As May slipped by Pip grew anxious.

More people were disappearing. The Ministry's own mouthpiece, the Daily Prophet, was itself peppered with doubts and demands that their beaurauctatic overlords simply couldn't answer. Not with the Dark Mark's poisonous glimmer lighting up the sky each night.

There was a palpable feeling among the Order that was something was coming.

Patrols tripled. The Department of Mysteries' dungeons became more of a home to Pip than Grimmauld Place. She closed her eyes and she was in the black caverns, the hair standing on the back of her neck, the sensation of being watched unshakeable.

What made it all the worse was that the distraction she'd chosen from reality was becoming...complicated.

Sirius experienced life with his whole soul. Nothing could be small or simple. It was always deep, passionate; he threw himself in and didn't bother looking back. His embrace was too soft, his kisses too loving.

What Pip had initially shrugged off, she could no longer ignore. The two of them were straying dangerously close to the boundary between friends and something more. She was terrified. She couldn't risk the fallout of that vulnerability; she hadn't done so in two decades and didn't plan on starting now.

To make matters worse, there was the added element of newfound guilt. It had started gnawing at Pip the same afternoon Harry popped into the kitchen fireplace. Nostalgically remembering his Hogwarts days with Lupin, the forlorn longing in Sirius' words brought home how trapped he truly was.

It seemed, at times, that Sirius existed in the severed, liminal space between his golden past and shadowy present. While Pip's own history was spotted with misfortune, she was free to make whatever terrible choices she fancied, Sirius included. His options, however, were limited.

If Sirius were free, would he choose to spend his freedom on Pip? Was she taking advantage him?

She honestly didn't know, and judging from Remus's (who'd mercifully kept his mouth shut) troubled frowns, she guessed he didn't know either.

These worries drifted to the surface one June evening.

Despite the last month's promise of a warm summer, the days were colder, the nights longer. The weak sunrays that writhed their way through the clouds overhead were suffocated before they reached the ground.

Sirius trotted into the parlour in his animagus form. He'd taken to the habit recently out of sheer boredom. The black dog carried a piece of parchment in its jaws which it deposited on Pip's lap.

Sirius's letter was from Harry, detailing life at Hogwarts. OWLS were coming up and Harry's classmates were going barmy. Hermione in particular was acting nuttier than usual, while Ron was pretending like the whole thing wasn't happening – a bad dream he would soon wake from. Umbridge was still a cow. Gryffindor had beat Ravenclaw to win the Quidditch Cup, though Harry had been relegated to the sidelines because of the aforementioned cow's vendetta against him.

There was a line for Pip at the bottom, requesting that she not neuter any pets without his consent. She may or may not have reintroduced the theme in a subsequent letter...

Sirius's eyes were suspicious and accusatory. Pip bit back a laugh and quickly changed the subject. 'Although my Ravenclaw heart is wounded,' she said, 'I'm thrilled for Harry. It's a shame he couldn't play, though...'

Sirius grunted, rolling his eyes. I know what that's like.

There it was again, that gnawing guilt. Pip's expression must've mirrored her perturbing thoughts because Sirius nudged her knee with his nose. She shook her head, but found herself talking despite herself. 'Sirius...hypothetically, if we –,' she paused, searching for the right words. 'If you were free...how much do you think would be different...with us, I mean?'

If it were possible for dogs to frown, that's what Sirius would be doing. His forehead was furrowed, his usually lolling tongue tucked away, his tail still. Without warning, he leapt onto the couch and bestowed a careless, sloppy lick upon Pip's cheek. She laughed and shoved him off, wiping the saliva from her skin. He crouched there a moment, smiling dopily, tail now going a mile a minute, before galloping back out of the parlour.

Somehow Pip didn't think she'd get any clearer an answer out of him on two legs.

The something that the Order was waiting for happened a few days later.

Pip was chewing on a half-eaten ham sandwich in the kitchen. She let out a small shriek as the air around her erupted into flames and a phoenix tail feather dropped onto her plate. Unrolling the attached parchment, she recognised Dumbledore's curling script.

Minerva has been attacked. Guard required at St. Mungo's immediately.

Pip reread the letter three more times. The notion of an injured Minerva McGonagall – a witch she respected and, frankly, feared in equal parts – was inconceivable. The woman was made from stone, she couldn't be hurt.

Pip was the first one there.

She barged into the St. Mungo's waiting room and sprinted in the direction the bewildered desk-witch had pointed. Off-white walls and healers in lime-green robes blurred past. Pip had always hated the smell of hospitals: disinfectant, bedpans, body odour, cheap disposable cloth and death. Right now, it added to the sense of panic bubbling within and made her stomach roll.

Pip's boots squeaked on the floor as she skidded to a stop and hesitantly crept into McGonagall's ward.

McGonagall was simply not designed to be hospitalised. She lay there unconscious, looking so unnatural in her hospital cot, seeming suddenly older and frailer than Pip thought possible. Her skin was translucent, her grey hair tumbling down from its usually severe bun. Her breaths were raspy and laboured.

But she had survived a blitz of curses that would've killed most. She had outright refused to die, and Pip clung to that thought as dawn approached at a crawling speed.

Order members burst into the room throughout the night. Arthur and Molly arrived in their pyjamas, Emmeline Vance with several cups of coffee. The aurors appeared all at once, incensed at being stuck on a pointless Ministry mission while McGonagall was fighting for her life.

As the pieces fell into place about what exactly had happened, dark fantasies about what torture Pip would submit Umbridge to if she got her hands on the hideous little toad overtook her thought process. At three o'clock in the morning, the whole lot of them waited with bated breaths as a healer prodded and poked McGonagall's sleeping form. A collective sigh was released at the news she would recover.

With the terror mildly alleviated, Pip's eyelids began to droop. She slumped against a healing apparatus coursing with glassy liquid but startled back awake at its frenzied beeps.

'Pip, dear,' Molly said with a motherly smile. 'You should go home. I think Minerva is well protected here.'

'You'll need some rest for tonight, after all,' Arthur added.

Pip's expression was blank. Tonight...tonight...what had she forgotten? She spun around in search of the calendar she'd paced past a hundred times that night. It hung haphazardly on the wall, freshly opened to June Eighteenth. Pip had forgotten about the sodding Daily Prophet Gala.

She briefly contemplated asking one of Order members to hex her, but with McGonagall stretched out in the hospital cot beside Pip, it seemed a little tone-deaf.

Instead, she apparated back to Headquarters where Sirius was waiting in the hallway. 'How is she?' he asked immediately.

'She's going to be alright,' Pip answered. 'The woman's a fighter.'

'I knew Minnie was too stubborn to die,' Sirius laughed weakly. He rubbed the nape of his neck and slumped onto the bottom stairs.

Pip murmured something in tired agreement and made to pass him, thoughts totally absorbed by the allure of a downy pillow and soft sheets upstairs. But Sirius' fingers closed around her wrist. His expression was almost guarded. 'You've been avoiding me,' he said. It wasn't a question.

Pip half-heartedly joked to herself that he'd stolen her line, but she had to admit he wasn't wrong. These days, she second-guessed each stolen moment spent with Sirius, thoughts clouded with doubt and guilt. It had become simply easier to sidestep them altogether if she didn't want to lose anymore sleep pondering the moral quandaries of her strange relationship with him.

A little confronted and altogether knackered, Pip shrugged. 'Things have been busy, that's all.'

Sirius's eyes shifted as he searched for the truth in her face. He carefully released her wrist. 'I don't think that's it, love.'

'Do we have to do this right now, Sirius? I'm dead on my feet, it's been a long night,' Pip sighed, already climbing past him.

He followed, the noise of their footfalls against the wooden stairs echoing through the empty house. 'I only want to know what's going on with us. We're okay, right?'

Pip nodded elusively. The sight of her bed had doubled her exhaustion. She kicked off a boot and started roughly pulling out her braid when Sirius' next statement brought her to stillness.

'Something's changed in you, Pip. Towards me.'

Pip's lips parted to speak but no words tumbled forth to save the situation. She hesitated too long, looking at Sirius with a pained expression.

Sirius betrayed some unreadable emotion for half a beat before it was replaced with a neutral, disinterested mask. He resembled – almost scarily – the painted faces of the Black family ancestors on the tapestry downstairs. A pureblood guise to hide the hurt in his eyes.

'I won't bother you anymore then,' he said.

Pip groaned, kicked off her other shoe and chased after him. 'Sirius, it's not like that! I just – I just think...if you weren't locked up in this house, do you think you would be making the choices you are now?'

Sirius laughed without humour. 'What choices? I don't know if you've noticed, Pip, but I haven't exactly had a chance to exercise free fucking will lately!'

Pip motioned wildly between them. She was doing a pitiful job of expressing her point and found herself shouting. 'This choice! This is what I mean! Maybe the only reason we've been fucking around is because you're stuck here with me!'

Sirius, glowering, weaponised Pip's words choice against her. 'I'm not the one feeling, stuck, love.' He slammed his bedroom door shut and the old house rattled, dust shaking loose from the rafters.

Pip clenched her eyes closed and waited for the harsh crash to drift away. That had not gone as planned.

With a frustrated exclamation, she stalked back to her room, snatched the bag she'd thrown onto her bed and stomped back into her shoes. She hunted around for the crumpled garment-bag containing her gown and disapparated from Headquarters.

Pip only bothered with a short grunt at Bill and Fleur's questioning looks upon turning up at their doorstep. She pushed past them for the couch where she drifted off into an agitated sleep.

'Would you pleaze stop with ze fidgeting?' Fleur snapped.

Pip's hair was being brushed back so ferociously it looked like she'd had a botched facelift. She could barely see with the angle her head was craned at, which was making it incredibly difficult to finish her makeup. 'I'm trying!' Pip protested. 'You almost made me poke my eye out with a spoolie!'

Fleur yanked her hair again in response, garnering a yelp from Pip who was now rethinking her decision to take sanctuary at their flat.

She supposed Fleur's manhandling was still preferable to the loaded silence that awaited her at Grimmauld Place, though. When this gala nonsense was done, Pip was determined to corner Sirius and set things straight.

To talk, like adults. She cringed at the thought. She wasn't entirely sure either of them were capable of that.

For now, Pip could only wince as Fleur stabbed the millionth bobby-pin into her scalp.

Bill's girlfriend had become the least-likely fairy godmother in the world. She'd taken on the challenge of preparing Pip for tonight's circus. The task complete, she stood back as though she'd summited a mountain or battled a dragon. Actually, she had experience with that last one and seemed to think it less taxing.

'It iz done,' Fleur announced with an air of fatigue.

Bill wandered in, holding a bag of fizzing whizbees. He titled his head to survey the results, speaking through a mouthful of sweets. 'Bloody good work, Fleur.'

Pip stood there like a reupholstered piece of furniture about to be auctioned off. 'Feeling a bit objectified here,' she griped, folding her arms across her chest. The ridiculous white gloves she was compelled into – the extravagant type that rested above the elbow – rustled as she did. She'd never looked less like herself.

While Pip grappled with a sense of imposter syndrome, Fleur ushered her towards the flat's cramped fireplace, pausing to brush out a wrinkle in Pip's gown. It was a fabric of sparkling sapphire blue that looked as though she'd cloaked herself in the twinkling night sky.

A cloak from the heavens, Pip thought wryly.

With Bill's reminder that she was already late, she climbed into the fireplace, accepting the clutch – in which her wand was stashed – that Fleur shoved at her. Bill deposited the floo powder into the grate so as not to dirty Pip's pristine gloves and, with a wink, she was engulfed in green flames.

Pip was reminded once again why she hated travelling by floo. She spat out a mouthful of ash as the space around her became an emerald tornado of flames. The spinning stopped abruptly, the flames dying until they only lapped at her ankles, and Pip shook away the dizziness to focus on the enormous foyer of the Cuffe estate. Brushing some soot from her dress, she was met by the party's bouncing host.

'Merlin's beard, Bones! You clean up well!'

Pip accepted Cuffe's arm to clamber out of the fireplace. 'You're not looking too bad yourself, Mr Cuffe.'

He waved her off with a blushing, bashful smile and directed Pip to follow the flock of other guests.

The Cuffes were new money, not of the old pureblood stock. Their estate was ostentatious and gaudy, practically screaming at visitors to guess how many galleons were stacked in the family's Gringotts vault. Out of high-ceiling windows, Pip observed a sprawling lawn so shockingly green she wouldn't have been surprised if Cuffe had gone out and painted over the grass himself.

He was a decent man, but he cared about appearances; that came across loud and clear in the ballroom. It was the heart of the place's over-the-top lavishness and it was dressed to the fucking nines.

Platinum banners met at the top of the arched ceiling and stretched out to encircle the entire oval room. The marble floor was so polished that Pip could see her mystified reflection in it. Round tables covered in white silk decorated the room, upon which immense floral arrangements blocked the view of whoever was sitting across from you. In each spot not dotted with bouquets, champagne glass towers were erected. Golden liquid poured down them with a luxurious splash.

That splash, and the indistinguishable wave of countless conversations, intermingled with the flutey music of an orchestra across the dance floor. Pip could make it out between the flurry of witches and wizards donning their best robes in a rainbow of twirling fabrics.

At least I'm not overdressed...

Claiming a champagne glass, Pip spun around at the shout of her name. She spotted Trecus and his wife tucked away on a white-clothed table. The couple were clearly a few drinks deep. Trecus was smiling at a disconcertingly frequent rate and Melinda had abandoned ferreting about for scandalous gossip to instead whisper sweet nothings in her husband's ear.

Pip's bottom had barely touched the seat before she excused herself to get another drink...or three. She was starting to wish she'd taken up Dung on his proposal to accompany her (despite his less than amicable relationship with the Ministry). If this didn't bode ill enough, the horror of all horrors that unfolded next certainly did.

As she gulped down another glass, Pip made eye-contact with a wizard across the room. She swiftly looked away, hunting for a place to hide, but her ex-boyfriend had already zeroed in on his target. Greg Cotton's brunette hair was parted neatly to one side, his robes of blue velvet. If he reached the landing zone, onlookers would think the two of them had colour coordinated.

Greg cast a winning smile at Pip, who surrendered to the inevitable. 'I thought I might catch you here.'

'Well, I do work for The Prophet, Greg,' Pip pointed out with an uneasy laugh. Maybe there was still time to make a getaway?

'Yes, so it would seem. You know we never really got a chance to catch up last time. How have you been?'

'Same old song and dance, really. How about you? What's life like as an international Quidditch star?'

She had fallen for his trap. And so Pip spent the following half hour listening to 'The Life and Times of the Incredible Greggory Cotton.' While she was already looking around for a tall structure to pitch herself off, things became exponentially worse. Another pair of eyes had locked onto Pip. Their owner was striding towards her.

This can't be happening.

She stood there paralysed as the disaster grew closer. It was like staring at a ticking time-bomb – a bead of sweat trickling from her forehead – as Merywn Finwick advanced from her peripheral vision.

Is this the universe's punishment for sleeping around! Shit fucking bugger, fucking shit-!

Merwyn beamed at her. 'I hoped I would see you tonight!'

'I do work for The Prophet,' Pip repeated weakly. She thought she might pass out from embarrassment. She seriously considered faking it to escape this nightmare.

Greg introduced himself to Merwyn, a flicker of convivial if competitive recognition passing between them. The Quidditch players fired into a conversation about the current league standings while Pip ever-so-slowly sidled out of view.

Right as she thought herself in the clear, she quite literally ran into someone else. 'Aunt Amelia!'

'Ophelia, there you are! I asked Cuffe where I could locate you earlier but evidently he's rather preoccupied-,' her aunt paused. 'You look quite lovely, you know,' Amelia Bones remarked, seemingly nonplussed as to how this could've happened.

'Thanks?'

Pip checked over her shoulder to see that Greg and Merywn had simultaneously registered her absence. Their puzzled gazes were roaming over the bustling ballroom. Pip seized her aunt by the elbows and whirled her around as a human shield, ignoring the older witch's affronted objections. Pip feared the assailants would soon latch onto her scent.

'Sorry Aunt Amelia. Er, can you hold this? Need to use the loo.'

She thrust her clutch into her aunt's hands, not waiting for consent, and snuck through the throngs of partygoers until she made it into the safety of an abandoned hallway. The noise of the party was muted here, the smell of Cuffe's bountiful floral bouquets not so overwhelming.

Pip inspected her reflection in a nearby window. With her elegant chignon, beautiful gown and snowy gloves, she resembled a responsible, put together woman who's life wasn't an absolute catastrofuck of her own making.

Pip titled her head skywards, clapping her hands together as though in prayer, and pleaded to whatever deity might be listening out there. One night she wanted – one night – where everything didn't go wrong.

At that moment, a ball of light rocketed into the hallway. It morphed into the silvery shape of a dog and Sirius's voice emanated from within. 'Harry's at the Department of Mysteries. It's an ambush. The Death Eaters are waiting for him.'