Chapter Eleven: I Don't Know How to Stop

"We're never going to find anything," Peter moans.

"Yes, we are."

"No, we're not, and even if we do, Moony's never going to let us go through with any of it."

"We are, and he is. You just leave Moony to me," Sirius sighs—they've been over this.

Peter shoves the book he's been poring over farther up the table and buries his head in his hands. "Maybe we should listen to him, you know? Did you hear the thing he said about half-human, half-animal mutants? I don't want to get stuck as a mutant, Sirius. I don't want it."

"Pete," says Sirius, pushing aside his own textbook and grabbing both of Peter's hands. Peter looks up at him, wild-eyed, and squeezes like his life depends on it. "I'm not going to let you turn into a mutant. I promise."

"But I'm no good at magic, Sirius, and anyway, we're literally twelve years old. How are we supposed to pull off something as complicated as—" he lowers his voice dramatically "—becoming Animagi?"

"First of all," says Sirius, grinning, "I'm going to be thirteen next month, which means one of us will be a bona fide teenager. No more minor leagues, my friend."

Peter rolls his eyes. "Not helping, Sirius."

"Second," Sirius forges on as if he hadn't heard him, "becoming Animagi is basically just fancy Transfiguration, isn't it? In case you haven't noticed, James and I are pretty good at Transfiguration so far, and Moony is pretty good at, well, everything. We'll help you."

"You're second years."

"I mean, at the rate we're going, we're going to be of age by the time we find anything in this whole bloody library that tells us how to do it, so I don't think that's going to be a concern," Sirius points out.

To be fair, it's not like they've been scouring the library night and day for information about becoming Animagi. Moony has been very vocal with his disapproval, which means that Sirius, Peter, and James are only really looking into it at times when Moony is otherwise occupied in the evenings somewhere other than the library, and that really doesn't happen all that often. Right now, he's practicing Charms with Alice in the common room, which has left James free to keep Mary, Marlene, and Emmeline distracted while Sirius and Peter go looking up Animagi again.

However, the fact alone that they haven't had much of an opportunity to look is just going to slow them down even more. Sirius doesn't foresee them getting much of anywhere unless or until Moony changes his mind and agrees to help them look—or even just lets them look without them having to do it by sneaking around all the time.

For his part, Sirius can't get the idea of helping Moony with his transformations this way out of his head. He feels so helpless every full moon, watching the clock count down the hours and wondering if this is going to be the month that Moony hurts himself so badly that he has to be put back in restraints, like his parents used to do to him before he came to Hogwarts. It could be worse: at least Moony never remembers his transformations afterward. But he says that, after he was human again, his limbs would hurt something awful everywhere the bindings touched him—and he says he doesn't want to put whatever part of his mind takes over when he's the wolf to have to endure the powerlessness of being restrained.

Sirius wonders sometimes what it's like to be inside Moony's head. The Moony he's mates with has no memories of being the wolf, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing happening in Moony's head on full moons—it just means, probably, that the specific part of Moony that Sirius knows goes dormant, and another, more primal part takes over. If he's being entirely honest with himself, Sirius has to admit that part of the appeal of becoming an Animagus is the idea of being able to shift into a form that can get to know the part of Moony that right now is inaccessible. There's a whole hidden part of his friend that Sirius can't touch, and he feels like he can't fully understand Moony without knowing the wolf side of him, too.

Of course, that's not to say that Sirius doesn't feel close to Moony already. The way he feels about Moony—well, to put it one way, there are pieces of Sirius's relationship with Moony that go just as deep as anything he's ever shared with Regulus. The same is true of his friendships with James and Peter, and frankly, it scares him—more than a little. Sirius had thought that having Regulus as a best friend—as a soulmate, even—was the natural, even inevitable result of a whole lifetime of shared trauma, but he, James, Moony, and Peter have never experienced any trauma together, and they've slid neatly into the part of Sirius's life that Regulus used to occupy. Hell, he hadn't even known any of them that long before it happened, and he still hasn't known any of them very long, when you think about it.

But it doesn't scare Sirius enough to make him want to stop. There's something addictive about having soulmates, and if you want to talk about powerlessness—

How can it hurt him when it feels so good? The only way this catches up to Sirius is if he stops being friends with them, right? And he already knows that's never going to happen—not while he has any say over it. If he knows they're always going to be in each other's lives, what possible harm could come from needing them to do the thing they're going to do anyway?

But then he remembers feeling the same way about Regulus—having unshakable faith that his brother would always be his best friend. If Sirius couldn't even keep his friendship alive with his own brother, how the hell does he know that he can do it for the rest of his life with people he's only known for the past year?

He thinks he knows at least one person who'd understand—so the next time it crosses his mind, he makes a point of asking Marlene as they're finishing up dinner, "Want to practice for Defense with me? We can go outside, if you want—the common room and the library both probably aren't great places to duel."

"Yes, please. You can help me with my Trip Jinxes—mine is a disaster."

So they head outside, finding themselves a spot in the grass a ways away from anybody else, and Sirius really does help her with her Trip Jinxes for a good half an hour before he brings up the reason he's really brought her here. "So, uh, I wanted to ask you something."

"Oh, so you've got an ulterior motive in bringing me out here?"

"Maybe," Sirius admits. "When Mary started spending time with the Hufflepuffs this year—I know you wanted that for her, but did you ever feel…?"

"Shafted?"

"Yeah."

"Kind of lonely?"

"Yeah."

"And you're bringing this up because…?"

He shrugs as nonchalantly as he can manage. "I'm a little worried I'm getting too reliant on the blokes. Just wanted to get your thoughts about—about dependency, I guess. I mean, do you still worry about needing her too much? If you don't, then how did you get yourself to stop?"

"Honestly? It's not that I'm not happy she's trying to get out of her shell, because I really, really am—but whenever she's not there, I feel sort of… aimless. Like all along, I was the one who needed her more, and now that she's not clinging to me twenty-four/seven, I don't know what to do with myself when she's not there. I fill up the time with other people—I talk to Alice and Em both a lot, and you and the other boys more lately, too—but Mary gave me a purpose: Mary gave me a direction, and it's like I don't have that anymore."

"Were you ever that way with anybody before Mary? I mean, did you have a best friend growing up? Because I feel like I just—transferred everything from Regulus onto the other boys, and it's making me wonder if I ever…"

"Had anything just for yourself? Yeah, I hear you." Marlene's kicking the toe of her right shoe repeatedly into the dirt, pulling up grass and weeds everywhere, and she's not looking at him. "It wasn't like that for me—I never had anybody like that growing up. I mean, I had siblings, but they're…"

Sirius waits patiently.

"I'm the oldest. Mike and Matt, my brothers, are best friends. Meredith is only six—I feel really protective of her, but she's not old enough for me to, like, confide in her about anything. Maggie is the closest in age to me—she'll be coming to Hogwarts next year—but Maggie's always been kind of a loner, kind of independent. Plus, I'm not really a… my siblings and I, we're not…" She looks like she's struggling with herself over something. "I've just always kind of felt like an outsider in my own family. Sure, I love them, and I know they love me, but—I don't really fit. I think I was desperate for that, if that makes sense? Like, I would watch them when they'd—they didn't mean to exclude me, but sometimes, they still kind of did. There was still this divide. And I'd watch Mike and Matt, and I'd want something like that for myself so bad, and I never thought I was going to get it…"

"Until you met Mary," Sirius finishes for her, nodding.

She looks up, finally, and her dark brown eyes are big and afraid. "Yeah. Until I met Mary. And then, suddenly, somebody needed me, and it was like—suddenly, the biggest problem in my life was gone. I had a best friend! I had someone who wanted me around every minute of every day, and I had someone to tell all my secrets to, and it was…"

Addictive, Sirius thinks again, but he doesn't say it: he's sure that doing so would come across presumptuous and rude. "Yeah," he says instead. "I just—I don't know how to be alone. I don't know how to stop. I don't think I'm going to have to stop, but if I did—I mean, would it really be so bad to just…"

"Give in?" supplies Marlene. "While away your whole life buried in other people? I mean, if they make you happy, why shouldn't you indulge in it?"

"Exactly! I don't—" Sirius starts to say, but Marlene adds—

"Well, I've been on the other side of it, and I'm telling you, the other shoe always drops—you're always going to be left with yourself at the end of some day or other, and when you are, it doesn't feel good. I think it's better to get yourself to a place where you can stand it when you have to—I just don't know how to get there, not yet. I'm a little worried that…"

She chuckles darkly, and Sirius raises his eyebrows.

"I'm a little worried what's going to happen the next time I feel this way about someone—when I'm older and it's romantic. If it's this bad with Mare, and I'm not even in love with her…"

He twists his lips. "If I figure it out—if I learn how to separate myself from other people—I'll let you know how to do it. We can help each other out, right?"

"Yeah. Yeah, that sounds nice."

"Look, I know it's not really any of my business, but…"

"That doesn't seem to stop anybody around here from voicing their opinions," Marlene points out, and Sirius laughs out loud.

"I just… from where I'm standing, Macdonald still really loves you, Marlene. You should hear the way she talks about you."

Marlene's cheeks tighten. "Really?"

"Really. She'd give up everybody else in her life if you asked her to."

"I mean," she says with a laugh that almost masks her worry, "that feels really good to hear, but that's kind of the problem, isn't it?"

"Point taken," says Sirius with a smile. "Come on, let's try it again—and maybe when we're done with Defenses, you can quiz me on Astronomy. I got a D on my last star chart."

"A D? Seriously? Isn't, like, everybody in your family named after stars and constellations?"

"Well, why do you think I've developed such a mental block about it? It's a defense mechanism," Sirius says, and Marlene's still laughing by the time he hits her with another Trip Jinx.

xx

Now that the shock of Regulus basically telling Sirius up front that he doesn't love him anymore has worn off a little—and maybe even as a way to deal with that shock—Sirius is throwing himself headfirst into daydreaming about winter break at Andy and Ted's house. He doesn't actually know much about Ted, other than that he's Muggle-born, that he was in Ravenclaw, and that Andy obviously think she's a good bloke. In fact, Sirius has never even had a conversation with the man—after all, the whole year they were at Hogwarts together, his relationship with Andy was kept completely secret from the rest of the student body, so it's not like Sirius ever saw the two of them together in public.

But it gives Sirius a kind of thrill to have a Muggle-born wizard in the family, even if—especially if—it's a branch of the family that's been excommunicated from the rest of the Blacks. If Andy can do it—abandon their family and still be happy, still belong with somebody—maybe Sirius can do it someday, too.

It's not like he's never thought about it before. How many times when he was living at home did Sirius fantasize about running away? There are really just two big things stopping him: he's always worried what would happen to Regulus if he left home, and it's not like Sirius would have anywhere to go if he left home. However, neither of those reasons would be such a concern if he waited to get himself burned off the tapestry until later, when he and Regulus had both graduated and were living on their own.

His anticipation only grows when Andy's next letter arrives—because in it, she reveals that she's pregnant. "I'm going to be an uncle," he tells the other second years at the breakfast table with a big, goofy grin on his face as he folds the letter up.

"Dude, what are you talking about? Your brother is, like, eleven years old."

Sirius rolls his eyes. "Okay, so technically, I'm going to be a first cousin once removed, but same difference. Andy's pregnant—she and Ted are having a baby. She says she's due in April."

"That's so exciting!" Mary squeals. "Are you going to get to see the baby, like, over the summer?" She seems to realize her mistake right away because she follows this up with a quick, "Oops—I forgot. There's probably no way your parents will…?"

"Allow me to see her, yeah. It's okay—maybe I can go back next Christmas, when the baby is a little older."

"Unless…" says James. Sirius raises an eyebrow. "I mean, you could always tell your parents you're at my house and just… go over there instead. Mum and Dad are cool—they'd cover for you, if your parents ever asked them about it."

"Are you sure? Because—"

Sirius means to ask whether James is sure that he's comfortable helping Sirius lie to his parents, but James obviously interprets this the wrong way, Sirius realizes a second later. "Yeah. I know my mum was originally a Black, and she hasn't been excommunicated or anything, but she… knows what your parents are like—" Sirius knows James is thinking about the first time the Potters ever met Sirius, when he stumbled out of their fireplace having just been Cruciated repeatedly by Mum "—and she doesn't care so much about staying on good terms with the Blacks that she'd rat you out. Sure, I mean, she and Dad used to be kind of purist when they first got married and had me, but they figured out pretty quick that they didn't want to be the kind of people who believe in all that stuff."

This is new information to Sirius—James has only ever spoken highly of his parents, and he's never talked about them in the context of them being anything but blood traitors. "Your parents were purists, too?"

"Yeah, haven't your parents ever talked to you about them? I thought they, like, went through the entire Black family lineage on a weekly basis."

"Mum is more concerned with threatening to burn us off the way she did Cedrella," scoffs Sirius.

"Cedrella?" asks Emmeline.

"Yeah—she married a Weasley."

Before Peter or Mary can ask, Marlene explains, "The Weasleys are, like, the ultimate worst blood traitors as far as people like Sirius's parents are concerned."

Ignoring this, Sirius asks, "If your parents have gotten away from purity culture, then why hasn't Mum burned them off the tapestry yet? I mean, she's called the Potters blood traitors before."

"Probably because she doesn't know how out of the fold they are," says James, shrugging. "Everybody loves Mum and Dad, and they're still on good terms with a bunch of the pureblood families. They didn't go out of their way to make any pureblood enemies or anything. They just sort of… stopped going to galas and things."

"Well, I for one am glad that your cousin is going to raise her son or daughter away from all that," says Emmeline firmly. "Are you looking forward to meeting Ted?"

"Yeah, actually, I am. It'll be a little awkward staying with him when I don't already know him, but Andy swears he's friendly and is happy to have me over. Maybe, if I asked her, she'd be okay with some of you lot coming to visit once or twice, if any of you wanted? I'll want to mostly be spending time with her, obviously, but not everybody met her more than in passing last year, and I bet you'd all really like her."

A chorus of answers ring out at the table—Alice and Mary don't think they'll be able to get away at all over the break, but James, Moony, Peter, Emmeline, and Marlene are all down. "Hey, after she has the baby, can the four of us babysit on summer vacations?" asks James with a huge grin.

"I will definitely run that idea by her," Sirius snickers.

Thinking about Andy's new family only gives Sirius a slight twinge of jealousy. Of course he wishes he could live with her outside of Hogwarts, and he knows that Ted and the baby are the only things really standing in the way of that—but if Sirius can't get what he wants, at least he can appreciate that Andy is trying to keep him in her life in a meaningful way.