Chapter Thirty-Four: Last Salvations
Losing James hurts exactly as bad as Sirius always thought it would, if it were to come to that. All he ever wanted from James was to be his brother—to please him—to gain his approval, and Sirius has butchered that so badly that he doesn't think he's ever going to get it back. He's suffocating without James, just as much as he always expected he would if it ever came to this.
The part that surprises Sirius, though, is how badly he misses Peter. It's not like he'd thought that Peter didn't matter to him, but he was always so anxious about the thought of losing James that he didn't really stop to consider how bad things would get without Peter. In a way, Peter's reaction—to totally shun Sirius and Moony, to talk to James or the girls while acting like Sirius and Moony aren't even in the room, to refuse to so much as meet their eyes—is even worse than James's. James has said some pretty damn harsh things in the last few weeks, and those things cut Sirius right open, but at least Sirius knows he still cares enough to be angry. Peter—after what Sirius said to Peter, without knowing what's in Peter's head, he's afraid that Peter is just done with him.
Things with Moony, at the very least, seem to be back on track. It's not like Moony's forgotten what Sirius did—Sirius certainly hasn't forgotten what he did—but Moony's at least looking at Sirius the way he used to, with that broken-open honesty and (dare he say it?) adoration. It's not like Sirius deserves any of it, but—he thinks they just reached a point where they were so scared to lose each other on top of Peter and James that they had to remember their priorities, even if those priorities are terribly codependent and unfair.
Moony's backed off from trying to get in the way of Sirius's sex life, probably to try to maintain the uneasy peace they've forged, and James and Peter seem to have decided that they're perfectly content to watch Sirius burn his life down—but Mary and Alice have taken up Moony's old mantle and started trying to hunt Sirius and Marlene down whenever either Mary or Alice realizes the two of them are off together somewhere. Sirius has to say, he loves them both, but he's getting really sick of having them wrench open the doors to broom closets when he's in the middle of a shag. It's bad enough that he's doing it at all without the added insult of his friends making his private business become a public spectacle.
The thing with Marlene is… it's become a normal part of his everyday life, yet at the exact same time, every split is heartbreaking—and they have sex and subsequently split up, like, three times a week. He wishes he could just—accept that they're together, if only so that the constant heartache could stop. If they're not going to stay apart anyway, why even bother trying to do the right thing and break up? And—is breaking up even still the right thing to do? He knows it would have been at first, when he was still a mess over Emmeline and in no position to try to commit to somebody who wasn't the person he had feelings for, but—
—It's not like he doesn't have feelings for Marlene. He doesn't know. Sirius doesn't think it would be possible—for him, at least—to be in a quasi-relationship, even a dysfunctional one, with somebody for so long and not come to care deeply for them. And he does care deeply for Marlene. He cared for her before he pulled her into this mess, if only as a friend, and he cares for her as a lot more than that now, even if all they do is bang and fight. She just—
When he's with her, he feels like he has the strength to put everything else into the background for a few minutes. When he's with her, he wants to take care of her the way he always wanted Mum and Dad—Regulus—Emmeline—James—Marlene herself to take care of him.
Is that going to be his fate for the rest of his life? Is he going to keep looking to other people to save him because he can't save himself? Is he always going to shoulder a responsibility to save the people he loves—a responsibility that he's never going to be able to live up to?
"You're being too hard on yourself," Moony says earnestly when Sirius tries inarticulately to convey this a week before the next full moon. "I know you think you break everyone you touch—"
"Because I do," Sirius insists.
"—But you save me all the time. You save me every day you're with me. It's not about… taking care of somebody isn't all about the grand gestures, you know? I think it's about—coming down here to see me after every full moon, or listening to what I have to say, or not leaving. Especially the not leaving part. That's the most important one."
"We'll get them back. I still don't know how yet, but we will."
"And, you know, as far as the grand gestures do go—I think you blew that one out of the park when you decided to become an Animagus."
"I just wish it would hurry up and storm outside already," Sirius says, rolling his eyes. "If we have to start over again when school lets out for Easter break next Friday—"
"That won't happen," says Moony firmly. "Scotland is lousy with electrical storms. There's bound to be one that rolls through sooner rather than later. Just you wait—you'll all be Animagi in time for my next transformation."
"Yeah. Yeah, maybe."
"Do you, uh… do you know if James and Peter are still doing the chants?"
Sirius frowns. "Yeah, they are. Of course they are. They don't do them with me—I duck out of the dormitory and do mine alone at sunrise, and at sunset, we go in separate bathrooms—but I know they're still doing them. James still sets his WWN for twenty minutes before sunrise every morning, and it's not just for my benefit—he and Peter get up, too."
"I just… I don't understand why they're still bothering if they've written me off like they have."
"They haven't written you off. Maybe they've written me off, but—they'll never be done with you. You weren't the one who messed up, remember? As angry as James might be at you, he's still… he and Peter are still going to want to support you the way they think I can't."
Moony doesn't reply right away, and when he does, his voice is soft. "They're wrong, you know. You support me better than anyone ever has."
"Even after what I did to you?"
"Even… yeah. Even after that. You just—you made a mistake, Sirius. I don't hate you for making a mistake, not when I know it's—complicated in there." He punctuates his last words by tapping gently on Sirius's temple.
As it turns out, Moony is right: the next electrical storm arrives three days before the full moon. Sirius is accompanying him on his prefect rounds when they hear the first crack of thunder. They look at each other.
"Go," says Moony.
And Sirius—doesn't have his phial. The phials can't come in contact with sunlight between when they mixed the potion and when they take them out into the storm; all three of them are tucked safely in the corner of Peter's trunk. Sirius squeezes Moony's hand, turns around, and bolts for the staircase as fast as he can.
Up in Gryffindor Tower, he blows off Mary and Marlene's greeting entirely and flies up the stairs to the dormitory. He's not expecting Peter or James to be up there, so he's totally floored when he bangs open the door and finds them both sitting on Peter's bed with the phials in their hands.
"You—waited?"
Peter shrugs. "Didn't feel right to do this without you, even if you are…"
He doesn't finish the thought. He doesn't need to.
"Let's go," says Sirius as calmly as he can manage.
They're silent on the very, very brisk walk across corridors and down stairwells. When they burst through the double doors leading to the outside, Sirius vaguely regrets not having brought an umbrella with him before he realizes that that's ridiculous: he could cast an Impervius Charm on himself, and anyway, an Impervius Charm would probably break the second he transformed into—whatever he's about to transform into.
Heavy rain pelts them as they break into a run toward the Forbidden Forest, and they pause just on its outskirts, before they can duck into the woods. Wordlessly, Peter hands Sirius his phial—hands James his.
Sirius unstoppers it and holds it out in to the rain for just a moment—just long enough for rainwater to fill it to the brim, for its contents to suddenly and violently turn blood red.
They retreat all the way into the forest, then, where the canopy of leaves shields them from the bulk of the rain, but its patter on the ground beyond the woods is still deafening in Sirius's ears. Thunder cracks. "Here goes everything," mutters Sirius, and he raises the phial to his lips and drinks.
For a moment, nothing happens, and he's sure that they've somehow done something wrong—but if that were the case, he'd be turning into some horrible half-human mutant, and that's not happening, either. And then—as clearly as he can see the leaves on the trees and James's and Peter's anxious, apprehensive faces in front of him, he sees a huge and shaggy black dog in his mind's eye.
He closes his eyes, so as better to see it—concentrate on the scruff of its neck and the way it paws the ground and whinnies. A dog. Huh. He doesn't know what he was expecting, but it feels jarring for a second to think of himself turning into that—and then, in the next second, it feels suddenly and wholly like it fits.
Sirius is the first to transform, and it's—uncomfortable. Worse than uncomfortable. He wouldn't describe the transformation as painful, exactly, but he can feel his innards stretching and compressing and reshaping themselves into shapes they don't belong in, and the whole effect leaves him feeling unsettled and queasy. He collapses to the ground, staring up at James and Peter, who are watching with furrowed brows, their own phials empty in their hands. For a few moments, he can feel his underwear and robes melding onto the skin that's sprouting dark fur everywhere, and he screws up his face, holding back a roar of anguish—
—And then it's over, and he feels—just like himself, except not at all like himself. He'd wondered whether his thoughts would grow simpler, more animalistic, after he transformed, but the only differences he notices are physical—his mind seems to be the same.
But, as it turns out, he's spoken too soon.
Peter follows him down, and in instants, the shape Sirius knows and loves shrinks down to that of a grey—is he a mouse or a rat? A rat, Sirius thinks. At first, his only thought is that the idea of Peter as a rat somehow fits even better than the idea of Sirius as a dog, now that he's had a moment to get used to it—
—And then a full front of emotion blasts into Sirius's brain.
They aren't his emotions, he realizes quickly: even though they're strong, they feel detached from him somehow, almost as if the feelings are physically located inside of Peter and Sirius is just seeing them the way you see a person you've turned to face. He plucks up his legs—he's unsteady on them—and turns to face the opposite direction. The blast of emotion fades. It returns when he spins back around and stares Peter down.
And what he feels—what Peter feels—
There's none of the anger or hatred or even indifference there that Sirius would have expected. Instead, Sirius feels overwhelmed by the rat's—is it anxiety he's feeling? Insecurity? Hurt? Perhaps it's a mix of all three.
He did that to Peter, he realizes. Sirius did that when he accused Peter of blindly following James—when he sent Snape down that tunnel and revealed Sirius's own true colors.
James follows next, but unlike Sirius and Peter, he doesn't shrink—he scales up, all the way up to the figure of a massive stag—and Peter's tension in Sirius's head suddenly has a whole lot of company. James's mind feels—empty. It's not that it's devoid of emotion; on the contrary, there's so much emotion that it almost drowns Peter's out—but there's something empty inside of James that's longing to be completed, and there's disbelief in there, too, and horror, and abandonment.
That's when Sirius realizes that James and Peter can feel him, too.
In the first moment, he concentrates his every thought on the overpowering guilt that he's carried with him every day for years—that's intensified so much in the weeks since the prank. He concentrates so hard on it that he almost, almost blocks Peter and James out of his head—but not so much that he doesn't notice the sudden shifts in both their minds as well. Peter's mood takes on a burst of sadness and—is that empathy?—while James's morphs into his own twin guilt to match Sirius's.
And then, then Sirius thinks about his friends—about how broken he's felt without any of the people he's lost, but especially James and Peter, and about how desperately he's been clinging to Moony and Marlene as his last salvations. He knows they can't read his thoughts—just his mood—but he tries, too, to picture how destroyed Moony looks every time either of them raises the possibility of him walking away from Sirius—every time they tell each other without believing it that they're going to get James and Peter back.
Something like love spills over from James's mood and into Sirius's own.
It's so strong that Sirius—
—Feels complete in a way he doesn't think he's felt since—since childhood, feeling so terrified of Mum and yet so safe and protected by Regulus and Andromeda, as if Mum would never and could never touch him again with them by his side. There's still guilt gnashing at the edges—on top of the usual, Sirius now also feels guilty that he's made James feel guilty—but the cracked, shattered corners just… fill.
For a blinding moment, he wishes desperately that Moony were here to feel this, too.
And then—Peter and James are gone.
Not physically, of course; they're still standing right here staring between each other and Sirius; but they're gone from Sirius's mind, and all he wants is to get them back and keep them there for the rest of time. Now that he knows what it's like to feel them—for them to be a part of him—
—But it wouldn't be sustainable, he reminds himself: Sirius is supposed to be learning how to be his own person, not finding ways to meld even closer to the people he doesn't know how to separate from. And still, the memory of what it felt like to be one with his friends—he thinks that's going to carry him through a lot of pain for a lot of years, or at least, he hopes it'll be enough to do so.
Peter scurries forward and climbs on top of Sirius's back, clenching his paws around the scruff of Sirius's neck; James folds his knees until he's collapsed on the ground where Sirius can dash around to his side and press their fur together.
They stay like that for a long, long time.
The mind meld, it turns out, is a one-off: it doesn't come back for any of the rest of the half-hour they spend out in the rain as Animagi, and it stays gone even when they pop back into human form for a moment just so they can change back, to see if they can get it back. Now that Sirius knows what James and Peter feel like, he doesn't think he can bear to go the rest of his life without ever getting that sensation back—but he's going to have to. He did it for his whole life before, he reminds himself, and he can do it again—
—And he'll be stronger this time, because this time, James and Peter will really know him. This time, there are no more secrets—no more insecurities.
"I didn't know," James says the second time they transform back into their human forms. He has to almost shout for Sirius and Peter to hear him over the rain. "I didn't know it felt that way to—to be you. If I knew—"
"It's okay," says Sirius. "You had no way of knowing, and I'm not… just because I feel guilty doesn't mean I'm not—trash."
"You're not trash," says James. It's very strange to be having this conversation out in the rain, not touching, as humans, as if the last half-hour never happened—as if all they've ever had to communicate have been words. "If I knew—I would have known that my Sirius never left us. You were always there; we just… couldn't recognize you."
"And Moony feels that way, too?" asks Peter. "Not the guilt, but the—the loneliness?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I think he does."
"He's going to be so jealous we got to have this," says James with a laugh. "He's never going to forgive us."
But Sirius thinks Moony can forgive a lot: after all, he's already forgiven Sirius, or at least Sirius thinks he has. "I never said I was sorry," he hollers over the rain, because it needs to be said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I was so reckless and cruel, and I'm sorry I put you in that position, James, and Peter, I…"
"It's okay," Peter yells back.
"No, it's not. You're my best mate in this world, Peter, and I shouldn't have talked to you the way I did, and I should have fought harder to make you understand—"
"Even if you had, we wouldn't have listened. We're good now, all right? Just—stick to stuff like Trip Jinxes the next time you want to pick on Snivellus, okay?"
Sirius laughs. It feels really damn good to laugh. "You know this means we're all going to need nicknames, right? Moony's been the only special one for far too long."
"We'll come up with them together," Peter promises.
"Like we should," James agrees.
And then—Sirius is lunging forward and has got his arms around their necks. He doesn't care if it's wet or they're cold or there's water filling up his shoes. He has his friends back—better than back—and maybe, just maybe, the rest of it will work out okay, too.
xx
END OF PART FIVE