Chapter Thirty One

July the Thirteenth, Nine Hundred Ninety-Five
Early Evening

The first sensation that reached Davie's awareness when she regained consciousness was that was laying on her side. Her back was cold and --

"Ouch," she groaned, raising her arm weakly as she realized the wounds on her back, which had been rendered reparable only by Muggle means by use of numerous curses, were being cleaned. "Sirius, you don't need to --"

But when she weakly turned, readjusting the back of her shirt so that it covered her back, she was met not by Sirius' steely grey eyes, but by a cold, dark pair of eyes shaded by jet black hair.

"Severus?" Davie asked, leaning back carefully on her arms which had not completely shaken the feeling of being similar to limp noodles. "When did you --? Sirius said no one was supposed to arrive until --"

"I departed from Hogwarts early. I suspected Black would be too hotheaded to follow simple directions - a belief which does not appear to have been erroneous." Snape said coolly. "When I arrived I could hear Black barking his interrogation from down the corridor. You'd fainted by the time I reached the receiving room. Have you eaten?"

"No."

"And your wounds have obviously not been tended to," Snape added.

"I'm fine --"

"I'm sure," he sneered in response. "But the circumstance remains that Black is unable to follow to most rudimentary of instructions. Now, if you will allow me to finish."

Hesitantly, Davie returned to the position in which she had awoken, taken the brief opportunity to glance around the room - it was decorated in Slytherin pennants and dark fabrics, which Davie could only deduce were the choice in décor of Sirius' younger brother, Regulus. When Snape raised the back of Davie's shirt and dabbed at another wound, she gave a visible hiss. "I remember that one," she said through gritted teeth as he tended to it silently. "A gift from Mulciber. Lily and I turned out to be right about him --"

"What does she have to do with this?"

"She has everything to do with this, doesn't she Severus?" Davie said knowingly. "Everything you've done all these years, you haven't had to say a word. It's all been for --"

"Enough." Snape interrupted with a sharp hiss. "As I told you years ago, the how and the why no longer matter. I don't need to be reminded of how I found myself in this position."

"Nor do I," Davie answered quietly. "Things are different --"

"And do you plan on telling Black just how different things have become since your last meeting?" Snape asked snidely, admittedly relishing the fact that Davie tensed visibly. "Or will I be obliged to inform him --"

"Severus," she hissed. "All of that was a long time ago - I have no further reason to tell Sirius anything. My decisions were what they were. It was a lifetime ago."

"Indeed," he assented. "But it would appear that Black --"

"I don't appreciate being gossiped about in my own home," came a deep, gruff voice in the doorway. "I can take over now, Sniv--"

"Sirius!"

"No, Maddux - don't stop him," Snape said, holding up a hand to silence the girl as he smiled nastily. "Let him show you how much he's matured all these years." With a condescending bow, he sneered at Sirius, teeth bared in a humorless, feral imitation of a grin. "I leave the lady to the master of the house."

"Git," Sirius snarled as Snape swept out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

"He was just trying to get a rise out of you - and it worked, as always," Davie said in a woeful, chiding tone that was so familiar that Sirius couldn't help but smile at it. Davie sat up weakly and adjusted her clothes again. Sirius only now noted the fact that her body was covered in dark, unsightly bruises that seemed even larger on her thin, almost emaciated limbs. "You don't always need to -- oh!"

Her arms wavered beneath her and gave way beneath her - Sirius immediately dove forward and caught her in his arms to break what would have been a rather uncomfortable drop.

"Err -- Beater reflexes still seem to be in tact," he asked huskily, noting the closeness now that he help her about the shoulders. He hadn't consciously meant to put himself or Davie in this position, but now felt no compulsion to remedy it. With his face so close to hers - was it even possible that she was more than a decade older than he'd last been this close to her? Under the bruises, the sun and windburned skin, and the weary lines, she hardly looked different at all.

"I've, ah -- I never saw these," Davie said quietly, rending her gaze away from his and lowering them to the tattoos emblazoned across his chest, visible past his disheveled, partially unbuttoned shirt. "I must say, I'm not partial to them. I like them even less than the earring," she laughed weakly. "But…" Her voice trailed off, and Sirius felt some satisfaction in knowing that despite valiant effort on her part, the sudden closeness was something she too could not avoid being affected by.

"I just can't -- can't help being curious about them is all," she continued. She sounded so much like the tender, whimsical, inquisitive girl that Sirius had once taken so much pleasure in pestering before realizing that he had fallen in love with her; his skin prickled. After helping her get situated and sit on her own in the guest bed, he pulled up a chair beside it, unbuttoning his shirt - they were no longer teenagers. This wasn't a heated, passionate moment hidden behind a suit of armor in the Hogwarts corridors, Sirius reminded himself. Even if he didn't quite feel it, they were adults.

The expression on Davie's face seemed to momentarily confirm what Sirius had feared since he had started anticipating her arrival: while the woman in front of Sirius Black appeared very similar to the girl he had once known, it was unlikely that Davina Maddux would perceive the man in front of her as the same Sirius. Davie's eyes lingered on the latticework of tattoos and thin scars across his chest and shoulders, brushing her fingertips faintly across the marks - was she afraid? Disgusted?

"I did want to be there with you. Every moment of it," Davie said in a voice so faint that Sirius initially thought he had been imagining it altogether. "Even if it meant being thrown into Azkaban too. It's surprising --" she said, her voice seeming to progressively become more and more constricted in her throat. "-- what you're willing to do when you're young, and desperate, and -- hopelessly in love. You don't care who gets in the way. Nothing else seems important…"

"Davie, you didn't…" Sirius said, unconsciously giving her a slight shake. "You didn't hurt anyone just to be with me --"

"No," she continued with a sad laugh, still unable to meet Sirius' gaze. "I didn't do anything insane. Nearly, though. The night after I last saw you, I was prepared to kill someone. Anyone. It didn't even matter who. But I…" her voice trailed off again. She wasn't ready yet to speak about the aftermath of the night, and she suspected that no one else would tell Sirius except for herself. "I talked myself out of it."

"That's good, then," Sirius said, clearing his throat slightly, his tone somewhat lame and awkward as though he wasn't sure how to adapt to the realization of the gravity of the effect he'd had on Davie's life. "I mean -- look at you. Your life went all right, didn't it? You're an Auror, just like you always wanted to be."

"Yeah," Davie said blankly. "Just -- j-just like I --"

She suddenly felt herself grow slightly dizzy - the violent speed of her heartbeat upon being faced with Sirius again was constantly overwhelming. Her arms went slack again, and she wavered forward, needing to brace herself against his chest to keep from falling.

"You really need to stop doing that," Sirius laughed huskily, and he may have been naïve enough to believe they had overcome the strong physical tension between them, until Davie laughed as well -- the light sensation of her cool breaths across the skin of his chest caused his breath to hitch; it was a sensation that in all these years, nothing had been able to duplicate. It was familiar, and yet new, it caused a confusing sort of rush in him that he'd been seeking out in inebriation and had never found. He grabbed Davie firmly but not harshly by the shoulders, grimacing slightly at the feeling of having her so close, of caring for her and being unable to sense the same in reciprocity.

"Sirius?"

"You haven't missed me?" he asked in a tight voice, his forehead wrinkled as he attempted not to look at her. "Not even in the --"

"How can you say that?" Davie asked shrilly. "You think I didn't miss you? I had to run away from everyone and everything that meant anything to me here just to come to terms with you being gone - I had to leave because it hurt too much to be reminded I couldn't have you! I couldn't live my life anymore, and you think I haven't --"

"You heard I escaped!" Sirius retorted. "You knew Remus was at Hogwarts, you knew where everyone was! And you didn't even think to --"

"What was I supposed to do, Sirius?" Davie asked, shoving away from him and looking surprisingly stable now in the midst of a confrontation -- it seemed so typical of her. "Owl everyone and ask if I could back for a visit? When everyone treated me like I was insane for defending you, I was supposed to come back?!" she continued as hot, furious tears began streaming down her cheeks - and Davie crying was a sight that Sirius had never truly been able to handle with much poise. "I was twenty one when I last saw you and you'd expect me to run back to England just like nothing has changed --"

"NOTHING HAS CHANGED FOR ME!"

"So I just need top adjust my life accordingly!" Davie laughed humorlessly, her voice shrill and piercing. "To hell with the fact that I wasn't ready for --"

"Ready for what?!" Sirius snapped. ""Ready to put the bloody effort into pretending to love a mand you haven't ever --"

But before he finished, Sirius was quickly acquainted with the reflexes that Davie had acquired through a decade of being an Auror. In what seemed like a millisecond, Davie's hand lashed forward and pulled Sirius' wand from his back pocket; he found himself at the wrong end of his own wand.

"If you accuse me of not loving you -- if you tell me that all I did was pretending," Davie said through gritted teeth. "Merlin help me, Sirius, I might just kill you."

"I LOVE YOU!" Sirius bellowed in frustration, nothing remotely close to the romantic way he had admittedly often imagined being able to tell this woman again how he felt. "What about that do you not --"

"Understand?" Davie cried. "Nothing! I understand every single bit perfectly Sirius - you love me! And I still love you! What good does it do either of us anymore? We don't even know each other anymore and you think --"

"So you love me!"

"Don't do this to me again!" Davie yelled furiously, propping herself with one hand and wiping vehemently at her eyes with the other. "If you think you can play with my words again -- if you think you can use the same tricks on me you did when we were in school --"

"You want to talk about being tricked!" Sirius barked. "I asked you to marry me and you said there'd be plenty of time, once the fighting was through." he said with a half-snarl, leaning so close to Davie that the proximity now scared her a bit. "Well, Davie - since you're so wise, where's that time now?"

"Do you think I can change the past? Do you think I can turn back time?" Davie sobbed hopelessly and furiously all at once - she was somewhat a cross between a scared child, and a wild cat backed into a corner. "You think somehow I can just give you back all of the time you lost just because --"

"I want a chance to start!" Sirius said, grabbing Davie by the forearms as though giving her a shake would make her able to understand. "I want the life they took from me - my life stopped the day Lily and James died, and now you're going to tell me the Davie I knew is dead too --"

"The Davie you knew," she scoffed, squirming slightly in his grasp as he refused to relent. "We were in school! Back, I would have never been willing to kill --"

"You didn't kill anyone, you're only as much of a murderer as I am --"

"I'm more -- I was willing to kill, I wasn't going to be framed," Davie said darkly. "And I haven't been the same since I realized what I'd come too. Look at me!" she said desperately. "The Davie you knew would never have gone this far --"

"The only difference between now and then is that the old Davie didn't know what she was capable of. The Davie I knew was still bent on revenge on the Deatheaters that killed her parents. The attacks on Hogsmeade --" Sirius growled; to him, it was painfully obvious that she still was very much the same girl she had always been, the same girl who ran and hid because she was afraid, because she could not bear the thought of change. "The only thing that's changed is that you became everything I saw in you -- and look at me --"

"What's supposed to happen, things are just supposed to be normal now?" Davie asked with a desperate frustration present in her voice that Sirius knew as a harbinger of her hardheadedness beginning to waver. "We can't just pick up where we left off like --"

But before she could complete her rebuttal, Sirius tightened his grip on her arms, yanking her forward and resolutely pulling her lips to meet his.

The effect on Davie was explosive and immediate -- she tried at first to convince herself that this was not her Sirius anymore and that they no longer had any right to do this. She tried to remain convinced that the scent of fire whiskey and dust, the unkemptness of his hair, the lines, and the scars changed anything. But his lips banished all concern of those things, sending her consciousness flying back twenty years, They were once again teenagers trying not to get caught behind Greenhouse Five. Davie had spent years, a decade even, trying to convince herself that would never be the same. Why, then, did everything feel the same?

For Sirius, it was something even more momentous - something even greater. Over a decade in Azkaban had robbed him of sensation and exhilaration and all the things he had once valued over all else, and since his escape, he had struggled to retain it - he wanted to find something of the youth that he had once taken for granted. The burn of firewhiskey down his throat gave him sensation, but no thrill or inner warmth. The recklessness of being a fugitive gave him the occasional exhilaration, but in the end left him with nothing.

But this - his lips and Davie's lips, her weight in his arms, her arms now clinging tightly around his shoulders - was the familiar, stomach-churning, heart-pounding slow burn that he had failed so many times to replicate. The way she so openly received his kiss, the hesitant parting of her lips and the warmth of her breath - if Sirius shut his eyes and forgot he was in his brother Regulus' old bedroom, in the home he so deeply loathed, it all seemed very much correct...

A/N's

And thank goodness, we finally get these two in a liplock again - but don't get too comfortable! I never make it that easy for these two, mind you.

The next chapter picks up immediately where this one leaves off, so I'll let the wheels of your mind continue turning, trying to predict where things go from here. I'm going to keep responses fairly quick for this chapter because I want to get back to work on the next one. So, to Psycho-Bunny1309, Terrorist of the Seven Seas, Mymy2014, Jordanjinxxer, tonidepp16, and Tristan's Lady Meg for subscribing/favoriting, to amrawo, passingwhisper, Secerts of the Roman Empire, lilmisspurplesunshinee, and Wateranddarkness666 for reviewing.

Like I said, don't get too comfortable with Sirius and Davie being cozy just yet - of course, they have feelings for one another, so the kiss is understandable. But after one step forward, there are very often two steps back. Cheers!