Just getting out of the hospital and Sirius is already getting fleeced…
Okay, so. Some notes based on the reviews I've gotten.
This will not be a Honks story- I don't have anything against the ship in general, I'm just not willing to do that here given what I've already written.
To the clown bitching about me including Lavender and Hermione instead of just "finding a huddle puff to stick to him"... lol. Lmao, even. You have all the disdain that my cold, black heart can offer (and, between you and me, that's a lot).
Sirius hadn't been able to bring himself to go out of his way to look into the surviving members of the Order of the Phoenix until now.
Part of that was that he didn't want to acknowledge all the ones that had gone the way of James and Lily, like Marlene or Dorcas, and all the others who hadn't survived the upheaval after that Halloween. Eventually, he'd go and visit James and Lily's grave, but… he wasn't ready, not now when everything was so fresh, and he was being overwhelmed by both being outside of Azkaban and the decade he was catching up on.
Part of that was that he wasn't willing to look any of the survivors in the face, the ones who wrote him off as the one who betrayed James and Lily without so much as a backwards glance as if they weren't the closest thing to family he had anymore, without introducing said face to his fist, repeatedly and strenuously.
It was nothing more than a miracle that he could do so- he'd been ready for physical therapy mere days after Dora left for Hogwarts instead of the weeks that the doctors had promised, and by the time that the three-week estimate for him being ready for physical therapy rolled around, he was all but ready to be discharged from Saint Mungo's, and there he was forced to confront the reality of the people who had abandoned him to the dementors' alleged mercies (which were not, in fact, tender by any stretch of the imagination).
It wasn't a full gathering of the Order, no, just a small group of members that were wholly loyal to Dumbledore. Most of the others had sent letters, of one stripe or another, with Emmeline Vance's at least mentioning repeated petitions sent to the Ministry for Sirius' trial transcripts that had come back denied with Crouch's stamp on them even after he'd been demoted to the DIMC.
(The lack of a letter from Remus was as baffling as it was painful for Sirius.)
"Diggle. Doge. Podmore. You couldn't have written ahead?" He offered Figg a nod, as she'd done so, even if half of the letter had been about her cats.
"Apologies, Black," said Elphias Doge, with the same imperious tone that Sirius remembered from ten years and a lifetime ago, even if the conical hat the man had taken to wearing at the time (which made him look like nothing so much as a particularly ugly specimen of garden gnome) had been changed out for something that at first glance (and second, third, fourth, and perhaps even fifth, depending on how charitable the glancer was inclined to be) looked to be a particularly large fly's abdomen perched atop his head. "Dumbledore insisted on secrecy."
"Lie, try again," Sirius responded, the odd not-quite-instincts of the Family Magics telling him that that was a lie with only a little more certainty than his own mind.
The older man's jaw visibly tightened. "I'm trying to be charitable here, Black." He made a production of looking Sirius up and down. "You look good, too good. Did you even go to Azkaban, or were you just being sheltered by Malfoy?" He practically spat the last word.
Sirius blinked slowly, nostrils flaring as he fought down the instincts that told him to turn into Padfoot and bowl the man over, hospital waiting room be damned.
"I'm going to ignore that," Sirius returned, cutting off Arabella Figg's incipient angry rant at the knees. "You know very well where I was for the past decade, mister 'Special Advisor to the Wizengamot'."
Something in Sirius' tone of voice made Doge take a step back and visibly reassess his position. "Ah. My apologies, Black," he said.
"Good. Now then, we can talk about this over lunch- I've been hankering for a good burger for the past week, and I know this great American-style diner that shouldn't throw up too much of a fuss if we rent out one of the back rooms on short notice." Left unsaid was that he was already planning to go to this diner, which was wholly owned by the Black family through Marius Black's son, Michael (considered a Muggleborn by the magical world at large, who Sirius'd taken back into the family along with Marius the first week he was out of Azkaban).
"By all means," said Figg, gathering up her purse and shooting a grateful look at Sirius for offering an out, "lead the way.
The hushed conversation that Figg had with Doge while they walked the five minutes from Saint Mungo's to the Padded Foot Diner (to be quite honest, Sirius had never been the best at naming, and it was just a coincidence that this diner was owned by Michael Black, at least as far as any mortal involved in the situation could tell you) did a great deal for the man's manners, or at least his sense of restraint.
That said, Sirius could only stretch out a burger and fries out so far, and with one last belch, he turned his gaze to Doge's face and the attendant expression of disdain, bringing his half-drunk strawberry milkshake down to the table with a heavy clunk that belied the amount he'd already had. "So, old man Doge," Sirius said, noting the twitch the older wizard's eye made at that, "tell me, what does Dumbledore want from me this time?"
"Why, Sirius, I'm hurt you'd think that of me! I would never be so crass as to-" Doge began.
Sirius raised his hand, and the other man stopped. "Please, Doge, you've never been comfortable around the Blacks, and the only reason you'd bother to spend time around me that wasn't mid-battle is if Dumbledore says it's important."
Doge's face scrunched up with anger, but he couldn't dispute Sirius' declaration.
"Thought so. Now then, tell me, what is it that Dumbledore wants so badly that he's willing to send you to do it, but not enough to leave Hogwarts to do it himself?" asked Sirius, gray eyes glinting with intensity and, perhaps, a glimmer that is is most associated, in their minds, with Bellatrix Lestrange.
"He insists that Harry's living situation remain as it is, due to the nature of some of the… protections… that have been laid over his current living space," said Elphias Doge, not so much visibly nervous as less full of brash confidence than he had been before. "Before you ask, I'm not privy to the, ah, exact details of the protections in question, but I have full confidence in Albus Dumbledore and his magical abilities to protect any child, even the Boy-Who-Lived."
Sirius just sighed, fisting his hands hard enough his bones creaked momentarily before splaying them as far as he could. "I take it none of you have taken a look at the house, have you." It wasn't a question.
"He may not be loved as well as the other boy who lives there, but he's… he's got a good life," said Figg, quietly, and Sirius took a moment to recall all the rumors he heard about the way that Squibs were treated by the old families to prevent him from blowing his top on the older woman.
While he was doing that, Doge was taking the opportunity to continue digging. "See? If Arabella vouches for the boy's home, then it's perfect for him!"
"I would like to remind you," growled Sirius, with far more of Padfoot's voice than his human one, "that Arabella Figg, inasmuch as she is a truly caring individual, is a Squib child of the Bulstrodes, and her understanding of what is a good life is accordingly skewed. I took the opportunity, when old Mad-Eye sent me a letter, to ask him to check in a couple of places I suspected Harry might have lived, and do you know what he found?"
Apart from the widening of three pairs of eyes (and one, more world-weary pair finding itself more downcast), Sirius didn't get a response.
"Harry was living at Petunia's house, which was explicitly not a place he should have been sent as per James and Lily's wills, and Moody almost missed that he lived there if not for the man's impressively thorough search. He found a cot in a cabinet under the stairs, with old, old bloodstains all over it, and someone had written 'Harry's room' on the wall. He found two other rooms, one guest room that was all but unused, and one room that looked more like a storage area than a bedroom." Sirius made eye contact with Doge, who was at this point about as cool as a frog a good deal of the way through being boiled. "I find myself unwilling to commit to leaving my godson in a place like that, no matter what protections have been laid down."
"I'm sorry," came Figg's response, the only one to come since the other three members of the Order were all struck dumb by Sirius' revelation.
"You, I hold blameless," said Sirius, standing from the table to stare at the other three as if they were acromantula obstructing his view of a wonderful sunset. "Everyone else… think about what you've done, and see if you can live with it."
In his wake, Sirius left an uneasy mood (and a bill that, by unspoken agreement, would fall to Doge).
"Andy, how nice to see you outside of the hospital gaslamps!" Sirius shook his favorite cousin's hand vigorously, the flat look he'd borne earlier that day traded out for a genuine smile that, with the addition of face paint and the glint of madness in the eyes, wouldn't have been out of place on a Joker cosplay.
"And you must be Ted!" This Sirius said to the bronze-skinned man next to Andromeda, whose laugh lines deepened as he smiled to Sirius. "Glad to meet another man willing to thumb their nose at the 'proper pureblood elite'," he continued, affecting a posh accent on the last three words before scrunching up his face in disdain as manufactured as anti-queer sentiment.
"It's nice to finally meet my wife's favorite cousin," the man replied in a voice as smooth as the feeling of rubbing a well-made plushie on one's face. "Andi's told me a little bit about you as you were as a kid, but… well, life changes us all," he said, wincing as he realized what he was saying.
Sirius took it in good humor, at least. "Eh, some of us more than others. I'm still as stubborn as a dog with a bone, not quite housebroken, and deeply opposed to everything ol' Lucy did in the war. I may be taller, and more roguishly handsome, but the core of me is still the same."
"Speaking of things being the same," said Andromeda, smoothly slipping into the space after Sirius' statement, "I hope you have the same taste in curry you did before we both left the main family, as I made Uncle Alphard's recipe."
Sirius' smile softened from the brash, almost larger-than-life grin of someone all but daring the world to try him into something that, while not necessarily more honest, was more vulnerable. "Andy, cousin mine, you are an absolute angel, and for you I would plunge back into the heart of Azkaban."
She chuckled, then patted his (all too hollow) cheek affectionately. "And you, cousin mine, are entirely too skinny. Whatever they fed you in the hospital clearly wasn't enough."
"You can say that again," Sirius replied. "I went out to the Padded Foot today, and even after one of their burgers I was all but starving."
"Oh, well if even one of Michael's burgers couldn't solve the problem all the way, then we need to intervene stat," said Andromeda. "Let's get you sat down so we can stuff you as full as we can get."
Over the course of the night, the haunted look behind Sirius' eyes didn't go away completely, but Andromeda was very much relieved to see it making a rather solid go at disappearing with the sunlight.
And that's that!
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