a/n: This is either the halfway point, or slightly over the halfway point, depending on my exact chapter count and if it deviates from my plan. Woop woop! (Yes, this is turning into a longer story than I had planned. Hope you don't mind.)

Chapter Thirty-Six: Horcrux One

Sirius

March 1979, Saltburn

Sirius was bored.

Everyone else had a purpose.

Ginny was off with the Order, with his fucking friends, doing brave saving people stuff.

Hermione was off with his fucking family, being all chummy. Shopping today, he believed, with his mother.

He didn't know which of those was worse.

Okay, he did. It was worse that Hermione was with his family, because she might suddenly realise that he was actually a horrible little shit who'd never make anything of himself. So far, he'd lived up to their expectations nicely, but he didn't want Hermione to know that.

And Luna was off being Luna, except she wasn't, she was pretending to be her mother and messing with files all day. Useful messing with files, admittedly, so it was something helpful.

Well, he wasn't jealous of Luna. He'd rather die than pretend to be his mother.

He downed the apple juice in the chipped mug he was holding like it was whisky, throwing himself back onto his bed.

Seconds later, he got up to look for food.

He massacred some broccoli and potatoes in a pan, added some tomato sauce, ate three mouthfuls, then threw it away as inedible.

He watched half an episode of some programme about idiotic old men, then three minutes of the news.

The news was depressing.

He flicked to another channel, advertising utterly pointless noodles in a plastic jug, before turning into a programme about some people on a farm who couldn't seem to stop arguing with one another

He turned the TV off with his wand, something Hermione had told him firmly to stop doing and put the sofa cushions over his head, making a fort. He. wondered how long he could keep them there.

"Good evening," said Luna.

In all of that, he hadn't noticed she was in the house.

"I'm glad you're here," she continued, once it was clear he wasn't going to bother to answer. "I've got something I need your help with."

"Nobody else has."

"In case you have not noticed, Sirius, I am not anybody else."

"I had noticed that."

"Come on, then," she said.

"I want to know where we're going first." Sirius thought that was a reasonable expectation.

"To find a Horcrux."

Sirius did a double-take. He had been bored a minute ago, but in some ways, this felt like a little too much excitement.

"Ginny is doing her job," said Luna, "making sure that we get information to save people in the Order, and trying to stop Peter betraying you, and stopping you from suspecting Remus." She probably had no idea how that statement hurt, because she was Luna, and she would never have said anything to hurt on purpose. But it stabbed his heart a little, anyway. "All good things."

"Yes," said Sirius.

Luna continued. "Hermione is visiting with your family, again. Narcissa is sadly not going to be there, but she's making useful alliances to help us save Regulus and to extract those three Horcruxes hidden with Death Eaters. They are enacting the plan. And what are you doing, Sirius Black?"

"Keeping out of trouble. Not going anywhere with lots of wizards, unless I use Polyjuice. Not causing any problems or needing rescues."

The middle sentence had been Hermione's words, the rest of it was his own.

"And this is just a tiny little trip to an abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere, which will be completely straightforward."

Sirius was not sure that was true. As much as anything else, his experience of 'oh, it will be complete straightforward,' was plans that his friends had come up with at school. Marauder plans had a 33% chance of ending in detention, Remus had done the sums. It had been 75% in fourth year.

And Hermione would think it was reckless, and things were going well there. He had not yet done anything stupid. They had kissed, and they had slept together, twice, and they had held hands a little bit in the kitchen, and it was impossibly tame but he didn't want to risk messing it up. He told himself that was because they would have to live together, work together, even if he did. And he had experience of living in the same house as an angry Hermione, and he didn't want to repeat it.

He didn't tell himself any of the other reasons, because they weren't true.

Although he did think he might have accidentally said that he loved her. But it was an accident, and the point he was making had been about his family, not her at all. Even if he wasn't going to say that, because that would just be tactless, and Hermione probably hadn't noticed, anyway. How would she have? They'd both been half asleep.

"If you're going to say that Hermione won't approve," said Luna, holding out his jacket, "then do we think that is any more of a consideration than if Ginny will approve?"

"Yes," said Sirius. But he really was quite bored, and Hermione was talking to some of the people who hated him most in the world. "We're going for a look," he said. "We're not going to do anything today."

"Indeed," said Luna.

They Apparated with tiny, quiet pops to a little village, a Muggle village, or the countryside surrounding it, anyway. Sirius eyed it cautiously.

"I thought you said it was the middle of nowhere?" he said.

"As close as," shrugged Luna. "If you're worried, send Hermione or Ginny a Patronus message."

Sirius stiffened. "I don't think that's necessary," he said. "They might be busy. With somebody where it's inconvenient. They almost certainly are, actually. And I don't think we need to. You said it was fine."

"Oh, you can't do a Patronus, of course. That is fine."

"I can."

He could, in theory. He had never managed it after Azkaban. It wasn't that he couldn't remember the happy memories he'd always used, but that they had lost their potency after the years of prison and Dementors he could only keep at bay through transformation. The years of feeling nothing at all except despair had sucked the colour from those memories, and he was left with the dregs, as if they had happened to somebody else and that he had been told the stories. By a good storyteller, yes, but they were not entirely his stories.

Not his happiness, any more. Some other Sirius Black.

Poetic, really, when you considered that there were currently two of him.

"It isn't embarrassing, Sirius," said Luna, picking her way off the field she had Apparated into and onto the road. "I know plenty of people who cannot."

"How did you know?"

"You just spoke too quickly. And you had too many answers."

"And how did you know where this Horcrux was?"

"I do work in the Records Department, you know. I just looked it up."

"Yeah," said Sirius, flippantly. "Under H for Horcrux or V for Voldemort? Or even S for Severed Souls?"

"E for Evil, of course," said Luna, with a smile that was entirely in her eyes.

It turned out that she had simply listened when Harry had talked of Horcruxes, years ago in the future. Harry had never given her the village name, but he had revealed that it was where Voldemort's grandfather lived, and that Voldemort had been named in part for that grandfather, and she knew that he was Tom Marvolo Riddle from what Ginny had told her. So she just looked up all the Marvolo's, and there had been one here, who had a daughter who died the year that Tom Riddle had been born. And everyone knew by now that his mother had died in childbirth, and so he had been raised in an orphanage.

"I very much enjoyed doing Muggle puzzle books as a child," she said. "It is just like those dot-to-dot puzzles. Once you have one thing, you connect it to the rest, and here is a picture of Little Hangleton."

Sirius had never heard of a dot-to-dot puzzle. He did sort of want to do one in front of his mother, to see what she said.

"So you just connected the dots?" he asked.

"Indeed," said Luna, who appeared to be moving on to other things, anyway.

They walked down towards the village in silence, and Luna brought them to a completely empty field.

"Well," she said. "It ought to be here."

"Charms," said Sirius. "Strong charms. There's a fucking impressive quantity of magic here." He took out his wand, and crouched to the floor. "Loads of curses, too. Whoever set all of this really, really doesn't want anybody to get in."

"And if they do," said Luna, "he wants them to be trapped here."

"So he can find them and torture them and kill them."

"There is no pressure," said Luna. "None at all."

Sirius laughed a nervous laugh, and Luna joined in.

"We said we weren't going to do anything," said Sirius, reminding her of their earlier agreement. But he could see a way to unpick a few lines of the curses, already.

"I never actually said that," said Luna. "You see, I do not ever promise anything that I am not certain I will do. I said 'indeed', which neither promises or refuses to promise."

Sirius was going to remember that trick. He flexed his wand hand. "I could remove about half of this, in a few hours," he said. "After that I'd need to look some things up."

"I suppose there is little to no risk removing what we can," said Luna. "As long as Tom Riddle does not come along right at this very moment. And that does seem as though the probability would be low. If he notices after we have left, we simply deny all knowledge. Do we have an alibi, Sirius?"

"Ginny will come up with one," said Sirius. "But I doubt Voldemort is going to suspect us. We don't even technically exist."

"Always suspect those you do not feel worthy of suspicion," said Luna. Sirius wondered if that was viable life advice, or a recipe for how to become exactly like Mad-Eye Moody. He suspected the latter.

Sirius took to work, while Luna sat on a large rock that certainly hadn't been there when they arrived and kept watch. She never dressed appropriately for anything involving stealth. Her robes were turquoise, for Merlin's sake. Bright teal, actually. But her spellwork was competent, so the eyes of passing Muggles slid straight away from the girl on the rock and the man on the ground, sweating slightly as he worked his way through the charms, wards and curses on the property.

There were eighty four he thought he could remove. None of them were of the 'certain death' type. That was a pain, in a lot of ways, because the ones that wanted to outright kill you were relatively easy to dismantle. It was also a pain if you accidentally triggered one. But less of one than being caught by Voldemort, all things considered.

Voldemort, as they had discussed, did not want you to die. If the curses he'd set were any indication, he wanted intruders to lose a couple of important body parts, be lightly tortured, and to be trapped. For their blood to be captured, and for their wand to be burnt to a crisp. And Sirius quite liked this wand.

He spent a good thirty minutes looking, running diagnostic charms, and feeling for the edges of the wards before he went in with any dismantling. He had been stung by things like this before; nasty spells that caused you to feel as though you were going mad if you attempted to bring down anything it was linked to, or curses that released magic creatures or dangerous mists. The kind of wizards who set this up were usually insane, sadistic, or both. His father had some very similar spells in his study and in the basement of Grimmauld Place.

"Luna," he said, before he prepared to bring down the first spells on the property. "If I fuck this up, run."

"Indeed," said Luna.

Sirius decided he did not like that trick when it was being used on him.

"Maybe we should tell Hermione."

"You can if you want to."

Luna was fucking infuriating and he was never going out with her alone again.

He took a deep breath and turned back to what Luna claimed was going to be a shack when he was done with it.

He started with the ones his father had used, the very first dark spells he'd managed to undo by himself. He had been eight years old, and curious as to what his father had been given by Abraxas Malfoy at a dinner party. So after he'd been put to bed by Kreacher, he'd sneaked downstairs and into his father's study. He'd been able to undo the locking charms and detection charms on the door by the time he was four years old. Sirius didn't know whether Orion knew that.

He'd gone into the room, and in the corner had been the shiny little box, and Sirius had wanted to know what was in it. But he'd put his hand out, and felt the hum of something dangerous, so he'd simply removed it. And then he'd touched the box, and passed out, because he had failed to remove the curse that knocked the thief out.

He had become more careful after that. His father's anger was impressive, and scarier than anything to an eight-year-old boy, but thirty-seven year old Sirius was far, far more afraid of Lord Voldemort than he was of Orion Black.

Orion Black, for all of his skills, was not particularly inventive with torture. By the looks of these curses, Voldemort was.

Four hours later, he had removed the promised half of the enchantments. It was still dangerous, but he'd removed the trapping ones, at least, and everything else that he knew how. He'd need to look the rest up.

"Done," he said, to Luna, who was threading buttercups together into a chain. Sirius thought it was a bit early in the year for buttercups, himself, but he'd failed his Herbology NEWT.

"I can see the outline," she said, carelessly stringing the buttercups around his neck as she jumped down from the rock. "Looks like there's two floors, and that it's being held up more by magic than anything else."

"Excellent," said Sirius. "I trust those buildings absolutely."

"The Burrow stays up," said Luna. "It is my favourite building."

"Hogwarts is mine," said Sirius. "I suspect that's held up by more magic than I want to think about, too."

"Well done today, Sirius," said Luna. "I suppose we ought to go home." She looked over to him, and pulled what could only be described as a smirk across his face. "Or, we could go to the Ministry and dig into some people's personal records?"

Sirius once again thought this was something Hermione might not approve of, and said so.

"Oh, this one is entirely with Hermione's approval. You know she's been going through all those Muggle newspapers for anything about those Muggles Ginny found? Well, it is somewhat linked with that."

It was entirely linked with that.

Sirius was not completely sure they were allowed to be in the Ministry of Magic at two o'clock in the morning, but there they were. Besides, copious previous experience showed that it was possible to get into fights in the Ministry, including the most secretive areas, and nobody would notice until Voldemort showed. So it was probably immaterial whether they were technically allowed here.

Most of the levels were deserted as they went up the staircases, climbing slowly to Level One. A handful of lights were on when they went past Level Four, and there was some kind of meeting happening at Auror Headquarters, but nobody paid any attention to Luna and Sirius other than a small woman with a bow in her hair and a glare on her face. Sirius glared back.

"Why aren't we using the lift?" he asked, as they set off up the last flight of stairs.

"I don't like the lift," said Luna. "It looks at me oddly. I do wonder if there is a poltergeist trapped in it, which would be sad."

Sirius had no response to that, did he?

Luna's office was in more of a state than Sirius' bedroom, but she seemed to know where she was going. She rifled through a series of files on her desk, before crossing to the other desk, and putting half of a large stack there into the bin.

"She has not got an adequate grasp of filing systems," said Luna. Sirius thought that was a bit rich, coming from her, but instead he sat down on the chair behind Luna's colleague's desk. He was not-so-pleasantly surprised when it shot backwards across the room and tipped him into a filing cabinet.

"That is not the way to speed up the search," Luna admonished him.

"What are we looking for?" Sirius asked, Vanishing the offending chair.

"Ginny has given me a list of the names of the Muggles in that house. We are cross checking them with wizarding records, so as to determine if they have wizarding heritage."

"Okay."

"Excellent," said Luna.

They worked in silence, and Luna was the one to find something first. "Mary Taylor. Not the least common name. This matches Ginny's description, however, and she has Squib parents."

"I've found another," said Sirius. "Funny. She's also got a Squib in the tree."

"That's not a very nice thing to say," said Luna.

Sirius twitched. She wasn't wrong.

"Sorry."

"I understand. You had many years of hearing all of this horrible stuff. It stands to reason that you sometimes do repeat it."

"I shouldn't, though, should I? I need to be better than that." He kicked at the chair, and it rolled backwards a little bit again. In frustration, he stood up, kicked the chair away into the wall, and threw himself and his stack of records onto the floor instead.

"Oh Sirius," said Luna. "You do have such terrible self-esteem."

"Fuck off," he said, but he didn't really mean it, and he thought Luna knew that too.

"I understand," she said. "Well, I do not. I have never lived what you have. But it's funny, isn't it? How family continues to define you, even though you try to become somebody else. I fear I am forever doomed to be the strange girl without a mother, who never quite worked out how to be with other people, because she was always alone."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"I thought you were pretty sorted, you know."

"Everyone thinks everyone else is, what was it, pretty sorted. They are not, usually. We are all about equally unsure of ourselves and our place in the world. Did you know, Muggles believe that most people are thirty before they work out why they really are?"

"I'm thirty-seven," said Sirius.

"You spent twelve years having the soul sucked out of you by demons," said Luna. "In terms of developmental years, you are twenty-five."

"Makes me feel slightly better about being a monumental fuck up." He didn't necessarily believe that, fucking hell, his body felt thirty-seven or sometimes even older, and he had suffered through the odd moment of personal growth in Azkaban. But it did make him feel better, and perhaps that was the point.

"That's quite alright, Sirius." Luna flicked through several more piles, then turned back to him. "I am pleased for you and Hermione."

"Thanks. I'm really worried I'm going to fuck it up."

"You most likely will. It would be improbable that a person would never cause an issue once or twice in a relationship."

Again, Sirius felt weirdly better for that. Which he shouldn't, given that Luna had basically just assured him that his fears were correct and that he would mortally offend Hermione at some point probably in the very near future. Like the whole having gone to hunt Horcruxes without consulting anyone and taking down half the defences of one of them and now having technically broken into the Ministry of Magic.

But Hermione had done irresponsible things in the hunt of Horcruxes, and had broken into the Ministry of Magic twice, so did not have a leg to stand on.

Admittedly, Sirius was on three times at present, but one of those had been entirely to see if he could in the summer after sixth year, and didn't count.

"Thanks, Luna," he said. He realised something he had never asked Luna. "Did you have someone, in the future? A boyfriend you left behind?"

Luna gave him a slightly sad smile. "I did not. I am less than interested in boys, shall we say? My interests lie elsewhere. And there was somebody, but, well, it is not to be."

"Oh." Sirius wasn't quite sure what to say. He spoke quickly, to avoid any accusation of not being okay with her fancying girls. "I'm sorry about that. Do you, was it anyone I know?"

"Oh yes," said Luna. "But I would rather not say who."

"You never know," said Sirius. "They might come around. If you get back there."

"I know, almost for certain, that they will not," she said, and she looked less sad than simply resigned, now. "I do feel sad, sometimes, but that is sometimes how life can be."

"Yeah. Life's a pile of Hippogriff shite." They worked in silence again.

Twenty minutes later, they had a collection of papers spread across the floor in front of them.

"There's a link," said Sirius. "It's the squibs. They're all Muggles, but all of them are registered as having magical heritage because they have a parent or grandparent who's a squib."

"But why?" asked Luna. "I would be lying if I said that I understood."

"It's a start," Sirius decided. "Come on. It's almost four o'clock. You actually have a job to go to in the morning."

"I'll sleep here," said Luna. "I do not want to go home, it will lose me an hour and a half of sleep."

"Good point," said Sirius. He stood up, stuffing his wand into his pocket. "See you, then."

He got to the doorway. "Er, Luna? Thanks. I dunno, you made me feel a bit better about all of this shit."

"What was it you said?" she asked. "Life is a pile of Hippogriff shite?"

"A massive one."

"Do you love her?"

"Hermione?"

"I am not talking of the Hippogriff. Why would I be?"

He shifted his weight to his other foot, and straightened his jacket.

"I dunno. How do you know when you love someone?"

"You do," she said, simply. "Not right away, not always. It's there, though. That feeling that you could not live another day without them. That you know who they are, even the bad parts, and you still choose them."

"Except sometimes you have to. Live without them, that is."

"Indeed, Sirius," said Luna. "Goodnight. Do tell her, when you know, won't you?"

Sirius nodded, and left.

He walked out through the still deserted Ministry, and took a Floo connection from the Atrium to the Leaky Cauldron on Diagon Alley. That wouldn't draw attention, not in the way going to somewhere identifiable. Not that their house had Floo, or anywhere else in their small town. The Magical Transportation folks would have disconnected the one in Jo's house, if she'd had one. They were efficient.

He Apparated from the Leaky to Saltburn, and sat on the pavement outside Jo's old house. The pavement was wet with the recent rain, and Sirius felt it seep up through his jeans. They were rebuilding the house now. Some wizards had been along first, and removed all the spell damage, and now some Muggle builders had been contracted by somebody to do the repair work. It had almost been completed, and a For Sale sign adorned the front of it, nailed next to the door.

He had no idea if he loved Hermione.

It was unlikely that she had noticed, but he thought he had said he did. He'd muttered something about not allowing people he loved to go anywhere near his family. It was something he stood by. But he'd never put a woman in the category of love, before. Just James and Remus and Peter.

He'd never been in love before.

"Sirius, you're a fucking idiot," said Ginny, as she landed next to him.

"I thought we agreed not to Apparate out here?" asked Sirius, deciding not to reveal that he had too.

"Ah, what would Hermione say?" replied Ginny. "Getting sloppy leads to getting caught. She's why Harry got away with so much shit, I'm telling you. But yes, we did. And some idiots dumped a sofa on the alley, flytipping Hermione says it's called, and I keep forgetting to Vanish it or something before I leave. Explode it would be more fun, but a possible breach of the Statute."

"You're talking very fast," said Sirius, because she was, and he didn't much care about some tipflyed sofa.

"Right," said Ginny, raising an eyebrow at him sat on the pavement.

"How did you know you loved Harry?" asked Sirius.

"If we're going to have a heart to heart, can we go inside?" she said. He picked himself up, and followed her in. "Also, I snogged Remus tonight. So I'd rather not talk about Harry."

Sirius stopped in his tracks, halfway across the road. Ginny sighed, and dragged him out of it, glaring at him all the way.

"Yeah," she said, unlocking the door. "I'm being a shit to both your best friend and your godson. Oh, and it was when I was about eleven." She flopped into the armchair, and pulled her hair from it's plait.

"Everyone seems to know immediately."

"Sirius, right, not meaning to be an idiot, but you don't exactly have a life that's been brimming with love. It's going to take you a while, yeah? Now stop angsting and tell me that I'm not being an arsehole to two different men. Fuck," she said. "I want to be with Remus and I also want to fix that fucking Time-Turner and go back to Harry."

"You're not," said Sirius, watching her tug the knots from her hair with fierceness. "You don't think Hermione is, and she was with Ron."

"I always assumed she'd dumped Ron," said Ginny. "I'd dump him, if he wasn't my brother. Considered sacking him as a brother a few times too, him and Percy both. I was supposed to be fucking marrying Harry, Sirius!" She was crying now, hot angry tears, and Sirius had never been good with crying.

"Ginny," he tried. This was not something that Ginny did, apart from that first night in the past when she had screamed at Hermione. "Ginny. It's going to be okay."

She threw her hair bobble to the floor. He tried again.

"Harry might not even know you're missing. We could be here for years. There's so much shit going on, that we perhaps should be taking our happiness where we can find it." He thought of Luna. Not that he'd say that to Ginny, because that would be betraying Luna's confidence.

"Do you think I should cut my hair?" she asked. "I feel like Philomena has a bob."

"Concentrate," he said. "Do the best you can by Remus, yeah? Don't be a twat. Don't cheat on either of them when you're in their timeline. Or I'll curse you. Is that what you wanted me to say?"

"Sort of," she said. "He told me he was a werewolf, and I said 'and?' I don't think that was the right thing."

"I cornered him in the bathroom and shouted that I knew what he was, then I punched him because he hadn't told us before and he'd been letting himself suffer alone."

"Shit."

"In my defence, I was twelve." Sirius wasn't proud of it, even if he spoke in his own defence.

"Harry killed a basilisk at twelve."

"Harry's a bastard of an overachiever, did anyone ever tell him that?"

Ginny laughed. "I don't think so. I never bothered to, anyway."

"Good. Probably doesn't need to hear it, with all he had going on."

"What did Remus do when you punched him?"

"Punched me back. Then hexed me, because he's always been faster at duelling than me."

"Boys. All idiots. Might become a lesbian, might solve a few things."

Sirius had a tear in his eye, too. The twelve year old Remus, the twelve year old Sirius, fuck, the twelve year old Harry, all of them had had enough shit in their lives to last them a lifetime before you factored in what they all had to come.

"You're going to need to tell him you're fine with it, you know," he said. "Several times. More than several. Probably around twenty, and even then I still don't know if he'll believe it."

"Do you reckon he ever believed that Tonks was okay with it?"

"I dunno. He never was when I was alive. He hated it. I thought he was going to get himself killed over Tonks, because he was so worried about what he might do to her if they ever even kissed, let alone anything more. And I'll admit to losing it a bit at one point, because I'd heard that spiel constantly from '75 to '81."

"But he'd kissed people before?" Ginny looked panicked. "I'm not his first kiss, am I?"

"No," said Sirius. "That would have been Flavia Longbottom, in fourth year. He had an accidental reputation as a womaniser by the time we left Hogwarts, did you know? He used to go on a few dates with a woman, and then panic, and dump them."

Ginny giggled, a nervous giggle. "I can imagine that."

Sirius looked at her, at her panic despite the slightly hysterical smile, and considered giving her a hug. "I think you're right," he said, deciding against it. "Philomena has a bob. And, what are those things called across the forehead?"

"Fringe," said Ginny, with a devilish grin. "Will you cut it for me?"

"Yeah," said Sirius. "Oh, by the way. Luna and I got halfway through stealing a Horcrux tonight. Will you duel on my side if Hermione tries to kill me?"

"Depends how hard she tries."

"You sure the Hat didn't put you in Slytherin?"

"Just cut my hair, dickhead."

a/n: Don't worry, Ginny isn't going to angst over everything nearly as much as Hermione and Sirius did.

Thank you to Rachael for beta-ing and reassuring me that it does all make sense still. It's going to get less complicated from here onwards as people's storylines begin to merge more.

And thanks to everyone who's reading, too, especially those who have left reviews. I do actually love getting them.