Previously in the Darklyverse: Alice and Sirius's relationship remained uneasy after they fought in sixth year about purity politics. Frustrated by it having nothing to do with the war effort, Sirius quit the Quidditch team in seventh year. The Gryffindors prepared for their N.E.W.T.s. Dirk broke up with Alice.
xx
May 6th, 1978: Sirius Black
It's Hufflepuff versus Slytherin, and Sirius is supporting Hufflepuff, of course, in spite of anything the Order has to say about inter-house unity, because there's no way he's going to root for Slytherin with his Death Eater brother playing Seeker for them. He's sitting in the stands with James on one side of him and Remus on the other, and they're all holding a big yellow banner with a badger on it that they wave in the air every time Hufflepuff scores a goal.
Slytherin is in the lead, because of course it is. Sirius isn't entirely surprised, since Hufflepuff's Chasers are all new to the team this year, after Elisabeth passed away and Kirley and Hestia both graduated. Still, he hopes Benjy will beat out Regulus to catch the Snitch and end this before Hufflepuff accumulates too many points—the fewer goals today's winning team scores, the better it is for Gryffindor in their upcoming game against Ravenclaw.
Marlene is in the row in front of Sirius, not cheering, not waving a flag, not doing anything to suggest that she's having a good time. He can't decide whether he feels sorry for her or whether he's too pissed to be capable of sympathy.
Slytherin scores another goal, and Sirius cringes. "Come on, Benjy, catch the Snitch already and put us out of our misery," he mutters.
Slytherin scores another goal, then yet another. "Slytherin leads seventy to twenty!" Mike McKinnon updates all of them, his voice magically elevated and booming out across the stands. "And it looks like—yes—our Seekers have spotted the Snitch!"
Sirius can barely make out Regulus's and Benjy's forms as they zoom toward the Slytherin goalposts. Benjy pulls ahead of Regulus, and Sirius thinks he's about to win this thing for Hufflepuff, when—Sirius can't quite see what has happened, but Benjy and Regulus fly off course and, presumably, lose sight of the Snitch.
"And that's a penalty to Slytherin for blurting—locking broom handles to steer Black off course! Chaser Richard Rowle puts it away, no problem, bringing Slytherin's total to eighty—"
"Benjy could have gotten that. Why wouldn't he?" says Remus.
"If Hufflepuff only scored two goals before catching the Snitch, then either we or Ravenclaw would only need to score three goals in our game together in order to win the championship," says James. "Even if Slytherin is leading them in points, Hufflepuff's going to want to score as many goals as they can before going for the Snitch. As long as they're not more than a hundred and forty points behind, it's in their favor to wait."
"We could be waiting a while for this match to be over, then," Sirius says with a frown. "This could get ugly."
An hour and nine fouls later, Slytherin is still in the lead, a hundred and ninety to eighty, and Benjy has blocked Regulus from catching the Snitch another two times. Lily and Emmeline have straight up broken out their textbooks and started to study in the row in front of Sirius, and he's sure that Marlene and Alice are giving each other looks of annoyance, though he can't quite make out their faces from the angle they're standing.
It's still weird to Sirius to be sitting in the stands when a Quidditch game rolls around, even though he quit the team nearly a year ago when the season started. Even during games where Gryffindor isn't playing, it's a little bizarre not to be doing mental math, figuring who's in the lead and where Gryffindor stands in the running for the Quidditch Cup. Still, it feels like a lifetime ago that Sirius cared about things like Quidditch. The only thing he could be doing that really matters right now is fighting the Death Eaters, but their branch of the Order hasn't done jack shit to that end all year long, and he's just itching to graduate and get more important task assignments.
He knows Marlene is fed up with being sidelined in the organization that started out with just them and Dorcas figuring it out on their own. He knows it, and he even thinks she's sort of right. But which of them would have died this year if they'd kept on going the way they'd been going? Whose lives did Dumbledore save by benching the students?
Sirius feels bad for Eddie Bones, who's going to be the only one left at Hogwarts after Sirius's cohort graduates next month—the only one left to head up War Stories and wait until he can fight. He wonders if Dorcas will keep meeting with Eddie or if that will become one of this year's graduates' jobs—who will have to doll out bullshit assignments with just enough substance to keep Eddie from quitting and going off on his own? Will it be Sirius? Sirius hopes it won't be him.
"Look," says Alice suddenly from in front of Sirius, pointing, and Sirius looks up. It's over in a flash, and Sirius can't quite see what happens before Mike shouts, "And it's a win for Hufflepuff as Seeker Benjy Fenwick catches the Snitch! Hufflepuff wins, two hundred and seventy to two hundred and fifty!"
"They barely eked that one out," says Peter on Remus's other side. "If they'd waited any longer, Slytherin would have gotten so far ahead that even catching the Snitch wouldn't catch Hufflepuff up."
"Still, that means whoever wins next time needs to score quite a few goals to win the Cup," James says. "That could take a while."
"It sort of sucks for Hufflepuff that their game came first," says Sirius. "We and Ravenclaw get the advantage of knowing how highly we have to score in order to win the whole thing."
They file out of the stands, catching up with the girls again, Sirius and Remus making a point of avoiding Marlene. As far as Sirius knows, Marlene and Remus have reached a kind of uneasy peace where they're not really speaking, but they don't hate each other? Sirius doesn't really know. Remus hadn't wanted to talk much about it, and Sirius can't blame him—it's not like he himself wants to spend any time talking about how messed up things are between himself and Marlene.
He wishes he could just discount his entire relationship with her as a giant mistake. They only got together because Emmeline left him and he was lonely and Marlene was available, and they fell into a habit—no, an addiction—of cyclical sex that left her acting alternately needy and accusatory. Then they tried to smooth it all over and be boyfriend and girlfriend, which worked for a while—or at least seemed to—until the past caught up with them and Marlene said she wanted space. And Sirius used that space to figure things out with Remus, and even though he wouldn't have cheated, she dumped him for lying to her and all the other things that she couldn't keep excusing away.
He would wash his hands of it entirely, except—he grew to love that girl with whom he kept coming together in broken places, and his relationship with Marlene, outside of family, is the most influential and important relationship he's ever had in his life. How can he just erase someone who left the impact that Marlene did on him? How do you pour that much of your soul into someone else only to act like they don't exist?
So he doesn't know how he feels, and he's bitter and tired and cold, and he doesn't want to talk about her or to her or any of it, ever again. Except—he knows that's not going to last. He knows it because he wakes up at night sweaty and convinced that she's here and in danger and he has to save her from the Death Eaters before they take her, too, only for him to turn around and find that everything's fine and it was just a dream—the danger isn't real, but that feeling that someone or something is going to take her away from him—well, it already has. If only Remus had never kissed Sirius—if only Marlene weren't so stubbornly proud—then maybe they wouldn't be in this position, but they are.
So yeah, he doesn't talk to Remus about it, and he doesn't admit to anybody—least of all himself—that he still has feelings for the girl who turned his world upside down for three years of his life. He wishes love were linear so that he could hop straight from Marlene to Remus with no mess in between, because the mess here is huge, and he doesn't have the faintest idea how to clean it up.
He doesn't talk about it, and yet he thinks Remus knows that something is up. The way Remus looks at him sometimes… it's like he doesn't trust that everything is okay, and why should he? What reason has Sirius given him to believe that he's a healthy person, when his relationship history looks like it does and his family has been punishing him for years for not being a Muggle-hating pureblood supremacist like they all are?
With the game over, it's back to N.E.W.T. studying with Remus and Alice in every second of Sirius's free time. He could do without Alice tagging along, honestly, but Remus tells him that she hasn't done anything to warrant his wrath, to play nice and welcome her back into the fold while she's going through her breakup with Dirk Cresswell, so he doesn't tell her to sod off or avoid her like he kind of wants to.
It comes to a head the next day, when Remus ducks out to find a bathroom and leaves Sirius alone with Alice in the library. "Why do I get the impression that you don't want me around very much?" she says after setting down her quill and snapping her Defense Against the Dark Arts textbook shut. She sounds serious, but she's smiling a little, so Sirius doesn't get the impression that she's looking for a fight.
Alice is his friend, sure—they've all been friends together since they were eleven—but he never really forgave her for what she said about purebloods and werewolves back at the Basilisk last year. He knows that's not entirely fair—she's changed a lot since then, and he has to give her credit for being open-minded and growing over time. But he looks at her and then at Remus, who never did a darn thing to hurt anybody in his life, and can barely stomach his indignation at Remus defending Alice when Remus should be the one feeling irate and offended, not Sirius.
"You thought the laws barring werewolves from employment were fair. You thought purebloods weren't conspiring to keep Muggle-borns tamped down in society and out of their family trees. You—"
"Okay, first of all, I did think those things. I don't anymore."
Sirius slumps down in his seat. "I know. I guess I just… don't believe that people are capable of real change."
It makes sense, given the family Sirius grew up in. He doesn't think about the Blacks any more than he has to—Mum and Dad screaming at him for getting sorted into Gryffindor and for one of his best friends, Peter, being Muggle-born; the whole family heaping praise on Regulus for joining the Death Eaters; getting burned off the family tree tapestry the night he ran away. Nobody in his family has ever done an iota of work or thought to become more like someone whom Sirius could stomach: why should he believe that anyone else would?
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do to prove myself to you," says Alice, "and I don't really think I should have to prove myself, anyway. I like to think we live in a world where people can be assumed to have good intentions."
It's so totally not what Sirius believes, but he just nods and says, "That's fair."
"I know I… got distant from you all when I was with Dirk, but that's over now. I'm sure we'll get closer when we've left here and started doing real work for the Order, but I need you to trust me—I mean, I want you to trust me. I'd like that."
"Look, I'm sorry about Cresswell," says Sirius. "I know you cared about him, and he seems really kind and stable and, you know, everything that we aren't."
"I don't need you to be stable. I just want to love my best friends and know they love me back."
Sirius looks at her—like, really scrutinizes her—for a moment. This is Alice, and whatever flaws she may have, she's still the girl who waved Sirius over to sit by her in the Great Hall during the Sorting ceremony and has been his friend ever since. "Of course I love you," he tells her. "Even when I don't like you very much, I always love you."
Alice laughs. "If that's the best I can get, I'll take it."