act against him."

"Regulus."

"Your brother?" She looked into his eyes for the first time since he'd come outside.

"He was afraid of my parents. He… he wasn't bad. Not really. He got cold feet, you know, and tried to leave the Death Eaters. Tries. I forget when exactly that happens. But still he joined, and he almost certainly killed and tortured, because he was afraid of our parents and he was afraid of the other Death Eaters."

Thinking about Regulus hurt. He wanted to save Regulus, too, but Regulus had made his own choices and that wasn't going to be possible.

"He was very brave, your brother."

"Do you know something about him too? No, wait. Don't tell me. I don't think I want to know what that twat did."

"I will if you want to."

This startled Sirius. She'd always been pushing back at his desire to know more of the future than he did, because she thought it would make him run headfirst into trying to stop things. And here she was, offering him information about his brother.

Did she think he'd changed, and that he was content to let the world work itself out the way it had before? Because he wasn't. He was still just as determined, he just planned to change his approach.

Perhaps it was her that was changing.

"Okay."

He still wasn't sure if he wanted to hear this. But information had to be a good thing.

"Regulus stole something from Voldemort. I don't know what provoked it, except he'd had some kind of interaction with Lucius Malfoy around the time that he did it and Regulus had stormed out of Malfoy Manor. The thing he stole… it was helping keep Voldemort alive, essentially. He found out about it when he leant Kreacher to Voldemort, told Kreacher to come back, and Kreacher told him what it was. He went out there, and he took the item, and he died doing it. Kreacher told us the story."

"Fucking hell. Regulus. What happened to the item?"

"Ron destroyed it some years later. The story of how it got to Ron involves Kreacher, Mundungus Fletcher, Dolores Umbridge and Severus Snape, so a wide range of your very favourite people."

He laughed at that, a low chuckle which surprised him when it came out of his mouth.

"Dung wasn't so bad, long as you didn't rely on him for anything."

"He stole loads of valuable stuff from your house just after you died."

"That doesn't surprise me," said Sirius. "I'll bet I didn't want any of it anyway."

"Probably not. Harry got all angry about him disrespecting your memory."

Sirius laughed. He could imagine Harry doing that. He was a good kid. Would be. The passage of time, and what fitted where, was confusing him at the best of times.

"My little brother, turned out to be a hero," he said, after a few moments silence. He'd known Regulus had been trying to get out. He'd always assumed that this had been discovered and that some Death Eater had killed him on Voldemort's orders. Not that he'd died doing a brave and noble thing, a very Gryffindor thing. He wondered if the Death Eaters had ever known what had happened to Regulus. His parents had known he'd died; he'd assumed they'd been told by Death Eaters but it must have been Kreacher.

The item, though.

Something that kept Voldemort alive.

He dug through the darkest bits of his brain, the parts where he kept the memories of his life with his parents.

Horcruxes.

"Was it a Horcrux?" he asked her.

"How do you know about those?"

"Lot of Dark wizards in my family," said Sirius. "And ones that weren't very good at keeping children away from things that weren't appropriate for them to hear."

"But not Regulus," she said.

"No, Regulus was not a Dark wizard. Just a very scared one."

She smiled, a soft and sad smile. "It was a Horcrux."

"That bastard. I'm glad my brother stole it."

"Even if he had to die?"

Sirius wasn't sure. He was a Death Eater, and his creed had always been that Death Eaters deserved what they had coming to them. But he wasn't, not really. He'd been Marked under fear, and he had tried to redeem himself.

"Regulus didn't deserve to die."

"Nobody deserves to," she said.

"Voldemort? Bellatrix? Dolohov?" Sirius asked. "Loads of nasty ones, who weren't doing it from fear but because they wanted to."

"Okay, those three," said Hermione, rubbing the heavily disguised scars on her arm and thinking of Remus and the scarring along her chest. "And I'd add Umbridge."

"Death Eater?" asked Sirius.

"The world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters," she said.

He remembered that line. "Didn't I say that to Harry?"

"You did."

"Well, must be right if I said it," he said. He stretched out his legs, which were getting cramp from holding him into the tree. He still didn't feel as though he could relax up here. Hermione did, by the way her hands were now draped into the branches rather than holding on with little white knuckles like his own were. "And besides, my parents never took the Mark."

"Your parents?"

"Bad people, not Death Eaters."

"Oh." She was waiting for him to continue.

"After I'd been sorted into Gryffindor, I used to wish that Regulus would be too. I thought the two of us could escape them. But he wasn't, and he couldn't. They kept a much tighter leash on him, after I started to rebel. It made me rebel more. It made him hide from them, but it didn't make his thoughts change. It didn't make either of our thoughts change."

He didn't know where he was going with this. Talking about his parents had never ended well for him, and it was by far better that those thoughts stayed where they belonged, shoved back into the furthest bits of his brain. Sirius knew what talking about his parents would lead to, and this was not a time for all of that.

His mouth had other ideas, and kept talking.

"They started off being quite normal. You know, gentle manipulation of the sort I've seen other parents do. It got worse. I went into Gryffindor, and they turned physical that Christmas. I was mad to think Regulus would ever go into Gryffindor after that. They made him watch. They knew all sorts of Dark magic, Hermione, and they weren't afraid to use it."

She was motionless and silent, the side of her face closest to him illuminated by the moon. It was listening, and letting him lead.

"I didn't tell anyone for years. How do you tell someone that your parents are cursing you, starving you, trying to make you do horrible things under the threat of pain?"

She was still watching him talk. He looked down at the grass. He was glad she wasn't reacting. It made it easier than if she'd have looked horrified.

"I… I wanted them to stop so badly that I did one of the things once. I cursed a Muggle. He had his wand on me, my father, and she was standing behind. They took me out into the square, and made me choose a Muggle to curse. They watched my face as I did it, and when I tried to stop before they thought I should he blasted me in the back. I… I fucking finished the job and then they let me run into the house."

There were well over a thousand blades of grass on the lawn. Maybe a million. Perhaps he could count them instead of telling this story. His shoes were on the grass. One of them was on its side. How many blades of grass were underneath it.

"It was the summer when I was thirteen. End of second year. I felt the worst I have ever felt, I relived it constantly when I was in Azkaban. I should have refused. I should have cursed them. I never did it again, Hermione, you have to believe me!"

"I believe you. You are not a bad man, Sirius."

"I've done bad things. I don't trust that I wouldn't do them again. Not to a Muggle. To someone else. Someone who actually deserves it."

"Good people do bad things. A bad person would not have this level of remorse. Voldemort didn't have a shred, even when he needed it most. Neither did Bellatrix. Which is why they won't be forgiven."

"I can't forgive myself."

"Maybe you will, in time. You didn't do it through choice."

"But I did it for the same reasons Regulus joined the Death Eaters, and I can't forgive him for that."

He took his hands off the branch they were gripping and began to roll up his t-shirt at the back.

"That's the scar," he said, pointing at a place he couldn't see but knew well on his lower back. He knew it was a round scar, maybe an inch wide, with a uneven edge and a slightly raised part on the left side.

"Sirius," said Hermione, reaching forward. "There's so many."

"My parents were bad people. Blacks generally are."

She touched the burn mark from the day he'd tortured the Muggle. Her fingers bumped over the raised part, and swirled around the edges in a soft circle that spoke of forgiveness. He relaxed, just a tiny bit. He remembered why he had been so tense. It wasn't the subject matter they were talking about. It was that he was in a fucking tree.

"You are not."

"I hurt a Muggle, an innocent Muggle."

"You were thirteen"

"Old enough to know better."

"You were a child." Her fingers were tracing lines between all the scars now, sliding along them and around them. "Tell me, honestly, that you think we should hold any other abused, frightened thirteen year old accountable for their actions?"

He was silent. He couldn't say that. They weren't.

"Then why are you so special that we should? They were torturing you just as much as anything you did that day, Sirius."

She removed her hands from his back, and rolled the t-shirt back down. His back felt cold now, and there was a small part of Sirius that wanted to ask her to continue. He didn't need her pity, though.

He may have fucked up, badly, all those years ago, but he could make it right.

Maybe not for that Muggle, he didn't have the first clue where to find that man. But he could for the others his actions, or lack of actions, had hurt.

"You never answered my question."

Gracefully, she manoeuvred herself through the tree to sit on the same branch as he was, and put her arm around his back.

"I'm not special. That's the point. I've done some terrible things, and I couldn't save my friends."

"We've all had someone we couldn't save," said Hermione. She was thinking of someone, or someones. Sirius could see her eyes drifting off to the sea again, and there was a look of remembering in her eyes. He wanted to ask who she hadn't saved, but she wouldn't tell him. The only willing piece of information she'd given was about Regulus, and that was likely calculated.

She'd gambled that he wouldn't want to change his brother's death. Maybe Harry wouldn't have survived without it. Maybe she wouldn't have, either.

Besides. He was keeping secrets from her. She had the right to her own.

"I'm sorry about your parents," he said.

"It's okay," she said. "It hurts, but you know how it is. We can be strong, because we have to be, when we lose family."

"I know," he said. "James and Remus were family. Regulus."

"I'm sorry we can't help them."

"Yeah. I know."

"Is it wrong that I still can't forgive him? Regulus? I want to help him, but I can't forgive what he did."

"I don't think so. I… I took a long time to forgive some people."

"You won't tell me who."

"No."

Much later, close to midnight, Sirius came in from the garden. Hermione had preceded him in, and was likely in bed by now, but he'd wanted the extra time to think. She had been right that the rise and fall of the sea was calming.

"Hello, Sirius," came an ethereal voice from the shadows of the kitchen. Luna, sat at the squashed-in kitchen table, was eating a bowl of soup. "You're looking as if you have a lot on your mind."

"Just… stuff."

"Oh yes, I understand. It's rather difficult, isn't it, to sort through your thoughts. I've been struggling with that myself."

Sirius went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. He'd never quite got his head around Muggle glasses. So fragile. He'd dropped one their first day here and it had smashed everywhere, splitting into tiny fragments on contact with the tiled kitchen floor. At least they'd been able to clean it up with wizarding methods.

"Yeah?" he said to Luna.

"Sometimes I feel as though there's a Wrackspurt in my brain."

Sirius had no idea what one of those was.

"I've been writing all this down, you know. I'm still not sure exactly where we are, but it's an interesting experiment in psychology. Daddy might print some of the story, when we get back."

"Luna?" said Sirius. "Do you know why Hermione is so reluctant for anything to change, in the future?"

"It's hard to perceive what you do not know to be true, without any evidence," said Luna. "And Hermione has always had a rather closed mind, if you ask me. She finds making a connection between an idea and the possible realities almost impossible."

"Yeah." Sirius wasn't entirely sure he understood.

"And fear," said Luna. "She's afraid of losing Harry and Ronald. I don't know if she knows that herself, but she is." She paused, scribbling something on the parchment next to her. "Of course, we may all be dead anyway."

"Thanks Luna. I'm going to try and get some sleep."

"Goodnight, Sirius."

He arranged his blankets around himself on the sofa, trying to wrap himself in them without any part of his body sticking out. He understood not wanting to lose people. That was why he was here, after all, but he just wished she would be even a little bit honest with him about her motivations.