Chapter 8

As He Was

Sirius was no foreigner to the sensation of a quickened heart, a dry throat, or a lightened body in danger of floating away at the thought of someone, so he knew what it meant. And if he was going to do this, then he might as well do it properly.

-.-.-.-.-

This was awful. It was the end of world. The feeling might have been exaggerated and probably unwarranted but that didn't stop the dark pool of anxiety churn in her stomach as she looked at what was laid out before her, on the her table with scratches and pen marks from generations of idle scraping.

Her astronomy exam.

Acceptable*.

Larka needed to remind herself to regulate her breathing. Thankfully, it accounted for only ten percentages and Professor Sinistra had been so, so awfully nice and allowed her to turn in an extra chart to bump the mark up to an Exceeds Expectations. The professor expressed concern over her recent work, citing uncharacteristic carelessness in her drawing and calculations. Larka had been too ashamed to even look at him in the eyes, afraid of his disappointed gaze, before she quietly scampered away. What could she tell him? That the decline in quality and her failure of a test was due to late-night escapades with the resident ostracized playboy? She wasn't living a Harlequin penny novel.

It had to stop. Life had to return to what it was four months ago.

With a pang, Sirius's carefully constructed face flashed in her mind: hair so dark it looked black, falling over his full brows, a slant light playfully highlighting the slight curve of his nose, and shadows extending the exquisite corners of his vivid grey eyes. It wasn't like she was smitten or anything, but even a neutral party must admire the blazing clarity of his eyes.

But no.

No, she told herself. May had started and all things seemed possible in May. It was time to put away impractical fancies.

-.-.-

"Are you alright?" Kelso asked her.

Larka didn't go to the Quidditch pitch last night, and the guilt was almost eating her alive. The entire night, Larka had dreamt of Sirius, frozen stiff and white, an ice pop fitted among the bleachers at the top of the Quidditch pitch, his cheeks blue and lips purple, grey eyes like marbles boring straight into her dream-vision, in a silent accusation of why, why, why.

"Yes, I'm fine, sorry for worrying you," Larka apologized.

"Novia's not still," Kelso whispered discretely, careful to camouflage her voice under the hubbub of the common room, directed away from Novia on the other side of the round table, "tearing up her sheets and whatnot, is she? I thought she'd gotten over him by now."

Larka thought about Novia's second bedside lamp and third set of sheets that Larka had sewn back together, and said, "She is; just residual anger, maybe." Novia had seemed to have gotten over actively missing Sirius two weeks after their breakup, and haven't noticed anything peculiar about Sirius's disappearance from his coterie, but she still had so much destruction pent up.

Kelso sighed, flashed Novia a smile, before turning back to Larka, "At least she's no longer running off weeping every other hour; what a nightmare that first week had been—oh Merlin, speak of the devil!"

Who was it but Sirius, sauntering over, a slow, purposeful walk through the Gryffindor common room, in another band tee and the leather jacket that needed mending. There was no mistaking his direction, which was their corner table and settee.

Novia, hitherto studying her notes intently, started to tremble**.

Sirius stopped at the edge of their table, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the waxed birch surface, his hands coming up to cross his fingers in perfect parallel lines. "Larka," his voice carried through the entire common room, a low timbre that held just the right amount of purr, "if you're free this Saturday, would you like to accompany me to Hogsmeade? We'll go for to the pictures and a dinner, the traditional sort of date***."

Larka looked around—it seemed like she was the only person around named Larka. She looked up at Sirius, whose face was a slate of earnestness. He couldn't be serious? She looked left helplessly at Kelso, who avoided her gaze as if in disapproval. She looked back at Sirius, silently imploring him to explain.

He just waited, a monument of patience (a peculiar sight indeed).

Larka opened her mouth, found her throat and lips completely dry, closed her mouth, licked her lips, and then tried once more, "I—I have to think about it," she said feebly.

Sirius nodded, apparently not at all put off by this subtle rejection. "Of course," he said, straightening up, "A lady must ponder. I shall humbly await," he bowed and took her limp hand, kissing the top of her middle knuckle, "good news, I hope."

He certainly did not do anything without a spectacle; Larka thought as he walked away, disappearing once more into whatever different dimension that housed Sirius during the daylight nowadays.

"What," Kelso breathed out, "was that?"

Larka could not answer her.

"So will you?" Novia asked. Larka, as familiar with Novia as she was, could not discern any particular emotion from Novia's voice.

"I don't know," Larka said honestly, and she wouldn't until Friday night.

Thursday at dinner, Kelso mildly inquired if Larka had made up her mind, her eyes catching the (now) rare sight of Sirius in the Great Hall, close by not too close to where they were sitting.

"I don't know," Larka repeated herself.

Kelso replied, "I think you have to, otherwise this 'problem' will just fester."

Larka did not appreciate Kelso's gesture of air quotes, but she did admit to the valid point—it was was definitely festering.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Sirius stretching, arms outwards and balancing tall chair by its hind legs, a dangerous feat since the Great Hall chairs were heavy oak and generally refused to move, let alone dexterously. It was an exemplary feat of willpower that kept Larka from turning to him in worry. Of course, even without turning she could imagine what she would have saw—his black hair would be falling just slightly into his grey eyes, and the shirt underneath his open jacket would show just a sliver of pale muscle, his shoulders would roll back once, twice, and then his fingers would start to tap the table top just about—

Tap, tap, tap.

—Now.

Larka did not spend a large portion of her time watching or thinking about Sirius, just that he was such a memorable sort of person that it was easy to have a vivid image of him in her mind. She, of course, was not still thinking about him; no, she was thinking about—those ornamental pumpkins sure looked, well, ornamental.

"Hmm," Novia hummed beside her, as if knowing she was thinking about—about pumpkins, of course, why it was hardly the season for pumpkins, being May and warm and quite some time away from Halloween, and really, who decided that pumpkins were ornamental?

Thursday night was awkward.

Novia sat on her bed, her back against the wall and facing the long, wrought iron framed window directly, her body a taut north to south line while Larka looked at her helplessly from the east. The furniture in their room were set up to portion the rectangular space into fair portions, but never before had Larka felt so distinctively that there were sides to this room. Larka tried to make small talk—gossip, food at dinner, and finally resorting to the weather—but Novia gave her curt answers and clearly did not wish to converse.

Larka went to bed feeling small and abandoned.

Friday morning was even more awkward. Larka woke at precisely seven twenty five, as per usual, gingerly climbed out of bed and crossed the room to wake Novia up, as per usual. She found, however, Novia to be already awake, lying perfectly still in her bed, hands crossed resting on her stomach, staring straight at the ceiling like a stone golem that had yet figured out how to command its limbs.

"Novia?" Larka said tentatively.

Novia did not respond straightaway, but her eyes flickered to hold Larka in her reflective blue pupils. There seemed to be a million accusations and yet nothing at all in her stare that lasted the eternity of a minute, after which Novia rolled out of bed and said "I'm up" without looking at Larka again.

Novia seemed pensive the entire morning, not even bothering with doodling in the margins of her notebook during class. When they stopped by corridors that was the halfway point from the Gryffindor tower to the Slytherin dungeons, where they always met Kelso for lunch on Fridays, Novia suddenly said, "Are you going?"

There was no doubt as to what she was asking. "I don't know," Larka answered yet again, but she knew she was just procrastinating making an actual decision.

"You should go; no, you have to," Novia corrected herself.

"Have to what?" Kelso asked, coming up beside them.

"Nothing," Novia said briskly, "have to eat lunch, let's go in."

However, it was as impossible to keep focused during lunch as it was in class. Larka's thoughts always found its way to Sirius. Lunch served buttermilk fried chicken and Larka thought that he would have found it too battered and fried for too long. The scratch marks on the wooden surface of the dining table looked like a landscape of grass under the night sky to her. The noise of chicken bones being ripped apart sounded like Sirius absentmindedly cracking his knuckles****, cupping one large, pale hand over the other and rolling the inside hand until all his bones cracked, a sound that he found comforting and Larka found slightly disconcerting. Halfway through the afternoon Binn's lecture on the evolution of firecrackers and gunpowder, Larka remembered how Sirius said the old croakers (that was what he called the Tudor cavalry) used a touch of magic to steady their hands when firing***** and she spent the rest of the class worrying about how eager he had sounded and if perhaps he would recklessly try to recreate that after his breakthrough with the lighter nonverbal spell.

In the middle of working out a housework charm, Larka had an epiphany—these two days had been even more detrimental to her pursuit of good marks. Being a reasonable woman, Larka then made the sound deduction that there was nothing advantageous to not going to a dinner and movie with Sirius. It wasn't as if falling hopelessly in irrevocable, desperate love depended on and solely on just one evening.

So that evening, as Larka shut their residence door behind her, she said delicately, "I think I'll go with him." She already had Novia's blessings ('blessings'? was that what it was? could Novia give it? did she need it?), but she had wanted to check with Novia again, before she said anything to Sirius. (Emma had taught her that communication was crucial.)

Novia didn't seem surprised; she shrugged as she kept her back to Larka. "Good. He's something that all girls have to suffer through once."

What an odd choice of diction, 'suffer through', like Sirius was some kind of ordeal, a phase, the dark tunnel when people talk about 'the light at the end of the tunnel'.

"It's for the best," Novia added, "If you break his heart then he deserves that, and if he breaks yours, well, he won't, because you're going in with the proper knowledge of what he is. You might as enjoy it while it lasts."

"What he is?" Larka repeated foolishly.

Novia turned around to face Larka now, her face flushed with some emotion, "A narcissistic, insensitive, stupid, uncultured, chauvinistic, nasty, chain-smoking arsehole who is incapable of empathy******."

Larka smartly kept quiet and climbed into bed.

Later into that night, just when Larka had sunk into a sweet slumber with a very promising beginning to a dream (she was sitting on a gigantic striped mushroom, petting a floating mackerel in mid-air)—she was rudely interrupted in her imaginative efforts.

"Ooh," she groaned, unwilling to open her eyes.

Something feathered the side of her neck again, ticklish and annoying. Larka resigned to drift into consciousness as she mumbled, "What is it?" Or rather, she meant to say that, but a string of some sound came out instead. The tickling did not stop, and Larka opened her eyes with Herculean effort and peered into the darkness. A black form was hovering over her. Hmm, how alarming, Larka thought calmly as she reached to her right to tug at her bedside lamp.

It was Sirius, although without a pet mackerel, which confused Larka greatly. She really was too groggy for this, whatever this was. "Sirius?"

"Yours truly," he confirmed.

"Yours truly," he confirmed. He looked around, head cocked to the side like a curious sparrow. Larka blushed for the state of their room: it wasn't messy, but it was close to being so.

"What are you doing here?" she asked. Then after a moment, she asked the right question, "Wait, how did you get inside?" She was in her embarrassingly grandmotherly flannel pyjamas and drew up the equally grandmotherly paisley quilt up to her chin.

Sirius flashed his winning smile and replied airily, "One must have ways of getting about discreetly."

Larka tried not to think of all the previous times that Sirius had sneaked into girls' residences, and exactly what that implied. Or all the grand adventures that he had before her. With all those other girls. And the experience, the pleasures, the stories—the tales that she was not part of. She felt slightly embarrassed at the rising feeling and felt that Sirius somehow could tell, like a child feeling like their parent was omniscient. "So why did you come here?" she distracted herself by asking. It was a prudent question, she applauded herself.

"Well I have to know whether to book a Hogsmeade restaurant for dinner or not."

All restaurants in Hogsmeade were walk-ins, but Larka blushed and said, "Sure." Then she realized how she had repeated the back-and-forth between Novia and him before; horrified, she looked up and blurted out, "Oh Merlin, I mean—"

Sirius tapped her lips with his fingertips and stopped her from rambling on, "I get exactly what you mean, which is, 'Oh Sirius," he threw his head back and brought his hand to his forehead with great dramatic flair, "please carry me away from the dreadful gloom of this tower and fly me to the moon!'"

Larka swallowed a chuckle and instead said dryly, "Let's say I mean that."

"Alright," Sirius winked, "Dinner for two, I shall inform my footman to immediately inform the butler to inform the booking-valet."

"Good luck finding any of those three people," Larka bid him.

"Nonsense," he waved, "can't you see George, Michael, and John right behind me?" There was, of course, no George, Michael, or John. "Oh, and," Sirius turned to the other side of the room, "we're good though, right?" he asked Novia, who had been still this entire time. Larka was about to shush Sirius before he could wake the sleeping Novia when Novia suddenly sat up in bed, not a trace of sleep-induced daze in her eyes.

"Good?" Novia asked sharply.

"Yes," Sirius said, facing great danger with bravery and even stepping towards her—oh, the courage of the ignorant, Larka apprehensively. "I know you have some, uh, thoughts about me, due to misunderstandings, and of course," before Novia could fly into a rage, "my mistakes, but I trust that being gracious as you are, you can look past that. After all," he flashed his pearly teeth, "as I've lately come to understand, friendship needs to be looked after."

Novia, instead of wrath, responded with a pensive and—wistful? Larka didn't understand—look. "You," she said simply.

"Yes," Sirius replied.

"This?"

"Yes," he answered again, "What I should be, at least."

"Fine," Novia dropped down to the bed, dragging the sewn-together cover over her again, and adamantly faced the wall.

"Well that's something sort of taken care of," Sirius returned to Larka with a lopsided grin.

The strange dynamic between her and Novia was not to be rebalanced so easily, but Larka thought the effort should be commended, so she grinned back before shooing him away.

"Eight," he shouted as the door closed, disregarding what the neighbours would have thought, "I'll come pick you up at eight!"

-.-.-.-.-

Sirius had been stewing in anticipation and the foreign sensation of nervousness until Friday. He last remembered this congealing feeling when he returned to the House after being Sorted*******. There was little reason to be nervous, he reasoned: he figured that Larka rather fancied him, and even if she didn't, the usual Sirius would have had complete confidence in his swashbuckling charms. Except he wasn't the usual Sirius now, was he? He wasn't sure who he was without the familiar shapes of his Marauders next to him, but he felt like she knew who he was, and to understand him was surely to love him.

She had, inexplicably, said something true about him, and because of that, he also felt like he had touched something true of hers, in the same intimate way. He wasn't quite sure what this feeling was, but in this time of confused logic, he thought maybe he wanted her love. Scratch that, he did want that, but he was also afraid to want it, and even more afraid to try to get it. Fear was not, however, a foreign sensation, unlike nervousness, and he knew how to deal with it.

Friday afternoon was when this pudgy, rural cheeked little thing found him sitting in a tree at the base of the Gryffindor tower, staring daringly into the fading sun (with a pair of sunglasses; he was daring, not stupid). Sirius looked down at her, futilely regulating her own breath, and had snapped a branch and was about to drop it on her head when he recognized her as one of Larka's. He swung forward and jumped, landing (gracefully, if he might add, even if his silk trousers now had a tear, but he turned strategically so it wasn't visible) in front of the girl and drew up to his full height so as to tower over her imposingly (he had to be nice to her but not that nice). "I hope you're not playing Pheidippides," he drawled lazily in his snob voice, "to do the whole 'she told me to tell you' thing; that's so nursery school."

The pudgy girl shook her head then said shakily, "Stay away from my friends."

She really didn't understand the inner works of a man's mind very well, did she? A lesser man would have been spurred to date Larka just to spite this little boule de suif.

It was fortunate for her that Sirius was not such a base man, he congratulated himself as he picked the lock to Larka's room.

As he took the door handle to turn it, he paused. The two days of uncertainty crested right then, overwhelming him like a rancorous sea wave dragging him undertow.

He swallowed cautiously.

In that second, Sirius became like any other boy and pondered: why should Larka fancy him? Moony was the sort of person who was good, invariably and fundamentally. Prongs was good, fundamentally, but not invariably. He—Sirius Altair Black, Life-Force of Redcrosse, Bon Vivant Extraordinaire, Most Original Personage To Have Existed In Possibly Forever—was good occasionally and usually as an afterthought. Larka was good like Moony, always patient, always kind, and never struggled to be so. She was like a completely different species from him. Or mutated. Probably mutated. Like a dragon with scaled wings and elk legs. Actually that beast probably existed in more ancient times******* (the olden days had really fucked up creatures). Anyhow, the point was, Larka shared with Moony this quintessential goodness. Sure, she lacked Moony's underlying watchful cunning, but that proved to be a grain of sugar in a salt mine. And Moony was much more suited for domestic life than Sirius would ever be, could ever been. Sirius didn't know why birds didn't besiege Moony constantly instead of himself—well, okay, Sirius knew why, but he didn't understand it, and Larka wasn't like that, really.

Even Prongs, with his relentless hard-headedness was more of a traditional love interest than the flighty Sirius with a bad record and even worse reputation. Prongs was also money; new as money came, but still money like one couldn't even believe, matched by not even the richest of the peerage families, and he of all people knew that the peerage families weren't as minted as they pretended to be, least of all his own. Prongs was such a straightforward, friendly person that he was at once easy to love and the thought of being loved by such a person was undoubtedly magnificent.

It had always been so very obvious, that he was not a smart pick. In a rare moment of doubt, Sirius wondered why Larka, oh sensible, sensitive Larka, would choose him. Not that it was really a choice, or that Prongs or Moony would reciprocate, but Sirius had enough experience in this sort of matter to understand that reciprocity wasn't a perquisite of anything. Even if Larka dismissed those two, who was to say she should take up him, Sirius? Who was to say Sirius wouldn't fuck up like he always did, be a tosser even when he didn't mean to be one? Because what good had he brought to anybody, to any single person, even when he tried his damnest?

But he was getting ahead of himself.

Sirius steadied his breath and thoughts, braced himself for the best and worst, put a smile on his face, and turned the handle.


* An Acceptable was indeed unacceptable, since Larka J. Roxburgh wanted to keep her options open for after graduation. In order to pursue further education in either mathematics or astronomy (or pioneer the academia area of astronomical mathematics, but that sounded so ambitious that it was silly and Larka couldn't bring herself to tell anybody), she needed at least an Exceeds Expectations in all of her related courses.

** Novia Brooks, in the wake of Sirius A. Black approaching, was trying to decide if her predominant feeling was 'I knew it! I knew he would come back to me' or 'I shall tell him no, I shan't take him back, with suitable dignity and pride'. A mini war waged within her, and one side had almost won before Sirius rendered her internal civil war superfluous—what, which side won? Well, did it matter?

*** The 'traditional sort' was not the pureblood tradition. In fact, in the pureblood world, the modern invention of the 'date' was grudgingly tolerated with the sort of resigned acknowledgment that the kids would do what the kids wanted. The formal wooing process begun with an introduction (by a third mutual acquaintance) and then a courting period (chaperoned, of course). The 'date' could sort of, kind of, maybe be thought of as part of the latter stage. In any case, times were different, and most families just cared about the marriage proposal now anyway.

**** Sirius A. Black had a few habits that he recognized as 'bad'—to societal standards and health care insurance rules, at least. Besides his smoking, which was actually becoming quite manageable now, at just a pack every three days, although he never meant to manage it—besides his smoking, he also had a habit of cracking his bones. The family physician told him that it was unhealthy for the connective tissue at the joints, but his Mother thought it was rude so he did it as much as he could—oh the small (only) battles that he won. By the time adulthood was in sight, sound of crackling bones was to Sirius what clattering baby rattles was to others.

***** The lock-n-thrust was a perversion of the immobilization spell and was universally used by the Normans when steadying their sword arm. By the Tudor period, the common soldiers had trouble inciting this simple spell, and a common measure to help spell-invoking was to produce a short and loud yell right before cocking their paper cartridge firearm—the concept was that the sudden, alarming sound would cause one to freeze naturally, and therefore help with the intended effect of the spell. This had been largely debunked by modern studies of magical theory.

****** As Arlene Day would say, this assessment was 'way harsh'. As Judith Mariota the keeper of rumours would say, it was currently the popular opinion, and truth was what the masses made it to be anyway. As Lily Evans would say, it was 'only partially true; the part about being a narcissistic, chauvinistic, chain-smoking arsehole especially true, but not so much the others'. As Scarlett Brühl would say, it was mostly accurate 'except for perhaps the uncultured part'. As Larka J. Roxburgh would say, however, all the allegations were a tiny bit true, but that was the case for every single human being, only to differing degrees; what mattered was that she saw Sirius A. Black as a caring, sensitive, considerate, clever, cultured, gentlemanly arsehole who was perhaps a little too fond of smoking, but which uni boy did not have his vice?

******* The Sorting Hat had sat on Sirius A. Black's head for a full seven minutes and twelve seconds, long enough for a junior parliamentary debate. When the boy requested to be in Gryffindor instead of Slytherin, the Hat, despite being wise and old, had a moment of being old beyond wisdom when he said, "But you're a Black."

Sirius, eleven years old, blew up like a puffer fish at the slightest provoke, went into a tirade of how the prejudices based on one's last name has now been hardened into a system and made into an ideology, and he would one day gather enough masses to revolt against this ideology of repression and thoughtlessness. For how could one's surname, one word, convey an identity that an eleven-year-old had yet to be able to erect for himself, and a judgment that would form that identity for him? By following this ideology, which is inherently racist, sexist, xenophobic, unfair, and ultimately evil, Hogwarts would inevitably fall as racist, sexist, xenophobic, unfair, and ultimately evil as well. He had not expected for a well-respected magical artefact, wealthy in age and therefore theoretically wealthy in wisdom, to be so predictably clichéd. And evil.

Needless to say, the Hat was bewildered at what an offhand remark had brought forth. In fact, he had not made any judgments (if so, he would have already dismissed the boy), but the boy was so ready to be affronted and so easily defensive that the Hat, who was indeed wealthy in wisdom, could see the scars on his mind. So he asked the boy whether he would be willing to bear scars on his back instead.

The boy considered Mother (who awoke with a Bloody Mary but made him punish himself less frequently now), Father (who still treated him like a pest and refused to think about where his string of disappearing women disappeared to), his little brother (who still looked at him with tender if hesitant brotherly eyes and sucked on his thumb when they were alone), his cousins (who were all beautiful outwards and rotting inwards), his Room (the one in the back of the cellar in the House, cold and dank with a smuggled small candle). He thought of his precious collection of clocks (a few of which should technically be national property, but what did the everyman know of incense clocks or the genius of Abraham-Louis Breguet's carriage clocks; of which he would undoubtedly lose if his parents were further displease with him), his prized toy collection (his re-enactment figurines troop of the Alexander's conquest of the Persian Empire, his fleets sailed like the Flying Dutchman, his palace model that had constant politics going on and a new emperor in power every other week —all soon to be his cousin's, he knew, because he was no longer at an appropriate age for playthings), the little girl that his parents wanted to set him up with (a wimpy cry baby who fainted at the sight of a tarantula he had put on her lace gloves), the hundreds of people awaiting for him to fulfil his inheritance (awaiting and would always wait because he would never take up his Mother's mantle, a thrill going through him at that thought), and finally the little boy on the train (whose father his own father didn't like, so he immediately liked this James).

The boy Sirius considered his own flesh and skin, every bit a product of his parents, flawless because Mother was too elegant for scars, and said to the Hat: bring on the scars. And if there were traces of moisture at the corners of his eyes, he didn't know whether it was for his clocks or his toys or Reggie or himself, but he didn't care.

******** It most certainly did not.