"Well, kid, I suppose now it's our turn to talk," Sirius said calmly as he leaned back against his desk, seconds after his wife stormed out of his office angrily.

He couldn't blame her at all for it… the look on her face had certainly shown that she needed time on her own to let out the steam. If Mia had stayed there a little longer, she could have yelled until her vocal cords snapped – she might not usually be the screaming type but she certainly had been angry enough to open an exception that one time.

Harry still looked shocked as he sat back down on the couch. "I… I… she's pissed."

"Worse. She's livid," Sirius pointed out. "And she's not easy to piss off, kid. I can count with the fingers of one hand how many times she looked that angry, a couple of which were caused by Umbridge." He uncrossed his arms and sat on the chair Mia had occupied before. He wasn't intending to give him one of those patronizing speeches, just a little heart-to-heart with banter put aside. "A burden? What's gotten into your head to say that, kid?"

"I don't know…" he mumbled, still confused. "Maybe I shouldn't have said it to Aunt Mia but it's not entirely false is it?" he asked, trying to justify himself. "I mean, from time to time I get myself thinking that if you weren't responsible for me, you wouldn't have been dragged into this mess. You could be living your lives far away from this war…"

"No, we couldn't," he said firmly, making Harry look up to face him – his expression seemed very determined… "Look, I'm not going to bother telling you that you didn't drag us into this mess because you should already know that, Harry. But you know I'm going to tell you instead? That even if Lily and James were alive, Mia and I would still have made a point of dragging ourselves into this mess instead of running away for some safe destination. Because even if you weren't ours, you'd still be family and we'd still fight for you. That's what we do, kid, so get your mind out of the gutter. Family is not a burden."

"Yours was," Harry pointed out without thinking. "I mean your parents," he amended quickly. "The way you talk about them – it's like you wish you'd never met them."

"Right in all but one accounts," Sirius offered him with a dry chuckle. "They might be my parents but they weren't my family. My real family were the Potters: your grandparents, your dad… even your Mom after they got married and Moony as well." Wormtail too before he'd betrayed them all, he thought for a moment before continuing. "They were the ones that I picked, just as we picked you even before your parents died – no matter how much trouble you cause, that's not going to change. So stop thinking of the what-ifs involving you not being in our lives – you can sit right there for years imagining different scenarios and, guess what? That's not going to change anything and even if it could, we wouldn't want to. Just… tell me what this sudden guilt is about."

"It's not… sudden. It's been building up for a while, I guess," Harry explained, twisting his hands on his lap nervously as he looked down. "You know before you came back? When Izzy and I were kids and we lived in Montreal?" Harry asked his godfather, who nodded. "We could see there was something really sad about Aunt Mia back then – she smiled a lot when she was with us but it rarely really reached her eyes. Eventually, Lulu told us it was because you weren't there with her. She missed you."

"Izzy told me about that already," Sirius admitted stiffly – he didn't like thinking of that time.

Harry continued. "I always thought that when you came back that… that shadow in her eyes would disappear. And it did, for a while," he added quickly. "After you guys got married and Aunt Mia found out she was having Alex, she was just… so happy. The way she was supposed to be. But then it all came back: the Death Eater attack during the World Cup, the Triwizard Tournament, Voldemort returning, the ministry against me, Umbridge… then there was a shadow again – you being around helped her deal with it a lot but now there is just so much piling up… She's stressed because of me over and over again and it's not fair to her. My point is that after all Aunt Mia's done for me: raising me, giving up her life in Montreal so I could come to Hogwarts, always being available to help… she deserves to be happy and without a care and sometimes it's like the only thing between her and that is me."

There was a short moment of silence between them. So keeping the Horcruxes from them had been more about Mia than about both of them. It was understandable, he mused. Mia had raised Harry since he was a baby – he was bound to feel a stronger parental bond with Mia than with him and that made him more protective of her. Being Sirius himself protective of her, he couldn't fully blame the kid for it…

Yet some things needed to be said and when Sirius spoke up, his tone was more sincere and sombre than Harry had ever heard it. "Well, I'm sorry to break the news to you, Harry, but with or without war, happy lives without a care are a myth. Sure, sometimes you have fewer things to worry about than others but there is always something to bug us. All in all, I'd say Mia is as happy as one can be under the circumstances and you have something to do with it: for instance, you said me being here helped. Do you know what I would be if you weren't in our lives? Nothing. I'd be an empty shell of a person with no soul in one of Azkaban deepest cells. Don't think I forgot you were the one who helped me escape Flitwick's office when the Dementors were coming for me and then testified to set me free. You're far from on the way of her happiness, you're part of it, actually."

Harry didn't respond to that, remaining silent and looking down instead. He didn't know what to say, actually. Somehow in his mind all bad things that he blamed on himself seemed to overshadow the good ones until someone mentioned them.

Sirius continued, then. "So, you really didn't say anything about the Horcruxes because you didn't want to add up her stress even more, hum?" Sirius concluded and Harry nodded silently. "You didn't have to deal with all of that on your own, you know? You might not tell Mia but you could have told me. Believe me, after a decade in Azkaban, one is able to deal with pretty much anything," Sirius said dryly. Sure, he would have been in quite a pickle if Harry asked him to keep something that important from Mia but he was sure he could figure something out …

Harry shook his head immediately, his thoughts mirroring his godfather's. "No, I couldn't do that, Sirius. Then you'd have to chose between keeping the secret for me or telling Aunt Mia," he said. "That's why I didn't tell Izzy either – I either had to tell the three of you or none. I thought it would be better if I told none…"

"… and now it came back to bite you in the arse," Sirius finished for him. "You know, that's the problem with lies and omissions – they often come back to give you grief. Better stick with the truth, especially when it comes to people you care about. I learned that the hard way."

His godson looked at him curiously, waiting for a further explanation. "Are you going to tell me how you did?"

Sirius groaned internally. There was a reason why he and Mia had never mentioned their big fight to Izzy or Harry: they hated remembering it, let alone mentioning it. But he supposed telling Harry would be a good step towards an understanding. "Last year I did something very stupid and it hurt Mia a lot."

"What?"

He stood up, not feeling like remaining sat and walked to stand against the stone wall of the office. "Let me start from the beginning. We'd caught one of You-Know-Who's pals and I was in charge of watching him before we handed him to the Dementors – the bastard had a big mouth and just wouldn't shut up. He was provoking me and ended up telling me, among other things, where Wormtail supposedly was." He purposely avoided saying the rest Rodolphus had said – there were some things Harry just didn't have to know.

"Why would he tell you that?" Harry asked immediately.

"Most likely because it was a trap, though I'm pretty sure Wormtail isn't much loved among the death eater community," Sirius explained quickly. "The fact is that I wanted to go after him even though it sounded like a trap and Mia didn't want to let me go and asked me to promise I wouldn't. So," he said, swallowing hard – that was the hardest part to admit, "I looked her in the eyes and I made the promise."

"But you still went after him," Harry guessed easily.

"Yeah. It really was a trap, obviously, and not only Wormtail wasn't there but also I was pretty close to not being able escape it. When I got back home, Mia didn't yell or cry – she just turned at me and I could see she looked so… broken. Disappointed. It felt worse than it would if she'd cursed me. We spent a whole week walking on eggshells after that, barely speaking to each other."

"When exactly did this happen?" his godson inquired. He just couldn't remember them ever being like that…

"Exactly a week before the battle at the Department of Mysteries," Sirius told him. "We hadn't made up yet by the time it happened. I don't think I need to tell you how… terrified I was of losing her, let alone of losing her before I had a chance to beg her for forgiveness – she eventually did, though. The point of me telling you this is to show you that we all make mistakes. Huge ones. The good thing about mistakes is that we get to learn from them. After that, I promised myself that I would never lie to her like that again. I hope you learn something similar from this."

"So, you're not… angry at me for not telling you about the Horcruxes?" Harry asked him tentatively.

"Try disappointed that you didn't give us a little more credit, kid," Sirius stated with a sigh. "But next time you discover something this important, we'd better find out about it from you, Harry. Believe it or not, Mia can handle a lot more than you can imagine – yes, the Horcruxes would have scared her at first and made her even more worried about you but she'd deal with it and she'd be fine. She's a lot stronger than you think."

Harry sighed. "She's really hurt now, isn't she? I thought I was doing the right thing for her. For all of you. But I guess Aunt Mia was right. She has the right to be upset. Especially when I said that about…her life being easier without me there… For all that's worth, I'm really sorry I did it – I didn't mean to hurt her."

"I know you didn't," his godfather assured him. "And just for the record, she was right: you being a burden to us could only happen if this world was an uninhabitable mess of a place, so don't even let that thought cross your mind again. It's a waste of brain cells."

"I won't," he promised and was surprised when realizing that, this time, he meant it. "I should… probably go apologize to her, shouldn't I?" he asked, unsure. He didn't feel all that ready to face her… He turned to his godfather, hoping for an answer. "Do you think I should do it right now?"

Sirius shook his head. "Knowing Mia, you might want to give her a little time to process the fight before trying to apologize or else you're risking a second round of yelling. At least wait until tomorrow, okay? In the meantime you can talk to your friends and Ginny if want other opinions on this."

Harry huffed, annoyed with himself. "Ginny's been telling me for the past two weeks that I should tell you about the Horcruxes," he said. "She told me that if you found out in some other way you'd be upset. I should have listened to her – she's usually right."

"Well, she always seemed like a smart girl to me," Sirius pointed out before managing to offer him a smirk. "You'd better marry her one day or I'm fixing up Alex with her when he's bigger. He can handle an older woman."

Harry couldn't help chuckling. "I'll take that under consideration." Suddenly, he felt tempted to ask Sirius something he'd been wondering about ever since Mia had told him they knew about the Horcruxes. "Can I ask how you guys found about the…?"

"She heard you, Ron and Hermione speaking about it in the library yesterday afternoon," Sirius responded before he could finish.

"In the library?" he asked, confused. "But we'd cast a muffliato charm all around us. I mean, I remember Ron doing it."

"Not very well, apparently – he probably should give a thought to training the spell before using it again," Sirius pointed out. "Anyway, Mia was able to hear pieces of what you were saying through the static of the Muffliato and figured it out." He left out the existence of the book about Horcruxes in Grimmauld Place, knowing Harry would want it – he still wanted to research a little more before handing it to his godson. "So… what are you planning to do about them?"

"Find them and then destroy them," Harry told him flatly. "It's the only way to end Voldemort. Dumbledore promised he would let me help him destroy the next one he found."

Did he? Sirius thought dryly. The headmaster was another loose end in that argument… "If you need help, Harry, you know you can count on us. And I'm not just offering help so you'll know it's available – I'm offering it so you'll use it. I hope you don't forget your promise of mutual communication again."

"I won't. I promise I won't," Harry said. "I'm really sorry I didn't think of it before, Sirius. I…" he glanced at the clock on the wall of Sirius's office. "…I've got a DADA class in five minutes."

"Well, we wouldn't want to get Snivellus worked up because you're late, would we?" Sirius said with a groan. "Just do me a favour first. Do you have the map on you? I needed to borrow it for a while – I'll give it back tomorrow, okay?" He imagined that might save him some time of walking around the castle searching for his wife. Merlin knew where she could be after having stormed out the way she had.

Harry nodded, reaching for the pocket of his robes and removing the neatly folded piece of battered parchment, which he handed to Sirius. "You're going to meet Mia, aren't you?" he asked, receiving a nod in return. "Can you tell her I'm sorry? I mean," he added quickly, "not tell her I asked you to tell her – just… please let her know that I'm sorry…"

"Don't worry about it, kid," Sirius told him, understandingly. "Now get your arse out of here and go to class before Snape takes a turn at yelling at you too."

"I'm going," Harry said, reaching for his bag of books and standing up before he headed to the door. Then, just as he opened it, he turned around to face Sirius. "Thanks. For this talk. It helped," he said. And then, he was gone, closing the door behind him.

Sirius sighed when he saw himself alone. That had been some talk: he didn't even know where he should start analyzing it. Oh, well, maybe he should just leave the analysis for later… or give up on it altogether. Now, what he needed to do was finding Mia and deal with her.

He looked down at the yet blank map on his hand. "I solemnly swear I am up to no good." It was strange how easily the words rolled off his tongue even though he hadn't said them in such a long time – in fact, he realized, the last time he had used the map had been when Filch had confiscated it from him and James in the last week of classes in his seventh year. Just as the thought crossed his mind, he felt sort of a pang in his heart and instinctively looked over his shoulder – part of him expected all the guys to be there, ready to cause some mischief. But that wasn't the case. It would never be again with one of them dead and another being a traitor. He shook his head, ordering himself to stop thinking of it – he should just think of searching for Mia now.

Finding her dot revealed itself to be a handful of a task – in some areas of the map there were just so many moving dots and so many names jumbled together that it was hard to tell which was which. To get a wider view of the place, he ended up spreading the whole map open over the mess on his desk, which consisted of an assortment of Quidditch magazines and catalogues, parchment, quills and Merlin knew what else. As he studied the map, he soon realized his wife wasn't in the places he'd expected the most: either locked in her office or in Dumbledore's giving him grief for having kept the Horcruxes from them – then again, the headmaster wasn't there either…

Where else could she be? He wondered. She wouldn't have just headed home without saying anything, would she? He spent several more minutes searching through the jumbled dots in the map, spotting Izzy's in the Gryffindor Common Room and in the DADA classroom, before deciding to use logics. Where would he go if he was upset and wanted a moment alone? Likely some secret passageway where nobody could find him. Mia didn't know the castle that well, though, so he marked that as unlikely. Astronomy tower? No, only the dots of a couple of students were there, probably snogging. Some empty classroom? There were dozens of them and he just didn't have the time to check them all, so he skipped to the next possibility. Kitchens? Nothing but house-elves' names there. Suddenly, he felt dumb. The lake. Of course that was where she'd gone, he realized even before he even spotted her dot by the margin of it – the lake had always been sort of a special place for them. A calm place to think.

"Mischief managed," he murmured, clearing the parchment of all signs of a map in it. He folded it back, shoving it in his pocket and then he headed out of his office, aiming for the lake.

Mia realized she probably looked like a madwoman to anyone who would see her right then: she was pacing left and right in a hurried pace, which made it seem like she kept heading somewhere and suddenly changing her mind, her hair was probably a mess because she couldn't help running her hands through it in irritation and her eyes were red and swollen from those furious tears that insisted on running down her face. In fact, she was so sure she looked like a madwoman that she had not only picked one of the most secluded spots by the side of the Hogwarts's lake but also cast disillusionment charm around her so, in case a student of hers happened to stumble upon her sorry self, he or she wouldn't lose all the respect for the mad History of Magic teacher.

Her mind kept darting between the two big issues that were bothering her: the Horcrux situation and Harry thinking he was a burden. A burden! Simply thinking of it made her jaw clench even harder and the tears fall more furiously. How was it possible that he thought that?

Just then, she heard the sound of footsteps approaching her and looked in the direction of them only to see her husband emerging from the bushes, holding a large piece of parchment that she recognized as the Marauders Map open in front of him.

With an odd look of confusion, Sirius looked right through her and then at the map. Then though her again and back at the map.

"What the hell?" she heard him mumbled under his breath. It was clear he couldn't see her thanks to the disillusionment charm and the map said otherwise – if she hadn't felt so… distressed, she might have found that amusing. "Hum… are you there Mia?" he asked in a not-very-hopeful voice.

"I'm here," she responded to his confusion. Her tone came out feebler than she'd expected. That was one of the reasons why she hated crying – even her voice got all messed up by it…

She shook her head absently and reached for her wand to remove the disillusionment charm. By the time she did it, he'd already closed the map and was putting it back in his pocket, making his way to her just as soon as he saw her face.

"You're crying," he said, enveloping her with his arms and rubbing her back softly.

"No, I'm not," she mumbled stubbornly, yet relaxing against his hold, letting herself sink into the comfort of it.

"Well, your eyes seem to disagree with you, love," Sirius told her softly, pulling back a bit, just to brush her tears away with his sleeve.

"I hate crying," she mumbled, sniffing before she mentally ordered herself to get back together. "I'm sorry. I was just… having a moment."

He shifted, sliding a hand behind her back and walking her to a nearby tree so they could seat down on the floor against it. "You can have all the moments you need, Mia. I suppose you're entitled to them now."

She nodded silently, resting her arm on her bent legs and looking down at the grass on the floor as they sat down. "So…" she asked, hesitatingly, "where's Harry?"

"At his DADA class, last I checked," he told her shortly. He wasn't sure how much he should press the matter about Harry right now – he wasn't sure how much she could handle that soon after the fight. "Are you okay?"

"I don't know," she mumbled, turning to him. "I just can't believe Harry would think… do you think it might have been me?" Her throat felt incredibly dry as she asked him that – that possibly was what she'd feared the most ever since she'd stormed out of her husband's office. "Do you think it's something I did that made him think he was a… a burden?"

"Of course not, Mia," Sirius told her immediately. "That's a ridiculous idea."

"Is it?" she asked, standing up again and starting to pace once more. "Because lately I haven't had a chance to act as much like a mom to him and Izzy as I used to before, back when it was just them. I mean, Alex is a handful and Mary is still so little yet… Between the two of them and everything else…" What sort of mother would make their kid feel like a burden? Part of her questioned, making her feel just horrible. Maybe she was the problem. She clenched her job so hard, trying to keep the tears from falling again. This time, she was successful.

"It's nothing about that," Sirius told her firmly, reaching for her hand and tugging it back down, asking her to sit by his side again. When she did, he kissed her cheek softly. "Listen, during that time that passed between you storming off and me coming here, I was talking to Harry and, believe me, the reason why he thought he was a burden was far from you making him feel like you're… alienating him or something. It's the opposite reason, actually – he thinks that after all you've done for him, the least you deserve is to have a happy, unpreoccupied life."

"What?"

"He just wants you to be happy, Mia. That's it. And he thought that him 'dragging us' into the war is what is keeping you from that blissfully happy life – it took me while, but I think I managed to convince him that he didn't drag anyone into any war and that he's far from a burden. Look, all that time I spent talking to him it was clear that he loves you and doesn't doubt that you love him right back – he only kept the Horcruxes from you trying to protect you and from me so I wouldn't have to chose between keeping the secret for him or telling you."

"But he shouldn't worry about protecting me," Mia mumbled, half relieved, half frustrated. "From the truth, much less! I'm an adult and perfectly capable of protecting myself if I need to."

Sirius sighed. "Sometimes it's just hard for us to help it, love," he told her. "Listen, the kid is really sorry he hurt you. You could see it from miles away. And it's also clear he loves you like a parent – that's a bond only the two of you have."

She shook her head. "But you…"

"I am more like a… cool uncle or a close mate to him than a dad, Mia. And that's to be expected: you've been taking care of him since he was a baby, I just showed up when he was nearly fourteen and missed out a lot. Same with Izzy but I guess in her case I was lucky she was open to become a Daddy's girl. With all this I'm trying to say that you didn't do a thing to make him think he was a pain in our arses – he's just… Harry. Add the teenager factor to that and you'll have a really confused kis with a knack for blaming himself for whatever bad things happen in the lives of people close to him." He reached for Mia's hair, running his hands soothingly through it. "He never meant to hurt you."

Her eyes were glittering with tears again when Sirius was finished and she reached up to dry them just as soon as she realized it. "That daft boy," she mumbled under her breath, irritated. "I hope you told him I'm not some… helpless ninny that he needs to be shielded from the truth."

Sirius managed to grin, then, and his arm came down to circle her frame. "He wouldn't dare think of that but I'm pretty sure I said something along those lines."

"And what about the Horcruxes? Did he say anything else about them?"

Sirius shook his head. "Only that he intends to destroy them all. Oh, and Dumbledore apparently promised him that he'll let him help get rid of the next one he finds."

Mia sniffed at the mention of the Headmaster. "I just don't get that man. I really don't. Before starting the lessons, he came to us and asked us if we were okay with him teaching them to Harry. Then, not another word about it! He didn't even bother to let us know that Harry's sworn enemy has his soul spread in pieces all over the world, for what we know! All this time we've all but trusted him with our lives and he can't trust us with something concerning our own godson's life!"

Sirius nodded. "Sounds shady, doesn't it? I suppose that now that we're here at Hogwarts, we should use the opportunity to go have a little chat with Dumbledore about it."

To his surprise, Mia shook her head in a 'no'. "Don't bother. I headed straight there when I left your office but that gargoyle guarding his office told me he had left the school to handle some 'personal business' and hadn't said when he was coming back!" She huffed in frustration – he was probably looking for a Horcrux, she imagined. "Of all the times he could disappear…"

"We'll just have to wait for another day," Sirius said, rubbing one of her arms. Then, he let out a deep breath. "Well, are you okay now?"

"Almost," she whispered back – before being completely okay, she needed to talk to Harry and right now she didn't feel quite ready for that yet… Tomorrow, she told herself.

"So," he started in a tone of conclusion, "today I had to play a role of the respectable adult in my chat with Harry and then again a little with you. It was interesting."

"I bet you wish you won't have to do it again anytime soon," Mia said, her lips curling slightly.

"I guess it does work better for me in small doses," Sirius admitted sheepishly. He looked at Mia, then. "Well, do you want to stay here a little longer of do you want to go home?"

She sighed and leaned closer, kissing the corner of his mouth very softly as a way of thanking him for… everything. It occurred to her that decades before it had been somewhere near that spot where they sat together that Sirius had kissed her for the first time. "Take me home," she whispered. That day, she didn't want to think of Horcruxes, secrets or burdens. She really just wanted to go home. The rest can wait for tomorrow.

A/N: This comes like twelve hours late and I am really sorry but it was inevitable this time.

So, a few days ago one of my teachers got me another intern-ship interview and... long story shot, after hours waiting in some uncomfortable office, the interview went really well (thank god!) and this time I was accepted! I'm starting this Friday. Hopefully, it won't interfere much with me writing this fic as I'll try to manage my time better but I'll be working 8 hours a day for the next six weeks so there may be a delay or two with the chapters (I'm crossing my fingers so that it won't happen)...

Meanwhile, I hope you like the chapter - I spent hours writing and deleting segments because it wouldn't end up the way I wanted until I managed to get it approved by my very self-critic self... Feedback is welcome! Review!