Chapter Twenty-Five: All the Sneaking Around You've Been Doing

The Marauders finish the countercurse just in time—because the pretense of researching Animagi in the Restricted Section in secret at two o'clock every morning gives Sirius perfect cover to actually read up on how to prevent and deal with unplanned pregnancy. It took about three days of perusing the unrestricted Healing section of the library for Sirius to decide that he and Marlene weren't getting anywhere without breaking into the books they're not supposed to be reading. It makes sense, doesn't it? Teenage sex is, like, highly illegal in Wizarding Britain—it's not like Pince would just leave books telling you how to get away with it lying around.

He and Marlene never go to the library together: they don't want to raise anybody's suspicions as to why they're suddenly spending so much time together. Sirius doesn't tell her how, exactly, he's managed to break into the Restricted Section, and he doesn't give her the countercurse—but she keeps looking in the regular section by day whenever she can get away from the other girls, while Sirius starts spending a chunk out of every night under James's Invisibility Cloak in the shelves he's not supposed to be in.

It's been about a week of this by the time Sirius finds something useful. Technically, all he really needs to know right now is how to—deal with it—if it turns out Marlene is pregnant, but he still scribbles down every contraception charm in the book before he puts it away. It took him bloody long enough to find this book in the first place: he's not about to waste another week and a half of his life looking for it again the next time he's ready to have sex.

Not that that's going to happen anytime soon—Sirius having sex again, that is.

As much as he never wants to put himself or Marlene through what they've just been through ever again, he—can't get what they did out of his head. Guilt notwithstanding, it did feel bloody fantastic, and—he sees her all over the castle every day, and every time he does, he just… pictures her with her robes half off and her face contorted in—

No, he tells himself firmly. He's got to stop thinking about it. If he doesn't, he's going to drive himself mad.

But he can't stop thinking about it. How could he? Sirius can't just brush it off like it wasn't a big deal. It was a huge deal, and the more he avoids talking to anybody about it, the more he keeps thinking about it.

Besides, obsessing over what it felt like to have sex with Marlene is—a lot easier than obsessing over Em or Regulus or Bellatrix or Mum was before he switched tracks. It's not that he feels so good about himself or his life choices—he feels totally ashamed of himself, and he's still sort of paranoid that they're going to get turned in and sent to Azkaban or something—but, well, at least it felt good. At least it's a temporary problem, one he can fix easily by just… apologizing to Marlene and never doing it again. Hell, maybe they'll even become closer friends as a result of what they did; maybe it'll help fill the void Em and Regulus left behind a little.

It's weird to have seen this side of Marlene, of course, because—it's not like he ever thought she was ugly, but he was always so fixated on Emmeline that he never really considered thinking of anybody else he knew personally as being attractive before. He keeps catching himself looking sidelong at Marlene at meals or in class or in the common room, studying her dark skin and eyes and the patterns into which she's twisted her cornrows. She's—good-looking, now that Sirius really thinks about it. Her chin is much nicer than Evans's, whatever James says, and when she smiles, it lights up her whole face.

With Emmeline still avoiding Sirius—and no matter how pissed at him she is, he feels an even bigger surge of guilt every time he imagines Em finding out that he's slept with Marlene—Sirius's seating arrangements have gotten all screwed up in every class except Care of Magical Creatures, which Em isn't taking; Defense Against the Dark Arts, in which Sirius always pairs off with James; and Herbology, where the Marauders are together at one station and Em's at another with Marlene and Alice. (They share that class with the Hufflepuffs, which means Mary's always partnered with Veronica Smethley and Greta Catchlove, and Evans works with Benjy Fenwick and Elisabeth Clearwater.)

As a result of the Emmeline thing, Sirius does now have one guaranteed time to talk to Marlene in private, and that's Muggle Studies. Sirius always used to sit with Em in there, but for the last—almost two weeks now, probably, Em's claimed the seat next to Alice's, leaving Marlene to come to Sirius's desk. Their lessons are never practical ones—Quirrell spends the whole period lecturing—but he's so non-confrontational that he usually doesn't call Sirius out if he casts a Muffliato and keeps his voice down.

"I have good news," he tells Marlene in an undertone just as Quirrell is starting to dig into today's lesson, and he passes her his crumpled-up sheaf of parchment. "I found some stuff that could be useful if—if we need it."

He realizes belatedly that the parchment he's just handed her also has got protection spells on it, but it's too late: Marlene's already un-crumpled it and scanned down it quickly. She doesn't comment on this, though, just telling him, "I have good news, too. I got my period last night. We're—I think we're safe."

Sirius doesn't think he's ever felt so relieved (if a little horrified by the mention of Marlene's period—if he didn't know what that meant before he found this book, he certainly knows what it means now, and it's gross). "That's amazing news. Look, I'm—really sorry for everything I put you through. I know I was scared, so you must have been…"

"It's all right. It's not like you forced me to do anything I didn't already want to do."

Anything she didn't already want to do? But that makes it sound like…

"Anyway, I was thinking we should—do something," Marlene whispers. Oh, no. "I know you said you don't want to—do it again, and that's fine. But—everything's different now, right? We should at least—try and get to know the people we just…"

Oh. Well, that's not so bad. It's harmless, isn't it? Just—doing what Sirius should have done before they had sex. "Sure. Want to skip dinner after this and go down to the kitchens?"

"We shouldn't. I… kind of don't want the girls to figure out I'm with you. No offense."

That's fine by Sirius: he doesn't want to give the Marauders any reason to believe that his friendship with Marlene is—anything more than friendship. "Later tonight, then? When everybody's usually in their dormitories?"

"You realize I usually go to bed at, like, nine, right?"

"Oh, come on. Make an exception, McKinnon."

Marlene smiles. "Well… I guess it wouldn't be so weird for me to say I need to stay up late doing Sprout's essay. I do procrastinate a lot. And—it's not like we girls exactly keep tabs on each other in the evenings. It's not uncommon for us to scatter around after dinner. That's when Mary sees Lockhart—" that's Mary's boyfriend of the year, Gilderoy Lockhart, onto whom she latched almost immediately after breaking up with Davy Gudgeon "—and the other Hufflepuffs, and Alice is usually up late studying wherever. Lily's usually out with Snape, and Em… well…"

His pulse picks up. "What about Em?"

"I dunno. She's just been acting dodgy lately. You've noticed it, too, haven't you? You used to always work with her in at least half our classes, and now, she's just… always alone whenever she can help it, or sometimes with Lily, probably so that nobody tries to go over to her."

Sirius has noticed that it's not just him Em seems to be avoiding, which is another relief: she definitely seems to be the most pissed at him, but if it's everybody she's dodging, then the problem's got to be on her end, hasn't it? It still hurts like hell when he thinks about what it's felt like to lose her, but—well, at least he's had this scare with Marlene to take his mind off of it.

"Meet me in the Entrance Hall tonight? Say at nine?" Sirius says now.

"Yeah," says Marlene, and she smiles at him again as he takes off the Muffliato. Another memory—a flash of the way her hips felt under his hands—strikes him, and he quickly looks away.

xx

He's not planning to do it. He swears. But—he hasn't been able to get her out of his head, and he walks a little too close to her in a deserted corridor, and when her warm hand brushes his sweaty one, he just—

At least they use protection this time. On the other hand, if they hadn't had access to protection, they probably wouldn't have done it at all, and Sirius—shouldn't have done it at all.

Right?

It's just—he tried to talk to Em at dinner tonight, just some stupid comment about that essay for Sprout Marlene's pretending to be working on right now, and the look on Emmeline's face when he addressed her was… he never wants her to look at him that way ever again. And he needs to forget. You can forgive him for needing to do something to make himself forget, can't you? That's understandable, isn't it?

Now that Sirius isn't worried he's going to be a bloody father—now that he's had some experience with this and isn't full-on panicking—he's not in such a rush to get out of the broom closet. Like last time, their robes are still half on; they're slumped down on the floor with Sirius's fingertips tracing idle patterns on Marlene's bare shoulder. Her head is on his chest, her arm slung around his waist, and it's—nice, especially coming down from the high he got from doing this.

"Sorry about—I mean… I got blood all over us," she says.

"It's fine. Nothing a Scourgify can't take care of."

"If we're going to make a habit of this," she says, and she sounds happy at the thought of it, "we really should talk about it this time, you know."

But he's a mess of guilt, and if anyone ever found it—he already has a hard enough time facing himself in his mind without having to actually own up to what a sick freak he is. And anyway, he made himself a promise when Emmeline broke hers: no more promises. It's better this way—if nobody expects anything from him and he doesn't expect anything from them in return. He can't give Marlene what he, frankly, has probably led her on to expect by now, and it would be worse to try and fail like he knows he would than it would be to just—cut his losses.

"We can't make a habit of it," he says. Marlene stiffens in his arms. "I just—I can't. I'm sorry."

But then—he does it again. And again. The fourth time, it happens on the full moon, and when Sirius thinks afterward about how he was getting off with a girl he doesn't even love while Moony was stuck clawing himself up in the Shrieking Shack, he thinks he might hate himself enough to stop—but he doesn't.

The next morning, in the Hospital Wing, Sirius has just clambered on top of Moony's cot when Moony says to James and Peter, "Not that I don't appreciate all three of you coming down here—because I really, really do, I swear it—but can Sirius and I have some time alone?"

At first, Sirius is sure that Moony's somehow figured out where Sirius has been disappearing to for the last couple weeks. He settles into the cot and tries to arrange his face in a way that will look normal, but Moony figures him out the second he gets his head on Sirius's chest. "Your heart is racing."

"I—yeah. That's normal for me."

"Not that I've noticed when we… not after full moons. You're always so—steady."

"You should hear my pulse when I'm at Grimmauld Place—or every time I run into Regulus," Sirius mutters. "I always worry Madam Pomfrey's going to have to treat me for heart disease or something from all the racing it does."

"That's what this is about, right? Your family?"

"What?"

"You—being nervous right now. All the sneaking around you've been doing. Come on, Sirius—you don't really expect us to believe you've been where you keep saying you're going for the last couple of weeks, do you? James and Peter were in the kitchens when you said you were going down there last weekend, and they said they didn't see you there. Same deal when Alice and I were in the library and they said that was where you were supposed to be."

Moony must notice when Sirius's heartbeat accelerates even more, but mercifully, he doesn't comment on it.

"I just… wanted to be alone."

"That's what we figured, and we get that. I get that—really." Sirius holds in a sigh of relief. "But Sirius, I'm worried about you. I know it hasn't ever been easy with your family, but you… your whole life kind of fell apart this year, and with whatever has been going on with Emmeline—"

"There's nothing going on between me and Emmeline," he says a little too quickly.

Moony frowns. "I didn't think there was. She's not spending much of any time with any of us, and she won't tell anybody why. But—I just meant it must feel like just another blow on top of all the others, and—if there's ever a good time to lose a friend, that time for you definitely isn't right now. I want you to be okay. I want you to have support. I want to—I know I can't fix any of it, but I want to take care of you."

He's blushing deeply by the end of this speech. He's scooted down the cot and then lifted up his head so that his chin is resting on Sirius's chest and they're looking each other in the eyes, and—for the first time in weeks, Sirius stops thinking about his family and Emmeline and Marlene and allows his adoration for this boy to just overwhelm him. The mess Sirius has made of his life—it's going to work out okay. He hasn't lost Moony. He hasn't lost James or Peter, either, but—he hasn't lost Moony, and Moony's right here with him in bed, and Sirius doesn't have to face any of the rest of it until Transfiguration.

"You do already," Sirius says. "You do take care of me. You do it really well."

And—he knows he depends too much on his friends in order to feel anchored. He knows that. But for the first time in a while, he suddenly feels—almost angry, because if he wants them around, and they want to stick around, then why should he have to set up boundaries? Why shouldn't Sirius get to just rely on them to function like he so desperately wants to? It's not like it would be healthy to veer the other direction and never lean on anybody at all, would it?

The answer is probably somewhere in the middle—something something moderation something. But—well, it's not like Sirius has the first idea how to achieve that. Given the alternatives, would it really be so much worse to need the Marauders too much than it would be to totally isolate himself?

That's how he ended up in this situation in the first place, though, he reminds himself: he needed Em too much, and now he's lost her. He pictures the rest of his life as a long chain of dependency, relying on one person to get over the other until the relationship breaks and he has to repeat the cycle, and he hates himself more than he already has for the last weeks—months—years.

He doesn't have to figure it out right now, Sirius tells himself. He's not going to sort out how to find a balance—how to have friends but be more self-reliant—overnight, so it's not like it's going to delay things much if he just… soaks Moony up and puts it off until tomorrow.

He can make it one more day without solving all his problems. Hell, in the meantime, maybe he'll even get a head start and put a stop to things with Marlene.

But for some reason, the thought of stopping the pattern that he told Marlene he didn't want to fall in feels a lot harder thirty minutes later when he gets out of Moony's cot. All his thoughts come rushing back, and he knows that if he can just have a go with her one more time, it'll make them stop for a while—make him feel good for once, at least in the moment. Besides, wouldn't he rather preoccupy himself with thoughts about sex he can have than thoughts about relationships he can't?

This isn't sustainable, a small voice tells him: if they do what Marlene suggested and make this a habit, they're going to get attached, and getting attached is the source of all the trouble. But—if every time is the last time, then there's no attachment: all there is is gratification, and Sirius could sure as hell use a little of that in his life.

Right?