Remembering Sirius
Chapter 5- Explanations
Author's Note: Thanks so much to everyone who reviewed--Elaine02, cassie89, LouLou Writer 2005, and SecretWanderings. I really, really, really appreciate it, and it gets faster updates!
Elaine02: Good! Here's your update.
cassie89: Is this soon enough?
LouLou Writer 2005: Good thoughts...people didn't really like the way I went about writing this on MNFF, so I tweaked it a bit...tell me if it goes over okay.
SecretWanderings: :spy theme music: I'm on it.
Harry felt his stomach turning. How could Sirius have found out! He had just begun to let loose and live free...things had been going perfectly—hadn't they?
"Who are you?" Sirius repeated loudly.
No, thought Harry. I can't lose him—not again. He plucked up his Gryffindor courage and found his somewhat unsteady voice.
"I—I can—explain—"
"Good, because I would REALLY like to hear your excuse!"
"Let's—could—could we go—"
"I don't' care, let's go, let's go anywhere, I just want to know why you've been impersonating my BEST FRIEND!"
Harry didn't want to be overheard. Where could he go? Sirius was starting to get annoyed with his lack of response.
"The Room—Room of Requirement."
He waited for a response, but didn't get one. Sirius raised his eyebrows and gestured in the direction of the Room of Requirement.
"Well?" he demanded.
"Right," said Harry, and started walking. He glanced occasionally over his shoulder at Sirius, who was fuming. What was he going to do; what was he going to say? Hi, Sirius, I'm from the future, pretty much everyone you care about has betrayed you or died, including you. It was mostly my fault—sorry about that, mate. I defeated Voldemort once, and I'm destined to do so again, does that clear everything up for you?
Harry almost laughed bitterly at this. Seriously, what was going to happen?
They reached the Room of Requirement with Harry's insides squirming as he tried to think of any kind of explanation. He'd lied when he said he could explain, but he didn't think it was a lie at the time. How could he have known how his mouth would go dry every time he tried to speak, or how it would feel as if he left his stomach behind when he thought of the trouble he was in? No, he couldn't have known that it hurt him more than his scar burning to see Sirius sitting before him with anger, hate, and distrust in his eyes as he impatiently waited for an answer. An answer that Harry had no idea how he was going to give.
He'd have to lie again. He'd have to! The truth would kill him—who wants such a bleak future to look forward to, even if for only as long as Harry was there? No one, he decided. He'd have to lie—but he would at least tell the partial truth.
"Weh—" started Harry. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Well, I guess you want to know who I am."
Sirius gave him a look that clearly said, Could you be more obvious?
"Right," said Harry, turning red, "I'm not James."
Sirius gave him a look of irritation, saying, You did it! You were more obvious!
Harry was tempted to keep stating the plain—it was much easier to talk with Sirius in his head then to carry on an actual conversation, but he knew he had to go on. Here goes nothing, he thought.
"I'm his son."
Sirius opened his mouth and spoke out loud this time.
"You're WHAT! You expect me to believe some cock-and-bull story about how you're from the future!"
"Yeah," said Harry sheepishly.
"Let me get this straight—you somehow, miraculously get your hands on a Time-Turner, which is pretty near impossible, and use it to come and see me?"
"Well, yes—and no. I came here to see you, but I didn't use a Time-Turner. It was a Pensieve."
"Don't be daft, you can't converse with people on a Pensieve!"
"You can on Dumbledore's," said Harry quietly.
Sirius gave a bark-like laugh.
"So what—you somehow find out that you can do this on Dumbledore's Pensieve, and sneak into there to use it? Yeah, right."
But the look on his face told Harry that it sounded exactly like something Sirius would do.
"No—Dumbledore told me. Actually, I had to figure it out on my own. He—er—thought it might be...good for me to see you at...at my age."
"Why?"
Harry's heart sank—he'd so been hoping he wouldn't have to answer that. What could he say?
"Well, I'd...I'd been having a pretty rough time, and I couldn't—er—talk to my parents, so—"
"So why were you having a rough time? And why couldn't you talk to them? And why not see your parents here, instead of me?"
"Well, I wanted to go back to ex—exactly how old he was, but I didn't realize he wouldn't be here..."
"There are three problems with your answer. One—why would James be at Hogwarts over Christmas break? And two—Dumbledore supposedly set this up, right? Well, he's got to be the smartest wizard in the world, so how would he not remember a simple thing like James's Christmas habits? And you're dodging my other questions!"
Harry was running out of excuses. Sirius was just like Fred and George—they acted like slackers, but they were very smart—and good at reading people.
"Well, the thing is—"
"The thing is that you're not telling me the truth—AGAIN! You don't want to mess with me, OR my friends...WHOEVER you are!"
Harry sat down and put his head in his hands. He couldn't get out of this one.
"I can't," he moaned.
"Can't what?" said Sirius, his eyes flashing dangerously.
"T-tell you."
"Well, why the hell not!"
He didn't want it to end this way; he desperately wanted to stay here and part with Sirius on good terms, but what choice did he have? Feeling torn, he looked at Sirius and said,
"I just can't. It's over, I'm going."
"OH NO YOU DON'T!" Sirius roared, grabbing Harry by the arm as he turned to leave. "Not until I get some answers! Now, you're hiding something from me and I want to know what it is!"
Harry gave him a pleading expression.
"I'm trying to protect you."
"WHY?"
Harry could see Sirius wasn't going to take no for an answer. How could he explain? How could he get out of explaining?
"Because I don't want to hurt you."
"Oh, that's rich! The liar who pretends he's someone he isn't doesn't want to HURT MY FEELINGS! I've got news for you—I can handle WHATEVER'S thrown my way!"
"Even if it gave away your entire future?" Harry half-whispered.
"So you're sticking with the future story, then?" retorted Sirius skeptically.
"You could tell when I was lying earlier, ("ha!" grunted Sirius) so look at me now—does it look like I'm lying to you?"
Sirius narrowed his eyes and stared into Harry's. Suddenly, his features softened.
"No," he said, sounding as though he could hardly believe what he was saying. Harry couldn't either. He let out a sigh of relief.
"Will you hear me out, then?" he asked tentatively. Sirius paused for a moment.
"First...what are all the marauders' animagus forms and their names to go along with them?"
"You're Padfoot, a dog, James is Prongs, a stag, Peter is Wormtail, a rat, and Remus is Moony, a werewolf."
This seemed to convince Sirius more than anything else.
"I guess so," he mumbled. "But no more lies! Tell me everything that was true about what you already said."
"Well, I'm not James, I am his son, and I came here via Dumbledore's Pensieve."
"Okay," said Sirius, nodding, "then tell me why you wanted to see me."
Harry hesitated. Sirius noticed.
"Haven't I already told you I can handle it? If it's about my—my future, then, well, this is only a Pensieve, right? Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but even with these so-called conversing with people charms, visiting memories can't change the past. Am I right?"
Harry nodded, knowing where this was going.
"So that means for only as long as you're here will I know what's going to happen to me."
Harry didn't even bother to nod this time.
"If I know something bad's gonna happen, and I know it won't weigh me down for the rest of my life, then all the more reason to make the time I have mean something and have fun...right?"
Harry sighed—Sirius was smiling. The cocky git knew he'd won.
"Fine," said Harry, but stopped. How much should he tell him? Should he know about his friends, too? About how Peter betrayed him? About how James died?
He'd have to tell more lies to only tell him about how he'd died, and he didn't want to do that again. He'd have to start from the beginning—from the Prophecy.
Harry shuddered. This would be the first time he had talked about it to anyone.
"Well?" Sirius urged.
Harry closed his eyes for a second, then said,
"Here it goes—the condensed version of my life. Voldemort killed my parents when I was only a year old."
For a second, he looked deeply disturbed by the news of his friend's death, but then put on a straight face, probably remembering what he'd said about hearing the truth. He spoke to Harry.
"And your name is?"
"Harry."
"Harry," Sirius repeated, seeing how it felt on his tongue. "Go on—why didn't he kill you?"
"There," Harry said resentfully, "there was a—a prophecy. It said that, more or less, I was the only one who could defeat him, and I had to kill him or he would kill me."
Sirius raised his eyebrows at this.
"Go on," he said.
"Fine," said Harry, "so my parents knew about the Prophecy, but so did Voldemort—or part of it, anyway. They had to go into hiding—you were their secret-keeper, but at the last minute, you got them to change it to—to Wormtail. They didn't think Voldemort would suspect him, see. But Peter," said Harry bitterly, "he'd been Voldemort's spy all along. Too weak to resist him."
Anger spread across Sirius's face until he got control of his emotions.
"Yeah," Harry continued, "and told him they were hiding in Godric's Hollow. Voldemort killed them, but he couldn't kill me because my mother died trying to save me. He didn't know all of the Prophecy, or that it would be smarter to wait until I had grown to make a move. So when he tried to perform the Killing Curse, he transferred some of his powers to me—like being a Parseltongue."
Harry brushed aside his bangs.
"And he gave me this scar.
"You went after Wormtail to kill him, but he set you up. He made it look like he was trying to kill YOU for betraying them, and wiped out a dozen people with one curse before cutting off his finger and transforming. So you were assigned blame for everyone's, including 'Peter's', deaths and went to Azkaban. He went to live with my best friend Ron's brother, and then Ron as 'Scabbers.'
"I went to live with my obnoxious, overweight relatives until I was eleven. Then in my third year, you asked Fudge—the Minister of Magic--for the paper when he came round the prison and saw Ron and 'Scabbers' because their family won the Prophet Galleon draw. You knew it was him cause of his missing toe, see. You had stayed sane only because you knew you were innocent, so when the dementors opened the cell to give you food, you transformed and slipped out to find Wormtail at Hogwarts. Everyone thought you were after me, though."
Sirius looked as though he couldn't decide what to feel--angry at Peter for putting him in Azkaban, or pleased that he was savvy enough to get out. He compromised by just nodding.
"Anyway," continued Harry, "at the end of that year, well—"
He stopped, trying to think of a way to say this without going on for hours.
"Long story short, Peter got away again, but so did you. It involved a certain unsubdued werewolf, a hippogriff, and time-traveling—with a Time-Turner.
"You went into hiding until my fourth year, when I wrote you because my scar was burning, and it had only burned before when I was near Voldemort."
"Wait," said Sirius, "You saw Voldemort AFTER this!"
"Well, yeah," said Harry, "Um, anyway, they held the Triwizard Tournament that year for the first time in a long time, but there was an age-restriction, and most of my friends and I were underage. But one of Voldemort's supporters was pretending to be—"
"Sounds like someone I know."
"Was pretending to be Mad-Eye Moody, who was teaching—"
"You mean Alastor Moody? Why's he called Mad-Eye?"
"WHO WAS TEACHING that year. He put my name in the Goblet of Fire under a different school, and it picked me as the Fourth Champion. He did everything possible to make sure I got to the Cup first and turned it into a Portkey. Only problem was, Cedric—the other Hogwarts champion—got there at the same time I did, and we had both helped each other out a lot. He wanted to be noble and let me take it and I couldn't talk him out of it, so I told him—I told him to take it with me."
Harry paused again, steeling himself for what was coming next.
"It took us to a graveyard for Voldemort's rebirthing ceremony. Wormtail killed Cedric as soon as he saw him. He came back to life, I escaped, and Fudge didn't want to believe it, so all through my fifth year he spread the word through the Prophet that Dumbledore was losing his touch and I just wanted more fame.
"At the end of that year, Voldemort lured me to the Department of Mysteries to get me to take the Prophecy and force me to give it his followers so he could hear the rest of it. Dumbledore had kept me in the dark, so I was gullible enough to be swayed by his farce. There was a battle. The Order of the Phoenix—you know what that is, right?"
Sirius nodded.
"The Order of the Phoenix came, including you, even though you were supposed to be in hiding. Most people got injured, but you—you died."
Sirius looked horrified. Harry had been afraid of this—what if he changed his mind and said it was too much? What if he told him to go back where he came from?
But Sirius put his emotionless face back on and just nodded again.
Thank Merlin, he thought.
"It hit me pretty hard because you were my godfather, and as good as a parent. I felt horrible; I thought it was my fault. Eventually, people from the Ministry showed up and had no choice but to accept the fact that Voldemort was back. Dumbledore gave me 'time to heal' and this opportunity for...for closure...do you still think you can handle it?"
"I don't know…this might take a little getting used to…I mean, I know what I said before, but it's kind of a heavy burden to carry."
"And a prophecy isn't? I'd kill to only have to know about the prophecy for a couple days! …Unfortunately, I'm going to have to kill anyway."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. I'm really tempted to just send you back, but…"
"Please…please don't."
Sirius sighed, seeming to have come to a decision. Harry only hoped it was the right one.
"Fine…I guess—I guess I could try not to think about it…like I said before, though—Dumbledore's the smartest wizard ever, so wouldn't he know that someone who can (he puffed up his shoulders proudly) break out of Azkaban would see right through you?"
"I guess...I guess he wanted you to know so that we could be closer. Wait a minute—how did you figure it out?"
"Oh, that," said Sirius, and grinning, he told Harry the story.
When he'd finished, he said with a smirk,
"One last question—who's you mother, eh?"
Smirking back, Harry said,
"Where's the fun in telling you? Oh, no--you'll have to figure it out on your own."