A/N: My dear friend Azzie (Inkfire) requested more Marlene in this chapter, and I'm afraid I did not deliver at all. XD Next time, I hope!
Starting in this chapter, there are going to be some pieces of the story that won't fully be explained unless you read Darkly. You'll still be able to follow everything just fine if you haven't read it, but some of the characters' motivations for their actions may be unclear.
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Chapter Seventeen: You Belong With Us
Honestly, Sirius is totally blindsided when Mary invites him to stay with her over Easter break. Sure, he's grateful: it was lonely staying at Hogwarts over Christmas. But out of all the Gryffindor third years, Mary's by far the one that Sirius has spent the least amount of time with—other than Evans, that is. And, hell, with his and Evans's track record of heavy conversations about Snape and Regulus, he almost feels like he knows Evans even better than he knows Mary.
She doesn't look nervous at all when she asks him, and it's a testament to how much she's changed since first year, back when she was terrified to talk to anybody but Marlene. "That's really generous of you, Mare. Thanks," he says a little awkwardly.
"No problem. So, like, will you come? You're leaving me hanging here, Black."
"Are you sure I'm not going to be a bother? You've said before that your mum is really overprotective, and I don't want to—get you in trouble or—"
Mary shrugs this off. "She's loosened up a little. It was hard after first year because, like, she and Dad had just gotten divorced, and magic was all new to her, and she hadn't been planning on ever sending me to boarding school—but it's better at home now. I know you were stuck at home all last summer, but I got to see Marlene every week."
"And she's not going to mind me sleeping over every night? I mean… I'm a boy," he says sheepishly.
Laughing, she says, "Well, she knows it's not like that with you because I just told her two weeks before I asked her that I'm dating Davy Gudgeon. She kind of flipped out about it, but at least it means she's not worried about you and me, right? Anyway, it's fine. You can have my room, and I'll sleep on the couch."
Mary getting a boyfriend was another surprise—Sirius hadn't realized Mary was interested in Gudgeon like that—but he's gotten used to them being together over the last month. She doesn't really bring him around to hang out with the Gryffindors; they do stuff together most evenings, Sirius thinks, but when she spends time with Sirius and the others, it's almost always in the common room, in class, or at the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall. Sirius prefers it this way: he mostly just finds Gudgeon a little dull and annoying, and he doesn't particularly want to deal with how needing to include Gudgeon all the time would affect their group dynamic.
He's not totally sure what he and Mary are going to do for all of break, but he probably shouldn't worry: she's chatty enough nowadays that she'll probably find things to talk his ear off about the entire time. He imagines they'll see Marlene at least once, too, and maybe some of the other Gryffindors.
No, the thing Sirius is actually worried about is Regulus. With the way things have devolved between the two of them, there was never a chance that Sirius was going to go back to Grimmauld Place with him over Easter—but even if they're still dueling in the Hogwarts corridors, that doesn't mean Sirius isn't still concerned about his brother's well-being. He wishes the moron would stop going home for Christmas and Easter, but Regulus seems to be dead set on not making Mum and Dad feel abandoned, and it's not like Sirius can do anything to stop him.
The tricky part is going to be leaving King's Cross station with Mary and her mum within eyeshot of Mum, Dad, and Regulus. It's not like Mum and Dad could force Sirius not to go home with the Macdonalds—not in public, anyway—and it's not as disastrous as, say, going home with Andy back when they were still friends would have been, but he still knows that he's probably going to pay for this come June when he's forced to go back home.
After some consideration and some back-and-forth, Sirius winds up making arrangements to leave the station with James's parents, who will Side-Along-Apparate him to the Macdonalds' house afterward. He's heard Mum call the Potters blood traitors before, but then again, Mum's called almost every pureblood family Sirius knows blood traitors before, and she hasn't burned James's parents off the family tree on the tapestry yet. In any case, the Potters are really well-respected even among pureblood families, and telling his parents that he's staying with the Potters over break will avert the trouble that they'd cause if they found out he'll really be at Mary's.
He writes to them to let them know his intentions a week before break is slated to start. Penning the letter gives Sirius a weird feeling, like always. He and his parents do communicate at least once a month, and when they do, they act cordial. Sometimes, Mum and Dad even tell Sirius information about things happening in the extended family—pureblood business. It's almost like they forget what a big blood traitor Sirius is when he isn't right in their face to remind them of it—or like they want to put on the appearance of making an effort with him, as if to be able to say, well, they tried to keep him on the straight and narrow, but look how he's betrayed them when they haven't been around to see it.
At King's Cross, Mrs. Potter greets Sirius with a big hug, and Mr. Potter shakes his hand vigorously while asking how he's enjoying his classes. Sirius gets a glimpse of his own family, and his eyes connect with Dad's for a fleeting second—but then Dad looks away without calling to him or getting Mum or Regulus's attention, and Sirius breathes easy again.
"We've been so looking forward to you spending the week with us," says Mr. Potter loudly. "We'll put you in the room next to James's."
James and Sirius lock eyes, and Sirius holds in a snort.
The Potters treat him to dinner before taking him to Mary's. He hasn't spent a ton of time with James's mum and dad, and he always feels a little embarrassed around them, given how they were introduced—but they're nothing but gracious, asking him plenty of questions about how things are going at Hogwarts and whether he plans to try out for the Quidditch team, too, when James does so next year. He has been thinking about it, and he'll probably go for the Beater position that Macmillan is going to vacate when she graduates at the end of the year. It's not like he's got much of a choice: James has already called dibs on Chaser, and Macmillan is the only other person on the Gryffindor team graduating this year.
Mrs. Potter gives him a tight hug while Mr. Potter is getting ready to take him to the Macdonalds', and then so does James. "Write me and tell me if Mary's mum will let you get away for a day to come over here," James says in his ear. "The plan is for everybody to come on Tuesday afternoon."
"I will," Sirius promises. James squeezes Sirius's shoulders like he's not pissed at him, like they're always going to be best friends, and then releases him.
Mary and Mrs. Macdonald live in a one-story, two-bedroom cottage in Scotland full of odd Muggle contraptions Sirius has never heard of. The first thing Mary does is show him how all this stuff works. The refrigerator is easy enough to understand: it works just like iceboxes in wizarding homes, except it's kept running with something called electricity instead of Cooling Charms. The phone is a little less comprehensible—it reminds him of the two-way mirrors that he shares with James, but it's weird to him to think that Muggles have a way of letting you talk to anybody, anywhere in the world, with just your disembodied voices. How is that possible without magic? Mary doesn't seem to have a great understanding of it; she tries and fails to explain it a couple of times before she gives up and shows him how it works by crank-calling somebody called an "operator."
But the absolute weirdest thing in the house has got to be the television (or, as Mary calls it, the TV). "I can't believe wizards haven't made an equivalent of this," he tells her in the middle of their second hour of a program called General Hospital. "This is addictive. How do the Muggles manage this?"
"Dunno, but I miss it when we're at Hogwarts. I'm totally behind on all my shows. I don't even recognize, like, half the characters on half of them, and the other half have all been cancelled by now."
"It is totally unfair that you can't bring one of these into the castle. I'd watch it every night."
Considering how overprotective Mary says her mum is, Sirius is surprised that Mrs. Macdonald mostly leaves them alone at first. He and Mary binge watch television and eat ice cream until one in the morning, then stuff down some cereal and go for a long walk the following morning. Nothing seems amiss until noon, when Mrs. Macdonald calls them for lunch.
She's fixed beef and mashed potatoes; they ladle them onto their plates, and Sirius is just raising his fork to his mouth when Mrs. Macdonald says, "Mary, would you like to say grace?"
Whoops—he lowers his fork. But Mary is shrinking into herself when she quietly says, "No. Please, Mum."
There's some sort of battle of wills that Sirius doesn't understand as Mary and her mum stare at each other, and then Mrs. Macdonald says, equally quietly, "All right."
"Has Dad…?"
"I haven't heard from him, honey."
Mary bounces back to her usual self after just a few minutes, but she shuts down again when Sirius asks her about it after dinner. "So you're religious?" he asks, watching her carefully.
"I… no. No, I'm not." And she won't say another word about it.
He has so many questions—why she apparently doesn't pray anymore and what her dad has to do with all of it—but he doesn't want to push her, so he holds his tongue, both now and on Sunday when Mary declines her mum's invitation to join her at Easter mass. Mary's pretty subdued after Mrs. Macdonald first leaves for church, but when she turns on the TV, Sirius flips to the news and spends the next two hours pestering her with questions about Muggle politics and society. She's not able to answer everything he asks—she's been away from this life for almost three years now, after all—but he gets a crash course in the structure of the British Muggle government and political parties, and she's able to answer some of his more straightforward questions about things he spots or hears in news segments, like how motor vehicles work.
By the time Mrs. Macdonald returns, Mary's warmed back up, but she's quick to tell her that they're leaving and hurries Sirius out for another walk. Mary is wearing Muggle clothes, but Sirius doesn't own any—the ones he bought with Andy last year don't fit him anymore—and he feels very out of place in his work robes, though at least he's not wearing a wizard's hat.
"Hey, Mary?" he says five minutes into a rambling speech about Mary's last date with Gudgeon.
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for having me here. Seriously, I mean it. We don't spend enough time together, just the two of us, and…"
"Yeah! Yeah, of course. Just, um…"
"What?"
"Look, I'm sorry about—like—about telling people what you said about what Potter said about Lily. I know I shouldn't have done that."
They've never talked about it, and Sirius had let go of his anger about it weeks ago, so it surprises him that Mary would bring this up now. "It's okay. I wasn't happy, but—I shouldn't have said anything in the first place, right? Plus, I'm the one who told Evans."
"Yeah, but James seemed more unhappy about the school knowing than he does about Lily knowing, didn't he?"
He shrugs. "James is a little… I don't think he cares what Evans thinks of him, but I think he cares a lot about his reputation—more than he'd be willing to admit to anybody."
"But he's different with you boys, right? Like, I think he opens up more with us girls than he does with other people, but I usually still feel like he's…"
"Kind of closed off. Yeah."
It's weird to think about James like this because Sirius is so totally used to James being his bold, honest, affectionate self around him, Moony, and Peter—but he knows that's not what James is like to everybody else. It's not like he doesn't see James doing it: James is more confident than usual even just when they're around the girls, and when you mix in people who aren't Gryffindor third years, he gets downright cocky. Sirius knows this about him, since he plays along with James's jokes and bullies Snape right alongside him—because that's what they are, isn't it? Bullies? The thought of it always makes him feel sort of bad about himself, even though he's always quick to assure himself that it's just a laugh, just something he and James share—that Snape is mean and violent and quick to use the Dark Arts on anybody he doesn't like, namely Sirius and James.
"It's not just James," Mary says now. "All my Hufflepuff friends say that the eight of us are kind of… I don't know. Impenetrable. We are pretty exclusive, which is weird for me to even think about. I never would have believed you if you'd told me when I was in grade school that I was going to be part of a clique."
"Yeah? What were you like in Muggle school?"
"What do you think I was like?"
He doesn't even have to think about it. "Quiet? Kind of a loner?"
"Yeah—a nerdy loner."
He chortles, "Seriously?"
"Seriously. I know, like, my marks are terrible at Hogwarts—I'm no good at magic—but I was actually really, really smart at Muggle stuff. Don't tell Marlene, but that's probably why I'm so good at Arithmancy. I was a math geek growing up."
"I won't lie—I always wondered why you signed up for Arithmancy, since it's got a reputation for being really tough, and—no offense."
"None taken. I'd think the same thing if I were you."
"Was it hard? Coming to Hogwarts and… and struggling all of a sudden?"
"Well, it was definitely, like, a blow to my ego," Mary laughs, "and it made me wonder if—if I'm really better off in the wizarding world, you know? It's not like I'm any good at any of it, and with the way some people treat Muggle-borns…"
"Hey—hey. Don't listen to any of them, okay? You belong here. You belong with us. I promise."
Grinning, she says, "With parents like yours, how did you turn out so decent, anyway?"
"Dunno. Maybe I just have no spine and weak morals."
He's smiling, but Mary sees through it. "That's not—they don't say that about you?"
"They do—well, my brother does. Honestly, I don't know what my mum and dad think of me. I know they're disappointed in me, but they… give mixed signals sometimes. I mean, I would have thought Mum would have burned me off the family tree years ago."
"I'm sorry. You don't listen to him, all right? If anybody's got bad morals, it's them, not you."
But Sirius isn't sure about that. He thinks Regulus is wrong about him—he doesn't think his own ethics are weak just because he was more open-minded going into Hogwarts than Regulus was—but Regulus is equally strong in his convictions, and in Regulus's view of the world, that means he's driven by ethics just as much as Sirius is, even if their viewpoints radically conflict. In fact, with how fixated Regulus is on living his beliefs, it's like he's acting like just as much of a Gryffindor as Sirius ever has.
He files that one away to use the next time he and Regulus see each other in the corridors. He's got to bring his A game, after all.
After his conversation with Mary, Sirius finds himself paying close attention to James when they all see each other at the Potters' manor on Tuesday. It's not like he's a completely different person outside the dormitory compared to inside: both ways, he's still got the same sense of humor, the same undeniable air of being a ringleader, the same—spark. But when they're around other people, that spark is a little—Sirius doesn't know. Exaggerated, maybe.
And Mary's right about another thing: their crowd definitely acts exclusive. Sirius feels totally at home, here with his seven best friends in James's sitting room, and he feels the same way when he sees them in the common room or in double classes with other houses—but the way they're all unafraid to be unapologetically together in public is probably off-putting. And Sirius isn't sure that it even bothers any of them how hard they make it for anybody else to break in. After all, it's not like any of them would accept Gudgeon if Mary were to start bringing him around, would they?
The more Sirius thinks about it, the more the Gryffindors remind him of the way the old pureblood families are—totally obsessed with how exclusionary they are. He tries to put the thought out of his mind. He's nothing like his family—nothing.
Right?