Sorry about the wait. My Sirius comes a little from the movie, but I have seriously thought him over.

Chapter VII

The Blue-Haired Man

"Darryn," I whispered. "I'm sorry. I could have done better, I know it—" He made a small gesture of acknowledgement. Those words, Have a nice day, rang again through my head, mocking me.

"Thank you, Remus."

Mr. Pole took Darryn by the arm. "Come on, Darryn, we'd best not try the Ministry's patience." Darryn stood and consented to be led, head hung, out of the courtroom. His mother followed, touching my arm lightly as she passed. Darryn did not look back. Have a nice day.

I felt Dumbledore standing beside me. When Dumbledore stands beside you, you can feel it. It is among the best feelings in the world. "Under the circumstances, Remus, I thought you did very well. I considered speaking, but the politics would have been horrible. I was confident that you had the eloquence to get him out of a death sentence, and you have done as much."

"A death sentence, Professor?" I asked incredulously.

"That is the general procedure for homicidal beasts…."

Temporarily insane, or a homicidal beast. That was a hard choice. Have a nice day.

Crouch's cruelly ironic words, Have a nice day, echoed in my head for the rest of that day, as I sat staring glumly at the remaining half of a sandwich on my plate that I had no appetite for, as Frank and I hammered together the frame of a chicken coop, as we dueled. I think that this echoing emptiness in my mind helped with the Occlumency involved in the dueling lesson. Frank entered my mind, and all he could find were the words, Have a nice day. It made him laugh the first few times, then he became convinced that something was wrong and stopped laughing. Ned and the chickens watched my lesson with varying levels of disinterest, but hung around anyway, wondering, I think, if all of this flashing light and shouting had anything to do with them.

Over the week (during which Frank and I finished the coop and made great progress on my dueling skills), I grew depressed, and faintly stir-crazy. Poor Lizzie, I constantly reminded myself, trying to put my situation into perspective, but it did not work. I had to leave, if just for a few hours. I could go see Sirius, I knew where he lived. He could always cheer me up. On Friday night, I apparated to Sirius's street in London and found his apartment. He lived on the fourth floor of a dingy building near Petticoat Lane. I was puzzled by that, because the Sirius I had known at school would die before he used words like "petticoat," but that was where he lived.

I convinced the security guard (Muggle, of course) that Sirius would indeed want to see me, and that if he wasn't in, I would wait outside his door until he came. The guard did not seem happy about it, but reluctantly let me go up the stairs. Sirius was not in. I glanced down the stairs, having a feeling that the guard might have followed me, then opened the door to Sirius's apartment.

It was even messier than I had expected, if that was possible. If you looked at the floor, bed, and table, you could tell who Sirius was, what he looked like, and what he had been doing. The bed was under a layer of flotsam and jetsam that included magazines, dirty and clean clothes (it was hard to distinguish between them), candy, clipboards with rather important-looking papers on them. His owl was perched on the headboard, and had decided that I was not worth waking up for. The table was piled high with dirty dishes, books (mostly schoolbooks, lingering in the house like guests that linger at a house beyond their invitation), and non-perishable food. On the table before the only chair in the house whose seat was visible was a ledger with a lot of numbers in it, a plate with bread on it, and a tube of some sort of hair gel with the cap missing. The floor was invisible through layers of clothes, papers, magazine clippings, boxes. In a corner was a tank with a streeler in it.

I picked my way to the table and sat. Yes, this was a Sirius I knew. He could make Petticoat Lane his home by insulating himself with the girliness of it with his mess. I set about the formidable task of doing the dishes.

I had hardly dented the piles when Sirius came, wand raised. He dropped it, laughing, when he saw me directing plates in and out of the sink. His hair had been died a deep electric blue. "Here I was, all ready for a burglar, and it's just Moony doing the dishes. What're you doing here?"

"The dishes," I replied, perfectly straight-faced. A smile broke loose, and I relented. "I've been depressed, Padfoot." I looked at his hair derisively. "Blue hair, Sirius?"

He shook his head. "Don't try to make me regret it. I love it. You're depressed though—I think I can help with that. Wasn't anything to do with the werewolf decree, was it? I thought that was the nastiest thing they could have done, made you wear labels like that. It's why you didn't move here?"

"Yeah. I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I figured you had enough on your plate without joining a werewolf campaign." I stopped the dishes' progress across the kitchen and sat in the chair I had cleared. "But you remember Darryn? Lia's brother?"

"Oh, dear." He tossed his bag onto the bed and sat. "We meet the in-laws."

"I went to his trial, and he lost."

Sirius nodded. "I heard about that, something about a werewolf killing his sister and going to Wales. I didn't connect it with you, idiot that I am. I hope you argued for him?"

"Not well. But I tried. And I did get their attention—and I helped get his punishment changed from death to indefinite imprisonment—I don't know. They decided that a werewolf's time of the month is a form of temporary insanity."

"And the nasty thing is," Sirius grumbled, "that if he'd done that after they invented the potion, they'd've blamed it on the people who made it. He was just three months too early."

"It wouldn't have made him feel any better."

"No, probably not." He sighed. "And you're staying with Dumbledore. How goes it at the nerve center of the wizarding world?"

"Hot. And dull. That's part of my problem. I can't leave the house alone because there are people after anyone Dumbledore seems to care about, but there's nothing to do in there. It has made people insane, I've seen it. This woman he was protecting went out to dinner one night and got killed in the street. She hadn't been out of the house for six months."

"Was her name Eliza Buchanan? Murdered in York by the Death Eaters, outside an Italian restaurant? Declared missing, presumed dead for the last six months?" I nodded, and he shrugged. "Read it in the paper. You knew her, then."

"Yes. I had gone to the restaurant with her." There, it was said—I'd gone on a date. Let him interpret it how he would.

He whistled. "You've been busy." He pulled a newspaper from a stack on the table, flipped through it. "She's pretty."

"She's pretty like a sword is pretty, or like a lightning bolt is pretty."

"Oh. That kind of pretty."

"I didn't like her much. She was a little creepy sometimes. She went out into the orchard all the time, and she screamed and kicked things and punched the trees when she was in a bad mood, or talked to the chickens and threw apples at them when she was in a good mood." I looked moodily at a moving box, remembering that conversation in the tree over a handful of berries.

"Speaking of girls," Sirius drawled languorously, leaning back in his chair with his fingers laced behind his head.

I laughed tightly. I was still in the tree, and the subject change had not been smooth. "Siri, you said you'd given up on girls."

"Hah. That was before I met Kudra." He pulled a Muggle picture out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was a picture of him kissing a beautiful Indian-looking girl against a background in deep shadow. On the back of the picture was written in pink, bubbly letters, "Kudra told me to! Please, Siri! XXX, Vana." I hid a smirk and returned the picture.

"Nicely done."

Sirius squeezed a mountain of hair gel into his palm and rubbed it into his hair. His hair was one of his many vanities. He was proud of its curl and copper-tinted black, and kept it long. His other vanities were his tattoos and his beard. I often had to tell myself, No, he is not a rock star. Because he wasn't. He was Sirius, and that is something entirely different.

"And you get to meet her, Moony, because we are going to her pitár's restaurant right now and getting drinks—and you aren't paying anything." He crumpled his hair in both hands and let it fall in crinkled waves to his shoulders, then shook it. A gob of gel hit the wall like a mouthful of spit, and I wrinkled my nose. He unbuttoned the first three buttons on his shirt, displaying his moon tattoo. I shook my head and followed him out of the apartment building. He waved jauntily to the grumpy security guard, who seemed less put out about me than before.

We talked amiably about the good old days while we walked the three blocks to "her pitár's restaurant." I was surprised that we actually thought of the good old days as such, for they had barely ended a month ago. But in a way, I was not surprised. As far as I was concerned, those days could have been part of a different universe. I could no more return to them than I could bring Lia back to life. I wondered if Sirius felt the same way. I doubted it.

The restaurant was called Pitár's House. I had gathered that this was Indian (it isn't Indian they speak in India, but I can't remember what it is) for father. It was sandwiched between an Italian restaurant and a Japanese restaurant, like three good books on the same shelf, all vying for attention.

We entered the restaurant and went straight to the bar. The bartender, whom I though must be Kudra, was busy with other patrons, so I looked around. Pitár's Place was moodily lit; largely dark, with red and blue spotlights on Hindu art around the walls and a small oil lamp on each table. Plants grew all over, jade plants, orchids, palms, ivies, benign breeds of cactus. Near the door was a tank with tropical fish and a small red and white lobster in it.

"Siri!" a voice sang. I looked toward Kudra. A somehow restrained smile was on her face. It did not seem quite as big as it ought to be, but seemed entirely sincere. I pursed my lips upon allowing my eyes to roam beyond her face—she was built, under that brilliant peacock-green saari, like one of those Hindu goddesses around the walls, something like a three-dimensional figure 8. It was hard to know whether I was supposed to stare in awe or look away in embarrassment. I compromised by looking exclusively at her face. I could see why Sirius had picked her.

He introduced me as "Remus, but call him Moony." I kicked him under the bar. Only the Marauders and Lia called me Moony. Kudra saw my frustration and called me Remus, moving herself a few steps up in my esteem. Sirius ordered both of us something I had never heard of, and she got it.

"Sorry about the name confusion," he muttered. "Lucky for both of us, she's smart like that."

"What did you order?" I asked. Why had I consented to this, I was not really into all-night parties like Sirius was, I wasn't into them at all, and I had a dueling lesson tomorrow morning and Frank would laugh at me when he found out, I knew he would…

Happily for my sanity, Sirius knew full well that I didn't like staying up late. I knew he knew that, and berated myself for thinking he wouldn't remember. We stayed in the restaurant until nine-thirty, bantering with Kudra and the other patrons. Admittedly we left a bit drunk, and I would probably regret it in the morning, but for the first time since—Merlin, since February, I had enjoyed myself. I returned to the Order feeling very happy. It occurred to me when I arrived that I ought to have been trying to recruit Sirius, but decided that I could do it later, when my sanity was not at stake.