Chapter 69: Sirius, Cousin
When Sirius and Remus reached the edge of Hogwarts grounds, they found Harry awaiting them. Harry was making good use of the various burning spells Remus had had him practicing all week to sculpt a giant golden snitch out of a great mound of snow. When he noticed that Sirius and Remus had arrived, Harry finished off his impromptu art project by charming it to sparkle with gold.
"Your charmwork is excellent, Harry," said Remus. "That's at least two OWLs you needn't worry about too much."
"Tell it to Hermione," said Harry. "I'm pretty sure she got Ron and me homework planners for Christmas."
At any other time, Sirius would have laughed, but Harry's casual commentary on his marks and his friends seemed very far away.
"Did you speak to Dumbledore?" Remus was asking.
"Yes. I told him everything. Well— almost." Harry glanced apologetically at Sirius. "I tried to leave out the stuff the locket said to you, but the portrait of Phineas Nigellus—"
Sirius swore in a way he hadn't since his first months away from Azkaban. "I forgot he was there. This was the one time he didn't try to call everyone's attention to himself."
"He said that the real Regulus wouldn't have spoken to you that way."
Sirius closed his eyes for an instant in the hope that that would make everything— Harry and Remus and the castle and the snow snitch— disappear. It didn't work. When he opened his eyes, the light bouncing off the snow was still blinding and Harry and Remus were still watching him carefully.
"Regulus spoke to me that way many times. It's how Kreacher still speaks to me. It's how my mother's portrait at Grimmauld Place speaks to me. It's how Phineas Nigellus speaks to me, come to that. I'm sure he had quite a laugh telling Dumbledore what happened."
"I don't think he did," said Harry, and Sirius didn't bother arguing because he hated arguing with Harry. "Dumbledore offered Kreacher the holiday off, but Kreacher got kind of offended and said he wanted to cook the feast tomorrow. Oh, and he brought me a treacle tart. I knew you'd tell me not to eat it in case he poisoned it, but Dobby came along with him so I thought it would be all right and it was." Harry casually summoned a bag that had been lying on the far side of his snow snitch. "Are you ready to go back to Hogsmeade?"
Sirius wasn't ready to do anything other than turn back into a dog and swim across the frozen lake until he couldn't feel anything. With an unconscious snort, he realized that if he did, he would drown as Regulus had drowned.
"Yes," he told Harry. "I'm ready to go." He glanced at Remus. "Remember that you promised to come round Andromeda's tomorrow."
"So I did," said Remus. "I'll see you then."
It was a perfectly normal sort of goodbye, but it left Sirius biting down a wave of anger as he considered how likely it was that Remus was going to go straight to Dumbledore— or worse, to Snape— to discuss Sirius and Sirius' brother and Sirius' house-elf and Sirius' life.
He turned and went back the way he'd come, now with Harry trotting at his side instead of Remus.
He remembered how Harry had snuck out of the castle on Halloween and sat quietly with Tonks, keeping Sirius company without pressing him to say a word.
Regulus' voice sounded in his ears again.
Harry clings to you, perhaps, because thanks to you he has no one else. You are nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing to Harry, you can do nothing for him, he is better off without you, he wouldn't miss you if you were gone, he didn't miss you when you were gone…
"Was there anything in particular you wanted to do this evening?" Sirius asked abruptly as he and Harry reached the cottage. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. He couldn't drown out Regulus' words with his own.
"Not really," said Harry. "I'm tired."
Of course he was. They had, after all, skipped sleeping the night before in favor of a starlit swim to a lake full of inferi.
"Maybe we'll just eat and listen to wizarding radio by the tree."
Harry raised the bag he carried. "I have food. Don't worry, I asked Dobby, not Kreacher. Is ham all right?"
Harry was so kind, and so wonderful, and no one in the world deserved Harry, least of all Sirius. "It's perfect."
Harry put the food on plates and set the table as Sirius struggled with the radio, which seemed not to want to tune properly beneath his suddenly clumsy fingers. "Celestina Warbeck or Christmas stories?"
"Mrs. Weasley loves Celestina Warbeck," said Harry. "What kind of Christmas stories?"
"All kinds. Some families swear by one broadcast, some swear by the other. My family, of course, listened to neither. Celestina Warbeck is a half-blood and some of the classic stories portray Muggles in a positive light."
After some minor deliberation they chose the stories, not least because the signal seemed clearer.
The first story involved a dozen students who were taking the Hogwarts Express home for Christmas when a snowy avalanche buried the train and left them stranded. Far too conveniently, none of the usual magical solutions to the problem worked, and a young witch and wizard by the names of Etheldreda and Adam were tasked with saving their peers' lives through sheer wit and bravery. Etheldreda meanwhile realized that she did not want to marry her fiancé, the rich and cowardly Firmin, but much preferred the quietly selfless Adam.
Harry rolled his eyes a bit, but he didn't suggest that they turn it off.
The next story was a rather silly murder mystery. It turned out that no one had died, after all, but determining as much involved both a large amount of mince pies and an insufferable aunt falling into a vat of dragon dung.
Harry, who like Sirius had experience with insufferable aunts, seemed to find that one most amusing.
The third story made Sirius uneasy with memory. This story he vaguely recalled having heard as a child. He remembered the men meeting by chance on the road; the way the wizard who had little shared with the Muggle who had none; the way their families came together to cook the meal; the way the Muggle and wizard child were delighted to share a bar of chocolate.
It had to have been Uncle Alphard who'd let him listen to it. No one else in his family would have.
Harry was yawning widely by the end and so Sirius suggested that they both go upstairs and get ready for bed. He, himself, had no intention of sleeping that night— but he knew that if he didn't go to bed, Harry wouldn't go either.
An hour later, Sirius slipped into Harry's bedroom and placed two brightly wrapped packages on the foot of his bed.
That done, he ought to have left.
Instead, he stood and stared at Harry's pale face as Harry slept.
A year and a half had passed since their reunion. Harry's face was still strange but familiar. He looked so very much like James that a part of Sirius thought that he, too, must still be fifteen years old if the boy before him was fifteen. It was all the more true now that Harry's eyes, the perpetual reminder that James had finally found Lily only to lose her, were closed.
He knew very well that he was not fifteen. He could feel it in his own bones— not yet aching with age, but removed from the relentless energy of childhood.
He knew very well that Harry was not James. James' laughter about the fictitious aunt falling into a vat of dragon dung would not have been underscored by the bitter knowledge of what it was to be a member of a family that rejected everything you were.
He relaxed into the almost-normal feeling of being in two times at once. He had felt this way often when Félicité had directed him to remember the most horrible moments of his life as completely as he could.
He was fifteen and looking forward to Christmas morning with James and his parents.
He was thirty-six and ambivalent about spending Christmas with Harry and the scraps of family they'd cobbled together.
(Should he have sent Harry off to the Weasleys? From what he knew, Molly would have reveled in hosting Harry. But would Harry have felt like Sirius was rejecting him? Sirius would have felt like he'd been rejected, but Harry wasn't Sirius. Harry wasn't even James, who had been virtually incapable of feeling unwanted.)
He was fifteen, and he was thirty-six, and he was also in a different life where James had lived and James was the one looking down on his sleeping son.
Then came the recurring flash of irritation that Remus had found a way to save Sirius but hadn't found a way to save James.
He knew Remus would have bought him a book of crossword puzzles for the holiday. That was what Moony had been doing on all special occasions: Christmas, birthday, first day of school, release from a sadistic prison where Sirius had been tortured year after year for a crime he hadn't committed, et cetera.
Sirius slipped out of Harry's room before Harry could awake with a start to find his privacy violated. He made his way back downstairs.
The package from Remus was easy to find: it was the best-wrapped, and Sirius knew Remus hadn't even used a house-elf to do it. Sirius opened it as carefully as he could and took the book of crossword puzzles in his shaking hands. There was another book, too: The Transfiguration of Stephenson Palace, which Sirius had admired in Dumbledore's office that morning. How had Remus known that Sirius had wanted it before Sirius had known that Sirius had wanted it? Remus was obviously taking full advantage of his unfair knowledge of the future. Sirius liked that about him.
He knew his mind wasn't in a fit state to focus on an oral history of perhaps the most complex transfiguration in modern history, and so he set The Transfiguration of Stephenson Palace aside and summoned a quill to begin with the crossword puzzles.
Contaminants. 10 letters.
He was helpless.
He didn't know the answer, and when he tapped his quill on the next clue, it didn't light up the way it was meant to. Either there was something wrong with the charm on the page or there was something wrong with him.
He laughed darkly. He knew which was most likely.
He set the book of crossword puzzles atop The Transfiguration of Stephenson Palace and reached for the next package.
This one was from Andromeda. She had sent it by owl even though they had planned to see each other on Christmas day. The attached note explained why: there was something rather personal about the gift that not everyone would understand.
The package was cool and flat and ominous. Sirius ripped it open before he lost his nerve.
It was a framed photograph of the sky. The star Sirius shone more brightly than any of the others. The photograph had plainly been taken with a Muggle camera, adding just the right hint of rebellion to its tribute to their family's ancient naming conventions.
It was perfect.
He didn't need to ask what Andromeda was thinking. She was thinking that they were still a family and that they could reclaim their connection without carrying along all of the mania that came with it.
Fittingly, the photograph did not include the star Regulus. Alpha Leonis was only the twenty-first brightest star in the sky, and would be too far to the left of Canis Major in any event…
With a flick of his wand, he opened a drawer and summoned the photographs he'd taken from Grimmauld Place the year before when he'd been hunting for a present for Harry.
Regulus and Sirius as tiny boys standing in a crib. Regulus and Sirius posed with their parents. Regulus and Sirius posed with their cousins. Regulus with the Slytherin Quidditch team.
The last photograph had been taken less than a year before Regulus' death. What on earth had he been thinking when he'd looked into the camera, surrounded by his teammates? (At least three of them had been Death Eaters— two dead, one in Azkaban.) Had he had doubts about Voldemort already, as Slughorn had suggested? Or had he only changed his ways when Voldemort had abused Kreacher?
Was there any way to know?
Sirius was still staring at the photograph when Harry's overly-athletic footsteps sounded on the stairs.
"You started without me!" Harry complained. It was rather a hypocritical complaint, as Harry was wearing the watch Sirius had left on his bed. Harry was unimpressed when Sirius pointed it out, disdainfully informing Sirius that presents left on one's bed differed greatly from presents left under the tree. Sirius made note of the fact that Harry was just making shit up. Harry was unperturbed.
"The watch," Sirius began, ignoring Harry's protestations because he didn't really care. "You're less than two years from the important watch, but I've noticed that you have a habit of breaking your cheap watches by wearing them in the water or to play Quidditch or wrestle trolls or whatever else you do."
"I hardly ever wrestle trolls," said Harry. "And what do you mean, important watch?"
It was an innocent question and a knife to his heart. Harry should have been raised in the wizarding world where he belonged. Harry should have known about traditional coming-of-age gifts.
"You come of age when you turn seventeen. The traditional gift is a watch. In some families, it's an heirloom passed from father to son and mother to daughter, a bit like your invisibility cloak. In other families, the parents save up for years to buy the most expensive thing their child will ever own. It matters. It really, really matters, even to people who don't set much store by material things most of the time. Mine came from your grandparents, of course. On the back it said with love from Fleamont, Euphemia, and James. Every time I looked at it, I knew that I had someone even though my own family considered me worse than dead."
Harry nodded solemnly. "You lost it when you went to Azkaban?"
"I lost it in a fight about a year before that. Death Eater got the watch, but he didn't get me."
That was when Harry's eyes fell on the photograph in Sirius' lap. He grabbed for it before Sirius had a chance to hide it. A keening curiosity overtook Harry's face. "Regulus was a seeker," he said. "He's sitting in the middle of the front row. That's where the seeker sits. That's where I sit."
Exhausted anger bubbled up in Sirius for the umpteenth time that day. "So what if he played seeker? That doesn't mean anything. One of every seven players is a seeker."
"Not really," said Harry. "Chasers and beaters are always getting injured, and you can switch out the players who worry about the quaffles and the bludgers. But seekers—"
"If you feel so connected to the other seekers of the world, perhaps the Malfoys will have you over for Christmas dinner and you can commune with Narcissa's brat."
"He's not really a seeker. He just bought his way onto the team," said Harry airily, apparently completely unaffected by Sirius' anger. "I'll start breakfast, shall I?"
Sirius would have felt far less like human rubbish if Harry had yelled back at him.
He might have felt better if Harry had burst into tears. Instead, Harry was… managing him. Handling him. Forgiving Sirius' ridiculous outbursts the way James always had, except Harry wasn't James, and Sirius wasn't fifteen years old.
Harry cracked eggs into a bowl.
(Years of neglect interspersed with indentured servitude had turned Harry into an excellent cook.)
"Open the present I got for you, would you?" asked Harry casually. "It's right over there."
Harry had no business being the mature one in this relationship, but that was exactly who Harry was.
Sirius reached for the present and flipped it over in his hands. It was bulkier and heavier than the gifts he'd received from Remus and Andromeda. It had the feeling of youth about it even though Harry wasn't James and Sirius wasn't fifteen.
Sirius slid one finger under the paper.
"Just rip it," Harry directed. He was cooking bacon now, as naturally as if he'd been cooking bacon since he'd been tall enough to see the pan.
Sirius ripped it.
Harry had given him a motorcycle cover and a motorcycle stand.
Sirius' throat tightened.
This was ridiculous.
This was backwards.
"Thank you, Harry. It's perfect."
Harry grinned and slid eggs and bacon onto plates.
Sirius had no way of saying anything beyond thank you, which wasn't enough.
"You know we can return the watch and the boots if they aren't to your taste," Sirius said instead. "You aren't stuck with them just because they're what I picked."
"No," said Harry. "I like them." And he didn't say more than that, but Sirius could see that they certainly suited him as they prepared to Apparate to Andromeda's house.
One of the Hogwarts owls swooped importantly through the front window just as they were leaving. Harry gave the bird a friendly stroke with his left hand as he detached the letter with his right.
Sirius read over Harry's shoulder.
Dear Harry,
I have it on good authority that Horace Slughorn, former professor of potions, will be visiting the home of Ted and Andromeda Tonks today. I do not doubt that he wishes to see you at least as much as he wishes to see the Tonks family.
Please do me the favor of flattering Horace should the opportunity arise. For reasons I shall not explain today, you and I may both have need of him.
Warmest Regards,
Albus Dumbledore
P. S. Please do not believe that this letter extinguishing itself once you have read it reflects negatively upon the confidence I have in you.
And indeed, the note burst into flames as Harry and Sirius read the last words of the postscript.
"I'm not going to like Horace Slughorn, am I?" Harry asked.
"He's not so bad," said Sirius, but inwardly he was sorry that old Sluggy had decided to expand the guest list beyond the strict limitations of People Sirius Actively Loved.
When they arrived, though, Sirius quickly learned that Slughorn was not alone in intruding upon their peaceful gathering. Tonks had invited both Mad-Eye and Kingsley. One of Ted's brothers had joined them; so had one of Ted's colleagues. Andromeda's school friend Kimberly, who Sirius vaguely remembered meeting in a past life, had come to visit as well. Every so often Tonks gazed at Kimberly with visible hunger for approval. Kimberly had obviously been an honorary aunt to Tonks for all of her life.
Sirius remembered Regulus' words.
Little Nymphadora looks at you with curiosity, and Andromeda with nostalgia, but they lived the best years of their lives without you.
Even though Sirius had no reason to dislike any of Anna's guests, dinner was painful.
He watched as Harry flattered Slughorn on Dumbledore's command. To Sirius, Harry's distaste for Slughorn was palpable. Slughorn was dismissive of Remus, and in Harry's mind that was nothing less than criminal.
Sirius was jealous of Harry's affection for Remus, and it was ridiculous and he knew it but he still felt it.
At long last, the dinner had been eaten and Tonks casually asked whether Sirius wanted to duel. Sirius said something vaguely witty about not wanting to hurt her in front of her parents on Christmas and offered to do the washing up instead.
Anything to get away from the sickening happiness that flooded the room.
"You don't need to help," said Andromeda warmly. "It won't take—"
"I'd like to discuss something with you," said Sirius more bluntly than he'd intended.
"All right, then," said Andromeda, and Kingsley offered to duel with Tonks if she really felt like being knocked into her parents' pond today.
Andromeda and Remus and Harry and Tonks all knew that Sirius was teetering on the edge of something, and it seemed that Kingsley had figured it out too.
Sirius was past caring.
"Was the present too much?" asked Andromeda when they were alone.
"No," said Sirius honestly. "It was perfect. It was… interesting timing."
"A gift on Christmas is interesting timing?"
"I learned something about Regulus yesterday," he began, and before he knew it he was telling Andromeda (almost) everything. How Regulus had died trying to defeat Voldemort. How a dark object had taken the form of Regulus and taunted him. How Kreacher had been involved.
"Was I blind about Regulus?" he asked as he took a grateful gulp of the wine Andromeda had somehow maneuvered into his hand. "Was I the only one who couldn't see him?"
"He was a Death Eater. That's what you saw. That's what you needed to see to keep yourself alive. If he backed out of being a Death Eater because he had an odd affection for that house-elf— rather than because he thought that perhaps he oughtn't murder people like my husband for the great crime of being a wizard born to Muggle parents— he was still a Death Eater."
"You're the only one who thinks that," said Sirius quietly. This time he took a slightly smaller gulp of wine and tried to appreciate its earthy undertone.
"Almost no one understands what it is to have a sociopath for a sibling." Andromeda waved her wand at the bottle of wine, which obediently emptied itself into her glass. She, too, took a longer drink than was strictly socially acceptable.
"I don't know that he was a—"
"He was a Death Eater. Death Eaters are sociopaths. A human being, whether wizard or Muggle, does not dedicate himself to the extermination of other human beings based on arbitrary criteria unless he is a sociopath. It doesn't matter if he selflessly loved the helpless family servant or whether he plaited your hair when you were a child!"
Sirius tried to swallow his laughter. "Regulus did not plait my hair," he informed Andromeda. "And I'm a bit surprised that Bella plaited yours."
Andromeda shrugged gracefully. "Sometimes, when we were very young."
The wine swirled in his glass. Wine and glass were separate, and yet not. It was magic.
The wall had almost turned into glass for Sirius when he'd been nine years old. Bellatrix had run to him, not caring that she was half-dressed.
"Bella did try to comfort me that time I nearly blew up Grimmauld Place with untrained magic," Sirius mused. "It's the last time I remember liking her, even though I pretended I didn't."
Andromeda laughed. "I remember that. Bellatrix was loyal. She was protective. She was brilliant. She would also murder my husband and my daughter and you and your godson if she had a ghost of a chance."
"I suppose we all have light and dark inside of us," Sirius admitted. It was easier to say it to Andromeda than to Harry or Slughorn or an obnoxious Horcrux.
"Regulus—Alpha Leonis— isn't really a single star. It's a multiple star system."
"I did get an O in astronomy, you know."
"I should certainly hope so. You ought to have been able to pass your NEWT before you started Hogwarts. Back when Grimmauld Place couldn't decide whether to take direction from you because you were the proper heir but completely untrained."
He felt his head on Bella's chest.
He felt Regulus' hand in his.
The future Death Eaters.
How he'd hated them.
He didn't say anything.
"I know," said Andromeda. She split the last of the bottle of wine between their glasses.
To be continued.
Author's Note: I hope you're all safe and healthy in the crazy world in which we find ourselves, and I hope this chapter was a happy distraction for you. I'm trying to get back onto my normal update schedule… but as we've established, the world is crazy. Please be generous in forgiving the extra typos in this chapter. I decided that I'd rather have it posted than have it perfect.
Recommendation:
Ghosts by cupid-painted-blind. It is story ID number 3023145 on this site.
Summary: Andromeda takes a walk through the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black after her husband dies, finding nothing but dust and nostalgia and a few unburied ghosts.
There are lots of stories about Andromeda and Narcissa after the Battle of Hogwarts. This ficlet is much my favorite, and high on my list of all-time favorite Blackfics. (Also, I totally would have used Meda instead of Anna as Andromeda's childhood nickname if I'd thought of it. But I'm 15+ years into having Anna as a headcanon, so Anna she remains in my fic.)
