Author's Note: Excuses time! I know this is your favorite part.
I feel like the quality of this fic has been steadily degrading, excepting the bits and pieces I wrote in advance and wove in. I think the inspiration is evaporating. There are still things to do, but when I try to do them, the words come out twisted, and it all ends up sounding forced or contrived or both. I'm attributing this downward spiral primarily towards my having started college, which not only makes me very tired but also inundates me with insipid reading to do. Not good for the creativity, exhaustion and boring textbooks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah; no excuses. Up, up, and away!
One of these days, there might even be a climax. Gasp! And don't ask me what the hell is going on in the first section of this chapter, because I have no flippin' idea. At least it doesn't suck like last chapter. Always good, things not sucking.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Figurative
Tuesday was the worst day of the week, as far as Sirius Black was concerned. It was too early to anticipate Friday, and the warmth of the weekend had largely faded. Tuesdays were to be trudged through, tolerated, survived. There was no enjoyment to be had in them. They were a trial.
A trial with a hell of a lot of homework attached.
Sirius tapped his quill on his slowly-burgeoning Charms essay. Flitwick just had no concept of all the important things Sirius had to do with his life. Sirius wasn't quite sure what those things were, either, but he could probably come up with a few if he thought about it. He could be pretty creative sometimes. He could be extremely creative when that creativity entailed not doing homework.
He drummed out a bit of a rhythm on the parchment with the end of his pen. He knew perfectly well how to do the Charm in question; he didn't see why he should have to write a bloody foot-long essay about it. What was the sense in that? It was like telling a monkey to write an essay about how to peel a banana. Except for the obvious fact that monkeys… couldn't… write essays…
Sirius frowned. That was a miserable excuse for a simile, even for one that was only in his head. He gave himself a figurative rap on the figurative knuckles with a figurative ruler. That done, he went up to the figurative chalkboard and wrote Professor Flitwick is a frigging sadist, underlined it twice, and stood back to admire his handiwork.
Maybe this was why he never got any work done.
Oh, well.
Back in his figurative classroom, Sirius added He will someday be smothered in his sleep by a Charms-challenged student, which will not be me and furthermore will have nothing to do with me; this is not a confession in parentheses under his previous statement. Then he tossed the figurative chalk over his shoulder without caring to watch where it would land and went out onto the figurative playground. He sat down on the figurative swing and looked around. It was a bit of a dreary place; all grays and industrial silvers. Sirius supposed absently that this was a reflection on his impression of school and education in general, though he couldn't focus on the idea. If you tried to analyze figurative places, they went up in smoke, and Sirius wasn't done bumming around in this one yet.
After working the swing for a little while, he hopped down and wandered over the tanbark to a wooden bench, where he sat and watched three children dressed in gray trying to make a sandcastle. The sand wouldn't hold, and their structure kept collapsing every time they sought to bring it up to a substantial height. Sirius was about to suggest that they add some water to give the sand a better consistency when a girl walked up to him.
And not just any girl.
She had dark hair and dark eyes and expressive, sculpted dark eyebrows. She also had a very nice ass—significantly nicer than Lily Evans's, thanks very much. (Take that, James.)
"Hello, Sirius," she said.
"Good afternoon," he replied. He glanced up at the unclear, unresponsive, entirely ambiguous sky, which was uniformly an inconclusive shade of gray. "Or is it morning?"
The girl shrugged. She was wearing black, which highlighted the best parts of her and made her stand out like a slash of oblivion against the watery background.
She drew a ruler and slapped the back of his hand sharply.
"Jesus!" Sirius cried, jerking his hand away to nurse it. "What the hell was that for?"
The girl shrugged. "Bad simile," she remarked.
"It wasn't that bad," he contended. "A little weak, yeah, but not like the last one."
The girl raised her shoulders again, and Sirius decided that he very much liked that little gesture. It played pleasantly with the curves and contours of her body.
"You have a dirty mind," she reported. Before he could protest—all of his prospective protests being lies anyway, of course—she stepped around behind the bench and began to run her fingers through his hair.
Oh, that was nice. She had deft, slender fingers, and her smooth nails grazed his scalp. He wanted to lean back and paw the air with his foot and let his tongue loll out of his mouth.
Looking down at himself, he discovered that he had become a dog. But not the usual dog—now he was a little black Labrador puppy. He was small, fluffy, and painfully adorable.
The girl clipped a leash onto the collar around his neck, lifted him down from the bench, and started pulling him towards the edge of the schoolyard. Sirius tried to scramble away.
"Where are we going?" he inquired warily.
"To the pound," the girl answered.
"Hell, no!" Sirius shouted. He barked a few times and added a growl for good measure.
He was still insufferably cute. It was hard to be scary and a puppy at the same time.
"That's where all the bad dogs go," the girl told him equably.
"What about the ones that stay with their neglectful owners until they mangle some innocent person walking down the street?" Sirius shot back.
"Psh," the girl said.
"'Psh'?" Sirius repeated. "That's not even a word!"
"It's an interjection," the girl responded.
"Interjections are like fake words," Sirius declared, pulling back on the leash, digging his charming little puppy claws into the tanbark. "They're like half-assed words."
The girl tugged harder, endangering Sirius's charming little puppy windpipe. "They are not," she said.
He growled and hauled back. "Are—so—"
"Sirius?" Remus prompted, shaking his shoulder gently.
Sirius blinked, raised his head from his folded arms, and glanced around blearily. From the looks of things, he'd fallen asleep in the common room over his essay. That was what came from sitting in front of the fireplace trying to write about Charms. It was like giving a man warm milk and tucking him into bed, doing homework before the fire was.
Sirius was about to give himself another figurative rap on the knuckles when he remembered how that had gone.
"Hey, Remus?" he said.
"Yes?"
"Never let me have butterbeer before bed again."
"All right."
"Ever."
"I understand."
"Remus, my dear boy, I very much doubt that you do."
"Okay… Then I don't understand."
"Very good," Sirius concluded.
There was a pause.
"What?" Remus said.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"So I told her yes, I would go out with her if there was a total solar eclipse," Sirius related, "and I was wondering if you knew when that was likely to happen. 'Not in our conceivable lifetime' being a good answer."
Remus smiled a thin, mischievous little smile. "Isn't Noelle taking Advanced Astronomy?" he asked innocently.
Sirius stared at him in horror. "Wh—wh—"
They were walking back to the common room, and James had to stop and lean against a marble statue of a stately wizard to laugh.
Remus flashed a contented grin, and Peter chortled happily. "Girls are devious creatures, Mister Black," he noted. "You of all people should know that."
"I make a distinct point not to go out with devious girls," Sirius informed him. "Because the next thing you know, they're pulling shit like this." He snorted. "Smart women. Probably the most terrifying thing on this Earth, after the rat's nest on James Potter's head. No offense to rats, Peter."
Peter nodded graciously.
"Oh!" James cried suddenly. "Smart girls! That reminds me!"
"Here we go," Sirius sighed.
"Lily wanted us to meet her up there at twelve-thirty, remember, Remus?" James was yanking on his victim's sleeve. When Remus's face moved into an expression of bewildered recollection, James pressed on. "For the curfew stuff! And it's almost one! Come on, come on, come on!"
Remus attempted to fend for the safety of his sleeve, which was still trapped securely in James's iron pincer grip, as the taller boy dragged him down the hall at a run.
"Lily," Sirius muttered vindictively. "Always Lily. Lily this; Lily that; Lily's so pretty, I'm going to kiss her someday if I ever stop being a prude and a pansy."
Peter smiled faintly and raised his eyebrows. "You could probably have her, if you want her."
"I don't," Sirius answered, truthfully as far as he could tell, "and I couldn't. She thinks I'm an obnoxious, arrogant, egotistical prick, and if she wasn't right, I might correct her. In any case, she and James would be disgustingly cute together and so on."
"That's noble of you," Peter commented.
Sirius frowned. "Probably comes with the nobleman territory. I'd ditch it if I could."
"I don't know," Peter said. "It's kind of admirable."
Sirius stared at him. This was uncharted territory—some quality of his being admirable, that was. Sirius Black was wild, half (or perhaps three-quarters) mad, brilliant, unhinged, and extremely rowdy. He was not, as far as he knew, admirable in the slightest.
Accordingly, he was now also speechless.
Peter rooted through his bag. "Damn!" he said. "I must've left my Transfiguration book in the classroom. I'll meet you back at the common room, right?"
"Right," Sirius confirmed. It wasn't like he had anywhere else to go, except perhaps a figurative playground—and he wasn't sure his brain was prepared to endure another dose of that particular ilk of lunacy just yet.
As Peter ran off, Sirius placed his hands in his pockets and kicked at the rug as he strolled down its length. He'd teach that damn rug who was boss. He'd put it in its place.
"Psst," someone said.
Sirius looked up abruptly. His hand strayed towards his wand, slowly, like a Western sharpshooter's just before the stroke of noon.
That one wasn't too bad.
The door to a side room was ajar, and it creaked as it opened further, admitting one Regulus A. Black into the hallway.
Every muscle in Sirius's back instantly went taut. He wasn't sure whether he wanted to laugh derisively, sob like a baby, or throw himself off a bridge. (Where he would find a suitable bridge was a different problem, one that he was not interested in addressing.) For the second time in two minutes—and perhaps in his life—he was struck dumb.
Regulus looked at him sullenly. Ever the rebellious little brother. Ever the unconscionable little imp. Ever the stupid little boy Sirius Black had loved with all his heart.
Sirius forced some saliva to collect in his mouth by thinking about rare steaks and then swallowed with difficulty. "What do you want?" he asked, forcing his voice to sound cold.
As always, Regulus did his damnedest to match his brother's frostiness, flake of ice for flake of ice. "You shouldn't associate with those people," he announced.
Sirius felt a growl building in his chest and fought it down. Now was not the time to rip his brother's throat out. That could wait. "And why not?" he inquired.
Regulus made an altogether risible show of looking both ways. "Because some shit's going to go down," he explained in a low voice.
"Hey." Sirius scowled. "Don't you talk like that."
The scowl that alighted on Regulus's face probably matched perfectly. It was a good thing they had those opposite badges to tell them apart.
Not.
"Why not?" Regulus retorted. "You say shit like that all the time."
Sirius leapt forward and punched him in the arm. "Well, I'm not you, you little shit!"
Regulus swung and missed. "You're a little shit!"
"Your mother is a little shit!" The words had slipped free from Sirius's mouth before he could bite them back. It was what they'd always said—a bit of nonsense to slaughter their pointless little stereotypical sibling arguments. How they would laugh, and laugh, and laugh…
"Your face is a little shit!" Regulus said.
Sirius stared at his brother incredulously, which gave Regulus the opportunity to pummel at him ineffectually with both fists. For a good few minutes, they beat at each other, neither really intending to hurt the other, neither hoping to land a solid blow, neither really wanting to stop. Then Regulus hit Sirius where he already had a bruise from running into a doorframe, and Sirius shoved him hard enough that he fell on his ass on the floor.
Frowning up at him, Regulus rubbed at his shoulder. Sirius didn't think it a coincidence that his most recent strike had been aimed there. "You never talk to me," Regulus said.
"You never talk to me," Sirius countered, folding his arms across his chest.
"Yeah, fuck you."
"Don't fuckin' say that."
"You just fuckin' said it."
"Look, do I have to—?" Sirius raised a fist and left the question pointedly open-ended.
Regulus snorted and collected himself to his feet. Unnecessarily he brushed off his robes. His green and silver badge glinted in the candlelight, and Sirius felt his heart break one more time. How hopelessly absurd was it that a fucking hat had split them apart?
He knew, however, that that wasn't all there was to it. The Sorting Hat had played its cruel role with gusto, yes, but that had only been a small fracture in the once-smooth surface of the Black brothers' rapport. It had been Sirius himself who had dug the chasm that gaped between them now—dug it with his own two hands, bit by bit, filth under his fingernails. At the core, this was his doing.
"Just be careful, is all," Regulus told him.
Sirius looked at his brother—his baby brother, his pupil, his apprentice, his confidant and his companion. That face was so similar to his; so close to the visage that appeared in the mirror. The eyes, the cheekbones—Regulus styled his hair differently, and deliberately so, but the color and the texture were the same. The Black brothers could have gone down in history. They could have been inseparable; they could have been unstoppable.
"You be careful, too," Sirius said, hollowly.
"Fuckin' whatever."
"And knock that shit off or I'll knock it out of you."
"Kiss my ass, Sirius."
"I'll kick it halfway to Australia for you, but that's about the extent of my services."
Regulus gave him the finger.
Sirius shoved him. "Get the hell out of here, you little cretin."
In the middle of his third step, Regulus hesitated and turned. "For real, though," he said slowly. "For real, be careful."
Once again Sirius crossed his arms. "Why?" he demanded.
Regulus's eyes shifted incessantly, refusing to focus on a single object for more than a portion of a second. "Because you hang out with half-bloods," he answered eventually. "And half-bloods are in deep shit."
All the wispy fragments of love and wonder and confusion and happiness coalesced into one dark cloud of fury.
"If you bastards fucking touch them—"
Though he was no great interpreter, Regulus Black saw the signs on his brother's face. Of course, those signs might as well have been written in neon. Regulus ran.
"Get back here—"
Sirius was shouting at an empty corridor. He clenched his fists, then released; clenched and released; breathed slowly in and out. It was like reining in rearing horses, but he did it.
Now, that was a bad simile. One step after another, Sirius went back to the common room. He was halfway to the figurative swings by the time he arrived.