Chapter Twenty-Six: We're Not Waiting
The moments right after: that's when it feels best. When everything is dreamlike and hazy, Sirius can close his eyes and cuddle up to the warm body next to him and pretend he's going to feel this way forever—that nothing else is ever going to touch him.
Every time, it wears off too quickly—but that only makes it more addictive. If he can only get ten minutes at a time of peace in his life, he's going to chase those ten minutes as often as he can.
It flies in the face of everything he believes about sex, relationships, loyalty, and independence, of course—but in a strange way, the hypocrisy is part of what drives him to keep doing it. After all, it's too late for Sirius: he's already thrown away his virginity, and he was a blood traitor long before he did so. If there's nothing left that he can do to make amends—to save his soul—he may as well get something that feels good out of it.
Because it does feel good, even if it's—confusing. After all, it's not like Sirius and Marlene have ever been close. But now…
He should have realized that there would be no way he could spend so many nights literally inside of her without starting to feel like they're connected somehow. Things get so heavy, so intimate, when they're alone together, but the rest of the time, they barely even make eye contact. Sirius wants to keep it a secret as much as Marlene does, and he doesn't want to have any kind of conversation to set any ground rules, because that would mean commitment, and the last thing Marlene needs from Sirius right now is for him to try to commit to her—but at the same time, it feels wrong to just ignore her in public as if she doesn't mean anything to him.
Even before the sex started, she meant something to him. She was his friend, and he enjoyed her company, and he felt safe talking to her about things like codependency and, on rare occasion, his relationships with Regulus and with Mum. And now, all those good feelings he gets when they hook up? He associates all of them with her.
It's a weird dichotomy: they really aren't much more than incidental friends, and yet suddenly Marlene is the person Sirius feels like knows him the best in the world, even though he knows that isn't rational. How do grownups compartmentalize when they have casual sex? How is Sirius supposed to look at her every day when they're out there and not treat her like his—his—?
Girlfriend, his brain supplies. It feels like she's his girlfriend, but she's not, and he doesn't even want her to be.
And then, at other times, Sirius looks at her when they're naked—they've progressed to taking their clothes all the way off these last few times—and he feels totally uncomfortable, like he doesn't know her at all and what they've just done is some kind of egregious violation of both their privacy. He feels like he's going to go mental if he keeps this up—
—But that wouldn't be such a bad thing, he reminds himself. After all, going mental about a girl who doesn't matter while he's having fantastic sex is a lot preferable to the rage and hurt and betrayal and loneliness he was feeling before he snapped and started all of this.
They pull it off for two months—and then Moony and Alice catch them coming out of a broom closet one Saturday night in March.
Alice's reaction is pretty much on par with the way Sirius imagined it: she gets flustered and blushes and starts rambling about how they shouldn't be breaking the rules. Moony, on the other hand, catches Sirius completely off guard. He'd been expecting Moony to admonish him, act disappointed in him, maybe express some confusion or concern about Sirius's life choices and what exactly possessed him to start having sex, and with Marlene, of all people.
The confusion is on point—Moony furrows his eyebrows and is totally speechless for about a minute of Alice's rambling as the gears in his brain turn it over—but the rest of Moony's reaction is totally unexpected. His face is bright red when he turns on his heel and starts marching back down the corridor the way he came. If Sirius didn't know better, he'd think Moony were angry.
"Remus? Remus!"
He feels shitty for completely ditching Marlene in order to go after Moony instead of staying and supporting her through what's bound to be an unpleasant conversation with Alice. But honestly—and he feels shitty about this, too, but not enough to stop himself—his relationship with Moony is more important to him than his relationship with Marlene, and if Moony's upset with Sirius's life choices, then Sirius's top priority is to figure out a way to make that right with him.
He catches up to Moony and says in a low voice, "In here."
Moony allows Sirius to drag him into an empty classroom and close the door. "Looks like I was wrong," he says, and Sirius hasn't got any idea what's he's talking about until he adds, "I would have sworn it wasn't McKinnon you were asking me about, and I also would have sworn she wouldn't feel the same way even if you did—but I guess it was her, and she does." The emotions in Moony's voice are indecipherable.
"It's complicated," says Sirius: he's not about to tell Moony that Emmeline was the one he originally talked to Moony about fancying, not now that they're not even friends anymore and Sirius doesn't know why. Besides, he's sure that all the Gryffindor fourth years (sans Evans) are about to find out that he's been screwing Marlene—shit, Em is about to find out, too—and when they do, he definitely doesn't want any of them knowing that Marlene is a rebound.
Because that's what she is, isn't it? Emmeline dumped him—or whatever the equivalent to that would be for somebody he technically wasn't dating yet—and he rebounded on Marlene. Laid out like that in his head, he feels even worse about his life choices lately. Marlene is his friend—she deserves better than this.
"I just thought…" Moony trails off. "How long?"
"Since—since January. Since Bellatrix."
"I can't even believe I'm asking you this, but do you love her?"
"What? No, Moony." Why does he feel like he owes Moony an apology? It's his sex life—his business. "It's—too recent for that. I don't know her well enough."
"Well, then, that's even worse," Moony snaps. "I thought—but what do I know? It's not like we've ever talked about how far we'd be willing to go if we got girlfriends."
"She's not my girlfriend," says Sirius with a dry laugh.
"Oh, she's not your girlfriend? That's why you were snogging her in a broom cupboard?"
Sirius doesn't answer. He waits for Moony to figure it out, expecting his face to go red again when he does—but Moony surprises Sirius for the second time that night when, instead, he goes deathly pale. "You're shagging her?"
"Moony—"
"You know that's illegal, right? You're going to risk going to bloody Azkaban over a girl you don't even love?"
"They wouldn't—"
"Oh, they would. They would lock you up for statutory rape if Marlene asked them to."
That hadn't occurred to Sirius before. She wouldn't—she wouldn't—would she? The truth is, Sirius doesn't really have any idea how Marlene feels about what they've been doing the last two months because he hasn't asked her. He can guess that she wants more from him than he's been giving her—she's the one who wanted to talk about boundaries, work out some kind of an arrangement—but she was just as scared as he was of anybody finding out. They're friends. They've been friends for years. No matter how deeply he disappoints her, she wouldn't turn it around on him like that—right?
It's reason enough to put an end to it—to stop letting it slide. But—
"What am I supposed to do if I lose you, huh?" Moony demands. He's still deathly white, and his voice is wavering. "How am I supposed to get through full moon mornings without you? How am I supposed to get through any of this without you?"
And he just wants to swoop in and—and make it better. Take that look off of Moony's face. And yet Sirius realizes, standing there in the classroom with Moony looking so vulnerable, so afraid, in front of him—
"I can't stop," he whispers. "I can't, Moony. If I knew how, I would have ended it the second it started."
A shadow crosses over Moony's face. "Why? Are you really so horny all the time that you can't—"
"It's not that. It's… it's everything. It's the only way I know how to make the rest of it go away. I just—I need something, and I shouldn't be doing it—I hate myself for so many reasons for doing it—but for a few minutes, when it happens, it makes the rest of the bullshit go away. Do you have something else you can give me that will do the same thing, Moony? Because I don't think you do, and if you don't…"
And Moony—Sirius doesn't understand it, but Moony looks like Sirius has just slapped him. "Fine," he says eventually. "It's your life. But if you get yourself locked up over this, I am never forgiving you for leaving me. Do you hear me? I won't forgive you, Sirius."
"That's not going to happen," Sirius swears, even though he's in no position to make any promise, let alone that one. He steps forward and puts his hands on Moony's cheeks. "I would never, ever, ever abandon you. Haven't you realized that by now? You and I—nothing's ever going to get in the way of that."
Moony's got his eyes closed; he twists his neck a little, and the skin of his cheeks flows over Sirius's fingers. "You better be telling me the truth. You—you just better."
xx
It's not like Sirius is going to be able to hide this from Peter and James, now that Moony and Alice know, so he tells them first thing when he gets back to the dormitory. Moony doesn't come with him, claiming that he wants to find Alice again so they can go study, but Sirius gets the strong impression that Moony really just—doesn't want to be around Sirius any more than he has to right now.
Well, fine. If Moony's not going to support him, Sirius will just have to work it out without him.
James and Peter don't react nearly on the scale that Moony did. Peter doesn't seem to know what to say, and after a few incredulous statements to the effect that he doesn't understand why Sirius would go for Marlene, James just laughs anxiously and says, "Well, I hate to burst your bubble, mate, but you're going to have to cut things off with her for a while at some point in the near future. It'd be awfully hard to get away with keeping a Mandrake leaf in your mouth for a whole month without the girl you're snogging noticing, don't you think?"
"What are you—"
"The spell. Pete and I found it. We're all going to be Animagi, Sirius. Moony didn't tell you?"
"He must have been too distracted telling me off for my bad sexual decisions," says Sirius. He rolls his eyes and tries to adopt a drab tone to conceal how upset he really is about this. "So what do we have to do, exactly?"
"Well, the first step is the Mandrake leaf—you've got to keep it in your mouth from one full moon to the next," Peter answers, "but we should hold off on that until we gather the ingredients for the next step, which is combining the leaf with the other stuff in a phial that's got to be struck by moonlight. Then you have to do this chant thingy with your wand every sunrise and sunset—"
"It's really dumb," James interjects, "like, really corny."
"—And wait until the next electrical storm, which is when you drink the potion and transform for the first time."
"That… doesn't sound that bad, actually," says Sirius. He'd been expecting there to be more steps involved—it sounds like the process really just involves a lot of waiting.
"Yeah," says Peter, "but if it goes wrong, you get stuck as a half-human, half-animal mutant forever. And the potion ingredients are going to be balls hard to find. Not the first one—the first one's just one of your hairs—but you need—James, what do we need again?"
James reaches into his pocket and pulls out a crumpled sheaf of parchment. "'A silver teaspoon of dew collected from a place that neither sunlight nor human feet have touched for a week and a chrysalis of a Death's Head moth,'" he recites before crushing it into his robes again.
"Ouch. And I'm guessing we can't just Transfigure ourselves a Death's Head moth to get the chrysalises?"
"Nope."
"Lovely. What's the chant thingy?"
James pulls the parchment back out. "You have to do it every day at sunrise and sunset. You have to—get this—touch the tip of your wand to your heart while saying, 'Amato Animo Animato Animagus.'"
"Seriously?"
"Yeah. I told you it's dumb."
"Does it have to be exactly at sunrise and sunset? Because in the winter, sunset is at, like, half past three in the afternoon—we'll still be in class."
Peter nods. "If we try and do it in the fall, we'll need the storm to happen by mid-November if we don't want to have to start over when the days get longer. If we don't do it precisely at sunrise or sunset on any one day—"
"Mutants. Right. But it's not going to take us until November to get it done, is it? I mean, the chrysalises and the dew and the Mandrake leaves might be kind of tricky, and then we have to do the leaf thing for a month, but Scotland has electrical storms all the time—it's not like we're going to be waiting around for months for one to happen."
"I know," says James, "but every time any of us leaves Hogwarts, we have to start over. Hogwarts is exempt from the Trace, but if any of us go home and try to do the chant, the Ministry will know about it—and not just the fact that we've done magic, but the fact that the magic we've done is illegal. They'll send our arses to Azkaban faster than we can say 'Animagus.'"
"It's March right now," Peter adds, "and we could all stay at Hogwarts over Easter break, which would give us three months. If we failed, and we had to start over in September, we'd only have about two and a half months before the days got short enough that we couldn't pull it off. Sunsets will be after four o'clock—after the time classes let out for the day—by mid-January, and there's six months between then and school letting out, so we were thinking we'd wait until next January and—"
"We're not waiting," says Sirius immediately, shaking his head. "I mean, if we don't get the chrysalises or the dew early enough that we have more than a month for the Mandrake leaf and a couple weeks after that to wait for the next storm, then we can wait until September. But I'm not waiting 'til January."
"Sirius, be reasona—"
"Moony needs us," he says simply. "I'm not waiting."
Peter looks at James, who after a moment shrugs and says, "For the chrysalises and the Mandrake leaves—this isn't the only potion they're used for, so we just have to find a supplier."
"Would they stock those in an apothecary? We can sneak out to Hogsmeade tomorrow and check J. Pippin's Potions, can't we?"
"That's what we were thinking, yeah."
"And the dew?"
Peter says, "For it not to have been touched by sunlight, it's got to be in a cave somewhere or something—but we're not sure how we're going to get out to any caves, no matter whether we're at Hogwarts or at home. It's not like we can just Apparate to one whenever we want, and we don't even know of the locations of any caves."
"Well… can we get help from the outside—from somebody who can Apparate?"
"Yeah? Like who?" says James. "If anybody else figures out what we're up to—"
"If it took us two whole years to find the spell, do you really think many witches and wizards are going to realize when we ask them for—for dew untouched by whatever—"
"Sunlight and human feet," Peter supplies.
"Yes, that—that they're going to realize what we need it for?"
"But who would we even ask? Our parents are out—they'd all demand an explanation. You're not talking to your cousin anymore."
It takes Sirius a second—and then it comes to him. He smirks. "Mundungus Fletcher."
James raises his eyebrows. Mundungus Fletcher is a squirrelly fourth year and probably the only Slytherin in this school right now that Sirius can stand. He's good-natured, says hello to literally every fourth year he passes in the corridors, regardless of blood status or house—and has got a reputation for smuggling illicit items into the castle for twice their usual black market price. "Fletcher? It's just—are we sure we can trust him?"
"Come on, James. Fletcher doesn't kiss and tell—we all know that. If he did, then nobody would trust him, and he wouldn't still have an operational business, would he?"
Peter's shaking his head. "But—even if Fletcher has connections who can get the dew for us, do we really want to leave the collection in the hands of some criminal we don't even know? Who's to say that they'll actually do the digging we need them to do to find an untouched place?"
"Then we'll ask Fletcher to get us a Portkey," James decides, "so that we can go there and collect the dew ourselves. We'll need to be careful about our timing anyway—we shouldn't collect it before the full moon when we take the Mandrake leaves out of our mouths."
"So—we're doing this. We're finally doing this."
His eyes meet James's, then Peter's, and for the first time in months, maybe even years—Sirius feels like he's got something to feel excited for.