Harry was practicing legilimency with Blaise, Lyra curled up in an armchair reading some runes book or other (not talking, because Blaise had bet that she couldn't not talk for a whole hour), when Sirius bounded into the main room of their flat. Mira was off somewhere doing business things, he thought. She had been working a lot, kept popping back over to Britain with Lyra's portal, too, doing things with the Department of Education — apparently there were going to be a few changes at Hogwarts next year. (He hadn't wanted to ask.) He had, in fact, just thought that the whole afternoon was unusually quiet.
That thought lasted until Sirius yanked the door open so hard Harry was pretty sure the handle left a dent in the wall behind it and pounced onto the sofa, grinning like a maniac. There was really no other word for it. Blaise barely got his feet out of the way in time.
"What are you all doing in here, just sitting around, being boring? You're too young to be so square! You're my godson, we should do something! Like...go to the beach! Have you ever swum in the Pacific? I haven't, which is just stupid, it's been just sitting there my entire life, and only a few miles away all summer. Ooh! Or we could go to Chinatown! Eggrolls, Harry! Or, I don't know, what do you even like to do? You have to do something for fun. How have we never talked about that? Flying? I know you play Quidditch, but have you ever seen stunt flying before? I'm sure there's an exhibition ring around here somewhere. Not sure about show times, but even if they're just practicing, it's outta sight, dude! Or, you said something about practicing dueling, right? I know there's a dueling club out by that wilderness reserve. What was it called again? Tep... Top... Fuck it, something with a 'T', anyway."
Harry had no words. Just...what the fuck? Blaise was, of course, taking this in stride, as he did everything, soft amusement radiating off of him. "I see someone's feeling a bit mad today," he murmured.
Harry was pretty sure Sirius didn't hear him, still babbling on about playing tourists and how he used to go exploring muggle London as a kid and cities were great, they should see more of it than just this flat. Not that it wasn't a nice flat, but— An orange spellglow hit him from behind, Harry hadn't heard the incantation over Sirius. He yelped, popping back to his dog form and jumping over to Lyra's chair, growling and snapping in her face in a way that made Harry want to be at the top of the nearest tree. Yes, she had just hexed him in the back, but... He just didn't really like dogs, okay, especially angry ones.
Lyra did not share his entirely reasonable discomfort with animals that could bite her face off growling two inches from her nose. "Ugh, dog breath!" She shoved him onto the floor, whereupon he turned back into a very angry wizard.
"What the fuck was that for, Trixie?"
She raised an eyebrow at him, but didn't tell him off for calling her Trixie. (Which supposedly only Mira was allowed to do, because...well, Harry's pet theory was that Lyra fancied Mira, but he didn't dare ask her for confirmation, because she'd probably straight-up admit it, and knowing that would be even weirder than just suspecting it.) She had apparently given up entirely on trying to make him call her Lyra. She had admitted, when he'd confronted her about it at the beginning of summer, that yes, Bellatrix Lestrange was her mother, or more accurately, her much older identical twin — and no, that didn't bother her, why would it, Bella was a fucking impressive witch, even if she was the evil twin. Bellatrix was her middle name, even, because of how the Blacks named their kids, so it wasn't like Sirius was even entirely wrong to call her Bella (or Trixie). She just preferred not to draw attention to the resemblance between herself and her...evil twin.
Of course, Harry was pretty sure that Sirius had started out calling her Bella in the first place because he'd legitimately confused the two of them. In typical Sirius fashion, rather than try to pretend that whole post-Azkaban paranoia and confusion thing hadn't happened, he had decided to play into it, teasing her about the resemblance pretty much constantly, even though he had to know by now that they weren't really the same person.
Harry was pretty sure she didn't actually mind, now that everyone knew about the relationship between herself and Bellatrix. (And yes, it did bother him that he'd been the last to find out — granted, no one had actually confirmed it for Sirius, but he totally knew.) In fact, he kind of suspected she was going out of her way to encourage him, because (for some reason that only made sense to her) she thought it was funny being compared to an insane murderer like Lestrange.
Blaise checked the time. "Thirty-seven minutes."
Lyra ignored him. "Just encouraging you to focus, Siri, darling." Her tone and the smirk that accompanied her words made Harry think she was quoting someone, a private joke of some kind.
Sure enough, "Are you sure you're not Bellatrix?" Sirius asked, every inch of his body language projecting overly-obvious suspicion. "Because that sounds exactly like something my mother used to say all the time."
"I heard it from Cissy."
"A likely story..."
"Oh, for fuck's sake!" Lyra snapped, trying to sound outraged, but not quite managing it, as she couldn't quite seem to get the smirk off her face. She slid her left sleeve up, baring her forearm. "There are some distinguishing features between the two of us, you know."
"Pretty sure she could hide the Mark if she wanted to."
"Pretty sure she wouldn't bother."
"Unless she was trying to convince me that she wasn't herself."
There was really nowhere to go once the teasing reached that point — Sirius could claim anything Lyra did (or didn't do) as evidence that she was really Lestrange trying to convince him that she wasn't. "Are you trying to annoy me enough that I'll practice dueling with you?"
"No, of course not!" Sirius said, very emphatically. Then he grinned. "Is it working?"
"Kind of, yeah." Lyra closed her book with a sharp snap, though she clearly wasn't actually annoyed. "Though I know kicking your rusty old arse isn't going to do a bloody thing to convince you I'm not her."
"HA!" Sirius nearly shouted, a delighted bark of laughter. "Not today, Trixie! Today's one of those days where everything goes my way."
Lyra snorted. "Yeah, we'll see about that. Third blood and nothing you can't heal?"
"And no Unforgivables."
"Oh, right, public gym. But how am I supposed to be Bellatrix if I'm not allowed to use the Cruciatus?"
"You're definitely still Bellatrix even if— Wait, can you actually cast it? Aren't you like, twelve?"
She flipped him off. "Did you want a demonstration?" she offered, grinning, a teasing lilt to her tone.
Sirius shuddered. "No. Do you know how much that thing hurts?"
"Of course I do," she drawled, disturbingly matter-of-fact about it. Harry was far more bothered by her being kidnapped and tortured at the end of the year than she was, which, well, there was obviously something wrong with that girl. He still wasn't entirely convinced she was human — even if she was Lestrange's clone, clearly that just meant Lestrange wasn't human either. "But after is even better when you're a little mad. Like, better enough that it's borderline worth it."
Okay, that was just— Is she being serious about that? he thought at Blaise, because he honestly couldn't tell.
Dark amusement accompanied his response. I did tell you she likes to play rough.
I think you're fucking with me. Didn't you tell me that curse can literally melt someone's brain?
Yeah, but that takes a while, and no, I'm not. Sirius thinks she's exaggerating a little, just to fuck with him. I'm getting the impression that she's not wrong about the afterglow being better during a manic episode, but it's still definitely not worth it.
Harry tried not to get all uncomfortable about Blaise using legilimency so casually. He could probably have reached out and confirmed that just as easily — mind magic had gotten kind of scarily easy since he'd started having those weird Voldemort dream-vision things, which Snape had confirmed meant he was actually coming into the talent, now — but... It bothered him a little, how easy it was to just get in someone's head. Made him feel kind of...dirty, compromising people's privacy like that. Even when he used legilimency to talk to Blaise, like he just had, he tried not to pick up anything other than their conversation.
Yeah, well, it's not like I can do anything without him noticing, he could stop me if he wanted, just doesn't care. Thinks it's funny, the three of us having a conversation Lyra isn't privy to.
"A, that was such a Bellatrix thing to say, and B, there are spells to make you come without having to do the whole every-nerve-on-fire thing first, you know."
Lyra's teasing smirk fell away in obvious incomprehension. "Wait, what?"
"What, what? I find it hard to believe that Zee hasn't at least mentioned that sort of kinky shite at one point or another."
Harry, who actually was following the conversation — and somehow wasn't even surprised there were spells like that — flushed at the idea of Mirabella teaching them to Lyra. Or anyone. He knew they all considered it weirdly prudish and muggle of him to be so uncomfortable talking about sex, but he didn't care, there were some things he just didn't want to think about, including mums having sex.
Blaise sniggered. You know Mira doesn't care if you think about her— Harry shoved him out of his head. (Blaise, unlike Harry, had no concept of personal space when it came to legilimency, and had a habit of eavesdropping on Harry whenever Harry didn't actively stop him. In hindsight, he thought he should have expected that, the way Blaise just physically sprawled all over everyone all the time, too.)
"Mira thinks sex is better when there's actual skill involved. Orgasm-inducing charms are cheating." (The fact that Mira and Blaise clearly talked about sex fairly regularly was one of the weirdest, most uncomfortable things about their relationship.) "And I'd prefer to practice dancing over dueling, if anyone cares."
Both Lyra and Sirius turned to look at him, their expressions as they considered the not running-off-to-beat-the-shite-out-of-each-other option eerily similar — slightly surprised and maybe a little annoyed. Then Lyra shrugged. "Fine with me. Want to learn how to salsa, Siri?"
"I already know how to salsa, Ellie Adams taught me back in...what summer did we... Ooh! I know what we should do! Dancing! Muggle dancing!"
"Muggles salsa," Blaise interjected.
"No, I mean, not— Have you ever been to a disco? Any of you?"
"I hate to break it to you, Sirius, but nobody discos anymore unless they're doing it ironically."
"We should go! We have to go! It'll be great!"
"We're a little young to get through the door, in case you hadn't noticed." Blaise, as generally happened when Lyra got like this, seemed to be playing the voice of reason. Not that he would actually try to stop them if he couldn't talk them out of it.
Sirius was briefly stymied, but Lyra grinned. "Aging potions are a thing, Blaise."
"Also, it's three in the afternoon, pretty sure nightclubs are only open at night."
Hey, I got them to not go beat the shite out of each other somewhere, didn't I?
Harry shoved Blaise out of his head again. And then immediately re-established the connection, because Sirius said, "So we have time to figure out where we're going, have dinner, maybe see if we can score some Dragonsbreath — ooh! or Wyrm! I would love to see Bellatrix on Wyrm, that would be fucking hilarious!"
So Harry had to ask, Do I even want to know what those are?
Dragonsbreath is an hallucinogen, usually you smoke it. Wyrm is a controlled potion that mimics the experience of an empath. Usually the recreational version is tweaked so you only pick up the positive emotions. Yes, they're both illegal, no, they're not really that dangerous — I'm pretty sure there was Dragonsbreath at the Hufflepuffs' post-exams party.
Harry squirmed. He wasn't entirely sure he was comfortable with the idea of Sirius or Lyra — neither of whom were the most stable at the best of times — running off to do the magical equivalent of some kind of party drugs. Not that he really knew much of anything about drugs, he just... The idea of making it so you couldn't trust your own senses, or so you couldn't think straight, or didn't really have control of yourself, on purpose, was just...why?
"I'm pretty sure that Wyrm and aging potions don't mix well." (Because of course Lyra would know that off the top of her head — unless it was just an excuse not to take it.) "What does one wear to a nightclub?"
"Uh..." Sirius pulled his wand, started conjuring illusions of a handful of girls — they had to be people he actually knew back in the Seventies, because Harry was positive that was his mother, wearing some kind of weird scrunchy blouse that left her shoulders and waist bare, and a skirt that covered less than Mirabella's obscenely tiny housecoat. (That was just bloody uncomfortable.) "Things like this. Or, well, they did. I guess we should probably look into that. To the shops!"
"Yeah, alright, just let me grab some shoes. You have muggle money?"
Sirius patted down the pockets of his robes, frowned, and left the room, presumably in search of his wallet, effortlessly dodging the flying sandals Lyra had summoned from the entryway on his way out the door.
"Put on muggle clothes while you're at it!" she shouted after him. She was already wearing muggle clothes — what she considered to be a scandalously revealing vest and the same sort of shorts the muggle girls wore around here. Which wouldn't actually scandalise anyone other than like, Malfoy's mum, but she had a point, he didn't think he'd ever seen any of the purebloods at school with their shoulders uncovered. Or their knees. He'd just never noticed until she pointed it out.
"I thought you hated shopping," Harry said, completely unenthused with the idea of following Lyra and a disturbingly Lyra-ish Sirius around a muggle shopping centre for God knew how long.
"I do, but I've never been to a muggle tailor, and I don't like shopping because it's boring and tedious and people are generally annoying. But in case you haven't noticed, Siri's a bit mad today, so I'm pretty sure it's not going to be boring and tedious, and having company to mock stupid people generally makes them less annoying. Besides, I never get to see the Black Madness from this side. This is great."
"Uh huh." Is the Black Madness contagious?
Technically? No, I don't think so...
But... Because Harry was pretty sure there was a but at the end of that thought.
"Yeah, give it a few hours," Blaise said. "It starts to wear on you, trying to keep up."
"Maybe for you—"
Blaise sent a wave of resigned exasperation at him. Yeah, I thought she might say something like that. But Lyra's always a little mad. Sure, she generally has enough self-control to not act like it, but have you ever seen her just sit around not doing anything for more than ten seconds or so? It's not out of the question that she'll decide that if Sirius doesn't have to act like a normal person, she doesn't either.
We're so fucked.
"—but you don't have to come, I assume you already have something for you and Harry to wear. We'll come back and get you when it starts getting dark. You do want to come to the dancing part, don't you?"
Probably. Blaise grinned. "Wouldn't miss it."
Harry didn't actually think he did want to go, but he definitely didn't want to get left behind while everyone else went out partying, either. He nodded, somewhat reluctantly, just as Sirius reappeared in the doorway in jeans and a faded Rolling Stones t-shirt that he might have actually bought in the Seventies.
"Aren't you ready yet?"
"You were the one who was holding us up," Lyra said, skipping across the room to link her arm through Sirius's, looking for all the world like his teenage daughter, dragging him off to the mall.
Of course, that image was ruined almost immediately, as Harry was pretty sure he heard Sirius suggest that they try to find a muggle drug dealer and buy some ecstasy just before the door to the flat slammed behind them.
Blaise started giggling almost immediately.
"What the hell is so funny?"
"Nothing, just. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to get themselves arrested at some point tonight, but at least it will keep them entertained."
Harry groaned. "I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to get us arrested before the end of the night. And then spend a couple of hours laughing at us before breaking us out, or something."
Blaise just laughed harder.
Well, they hadn't managed to get anyone arrested, yet, though Harry wasn't entirely sure how. Lyra had tried to explain at one point that luck and magic and the whole damn universe were on their side on a night like this, but Lyra was also noticeably...not sober. (Granted, not very noticeably, just...kind of softer, and she didn't make as much sense as usual when she was talking.) Was there a word for being drunk and high at the same time? Because she'd been getting free drinks all night, and she and Sirius had definitely taken some of the...whatever Sirius had offered him on the way to the concert that someone told Lyra about sometime between arriving at the club and Sirius starting a fight with someone who objected to the way he and Blaise were dancing.
(Which was, admittedly, very...suggestive. Harry had no idea if Sirius was actually trying to fuck with his head about Blaise — he should never have asked him for advice on that, it hadn't helped, and now Sirius knew to tease him about it — or if he was just enjoying pretending to be twenty-five again, but watching the two of them was making this whole evening not only kind of weird and uncomfortable, but also incredibly frustrating.)
And then there had been the afterparty, with the hookah and the brownies (Harry had had half of one, and his head still felt weird) and more alcohol and Sirius disappearing to hook up with some girl he'd been chatting up and Blaise trying to teach him how to 'crowd surf' — using legilimency to get a feel for the energy of a group and letting it carry you away, kind of like getting lost in someone else's thoughts, but much more...generalised. He was pretty sure he hadn't done it right, because the scene was pretty mellow, but Harry just kept getting more uncomfortable. Especially since whatever those pills were had made Lyra weirdly touchy-feely, like Blaise when there were dementors around. But only with the three of them. (Blaise had caught her trying to break the fingers of some creep that grabbed her arse as they were leaving the concert.) Mostly Sirius, actually, whenever he wasn't obviously trying to pick up someone else (and sometimes even when he was, which weirdly didn't seem to be a deterrent). Which was...mostly just really uncomfortable. Because, well...
They were cousins, right? First cousins. (Once removed, if Lestrange counted, but Harry really didn't think she did — technically she and Lyra had the same DNA, which meant Lyra's biological father and Sirius's mother were brother and sister.) And they might look the same age now — he, Blaise, and Lyra had aged themselves up about ten years, and Sirius had de-aged about the same — but that didn't change the fact that he was still twenty years older than her, really, it just made them look like brother and sister instead of father and daughter. And had he mentioned they were cousins? Because they seemed to have forgotten that, all teasing and joking and flat out flirting with each other, sharing cigarettes and whispering and giggling behind people's backs. (Or, as Blaise suggested, just forgot that they weren't supposed to do that sort of thing in public. Apparently Black incest jokes were a thing, like dumb blonde jokes. Except more based in reality.)
And even if they weren't cousins, and Sirius wasn't twenty years older than Lyra, Harry was still pretty sure he wouldn't be comfortable with the two of them being like this with each other, because if he didn't know any better (and he wasn't sure he did), he'd say they were competing with each other to see which of them could come up with the stupidest thing to do.
Aside from starting fights and the almost breaking fingers incident and dragging Harry into a mosh pit (which, Lyra was insane, that wasn't fun at all) and the drugs — where the hell did Sirius get those, anyway? — Lyra had spent over an hour using wandless magic to convince a bunch of stoned groupies that she had some kind of telekinetic powers (which...technically), and Sirius had suggested that they steal a bloody motorbike and go for a joyride. The only reason he hadn't done it was because only two of them would be able to fit on a single motorbike, and Sirius was the only one who knew how to drive one.
And then Sirius had brought up the ocean again, and Lyra had hailed a cab — though she refused to get in it, insisted she'd catch them up later — and before he knew it, Harry was standing on a beach, waves washing over his feet, watching the two of them and Blaise strip to go skinny-dipping by moonlight. It probably wasn't the most surreal thing he'd ever seen, but it kind of seemed like it, in the moment.
He was suddenly aware that this was the furthest he'd ever been from home, and struck by how...normal and not normal it was, all at once. There wasn't any magic magic to it — well, other than Sirius popping into his dog form to frolic in the waves — but for a brief, glorious moment, he'd thought he'd understood what Lyra meant, when she said that the entire universe was on their side tonight. Like he was exactly where he was meant to be, in the moment.
And then the police had shown up on the road behind them, lights flashing, shouting about this being a private beach, and how they shouldn't be swimming at night or without a lifeguard, anyway, and they'd grabbed their clothes and tore off down the shoreline, completely starkers. Harry had, of course, run along with them, though he had the advantage of still wearing his trousers, rather than trying to carry them. Blaise discovered, when the police finally stopped chasing them and they stopped to get dressed, that he'd lost his somewhere along the way, had to have Sirius duplicate Harry's.
Of course, by the time they stopped and got dressed and decided they should probably try to find their way back to their building, if only because Sirius was starving to death, it was far too late to find a cab, and they were well and truly lost. They were also barefoot — none of them had grabbed their shoes, back at the beach — the three of them still had wet hair, Lyra and Sirius were still insane and probably still under the influence of all the shite they'd taken over the course of the night, and they were all dressed like they'd just left the club. Harry was tired and had a headache he was going to blame on that brownie, and this was, he thought, a terrible state to be wandering around some part of a strange city that was starting to remind him uncomfortably of Knockturn Alley.
He was pretty sure that woman Sirius had been flirting with, when he said he was going to ask for directions, was a hooker.
So of course this was the perfect time to encounter a group of half a dozen rowdy guys, maybe a little older than seventh-years, laughing and passing around a bottle of some kind of liquor, reminding Harry of Dudley and his gang — or what they'd probably be like in a few more years. Except Harry was pretty sure they were part of a real gang, not just a bunch of spoilt middle-class kids from the suburbs.
They obviously spotted Sirius and Lyra, who had managed to get some distance ahead of Harry and Blaise and were now waiting for them to catch up — they had been dancing and skipping and racing ahead from one corner to the next just because they could — right around the time Harry spotted them.
"Hey, hey!" one of them said, smacking another in the arm. "Look, cuzz," he said, pointing at them, across the street. There was some laughing and a few exchanges that were too quiet for Harry to catch, and then the whole group of them starting meandering across the road, all false casualness and bravado. They spread themselves out to form a sort of threatening half-circle around the two Blacks, cutting off an easy escape.
"Oh, fuck," Harry muttered, his feet already carrying him toward the scene a bit faster, reacting to the sight of his friends in danger without any conscious input from his brain.
Before he could get more than two steps away, Blaise caught his arm. "Maïa's right, your hero complex is ridiculous. You should work on that."
"What? Come on, Blaise, we can't just— We have to—"
Blaise actually stopped moving completely at that. "We have to what? Lyra and Sirius can take care of themselves, we'd just get in the way."
Which...was a point. Harry didn't really know what he would do, he had far more experience with fighting giant snakes and teenage bullies than grown men intent on robbing him, but he just— They had to do something!
"You— It's six on two, and Lyra and Sirius are drunk! It's not like they're just going to hand over their wallets or whatever!" For one thing, they didn't have their wallets — they'd given them to Harry to hold onto while they went swimming — but even if they did, he was sure they'd think it was much more fun to start a fight when they were outnumbered three to one and probably get the shite beaten out of themselves, or worse — this was America, they could get shot! He grabbed Blaise's arm, started dragging him toward the developing fight.
One of the guys said something, Harry caught the flash of a blade in his hand, though not the words. Whatever it was, the Blacks apparently thought it was hilarious.
"They're not that drunk. Or at least, Sirius isn't, I assume Lyra's not either. Just let them handle it."
"They're going to get themselves killed, Blaise!"
"Oh, relax, they have it under control. If it gets really hairy, I'm sure they both know more than enough incapacitating magic to save themselves. We, on the other hand, actually might get killed if we draw too much attention, so keep it down, yeah?"
"What?!" Harry hissed, trying to keep his voice down, but seriously?! "Why wouldn't they use magic to defend themselves?!"
"Well, as best I can tell — Sirius is a little muddled at the moment — pretty much the same reason Lyra doesn't use magic when she's hunting spiders: it's too easy."
"What are you—"
Blaise reached out, guiding him toward Sirius's mind, pulling him a bit further in than he would have gone himself. It was disorienting enough that he stumbled in his own body, Blaise pulling him off the pavement to sit on the steps of a derelict building. He felt a flutter of amusement from Sirius, though he couldn't quite tell if it was directed at him, or both him and Blaise.
What the hell are we doing, Blaise? Harry thought, allowing his discomfort and a bit of irritation to seep into the thought.
Oh, relax, Harry. He knows how to occlude, he'll stop me if I try to go too far. But we wouldn't want to distract him, anyway, so we're just eavesdropping.
Eavesdropping meant maintaining superficial contact, kind of similar to 'casual legilimency', just picking up the person's immediate thoughts and emotions, but focused 'outward' to see and hear what they did.
Harry sent a rather resigned feeling of acceptance to Blaise. That was fine, he supposed. It wasn't like he didn't want to see what was going on over there. He just... Never mind, he was being stupid, focusing on his issues with legilimency when there was an actual problem developing a block and a half away.
"Aww, look, Siri, he wants to play with us!" Lyra giggled, a nasty-looking knife appearing in her own hand.
"Really, Bella? You brought your dueling knife to go clubbing? Where were you even keeping that thing?"
"Why wouldn't I bring it?" she asked, ignoring the question of where she'd kept it, though Harry was pretty sure the answer was in that weird shadow dimension she'd been playing around with for months, now.
"Hey! I said take off the necklace, bitch!" the guy with the knife snapped, obviously unconcerned about the weapon she'd drawn from nowhere.
It's charmed, Blaise thought at him. See how it's all fuzzy around the edges, kind of blurry? That's an unobtrusive charm of some sort. A really good one, if it's also masking their conversation about it.
"And the earrings," another added.
Sirius was distracted trying to decipher the tattoo on his neck, but not too distracted to give him a mad grin. "And I said if you don't bugger off, we're going to be forced to kick your arses halfway back to Britain," Sirius said. It actually sounded rather as though he hoped they wouldn't.
"And I said that sounded like fun," Lyra interjected.
"Yes, because you're a bloody psycho."
As though you have any room to talk, Harry thought at him, before he could stop himself.
Another flutter of amusement was directed at him, though Sirius was obviously more focused on the guy with a blue bandanna off to his left. Something about the way he was holding himself, Harry thought, though he wasn't quite sure what.
"We might be insane, Siri, but we're not psychotic. Oh, shut up, Eris, I'm not that floaty."
What the fuck?
I have no idea. Blaise's thought was tinged with a distinct note of exasperation. Maybe they actually did get their hands on some Dragonsbreath.
Yeah, Harry was just going to file that away on his list of weird things about Lyra he had thought would be explained when he figured out who she really was, but hadn't been. Whatever.
Sirius sniggered. "Not psychotic, says the girl talking to the voices in her head."
"Did I say that aloud? Oops." She could barely keep a straight face long enough to get the words out, but before Sirius could follow up with another question, the guy with the bandanna, the one Sirius had been watching out of the corner of his eye, lifted the front of his shirt, revealing the handle of a pistol tucked into his belt.
"Stop fucking around," he said coolly, his tone confident and self-assured, as though no one in their right mind would continue to resist an attempted mugging when badly outnumbered by armed men, and one of them had a gun.
Not, of course, that either Lyra or Sirius was in their right mind. Ever. "Hey, Siri, should I teach them why you don't bring a gun to a knife fight?"
Sirius started laughing, even as the guy with the gun said, "It's the other way around, sweetheart — don't bring a knife to a gun fight."
"Not if I'm only two feet away from you." Her knife was at his neck faster than blinking, its outline clear and sharp, now, whatever charm she'd had on it broken as she drew too much attention to it. She froze momentarily, as though to make her point, then smirked and drew a thin red line under the guy's ear before she withdrew, standing in the same spot as before with a cocky tilt to her hips and a shit-eating grin.
The rest of them pulled their weapons, then -— only one other had a gun, but two more had knives, and one had a heavy-looking set of brass knuckles. Every one of them looked ready to kill them for the couple bits of jewelry Lyra had on her, or if either of them so much as moved.
"Really, Trixie?"
"Don't worry, I may not be Other Bella, but I'm pretty sure we can take them."
Sirius sighed, abruptly switched languages, to Welsh, Harry thought. Which was kind of annoying, Harry didn't speak Welsh any more than the Americans did, and he wasn't nearly as good as Blaise when it came to picking up the meaning behind words he didn't understand, or just communicating without words in general. There was a brief exchange during which Lyra rolled her eyes and Sirius's tone went very stern, but it was quickly cut off by one of the guys with a knife deciding he didn't like the way they were clearly planning something, and rushed Sirius from his left.
What— Harry began.
He didn't even need to finish the thought before Blaise responded. He told her not to use magic, and she said of course she wouldn't, didn't need to. Then he added that they shouldn't kill anyone, either.
It was kind of hard to tell what happened next, since everything was from Sirius's perspective, and Harry wasn't great at interpreting what he was seeing, he'd never tried to eavesdrop on someone in a bloody knife fight before. But he thought Sirius had sort of stepped aside and turned, let the guy's stab at him go wide. He got a momentary glimpse of the one Lyra had cut — the leader? — grabbing her arm to control her knife, trying to pull her into some kind of hold before there were brass knuckles swinging at his head. He ducked, elbowed the guy behind him in the nose — Harry hadn't even realised he was there — and kicked another in the knee, sending him to the ground, though he rolled back to his feet almost immediately.
Harry wasn't sure, but he thought most of them were focused on Sirius. He probably looked like the bigger threat — he was a bit taller than Lyra, though still shorter than most of their attackers, and the age potions had started to wear off a while ago, so he definitely looked older and tougher.
But, well, Lyra was vicious.
The guy with the gun managed to take her knife from her, holding her nearly off the ground by the arm and prising it from her fingers with his other hand, but this left his weapon undefended at his waist — obviously he couldn't try to shoot Sirius with his friends all around, which made him and the other guy with a gun (who had his out, but clearly couldn't find a safe target) pretty much useless. Lyra grabbed it and chucked it away down the street, then grabbed his ear and twisted.
The man shrieked, dropping her as he slapped a hand to the side of his head, then dropping to the ground as she kneed him in the balls. She followed up with a kick in the head, after which he stopped moving.
"I said don't kill anyone, Bella!" Sirius complained, grabbing a knife-man's wrist and chopping him in the throat before twisting him into a hold which, when he immediately tried to wrench himself free, broke his arm. He retreated with a pained howl.
"I didn't. I don't think," she said, throwing a doubtful glance at the guy who was, at the very least, unconscious, sidestepping a thrust from another knife, spinning around to sweep the legs out from under one of Sirius's assailants. He tripped, stumbled off the pavement and into the street.
Sirius caught sight of blood on Lyra's hands as she reclaimed her weapon, settled into a crouch facing the other guy with a gun, keeping the two of his friends who were still fighting Sirius behind her so that he wouldn't shoot. One of them managed to get in a solid blow to his kidneys, sending him to his knees and thoroughly distracting him from his insane cousin's fight. He fended off a kick from one, grabbed his trouser cuff and yanked him off balance, though that move left him unable to avoid the brass knuckles aimed at his ribs and the follow-up blow to the gut.
The air was knocked out of him like being hit by a bludger, but before the guy could finish him off, the one Lyra had tripped lunged at her. She feinted, dodged, and shoved him into Knuckles, whose head hit the wall behind them hard enough that Sirius judged him to be out for the count. The gunman she had been concentrating on — who had long since realised he wasn't going to be able to shoot her without hitting anyone else and holstered his weapon — took advantage of her momentary distraction to get an arm around her neck, throttling her as he struggled to get the gun — now caught between them — back into his hand.
Sirius rolled back to his feet to face the two remaining knife-wielders, who finally seemed to have realised the value of coordination, circling around him, getting ready to attack from opposite angles. Said coordination failed almost immediately, however, as one of them was distracted by Gun Two screaming. Understandable — Sirius couldn't help but glance over himself. Lyra had stabbed him in the leg, a non-fatal wound to the right quadricep, and used the distraction to sink her teeth into the arm which had been wrapped tightly around her throat. He forgot about the gun, grabbing her by the hair with his other hand, trying to pull her off.
The knife guy who hadn't been distracted thought to use Sirius's momentary distraction against him, closed quickly, using his blade as though he actually had some experience with the weapon. He was forced to fend it off with his hands, taking a long slice along his right forearm, but getting the knife out of the way long enough to find his solar plexus with a quick jab. He dropped his weapon and fell back, the breath knocked out of him, as his friend realised he was supposed to be attacking as well.
Sirius snatched up the fallen knife, fell to circling the kid — he seemed younger than the others, less experienced — who was obviously leery of closing now that Sirius was armed as well.
There was a wet snap behind him, the kid's eyes going wide as Lyra's gunman screamed bloody murder. Sirius took the opportunity to duck in, catch him with an uppercut, knocked him right out.
"I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's safe to approach, now," Blaise said calmly, offering Harry a hand back to his feet before tucking his thumbs into his conjured pockets and strolling toward the carnage.
"Holy shit," Harry muttered. It had seemed like a lot going on from Sirius's perspective, but looking at it like this... Somehow the aftermath looked worse than it had in the moment.
Three of the guys were out cold, one collapsed against a building holding his broken arm, covered in vomit, clearly in shock. One, disarmed, had his hands in the air, surrendering to Sirius. The last one, the one that had tried to strangle Lyra, had a broken leg. He was trying to pull himself down the road with his arms and his one good leg, whimpering as she walked slowly alongside him, giggling and kicking his gun just out of his reach with every step.
Sirius sent the one who had surrendered running before turning to survey the damage. "Well, that was fun," he said, grinning, before he noticed what Lyra was doing. "Bella, stop playing with your food. I sent that kid to get help for his friends, it shouldn't take that long before the muggle Aurors show up."
"But Siri, he tried to break my neck," Lyra whined, kicking the gun away again and hopping over the man's arm as he made a swipe at her ankles.
"Yes, and?" he said, then cast some kind of spell at the one whose arm he'd broken.
"And I think that makes him an acceptable target."
Harry kind of agreed, but teasing him like that was a little fucked up. Like, even more fucked up than he generally expected from Lyra. Especially since if he actually did manage to get the gun back, he'd probably kill her.
"Acceptable target?" Sirius repeated, before Harry could decide exactly how to explain how fucked up this was, as he bent over to make sure the one she'd kicked in the head was still breathing. (He was, Harry had already checked.) "He's a bloody muggle, and you've already broken his knee. Now you're just being sadistic."
"Yes, and?" she said mockingly, then sighed. Pouted. "No one ever lets me have any fun." She stuck her tongue out at Sirius before casually stomping on the gunman's hand (Harry winced, his stomach turning — that definitely hadn't been necessary), rendering him unable to use his weapon, even if he had managed to find it after she kicked it into the gutter. (It might have gone down a storm drain.) He screamed, pulling his hand protectively to his chest, glaring up at them and muttering curses which were entirely ignored.
"Yeah, okay, Bellatrix."
"You keep comparing me to her as though it's an insult," she noted. "But I really don't think it is."
Even though Harry had already kind of known that, her blasé admission made him even more uncomfortable than seeing her crush that guy's hand when she'd obviously already thoroughly won their fight. When they'd talked about it — kind of — a few weeks ago, he'd pointed out that Lestrange was infamous for torturing people into insanity and had a body count that might have been higher than Riddle's by the end of the war, not to mention she was a complete fanatic and had gone to Azkaban voluntarily rather than forsake Riddle. She had pointed out that 'Bella' was also responsible for developing stable time travel and organising a goblin rebellion as a distraction back in '75. (And also that Riddle had had her under some kind of mind control, which just...seriously? Nobody believed the Imperius Defense!) He'd told her that no matter how brilliant she was, Lestrange was still fucking insane, and just evil, at which point she had started laughing at him because, "Evil is a matter of perspective, and you do realise your mother was Lily Evans, right?" Which had pretty much ended the conversation, since Harry had gotten pissed off because Lily hadn't been a saint, okay, he knew that, but she hadn't tortured people to death, making that comparison just...wasn't okay.
The point was, Lestrange really wasn't the sort of person anyone should want to be compared to, even for the shock value, and Harry was definitely not okay with the way Lyra...kind of seemed to look up to her, in a way. Not that he had any idea what to do about that.
Sirius apparently thought she was just saying that in a bid to get him to knock it off, like he was only doing it to bug her, and he'd stop if he knew it wasn't. "Nice try. I'll stop when you admit you're really her."
"As amusing as this is," Blaise interrupted, "we really should get out of here before anyone else shows up."
"Ugh, fine."
"Yeah, alright, just let me..." Sirius pulled his wand, cast a sleeping charm at the one Lyra had been taunting, followed by...some kind of healing spell, Harry thought, on his knee. The same thing he'd done to the shocky one with the broken arm.
"What was that?" Harry asked.
"Well I wasn't just going to leave them with shattered joints, was I? Those never heal right without magic."
Which was...good of him? Really, Sirius confused Harry a lot of the time. He didn't have a problem with breaking someone's knee in the first place, but did have a problem with leaving it that way? Somehow Harry kind of felt that he should either want to entirely avoid doing shite like breaking knees, or else not care at all. The way he treated Lyra was similarly weird. He compared her to a psychotic murderer pretty much constantly — and not always entirely as a joke, either, like just now — but it...didn't actually seem to bother him, Harry guessed. And he...kind of thought it should? It definitely bothered him. But even if she did remind Sirius of Lestrange, he still obviously enjoyed her company. (And Harry wasn't even going to touch the weird incest-y flirting thing.)
Lyra scoffed at him. "They wouldn't have healed you if they'd managed to shoot you."
"Don't care," Sirius replied lightly.
"Should we, um...do something? To, you know, get rid of any evidence?" Not that Harry knew what those things might be, but he suspected Sirius did, at least. He had been an Auror, back in the War. (As well as a vigilante operating outside the law, before he was wrongfully imprisoned while trying to carry out a revenge killing and eventually became an escaped convict. Harry suspected he hadn't been a very good Auror, at least when it came to enforcing the law. But he probably did know how to break the law and not get caught.)
"I guess we could obliviate them," Blaise suggested, though he didn't seem too concerned about it.
Lyra groaned. "We didn't actually use magic on them, perplexus is probably enough for them to dismiss anything weird we might have said."
"Sleeping charms and healing spells won't trigger a law enforcement alert, but memory modification would," Sirius informed them. "Same for anything to obscure our identities. If you want to compel them to keep anything weird they might have seen or heard to themselves, that's fine, but the magical authorities are much more likely to track us down than the muggle Aurors. Pretty sure an attempted mugging gone wrong will never get high-enough up in the muggle law-enforcement system for them to refer it to their magical counterparts."
"Especially since we didn't kill any of them," Lyra added.
"Yeah, okay, but what about, like, fingerprints? And Sirius is bleeding, they could get DNA..." Granted, everything Harry knew about forensics was things he'd seen on telly, but he was pretty sure that was something to be concerned about. That one guy had probably pulled out some of Lyra's hair, too...
Blaise shrugged. "Yeah, if it was mages, we'd have to worry about blood tracking, but the muggles wouldn't have anything to compare it to." It's fine, Harry. It'll be much more suspicious if we scrub the scene than if we just leave it, he added silently, reassurance almost overwhelming in his mental 'tone', which was not only slightly patronising, but also made Harry wonder exactly how he was so confident about that. It was...not entirely unexpected that Lyra would have opinions on how to best cover up evidence of her crimes — she did somehow manage to get him out of Hogsmeade and make it look like he'd bloody died — but when had Blaise ever done anything he'd need to cover up?
"Are you going to compel them not to talk?"
"Nah, they were trying to mug them, and I'm pretty sure the blue means they're Crips? So I kind of doubt they'll actually go running to the cops, anyway. If we just go, it should be fine."
Harry wasn't entirely sure about that, it felt...wrong, just leaving, like they were leaving themselves exposed. He sort of wanted to just compel them himself — compulsions were easy (scarily so, almost) — but he had never tried to set a compulsion to last longer than a couple of minutes, and he was pretty sure this wasn't the best time to try to start experimenting with that. And, well...he did have to admit that the rest of them seemed to have a better idea what they were talking about. "Fine, let's just get out of here, then."
Blaise nodded, but while they'd been talking, Lyra and Sirius had gotten distracted again.
"Do you really expect me to believe that you were raised by a cursebreaker who's been dead longer than you've been alive? Pull the other one, Bella."
"Do you really expect me to care whether you believe me or not?"
"Come on, let's go back to the flat," Blaise said, throwing an arm around Lyra's shoulders and interrupting their bickering.
She rolled her eyes. "Fine, fine. Which way did that whore say it was, again?"
"I'm sure you know I meant let's go directly back to the flat."
"I'm not sure I did. Aren't you having fun? I'm having fun." She grinned at them, as peppy and delighted with herself as ever, despite her quickly-developing black eye and the blood that had gotten on her face when she bit that goon.
Not for the first time, Harry asked himself why he hung out with her. Insanity was clearly contagious.
"No. Harry and I are tired, and Harry hasn't been having fun since we got to the club. Sirius still hasn't gotten dinner, and if we're not back by sun-up Mira will be annoyed with you. Don't you have plans in the morning, anyway?"
Lyra pouted up at him. "That's like, four hours from now."
"Yes, and some of us would like to spend those four hours sleeping. Please take us back."
"Ugh, fine. Siri, bring Harry," she said, wrapping an arm around Blaise's waist and turning on her heel, disappearing with a crack.
Harry stared at the spot they'd vanished from for a long moment. He wasn't entirely able to keep the outrage from his voice when he finally found his words again. "Are you telling me we could have just apparated back at any time? What the fuck—!"
Sirius just grinned at him. "Well...yes? But we were on an adventure."
"I'm never going out with you again," he informed his godfather. "Never."
It still amuses me that Leigha's Sirius and Bellatrix are basically the same person, but just had different life experiences. —Lysandra
This one seems a bit sketchy and minimalist, even for me, but I did manage to hit all the points I wanted to as far as character dynamics and Harry's legilimency training go, and it is just a summer scene, so I'm going to call it good enough and move on.
There were a couple of fun bits I didn't quite manage to work in, though. The original ending was to have Blaise just give the muggers a few hundred dollars before they left, tell Harry he thought they owed them something for their troubles, because Lyra and Sirius may have traumatised them for life. Also, please assume that after they dropped off Harry and Blaise, Sirius and Lyra did go out and steal a motorbike. The reason Lyra doesn't like cars is that they're moving iron boxes with enough large holes in them to do weird, disorienting things to the currents of ambient magic inside. Motorbikes, on the other hand, are fucking great.
And, for anyone who is interested, Sirius starting a fight involved a lot of confusion about the words fag and bum. Because Brits.
—Leigha
