They kept meeting in the garden as the weeks passed, both growing increasingly annoyed that Harry still hadn't been brought to join them at Grimmauld Place. They talked more, too. Not just about Harry and the Order and the coming war.

They talked about what it was like growing up for each of them; Sirius being brought up in a rigid, pureblood House where he learnt all the customs and intricacies of wizarding culture, and Hermione being brought up in a no doubt loving but not fully understanding home.

Hermione told Sirius about how her parents had enrolled her in all sorts of hobbies as a child, hoping one would stick so she wouldn't have her head in a book forever. She told him about the disastrous few ice skating lessons she took, both laughing at her retelling of falling immediately on her arse every time she stepped on the rink. Hermione had liked ballet, though, and the gymnastics lessons she was enrolled in. She'd kept it up until she'd gone to Hogwarts, and then she joked that it's a bit difficult to go to semi-weekly dancing and gymnastics lessons in London when you're at a boarding school in Scotland.

Sirius, in turn, told her how he'd had to learn the history of the Black family and could name every relative back to somewhere in the 1500s. Why his mother thought that would ever be useful Sirius never knew. He told her about learning the names of constellations and stars and when they'd meet past midnight, he spent hours pointing them out to her. Telling her the myths and stories behind them, and where he could, told her about his family members named after them.

He had a big family, and they'd all been close when they were younger. He told her about the days he spent playing with Bellatrix, Narcissa and Andromeda, his cousins. Sirius explained that the only one of them he'd seen recently was Bellatrix, and that was because his cell in Azkaban was in the same wing as hers. Andromeda had been disowned just after she'd graduated from Hogwarts; she married a muggleborn and that was unacceptable to his family.

He was sorrowful when he talked about them, especially Bellatrix. She was a bad person, he explained. But there was a time when she was just his older cousin who'd play games of make-believe with him when they were just kids. They were still just kids when she'd got caught up with all that death eater shite, he told her, earnestly. They'd just been raised with arrogance and bigotry and she'd never been able to see anything outside of it.

He didn't tell her about Regulus.

Hermione told him that she was an only child, but that every summer, ever since she could remember, her parents would take her to visit her cousins in France. They were like sisters to her, rather than cousins. They were the ones who'd first given her a cigarette to try, away from their parents' eyes. She told him that they were the first to get her drunk, and that she hadn't got to see them this summer and that she missed them. For the first time since she was born, her parents were going to France without her and didn't even have an explanation why.

Sirius only spoke a bit about the Marauders, but he told her about some of their more outrageous pranks. Told her about his and James' quidditch victories, to which she rolled her eyes. And then he talked about the wild parties they'd have after. "It was the seventies, Hermione and even wizards were wanting to let loose." He spoke about sneaking cigarettes into Hogwarts, and then muggle alcohol. He told her that they'd even managed to sneak in weed, and acid once. She laughed when he told her that it was the weirdest experience of his life because James had had a bad reaction and turned into Prongs. Sirius nearly cried laughing at the memory of the four of them high out of their minds, running after a stag in their dorm room.

They spoke about Harry, and how they worried that his aunt and uncle were mistreating him. How Dumbledore didn't seem to care, as long as the blood wards were upkeeped. "But the thing is," Hermione told Sirius, "you have a lot of books on wards in your family library, did you know? And they all say that a blood ward is useless if someone has your blood. I looked up the ritual that he used, as best I could. Don't know why I bothered, really. Harry told me that he used his blood in the ritual."

Sirius looked at her with a grave expression. "So what you're telling me is that Harry is at his aunt's with no protection except whoever the Order sticks on him?"

Hermione nodded. There was nothing else to say - it was clear to both of them that Harry, like everyone else, was just another cog in Dumbledore's machine. It was a metaphor they'd used before, and a thought came to Hermione. "Dumbledore's keeping him there for nothing, and with no protection." She dismissed the so-called guard that was set by the Order and she didn't have to listen to their meetings to know that they weren't doing anything. Half the time they didn't show up.

"Why don't we remove a cog from the machine of the greater good?" Hermione slyly suggested.

Sirius quirked an eyebrow in an unasked question: how?