Chapter 31: To Laugh, To Live

Cressida knocks on Sirius' door lightly. It is the dead of the night and she can't sleep. She has an inkling that even if she did, it wouldn't be filled with sweet dreams. She won't bother Sirius if he's asleep – as he should be – but on the chance that he isn't, it would be a less lonely option than sitting on her bed alone.

A soft click sounds and the door creaks open. He doesn't look surprised to see her. His is barely a whisper. "Come on." The lamp in his room is lit, encasing it in a soft warm light that is easy on tired eyes. Cressida slips inside, sinking into the right side of the bed. Sirius sits against his pillow next to her, head pressing into the wall.

"You would have been proud of him," says Cressida. "I was proud of him."

"It's like…it all just happened when I wasn't looking," Sirius confesses. "I wanted him to change so bad and he always refused. Then suddenly when I've finally given up, he does, and I wasn't there to save him."

"I'm so sorry." She sniffs, pulling the sleeve of her cotton shirt over her thumb and wipes it under her eyes. "I was there but I didn't. Fabian and Gideon were also killed. By Dolohov. Regulus wasn't even meant to be there. He came for me because Snape figured out who I was and was trying to expose me in a way that would have gotten me killed instantly."

Cressida breathes through her teeth, throwing her head back against the wall.

"It's unfair. I said to him just a day before that I didn't mind being the one to die. But Regulus was all about surviving. That's all he wanted. He just wanted to continue. Yet here I sit." Her mind reels back to the letter in her bag. "He wrote you something." Cressida moves off the bed and back into her own bedroom, searching arm deep into her bag until she finds the envelope. Sirius waits for her, no longer hunched over. Silently she hands it to him. "He wrote this a few days ago. I wrote some too, just in case. We knew it was a risk."

His finger traces along the envelope's edge, thumb pressing into the corner point. "Can you read it for me?"

Cressida stares at the letter. Then shakes her head. "I don't think he wrote it with the intention for anybody else to read it. You don't have to read it now." Sirius turns his eyes away from the pristine white and Cressida knows that he's had enough. She takes it from his fingers without resistance and places it in the top draw of his nightstand.

"Can I read yours?" Cressida peers at him with raised brows. "The letter you wrote."

"I don't have it," she answers truthfully. "And it wasn't something I intended for you to have while I'm still alive."

"What don't you want me to know?" Cressida smiles, shaking her head, letting her long hair fall over her shoulders and curtain her face. "Do you have dark secrets?"

"Yes," she snorts tiredly. "Things I've never told anybody. Even you."

"Making me curious." Cressida swings her neck around as though contemplating. "Are they good or bad things?"

Her head falls into a bow. "They're… not really either I suppose. I was just telling you what I wanted you to know."

"So why won't you tell me now?"

"Because I don't like seeing people's reactions to things like that. Like when you took me back through your memory of the Ball. I hated it. I hate seeing people in pain because of me. I feel like I'm taking and using their emotions." She looks up at Sirius. "I hate knowing that I can be the source of somebody's tire."

"You're not tiring."

Cressida purses her lips in a grim smile. "Everybody gets tired. But I want to make that that if I'm tiring anybody, it's myself. I need to come with solutions to my own problems. I need to stop having people as crutches and you need your life."

Sirius tosses his hand into her lap, fingers splaying over hers. "I do have a life, thank you very much. And despite having some shitty aspects, I very much enjoy it. You're one of my favourite parts. I love when we wrestle for the last biscuits. Quidditch practice. Movie nights. Sticking quills into Remus' hair when he's sleeping." His fingers forcefully lace through hers. "And never once I have thought that helping you when you need it is tiring. Except with James but I sort of count that as a thing in itself." Cressida laughs, her head falling into the pillow. "My dear Cress, we became illegal Animagi for Remus, and you think that I'm going to get tired of you? I was more tired about having to wake up every sunrise and say that stupid incantation."

"I feel like we should make him go through it just so he understands how much we love him."

"I saw James' mediating once. Remus was the only one sound asleep in the dorm." Their laughter flows easily as the wears of the days gone past trickle away even for just those few minutes. Cressida shuffles down, digging her legs in under the blanket. "Holy crap!" he hisses, his own legs jumping away from hers. "Your feet are bloody freezing!"

"Are they?" she mocks, digging under the blanket further, searching for his legs again. The blanket puffs and shifts around wildly from their antics. After a minute, she doesn't even have an agenda other than to cause chaos and his falls similar to the same.

"I-I will spit on you!"

Cressida pauses, staring at him with a perturbed expression. "That is the strangest threat you've ever given me."

"It's valid." Scrunching her nose, she smacks a loose hand at his face. "Not the face! It's the best-looking part of me."

"My apologies. Can't ruin the pretty boy's reputation."

"No," he agrees with a laugh. Sirius turns on his side, billowing the blanket back over them both evenly. "Especially if I have to stand next to you again. What did we use to say? That we're both so hot-?"

"We'd ruin the world," she finishes. "That's why we could never get together. Though I think the reasoning now might have changed."

His lips pull into a small smirk. "A little bit." His Adam apple bobs as he blinks slowly, eyes pointed at the space between them. "I wished it hadn't sometimes."

Cressida shifts her head to move the fluff of the pillow out of her view. "Why's that?"

"It's… harder. Don't get me wrong, I feel good knowing that people really who I am, but sometimes I just wish I had gotten it easier. I tried to deny it for so long because I thought that I could make myself fall in love with somebody the way I wanted to." Cressida stretches her hand out, gently gripping his forearm. Sirius smiles down, laying his other hand atop of hers. "I wanted to fall in love with you so badly." His eyes snap up to hers, the whites growing larger. "I just would have… it felt like it would have been so easy. I know you down to your freckles and I think you know me down to mine. I thought that maybe if I got close to you then it'd start with a crush. For a while I thought I did have one, but it was just my head desperately clinging to the idea. Before I even knew that I liked guys, I was going crazy trying to figure out why it wasn't you. Everything was perfect, except that I was born wrong."

"You weren't born wrong," Cressida smiles, squeezing his arm. "You were born perfectly right. And maybe we wouldn't have worked out. Merlin, we can be like firecrackers together some days."

"It felt like I was. When they would be talking about girls, I tried to force myself to have the same thoughts, but it always felt wrong. Like I could understand what they were saying, but they were putting it to the wrong people."

Cressida pinches her brows in a mocking manner. "Did they ever talk about me? I'll be offended if they didn't."

Sirius laughs, nodding his head. "Trust me, they talked about you. In a good way. Did you girls ever talk about us?"

"Oh yes," Cressida nods eagerly. "Lily ranted about how much of a toerag James was every night. Mary was complaining once about how Remus drooled on her notes because he fell asleep just before the full moon and Marlene would complain because you were hot, but a snarky prick half the time. Admittedly I have complained a few times about all of you."

"Lovely to know that you all thought highly of us," Sirius chuckled, digging his shoulders further under the edge of the pillow. Cressida grins at him, shifting over, resting on her poised forearms. He looks at her from the side of his eyes. "So you had a crush on Remus in third year, and James from fifth? Was I ever on that list? You have to admit I am totally the best looking out of us all."

"Looks don't mean everything," she points out mirthfully.

Sirius stretches his neck back. "I have… personality too," he adds unsurely.

"Not a particularly good one." Cressida grins innocently, hiding her mouth into her forearms as Sirius gives her a mockingly offended expression.

"Insult me all you want, Cressida my Little Star. I know that I have your affections." Her face digs deeper into her arms to stifle her grin that's beginning to hurt her cheeks. "I saw the disappointment in your eyes when I told you."

Cressida lifts her head with narrowed eyes. "Sirius I nearly tackled you in a hug. I hardly think that's disappointment."

"Alright. Relief then. Relief that it wasn't you, it's me."

"Oh, that was you trying to break up with me?"

"I can hear the heartbreak in your voice. It pains me so."

Cressida smacks his chest with a laugh, rolling onto her back. "When did you figure it out?"

Sirius laughs to himself, his lips drawing wide and a faint dusting of his cheeks appearing. "It was the summer before our fifth year. We were all at James'. It was the middle of the night and we snuck out but we didn't wake you because we wanted to go skinny dipping at the lake. That was a strange night."

"I remember that," she hisses. "I heard you trying to sneak out without me. I followed you all the way down to the lake. Got a right surprise, didn't I?" They lapse into a fit of childish giggles. Cressida covers her mouth, watching Sirius laugh. "Can I tell you something?" He nods with a hum. "It was my sexual awakening too."

They lapse into an even bigger bout of laughter, Sirius head thrown back into the pillow at the same time Cressida digs her face into it, her laughter muffling.

"I'm horrified to even admit how long I stayed," she huffs out through her almost silent laughter. Sirius holds his chest with one hand, the other smacking her arm repetitively. His nose is scrunched, breaths turning into heaves as he tries to breathe. They laugh until they have no more to give, and her smile slowly drops with the trickling energy. The happiness lingers, but Cressida's thoughts travel back to why she came in, in the first place. "Is it wrong?" she asks. "That we're laughing? I just watched three people die."

Sirius pets her forehead, his own composure softening. "I don't think it is. If we didn't, we may as well have died too. Laughter is a part of life. A good part. You're home safe and I'd rather be up all night laughing than thinking about the things that I couldn't change."

Cressida nods slowly. "Mourning isn't a straight line," she whispers. Turning onto her stomach, she pulls the pillow closer to her face, burrowing in for the night.