James,

I always feel sort of dumb starting these letters off because I know you're never going to read them. I certainly hope you're never going to read them, anyway. I haven't quite been able to bring myself to burn any of them after writing them, but the only way you'll ever find them is if you go through my trunk at school once I'm back up there with you, and snooping around in my stuff doesn't really seem your speed, especially not when you've made it pretty clear you don't want to hear what I have to say.

It didn't go well with Remus tonight, and not just because I broke up with him. I'd thought it was going to help things that I'd tried to put myself in his shoes and sympathize with his reasons for doing what he did. Instead, he went ballistic on me about how I don't have the right or some shit to work on myself and start feeling better when I left him feeling so bad. It pissed me off at first. It's like I can't do anything right with him, not when he didn't believe that I wouldn't cheat on him with you and not now, and it's not fair of him to weaponize what I'm doing to fix the mess he made in me. But now that he's been gone a little while, I mostly just feel sorry for him because he's obviously really messed up and I know I contributed to that. I feel sort of guilty. It's stupid when he's the one who cheated, but I should have done a better job of balancing the two of you. I think I set him up to feel like he and I weren't safe, even though all I was trying to do was make you feel like you and I were safe.

And then I don't even know what to feel about Peter. Remus said there's something weird going on with him, and I've kept worrying more and more all night that, whatever it is, I made it worse by dumping all my emotional baggage on him in letters every day. He's my next letter after I finish this one.

And after the one to Peter—I don't know. I know I won't be writing to Remus tonight—I think things need to settle a little before I try to salvage our friendship—but I can't decide whether or not to write to you. See? Sounds stupid when that's literally what I'm doing right now, doesn't it? But writing to my pretend best mate in my head is a hell of a lot different than writing to you for real, somewhere you'll be able to see it, and it's been four days since I asked you to partial Floo here, and all you've sent me back are some notes from class attached to a letter from Lily. I don't want to come on too strong, but it's really lonely without you, and I can barely believe what I did to you, and I'm scared to talk to you again because I'm scared that, if I don't say the exact perfect thing, I'll blow it and never get you back. I don't know what I'm going to do if I can't get you back.

Anyway, I guess that's all I have to say for tonight, at least until I actually write you a letter to send you—if I do. Talk to you for real soon, maybe.

Yours,

Padfoot

xx

Mornings are the hardest time. As he's waking up, there are always a few moments when he forgets where he is and what he's done—when he thinks that he's back in his bed at Hogwarts, that James is still his best friend, that Remus never cheated on him. But Remus did cheat, and James is gone, and Sirius is alone in the room he usually shares with James at the Potters' house, here to brave another day of… working on himself, whatever that's supposed to mean.

He supposes it's helping, sort of. It definitely helps not to have to see Regulus's—or even Remus's—face every day, and all of it is a lot more bearable thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Potter. Having time away from the people he got into this mess with has probably helped him process—kept him feeling calm.

But it's like Remus said: it can't last forever. James is coming home for Christmas (with Peter and Remus in tow for at least part of it), and then Sirius is going back to school in January. He just wishes he could guarantee that he'd have it all figured out by then.

It's pretty safe to say that Sirius will not have it all figured out by January. He's getting there, but he just needs more time than the universe is going to give him.

It's Saturday. Mrs. Potter is gone by the time Sirius stumbles into the kitchen—she mentioned last night that it's her weekend this month to work overtime at St. Mungo's—but Mr. Potter, who's reading today's Prophet and sipping coffee when Sirius walks in, glances up and gives Sirius a grin. "Morning."

"Hey."

"You look exhausted. Did you get much sleep last night?"

Sirius shakes his head. "Not after… I talked to Remus last night, and…"

Mr. Potter, of course, already knows this: he and Mrs. Potter cleared out of the living room at the scheduled time to give Sirius some privacy. "It didn't go well, I take it? I'm sorry, kiddo. That's a tough break."

"We broke up. I don't think he wanted to, but I can't… and I tried to be understanding, I did, but all it seemed to do was make him mad that I'm healing and he's not."

"Honestly? Try not to take it too hard. Some wounds need time to scab over, and trying too hard to heal them will just make them worse."

"But I'm running out of time. I only have until January—actually, less than that, because James will be coming here for Christmas."

The corner of Mr. Potter's lips quirks. "Don't worry about James. I've never seen that boy so devoted to anyone but you. He'll come around."

Sirius drops into the chair next to Mr. Potter's. "That's the problem, isn't it? He would have done anything for me, and I used him. If I were him, I know I wouldn't forgive me for it."

Mr. Potter claps him on the shoulder. "You made a mistake. It happens. Sometimes people don't forgive each other, but sometimes they do. If James and your friends could forgive you in fifth year for the, er, incident with that Snape boy—"

"That's just the thing," Sirius sighs. "I'm running out of chances. People keep giving them to me, and I keep wasting them."

"James is your best friend. I'm sure he'll come around," says Mr. Potter again.

A glimmer of a smile twists Sirius's lips. "How do you and Mrs. Potter do it?"

"Do what?"

"How do you know everything about… everything?"

Mr. Potter laughs. "Trust me, son, we don't know everything, but what we do know we had to figure out as we went along. You'll figure it out for yourself, too. You've just got to get through this part first."

"Can I skip it? Can I skip to the part where I'm you?"

Mr. Potter just smiles and says, "Don't sell yourself short. Your friends love you for exactly who you are, and so do Euphemia and I."

But Sirius isn't so sure he deserves it. He busies himself fixing a bowl of cereal at the counter and just—pretends like the outside world is as safe as this kitchen.

All day, he feels like he's just hanging around waiting for James or Peter to write him back, but neither of them does for hours and hours. The letters he ended up sending them last night were short and apologetic, but a two-sentence apology can't be enough for James, and it might not be for Peter, either, though that one's harder to gauge: after all, Sirius doesn't even know what's gone wrong there. He goes for two runs, cooks lunch for Mr. Potter and himself, tries to decipher the terrible handwriting in James's class notes and to follow along with the spells he's supposed to be learning this week. At this rate, it'll be a bloody miracle if Sirius catches up on his schoolwork in enough time to survive any of his N.E.W.T.s in June.

He writes James two more letters that he stuffs in the bottom of his trunk without sending.

When the Potters' owl finally returns the next day, it's carrying a letter not from James, not from Peter, but from Lily, who wants to do a partial Floo over here tonight. This surprises Sirius: it's not like the two of them have ever been anything to each other besides mutual friends of James's. Still, he's not exactly going to turn her down. He's curious, and she's his friend (sort of), and he's dying for somebody to tell him what's going on with James and Peter.

By dinnertime, Sirius is almost as nervous to talk to Lily as he was to talk to Remus two nights ago. He takes Mrs. Potter's advice and goes for a run right before he's supposed to talk to Lily so that he can get some of the pent-up energy out of his system. It doesn't slow his brain down at all, but at least now there's an actual, legitimate reason for his heart to be pumping away like this, other than to torture him.

When her head arrives in the fireplace, Lily breaks out in a soft smile. "Hey, Sirius. You look good."

"Yeah, that's what everyone keeps telling me."

She raises her eyebrows. "You don't feel any better for having gotten away from everything for a while?"

"I feel better, sure, but I don't know if I feel good enough to call it good. If you didn't notice, my whole life kind of fell apart."

Lily's smile droops. "For what it's worth, I don't think you're going to lose James for good, and I know Remus will do whatever it is you want him to do in order to stay in your life somehow."

"And Regulus?"

She shakes her head. "I don't know your brother as anything other than the boy who's bullied me for being Muggle-born for the last five years, but it sure seems to me like you mean a hell of a lot more than that to him. With all the worrying you've been doing about why Remus did what he did with him, have you stopped to consider why your brother did it?"

"Because he wants to punish me," says Sirius immediately.

"Maybe, but I don't think that's it. I think he was just… trying to get your attention."

Sirius laughs out loud at this. "He's a Death Eater, Lily. He let me protect him from Mum for years and then turned around and became her when I wasn't looking. I think we're past the point of him acting out for attention."

"Maybe. You do know him better than I do," Lily muses.

Sirius rubs the back of his neck awkwardly. "Not that I don't appreciate the visit because I do—really—but why are you here? I didn't think I meant anything to you other than…"

"Than the bloke my boyfriend used to be in love with and still puts ahead of me?"

"Wow," says Sirius. "Blunt, but it does the job."

"You may be my friend because of James, Sirius, but that doesn't mean you're not my friend." He bows his head, embarrassed, at least until she adds, "And anyway, now that this whole business with your brother has come out, I've been feeling sort of… linked to you. I don't know."

Sirius narrows his eyes. "Linked to me how? Why?"

"Because your brother picked the Dark Arts over you—" he winces "—and Severus did the same thing to me a year and a half ago."

He's quiet for a long time, long enough that Lily starts looking nervous until he answers, "I'm sorry for my role in… that. Maybe he was already Dark when I met him in first year, but that wasn't why we targeted him. We targeted him because… because it was easy. We shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have done that."

Lily's lips twitch. "You sound like you've been talking to James. He said something very similar the other day."

"I'm sorry you lost him," says Sirius even quieter now. "I'm sorry we've all been such shit replacements for him to you."

"You're not replacements," Lily says immediately. "None of you is anything like him. It's just… different."

"And now you sound like Remus."

"Do I? James is the one I talked to about not rating people, not Remus. I guess James took it to heart enough to pass the message along."

Sirius feels a glimmer of hope at this. If James is taking advice from Lily—and it's solid advice—then maybe there's a chance he'll have enough perspective to realize that Sirius never meant for anything to end up like this, that he was only doing his best, even if his best wasn't good enough.

"Are you okay?" he asks Lily now. "Do we treat you like you deserve, or do we make you feel—lonely?"

It's Lily's turn to go quiet, Sirius's to anxiously wait. "It's not that you're so awful to me. It's just… my relationships with all of you were never about… us. Does that make any sense?"

"It does. But we'll do better, okay? We can start over—get to know each other. Lily, I'd really, really like that."

And he means it, crouched here on the ground looking keenly into Lily's almond eyes in the hearth. If he's really lost Regulus, it means he might be the one person in Lily's life who might understand how she feels, and if this is what Lily is feeling—nobody, nobody, should have to feel like that alone.

Lily won't be alone anymore. Come January, Sirius will make sure of that. He just—he can only hope that she won't be the only one left waiting for him.