Chapter Six: Something That's Not Allowed

- five -

"You really don't say much when McKinnon isn't around, do you?" Sirius asks Mary.

It's about half an hour into their first swap day, and Sirius can see why Marlene is worried Mary isn't branching out enough—she's barely made a peep the whole time she and Sirius have been out together. It definitely makes it hard to talk to the girl, but Sirius wouldn't say he exactly regrets it. They're going to be living together for the next seven years, after all, and it's already weird enough being on relatively bad terms with Evans: he doesn't want to do it with any more of the first year Gryffindors than he has to.

"Sorry," Mary mutters.

"No, don't apologize, just—let's do something." They'd gone for a walk around the grounds to start out with, but considering how one-sided their conversation has been so far, Sirius is starting to reckon they'll be better off with some kind of structured activity. "Why don't we… play a game or something? Like, we could play twenty questions. I'll ask you twenty questions about you, and then you can ask me twenty questions about me."

"That's… not how twenty questions works," says Mary, but she smiles a little.

"Isn't it? I guess that makes sense—it's a Muggle game, and my family is—well, they don't really do anything remotely Muggle-like. But that doesn't mean we can't play it this way."

Mary thinks about it for a second, then says, "Yeah, okay. You go first."

"All right, um—what do you think of the wizarding world so far? It must have been a really big change, finding out that all this exists."

"It… I don't know. A lot happened this year. My parents got divorced, too, right before I came here, so I kind of—lost my dad at the same time as I found out magic is real, and it's made it hard to enjoy it."

"I'm sorry."

"Thanks. It's okay. I just—maybe it would be different if I were any good at school, but I'm not. I'm at the bottom of the class already, I bet."

"Yeah, but, I mean—you're Muggle-born, so it's probably harder for you than it is for anybody else, you know? I wouldn't beat yourself up over that."

"It's not hard for all Muggle-borns," she says with a little bit of an edge to her voice. "Lily's really good at—well, almost everything, and she's Muggle-born, too."

Whoops—there he goes again. "Yeah, I guess that's true. Sorry—that was probably offensive of me."

"It's okay."

"I'm still learning. My parents are really…"

"Yeah, I know."

"Anyway," says Sirius, hasty to move on, "it's your turn."

"Okay. Um—are you and Lupin really dating?"

Sirius smirks. "No, we're not. Neither are James and Peter."

"Okay, then are you and Emmeline dating?"

"It's my turn," he points out, and she looks away with a small smile on her face.

- four -

"You seem distracted," says Alice on their second swap day the following weekend, when it's her turn to hang out with Sirius. "Is everything all right?"

She has a point: Sirius has been feeling off ever since he got Regulus's letter at breakfast this morning. Most of the letter was the usual stuff—he misses Sirius, he's bored, he hopes Sirius is doing okay surrounded by all the Muggle-borns—but in the last paragraph before his signature, he mentioned that Mum has been particularly on the warpath with the holidays coming up and that Sirius might want to stay at Hogwarts over the holiday.

He's got time to figure it out—Christmas break is a month away—but in a way, the fact that Regulus is bringing it up now makes Sirius worry that things are worse at home than he had feared. He's gotten the impression from Regulus's letters that his brother has been dying to see him, and if he's made up his mind this far in advance that he ought to stay out of Mum's way—if Regulus is so concerned for Sirius's safety that he'd give up his only chance to see his brother in four months without even feeling conflicted enough to wait to bring it up—

"Uh, yeah, things are fine. I just—need to talk to my cousin."

"Narcissa?"

"What? No, no way. Andy—Andromeda. There's some stuff going on at home with my brother, and—she can probably help me figure it out."

"I'm good here, if you want to track her down and come find me when you're done," Alice offers.

But Sirius shakes his head, a smile tugging at his lips. "Do you want to come with me and meet her? She's cool, I promise."

He doesn't really have any idea where Andy spends her Saturday mornings, but his best guess is the Slytherin common room, so he leads the way as he and Alice set off toward the dungeons. "It's about my mum," Sirius explains on the way. "She's a little…"

"Yeah, I know your family are all purists," Alice says. "It's okay. Mine probably are, too, a little."

He shakes his head. "That's not it. She's not just a purist. She's…"

But now that he's trying to find words to describe Mum, he has no idea how to describe her. Part of the problem, of course, is that Sirius's coping mechanism is to completely block out all his specific memories of Mum—to pretend he's somewhere else, when she's doing what she does, and just not think about her the rest of the time.

Just for a second, he closes his eyes and allows himself to remember—red skin; racing heart; the way he'd lock himself into his bedroom by blockading the door with every piece of furniture he owned, at least until Mum would use Reducto to blast down the door and send it all splintering out of her way. He wonders if Regulus still hides underneath Sirius's bed when he's scared, even though Sirius isn't there anymore to huddle up with him in the place where Regulus always felt the safest. He wonders how many times a week Mum hits Regulus—or worse. If it's anything like it was when Sirius was living at home, it happens at least four times a day.

"She's a nutter," Sirius concludes, "and she's—not very nice to me or my brother." It's probably the biggest understatement he's ever made, but for now, it'll have to do.

When they reach the corridor that houses the Slytherin common room, Sirius stops before a blank wall and stands there blankly. "Where, um—where is it?" Alice asks curiously.

"It's right in front of us—behind the wall—but I don't know the password, and even if I did, I wouldn't want to go in there. I guess we're going to have to wait for somebody to show up and check for her in there for us."

"No worries," says Alice, and she leans back against the opposite wall and drops down onto her haunches.

Sirius joins her on the hard floor. "I'm sorry to drag you along with me. I should have just waited until after dinner, when swap day was over."

Alice smiles. "It's okay, really. This is your friendly cousin, right? It should be nice to meet her—and I appreciate you being willing to talk about family stuff in front of me. If any of it is stuff you don't want people to know, I promise I won't tell."

"Thanks, Abbott. While we're waiting, do you want to tell me about your family? I mean, everybody knows that mine is nuts, but I feel like I don't know anything about where you came from yet."

"Yeah—so I'm an only child. I love my parents, but I wouldn't say I'm very close to either of them? They always… I guess they put a lot of pressure on me. They're expecting a lot from me, now that I'm here—me becoming an Auror was their idea—and I appreciate that they believe in me, but I got lonely sometimes, you know? I didn't really have any friends growing up—I just stayed home and studied reading and writing and maths with Mum all the time. We never really did anything as a family, just the three of us, either. Sometimes they'd have friends over, but their friends never brought other kids, and I wasn't supposed to speak unless spoken to."

Sirius is spared trying to think of a considerate and sympathetic response by the approaching footsteps of a pair of teenage girls at the end of the corridor. "Hey!" Sirius calls to them. They don't seem to realize he's addressing them, so he says again, "Oi!"

They look at each other and giggle. "Yes?" says the taller girl.

"Can you check and see if Andromeda Black is in your common room? I need to talk to her."

"Sure," she says with another giggle. When the girls come up to them, the shorter one whispers the password so that Sirius and Alice can't hear, and they disappear inside the room. A couple of minutes later, Andy emerges, wearing her schoolbag slung over her shoulder and a frown on her face.

"Sirius? Is everything all right?"

"I need to talk to you about my mum," says Sirius breathlessly. "This is my friend Alice Abbott, by the way. Abbott, this is Andy."

"Pleasure to meet you," says Andy warmly to Alice. "Come on, let's go for a walk."

They head back out the way they came, Sirius and Alice hurrying to keep up with Andy's brisk pace. "I heard from Regulus this morning—he reckons I should stay here over the break."

"That bad, huh?"

"I dunno. He's not telling me any details, but—that doesn't surprise me. We never really talk about… what our mum is like. We just—dealt with her together, when I was still living at home—we knew what each other was going through because we were both going through the same thing. But now… I'm just worried about him. I mean, should I do it? Should I stay here?"

Andy considers this. Sirius glances at Alice—she's watching him closely, but she bows her head the second he makes eye contact. Finally, Andy says, "Well, the stuff your mum has been melting down about—does any of it have to do with you being a Gryffindor and consorting with 'Mudbloods?'"

Sirius closes his eyes hard for a second. "Yeah. Not all of it, of course, but—I think some of it does."

"Then I'd say you'd better go back there," says Andy matter-of-factly. "You're going to have to face it at some point or another—you'll be living there over the summer, after all—and the longer you put it up, the more rage she's going to build up. I hate to say it—I know how this is going to sound—but it would probably be good for Regulus to take the brunt of it off of him for a couple of weeks, too."

"I just don't want him to pay for my—I don't want to call it a 'mistake,' but when I think about Regulus, that's what it feels like," he admits.

Bracingly, Andy claps him on the shoulder. "Tell him you're going back for the holiday. Tell him you'll be there for him."

"Can't I just stay with you from now on?" asks Sirius, and he hopes his voice doesn't sound too much like he's begging, because he definitely feels like he's begging. "Can't we both just—? I mean, you're graduating this year. You'll have your own place by the summer."

It's Andy's turn to pointedly look away. "I know that seems like the solution, but it's not. If your parents take me to the Ministry for a custody battle, I'll lose, and then it'll be even worse for you when you have to go back there."

"But how do you know you would lose? If we tell them she's… what she's…"

"Sirius," she reminds him, "your parents are both purebloods, and my… I'm going to be…"

As she stammers, Sirius realizes what she's trying to tell him, without coming right out and saying it in front of Alice: Andy may be a pureblood, but if she marries Ted Tonks, she'll have a Muggle-born living in her household, and the Ministry will give preferential treatment to Sirius's parents. He thinks about this for a second and then realizes with horror, "Andy, you can't. You can't. If you get excommunicated—what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to see you then?"

"We'll figure it out, okay? I'll still be in your life somehow. I promise. Now, Abbott—Sirius tells me you're beating him in every class?"

- three -

Apart from Emmeline, Marlene is hands down the easiest of the girls to talk to. When it's Sirius's day with her, there aren't any awkward pauses like there were with Mary or with Alice: Marlene keeps up a constant stream of chatter about her younger siblings (all five of them), her performance in her classes (all seven of those), and her worries about Mary. "I just want her to settle in and be happy here," she sighs now. "She's starting to warm up a little, at least to the other girls—and she told me she's told you and Remus about her parents getting divorced, which is really good. I think she needs people to hear that. She's trying—I know she's trying. But I don't want her to be lonely, you know? I think she gets lonely a lot, even with me around. I mean, I have other friends—I want her to feel like it's okay for me not to be with her every second of every day, like she's got a whole support network, too."

"McKinnon?"

"Yeah?"

It's the first word he's managed to get in edgewise in about three minutes, which sounds like a short amount of time but really, really isn't. "You're doing great, okay?" he assures her. "You're a really good friend to her—I can tell. And I'm sure she doesn't resent you for having other friends. It wouldn't be good for either of you not to have any other friends besides each other."

"I know—and I'm not trying to make it sound like she's dragging me down or annoying me," she adds hastily. "She's not. She's really not. I just want…"

"It'll get easier for her. She just needs time, I bet, and…" He doesn't know how to say this without sounding like a jackass, but he wants her to hear it, even if it comes out wrong, so he adds, "You don't have to—I just mean it's not your job to… to be her mum. You know? You can take care of yourself, too—like, it's okay to focus on yourself some of the time. Most of the time, even."

Marlene shrugs. "I know that. It's not like she's trying to put me in that role, but—"

"Yeah, but just because she's not making you do it doesn't mean you're not…"

She folds her hands together in front of her and looks down at them. "I mean—I know it's me. I know that. It feels good to be close to somebody, to be needed, and I'm sure I'm—I'm trying to encourage her to have other friends, and I'm trying to have other friends, too, but it's easy to… get lost in somebody else. Does that make any sense? Before Mary, I've never had a best friend before, and—I like having a best friend. I like it so much that I'm starting to feel like I don't know who I am outside of that."

Honestly, does he know how that feels?—can he relate to Marlene in any way about this topic? He can't—not at this point in his life, anyway. Sure, a lot of the ways Sirius thinks about himself are in relation to other people, but he's never felt like he's not his own person outside of Regulus, and he doesn't feel now like he's not his own person outside of Peter or Moony or James.

Well—maybe that's not entirely accurate. He doesn't feel like he doesn't know himself outside of any one person, sure. But are there days, increasingly often, that he just—drowns in the blokes. He can't even remember the last time he did anything without someone, usually one of the three of them, there with him.

So he admits, "I know—I mean, I kind of know what you mean. I think it's just a weird time because we're all still getting used to being at Hogwarts. All the relationships that used to be important to us are just on the sidelines now, and we're spending all this time with new people in new dynamics that we're still getting used to, and we're immersed in it all the time. At least for me, that makes it easy to… I don't know. Lose perspective about what life was like before I came here. A few months ago, I was…"

A few months ago, Sirius was a purist dick, and he knows it. Hell, he probably still is a purist dick, because when he thinks about what he's become—how easily he's compromised his morals just to fit in with the half-bloods and Muggle-borns around him—sometimes, he feels a little sick.

- two -

"I know this day is supposed to be all about getting to know each other," Emmeline tells him, "but I feel like I already know you pretty well, and I kind of just want to cheat and do—something fun. Something that's not allowed."

He knows what she means. If you asked him, Sirius could tell you all about Emmeline's relationships with her parents and older sister, her favorite and least favorite subjects, what she thinks about pureblood culture, and all of the rude but hilarious comments she's made in the last three months about everyone from Severus Snape to Professor Binns. "The boys and I found a passageway last weekend that goes all the way from here to Hogsmeade," he tells her. "Want to sneak into Honeydukes and stuff our faces with Ice Mice?"

"That sounds perfect," she agrees, and when she smiles at him, he thinks he could survive winter break with Mum and Dad if only he had this girl and her smile to get him through each day of it.

- one -

When he hears it, his first thought is, well, shit: now he's going to get held up before he can go back to the blokes. The full moon was two nights ago, and Sirius has been feeling extra protective over Remus ever since he left for the Whomping Willow, even now that he's back and all healed up with color back in his cheeks. But Sirius knows what it's like to cry so hard it seems like it'll never stop, to feel like your whole life is as worthless and miserable as you are—knows it intimately from, oh, just about four times a day every day with Mum back before Hogwarts—so he steels himself and pushes open the door to the girls' loo.

He checks for feet first: there's just one stall that's occupied. He grits his teeth and knocks on the door. "Um… I'm sorry if I'm way out of line here, but are you all right?"

"Go away," comes Lily Evans's shaky voice. The sobbing stops, replaced by a hopeless sort of whimpering that, honestly, worries Sirius more than the outright crying did.

"I'm coming in. Are you decent?"

"I said, go away!"

"I'm taking that as a yes," he says, taking out his wand and aiming it at the lock. "Alohamora."

The door of the stall swings open. Evans is sitting on the toilet—fully clothed, thank god—with a very damp handkerchief in her hands. Her face is all blotchy, and her eyes are puffy, and quite frankly, Sirius doesn't think he's ever seen her look more human—or more relatable. "Leave me alone," she tells him in a slightly steadier voice.

"I can't do that. Either we can talk about it, or I can sit here with you until you calm down, but I'm not leaving."

"Black—"

"I'm not kidding, Evans. I'm not leaving you alone like this."

He wants to ask her if this is about her having no friends in Gryffindor—if this is because she's lonely with only Snape for company—but he doesn't know how to say that without sounding like a jackass, either, and he suspects that Evans won't be as forgiving as Marlene was. So he tries framing it another way: "If… if you want in, it's not too late. All you have to do is—"

"Abandon my best friend?" She swipes at the wet patches under her eyes, glancing up at the ceiling as she does so. "I don't think so."

"Just so you know, nobody hates you. I know I don't hate you."

Evans gives a choked laugh. "I hate how you treat Sev, and I hate how full of yourself you are, and I hate feeling like I'm surrounded by you lot every waking moment—but I don't hate you, either. Mostly, I just wish you'd leave us both alone."

"Well, I'm not leaving this bathroom until I know you're okay, so leaving you alone is going to have to wait."

They sit there in near-silence broken only by Evans's sniffles for about ten minutes. Neither of them says anything more, but it's just like he felt sharing a cot in the Hospital Wing with Moony: right now, he doesn't need words to feel like maybe this girl can be, if not a friend, then at least someone whose well-being Sirius cares about from a distance—someone human.

They don't talk about it afterward. In fact, Evans acts so blatantly normal, dodging everybody to sit alone in Gryffindor-only classes and only speaking to them if it's to stick up for Snape, that Sirius would start to think he'd imagined the whole thing—except on Wednesday, he catches her staring at him in Charms, and when he catches her eye, she gives him a rare, sad sort of smile before she quickly looks away.