Chapter Thirty-Eight
September the Fifth, Nineteen Hundred Ninety Five
"No, Sirius, we can't do that again. Once was bad enough."
By some stroke of luck, Davie and Sirius had managed to arrive back at Grimmauld Place just moments before everyone else returned as well - thankfully, Snape was too occupied with the duties of being Potions Master to mention that he had seen a teenaged Sirius and Davie, and even if he had mentioned it, they never would have believed that Davina Maddux, reputed as an Auror who followed rules by the book even if it killed her, would do such a thing.
Sirius, however, appeared to have no qualms at all in pushing his luck, especially is said pushing presented him the prospect of being young again. Being young again meant erasing over ten years of imprisonment and isolation and disappointment, even if these things were erased only to him. The desire for this was what led him to decide not to sleep after the rest of the Order had departed save for Davie; he waited until they were surely gone, then returned to the living room, where Davie was already laying down on one of the old sofas in the manner to which she had grown accustomed, when he approached her with the suggestion that they try the Anti-Aging Charm, just once more. Davie quickly refused.
"Why not?" Sirius snapped. "What was so bad - because you're scared? Because it made you feel something -"
"I don't want to -"
"You're scared because it gave you away?" Sirius persisted, his eyes glinting furiously - and fury of this level between the two of them was something that rarely did anything but escalate. This, too, was something familiar, except with a very poignant difference. There was no Lily and James to pull them apart and calm them down this time. There was no Remus to step into the middle and try to alleviate tensions. It was Sirius and Davie, butting heads with tempers flaring and nothing to stop whatever damage might be done. "You're scared because now I know you're not as frigid on the inside as you act towards me!"
"Do you need to make this about us?" Davie asked, sitting up and running a hand through her hair in exasperation. "Do you need to make this about - about what we did, or what we might have done if -"
"That's it, isn't it?" Sirius pressed on, steamrolling over Davie completely, which was by no means easy. Davina Astrid Maddux was never one to allow another person to speak over her under any circumstance, especially when tempers came into play. "You're afraid of the fact that if the charm had lasted just a bit longer -"
"- that I would have slept with you?" Davie snapped shrilly, drawing herself up to full height and looking Sirius in the eye. "That I might have given in and said to hell with it, let's shag right beneath Hogwarts? Yes, Sirius - I'M BLOODY TERRIFIED!" she snapped. "Because I've spent more than a decade trying not to give in - I've spent more than a decade trying not to cry at night because everything in my life has gone wrong, and I'll be damned if I've wasted the past ten years of my life trying to forget all of this!"
Sirius took a step backwards, taken aback by the sudden confession - this was the way major revelations came from Davie, like volcanic eruptions so violent that one could not in any way prepare for them, but the familiarity of this aspect of Davie's personality presented the first instance in which Sirius felt no sense of relief at something about the woman he loved that had remained unchanged.
"I - I give up," he said suddenly, his voice weakened as he was unable to look at Davie in the eye. Davie on the other hand, stared at Sirius as though he had just sprouted another head. He had never given up on her, he had never stopped pressing her or trying to convince her into things.
Davie looked at him - really looked at him - for the first time in all these years and noticed not only the physical differences, but the weariness, the tiredness in his dark brown eyes that had not been there before.
"Just - just one night. Please. Let me go back to being the me I remember for one night. Even if I have to go alone," he said, his voice filled with a desperation that left Davie genuinely unsettled. Sirius Black did not beg. He did plead for anything, yet here he was - Davie would not have been surprised if he went onto his knees if she continued to refuse.
"Just tonight." Davie said, and Sirius looked up immediately at her in surprise. If it was unusual for him to concede in an argument, it was even more an anomaly for her to do so. "But I'm going with you. Wherever you go, I'm going. If something happens to you and it's my fault -"
Davie froze when Sirius suddenly gained a very different expression on his face - what did he hope would be the end of that statement? Davie didn't even know what she'd been about to say, just that she'd been speaking without thinking.
"I don't want to have to explain that I've been turning you into an eighteen year old boy, they'll all have my head," Davie corrected herself abruptly. "Merlin knows you're reckless enough as it is."
But Sirius could not care any less what Davie's reasoning was, only that she had just agreed to come with him. He turned his face away from her, pretending to busy himself looking for his wand though he knew very well where'd he'd placed it last. He simply did not want to risk her looking into his eyes and seeing that the gears in his head were turning furiously.
It was wrong to manipulate her feelings. It was wrong to plan ways to take advantage of the things he knew she felt. Sirius knew that the ideas coursing through his head were wrong on so many levels, but if this was the last chance Davie would allow him to relive whatever wisps he could cling onto of their youth, then his desperation won out without question. He would apologize later - it wasn't as if he was going to do anything to hurt her.
"Aha," he said, finally picking up his wand from a nearby vanity table, pretending that he was quite satisfied after a feigned search for it. "Right then - well," he said. "We'll get on with this quickly then."
This time, after casting the charm, Sirius and Davie seemed better prepared for the strange sensation that the transformation caused - Davie hardly even made a sound, leaning forward on the coffee table. When the change was complete, she glanced up at Sirius, keeping a few safe steps away from him. The past few days had been strange between them, after the incident at Hogwarts, and the risk of the same incident repeating itself, as much as Davie would have liked to deny it, was very real.
"Where are we going?" Davie asked hesitantly, and for a brief moment, Sirius' jaw clenched - Davie knew that expression well enough. It meant he was concerned about something, but what, Davie would not find. Sirius immediately stepped forward and took a hold of her forearm, pulling her off without explaining.
They followed the same procedure for safe Apparition as they had before, sneakily making their way to Diagon Alley. The entire way, Davie repeatedly asked where they were going, but Sirius remained mum, a stoic expression plastered across his face.
"Leave the Apparating to me," Sirius said finally, once they had reached the same side alley as the last time. "We're going to - to the last place I remember being happy," he explained, taking a hold of Davie's arm. She opened her mouth to protest, but before she could utter so much as a word, there was a telltale jolting sensation behind her navel, and she was yanked off of the ground, landing with a thud on a hardwood floor, somewhere very dark.
Davie could not see a thing - a small sliver of light drew a perforated line on the floor, peering through heavy curtains over a tall window, but other than that, the room was submerged in darkness. Having landed on her behind, Davie gave a small pained groan, feeling around the ground beneath her hesitantly. The ground was dusty, but beneath the layer of dirt was a smooth floor. Feeling a bit further around her, Davie felt her hand hit the edge of a carpet of some sort - a worn down Saxony rug that felt strangely familiar underneath her palms, though she could not immediately place it.
"Davie?"
"Where did you take me?" Davie asked in a tight and inexplicably fearful voice, and a faint rustling sound signaled that she was getting to her feet and pulling her wand out from her traveling clothes. Before Sirius could reach out to stop her - he had meant to do so and explain himself far sooner - she had drawn her wand.
"Lumos!"
A light burst out for the tip of her wand and proceeded to settle into the lamps in the room - and once Davie's eyes had adjusted to the light, she gasped, dropping her wand with a clatter.
They were in the old Maddux home - it was covered in dust that seemed to make the air thick with a sense of age and neglect, but everything was recognizable. The chairs and the table, the fireplace, the sofas - all of it was the same. The house had remained completely untouched.
"I'm sorry," Sirius said suddenly, and Davie wheeled around to face him, her face quivering as though she could not decide whether she wanted to cry, or to beat Sirius to a bloody pulp. "This - this is the last place I can remember being happy. I had to -"
"You have no right," Davie said throatily, her voice shaking with fury as tears began leaking from the corners of her eyes. "You had no right to bring me here - this is my home and if I wanted to stay away, then bloody hell, I had every right -"
"I had to see it again - if this is my last chance, I had to!" Sirius said, gesturing wildly with his arms. "This was home for me too! This was the last home I knew before I went to Azkaban, I had to see -"
"Then by all means, go see!" Davie said shrilly, throwing herself onto the sofa, crossing her arms over herself and coughing at the cloud of dust that arose upon the couch being sat on for the first time in over a decade. "But I don't want to see any of it. I don't want to be in this place."
"Fine." Sirius said, departing up the stairs alone. He didn't care about the dust - it was nowhere near as decrepit as Grimmauld Place, dust was nothing to him. He let his hand run over the banister as he ascended the stairs, looking around. He walked at almost a snail's pace across the upper floor, occasionally glancing back down the stairs at Davie, who did not move - she stared intensely forward, and could have passed as a statue if not for the visible quivering of her hands.
He found himself at the door at the end of the hallway - the den, which had served as his first bedroom when they'd first taken up house in the Maddux residence. He placed his hand on the ornate doorknob and pushed it, glancing around - but this was not the elegant office he had been familiar with. Davie - clean, meticulous, fastidiously organized Davie - would never have let her father's precious library fall into such disarray, and yet as Sirius glanced around, his eyes were met from every angle by documents and books and newspapers strewn all over the floor and the large desk in the middle of the room. Approaching the desk, he placed his hands on the papers and whisked some of the dust from them, using his other hand to shield his face. His brow furrowed when he realized that they were all clippings with various dates from the Daily Prophet, from Muggle newspapers, and other papers Sirius did not even recognize.
Sirius Black Arrested on Charges of Conspiracy and Murder… Peter Pettigrew Murdered by Schooltime Friend… Former Hogwarts Student Sentenced to Life in Azkaban…
All of the clippings were about him being sent to prison - piled on top of photographs of the street where he'd cornered Peter , after Peter had betrayed the Potters, pieces of parchment with details and names scribbled and crossed many times over. He began sifting through them more deeply - it was so surreal. He was young again at first glance, and yet still he was being faced with the events of the past decade that he wanted nothing more than to erase. All of it was here, scattered haphazardly around the room.
"I tried so hard to make sense of it all."
Sirius visibly jumped in surprise at the sound of a voice in the doorway, and he looked up to see Davie standing just outside in the corridor, quite pale in the face and quivering visibly, even from this distance. The last time he had seen her this way was one the Hogwarts Express, the September after her parents were killed.
"It all seems so obvious now," she said with a forced laugh, though tears were streaming steadily down her cheeks now. "I suppose that's part of it - you didn't trust me enough to tell me you weren't their Secret Keeper. Remus wrote me last year while I was still in Bulgaria, about how you escaped from Azkaban, and how Peter - well, you know. I felt so thick for not seeing it, I didn't even answer his letter," she explained, attempting to sound casual as she took a few hesitant steps into the room. "And I lied to you," she finished, glancing up at Sirius with a gaze that drilled relentlessly into his.
"You - come again?" Sirius asked, his forehead wrinkling.
"When I told you I'd forgotten about you up until the moment I saw you, the night they rescued me," Davie said, her voice suddenly filled with a disconcerting calm. "I didn't forget you. For the past year I've hated you."
Sirius took a reflexive step backward, and Davie let out a harsh choking sound that may have been some sort of attempt at laughing if not for the fact that it was completely humorless and accompanied by a sweeping motion of her arm that shoved a pile of papers clean off the desk and into the air, fluttering around them now like a swarm of white birds.
"I hated you," she repeated blankly. "Because for ten years, you let me think this was my fault, that I couldn't get you out of Azkaban because somewhere along the road, my efforts had fallen short, that you had somehow placed your trust in me and I had let you down. You didn't trust me," Davie said resentfully. "Everything we had - even if I tried to forget about it, I still believed in it until I realized it was a lie -"
"It was never a lie!" Sirius roared, giving the old desk a shove in frustration so that it creaked and threatened to tip over completely. "You think there wasn't a night that I fell asleep without feeling like I was the spy because I was letting you fall asleep in my arms thinking I had told you the truth? All I was trying to do was what you did - I wanted to protect you!"
Davie attempted to laugh harshly yet again, but this time, it only managed to escape her lips as a piteous, choking sob. She raised her arm, using her sleeve to wipe her face and opening her mouth a few times as if she were about to speak - Sirius was so frustrated that he was nearly tempted to take her by the shoulders and shake the words out of her.
"The story Remus told," Sirius said in realization, recalling what their friend had shared about the fight that had occurred in this very room. Davie exhaled deeply and looked down at the desk, strewn with papers that felt like relics to her. Her hands shook as she remembered the days on end that she spent in this room, barely eating and never sleeping. She remembered tearing pages from the Daily Prophet, clipping moving magical photographs and laying them on the surface of the desk alongside Muggle photos of the scene of the crime as though the photos were hiding some sort of code that she could break. Days on end for an entire year, she obsessed over every detail of the crime as though there was something missing.
"It doesn't matter anymore," she sobbed. "I can't love you because - BECAUSE NONE OF THIS MATTERS -"
"NO!" Sirius interrupted. "I'm not going to pretend that there's nothing left between us when you and I both know -"
"What do we both know?" Davie asked in a coldly calm voice that sounded, for lack of a better description on Sirius' part, very Slytherin. "I know I'm not eighteen anymore, Sirius. Do you know that?"
For a while, Sirius stared at Davie in very tense silence - the truth had finally come out, and not only that. It had burst out like a rogue Fillibuster's Firework that neither Sirius nor Davie had been ready for.
"Do you remember what I said? That day on the grass at Hogwarts?" Davie asked suddenly, her voice quavering with emotion. "About growing up?"
"Yeah," Sirius said, unable to help it now that his voice was beginning to feel choked and restrained as well. "That's it's something like dying, you said. I remember." he said, and only now did he finally feel the full impact of what she had said that day. He had thought she was being silly, that she was simply worrying herself too much over Romnic Digby's disappearance. Now, however, it felt almost as though those words had been just as much a prophecy as the one produced by Sibyll Trelawney that had driven the Potters into hiding.
"If growing up is a little bit like dying," Davie said quietly, leaning weakly against the desk as though all of these revelations were just as exhausting physically as they were emotionally, "I think I've done a great deal of growing up. Because - because, Sirius, I've felt dead for a long time. A very long time."
"We're not dead, Davie!" Sirius said, and to his slight chagrin, hearing him make this statement with such pleading in his voice only made the sobs rack her small figure even worse. She was now overtaken by a great deal more emotion than she was comfortable with sharing, not the least of which was a sense of fear at the thought of Sirius knowing everything that had happened in the past years.
"You have to accept that we're not the same anymore," Davie said shakily, unable to look him in the eye - just one look into his eyes threatened to change her mind, and in her mind, she wanted this simply to be resolved once and for all. Her heart, however, did not seem to be cooperating. "Too much has happened -"
"Too much has happened and yet every time I catch you off your guard you still say that you love me too -"
"Enough," Davie said, though she no longer had the strength to yell at him. Instead, she pushed her weight off of the desk and strode past Sirius out of the room.
Sirius couldn't bring himself to move - though he felt guilt admitting it to himself, he had expected Davie's resolve to be much weaker than this. He thought that bringing her here would be enough, that it would be the single grain of sand that tipped the scale. He pressed the heel of his hand into his forehead, grasping at his hair slightly. He stood in the same spot for perhaps five minutes before striding towards the door and back into the hallway. However, when he stepped out, before he took another step towards the stair case, he spotted Davie standing in front of a closed set of double doors. She was silent, staring down at the doorknob with her hand hovering over it, yet for this entire time she had not opened it.
Unsurely, Sirius strode up behind Davie, but instead of addressing her, he placed his hand on the other door handle and pushed the door open. In her surprise, Davie let out a small gasp, but, after inhaling deeply, she stepped inside. This had been her room once, as strange and unfamiliar as it felt now. It felt strange to feel like a guest in her own home - in a place that was still hers - but despite owning the old brick building, it had not been a home to her in a long time. Even though nothing had changed, there was a sort of fear and surprise in Davie's eyes as though she had never seen the place in her life.
However, when Sirius extended his wand to light the lamps in the room, it would turn out that his surprise was even greater - the room appeared practically untouched since the last time he had been in it, the night Lily and James had died. His nightshirt and slippers were still sprawled where he had discarded them in his rush to reach Godric's Hollow. The bed was still unmade, which Davie would never have stood for - she had been in Bulgaria at the time. The room was clean and free of dust unlike the rest of the house, because Davie had put a Permanent Cleaning Charm on the room, unable to stand dust of any kind collecting on her things. The tall standing mirror near the bed was framed completely by moving photographs - a photo of a very young Davie being carried by her father, still with her pigtails and crooked teeth, a photo of Lily and Davie making silly puckered faces at the camera, taken at the train station at the end of their third year. Sirius walked over and pulled a photograph from its place on the mirror, staring at it silently - this particular photograph was of Davie placing a medallion around his neck from their graduation from Hogwarts. Sirius remembered this night clearly, when no one had come for him, and Davie stepped out of her place in the line of seventh years to place to fill the void.
"Turn wheresoe'er I may, by night or day, the things which I have seen I now can see no more (1)," she recited in a near-whisper. Sirius turned around to face her and saw that she was sitting on the unmade bed, looking at a leatherbound, journal-like book which he recognized as the book of Muggle poetry Lily's parents had given to her as a graduation present. Ever since she'd received it, she had been hung up on the same poem, and like so many things, it only became clear now to Sirius why it was so meaningful to her. So many of the things Davie had said when they were young that he had dismissed, he now regretted having ignored.
"I could never come back here," Davie said so quietly that Sirius barely heard her. He turned and found that she was sitting and staring at her hands as she spoke. "After the first time I saw you in Azkaban, I came home and took one look in here and could never come back in. It - it hurt too much," she stammered weakly. "Too much had changed all at once, I didn't want to face it -" She jumped slightly when she felt Sirius placed his hands gently on her shoulders from behind.
"When I was eighteen, I could have had - any girl I wanted," he said with a weak laugh. "Now look at me, I'm a fugitive. Not even the woman I was engaged to will have me anymore -"
"You're twisting the situation and you know it," Davie said, whirling around suddenly, only to found that a slight smile remained on Sirius' lips. His brown eyes were warm, and youthful, and without malice. 'If things were different, you know - you know we'd -"
"You're wrong about things changing," Sirius said stiffly. "They haven't. When we were in school, what was your excuse for not being with me? Because you didn't want everyone staring at you, because it was wrong - now, what's changed? The only difference I see is that you have a different excuse -"
"Why are you making this so hard?" Davie asked weakly, shaking her head. "Whatever we had, it's not the most important thing right now -"
"What happens when this war is over?" Sirius interrupted. "What happens when there's no more Voldemort and no more bloody war, Davie? You'll have thrown away everything and then they'll still have won because they'll still have succeeded in taking everything from us -"
"Sirius, stop -"
"You're just letting them beat you and you're letting them win because even if you've killed every last one of them, you've still let them dictate your entire life and you'll have nothing left -"
"STOP!" Davie burst out desperately, suddenly unable to stop herself from crying again. Sirius felt a pang of guilt at the fact that she was crying so much because of him. He had gone too far in implying that Davie's attempts all these years had been futile, that by becoming an Auror to avenge her parents, she had thrown away everything else. He had gone too far down the rabbit hole, as it would appear, and no longer knew what to expect from the woman in front of him.
He did not at all expect, in fact, that she was going to practically lurch forward, wrapping her arms around him and crying inconsolably into his shoulder. Suddenly, the situation became familiar again - they were sixteen, on the Hogwarts Express. Davie was crying openly for the first time about her parents' death and Sirius simply rubbed her back unsurely, not in an position to say or do anything more. Things, Sirius mused silently, seemed to finally be coming full-circle.
"I - I don't want to do this anymore. I didn't want it to turn out this way," she sobbed shakily, and Sirius had nothing else to do except listen with his hand rubbing her back hesitantly. "I knew if I came back, I wouldn't be able to turn my back on any of this again, I knew it. I thought I'd gotten stronger, it's been fifteen bloody years, but I'm still the same. I shouldn't have stayed but I did and now it's too late -"
"Too late?"
"It's too late," Davie repeated tearfully, "because now no matter how hard I try, I can't force myself to stay away from you."
And before Sirius could react, Davie had pulled out of his arms, pressing her lips gently to his - Sirius felt what may very well have been a volcano erupting in his chest, and after hearing what he had been waiting for years to hear, a chaste kiss wasn't enough. He deepened the embrace, wrapping his arms around her tightly as though he were guarding against the possibility of her changing her mind and running away again. But she did not. When Sirius pulled her closer, she obliged, drawing her body against his and for once, instead of the sense of apprehension and fleetingness that their kisses always were laced with, this one was filled with a recklessness and a curiosity, even an awkwardness that felt as though they had allowed their minds to return to the state of feverish love they had shared as teenagers as well.
Sirius shifted so that he was slowly laying Davie onto her back, the sensation of clean linen sheets and down pillows feeling like something out of a dream. Davie clumsily unfastened the buttons of Sirius' shirt as he pulled her jumper off over her head. He proceeded to trail kisses hungrily down the ivory skin of her neck, the bare skin of his chest running over the smooth fabric of the camisole Davie wore underneath.
"Sirius, wait," Davie said breathlessly, though she made no motion to push him away. "Sirius - you need to know -"
"It doesn't matter," Sirius said in a muffled voice, pausing to brush a strand of hair out of Davie's flushed face.
"It matters," Davie insisted, biting her lower lip in apprehension. "If we - if we're going to do this, you need to know what happened while you were gone -"
"I've put two and two together," Sirius said with a wry smile, and Davie's expression changed to one of confusion and surprise. "All the stories about the arguments and everything that happened, the way you wrote each other- something happened with you and Remus. If it was going to happen, at least it was with someone trustworthy -"
"No, Sirius, you don't understand. It wasn't -"
"You don't need to be sorry," Sirius said, raising a finger to her lips and hushing her. He lowered his head and grazed his lips slowly over her collarbone. "None of that matters anymore," he spoke, his warm breath causing an eruption of tiny goosebumps over Davie's skin. None of it did matter, Davie thought suddenly, the last completely lucid thought that she could manage - and then, all that mattered was the man she had loved for so many years.
A/N's
Aaaaand I think we can deduce what happened from there. Le wink!
Next chapter, we will find out in a very harsh way what Davie meant to tell Sirius before they did the deed. But for now, relish the fact that they've finally quit the denial!
(1) is another passage from the namesake poem of this story by William Wordsworth. I told you it would come up a lot!
I'll keep this quick because I know I've kept you waiting for a long time - my summer has turned out to be more hectic than I'd planned, but all of the new footage for Deathly Hallows and everything has remediate me! Thank you to dragonboy456, AddictedToPotterAndProudOfIt, honestonlyforyou1, D. R. Sabre, zoey zink, and BlueEyedGunSlinger for your feedback - and for those of you who sent me birthday greetings as well, double thanks! Until next time, which will hopefully be soon, cheers!