Chapter Three: This Big, Unnecessary Wall

For the first couple of days, Sirius does almost everything in a gaggle with Peter, James, and Remus; it's not until Saturday that he gets any one-on-one face time with any of the blokes. So far, James is the best at Transfiguration, while Peter is really struggling with it, so James stays behind with him to help him practice as Sirius and Remus head out to the grounds to work on their History of Magic essay in the warm grass. The sun feels good on his face at first, but it's warm enough out here that sweat quickly starts to plaster Sirius's hair to his face.

"So you and Vance, huh?" Remus says as he's flipping through his textbook with his tongue stuck out between his teeth.

"It's not like that," says Sirius automatically. "And anyway, I haven't spent that much time with her. I'm always with you and Peter and James."

"Not in Transfiguration," Remus points out, "or Charms, or Potions, or—"

"Okay, okay, so I've partnered her in some lessons. I think she's cool, but that doesn't mean… I mean, we're eleven years old. It's not like I've ever had a girlfriend before. I don't even know if I would want a girlfriend. Aren't girls supposed to be full of drama, anyway?"

"Not always." Remus shrugs one shoulder, looking a little heartened for reasons Sirius doesn't understand. "Abbott is pretty no nonsense."

"Yeah, what's that about, anyway? Are you two—?"

"What? No! God, no. She's just good to practice spells and study with, that's all. I'm not… I mean, I've never…"

"Liked anybody like that yet?"

He shrugs again, looking down, and Sirius immediately backs off, saying, "Sorry, man. We don't have to talk about it."

"It's okay. I mean, the girls are nice. Abbott asked me this morning if I wanted to practice Defense with her later, so I think I'll do that tomorrow. I just want to get to know them all better, you know? So far, it's like—we're polite to each other and everything, but it feels like there's this big, unnecessary wall up."

Sirius knows what he means. "I think we're all just… a little nervous about being here, so we're sticking to the people we know the best from the dormitories. We should ask them all to do more stuff with us—come out here to study or whatever—or even just go and sit by them more of the time in the common room. It's like James said—this is our family now, right? The sooner we all get to know each other, the sooner we'll…"

"Feel like we belong," Remus finishes for him. "Yeah. That makes sense."

It feels doubly important to do so now that it's been two and a half days with no reply since he wrote to Regulus the night of the Sorting Ceremony. Every morning post—every time an owl taps on the window of the Gryffindor common room—Sirius half-expects a letter from home, but he hasn't received anything since Mum's letter on Thursday morning. He'll try again tomorrow if Regulus hasn't sent anything by then—he can't avoid Sirius forever. Right?

"Abbott and McKinnon and Vance are all pretty friendly," says Remus now, "but I think Macdonald and Evans are going to be harder to crack."

"Macdonald's just shy, I think, but I don't think Evans wants us to crack her. She seems pretty determined to isolate herself from all of us."

"You say that like it doesn't bother you at all."

"And it bothers you? If she wants to spend all her time hanging around Snivellus and wishing she were in Slytherin, that's her prerogative. Far be it from me to try and drag her away from him."

"I dunno. I just feel a little bad for her. She's going to get pretty lonely pretty quickly if she keeps dodging her entire house."

"It's her funeral," says Sirius staunchly. "But hey, do you have any memory at all of what Binns was saying on Thursday about Alfred the Eager? Something something goblin rebellions something—"

"It's Elfric the Eager," says Remus, rolling his eyes fondly. "What lecture were you listening to? Give me your notes…"

It's nice, studying out in the grass with Remus, even if Sirius is all sweaty and there's not much of a breeze—but as the minutes while by, Remus starts getting fidgety and avoiding Sirius's eyes. After about two hours of this, he decides that he's had it. "Seriously, what?" Sirius pries. "Are you nervous about your hot study date with Abbott or something?"

"I told you, it's not like that," Remus sighs. "It's just—well—I need to tell the three of you that… I'm not going to be in the dormitory tonight."

"What? Why not? You're not sick of us already, are you?"

He smiles thinly. "It's not that. It's… my mum. She wrote and said—she's sick, and she asked me to come home for the night to see her."

"But—I was with you for all of breakfast, and you didn't get anything in the owl post this morning."

"Yeah, I know. It… was last night. Mum and Dad's owl swung by the dormitory after you all were asleep."

Sirius raises his eyebrows—you'd think an owl tapping on the glass of the window would have woken everybody up—but Remus looks so stressed about this that he drops this line of questioning. "Hey, I'm sorry your mum is sick. Did she say what she's come down with?"

Remus shrugs. "I'm sure she'll be fine. She… gets sick with different things a lot, but it's never turned into anything too serious."

"Still, it's got to be some kind of serious if she wants you to come home."

"It's fine, okay? I'll be back tomorrow afternoon."

Sirius studies Remus's face for a moment—now that he thinks about it, Remus has been getting paler and a little greener every day since they met on Wednesday. Is it because he knew his mum was deteriorating—because he's been worried about her? Or is this just one more concern on top of Remus's own anxieties about starting classes at Hogwarts and moving away from home?

"What time are you leaving?"

"Maybe… around seven? Dad's supposed to pick me up from Hogsmeade. Mad—uh, Professor McGonagall is going to escort me over there."

"Hogsmeade?" whines Sirius. "You're so lucky. I've been hearing about Hogsmeade weekends ever since my cousin Bella started going here, and you're normally not allowed to go until third year. Um—not to be insensitive, I mean."

"It's okay. I'm not going to any of the shops or anything; I'm just going straight home with Dad."

"Right. Well… I hope your mum feels better soon."

"Thanks."

xx

Apart from telling James and Peter that he's going to be away for the night, Remus remains tight-lipped about his visit home right up until he ducks out of the common room at ten minutes to seven. It's weird, being in the dormitory that night without Remus—and surprising how quickly Sirius has gotten used to having Remus, James, and Peter's companionship all night every night. He feels an odd sense of loss chatting with Peter and James in the dormitory before bed without Remus there with them. Having the three of them to keep him company has kept Sirius's mind off of how much he misses Regulus—how concerned he is for what's happening to Regulus back at home—and maybe Sirius has been using his roommates to feel safe, too, in a way that he never did at home with Mum and Dad.

Remus gets back around three in the afternoon the next day, but Sirius doesn't see much of him: Remus barely says hullo to the blokes before going off to find Alice for Defense practice. Shortly afterward, Peter guilts James into helping him with Transfiguration some more, leaving Sirius unoccupied—so he makes a point of tracking down Marlene, Mary, and Emmeline in the common room. "Anyone for Exploding Snap?" he asks, pulling a deck out of his pocket and shuffling it expertly.

He keeps an eye on Mary as they play through four games—she's still not saying much, but she laughs every time one of the cards blows up, especially when Emmeline's sleeve catches fire and Sirius has to think fast to put it out with his schoolbag. Marlene seems to be rather protective over Mary; she keeps muttering a running stream of commentary to her to keep Mary smiling as they play, and when Sirius finally puts the deck away, Marlene tilts her whole body so she can lay her head on Mary's shoulder.

"So tell me about yourselves," Sirius says to the two of them, kicking his feet up on the coffee table. "I feel like I barely know you two yet."

"Um," says Marlene, "I'm a pureblood. My birthday is June 29th, so I just turned eleven this summer—I always spend birthdays with my Uncle Doc. He's more of a distant cousin, really, but I call him my uncle. Anyway, he's an Auror—that's what I want to be when I grow up, too. I wake up really early, so I'm definitely that party pooper who's asleep by ten every night, and… uh… I hate vegetables."

"You hate vegetables?" Sirius repeats, laughing.

"I hate vegetables. Lettuce is the worst. Nothing leafy should ever belong in the human body. I dunno; what else am I supposed to say? I'm not that interesting."

"Sure you are," he says, and Marlene grins at him.

"What's an Auror?" asks Mary, so quietly that Sirius almost misses it under the laughter. Sirius thinks it's the first time he's actually ever heard her speak.

"Aurors work for the Ministry of Magic," says Marlene. "They're basically Dark wizard catchers. What about you, Mare? What do you want to do after Hogwarts?"

"I don't know yet," Mary says. She tilts her own head so that it's resting a little against Marlene's. "I didn't even know magic was real until this year—I don't really know what jobs are out there."

"Mary's Muggle-born," Marlene informs him. Her voice takes on a bit of an edge, as if she's daring Sirius to say something disparaging about it, and can he blame her? "Her parents are greengrocers."

"Well, what did you like to do best in the Muggle world?" Emmeline prompts Mary. "Or—out of all the classes we've had so far, which ones did you like best?"

"Herbology was cool, I guess," says Mary. "I have my own garden in our backyard at home. And—I like animals. Are there any jobs you can do with animals and plants?"

"Sure there are," Emmeline says. "You could run an apothecary, if you like Herbology, or you could work for the Ministry—they have a whole office that creates habitats for magical beasts and helps keep them secret from the Muggles."

"That's good, because I think I'll just, like, stay in my lane. I'm not very good at any of the spells or potions we've done so far."

"None of us are any good at spells or potions yet," Sirius assures her. "Give it some time. I'm sure you'll do fine."

Marlene interjects, "What about you, Black? I don't know anything about you except that you're a Black, which… I mean, everyone knows the Blacks are a little…"

"'Toujours pur,'" Sirius mutters.

"What?" says Marlene.

"They call themselves 'always pure,'" he explains. "They're sort of obsessed with preserving the bloodline."

"But you're not like that, are you?"

Emmeline's the one who asked, but Sirius looks Mary right in the eye—bashful, timid Mary who's bad at spells and leans so much on Marlene—and he just sees a person, another human being. Dammit. He's going to have to reevaluate some things, isn't he?

"No," he says directly to Mary. "I'm not like that—or, at least, I don't want to be."

xx

When post arrives the next morning, Sirius has just about resigned himself to writing to Regulus again and asking directly what's up when his parents' handsome black owl, Aries, swoops overhead and drops a letter right in Sirius's black pudding. "That from your mum and dad?" James asks through a mouthful of sausage.

"No," says Sirius, recognizing the handwriting. "It's from my brother."

"Reg-something, right?"

"Regulus, yeah. Everybody in our family is named after astronomical stuff—Regulus is a star in the constellation Leo."

He barely hears James's reply as he tears the letter open and reads it hungrily:

Dearest brother,

What happened? You were just talking to Andy the morning you left about joining her in Slytherin, and now you tell us you've been Sorted into Gryffindor. Mum and Dad are flipping out—it's pretty bad over here. I'm okay, though. I'm staying mostly in my room, and Mum's mostly leaving me alone.

I know you've got to make the best of it now that you're stuck in there, but Sirius, you need to be careful. You know what Mum and Dad always say—the Mudbloods are going to crush you if you don't crush them first. If you were in Slytherin, you could stay away from all that and focus on the kind of people you can trust, but you're not, and I'm worried.

Regulus

Ouch. Regulus may say that they're leaving him alone, but if he's calling Sirius "dearest brother," that means he's trying too hard to be optimistic, and Regulus only does that when things with Mum are bad. For the first time, the surge of guilt Sirius feels over becoming a Gryffindor is directly related to Regulus—what he's got to be enduring at home as Sirius's proxy. Is he okay? Has he been harmed too badly? Is he dwelling on it? It's never good for Regulus when he dwells on things.

Sirius rereads the second paragraph, then rereads it again. It's strange: up until Wednesday, Sirius would have sworn that all Muggle-borns have it in for the purebloods, but Mary and Peter don't seem like they think of themselves as superior to Sirius—if anything, they seem like they're just trying to find their way and stay afloat, just like everybody else, like Sirius.

"What's he say?" asks James.

Sirius crumples up the letter and stuffs it in his pocket—he doesn't want James or anybody else reading any of what Regulus said. "Nothing much—just that our mum and dad are pretty freaked about me being a Gryffindor."

"I'll bet. How long did you say it's been since a Black has been Sorted into Gryffindor?"

Sirius snorts. "Probably a couple of centuries. I think I had a couple of great-aunts and -uncles who were in Ravenclaw, but everybody else has been Slytherin."

"At least it's not Hufflepuff—then they'd probably really take the mickey out of you."

"Yeah." Aries is still hopping around expectantly on top of the table, and Sirius strokes her feathers for a moment before murmuring, "Do you know where the Hogwarts Owlery is? If you wait for me up there, I can come up and send off a return letter tonight."

She hoots at him before taking flight again and soaring out one of the open windows. For a second, Sirius thinks she's heading back to Grimmauld Place, but then he realizes she'll probably go up to the Owlery from the outside.

He shakes his head to clear it and tries to tune into whatever it is Remus has said that James and Peter are laughing at. Sirius can deal with Regulus later—he's at Hogwarts now, and there's only so much he can do to help from here.

He just hopes that Mum isn't going to inflict too much damage on Regulus for this in the year before he comes to Hogwarts, too. Maybe Regulus will be a Gryffindor, too, and Sirius can introduce him to Peter and Mary—see what Regulus thinks about the whole Muggle-born business once he's actually met a few for himself.

Sirius can find a way to make this work. He can. There may be Muggle-born and half-blood Gryffindors in his life now, but Regulus is still one of the biggest parts of Sirius, and he'll reconcile the two if it kills him.

xx

After another full day of classes, at the end of dinner, he bids goodbye to the Gryffindors and walks up to the Slytherin table, searching for Andy. Whispers at the table follow him, and he rolls his eyes: do they really all have nothing better to do than to gossip about the first year Black who's been placed in Gryffindor? Finally, his eyes find her and Cissy, and he marches right up and taps Andy on the shoulder. "Hey."

"Hey, cousin. I'll see you all later, okay?" she says to Cissy and their friends, and then she gets up from the table and starts taking long strides out of the Great Hall.

Sirius's legs are a lot shorter, and he hastens to keep up. "Can we go up to the Owlery? I don't really remember how to get there, and Aries is up there—I'm supposed to write Regulus back tonight."

"Sure, no problem, but—how are you doing, Sirius? How is it in there?"

"It's good. It's fine. My housemates are cool. Two of them are Muggle-born, and they're not… I mean…"

"Told you," says Andy, smiling. "Have you heard from your family at all?"

"My mum isn't happy, and Regulus—actually, it's kind of funny: he's worried about me, but I'm worried about him. I think my mum might be taking it out on him."

"Yeah, I'm sorry about her. I know she's…"

"I know, but you don't have to feel guilty about it. I grew up with Walburga for a mother, but you grew up with Bella for a sister."

"Point taken," Andy laughs. "Are you making friends and everything? How are classes?"

"Classes are fine. I'm not much good at any of them yet, but I've only had two days of lessons so far. It's weird sleeping in a dormitory and hanging out in a crowded common room all the time, but I like the people."

Andy opens a random classroom door, sticks her head inside, and then, satisfied, beckons Sirius to follow her in. She plops down on top of the teacher's desk, crossing her legs, while he slouches against the wall with his hands behind his bum.

"What's it like, being in Gryffindor? Is everybody as snobby on the inside of your house as they are to the rest of us peasant folks?"

Sirius rolls his eyes fondly. "They're all pretty normal, actually. I like them better than my mum and dad's friends' kids who've come over to Grimmauld Place, anyway. My roommates are great—James Potter says we're already like brothers, now that we all live together—and the girls are cool, too. Emmeline Vance is really funny—I've worked with her in class a few times—and Marlene McKinnon and Alice Abbott are friendly, too."

"Like brothers, huh?"

"Yeah," he says, "but don't tell Regulus I told you that. He's got no reason to feel threatened, and I don't want to worry him unnecessarily. But hey—I wanted to ask you something."

"Shoot."

"When you first started dating your boyfriend…"

"Ted," she supplies.

"When you first started dating Ted, what about him was—why did you pick him? It's not like there are any other Blacks anywhere who give Muggle-borns a chance, and I doubt you've got any friends in Slytherin who do, either. So what made you change your mind?"

A smile plays at Andy's lips. "We met last year, when I was in sixth and he was in fifth—he's in Ravenclaw, you know, so we never had any reason to know each other until he became a prefect and I started seeing him at meetings. We got assigned to patrol the corridors in the evenings together and got to talking, and, well—you know what happened from there."

"And nobody else knows?"

"Nope. We fight about it sometimes—he thinks I'm ashamed of him—but it's not that. It's just—if Cissy finds out, she'll tell our mum and dad, and I don't know if I'm ready to have that conversation with them yet, you know? Of course you know—your mum is even worse than mine."

Sirius doesn't even want to imagine what Mum would have to say if he tried to bring a Muggle-born girl home for the holidays some year in the distant future. Then again, maybe having an outsider there with him would provide him and Regulus with some protection against her.

When they get up to the Owlery, he chooses his words to Regulus carefully, just in case Mum intercepts the letter:

Regulus,

I'm still your brother, and it's going to be okay. Nobody's crushing anybody, and I actually think you'd like it here. You'll see next year—I can't wait to have you here.

Keep your head down, and don't try to be clever.

Sirius