A/N: OMG you have NO IDEA how HAPPY you guys make me! I swear! YAY! (I've got 1,000 hits! I should have a party!) Okay, there's now an HP club at my school and I'm Spazzing! Like with a capital S. Im sorry this took so F'ing long, I've been wiped out lately between my SATs and AP tests coming up. God I HATE being a junior so I've had no time for Fan fiction. So this has been in the works for WEEKS. I hope the other chapters will come up sooner. Now I'm going to dork out and do what I've always wanted and give little uber personalized thing-ys for reviews. Hee-hee!

champion-of-moral-indignation: Thanx so much:bows: I heart characters. I know that sounds bizarre, but personally I think they're more important than plot. To Explain: We see the world through the characters, a plot, even a brilliant one, with 2D characters is unspeakably boring and hard to concentrate on. A lot of ppl find that with LOTR, also, Josh has heard me say this 1,000 times, characters are human beings only in another world. They have to have a place they start from, a personality (as district as a finger print) and a place they are headed. They have to have opinions, pet peeves, quirks, everything real people have got. And whatever you do for/to a character (or what they do for/to themselves) has to be reflected in their actions and life after that. The social and emotional and realistic rules that exist in our world are the same as in there's. The good part is once you've got a character down pat you can basically write these things in your sleep. Just drop em in a situation and they go on from there. That's my thingy.

harrypotterfan52:huggles:

aztecgold882: You have me saying chappie now! Oh don't worry Amethysts got a lot to say in this chapter. :huggles: thanx! I've got my fingers crossed and they wont be uncrossed until I hear back from the guys at the IYWS. Its making it very difficult to type.

Intel Master: Everyone meet Josh. Josh is an HP fanboy. Yay for Josh!

hopeislost908: (looks over name. Blinks. Rereads. slaps forehead.) dur! its all one word. Sorry threw me off. Im kind of slow sometimes. Awwww! Thanx! I love having my ego stroked:D! So yeah: advice write during Chem b/c no one cares about it. jk(but not really).

alexekia2222: Yay!

Finally...

-The Evil Duck

The Child of The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black

-Part 4-

If The Sky was Spinning In a Washing Machine

January 1976

When Sirius Black walks into a room it immediately turns upside down and can never right itself again...

...which isn't always a bad thing...

I was in history class, not really paying attention, just trying to stay awake when he came in. It's very difficult for me to do anything but sleep in Mr. Steins class because nothing ever really happened in history. In the thirteen hundreds people protested and complained about the poll tax and the king, in 1976 people protest and complain about the poll tax and Prince Philip is certainly a card, isn't he? We never learn anything from history, so why bother?

I was doodling in my notebook thinking about Sirius, actually. Something I've been doing a lot. My friend Mya kept insisting that I like him. Like-like him. A term I haven't really used since primary school, but found myself saying more and more when trying to defend myself against Mya.

"I don't!" I'd say, "we're friends! I like him, but I don't like-like him. Just like him. As a friend. We're close."

I had made the mistake of saying "I love him", to Mya meaning that I love him as a friend and she never let me forget it.

(I thought I loved him like that, or rather I didn't think but I said so anyway. I'm not an incredibly emotionally open person, I don't cry at the end of movies, I don't have rabid political debates. I don't have many confrontations at all, actually, and those I do have are always about something personal happening right now. If some git is picking on Kristen because she accidentally let slip that she has a crush on Mr. Wolf then I'll tell them off, if someone calls Azure a dirty faggot or a Nancy Boy I'll threaten them, if someone tells me Flax smells odd I'll agree with them and let it go. It's smarter to keep your mouth shut and hands clean. People will associate you with any given stupid action and you'll never ever live it down. So I kept my growing crush (I hate that word) on Sirius quiet. It's my business after all, my feelings, and my fantasies.)

Mya MacGraw is a rational person, which one of the reasons she's my best friend, that's why it surprises me that she got on my case about Sirius as much as Kristen Vicks (another good friend of mine), who believes in Prince Charmings.

"It's fate," Kristen'd say when I'd mention I'd gotten another letter, "he's going to come house and sweep you off your feet and profess his love to you." Her eyes would get all soft and gooey when she said this. Mya and I would usually snort together. Funny thing is, she was close to right.

I was there in Mr. Steins European History, drawing pictures of dogs, hearts, and Mr. Stein being run through with a stake (Sirius's history teacher is dead, why can't I be lucky too?) when there was a knock at the door. Mr. Stein stopped talking, though I hardly noticed it and only looked up when I heard a very familiar voice say, "Hello, have I got the right room?"

Couldn't be.

But it was.

Sirius leaned in the doorway surveying the classroom until his eyes, gray-blue and warm at the moment, fell on me and he grinned broadly. I mouthed "what are you doing?" and he shrugged. Most of the class was watching him now. Many of the girls with a good deal of interest. Kristen, who was seated next to me, was literally drooling. Mya poked me in that back of the head and asked, "that's him, isn't it?"

"Can I help you?" asked Mr. Stein harshly.

"I should hope so, sir," said Sirius straightening to look at my teacher, "I'm looking for one Amethyst O'Connor, it's very important."

"Will it take long?" asked Mr. Stein.

"I'm not sure sir," said Sirius, "Head Mistress Cooper sent me, sir." He did his research, I thought. That is, in fact, my head teacher's name.

Sirius was obviously not a student here. His uniform was the same gray I think every British student is forced to wear but there was something...off about it. Indescribably odd like so many other things about Sirius, but Mr. Stein bought it and told me to hurry up.

"What the Hell are you doing here?" I asked Sirius as soon as we were alone in the hallway. "How did you even get here?"

"Hello, Am, I missed you too," he said warmly.

"I–hello, Sirius, I think you know I've missed you. Now how did you get here!"

"Magic," he winked. It's infuriating to know he was telling the truth.

"How did you know where I was?" I asked.

"Azure told me," he said, "is he ill?"

I nodded. He's been getting sick a lot lately. It's really been scaring my parents. He's worried himself ill.

"Do you have the day off school?" I asked.

"No, why?" He asked confusedly.

"Then shouldn't you be at school?" I asked him.

"Probably," he shrugged. "I would have been here sooner but I got lost."

"I thought you got here using magic," I said. We were walking up the stairway now, Sirius was leading and I was following, as he knew where he was going. The third floor of St. Columbia's is deserted. Since the Blitz a good portion of it is blocked off, the belief being that if you're closer to the ground when the bomb hits it'll be easier to bury you. Thirty years later it's just habit.

When we came to where it's usually blocked off Sirius managed to push the door open without problem. He said, "I tried to Apperate, well I succeeded because I'm here but--"

"Apperate?"

"Disappear in one place and appear in another. A bit like...what do muggles call it...teleporting? Is that a word?"

Sirius is different from anyone else in the world, I must have decided this then. Not just because he's a wizard, because apparently there are loads of them floating around and I've just never noticed them, he's just incredibly unique.

They say everyone in the world is special, but I think that's a load of tosh. People tend to conform; girls wear makeup, boys play football. That's what bothers me about secondary school, everyone feels like they have to fit into a mold. Then we grow up into that. I might not wear makeup and I might play football but Im hardly anything special anyway. I'm just a tomboy, a different class of ordinary, but ordinary none the less.

People are the same. Sirius isn't. He's not quite rebellious, because rebellious means that you were something like what you're going against. It implies a relationship to the norm. He's not a rebel, because he's never been within a hundred yards of the norm. He's something else entirely. He's only himself.

"Yeah," I told him.

"Well, I ended up in Ireland first, bit off the mark, you'll agree. Then I bounced around every conceivable inch of the UK before I finally ended up here. In front of The Tower of London actually, which is pretty lucky," he said.

"You know, this is blocked off for a reason."

"I'm sure," he said closing the door behind us, "I just wanted a private place to talk."

"If the building falls in on us--"

"Then we'll be too dead to know the difference," Sirius said. He looked over at me and his eyes fell on something above my chest and he smiled. A real smile, not one of his smirks or quick half smiles. It was hot, as in thermally, and I felt my cheeks reddening under his gaze.

"What?" I asked in a voice I didn't recognize.

"You're wearing the necklace." He gestured to it.

He is, I'd decided shortly after meeting him, the most handsome person that could ever exist. Something about him doesn't quite look normal...maybe not even possible. But more than that, there's something about the way he looks at things, the simplicity of his views as well as the actual color changing gaze.

"I love..." I began looking into his eyes. We'd come to a stop now, in the abandoned hallway, just standing up to our ankles in dust as if it was normal. He was close to me, so close it was making me want to step back, or maybe forward, my brain wasn't exactly working properly. There was something about how he was looking at me. Something in his eyes. Something in him.

There's an old saying everyone's heard, 'eyes are the windows to the soul'. Sirius is proof of that. I'm not a poet, I don't pretend to understand the spiritual piece of humanity, that's what's there for God to work out, but you can tumble into Sirius's mind, you can get lost in his eyes. It's like staring into the sky, if the sky was spinning in a washing machine. "...It," I said quickly and maybe too loudly, catching myself. The world came back around me as Sirius broke the gaze.

"I'm glad," he said a little hoarsely, "I'm glad you love...it."

"Yeah," we stood there for a few moments. The smile disappeared slowly before he began to talk.

"I have to tell you something but I don't know how to," he said quietly.

"Well, that's a problem," I told him grinning. He half smiled. It was sad. Not sad, just worried. My smile faded. "What is it?"

He looked away from me, "You know," he said slowly and pensively, "I finally get it."

"Get what?" I asked.

"Romeo and Juliet," he said as if we'd been talking about it. I suddenly remembered our conversation from the summer before. "I was wrong. I've just been thinking about it. Romeo wasn't a git after all, and he was in love."

"I thought you didn't believe in love, Mr. Black," I teased.

"I didn't." Something about the way he said it made me shiver. "Romeo was the– he was different from the rest of them, his family I mean. He saw –he didn't buy all the bullshit they were feeding him because he saw what of the Montegues for hundreds of generations were too ruddy blind to see. He knew that the Capulets were exactly the same as the Montegues. They–we're all human," his voice was raising goose bumps on my arms.

He stopped speaking suddenly, turning to look at me. I looked into his face and I knew what he was going to say. And I understood too. "So he knew he was different, and it hurt him. But then he saw her and he knew, he absolutely knew, he was right. He saw her and everything he'd gone through, all the stupid crap he'd had to put up with, all the fuck heads and ministry–er idiots he'd had to deal with were gone. There was only her...and he was happy, really, truly happy, for the first time, ever, and he didn't know how he had ever or would ever live without her...I..." he trailed off, his eyes on (or in) mine.

I couldn't speak for a long while. My throat was so dry it didn't feel remotely like a throat anymore, more like a dessert. "That's...that's beautiful, I managed."

He shook his head and kept looking at me in a way that made my heart threaten to explode, "you're beautiful."

My face felt like it was on fire, and it wasn't alone. "Im not...I'm..."

"Yes, yes you are." He tipped my chin up the way they do in movies and touched my cheek. "You're the most beautiful person I've ever met, that anyone's ever met. You're the one who made me realize it Am, you're the one who made me believe in love...because...because... well..."

All I could see were his eyes, and I felt like I was falling into them, toppling upwards into the sky, and I knew what he was going to say, because it was written there.

"I love you, Am."

If my life was a movie then I would have whispered, I love you too, in some cliché poetic but sappy manor. But this wasn't a moment from a movie, so all I could do was stammer, "I...me...you...I...too, you too."

The kiss, however, could have been from some 1930s romance story. The kind of Hollywood kiss that comes at the end of the movie when the hero and heroine hook up. The kind where the girls foot pops up and makes me say "that is so stupid". My foot didn't pop (thank God), but that was possibly the only difference. That and the distinct "oomph" when our lips touched.

I wanted it to last forever and I think it nearly did. When we broke apart I couldn't breathe let alone talk but somehow I managed a "wow."

Sirius smiled and in a far-off voice that sounded almost as stupid as mine said, "yeah." He cleared his throat then said, "So, um, are we, do you...?" He tried again, "so you do? and are we...an...a...a thing? Would you like to go out sometime?"

I laughed, "yes." It was such a funny situation. I never ever expected it but had always played it out in my head and it always ended with that perfect kiss. I always felt guilty after my daydreams, I felt like I was betraying myself somehow, that I was becoming too much like Kristen and her type. But what the Hell did I know? That moment, that kiss, that time up in the dilapidated third floor, was the best of my life. "Oh," I remembered, "I've got something for you."

"You've just given me loads, trust me," he said. I made a face to stop him from being so cheesy in the future.

"Some bloke turned it in a few days ago, I was going to write to you. When we told the bloke how much it would cost to fix it he just let us have it." He looked confused, "a motorbike, I mean. And it must have been something when it was new. I mean, I'm far more of a car person, but this isn't some crappy Brit bike, this is an American! a Harley-Davidson–!" He cut me off with a kiss and I suddenly believed in Prince Charmings too.

A/N:The title...yeah... I dunno, I liked the quote. Shhh. I know it doesn't really work but I liked it. Meh, could've been better, could have been worse. Its hard to keep everything going at once. Meh. Meh. and Meh again. Oh well, Hakuna Matata