Chapter Twelve: If You Want to Talk About Sympathy

This year, Sirius's birthday falls on the same night as the full moon. He's not looking forward to it, and not just because he knows he's going to be worried about Moony: it reminds him too much of spending it at home with Regulus, of counting down the hours until it's over and praying he can go just one birthday without Mum tanning his hide over something. Last year, he didn't even bother telling anybody when his birthday came around—the boys, at least, have found out since then, but he thinks they know better than to make a point of trying to celebrate it.

So it surprises him when he wakes up that day to find a neatly wrapped present at the foot of his bed. "Is this from—?" he asks the boys, but they just shake their heads.

There's a card on top, and he opens that first:

Sirius,

James says you don't like acknowledging your birthday, but I know I'd feel awfully lonely if everybody forgot about mine, so I'm acknowledging it. Thirteen is a big year, you party pooper! You're an old fart now. Before you know it, you'll be Apparating everywhere and guzzling Firewhiskey and hobbling around in your walker—well, okay, maybe you have a while before that last one happens.

lots of love,

from your friend,

Emmeline

He stares down at it for a minute before Peter rips him out of his reverie by asking, "Who's it from?"

Sirius rips his eyes away from the place where she signed her love. "Em," he says, trying to keep his voice steady. "She says she already knows I don't like celebrating my birthday and just doesn't care."

At breakfast, he tries to tell her not to bother in the future, but Emmeline won't hear of it. "You have to do something for yourself," she insists. "Come on. You only get one day out of the whole year that's all about you."

"I don't mind having a day for myself—I just don't want that day to be November twentieth."

"Fine. We'll do your half-birthday. You don't have anything against—" she quickly counts on her fingers "—May twentieth, do you?" Sirius shakes his head. "Good. My actual birthday is May seventeenth—we can have a double celebration the weekend of."

"Yeah, okay," he says, neglecting to mention the flush of pleasure that this idea gives him. "Oh, and thanks for the Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans. How did you know I was running low?"

"I didn't," she smirks, "but with the way you're constantly popping them in the common room, I figured you'd always appreciate having somebody replenish your stock."

He doesn't tell anybody, but he carries her letter around in his pocket all day, pulling it out and tracing his eyes over her untidy handwriting every time he ducks into a bathroom stall. He's thirteen now, and Emmeline will be, too, soon: that means they're old enough to start thinking about things like dating, aren't they? If, after her birthday this year, he asked her out, would she say yes? Does he even want to find out?

The truth is, as flustered as thinking about Emmeline sometimes makes him feel, he's really not in a rush to find out what it would be like to have Em be his girlfriend. Maybe she's not interested in him that way, but it's not like she's shown any interest in anybody else, either: they've got all the time in the world to explore that stuff later, when Sirius hopefully starts figuring out how to stand on his own two feet enough that he won't become dependent on her the way he feels himself depending on Moony, James, and Peter.

In the meantime, if all he can get is a letter with her love—he's not going to pass that up, and he might even allow himself some long, precious moments imagining what she'd taste like if he kissed her, but he's perfectly happy to relegate that kind of relationship with Em to his daydreams. The boys have long since stopped teasing Sirius about having a crush on her, for which he's grateful: he doesn't need anybody putting that kind of pressure on their relationship when he's not ready to do anything about it, not yet.

As is usual on the nights of full moons, Sirius, James, and Peter stay up way too late without Moony there to keep them in check, and Sirius has to drag himself out of bed the next morning. Now that it's late November, sunrise doesn't happen until around eight o'clock in the morning, which means that Moony doesn't get back to the castle with Madam Pomfrey until about twenty minutes before classes start. The three of them grab a quick breakfast, then drop by the Hospital Wing before Transfiguration is scheduled to start.

Immediately, Sirius can tell something is wrong. The only bed occupied in the wing has got its curtains drawn—Madam Pomfrey only ever draws the curtains on Moony's cot if he's really, really hurt. So unless that isn't Moony in there, and he and Pomfrey haven't returned yet—

But then Pomfrey comes out of the back room, and Sirius's stomach sinks. "Can we see him?" he asks before she has a chance to get a single word out. "How bad is it?"

Madam Pomfrey starts to tell him off, but then they hear Moony's voice from behind the curtains: "It's okay. They can come in."

Sirius suspects Moony might be in too much pain to sleep. He looks fine—there aren't any visible gashes or new scars anywhere, at least—but he keeps shivering and rubbing at his arms and wrists. "What happened? Are you okay?" Peter says immediately as they crowd around the bed.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I shouldn't be complaining. At least I'm not hurt like I was last month, right?" says Moony, one corner of his mouth quirking up.

Sirius thinks back to last month—he'd had more and deeper gashes than usual for Madam Pomfrey to heal. "But if you weren't scratching yourself," he says slowly, "then what—?"

Moony blinks at him. James is the first to put it together: "She put you in restraints this month, didn't she? Because last month was so bad?"

"I didn't want her to," Moony whispers, "but she was worried. It's okay, really. I'm just—"

He winces when Sirius climbs into bed with him, but when Sirius apologizes and immediately starts to get back up, Moony says quickly, "No—stay."

"Are you sure? I don't want to hurt—"

"Please. Getting to see the three of you the next morning is the only good part of this. You and me getting to…"

Sirius doesn't make him finish the sentence—he's pretty sure he knows what Moony is thinking, and if it were him, he definitely wouldn't want to have to say it out loud. He climbs back into bed, getting himself situated on top of the sheets covering Moony. "Is it mostly your arms and legs that hurt? I can try and rub some blood flow back into them, if you want."

"That sounds nice," says Moony, his eyes fluttering closed.

Sirius takes his time massaging circles into Moony's limbs; he quickly realizes that doing so through the sheets is irritating Moony's skin, so he crawls underneath the sheets with him so that he can press his own flesh right up against Moony's. "Why didn't you tell us you were going back into restraints?" asks James, who's sitting with Peter at the foot of the bed.

"Didn't want to worry you lot," Moony sighs.

They only have a few more minutes before they have to get to Transfiguration, and by the time Sirius stops his rubbing motion and starts to sidle out of the cot, Moony seems to be a little closer to sleep. "You have to let us help you," Sirius tells him, "so that this stops happening to you. I hate seeing… I…"

Moony reopens his eyes with effort. At first, Sirius thinks he's going to protest, but after a moment, he just mumbles, "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay. You can help. I'll help you look in the library."

Sirius feels like he can breathe a little easier knowing that Moony's no longer actively fighting them against their plan to research how to become Animagi—against their plan to help him. It's not that he's happy about what prompted Moony to give in—Sirius hates seeing him so powerless—but if it had to happen, then at least he knows some good is going to come out of it.

He's so, so tempted to skive off Transfiguration and maybe even Herbology afterward so that he can stay in here with Moony and sleep, but he knows Madam Pomfrey would never allow it, so he just kisses the top of Moony's head and says, "We'll help catch you up in classes tonight."

"Thanks," Moony murmurs. By the time Sirius, Peter, and James are leaving the Hospital Wing, they can hear Moony starting to snore.

With Moony's cooperation, they start spending more time in the library, peering through dusty textbooks for any hint of the spell that will allow them to become Animagi. They devote so much time to it over the next few weeks that the girls actually start to get suspicious. Alice, for one, spends a lot of time in the library herself, and Sirius wishes she would just shut up when she keeps nosing around to try and find out what, exactly, it is that they're looking for in titles like A Guide to Advanced Transfiguration and An Anthology of Eighteenth Century Charms.

Meanwhile, Mary hazards a guess that's so close to the truth Sirius feels a little uncomfortable going along with it, even though she's just provided him with a ready-made excuse to fall back on. "It's about Lupe, isn't it?" she asks during the last weekend of term. She's helping him with his Herbology essay in the library, where she'd found him buried neck-deep in books and offered to distract him from his search with some schoolwork that he really ought to have been doing all along.

"What's about Lupe?" asks Sirius idly, scanning his eyes over the last paragraph Mary's edited for him.

"What the four of you keep doing in here." Horrified, Sirius looks up—but Mary doesn't look terribly accusatory. "Like, you were sneaking around him at first—he didn't actually start joining you lot down here until after the last time he was hospitalized. You were trying to hide it from him, weren't you?"

"Hide what?"

"You're trying to find a cure for—whatever it is he's sick with. Aren't you? And, like, you didn't want him to know, but he knows now, and he's started helping you look."

It's so perfect, and Sirius is so short on other plausible excuses, that the only reasonable reaction is to go along with it—even though doing so makes him really, really nervous. "We're probably looking for no reason," he says hesitantly. "If the cure for what he's got were so simple you could find it in any old library book, Madam Pomfrey would have patched him up good as new by now."

"And you're not going to tell us what he's sick with?"

"He doesn't like to talk about it," Sirius mutters. "We only really figured it out on accident—but he doesn't want anybody else to see him differently if they find out what's wrong."

"Well, I think you're doing a great thing by trying to help him, even if he's not letting you let other people help you," says Mary. "He's lucky to have mates like the three of you."

"Thanks," says Sirius, feeling suddenly hot in the face. "Hey, are you sure you can't get away from your mum for a day over the break? My cousin says anybody who wants is welcome to come and see us on Boxing Day. It'd be really nice to see you there."

She shrugs. "Ever since my parents got divorced, Mum's been really overprotective. I can ask, but I really don't think she's going to go for it. She worries enough about me with me being a—with me being away at boarding school most of the year and all."

Sirius wonders what it's like to have overprotective parents. The most worrying his own parents do about him is to freak out about all the Mudblood influences he's facing here in Gryffindor—but they're not so concerned about sheltering him from them as they are about punishing him anytime they think he's paying too much credence to them.

Regulus still isn't talking to him, but he apparently hasn't said anything to Mum and Dad to spill the beans that Sirius is actually visiting Andy and Ted over break instead of staying at Hogwarts, because they haven't said anything in any of their letters to indicate that they don't believe him. He doesn't actually know whether or not Regulus is going home for the holidays: Mum and Dad haven't mentioned Regulus's plans, and Sirius isn't exactly on speaking terms with Regulus to find out directly. He hopes Regulus is staying at Hogwarts or maybe going to a friend's house, even if the friend is one of the godawful Slytherins in the gang Regulus always hangs around with. Mostly, he just doesn't want Regulus to be stuck alone with their parents in Grimmauld Place—he wouldn't wish that on anybody, especially not the brother who at one time, at least, used to be Sirius's best friend.

They quite literally bump into each other a couple days before the end of term. Sirius is running late for Potions, but when Regulus flashes him a half-smile, Sirius decides he doesn't care how many points Slughorn docks him if he's late—it'll be worth it if he can get anything close to a real conversation out of his brother. "How have you been? You're not going home for Christmas, are you?"

"I—" Regulus looks behind him at his gaggle of friends, who are folding their arms and staring Sirius down like they're readying themselves for battle.

"Relax, fellas," says Sirius, holding up his hands. "We're all good here. I just want to talk to my brother for a minute—find out what he's doing for break, so I know what to say to our parents about it."

"I'm—yeah, I'm going home," Regulus whispers.

Sirius's face falls. "You idiot. What are you doing that for? Why would you put yourself through that when you could—?"

"What? Go with you to the Mudblood's house? Stay here alone? At least, this way, I know Mum and Dad won't be abandoned by both of their children for the holidays."

"Since when do you care about taking care of Mum and Dad?" says Sirius. He's a little mad, but mostly, he's just confused—frustrated. "It's not like they've ever given a shit about taking care of you."

"They're not bad people, Sirius. They still love us, and—"

"Do they? Do they really? Because when you love somebody, you don't treat them like garbage. People who love their kids don't use the Cruciatus Curse on them just for forgetting to wash their hands before they eat."

"Try to understand," Regulus breathes. "All last year, they couldn't get over how badly they'd failed you, you—turning out the way you did here at Hogwarts and all. You may be able to hate them, but if they think I hate them, too—"

"Don't you? Why shouldn't you, after the way they've treated you—the way they've treated both of us? Regulus, you're terrified of them—"

"Maybe I shouldn't be," he snaps, folding his own arms now. "Maybe seeing you through their eyes all of last year has taught me a little sympathy."

"If you want to talk about sympathy—"

Turning away, Regulus mutters, "I have to go. McGonagall's going to have my head if I'm late for Transfiguration again."

"What happened to you? What did I do to you that was so bad as to make you hate me this much?"

With Regulus bent over his bag like he is, Sirius can't see his face when Regulus says, "I don't hate you."

"But you don't love me anymore, either. You said so yourself."

"It's complicated."

"Then un-complicate it. Regulus—Regulus!"

But in an instant, his brother is gone, the shoulders of his little Slytherin friends blocking him from Sirius's view as they scurry down the corridor and out of sight. Cursing, Sirius slings his bag back over his shoulder and hurries off toward the dungeons.

When he gets there, Slughorn docks him five points but doesn't seem particularly pissed about it—he still takes the time to stop by his and Em's cauldron and wish Sirius a merry Christmas in the first few minutes of class. "Are you okay?" Emmeline mutters to him as they busy themselves chopping Knotgrass.

"Yeah. Ran into my brother before class, that's all."

"And how did that go?"

"He's going home for break. I cannot believe that he's going home for break."

"How are you going to cover up the fact that you're meeting your cousin, anyway? I mean, if your brother's going home, and so is Black—I mean, Narcissa—then your parents and aunt and uncle are going to be there to see you at the station when they go to pick the two of them up, aren't they?"

"I'm not meeting Andy at the station," Sirius admits. "I'm staying behind and Flooing to her house."

"And that's allowed?"

He shrugs. "Probably not, but I'm a lot less concerned with what McGonagall would do to me if she found out than I am about what Mum and Dad would do to me if they saw me at King's Cross."

Emmeline bows her head. "I'm sorry your family is so…"

"Yeah," says Sirius. He dumps a handful of Knotgrass into their cauldron and ducks his head as it starts spitting out sparks. "Me, too."