Harry Potter canon is a mystery series, and everything about it carries the trappings of that genre. That isn't to say that this story is much of a mystery, though. I'm not trying to mimic canon. I'm just playing in my sandbox.
So, when it comes to Big Secrets, I'm usually not interested in keeping them for long.
Not to mention, I'm not a fan of Big Reveals causing rifts between my characters.
This isn't about cheap drama for me.
There's enough drama from outside sources.
One.
In the back of his mind, Felix knew that he didn't deserve ninety percent of the praise that Merope heaped upon him; everything he taught her about how to care for baby Thomas, he'd learned from Molly Weasley and Alice Longbottom. Heaven only knew what he would have tried to teach the poor girl if he'd based everything on his own upbringing.
All the same, Felix showed Merope how to dress Thomas, how to change him, how to bathe him, how to feed him. He showed Merope what to do when Thomas cried, how to coax him to sleep, how to support his weight when she held him. He taught Merope to sleep when Thomas slept, so that she wouldn't overtax herself when he woke in the middle of the night.
It was around the time that Felix came back to the home they shared, after gathering a number of primers and easy chapter books to begin the arduous process of teaching Merope her letters, that she asked a question he knew he ought to have expected.
But when she asked, he found himself utterly unequipped to answer it.
"Mister Mavros . . . why are you doing all this?"
Felix set his new acquisitions aside. He sat down across from Merope. He clasped his hands between his knees and hung his head low. "Miss Gaunt," he said eventually, "the last thing I would ever want to do is lie to you. You have been lied to all your life, and you deserve the truth."
Merope's face screwed up with confusion; she didn't ask for clarification, even though it was quite clear that she wanted to.
Felix licked his lips nervously. Sighed. "I'll say . . . this. There are two reasons for what I'm doing here, with you, for you. One of them is selfish; the other is not. If you wish to know both, I will tell you both. I must warn you, though, that the selfish reason might not make sense to you. It will only cause more questions to crop up." He looked up. "But if you want to know . . . I'll tell you."
Merope frowned; she didn't seem particularly upset. If anything, she looked resigned. Like she'd been expecting something like this. It wasn't even disappointment that crossed her face; it was something suspiciously close to boredom.
Felix felt his heart break.
". . . Tell me. Please."
"What do you know, Miss Gaunt, about manipulating time? Seeing the past, or the future?"
Merope blinked. Her head tilted to one side. "Not . . . much."
Felix nodded. "Suffice to say, Miss Gaunt, I have seen the future. That is, I have seen a future. The selfish reason for my being here, with you, is to avoid that future. The unselfish reason for my being here is that you needed help, you deserved help, and I was in a position to provide it."
Merope looked down at her lap, at her hands. Thomas was down for a nap in the master bedroom, and his mother seemed listless. Everything she knew to do, everything with which she spent her time, involved helping people; without that, she had no notion of what was left. No one was pressing her to clean, to cook, to help.
She looked, more than anything, like she was about to float off into the void.
". . . What have you seen in the future, Mister Mavros?" Merope asked.
"Miss Gaunt, are you sure—"
The last Gaunt heiress looked Felix in the eye, and there was something in her expression that he'd never seen before; something that told him, more than anything he'd seen from her so far, that this was a woman in whose veins flowed the blood of a Hogwarts founder. Merope Gaunt was a serpent, through and through.
"Tell me, Mister Mavros."
Sirius groaned. Ran a hand through his hair. "All right. I guess . . . we'll start with the easiest question: how familiar are you with the name Black?"
Two.
A foul wind blew through Little Hangleton on the night that Marvolo Gaunt returned home. Months and months had passed him by, very nearly a year, and the old shack was still there. Marvolo didn't notice the repairs made to the roof, but he did see that the land surrounding his home was neat and tidy. At least, neater and tidier than he'd left it.
Some part of Marvolo wondered if his simple dolt of a daughter had finally gotten it through her head to make the place presentable, worthy of his station, and he found a smile hidden beneath the open malice writ across his face. There was a possibility, far-flung, untouchable, that—if he'd stepped inside to find a hot meal waiting for him—he would have rewarded Merope for her dutiful adherence to her role in the family.
How Marvolo would have rewarded his daughter was a mystery that no one would ever be able to puzzle out, because Merope wasn't there. The house was clean, dry, filled with trinkets and gifts and knickknacks she'd abandoned in her mad dash from town, but Merope Gaunt herself was nowhere to be seen.
Marvolo stared openly at the gramophone in his living room, knowing nothing of what it was or what it could do, too mystified to be insulted; he couldn't work out what he ought to do.
It would take him several days to fully unpack what this predicament meant for him.
He eventually shuffled over to his favorite chair, collapsed into it, and almost immediately fell into a dead sleep. Marvolo would seek out his younger child in the morning; Marvolo would be approached by people he'd never known, people he'd never wanted to know, and learn about his younger child's fate in the morning.
Marvolo would learn about all the people his younger child had helped, had saved, in the morning.
Marvolo would drive himself apoplectic with fury in the morning.
That night, though, he slept.
Three.
Merope stood in the middle of the front parlor, cuddling her sleeping infant against her breast, watching him with an unreadable expression on her face. She looked like she was trying her hardest to fold in upon Thomas, to make her body a shield for him, and she shivered despite the fire roaring in the hearth nearby.
". . . You mean to tell me, Mister Mav—er, Mister Black," Merope muttered, barely whispering past her teeth, "that this . . . this boy . . . is destined to become the worst villain our world has ever seen?"
"Destined?" Sirius repeated. "No. No, I don't think that at all. I've already seen plenty of things changed, based purely on circumstance and dumb luck. Your son is no more destined to become a villain than I was destined for thirteen years in Azkaban."
Merope turned to look at Sirius. "Did you come here to kill him, Mister Black?"
The way she asked him, utterly devoid of fear or even judgment, her voice filled not with reproach but with simple resignation, seized Sirius's heart. This was a girl falling back on her oldest coping mechanisms, and Sirius had a feeling that—unless he handled the rest of this conversation very carefully—she was just going to dissociate.
"No, Miss Gaunt," said Sirius, solemnly. "I did not."
Merope studied Sirius's face, searching for a sign that he was lying. Sirius stared back at her, his grey eyes unyielding, and something about her softened. She smiled at him, soft and gentle, and relief flooded through Sirius's veins.
"You said one reason was selfish. I guess it must be this one. To avoid . . . war. With my son. What was the other reason? Why you? Why me? Why now? Why not just . . . wait for me to die and just be done with it? Why go through all the trouble of saving me?"
Sirius drew in a careful breath. "When I was young," he said, "I fled from my parents' house. A friend took me in, he and his parents both. They gave me a soft place to land when I needed it most. I failed to help that friend when he needed me, and I've always been . . . haunted by that." He gestured randomly. "I guess, framed that way, it makes this reason selfish, too. But the point is, when I found out what happened to you, the fate you were . . . destined for. I hated it. No one deserves to live through the kinds of hardships you've had, only to die alone in the cold."
Merope still looked confused. "But you could have just . . . adopted Thomas. You say I gave birth in an orphanage. You went out of your way to save me, just because you . . . hated the idea of me dying? That's all? That's . . . your motive? You broke time for that?"
Sirius nodded. "I did, Miss Gaunt."
"You are . . . a strange man, Mister Black."
Sirius laughed, quietly, so as not to wake the baby. "You're most certainly not the first person to say that," he said.
Four.
Merope averted her gaze. "Your friend. The one you failed to help." She licked at her lips. "Did my Thomas kill him?"
Sirius's gaze didn't waver. "Yes, Miss Gaunt. He did."
"So . . . what does that mean now? What's going to happen?"
Sirius sighed again. "What's going to happen, Miss Gaunt, is I'm going to teach you to read and write. I'm going to help you raise your son as best I can. In ten years, my patron is going to fetch me and take me back home."
"Ten years," Merope repeated. "You are going to spend ten years here, in your own past, helping me."
"I am, Miss Gaunt."
"But . . . why?"
"Because that's about how long I think it's going to take," Sirius said, "to make sure you and Thomas will both be provided for." He put his hands on his knees. "I have ulterior motives, yes. I want to make the world safer for my godson. I want to make the world safer for my friends. That's one reason I'm here. But the other reason, that you deserve the help that I can give you, is just as important. You do deserve a better life. More than you got in my time. I'm here because I can give that to both of you. I may have lied when I told you my name, but I didn't lie when I said I was wealthy."
Merope's brow furrowed. "Why did you lie about your name, Mister Black?"
Sirius gestured. "My grandfather lives here in London. The last thing I wanted was for him to hear that some pretender was using his name for . . . whatever he might accuse me of doing."
"Couldn't you just tell him what you're doing? Like you've done with me? Surely he knows enough about time travel to understand it, if he's a wizard and all."
Sirius's eyes turned dark. "Miss Gaunt, my family is full of cheats and turncoats and would sooner shove a knife in my back than shake my hand. Even if I could convince him of my sincerity, I don't trust my grandfather to help anyone, least of all you." He paused. "Your father and brother would like him quite a lot, I think."
Merope went pale, but she no longer looked confused. "I see," she murmured.
"Have you heard of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, Miss Gaunt?" Sirius asked.
"I . . . think so?"
"It's the name given to the most 'important' wizarding families here in Britain, which is to say . . . pureblood families." Sirius cleared his throat, pointedly. "The Black family is one of them. The Gaunt family is another. Most every member of this collective, I want nothing at all to do with. In the future I lived through, where your son goes on a crusade to end the world of 'filthy Muggles,' a majority of those illustrious families happily join his cause."
Merope's eyes snapped wide, then went narrow. "Thomas's father is a . . . Muggle."
Sirius nodded. "I know, Miss Gaunt," he said.
"I want to believe that you're lying to me," Merope said eventually. "I want to think this is all some ploy to scare me, because it would make more sense. But . . . for the life of me, I can't figure out why you would ever bother to do that."
Sirius ran a hand through his hair again. "I'll figure out some way to show you," he said. "If, at the end of this decade, you still don't know what to make of me, well . . . my patron can show you." He reached over and grabbed one of the books he'd tracked down. "For the moment, though, we have plenty of work to do. What do you say, Miss Gaunt? Shall we get started?"
Merope studied her companion's face for a long, long time.
She smiled again.
"All right, Mister Black. Let's."