Warnings: Language. Plus:
1. Characters with unexamined opinions and extreme logic gaps.
1a. I.e.: please don't assume I agree with anything anyone coffcoffSirius says.
2. Three dialects, one of which is an actual linguistic dialect.
2a. Please don't assume I agree with Sirius's snobby opinions about Northern English accents. (Evan does, but we're not asking him.). If you want to know what this sounds like, there are some good youtube hits if you search 'lancashire sound poems.'
2b. Also I am getting my Northern English dialect information from online sources, so if you're familiar with Lanky IRL and know how I could be doing better, please let me know.
3. The boys forgot to bring the easygoing and the cute. They'll both be back for the next-and-final chapter, I promise, but we have some stuff to get through first and I'm telling you up-front, the boys left their laid-back at home today.

Time-sensitive notes:

The moment I started writing the Subjectiverse (nearly a decade ago!) the nature of the project forced me to take the lit-crit position that the author is dead. I had to decide a long time ago not to care what she says, for the purely practical reason that I can't rethink a story this size every time she gets a new idea. I don't feel bound to honor her jossing, assumptions, or beliefs—now or ever.

So this recent spurt of opinionation may hit me less hard than some, and I want to say this to those who not only strongly disagree with her but are also feeling like she's making it hard to hold onto something you care about:

The author who calls herself Robert Galbraith gave us this fandom. She gave us everything but the right to make money from it. I'm grateful. It's ours now. She doesn't get to kill it for us. It's MINE. It's YOURS. It's something we've also made, shaped, done. It's a language we speak, it's a culture we share. She kicked it off, but her part is over. Some of her ideas are valuable, and some of them are nonsense. There's no need to treat either like the other.

The author and her world are both deeply flawed. This shouldn't surprise anybody who's read her work with adult eyes. That's ok. Her part in Harry's story is over. It's ours now.

The arc of history bends (erratically) towards compassion. Every generation thinks its grandparents are monsters/conservatives/squares/tories/optimates for still being against some form of liberty/equality/respect/lack of torture that should be a basic human right. This will happen to me, and it will happen to you. It'll hurt. It'll be a good thing. It is now.

Let's not let something we've communally poured our hearts into for over twenty years be ruined for us. We don't have to feel betrayed because social evolution is happening and not everyone's elastic enough to get on board fast enough: that always happens. It's sad that she's one of the ones left behind the curve, but no one is always admirable in every respect. It's ok to take the good and leave the gross. Just write the world you love.

The Hounding of the Basket-Case

Covered in cobwebs, sporting a beautiful shiner, and very nearly hacking with hay fever, Sirius landed where the third-to-last of the portkeys had taken him and looked warily around. The other portkeys had taken him more or less where he'd thought they might, after, that echoing, mouldy room of dead mechanical monsters and punk-arse muggle kids who had not unreasonably thought they weren't going to have to worry about an adult stumbling into whatever they were doing with those giant needles with the pumps in—they probably still thought that, with any luck, since the resulting scuffle hadn't left any evidence an Obliviate couldn't get rid of.

Lily had sent him to some library, the Forbidden Forest, another forest, for some ungodly reason to a rustily deserted playground choked with meadow cat's-tail and its hellish pollen, and an unnervingly gorgeous field of wildflowers surrounded by mountains that were probably the Alps, given the tribe of skinny, brown, triangle-faced goats that had tried to eat his clothes and left boot right off him. All of those had made sense as places Snape might go for ingredients—other than the kids with their pointy muggle potions staring at the pretty dust motes.

But at least it had matched the portkey, more or less. There'd been giant rolls of cloth propped up on the walls, if no actual spinning wheels. This place didn't make sense or match: there was not a single bluebell in evidence.

Sirius was on a shabby street, and he wasn't between two buildings because there was no 'between' to the buildings. Lily had, however, put him in a corner, where a red brick addition hung like a dignified sore off a shabby, grubby, ancient building, as near to an unadorned pentagram as a building with straight walls could be. Sirius came around to the front (if it was the front) and very nearly went inside without casting point-me, the place was so Sniv-like.

It was a stark place, with white-barred windows and a white-barred glass door glaring out of it like teeth. The uneven stones that made up the walls… the best Sirius could say about them and their thick mortar was that they muddled together into a nearly-uniform beige. They had splotches of fire damage and paler veiny places that looked as if someone had relatively-recently ripped down clusters of living ivy as an offence against depression.

Or—no, actually, someone had put up baskets of plants, and then let them die. They were so brown they faded into the stones; it was quite hard to tell. A more recent enterprising soul had put a shiny, gold-coloured lantern above the door, all in clean modern diamond-shaped lines. Higher up, in the same colour, bolted to the building by grey bars that made no effort to hide against the stones, were the words PENDLE WITCH.

The sign on the door read, "No Vacancies."

Probably not the best idea to go surging boldly in after all, then. A shared hair-colour might be enough to persuade the locals that Sirius had legitimate reasons to be looking for a six-year-old nightmare, despite how completely opposite from each other they looked otherwise, but Snape was unlikely to hesitate even a second before shrieking, "This man is not my daddy!" if he felt like being difficult. Which he always did.

Not that Sirius wanted to take on that particular role even for a second anyway, even if it would disgust Sniv as much as it did him.

His point-me sputtered, the way it did when the target was too far off, the way it had every single other time, and his shoulders sagged. He was about to admit defeat and crawl home in shame to be scolded by Lily and gutted by at least one of his cousins when an out-of-place not-drab thing caught his eye.

Someone had stuck a shiny blue-black sticker on one of the worn-pale bits of the dark green-grey, er, fence next to the inn, where the next building over didn't stick out so far. When Sirius came over to look closer, he saw it was an adorable black puppy with big blue eyes.

He regarded it with grave suspicion, and then, putting his back to the muggle passers-by, with his wand.

Yep: portkey. He couldn't do a really good test without turning into Padfoot, but he took the best sniff he could with his sad human nose. He didn't know whether this was the one Lily really thought would be it and she'd wanted to make sure James was thoroughly distracted before Sirius got a good clue, or he'd missed other markers at the other places, or what was going through her shiny red head, but he knew it was hers. She'd helpfully smeared so much of her favourite perfume on it that he nearly sneezed, and besides, that was how she always drew eyes, with the little white flecks in the pupil to 'give them life.' She never could get them in the same place in both eyes; everyone she drew looked a little cross-eyed. It was cuter and less disturbing than usual on a puppy.

Sighing, he touched it and, for the eighth time, said, "Pax."

The woods were lovely, not dark and deep and gnarled in any Snape-appropriate way, but river-full and actually mostly moorland-or-pasture-or-something off to his right. He was alone this time, thank Merlin.

He turned with more of a feeling of leisure, what with the sounds of the splashing water replacing the car horns and chatter that said there were eyes on him that, however uninterested, stopped him doing magic. Using the portkey didn't count. Muggles who saw nothing where they thought they'd just seen something would assume that either it was a ghost or their eyes had been playing tricks on them or they'd not noticed themselves blinking. Coming instantly into a place was a risk, but disappearing without the crack of disapparition was usually okay.

He was standing next to the sort of shortish pole with pointy wooden flaps on that told him he was on a walking trail. Instead of the name of the trail, the flaps sported a simple, flat picture of what Sirius at first thought was a seated bear. On closer examination, he realized it was meant to be a pointy-hatted witch, seated sidesaddle on a broom as if brooms made gravity completely stop working and wind resistance not apply.

Nothing to do with actual witches or wizards, then.

The pole had a wooden bucket-thing attached, with brochures in. The first was just a muggle map of the area, with the river and walking trails and farms and attractions marked out.

Four women being publicly hanged stood out in stark, sketchy lines on the olde-tymey cream of the other, while said public was pious at them and more women clutched the bars of a low jail tower in the background. The big letters up top read, The Wonderfvll Discoverie of Witches in the Covntie of Lancaster' with a smaller subtitle in less trying-to-look-ancient print that provokingly asked, Who were the witches of Pendle?

Almost certainly your run-of-the-mill Muggles drunk on fear and spite and religious guilt and whatnot, Sirius concluded glumly after leafing through it. The dismal story of family feuding and parents and children betraying each other to death in court was peppered with wonderfvll names, though: Alizon,* Law, Device, Nutter, Whittle.

* In his fourth year, Sirius had gone out a few times with a fifth-year Hufflepuff named Allisounne. Probably a nice enough girl, he supposed, when she wasn't clearly chatting you up on orders from her family to make nice with the Black heir who might just be tolerable as a potential in-law since he was pals with Charlus Potter's kid. Not even the MacMillans would name a kid Alizon these days. It was too bad, really—with a girl named Alizon, getting ditched via a bucket of flesh-eating slugs dumped on his head would have been less of a surprise. You expected something classier from an Allisounne. Frogs, at least.

According to the pamphlet, the walking trail was the route the accused muggles (it had selections from their confessions, and they hadn't mentioned anything like any magic Sirius had heard of. If there was a British curse that Sirius hadn't at last heard of by the time he got to school, Sniv had probably pulled it out of his arse during a temper tantrum) had been forced down on their way to the trial that would kill most of them. Really, really lovely.

"Way to be an apologist, Lily," he muttered, scowling.

Growing up in an historically anti-wizard area didn't excuse Snape. Everyone grew up knowing about witch hunts, and that old Wendelin the Weird pap that got shoved down the first years' throats was just shoved theredown to reassure them. It was You Don't Have To Live In Fear at its most transparent: They're Not So Clever and We'll Give You Protection If You Stay And Learn rolled into one.

Everyone knew that. It wasn't like Sniv was the only kid who'd grown up with that fiery shadow knocking at his dreams, and not everyone grew up Dark and hateful.

And what was wrong with Lily, anyway, apparating pregnant all over creation to put little stickers on public buildings? Sirius would have liked to have had a word with Prongs about it, but it wouldn't occur to Prongs to try and discourage this without talking to Lily about it directly. Sirius liked his face intact.

With a sigh, bracing himself again to admit defeat and probably eventually have to report back for scolding and evisceration, he cast Point-Me one more time.

His wand twitched left and held steady. Thank Merlin.

Sirius double-checked to make sure there was no one about. Then Padfoot trotted off through the trees, following the path of the twitch. It was cool out, though not so cool as in the probably-Alpine-meadow. Between the hazels and hollies and elms and lindens, the flowers were quite different, far more familiar to Padfoot's curious nose.

So were the very distracting mice and birds and hedgehogs and butterflies and things, but while Padfoot's breed of dog, whatever it was (Moony said Newfie, Pete said Grim, James said Bear, and Sirius said Me) might not have been a bred-for-hunting dog, it probably was some sort of a tracker. Padfoot was more focused when Sirius wanted to find someone than he'd expected to be the first time he tried it. Not aggressive, though—concerned was more like it, which was a distinctly odd feeling when it was Snivvy he was looking for, even a de-aged Sniv.

It was a bit of a lope even for four feet. Evidently Lily hadn't been kidding about putting him far enough away from where she'd thought Snape might be to avoid spooking the little weasel. Not absurdly far, though; it wasn't too-too long before Padfoot started to pick up Boy and Man's Clothes and Sirius's Kitchen and something with radish and fennel Snape must have had for lunch (the weirdie) and what Slughorn called a raw potion—the sort where. after it had come together you could still tell what the parts had been.

This one was more complicated than most, and the strongest scent on Snape by far. Padfoot was surprised by how completely vegetarian it smelled. As he got closer, he started to pick up on a chestnutty undertone which sort of went against the rest of it in a way he couldn't pin down. It was a puzzle that was going to itch at him, he could tell, which was infuriating because he really didn't care.

It was going to be like when Pete started humming Hey Jude by way of suggesting that it had been a long time since they sat around getting stoned and Prongs completely missed this subtext and started shouting All You Need Is Love at Lily off-key and then Sirius and Remus looked at each other and they both instantly knew that Sirius was going to be stuck with a slow beat like traumatized rocking in his head all week and Moony started racing to get back to the flat and take control of the gramophone before he got stuck with Black Sabbath and Ozzy being 'ten times more in love with his own voice than the music, which is just like you to not recognize when you hear it, Padfoot,' on a gramophone cranked up to thirteen.

He was paying so much attention to figuring that strange over-layered smell out as he slowed to approach that he almost didn't notice what he was walking into until he got punched in the nose by FLOWERS FLOWERS FLOWERS!

To Padfoot, this was a bit like being punched in the nose by CARDBOARD CARDBOARD DUST! Flowers didn't move and weren't good to eat. They were only interesting because of the animal smells on them.

There was a lot of that on these—deer, which was one of Padfoot's favourite smells, along with foxes, frogs, stoats, grass snakes, weasels, voles, mice, squirrels… red squirrels, too, which was a very interesting smell because those little buggers were vicious. But there were so many flowers that all the pheromones were rather oppressed by the pollen.

Padfoot sidled behind a strawberry tree before he could sneeze, nose wrinkling at the don't-eat-me-you-won't-like-it smell of the round, warty fruits, and Sirius stood up. He looked out into the clearing: bluebells, and bluebells, and bluebells, and lots of grass and birch trees, and a few broader good-for-sitting-in trees scattered about.

And, yes, the kid was sitting in one of them. Or, not so much sitting as draped over a branch four times his current size like a droopy boa constrictor, absorbed in a book twice the current size of his head. He was still wearing his fussy little frock coat and neat boots, because he was just determined to give Sirius as many headaches as possible.

Sirius deliberately stepped on a branch. Snape's head shot up. Although they weren't close enough together that Sirius could see the black eyes narrowing as they fell on him, he could feel Snape's attention hone. He gave an eyebrows-up, unimpressed little wave, and put one hand on his hip doing his best to broadcast I hope you've had fun with your little hide-and-seek game because your mum is about to give you the hiding of your life and I'm not going to stop her.

Snape sneered at him and hunched back down over his book again.

Sirius sighed, very loudly, and made his way over and up. Snape tensed as he got closer, but didn't actually run away again. Taking the slab of chocolatey oats out of his pocket, Sirius waved it at him. "If this is ruined, it's your fault for being a spastic grasshopper and dropping the milk jug in it," he declared.

"What are you doing here?" Snape demanded.

Sirius paused. Something felt wrong. One minute he couldn't put his finger on it, and the next he was bursting with… he didn't know a word for it. 'Aggrievation' sounded about right. He'd given the brat a perfectly polite—okay, not polite, but a good-faith opening to… he wasn't sure what, but an opening, and he hadn't expected…

What, he hadn't expected Sniv to be rude? Of course he had. Sniv never did anything but bite one's head off.

He felt like a bad dog, that was what it was. And that made no sense at all. Snape hadn't even sounded especially aggressive or scornful, for him. That blunt question after his show of playful nonaggression made him feel…

Overdressed?

Yes. That. Like he'd shown up to breakfast before Herbology in dress robes. With frills. What the hell.

"Hullo to you too," he said, vexed.

"You didn't say hello," Snape pointed out, raising an eyebrow and… well, his twiggy arms had been more or less crossed on the bough already, but now he was making it look intentional. "You said I should feel guilty about ceasing to care about how to manage you and Lupin together in a confined space when confronted instead with the prospect of you and Potter in a confined space."

Realizing that this in fact was what he'd said and that therefore arguing that none of those words had come out out of his mouth would get him nowhere—as would pointing out that Snape was making Sirius and all his friends sound like Knockturn Alley tourist-nappers—he asked, "Did you know every time you say Jamie's name it sounds like you're spitting?"

Snape gave him a not really but I would certainly rather spit than say it sort of look, and coolly went on regardless. "Since that is, from my standpoint, an intolerably toxic combination, I do not feel in the least guilty, and rather than being so impolite as to attack the very stupid premise of your question, which is that leaving before he knew I was there was unreasonable rather than my only possible option, I moved on. And, now that we have unfolded the conversation which you apparently would have liked to make take all day, I repeat: what are you doing here, and is your dearest chum behind you?"

"I sent him to see if you'd gone back to Evan," Sirius waved Snape's rising grim alarm down.

"Oh god," Snape groaned, though his shoulders relaxed a little. "Black, Evan is working. His client—"

"Don't be a moron, I sent James to the wrong side of the street for his studio. Which I can't imagine he's even in, if it's a wedding portrait. My creepy uncle Darius went on and on once about that one time he did one of those with the bride-mama in the room in a studio where Great-Uncle Chrystonacrutch could drop by and nose in. He would have needed a calming potion just talking about it, if Uncle Robo-Creep knew what an emotion was. I saw Evvie's face. He doesn't put himself in uncomfortable situations."

"...One or two interesting characterizations in that," Snape noted dryly, "But I suppose Delphine wouldn't tell someone coming in off the street making demands where he's painting in any case."

"Who?"

Snape's eyebrows rose at him again. "The receptionist? I'm sure she's related to you."

"Not particularly, if you mean she's a Rosier," Sirius shrugged. "My uncle and aunt were both okayed to marry one because nobody else had in three or four generations and there weren't a lot of options that decade. You have to cycle families if you don't want the kids born with fifteen toes. My parents were such close cousins they wanted me to marry Alecto Carrow," he added darkly. "We haven't married that family in I think about six generations, and there's a reason."

Snape's mouth did a thing before quickly smoothing out. It wasn't exactly sympathetic, but Sirius was pretty sure it meant okay, yeah, I still don't forgive you for breaking Reggie's heart but I can't deny anybody would run away screaming from that, only I can't say so because of that Slytherin United Front bullshit.

This heartened Sirius enough to ask (peevishly, to drive home that Snape was being ridiculous), "Are you ever coming down? I'm getting a crick in my neck."

"No," Snape said, in that flat you have no right to ask and are furthermore an idiot way he had. "You still haven't said what you're doing here."

Throwing up his hands, Sirius said, "I said I'd look after you till Evan got back!"

"And I still don't know why you did in the first place! Don't even bother claiming noble child-protective altruism, you know I'm not helplessly eight in anything but physicality."

"...I thought you were, like, five," Sirius noted, disturbed. When he came to remember it, the first time he'd seen Sniv, when the arrogant snot had joined their compartment without even a hello, much less a by-your-leave, he'd thought the kid had somehow snuck on to go to school with his redheaded babysitter (because they looked in no way related).

And then Sniv had started telling what had looked at the time like a quite bully-able girl (a very wrong first impression, but she'd been pretty miserable over her sister at the time, which she said was Sniv's fault) to go in Slytherin where someone dressed like her would have been gnashed into tiny little pieces.

Then Cousin James, who Sirius hadn't met till then (because The Family hadn't exactly disowned Cousin Dorea for her marriage to a cosmetics-making drip but hadn't really approved either and had happily stopped inviting her to things after she'd turned down three Yule invitations in a row) and had been quite liking, had turned out to have Opinions about Slytherin.

Sirius hadn't considered that he might not go there before. His future had been presented to him as a forgone conclusion. Suddenly there were options—options that meant spending most of every day being nowhere near Bella and not having to hang around Prissy Cissy or the Mulciber and Avery creeps-in-training forever—and James made him think they might even be more than theoretical.

And then the scrawny little redhead-badgering squit had been snide about Sirius's new life goal. And Sirius had stopped noticing he was little and noticed instead that he looked like he washed by dumping a bucket of water on his head and calling it day, and had the same kind of nose as that portrait of Phineas Nigellus Black that always told Sirius he'd never amount to anything.

Grown up, was Snape really that short? He always looked to Sirius like a black Scottish terrier, scowly and ruffled-up and staring like he wanted to bite from too far down for comfort. He was shorter than James and Remus and Reggie, but he wasn't actually that much shorter than Evan and Sirius, was he? Couple inches. Definitely taller than Peter. Though, again, not by a lot.

It was just how skinny he was making him look small, and the way he tilted his head down a little so he was glaring at people through his eyelashes, even though he didn't really have to, and that he unquestionably had small dog syndrome. It drove Sirius crazy, the way his eyes said everyone should back down from him when he was barely a mouthful, just like the worst kind of crazed, flea-bitten alley cat.

But his height was just average, really. Pete had also probably looked years younger than he was as a kid, but he was just a short guy, and always had been. Why would somebody who was normal-sized as an adult be that titchy as a kid?

Not that it mattered.

"Are you sure you're eight?" he asked dubiously. "You look maybe four."

Snape looked unimpressed at him.

"Okay," he allowed, "six."

"We're the same age," Snape said with strained patience, "and my motor control is sufficient to control my wand, so I can't see that it matters."

"Well, I thought you were five or six when I agreed," he said reasonably.

"But you didn't when I left," Snape said implacably. "Even if you were responsible enough to be left to care for an actual child—"

Sirius glared. James seemed to think he was going to do great, even if Lily looked stressed when it came up, thankyouverymuch.

"—by that point, you didn't think that you had been. And you cannot possibly have thought that, had I been actually helpless and left with you, I would have been grateful for any lack of malice that you might have wished to leverage against me later."

"Merlin but you make my head hurt," Sirius complained, and flopped down on the ground. Morosely, he took a bite of the oat-thing. And then glared up at Sniv: it was excellent to the point of being annoying. "It's not that complicated, Snape. My cousin asked me for a favour, and then later I'd already agreed."

"But 'later' you knew he wasn't asking you for what he thought he'd asked you for. You knew I was acting as if my mind was also younger on purpose: you knew what he'd asked was unnecessary."

"I take it you've never pissed Evvie off," Sirius said dryly.

Snape looked smug, in a that's right, I have successfully avoided that dire fate, so either I'm brilliant or you're stupid sort of way. Horrifyingly, it was kind of cute on that parrot-face.

"Anyway, what does it matter whether I was just keeping my promise, or am actually not a hundred percent sure whether you have the control over your magic that you think you do, or are likely to go shopping in Knockturn and then kill everyone who tries to disassemble you for parts and end up in Azkaban and then Evan will kill all my friends and cut my ears off?"

Looking delighted, Snape said reasonably, "If I did kill people, under those circumstances it would be self-defence. So I wouldn't end up in Azkaban and he'd probably just convince Witch Weekly to strongly hint you all have incurable social diseases."

Sirius stared at him.

"And maybe the goblins to confiscate all your money, I suppose," he said in an oh-ok-I'll-be-fair-if-I-must voice.

"You'd think someone who flaunts his vocabulary all over the place would be familiar with the word disproportionate," Sirius said finally.

"Disproportionate," Sniv said promptly with narrow eyes, "adjective. E. The only kind of response that effectively communicates to Sirius Black that what he is doing is undesirable, although still insufficient to make him consider stopping."

"For fuck's sake," he sighed, scrubbing his hands down his face.

"Your scenario is ludicrous," Snape snapped, passing up the opportunity to chide Sirius for swearing in front of a minor, which in his place Sirius would have pounced on even if Snape was, as usual, pretending his body was twice its actual size. "I don't deliberately put myself into situations where I'm sure to be attacked."

Sirius stared at him again. "Uh," he noted, not quite sure how to point out how incredibly bad Snape was at minding his own business while the arse was so small that an argument certain to end up in hexing would get Sirius in trouble whether he won or not.

Snape turned blotchy again, leapt to his feet (on the fucking tree branch, for Merlin's sake), and hurled the book at him. "YOU HUNT ME DOWN AND AMBUSH ME!" he bellowed in treble as Sirius, not used to things coming at his head when he didn't have a bat in his hands, tried to fend the thing off. The oat bar went flying off into the thick grass. "YOU JUST DID IT AGAIN! WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU? WHY CAN'T YOU LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE! WE NEVER HAD TO SEE EACH OTHER AGAIN! WHY CAN'T YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE?"

Sirius heard someone crashing through the trees and possibly swearing. He heard it, but he didn't really notice, because Snape was crying.

Distantly, he thought that Lily must have been right about the potion messing with Snape's head more than he thought; if anything, the nickname had, been about the way Sniv fell apart and got stuttery or crawlingly conciliatory whenever Lily was mad at him, but it hadn't really been about anything but how his forename sounded at all. Sirius had never seen this before. He didn't know how to feel about it, let alone what to think.

"Lily thought I should find you too!" he said desperately.

Snape hurled a pinecone at his face. He wasn't sitting in a pine tree. The pinecone, from the way it felt against his wrist when he blocked it, also wasn't made of wood. Sirius would probably have been more curious about that if he'd had more attention to spare.

"I just made up the Knockturn thing to convince James," he was trying to explain something he didn't quite understand himself, when whoever had been storming through the trees stormed right into the clearing.

In the moment before Sirius turned to see the large, heavyset, yellow-eyed, black-haired man with a battered, veiny, red hook of a nose in dull, threadbare muggle clothing, he saw Snape's eyes go wide enough to fall out of his head, and saw him back up on his branch to shrink against the tree trunk.

"Jow yez fat yeds, frittin they rappits! Sawlreet fur thee toorists, tha dooant know wha'tis t'be clempt, and dost mean ta fill the—" He caught sight of the tiny-Snape in the tree, and shut up and stared.

"What?" Sirius asked helplessly.

"He said to stop shouting unless you want to pay him for frightening the rabbits he was trying to poach," Snape said absently, staring back in horror. Something awful had happened to his vowels.

"You were shouting," Sirius couldn't help pointing out.

"You sodding started it."

"I really didn't."

The man, still staring at Snape, pointed wordlessly at the ground.

Sirius half expected Snape to throw another transfigured pinecone, possibly lit on fire, but the Slytherin just hunched against the tree, vibrated indecisively for a minute, and dropped unceremoniously to the grass, continuing to hunch.

After a long, silent, loaded moment of big fists settled in sagged-over hips, a pursed mouth in a blue five-o-clock jaw, and twiggy eyebrows beetled together forbiddingly over a nose that looked even worse than Snape's due to all the inflamed capillaries, Snape hunched even more, his shoulders now quite close to his ears, and snarled defensively, "It was an accident."

"I know the accidents you have," the man said, crossing his arms over his belly. Now that he was speaking comprehensibly, Sirius could tell that the sour, flat abomination that had happened to Snape's vowels was due to Snape's having had an aneurysm.

"It wasn't my accident," Snape said. His shoulders were going to get pulled out of their sockets soon if he didn't stop that. "I was tutoring and she got startled."

"So you run home for Mam to fix it?" the man demanded.

"It doesn't need fixing, it'll wear off, and if it did I could fix it myself, and I didn't run anywhere, I just came to get some fucking air—"

"Mouth!" the man snapped.

Snape shut up sullenly, his head going down.

"Look at a man when he's talking to you!"

"So this'll be your dad, then," Sirius guessed, a little weakly. "Er. Hi. I, uh, I'm his roommate's cousin…" He realized that giving his name might not be the best idea if Snape had ever complained about school. He thought about offering his hand, but the man didn't look in the mood. Then he pulled himself together, because he wasn't Peter, and offered his hand after all, with one of his more businesslike dazzling smiles.

Presumably-Mr.-Snape took the hand grudgingly, with an air of doing him a favour much against his own inclinations, for which Sirius, who was a disagreeable waste of space, had better be grateful because this was a major imposition and a waste of his time. He did not introduce himself but instead sighed impatiently. His breath was on the beery side. Sirius's dad at least had the good manners to get drunk on good wine and slink off to his study where no one had to smell him who didn't want to.

Sirius had always laughed at the idea that Narcissa was teaching Snape manners, and had presumed that all her efforts were a dismal failure. He realized now that she was, in fact, a miracle worker—though, of course, he didn't mean to tell her so.

"Look at you all dressed like a vicar and mealy-mouthed as a parson," Mr. Snape said to Snape, disgusted, as if the kid hadn't just been swearing. Maybe he meant that Snape didn't butcher all the sounds of English quite as badly as he did. "This piece of Southern faff minding you, then? Best be; tha's not to come home trying to lure your Mam back into all your addlepated stick-waving, mind me? She's out of it and staying out; you won't fool her playing wounded-bird."

"Actually we were just playing hide and seek," Sirius said, trying to sound smiling instead of hasty.

It was just because he wanted this over and to get back home, not at all because Snape's eyes had been stricken without surprise or too much like Reggie's for comfort or unbearable or anything. It was just because he was a Gryffindor and this was the sort of situation where you were supposed to use chivalry, wasn't it?

Not that Snape was a maiden fair by a long shot (although before Evan showed up with him today Sirius would have been prepared to swear he was almost certainly still a virgin), but since Snape wasn't fighting back on his own for once (which was so weird) somebody had to. "My cousin's really the one looking after him, of course, but he had some work to do this afternoon. And my flat was getting a bit noisy, so it seemed like a good idea to go get some air. Air's good for kids, right? And I figured Severus would know someplace nice to go walking since he does all that brewing—I'm from London myself, you know, and this certainly is a lovely walk."

"It shrieks in the blood with the despair of the slandered dead," Snape said, as though he wasn't really paying attention to what was coming out of his mouth, staring at him. Sirius couldn't blame him for the staring; 'Severus' had felt incredibly strange in his mouth. "You don't feel it?"

Mr. Snape made a noise somewhere between pfft and bah.

"I did see those brochures at the bottom, is that what you mean? I just thought it was nice out—all these bluebells—but I don't see why you want to come here if it's giving you the psychometric heebie-jeebies."

Snape, who had not moved away from the tree trunk, banged the back of his head against it once. Sirius had partly asked because he honestly wanted to know, and this was no answer, but the question was really only useful as a way of defusing the situation.

"Well," Snape said, "as you just snuck up on me, as usual, I suppose that makes it your turn to hide, but you needn't try too hard as I shan't come looking."

"Shan't," echoed Mr. Snape in, yes, again, disgust. With the same air of deeply-put-upon unwilling magnanimity, he asked, "Hast a word for your Mam, Seth?"

"No," Snape said curtly while Sirius was wondering who the hell Seth was. Or, if not really who, this being obvious, then at least what that was about. It was true that 'Severus' was a more traditional name than either James or Peter, but it wasn't as if you could change your name before McGonagall called you up for the Hat, unless your parents did it for you. Which probably hadn't been the case here, since this was Sniv's dad calling him by a weird name.

"Just as well," the man said sourly, and started off. Before hitting the trees again, he swung around and said, meaning it, "If you don't keep it down, you can fetch us supper."

"Come to think of it," Snape said with a nasty smile, eyes flashing and his voice gone cut-glass to the point that Narcissa would have had nothing to criticize. His expression wasn't especially like one of the smiling, blank-faced murder-children from horror movies, but it was no less creepy. "You can tell her the teashop in Diagon is hiring, Heartwood in Sherwood would love to expand its line to health teas that work for muggles, and Rosier and I have a guest bedroom she can stay in until she can put down for her own flat. Though, of course, it is her house and I'm not putting you up."

"And I'm not putting you up when someone beats you bloody for that fairy hair," Mr. Snape snapped with an I know that was sorry sally but I am past the end of my patience air, and stormed off in the direction he'd stormed in from.

"Noan's sichan antwacky yamper butchew!" Snape yelled after him, face gone white around the eyes and splodgy again. At least he didn't look likely to start leaking again; he was just mad this time.

Sirius didn't speak for a long time. When he judged Snape was sufficiently calmed down that any word wouldn't send him into another screaming tantrum, he asked, "No one's such a what but him?"

"Antiquated rot-brained Tyrannosaurus Mental-Case," Snape snapped, failing to unclench his teeny fists as he went on seething in his dad's direction. "Who the fuck cares about my hair. It has to be long enough to tie back or it gets in the cauldron and then there are explosions."

"Well, yeah," Sirius agreed, because this was inarguably true even if Sniv's hair was a sad disgrace to all black-haired people everywhere. Peter had had loads of problems with that until James introduced him to the famous Potter hair-gunk to keep it in place during class. Conversationally, he added, "If I'd ever talked to my mum like that, I wouldn't be here to annoy you today."

"Pity," Snape said in a reflexive sort of way without seeming to mean much by it, weighted down with the embarrassment of someone who'd just had a private scene publicly. Or possibly with contact humiliation.

"Maybe," Sirius speculated, "if we locked your dad and my mum in the same room, by the time we let them out the world would be improved."

"She'd just kill him," Snape said dully. "No one would learn anything."

"Well, yeah," Sirius shrugged. "That's what I meant."

This actually won him an unwilling snort of laughter. "You realize she'd kill him on sight simply for being muggle and have her elf take care of the body before he had a chance to actually be offensive, and then nothing would ever actually happen to her."

Shrugging again, Sirius said, "Too bad for Reggie, but she's not my problem anymore."

Snape flicked his eyes at him, but didn't respond. He sat down against the tree with a sigh, running his hand through the grass and closing his eyes. Then he jolted a bit and opened one eye to keep it warily on Sirius.

It seemed like the wrong moment to loom, so Sirius sat down, too. "Look, I didn't come after you to, you know, come after you. It just… I had promised Evan, and he's as bad as Remus for making you feel like a worm when you disappoint him, except Narcissa doesn't come after you for making Remus sad. I dunno, it just felt like I should when you left like that, and then Lily thought a youthening potion might have more of an effect on your feelings than your mind, so it really seemed like someone ought to. You were pretty, uh, jumpy when we were kids, you know."

"Because you kept jumping me," he snarled.

Sirius considered this. You were supposed to have an enemy at school, weren't you? It taught you how to deal with opposition when you grew up. The only thing about Regulus that had ever disappointed their mother had been that he was a bit wet, and usually just sort of disappeared when people were trying to push him around, without getting them back for it later.

Mother had quite approved of Sirius having a feud on with an uppity no-name from a rival House. Even if elevating a no-name to the status of Rival was a bit beneath the dignity of the family, and even if it was wrong for Sirius to be a rival of that particular House instead of in it. Sirius was a complete screw-up who was bound and determined to be an embarrassment, so while it was beneath him to give such a distasteful person attention, at least he'd been developing his enmity against someone who could never have been an ally.

At least, she'd thought that until Reggie had decided Snape was his friend and convinced Mother that Sirius's feud was a threat to Reggie's grades.

And okay, most of what Mother thought was not merely bonkers but straight-up horrible so you couldn't go by her, but James had never seen anything wrong with it. Not in the normal way. Not until things went too far there could have been consequences that lasted beyond the end of term, permanent ones.

Sirius got that there was a line to be drawn between school games and real enmity. He totally understood that he'd stumbled over that line once and made a huge and terrible mess that could have been catastrophic. He had felt awful about that: felt stupid for his clumsiness, been terrified for what it could have done to Moony.

But there wasn't anything wrong with the games. James didn't think so, and James understood how to be a Gryffindor and a good person. Sirius spent his life trying to feel his way towards that, but James just knew.

And if it was what you were supposed to do and it wasn't wrong, well… if Snape hadn't wanted to be in a feud with Sirius, why hadn't he ever bowed out? Plenty of people had, when they were all still getting to know each other. They'd gone grassing to the teachers, which meant they played by girl-rules and didn't want to play boy-games, or pranked back once or twice and then disengaged. One or two had said it wasn't funny and they were scared, so clearly they weren't at school to get ready for life.

Or, at least, they weren't at Sirius's level yet, and none of them had ever felt ready to take him on, he supposed. He'd tried to be friendly, even if they were going to be no-hopers; you were supposed to be kind to that sort of person, if you were Gryffindor, and he wasn't Slughorn to just ignore them if they weren't going to be any use.

(Though he still wasn't sure why you were supposed to spend any effort on them when they were useless. It was one of those things he had to believe James about, and Lily agreed with James, and Remus said he agreed and was pleasant to everybody, even if he didn't particularly invest in anybody but his best friends. If you were going into politics, okay, a lot of useless people who liked you suddenly were no longer useless, but Sirius didn't plan to go anywhere near the Ministry, thanks all the same.)

But Snape had never bowed out, or disqualified himself, or said he didn't want to play. He met them halfway every time, and when he didn't give as good as he got in the moment he made up for it later. He'd even joined the Quidditch team, for pity's sake, which was as good a way of ramping up a rivalry as Sirius could think of.

Sirius had sometimes actually felt friendly towards him, after games. Sniv had deliberately chosen to challenge himself more and be more of a challenge, and he was one. He was a good enemy off the field because he taught how not to trust that an enemy would fight with rules, and he was a good opponent on the field because…

Well, it wasn't that he didn't cheat. You couldn't say that a Chaser who didn't just snitchnip but actually stuffed the thing up his jumper and flew around with it until the score was evened up didn't cheat. He cheated like he'd stocked up on cheats and then found they were going out of style.

And he was just as mean up there as Sirius would have expected. He'd spin you around until you were dizzy, or throw a quaffle at you, or throw an elbow where no elbow should ever go, or come up behind you and purr venom in your ear seventeen times a game until you muffed your angles or missed a shot or forgot to aim your bludgers at anyone else altogether.

But that was the kind of thing you had to expect and needed to be able to handle, and Sirius was bad at ignoring it. When his blood wasn't up, he could admit he'd needed the practice. Sniv hadn't ever gone out of bounds the way Avery and Mulgrew did. The way Pete did sometimes, though Sirius forgave him for that out of loyalty and because he was a little guy who got flustered.

Sniv was good to play against because, when he agreed to play a game, he made you work for it without resorting to breaking the rules you weren't supposed to break.

Not that Sirius liked him. You couldn't like anyone that Mother thought was okay. And he was aware that James really thought Snape was bad, to the core, and James was probably right.

Not just because Sirius trusted James—in this case, Prongs's reasons were clear and made intuitive sense. Reggie hadn't palled around with his horror-flick roommates the way Snape did with his. You didn't have to be friends with people just because you were stuck with them, and Snape hung out with Avery and Mulciber and that nasty crowd all the time. He kept trying to confuse Lily about what was right, and he didn't listen to her even when he was crawling at her.

But Sirius had always thought they both understood what they were doing. He'd always thought they were in agreement about using each other to be—well, not better per se, in Snape's case, but tougher and sharper and faster. Snape screamed about it a lot—he shrieked his head off to teachers when they got caught, but that was… what had Mr. Snape called it?

Playing wounded-bird. Making people think they'd gone too far when they hadn't, trying to make them feel guilty, convincing authority that you were an innocent victim of senseless crime… those weren't exactly respectable tactics, and it had always struck Sirius as lazy and unimaginative and a bit slimy of Sniv to use them as his first resorts.

But he hadn't thought much of it. Sniv was slimy. He wouldn't walk up to you in the hall and hex you, he'd convince the elves that you wanted to scent your laundry with an herb that turned out to be woad, right when you had an exam the next day, or he'd somehow get something into your food. The victim strategy didn't really work for him most of the time and Sirius had sort of assumed, he realized now, that Snape was keeping on with it on purpose, because he knew he didn't have it right yet.

After all, Sniv wasn't lazy or unimaginative in other ways. One of the things he'd gotten into Sirius's food had made him think he was a badger—not a Hufflepuff, an actual badger, who would only eat bacon and sausage because they looked the most like worms, and tried to dig his way through the stone floor of the Great Hall until Flitwick had noticed. Another time, his skin had turned transparent. James had been more or less turned into a beehive once, and there'd been a whole week where every chair all four of them sat on suddenly developed a cushion of wet clay that hardened instantly to trap them in place but still managed to also leave them, when they broke free and stood, with moistly clay-stained trousers.

You didn't have to worry that Sniv would give you boils or turn your knees inside out; that was so far beneath his hornets-nest brain that he wouldn't bother. When he went after you, it was because you'd given him an excuse recently and he was in need of a guinea pig for something he'd just thought up.

Only he hadn't sounded right just now.

Or maybe that just meant he finally had worked out how to make someone feel guilty? Being little was a bit of a crutch as far as that went, of course.

But crying was a pretty obvious move, and he'd never tried that before. Crying, as a tactic, was about as imaginative as a boil hex. It couldn't, it just couldn't be that Sniv was trying it now because he'd never thought if it before—it just plain wasn't something he'd do.

Not on purpose.

Sirius didn't know what to do with that, and now it was occurring to him that, faced with someone who knew him, Snape hadn't played the 'Help help I don't know this man' card. Granted, the someone who knew him was remarkably unpleasant, but Sirius could think of three ways that, in Snape's place, he could have used that setup to get away from both of them.

"Okay," he said finally, "here's the thing I don't understand."

"The one, lone, singular thing," Snape said dryly.

Sirius ignored this bit of arsery, since it was pretty clearly just habitual. "What I don't get is," he started again, ha-ha-doggedly, "if you wanted to stop, why didn't you make it all stop?"

Snape turned his head slowly and stared at him with utterly blank eyes. With no emotion in his voice, he uttered, "Are you actually fucking kidding me."

Sirius looked down at him and considered whether 'kidding' was meant to have been a pun. Then he realized Snape's other option would have been to ask if he was serious, recalled that at school, once he'd got beyond bored with that sad joke his usual response had been to joke back about how he was rarely so hard up he had to resort to fucking himself, and let it lie.

"No, really," he insisted. "You're meant to be Slytherin, aren't you?"

"Well, I didn't think so," Sniv said sardonically, "but here we are."

He paused. "You said Lily should be in Slytherin," he insisted. "On the train, first year."

"Because I thought it would be good for her," Sniv said tiredly. "She's good at thinking outside the box when it comes to Charms, but other than that she never bothers. Just because I thought she should go doesn't mean I wanted it for myself."

"You looked pretty damn smug when the Hat put you there, though," he pointed out.

"Yes, because even if it wouldn't put me where I was hoping, I talked it out of putting me where I refused to go."

"Talked," he repeated.

"Whatever."

"...Where did it want to put you?"

Snape glared up at him. "None of your business."

"Whatever," he echoed. "But it did put you in Slytherin, so aren't you supposed to be good at making what you want happen? What happened to 'if you need to know what a Slytherin wanted, look at what happened'?"

"Enlighten me," Snape said flatly. "What, exactly, do you imagine I could have done to make you stop."

"Literally everybody else in our year made it clear to us that they didn't want to be in on the action," Sirius reminded him. "We fooled around with everyone at first, and they all told us they didn't want to keep it up. Everybody but you."

Snape glared at him more, eyes gone hotter. "You bullied everyone else into submission, you mean," he said bitterly. "You're blaming me because nobody else had any self-respect? Don't answer that; of course you are."

"What has self-respect got to do with anything?" Sirius asked, bewildered.

"I mean," Snape spat, "that I won't be defeated by a bastard like you! If other people were willing to give in and let you walk all over them, that's their decision! You don't rule me."

"Defeated?" Sirius repeated. The rest of that made so much less sense that he couldn't even deal with it. "It was school, Sni—Snape. The only thing at school that can defeat you is your NEWTs. Well, I guess the OWLs first, but everything else is just… practice. It doesn't matter, it's just how you make use of your time."

Incredulous, Sniv delicately turned the words over in his mouth, examining them. "Doesn't matter."

"Well, I mean, making friends matters, but your connections and your exams, those are the only things that come out with you, aren't they."

"Er," Snape said, looking at him as if he'd grown another head and not because Snape had hexed him. "That's… I don't even know how to—that's insane, Black. Of course the practice matters. School is where you work out who you are, and work out how to do it, and learn who everyone else is so you'll know later on. You don't… you don't graduate and suddenly nothing that happened was real."

"Of course you do," Sirius disagreed, giving him the same kind of look back. "Everybody's in their Houses, so you know who's on your team and who's against you, but when you graduate... I mean, you don't forget what team you were on, but when you get a new job you have to be on that team, with whoever else is on it."

"And you are employed at…?"

"Look, what I mean is, you have to be able to say 'oh, we were kids then.' It's a new pitch. People still playing their last game aren't going to hit a lot of their goals."

"No," Snape said, very slowly over several syllables, still eyeing him. "People still playing their last game are going to block all your goals, because they have not stopped playing against you."

"Well, if they're busy doing that, they're not going to get very far, are they?"

"I don't see why not," Snape said, beginning to look amused. "Alien though this concept may be to you, Black, some people have enough neurons to entertain more than one thought at a time and, in addition, two entire hands."

"Merlin but you're a pill," Sirius complained good-naturedly. "I'll grant you a lot of people who were in the same House end up staying allies with each other, but that's because they think the same things are important, so they want a lot of the same things to happen. It's natural, but's it's not automatic."

"Very little in the wizarding world is automatic," Snape remarked irrelevantly, "although Dumbledore has some interesting pieces of technomancy in his office."

"You know what I mean."

"Rarely."

Sirius sighed, aggravated. "If you don't leave school in your head, you'll be stuck there forever, that's all I'm saying. Most people do."

"But here's where you're insane," Snape said patiently. "It's not, oh, school was one game, wipe the board and start over for the next one, what's next is all that matters now what's past is over. It's life, which is located on school grounds for a time, but continues to be the same life afterwards. And everything that happened there has still, even once you are elsewhere, happened. What it did to you, or for you, remains done. Everyone remembers who you were, and what you did, and if you rely on everyone thinking 'he was just a kid,' no. You were deciding who to be. Practising who to be. Deciding what you think is all right to do. People who were around when you were making those decisions won't forget that! Not if you were the same person the whole time.

"Which," he ploughed on stonily, "you were. I don't know why you think I should give you the gift of a clean slate when you and your friends look at me and speak to me the same way you always have. You said you made up that story about Knockturn to convince Potter—"

He really did sound as if he was spitting. Every time. Sirius continued to be amazed by his consistency.

"—That you had a duty to find me. Meaning that you didn't think it worth making the argument to him that I might be vulnerable—"

"Well, it's you," Sirius pointed out. "You're not vulnerable, you're a menace."

"Which is exactly my point! If you believed anything you just said, you wouldn't treat me like a Slytherin menace, you'd treat me like a St. Mungo's research wonk."

"...Wonk?"

Snape looked aggravated. Actually, he looked disappointed. Sirius didn't care what he felt, of course, didn't know or care what that was about. It still made him clench a little inside, just reflexively. "Research swot, then. If you're going to go around swearing like a muggle, learn some other words, for fuck's sake, or you betray yourself to absolutely everybody."

Sirius wordlessly made the two-handed triangle sign of cloak-and-mirror at him with a pointed look, reflecting that 'betray yourself to everybody' back to the half-arsed climber who'd pestered Narcissa into teaching him to talk properly but had never bothered learning to wash his hair.

"I," Snape said, annoyed, "don't pretend to be anything I'm not. Your thinking someone like me shouldn't exist is your cognitive diss—your problem."

Sirius felt that since nobody who'd talked to Sniv for five minutes felt he should exist, it was pretty clearly Snape's problem on several levels. But that, too, was Snape's problem. "The thing is," he said slowly, "people usually have several teams they're on. Job's just one of them. Jamie's pretty sure he knows one of yours."

"But I've graduated," Snape said silkily, or what would have been silkily if his voice hadn't been all piping-high. "So surely I get to choose everything anew."

"You could," Sirius allowed. "He just doesn't think you have."

"I suppose I'm meant to ask 'what do you think,'" Snape said icily. "I do not ask it."

"Because you do not care, blah blah. Actually, you're not meant to ask anything because we're still on my question."

"I've answered your questions, though I certainly didn't have to," Snape said crossly.

"You might want to avoid that tone of voice while you're titchy, it just sounds like you need a nap. Yeah, glaring just makes it worse. And you didn't, actually."

Snape didn't stop staring, and now he was incensed because Sirius had called him a liar or something.

Sirius sighed. "If you didn't want to fight with us, why did you keep doing it? Other people just stopped when they wanted to stop. We didn't keep after them, when they didn't want to."

"Nobody wanted to!" Snape barked. "Nobody. Wanted. You. People tried to stand up to you, and they gave up."

He sighed again. "It was just fun, Snape."

"You don't get to decide what's fun for other people!" He was furious now, drilling Sirius with eyes like Narcissa's. "You don't get to decide what's funny for other people! You don't get to say 'learn to take a joke'! If it's funny for you, it's funny because you weren't threatened—you were threatening other people. You don't get to tell anyone else how much they're allowed to be hurt when you hurt them!"

"When they weren't having fun anymore," Sirius said loudly and slowly, "they stopped playing. You never stopped. You just bitched about it for seven years straight. If you wanted to stop, why didn't you just stop?"

"NOBODY—"

"Keep it down, he'll come back!"

Snape froze, throat jumping. Then he looked like he was about to start bellowing again, just on principle.

"Nobody could possibly want an arse like him around," Sirius interjected hastily, "and he clearly wants to get on with his bunny-hunting and he smells bad, so just don't shout, all right?"

"Did you think I'd find your calling someone smelly and globally and irrevocably unwanted funny just because, for once, it isn't me?" Snape asked coldly. His face hardened further. "Nobody was playing. They tried to stand up to your bullying until you scared them into submission."

"Merlin, it's like you don't understand English," Sirius wondered at him, shaking his head. "They got the result you claim you wanted. If you wanted us to stop training with you, all you had to do was look at literally everybody else to work out how to make that happen."

Snape actually snarled at him. "They have to spend the rest of their lives knowing they curled in on themselves like spineless hedgehogs the first time some arrogant, entitled, gold-drooling pureblood knobhead decided to kick them around for his own entertainment. If you think that's the result anybody wants, you are out of your infinitesimal mind."

"So you play a game you hate for seven years just so you won't have a memory of deciding it's not worth your time?" Sirius asked, completely confused. "What the hell good is that to you?"

"What good is it to me?" Snape repeated blankly. "Not worth my time?!"

"Well, yeah," Sirius said, surprised. "Except it was, wasn't it? I know you were taking a jillion classes, but DADA was pretty worthless most years. We all did pretty well on the NEWT practical, even Pete; didn't you? Well, Moony did better on the theory section, but still."

"I see," Snape said, very slowly. "You are actually insane. I mean, you're not just deluded and narcissistic and reckless, you are legitimately certifiable."

"I legitimately do not know what you're talking about. It's up to you what you do with your time, isn't it?"

"Do the words 'external forces' mean anything to you?" Snape demanded, shrilly. Sirius thought it would have been shrill even in his usual baritone.

"Sure," he said, as though spelling it out to someone who was actually four. "They're what you have to work around."

"And how, exactly, pray," Snape demanded bitingly, "do you think one 'works around' an unceasing tsunami?"

Sirius shrugged. "I dunno, a broom? Or those surfboard things they have in the rum adverts. I always wanted to try one of those. It looks like fun. Or you could levitate, in a pinch. What do waves have to do with anything? Anyway, aren't those big ones just one and done?"

Snape's jaw dropped slightly under bug eyes, and then he closed it, slowly shaking his head. Sirius had no idea how long they sat there, staring at each other from across a gulf of the most profound mutual incomprehension he'd ever encountered except for the time Remus admitted he didn't like Quidditch.

Finally, Snape asked, in a much smaller voice but not a less angry one, "How did you find this place?"

"Oh, Lily gave me these," he said, fishing into his pocket for the portkeys. "I have no idea where we are, except for your dad calling me Southern."

In an even smaller voice, "Lily told you how to hunt me down?"

Sirius looked up in alarm. Fuck, he was tearing up again. "Uh," he started. "She agreed somebody needed to find you before you got in trouble—"

"And of course she wouldn't come," he said bitterly, retreating behind his shoulders and hair again. Unfortunately for Sirius, he didn't do it fast enough to hide that the tears were actually spilling over now.

"Well, we didn't know where you'd go, and she's up the duff the size of a whale so she didn't want to just jump in," he gabbled, panicked. "I told her I needed a way where I wouldn't be able to find the places again since she thought you'd, I dunno, go to a regular sulking spot or something…"

He stared helplessly. Sniv had curled completely up around his knees, absolutely silent.

"Right," he said eventually, at a loss for anything else to do. "That reverse portkey Evan gave you? Uh, I think you'd better use it. Or give it to me and I will."

There was a long moment that felt like something teetering, and then Snape silently touched one of the buttons on his sleeve.

Notes: I am in no way trying to be mean to Sirius. Nor do I think he is remotely justified. I think he was trained to be one kind of thoughtless from birth, and in rejecting that training took a whole lot of things on faith that he should have thought harder about because he trusted and was loyal to someone who was a different kind of thoughtless. In other words, I see him as someone who is not naturally stupid or cruel, but who has been ethically lazy for a long time and is being asked to examine himself in a situation where he's unwilling to lose face, back down, or admit to mistakes he's starting to suspect he may have made.
(Sorry, that was a bit tell-don't-show, but there really is a limit to how much character growth he's going to allow himself during a ten-minute conversation with Sniv. After it may be another question... we'll see!)