A week later, Crevan Bertrand had been buried, unsupervised by his youngest niece. Cam went, she said, only because she found herself unable to concoct a way to explain it to her cousin Mel, who was also her supervisor in the Records Rooms of the Ministry of Magic. She hadn't liked Eglantine's suggestion that she tell Mel that it was none of her damn business.
While Crevan was being interred in the family plot, Eglantine was still asleep. She had drifted off on the downstairs couch of Lily Evans's parents' house, where they had been watching Monty Python on television. Lily was the only person she knew who wouldn't judge her for having a Death Eater for an uncle. Not that she hung around many people from Hogwarts to begin with—she didn't want to fit in with the swotty purebloods her uncle tried to push her towards, nor the pseudo-rebels who were really just prats—but of the few she tolerated, Lily was the least likely to condemn her simply because her uncle was a criminal. She would insult Crevan right along with her, despite his being dead, and she'd constantly one-up Eglantine's insults so they got more and more lascivious. But she never judged her.
Lily's sister Petunia did, however. When Eglantine woke up, she could hear Petunia complaining to Lily's parents in the kitchen; Lily was still fast asleep, but Eglantine could hear Petunia complaining about why Lily and Eglantine thought they were too good to sleep in beds, which seemed to Eglantine to be a bit like grasping at straws. They'd fallen asleep on a sofa watching television, not erected giant stone plinths in the backyard that were engraved to say, "WE ARE BETTER THAN PETUNIA EVANS." She wasn't sure why Petunia always had such a bad temper with her: she'd always made an effort to be friendly even though Lily herself was distant to her sister, and always invited her along to the movies or the disco, despite the fact that Petunia had never once said yes. (Even Lily never said yes to the disco.)
"Hey," Eglantine whispered to Lily, who had fallen asleep at the opposite end of the sofa, her bare, pink-toed feet wedged into Eglantine's armpit. "I'm going to head out. Everyone else is at my uncle's funeral. Not often I get the house to myself."
Lily's nose wrinkled. "Tell me about it," she mumbled. "Petunia never leaves."
Eglantine extracted her feet from where they had been shoved between the back of the couch and the cushion, and spider-crawled over Lily. "See you, you old snotbag. Too good for a bed!"
She could see Lily's parents surreptitiously watching her from the kitchen window, Petunia faintly visible and sour-faced behind them, as Eglantine mounted her broom in the back garden and flew off. She was almost certain that an old man cutting his grass had seen her, but his assertions that he'd seen a young lady with very permed brown-red hair and jean shorts get on a broom and fly off would likely be dismissed as whimsical senility. She thought that she probably should've used the bus again, but she was feeling disinclined to do anything that reminded her of that night.
Back at home, Eglantine landed in the carriage house area of her father Osbert's house, which was where her family tended to keep their brooms (her mother thought they were too dirty to come indoors), as well as their old flying carpet, which was now illegal. Inside there it was golden and smelled sweet, like hay, even though the old horse stalls had been empty for years before her father bought it with his share of the inheritance from Eglantine's grandparents, whom she had never met: they died before even Victor, the oldest of all the Bertrand children, had been born.
The house itself was boxy and blue, surrounded by a high wrought-iron fence and with another, much shorter, wrought iron trim atop the roof. It had been built in 1874 by a Muggle mill-owner—Eglantine liked to think of details like this; she felt it made the world more personal—and since he had always been too busy owning his mill and had never had children, the house had been left abandoned in 1915 during the war and had been empty until Eglantine's parents had purchased it. They'd almost completely restored it: the floors had their old Victorian sheen, the ormolu fireplaces glowed, the wallpaper (even the ugly bits) was vivid and bright, and the kitchen, crammed with cast-iron and brass, was a constant, warm clamor of elves and energy, baking bread and brewing a steady supply of tea. There was a kettle going when Eglantine walked in, head still pounding from a late bedtime and a late waking, and one of the house-elves was rolling out cookie dough across the scrubbed-wood table.
"Good morning, Miss. Would Miss like a cup of tea?"
"Sure. My parents didn't say when they'd be back, would they?"
"They said they'd be back at teatime, Miss."
Good. That left five full hours of solitude. She'd put away all the robes she'd left scattered around her room last night, have a bubble bath, and read up on her curses—and through it all, she could have her music on as loud as she pleased, with nobody to tell her to "turn those screaming Muggles down," as her mother frequently called up the stairs.
Her bedroom was in the back of the house, overlooking the courtyard and the garden, and the open windows let in a sweet honeysuckle scent. A crystal made wavering rainbows on the sage green walls, and the prisms were reflected again by the small silver mirror above the marble fireplace and by the mirror above her dresser. She took out her large red record player and put it on her desk—it was covered with books about jinxes, hexes, and curses, as well as several sheets of notes—and took out her favorite records. She'd start with ABBA: they were loud enough to drown out the noise of anxiety in her head, the idea that she was alone in the house and that Death Eaters had now killed two Bertrands—what was one more?
"I love you, I do I do I do," she bellowed, folding her robes to put into her dresser.
A dark-haired figure appeared in the mirror behind her. "So do I," it said.
Without thinking—without even imagining any dire consequences—Eglantine spun around and Stunned him. The room flooded with red light; the dark-haired figure flew backwards onto her fluffy, white-counterpaned bed, revealing dusty pants.
She stood there gaping at the person—the sixteen-year-old, male person—until she heard the fluttering of an owl at the window (warning her that if she continued upon her dangerous path of using magic, she would be expelled from the school that had taught her half the magic she knew in the first place). Then she un-Stunned him—second warning—and he slowly sat up, groaning and rubbing his temples.
"Awfully quick on the draw, aren't you, Eggs? I think you're in trouble, you know." He gestured at the owls and picked up one of the letters. "This Fudge fellow is a bit jumpy, isn't he? Sort of rapid himself. Maybe the two of you should form a partnership."
"What. The. Fuck. Are you doing. In my house?"
"You know, I seemed to recall an invitation you gave me before we left school; something to the effect of, 'Come see a movie with me sometime.' Well, here I am. Let's see a movie."
"Fuck off! Get out of my damn house, you lunatic!" She waved at him, shooing. Not only could she not remember inviting Sirius Black to a movie, she really couldn't remember inviting him into her bedroom.
He held up his hands in surrender. "All right. You really want to know why I'm here? I ran away from home and the Potters are on vacation in Crete, and Remus is ill, and Peter is boring. So you, Eglantine, as one of my oldest though most female friends, win two fabulous weeks of me sleeping in your closet and doing whatever you want me to do so long as I haven't got to go live in the woods." He flipped his hair. "And I'll have you know, there are plenty of girls who would kill to have me sleeping half that close to them."
"Well, I wouldn't," said Eglantine. Though she had to admit, if it hadn't been for his personality, and the fact that she'd known him since they were both eight years old and both extremely goofy-looking, and she was somewhere dark and full of music, she might have gone for it. "Why'd you run away from home?"
"Just couldn't take it anymore." He laid across her bed in a mock-seductive pose. "The shouting. The fighting. The shouting. The 'Regulus never does that.' Have I mentioned the shouting? It just got incredibly old."
"Didn't know your mum was that bad," Eglantine said, sitting on the foot of the bed. "Still, must beat having a Death Eater uncle."
It had slipped out—here in her bedroom, the fact seemed odd but part of life, part of her, and she hadn't thought to conceal it as she would have elsewhere—before she could consider the prudence of telling Sirius Black that she was related to a Death Eater, and probably a murderer. Not that she cared what he thought, not that much, but he was still one of her oldest friends. And his parents…she wasn't entirely sure about his parents. If he ever changed his mind, well, she was sure they'd been friends with Crevan and Alya for the same reason as Dolohov. They certainly hated Muggles enough.
"Oh, so that's why they offed him?" he said, his expression only mildly curious. "I read about that in the Prophet, and I would've written a letter of sympathy only I knew that I didn't need to have sympathy, that nobody much liked him anyway except your cousin Victor and maybe your dad. For what it's worth, I don't think he was as evil as most of them. Always seemed a bit of an idiot to me—no offense."
"No, he was. I just…it's depressing, you know? How your own relatives can turn out to be such…such scum. I mean, half the people he invited to those things were probably Death Eaters. Not the Prewetts, obviously. Or any of us—my dad, Mum, Bertie, Carlisle, Cam. Or you. And nobody ever thought…"
"And we never saw just how bad they were? Yeah, I think of that too sometimes. Some of them were definitely Death Eaters, which should make for some awkward moments if either of us become Aurors. But we can always think of it as strategic advantage, eh? We know their weaknesses. Like Yaxley and his phobia of wet pants—I still remember that time you accidentally sloshed that entire glass of eggnog across his trousers and he ran off screaming. That was classic."
"What do you mean 'accidentally'? He was a creep. He was always looking down Mel's shirt."
Sirius frowned. "You know, my parents would probably be proud of me if I became one of them. They won't do it themselves—they're too fancy for it; too high on their own horses to stand up for their loathsome little beliefs, and I wish they would, because then I could see her put in jail—but I think they'd be proud if I did. They'll push Reg into it, though. He's weak."
Eglantine had never been close with Sirius's younger brother Regulus, a nervous, pretty-faced boy who'd always reminded her of an anxious hare. The chief thing she always remembered about Reg was that they locked him in a closet at Crevan's and forgot about him until Sirius's parents, tipsy on wassail, left without both their children and had to come back. And also the time they duped Reg into eating a whole pound of Bertie Bott's Beans.
"Yeah, he'll go for it," she said. "And he'll get captured first thing, probably, because he'll drop his wand in terror."
She was smiling until she felt the hand on her shoulder. "Uh-uh. No touching. That's the number one rule of sleeping in my closet."
"I don't like that one. Are there others?"
"No complaining about the lack of touching. No mentioning touching. And no complaining about my musical choices."
"Is that what that is? Music? I thought it was a bloke getting burned to death."
"He's singing. He happens to have the broadest range of any major rock singer."
"How lovely for him. And this is what he does with it?"
"You do not insult Queen. If you insult Queen, I call the Death Eaters."
"Wow. All right. Shutting up about Queen. Hey, d' you people have any oatmeal? I'm starving."
So began the two weeks that Sirius spent in Eglantine's closet. She made him a rather comfortable bed out of spare quilts, and slapped him when he (jokingly, he said afterward) tried to pull her down onto it. For several days, they encountered one another only in the mornings and evenings, when she would get changed, much to his chagrin, behind a large screen. There was always music. He found that he liked the Rolling Stones (especially "Paint it Black," because he was an unabashed narcissist), but not the Beatles—they were too hokey. He liked The Who, but not, obviously, Queen—too dramatic. He absolutely reviled Elvis Presley.
It was the first time that Eglantine had spent such a large quantity of time with a boy who wasn't one of her brothers, or Lily's odd, rather creepy friend (former friend, really) Severus. She couldn't entirely decide whether she liked it or not. On one hand, it was pleasant to have somebody to tell about her day who wasn't Cam, or her mother, or her father. And she'd always liked Sirius—he was almost like a brother, because she'd known him for so long, but he wasn't anywhere near as wet and brainless as either Carlisle or Bertie. She had loved Bertie, but even Cam had thought he was a tiny bit of a stick in the mud. As children, she and Sirius always been one another's companions at Christmastime, usually with Reg and sometimes with Cam and Belinda, who would usually drift off after about fifteen minutes to go flirt with the Prewett twins. Those had been the best Christmases that Eglantine could remember: the ones spent solely with Crevan, Alya, and her cousins had been dull, since she was at least five years younger than everyone else, and usually somewhat forgotten; and then, after Crevan stopped having parties altogether, that had been the least exciting of all. It had just been Osbert, Ethelinda, Bertie and whatever girlfriend he was hanging out with at the time (usually Marlene) and sometimes Arthur Weasley, who'd come by to eat and try to sneak into Eglantine's room to fiddle with her record player; Carlisle, who lived and breathed Quidditch and stayed indoors for five minutes before going out to have a match with Victor and Mel and the Prewetts in Crevan's fields; and Cam, who'd usually tag along with Carlisle so she could still encounter the Prewetts. Even after Carlisle moved, and they started going to America, she'd still rather have been at Crevan's, snooping through the house with Sirius and Reg, dropping Dungbombs on the friends of her uncle's whom they least liked, and flying her grandfather's old brooms down the upstairs hallways.
On the other hand, he farted in his sleep. She could hear it through the door. He would come out of the closet, grimacing and holding his ears, whenever she played "Hound Dog," and he wouldn't tell her why he had laughed so hard the first time she played it. He wasn't nearly as enjoyable as he used to be, and he was moody, and if he wasn't moping in the closet and obviously wishing she would talk to him about it, he was prying. He asked her constant, badgering questions about what she was doing, and what song was that, and where was she going, and what was that movie about, and what was a disco.
"You've never been to a disco?" she asked him incredulously that first Friday night, putting her hoop earrings in and smearing glitter across her eyelids. She was going to go alone: Cam was having dinner with Mel and some blonde chap from the Ministry that Mel was trying to set her up with. (Eglantine had to throw her Alice band out the window to convince her not to wear it to the dinner.)
"No. Should I have?"
"Um, yes. Get dressed. Or—er—clean yourself, or something. You're coming. Wow—I know it's a Muggle thing, but I thought you'd at least have gone a few times to meet girls."
He grinned. Cam would have said that his wicked grin looked a lot like hers, but Cam always missed the important things, like the fact that she was always proposing something enjoyable and he was usually about to be an annoyance.
"I have something we can go on."
"I am not falling for another of your stupid double entendre puns."
"You will, but this isn't one of them. Didn't you wonder how I got here?"
"I asked you how you got here. You wouldn't tell me."
"That's because I was saving the surprise until later. Until now, in fact. I hid it in the hayloft of that carriage house."
"You hid what in the hayloft of the carriage house?"
"Our means of transportation."
"Ooh, so you've got a broom." She took out her lipgloss and smeared it on. "I already knew that."
"It's not a broom. It's much cooler than a broom."
"Sorry, you can't be cool. You don't know what cool is. People who hate Queen are not allowed to be cool."
He tossed his hands up in aggravation. "Enough with Queen! I just don't like them! Accept it!"
"Don't be getting all shouty like your mother. Come on, show me this 'means of transportation.' Will Lily fit on it? I was going to make her come with us. Or try, anyway—she never does."
"If she never does, there's no sense asking her, is there?"
"She'll cave someday."
"Why are you putting on so much makeup? It looks weird."
She threw her blusher brush at him. "Shut up! How should you know what 'looks weird' at discos? You've never been!" She reached for her can of hairspray and fluffed it up until it was roughly the size of a boxwood. "You'll look weird, dressed like a hobo."
"Oh, well, sorry, I happen not to have brought an entire disco wardrobe with me when I escaped Grimmauld Place. Next time I'll pack my silver lame bell bottoms."
"Oh, so you do know about discos."
"No, I was reading some of your magazines the other day in the closet when I was bored. I now know what to do if I am ever ensnared into a relationship with an older man, and also how to perfectly apply mascara without it becoming clumpy." He picked up a couple of Eglantine's smaller outfits and looked at them, confused. "You people are fascinating, really—you women. I mean, what is this?" He pulled on it. "It's like some sort of sling for people with broken limbs. And those shoes are insane. How does a person walk on them?"
"Attractively." Eglantine fluffed her hair again. "Let's go. And we're getting Lily, whether you want to or not."
"I don't know if we can. Let me show you."
"Fine. You sneak out this way through the window, and I'll go out through the kitchens—I usually go out through the servants' stairs so Mum can't see what I'm wearing. Meet you in the carriage house."
He was still navigating his way down the ivy as Eglantine walked across the darkened courtyard to the carriage house and lit the lamps. She polished her broom quickly as she waited—she wasn't entirely certain that she trusted Sirius's "method of transportation."
Eventually he emerged, sweating, through the carriage house door. "I was not properly warned about that ivy."
"I thought you were coordinated."
"You want to find out just how coordinated?"
Eglantine rolled her eyes. "No! The answer will always be no! Come on, let's get whatever this thing is on the road to Lily's."
"Boring old Lily," he muttered, opening the creaky, uneven back door to the upstairs hayloft of the carriage house. "She'll ruin the fun."
"No offense, but if anybody's going to ruin anyone's fun, it's going to be you."
"What do you mean? I'm a barrel of laughs. I am mischievous, witty, and handsome."
"You moped in the closet all day during the week. You were so intent on sitting in that closet that you read my magazines. And you complained about nearly everything."
He looked back at her, frowning in concern. "Where's this coming from? You never mentioned that you thought that."
"Well, no. Why would I?"
"A more apt question might be, why would you wait until now to mention it?"
She shrugged. "Because. I don't know; I just don't want you getting all…weird. Promise me you won't get weird?"
"I dunno what you mean by 'weird,' but I'll try."
She didn't want to tell him what she meant by weird, because she wasn't completely sure herself. Weird, she meant, as in the feeling she got when he was talking about his family's anti-Muggle prejudices and how they tried to inflict that on him, of being intensely disinterested and simultaneously fascinated. Weird, as in the way he looked at her as if he were actually drinking in the fact that she was listening to him. Weird, as in the dark expression that had appeared on his face when he'd emerged from the closet after Camilla had left the room, because she and Eglantine had been talking about Eglantine's latest disco conquest. Weird, as in the fact that she'd never felt this close to anybody but Cam, not even Lily, and the fact that she really wasn't comfortable with it and couldn't wait for Sirius to leave, but at the same time, would feel alone if he did. Even after such a short time, it was like all the times they'd seen one another before culminated in some sort of prerequisite to this instant familiarity. It was like those instant meals that Muggles were so fond of: it's not much until you apply just a little bit of heat, and then hey presto, ravioli.
The hayloft was dark, stuffy, musty, and entirely devoid of hay: it was a plain, low, sloped room with rough floors and a large door opening over the carriage yard, and another trap door towards the back for the hay to be dropped down to the ex-horses.
Sirius knew exactly where the lantern was and lit it from a match container beside it. "I've come up here a few times during the day—still dark in here, but it was light enough for me to figure out where the lanterns were." He motioned to Eglantine. "It's over here."
It was a large black shape covered by a tarpaulin. He pulled it off. Underneath was a motorbike.
"Why do you have that up here? How did it get up here?"
"It flies." Sirius grinned. "If we want it to. I rather fancy driving on the road, myself."
"I've never driven one of those."
"Well, I'll be driving it."
"Fine. Then I'll drive my car."
He laughed; it was a loud, short laugh, like a bark. "You have a car? Where?"
"In an abandoned barn that uncle Crevan forgot was on his land."
"Excellent. Does it fly?"
"No. It can be invisible, though. Cam enchanted it for me so Crevan wouldn't ever see it."
"Camilla Bertrand enchanted an illegal vehicle? I'm impressed at that. I didn't think your sister sneezed without a permit."
"You don't know Cam like I do. She's not the goody-two-shoes everybody thinks. She almost kissed a guy at a disco…once." She was staring at the motorbike. It was intriguing. She had a vision of herself in a black leather outfit like something out of some American karate movie, hair streaming behind her in the wind, black goggles on—maybe not the goggles—roaring through the streets. And all the men would be so jealous of Sirius, and they'd pay even more attention to her…
"On second thought," she said, "Lily's probably busy. I forgot, she did mention some sort of family thing this week."
Sirius grinned. "I knew you couldn't resist the primal urges excited by the motorbike."
"Merlin's toes, stop assuming that I think you—or anything about you—is sexy! Just stop!" She swung a leg over the back seat of the bike. It wasn't the most comfortable thing in existence, and in fact was rather likely to chafe, but she was sure it looked appealing.
"But everybody thinks I'm sexy."
"Exactly. That's all I need—for everybody else to think you're sexy. Mission accomplished. Now would you start this thing? I want to make an entrance."
"Why does everyone else need to think I'm sexy?"
"Just shut up and take me to the disco, would you?"
"Fine." He took a helmet out of a pile of broken wood and leaves, brushing it off. "Just remember that I've got feelings, you know."
She rolled her eyes. "Yes, you feel like you're the universe's sexiest man. And I, in turn, feel like you're just another sixteen-year-old boy who will soon learn that he looks like a sixteen-year-old boy, spots and all."
The engine roared into life. She could only faintly hear him say, "I don't have spots," before they flew out of the barn and up above the house.