Title: Subject To Change
Author: Lily Potter
A/N: A Sirius affair needs to be postponed until I can figure out what to do with it. The characters refuse to cooperate until they know what I know what I want to do. Until then…this will have to do.
Sirius Black stood by the front of a flat, exhausted. His tongue lolled out of his mouth, and a single thread of saliva hung from the loose tongue, until it snapped, and hit the soggy tarmac. The tarmac outside the flat was normally soggy; it was London, after all. If Sirius had been a human at present, he would have probably not blended in at all with his surroundings, in which people scurried about like rats in the rain, with the collars of their coats turned up and their Wellington boots squelching through the streets.
Sirius, in his tattered wizarding robes, would probably have fitted in as much as a hothouse flower in a bag of coal, but Sirius was a great black dog, and the people who hurried along merely saw him as a stray, scrounging about for a bit of food, if they saw him at all.
Sirius began to scrounge about for a bit of something in the dustbins, which were in the alley next to the flat. The main thing that could be found in his canine mind was the thought of food, or lack thereof. However, somewhere in his mind, Sirius sensed that he had something important to do; something that had to do with this flat. He dug a little deeper into the bin and pondered the problem. Ah Ha! He spotted a chicken bone and nicked it before anyone could snatch it away. Sirius thought some more as he gnawed on the bone. What did he need to do?
Remus. The thought clicked. He needed to talk to Remus. Who lived in the flat. The more sensible part of his mind took over. Remus lived on the third floor of the flat. How could he get in?
He spotted a lady walking several dogs who was heading toward the flat. Abandoning his bone, Sirius followed the lady and stayed close enough to be mistaken for one of her dogs, but not enough to be noticed by the woman. The woman and her dogs headed to a lift, and Sirius followed. The other dogs, (most of them small, and one Cocker Spaniel who's yip sounded annoyingly like nails on a chalkboard,) seemed to take not notice of the intruder, sensing that he wasn't a real dog; and thankfully didn't bark long, except for that Cocker Spaniel. As luck would have it, the woman went to the third floor, and Sirius went in one direction, as the woman with the highly irritating dogs went in the other.
Finding Remus was not difficult; Sirius could follow wherever Remus had gone. It was the fact that Remus had gone so many places on the bloody third floor that following his trail was well nigh impossible. Sirius' nerves grew increasingly edgy as he circled one way, then another. Finally, he reached a flat that had the Moony-smell permeating through it. He scratched on the door of the flat.
"I DON'T WANT ANY!" came the highly irritated reply. Sirius persistently scratched again.
"I told you," said Remus, unlocking the door and opening it, "I don't like cosmetics, I don't wear cosmetics, cosmetics would not suit me in the least, and if you call on me again I'm phoning…" He stopped short in the middle of his rampage and looked down. "Oh…"
Sirius wagged his tail in greeting and tried to squeeze through the door. Remus, realising that the great black dog could not fit through the door as his own personage occupied it, moved. Sirius wagged his tail once more obligingly, and went through. Remus followed.
What he found in the kitchen of his house was not a great black dog, but a tall, thin, gaunt man, whose matted hair hung in elflocks about his face. This tall thin gaunt man also appeared very wet, and rather smelly.
"Remus I need to talk to you," said the man, shaking out his hair in the manner of a dog, and spraying the kitchen with water.
"I think a shower would be in order first," said Remus pointedly. "Sirius, you smell like a wet dog."
"You would too if you had run from Scotland to England in the rain for three weeks," said Sirius looking vaguely annoyed. "Listen," he said, trying to untangle some of his matted hair, and only succeeding in tangling it further. "I've just come from Hogwarts, Voldemort has just risen to power and…"
"I think a shower first," said Remus, pinching his nostrils together with his fingers and shoving Sirius towards the bathroom.
A/N: I apologise that this took so long to get back. I had accidentally deleted it, and had to get a copy from my friend. (I'm a bit thick sometimes…that's all.)