Previously in the Darklyverse: After fighting with Reg and admitting to him that she's a vigilante, Mary offered to become Emmeline's Secret-Keeper and take her into her house while Emmeline is in hiding from the Death Eaters. While she was Imperiused, Sirius dredged up his romantic history with her to try to break her mind free. Alice investigated missing funds from Runcorn's deal with the Canadian Ministry.

xx

May 6th, 1982: Sirius Black

"So Em's staying with Mary—what, indefinitely?" James asks him. They're at the Potters' house; it's the beginning of Lily's workday, and they're sitting on the sofa while Harry scribbles on pieces of parchment and babbles where he's sprawled across the floor. Neville, whom Frank dropped off to visit Harry an hour ago, has gathered a large pile of all Harry's stuffed animals on the floor and is intently occupying himself by walking across the room and depositing them one by one into James's lap. There are enough stuffies that they've begun spilling off James's lap and onto the rest of the couch.

"She's only been there two days, but apparently Cattermole didn't come home last night, and he hasn't written or anything to say where he's been staying or for how long. I don't know if he'll insist they kick her out when he comes back—Mary doesn't seem to think so—but Mary told Alice that she's just… taking her in. I don't think Mare likes how quiet the flat is without Cattermole there."

"But Remus and Alice specifically got a three-bedroom flat so that Emmeline wouldn't have to share with Alice anymore. I know Em hasn't actually slept in it yet, since she ran off with Dumbledore before they signed the lease, but—you said you've been sleeping in Moony's room, right? So it's not like there's not a bed available for her."

"I think… well, I think she's avoiding me," Sirius admits. "I may have… said some stuff to her while she was under the Imperius Curse, you know, to try to bring her back to us."

"Stuff like what?"

"Stuff like—"

"Daddy! Sissi!" Harry interjects. He clambers over to them, waving a sheaf of parchment full of green and yellow scribbles.

"It's beautiful," James declares.

"You're a born artist," Sirius agrees. "Here, if you give that one to Uncle Sissi, I'll hang it up on my wall at home."

Harry proudly holds out the parchment, and Sirius takes it and sets it on the side of the couch that isn't overflowing with stuffies. Running back to his crayons, Harry brushes past Neville, who deposits a stuffed dog on top of James before heading back toward the shrinking pile on the floor.

"So what was it you said to Em to bring her back?" James continues.

Sirius rolls his eyes—he'd been rather hoping that the kids would distract James from the point. "Some stuff about Peter—I sort of feel responsible for her going off to see him, you know, because if she was trying to avoid thinking about him before, it's definitely my fault that she's not anymore. And, uh… and some stuff about fourth year."

"Fourth year?"

"Yeah. Before her parents died. She was one of my best friends, remember? We—may have kissed a couple of times."

"You kissed Em?"

"Not recently, god, Prongs! Not while she was under Imperius! I'm saying we kissed in, like, third year. I thought I told you that already when Emmeline told Marlene the whole sordid story back in seventh year."

"You told me the thing about her parents," says James, shrugging, "and you told me you were kind of more than friends, but you didn't tell me you'd actually done anything."

"Well, we did. And I brought it up, and I wish I hadn't. It didn't even seem to really help break her free—the stuff about Peter was what did that—but if she doesn't want to see me, I think it might have… dislodged some things that we'd put in the past, you know, the more she thought about it while she was gone."

"You know you're gonna have to go over there and talk to her if she won't come to you. You can't just avoid each other forever."

"Yeah, and I don't want to avoid her forever, but it's going to suck. That's all I'm saying."

Neville returns with a large stuffed elephant and sticks it on top of the already rather large pile spilling out of James's lap. It's high up enough that it reaches James's chin for a moment before the whole tower collapses all over the couch and floor. Neville's bottom lip wobbles.

"You're okay, Neville," says James. "Here, come sit in your Uncle Jamie's lap for a minute." He clears two teddy bears and a pig off of himself and pats one of his thighs. "Harry, come over by Neville and Daddy for a bit! Padfoot, can you go fetch one of the Winnie the Pooh storybooks? It doesn't matter which one. Neville's on a big kick for them."

"Lily and her Muggle series," mutters Sirius, smiling. "The next thing we know, she's going to bring in one of those tellyvision things for the kids to watch."

"Don't tempt her," James says, grinning.

It's been nice spending time with James and the kids since, during Sirius's stint at Hogwarts, he didn't get out of the castle much to see anybody, let alone his best mate. It sucks that he's unemployed—Scrivenshaft's has already filled his old position and Em's, too, after she quit—but now that teaching at Hogwarts is no longer an option, it's not like he wants to spend the rest of his career working in a shop, anyway. The one good thing about working at Scrivenshaft's was doing it with Emmeline, but he doubts that they'll be able to find jobs together again someplace else, or even that Em would want to work with him again, given how things between them are going.

He's been considering taking a leaf out of Marlene's book and going out for a Hit Wizard position, now that his father's dead and his influence probably won't continue to block Sirius out of the Ministry. With the Department of Magical Law Enforcement's new budget following the Canada deal, they're hiring, and Sirius likes to think he's gotten pretty good at fighting after going on constant Order raids for the last five years. He wouldn't want to be an Auror, even though the Ministry is looking for more of those, too—Aurors spend most of their time one step behind the Dark wizards they're chasing, while Hit Wizards get to be in the middle of the action, even if sometimes the action is just arresting batty old wizards who get pissed at their siblings when they're forced together over the holidays and end up with turkey legs magically lodged up their nostrils.

Sirius doesn't tell any of this to James, though. James doesn't exactly resent being a stay-at-home dad, but Sirius knows he'd wanted more from his career than conjuring up furniture for people and supervising finger painting with toddlers, one of whom isn't even James's own.

Later that day, when he gets back to—well, he can't really call Remus and Alice's flat home, but it's close enough—Remus is the only one there, juggling the contents of several mixing bowls and pots with his wand. Normally Remus would be in the first half of his day in Canada right now, but he's been feeling particularly peaky with the full moon coming up tomorrow night and opted to take an extra day off before it hits.

"Alice working late?" asks Sirius by way of greeting.

"Nah, she got home about an hour ago, but then she headed over to that Muggle woman's house to ask what was up with her getting fired—you know, the one working in the Ministry Treasury who was looking into the missing money from Canada. I hope you're cool with stir fry for dinner."

"I am more than cool with stir fry for dinner. Thanks for cooking."

Alone in the kitchen with Remus, Sirius feels like he can't breathe, but that's nothing new. Remus is still hot and cold. They're sharing a bed, for god's sakes, but when they do, Sirius is Padfoot, so it's not exactly sexual. Besides, Remus has been avoiding eye contact and looks unsettled anytime Sirius does catch his eye. Sirius doesn't know what to make of it, honestly, but he's learned to roll with it. They'll move forward on Remus's timetable, because if Sirius isn't okay with that, they won't move forward at all.

The full moon is tomorrow night, and he expects they'll spend it here again, curled up in bed as Moony and Sirius in a reversal of the roles they've settled into the last couple of nights. So it catches Sirius off guard when they're heaping food on their plates and Remus says, "I think we should spend tomorrow night at the Potters'."

"Yeah?" says Sirius, trying not to sound too invested. Remus did at least say "we," not "I."

"Yeah. I think James feels left out—you know, like it's just one more thing he has to miss out on, being stranded in Canada—even if it is a lot less exciting without going into the Forbidden Forest. And—I think it's time that Harry meets Moony. If I'm out there instead of here, I won't transform until it's nighttime in Vancouver, of course, so if you want, you can get some sleep here before meeting me over there."

"Are you sure?" Sirius asks, feeling like an asshole. "I mean—I'm sure Harry will adore Moony. It's just—I know Harry has a thirty-word vocabulary right now, but when he really starts talking, he might not understand until he's older that he can't go telling people out in the world about his wolf friend that comes over one night a month."

Remus purses his lips. "I mean, he's going to find out sooner or later. I'd rather he know now, before he starts to grow up and forms any prejudices. Besides, it's not like any of Lily and James's Canadian friends know anything about any of us to be able to piece it together. James doesn't even have Canadian friends, and Lily doesn't really talk to the other Healers outside of the hospital."

Sirius still doesn't think it's the best idea—after all, the job Remus has right now is in Canada near the Potters' house, and the wizarding community of British Columbia isn't that big. But he bites his tongue, not wanting to say anything that might come across as—

He's being stupid, he tells himself. Winning back Remus's trust doesn't have anything to do with keeping mum about anything Remus might perceive as critical. Still, he just slurps up some noodles and says thickly, "So I'll meet you at the Potters' around when you get off work tomorrow? That should be at, like, two in the morning for me, but I can deal."

Remus pushes vegetables around his plate. This whole time, he hasn't looked Sirius in the eye.

There's a crack at that moment that can only mean Alice is home with some answers about the Canadian deal. "Well, just like we thought, Miponia got fired the second she started looking into the discrepancies I pointed out in the records. They fed her some line about there being pushback among the purebloods about hiring a Muggle for the job, but I don't buy it for a second. It took some convincing, but she's agreed to help me keep digging. I'll ask Mary or Andromeda to connect us with somebody at the Prophet who can put the story out for us whenever we have answers about what Runcorn's done with the money."

"How's she supposed to dig when she hasn't got a job with the Ministry anymore?" Sirius points out.

"I'll have to do a lot of it myself, of course—but she said she'll help decipher any additional records that I come across. She managed to get hold of a list of names of wizards who were in the room when the deal was made, so I'll start there."

Remus hands her an empty plate as she comes up to the table, and she starts gratefully loading it up with stir fry. "I'm going to take this into the bedroom, if you don't mind," she says, however, as she snatches her empty glass off the table and steps up to the sink to fill it up with water. "I'm exhausted. Work was a gong show."

"No problem," says Sirius, but as Alice departs, Remus is frowning. "What?"

"She's been keeping to her room a lot the last few days," says Remus in an undertone.

"You mean since I started staying here."

"Well… in all fairness, if we don't even know what we're doing, we can't exactly expect everybody else to necessarily feel comfortable around us."

Sirius is surprised that Remus actually went there. The last—couple of days, especially, but really ever since they started building their way back from the revelation that Sirius thought Remus was a Death Eater—their relationship has been a mess of vacillation between acting intimate and being aloof, never really talking openly about what's wrong or what either of them wants. Sirius knows what he wants, and that's Remus back, but he hasn't got a clue what exactly Remus is playing at.

He'd come to accept that maybe he'd never figure it out, but now—maybe—

"What are we doing?" says Sirius quietly.

"We don't… I'm…" Remus stammers, but then he looks Sirius straight in the face and adds, "I don't know if I should trust you, but I think I do. I think I don't remember how to stay away."

They sit there for a moment, Remus staring at him and Sirius gaping back, a million wordless emotions flitting through his head. "I'm going back to the bedroom," Remus says abruptly, and he directs his wand at his dishes so that they empty their contents into the trash and come to rest in the sink. At first, Sirius thinks this is going to go the way it went the last two nights, with Sirius lying unable to sleep until Remus gets home around two in the morning, at which point Remus doesn't turn him away when Padfoot nudges open his door. But then Remus says, "Coming?"