Interlude: Damned and Divine
He never thought he'd say this, but there's an unfortunate side-effect to having sex.
He watches it in effect right now. Her blue eyes blink up at him, the haze of drugged pleasure slowly clearing. A frown furrows her smooth white brow.
"Black?" she says, as though disbelieving her senses. Her gaze scans the room. They are lying on James's bed, still breathing heavily and covered in sweat, his bare chest pressing against her breasts as he supports himself over her. He is still lodged inside her.
Her breaths begin to come more shallowly as she panics. "What the –"
Sirius sighs. He has to deal with this every single time. Annoyingly, something about physical lovemaking makes the manufactured love wear off. He rolls away from her warm and welcoming body, leaving a trail of their combined fluids glistening on her thigh, to the two things he makes sure to never be without.
One is his wand. The other is a small glass flask.
Marlene sits up in bed, frowning furiously. She drags the sheet up to cover her nudity from him. "What on earth –?"
"Petrificus Totalus," he says briefly. He doesn't like it when she gets like this. The first time they had sex and he didn't know what the side-effect would be, she nearly managed to get all the way to Lily and Dumbledore before he caught up with her and performed the Memory Charm. He hates seeing her beautiful face twist into confusion when she looks at him. It hurts somewhere, deep within his chest.
He unstoppers the flask and cannot resist taking a sniff. To him, Amortentia smells like a combination of her skin, the indefinable aura of wealth and privilege which clings to Grimmauld Place, and the scent of the Chocolate Frogs he and James consume in large quantities every Hogwarts train journey. Sometimes he thinks that he can catch flashes of the Slytherin common room or the new-mown grass of the Quidditch pitch.
There is a lot he would give to know what it smells like to her.
Her boyfriend, perhaps. The thought makes his stomach tighten with jealousy.
When it comes to Marlene, Sirius has a routine; he's been doing it for over a year now, and he's more or less perfected it. Most of the time he lets her carry on with her own life, probably thinking no more of him than she would of the sky. But then comes a point when he can no longer take that. When he has to have her, be in her, pretending that they are the only two people in the entire godforsaken world. So then he slips her the Amortentia somehow – a drop in her pumpkin juice at dinner, a tipple into her breakfast milk – and then she is his. She adores him. Wants him.
Loves him.
It only lasts until he's fucked her in a broom closet or empty classroom somewhere. But it'll tide him over for a while. He'll cast the Obliviate, hating that it is necessary. He doesn't just wipe away the memory of their lovemaking; slowly, carefully, at the end of every tryst, he wipes away a little more of her earlier memories involving him. The ones which tell her that she should hate him. And then he lets her go.
The next time she sees him passing in the corridors, there'll be a little less automatic loathing in her eyes, because he is methodically removing everything which tells Marlene McKinnon that she should not be getting involved with Sirius Black.
Soon, he hopes, the Memory Charms and love potion won't even be necessary. There will come a time when the way she looks at him after sex will be exactly the same way as she looked at him before it. They're not quite there yet, but they're getting there, hence why she hasn't immediately lunged to claw his eyes out.
He turns back to her prone body. Her mouth is a little open, and he tips some of the Amortentia down her throat. Here at the Manor there's no need to set her free to go her own way. He's decided to keep her under the love potion all the time instead, until such a time as he will no longer need it.
Sirius lifts the Body-Bind. Marlene swallows reflexively, and the frozen confusion on her face gives way to relaxed affection. Smiling, he gets back into bed beside her, curving his body protectively around hers.
She rubs lightly at the gash James made on his arm. When she's under the Amortentia, she has a strange fascination with his blood – he thinks that his own initial bewilderment over being attracted to a half-blood of all creatures must have somehow transferred into the potion he brews, until the sight of what runs through his pure Black veins serves almost as an aphrodisiac. He's not complaining. He lowers his head to brush his lips over hers, but there is a sudden abrupt pain in his forearm, and he groans.
"What is it?" she whispers.
"I need to go," he mutters back. "Stay here, my love."
He roots on the floor for his discarded clothing and takes a moment to admire her before he goes. She looks so beautiful, naked and slightly flushed, grinning shyly in his – no, James's – bed. Sirius smirks a little. His best friend won't be happy. But then, he's been in a right awful mood since he left Hogwarts.
It's amusing, it really is, the way James thinks he can keep secrets from his blood-brother. Sirius knows all. As if James expected him to believe that he'd barely seen Lily for weeks.
He goes down to see what the Dark Lord wants.
Yaxley ignores the burning of the Dark Mark. He will answer the summons soon, but this opportunity is far too golden to pass up. He watches Sirius Black exit James Potter's room.
Then he enters it.
Black's present from the Dark Lord is lounging on the bed, eyes heavy-lidded. She looks up with strangely indifferent curiosity as he enters. He notes that she is not particularly attractive, at least not for someone of Black's calibre, and is amused. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
He realises that there is something wrong with her. She is under a sheet, most probably fully nude, but makes no effort to cover herself up as he approaches, only watching him unblinkingly. She might be under Black's protection, but is she not even the slightest bit wary of the fact that an unknown Death Eater is coming closer to her unprotected body?
She probably doesn't have much self-preservation. She's a half-blood getting mixed up with a Black in the middle of the Dark Lord's headquarters – one can't get much stupider than that. But still, he can't even see that she's got her wand on her…
He stops by the bed, and she finally speaks.
"Are you looking for Sirius? He's gone downstairs."
He sees how dilated her pupils are, the dreamy singsong quality of her voice. Suspicion dawns. Perhaps she's not stupid. Perhaps she's just –
The Dark Mark suddenly flares with even greater agony. His lord does not like waiting. Mind churning with his theory, Yaxley turns to leave, but suddenly remembers something. He can't have her telling Black about his little visit.
"Obliviate!"
She collapses. He stares – unless you're of remarkably weak constitution, or you've had the Memory Charm cast upon you numerous times in succession, people don't normally collapse from it – but there's no time to gawk at it. He needs to go.
But he'll be back, with the things he needs to test this little theory. If what he thinks is true, he won't need to do anything to the girl. No, he'll be able to torture Sirius Black without lifting his wand at all.
AN: And that's as far as I ever got! As someone said, we've now come full circle, and I've compressed seven years of story (though technically I only kept writing it for 4) into about three weeks. I hope you enjoyed the ride. And especially the revelation about Marlene! I hope this answers the arguments some of you had about the impossibility of Marlene willingly being with Sirius. I told you to hang on for a little longer.
FUTURE UPDATES
Now comes the difficult part. I'm going to take the rest of the weekend off to plan the whole story, right until the finish, which is something I've never actually done and is a major reason I struggled to finish the story before. I anticipate that in total it will be 80k-90k words long. Then - once I've planned - I'll start writing the next chapters. I think my schedule for this story will be 'short chapters, a short wait between them' rather than long chapters with a longer wait, because I don't want to lose momentum. I hope to finish the story within a month or two, with new chapters posted two times a week. (It's probably too early to be telling you this, but after I finish Blood Will Have Blood I have an idea for another dark Jily AU set in the Hogwarts School for the Criminally Insane. And of course I also need to work on my Dramione, The Liar's Kiss.)
I have to go now, but I'll reply to all guest reviews as usual in the next chapter, which will hopefully be on Monday/Tuesday :)